Box Turtle Bulletin

The Daily Agenda for Monday, March 21

TODAY’S AGENDA is brought to you by:

From Michael’s Thing (a bi-weekly gay bar guide), August 2, 1976, page 7. (Personal collection.)

The Barefoot Boy Disco was immensely popular from about 1974 to about 1978 or 1979 (near as I can tell) that launched the careers of quite a number of major DJs of the era. Disco queen and former porn star Andrea True, whose “More, More, More” in 1976 became part of the disco canon, name-checked the Barefoot Boy in her 1977 single “New York, You Got Me Dancing” (“Dancing the night away / Oh what a joy at the Barefoot Boy”). The club later became Zeus (or Barefoot Boy at Club Zeus). It then became Stix in the early 1980s. A residential tower now stands where the gays used to dance the night away.

George Sokolsky

TODAY IN HISTORY:
► The Lavender Scare Hits The Papers: 1950. The nascent Lavender Scare blew itself wide open in the nation’s newspapers when arch-conservative columnist George Sokolsky, an early admirer of Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) and close friend of J. Edgar Hoover and, later, Roy Cohn, took to his column to blast the U.S. State Department, once again, for harboring “known Communists” and worse. What could be worse, you ask?

The most damaging contribution to the subject has thus far been made by John Peurifoy, deputy under-secretary of state in charge of administration. His statement should have shocked this nation. When Maximillian Harden, the German journalist, called attention to a similar camarilla in the Kaiser’s court, involving Prince Eulenburg, it shocked and astonished the world. Yet, in this generation, in the United States, a charge that 91 employees of the state department were dismissed for being homosexuals passes with little excitement.

The Eulenburg affair, as the 1907 German scandal was known was often brought up whenever the topic of gays in government employment came up. Never mind that Prince Philipp zu Eulenburg was never found guilty of any sort of wrongdoing — other than having the socking temerity of living and faithfully serving the Kaisar as a homosexual (see Feb 12). And indeed, when Peurifoy testified before the Senate Appropriations Commitee that 91 State Department employees were let go “for moral weakness (“Most of them were homosexual. In fact, I would say all of them were.”), that news almost didn’t make the papers (see Feb 28. Where it did, it was buried in a much larger article about an ongoing political argument over Alger Hiss.

The Ninety-One might almost have been forgotten, had it not been for the rising public feud between Peurifoy and McCarthy. On March 12, Peurifoy blasted McCarthy for claiming that the State Department was rife with Communists. “If he isn’t prepared to substantiate the charges, he should withdraw his allegations,” Peurifoy said. “This is much too important to the country and its foreign policy to be left to innuendo.” He also added this taunt: “I think that Senator McCarthy owes it to the country to make available to the committee any evidence which he has that involves the loyalty of persons in the Department of State, whether it be the 205 that he said were communists in Wheeling, the 57 that he said were card carrying communists in Salt Lake City, the four that he said weren’t communists at all in Reno, the 81 that he mentioned on the floor of the Senate, or just one.”

McCarthy countered that he was preparing a dossier on 81 cases but “the Democratic membership of the committee kept me from completing even one case.” Two days later, McCarthy made public three names. A fourth name he didn’t release, although he turned it over to the committee. Recalling Peurifoy’s remarks about the 91 released for “moral weakness,” McCarthy declined to give the fourth name to reporters because of the “sordid details of this case.” Sokolksy wondered why there was so little attention being paid to those “moral weaknesses”:

Perhaps the reason is that the word, homosexual, is considered bad. It is not the word that is bad; it is the consequences of the deed that lay the individual open to blackmail. He is ashamed; he is frightened; he has become accustomed to secrecy, conspiracy, lying. He is always subject to blackmail.

Mr. Peurifoy said, in giving the figure 91:

“Most of them were homosexuals. In fact, I would say all of them were.

Of course, Mr Peurifoy withheld the names of these persons and therefore it is not known what positions they held. For instance, if a homosexual held such a position as under-secretary of state, or assistant secretary or as sensitive bureau chief, the menace to the United States would be that if the espionage services of a foreign power or of a world-wide conspiracy got at him, he would have three alternatives 1. To resign yet to risk exposure; 2. To submit to blackmail and become a spy for a foreign power; or 3. To commit suicide.

I am dealing with this problem not from a moral but from a practical standpoint. There are some persons who excuse the homosexual on the ground that he was born that way. Others became involved in Freudian jargon and explain this phenomenon as due to a variety of causes. From our standpoint, it is merely a question as to whether a person whose conduct lays him open to blackmail is a good security risk.

Now, in all the arguments on the subject, those who defend the state department and attack Senator McCarthy miss two points:

1. Our foreign policy has been wrong since 1943 (Teheran) because it was controlled by a foreign power, Soviet Russia. … What part did these homosexuals, subject to blackmail, play in the formulation and conduct of those erroneous policies?

2. Whereas some of the rest of us may be as black at heart as Al Capone, those in the state department must be as pure in mind and purpose as driven snow. For that department gathers the data, formulates the policies, lays down the techniques, short of war, for the defense of our country in times of peace and war.

