Box Turtle Bulletin

Today In History, 1982: “The Advocate” Investigation Uncovers Decades of FBI Surveillance

In news that surprised no one, The Advocate’s Washington, D.C. editor Larry Bush revealed “a concerted nationwide surveillance and investigation program by the FBI into the lives of wealthy, prominent, closeted homosexual men as well as into gay civil rights groups, and the collection of thousands of names of suspected homosexuals in the course of nearly 30 years.” According to FBI spokesman Lane Bonner, the surveillance began in 1954 and involved the national headquarters and every FBI field office. Bonner said that the surveillance ended in the late 1970s under Attorney General Edward Levi, but not before collecting thousands of pages of information on gay activists and private citizens.

The Advocate learned that the investigations had actually begun as early as 1943, when the FBI paid informants to report on the loyalty of gay Americans. The surveillance was expanded drastically in the early 1960s during project HOMEX, short for Homosexual Extortion. HOMEX investigated prominent, wealthy, closeted gay men who the FBI believed were potential extortion targets who might not come forward if they were being blackmailed. HOMEX generated twelve volumes of material kept at FBI headquarters, with each volume about two inches thick and containing some 200 entries. Another “25 or 27” volumes were kept in the New York FBI field office. It was anybody’s guess how much more was maintained at other field offices. To collect all of that information, the FBI conducted what it called “fugitive-style investigations,” which involved monitoring personal mail and bank accounts, interviewing neighbors, friends and employers, and the occasional surveillance of the targets’ movements. Bonner tried to explain HOMEX in the best possible light: “In the HOMEX investigation, it was necessary for us to do extensive investigations into homosexuals, because of their reluctance to come forward. There may be some people confused by that. We were not surveilling people to see if they engaged in homosexual acts. But also, in connection with other counterintelligence activities, we had a responsibility to disseminate information on those who held government employment.”

Bush wrote, “The HOMEX program resulted in only one arrest: of a commercial rabbit breeder from a Denver suburb on charges of extortion, in January 1978.” But HOMEX also produced other benefits for the FBI. Through HOMEX, they could identify people who the FBI could “develop” as informants for the FBI. In other words, a project that was ostensibly supposed to protect gay people from blackmail wound up being a tool of blackmail for the FBI. One 1967 memo addressed “To All Agents” spelled out what they were looking for: a “Baby Doll — A victim who exhibits a real fear of being caught and exposed as a homo and who is particularly vulnerable to extortion (possibly on a continuing basis).” The memo directed all agents “to submit names or identifying information on persons who may be logical persons to include in this album, so their photographs and background information may be obtained.” The memo closes with the request that “Any agent knowing of anyone coming under the category of ‘SHAKEMEN,’ ‘CHICKEN,’ or ‘BABY DOLL’ who could be developed as informants should route information to [redacted].” [Emphasis mine]

If the FBI was looking for gay people they could blackmail into becoming informants, they also feared that the Soviet Union and other hostile intelligent services might be doing the same. In a memo titled, “Homosexual Hangouts Throughout the United States, Criminal Intelligence Program,” dated December 23, 1965, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover directed each field office to “index locations” in its territory of all gay bars and meeting places “in order to conduct thorough interviews and for use in setting out leads” of foreign agents looking to entrap gay people into their intelligence services. According to The Advocate, FBI spokesman Bonner wouldn’t comment on whether its surveillance of gay bars was still underway as of 1982. “We know that representatives of the Soviet Union routinely cruise so-called gay bars. We know that for a fact. This matter would fall within the internal security mandate of the FBI. It would certainly be a matter of investigative interest to the FBI, to determine the targets of their contacts and their efforts. We certainly are interested in any effort on the part of hostile intelligence groups to expose or use any person’s sexual preference who would have access to national security information.”

That’s not the only thing the FBI was worried about. Until 1975, gays were banned from federal employment, and they were also banned from serving in the military long after. To aid other agencies in ferreting out homosexuals from their offices and mail rooms, the FBI established “control files” to collect any and all information on homosexual activities. Field offices were ordered to collect news clippings and any other material relating to the arrests of gay people charged on “morals” offenses. Special annotations were made for those who were later identified as being employees of the U.S. government or who may have held security clearances with federal contractors. A November 23, 1956 memo from the San Francisco FBI field office notified headquarters that “a 53-page memorandum, listing the names of individuals and places suspected of homosexual activity,” had been placed in its files. “Some of these individuals have been identified as having homosexual tendencies, others have been identified as associates of homosexuals.” Another report on November 2, 1960, described “individuals of obvious interest to the Department of Defense [who] are marked with red tabs. In all cases where a member of the Armed Forces has been arrested, a copy of the arrest report has been furnished the Armed Forces Police for appropriate action.” Another report from later that month praised the Salt Lake City vice squad for its “excellent cooperation” by circumventing a municipal ordinance requiring that arrest records be made available only under a warrant. The same report indicated that many of those who were arrested were turned free by the court in protest of the methods used by police to entrap the suspects.

As you might expect, the FBI was particularly interested in gay rights groups, which the FBI considered to be as subversive as the Community Party, the American Nazi Party and the KKK (Jul 6). The FBI sought papers of incorporation, lists of officers, membership and mailing lists, magazines, newsletters, posters, leaflets and anything else they could find. They actively monitored pickets and rallies, and often had informants planted in key meetings to report participants’ names and discussions back to the FBI. Some groups were  monitored long after the FBI formally decided they weren’t a threat. A January 29, 1974 memo ending the investigation of the San Francisco Tavern Guild said: “No information developed indicating organization involved in any activity within the investigation jurisdiction of the FBI. Activities of this group will continue to be followed by above source [name redacted]” even while recommending “this matter be placed in a closed status.” The Advocate also had these examples from San Francisco:

By 1959, when San Francisco’s mayoralty race first raised the possibility of a tolerant attitude towards homosexuals (Oct 7), the FBI memos show infiltration of the Mattachine Society and an effort to determine whether the group favored one political candidate over another, and particularly whether there was any ground for believing the incumbent mayor was sympathetic to the call for an end to harassment of homosexuals. In the early 1960s, a memo noted that a homosexual rights group had endorsed then-San Francisco Sheriff Richard Hongisto for office. The files also indicate that all officials of the Committee on Religion and the Homosexual (Jan 1), including prominent San Francisco ministers, had been marked for name indexing and the establishment of separate files.

