The Daily Agenda for Monday, March 23

Jim Burroway

March 23rd, 2015

Eniac-348x196TODAY’S AGENDA is late. Our web server, Successful Hosting, hasn’t been so successful lately. Problems started on Saturday with intermittent access problems to the server that hosts BTB. When I first signed up for Successful Hosting ten years ago, they were an amazing company, with outstanding and responsive customer service. But in the ten years, they’ve gone from amazing to so-so, to awful, to abysmal. Somewhere along the way, they turned their servers over to NaviSite. (I don’t know Successful Hosting’s relationship to NaviSite, whether they were bought or if they have a re-selling relationship.) But to give you an idea of how things go today, when they first started experiencing problems with a Cisco switch on Saturday, their response was to re-seat it and “wait[] on words from upper management to have this module replaced ASAP.” It wasn’t replaced ASAP, and it died on Sunday. So get this: a single-point failure affected many different servers and who knows how many web sites for almost nine hours with no backup plan or replacement spare in site. What kind of a company allows a single-point failure to happen with no plan to deal with it? Okay, I see it now. In very small type, it says that NaviSite is “a Time Warner Cable Company.”

TODAY’S AGENDA is brought to you by:

From Michael’s Thing, April 29, 1974, page 14.

This is one of those clubs that came and went in New York City, more or less without a trace. The only bit of info that I can find on it is that the space had originally been a club called Stage 45 until the Lib came along in the early seventies. Today, even the storefront is gone. The building’s there, but the address has been walled- and glassed-in, and is no longer accessible from the street.

TODAY IN HISTORY:
New Haven Colony Sentences “Sundrie Youths” To Public Whipping: 1653. The court records for Puritan colony at New Haven includes the following account for March 23, 1653:

Upon a complaint made to he Governor of sundrie youths in the Town that had committed much wickedness in a filthy corrupting way one with another, they were called before the Governor and Magistrates … [Those charged were] Benjamin Bunill, Joshua Bradly, Joseph Benham,William Trobridg, Thomas Tuttill & Thomas Kimberly. They were examined in a private way, and their examinations taken in writing, which were of such a filthy nature as is not fit to be made known in a public way; after which the Court were called together, and the youths before them. Their examinations were read and, upon their several confessions, the Court … Sentenced the youths above named to be whipped publicly. And whereas John Clarke, servant to Jeremiah Whitnell, was questioned and charged by one of them for some filthy carriage, he denied it, and another of the company in some measure cleared him from that the other charged him with, whereupon he was not sentenced to be corrected publicly, but the Court left it with his master to give him that correction in the family which he should see meet, warning John Clarke that if ever any such carriage came forth against him hereafter, the court would call these miscarriages charge upon him to mind again.

[Source: Jonathan Ned Katz. Gay/Lesbian Almanac: A New Documentary (New York: Harper & Row, 1983): 100.]

Robert Ruark

65 YEARS AGO: Columnist: “State Department Hires Perverts”: 1950. The early stages of the McCarthyite red scare also had distinctly pink undertones, as gay people became looked upon as being as much as a danger to national security as communists. When  deputy undersecretary of State John E. Peurifoy’s revealed that the State Department had fired 91 employees for being gay (see Feb 28), his statement was barely noticed, buried as it was in a larger testimony centered around the explosive controversy surrounding Alger Hiss. But that small statement would soon grow into a huge national scare all of its own, a lavender scare that was intwined with the red scare. Three weeks later, influential columnist George Sokolsky brought the lavender scare to the nations newspapers (see Mar 21). Two days later, author and novelist Robert Ruark whose column was syndicated by Scripps-Howard, added his weight to the new scare with his own unique literary style:

Looks like a new point in journalism has finally been reached, at which it is possible to face the problem of homosexuality and perversion with the same honesty it took us so long to win in the case of venereal disease. Our peering into the well of loneliness is as much overdue as our realization that syphilis and gonorrhea were something more than “social” diseases, to be hushed behind the hand.

This belated appraisal of a human aberration is due to the fact that our State Department, in record, as been filled with a type of humanity which is not “normal” as we construe normalcy in the broad sense, and that the list of perverted sex-crimes seems to be mounting furiously.

There is considerably more to abnormality in the sexes than a simple negation of boy-meets-girl. There is a great difference between homosexuality and perversion. The homosexual in a simpler sense is less dangerous to the world around him, because his odd sexual leanings creep easily into vicious criminality with innocents as victims.

Divergents from the sexual norm are pitiable, and in general live a life of mental and spiritual torture, full of frustration and persecution. Their residence in a minority group makes them subject to censure by the majority and leads them to a life in shadow.

This creates a constant nervousness that pays off in panic. Most “queers” eventually acquire a tendency to hysteria, which means the blow their tops in time of stress. Since the also must hide from the world that outweighs them — since the must always mask their activities in stealth and secrecy — they are forever open to apprehension.

A pervert fondles a child. The child cries. The creep blows his roof. He is panic-ridden and hysterically afraid of being caught. He throttles the child. A homosexual — possibly even a “happily” married one — is suddenly confronted with public awareness of his abnormal outcroppings. His position, his job, his very life is at stake. He blows his top. He has three choices. He can kill himself, jill his discoverer, or submit to blackmail.

In the loneliness that cloaks a homosexual that places him basically apart form his fellow, he scarred soul calls out for company. So his inclination is to surround himself with his like. Homosexuals travel in packs, as do most divergents from an accepted status.

It is all well to say that a man must live his own life and in a manner which best suits him, but in government which is operated for the greater good of the greatest number a dissenter from accepted behavior is a great liability. The drunkard, the boss who chases every stenographer, the sexual degenerate or homosexual all have a gaping chink in the behavioristic armor. This leads almost invariably to erratic action, neglect of job, and even to blackmail. Always to blackmail.

