Austria will get to know a lesbian angel, France takes action against the high suicide rate among gay teenagers, and the Dutch read about two lesbian women – here’s what’s going on in Europe.

Austria

AfterEllen.com reports that Austrian show Starmania – a reality TV show much like American Idol – debuts its fourth season Friday with openly lesbian/bi Bulgarian pop singer Lucy Diakovska among the show’s three judges.

Lucy Diakovska is best known as part of the once very successful German girl group No Angels, who – unfortunately – wasn’t very successful at this year’s Eurovision Song Contest when they came in last. To learn more about her (and see some glamorous pics) go to AfterEllen.com.

Germany

• Last Saturday Miriam Meckel, TV host, university professor and book author, and her partner, popular talk show host Anne Will, attended the awards ceremony for the “Deutschen Fernsehpreis”, a German TV awards show, together. Meckel was a member of the jury, which also included out TV host Bettina Böttinger. Meckel and Will came out as a couple last November, an event that had long been awaited by German lesbians and that was comprehensively reported about in the press and even by AfterEllen.com. To see pictures of the couple on the Red Carpet, you can go to Gettyimages.com.

• If you live in Hamburg or the Northern part of Germany or happen to visit the area next week, you might want to check out the program of Hamburg’s gay and lesbian film festival. From Oct. 20th to Oct. 26th, a broad variety of both gay- and lesbian-themed movies will be shown in four different cinemas. Among the over 100 movies are documentaries, feature films and short films from all over the world, like British movie Affinity, a movie based on yet another Sarah Waters novel, German movie Mein Freund aus Faro, about a young woman who falls in love with another woman who mistakes her for a boy from Portugal, and French movie Water Lilies, about two women from a synchronized swimming team who become lovers. The program also includes 2007 Academy Award Winner Freeheld, Puccini for Beginners and Drifting Flowers from Taiwan.

France

• This is not specifically lesbian news, but still noteworthy: Young, gay and what people think is the subject of a contest organized by French health minister Roselyne Bachelot together with scientists, artists and the media. Famous director André Téchiné (“My Favourite Season”, “Changing Times”, both starring Catherine Deneuve) serves as president of the jury.
  The main goals of the contest are to change the representation of homosexuality in the society, enhance dialogue and make people think about the consequences of homophobia, resulting, for example, in an alarming number of suicides among French teenagers that’s estimated to be about 7 times higher than the risk for straight teenager.
  Participants can deliver a storyline, 4 of which will be made into short movies and aired on the channels of the Canal+ group. If you want to know more, you can visit the official website of the contest: www.leregarddesautres.fr

• Starting today, French TV channel “Téva” airs short-lived US TV show “Cashmere Mafia” about four ambitious and successful business women in New York who have been best friends since business school. One of them, Caitlin, falls in love with another woman. You can learn more about the show on AfterEllen.com.

Netherlands

As part of the campaign Nederland Leest (The Netherlands read) that starts on Oct. 17th and runs through November 14th, Dutch libraries and schools will give away the novel “Twee Vrouwen” (“Two Women”) by Harry Mulisch, one of Holland’s most famous writers, to its members and students. There is also a special priced new edition in bookstores. “Twee Vrouwen” is about the lesbian relationship between Laura, a divorced woman who has never been with another woman before, and Sylvia, who she picks up on the street one day. The book was first released in 1975 and – of course – caused quite a stir back then. It was also made into a movie in 1979.
To learn more about the campaign, you can go to their official website. There’s an English review about the book on Complete-Review.com, and information on the movie is available on IMDB.

If you think that there’s something missing from this column that we should have written about, it’s very likely that we just didn’t know about it. To prevent this from happening again, please help us and let us know what’s going on in your country that you think should be reported about in this column. You can either send us a private message via this website or an e-mail to entertainment@eurout.org.

(Posted on eurOut on Oct. 16th, 2008)