The Daily Agenda for Thursday, March 26

Jim Burroway

March 26th, 2015

TODAY’S AGENDA:
Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Lafayette, LA; Lake Worth, FL.

Other Events This Weekend: European Gay Ski Week, Avoriaz, France; Los Angeles Leather Pride, Los Angeles, CA; AIDS WAlk, Orlando, FL; European Snow Pride, Tignes, France.

TODAY’S AGENDA is brought to you by:

From Vector (San Francisco, CA), October 1973, page 20.

From Vector (San Francisco, CA), October 1973, page 20.

The Club Turkish Baths is believed to have become San Franscisco’s first gay bathhouse when it opened in 1935. Located on the same block as Compton’s Cafeteria, scene of perhaps the first true riot in response to police operations against gays, drag queens and transgender people (see Aug 21), the Club was at the south end of San Francisco’s pre-Castro gayborhood of the Tenderloin. Spanning four floors, it was also the largest bathhouse in San Francisco.

Bulldog Baths poster.

Bulldog Baths poster.

In 1979, new owners took over and renamed it the Bulldog Baths. They also did an extensive remodeling, complete with a full-sized big-rig truck greeting visitors as they arrived at the second-floor entrance. It’s layout was like a Disneyland of man-sex. The tractor rig at the entrance, the life-like prison (with guards) above, a full bar with billiards, music and “back room” below, a “jock” are with a giant screen showing sports films, a restaurant — a real restaurant — along with the usual stuff found in more conventional bathhouses. All of it was decorated with murals and graffiti art by New York artist Brooks Jones.

The Bulldog lasted until San Francisco shut down all of the city’s bathhouses in 1983. The Tenderloin fell into further decline until recently, where it has undergone some rather startling gentrification for the first time in its long history. Here’s how far that gentrification has gone: The Bulldog Baths are back in business — as a doggie day care and spa.

L-R: David McCord, David Zamora, and Boulder County Clerk Clela Rorex.

TODAY IN HISTORY:
40 YEARS AGO: Boulder, CO Issues Same-Sex Marriage Licenses: 1975. It all began when Dave McCord and Dave Zamora, both 27, went to their local county clerk’s office for El Paso County (Colorado Springs) and sought a marriage license. According to McCord, the clerk told them, “We do not do that here in El Paso County, but if you want to, go to Boulder County, they might do it there.”

So they did, and asked County Clerk Clela Rorex for a license. Rorex turned to the county’s Assistant District Attorney, William C. Wise, who wrote a quick memorandum noting that Colorado’s marriage laws weren’t gender specific. “There is no statutory law prohibiting the issuance of a license, probably because the situation was simply not contemplated in the past by our legislature. The case law is strongly on the side of the public official that refuses to issue a marriage license in these situations, and a public official could not be prosecuted for violation of any criminal law by such marriage licensing,” Wise wrote.

With Wise’s decision in hand, Rorex decided, as a “strictly administration decision,” that she would issue the county’s first same-sex marriage license to McCord and Zamora. “I am not in violation of any law,” she reasoned, “and it is not for me to legislate morality and not give persons a license if I so desire.” She also said she would continue to issue licenses in similar case as long as it was legal.

A month later, a guy by the name of Roswell Howard tried to protest the decision by showing up with a horse and a plethora of reporters. “a boy can marry a boy and a girl can marry a girl, why can’t a lonesome old cowboy get hitched to his favorite saddle mare?”, he said to the cameras. But Rorex as quick to deny the license, and she had solid legal backing to do so: the horse was too young to marry without written parental consent.

Richard Adams and Tony Sullivan.

Six couples were married altogether before the State Attorney General stepped in to call a halt. Among them were California residents Richard Adams and Tony Sullivan, an Australian national who was trying to legally immigrate to the U.S. to be with Adams. They had already married on March 20 in a religious ceremony officiated by the Metropolitan Community Church’s founder, Rev. Troy Perry, in the hopes that they could secure a green card for Sullivan on First Amendment freedom-of-religion grounds. When they heard Johnny Carson joke about the marriage licenses being issued in Boulder, they flew to Colorado and got their license on April 21.

