Box Turtle Bulletin

Born On This Day, 1936: Yves Saint Laurent

80 YEARS AGO: (d. 2008) One of the greatest names in fashion got his start at another storied fashion house, Christian Dior. In 1957, Dior was so impressed with Saint Laurent’s designs that Dior named Saint Laurent to succeed him as designer. When Dior died suddenly later that year, Saint Laurent became head designer at the age of 21. Saint Laurent’s 1958 collection is credited for saving the firm. In 1958 and 1959, the firm’s owner, Marcel Boussac, reportedly pressured the French government not to draft Saint Laurent into the army to fight in the Algerian War of Independence. But after the critically panned 1960 season, Saint Laurent suddenly found himself without a job, conscripted and undergoing combat training.

This would be Saint Laurent’s low point. Hazed by fellow soldiers, he lasted only 20 days in the military before he was sent to a military hospital due to stress. While there, he was placed under sedation and given psychoactive drugs and electroconvulsive therapy. Years later, he would point to this period as the genesis for his later problems with drinking and drug addictions.

After he was released later that year, Saint Laurnet and his partner, Pierre Bergé, founded their own fashion house under Saint Laurent’s name. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Saint Laurent would set several fashion trends: safari jackets, tall thigh-high boots, and the Le Smoking tuxedo suit for women. He was the first major French designer to come out with a full ready-to-wear line, and he was the first designer to feature non-Caucasian models on his runway. His personal life also followed several 1960s and 1970s trends: partying at Regine’s and Studio 54, drinking and snorting cocaine. He nevertheless maintained a hectic schedule of designing two full haute couture and ready-to-wear lines each year even though, because of his drug use, he could barely walk down the runway at the end of some of his shows. After 1987, he began turning his design work over to his assistants. He retired completely in 2002 and died in 2008 of brain cancer in Paris.

Today In History, 1965: First Gay Rights Protest at the Pentagon

Photo by Kay Tobin Lahusen (see Jan 5. Source.)

That year marked several important milestones in the history of organized gay protest. The year of gay protests actually got a head start in 1964 when Randophe Wicker (Feb 3) led a small band of activists protesting in front of a New York City army induction center (Sep 19).  In April of 1965, gay rights advocates held the first White House protests demanding equal treatment in federal employment and other areas of discrimination (Apr 17),  A string of other protests followed: at the United Nations (Apr 18), another one at the White House (May 29), the Civil Service Commission (Jun 26), and Philadelphia’s Independence Hall (Jul 4), and, on this date, the Pentagon.

Participants at the Pentagon picket included gay rights pioneers Frank Kameny (May 21), Barbara Gittings (whose birthday is also today; see below), Jack Nichols (Mar 16) and about a dozen others. CBS cameras were on the scene to capture it, and a report on the protest was featured on the local affiliate’s evening news.

Born On This Day, 1911: Henry Wilson

Henry Willson (left) with Rock Hudson.

(d. 1978) The future Hollywood agent was born for show business: his father was vice president of the Columbia Phonograph Company and president of Columbia Gramophone Manufacturing Co. Alarmed at his son’s interest in tap dance, he sent Henry to a boarding school in Asheville, North Carolina where he thought rough sports, rock climbing and backpacking would straighten his son out. Needless to day, it didn’t. In 1933, Henry moved to Hollywood and became a talent scout for Hollywood mogul David O. Selznick, discovering Lana Turner (although not at a drug store counter, as legend had it), Joan Fontaine and Natalie Wood.

But his real claim to fame was his uncanny knack for finding (and often, allegedly, bedding) the hottest beefcake stars of the 1950s. His “Adonis factory” transformed Robert Moseley into Guy Madison, Francis Cuthbert into Rory Calhoun, Merle Johnson into Troy Donahue, Arthur Kelm into Tab Hunter, Robert Wagner into, well, Robert Wagner, and most famously, Roy Fitzgerald into Rock Hudson. That minor detail about some of them lacking discernible talent proved to be of little hinderance to breaking into show business. Willson personally coached his charges in how to act, how to behave, and how to butch it up if they were lacking in that particular area. He staged “dates” for his gay stars when needed, and he even talked Hudson into a three-year marriage to his secretary when rumors began to become a little too active.

