Box Turtle Bulletin

The Daily Agenda for New Year’s Day

Happy 2012, everyone. 2012. 2012. 2012. And for the next several weeks, whenever you write a check (that is, if you are still writing checks and not already paying for everything online), you will probably, out of force of habit, mistakenly date it for 2011, only to have to scratch it out and correct the year to 2012. And so that is why today’s Daily Agenda is late. It’s not actually late; when I wrote it yesterday afternoon, I post-dated it in the software to show up overnight on January 1 — 2011. Which is why if you checked in earlier this morning to see it, you wouldn’t have found it. Instead, you would have had to go back a full year, to New Year’s day of last year, to find it. Now that that has been properly sorted out, here’s to a very happy, productive, informative, and prosperous (in whatever way you measure prosperity) New Year.

The Delaware State Capitol

TODAY’S AGENDA:
Civil Unions Law Takes Effect: Delaware. Last May, Governor Mack Markell signed Delaware’s civil unions bill into law, which gives same-sex couples the same rights and responsibilities at the state level that are granted/imposed on married couples. It also recognizes marriages and civil unions performed in other states. The law take effect today.

TODAY IN HISTORY:
English Criminal Law Amendment Act Takes Effect: 1885. English law had long held that homosexuality was an “abominable crime” punishable with death by hanging, but in 1861, the law was modified to provide imprisonment from ten years to life instead. But crime of sodomy was always difficult to prosecute because it required a witness and evidence that the sexual act had been fully consummated, complete with penetration and what we would call a happy ending. Obviously, that made convictions rare.

That changed in 1885, although the change was rather unintentional. During the middle of the nineteenth century, there was a growing concern over the dangers suffered by England’s daughters over the “gross indecencies” imposed upon them. But again, convictions were rare because the statute required that the sexual assault take place in a “public place.” And so on January 1, 1885, a revision to the criminal code raised the age of consent for girls from thirteen to sixteen, and it made “gross indecencies” punishable regardless of age and place a misdemeanor, punishable with up to two years imprisonment. It didn’t take long for “gross indecency” to be interpreted by the courts to include homosexuality. In fact, it would be under this statute that Oscar Wilde would be convicted and sentenced to the maximum two year term ten years later.

Los Angeles Gay Bar Raided: 1967. It all was sparked by the temerity of a kiss, when a small group of gay men at Silverlake’s Black Cat bar, upon the countdown to midnight on New Years’ eve, had the gall to kiss each other “on the mouth for three to five seconds” in the presence of about six undercover policemen s who had infiltrated the gay bar. As soon as the pecks on the lips began, police identified themselves and began viciously beating and arresting the kissing offenders. As the melee widened, several people tried to escape to the nearby New Faces bar. Undercover officers followed and raided that bar as well. One of the New Faces workers was beaten so badly by police that they cracked a rib, fractured his skull and ruptured his spleen. Six Black Cat kissers were tried and convicted of “lewd or dissolute conduct” in a public place, conduct that consisted of male couples hugging and kissing.

Two years before the Stonewall uprising in New York, the Black Cat raid had the effect of galvanizing the gay community in Los Angeles. Gays turned out for protests and demonstrations in the months that followed, and they began to pass a newsletter around which would eventually morph into The Advocate. By the time of a similar police raid on a dive bar in Greenwich Village two years later, the ground was well prepared for gays to come out nationally to declare their presence in society. In 2008, the Black Cat bar was declared a historical-cultural landmark by the city of Los Angeles, in a move that was partly inspired by the story of the Black Cat bar posted on BTB in 2006.

Homosexuality decriminalized: The first day of the year often marks the day in which new state laws take effect, which explains why on this day in history, a number of states officially decriminalized homosexuality effective January 1. Among the states that I know of in which laws prohibiting same-sex relations include: Arizona (19800, California (1971), Colorado (1971), Hawaii (1972), Iowa (1976), New Mexico (1975), North Dakota (1978). Ohio (1974),  Oregon (1971) and Vermont (1977). If you know of any others, please let me know in the comments below.

If you know of something that belongs on the agenda, please send it here. Don’t forget to include the basics: who, what, when, where, and URL (if available).

And feel free to consider this your open thread for the day. What’s happening in your world?