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 lobbyFebruary 18th, 2016
Last September, a dozen or so good Catholic school alumni were out for a night of getting drunk and having a fine ol’ time when they decided that it would be awfully fun to gang up on a gay couple and beat them while screaming homophobic slurs. Having had their jollies, they left the couple bleeding on the sidewalk, and all set off to celebrate at a bar, big smiles on their faces.
But as this was 2015, security cameras abound and soon three of the assailants were in custody.
Two of them pled guilty, expressed remorse, and agreed to community service. But Kathryn Knott, a blond pretty daughter of a local police chief decided that she’d fight the charges. Surely a jury would take her word over that of a couple of, well, you know.
The jury listened to her character witnesses tell of what an angel Kathryn is, her dramatic “I’m sorry for what happened to you” to the victims, and her protestations that she was only there to break up the fight. They also heard and the testimony of the victims, witnesses who saw her swing punches, and her history of homophobic and other hate-filled tweets. In the end, they decided that not only was Kathryn Knott guilty, she’s also a horrible person.
Her counsel had argued that she shouldn’t receive punishment because people had already said mean things about her, and surely that’s punishment enough. But the judge was equally not a fan and on Monday, the 8th, gave her sentence. (6ABC)
Common Pleas Judge Roxanne Covington questioned how then-hospital worker Kathryn Knott walked away from the victims as one lay badly injured in September 2014.
She also ordered the 25-year-old Knott, whose online posts have insulted gays, non-English speakers, Middle Easterners and hospital patients alike, to get anger management treatment and stay out of Philadelphia during two years of probation.
“While these were homophobic slurs that started this incident, it could have been any type of hate speech,” said the judge, who said she herself might have been attacked walking with her girlfriend or sister. “It could have been anyone.”
She sentence Knott to 5 to 10 months in jail.
But, as we already know, Knott isn’t fond of being punished for her actions. And it’s just not fair.
The other two who admitted their guilt, expressed remorse, and negotiated their punishment received a lesser sentence. Surely Knott, being blond and pretty, should be able to have a do-over and now accept the same deal she had already rejected.
Or how about this, instead of going to jail, Knott could go on TV. There she could tell everyone that it’s a very bad thing to beat gay couples and leave them unconscious on the ground with a broken jaw.
How’s that? It could be two-fer. Not only would she not be in jail, but people might start to like her instead of say all those meany mean things about her. (Philly)
As an alternative to being locked up, attorney William Brennan suggested that 25-year-old Knott could perform a public-service announcement “where she could take the infamy of the arrest and maybe heal some wounds.”
But if Knott wanted to heal wounds, she could have done so right after she caused them, while her victims were laying there in front of her. And television celebrity is not punishment for inhumane and criminal behavior.
February 18th, 2016
TODAY’S AGENDA is brought to you by:
From the Advocate, March 5, 1981, page 3. (Personal collection.)
Tired of snowstorms and below-zero temperatures? This might be a good time to book a trip to Florida. Key West has long been known as a very gay friendly location, with a good number of resorts and guest houses catering the the gay and lesbian markets, with many of the resorts for gay men being clothing optional. The Sea Isle Guest House was one such landmark. Built in 1948 as garden apartments for the military, the complex was converted to a gay resort in the late 1970s — complete with a statue of Judy Garland. The owners sold the Sea Isle in 2004, and the next thing everyone knew, it had been bulldozed and replaced with a cluster of cookie-cutter townhomes.
John Sholto Douglas, 9th Marquess of Queensberry
TODAY IN HISTORY:
► Marquess of Queensberry Accuses Oscar Wilde of Being a “Somdomite”: 1895. British playwright Oscar Wilde was dining at the Albermarle Club when the Marquess of Queensberry left a calling card with the porter. It read, “To Oscar Wilde posing as a somdomite.” The misspelling may have been the product of Queensberry’s rage over the relationship between Wilde and his son, Lord Alfred “Bosie” Douglas. Queensberry had ferocious arguments with his son, trying to get him to stop seeing Wilde, but Bosie refused. Queensberry even threatened to go public with what he knew, but Bosie refused to back down. So on February 18, 1895, Queensberry followed through on his threat.
Oscar Wilde and Alfred Douglas.
This action led to a long string of events which eventually led to Wilde’s disgrace, imprisonment, exile in France, and early death. Perhaps all that could have been avoided if Wilde had decided not to sue Queensberry for libel. His friends advised him against it, but he may have felt he had little choice. Having been called out publicly like that, declining to sue might be taken as an admission of guilt. Unfortunately, Wilde’s libel case collapsed when Queensberry’s lawyer asked whether he had ever kissed Walter Grainger in greeting. “Oh, dear no,” Wilde replied, “He was a peculiarly plain boy. He was unfortunately extremely ugly. I pitied him for it.”
Queensberry’s lawyer pounced on Wilde’s admission that attraction was the reason he didn’t kiss him. In short order, Wilde lost the case, and was charged with gross indecency. Wilde’s first criminal trial ended in a hung jury but the second one resulted in Wilde’s conviction and sentence to two years imprisonment at hard labor.
► British Quakers Publish “Toward a Quaker View of Sex”: 1963. A report published by an influential group of eleven Quaker scholars challenged what it considered a hidebound view of sexuality among Christians. The groundbreaking report insisted on the basic similarity of homosexual and heterosexual emotional experience and placed the two on an equal moral footing, insisting that the morality be judged by the same standard.
“Surely it is the nature and quality of a relationship that matters,” the authors wrote. “One must not judge by its outward appearance but by its inner worth … We see no reason why the physical nature of a sexual act should be the criterion by which the question whether or not it is moral should be decided. An act which expresses true affection between two individuals and gives pleasure to them both, does not seem to us to be sinful by reason alone of the fact that it is homosexual.”
The report asserted that “sexuality, looked at dispassionately, is neither good nor evil — it is a fact of nature.” it also explored the meaning of morality itself. “It seems to us,” the report continued,” that morals, like the Sabbath, were made for man, not man for morals, and that as society changes and modes of conduct with it, we must always be searching below the surface of human behavior, to discover what is in fact happening to people, what they are seeking to express, what motives and intentions they are satisfying, what fruits good or bad, they are harvesting.”
Towards a Quaker View of Sex was not an official Quaker statement on sexuality. But because it was published by the Literature Committee of the Friends Home Service Committee, it would prove to be a profoundly influential document among Quakers for the next several decades. You can read the full report here (PDF: 117KB/7 pages).
► 50 YEARS AGO: North American Conference of Homophile Organizations (NACHO) Forms: 1966. Following the success of the East Coast Homophile Organizations’ (ECHO) efforts to organize several gay rights groups for coordinated actions (see Oct 10), forty activists from the East and West Coasts, the Midwest and Texas met in Kansas City for a planning conference for what would become the first attempt at a national coalition of gay rights groups. Fifteen organizations were represented at the Kansas City meeting which was moderated by the Rev. Clarence A Culwell, a straight UCC minister who headed the San Francisco-based Council of Religion and the Homosexual (see Jan 1). The conference agreed to sponsor public meetings in several cities for Armed Forces Day, May 21, to discuss gays and the draft. It also agreed to a follow-up meeting in San Francisco in August to solidify the organization and plan further actions.
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?
February 17th, 2016
TODAY’S AGENDA is brought to you by:
From David, May 1972, page 41. (Personal collection.)
TODAY IN HISTORY:
► Laredo D.A. Defends City’s Reputation: 1953. The District Attorney for Laredo, Texas, defended his fair city’s reputation against allegations made by a Mexican newspaper in Nuevo Laredo, just a cross the border from Laredo. El Mañana, a morning daily with wide circulation in both communities, wrote in a series of articles that many prominent citizens of Laredo were involved in homosexual activities, and it promised to run a list of names in a future article. Laredo D.A. James Kazen denounced the stories as “wholly untrue,” and successfully appealed to Judge R.D. Wright to reconvene a grand jury to investigate the reports. Kazen did acknowledge that there were homosexuals on the streets of Laredo — but only four, and two of them were outsiders who had only recently moved to town.
► 55 YEARS AGO: Chicago Police Raid Lesbian Bar: 1961. Chicago police, like New York Police, were always raiding gay bars, often for the same reasons. As in New York, gay bars in Chicago tended to have mob connections, and police raids were planned according to whether the proper protections were paid to the proper officers on the force. While raids were a routine feature of gay life in Chicago, each one nevertheless was added insult to the daily difficulties of gay life. In March of 1961, a Chicago woman who went by the name of Del Shearer (a pseudonym she used throughout her career in activism) wrote to the Daughters of Bilitis’ newsletter The Ladder to describe the latest insult:
On February 17, shortly before midnight, the police arrested some 52 people, herded them off to a Chicago jail, and charged them with presence in a disorderly house. According to Illinois statutes, all “owners, agents, and occupants” thereof are subject to arrest. First, not all were arrested. It was determined by the arresting officers on the basis of “fly fronts” who was to be taken in — “fly fronts” which were made in women’s slacks by legally owned and operated manufacturers are not illegal and thus they do not constitute disorderly conduct. Second, on the night this raid occurred, there was no apparent violence, disturbance of the peace, disorderly assembly, or legal violation. At the station those women wearing “fly fronts,” regardless of whether they wore lipstick, long hair, or earrings, were made partially to undress in order to determine whether they wore jockey shorts. (I suppose they will now be charged with indecent exposure.) It now appears that those arrested at the discrimination of the police are to appear in courts in March, where they will face the charge against them.
Though I do not wish to go into the details of their fifteen-hour detention period, I will say that the conditions of the lockup itself, as well as their treatment, violated more than a few Illinois laws.
After briefly describing the raid — we don’t know the name of the bar was raided on that night — Shearer then went on to vent her frustration with the general feeling of resignation the gay community had about the raids:
Gay people have let their fears overpower their conscience. They’re afraid of publicity and newspapers, of public condemnation and the loss of their families’ love. They’re afraid of the big, black, threatening cloud that hangs above each and every one.
The object of the homosexual to live without fear of discrimination and persecution will never be attained without a fight. If the gay element wants its freedom, it has no choice but to fight, for freedom in this country or any country is not a thing given or guaranteed to anyone who does not hold it in highest esteem. The word fight is a frightening word.
Gay people, like many Americans, think in terms of jobs, money, reputation, and prestige. Like most Americans, they feel these are more important than either ethics or morals. For this reason, they seem to be primarily concerned about their own necks. Not only have they lost sight of their own rights, but they seem completely to have forgotten homosexual posterity. No legal miracle is going to free us or those who come after us.
If we ever hope to win our battle, we must fight. First, we must unshackle ourselves from fear, for it alone is our omnipresent enemy. We fear sacrifice, though sacrifice is called for. In any war — physical, social, civil, or international — both sides suffer; in the course of warfare, before or after, all involved must suffer. We are afraid to suffer in battle, though it may well be that our sufferings will be augmented a thousand times if we do not fight. If we do not fight, we will continue in ever-increasing numbers to be made the target of society’s and the police’s blows. We will continue to be ridiculed, persecuted, denied our legal rights, and falsely prosecuted at the command of our discriminating master. Are we to be bound as children by the fear which disorganizes us? Are we to think as children of the world filled with honey trees and sugarplum trees, where we will live happily ever after? We are a minority group and because we are, we consider ourselves orphans of society, without parents to protect us and without love. Orphans grow up, though, as we must. When they realize that they have to look out after their own interests, the sky becomes the limit. Our case is not radically different.
…Homosexuals everywhere have been made the scapegoat of society. The prejudices held against us are in most cases built out of sight of the very same scientific findings and theories with which Americans in this scientific age so cleverly rationalize their behavior — but not that of their fellow man. How long will we sit quietly and watch society kindle the flames beneath the stakes on which we burn with our own legal and moral rights?
Shearer went on to found a Chicago chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis later that year. In 1964, she was the only woman to appear among five panelists for a televised two-hour discussion on WBKB (Channel 7, which later became WLS-TV). Shearer also served as the national vice president for the Daughters of Bilitis. But there were limits to how far she was willing to take the fight. She resigned from the DOB governing board in 1965 due to her strong disagreement “at this time or in the very near future” with the tactic of picketing by East Coast homophile groups (see Apr 17, May 29, Jun 26, Jul 4, Jul 31, Aug 28, and Oct 23). And with her resignation, she also left the homophile movement entirely.
[Source: Letter to the editor from “D.S., Illinois.” The Ladder 5, no .7 (April 1961): 21-23.]
► 50 YEARS AGO: “Chicken And Bulls” Blackmail Ring Busted: 1966. A massive, multi-state blackmail ring stretching from Chicago to New York To North Carolina was broken with the arrest of nine extortionists, with eight more being sought. As The New York Times reported, the gang employed “chickens” (including college students and at least one bodybuilder) who posed as young gay men who would allow themselves to be picked up by other gay men, usually travelling businessmen, to go back to the hotel. Once there, the “chicken” would beat and rob their victims and leave. A few hours later, other men — the “bulls” — posing as policemen would arrive at the hotel for another shakedown. Saying that they had arrested a homosexual prostitute with the victim’s wallet in his possession, the “police” needed to victim to go to the station to make a statement. Fearing exposure, the victim would often offer a bribe to the “police” to make the whole problem go away. In another version of the shakedown, “police” would burst into the hotel room just when the men were in a compromising state of undress, and the shakedown would begin with the threat of arrest.
