Box Turtle Bulletin
News and commentary about the anti-gay lobby“Now you must raise your children up in a world where that union of man and box turtle is on the same legal footing as man and wife…”
News and commentary about the anti-gay lobbyJuly 10th, 2016
250 YEARS AGO: The following story was reported in the July 1766 issue of London’s Gentleman’s Magazine for July 10:
A discovery of a very extraordinary nature was made at Poplar, where two women had lived together for six and thirty years, as man and wife, and kept a public house, without ever being suspected; but the wife happening to fall sick, and die, a few years before she expired, revealed the secret to her relations, made her will, and left legacies to the amount of half what she thought they were worth. On application to the pretended, she at first endeavoured to support her assumed character, but being closely pressed, she at length owed the fact, accommodated all matters amicably, put off the male, and put on the female character, in which she appeared to be a sensible well-bred woman, though in her male character she had always affected the plain plodding alehouse-keeper. It is said they had acquired in business money to the amount of £3000 [£470,000 today]. Both had been crossed in love when young, and had chosen this method to avoid further importunities.
[Source: “Historical Chronicle: July 10.” The Gentleman’s Magazine (July, 1766): 339. Available online via Google Books here.]
July 10th, 2016
In 1984, the Dallas/Ft. Worth suburb of Arlington was having a problem at Randol Mill Park. It seems that the popular park had become a well-known venue for men (often heterosexually-married men) to solicit sex with other men. Its notoriety even earned it a listing in Bob Damron’s Address Book, a popular pre-internet national guide to gay bars, businesses, organizations and cruising areas.
City council members weren’t pleased. The last thing that Arlington’s city fathers wanted was for the city to gain a reputation for gay friendliness. Council members Jim Norwood, Richard Green and Leo Berman had recently protested a gay adaptation of Edward Albee’s (Mar 12) Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolfe at Theater Arlington, saying the play was “inappropriate to community standards.” City Council ordered the police to step up patrols in the park and adopted a resolution asking Dallas-area newspapers to publish the names of those arrested for public lewdness. “I think the thing they fear more than anything else is public exposure,” said Mayor Pro-Tem Gary Bruner, with no hint of irony. The Dallas Times Herald, Dallas Morning News and the Arlington Daily News all said they would refuse to do so. Said Times Herald Editor Will Jarret, “That’s not our function. We shouldn’t be instruments for public officials to punish or embarrass people.”
But after less than a year’s worth of increased patrolling and enforcement by Arlington police, the Mid-Cities Daily News reported, “We have not heard nearly as much about the problem as last year.” But for whatever reason, the Klan was still excited over queers in the park. The Klan’s “exalted cyclops” of the Ft. Worth kalvern, Bill Walton, announced that his group would be holding a picnic at the park to send a message that gays weren’t welcome. The Daily News responded, “Given the choice between sharing a park with homosexuals or a bunch of white-sheeted, racist, hate-peddling losers, we think we would prefer the homosexuals.”
Well sure, given the choice.
When the Klan held their picnic three days later — sans white sheets — Scott Patrick, the exalted cyclops of the Garland klavern, sounded disappointed with what he found — or didn’t find. “I expected the situation to be a little more blatant. I’m sure all the publicity kept it out.” With none of those dreaded homosexuals in sight, Walton was left with no option but to complain about other groups. “Would you believe I actually had a Jew ask if a Jew could come to one of our meetings,” he told a reporter. “I said ‘no.’ A Jew would have about as much chance of attending as a nigger. You’ve got to admit they aren’t as intelligent as we are.”
[Additional sources: “Arlington City Officials Order Crackdown on Homosexual Activity.” Dallas Voice 1 no. 18 (September 7, 1984): 1.]
July 10th, 2016
145 YEARS AGO: (d. 1922) He is best known for just one work, the monumental seven-volume novel À la Recherche du Temps Perdu, known in English as In Search of Lost Time or Remembrance of Things Past. But that alone has secured his reputation as one of the greatest authors of all time.
