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 lobbyDecember 24th, 2015
Greece’s parliament has approved a bill granting same-sex couples the right to a civil union, becoming one of the last European countries to give them legal recognition after years of opposition from the influential Orthodox church.
The bill does not include adoption rights and may have other deficiencies.
December 24th, 2015
TODAY’S AGENDA is brought to you by:
From In Step Milwaukee, December 21, 1984, page 41.
(Source.)
The Finale opened in 1975 as a small, friendly gay bar, but its popularity allowed it to expand six months later to add a dance floor in the back. It was known for the costume parties held for Halloween and New Years Eve. The parties came to an end in 1986 after a fire gutted the bar. The Finale never re-opened. Since then, the building was fixed up rather nicely and today houses a trendy restaurant.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS:
► Brenda Howard: 1946-2005. “The next time someone asks you why LGBT Pride marches exist or why Gay Pride Month is June tell them “A bisexual woman named Brenda Howard thought it should be.” That’s how New York area gay rights activist Tom Limoncelli euglogized Brenda Howard shortly after her death in 2005. Howard was among the thirty-seven women and men who founded the more militant Gay Liberation Front shortly after the Stonewall rebelion in 1969. She helped to organize a one-month anniversary commemoration of Stonewall, and then created the Christopher Street Liberation Day March a year later for Sonewall’s first anniversary. She later pushed to expand the commemoration to a whole week, to be known as “Pride Week” and encouraged similar observances in cities across American. Those efforts led to her being known as “The Mother of Pride.”
After GLF broke up, Howard moved over to the Gay Activists Alliance to chair its Agitprop Committee and Speakers Bureau with it’s message, “Gay is great, be proud if you’re gay, don’t mess with us if you’re not.” In 1987, she helped to found the New York Area Bisexual Network and became active in BiPAC and BiNet USA. She died of cancer on June 28, 2005, on the very day of the thirty-fifth Pride Parade of New York.
► Lee Daniels: 1959. The actor, producer and director became the first African-American to solo produce an Academy Award winning film with 1992’s Monster’s Ball
His 2012 film The Paperboy, a 1960s erotic thriller starring Matthew McConaughy, Zac Efron, Nicole Kidman, John Cusack, David Oyelowo, Macy Gray and Scott Glenn, opened to decidedly mixed reviews. The strong cast appears to have saved the film from ignominy. The Village Voice Film Poll sprinkled best actor/actress nominations for just about about the entire cast, but nominated Lee Daniels for Worst Film. His 2013 film, The Butler
► Ricky Martin: 1971. Born Enrique MartÃn Morales, the Puerto Rican singer first achieved fame as a member of boy band Menudo before embarking on a solo career in 1991. His early popularity in Latin markets was boosted by his appearance in the second season of a Mexican telenovela, Alcanzar Una Estrella (“Reach for a Star”) in which he played a member of a boy band which achieves fame and fortune. In 1999, Martin found crossover appeal with the singles “Livin’ la Vida Loca” and “She’s All I Ever Had,” from his first English language album. That was followed with “She Bangs” in 2000. In 2007, he took a break from recording, but returned again with a new album in 2010, along with his autobiography, Me
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?
December 23rd, 2015
TODAY’S AGENDA is brought to you by:
From Vector (San Francisco, CA), December 1973, page 48.
TODAY IN HISTORY:
► Rep. Dannemeyer’s Op-Ed Against Gays in the Military: 1991. “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” the military’s ban on openly gay servicemembers, has been gone since 2011 (see Sep 20), and the controversy surrounding gays serving openly has largely disappeared. But in 1991, the debate was well underway over whether the Defense Department should rescind its decades-long policy of prohibiting gays in the military. In the pre-DADT era, the ban was a matter of DoD policy, not the law. Conservatives then, as now, wanted to keep the ban in place, and few were more hard core about it — or more obnoxious — than Rep. William “Wild Bill” Dannemeyer (R-CA). On December 23, 1991, he was true to form in his op-ed lambasting gay people with his usual class:
A very poor joke asks: What is meaner than a pit bull with AIDS? The guy who gave the dog AIDS, of course. This could be the fightingest son-of-a-gun in the whole Army. But should he be?
I have seen how aggressive the lunatics of ACT-UP can be-rioting in the streets, smashing windows, fighting with anyone in disagreement-and have often thought how effective they might be on the front lines of combat. But does this prowess and compunction for destruction automatically certify the few and the proud?
…Many people still believe that homosexual sodomy is a perverse behavior, that someone choosing to do so isn’t playing with a full deck. Survey after survey of military personnel supports this belief. …For homosexuals to blame others for reacting adversely to their chosen lifestyle is absurd. The notion of punishing “homophobes” (the label applied to people who find homosexual sodomy repugnant) in the military as perverts rather than those persons who define their very existence by a sex act is itself perverse…
Those were the arguments against gays in the military in the early 1990s. When Bill Clinton ran for President, he promised to overturn the ban. But as soon as he was sworn into office, he ran into a buzz saw of opposition led by fellow Democratic Sen. Sam Nunn of Georgia. In 1993, Congress shifted the ban from administrative policy to legal imperative with the passage of the Defense Authorization Bill, which included the codification of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” into law. According to Servicemembers United, 14,346 soldiers, sailors and airmen/women would be discharged under “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” over the next eighteen years.
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?
December 22nd, 2015
Since 1983 the Food and Drug Administration has forbidden any man who had ever had sex with another man – even once – since 1977 from donating blood, out of fear of transmitting the Human Immunodeficiency Virus. And while that made sense in 1983, for many years that has been a policy based on fear and stereotype instead of science.
All blood donated is tested for bloodborne pathogens, including HIV. And current tests allow detection of an HIV infection as recently as nine days after exposure.
Considering that men who have sex with men continue to account for over half of all new HIV infections, it does not seem unreasonable for there to be some waiting period after a sexual encounter for a gay man to donate blood in many instances, just to be certain that he hasn’t been infected too recently to have tests identify the virus.
But forty-seven years is an excessive amount of time to wait.
Several other nations – including the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Finland, and Japan – have all revised their restrictions to a much smaller abstinence window, most selecting one year. Now the United States has followed suit. (Washington Post)
The Food and Drug Administration on Monday lifted a decades-old, lifetime ban on blood donation for men who have had sex with other men, replacing it with a 12-month “deferral” period that prohibits such donors from giving blood for a year after their last same-sex contact.
The agency said its updated policy reflects “the most current scientific evidence” and mirrors the approach taken in other countries, such as Australia and the United Kingdom. “We have taken great care to ensure this policy revision is backed by sound science and continues to protect our blood supply,” FDA Acting Commissioner Stephen Ostroff said in a statement.
I don’t agree that this reflects “the most current scientific evidence”. It seems to me that a much shorter window – maybe a few weeks or a month – could be utilized with the same level of protection. It also seems to me that a person on PrEP would present no risk to the blood supply irrespective of their most recent sexual experience. As would those in monogamous relationships in which neither party is HIV+.
But this is a step in the right direction. And the FDA has said that it is a “first step” and is likely to evolve. Let’s hope the next step reflects individual risk assessment. Let’s also hope that it comes a bit sooner than 23 years.
December 22nd, 2015
In 1987 there was little to no hospice care available for dying AIDS patients. Several activists united and petitioned LA County Board of Supervisors for funding and the AIDS Hospice Foundation was born with Michael Weinstein at its helm.
In 1995 – 1996, antiretroviral medication changed the face of HIV. Those infected with the virus no longer could expect an onset of opportunistic maladies followed by an early painful death. Now HIV, if properly treated, has no significant impact on quality of living or life expectancy. And the need for specialized AIDS hospice care diminished significantly.
So Weinstein rebranded the organization as AIDS Healthcare Foundation, and began offering medical services to those infected with HIV. Over time, AHF has grown tremendously, with revenues in the hundreds of millions of dollars (much of it through either grants or Medicare) and programs dotting the globe. Also growing has been Weinstein’s political power (and compensation – about $400,000 in 2012).
Michael Weinstein has not been hesitant to use his connections and power, using public media attacks and lawsuits as his primary methods. In 2012, they spent over a million dollars on legal fees.
Many of Weinstein’s efforts have been controversial, and most come across as heavily moralistic. Taken cumulatively, they paint a picture of a man and an organization determined to stop others from having sex in ways in which he disapproves.
In 2007, Weinstein decided that Viagra was being used by people who were doing drugs. Disapproving, AHF held a press conference accusing Pfizer, the maker of Viagra, of contributing to HIV and announced a lawsuit against them over their marketing and demanding that they contributed to AHF. (Bay Area Reporter)
The Los Angeles-based AIDS Healthcare Foundation has charged the pharmaceutical company Pfizer with “promoting Viagra as a party drug … leading to more infections with sexually transmitted diseases such as HIV,” according to its president Michael Weinstein.
AHF filed suit in a Los Angeles court Monday, January 22 to force the company to end those ads, begin an education campaign on the responsible use of Viagra, and pay an unspecified sum to the organization to help care for people infected with HIV.
Weinstein had no facts to back up his assertions.