While most of his male clients were heterosexual, the disproportionate number of gay male leads in his stable led many to assume that all of his clients were gay. And as Willson’s own homosexuality was public knowledge, many of his clients, gay and straight, began distancing themselves from him as he became addicted to drugs and alcohol, and also as he became increasingly paranoid. His influenced waned through the 1960s, and by 1974 he became a ward of the Motion Picture and Television Country House and Hospital, where he died of cirrhosis of the liver. With nothing left of his estate, he was buried in an unmarked grave in North Hollywood. In 2005, Willson became the subject of Robert Hofler’s biography, The Man Who Invented Rock Hudson: The Pretty Boys and Dirty Deals of Henry Willson.

Born On This Day, 1932: Barbara Gittings

(d. 2007) Her friend and fellow gay rights activist Jack Nichols (Mar 16) called her “the Grand Mother of Lesbian and Gay Liberation.” In fact, it would be very difficult to overstate her contributions toward where we are today. Her quest for equality and dignity began when she flunked out of her freshman year at Northwestern University because she spent too much time in the library trying to understand what it meant to be a lesbian. “I devoured everything! I looked for myself in the books on abnormal psychology. I tried to find myself in legal books. I tried to find myself in encyclopedias. I found everything I possibly could. What I found was puzzling. It was me they were talking about, but it wasn’t me at all. It was very clinical; it didn’t speak of love; it didn’t have very much humanity to it.”

But one book in particular did catch her attention: Daniel Webster Cory’s The Homosexual In America (Sep 18). “The book was fascinating because, now that I look back on it, Cory’s book was very much a call to arms. … He said that we were a legitimate minority like any other minority group.” In 1956, she got in touch with Cory to find out what she could do for her minority group. He told her about One, Inc in Los Angeles, which had a large library and published ONE, the first national gay magazine to be sold on newstands. She flew to Los Angeles and went to One, Inc’s offices and asked what she could do. They told her about the Mattachine Society in San Francisco. She hopped on another plane and flew to San Francisco where the Mattachine folks told her about the Daughters of Bilitis. “Then I found myself for the first real time, not in a bar, but in someone’s living room in a nice setting with twelve other lesbians.”

Two years later and living in Philadelphia, Gittings got a call from Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon asking if she would organize a DoB chapter in New York. She formally joined DoB and traveled every weekend to New York to get the chapter established. It was through the New York DoB that Gittings met her life partner, Kay Lahusen  (Jan 5, she adopted the alias of Kay Tobin when she took up activism herself). Gittings later gained a national platform within the gay and lesbian community as the editor of the DoB newsletter, The Ladder in the mid-1960s.

No Limits: Barbara Gittings picketing the White House, 1965.

In 1963, Gittings and Lahusen met Frank Kameny (May 21), the pioneering gay rights activist based in Washington, D.C.. He was, as she described him, “the first gay person I met who took firm, uncompromising positions about homosexuality and homosexuals’ right to be considered fully on a par with heterosexuals.” Together, they formed a collaboration that would transform the gay rights movement from one of timidity and defensiveness to bold action and determined demands for equality. Those actions included the first ever gay rights protests in front of the White House (Apr 17), Philadelphia’s Independence Hall (Jul 4), and the Pentagon (above), all beginning 1965. The protests were audacious for their time — the Daughters of Bilitis officially opposed picketing, and they would force her removal as editor of The Ladder in 1966 over the issue.

Barbara Gittings, Frank Kameny, and John E. Fryer as “Dr. H. Anonymous” at the 1972 APA panel on homosexuality.

Gittings, Lahusen and Kameny made a powerful team. Their greatest accomplishment came in the campaign to remove homosexuality from the American Psychiatric Association’s list of mental disorders. In 1971 Kameny and Gittings organized an exhibit at the APA convention in Washington, D.C. While there, they attended a panel discussion on homosexuality, and were outraged to discover that there were no gay psychiatrists on the panel. Kameny grabbed the microphone and demanded that the APA hear from gays themselves. The following year they were invited to participate in a panel discussion entitled “Psychiatry, Friend or Foe to Homosexuals? A Dialogue.” They got Dr. Judd Marmor, a pro-gay psychiatrist to appear on the panel, and of course Gittings and Kameny would participate. Lahusen thought something was still missing. “Look, you have psychiatrists on the panel who are not gay, and you have gays on the panel who are not psychiatrists. What you’re lacking on the panel are gay psychiatrists.” After considerable effort, Gittings finally convinced Dr. John E. Fryer, a gay psychiatrist to take part. But he would do so only on the condition that he would remain anonymous; he could wear a disguise and use a microphone to alter his voice. The appearance of “Dr. H. Anonymous” on that panel created a sensation at the convention, as he described how he was forced to be closeted while practicing psychiatry (May 2). Gittings, in turn, read aloud letters from other gay psychiatrists who refused to participate out of fear of professional ostracism. The following year, homosexuality was removed from the APA’s list of mental disorders, and Gittings celebrated by being photographed with newspaper headlines, “Twenty Million Homosexuals Gain Instant Cure.”

