The Daily Agenda for Wednesday, December 10

Jim Burroway

December 10th, 2014

TODAY’S AGENDA is brought to you by:

From GPU News (Milwaukee, WI), November 1978, page 32.

Chicago’s Knight Out was located at 2936 N. Clark, in what was then the middle of Boystown (which has drifted further north since then). While I can find several brief mentions of it online, I can find very little information about it, other than that it appears to have closed sometime before 1980.

Charter for the Society for Human Rights, 1924.

TODAY IN HISTORY:
90 YEARS AGO: First American Gay Rights Group Founded: 1924. Henry Gerber, a Bavarian immigrant to Chicago, served in the U.S. Army’s occupation of Germany following World War I, where he learned about the country’s well-established gay rights movement. He read up on German homophile magazines and came in contact with Magnus Hirschfeld’s Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, the first organization in the world working to advance gay rights (see May 14). When Gerber returned to Chicago, he founded the Society for Human Rights (SHR) in 1924 with an African-American clergyman named John T. Graves as president. SHR is believed to be America’s first gay rights organization. Gerber also founded Friendship and Freedom, the first known American gay publication.

When the state of Illinois granted a charter on December 10, 1924, the Society became the first documented gay organization in America. To gain the charter, they deliberately kept the Society’s mission vague, omitting any mention of homosexuality in their application. Still, they were surprised that no one from the state investigated before issuing the charter, which described the Society’s objective as:

to promote and to protect the interests of people who by reasons of mental and physical abnormalities are abused and hindered in the legal pursuit of happiness which is guaranteed them by the Declaration of Independence, and to combat the public prejudices against them by dissemination of facts according to modern science among intellectuals of mature age. The Society stands only for law and order; it is in harmony with any and all general laws insofar as they protect the rights of others, and does in no manner recommend any acts in violation of present, laws nor advocate any matter inimical to the public welfare.

Henry Gerber

Gerber found getting SHR off the ground difficult. Graves was the only clergyman willing to join. Gerber tried to interest physicians, sex educators, and sexual freedom advocates. “The most difficult task was to get men of good reputation to back up the Society,” he later wrote, but “they usually refused to endanger their reputations… The only support I got was from poor people (who) were illiterate and penniless.” One of his problems, he discovered, was that “most people only join clubs which already have members.” Fewer still were willing to receive the SHR’s newsletter, Freedom and Friendship, which only lasted for two issues. Gerber ended up bearing most of the work and all of the costs for SHR. In 1962, he reflected on those difficulties:

I realized that homosexuals themselves needed nearly as much attention as the laws pertaining to their acts… The first difficulty was in rounding up enough members and contributors so the work could go forward. The average homosexual, I found, was ignorant concerning himself. Others were fearful. Still others were frantic or depraved. Some were blasé. Many homosexuals told me that their search for forbidden fruit was the real spice of life. With this argument they rejected our aims. We wondered how we could accomplish anything with such resistance from our own people.

But the final straw for the group came when the wife of the group’s vice president denounced Gerber and his associates to police as “degenerates.” In July, 1925, police arrested Gerber, Graves and two others, with the Chicago Examiner reported the story under the headline, “Strange Sex Cult Exposed.” Gerber was tried three times, but the charges were eventually dismissed because he was arrested without a warrant. He was nevertheless ruined, jobless and drained of his life savings, and SHR was no more. Gerber continued writing about gay rights, sometimes under his own name and sometimes under a pseudonym. In 1962, he wrote a detailed history of SHR for ONE Magazine (major portions of that account can be found here.) He died on New Year’s Eve in 1972 at the age of 80, having lived long enough to see gay rights advocacy take on a new vibrancy in the 1950s and 1960s, culminating in an explosion of advocacy and pride after the Stonewall Rebellion of 1969.

[Source: Jim Kepner and Stephen O. Murray. “Henry Gerber (1895-1972): Grandfather of the American Gay Movement.” in Vern L. Bulllough’s (ed.) Before Stonewall: Activists for Gay and Lesbian Rights in Historical Context (Binghamton, NY: Harrington Park Press, 2002): 24-34.]