When pressed during a telephone conference call Monday to back up his assertion with data, Weinstein mentioned recently speaking with a group of black youth who said crystal meth “use is rampant” within their community.
I can’t find the results of that lawsuit, so it may have been nothing more than a bluff or an attempt at extortion.
Also in 2007, AHF began running ads in Indian newspapers accusing Cipla, an Indian company, of price-gouging. They did not get the support of local non-profit organizations who saw a conflict of interest. At the time, a leading Gilead exec was on AHF’s Board and they provided funding to Weinstein’s organization. (Gilead denied any connection with Weinstein’s effort.) (IndiaTimes)
Cipla had refused Gilead’s offer to sell the latter’s anti-AIDS drug Viread under a licensing agreement. Cipla is also the only Indian company opposing Gilead’s patent application for its blockbuster anti-HIV drug Viread in India.
In recent years, Weinstein has decided that he disapproves of people watching bareback porn and waged a war of accusation and innuendo against producers. Even though there is testing and prevention efforts in porn – both gay and straight – Weinstein and AHF seemed determined to stop its production altogether and in all circumstances.
In 2012 AHF spearheaded an initiative on the ballot in Los Angeles County which required porn actors, gay or straight, to wear condoms during anal or vaginal sex. Weinstein was not shy about his desire to monitor other’s desire. (Weinstein op-ed)
The fact that most straight porn is made without condoms sends a horrible message that the only kind of sex that is hot is unsafe.
Though opposed by the Libertarian Party, the Republican Party, and local newspapers, Measure B passed the vote with 60% of the vote. And, as could be expected, the $6 billion industry – and its economic benefits – moved out of Los Angeles County with sadly ironic consequences. (SF Weekly)
Last year, after Measure B pushed several companies to Nevada, the industry saw its first on-set transmission in over a decade. Though the performer tested negative for HIV before his shoot, the test used was not the RNA plasma test that is the standard here in California. By the time he shot the scene, his viral load had increased to the point where he could transmit the virus to someone else.
Undeterred by real life consequences, Weinstein presses on seeking a statewide initiative forcing his ideas about acceptable porn production throughout California. There may be an initiative on the 2016 ballot to mandate Weinstein’s views.
In 2012, as the result of a county audit finding that AHF had overcharged LA County by millions of dollars, Weinstein sued the County in an effort to punish Supervisor Yaraslovsky, with whom Weinstein had feuded. (LA Times)
The lawsuit arose out of an audit by the county, which claimed the foundation had overcharged $1.7 million for its AIDS services by billing for costs that should have been allocated to other sources. The judge did not rule on which side was correct, only saying that the county has the right to audit its contractors.
Weinstein, defending his political tactics, told the paper that regardless of who was billed for the costs, the money was spent serving patients: “We would not have gotten to where we are today if we hadn’t fought like hell on behalf of our clients and our mission.”
A U.S. District judge ruled for the county this week. “Rather than a sincere attempt to vindicate their First Amendment rights,” the paper quotes the judge saying, “the court fears that plaintiffs instituted this action in an effort to obtain a tactical advantage in their ongoing political battles.”
To illustrate his conclusion, he included an excerpt from an email Weinstein sent to a foundation staff member shortly before the suit was filed:
“It is time to take the gloves off,” Weinstein wrote, according to the written decision reported in the Times, “We need to go after Zev [Yaroslavsky] directly and hard. He is the real power behind our problems with the county on porn, the audit and fee-for-service. Plus he is a lame duck and an arrogant jerk. His Berman-Waxman power base is dead and he and others need to be taught a lesson. The voters are with us.”
But it isn’t just the big-dollar fights and power plays that have caused controversy. So too have many of AHF’s public pleas for the public to get tested.
In Los Angeles, one can’t get away from AHF’s billboards. And they seem to share a common theme: sex is dirty and bad and people who want to have sex with you are liars who want to give you diseases.
One such campaign featured a number of couples of various races and sexes with the tag line “Trust Him?”
Though nothing in the ads tells you why one would not trust the other, but Weinstein apparently assumes that sex must include some sleazy component and had this to say about the immensely unpopular billboards. (Poz)
“While infidelity is nothing new, the level of risk in contracting STDS from bed-hopping partners is at an all-time high. We want to remind couples that STDs linger around much longer than a wandering eye and that secret sexual experiences can often produce much more than what one bargained for.”
This message has many HIV/AIDS activists disgusted at Weinstein and his organization. (HIVPlusMag)
This stigmatic view of sex and trust is both reductive in personal responsibility and stigmatizing towards HIV-positive people. It suggests that people living with the disease are akin to criminals who lie in order to have sex, or even intentionally spread the virus. Sure, the people behind the AHF campaign may argue differently. However, it is hard to ignore the criminal theme of the advertisements that, by default, further marginalize people living with HIV and keeps fear in the forefront of safer sex messaging. As one Facebook user stated, “This does not say ‘fear HIV.’ It says, ‘fear people living with HIV.'”
In addition to all the ways that Weinstein doesn’t want people to have sex, he also has opinions about how they meet. Earlier this year, another of AHF’s billboard campaigns went on the direct attack against hook-up sites.
As usual, when Tinder objected, Weinstein bulldozed over them and hinted that it all could be fixed by coughing up. (Guardian)
“They’re tone deaf,” Michael Weinstein, president of AHF, told the Guardian. “It would have been much wiser for them to say that they’re concerned about their customers and look forward to working with us to help people get the checkups that they need. This would not have been the global story that it has become if they had not responded that way.”
And lest you think these ads come across as sex-negative,
“There are consequences to hooking up,” Weinstein told the Guardian. “That’s not a moralistic judgement. It’s just a fact and minimizing that is important.”
But nothing has set Weinstein and AHF apart from the HIV/AIDS community more than Weinstein’s obstinate opposition to pre-exposure prophylaxis. The battle between anti-PrEP forces (Weinstein and AHF) and pro-PrEP forces (The Centers for Disease Control, the World Health Organization, AIDS Project Los Angeles, amFAR, Gay Men’s Health Crisis, the National Minority AIDS Counsel, and virtually every gay and AIDS/HIV advocate that seeks to see an end to the transmission of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus) has turned into all out war.
The opening salvo was fired by Weinstein on April 7, 2014 (AP)
“If something comes along that’s better than condoms, I’m all for it, but Truvada is not that,” said Michael Weinstein, president of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation. “Let’s be honest: It’s a party drug.”
Obviously, Truvada is not a party drug. It is not a euphoric, a hallucinogen, a mood enhancer, nor does it have the hallmark of any other pharmaceutical whose primary purpose is to feel good. What Weinstein meant here is what he meant when he accused Viagra of being a party drug: that it was used by people doing drugs and having bad bad sex. That it prevented these naughty naughty gay boys from infecting each other with HIV was secondary to his objection to their behavior.
In August 2014, Weinstein started running ads in gay newspapers which, at first glace, appeared to say that PrEP was not very effective at preventing transmission.
Those who read the text would learn that any effectiveness was low due to low adherence – not exactly a surprise for research in high-risk and third world populations. But even if you get beyond the graph, Weinstein extrapolated from that data a conclusion set that is not supported in science: Low adherence means low effectiveness in preventing HIV and effectiveness measures whether Truvada works in the real world.
In other words, Truvada doesn’t work.
This infuriated those who have been taking strides to eliminate HIV transmission in the real world. They particularly noted the dishonesty of Weinstein who never notes that for those who DID adhere to the drug protocol effectiveness was 99% or better.
But Weinstein seems uninterested in facts. He has positions. And a sizable salary based on continued services to those who become newly infected each year.
In fact, there have been raised questions about the ethics of AFH’s testing facilities and how they feed a stream of income into the organization. In April of this year, three former staffers filed a whistleblower lawsuit against AHF:
The plaintiffs accuse AHF of an “organizational-wide criminal effort” across at least 12 States in the form of kick-backs to AHF clients and staffers. They believe that AHF has defrauded governmental programs out of tens of millions of dollars, based on their own experience with the agency going back to at least 2010.
The three plaintiffs, all former managers at AHF who were in a position to be familiar with agency policy, also include Mauricio Ferrer of Florida and Shawn Loftis of New York.
When someone tested positive in an AHF clinic, the suit claims, they were offered cash or other inducements to be linked to care in AHF clinics. Furthermore, AHF staff were provided commissions when they successfully linked someone with a positive test result to AHF services. This procedure was developed first in Los Angeles and then spread across all States where AHF has a presence.
Of additional concern is whether AHF’s (grant funded) testing centers inform those who test HIV negative that they have an options to persue PrEP. Although some communities, like West Hollywood, require all testing facilities to give PrEP referral information, many do not.
And Weinstein has made it clear that he is the face and voice of opposition to PrEP. While some, like Larry Kramer, initially had concerns, they’ve come to see the potential of the drug. Kramer joined Peter Staley and others earlier this month in releasing a statement that reads in part:
We – AIDS activists, new and old, aged 24 to 80 – have just broken bread in the same apartment where GMHC was formed, coming together for a lively discussion on how to reduce HIV infections among gay men and trans women. Although we may not see eye-to-eye on every issue we debated tonight, we all agree that Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) is highly effective at protecting a person from HIV infection. While PrEP isn’t for everyone, any individual who thinks they are at risk of getting HIV should have easy access to it, without judgement.