Gittings (left) kissing Isabel Miller. Photo by Kay Tobin Lahusen (Jan 5). (Source.)

In the 1970s, Gittings’ passion returned to where she first tried to find information about what it means to be a lesbian: the library. She helped to found the American Library Association’s Gay Task Force, which is believed to be the first professional organization for gay people in the country. In 1971, she hit on an idea that would sure to gain attention at the ALA’s 1971 convention in Dallas. “We needed to get an audience,” she remembered. “So we decided… let’s show gay love live. We were offering free—mind you, free—same-sex kisses and hugs. Let me tell you, the aisles were mobbed, but no one came into the booth to get a free hug. So we hugged and kissed each other. It was shown twice on the evening news, once again in the morning. It put us on the map.”

She continued, “You know that kissing booth wasn’t only a public stunt. It gave the message that gay people should not be held to double standards of privacy. We should be able to show our affections.”

Gittings never turned down an opportunity to represent the gay community. She appeared on the Phil Donahue Show in 1970, and on the David Suskind Show with a panel of six lesbians in 1971. A week after her David Suskind appearance, a middle-aged couple spotted her in a supermarket. The wife approached her and said, “You made me realize that you gay people love each other just the way Arnold and I do.”

Gittings died in 2007 after a long battle with breast cancer. She is survived by Kay Tobin Lahusen (Jan 5), a fellow gay rights advocate and her partner of 46 years. You can see a personal remembrance of Barbara Gittings by Jack Nichols here. You can view a three-part video of a 1988 interview with Gittings and Lahusen here, here, and here. In 2012, a portion of Locust Street in Philadelphia was re-named Barbara Gittings Way in her honor, and she was inducted into Chicago’s Legacy Walk.

[Additional source: Eric Marcus. Making History: The Struggle for Gay and Lesbian Equal Rights, 1940-1990. An Oral History(New York: HarperCollins, 1992): 104-126, 213-227.]

Born On This Day, 1965: Ian Roberts

The hunky Australian made headlines in 1995 when, as a playor for the Manly-Warringah Sea Eagles rugby club, he came out as gay. He came out in a big way: by posing nude for the first issue of Blue magazine. Public reaction was mostly positive, and his teammates were supportive. He sat out the 1996 season due to injuries, and signed with the North Queensland Cowboys in 1997. He retired from regular play in 1998 after his injuries kept piling up. That same year, he began studying acting at the National Institute of Dramatic Art in Sydney. He had a brief cameo in the 2005 Australian film Little Fish, and he took the role of Riley, a henchman of Lex Luthor in 2006’s Superman Returns. He also appeared in the final season of Comedy Central’s Reno 911, in the 2009 Australian mini-series Underbelly: A Tale of Two Cities, and in the ABC1 drama The Cut. In 2012, he appeared in his first starring role, as a gay characer, in the indy film Saltwater.

Today’s Agenda Is Brought To You By…

Today In History, 1895: Oscar Wilde Enters Bankruptcy

A tiny notice appeared in The Guardian of London:

BANKRUPTCIES GAZETTED, July 30, 1895.– Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde, late Tite-Street, now of her Majesty’s Prison at Petonville, author.

From the Commercial Gazette, September 4, 1895, page 35.

Wilde was arrested (Apr 5) after losing his libel case against the Marquess of Queensberry, the irate father of Lord Alfred Douglas. “Bosie,” as Wilde called Douglas, was Wilde’s lover, and Queensberry publicly accused Wilde of “posing as a somdomite” (Feb 18). Wilde sued Queensberry and lost, which meant that Wilde really must have been a “somdomite.” On that basis, he was charged with gross indecency. His first trial ended in a hung jury, but the second trial resulted in his conviction and sentencing to two years imprisonment at hard labor (May 25).

