The Daily Agenda for Friday, September 12

Jim Burroway

September 12th, 2014

TODAY’S AGENDA:
Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Athens GA; Benidorm, Spain; Burlington, VT; Charlottesville, VA; Chula Vista, CA; Greensboro, NC; Pride Humboldt/Eureka CA; Idaho Falls, ID; Nags Head (Outer Banks), NC; Savannah, GA; Spartansburg, SC.

Other Events This Weekend: Folsom Europe, Berlin, Germany; Out in the Park at Six Flags Great America, Chicago, IL; Kings Island Pride Night, Cincinnati, OH; Best Buck in the Bay Gay Rodeo, San Francisco, CA; International Bears Week, Sitges, Spain.

TODAY’S AGENDA is brought to you by:

From Come Out!, the Gay Liberation Front's official newspaper, January 10, 1970, page 2.

From Come Out!, the Gay Liberation Front’s official newspaper, January 10, 1970, page 2.

Kathy Braun wrote the following description of another of the GLF’s Gay Community Dances for the April 1970 edition of Come Out!:

The Dance, by Kathy Braun.

On Friday, February 6, GLF held another of its continuing series of dances at Alternate U — 530 6th Ave, The purposes which we set out for the dances were, to provide an alternative to the exploitive gay bars in the city, to raise money for a GLF Community Center, and to politicize the homosexuals hanging around this town.

This particular dance was held a sa benefit for COME OUT with any money over the needs of the paper to go back into the Community Center Fund. The dances are sponsored by the Aquarius Cell and anybody wishing further information on any detail may check with the people involved. $667, was netted profit, and as of publication, no determination has been made about the distribution to the paper and the center.

ART REVIEW
The light show, by , [sic] seemed good. To tell the truth, I was paying more attention to the people but at the next dance I’ll give it more attention. The choice of restricting the light show to a section of the floor was superb in that it provided people with a choice instead of imposing a show on them.

The records played were exciting, danceable, and at the right volume. My current favorite song is “And the World will be a Better Place” but I couldn’t even tell you if it played since I go around singing in my head all the time, in counterpoint to “Everyday People.”

The dancing was of the usual superlative quality. Them queers can sure shake a leg.

As theatre, Beck & Malina couldn’t ask for more. I couldn’t certainly. 600 people, music, lights, costumes, kissing, seductions, promises made, truths explored, conflicts, politics. Hit it, sisters & brothers.

ANALYSIS
Alternative to the Gay Bars — Sensational. Who wants to go to a bar when you can get 600 dancing partners, a light show, and free coat check all for a contribution of $1.50, with drinks only a quarter.

Raise Money for Center — Hotcha! $943 in the safe deposit box already. Right on!

Politicize — This is the beauty part. Although I feel that GLF is not unified on its specific approach to politics (and need it be?) the underlying theory that prevails is that effective politics must be based on CARING ABOUT PEOPLE and it is this theory which permeates the actions of every member of GLF and communicates directly to the people who come to the dances. Although there are some people who get together and talk politics, most people are simply dancing, looking, listening, groping, drinking, laughing, having fun, being CARED about. Gorgeous.

TODAY IN HISTORY:
 John Vassall Arrested for Spying: 1962. No one ever bothered to ask how a low level British Admiralty clerk earning £908 a year was able to afford a home in London’s Dolphin Square apartment complex, which had been home to such illustrious residents as Charles de Gaulle, C.P. Snow and Sir Oswald Mosley. Nor did they pay much attention to his 36 Savile Row suits, three cashmere overcoats, tailored silk shirts, or exotic holidays.

They should have, particularly since Vassall held a Top Secret clearance with the Royal Navy. But British investigators didn’t begin poking around until December 1961, when a KGB agent, Anatoli Golitsin, defected to the United States and spilled the beans about Soviet agents working in the West, including two spies in the Admiralty. MI5 agents decided that one of them might by Vassall, but didn’t act for more than a year. Then in June of 1962, another KGB agent, Yuri Nosenko, began providing further evidence of Vassall’s spying. Even then, MI6 held off for three more months, until September 12, 1962, when Vassall was finally arrested and charged with spying for the Soviet Union.

Vassall confessed immediately: about the spying, about the cameras and films hidden in his apartment, about the documents that he stole, and about how he got into the spying business for the Soviets. It began in 1952 when he was a member of the Naval Attaché at the British Embassy in Moscow, where he found himself socially isolated on several fronts: a Brit in Moscow, a common civil servant among upper-class officers and diplomats, and, crucially, a homosexual at a time when it was illegal both in Britain and in the Soviet Union. Through a Polish worker at the embassy, Vassall became connected with Moscow’s gay underground. In 1954, he was invited to a party — which was actually a classic “honey trap” set up by the KGB — where Vassall was encouraged to become extremely drunk, and where he was photographed in compromising positions with several men. The Soviets used those photos to blackmail Vassell, and he became their agent for the next eight years.