Proust’s father was a prominent surgeon and his mother was the well-read daughter of a wealthy Jewish family from Alsace. He was born in Paris just two months after the Franco-Prussian War and during the bloody suppression of the French Commune. Food and fuel shortages during the uprising contributed to widespread hunger and worry, both of which greatly affected Proust’s mother when he was born. He was described as a sickly child, and wasn’t expected to survive infancy. He had his first serious asthma attack at the age of nine, and continuing illnesses often interrupted his education. Nevertheless, he excelled in literature and was awarded with numerous honors in school. He was published in several literary magazines in 1890 and 1891, and he co-founded a literary review in 1892. His asthma rendered him something of a solitary figure, and he was eternally devoted to and, in many ways, dependent on his mother. He lived in the family apartment with his parents until 1905, when his mother died and left him bereft. (His father had died two years earlier.)
Marcel Proust (seated), with Robert de Flers and and Lucien Daudet, 1892.
Proust’s pursuit of male companionship began rather early in life. At Lycée Condorcet, Proust made friends with Jacques Bizet, the son of the famous composer, and Daniel Halévy, the composer’s nephew. At age seventeen, Proust fell in love with Bizet, but his mother, suspecting that the two had become lovers, forbade her son from seeing him. In 1891, Proust met Oscar Wilde and invited the famous British writer to dine with him and his parents. In a possibly apocryphal story, Wilde’s sensitivities were offended by the Proust’s heavy, dark Victorian furniture and left, saying “How ugly is everything here.” Whether the story is true or not, Proust would later, unsympathetically, allude to Wilde’s fall in Sodom and Gomorrah, the fourth volume of À la Recherche du Temps Perdu. In 1892, Proust sat for a photo with the playwright Robert de Flers and Lucien Daudet, whose reputation was that of “a handsome young man, curled, well-dressed, pomaded, painted and powdered.” Proust’s mother was scandalized by the photo, his right arm resting on Proust’s shoulder, and forbade Proust from circulating copies of it. That, too, would appear in Jean Santeuil, a novel which wouldn’t see the light of day until it was published posthumously in 1952.
Proust pursued a number of relationships with other men, although he was eager to avoid the tag of “homosexual” himself. In a letter to the André Gide, the gay author who had published his groundbreaking defense of homosexuality in 1911, Proust said that he could write very extensively about homosexuality, as long as he didn’t ascribe it to himself. In fact, homosexuality appears as a recurring theme throughout À la Recherche du Temps Perdu, especially in the later volumes, where Proust shows himself unusually knowledgeable about the difficulties of being a closeted gay man.
After his mother died in 1905, Proust was bereft, mourning her for the rest of his life. He moved from his parents’ apartment, taking much of the heavy furnishings with him, and moved to another apartment where he lined his bedroom with cork to shut out the noise, and hung heavy curtains that were never opened. And that’s when he set about writing the epic novel that would define his entire career. By 1912, his manuscript ran 1,200 pages and he began looking for a publisher.
Du côté de chez Swann (Swann’s Way), 1912
After being turned down by three publishing houses, Proust resorted to self-publishing the first volume, Swann’s Way, in 1913. At the time, it was advertised as the first installment of a three-volume novel. The second volume, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, was ready for 1914, but it was delayed five years because of the war. That gave Proust plenty of time to revise and expand the entire series. When In the Shadow was finally published, it was awarded the Prix Goncourt that year. The third volume, The Guertmantes Way (1920/1921) came out in two installments, as did the fourth volume, Sodom and Gomorrah (1921).
Between 1919 and 1922, Proust worked incessantly on the remaining volumes, rarely leaving his cork-lined bedroom. He died of pneumonia and a pulmonary abscess in 1922, just after the second installment of Sodom and Gomorrah was published. That would be the last volume that Proust would oversee publication. His brother would oversee the publication of the rest of Proust’s great opus over the next five years. The fifth volume, The Prisoner, came out in 1923. Proust had written it during the publication hiatus during the war, along with the sixth volume, The Fugitive, which came out in 1925. From an editorial standpoint, The Fugitive proved to be the most troublesome, appearing as it did without Proust’s final revisions and corrections. Three later editions, one in 1954 and two others in 1987, incorporated corrections later found in the Bibliothèque Nationale and in papers found by a relative. The final volume, Finding Time Again, which Proust had mostly written when he was writing the first volume, was published in 1927.
