October 21st, 2014
TODAY’S AGENDA is brought to you by:
Police raids on gay bars were ubiquitous in city across the country. Raids had a couple of immediate effects: they caused short term headaches for bar owners and employees, and they endangered their customers to arrest and, often worse, public exposure. Today we think of whether people are out of the closet or not, but forty years ago, it was much more likely for gay people to live somewhere in between — out among some family members but closeted at work, out in the neighborhood but closeted among other friends and family members. For those who were closeted or perhaps only partly out, having their names and addresses printed in the paper was just too big of a risk to take.
And so this led to a longer-term effect that bar owners often had to deal with after a raid: the inevitable loss of business that followed. It wasn’t unusual for a gay bar to go out of business soon after a raid simply because their clientele simply vanished, never to return. And so one way for bar owners to try stay in business after a raid was to put out the word that the police action wasn’t actually a raid. That’s what the owners of the Detour did after their club was raided on October 21, 1971. According to Our Community, the local LGBT paper:
Nine persons were arrested at the Detour, 3113-A Live Oak, in an encounter with Dallas police Thursday, October 21. Three minors were arrested for being on the premises of a bar serving alcoholic beverages, although they had not been served by any Detour employees, according to the owners. Six persons were also arrested when they complained of police harassment and were charged with disorderly conduct. This group included 5 blacks and 1 white.
The encounter occurred as a consequence of an anonymous complaint. The police charged that the Detour was operating billiard tables without a license, operating a dance floor without a license, and serving minors. The owners contend that their- operating the billiard tables and the dance floor resulted from innocent errors.
…According to the owners, approximately “150 guests” had their ID checked by police and were then told to leave the Detour. The owners point out that this should not be regarded as a “raid” since only the minors, the bartender, and the party of six were arrested. On balance, the police were well-behaved and not belligerent in any way. One need not be afraid to go to the Detour because the bar has had no trouble with the police since the October 21 encounter.
TODAY IN HISTORY:
► The Bishop of Clogher Defrocked for “Sodomitical Practices”: 1822. On July 19, 1822, Bishop Percy Jocelyn, the Anglican Bishop of Clogher in the Church of Ireland was caught in, shall we say, a most compromising position with a Grenadier Guardsman, John Moverly, at the White House Pub’s back room (apparently, they had ’em even then) in Westminster. They were caught by the pub’s proprietor, and dragged through the streets by a mob, mostly naked as they were found, to a nearby jail. Bishop Clogher was granted bail a few days later, but the soldier remained in jail:
Lord Sefton went to see the soldier in prison. He says he is a fine soldierlike man and has no the air which these wretches usually have. The Bishop took no precautions, and it was next to impossible he should not have been caught. He made a desperate resistance when taken away, and if his breeches had not been down they think he would have got away. It seems that the soldier will be proceeded against with the greatest vigour, and the Magistrate is much blamed for having taken such small bail as that which he required. The Duke will not spare the Soldier. Lord Lauderdale said the other day that the greatest dissatisfaction would pervade the public mind at the escape of the Bishop and the punishment of the Soldier, and the people, who cannot discriminate, or enter into nice points of the law, will only see in such apparent injustice a disposition to shield the offender in the higher classes of society from the consequences of his crime, while the law is allowed to take its course with the more humble culprit.
Eventually, the soldier was released on bail as well. Both fled the city and were never seen again (although the Bishop was reportedly later seen in Paris as though nothing had happened). The Bishop’s ecclesiastical trial was set for October 21, and it went on despite his absence. According to the court record:
…It [the evidence] also proved the fatal and depraved purposes for which he associated himself with a private soldier, wholly beneath him in rank and station, as the unworthy and vicious partner of his depravity and guilt. The place chosen by him for that base purpose was also unfitted to him as a prelate of the church, the man of high rank and station; it was a common alehouse, situate in St. Alban’s-place in the city of Westminster. In his career of vice, he was very fortunately stopped, before he had perpetrated the last foul act, or crime, which he himself designed; and by which, if committed, his life would have been forfeited to the offended law of the country. Being found by the watchman and others, in a situation disgraceful and degrading to him, he was made a prisoner, in order to be removed to the watch-house of the district.