Three days later, the Colorado Attorney General declared the six marriages invalid and ordered a halt to the licenses. The INS made it clear that it would not recognize Sullivan’s marriage. The INS district director wrote, “You have failed to establish that a bona fide marital relationship can exist between two faggots.” That crude ruling was quickly replaced with a more official declaration stating that the marriage was invalid because neither spouse “can perform the female functions in marriage.” The couple sued in Federal Court, but judge Irving Hill ruled against them, grounding his ruling partly on religious principles, which “could not possibly sanction any marriage between persons of the same because of the vehement condemnation in the Scriptures of both religions (Christianity and Judaism) of all homosexual relationships” — ignoring the couple’s MCC religious marriage in the process. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the decision, and the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the case.

After living abroad, Adams and Sullivan slipped back into the U.S., with Sullivan living as an undocumented immigrant. The couple remained together for four decades, until Adams’s death in 2012. None of the six couples married in Colorado saw their marriages formally annulled. Instead, their licenses were simply ignored, as though they didn’t exist. Two decades after Boulder’s historic step, Rorex reflected on that momentous decision to grant the licenses:

“Honestly, I was pretty young,” says Rorex, who went on to get her master’s in both public administration and legal administration and has been with the Native American Rights Fund’s Boulder office since 1992. “I had no real political background; I was not a political animal when I ran for that office. I didn’t even know any gays or lesbians. I didn’t know anything about the issue. I just operated from gut instinct.”

And her gut told her to give a license to two men who loved each other and wanted to get married. “It felt like the right thing to do,” she recalls, “but I couldn’t have articulated why in 1975.” She can today.

“Over all of these years, I’ve watched this issue, because of the place I was at that time — the accidental moment of history I was involved in — and I’ve grown to become a real staunch crusader for same-sex marriages,” Rorex says. “I’m continually surprised that it has taken so long for people to give equal rights to same-sex partnerships.

[Additional source: Joyce Murdoch & Deb Price. Courting Justice: Gay Men And Lesbians V. The Supreme Court (New York: Basic Books, 2001): 219-225.]

Gay Group Meets at White House: 1977. In a historic first, a group of gay advocates from the National Gay Task Force (later, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force) met with presidential aide Midge Costanza for the first official discussion of gay rights at the White House. Gay rights leaders, including Bruce Voeller (see May 12), Jean O’Leary, Frank Kameny (see May 21), Elaine Noble (see Jan 22), Rev. Troy Perry (see Jul 27), William B. Kelley, and several others, told reporters that the three hour meeting was “a happy milestone on the road to full equality under the law.” The meeting took place while President Jimmy Carter was away at Camp David for the weekend, but participants were assured that Carter was aware of the meeting and promised to support anti-discrimination legislation for employment in the federal government. “We had a fantastic meeting,” said O’Leary, NGTF co-director, “What we got was a commitment on all the issues we brought up” for further discussion not only at the White House, but within individual executive agencies.

The next day, White House Press Secretary Jody Powell appeared in CBS’s Face the Nation and defended the meeting. “For an organized group who feel they have a grievance that they are not being treated fairly, for them to have a right to put that grievance before high officials and say ‘we want redress,’ that to me is what the essence of America is all about.”

Anita Bryant, who was then campaigning against a Miami, Florida gay rights ordinance, thundered her disaproval: “Behind the high sounding appeal against discrimination in job and housing — which is not a problem to the ‘closet’ homosexual — they are really asking to be blessed in their abnormal lifestyle by the office of the President of the United States. I protest the action of the White House staff in dignifying these activists for special privilege with a serious discussion of their alleged ‘human rights’.” Later that day her self-righteous indignation grew: “Before I surrender to this insidious attack on God and His laws and the parents and their rights to protect their children, I will lead such a crusade to stop it as this country has not seen before.”