À la Recherche du Temps Perdu saw its first English translations between 1922 and 1930, by C. K. Scott Moncrieff, who gave the work the English title Remembrance of Things Past, a phrase taken from one of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. When the Modern Library released an updated translation 1992, it gave the title as In Search of Lost Time, which more closely captures the original French. Penguin Classics is in the process of producing a new, revised translation, with the final volume expected to be released in 2018. Two recent biographies had rounded out our understanding of Proust: Edmund White’s Marcel Proust: A Life (2009) and William C. Carter’s identically titled Marcel Proust: A Life which was released by Yale University Press in 2013.
July 10th, 2016
Because Proust:
July 10th, 2016
85 YEARS AGO: The American composer and lyricists is best known for his scores for the Broadway hits Hello Dolly! (1964), Mame (1966) and La Cage aux Folles (1983). The latter earned Herman a Tony for best musical. His most famous song, “Hello Dolly!”, knocked the Beatles from #1 in 1964 when Louis Armstrong recorded it. “When they passed out talent,” Carol Channing said, “Jerry stood in line twice.”A 2008 PBS documentary about him reported that Herman was diagnosed HIV-positive in 1985 when that diagnosis was an automatic death sentence. He was lucky, and is among of the fortunate few to live to see the lifesaving “cocktail” become available in 1995. The AIDS epidemic wiped out half the original La Cage aux Folles chorus before the show’s final run, but the show’s signature anthem “I Am What I Am” can still bring audiences to their feet with its call for dignity and integrity in the face of bigotry and fear.
July 10th, 2016
With bandmate Chris Lowe, he was one half of the electronic dance duo Pet Shop Boys. Their first single, “West End Girls,” was actually recorded twice. The first version was released in 1984 and became a club hit in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles. (Go figure.) After the duo signed with EMI, they re-recorded the song, and it became a 1986 number one hit in the U.S. and the U.K. Tennant was coy about rumors over his sexuality throughout the 1980s, but he finally came out in a 1994 interview with a UK gay magazine. Pet Shop Boys are still going strong. On March 14, 2011, they released a double CD of the complete three-act ballet score for The Most Incredible Thing with the Wrocław Score Orchestra. Their latest studio album, Super, which features the single “The Pop Kids,” came out last April.
July 9th, 2016
In the past ten years— Six Amish girls went to school. Six people went shopping at the mall. Thirty-two students went to college. Nine more went shopping at the mall. Six attended a meeting at City Hall. Six more students went to college. Two people went to see kids putting on a musical at church. Thirteen went to classes in an immigration center. A nurse cared for seven residents in a nursing home. Thirteen went to work at an Army base. Eight went to work at a beer distributor. Five went to a supermarket to meet their Congresswoman. Five were in an IHOP. Eight were at a hair salon. A teenager almost made it home from 7-Eleven. Three students went to high school. Seven more students went to college. Five black men were just out and about in Tulsa. Five people went for coffee. Twelve went to see a movie. Six Sikh worshipers went to pray. Five people were afraid of their co-worker. Twenty elementary school children went to school; so did six teachers. Three went to cheer on the runners; one police officer guarded a campus and another gave chase. Thirteen people went to work at a Navy Yard. One young man heard voices. One man sold loose cigarettes. Another was buying a toy BB gun. Another shoplifted a box of Swisher Sweets. One young man saw visions. So did another. A woman was disoriented and delusional: sometimes she couldn’t stop turning on and off the lights. One man was going down a stairwell. A twelve-year-old played in the park. Two police officers sat in their patrol car. One young man reached for a pill bottle. Another took pills and saw visions. Another was naked. Another was “screaming and yelling,” and that was before he was mauled by a police dog. One man ran away. Another rode a bicycle. Nine people studied the Bible. Four went to work at an Armed Forces recruitment office; another went on duty at the Navy Reserve. A woman failed to use her turn signal. Fourteen people attended an office party. Three Muslim men were at home. Eight family members slept. Forty-nine people danced. A man sold CDs. Another had a broken tail light. And five police officers were protecting a friendly, peaceful protest. Ora pro nobis.
July 9th, 2016
Jean Carlos Mendez (left) and Luis Daniel Wilson-Leon (right)
Luis Daniel Wilson-Leon, 37 years old.
