Box Turtle Bulletin

Today In History, 1969: Gay Liberation Front Organizes First Post-Stonewall March Against Police Harassment

In the days following the Stonewall rebellion on June 28, the Mattachine Society of New York sponsored several discussion groups to try to tap into the newly-energized gay community and figure out what their next steps should be. One problem that quickly emerged was that in the rebellious atmosphere of the late 1960s, most of the younger crowd was in no mood to sit around and hold endless planning meetings. They were looking for something to do now, and that something, in that place in time, meant taking things to the streets.

An early GLF meeting.

Out of that restlessness came a new force, the Gay Liberation Front, which was an ad-hoc movement that grew out of those Mattachine meetings just a few weeks after the riot. The GLF’s approach to things was truly radical. It eschewed leadership structures and defied all attempts of control. All decisions were made by consensus — often after paralyzing discussions, arguments and endless political analysis. But the GLF was anything but passive, and many credit it with preventing the momentum of Stonewall from dying out, as had happened so many times before when LGBT people had risen up against anti-gay oppression (Jan 1, Aug 21).

One of the GLF’s first public actions took place a month after Stonewall with a march to demand an end to discrimination and police harassment. A crowd of five hundred gathered for a rally at Washington Square. Martha Shelly, president of the New York chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis and a GLF founding member, kicked things off: “Brothers and sisters, welcome to the city’s first gay power vigil. We’re tired of being harassed and persecuted. If a straight couple can hold hands in Washington Square, why can’t we? … We’re tired of straight people who are hung up on sex. Tired of flashlights and peeping-tom vigilantes. Tired of marriage laws that punish you for lifting your head off the pillow.”

After more speeches by Marty Robinson and a straight ally who called herself Sister Marlene, the crowd began marching, four abreast, to Sheridan Square, clapping and shouting “Gay Power!” and other slogans, bringing traffic on Sixth Avenue to a halt. When they arrived at Sheridan Square, there were more speeches, appeals for money, and a round of “We Shall Overcome.” Jonathan Black at The Village Voice observed that “gay power had surfaced … A mild protest, to be sure, but apparently only the beginning.”

[Sources: Edward Alwood. Straight News: Gays, Lesbians and the News Media (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996): 90-91.

Jonathan Black. “Gay Power Hits Back.” The Village Voice (July 31, 1969): 1, 3, 28. Available online here.]

Today In History, 1978: New Jersey Senator: “We Used To Beat Them Up”

New Jersey state Sen. Joseph A. Maressa

Through the 1960s and 1970s, a number of states embarked on a massive undertaking of combing through some two centuries’ accumulations of old laws to throw out obsolete laws (flagmen would no longer have to walk in front of automobiles as a warning to people on horseback) and re-codify it into a new easy-to-maintain format. In 1978, when New Jersey Gov. Brendan Byrne (D) signed his state’s new criminal code into law, it had the effect of wiping the state’s old sodomy law off the books. The old law had provided a maximum penalty of up to twenty years.

State Sen. Joseph Maressa (D-Camden Co) discovered the omission and decided to do something about it. On July 27, he introduced Senate Bill 1276, co-sponsored by nineteen of the forty state senators, to keep consensual same-sex sodomy between males (women weren’t covered under the bill) a crime punishable by five year in prison. “I was brought up in the old school,” Sen. Maressa said. “Homosexuality still shocks me. And it galls me when people defend those who desecrate the flag. It’s their right to express themselves that way, they say. I’ll tell you, I’d take them out and shoot them. You might say I subscribe to the old virtues.”

“I checked with Attorney General Degnan,” he added, “and he tells me nobody has ever been prosecuted under the old sodomy law, and I don’t expect anybody will under the new one. We used to beat them up, but we don’t do that anymore.”

Fortunately, his bill didn’t get very far, and he withdrew it, reluctantly, in early 1979 after opposition from the public. “I still agree the male sex role is the macho male,” he said. ” I just hope homosexuals don’t take it out to the streets.”

[Source: “Repression in N.J.” Gay Times, Issue 71 (undated/1978): 5.]

Born On This Day, 1919: Martin Block

(d. 1995) His life was in books, from the early years in which he made deliveries for a book store in New York City, to working at a book store in Grand Central Terminal after a stint in the military, to becoming one of the owners of Studio Book Store after moving to Hollywood. That’s where, in 1950, his friend Rudi Gernreich (Aug 8) invited him to join an organization that Rudi, Rudi’s lover Harry Hay (Apr 7), and others were forming. Block remembered going to his first meeting of what would become the Mattachine Society:

Everybody was scared. I guess people were rather psychotic about it. But because of my background, this business of being afraid of the FBI or the police was a lot of shit to me at the time, as it is now. You see, my father was a socialist, and my mother was an anarchist. When the time came for the meeting, I think Rudi drive, and we took some sort of circuitous route to avoid being followed. Everybody was very worried about Mr. Hoover’s crazy FBI men. I don’t think anybody was interested in following us, but Rudi was fearful. The whole group was fearful…

Block listened to the discussions about forming a new movement to advocate for gay people, and found that he disagreed with every word that was said. But he enjoyed the company and decided to become a member. But after a few years, Block and several others became bored with the endless theorizing and helpless complaining. After one particularly dull meeting, Block, Dorr Legg (Dec 15), Don Slater (Aug 21), and Dale Jennings (Oct 21) stayed late and talked about doing something besides talking, something that would be useful for gay people across the country. That something, they decided, would be a magazine they called ONE, from a quote by Thomas Carlyle, “A mystic bond of brotherhood makes all men one.” Block recalled that ONE’s mission would be a simple one:

We would not attempt to turn anyone in our direction. We weren’t going to go out and say you should be gay, but we said, “You can be proud of being gay.” You can be proud of being yourself. You could look yourself in the mirror and say, “I’m me, and isn’t that nice?” That in itself was radical. Nobody put it in words, but that was the underlying thought and underlying feeling behind the magazine.

Block became ONE’s president and its first editor when the magazine debuted in January 1953. But because of demands at his bookstore and other family concerns, he gave up his editorship in June and was removed as the organization’s president. He remained involved with ONE in various capacities through the 1950s. Later, he became a regular book reviewer for the Los Angeles Daily News, the Saturday Review, and the New York Times Book Review. After he closed his own bookstore in the late 1950s, Block became the manager for the book department at Robinson’s Department Store in Pasadena. He died in West Hollywood, California in 1995.

[Sources: Eric Marcus. Making History: The Struggle for Gay and Lesbian Equal Rights, 1940-1990. An Oral History (New York: HarperCollins, 1992): 37-42.

C. Todd White. Pre-Gay L.A.: A Social History of the Movement for Homosexual Rights (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2009): 29-47.]

Born On This Day, 1927: Fr. Robert Carter, SJ

(d. 2002) The early leader of Dignity and co-founder of the National Gay Task Force was gay long before he was Catholic. He had been born to Protestant parents, both from different traditions. He grew up in Lakewood, Ohio, and Park Ridge, Illinois. While studying at the University of Chicago, he wrote a review of a Tennessee Williams poem for the school paper, and was invited to see the opening of Williams’s The Glass Menagerie, which opened in Chicago in 1944. This when Williams was still a nobody. Carter and Williams became lovers, briefly. Carter later wrotein an unpublished memoir, “He may have thought he seduced me, but he didn’t or at least gets only half the credit.”

Carter became interested in Catholicism after reading James Joyce’s Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man. The day after graduating with his Bachelor’s Degree in 1946, he converted to Catholicism. He continued studying at Chicago, and picked up a master’s degree in Greek and went on to pick up a Ph.D. in 1953. He entered the Society of Jesus in 1954 and was ordained a priest in 1963.

In 1972, Carter co-hosted the first meeting of Dignity in Manhattan with fellow Jesuit Fr. John McNeill. Carter later remembered that meeting: “There were about 15 present. I remember walking to the meeting and wondering with some trepidation what I was getting myself into.” Carter became one of the Dignity’s board members and theological advisers. “No longer was I just the professor of Early Church Studies and a research scholar. Now I was giving hope and new life to many gay Catholics,” he wrote.

He marched with Dignity in the 1973 Gay Pride March in New York City. Howard Brown, a former city commissioner who had recently come out, invited carter to become a founding member of the National Gay Task Force (Oct 15). The New York Times reported on the new organization: “A number of homosexual and lesbian organizations were represented on the board. One member was the Rev. Robert Carter, a Jesuit priest and professor of historical theology.” This marked him publicly as a gay man. A subprovincial of the Jesuit order paid him a visit. “It seems that they were afraid I had had a psychotic break or something,” he wrote. But he was unfazed. “Since Jesus had table fellowship with social outcasts and sinners, those rejected by the religious establishment of his time, I consider myself to have been most fully a Jesuit, a ‘companion of Jesus,’ when I came out publicly as a gay man, one of the social rejects of my time. It was only by our coming out that society’s negative stereotypes would be overcome and we would gain social acceptance.”

Despite calls for his ouster, he wasn’t disciplined. This was before the Catholic Church’s stance on homosexuality had coalesced into a hardline position. Meanwhile, Carter kept busy with his work in Dignity. When the Catholic Church barred Dignity from meeting on church property, he began celebrating Mass in apartments. He held blessing ceremonies for gay couples, he testified before City Council in support of a gay rights law, and he continued to march with a Dignity contingent in Pride parades while wearing his clerical collar. In 1982, he went back to school and got a degree in Social Work from Columbia in 1081, just in time for the AIDS epidemic to hit. He counseled AIDS patients at Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx, and he was the supervisor of the AIDS outpatient program at Bellevue. When his Jesuit province banned him from saying Mass for Dignity, he travelled to Philadelphia, which was outside his province’s jurisdiction, to say Mass there. He died in 2010 at a Jesuit health care facility at the age of 82.

Born On This Day, 1940: Rev. Troy Perry

Perry’s life had always been difficult. His bootlegger father died when Perry was twelve. His mother married an alcoholic who reduced the family to poverty and was physically abusive. Troy ran away from home and stayed with relatives, who introduced him to Pentecostalism. He became a preacher and self-styled “religious fanatic” at age fifteen. At nineteen-year-old, he married a Church of God pastor’s daughter and became the pastor of a CoG church in Jolliet, Illinois — all this despite knowing that he was gay and was sexually active with other men. He merely told himself that it was a phase and that he wasn’t really gay. After all, it was impossible to be both gay and Christian, his superiors in the church had reassured him. But when the elders at the church he was pastoring found out, they forced him to resign.

The couple moved to California, where they joined the Church of God of Prophecy, another Pentecostal denomination. While there, his wife found hidden in a mattress a copy of Donald Webster Cory’s groundbreaking The Homosexual In America (Sep 18). That led to an immediate divorce, with his wife taking their two young sons with her.. That meant that he had to explain things to his COGOP superiors. They acted as CoG had: they kicked him out.

Perry spent the next several years, which included a stint in the Army, trying to figure out what he was: was he gay, or was he Christian? In 1967, he tried to kill himself after breaking up with a boyfriend. In 1968, he was on a date at a gay bar near Long Beach called The Patch when when  police decided to randomly arrest two of the bar’s patrons (Aug 17) . His date, broken and demoralized by the experience, decided that no one cared about gay people, including God. That’s when Perry decided it was time to show that young man, and all gay people, differently. He placed an ad in The Advocate announcing a worship service designed for gays in Los Angeles, and twelve people turned up on that first Sunday. That would be the genesis for the Metropolitan Community Church, the only Christian denomination founded specifically to address the spiritual needs of LGBT people. MCC now has 250 congregations in 23 countries around the world.

Will the FDA Gay Blood Ban Finally Go Away?

The Food and Drug Administration has posted a request for public comment on possible changes to the FDA’s current policy barring gay men from donating blood unless they have been sexually abstinent for a full year. According to the notice, the FDA appears ready to consider changing that policy (PDF: 321KB/7 pages):

Interested persons are invited to submit comments, supported by scientific evidence such as data from research, regarding potential blood donor deferral policy options to reduce the risk of HIV transmission, including the feasibility of moving from the existing time-based deferrals related to risk behaviors to alternate deferral options, such as the use of individual risk assessments. Additionally, comments are invited regarding the design of potential studies to evaluate the feasibility and effectiveness of such alternative deferral options. FDA will take the comments received into account as it continues to reevaluate and update blood donor deferral policies as new scientific information becomes available.

Before last December, it had been FDA policy to permanently ban all men who had ever had sex with another man. That policy was updated to limit that ban to men who had sex with other men in the last twelve months, which, it said, was “better align[ed] the deferral period for MSM with the deferral period for other men and women at increased risk for HIV infection, such as those who had a recent blood transfusion or who have been accidentally exposed to the blood of another individual through a needle stick.”

According to this latest request for comment, the FDA is now considering proposals that would “move from a time- based deferral period to a deferral policy based on individual risk assessment. An individual risk assessment would involve asking potential donors a series of questions designed to defer donors with high risk behaviors.” The request sought comment on what kinds of questions to ask, how specific should they be and still be “understandable and acceptable to all blood donors” while also ensuring donors will answer them accurately, and what other procedural changes might be necessary to ensure the risk assessments are being performed. The notice also requests input for the design of a potential study “to evaluate the feasibility and effectiveness of alternative deferral options such as individual risk assessment.”

The comment period closes 120 days from now.

How the Media Misses The Big Story

Jeff Sharlet, author of The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power and C Street: The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy, is  not just a keen observer of the power of religion over public life, but also of the power of power over individual people. On Sunday, New York magazine posted Nick Tabor’s interview with Sharlet asking why the media has had so much trouble “figuring out how to handle Donald Trump.” Part of the problem, Sharlet says, is that the media has consistently dismissed the fringe as fringe, even though if we’re talking about an apparently extreme ten percent “fringe,” it’s still 30 million people:

It’s the idea of the journalist measuring a story’s importance by the scale of the stage on which it occurs, rather than by the depth of meaning it reveals. So we take an issue and say, “What does this mean for America?” There’s all sorts of interesting stories that maybe don’t mean anything for America, but they mean a great deal for how we understand how people make sense of their lives, right?

He gives an example:

I can think of big magazine stories about megachurches that I knew that remade them over in the image of a Republican voter. “I know that church. That’s a spiritual-war church; that’s their main concern. I know that they do tons of exorcisms every week, which is deliverance ministry. I know that they talk all the time about demons and the problems of demons. And that’s who they are.” And somewhere, someone made the assumption, “I don’t want to make them look stupid, so I won’t put that in.” That that’s being respectful. And there was a moment where the New York Times declared that we need to be more respectful. Yes, we do, and you respect that by not thinking that they want to be seen like you.

…If you think, “I don’t want to impose a story that those guys are insane, so I’m going to bend over to the opposite direction so that I can be fair.” Well, now you’ve erased the possibility that what you think of as wacky and serious coexist. That the deliverance ministry and the strategic political thinking coexist, and always have.

The whole piece is a really smart analysis of why the media consistently misunderstands and underestimates both the left and the right.

Today’s Agenda Is Brought To You By…

From David, a Jacksonville-based gay photography/lifestyle magazine, May 1973, page 48.

The Cove, located along the northern edge of Atlanta’s Piedmont Park, opened in 1971 and later expanded as a twenty-four hour club and disco that catered to the rough trade kind of crowd.  After the rest of the bars closed, the still-unlucky ones could head to the Cove and begin picking among the rest of the leftovers before the sun went up. The music and dancing was said to be top notching, but the bathrooms were known for being among the worst in the South. The Cove closed in 1994 after the city began closing down its remaining twenty-four hour clubs, and the building was later demolished.

This Month In History, 1940: Homosexuality and Lesbianism Treated With Metrazol

The professional literature before 1980 is thoroughly infected with torturous descriptions of psychiatry’s barbarous attempts at “curing” homosexuality. Many accounts deal with the application of painful electric shock delivered via electrodes attached to sensitive regions of the body (Jan 18, Jan 20, Mar 11, May 8, Jun 3, Sep 6, Oct 30, Dec 8). But the imagination for new methods of torture didn’t end there. Dr. Newdigate M. Owensby, who practiced at Atlanta’s prestigious Medical Arts Building and founded the Brook Haven Manor Sanitarium outside of Atlanta, published a brief paper in the July 1940 edition of the prestigious Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease describing his own unique experiments to cure homosexuality.

He based his experiment on curing homosexuality on “the assumption that homosexuality and lesbianism are symptoms of an under developed schizophrenia.” Other psychiatrists had been experimenting with Metrazol-induced seizures for schizophrenia since 1934, and their logic, wierd as it may sound, went like this: people with epilepsy (which was considered a mental illness) almost never had schizophrenia (or so they thought), and people with schizophrenia almost never had epilepsy (or so they thought). And so maybe there was something in the epileptic seizure that either prevented or  cured schizophrenia, so they thought. And why why wouldn’t it, so they thought, since electric seizures induced by Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT) was already known to be surprisingly effective for cases of severe depression. (ECT is still found to be useful today to treat severe depression.)

Owensby stretched that already thin line of thinking further: if homosexuality was a kind of an underdeveloped schizophrenia — where he got this belief, I have no idea — then why not try injecting his subjects with Metrazol to produce an epileptic-type grand mal seizure, and thus ridding his patients of that underdeveloped schizophrenia? Owensby extended his already-stretched theory even further by suggesting that Metrazol seizures might “liberate this previous fixation of the libido and the psychosexual energy becomes free once more to flow through regular physiological channels.” Again, who knows where he got that idea. But to give you an idea of what this kind of seizure looked like, here is a brief film clip unrelated to Owensby’s report from a few years earlier:

Ownesby provided six case studies of his experiments:

Case I.-A white male of 19 years had been arrested and sentenced to prison because of moral turpitude (homosexuality). He was paroled for treatment and promised a pardon if his perversion was corrected. The family history was not enlightening. Homosexual experiences began during his fourteenth year and continued thereafter. Feminine mannerisms were evident. Metrazol was administered until fifteen shocks were produced. All homosexual desires had disappeared after the ninth shock, but treatment was continued until all feminine mannerisms had been removed. Normal sex relations were established and eighteen months later there had been no return of homosexual tendencies. He was granted a pardon.

Case 2.-A white male aged thirty-four years. Had been a homosexual since his fifteenth year. He was frank enough to admit that the only reason for seeking treatment was fear of exposure and subsequent disgrace. All homosexual desires disappeared after seven grand mal attacks were induced by metrazol. He was married four months later. At the expiration of ten months he stated there had been no recurrence of homosexual desires or practices.

Case 3.-A white male aged forty-four years. Had been a homosexual since early youth. Most of his past life had been spent in penal institutions because of the opportunities to indulge his perversion. He seemed proud of the fact that he was a “man-woman”. Was constantly inebriated when out of prison. Metrazol was administered until ten grand mal attacks had occurred. He appeared to be regenerated after the ninth seizure. His common law wife states that, with the exception of an occasional overindulgence in alcohol, he has been a normal, hard working man for the past six months.

Case 4–A white male aged twenty-five years. Has been a homosexual since his fifteenth year. His mother was a neurotic. A sister had a manic depressive attack. A brother was an alcoholic. The patient was seclusive and spent most of his free time in his room. Would take an occasional trip to another city in order to satiate his homosexual desires. Was reluctant to discuss his perversion. Six grand mal attacks were induced by metrazol. Normal sex relations became established shortly thereafter and at the expiration of three months the patient claimed to be sexually healthy.

Case 5.-A white male aged twenty-six years. Married. Had indulged in active homosexuality since his seventeenth year. Appeared to be an ambulatory schizophrenic. His marriage had been arranged by a doting mother. Had never been self supporting. An obvious personality change followed the sixth induced grand mal attack. Whereas he had formerly been indifferent to his family and friends, he began to show interest and affection for them. He secured a position after returning home and became self supporting. Six months after receiving the metrazol treatment, he reported that he had continued to be free from all homosexual desires.

Case 6.-A white female aged twenty-four years. Name and address given were admittedly fictitious. Said to have been a lesbian since puberty. Promiscuous. Preferred the active role. Inclined to boast of her conquests. Inebriate for past four years. Ten grand mal seizures were induced by metrazol. Became infatuated with an intern after the treatment had been discontinued and frequently complained of nocturnal emissions. Remained institutionalized for six weeks after the last treatment and appeared to be healthy in every way. No subsequent reports.

The report’s weak findings are obvious: no measures of sexual orientation before or after, no long-term follow-up, widespread evidence of involuntary or coerced participation — not to mention a deeply flawed belief in the nature of homosexuality itself. What’s more, it’s easy to imagine that anyone being subjected to this kind of torture would say or do anything to make it stop. In fact, the use of Metrazol-induced seizures in other cases was finally halted when it was found to be both ineffective and terrifying to patients. The seizures could be so severe that some patients actually experienced spinal fractures. It was later discovered that repeated treatments could, in some cases, lead to lasting brain damage. Needless to say, there is no evidence whatsoever that this treatment had any kind of effect in changing anyone’s sexual orientation. Indeed, in June 1949, Dr. George N. Thompson, writing for the same journal, concluded that Metrazol shock therapy was utterly ineffective in curing homosexuality.

But the National Association for the Research and Treatment of Homosexuality (NARTH) didn’t bother to read that memo. They like to think of themselves as the scientific arm of the ex-gay movement, but when they issued their so-called “journal” in 2009 with a report which supposedly documents successful efforts to change sexual orientation, they included Owensby’s 1940 paper as a success story. Under the heading of “pharmacological interventions,” they write simply, “Owensby (1940) reported that six patients ceased all homosexual behavior after taking the drug Metrazol (pentetrazol).” They not only neglected to mention what Metrazol was all about — it wasn’t just some pill prescribed to patients — they also forgot to point out that the FDA revoked its approval of the drug in 1982.

[Sources: Newdigate M. Owensby. “Homosexuality and lesbianism treated with Metrazol.” Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 92, no. 1 (July 1940): 65-66.

George N. Thompson. “Electroshock and other therapeutic considerations in sexual psychopathy.” Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 109, no. 6 (June 1949): 531-539.

James E. Phelan, Neil Whitehead, Philip M. Sutton. “What the research shows: NARTH’s response to the APA claims on homosexuality.” Journal of Human Sexuality 1 (2009). ]

Born On This Day, 1940: Mel White

He had been an important behind-the-scenes figure in the Evangelical movement from the 1960s through the 1980s, working as a ghostwriter for Billy Graham (Approaching Hoofbeats: The Four Horsemen of the Apocolypse, 1983), Pat Robertson (America’s Dates With Destiny, 1986), and Jerry Falwell (If I Should Die Before I Wake, 1986, and Falwell’s autobiography, Strength for the Journey, 1987). After marrying in 1962, While revealed to his wife that he had always been attracted to other men. As he wrote in his 1994 autobiography, Stranger at the Gate: To Be Gay and Christian in America, he embarked on a more than two-decade long struggle to rid himself of the gay, including conventional psychotherapy, electric shock aversion therapy, and exorcism. Nothing worked, and after he tried to kill himself, he and his wife agreed to amicable divorce. She later wrote the foreword for Stranger at the Gate, in which he came out publicly as gay.

In 1998, White founded Soulforce, an organization which advocates for LGBT people through dialogue and other forms of nonviolent direct action in the mode of Mahatman Ghandi and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In 2008, White and his partner, Gary Nixon, were the first same-sex couple to be legally married at All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena.

White has long been involved in other secular areas as well. Since 1965, he has produced 53 film and television documentaries, mainly about spirituality, and he written sixteen books. In 2009, White appeared in the fourteenth season of The Amazing Race with his son, screenwriter/director/actor Mike White. His latest book, Holy Terror: Lies the Christian Right Tells Us to Deny Gay Equality, was published in 2012

Today’s Agenda Is Brought To You By…

Today In History, 1808: Australian Court Convicts Two Of “Most Disgusting and Abominable” Crime

New South Wales. View of Sydney, from the East Side of the Cove. No.2, by John Eyre, 1810

On July 31 of that year, the Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser offered this brief report:

Court of Criminal Jurisdiction.

On Monday the Court assembled, and proceeded to the trial of

Richard Moxworthy, charged with the commission of an offence, of the most disgusting and abominable kind.

In support of the accusation many witnesses were called, the most favorable of whom went considerably to strengthen the material circumstances of the charge; which after a long and painful investigation, left not on the minds of the Court a doubt of actual guilt.

John Hopkins, his accomplice in the crime, was also indicted on the charge, and found guilty

Australian gay rights activist, journalist, artist and historian Bob Hay delved into the story and uncovered (PDF: 398KB/10 pages) the events that led up to the trial:

Not so lucky were Dubliner, Richard Moxworthy and Bristol-born John Hopkins who came into Sydney on board the US ship Hero on July 10, 1808. Moxworthy was second mate on this privateer and trader and was aged 42. Hopkins was only 16. The two were caught having sex when the ship was somewhere off Mexico. They were immediately relieved of duty and placed in irons until the Hero arrived in Sydney.

It’s not clear why the Australian Court felt that it had jurisdiction over a crime that happened on an American vessel, but New South Wales was a penal colony at the time and I guess that’s what you do: you take criminals to prison. Australia’s law mirrored English law, which included the “abominable crime” as a capital offense all the way up until the latter part of the nineteenth century. The Sydney Gazette doesn’t explicitly report that Moxworthy and Hopkins were sentenced to death, but that’s a reasonable conclusion, especially considering a brief notice that appeared two weeks later:

His honor the Lieutenant Governor has been pleased to extend the Royal Clemency to the two persons who were convicted capitally before the last Court of Criminal Jurisdiction.

Hay picks up the story from there:

After receiving a Conditional Pardon, Moxworthy again went to sea, this time as coxswain of the government sloop Blanche. Hopkins was not so successful: on April 26, 1822 the Sydney Gazette carried an advertisement offering £10 reward for the capture of John Hopkins who had absconded from his parole and was wanted for “diverse and other robberies”. There is no evidence that he was ever captured and that is the last we have heard of him.

Today In History, 1865: Dr. Barry’s Death Reveals a Lifelong Secret

Before Dr. James Barry’s death, he left strict instructions that no one was to change him out of the clothes in which he died. But the charwoman sent to prepare his corpse had no room for such nonsense. And so when she pulled his nightshirt up to wash his body, she screamed: “The devil! It’s a woman!”

Dr Barry, while alive, was known as a fierce and demanding doctor, and in the process became one of the most highly respected surgeons in Victorian England. As Britain’s Inspector General of Military Hospitals he was feared for his combative temper and fierce determination. He famously got in a bitter argument with Florence Nightingale, who called him a “brute” and “the most hardened creature I ever met throughout the Army.” As Inspector General, he fought for better food, hygiene, sanitation and proper medical care for soldiers and for the humanitarian treatment of prisoners. His reforms undoubtedly saved thousands of lives. He became the top-ranking doctor in the British Army, where despite his argumentative personality, he was also reputed to have an very good bedside manner. Many who knew him also remarked on his high, soft voice and his diminutive stature — he stood barely five feet tall on special stacked-soled shoes. His black manservant, who joined Barry’s employment in South Africa and would remain with him for the next fifty years, was entrusted with the task of laying out six small towels every morning that Barry used to conceal his curves and broaden his shoulders.

Despite the charwoman’s discovery, his secret remained tightly held and he was buried under the only name he had gone by since his early twenties. It wouldn’t be until the 1950s, when his British Army records were unsealed, that it was revealed that Barry had been born in Ireland as Margaret Buckley to a forward thinking family who were staunch supporters of women’s rights. But whatever ideals about women’s rights the family may have held, society’s limitations said otherwise: women were barred from studying medicine. So Margaret became James Barry shortly after she, then he, began training to become a doctor. And in every respect, he remained a man in what was very much a man’s world until the day he died.

Barry’s life and career is the subject of Rachel Holmes’s 2007 book, The Secret Life of Dr James Barry: Victorian England’s Most Eminent Surgeon.

Today In History, 1985: Rock Hudson’s AIDS Diagnosis Confirmed

Rock Hudson with Doris Day, in a television appearance that touched off national speculation about Hudson’s health.

The rumors had been swirling for some time, long before Rock Hudson entered a Paris hospital for what was clearly a very serious illness. He had appeared on July 16 at a news conference in Carmel, California, alongside his 1959 Pillow Talk costar, Dorris Day, to promote Doris Day’s Best Friends, a new animal companion program on the Christian Broadcasting Network. Hudson had agreed to be her first guest. Hudson was so late for the press conference that by the time he got there, a lot of the reporters had already left. Those who stayed were shocked by what they saw: sunken cheeks, poor complexion, unsteady on his feet, his speech barely intelligible and his clothing several sizes too large for his now skeletal body. Day embraced her former co-star, and they somehow made it through the press conference. Hudson taped the show a few days later, although he was so weak they had to stop several times.

A few days later, Hudson flew to Paris where he was no stranger to the medical establishment there. Back in the states in 1984, he had a scratch on his neck that wouldn’t heal, so he went to a doctor. The doctor told him that was no scratch, but Kaposi’s sarcoma, a rare form of skin cancer and a common opportunistic infection among AIDS patients. Hudson went to Paris to receive treatment with HPA-23, an experimental drug unavailable in the U.S. which was supposed to inhibit an enzyme that allows the AIDS virus to multiply. (HPA-23 was found to be ineffective against AIDS in 1989.) Now a year later, he made arrangements to return for another appointment with Dr. Dominique Dormont, the specialist who had treated him the year before. The appointment was set for July 22, but Hudson collapsed in his room at the Ritz the day before. The hotel summoned a doctor, who assumed that Hudson was experiencing heart problems and rushed him to the American Hospital of Paris. The doctors there, ignorant of his AIDS condition, noticed that his liver function was poor and suspected some kind of liver disease. This led Hudson’s publicist, Yanou Collart, to tell reporters that he was suffering from liver cancer.

Rock Hudson’s return to Los Angeles.

When Dr. Dormont finally arrived at the hospital, he determined that Hudson was too weak to undergo any more HPA-23 treatments. Hudson decided to return to Los Angeles as soon as possible. He also decided to announce that he had AIDS.  Collart remembered, “The hardest thing I ever had to do in my life was to walk into his room and read him the press release. I’ll never forget the look on his face. How can I explain it? Very few people knew he was gay. In his eyes was the realization that he was destroying his own image. After I read it, he said simply, ‘That’s it, it has to be done.'”

Collart’s statement acknowledged Hudson’s disease, but not his sexuality. “He’s lucid. He’s talking, He’s joking… He’s feeling much better and in quite good spirits,” Collart said. “He doesn’t have any idea now how he contracted AIDS. … Nobody around him has AIDS.” In 1981, Hudson had undergone open heart surgery at Cedars-Sinai Hospital, near West Hollywood, where he received several blood transfusions. That would have been during the earliest days of what would soon be understood to be a major blood-borne epidemic. This meant that his sexuality may have been coincidental to his AIDS, but nobody really knew, then or now. But at the time, that explanation provided a path to plausible deniability.

And so the dancing around his sexuality would continue for another three weeks. Finally, and with Hudson’s blessing, close friends Angie Dickinson, Robert Stack and Mamie Van Doren acknowledged Hudson’s sexuality in a supportive article in People magazine. Messages of support and a procession of visitors followed: Morgan Fairchild, Joan Rivers, Nancy Walker, Tony Perkins, Carol Burnett, and, of course, Elizabeth Taylor. Hudson’s death less than three months later provoked another wave of sympathy and galvanized much of Hollywood, with Elizabeth Taylor’s prodding, to undertake the task of reducing the stigma surrounding HIV/AIDS.

Emphasis Mine

Rock Hudson (left) and Lee Garlington in 1963. The couple broke up in 1965.

On October 28, 1966, the FBI forwarded the following memorandum to Marvin Watson, special assistant to President Lyndon Johnson:

October 28, 1966.

Memorandum.

Rock Hudson has not been the subject of an FBI investigation. During 1965, however, a confidential informant reported that several years ago while he was in New York he had an “affair” with movie star Rock Hudson. The informant stated that from personal knowledge he knew that Rock Hudson was a homosexual. The belief was expressed that by “personal knowledge” the informant meant he had personally indulged in homosexual acts with Hudson or had witnessed or received the information from individuals who had done so.

On another occasion, information was received by the Los Angeles Office of the FBI that it was common knowledge in the motion picture industry that Rock Hudson was suspected of having homosexual tendencies.

It is to be noted in May, 1961, a confidential source in New York also stated that Hudson definitely was a homosexual.

Our files contain no additional pertinent information identifiable with Mr. Hudson.

The fingerprint files of the Identification Division of the FBI contain no arrest data identifiable with Mr. Hudson based upon background information submitted in connection with this name check request.

NOTE: Per request of Mrs. Mildred Stegall, White House Staff.