The Advocate found evidence that similar investigations took place in Phoenix, Los Angeles, San Diego, Birmingham, New Orleans, Miami, New York City, Denver, Seattle and Washington, D.C. Records indicated that those investigations slowed by the mid-seventies. None of the files provided to The Advocate, however, shed any light on the FBI practice of planting anonymous charges of homosexuality to smear public officials or civil rights leaders. Bayard Rustin (Mar 17), who had co-founded the Congress for Racial Equality and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, often found his homosexuality being used against him. But others who had filed Freedom of Information Act requests to see their own FBI files found plenty of evidence of this tactic. One was Dr. Laud Humphreys, a sociologist and author of Tearoom Trade, a 1970 book about sexual encounters between men in public toilets:

“I filed for my FBI records under the Freedom of Information Act,” Humphreys told The ADVOCATE, “and that’s where I learned what they had done to me. They sent anonymous letters to university officials where I worked, calling me a homosexual, saying I should be dismissed.” Humphreys said he found the accusation interesting, since there was nothing in his files to indicate he was in fact homosexual or even rumored to be so.

“My concept of these data is what I call a freeze-dried stigma,” Humphreys said. “It involves all sorts of data, punched up and flattened, and all the distinctions disappear. You just add hot water to it, and you have a person who immediately looks guilty.”

Historian (John) O’Emilio said he had found the FBI documents “surprising, yet I really shouldn’t be surprised. No matter how aware I become of how unscrupulous people with power are, I am always shocked when I see the actual instance. Thirty years ago what made it especially pernicious was that we were sitting ducks, and we still haven’t counted up the costs of individual lives that were ruined because of it.”

[Source: Larry Bush. “Investigations of Gay People Confirmed: Has the FBI Been In Your Closet?” The Advocate Issue 346 (July 8, 1982): 16-20, 24.]

Born On This Day, 1906: Philip Johnson

110 YEARS AGO: (d. 2005) He was only twenty-four years old and fresh out of Harvard when he founded the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. He would have been regarded as a great visionary even if that had been his only accomplishment. But Johnson wanted more, and in his travels to Europe he became exposed to such masters of modernism as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, and Walter Gropius. Johnson’s 1932 MOMA show, “The International Style: Architecture Since 1922,” introduced modern architecture to the American public, and Johnson became an evangelist for the International Style. Johnson’s travels to Europe also exposed him to the early ideology of Hitler’s National Socialism, which Johnson also eagerly embraced. He remained enamored with Nazism until Germany’s 1939 invasion of Poland, when he toured that conquered country at Hitler’s invitation. As Johnson later said, “I have no excuse [for] such utter, unbelievable stupidity. … I don’t know how you expiate guilt.”

Philip Johnson’s perfectly sublime Glass House (1949).

Fortunately for Johnson, there would be a second chapter to his life. After the war, he designed his 1949 masterpiece Glass House as his own private residence in New Canaan, Connecticut. That design put him at the forefront of modernist architecture in America. In the 1950s, he teamed up with his mentor Meis van der Rohe to design the Seagram Building in New York. The steel-and-glass design would define the essential elements of American skyscrapers for the next sixty years. Other important landmarks followed: the PPG tower in Pittsburgh, the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center, the IDS Tower in Minneapolis. Johnson’s minimalist steel and glass design would also be the defining feature of his Chrystal Cathedral, which he designed for televangelist Robert Schuller in Garden Grove, California. After Schuller’s empire went bankrupt, Chrystal Cathedral was sold in 2011 for $57.5 million to the Orange County diocese of the Catholic Church. After some sensitive and beautiful renovations for liturgical purposes, the building became Christ Cathedral, the diocese’s official seat.

From the sublime to the ridiculous: the AT&T Building, 1984.

By the 1980s, Johnson had decided that minimalism had boxed him into a corner, if you will excuse the pun. So in a fit of iconoclasm, he abandoned his minimalist signature by placing a garish Chippendale corbel on top of the AT&T building in New York. In doing so, he practically invented what became known as post-modernism. Because of that horrible act of vandalism to New York’s skyline, I hold him singularly responsible for the damnable plague of third-rate developers placing post-modernist geegaws on every tacky strip mall, apartment complex and gated community home in North America.

Fortunately, Johnson’s latest design is considerably more redeeming. The largest LGBT congregation in America, Dallas’s Cathedral of Hope, commissioned Johnson for its Interfaith Peace Chapel, which opened to the public in 2010. Johnson didn’t live to see it come to fruition. He died in his sleep at Glass House in 2005, survived by his partner of 45 years.

Another Regnerus-Like “Research” Paper On Gay Parents Making the Rounds

Paul Sullins, defending a flawed paper by Mark Regnerus in 2013.

The Federalist website is giving this research significant play:

The study by sociology professor Paul Sullins found that “[a]t age 28, the adults raised by same-sex parents were at over twice the risk of depression as persons raised by man-woman parents.” In addition, there was an “elevated risk associated with imbalanced closeness and parental child abuse in family of origin; depression, suicidality, and anxiety at age 15; and stigma and obesity.”

Given these findings, Sullins concluded that “[m]ore research and policy attention to potentially problematic conditions for children with same-sex parents appears warranted.” This study is significant, Sullins writes, because other studies that have “reported ‘no differences’ in well-being” most often use “psychometric measures of depression or anxiety,” which has led to “a lapse in policy attention to the potential needs of such children.” Sullins’ research challenges the “benign findings” of these other studies.

“Reanalyses have confirmed, not surprisingly, the presence in such samples of strong ascertainment bias, social desirability bias, and/or positive reporting bias” in studies that have concluded there are no differences between children of same-sex couples and those of opposite-sex parents.

Let’s go to that paper, shall we? First of all, the good thing here is that the paper, published in the Egyptian journal Depression Research and Treatment, is available online for free. That’s also the bad thing, which I’ll get to later. Second, this paper has many of the same problems with the widely-panned 2012 paper by Mark Regnerus that purported to show that children of parents in same-sex relationships fared significantly more poorly than children who were raised in homes by their biological opposite-sex parents. In fact, Regnerus’s paper found no such thing, although he did his best to make his turd look nice and shiny.

Like Regnerus’s paper, Sullins says that he based his research on a nationally-represented sample from the US National Survey of Adolescent to Adult Health. He combed through 15,701 respondents, at ages 15, 22, and 28. But like Regnerus, Sullins quickly ran into a problem. Remember, Regnerus could only find two same-sex couples in his sample who had actually raised their children as a couple. Two! So he stacked the deck by re-defining “children,” “raised,” “by,” and “same-sex couples.” Sullins had a similar problem: out of a sample of 15,701 respondents, he could only find 23 adolescents raised by just 20 same-sex couples, “consisting of 17 lesbian partners and 3 gay male partners.”

And what do we know about those families? Not much. We don’t know how much time those children spent with their same-sex parents. We don’t know whether they spent the most formative periods of their lives with opposite-sex parents who then got divorced, or whether they were children of a single parent who had gone through multiple parters over time. We know nothing about the stability, or lack there-of, of either the opposite-sex or same-sex parenting that these children experienced.

