The Daily Agenda for Monday, October 5

Jim Burroway

October 5th, 2015

TODAY’S AGENDA is brought to you by:

From GPU News (Milwaukee, WI), May 1978, page 40.

From GPU News (Milwaukee, WI), May 1978, page 40.

TODAY IN HISTORY:
Vasco Núñez de Balboa Feeds “Men Dressed Like Women” To His Dogs: 1513. The Spanish conquistador and explorer Vasco Núñez de Balboa is a revered figure in Panama, where you can buy a bottle of Balboa beer for about 1.50 Balboas (which is used interchangeably with the U.S. Dollar, also legal currency there). His name graces Panama City’s main port at the Pacific entrance to the Panama Canal as well as numerous avenues and parks throughout the country.

Balboa first explored the South American coast from present-day Columbia to Nicaragua in 1501, before settling on the island of Hispaniola to become a farmer. When Balboa returned to the South American continent in 1509, he did so as a stowaway from Hispaniola — a bankruptcy refugee, to be exact — but he quickly proved his worth with his knowledge of geography and local native culture, thanks to his earlier expedition. In 1510, Balboa founded the city of Santa Maria la Antigua del Darién on the northern coast of present-day Colombia near today’s border with Panama, and in 1511, he declared himself governor of Veragua, which roughly covered the Caribbean coast of present-day Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama. Balboa then spent the next three years exploring his domain, defeating various native tribes and befriending others, always remaining on the lookout for gold.

In 1513, Balboa arrived at the region in present-day Panama controlled by the chief Careta, whose forces Balboa defeated and whom Balboa befriended. Together, Balboa and Careta defeated a rival chief, Ponca, and made an alliance with another chief, Comagre, whose son told them that if they really wanted to find lots of gold, they needed to conquer the tribes living on the coast of “the other sea” on the other side of the Isthmus of Panama. Balboa and his hordes set off to conquer their way south, and on September 20, when Balboa stood on a summit on the mountains alongside the Chucunaque River, he became the first European to see, on the distant horizon, the Pacific Ocean. Nine days and one battle later, Balboa walked knee-deep into the ocean with his sword in one hand and his battle standard in the other, and claimed possession of the “South Sea” and all of its adjoining lands for Spain.

While Balboa continued his journey along Panama’s Pacific coast, conquering and discovering as he went, he discovered, after killing chief Quarega and entering his village, what Balboa perceived to be the famously relaxed attitude among Quarega’s people toward the Peccatum illud horribile, inter christianos non nominandum. I say perceived, because it’s not exactly clear that Balboa’s men correctly interpreted what they saw. Sure, native groups throughout Panama had a reputation for tolerance of homosexuality and cross-gender behavior, so it’s not inconceivable that he found some of those goings-ons in Quarega’s court. But some scholars doubt that Balboa’s men actually managed to come across two full score of them in a single village. Some speculate that the Spaniards mistook the ceremonial attire of members of Quarega’s court for women’s clothing. Others suggest that in the political vacuum following Quarega’s death, there may have been some finger-pointing among political rivals who were savvy to the Spaniards’ disgust for the “sin so horrible.”

At any rate, at least forty of them — Gay men? Transgenders? Cross dressers? Or disgraced officials on the losing end of political score-settling? — were rounded up and devoured by Balboa’s dogs, in what has been described as the first recorded instance of Spanish punishment of homosexuality in the New World. About a century later, Antonio de la Calancha, a Spanish official in Lima, was still singing his praises, albeit somewhat inaccurately, of the man who “saw men dressed like women; Balboa learnt that they were sodomites and threw the king and forty others to be eaten by his dogs, a fine action of an honorable and Catholic Spaniard.”

[Sources: Charles C. Mann 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, (New York, Alfred A. Knoff, 2011): 348.

Ward Stavig. “Political ‘abomination’ and private reservations: the nefarious sin, homosexuality, and cultural values in colonial Peru.” In Pete Sigal’s (ed.) Infamous Desire: Male Homosexuality in Colonial Latin America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003): 134-135.

Walter Williams. “The abominable sin: the Spanish campaign against ‘sodomy’ and its results in modern Latin America” in ): in Larry Gross and James D. Woods’ (eds.) The Columbia Reader on Lesbians & Gay Men in Media, Society, and Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999): 128.]

