Box Turtle Bulletin

Today In History, 1982: Michael Hardwick Arrested

Michael Hardwick

It all started in July, when Michael Hardwick threw a beer bottle into a trash can outside of the Cove, an Atlanta gay bar where he worked. Atlanta police officer Keith Torick, who had been subject to numerous citizen complaints for his abusive and legally-questionable tactics, cited Hardwick for public drinking. That kicked off a long comedy of errors, beginning with Torick’s writing the wrong date on which Hardwick was to appear in court. When Hardwick failed to appear because of the error, Torick got a warrant for Hardwick’s arrest. Soon after, Hardwick went the courthouse, paid the $50 fine (which should have invalidated the warrant), and thought it was all taken care of. But for some reason, his payment wasn’t recorded correctly, and on August 3, that same Officer Torick showed up at Hardwick’s apartment at the highly unusual hour of 3:00 a.m. Torick entered the apartment (accounts differ on how he got in), and discovered Hardwick and another man engaged in oral sex, an act which Georgia’s sodomy law defined as a felony punishable with “imprisonment for not less than one nor more than 20 years.” Torick announced that the two were under arrest. Hardwick shot back, “What are you doing in my bedroom?”

The arrest was humiliating for the two men. Hardwick recalled that when the police officer brought them to the police station, he loudly made sure everyone there knew that he had arrested them for “cocksucking,” and that they should be able to find plenty of what they were looking for in Atlanta’s city jails. Hardwick posted bail within the hour, but was detained for twelve more hours near other criminals who had been told why he was there. Hardwick had never fought for gay rights before, but that moment changed him. “I realized that if there was anything I could do, even if it was just laying the foundation to change this horrendous law, that I would feel pretty bad about myself if I just walked away from it.”

Georgia Attorney General Michael J. Bowers

After the local district attorney decided not to press charges, Hardwick decided to sue Georgia’s Attorney General Michael J. Bowers in federal court to overturn the state’s sodomy law. The ACLU agreed to take the case on Hardwick’s behalf. The case ultimately made it to the Supreme Court which, in a surprising move, overturned an 11th Circuit Court of Appeals decision and upheld Georgia’s sodomy law (Jun 30). Surprising because the Court had built a solid case history upholding the rights to privacy for heterosexuals to engage in private, non-procreative, non-marital sexual behavior in the privacy of their bedrooms — under exactly the same terms as Hardwick’s case. But for gay people, that same right to privacy simply vanished. It wouldn’t be until 2003, when the Supreme Court would finally admit that Bowers v. Hardwick “was not correct when it was decided, and it is not correct today” when it overturned sodomy laws nationwide in Lawrence v. Texas.

In 1998, Bowers resigned as Attorney General and ran for Governor. His race tanked after it emerged that the defender of the state’s morals had engaged in a decade-long affair in violation of Georgia’s similarly archaic adultery law. That same year, the Georgia Supreme Court declared the state’s sodomy law unconstitutional, because it infringed on a heterosexual man’s rights to privacy (Nov 23).

Bowers later acknowledged only one regret in the case that bears his name: that his name didn’t appear second “because then it wouldn’t look like I’m the homosexual.” Hardwick died in 1991 in Gainesville, Florida, reportedly from complications from AIDS.

[Additional sources: William Eskridge, Jr. Dishonorable Passions: Sodomy Laws in America, 1861-2003 (New York: Viking, 2008): 231-233.

Joyce Murdoch and Deb Price. Courting Justice: Gay Men and Lesbians v. the Supreme Court (New York: Basic Books, 2001). 277-309.]

Today’s Agenda Is Brought To You By…

From The Advocate, July 12, 1979, page 12.

It’s the end of an era. The old gay.com chat rooms are no more. According to this FAQ page, the chat rooms shut down yesterday as gay.com fell under new ownership.

Q: What happened to the website?
A: As of August 1, 2016, Gay.com is under new management.

Q: Will the website come back?
A: The dating website as you know it, will not be coming back.
Q: What is replacing the website?

A: The new owners of Gay.com are committed to bringing you new and innovative dating and connection options. The new site will be available on August 1, 2016.

Q: Will the chat rooms also disappear?
A: Yes, the chatrooms will disappear.

