Box Turtle Bulletin

The Daily Agenda for Friday, January 9

TODAY’S AGENDA:
U.S. Supreme Court to Consider Marriage Appeal Petitions: Washington, DC. The U.S. Supreme Court will meet in conference today to decide whether the grant certiorari to any of the four cases from the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, which upheld same-sex marriage bans in Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and Tennessee. The court will also consider a separate petition from Lambda Legal to hear its case from Louisiana which upheld that state’s marriage equality ban. Lambda Legal is asking for that case to go directly to the U.S. Supreme Court even though the Fifth Circuit has not yet weighed in on the case. The Supreme Court will today decide whether it wants to hear any of these cases, reject any of them, or hold them to decide again at a later date. Any decisions could be announced either this afternoon or Monday morning.

Fifth Circuit to Hear Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi Marriage Cases: New Orleans, LA. The three cases on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals’ calendar this morning are:

• Robicheaux vs Caldwell, the Louisiana case that upheld that state’s ban on same-sex marriage;
• Campaign for Southern Equality v Bryant, the Mississippi case which declared that state’s ban on same-sex marriage unconstitutional; and
• DeLeon v Perry, the Texas case that found that state’s ban on same-sex marriage unconstitutional.

The court convenes at 9:00 a.m., which one hour allotted for each case (30 minutes for each side). The oral arguments will be recorded, and will likely be made available sometime later today.

TODAY’S AGENDA is brought to you by:

From a flyer distributed in 1961. (Source).

The Diplomat in 1959 (Source).

Drag performer David Hummell began his career in the 1950s. He remembered the Diplomat:

I later moved to Detroit and happened upon a gay bar (The Diplomat) that had just started the very first drag show in Detroit. There may have been touring shows like the Jewel Box Revue but this was the first club to house a drag show. I had just lost my job so I decided to work on an act. Being six foot two I was way too tall to pass as a real female so I concentrated on comedy routines. I had another friend, Joe Price, who also wanted to break in an act so we teamed up and called ourselves The Fono Fools. After playing a few gigs we went to The Diplomat and became part of their show. This was in the late 1950s…

The Dip, as the locals called it, was owned by Morrie Weisberg and “Fat Jack” Bookie Stewart, who was described as “a Mafia-type character who spoke through a hole in his throat.” He also performed in drag. The drag shows were so legendary that straight couples soon arrived to check out the entertainment. But whatever entertainment value a few cutting-edge straight people found there, the Dip remained firmly gay. It was popular with Detroit’s gay community when the city was still the sixth largest in the nation, and it was a beacon to gay people who traveled there from outlying areas such as Ann Arbor, Jackson, Pontiac and Flint. Today, the building is gone, and the hallowed ground is occupied by a Baptist church.

TODAY IN HISTORY:
► 55 YEARS AGO: Homosexual Crackdown at the University of Michigan: 1960. The campus paper, the Michigan Daily, headlined its editorial “Homosexual Crackdown of Dubious Value,” and informed the student body that Ann Arbor police had been patrolling campus restrooms, arresting 34 men. The paper dubbed the arrests “seriously questionable with regard to methods, motives, legality and moral implications.” The paper also criticized the expenditure of public funds “to aggravate the psychological problem of the homosexual, first by enticement, then by arrest, arraignment, trial, and perhaps a prison sentence. This is neither a logical way to spend public funds nor a sensitive way to handle a public problem.” Staff writer Thomas Hayden found the police motives odd:

No major incident-such as an attack on a child-triggered it. The police themselves admit no organized ring exists. Since the state law against indecent conduct between males has been on the books for many years, the suddenly renewed enforcement for no specific reason seems curious. It leaves one to guess that an irrational force in Ann Arbor is overly interested in keeping the city “a decent place to live” and that the police, are hypersensitive with regard to the public image.

What’s revealing about the editorial, however, is that writer didn’t tackle the topic because he thought gay people should be left alone more or less like anyone else. Instead, he engaged a much order argument, saying that gay people weren’t criminals who were responsible for their actions, but were mentally ill and couldn’t help what they were doing:

The situation once more illustrates the cultural lag which puts the homosexual under the heading of “criminal” when he is most often an individual with serious psychological difficulties. …What must be questioned most basically is the state statute itself. It simply is not consistent with advances in modern psychiatry. It is based on an absurd conception of homosexuality as the immoral behavior of stable rational individuals. It makes little attempt to understand such individuals as anything other than criminals, and most frightening of all, it sentences them to state prisons where their environment is hardly conducive for cure.

This line of reasoning passed for an “enlightened” viewpoint in 1960, even among many gay people. It would still take a few more years before gay rights activists would directly challenge the homosexuality-as-illness explanation, and even then it was controversial (see Mar 4). Meanwhile, Michigan’s crackdown would have tragic results for those arrested. At least nine pleaded guilty after a judge threatened them with six months in prison if they insisted on a jury trial (see Mar 12), and one man who had been found guilty a week earlier committed suicide two days before he was due in court for sentencing (see Mar 13).

[Source: Hal Call. “Calling Shots.” Mattachine Review 6, no. 3 (March 1960): 18-19.]

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?