Box Turtle Bulletin

Where Did the Vatican II Priests Go?

Sr. Jeannine Gramick co-founded New Ways Ministry in 1977 with Fr. Robert Nugent. New Ways is “a gay-positive ministry of advocacy and justice for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) Catholics, and reconciliation within the larger Christian and civil communities.” Both Gramick and Nugent ran into opposition from the Vatican during the church’s rightward turn during the 1980s and 1990s, and in 1999, both were “permanently prohibited from any pastoral work involving homosexual persons and are ineligible, for an undetermined period, for any office in their respective religious institutes.”

Fr. Nugent returned to parish-based ministry and retired in 2014. He passed away a year later. But Sr. Gramick refused to “collaborate in my own oppression by restricting a basic human right (so speak).” She switched orders to the Sisters of Loretto, where she continues her social justice and LGBT outreach work. Last June, she attended a meeting of the Association of U.S. Catholic Priests (AUSCP), which was formed five years ago by a group of priests who came of age during and immediately following Vatican II. She went to find out what ever happened to the “priests of Vatican II”:

At the end of June, I found out where many of them had been when I bumped into dozens and dozens of them in Chicago. Most of them were retired now or, as one said to me, “Not retired, just recycled.” They were still concerned about spreading the Gospel and fostering justice issues. …I felt right at home with these priests whose organization was founded to keep the vision of Vatican II alive. As Paul Leingang, the AUSCP communications director, put it, “We make Vatican II not a matter of nostalgia, but a matter of urgency.”

…As if to show that the AUSCP recognizes the value of dissent, the group presented an award to Bishop Thomas Gumbleton, a church resister who has publicly supported same-sex marriage.

…The significance of community rang clear in a presentation by St. Joseph Sr. Carol Zinn, past president of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, who spoke on Pope Francis’ second encyclical, “Laudato Si‘, On Care For Our Common Home.”

Zinn explained that our care for humankind, the earth, and all of creation centers around connection, not separation. Our care for our common home is based on community, not individualism. Whether the critique is about exploitation of our environment or various species; the abuse of people made poor by physical, sexual, or economic violence; global warming or consumerism; insufficient or unsafe water; hostility toward ethnic, religious, or sexual minorities; or the numerous other sins that cry out for justice — we need to grasp the fact that the cause of all these evils is the lack of genuine relationships. Laudato Si‘ calls us to get the message that the universe is connected; it is not isolated bits of matter. Only when we see our relatedness will we be motivated to care about all the beings in our common home.

Pope Francis has become something of a Rorschach test. People on the left see the things they want to see in him, as do people on the right, even as they also pine for the days of his two immediate predecessors when things seemed more clear cut. Just this week, liberals were pleased but cautious when Pope Francis created a new commission to study the possibilities of ordaining women as deacons, while conservatives celebrated his anti-transgender comments to bishops in Poland.

Meanwhile, and getting back to the story, it’s a great irony that, at least here in the U.S., the stereotypes of the past have been completely turned on their head. How many movies and sitcoms can you recall in which the older, authoritarian monsignor found himself in the exasperating position of having to deal with the hip, smart, younger priest who was fresh out of seminary and hell-bent on changing the world? That trope no longer holds in today’s church, as Sr. Gramick’s post illustrates. Today, it’s the older priests — those nearing retirement and those working past retirement — who are far more likely to embrace the kind of openness exemplified by the Second Vatican Council. They were those hip young priests in those story lines. (Sadly, and back to the real world, they were mostly sidelined when it came to promotions to diocesan offices and the hierarchy.) That’s not true for today’s crop who have joined the priesthood under Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Today’s doctrinaire and authoritarian priests are far more likely to sport hipster beards than wire-rim spectacles.

Today’s Agenda Is Brought To You By…

From the National Reno Gay Rodeo program, August 4-7, 1983, page 26. (Source.)

The big rodeo in Reno wouldn’t have happened in 1983 if one anti-gay group had gotten its way:

A religious group calling itself the Pro-Family Christian Coalition last week lost its attempt to halt this weekend’s annual Gay Rodeo.

Calling the estimated 50,000 Gay spectators expected for the annual event a health crisis, the Coalition asked the Washoe County Commission to stop the four-day event scheduled August 4-7. But after hearing from the Reno District Attorney that the rodeo would have to be found to present a clear and present danger, the County Commission voted to take no action on the Coalition’s request.

