Box Turtle Bulletin

Born On This Day, 1950: Roberta Achtenberg

Sen. Jesse Helms (R-NC) wasn’t about to let President Bill Clinton appoint her as Assistant Secretary for Housing and Urban Development if he had anything to say about it. “She’s not your garden-variety lesbian,” he complained. “She’s a militant-activist-mean lesbian, working her whole career to advance the homosexual agenda. Now you think I’m going to sit still and let her be confirmed by the Senate? … If you want to call me a bigot, go ahead.” Helms was a bigot, and, garden-variety lesbian or not, she nevertheless became the first openly gay person to receive a Senate confirmation for an administration position (May 7).

The daughter of immigrants grew up in Los Angeles and attended college at UCLA and UC Berkeley, before studying law at Hastings Law School in San Francisco and the University of Utah. She had married another male law student while at Berkeley, but the couple divorced amicably after Achtenberg figured out she was a lesbian.

Achtenberg quickly became concerned about the legal disadvantages that gays and lesbians experience, and as a member of the Anti-Sexism Committee of the National Lawyers Guild, she helped to write a manual to advise lawyers representing gay and lesbian clients. She also began working with the Bay Area Lawyers for Individual Freedom, and then co-founded the Lesbian Rights Project, which later became the National Center for Lesbian Rights. In 1979, she met attorney Mary Morgan, who already had a well-established track record representing lesbian mothers in custody cases. By then, Achtenberg was out, and she was ready for politics. She ran, unsuccessfully, for a seat in the California State Assembly in 1988, and she succeeded in getting elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1989. When a little-known former Arkansas governor decided to run for president, Achtenberg joined the Clinton campaign and worked on the Democratic Party’s drafting committee.

When Clinton nominated Achtenberg for HUD Assistant Secretary, conservative Christians were outraged. They accused Achtenberg of launching a “personal vendetta” against the Boy Scouts because she was one of fifty — fifty! — members of the San Francisco United Way board of directors who voted unanimously to deny funding to the Scouts because of their discriminatory anti-gay policies. The Christian Action Network circulated a videotape of Achtenberg and Morgan, showing them hugging each other, ever so briefly, during the 1992 San Francisco Pride parade. Helms called that brief contact an “insane assault on family values.” Achtenberg was nevertheless confirmed in a 58-31 vote.

Achtenberg left HUD in 1995 to run for mayor of San Francisco, but lost. She served on the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce until 2005, and she was appointed to the Board of Trustees of Cal State in 2000, becoming chair in 2006. In 2011, President Barack Obama appointed her to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

Yeah, I Needed This…

Plagarism Should Be the Very Least Of Our Worries Right Now

It was truly an honor to introduce my wife, Melania. Her speech and demeanor were absolutely incredible. Very proud! #GOPConvention

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 19, 2016

via Washington Post.

And her speechwriters’s plagiarizing didn’t stop there:

He will never, ever give up. And, most importantly, he will never, ever, let you down.

— Melania Trump (2016)

Never gonna give you up
Never gonna let you down.

— Rick Astley (1987)

Sad! Pathetic! Weak!

Okay, the fun part of this post is over, because the bigger issue is that this silly controversy — and it is a silly one in the greater scheme of things — is overshadowing a much larger problem on display in last night’s convention speeches. If you had to pick one speech that wasn’t filled with gut-level bloodlust and hatred, Melania’s relatively optimistic and positive speech was the only one that stands out. Josh Marshall zooms back out:

In substantive terms, the much bigger story from last night was a hastily thrown together program focused on violence, bloodshed and betrayal by political enemies. We’ve become so inured to Trump’s brand of incitement that it’s barely gotten any notice that Trump had three parents whose children had been killed by illegal/undocumented immigrants to tell their stories and whip up outrage and fear about the brown menace to the South. These were either brutal murders or killings with extreme negligence. The pain of these parents is unfathomable.

But whatever you think about undocumented immigrants there’s no evidence they are more violent or more prone to murder than others in American society. One could just as easily get three people who’s children had been killed by African-Americans or Jews, people whose pain and anguish would be no less harrowing. This isn’t illustration; it’s incitement. When Trump first did this in California a couple months ago people were aghast. Now it’s normal.

Even more disturbing, numerous speakers from the dais, including some of the top speakers of the evening, called for Hillary Clinton to be imprisoned. At least two – and I think more – actually led the crowd in chants of “lock her up!” There has never been any evidence of criminal activity on Clinton’s part. An investigation with a lot of pressure to find something amiss concluded that no charges should be recommended against her and that no prosecutor would bring charges against Clinton for anything connected to her private email server

It goes without saying that it is a highly dangerous development when one presidential nominee and his supporters make into a rallying cry that their opposing candidate should be imprisoned. This is not Russia. This is not some rickety Latin American Republic from half a century ago. This is America. For all our failings and foibles this is not a path we’ve ever gone down.

To be clear: I’m no Clinton fan. I loathe everything she (and he before her) stands for, especially the safe triangularizations that she and her husband have been famous for over the past three decades. But it’s one thing to cynically creep up to and blur the lines between what’s right and what’s wrong — something she’s guilty of in spades — and quite another to obliterate anything that remotely resembles the law, democratic values, citizenship, common decency or facts — things which are today derided as “political correctness.”

I’ve been on the front lines of publicly confronting bigotry ever since I started this blog ten years ago. Some of that work has included going straight into the heart of some rather ugly conferences to hear, first hand, bigotry — there’s no other word for much of it — being spewed by some very angry people. My partner asked me again last night how could I just sit there and not run screaming out of those conferences. I don’t know. I guess I saw these people for what they seemed to be at the time: buffoons who were going against the tide and whose threat was diminishing, at least here in the U.S. (which is why many have been turning their attentions elsewhere in the world). They were on a sinking ship, and the really sad thing is that they knew it. Each year, their conferences were getting smaller and smaller, and they commiserated about the poor attendance in the hallways. Knowing that — keeping that long view — kept me sane and kept me sitting in that seat listening to their bigotry and lies. I wasn’t scared or angry, just attentive, shaking my head from time to time as I took notes on what they said.

