Box Turtle Bulletin

The Daily Agenda for Monday, June 4

TODAY’S AGENDA:
Dr. Drew To Discuss Ex-Gay Therapy: HLN (Formerly CNN Headline News). Educator, sexologist, ex-gay survivor, and author of Ex-Gay No Way: Survival and Recovery from Religious Abuse, Dr. Jallen Rix will appear on Dr. Drew tonight to discuss the damaging effects of ex-gay therapy in light of California’s S.B. 1172, which would place limitations on the practice of ex-gay therapy among licensed therapists in the state. Joining Dr. Drew Pinsky to defend ex-gay therapy will be NARTH’s David Pickup. To get an idea of who David Pickup is, you have to see this video. Seriously. You have to see this video. Which should make Dr. Drew unusually entertaining today. Dr. Drew airs on HLN (formerly CNN Headline News) tonight beginning at 9:00 p.m. EDT/6:00 PDT.

Lambda Literary Awards: New York, NY. Special honorees at tonight’s Lambda Literary Award ceremony are Tales of the City author Armistead Maupin, amd feminist writer and activist Kate Millett. Awards will be given out for twenty-four categories including drama, children’s/young adult, memoirs, general fiction, mystery, poetry, romance, erotica, nonfiction and LGBT studies. You can see the full list if finalists here.

TODAY IN HISTORY:
“Contribution to the Study of Intermediacy”: 1918. Since the late 1880s, American medical and mental health professionals had been struggling with the question of what to do with those who fell outside of conventional gender roles and sexual expressions. For centuries, such people were considered criminals and were severely punished, often with their lives. In the nineteenth century, a new science of sexology had emerged which characterized the experience that today we would consider gay or transgender as “constitutional” rather than transgressive. The truly liberal-minded reformers of the era called for scrapping criminal codes against these “intermediate” types, but what to do next was a matter of debate. But as Dr. E.S. Shepherd, writing for the June 1918 issue of the American Journal of Urology and Sexology, that debate wasn’t always a high-minded one:

THIS paper had its origin in a remark by the editor that perverts should be given a dose of HCN (Hydrochloric Cyanide). One is frequently tempted to agree with that prescription, but it might be well to first make sure that such wholesale elimination would not remove a number of valuable citizens. When this was suggested to the editor he advised that I sketch for the Journal a few intermediates who were of social value. Such a sketch presents insuperable difficulties. Out of the prevailing ignorance there arises a serious prejudice which maintains that intermediacy and perversity are synonymous. To call a man an intermediate is, in the popular conception of the word, equivalent to calling him a fellatrist and the mere accusation of such iniquity will ruin any man, even though he can prove his innocence, and show that the accusation was made with intent to kill him. We are never really able to b!lieve that the accused was innocent, partly I fear, because we hope he was guilty. …

One is therefore compelled to cling to quite general statements. As is well known, our unsatisfied sexuality motivates that particularly cruel and malignant persecution which we mete out to those suspected of sexual trespasses and this persecution is intensified manyfold where the trespass involves what we have designated as perversity. Possibly our own repressed perversities find relief in such outbursts, just as vice-crusading serves similarly for the normal sex: hunger. At any rate one can not tell the truth as frankly as one might desire without involving many innocent people in a most unjust persecution. Physicians, for the most part, see only the lower classes of intermediates — those neurotics who are both perverse and mentally inferior or the spiritually feebleminded who call for treatment of one disease or another. Hence arises a distorted perspective which ignores those buoyantly healthy intermediates who frequently do not know that they are different trom other men and who often are not so, judged by the physician’s standards. The doctor thus falls into the vulgar error of supposing that a mixed psyche (the fundamental criterion of intermediacy) is synonymous with fellatio, sodomy, and the various sadistic-masochistic methods of detumescence. This supposition is true in about the same degree as the assumption that all normal men have sexual relations, or desire them, with all of their female acquaintances — some do, some don’t, more or less, according to the individual and the circumstances.

What’s fascinating about this paper is that Shepherd named the very problem that stood in the way of studying LGBT people for the next half decade: that almost all studies would be of LGBT people who sought (or were compelled to seek) psychological treatment. Since doctors only saw LGBT people who were disturbed, the medical and mental health professions concluded that all LGBT people were disturbed. “The problem,” he wrote,” is greatly obscured by the fact that most intermediates pass unrecognized even by their most intimate friends, since any hint of intermediacy involves under the prevailing ignorance the accusation of perversity which means ruin.”

Shephard’s paper was light years ahead of its time in the way he not only laid bare the question of what was “normal,” but questioned why “intermediates” didn’t pass muster under that definition.

It can not be too soon realized that intermediates are, in common with others, human beings and subject to the same environmental forces either elevating or degrading. Furthermore, there are all degrees of intermediacy both psychic and physical. There are, for example, fellatrists who, in intellectual acumen, spiritual elevation, or altruism and artistic creativeness, are wonderfully endowed. That they are not recognized as such is merely a question of our social conventions and the correlated defensive measures. On the other hand we have the male prostitute of the streets and beaches whose grossness is in no way better or worse than that of the pimp or rogue. In between lie all degrees of physical ‘normality’ combined with an intermediate psyche and the reverse. The point to keep in mind is that we have all degrees from the spiritually-gifted intermediates or pseudo-normals, grading down to the grossest natures. Nor should it be forgotten that many a libidinous male who boasts his ‘normality’ is spiritually mere sewage.

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?