In 1956, Vassall was assigned to the Admiralty, where he photographed secret documents and passed them to his KGB handlers in exchange for money. The documents he passed to the Soviets included specifications for British radar, torpedoes, nuclear weapons, anti-submarine equipment, and tactics. When Golitsin defected in 1961, the Soviets ordered Vassall to stop working and return his camera. Then Nosenko began providing information about Vassall to the CIA in Geneva right about when the Soviets gave Vassall his camera back and ordered him to resume spying. It is now suspected that Nosenko, who never defected and whose information about other spies proved to be unreliable, may have set Vassall up to protect a more valuable spy at the Admiralty. When Vassall made his full confession following his arrests, he insisted that he had not stolen some of the documents that Golitsin said he stole.

Vassall was sentenced to 18 years’ imprisonment, of which he served ten. A public enquiry the following year, known as the Vassall Tribunal, tried to determine who in the Admiralty was to blame for the lax security oversight. Tam Galbraith, Civil Lord of the Admiralty, who was Vassall’s boss, was singled out for special scrutiny amid rumors that the he and Vassal had been lovers. Galbraith was declared innocent on all accounts, as were his other superiors in the Admiralty.

Vassall’s arrest also reignited the debate over Britain’s criminalization of male homosexuality. Five years earlier, the Wolfenden Commission had recognized that making gay men criminals exposed them to blackmail and extortion, and recommended that criminal penalties be lifted (see Sep 4), but Parliament refused to act. Now, it seemed that the time was right to revisit that decision. Peter Black, writing for the Daily Mail in 1963, argued:

The point is that though homosexuals  are no more inclined to treachery than you are. the law as it stands gives the Communists a lever against them which they have over nobody else.  If Vassall had not been a homosexual, and subject to this law, the Russians might have got him anyway. I think he had a predisposition to treachery. But they could not have blackmailed him into it.

Homosexuals are specially vulnerable to blackmailers because they cannot appeal to the protection of the law. The  blackmailer threatens him  with exposure. It he goes to the police exposure is what he’ll get anyway; for the police can, and sometimes do, charge the victim for participating in the offences he is being blackmailed about. So the law sharpens the threat of exposure and sharpens the wits of those vulnerable to it.

Those arguments however went nowhere, and homosexual relations between men remained a criminal act until 1967 (see Jul 28).

After Vassall’s release from prison in 1972, he wrote Vassall: The Autobiography of a Spy, which was published in 1975. He then changed his surname to Phillips and lived out the rest of his life in obscurity. He died in 1995 of a heart attack at the age of 71 in St. John’s Wood, north London. In 2006, details of his confession were released by the National Archives.

 45 YEARS AGO: Gay Liberation Front Protests Village Voice: 1969. More than two months had passed since the landmark Stonewall uprising, but New York’s news media was still unable to grapple with what that night of defiance really meant. On the day following the riot, The New York Times buried its story on page thirty-three, where it didn’t even bother to mention why the patrons of the Stonewall Inn were fighting. The New York Daily News reported the whole thing, on page thirty, from the police’s point of view (“3 Cops Hurt As Bar Raid Riles Crowd”). The Daily News followed on  July 6 with their infamous report, “Homo Nest Raided, Queen Bees Are Stinging Mad.”

If it weren’t for the Village Voice’s extensive coverage, much of what we know about Stonewall might have been lost to history. The Voice did have one advantage that New York’s more powerful media didn’t: it was located on Christopher Street, just a few doors down from the Stonewall. The July 3 edition of the weekly newspaper featured two front page stories about the riot: “Gay Power Comes to Sheridan Square” by Lucian Truscott IV, who reported what took place outside of the Stonewall. A second reporter, Howard Smith, arrived at the scene during the first raid just as police were loosing control of the crowd. Smith got caught up inside the bar where police had retreated for protection from the crowd. Smith described that experience in “From the Inside: Full Moon Over The Stonewall.”

While the Voice’s reporting on the rebellion was the most thorough and detailed of all the city’s news outlets, it wasn’t above the kind of mocking tone and prejudicial stereotypes that were typical at that time. Truscott wrote of “the forces of faggotry,” the “blatant queens” with “limped wrists and primed hair” battling police, which he described as “the city’s finest.” Smith’s report was less colorful, yet he couldn’t resist calling one lesbian a “dyke.” In his July 10 Voice column, Walter Troy Spencer called the riot “the Great Faggot Rebellion,” and laced his entire column with sneering disdain (“…a lot of that weekend’s swishy cruising on the streets around the Stonewall had gotten flamboyant and aggressive…”).

From the Village Voice, August 7, 1969, page 46. (Click to enlarge.)

From the Village Voice, August 7, 1969, page 46. (Click to enlarge.)

Immediately following the riot, the gay community began to organize. In August, the newly formed Gay Liberation Front (see Jul 27) tried to place two small ads in Village Voice. One ad in the free Bulletin Board section on page two was to publicize the GLF’s community dances, and the other one, a paid ad for the classified section, was to announced the forthcoming publication of the GLF’s new newspaper, Come Out! The second ad was supposed to have the headline “Gay Power to Gay People,” but Voice staff deleted the lead-in without notifying the GLF.  They also changed the Bulletin Board ad to read “Homophile Dance” instead of Gay Community Dance.”

