The Daily Agenda for Friday, September 26

Jim Burroway

September 26th, 2014

TODAY’S AGENDA:
Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Belgrade, Serbia; Durham, NC; Ft. Collins, CO; Memphis, TN; Moab, UT; Richmond, VA; Sedona/Cottonwood, AZ; Soweto, South Africa; Sunderland, UK; Willemstad, Curaçao.

AIDS Walks This Weekend: Chicago, IL; San Diego, CA; Seattle, WA; Wilmington/Rehoboth, DE.

Other Events This Weekend: Everybody’s Perfect 3 LGBTIQ Film Festival, Geneva, Switzerland; Queer Lisboa 18 Film Festival, Lisbon, Portugal.

TODAY’S AGENDA is brought to you by:

From The Advocate, May 13, 1982,  page 19

From The Advocate, May 13, 1982, page 19

The building had a long history as a gay gathering spot, going as far back as the 1940s when busses used to drop off G.I.s there after being discharged. From 1957 to 1962, it was known as the Tel and Tel Tavern, so named for the Pacific Telephone and Telegraph building across the street. In 1963, it changed its name to Derek’s Tavern, then in 1965 it became The Annex. As Derek’s Tavern, it had already gained a reputation with Portland’s vice squad for being “frequented by homosexuals of higher class and means.” Such notable patrons included Johnny Mathis and Rudolph Nureyev. In 1971, the tavern was sold again and became The Family Zoo, which became one of Portland’s more popular gay nightspots. I don’t know when the Family Zoo met its demise, but the site today is home to New Avenues for Youth, a homeless and at-risk youth service organization.

TODAY IN HISTORY:
Gay Man and Lesbian Killed in Firebombed Apartment: 1992. The election to decide the fate of Oregon’s Measure 9 was still just over a month away (see Nov 2), and the campaign waged by anti-gay extremists was already worrying to gay activists across the state. Measure 9, if enacted, would have amended the state constitution to prohibit the expenditure of “monies or properties to promote, encourage or facilitate homosexuality, pedophilia, sadism or masochism.” It would have banned gay groups from using city parks, and would have prohibited public libraries from carrying books about homosexuality.

The measure put forward by the Oregon Citizens Alliance, a radically-conservative religious right group that was closely aligned with the Christian Coalition, and was headed by Lon Mabon, with Scott Lively serving as his right hand man. Their campaign was especially nasty. The OCA had released a graphic video depicting gay people as uniformly debauched and featured alarming statistics manufactured by anti-gay extremist and Nazi sympathizer Paul Cameron.

The extreme nature of the anti-gay propaganda flooding the state from the OCA and other groups accompanied a marked increase in violence throughout the state. Campaign offices in opposition to Measure 9 were repeatedly burglarized and vandalized, often with urine and feces smeared throughout the premises. Gay bashing were on the rise, and telephone threats were becoming commonplace. Editors of , a Portland gay newspaper, arrived to work one morning to find “We’re Going to Kill You,” written on their front door. Portland police reported that attacks on LGBT people had risen by twenty percent since the campaign began. Donna Red Wing, Executive director of Portland’s Lesbian Community Project said, “I wouldn’t say the OCA is doing that, but I think the climate they helped create is one of violence. When they’re talking about gays and lesbians as subhumans, animals, birth defects and abominations … it just makes it easier for people to hurt us.”

The worst fears became a reality in the early morning hours of September 26 when four skinheads threw a firebomb into a basement apartment in Salem. Hattie Mae Cohens, 29, and Brian H. Mock, 45, were killed in the blast. Cohens was black, Mock was white, and both were gay. Six others sleeping in the apartment were injured. Local officials denied that it was a hate crime. “This clearly was not a crime targeted at homosexuals,” said district attorney Dale Penn. “When all is said and done, the primary motive for the killings will likely not be race or sexual orientation, but both of them played a role.” Four were charged with murder, arson and assault: Yolanda R. Cotton, 19; Leon L. Tucker, 22; Philip B. Wilson, Jr., 20; and Sean R. Edwards, 21. Edwards pleaded guilty to aggravated murder, in a plea bargain in which he avoided the death penalty in exchange for testifying against the others. Tucker and Wilson were then found guilty of murder, assault, arson and racial intimidation. Cotton was acquitted of all charges.

The violence didn’t end with the Salem bombing. A few weeks later, vandals hit St. Matthew’s Catholic Church in Hillsboro, spray-painting swastikas and anti-gay graffiti inside the sanctuary and setting fire to the church’s offices. Hours later, Fr. Jim Galluzo, preached a homily amidst the damage on the need to respect the rights of gay people. Meanwhile, OCA head Lon Mabon denied that his group’s rhetoric had anything to do with the increase in violence. Instead, he claimed that gays were provoking others to commit violent acts and were staging incidents themselves to earn sympathy.

