Box Turtle Bulletin

The Daily Agenda for Monday, November 16

EMPHASIS MINE:

Source: Colourbox.com

I can go years without remembering a dream.  A couple of months ago, I had one that I don’t think I’ll ever forget. It was no ordinary dream. It was a three-parter, like three scenes of the same play. All three featured my Dad, who died more than thirty years ago while I was in college. Let me tell you about Part 1. Here, Dad isn’t just some ordinary guy from a modest Northeastern rural Ohio family, but a world-famous writer whose masterpiece got him exiled from his homeland (!). It begins at an airport. Dad and I had just gotten off the plane, arriving at his home country after the government announced it had lifted his banishment and would allow him to return. He brought me with him to introduce me to his family and show me his village. But he was very worried. He feared that his country’s invitation for him to return might have been a ruse. He feared being abducted, arrested or even assassinated. But he was determined to see it through. After we made our way through the airport, he stopped and pointed through the crowd to a set of glass exit doors beyond, doors which led out of the airport to an elevated pedestrian walkway beyond. He leaned in to me and said in a very urgent voice, “If anything’s going to happen, it’ll be after I go through those doors.” The next thing I knew, he took off ahead of me and through the doors.  I ran to catch up. Fortunately, our fears weren’t realized, and I joined him onto the tree-lined walkway out of the airport.

The dream segued into parts two and three, which took place in his village with friends and relatives. Those parts were similarly extraordinary, to me at least, and after I awoke, I spent a few minutes in bed feeling grateful for having had a chance to spend some time with Dad, even if it was only in a dream. Now I’m not one of those people who places a lot of stock in dreams. They aren’t messages from beyond, nor are they omens or predictions of things to come. Dreams are simply the product of one’s own mind. And if they reveal anything, it’s the state of one’s mind at the time of the dream. And clearly, the first part of the dream spoke to me as being about transitions, which have been much on my mind lately. In the next four to six months, I hope to undergo a pretty big one. Over the past year or more, I’ve been working incredibly long hours at my full-time job, and that has left very little time for much of anything outside of work. (The blog has obviously suffered as a result.) But if all goes well, I hope to be able to take early retirement next year, and I may be able to establish that 2016 retirement date in the next several weeks.

It’s appropriate for Dad to appear in this dream, as he has a lot to do with my pending retirement. He often talked about what he wanted to do when he retired. Part of his plan was to sell everything and live in an R.V., and become the beach bum he always wanted to be. The other part of his plan was for his four sons to move to different, interesting parts of the country so he could pull into their driveways and plug in for a few weeks. (I did my part; I moved to Tucson). But he died at 48, and he never got to see retirement. I’ll be 55 soon, and I’m not guaranteed a 56. So he is why I’ve been saving for this day since my early twenties.

As excited as I am at the prospect, I also have to admit that it’s pretty scary — the idea that I will no longer be working, will no longer have a paycheck, and will *really* be on my own in ways I’ve never been before. It’s actually quite daunting, even though I’ve been preparing for this for thirty years.  And yet, I have so many plans and so many things I want to do. Among them, I want to re-energize this blog and take it places it (and I) have never gone before. There are so many stories out there, which means there are so many things I want to experience, so many people I want to talk to, and so many things I want to be able to tell you about. And in the next several months, I should have the freedom to do all that. Meanwhile, Dad’s words to me in that dream have become something of a personal motto lately because if anything’s going to happen, it’ll be after I go through those doors.

TODAY’S AGENDA is brought to you by:

From Dallas Voice, November 9, 1984, page2 12-13. (Source.)

TODAY IN HISTORY:
► 10 YEARS AGO: Box Turtle Bulletin Goes Live: 2005. It’s ironic, in a way, that when I first brought BTB to life ten years ago, I had no intention for it to become a blog. In fact, I said so right there: “This isn’t a blog.” My vision back then was to have a more or less static web site with long-form articles exploring the many ways anti-gay activists were blatantly misrepresenting social science research to further their aims. That was a pretty big deal ten years ago, because anti-gay individuals (like Paul Cameron, James Dobson and Timothy Daley), and organizations like the Family “Research” Council and Focus On the Family had long ago discovered that if they put out a lot of propaganda with scholarly-looking footnotes citing articles in professional journals, they could pretty much say whatever they wanted, confident in the knowledge that nobody was going to bother spending countless hours looking up those footnotes and discovering that what they were saying was absolutely not true at all.

I was that nobody, and the exercise of looking up those footnotes was an important part of my own coming out five years earlier because I, as someone who valued science, had at one time believed that what they worked so hard to research and document in footnotes had to have been true. Obviously, discovering that virtually everything they said was a lie outraged me on many levels. Not only because they were supposedly godly people who valued truth, but it outraged me as a scientist, as someone who considers data integrity as sacrosanct. What they were doing we would call fraud or malpractice in any other profession. If engineers treated their data the way these anti-gay activists did, we’d see sewage coming out of our water taps, planes falling out of the sky, nuclear power plants exploding, and bridges collapsing left and right. If we ran science the way they did, doctors would still be treating diseases with Clark Stanley’s Snake Oil Liniment.

But more important than all that — beyond the ethics of how you treat other people’s data — was the overarching ethics was how you treat other people. These activists were causing real damage to families, communities and to the world at large, while presenting themselves as scholarly experts whose only concern was what the data was supposedly telling them.

