lifestyle

Photo by Dan Polley

Gay Pride in Panama, 2010
photos by Dan Polley, Cesar Paniamogan Jr. & Eric Jackson

This year's Gay Pride observance was a bit larger than previous occasions, and featured a proliferation of gay organizations --- which different people took in different ways --- and the appearance of a local gay medium, Gay TV Panama. What might look like --- and actually be --- a division in the movement reflects the reality that sexual orientation is something with which someone is born, a "behavioral trait" much like whether one is right-handed or left-handed. It would follow that, just as there are Democratic and Republican southpaws, among the world's large homosexual, bisexual and transgendered minorities there are people with different political, economic and social philosophies and folks from many different walks of life. Thus groups that look up to different leaders coming to the same Gay Pride event are not the harbingers of division and disintegration so much as a reflection of what's already there, a sign of united action by different social circles.

But let's cut to the chase. Who won the Pink Egg for the most homophobic person or institution in Panama?

It was close enough that it was called a tie. We have:

• Jointly and severally, magistrates Milixa Hernández, Judith Cossu de Herrera and Marcela Gómez de Antinori of the Superior Court of Childhood and Adolescence, who stripped a lesbian mother of custody of her child, ruling that a parent's homosexuality poses a "social risk" for the child; and

• Kevin Arjona Moncada, a law student who wrote a vicious anti-gay screed that was published in El Panama America.

As in years past, the American community and different varieties of panagringo dual nationals were present for the observance. Some passersby exuded curiosity and some expressed fear, but there were more expressions of support and tolerance than there were of opposition and hostility.