The event at Itawamba County Agricultural High School in Fulton, Mississippi, was cancelled by the school board because of “distractions in the educational process”.

School authorities had earlier told 18-year-old student Constance McMillen that she would not be allowed to arrive at the prom with her girlfriend and turned down her request to wear a tuxedo.

They also told Ms McMillen that she and her girlfriend would be asked to leave the event “if any of the students complained about their presence” - before deciding to cancel the prom outright.

Ms McMillen told local media that cancelling the prom was an act of “retaliation”.

“A bunch of kids at school are really going to hate me for this,” she added.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Mississippi (ACLU) has filed a lawsuit on behalf of Ms McMillen, saying that the school has violated the student’s First Amendment right of free expression.

“It’s shameful and cowardly of the school district to have cancelled the prom and to try to blame Constance, who is only standing up for herself,” said Christine Sun, an ACLU lawyer.

She added: “We will fight tooth and nail for the prom to be reinstated for all students.”

A Facebook group set up in support of Ms McMillen - Let Constance Take Her Girlfriend to Prom! - has already attracted over 50,000 fans.

2006 performance Susan and Darren has been reworked to reflect the changing relationship between dancer Darren Pritchard and his party loving mother, Susan. Starving Artist’s award-winning signature piece Road Movie, originally performed in 1995, will also be revisited especially for the festival.

Among the new performances scheduled is Must: An Inside Story, presented by Peggy Shaw in collaboration with the Clod Ensemble. Shaw is a legend of the New York performance art scene and will here  share her view of the medical profession from her current perspective as a 65-year-old lesbian grandmother. Elsewhere, Christopher Green – better known as Southern Belle Tina C – will host an 18th birthday party featuring Stockport housewife Mrs Barbara Nice, a new strip routine from Ursula Martinez and karaoke from Kazuko Hohki and her Frank Chickens.

Queer Up North faced closure in 2007 due to Arts Council cutbacks. The decision was reversed after an appeal and the festival is now once again building on the success of previous years. Organisers had further cause to celebrate this year when their co-commissioned, anti-homophobic bullying work, FIT, was made into a film and sent to every secondary school in the country.

The 2010 festival runs from 18 to 31 May at venues across Manchester, including the La Gayola Spiegeltent. The specially erected mobile dance hall is set to host cabaret, burlesque and musical performances over the closing weekend of the festival. The full line-up will be published in the next fortnight. See here for more information.

The Intercom Trust, which is based in Cornwall but also covers the counties of Devon, Dorset and Somerset, is a resource that “provides help against homophobic and transphobic prejudice, crime and discrimination”.

It recently posted an advert for a full-time community helpline worker and administrator, stating that it required someone with experience of gay and lesbian issues.

However, one potential applicant contacted local newspaper the Exeter Express & Echo to complain about the “offensive” advert.

In an email to the paper, the anonymous jobseeker said: “I find this offensive that the advert is being specific about a person’s sexual orientation.

“I have no desire to enter into any exchange of opinions as I do not have a problem with whatever any person is or believes… It is just that I am looking for a job in administration and found it amazing that I have to be something which is so specifically personal and nothing to do with my ability to do the job in order to apply for that post.”

However, The Intercom Trust executive director Michael Halls defended his organisation’s decision in the paper.

He said: “This position for a helpline worker and administrator requires the person to answer the helpline and speak to people who have often suffered terrible emotional damage. If someone has spent years and years of their life desperately hiding from all of their family something they know will have them thrown out, they want to speak to someone who is sensitive to the issues of being gay or lesbian.

“And if they find themselves speaking to someone who is straight they may close down in the conversation. They need to speak to someone who understands from the inside. It is the same thing for a women’s rape crisis helpline for example — the callers, who are traumatised enough, don’t want to talk to a man.”

The trust claimed there was a “genuine occupational requirement” for being sexuality specific in its advert.

According to equality law, employers are allowed to circumvent discrimination laws on sexuality if they can demonstrate there is a genuine requirement of the role.

The news comes just a week after the fallout of Pink News editor Jessica Geen ‘coming out’ as straight in a national newspaper, causing division among the gay community as to the importance of sexuality in her job role.

If the incident is playing on your mind to the point where you are behaving oddly around her she is likely to have noticed. If this continues it will ultimately damage your friendship.

As always, communication is the key. You need to talk about it. Find out how she feels and let her know how you feel. This may be a scary prospect but it would be a shame to sacrifice your relationship based on a misunderstanding. You may be blowing things out of proportion and worrying needlessly.

If you find that she is attracted to you then this does not have to be the end of your friendship. You might need some space but with a basis of honesty, you might have a chance at working things out.

If you carry on letting it eat you up then you risk creating unbreakable barriers between you both.

Do you have a sex/relationship problem you need Sappho’s help with? Email Sappho@lesbilicious.co.uk, and remember to include a name, age and location.

Disclaimer

A recent test carried out by Open Net Initiative (ONI) showed that a Bing version tailored for users in Arab countries filtered English and Arabic queries related to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender material, alongside keywords related to sexually explicit content.

Attempts to use filtered keywords prompted a message which said: “Your country or region requires a strict Bing SafeSearch setting, which filters out results that might return adult content.”

Filtered Arabic words included “lesbian”, “gay” and “homosexuality”. These words were allowed as English keywords when searching for websites, but banned in image searches.

ONI researchers said: “Microsoft has signalled its willingness to be at the forefront in protecting freedom of expression around the world. It is difficult to reconcile this position with Bing’s current filtering standards.”

Microsoft has not commented on the claims.

The study, conducted by sociologists Sven-Axel Mansson and Kristian Daneback, is the result of an online survey which questioned 855 people aged 18-24 about their sexual activity. Mansson said his research shows that there is “increasing interest in experimenting and pushing boundaries, and a growing resistance to defining oneself as heterosexual, homosexual or bisexual.”

The survey revealed that 31 per cent of women and seven per cent of men in the Scandinavian country were attracted to members of the same gender, although they usually found members of the opposite most attractive. Meanwhile, 39 per cent of the women and eight per cent of the men said they had sexual fantasies about both genders.

Thirteen per cent of the female respondents (compared with just under six per cent of British women) and three per cent of the male said that they had sex with men and women.

Last year, the Charity Tribunal ruled that Catholic Care could not be exempt from equality legislation which prevents agencies from restricting its services to heterosexual couples only. The agency is now appealing this decision in the High Court, where they are opposed by the Equality and Human Rights Commission and the Charity Commission.

In Court yesterday Christopher McCall QC, representing Catholic Care, said that as the charity was, “inspired by the tenets of the Roman Catholic Church” they believe that, “a family unit is made up of a man and woman whose lives together are fulfilled by the blessing of children”.

McCall continued: “It accepts that to carry on as before involves discrimination but says it is merely a justifiable means to a legitimate end, namely that of securing homes for children who could be expected not otherwise to find homes at all”.

Mark Wiggin, CEO of Catholic Care, claims that the charity has put 1,388 of the most vulnerable children in Yorkshire into “loving” households since 1963. If the agency closed, he said, “children would lose an effective and well respected resource in the Yorkshire region”.

McCall admitted, however, that there were more children than suitable heterosexual homes available for them. Despite this, and after having 21 months to adjust to the new rules, Catholic Care is the last adoption agency still fighting Sexual Orientation Regulations (SORs).  The Roman Catholic Church lost an earlier battle against the SORs, which state that gay couples must be considered as adoptive parents in the same way heterosexual parents are.

The case will be heard for two more days and the verdict returned at a later date.

The party, which has already issued lists of women and ethnic minority candidates, sees lesbian and gay prospective parliamentary candidates (PPCs) as a key tool in the campaign to present a more caring, modernised Tory Party.

The list, sent to the Daily Mail, specifies the 20 out gay PPCs who will stand in the impending general election, 11 of whom told party leader David Cameron that they were happy to be named. According to shadow minister for the environment Nick Herbert, who is gay, if all the candidates win their seats, it would mean the total number of out Conservative MPs would be greater than rival Labour. Currently there are just three gay Tory MPs who are out and in parliament – Herbert himself, Alan Duncan and Greg Barker. He said: “A successful political party ought to look like the country it seeks to govern.”

There is only one woman on the list, Margot James, who is standing for Stourbridge in the Midlands. She looks likely to join Angela Eagle, Labour MP for Wallasey, as the second out lesbian in Westminster, and only the third ever in Westminster history. The first, Labour’s Maureen Colquhoun, came out in 1976 and left parliament in 1979.

Other names on the list include Mark Coote, Nick Boles and Iain Stewart, who are standing in safe seats, with Simon Nayyar and Matthew Sephton less likely to be successful.

The global day champions the economic, political and social achievements of women past, present and future.

The first IWD was held on March 19 1911 in Austria, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland, during which more than 1m women and men attended IWD rallies campaigning for women’s rights to work, vote, train and hold public office.

The tragic deaths of 140 working women in the ‘Triangle Fire’ in New York occurred less than a week after the first IWD, highlighting the plight of women’s working conditions and labour legislation, and became an integral part of subsequent IWD campaigns.

The United Nation’s chosen theme for this year’s event is Equal Rights, Equal Opportunities: Progress for All.

To mark the day, The Independent newspaper has compiled a list of ‘100 women who changed the world’. It includes several gay and bisexual woman, such as the poet Carol Ann Duffy, the psychotherapist and feminist campaigner Susie Orbach and novelist Virginia Woolf. It also highlights the gay rights campaigning work carried out by journalist Joan Bakewell.

A comment piece in the Guardian tells of the launch of a “manifesto” for 21st century feminism.

It said: “This International Women’s Day, we should recommit to a women’s liberation which is connected to a wider movement for human emancipation and for working people to control the wealth they produce.

“That’s why women and men have to fight for liberation. We won’t win without a fight, because there are many vested interests who want to stop us. But more and more people are beginning to connect campaigning over climate change, war and inequality with fighting for women’s liberation.”

In the UK on Saturday (6 March), around 8,000 women took to the streets of London to protest against violence against women as part of the Million Women Rise campaign.

Among those taking part was Laura Colclough, who travelled from Oxfordshire to be present at the march. She told Lesbilicious: “I went to stand together with other women in a public space, hold our heads up and bring the issue of male violence against women out of the shadows and onto the streets.

“I was there for myself as a survivor and for all victims who don’t have a voice.”

Coincidentally, on the eve of IWD, Kathryn Bigelow made history by becoming the first woman ever to win a best director award at the Oscars for her low-budget Iraq war film, The Hurt Locker.

IWD is now an official holiday in China, Armenia, Russia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bulgaria, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Macedonia, Moldova, Mongolia, Tajikistan and Ukraine.

The film, provisionally entitled Scarpetta, will be an original story by Irish writer Kerry Williamson and based on the character, rather than an adaptation of one of Cornwell’s 17 novels featuring the crime-fighting doctor.

The film, which takes place in the present day, rather than the books’ 1980s setting, will feature a younger version of Scarpetta, before she reached the top of her career and will explore the experiences that shaped her. “There’s almost a brewing passion in her, an intensity and sexuality that she doesn’t feel comfortable unleashing,” says Williamson.

The film is due to start shooting this autumn and is the only Kay Scarpetta project to come to fruition: Cornwell optioned a book in 1990 and several actresses, including Jodie Foster, have been linked to the character, although none of the roles materialised.

Patricia Cornwell herself is delighted with the casting of Jolie, stating: “When Angelina came out of the left field last year, I was floored.” Some of the writer’s admirers, however, have expressed disappointment. On Cornwell’s website, the majority of fans express disappointment at the “terrible” and “bad” choice of Jolie.

Although another recurring character in the novels, Scarpetta’s lesbian niece Lucy, will not appear in the first film, she is slated to make an entrance in later films in the long-running franchise that is predicted.

The film is due for release in 2012.