A gay male couple legally married in Argentina Dec. 28.

Activists Alex Freyre and José María Di Bello tied the knot at a registry office in Ushuaia, capital of the far-southern province of Tierra del Fuego.

The couple had been blocked from marrying in Buenos Aires on Dec. 1 after a national judge issued a ruling that conflicted with a city judge’s ruling that had authorized their marriage.

The nation’s Supreme Court then promptly announced it would resolve the matter of the conflicting rulings.

In Tierra del Fuego, meanwhile, Gov. Fabiana Ríos issued a decree allowing the marriage there.

She called the marriage “a breakthrough in human rights and social inclusion” and said, “We are delighted that it has happened in our province.”

Federal and provincial human rights officials attended the wedding.

“Finally, the first marriage between persons of the same sex in Latin America and the Caribbean has occurred,” said Claudio Morgado, president of the National Institute Against Discrimination, Xenophobia and Racism (INADI), who witnessed the event. “This took place after a strong activist fight by FALGBT (Argentina Federation of Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals and

Trangenders) and great work of coordination between INADI and the legal secretary of Tierra del Fuego. INADI feels that we had to join in this historic moment marking a major advance in the fight against discrimination against lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgenders.”

INADI immediately featured the wedding at the top of its official Web page.

“I am happy to have accomplished this, which for others is so easy and for us has been so difficult,” Freyre told Radio 10 after the ceremony. “We promised that we were going to do the impossible to fulfill our wish, which is not (just) something of José María and Alex but rather the wish of millions of gays and lesbians.”

A bill to legalize same-sex marriage nationwide is pending in Argentina’s Congress and FALGBT President María Rachid says there are enough votes to pass it.

“There is sufficient consensus to address the law at the beginning of (2010),” she said. “The (vote) counts show we have a sufficient majority to act on it and approve it.”

Buenos Aires, some other Argentine cities and the province of Río Negro already have civil-union laws for same-sex couples. Elsewhere in Latin America, similar laws are in force in Uruguay, Mexico City, the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul, and the Mexican state of Coahuila, which borders Texas.

In addition to Tierra del Fuego, same-sex marriage is legal in Belgium, Canada, the Netherlands, Norway, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, and the U.S.

states of Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont. It will become legal in March in Mexico City and Washington, D.C.

Twenty-four men were arrested at a house in Saly, Senegal, on Christmas Eve for “homosexual activities,” local media said.

They were held overnight and may face prosecution.

Evidence collected by police included cosmetics, wigs, condoms and lube.

Having gay sex in Senegal can lead to imprisonment for up to five years.

In August, two men from the town of Darou Mousty were convicted of sexual acts “against nature” and jailed for two and five years respectively after neighbors claimed they were having gay sex.

Numerous other men have been arrested since early 2008 for “crimes”

variously called “homosexuality,” “incitement to debauchery,” “corruption of good behavior,” “acts against the order of nature,” “indecent conduct”

and “homosexual marriage,” according to the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission.

Last May, Prime Minister Souleymane Ndéné Ndiaye called homosexuality “a sign of a crisis of values,” IGLHRC said.

The gay group Inclusive Foundation was raided by police in Tbilisi, Georgia, Dec. 15 and the organization’s leader, Paata Sabelashvili, was jailed for two weeks.

Gay activists in Western Europe say the group remains under surveillance and that its phones are tapped.

“We are very concerned with the way the police forces treated the staff of the Inclusive Foundation and with the damage they caused to the office,”

said Martin K.I. Christensen of the European Region of the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association. “The other worry is that Georgian police still monitor the office and that other leaders of the Inclusive Foundation, Tinatin Japaridze and Eka Agdgomelashvili, continue to be under police surveillance.”

The raiding officers did not wear uniforms, identify themselves, produce a search warrant or explain the raid, activists said.

The officers confiscated cell phones and denounced members of the Women’s Club, who were meeting at the time, as “perverts,” “sick people” and “Satanists,” activists said.

Police threatened to out the women and threatened to kill Agdgomelashvili when she would not stop demanding a search warrant and the officers’

identification documents.

Inclusive Foundation leaders say they are constantly followed by “cars full of men without uniform” and that “one such car is permanently stationed outside the entrance to the house of one of the staff members.”

Three members of GayBelarus were fined a total of about $467 Dec. 23 for picketing the Iranian Embassy in Minsk to protest Iran’s treatment of gay people.

Sergey Androsenko was fined $307 for organizing an unauthorized protest and Sergey Praded was fined $123 for taking part in it. A third participant was fined $37.

An embassy employee testified that among the people handed protest material was the Iranian ambassador himself.

Androsenko said his fine was unusually harsh for nations of the former Soviet Union and equals one month’s worth of his salary.

“I am going to appeal for review ... to the U.N. Human Rights Committee,”

he said. “It will reveal the roughness of Belarusian legislation to issues of organizing such actions and restrictions on expressing one’s own thought.”

“The world can’t hear the voice of Iranian gays, who are being executed,” he added. “We, activists of LGBT movement, have to become this voice.”

Assistance by Bill Kelley