Luis grew up in Puerto Rico, where as a young man growing up he was harassed for being gay. It was a really small town and “he was always the odd man out,” said his friend of twenty years. Luis was so reserved that when his friend came out to Luis as gay, Luis thought it was a trick. “Back then, gay culture wasn’t really accepted like it is now. Even though I’m really masculine and people don’t know what I am, I had this feeling that he, because he was different, I kind of felt that security that I could trust him with the information.”
Daniel eventually came out. He also continued to attend church. But he remained reserved. “If he is sad, you will never know,” said a cousin. Luis moved to Vero Beach, Florida. “He just needed some change, because we dealt with a lot of machismo. We were pushed out and we were secluded by everywhere else for being gay,” said his friend. Another cousin said, “He just wanted to embrace who he was, and he felt that society itself just didn’t have that. He couldn’t have that ability at the time over in Puerto Rico.”
But he soon blossomed. He took a job at a show store even though he couldn’t speak English. Before long, he caught on and was promoted to store manager. He then moved to Orange Country, attracted to the large LGBT community there. Then one day, he bought a bottle of cologne, Declaration by Cartier. And he was smitten by the salesman, Jean Carlos Mendez Perez. Weeks later, they bumped into each other at Pulse. They became regulars, then started eating out together, then rented a house together in Kissimmee. They had been together for nearly eight years. On that early Sunday morning, they were at Pulse again. Luis took six pictures and posted them to Facebook. They looked like they were having a good time.
Jean Carlos Mendez Perez, 35 years old.
Jean Carlos moved from Puerto Rico to the U.S. when he was a teenager. Adjusting to his new home wasn’t easy, but made friends fairly easily. He was a gym nut and a fragrance fan. He loved looking good, smelling good, and feeling his best. His humor and warmth made him the best salesperson at Perfumania. He recently started wearing Jimmy Choo perfume. His sister-in-law said he was a doting uncle to her three kids, buying them candy and ice cream at the drop of the hat. “He was like a little kid when he was with them.”
July 9th, 2016
(d. 2015) His family was as impressive as he: his father, a Lithuanian Jew, was a respected physician. His mother was among England’s first female surgeons. His large extended family included scientists, physicians, statesmen and a Nobel Laureate. He earned a BA in physiology and biology from Queen’s College, Oxford. After a disappointing experience in academic research, he spent a summer on a Israeli kibbutz and scuba diving in the Red Sea to consider his future. He determined that his future was in medicine, and returned to England to enter medical school. He was also determined to work with real patients in an actual hospital setting. As he wrote in his 2015 autobiography, On the Move: A Life:
My pre-med studies in anatomy and physiology at Oxford had not prepared me in the least for real medicine. Seeing patients, listening to them, trying to enter (or at least imagine) their experiences and predicaments, feeling concerned for them, taking responsibility for them, was quite new to me … It was not just a question of diagnosis and treatment; much graver questions could present themselves—questions about the quality of life and whether life was even worth living in some circumstances.
Sacks moved to the U.S. in 1959 and studied psychiatry and neurology. He also experimented with recreational drugs. A book he read on migraines by a nineteenth-century physician while high on amphetamine led to an epiphany that would set the direction for the rest of his life: he would chronicle his observations of his patients’ neurological diseases and other oddities. He would be a tour guide of the mind. His books were inspired by nineteenth-century case histories, but with a decidedly twentieth-century eye for narrative details. His 1973 best-seller Awakenings explored the inner lives of of post-encephalitis patients who had survived an epidemic in the 1920s only to be locked in a catatonic state for the next fifty years. The inner lives only become accessible when Sacks administers the experimental drug L-Dopa, which brings about an “awakening” among his patients. The book was made into a successful film in 1990.
More books followed. If you haven’t read any of these, then you’re life is all the poorer for it: The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1985) contains 24 essays exploring the altered perceptions of people whose mental impairments are sometimes insurmountable, yet those impairments often reveal a kind of richness that is easy to overlook. One essay, “The Dog Beneath the Skin,” talks about a 22-year-old medical student who, after a night of partying on amphetamines, cocaine, and PCP, wakes the next morning to find that he now has an exceptionally heightened sense of smell. Sacks would later reveal that he was that medical student.
And more: Seeing Voices (1989) dived into the world of the deaf, with a particularly fascinating chapter of how sign language evolved to convey tenses and spatial relationships that are impossible to translate into spoken languages. An Anthropologist from Mars (1995) presents people living with autism, Tourette’s syndrome and amnesia. One essay profiled a painter who was profoundly color blind, another presented a man who found the experience of recovering his eyesight after surgery to be deeply disturbing. For The Island of the Colorblind (1997), he goes to Guam and Micronesia, where congenital colorblindness and severe sensitivity to light is common. Musicophilia (2008) explores the intersection of music and neurology among children with Williams syndrome who are “hypermusical” from birth, and people for whom a symphony sounds like nothing more than “the clattering of pots and pans.” In The Mind’s Eye (2010), he explores how we see and what we see, even when we can no longer see. There’s the concert pianist who can see but can’t recognize what she sees, another who can’t see in three dimensions, and a writer who keeps writing even though a stroke destroyed his ability to read. And in Hallucinations (2012), he writes about patients (and himself) who experienced mind-altering states to explore what those experiences tell us about the brain’s structure and function.
As you can see, Sacks made several autobiographical appearances in his essays. He also wrote four fully autobiographical books. In A Leg To Stand On (1998), he talks about his recovery from a severe leg injury inflicted by a bull on a Norwegian mountaintop. During his recover, he discovers that his leg no longer feels like it’s a part of his body. While this book follows familiar terrain — an exploration of how a patient recovers from a neurological trauma — here, the patient is himself, both physically and psychically. An aunt visited him in the hospital and told him, “You’ve always been a rover. There are rovers, and there are settlers, but you’re definitely a rover. You seem to have one strange adventure after another. I wonder if you will ever find your destination.”
It would take three more autobiographies before he could do so. His second effort, Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood (2001), started more or less at the beginning. Taking its title from his Uncle Dave who was fascinated with the metal’s properties, Sacks revealed his experiences in a sadistic boarding school during the Blitz, and his childhood fascinations with chemistry, Cuttlefish, H.G. Wells and the periodic table. But the only love affairs he revealed in that book were his love of science.
Fourteen years later in On the Move: A Life (2015), Sacks finally revealed his sexuality for the first time. When he came out to his parents at eighteen, his mother, in her shock, blurted, “You are an abomination. I wish you had never been born.” He wrote about his few gay love affairs while in California in the early 1960s, where he rode around on his motorcycle in a leather jacket and took up other “masculine” activities: weightlifting, mountain climbing, and bodysurfing. But then he was celibate, from 1973, until he met the writer Bill Hayes thirty-five years later:
Shortly after my seventy-fifth birthday in 2008, I met someone I liked. Billy, a writer, had just moved from San Francisco to New York, and we began having dinners together. Timid and inhibited all my life, I let a friendship and intimacy grow between us, perhaps without fully realizing its depth. Only in December of 2009, still recuperating from knee and back surgeries and racked with pain, did I realize how deep it was. Billy was going to Seattle to spend Christmas with his family, and just before he went, he came to see me and (in the serious, careful way he has) said, “I have conceived a deep love for you.” I realized, when he said this, what I had not realized, or had concealed from myself before — that I had conceived a deep love for him too — and my eyes filled with tears. He kissed me, and then he was gone.
…There was an intense emotionality at this time: music I loved, or the long golden sunlight of late afternoon, would set me weeping. I was not sure what I was weeping for, but I would feel an intense sense of love, death, and transience, inseparably mixed.
Oliver Sacks and Bill Hayes
After he submitted that manuscript to his publisher, Sacks learned that he had metastatic cancer. He continued writing, including four essays for The New York Times which were collected in the posthumous Gratitude. “My predominant feeling is one of gratitude,” he wrote just a few months before he died. “I have loved and been loved. I have been given much and I have given something in return. Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.” He died on August 30, 2015. According to his New York Times obituary, “He is survived by his partner of six years, the writer Bill Hayes.”
July 9th, 2016
We Two Boys Together Clinging, 1961.
