Latvia saw its first Pride parade July 23 after the Riga Regional Administrative Court slapped down a ban on it issued by city leaders three days earlier.

The approximately 150 marchers were heavily outnumbered by around 1,000 anti-gay protesters, who hurled insults, bottles and rotten eggs, blocked the streets and forced the parade to be rerouted.

The protesters chanted “No sodomy” and “Gays fuck the nation.”

In the end, police formed a human chain around the marchers to keep them safe. At least six anti-gay demonstrators were arrested.

The parade ended at an Anglican church where a “rainbow mass” was celebrated by Maris Sants, a former minister in Latvia’s dominant Lutheran church who was defrocked after he came out.

When the service ended, anti-gays blocked the church exits. Police escorted the marchers from the building and bussed them to safety.

“I have never experienced so much hate before,” Swedish marcher Rickard Lundgren told the Stockholm Web site QX.se. “The hate was shining in their eyes.”

Officials in the capital city banned the march July 20 after Prime Minister Aigars Kalvitis denounced it as “a parade of sexual minorities [taking] place in the middle of our capital city next to the Dom [Cathedral].”

A city spokesperson claimed the march would harm gays and lesbians by reducing tolerance for them.

“The majority of society was against it, and it could result in unrest,” said Ugis Vidauskis, spokesperson for Riga City Executive Director Eriks Skapars.

Now that it’s the law of the land, Canadians want to keep same-sex marriage, a new poll has found.

The Globe and Mail/CTV poll found that 55 percent of those surveyed say the next government should leave the law as is, while 39 percent would support an attempt to undo it. Six percent lacked an opinion.

Conservative leader Stephen Harper has pledged that if the Conservatives come into power, they will try to overturn the House of Commons and Senate votes that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide.

The poll also found that 51 percent of those surveyed oppose gay adoption and 46 percent support it. The legalization of same-sex marriage probably automatically legalized adoption by married same-sex couples. But adoption law is made at the provincial level, and not all provinces and territories have had a court decision on the matter yet.

The poll questioned 1,000 Canadians and the results are said to be accurate within 3.1 percentage points 95 times out of 100.

Two male teenagers were hanged in Mashhad, Iran, July 19 for having sex with each other, the Iranian Students News Agency reported. The report was translated from Farsi by the British gay-rights group OutRage!.

The teens, one age 18 and one under age 18, reportedly were convicted by Court No. 19 under Islamic Shariah law, which punishes homosexual acts with death. They were identified only as “M.A.” and “A.M.”

The reports said the couple acknowledged having sex but said they didn’t realize it was a capital offense. They also testified that most Iranian boys have sex with each other.

Another report, by Iran Focus, claimed the two were hanged not for engaging in gay sex but for sexually assaulting a 13-year-old boy. Neither the ISNA report nor a report from the National Council of Resistance of Iran reported this information, OutRage! said.

However, The Times of London reported it on July 22. The paper said: “Iran’s religiously conservative judiciary determined that the pair had raped the 13-year-old boy at knifepoint while he was out for a bicycle ride in the northeastern province of Khorassan.”

OutRage! expressed skepticism over the rape claims.

OutRage!’s Peter Tatchell broke the story in the English-language media.

“According to Iranian human-rights campaigners, over 4,000 lesbians and gay men have been executed since the ayatollahs seized power in 1979,” he said. “Altogether, an estimated 100,000 Iranians have been put to death over the last 26 years of clerical rule.”

OutRage! urged the international community to begin treating Iran “as a pariah state” and to “break off diplomatic relations, impose trade sanctions, and give practical support to the democratic and left opposition inside Iran.”

A prominent Mexican gay activist was murdered in what appears to be an anti-gay hate crime, Amnesty International said July 14.

Octavio Acuña worked for the Quereteran Association for Sexual Education in Querétaro and ran a condom shop. He was found bleeding to death from multiple stab wounds inside the shop on June 21. Nothing had been stolen.

In 2004, Acuña and his partner filed a complaint with the State Human Rights Commission alleging that municipal police officers had stopped them in a public park and told them “their sort” should not be there. A few weeks ago, Acuña publicly criticized the commission’s failure to act on his complaint.

Local human-rights organizations say another gay activist was drugged and beaten the weekend following Acuña’s murder, in another suspected homophobic attack.

Police in Queenstown, Eastern Cape, South Africa, broke up a demonstration by AIDS activists with rubber bullets and tear gas July 12, Human Rights Watch said. Forty protesters were injured.

The demonstrators, organized by the Treatment Action Campaign, were protesting the government’s poor record in providing antiretroviral drugs to people with HIV.

In December, the Eastern Cape Health Department stopped accepting new HIV patients and referred those already on treatment to Frontier Hospital in Queenstown, which is caring for fewer than 200 of the approximately 2,000 people in need. More than 50 AIDS patients have died while on the hospital’s treatment waiting list.

South Africa has some 5.3 million HIV-positive residents. In November 2003, the federal government promised to provide 53,000 patients with free antiretroviral treatment by March 2004. But a year later, only about half that number were receiving the drugs.