Weinstein appears to be the sole hold-out. But he is always ready to speak to any news source which is looking for “controversy” on the issue.
At the heart of Weinstein’s objections is the assertion that people at greatest risk won’t take the drug consistently. Which may be true. But it’s very implausible to assume that those who don’t have enough structure in their lives to take a pill once a day do have enough structure to have condoms ready and use them every time. Of the two, a daily pill requires far less forethought. Weinstein’s argument is laughable.
Also conveniently ignored is the consequences of occasional lapses. Failing to use a condom just one time can result in HIV transmission. But failing to take the pill just one time, or two times, or three times a week still provides enough protection to prevent transmission. In testing, those whose blood revealed adherence to the protocol four times per week have nearly 100% effectivity.
And, unlike condoms, PrEP doesn’t break.
As a corollary argument Weinstein insists that those who use PrEP won’t use condoms, which will lead to an increase in other STIs. And that too might be true. But it raises the natural question: if we find a true vaccine or a cure for HIV, will Weinstein oppose that measure as well because it would mean less condom usage? Will he insist that some continued HIV infection is a small price to pay for preventing increased gonorrhea?
That may be less rhetorical of a question than one might imagine. Weinstein has actually penned an op-ed to the LA Times calling on the federal government to cease funding for the search for a vaccine for HIV. Framed as a complaint against the wasting of funds that could otherwise be used (by AHF, I presume) to pay for treatment, it still is a chilling idea that the head of a prominent HIV/AIDS care organization opposes the search for a vaccine which could end the pandemic.
Although the opinions of both the activist and the science community have reached near consensus about the efficacy and value of PrEP as a tool in the fight against the transmission of HIV, Weinstein has been effective in his opposition. He has sown doubt in the gay community as to whether PrEP works. He has done his best to shame those who use this “party drug”. At least in part, he has contributed to the slow uptake in PrEP usage in the gay community.
And, having slowed the PrEP movement, now he’s decided that it’s time to mock the Centers for Disease Control for their struggle in convincing gay men that this preventative measure is neither shameful not ineffective.
You see, you shouldn’t push PrEP, but treatment. After all, if you pay AHF to treat people once they’ve contracted HIV, then their virus is brought down to undetectable levels and they are non-infectious. And as for PrEP, leave it to the Truvada whores who have multiple partners and never use condoms.
But the word is – finally – getting out. I see PrEP becoming a regular discussion point in some subsets of West Hollywood. Activists in New York are becoming more vocal. San Francisco City government is dedicating city resources. Social approval is on the uptick and the community – though originally fearful of another “solution” – has had time to observe and see how things went for the earliest guinea pigs.
Weinstein should get his gloating out of his system. Because I think that PrEP is going to become as common as condoms were in the 90’s and AHF is going to have to come up with some other business plan.
December 22nd, 2015
TODAY’S AGENDA is brought to you by:
From Arizona Gay News, December 23, 1977, page 12.
The city of Tucson found itself in the gay bar business quite by accident a year later, in November of 1978, when it purchased Tucson House, a high rise apartment building on 1455 N. Miracle Mile, which the city intended to turn into public housing for senior citizens. City council members were surprised to learn that a tiny strip mall in front of Tucson House, which housed Jekyll and Hyde’s and its sibling gay disco, the Last Culture, was part of the same real-estate deal, making the city the clubs’ new landlord. While Tucson overall was quite gay friendly for its day — the city council would pass a broad anti-discrimination ordinance a month later — anti-gay council member Ricard Amlee was aghast. “I don’t want to use city funds to finance any of their operations,” he said, apparently ignorant of the fact that the two bars were now paying the city “four figures each month” for rent and still had eight years to go on their lease.
The clubs are long gone, although building is still there (that stretch of Miracle Mile was renamed as the southern portion of Oracle Road to reflect a realignment several blocks to the north), and houses a family and youth counseling non-profit organization.
TODAY IN HISTORY:
► President Obama Signs DADT Repeal Into Law: 2010. It all came down to the wire during the closing days of the 111th Congress. If it hadn’t been for the heroic efforts of Sens. Susan Collins (R-ME) and Joe Lieberman (I-CT) when all hope for DADT’s repeal appeared to be dead, President Barack Obama never would have been able to place his signature on the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Repeal Act of 2010. But sign it he did, and that act kicked off a nine month process to implement DADT’s repeal. Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell officially came to an end on September 20. Since then, DADT’s end has been largely considered a non-event within the military. Even Marine Corps Commandant Gen. James Amos, who had been on record as opposing DADT’s repeal, now says he is “very pleased with how it has gone.”
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?
December 21st, 2015
Kenneth Miller
Isabella Miller-Jenkins is fifteen and she hasn’t seen her mother, Janet Jenkins, in at least five years.
In 2010, Lisa Miller (Isabella’s other mother) took her and fled to Nicaragua so as to avoid compliance with court orders to first allow visitation and – when she defied the court – to turn primary custody over to Janet Jenkins. Miller and Jenkins had been in a civil union when the child was conceived and both had parental rights. When the relationship soured, Miller claimed a conversion to conservative Christianity and used her newfound religious ideologies to gain allies in her custody battle.
The parental kidnapping was planned and assisted by her attorneys, Liberty Counsel’s Mat Staver and Rena Lindevaldsen along with a network of other supporters. Among them was Kenneth Miller (no relation), a Mennonite minister who provided plane tickets and facilitated people to assist Miller in her abduction.
In 2012, Kenneth Miller was found guilty of aiding in the kidnapping and sentenced to 27 months in jail. Rev. Miller appealed the decision arguing that the Virginia courts did not have jurisdiction as his criminal act did not occur in that state (the Virginia courts had jurisdiction over the parental rights, the abduction took place in Tennessee, Kenneth Miller performed his role in Virginia, and Lisa fled with Isabella first to Canada and then to Nicaragua).
Now the appeals court has responded. (Reuters)
On appeal, Miller argued that Vermont, where the custody battle between the women took place, was an improper venue, as he personally was not alleged to have committed any criminal act there.
But U.S. Circuit Judge Susan Carney, writing for a three-judge panel, said it was Lisa Miller’s removal of her child from the United States that allowed that allowed for the jurisdiction.
“It was not, for example, simply violating a state court custody order and crossing a state line: Its international nature endowed it with a different character and consequences,” Carney wrote.
To date, Mat Staver and Rena Lindevaldsen have not been held accountable for their role in the abduction.
December 21st, 2015
TODAY’S AGENDA is brought to you by:
From This Week In Texas, December 18, 1976, page 23.
EMPHASIS MINE:
We’re driving cross-country from Tucson to visit family in Ohio. Guess where I was today.
Here’s a hint:
Merry Xmas, fellow pagans!
TODAY IN HISTORY:
► Time Magazine’s “Opportunistic Diseases”: 1981. Nearly seven months had passed since the CDC had issued its first notice of a puzzling new condition that was appearing in gay men (see Jun 5). A month after the CDC raised the alarm, the New York Times picked up the story (see Jul 3). But beyond that, the news was slow to spread outside of a few gay publications (and most of them were gun shy). In fact, the media seemed to go out of its way to keep from looking at AIDS. Randy Shilts described the problem in And the Band Played On
The difference, (the CDC’s James W.) Curran knew, was media attention. Once Toxic Shock Syndrome hit the front pages the heat was on to find the answer. Within months of the first MMWR report, the task force had discovered the link between tampons and the malady. Back in 1976, the newspapers couldn’t print enough pictures of flag-draped coffins of dead American Legionnaires. However the stories just weren’t coming on the gay syndrome. The New York Times had written only two stories on the epidemic, setting the tone for noncoverage nationally. Time and Newsweek were running their first major stories on the epidemic now, in late December 1981. There was only one reason for the lack of media interest, and everybody on the (CDC’s) task force knew it: the victims were homosexuals. Editors were killing pieces, reporters told Curran, because they didn’t want stories about gays and all those distasteful sexual habits littering their newspapers.
The December 21 edition of Time (which featured Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi on the cover) placed the article titled “Opportunistic Diseases” deep inside. The article provided little context, information, or hope. Truth be told, there was little to give of any of those thus far. No one knew what caused it, nor did they even know what to call it. Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome wouldn’t get its official name until July 1982. Time, instead, focused on the prevailing image of gays as diseased, while simultaneously expressing surprise that lesbians weren’t coming down with the strange new infections. Of the speculations about the disease, Time wrote:
One possible culprit in the syndrome is cytomegalovirus, which is known to weaken immune defenses and can be transmitted in semen more than a year after infection. In a recent study, traces of CMV were found in 94% of homosexual men, as opposed to 54% of heterosexual men. U.C.L.A.’s Dr. Michael Gottlieb believes that CMV does contribute to the immune deficiency, but, he points out, both the virus and homosexuality “have been around for thousands of years.” Thus, he concludes, “there is a piece of the puzzle missing.”
