The Daily Agenda for Wednesday, July 1

Jim Burroway

July 1st, 2015

TODAY’S AGENDA:
Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Budapest, Hungary; Catania, Italy; Cologne, Germany; Leamington, UK; Lethbridge, AB; Madrid, Spain; Porto, Portugal; San Antonio, TX; Schwerin, Germany; Sheffield, UK; Victoria, BC.

TODAY’S AGENDA is brought to you by:

From Arizona Gay News, June 24, 1977, page 7.

From Arizona Gay News, June 24, 1977, page 7.

The Last Culture disco opened in Tucson in 1977 over the July 4 weekend. The Arizona Gay News described the new club:

Aztec, Egyptian, Futuristic are apt words to describe the totally remodeled Last Culture disco located at 1455 N. Miracle Mile. Owners Bernie, Joel, and Budd have spared no expense to make this club one of the most up to date discotheques in the West. A complete new computerized sound system. A completely new lighting system. A complete new laser system that will have your head spinning are but three of the innovations that have been installed. There is a new bleacher section for resting between dances.

The Last Culture disco is in conjunction with Dr. Jekyll’s and Mr. Hyde’s Restaurant which makes this facility one of the most complete entertainment centers in the Southwest.

The city of Tucson inadvertently found itself in the gay bar business in November of 1978 when it purchased the Tucson House, a high rise apartment building on 1455 N. Miracle Mile, which the city intended to turn into public housing for senior citizens. City council members were surprised to learn that the strip mall in front of Tucson House, which housed The Last Culture and Jekyll and Hyde’s, happened to be part of the same transaction, making the city the clubs’ new landlord. While Tucson overall was quite gay friendly — the city council would pass a broad anti-discrimination ordinance a month later — anti-gay council member Richard Amlee was aghast. “I don’t want to use city funds to finance any of their operations,” he said, apparently ignorant of the fact that the two bars were now paying the city “four figures each month” for rent.

At about the same time, the business itself was sold to new owners, and I don’t know what happened after that. I’m still combing through back issues of the Arizona Gay News, which showed that the business continued to advertise as Jekyll’s Last Culture for a few more weeks, as it had been doing through much of 1978, after which it seems to have dropped The Last Culture and advertised itself simply as Jekyll’s. The building is still there (that portion of the old Miracle Mile was renamed Oracle Road to reflect a realignment several blocks to the north many years earlier), and houses a family and youth counseling non-profit organization.

[Sources: “Jekyll’s Changes Hands, City New Landlord.” Arizona Gay News 3, no. 47 (November 23, 1978): 1.]

L-R: Willem Arondeus, Sjoerd Bakker, and Johan Brouwer.

L-R: Willem Arondeus, Sjoerd Bakker, and Johan Brouwer.

TODAY IN HISTORY:
Gay Resistance Fighters Shot By Nazis: 1943. Dutch painter and writer Willem Arondeus’s career in art, like that of many artists, was marked by poverty. But his 1938 biography of the Dutch painter Matthijs Maris (1839-1917) not only assured Arondeus of a modest steady income, but Maris’s fight on the barricades in 1871 for the Paris Communards inspired Arondeus to join the Resistance when the Nazis invaded Holland. Arondeus hatched a plot to burn the Bevolkingsregister which housed the citizen registration office in Amsterdam where the Nazis kept copies of all of the identity cards held by Dutch citizens. Late on March 27, 1943, Arondeus and fourteen others, including two young doctors, donned German uniforms, asked the building’s guards to open the building for a special inspection. As soon as they gained entry, the two doctors injected the guards to put them asleep and placed them in the courtyard away from harm while the rest of the crew set fire to the building.

aanslag_bevolkings_register1_370

The destroyed Bevolkingsregister, 1943.

Five days later, an unknown infiltrator informed the Nazis, which arrested the group. During the trial, Arondeus took responsibility for the fire. The two doctors were sentenced to life in prison, but the rest were ordered to go before a firing squad. Before he was executed, Arondeus asked his lawyer to make public after the war that he and two others were gay: the tailor Sjoerd Bakker, who made the fake German uniforms, and writer Johan Brouwer. “Tell the people that gays are not cowards,” Arondeus instructed his lawyer. (Bakker, for his part, requested a pink shirt as his last request before his execution.) But despite the Netherlands’ renowned liberal attitudes, Arondeus’s request wasn’t heeded until 1990 when a television documentary by the Dutch filmmaker Toni Bouwmans revealed the full story.

[Source: Lutz van Dijk. “Arondeus, Willem” in Robert Aldrich and Garry Wotherspoon (eds.) Who’s Who in Gay and Lesbian History: From Antiquity to the Mid-Twentieth Century, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2002): 34-35.]

Rep. Larry Craig (R-ID)

Rep. Larry Craig (R-ID)

Larry Craig Preemptively Denies Connection to Gay Page Sex Scandal: 1982. Rumors of Sen. Larry Craig’s (R-ID) sexuality have long swirled around Washington as well as back home in Idaho. When his 2007 arrest in a Minneapolis airport men’s room for soliciting sex from an undercover (male) police officer went public (see Aug 27), many Washington insiders weren’t too terribly surprised by the news.

A lot of that had to do with a gay page scandal that broke on June 30, 1982. CBS News aired an exposé featuring Congressional page Leroy Williams alleging that he had sex with three House members when he was 17. Neither CBS News nor Williams named any of the House members publicly, so it was quite surprising when the very next day, then-Rep. Larry Craig Craig issued a statement saying that reporters were calling him saying they were going to publish his name in connection with the scandal as “part of a concerted effort at character assassination.” He added, “I have done nothing that I need to be either publicly or privately ashamed of. I am guilty of no crime or impropriety, and I am convinced that this is an effort to damage my personal character and destroy my political career.”