And so I can’t say I’ve never seen anything like what we’re now seeing at the GOP convention before — of course I have, but it was always in miniature and never to this kind of a scale. It had its place, but it appeared to be contained to those specific places. Reagan, Bush, Dole, Bush again, McCain, Romney — they were all anti-gay, but they were, to varying degrees, relatively nice about it. They were sometimes anti-other people too, though not always, not consistently so, and certainly not so publicly so. To the extent that they were, they were also, to varying degrees, relatively nice about them too. “Relatively” is the operative word here, of course. Also, because there was a whole range of motivations at play, from bigotry to cynicism to cold political calculations, they were always able to maintain a kind of a plausible deniability about whatever motivations they had that led to their policies. And by the way, Democratic candidates and Presidents during that period, I think, were just as guilty. And so whatever the motivation, the end result was nearly always the same, from marriage bans and AIDS neglect to “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and DOMA.

But now it’s clear that the kind of bigotry I saw on display at those anti-gay conferences wasn’t as contained as I thought. My exclusive focus on anti-gay politics — what I now call my “gay blinders” — kept me from understanding that it was a symptom of something much larger. And that larger thing has now gone mainstream and expanded to include all kinds of those people. In the way they used to just blame gay people, they now blame all those people for all of our problems. Those people: gays, transgenders, blacks, Muslims, immigrants, refugees, Mexicans, Democrats, the media, public schools, unions, Supreme Court justices, academics, the Obamas, RINOs, #NeverTrumpers — does it even matter exactly who those people are anymore? They’re all — we’re all — enemies, according to a serious candidate for President of the United States and his supporters. That makes this a real and pressing threat to everything we know in our hearts to be true and right, even among those whose politics won’t let them say so out loud. And it’s because of that that I now have to admit that I am truly scared, in a way I was never scared before at those rather sad and poorly-attended anti-gay conferences. I know I’m not being temperate here, and I don’t take this as a point of pride. I’m afraid that recent events are causing me to lose that capacity. Or maybe, it’s a luxury I can no longer afford.

Log Cabin Republicans: “Losers! Morons! Sad!”

The Log Cabin Republicans have plagarized Donald Trump’s tweets (that’s a joke, people!) for a full-page ad in the Cleveland edition of USA Today in response to yesterday’s adoption by the Republican National Convention of the most anti-LGBT platform in the party’s 162-year history. They explain in a press-release:

“Response from allies to our reaction in the wake of the drafting of this vitriolic anti-LGBT platform has been nothing short of staggering,” Log Cabin Republicans President Gregory T. Angelo stated. “The email sent to our members last week propelled Log Cabin Republicans to the top trend on Facebook for more than two days, and now holds the record as the highest-grossing single fundraising appeal this organization has ever sent. But this was fundraising with a purpose—I’m pleased to share that every last cent donated to Log Cabin Republicans via last week’s email has been spent on this project. This unprecedented support is representative of the GOP I know, and this is the GOP our members want to see.”

The provocative advertisement reads, “LOSERS! MORONS! SAD! No, these aren’t tweets from Donald Trump. This is what common-sense conservatives are saying about the most anti-LGBT platform the Republican Party has ever had. GOP Platform Committee: Out of touch, out of line, and out of step with 61% of young Republicans who favor same-sex marriage.”

“It’s my hope this advertisement will be a wake-up call to the intransigent and ancient voices on the GOP Platform Committee that marriage equality is the law of the land, gay families are a part of the fabric of America, and LGBT Republicans have an important role to play in growing the Party,” Angelo concluded.

Today’s Agenda Is Brought To You By…

From Where It’s At (New York, NY), July 24, 1978, page 63.

The building today houses half of a Colombian bakery.

Today In History, 1884: Medical Journal Describes “Perverted Sexual Instinct”

Dr. George F. Shrady

One of the many startling things one encounters in nineteenth-century medical journals is the terminology writers deployed to describe something which heretofore had no name. The German word Homosexualität had another decade to go before it made its way into the English language (May 6), leaving Dr. George F. Shrady, editor of The Medical Record and one of the nation’s most prominent physicians, some difficulty in describing those whose inclinations were not toward procreation:

SIR THOMAS BROWN once wrote, platonically, that the act of procreation was “the foolishest act a wise man commits in all his life. Nor is there anything that will more deject his cooled imagination.” The physician learns, however, that man, so far from tending toward this ideal, is more apt to show instincts of a violently opposite character, and finds, far down beneath the surface of ordinary social life, currents of human passion and action that would shock and sicken the mind not accustomed to think everything pertaining to living creatures worthy of study. Science has indeed discovered that, amid the lowest forms of bestiality and sensuousness exhibited by debased men, there are phenomena which are truly pathological and which deserve the considerate attention and help of the physician.

That Shrady used the word “pathological” shows that already he had been influenced by various German authors — Carl Westphal (Mar 23), Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (Aug 28), Richard von Krafft-Ebing (Aug 14), to name a few — who had already made a name for themselves in the study of Homosexualität (or Urnings, a term that was more widely used in Germany). Before homosexuality became the subject of serious study, it had been written off as mere evil or vice. Viewing it as pathology at least invited society to consider that homosexuals weren’t criminals, but were somehow diseased or deformed, and were merely acting according to what came naturally to them. This framework was considered far more enlightened, because the proper response wouldn’t be punishment and scorn under this understanding, but treatment and pity, an arguable advancement in how gay people would be treated.

