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 lobbyAugust 12th, 2016
Click to view the full broadsheet.
Yes, that was the actual British legal term for homosexual activity, and it was a capital offense until 1861, when the laws were finally relaxed to allow for life imprisonment. But that change came almost thirty years too late for Captain Henry Nichols. In 1833, the London Courier printed the following account:
Captain Henry Nicholas Nicholls, who was one of the unnatural gang to which the late Captain Beauclerk belonged, (and which latter gentleman put an end to his existence), was convicted on the clearest evidence at Croydon, on Saturday last, of the capital offence of Sodomy; the prisoner was perfectly calm and unmoved throughout the trial, and even when sentence of death was passed upon him. In performing the duty of passing sentence of death upon the prisoner, Mr. Justice Park told him that it would be inconsistent with that duty if he held out the slightest hope that the law would not be allowed to take its severest course. At 9 o’clock in the morning the sentence was carried into effect. The culprit, who was fifty years of age, was a fine looking man, and had served in the Peninsular war. He was connected with a highly respectable family; but, since his apprehension not a single member of it visited him.
You can also read a different account from another popular broadsheet by clicking the above image.
[via ExecutedToday.com, which goes to show that there really is a blog for everything.]
August 12th, 2016
That summer, greater Miami was swept up by an unprecedented wave of media-driven anti-gay hysteria, triggered, in part, by the murder of a male Eastern Airlines flight attendant earlier in August (Aug 3, Aug 11). Bars and beaches were being raided and gay men were being convicted under various vague public nuisance laws or the similarly vague “lewd and lascivious” law. (Prosecutions and convictions under Florida’s sodomy law were very rare, but mere threat of being charged with that felony often induced guilty pleas to lesser offenses.) The Miami News on August 12 reported on one such case involving a gay man and a reputed police informant who was apparently himself gay. Because The News’s report leaves open far more questions than it answers, I will just repeat it in full.
Informant Escapes Jail Term in Pervert ‘Turnabout’ Trial.
By Larry Birger
Miami Daily News Staff WriterA self-styled police informer escaped trial on sex charges today when a convicted homosexual refused to press a complaint which he had filed at the suggestion of City Judge Cecil C. Curry.
Odom’s photo from the Miami News
The case against truck driver Leonard M. Odom, 24, of 3523 SW 14th Ter., was dispatched so quickly that the name of the complainant’s attorney escaped reporters.
The convicted homosexual, Walter G. Quester, changed his mind and dropped charges against Odom of committing lewd and lascivious acts.
Judge Curry asked the unidentified attorney for Quester: “Why did you drop the charges?”
“I don’t know,” the lawyer replied. “I wasn’t here yesterday.”
The attorney was referring to the unusual court session at which the judge had turned on the chief witness against the defendant at Quester’s hearing on charges of lewd and lascivious acts.
On the basis of Odom’s testimony, concerning a “date” he claimed he’d had with Quester to get information for the police, Quester was convicted and sentenced to 60 days in jail.
Then Curry told Odom, “It looks to me as if you’re just as guilty as the defendant.” He suggested to Quester that he file counter-charges against Odom, which was done.
Before today’s hearing Odom’s lawyer, Morey A. Rayman, said he would move that Curry disqualify himself as presiding judge on grounds he had prejudged the defendant.
This report raises all sorts of questions. Was Odom really working as a police informant? Or did he decide to try to claim that’s what he was doing in order to try to get out of being charged himself? What — or who — led Quester to drop the charges against Odom? And with Odom’s name, address, and photo published in the paper, what happened to him after the trial was over?
It really is quite possible that there were two victims in the sordid mess, each one trying to make the best of a very bad, no-win situation. These are the kinds of stories that appear briefly in newspapers across the country and then, just as quickly, disappear. These are also the kinds of stories I would love to be able to track down. In searching Ancestry.com, there was a Walter G. Quester who died in 1987 in Broward County, Florida, and a Leonard M. Odom who died in Madison, Florida in 1997. Were these the guys mentioned in this article?
August 12th, 2016
The North American Conference of Homophile Organizations (NACHO), an umbrella group with representatives from twenty-six local and national gay rights organizations, was formed two years earlier, and from the very beginning they were hampered by squabbles between the member groups. When they met in Chicago just a few weeks before the contentious Democratic National Convention, a whole host of fault lines had emerged: along generational lines with younger members being influenced by civil rights and anti-war protests; along gender lines as lesbians became increasingly impatient and distrustful as the dominant male leadership gave short shrift to their concerns; and along geographic lines between the more “militant” East Coast and the less confrontational West Coast factions.