Wilde may have been in prison, but he still legally owed Queensberry £677/3/8d, to cover Queensbury’s legal expenses from the libel trial. Queensberry, not satisfied with just seeing the little bugger in jail, brought bankruptcy proceedings against Wilde for payment of the £677 and change owed by Wilde, who obviously now had no means of paying, what with his royalties having dried up and him being in prison and all. Wilde may have been in prison, but Queensberry made sure there would be another humiliating public trial where Wilde was subjected to insults from the sizable crowd.

When the Commercial Gazette published a listing of Wilde’s creditors, it listed Wilde’s total liabilities at £3,591/9/9d, of which only £914 was partially secured. The largest debt listed was £1558 owed to Sir H. Lloyd, the trustee of Wilde’s divorce settlement from his wife. Wilde also owed £71 to the Savoy Hotel, which was something of a second home for Wilde. He often stayed there for weeks at a time, whenever he wanted to entertain certain particular guests who couldn’t be so well entertained in the Tite Street home Wilde shared with his wife and children. Guests like Bosie and a few other special friends or tricks he would pick up from time to time. Other debts were to various vendors for tobacco, jewelry, wines, and to cover a theater rental.

It’s not clear what might have happened with those other debts if Queensberry hadn’t decided to pursue Wilde into bankruptcy. But as it happened, Wilde was never able to emerge from bankruptcy and he died peniless in Paris in 1900. His estate was finally discharged from bankruptcy in 1906.

[Sources: “Bankruptcies Gazetted.” The Guardian (London, August 7, 1895): page 15.

“Oscar F. O’F. W. Wilde” The Commercial Gazette (London, September 4, 1895): page 35.]

This Month In History, 1919: A Plea From An Invert

Through the early part of the twentieth century, American medical and psychological writers began taking an increasing interest in homosexuality (or “sexual inversion,” “contrary sexual feeling,” “perverted sexual instinct,” or any number of other terms which they had yet to settle on). It was rare, however, to hear from “inverts” themselves. The July 1919 issue of the Journal of Urology and Sexology carried one interesting letter to the editor that gives some indication of the frustration that many felt due to the severe societal disapproval that was prevalent a the time:

A PLEA FROM AN INVERT

To the Editor:

A plea to be heard before it is too late — will you not listen and perhaps advise me? If you only knew how I need help!

I am a misfit. I am a young man who has never cared for any women. Am I to blame because God has given me a feminine nature? Why should I be shunned by all people, loathed by them!

I am clean and refined, am well educated in the fine arts and have high ideals concerning all things. And yet men who are covered with filthy sores from evil living, who have never had a decent thought or ideal in their lives, sneer at me. I am an outcast; I am lower than the lowest!

What few who are kind to me are women who have praised me for my high ideal concerning life.

Because the custom is not that two men shall marry, is it so wrong? If I love and respect a friend and he loves me, is it not as pure a marriage as between a man and woman; and far more equal?

I wish I had a friend to go and live with, to work out our ideals, and to grow in every way. Yet this has made me accursed among men; I am damned to a living hell!

Must I — who have denied myself almost too much, to become worthy of the highest friendship — must I forever walk alone?

Is there aught but beauty in the love of Marius and Cornelius in “Marius the Epicurian” by Walter Pater? Is Marius to be considered vile, because he had that “feminine refinement” that made him idealize life, that led him finally to the Christian faith and martyrdom?

I am alone and tired. Is it not a sad thing that I and many other young men who are worthy of much, should have but one hope — that Death shall come soon!

I need advice. If some young man among your readers might write to me! Do you not think we would save each other?

You must not believe me physically or mentally deficient — though I am near to suicide I

–Homo.

[Source: Anonymous. Letter to the editor: “A plea from an invert.” American Journal of Urology and Sexology 15, no. 7 (July 1919): 336. Available online via Google Books here.]

