Box Turtle Bulletin

The Daily Agenda for Friday, August 24

TODAY’S AGENDA (Mine):
By the end of today, I will have two fewer wisdom teeth than when I started.

TODAY’S AGENDA (Ours):
Prayer Vigil at Burned-Out Church: South Bloomingville, OH. Last weekend, a fire destroyed a historic 158-year-old South Bloomingville Christian Church. Only the front wall and steps were left standing. State fire investigators ruled that the church fire was deliberately set. The pastor, Rev. Scott Davis, told reporters that he believed the church was torched “because this is a gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender church, and people around here don’t agree with it.” A $5,000 reward has been posted for anyone with information leading to the arrest of those responsible. There will be a Stop the Hate candlelight prayer vigil this evening at 7:00 p.m. on the church grounds.

Webinar for LGBT Immigrant Youths: Online. On August 15, 2012, the Department of Homeland Security announced the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, in which eligible undocumented youth age 30 and under may be given temporary permission to stay in the U.S. A broad coalition of LGBT advocacy groups will hold an online webinar to provide more specific information about eligibility and assistance with the application process.

To participate in the webinar, please click here to register. After registering you will receive a confirmation emailing containing information about joining the Webinar. If you do not have computer access, you can simply call in toll free to:  1-877-273-4202, Conference Room: 9495854. The webinar takes place today at 2:00  p.m. EDT, / 11:00 a.m. PDT.

The conference is sponsored by CenterLink: The Community of LGBT Centers; Equality Federation; Immigration Equality; Lambda Legal; National Center for Lesbian Rights; National Council of La Raza; National Gay & Lesbian Chamber of Commerce; National Gay and Lesbian Task Force; and National Queer Asian Pacific Islander Alliance (NQAPIA).

Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Bedford-Stuyvesant, NY; Charlotte, NC; Chico, CA; Cornwall, UK; Foyle, UK; Manchester, UK; Ottawa, ON and Ventura Co, CA.

Other Events This Weekend: Big Bear Adventure Weekend, Big Bear Lake, CA; Shout Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, Birmingham, AL; Burning Man, Black Rock Desert, NV; Windy City Rodeo, Crete, IL; Taste of Provincetown, Provincetown, MA; AIDS Red Ribbon Ride, Rochester, NY.

Homosexuals are fit to print.

TODAY IN HISTORY:
New York Times’s “Homosexuals In Revolt”: 1970. On June 28, 1969, the patrons of the Stonewall Inn erupted in revolt when New York City police tried to raid the bar. The New York Times, the city’s newspaper of record, published nary a word about it. But more than a year later, the Grey Lady finally found that the explosion of new gay organizations, along with the successful Gay Pride march and a large gathering in Central Park marking the one-year anniversary of Stonewall a few months earlier, was all too much to ignore. And so on August 24, 1970, the Times printed an exhaustive and (for 1970) relatively balanced exploration of the dynamic shifts that had just occurred within the gay community over the past year, namely its new-found pride and emerging sense of self worth. Of course, not everyone thought those new dynamics were positive:

This new attitude has its critics, both among “straights” and among homosexuals. Many doctors believe that, while homosexuals have full legal rights, “gay is not necessarily “good.” Dr. Lionel Ovesey, ad professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons, said: “Homosexuality is a psychiatric or emotional illness. I think it’s a good thing of someone can be cured of it because it’s so difficult for a homosexual to find happiness in our society. It’s possible that this movement could consolidate the illness in some people, especially among young people who are still teetering on the brink.”

Having gotten that out of the way early on however, the rest of the Times article focused mainly on the the emergence of a new attitude and commitment to equality among younger people, in contrast to the timidity that was still common among the older generation. The youth, who were organizing gay advocacy and social groups at an astonishing pace across the country, were inspired particularly by the civil rights movement as well as the women’s movement:

“We are all fighting for equal rights as human beings,” explained (New York Mattachine Society president Michael) Kotis, who had a picture of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. above his desk in the society’s cramped offices on West End Avenue. “The philosophical ideals on which this country was founded have yet to be realized. We owe a great debt to the blacks — they were the pioneers.”

Gays and lesbians were up against a lot of history however, and they were also up against a lot of internalized shame and guilt — even among some of the brave new activists:

“The first job we have to do is to decondition ourselves, to undo that self-contempt we have,” said Don Kilhefner, a graduate student who started a Gay Liberation branch at the University of California at Los Angeles. “We’ve gone through the same kind of conditioning blacks have gone through. We believe the myth society tells about us, consciously or unconsciously.”

“Homosexuality is not an illness; it’s a way of expressing love for someone of the same sex, and any form of love is beautiful and valid,” said Karla, a leader of the Lavender Menace, a lesbian organization in New York, who would not give her full name.