While the Coalition claimed to have garnered 6,000 signatures on a petition published as a full page advertisement in several Reno newspapers, organizers of the rodeo received support from the county health department, the University of Nevada Health Department, the Reno Casino Dealers Association, and at least one daily newspaper.

The annual Gay Rodeo, Reno’s fourth largest event of the year, includes such traditional rodeo events as bull riding, square dancing, and a horse show.

— From The Washington Blade, August 5, 1983, page 9.

Today In History, 1956: New York TV Station Airs “Introduction to the Problem of Homosexuality”

The pioneering WRCA-TV (now WNBC) aired an award-winning weekly panel discussion program called The Open Mind. The program, hosted by Richard Heffner, was well ahead of its time when it first went on the air in May 1956, and sixty years later it’s still an acclaimed syndicated program on American Public Television. On August 4, 1956, Heffner hosted the first televised discussion on the East Coast on homosexuality. And fortunately, the Daughters of Bilitis’s magazine The Ladder featured a review of the program by Sten Russell (real name: Stella Rush). If it weren’t for her review, it might be difficult to reconstruct the discussions that took place that night.

According to Russell, the program featured attorney Florence Kelley, psychologist R.W. Laidlaw, and a clergyman by the name of Dr. August Swift. didn’t take long for the prevailing prejudices about gay people to appear. When Heffner asked the panel whether homosexuality harmed society and should be punished by law, it was the clergyman who re-cast the question as to whether the law should concern itself with people who were not harming society. Kelley, the attorney, jumped in to counter that the law certainly should apply “when children were involved” — reflecting the common view that gays were child molesters — unless, she added, it was found that “homosexual offenders” could be treated. Laidlaw, the psychologist, said that of course they could be treated, to which Kelly retorted, “Yeah, anything can be treated… but how successfully?” Russell’s account indicated that the program continued along those lines:

The moderator asked if the homosexual could accept himself if society didn’t accept him. The conclusion was that it was very difficult, indeed. The moderator asked if there were cultural factors in the present making for more homosexuality. Miss Kelley asked if homosexuality were [sic] growing or just being more talked about. She cited Kinsey’s books as examples. The moderator said that the matter of national “security” had focused attention on this problem. He mentioned blackmail potential as part of the “security problem”.

Laidlaw said that a homosexual was not necessarily neurotic or psychotic, but that he was more likely to be in certain ways, due mainly to the pressures of public opinion which caused him to have to hide and cover up his actions and desires. Dean Swift was concerned as to the shock children experienced when approached by adult males. Laidlaw said that that depended on the predisposition of the child. Miss Kelley said that she was not worried about the “predisposition of the child,” but that the American Law Institute wished to protect any child from the traumatic shock of any sexual attack.

Despite the obvious prejudices, the program was (for 1956) relatively evenhanded and balanced — as balanced as a program like this could be where people were talking about another group of people who weren’t in the room. But even without the presence of a genuine gay person on the panel, the program proved controversial. New York’s Francis Cardinal Spellman threatened to go to the FCC to have NBC affiliate’s broadcasting license revoked. That did nothing to deter Heffner or WRCA. They scheduled another program on homosexuality nearly two months later (see Sep 29) followed by another in January.

[Source: Sten Russell (pseudo. of Stella Rush) “The Open Mind: A Review of Three Programs.” The Ladder 2, no. 2 (November 1957): 4-7, 22.]

Today In History, 1995: Pres. Clinton Forbids Denying Security Clearances Due To Sexual Orientation

President Bill Clinton signed an Executive Order officially banning discrimination in granting security clearances based on sexual orientation. For decades, federal agencies routinely denied security clearances to gay people on the assumption that all gay people were subject to blackmail or were mentally ill. A 1953 Executive Order signed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower included “sexual perversion” as a basis for firing from the federal workforce (Apr 27). That ban was lifted in 1975 (Jul 3), but policies regarded security clearances remained vague. A GAO study found that eight government agencies had already stopped using homosexuality as a reason for denying clearances, including the Defense Department, State Department, the FBI and the Secret Service, but other agencies continued the practice. Clinton’s Order established uniform standards for granting security clearances, and it added sexual orientation to the non-discrimination clause. This Executive Order came almost two years after “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was passed by Congress.

The Family “Research” Council’s Robert Maginnis denounced the move: “In all healthy societies, homosexuality is recognized as a pathology with very serious implications for a person’s behavior. … Even more importantly for security concerns, this is a behavior that is associated with a lot of anti-security markers such as drug and alcohol abuse, promiscuity and violence.” FRC hasn’t changed much since then. Rep. Bob Dornan (R-CA), who was never at a loss for words when it came to outrageous statements, called gay people “promiscuous by definition,” and said that Clinton’s action was “something else he didn’t have to do that’s gotten in our face. I wouldn’t trust them with a $5 loan, let alone the nation’s secrets.”