Although the delegates failed to form a unified national organization, they did manage to accomplish two things. First, they passed “Homosexual Bill of Rights”, which was proposed by the Resolutions Committee chaired by Daughters of Bilitis president Shirley Willer (Sep 26). The Homosexual Bill of Rights consisted of these five points:
Their second accomplishment would prove to be more enduring; the adoption of Frank Kameny’s “Gay is Good” slogan as the official slogan of the movement. The full resolution read:
BECAUSE many individual homosexuals, like many of the members of many other minority groups suffer from diminished self-esteem, doubts and uncertainties as to their personal worth, and from a pervasive false and unwarranted sense of an inferiority and undesirability of their homosexual condition, and from a negative approach to that condition; and
BECAUSE, therefore, many individual homosexuals, like many of the members of many other minority groups, are in need of psychological sustenance to bolster and to support a positive and affirmative attitude toward themselves and their homosexuality and to hae instilled into them a confident sense of the positive good and value of themselves and of their condition; and
BECAUSE it would seem to be very much a function of the North American Homophile Conference to attempt to replace a wishy-washy negativism toward homosexuality with a firm no-nonsense positivism, to attempt to establish in the homosexual community and its members feelings of pride, self-esteem, self-confidence, and self-worth, in being the homosexuals that they are and have a moral right to be (these feelings being essential to true human dignity), and to attempt to bring to bear a countervailing influence against negative attitudes toward homosexuality prevalent in the heterosexual community; and
BECAUSE the Negro community has approached similar problems and goals with some success by the adoption of the motto or slogan: Black is Beautiful
RESOLVED: that it is hereby adopted as a slogan or motto for NACHO that
GAY IS GOOD
The vote was unanimous, perhaps the only point of unanimity in the convention. Kameny saw his slogan’s adoption as being a critical step toward changing the internal self-perceptions that many in the gay community had of themselves. Just a few years earlier, he persuaded his own group, the Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C., to pass a resolution declaring that homosexuality was not a mental illness (Mar 4), a vote that was very controversial locally and nationally (May 11). This showed Kameny that if the gay community wanted mental health professionals to stop regarding gay people as mentally ill, then gays and lesbians themselves would have to change how they saw themselves:
A sign at a gay rights demonstration in Albany, New York, 1971 (Source)
In order that we might hear something good to offset all this negativity, I came up with the slogan “Gay is good” in 1968, in parallel with the slogan “Black is beautiful” coined around the same time for similar psychological reasons. Upon careful analysis, it quickly became clear that as long as we were classified by organized psychiatry as being mentally ill or emotionally disturbed, we were never going to be granted any kind of remedy for the cultural ills besetting us. Society was not going to offer protection to a bunch of “loonies,” which is what psychiatry of that day made of us…
Psychiatry would eventually change its mind about five years later. For countless millions of gay people, it would take longer. But Kameny didn’t just fight to change how the laws pr psychiatry treated gay people. He fought so that gay people to see themselves as fully equal to everyone else as people. In 2007 when his papers and artifacts were accepted by the Smithsonian Institution, Frank reflected in an email to me:
I’ve said, for a long time, that if I’m remembered for only one thing, I would like it to be for having coined “Gay is Good.” But never did I expect that that would make its way to the Smithsonian. I feel deeply contented.
[Sources: Ronald Bayer. Homosexuality and American Psychiatry: The Politics of Diagnosis 2nd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987):89-91.
Frank Kameny. “How It All Started.” Journal of Gay & Lesbian Mental Health 13, no. 2 (2009): 76-81.]
August 12th, 2016
(d. 1943) Influenced by the writings of Havelock Ellis (Feb 2), Radclyffe Hall described herself as a “congenital invert,” typically dressing in masculine clothing and living her lesbianism on her sleeve. Her nickname, “John,” was bestowed on her by her first partner, the German singer Mabel Batten. When Batten died in 1916, Hall had already fallen in love with Batten’s cousin, the sculptor Una Troubridge, and the two of them would remain together for the rest of Hall’s life. Hall’s first novel, the long and dreary The Unlit Lamp, didn’t sell well. But her next books — a comedy titled The Forge, a more serious volume titled Unlit Lamp, and another comic novel A Saturday Life, established Hall as a novelist of serious talent.