Q: What will happen to all my profile information (pics, story, chats, friends, etc)?
A: All the personal information you provided in your profile, including pictures and stories, will be permanently deleted.

Q: Can I retrieve any of my profile information after August 1, 2016?
A: Unfortunately, you will not able to retrieve any of your old information after that date.

…Q: Will the app also be discontinued?
A: Yes, the current version of the app will also be discontinued.

Q: I am a premium member and I purchased my account via the website, will I get a refund?
A: Yes, if you purchased your account on the website please use the request form below to receive your prorated refund.;

Chris and I met via the Tucson chat room on gay.com. That was fourteen years ago. To be honest, I didn’t know the chat rooms still existed. And who knew they had an app, let along that anyone was still paying for it. The new gay.com looks like online cam site, with a dating link that redirects to men.date. In other words, R.I.P.

Today In History, 1913: (How) Should Homosexuals Be Treated?

Doubted prostate massages would cure homosexuality.

Columbia University’s Abraham A. Brill, as the English translator of Sigmund Freud’s writings, had singlehandedly introduced Americans to Freud’s teachings and became known as the father of American psychoanalysis. The August 2, 1913 edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association published a talk that Brill gave at the AMA’s annual convention in Minneapolis in June, exploring the question of how homosexuals can be “treated” to ameliorate their condition. He began his talk by discussing how his encounters with homosexuals shaped his understanding of them:

Of the abnormal sexual manifestations that one encounters none, perhaps, is so enigmatical and to the average person so abhorrent as homosexuality. I have discussed this subject with many broad-minded, intelligent professional men and laymen and have been surprised to hear how utterly disgusted they become at the very mention of the name and how little they understand the whole problem. Yet I must confess that only a few years ago I entertained similar feelings and opinions regarding this subject. I can well recall my first scientific encounter with the problem. Ten years ago, when I met a homosexual who was a patient in the Central Islip State Hospital. Since then I have devoted a great deal of time to the study of this complicated phenomenon, and it is therefore no wonder that my ideas have undergone a marked change. Tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner, I have met and studied a large number of homosexuals and have been convinced that a great injustice is done to a large class of human beings, most of whom are far from being the degenerates they are commonly believed to be.

After laying out what was then considered to be the most advanced medical and psychiatric knowledge about homosexuality, he then described physicians who were offering quack advice on how to treat homosexuality:

…I can never comprehend why physicians invariably resort to bladder washing and rectal massage when they are consulted by homosexuals, unless it be to kill the homosexual cells in the prostateso that their place may be taken by heterosexual cells, as one physician expressed himself when one of my patients asked him how massage of the prostate would cure his inversion. It is an unfortunate fact that such ridiculous ideas are often heard in the discussion of psychosexual disturbances. Only a few months ago a patient told me that he was told by two physicians that his hope for a cure lay in castration.

Castration may cure homosexuality — and all other sexuality with it — but quite a number of gay men will tell you that prostate massages would have little curative effect. Brill added, “Investigators agree that homosexuality is no sign of mental or physical degeneration.” He agreed with those views, but he described three cases in which he claimed to have “cured” homosexuals anyway, after only six to ten months of psychoanalysis. But in the discussion that followed, Dr. D’Orsay Hecht of Chicago noted the incongruity:

Dr. D’Orsay Hecht: Why fix what’s not broken?

I was also impressed with the effort of Dr. Brill to correct homosexuality by decrying it. But if in the eye of the specialist homosexuality is but a contravention, socially speaking, and if it has just as much right to a hearing from the point of view of a sexual act as has heterosexuality, I really cannot see why the homosexual should care to be delivered from his homosexuality, except that he feels disgraced by it. Then again, a large number of homosexuals are in no way abhorrent of themselves in respect to their natures; they seem to be perfectly happy and perfectly well adjusted, probably in a restricted sense, and these patients probably are not worth while treating as Dr. Brill treats them. If we accept homosexuality as a condition which has as much right to exist as heterosexuality, why should we address ourselves to the duty of treating it?

Brill chose not to answer the question, electing instead to focus his rebuttal to other questions raised during the session.

[Source: A.A. Brill. “The conception of homosexuality.” Journal of the American Medical Association 61, no. 5 (August 2, 1913): 335-340.]

