The Daily Agenda for Thursday, January 16

Jim Burroway

January 16th, 2014

TODAY’S AGENDA:
Events This Weekend: Arosa Gay Ski Week, Arosa, Switzerland; Aspen Gay Ski Week, Aspen, CO; Bärenpaadiie, Hamburg, Germany; Midsumma, Melbourne, VIC; Mid-Atlantic Leather Weekend, Washington, DC.

TODAY’S AGENDA is brought to you by:

From Vector, a publication of the San Francisco gay rights organization Society for Individual Rights, October 1972, page 29.

 
Drag performers are so lame these days, lip-synching to Britney Spears and Beyoncé. Back in the day, they used to actually sing and act and dance to real, live music. Today, not only can’t drag queens sing, but even Britney Spears and Beyoncé are lip synching.

TODAY IN HISTORY:
Louisiana Supreme Court Upholds Conviction of Lesbians for “Unnatural Carnal Copulation”: 1967. Convictions of women for “crimes against nature” have been exceedingly rare in our nation’s history, but the Louisiana Supreme Court in 1967 upheld two such convictions. In 1966, Mary Young and Dawn DeBlanc were arrested and charged with “having committed a crime against nature” under Louisiana law during the course of a prostitution sting. A police officer testified in court that he had spoken with DeBlanc over the phone about arranging to meet her and Young at a motel. As they settled on a price for services rendered, DeBlanc said that sometimes they “gave a show” for an additional charge. The evidence at trial for the crime against nature charge was slim: A photo of the girls naked in the motel room when they were arrested and certain comic books in one of the girls’ purses which was labeled obscene. Judge Frank Shea refused to throw out the flimsy evidence, and in stead instructed the jury that the law defining “crimes against nature” included any joining or connection of a genital organ of one person with the mouth of another. He also refused to instruct the jury on laws on entrapment.

Young and DeBlanc were convicted and sentenced to thirty months in the Orleans Parish prison. They appealed the case to the Louisiana Supreme Court on the grounds that the charge was vague. In 1967, the court ruled:

The statute, of course, requires proof of an “unnatural carnal copulation.” As pointed out by this court … this phrase simply means “any and all carnal copulation or sexual joining and coition that is devious and abnormal because it is contrary to the natural traits and/or instincts intended by nature, and therefore does not conform to the order ordained by nature. … Oral copulation by and between two women constituted “unnatural carnal copulation” within statute proscribing such conduct.

[Source: Jonathan Katz. Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the USA (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1976): pp 127-128.]

Photo by Annie Leibovitz

TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Susan Sontag: 1933-2004. Her literary career began in fiction, and she considered herself mainly a novelist even it was her essays which made her famous. When “Notes on ‘Camp'” was first published in the Partisan Review in 1964, it established her reputation as a critical thinker in popular culture. That essay has become the reference point for everything we thing about when we think of “camp”: the “so bad it’s good” quality; the celebration of the unnatural, the obvious artifice which fails to conceal deeper truths; the mocking of all that is serious; the playfulness that serves as an answer to moral indignation. Her series On Photography, which first appeared in the New York Review of Books between 1973 and 1977, drew on the works of Dian Arbus, Andy Warhol, and the Depression-era photography commissioned by the Farm Security Administration to illustrate the relationship of photography to the viewer and the photo’s subject.

When she published Illness as Metaphor in 1978, she tackled the way sufferers of diseases are affected by the perceived morality and character traits of the disease itself. “With the modern diseases (once TB, now cancer), the romantic idea that the disease expresses the character is invariably extended to assert that the character causes the disease — because it has not expressed itself. Passion moves inward, striking and blighting the deepest cellular recesses.” Written while she was being treated for breast cancer, she argued that the metaphors people applied to diseases had the effect of silencing and shaming patients. Her observations couldn’t have been more prescient time. When AIDS came along just a few years later, Illness as Metaphor would find deeper relevance in the gay community, and it would lead her to write its continuation, AIDS and Its Metaphors in 1988.

Sontag was nothing if not controversial. Easily dismissive of anything she saw as smacking of provincialism — including the provincialisms of intellectual Harvard, Paris, Oxford or New York, making her relationship with the city she called home an uneasy one. “I don’t like America enough to want to live anywhere else except Manhattan. And what I like about Manhattan is that it’s full of foreigners. The America I live in is the America of the cities. The rest is just drive-through.” That was tame. In 1965, she famously remarked that “the white race is the cancer of human history.” She expanded that view in 1967 when she wrote, “America was founded on a genocide, on the unquestioned assumption of the right of white Europeans to exterminate a resident, technologically backward, colored population in order to take over the continent.” In 1968, her anger at the U.S. led her to visit North Vietnam, which she documented in “Trip to Hanoi.” That same year, she visited Cuba and called for a sympathetic understanding of the Cuban Revolution. Critics denounced her for what they saw as a naive sentimentality when it came to Communism. A few years later, Sontag renounced her earlier views, particularly when the Cuban regime imprisoned the poet Heberto Padilla and launched a wave of persecutions against the island’s gay community.

She drew another wave of indignation following the September 11 terrorist attacks, when she wrote in the New Yorker, “Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a ‘cowardly’ attack on ‘civilization’ or ‘liberty’ or ‘humanity’ or ‘the free world’ but an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions? … In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): Whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday’s slaughter, they were not cowards.”

Aware that she was bisexual at during her early teens, Sontag was married from 1950 to 1959, a union which produced a son, David. After her divorce, she had a number of lovers, both male and female. She had been open about her sexuality since 1995. In 2000, she told The Guardian that she had been in love seven times in her life. “No, hang on,” she said.” “Actually, it’s nine. Five women, four men.” The last of those loves was photographer Annie Leibovitz (see Oct 2), a relationship that lasted from the 1980s until the day Sontag died of cancer in 2004. Her New York Times obituary, like most obituaries, said only that she was survived by her son and a younger sister.

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?

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