Her lasting fame came with her 1928 novel The Well of Loneliness. It was the only one of her eight novels with an overt lesbian theme, although the subject had come up in some of her short stories. There was nothing sexually explicit about he novel, yet it became the subject of a sensational obscenity trial in Britain which resulted in all copies of the novel being ordered destroyed. Its publication in the U.S. came about only after a long court battle. After the fireworks were over, the New York Court of Special Sessions cleared the book for publication in 1929 (Jul 27), and it has been continuously available in the U.S. ever since then.
Radclyffe Hall (right) with Una Troubridge
Hall and Troubridge were important figures in lesbian circles in London, Paris and elsewhere in Europe, where Hall was easily recognized by her tailored jackets, ties, socks and close-cropped hair. Her appearance wasn’t particularly shocking in the 1920s, where androgynous appearance among women was considered tres chic. But as the decades wore on, it became her most consistent visual identity, in keeping with her self-identification as a member of “the third sex.” Britain’s sensational press was only too happy to play up that image. During the height of the furor over the British obscenity trials, newspapers routinely published photos of her in the most masculine way possible, often cropping the photo above her waist on the many occasions when she wore a skirt with a man’s jacket.
The Well of Loneliness would be the only source of information about lesbianism for many women right on through the 1960s. Hall herself said that she had received more than 10,000 letters about her novel, many of them thanking her from grateful lesbians. When she died in 1943 of colon cancer, The Well of Loneliness had been translated into fourteen languages and was selling more then 100,000 copies per year. The Ladder, the newsletter for the Daughters of Bilitis, often wrote of The Well of Loneliness in the 1950s in reverential tones, and many anonymous letters to the editor from across America citing the book as a lifeline for women coming to terms with their sexuality.
August 12th, 2016
(d. 1960) The Harlem Renaissance blues singer was known as the “Brown Bomber of Sophisticated Songs.” Her “sophisticated songs” were obscene parodies of famous blues standards and popular songs. She sang them in the speakeasies of Harlem, often while brazenly flirting with the women in the audience. She was famous for her powerful voice, her girlfriends, and her manner of dress, especially her signature tuxedo and top hat. In the 1930s, she headlined the Harlem’s Ubangi Club, an “exotic” (read: gay) club where she performed with a chorus line of drag queens as backup. She was successful enough to acquire a Park Avenue apartment, a fancy car, servants, and, as she claimed at one time, a white wife in New Jersey.
But by 1937, the popularity of Harlem began to wane, so she moved to Los Angeles to be with her mother. She continued to carve out a place for herself there in the underground gay scene, performing at such popular lesbian bars as Joquins’ El Rancho in Los Angeles and Mona’s in San Francisco.
But when the straight-laced fifties came around, Bentley abandoned her trademark tuxedo. She began wearing dresses, and, in a 1950 article for Ebony, claimed to have cured her lesbianism through hormone treatments. She also said that she married J. T. Gibson, a newspaper columnist who later denied that they had ever met. She did marry a man who was sixteen years her junior, although they eventually divorced. In 1960, she was on the verge of being ordained a minister for the Temple of Love in Christ when she died of pneumonia at age 52.
Sometime in the 1950s, she appeared on Grocho Marx’s You Bet Your Life.
August 11th, 2016
I grew up with the Ohio literally in my back yard in Portsmouth, although the levee blocked the view. I could sit and watch the Ohio roll by all day long.
Here’s one of my relatives, Isaac Boroway (1754-1801), in the Gnadenhutten cemetery. The spelling of the family name seems to have gradually changed through the 1800s. Isaac was Moravian, the world’s oldest Protestant sect; its establishment preceded Martin Luther by about a century. Isaac was also a Revolutionary War veteran from Lancaster, PA.
That photo up there is the view of the river from Marietta, Ohio. We’ve been traveling throughout Ohio this past week visiting family, and we’ll be here another week before returning to Tucson. That’s why blogging has been so light, and it’s why it will continue to be so until about this time next week.
Yesterday, we were in Zoar, the site of Ohio’s most successful communal and separatist settlement. It’s not far from Uhrichsville, where my dad’s side of the family came from and where my uncle (his older brother) still lives. Today, we’re in Marietta. I have no connections here. We’re here just because it’s pretty and I’ve really never been here before.