The gang’s success hinged on several factors: homosexuality was illegal everywhere except Illinois, and even there the mere threat of being publicly exposed was enough to induce the victim to do just about anything to avoid having his reputation, career and family life ruined. The ring’s longevity — it would later be revealed that it had been in operation for about a decade — was further aided by the fact that none of the victims went to the police. And why would they? They already thought they were dealing with the police. Actual police corruption was so rampant, with many of them operating their own blackmail schemes using many of the same tactics, victims had no way to tell the fake cops from the real.
To further add to the confusion, some members of the gang actually had police connections, allowing the gang to imitate police officers with a great deal of precision. John J. Pyne, the gang’s ringleader, was a retired Chicago policeman. In his home, the FBI found police badges and identification papers for almost every state, along with a variety of blank arrest warrants, charge sheets and extradition forms from several jurisdictions. As the investigation and trials unfolded over the next two years, investigators would learn that millions of dollars were extorted from over a thousand victims. The victims themselves were no lo-lifes. They included university deans, professors, military officers (including a navy admiral and two generals), several well-known actors, TV personalities (including, it’s been said, Liberace, who refused to testify before a grand jury for fear of ruining his career), and at least one U.S. Congressman. Their boldness knew no limits. Twice, they confronted Rep. Peter Frelinghuysen (R-NJ) in his Capitol Hill office, took him to a private plane to fly to New Jersey, and brought him directly to a bank where he paid a total of $50,000. They pulled a prominent surgeon out of an operating room, forcing his colleague to finish the surgery. They even went into the Pentagon and escorted Admiral William Church out of the building and to a bank where he handed over $5,000. Church later committed suicide to avoid testifying before a grand jury against his blackmailers.
Church’s suicide (and Liberace’s reticence) was indicative of the greatest problem that the FBI and New York Police Department faced in trying to break the case: almost none of the victims were willing to talk to police, let alone testify. If there is a silver lining in the whole affair, is is probably the fact that investigators had to figure out how to set aside their own prejudices, and through persistence and discretion, build a foundation of trust between themselves and the victims. The Mattachine Society was enlisted as a go-between so that victims might feel less exposed. Some judges, where they could, allowed victims to testify anonymously, or allowed victims to testify about the blackmail without going into any sexual details. These accommodations were a complete turnaround from the way law enforcement and the courts had dealt with gay people during the Lavender Scare of the 1950s. Press coverage was also markedly different. With the roster of victims including the cream of society, it was much easier to portray them with considerable sympathy. As one law enforcement official told The Times, “Extortion of money from well known persons who are homosexual or bisexual is a persistent problem. We want to alert these people who come from all walks of life that such extortion schemes exist and we want to impress upon them also that New York City detectives are no part of this disgusting racket.”
Over the next two years, various members of the ring were tried, with most found guilty and sent to prison. Pyne was sentenced to two consecutive 20-year federal prison terms. Weightlifter John Fellabaum, a ringleader who posed as a muscle-bound “chicken,” angered the judge when he forced a witness, an antiques dealer from Maine, to take the stand and publicly out himself, after which Fellabaum immediately changed his plea to guilty. The judge was outraged. “I have been sentencing people for twenty-seven years and it has been a a long time since I have come upon a case that was so revolting as your case. I think you are so steeped in filth that as I read the report I cringed, and my flesh crept as I read the depth of inequity to which you allowed yourself to sink.”
[Sources: William McGowan. “The Chicken and the Bulls” Slate (July 11, 2012). Available online here.
Angus McLaren. Sexual Blackmail: A Modern History
TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
► Friedrich Alfred Krupp: 1854-1902. Fritz had every advantage available to one born to Germany’s most prominent industrialist family. Named for his grandfather who founded the family firm in 1811, and heir to the vast steelmaking, mining, and armaments conglomerate assembled by his father, young Fritz, at the relatively young age of 33, stepped in as head of the Krupp empire when his father suddenly died. Under Fritz, the Krupp firm developed nickel steel which would revolutionize battleship armor and cannons, and created a shipbuilding works which would go on to build Germany’s first U-Boat in 1906. Fritz also cultivated a very close working relationship and personal friendship with the Kaiser, Wilhelm II, which proved especially fruitful. His wealth and business acumen was such that crowned heads of state often negotiated contracts with him personally, while his tact and charm allowed him to resolve touchy problems whenever they arose.
Fritz’s first love though wasn’t business, but oceanography, a hobby he would pursue throughout his life. Because of poor health, he frequently traveled to the Mediterranean where he could indulge his hobby, along with another — young, exotic men. From 1898, he took up a semi-permanent residence on Capri, where he could pursue both pleasures, well out of sight of his wife and family. He was also generous with the local community, so much so that the Capri council made him an honorary citizen.
But because the burdens of business required him to spend a considerable amount of time in Berlin, he sent several of his favorites to the Hotel Bristol and arranged for their employment there with the understanding that when he was in town, they were to attend to him rather than their duties. The men quickly proved unsuitable to their tasks.
Between his time in Capri and the men he had stashed away in Berlin, stories began to leak out in the Italian press, and insinuations began to make their way into the German papers in 1902. As the stories began to leak out, Krupp’s wife was confined to a mental asylum — whether it was due to her distress or to ensure her discretion, it’s hard to say. Finally, on November 15, the Social Democratic magazine Vorwärts published an article, titled “Krupp in Capri, which boldly accused Krupp of homosexuality, including his fondness for Adolfo Schiano, an 18-year-old barber and amateur musician.
Krupp requested an audience with the Kaiser, but one week later, on the day they were to meet,, Krupp was found dead in his home, apparently of suicide, although the circumstances surrounding his death were never revealed. No autopsy was ever performed, and Krupp’s body was placed in a closed casket. Within days, Krupp’s wife was released from the asylum; her sanity apparently was miraculously restored. In a speech at Krupp’s funeral, the Kaiser denounced the Social Democrats for “lying” about Krupp’s homosexuality. His heirs then launched a libel suit against Vorwärts, but it was quietly dropped a short time later.
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?
February 16th, 2016
TODAY’S AGENDA is brought to you by:
From the International Gay Rodeo Association program, 1989, page 8. (Source)
THIS MONTH IN HISTORY:
► Aversion Therapy for “Sexual Deviation”: 1973. Attempts to cure homosexuality have taken many forms, many of them cruel. Perhaps the cruelest might be the use of electric shock aversion therapy. This method was first described in the academic literature in 1935, and reports of its continued use persisted through the 1970’s and even later. Two of sixteen participants at a Brigham Young University program committed suicide in the mid-1970’s, and there are similar reports of suicide and long-term psychological and physical damage elsewhere.
There are literally hundreds of reports of various forms of aversion therapy in the literature between 1935 and 1980. In 1973, one such report appeared in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology by two researchers from the University of Vermont. Dr. Harold Leitenberg and Ph.D candidate Edward J. Callahan wrote an article titled, “Aversion therapy for sexual deviation: Contingent shock and covert sensitization“, in which they described their experiments on six subjects:
Six subjects were selected from a group of 23 referrals during a 2-year period. Selection was made on the grounds of desire to undergo aversion therapy and the consistent occurrence of measurable erection during presentation of slides depicting their deviant form of arousal. Seven referrals decided agains treatment (two of these were court referred), two subjects dropped out during the first phase…
Treatment Procedures
Contingent shock: …Shock levels varying from “pain” to “tolerance” were then randomly selected for administration as part of a punishment procedure which made shock contingent upon erection. These shock levels ordinarily ranged from .5 milliampere to 4.5 milliampere, and shock duration was varied randomly from .1 second to .5 second. Erection was monitored by a penile strain gate. Five slides of deviant material and two heterosexually oriented slides were presented for 125 seconds apiece in each session while the subject was instructed to imaging whatever was sexually arousing with the person on the slide. An attempt was made to obtain slides appropriate to each person’s idiosyncratic sexual arousal. If during the “deviant” material slide, the penile circumference increase exceeded a level of 15% of full erection, shock was administered through electrodes on the first and third fingers on the subject’s right hand.Covert Sensitization: This technique involves the presentation of verbal descriptions of “deviant” acts and the description of aversive consequences, such as nausea, vomiting, discovery by family, etc. … For example, a man might be asked to imagine going to the apartment of a homosexual contact, approaching the man’s bedroom, initiating sexual activity, feeling increasingly nauseous, and finally vomiting on the contact, on the sheets, and all over himself. A variation of this scene might involve the patient finding the homosexual contact rotting with syphilitic sores, or finding that the contact had diarrhea during the sexual encounter.
The subjects included two pedophiles and a young man arrested for indecent exposure. The other three were:
Subject 2
The patient was a 38-year-old depressed married man with a 13-year history of active homosexuality and depression. The patient sought behavioral treatment after 4 years of psychiatric counseling which had not alleviated either problem. He continued psychiatric counseling for the depression, with the stipulation that no sexual matters be discussed. His homosexual activity consisted of seeking. His homosexual activity consisted of seeking contacts 2-3 times a week, usually without success. …He sought treatment to reduce homosexual urges since he felt they led to frustration, depression, and an inability to concentrate on work.The patient was a 38-year-old depressed married man with a 13-year history of active homosexuality and depression. The patient sought behavioral treatment after 4 years of psychiatric counseling which had not alleviated either problem. He continued psychiatric counseling for the depression, with the stipulation that no sexual matters be discussed. His homosexual activity consisted of seeking. His homosexual activity consisted of seeking contacts 2-3 times a week, usually without success. …He sought treatment to reduce homosexual urges since he felt they led to frustration, depression, and an inability to concentrate on work.
…The subject’s only homosexual contact during treatment occurred during a 2-week break in treatment in this phase. The patient reported an inability to reach climax during this contact. During a later talk to a former contact, the patient felt the symptoms of impending vomiting and left the situation. He later connected this feeling with experiences felt during treatment.
…
Subject 4
This was a 19-year-old homosexual with no prior sexual or dating experience with girls. … Sexual contacts [with other men] led to guilt feelings and vacillation over whether he wanted to learn to accept homosexuality or to change his pattern of sexual arousal. After discussing his dilemma with a few friends and relatives, he decided to seek treatment.Phase 1: Contingent shock was administered for 10 sessions. Penile circumference changes were reduced during slides of males and females initially; however, this suppression during slides of females was only transient. There was an increase in average daily homosexual urges to slightly more than two per day and a slight increase in frequency of daily homosexual masturbation, while homosexual fantasies were slightly decreased. The patient was somewhat disturbed by the experience of shock, but was willing to undergo it in order to change his sexual arousal pattern. He had one homosexual contact late in this phase.
Phase 2: Covert sensitization was administered for seven sessions. Penile circumference changes to slides of men reduced greatly, and penile circumference changes to slides of women continued to increase. Rapid progress was reported by the subject in this phase. … After seven sessions, the subject reported he was progressing more quickly than he could stand “physically.” He felt his progress was strong enough to drop treatment and continue to make adjustment alone. After 3 months, however, he returned to treatment because of “unwanted” homosexual contact which unnerved him about the stability of his progress.
… An attempt was made to return the subject to contingent shock treatment. The subject became very upset by this and misapplied the electrodes during the first scheduled shock session in order to reduce the shock. At the next session, he explained that the felt shock had not helped him and that he did not want to go through the painful experience since he felt it had not therapeutic effect. At this stage, he said he would have to quit treatment rather than go through contingent shock again.
…
Subject 5
The patient was a 29-year-old married man referred after being apprehended by police while walking along a main street in women’s clothing. This was his first police contact in 17 years of cross-dressing, and no charges were pressed. His treatment was voluntary; his reported reason for wanting therapy was the desire to feel sexually “normal.” Although married, the patient reported intercourse occurred only twice a year.…Treatment consisted of one phase of contingent shock and one phase of covert sensitization. There was rapid and substantial suppression of erection to transsexual fantasies during the first phase. (Note that measurement was taken without the shock electrodes attached.) Intercourse was reported to increase to once a week, although independent confirmation with his wife was impossible since the patient claimed that his wife was unaware of his transvestism, and he did not wish us to contact her. …
Calahan and Lienteberg concluded that ” both treatments combined led to a favorable outcome,” despite acknowledging the difficulty of independent verification.
By the time this paper appeared in The Journal of Abnormal Psychology, Callahan had already moved on to UCLA, where he became a Behavioral Modification supervisor for the Neorpsychiatric Institute, where five-year-old Kirk Murphy was treated by future anti-gay activist George Rekers for what was identified as Kirk’s “Gender Identity Disorder.” (There is no evidence that Callahan was involved with Kirk’s treatment.) He is currently at UC Davis. Leitenberg, who had founded the University of Vermint’s Behavior Therapy and Psychotherapy Center in 1972, served as its director until his retirement in 2001.
[Source: Callahan, Edward J.; Leitenberg, Harold. “Aversion therapy for sexual deviation: Contingent shock and covert sensitization.” Journal of Abnormal Psychology 81, no. 1 (February 1973): 60-73. Abstract available here.]
TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
► Katharine Cornell: 1893-1974. She shared the title of “The First Lady of the Theatre” with Helen Hayes; as good friends and colleagues, they each deferred the title to each other. While Hayes is probably more well known today, Cornell’s own acting and contributions to the theater are legendary. Part of her success can be attributed to her collaboration with her husband, Guthrie McClintic, a successful director and producer. Their marriage was both professional and one of convenience: Cornell was lesbian and McClintic was gay. She was a member of New York’s “sewing circles, with relationships with Tallulah Bankhead and Mercedes de Acosta, among others. Meanwhile, McClinctic directed Cornell in every play since their marriage.