But let those numbers sink in: Sullins is basing his entire eight page on those tiny numbers. Twenty same-sex couples.

Out of how many? In 2013, Gary J. Gates at the Williams Institute combed through census data and found that “more than 111,000 same-sex couples are raising an estimated 170,000 biological, step, or adopted children.” Sullins found just twenty out of 111,000 couples. That would be about 0.018% of the total. Which means that if this were a poll, Sullins’s margin of error would be, at best, plus or minus 18.4 percent at a 90% confidence level.

Click to enlarge.

But let’s also look at it a different way. The Standard Error (SE) that Sullins calculated for outcome measures of the children of those twenty same-sex couples is huge when compared to the the data set for opposite-sex couples. What this means is that it only takes one or two individual adverse scores coming from one or two dysfunctional families to throw off those averages. When you see such large swings in the data, you know right away that you need a larger sample to get a clearer picture of what’s going on. Any small sample can sweep up significant anomalies that diminish or disappear once the sample size gets larger. A sample size of 2,000 gay- or lesbian-led families could decrease that standard error by a factor of ten. At least then, you’d start to look at something that can approximate the rest of the 109,000 same-sex couples raising children. Running the numbers again, an opinion poll of 2,000 respondents would have a margin of error of ±1.8%.

How does this scale up to the 111,000 same-sex couples raising children? Well, because it’s supposed to be a peer-reviewed paper — more on that in a moment — Sullins covers himself here somewhat:

Limitations. Despite the signal strengths of Add Health as a large nationally representative longitudinal dataset and notwithstanding the strong significance for contrast effects reported above, the very small size of the sample of children raised by lesbians imposes important limits and prompts great caution regarding the conclusions of this study. As with all observational studies, causal inference is not possible. Moreover, many subtle distinctions and pathways of influence simply cannot be addressed with only 20 cases, and unobserved differences between the parent comparison groups may well confound some or all of the child differences observed. In particular, the lack of useful measures for parent mental distress, depression, family history of violence, alcohol consumption, and substance abuse precluded examination of important familial risk factors which may be associated with child distress. For these reasons, the findings of this study should be considered only provisional and exploratory until and unless they are confirmed by further research.

I wonder if Sullins would be so careful when he’s interviewed about this. Somehow, I doubt it. After all, he’s a research fellow at the Marriage and Religion Research Institute, which is an arm of the Family “Research” Council.

So how did a paper with such sweeping conclusions make it into a professional journal? Well the biggest problem with professional publishing these days is that there are literally thousands of medical and social science journals around the world begging for papers to fill their issues. A few are influential because they can attract the best of the best. And because they can attract the best of the best, they can by very selective about which papers they publish. Many of them reject far more papers than they publish. Other journals however are left fighting over scraps.

Cairo-based Hindawi Publishing Corporation, which publishes Depression Research and Treatment, has been criticized for using spam email to solicit manuscripts (PDF: 111KB/2 pages). What’s more, it’s a pay-to-publish journal, charging its authors about US$1,000 as an “article processing fee.” Truly reputable journals don’t rely on charging authors to submit their manuscripts for their profits, not when they can charge a subscription or they sell the articles on a per-article basis because the quality of their content justifies the price.But Hindawi is among the new class of “Open Access” free journals, which advertises its bug as a feature. It gives away its articles for free, in exchange for charging authors exorbitant “fees” on the front end. Naturally, this creates an incentive  to publish more articles already paid for by authors –especially from those who can’t get their papers published elsewhere — with little regard to whether the article has any merit in the first place.

And Hindawi goes a step further. They increase their profit margins by not employing editors for their journals. Editors fill a critical function. An editor is ordinarily a recognized subject matter expert who can act as a gatekeeper to ensure the quality of the journal’s content. More critically, that editor is also tasked with overseeing the peer-review process, which involves knowing which reviewers are qualified to review a paper. Instead, the editorial role at Hindawi is handled by staff members at the company’s headquarters in Cairo, which leaves the most critical task of peer review in the hands of those who may know little or nothing about the paper’s subject. That is, if Hindawi actually has a peer review process. Many open access journals use the practice of publishing now (and collecting the author’s “processing fee”) and letting people ask questions later.

Those problems at Hindawi are evident not only with Sullins’s paper itself, but with the overall reputation of Depression Research and Treatment. Among the 1,061 psychology journals listed at Scimago Journal and Country Rank, Depression Research and Treatment is ranked at number 380. From a top-to-bottom perspective, they can at least brag that they’re in the top half. Unfortunately, Hindawi’s poor publishing practices have become far more common in the publishing world as newcomers to professional publishing scramble to find manuscripts to publish.

So the real question is this: what do other professionals think of the kinds of papers that Hindawi publishes in Depression Research and Treatment. One key measure is to count how many times other researchers cite papers in a given journal when they’re writing their papers. Articles in the top twenty psychology journals are cited, on average, 8.8 times for each paper. For the top fifty, each paper on average gets 6.1 cites. For Depression Research and Treatment, that average is just 1.7.

So there you have it: Sullins had to pay $1,000 to publish a flawed paper using flawed methodology in a pay-to-publish journal with no editor to oversee a questionable peer-review process, and that is generally ignored by his peers.

Texas Leads 13-State Lawsuit Against Obama’s Transgender Bathroom Directive

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is leading a coalition of thirteen states in a lawsuit filed against the Obama administration. The lawsuit seeks a permanent injunction against directives from the Justice Department and the Education Department which warn that Title IX funding may be withheld from school districts and colleges that discriminate against transgender students. The particular point of contention among conservatives is whether schools can be compelled to make restrooms and changing rooms available to transgender students according to their gender identity:

The coalition, led by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, has already filed suit against the Obama administration to seek a permanent block of the directive. Wednesday’s request, if approved, would affect not just these states but public schools across the country.

The states filed the case in U.S. District Court in the Northern District of Texas. Harrold Independent School District, just northwest of Wichita Falls, is the official plaintiff on behalf of Texas, but most of the attention in the Lone Star State has fallen on the Fort Worth Independent School District.

There, the superintendent incurred the wrath of Paxton, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and other Republican leaders for setting local rules that would allow transgender students to use the bathroom of their choice.

Last week, Paxton issued a nonbinding opinion that the new guidelines for transgender students violate state law by relegating “parents to a subordinate status” in being informed about their children. He also said Fort Worth ISD Superintendent Kent Scribner illegally enforced the rules without the school board’s input.

Scribner countered that the school district’s guidelines for transgender students had been approved by the district five years ago, long before the current controversy.

The thirteen states joining the lawsuit are: Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Wisconsin, and West Virginia.

Today’s Agenda Is Brought To You By…

Amanda Alvear, 25 years old.