Shirley Willer

Shirley Willer

TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Shirley Willer: 1922-1999. Her childhood was hard. Her father, a respected judge in Chicago, was also an alcoholic and violent abuser. When Shirley was nine, her mother packed up and left, taking Shirley and her younger sister with her. As Shirley got older, she managed to scrape enough money together to go to nursing school, where she learned about other women who shared some of the same romantic desires she did. When she told her mother that she was a lesbian, her mother went out and purchased a copy of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, a remarkably understanding act for a woman in the 1940s.

Willer’s oversized personality matched her physicality. She was heavyset with short cropped hair and tailored clothing, all of which made her “butch” — a term she hated for its stereotypical role-playing connotations. “Because I was heavy,” she later explained, “I looked much better in tailored clothes.” Her appearance got her trouble with the police one night while she was headed to a gay bar. “Just the assumption that I was gay was justification enough for one policeman to pick me up by the front of my shirt and slap me back and forth. He called me names, the same ones they used now. ‘You god-damned pervert. You queer. You S.O.B.’ … I was so angry at the policeman I could have killed him! I wasn’t frightened; I was angry! He had no right to do that to me! and that’s been my attitude all my life. They have no right!”

After watching a male nurse die after horrible treatment at a Catholic hospital because he was gay, Willer was driven to become an advocate for gay rights. “Barney’s death probably had a great deal to do with my aggressiveness,” she said. She and five other women talked about forming a group, but they dropped it after deciding it was too dangerous, given the political climate of the McCarthy era. But by the late 1950’s, Willer began hearing about other homophile groups around the country, including a chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis in New York City. So she decided to mov to the Big Apple in 1962. Upon arrival, she wrote to the DOB chapter, and Marion Glass answered with details about their next meeting. Willer and Glass met at that meeting and quickly became lovers and partners. The two turned out to be perfect complements to each other: Glass was as thoughtful as Willer was brash. Together, with Glass serving as Willer’s mentor and advisor, Willer become the chapter’s president in 1963, and three years later she was elected the national president of DOB.

Willer’s passion as DOB president was in travelling across the country planting as many DOB chapters as possible. She was aided in that effort through the generosity of an wealthy closeted lesbian, known only as “Pennsylvania,” who wanted to contribute to DOB anonymously. Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, co-founders of the original Daughters of Bilitis group in San Francisco, were among the very few who had met “Pennsylvania.” Lyon remembered, “She was so nervous when we started talking about lesbians… up until then, she had been very poised and sophisticated, but when we started talking about lesbians she couldn’t even look at us. She started blushing and fidgeting.”

But over a five year period, “Pennsylvania” wrote more than $100,000 in checks of $3,000 each, made out to different DOB members each time. Those checks, in turn were turned over to the national organization with Willer being the conduit through whom those checks flowed. “Pennsylvania’s” money was first used to turn the DOB’s newsletter The Ladder into a slick, professionally typeset magazine available on newsstands. She also funded the establishment of new DOB chapters across the country, along with Willer’s travel expenses to get them started. Willer said, “There wasn’t an operating chapter of the Daughters that didn’t receive at least six thousand dollars to put toward a building fund or toward office expenses or toward publications. … Nobody was supposed to talk about our benefactor or what she did. And this woman will never take credit for her contribution to the movement, which amounted to more than one hundred thousand dollars. But she does have the satisfaction of being able to go down the street and see a couple of guys or a couple of girls walking hand in hand, and seeing the Mafia lose control of the gay bars, of seeing homosexuality become much more acceptable.”

But Willer’s traveling in those pre-cell phone/pre-Twitter/pre-text message days meant that members of already existing chapters weren’t able to contact her when problems arose. In 1968 when Philadelphia police raided a popular lesbian bar, the local DOB chapter couldn’t reach Willer to coordinate a response (see Mar 8). The resulting inaction led to the fracturing of Philadelphia’s homophile movement and the closure of DOB’s chapter there (see Aug 7). Another sticking point was the DOB’s official position against picketing, a controversial position which put Willer, who wanted to see more direct action in the organization, in a no-win position. “This split between those who wanted to make noise and those who wanted to do things quietly affected me very directly,” she recalled in 1989. “During the second half of the 1960s, I was more and more at odds with the official position of DOB.”