A liar advantageously station; a blackmailed creature in a sensitives spot; a frightened soul, caught in the web of conspiracy, can produce such a results as the conquest of China by Soviet Russia by consent. There is the menace.

Sokolsky was considered one of the most important columnists in the country. When he died in 1962, honorary pallbearers included Herbert Hoover, Robert Kennedy, J. Edgar Hover, Douglas MacArthur, Sens. Barry Goldwater (R-AZ), Everett Dirksen (R-IL) and Thomas Dodd (D-CT).

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS:
► Vadim Alekseevich Kozin: 1903-1994. The great Russian tenor Vadim Alekseevich Kozin was celebrated throughout the Soviet Union in the 1920s for his recordings and concerts specializing in gypsy romances and love songs. He sang those songs, which he wrote himself, with such passion and tenderness that garnered him the title of the “Russian Orpheus.” He once gave a concert with American Paul Robeson and is said to have performed for Winston Churchill, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin at the Tehran conference in 1943. But in those precarious days during Stalin’s rule, Kozin fell out of favor with the Kremlin and was arrested in 1944. He was sent to a prison camp near Magadan in the Russian Far East for five years for political offenses, “corruption of youth” and homosexuality. From that moment on, his songs disappeared from the radio and his public concerts came to an end.

After his release in 1950, Kozen resumed performing in local theaters in the Russian Far East and Siberia, but he was prohibited from performing in Moscow and Leningrad. It was during this period when Kozen began to keep a diary. “How I would like even just once,” he wrote of one unnamed man in 1956, “even for one instant, to look into the depth of those green eyes. Why does it happen like this? One person appears, and there is nothing else sacred in the world. He has filled it all himself. Who that person is, no one will ever find out.”

Kozin also used his diary to express his impatience with the official attitude toward homosexuality. “There is nothing unnatural in the life I want to live,” he wrote. “There is real, good friendship and complete mutual trust.” In another entry, he criticized actors with their “demonstration of fictional family values” and waving of party cards. “Do I have the moral right, with my defects, to see them that way? After torturous and long thought, I have realized that I do. They are much more rotten people.”

But Kozin worried that he risked further imprisonment. In another entry, he was alarmed by another actor while on tour. “His behavior will lead him to the camp. I must tell him that his sexual motives shouldn’t affect me at all. … I don’t want people to think about me like that again. I will try to suffer alone.”

Kozin’s fears were well-founded. He was arrested again in 1959 for homosexuality and was forced to write a humiliatingly detailed confession. Despite a brief revival in the 1980’s when his records were reissued, he was never officially rehabilitated. He died in Madagan in 1994 at the age of 91. Since his death, Vadim Kozin has become an icon in Russia’s gay community. One of his most famous songs is one called “Friendship” which, he later confided to a friend, was dedicated to another man:

“We are so close that words do not have to be repeated. Our tenderness and our friendship are stronger than passion and greater than love.”

Vadim Kozin with friends in Madagan in 1993:

► Rosie O’Donnell: 1962. During her years hosting her popular daytime talk show, The Rosie O’Donnell Show, from 1996 to 2002, she developed a reputation for being “The Queen of Nice” and for her self-professed crush with actor Tom Cruise. Two months before her talk show ended, she came out, saying, “I’m a dyke!” When she became a moderator for The View in 2006, her “queen of nice” persona was ancient history, as she engaged in several public controversies and on-air disputes. She was encouraged by the program to be provocative and outspoken, and she certainly delivered. She picked a public fight with Donald Trump, she compared the Mark Foley congressional page scandal to the Catholic Church’s child sexual abuse scandals, and she condemned the Bush Administration’s Iraq war policies. The final straw for O’Donnell’s tenure on The View came during an on-air argument with co-host Elizabeth Hasselbeck. The producers showed O’Donnel and Hasselbeck in a split screen, which, O’Donnel, said, “they (the producers) had to prepare that in advance… I felt there was setup egging me into that position.” Tired of the confrontations, O’Donnel left the show in May, 2007. Parade magazine named her “The Most Annoying Celebrity of 2007,” while Time called her one of their “100 Most Influential People.”

Since then, O’Donnell has been involved in several projects, including acting as Executive Producer of a Lifetime movie, hosting SiriusXM’s “Rosie Radio” from 2009 to 2011, a short-lived talk show on Oprah Winfrey’s OWN, and a collaborative partner in the LGBT family vacation company R Family Vacations. She has also been involved with several charitable causes, including early childhood care and education, adoption and foster parenting, and rehabilitation therapies for Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans. Her For All Kids Foundation has awarded more than $22 million in grants to 1,400 child-related organizations. Overall, O’Donnell has given more than $100 million to charity. O’Donnell herself is a foster and adoptive mother, and in February of 2004, she married Kelly Carpenter in San Francisco when Mayor Gavin Newsom launched an ill-fated effort to grant marriage licenses to same-sex couples, but the couples split in 2007. (Their marriage, by then, had been invalidated by the California Supreme Court, along with all of the other 2004 “winter of love” marriages.) In 2012, O’Donnell married Michelle Rounds in a private ceremony in New York, and they adopted a daughter, Dakota, in early 2013. The couple separated in 2014, and their divorce was finalized last October.

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This your open thread for the day. What’s happening in your world?