Today In History, 1988: Reagan Bans AIDS Discrimination For Federal Employees

Acting on a recommendation from a 13-member President’s Commission On the HIV Epidemic, President Ronald Reagan ordered a ban on discrimination against federal workers with AIDS. His actions however drew sharp criticism from AIDS activists for not acting on many of the other recommendations from his commission. Another of those recommendations included federal legislation to protect HIV-positive workers outside of the federal government. The President instead urged a voluntary approach and asked “businesses, unions and schools to examine and consider adopting” similar policies. Acting on a few other recommendations, Reagan also ordered the FDA to notify those who received blood transfusions to advise them to take an HIV test, and promised to help accelerate the development of AIDS medications. As for the rest of the Commission’s 500 recommendations, Reagan ordered another round of studies, which effectively kicked the can further to whoever would win the 1988 elections. Meanwhile, Vice President George Bush, who was running for President, endorsed the commission’s recommendations which included a spending increase of $3.1 billion to combat the disease.

Dr. Frank Lilly, the commission’s only openly gay member (Jul 23), criticized Reagan’s limited action. “We’ve got a blueprint for a national policy on AIDS,” he said. “It’s a piece of whole cloth. You can’t pick and choose your own menu from it.” Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), who had led the charge in Congress to increase the federal government’s response to the epidemic, accused Reagan of stalling: “This administration has done its best to avoid making even a single helpful AIDS decision in the eight years of the Reagan presidency,” he said. “They handpick a commission, and then don`t even have the courage to accept its recommendations… What we need is leadership, and while Dr. (Surgeon General C. Everett) Koop and (HIV Commission chairman) Adm. (James) Watkins have given that, once again the President is hiding.”

Born On This Day, 1845: Lord Ronald Gower

Saturated in Urningthum. Portrait of Lord Ronald Gower (1897) by Henry Scott Tuke (Jun 12)

(d. 1916) Professionally, he was a sculptor and politician, creator of the statue of Shakespeare and four of his characters which stands in Stratford-upon-Avon, and Liberal member of Parliament from 1867-1874. Personally, well, he never married, for reasons that were obvious to everyone who knew him. His friend, Oscar Wilde (Oct 16), used Gower as the model for the hedonistic esthete, Lord Henry Wotton, in The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Gower’s statue of Hamlet in Stratford-upon-Avon.

Gower shared Wotton’s (and Wilde’s) enthusiasm for the Esthetic movement, whose rallying cry was “art for art’s sake,” reflecting the belief that beauty itself was the only worthwhile guiding principle. Everything about Gower reflected those beliefs: his friends, his decorative tastes, his sculptural projects and his clothing, although his reputation as a dandy did little to impress Henry James (Apr 15) who deemed him “not so handsome as his name.” John Addington Symonds (Oct 5) said Gower “saturates one’s spirit in Urningthum (homosexuality) of the rankest most diabolical kind.” Gower’s most significant lover was the handsome young journalist Frank Hird, whom Gower adopted as his son, leading Wilde to quip, “Gower may be seen, but not Hird.” The happy couple remained together until Gower died in 1916 at the age of 70.

Born On This Day, 1924: James Baldwin

More fully American in Paris.

(d. 1987) He was born to poverty in Harlem, the son of a Pentecostal preacher and a mother with, as he put it, “the exasperating and mysterious habit of having babies.” As he grew older, his father groomed him for the family business of saving souls, but when Baldwin turned seventeen, he left the business and his home and journeyed to an entirely different world in the Village. He began writing book reviews for the New York Times, focusing on books about “the Negro problem, which the color of my skin made me automatically an expert.” Some of his essays led to a few fellowships which allowed him to leave New York for France, where he stayed for the next six years and would spend the better part of his life.