And so those abuses of social science research were at the heart of what I wanted to get at, and this web site had a terrific start in exposing some of the most egregious abuses. (This exposé helped to thwart a Bush nominee for Surgeon General. And more recently, BTB was the first web site to expose Dr. Mark Regnerus’s fraudulent study.)

And so here’s the thing. When a web site starts to gain readers, and those readers and writer (and later, writers) start to interact, then it’s no longer just a web site under the control of the site’s publisher. Instead, it becomes a community, and that community is what informs where the web site goes from there. And so somewhere along the way, BTB became a blog. Not because I wanted it to become one, but because somehow that’s just what happened. Meanwhile, we branched out quite a bit, particularly with our reporting on the unfolding events in Uganda following the calamitous 2009 conference in Kampala put on by three American anti-gay extremists (BTB was the first western outlet to report on that conference more than a week before it took place) which led to the introduction of the so-called “Kill-the-Gays” Anti-Homosexuality Bill in that nation’s parliament.  We also brought you the tragic story of five-year-old Kirk Murphy, who was treated at UCLA for “cross-gender disturbance” — their term for effeminate homosexuality — by a young grad student who would later become an prominent and infamous anti-gay activist. This story, and many others like it told elsewhere on the inter webs, have provided the powerful incentives for several state legislatures to prohibit licensed professionals from providing sexual orientation change therapies for non-adult patients.

Since starting this web site, our opponents have been forced to change their tactics. They no longer expend as much energy misrepresenting social science research as they once did, simply because there are now too many people — like those of us here at BTB, and others as well — who are onto them and can call them out. It helped, too, that researchers themselves have been more willing to speak up when they’ve seen their research misrepresented. Some tried to give their own brand of social science one last shot, but that also failed. Miserably. So miserably that our opponents quickly abandoned that approach. So anti-gay activists were forced to shift their tactics. They’ve also been losing. There’s that too. BTB didn’t cause all of that to happen, or even most of it, not by a long shot. But we did play our part in the small ways that we could, and I take some measure of personal satisfaction in that.

So where does BTB go from here? If I tried to guess, my guess would probably be as accurate as the first time I tried to predict what this thing would be. But I do plan to rejuvenate the site– to blow the stink off, as my grandmother would have put it. The site’s coding needs a complete overhaul — it’s hopelessly antiquated — but more to the point, the blog’s editorial direction will almost certainly change. So much has changed in the past ten years, in the progress of our community, as well as for me personally. This site will need reflect all that. But I also don’t want to forget why BTB came into being in the first place, because some things still haven’t changed. Not enough, anyway, and certainly not everywhere.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
► Paula Vogel: 1951. “I only write about things that directly impact my life.” Vogel says. “If people get upset, it’s because the play is working.” It certainly worked for How I Learned to Drive, which explores control and manipulation through the issues of misogyny, pedophilia and incest through the relatively simple metaphor of driving. She won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for it.

Her first major play, The Baltimore Waltz was a comedy about AIDS, in 1990, when AIDS still couldn’t be joked about much. Hot’N Throbbing (1994) looks at the intersection of porn and domestic violence, while The Mineola Twins (1999) portrays women’s experience over the previous thirty years through the eyes of identical twins. The plays are deadly serious, though many of them are also comedies or at least incorporate comedy in them. They are also, as theater theorist Jill Dolan wrote, “at once creative, highly imaginative, and brutally honest.”

Vogel says that her family, especially her brother who died of AIDS in 1988, play a very important role in her plays. “In every play, there are a couple of places where I send a message to my late brother Carl. Just a little something in the atmosphere of every play to try and change the homophobia in our world.” She is also a teacher, having led the graduate playwriting program at Brown University. In 2004, she married Brown University professor and researcher Anne Fausto-Sterling in Massachusetts. In 2008, she left Brown to chair the playwriting department at Yale. She stepped down from that position in 2012.

► Glenn Burke: 1952-1995. He was known as “the guy who invented the high five,” when in a game in 1977, Burke was standing on deck as fellow Dodger Dusty Baker was rounding third and headed for home after hitting a home run. As Baker crossed home plate, Burke raised his had. Baker responded by raising his also, and when the two slapped hands, history was made. Believe it or not. And to make the scene complete, Burke then stepped up to the plate and hit a home run of his own.

Burke made another kind of history, after a fashion: he is believed to be the first gay ballplayer who was out to his team mates. According to his 1995 autobiography, Out at Home, Dodgers General Manager Al Campanis offered to pay for his honeymoon if Burke agreed to find a girlfriend and get married. Burke said no. He also angered manager Tommy Lasorda by hanging out with Lasorda’s estranged gay son. The Dodgers soon traded him to the Oakland A’s, where manager Billy Martin called him a faggot in front of his teammates. Burke retired in 1979.

In 1982, Burke became the first former professional league player to come out as gay. He was a hero in his adopted community in San Francisco’s Castro, but without baseball his life soon spiraled downhill. He struggled with drug addiction, and for a while became homeless. He spent several months in prison for grand theft and possession of a controlled substance. His final months were spent with his sister before succumbing to AIDS in 1995 at the age of 42.

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?