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News and commentary about the anti-gay lobby“Now you must raise your children up in a world where that union of man and box turtle is on the same legal footing as man and wife…”
News and commentary about the anti-gay lobbyPosts Tagged As: Daily Agenda
April 4th, 2013
TODAY’S AGENDA:
Events This Weekend: Spring Diversity, Eureka Springs, AR; AIDS Walk, New Haven, CT; Dina SHore Weekend, Palm Springs, CA; Phoenix Pride, Phoenix, AZ; Gay Snow Happening, Solden, Austria.
TODAY IN HISTORY:
Anita Bryant Advocates Imprisoning Gays For 20 Years: 1978. Newspapers across the country got a bit of a tease from Playboy, which released a few tantalizing tidbits from an interview with anti-gay activist Anita Bryant that would appear in the May 1978 edition. In a small preview released to the wire services, Bryant was quoted as suggesting that sending gays to prison for 20 years “might make them think twice, especially the young ones. Any time you water down the law, it just makes it easier for immorality to be tolerated.” She went on: “Why make it easier for them? I think it only helps to condone it and make it easier for kids who wouldn’t be so concerned if it was a misdemeanor, whereas a felony might make them think twice, especially the younger ones.” When asked whether prison life might not be conducive to homosexuality, she answered, “They’ll have plenty of time to think. Just because prisons are corrupt and not doing the right thing in rehabilitation because they don’t have enough emphasis on spiritual emphasis doesn’t mean there should not be a strong punishment for that.”
TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Anthony Perkins: 1932. Best known for his role as the sexually-conflicted Norman Bates in the Alfred Hitchcock classic Psycho, Perkins’s own sexuality was the subject of rumors throughout his career. He shared a long-term relationship with fellow 1950s teen idol Tab Hunter (See Jul 11. Hunter discussed their time together in his 2005 memoir Tab Hunter Confidential) 
Graham Norton: 1963. When the Irish comic’s 1992 stand up comedy performance at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe as a tea-towel clad Mother Teresa, it caught the attention of Scottish Television, which, bizzarely, mistook him for the real Mother Teresa. Soon he was appearing on BBC radio, then as a stand-in late night talk show host for Britain’s Channel 5. He eventually took his openly-camp act to Channel 4 for his own weely talk show, So Graham Norton, then V Graham Norton. In 2004, he tried to take his show to America, with The Graham Norton Effect on Comedy Central, but the controversy over Janey Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” at the Super Bowl that year soured Norton on bringing his raunchy, innuendo-laden comedy to the U.S. He returned to Britain in 2005, and landed several gigs on BBC. In 2007, he returned to weekly late-night talk with The Graham Norton Show on BBC Two, and in 2009 his show moved to BBC One, where Series 13 begins tomorrow night with guests Tom Cruise, Olga Kurylenko, Gerard Butler and Paramore. North Americans can catch butchered versions of the show at impossibly odd times on the disasterously programmed BBC America, or on BBC Canada.
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April 3rd, 2013
TODAY’S AGENDA:
Events This Weekend: Spring Diversity, Eureka Springs, AR; AIDS Walk, New Haven, CT; Dina SHore Weekend, Palm Springs, CA; Phoenix Pride, Phoenix, AZ; Gay Snow Happening, Solden, Austria.
The justices of the Iowa Supreme Court who made history in the Midwest
TODAY IN HISTORY:
Iowa Supreme Court Declares Ban on Same-Sex Marriage Unconstitutional: 2009. In a unanimous ruling, the Iowa Supreme Court upheld a lower court ruling which held that the state’s marriage statute was unconstitutional. The Court concluded that:
We are firmly convinced the exclusion of gay and lesbian people from the institution of civil marriage does not substantially further any important governmental objective. The legislature has excluded a historically disfavored class of persons from a supremely important civil institution without a constitutionally sufficient justification. There is no material fact, genuinely in dispute, that can affect this determination.
Senate Majority Leader Mike Gronstal and House Speaker Pat Murphy issued a joint statement welcoming the court’s decision. Citing Iowa’s long tradition in being a leader in civil rights, they congratulated “the thousands of Iowans who now can express their love for each other and have it recognized by our laws.” Iowa’s same-sex couples began marrying on April 27.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Anne Lister: 1791. Her father was a veteran British soldier who fought with the Redcoats at the Battles of Lexington and Concord (he later wrote a book about it) during the American War for Independence. After the war, he married and became a wealthy country gentleman in Yorkshire. His eldest daughter, Anne, was brought up with all of the advantages education and erudician, the latter resulting in an intense interest in classical literature. In 1826, she inherited the family estate, Shibden Hall, and with it a steady income from the estate’s tenants. That modest wealth was enough to afford her a measure of independence and deference from those who might otherwise criticize her “masculine appearance.” She was sometimes referred to as “Gentleman Jack,” for her propensity to enter into business (she became engaged in the very male-dominated coal mining business) and recreational affairs (she was the first woman to climb Mont Perdy in the Pyrenees in 1830) that were not considered normal for a woman of her standing.
What’s more, private life was not considered normal for a woman of any standing. Lister had a long term relationship with Marianna Belcombe, which lasted lasting several years including a period of time when Belcombe was married. In 1832, Lister met and fell in love with a wealthy landowner Ann Walker, and the two of them would remain together for the rest of Lister’s short life. Their relationship was as close to a marriage as was possible, given the times. Lister died in 1840, at the age of 49, while traveling with Walker in Eastern Europe.
Lister left behind a 26-volume diary covering the years 1806 to 1840. Most of the diary covered various mundane topicc — the weather, social events, business concerns, her travels — but about a sixth of the diary was encrypted in a simple code. Those coded sections describe her lesbian nature and affairs. When a relative, John Lister, who was the last to inhabit Shibden Hall, decoded the diaries and discovered the contents, he was advised to burn them. He didn’t, but decided instead to hide them. A century later, Helena Whitbread published portions of the diaries in two
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April 2nd, 2013
TODAY’S AGENDA:
Uruguay Senate To Vote on Marriage Equality Bill: Montevideo, Uruguay. The Uruguay Senate today is expected to vote on a marriage equality bill, which passed overwhelmingly in the country’s lower house last December. The bill, which is backed by the ruling party, is expected to easily pass in the Senate despite increasing opposition from the nation’s Roman Catholic hierarchy. Bishop Jaime Fuentes of Minas denounced the legislation as “a move by the father of lies that seeks to confuse and deceive the children of God.” The bill nevertheless has been largely uncontroversial, with a majority of Uruguayans supporting it. Uruguay has provided civil unions to same-sex couples since 2008.
THIS MONTH IN HISTORY:
ONE Magazine Educates Readers on Legal Definition of Entrapment: 1954. Police entrapment was a very real concern for LGBT people everywhere, with many police departments being particularly aggressive in their pursuit of gay people. But the difficulty of proving entrapment made it an extremely rare defense, as an article from the April 1954 issue of ONE illustrates. The unsigned article,written by “ONE’s legal counsel” (possibly Eric Jubler, who would later successfully defend ONE in a landmark censorship case (see Jan 13)) begins with a brief overview of the relevant law, and then provides three specific examples to illustrate what does and does not constitute entrapment:
1 — The first situation is that where an officer offers to buy a prohibited article, and the defendant is willing to sell. This can arise in narcotics cases, liquor cases, or in prostitution. In these cases, it is no defense that the officer disguised his identity. Where the de-fendant is motivated by a desire for money, there is no entrapment by an officer who offers money.
2 — The second type of case involves more active activity on the part of the officer. He may secure the confidence of a thief and loan him a gun with which to commit a robbery; he may pretend to be an accomplice; he may take narcotics into a city and there-by attract narcotic peddlers anxious to buy. In these situations, the officer creates situations which make it easier for a criminal to commit an offense which he seeks an opportunity to commit. The idea for the offense has, however, originated with the defendant.
3 — In the third situation, the officer suggests the commission of the crime. He overcomes the defendant’s unwillingness by threats or appeals to sympathy, pity or friendship. In this situation, entrapment exists. (For example, in a famous case, a prostitute induced a man to live with her outside of wedlock. She had been hired to do so by police, who arrested the man for violation of a morals law. It was held the man had been entrapped.) But in this situation, the proof of the defendant’s reluctance must be clear and overwhelming. CASES ARE EXTREMELY RARE IN WHICH A CLAIM OF ENTRAPMENT IS SUCCESSFUL AS A DEFENSE.
In situations of homosexual life, we can apply the law as obtained from the above situations and lay down the following general rules, dependent in each case, of course, upon the particular facts:
It is obvious that, for instance, a homosexual who makes the acquaintance of a strange man, perhaps in a public place, and proposes to him the commission of an illegal act, cannot urge the defense of entrapment, even though the stranger was a vice-squadder “staked out” as a decoy to attract such defendants.
If, in the same situation, it was the vice-squadder who proposed the illegal act the same would be true. A MERE SOLICITATION BY A VICE SQUAD OFFICER DOES NOT CREATE ENTRAPMENT. These cases are similar to situation (2) above: the officer has merely created a situation in which a defendant can commit an act with more ease.
Only in the third situation can en-trapment truly be claimed: If the officer “picks up” the defendant, gains his acquaintance, proposes the act, and proceeds to overcome the defendant’s genuine reluctance and unwillingness by appeals to sympathy, pity. friendship, etc., entrapment exists, but IF, AND ONLY IF the defendant was in fact unwilling, and the officer’s appeals were such as to leave no doubt that he was the procuring party. To prove such a state of fact requires a strong degree of proof; obviously, the defendant is forced to take the stand in his own defense, and his version of the facts must be so strong and believable as to convince a judge or jury of its truth and validity.
This discussion by ONE was not only in the immediate interest of many of its readers, but it also came about as the result of direct experience of least one member of ONE’s founding staff members. Dale Jennings recounted in ONE’s very first issue on 1953 of his own narrow escape after having been arrested in a clear case of entrapment by the Los Angeles Police (see Jun 26). Jennings surprised everyone by publicly proclaiming his homosexuality in court while refusing to plead guilty to the charges. His case was finally dismissed, not because he was exonerated, but because the jury couldn’t agree on whether to believe his claims of entrapment.
[Source: Unsigned. “The law: A discussion of entrapment.” ONE 2, no. 4 (April 1954): 7-8.]
April 1st, 2013
TODAY IN HISTORY:
Canada Reduces Criminal Penalty for Sodomy: 1955. Canada enacted the first of a long series of consolidations of its federal statues, with a new amended Criminal Code going into effect on April 1, 1955, which replaced the Section 202 of the old Code:
“Everyone is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for life who commits buggery, either with a human being or with any living creature.”
with Section 147, which reduced the penalty from life imprisonment to fourteen years:
“Everyone who commits buggery or bestiality is guilty of an indictable offence and is liable to imprisonment for fourteen years.”
The Criminal Code would undergo another round of consolidation and modernization with the Criminal Amendement Act of 1968, which, when it was finally passed in 1969, resulted in the full decriminalization of homosexuality (see May 14).
First Openly Lesbian Candidate Wins Public Office: 1974. For most of the previous decade, politics was the lifeblood of The University of Michigan’s Ann Arbor campus. In 1964, President Lyndon B Johnson chose that progressive campus to unveil his Great Society proposals during the commencement ceremony. In 1965, the anti-war movement was born when UM faculty members and 3,000 students held the nation’s first faculty-led “teach-in” to protest the Vietnam war. By 1974, protests, demonstrations, sit-ins and teach-ins to support all sorts of counter-cultural causes — civil rights, peace, women’s liberation, marijuana decriminalization, and all sorts of other progressive and radical causes — became mundane events in Ann Arbor’s student life.
And so when Ann Arbor city elections came around in 1974, few eyebrows were raised when a local political party, the Human Rights Party (HRP), ran Kathy Kozachenko to represent the second ward surrounding the UM campus. Republicans, which until then had held a solid lock on city government, couldn’t find anyone to run in the second ward, leaving a lone Democratic candidate to run against Kozachenko. With Kozachenko running openly as a lesbian, it proved to be a tight race. After expressing fears that she might lose on election day, she ended up winning by just nine votes. “This is so goddamn great!” she told reporters. “Our victory cannot be attributed simply to gay people and the HRP ‘core’. I think people really understood the difference between actions and words.” Meanwhile, Kozachenko’s opponent, Mary Richman, gave what was perhaps the most unlikely concession speech in the history of American politics: “Apparently all the Republicans voted for Kathy.” In fact, Kozachenko may have been helped by a successful HRP-sponsored ballot initiative which proved popular with UM students: the so-called “dope ordinance” which reduced the fine for possession of marijuana to $5.
First Gay Couples Marry in Netherlands: 2001. In 1998, the Netherlands became the first non-Scandinavian country to institute registered partnerships (geregistreerd partnerschap). That law was written so that opposite-sex couples could also enter into registered partnerships, making it a viable alternative to marriage for straight people while, at the same time, being the only option available for gay couples. That changed in April 1, 2001, when the Netherlands became the first country in the world to grant marriage equality to same-sex couples. At the stroke of midnight, three couples — two male and one female — were pronounced legal spouses in ceremonies at Amsterdam City Hall.
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March 31st, 2013
Easter and her Easter Lilly, about 1925.
Easter Wishes: On April 10, 1898, which just happened to fall on Easter Sunday that year, Margaret Nash gave birth to a little girl. Her husband, Louis, wanted to name the infant Easter Lilly Nash, but Margaret, being an eminently sensible woman, had no intention of giving her daughter such a frivolous name. They compromised, and the infant who would become my great grandmother was named Easter Mary Nash. When I came along, I always knew her as “Easter” and not grandma because, she later informed me, she wasn’t nearly old enough to be a grandma. She was, I think, already seventy when she said that.
She was a remarkable woman, one who never let this small matter of being a woman get in her way. She was a working woman in the 1920’s and was an entrepreneur throughout the rest of her life — at a time when women simply didn’t do these things, and in Appalachian Ohio where this was doubly unusual. She hated being told that she couldn’t do something. More often than not, she’d take such a statement as a personal challenge and she’d go out of her way to prove the challenger wrong. She and her husband, Cecil, brewed beer and made bathtub gin during Prohibition, perhaps because the government said they couldn’t, but more likely because, well, you had to offer your guests something whenever they paid a call (although none was ever offered to her husband’s relatives: they were teetotalers.) When an aspiring writer in the neighborhood complained that he couldn’t get published, she got tired of his bellyaching and, on a dare, wrote a short story and got it published in a popular romance magazine. Later in life, she took up oil painting with passable success (I have a number of her paintings hanging in our home). The only challenge she didn’t meet is that she never learned to drive. That didn’t bother her — that was Cecil’s job — and besides, she was a great story-teller and she loved to regale her audience with the hilarious misadventures of her lone spin (literally) behind the wheel.
Easter (left) with a customer at her grocery store’s soda fountain, about 1955.
But that small failure didn’t slow her down. Easter took pride in being an independent and shrewd business woman. She operated shoe stores around town, and later she owned a grocery store and rented houses — all on her own, even though she was married to a perfectly dependable husband who was quite capable of supporting her. She was often told that women couldn’t do these things, and that married women with children shouldn’t. “Maybe your husband should look over these papers,” bankers and wholesalers would say, but she’d just remind them that she was the one taking care of business, not him. When she was building her grocery store, the building inspector came out to check on the stakes that the contractor had laid out to determine where the building would go, and declared that the stakes were too close to the street and needed to be set back another five feet. She argued with him for more than an hour, but he wouldn’t budge. She relented, the contractor moved the stakes back, and the inspector gave the okay and left. That night, she returned to the lot and moved the stakes forward five feet, and the building went up right where she wanted it in the first place.
You might be forgiven if you called her a feminist, but probably not by her. She hated labels, and she regarded feminism as silly and politics irrelevant. The only political statement I ever heard pass her lips was that she thought JFK was sexy. It’s not that she didn’t understand that a woman’s place was in the home; she just didn’t see how it applied to her. Her only interest was in the things that she wanted to do, and she was determined never to allow anyone to stand in her way. If you were to insist on pinning a label on her — and since she’s dead I think it’s probably safe to do so now — you could say that Easter was a post-feminist woman in a pre-feminist world.
Easter and me, Christmas, 1961.
Easter loved the age in which she lived: 1898 to 1990. I grew up just a few blocks from her house, and I’d often go over there and ask, “Easter, tell me about the olden days.” That would always get a laugh out of her since, like I said, she didn’t think of herself as particularly olden. But she’d tell me about her childhood and the many things she did and saw: the first time she lived in a house with electricity, the first time she saw a car or heard a phonograph. Her stories were as captivating to me as any movie. And she’d always end with the observation that she couldn’t have been born in a more fascinating time. “I’ve seen us go from the horse and buggy to the moon. No one will ever witness a greater span of progress than that.”
My Easter was very special to me. She’s been gone for almost twenty-three years and I can still hear the sound of her chuckle and the way she spoke, with that particular Appalachian accent that has all but died out with her generation. As I grow older, I appreciate and honor her more and more. I hope your Easter is just as precious.
TODAY’S AGENDA:
Events This Weekend: BEARcelona, Barcelona, Spain; White Party, Palm Springs, CA.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Richard Chamberlain: 1934. He first gained fame as the handsome young intern, Dr. Kildare, in the television series fo the same name in 1961, a role that lasted until the series ended in 1966. From there, he became involved in repertory theater and film roles which had a more literary bent: The Tree Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Music Lovers, and The Lady Carline Lamb (his 1974 appearance in The Towering Inferno being a notable departure.) He returned to television in the 1970s in several popular miniseries, including Centennial, ShÅgun, and The Thorn Birds as Father Ralph de Bricassart. He lived in Hawaii with his partner, Martin Rabbett, from 1976 to 2010; and it was during that time that he was outed by a French women’s magazine in 1989. While that outing didn’t really stick very well with the general public, it didn’t surprise many people when Chamberlain finally and officially came out in 2003 in his autobiography Shattered Love
Barney Frank: 1940. He represented Massachusetts’s 4th Congressional district from 1981 until his retirement in 2012, and he did so as an openly gay representative since 1987. When he came out to The Advocate that year, he became the first member of Congress to do so voluntarily. He recalled that when Rep. Stewart McKinney of Connecticut died of complications from AIDS (McKinney’s physician claimed that McKinney became infected from a blood transfusion, but many didn’t believe it.), there was “an unfortunate debate about ‘Was he or wasn’t he? Didn’t he or did he?’ I said to myself, I don’t want that to happen to me.” After coming out, Frank easily won re-election in 1988 and in just about every election since then.
He earned a reputation for being one of the House’s quickest wits, saying, for example, that he was unable to finish reading the Starr Report about President Bill Clinton’s relationship with Monica Lewinsky because it was “too much reading about heterosexual sex.” In 2006, Rep. John Ostettler (R-IN) accused Frank of pushing a “radical homosexual agenda.” Frank responded to that charge by point out, “I do not think that any self-respecting radical in history would have considered advocating people’s rights to get married, join the army, and earn a living as a terribly inspiring revolutionary platform.” He married his partner, Jim Ready, in July of 2012, making Frank the first gay-married Congressman in history.
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March 30th, 2013
TODAY’S AGENDA:
Events This Weekend: BEARcelona, Barcelona, Spain; AIDS Walk, Ft. Worth, TX; White Party, Palm Springs, CA; European Snow Pride, Tignes, France.
THIS MONTH IN HISTORY:
“Yes, I Am!”: 1958. It seems that much of gay history before the rise of the women’s movement in the 1960s is often centered on the experiences of gay men. It was men were being arrested and jailed, in numbers which far exceeded the experiences of lesbians, although lesbian bars were also targeted by police (see for example, Mar 8, Sep 8, Sep 21). We can all imagine what it was like to be a gay man fifty-five years ago thanks to the early homophile magazines ONE and The Mattachine Review. The latter was devoted almost exclusively to male concerns (although lesbians made an occasional appearance from time to time) while ONE, in its early days, mostly relegated women’s concerns to a segregated regular column called “The Feminine Viewpoint.”
In 1956, the Daughters of Bilitis began publishing The Ladder to provide women with a voice separate from men — and indeed, for much of the fifties, the gay men’s movement and the lesbian movement, such as they were, were mostly separate movements which only sometimes recognized the common cause between them. But thanks to The Ladder, we have, preserved like a time capsule, a collection of voices from, well, the feminine viewpoint. And so what was it like to be a lesbian in the 1950s? Well, an article that appeared in the March 1958 issue of The Ladder provides one illustration of how invisible lesbians often were — and often made themselves — in those year. The article was signed with the name of Sandra Pine, although that was probably a pen name. It was titled, simply, “Yes, I Am!”:
I wish it were possible for me to wr1te this on my letterhead, but my “world” would be too shocked if they were to learn their perfectly proper and “normal” appearing friend, business and professional member of their society were any different than she appears. And more shocked to know that she is secretly glad to be a Lesbian.
I’ve never consulted a psychiatrist (but many have with me) as I am not emotionally disturbed nor suffering from a guilt complex. I am perfectly healthy, have no need or use for drugs, cigarettes or alcohol. Although I move in a society that uses them with the rest of their problems, I’m not concerned with their use.
I’ve only had one “friend”. Fifteen years ago we “discovered” one another at a rather boring society tea and instantly we knew there was a tie that bound us. We’ve been true. There is nothing “cheap” about the deep love that we have shared. We are both very prominent women. There has never been the slightest finger of suspicion pointed at us. Our manners in public are such as not to attract any undue attention. We are both attractive, well groomed, fashionably dressed, completely feminine.
If occasionally our hands meet under the table when dining out it is with complete fulfillment and security. We have found what few individuals ever do – that is complete compatibility and understanding, without jealousy or distrust.
I am always secretly amused when some wise person says “I can tell one a mile away”. When my secretary, a clever young woman who has been with me for 10 years, said to me recently when she accidentally saw my copy of THE LADDER: “What do you want with that stuff – you’re no homosexual” I knew my mask had never slipped, and I was secretly proud of the fact. But I long f or the day when I could say “I am a Lesbian” with the same ease I say “I am a Republican”.
My friend and I do not and never have lived together. We have conventional families who never even guess we are “different”. We manage to have a day a week together. We meet at social affairs and quite often we weekend, or take a vacation somewhere, even Europe.
I would not change my way of life, even if I could. Of course, we all should come out in the open and proclaim our status, but the world is not quite ready for that. While I’m not afraid of men, mice, ‘ snakes or storms, I’m just not brave enough — yet — to say “Ye s, I am!”
As an answer to that odd, contradictory, and yet, given the times, understandable declaration of deeply closeted pride, The Ladder published another article the following July by Jule Moray, titled, “An Open Letter to Sandra Pine”:
I was touched by your article, “Yes, I Am” in the March edition of THE LADDER; touched, and a little terrified.
I see two well dressed women, perfeotly groomed, at whom the finger of suspicion has never pointed; their hats fashionably perched above m~sks that never slip. Two perfect ladies, completely feminine. Miss Pine, might I ask what are you being feminine for?Whom are you trying to deceive? Yourself, or the well dressed, well groomed, completely masculine men you meet every day? Or your conventional families, who trust you and would never guess? Is it not possible that these normal business and professional friends are as afraid of showing you that they know, as you are afraid of knowing they know? Let us by all means keep our personal lives as private as can be; but if we are lucky enough (and many are not) to have private lives why not let them be as full and satisfying as we can possibly make them? A hand touched beneath the table; one day in seven alone; the occasional week-end; even a trip to Europe in fifteen years -is that the best you can do for your love life, Miss Pine?
Would you lose your job, your mother’s love or your right to vote Republican if you let slip just a couple of small hairpins, took a flat with you friend (sic), and started to make up for all the time you two have lost? Who is going to worry? Not your secretary — you haven’t made a pass at her in ten years — we know that. Not those professional and business gentlemen — you’ve been giving them the red light all along. Who else is there? The ladies at your social gatherings — they’ll be only too thankful you’re not after their men. And at the very worst, if the whole town knows you’ve left home and are sharing with a roommate; is that going to rock anybody?
My friend and I have been together for twenty years; it took us eight years, owing to the war before we were able to live together. We’re not at all smart or well groomed, and I don’t honestly know if you’d say we are feminine or not. Probably in every plaoe we’ve ever lived everyone has known we are Lesbians. We rarely think about it, and we never worry about it. Certainly no one has ever hinted that our relationship is at all strange. Most of our friends are married and no one has ever refused to come to our house. We, in fact, think ourselves liked, sometimes well-liked, very rarely disliked.
Miss Pine, you are not afraid of men, mice, snakes or storms? All right; why don’t you take that flat? A comfortable one, serviced, you can afford it. Let yourselves go a bit over the decor, be bold, but cosy; and, before it’s too late, see to it that there’s only one bedroom with a full size double bed. You won’t, either of you be so well groomed in the future — but it will be worth it.
[Sources: Sandra Pine. “Yes, I Am!” The Ladder 2, no. 6 (March 1958): 12-13.
Jule Moray. “Open Letter to Sandra Pine.” The Ladder 2, no. 10 (July 1958): 16-17.]
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March 29th, 2013
TODAY’S AGENDA:
Events This Weekend: BEARcelona, Barcelona, Spain; AIDS Walk, Ft. Worth, TX; White Party, Palm Springs, CA; European Snow Pride, Tignes, France.
THIS MONTH IN HISTORY:
Inducing Hallucinations to “Cure” Homosexuality: 1962. Ever since Ivan Pavlov taught his dog to salivate whenever a bell was rung, Behavioral Therapists employed all sorts of adverse stilumi to produce a conditioned response in their patients which would represent a desired change in behavior: smoking cessation, giving up alcohol and other drugs, or stopping being gay — as though being gay was nothing more than behavior. And as far as Behavioral Therapists were concerned, being gay was just behavior and nothing more. (See Blind Man’s Bluff for a more complete explanation of Behavioral Therapy and its history.) And ever since Louis M. Max invented a device for delivering non-lethal doses of electric shock (see Mar 11), Behavioral Therapists have deployed any number of punitive methods designed to “cure” their patients of their homosexuality (see Jan 18, Jan 20, Jun 3, Jul 26, Oct 30, Dec 8), and our award-winning investigation, What are Little Boys Made Of?).
But among the cruelest methods for attempting to “cure” gay people must be the one described by the University of Edinburgh’s Dr. Ian Oswald, in which he used a combination of aversion therapy and induced hallucinations to try to cure one of his patients of the gay. (His other six patients were two rubber fetishists — one apparently gay and one straight — three alcoholics, and a married cross dresser.) The aversion therapy portion of the treatment was literally retching: Oswald administered two-hourly injections of apamorphine, a powerful emetic which induced violent vomiting and, in some cases, diarrhea. This was already a relatively common form of aversion therapy, but for Oswald’s experiments, the vomiting and depletion of electrolytes had the additional effect of making his patients dizzy and lightheaded. The patients were also injected with pilocarpine nitrate, which causes heavy salivation and sweating and, in some cases shortness of breath. Oswald never does state why he injected his patients with pilocarpine nitrate, but it might have been to create a simulated panic sensation in his subjects. He also gave his patients small doses of dexamphetamine, a stimulant, which he used to induce a condition of sleep deprivation in his patients.
All of that pharmacology was in the service of creating a condition in which his patients could be induced to experience auditory hallucinations when a tape loop was repeatedly played for hours on end. His goal was to create a state of mind similar to that of paranoid schizophrenia. Here is how it went for a patient identified as Case 5:
Case 5. A homosexual male aged 25 under the management of Dr. W. D. Boyd. The patient’s tyrannical father died when the patient was 15. The mother, to whom the patient was closely attached, was a drunkard, a spiritualist and a Lesbian. Elder brother had never engaged in honest work. No family history of mental illness.
Homosexual relationships began at the age of 14 and included frequent brief affairs in public lavatories and several long love-affairs. He had married at 19 and had two children. He came for treatment to try and salve his marriage, for he had been living away with a man for eight months. He was usually a passive partner, principally interested in fellatio. He was greatly excited by male urine and sometimes drank it.
Aversion therapy was embarked on with some reservations. A 30-minute interview in which he described his homosexual practices was tape-recorded. Every two hours he received apomorphine by injection and then the tape-recorded interview was played through a loud speaker. Glasses of urine were sometimes placed by him. In the intervals the following tape loop was played; “It makes him sick, it makes him sick, Sex with men? Oh, it makes him sick now. He gets sex with men. It must make him sick now. He’d meet men in the lavatories. Ugh. Sex with men makes him sick. He looks at men’s bodies. It must make him sick now.” (One male voice). Four seconds pause.
He received pilocarpine nitrate 1/20 grain once on the first day and once on the fourth, and dexamphetamine sulphate 10 mg. each night. Fluid and electrolyte depletion were prevented as with the other patients and serum potassium and sodium remained within normal limits, though the CO2 combining power rose to 33@5m.Eq./L. and chloride fell to 96 m.Eq./L. on the fourth day, having remained within normal limits previously.
He experienced the words of the tape-loop changing from the first day and throughout the four days’ treatment. The changes never had any great significance for him, seeming merely trivial or absurd. He could not voluntarily re-experience what was actually played through the loudspeaker. The changes were experienced by day and night throughout the four days and three nights of treatment.
At times he wrote down the various phrases he heard, which included:
“I like it thick my bacon thick. Sanford man, what makes it him sick now. He has Sangford man. They musta made a mistake now. They’ll need 8 men in the lavatories. Sangford man makes it sick. Be a good man Sportis? Do not make sick now. I’ll knock him sick. What makes him sick now. Enough with men’s bodies. Bolton quick it’d make you sick. Sex written in. He’s got six sick men, that must make him sick now. He’d eight men in the lavatories. Sax written back Matron’s sick. Hey’n they’ve got nice bodies. But you mustn’t make them sick now.”
After the end of treatment on the fourth day he wrote of his most recent auditory experiences:
“This impression of the tape-recorded message was not written down in detail at the time I heard it because I was quite convinced that it really was a separate recording, and I accepted it as such without question. I remember that the dialogue seemed much briefer and with longer pauses than the original recording, also the intonation seemed different. While listening, my mind’s eye formed a picture of the characters involved in this little ‘sketch’. One person monopolized all speech on a telephone while his weak-stomached friend sat immobile in a bath-chair. The man on the ‘phowne would jokingly say he had ‘mixed bodies’ (sweets?) then say something quietly to the effect that he had better not say that as it might make ‘him’ (the bath-chair sitter) sick. There would then be a deep belching sound not before heard on the recorder and the person on the ‘phone would say, ‘He’s sick now,’ or words to that effect. Then after a pause, very loudly, ‘Oh, we’ve made him sick, we’ve made him sick,’ then carry on more normally asking after the health of two friends with strange names I cannot remember. The dialogue would then come round to the part about ‘mixed bodies’ and carry on repeating endlessly the same sickly tale. If I remember correctly these variations in the recordings always came after I’d snatched a little sleep. They never changed while listening and no effort would make them sound like the original recording.”
A month later the patient reported that he had had one attempt at sexual relations with a man but had stopped because he felt feelings of revulsion and physically sick. Within two months, however, he had left his wife and gone off to live with a man.
As for the other patients, Owens claimed success with the three alcoholics, but only one of the two fetishists — the other rubber fetishist had “formed a friendship with a male homosexual (but had not had sexual relations with him” — while the cross-dresser, “in the 8 month since, he has dressed-up in female clothes on many occasions.”
[Source: Ian Oswald. “Induction of illusory and hallucinatory voices with consideration of behaviour therapy.” Journal of Mental Science 108, no. 453 (March 1962): 196-212.]
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March 28th, 2013
TODAY’S AGENDA:
Events This Weekend: BEARcelona, Barcelona, Spain; AIDS Walk, Ft. Worth, TX; White Party, Palm Springs, CA; European Snow Pride, Tignes, France.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Dirk Bogarde: 1921. He was born Derek Jules Gaspard Ulric Niven van den Bogaerde, but his friends and fans called him Dirk. After serving in the Queen’s Royal Regiment in World War II as an intelligence officer, he became one of Britain’s top matinee idols in the 1950s. In the 1960s he decided to do away with his heart-throb image with more challenging roles, including that of the closeted Melville Farr in 1961’s Victim, who resolves to break up an extortion racket that targets gay men. Time magazine was scathing in its review of Victim, denouncing it as “a plea for perversion.” “Everybody in the picture who disapproves of homosexuals proves to be an ass, a dolt or a sadist,” Time fumed. “Nowhere does the film suggest that homosexuality is a serious (but often curable) neurosis that attacks the biological basis of life itself.”
Bogarde won critical acclaim playing the sinister Hugo Barrett in 1963’s The Servant, and he took on the gay lead in the 1971 art house film Death in Venice. Warner Brothers tried to drop the distribution of Death in Venice because they feared it would be banned for obscenity. They relented after Queen Elizabeth II and Princess Anne attended the premiere in London.
If it was brave for a popular actor to take on gay roles like that, it was doubly brave of Bogarde because he never officially came out. And yet he remained dedicated to his lifelong partner Anthony Forwood, whose death in 1988 after a long struggle with Parkinson’s disease and liver cancer led Bogarde to become an advocate for assisted suicide. Bogarde died in 1999. It wasn’t until 2004 when his brother Gareth van den Bogaerde finally acknowledged publicly that Dirk was gay.
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March 27th, 2013
Edith Windsor
TODAY’S AGENDA:
Supreme Court to Hear Oral Arguments in DOMA Case: Washington, D.C. As I said yesterday, this is the month when history will be made. In part two of that history, U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments today in the case of Windsor v U.S., which challenges the constitutionality of Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act. Section 3 is the portion of the federal law which bars the U.S. government from recognizing same-sex marriage performed by the states. This case was brought by Edith Windsor, the widow of Thea Spyer, who is being forced to pay $363,000 in federal estate taxes because the government is barred from recognizing their marriage. The couple had been together since 1965, and they were finally able to wed in Toronto in 2007, two years before Thea’s death.
A Federal District Judge ruled in Windsor’s favor and struck down DOMA’s Section 3 as unconstitutional, and the case was on its way to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals when Windsor’s attorneys, citing her age and poor health (she’s 83), asked the Supreme Court to take the case directly. (The Second Circuit ended up upholding the lower court’s ruling.) Oral arguments for Windsor v. U.S. will begin this morning at 10:00 a.m. and they are scheduled to last about two hours. Part of the reason for the extended time for oral arguments rests with the Justice Department’s determination that they could not defend the law’s constitutionality based on the facts and the heightened scrutiny that the believe the case requires. The House Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group (BLAG), under the direction of House Majority Speaker John Boehner (R-OH), then annouced that they would take up the statute’s defense, and so part of the oral arguments this morning will focus on whether BLAG has standing. Audio recordings will bceome available by 2:00 p.m. EDT. You can find the full docket of documents and amici briefs here.
Events This Weekend: BEARcelona, Barcelona, Spain; AIDS Walk, Ft. Worth, TX; White Party, Palm Springs, CA; European Snow Pride, Tignes, France.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Bob Mizer: 1922. Before there was the internet and its most lucrative offering, online porn, and before the proliferation of dead-tree porn in the late 1960s through the 1980s, there was the “physique” magazines that sprang up after World War II. Bob Mizer was the mild-mannered publisher and photographer for Physique Pictorial, one of many such magazines that published “beefcake” photographs under the guise of bodybuilding and health. His photography studio, the Athletic Model Guild (AMG), specialized in men (gay and straight) doing bodybuilding poses or wrestling in pairs. But that thin guise — almost as thin as the posing pouch that his models wore — wasn’t enough to keep him from being convicted in 1947 of unlawful distribution of obscene materials and serving a nine month sentence at a work camp in Saugus, California.
That setback barely put a dent into Mizer’s career. In addition the Physique Pictorial, Mizer added Young Adonis in 1963 and Grecian Guild Studio Quarterly in 1966. When obscenity laws were relaxed in 1968 allowing full male frontal nudity, Mizer quickly adapted with the times. Through it all, AMG was very much a family affair, with Mizer’s mother (her skills as a seamstress was put to use in creating a line of skimpy briefs and posing pouches) and brother (an accountant) playing important roles in the business. Mizer would photograph thousands of men and take nearly a million different images. He also produced over 3000 film titles from the 1950s to the 1980’s, which mostly consisted of film (and later, videotape) of his photo sessions. He died in 1992, and AMG went dormant for a while. But under new ownership, Mizer’s archives are being catalogued and digitally remastered. Mizer never thought of himself as an artists, but his work has garnered a significant re-appraisal in the past two decades, which influenced artists like Robert Mappelthorpe and David Hockney. The Los Angeles Times wrote in 2004 that “Mizer’s pictures are historically important because they capture a time, place and attitude so vividly that it still seems to be with us. His photographs are inspiring because they were not made to fill a market niche that already existed. Instead, they created the niche and then filled it with aplomb.” In 2009, Taschen Books released the monograph Bob’s World: The Life and Boys of A.M.G.’s Bob Mizer
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March 26th, 2013
TODAY’S AGENDA:
Supreme Court to Hear Oral Arguments for Prop 8: Washington, D.C. This is the month where history will be made. Today the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in the case of Hollingsworth v. Perry, the challenge to California’s Proposition 8 which bans marriage equality for same-sex couples. Oral arguments will begin this morning at 10:00 a.m. and they are scheduled to last one hour. Audio recordings of the oral arguments are typically released at the end of the week, but, in an unusual move, the court will release the recordings at about 1:00 p.m. EDT. The last time the court made the recordings available on the same day was when it heard three days of arguments over the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. “Obamacare”). You can find the full docket of documents and amici briefs here.
In addition to the drama taking place inside the court room, there will be competing marches and demonstrations outside of the Supreme Court building. The anti-gay National Organization for Marriage has organized a march and rally, which will run up against the pro-equality United for Marriage Rally, both of which will take place in front of the Supreme Court. For more information on attending the United for Marriage Rally or to attend one of the other rallies in 50 states around the nation, click here.
TODAY IN HISTORY:
Boulder, CO Issues Nation’s First Same-Sex Marriage Licenses: 1975. There’s a lot I don’t know about this case, and so ordinarily I probably would have waited until I was able to gather more information before writing about it today. But with this historic event touching on same-sex marriage coinciding to the U.S. Supreme Court’s hearing of oral arguments for Prop 8 makes this story far to relevant to pass over. For example, I don’t know why Boulder, Colorado’s Assistant District Attorney William C. Wise issued a memorandum on March 26, 1975 which noted that Colorado’s marriage laws were not gender specific. “There is no statutory law prohibiting the issuance of a license, probably because the situation was simply not contemplated in the past by our legislature. The case law is strongly on the side of the public official that refuses to issue a marriage license in these situations, and a public official could not be prosecuted for violation of any criminal law by such marriage licensing,” Wise wrote.
Boulder County Clerk Clela Rorex (perhaps that same day, although the chronology isn’t entirely clear) issued the County’s first marriage license to Dave McCord and Dave Zamora, both 27, who went to Boulder County after having been refused a license in El Paso County (Colorado Springs). McCord told reporters that the El Paso County Clerks office told them, “We do not do that here in El Paso County, but if you want to, go to Boulder County, they might do it there.” Rorex however, decided to issue the license “strictly (as) an administration decision. I am not in violation of any law and it is not for me to legislate morality and not give persons a license if I so desire.” She also said she would continue to issue licenses in similar case as long as it was legal.
A month later, a guy by the name of Roswell Howard tried to protest the decision by showing up with a horse and a plethora of reporters. “a boy can marry a boy and a girl can marry a girl, why can’t a lonesome old cowboy get hitched to his favorite saddle mare?”, he said to the cameras. But Rorex as quick to deny the license, and she had solid legal backing to do so: the horse was too young to marry without written parental consent.
Six couples were married altogether before the State Attorney General stepped in to call a halt. Among them were California residents Richard Adams and Tony Sullivan, an Australian national who was trying to legally immigrate to the U.S. to be with Adams. They had married on March 20 in a ceremony officiated by the Metropolitan Community Church’s founder, Rev. Troy Perry, hoping to secure green card for Sullivan on First Amendment freedom-of-religion grounds. When they heard Johnny Carson joke about the marriage licenses being issued in Boulder, they flew to Colorado and obtained their license on April 21.
Three days later, the Colorado Attorney General declared the six marriages invalid and ordered a halt to the licenses, and the INS made it clear that it would not recognize their marriage. The INS district director wrote, “You have failed to establish that a bona fide marital relationship can exist between two faggots.” That crude ruling was quickly replaced with a more official declaration stating that the marriage was invalid because neither spouse “can perform the female functions in marriage.” The couple sued in Federal Court, but judge Irving Hill ruled against them, grounding his ruling partly on religious principles, which “could not possibly sanction any marriage between persons of the same because of the vehement condemnation in the Scriptures of both religions (Christianity and Judaism) of all homosexual relationships.” The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the decision, and the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the case.
After living abroad, Adams and Sullivan slipped back into the U.S., where Sullivan remained as an undocumented immigrant. The couple remained together for four decades, until Adams’s death in 2012. None of the six couples married in Colorado saw their marriages formally annulled. Instead, their licenses were simply ignored, as though they didn’t exist. Two decades after Boulder’s historic step, Rorex reflected on that momentous decision to grant the licenses:
“Honestly, I was pretty young,” says Rorex, who went on to get her master’s in both public administration and legal administration and has been with the Native American Rights Fund’s Boulder office since 1992. “I had no real political background; I was not a political animal when I ran for that office. I didn’t even know any gays or lesbians. I didn’t know anything about the issue. I just operated from gut instinct.”
And her gut told her to give a license to two men who loved each other and wanted to get married. “It felt like the right thing to do,” she recalls, “but I couldn’t have articulated why in 1975.” She can today.
“Over all of these years, I’ve watched this issue, because of the place I was at that time — the accidental moment of history I was involved in — and I’ve grown to become a real staunch crusader for same-sex marriages,” Rorex says. “I’m continually surprised that it has taken so long for people to give equal rights to same-sex partnerships.
[Additional source: Joyce Murdoch & Deb Price, Courting Justice: Gay Men And Lesbians V. The Supreme Court
Gay Group Meets at White House: 1977. In a historic first, a group of gay advocates from the National Gay Task Force (later, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force) met with presidential aide Midge Costanza for the first official discussion of gay rights at the White House. Gay rights leaders, including Bruce Voeller, Jean O’Leary, Frank Kameny, Elaine Noble, Rev. Troy Perry, and five others, told reporters that the three hour meeting was “a happy milestone on the road to full equality under the law.” The meeting took place while President Jimmy Carter was away at Camp David for the weekend, but participants were assured that Carter was aware of the meeting and promised to support anti-discrimination legislation for employment in the federal government. “We had a fantastic meeting, said O’Leary, NGTF co-director, “What we got was a commitment on all the issues we brought up” for further discussion not only at the White House, but within individual executive agencies.
The next day, White House Press Secretary Jody Powell appeared in CBS’s Face the Nation and defended the meeting. “For an organized group who feel they have a grievance that they are not being treated fairly, for them to have a right to put that grievance before high officials and say ‘we want redress,’ that to me is what the essence of America is all about.” But Anita Bryant, who was then campaigning against a Miami, Florida gay rights ordinance, denounced the meeting. “Behind the high sounding appeal against discrimination in job and housing — which is not a problem to the ‘closet’ homosexual — they are really asking to be blessed in their abnormal lifestyle by the office of the President if the United States. I protest the action of the White House staff in dignifying these activists for special privilege with a serious discussion of their alleged ‘human rights’,” she said in a written statement.
US Supreme Court Overturns Oklahoma’s Gay Teacher Ban: 1985. In 1978, Oklahoma state Senator Mary Helm introduced a bill allowing public schools to fire or refuse to hire anyone who engaged in “public homosexual activity” or “public homosexual conduct.” The first was defined as violating the state’s anti-sodomy law (which also banned heterosexual sodomy, but Helms’s law only dealt with violations by gay people) and the second was defined to include “advocating, soliciting, imposing, encouraging or promoting public or private homosexual activity in a manner that creates a substantial risk that such conduct will come to the attention of schoolchildren or school employees.” That latter provision endangered heterosexual teachers who might presume to defend gay neighbors or relatives. Shortly after the bill was introduced, more than 100 teenage boys joined KKK chapters in local high schools to “declare war on homosexuals” with the full support of Klan leader David Duke (who happened to be a friend of Family Research Council’s current president Tony Perkins.) One student Klansman declared, “We are not just against blacks like the old Klan. We are against gays … because this activity is morally and socially wrong.”
Antia Bryant lobbied the Senate for the bill’s passage, saying that it would curb “the flaunting of homosexuality.” The Helm’s Bill sailed through the House and Senate, passing the upper chamber unanimously. Stan Easter, a gay man licensed to teach in Oklahoma, sued the Oklahoma City Board of Education in Federal Court with the backing of the National Gay Task Force. But Easter backed out over the backlash. Fortunately, Federal Judge Luther Eubanks said NGTF had standing to sue based on sworn affidavits stating that the group’s gay members included Oklahoma teachers who feared that having their names made public would result in their immediate firing. But Eubanks then went on to uphold the law’s constitutionality. The Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals largely reversed his decision, saying that while a teacher could be fired for violating Oklahoma’s sodomy law, the rest of the law violated teachers’ free speech rights under the First Amendment. The State of Oklahoma appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which deadlocked 4-4 (Justice Lewis Powell, seriously ill with prostate cancer, was absent during oral arguments and didn’t vote). That meant that the lower court’s ruling stood and the gag rule against Oklahoma teachers was lifted.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS:
Tennessee Williams: 1911. If you were to ask who was the most celebrated gay playwright in history, most people, gay or straight, may point to Tennessee Williams. Which is ironic because if the gay themes in his his work is any indication, he appears to have been rather conflicted by his homosexuality. Blanche’s first husband in the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Streetcar Named Desire killed himself. So did Skipper in the Pulitzer Prize winning Cat on the Hot Tin Roof, and his death threatened to out his pro football buddy and severe alcoholic Brick. In Suddenly, Last Summer, Sebastian was torn apart and eaten by the boys whose sexual favors he sought. For the most part, gay characters are dead and don’t appear on the stage in Williams’s plays; Brick remained closeted, with just enough deniability for straight audience members who didn’t want to see it.