Cornell’s acclaimed Broadway roles include the title character of George Bernard Shaw’s Candide, Countess Ellen Olenska in The Age of Innocence, the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning in The Barretts of Wimpole Street — and that’s just before the Great Depression. Her career continued unabated through the 1950s. Her appearance in the title role of 1936’s St. Joan won her a bevy of honorary degrees from several colleges and universities, and she won a Tony Award for Best Actress for Antony and Cleopatra in 1947. After McClintic died in 1961, Cornell decided to retire rather than work with another director. She restored the 300-year-old Association Hall on Martha’s Vineyard, which was later rename the Katharine Cornell Theater. She died of pneumonia in 1974, and was buried next to the theater named in her honor.
► 90 YEARS AGO: John Schlesinger: 1926-2003. The British director of film, stage, television and opera became one of the more influential figures in Britain’s post-war entertainment industry. He began acting in a small number of small parts in films shortly after leaving Oxford. In the mid-fifties, he began directing short documentaries for the BBC. His first feature film came in 1961 with Terminus, a documentary set on a London train station. It earned him a Venice Film Festival Gold Lion a British Academy Award. He then set about making fictional feature films beginning with the award-winning A Kind of Loving (1962), which was the sixth most popular movie in Britain that year. A string of films followed, many of which were set in “swinging London” of the 1960s, and which established Schlesinger as an influential part of the British New Wave.
His first American film, 1969’s Midnight Cowboy
Schlesinger went on to make a string of films, some portraying the underbelly of society, others focusing on unusual and often flawed characters, including Sunday Bloody Sunday
Schlesinger lived quite openly with his partner, Michael Childers, since the late 1960s, although he didn’t publicly address his sexuality until 1991, when Sir Ian McKellen was attacked for being the first openly gay person to be knighted. Schlesinger was one of a dozen British gay and lesbian artists who signed a letter coming to McKellen’s defense.
In 1998, Schlesinger underwent a quadruple heart bypass, and then suffered a stroke in 2000. He remained in poor health until his death in 2003.
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?
February 15th, 2016
TODAY’S AGENDA is brought to you by:
From David, May 1972, page 59. (Personal collection.)
As a rule, most of the businesses we feature here are defunct. The Baton Show Lounge in Chicago however is still in business, although it is located a few doors up from where it used to be. It’s been around since 1969, and is world famous for its legendary drag shows. So famous, in fact, that reservations are recommended on the weekends.
TODAY IN HISTORY:
► Michael Swift’s “The Gay Revolutionary”: 1987. Think back to what the beginning of 1987 was like. AIDS was ravaging the gay community, with nearly 25,000 dead and AZT, the first U.S. government-approved treatment for HIV therapy, wouldn’t become FDA approved for another month. The year would be the year of the cri de coeur, with ACT-Up’s formation that year being the most visible manifestation of the growing anger over the apparent indifference on the part of public officials in New York City and Washington, D.C., as well as the overt hostility that the epidemic engendered in much of conservative Christianity.
Another cry rang out from Boston, although it was little noticed at the time. Just another crazy essay from the often-provocative Gay Community News. This one, written under the byline of Michael Swift was printed and then soon forgotten, until two years later when Rep. William Dannemeyer (R-CA) read it into the Congressional Record:
We shall sodomize your sons, emblems of your feeble masculinity, of your shallow dreams and vulgar lies. We shall seduce them in your schools, in your dormitories, in your gymnasiums, in your locker rooms, in your sports arenas, in your seminaries, in your youth groups, in your movie theater bathrooms, in your army bunkhouses, in your truck stops, in your all male clubs, in your houses of Congress, wherever men are with men together. Your sons shall become our minions and do our bidding. They will be recast in our image. They will come to crave and adore us.
…All laws banning homosexual activity will be revoked. Instead, legislation shall be passed which engenders love between men.
All homosexuals must stand together as brothers; we must be united artistically, philosophically, socially, politically and financially. We will triumph only when we present a common face to the vicious heterosexual enemy.
If you dare to cry faggot, fairy, queer, at us, we will stab you in your cowardly hearts and defile your dead, puny bodies.
…We shall be victorious because we are fueled with the ferocious bitterness of the oppressed who have been forced to play seemingly bit parts in your dumb, heterosexual shows throughout the ages. We too are capable of firing guns and manning the barricades of the ultimate revolution.
Tremble, hetero swine, when we appear before you without our masks.
From there, the essay became the anti-gay establishment’s favorite example of the so-called “homosexual agenda.” Lou Sheldon’s Traditional Values Coalition put out a notorious video, “Gay Rights, Special Rights,” which repeated passages from the so-called manifesto and paired it with ominous music and pictures of children. In the 2001 book, Bringing Up Boys, Focus on the Family’s James Dobson cited Swift’s essay (retitling it “Goals of the Homosexual Movement”) as evidence that parents must protect their children from homosexuals. “Guard them night and day when they are young,” he wrote. “Don’t send them into a public bathroom alone.” In more recent years, the so-called manifesto has gone international — from Latvia and Russia, to Uganda and Jamaica — and it still re-emerges from time to time here at home.
But every time the essay is repeated by anti-gay extremists, they always carefully omit a vitally important component of the piece, just as that component was skipped when Dannemeyer read it into the Congressional Record. And for the essay to serve their purpose, it’s critical this crucial piece be left out, because it’s impossible to understand the true nature of the essay without it. That piece that they always leave out is this, the prologue:
This essay is an outré, madness, a tragic, cruel fantasy, an eruption of inner rage, on how the oppressed desperately dream of being the oppressor.
The name of the essay’s author, Michael Swift, should also be a clue. Nobody knows who the real author is, but the essayist clearly took his cue from the famous satirist Jonathan Swift, whose 1729 essay A Modest Proposal — in which the other Swift suggested that the easiest way to ease the crushing poverty in Ireland was for the Irish to sell their plentiful babies as a food delicacy for the rich — created a wave of outrage in England for the way that he savaged the condescending attitudes of those behind many of the illogical solutions that had been proposed at that time.
The 20th-century Swift’s essay, similarly, satirized the attitudes behind some of the worst homophobic expressions that were then being unleashed in 1987, by perfectly mimicking how those homophobes imagined the worst of the “militant homosexuals.” He mimicked their prejudices so well that they took it as a genuine manifesto, and it’s that accomplishment which makes it, I think, a perfect satire. But it’s also ironic that those whose attitudes Michael Swift satirized so well found such a nearly perfect weapon in that very same essay. Michael Bronski, who had been a features writer for Gay Community News when the first essay ran, later developed second thoughts about it. In 2003, Bronski said, “We printed it thinking that it was sort of funny. It’s been picked up by all these lunatic right-wing fringe people. In retrospect, it’s caused so much… it keeps getting quoted as being serious by people on the right and it simply was making a political point, using humor. I personally would, knowing how much it’s been misrepresented, I would think twice about printing it then.”
TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
► Edwin Cameron: 1953. As far as closets go, the outspoken Justice on South Africa’s Constitutional Court has obliterated the biggest ones: he’s gay and he’s HIV-positive. Justice Cameron was a human rights lawyer during Africa’s Apartheid years in the 1980s, where he co-drafted the Charter of Rights on AIDS and HIV, co-founded the AIDS Consortium, and was the first director of the LAIDS Law Project. As Apartheid crumbled, he worked to safeguard human rights, including the rights of LGBT people, in the new Constitution of South Africa.
In 1994, President Nelson Mandela appointed him an Acting Judge of the High Court, an appointment that became permanent in 1995. By then, he had long been out of the gay closet, but in in 1998, after a poor black woman living in a township in Durban went on the radio to talk about having AIDS and was killed three weeks later, he decided it was time to come out of the HIV closet. “I thought if [this woman], without any protection, living in a township, not behind a palisade like I do in my middle-class suburb in Johannesburg, not with the income of a judge, not with the constitutional protection… I thought that I should speak out…”
In 1999, he became an Active Justice on the Constitutional Court before being appointed to the Supreme Court of Appeal in 2000. In 2009, he was made a permanent Justice of the Constitutional Court by President Kgalema Motlanthe.
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?
February 14th, 2016
The Family “Research” Council’s Tony Perkins has joined Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnel, and GOP presidential candidates Sens. Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio in demanding that Justice Scalia’s seat remain vacant until after the next President is sworn in. According to Perkins:
“The Supreme Court has now become the centerpiece in this presidential election. There has not been an election-year nomination in generations and the Senate must not break that trend now. With the election only 269 days away, the people should decide what president should fill this seat,” concluded Perkins.
You can pretty much count on Perkins being wrong whenever he opens his mouth. Within the current generation — well, the current generation of still-living Supreme Court Justices anyway, there is one Justice who was nominated during an election year. That would be Justice Anthony Kennedy, was nominated by Reagan on November 30, 1987. Cruz counters out that, technically speaking it wasn’t yet an election year and this is supposed to matter somehow. But it seems to me that what really ought to matter is that the Dem0cratic-led Senate had no problem with the idea of confirming him on February 18, 1988, which is about the same spot on the Election year calendar as where we are today. You see, that was back in the olden days when having a split government between the White House and the Senate (where Democrats enjoyed a 55-45 majority) was not seen as an excuse for not getting anything done.
Appointing Supreme Court Justices has often been brought with political calculations. That’s why justices who are considering stepping down are nearly always careful to do so in a non-election year. Which is why it’s true that it’s not common to name a new Justice to the bench during an election year. And yet there is a pretty good history of Supreme Court Justices inconveniently dying in office and their replacements getting named and confirmed throughout the history of the Republic. It’s odd seeing a political party that prides itself on constitutional and historical precedence, not to mention the actions of our much-invoked Founding Fathers, ignore that history.
Besides Kennedy, I’ve found these other examples of Supreme Court nominees ascending to the bench during an election year, even sometimes in during extremely contentious election years. There have even been a few notable lame duck appointments in our history:
William Brennan Jr., was named to the Court through a recess appointment by Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1956, just three weeks before the presidential election. Brennan was selected to succeed Sherman Minton, who resigned following a period of declining health and tired from trying to place peacemaker through the many violent personal feuds among his colleagues. Political calculations played an important role in Brennan’s appointment. Eisenhower’s advisers thought that naming a Catholic Democrat to the bench would help solidify Eisenhower’s support in the Northeast. (They needn’t have worried; Eisenhower defeated Adlai Stevenson in a landslide.) When the Senate returned and took up Brennan’s nomination, he faced fierce opposition from the National Liberal League who thought he’d be too beholden to the Vatican, and from Sen. Joseph McCarthy who objected to Brennan’s characterization of McCarthy’s Red Scare as “witch hunts.” McCarthy wound up being the only Senator to vote against Brennan’s confirmation.
Frank Murphy, Attorney General in the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration, was nominated on January 4, 1940 to fill the seat vacated by the death of Pierce Butler. He was confirmed by the Senate on January 16.
Benjamin N. Cardozo, a well-know Democrat, was appointed by Republican President Herbert Hoover in February 1932 to succeed the legendary Oliver Wendell Holmes. At ninety and in ill health, Holmes had stepped down at the urging of his colleagues. The New York Times hailed Cardozo’s nomination: “Seldom, if ever, in the history of the Court has an appointment been so universally commended.” The still-Republican-controlled Senate confirmed Cardozo by a unanimous voice vote. The following November, Hoover and more than a hundred Republican Representatives were wiped out in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Democratic landslide.
John Hessin Clarke was nominated by Woodrow Wilson on July 14, 1916, just a few weeks after Clarks Evans Hughes resigned as Associate Justice to run against Wilson in 1916 that year as the Republican Presidential nominee. (Hughes would later be named Chief Justice by Herbert Hoover in 1930.) Clarke was confirmed unanimously on July 24.
Louis Brandeis was nominated by Wilson on January 29, 1916 following the death of Joseph Rucker Lamar four weeks earlier. Brandeis, an Republican economic ally of the Democrat Wilson’s anti-monopoly policies, was so controversial that the Senate Judiciary Committee held a public hearing on the nomination for the first time in history. This resulted in an unprecedented four months gap between Wilson’s nomination and the Senate’s final confirmation.
Mahlon Pitney, a prominent New Jersey Democrat, was nominated by the Republican President William Howard Taft on March 13, 1912 to fill the seat vacated by Marshall Harlan’s death the previous October. Taft was defeated in his bid for re-election the following November.
Rufus Wheeler Peckham ascended to the bench on January 1896 after having been nominated by President Grover Cleveland the month before. Peckham was selected to fill the seat vacated by Howell Edmunds Jackson’s death. All this happened during Cleveland’s second term of office, which, if you will remember, was not consecutive with his first. Benjamin Harrison had defeated Cleveland in 1888, only to lose to Cleveland four years later. By the way, Peckham was the last Supreme Court Justice nominated by a Democratic president and confirmed by a Republican-controlled Senate, although until this year this appears more a product of circumstances than thickheaded GOP posturing. And also by the way, two years earlier, Cleveland nominated Peckham’s brother, Wheeler Hazard Peckham, for a different seat on the Supreme Court. That nomination was blocked in the Senate.
Howell Edmunds Jackson was nominated by Benjamin Harrison on February 2, 1893, nearly three months after Harrison lost his bid for re-election the previous November. (This was when presidential terms began on March 4th. The twentieth amendment changed the start date to January 20 beginning in 1937.)