The missing link could be “poppers,” drugs like amyl nitrate and butyl nitrate, which are said to enhance orgasm. More than 85% of the CDC patients admitted to inhaling them. Another possible explanation is the so-called immunologic overload theory, says San Francisco’s Dr. Robert Bolan. Homosexuals with many sexual partners often contract numerous venereal diseases, intestinal disruptions (gay bowel syndrome), mononucleosis and other infections, explains Bolan. “This constant, chronic stimulation to their immune system may eventually cause the system to collapse.”
All of those theories would soon be proven wrong, although some of them would continue to linger among the conspiratorially-minded AIDS deniers who insist, against all evidence to the contrary, that the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) doesn’t cause AIDS. It’s been said that there is no such thing as bad publicity. Time proved that aphorism wrong.
Kirk Murphy, in 2003
► “The darkness keeps calling and I must go”: 2003. With those words written on a suicide note, Kirk Andrew Murphy ended his life in a New Delhi apartment. “”I’ll never forget this as long as I live,” said Frank, his supervisor back in Phoenix, Arizona. He was the first outside of India to receive the news. “I got a phone call from the account manager who reported to me. It was midnight or one o’clock in the morning. I was totally shook up.” Frank contacted Kirk’s sister, Maris, in New York, and together they went to India for the funeral.
What happened seemed utterly senseless to Maris, but seven years later she would learn something that would suddenly make so many things about her brother click. That’s when she learned that in 1970, when Kirk was just about to turn five years old and Maris herself was just an infant, their mother took Kirk to see a specialist at UCLA’s Gender Identity Clinic after a well-known researcher appeared on television to warn parents that gender-variant children would grow up to be homosexual. According to that researcher, UCLA had a new program, paid for with federal grants, to prevent homosexuality in children. Kirk’s mother saw that program and made an appointment. Kirk came under the care of a young grad student by the name of George Rekers, who worked with Kirk for about nine months before pronouncing him “cured.” Rekers went on to build a career on Kirk’s case, which Rekers mentioned in nearly twenty journal articles, chapters, and books. As late as 2009, referring to Kirk as “Craig,” Rekers wrote:
Follow-up psychological evaluations three years after treatment indicates that Craig’s gender behaviors became normalized. An independent clinical psychologist evaluated Craig and found that post-treatment he had a normal male identity. Using intrasubject replication designs, this published case was the first experimentally demonstrated reversal of a cross-gender identity with psychological treatment, and the journal article on this case was among the top 12 cited articles in clinical psychology in the 1970s
Kirk, at the age of 4 years and 6 months, just a few months before entering treatment at UCLA’s Feminine Boy Project (Photo courtesy of the Murphy family)
Nothing could be further from the truth. Well, it is true that Rekers’s initial case report did become one of the most widely cited articles in the 1970s. But to say that Kirk had “become normalized” according to Rekers’s definition turned out to be misleading, to put it extremely mildly. Rekers’s went on to become an important anti-gay activist. He co-founded the Family Research Council in 1983 and served as its first chairman and CEO. He also became an important figure in the ex-gay movement, serving on the Scientific Advisory Committee and the Board of Directors for the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH). All that came to an end in 2009 when Penn Bullock and Brandon K. Thorp, two from the alternative newsweekly Miami New Times, photographed Rekers at Miami International Airport as he returned from a European vacation in the company of a handsome male escort.
In 2011, BTB was privileged to bring you the real story of Rekers’s most famous case history. In our award-winning investigation, What Are Little Boys Made Of?, we interviewed Kirk’s family, friends and associates, and we revealed the horrible treatment that Kirk and his brother went through while under UCLA’s care, and we learned of its terrible aftermath. We also investigated the state of psychology in 1970 and its evolution in the decades since, we looked into the claims that Kirk received “independent” follow-up evaluations indicating that he was healthy and straight, and we tried to get to the bottom of who exactly was in charge of Kirk’s treatment at the hands of that inexperienced grad student.
You can find all of that information here, along with statements from Kirk’s brother and sister, eulogies from family and friends, links to original published reports about Kirk’s case and the controversy it generated among behavioral therapists, and more information on the ex-gay movement and attempts to change sexual orientation.
If Kirk were alive today, he would be 48. He is still missed by his mother, sister, brother, and everyone who knew him.
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?
December 20th, 2015
TODAY’S AGENDA is brought to you by:
From ONE, December 1963, page 24.
TODAY IN HISTORY:
► Frank Kameny Fired From Government Job for Being Gay: 1957. Frank Kameny was a World War II veteran and Harvard-trained astronomer working for the Army Map Service. In Eric Marcus’s compendium of oral histories, Making History
When I was on assignment in Hawaii in November or December of 1957, I got a call from my supervisor in Washington, D.C., to come back at once. I told him that whatever the problem, it could wait a few days, and I returned to Washington at the end of the week. As soon as I got back, I was called in by some two-bit Civil Service Commission investigator and told, “We have information that leads us to believe that you are a homosexual. Do you have any comment?” I said, “What’s the information?” They answered, “We can’t tell you.” I said, well, then I can’t give you an answer. You don’t deserve an answer. and in any case, this is none of your business.” I was not open about being gay at that time — no one was, not in 1957. But I was certainly leading a social life. I went to the gay bars many, many evenings. I’ve never been a covert kind of a person, and I wasn’t about to be one simply because I was working for the government. I’ve never been one to function on the basis that Big Brother may be looking over my shoulder.
So they called me in, and ultimately it resulted in my termination. They did it the way the government does anything: They issued a letter. They said they were dismissing me for homosexuality. I was in shock.
…Keep in mind I had been training all of my life for a scientific career, for this kind of occupation. I was not at all familiar with the job market. When I was thrown out, I had nowhere to go. Perhaps if this had happened five or ten years later, I would have had a professional reputation to fall back on, but in this case I didn’t. For a long time I applied for jobs in astronomy, but there was nothing. Ultimately, in 1959, I got a job doing something in physics. My bachelor’s degree is in physics, in the area of optics.
But meanwhile, I had decided that my dismissal amounted to a declaration of war against me by my government. First, I don’t grant me government the right to declare war on me. And second, I tend not to lose my wars.
Kameny launched a string of appeals, first through the Civil Service commission itself, then through the courts. He took his appeals all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court — writing his own brief (which is available here
Kameny went on to co-found the Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C., which in 1963 launched a long campaign to overturn the federal employment ban on gay people and to overturn the district’s sodomy law. In 1965, he organized the first picket line in front of the White House in support of gay rights (see Apr 17), followed by several other protests throughout that year. He was also an instrumental player in the fight to remove homosexuality from the American Psychiatric Association’s list of mental disorders. In 1971, he became the first openly gay candidate for the U.S. Congress when he ran for D.C’s non-voting Congressional delegate (see Feb 22). In 1975, the U.S. Civil Service Commission notified him that they had changed their policies and were now allowing gay people to work in federal jobs (see Jul 3). In 2009, the U.S. government officially repudiated Kameny’s firing when John Berry, the openly gay Director of the Office of Personnel Management, delivered a formal apology during a special OPM ceremony in his honor. Upon receiving the apology, Kameny tearfully replied, “Apology accepted.” He passed away in 2011 at the age of 86. You can read his full biography here.
► Vermont Supreme Court Rules State Must Recognize Same-Sex Unions: 1999. In a unanimous decision, the Vermont Supreme Court ruled that the state must provide the same benefits, protections and obligations to same-sex couples as it does to heterosexual couples. The Supreme Court left it up to the legislature to decide how it would end the discrimination, either through marriage or through civil unions. Most state political leaders opted for the latter. State Attorney General William Sorrell, predicted, “It would likely be a civilly sanctioned relationship that would, for all intents and purposes, have the benefits and protections a traditionally married couple would have but wouldn’t be called a marital relationship. They wouldn’t be called spouses, they’d be called domestic partners, and for a number of people, that makes an enormous difference.” Gov. Howard Dean concurred, saying that same-sex marriage “makes me uncomfortable, the same as anybody else.”
The argument for Civil Unions won the dayBeth Robinson, the lawyer for the winning plaintiffs, dismissed that idea and pressed for full marriage. “The Legislature will come to understand that as a practical matter, you can’t call it something different and have it be truly equal.”
It would take another decade before the Legislature would come to that understanding, opting instead to go for civil unions, which Gov. Dean signed into law 0n April 26, 2000. It took effect on July 1, 2000. In 2009, the Legislature revisited the issue again and passed a same-sex marriage bill with bipartisan support, only to see it vetoed by Gov. Jim Douglas (R). The legislature then overturned the governor’s veto, and same-sex marriages finally became available in the Green Mountain State on September 1, 2009.
Seth Anderson, left, and Michael Ferguson were one of the first same-sex couples to marry in Utah.
► Judge Strikes Down Utah’s Marriage Ban in First Post-Windsor Federal Decision: 2013. In a surprise early Christmas gift (the decision hadn’t been expected for another month or so), Federal District Judge Robert J. Shelby declared that Utah’s ban on same-sex marriage vilated the U.S. Constitution’s guarantees of equal protection and due process.
