The Daily Agenda for Saturday, November 22

Jim Burroway

November 22nd, 2014

TODAY’S AGENDA:
Events This Weekend: Florence Queer Film Festival, Florence, Italy; Mezipatra Queer Film Festival, Prague/Brno, Czech Republic; Side-By-Side LGBT Film Festival, St. Petersburg, Russia.

EMPHASIS MINE:

Oblivious to the fact that he was being held in the hearts of Christian congregations across the country, 36-year-old gay man Andrew Fitzpatrick reportedly went about his grocery shopping Friday fully unaware that he was currently the focus of thousands of prayers. According to reports, Fitzpatrick made his way through the cereal aisle of his local Safeway without the slightest clue that, at that very moment, entire ministries of various Christian denominations were simultaneously bowing their heads, clasping their hands together, and asking God to release him from his sexual orientation. …

The Onion, of course.

TODAY’S AGENDA is brought to you by:

From The Fifth Freedom (Buffalo, NY), February 17, 1974, page 2.

From The Fifth Freedom (Buffalo, NY), February 17, 1974, page 2.

Trying to operate a gay bar or night club in Buffalo in the early 1970s was a very dicey proposition:

The gay bar situation in Buffalo has never been good. Whenever a new bar opens, the first question in everyone’s mind is “How long will it stay open?” The Vice Squad and the S.L.A. have closed so many bars in the past several years that it seems like they’re playing a game of musical chairs.

Mattachine has, in the past, taken a “hands off” attitude toward the problems of the bars. However, it is now apparent that due to the backward policies of the Buffalo Police Vice Squad and the State Liquor Authority, an atmosphere has been created at the gay bar level that is clearly oppressive to any gay person that wishes to use the bars to give expression in to their social needs. Bar closings by Vice Squad/S.L.A. actions and subsequent overreaction by other bar owners to these closings, by instituting policies of “no touch-no slow dancing,” has created an intolerable situation for all of us.

— Don Michaels, on the gay bar problem in Buffalo, The Fifth Freedom, March 10, 1974.

Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS:
Benjamin Britten. 1913-1976. Fame came early to the English composer with his a cappella choral work, A Boy Was Born when he was just 21, and his 1945 opera Peter Grimes sealed his international reputation. His compositions were both prodigious and varied: working in orchestral, chamber, instrumental, choral and solo vocal. Much of his vocal work was written for tenor Peter Pears, who he met in 1937 and who became his musical inspiration and life partner. In 1939, Britten and Pears went to America, where his friendship with Aaron Copland inspired the development of Britten’s own work, notably his operetta Paul Bunyan.

Britten’s sexuality wasn’t the only thing controversial about him: he was also a pacifist during World War II. On returning to Britain in 1942, he fought a long battle for recongition as a conscientious objector. The resulting publicity led to a drop in commissions and performances in London both during and after the war. It also shaped his work. Many of his operas featured an “outside” character on the fringes of society, many of them at least suggestive of being gay. His 1973 opera, Death in Venice, based on a novel by Thomas Mann, is perhaps the first to feature an openly gay character. By then , Britten found that he was no longer an outsider, but an acclaimed 20th century composer. On July 2, 1976, he was awarded a life peerage as Baron Britten, just a few months before he died. Pears died ten years later, and was buried next to Britten at a churchyard in Aldeburgh.

Billie Jean King: 1943. Like all tennis greats, she started playing at a young age and won her first Wimbledon doubles title in 1962 at the age if eighteen. That was the first of 20 Wimbledon titles between 1961 and 1979. She also one 13 U.S. titles, four French and two Australian. Throughout her career, she fought for equal prize money for men and women players. When she won the U.S. Open in 1972 but received $15,000 less than the men’s champion, she announced that she would not play the next year if the prize money weren’t made equal. The following year, the U.S. Open became the first major tournament to equalize its prize money for men and women.

Bobby Riggs congratulates Billy Jean King after his defeat.

Her campaign for tennis equality took a particularly public turn in 1973 when Bobby Riggs, a champion mens player from the 1940s, claimed that women’s tennis was so inferior to men’s that even a fifty-five year old like himself could beat the top women’s players. King accepted the challenge, and the Battle of the Sexes was on. Before more than 30,000 spectators at Houston’s Astrodome and a worldwide audience of 50 million people in 27 countries, King beat Rigs 6-4, 6-3, 6-3.

In 1974, King became the first president of the Women’s Tennis Association. In 1983, she retired from singles play, but continued to play doubles sporadically through 1990.

In 1981, King was sued for palimony by a former lover with whom she had had a relationship since 1971. The lawsuit effectively outed King, making her the first prominent professional female athlete to be openly gay. This came about despite her having been married to her husband since 1965. They divorced in 1987. Since then, she has been very involved with the Women’s Sports Foundation and the Elton John AIDS Foundation. In 2012, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barrack Obama for her advocacy work for women and the LGBT community.

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).

As always, please consider this your open thread for the day.

greg & rob

November 22nd, 2014

Dear Box Turtle,
We have enjoyed your daily emails for a long time now. Today’s article about Buffalo, NY caused us both to pause due to the fact that in 2006 my partner of 25 years & I tried opening a Liquor Store (not even a bar), we spend 10’s of thousands of dollars in research & application legal fee’s etc…not to mention we purchased a huge beautiful building and so forth. To make a ong story short as soon as a letter was written to the SLC that they shared with us, written by another liquor store owner miles away stating that the “Gay couple wanting to open their own liquor store” etc…. and a bunch of grievances he stated that were all objectionable, never the less they questioned us extensively on being a gay couple and what community we would be marketing to? To shorten the nightmare, I will end by stating that we lost 90k plus years of work and a lot of enthusiasm & ultimately lost the battle with the SLA. We have always believed & asserted that once the SLA found out that a gay couple were the owners of the new store they went on a campaign of forced closure that we had not the financial resources to battle & ultimately it was a lesson learned. We just wanted to share our experience from 8-9 years ago. Thank you very much for reading.

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