The Daily Agenda for Friday, January 25

Jim Burroway

January 25th, 2013

TODAY’S AGENDA:
Events This Weekend: Creating Change Conference, Atlanta, GA; Midsumma, Melbourne, VIC; BeefDip, Puerto Vallarta, JAL; Winter Rendezvous Ski Week, Stowe, VT; Out In the Desert LGBT Film Festival, Tucson, AZ.

TODAY IN HISTORY:
Alice Mitchell Kills Freda Ward: 1892. Freda Ward was the socialite daughter of a wealthy planter and merchant. Alice Mitchell was the daughter of a retired furniture dealer. Both were well known about town, daughters of two of the best families of Memphis, Tennessee. Alice would later say that as far as she could remember, she had an “extraordinary love” for Freda. The letters the exchanged revealed, as one newspaper put it, “that Alice loved Freda as man loves woman, and Freda loved Alice as woman regards man.”  According to one newspaper account,

“Twice Alice went to visit Freda’s family, during which time the two girls, as witnesses attested, showed ‘disgusting tenderness’ for each other. They were seen to swing together in a hammock by the hour, hugging and kissing each other — they hugged and kissed ad nauseum”.

Alice was ashamed of doing this in public, but Freda upbraided her for this.” Their relationship grew. Alice proposed marriage, but it appears that Freda either refused the offer or was prevented from accepting it by her family.  As Freda was about to leave Memphis to board a steamboat to her family’s home town in Arkansas, Alice waylaid her and killed her on the streets of Memphis. As she later explained:

“I was in love with Freda. I could not live without her. Long ago we made a compact that if we were ever separated we should ill each other. When I found that Josie had forbidden Freda to have nothing more to do with me, I saw nothing else to do but to kill her. I took father’s razor, but told no one what I was going to do.

Newspapers around the country followed every detail of the case and trial. And since this occurred at about the time psychologists and medical professionals were beginning to understand homosexuality and lesbianism as something other than simply criminal acts, the Mitchell-Ward case was dissected in the nation’s medical journals as well. The Memphis Medical Monthly carried an extensive report of the trial in which Mitchell was judged insane.

Other medical journals weighed in on the exact nature of her insanity. It was a common nineteenth century belief that insanity was the result of “degeneracy,” which was a body of beliefs that held that human beings, through the natural course of evolution, would naturally produce children who “de-generated” some of their parent’s characteristics in an imperfect form — think of a xerox copy of a xerox copy. With ordinary evolution, these inferior copies would be disadvantaged and their genes would die out. But Degeneracy theory held that the advances and “luxuries” of modern society protected these lesser individuals and allowed them to bear further de-generated offspring. Degeneracy didn’t always yield blemished children: geniuses were also held as examples of a kind of positive “de-generation” (because they deviated from the norm), and evidence of their degeneracy was often found in various personality quirks or eccentricities.

Yet it was an extraordinarily short trip from “de-generation” to degeneracy, and the Mitchell-Ward case become, literally, a textbook example. Even two decades later, as in the following passage from 1914 by Douglas C. McMurtrie from the American Journal of Urology. He cited other psychologists and sexologists who observed that “congenital sexual inversion is widespread in America, homosexual women being frequently found in societies and clubs.” He then turned his attention to the still talked-about Mitchell-Ward case from two decades earlier, and places great importance on Mitchell’s mother’s mental state:

One of the most widely known cases of violent crimes due to sexual inversion in the female occurred in Memphis, Tenn., approximately in 1891, though the exact date is unknown to me. The facts were typical of sexually inverted affection and are of considerable interest. They have been reported by Comstock. [Here, he quotes a brief account of the crime by T. Griswold Comstock for the New York Medical Times in 1893]

… In accounting for the deed, Comstock, while diagnosing Alice Mitchell as a sexual “pervert,” considers her insane. It appears that her mother in her first confinement had child-bed fever and puerperal insanity, and was confined in an asylum, and that before the birth of Alice she was deranged, and this aberration continued until some time after labor. Although no actual determination was made of Alice’s mental state it was decided she was insane.

This may have been the case. In the light of present knowledge regarding this sexual anomaly, however, it may be said that no more insanity might have been involved in this crime of homosexual jealousy than is involved in analogous crimes of heterosexual jealousy which come constantly before the courts.

A full account of the case of Alice Mitchell giving the facts as proved in court and the various testimony of the medical witnesses is given in the Memphis Medical Monthly. The article also contains a report of the direct examination of the defendant. It is noteworthy that in none of the medical evidence was there any mention of there having been a sexual condition chiefly accountable for the crime.