And as it turns out, Marietta has been a pretty amazing discovery. Why hasn’t anyone told me that Marietta was such a happening place? Restaurants downtown were packed — on a Wednesday night. I think any real Brooklyn hipster — and I’m not speaking of hipsters lifestyle adoptees who wear flannel and work boots as fashion accessories — would feel right at home here.
August 11th, 2016
From David, a Florida gay lifestyle and photography magazine, May 1972, page 44.
The Alley Room was part of a three-bar complex in Miami Beach. The main bar in front was the South Wind Lounge, with the Cub Room off to the side and the Alley Room in the back. The bar and a neighboring liquor store were gutted by a fire on June 2, 1975. The fire broke out at about 3:30 a.m. and a dozen or so patrons and employees made it safely out as flames engulfed the building and shot through the roof, lighting the night sky throughout the area and attracting a crowd of spectators from nearby hotels and apartment buildings. “Miami Beach Fire Chief Albert Bishop said that the flames apparently were fed by the contents of hundreds of bottles of liquor which burst under the heat,” reported the Miami News. A hardware store and a bingo parlor on the same block sustained smoke damage. The liquor store was able to undergo repairs and get back into business, but the South Wind and Alley Room are now an empty lot.
August 11th, 2016
The murder earlier this month of William T. Simpson, a 27-year-old Eastern Airlines flight attendant (Aug 3) blew open another round of frantic anti-gay hysteria in Miami, particularly after the Miami Daily News wrote that the murder revealed a hitherto-unknown “colony of some 500 male homosexuals, congregating mostly in the near-downtown northeast section and ruled by a ‘queen’.”
Not to be outdone, the Miami Herald jumped into the fray with a front-page article by Miami police detective Chester Eldredge titled, “Official urges society to face pervert problem.” He wrote that Miami had been lucky, so far: “We are extremely fortunate that there have been no more violent crimes in Miami involving them. The sex pervert or deviate is an individual who has reached the age of reason, yet knowingly disregards the idea of reproduction. They compromise a group that ranges from relatively harmless homosexuals to the fierce sadist who horribly mutilates and tortures his victims.” He estimated that there were somewhere from five to eight thousand homosexuals in Miami, and urged the state to build more psychiatric hospitals “so they can be removed as a social blight and become useful citizens.”
[Source: Edward Alwood. Straight News: Gays, Lesbians and the News Media (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996): p 3.]
August 10th, 2016
The Christian Broadcasting Network reported that Republican Presidential nominee Donald Trump will appear at the anti-LGBT “Rediscovering God in America” conference in Orlando. The event will be held this week on August 11 and 12, coinciding with the two-month anniversary of the Pulse night club massacre:
Trump will speak to them about his push to repeal the Johnson Amendment. The law, which has been in place for decades, has made it more difficult for pastors to speak out on political issues and candidates from the pulpit. We should also note that former presidential candidate Sen. Marco Rubio will also speak to pastors at the two-day event.
Liberty Counsel Action, the political action arm of the Liberty Counsel, and the Florida Renewal Project, an affiliate of the American Renewal Project, are sponsering the the private event which will be closed to the public and press. About 700 pastors and spouses are expected to attend. David Lane, founder of the American Renewal Project told Bloomberg that Trump’s talking about the Johnson Amendment would be just “a good first step”:
“That’s a good first step,” said David Lane, the American Renewal Project’s founder. “But what about the religious liberty of Christian photographers, Christian bakers, Christian retreat centers, and pastors who believe same-sex intercourse and marriage is sin? These Christians were simply living out their deeply held convictions of their Christian faith when they politely refused to provide services for a same-sex wedding. Doesn’t the First Amendment give us all a right to our beliefs?”
Lane added, “Homosexual totalitarianism is out of the closet, the militants are trying herd Christians there.”
Last month, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) was named the event’s headliner, a move which brought fierce criticism from members of Orlando’s gay community. Rubio tried telling the Tampa Bay Times, presumably with a straight face:
“The event I will be speaking at in Orlando is a gathering of local pastors and faith leaders. Leave it to the media and liberal activists to label a gathering of faith leaders as an anti-LGBT event. It is nothing of the sort. It is a celebration of faith,” he said.
So is it an anti-LGBT event? You tell me. Here’s a rundown on some of the other speakers that Trump and Rubio will be sharing a platform with:
August 10th, 2016
From the Urologic and Cutaneous Review, June 1914.
August 10th, 2016
The outer walls and a guard tower of the old Ft. Madison Penitentiary (Source.)
