The Daily Agenda for Tuesday, January 12

Jim Burroway

January 12th, 2016

TODAY’S AGENDA is brought to you by:

From The Weekly News (Miami, FL), October 21, 1987, page 33.

From The Weekly News (Miami, FL), October 21, 1987, page 33.

My Friend’s Place operated from approximately 1986 to 1991.

State Sen. Charley E. Johns (center) with two members of the Johns Committee.

State Sen. Charley E. Johns (center) with two members of the Johns Committee.

TODAY IN HISTORY:
Florida Legislative Committee Reveals Search for Homosexuals at University of Florida: 1959. The Florida Legislative Investigations Committee was Florida’s homegrown version of the McCarthy Red and Lavender Scares from earlier in the decade. Known popularly as the Johns Committee for its first chairman, Senator president Charley E. Johns, who sought to create a Florida version of the U.S. House Committee on Un-American Activities. Johns had served earlier in the decade as Senate President, and then became acting Governor from 1953 to 1955 after Gov. Daniel McCarty died in office. (Florida didn’t have a Lieutenant Governor at the time; the Senate president was second in line.) Johns returned to the Senate in 1956, where he launched the committee after having gotten a mandate to investigate alleged communist links to the NAACP and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. But the NAACP bogged the committee’s work down in several court challenges.

With that work stymied, the Johns Committee decided to go after a much less organized target: gays and lesbians in the state’s schools, colleges and universities. In 1959, the Miami Herald reported that the Johns committee “has been quietly probing reports of homosexuality at the University of Florida.” Details were so far, but the paper predicted that “the full story will break when the committee meets for a public airing of its findings.” The date for that meeting had yet to be set, and Sen. Charley Johns was cagy about what exactly they were investigating. “We might be investigating communism,” he declared. “We might be investigating integration … or almost anything. But no public statement will be made until the full committee has met and fully aired the subject under consideration.”

The Board of Control, which supervised the state’s public universities, assured the Johns committee of the “immediate dismissal” of any gay professors or students unearthed in the witch hunt. William C. Gaither, a Board of Control member form Miami, told the Herald that the University of Florida was cooperating with the investigation.

“You can take any sizable group of a hundred to thousands and probably find some with homosexual tendencies,” said Gaither. “Be we do not think the University of Florida is harboring homosexuals. … I have heard rumors that 100 to 150 people are involved. But reports are that only five or six persons were interrogated during a hearing at Gainesville last weekend.”

From 1959 to 1964, the Johns Committee waged a massive campaign of intimidation and bullying in order to weed out gays and “undesirables” from the schools and universities. Professors and students were called out of class rooms one by one by uniformed campus police officers and interrogated for hours. Undercover officers sat in on classes and took careful notes. The committee succeeded in revoking 71 teachers licenses and obtaining an additional 39 dismissals, along with the expulsion of unknown numbers of students. One UF professor who was forced out attempted suicide the next day.

[Source: “Students, Faculty Quizzed: State Conducting UF Morals Probe.” Miami Herald (January 13, 1959): 2-A.]

GMHC’s office in 1983.

Gay Men’s Health Crisis Founded: 1982. Several dozen men gathered in writer Larry Kramer’s New York apartment to discuss the mysterious “gay cancer” that had been claiming the lives of their friends and lovers, and to figure out how to raise money for research. The group originally thought they were coming together for a one-time thing: persuade a club to hold a benefit, invite a bunch of A-listers to come and donate, give the money to a suitable research organization, and go home. But it quickly became apparent that there was much, much more work to be done. Forced by widespread apathy on the part of the news media, city officials, local health authorities, and even “confirmed bachelor” and barely closeted Mayor Ed Koch, the Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC) quickly went from being an ad-hoc group to organize a fundraiser to a full-fledged charitable service organization to fill the void that the city refused to fill.

GMHC would go on to raise money to provide services and assistance for people with HIV/AIDS, including assistance from a large army of volunteers to meet day-to-day needs like cooking, housecleaning, dog-walking, and transportation to medical appointments, as well as help in navigating the apathetic bureaucratic maze. They also, just as critically, hounded the news medial trying to get attention to the disease. When that mostly failed, GMHC started a crisis hotline, which became one of the organization’s most important avenues for distributing AIDS information in the pre-Internet era. They also distributed material to help educate the general public on the need for safer sex. In these areas, GMHC worked hard to meet the needs that had been, at best, ignored by local and national health authorities and charities (most shockingly, including most faith-based charities). GMHC also battled the overt stigmatization and hostility which grew among well-known public figures, nationally as well as locally.

GMHC quickly established itself as a well-regarded authority for HIV/AIDS education and service. By 1984, the Centers for Disease Control called on GMHC’s help in planning public conferences on AIDS. As the epidemic continued to grow, GMHC expanded its reach by assisting heterosexual men and women, hemophiliacs, intravenous drug users, and children. This past year, GMHC has struggled with funding cuts, controversies over its new office space and the recent departure of its executive director as the organization continues its work as one of the nation’s leading non-profit, volunteer-supported AIDS service and educational organizations.

John Singer Sargent, Self Portrait, 1906.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
160 YEARS AGO: John Singer Sargent: 1856-1925. Was he or wasn’t he? Scholars have scratched their heads over that question. He was born in Florence to American parents, who were well off enough to casually travel throughout Europe. Sargent’s drawing skills developed early, and at the age of eighteen he went to Paris to study painting. His early masterpiece, El Jaleo (1882), which portrayed a bare-armed Spanish Gypsy dancer in full movement, was both sensual and exotic — and, therefore, scandalous in the closing days of the Victorian era. Other portraits were similarly controversial. His full-length portrait of New Orleans-born Parisian socialite Virginie Gautreau (1884), depicting her in a strapless gown and a plunging neckline, had much of Europe clutching its pearls.

Almost immediately, Sargent established himself as the defining painter of what would soon become known as the Edwardian era. He worked on the edge between respectability and sensuality. But he also had a commercially successful knack for finding beauty in everyone he painted while simultaneously preserving a candid honesty to his portraits. And just about everyone who was anyone sat for a portrait.

John Singer Sargent, Portrait of Nicola D’Inverno, 1892.

For all of Sargent’s notoriety through his paintings, he was profoundly circumspect in his private life. He was flirtatious with women, but had no significant romantic attachments. He formed deep friendships with men — including Henry James, Oscar Wilde, and Robert Montesquiou, and perhaps most significantly, his assistant of twenty-six years and sometimes model Nicola d’Inverno — but there is no evidence that his relationships went beyond deep friendship.

And yet, the talk has always been there, and it was only amplified when, upon his death in 1925, his family destroyed his personal papers. And that talk centered on his male nudes, much of which were created for his own personal study and enjoyment, and not for public exhibition. In Donna Hassler’s preface in John Esten’s John Singer Sargent: The Male Nudes, she writes:

John Singer Sargent, Thomas E. McKeller as Apollo, 1921-25.

To Sargent, however, rendering the nude male figure was more than just an academic pursuit… He showed a strong preference for portraying the masculine form throughout his career (few Sargent drawings or paintings of the nude female figure are extant), and his work ranges from a straightforward student study of an unidentified male model wearing an posing strap to an emotionally charged, fully nude drawing of an identifiable male model, Thomas E. McKeller.

As Esten points out, “Like beauty, homoeroticism is in the eye of the beholder.” And many beholders have seen it in Sargent’s paintings. Several of his male nudes made their way into the famous mural in the Rotunda of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, some of them, including his sketch of McKeller as Apollo, refashioned into female figures.

Felipe Rose: 1954. You know him as “the Indian” for his appearance as a founding member of the Village People. The son of a Puerto Rican mother and Lakota Sioux father, Rose grew up in Brooklyn where he took up dancing at a very young age. When he was sixteen, he studied dance with the Ballet de Puerto Rico and participated in a Lincoln Center dance recital with the Ballet Company. At the urging of an aught, he began dressing in tribal regalia and exploring Native American influences in dance as an homage to his father’s heritage. He also, at about the same time, began exploring New York’s gay nightlife. Soon after French producer Jacques Morali saw him working as a go-go dance in his “Indian” get-up at a New York gay bar, he recruited Rose into a new singing group in which members wore costumes representing different “masculine” occupations. The Village People scored their first major disco hits, “Macho Man” and “Y.M.C.A” in 1978.

There have been numerous personnel changes in the Village People over the years, but there has only been one Indian. Rose is one of only two only Village People to have never left the group, and with Alex Briley (the G.I/Sailor), he remains one of only two original members.

While the Village People is all camp, Rose takes his Native American heritage seriously. In 2000, he recorded the single “Trails of Tears,” Which was nominated for 3 NAMMYs (Native American Music Awards). He is a member of the Advisory Board of the Native American Music Association.

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?

Nathaniel

January 12th, 2016

Family Research Council struggles to keep Kim Davis relevant by getting her an invitation to the State of the Union Address.
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/kim-davis-to-attend-state-of-the-union/ar-CCpAS8?li=BBnbcA1

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