It was increasingly clear that for the local chapters to thrive, they needed the freedom to respond quickly without having to wait for approval from the national organization, particularly when the local chapters wanted to act outside of the DOB’s restrictive one-size-fits-all policies. Marion Glass (under the pseudonym Meredith Grey) proposed a massive reorganization in the August 1968 issue of The Ladder. Under this proposal, all DOB chapters would be autonomous and the national organization’s sole role would be limited to publishing The Ladder. But there was a hitch: the change would require the approval of the membership, and that issue of The Ladder still had no announcement of where that year’s national DOB Convention would be held. When the DOB’s finally convened their biennial convention in Aurora, Colorado, the short notice meant that only fifteen members showed up. With so few members on hand to make such a momentous decision, the group decided to defer until the next biennial convention, which wouldn’t occur until 1970.

Frustrated by the delay, Willer decided not to stand for re-election as the Daughters’ national president. She also withdrew from gay activism altogether, and with her withdrawal, “Pennsylvania’s” dollars stopped flowing as well. Two years later, the DOB did finally vote to disband its national organization and set all of its individual chapters free. But by then, it was too late. Only a few DOB chapters remained, and The Ladder only had another couple of years before it too went belly-up. Meanwhile, Willer and Glass retired to Key West, Florida, where they ran a rock shop for tourists and became involved with the growing local LGBT community. Willer died on New Years Eve in 1999.

[Sources: Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon. “Shirley Willer (1922-1999).” In Vern L. Bullough’s Before Stonewall: Activists for Gay and Lesbian Rights in Historical Context (Binghamton, NY: Harrington Park Press, 2002): 203-205.

Eric Marcus. Making History: The Struggle for Gay and Lesbian Equal Rights: 1945-1990. An Oral History (New York: HarperCollins, 1992): 127-135.

Marcia M. Gallo. Different Daughters: A History of the Daughters of Bilitis and the Rise of the Lesbian Rights Movement (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2006):82-83.]

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?

Hue-Man

September 26th, 2014

Toronto Mayor Rob Ford’s hatred of gays has spread through his so-called Ford Nation. (I’ve spared you the text which is linked at her Twitter if you’re unable to guess its contents.)

“Earlier this week, openly gay city councillor Kristyn Wong-Tam, who is running for re-election in Ward 27, tweeted one of many letters she says she’s received anonymously.

It says: “I hope you get AIDS and die in public office.””

“It ended: “I support Ford Nation.”

Wong-Tam’s staff filed a report about the letter with the police.”

Another letter from Ford Nation finds its way to me at City Hall. #TOpoli #voteTO #homophobia pic.twitter.com/St25ARIcW8
— Kristyn Wong-Tam 黃慧文 (@kristynwongtam) September 23, 2014

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/racist-homophobic-comments-mar-municipal-campaign-1.2777534

FYoung

September 26th, 2014

Thanks, Jim, for the concise history of the Daughters of Bilitis and Shirley Willer’s key role in that organization.

FYoung

September 26th, 2014

Secretary of State John Kerry’s Remarks at a High-Level Dialogue on Combating Violence Targeting LGBT, at the United Nations

http://www.state.gov/secretary/remarks/2014/09/232162.htm

Merv

September 26th, 2014

After their success in getting anti-gay measures on the ballot in Oregon, the OCA expanded to Washington state. In those days before internet use was widespread, local computer bulletin board systems (BBSes) were a very popular way for the gay community to meet and stay in touch using dial-up modems. Some large systems would allow dozens of people to connect simultaneously. In Washington state, pro-gay activists relied on dial-up BBSes to coordinate efforts to thwart signature gathering for petitions to get the anti-gay measures on the ballot there. When signature gatherers were spotted in public, they were reported on the BBS, and people would be asked to go out and attempt to discourage passers-by from signing. I don’t know how effective those efforts were specifically, but the OCA-affiliated groups never did gather enough signatures to get on the ballot in Washington state.

Paul Douglas

September 26th, 2014

Old Scott Lively has (unfortunately for Massachusetts) left Oregon (not his natal state). This probably had to something to do with his being held liable in a lawsuit for battery of a lesbian journalist at one of their klan meetings. The OCA fanned the flames of hatred through their well-funded propaganda war against LGBT people and he whines that people got angry. To read Deadly’s account of the same period is to read the story of a poor, noble martyr just going about the “business of the Lard”, humbly and prophetically. This guy is as narcissistic and incapable of self-examination or self-criticism as they come. You really understand the mindset of cliques like the leadership of Nazi Germany when reading him. Reality is so filtered (in his case by religion) that it becomes something unrecognizable to the average Joe.

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