Box Turtle Bulletin
News and commentary about the anti-gay lobby“Now you must raise your children up in a world where that union of man and box turtle is on the same legal footing as man and wife…”
News and commentary about the anti-gay lobbyAugust 7th, 2015
TODAY’S AGENDA:
Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Antwerp, Belgium; Eugene, OR; Ferndale, MI (Trangender Pride); Kampala/Entebbe, Uganda; Malmö, Sweden; Mannheim, Germany; Moscow, ID; Plymouth, UK; Reykjavik, Iceland; Swindon, UK; Toronto, ON (Leather Pride); Windsor, ON.
Other Events This Weekend: Northalsted Market Days, Chicago, IL; Summer Diversity Weekend, Eureka Springs, AR; Rendezvous LGBT Campout, Medicine Bow National Forest, WY.
TODAY’S AGENDA is brought to you by:
From The Alienist and Neurologist, (an early psychiatric journal), 1907. (Source.)
From the ad copy: “It gives a long and pounding stroke, medium and side stroke, short and rubbing motion.”
J. Edgar Hoover
TODAY IN HISTORY:
► J. Edgar Hoover Demands His Name Be Removed From Mattachine Mailing List: 1964. Frank Kameny was not one to shy away from directly confronting the powerful in Washington, D.C. (See May 21). He was also not one to shy away from publicity. Just the year before, Kameny became the first gay rights activist to appear before a Congressional committee (See Aug 8, Aug 9), where he refused to comply with a Congressman’s demands that he turn over the membership list of the Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C. (MSW). Kameny took the opportunity to lambast Congressional efforts to strip his organization of its tax-exempt status and, further, to argue forcefully for the full equality for all gay and lesbian Americans.
Frank Kameny
One of MSW’s early efforts was to keep its own members informed of issues and events through a typewritten and mimeographed newsletter called The Gazette. The newsletter was also sent out to other interested and uninterested parties, including the Supreme Court Justices, members of Congress, the President, the Attorney General and other members of the President’s cabinet, and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. In July, an FBI agent wrote an internal member objecting to the Society’s adding Hoover to their mailing list without his consent. “This Society attempts to legalize the activities of homosexuals and carries on an active campaign to have these persons admitted to employment in the United States Government and elsewhere,” he wrote. “This material is disgusting and offensive and it is believed a vigorous objection to the addition of the Director to its mailing list should be made.” He recommended that two FBI agents contact Kameny and impress upon him “that Mr. Hoover objects to receiving this material and his name should immediately be removed from their mailing list.”
Hoover concurred with the recommendation with a handwritten notation at the end of the memo: “Right – H.” On August 6, the FBI contacted Kameny, and he and Gazette editor Robert King met with the agents at FBI headquarters. The agents told them that Hoover’s addition to the mailing list “was considered offensive” and demanded his name be removed. Kameny and King explained that they sent the newsletter to government officials as part of a larger educational effort. Kameny also pointed out that as an organization working for the civil rights of gays and lesbians, they “have a right to communicate with government officials.” But Kameny and King did agree to take the FBI’s request back to the MSW executive board. They also asked the agents to convey to Hoover an invitation to attend a homophile convention that was to be held in Washington later that year (see Oct 10, Oct 11). According to another FBI memo, “This invitation was emphatically and immediately declined.”
When the MSW executive board met and decided to accede to the FBI’s request, but on one condition: if the director personally assured MSW, in writing, that the FBI had destroyed all of its files about the MSW. Their decision was sent in a letter to the FBI on October 1. FBI agent M.A. Jones wrote in an internal memorandum, “This letter is a blatant attempt to open a controversy with the Bureau. Any further contact with them will be exploited to the Bureau’s disadvantage. It is apparent they are attempting to involve government officials in their program for recognition and any further contact by the Bureau will only serve their ulterior motives.” The FBI declined to respond to the letter, and Hoover continued to receive the Gazette.
