The Daily Agenda for Thursday, April 30

Jim Burroway

April 30th, 2015

TODAY’S AGENDA:
Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Willemstad, Curaçao; Norrköping Sweden; Northhampton, MA; Raleigh, NC.

AIDS Walks This Weekend: Atlantic City, NJ; Asbury Park, NJ; Charlotte, NC; Morristown, NJ; Newark NJ; Ogunquit, ME; Ridgewood NJ.

Other Events This Weekend: Texas Tradition Rodeo, Dallas, TX; Frieberg Gay Film Festival, Frieberg, Germany; Miami Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, Miami, FL; Hot Rodeo, Palm Springs, CA; Prague Rainbow Spring, Prague, Czech Republic; Sitges International Bear Meeting, Sitges, Spain; Tybee Rainbow Fest, Tybee Island, GA.

TODAY’S AGENDA is brought to you by:

04.30.RinglingBros-Poster1983

A poster for the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus benefit to fight AIDS, April 30, 1983.

This poster was submitted by BTB reader Jaime Harrington last September:

My partner and I were visiting with our friend whose husband just died. They just were able to marry, together 48 years. He relayed to me this meeting by the gay men’s health crisis in 83 and have the poster from it. I apologize the picture isn’t the best. He relayed there was a total news blackout regarding it. But it was either 15 or 18,000 people showed up.

Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) convers with his chief counsel, Roy Cohn, during the Army-McCarthy hearings, April 26, 1954.

Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) convers with his chief counsel, Roy Cohn, during the Army-McCarthy hearings, April 26, 1954.

TODAY IN HISTORY:
“A Pixie Is a Close Relative of a Fairy”: 1954. Roy Cohn was only 24 years old when he gained prominence for his part in grilling witnesses on the stand in the Rosenberg trial of 1951. Cohn’s performance impressed FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who recommended Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) hire Cohn as his chief counsel on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Cohn, in tern, recruited his friend and anti-communist crusader, G. David Schine, to join McCarthy’s staff as an unpaid “chief consultant.” The two spent the summer of 1953 on a widely-criticized tour of Europe, visiting libraries of the U.S. Information Agency and snooping for what they considered to be subversive material. One American official in Germany jeered them as “junketeering gumshoes.”

David Schine and Roy Cohn, the "junketeering gumshoes."

David Schine and Roy Cohn, the “junketeering gumshoes.”

It appears that at about this time, Cohn took quite a shine to Schine and developed something of a schoolboy’s crush. By all accounts, Schine appears to have been straight and there’s no evidence to suggest that Cohn’s affections were returned. Nevertheless, when Schine was drafted into the army the following November, Cohn was livid. Through back channels, Cohn made several demands in Schine’s behalf for light duties, extra leave, and not to be assigned overseas. He also demanded that Schine be given an officer’s commission — Schine had been inducted as a private — but the army refused due to lack of qualifications. Cohn pestered everyone from the Secretary of the Army on down, charging that the Army was holding Schine “hostage” in an attempt to dissuade Cohn and McCarthy from launching a witch hunt against the Army, and threatening to “wreck” the Army” if he didn’t get his way.

Cohn’s behavior raised eyebrows, not only in the Army but also in the Senate. Sen. Ralph Flanders (R-VT), who despised McCarthy, gave a speech on the Senate floor questioning” the mystery concerning the personal relationship of the army private, the staff assistant and the senator.”

Special counsel Ray Jenkins

Investigations Subcommittee special counsel Ray Jenkins

The resulting Army-McCarthy Hearings, broadcast live on national television from April to June of 1954, had Americans glued to their sets to watch the epic battle between McCarthy and the Army. In mid-April, while the committee’s special counsel Ray Jenkins grilled Army Secretary Robert T. Stevens, Jenkins produced a key piece of evidence provided to him by Cohn. It was a photo of a smiling Stevens standing next to Schine, a photo that Jenkins charged was “taken with you (and Schine) alone at your suggestion.” It had been taken the previous November, soon after Schine was drafted and undergoing basic training at Fort Dix, New Jersey. Stephens had gone to Fort Dix to meet with McCarthy and Cohn, and the photo was taken after the meetings were over. If Stevens was so outraged at McCarthy and Cohn’s demands, why was he photographed alone with Schine, appearing somewhat relaxed, looking in Schine’s direction and smiling. Wasn’t the real truth something else? “Isn’t it a fact,” Jenkins pressed, “that you were being especially nice and considerate and tender of this boy, Schine, in order to dissuade the senator from continuing his investigation of one of your departments?”

“Positively and completely not,” Stevens answered, and he insisted he treated all privates in the Army the same. This answer was hard to believe. After all, how many Army privates get their photo taken alone with the Secretary of the Army?

The photo caught Stevens and the Army’s counsel, Joseph Welch, off guard. Later that evening, Welch got a call from the Army photographer who took the photo. The photographer saw the photo in the news and was angry that it had been altered. There were three people in the photo, and a fourth who was only partly in the frame. It was not, as Jenkins claimed, a friendly photo of an Army Secretary and a private, but a group photo of Stevens, Schine, Air Force Col. J.T. Bradley and, on the far edge of the photo, the left arm of McCarthy’s chief of staff, Frank Carr. And when you saw the full photo, it became clearer that Stevens wasn’t looking at Schine and smiling, but was looking past Schine toward Col. Bradley.

DavidSchine

David Schine testified on April 29 that the photo he gave McCarthy’s staff hadn’t been cropped.

When Welch revealed the original photograph to the committee the next day, it was Jenkins, McCarthy’s and Cohn’s turn to be put on the defensive. Welch told Jenkins, “I would like to say with all of my power, sir, I know you would never participate in a trick like this, but I suggest to you that you were imposed upon.” Jenkins sputtered that he got the altered photo from “one of the parties in interest in this case, and I might say an adverse party of interest to Mr. Stevens, as being the genuine authentic photograph. And I presented it in good faith.” But all of America knew that Jenkins had been duped. What’s worse, it was proof that evidence being fed to the committee was being doctored and was untrustworthy.

So instead of the committee investigating the Army, it was now investigating where the doctored photo came from. On April 29, Schine was called to testify. He said that he had supplied a copy of the photo to McCarthy’s staff, but that the photo he provided showed all four people. The next day, the committee called Cohn’s assistant, James Juliana, to the stand. He acknowledged receiving the photo, but repeatedly claimed he had no idea where it came from.

Top:  Joseph Welch asks James Juliana, "Did this come from a pixie?" Bottom: The fairy is not amused.

Top: Joseph Welch (R) asks James Juliana (L), “Did you think this came from a pixie?”
Bottom: The fairy is not amused.

Welch was incredulous. He thrust a copy of the photo at Juliana and asked, “Did you think this came from a pixie? Where do you think that this picture I hold in my hand came from?”

Juliana replied, “I had no idea.”

McCarthy tried to give Juliana some relief from the grilling by asking Welch an apparently innocuous question: “With the counsel for my benefit define — I think he might be an expert on that — what a pixie is?”

Welch replied, with relish. “Yes, I should say, Mr. Senator, that a pixie is a close relative of a fairy. Shall I proceed, sir? Have I enlightened you?”

The room burst into raucous laughter. Even McCarthy, aware that the cameras were now trained on him, managed a chuckle. But Cohn sat stone-faced and was clearly not amused. Cohn later called the remark “malicious,” “wicked,” and “indecent.” After the hearings were over, Cohn resigned from McCarthy’s staff and went into private practice in New York City. He became a fixture at Studio 54 in the 1970s, he threw lavish parties featuring very beautiful young men, and he used Barbara Walters as his beard. All the while, he insisted that he was straight. And until the day he died, he insisted that the disease he was suffering from was liver cancer. He died in 1986 of AIDS.

“I’m gay,” says Ellen, directly into the microphone.

“Ellen” Comes Out: 1997. Ellen DeGeneres had already come out as a lesbian publicly two weeks earlier with a Time magazine cover story titled, “Yep, I’m Gay.” But Ellen Morgan, her clumsy, nervous, and eager-to-please character on her weekly sitcom, Ellen was as closeted as ever, although hints were dripping out throughout season four. Ellen’s character finally came tumbling out in her characteristically awkward fashion when she met Susan, a lesbian television producer who assumed that Ellen was also gay. Although Ellen denied it, much of the episode dwelled on her trying to come to terms with the fact that she really, really liked Susan — in that way. When Ellen was told that Susan was about to leave town, Ellen rushed to the airport and, after much hemming and hawing, finally said it: “I’m gay” — while inadvertently saying it directly into the public address microphone that carried her announcement throughout the terminal.

Getting the episode to air was easier than you might think. Network executives had become antsy about the series’ lackluster ratings and lack of focus, and DeGeneres wasn’t much interested in fixing the problem by relying on the standard sitcom formulas of dating and relationships. One producer suggested that maybe Ellen could get a puppy, an indication of how desperate the producers were to think that a puppy was all that was missing. That plot element was discarded, but the suggestion lived on in the episode’s title, “The Puppy Episode.” ABC and Disney agreed to their next plan, which was for Ellen to come out as lesbian. After rejecting the first script for not going far enough — “If we’re going to do it, let’s do it,” Disney executive Dean Valentine reportedly said — they began production on the episode on March 7.

Word spread, and the backlash soon followed. The studio received one bomb threat, and DeGeneres was followed to work by a “suspicious man” at least once. The American Family Association called for an advertiser boycott, as they always do, leading Chrysler to refuse to buy advertising time for the “Puppy Episode,” along with did J.C. Penney. (DeGeneres would become the advertising face for J.C. Penney in 2012, prompting yet another AFA boycott.) Wendy’s dropped Ellen from its sponsorship altogether, and ABC affiliate WBMA in Birmingham, Alabama refused to air the episode. Jerry Falwell displayed his monumental ingenuity by calling DeGeneres “Ellen Degenerate,” to which DeGeneris responded, “I’ve been getting that since the fourth grade.” Laura Dern, who played Susan, was unable to find work for a year and a half because of the episode.

“The Puppy Episode” however was the highest-rated episode of Ellen ever, drawing some 42 million viewers. It won two Emmys, a Peabody, and a GLAAD Media Award. Ellen was renewed for another season, but each subsequent episode was prefaced with a parental warning. Ratings dropped, perhaps because of the backlash, perhaps because of the warning, but also perhaps because so many episodes wound up dealing with gay-specific issues which were of little interest to the larger audience. At any rate, Ellen was cancelled after the end of Season 5.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9emoc2rEwM

The Admiral Duncan immediately after the blast (Click to enlarge).

London Gay Pub Bombed: 1999. It was the start of a bank holiday weekend in Britain, and the venerable Admiral Duncan pub in Soho was packed with people getting an early start. Londoners that Friday evening were only somewhat wary following two unsolved bombings earlier that month in Brixton (April 17) and East London (April 24). Fortunately, nobody died in either bombing, although sixty one were injured, including a two year old toddler with a four inch nail embedded in his brain. Police narrowed the search to neo-Nazi David Copeland based on a CCTV image from the Brixton blast. Brixton was targeted because of its black population, while the East London neighborhood was largely inhabited by South Asian immigrants. Some feared that the next target might be Jewish, or possibly gay. One gay pub in Soho had put up a poster warning customers to be vigilant for any suspicious activity, but most people thought that his motivations were more racist than homophobic. That theory was quickly dispelled at 6:37 p.m. when a nail bomb that had been left in a bag at the Pub’s entrance went off. Jonathan Cash, who would later write a play about the bombing, described it this way:

“The loudest, most alien sound I have ever heard ripped through the pub and smashed into my head. I don’t know how long it went on – a couple of seconds, perhaps – then the most enormous crunch of something structural and solid. I felt no pain, just terror. My eyes were ringing, my nose filled with sulphurous dust and, in the blink of an eye, I saw unrecognisable shapes flying past towards the doors. With the dust and smoke, I could see little more than six inches in front of me. Somehow I was on the floor. Then I heard the screaming. I didn’t make any sound. Or perhaps I did. I can’t remember.”

Nick Moore, John Light, and Andrea and Julian Dykes.

Andrea Dykes, 27, who was four months pregnant, was killed instantly, along with two friends, Nick More, 31 and John Light, 32. About seventy were injured, including Dykes’s husband, Julian, who remained in a coma for three weeks. Four of the injured required amputations.

Police tracked Copeland down later that night and arrested him. He told them that he had hoped that his bombings would inflame racial tensions and create a backlash that would generate popular support for the radical-right British National Party. On June 30, 2000, a court sentenced Copeland to six life sentences, and in 2007 the High Court ruled that he should remain in prison for at least 50 years, guaranteeing that he will remain put away until at least the age of 73. There is now a memorial chandelier with an inscription and a plaque at the Admiral Duncan to remember those where were killed and injured.

Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas

TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Alice B. Toklas: 1877-1967.Born in San Francisco, she met Gertrude Stein (see Feb 3) on the very first day that she arrived in Paris, on September 8, 1907. They remained inseparable for the next thirty-nine years until Stein’s death in 1946. Together, they hosted one of the more illustrious salons that attracted the best writers and painters of the Paris avant-garde, including American expats Ernest Hemingway, Thorton Wilder, and Paul Bowles. Stein and Toklas were early patrons of Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, and they were also patrons of some rather unsavory characters before and during World War II. Their support for the Vichy government went far beyond considerations of wartime survival. They could have easily escaped to Switzerland, but their friendship with the anti-Semitic Bernard Faÿ and open admiration for Vichy leader Marshal Philippe Pétain (Stein translated a collection of Pétain’s speeches into English to bring them to a wider audience) gave them privileges denied ordinary French citizens, let alone those who were both Jewish and gay.

Toklas was Stein’s partner in every way: cook, lover, editor, critic and muse. Stein gave her own autobiography the tongue-in-cheek title of The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas, while Toklas’s 1954 memoir was titled The Alice B Toklas Cookbook. It was, technically I suppose, a cookbook — there are three hundred recipes, including the famous brownie recipe titled “Haschich Fudge” — but it’s was more accurately a memoir of the many dinners that Toklas and Stein hosted for their famous friends over the years. In 1963, Toklas really did write an autobiography, What Is Remembered, but it ends abruptly with Stein’s death in 1946, much as Toklas’s own life did in many ways. Their relationship being legally unrecognized, Stein’s relatives plundered the couples’ art collection and left Toklas in poor financial and physical health. She died in poverty in 1967 at the age of 89, and was buried next to Stein in the Peré Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

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?

Joe

April 30th, 2015

Viewed through the lens of Box Turtle Bulletin, the amount of energy, time, and resources expended then, and expended now, on America’s homosexual anxieties is really quite absurd.

Hue-Man

April 30th, 2015

Surprising news from a Conservative government.

“Canadians no longer need to undergo sex-reassignment surgery in order to change the gender marker on their citizenship certificate under new reforms from Citizenship and Immigration Canada.

As of February, those wishing to change their gender on the certificate need only now submit provincially or territorially-issued documentation such as amended birth certificate.”

“The move puts the federal requirements more in line with provinces, where change is swiftly spreading across the country. Currently, Ontario, B.C., Alberta and Manitoba have removed sex-reassignment surgery as a requirement for changing gender on provincial documents like birth certificates. Other provinces and territories, like Nova Scotia, have introduced legislation to change their requirements as well.” http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/federal-government-quietly-eases-requirements-for-canadians-seeking-to-change-gender-on-citizen-certificate

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