Judge Shelby’s was the first Federal ruling in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Windsor v. US four months earlier. That Windsor decision, which declared that Section 3 of the federal Defense of Marriage Act violated the U.S. Constitution’s Due Process clause. Judge Shelby relied heavily on the Windsor decision in striking down Utah’s law, even including Justice Antonin Scalia’s blistering dissent Windsor as part of his analysis:
The Constitution’s protection of the individual rights of gay and lesbian citizens is equally dispositive whether this protection requires a court to respect a state law, as in Windsor, or strike down a state law, as the Plaintiffs ask the court to do here. In his dissenting opinion, the Honorable Antonin Scalia recognized that this result was the logical outcome of the Court’s ruling in Windsor:
In my opinion, however, the view that this Court will take of state prohibition of same-sex marriage is indicated beyond mistaking by today’s opinion. As I have said, the real rationale of today’s opinion … 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.
133 S. Ct. at 2709 (citations and internal quotation marks omitted). The court agrees with Justice Scalia’s interpretation of Windsor and finds that the important federalism concerns at issue here are nevertheless insufficient to save a state-law prohibition that denies the Plaintiffs their rights to due process and equal protection under the law.
…And Justice Scalia even recommended how this court should interpret the Windsor decision when presented with the question that is now before it: “I do not mean to suggest disagreement … that lower federal courts and state courts can distinguish today’s case when the issue before them is state denial of marital status to same-sex couples.”
Judge Shelby then took the unusual step in declining to stay his ruling, which meant that marriage began almost immediately in Salt Lake City and several other county offices. The state’s Attorney General’s office was in turmoil — John Swallow had resigned the month before in the wake of multiple corruption investigations — and so things were a bit disorganized in their efforts to get a stay. The Tenth Circuit quickly denied Utah’s pleas, as did Judge Shelby when the state tried to go back to him again. The state then decided to try to go to the U.S. Supreme Court for a stay, but first they would have to engage outside counsel to do it since their own staff had proved incapable in the lower courts. Utah finally filed its request on New Year’s Eve and the high court finally issued its stay on January 6, but not before some 1300 same-sex couples were legally married.
Since then, federal judges have followed Judge Shelby’s lead in striking down marriage bans in Virginia, Texas, Michigan, Idaho, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Florida, Colorado, West Virginia, North Carolina, Alaska, Arizona, Wyoming, Missouri, South Carolina, Arkansas, and Mississippi. All of those rulings following more or less the same findings as Judge Shelby’s ruling in Utah. Meanwhile, the Tenth Circuit upheld Judge Shelby’s ruling on June 25, 2014. Utah then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. On October 6, the Supreme Court refused to consider Utah’s request, along with similar requests from Indiana, Oklahoma, Virginia and Wisconsin. Marriages resumed once again in Utah along with the other four states.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
► 140 YEARS AGO: Elsie de Wolfe: 1865-1950. She was the legendary interior designer who finally put gloomy victorian styles out of its misery. And for that, she is hailed as America’s first decorator and her designs, nearly a century later, are still just as fresh today as they were bold in at the turn of the last century. She began her creative life as an actress in the 1890s, but her appearances were appreciated more for her stylish clothes than for her performing abilities.
At about 1887, she began what was called a “Boston marriage” with Elisabeth “Bessie” Marbury, a New York socialite, literary agent, and business manager with such illustrious clients as Oscar Wilde (see Oct 16), George Bernard Shaw, and Sarah Bernhardt. The two bought and restored Villa Trianon in Versailles, France, where de Wolfe became enamored with the light colors and brightly-lit rooms that defined French style. She then drew on those influences as she set about redecorating Marbury’s New York home by throwing out all of that dark Victorian furnishings and cluttering bric-a-brac. New York’s high society took notice. When a group of wealthy women formed the exclusive Colony Club, de Wolfe was tapped to design the clubhouse’s interiors. The Colony opened in 1907 and with it, de Wolfe’s reputation was set.
A photo from A House In Good Taste, 1913.
Instead of the dark paneled rooms and heavy atmosphere common with men’s clubs, The Colony featured light draperies, pale walls, wicker furniture, chintz — she became known as “the Chintz Lady” — and light, lots of natural light. Her design practice exploded overnight, with commissions for private houses, clubs, opera boxes, and a dorm at Barnard College. Her 1913 book, The House in Good Taste
De Wolfe was an iconoclast in many ways. She single-handedly turned the design profession from a “man’s world” into one in which women could excel. She embroidered her own pillows with the motto, “Never complain, never explain.” At her home in France, she had a dog cemetery where each headstone carried the epitaph, “The one I loved the best.” And speaking of France, When World War I came along, she broke from all expectations by volunteering to become a nurse — where she was awarded the Croix de Guerre and the Legion of Honor for her work with mustard gas victims. In 1926, she scandalized French society with her grand entrance to a society ball dressed as a Moulin Rouge dancer while turning handsprings — at the age of 61. Her many years of practicing yoga did well for her. Her marriage that same year to the diplomat Sir Charles Mendl was also a surprise because, as The New York Times dryly observed, “When in New York she makes her home with Miss Elizabeth [sic] Marbury at 13 Sutton Place.” Her marriage now made her Lady Mendl, immortalized in the Cole Porter lyric:
When you hear that Lady Mendl, standing up
Now turns a handspring landing up-
On her toes
Anything goes!
When World War II broke out, Mendl and de Wolfe moved to Hollywood. After the war, they returned to Villa Trianon where de Wolfe died in 1950.
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?
December 19th, 2015
TODAY’S AGENDA is brought to you by:
From Our Community (Dallas, TX), November 1971, page 7.
Entre’ Nuit opened at at 4516 McKinney Avenue in Dallas sometime in mid-November of 1971. According to an announcement in Our Community, Entre’ Nuit boasted “a stunning parquet wood dance floor (the largest in Dallas), luxurious carpeting, wall-to-ceiling mirrors, a neo-Grecian classical facade and interior columns, spacious T-rooms, and billiards table.” But opening a gay club was a dicy proposition, as Our Community reported in January:
The beautiful Entre’ Nuit had been opened less than a month, and was already one of the favorite gathering places for the gay folks of Dallas. But on the morning of Sunday, December 19, at about 7: 00 A.M., someone (for reasons unknown) burned it. An off-duty policeman was the first to spot the flames, but by the time the fire department was able to bring the fire under control, the back half of the bar was completely gutted. Three jugs of gasoline had not burned. One was in the center of the parquet wood dance floor, another was placed near the bar, and the third was close to the entrance.
Bill and Joe, owners of the Entre’ Nuit have no idea who burned the bar nor do they know of any motive for anyone doing so. But one thing is certain: the Entre’ Nuit will not be closed for long. Completely redone, and with much the same decor, it will reopen shortly after the first of the year. So everyone attend the Entre’ Nuit New Year’s party even if it will be a little late this year.
Most gratifying is the way other bar owners have rallied together and have offered a reward ($800 so far) for the arrest and conviction of the person responsible for this latest burning.
Entre’ Nuit wasn’t the only establishment targeted that night:
Sunday night, December 19th, at 3: 15 A.M., the manager of the King of Clubs had just closed the club and was driving away with friends when he happened to look back and see a man with a can (perhaps gasoline) in the shadows of the building. The manager and his friends quickly stopped the car and gave chase to the prowler who ran down a side street and was lost in darkness. From the other side of the building, another man ran in a different direction. When the friends and manager reentered the club to call police, they head still a third man run across the roof, jump off, and disappear into the night. The police came, made a thorough search, and promised the club would be checked several times a night from now on. For added precaution, a security guard will be in the building at all times.
The paper then addressed the speculation that these might have been “gay-on-gay crimes”:
It was pure luck that this attempted burn-out was thwarted. With the burning of the Swinger, the Entre’ Nuit, and the vandalism of the Villa Fontana, the gay community is getting a little fed up with this crap, and is patronizing the victims of these “gay against gay?” crimes. One wonders who gains? Who is the loser – the real loser? The Swinger and the Villa have reopened and is doing more business than ever before. The Entre’ Nuit will reopen soon too. Gay bars are like gay people themselves: we’ve been imprisoned, murdered, and brutalized all through history. Yet we always come back — stronger.
From the 1980s to the late 1990s, that entire area of McKinney Avenue underwent a massive gentrification — although that particular area adjoining Highland Park was never exactly down on its heels. The building where Entre’ Nuit was housed is now a trendy boutique.
[Source: “Arsonists Burn Another Bar.” Our Community (January 1972): 8.
“King of Clubs Saved from Arsonist.” Our Community (January 1972): 11. Full copies of Our Community are available online here.]
An abandoned building of the Norfolk State Hospital, via Flickr.
THIS MONTH IN HISTORY:
► 120 YEARS AGO: “Exaggerated Human Nature”: 1895. What is Insanity? Who better to ask than an insane man?
Said a patient in the Norfolk (Nebraska) Hospital: “I am not insane; this man is not insane; that man is not insane. There is no such thing as insanity; it is simply an exaggerated form of human nature.”