The British artist was born with synesthesia — his brain “sees” colors whenever he hears music. Those colors guide him when he designs stage sets for operatic and ballet productions. In addition to set design, he is a renowned painter, print maker and photographer. While still a student at the Royal College of Art, Hockney’s exhibition Young Contemporaries in 1961, marked British Pop Art’s arrival. Later that year, he sold two of his prints to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. That same year, he also read the poems of Walt Whitman, which inspired Hockney to paint several paintings on the themes of love and homosexuality, including We Two Boys Together Clinging, where the title and some of the text in the painting are lines from the Whitman’s poem of the same name. By the mid 1960s, Hockney moved to Los Angeles, where he made an entire series of paintings of swimming pools rendered in vibrant colors.
In more recent years, Hockney has been exploring the limits of scale. His “A Bigger Grand Canyon” (1998) is actually a series of 60 paintings which, when combined together, produce one enormous painting of 6 3/4 feet by 24 feet. That painting was bought by the National Gallery of Australia for $4.6 million. In 2007, he produced Bigger Trees Near Warter, a series of fifty separate canvases which combine to form a 15 feet by forty feet painting. He donated those canvases to the Tate Gallery in London. “I thought if I’m going to give something to the Tate, I want to give them something really good. It’s going to be here for a while.” He described it as a duty of successful artists to donate some of their work. He had turned down several requests to paint a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II, explaining politely that he was too busy painting her country. But he relented in 2012 while watching the Thames River pageant for the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee on television. He created a digital painting on his iPad and donated a printed copy to the Royal Collection.
David Hockney with Bigger Trees Near Warter, 2007.
July 9th, 2016
When the other gay star of Top Gun came out of the closet in 2009, she said that coming to terms with her sexual orientation had been a long, ongoing process since she was twelve, when she was convinced that God was punishing her. She now says that it’s much easier to become spiritual now that she knows that “God is okay with you being gay.” She graduated from Juilliard’s Drama School in 1983 and began landing acting roles right away. Her breakout role was as an Amish mother in 1985’s Witness with Harrison Ford, for which she was nominated for a Golden Globe award. In 1986, she was the flight instructor, Charlie, in Top Gun with Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer. She continued acting in films and television throughout the 1990s before taking a break in 2001. She resumed acting in 2004, and in 2008 she guest starred on Showtime’s The L Word, where she played a closeted Army colonel. In 2010, McGilllis entered into a civil union with her partner, but they separated a year later.
July 8th, 2016
Brenda Lee Marquez McCool, 49 years old.
Brenda was the mother of eleven children. And she beat cancer. Twice. She was one tough mother. She was from Brooklyn, moved to San Bernardino, California, then to Orlando. Her ex-husband — they remained friends and stayed in touch — said, “She was a good mother [and] a good provider. She was always trying to help people, taking people in who had no place to live.”
Her son, Isaiah Henderson, is gay, and she loved dancing. So they often went out to Pulse together. They were there again that night. Shortly after midnight, she posted a video to Facebook showing dancers having fun on the dance floor. Before the gunman opened fire, she spotted him. According to her sister-in-law, who was also inside the club during the attack, “Brenda saw him point the gun. She said, ‘Get down,’ to Isaiah and she got in front of him. She was shot dead. That’s how much she loved her kids.”
Isaiah got separated from his mother during the chaos, and was later pulled to safety by police when they stormed the club. Isaiah is taking his mother’s death very hard, and relatives say he is struggling with survivor’s guilt. During the funeral, he paid homage to his mother. “I never thought that her life would be ended right in front of my eyes,” he said, sobbing. “My mother accepted everyone with open arms. She loved everybody equally, no matter what.” He broke down, and two of his brothers rushed to the pulpit to hold him up and console him. “I haven’t stopped crying since,” he said.
July 8th, 2016
From The Times of London:
The existence of a Club, or Society, for the purpose so detestable and repugnant to the common feelings of our nature, that by no word can it be described without committing an outrage upon decency, has for some time been suspected by the Magistrates of Bow-street; who cautiously concealing the odious secret, abstained from taking any steps on the information they had received, until an opportunity should offer of surprising the whole gang. About 11 o’clock last Sunday evening, three separate parties of the patrole, attended by constables, were detached from Bow-street on this service; and such was the secrecy observed, that the object of their pursuit was unknown, even at that moment, to all but the confidential agents of Mr. Read, who headed the respective parties. The enterprise was completely successful. — We regret most deeply, that the information given at the office was found to be so accurate, that the Officers felt themselves justified in seizing no fewer than 23 individuals, at a public-house, called the White Swan, in Vere-street, Clare-market.