While in Europe, Baldwin learned two surprising things: 1) that he was never before more thoroughly an American as he was the moment he landed on French soil, and 2) “I was forced to admit something I had always hidden from myself, which the American Negro has had to hide from himself as the price of his public progress; that I hated and feared white people.” And from working through those two issues, he came to a profound realization: “I imagine that one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, that they will be forced to deal with pain.” He also worked through his ambivalence of what it was to be an American. “I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”

Baldwin’s first novel, 1953’s semi-autobiographical Go Tell It on the Mountain, was written during his first sojourn to France and became an instant American classic. His first collection of essays, Notes of a Native Son came out two years later. Despite his success, his publisher turned down his third novel, Giovanni’s Room. The problem was that Baldwin, this time, had tried to break two barriers. The first was that Baldwin’s characters were all white, but  Baldwin was an established Negro writer. This book, they feared, would alienate his audience and ruin his career.

Of course, Giovanni’s Room broke a second barrier; the two main protagonists were gay lovers. And yet the themes were similar to those confronted in Baldwin’s two earlier works. Just as Baldwin had to escape New York so he could work out the alienation he felt for the land that he loved, the American “David” in Giovanni’s Room had also found himself in Paris, torn between the expectations of marriage to his fiancé and the love that he felt for his Italian lover. Other novels — 1962’s Another Country and 1968’s Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone — also dealt unflinchingly with gay and bisexual themes. In an essay that was included in the 1961 collection Nobody Knows My Name, he tackled the argument that homosexuality was somehow unnatural:

…To ask whether or not homosexuality is natural is really like asking whether or not it was natural for Socrates to swallow hemlock, whether or not it was natural for St. Paul to suffer for the Gospel, whether or not it was natural for the Germans to send upwards of six million people to an extremely twentieth-century death. It does not seem to me that nature helps us very much when we need illumination in human affairs. I am certainly convinced that it is one of the greatest impulses of mankind to arrive at something higher than a natural state. How to be natural does not seem to me to be a problem — quite the contrary. The greatest problem is how to be — in the best sense of that kaleidoscopic word — a man.

Today’s Agenda Is Brought To You By…

Emphasis Mine

The following letter to the editor appeared in the Milwaukee gay newspaper GPU News:

Dear G.P.U. NEWS:

Thank you very much for sending me copies of the October G.P.U. NEWS carrying my article.

I note in another article that in Milwaukee you have vice squad policemen who sometimes visit gay bars. I would suggest that if such policemen are identified by any patron that they be publicly pointed out to the other patrons. I know that if any of our D.C. plainclothesmen ever came into our bars (they don’t), I’d get up on a chair or a table and make a public announcement, identifying him as a policeman and warning everyone to shun him as they would the plague — or as the human vermin that he is. A systematic operation of this kind would mean that any particular plainclothesman could make, at most, his “maiden” arrest — his first. After that, he would be identified as soon as he walked into a bar and his usefulness would be ended. Give it some thought.

Keep me informed on events in Milwaukee and my greetings to those who remember me.

Cordially,
Franklin E. Kameny

[Source: Letter to the Editor. G.P.U. News (November 1972): 5. Available online here.]

Today In History, 1961: First Meeting To Discuss Organizing a New Kind of Gay Rights Organization

It was against the law to be a gay government employee. If you worked for the federal government and they even so much as suspected you to be gay, you were out of a job. Most of those who were fired or forced to resign simply disappeared. But when the Army map service fired Frank Kameny (Dec 20), he fought back, just as you might expect a World War II veteran who saw action in the Battle of the Bulge would do. He appealed his firing though the Civil Service, and when he exhausted that channel, he sued the government. He lost the suit and its appeal. When his lawyers told him the case was hopeless and they wouldn’t go any further, Kameny taught himself how to file his own petition to the U.S. Supreme Court. His petition shows his combative nature; he called the government’s ban on employing gay people a “stench in the nostrils of decent people, an offense against morality, an abandonment of reason, an affront to human dignity, an improper restraint upon proper freedom and liberty, a disgrace to any civilized society, and a violation of all that this nation stands for.” The Supreme Court denied his petition without comment (as was customary).

Somewhere along the way, Kameny became not just some guy fighting to get his job back, but a fully assertive gay rights activist, the likes of whom no one had seen before. In 1960, Kameny met Jack Nichols (Mar 16), and the two decided to start a grassroots movement to advance the civil rights of gay people. They contacted leaders of the Mattachine Society of New York, who gave them advice on how to set up a group in D.C. along with a list of potential members living in the area. As was customary at the time, almost all of the names on the list were aliases, including one particular alias for a police sergeant from the D.C. Police Department’s Morals Division.