The article went on to discuss some of the discrimination that gay people face, particularly in employment where people were routinely fired if their employers found out they were gay. At that point, the article circled back around to Karla:

As a result, people like Karla, despite her devotion to the movement, are still afraid. “I still face the possibility that I might have to make it in the ‘straight’ world,” she said, in explaining why she would not give her full name. “And there are a lot of things you still can’t do if they know you’re ‘gay’.” In answer to these problems, “gay” organizations provide legal counsel, offer advice on job hunting, and lobby for legislative reforms.

There is much that feels antiquated when reading this article more than forty years later, but there is also much that feels familiar, particularly the tensions between the more established gay rights groups who feared pushing too hard and provoking a backlash (and who, quite visibly in this article, called themselves “homosexuals”), and the younger, more active members of the community who were impatient for change and were more willing to take their complaints to the street — and to proclaim themselves gay:

There are sharp disagreements within the homosexual community. People such as Michael Brown of Gay Liberation in New York identify with a broader radical movement. “The older groups are oriented toward getting accepted by the Establishment,” he said, “but what the Establishment has to offer is not worth my time. …”

On the other side are organizations such as the Tangent Group in Los Angeles, headed by a brisk, middle aged man named Don Slater. He agreed that homosexuals should have pride in themselves, but he added: “People should stop thinking of homosexuals as a class. They’re not. We have spent 20 years convincing people that homosexuals are no different than anyone else, and here these kids come along and reinforce what society’s thought all along — that they’re ‘queer.’ ‘Gay’ is good! To hell with that. Individuals are good.”

The parameters of the argument have changed quite a bit in the past forty years, but the fundamental discussion continues: assimilation vs. queer identity, the establishment vs. the grassroots, Gay, Inc. vs. Act-Up. Some things may never change.

Canada’s Largest Protestant Church Accepts Gay Ordination: 1988. The governing council of the United Church of Canada voted at a meeting in Victoria, British Columbia, to allow gay men and women to be ordained into the clergy.  The church, which was formed in 1925 from a merger of Canada’s Presbyterian, Methodist and Congregational churches, decreed: “All persons regardless of their sexual orientation, who profess faith in Jesus Christ and obedience to Him, are welcome to be or become members of the United Church. All members of the church are eligible to be considered for the ministry.”

The 205-160 vote followed months of heated debate, during which a quarter of the church’s ministers and 30,000 of its 860,000 members signed a declaration opposing the move. Over the next four years, membership fell by 78,000 as some congregations split and a few others left the denomination altogether.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Stephen Fry: 1957. Fry never really had an official coming out moment in his professional life. When he was asked when he first acknowledged his sexuality, Fry joked, “I suppose it all began when I came out of the womb. I looked back up at my mother and thought to myself: ‘That’s the last time I’m going up one of those.'” His early interests included being expelled from two schools and spending three months in prison for credit card fraud. But once he got that behind him, he earned a scholarship to Queen’s College at Cambridge University and was awarded a degree in English literature. While at Cambridge, he joined the Cambridge Footlights, an amateur theatrical club, where he met his best friend and comedy co-conspirator Hugh Laurie.

After a Cambridge Footlights Review in which Fry appeared was broadcast on television in 1982, Fry and Laurie were signed to two comedy series for Granada Television. In 1983, the duo moved to the BBC. Their first show, a science fiction mocumentary, flopped and was cancelled after only one episode. Their next project, the sketch comedy A But of Fry & Laurie, was considerably more successful, running for four seasons between 1986 and 1995. Fry also appeared in several episodes of the Rowan Atkinson’s Blackadder series.

Beginning in 1992, Fry began appearing in several BBC dramas, and in in 2005 he added documentaries to his many projects. He explored his bipolar disorder in the Emmy Award-winning Stephen Fry: The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive in 2006, and that same year he delved into his genealogy in an episode of Why Do You Think You Are? His six part 2008 series Stephen Fry in America had him travelling through all fifty states, mostly in a London Cab. His film credits include portraying Oscar Wilde — a role he said he was born to play — in 1997’s critically acclaimed Wilde. He made his directorial debut in 2003’s Bright Young Things, and he provided the voice for the Cheshire Cat in Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland.

Fry’s interests seems to know no bounds. He’s appeared in London’s West End, published four novels and several non-fiction works, sits on the board of directors of the Norwich City Football Club, and is an active blogger podcaster, vlogger, and Twitterer. (One stray tweet from Fry linking to BTB resulted in the highest single-hour traffic in the web site’s history.) He flies his own biplane, and is a member of the Noel Coward Society,  the Oscar Wilde Society, the Sherlock Holmes Society — and he was was voted pipe-smoker of the year in 2003. He has recently completed filming for the three-part adaptation of The Hobbit, of which the first installment is scheduled to debut in December.

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?