Three years later, the Vere Street scandal was the subject of Robert Holloway’s pamphlet, The Phoenix of Sodom, or The Vere Street Coterie:
The fatal house in question was furnished in a style most appropriate for the purposes it was intended. Four beds were provided in one room: — another was fitted up for the ladies’ dressing-room, with a toilette, and every appendage of rouge, &c. &c.: — a third room was called the Chaple, where marriages took place, sometimes between a female grenadier, six feet high, and a petit maître not more than half the altitude of his beloved wife! There marriages were solemnized with all the mockery of bride maids and bride men; the nuptials were frequently consummated by two, three or four couples, in the same room, and in the sight of each other!
Incredible as this circumstance may appear, the reader may depend it is all provable: — the uper part of the house was appropriated to wretches who were constantly in waiting for casual customers; who practised all the allurements that are found in a brothel, by the more natural description of prostitutes; and the only difference consisting in that want of decency that subsists between the most profligate men and depraved women. — Men of rank, and respectable situations in life, might be seen wallowing either in or on beds with wretches of the lowest description: but the perpetration of the abominable act, however offensive, was infinitely more tolerable than the shocking convcersation taht accompanied the perpetration; some of which, Cook has solemnly declared to me, was so odious, that he could not either write, or verbally related. It seems many of these wretches were married; and frequently, when they are together, make their wives, who they call Tommies, topics of ridicule; and boast of having compelled them to act parts too shocking to think of…
It seems the greater part of these reptiles assumed feigned names, though not very appropriate to their calling in life: for instance, Kitty Cambric is a Coal Merchant; Miss Selina a Runner at a Police office; Black-eyed Leonora, a Drummer; Pretty Harriet, a Butcher; Lady Godina, a Waiter; the Duchess of Gloucester, a gentleman’s servant; Duchess of Devonshire, a Blacksmith; and Miss Sweet Lips, a Country Grocer. It is a generally received opinion, and a very natural one, that the prevalency of this passion has for its object effeminate delicate beings only: but this seems to be, by Cook’s account, a mistaken notion; and the reverse is so palpable in many instances, that Fanny Murry, Lucy Cooper, and Kitty Fisher, are now personified by an athletic Bargeman, an Herculean Coal-heaver, and a deaf tyre Smith: the latter of these monsters has two sons, both very handsome young men, whom he boasts are full as depraved as himself. These are merely part of the common stock belonging to the house; but the visitors were more numerous and, if possible, more infamous, because more exalted in life: and these ladies, like the ladies of the petticoat order, have their favourite men; one of whom was White a drummer of the guards, who, some short time since, was executed for sodomy with one Hebden, an ensign. White, being an universal favourite, was very deep in the secrets of the fashionable part of the coterie; of which he had made a most ample confession in writing, immediately previous to his execution; the truth of which he averred, even to his last moments; but it is impossible to give it literally, for the person who took it, in the presence of a magistrate, said that the recital made him so sick he could not proceed…
That the reader may form some idea of the incontrollable rage of this dreadful passion, Cook states that a person in a respectable house in the city, frequently came to this sink of filth and iniquity, and stayed several days and nights together; during which time he generally amused himself with eight, ten, and sometimes a dozen different boys and men! …
Sunday was the general, and grand day of rendezvous; and to render their excuse the more entangled and doubtful, some of the parties came a great distance, even so much as thirty miles, to join the festivity and elegant amusements of grenadiers, footmen, waiters, drummers, and all the Catamite brood, kneaded into human shape, from the sweepings of Sodom, and the Spawn of Gomorrah…
Two men were found guilty of sodomy and were hanged (Mar 7). Seven more were found guilty of attempted sodomy and were made to stand at the pillory (Sep 27). The crowds who turned out for the pillory were particularly violent, throwing rotten fish, dead cats, “cannonballs” made of mud, and vegetables at the convicted men. The men were severely injured and barely survived their allotted time at the pillory.
July 8th, 2016
Jack Nichols and Lige Clarke. Photo by Kay Lahusen (see Jan 5).