Born On This Day, 1966: Sean Patrick Maloney

50 YEARS AGO: After earning his Bachelor’s degree in 1988, Maloney spent a year volunteering with the Jesuits in the slums of Chimbote, Peru. He then returned to get his Juris Doctor from the University of Virginia’s School of Law in 1992. He entered politics in 1991, working for Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign, and he returned to work on his re-election campaign in 1996. After that campaign, he was offered a position in the White House staff, where he was senior advisor and White House Staff Secretary from 1999 to 2000. When Matthew Shepard was brutally murdered in Wyoming, Maloney was one of two officials sent by President Clinton to represent him at the funeral. One newspaper noted that Maloney was “the highest ranking openly homosexual man on the White House staff.”

After 2000, he became a senior attorney at the law firm which represented the Shepard family. He returned to politics in 2006, first as a member of Governor Eliot Spitzer’s administration, then in Gov. David Paterson’s administration after Spitzer’s resignation due to a prostitution scandal. In 2012, Maloney ran for New York’s 18th Congressional district and won, making Maloney one of six openly gay and bisexual members of Congress. Maloney and his partner, Randy Florke, together since 1992, are raising three adoptive children. Despite New York becoming a marriage equality state in 2011, the two had chosen not to marry because their marriage would not have been recognized under the Defense of Marriage Act. DOMA was declared unconstitutional in 2013,  and Maloney and Florke married the following year in Cold Spring, New York, making Maloney only the second member of Congress to legally marry his same-sex partner.

Today’s Agenda Is Brought To You By…

Emphasis Mine

Speaking of political conventions, Lesbian Tide reported the results of the Social Workers party convention in 1980:

SWP COMES OUT AGAINST GAYS

At its 30th national convention, Socialist Workers Party (SWP) members decided to end its support of and intervention into the lesbian and gay rights movement. In the early 70s, the SWP had dropped their policy of excluding open lesbians and gay men from membership. In this latest move, however, SWP flatly stated that “coming out (especially on the job) is not political, but purely personal, and even has dangers of leading into “peti-bourgeois utopian lifestylism”!

— From Lesbian Tide, May 1980, page 22.

This Month In History, 1958: “My Daughter Is a Lesbian!”

Stonewall was still eleven years away. The first Christopher Street Liberation Day march would be a year after that. And it would be two years after that when Jeanne Manford marched with her son during that year’s Pride parade with a sign reading “Parents of Gays Unite in Support for Our Children.” In 1958, the idea of publicly-proclaimed pride was impossible to imagine. Simple visibility was still the single greatest hurdle for gay people, thanks to the very real dangers it brought: police raids (Aug 14), arrest (Jun 23), loss of employment (Mar 22, Dec 20), commitment to a psychiatric hospital (Apr 14, Jul 26), murder (Aug 3, Jan 5). There were few visible examples of gay people, and almost no visible examples of family members who accepted and supported their gay relatives.

Actually, there were few visible examples of gay people accepting themselves. But more often than not, they saw themselves as freaks, perverts, deviants, delinquents, degenerates, sick — not just because society said so, but also because the “experts” said so, from all the respected professional organizations, prestigious universities and the most trusted hospitals. When Frank Kameny dared to challenge psychiatry’s verdict that gay people were mentally ill in 1965 (May 11), the push-back was furious within the gay community. The reaction could be summed up this way: who died and made you an expert on homosexuality? What credentials do you have to challenge those who have spent an entire lifetime studying the “problem.” Kameny’s answer was simple: “We are the true authorities on homosexuality, whether we are accepted as such or not.”

Getting gays and lesbians to accept themselves was still the biggest challenge facing the homophile organizations, and an essay written by a mother of a lesbian in the July 1958 issue of The Ladder, the official newsletter of the Daughters of Bilitis, shows just what a challenge that was. She spent her essay countering a lot of misinformation that a lot of people — including a lot of gay people –shared. To counter the assumption that her daughter would live a life of lonely spinsterhood, she described her daughter’s “congenial, intelligent, loving and kind ‘mate’.” Against the prevailing view that mothers were responsible for their child’s sexuality, she defended herself by pointing to her daughter’s morality (“she could not be cheap and promiscuous”) and her good citizenship. And to counter society’s assumptions that a faithful heterosexual marriage was every woman’s birthright, she offered the example of her own sad marriage.

In all, this isn’t so much a portrait of a mother and her lesbian daughter, but a counter-narrative to the prevailing opinions of gay people at that time. The essay’s defensiveness isn’t what we would recognize as a proclamation of pride today, but when you consider how oppressive the dominant assumptions were at that time, Mrs. Doris Lyles had to start somewhere.