George Shiras, Jr. was also nominated by Harrison, on July 19, 1892, nearly six months after Justice Joseph P. Bradley’s death, and just a little more than three months before the election that would turn the unpopular Harrison out of office. As unpopular as Harrison had become by 1892 — his economic policies would eventually lead to the Panic of 1893 — he somehow managed to place two Justices on the Supreme Court both during and after his failed bid for re-election.
Melville Fuller was nominated as Chief Justice by Cleveland on April 30, 1888, after the death of Morrison Waite a month earlier. Fuller’s nomination came just a little more than six months before Cleveland lost his bid for re-election to Harrison. Which makes Cleveland the only president to have successfully nominated a Supreme Court justice during two different presidential election years which ended his term in office.
William B. Woods was named to the high court by Rutherford B. Hayes on December 21, 1880, just a few months before Hayes was set to leave office. Hayes, a Republican, was succeeded by another Republican, the ill-fated James Garfield. Associate Justice William Strong waited until after the election to tender his resignation and make way for Woods. As well he should. Strong was one of five Supreme Court Justices who sat on the Electoral Commission whose sorry task it was to sort out the disputed 1876 Presidential election. Strong and his fellow Republican commission members awarded every disputed vote to “His Fraudulency” Rutherford B. Hayes.
Samuel Nelson was nominated by the Whig President John Tyler in February 1845 following the death of Smith Thompson in December, and just one month before the highly unpopular Tyler was to leave office. Tyler had been so hated that he had to fend of an impeachment attempt by his own party in the House of Representatives. Thanks to his enmity with his fellow Whigs and the lack of support among Democrats, four of his own Cabinet nominations were rejected by the Senate, the most of any president before or since. Tyler also had a difficult time getting a replacement for Thompson through the Senate. Before he hit upon Nelson, Tyler had nominated John Canfield Spencer, and Ruben Walworth. With Nelson, the third time was the charm, and despite the Senate’s animosity toward Tyler nominations, he still managed to get Nelson seated on the high court just before leaving office. (The Whigs themselves would go extinct just nine years later.)
Peter Vivian Daniel was a lame-duck nomination by Martin Van Buren on February 26, 1841, to fill the seat vacated by the death of Philip Pendleton Barbour just one day earlier. Daniel was confirmed two days before the Democrat Van Buren was succeeded by his already-controversial Whig successor, John Tyler.
John Catron was nominated by Andrew Jackson on March 3, 1837, on Andrew Jackson’s last full day as President. This case is unusual because Jackson was given the opportunity to name two new justices after Congress expanded the U.S. Supreme Court from seven to nine members. Catron was the only nominee to accept the nomination, leaving the second seat to be filled by Jackson’s successor, Martin Van Buren. The new Senate of the next Congress confirmed Catron’s appointment after Jackson left office. Catron would go on to side with the majority in the Dred Scott decision.
William Johnson was nominated by Thomas Jefferson on March 22, 1804, following the resignation of Alfred Moore the previous January. He was confirmed by the Senate on May 7.
John Marshall, perhaps the most famous and influential of all of the Chief Justices, was nominated to the post by John Adams on January 20, 1801 after the death of Oliver Ellsworth. Adams and his Federalists had lost badly during the 1800 election, and they were about to lose both the Executive Mansion and Congress to Jefferson and the Democratic-Republicans. Adams and the Federalists not only pushed through Marshall’s nomination, but they also passed what became derisively known as the Midnight Judges Act, which reduced the size of the Supreme Court from six members to five (the reduction would occur upon the next vacancy), which meant that it would take two more vacancies before Jefferson could make an appointment. The Judiciary Act of 1801 got its more common name when it was alleged that Adams stayed up until midnight on his last day in office packing the Federal judiciary with his chosen appointments. The controversial law was repealed in 1802, and Jefferson was able to make three appointments to the bench during his eight years in office. Meanwhile, one of those last-minute Adams appointments, William Marbury, went to court to try to force the Jefferson Administration to honor Adams’s commission. That case led to the landmark Marbury v. Madison decision which declared an earlier law that Marbury cited in his attempt to force the commission was itself unconstitutional, thus establishing the doctrine of Judicial Review for all of the courts to come.
Alfred Moore was also nominated by John Adams in April of 1800, seven months before the election that would see the Federalists tossed out of office. Moore was nominated some six months after James Iredell died.
Oliver Ellsworth was nominated by George Washington to be the nation’s third Chief Justice on March 3, 1796, eight months before the election that would make John Adams the nation’s second President. Ellsworth’s nomination closed a contentious chapter in the early history of the Court. In 1795, Washington named John Rutledge as Chief Justice as a recess appointment while the Senate was not in session. Rutledge became Chief Justice on June 30 and on July 16, he have a controversial speech lambasting the Jay Treaty with Great Britain, saying that he’d rather the President would die than sign “that puerile instrument.” That speech cost him support in the Senate, which ratified the treaty with the constitutionally-mandated two-thirds support. By the time the Senate took up Rutledge’s nomination, his support had evaporated and the Senate rejected his appointment.
Samuel Chase was nominated by George Washington on January 26, 1796 to fill the seat made vacant by John Blair’s resignation.
Against that history, I’ve only found six cases where a Supreme Court Justice died or left office and his seat went unfilled until after the next Presidential election:
Earl Warren, the legendary chief justice who will forever be remembered for steering some of the nation’s most important civil rights decisions through the Court, announced his retirement in June 1968. Lyndon Johnson nominated Abe Fortas, already an Associate Justice on the Supreme Court, for the top spot. But a coalition of conservative Republicans and Dixiecrats, led by Strom Thurmund rebelled against the Fortas nomination and its likely extension of the Warren Court’s pro-civil rights legacy. Fortas’s case wasn’t helped when it was learned that his moonlighting teaching job came with a lucrative income secretly provided by a group of Wall Street investors. With a full-on filibuster blocking a vote on Fortas’s confirmation, Johnson was forced to withdraw the nomination. Fortas resigned in 1969 as his ethics problems continued to grow. The Supreme Court plodded along without a Chief Justice until Richard Nixon nominated Warren Burger the following June.
Roger B. Taney, the nation’s fifth Chief Justice, died on October 12, 1864, just three weeks before Abraham Lincoln’s successful re-election bid, although by then his soon-to-be landslide re-election was no longer in doubt. Perhaps that explains why Lincoln wasn’t in any hurry to fill the post. Lincoln selected his former Secretary of the Treasurer and longtime frenemy Salmon P. Chase to succeed Taney on December 6, 1864. The Senate confirmed him that very same day.
Peter Vivian Daniel, who himself ascended to the bench as a lame-duck appointment in 1941, died n May 31, 1860 during James Buchanan’s last year in office. Buchanan didn’t seem to be in much of a hurry to replace Daniel. Neither was Buchanan’s successor, Abraham Lincoln, who waited until 1862 to name Samuel Freeman Miller to the bench.
John McKinley died on July 19, 1852 as Millard Fillmore was in the middle of his last year in office. Fillmore, the last Whig President, tried three times to fill the vacancy. Three times Fillmore’s nominations were rejected by the Democratic-controlled Senate. Fillmore’s successor, Franklin Pierce, took the rare step of consulting with a group of sitting Supreme Court justices to fill McKinley’s seat. He chose Alabama lawyer John A. Campbell in an attempt to appease southern Senators. The Senate unanimously approved Campbell’s appointment, and he would later form part of the majority for the infamous Dred Scott decision. Meanwhile, the Whigs never recovered form Fillmore’s presidency. The party outlasted Fillmore’s administration by a mere two years.
Henry Baldwin died in 1844 during Tyler’s last year in office. Tyler made two tries to replace him, nominating Edward King, and then John M. Read. The Senate refused both appointments, and the seat remained vacant until James Polk became president. Polk tried two more times to fill the seat, naming James Buchanan (the future president who refused the appointment) and George Washington Woodward, who the Senate refused to confirm. Finally Polk nominated Richard Cooper Grier on August 3, 1846 and the Senate unanimously approved his nomination the next day.
Robert Trimble died on August 25, 1828 during John Quincy Adam’s last year in office. Adams, a Democratic-Republican, nominated John J. Crittenden to fill the spot, but Andrew Jackson’s Democratic supporters in the Senate (who that year had split off from the Democratic-Republican) refused to confirm him. After Jackson became president the following March, he named John McLean to the position.
Republicans are now trying to say that there is a “tradition” of waiting until the next president is elected before filling a Supreme Court vacancy during the president’s last year in office. But it turns out that there is precious little evidence of any such “tradition.” The actual history of the Republic says otherwise, although there are exceptions. And when you look at those exceptions, they are just about always during periods of political crises. Johnson was so badly despised by members of his own party that he had already withdrawn from the primary. Buchanan, well he more or less sit on his hands as a civil war loomed. Fillmore was so disastrous he broke his party for all time, completing a feat that his Whig predecessor, Tyler, very nearly accomplished eight years earlier. And John Quincy Adams had the misfortune of being president just as the anti-establishment Andrew Jackson began his scorched-earth path to the Executive Mansion. The Constitution tells us that the Senate has the obligation to consider any Supreme Court nominations sent its way, but history tells us that when the Senate is broken, it tends to stay broken, at least until the next election comes along and clears the air. Which means that the Republican-led gridlock in Congress now threatens to create a Republican-induced gridlock in the Supreme Court. Yes, there’s precedent for that, but not a good one.
February 14th, 2016
TODAY’S AGENDA:
So, what are your plans for Valentine’s Day?
TODAY’S AGENDA is brought to you by:
From GPU News (Milwaukee, WI), February 1972, page 14. (Source.)
EMPHASIS MINE:
I’m not much of a poetry guy, but I’ve always found this Valentine’s Day poem rather haunting. I found it in the February, 1962 issue of ONE magazine a few years ago, and I’ve been posting it for every Valentine’s Day ever since.
John, Passing
Steve, you say your name is, from Columbus, somewhere,
Going through New York on your way to somewhere else.
Oh New York is my home, I offer, smiling secretly
At the handsome aspirant who is really no longer
An aspirant but — John, passing — in one of his legion disguises.
Only last week you were Tim from Maine’s lumbering woods
Ending your vacation days here — Steve, you say.
Oh, yes. You’ve chosen that temporary name, John, passing.
But before we start, and you leave, admiring the neatness of my petite bedroom,
Let me make another plea as I did when you, John, passing, were here as Milo,
A hundred Bobs, Franks, Georges, Bills and one Sylvester ago.
Stay.
John, passing.
Stay.
So I may stop days and weeks searching you,
Finding the many different names you answer to and faces you wear.
So we can weld an iron home from this swirling world
And fend from reality’s cruel sunlight
So loneliness’ deep ulcers can have end and justification in you
And what’s left of this savagely confused pattern can bring a happier existence.
Pause.
You needn’t answer.
I’m sorry.
I’ve embarrassed you.
Steve you say your name is.
We’d better get on before you’re late for your train.
— Vincent Synge
TODAY IN HISTORY:
► 25 YEARS AGO: San Francisco Establishes Domestic Partnership Registry: 1991. The idea had been tossed around since 1979, when gay rights activist Tom Brougham proposed a new category of relationship called “domestic partnership.” His cause was taken up in 1982 by San Francisco Supervisor Harry Britt, who had taken the seat of slain Supervisor Harvey Milk. Britt’s bill authorizing domestic partnerships was vetoed that year by Mayor Dianne Feinstein, It would be passed again in 1989, but that law was repealed by a voter initiative in 1990. Fortunately, that same year city voters approved Proposition K which established a modified version of domestic partnerships which allowed same-sex and opposite-sex couples to register. Fittingly, on February 14, 1991, the brand new registry was established in San Francisco allowing partners to register. San Francisco however wasn’t the first city to provide domestic partnerships. That honor went to West Hollywood in 1985.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
► Jim Kepner: 1923-1997. There’s no telling exactly when Kepner was born. His mother found him wrapped in newspapers under an oleander bush in an empty lot in Galveston, Texas in late September of 1923. They guessed he was about eight months old, give or take. He never knew exactly how old he really was. I asked around trying to get more clues, but Paul Cain, author of Leading the Parade: Conversations with America’s Most Influential Lesbians and Gay Men
And so I shall.
Kepner may have been abandoned because of his deformed leg and club foot, which despite corrective surgery and physical therapy, gave him a limp for the rest of his life. That limp, more than his attempt to classify himself as a Conscientious Objector, probably kept him out of the draft during World War II. That he was open about his homosexuality may have played a part also. In 1942, he moved with his father to San Francisco, where he discovered the underground gay scene. He also began searching for books and other material on homosexuality. Over the years, that search would lead him to compile one of the largest archives of LGBT literature in the U.S.
Between 1943 and 1951, he moved to Los Angeles, New York, Miami, back to San Francisco, then back to Los Angeles. Like a lot of young idealists of his day, he became involved with the Communist party while the U.S. was still allied with the Soviet Union, but was kicked out when his homosexuality became known. Upon returning to L.A., Kepner became involved with the Mattachine Society. Soon after, he met up with other former Mattachine members who had just launched ONE, the first nationally-distributed gay magazine (see Oct 15).
