Taipei, Taiwan, police raided a “gay orgy” at a private apartment Jan. 17 and detained 92 men for alleged illegal drug use, the China Post reported.

Police said the men were wearing only underwear and the floor was littered with condoms and tissues. Hundreds of ecstasy pills were confiscated, they said.

The party reportedly was open only to “well-built men” who paid $7.42 each to attend.

The detainees were subsequently force-tested for sexually transmitted diseases. Twenty-eight tested HIV-positive and 46 had syphilis, reported the China Times and the United Daily News.

Only 14 of the HIV carriers were listed on the government’s official tally of people with HIV.

“Half of the participants in the home party are infected with HIV or other sexually transmitted disease,” Ling Ding, deputy director of Taiwan’s Center for Disease Control, told the Deutsche Presse-Agentur wire service. “This fully shows the danger of attending such parties.”

The 64 partiers who tested HIV-negative will be forcibly retested in April to make sure they did not become infected during the party, Health Minister Chen Chien-jen told ETTV, a cable news channel.

Knowing transmission of HIV carries a seven-year prison sentence in Taiwan.

Canada’s Justice Department said Jan. 19 it will appeal a recent ruling in a class-action lawsuit that granted gays and lesbians expanded access to Canada Pension Plan (CPP) benefits.

When the federal government extended numerous spousal benefits to same-sex couples in 2000, it chose Jan. 1, 1998, as the date for retroactive access to pensions.

The class-action ruling rolled that date back to April 17, 1985 — the day equality guarantees took effect in Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

The extension increased the number of gays and lesbians eligible for CPP benefits by approximately 1,500, at an estimated cost to the government of $400 million (US$307 million).

According to Toronto’s Globe and Mail newspaper, the government believes providing benefits retroactive to 1998 was already quite generous.

Sixty-eight percent of 16,871 men questioned in the United Kingdom’s latest Gay Men’s Sex Survey expect a prospective sex partner who is HIV-positive to reveal his status before they have sex.

Forty-four percent of HIV-negative and untested respondents would decline to have sex with someone who revealed his positive status. Forty-five percent would go ahead and have sex but be “extra careful.”

“This strongly suggests that one very common strategy for avoiding HIV infection being employed by men not tested positive is the expectation that men with HIV will inform them prior to sex which in turn will allow them to avoid exposure by either avoiding sex with the infected man or modifying the sex they have with him,” researchers said.

“Over a third of all men not tested HIV-positive both expected a positive partner to disclose their status prior to sex and would not want to then have sex if they did. In this climate, it is difficult to see what incentive men with HIV have for disclosing their HIV status.”

Most gays and lesbians are not really gay, they’re just perverts, Belgian Roman Catholic Cardinal Gustaaf Joos told the weekly P-magazine Jan. 21.

“All those who say they are lesbian or gay, a maximum of five to 10 percent are effectively lesbian or gay,” Joos, 80, said. “All the rest are simply sexual perverts. Don’t hesitate to write that down. I demand you write that down. I don’t care if they all come and protest at my door. I won’t open the door.”

A spokesman for the Belgian Catholic hierarchy said Joos was speaking only on his own behalf. Pope John Paul II made Joos a cardinal last year.

The Vital Statistics Agency in the Canadian province of British Columbia Jan. 14 ordered the province’s marriage commissioners to start performing weddings for same-sex couples or resign by March 31.

British Columbia is one of two Canadian provinces where full same-sex marriage was legalized by court order last year. The other is Ontario. Foreigners can marry in those provinces, as well. They can purchase a license and marry the same day.

Canada’s federal government has said it agrees with the rulings by the British Columbia and Ontario supreme courts and will legalize same-sex marriage nationwide this year, although there has been some foot-dragging at the federal level since Paul Martin replaced Jean Chrétien as prime minister on Dec. 12.

The associate editor of the French gay magazine Têtu, Judith Silberfeld, faces charges of abusing a member of the government for reporting that anti-gay Deputy Families Minister Christian Jacob has spent “a lot of time studying the media and television, the running of which he understood very little about.”

The magazine’s December 2002 Web report was quoting an e-mail that appeared to have come from Jacob’s office but was in fact fake. Têtu quickly published a retraction but Jacob pursued legal action anyway, alleging defamation.

The magistrate who summoned Silberfeld said she had used “expressions suggesting that the deputy minister for the family did not have the intelligence that should be expected for someone in his position.”

The current issue of Têtu accuses Jacob of waging a personal vendetta against Silberfeld.