A regular column in the nineteenth-century journal The Medical Standard included a roundup of items submitted by doctors from each of the 38 states, several territories and a number of Canadian provinces. Many of the notices amounted to little more than gossip: the practice of a “voodoo doctor” in Georgia, a doctor in Illinois who was charged with criminal assault “by a hysterical female,” a “magnetic healer” in Kentucky “who is ‘curing’ hypochondriacs and hysterical females in great numbers at Bowling Green.” (Women were commonly diagnosed with “hysteria” in the nineteenth century; its cure was sometimes a hysterectomy.) Among those notices was this case from Iowa:
A case of sexual perversion has been discovered in the Ft. Madison penitentiary. A woman from her early youth had dressed in male attire, was universally regarded as a man, married and lived with a woman as a husband. She was recently arrested for horse-stealing and sent to the penitentiary; in the hospital of which her sex was discovered.
This is all I know about the man in question, although I’ll certainly keep my eyes open. The Ft. Madison penitentiary was established in 1839, seven years before Iowa’s statehood. The old facility, expanded several times over the years, is still in use today as the Iowa State Penitentiary, making it the oldest operating prison west of the Mississippi, although that distinction is set to end in a few months when a new facility opens and the 175-year-old facility will finally be retired.
[Source: “State Items. Iowa.” The Medical Standard 4, no. 2 (August 1888): 60. Available online at Google Books here.]
August 10th, 2016
The New Mexico State Hospital, now the Behavioral Health Institute.
Throughout much of the twentieth century, the mental health professions were exceptionally slow to come to grips with the distinction between sexual orientation (defined according to the gender one is attracted to) and gender identity (defined according to the gender in which one views oneself). Until relatively recently, it was broadly believed that every man who “wanted” to be a woman was gay, and that every gay man secretly wanted to be a woman. The magnitude of suffering inflicted on gay and transgender people due to this ignorance is incalculable; it is also illustrated by a letter that one psychiatrist, Rodolfo M. Bramanti, of the New Mexico State Hospital in Las Vegas, New Mexico, wrote to a probation officer. Bramanti published the letter in the August, 1965 edition of the journal Southwestern Medicine to discuss “some of the medical, legal and social problems that homosexuality creates”:
Dear Mr. M …… .
This letter is in reference to Mr. Peter M., a previous patient in this Unit, who was released on ….. , I have been quite concerned ever since in trying to secure the best solution to his problem, and, as I promised you in our telephone conversation, in the following I will try to discuss this case and summarize the conclusions at which I have arrived.
…I think he belongs to the group that modern psychiatry knows as sociopathic personality, sexual deviation (also called sexual perversion), in whom the only manifestations of the disorder are in the sexual sphere. The pervert suffers from an anomaly of the sexual drive and gets satisfaction either in some other activity than that of complete heterosexual intercourse, or, in some deviant activity, acts that are not accepted bv our morals, customs or laws.
Peter, as the generality of homosexuals, has a tendency to be immature in his reactions, is easily depressed and discouraged, frequently frustrated, emotionally unstable, dependent and self-indulgent, and involved in love affairs with other men which end in disappointments, frustrations and suicidal thoughts. These could have the appearance of psychotic symptoms, but, altogether, do not constitute the well-defined picture that characterizes the schizophrenic.
…The problem, as I see it from a practical standpoint, is that we are dealing with a youngster, who at the present time shows all the emotional feelings of a female, even though he has the complete appearance of a male. Due to his abnormal urges he has been indulging in homosexual relations and creating a difficult problem in his community.
Bramenti launched into a long and wide-ranging dissertation on the attitudes of society towards homosexuality, a dissertation that cites the Judeo-Christian tradition, the 19th century Napoleonic code (which dropped all sanctions against homosexuality), and, somewhat surprisingly, the rigidity of gender binaries, leading Bramanti to conclude that “our laws and the community attitudes in this respect are not only unscientific but unjust.”
Bramanti then discussed the range of therapeutic options available to Peter, and it is here that it becomes rather obvious to anyone reading it today that Peter’s problem wasn’t so much that he was a gay man in a homophobic society, but that she was a transgender person among professionals who hadn’t the slightest clue about what that distinction meant:
Peter came to this hospital with the idea that an operation could be performed to make him apparently, at least, more female — In other words, he completely refused the idea to become a male: even more, he was disgusted, disappointed because his physical appearance did not fit with his female mind and he thought that medical science could convert him into what he has been longing to be.