On August 1, 1961, just five months after the Supreme Court rejection, Kameny and Nichols called a meeting at the Hay-Adams Hotel in Washington, D.C. Before the meeting got under way, one of the attendees who worked on Capitol Hill whispered to Kameny, “That guy over there is a vice cop.” Kameny noticed that “that guy,” Sergeant Louis Fouchette, had a gun and holster under his suit jacket. Kameny walked over to Fouchette and announced, “I know who you are.” His cover blown, Fouchette got up and left before he was able to glean much information about this new group. Nevertheless, he filed a report with the department, and the Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C. was already on the government’s radar before it was officially launched.

Fouchette’s presence was a chilling reminder of just how much work still lay ahead. In subsequent planning meetings before the group’s official launch, the they decided to require everyone in the group except Kameny to adopt an alias. This way, if the police or FBI obtained a membership list or meeting minutes, members who were government employees would escape exposure and avoid losing their jobs. Kameny was exempt from this requirement because he had already lost his job and was blacklisted from further employment. Besides, once you put your name on a Supreme Court writ, you’re about as out as you could possibly be.

Aliases aside, Kameny was determined that the new group would be nothing like anything that had been established before. Until now, homophile groups had mostly limited their activities to hosting discussion groups, often featuring straight “experts” to explain to homosexuals the “problems” of homosexuality. Homophobic messages were so prevalent in society and so thoroughly internalized by many leaders in the homophile movement, that the very idea that gay people might be advocates for themselves was denounced as crazy, radical, and dangerous. The thinking went this way: if we could educate straight people, with straight “experts” being the face of that educational effort (no matter what implicit prejudices those “experts” themselves may hold), then a more educated public would become a less prejudiced public.

Kameny rejected that ideal. He saw the gay community’s situation in the 1960s as similar to that of the African-American community in the 1920s. He had studied the civil rights movement closely — for example, he often cited the Supreme Court decision in Alabama v. NAACP as justification for not turning over membership lists to government authorities — and he saw the need for new kind of organization using direct action to advance the cause of civil rights for gay people. His new organization would be “what the NCAAP is to the Negro.” As he explained to New York activist Randy Wicker two years later:

For us, education is not really what we are seeking to do. As the Negro found out, simple presentation fo truth does not eliminate prejudice. It never has. That is what education is. We are seeking to eliminate prejudice. … We are NOT and educational organization; we are a civil liberties organization. What we are engaged in never was education, per se, and is … rapidly becoming politics.

[Additional Sources: Lillian Faderman. The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015): 132-133.

Michael G. Long (ed.) Gay Is Good: The Life and Letters of Gay Rights Pioneer Franklin Kameny (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2014): 20-21.]

Today In History, 1965: Washington Post Reveals Civil Service Offering Disability Retirement for “Alcoholics and Homosexuals”

Jerry Kluttz, writing for the Washington Post’s “Federal Diary” column, revealed that more than fifty alcoholic federal employees, who would have normally been fired, were instead placed on retirement “for physical disability” over the past year, Kluttz described this as “a more liberal approach to their problems.” He noted that the disability program was also available for gay employees:

It is also possible for homosexuals to be given disability retirements; not because they are sex deviates but in spite of it. Their disabilities must qualify them for retirement and the disabilities may or may not have had some connection with or contributed to their sex behavior.

The longtime Government policy to fire overt homosexuals remains unchanged under the policy that their conduct tends to discredit the Federal service. Known homosexuals would probably be ousted before the could be retired on either physical or mental disabilities.

Fired employees, however, have the year following their dismissal to file for disability retirement, and several sex deviates have taken advantage of this provision.

Kluttz didn’t have a breakdown on the number of gay people who filed for disability retirement, but overall more than 17,000 employees out of 50,000 who were retired in the previous year were ruled disabled. The civil service had previously ruled “unconventional sex behavior” as willful misconduct, and were thus ineligible for disability retirements under federal law. But with the commission’s decision to extend disability retirement benefits for those suffering from mental illnesses, gay employees were increasingly falling under that category in accordance with the APA’s classification of homosexuality as a mental illness.