Insanity is a type of civilization, the offspring of humanity’s progress, the step-child of Nature, the penalty inflicted for brain-development. Indeed, it is in itself an abnormal form of brain-development, an exaggerated type of human nature. It is a little plant that has sprung from the footworn pathway traversed by the mighty cavalcade coming down the vast reaches of human civilization, human culture and human competition. It may be regarded as a proud flesh of the mind — a preternatural development or derangement of the protoplasmic cells. When the clock of civilization struck its sunrise hour, man everywhere was an unclad savage, drunken, greedy, treacherous and beastly. To fill his stomach and to find a comfortable place to sleep completed the apex of his ambitions and gratifications. It was his normal state.
When he commenced to enlarge his cranial sphere, when he began to expand the horizon of his thought-realm, he started the development of a subtle, an inscrutable agency, which has developed rough corners, exaggerated eccentricities and uncontrollable proclivities. In the slow and leisurely peregrination or the mad stampede at times of humanity adown the corridors of the past, in the jostle, the clash, the strife, the crowd, the crush, the greed, the vices and the mistakes, do we wonder that here and there should occur exaggerations, excrescences and abnormal protuberances of the functions of the mind?
Dr. J.H. Mackay was the superintendent of the State Hospital for the Insane in Norfolk, Nebraska, where presumably he had that enlightening exchange with an inmate. He talked about his tenure there at an 1895 meeting of the Missouri Valley Medical Association in Kansas City. But imagine the horrors that patient, and others, must have endured under Dr. Mackay’s direction:
A unique fact in connection with the insane is that any injury producing pain, such as a scald, burn or corporeal punishment, as well as a shock or fright, has a remarkably salutary influence in brightening up the minds of the insane. Recently a patient in this hospital severed the external jugular vein and was in rigors from hemorrhage when found. The vein was ligated and the patient made a good recovery and improved very rapidly, his mind becoming much clearer than previous to the injury. Instances are on record by the score where accidents of scalding and other injuries involving pain have resulted in the recovery of patients suffering from melancholia and acute mania. It would be interesting to try the results of scorching the soles of the feet, or of administering corporeal punishment or blood-letting, fright and shock in some of the chronic cases of insanity and confirmed melancholia and mania. I am of the candid belief that such treatment would result in good to the patient. It may be claimed that such treatment is barbarous. No treatment is barbarous that benefits a patient and releases his mind from the fog and gloom of insanity, however painful that treatment may be.
Mackay’s beliefs were rather typical for the late 1800s. He was a firm believer in Degeneracy Theory (see Aug 16, Sep 9, or Oct 26 for brief explanations) and the older pseudo-science of phrenology (see Aug 6 for a brief introduction), and he touched on both theories in his talk. Those beliefs led him to the conclusion that all mental illness and criminality — Mackay didn’t see the difference between the two — were actually physical ailments of some sort, with its roots either in the patient’s heredity or his misshapen skull. He presented his sketches of skulls to prove his point:
The next is a drawing of the skull of another murderer. Do you see the deposit of bone along the suture. It is nearly one-fourth of an inch thick. Who knows but what the abnormal condition of that poor fellow’s skull led him to be a criminal? and yet he was hanged. What was accomplished by killing him? …A representation of the skull of a Flathead Indian is also shown here. The Flathead is one of the most cruel and bloodthirsty of races. It is well known that the sloping angle is produced almost wholly by artificial means. What the shape of the skull may have to do with his vicious nature I leave to you to judge. The drawing of a normal skull is introduced for purposes of comparison. …
The malformations of which I have spoken exhibit peculiar types of exaggeration or atavism. Certain portions of the brain are abnormally developed; others are practically annihilated, crowded upon and crowded out until the patient has become mentally lop-sided. unbalanced and uncontrollable. Genius, incoherence, imbecility, criminality and perverted sexualism run riot, unrestrained and unbridled by the individual. Two-thirds of all the patients are sexual perverts. Homosexuality, sexual inversion, masturbation, urnings et id omnia genus ail nauseam are the rule.
There were also the “men-haters” among the women:
There are men-haters among the women — women whose sexual system has been starved or perverted or abused; old maids with acquired or inherited sexual perversion, starvation or inversion; married women whose maternal instinct and sexual nature have been extinguished by hard work, poor diet, frequent child-bearing and nursing, and the dreary, monotonous, pleasureless, changeless grind of a quarter of a century, more or less, of married life.
Because Degeneracy Theory held that things would only get worse, Mackay was a proponent of what had become known as Eugenics (see Nov 10 for an explanation; see Aug 16 for another example of Eugenics advocacy). Mackay’s proposal was particularly draconian.
It goes without saying that to be effective any effort to improve the physical characteristics of our race must antedate the birth of the individual. We need laws to abridge the life of all monsters that do not conform to the type of man, to quarantine or prohibit the public exhibition of museum freaks, and to prevent, as far as possible, the birth of such. A judicious inspection by the state of all children before reaching puberty would serve the double purpose of discovering abnormal conditions of mind and body, and afford an opportunity for the application of means, as far as possible, to remedy them, and the segregation of those totally unsuited mentally or morally to propagate their species. In this way only can we hope to prevent insane and half-witted girls becoming pregnant. Rigid restraint, quarantining and unsexing of criminals, insane, rapists, imbeciles and those who spread specific diseases.
Mackay was a political appointee of the Populist/Democrat Gov. Silas Holcomb, and took over the state hospital in Norfolk soon after the Governor took office in 1895. Mackay resigned his position in the summer of 1896. No explanation was given for his departure, but his wife filed for divorce the following year — a rarity and a scandal at that time — claiming “extreme cruelty and inhumane treatment,” and adultery. He died in Houston in 1922 at the age of 57.
[Source: J.H. Mackay. “Exaggerated human nature.” Medical Arena 4, no. 12 (December 1895): 353-361. Available online via Google Books here.]
TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
► 55 YEARS AGO: Michelangelo Signorile: 1960. After graduating with a degree in journalism at at Syracuse University, the Brooklyn native returned to New York where he got his first job at a public relations firm which specialized in placing stories about their entertainment clients in gossip columns. That naturally meant that he was collecting and trading in gossip, which is where he noticed the double standard in how the media glamorized the heterosexuality of celebrities while maintaining a veil of silence around anything that might be remotely gay. But it wasn’t until his friends began dying in the early years of the AIDS crisis that he began to draw a line from gay invisibility to the ease with which media and public officials could turn a blind eye on what was happening. He became an activist in 1988 when he joined ACT UP, which led to his arrest during a speech by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (later to become Pope Benedict XVI) who was the Vatican’s point man on Catholic orthodoxy and the author of papers against homosexuality and against condom use to prevent the spread of AIDS. Signorile had gone simply to watch the protesters, but as he heard the Cardinal speak, he thought of the homophobia he had experienced growing up in the church, and he couldn’t contain himself. As he wrote later in Queer in America: Sex, the Media, and the Closets of Power
Suddenly, I jumped up on one of the marble platforms, and looking down, I addressed the entire congregation in the loudest voice I could. My voice rang out as if it were amplified. I pointed at Ratzinger and shouted, “He is no man of God!” The shocked faces of the assembled Catholics turned to the back of the room to look at me as I continued: “He is no man of God—he is the devil!'”
So yeah, he was arrested, and another gay rights activist was born.
Signorile is considered the pioneer of the controversial act of outing public figures. He was the co-founding editor of OutWeek, where, in a weekly column called “Gossip Watch,” a watch column of the city’s gossip columns, he railed against the media’s double standard on how they treated gay and straight public figures, and he argued that this double standard drove the gay community to invisibility in the midst of an growing health catastrophe. He outed Hollywood producer David Geffen, who was promoting Guns ‘N’ Roses and comedian Andrew Dice Clay, two acts which were attacked for crude anti-gay lyrics and “jokes” about the AIDS crisis. He also outed gossup columnist Liz Smith and, perhaps most famously, publishing tycoon Malcolm Forbes (see Mar 18). It was actually Time magazine which coined the term “outing,” but Signorile always considered the term itself biased. He preferred to call what he did “reporting,” and insisted that it was no different from the same kind of reporting that media outlets routinely do with straight people.
Signorile later worked at the Advocate and Out magazines, and he also wrote columns for Gay.com. In 2000 he began working in internet radio, and that led to hosting The Michelangelo Signorile Show on SiriusXM OutQ beginning in 2003. In 2014, his program moved to a broader audience on SiriusXM’s Progress 127, from 3:00 to 6:00 p.m. EST. He has written four other books, including Life Outside – The Signorile Report on Gay Men: Sex, Drugs, Muscles, and the Passages of 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?
December 18th, 2015
Does this look like the face of an innocent woman? It’s not, it’s Kathryn Knott.
Kathryn was out drinking with 14 of her good friends from her Catholic high school last September in downtown Philadelphia when the group ran into a gay couple. So they decided that they’d beat them while screaming homophobic slurs. One of the couple was knocked unconscious and left with broken cheekbones and a fractured upper jaw that needed to be wired shut for eight weeks.
Perhaps they forgot that anything that is done on a street in a major city is likely to show up on a surveillance camera. So they just went on to the next bar and thought nothing of it. Until their faces were flashed across the screens of everyone watching the news.