Kepner’s first article in ONE appeared in March, 1954, titled “The Importance of Being Different” under the pseudonym of Lyn Pedersen. His debut article went to the very heart of a critical debate taking place in the gay community. Mattachine founder Harry Hay, for example (see Apr 7), argued that gay people were a distinct cultural minority, while others like Dale Jennings (see Oct 21) argued that the only difference between gay people and straight people was who they went to bed with. Kepner threw his support with Hay, announcing “Vive la Différence!” But he also urged readers not to let the controversy split the nascent movement. “What can a Society accomplish if half of it feels its object is to convince the world we’re just like everyone else and the other half feels homosexuals are variants in the full sense of the term and have every right to be? … Only by allowing the free action of individual groups within the structure of an elastic society can such diverse philosophies work together.”
By the fall of 1954, Kepner was working more or less full time at ONE, although he didn’t draw a salary until 1957. Kepner continued writing under his own name as well as several pseudonyms, mainly as a marketing ploy to mask the fact that ONE had such a tiny staff. Meanwhile, ONE had also established an educational branch, the ONE Institute, in addition to the publication arm of ONE magazine. The competing goals, education versus publication, put a strain on the organization’s meager resources and energies. Kepner finally resigned from ONE in 1960, frustrated by the infighting and what he saw as lax management in the organization.
Kepner stayed out of gay advocacy until the mid sixties. In 1966, he became the secretary of the Southern California Council on Religion and the Homophile, and edited ten issues of their newsletter. He also began publishing his own magazine, Pursuit & Symposium, which focused on gay history. He mortgaged his house to fund it. After two years, the magazine failed and he lost his house. In 1967, he helped to organize a rally in response to the LAPD raid on the Black Cat bar (see Jan 1), where he declared that “the nameless love would never again shut up.” Out of that rally came a new gay rights group, PRIDE (Personal Rights in Defense and Education), with Kepner serving as the editor for the group’s newsletter. In October, that newsletter became The Los Angeles Advocate, then later simply The Advocate. Kepner remained a regular with The Advocate through 1976, and contributed sporadically afterwards. Kepner also helped to form the Society of Pat Rocco Enlightened Enthusiasts (SPREE), a group of film enthusiasts and fans of Pat Rocco (see Feb 9), and Kepner is credited with convincing the Park Theatre’s (straight) owners to program for gay audiences. In 1969, he became an active member of the Los Angeles Gay Liberation Front, and he served on the Christopher Street West committee from 1970 to 1977. He was a founder of the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center, and would come to work as a member of their paid staff for their education program from 1978 to 1980.
Jim Kepner with his archives
Beginning in 1971, Kepner made his vast collection of gay documents and memorabilia available to the public. In 1975, he dubbed his collection the Western Gay Archives, then renamed them again in 1984 as the International Gay and Lesbian Archives. By then, the collection consisted of 25,000 books and thousands of other items. In 1994, Kepner’s collection was merged with ONE’s archives at the University of Southern California. That archive today is known as the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives. If you ever have a chance to stop in, I heartily recommend it. Kepner died in 1997, at about the age of 74. A month later, his anthology, Rough News — Daring Views: 1950s’ Pioneer Gay Press Journalism
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?
February 13th, 2016
If Scalia’s death doesn’t sharpen our attention to what’s really at stake in the 2016 elections, I don’t think anything else will. It’s tempting to think that we’re not likely to see the likes of another Scalia on the top bench. But consider the prospects of a President Trump or a President Cruz or a President Rubio or a President Carson or even a President Kasich entering the White House. I truly believe that all bets will be off, since all of those candidates (except Kasich) have pledged specifically to try to overturn last summer’s Obergefell decision by appointing anti-marriage conservatives to the high court. Scalia was appointed to the bench by Ronald Reagan in 1986 — nearly thirty years ago — so you can see how high the stakes are for naming his replacement. Cruz, Rubio, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnel have already demanded that any question of Scalia’s replacement wait until after the elections. So it’s looks increasingly likely that the Senate will filibuster pretty much anyone Obama nominates to be Scalia’s replacement.
In the next several days, we’ll have a number of pious politicos tell us what a great Justice he was, and why they want more Justices like him on the bench. And we’re also going to hear a number of politicians and thought leaders tell us what horrible people we are for remembering Scalia for the judicial scourge that he was. But how can we remember him otherwise, particularly when his oft-quoted dissents from four landmark gay rights cases are so memorable?
So in the interest of remembering that great man Antonin Gregory Scalia, here are some choice quotes from those four dissents. First, from his dissent from Romer vs.Evans (1996):
The Court has mistaken a Kulturkampf for a fit of spite. The constitutional amendment before us here is not the manifestation of a “`bare . . . desire to harm'” homosexuals, ante, at 13, but is rather a modest attempt by seemingly tolerant Coloradans to preserve traditional sexual mores against the efforts of a politically powerful minority to revise those mores through use of the laws. That objective, and the means chosen to achieve it, are not only unimpeachable under any constitutional doctrine hitherto pronounced (hence the opinion’s heavy reliance upon principles of righteousness rather than judicial holdings); they have been specifically approved by the Congress of the United States and by this Court.
…But though Coloradans are, as I say, entitled to be hostile toward homosexual conduct, the fact is that the degree of hostility reflected by Amendment 2 is the smallest conceivable. The Court’s portrayal of Coloradans as a society fallen victim to pointless, hate filled “gay bashing” is so false as to be comical. Colorado not only is one of the 25 States that have repealed their antisodomy laws, but was among the first to do so. But the society that eliminates criminal punishment for homosexual acts does not necessarily abandon the view that homosexuality is morally wrong and socially harmful; often, abolition simply reflects the view that enforcement of such criminal laws involves unseemly intrusion into the intimate lives of citizens.
There is a problem, however, which arises when criminal sanction of homosexuality is eliminated but moral and social disapprobation of homosexuality is meant to be retained. The Court cannot be unaware of that problem; it is evident in many cities of the country, and occasionally bubbles to the surface of the news, in heated political disputes over such matters as the introduction into local schools of books teaching that homosexuality is an optional and fully acceptable “alternate life style.” The problem (a problem, that is, for those who wish to retain social disapprobation of homosexuality) is that, because those who engage in homosexual conduct tend to reside in disproportionate numbers in certain communities, have high disposable income, and of course care about homosexual rights issues much more ardently than the public at large, they possess political power much greater than their numbers, both locally and statewide. Quite understandably, they devote this political power to achieving not merely a grudging social toleration, but full social acceptance, of homosexuality.
When the Court takes sides in the culture wars, it tends to be with the knights rather than the villains–and more specifically with the Templars, reflecting the views and values of the lawyer class from which the Court’s Members are drawn. How that class feels about homosexuality will be evident to anyone who wishes to interview job applicants at virtually any of the Nation’s law schools. The interviewer may refuse to offer a job because the applicant is a Republican; because he is an adulterer; because he went to the wrong prep school or belongs to the wrong country club; because he eats snails; because he is a womanizer; because she wears real animal fur; or even because he hates the Chicago Cubs. But if the interviewer should wish not to be an associate or partner of an applicant because he disapproves of the applicant’s homosexuality, then he will have violated the pledge which the Association of American Law Schools requires all its member schools to exact from job interviewers: “assurance of the employer’s willingness” to hire homosexuals.
Scalia’s dissent from From Lawrence vs. Texas (2003), which struck down sodomy laws nationwide:
This reasoning leaves on pretty shaky grounds state laws limiting marriage to opposite-sex couples. Justice O’Connor seeks to preserve them by the conclusory statement that “preserving the traditional institution of marriage” is a legitimate state interest. But “preserving the traditional institution of marriage” is just a kinder way of describing the State’s moral disapproval of same-sex couples. Texas’s interest in §21.06 could be recast in similarly euphemistic terms: “preserving the traditional sexual mores of our society.” In the jurisprudence Justice O’Connor has seemingly created, judges can validate laws by characterizing them as “preserving the traditions of society” (good); or invalidate them by characterizing them as “expressing moral disapproval” (bad).
Today’s opinion is the product of a Court, which is the product of a law-profession culture, that has largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda, by which I mean the agenda promoted by some homosexual activists directed at eliminating the moral opprobrium that has traditionally attached to homosexual conduct. I noted in an earlier opinion the fact that the American Association of Law Schools (to which any reputable law school must seek to belong) excludes from membership any school that refuses to ban from its job-interview facilities a law firm (no matter how small) that does not wish to hire as a prospective partner a person who openly engages in homosexual conduct. See Romer, supra, at 653.
One of the most revealing statements in today’s opinion is the Court’s grim warning that the criminalization of homosexual conduct is “an invitation to subject homosexual persons to discrimination both in the public and in the private spheres.It is clear from this that the Court has taken sides in the culture war, departing from its role of assuring, as neutral observer, that the democratic rules of engagement are observed. Many Americans do not want persons who openly engage in homosexual conduct as partners in their business, as scoutmasters for their children, as teachers in their children’s schools, or as boarders in their home. They view this as protecting themselves and their families from a lifestyle that they believe to be immoral and destructive. The Court views it as “discrimination” which it is the function of our judgments to deter. So imbued is the Court with the law profession’s anti-anti-homosexual culture, that it is seemingly unaware that the attitudes of that culture are not obviously “mainstream”; that in most States what the Court calls “discrimination” against those who engage in homosexual acts is perfectly legal; that proposals to ban such “discrimination” under Title VII have repeatedly been rejected by Congress, that in some cases such “discrimination” is mandated by federal statute, (mandating discharge from the armed forces of any service member who engages in or intends to engage in homosexual acts); and that in some cases such “discrimination” is a constitutional right (see Boy Scouts of America v. Dale, 530 U.S. 640 (2000)).
…Today’s opinion dismantles the structure of constitutional law that has permitted a distinction to be made between heterosexual and homosexual unions, insofar as formal recognition in marriage is concerned. If moral disapprobation of homosexual conduct is “no legitimate state interest” for purposes of proscribing that conduct, and if, as the Court coos (casting aside all pretense of neutrality), “[w]hen sexuality finds overt expression in intimate conduct with another person, the conduct can be but one element in a personal bond that is more enduring,” what justification could there possibly be for denying the benefits of marriage to homosexual couples exercising “[t]he liberty protected by the Constitution”? Surely not the encouragement of procreation, since the sterile and the elderly are allowed to marry. This case “does not involve” the issue of homosexual marriage only if one entertains the belief that principle and logic have nothing to do with the decisions of this Court. Many will hope that, as the Court comfortingly assures us, this is so.
Scalia’s dissent from US v. Windsor (2013), which declared the Defense of Marriage Act unconstitutional (by now, he’s at least seeing the writing on the wall):
However, even setting aside traditional moral disapproval of same-sex marriage (or indeed same-sex sex),there are many perfectly valid—indeed, downright boring—justifying rationales for this legislation. Their existence ought to be the end of this case. For they give the lie to the Court’s conclusion that only those with hateful hearts could have voted “aye” on this Act. And more importantly, they serve to make the contents of the legislators’ hearts quite irrelevant: “”It is a familiar principle of constitutional law that this Court will not strike down an otherwise constitutional statute on the basis of an alleged illicit legislative motive.” Or at least it was a familiar principle. By holding to the contrary, the majority has declared open season on any law that (in the opinion of the law’s opponents and any panel of like-minded federal judges) can be characterized as mean-spirited.
…The penultimate sentence of the majority’s opinion is a naked declaration that “[t]his opinion and its holding are confined” to those couples “joined in same-sex marriages made lawful by the State.” I have heard such “bald, unreasoned disclaimer[s]” before. When the Court declared a constitutional right to homosexual sodomy, we were assured that the case had nothing, nothing at all to do with “whether the government must give formal recognition to any relationship that homosexual persons seek to enter,” — with an accompanying citation of Lawrence. Now we are told that DOMA is invalid because it “demeans the couple, whose moral and sexual choices the Constitution protects.” It takes real cheek for today’s majority to assure us, as it is going out the door, that a constitutional requirement to give formal recognition to same-sex marriage is not at issue here — when what has preceded that assurance is a lecture on how superior the majority’s moral judgment in favor of same-sex marriage is to the Congress’s hateful moral judgment against it. I promise you this: The only thing that will “confine” the Court’s holding is its sense of what it can get away with.
…As I have said, the real rationale of today’s opinion, whatever disappearing trail of its legalistic argle-bargle one chooses to follow, is that DOMA is motivated by “‘bare . . . desire to harm'” couples in same-sex marriages. How easy it is, indeed how inevitable, to reach the same conclusion with regard to state laws denying same-sex couples marital status.
Scalia’s dissent from Obergefell v Hodges (2015), which struck down bans of same-sex marriage nationwide:
The substance of today’s decree is not of immense personal importance to me. The law can recognize as marriage whatever sexual attachments and living arrangements it wishes, and can accord them favorable civil consequences, from tax treatment to rights of inheritance. Those civil consequences—and the public approval that conferring the name of marriage evidences—can perhaps have adverse social effects, but no more adverse than the effects of many other controversial laws. So it is not of special importance to me what the law says about marriage. It is of overwhelming importance, however, who it is that rules me. Today’s decree says that my Ruler, and the Ruler of 320 million Americans coast-to-coast, is a majority of the nine lawyers on the Supreme Court. The opinion in these cases is the furthest extension in fact—and the furthest extension one can even imagine—of theCourt’s claimed power to create “liberties” that the Constitution and its Amendments neglect to mention. This practice of constitutional revision by an unelected committee of nine, always accompanied (as it is today) by extravagant praise of liberty, robs the People of the most important liberty they asserted in the Declaration of Independence and won in the Revolution of 1776: the freedom to govern themselves.