Bramanti briefly describes the case of Christine Jorgensen (who Bramanti insists on calling “Chris Jorgenson”), the first celebrity transgender person to be written about in the popular press (May 30). Bramanti considered the option of gender reassignment for Peter:
Can we advise such an operation in the case of Peter M … ? There are many factors to be considered. In fact, could we legally sanction such an operation? Should a surgeon agree to perform it? Is it justified from the religious point of view to try to transform what God decided? In the event that the operation is performed, should he be considered as a man or as a woman in spite of the fact that he will be lacking the male sexual characteristics as well as those of a female.
I feel that with all these drawbacks, we can hardly advise such a porcedure and, practically, we rule it out as a prospective solution of this problem.
Investigating the option of gender reassignment, in hindsight, appears to be the most logical course of action based on what we know today. Had Peter been under the care of a mental health professional who was knowledgable about gender identity issues, there may well have been a more positive outcome. But just when Bramanti brought up the most logical option, he retreated from a scientifically-valid position to an entirely religious-based one.
Bramanti then considered other therapeutic options for Peter: hormone treatments to “accentuate the masculine characteristics,” electroconvulsive therapy, and psychoanalysis, all of which he rejected because he believed they would fail to provided the hoped-for outcomes. Convinced as Bramanti was that he is dealing with a homosexual problem, he even quoted, in its entirety, Sigmund Freud’s famous letter to an American mother (Apr 9), the very letter in which Freud said that homosexuality was “nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation.”
That letter didn’t seem to phase Bramanti, since he then considered institutional options for Peter. He discussed an institution in California “that takes care of sexual perverts,” but ruled it out when he discovered that they only handled people who were genuinely psychotic. He also considered “Labortherapy,” which, he said, “may also be, as you very well pointed out, good.” Bramanti contacted the head of the Vocational Rehabilitation Department, who told him that Peter “could have good chances for such a program, provided that he wear clothes according to his sex, which, as you know, the patient refuses to do.”
After considering that there is nothing that can be done clinically to “change Peter’s condition,” Bramanti made the following six recommendations, which, given the tortuous journey he took to getting to them, turned out to be somewhat-for-1965 enlightened:
1) Take an understanding attitude toward his sexual behavior by explaining to his family, his relatives and members of the community that Peter M. should be accepted the way that he is.
2) Alleviate his emotional tensions, his frustrations, anxieties and periods of depression. In this sense, psychotherapy, adjusting him to his inversion, is the type of therapy recommended, if financially feasible. Some psychopharmacologic agents could also help him in achieving this end.
3) Punishment is by no means indicated. The best thing one can do is treat him as politely as one would anyone else. He, on his part, of course, should be expected to abide by the ordinary rules of decency such as applied to relationship between men and women, namely, he should not seduce others nor force himself on people who are not interested in his company. He should not flaunt his desires in public by dressing in clothes of the opposite sex or otherwise and he should not embarrass those around him by making love or about it in public.
If he behaves himself and controls himself as discreetly as people with heterosexual desires are expected to do, his private life should be of no more concern to anyone else than should a normal person’s. Putting him in jail or in a hospital results only in providing him and the other inmates or patients with added opportunities for abnormal sexual activity.
4) Due to the tendencies of being immature in his reactions, easily depressed, discouraged and frequently frustrated, he could be a suicidal risk: therefore, close supervision by the Probation Officer is in order.
5) The tentative idea of placing him in Vocational Program for the purpose of training him as a beautician should be encouraged, if he would agree to dress as a man during the training period.
6) It is also felt that a priest could help by providing him with support.
[Source: Rodolfo M. Bramanti. “Letter to a probation officer on a case of homosexuality.” Southwestern Medicine 46, no. 8 (August 1965): 253-257.]
August 10th, 2016
“I’ve always been a poet who wrote about urban life because I love the layers and surprises and the jangly complexities of cities,” he once said. “I feel at home in cities, being a gay man. It’s a place of permission and possibility.” He is the author of several collections of poetry, notably his 1995 award-winning Atlantis, which was inspired by his partner’s death from AIDS the year before. 1997’s Heaven’s Coast: A Memoir also chronicles his partner’s diagnosis, illness and death, as well as Doty’s grief afterwards. Another memoir, Dog Years, is about two dogs that Doty had acquired as companions for his dying partner. The book is not only about the character of his dogs, and also about “everything we cannot talk about,” as one reviewer put it. In the end, the book was less about how Doty took care of his partner and the dogs, but of how the dogs took care of him. It is truly a dog-lover’s love song.