As for Williams himself, he was certainly not closeted, socializing in gay circles and taking a string of lovers. His most enduring relationship with Frank Merlo lasted sixteen years; they remained together until Merlo’s death in 1963. That plunged Williams into a severe depressions, for which he turned to Dr. Max Jacobson for help. Jacobson, nicknamed “Dr. Feelgood,” prescribed amphetamines for this depression and Seconal for his insomnia. Unsurprisingly, Williams appeared incoherent in several interviews, and his reputation suffered. He died in a Paris hotel room in 1983, having chocked to death on the cap from an eye drops bottle, surrounded by prescription drugs including barbiturates.
Scotty Joe Weaver: 1986. He should have turned twenty-seven today, but he only managed to see his eighteenth birthday. On July 22, 2004, his badly burned body was found at the side of a rural Alabama road. He had been beaten, strangled, cut, burned and robbed of between $65 and $80. While robbery was first thought to be the main motivation, Baldwin County District Attorney David Whetstone quickly determined that Weaver’s sexuality was the reason he was killed. “We have very specific evidence that indicates part of the motive involved his sexual orientation,” he said, noting that the wounds on Scotty Joe’s body indicated “overkill,” a common feature of anti-gay hate crimes.
Robert Porter, 18, Nichole Bryars Kelsay, 18, and Christopher Gaines, 20 were arrested and charged with capital murder. Gaines and Kelsay had been Scotty Joe’s roommates, and Gaines’ lawyer at that time said that Gaines told him that Porter “spoke openly of wanting to kill the guy because he was gay.” Gaines pleaded guilty to avoid the death penalty, and was sentenced to life without parole. Porter pleaded guilty and received two consecutive life sentences. Kelsay pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit murder and was sentenced to 20 years. Alabama doesn’t have a hate crime law covering sexual orientation. And despite the District Attorney’s findings, Scotty Joe Weaver’s murder was not included in the FBI’s hate crime statistics for 2004, representing another example of the gaps in the FBI’s hate crime reporting program. The crime was featured in the 2006 documentary, Small Town Gay Bar
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March 25th, 2013
TODAY IN HISTORY:
Thomas/Thomasine Hall: 1629. The Virginia Colony Court’s records describe the case of a servant, Thomas or Thomasine Hall, who claimed to be “both a man and a woman.” In testimony before the court, Hall told of being born at or near Newcastle Upon Tyne and recalled being christened “by the name of Thomasine.” Hall was dressed in woman’s apparel until the age of twelve. At the age of 22 while living in London, Hall’s brother joined the army and Hall “cut off his hair and changed his apparel into the fashion of a man” and joined the army. After leaving the army, Hall again “changed himself into woman’s apparel and made bone lace and did other work with his needle.” Shortly after, Hall again changed “his apparel into the habit of a man and so came over into this country.”
After arriving in Virginia as a male, he changed his expression back to that of a woman, but rumors spread that “Hall did lie with a maid … called Great Bess.” In one encounter, two men assaulted Hall, threw him on his back and “pulled out his members,” revealing that Hall anatomically “was a perfect man.” Three other women testified to having searched Hall and reported that “he was a man.” But a Captain Basse performed an inspection and determined that there was “a piece of flesh growing at the [section of the document is missing] belly as big as the top of his littler finger (an) inch long.” Basse commanded Hall “to be put in woman’s apparel,” apparently deciding that Hall was a female. To finally resolve the case, the Court decided to accept Hall’s own self-definition as both man and woman, and ordered the determination “to be published in the plantation” where Hall lived, “that he is a man and a woman” and ordered Hall to “go clothed in man’s apparel, only his head to be attired in a coyfe (coif) and crosscloth with an apron before him.”
300 Lashes In Savannah for Sodomy: 1734. The description is extremely brief. No names, no details, just two short sentences in the diary of Johann Boltzius and Israel Gronau, Lutheran pastors who ministered to German settlers in the Georgia Colony:
Today an execution of judgment was held here in Savannah. A man from this place had been accused and convicted of sodomy and inciting others, for which he was to receive three hundred lashes under the gallows.
Betty Friedan Says Lesbians Are Taking Over the Women’s Movement: 1973. During the first major fundraising event for the New York chapter of the National Organization for Women, noted feminist author Betty Friedan and NOW founder cited “man hating” and lesbians as two factors that would hinder progress for women. In remarks to those gathered, the author of the 1963 book The Feminine Mystique which is credited for sparking the Women’s movement in the 1960s, repeated her opinion that lesbians were being used as a ploy to divide women. “Le U.S. Rep. Bella Abzug introduce a bill for lesbian mothers. Let Ms. Magazine do a special issue about lesbians. But let us concentrate on men and women working together for full partnership in society.” She continued:
“I have had to say some uncomfortable things because I felt they were important. I think the movement has been infiltrated and the lesbian issue has been pushed forward for divisive purposes. We must not let ourselves be used. … You don’t have to hate men or give up children to be liberated.”
An Associated Press article describing the meeting reported this reaction to Friedan’s remarks:
“Her putting down of the lesbian issue as irrelevant to the women’s movement was incredible,” said Jan Welch, who described herself as a feminist, NOW member and a lesbian, but not a man hater. “I want her to prove that I am somehow harmful to the movement because I am a lesbian. I think it’s Betty that’s causing all the problems.”
TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS:
Anita Bryant: 1940. The less said, the better.
Elton John: 1947. He was born Reginald Dwight in Middlesex. He started playing piano at the age of three, and took up formal lessons at seven. He took to composition and showmanship early, writing his own music and playing piano like Jerry Lee Lewis at school functions. By eleven, he won a junior scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music, where he learned Chopin and Bach. He became a pub pianist at fifteen and began playing in bands around London. He answered an ad in the New Musical Express for a songwriter, and was given a stack of lyrics written by Bernie Taupin. Dwight wrote music for the lyrics and sent them back to Taupin, and one of history’s most successful song-writing partnerships was born. Shortly after, Dwight adopted the name Elton John. In 1969 he recorded his first Album, Empty Sky, and followed that up with the eponymous Elton John, which yielded him his first US Top Ten single, “Your Song.” A string of hits followed, building toward the 1973 smash “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road,” from the album by the same name. In 1976, he “came out” as bisexual, but few believed him. When he married German recording engineer Renate Blauel in 1984, many speculated that the marriage was just a cover. They divorced in 1988, and he finally decided he was “comfortable” being gay.” In 1992, he founded the Elton John AIDS Foundation which raises money for HIV/AIDS prevention and fighting stigma and discrimination against people with HIV/AIDS. Since 1993, John has been in a relationship with David Furnish, which they formalized with a civil partnership in 2005. They became parents in 2010.
Sheryl Swoops: 1971. The standout women’s basketball player led her Texas Tech teammates to the NCAA women’s basketball championship in 1993 during her senior year after setting several NCAA records which are still on the books today. When the Women’s National Basketball Association was formed in 1997, she was the first player signed to the new league. She began her professional career with the Houston Comets, returning to the court only six weeks after giving birth to her son and leading the Comets to the 1997 WNBA Championship. From 1995 to 1999, she was married to her high school sweetheart, but in 2005 she finally announced that she was gay, saying “it doesn’t change who I am. I can’t help who I fall in love with. No one can. … Discovering I’m gay just sort of happened much later in life. Being intimate with [Alisa] or any other woman never entered my mind. At the same time, I’m a firm believer that when you fall in love with somebody, you can’t control that.” Over time, it appears that Swoopes has determined that she is not so much gay as bisexual: in 2011, she broke up with Alisa and became engaged to a man.
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March 24th, 2013
TODAY’S AGENDA:
Banned Ugandan Play To Be Staged In U.S.: Baltimore, MD. Last summer, play featuring a gay character in a pro-gay treatment was performed in a couple of small venues in suburban Kampala, Uganda. British national David Cecil, who served as the play’s producer, was soon arrested, jailed, tried and acquitted of charges in connection with staging the play, only to be re-arrested again and deported a month later. That play, The River and the Mountain, is being presented as a stage reading through this weekend in the Baltimore/Washington, D.C. area. Today’s reading of The River and the Mountain will be held at Single Carrot Theatre, 1727 N. Charles St., Baltimore, MD., at 5:30 p.m. Readings are free, though donations will be accepted. Click here for more information.
Events This Weekend: Florida AIDS Walk & Music Festival, Ft. Lauderdale, FL; BFI London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, London, UK; Black Party, New York, NY; European Snow Pride, Tignes, France; OutBoard, Winter Park, CO.
TODAY IN HISTORY:
ACT-UP Launches First Protest: 1987. Morning rush hour became ensnarled in lower Manhattan as 250 AIDS activists protested at the corner of Broadway and Wall Street. The protest was the result of growing frustration over New York City’s lax response to the AIDS crisis in the city as well as the Food and Drug Administration’s cautious and excruciatingly slow process for approving new drugs to combat the disease. Only one drug, AZT, had been approved so far, but at $10,000 per year ($20,000 in today’s dollars) it was prohibitively expensive, hard to obtain (it was being rationed), and of very limited efficacy in treating the disease. European regulators had approved several other drugs for use in combating AIDS, but the FDA’s standard process for approval would take the better part of a decade, far longer than most people with AIDS would have to live.
The newly-formed group, ACT-UP (AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power), was born from that frustration, and on the morning of March 24 they took to the streets for the first time. Playwright Larry Kramer, one of the group’s founder, said, “We’ve been told by the leading AIDS experts that there are drugs that are safer to use and more promising than AZT. We want these drugs and we want the Wall Street business community to help us get them.” The group also called for a massive public education campaign to stop the spread of the disease, an anti-discrimination policy for people with AIDS in treatment, insurance, employment and housing, and a national comprehensive national policy on AIDS. Protesters sat down in the middle of the street, resulting in seventeen arrests. After more than a year of protests, including a massive protest in which members of ACT-UP occupied the grounds of the FDA in Washington, D.C., (See Oct 11), the FDA finally relented and instituted a new emergency streamlined process for quicker approval of AIDS drugs.
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This your open thread for the day. What’s happening in your world?
March 23rd, 2013
TODAY’S AGENDA:
Banned Ugandan Play To Be Staged In U.S.: Baltimore, MD. Last summer, play featuring a gay character in a pro-gay treatment was performed in a couple of small venues in suburban Kampala, Uganda. British national David Cecil, who served as the play’s producer, was soon arrested, jailed, tried and acquitted of charges in connection with staging the play, only to be re-arrested again and deported a month later. That play, The River and the Mountain, is being presented as a stage reading through this weekend in the Baltimore/Washington, D.C. area. The reading was supposed to feature Okuyo Prynce, a Ugandan actor who played the leading gay role in the original production in Kampala, but his entry into the U.S. has been held up by the INS. Playwright Beau Hopkins however hopes to be on hand for the stage readings. Readings of The River and the Mountain will be held at:
Readings are free, though donations will be accepted. Click here for more information.
Events This Weekend: European Gay Ski Week, Alpe d’Huez, France; Exeter Pride, Exeter, UK; Florida AIDS Walk & Music Festival, Ft. Lauderdale, FL; BFI London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, London, UK; Black Party, New York, NY; European Snow Pride, Tignes, France; OutBoard, Winter Park, CO.
TODAY IN HISTORY:
Columnist: “State Department Hires Perverts”: 1950. The early stages of the McCarthyite red scare also had distinctly pink undertones, as gay people became looked upon as being as much as a danger to national security as communists. Deputy undersecretary of State John E. Peurifoy’s revelation (see Feb 28) that the State Department had fired 91 employees for being gay sent shock waves around the country and the nation’s columnist and pundit class in a tizzy. Author and novelist Robert Ruark, whose column was syndicated by Scripps-Howard, weighed in with his own unique literary style:
Looks like a new point in journalism has finally been reached, at which it is possible to face the problem of homosexuality and perversion with the same honesty it took us so long to win in the case of venereal disease. Our peering into the well of loneliness is as much overdue as our realization that syphilis and gonorrhea were something more than “social” diseases, to be hushed behind the hand.
This belated appraisal of a human aberration is due to the fact that our State Department, in record, as been filled with a type of humanity which is not “normal” as we construe normalcy in the broad sense, and that the list of perverted sex-crimes seems to be mounting furiously.
There is considerably more to abnormality in the sexes than a simple negation of boy-meets-girl. There is a great difference between homosexuality and perversion. The homosexual in a simpler sense is less dangerous to the world around him, because his odd sexual leanings creep easily into vicious criminality with innocents as victims.
Divergents from the sexual norm are pitiable, and in general live a life of mental and spiritual torture, full of frustration and persecution. Their residence in a minority group makes them subject to censure by the majority and leads them to a life in shadow.
This creates a constant nervousness that pays off in panic. Most “queers” eventually acquire a tendency to hysteria, which means the blow their tops in time of stress. Since the also must hide from the world that outweighs them — since the must always mask their activities in stealth and secrecy — they are forever open to apprehension.
A pervert fondles a child. The child cries. The creep blows his roof. He is panic-ridden and hysterically afraid of being caught. He throttles the child. A homosexual — possibly even a “happily” married one — is suddenly confronted with public awareness of his abnormal outcroppings. His position, his job, his very life is at stake. He blows his top. He has three choices. He can kill himself, jill his discoverer, or submit to blackmail.
In the loneliness that cloaks a homosexual that places him basically apart form his fellow, he scarred soul calls out for company. So his inclination is to surround himself with his like. Homosexuals travel in packs, as do most divergents from an accepted status.
It is all well to say that a man must live his own life and in a manner which best suits him, but in government which is operated for the greater good of the greatest number a dissenter from accepted behavior is a great liability. The drunkard, the boss who chases every stenographer, the sexual degenerate or homosexual all have a gaping chink in the behavioristoc armour. This leads almost invariably to erratic action, neglect of job, and even to blackmail. Always to blackmail.
When a man or woman is susceptible to easy blackmail, he is a tremendous risk in a position of trust. I know the story of the highly-placed State Department executive who crowded the lists with so many homosexuals that 91 resignations of firings have recently resulted. His appointees surrounded themselves with their appointees, and on down the line. What you have finally is a corroded organization which can be bribed, bulled or blackmailed in the easiest possible fashion.
Homosexuality has figured, off stage, in one of our traitorous operations. Homosexuality and similar irresponsibility has weakened us all over the world through the State Department’s calm acceptance of abnormality. A great deal of the trouble we are in, internationally, can be laid to the tolerance of that kind of weakness in a service which should be above reproach. You can say that the queer ones are pathetic and deserve a right to pursue happiness in most businesses but you don’t need them in positions of heavy trust. I have some case histories tomorrow.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS:
Carl Westphal: 1833. the German neurologist is credited for revolutionizing psychiatry and bringing it into the world of modern medicine. That he is much lesser known today than Sigmund Freud is just goes to show just the kind lock psychoanalysis held in the mental health professions throughout the first three-quarters of the twentieth century. Westphal founded the Archiv für Psychiatrie und Nervenkrankheiten (Archives of Psychiatry and Nervous Diseases) in 1868 where, for the first time, German clinicians could publish articles and discuss a new understanding of mental illness: that it was a medical problem rather than moral or sinful failings subject to conviction and incarceration under the law. Westphal is credited for coining the term “agoraphobia,” to describe the case of three male patients who feared going out in public. He was the first to describe what is now known as hepatolenticular degeneration, in which cooper accumulates in the tissues and causes neurological and psychiatric symptoms, as well as liver disease. And he was the first to describe narcolepsy and cataplexy, which is a sudden temporary loss of muscle tone.
And, owing to a paper Westphal published in the Archiv in 1869 where he wrote about the case of a woman who was sexually attracted to other women rather than men, Westphal became the first to describe, in clinical terms, those who experienced Konträre Sexualempfindung (“contrary sexual feeling”). He described what would later become known as homosexuality as being the result of an individual’s alienation from his or her own gender, an archaic and ultimately unproven theory that remains a crucial underpinning of much of what is taught in ex-gay circles today. Westphal wrote:
I chose the term ‘contrary sexual feeling’ from a suggestion by an admirable, and in the field of philology and archeology, most distinguished colleague, after failing to find shorter and more appropriate terms. What shall here be expressed is that it is not always simultaneously the sexual urge as such with which we are dealing, but rather also merely the feeling of the complete inner being, being alienated form its own sex.
By describing homosexuality as something that was an expression of the essential nature in an individual, the paper sparked tremendous controversy in medical circles. Until then, those who were caught engaging in homosexual behavior were treated as heretics, sinners, and criminals. Westphal instead sought to abolish those primitive, archaic superstitions with a new “scientific” understanding of gay people. Westphal’s paper, in particular, ascribed homosexuality to a disorder of the central nervous system. And while that particular theory was eventually discarded, it nevertheless placed homosexuality in the realm of psychiatry, there it it would remain for more than a century. So while Westphal can be credited for introducing the idea that gay people weren’t sinful criminals, he can also be blamed for the classifying all gay people as mentally sick. It could be argued that in 1869, that represented a huge advancement, but in reality it merely represented an exchange of prison and the pillory for the mental asylum and torturous treatments (see Jan 18, Jan 20, Mar 11, Jun 3, Jul 26, Oct 30, Dec 8), an exchange that would last for another hundred years before the American Psychiatric Association finally removed homosexuality form its list of mental disorders in 1973.
J. C. Leyedecker: 1874. At the turn of the century, men’s shirts were sold with detachable collars, and New York’s Cluett, Peabody & Co. and their advertising agency launched one of the most successful advertising campaign for Cluett’s line of Arrow collars. The Arrow Collar Man was the creation of Joseph Leyendecker, one of the the pre-eminent American illustrators of the era. Little did the nation’s housewives know that when they purchased those collars for their husbands with the handsome and debonair Arrow Collar Man in mind, that he was modeled after Leyendecker’s life-long partner, Canadian-born Charles Beach. By the time Leyendecker landed the Arrow Collar gig at the turn of the century, his work was already making regular appearances on the covers of the Saturday Evening Post, a relationship that would last for 44 years. Meanwhile the handsome Beach would turn up for Leyendecker’s illustrations in ads for Kuppenheimer Suits, Interwoven Socks, Pierce-Arrow automobiles, and wherever style and class were called for.
J.C. Leyendecker
By 1914, Leyendecker was financially secure enough to by a large home in New Rochelle, NY for himself, Beach, and Leyendecker’s brother and sister. The parties which Leyendecker and Beach hosted at their home became important important social events as Leyendecker became acknowledged as one of the country’s great illustrators. But with the stock market crash of 1929 and the onset of the great depression, Leyendecker’s high-society style lost favor among advertising agencies. Cluett, Peabody & Co. dropped him in 1931 as the company had stopped making collars in favor of completed shirts. By 1936, the Saturday Evening Post cut back on their commissions for his covers. World War II brought something of a respite, with contracts for war bond posters, but that work would mark the end of his output. He died in 1951, survived by his sister and Beach. A really great monograph of his illustrations
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March 22nd, 2013
TODAY’S AGENDA:
Events This Weekend: European Gay Ski Week, Alpe d’Huez, France; Exeter Pride, Exeter, UK; Florida AIDS Walk & Music Festival, Ft. Lauderdale, FL; BFI London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, London, UK; Black Party, New York, NY; European Snow Pride, Tignes, France; OutBoard, Winter Park, CO.
TODAY IN HISTORY:
Suspensions Announced of Allegedly Gay Teachers in Florida: 1961. Pinellas County School Superintendent Floyd T. Christian confirmed at a school board meeting that five Pinellas County teachers had been suspended for “alleged homosexual practices.” The action came after accusations against the teachers were lodged by a state Legislative Investigative Committee which had been formed in 1956 to root out communists from government but switched its focus to look for gays among teachers and university professors. Superintendent Christian said that following the accusations from the state, the teachers were suspended last October “with the full knowledge and approval of the board.” The matter was referred to the state’s Cabinet Board of Education in Tallahassee for a decision on whether to revoke their teaching certificates. The state board revoked the certificates of three of the teachers, but that decision was overturned by the State Supreme Court in 1962, saying the state board didn’t follow proper procedures. The three teachers’ certificates were finally restored in 1963.
Superintendent Christian would go on to become the Florida Commissioner of Education from 1965 to 1973, which became an elected position with Florida’s new constitution in 1968. Christan’s career ended in scandal, and he spent several months in federal prison following a conviction for income tax evasion.
Montana Senate Requires Convicted Gays To Register With Police: 1995. In a 41-8 vote, the Montana Senate gave its approval to a bill that would require offenders of the state’s anti-homosexuality law (which prohibited “deviate sexual conduct”) to register for life with local law enforcement officials. The provision was a last minute amendment to a bill requiring registration for those convicted of murder, rape, aggravated assault, incest, sexual assault, and indecent exposure. During the debate, Sen. Al Bishop (R-Billings) said that homosexual acts, even consensual acts between adults, were “even worse than a violent sexual act,” a statement that drew outrage among women’s rape crisis advocates. Gay rights advocates quickly organized rallies in Helena, Billings and Missoula, and the entire state became the target of national scorn. By noon the next day, red-faced lawmakers were in full retreat mode, repealing the provision specifying “deviate sexual conduct” from the bill that they had just passed the day before in a unanimous voice vote with no debate.
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This your open thread for the day. What’s happening in your world?
March 21st, 2013
TODAY’S AGENDA:
Rhode Island Senate Committee Considers Marriage Bill: Providence, RI. Last January, the Rhode Island House overwhelmingly approved a bill to provide marriage equality for the state’s same-sex couples. The tally was 51 to 19, with even the Republican Minority Leader urging the Senate leadership to bring the bill up for an up-or-down vote. One problem though is that the Democratic Senate President, Teresa Paiva-Weed, is an outspoken opponent of marriage equality. Paiva-Weed assigned the bill to the Senate Judiciary Committee, where four Senators support marriage equality, and four oppose, although one of those who oppose said he would vote to move the bill to the floor because his constituents asked him to. That makes five of the six votes needed for the bill to pass out of the committee, with two others not yet announcing their position.
Meanwhile, the waters were muddied when a senator proposed a competing bill that would allow Rhode Island voters to vote on a constitutional amendment allowing same-sex marriage. But that bill provides such broad religious exemptions that it would eviscerate the state’s anti-discrimination laws which prohibit discrimination in employment, credit and public accommodations. That proposed amendment posed a serious threat by drawing support away from the bill passed by the House. But earlier this week, three Democratic co-sponsors announced they were withdrawing their support of the bill after getting an earful from their constituents.
All of this means that it’s anybody’s guess what will happen when the Senate Judiciary Committee meets today to consider both bills. The meeting will take place beginning at approximately 4:30 this afternoon in Room 313 at the State House.
Banned Ugandan Play To Be Staged In U.S.: Baltimore, MD. Last summer, an unusual play was performed in a couple of small venues in suburban Kampala, Uganda. What made the play so unusual was that it was the first known play on the Ugandan stage to feature gay characters in a pro-gay setting. British national David Cecil, who served as the play’s producer, was soon arrested, jailed, tried and acquitted of charges in connection with staging the play, only to be re-arrested again and deported a month later. That play, The River and the Mountain, will be presented as a stage reading beginning today and through the weekend, in four venues in the Baltimore/Washington, D.C. area. The reading was supposed to feature Okuyo Prynce, a Ugandan actor who played the leading gay role in the original production in Kampala, but his entry into the U.S. has been held up by the INS. Playwright Beau Hopkins however hopes to be on hand for the stage readings.
Readings of The River and the Mountain will be conducted:
Readings are free, though donations will be accepted. Click here for more information.
Events This Weekend: European Gay Ski Week, Alpe d’Huez, France; Exeter Pride, Exeter, UK; Florida AIDS Walk & Music Festival, Ft. Lauderdale, FL; BFI London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, London, UK; Black Party, New York, NY; European Snow Pride, Tignes, France; OutBoard, Winter Park, CO.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Vadim Alekseevich Kozin: 1903. The great Russian tenor Vadim Alekseevich Kozin was celebrated throughout the Soviet Union in the 1920s for his recordings and concerts specializing in gypsy romances and love songs. He sang those songs, which he wrote himself, with such passion and tenderness that garnered him the title of the “Russian Orpheus.” He once gave a concert with American Paul Robeson and is said to have performed for Winston Churchill, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin at the Tehran conference in 1943. But in those precarious days during Stalin’s rule, Kozin fell out of favor with the Kremlin and was arrested in 1944. He was sent to a prison camp near Magadan in the Russian Far East for five years for political offenses, “corruption of youth” and homosexuality. From that moment on, his songs disappeared from the radio and his public concerts came to an end.
After his release in 1950, Kozen resumed performing in local theaters in the Russian Far East and Siberia, but he was prohibited from performing in Moscow and Leningrad. It was during this period when Kozen began to keep a diary. “How I would like even just once,” he wrote of one unnamed man in 1956, “even for one instant, to look into the depth of those green eyes. Why does it happen like this? One person appears, and there is nothing else sacred in the world. He has filled it all himself. Who that person is, no one will ever find out.”
Kozin also used his diary to express his impatience with the official attitude toward homosexuality. “There is nothing unnatural in the life I want to live,” he wrote. “There is real, good friendship and complete mutual trust.” In another entry, he criticized actors with their “demonstration of fictional family values” and waving of party cards. “Do I have the moral right, with my defects, to see them that way? After torturous and long thought, I have realized that I do. They are much more rotten people.”
But Kozin worried that he risked further imprisonment. In another entry, he was alarmed by another actor while on tour. “His behavior will lead him to the camp. I must tell him that his sexual motives shouldn’t affect me at all. … I don’t want people to think about me like that again. I will try to suffer alone.”
Kozin’s fears were well-founded. He was arrested again in 1959 for homosexuality and was forced to write a humiliatingly detailed confession. Despite a brief revival in the 1980’s when his records were reissued, he was never officially rehabilitated. He died in Madagan in 1994 at the age of 91. Since his death, Vadim Kozin has become an icon in Russia’s gay community. One of his most famous songs is one called “Friendship” which, he later confided to a friend, was dedicated to another man:
“We are so close that words do not have to be repeated. Our tenderness and our friendship are stronger than passion and greater than love.”
Vadim Kozin with friends in Madagan in 1993:
Rosie O’Donnel: 1962. Times change, don’t they? During her years hosting her popular daytime talk show, The Rosie O’Donnell Show, from 1996 to 2002, she developed a reputation for being “The Queen of Nice” and for her self-professed crush with actor Tom Cruise. Two months before her talk show ended, she came out, saying, “I’m a dyke!” When she became a moderator for The View in 2006, her “queen of nice” persona was ancient history, as she engaged in several public controversies and on-air disputes. She was encouraged by the program to be provocative and outspoken, and she certainly delivered. She picked a public fight with Donald Trump, she compared the Mark Foley congressional page scandal to the Catholic Church’s child sexual abuse scandals, and she condemned the Bush Administration’s Iraq war policies. The final straw for O’Donnel was during an on-air argument with co-host Elizabeth Hasselbeck, the producers showed O’Donnel and Hasselbeck in a split screen, which, O’Donnel, said, “they (the producers) had to prepare that in advance… I felt there was setup egging me into that position.” Tired of the confrontations, O’Donnel left the show in May, 2007. Parade magazine named her “The Most Annoying Celebrity of 2007,” while Time called her one of their “100 Most Influential People.”
Since then, O’Donnell has been involved in several projects, including acting as Executive Producer of a Lifetime movie, hosting SiriusXM’s “Rosie Radio” from 2009 to 2011, a short-lived talk show on Oprah Winfrey’s OWN, and a collaborative partner in the LGBT family vacation company R Family Vacations. She has also been involved with several charitable causes, including early childhood care and education, adoption and foster parenting, and rehabilitation therapies for Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans. Her For All Kids Foundation has awarded more than $22 million in grants to 1,400 child-related organizations. Overall, O’Donnell has given more than $100 million to charity. O’Donnel herself is a foster and adoptive mother, and in February of 2004, she married Kelly Carpenter in San Francisco when Mayor Gavin Newsom launched an ill-fated effort to grant marriage licenses to same-sex couples, but the couples split in 2007. (Those marriages were later declared invalid by the California Supreme Court.) In 2012, O’Donnel married Michelle Rounds in a private ceremony in New York.
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Featured Reports
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Prologue: Why I Went To “Love Won Out”
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