…This is a naked judicial claim to legislative—indeed, super-legislative—power; a claim fundamentally at odds with our system of government. Except as limited by a constitutional prohibition agreed to by the People, the States are free to adopt whatever laws they like, even those that offend the esteemed Justices’ “reasoned judgment.” A system of government that makes the People subordinate to a committee of nine unelected lawyers does not deserve to be called a democracy.
…If, even as the price to be paid for a fifth vote, I ever joined an opinion for the Court that began: “The Constitution promises liberty to all within its reach, a liberty that includes certain specific rights that allow persons, within a lawful realm, to define and express their identity,” I would hide my head in a bag. The Supreme Court of the United States has descended from the disciplined legal reasoning ofJohn Marshall and Joseph Story to the mystical aphorisms of the fortune cookie.
February 13th, 2016
The Supreme Court has been a body in political balance with three liberal justices, three conservative justices, and Justice Kennedy who, in the middle, often swung the majority. But there has been concern for some time that a few of the more liberal justices are aging and may soon wish to retire and, depending on the President at that time, this could shift the bench’s direction.
But I don’t think anyone expected this: (San Antonio Express)
Associate Justice Antonin Scalia was found dead of apparent natural causes Saturday on a luxury resort in West Texas, federal officials said.
A federal official who asked not to be named said there was no evidence of foul play and it appeared that Scalia died of natural causes.
Scalia was a constitutional originalist in that he held that the protections in the Constitution should be interpreted by the original teachings of the Roman Catholic Church. Or so it seemed to me.
A man never deterred by compassion or decency, Scalia was quick to denounce those of whom he disapproved in scathing tones. Among such were gays and lesbians who his judicial review never seemed to find in the inclusive language of the Constitution. For Scalia, “all men” came with an asterisk (*except the homosexuals).
He will not be missed by our community.
February 13th, 2016
TODAY’S AGENDA is brought to you by:
From This Week In Texas, July 2, 1977, page 30.
THIS MONTH IN HISTORY:
► Magazine cover provokes outrage: 1960. Fifty-five years ago, ONE magazine published yet another issue, just like it always did every month. This one, as issues go, was rather ordinary: A couple of poems, two short stories, an article about the organization of families, another one asking “Can we be worthy of a free erotic life?”, a scathing book review of Edmund Bergler’s 1000 Homosexuals (Bergler, a homo-obsessed psychoanalyst, was the delightful combination of Paul Cameron and Scott Lively of his day), an advice column by psychologist Blanche Baker titled “Toward Understanding,” a brief commentary on England’s long-running debate over the Wolfenden Report’s recommendation that Parliament rescind the nation’s sodomy laws (see Sep 4), and a few letters to the editor. It was a decent issue, but mostly unremarkable. But the following month, one reader felt compelled to complain about that issue:
Dear ONE:
Good grief, Charley Brown! The cover of the February issue is simply TOO MUCH! For months now , with a snarl on my lips and no joy in my heart, I have been looking at those effeminate line drawings, girlish youths and that awful photograph of a nelly cop an ONE cover without so much as a line of protest to you. Looking back I can’t find anything like a real male figure all the way back to that sailor drawing in ’57. And now these weird creatures! They’re enough to steam a saint!
ONE, May 1957.
I know that many people have a positive predilection for effeminancy, as opposed to true femininity. I don’t have such a feeling; in fact an overdose of male girlishness gives me the vapors. If real male art is hard to come by couldn’t you canvass friends? Nobody wants ONE to ape the muscle mags with sweaty weightlifters all over the place, but this shouldn’t deny us the opportunity of seeing on occasional attractive man in your pages.
One last item: I think all this grotesquely womanish art is bad psychologically for those of your readers who are battling to free themselves from self-identication with the popularly-held homosexaul stereotype. Please help them remember once in a while that the average person with homosexual preferences looks, and is, as male as the next guy.
ONE, February 1958.
The Daughters of Bilitis insisted that women wear proper skirts instead of jeans or slacks at DoB events. Police often entered lesbian bars to make sure women wore blouses with the buttons on the left instead of the right. Men had fewer imposed fewer dress code restrictions (outside of drag, anyway), but they were no less scrutinized and judged if they otherwise fell afoul of gender norms. And many of those judgments often came from gay men and women toward other gay men and women, in many cases just as harshly as those coming from the police or others outside the gay community.
Those who violated those gender norms — and those norms were much more restrictive fifty-five years ago — were seen as garish neon signs that drew far too much unwanted attention. A man who was romantically inclined towards other men was already violating far more gender norms than anyone could count. And in 1960, the last thing most of such men (and women) wanted to see was other people whose gender-role variance they perceived as being more visible than their own.
Grant Wood, self-portrait, 1932.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
► 125 YEARS AGO: Grant Wood: 1891-1942. Born a few miles outside of Anamosa, Iowa, the great expanse of the upper great plains and the solid simplicity of its people would always be near to his heart. He studied at the Art Institute in Chicago, and from 1920 to 1928, he made four trips to Europe where he studied Impressionism and Post-Impressionist styles of painting, but his heat never strayed far Iowa, nor did his style stray from simplicity and directness which are the bedrock of Iowa’s people. His style became known as Regionalism, which depicted rural American themes in a style which recalled the severe Calvinism of Northern Renaissance paintings.
American Gothic, 1930.
This is best exemplified in his iconic 1930 painting American Gothic, perhaps among the best known, best loved, and best parodied of American paintings. Art critics, at least those who assumed the painting was meant to be satire of small-town life, praised it. When a copy was printed in the Cedar Rapids Gazette, locals denounced their depiction as “pinched, grim-faced, puritanical Bible-thumpers.” Wood himself defended the painting as simply a a depiction of the American pioneer spirit. He also became a vocal critic of modernist trends and the dominance of the East coast art world. No other American artist before or since has earned such national fame without ever showing his work in New York.
In 1932, he founded the Stone City Art Colony to help other artists get through the Great Depression, and from 1934 to 1941 he taught at the University of Iowa’s School of Art, where his teaching career was very nearly derailed over accusations that Wood was gay. The only report that contains the complete details of those accusations was buried in a time capsule of the Art and Art History Building in 1934, and the details will remain hidden until the cornerstone is opened some twenty years from now. New allegations arose in 1941 when university colleagues, most of whom embraced the European trends that Wood so clearly disdained, tried to get Wood removed from the faculty. Their accusations centered around a very brief marriage that ended in divorce in 1938 and the handsome young roommates who lived in his home. When a reporter from Time came sniffing, the university president managed to get the story spiked, and reorganized the Art Department so that Wood would be placed in an entirely separate division and away from his detractors. But before Wood could resume teaching, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and died in February 12, 1942.
Most biographies which have come out since Wood’s death have either avoided his homosexuality or dismissed it. Tripp Evans’s 2010 Grant Wood: A Life
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?
February 12th, 2016
TODAY’S AGENDA is brought to you by:
From The Calendar (San Antonio, TX), February 11, 1983, page 24.
TODAY IN HISTORY:
► Premiere of “Making Love”: 1982. Starring Michael Ontkean, Charlie’s Angels star Kate Jackson, and Harry Hamlin, Making Love opened in theaters as the first mainstream film to tackle homosexuality in a nonjudgmental way. That’s not to say that the story wasn’t without drama when Zach (Ontkean) and Claire (Jackson) dealt with a crumbling marriage as Zach struggled to deal with his attractions to other men. When he meets gay novelist Bart McGuire (Hamlin), their professional relationship (Zach was a doctor, Bart a patient who was in for a check-up) turned into a lunch date, then a dinner date, and then a full-fledged relationship, which over time, ends in a divorce for Zach and Claire. Claire handles the news badly, but over time comes to understand that gay people can live happy lives. The film’s happily-ever-after ending had the cautious feel of a made-for-TV movie, which critics hated. Gay critics, however, were overjoyed that the film was a positive portrayal where the gay characters didn’t all die in the end.
In real life however, the film demonstrated one significant difficulty in making mainstream movies about gay men: it seemed to confirm the fear that taking such a role would be career killers. Tom Berenger, Michael Douglas, Harrison Ford, William Hurt and Peter Strauss were all approached to play Zach; they all turned the role down. After the film’s release Ontkean and Hamlin had trouble living the film down. Hamlin’s promising career stalled for the next four years until he landed a role in NBC’s L.A. Law. Ontkean tried to prevent clips of his role from appearing in Vito Russo’s 1996 documentary The Celluloid Closet.
► San Francisco Mayor Orders Issuance of Same-Sex Marriage Licenses: 2004. It was a stunning announcement, when San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom declared that the California Constitution’s equal protection clause gave him the authority to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Between February 12 and March 11, 2004, an estimated 4,000 joyous couples lined up at City Hall to take part in what was quickly dubbed “The Winter of Love.” But the weddings came to an abrupt halt when the California Supreme Court declared that the mayor lacked the authority to bypass state law. All of those marriage licenses were voided, and same-sex marriage would remain unavailable until 2008 when the state Supreme Court found that “equal respect and dignity” of marriage is a “basic civil right” for all couples in California, gay or straight. That finding was overturned by California voters when they approved Prop 8 in 2008, which itself was ruled unconstitutional in 2010. That ruling was upheld by a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in 2012, and a challenge to the U.S. Supreme Court by anti-gay activists was rejected due to lack of standing in 2013.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
► Philipp zu Eulenburg: 1847-1921. A close, personal friend of Kaiser Wilhelm II, Eulenburg had a tremendous influence over the younger Kaiser, and over Germany’s politics in general. Like virtually everyone else in positions of influence, Eulenburg married a Swedish countess in his twenties. Together they had eight children. But also like many others of similar outlook, his marriage did little to discourage his many liaisons with others in the Kaiser’s inner circle.
In 1900, Eulenburg’s brother was exposed as a homosexual. The Kaiser demanded that Eulenburg cut all contact with his brother, a demand that Eulenburg refused, though that refusal appears not to have affected Eulenburg’s career. That same year, Eulenburg was given the title of prince in recognition of Eulenburg’s valuable counsel and friendship to the Kaiser. That counsel included urging the Kaiser to exercise a more autocratic rule independent of the Reichstag. Eulenburg also retained his post as Ambassador to Austria-Hungary, which he had held since 1893.
But holding such a powerful and influential position in the Kaiser’s court made Eulenburg a political target. In 1902, Eulenburg resigned his Ambassadorship and withdrew from politics, pleading exhaustion, although we now know that the real reason was blackmail. That was at about the same time the Germany was rocked by revelations that German industrialist Friedrick Krupp was frolicking with young men in Capri and Berlin (see Feb 17). Eulenburg returned to the Court in 1906, where he again drew the ire of critics of the Kaiser’s increasingly autocratic rule and expansionist foreign policy. Eulenburg’s timing for his return wasn’t good. Between 1906 and 1907, six military officers committed suicide after being blackmailed, and dozens of soldiers and officers had faced courts marshall for homosexuality.
Maximillian Harden, publisher of Die Zukunft, struck the first blow agaisnt Eulenburg by outing him in an article printed in April of 1907. Harden also outed General Kuno von Moltke in the same article. At the Kaiser’s urging, Eulenburg and Moltke denied the report and charged Harden with libel. Moltke’s trial came in 1907. It didn’t go well for Moltke. His former wife, a soldier, and even sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld (see May 14) testified against him. The court declared that Molte indeed was gay and cleared Harden of libel. The Kaiser voided the verdict and demanded a new trial, which found Harden guilty. He was sentenced to four months imprisonment.
But the details from the first trial both shocked and disgusted Germany. When Eulenburg’s perjury trial came around in 1908 — he was charged for denying his homosexuality during the Moltke trial — the prosecution had lined up hundreds of witnesses. Forty-one testified against Eulenburg, including several who described watching him through a keyhole. Eulenburg collapsed in the courtroom early in the trial, and proceedings were suspended while he underwent medical treatment. It resumed later that year with Eulenburg on a stretcher, but was suspended again due to his poor health. The case remained in limbo until the destruction of the German Empire in 1918, and it never resumed after that. Eulenburg remained in retirement, with no further contact with the Kaiser, until Eulenburg’s death in 1921 at the age of 74.
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?
February 11th, 2016
TODAY’S AGENDA:
Events This Weekend: Belgium Leatherpride, Antwerp, Belgium; Cologne Street Carnival, Cologne, Germany; Gay Mardi Gras, New Orleans, LA; Arizona Gay Rodeo, Phoenix, AZ; Sitges Carnival, Sitges, Spain.
TODAY’S AGENDA is brought to you by:
From The Advocate, March 15, 1972, page 7. (Personal collection.)
Before San Francisco’s Eureka Valley rebranded itself for the Castro Theater that remains its most prominent landmark, gay life in San Francisco centered on Polk Street, particularly the area between Geary and Union known locally as Polk Gulch or Polk Strasse. California Hall, at Polk and Turk, saw an important event in San Francisco gay history when police raided a New Years Day Mardi Gras ball sponsored by the Council on Religion and the Homosexual. The ensuing uproar forever changed LGBT politics in the city. Polk Street was also the location for San Francisco’s first Gay Pride parade in 1972. The Town Squire, a clothing store that opened in 1960, was just one of scores of popular businesses catering to the gay trade. By the late 1970s, gay life shifted to the Castro, and Polk Street became known more for its hustlers, sex workers and transgender refugees. In recent years, the entire area has undergone massive gentrfication, pushing out all of the old queer places and queer people. The storefront today is home to a computer repair business, with swank new condos rising up from above it.