Bobbi Campbell in 1983.

“K.S. Poster Boy” Comes Out: 1981. Only six months had passed since the Centers for Disease Control had warned the world of a strange new disease striking down otherwise health gay men (see Jun 5). That first warning, about a group of gay men in Los Angeles who died from an extremely rare form of pneumonia, was followed a month later with another report of gay men dying from Kaposi’s sarcoma (KS), a rare and usually treatable form of skin cancer. KS, with its purple splotchy lesions, would quickly become the most visible mark of the new beast stalking the gay community. In the fall of 1981, Bobbi Campbell (see Jan 28), an San Francisco registered nurse who had been politically active in the gay community, noticed some purple sores on his feet after a day of hiking at Bug Sur. Figuring they were blood blisters, he ignored them until they got bigger. When he saw the doctor on October 8, he became the sixteenth person in San Francisco to be diagnosed with K.S.

Most newspapers, including gay newspapers, were reluctant to write much about the new diseases, even though people in the gay community couldn’t ignore that something was very wrong. Campbell decided it was time to break the silence. In an op-ed to the San Francisco Sentinel, he introduced himself. “I’m Bobbi Campbell and I have ‘gay cancer.’ Although I say that, I also want to say I’m the luckiest man in the world.” He then announced his intention to become the K.S. Poster Boy. “The purpose of the poster boy is to raise interset and money in a particular cause, and I do have aspirations of doing that regarding gay cancer. I’m writing because I have a determination to love. You do too — don’t you?”

Within a week, Campbell persuaded a Castro pharmacy to display posters about K.S. on its front windows. The following month, he wrote another op-ed for Sentinel explaining his actions, which he likened to “a crisis topped only by coming to terms with my homosexuality in 1970.” He continued:

The adjustment process in these two situations was similar. I had to acknowledge to myself that I really was in a particular situation, that I had not chosen to be there, but I could choose what I would do in response, and I especially could decide how public or private I wanted to be. Gayness, like a cancer diagnosis, is socially stigmatized, and it can be concealed or divulged. … If it never occurred to you that a cancer diagnosis is a ticket to minority status, think again. People have lost their jobs, their homes, their friends, and their lives because of others’ reactions to their illness.

Campbell started what would become a “gay cancer” support group. AIDS still didn’t have a name yet, and the idea that they were suffering from “gay cancer” was still a source of hope in the earliest days of the crisis. As one member of Campbell’s support group said, “My diagnosis was of cancer, not AIDS… . I remember thinking in the back of my mind, “Well, some people beat cancer. Maybe I will…’.”

Those hopes were soon dashed as it became increasingly clear that this was no ordinary cancer. Meanwhile, Campbell took his advocacy nationwide when he appeared on the cover of Newsweek in 1983. That same year, he co-founded the People with AIDS Self-Empowerment Movement, which established the Denver Principles which rejected the notion that people with AIDS (PWA) were “victims” and demanded the inclusion of PWAs in all aspects of organized responses to the epidemic, including the right to make informed decisions with regard to their own care. Campbell died in 1984, nearly three years after he was diagnosed with K.S.

[Sources: Randy Shilts. And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic (New York: St. Martun’s Press, 1987): 107-108.

Joe Wright. “Only Your Calamity: The Beginnings of Activism by and for People with AIDS.” American Journal of Public Health 103, no. 10 (October 2013): 1788-1798. Available online here.]

AIDS Transmission Linked to Blood: 1982. Ever since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention first began to track a new disease that would be known as AIDS in the summer of 1981 (See Jun 5), doctors and epidemiologists were scrambling to try to figure out how this disease was transmitted. Some believed it was the result of heavy drug use, some believed that it was somehow blood-borne, and some just thought it was some sort of natural breakdown of the immune system among “promiscuous homosexuals” who had too many sexually transmitted diseases over their lifetime. That last explanation didn’t do a very good job at explaining why AIDS was showing up among Haitians and hemophiliacs, but when you have homosexuals available for an ready target, it’s easy to ignore the pieces that don’t entirely fit the theory.