In 2008, he won the National Book Award with Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems. His 2010 The Art of Description: World into Word is reflection not just on the art of writing, but also on the art of seeing what one wishes to write about. His latest book of poetry, Deep Lane: Poems, was published last April.
August 10th, 2016
The British transplant to America is an author, political commentator and a seminal blogger, having begun blogging before blogging was cool, with The Dish being one of the highest trafficked blogs on the net. Sullivan describes his views as politically conservative — he supports a flat tax, privatizing social security, and supports free markets in health care. If you read him with 1995 in mind, you’d pretty much agree: he’s conservative. And he has developed conservative arguments against the use of torture, his opposition to capital punishment, his concerns over the growing influence of “Christianism” (as he distinguishes it from Christianity) in American politics, his grudging support for Obamacare. His conservatism also led him to become a strong advocate for same-sex marriage several years before same-sex marriage was cool.
Because conservatism has changed to such a radical extent in America, those positions have opened him up to accusations of being a raving liberal. He supported George W. Bush in 2000, but went with Kerry, reluctantly, in 2004 over disagreement with Bush’s conduct of the wars and his position on the Federal Marriage Amendment. In 2008, Sullivan enthusiastically supported Obama and developed a fixation on the weirdness that was Sarah Palin. He supported Obama again in 2012, and appears to have all but given up hope for a reformed GOP. In 2013, he took The Dish completely independent, financially and technically, from the Daily Beast. After thirteen years of relentless blogging, Sullivan finally put The Dish down in 2015.
August 9th, 2016
Yesterday, Uganda’s Minister of Ethics and Integrity Simon Lokodo appeared before journalists and read a statement following last week’s police raid on a Mr/Ms/Mx Pageant that was being held as part of Uganda Pride celebrations. The U.S. Ambassador to Uganda has condemned last week’s raid, as did a coalition of Ugandan LGBT and human rights organizations.
The law is clear that the promotion of LGBT activities is criminal in letter and intent, and offensive to the laws of the Republic of Uganda. I therefore, call upon all stakeholders, ministries, departments, agencies, local governments, faith-based organizations, civil society organizations, the media, the families , the communities join the government to curb the escalating levels of immorality by upholding and integrating the national ethical values of Uganda into their daily life and work.
A program to rehabilitate the members of LGBTI community with the ultimate aim of giving them a chance to live normal lives again has been developed in my office. And Government remains committed to ensuring that Ugandans live today our cherished values and principles.
Lokodo’s comments apparently received fairly wide play in Uganda’s press:
@KuchuTimes @KashaJacqueline @nkali_biggie @SMUG2004 @Opimva @frankmugisha @RevJide @USAmbUganda @femauganda @ pic.twitter.com/V47XWJsNfm
— FARUG (@Far_Uganda) August 9, 2016
The Ugandan government has also released a more lengthy statement on the official press office’s web site, which paints Uganda’s local LGBT community as a product of “foreign forces”:
The Government has learnt of the ongoing promotion of activities of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) Movement in Kampala, who with the influence of some foreign forces have organized week-long festivities in different locations in Kampala and Wakiso Districts.
The promotion of these festivities, which would purportedly culminate in a “Gay Parade” on Saturday 6th August 2016, is criminal and illegal as they have not been cleared by the Uganda Police Force, and are against the laws of the Republic of Uganda; specifically the Penal Code, which is built on precedents set in many other countries.
…We wish to emphasize that whereas the promotion of homosexuality is criminalized under the Penal Code, there is no violence against the LGBT community in Uganda — contrary to some claims made loosely by proponents of this movement.
…Government will not condone the promotion of the illegal activities of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT)movement and through the Uganda police will work to ensure that the criminal and illegal activities of the Gay community are halted.
The organizers of the planned Gay Parade on Saturday 6th August 2016 are advised to stop their activities immediately. The public is called upon to refrain from joining and participating in Gay activities.
Hon. Lokodo is lost on the law as there is no such offence as "promotion of homosexuality" under the PCA. #UgPride16
— Susan Mirembe (@Cell_met) August 8, 2016
As several Ugandans have already pointed out, Uganda has no such law against “the promotion of LGBT activities.” Uganda’s constitution promises broad freedom of speech protections, although in practice the authoritarian President Yoweri Museveni has pushed a set of draconian laws through parliament that he has used as a pretext to jail dissidents and political opponents and ban meetings, rallies and other gatherings. The law requires organizations holding such meetings to notify police ahead of time and obtain permission before going ahead with the meeting. LGBT activists in Uganda say that they have complied with the law for Uganda Pride activities in 2014 and 2015 without incident. They also say that they gave notice to police in 2016, but the Ugandan authorities have accused the groups of violating the law.
