Box Turtle Bulletin

The Daily Agenda for Tuesday, June 4

TODAY’S AGENDA:
House of Lords Continue Marriage Equality Debate: London, UK. The British House of Lords will hold its second day of debate on a marriage equality bill which passed in Commons two weeks ago. The Lords spent much of yesterday debating Ex-chief constable Lord Geoffrey Dear’s amendment’s amendment which would wreck the bill altogether and prevent it from reaching a second reading. Dear actually had the audacity to justify his amendment with a bit of concern trolling:

He said: “I fear the Bill, should it become law, could well create such opposition to homosexuals in general that the climate of tolerance and acceptance in this country, that we have all championed and supported and seen flourish over the years, could well be set back by decades.”

…But Lord Black of Brentwood, a gay Tory peer and executive director of the Telegraph Media Group, hit back at Lord Dear in a powerful speech. “This is 2013,” he said. “Gay people don’t want to be tolerated in this society. They want to be equal in this society.”

The vote on the amendment is expected to take place at around 5:00 p.m. London time, and peers are calling it to close to call. Peers are also warning that if the bill is rejected by the Lords, then it will precipitate a constitutional crisis after the bill enjoyed such strong cross-party support in Commons.

Multiple Hate Groups To Protest At HRC Headquarters: Washington, D.C. Peter LaBarbera (Americans for Truth about Homosexuality), Linda Harvey (Mission America) and Diane Gramley (American Family Association of Pennsylvania) — all three of who head SPLC-identified anti-gay hate groups — will be joined by Liberty University’s Matt Barber and Eric Holmberg of the Apologetics Group for a press conference in front of the headquarters of the Human Rights Campaign. Their press release states:

“Why are so many cities proudly celebrating a harmful sexual preference that undermines health, undermines families, and leads children astray?” asks Linda Harvey, talk show host and founder of Mission America. “The Human Rights Campaign is simply wrong to continue its business of selling this lifestyle to America. There’s nothing here to be proud of, but instead, this organization should be very ashamed.”

Peter LaBarbera, President of the Americans for Truth About Homosexuality, explained: “On Tuesday morning we will gather in front of the world’s most powerful homosexual lobby group, Human Rights Campaign, in Washington, D.C., during so-called ‘Gay Pride Month’ (June) to proclaim the politically incorrect truth: that proud homosexuality is against God; against Nature; very unhealthy; and a serious threat to children and religious freedom. Thankfully, it is also changeable — as proved by the existence of countless thousands of happy former ‘gay’ men and ex-lesbians.

“Our bottom line is that homosexuality is nothing to be proud of. In fact, practicing homosexual behavior, a destructive sin, is something to be ashamed of. Out-and-proud homosexualism — far from being a ‘human right’ — is actually a human wrong.”

The news conference will take place today at 11:00 a.m. in front of the HRC building at 1640 Rhode Island Ave. NW in Washington, D.C.

THIS MONTH IN HISTORY:
95 YEARS AGO: Inverts Of Social Value: 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 – JB]. 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.

[Source: E.S. Shepherd. “Contribution to the study of intermediacy.” American Journal of Urology and Sexology 14, no. 6 (June 1918): 241-252. Available online via Google Books here.]

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?