My daughter is a Lesbian. By all measures of accepted society, that is a pretty blunt statement. If I were an average mother, I wouldn’t even bring this assertion out and view it furtively, even when alone. Nevertheless, I do not think I would come under what one would call average, and I say this in a far from self-satisfied manner. However, I do not believe in hiding truth under our stilted, self-imposed laws of society. Many people today are frustrated and under mental treatment because of these frustrations, simply because they refuse to face the truth and prefer to delude themselves in so many ways.

My daughter from small girlhood seemed to be a little different from the average child. For one thing, she was above average mentally and had very strong will power and determination that even in childhood seemed to brook no interference. Frankly, I believe that if I had been a dictatorial, demanding mother whose child had to bend to her ego and demands, I might have had a pretty serious case of delinquency to contend with today, instead of an intelligent, serious-minded daughter who holds a fine position in a respected professional field, lives what is for her a full, rounded-out life of contentment and security, with no frustrations or problems, at least none that amount to much.

I will be very frank in saying that I am lucky in that she found a congenial, intelligent, loving and kind “mate” in this association of which I am aware but do not understand completely as a normal mother and wife. I do not like that word “normal” applied here, for there are no two more normal persons alive than my daughter and her charming associate.

In finding out about my daughter’s preferences, I had one very firm belief. I knew she would find someone of kindred tastes and lead a very circumspect life no matter what path she chose, for I knew my child and understood she could not be cheap and promiscuous, whether Lesbian or heterosexual. This thought was a great comfort and from the beginning I knew she would need love, appreciation and understanding from me; not censure, shame or withdrawal. One thing I have done to an extent most people would feel was too much to the extreme: I have left her to her own devices and now, in her middle twenties, she leads her own life completely and when she wishes to come to me, for whatever period of time she chooses, she knows she is welcome and won’t be importuned to “come oftener” and “stay longer”. As a child, I led a sheltered life in which my mother dominated all my moves and actions. When she passed away, I was at completely loose ends and made a very foolish marriage which would not have happened had I been free to follow my own course in life. This had made me wary of being possessive and trying to shape and run the lives of others. As a consequence, I think I have my daughter’s love and loyalty — even to a greater degree than most mothers who make demands and expect them to be carried out.

With the background of theatrical people during my childhood, I learned rather early that all of us, men or women, did not come within the realm of “norms.” Maybe this is why my daughter’s fate didn’t seem so terrible to me. I could think of a great many worse things, such as the unhappy twenty years of marriage I had shed at the time I learned of my daughter’s “difference”. I spent those years with a man who was a congenital liar, who preferred a lie when the truth would have served him better, and who couldn’t leave town for a week’s trip as a Salesman who travelled without having his quota of affairs with anyone — waitresses, nurses, — he seemed to prefer uniforms. It was a question of keeping my marriage together by not digging too deeply in the barrel, and keeping my temper, but definitely losing my self-respect. This I believe is a fate far worse for a girl. Maybe I’m wrong and maybe I should use every means within my power to help my daughter in her situation, but frankly I do not believe she needs help from me or anyone else. If ever the time should come when she feels the need for advice or counsel, I only hope I will be able to advise her wisely, but certainly not against what she believes with all her being to be her path in life.

We preach freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and even though reams and reams have been written on the subject, there are very few who will admit belief in freedom of love.

[Source: Mrs. Doris Lyles. “My Daughter Is a Lesbian.” The Ladder 2, no. 10 (July 1958):4-5.]

Born On This Day, 1953: Tim Gunn

His role on Project Runway is that of a fashion professor and mentor, in line with his previous life as a member of the faculty at Parson The New School for Design, where he served as the fashion design chair before moving to Liz Claiborne in 2007 to work as their chief creative officer. Meanwhile, he’s been “making it work” at the Lifetime reality series which just started its thirteenth season last week. He is an animal rights advocate and speaks out against the use of fur in fashion. He also made an “It Gets Better” video, motivated by his own suicide attempt when he was seventeen. He’s  been a rather private person, not given to opening his life to public scrutiny. But that began to change in 2006 when, in an interview with Instinct, Gunn said that he hadn’t been in a relationship since the early 1980s, after the end of a six-year relationship with the love of his life, whom he still loves today. He’s been celibate ever since then. In 2012, he wrote a short essay, Shaken, Not Stirred (available only as a Kindle Single) in which he described growing up with a rigid, controlling FBI-agent father who was J. Edgar Hoover’s ghostwriter.

Today’s Agenda Is Brought To You By…

From Michael’s Thing (New York, NY), February 2, 1976, page 50.

Harry’s Back East was a longtime gay bar whose origins went back to at least 1968. In 1971, the weekly newsmagazine GAY called it “the busiest bar in New York any night.” It probably owed its popularity to its reputation as a simple, laid-back and friendly establishment. At least one story has it that Judy Garland paid a visit there in 1969 shortly before she died. The front bar area was a narrow space, with a very long bar in front that ran the length of the front room and just about every item imaginable hanging from its ceiling — toys, dolls, musical instruments, you name it. The dance floor was in the back, adorned with a disco ball and a large red light connected to a light switch at the front bar that the bartender could flip whenever the cops came in. When the red light came on, that was everyone’s signal to stop dancing together and act innocent — whatever that meant — lest the cops start arresting them for “lewd” conduct. If the owners were current on their bribes, then the cops would leave, the red light would go out, and everyone would go back to doing whatever they were doing before they were so rudely interrupted. But if the bribes had gone unpaid, the cops would stay and become a general nuisance, making everyone uncomfortable until either all the patrons left or the owner arrived and paid up. Harry’s survived that era and soldiered on until 1982 when it finally closed. The location in 2011 held a restaurant that later closed. Now it’s a retail store that sells fancy frozen foods that Manhattanites can re-heat in their gourmet kitchens.

Today In History, 1961: Illinois Becomes First State to Rescind Sodomy Law

In 1955, the Illinois General Assembly inaugurated the gargantuan task of overhauling its criminal code. Since its last major revision in 1874, the code had accumulated a patchwork of conflicting and confusing statues, some of which made no sense in the 20th century. Horse thieves, for example, were punished with a minimum penalty of three years in prison, but the maximum penalty for auto theft was only one year.

Over the ensuing six years, an eighteen-member joint committee of the Chicago and Illinois Bar Associations combed through the 148 chapters and 832 sections of the old statute books, using the American Law Institute’s 1956 Model Penal Code as a guide. The ALI had put together its Model Penal Code because a number of states were planning to revise their criminal codes over the next decade, and the 1956 Model Code was intended to guide them through the process. Among its many recommendations included the elimination of all prohibitions against consensual sexual activity between consenting adults, including those laws which criminalized homosexual activity and relationships. Because the Model Penal Code also touched on a plethora of other criminal statues, it’s likely that most Illinois lawmakers didn’t realize that they were repealing their anti-sodomy law by adopting the omnibus legislation. Nevertheless, the code was adopted and signed into law by Gov. Otto Kerner, and the anti-sodomy law’s repeal became effective on January 1, 1962.

That didn’t mean however that eliminating the state’s anti-sodomy law was entirely by mistake. A booklet describing the new code prepared for Chicago Police by Claude R. Sowele, assistant professor at Northwestern University’s law school, commented, “The Law should not be cluttered with matters of morality so long as they do not endanger the community. Morality should be left to the church, community and the individual’s own conscience.” While Illinois became the first state to legalize consensual adult same-sex relationships, the change in the state’s criminal code had few practical benefits for the state’s LGBT population, as police raids and harassment on other pretexts (or no pretext even, other than the opportunity to milk the gay community of more bribes) would continue without letup for another two decades.

For the next ten years, Illinois would remain the only state in the union to legalize consensual adult same-sex relationships. In 1971, Connecticut finally rescinded its sodomy law, followed by Colorado and Oregon (1972), Hawaii and North Dakota (1973), Ohio (1974), New Hampshire and New Mexico (1975). The big year was 1976, when California, Indiana, Maine, Washington and West Virginia stopped criminalizing homosexuality. By the time Lawrence v. Texas struck down all sodomy laws nationwide in 2003, thirty-six states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico had eliminated their anti-gay statutes, either by legislative action or by state court decisions. Progress towards equality in the U.S. has only accelerated since then. It took forty-two years to get rid of all of the sodomy laws across America. But it only took us eleven years from the time Massachusetts instituted marriage equality in 2004 (May 17) until all Americans gained the right to marry the person they love in 2015 (Jun 26).