The bishop wasn’t actually convicted of the capital offense of sodomy itself because English law required that the act be, err, fully consummated, a standard of proof that was difficult to reach. Hence the observation that he was caught before perpetrating “the last foul act, or crime” of the, um, emission of seed. But the evidence was strong enough to strip the bishop of his office for “the crimes of immorality, incontinence, Sodomitical practices, habits, and propensities, and neglect of his spiritual, judicial, and ministerial duties.”
It’s almost impossible for a scandal to unravel worse than this one. First, the fact that a Bishop was caught in flagrante delicto was itself quite shocking. That was compounded by the perception that he had been given preferential treatment with his early release with very low bail. And if all that wasn’t enough, the Bishop was a well-known member of the Society for the Suppression of Vice. All of this hypocrisy was too much for Londoners to bear, and for many weeks afterward it was unsafe for members of the clergy to be seen on the streets. But it all made great material for satirists:
The Devil to prove the Church was a farce
Went out to fish for a Bugger.
He baited his hook with a Frenchman’s arse,*
And pulled up the Bishop of Clogher.
*Moverly was from a French family.
[Source Chris White’s Nineteenth-Century Writings on Homosexuality: A Sourcebook (London, Routledge, 1999): pp 33-34.]
► 40 YEARS AGO: Los Angeles Times Picketed Over Refusal to Cover Gay Issues: 1974. Two hundred demonstrators protested the ongoing crackdown on gay bars in West Hollywood, but the Los Angeles Times ignored the protest. Later that summer, two thousand people turned out for the Christopher Street West parade (the name given for the annual Pride event held in June), but the Times ignored that also. Four months later, the Los Angeles Metropolitan Community Church raised money to buy a bus for a local children’s home –a fascinating human interest story, but the Times wasn’t interested. On Sunday, October 20, Rev. Lee Carlton told his congregation that it was time to do something about it.
The next day, thirty protesters arrived at the Times building, with reporters from five local TV stations, radio stations and the Associated Press in tow. Times managers thought the protesters would leave by the end of the day. But at closing times, protesters pushed their way into the vestibule, spread out their sleeping bags and settled down for the night. The next morning, Times employees stepped and tripped over the protesters as they tried to get to work. Finally, a manager came down and said that the editorial board would meet with a few representatives. Six went inside. Activist Morris Kight later described the tacit agreement: “They said we were absolutely right in our protest. They admitted they had dealt with us very badly and laid out out a plan. They said we would disappear from their pages for about six months while they figured out what to do about us. We took them at their word on that. After that, they improved dramatically.”
[Source: Edward Alwood. Straight News: Gays, Lesbians and the News Media (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996): 133-134.]
► Kansas Supreme Court Overturns 17-Year Sentence for Gay Sex: 2005. Matthew R. Limon was eighteen. In February 2000, a week after his eighteenth birthday, he performed consensual oral sex on another teenager who was just under fifteen years old — three years, one month and a few days younger. The two were students at the same residential school for developmentally disabled youth. Under Kansas law, what Limon did was statutory rape. Also under Kansas law, a “Romeo and Juliet” exemption provided much more lenient sentences for those in a similar situation to Limon’s: a maximum of fifteen months’ imprisonment. But also under Kansas law, that “Romeo and Juliet” exemption applied to heterosexual teens only. Because Limon’s act was with another boy, he wasn’t eligible to be sentenced under that exemption. Limon got seventeen years as an adult sexual predator.
In 2003, lawyers for the ACLU appealed the sentence, which a state appeals court upheld. It then went to the Kansas Supreme Court which ruled unanimously that because of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2003 decision striking down the nation’s sodomy laws, Kansas could not use its laws to express “moral disapproval” of homosexuality, nor could it punish illegal sex more harshly if it involved homosexual acts rather than heterosexual acts. The court ordered Limon re-sentenced under state’s “Romeo and Juliet” law, which resulted in his release after five years of imprisonment.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS:
► 130 YEARS AGO: Claire Waldoff: 1884-1957. Born Clara Wortmann in Gelsenkirchen, Westphalia, she took the stage name of Claire Waldoff while studying theater. In 1907, she went to Berlin where she quickly became a celebrated cabaret singer. Her style was unique: instead of using double-entendres for which cabaret was known for, she went straight to the point. She was bucked the cabaret’s stylish conventions by adopting a rough persona, wild red hear and street Berliner slang, all of which suited her short and stocky presence. She limited her performances to just three songs and no encores, which gave her time to play at several venues in a single night. Openly lesbian, Waldoff settled in nicely with other lesbian friends and her life partner, Olga Von Roeder, through much of the Weimar period.
The Great Depression and the Nazi’s rise to power brought cabaret culture to an end. In 1939, Waldoff and von Roder left Berlin and moved to remote Bayerische Gmain near the Austrian Alps. After the war, she lost her savings in the German Monetary reform of 1948, but was able to get a stipend from the City of Berlin in 1954, the year after she wrote her biography. She died in 1957.
► Dale Jennings: 1917-2000. If anyone knows anything about Jennings, it’s probably limited to just one thing: his false arrest in February of 1952, from within his own home, on charges of soliciting a police officer for immoral acts. It wasn’t the fact that he was arrested which was so notable, but that he chose to fight the charges while also refusing to deny that he was gay. A gay man arguing before a jury that he was innocent was so unusual it made headlines across the country. Those headlines only got bigger when the jury deadlocked 11-1 for acquittal and the charges were dismissed (see Jun 23).
If he was known for anything else, then perhaps it was because two years earlier, Jennings helped to found the Mattachine Foundation with Harry Hay, Chuck Rowland, Rudi Gernreich, and Hay’s student at the California Labor School, Bob Hull, who happened to be Jenning’s boyfriend at the time (see Nov 11). Jennings had met Hay and Gernreich while involved with the Communist Party in Los Angeles. When Jennings was arrested in 1952, the Mattachines came to his rescue by raising money, hiring a lawyer, and generating enough publicity about the case that it would come to the attention of those newspapers which wrote about it. The case also had the effect of raising Mattachine profile among gay people who previously hadn’t known about the secretive group, and its membership skyrocketed.
That it was Jennings who galvanized the Mattachines and gave it a sense of purpose is, perhaps, the greatest irony. Jennings, despite his flirtations with Communism, had little patience for the political theorizing and navel-gazing that took place in the early Mattachine meetings. One Mattachine member recalled that as the group droned on about “the pain and sorrow, the desperate loneliness of being homosexual and afraid, always having to lie and hide,” Jennings “struggled not to laugh out loud.” He also scoffed at Hays’s insistence that homosexuals made up a distinct minority who were inherently and qualitatively different from heterosexuals. Jennings maintained that there were no differences whatsoever between men who preferred sex with women and men who preferred sex with men. “How could you construct a cultural minority out of a group of people with little in common except what they did in bed?”, he asked. Where Hays wanted the right to be publicly gay, Jennings wanted nothing more than the right to be left alone.
Jennings may have expressed a desire to be left alone, but his combative nature ran counter to any desire he might have had to leave things well enough alone. As a budding novelist and playwright, he felt he had a lot to say and was determined to say it. And so during another one of the interminable Mattachine meetings, he found himself drifting into the kitchen where a smaller group of people were discussing the need for a nationally-distributed magazine (see Oct 15) — a real magazine, professionally typset and graphically designed rather than the typewritten and mimeographed newsletters that had tried to pose as pale imitations. Jennings’s contributions would prove to be crucial: he was the only one of that small group who knew the first thing about the mechanics of publishing: editing, layout, typesetting, artwork, advertising, and so forth. He also provided access to the magazine’s first printing press: the first issue was printed by Jennings’s sister and brother-in-law in their basement.
Jennings wound up serving on the editorial board of ONE Magazine when it made its debut in 1953. As was common practice for ONE’s authors in its early days, Jennings not only wrote under his own byline, but also under other pseudonyms to provide the illusion that ONE’s staff was larger than it really was. That first issue included his first-person account of his arrest and acquittal under his own name, along with two other articles as “Heironymus K.” and “Elizabeth Lalo.” In ONE’s third issue, as “Jeff Winters,” Jennings wrote “Homosexuals Are Not a People,” which, as the title suggested, reiterated his contention that homosexuals did not make up a distinct minority. (“Homosexuality is today’s great irrelevancy,” he argued.) As “R. Noone,” he lambasted President Eisenhower’s executive order barring the employment of gay people in the federal government (see Apr 27) in 1953. And in 1954, again as “Jeff Winters,” he wrote “Can Homosexuals Organize?”, a very critical history of the Mattachine Foundation which had just kicked out its founders and reorganized itself as a much more conservative Mattachine Society (“The present Society however invites certain destruction by denial of all those things for which the Mattachine was founded. …From the trembling president on down to the least officer, they are terrified.” see Apr 11).