[Source: Jerry Kluttz. “The Federal Diary: Disability Retiring Given Alcoholics and Homosexuals.” The Washington Post (August 1, 1965): B1.]

Today In History, 1983: Gay Activists and People With AIDS Attack Slow Federal Response Before House Subcommittee

Angered over the Reagan Administration’s lack of a coherent response to the AIDS crisis more than two years after health officials first noticed the emerging epidemic (Jun 5), gay activists and people with AIDS converged on the Capitol to testify before the House Government Operations subcommittee to demand a substantial increase in government efforts to combat AIDS. Activists demanded more money be allocated to combat the crisis, but they also warned that money alone wouldn’t be enough.

Stanley Matek

“It must be acknowledged that AIDS-related efforts in all quarters of our system thus far have been ad hoc, largely expedient, and gravely incomplete,” said Stanley Matek, an openly gay past president of the American Public Health Association. “These inadequacies stem … clearly and almost completely from a lack of resources. It is clear … that the Administration’s marching orders to [National Institutes for Health and federal Centers for Disease Control] program directors is unequivocal: ‘Don’t ask for money; make us look as good as you can with what you’ve got’.” Matek urged that a commission be created and charged with developing a master plan for AIDS research, budget requirements, and recommendations for prioritized funding.

Activists complained of bureaucratic red tape, infighting, inadequate funding, and a lax response from the Reagan Administration for preventing an effective efforts to combat the epidemic from getting off the ground. Marcus Conant, a physician at the University of California-San Francisco, complained, “If the Jonas Salk of this epidemic were to appear today with a proposal that all of us thought worthy, it would take him 18 months to two years to buy his first test tube.” Steve Endean, of the Gay Rights National Lobby found the government’s response a “cruel joke.” He noted that that the National Institutes of Health had only spent $12 million on AIDS research to date, and said, “Whether the reason — or excuse — is the inherent bureaucratic delays in responding to public health emergencies or another example of a far too common institutional homophobia by the federal government, the response to date by the federal government has been inexcusable. National Gay Task Force executive director Virginia Appuzzo blasted the Administration for forcing the CDC “to beg, borrow, and steal from other vital programs to support their work on AIDS.” In contrast, she said, AIDS service organizations within the gay community had already budgeted $2.5 million for 1983 and another $6.8 million for 1984.

Former NGTF director Bruce Voeller said it was “imperative” to “develop a comprehensive master plan and to convene a major council of advisors to review and comment upon the plan. … In the absence of the federal leadership so badly needed in the form of such a master plan and its correlated budgets, we have seen more than two years of fragmented and ill coordinated research conducted on AIDS”

Mel Rosen, of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, blasted government agencies for not working to help people with AIDS and forcing gay groups like GMHC to develop their own social service capabilities. “Most of these services would have been automatic for any terminally iII patient,” he said. “In the cases of the AIDS patients those services were not forthcoming. Fear of the diseases, fear of death, fear of disenfranchised minorities all added to the lack of services by private and government agencies.”

“I sit before you a very changed man from a year ago,” Rosen continued. “I have discovered that medicine, research, and the so-called safeguards we have in place to
warn us about pending disasters are political and do not work when disenfranchised minorities are involved. When toxic shock and Legionnaire’s disease first came on the scene there was an immediate response by government and press. Why did hundreds of people have to die before anyone moved in this case?”

Michael Callen of New York City, NY, Roger Lyon of San Francisco, and Anthony Ferrara of Washington, D.C.

The testimony by gay and lesbian leaders were reinforced by three people with AIDS who testified before the subcommittee. Roger Lyon of San Francisco told the panel, “I came here today in the hope that my epitaph would not read that I died of red tape.” All three testified about the importance of gay groups that formed to help take care of those with AIDS, and urged the government to work directly with those groups. “For example,” said Anthony Ferrera of Washington, D.C., “the doctors and nurses at NIH are very compassionate and supportive. But they’re not gay. They don’t understand the special psychological needs of gay people.” He also was concerned that some institutions appeared to be hindering the efforts of gay groups to work with people with AIDS.

Subcommittee Republicans aggressively attacked the anti-Reagan Administration testimonies of gay leaders and people with AIDS, although, for the most part, they were far more deferential toward the men with AIDS. Except for Rep. Larry Craig (R-ID). He didn’t defer to anyone. He immediately linked AIDS to the “homosexual lifestyle” and asked whether there had been “an exodus” from the gay community because of AIDS.

Ferrara cut him off: “It’s impossible to leave the gay community,” he said. Lyon chimed in. “What we’re finding in the gay community is a very strong bonding, a coming together,” said Lyon. “I think AIDS has strengthened the gay community.” Michael Callen from New York City added: “Many of us moved to the cities to escape the prejudice we had experienced as gay and lesbian people. Where are we going
to go?”

This was the second time a congressional committee held hearings on the AIDS crisis. The first hearing was conducted by Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) in Los Angeles three months earlier (Apr 13). It would take another four years before the Reagan Administration would finally acknowledge the demands of AIDS activists and convene a presidential commission to devise a national strategy for AIDS (Jul 23).

[Sources: Steve Martz. “Gay leaders Rap Federal AIDS Response At Hearing.” Washington Blade (August 5, 1983): 1, 21.

Steve Martz. “I Don’t Want To Die of Red Tape.” Washington Blade (August 5, 1983): 1, 21.

“Excerpts from AIDS Hearing testimony.” Washington Blade (August 5, 1983): 19-20.]

Today In History, 1996: Rep. Jim Kolbe Comes Out

20 YEARS AGO: On July 12, 342 Congressional representatives rushed to pass the so-called Defense of Marriage Act into law. The three openly gay representatives, Steve Gunderson (R-WI), Barney Frank (D-MA), and Gerry Studds (D-MA) spoke passionately against the bill, making their status as gay men relevant to the debate. Reps. Jim Kolbe (R-AZ) and Mark Foley (R-FL), who were closeted, quietly voted for the bill. Almost immediately after the vote, San Fransisco activist Michael Petrelis began an email campaign to urge other activists, journalists and publications to reveal the two congressmen’s secrets. The Advocate had a policy against outing public officials, but since they were following up prior reports and rumors from other media, they felt that if those reports could be independently verified through three different sources, the next step would be to approach the lawmakers and ask if they were gay. They were verified, and The Advocate asked Kolbe and Foley to explain their votes and verify the truth about their sexual orientation. The Advocate continued:

Both men objected to the latter line of questioning. “Even members of Congress should be allowed to have personal lives,” Kolbe, 54, said in a telephone interview. “The issue of my sexuality has nothing to do with the votes I cast in Congress or my work for the constituents of Arizona’s fifth congressional district.” Upon reflection, however, Kolbe decided to come out soon after talking to The Advocate, saying the magazine’s questioning of him was a chief factor. Foley, in written answers to The Advocate‘s questions, stated his belief that “a lawmaker’s sexual orientation is…irrelevant.”

Kolbe decided to beat The Advocate to the punch. (Foley wouldn’t come out until 2006, when he resigned after sexually suggestive instant messages between him and a 16-year-old page came to light.) On August 1, Kolbe revealed that he was indeed gay. “That I am a gay person has never affected the way that I legislate,” he said in a statement. “The fact that I am gay has never, nor will it ever, change my commitment to represent all the people of Arizona’s Fifth District,” which included most of Tucson and the southeastern corner of the state. Rep. Frank came to Kolbe’s defense. “In general, Kolbe has voted against bigotry and discrimination,” he said, “so his overall record is intellectually honest on this issue.” Petrellis reacted positively to the outing as well. “I think it’s a terrific development that we now have an equal number of openly gay G.O.P. members of Congress.”

Kolbe was reelected to his seat in 1998, and in 2000, he became the first openly gay person to address the Republican National Convention. His speech was about free trade and he didn’t come within ten miles of addressing gay rights, but the Texas delegation protested by bowing their heads, purportedly in prayer. Ohio anti-gay activist Phil Burress called for Kolbe’s arrest on sodomy charges. Meanwhile, Kolbe continued to defend his vote for DOMA on states rights grounds. “My vote on the Defense of Marriage Act was cast because of my view that states should be allowed to make that decision, about whether or not they would recognize gay marriages,” he said. “Certainly, I believe that states should have the right, as Vermont did, to provide for protections for such unions.” He voted against the Federal Marriage Amendment in 2004 and 2006. By the time he was wrapping up his congressional service in 2006, Kolbe telling local audiences in Tucson that “in a few years,” same-sex marriage would be normal and uncontroversial. He retired from Congress in 2007.

