Asia Pink Awards will celebrate those campaigning for LGBTQI acceptance in Asia
The first ever Aisa Pink Awards will take place this Sunday, March 16, in Singapore. Launched by Element Magazine, Singapore’s first gay men’s magazine, the awards will celebrate individuals and businesses in the region who have actively campaigned for diversity and social acceptance of the LGBTQI community.
Individuals considered for awards include A-Mei, a Taiwan-based singer who is extremely expressive in her support for gay rights; M. Ravi, a Singapore lawyer who mounted a constitutional challenge against Section 377A of Singapore’s Penal Code, which criminalizes homosexuality; singer Anthony Wong, who publicly declared that he was gay during a concert at Hong Kong Colliseum; and Taiga Ishikawa, the first of Japan’s two openly gay male politicans to win an election, who also successfully lobbied the Japanese government to allow Japanese citizens to marry foreign nationals in countries where same-sex marriage is legal.
Businesses nominated for awards are mainly comprised of American and European corporations. Google, Goldman Sachs, IBM and J.P. Morgan are all up for consideration, while Britain’s Barclays and Standard Chartered and Sweden’s IKEA are also in the running. The remaining business, Nomura, is a Japanese conglomerate which sponsored Hong Kong Pride, Hong Kong’s LGBT Film Festical and India’s LGBT Film Festival.
Element Magazine’s associate publisher will chair a panel of judges, including the CEO of China’s largest gay website, the editor and co-founder of Gay Star News and a board member of International Lesbian and Gay Association-Asia. The awards ceremony kicks off at 8:00am EDT Sunday morning and can be streamed through Moovz, a social network aimed at the gay community. Gay Filipino pop star Sebastian Castro will host the pre-show, starting at 7:30 EDT.
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