When a man or woman is susceptible to easy blackmail, he is a tremendous risk in a position of trust. I know the story of the highly-placed State Department executive who crowded the lists with so many homosexuals that 91 resignations of firings have recently resulted. His appointees surrounded themselves with their appointees, and on down the line. What you have finally is a corroded organization which can be bribed, bulled or blackmailed in the easiest possible fashion.

Homosexuality has figured, off stage, in one of our traitorous operations. Homosexuality and similar irresponsibility has weakened us all over the world through the State Department’s calm acceptance of abnormality. A great deal of the trouble we are in, internationally, can be laid to the tolerance of that kind of weakness in a service which should be above reproach. You can say that the queer ones are pathetic and deserve a right to pursue happiness in most businesses but you don’t need them in positions of heavy trust.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS:
Carl Westphal: 1833-1890. the German neurologist is credited for revolutionizing psychiatry and bringing it into the world of modern medicine. That he is much lesser known today than Sigmund Freud just goes to show how much of a lock psychoanalysis held in the mental health professions throughout the first three-quarters of the twentieth century.  Westphal founded the Archiv für Psychiatrie und Nervenkrankheiten (Archives of Psychiatry and Nervous Diseases) in 1868 where, for the first time, German clinicians could publish articles and discuss a new understanding of mental illness: that it was a  medical problem rather than moral or sinful failings subject to conviction and incarceration under the law. Westphal is credited for coining the term “agoraphobia,” to describe the case of three male patients who feared going out in public. He was the first to describe what is now known as hepatolenticular degeneration, in which cooper accumulates in the tissues and causes neurological and psychiatric symptoms, as well as liver disease. And he was the first to describe narcolepsy and cataplexy, which is a sudden temporary loss of muscle tone.

And, owing to a paper Westphal published in the Archiv in 1869 where he wrote about the case of a woman who was sexually attracted to other women rather than men, Westphal became the first to describe, in clinical terms, those who experienced Konträre Sexualempfindung (“contrary sexual feeling”). He described what would later become known as homosexuality as being the result of an individual’s alienation from his or her own gender, an archaic and ultimately unproven theory that remains a crucial underpinning of much of what is taught in ex-gay circles today. Westphal wrote:

I chose the term ‘contrary sexual feeling’ from a suggestion by an admirable, and in the field of philology and archeology, most distinguished colleague, after failing to find shorter and more appropriate terms. What shall here be expressed is that it is not always simultaneously the sexual urge as such with which we are dealing, but rather also merely the feeling of the complete inner being, being alienated form its own sex.

By describing homosexuality as something that was an expression of the essential nature in an individual, the paper sparked tremendous controversy in medical circles. Until then, those who were caught engaging in homosexual behavior were treated as heretics, sinners, and criminals. Westphal instead sought to abolish those primitive, archaic superstitions with a new “scientific” understanding of gay people. Westphal’s paper, in particular, ascribed homosexuality to a disorder of the central nervous system. And while that particular theory was eventually discarded, it nevertheless placed homosexuality in the realm of psychiatry, there it it would remain for more than a century. So while Westphal can be credited for introducing the idea that gay people weren’t sinful criminals, he can also be blamed for the classifying all gay people as mentally sick. It could be argued that in 1869, that represented a huge advancement, but in reality it merely represented an exchange of prison, the pillory and other torturous punishments for the mental asylum and torturous “medical” treatments, an exchange that would last for another hundred years before the American Psychiatric Association finally removed homosexuality form its list of mental disorders in 1973.

J. C. Leyendecker: 1874-1951. At the turn of the century, men’s shirts were sold with detachable collars, and New York’s Cluett, Peabody & Co. and their advertising agency launched one of the most successful advertising campaign for Cluett’s line of Arrow collars. The Arrow Collar Man was the creation of Joseph Leyendecker, one of the the pre-eminent American illustrators of the era. Little did the nation’s housewives know that when they purchased those collars for their husbands with the handsome and debonair Arrow Collar Man in mind, that he was modeled after Leyendecker’s life-long partner, Canadian-born Charles Beach. By the time Leyendecker landed the Arrow Collar gig at the turn of the century, his work was already making regular appearances on the covers of the Saturday Evening Post, a relationship that would last for 44 years. Meanwhile the handsome Beach would turn up for Leyendecker’s illustrations in ads for Kuppenheimer Suits, Interwoven Socks, Pierce-Arrow automobiles, and wherever style and class were called for.

By 1914, Leyendecker was financially secure enough to buy a large home in New Rochelle, NY for himself, Beach, and Leyendecker’s brother and sister. The parties which Leyendecker and Beach hosted at their home became important social events as Leyendecker was acknowledged as one of the country’s great illustrators. But with the stock market crash of 1929 and the onset of the great depression, Leyendecker’s high-society style lost favor among advertising agencies. Cluett, Peabody & Co. dropped him in 1931 as the company had stopped making collars in favor of completed shirts. By 1936, the Saturday Evening Post cut back on their commissions for his covers. World War II brought something of a respite, with contracts for war bond posters, but that work would mark the end of his output. He died in 1951, survived by his sister and Beach. A really great monograph of his illustrations was published in 2008 by Abrams.

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).

This your open thread for the day. What’s happening in your world?

enough already

March 23rd, 2015

I don’t know of any blogger who is really happy with their hosting service.
Yours, being Time-Warner, is of course, worst of all.
Maybe Hillary knew what she was doing, after all….*

*Better mention that, yes, I was comparing apples to oranges or somebody will be sure to lecture me on the difference.
Which isn’t one, not really.

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