Homosexuality itself is a crime under an older Ugandan law that was inherited from Britain when Uganda gained independence in 1962. According to that law, any person who “permits a male person to have carnal knowledge of him or her against the order of nature…commits an offence and is liable to imprisonment for life.” But there is no legal mechanism that prohibits LGBT advocacy or support activities. There are, however, plenty of non-legal or extra-legal mechanisms at play, which Lokodo has no fear of deploying.
Ethics Minister Simon Lokodo is a defrocked Catholic priest who was one of the strongest proponents of the notorious Anti-Homosexuality Bill, also known as the “Kill the Gays Bill” due to the death penalty for “repeat offenders” of homosexual activity, as well as for anyone who was gay and HIV-positive. Lokodo was among the chorus of Ugandans who repeatedly lied to the rest of the world about the existence of the death penalty in the proposed legislation.
The bill also would have added criminal penalties for anyone who advocated on behalf of gay people, anyone who provided housing or other services to gay people, and anyone who neglected to report gay people to police. In 2014, the Uganda Parliament approved an amended version the Anti-Homosexualty Bill which dropped the death penalty in favor of a lifetime sentence. Following worldwide condemnation and several countries suspending foreign aid to Uganda, the country’s Constitutional Court annulled the law on a technicality later that year in a face-saving move.
But even before Parliament acted on the bill, Lokodo often pretended as though the proposed legislation had already become law by shutting down LGBT rights conferences and meetings. He arrested the producer of a play which was being performed at a small theater portraying the difficulties LGBT people face living in Uganda. He has also moved to shut down NGOs for their perceived or actual support for LGBT rights, although Ugandan activists have repeatedly defied his ban on their work.
In 2009, American extremist Scott Lively, along with ex-gay activists Don Schmierer and Caleb Lee Brundidge appeared at the now infamous March 2009 conference in Kampala and called for “offering” gay people the false choice between lengthy prison terms and ex-gay therapy. Conference organizers also distributed copies of discredited American ex-gay activist Richard Cohen’s book, Coming Out Straight. Cohen was banned for life from the American Counseling Association, and his controversial “holding” or “touch” therapy techniques has made him the laughingstock of the ex-gay movement.
In his talk at the 2009 conference, Scott Lively re-inforced several stereotypes about gay people in Uganda, principally the idea that homosexuality is a foreign import in Africa and that people become gay as the result of financial and other material inducements from wealthy foreigners. Several members of Uganda’s parliament reportedly attended that conference and several other follow-up meetings after an announcement was made at the end of a Parliamentary session inviting members to the conference. While Lively is not the origin of those false stereotypes, he did reinforce them. They are also included as part of yesterday’s official government statement:
In our society, our African values and cultures consider sexual activity to be private and personal, and it is not conducted in public. Certainly, neither is homosexuality.
It is for this reason that the promotion of ‘gay’ activities is unwelcome.
In addition, we have noted that the promotions being held are aimed at mobilizing people to join this LGBT movement, which interestingly goes against the argument that gays are “born” that way. We are aware that there are inducements, including money, being offered to young people to promote the practice.
Meanwhile, local activists vow to resist government efforts to shut down public meetings:
Lokodo 2day addressed e nation n vowed 2 do everything within his power 2 'stop' gays.Wen wl this persecution end? pic.twitter.com/ICKE1yUEpW
— KuchuTimes (Q-Times) (@KuchuTimes) August 8, 2016
Minister Lokodo says, LGBT Ugandans can hold private events & I am saying we shall hold any events public or private like any Ugandan
— Dr. Frank Mugisha (@frankmugisha) August 8, 2016
@realraymond55 True! No one is hiding. We are here for good. @KuchuTimes @frankmugisha @KashaJacqueline @muganziruth
— Pepe Julian Onziema (@Opimva) August 9, 2016
We wont b forced 2 turn in2 an underground movement, we've worked way 2 hard 4 that. @KashaJacqueline @frankmugisha @Opimva @muganziruth
— KuchuTimes (Q-Times) (@KuchuTimes) August 9, 2016
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