Amanda worked as a pharmacy technician and planned to become a nurse. She had transformed herself over the past two years. She shed 180 pounds with the help of bypass surgery and daily workouts. On that Saturday, she had spent the day shopping with her nieces. “She was a fashionista,” said her brother. “She liked to look good, and she wanted my girls – her girls – to look good,” he said. “She liked to make them look very good.”

Her brother said that she enjoyed going out to gay and lesbian clubs because they were fun places to be and she felt safe there. “She wouldn’t want anyone to spread hate for her,” her brother said. “She’d rather they spread more love, keep friends and family close and have a good time doing it.” She went to Pulse for Latin Night with her best friend, Mercedes Marisol Flores. While at Pulse, Amanda posted a series of short videos on Snapchat. In the last video, she captures the moment the gunman opened fire. First, it’s just her having fun with friends. Then gunshots. “Shooting,” she says. Whatever she said after that is drowned out by about 17 gunshots in six seconds.

Neither Amanda nor Mercedez made it out. They were both found dead in a bathroom. “I found out earlier today from another friend of hers that Amanda and her had a chance to escape,” said her brother, “But Amanda went back in because she wasn’t going to leave without Mercedez. She almost made it out.”

Mercedez Marisol Flores, 26 years old.

Mercedez was originally from Queens, New York, but moved to Davenport, Florida, where she graduated from Ridge Community High School in 2008. She worked at Target and studied literature at Valencia College. She was also an avid music fan and was interested in party planning. She wanted to learn to coordinate events for her two older brothers who worked as DJs.

She went to Pulse almost every weekend, often with her best friend, Amanda Alvear. Mercedez and Amanda had known each other for 12 years and were best friends. “They went on cruises together, road trips, plane trips, whatever,” said Amanda’s cousin. “They were both so outgoing. They were like twins.”

Today In History, 1975: J. Edgar Hoover’s Homosexuality Denied… Again

Clyde Tolson and J. Edgar Hoover, on vacation.

J. Edgar Hoover, the Federal Bureau of Investigations’ 48-year chief, was dogged by rumors of his homosexuality and a suspected longtime affair with his assistant Clyde Tolson, but those rumors were put down as quickly as they arose. When Hoover died in 1972 he left his estate to Tolson, who moved into Hoover’s house. When Tolson died in April of 1975, speculation arose again over what everyone acknowledged as an extraordinarily close relationship with Hoover. In July, the subject came up again on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” according to this UPI article:

Rumors that the late FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was a homosexual “absolutely could not be true,” according to a former top FBI official.

William A. Sullivan, who retired Saturday as assistant FBI director, made the statement in response to a reporter’s question on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”

Hoover never married and maintained a lifetime friendship with his top assistant, Clyde Tolson, who died earlier this year.

CBS reporter Fred Graham told Sullivan it was “common knowledge that there were allegations that J. Edgar Hoover was a homosexual.”

“I wonder, “Graham asked, “can you tell me if that was investigated by any security agency, and can you tell me whether or not the FBI knows whether or not that’s true — was true?”

Sullivan replied: “I think that that is a — that question there is so ridiculous, about the homosexuality of J. Edgar Hoover, that I will just not give any credit to it, because I think it — it just absolutely cannot be true. I don’t believe.”

Graham: “But are you telling me that it was never checked out?”

Sullivan: “Certainly not. It was not checked out. It was so ridiculous that you could not check out something like that.”

Born On This day, 1899: George Cukor

George Cukor, on The Philadelphia Story set with Katharine Hepburn.

(d. 1983) A glance through his filmography shows that Hollywood would not have been Hollywood without George Cukor’s directing many of its landmark films with RKO and MGM.  In 1931, he made his solo directorial debut with Paramount with Tarnished Lady starring Tallulah Bankhead, and went on to work on twenty-six films over the next ten years including, notably, A Bill of Divorcement (1932, debuting Katharine Hepburn), Dinner at Eight (1933), Little Women (1933), David Copperfield (1935), Romeo and Juliet (1936), Camille (1936), The Women (1939), The Philadelphia Story (1940), Gaslight (1944), Adam’s Rib (1949), Born Yesterday (1950), A Star is Born (1954), and My Fair Lady(1964). Cukor had been hired by his mentor, David O. Selznick, to direct Gone With The Wind even before the book was published. But Cukor was fired three weeks into filming after expressing dissatisfaction with the script. (A replacement director was also dissatisfied with it and quit, prompting a complete re-write of the film.)

Cukor had a reputation as a “woman’s director” for his ability to coax great performances from his actresses. He hated the title, perhaps seeing it as a dig at his open secret: just about everyone in Hollywood knew he was gay. He luxurious home was host to weekly Sunday afternoon pool parties attended by closeted celebrities and their guests. Hollywood was — and still is — a very small company town, and word had a way of getting around. Producer Joseph L. Mankiewicz threw shade: “In a way, George Cukor was the first great female director of Hollywood.” But the quality of Cukor’s work belied those who dismissed him because he wasn’t a typical macho director. Twenty-one actors and actresses working under Cukor received Oscar nominations; three actors and two actresses came up winners. Cukor himself earned five Best Direction nominations, finally winning an Oscar for My Fair Lady.

Philly Archbishop: No Communion For You!

Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput has a reputation for being one of the more hardline Catholic prelates in North America. He officiated the opening mass for the annual conference of Courage, the Catholic ex-gay ministry, in 2014. He has also co-sponsored the National Organization for Marriage’s futile and poorly-attended “March for Marriage” rallies Washington, which drew dozens to the nation’s capital to protest against marriage equality. So this latest directive from the Philly Archdiocese shouldn’t surprise anyone:

Divorced and civilly remarried Catholics, as well as cohabitating unmarried couples, must “refrain from sexual intimacy” to receive Holy Communion in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, Archbishop Charles J. Chaput has asserted in a new set of pastoral guidelines.

Released Friday, the guidelines instruct clergy and other archdiocesan leaders on implementing Amoris Laetitia, a major document on family that Pope Francis issued in April.

His six-page instruction, which appears on the archdiocesan website, may be the first of its kind issued by the bishop of any American diocese in response to Amoris Laetitia, Latin for “the joy of love.”

Acknowledging that it is a “hard teaching,” Chaput goes on to say that Catholics in same-sex partnerships, those remarried without a church annulment, and cohabitating persons may not serve on parish councils, instruct the faithful, serve as lectors, or dispense Communion.

Allowing persons in such “irregular” relationships, “no matter how sincere,” to hold positions of responsibility would “offer a serious counter-witness to Catholic belief, which can only produce moral confusion in the community,” according to Chaput.

Amoris Laetitia is the post-synodal Apostolic Exhortation that was the product of the 2014 Extraordinary Synod of Bishops on the Family. The Synod opened on a very positive note, with Pope Francis calling on the gathered bishops to provide a welcoming space for gay people in the church. The draft report placed before the bishops proposed: “Homosexuals have gifts and qualities to offer to the Christian community: are we capable of welcoming these people, guaranteeing to them a fraternal space in our communities?” That stunning proposition was met with fierce pushback from conservative clerics, resulting in a final report that obliterated any recognition of those “gifts and qualities.” Instead, the final version in Amoris Laetitia simply said (PDF: 1.2M/264 pages):

Today’s Agenda Is Brought To You By…

Xavier Emmanuel Serrano Rosado, 35 years old.

Xavier was born in Ponce, Puerto Rico, and moved to the mainland about ten years ago. He was dedicated father to his five year old son. He took a job at an Aldo shoe store because the work hours would better accommodate his schedule with his son. When his son graduated from pre-kindergarten, Xavier wrote on Facebook, “I have no words to express how proud and happy I am of my little boy.”

Xavier was also an accomplished dancer known by his stage name, Eman Valentino. He had performed at local theme parks, including Walt Disney World, and on the Norwegian Cruise Line. He also performed at local gay bars, including Splash bar in Panama City and Orlando’s Parliament House. One video posted on YouTube shows him performing at Parliament House in a top hat, long coat and gloves:

Xavier had recently begun dating Leroy Valentin Fernandez, who was also killed during the shooting.

Leroy Valentin Fernandez, 25 years old.

Leroy loved dressing up, singing and dancing, especially to Beyoncé or Jennifer Lopez. He was a leacing agent at an apartment complex where he kept his co-workers entertained. “He filled our office with music,” said the apartment manager. “He sang Adele in the office until we couldn’t take it anymore. It just feels very quiet, now.” Things were really falling into place: He was taking care of his mom, he had a job that he really liked, and he was beginning to date Xavier Serrano, someone who shared his love for Latin dancing. What more could he possibly want in life?

Today In History, 1889: First Arrests In the “Cleveland Street Scandal”

Thomas Swinscow

The London Central Telegraph Office had two problems. The first one was that a number of its delivery boys had been found having sex with each other in the basement toilets of its central office. Not only that, but those same boys used their mobility engage in commercial sexual enterprises with gentlemen clients in a loosely organized prostitution ring. For that, the General Post Office had created its own investigative force in 1887 to crack down on prostitution and other crimes being committed in the postal service. In 1889, the Central Telegraph Office had another problem: cash had gone missing from its tills. Naturally, suspicion fell on those same messengers boys, one in particular: Thomas Swinscow, who was discovered to have had 18 shillings on him. That’s about £90 today, a sum which no messenger boy would be expected to have jangling around in his pocket. Swinscow explained that he didn’t steal it, but earned it fair and square. Well, not quite. After police pressed him further, he revealed that he had been paid “from going to bed with gentlemen” at the home of Charles Hammond, 35, of 19 Cleveland Street. He got four shillings to allow clients to “have a go between my legs” and “put their persons into me.” He only admitted to having done so twice in total. But never mind where the remaining ten shillings came from, because Swinscow gave up the names of three other telegraph messenger boys who Swinscow claimed to have worked for Hammond: Algernon Allies, Charles Thickbroom, and Henry Newlove — no, I’m not making that name up — who Swinscow claimed had introduced him to Hammond.

On July 6, 1889, Police went to 19 Cleveland Street to arrest Hammond and Newlove. But when they got there, they discovered that Hammond and Newlove were nowhere to be found. Later that afternoon, they found Newlove hiding in his mother’s home, but Hammond had already fled the country. Police charged the eighteen-year-old Newlove with “unlawfully, wickedly, and corruptly conspire, combine, confederate and agree to” procure young men “to commit the abominable crime of buggery.” And they pressed Newlove, Swinscow and the other messenger boys to cough up more names of men they had serviced. This is where things got tricky because the names implicated were big ones: Henry Fitzroy, Earl of Euston and Lord Arthur Somerset, an equerry to the Prince of Wales. More names were produced, including, most prominently, Prince Albert Victor, the eldest son of the Prince of Wales and grandson to Queen Victoria, and therefore the second in line to the throne.

L-R: Charles Hammond; Henry Fitzroy, Earl of Houston; and Lord Arthur Somerset.

There was never any proof of Prince Albert’s involvement, but even without it, the whole affair involved enough prominent people that it’s handling called for a certain delicacy. Not only was Hammond tipped off, but someone also warned Somerset, who fled first to Germany, then the South of France where he spent the rest of his life with a male companion. Hammond, meanwhile, fled to France, which expelled him to Belgium under British pressure. He then emigrated to the U.S., with Somerset paying for Hammond’s passage. Interestingly, neither man was ever extradited back to Britain, despite treaties being in place allowing Britain to do so. Instead, their cases were quietly dropped.

The same wasn’t quite so true for the messenger boys. Newlove was convicted in September of gross indecency and procuring. But in a surprising turn, he was sentenced to only four months hard labor. Gross indecency alone would get you two years at hard labor. The remaining less cooperative youths were sentenced to nine months of hard labor.

The whole story stayed out of the press, partly because police actions against houses of prostitutions were common enough to be boring, and partly because the police kept things very quiet. But Ernest Parke, a journalist for a tiny radical political weekly, The North London Press, found it odd that the boys had been given such light sentences. When he learned about Hammond’s escape, he poked around some more and discovered that the boys had fingered, so to speak, some rather prominent aristocrats.

On September 28, Parke broke the story in The North London Press, but without naming specific names. Two weeks later, he published a follow-up story naming Fitzroy in “an indescribably loathsome scandal in Cleveland Street.” He also said that both Lord Somerset and the Earl of Euston were allowed to escape to Peru to protect someone higher up. When reading between the lines, many readers came to understand that the higher-up was Prince Albert Victor.

Euston was, in fact, still in England, and filed suit against Parke for libel. That trial only ensured that the whole scandal would dominate the papers for weeks to come. But when the trial started, Parke refused to reveal his sources, and with no witnesses willing to come forward to back him up, Parke was found guilty for libel and sentenced to twelve months in prison. But another trial in December brought the case before the public’s attention, when Newlove’s defense attorney was charged with obstructing justice by warning Hammond of his imminent arrest, and thus allowing Hammond to flee the country. The attorney was convicted and sentenced to six weeks in prison.

MP Henry Labouchère

Member of Parliament Henry Labouchère, demanded an investigation of Parke’s allegations of a cover-up. Four years earlier, he successfully campaigned to add “gross indecency” to the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1855. His amendment doing so was known as the “Labouchère Amendment.” Labouchère was convinced that the Prime Minister Lord Salisbury, the Lord Chancellor of England and the Attorney-General impeded the investigation and allowed Somerset and Hammond to escape. He pressed this allegations so harshly that he was suspended from Parliament for a week. His proposal to form an investigative committee was rejected, 204-66.

The scandal faded, but the newspaper coverage had reinforced generally negative attitudes towards gay men by reinforcing the perception that the telegraph messenger boys had been corrupted and exploited by a homosexual upper class. (In fact, the boys had already played around with each other in the Telegraph Office’s restrooms long before they were introduced to Hammond.) When Oscar Wilde alluded to the scandal in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), one reviewer called it suitable for “none but outlawed noblemen and perverted telegraph boys.” When Wilde was put on trial for gross indecency in 1895, prosecutors questioned the West End erudite dandy about his associations with young working men. As for Prince Albert Victor, society gossip swirled around his sex life right up until his death in 1892, and it continued long after.

Today In History, 1965: FBI Memo on “Obstructive Tactics of Organizations”

FBI Memo: “Obstructive Tactics of Organizations” (Click to download. PDF: 155 KB/3 pages)

A month earlier, FBI field offices in Birmingham, Alabama, and Louisville, Kentucky, forwarded copies of a leaflet published by the East Coast Homophile Organizations (ECHO) containing instructions on “how to handle a federal investigator” (Jun 4). The Eisenhower-era Executive Order 10450 prohibited the federal employment of gay employees (Apr 27), and the FBI, the Civil Service Commission, and several other federal agencies were tasked to investigate and root out anybody on the federal payroll who might be gay. The ECHO pamphlet, which by its language was almost certainly written by Frank Kameny (May 21) of the Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C., provided some fairly straightforward advice: Don’t incriminate yourself, never lie, but also refuse to answer questions when necessary, sign no statements, give no names, insist on witnesses, and so forth. And get a lawyer.

This advice, based on the Fifth and Sixth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, was deemed by the FBI as evidence of homosexuals “obstructing the efforts of the Bureau.” Meanwhile, the Justice Department had asked that the FBI provide to the Department’s Training Division “instructions issued by such groups as the American Nazi Party and the Mattachine Society to their members to obstruct the efforts of the bureau and law enforcement.” On July 6, the FBI fulfilled that request by providing a memo outlining “obstructive tactics” of five “certain organizations.” Lumped together in the five were the American Nazi Party, the Communist Party U.S.A., the Ku Klux Klan, the Minutemen, and the East Coast Homophile Organization [sic]:

The above consists of branches of the Mattachine Society in Washington, D.C. and New York, New York; the Janus Society, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and the Daughters of Bilitis, New York, New York. These organizations strive to gain acceptance for homosexuals at every level of society. Together, during the Fall of 1964, they issued instructions to their members on the manner in which they are to conduct themselves when questioned by investigators of the Federal Government and when they are arrested. A copy of these instructions, as they were received in FBI Headquarters from the Mattachine Society of Washington, Post Office Box 1022, Washington, D.C., is attached.

Today In History, 1969: “Homo Nest Raided, Queen Bees Are Stinging Mad”

Coverage of the Stonewall rebellion in New York’s news media was quite scant. The New York Times buried its first day’s coverage with a very small article on page 33 (Jun 29). The New York Daily News placed its first small story on page 30. But on July 6, the Daily News — which was a very different paper than it is today — returned to the subject again for the Sunday paper, and gave the story the paper’s trademarked sensationalized treatment:

Homo Nest Raided, Queen Bees Are Stinging Mad

By JERRY LISKER

She sat there with her legs crossed, the lashes of her mascara-coated eyes beating like the wings of a hummingbird. She was angry. She was so upset she hadn’t bothered to shave. A day old stubble was beginning to push through the pancake makeup. She was a he. A queen of Christopher Street.

Last weekend the queens had turned commandos and stood bra strap to bra strap against an invasion of the helmeted Tactical Patrol Force. The elite police squad had shut down one of their private gay clubs, the Stonewall Inn at 57 Christopher St., in the heart of a three-block homosexual community in Greenwich Village. Queen Power reared its bleached blonde head in revolt. New York City experienced its first homosexual riot. “We may have lost the battle, sweets, but the war is far from over,” lisped an unofficial lady-in-waiting from the court of the Queens.

“We’ve had all we can take from the Gestapo,” the spokesman, or spokeswoman, continued. “We’re putting our foot down once and for all.” The foot wore a spiked heel. According to reports, the Stonewall Inn, a two-story structure with a sand painted brick and opaque glass facade, was a mecca for the homosexual element in the village who wanted nothing but a private little place where they could congregate, drink, dance and do whatever little girls do when they get together.

The thick glass shut out the outside world of the street. Inside, the Stonewall bathed in wild, bright psychedelic lights, while the patrons writhed to the sounds of a juke box on a square dance floor surrounded by booths and tables. The bar did a good business and the waiters, or waitresses, were always kept busy, as they snaked their way around the dancing customers to the booths and tables. For nearly two years, peace and tranquility reigned supreme for the Alice in Wonderland clientele.

The Raid Last Friday

Last Friday the privacy of the Stonewall was invaded by police from the First Division. It was a raid. They had a warrant. After two years, police said they had been informed that liquor was being served on the premises. Since the Stonewall was without a license, the place was being closed. It was the law.

All hell broke loose when the police entered the Stonewall. The girls instinctively reached for each other. Others stood frozen, locked in an embrace of fear.

Only a handful of police were on hand for the initial landing in the homosexual beachhead. They ushered the patrons out onto Christopher Street, just off Sheridan Square. A crowd had formed in front of the Stonewall and the customers were greeted with cheers of encouragement from the gallery.

The whole proceeding took on the aura of a homosexual Academy Awards Night. The Queens pranced out to the street blowing kisses and waving to the crowd. A beauty of a specimen named Stella wailed uncontrollably while being led to the sidewalk in front of the Stonewall by a cop. She later confessed that she didn’t protest the manhandling by the officer, it was just that her hair was in curlers and she was afraid her new beau might be in the crowd and spot her. She didn’t want him to see her this way, she wept.

Queen Power

The crowd began to get out of hand, eye witnesses said. Then, without warning, Queen Power exploded with all the fury of a gay atomic bomb. Queens, princesses and ladies-in-waiting began hurling anything they could get their polished, manicured fingernails on. Bobby pins, compacts, curlers, lipstick tubes and other femme fatale missiles were flying in the direction of the cops. The war was on. The lilies of the valley had become carnivorous jungle plants.

Urged on by cries of “C’mon girls, lets go get’em,” the defenders of Stonewall launched an attack. The cops called for assistance. To the rescue came the Tactical Patrol Force.

Flushed with the excitement of battle, a fellow called Gloria pranced around like Wonder Woman, while several Florence Nightingales administered first aid to the fallen warriors. There were some assorted scratches and bruises, but nothing serious was suffered by the honeys turned Madwoman of Chaillot.

