in SGBOY.COM's online forums and IRC chat room – which are the region's busiest for gay Asian men. The move follows stinging criticism from the Minister of State for Health Balaji Sadasivan this month in which he said the homosexual community was mostly to blame for an "alarming AIDS epidemic" in Singapore. LGBT party banned In December 2004, the government turned down an application by gay dating platform Fridae to hold its Snowball.04 party on 25 December because the event was "likely to be organised as a gay party which is contrary to public interest," according to Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong. Lee said that in previous editions of the party in 2002 and 2003, assurances were sought from party organisers that the event would include the wider community. "We allowed it and we made it quite clear that it had to be a party which was not targeted at gays alone," Lee said. "As the party turned out, our sense of it was that it was beyond what we were prepared to accept. So we said no." 2005 On 21 May 2005, the Straits Times reported that 3 teenagers was infected with the HIV virus in 2004, the biggest in a year since 1985, when HIV was first detected in Singapore. Before 2004, Ministry of Health figures showed only 1 teen at most per year tested positive for HIV. Another alarming change was that the infected teens in the past two years were gay. Previously, the 3 teens infected between 2000 and 2002 had been heterosexual. In 2005, the lone 17-year-old student who had so far tested positive for HIV was also gay. He was presumably infected by his older partner who pressured him into having unprotected sex, according to Action for AIDS programme director Roger Winder. On 6 December 2005, UK newspaper The Daily Telegraph reported that a Singaporean man Ghani Jantan and his British partner John Walker were the first gay couple to announce their civil union in the print version of the widely read British daily. The pair were amongst the first wave of more than 1000 homosexual couples to take advantage of the civil partnership law which grants gay unions almost all the legal rights and obligations which apply to heterosexual marriages. The story was also carried by Singapore's Today newspaper. In June 2005, government authorities turned down an application by gay dating platform Fridae