Box Turtle Bulletin
News and commentary about the anti-gay lobby“Now you must raise your children up in a world where that union of man and box turtle is on the same legal footing as man and wife…”
News and commentary about the anti-gay lobbyMay 31st, 2012
TODAY’S AGENDA:
Dharun Ravi Begins Serving 30-Day Sentence: New Brunswick, NJ. Dharun Ravi, the former Rutgers University student who was convicted in March of multiple charges stemming from his using a webcam to spy on Tyler Clementi, his dorm roommate, during an intimate encounter with another man, will turn himself in today to begin serving his 30-day jail sentence.
New Jersey’s sentencing guidelines call for five to seven years in prison for second-degree crimes with a maximum of ten years, although it can be reduced for “extraordinary circumstances.” Ravi’s reduced sentence prompted an appeal by the prosecutor’s office. While the sentence is on appeal, Ravi’s sentence was stayed, but he has the option of going ahead and serving it as long as he waives double jeopardy if the prosecutor’s arguments prevail on appeal. According to a statement released Tusday, Ravi chose to go ahead and begin serving his sentence, saying, “It’s the only way I can go on with my life.”
Philadelphia Trans-Health Conference: Philadelphia, PA. The free three-day conference offers workshops and activities focused on the health and well-being of transgender people, and provides important information and support for transgender allies. The conference, now in its eleventh year, draws approximately 2,000 people. The conference take place at the Pennsylvania Convention Center and will continue through Saturday, with inclusive worship services lined up for Sunday.
Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Albany, NY (Black & Latino Pride); Birmingham, UK; Boston, MA; Buffalo, NY; Cambridge/Kitchener/Waterloo ON; Davenport, IA; Dayton, OH; Detroit, MI; Dresden, Germany; Gothenburg, Sweden; Honolulu, HI; Kansas City, MO; Karlsruge, Germany; Kiel, Germany; Lille, France; Ljubljana, Slovenia; Los Ranchos, NM; Mexico City, DF; Nantes, France; Pittsburgh, PA; Queens, NY; Riga, Latvia; Sacramento, CA; Salt Lake City, UT; Santa Cruz, CA; Sheffield UK; Sonoma Co, CA; Spencer, IN; Springfield, MA; Staten Island, NY; Tulsa, OK and Warsaw, Poland.
AIDS Walks This Weekend: Beaver Lake, NY; Boston, MA; Clinton, NY; Long Beach, CA and Syracuse, NY.
Other Events This Weekend: AIDS Lifecycle, San Francisco to Los Angeles; Connecticut Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, Hartford, CT; Gay Days at Walt Disney World, Orlando, FL.
TODAY IN HISTORY:
Scientists Trace AIDS To 1951: 1986. The summer of 1986 looked to be another terrible year in the nearly five-year-old AIDS epidemic. To be precise, that should be the five-year-old known AIDS epidemic. The CDC first noted the new disease in 1981 with the death of five young men, “all active homosexuals” whose immune system had been mysteriously and severely compromised. Out of the 23,000 known cases of people with AIDS between 1981 and the end of 1986, 56% were already dead (PDF: 32KB/5 pages).
While anti-gay activists rushed to declare that the so-called “gay plague” was a divinely inspired “terrible retribution,” scientists sought to figure out where the deadly disease came from. It wasn’t long before doctors in Europe and Africa noticed that the new disease first reported in America was remarkably similar to a mysterious illness striking the Congo River basin of Zaire and was already spreading eastward to Uganda. Swedish doctors remembered an infant born in Zaire who had contracted a similar disease in 1975 and finally died in 1982. Others recalled a Danish surgeon who died in 1977 after working in the Congo River region. Preserved blood and tissue samples tested positive for HIV, and this sent scientists scurrying to identify earlier possible samples which may offer clues to the disease’s origin.
On May 31, 1986, a team of American scientists published a letter in the British journal The Lancet announcing that they were able to determine that a blood sample that had been taken from an unknown patient at a Kinshasa hospital in 1959 tested positive for HIV. Nothing was known of the patient — neither a name nor medical records survive — but we can certainly guess at the suffering he or she must have endured. Nevertheless, this finding was an early clue that the epidemic itself was much older than previously thought. Later genetic analysis of the virus in that blood sample would indicate that the virus had actually entered the human population sometime around 1931. And later analysis still would push that estimate back to around 1908. But as early as 1986, it was already clear that it was only the stigma surrounding the disease, and not the disease itself, that was then approaching its fifth birthday.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Walt Whitman: 1819. Usually I commemorate famous birthdays by providing a brief biographical sketch. But when describing the life of the great American poet, it strikes me as unseemly to describe a man’s life when he has already written all that needs to be said:
When I Heard At The Close Of The Day.
WHEN I heard at the close of the day how my name had been
receiv’d with plaudits in the capitol, still it was not a happy
night for me that follow’d,
And else when I carous’d, or when my plans were accomplish’d,
still I was not happy,
But the day when I rose at dawn from the bed of perfect health,
refresh’d, singing, inhaling the ripe breath of autumn,
When I saw the full moon in the west grow pale and disappear in
the morning light,
When I wander’d alone over the beach, and undressing bathed,
laughing with the cool waters, and saw the sun rise,
And when I thought how my dear friend my lover was on his way
coming, O then I was happy,
O then each breath tasted sweeter, and all that day my food
nourish’d me more, and the beautiful day pass’d well,
And the next came with equal joy, and with the next at evening
came my friend,
And that night while all was still I heard the waters roll slowly
continually up the shores,
I heard the hissing rustle of the liquid and sands as directed to
me whispering to congratulate me,
For the one I love most lay sleeping by me under the same cover
in the cool night,
In the stillness in the autumn moonbeams his face was inclined
toward me,
And his arm lay lightly around my breast and that night I was
happy.
This poem was originally part of a sequence of poems titled “Live Oak with Moss,” which tells the story of an unhappy affair with a man. When Whitman published the third edition of Leaves of Grass in 1860, he included them among the forty-five poems of “Calamus,” but re-arranged their order to obliterate the narrative. For the fourth edition of Leaves of Grass, two of the three poems dropped were “Live Oak ” poems, perhaps revealing that Whitman still feared that the poems told more than he could safely reveal. You can see the reconstructed “Live Oak” series at the Whitman Archive.
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Steve
May 31st, 2012
That Danish surgeon was a lesbian by the way:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grethe_Rask
Pacal
May 31st, 2012
What is particularily funny is the resistance that so many “experts” on Walt Whitman still have to the idea that Whitman was Gay. Some wtill deny it or they claim he never “did it” or if he did he only “did it” once or twice. Or that he wasn’t speaking about sex but about pure platonic love, that his posible lovers were actually Hetrosexual, after all some got married and had children. And of course they use Whitman’s scathing reply to John Addington Symonds, when John suggested that “adhesiveness” could be physical. This of course neglects those little journal entries with Whitman referring to picking up men and taking them home. And of course given that Whitman was rather discrite it would have been most unlike him to openly say it anyway. But then the fact that Whitman got along so well with Edward Carpenter should also give a clue.
Ben in Oakland
May 31st, 2012
When my late partner and i Had our wedding in 1992, almost 20 years ago– we called it a wedding among our gay friends and a commitment ceremony among most of our straight friends– this was the poem my best man read.
It’s always been one of my favorites.
Hue-Man
May 31st, 2012
The history of HIV/AIDS has been so poorly communicated; most people, if they noticed, probably think it started in the early ’80s with the gay airline steward who infected all his gay friends. That myth is easier to understand – and blame gay men – than the more complicated history stretching back into the 19th century.
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