The CDC was finally able to shed some light on the controversy in the December 10, 1982 edition of the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. That week’s MMWR carried a report of a 20-month old infant in San Francisco who developed all of the hallmark opportunistic infections associated with AIDS. The infant was delivered by C-section in March 3, 1981, and was given several blood transfusions over a four-day period, followed by more transfusions and other blood products during the one-month hospitalization that followed. Six months later, he began developing infections that continued through the next year. MMWR reported, “The parents and brother of the infant are in good health. The parents are heterosexual non-Haitians and do not have a history of intravenous drug abuse. The infant had no known personal contact with an AIDS patient.” But further investigation revealed that one of the nineteen donors who gave blood that was given to the infant during that first month was found to have AIDS:

The donor, a 48-year-old white male resident of San Francisco, was in apparently good health when he donated blood on March 10, 1981. Platelets derived from this blood were given to the infant on March 11. Eight months later, the donor complained of fatigue and decreased appetite. On examination, he had right axillary lymphadenopathy, and cotton-wool spots were seen in the retina of the left eye. During the next month, December 1981, he developed fever and severe tachypnea and was hospitalized with biopsy-proven Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia. … He died in August 1982.”

The CDC concluded:

The etiology of AIDS remains unknown, but its reported occurrence among homosexual men, intravenous drug abusers, and persons with hemophilia A suggests it may be caused by an infectious agent transmitted sexually or through exposure to blood or blood products. If the infant’s illness described in this report is AIDS, its occurrence following receipt of blood products from a known AIDS case adds support to the infectious-agent hypothesis.

…This report and continuing reports of AIDS among persons with hemophilia A raise serious questions about the possible transmission of AIDS through blood and blood products. The Assistant Secretary for Health is convening an advisory committee to address these questions.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Mark Takano: 1960. The Congressman representing California’s 41st district in the Inland Empire of San Bernardino County, comes from a family that knows quite a lot about discrimination. He is Sansei, a descendent of immigrants from Japan, and his parents and grandparents were held in internment camps during World War II. His grandmother lost all of her property as a result. After the war, the family returned to California, and Takano graduated as class valedictorian at his Riverside high school and graduated from Harvard in 1983. He then taught British literature in public schools for the next 23 years.

Takano first ran for Congress in 1992, winning the Democratic nomination but losing narrowly to Republican Ken Calvert. He tried again in 1994, but lost to Calvert by a much wider margin. He then stayed away from electoral politics until 2012, when he decided to run for the newly-redrawn 41st Congressional district. He won, defeating Republican John Tavaglione 58% to 42%, making Takano the first openly gay member of color of the House of Representatives. He was re-elected for a second term this past November.

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.

FYoung

December 10th, 2014

The link to the history of SHR for ONE Magazine is broken:

http://www.outhistory.org/wiki/Henry_Gerber:_%22I_wanted_to_help_solve_the_problem,%22_1920-1925

Jim Burroway

December 10th, 2014

Outhistory.org had moved around a number of links. I’ve fixed them.

Hunter

December 12th, 2014

Meant to leave a comment a couple of days ago: the Knight Out was “my” bar back in the 70s — a couple blocks from my apartment, congenial, sometimes a little raucous, mixed (men and women), a little scruffy — just your basic neighborhood bar in what was then the gay neighborhood. Only place I ever ran a tab. Everybody’s favorite was Scotty, a butch lesbian who looked like trouble and was about the sweetest, most unassuming person you’ve ever met. She was sometimes a patron, sometimes a bartender, but we all adored her no matter which side of the bar she was one.

I once took my boss there; she proceeded to get loaded and took off in her car down the middle of Clark Street, even though I tried to persuade her to take a cab. She survived, somehow, without loss of life or property.

Jim Burroway

December 12th, 2014

Thanks Hunter. I love it when folks can fill me in about some of these places.

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