Box Turtle Bulletin
News and commentary about the anti-gay lobby“Now you must raise your children up in a world where that union of man and box turtle is on the same legal footing as man and wife…”
News and commentary about the anti-gay lobbyPosts Tagged As: Daily Agenda
November 2nd, 2012
TODAY’S AGENDA (Ours):
This is the final week of campaigning before voters go to the polls next Tuesday. Polling shows that the four marriage ballot questions are tightening up in Maryland, Maine, Minnesota and Washington. Opponents have gone on the air in all four states with their long-anticipated school attack ads, contending that marriage equality will result in gay sex demonstrations. Or something.
Here is our final wrap-up for 2012 until election day:
Maryland Question 6: If passed, Question 6 will provide marriage equality for Maryland same-sex couples. Marylanders for Marriage Equality is fighting a tight battle for Question 6’s passage. Hurricane Sandy closed early voting on Monday and Tuesday this week, and many Marylanders, particularly those on the Eastern Shore, are contending with power outages and flooding, which complicates the get-out-the-vote efforts. The state has extended early voting today, from 8:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m.
What you can do: It’s crunch time. If you haven’t voted, please do so today. You can also spread the word about Question 6, fairness, and equality through their One Million Conversations initiative, and up for an Election Day volunteer shift with the campaign.
Maine Marriage Initiative: A “Yes” vote on Question 1 will allow same-sex couples to marry in Maine. Mainers United for Marriage is the main campaign behind the initiative. Mainers United released an ad featuring Brian Arsenault who hopes to marry the girl of his dreams when he gets older, like his two mothers want to do. Their get-out-the-vote effort gets serious this weekend, with volunteers calling on supporters to help fill 3,000 GOTV shifts beginning Saturday morning until the polls close on Tuesday. Shifts include knocking on doors and making phone calls to voters.
What you can do: You can volunteer for a GOTV shift here or volunteer for other activities here.
Minnesota Marriage Amendment: Amendment 1 is the ballot proposal to amend the state constitution to ban same-sex marriage. Minnesotans United for All Families is the main group fighting against the amendment’s passage. On Monday, they kicked off their GOTV efforts with a Vote No Rally at Northrop Plaza at the University of Minnesota. Nearly 3,000 folks joined us to hear from speakers including Senators Amy Klobuchar and Al Franken, Minnesota Vikings Punter Chris Kluwe, Minnesota Lynx Coach Cheryl Reeve, Freedom to Marry’s Thalia Zepatos, Human Rights Campaign President Chad Griffin, Republican Madeline Koch, and Minnesota native Rachael Leigh Cook. They’be set up dozens of Action Centers across Minnesota and nearly 15,000 volunteer shifts have been recruited.
What you can do: Login with your Facebook account and starting using the new kNOw Tool to help identify “no” voters that you know. You can also sign up to volunteer for the GOTV efforts here.
Washington Referendum 74: If Referendum 74 is approved, same-sex couples will be able to marry just like everyone else in Washington state. Washington United for Marriage is working for R74’s passage. As is the case with the other three states, this week is all about getting out the vote, which for Washington looks a little different from the other states because Washingtonians don’t go to a polling location to vote. The entire state votes by mail and ballots need to be postmarked by November 6. This means that we probably won’t know the results until several days after election day. Washington’s GOTV is labor intensive, through phone calls and door-to-door visits. In one single night last week, they finished the day logging 75,291 calls to voters across the state. Their door-to-door campaign, Knockvember, kicks off seriously this weekend.
What you can do: You can volunteer for phone banking, door-to-door canvassing or campus crawls here. And be sure to get your ballot in the mail and postmarked by Tuesday, November 6.
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.
