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News and commentary about the anti-gay lobbyPosts Tagged As: Daily Agenda
November 17th, 2012
TODAY’S AGENDA:
Events This Weekend: Hong Kong Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, Hong Kong, China; Mazipatra Queer Film Festival, Prague/Brno, Czech Republic; Pride, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
TODAY IN HISTORY:
The Arrest of “The 41” in Mexico City: 1901. Getting to the bottom of what actually happened is tricky business. The only accounts of the raid conducted by Mexico City’s police on a private party come from a decidedly unapproving and often sensational press. We know virtually nothing of those who were arrested; we barely know some of the names. Their story was never told: they were never interviewed, and as far as I can tell there is not a single quote which can be reliably attributed to any of them. Whatever we may know of the scandal was clouded further by fictional accounts — the 41, as they were simply known, became the subject of a popular novel in 1906. But one thing is certain: the “Ball of the 41” became the scandal of the year, inspiring more than a month of headlines, sermons, editorials, and even a few corridos.
Only a few details are solid. In the very early morning hours of November 17, 1941, police raided a private party and arrested forty-one men, nineteen of them were dressed as women. The one in drag were publicly humiliated by being forced to sweep the streets — “women’s work.” The 41 were taken to an army barracks and inducted into the Mexican army. At least some of them were then put on a train to Veracruz, sent by ship to the Yucatán, and made to serve in the army as it was putting down a Mayan insurgency.
Those appear to be the bare facts, which, of course, weren’t enough to satisfy the nation’s newspapers. Here is how El Popular reported the story on November 20:
Last Sunday night, the police of the Eighth Precinct were informed that in the house located at number 4 La Paaz Street, a ball was being held without the corresponding permit. They immediately moved in to surprise the culprits, and after having encountered numerous difficulties in trying to get the partygoers to open up, the police broke into the house’s patio where they found 42 individuals who were dancing to the excessively loud music of a local street band.
When they noted the presence of the police, some of those who were dressed in women’s clothing attempted to flee in order to change out of the clothes of the opposite six; but as the police understood the gravity of the situation, they did not allow anyone to leave, and all 42 including those still dressed as women were taken to the station from which they were then sent to Belem Prison, charged with attacks on morality, and put at the disposition of the District Governor.
As a complement to the previous report, we will say that among those individuals dressed as women, several were recognized as dandies who are seen daily on Plateros Street.
These men wore elegant ladies’ gowns, wigs, false breasts, earrings, embroidered shoes, and a great deal of eye makeup and rouge on their faces.
Once the news hit the boulevards, all kinds of commentaries were made, and the conduct of those individuals was censured.
We will not provide our readers with further details because they are summarily disgusting.
It was said that many of those arrested came from highly respected families with ties to the government of dictator Porfirio DÃaz. Some of the earliest newspaper reports, like this one, had it that 42 were arrested. That number later dropped to 41, which generated even more rumors. One had it that the elderly lady who owned the house was one of those arrested, and she was later released. Other, more sinister rumors had it that one of those arrested was one of DÃaz’s nephews.
El Popular may have been reluctant to provide details, but in subsequent days it was happy to imagine the scene for its readers:
If only we had seen them in their resplendent hairdos, their fake cleavage, with their shiny sparkling earrings, with their falsies like the ones worn by anemic bimbos, with their corseted waists, their dancing-girl skirts like inverted tulips, their butterfly tights, their shoes fringed with crimped gold thread and colored glass beads, and all of them bedaubed in white powder and rouge, prancing about in the fandango with their perfumed and curly mustaches.
On November 23, El PaÃs published this account of one group of prisoners being transferred to the train bound for Veracruz:
The men-only ball that was raided by the police continues provoking talk in all social circles, by virtue of the fact that many of those detained are perfectly well known, since among them are men who stroll day after day down the boulevards showing off their stylish and perfectly tailored suits and wearing sumptuous jewels.
As we stated in yesterday’s issue, 12 of those captured in the house on the fourth block of La Paz were sent to Veracruz along with seven thieves who were also conscripted into the armed services.
At 5:30 in the morning, the hour at which attendance is taken in the 24th Battalion (that is being remitted to the port of Veracruz), those called on first were the 12 individuals who had been at the famed ball, and after number 13, who was a pelado [a term for a rough, lower-class urban Mexican] was called, he replied on hearing his name, “Present, my Captain,but let me go on record as saying that I am being conscripted as a thief; but I’m not one of them,” and he pointed to the group of dancers.
This provoked the laughter of those present, because not even a thief was willing to be confused with the perfumed boys, as they are called by the soldiers from the barracks
A very amusing scene developed in the the barracks of the 24th Battalion when the repugnant ones arrived wearing their magniï¬cent overcoats, along with hats and ï¬ne patent-leather shoes. The captain of the recruits made them all strip without delay, and then handed out the rough but honorable articles of clothing that are given to recruits.
With tears in their eyes, they stripped off all their clothes, some of them begging that they be allowed at least to keep their ï¬ne silk undergarments, a request that the captain denied, since, he told them, there they were just the same as everyone else. He didn’t even allow them to keep their socks, and they all began to cry as they put on the shoes that would replace their lovely patent leather ladies’ shoes.
The government paper, El Imparcial, took plains to deny that the army was foolish enough to send any girly-men to the front lines:
All of the prisoners have been sent to Yucatán, but not — as it has been said — to join the ranks of the valiant soldiers taking part in the campaign; they will be employed instead on such tasks as digging trenches, opening breaches, and raising temporary fortifications.
As you have undoubtedly noticed, it was the men in drag who occupied the attention of the press; through their manner of dress, they particularly transgressed the limits of what was tolerable in Mexican society. This brings up the two ways in which homosexuality has traditionally been viewed in Mexico: There are homosexuals, and then there are homosexuals. There are men who are attracted to other men (we understand this homosexuality as a sexual orientation), and there are men who, while identifying as men, are effeminate and, more specifically, adopted the “passive” role (a further transgression of the male gender role.) The second group, it might be said, are the real homosexuals according to traditional society; it was possible (and still is in some rural areas) for one man to have sex with another man and still be regarded as straight, as long as he is the one who retains his claim to masculinity by being the chingón (the one who does the deed) and not the chingado (the one to whom the deed is done), who has effectively surrendered his claims to masculinity.
As long as there was at least some measure of deniability that one had surrendered their masculinity, then that masculinity (and hence, heterosexuality) remained intact in many peoples’ eyes. But deniability was crucial. A few newspapers tried to argue that the twenty-one who weren’t in drag were had been “tricked,” leaving readers to try to imagine who those “tricked” men couldn’t have known who they were dancing with. Other accounts, of course, found that impossible to believe. And it appears that it was that lack of deniability which ultimately doomed everyone to the same fate. While those who were in drag were the most remarked-upon players in the scandal, the whole affair today is known as the “the 41,” not just the nineteen.
Today, the number 41 has become slang for homosexuality or, more specifically, “faggot” or maricón. Some of the early LGBT advocacy groups in Mexico incorporated the number into their names, just as many similar groups in the U.S. have leveraged “Stonewall” as a shorthand for the struggle for gay rights.
[Sources: Robert McKee Irwin. “The Famous 41: The scandalous birth of modern Mexican homosexuality.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 6, no. 3 (2000): 353-376.
Robert McKee Irwin, Edward J. McCaughan, Michelle Rocio Nasser. The Famous 41: Sexuality and Social Control in Mexico, 1901
TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Rock Hudson: 1925. In 1960, The Saturday Evening Post’s Pete Martin interviewed him in 1960 and asked the question that far more people were asking that we might realize:
“…Somewhere during this interview I have to write at least one paragraph in which I say that you were married and that you are not married any more. I’ll tell you this before you begin: I’ve read that your marriage was “made,” not by you but by the same agent who is reported to have made a star of you.
“I’m sure you did read that,” he said. “I read it too, and it made me fell like an idiot. She was my agent’s secretary. I met her in a supermarket. She introduced herself. Naturally I had talked to her many times on the phone. For a while we had a lot of trouble getting together. Either I had a date or she had one. We went together for a year and were married. But it didn’t work out. We stayed married only a couple of years. Last summer our divorce was final. Now I’m single again.”
…I said, “I’m interested in your present reaction to dames. You do date, don’t you?”
“Certainly,” he said. Only my dates don’t get into print. To get a date into print you have to appear in a public place like a night club. I don’t like night clubs.”
“What’s your idea of a date?”
“To take a girl for a sail or meet her at my house or somebody else’s house. What am I supposed to prove? There are times when I almost wish I made the scandal sheets.”
Even in 1960, the interest in Hudson’s love life went a bit beyond that experienced by other male sex symbols. What other subtext could possibly explain the question about whether his marriage to Phyllis Gates was “made” or not? Martin’s question came exceptionally close to exposing the secret that just about everyone in Hollywood knew, that Hudson’s agent, Henry Willson (see Jul 31), had prevailed on Hudson to marry Willson’s secretary after Hudson narrowly escaped having his secret exposed in Confidential magazine in 1955. The couple divorced in 1958, and Hudson never married again.
Hudson was just one product from Willson’s “adonis factory,” so named for Willson’s uncanny ability to find (and often, bed) some of Hollywood’s hotest male stars. Willson took a not-so-smart Roy Fitzgerald out of the truck he was driving, fixed his teeth and his bad grammar, taught him to lower his voice and lose his sibilant lisp, along with how to move, shake hands, sit, dance, sing, ride horses, and even act. It took Hudson thirty eight takes before he could successfully deliver his only line in Warner Brother’s Figher Squadron in 1948.
He got better from there. He received good reviews for his role in 1954’s Magnificant Obsession opposite Jane Wyman, and his popularity went through the roof with the 1956 release of Giant, which also featured Elizabeth Taylor and James Dean. In the 1960s, he turned to romantic comedies, including three with Dorris Day: Pillow Talk, Lover Come Back, and Send Me Now Flowers. As the sixties wore on, film offers declined and Hudson began transitioning to television. From 1971 to 1977, he played police commissioner Stewart McMillan in McMillan & Wife (“wife” was played by Susan Saint James).
In November 1981, Hudson suffered a serious heart attack, followed by quintuple bypass surgery. Because of his heavy drinking and smoking, that didn’t surprise anyone, but his unusually long recovery did raise some eyebrows. He remained in ill health while filming The Ambassador in 1983-1984, and health problems followed while filming the made-for-TV movie The Vegas Strip Wars in 1984. When he began appearing in a recurring role in the primetime soap Dynasty, his gaunt appearance, deteriorating speech and failing memory — he could no longer memorize his lines — rumors began to fly. First it was cancer, this publicists said, but others began whispering “AIDS.”
In July 1985, Hudson appearance on Doris Day’s talk show became instant news due to his shocking appearance in incoherant speech. The following week, Hudson was in Paris for experimental treatment when he issued a press release confirming that he was dying of AIDS, which he attributed to multiple blood transfusions when he underwent bypass surgery. But that story didn’t hold. People magazine published a story about Hudson’s disease, and featured comments Hollywood actors including Angie Dickinson, Robert Stack, Joan Rivers, and Mamie van Doren, who said they knew about his homosexuality and supported him. His death on October 2, 1985, galvanized Hollywood, especially his life-long friend Elizabeth Taylor, and made AIDS fundraising not just a fashionable cause, but an urgent one for a nation that was still very uncomfortable with discussing the disease.
[Sources: Peter Martin. “I call on Rock Hudson.” The Saturday Evening Post 233, no. 4 (July 23, 1960): 16ff.
Robert Hofler. The Man Who Invented Rock Hudson: The Pretty Boys and Dirty Deals of Henry Willson
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November 16th, 2012
TODAY’S AGENDA:
Events This Weekend: Hong Kong Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, Hong Kong, China; Mazipatra Queer Film Festival, Prague/Brno, Czech Republic; Pride, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Paula Vogel: 1951. “I only write about things that directly impact my life.” Vogel says. “If people get upset, it’s because the play is working.” It certainly worked for How I Learned to Drive, which explores control and manipulation through the issues of misogyny, pedophilia and incest through the relatively simple metaphor of driving. She won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for it.
Her first major play, The Baltimore Waltz was a comedy about AIDS, in 1990, when AIDS still couldn’t be joked about much. Hot’N Throbbing (1994) looks at the intersection of porn and domestic violence, while The Mineola Twins (1999) portrays women’s experience over the previous thirty years through the eyes of identical twins. The plays are deadly serious; many of them are also comedies or at least incorporate comedy in them. They are also, as theater theorist Jill Dolan wrote, “at once creative, highly imaginative, and brutally honest.”
Vogel says that her family, especially her brother who died of AIDS in 1988, play a very important role in her plays. “In every play, there are a couple of places where I send a message to my late brother Carl. Just a little something in the atmosphere of every play to try and change the homophobia in our world.” Se is also a teacher, leading the graduate playwriting program at Brown University. In 2008, she left Brown to chair the playwriting department at Yale. She stepped down in 2012. In 2004, she married Brown University professor and researcher Anne Fausto-Sterling in Massachusetts.
Glenn Burke: 1952. He was known as “the guy who invented the high five,” when in a game in 1977, Burke was standing on deck as fellow Dodger Dusty Baker was rounding third and headed for home after hitting a home run. As Baker crossed home plate, Burke raised his had. Baker responded by raising his also, and when the two slapped hands, history was made. Believe it or not. And to make the scene complete, Burke then stepped up to the plate and hit a home run of his own.
Burke made another kind of history, after a fashion: he is believed to be the first gay ballplayer who was out to his team mates. According to his 1995 autobiography, Out at Home
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November 15th, 2012
TODAY’S AGENDA:
Events This Weekend: Hong Kong Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, Hong Kong, China; Mazipatra Queer Film Festival, Prague/Brno, Czech Republic; Pride, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Frank Kameny (center) marching with members of the Washington Mattachine Society in 1970.
TODAY IN HISTORY:
First Official Meeting of the Washington Mattachine Society: 1961. On this date in history, gay rights pioneer Frank Kameny and several others held the first official meeting of the Washington Mattachine Society. The Washington Mattachines, unlike other Mattachine Societies elsewhere in the country, brought a new, aggressive approach to the fight for gay rights. Frank Kameny later reflected on the society’s founding in an essay he contributed to Eric Marcus’s Making History: The Struggle for Gay and Lesbian Equal Rights : 1945-1990 : An Oral History
Meanwhile, other things were going on with Mattachine. The national structure of Mattachine collapsed in March of that year. The San Francisco Mattachine had cut loose all the other affiliates and wished them well, urging them to change their names and to keep on working. The Denver group became The Neighbors and disappeared. The New York group retained its name and incorporated as a nose-thumbing gesture to San Francisco. It be came the Mattachine Society, Incorporated, of New York versus the Mattachine Society in San Francisco. It was all very petty.
…That following November, on November 15, 1961, we had our first official meeting of the Washington Mattachine. I was the organizer and founder. We did all the things that an organization does when it gets going. We took out a back account, got a post-office box, wrote our constitution, elected our officers, set up our meeting structure, and chose a name. I opted against using the Mattachine name, but I was outvoted. I wanted something that was more explicit and expressive, but wouldn’t have used the word gay then. While it was an in-group word, it hadn’t yet gone public.
Now the movement of those days was very unassertive, apologetic, and defensive. I don’t say this critically, and not necessarily derogatorily, but it was a different era. First of all, up to this time, homosexuality had never been publicly discussed. Let me give you an illustration of that. As you’re aware, the question of queers int he government was very much part of the grist of the mill for McCarthy in his hearings in the early 1950s. When McCarthy was riding high, I was still in graduate school at Harvard. I read the Boston Herald every day. I read the New York Times every Sunday. I listened to the radio all the time. I read Time magazine weekly. Yet I did not learn until somewhere around 1958 or 1959 that homosexuality had been a theme of those hearings because it was not widely reported.: the word homosexual was not fit to print or discuss or be heard. Virtually from one end of the decade to the other, outside the medical books, there was nothing anywhere on the subject. It was blanked out, blacked out. It wasn’t there!
Because there was no publicity, there was no way of getting to people. The people in the small movement at that time were only talking to themselves. There was absolutely nothing whatsoever that anybody heard at that time, anywhere that was other than negative! Nothing! We were sick; we were sinners; we were perverts. And so the movement, predictably, in retrospect, did not take strong positions. It gave a hearing to everybody, saying, “As long as it deals with homosexuality, all views must be heard, even those that are the most harshly and viciously condemnatory to homosexuals. We have to defer to the experts.” My answer to that was, “Drivel! We are the experts on ourselves, and we will tell the experts they have nothing to tell us!” Giving all views a fair hearing didn’t suit my personality. And the Mattachine Society of Washington was formed around my personality.
So we at the Washington Mattachine characterized ourselves within the movement as an activist militant organization. Those were very dirty words in those days in the movement, such as it was. You weren’t supposed to be militant. And we were, both in our actions and our goals. Our statement of purposes set out our goals, which were generally to achieve equality for homosexuals and homosexuality against heterosexuals and heterosexuality. Equality was the primary issue.
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November 14th, 2012
TODAY’S AGENDA:
Events This Weekend: Hong Kong Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, Hong Kong, China; Mazipatra Queer Film Festival, Prague/Brno, Czech Republic; Pride, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Aaron Copland: 1900. Born in Brooklyn to Lithuanian Jewish parents, Copland composed some of the most quintessentially American classical music. Appalachian Spring celebrated American pioneers; Billy the Kid set the open prairie to music; Rodeo sells beef on television (“It’s what’s for dinner”); and Fanfare for the Common Man was, briefly, the theme music for Rick Perry’s ill-fated presidential run, which was ironic that a rabidly anti-gay politician would turn to such patriotic music that was composed by a relatively openly gay man.
Copland’s childhood was a rather typical one for an immigrant family in New York City. His father, who had no musical interest, owned a small department store. It was his mother, brothers and sisters — he was the youngest of five — who were musically inclined. His oldest brother played violin, and a sister gave him his first piano lessons and exposed him to opera. From the age of thirteen, he began formal music lessons. By age fifteen, he decided to become a composer. From 1921 to 1924, Copland went to Paris for further study at the Fontainebleau School of Music. In 1925, he returned to the U.S., and with two Guggenheim Fellowships in 1925 and 1926, he was able to rent a studio apartment where he lived for the next thirty years. He met Alfreid Stieglitz, who introduced him to many of the leading artists of the day: Paul Strand, Ansel Adams, Georgia O’Keefe, and Walker Evans, whose photos inspired Copland’s opera The Tender Land.
Stieglitz’s determination that American artists should reflect “the ideas of American Democracy” had a profound effect on Copland. It also represent a severe challenge. American classical music composers looked to Europe as a model for music composition. All that American had was popular music, folk music and jazz. The challenge for Copland was to show how these so-called “lower” forms of music could be in integral part of classical music. He joined five other like-minded composers to form what was called the “commando unit,” who collaborated in joint concerts to promote their new approach.
Once the depression hit, Copland expanded his horizons again through travels to Europe, Africa and Mexico. When Hitler and Mussolini attacked Spain in 1936, Copland, along with many other artists, were sympathetic to the Spanish Republicans, and many of them had joined the Communist Party. Copland himself didn’t join — he was committed to his refusal to join any party — but he did sympathize with leftist political movements, including his support for the Communist Party USA ticket during the 1936 presidential election, and for Henry A. Wallace’s presidential bid on the Progressive Party ticket in 1948.
This period of political turmoil coincided with some of Copland’s most famous work. In 1939, he completed his first two Hollywood film scores, for Of Mice and Men and Our Town. That same year, he debuted his highly successful ballet Billy the Kid. He followed that with two more acclaimed ballets, Rodeo (1942) and Appalachian Spring (1944), which featured the melody of an old Shaker hymn, “Simple Gifts.” A Lincoln Portrait and Fanfare for the Common Man, both debuted in 1942 as American was entering World War II, have become American patriotic standards.
But the McCarthy era of the 1950s proved difficult. A Lincoln Portrait had been on the program for Eisenhower’s 1953 inaugural concert, but it was withdrawn over controversy over Copland’s earlier sympathies with leftist politics. That same year, he was called to testify before Congress, where he insisted that he had never joined the Communist Party. Ignored during the controversy was Copland’s deeply patriotic music, a neglect which outraged many American musicians.
During the 1950s, Copland’s pace in composition fell off, as new avant garde musical trends became fashionable in the music world. But he did continue to exert a major influence among other American composers, most principally his friend and student, protégé Leonard Bernstein. By the 1960s, he had more or less given up composing and took up conducting. He wasn’t crazy about the idea, but, as he said, “It was exactly as if someone had simply turned off a faucet.” This change in his career gave him the opportunity to guest conduct some of American’s great orchestras, and to record a major part of his canon for posterity. His health deteriorated through the 1980s and he died in 1990 from Alzheimer’s and resipitory failure.
Albrecht Becker: 1906. Albrecht Becker was an actor and production designer who lived with his parter of ten yeas in Würzburg in Bavaria. In 1935, he came under the notice of the Gestapo when they were investigating another Würzburg resident, Dr. Leopold Obermayer, a Swiss national who was both Jewish and gay. During the course of the Gestapo’s investigation, they found several photos of young men, including Albert Becker, in Obermeyer’s possession. Obermeyer was sent to Manthausen concentration camp, where he ultimately perished. Becker was also tried under Germany’s notorious Paragraph 175 and sentenced to a three year term in Nürnburg Prison. In 1940, he joined the German army and sent directly to the Eastern front where soldiers weren’t expected to survive. But survive he did, and he was able to return to Germany and work in the film industry after the war. He became an internationally recognized photographer, production designer and actor for German television. His story is one of six personal histories recounted in the 2000 documentary, Paragraph 175,
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November 13th, 2012
THIS MONTH IN HISTORY:
Marriages Between Women: 1902. The November 1902 issue of the journal Alienist and Neurologist (“Alienist” was a nineteenth century term for psychiatrist) included this brief notice:
MARRIAGES BETWEEN WOMEN.– Two recent cases of marriages between women have been disclosed by the death of the alleged “husband”. (“George” Greene, a well- known citizen of Ettrick, Va.,) who died at the age of 75. The wife called in assistance to prepare the body, when deceased was discovered to be a woman. “He” had been born in England, but came to the United States when a child. “He” early exhibited proclivities for male attire to which the family soon became accustomed. “He” worked for several years as a man and married (at the age of 40) a widow. The couple maintained their relationship without discovery until Greene’s death, at the age of 75.
“William” C. Howard died in Canandaigua, New York, at the age of 50. The refusal of the “widow” and “children” to permit an undertaker to prepare the body for burial led to a coroner’s inquest, which disclosed the fact that “William” was a woman. “William” had early manifested male proclivities. “His” family had been unable to induce “him” to adopt female attire. When a girl on “his” father’s farm “he” donned male attire and took up masculine occupation, taking care of horses and cattle and doing chores. The family ceased to remonstrate with her, at length growing accustomed to her male attire and often joking about the attentions she paid her own sex. She escorted girls to parties and spent money on them freely. Finally she “married” a woman named Dwyer and later adopted two children. The couple took a farm near Canandaigua and settled down quietly.
There was nothing especially feminine in either Greene or Howard; while Howard’s ancestral family knew the real condition of things, they do not seem to have looked upon the relationship as at all abnormal. This would appear to indicate that the relatives of inverts have a certain tolerance for homosexuality. The influence of training at the indifferent periods in the development of homosexuality is suggested by the Howard case. The donning of male attire for convenient purposes may have stimulated a potential inversion previously latent.
[Source: Charles H. Hughes. “Marriages between women.” Alienist and Neurologist 23, no. 4 (November 1902): 498-500.]
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November 12th, 2012
The November 1954 issue of ONE.
TODAY IN HISTORY:
Miami’s Anti-Gay Mayor Writes To Gay Magazine: 1954. Miami’s witch hunt against gay people wasn’t just the subject of headlines in South Florida (see Aug 3, Aug 11, Aug 12, Aug 13 (twice that day), Aug 14, Aug 26, Aug 31, Sep 1, Sep 2, Sep 7, Sep 15, Sep 19, Oct 6 and Oct 20). ONE magazine, the pioneering Los Angeles-based gay magazine was paying close attention and relaying events to its national audience. In its November 1954 cover story, Jim Kepner (writing as Lyn Pederson) brought ONE’s readers up to date with a complete chronology beginning with the murder of a 27-year-old Eastern Airlines flight attendant, William T. Simpson and the police’s discovery of a gay community with a “nominal head of the colony — a queen” (see Aug 3). Kepner mocked the investigation: “Pulling two and twaddle together, detectives guessed if Simpson hadn’t been the queen, perhaps he’d been a sort of royal pretender, killed by his rival.” But after recounting all of the events that followed, Kepner warned that what was happening in Miami was no laughing matter:
The Miami story illustrates what trumped up hysteria can do in a few weeks to any city in the United States. Corrupt politicians and opportunistic demagogues can endanger any community that permits itself to be herded into pogrom. …And one begins to realize that by all the requirements, the fantastically large minority of homosexuals is perhaps the top candidate for any new and large scale witch hunt In America.
Now that homosexuality has become mentionable in polite society, the social balance can be seen quickly shiftin” as society tries to decide what new attitude it must take to the problem. It seems certain to this author that the shift will be fast, and the new attitude drastic, and that it will determine in large part the extent to which this nation remains a free and open society.
If Miami had caught the attention of ONE, it can also be said that ONE also caught Miami’s attention as well. The Miami News published a front-page article in August on “how Los Angeles handles its 150,000 perverts.”: “In California the homosexuals have… established their own magazine and are constantly crusading for recognition as a ‘normal’ group.” On November 4, ONE wrote a letter to Miami Mayor Abe Aronovitz, who was leading the anti-gay witch hunt. We don’t know what that letter said, but Aronovitz replied on November 12. Based on the Mayor’s reply, it appears that at least one of ONE’s objectives was to take Aronovitz to task for his proposal to try to shut down the city’s gay bars (see Sep 15, Sep 19, Oct 6 and Oct 20). Whatever other objections ONE may have raised, Aronovitz’s reply remained limited to just that one item. That reply was printed in ONE’s January 1955 issue:
Mayor Aronovitz’s letter and ONE’s response (ONE, January 1955, page 36).
November 12, 1954.
One, Inc .
232 South Hill Street
Los Angeles 12 , CaliforniaAttn: Mr. Marvin Cutler , Secretary
Bureau of Public InformationGentlemen:
In reply to your letter of November 9th, this is to advise that I have never advocated harassing homosexuals or other deviates. I have always insisted that the lowest form of human being is the individual who while operating a public business violates many laws and caters to homosexuals for the purpose of taking advantage of other human beings.
Miami is not required to provide a haven for the homosexuals and deviates of the nation and therefore, if you will keep informing the nation of this fact, I will be much obliged.
Yours very truly,
(signed)
Abe Aronowitz,
Mayor
ONE recounted several statements that Aroniwitz had uttered over the past several months and concluded, “The editors of ONE feel that the above statement by the Mayor of Miami is slightly at odds with statements attributed to him by the MIAMI DAILY NEWS.” As for providing a haven for the homosexuals of the nation, ONE curtly observed: “Editorially, we might also point out to the Mayor of Miami that it is quite possible that some of the homosexuals in Miami might have been born there.”
[Sources: Lyn Pedersen. “Miami Hurricane.” ONE 2, no. 11 (November 1954): 4-8.
Unsigned. Letter from Mayor Abe Aronowitz. ONE 3, no. 1 (January 1955): 36.]
Gay Liberation Front Protests Time Magazine: 1969. The cover story of Time magazine two weeks earlier (see Oct 31)) continued to weigh heavily on the minds of New York’s gay activists. The article said a few nice things about gays — it included a few comments from New York Mattachine member Dick Leitsch and Washington Mattachine founder Frank Kameny to represent gay people. But it also included quotes by Dr. Charles Socarides and a man he claimed to have cured. (Socarides would go on to co-found NARTH in 1993.) Those views and the article might have been acceptable if it had appeared just a year earlier, but in November of 1969, just four months after the Stonewall Rebellion, members of the Gay Liberation Front saw no need to sit by while so-called “experts” cast judgments on their mental health and moral beliefs. Many in GLF were particularly angry because they had cooperated with the writer, only to find the article emphasizing the old tired stereotypes, particularly of gay men.
On November 12, members of the Gay Liberation Front and the Daughters of Bilitis picketed the Time-Life building and handed out leaflets to passers-by. They read, “In characteristic tight-assed fashion, Time has attempted to dictate sexual boundaries for the American public and to define what is healthy, moral, fun, and good on the basis of its own narrow, out-dated, warped, perverted, and repressed sexual bias.” But due partly to the cold and snowy weather, the protest didn’t attract much attention, save for some jeers from construction workers across the street and a very brief mention during the eleven o’clock news on the ABC affiliate.
[Source: Edward Alwood. Straight News: Gays, Lesbians and the News Media
“A martini, honey, and don’t waste any space with those olives!”
TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS:
Megan Mullally: 1958. “What’s this? What’s going on here? What’s happening?” Oh sure, some might have thought the sitcom Will & Grace was about the two title characters. But if that were true, it would have just been a gay man and his fag hag. Yawn. So if you ask me (and I’m acutely aware that you didn’t), Megan Mullally’s portrayal of booze-guzzling, pill-popping, boob-flashing, gold-digging, maid-abusing Karen Walker (alias, “Anastasia Beaverhausen”) is what really made the series an essential part of NBC’s Must See TV. To say that Karen was narcissistic was, well, as Karen would say, “That’s like saying Prada’s are just shoes or vodka is just a morning beverage.”
Mullally started out in Chicago theater before moving to Los Angeles in 1985. She made minor guest appearances in a long, long list of sitcoms, including Seinfeld, Frasier, Wings, and Mad About You. Then came her eight year run on Will & Grace where she was tapped for seven consecutive Emmy Award nominations for “Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series”; she won in 2000 and 2006. After Will & Grace, she had her own short-lived talk show and has stayed busy with several guest appearances. She also returned to the stage, starring in Mel Brook’s Broadway musical adaptation of Young Frankenstein, and in a production of Adam Bart’s The Receptionist in Los Angeles.
The most feared Man on Capital Hill
Mike Rogers: 1963. “The Most Feared Man On Capital Hill” is known for his ability to snoop out closeted anti-gay politicians and expose them long before the mainstream media catches on. Rogers’s targets have included Virginia Congressman Edward Schrock, Idaho Senator Larry Craig, and former RNC chair Ken Mehlman. Some have criticized him for it, but he says what others call “outing” he calls “reporting.” In 2009, Rogers appeared on a local Washington, D.C. news program with host Doug McKelway, who criticized Rogers and said that he would like to “take you (Rogers) outside and punch you across the face.” Rogers demanded an apology, but never got one. Ask him what his favorite movie was, and he will tell you it is Outrage, the 2009 documentary by Kirby Dick which discusses the hypocrisy of closeted politicians who work against the gay community.
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November 11th, 2012
Recruitment poster by JC Leyendecker
Today is Veterans Day, the day set aside to honor all armed forces veterans — all of them, including LGBT veterans. The chosen date, November 11, marks the date and time of the armistice which ended the Great War, 11/11 at 11:11 a.m. The date was originally known as Armistice day, which was first proclaimed in 1919 by President Woodrow Wilson, who wrote:
To us in America, the reflections of Armistice Day will be filled with solemn pride in the heroism of those who died in the country’s service and with gratitude for the victory, both because of the thing from which it has freed us and because of the opportunity it has given America to show her sympathy with peace and justice in the councils of the nations.
In 1938, Congress made Armistice day a permanent annual holiday as “a day to be dedicated to the cause of world peace and to be thereafter celebrated and known as ‘Armistice Day’.” After the end of the Second World War, Armistice day was expanded to honor all veterans, not just those of World War I. Congress officially changed the name of Armistice day in 1954 to Veterans Day. While today is remains the day officially set aside to honor veterans, many government offices and banks will be closed tomorrow as part of the observance.
Many other countries continue to observe this date as either Armistice Day or Remembrance Day. In many British Commonwealth countries, Remembrance Day is also known as Poppies Day, after the red poppies in the poem “In Flanders Fields” which bloomed on some of the worst battlefields of Flanders. The brilliant red color is symbolic of the blood that was spilled.
TODAY IN HISTORY:
Woman Who Posed As Man 60 Years, Dead: 1907. That was the headline in The Trinidad (Colorado) Advertiser above this news item:
Katherine Vosbaugh, who for sixty years posed as a man, wearing male garb, living the rough life of the pioneers in the Southwest and who even “married” another woman, died yesterday morning at the San Raphael Hospital in this city, where she had been a county charge since he secret of her life was discovered by Dr. T.J. Forham, of this city two years ago.
Born nearly four-score years ago in France of a good family, this remarkable woman donned male garb when but a slip of a girl, came to America and worked as a back clerk, bookkeeper, restauranteur, cook, and sheep herder for over half a century without her sex being known.
In July, two years ago, “Frenchy,” a cook and sheep herder on the Sam Brown ranch, near this city, was taken with pneumonia and brought to the hospital where her secret was revealed. Even then, this strange woman refused to wear skirts. Clad in regulation man’s attire, she has since worked about the hospital and was known by the nickname of “Grandpa.”
Katherine Vosbaugh was left an orphan at the age of twenty years. Her father, a well educated man of considerable means, gave her an excellent business education. At hi death she was an expert accountant and spoke her native tongue, English, German, and Hungarian. Her only motive in assuming the disguise at first seems to have been to enable her more easily to secure employment.
She worked in several cities all over the country before settling at Joplin, Mo., where she worked for fifteen years as a bank clerk, and it was in this city where she married. The name of her “wife” was never learned, but the ceremony seems to have taken place for the purpose of saving the woman’s good name. A few months after the marriage a child was born to the wife, which died after a few months.
Shortly after the death of the child the two women came to this city and opened a restaurant on Commercial street. Here she was known as “Frenchy” and the establishment was one of the most popular restaurants in the Southwest.
Wheat became of “Frenchy’s” wife is not known. She drifted away and her “husband” refused until the time of her death to reveal the woman’s name.
After leaving here the woman secured a position as cook on a big sheep ranch near Trinche ranch. The eccentricities of youth became more pronounced as she grew older and more and more she came to look like a man. For years she lived with men on the ranch, cooking for them, assisting them in the ranch work, and sleeping in the same rooms, but her secret was never suspected.
Two years and four months ago she was stricken with pneumonia, and it was then that her secret was discovered. Since then she failed rapidly in body and mind and her death was due to a general breakdown.
[Source: Jonathan Ned Katz. Gay/Lesbian Almanac (New York: Harper & Row, 1983), pages 323-324.]
Six Year Old Child Has An Odd Trait: 1960. That’s another headline given for a column titled “Child Care” by Dr. Milton I. Levine and Jean H. Seligmann, in which a mother writes in about her cross-dressing son. Naturally, it’s the parents’ fault:
(Q) “My son is 6 year old and has a peculiar trait which has me very worried. He likes to dress up on girls’ or women’s clothing. I have two older daughters aged 9½ and 11 and he loves to wear their clothes whenever he gets the chance. He says theirs are much nicer than his. One day I found him in one of my dresses walking around in my high-heeled shoes. I am terribly frightened that he may be abnormal when he is older. What can I do? He seems normal otherwise and plays equally well with both boys and girls. He sees his father a little in the evenings and his father is home every weekend.”
Mrs. T.R.D.
(A) The desire to dress in the clothes of the opposite sex is fairly common in young children, but is a tendency which should not be encouraged. Sometimes this activity continues on into adult life when it becomes more and more difficult to change.
Although a child or adult prefers the clothes of the opposite sex, this does not necessarily mean that the person is a homosexual. As a mater of fact, in the vast majority of cases studied these children grew up with normal sex desires. But undoubtedly there are some who do become homosexual.
We do not know enough about your home environment or the manner in which your son has been brought up to say just why he likes to dress in female attire, but there are a number of possible causes. Sometimes boys feel their parents really wanted a girl and they try to act or look like one. Boys who live in a home atmosphere which is largely feminine may want to dress like women. (We know of instances where boys have been allowed to dress like girls without any objection from their parents.) If a boy is too close to his mother, or if he hasn’t enough contact with his father, he may want to dress like a woman to be like his mother.
Be sure your son feels the importance of being a boy. He should know that both you and his father wanted a son and are happy he is a boy. He should be discouraged from wearing girls’ clothes but not teased or laughed at. He should get a great deal more attention from his father who should encourage him in male interests. He should look more and more to his father as his model.
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November 10th, 2012
TODAY’S AGENDA:
Events This Weekend: Daytona Beach Pride, Daytona Beach Florida; Gay Day Disney, Hong Kong, China.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Phyllis Lyon: 1924. The Oklahoma native earned a degree in journalism from the University of California at Berkeley in 1946 and worked as a reporter for a California paper before moving to Seattle to work at a magazine in 1950. That’s where she met the love of her life, Del Martin. They became a couple in 1953 when they moved to San Francisco together. “We really only had problems our first year together,” she later told The Washington Post. “Del would leave her shoes in the middle of the room, and I’d throw them out the window.” Del responded “You’d have an argument with me and try to storm out the door. I had to teach you to fight back.” Their life together was all about fighting back. In 1955 Phyllis and Del, along with six other women, formed the Daughters of Bilitis, the first national lesbian organization in the U.S. Phyllis was the first editor of the DOB’s groundbreaking newsletter, The Ladder from 1956 to 1960, when Del took over. Pseudonyms were common then, and Phillis edited The Ladder as “Ann Ferguson” for the first few months, but she dropped it to encourage their readers not to hide. By October 1957, they had 400 subscribers across the country. In 1964, they helped found the Council on Religion and the Homosexual, bringing together national religious leaders and gay and lesbian activists for a national discussion of gay rights. Phyllis was also the first open lesbian to serve on the board of the National Organization for Women in 1973. Phyllis and Del were also active in San Francisco’s Alice B. Toklas Democratic Club.
On February 12, 2004, Phyllis and Del married for the first time when San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom ordered that marriage licenses be granted to same-sex couples. That marriage lasted until August 12, but not because the couple split up. That was when the California Supreme Court voided several thousand marriage licenses given to same-sex couples. Del and Phyllis were deeply dissapointed. “Del is 83 years old and I am 79,” she said. “After being together for more than 50 years, it is a terrible blow to have the rights and protections of marriage taken away from us. At our age, we do not have the luxury of time.”
But they had the luxury of just enough time. They were married again on June 16, 2008 after the California Supreme Court ruled that prohibiting same-sex marriage was against the state constitution. Del and Phyllis were given the honor of being the first same-sex couple to be married, and they wore the same outfits in which they were first married in 2004. Del passed away two months later, on August 27, 2008.
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November 9th, 2012
TODAY’S AGENDA:
Groundbreaking and Naming Ceremony for LGBT-Friendly Low-Income Senior Housing Complex: Philadelphia, PA. Project planners, LGBT-advocates and public officials will mark the start of construction on Philadelphia’s LGBT-friendly low-income senior housing complex, which is being billed as the first urban project of its kind in the nation. The six-story building will feature 56 one-bedroom units, with a 5,000 square-foot enclosed courtyard and multi-purpose spaces to be shared by residents and the larger community. The plans also include nearly 2,000 square feet of rentable ground floor retail space fronting 13th Street in the heart of Philadelphia’s neighborhood. Mayor Michael Nutter will reveal the project’s name, and LGBT civil rights pioneers Randy Wicker (see Jul 15), Ada Bello (see Aug 7), Mark Horn, Jeff Fouratt, Michael Lavery, and Mark Segal (see Dec 11) will also be on hand. The groundbreaking ceremony will take place at 249 South 13th Street, between Spruce and Locust Streets, from 11:00 a.m. and noon.
Transgender Leadership Summit: Berkeley, CA. The Transgender Law Center will present their seventh annual Transgender Leadership Summit, which will present several workshops ranging from legal, health care, organizational development and much more. The Transgender Advocacy Network, a national network of transgender advocacy and educational organizations, will also be there presenting workshops of lessons learned from advocacy work across the country. The summit takes place today and tomorrow at the University of California, Berkeley. You can follow the event on Twitter at #TLS12, and they will also livestream portions of the Summit.
Other Events This Weekend: Daytona Beach Pride, Daytona Beach Florida; Gay Day Disney, Hong Kong, China.
THIS MONTH IN HISTORY:
“They Cannot Whistle”: A European Overview of Sexual Inversion: 1894. Most original thought on homosexuality in the nineteenth century was being published in Germany and France, two nations whose obscenity laws declined to interfere with what was billed as “scientific” material. The same was not necessarily true in Britain or the U.S., where authorities were more strict about what could be published. But if a publication first appeared abroad in a foreign language, its translation into English and publication in journals and books sold exclusively to the medical professions was typically allowed. This had the effect of stifling the study of sexuality in Britain and the U.S. while the new science of sexology on the continent enjoyed a multi-decade head start. Consequently, late nineteenth century American and British medical professionals were still dependent on French, German and Italian sources for information on sexuality. And so the November 1894 edition of the American journal Physician and Surgeon included this lecture by Dr. Paul Blocq from Paris on the topic of “sexual inversion”:
It is important, first of all, to explain what we mean by sexual inversion, and show how it differs from the other perversions of the genital instinct. We may arrange these aberrations in three classes: (1) Where the instinct is abolished, impotence and agenisis. (2) When it is exaggerated, satyriasis and nymphomania. (3) Perversions. This last class includes onanism, fetichism, masochism, and sadism. Then comes inversion, which may be defined as a sexual attraction between individuals of the same sex — homo-sexuality. In man we may, according to [Albert] MOLL, give it the name of uranism, keeping the expression, pederast (sodomist) for the group of persons who practice coitus in ano. In woman it is called tribadism, saphism or lesbism [sic], according to the method they may employ to produce the sexual orgasm. [All parentheticals and italics in the original, bracketed info added.]
Acknowledging that “the medical study of this state is quite modern,” homosexuality itself has existed in Biblical times “and in the ancient history of different nations.” He reviewed the European literature on homosexuality (Richard von Kraftt-Ebing, Heinrich Kaan, Albert Moll, Julien Chevalier, Karl Friedrich Otto Westphal, among others), and concluded — not by science but solely by way of analogy — that homosexuality was a pathological condition:
Take hunger, for instance: it recalls to the normal organism the want of food, but of course we know plenty of states where this instinct is wanting and yet the stomach is in a normal condition. It is probably the same in a man whose sexual organs are in a normal state and yet his instinct is perverted. That is to say, it is easy to understand that the genital instinct can present the same abnormalities that the other functions do. Nevertheless, the objection will be made that a person in good health is pushed by nature to perpetuate his species, and one cannot qualify as morbid the absence of sexual desire when its reproduction is possible, for it is known that some uranists have had wives and had children by them. But take up the comparison again. We can see also that there is no sufficient reason for denying the pathological nature of inversion in these facts, for no one, for instance, will deny that the absence of appetite is pathological whether the organism receives the usual quantity of food or not, and the default of sexual propensity is likewise a pathological fact whether coition is possible or not. The comparison is possible also with those persons who have a taste for indigestible substances, such as chalk, lead, et cetera. These are pathological tastes and yet the normal one for nutritive substances may and often does exist with this state.
That is what passed for science in the late nineteenth century and well into the twentieth. His descriptions of gay men is equally based on impressions rather than rigorous scientific study:
The first thing noticed in such patients, as a rule, is effeminacy. This modifies the physiognomy, voice, attitude and walk. It must not be supposed, though, that all persons who act and walk like women are of this class, n0r that there are not any uranists who preserve the normal appearance of man. It is only to be remarked that many of them take the woman type, or at least they imitate it and make efforts to reproduce it artificially by shaving off the beard or moustache, some going so far as to have it pulled out (epilation). If they have not naturally a soprano or alto voice they will try to cultivate one. [Karl] ULRICHS states that they cannot whistle but this sign is not proven. …
They will adopt ladies’ silk stockings, high heeled boots and even wear corsets. The furniture of their rooms will show the same tendency, with a profusion of fans, toys, and perfumes. Some of them will even work at crochet and women’s needlework. GYURKOWECHSKY [?] says that they resemble women more than men by their caprices, changeableness, and facility for telling lies (not gallant) while they have an excessive prudery.
Their intellectual state is not, however, as a rule bad, as they ha”e been known to direct large business enterprises with some ability. They possess a real aversion to women and never approach them if possible. …
As to their sexual feelings, they make ‘psysical manifestations of inversion by making the actual love they seem to feel to the person they have chosen and express their passion just as normal men do for the women of their choice. They seem to feel the same passion as men do for women and express it strongly in letters of which many hundreds are extant. … According to their own confessions they know one another by an oblique look of the eyes, but this sign is certainly very indefinite.
What caused this condition?
A large number of theories have been proposed to account for the genesis of this state. [Paulo] MANTEGAZZA thinks that it is anatomical in its origin. For instance, in passive sodomists, the nervous filaments which should be distributed to the genital organs are given off to the rectal mucous membrane, but there is no demonstration given of this idea. As the normal excitation of these nerves comes from the brain and cord it is more likely that [Valentin] MAGNAN and [Eugene] GLEY are in the right in thinking that it is a corticle trouble. KRAFT-EBING [sic] is also of this opinion, and while we have no confirmation of it by post-mortems, still, it is a possible explanation of the state. Personally, we share the ideas of MOLL, who thinks that there is an abnormal genital instinct in these cases simply because this instinct in degenerated subjects is their locus minoris resistentiæ.
Once a diagnosis is made, what should the physician do then?
About treatment:— Two indications present themselves. In some of these subjects there is a sort of hyperesthesia of the genital organs and this must be met by proper medication. Warm douches, bromides, and camphor combined with lupulin are useful drugs, and in the other cases one can insist on their returning to the normal as regards sexual life. Sometimes this is best carried out by suggestion without hypnotism. Surgical intervention by castration has been suggested.
[Source: Paul Blocq. “Sexual Inversion.” Physician and Surgeon 16, no. 11 (November 1894): 549-553. Available online here.]
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November 8th, 2012
TODAY’S AGENDA:
Events This Weekend: Daytona Beach Pride, Daytona Beach Florida; Gay Day Disney, Hong Kong, China.
TODAY IN HISTORY:
Police Woman “Flowers of Evil” Episode Airs: 1974. When NBC’s hour-long action drama Police Woman starring Angie Dickinson began airing in 1974, it was so popular that even its reruns in the spring and summer of 1975 ranked number one in the Nielsen ratings. It was first successful police drama to feature a woman in the starring role. Dickinson’s unabashed sex appeal, undoubtedly, played a far greater role in its success than the plot lines themselves. One particularly odious episode, “Flowers of Evil,” had Dickinson’s character, Sgt. Pepper Anderson, investigating a trio of lesbians who run a retirement home where they murdered and robbed their elderly residents.
To add insult to injury, the Police Woman episode aired one month to the day after a similarly negative plot line appeared on ABC’s Marcus Welby, M.D., in which a child molester was portrayed as gay (see Oct 8). Police Woman’s “Flowers of Evil” was originally scheduled to air on October 25, but after the National Gay Rights Task Force organized national protests and advertisers began canceling, NBC pulled the episode for re-editing. But with the filming wrapped up, the edits were mostly cosmetic. After the episode aired on November 8, TV Guide called it “the single most homophobic show to date.” A week later, a group known as Lesbian Feminist Liberation occupied NBC’s Standards and Practices office overnight, unfurled a banner from an office window reading “Lesbians Protest NBC.” Advocates continued to negotiate with NBC for several more months, and NBC finally agreed in 1975 to not rebroadcast the episode during re-runs and to withhold it from syndication. The “Flowers of Evil” episode re-appeared again, but only after thirty years had passed, in the Season 1 DVD box set
Harvey Milk taking the oath of office.
Harvey Milk Elected to San Francisco Board of Supervisors: 1977. Newspapers across American carried this two-paragraph news item a few days after election day:
Homosexual Elected to Supervisors’ Board
San Francisco (AP) — Harvey Milk Tuesday became the first avowed homosexual to be elected to the city’s board of supervisors, some 25 years afte he was discharged by the navy when it learned he was gay. Mr. Milk, 47, a camera store owner, said Wednesday, “I’m a symbol of hope for gays and all minorities. My election, against all the odds, shows that the system can work and that there is hope.”
Mr Milk defeated a field of 17 candidates which included several other gays and former San Francisco 49ers football player Bob St. Clair.
This was Milk’s third run for Supervisor. He lost in 1973 and 1975 when all six Supervisor seats were elected in city-wide at-large elections where the top six vote getters joined the board. He also ran for the State Assembly in 1976, but lost in a close race. In 1977, San Francisco switched to single-member districts, and Milk won a seat on the Board of Supervisors on his third try.
Networks Reject PFLAG Ads as Offensive: 1995. Parents, Family and Friends of Lesbians and Gays created at least three television ads to address the effect of anti-gay rhetoric on bullying and suicide. (According to Commercial Closet, the ads were this, this, and this — but only the last one matches the descriptions provided in news reports.) One of those ads, “Guns,” featured a teenage girl rummaging through her parents’ bedroom looking for a gun. Another ad featured a young man being beaten by bullies (that ad does not appear to be online.) Those images were disturbing enough. But what made the ads particularly controversial was that intercut between those images were video clips of Rev. Jerry Falwell, Rev. Pat Robertson, and Sen. Jesse Helms (R-NC). The “Guns” ad, for example, went like this:
(Young woman enters her parents’ bedroom)
Jerry Falwell: Homosexuality is moral perversion and is always wrong. God hates homosexuality.(Young woman frantically searchers dresser drawers and linen closet)
Pat Robertson: Homosexuality is an abomination. The practices of these people is appalling. It is a pathology. It is a sickness.(Young woman finds a gun in a cedar chest)
Jesse Helms: A lot of us are sick and tired of all of the pretenses of injured innocence. They are not innocent.(Young woman holds gun and cries.)
Announcer: It is estimated that thirty percent of teenage suicide victims are gay or lesbian.(PFLAG logo appears)
The ad drew a direct threat from Bruce Hausknecht, associate general counsel for Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcast Network. “The spots contain defamatory material and cast Pat Robertson and CBN in a false light by implying that Pat advocates/promotes heinous crimes against gays or directly caused the suicide of one or more homosexual persons. This is outrageously false and severely damaging to the reputation of Dr. Robertson and this ministry.” Hauskenecht warned that if the ads were aired, CBN would “immediately seek judicial redress against your station,” including injunctions and monetary damages. As a result, the ads were rejected by eight stations in Washington, D.C., Tulsa, Houston and Atlanta, and by CNN, which had tentatively accepted them for Larry King Live. Some of those stations did accept the companion ad depicting the young man being beaten.
PFLAG criticized stations for not airing the ad. Pointing out that talk radio was filled with anti-gay statements on a regular basis, PFLAG’s board president Mitzi Henderson said, “These people (Falwell, Robertson and Helms) are particularly accessible and public. We think they’re representative of a variety of sources. … We wanted to say, ‘Wake up and join us in opposing hate speech.'”
PFLAG executive director Sandra Gillis said that Tulsa, Atlanta and Houston were chosen “because they’re heartland america. Mainstream, middle Americans are not an intolerant lot. They don’t realize the level of abuse and violence against gays and lesbians.” She said the campaign’s message was “watch your words. They can create a climate in which violent people think their violent action is okay.”
Charles Demuth, Self Portrait, 1907.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Charles Demuth: 1883. An important modernist watercolorist and oil painter, the Lancaster, Pennsylvania native studied at Drexel University and the Pensylvania Academy of Fine arts before moving on to Académie Colarossi and Académie Julian in Paris. While in Paris, Demuth became part of the avant garde scene. While that exposure proved profoundly influential, Demuth didn’t stay in Paris long, just a little over a year. He came back home to Lancaster where he remained for the rest of his life, although he continued to travel frequently to Provincetown, New York, Philadelphia and, occasionally, to Europe. While in New York, he frequented Lafayette Baths, which likely inspired his 1918 homoerotic Turkish Bath with Self Portrait. But ill health in 1921 while in Europe forced his return to the U.S., where he was treated for diabetes, becoming one of the first people in the U.S. to take regular insulin injections. Ill health would plague him for the rest of his life.
His first solo show was in 1926 at the Anderson Gallery in New York, followed by another one at Intimate Gallery, which was run by his friend Alfred Stieglitz. His most famous painting, The Figure Five in Gold, was inspired by his friend William Carlos Williams’s poem “The Great Figure.” The Wall Street Journal’s Judith Dobrzynsky described its importance:
Charles Demuth, The Figure 5 In Gold, 1928.
It’s the best work in a genre Demuth created, the “poster portrait”. It’s a witty homage to his close friend, the poet William Carlos Williams, and a transliteration into paint of his poem, “The Great Figure”. It’s a decidedly American work made at a time when U.S. artists were just moving beyond European influences. It’s a reference to the intertwined relationships among the arts in the 1920s, a moment of cross-pollination that led to American Modernism. And it anticipates pop art.
He created other poster portraits to honor several of his friends: Gertrude Stein, Eugene O’Neil, Georgia O’Keefe, Marsden Hartley among them, and his work was identified as part of the Precisionism movement, a distinctly American style of painting that was influenced by the industrialization and modernization of the American landscape. In 1927, he started a series of painting depicting industrial and agricultural structures in Lancaster. His last painting in the series, After All, was completed in 1933. He died two hears later at the age of 51.
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November 7th, 2012
TODAY’S AGENDA:
Events This Weekend: Daytona Beach Pride, Daytona Beach Florida; Gay Day Disney, Hong Kong, China.
TODAY IN HISTORY:
José Sarria Runs for San Francisco City Supervisor: 1961. He lost, of course, but he also won by losing. Before throwing his tiara into the ring, Sarria was better known as a drag performer and waiter at San Fransisco’s Black Cat bar, where he regaled audiences with campy versions of Italian opera. He fought constantly against police raids against gay men and gay bars — he himself had been arrested in an entrapment case. One tactic was for police to raid gay bars and arrest everyone dressed in drag for violating a city ordinance that barred men from dressing as women with “an intent to deceive.” He printed up buttons for drag queens to wear on their dresses reading “I am a boy.” That tactic effectively ended the raids on drag queens.
When Sarria decided to run for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1961, he became the first openly gay candidate for public office in the United States. The elections that year were for five at-large seats in which the top five vote-getters citywide were seated. Sarria almost won by default until city officials put out a call for more candidates at the last minute when they realized what was up. Thirty-four candidates ended up running for the five slots. Sarria’s platform was a simple one:
My platform when I ran was “Equality Before the Law.” The San Francisco Court House had just been built and that was the slogan on it and I said, “This is what my slogan will be. I’m going to take it and shove it right down their throat.” I saw that there were two interpretations of the laws and that they were trying to make gay people second rate citizens. I’ve never been a second rate citizen.
Sarria earned nearly 6,000 votes, putting him in ninth place. While he didn’t make it onto the Board of Supervisors, his 6,000 votes effectively defined a significant voting block which could not be ignored in future elections. Sarria’s loss marked a change in San Francisco city politics as a result. As Sarria recalled, “From that day on, nobody ran for anything in San Francisco without knocking on the door of the gay community.”
Prop 6/Briggs Initiative Defeated: 1978. State Sen. John Briggs had been a part of Anita Bryant’s campaign two years earlier to roll back a gay rights ordinance in Miami, Florida. So when he decided to run for the Republican nomination for California Governorship in 1978, he thought he had hit on the perfect campaign platform: the so-called threat posed by gay teachers in the public schools. He lost the nomination, but managed to get placed on the California ballot Proposition 6, which would have banned gays and lesbians from being teachers. It also would have banned anyone else from teaching, gay or straight, who defended gays and lesbians whether they did so in the schools or outside.
Briggs played to society’s fears of gays as predators to the hilt. He told the San Francisco Examiner, “One-third of San Francisco teachers are homosexuals. I assume most of them are seducing young boys in toilets.” Del Martin, a San Francisco resident who had founded the Daughters of Bilitis in 1955, countered that Prop 6 threatened to unleash a witch hunt that would hurt everyone. “All you have to do is point your finger and say, ‘you’re gay,'” she said. “That kind of thing is as damaging to heterosexuals as to homosexuals.”
In September, Prop 6 looked like a sure thing, with 61% supporting the proposal. But several events conspired to lead to the measure’s defeat: at San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk’s encouragement, thousands of gays and lesbians emerged from the closet for the first time to their friends, families and co-workers; Log Cabin Republicans organized to become a rallying point for other conservative Republicans to oppose the measure; and former Gov. Ronald Reagan came out against it — going so far as to write an op-ed against Prop 6 for the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner. “Whatever else it is, he wrote, “homosexuality is not a contagious disease like the measles. Prevailing scientific opinion is that an individual’s sexuality is determined at a very early age and that a child’s teachers do not really influence this.” Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter also came out against it. When election day came, Prop 6 went down in defeat, 42% to 58%.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
John Fryer: 1938. You have John Fryer to thank for that fact that you are not mentally ill. For many years, he was known only as Dr. H. Anonymous, the disguised gay psychiatrist whose talk at an American Psychiatric Association panel on homosexuality is credited for paving the way for the organization’s removal of homosexuality from its list of mental disorders. But friends who knew him knew a complicated man: gregarious and charming, difficult and biting, always intense.
He knew he was gay from the age of fourteen, and did little to hide it through his high school and college years. But when he became a medical intern at Ohio State, he understood that it was in his best interest to keep his sexuality a secret from his superiors. His psychiatric residency at the Menninger Clinic in Topeka only reinforced his closet door. There were only about 100,000 people in Topeka, and if he went to a gay bar there, he was almost certain to run into someone connected with the clinic — either as a patient or an employee. Menninger was a very homophibic place, and Fryer soon became depressed. A supervisor noticed and set him up with free therapy with a psychoanalyst. Fryer went out on the limb and confessed everything to her. “There is only one solution,” she said. “Did you ever think of leaving Topeka?”
Leave he did, to the University of Pennsylvania in 1964. That residency lasted about six months until his supervisor there found out that he was gay. “You can either resign or I’ll fire you.” Fryer accepted six months’ severance and resigned. He ended up working at Norristown State Hospital in northern Philadelphia, where he was given the worst assignment: Building 11 as the only psychiatrist for 400 male patients, and Building 13 which housed the chronically incontinent. Fryrear set up a behavioral program in Building 13 which rewarded patients who controlled themselves with trips to the Poconos. By the time he was finished, he had solved the incontinence problem in Building 13. He also found himself surrounded by staff that could accept the fact that he was gay.
By 1970, he became a part of what was loosely called the Gay-PA, an underground network of closeted gay psychiatrists who attended the annual meetings of the APA. They watched in 1970 when “outside agitators” — Frank Kameny, Barbara Gittings, among others — picketed the APA meeting in San Francisco in 1970 (see May 14). Fryer later recalled, “We in the Gay-PA commented, ‘Isn’t that nice?’ But we weren’t about to do anything that might expose us.”
But things quickly changed for Fryer. The APA asked Barbara Gittings to be a part of a panel on “Lifestyles of Non-Patient Homosexuals.” Barbara’s partner, Kay Lahusen, noticed that the panel had gays who weren’t psychiatrists and psychiatrists who weren’t gay. What the panel needed, she said, was a gay psychiatrist. Fryer recalled:
Barbara Gittings called and said, “John, we need you to be on a panel [in May of 1972],” and I said, “Tell me about it.” She said, “It’s going to be a panel about homosexuality, and we need a gay psychiatrist.” I said, “Sooo . . . ?!” She responded, “Well look, you…um…think about it.”
He had a lot to think about. His father had died and he was between jobs. This was not a good time for him to expose himself, either emotionally or professionally. But he had already been thrown out of one residency for being gay and lost another job for being gay. He knew that his fellow psychiatrists needed to hear about that. So he called Gittings back and said he would do it — on one condition: he couldn’t do it as himself. He would need a disguise. His lover at the time, a drama major, devised one: a formal suit several sizes too big — not an easy task for such a big man to begin with — and a wig and rubber mask that was distorted beyond recognition. He also spoke into a special microphone to disguise his voice.
L-R: Barbara Gittings, Frank Kameny, and John Fryer as “Dr. H. Anonymous”
Speaking as “Dr. H. Anonymous,” Fryer spoke opened his talk with the words”I am a homosexual. I am a psychiatrist.” He talked about just a few of the different closets he was forced to hide in: as a gay man who had to hide his sexuality among his professional colleagues, and as a gay man who had to hide his profession among other gay people. “There is much negative feeling in the homosexual community towards psychiatrists,” he explained. “And those of us, who are visible, are the easiest targets from which the angry can vent their wrath.” He also addressed the “more than a hundred [gay] psychiatrists” attending the convention, urging them to find ways to help change the attitudes of their patients, both gay and straight, towards homosexuality. It would be risky, but “We are taking an even bigger risk, however, not accepting fully our own humanity, with all the lessons it has to teach all the other humans around us and ourselves. This is the greatest loss: our honest humanity.”
The panel was a resounding success. That night, Fryer wrote in his diary:
The day has passed — it has come and gone and I am still alive. For the first time, I have identified with a force which is akin to my selfhood. I am not Black. I am not alcoholic. I am not really addicted. I am homosexual, and I am the only American psychiatrist who has stood up on a podium to let real flesh and blood tell this nation it is so.
The next year, Dr. Robert Spitzer, who was in charge of revising the APA’s Diagnostics and Statistics Manual (DSM) which defined the official list of mental disorders, met with members of the Gay-PA, and those meetings eventually led to the removal of homosexuality from the DSM in 1973.
But for Fryer, life continued to be difficult. After the 1972 APA meeting, he took a job at another psychiatric hospital in Philadelphia. A medical student learned that Fryer was gay — Fryer later hinted that he may have come on to the student but insisted that it went no further — and went to the Administration. Fryer was called in and told, “If you were gay and not flamboyant we would keep you. If you were flamboyant and not gay we would keep you. But since you are both gay and flamboyant, we cannot keep you.” Ironically, that same administrator had sat in the front row at the APA meeting during Fryer’s talk the year before, and had no idea who he was.
Fryer then took a teaching assignment at Temple University. In 1978, he got his associate professorship and with it came tenure. He could no longer be fired. He was free to be out, and he could also, finally tell the full story behind Dr. H. Anonymous. Fryer retired from Temple in 2000, and died in 2003 at the age of 64. In 2004, the Association of Gay and Lesbian Psychiatrists endowed an award in his name. The first John E. Fryer Award, sponsored by AGLP and given by the APA, was awarded to Frank Kameny and Barbara Gittings in 2006 for their role in that fateful APA panel in 1972.
[Source: David L. Scasta. “John E. Fryer, MD, and the Dr. H. Anonymous Episode.” Journal of Gay & Lesbian Psychotherapy 6, No. 4 (2002): 73-84.
Jeanne Lenzer. “John Fryer.” British Medical Journal 326, no 7390 (March 22, 2003): 662. Available online here.]
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November 6th, 2012
Even J.C. Leyendecker couldn’t find anything sexy about elections. (Cover illustration for the Nov 4, 1916 Saturday Evening Post.)
TODAY’S AGENDA:
In the end, it all comes down to the ballot box. In addition the a presidential contest which pits the most pro-LGBT president in American history against, well, let’s just charitably say the other guy, we also have ballot initiatives in four states in which gay families are undergoing the indignity of asking their neighbors to validate their existence. Here is where those states stand so far:
Maine: Question 1, which would give same-sex couples the right to marry, is leading 52-44. There is a huge gender gap (59-37 for women, 43-55 for men), as well as a huge party affiliation gap (75% of Dems support Q1, 75% of Republicans oppose it). When broken down by age groups, only seniors oppose it, but not by as much as you might thing, 46-51.
Maryland: Question 6, which will also give same-sex couples the right to marry if passed, is leading 55-39. But the poll is very problematic, in that it doesn’t ask the question as it appears on the ballot. Further, respondents were asked whether they strongly support/support/oppose/strongly oppose, rather than the simple yes/no question on the ballot. It’s unclear how that poll will translate at the ballot box.
Minnesota: Amendment 1 would deface the state’s constitution with a ban on same-sex marriage. KTSP/SurveyUSA last Sunday had Amendment 1 barely failing at 47-48, which was the first time the tracking poll has shown support for Amendment 1 trailing. Public Policy Poling has Amendment 1 being defeated 52-45. Observers are actually expecting the vote to be close, although there is one quirk that works in our favor. In order for a proposed amendment to be approved, it has to be approved by more than half of all ballots cast, not just those in which either a “yes” or “no” is marked for that particular amendment. If someone were to vote for President but decide to skip the amendments, that ballot would effectively become a “no” vote for those amendments.
Washington: Referendum 74 would make same-sex marriage legal in Washington State. Of the four states, polling in Washington is the narrowest right now, with the most recent poll showing Ref 74 tightening to 49-45 after having enjoyed a wider lead earlier in the campaign season. Because Washingtonians vote by mail, it may be several days or even weeks before final results are in.
Here are some other races we’ll be watching:
Arizona: State Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D) is trying to make some history of her own. If she wins against former mayor of Paradise Valley Vernon Parker (R) for Arizona’s newly drawn 9th congressional district, Sinema will be the first openly bi member of Congress.
California: Mark Takano (D), an openly gay high school teacher, holds a slight lead over John Tavaglione to represent Riverside County in the 41st district. If he wins, the Japanese-American will be the first openly gay person of color in Congress.
Iowa: State Supreme Court Justice David Wiggins is facing a tough retention election as Sen. Rick Santorum and other social conservatives campaign to have him removed from the Iowa Supreme Court. Wiggins was joined the other justices for a unanimous ruling in 2009 which granted marriage equality for same-sex couples. Chief Justice Marsha Ternus and Justices David Baker and Michael Streit lost their retention votes in 2010. Three more justices will face retention votes in 2016.
Massachusetts: If former State Sen. Richard Tisei (R) succeeds in ousting Rep. John Tierney (D) from the House, Tisei will be the first Republican to enter Congress while openly gay. Tierney, who has held his seat since 1997, has seen a bitter fight this go round, with allegations of corruption lodged against his wife and brothers-in-law. The 6th congressional district is considered a swing district, and the race appears to be very close.
New York: Sean Patrick Maloney (D), openly gay and former senior advisor to Pres. Bill Clinton, is looking to unseat freshman Rep. Nan Hayworth. Hayworth has been supportive of some gay issues, saying that she “respects” the decision by the state of New York to provide marriage equality for gay couples.
Rhode Island: Openly gay freshman Rep. David Cicilline (D) is facing a tough battle against to keep his house seat against former Rhode Island police superintendent Brendan Doherty. Cicilline continues to face controversy over his time as Providence mayor.
Wisconsin: Rep. Tammy Baldwin (D) is vying to becoming the first openly gay person in the U.S. Senate in her race against former Gov. Tommy Thompson (R). Most polls have the campaign as a dead heat following a recent rise in the polls for Baldwin.
Also in Wisconsin, Mark Pocan (D) is expected to win the seat currently held by Rep. Baldwin. If he defeats Chad Lee (R), we will see, for the first time, a seat in Congress pass from one out member to another.
Rep. Jared Polis (D-CO) is expected to win over his challenger, Kevin Lundberg. In January, he will become the longest serving LGBT person in the House following the retirement of Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA).
I know that every year it is said that that year’s election is the most important election of a lifetime, and there is a strong argument for that to be made for 2012. But the fact is, we should approach every election as though it were the most important. Because every election is. Even if we would just rather it all be over with as soon as possible. I plan to be up late looking at results.
TODAY IN HISTORY:
West Hollywood Incorporates As A City: 1984. Voters in the an unincorporated area of Los Angeles known as West Hollywood voted to incorporate as a city and elected a city council in a combined election. Attention in the news media focus on the fact that three of the five new council members were gay or lesbian in the new municipality, while many gay leaders hailed the new city with gays making up an estimated 40% of the population as a “gay Camelot.” But the main issue that ignited the incorporation campaign in a city where 90% were renters was the decision by the County of Los Angeles to significantly reduce its rent-control regulations. Nevertheless, gay leaders saw incorporation as yet another stepping stone toward full acceptance.
Valerie Ferrigno, who was selected by the council to serve as mayor for the council-manager city government, became the first known lesbian mayor of an American city. “You don’t have to say avowed lesbian or admitted lesbian,” she said. “I am a lesbian. I won’t deny it.” She then summed up the significance: “We were illegal not too long ago. The first consenting adults bill wasn’t proposed until 1968. Ten years ago I couldn’t have been elected, and not because I was too young. We’ve come a long way in a very short time.”
TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS:
Michael Cunningham: 1952. He’s gay and he’s a writer, but don’t call him a gay writer. That’s not what he does. He wins Pulitzers for writing novels with the title of The Hours
Born in Cincinnati, raised in Pasadena, Cunningham studied Enlish Lit at Stanford and received a Masters of Fine Arts from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. While studying for his Masters, he had short stories published in Atlantic Monthly (back when Atlantic used to publish short fiction) and Paris Review. He receved a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1993 and an NEA Fellowship in 1998. He has taught at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and at Brooklyn College. He currently teaches at Yale. His most recent novel, By Nightfall
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November 5th, 2012
TODAY IN HISTORY:
First Openly Gay Candidate Elected to State Legislature: 1974. Elaine Noble, an “avowed Lesbian” in the parlance of the day, made history when she became the first openly gay candidate to win a seat in a state legislature. She won her seat in the Massachusetts House of Representatives with 59% of the vote. When she decided to run, she was pressured to hide her sexuality. “There was a lot of pressure from some of my supporters in the community not to mention it,” she told reporters after her win. “But I thought it was necessary to state that politically. I mean, we’re not purple, right? … I figured the worst thing that can happen is that I lose.” And so she listed among her qualifications in her campaign literature her master’s degree from Harvard, her membership in the Women’s Political Caucus, and her radio program “Gay Way” on a local FM station. she focused her campaign on neighborhood issues: crime, health care, housing for the district’s many elderly residents, and the neglect in city services. She later described the campaign as “very ugly.” Her windows were shot out, her car was vandalized, and windows were broken out at her campaign headquarters. The harassment continued even after she took office. She had to deal with obscene profanities, and at one time human feces were left in her desk. But when she stood for re-election two years later, she won with almost 90% of the vote.
San Francisco Bans AIDS Discrimination: 1985. The San Francisco Board of Supervisors unanimously passed a measure forbidding the firing or eviction of anyone because they had AIDS, and would prohibit others from requiring AIDS tests. The move came after similar bans were enacted in Los Angeles and West Hollywood.
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November 4th, 2012
TODAY’S AGENDA:
Today Pride Celebration: Palm Springs, CA.
Also Today: Fall Diversity, Eureka Springs, AR.
TODAY IN HISTORY:
California’s Prop 64 To Quarantine People With AIDS Defeated: 1986. Lyndon LaRouche’s name is all but forgotten today, but in the early 1980s the paranoid perennial Presidential candidate was regarded more as a joke than as a serious political thinker, even though he took himself very seriously. LaRouche typically ran as a self-styled Democrat (much to the consternation of real Democrats) while putting forth elaborate conspiracy theories and bizarre economic platforms. During his 1984 campaign, he managed to purchase 14 television spots in which he called Democratic presidential candidate Walter Mondale a Soviet KGB agent, and charged that Henry Kissinger and the Queen of England were in charge of worldwide drug cartels. He lost, of course, but didn’t go away.
Marchers protest Prop 64, known as the LaRouche Initiative, during San Francsico’s Freedom Day Parade, June 29, 1986.
In 1986, at the height of the hysterical anti-gay backlash that had sprung up in the midst of the growing AIDS epidemic, LaRouche founded his Prevent AIDS Now Initiative Committee (PANIC), which gathered enough signatures to place Proposition 64 onto the ballot. Prop 64, also known as the LaRouche Initiative,would have placed AIDS onto California’s list of communicable diseases under the state’s public health law, and that would have effectively forced anyone who was HIV-positive out of their jobs and schools and into a quarantine.
The LaRouchites said that such measures were required because AIDS was “worse than the Black Death” that devastated 14th-century Europe and Asia, and was “more deadly to mankind than a full-scale thermonuclear war.” They also claimed that AIDS had been created by the Soviets — or maybe the International Monetary Fund or maybe the World Bank — to kill “excess eaters” in Africa, and asserted that it could be spread like the common cold through casual contact or through mosquito bites. “A person with AIDS running around is like a person with a machine gun shooting up a neighborhood,” LaRouche told a San Francisco radio program. Health officials denounced LaRouche’s harebrained theories, but LaRouche held his ground. His Biological Holocaust Task Force charged that “AIDS is the first known epidemic which could potentially wipe out the entire human race” and that his detractors were “guilty of one of the most evil cover-ups in medical history.”
Flyer for a LaRouche-sponsored conference in Atlanta, 1992. (Click to enlarge.)
Despite support from Congressman William E. Dannemeyer, Prop 64 lost in a landslide, 71% to 29%. LaRouche brought it back again in 1988 as Prop 69, when it lost by an even wider margin. He also made that AIDS quarantine the centerpiece of his 1988 presidential campaign, but Prop 64 would prove to be his high water mark, such as it was. In October 1986, federal and state agents raided his heavily guarded compound in Loudon County, Virginia and offices in Massachusetts. A federal grand jury indicted LaRouche and several of his associates with credit card fraud and obstruction of justice. In 1988, he was convicted of conspiracy to commit mail fraud, 11 counts of actual mail fraud and a count of conspiring to defraud the IRS, all part of a wider effort to obtain credit card loans in his name and those of his supporters that he had no intention of repaying. LaRouche, true to form, blamed the raid on Raisa Gorbachev, the Soviet Union’s First Lady.
LaRouche served six years in prison, running again for President from prison in 1992. At one time, he shared his cell with televangelist Jim Bakker, who recalled, “to say LaRouche was a little paranoid would be like saying that the Titanic had a little leak.” He still hasn’t gone away. More recently, he posted an image of President Barack Obama as Hitler that began appearing at Tea Party and Town Hall meetings in 2009, and he helped to popularize the fiction that Obama’s health care reform included so-called “death panels.”
TODAY’S BIRTHDAY::
Barbara Grier: 1933. The Cincinnati native came from a colorful family: Her father was a womanizing former small town doctor who became a medical salesman, and her mother was a before-her-time feminist and actress. Her great-grandfather, James Jesse Strang, had five wives and headed a breakaway Mormon sect known as the Strangites which had a somewhat feminist bent. One of Strang’s wives, Grier’s great-grandmother, dressed in men’s clothing and travelled with him as a man on evangelical tours.
Grier herself didn’t fall very far from the family tree. She announced to her mother at the age of twelve that she was a homosexual. As Grier recalled later, her mother corrected her. “Mother said that since I was a woman, I wasn’t a homosexual. I was a lesbian. She also said that since I was twelve I was a little young to make this decision and we should wait six months to tell the newspapers.” That task out of the way, Grier then began collecting lesbian fiction, beginning with her mother’s copy of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness. “Mother gave my wider world validation, Grier said. “It’s a pretty easy jump to see why I began collecting a lesbian fiction a few years later — Mother opened me up to many, many things.”
Shortly after Grier graduated from High School, she met Helen Bennett in the public library and they became partners for the next twenty years in Kansas City. While there, Grier met Jeannette Howard Foster (see Nov 3), who was herself in the process of compiling her groundbreaking bibliography of lesbian literature, Sex Variant Women in Literature. Foster mentored Grier in the art of bibliography, and Grier set about compiling her own extensive bibliographies, including several volumes of The Lesbian in Literature. It was during this time that Grier discovered the Daughters of Bilitis’ magazine The Ladder. “From the first issue I saw, the March 1956 issue, I said this is what I am going to spend the rest of my life doing.” Grier’s memory must have been a little off: The Ladder’s first issue wasn’t until October 1956. But the March 1957 issue inaugurated an important new column called “Lesbiana,” which was a running bibliography of lesbian fiction, non-fiction, drama and poetry, along with a brief overview of each work. Grier wrote a letter to The Ladder, which was published in August of that year offering her own additions for “Lesbiana”:
“I have now reoeived and thoroughly read (and reread) five issues of THE LADDER, and I feel I must write and congratulate you on your magnificent work for us all. I enjoyed your attempt to list and annotate literature in your feature ‘Lesbiana’ most of all, as I know the years of frustration and work involved in collecting a library of gay literature. I now have some 300 works of fiction, poetry and drama, with perhaps 200 devoted to women. Your , column should help many others along the same lines. … I am enclosing with this letter a few additions you might wish for ‘Lesbiana’. …
G.D., Kansas City, Kansas
That anonymous introduction marked the start of fifteen years of Grier (as “Gene Damon”) reviewing lesbian-themed writings in The Ladder, beginning with the following month’s issue which featured her reviews of two works of pulp fiction. She continued contributing book reviews under multiple pseudonyms, including Lennox Strong and Vern Niven (her fifth cousin was British actor David Niven). During the nearly-disastrous 1968 Daughters of Bilitis convention (see Sep 26), Grier was named editor of The Ladder, and she immediately began remaking the magazine to reflect her own priorities. Without consulting with the national board, she dropped the subtitle “A Lesbian Review” and began focusing more on the growing women’s liberation movement. She expanded every section to add more fiction, poetry, and artwork, but cut back publication to six times a year instead of monthly.
But her boldest move occurred two years later when Rita Laporte, DoB’s President, walked into the Daughters of Bilitis office in San Francisco and walked out with the magazine’s production tools, correspondence, archives and, most importantly, its mailing list — all without the board and other officer’s knowledge. Laporte turned those materials over to Grier, and in the following issue (August/September 1970), The Ladder proclaimed itself an independent publication for “all women, that majority of human beings that has known oppression longer than anyone.”
While Laporte did the deed, Grier was suspected of instigating the move. According to Marcia Gallo’s Different Daughters: A History of the Daughters of Bilitis and the Rise of the Lesbian Rights Movement
“It was Barbara’s idea,” (DoB co-founder) Phyllis Lyon insists. She believes to this day that Barbara Grier convinced Rita Laport to help her steal The Ladder. “Rita went to the place where the addressograph plates were made for mailing The Ladder to subscribers.” The small business was one that she and (her partner Del) Martin, along with three other friends, were partners in. One of them, Pat Durham, was there that day Laporte came in asking for the mailing materials. She knew Laport was the president of DOB so gave her the plates when asked. However, “she wondered, and later that same day called us,” Lyon explained. Laporte took the address plates as well as files from DOB’s office and transported all of it to her new home in Sparks, Nevada, near Reno. Although Grier still was editing the magazine from Kansas City, they began producing The Ladder from Nevada in early summer 1970 — away from San Francisco and DOB’s organizational center.
Grier defended the theft as an act of lesbian feminist salvation, explaining that they did it to save The Ladder from the DOB’s institutional weakness. “DOB was falling apart — we wanted The Ladder to survive. But Grier’s actions hastened The Ladder’s doom, now that it was cut off from DOB funding. It lasted another two years before folding in 1972. It barely outlasted the DOB as a national organization. Denied the powerful organizing tool and voice that The Ladder provided, the DOB board vote to disband the national organization and free the local chapters to operate autonomously.
Shortly after The Ladder’s demise, Grier launched Naiad Press, which for the next twenty-five year focused on publishing books “about lesbians who love lesbians, where the girl is not just going through a phase.” Naiad published more than 500 original titles, making it the world’s largest lesbian publisher. It brought back several out-of-print works, including Gertrude Stein’s prose poem “Lifting Belly” and countless classic lesbian pulp fiction titles from the 1950s and 1960s, which sparked an enormous revival of interest in the genre. Among Naiad’s notable works was Jane Rule’s Outlander
In 1985, Grier was given the President’s Award for Lifetime Service from the Gay Academic Union for her work in cataloguing and preserving lesbian literature. In 1991, she and her longtime partner Donna McBride were given the Lambda Literary Award for Publisher’s Service for their work with Naiad Press, and in 2002 they were honored with the Lambda Literary Pioneer Award. Grier’s own collection of lesbian literature is believed to be the world’s largest. Almost fifteen thousand books and several hundred feet of papers is now housed in the James C. Hormel Collection of the San Francisco Library. Grier died of cancer in Tallahassee in 2011 at the age of 78.
[Sources. Unsigned “Lesbiana.” The Ladder 1, no. 6 (March 1957): 12.
“G.D.” Letter to the editor. The Ladder 1, no. 11 (August 1957): 24-25.
Victoria A. Brownworth. “Barbara Grier (1933- ): Climbing the Ladder.” In Vern L. Bullough’s (ed.) Before Stonewall: Activists for Gay and Lesbian Rights in Historical Context
Marcia M. Gallo. Different Daughters: A History of the Daughters of Bilitis and the Rise of the Lesbian Rights Movement
Robert Mapplethorpe, Self-portrait, 1980
Robbert Mapplethorpe: 1946. Nearly banned in Cincinnati, shunned by the Corcoran, denounced by politicians, Mapplethorpe has become a kind of a shorthand for those who see contemporary art as sending civilization to hell in a hand basket and seek to control it. His studio work consisted mainly of rather common subjects: still lifes, orchids, lilies, and celebrities. Lots of celebrities, including Richard Gere, Laurie Anderson, Peter Gabriel, Andy Warhol, and Patti Smith, who Mapplethorpe dated while still trying to figure out how to come to terms with his own sexuality.
It wasn’t until he began putting together the works for his 1989 solo tour The Perfect Moment, that he decided to include, for the first time, some recent photos that he had taken. They included several provocative, sexually explicit images of homoeroticism and BDSM. The American Family Association slammed the National Endowment for the Arts, which had funded the exhibit, which they called “nothing more than the sensational presentation of potentially obscene material.” Congressional leaders threatened to cut funding for the NEA. When that failed, Sen. Jesse Helm introduced an amendment prohibiting the NEA from funding “obscenity,” which cast a chilling effect on the arts for more than a decade.
The Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C. had initially agreed to host the travelling exhibit, But on June 12, 1989, it announced its cancellation. That reversal, in turn, generated further public protests from defenders of art and free expression. In one protest, artists and LGBT advocates projected slides of Mapplethorpe’s photos on the museum’s facade. Pop artist Lowell Blair Nesbitt revoked his $1.5 million bequest to the Corcoran and several artists began canceling their own exhibits. The Corcoran’s director, Christina Orr-Cahall, issued a formal statement of apology in September, and resigned the following December.
When The Perfect Moment arrived at the Contemporary Arts Center of Cincinnati in April of 1990, it drew large crowds and considerable controversy. Hamilton county’s prosecutor tried to shut the show down, but the judge ordered the city and county not to interfere with the exhibit. After the show was over, the center and its director, Dennis Barrie, were charged with “pandering obscenity,” in what may well be the first time an art museum has faced criminal charges over the contents of an exhibit. The museum and Barrie were both acquitted.
Mapplethorpe didn’t live to see the controversy over his photos. He died on March 9, 1989 of complications from AIDS at the age of 42.
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November 3rd, 2012
TODAY’S AGENDA:
Pride Celebration This Weekend: Palm Springs, CA.
AIDS Walk This Weekend: San Luis Obispo, CA.
Other Events This Weekend: Fall Diversity, Eureka Springs, AR; Side By Side LGBT International Film Festival, St. Petersburg, Russia.
L-R: Russell Henderson, Aaron McKinney
TODAY IN HISTORY:
Aaron McKinney Found Guilty of Matthew Shepard’s Murder: 1999. After ten hours of deliberation, a jury in Laramie, Wyoming found Aaron McKinney guilty of first-degree murder of Matthew Shepard, after having been acquitted of the higher charge of premeditated first-degree murder. Testimony would begin the next day for the penalty phase to determine McKinney’s eligibility for the death penalty. The jury would ultimately reject that option and McKinney instead drew two consecutive life terms.
McKinney confessed to his role in beating Matthew Shepard with a .357 magnum and tying him to a fence outside of Laramie. After Shepard died from severe brain damage, McKinney’s attorneys spent the trial fighting for a reduced conviction to escape the death penalty. Co-defendant Russell Henderson plea bargained two life sentences without possibility of parole earlier in the year.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Jeanette Howard Foster: 1895. A pioneer of what would later be known as lesbian studies, Foster had graduated from Rockford College with a degree in chemistry in 1918. Her biographer, Joanne Passet, said that Rockford College was valuable in contributing “to her health, sense of self and confidence.” Perhaps some of that occurred when, as a junior, she was on the student council deciding the fate of two young women who were judged in a “morals case.” No details were given except that the two women had taken every opportunity to lock themselves together in a dorm room. Foster realized that she was the only one on the student council who didn’t understand the implications of what that might mean. She went to the library and, guessing that the “morals case” reflected something sexual, looked into a copy of Havelock Ellis’s Studies in the Psychology of Sex and discovered that there was a phenomenon called Sexual Inversion on Women.
Perhaps recognizing herself in the description Foster began a lifelong passion for learning and compiling everything she could find about female sexuality. She earned a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago’s Graduate Library School, and she took jobs at libraries and universities across the country, wherever she could have access to libraries which might have examples of lesbian literature. As Passet observed:
In her lifetime, she lived in 17 states and changed jobs frequently in order to gain access to library collections that would advance her research. The gay activist and Professor Karla Jay, who interviewed Foster in the mid-1970s, claims that she would have become a nun if it would have gained her access to lesbian literature in the Vatican Library.
Along the way, she became the first librarian for Alfred Kinsey’s Institute for Sex Research at the University of Indiana from 1948 until 1952. By 1956, she was ready to publish the result of more than two decades of research. Sex Variant Women in Literature: A Historical and Qualitative Survey was the first text to systematically document first work to systematically document works by and about lesbian, bisexual and cross-dressing women in literary texts. Foster’s choice of title was very deliberate. “I had learned from searching bibliographies a title beginning with the word sex couldn’t be ignored.” As for “variant woman,” she reasoned that because its meaning was “no more than differing from a chosen standard,” it was neither judgmental nor emotionally charged. As if that weren’t groundbreaking enough, Howard Foster published the text undr her home name, in the immediate wake of the McCarthy era. She also contributed fiction, poetry and reviews to the Daughters of Bilitis’ groundbreaking magazine The Ladder.
Today, Sex Variant Women in Literature is considered the founding document for an entirely knew area of scholarship. Without it, it is certain that so much of lesbian-themed literature would have been lost to history. In 1974, Foster was honored with the 1974 Stonewall Book Award, and her bibliography was reissued the in 1976 and again in 1985. It remains to this day a definitive bibliography for libraries seeking to establish a core collection of lesbian literature. Foster eventually retired to Pocahontas, Arkansas with two other women, where she died in 1981 at the age of 85. Passet’s biography, Sex Variant Woman: The Life of Jeanette Howard Foster
[Other sources: Virginia Elwood-Akers. “Jeannette Howard Foster (1895-1981).” In Vern L. Bullough’s (ed.) Before Stonewall: Activists for Gay and Lesbian Rights in Historical Context
Marcia M. Gallo. Different Daughters: A History of the Daughters of Bilitis and the Rise of the Lesbian Rights Movement
Nothing gay here: Charles Nolte as Billy Bud
Charles Nolte: 1923. His 1947 Broadway debut was in a production of Antony and Cleopatra staring Charlton Heston and Maureen Stapleton, but it was his 1951 appearance as the title role in Billy Budd which earned him critical acclaim, even as those same critics ignored the play’s homoerotic subtext:
Nolte recalls, “Not one of the reviewers, and there were dozens in those days, mention the fact, of course, that Claggart has the hots for Billy Budd, and so did Captain Vere. But what is so fascinating is the fact that you could not discuss it, although everybody knew it. But they had to find ways of obfuscating the basic facts. Making end runs around. Using similes and metaphors. The whole canon of Billy Budd is replete with people trying to avoid saying what is perfectly obvious.”
In 1954, Nolte played opposite Henry Fonda in the premiere of the hit play, The Caine Mutiny Court Martial. After appearing in several live television dramas and four feature films — War Paint (1953), The Steel Cage (1954), and two other uncredited roles in Ten Seconds to Hell (1959) and Under Ten Flags (1960) — Nolte decided to return to his native Minnesota to earn a Ph.D. and teach acting at the University of Minnesota’s Theater Department. He also taught acting at the Guthrie Theater drama school at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. He continued writing plays, including “Do Not Pass Go” which was produced off-Broadway. He also appeared in a local production, this time as an openly gay man in “Exit Strategy,” about two senior citizens who are about to lose their home. Nolte died in 2010 at the age of 86, reportedly while doing what he loved: listening to a recording of one of his favorite operas. He was survived by his partner of over fifty years, former child actor Terry Kilburn.
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Featured Reports
In this original BTB Investigation, we unveil the tragic story of Kirk Murphy, a four-year-old boy who was treated for “cross-gender disturbance” in 1970 by a young grad student by the name of George Rekers. This story is a stark reminder that there are severe and damaging consequences when therapists try to ensure that boys will be boys.
When we first reported on three American anti-gay activists traveling to Kampala for a three-day conference, we had no idea that it would be the first report of a long string of events leading to a proposal to institute the death penalty for LGBT people. But that is exactly what happened. In this report, we review our collection of more than 500 posts to tell the story of one nation’s embrace of hatred toward gay people. This report will be updated continuously as events continue to unfold. Check here for the latest updates.
In 2005, the Southern Poverty Law Center wrote that “[Paul] Cameron’s ‘science’ echoes Nazi Germany.” What the SPLC didn”t know was Cameron doesn’t just “echo” Nazi Germany. He quoted extensively from one of the Final Solution’s architects. This puts his fascination with quarantines, mandatory tattoos, and extermination being a “plausible idea” in a whole new and deeply disturbing light.
On February 10, I attended an all-day “Love Won Out” ex-gay conference in Phoenix, put on by Focus on the Family and Exodus International. In this series of reports, I talk about what I learned there: the people who go to these conferences, the things that they hear, and what this all means for them, their families and for the rest of us.
Prologue: Why I Went To “Love Won Out”
Part 1: What’s Love Got To Do With It?
Part 2: Parents Struggle With “No Exceptions”
Part 3: A Whole New Dialect
Part 4: It Depends On How The Meaning of the Word "Change" Changes
Part 5: A Candid Explanation For "Change"
At last, the truth can now be told.
Using the same research methods employed by most anti-gay political pressure groups, we examine the statistics and the case studies that dispel many of the myths about heterosexuality. Download your copy today!
And don‘t miss our companion report, How To Write An Anti-Gay Tract In Fifteen Easy Steps.
Anti-gay activists often charge that gay men and women pose a threat to children. In this report, we explore the supposed connection between homosexuality and child sexual abuse, the conclusions reached by the most knowledgeable professionals in the field, and how anti-gay activists continue to ignore their findings. This has tremendous consequences, not just for gay men and women, but more importantly for the safety of all our children.
Anti-gay activists often cite the “Dutch Study” to claim that gay unions last only about 1½ years and that the these men have an average of eight additional partners per year outside of their steady relationship. In this report, we will take you step by step into the study to see whether the claims are true.
Tony Perkins’ Family Research Council submitted an Amicus Brief to the Maryland Court of Appeals as that court prepared to consider the issue of gay marriage. We examine just one small section of that brief to reveal the junk science and fraudulent claims of the Family “Research” Council.
The FBI’s annual Hate Crime Statistics aren’t as complete as they ought to be, and their report for 2004 was no exception. In fact, their most recent report has quite a few glaring holes. Holes big enough for Daniel Fetty to fall through.
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