30 YEARS AGO: US Supreme Court Overturns Oklahoma’s Ban on Teachers Who Support Gay Rights: 1985. In 1978, Oklahoma state Senator Mary Helm introduced a bill allowing public schools to fire or refuse to hire anyone who engaged in “public homosexual activity” or “public homosexual conduct” (see Feb 21). The first was violation, “public homosexual activity,” was defined as any act which violated the state’s anti-sodomy law (which also banned heterosexual sodomy, but Helms’s law only dealt with violations by gay people) and the second provision concerning “public homosexual conduct” was defined to include “advocating, soliciting, imposing, encouraging or promoting public or private homosexual activity in a manner that creates a substantial risk that such conduct will come to the attention of schoolchildren or school employees.” That latter provision endangered heterosexual teachers who might presume to defend gay neighbors or relatives. Shortly after the bill was introduced, more than 100 teenage boys joined KKK chapters in local high schools to “declare war on homosexuals” (see Jan 25) with the full support of Klan leader David Duke (who happened to be a friend of Family Research Council’s current president Tony Perkins.) One student Klansman declared, “We are not just against blacks like the old Klan. We are against gays … because this activity is morally and socially wrong.”

Anita Bryant lobbied the Senate for the bill’s passage, saying that it would curb “the flaunting of homosexuality.” The Helm’s Bill sailed through the House and Senate, passing the upper chamber unanimously. Stan Easter, a gay man licensed to teach in Oklahoma, sued the Oklahoma City Board of Education in Federal Court with the backing of the National Gay Task Force. But Easter backed out over the backlash. Fortunately, Federal Judge Luther Eubanks said NGTF had standing to sue based on sworn affidavits stating that the group’s gay members included Oklahoma teachers who feared that having their names made public would result in their immediate firing. But Eubanks then went on to uphold the law’s constitutionality. The Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals largely reversed his decision, saying that while a teacher could be fired for violating Oklahoma’s sodomy law, the rest of the law violated teachers’ free speech rights under the First Amendment. The State of Oklahoma appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which deadlocked 4-4 (Justice Lewis Powell, seriously ill with prostate cancer, was absent during oral arguments and didn’t vote). That meant that the lower court’s ruling stood and the gag rule against Oklahoma teachers was lifted, but the ban on teachers engaging in “public homosexual activity” remained.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS:
Tennessee Williams: 1911-1983. If you were to ask who was the most celebrated gay playwright in history, most people, gay or straight, may point to Tennessee Williams. Which is ironic because if the gay themes in his work is any indication, he appears to have been rather conflicted by his homosexuality. Blanche’s first husband in the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Streetcar Named Desire killed himself. So did Skipper in the Pulitzer Prize winning Cat on the Hot Tin Roof, and his death threatened to out his pro football buddy and severe alcoholic Brick. In Suddenly, Last Summer, Sebastian was torn apart and eaten by the boys whose sexual favors he sought. For the most part, gay characters are dead and don’t appear on the stage in Williams’s plays; Brick remained closeted, with just enough deniability for straight audience members who didn’t want to see it.

As for Williams himself, he was certainly not closeted, socializing in gay circles and taking a string of lovers. His most enduring relationship with Frank Merlo lasted sixteen years; they remained together until Merlo’s death in 1963. That plunged Williams into a severe depressions, for which he turned to Dr. Max Jacobson for help. Jacobson, nicknamed “Dr. Feelgood,” prescribed amphetamines for this depression and Seconal for his insomnia. Unsurprisingly, Williams appeared incoherent in several interviews, and his reputation suffered. He died in a Paris hotel room in 1983, having chocked to death on the cap from an eye drops bottle, surrounded by barbiturates and other prescription drugs.

T.R. Knight: 1973. Theodore Raymond began his acting career at the age of five at Minneapolis’s Guthrie Theater. He won a scholarship the the Minneapolis-based Children’s Theatre Company while a freshman in high school. After high school, he landed several leading roles at the Guthrie before moving to New York to try his luck on Broadway, where he appeared in the 2001 revival of Noises Off and the 2003 revival of Tertuffe. But his big break came two years later when he landed the role as Dr. George O’Malley in ABC’s Grey’s Anatomy.