Craig was the only of the 435 House members to issues such a statement. He then flew to Idaho for a previously-scheduled campaign stop where he addressed the issue again: “Persons who are unmarried as I am, by choice or by circumstance, have always been the subject of innuendos, gossip and false accusations. I think this is despicable.” His statements, out of the blue, puzzled some and raised red flags with others, though few were willing to acknowledge them at the time. What prompted Craig’s pre-emptive, un-sought denial?

 Peter Fearon, then with the New York Post, said he never said his paper was preparing to name Craig. “No, no — it wasn’t ‘are you under investigation?’ It was simply an inquiry: ‘Have you heard anything? Who have you heard about? Have you heard any names mentioned? What’s your reaction to this news?’

“The next thing I know, Larry Craig has issued a press release:  ‘This isn’t me.’ Which I just thought was a bizarre and ultimately very foolish thing to do.

“He was the only person going on the record anywhere,” Fearon said. “And of course, when you do that, it’s like raw meat. He’s saying, ‘Nobody’s actually accusing, but it wasn’t me!’ It’s no wonder it’s dogged him. He denied something that no one had accused him of.”

Williams recanted his statements a month later, as did a second page who appeared on CBS. A House ethics committee investigated and found no evidence of wrongdoing. Craig proposed to Suzanne Thompson by the end of 1982. The couple married the following summer and the page scandal was forgotten. Mostly.

Here are two  news reports from July 2, 1982 on the page scandal. Both reports included Craig’s denials:

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS:
90 YEARS AGO: Farley Granger: 1925-2011: Despite being one of the best-looking and well-regarded men in Hollywood, Granger didn’t have the kind of prolific a film career one might expect. He is best known for his role in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope and Strangers on a Train and for Luchino Visconti’s Senso. In Rope, Granger played a murderer and (implied) lover of an accomplice in a story inspired by the Loeb and Leopold murder.

In real life, Granger enjoyed the attentions of men, and women. According to his 2007 autobiography Include Me Out, he had affairs with Patricia Neal, Arthur Laurents, Shelly Winters, Leonard Bernstein, Barbara Stanwick and Ava Gardner. As for dealing with “liberal” Hollywood’s deeply-entrenched homophobia:

I found it difficult to answer questions about “gay life in Hollywood when I was living and working there. …I was never ashamed, and I never felt the need to explain or apologize for my relationships with anyone. I had many gay friends, but more of my friends were straight and most were married with families. The ratio of my gay to straight friends was probably in direct proportion to that of gay and straight people in general. I have loved men. I have loved women.”

Granger insisted he was never closeted, and he also resisted labeling himself:

Men or women?

“That really depends on the person,” he said impishly. But his follow-up comment left little doubt: “I’ve lived the greater part of my life with a man” — he has been with (Robert) Calhoun in New York since the 1960s — “so obviously that’s the most satisfying to me.”

In the late 1950s, Granger left Hollywood and moved to New York City, where he launched a second career on Broadway. Granger died in 2011 of natural causes in New York at the age of 85.

Fred Schneider: 1951. The B-52s front man is probably America’s best known practitioner of sprechgesang. (The Free Dictionary: “a type of vocalization between singing and recitation … originated by Arnold Schoenberg, who used it in Pierrot Lunaire (1912)”) The group’s guy-and-gals call-and-response between Schneider and Kate Pierson and Cindy Wilson have become a trademark ever since “Rock Lobster” hit the charts in 1978. That sound defined the B-52s as the quintessential party band, inviting everyone to pile into the Chrysler as big as a whale. Schneider was coy about his sexuality throughout the 1980s and most of the 1990s, but his reluctance appeared to be more a matter of annoyance than fear. “I’m on the same side the fence as k.d., Elton and Frederick the Great. I just don’t like to share my personal life with the public.” Of course, there wasn’t much sharing needed. His own mother’s reaction when he came out to her probably sums it up for everyone else. “Oh I know, Freddie,” she said, and continued vacuuming without missing a beat.

Roddy Bottum: 1963. The keyboardist for Faith No More since 1982, Bottum came out as gay in 1993 the year after his father died. It’s easy to imagine that his revelation would have come as quite a shock to the hyper-hetero world of heavy metal, but Bottum described it as “a positive and uplifting experience. I guess I expected some of the fans to burn crosses or throw panties at me, but nothing like that ever happened.” One of his hits with Faith No More was “Be Aggressive,” from their 1992 album Angel Dust. The homoerotic song was about oral sex. “It was a pretty fun thing to write, knowing that (lead singer Mike Patton) was going to have to put himself on the line and go up onstage and sing these vocals.” Bottum’s openness about his sexuality didn’t exactly open the floodgates for other heavy metal rockers to come out. “You’d think there’d be a lot more homosexuality in metal with all the dressing up,” he told The Advocate in 1999. By then he had left Faith No More — and metal — to form the indie boy/girl group Imperial Teen. Since 2005, Bottum has written scores for more than a dozen movies and television shows.

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?

Paul Douglas

July 1st, 2015

I’d forgotten that Larry Craig offensive from so many years ago. Bought himself some more time.
Gay as a goose, that one.

Priya Lynn

July 1st, 2015

Happy Canada Day everyone!

Mark F.

July 2nd, 2015

Good thing Roddy’s name is nor “Randy.”

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