California Studies Treatment for “Sex Deviants”: 1951. An item appeared in The Los Angeles Times describing efforts that promised “the eventual solution of one of California’s most difficult problems – the sex offender.” California had tried to “legislate sexual offenses out of existence” through more severe penalties, but lawmakers were “finally persuaded medical research might bring results,” and passed the Sexual Deviation Research Act in 1950. And with that, according to The Times, efforts were now fanning out to “several laboratories, schools, hospitals, and clinics throughout the State.” The Dean of UCLA’s Medical School was already bragging of research breakthroughs. “It is now possible, he states, to predict with a fair degree of accuracy, through blood and urine tests, the onset of a sexually psychopathic ‘attack’.” What, exactly, was being studied was obviously very sensitive; it took eight paragraphs before the LA Times writer finally got around to describing what these “sexual deviations” might be:

Another study underway is concerned with diagnosis and treatment of homosexual males. The purpose of this research is twofold: (1) to make physical, psychiatric, glandular and mental studies of the types of homosexuals who affect feminine behavior and (2) to investigate such psychological factors in homosexuality as the personal, family, social and cultural histories of patients. Results of these studies, it is felt, should greatly add to more accurate diagnosis of types of homosexuality and its treatment.

Research would continue for at least another thirty years in California and throughout the western world, all to no avail. When the American Psychiatric Association finally determined in 1973 that homosexuality was not a mental illness in need of a cure, efforts to change sexual orientation in the scientific community slowly began to wane over the course of the next decade — with the notable exception of a very tiny religiously-motivated dissident minority, and their efforts to change sexual orientation still come up short. California’s law mandating research into curing homosexuality remained on the books, ignored and forgotten, until it was finally repealed in 2010. In 2012, California began moving toward the opposite direction when Gov. Jerry Brown signed legislation which prohibits licensed professionals from providing conversion therapy to minors.

HC Robert Mapplethorpe.jpg

25 YEARS AGO: Cincinnati Museum Acquitted of Pornography Charges over Mapplethorpe Exhibit: 1990. Before the late 1980s, photographer Robert Mapplethorpe was known for his brilliant black and white photographs of achingly beautiful subjects: orchids, lilies and celebrities, including Richard Gere, Laurie Anderson, Peter Gabriel, Andy Warhol, Grace Jones and Patti Smith. But when he began putting together his 1989 exhibit, The Perfect Moment, he decided to include some of his more recent works, photos that he had begun taking since the early 1980s of very sexually explicit images of homoeroticism and sadomasochism. The exhibit, funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, sparked immediate outrage among social conservatives. Sen. Jesse Helms (R-NC) tried to de-fund the NEA entirely, and wound up settling for yet another of those many “Helms Amendments” that wound up littering the legal landscape for decades to come. This amendment barred the NEA from funding “obscenity,” a nebulous mandate which cast a chilling effect on the arts for more than a decade.

The controversy led the Corcoran Gallery to cancel The Perfect Moment, in the summer of 1989, but the Washington Project for the Arts stepped in to host the show. Thanks to the publicity, some forty thousand people attended. The show’s next step was the University Art Museum in Berkeley, which hosted the show without incident. From there, it went to the Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati, but police closed the exhibit on opening day in order to videotape the exhibit on orders from Hamilton County Prosecutor Arthur Ney. Later that day, Ney got an indictment from the grand jury charging the CAC and its director, Dennis Barrie, on charges of pandering obscenity and child pornography. If convicted, the museum faced fines of up to $10,000 and Barrie faced up to a year in prison and $2,000 in fines.

A demonstration in downtown Cincinnati immediately after the trial ended.

A demonstration in downtown Cincinnati immediately after the trial ended.

As far as anyone knew, no other museum in the country had ever been indicted on similar charges. The controversy had an immediate impact in the city and on the museum. When the exhibit reopened with seven portraits removed and replaced with black placards, crowds descended on the small museum to see what the fuss was all about. One farmer arrived with mud on his boots and overalls and presented a check for $20, saying that he’d fought in World War II for the freedom of expression exemplified by the exhibit. Nearly 80,000 people attended the exhibition, making it one of the most successful shows ever for the CAC.

When the trial got underway in late September, the jurors were subject to a crash course on art history and photography from some of the country’s leading museum directors. Martin Friedman, director of Minneapolis’s Walker Art Center, expounded on the formalism behind Mapplethorpe’s composition and lighting. Janet Kardon, the exhibit’s curator, testified, “No matter what the subject matter, he brought a sense of perfection to it. And all of the attributes one characterizes a good formal portrait by, that is composition and light and the way the frame is placed around the image, all of those things are brought to every image.” One of those images, was Mapplethorpe’s 1978 Self Portrait (NSFW), which featured what Kardon described as a “figure study” in which “the human figured is centered. The horizontal line is two-thirds of the way up, almost the classical two-thirds to one-third proportions … it’s very symmetrical, which is characteristic of his flowers.” Of course, none of his flowers had a bull whip inserted in the ass.

Evan Turner, from the Cleveland Museum of Art, told the jury, “I think with these difficult images, one way of judging their quality … is to look at them as abstract, which they are, essentially.” Robert Sobieszek, photography curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, placed the portraits in biographical terms: “They reveal, in very strong, forceful ways, a major concern of this creative artist; a major part of his life, a major part of his psyche or psychology, his mental make-up and perhaps, they say to me, some troubled portion of this life that he was trying to come to grips with… IT’s not unlike Van Gogh painting himself with his ear torn off, or cut up.”

Surprisingly, the prosecution called only one “expert” witness, the anti-gay activist and author Judith Reisman, who was then a paid “researcher” for the American Family Association’s. Her artistic background, as the defense repeatedly pointed out, was limited to writing songs for Captain Kangaroo.

Dennis Barrie hugs his attorney H. Louis Sirkin after hearing the verdict.

Dennis Barrie hugs his attorney H. Louis Sirkin after hearing the verdict.

After less than two hours of deliberation, the mostly blue-collar jury returned verdicts of not guilty. Defense lawyer H. Louis Sirkin called the verdict “a signal to everybody that before they start shutting down museums and telling people what they can say and what they can see, they better realize there is a protection out there, and it is the greatest document ever written.” A visibly relieved Barrie reacted, “This was a major battle for art and for creativity, for the continuance of creativity in this country. Mapplethorpe was an important artist. It was a beautiful show. It should never have been in court.” Meanwhile, the CAC came out of the controversy stronger than ever. It had overgrown its previous digs at the Mercantile Center and in 2003 moved into a splendid new building which the New York Times described as “the best new building since the Cold War.”

[Additional source: Richard Meyer. Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002): 211-218.]

TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
175 YEARS AGO: John Addington Symonds: 1840-1893. He fulfilled the expectations of Victorian England by marrying and having a family, but the poet and literary critic was always conscious of “men constituted like me.” As an early proponent of what was then called “male love,” Symonds was among the first to publish works for general audiences with direct references to homosexuality. His 1876 Studies of the Greek Poets, Second Series, included praise for Greek “friendship,” which led to withering condemnation from critics. One critic decried Symond’s “phallic ecstasy” and his “palpitations at male beauty.”

While Symonds became more circumspect in identifying himself with “male love,” he nevertheless continued to explore the theme. Symonds’s 1878 translation of Michelangelo’s Sonnets corrected, for the first time, the proper male pronouns which had been rendered female by previous translators. And in that same year, he published his poem “The Meeting of David and Jonathan” (1878), where Jonathan, “In his arms of strength / Took David, and for some love found at length / Solace in speech, and pressure and breath / Wherewith the mouth of yearning winnoweth /Hearts overcharged for utterance. In that kiss / Soul into soul was knit and bliss to bliss.”

Whew!