TODAY’S AGENDA (Theirs):
NARTH Annual Conference: Orlando, FL. It’s been a difficult year for NARTH, now that the California legislature has banned licensed therapists from providing Sexual Orientation Change Efforts (SOCE) to minors. That has to hurt since, as NARTH’s co-founder Joseph Nicolosi admitted recently, half of their clients are teenagers and they represent a growing customer base. Plus, NARTH is now on the outs with Exodus International, first because there is a fundamental disagreement on whether gay people can change, and second because Nicolosi recommended using porn as part of that change process during Exodus’s 2010 conference — a definite no-no as far as the Evangelical-oriented Exodus is concerned.
This year, NARTH chose Exodus’s own hometown as the location for their annual conference and commiseration party. The featured speaker this year is Mathew Staver, Executive Director of Liberty Counsel and Dean at Jerry Fallwel’s Liberty Law School. NARTH recently announced that Staver will join with NARTH to challenge California’s SOCE ban in court. Staver’s law school is currently being sued as part of a larger racketeering lawsuit in connection with Isabella Miller-Jenkins’s kidnapping in direct violation of a court order. The conference begins today and continues through Saturday at the Renaissance Orlando Airport Hotel.
TODAY IN HISTORY:
Observations about “Sexual Inversion in Women”: 1912. Exactly one hundred years ago today, the journal Lancet-Clinic published an article by Dr. Douglasl C. McMurtrie which attempts to explain lesbianism or, as he put it, “sexual inversion in women.” McMurtrie set the stage for his discussion by observing that most physicians may know little to nothing about homosexuality — or “sexual inversion” — in general:
Cases of abnormal sexual development are liable to come under the observation of the psychologist as frequently if not more frequently than under the notice of the physician. That this is true is due to the fact that very few such cases are ever brought to the physician in a professional capacity. The subjects tend to conceal the fact of their condition, and are inclined to work out their own salvation. Only when their course conflicts violently with the interests of the community is the medical man called upon to diagnose and prescribe. The great majority of the sexually abnormal live their lives without ever coming in contact with the medical profession, at least in so far as their physical characteristics are concerned.
And given the relative rarity of physicians’ experience with homosexuality, McMurtrie wrote that the medical profession’s exposure to lesbianism was rarer still:
Perhaps one of the least known phases of sexual abnormality is that of homosexuality in women. There have been many studies of inversion, but practically all devote but little attention to female manifestations. …One reason for the lack of data on the subject is undoubtedly the difficulty of recognizing sexual inversion in women, due to the customs of the day which permit and even call for caresses and outward demonstrations between members of the female sex. In addition women are very generally ignorant of the details of sexual character and, not recognizing themselves the character of their tendencies, there would be greater difficulty for others to secure definite information.
What followed then were descriptions of ten case descriptions, three of them men who were included as “of immediate interest to the subject” of homosexuality generally. Of the five women, three were prostitutes and one was an actress. Two more had scant details of only a sentence or two. One had a longstanding relationship with another women who cheated on her, plunging her into depression. When , after two years, her lover returned, all was well. This woman, identified only as “G,” seemed to have a particular self-assurance about her sexuality, which McMurtrie obviously regarded with some surprise:
G. has only cared for this one woman. She describes this passion, however, as the most intense possible in life and the companionship of the loved one as the greatest happiness. She can see nothing wrong in such relationships except promiscuity, and regards the bond as being as holy as the conventional marriage vow. To this very unusual history I have only to add that the woman in question is highly regarded by all who know her, and not even her relatives and closest friends have the slightest idea of her sexual characteristics.
[Source: Douglas C McMurtie, “Some observations on the psychology of sexual inversion in women.” Lancet-Clinic 108, no. 18 (November 2, 1912): 487-490.]
Oregon’s Measure 9 Defeated: 1992. By a vote of 56-44%, voters in Oregon rejected Measure 9, which would have amended the state constitution to prohibit the expenditure of “monies or properties to promote, encourage or facilitate homosexuality, pedophilia, sadism or masochism.” This would have banned gay groups from using city parks or books about homosexuality in the public library. The measure was an effort of the Oregon Citizens Alliance, a conservative religious right group that was closely aligned with the Christian Coalition and was headed by Lon Mabon, with Scott Lively serving as his right hand man.