Jack Nichols (Mar 16) and Lige Clarke had cut their activists’ teeth as members of the Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C.. Nichols helped to organize the the first White House protest in 1965 (Apr 17), while Clarke lettered nine of the ten picket signs. Nichols and Clarke moved to New York in 1968, where the couple became regular columnists for the straight, unabashedly-pornographic Screw magazine. Their column, “The Homosexual Citizen,” was the first regular LGBT column to appear regularly in a non-LGBT publication, and it made them arguably the most visible gay couple in the country.
Nichols and Clarke devoted their July 8 column to a description of the Stonewall riots, which had occured the week before. “Last week’s riots in Greenwich Village,” they wrote, “have set standards for the rest of the nation’s homosexuals to follow.” They also reported that the Electric Circus, a popular and hip night club, took the unusual step of publicly inviting gay people to dance with their straight patrons on the dance floor. “If you’re tired of raids, Mafia control, and checks at the door, join us for a beautiful evening on Sunday night, July 6.”
According to Nichols and Clark, “for the first time in New York’s history, a huge club was experimenting with social integration between heterosexuals and homosexuals.” Nichols and Clarke went, and found “a groovy crowd. … hip moustaches, long hair, and hundreds of handsome young men. The acid-rock band blared forth a medley of fast tunes.” They found that the Electric Circus’s experiment was successful, mostly, with the exception of one “uncool creep” who was shouting “Goddamn faggots” as he was hustled out of the club. They closed their column with the following “call to arms,” which Nichols later attributed solely to Clarke:
The revolution in Sheridan Square must step beyond its present boundaries. The homosexual revolution is only part of a larger revolution sweeping through all segments of society. We hope that “Gay Power” will not become a call for separation, but for sexual integration, and that the young activists will read, study, and make themselves acquainted with all of the facts that will help them carry the sexual revolt triumphantly into the councils of the U.S. government, into the anti-homosexual churches, into the offices of anti-homosexual psychiatrists, into the city government, and into the state legislatures which make our manner of love-making a crime. It is time to push the homosexual revolution to its logical conclusion. We must crush tyranny wherever it exists and join forces with those who would assist in the utter destruction of the puritanical, repressive, anti-sexual Establishment.
[Sources: Charles Kaiser. The Gay Metropolis: The Landmark History of Gay Life in America 2007 ed. (New York: Grove Press, 2007): 201-202.
James T. Sears. Rebels, Rubyfruit, and Rhinestones: Queering Space in the Stonewall South (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press , 2001): 28-29.]
July 8th, 2016
Police sketch of “The Doodler”
The Associated Press reported:
(San Francisco) Police say a suspect in 14 homosexual murders has not been charged because three survivors of his knife attacks, including a “well-known entertainer” and a diplomat, won’t “come out of the closet” and testify against him. For the past year, police have been questioning a young man they call “The Doodler” about the 14 slayings and three assaults that occurred in San Francisco’s gay community between January 1974 and September 1975, Inspector Rotea Gilford said Thursday.
Interest in the case surfaced again this week after two Redondo Beach, Calif., men were arrested in Riverside for questioning about as many as 28 slayings linked to homosexual encounters.
The suspect here, his name not released, has talked freely with police but has not admitted the slayings, Gilford said. He said police are “fairly certain” they have the right man, but need the testimony of survivors who may be able to identify “The Doodler.”
In the attacks, the murderer met other men at a number of after-hours gay clubs and restaurants in San Francisco. He usually sketched them men before having sex with them and then stabbing them. Police believe the man committed the murders after feeling shame over his homosexual experiences.
Gilford said the three survivors include the entertainer, the diplomat and a man who left San Francisco and won’t answer letters or phone calls at his new express. “My feeling is that they don’t want to be exposed,” he said.
Harvey Milk, an advocate for homosexual rights, said of the victims who refuse to speak up, “I can understand their position. I respect the pressure society has put on them. Milk said many homosexuals may keep their sexual preference a secret because they fear losing their jobs. “They have to stay in the closet,” he said.
Another spokesman for the gay community, teacher Hank Wilson, said the case represents society’s “double standards” in dealing with crimes involving homosexuals. “You never year about the heterosexual murderer who had killed 12 women after raping them,” he said.
“The Doodler’s” victims included:
With no witnesses willing to identify him, “The Doodler” was never brought to justice.
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