Box Turtle Bulletin

The Daily Agenda for Tuesday, May 12

TODAY’S AGENDA:

From The Empty Closet (Rochester, NY), May 1974, page 5.

The Streaking craze hit its peak in the spring of 1974. Wikipedia says the “epidemic” started the year before on the Stephen F. Austin State University campus in in Nacogdoches, Texas, and pretty soon it seemed everyone was streaking. There was even a hit song about it. Streakers also hit this Great Gatsby Show in Rochester, NY, according to the city’s gay paper, The Empty Closet:

Another opening, another show. THE GREAT GATSBY at Jim’s brought awards to TOM, MIKE, MAURICE, STEVE, and others. The most appropriate award, I think, was to Stanley for “Best Streaker”, he bared his soul, and went back to basics where only his personality is the thing. How can we be a liberated generation when we are so busy emulating someone else’s generation that we can’t be ourselves?

The 1970s are coming back into vogue again. I wonder if streaking will see a return?

TODAY IN HISTORY:
► 40 YEARS AGO: California Decriminalizes Homosexuality: 1975. Efforts to repeal California’s Sodomy law began in 1969 when San Francisco Assemblyman Willie Brown introduced what became known as the Brown Bill into the lower House. He reintroduced the bill every year until its passage in 1975. That year, the bill advanced through the House only to run into trouble in the Senate. The vote stood at a 20-20 tie when Senate Majority Leader George Moscone (who later became mayor of San Francisco) locked the chamber’s doors until Lt. Gov. Mervyn Dymallyin could fly in from Denver to deliver the tie-breaking vote. Gov. Jerry Brown signed the bill into law when it finally reached his desk.

Members of Chicago’s gay community march against police harassment, arrests and anti-gay violence, June 5.

► Chicago Police Launch Campaign of Gay Bar Raids: 1979. The first one hit was Carol’s Speakeasy. Vice Squad officers had obtained membership cards and used them to gain entrance. They raided the place at 3:30 a.m., and remained there long after closing time, keeping patrons from entering or leaving the club, checking I.D.’s, and calling for a building and fire inspection. Four were arrested outside the club.

One week later, police returned to Carol’s again, at 1:15 a.m. on May 18. Police ordered the approximately six to eight hundred people to leave. Outside the club, a photographer began taking pictures of the raid, and police immediately knocked him to the ground and began beating him. A friend tried to intervene, and police roughly pushed him into a squad car, tearing the ligaments in his arm in the process. Another patron was beaten so badly he wound up in intensive care with a concussion. Eleven were arrested in all, although it was never explained what exactly they were being charged with.

Less than twenty-four hours later, police launched yet another bar raid, this time at the New Flight. Seven were arrested. As the bar was being evacuated, one officer was heard to yell, “Be sure to take your purses.”

Gay community leaders met with the 18th district watch commander, identified only as Captain Rooney, who claimed not to know who ordered the raids or how many officers were involved. He chalked the police violence up to “frayed nerves,” and claimed the raids on Carol’s were nothing more than “a routine response to neighbors complaints. He then refused to answer any more questions. Another officer of the tactical squad also refused to answer questions, saying,” If you want an interview, pay me. Famous people get paid.”

On June 5, about a thousand people marched to protest police harassment, and against rising anti-gay violence that received almost no attention from Chicago Police. Mayor Jane Byrne and other city officials met with march organizers and conceded that “there certainly, in my view, has been harassment in the gay community,” and promised to look into it. But it doesn’t surprise me at all that I haven’t been able to find any follow up reports on the matter.

[Sources: David W. Linger. “Bar raids in Chicago.” GPU News (Milwaukee, WI, June 1979): 4.

“Chicago March.” GPU News (Milwaukee, WI, July 1979): 11.]

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS:
► Bruce Voeller: 1934-1994. Where to begin? He was a tireless gay rights advocate who co-founded the National Gay Task Force in 1973 and served as its director until 1978. He was a talented biologist, having studied biochemistry, developmental biology and genetics. That put him on the front lines as a researcher for a new disease that others started calling Gay-Related Immune Disorder (GRID), a name that he challenged for its medical inaccuracy. Voeller is credited for giving the new disease the more accurate name of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS).

Voeller had married Dr. Kytja Scott Voeller, whom he met in grad school. Together they had three children. He came out in 1964 when he was 29, and the resulting divorce was messy. Voeller had to fight all the way up to the Supreme Court to gain child visitation rights. By then, he was heavily involved in the resurgent gay rights movement. He was among the founders of the Gay Activists Alliance in 1969 and served as its third president. But where the GAA was more interested in street activism, he sought to bring gay activism into the mainstream of political discourse. In 1973, he left the GAA and founded NGTF (later, NGLTF), and built it into a nation advocacy organization. As NGTF director, he attended a historic White House meeting in 1977 with thirteen other LGBT advocates to raise awareness about discriminatory laws and policies.

In 1978, Voeller left he NGTF and established the Mariposa Education and Research Foundation to conduct human sexuality research. Among his concerns was that books, papers, and other ephemera on the LGBT movement was easily lost or destroyed, posing a danger that LGBT history itself would vanish. So he created a network of volunteers to search for and gather as much as possible, and that extensive collection was donated to the Cornell University Library in 1988. With the advent of AIDS, Voeller returned to his biologist’s roots and the Foundation shifted its focus to reducing the risks of sexually transmitted diseases. His 1989 study warned that mineral oil lubricants caused rapid deterioration of latex condoms, leading to a shift to water-based sexual lubricants. He pioneered the use of nonoxynol-9 as a spermicide and topical virus-transmission preventative,, and he studied the reliability of various brands of condoms in disease prevention. The results of that study even appeared in Consumer Reports, making the information widely available and accessible to the public. He was conducting studies on viral leakage for the (then) recently approved “female” condom when he passed away in 1994 of an AIDS-related illness.

► 40 YEARS AGO: Jared Polis: 1975. Polis earned his fortune when he founded American Information Systems, an Internet access, web hosting and application service provider. He also co-founded an online greeting card company and an online florist. After selling those companies during the height of the dot-com bubble, he used his wealth to found the Jared Polis Foundation in 2000, with the mission to “create opportunities for success through education and access to technology.” The foundation has refurbished and donated more than 3,500 computers each year to schools and other non-profits. He also founded two charter schools for at-risk students, and another school for older immigrant youths. He founded another school in Denver to serve youth who are homeless or living in unstable conditions.

When he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives for Colorado’s Second District in 2008, he was the first openly gay man to be elected as a freshmen (all the other gay Representatives came out while already in office). He is also the first openly gay parent in Congress. As Congressman, he has been a tireless advocate for LGBT equality. In 2011, he launched the Fearless Campaign, dedicated to “empowering our political leaders with the moral courage it takes to vote fearlessly on the politically charged issues of today, regardless of the perceived political risk.”

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?