The prosecutors isolated three of the participants to charge with assault and conspiracy. Two of them, Philip Williams and Kevin Harrigan, plead guilty to assault and conspiracy. They got off pretty easy. (Philly.com)
Philip Williams, 24, of Warminster, and Kevin Harrigan, 26, of Warrington, were both sentenced to probation, community service at a LGBTQ center yesterday before Common Pleas Court. Both men will also voluntarily stay out of Center City as part of their probation deal, though an attorney for one admitted it would be difficult to enforce.
But the third assailant decided that punishment – even light punishment – was for fools and suckers. After all, she’s a pretty blonde girl whose daddy is a chief of police in one of the nearby suburbs.
So Kathryn Knott decided to fight her arrest in court.
And so for the past several days, a jury has heard character witness say that she’s lovely and non-violent. Others in the party all claimed that they didn’t see her throw a punch. And she swore, up and down, that she only tried to stop the fight. And never ever ever did she hurl homophobic slurs. No, not her.
But they also heard the victims tell that she did, indeed, throw punches and scream slurs. And several witnesses did as well.
Then there was Knott’s social media history which suggested that she held animus towards gay people.
And, after three days of deliberation, the jury just didn’t find her believable. (Philly Voice)
After a series of contentious, “heated” deliberations, a Philadelphia jury returned a mixed verdict Friday in the assault trial of Kathryn Knott, finding the Bucks County woman guilty of simple assault and conspiracy to commit simple assault against Zachary Hesse, one of two victims beaten as they walked to get pizza in Center City on Sept. 11, 2014.
Knott also was found guilty of reckless endangerment against both Hesse and his boyfriend, Andrew Haught, but acquitted of aggravated assault, a felony and the most serious charge against her.
Several on the jury were fighting for a guilty charge on all counts. And though they disagreed as to the extent of her culpability, jurors found Knott’s demeanor, obvious lies, and lack of remorse to be disgusting.
Kathryn Knott will receive her sentencing on February 8. Having put the victims through the trauma of reliving the event and having taken jurors away from their lives and insulted them with lies, I sincerely hope that Knott’s sentence is significantly more severe than that of her fellow assailants who admitted their crimes and expressed remorse for their actions.
December 18th, 2015
Jewish newspaper Haaretz has noted that an ultra-orthodox statement on homosexuality has disappeared
The Torah Declaration, the paper that outlines the ultra-Orthodox position on homosexuality, is no longer accessible online, signaling that at least some of its backers in the community may be distancing themselves from the document’s uncompromising stance on LGBT identity.
Haaretz notes the strong connection between the statement and Arthur Goldberg, founder of JOHAH, and speculates that the removal of the document may reflect a growing distrust in ex-gay efforts following a fraud lawsuit against JONAH.
December 18th, 2015
In 2000, Arthur Goldberg (a felon convicted of fraudulent financial dealings) founded Jews Offering New Alternatives to Homosexuality (JONAH, now renamed Jews offering New Alternatives to Healing). As most other ex-gay organizations had a strong evangelical Christian emphasis, JONAH provided a place for same-sex attracted Jews to rediscover their heterosexuality in a space that was respectful of their religious and cultural heritage.
But, as was the case with the Christian ex-gay groups, they failed. It turns out that Jews are no more likely to be counseled into changing their sexual orientation than are evangelical Christian.
In 2013 a number of former clients of JONAH filed a lawsuit against JONAH, Arthur Goldberg, and counselor Alan Downing claiming that they had fraudulently offered services and made promises that they could not fulfill (in addition to some really creepy “therapy” techniques). After significant testimony and consideration, on June 25, 2015 the jury unanimously determined that consumer fraud had been committed and that JOHAH was liable for $72,400.
Today Judge Peter Bariso of the Superior Court of New Jersey has entered his order. It could not be worse for JONAH, Goldberg, and Downing:
1. JONAH, Inc. shall permanently cease any and all operations within thirty (30) days of the entry of this Order, including its educational functions, its provision of referrals and/or direct services, and operation of its websites and listservs, which it shall cause to be taken offline, provided however that it shall be permitted to maintain use of “@jonahweb.org” email addresses, only for those purposes not prohibited by this Order, for one hundred eighty (180) days from the entry of this Order;
2. JONAH, Inc. shall permanently dissolve as a corporate entity and liquidate all its assets, tangible or intangible, within one hundred eighty (180) days of the entry of this Order;
3. As of the date of this Order, pursuant to the New Jersey Consumer Fraud Act, N.J.S.A. §§ 56:8-1, et seq., Defendants are permanently enjoined from engaging, whether directly or through referrals, in any therapy, counseling, treatment or activity that has the goal of changing, affecting or influencing sexual orientation, “same sex attraction” or “gender wholeness,” or any other equivalent term, whether referred to as “conversion therapy,” “reparative therapy,” “gender affirming processes” or any other equivalent term (“Conversion Therapy”), or advertising, or promoting Conversion Therapy or Conversion Therapy-related commerce in or directed at New Jersey or New Jersey residents (whether in person or remotely, individually or in groups, including via telephone, Skype, email, online services or any delivery medium that may be introduced in the future, and including the provision of referrals to providers, advertisers, promoters, or advocates of the same), provided however that Alan Downing shall have thirty (30) days from the date of the entry of this Order to cease the provision of Conversion Therapy to his current clients;
4. Plaintiffs’ counsel is awarded attorneys’ fees and expenses in the amount of three million five hundred thousand U.S. dollars ($3,500,000) to be paid by Defendants (the “Fee Award”) within such time as mutually agreed upon by the Parties. Plaintiffs shall submit to this Court a notice of satisfaction upon Defendants’ payment of the Fee Award.
[emphasis added]
So one more ex-gay group is gone.
December 18th, 2015
TODAY’S AGENDA is brought to you by:
From The Calendar (San Antonio, TX), December 18, 1987, page 7. (Source.)
TODAY IN HISTORY:
► 35 YEARS AGO: New York Court of Appeals Strikes Down Sodomy Law: 1980. New York became the twenty-fourth state in the nation to legalize homosexuality when the Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court, struck down the New York’s consensual sodomy law. In a 5-2 decision, the court ruled that the law violated Constitutional rights to privacy and equal protection, noting that the law banned anal and oral sex only when those acts were performed by unmarried couples. Married couples were exempt under the law. Writing for the majority, Judge Hugh Jones wrote:
“We express no view as to any theological, moral or psychological evaluations of consensual sodomy. It is not the function of the Penal Law or our governmental policy to provide for the enforcement of moral or theological values. …the People have failed to demonstrate how government interference with the practice of personal choice in matters of intimate sexual behavior out of view of the public and with no commercial component will serve to advance the cause of public morality or do anything other than restrict individual conduct and impose a concept of private morality chosen by the State.”
TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
► 40 YEARS AGO: Jay Bakker: 1975. Having grown up in front of television cameras as the son of televangelists Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker at their Christian theme park home in Charlotte, North Carolina, he was deeply affected when his father’s empire came crashing down. His father was sent to prison for financial irregularities and mail fraud, and his family was subsequently ostracized by fellow Evangelicals. For Jay, that led to a downward spiral of rebellion and drug abuse. But he eventually turned his life around and committed himself to a different vision of Christianity, one with God as a loving and accepting being rather than a God of judgment and wrath. In the process, he became a very different kind of minister, an “evangelical punk preacher,” as he describes himself. Jay’s experience of being outcast informed his own philosophy of inclusiveness which extends to LGBT people. In the 2006 documentary One Punk Under God, Jay explains why he supports same-sex marriage to a congregation that is not ready to accept that message:
In 2011, Jay Bakker released his book, Fall to Grace: A Revolution of God, Self & Society
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?
December 17th, 2015
TODAY’S AGENDA is brought to you by:
From IN Northeast (Boston, MA), December 14, 1992, page 10.
The club which was located just off of I-84 in western Hartford, CT, is now host to the Charter Oak Boxing Academy.
TODAY IN HISTORY:
► New York Times: “Growth of Overt Homosexuality In City Provokes Wide Concern”: 1963. Randy Wicker was a brash young activist who, beginning in 1958, decided it was time to shake things up if the gay community was ever going to get anywhere. As a grad student, he volunteered with the New York Mattachine Society hoping to move the organization’s advocacy efforts in a much stronger direction. When the group scheduled a talk on “The Homosexual and the Law,” Wicker took it upon himself to print up some signs and post then throughout Greenwich Village to publicize the event. Mattachine members, who were more accustomed to the more closeted word-of-mouth method of getting the word out, found Wicker a “disturbing acquisition to the movement,” as the group’s president later said. To get around the Mattachines’ fearfulness, Wicker created a one-man advocacy “group” he called the Homosexual League of New York, so that whenever he had a project that the Mattachines felt was too far out there, his league of one could ride to the rescue. It was under that guise that Wicker appeared on WBAI radio in 1962 (see Jul 15), where New York radio listeners, for the first time, heard Wicker and six other gay men talk for ninety minutes about what it was like to be gay.
Wicker was always looking for ways to generate attention, and so when Robert Doty of The New York Times contacted him asking for help on a story about homosexuals — Doty explained that he actually knew very little about the subject — Wicker was eager to help. He took Doty on something on a field trip of gay bars in New York, and he provided him with articles from ONE magazine about Evelyn Hooker, the UCLA psychologist whose research challenged the prevailing view that homosexuality was an illness (see Aug 30 and Sep 2). As Wicker later recalled, “I told him, ‘Look, I understand that the majority opinion in the psychiatric community says that homosexuality is a disorder and that these people are out claiming they can change people. All I want is equal treatment. At least give some exposure to the minority voices that say homosexuality is not necessarily a pathology.”