When the August 7 edition of the Voice came out, GLF members discovered the deletions. At the GLF’s next general meeting, there was a great deal of discussion about the Voice’s unilateral editing of the ads. They decided to give it another try and place another ad to advertise the Gay Community Dance planned for September 5th. The ad was accepted, but the person who placed the ad received a phone call from someone at the Voice the next day to say that it was Voice policy to refuse to print obscene words in classified ads and that the using the the word “gay” to refer to, well, gay people, was obscene — even though the Voice routinely accepted, without question, ads for apartments from landlords specifying “no gays.” The Voice saw itself as one of the most liberal papers in the country, and it defined its liberalism as allowing its writers to say anything they wanted. That meant that writers were allowed to write about “faggots” and “blatant queens” with the full support of editors and management. even though no writer would have dreamed of using derogatory language to describe blacks or other minority groups. But that freedom ended at the Voice’s advertising, where the Gay Liberation Front was barred from using the word “gay.” They weren’t even allowed to use the word “homosexual.” That, too, was just as bad as “gay.”

GLF Protesters in front of the Voice. From Come Out!, November 11, 1969, page 11.

GLF Protesters in front of the Voice. From Come Out!, November 11, 1969, page 10.

The Gay Liberation Front struck back with a protest at the Village Voice on Friday morning, September 12 at 9:00 a.m, demanding a meeting with publisher Ed Fancher. The protest went on all day as Fancher stubbornly refused to meet with the group. Later that afternoon, a protester tried to place a classified ad reading, “The Gay Liberation Front sends love to all Gay men and women in the homosexual community.” That ad was rejected. But soon after, Fancher agreed to meet three of the protesters’ representatives. This is how the premiere issue of Come Out! described the meeting:

Once inside and upstairs, the representatives encountered a cry of outrage that GLF has chosen the Village Voice as a target (sooo liberal we are). The suggestion was made that we negotiate the three points in dispute I )changing classified ads without knowledge or consent of purchaser, 2) use of the words “Gay” and “homosexual” in classifieds, and 3) the contemptuous attitude of the Village Voice toward the Gay Community. GLF explained that the two issues involving classified ad policy were not negotiable and that the substance of the paper should be of legitimate concern to a responsible publisher. Ed Fancher replied that the Village Voice exercised no censorship of its articles, and that if a writer wanted to say derogatory things about faggots, he could not in good conscience stop him. Fancher also said that we had no right to tamper with “freedom of the press.”

This GLF accepted with the absolute understanding that Gay Power has the right to return and oppose anything the Village Voice staff chooses to include in the paper. On the Classified Ads policy he conceded completely. He said that not only would the Voice not alter Ads after payment, but that in Classified Ads the words “Gay” and “homosexual” per se were no longer issues. One of the GLF representatives in the upstairs office stepped to the window facing Seventh Avenue and flashed the V for Victory sign to the waiting crowd below. WE HAD WON!

The Voice’s next edition didn’t see fit to report on the protest at its front door, but the GLF’s tiny ad did appear in that issue’s Bulletin Board.

From the Village Voice, September 18, 1969, "Bulletin Board" on page 2: The Gay Liberation Front ad that was so "obscene" (Click to enlarge.)

From the Village Voice, September 18, 1969, page 2: The Gay Liberation Front ad that was so “obscene” (Click to enlarge.)

[Sources: Untitled article. Come Out! 1, no. 1 (November 11, 1969): 10. Available online here.

Edward Alwood. Straight News: Gays, Lesbians and the News Media (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996): 88-91.]

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?

Hyhybt

September 12th, 2014

All this good stuff today, yet what sticks in my mind are from the top and bottom: up top, that either the date January 2, 1970 or the one January 10, 1979, or both, has to be wrong, and at the bottom, I hope Cathy Denton’s mom got better.

Jim Burroway

September 12th, 2014

Hybybt, The 1979 was a late night fat-finger. I’ve corrected it. As for why an ad for a January 2 dance appeared in a paper dated January 10, I have no answer, except to say that Come Out! was never run as a professional paper but an ad hoc collective. Which is to say that it was as erratic as GLF itself.

I hope Cathy Denton’s mom got better too. The Voice had quite a large number of ads from families looking for their kids.

FYoung

September 12th, 2014

Thanks for the background on the protest against the Village Voice, Jim. I don’t recall ever reading the details on this protest.

FYoung

September 12th, 2014

Congregations more accepting of gays, survey finds

“Overall acceptance of gays and lesbians in U.S. religious congregations rose significantly between 2006 and 2012, but it declined in Catholic congregations, according to new data released Thursday.”

http://www.tennessean.com/story/news/religion/2014/09/11/congregations-more-accepting-of-gays-survey-finds/15479619/

This is a survey of clergy mainly, not members.

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