A couple walks past police officers to attend the New Year’s Mardi Gras ball.
TODAY IN HISTORY:
► SF Judge Acquits Four From New Years Day Raid: 1965. On New Years Day, San Francisco police raided a ball hosted by the Council on Religion and the Homosexual, a coalition of of gay and straight people of faith in the Bay area (see Jan 1). The raid took place despite negotiations between ball organizers and the SFPD which resulted in an empty promise by SFBD not to harass attendees or arrest anyone arriving at the ball in costume, including those in drag. Instead, police snapped photos of everyone trying to enter the building and later demanded entrance. Three CRH lawyers explained that the party was a private party under California law and that police could not enter without buying tickets or showing a warrant. The lawyers were arrested, along with a ticket-taker, and charged with obstructing an officer.
Trial for the four began on February 8 with Marshall Krause, an attorney from the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, demanding that the police state in detail what the four did to interfere with the officers. Three inspectors and one officer were called to the stand and questioned extensively. According to the testimony, the officers had, in fact, gained entrance to the hall, but were stopped inside when the four asked for search warrants as required under the Constitution. When asked why police were taking pictures of guests arriving at the ball even though no crime had occurred, one official replied that police “wanted pictures of these people because some of them might be connected to national security.” He also claimed that the more than two dozen officers and two photographers were necessary “just to inspect the premises.” On February 11, their testimony ended, and Krause moved that the case be dismissed because the prosecution’s contention that the charges against the defendants lacked merit. Judge Leo Friedman agreed, and directed the jury to return not guilty verdicts.
The raid and resulting acquittals would be a major turning point for the gay rights movement in San Francisco. City officials, embarrassed by the obvious police misconduct, responded by designating officer Elliot Blackstone as the first liaison between the department and the LGBT community. One of the lawyers who had been arrested and charged, Herb Donaldson, would go on to become San Francisco’s first openly gay judge. Two years later, the Los Angeles Advocate would contrast the differing political climates for the gay community in Los Angeles to San Francisco and credit the “unbelievably inept harassment of a big New Year’s Eve Ball a few years ago” for “triggering the homosexual resurgence, and the organizations were quick to capitalize on the police bungling.”
[Sources: Kay Tobin. “After the ball…” The Ladder 9, no. 5 (February 1965): 4-5.
Unsigned. “Cross currents.” The Ladder 9, no. 9 (June 1965): 14-16.
Unsigned. Editorial: “Politics by the bay.” The Los Angeles Advocate 1, no. 4 (December 1967): 6.]
Time magazine, Feb 9,1976.
► 40 YEARS AGO: Newspapers Pull “Doonesbury” Over Gay Character: 1976. Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury, which had been in syndication for little over five years, had gained a reputation for taking on a host of controversial subjects: sex, drugs, the Vietnam War, race, women’s lib, Watergate, you name it. In 1975, Trudeau won a Pulitzer for Editorial Cartooning, making Doonesbury the first regular comic strip to be so honored. Trudeau was, you might say, the Jon Stewart of his day. President Gerald Ford, who was often skewered in Doonesbury, remarked, “There are only three major vehicles to keep us informed as to what is going on in Washington—the electronic media, the print media and Doonesbury, and not necessarily in that order.” On February 9, 1976, Time magazine put the cast of Doonesbury on its front cover, and noting, “The panels are so volatile that half a dozen editors regularly run the strip on the editorial page.”
As if to prove that volatility, just two days later newspaper editors across the country were confronted with what to do with that day’s latest Doonesbury installment. The strip was, by today’s standards, pretty innocuous: a simple conversation between Walden College law student Joanie Caucus and classmate Andy Lippincott, with whom Joanie has developed a crush. Andy sits down with her and explains the situation: he’s gay.
That panel sent dozens of newspaper editors over the cliff. At least three major newspapers — The Columbus (Ohio) Citizen-Journal, The Cleveland Press and The Houston Post — and an unknown number of smaller papers suspended the strip. Thomas Boardmen of The Cleveland Press tried to put a thoughtful, but ultimately self-contradictory spin on their decision: “The subject of homosexuality is one of the most important issues facing our society today and it deserves special treatment. We are not shying away from it but we do not believe that it is proper for the comic page.” Charles Egger, editor of the Citizen-Journal, faintly echoed his Cleveland counterpart: “We felt the subject matter was not appropriate for the comic page.” After the Citizen-Journal’s switchboard was flooded with thousands of complaints, the paper offered to mail copies of the deleted strip to those who requested it. In Houston, Post editors also called the strip “inappropriate on a comic page,” but a local radio station responded by reading it over the air, as did member of the Gay Activist Alliance at the University of Houston when anyone called their office number. “We’ve been getting about 50 calls a day,” said an unnamed GAA spokesman. All three papers resumed publishing the strip by the following Monday.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
► Tammy Baldwin: 1962. Her political career began in 1986 when she won a seat to the Dane County (Madison, Wisconsin) Board of Supervisors. In 1992, she won a race for the Wisconsin State Assembly by defeating two other candidates while garnering 59% of the vote. She was one of only six openly gay politicians nationwide to win a general election that year, and she was the first openly lesbian Assembly member. When Congressman Scott Klug announced his retirement in 1998, Baldwin ran for that seat and won, making her the first woman to be sent to Congress from Wisconsin, and the first person to enter Congress as an openly gay representative. She would go on to represent the 2nd District for seven terms. In 2013, she became the first openly gay Senator in history after defeating former Gov. Tommy Thompson to represent Wisconsin in the U.S. Senate.
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?
February 10th, 2016
TODAY’S AGENDA is brought to you by:
From Our Community (Dallas, TX), May 1971, page 10.
Dallas’s gay newspaper Our Community had this brief write-up:
If a stranger steps into the SWINGER, he want be a stranger long.’ I’d never been in a butch bar before, so I was a little apprehensive when I opened the door: I mean all those butch cowboy types. What if one of those handsome brutes lassod (sic) me, threw me down and “had his way” with me! Of course I’d try to defend myself (but I’m not very strong)”! This didn’t happen, but I’d been there only a few moments before I meet several friendly studs. They said: “If you go once, you’ll return often.” I’did. So will you. It’s friendly, like home.
The Swinger burned five months later. The site is now a Chevron station.
Post cards by J.C. Leyendecker, 1900.
THIS MONTH IN HISTORY:
► A New Homosexual Trait?: 1920. Dr. Walter Courtenay Rivers raised in the February, 1920 issue of Medical Review of Reviews:
A sexuological brochure published in 1913 brought me some correspondence both home and foreign. Among the writers of these letters was an English public school ‘coach,’ whom later I met. I then found that altho he had written he was glad my book had appeared, he was an invert himself; not only that, but a member of a homosexual coterie; and besides, one who physically indulged his abnormality. Upon which I felt that his acquaintance and correspondence were too potentially compromising for my as yet extremely slight scientific name. I asked him to send his ‘case’ to Dr HAVELOCK ELLIS (to whom I wrote about him also), and declined further communication with regret, for of course clinical experience is the only road to discovery. However, one clue I did get. He kept a large cat of which he seemed very fond, and he remarked that many of his friends had the same taste in pets.
The “brochure” that Rivers mentioned was a booklet published in 1913, titled Walt Whitman’s Anomaly, which explores exactly what its title implied: that Walt Whitman was a sexual invert or, in the still-newfangled terminology of the medical literature, a homosexual. Rivers was undoubtedly surprised by his “coach’s” interest in the book, as its sale was “restricted to members of the legal and medical professions. This was quite common at a time when anything which might be remotely construed as non-condemning of the “abominable vice” was routinely banned as obscene. Havelock Ellis’s early works were not immune from such official attentions (see Feb 2). And so Rivers’s nervousness over merely maintaining a correspondence with an invert was neither out of the ordinary nor out of line.
And yet, Rivers’s articles and writings were among a growing body of literature which was just beginning to try to figure out who these homosexuals were that they kept encountering. Given how little was really known about gay people, coupled with reluctance of the overwhelming majority of gay people to make themselves known, every tiny clue took in a huge significance. Including cats.
Since [Magnus] HIRSCHFELD’S (see May 14) exhaustive work does not mention such a trait, the matter seemed worth inquiry, and it is attacked here in the following way: First I have taken HIRSCFIELD’S list of eminent men who were of inverted disposition, and looked for record of their affection’ for cats as pets; secondly I have taken eminent persons who are stated to have been cat lovers, and looked for evidence of inversion in them.
Rivers encountered several difficulties in the first approach; Hirschfeld’s list went back into antiquity; Hirschfeld didn’t see pet ownership as an important detail to record, some names on Hirshfeld’s list weren’t prominent enough for such details to survive. But Rivers did find four worth mentioning: the 18th-century art historian and Member of Parliament Horace Walpole, the English poet Edward Fitzgerald, the French poet Charles Baudelaire, and the English essayist Walter Pater, for whom Rivers provided the following evidence of homosexuality:
The evidence of PATER’S inverted disposition might first be briefly given. He never smoked and never married; he was entirely averse to outdoor games altho not physically weak; he wore always a green tie; his works show passim a special sensibility to young male beauty.
But about their cats:
Four out of thirty-one is a proportion of one in eight. Is one out of every eight men, or, for the matter of that, one out of every eight distinguished men, devoted to cats? I imagine most people would say no. Some men, and particularly distinguished men, have notoriously a horror of them. These four, by the way, were all writers, and HAVELOCK ELLIS states that inversion is particularly frequent amongst authors. They were also pretty exclusively homosexual; there is no evidence of a bisexual disposition
Rivers then compiled his list of known cat-lovers in history “taking only those who have been dead some time” — undoubtedly to avoid impugning the reputation of a living person and opening himself up to charges of libel. Rivers then lists them:
Pope GREGORY the GREAT, HOKUSAI, TASSO, A. DE MUSSET, PAUL DE KOCK, PETRARCH, COWPER, WORDSWORTH, LISTON the SURGEON, RICHELIEU, CIIATEAUBRIAND, T. GAUTIER, DR. JOHNSON, SIR WALTER SCOTT, DUMAS the ELDER, SHELLEY, JEREMY BENTHAM.
Of how many of these may inversion be deemed a likely characteristic?
The quest now is much more difficult. To begin with, of none can we expect the trait looked for to be recorded outright. It will be a matter of inferring its presence from other, and commonly associated, characteristics, such as friendship enthusiasm, feminine tastes, aversion to women, physical stigmata of degeneration, and so forth; while even these may easily escape biographical mention. Again, bisexuality, physical attraction to men and women both, may mask inversion. Perhaps for these reasons, none of these cat lovers figure in HIRSCHFELD’S list of eminent inverts already spoken of.
You will notice Rivers’s referring to “physical stigmata of degeneration,” a reference to Degeneration Theory that I’ve mentioned elsewhere in these historical notes (see, for example, Sep 9, Jan 25, Feb 7). It was a medical axiom in those days that homosexuality, along with many other physical and mental ailments, were the result of evolution gone wrong. Before the industrial era, natural selection meant that the fittest survived. But modern society was now allowing all sorts of lesser-fit people to survive and breed, resulting in a kind of reversal of evolution — they called it “de-generation” — in which mankind was de-evolving or “degenerating” to a more primitive, less advanced state. The theory further held that degeneracy was not only imprinted on the brain, but the “physical stigmata” or signs of the degeneracy could also be found on the body as well, whether it was a physical abnormality, or the shape of the head, the cut of the brow, the width of the nose, the tone of the skin — you can see where this went racially, can’t you?
At any rate, River’s struck two individuals from his list immediately as not being gay, and concluded that only three were definitely gay. Three of seventeen now brings the ratio to somewhere closer to one in five. Clearly, he thought, he was onto something. But why cats?
And there is something else relevant to cats which is also relevant to our subject, and that is the close association in the human mind of cats with femininity. One always associates cats with the woman’s world, and of course male inverts are very often of feminine tastes. The former proposition seems the truer and profounder the more one tests it…
A good many readers, perhaps, will agree that fondness for cats does, on the whole, seem entitled to a place among male homosexual characteristics. If it be, then the reason is that it is a woman’s taste. My subject aforesaid, the public school coach, had his cat beside him when pouring out tea; which he did, if not, like COMPTON MACKENZIE’S inverted author WILMOT dispensing similar hospitality. See Sinister Street Vol 1. ‘with a myriad mincing gestures,’ still with quite unmasculine competence, gusto and deliberation; he sucked sweets, smoked only cigarettes. Indeed the tale of male homosexual traits has probably not yet been given anywhere with anything like completeness. For the heart of the inverted man seems always reaching out after something womanish in order to adopt it; or else recoiling from something that reminds him he is bodily a man. Of that unfortunate being it might almost be said:
Femina est: nihil feminitatis a se alienum putat.
[Source: W.C. Rivers. “A new male homosexual trait?” Medical Review of Reviews 26, no. 2 (February 1920): 55-60. Available online via Google Books here.]
TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
► John Yang: 1958. The Chillicothe, Ohio native rose quickly though the journalism ranks, beginning with the Boston Globe in 198o, then Time in 1986 and the Wall Street Journal in 1986. In 1990, he moved to the Washington Post and remained there for the next ten years as a political reporter. In 1999, he made the move to television as the D.C. correspondent for ABC News, where he earned a Peabody for his coverage of the 9/11 attacks on the Pentagon. He then became a Middle East correspondent from 2002 to 2004. Yang recalled the phone conversation with Peter Jennings when he got that gig:
“I was extremely flattered because at ABC News, Peter Jennings had veto power over foreign correspondents. And this was an area that Peter cared deeply about. And actually Peter got on the phone … It’s actually something that Peter said to me,” Yang recalled. “It’s that he thought that — and looking back, you can take what he said a couple of different ways, whether he meant [me] being Asian or being gay — but that he thought that what I would bring to that reporting was an understanding or an insight into … people who are marginalized.”
In 2007, he was once again in Washington, D.C., this time as White House correspondent for NBC News. He is currently a reporter and commentator for NBC Nightly News, Today, and for MSNBC.
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?
February 9th, 2016
TODAY’S AGENDA is brought to you by:
From The Los Angeles Advocate, July 1968, pages 12-13.
The Park Theater opened in Los Angeles in 1911 as the Alvarado Theatre on its namesake street just off MacArthur Park. In the 1960s, it was renamed the Park Theatre when it switched to porn. In 1968, the theater switched to gay-themed movies (including porn as well as art house movies). That switch was announced in June when the theater announced “A Most Unusual Male Film Festival,” which is believed to be the first gay film festival in a regular public theater. The Park continued to show gay films until 1971, when it was renovated into a twin theater and returned to mainstream films. The theater closed in 1986. The building is still there, although its glory days are long gone.
TODAY IN HISTORY:
► AIDS Employment Discrimination Declared Illegal in California: 1987. In the first such case in the nation, the California Fair Employment and Housing Commission unanimously ordered that the defense contractor Raytheon pay damages of about $6,000 to a Santa Barbara employee who was denied reinstatement to work following hospitalization due to an AIDS-related illness. John Chadbourne was given medical leave in December 19983 when he was hospitalized with pneumonia. He was diagnosed with AIDS one month later. He recovered from pneumonia and his doctor said he healthy enough to return to work, but his employer would not reinstate him without assurances that other employees would not be endangered. Instead, Raytheon kept him on medical leave, which meant that he retained his benefits (including medical insurance), but was living on significantly reduced income from his disability insurance. The Commission ruled that AIDS is a disability under the law and employers may not discriminate against people with AIDS who are able to work. With that ruling, Chadbourne was vindicated — or at least his estate was. Chadbourne died in January 1985, two years before the Commission’s ruling.
Raytheon went on to significantly improve its policies toward LGBT people and people with AIDS, becoming the first defense contractor to earn a 100% rating on the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index in 2005.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAY’S:
► Amy Lowell: 1874-1925. Her pedigree was impeccable: her family were those Lowells, of Brookline, Massachusetts. Her brother, Lawrence, was president of Harvard; another brother, Percival, was a renowned mathematician and astronomer, founder of the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, and who began the effort which led to the discovery of Pluto fourteen years after his death. Amy, born and reared at Seveneies, the ten-acre family estate, was the baby of the family. Befitting a daughter of a fine Episcopalian family of New England, she was first tutored at home, then attended the best private schools in Boston when she was not touring Europe with her family. At seventeen, her family decided that attending college was not a proper activity for a young woman, so she ensconced herself in the family’s 7,000-volume library at Seveneis and taught herself literature.
In 1902, on one of her many tours of Europe, she was inspired to take up poetry. In 1910, her work began appearing in Atlantic Monthly, and her first published collection, A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass, was published two years later. At about that time, she and actress Ada Dwyer Russell entered what was then known as a “Boston Marriage,” and they remained together for the rest of Lowell’s life. It is believed that Russell is the subject of Lowell’s love poems in ‘Two Speak Together’, from Pictures of the Floating World.
During one of the couple’s European tours, they met the Imagist poet Ezra Pound. Lowell embraced the Imagist style, so named by the precise use of visual images to convey a clarity of expression. It was also marked by free verse, where, according to Lowell, “one must abandon all desire to find in it the even rhythm of metrical feet. One must allow the lines to flow as they will when read aloud by an intelligent reader.” Then an Anglo-American movement, Lowell’s contribution to the style was in what she called “polyphonic prose,” in which the very written structure of the poetry was broken down and rendered as prose, which was then sometimes intermixed with structured verse. Her embrace and promotion of Imagist Poetry was so intense that it actually had the effect of driving a wedge between Pound and the Imagists, who he began derisively calling “Amygists.” His criticism of Lowell became pointedly personal. Referring to her short stature, her glandular-induced weight problems (and, undoubtedly, put off by her habit of smoking cigars), Pound referred to her as the “hippo-poetess” among his friends and accused her of hijacking the movement.
While Lowell remained dedicated to modern poetry, she was also a fan of historical poets as well. In Fir-Flower Tablets, she produced prose-poetry re-workings of the literal translations of ancient Chinese poetry, and she wrote several critical works about French literature. When she died in 1925 of a brain hemorrhage at Seveneies, she left behind an uncompleted two-volume biography of John Keats, with whom she undoubtedly felt a kinship. “The stigma of oddness,” she wrote of him, “is the price a myopic world always exacts of genius.” Her own genius was recognized posthumously with a 1926 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for What’s O’Clock.
► Pat Rocco: 1934. Pasquale Vincent Serrapica was born in Brooklyn and moved with his family to California in 1946, where he quickly got a twice weekly radio show on Pasadena’s KWKW while still a teen. He also completed his high school credits at home after refusing to deny his homosexuality in school. And so it might be surprising to learn that while in his twenties, he met with a local Youth for Christ director, who got him a singing gig for the religious group, a stint for which he even reacorded an album of devotional musice in 1954. By this time, Pasquale became Pat Rocco, and for the remainder of the 1050s he toured for musicals and appeared as a regular for the Tennessee Ernie Ford Show.
During this time, Rocco became interested in photography and film and in 1967, he answered an ad to shoot stills of nude male models. Seeing the potential of a significant money-making enterprise, he created his own business, Bizarre Production, and began creating and selling photos and erotic movies by mail order. The films got the attention of the Park Theater in Los Angeles, which was interested in creating a special lineup of films for a gay audience. Rocco’s Love is Blue premiered on a bill with several other avant-garde gay films on June 26, 1968 as part of A Most Unusual Male Film Festival, in what it is believed to be the first gay film festival in a public theater.
Rocco’s films stood out for not falling into the typical blue movie formulas. His films focused on the beauty of the male form and featured storylines with positive depictions of male intimacy. As Jim Kepner (see Feb 14) wrote in his profile of Rocco for GAY in 1970:
His fair young actors approach love as if no one had ever labeled male love sick , sinful or seamy. These lyrical fantasies evoke love in a way that makes most gay viewers proud of themselves and glad to be alive. … In competition with tired physique photographers too long in the trade, Rocco’s sometimes clumsy work seemed fresh, creative, excitingly beautiful. Though some early shorts used any trivial excuse to get the youths undressed, even Rocco’s weakest short subjects were made with surprising care. And the lyrical quality of Love is Blue, A Matter of Life, Yahoo, The Performance and the unforgettable Yes left most viewers moved as few other flesh-films had done.
While his films were explicitly nude, they skirted the edges of soft porn to such a degree that many complained that his movies didn’t go far enough. But others appreciated Rocco’s approach. Several of Roccos fans formed the Society of Pat Rocco Enlightened Enthusiasts, or SPREE, in 1968, which remained active for the next ten years publishing newsletters and mounting stage and film events.Meanwhile, Rocco’s films were a regular feature at the Park Theatre until 1971, when the Park decided to return to a more mainstream audience.
Rocco also performed an important service for the local gay community by creating short documentaries of gay rights protests and interviews of local figures. But as fictional gay films became more explicit during the 1970s, Rocco spurned the opportunity to go into hardcore porn. Instead, he turned his attention to photographing and documenting events in Southern California for gay publications. His first documentary, A Man and His Dream, chronicled the early years of Rev. Try Perry’s Metropolitcan Community Church. Rocco also became increasingly involved with gay rights advocacy. He campaigned for the resumption of the Christopher Street West Pride Parade, and he organized fundraising events for numerous organizaitons and gay rights causes. He developed a special interest in providing emergency housing in Los Angeles and established his own program, Hudson House, to provide housing, job training and meals for homeless LGBT youth. Hudson House soon spread to San Diego, San Francisco, and Hawaii. Rocco and his partner have retired to Hawaii, where they continue to be active in the local community.
► Holly Johnson: 1960. When the Liverpool-based band Frankie Goes to Hollywood released its first single “Relax,” with Holly Johnson on vocals, in October 1983, it took a slow three months before it hit the top of the UK singles chart. It’s rise to number one was helped along, ironically, by BBC 1 disk jockey Mike Read, who happened to notice what he called the “overtly sexual” nature of record sleeve and the printed lyrics as the single was playing. He unceremoniously lifted the tonearm, live on air, and denounced it as “obscene.” The BBC followed that with an on-air ban on all of its radio and television outlets (with the narrow exception of its top-40 countdown show). Until then, “Relax” had been a middling top-40 dance hit, but within two weeks it hit number one and remained there for the next five. It became the seventh best selling single in UK single’s history, and the temporarily ubiquitous “Frankie Say” T-shirts became not just a musical statement but a political one as well. The Beeb finally relented and lifted its ban at the end if 1984, just as a re-worked version of “Relax” was enjoying a second bout of popularity with the release of the band’s album Welcome to the Pleasuredome.
Johnson left Frankie in 1987 over differences in the group’s musical direction. After a bitter contract dispute, Johnson was finally able to start a solo career in 1989. His first album, Blast, met with some critical and commercial success, but his 1991 album Dream That Money Can’t Buy tanked. That year, he learned he was HIV-positive and withdrew from public life. Later that decade, he re-emerged as an occasional singer and, mainly, as a painter, with shows at the Tate Liverpool and the Royal Academy.
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?
February 8th, 2016
To celebrate the new year, I’ve included a poster designed by Lehu Zhang, a San Francisco based Chinese graphic designer. This year is the Year of the Monkey.
While I appreciate Zhang’s minimalist style, clearly we have different esthetics. I’m having trouble seeing the monkey.
Anyway, however, you celebrate, here’s wishing you a happy new year. I think I’m celebrating with kung pao chicken and hot and sour soup.
Featured Reports
In this original BTB Investigation, we unveil the tragic story of Kirk Murphy, a four-year-old boy who was treated for “cross-gender disturbance” in 1970 by a young grad student by the name of George Rekers. This story is a stark reminder that there are severe and damaging consequences when therapists try to ensure that boys will be boys.
When we first reported on three American anti-gay activists traveling to Kampala for a three-day conference, we had no idea that it would be the first report of a long string of events leading to a proposal to institute the death penalty for LGBT people. But that is exactly what happened. In this report, we review our collection of more than 500 posts to tell the story of one nation’s embrace of hatred toward gay people. This report will be updated continuously as events continue to unfold. Check here for the latest updates.
In 2005, the Southern Poverty Law Center wrote that “[Paul] Cameron’s ‘science’ echoes Nazi Germany.” What the SPLC didn”t know was Cameron doesn’t just “echo” Nazi Germany. He quoted extensively from one of the Final Solution’s architects. This puts his fascination with quarantines, mandatory tattoos, and extermination being a “plausible idea” in a whole new and deeply disturbing light.
On February 10, I attended an all-day “Love Won Out” ex-gay conference in Phoenix, put on by Focus on the Family and Exodus International. In this series of reports, I talk about what I learned there: the people who go to these conferences, the things that they hear, and what this all means for them, their families and for the rest of us.
Prologue: Why I Went To “Love Won Out”
Part 1: What’s Love Got To Do With It?
Part 2: Parents Struggle With “No Exceptions”
Part 3: A Whole New Dialect
Part 4: It Depends On How The Meaning of the Word "Change" Changes
Part 5: A Candid Explanation For "Change"
At last, the truth can now be told.
Using the same research methods employed by most anti-gay political pressure groups, we examine the statistics and the case studies that dispel many of the myths about heterosexuality. Download your copy today!
And don‘t miss our companion report, How To Write An Anti-Gay Tract In Fifteen Easy Steps.
Anti-gay activists often charge that gay men and women pose a threat to children. In this report, we explore the supposed connection between homosexuality and child sexual abuse, the conclusions reached by the most knowledgeable professionals in the field, and how anti-gay activists continue to ignore their findings. This has tremendous consequences, not just for gay men and women, but more importantly for the safety of all our children.
Anti-gay activists often cite the “Dutch Study” to claim that gay unions last only about 1½ years and that the these men have an average of eight additional partners per year outside of their steady relationship. In this report, we will take you step by step into the study to see whether the claims are true.
Tony Perkins’ Family Research Council submitted an Amicus Brief to the Maryland Court of Appeals as that court prepared to consider the issue of gay marriage. We examine just one small section of that brief to reveal the junk science and fraudulent claims of the Family “Research” Council.
The FBI’s annual Hate Crime Statistics aren’t as complete as they ought to be, and their report for 2004 was no exception. In fact, their most recent report has quite a few glaring holes. Holes big enough for Daniel Fetty to fall through.
“Google” is a trademark of Google Inc.
© Box Turtle Bulletin. All Rights Reserved.
Posts 
Posts via daily email: