Box Turtle Bulletin

Today’s Agenda Is Brought To You By…

Frank Hernandez Escalante, 27 years old.

Frankie was proud. One picture he posted on Facebook was him in a “GAY O.K.” tee-shirt, with the photo modified with a rainbow cover overlay. He had “love has no gender” tattooed on his the inside of his upper right arm. He was from Weslaco, Texas, in the Rio Grande valley, and a member of Aqui Estamos RGV, the “LGBTQ Rio Grande Valley family.” He taught his sister how to walk in heels. He loved Beyoncé.

Frankie’s family moved to Louisiana, and he moved to Orlando about three years ago where he felt he would be in a more accepting environment. He was at Pulse that night with his boyfriend, Brett Rigas. They were in the main room of the nightclub near a bar when the shooting started. Brett was shot in the arm, but escaped. He lost track of Frankie in the chaos.

Brett’s father called Frankie’s mother, asking if they had heard from Frankie. His mother tried to reach him by phone, but Fankie didn’t pick up. His family tried Snapchat, Instagram, and Facebook, all without success. His mother and sister hopped into a car and drove 753 from their home outside Lafayette, Louisiana, to Orlando, hoping to find Franki alive. On arriving to Orlando, they learned that he was gone.

The last time Frankie’s mother talked with Frankie was the day before, after she heard that “The Voice” singer Christina Grimmie had been shot and killed at a concert in Orlando on Friday. All she wanted to know was that he was okay.

Frankie was buried back in Weslaco. Many family and friends at his funeral wore shirts displaying “love has no gender.”

Jason’s mother being comforted by President Barack Obama

Jason Benjamin Josaphat, 19 years old.

Jason, a Haitian-American teen, had recently graduated from high school in Mesa, Arizona, and moved to Orlando with his mother. He was studying Computer Science at Southern Technical College. Less than two weeks before the shooting, he had graduated from Southern Technical’s business office specialist program. His interests included computers, photography and working out. His family described him as quiet. “He was always helpful, always willing to help someone in need,” said his aunt. His ungle added: “Never once has he ever shown any type of rage or anger. He was just high on life.”

When shooting broke out at Pulse, Jason called his mother from the bathroom. She told her son to look for a way out while she dialed 911 on another phone, keeping her son on the line. She heard the shots getting closer. Then the shooting stopped, but she could no longer hear her son.

Today In History, 1953: State Department Says It Has Fired 381 Gay Employees

Samuel Reber

In the early 1950s, the entire country was in the grips of Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s (R-WI) twinned witch hunts, the Red Scare and the Lavender Scare. One of his main platforms was the Senate’s Subcommittee on the Investigation of Loyalty of State Department Employees. While McCarthy’s main targets were imaginary Communists in the State Department, gay employees were also seen as “subversives” in need of rooting out. Among the more high-profile targets was Samuel Reber, a well-regarded twenty-seven year career diplomat who suddenly announced his retirement in May of 1953 after McCarthy charged that he was a security risk — which was a barely-concealed code for homosexual.

By then, President Dwight D. Eisenhower had already responded to McCarthy’s witch hunt by signing an executive order mandated the firing of all federal employees who were deemed guilty of “sexual perversion,” whether proven or not (Apr 27). Eisenhower also announced a re-organization of the State Department. Rep. Charles B Brownson, an Indiana Republican with his own lesser-known witch hunt underway in the House Government Operations Committee, asked the State Department for a progress report in rooting out homosexuals. On July 2, 1953, the State Department’s chief security officer R.W. Scott McLeod revealed that 351 homosexuals and 150 other “security risks” had been fired between 1950 and 1953.

Born On This Day, 1906: Richard Bruce Nugent

(d. 1987) When the Harlem Renaissance literary magazine Fire!! published his short story “Smoke, Lilies and Jade” in its first issue in 1926, Richard Bruce Nugent became the first African-American writer willing to declare his homosexuality in print — and he would remain so for the next thirty years. It was supposed to be Part One of a novel, but Fire!! never returned for a second issue and the novel was apparently never completed. Alex, the story’s main character, is gay:

Alex turned in his doorway … up the stairs and the stranger waited for him to light the room … no need for words … they had always known each olher ……… as they undressed by the blue dawn … Alex knew he had never seen a more perfect being .. . his body was all symmetry and music .. , and A;Jex called him Beauty … long they lay … blowing smoke and exchanging thoughts … and Alex swallowed with difficulty … he felt a glow of tremor … and they talked and … slept … [Ellipses in the original]

Oddly, thats not what drew the ire of other Harlem Renaissance critics. It was this: Alex makes out of an ivory cigarette holder “inlaid with red jade and green;” he blows smoke rings and dreams about wearing a long cape “very full and lined with vermilion;” he lies about “in a yellow silk shirt and black velvet trousers;” he drinks “stance liquors from curiously beautiful bottles;” he reads Wilde, Freud, and Bocaccio. Critics slammed the story’s decadence and exoticism — with “decadence” standing in as coded language for a kind of a Roaring Twenties type of homosexual that had gained a certain degree of fashion and notoriety in New York.

In 1925, Nugent had been attending the “Saturday Evening” salons of poet Georgia Douglas Johnson in his native Washington, D.C., where he was introduced to the leading African-American thinkers of the day, including W.E.B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, Jean Toomer, and Waldo Frank. He also met poet Langston Hughes (Feb 1). The two of them became fast friends and moved to New York. Nugent, Hughes, Cal Van Vechten (Jun 17) and several others became integral players in Harlem’s intellectual and artistic life, with Nugent becoming the most notorious. Van Vechten once wrote to Hughes that he saw Nugent at a society dinner in evening clothes “with his usual open chest and uncovered ankles. I suppose soon he will be going without trousers.”

Nugent wasn’t just a writer, but also a dancer, painter and illustrator. The apartment complex in Harlem that he shared with Wallace Thurman and other artists became known as Niggeratti Manor, where Nugent had painted the walls with murals, some depicting homoerotic scenes. Other illustrations appeared in Fire!! as well as two other African-American publications Opportunity and Palms, and other New York art magazines. Meanwhile, he continued to write short stories and even took his turn on the stage, appearing on Broadway and in an early production of the play Porgy (later adapted by George Gershwin for Porgy and Bess) In 1937, he published what is often considered his finest work, “Pope Pius the Only.”

In 1952, he married Grace Marr, with whom he shared accommodations and with her three brothers. The marriage was her idea; she thought she could “change” him. It’s unclear why he went along with it. He warned her that it was a bad idea, but marry her he did. The relationship was never consummated. Meanwhile, Nugent remained an active booster of Harlem’s literary and arts scene throughout the rest of his life. He was also a harsh critic of the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 1968 exhibition on the Harlem Renaissance which, astonishingly, was put together without the involvement of Harlem artists. In 1983 he was interviewed for the film Before Stonewall. He died in 1987. In 2002 Duke University Press published Gay Rebel of the Harlem Renaissance: Selections from the Work of Richard Bruce Nugent a collection of Nugent’s most important writings, paintings, and drawings, many of them made available for the first time. Gentleman Jigger, a previously unreleased, vaguely-autobiographical novel that Nugent wrote during his Niggeratti Manor days, was published in 2008.

Born On This Day, 1937: Dee Palmer

Jethro Tull fans who xhaven’tbeen keeping him might remember her as composer and keyboardist David Palmer. She had provided orchestral arrangements for several significant Jethro Tull albums, including Aqualung and Thick as a Brick before joining the band as a full time musician in 1976. At the time, she presented herself as an eccentric Englishman, complete with a Sherlock Holmes pipe and a beard. She remained with the band until it broke up in 1980 over Ian Anderson’s decision to release a solo album under the Jethro Tull name.

She was also married. She had told Maggie about her transgender feelings on their second date, and Maggie was accepting. “All of my time with Maggie was blissfully happy,” she later recalled. But after her wife died in 1998, Dee was left alone to confront her sense that something was wrong. “Once she died I sat in the kitchen looking down the garden for a year, then gradually from the outermost part of my body and soul where I had consigned what I was to learn was gender dysphoria started to reassert itself as something that I had to deal with again.”

She finally decided it was time to act on the feelings that she had been having since the age of three. She changed her name to Dee in 2000 and underwent gender reassignment in 2004. The whole process for her was very difficult. “It isn’t for wimps by the way … And it isn’t for people who want to wear a frock and prance around masquerading as a female. It’s nothing to do with that, it’s a light year away from that.” Now that she has transitioned, she feels liberated, and lives with a sense that there was nothing left to hold her back. “it is like jumping from a parachute. At first it’s very easy, but then suddenly the ground is coming up at you and you can’t stop until you’ve reached the end; it’s very much that kind of experience – your writing and performance will take on new dimensions.”

Born On this Day, 1984: Johnny Weir

The famous American figure skater is a three-time U.S. National Champion (2004–2006) and a the 2008 Worlds Championship bronze medalist, although for a number of reasons, his Olympic appearances in 2006 and 2010 were disappointing. When he appeared at the 2010 U.S. Championships wearing fox fur as part of his costume, he began to receive death threats from animal rights activists. He defended his decision to wear fur as “a personal choice,” but decided to remove the fur from his costume. By the time the 2010 Winter Olympics came around in Vancouver, he had to change his housing arrangement due to security concerns.

Weir was always a bit different — including the fact that he spins clockwise instead of counter-clockwise like most other figure skaters. He was long suspected of being gay — as are probably most male figure skaters. The fact that he designed some of his own skating costumes in a very androgynous style didn’t do much to quell the rumors. But for most of his career, he preferred to leave the questions unanswered. “It’s not part of my sport and it’s private,” he’d say. But when he published his memoir Welcome to My World in 2011, he finally came out as gay. He said his decision to come out was prompted by a string of suicides in 2010. “With people killing themselves and being scared into the closet, I hope that even just one person can gain strength from my story.”

In 2013, Weir retired from professional skating and became an NBC figure skating analyst for the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi. When controversy over Russia’s anti-gay laws prompted calls to boycott the games, Weir, who is a self-proclaimed Russophile, criticized those suggestions by saying that “the Olympics are not the place to make a political statement” about Russia’s anti-gay crackdown, adding “you have to respect the culture of a country you are visiting.” Just before leaving for the Sochi games, Weir filed for what looked to be a very nasty divorce from his Russian husband, Victor Voronov. The divorce was finalized in 2015.

Ex-Pope Benedict Took On The Gay Lobby And Won, Says Ex-Pope Benedict

We haven’t had a living ex-pope who became ex-pope of his own volition in more than 700 years, and we haven’t had an ex-pope’s post-poping memoirs in, like a kajillion. But we’ll have that soon. The Pope Formerly Known As Benedict XVI is due to publish his memoir, The Last Conversation, on September 9. The Italian newspaper, Corriere della Sera has the Italian newspaper rights for the book’s excerpts, and today ran a long article which, according to Reuters, discusses Benedict’s exploits against a “gay lobby” in the Vatican:

In the book, Benedict says that he came to know of the presence of a “gay lobby” made up of four or five people who were seeking to influence Vatican decisions. The article says Benedict says he managed to “break up this power group”.

…The Church has maintained its centuries-long opposition to homosexual acts.

But rights campaigners have long said many gay people work for the Vatican and Church sources have said they suspect that some have banded together to support each other’s careers and influence decisions in the bureaucracy.

Benedict, who now has the title “emeritus pope,” has always maintained that he made his choice to leave freely and Corriere says that in the book Benedict “again denies blackmail or pressure”.

His Prada shoes declined to comment for this story.

North Carolina Lawmakers Plot Raid Of Disaster Relief Fund to Defend HB 2

When the next hurricane or flood hits North Carolina and state residents turn to the state’s disaster relief coffers, they’ll find it half a million dollars poorer than it should be:

North Carolina lawmakers took steps Thursday to set aside a half-million dollars for the legal defense of a law limiting protections for LGBT people as a judge sought to streamline a cluster of lawsuits it has inspired.

Republican lawmakers were mapping out the end of the session, including possible changes to the law known as House Bill 2, which has attracted high-profile critics including the NBA. The session could end this weekend.

But there was no appetite to change the provision requiring transgender people to use restrooms corresponding to the sex on their birth certificate in schools, universities and many other public buildings. The law also excludes sexual orientation and gender identity from statewide anti-discrimination protections.

…The Senate also approved a plan to give McCrory’s office $500,000 to defend the law in court, by transferring money from a disaster relief fund. The measure still must pass the House.

The NBA had scheduled its 2017 All-Star game in Charlotte before the law was enacted earlier this year. Yesterday, the Charlotte Hornets and the NBA issued a joint statement saying that the minor changes to HB 2 that have been floated aren’t enough. While Republican Gov. Pat McCrory is trying to find some minimal changes to the law that might keep the All Star game in town while still keeping anti-LGBT lawmakers in his own party happy, he has no problem with trying to take advantage of whole episode in a re-eleaction campaign pitch:

A spokesman for McCrory’s re-election campaign, Ricky Diaz, later said in an email: “Any Democrat standing with the Human Rights Campaign and other out-of-state liberal interest groups by refusing any compromise is attempting to drive the NBA All-Star Game from North Carolina.”

Federal Judge: Mississippi’s Right-To-Discriminate Law Was Designed “To Put LGBT Citizens Back In Their Place”

Mississippi’s so-called “religious freedom” law, HB 1523, was due to go into effect at midnight last night. It would have allowed individuals, religious organizations and businesses to deny services to LGBT people based on “sincerely held religious beliefs or moral convictions.” The law also would have allowed county clerks to selectively refuse to issue marriage licenses on those same grounds. Late Thursday night, just before the law was due to go into effect, Federal District judge Carlton Reeves found that because it violated the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause and the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, the plaintiffs had a very high likelihood of prevailing in their lawsuit. He then issued an injunction preventing the law from going into effect.

It should be remembered that this isn’t a final ruling on the lawsuit itself, which is actually the combination of three separate lawsuits challenging HB 1523. That lawsuit is still going to go forward, and the state of Mississippi can still mount a defense of HB 1523 and, in theory at least, prevail. But Judge Reeves’s 60-page opinion certainly reads more like a final ruling than an injunction, and it demonstrates the deep hole the state’s lawyers are in. I think this paragraph sums it all up very nicely:

In physics, every action has its equal and opposite reaction. In politics, every action has its predictable overreaction. Politicians reacted to the Hawaiian proceedings with DOMA and mini-DOMAs. Lawrence and Goodridge birthed the state constitutional amendments. And now Obergefell has led to HB 1523.

As Judge Reeves put it, that overreaction in HB 1523 was twofold. First, section 2 singled out only three specific religious beliefs being eligible for special legal protections:

(a) Marriage is or should be recognized as the union of one man and one woman;

(b) Sexual relations are properly reserved to such a marriage; and

(c) Male (man) or female (woman) refer to an individual’s immutable biological sex as objectively determined by anatomy and genetics at time of birth

And then it said that the state would not prosecute any “discrimination” cases is that discrimination was done on the basis of any of those three specific beliefs. Judge Reeves found that:

“Discrimination” is defined broadly. It covers consequences in the realm of taxation, employment, benefits, court proceedings, licenses, financial grants, and so on. In other words, the State of Mississippi will not tax you, penalize you, fire you, deny you a contract, withhold a diploma or license, modify a custody agreement, or retaliate against you, among many other enumerated things, for your § 2 beliefs.

After providing a detailed analysis of the plaintiff’s standing to sue and that state officials were appropriately named as defendants, and that it was proper to sue before the law went into effect, he then dismantled, one by one, each of the state’s arguments supporting HB 1523. Some of the language he uses is pretty strong. For example, the state actually claims that the law didn’t single out a group of people for special treatment because it didn’t actually mention LGBT people:

The State then claims that HB 1523 “is about the people of conscience who need the  protection of H.B. 1523, and does not ‘target’ Plaintiffs.” 31 Docket No. 30, at 3, in Barber. The argument is unsupported by the record. It is also inconceivable that a discriminatory law can stand merely because creative legislative drafting limited the number of times it mentioned the targeted group. The Court cannot imagine upholding a statute that favored men simply because the statute did not mention women.

…The title, text, and history of HB 1523 indicate that the bill was the State’s attempt to put LGBT citizens back in their place after Obergefell. The majority of Mississippians were granted special rights to not serve LGBT citizens, and were immunized from the consequences of their actions. LGBT Mississippians, in turn, were “put in a solitary class with respect to transactions and relations in both the private and governmental spheres” to symbolize their second-class status. … As in Romer, Windsor, and Obergefell, this “status-based enactment” deprived LGBT citizens of equal treatment and equal dignity under the law.

Before turning to the bill’s violation of the religious establishment clause in the First Amendment, Judge Reeves embarked on a rather lengthy dissertation on how the First Amendment came into being because, what with Mississippi being Mississippi, people there tend to think “that the Establishment Clause is a technicality that lets atheists and members of minority religions thwart their majority (Christian) rule. The public may be surprised to know the true origins of the Establishment Clause,” which was, originally, “to protect Christians from other Christians,” with other faiths included in subsequent court decisions. Because some religious denominations blessed same-sex marriages, HB 1523 favored some denominations over others. More than that, it favored some specific religious doctrines over others:

In this case, moreover, it is difficult to see the compelling government interest in favoring three enumerated religious beliefs over others. “[T]he goal of basic ‘fairness’ is hardly furthered  by the Act’s discriminatory preference” for one set of beliefs. Edwards, 482 U.S. at 588. It is not within our tradition to respect one clerk’s religious objection to issuing a same-sex marriage license, but refuse another clerk’s religious objection to issuing a marriage license to a formerly-divorced person. The government is not in a position to referee the validity of Leviticus 18:22 (“Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination.”) versus Leviticus 21:14 (“A widow, or a divorced woman, or profane, or an harlot, these shall he not take.”)

Reeves was sixty pages into his opinion and he was just getting warmed up. Unfortunately, he was running out of time — the law was due to go into effect in just a few hours. And since this isn’t a final opinion for the case, he just left the remainder of his arguments for another time:

F. Other Considerations

The plaintiffs have made other First Amendment arguments and noted a preemption theory concerning 42 U.S.C. § 1983. In light of the substantive claims addressed above, and appreciating “the haste that is often necessary” in preliminary injunction proceedings, the Court declines to take up those other theories of relief at this time. Monumental Task Comm., Inc v. Foxx, — F. Supp. 3d —, 2016 WL 311822, at *3 (E.D. La. Jan. 26, 2016)

Reeves’s injunction orders “that the defendants; their officers, agents, servants, employees, and attorneys; and any other persons who are in active concert or participation with the defendants or their officers, agents, servants, employees, or attorneys; are hereby preliminarily enjoined from enacting or enforcing HB 1523.”

Today’s Agenda Is Brought To You By…

Christopher Joseph Sanfeliz, 24 years old.

Christopher’s family moved from Cuba to Carrollwood, just outside of Tampa, in the 1960s. Christopher graduated from Gaither High School, where one friend who now teaches at the high school remembered him as “the most positive guy I’ve ever known.” They had been in honors classes the marching band, where Christopher played trumpet. After high school, Christopher took several business courses at Hillsborough Community College. In 2013, he was hired as a bank teller and had worked his way up to become a personal banker.

Christopher loved to dance. A friend and ex-boyfriend wrote on Facebook, “I remember you teaching me the basics of Latin dancing and being the first guy I ever danced bachata with. (Best experience ever.)” Christopher told family members that he and a group of friends were going to go to Pulse in Orlando that weekend for Latin Night. So when news of the massacre broke, his father’s phone “was blowing up” on Sunday morning. He drove to Orlando and spent the day at the hospital waiting for word on his son’s fate. When he returned home that night, he knew Christopher was not among the 53 who were injured. That left only one possibility. When a sheriff deputy showed up at his home on Monday morning, he already knew.

Alejandro Barrios Martinez, 21 years old.

Alejandro grew up in Candelaria, Cuba. He lived in Candelaria briefly before moving to Orlando in 2014 to be closer to his father, sister and cousins. Despite still struggling with English, he was nevertheless outgoing and “always had a smile on his face,” said a friend. “He’s the type of person [who would] see you in a parking lot and he’d have a whole conversation with you.”

She often saw Alejandro at Pulse, although she wasn’t there the night of the shooting. At 3:30 a.m., a terrified Alejandro sent a text message to his boyfriend: “I don’t have time to tell you I am in a shooting and can’t leave scared with blood I love you don’t doubt it.” That was followed by another text: “My love, I am afraid of dying.”

His mother was still in Cuba. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) intervened with the U.S. Embassy in Havana, which issued a humanitarian visa so his mother could travel to Orlando. A cousin who is a journalist living in Chile, criticized the condolences offered by Cuban President Raúl Castro for failing that two Cubans were among the victims: “Will he send his condolences to the Cuban families they divided? Some of them today mourn the victims from two countries, unable to embrace.”

Today In History, 1943: Gay Resistance Fighters Shot By Nazis

L-R: Willem Arondeus, Sjoerd Bakker, and Johan Brouwer.

Dutch painter and writer Willem Arondeus’s career in art, like that of many artists, was marked by poverty. But his 1938 biography of the Dutch painter Matthijs Maris (1839-1917) not only assured Arondeus a modest steady income, but Maris’s fight on the barricades in 1871 for the Paris Communards inspired Arondeus to join the Resistance when the Nazis invaded Holland. Arondeus hatched a plot to burn the Bevolkingsregister which housed the citizen registration office in Amsterdam where the Nazis kept copies of all of the identity cards held by Dutch citizens. Late on March 27, 1943, Arondeus and fourteen others, including two young doctors, donned German uniforms, asked the building’s guards to open the building for a special inspection. As soon as they gained entry, the two doctors injected the guards to put them asleep and placed them in the courtyard away from harm while the rest of the crew set fire to the building.

The destroyed Bevolkingsregister, 1943.

Five days later, an unknown infiltrator informed the Nazis, which arrested the group. During the trial, Arondeus took responsibility for the fire. The two doctors were sentenced to life in prison, but the rest were ordered to go before a firing squad. Before he was executed, Arondeus asked his lawyer to make public after the war that he and two others were gay: the tailor Sjoerd Bakker, who made the fake German uniforms, and writer Johan Brouwer. “Tell the people that gays are not cowards,” Arondeus instructed his lawyer. (Bakker, for his part, requested a pink shirt as his last request before his execution.) But despite the Netherlands’ renowned liberal attitudes, Arondeus’s request wasn’t heeded until 1990 when a television documentary by the Dutch filmmaker Toni Bouwmans revealed the full story.

[Source: Lutz van Dijk. “Arondeus, Willem” in Robert Aldrich and Garry Wotherspoon (eds.) Who’s Who in Gay and Lesbian History: From Antiquity to the Mid-Twentieth Century, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2002): 34-35.]

Today In History, 1969: DC Appeals Court Rules Against Civil Service Commission’s Gay Employment Ban

John W. Macy, Jr., Chairman of the U.S. Civil Service Commission

In 1953, in the same year that President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed Executive Order 10450 barring the federal employment of LGBT people (Apr 27) he appointed John Macy to head up the U.S. Civil Service Commission. Macy stayed on that post until 1969, with the exception of one brief period from 1958 to 1961, when he was vice president of his alma-mater, Wesleyan University. While he spoke out against sexual and racial discrimination in government, he was the country most adamant and often nastiest supporter of the gay ban (Sep 28).

Clifford Norton had been a budget analyst for NASA for fifteen years when he was arrested for a traffic violation in 1963. Yes, that’s right. A traffic violation. Here’s what happened. Norton had spent the evening at a Washington, D.C. gay bar and left around midnight. He drove by Lafayette square, a well-known cruising area. He pulled over picked up a guy named Madison Proctor, drove around the square, drop Procter off, and the two drove off in separate cars. Two vice officers at Lafayette Square saw this and followed them. When police caught up with them at Norton’s apartment, they got out of their unmarked and arrested them.

Police took them to the station and grilled them separately for another two hours. Proctor spilled the beans, telling police that Norton had felt up his leg and invited him over for a drink. Norton steadfastly denied that he made any advances toward Proctor. When Norton said he worked at NASA, the interrogators notified Vice Squad head Lt. Roy Blick, who had been the department’s main force in hunting gays in D.C. since 1950 (May 19, Jun 19). Blick called NASA security chief Bart Fugler. When Fugler arrived at 3 a.m., Blick showed him Norton’s arrest record and let him monitor the last 20 minutes of Norton’s interrogation. Norton was released, but given a traffic ticket for going 45 m.p.h. in a 35 zone.

Fulger then ordered Norton to go immediately to NASA for more interrogations. That new round of interrogations lasted until 6 a.m., during which an exhausted Norton admitted he had had sexual experiences with other men in high school and college, had homosexual desires (but only when drunk, he said), and that he might have had sex with another man while drunk (though he claimed he couldn’t remember). NASA promptly fired Norton for “immoral, indecent, and disgraceful conduct” under Eisenhower’s Executive Order 10450. Norton appealed through the Civil Service Commission, to no avail.

Norton remembered reading in the Washington Star about Frank Kameny (May 21), president of the Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C., who had publicly challenged a congressional attempt to strip the group’s license to raise money for gay rights (Aug 8, Aug 9). Norton found Kameny’s number in the phone book, and called for help. Kameny worked with ACLU lawyers Glenn Graces and John Karr to sue the Civil Service Commission and its head, John Macy, in court. The federal judge granted the CSC’s motion for summary judgment.

Norton appealed again, and in 1969, the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled for Norton, saying that NASA and the CSC failed to provide “any reasonable connection between the evidence against him and the efficiency of the service.” In fact, Norton’s immediate supervisor had written to his superiors that he wasn’t worried about Norton’s job performance and wondered “if there was any way around this kind of problem.” If NASA couldn’t claim that Norton’s off-the-job activities affected his on-the-job performance, what else is there? Well, one objection they came up with was “moral grounds.” The court scoffed:

Pronouncement of ‘immorality’ tends to discourage careful analysis because it unavoidably connotes a violation of divine, Olympian, or otherwise universal standards of rectitude. However, the Civil Service Commission has neither the expertise nor the requisite anointment to make or enforce absolute moral judgments, and we do not understand that it purports to do so. Its jurisdiction is at least confined to the things which are Caesar’s, and its avowed standard of ‘immorality’ is no more than ‘the prevailing mores of our society.’ So construed, ‘immorality’ covers a multitude of sins. Indeed, it may be doubted whether there are in the entire Civil Service many persons so saintly as never to have done any act which is disapproved by the ‘prevailing mores of our society.’

All that was left now to justify Norton’s firing was some kind of nebulous “damage” to NASA’s reputation by having a homosexual in the office. The court ridiculed that idea also:

We do not doubt that NASA blushes whenever one of its own is caught in flagrante delictu; but if the possibility of such transitory institutional discomfiture must be uncritically accepted as a cause for discharge which will ‘promote the efficiency of the service,’ we might as well abandon all pretense that the statute provides any substantive security for its supposed beneficiaries. A claim of possible embarrassment might, of course, be a vague way of referring to some specific potential interference with an agency’s performance; but it might also be a smokescreen hiding personal antipathies or moral judgments which are excluded by statute as grounds for dismissal. A reviewing court must at least be able to discern some reasonably foreseeable, specific connection between an employee’s potentially embarrassing conduct and the efficiency of the service.

The court didn’t strike down EO 10450 entirely however:

Lest there be any doubt, we emphasize that we do not hold that homosexual conduct may never be cause for dismissal of a protected federal employee. Nor do we even conclude that potential embarrassment from an employee’s private conduct may in no circumstances affect the efficiency of the service. What we do say is that, if the statute is to have any force, an agency cannot support a dismissal as promoting the efficiency of the service merely by turning its head and crying ‘shame.’

The CSC complained that the Norton case made their job harder (it was, they whined, an “unwarranted burden on the executive branch”), but it did little to slow down CSC’s pursuit of gay employees. As the CSC’s chief counsel Anthony Mondello put it, if the CSC allowed gays in the government, “there would be a gradual deterioration of the civil service if it were commonly known that persons who repeatedly engaged in serious misconduct offensive to community standards were appointed or retained in Federal agencies. Government employment would be less attractive as a career and the quality of applicants would deteriorate.”

So the CSC continued firing gay employees. And why not? After all, it was still up to the fired employee to hire a lawyer, go through the appeals process and take the CSC to court, a process that consumed six years of Norton’s life. When the Civil Service Commission still refused to grant a rehearing, Kameny urged Norton to take it all the way up to the Supreme Court, but by then Norton was down to his last $4 and exhausted. When the commission agreed to pay Norton $100,000 ($655,000 today) and a lifetime pension for wrongful termination, Norton accepted the offer.

But it soon became apparent to the CSC that their anti-gay policy’s days were numbered. Mondello warned in 1971 that the newer cases “appear to be indefensible and could, if pursued, provide a vehicle for issuance of a legal decisions we could not live with.” Which, more or less, is what happened, although the outcome was considerable less dramatic than one might have expected. When Norton v. Macy became the basis for a 1973 class action suit, the CSC formulated a new policy that said that homosexuality was not “per se grounds of unsuitability.” The CSC finally rescinded its anti-gay hiring ban in 1975 (Jul 3), although it reserved for itself the right to fire gay people for “criminal, dishonest, infamous or notoriously disgraceful conduct.” It also defended its right to “(collect) information regarding one’s sexual preference in connection with a national security investigation.”

[Additional source: Lillian Faderman. The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015): 155-159.]

Today In History, 1982: Larry Craig Preemptively Denies Connection to Gay Page Sex Scandal

Rep. Larry Craig (R-ID)

Rumors of Sen. Larry Craig’s (R-ID) sexuality have long dogged him in Washington and back home in Idaho. Which is why his 1997 arrest in a Minneapolis airport men’s room for soliciting sex from an undercover (male) police officer (Aug 27) didn’t surprise too many Washington insiders.

A lot of that had to do with a gay page scandal that broke on June 30, 1982. CBS News aired an exposé featuring Congressional page Leroy Williams alleging that he had sex with three House members when he was 17. Neither CBS News nor Williams named any of the House members publicly, so it was quite surprising when the very next day, then-Rep. Larry Craig Craig issued a statement saying that reporters were calling him saying they were going to publish his name in connection with the scandal as “part of a concerted effort at character assassination.” He added, “I have done nothing that I need to be either publicly or privately ashamed of. I am guilty of no crime or impropriety, and I am convinced that this is an effort to damage my personal character and destroy my political career.”

Craig was the only of the 435 House members to issues such a statement. He then flew to Idaho for a previously-scheduled campaign stop where he addressed the issue again: “Persons who are unmarried as I am, by choice or by circumstance, have always been the subject of innuendos, gossip and false accusations. I think this is despicable.” His statements, out of the blue, puzzled some and raised red flags with others, though few were willing to acknowledge them at the time. What prompted Craig’s pre-emptive, un-sought denial?

 Peter Fearon, then with the New York Post, said he never said his paper was preparing to name Craig. “No, no — it wasn’t ‘are you under investigation?’ It was simply an inquiry: ‘Have you heard anything? Who have you heard about? Have you heard any names mentioned? What’s your reaction to this news?’

“The next thing I know, Larry Craig has issued a press release:  ‘This isn’t me.’ Which I just thought was a bizarre and ultimately very foolish thing to do.

“He was the only person going on the record anywhere,” Fearon said. “And of course, when you do that, it’s like raw meat. He’s saying, ‘Nobody’s actually accusing, but it wasn’t me!’ It’s no wonder it’s dogged him. He denied something that no one had accused him of.”

Williams recanted his statements a month later, as did a second page who appeared on CBS. A House ethics committee investigated and found no evidence of wrongdoing. Craig proposed to Suzanne Thompson by the end of 1982. The couple married the following summer and the page scandal was forgotten. Mostly.

Here are two  news reports from July 2, 1982 on the page scandal. Both reports included Craig’s denials:

Born On This Day, 1925: Farley Granger

(d. 2011) Despite being one of the best-looking and well-regarded men in Hollywood, Granger didn’t have the kind of prolific a film career one might expect. He is best known for his role in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope and Strangers on a Train and for Luchino Visconti’s Senso. In Rope, Granger played a murderer and (implied) lover of an accomplice in a story inspired by the Loeb and Leopold murder.

In real life, Granger enjoyed the attentions of men, and women. According to his 2007 autobiography Include Me Out, he had affairs with Patricia Neal, Arthur Laurents, Shelly Winters, Leonard Bernstein, Barbara Stanwick and Ava Gardner. As for dealing with “liberal” Hollywood’s deeply-entrenched homophobia:

I found it difficult to answer questions about “gay life in Hollywood when I was living and working there. …I was never ashamed, and I never felt the need to explain or apologize for my relationships with anyone. I had many gay friends, but more of my friends were straight and most were married with families. The ratio of my gay to straight friends was probably in direct proportion to that of gay and straight people in general. I have loved men. I have loved women.”

Granger insisted he was never closeted, and he also resisted labeling himself:

Men or women?

“That really depends on the person,” he said impishly. But his follow-up comment left little doubt: “I’ve lived the greater part of my life with a man” — he has been with (Robert) Calhoun in New York since the 1960s — “so obviously that’s the most satisfying to me.”

In the late 1950s, Granger left Hollywood and moved to New York City, where he launched a second career on Broadway. Granger died in 2011 of natural causes in New York at the age of 85.

Born On This Day, 1951: Fred Schneider

65 YEARS AGO: The B-52s front man is probably America’s best known practitioner of sprechgesang. (The Free Dictionary: “a type of vocalization between singing and recitation … originated by Arnold Schoenberg, who used it in Pierrot Lunaire (1912)”) The group’s guy-and-gals call-and-response between Schneider and Kate Pierson and Cindy Wilson have become a trademark ever since “Rock Lobster” hit the charts in 1978. That sound defined the B-52s as the quintessential party band, inviting everyone to pile into the Chrysler as big as a whale. Schneider was coy about his sexuality throughout the 1980s and most of the 1990s, but his reluctance appeared to be more a matter of annoyance than fear. “I’m on the same side the fence as k.d., Elton and Frederick the Great. I just don’t like to share my personal life with the public.” Of course, there wasn’t much sharing needed. His own mother’s reaction when he came out to her probably sums it up for everyone else. “Oh I know, Freddie,” she said, and continued vacuuming without missing a beat.

Born On This Day, 1963: Roddy Bottum

The keyboardist for Faith No More since 1982, Bottum came out as gay in 1993 the year after his father died. It’s easy to imagine that his revelation would have come as quite a shock to the hyper-hetero world of heavy metal, but Bottum described it as “a positive and uplifting experience. I guess I expected some of the fans to burn crosses or throw panties at me, but nothing like that ever happened.” One of his hits with Faith No More was “Be Aggressive,” from their 1992 album Angel Dust. The homoerotic song was about oral sex. “It was a pretty fun thing to write, knowing that (lead singer Mike Patton) was going to have to put himself on the line and go up onstage and sing these vocals.” Bottum’s openness about his sexuality didn’t exactly open the floodgates for other heavy metal rockers to come out. “You’d think there’d be a lot more homosexuality in metal with all the dressing up,” he told The Advocate in 1999. By then he had left Faith No More — and metal — to form the indie boy/girl group Imperial Teen. Since 2005, Bottum has written scores for more than a dozen movies and television shows.