The campaign for Measure 9 was particularly nasty, with the OCA releasing a graphic video depicting gays as universally debauched and corrupt, while extolling the virtues of two “ex-gays.” The campaign also saw Lively found guilty of using unreasonable force to remove a free-lance photographer from an OCA meeting which debuted the video. Typical of anything associated with Lively, the OCA refused to acknowledge the magnitude of Measure 9’s defeat, and vowed to return to the ballot box two years later. But Measure 19 in went down in flames in 1994 by a similar margin. A poll in December 1992 found that 57% of all Oregonians had an unfavorable view of the OCA, against only a 14% with a favorable view. Lively called the poll “flawed.”
Colorado’s Amendment 2 Passed: 1992. You win one, you lose one. That’s what happened in 1992. The same year in which Oregonians rejected Measure 9, voters in Colorado passed Amendment 2 to that state’s constitution which prohibited state and local governments or court from taking any action recognizing gays or lesbians as a protected class in anti-discrimination measures. The measure passed 60% to 40%.
The Amendment immediately landed in court, with the State Supreme Court ruling that the measure couldn’t pass “strict scrutiny” under the Federal Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause. When supporters appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, they ruled in 1995 in the landmark Romer v Evans that the measure didn’t even pass muster under a rational basis test. Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the majority, found that Amendment 2 went far beyond prohibiting “special rights” to gay people as supporters argued. It went further by actually disenfranchising gay people — and only gay people — from an important part of the political process. While everyone else could ask for redress from local governments and courts, gay people were singled out for being barred from that right of citizenship. “(Amendment 2) is at once too narrow and too broad,” he wrote. “It identifies persons by a single trait and then denies them protection across the board. The resulting disqualification of a class of persons from the right to seek specific protection from the law is unprecedented in our jurisprudence.”
TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Helen Sandoz: 1920. She went by “Sandy,” and she was born of hardy stock. She grew up on an Oregon farm, and after earning a bachelor’s degree she moved to Alaska for a time before moving back to Washington and Oregon where she held supervisory position in several department stores. One morning as she was driving to a bank, she rear-ended a farmer’s truck. The accident seemed minor, so she continued on to the bank. The teller saw her and asked “Miss Sandoz, did you know that there is blood trickling down your chin?” Turned out she had broken her neck and had to spend the a year in a full-body cast. She was never again able to sit still in a chair or remain mobile for any length of time, so she changed her career to one which allowed her to keep moving: she became a sign printer.
When Sandoz moved to San Francisco a few years later, she learned that a new organization for lesbians was being organized called the Daughters of Bilitis (see Oct 19). As DoB co-founder Phyllis Lyon recalled, “Sandy was one of the only lesbians wer knew in San Francisco when we moved here from Seattle in 1953. Del (Martin, Lyon’s partner) knew Sandy beforehand, when she was with a woman everyone called ‘Bridge.’ We visited them and Sandy’s partner wanted nothing to do with DOB. When they broke up in 1957, we got Sandy.” When the DoB filed for a state charter in 1957, Sandoz was among the those who signed her real name. She did use a pseudonym for her public DoB work however: as “Helen Sanders” she became DoB president in 1957. That year, she represented the Daughters at the ONE Midwinter Institute in Los Angeles, where she met Stella Rush, who was reporting on the Institute for ONE Magazine. The two hit it off, and later that year Sandoz moved to L.A. As The Ladder said when she announced her move, San Francisco’s loss was Los Angeles’s gain, as Sandoz quickly set about the work of establishing an L.A. chapter for the Daughters.
She also continued to work with the DoB’s groundbreaking magazine The Ladder, contributing articles as “Helen Sanders” and as “Ben Cat,” a persona she used to explore a wider range of topics from the perspective of a house cat that she shared with Rush. Sandoz put her artistic skills to use in designing several covers, and she served as editor from 1966 through 1968.
By 1968, the DoB was being split along several lines: Between those who wanted a more activist political organization verses those who wanted the DoB to be a social club, between those who wanted a strong national organization versus those who sought greater autonomy for local chapters, and between those who saw the DoB as primarily a gay rights organization for women and those who believed that the Daughters should throw its weight behind other feminist groups like the National Organization for Women. While Sandoz believed in NOW’s goals, she was put off by some of the anti-male rhetoric. She and Rush had spent their entire lives working with male (and female) members of ONE and the Mattachine Society, and they regarded the fight for gay and lesbian rights as being one fight. Consequently, Sandoz and Rush withdrew from the Daughters after a disastrous 1968 convention in order to concentrate on advocacy for both gay men and women. Sandoz died in 1987 in Anaheim of lung cancer at the age of 66.
[Sources: Stella Rush. “Helen Sandoz a.k.a. Helen Sanders a.k.a Ben Cat (1920-1987).” 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
k.d. lang: 1961. Growing up on Canada’s western prairie in Alberta, she became fascinated with the life and music of country music star Patsy Cline. She formed a tribute band called the Reclines in Cline’s honor in 1983, but when her debut album, A Truly Western Experience was released in 1984, the ReClines became a more conventional back-up band for a most unconventional Country and Western singer. Her career was taking off in Canada when, in 1987, Roy Orbison tapped her to record a duet of his hit “Crying.” That collaboration won them a Grammy in 1989.
That award coincided with her American breakout with the Grammy Award-winning Absolute Torch and Twang, which featured such standout songs as “Full Moon of Love,” “Big Boned Gal,” and my favorite, “Pulling Back the Reins.” In 1992, she shifted gears with Ingénue an adult contemporary album shorn of her country influences, which included her most popular song “Constant Craving,” giving her yet another Grammy Award. That coincided with her coming out as a lesbian in The Advocate. That, coupled with her veganism and animal rights advocacy — her “Meat Stinks” raised a huge stink in her cattle-ranching hometown in Alberta — put her country music career in deep freeze.
But it has done little to slow down her career. If anything, it gave her the freedom to become a vocalist — not a singer, but a vocalist of the highest calibre — whose range is utterly unbounded by the petty distinctions of genre and styles. Stephen Holden of The New York Times wrote, “Few singers command such perfection of pitch. Her voice, at once beautiful and unadorned and softened with a veil of smoke, invariably hits the middle of a note and remains there. She discreetly flaunted her technique, drawing out notes and shading them from sustained cries into softer, vibrato-laden murmurs. She balanced her commitment to the material with humor, projecting a twinkling merriment behind it all.”
But when it comes right down to it, words cannot express the artistry of lang’s voice. And so at this point, all I can do is to shut up and listen as she sings Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” during Canada’s 2005 Juno Awards in Winnipeg. If you know nothing else about her, then the only thing you really need to know is that she can do this:
If you know of something that belongs on the agenda, please send it here. Don’t forget to include the basics: who, what, when, where, and URL (if available).
And feel free to consider this your open thread for the day. What’s happening in your world?
November 1st, 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.
Hal Holbrook and Martin Sheen
TODAY IN HISTORY:
ABC Broadcasts “That Certain Summer”: 1972. ABC television’s Wednesday night broadcast of the Movie of the Week broke refreshing new ground when it aired “That Certain Summer,” which marked the first sympathetic portrayal of gay people on television. The made-for-TV movie portrayed a mid-40’s divorced man who must explain his homosexuality to his 14-year-old son, Nick, who is on a visit during summer vacation. The production was written and produced by Richard Levinson and William Link, and it had been pitched to NBC first, which rejected it. “It was perfectly acceptable for Bob Hope or Johnny Carson to mince about the screen doing broad parodies of homosexual behavior,” they later observed. “But anything else, anything not derisive or played for laughs, was out of the question.” ABC picked it up instead.
Scott Jacoby as Nick
“That Certain Summer” featured Hal Holbrook as Doug Slater, the teen’s father, Martin Sheen as Gary McClain, Slater’s partner, and Scott Jacoby as Nick. None of the characters fell into stereotype. In fact the two men were actually seen touching and neither of them died in the end. The New York Times’ John O’Connor said that the cast delivered “some of the most impressive and sensitive acting ever contributed ot television.” It would go on to receive Emmy nominations, with Scott Jacoby picking up the award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role in Drama for his portrayal of Nick. It also won a Golden Globe for Best Movie Made for TV.
But not everyone thought the movie was so wonderful. Sacramento’s KOVR received 400 phone calls, including a bomb threat, in protest. The calls began as early as 10:00 a.m. on the morning before the film aired. But station manager Bill Lange said that most of the calls on Thursday were favorable. That seems to have been the pattern across the country. ABC hired extra operators to handle an anticipated avalanche of angry phone calls, but the calls never materialized.
If you know of something that belongs on the agenda, please send it here. Don’t forget to include the basics: who, what, when, where, and URL (if available).
And feel free to consider this your open thread for the day. What’s happening in your world?
October 31st, 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.
TODAY IN HISTORY:
That Most Detestable, Horrid, and Abominable Crime Called Buggery: 1848. The following court record was entered:
The indictment against the prisoners was as follows: —
“Central Criminal Court, to wit the jurors for our Lady the Queen upon their oath present that Edwin Gatehouse, late of the parish of Lambeth, in the county of Surrey, and within the jurisdiction of the court, labourer, and William Dowley, late of the same place, labourer, being persons of depraved and unnatural dispositions,in the 12th year of the reign of our Sovereign Lady Victoria, by the grace of God of the united kingdom of England and Ireland, Queen, defender of the faith, with force of arms, at the parish aforesaid, in the county aforesaid, and within the jurisdiction of the said court, in a certain room there unlawfully and wickedly did meet, and were then together for the purpose of committing with each other that most detestable horrid, and abominable crime called buggery; and did then and there unlawfully and wickedly lay their hands upon each other with intent then and there feloniously, wickedly, diabolically, and against the order of nature to commit and perpetrate with each other the detestable, horrid, and abominable crime aforesaid. To the great displeasure of Almighty God, to the evil example of all others in the like case offending, and against the pace of our Lady the Queen, her crown and dignity. And the jurors aforesaid, upon their oath aforesaid, do further present that the said Edwin Gatehouse and William Dowley, being such evil disposed persons as aforesaid, afterwards (to wit) on the day and year aforesaid, with force and arms at the parish aforesaid, in the county aforesaid, and within the jurisdiction of the said court, unlawfully and wickedly did meet, and then and there were together in a certain room for the purpose and with the intent of committing and perpetrating with each other these divers nasty, wicked, filthy, beastly, and unnatural acts and practices; and that the said Edwin Gatehouse and William Dowly, in pursuance of such purpose and intent, unlawfully, wickedly, and indecently did then and there expose their naked private parts to each other, and did also then and there place their hands upon and take hold of and feel the naked private parts of each other, with intent then and there to excite and stir up in the minds of each other divers filthy, beastly, and unnatural lusts and desires, to the great scandal and subversion of religion, morality, decency, and good order, and against hte peace of our Lady the Queen, her crown and dignity.”
At the close of the case for the prosecution, Ballantine, for the prisoner, Gatehouse, objected that neither of these counts disclosed any offense. The second count was clearly bad within the principle of the cases recently decided. It did not allege that the place where the exposure took place was public; and even if it was public, the exposure was only to one person, which was not sufficient. Indecency, to be criminal, must be in a public place, and in the sight of divers of her majesty’s subjects. The first count also was bad. It did not aver an attempt to commit buggery, but a mere intention accompanied by an act indicative of that intention. Such intention was not criminal. To constitute an offence, some act in pursuance of such intention, and as a commencement to the actual crime of buggery, must be shown.