Unfortunately, equal treatment was not on offer when Doty’s story appeared on the Times’ front page on a brisk Tuesday morning in December:
The problem of homosexuality in New York became the focus yesterday of increased attention by the State Liquor Authority and the Police Department.
The liquor authority announced the revocation of the liquor licenses of two more homosexual taverns that had been repeatedly raided by the police. The places were the Fawn, at 795 Washington Street near Jain Street, and the Heights Supper Club at 90 Montague Street, Brooklyn.
The city’s most sensitive open secret — the presence of what is probably the greatest homosexual population in the world and the increasing openness of its manifestations — has become the subject of growing concern by psychiatrists and religious leaders as well as law enforcement officers. One division of the organized crime syndicate controls bars and restaurants that cater to the homosexual trade. Commenting yesterday on the attack on such places and the attention being directed at their habitues, Police Commissioner Michael J. Murphy said:
“The police jurisdiction in this area is limited. But when persons of this type become a source of public scandal, or violate the laws, or place themselves in a position where they become the victims of crime they do come within our jurisdiction.”
Mr. Hostetter said the Heights Supper Club had a signal light system “that warned the boys to stop dancing with one another” when a newcomer was suspected of being a policeman. The Fawn had a back room to which an admission was charged and where as many as 70 to 80 deviates had parties on Friday and Saturday nights. Most of the patrons were males, but on police found women dancing with women.
There were 19 police visits this year resulting in summonses and complaints of a noisy jukebox, disorderly premises, insufficient lighting and dancing without a cabaret license, and an arrest for degeneracy.
Before Doty could even broach the subject of homosexuality as a mental illness — and he did devote much of his article to that very topic — he introduced New Yorkers to homosexuals as criminals, or at least as associating with the criminal element. Doty wrote that homosexuality had been, until now, “protected by taboos on open discussion,” which allowed it to become “an obtrusive part” of New York society. As for balance, Doty provided this:
Two conflicting viewpoints converge today to overcome the silence and promote public discussion. The first is the organized homophile movement — a minority of militant homosexuals that is openly agitating for removal of legal, social and cultural discrimination against sexual inverts. Fundamental to this aim is the concept that homosexuality is an incurable, congenital disorder (this is disputed by the bulk of scientific evidence) and that homosexuals should be treated by an increasingly tolerant society as just another minority.
This view is challenged by a second group, the analytical psychiatrists, who advocate an end to what it calls a head-in-the-sand approach to homosexuality. They have what they consider overwhelming evidence that homosexuals are created — generally by ill-adjusted parents — not born. They assert that homosexuality can be cured by sophisticated analytical and therapeutic techniques.
More significantly, the weight of the most recent findings suggest that public discussion of the nature of these parental misdeeds and attitudes that tend to foster homosexual development in children could improve family environments and reduce the incidence of sexual inversion.
Wicker’s copies of ONE magazine featuring articles about Evelyn Hooker’s research on homosexuality made one small appearance in Doty’s article: “The homosexual has a range of gay periodicals that is a kind of distorted mirror image of the straight publishing world.” That was it. Doty then went on to describe, in a very stereotypical fashion, the homosexuals who “throng Manhattan’s Greenwich Village”:
They have their favored clothing suppliers who specialize in the rights slacks, short-cut coats and fastidious furnishings favored by mane, but by no means all, male homosexuals. There is a homosexual jargon, once intelligible only to the initiate, but now part of New York slang. The word “gay” has been appropriated as the adjective for homosexual.
… The list of homosexuals in the theater is long, distinguished and international. It is also self-perpetuating. There is a cliquishness about gay individuals that often leads one who achieves influential position in the theater — and many of them do — to choose for employment another homosexual candidate over a straight applicant, unless the latter has an indisputable edge of talent that would bear on the artistic success of the venture.
But back to that thing about homosexuality as a mental illness. A year earlier, Dr. Irving Bieber published the highly influential book, Homosexuality — A Psychoanalytic Study of Male Homosexuals, in which he and a team of seventy psychiatrists claimed a success rate of 27% in curing gay people through psychoanalysis. It would take several more years before many of Bieber’s colleagues and former patients to come forward to dispute those claims.But Doty devoted the remaining half of his lengthy article to Bieber’s views, including his theory that homosexuality was the result of of bad parenting:
In almost every homosexual case they found some combination of what they termed a “close-binding, intimate” mother and/or a hostile, detached or unresponsive father, or other parental aberrations.
Unsaid, though was that in almost every homosexual case they also found a gay man or a lesbian who was deeply distressed at being gay, so much so that they paid some very expensive psychoanalyst in a desperate attempt to get rid of it. What their so-called study said about those who didn’t seek their services, nobody bothered to ask. To back Bieber up, Doty turned to another psychoanalyst, Dr. Charles Socarides — the same Charles Socarides who would co-found the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH) in 1992 and whose son, Richard, would come out as gay. In Doty’s article, Socarides denounced the efforts of gay activists to win social acceptance for what he called a kind of “normal abnormality.” The homosexual is ill,” he said, “and anything that tends to hid that fact reduces his changes of seeking and obtaining treatment. If they were to achieve social acceptance it would increase this difficulty.”
“I thought it was a terrible betrayal,” said Randy Wicker of Doty’s article. “Because he was a man I had given all the information to and when it came out it was disgusting. He didn’t give any mention — not one mention — that there was a division among psychiatrists — not one word.” The Daughters of Bilitis’s The Ladder wrote that the story was designed to frighten readers into believing that gay people were flooding the streets of New York and “threatening to engulf the normals.” But Newsweek saw the article positively: “While straining for objectivity, a Times trademark, Doty nevertheless tried to explode a favorite myth propagated by some homosexuals that their condition is incurable and innate.”
[Sources: Edward Allwood. Straight News: Gays, Lesbians, and the News Media
Robert Doty. “Growth of Overt Homosexuality In City Provokes Wide Concern.” The New York Times (December 17, 1963): 1ff.
Jack Nicols. “Randolphe Wicker (1938- ).” In Vern L. Bullough’s (ed.) Before Stonewall: Activists for Gay and Lesbian Rights in Historical Context
TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
► Paul Cadmus: 1904-1999. When he died in 1999 at the ripe old age of 94, his New York Times obituary read:
Paul Cadmus, an American artist noted for a virtuosic figurative style that he applied to subjects ranging from biting social satire to moralizing allegories to sensual, sometimes sentimental male nudes, died on Sunday at his home in Weston, Conn. He was 94.
Mr. Cadmus found his inspiration in the art of Italian Renaissance painters like Mantegna and Luca Signorelli. His career was remarkable for its unruffled stylistic consistency over 70 years, from his days as a precocious student in New York in the 1920’s through his incendiary stint in the 30’s with the federal Public Works of Art Project, later folded into the Works Progress Administration, and up to the present. Although he stopped painting a few years ago, he continued to sketch.
The Fleet’s In!, 1934 (Click to enlarge)
It took the Times’s Holland Cotter four paragraphs before he could work his readers up to Cadmus’s favorite subject matter: the frank depiction of gay men as free and happy people. His “incendiary stint” came about over his 1934 PWAP commission, The Fleet’s In!, which portrayed sailors on shore leave in New York picking up local “trade”. That painting became the center of “the Battle of the Corcoran” when Navy Secretary Claude Swanson condemned it as “a most disgraceful, sordid, disreputable, drunken brawl” and ordered it seized from the gallery. The painting remained out of public view until 1981, but the outcry cemented Cadmus’s career as a satirist. For the rest of his life, he maintained that he was grateful for the publicity.
What I Believe, 1947 (Click to enlarge)
His cartoonish style became known as “magical realism,” and his themes nearly always touched on sexuality in some form, with homosexual themes nearly always present as either a subtext (glances and signals of cruising in otherwise ordinary scenes) or as an overt subject. His 1947 painting What I Believe, inspired by an E.M. Forster essay by the same name, was his visual manifesto. It depicts nude and contented gay couples in the center and left side of the painting in bright sunlight while reading, drawing, playing music, and conversing. That paradisal scene contrasted with the almost hellish right third of the painting, where heterosexual couples reclined in bare dirt and misery — not unlike traditional renderings of the final judgment. The painting, he said, celebrated “the sensitive, the considerate, and the plucky. Its members are to be found in all nations and classes, and all through the ages, and there is a secret understanding between them when they meet. They represent the true human condition, the one permanent victory of our queer race over cruelty and chaos.”
In an interview with the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art, Cadmus quoted the French artist Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres: “People say my paintings are not right for the times. Can I help it if the times are wrong?” Times have changed. The Fleet’s In!, the painting that started all the controversy, is now in the permanent collection of The Navy Art Gallery in Washington, where it is among its most popular attractions.
► 40 YEARS AGO: John Burroway: 1975. My youngest brother. Happy birthday, old man.
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?
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: