The Daily Agenda for Wednesday, June 17

Jim Burroway

June 17th, 2015

TODAY’S AGENDA:
Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Biarritz, France; Bisbee, AZ; Chicago, IL; Columbus, OH; Cumbria, UK; Denver, CO; Edinburgh, UK; Grand Rapids, MI; Guadalajara, JAL; Huntsville, AL; Iowa City, IA; Juneau, AK; Knoxville, TN; Lancaster, PA; Las Cruces, NM; Louisville, KY; Lyon, France; Nanaimo, BC; New Orleans, LA; Oldenburg, Germany; Oklahoma City, OK; Olympia, WA; Portland, ME; Providence, RI; Regina, SK; Riga, Latvia (EuroPride); Salem, MA; Salisbury, NC; Schenectady, NY; Shanghai, China; Sioux Falls, SD; Sitges, Spain; Springfield, MO; Syracuse, NY; Thessaloniki, Greece; Vienna, Austria; Wilton Manors, FL; York, UK; Zurich, Switzerland.

Other Events This Weekend: Lesbian and Gay Stadtfest, Berlin, Germany; Durban Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, Durban, South Africa; Folsom East, New York, NY; Frameline International LGBT Film Festival, San Francisco, CA; Cedar Point Gay Days, Sandusky, OH; Out in the Vineyard Gay Wine Weekend, Sonoma, CA.

TODAY’S AGENDA is brought to you by:

From The Calendar (San Antonio, TX), June 4, 1982, page 12.

From The Calendar (San Antonio, TX), June 4, 1982, page 12.

Dena KayeDena Kaye grew up singing gospel with her family around Houston. After high school, she switched to country and western and sang with bands in the Dallas/Fort Worth era. In an odd twist, she quickly found a gay following somehow and became one of the first national touring country and western acts willing to perform in gay bars in the 1980s.  “Gay people have been instrumental in helping me to advance my career,” she told San Antonio’s The Calendar. “Their support has been both inspiration and motivation to me. I’ll never forget the good times I’ve had, or the fine friends I’ve made.”

She also had the ability to bring all kinds of people together. When she made another appearance at Ab’s Westernaire, another San Antonio gay bar, the crowd from a neighboring straight C&W bar heard the music and joined the gay crowd. The straight bar’s owners even locked up their own place and joined the party. But despite opening for such luminaries as Hank Williams Jr., and Bobby Bare, she was never quite able to break into the big time.

TODAY IN HISTORY:
 Liberace Wins Libel Case: 1959. Liberace — his real name was Wladziu Valentino Liberace, but like Cher and Madonna he was known by a single name on stage — had become a piano-playing sensation in the U.S. in the 1950s. He started as a classical pianist, but he quickly added schmaltz and elements of Las Vegas showmanship (extravagant costumes, massive diamond rings, and his signature candelabra) to his repertoire of classics, show tunes, film scores and popular songs, all of which took his performances in a decidedly unclassical direction. His curly black hair, long eyelashes and bright smile made him a sex symbol for an odd collection of somewhat nerdy teenage girls, their middle-aged mothers and even their grandmothers — and for not a few gay men who understood what they were seeing. His flamboyance attracted questions about his sexuality, but those questions didn’t do much to dent the popularity of his his hit television series and packed concert halls.

But in 1956, a Daily Mirror columnist who went by the pen name Cassandra (real name: William Connor) wrote a scathing article the day after Liberace’s arrival in London for a live BBC broadcast and a European tour. If everyone else was willing to go along with Liberace’s persona of being sweet, sensitive, sensational and straight, Connor had no intention of playing along:

He is the summit of sex – the pinnacle of masculine, feminine, and neuter. Everything that he, she and it can ever want. I spoke to sad but kindly men on this newspaper who have met every celebrity coming from America for the past 30 years. They say that this deadly, winking, sniggering, snuggling, chromium-plated, scent-impregnated, luminous, quivering, giggling, fruit-flavored, mincing, ice-covered heap of mother love has had the biggest reception and impact on London since Charlie Chaplin arrived at the same station, Waterloo, on September 12, 1921.

Liberace replied with at telegram: “What you said hurt me very much. I cried all the way to the bank.” But he also decided to sue for libel. The case finally reached a London courtroom in 1959. On June 6, Liberace took the stand and denied that he was gay. He also denied that he was even a sex symbol. “I consider sex appeal as something possessed by Marilyn Monroe and Brigitte Bardot. I certainly do not put myself in their class,” he said, prompting laughter in the court room. When Connor took the stand, he denied trying to imply that Liberace was gay, although he found it difficult to square that claim with his word choices for his column. The most damning phrase, according to news accounts of the day, was his use of “fruit-flavored.” Apparently that was not the phrase to be tossed around at just anyone.

With no proof of actual homosexual activity on Liberace’s part — there were no former lovers to testify, no police arrests to report — the jury returned a verdict of guilty against Connor and the Daily Mirror, and awarded damages of $22,400. But today of course we know what was true all along: that he was actually gay even though he never came out of the closet during his lifetime. His estate and many of his remaining fans continued to deny for many years the numerous reports that when he died in 1987, it was AIDS that killed him.

 Premiere of Documentary of Drag Queen Competition: 1968. The documentary The Queen makes its premiere in a theater in New York City. The film, shot almost entirely with hand-held cameras, is a primitive pre-Stonewall prequel to Paris is Burning, and follows the behind-the-scenes preparations for the Miss All-America Camp Beauty Pageant – a national drag queen competition in New York City. The conversations recorded in the dressing rooms about draft boards, sexual and gender identity, sex reassignment surgery, and being a drag queen captures a very specific time in LGBT history. If you are ever lucky enough to see it, keep a very sharp eye out whenever the camera pans to the audience. You might just get a quick glimpse of Andy Warhol in his trademark platinum wig.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANmzaMD6-1k

 Guin “Richie” Phillips Murdered: 2003. One fine Wednesday in June, two fishermen pulled a suitcase out of Rough River Lake, located about midway between Elizabethtown and Owensboro, Kentucky. When they pulled it up and unzipped it, they found the grizley remains of Guin “Richie” Phillips, a 36-year-old gay man from Rineyville, near Elizabethtown. He was identified by some personal items and a University of Kentucky Wildcat tattoo on his shoulder. Phillips had disappeared on June 17.

When his mother reported her son missing, she told police that she feared that he had been harmed because he was gay. Her fears proved correct. Police arrested Joshua Cottrell, 21, and charged him with Phillip’s murder. Cottrell had been seen having lunch with Phillips in Elizabethtown, and they were seen together in Phillip’s truck that same day. Several days later, the truck was found abandoned in Southern Indiana. Prosecutors announced that they would seek the death penalty.

When the trial finally got under way in 2005, a mutual friend testified that Cottrell had bought a set of luggage at J.C. Penney’s and told the friend that he planned to do some travelling. Cottrell also said that he would “cold-cock” Phillips if he ever made a pass at him. Cottrell’s aunt testified that Cottrell had confessed to the crime but his family didn’t believe him. According to the aunt, Cottrell invited Phillips to his motel room and asked Phillips if he liked him. Phillips said yes, and Cottrell chocked him to death.

But Cottrell testified that Phillips came to his motel room uninvited, tried to kiss him, and tried to force him to into oral sex. Cottrell’s attorney told the jury that the killing was fully justified. “This kid is not a killer,” Scott Drabenstadt said during closing arguments. “This kid is not a robber. Yes, he did some very inappropriate things with the body. … But what set it all in motion, he was privileged to do. What set it in motion were the actions of a 36-year-old man.”

That “gay panic defense,” despite the testimony from Cottrell’s own relatives, was all that was needed to convince the jury to reject the more serious charge of murder in favor of second degree manslaughter. They recommended 30 years, but Kentucky law limited the term to twenty. Phillips’s brother told a reporter, “I think they were looking at my brother being a homosexual when they made their decision to pick the lesser charge.” Cottrell was sentenced to the maximum twenty years. He is now more than half way through his term and has been eligible for parole since 2007.

Carl Van Vechten, self-portrait, 1934.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
 135 YEARS AGO: Carl Van Vechten: 1880-1964. A writer and a photographer, Carl Van Vechten was fascinated with African-American culture and became a patron on the Harlem Renaissance. In 1926, he published his controversial 1926 novel Nigger Heaven, which portrayed the intellectuals, political activists, workers, and others who inhabited the “great black walled city” of Harlem. The book by a white author split Harlem down the middle: Langston Hughes was among the book’s fans and defenders (Hughes even wrote new poems to replace the songs used in the book’s first printing), while W. E. B. Du Bois and Alain Locke condemned it as an “affront to the hospitality of black folks.”

The question of whether a white man could truly know the Black experience lies at the very heart of the controversy surrounding Van Vechten’s life. Some of Van Vechten’s affinity for African-Americans can be traced to his wealthy family while growing up in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. His father endowed a school for African-Americna children, and he instructed his sons to always address the family’s employees with “Mr.” and “Mrs.”, regardless of their race. After graduating from the University of Chicago, he moved to New York to become the music and dance critic for The New York Times. In 1913, he took a year-long trip to Europe where he met Gertrude Stein and helped to get her work published.

In the 1920s, he began publishing novels himself, many of which containing sly and witty references to homosexuality. His 1923 novel, The Blind Bow-Boy includes a character he called “the Duke of Middlebottom,” whose stationery sported the slogan, “A thing of beauty is a boy forever.” It was about this time that Van Vechten emerged as a notable advocate for Black culture, writing articles in Vanity Fair celebrating the music of the Harleem Renaissance — the blues, jazz and spirituals which he said were the only authentic American musical forms. He also promoted writers of “the New Negro movement”: Alain Locke, Langston Hughes, Wallace Thurman, among others. In the 1930, Van Vechten took up photography and became known for his portraits of some of the leading artists of the day, including Langston Hughes, Marian Anderson, Pearl Baily, Josephine Baker, Marlon Brando, Truman Capote, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Lena Horne, Mahalia Jackson — the list is nearly endless.

Although Van Vechten had married the Russian-born actress Fania Marinoff in 1914, Van Vechten was gay. This was evident when his papers were unsealed twenty-five years after his death in 1964:

As the 25-year mark drew near, scholars assumed they were about to unveil Van Vechten’s diaries. “They said, ‘Of course, this is going to be exciting, and let’s open those journals and have a party,’ and the curator said, ‘Well, I don’t think so…’ It was a good instinct.” The few people who did attend the 1989 opening, including Willis, were shocked by what they found: 18 scrapbooks of graphic homoeroticism, full of mischief and devoid of explanation.

…Van Vechten collected newspaper clippings chronicling Harlem drag balls, early sex-change operations (“GI Who Turned Woman is a Happy Beauty”), court cases for “morals charges,” and abuse incidents. He assembled more restrained, if still theatrical, black and white photographs of male nudes, both Caucasian and African American, which most scholars think are mostly or entirely the work of Van Vechten. Nothing escaped him: Photos of ambiguously homoerotic Greek vases, labeled in childishly rounded handwriting, nestled against newspaper cutouts of male wrestlers locked in combat.

Emily Bernard’s 2012 biography, Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance: A Portrait in Black and White, explores the contentious racial and sexual intersections between the multiple worlds that Van Vechten inhabited and chronicled.

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?

Eric Payne

June 17th, 2015

A quick question, Jim. Is the redesign integration of a “menu page” going to be permanent?

In the past week, another site I peruse daily — Towleroad — underwent a design change that, frankly, I found atrociously hideous (and seems to have crashed the site, as well; it’s reverted to posting it’s final page from the old design, with no new content).

If you have a menu page to go to a specific daily agenda, is that menu selection going to be updated to select other “articles and news” made during the day?

There’s only 13 days left to this June, and I’m thinking there just might be some things said and done during the day that warrant “updates” to the content. Things like… oh, I don’t know… Pride celebrations nationwide… or Bill’s and my 20th anniversary on the 25th… and isn’t there some case in which SCOTUS was going to make a ruling?

Chris McCoy

June 17th, 2015

Eric Payne wrote:

Is the redesign integration of a “menu page” going to be permanent?

Are you viewing the mobile version of the website?

I find that the mobile version of the site leaves out a lot of useful information, such as the list of “tags” (e.g., Marriage, or Florida or Supreme Court of the United States) which can be clicked to give a historical list of related topics.

If you scroll to the bottom there is a link to view the desktop site. You may have to pinch-to-zoom in to be able to read the text, but I think the site does much better on the Desktop view than on the mobile view.

Eric Payne

June 18th, 2015

Chris,

Normally, my iPad brings up the desktop version of a site, as that’s the default I’ve set in my Opera browser. But yesterday, for some reason, the mobile site came up… both on my iPad and desktop. Thus my confusion. (I since discovered the problem was a cookie I picked up that forced a default to “m.” pages.)

And the re-designed Towleroad is back up.

I still hate it.

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