Official reports listed four injured policemen with 13 arrests. The War of the Roses lasted about 2 hours from about midnight to 2 a.m. There was a return bout Wednesday night.

Two veterans recently recalled the battle and issued a warning to the cops. “If they close up all the gay joints in this area, there is going to be all out war.”

Bruce and Nan

Both said they were refugees from Indiana and had come to New York where they could live together happily ever after. They were in their early 20’s. They preferred to be called by their married names, Bruce and Nan.

“I don’t like your paper,” Nan lisped matter-of-factly. “It’s anti-fag and pro-cop.”

“I’ll bet you didn’t see what they did to the Stonewall. Did the pigs tell you that they smashed everything in sight? Did you ask them why they stole money out of the cash register and then smashed it with a sledge hammer? Did you ask them why it took them two years to discover that the Stonewall didn’t have a liquor license.”

Bruce nodded in agreement and reached over for Nan’s trembling hands.

“Calm down, doll,” he said. “Your face is getting all flushed.”

Nan wiped her face with a tissue.

“This would have to happen right before the wedding. The reception was going to be held at the Stonewall, too,” Nan said, tossing her ashen-tinted hair over her shoulder.

“What wedding?,” the bystander asked.

Nan frowned with a how-could-anybody-be-so-stupid look. “Eric and Jack’s wedding, of course. They’re finally tieing the knot. I thought they’d never get together.”

Meet Shirley

“We’ll have to find another place, that’s all there is to it,” Bruce sighed. “But every time we start a place, the cops break it up sooner or later.”

“They let us operate just as long as the payoff is regular,” Nan said bitterly. “I believe they closed up the Stonewall because there was some trouble with the payoff to the cops. I think that’s the real reason. It’s a shame. It was such a lovely place. We never bothered anybody. Why couldn’t they leave us alone?”

Shirley Evans, a neighbor with two children, agrees that the Stonewall was not a rowdy place and the persons who frequented the club were never troublesome. She lives at 45 Christopher St.

“Up until the night of the police raid there was never any trouble there,” she said. “The homosexuals minded their own business and never bothered a soul. There were never any fights or hollering, or anything like that. They just wanted to be left alone. I don’t know what they did inside, but that’s their business. I was never in there myself. It was just awful when the police came. It was like a swarm of hornets attacking a bunch of butterflies.”

A reporter visited the now closed Stonewall and it indeed looked like a cyclone had struck the premisses.

Police said there were over 200 people in the Stonewall when they entered with a warrant. The crowd outside was estimated at 500 to 1,000. According to police, the Stonewall had been under observation for some time. Being a private club, plain clothesmen were refused entrance to the inside when they periodically tried to check the place. “They had the tightest security in the Village,” a First Division officer said, “We could never get near the place without a warrant.”

Police Talk

The men of the First Division were unable to find any humor in the situation, despite the comical overtones of the raid.

“They were throwing more than lace hankies,” one inspector said. “I was almost decapitated by a slab of thick glass. It was thrown like a discus and just missed my throat by inches. The beer can didn’t miss, though, “it hit me right above the temple.”

Police also believe the club was operated by Mafia connected owners. The police did confiscate the Stonewall’s cash register as proceeds from an illegal operation. The receipts were counted and are on file at the division headquarters. The warrant was served and the establishment closed on the grounds it was an illegal membership club with no license, and no license to serve liquor.

The police are sure of one thing. They haven’t heard the last from the Girls of Christopher Street.

That last sentence was probably the most accurate statement in the entire article. The Village Voice, which was supposed to be the more liberal, counter-cultural paper, was only somewhat more considerate in its choice of language when its coverage hit the streets three days earlier (see Jul 3). But at least the Voice’s Lucian Truscott IV was able to capture the riot’s importance: “The forces of faggotry, spurred by a Friday night raid on one of the city’s largest, most popular, and longest lived gay bars, the Stonewall Inn, rallied Saturday night in an unprecedented protest against the raid and continued Sunday night to assert presence, possibility, and pride until the early hours of Monday morning.” Disrespectful language aside, Truscott’s account would become the story of record, while Lisker’s article would be forever remembered for the kind of universal contempt directed toward gay people that gave rise to the rebellion in the first place. Lisker went on to become the sports reporter for the Daily News, New York Post, and Fox Sports. He died in 1993.

Born On This Day, 1602: Jérôme Duquesnoy

Jérôme Duquesnoy, Crucifix in ivory

(d. 1654) The Flemish artist was, in his day, regarded as one of the finest sculptors of the seventeenth century. In 1644, Duquesnoy was commissioned to create statues for the nave of the Cathedral of St. Michael and St. Gudula in Brussels, and the following year he was appointed “architecte, statuaire et sculpteur de la Cour” to Archduke Leopold William, Regent of the Netherlands. it was during the time where he produced some of his most famous works, many of which depicted strong, muscled male figures in the Hellenic tradition. In 1651, he became Court Architect and Sculptor, and in 1654 he went to Ghent to fulfill several commissions when he was accused of indecencies with his assistants. The Privy Council of Ghent convicted Duquesnoy of sodomy and sentenced him to death. He was bound to a stake in the Grain Market in the center of the city, strangled, and his body reduced to ashes. His reputation was destroyed and his memory repressed. It has only been recently that critical attention has returned to his work.

Born On This Day, 1925: Merv Griffin

(d. 2007) I vividly remember the moment I figured out that Merv Griffin was gay. It was sometime in the mid to late 1970s. I was in high school, off on summer break. I walked into the TV room. No one else was in there, but the TV was turned to The Merv Griffin Show. I think it was a holiday special of some kind. Fourth of July, maybe. There were a bunch of male Polynesian dancers on stage. But these were’t your typical just-off-the-islands Polynesian dancers. These were, like, from the islands of West Hollywood — muscular, buff, defined, hot!. I was transfixed, although I knew I shouldn’t be. The dancers finished their particularly athletic-style of Polynesian dancing and left the stage to a standing ovation from the mostly-older, mostly-female audience. Griffin walked out and started bantering with the ladies in the front row, as he often did. This time, it was about the dancers, about how good they were, about how good-looking they were, about how ohmygod how hot they were. This went on and on and on. It’s like he couldn’t stop talking about them. And that’s when it hit me.

“Ohmygodohmogodohmogodohmygod!!!!,” I exclaimed to — thank God — no one in the room. “Merv Griffin is GAY!” And nothing after that would ever convince me otherwise, not matter how many times he was photographed supposedly canoodling with Eva Gabor.

Like that other famously closeted Las Vegas celebrity Liberace, Merv Griffin entered show business early as a child prodigy on the piano. He started singing on the radio at age 19 in 1944. Avoiding the draft because of a heart murmur, Griffin earned enough to start his own record label the following year, and began touring. His first hit, a novelty tune called “I’ve Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts” reached number one in 1950.