Jennings tenure as ONE’s first editor-in-chief was short-lived. He was headstrong and opinionated, which led to constant fights with business manager Dorr Legg (a.k.a. Bill Lambert, see Dec 15) and co-founder Don Slater (see Aug 21), and others. That divisiveness — and Legg’s unease over Jennings’s Communist ties — led to Jennings’s departure in March of 1954. (He was replaced as Editor in Chief by Irma “Corky” Wolf, who went by the pseudonym Ann Carll Reid.) As Jennings acknowledged nearly three decades later to Slater:
Bill Lambert got rid of me at almost the precise time that the local red cell took my membership card away from me for being a carnivore (gay) and hence a security risk. Naturally both organizations were quite correct and should have been more circumspect about letting me come near them in the very beginning.
After leaving Mattachine and ONE, Jennings more or less dropped out. In 1968, he published his first novel, The Ronin, a recasting of an old Zen Buddhist myth, which found a somewhat surprising success in Japan. His second book, The Cowboys (1971), was based on a story he had sold to Warner Brothers and made into a John Wayne movie. He fought with the publishers to get his book published; they balked at the homoerotic passages. He finally got it published by a smaller imprint, but it was the $150,000 he got from Warner Brothers that secured his financial future.
Jennings bought a ranch outside of Los Angeles, but then lost it in a lawsuit to a former lover. He then moved to northern California, but decided in the 1980s to move back to southern California and reconnect with the gay community. But by then, the gay community had long since moved on and had forgotten him. Not only that, but the gay community had moved left politically while Jennings moved hard to the right. He did manage to reestablish contact with Don Slater in the 1980s, and they maintained a correspondence that lasted until Slater died in 1997. In 1984, Jennings sent a Christmas card to Slater lamenting, “When I was a loud-mouthed commie, people fled the Mattachine in the thousands; now that the prevailing shade this season is red, my conservatism is worse than damned: it’s ignored.”
Through the 1990s, Jennings became reclusive, surly, and a heavy drinker. He spent every day working on his memoirs on a word processer, but he often lost an entire day’s work by shutting the machine off without remembering to hit save. He began losing his memory, but was cognizant enough to ensure that his papers would go to Slater’s Homosexual Information Center Archives, which are currently housed at California State University at Northridge. He died on May 11, 2000 at the age of 82.
[Source: C. Todd White. “Dale Jennings (1917-2000): ONE’s Outspoken Advocate.” In Vern L. Bullough (ed.) Before Stonewall: Activists for Gay and Lesbian Rights in Historical Context (New York: Harrington Park Press, 2002): 83-93.]
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Steve
October 21st, 2014
“a maximum of fifteen months’ imprisonment” “which resulted in his release after five years of imprisonment.”
What?
Priya Lynn
October 21st, 2014
Steve, I assume that although the Kansas supreme court ruled he should have only been sentenced to 15 months in prison he had already served 5 years under the previous 17 year sentence before the case got to and was decided on by the Kansas supreme court.
FYoung
October 21st, 2014
Congratulations Wyoming!
Wyoming Becomes Latest to Legalize Gay Marriage
http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/wyoming-prepares-legalize-sex-marriage-26336559
Here’s the Wikipedia map:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same-sex_marriage_in_the_United_States#mediaviewer/File:Samesex_marriage_in_USA.svg
Steve
October 21st, 2014
Ah, yeah that makes sense. I see that the incident took place in 2000. I guess I assumed that he was out on bail or something while the cases where decided.
Priya Lynn
October 21st, 2014
I hope someone helps him sue for the years he was unjustly imprisoned.
Dave H
October 22nd, 2014
In reference to the bar ad for the Detour, I’d be curious to learn more about what went on at the “Bloody Buddy and Screw David Party” on Sunday afternoon.
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