But Symonds kept most of his writings on homosexuality private, first in letters to Walt Whitman, Edmund Gosse, and Edward Carpenter, and later in privately-circulated works like Male Love: A Problem in Greek Ethics (1883) and A Problem in Modern Ethics (1891), where he wrote in the introduction this answer to those who argued that the only good homosexual was a celibate homosexual:

I have taken no vow of celibacy. If I have taken any vow at all, it is to fight for the rights of an innocent, harmless, downtrodden group of outraged personalities. The cross of a Crusade is sewn upon the sleeve of my right arm. To expect from me and from my fellows the renouncement voluntarily undertaken by a Catholic priest is an absurdity, when we join no order, have no faith to uphold, no ecclesiastical system to support. We maintain that we have the right to exist after the fashion which nature made us. And if we cannot alter your laws, we shall go on breaking them. You may condemn us to infamy, exile, prison -– as you formerly burned witches. You may degrade our emotional instincts and drive us into vice and misery. But you will not eradicate inverted sexuality.”

In 1893, he began to publish more openly about homosexuality in Walt Whitman: A Study, and he began a collaboration with Havelock Ellis, who was then embarking on his landmark study, Sexual Inversion. Symonds died in 1893, ten months into that collaboration. When Sexual Inversion made its English debut in 1897, Symonds was listed as co-author. But Symonds’s executor, scandalized at the association, prohibited his name from being further associated with the book. Symonds was credited as “Z” in the second 1897 printing, and his essay “A Problem in Greek Ethics” was deleted. Interest in Symonds was revived in 1963 when Phyllis Grosskurth won the 1964 Canadian Governor General’s Award for John Addington Symonds: A Biography. Twenty years later, she would also bring The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds to print for the first time in 1984, ninety-one years after his death.

David Pallone: 1951. Major League Baseball umpires never become household names. But a few can somehow find ways to become memorable. That happened to Pallone on April 30, 1988, when he was umpiring at first base in Cincinnati when, in the ninth inning, he called New York Mets outfielder Mookie Wilson safe on a delayed call. That delay allowed another Mets runner to score the winning run. Reds’ manager Pete Rose rushed to Pallone to argue the call. Tempers escalated, one thing led to another, Pallone might have touched Rose, Rose definitely shoved Pallone, and Pallone immediately ejected him from the game. Fans showered the field with trash for the next fifteen minutes and Pallone had to be taken out of the game to ease tension. Rose was suspended for 30 days and fined $10,000.

Later that year, Pallone was forced to resign when a New York Post article outed him as gay and claimed that he was part of a teenage sex ring. Those charges were later proven groundless, but Pallone says in his memoir Behind the Mask: My Double Life in Baseball that team owners were unimpressed and pressured baseball commissioner Bart Giamatti to fire him anyway. Or, more accurately, Pallone was paid to leave, and strongly encouraged to do so. Today, Pallone is a diversity trainer and motivational speaker based in Colorado.

Thomas Roberts

 

Thomas Roberts: 1972. The former CNN Headline News anchor became the first national anchorman to come out as gay when, in 2006, he spoke at the annual convention of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association in Miami Florida during a panel discussion titled “Off Camera: The Challenge of LGBT TV Anchors.” Describing his appearance on that panel as the biggest step he had taken publicly to be out, he had been coming out at CNN over the past several years. But he found the tension between his public life and private life to be difficult to balance. “When you hold something back, that’s all everyone wants to know,” he told the gathering.

Roberts stayed at CNN until 2007, when he resigned to move to Washington, D.C. to pursue other opportunities. In late 2010, he began guest-anchoring for MSNBC, and became a full-time anchor in December.  He currently anchors MSNBC Live with Thomas Roberts weekdays from 1:00 to 3:00 E.T. In 2012, Roberts married Patrick Abner in New York, making Roberts the first (and the most handsome) national anchor to marry a same-sex partner.

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

October 5th, 2015

Columbia is a common name for several cities in North America.

Colombia is a country in South America.

Ben in oakland

October 5th, 2015

“We maintain that we have the right to exist after the fashion which nature made us. And if we cannot alter your laws, we shall go on breaking them. You may condemn us to infamy, exile, prison -– as you formerly burned witches. You may degrade our emotional instincts and drive us into vice and misery. But you will not eradicate inverted sexuality.”

When I lived in Chicago briefly from 1973 to 1974, I found this quote from Symonds in a gay newspaper there. I cut it out, and it has remained in my wallet for the last 42 years. Every once in a while I pull it out and read it again.

There is no clearer statement of the gay agenda.

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