In fact, if there is anything noteworthy about this affair, it is the fact that it wasn’t the nature of the love interest which proved to be the mark of Mitchell’s insanity during her trial, even though the lesbian aspects of their relationship were very widely reported. (Indeed, it was the main reason the case was such a sensation in the popular press.) Instead, she was judged insane because her mother was judged insane. She was the unfortunate degenerated offspring of a degenerated mother, and Mitchell’s degeneracy was seen as a more generalized sort which had little to do with her sexuality. The homosexuality of gay men, on the other hand, was often regarded as degeneracy sui generis, with one Texas physician in 1893 advocating castration for those judged to be afflicted with this “trait” so that it could not be passed on to future generations — to “nip it in the bud,” so to speak.

Degeneracy theory, which provided a theoretical basis for eugenics, would eventually die with the worst excesses of the eugenics movement. People with physical, mental, emotional or other anomalies — whether those anomalies were in the direction of weakness or strength — would soon lose the tag of “degenerate.” Everyone except for gay people. For them, the last remnant of this discarded theory would live on as the name commonly used against them — degenerates — until well into the late twentieth century. And in some circles, still today.

[Sources: Jonathan Katz. Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A. (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1976): pp 53-58.

Douglas C. McMurtrie. “Notes on the psychology of sex.” American Journal of Urology 10, no. 9 (September 1914): 432-436. Available online via Google Books here.

F. E. Daniel “Castration of sexual perverts.” Texas Medical Journal 9, no. 6 (December 1893): 255-271

“Murder In Cold Blood: Memphis Startled by a Most Sickening Tragedy.” The Day (New London, CT., January 26, 1892): 1. Available online via Google News Archive here.

“An Odor of Blood: The Details of Freda Ward’s Murder Retold.” Aurora (IL) Daily Express (February 25, 1892): 2. Available online via Google News Archive here.

“Misfit Affection: Strange Case of Alice Mitchell and Freda Ward.” Warsaw (IN) Daily Times (July 19, 1892): 1. Available online via Google News Archive here.

“Loved Like A Man: Developments in the Freda Ward Murder Case.” Warsaw (IN) Daily Times (July 20, 1892): 1. Available online via Google News Archive here.]

Oklahoma High School Students Form Klan Chapters: 1978. An estimated 112 to 132 high school students, mostly freshmen and sophomores at two high schools in northwestern Oklahoma City and the surrounding suburbs, joined teen chapters of the Ku Klux Kan. The purpose of those chapters, according to newspaper accounts, was to wage “a campaign of terror against homosexuals.” One unidentified youth said, “We are not just against blacks like the old Klan. We are against gays and the clubs that support them and are going to try to shut them down because this activity is morally and socially wrong.”

School officials were skeptical of that the reports were true. The principal of Putnam City High School said that the news accounts could be the work of “one young man” who “has made accusations and wants publicity.” The principal of Putnam City West Highs School vowed, “We won’t have the Klan on campus if I have any say-so.”

The boys, on the other hand, claimed credit for an attack on patrons leaving a gay bar in which several people were injured and cars were vandalized. As for the Klan chapter’s membership, one boy said, “The only people we won’t let in are girls, blacks, Jews or dope smokers. And we might consider Catholics if the time comes.” Another said that the chapters “have gotten instruction sheets and lots of information on the Klan from the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, even on making the robes and hats.” A third said that he joined the Klan “as a joke that kind of started making sense.”

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?

MattNYC

January 25th, 2013

Wow. Grab a tissue before listening:

http://www.npr.org/2013/01/25/170166408/after-years-of-estrangement-eight-siblings-become-a-family

Audio will be up after 9AM EST.

cowboy

January 25th, 2013

Re: Sundance Film Festival and Gospel of Intolerance (Uganda):

http://www.nytimes.com/video/2013/01/22/opinion/100000002020130/gospel-of-intolerance.html?WT.mc_id=VI-D-I-NYT-MOD-MOD-M289-ROS-0113-HDR&WT.mc_ev=click&WT.mc_c=205193

Bose in St. Peter MN

January 25th, 2013

I’m appreciating Exodus International’s latest video:

January 25th Week in Review

Alan Chambers is excited about switching up their set for the weekly video. Instead of coming to us from a comfy home den, they’re now broadcasting directly from… wait for it… you know you’ll love it… HEAVEN!

OK, my interpretation, not Alan’s. But, c’mon, that’s exactly how uber-white backlit sets have been used for generations.

Oh yeah, and out, happy gay people should feel free to call Exodus for help mediating squabbles with Christian family members.

Timothy Kincaid

January 27th, 2013

Bose,

I couldn’t get the video to play this morning, so I’m not sure of the context. But I think there might be times in which an Exodus member might not be a bad idea as a mediary between an openly gay person and a conservative religious person.

It can be a matter of language and culture, sometimes, and Exodus might serve as an interpreter. I’m familiar with both and at times I marvel at both how gay people misunderstand what a religious person is saying and vice versa.

Of course this presumes that Exodus can leave their own goals out of it. They are headed in that direction, but I’m not sure they are all at a place where they could be neutral. At this time I would probably recommend Gay Christian Network.

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