Today In History, 2010: Federal Court Declares California’s Prop 8 Unconstitutional

San Franciscans celebrate after Prop 8 is declared unconstitutional.

It’s hard to believe that only six years have passed since Federal District Judge Vaughn Walker’s decision declaring California’s Proposition 8 unconstitutional. So much has happened since then that it almost seems like a lifetime ago. While Judge Walker found that the ban against marriage equality merited strict scrutiny, he held that it didn’t matter because Prop 8 couldn’t withstand any level of scrutiny under the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause. He also found that animus against a minority was a critical element to Prop 8’s passage:

Proposition 8 places the force of law behind stigmas against gays and lesbians, including: gays and lesbians do not have intimate relationships similar to heterosexual couples; gays and lesbians are not as good as heterosexuals; and gay and lesbian relationships do not deserve the full recognition of society. … The Proposition 8 campaign relied on fears that children exposed to the concept of same-sex marriages may become gay or lesbian. The reason children need to be protected from same-sex marriage was never articulated in official campaign advertisements. Nevertheless, the advertisements insinuated that learning about same-sex marriage could make a child gay or lesbian and that parents should dread having a gay or lesbian child.

Judge Walker concluded:

Proposition 8 fails to advance any rational basis in singling out gay men and lesbians for denial of marriage license. Indeed, the evidence shows Proposition 8 does nothing more than enshrine in the California Constitution the notion that opposite-sex couples are superior to same-sex couples. Because California has no interest in discriminating against gay men and lesbians, and because Proposition 8 prevents California from fulfilling its constitutional obligations to provide marriages on an equal basis, the court concludes that Proposition 8 is unconstitutional.

The case then went to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which narrowed Judge Walker’s ruling considerably, holding that the key thing that made Prop 8 unconstitutional was that it took away a right from just one group of people who were already enjoying that right. According to the three judge Appeals panel, “Withdrawing from a disfavored group the right to obtain a designation with significant societal consequences is different from declining to extend that designation in the first place, regardless of whether the right was withdrawn after a week, a year, or a decade. The action of changing something suggests a more deliberate purpose than does the inaction of leaving it as it is.”

The decision was then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which took the case, heard oral arguments, and then on June 26, 2013, decided that Prop 8’s supporters didn’t have standing to appeal to the Ninth Circuit. That kicked the entire case back down and left Judge Walker’s ruling the final word on Prop 8. Two days later, gays were marrying again, after a nearly five year interruption to marriage equality.

Born On This Day, 1912: Virgilio Piñera

(d. 1979) Born the son of a civil servant father and teacher mother in Cárdenas, western Cuba, Piñera’s childhood was about as normal as anyone else’s, but with one distinction: he loved to read. Favorites ranged from Proust and Kafka to Moby Dick and Charles Dickens, which hinted at the future author, playwright and poet’s ability to pair ordinary Cuban street slang with a more rarified Spanish. His family moved to Camagüey while he was in his early teens, and that’s where he began writing. His first published poem El Grito Mudo (The Mute Scream) appeared in a Cuban poetry anthology in 1936, and he wrote his first play Clamor en el Penal (Noise in the Penitentiary) the following year while studying at Havana University.

Piñera’s career was an exercise in provocation and controversy. His 1948 play Electra Garrigó, blasted the values of Cuba’s upper class and elicited angry shouts from the audience, many of whom walked out. It also coincided with his exile to Buenos Aires, where he founded the literary journal Ciclón and collaborated with some of the more innovative and revolutionary writers in Latin America. Piñera returned to Cuba in 1958, just in time to see Batista flee and Castro ride triumphant into Havana. Piñera began working on the newspaper Revolución. His 1962 play, the mostly autobiographical Aire Frío (Cold Air), opened to wide acclaim in Cuba and Latin America.