Today In History, 2003: Ex-Gay Leader Experiences “Moral Fall”

Not gay: Michael Johnston and his mother in a 1998 television commercial.

Michael Johnston was literally the poster boy of the ex-gay movement. Five years earlier, he was one of the stars of a high profile national print and television ad campaign claiming that gays could change their sexual orientation (Jul 13). Johnston, who is HIV-positive, appeared with his mother in a controversial print ad under the headline “From innocence to AIDS.” He and his mother also appeared in a television commercial, in which she said, “My son Michael found out the truth — he could walk away from homosexuality. But he found out too late — he has AIDS.” Johnston founded Kerusso Ministries in Newport News, Virginia, started a program called the National Coming Out of Homosexuality Day, and he was featured in the widely-distributed ex-gay propaganda video, It’s Not Gay.

But all that ended when it was revealed that while Johnston was the public face of the ex-gay movement, he was privately engaging in anonymous sex with men without disclosing his HIV status. One man said that he had met Johnston, who called himself Sean, in a gay chat room in 2001 and had a six month relationship with him. “What we did was unsafe,” the man said, “I brought it up all the time, but [Johnston] didn’t seem to think it mattered. He would have these parties, get a hotel room, get online and invite tons of people — he just wouldn’t care.” When the story came to light, Johnston quickly shuttered his ministry and fled to Pure Life Ministries, an ex-gay residential program in rural Kentucky. He soon became director of Donor and Media Relations and became part of Pure Life’s speaker’s team. Meanwhile, his propaganda video is still for sale at the American Family Association.

Today In History, 2013: Marriage Equality Begins in Minnesota and Rhode Island

Margaret Miles and Cathy ten Broeke were the first to marry in Minneapolis.

After successful legislative campaigns, Minnesota and Rhode Island became the twelth and thirteen states, (in addition to the the District of Columbia), to provide marriage equality for its residents. Marriage equality went into effect in both states effective midnight on the morning of August 1.

In Minnesota, couples lined up to marry in Minneapolis, St. Paul and elsewhere across the state at the stroke of midnight. Three of those lucky couples received free Betty Crocker wedding cakes from General Mills, which is based in the Minneapolis suburb of Golden Valley.

Rep. Frank Ferri, lead sponsor of the marriage equality bill in the Rhode Island House, marries his partner Tony Caparco.

Rhode Island didn’t see quite the rush of couples looking to  marry right away as Minnesota did. With the rest of the northeastern United States and Canada having offered same-sex marriages for a number of years, there were already thousands of legally married same-sex couples residing in the Ocean State. So when their local clerks offices started opening between 8:00 and 8:30 a.m., couples arrived at a much more leisurely pace. Some got marriage licenses so they could marry at a later date, some held wedding ceremonies later that day, and others filled out the paperwork to convert their civil unions into marriages.

Born On This Day, 1930: Lionel Bart

(d. 1999) His professional songwriting career began in the 1950s when he began churning out pop hits for several British singers. But he is best known as the author for the book, music and lyrics for the smash 1960 London musical Oliver!, based on the Charles Dickens novel. When the show opened on Broadway two years later, it earned him a Tony for Best Original Score. In 1963, he wrote the theme song for the the James Bond film From Russia With Love. Bart’s style — and lifestyle — came to epitomize early 1960s Britain: palling around with Noel Coward, Brian Epstein, Judy Garland, Shirley Bassey, and even Princess Margaret, who called him a “silly bugger” for squandering his money.

Bart continued writing for the West End, scoring respectable successes with Blitz! (1962) and Maggie May (1964), but Twang! (1965) was a horrible flop, and La Strada (1960) closed on Broadway after only one performance. By then, he has broke and in serious decline due to alcoholism and LSD use. By 1972, he was bankrupt and slid further into drinking and depression. He sobered up in the early 1990s, but between his diabetes and nearly-destroyed liver, his health was permanently damaged. He died in 1999 after a long battle with cancer.