Knight’s work on Grey’s Anatomy was well received and things seemed to be going fairly well until late 2006, when rumors began circulating that his Grey’s Anatomy co-star Isaiah Washington insulted Knight with a homophobic slur. A short time later, Knight came out and Washington issued a statement apologizing for his “unfortunate use of words during the recent incident on-set.” But the controversy resurfaced again during the Golden Globe Awards in January when Washington responded to a question from the press that “I never called T.R. a faggot.” But Knight countered that defense during an appearance on the Ellen DeGeneres Show, saying “everybody heard him.” Washington apologized again, but his fate was sealed. Later that summer, ABC announced that it wasn’t renewing Washington’s Contract. Knight, for his part, remained with Grey’s Anatomy for two more seasons before leaving in 2009 due to what he called a “breakdown in communication” with the executive producer over his lack of screen time and his decision to be open about his sexuality.

Since Grey’s Anatomy, Knight returned to the theater, appearing in several off-Broadway productions as well as the Broadway’s A Life in the Theatre in 2010. On October 5, 2013, Knight married Patrick Leahy, his partner of three years, in Hudson, New York.

30 YEARS AGO: Jonathan Groff: 1985. The bulk of his career has been in the theater, beginning with his role as Melchior Gabor in Spring Awakening, for which he was nominated for a Tony and a Drama Desk Award, and won a Grammy for best Musical Show Album featured soloist. He has appeared in an off-Broadway revival of Hair, and he made his West End debut in 2010 in Deathtrap at the Noël Coward Theatre. He’s also worked in some television time, with a recurring role in One Life to Live and Glee. My four-year-old niece will recognize his voice in the Disney animated feature Frozen, for which he lent his voice to the mountain man, Kristoff.

His last two projects have both been with HBO. He appeared as Craig Donner in last year’s film adaptation of Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart. And he has starred as Patrick, a gay video game developer in the HBO series Looking, which completed its second season last Sunday. HBO declined to renew Looking for a third season, but will instead develop a final episode to wrap up the series.

Scotty Joe Weaver: 1986-2004. He should have turned twenty-nine today, but he only managed to see his eighteenth birthday. On July 22, 2004, his badly burned body was found at the side of a rural Alabama road. He had also been robbed of between $65 and $80, which was first first thought to be the main motivation for the crime. But Baldwin County District Attorney David Whetstone quickly determined that Weaver’s sexuality was the reason he was killed. “We have very specific evidence that indicates part of the motive involved his sexual orientation,” he said, noting that the wounds on Scotty Joe’s body indicated “overkill,” a common feature of anti-gay hate crimes. In fact, investigators learned that he had been beaten, strangled, cut, burned and nearly decapitated over several hours while tied to a chair in the mobile home he was living in.

Robert Porter, 18, Nichole Bryars Kelsay, 18, and Christopher Gaines, 20 were arrested and charged with capital murder. Gaines and Kelsay had been Scotty Joe’s roommates. Gaines’ lawyer at that time said that Gaines told him that Porter “spoke openly of wanting to kill the guy because he was gay.” Gaines pleaded guilty to avoid the death penalty, and was sentenced to life without parole. Porter pleaded guilty and received two consecutive life sentences. Kelsay pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit murder and was sentenced to 20 years. Alabama doesn’t have a hate crime law covering sexual orientation. And despite the District Attorney’s findings, Scotty Joe Weaver’s murder was not included in the FBI’s hate crime statistics for 2004, representing another example of the gaps in the FBI’s hate crime reporting program. The crime was featured in the 2006 documentary, Small Town Gay Bar.

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?

Hue-Man

March 26th, 2015

Canada’s Duhamel and Radford win pairs gold at world championships http://www.theglobeandmail.com/sports/more-sports/canadas-duhamel-and-radford-win-pairs-gold-at-world-championships/article23629482/

Eric Radford’s post-coming out interviews have that relaxed comfortable tone that we’ve seen repeatedly – Jason Collins, Michael Sam, Robbie Rogers…

LJ

March 26th, 2015

Today, Indiana governor Mike Pence signed our Religious Freedom Restoration Act into law. The pro-discrimination forces are busy reminding everyone (on my Facebook feed – it seems that I need new friends!) that this won’t change anything, which makes me wonder why in the depths of eternal conscious torment did we need this rubbish to begin with?

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