The good times were short-lived. The Castro regime, influenced by the ideals of Soviet Realism, started clamping down on artists whose work weren’t transparent and easily accessible, qualities that Piñera’s work clearly did not share. His homosexuality only added to his problems. He was arrested during the government’s campaign against the “three Ps” — prostitutes, pimps and “pájaros,” Cuban slang for faggots. He was released soon after, but for the rest of his life few would touch his work, aside from a brief respite in 1968 when a Cuban literary house honored him the prestigious Casa de las Américas awarded for his play Dos Viejos Pánicos (Two Elderly People in a Panic). He died in Havana in 1979 from a heart attack, largely forgotten and officially ignored. But as the centenary of his birth approached in 2012, the official Cuban newspaper Granma declared the year, “El Año Virgiliano” with an officially-sponsored symposium in Havana and the re-staging of Aire Frío and Dos Viejos Pánicos.

Anti-Gay Tea Party Congressman Loses Primary Race

In a surprising development, Tea Party darling Rep. Tim Huelskamp (R-KS) lost his primary bid for re-election to congress. Huelskamp was so tea-baggy that the representative from Kansas’s vast first district representing 63 farming counties voted against the Farm Bill because food stamps! He also voted against the Export-Import Bank, which played a huge role in promoting farm exports. His disruptive antics got so bad that he got kicked off the Agricultural Committee — making it the first time Kansas went unrepresented on the farm committee for more than a century.

And by the way, he’s extremely anti-gay, although that likely had zero effect in this campaign.

Anyway, the surprise wasn’t that Huelskamp lost. Pols showed that the primary race was very close to political novice Roger Marshall. Which was surprising when those polls first came out. But Huelskamp was, after all, an incumbent backed by the Koch brothers, so it seems that most people thought he could still pull this one out. So the surprise now isn’t just that he lost, but that he was so soundly thrashed:

Huelskamp, first elected to Congress in 2010, lost to Roger Marshall by a large 13-point margin in a year that has seen just three House incumbents toppled. Marshall will likely win the general election in November to represent the 1st Congressional District, as the district is heavily Republican and there is no Democratic challenger.

Marshall was the candidate of the establishment, and it’s unclear if his win portends anything larger for Republican House members who many fear will be damaged by the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump. So far during the primary season, worries that angry voters would boot out incumbents have not materialized.

The race became increasingly close in the final weeks leading up to the primary, as well-funded conservative and business groups poured in $1.5 million to shape the outcome.

Marshall, an OB/GYN, was supported by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts’s superPAC. Perhaps more critically, Marshall was also supported by the Kansas Farm Bureau. Huelskamp received support from Club for Growth, Heritage Action, and the Koch brother’s superPACs.

The Freedom Caucus, which is what Congressional tea partiers call themselves, are blaming GOP leaders for Huelskamp’s loss:

Republicans need to be unified behind conservative principles to stop the Obama/Clinton agenda,” Freedom Caucus Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) said in a statement. “The House Republican leadership’s opposition to Tim Huelskamp significantly damaged the ability of House Republicans to do that.”

House Republican leaders don’t control outside spending and had nothing to do with the nearly $2 million in anti-Huelskamp ads that poured into his district from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Ricketts family’s Ending Spending political group.

But that’s not the crux of the caucus’ anger. Huelskamp approached Ryan seeking a public assurance that he could reclaim his seat on the House Agriculture Committee next year, a critical position for his farm-heavy district. Boehner (R-Ohio) backed an effort to remove Huelskamp from the panel three years ago as punishment for repeatedly defying leadership in big votes, something Ryan promised he would never do.

The loss of his committee seat was likely Huelskamp’s undoing: Marshall attacked him relentlessly for being ineffective and putting “rigid” conservative values over the needs of his constituents.

The Freedom Caucus got heavily involved in the back and forth with leadership, imploring Ryan to go public with an alleged commitment to reinstall Huelskamp on the panel. But the speaker declined.

This tmeans it’s probably a good time to break out the popcorn. Or a pleasant merlot:

Turns out Speaker Boehner is indeed enjoying Kansas primary night. Just received this from former staffer! pic.twitter.com/hIzmFt8hn0

— carl hulse (@hillhulse) August 3, 2016

Huelskamp reintroduced the Federal Marriage Amendment in Congress in 2013 immediately after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the so-called “Defense of Marriage Act”. The FMA would ban same-sex marriage nationwide. Huelskamp reintroduced the proposed amendment in February 2015 at the start of the 114th Congress. As a state Senator, he authored the Kansas 2005 constitutional amendment that banned same-sex marriage and civil unions in that state.

Joe Biden Officiates his First Wedding

And it was for a same-sex couple:

Biden officiated over the wedding of two longtime White House staffers, Brian Mosteller and Joe Mahshie, at the Naval Observatory on Monday, his office said. …His office said the vice president obtained a temporary certification from the District of Columbia to preside over the wedding ceremony, which was attended only by the grooms’ families.

Proud to marry Brian and Joe at my house. Couldn't be happier, two longtime White House staffers, two great guys. pic.twitter.com/0om1PT7bKh

— Vice President Biden (@VP) August 1, 2016

Today’s Agenda Is Brought To You By…

From Bay Area Reporter, March 6, 1975, page 24.

This is another one of those San Francisco bars that is difficult to find anything about. It appears to have opened around 1972 near the corner of Market and Sanchez, at about the time the area was still a down-on-its-luck Irish neighborhood known as Eureka Valley, rather than the gay mecca of the Castro as it’s known today. The storefront today is now a Venetian seafood restaurant called Pesce.

Today In History, 1954: A Miami Murder Uncovers a “Colony of Homosexuals”

It’s funny what it took in 1954 for a major metropolitan area to discover that there were gay people in their midst. I say it’s funny, but it can only be funny today, sixty years later. It was certainly no laughing matter then. In the early morning hours of August 3, a young couple looking for a secluded spot along North Miami’s “lover’s lane” found the body of William T. Simpson, a 27-year-old Eastern Airlines flight attendant, lying in the middle of the roadway in a pool of blood. He had been shot on his right side, his head had severe lacerations and his right index finger had apparently been pierced by something. About 500 yards away, police found his 1950 cream-colored convertible, with the front seat spattered with blood and a .22 caliber shell on the floor. It appeared that after the assailant fled, Simpson managed to get out of the car and stagger to the road before collapsing and bleeding to death.

Miami News, August 9, 1954

Five days later, police formally charged two young men, Charles W. Lawrence, 19, and Lewis Richard Killen, 20, with first degree murder. The two didn’t just confess to the murder, they bragged about it. They had been rolling gay men in the area for several weeks. Lawrence would hitchhike and allow himself to be “picked up” by an unsuspecting mark, and Killen would follow in a green Chevy. After the mark pulled over to a secluded spot, they’d rob him. Ordinarily, they’d let the victim go, confident that he wouldn’t go to the police. But Lawrence carried a gun, and for some reason this time he pulled the trigger. One former high school buddy recalled that Lawrence “had an intense hatred of homosexuals.”

In the ensuing investigation, police appeared surprised and alarmed that there were so many gay men in the area. It shouldn’t have been much of a surprise. Local papers had been reporting that Miami’s sheriff deputies and Miami Beach’s police department had conducted several bar and beach raids since the previous November, arresting gay men and charging them with “vagrancy.” When a young girl was murdered in July, police responded, illogically, with five nights of gay bar raids to “make things hot for sex perverts in Miami.” On July 18, the Miami Herald published a letter to the editor proposing a final solution to the problem: “Just execute them all.” But on the same day that Lawrence and Killen were charged, the Miami News‘s front page headline looked as though detectives had stumbled upon an entirely new discovery: “Pervert Colony Uncovered In Simpson Slaying Probe”. They obviously had a hard time understanding what local gays were telling them.

A colony of some 500 male homosexuals, congregated mostly in the near-downtown northeast section and ruled by a “queen,” was uncovered in the investigation of the murder of an Eastern Air Lines steward…. Peace Justice Edwin Lee Mason said today, “I certainly learned a lot during this investigation I never knew before.

“I not only was surprised at the number of homosexuals turned up in the murder investigation but I was amazed to find out that there were distinct classes, not only based on age groups, but also on the ages of the persons with whom they liked to consort and groups based on types of perversion.”

…”We learned — among other things — that Simpson was bisexual. We also learned that there was a nominal head of the colony — a queen.”

Investigators, following a line of thought that possibly the murder might have been for succession of the title, and that Simpson may have been the “ruler” of what the investigators then believed to be a quite small group of homosexuals in Miami asked one man, who made no secret of his leanings:

“Was Simpson the ‘queen?’

“No,” came the response. “The queen is –” Here the man named a person quite prominent in the community.

“How many of you are there,” an investigator said he asked. “Twenty –Forty?”

“Oh, more than that.”

“A hundred?”

“Make it closer to five hundred,” came the staggering reply.

Dade County’s population was around 700,000 in 1954. Yet for such a large city, tossing around a figure like five hundred, which was assuredly a significantly low-balled estimate, was nevertheless enough to throw Miami’s newspapers in a tizzy. On August 13, the News began a three-part series on homosexuality, with the first installment calling it “A Disease ‘Worse Than Alcohol’.” The following day, the News reported on “How L.A. Handles Its 150,000 Perverts”. “This thing is like cancer,” Los Angeles police chief Thad F. Brown told the News. “It keeps getting bigger and bigger each year. We process about 150 homosexuals a month who are caught in the act.” The paper suggested a solution: “The police in Los Angeles have a policy of harassment.” As Brown explained, “We keep a constant check on bars and restaurants where they hang out. We try to get the licenses of the places catering to them.”

In the third installment of the series, the News warned about “Great Civilizations Plagued by Deviates” — Greece, Rome, and, naturally, Miami:

Police of several communities have watched with growing concern the gathering spots frequented by perverts and two departments have started all-out war against homosexuals. Miami Beach Police Chief Romeo Shepard says he will continue to harass homosexuals in Miami Beach. “I simply want them to get out of town,” said Shepard.

Sheriff Tom Kelly, who staged a big raid on homosexual gathering spots last Saturday, made a similar statement. “I will keep on harassing the homosexuals until they understand they’re not wanted in Dade County,” said Kelly.

The Miami police department has shown a reluctance to bother perverts. “If I ran all of the homosexuals out of town, members of some of the best families would lead the parade,” Police Chief Walter Headley once said.

A local attorney, E.F.P. Brigham, proposed legislation to deal with the problem:

If a sexual deviate is accused of molesting a child or any person for that matter, and manages to beat the charge in court, the state will still have the right to order a mental examination for the offender.

If the person is found to be a sexual psychopath (and that does not necessarily mean insane) the state will then have the right to institute civil action to put that person in an asylum for the rest of his or her life or until such time as a cure can be effected.

Miami was now in a full-blown panic, which would soon reach the statehouse in Tallahassee where it would rage well into the next decade. House speaker Ted David called for stronger criminal penalties for “confirmed sexual deviants… to meet the needs of Florida’s big cities.” Miami’s mayor, Abe Aronovitz, would make anti-gay campaigns a centerpiece of his administration.

And what about Killen and Lawrence, the two men who were charged with first degree murder? After claiming that they killed Simpson because he made sexual advances toward Lawrence, they were convicted of manslaughter in November and sentenced to twenty years in prison.

[Note on links: When I first wrote this, back issues of the Miami News was available online at the Google newspaper archive. Sometime late last year, the Palm Beach Post, which owns the copyright to the Miami News, pulled those back issues from Google. I hope to be able to reconstruct the sources used for this post later this year.]

Today In History, 1971: Residents of San Francisco’s Castro Neighborhood Concerned Over New Arrivals

45 YEARS AGO: The neighborhood surrounding San Francisco’s Castro Theater located on its namesake street wasn’t always known as The Castro. For much of its history, local residents called their working class neighborhood Eureka Valley, which, by the late 1960s had been in fading for several years as families packed up and moved to the suburbs. Rents and real estate prices fell, opening the neighborhood to an influx of new residents, mostly gay people looking for something a little more appealing than the Tenderloin or the Haight. This led to open hostility between the working class descendants of Irish, German and Swedish immigrants and the very openly gay new arrivals.

This hostility figured in a number of conflicts, one of which occurred on August 3, 1971 when Bob Pettingill, a 39-year-old gay restaurateur (he had opened the Sausage Factory in 1968, and it is still in business today), was elected chairman of the Eureka Valley Police Community Relations Board. He won the position after housewife Benita St. Arnant, who called all the newly established gay bars in the neighborhood “a public outrage,” dropped out of the race. Pettingill promised to try to patch relations between “the community’s two life styles.” But California Highway Patrolman Frank Crotty was pessimistic: “They have their lives to live and we have ours,” adding that he and others in the neighborhood were” fed up with all the hand-holding in the streets. My wife and child can’t go outside without being scandalized.”

Today In History, 1982: Michael Hardwick Arrested

Michael Hardwick

It all started in July, when Michael Hardwick threw a beer bottle into a trash can outside of the Cove, an Atlanta gay bar where he worked. Atlanta police officer Keith Torick, who had been subject to numerous citizen complaints for his abusive and legally-questionable tactics, cited Hardwick for public drinking. That kicked off a long comedy of errors, beginning with Torick’s writing the wrong date on which Hardwick was to appear in court. When Hardwick failed to appear because of the error, Torick got a warrant for Hardwick’s arrest. Soon after, Hardwick went the courthouse, paid the $50 fine (which should have invalidated the warrant), and thought it was all taken care of. But for some reason, his payment wasn’t recorded correctly, and on August 3, that same Officer Torick showed up at Hardwick’s apartment at the highly unusual hour of 3:00 a.m. Torick entered the apartment (accounts differ on how he got in), and discovered Hardwick and another man engaged in oral sex, an act which Georgia’s sodomy law defined as a felony punishable with “imprisonment for not less than one nor more than 20 years.” Torick announced that the two were under arrest. Hardwick shot back, “What are you doing in my bedroom?”

The arrest was humiliating for the two men. Hardwick recalled that when the police officer brought them to the police station, he loudly made sure everyone there knew that he had arrested them for “cocksucking,” and that they should be able to find plenty of what they were looking for in Atlanta’s city jails. Hardwick posted bail within the hour, but was detained for twelve more hours near other criminals who had been told why he was there. Hardwick had never fought for gay rights before, but that moment changed him. “I realized that if there was anything I could do, even if it was just laying the foundation to change this horrendous law, that I would feel pretty bad about myself if I just walked away from it.”

Georgia Attorney General Michael J. Bowers

After the local district attorney decided not to press charges, Hardwick decided to sue Georgia’s Attorney General Michael J. Bowers in federal court to overturn the state’s sodomy law. The ACLU agreed to take the case on Hardwick’s behalf. The case ultimately made it to the Supreme Court which, in a surprising move, overturned an 11th Circuit Court of Appeals decision and upheld Georgia’s sodomy law (Jun 30). Surprising because the Court had built a solid case history upholding the rights to privacy for heterosexuals to engage in private, non-procreative, non-marital sexual behavior in the privacy of their bedrooms — under exactly the same terms as Hardwick’s case. But for gay people, that same right to privacy simply vanished. It wouldn’t be until 2003, when the Supreme Court would finally admit that Bowers v. Hardwick “was not correct when it was decided, and it is not correct today” when it overturned sodomy laws nationwide in Lawrence v. Texas.

In 1998, Bowers resigned as Attorney General and ran for Governor. His race tanked after it emerged that the defender of the state’s morals had engaged in a decade-long affair in violation of Georgia’s similarly archaic adultery law. That same year, the Georgia Supreme Court declared the state’s sodomy law unconstitutional, because it infringed on a heterosexual man’s rights to privacy (Nov 23).

Bowers later acknowledged only one regret in the case that bears his name: that his name didn’t appear second “because then it wouldn’t look like I’m the homosexual.” Hardwick died in 1991 in Gainesville, Florida, reportedly from complications from AIDS.

[Additional sources: William Eskridge, Jr. Dishonorable Passions: Sodomy Laws in America, 1861-2003 (New York: Viking, 2008): 231-233.

Joyce Murdoch and Deb Price. Courting Justice: Gay Men and Lesbians v. the Supreme Court (New York: Basic Books, 2001). 277-309.]

Today’s Agenda Is Brought To You By…

From The Advocate, July 12, 1979, page 12.

It’s the end of an era. The old gay.com chat rooms are no more. According to this FAQ page, the chat rooms shut down yesterday as gay.com fell under new ownership.

Q: What happened to the website?
A: As of August 1, 2016, Gay.com is under new management.

Q: Will the website come back?
A: The dating website as you know it, will not be coming back.
Q: What is replacing the website?

A: The new owners of Gay.com are committed to bringing you new and innovative dating and connection options. The new site will be available on August 1, 2016.

Q: Will the chat rooms also disappear?
A: Yes, the chatrooms will disappear.

Q: What will happen to all my profile information (pics, story, chats, friends, etc)?
A: All the personal information you provided in your profile, including pictures and stories, will be permanently deleted.

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Chris and I met via the Tucson chat room on gay.com. That was fourteen years ago. To be honest, I didn’t know the chat rooms still existed. And who knew they had an app, let along that anyone was still paying for it. The new gay.com looks like online cam site, with a dating link that redirects to men.date. In other words, R.I.P.

Today In History, 1913: (How) Should Homosexuals Be Treated?

Doubted prostate massages would cure homosexuality.

Columbia University’s Abraham A. Brill, as the English translator of Sigmund Freud’s writings, had singlehandedly introduced Americans to Freud’s teachings and became known as the father of American psychoanalysis. The August 2, 1913 edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association published a talk that Brill gave at the AMA’s annual convention in Minneapolis in June, exploring the question of how homosexuals can be “treated” to ameliorate their condition. He began his talk by discussing how his encounters with homosexuals shaped his understanding of them:

Of the abnormal sexual manifestations that one encounters none, perhaps, is so enigmatical and to the average person so abhorrent as homosexuality. I have discussed this subject with many broad-minded, intelligent professional men and laymen and have been surprised to hear how utterly disgusted they become at the very mention of the name and how little they understand the whole problem. Yet I must confess that only a few years ago I entertained similar feelings and opinions regarding this subject. I can well recall my first scientific encounter with the problem. Ten years ago, when I met a homosexual who was a patient in the Central Islip State Hospital. Since then I have devoted a great deal of time to the study of this complicated phenomenon, and it is therefore no wonder that my ideas have undergone a marked change. Tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner, I have met and studied a large number of homosexuals and have been convinced that a great injustice is done to a large class of human beings, most of whom are far from being the degenerates they are commonly believed to be.

After laying out what was then considered to be the most advanced medical and psychiatric knowledge about homosexuality, he then described physicians who were offering quack advice on how to treat homosexuality:

…I can never comprehend why physicians invariably resort to bladder washing and rectal massage when they are consulted by homosexuals, unless it be to kill the homosexual cells in the prostateso that their place may be taken by heterosexual cells, as one physician expressed himself when one of my patients asked him how massage of the prostate would cure his inversion. It is an unfortunate fact that such ridiculous ideas are often heard in the discussion of psychosexual disturbances. Only a few months ago a patient told me that he was told by two physicians that his hope for a cure lay in castration.

Castration may cure homosexuality — and all other sexuality with it — but quite a number of gay men will tell you that prostate massages would have little curative effect. Brill added, “Investigators agree that homosexuality is no sign of mental or physical degeneration.” He agreed with those views, but he described three cases in which he claimed to have “cured” homosexuals anyway, after only six to ten months of psychoanalysis. But in the discussion that followed, Dr. D’Orsay Hecht of Chicago noted the incongruity:

Dr. D’Orsay Hecht: Why fix what’s not broken?

I was also impressed with the effort of Dr. Brill to correct homosexuality by decrying it. But if in the eye of the specialist homosexuality is but a contravention, socially speaking, and if it has just as much right to a hearing from the point of view of a sexual act as has heterosexuality, I really cannot see why the homosexual should care to be delivered from his homosexuality, except that he feels disgraced by it. Then again, a large number of homosexuals are in no way abhorrent of themselves in respect to their natures; they seem to be perfectly happy and perfectly well adjusted, probably in a restricted sense, and these patients probably are not worth while treating as Dr. Brill treats them. If we accept homosexuality as a condition which has as much right to exist as heterosexuality, why should we address ourselves to the duty of treating it?

Brill chose not to answer the question, electing instead to focus his rebuttal to other questions raised during the session.

[Source: A.A. Brill. “The conception of homosexuality.” Journal of the American Medical Association 61, no. 5 (August 2, 1913): 335-340.]

Today In History, 1988: Reagan Bans AIDS Discrimination For Federal Employees

Acting on a recommendation from a 13-member President’s Commission On the HIV Epidemic, President Ronald Reagan ordered a ban on discrimination against federal workers with AIDS. His actions however drew sharp criticism from AIDS activists for not acting on many of the other recommendations from his commission. Another of those recommendations included federal legislation to protect HIV-positive workers outside of the federal government. The President instead urged a voluntary approach and asked “businesses, unions and schools to examine and consider adopting” similar policies. Acting on a few other recommendations, Reagan also ordered the FDA to notify those who received blood transfusions to advise them to take an HIV test, and promised to help accelerate the development of AIDS medications. As for the rest of the Commission’s 500 recommendations, Reagan ordered another round of studies, which effectively kicked the can further to whoever would win the 1988 elections. Meanwhile, Vice President George Bush, who was running for President, endorsed the commission’s recommendations which included a spending increase of $3.1 billion to combat the disease.

Dr. Frank Lilly, the commission’s only openly gay member (Jul 23), criticized Reagan’s limited action. “We’ve got a blueprint for a national policy on AIDS,” he said. “It’s a piece of whole cloth. You can’t pick and choose your own menu from it.” Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), who had led the charge in Congress to increase the federal government’s response to the epidemic, accused Reagan of stalling: “This administration has done its best to avoid making even a single helpful AIDS decision in the eight years of the Reagan presidency,” he said. “They handpick a commission, and then don`t even have the courage to accept its recommendations… What we need is leadership, and while Dr. (Surgeon General C. Everett) Koop and (HIV Commission chairman) Adm. (James) Watkins have given that, once again the President is hiding.”