[Source: Michael G. Long (ed.) Gay is Good: The Life and Letters of Gay Rights Pioneer Franklin Kameny
You can read a copy of the Gazette from the spring of 1964 here.]
Barbara Gittings (left) holds a Homophile Action League banner.
► Philadelphia’s Homophile Action League Founded: 1968. Five months had passed since Philadelphia police raided Rusty’s, a bar that was popular with local lesbians (see Mar 8). The Daughters of Bilites had organized a chapter in the City of Brotherly Love the year before, and chapter members were furious at their treatment during the raid. They were eager to directly confront the city’s political establishment, but the national organization’s rules dictated that the national board had to approve of all activities deemed “political,” especially if they involved protests. Ada Bello recalled, “It was difficult to get authorization from the administration of DOB. We couldn’t find the president — remember, it was before cell phones and email — and we felt that it was hampering our ability to react… And so we thought, ‘Why not start another organization — one whose middle name is Action!'” On August 7, 1968, the Philadelphia DOB chapter voted to dissolve itself and re-form as the Homophile Action League, or HAL. Bello and Carole Friedman announced the organization’s purpose in the first HAL newsletter:
This newly formed group, open to both men and women, has adopted the name “Homophile Action League,” and has as its main purpose “to strive to change society’s legal, social and scientific attitudes toward the homosexual in order to achieve justified recognition of the homosexual as a first class citizen and a first class human being. … “We are not a social group. We do not intend to concentrate our energies on “uplifting” the homosexual community, for such efforts would be sadly misplaced. It is our firm conviction that it is the heterosexual community which is badly in need of uplifting.
Pioneering gay rights advocate Barbara Gittings (see Jul 31), who later joined HAL, recalled that “there hadn’t been any really concerted effort on the political scene until HAL was organized and began to attract some men.” HAL would become the main representative of the gay community to the city’s power brokers until the early 1970s, when it was displaced by the more aggressive Gay Liberation Front.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
► James Randi: 1928. Known as “The Amazing Randi,” the Canadian-born magician turned debunker took up magic while spending thirteen months in a body cast following a bicycle accident. He dropped out of school at 17 to join the carnival circuit and performed as a psychic in Toronto nightclubs. But when he recognized that some of the tricks of the trade were being presented as supernatural, he decided to blow the lid off of the scams.
Among his earlier revelations was in the late 1960s, when he “wrote” a successful astrological column by cutting up other astrological columns and randomly assigning those predictions to astrological signs and dates. In 1972, Randi seized the skeptics’ spotlight by publicly challenging the claims of Uri Geller, a popular performer of the television talk show circuit, famous for supposedly bending spoons telepathically. Randi claimed Geller used standard magic tricks to perform his paranormal feats and demonstrated how Geller performed his stunts. Geller sued Randi for $15 million for defamation, and lost.
Randi founded the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, later renamed the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. Over the years, he has tackled psychics, UFOs, faith healers, psychic surgeons, and other charlatans. In one bizarre episode, a believer in psychic phenomenon refused to be persuaded and tried to turn the tables on Randi. When Randi was demonstrating Geller’s spoon-bending tricks, an audience member shouted, “You’re a fraud because you’re pretending to do these things through trickery, but you’re actually using psychic powers and misleading us by not admitting it.” An atheist, Randi has a special empathy for victims of religious scams and faith healers, and was instrumental in exposing W.V. Grant, Earnest Angley, and Peter Popoff, who Randi exposed live on Johnny Carson’s The Tonight Show in 1986.
Randi became a U.S. citizen in 1987. Since then, he’s recovered from two major bouts with cancer, and in 2010 he came out as gay after seeing the 2008 biopic Milk. During an appearance at an annual skeptics’ convention in 2013, Randi announced that he and his partner of 27 years had just gotten married in Washington D.C.
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Nathaniel
August 10th, 2015
I am confused by the Hoover item included on this agenda. The only date given within the text is August 6th. While this item could have been used on several dates, given the complex sequence of events described, the 7th of August does not appear to be one of relevance. Is this a typo?
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