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The grandson of Oscar Wilde called Tuesday on President Vladimir Putin to protect the rights of homosexuals in Russia and to ensure fair media coverage of a gay pride march in May.
Merlin Holland -- grandson of the famous Anglo-Irish novelist, playwright and poet who was jailed in 1895 for homosexuality -- accused a Moscow city television channel of running a report on the march that was "overtly homophobic."
The report shown Saturday and Monday on TV Tsentr was "quite clearly intended to convince the Russian public that homosexuality is the affliction of a depraved and decadent minority in Western Europe," Holland wrote in the letter, a copy of which was obtained by AFP.
A spokesman for TV Tsentr refused to comment.
According to Holland, Moscow's powerful mayor Yury Luzhkov had also "publicly declared that he would ban peaceful demonstrations by sexual minorities, an act which would contravene both the Russian constitution and the European Convention on Human Rights."
Holland wrote to Putin: "Your country in the past has produced great works of art and literature and music, some of it indeed by those whose nature, like Tchaikovsky, was homosexual. It is nothing of which to be ashamed; it is not decadent and depraved."
Holland said he was not homosexual but was coming to Moscow to support the first International Day Against Homophobia conference to be held in the city this May, at the same time as the gay pride march.
Oscar Wilde, whose works included "The Picture of Dorian Gray" and "The Importance of Being Earnest," was a star playwright in late Victorian London, but his career and family were ruined after he was imprisoned in 1895 for homosexuality.
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AFP 071448 GMT 02 06
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