But what was the name of this condition? Westphal called it “Contrare Sexualempfindung” (contrary sexual instinct), while others employed various ideas of “inversion” (inverted sexual instinct, inversion of the genesic function, etc.). Early American writers tended to use the term “perverted sexual instinct” with “perverted” taking its original meaning as something which “has been corrupted or distorted from its original course, meaning, or state.” In the nineteenth century, all sorts of things could be “perverted,” including the understanding of religious doctrine (where the term actually originated), the application of economic incentives or the course of justice. It would only take another decade or so before “perverted sexual instinct” became shortened to “perversion,” and the “pervert” would become synonymous with gay people.

And so this is the terminology that Shrady settled on: perverted sexual instinct. He reviewed the literature and found:

Up to that time (1883) only twenty-one cases were on record, three being reported by Americans, the rest mainly by Germans, and none at all by English observers. In a recent number of the Irrenfreund (vol. xxvi., No. I, 1884), Krafft-Ebing has reported six more cases. …In the reported cases of congenital perversion, the abnormal instinct begins oftenest as early as the eighth or ninth year, but shows itself at first, perhaps, only in an inclination to adopt the manners and practices of girls or women. The victims show the somatic basis of their trouble in various ways. There is often an hereditary psychopathic or neuropathic taint. Epilepsy is sometimes present. There are noticed in some cases, though not often, defects of the genital organs, such as hypospadias or epispadias, small or defective testicles. The hair on the face is sometimes thin, the voice almost always soft. The “Urnings” have a mincing gait, and sometimes the hips are broad like those of women. Exacerbations of the perverted feeling appear periodically. It may be accompanied with melancholia and end in insanity or suicide.

The mental peculiarities of these unfortunates have much in common. They are of the artistic, poetical. and imaginative temperament, often exhibiting a tendency to rather weak philosophizing. Sometimes they are of a vigorous understanding. In most cases there is great mental distress felt through a consciousness of their unnatural instincts. Two or three have, like Ulrichs, boldly defended their practices.

As for what to do about these individuals:

If congenital perverted sexual instinct is a pathological rather than a vicious condition, the query arises whether there is any remedy for it. The history of cases reported shows that sometimes the instinct is cultivated and intensified by bad surroundings in childhood, such as, for example, the exclusive society of women and immoral nurses. Excessive sexual indulgence seems to increase it, and we may question whether in a few cases the condition would have ever developed, were it not for an early abuse and misdirection of the sexual powers. In conditions of nervous exhaustion and weakness, the symptoms are exaggerated, and Krafft-Ebing, in his last communication, reports the case of a married man, previously healthy, who experienced an entire change in the sexual feeling, which lasted for twenty-five years. He was then cured by general faradization and other tonic measures.

Faradization refers to the use of electrical instruments to induce an electrical current or magnetic field in the vicinity of an afflicted body part or in general areas of the head or body.  (This is not the same as electric shock conversion therapy, which would come about much later (Mar 11).) The late nineteenth century belief in the power of electricity and magnetism to cure all sorts of maladies gave rise to a thriving industry geared toward providing doctors with all sorts of “quack” instruments. Tonic measures, of course, refers to who knows what sort of snake oil which would may have been prescribed to restore masculine vigor to the unfortunate soul. (One wonders why NARTH hasn’t looked into these.) Shrady closes with this description:

In conclusion, we believe it to be demonstrated that conditions once considered criminal are really pathological, and come within the province of the physician. We have undertaken, therefore, the disagreeable task of laying some of the facts regarding sexual perversion before our readers. The profession can be trusted to sift the degrading and vicious from what is truly morbid.

We cannot do better than append the conclusions which Krafft-Ebing has reached upon this subject. He says: ” 1. There exists a congenital absence of sexual feeling toward the opposite sex, at times even disgust of sexual intercourse. 2. This defect occurs in a physically differentiated sexual type and with a normal development of the sexual organs. 3. Absence of the psychical qualities corresponding to the anatomical sexual type, but the feelings, thoughts, and actions of a perverted sexual instinct. 4. Abnormally early appearance of sexual desire. 5. Painful consciousness of the perverted sexual desire. 6. Sexual desire toward the same sex. 7. The sexual desire remains purely platonic or finds gratification in mutual onanism, or in feeling of the object of the affections. Often there is self-pollution, but for the want of something better. 8. There are symptoms of a morbid excitability of the sexual desires, together with an irritable weakness of the nervous symptoms, so that sensuous feelings, magnetic sensations, and even pollutions occur in simply touching the object of the affections. 9. The perverse sexual impulse is abnormally intense and rules all thought and sensation. The love of such individuals is excessive even to adoration, and is often followed by sorrow, melancholy, and jealousy. 10. People afflicted with this abnormity frequently possess an instinctive power to recognize one another.”

In this last conclusion we cannot agree. The power of mutual recognition is not instinctive but acquired.

Dr. Shrady’s credentials were very impressive when he wrote this article. He was president of the New York Pathological Society, a fellow of the American and New York Academies of Medicine, a member of the New York State Medical Society.  He had served as a consultant or resident physician for a number of prominent New York hospitals, and was he was a trustee of the Hudson State Hospital for the Insane in Poughkeepsie. He gained national prominence in 1881 when, after President James Garfield was shot, Shrady was called in to consult on the various options for treatment and wrote the autopsy report following Garfield’s death. In 1885, Shrady was in the limelight again as General Ulysses S. Grant’s personal physician while the former president was dying of throat cancer.

[Source: George F. Shrady “Perverted sexual instinct.” Medical Record 26, no. 3 (July, 19, 1884): 70-71. Available online for free via Google Books here.]

Today In History, 1993: President Clinton Unveils “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” Policy

President Clinton passes members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at Ft. McNair before announcing his new “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy.

“Let me say a few words now about this policy. It is not a perfect solution. It is not identical with some of my own goals. And it certainly will not please everyone, perhaps not anyone, and clearly not those who hold the most adamant opinions on either side of this issue.” With those words, President Bill Clinton unveiled a new policy on gays and lesbians in the military, which he called “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Pursue.”

This new policy was intended as a compromise posture, after his campaign promise to overturn the military’s blanket ban on gays and lesbians in the military ran into a buzz saw of opposition in Congress. That opposition was led by Sen. Sam Nunn (D-GA), chair of the powerful U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee. With the support of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Congress began the process of rushing through a federal law to reinforce the Pentagon’s then-existing policy of total exclusion. Clinton’s call for Congress to back down went nowhere, so on July 19, he proposed a compromise solution at a speech at the National Defense University at Ft. McNair:

I have ordered Secretary Aspin to issue a directive consisting of these essential elements: One, service men and women will be judged based on their conduct, not their sexual orientation. Two, therefore the practice, now 6 months old, of not asking about sexual orientation in the enlistment procedure will continue. Three, an open statement by a service member that he or she is a homosexual will create a rebuttable presumption that he or she intends to engage in prohibited conduct, but the service member will be given an opportunity to refute that presumption; in other words, to demonstrate that he or she intends to live by the rules of conduct that apply in the military service. And four, all provisions of the Uniform Code of Military Justice will be enforced in an even-handed manner as regards both heterosexuals and homosexuals. And thanks to the policy provisions agreed to by the Joint Chiefs, there will be a decent regard to the legitimate privacy and associational rights of all service members.

Sen. Nunn and other opponents of lifting the ban altogether accepted this so-called compromise, and it would eventually make it into the Defense Appropriations Act of 1994 passed later that year. But in practice, the compromise fell apart. Service members were discharged based solely on evidence of sexual orientation, recruits were asked about their sexual orientation as part of their enlistment procedure, and any hint that a service member was gay — even if that hint did not come from the service member himself — resulted in an immediate investigation with the goal of discharge from the armed forces. Over the next eighteen years that the policy remained in effect, 14,346 soldiers, sailors and airmen/women were discharged under “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” until it was finally repealed in 2011.

Donald Trump’s Ghostwriter: “He Has No Attention Span.” And That’s Just For Starters

Tony Schwartz was Donald Trump’s ghostwriter for The Art of the Deal. Before then, Schwartz had been a serious journalist, but this ghostwriting gig ended all that. “I knew I was selling out. Literally, the term was invented to describe what I did,” he told the New Yorker. The Art of the Deal made Trump’s reputation, and Schwartz, to his horror, feels responsible for what’s happening today.

I put lipstick on a pig,” he said. “I feel a deep sense of remorse that I contributed to presenting Trump in a way that brought him wider attention and made him more appealing than he is.” He went on, “I genuinely believe that if Trump wins and gets the nuclear codes there is an excellent possibility it will lead to the end of civilization.”

You really have to read this piece, and you have to do it before you decide who to vote for or whether you should even vote in November. There’s simply too much at stake to sit on the sidelines this time around:

Schwartz thought that “The Art of the Deal would be an easy project. … But the discussion was soon hobbled by what Schwartz regards as one of Trump’s most essential characteristics: “He has no attention span.”

…“Trump has been written about a thousand ways from Sunday, but this fundamental aspect of who he is doesn’t seem to be fully understood,” Schwartz told me. “It’s implicit in a lot of what people write, but it’s never explicit—or, at least, I haven’t seen it. And that is that it’s impossible to keep him focussed on any topic, other than his own self-aggrandizement, for more than a few minutes, and even then . . . ” Schwartz trailed off, shaking his head in amazement. He regards Trump’s inability to concentrate as alarming in a Presidential candidate. “If he had to be briefed on a crisis in the Situation Room, it’s impossible to imagine him paying attention over a long period of time,” he said.

…Schwartz believes that Trump’s short attention span has left him with “a stunning level of superficial knowledge and plain ignorance.” He said, “That’s why he so prefers TV as his first news source—information comes in easily digestible sound bites.” He added, “I seriously doubt that Trump has ever read a book straight through in his adult life.” During the eighteen months that he observed Trump, Schwartz said, he never saw a book on Trump’s desk, or elsewhere in his office, or in his apartment.

Trump’s short attention span meant that Schwartz was never able to interview Trump, which is a pretty big hindrance for any author who’s supposed to ghostwrite his biography. So Schwartz came up with another idea, he’d follow Trump around, listen in on phone calls, and take copious notes. Then he’d call his business associates to get more background material:

But their accounts often directly conflicted with Trump’s. “Lying is second nature to him,” Schwartz said. “More than anyone else I have ever met, Trump has the ability to convince himself that whatever he is saying at any given moment is true, or sort of true, or at least ought to be true.” Often, Schwartz said, the lies that Trump told him were about money—“how much he had paid for something, or what a building he owned was worth, or how much one of his casinos was earning when it was actually on its way to bankruptcy.”

…Schwartz says of Trump, “He lied strategically. He had a complete lack of conscience about it.” Since most people are “constrained by the truth,” Trump’s indifference to it “gave him a strange advantage.”

When challenged about the facts, Schwartz says, Trump would often double down, repeat himself, and grow belligerent. …Whenever “the thin veneer of Trump’s vanity is challenged,” Schwartz says, he overreacts—not an ideal quality in a head of state.

Familiar pattern, isn’t it. It’s an incredible piece. I have to stop quoting from it. You have to start reading.

Anti-LGBT Language Will Stay In the GOP Platform

This development, of course, isn’t surprising. Last week, after the Republican platform committee approved the most anti-LGBT platform in the party’s 162-year history, delegates were gearing up for a potential floor fight over the the anti-LGBT planks. All that was needed to force a floor debate over the platform was just 28 signatures from the 2,470 delegates — just a little over one percent. But they couldn’t get even that tiny bit of support in time to force a debate today:

Rachel Hoff, the platform committee’s first openly gay member, chalked up the failure of their “minority report” to scare tactics from her fellow GOP delegates.

“The pressure and intimidation for delegates to drop their support for the minority report worked, but this effort did demonstrate strong support for a more inclusive platform,” said Hoff, who represents Washington, DC. “A simpler document that stated our core principles would have been better, and there will be even more people who believe that on the committee in 2020.”

The Republican platform, which will be rubber-stamped by the full convention later today, includes calls for laws and government regulations recognizing only opposite-sex marriages; and endorsement of a constitutional amendment or the appointment of supreme Court judges which would result in allowing states to ban same-sex marriage; support for the so-called “First Amendment Defense Act” and other legislation designed to allow discrimination against LGBT people; support for lawsuits challenging the Obama administrations transgender non-discrimination policies; and a provision inserted at the last minute by the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins designed to allow parents to send their children to ex-gay therapy.

But hey, the GOP platform isn’t anti-LGBT at all. Don’t believe me? Just ask Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin, who told CNN that it’s not anti-LGBT because “there were gay people on the platform committee themselves, and we respect that and we’re an inclusive party. We’re a big tent.”

In fact, there was just one gay person on the platform committee, Rachel Hoff, who led the fight against the anti-LGBT planks.

Today’s Agenda Is Brought To You By…

Today In History, 1950: Psychiatrist Denounces Lavender Scare Witch Hunt

Henry P. Laughlin, 1964.

A Senate subcommittee under Joseph McCarthy investigating the federal employment of gay Americans was warned that five-month long witch hunt against homosexuals would have negative consequences on government functioning (Feb 28, Mar 14,Mar 21, Mar 23, Mar 24, Apr 14, Apr 18, Apr 26, May 2, May 15, May 19, May 20, Jun 15, and Jul 17). “The immediate effect of the probe is to threaten the emotional security and mental health of many government employees, warned Dr. Henry P. Laughlin of the Washington Psychiatric Society. “This is indeed unfortunate, tending to lower the efficiency and work production of those who have some actual or imagined basis for concern, and especially for those people whose homosexual experiences have been isolated or of a token nature or perhaps never occurred.”

Laughlin however emphasized that he was only speaking for himself and not the Society, before continuing on a line rarely heard in 1950: “Sexual orientation doesn’t enter into a person’s ability or capacity to do work. I am sure that many persons in government, as well as in industry and other areas of endeavor, have made significant contributions, although their orientation happens to be homosexual.” Laughlin’s testimony would fall on deaf years. Tens of thousands of people would be hounded out of their jobs over the next several decades, whether they were gay, suspected of being gay, or accused of being gay for whatever reasons.

Today In History, 1964: The Haight Theater Begins Catering to Gay Audiences

San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood started out as very prosperous upper middle class neighborhood, full of spacious multi-story single-family Victorian homes, those “painted ladies” which have become emblematic for the entire city. The neighborhood itself was hit hard during the Great Depression, and by the end of World War II, those prosperous residents had long since fled to the suburbs. Those “painted ladies” they left behind were subdivided into apartments, and, often, subdivided again. Many suffered from neglect, others were left vacant. By the 1950s, the neighborhood was solidly working-class, and even they were leaving as soon as they could afford to do so. But a core of longtime residents remained, and they mobilized to form the Haight Ashbury Neighborhood Council (HANC) in 1959 to fight several threats to the neighborhood, including a planned freeway that would have destroyed the Panhandle greenbelt, and the growing influx of African-Americans who were being displaced by urban renewal elsewhere in the city and who found the rents in Haight-Ashbury attractive.

The Tenderloin’s Polk Street had long been San Francisco’s Castro before the Castro became a thing. But in the early 1960s, another longtime gayborhood in North Beach was being wiped out by the Embarcadero freeway. That area had preceded the Tenderloin as the center of gay action, but the redevelopment had decimated the gay bars in the area. So with the low rents in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood already attracting other refugees of urban renewal, it was only natural that gay men driven out of other parts of the city plagued by construction or higher rents would move in. By 1964, it looked as if Haight-Ashbury might become San Francisco’s newest gayborhood.

The Haight Theater, at 1700 Haight Street, had been entertaining Haight-Ashbury residents since it opened in 1910 as a nickelodeon. It became a movie theater in 1915, and was renovated into an Art Deco palace sometime in the 1930s. The Haight became the once-prosperous area’s premiere showplace, but as the neighborhood declined, so did the theater. It finally went belly-up in early 1964. Francis Rizzo and Bernie Meshioff bought the dilapidated theater and, on July 17, re-opened it with a showing of Glen or Glenda, a quasi-autobiographical Ed Wood picture about a cross-dressing man. The film’s poster — “What Am I…Male or Female! The Strange Case of a ‘Man’ who changed his SEX!” — hit a neighborhood that was already in a panic over change.

Richard D. Boyle, the editor of the weekly Haight-Ashbury Independent, immediately publish an editorial demanding the owners provide “family type entertainment or close the theater in the interest of this residential district.” At about the same time, The San Francisco Chronicle sent a reporter who wrote about “The Haight Transformed.” Rizzo and Meshioff gave the reporter a grand tour, which included a lobby renovated with murals of nude young men in classical poses, and a Ladies room where one man was applying makeup to another man who called himself “Cleopatra.” A drag show was going on in the theater itself. Rizzo told the reporter, “This used to be a family theater. It went broke. They tried everything, art films, foreign films, Spanish-speaking films—and it went bust!” He also explained:

Bernie and I were in the advertising business. We got this idea and decided to do it. It’s unique. I mean, where do these people have to go? Did you know that in a Gay bar they charge a homosexual double what anybody else pays for a drink? I mean these men are being gouged all the time. So, we opened this theater for their entertainment.

The Haight also got the attention of an un-named reporter for ONE magazine, the nation’s first gay magazine to be sold in newsstands across the country. Shortly after The Gaight screened  Glen or Glenda, it hosted a Mr. San Francisco physique contest:

This reporter saw some of the most glorious bodies in the contest that he has ever set eyes upon. The winner was a spectacular, young coal-black Negro who didn’t appear to have a single flaw in his physique. The lobby of the Haight is thickly coated with tantalizing, all-nude murals of the male body done in brilliant colors; an art show of drawings and paintings on the same theme was held on the mezzanine.

The manager, who took the stage at intermission, claimed that the theatre was a “bold, new experiment especially for you people.” He also said that the theatre had over 1,500 patrons during the first three days of its new career. He promised the audience that he would have new gay movies coming from Hollywood and Italy for them soon. …

Although appealing to the homosexual audience has been part of the program of most art movie houses for years, such public announcements as those made by the manager of the Haight have not been heard by us before. Of the more than 300 persons attending the evening we did, not one appeared to be heterophile. There were campy calls from the rear of the auditorium as the physique models did their best to please the audience. Each contestant in the show was loudly cheered.

Neighborhood residents weren’t so enthralled. Stirred on by what was now a full-on campaign by the Haight-Ashbury Independent, the HANC swung into action. They organized protests in front of the theater denouncing the “sex” shows being shown in a family neighborhood. Bereft of any sense of irony, they organized their own kids to march in front of the theater with sings reading “Down with Haight SEX” and “Down with the ‘Ladies’ We Want Walt Disney!” HANC also fired off letters to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, the Police and District Attorney, demanding the authorities shut down the theater. The Police Department responded that the theater itself was perfectly legal, but that they would keep an eye on it to make sure no one was breaking the law. In fact, Rizzo had complained to the Chronicle that police officers were stopping by “hourly” to harass employees and patrons.

The harassment worked, although the Meshioff’s own unrelated legal difficulties likely played a larger part in the Haight Theater’s demise. He was first arrested for, allegedly, falsely accusing a group of heckling youths of robbing the theater. He skipped bail and fled town, with a string of bad checks floating around San Francisco in his wake. The Haight closed down by August.

Just a few weeks later, the theater reopened under new ownership with a double feature: Jerry Lewis in Who’s Minding the Store?, and Tony Randall and Burle Ives in The Brass Bottle. “Family films” were back at the Haight, now re-named “The Straight.” But the same kind of fare that had led to the Haight’s demise earlier that year produced precisely the same result again, and the Straight closed again two weeks later. Ironically, owners blamed “hoodlums” terrorizing patrons, quite possibly the same “heckling youths” who spurred the gay Haight’s closure.

Neither the Haight nor the Straight would again operate as a movie theater. The building served briefly as an Assembly of God church, and then, in 1967, music promoters proposed turning the building into a combination theater and 4,000 square foot dance floor. City officials refused the permits, so the theater opened as the “Straight School of Dance,” with such acts as the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, Country Joe and the Fish, Santana, and the Steve Miller Band providing “instruction.” The “school” closed in 1969, and the building sat vacant until it was demolished in 1979.

Haight-Ashbury never became the gayborhood that the Haight Theater’s presence appeared to herald. A few gay bars opened, but the influx of hippies just a couple of years later more or less pushed out the few gay men who had moved to the area. One of the great ironies of the 1960s was that those lefty-liberal if-it-feels-good-do-it Summer of Love practitioners with flowers in their hair were also every bit as homophobic as the rest of society. The gays of Haight decamped to Eureka Valley, another down-on-its-luck neighborhood just a few blocks away. Those new gay residents of Eureka Valley took the name of its main theater, The Castro, as the the name for their new home. And the rest of history.

[Sources: “Tangents.” ONE 12, no. 8 (August 1964): 14-15

Damon John Scott. Dissertation: “The City Aroused: Sexual Politics and the Transformation of San Francisco’s Urban Landscape, 1943-1964. (University of Texas at Austin, August 2008). Available online here. (PDF: 5.5MB/363 pages)]

Today In History, 1970: New York Police Raid After Hours Club, Mafia Owners Fail To Stoke Another “Stonewall”

NYC Police Commissioner Howard Leary

The Stonewall rebellion a year earlier had changed a lot. The gay community was more organized and more assertive than ever before. But there were a few things that hadn’t changed: police continued to raid gay bars and clubs, nearly all of which continued to be mob-owned. The gay community often found itself fighting on two fronts: 1) against direct harassment by the police, and 2) from getting caught in the crossfire of a larger economic tug-of-war between organized crime and corrupt police officials.

Most people today are very well versed on the first battle, but we often forget how important that second one was at the time. In New York City in the late sixties and early seventies, that second battle often threatened to eclipse the first. A good illustration of that can be found in a police raid that took place at The Barn, an after-hours club in the early morning hours of July 18, 1970. LGBT activist Randy Wicker (Feb 3) described what happened in his column in GAY, the nation’s first weekly gay newspaper:

Barn baloney bared: New York Police raided the Barn Sunday, July 18th, issued summonses to nine employees and sent dozens of patrons scrambling out of the back rooms and into the streets. Management mafiosi reportedly took to the streets also shouting “gay power” and urging the patrons to return apparently hoping to provoke a confrontation a-la-Stonewall. The Police left shortly thereafter and most of the patrons re-entered the club.

“These raids shouldn’t be conducted at all,” Marty Robinson, GAA (Gay Activists Alliance) Political Affairs Committee chairman, declared. “We don’t like these management people running around the street shouting ‘gay power’ to further their own ends. Gay people should not simply be pawns in a power struggle between the police and underworld elements. A conference with Police Commissioner Leary has been arranged to discuss this matter more fully.’

The public battle between the mob and NYPD masked the fact that the current situation was actually mutually beneficial to both parties. Because of the state’s reluctance (and often, outright refusal) to issue liquor licenses to gay businessmen who wanted to open gay bars, the mob stepped in to fill the void by opening unlicensed bars. They made tons of money selling watered-down drinks at exorbitant prices, and they shared the wealth with police officers and officials who were paid to look the other way. Sometimes a payment was missed, sometimes it was shorted, or sometimes a dispute broke out over how much the mob should pay, or sometimes the police might decide to put on a show of force for public consumption. Whatever the reason, police would periodically pretend to shut a bar down, and, if they were behind on their arrest quotas, they could fix that problem by hauling some of the bar patrons to the station house. But more typically, police wouldn’t arrest anyone, except, perhaps, a few bar employees. Nobody appears to have been arrested in the Barn raid either, and that foiled the club’s attempt to exploit the situation. But police behavior toward the club’s patrons were, typically, hostile, both before and during the raid.

L-R: Lige Clarke and Jack Nichols (publishers of GAY), Jim Owles, and Marty Robinson.

Robinson and Jim Owles, GAA president, led a delegation to meet with Police Commissioner Howard R. Leary to discuss the problem of the mafia-owned bars as well as how the police treated gay people. As GAY reported on August 17:

Jim Owles, president of GAA, told Commissioner Leary that the homosexual community is achieving a new awareness of itself and its problems, partly as a result of its witnessing other minority group struggles and partly as a result of problem. with the police that the gay community continually faces. He charged that raids on after-hours gay bars were made at hours on weekend nights, with police by their mere presence intimidating scores of patrons. “They hang around, they check I.D .’s at random. they indulge in verbal abuse, they station one man at the door and a patrol car out front for several minutes.”

Recently at the Barn (an after-hours bar), Owles contended, a police raid created a very heated atmosphere and near violence. “We’re here to ask you what can be done. Your actions make it difficult for a civil rights organization such as ours that is trying to reform the establishment. When we work against a background of such police tactics, they tend to undermine our efforts and to drive the gay community into the hands of extremists,” Owles charged. Nevertheless, he explained, “we are not asking the police to close down after-hours bars.” He said GAA’s concern was that homosexual patrons should be left alone when police take action against such establishments.”

…Robinson pointed out that the syndicate owns legitimate bars, too. He said “We’re here about a social condition — syndicate control of gay bars and payoffs to police. The bars are run shabbily and are a bad influence on the young kids just coming out who patronize these places and who already don’t know what to make of themselves because of the way society receives them. Such gay bars shouldn’t be tolerated in these years. We can’t live with it. We want to see legitimate bars where there’s no guy at the door with a cigar in his face saying to kids, ‘Welcome to your life- this is it, your subculture, your subterranean existence.’ Commissioner, our desire now is that anyone who’s honest can get into business and stay in without a shakedown, and can get police protection. But we must have police protection for this to be possible.”

…Reinforcing Robinson’s earlier remarks, Owles told the police that successful bars not opened by the syndicate were quickly taken over by it. “In an era when homosexuals are seeking their civil rights, it’s a blatant insult to have to go to a bar taken over by the syndicate. This situation will blow up sooner or later,” he warned. “Hence GAA is pressing for an investigation of alleged collusion between the State Liquor Authority and organized crime. Meanwhile, whatever struggles there are between the police and the syndicate, we simply ask that homosexual patrons not be used as pawns in between.”

Leary countered that if the GAA or anyone in the gay community had specific evidence of official corruption, they should bring it to the police. Owles countered that this was a problem for the NYPD to solve, not his. “As far as a police investigation is concerned,” he said, “it would be most difficult for most homosexuals to appear in court to help you. Actual lives would be in danger.”

The previous April, The New York Times published a front-page article about police corruption using information supplied by two officers, Detective David Durk and Officer Frank Serpico. That article forced New York Mayor John Lindsay to appoint a five-member panel to investigate charges of police corruption. A year later, the commission issued a report saying that police corruption was endemic, and it faulted the Mayor and Leary, who by then was a former police commissioner, for failing to act.

[Sources: Kay Tobin. “Police Commissioner Howard Leary Meets with G.A.A.” GAY (August 17, 1970): 3, 12.

Randy Wicker. “The Wicker Basket” GAY (August 17, 1970): 8.]

Today’s Agenda Is Brought To You By…

From The Body Politic (Toronto, ON), April 1983, page 18. (Source.)

The Body Politic, Toronto’s gay newspaper, was known for keeping tabs on which gay bars were excluding which clientele for which reasons:

The fall bar hop for Gays and Lesbians at the University of Toronto (GLAUT) ended on a sour note this year when a group of about 20 gay men and lesbians was refused admission to The Outpost, a popular denim and leather bar at Jarvis and Gerrard Streets.

Brian Pronger, organizer of the yearly tour of local bars, reports that the group was stopped at the door October 15 by an employee, apparently the bouncer, who said they would all have to show age of majority cards. Several in the group began to reach for their cards when the employee suddenly called them “a bunch of rowdies’ ‘ and asked why they wanted “to go to a gay bar.”

Pronger says he was “aghast” to realize that the man thought they were straight: “I told him that we were most certainly gay and to prove it I showed him my Club Bath card.” The employee, however, remained intransigent and went on to say that if members of the group objected to being turned away they should “phone The Body Politic.”

He finally suggested they should all “go back to Buddy’s” (a bar popular with collegiate and post-collegiate types). Acting manager Bob Saunders told TBP the bar is concerned about crowds of straight kids coming into the bar. He felt the bouncer must have mistaken the GLAUT members for “a bunch of rowdy straights.”

Pronger notes that the primary purpose of the GLAUT bar hop is to introduce members to the Toronto bar scene. “I don’t think many of them will go back to The Outpost,” he said.

The bar has also been criticized for its policy of excluding women. Two local gay men wrote to TBP recently reporting two incidents in which women were told to leave the bar. In both cases, the management refused to discuss the policy, and the women met with a response similar to what the GLAUT members experienced.

The following month, John Allec returned to this incident for a Body Politic editorial on behalf of the newspaper’s collective:

In its bar listings, Toronto’s new gay magazine, Circuit, says of The Outpost: “You are made to feel at home and you will want to go back.” Such is the case, but only, it seems, if you can get in in the first place.

I’ve been in The Outpost, a leather and western bar, several times a week since it opened last year; it’s my favourite bar. As Circuit writes, “if you’re a real man — or can give a good imitation” you’ll feel right at home. Lately, the management seems to be making sure that no one else gets in to spoil the atmosphere. There have been several reports of women being rudely barred at the door and, on a Saturday night last month, a friend and I were behind a dozen or so youngish (mostly male) university students who were told to “go back to Buddy’s, where you belong.”

Although the barring is inconsistent so far, it may be an effort to assure The Outpost’s regular customers that they can dress like walking hardware stores without having to put up with curiosity seekers. In today’s strained economic cHmate, every drawing card counts, though the management should ask itself whether such a policy is worth the bad feelings, and the damage it could do to a community still learning to stand together. Even those in macho drag, often on the periphery of the gay scene and generally an older crowd, may have experienced the unpleasantness of being told they aren’t welcome at certain places.

Charges of discrimination because of age, race, sex, effeminacy and dress are not new to Toronto. But the last place the city’s gay community, which has shown exemplary and militant opposition to discrimination, should tolerate such practices is within its own institutions.

Gay communities in smaller centres do not have the resources to support special interest socializing — Winnipeg, Saskatoon and Halifax, for example, have long histories of lesbians and gay men partying side by side. Must a larger community force its members to choose friends by sex and clothes to make sure they can go out together on a Saturday night? Most lesbians and gay men (myself included, I suppose) probably do prefer to mix with people they’re attracted to. But it’s unacceptable that some establishments feel they should make that decision for us and take advantage of the fact that they can dictate who goes where.

Did I end up going into The Outpost after the incident that Saturday night? Well, yes. But I did feel uneasy, knowing that next time I just might not make it through.

[Sources: Jim Bartley. “Outpost Turfs out U of T Group Party.” The Body Politic (November 1982): 16.

John Allec. Editorial: “Left Out At The Outpost.” The Body Politic (December 1982): 6. Both issues are available online here.]

Today In History, 1950: They Resign Voluntarily, Don’t They? That’s an Admission Of Their Guilt.”

Max Lerner, a columnist for the New York Post, began a series of articles on homosexuality in July, 1950, spurred on by the growing hysteria in government and the press over the presence of gay people in federal employment (Feb 28, Mar 14,Mar 21, Mar 23, Mar 24, Apr 14, Apr 18, Apr 26, May 2, May 15, May 19, May 20, and Jun 15). On July 17, Lerner published his interview with Sen. Kenneth Wherry (R-NE), the GOP’s floor leader and whip, and a primary backer of the ongoing Senate investigations into gays and lesbian employees in the federal government. Two months earlier, Sen. Wherry had issued a report estimating 3,750 “perverts” were government employees (May 19). The interview revealed just how uninformed those crusaders against gays in the federal government really were:

I asked Senator Wherry whether the problem of homosexuals in the government was primarily a moral or a security issue. He answered that it was both, but security was uppermost in his mind. I asked whether he made a connection between homosexuals and Communists. “You can’t hardly separate homosexuals from subversives,” the Senator told me. “Mind you, I don’t say every homosexual is a subversive, and I don’t say every subversive is a homosexual. But a man of low morality is a menace in the government, whatever he is, and they are all tied up together.”

…I asked whether he would be content to get the homosexuals out of the “sensitive posts,” leaving alone those who have nothing to do with military security. There might be “associations,” he said, between men in the sensitive and the minor posts. “There should be no people of that type working in any position in the government.”

…I asked on what he based his view that homosexuals represent an unusual security risk. I cited a group of American psychiatrists who hold that a heterosexual with promiscuous morals may also be a security risk, that some men might be reckless gamblers or confirmed alcoholics and get themselves entangled or blackmailed. The Senator’s answer was firm: “You can stretch the security risk further if you want to,” he said, “but right now I want to start with the homosexuals. When we get through them, then we’ll see what comes next.”

This brought me to the question of definitions. “You must have a clear idea, Senator,” I said, “of what a homosexual is. It is a problem that has been troubling the psychiatrists and statisticians. Can you tell me what your idea is?”

“Quite simple,” answered the Senator. “A homosexual is a diseased man, an abnormal man.”

I persisted. “Do you mean one who has made a habit of homosexuality? Would you include someone who, perhaps in his teens, had some homosexual relations and had never had them since? Would you include those who are capable of both kinds of relations, some who may even be raising families?”

“You can handle it without requiring a definition,” the Senator answered. “I’m convinced in my own mind that any homosexual is a bad risk.”

“But how about those who get pushed out of their jobs when they are only in a minor post, when no security risk is involved, and when they are forced to resign for something they may have done years ago?”

“They resign voluntarily, don’t they?” asked the Senator. “That’s an admission of their guilt. That’s all I need. My feeling is that there will be very few people hurt.”

[Source: Jonathan Ned Katz. Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A. (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1976): pp 95-97.]