Infection Alert! Rangoon, Yangon: Aung Htut

Aung Myo Htut better known as Addy Chen was arrested for being gay under a draconian sodomy law in Myanmar that prohibits men from engaging in sexual acts with other men under penalty of up to 10 years in prison. Under this law every active gay man in Myanmar is a sex offender. The gay/HIV community is understandably outraged by this, but they tend be over focusing on the broad nature of Myanmar Penal Code 377 and drawing attention away from the actual behavior that Chen was accused of.

According to a gay media outlet, Chen was accused of sexually assaulting an employee of his after the employee went to police accusing him of coercing him into having sex with him. That is why he was held without bail for 8 months and put on trial. We are not sure what the outcome of that trial was, but the point is that the draconian statute was being enforced on someone accused of using coercion to obtain sex from an employee. Talk about a hostile work environment.

When draconian laws are enforced people often wail about how unfair they are written, but never look at how they are enforced. In this case, it appears that Myanmar chooses only to prosecute gays accused of some form of sexual misconduct in addition to just gay sex. Section 377 certainly needs to be revised so that it only covers sexual misconduct and not just homosexuality, but if they were to revise it someone like Chen would probably still be arrested on the grounds that one cannot legally coerce sex from anyone.

*We are not sure how old he is, how tall he is, how much he weighs, or when he first knew of his condition.The entries for those fields are guesses.

Addy Chen is a well known HIV/AIDS and gay rights activist in Myanmar. He has been one for many years and a lot of people thinkt his arrest was largely motivated by his activism.

We wouldn’t bother putting him on this site if it didn’t need at least one listing for Myanmar.