Moscow Mayor Says Homosexuality 'Wrong'

Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov called homosexuality "wrong and unusual" in a London news conference attended by his Paris and Berlin counterparts, both of them gay.

Luzhkov, who was in London for a meeting of the leaders of Europe's four largest cities, also repeated his opposition to a Gay Pride parade planned for May 27 in Moscow, Bloomberg.com reports. He has called such a march "satanic."

Last year, the Moscow Gay Pride parade was attacked by Neo-Nazis and fundamentalists, and several attendees were badly hurt. The police stepped in but mainly arrested peaceful gay demonstrators instead of the attackers.

"Through the gay parade you promote some uncertain people and it becomes an invitation to acquire this quality of the sexual minorities," Luzhkov told reporters Wednesday at yesterday at the news conference briefing with the mayors of London, Paris and Berlin.

The Moscow mayor, in office since 1992, conceded that Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoe and Berlin Mayor Klaus Wowereit disagreed with his views when they met with London Mayor Ken Livingstone, a longtime supporter of gays and lesbians.

The mayors discussed the issue "in a peaceful and calm way," Delanoe said. "We have to look at equality of rights, and that leads us to combat every form of discrimination or stigmatizing of individuals because of their sex, their religion, color of their skin or their personal identity," he said.

Livingstone and Wowereit didn't comment publicly on Luzhkov's views. Livingstone issued a statement yesterday saying he condemns "all acts of homosexual discrimination" and "asserts the basic human and civil right of gays and lesbians to peacefully demonstrate."