He got a few minor film roles, but he found television more to his liking. He hosted a number of game shows from the 50s until the early 60s, when he switched to producing them rather than hosting. He guest-hosted the Tonight Show before Johnny Carson took over, then launched his own syndicated talk show in 1965. Griffin would continue to host various talk shows for the next two decades. He was praised by critics for taking on controversial topics with controversial guests, a trait that got him fired from a talk show gig at CBS in 1969. He was fired on a Friday, but was back on the air the following Monday as host of a new syndicated talk show, produced by Merv Griffin Enterprises, without skipping a beat. Meanwhile, his production company would produce some of the most successful shows on television: Jeopardy!, Wheel of Fortune, and Dance Fever. His real estate operations owned the Beverly Hilton and the Resorts Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City. By 2003, Griffin was a veritable Hollywood mogul, said to be worth around $1.2 billion dollars.

That Appalachian high school kid who saw Merv Griffin gushing over his Polynesian dancers wasn’t the only one to figure out that he was gay. Rumors had long circulated about his sexuality. Those rumors burst into the open in 1991, when Dance Fever host Deney Terrio sued him for sexual harassment. That same year, Griffin’s longtime bodyguard/horse trainer/driver Brent Plot filed a $200 million palimony suit. Griffin evaded questions from the press, and both suits were ultimately dismissed. Michelangelo Signorile alluded to Griffin in his 1993 book Queer in America, where he described an unnamed Hollywood “Mogul” who fired men from his company for being openly gay.

When Griffin died in 2007, his secret might have died with him. But Ray Richmond’s obituary in the Hollywood Reporter, said everything that needed to be said in the headline: “Merv Griffin Died a Closeted Homosexual.” Reuters then picked it up, as Richmond pondered the legacy that might have been:

What a powerful message Griffin might have sent had he squired his male companions around town rather than Eva Gabor, his longtime good friend and platonic public pal. Imagine the amount of good Merv could have done as a well-respected, hugely successful, beloved and uncloseted gay man in embodying a positive image. …

If you’re Griffin, why would you think a judgmental culture would be any more tolerant as you grew into middle and old age? Even in the capital of entertainment — in a business where homosexuality isn’t exactly a rare phenomenon — it’s still spoken of in hushed tones or, more often, not at all. And Merv’s brush with tabloid scandal no doubt only drove him further into the closet.

While it would seem everything has changed today, little actually has. You can count on the fingers of one hand, or at most two, the number of high-powered stars, executives and public figures who have come out. Those who don’t can’t really be faulted, as rarely do honesty and full disclosure prove a boon to one’s showbiz livelihood.

But Signorile saw it differently:

First off, Griffin’s closet kept him shockingly silent while he had access to the president of the United States as his own people were dying. This man was intimate with the Reagans (and Nancy Reagan in particular) during the height of the AIDS epidemic in 80s, with few treatments available and fear-mongering having gripped the media. …

Secondly, Griffin’s closet had him engaging in workplace sexual harassment, something that, as I showed in my 1993 book Queer in America, is common among closeted powerful men, who often are simply seeking outlets for sex….

Finally, Griffin’s closet had him firing gay men who’d actually made it up through the ranks of his own company, simply because they were openly gay. There is a story in Queer in America about a man identified as “The Mogul” who did just that. I can now reveal that The Mogul is Merv Griffin. Open homosexuality is a threat to the closeted, and powerful people in the closet like Merv Griffin will often do whatever it takes to squash those who are open and who might advocate that all among the powerful should come out.

Don’t Get Excited: The Homophobic Cardinal’s Resignation Was Nothing But Routine Housekeeping

Cardinal Nicolás de Jesús López Rodríguez

The Washington Blade picked up a report that has played out all over Spanish-language media but hasn’t made much of an appearance in the English language news outlets:

The Vatican announced on Monday that Pope Francis has accepted the resignation of Cardinal Nicolás de Jesús López Rodríguez of the Archbishop of Santo Domingo.

The Holy See said in a statement that the pontiff has named Monsignor Francisco Ozoria Acosta of the Diocese of San Pedro de Macorís as López’s successor.

LGBT media and blogs are, rightly, very interested in this development. López Rodríguez’s extreme homophobia is pretty notable in the Catholic Church, which is really saying something. When President Barack Obama named Wally Brewster, an openly gay and married man, Ambassador to the Dominican Republic, López Rodríguez called him a maricón (faggot) and pajaro (bird, another Spanish perjorative for a gay man) in an interview. After Ambassador Brewster criticized corruption in the Dominican Republic, López Rodríguez said, “That man needs to go back to his embassy. Let him focus on housework, since he’s the wife to a man.”

So when we see a report about a Catholic Cardinal — whose powerful position influences the future direction of the Church, in part, by deciding who the next pope would be — it’s tempting to try to examine Pope Francis’s accepting López Rodríguez’s resignation for signs of a push-back against the Church’s more anti-gay elements. The Blade article makes no attempt to draw any such inferences, but a number of high-profile bloggers have, naturally, juxtaposed this development against Pope France’s comments last week acknowledging that the church “must apologize” against gay people.

Now maybe Pope Francis did choose to accept López Rodríguez’s resignation because he saw in it an opportunity to push out one of the church’s worst homophobes. And maybe Pope Francis did it for other reasons that had little to do with López Rodríguez’s open anti-gay bigotry.

But the way I see it, there are far more reasons to interpret this as simply ordinary housekeeping and not one scintilla more. The official Holy See statement announcing López Rodríguez’s resignation says it was tendered “in accordance with canons 411 and 401 § 1 of the Code of Canon law.”

Canons 411 and 401 deal with the mandatory retirement age of 75 for all bishops in the Church. Upon turning 75, bishops are required to tender their resignations to the Vatican. The Vatican, however, is under no obligation to accept those resignations, and if it does decide to accept a resignation, there’s no requirement that says it has to do so in any kind of a timely manner.

In fact, it’s not at all unusual for there to be a delay of several years between a bishop’s resignation and the appointment of his successor. According to Canon Law, the bishop’s office ends immediately upon the Pope’s accepting the resignation, and so it is standard practice to hold off doing so until a successor can be named. That successor then is the acting bishop until his formal consecration.

López Rodríguez was born in 1936, which means he turned in his resignation four years ago in 2011 (He was born October 31). If he had turned 75 yesterday and the Pope accepted his resignation today, then you could definitely read something into it. But this resignation and naming of a successor has been years in the making, which makes it all perfectly routine and normal. The other thing that’s normal: when López Rodríguez turns eighty in October, he will still be a Cardinal, but he won’t be able to participate in any future conclave after that to select the next pope.