The Common Sergeant. — The judges have not yet expressly decided that the second count is bad, but in accordance with the cases which have been decided, I think they would hold it to be bad. I shall therefore tell the jury that, as to that count, they must against acquit the prisoner. An intent to commit sodomy, must, I think, be charged and proved. But this is, in my opinion, done in the first count; and at present, I see no reason for holding that that count is bad. But before judgment is given, I will consult some of the judges; and if necessary, reserve the point for consideration of all judges.
The Jury found the prisoners Guilty on the first count.
Judgement was respited.
[Source: Chris White’s Nineteenth-Century Writings on Homosexuality: A Sourcebook
Time Magazine’s “The Homosexual: Newly Visible, Newly Understood”: 1969. Mainstream news media was slow to wake up to the cathartic effect the Stonewall rebellion had on the gay community in 1969. The New York Times buried the story on page thirty-three, and didn’t bother to mention why the patrons of the Stonewall Inn fought back. The New York Daily News reported the whole thing, on page thirty, and only from the police’s point of view (“3 Cops Hurt As Bar Raid Riles Crowd”). The Daily News followed on July 6 with the infamous report, “Homo Nest Raided, Queen Bees Are Stinging Mad.” The most extensive reporting on the riot was in a series of articles by the Village Voice. It’s reporting was, by turns, both sympathetic and mocking, with the mocking parts sparking an angry protest by the Gay Liberation Front (see Sep 12).
On October 31, Time magazine noticed the rapidly growing visibility of the post-stonewall gay community with its cover story “The Homosexual: Newly Visible, Newly Understood.” Written by contributing editor Christopher Cory, researched by Madeleine Berry, and reported by Ruth Galvin, the magazine sought to provide a comprehensive view of what was still a very controversial and touchy topic:
Their new militancy makes other citizens edgy, and it can be shrill. Hurling rocks and bottles and wielding a parking meter that had been wrenched out of the sidewalk, homosexuals rioted last summer in New York’s Greenwich Village after police closed one of the city’s 50 all-gay bars and clubs on an alleged liquor-law violation. … Some 50 homophile organizations have announced their existence in cities across the country and on at least eight campuses. … W. Dorr Legg, educational director at Los Angeles’ 17-year-old ONE, Inc., claims, “I won’t be happy until all churches give homosexual dances and parents are sitting in the balcony saying ‘Don’t John and Henry look cute dancing together?'”
The article introduced its readers to two terms they likely hadn’t encountered before: “fag hags” (“the parlor darlings of wealthy ladies”) and “homophobic,” which just might be the first instance in which the newly-coined word appeared in a mainstream publication. (If readers are aware of an earlier use of the word in a mainstream outlet, please let me know either via email or in the comments.) Gay marriage, however, was not what we would think of today: “Marriage in these circles can involve a homosexual and a busy career woman who coolly take the vows for companionship—and so that they can pool their incomes and tax benefits for a glittering round of entertaining.” It also gave an approving nod to those who feared that these “newly visible” and gays were taking over the world:
Is there a homosexual conspiracy afoot to dominate the arts and other fields? Sometimes it seems that way. The presence of talented homosexuals in the field of classical music, among composers, performers, conductors and management, has sometimes led to charges by disappointed outsiders that the music world is a closed circle. The same applies to the theater, the art world, painting, dance, fashion, hairdressing and interior design, where a kind of “homintern” exists: a gay boss will often use his influence to help gay friends. The process is not unlike the ethnic favoritism that prevails in some companies and in big-city political machines; with a special sulky twist, it can be vicious to outsiders. Yet homosexual influence has probably been exaggerated. The homosexual cannot go too far in foisting off on others his own preferences; the public that buys the tickets or the clothes is overwhelmingly heterosexual.
According to Time, it was the straight world that kept the gay one in check. Otherwise “Homosexual taste can fall into a particular kind of self-indulgence as the homosexual revenges himself on a hostile world by writing grotesque exaggerations of straight customs, concentrates on superficial stylistic furbelows or develops a ‘campy’ fetish for old movies.” That was just before the article went on to acknowledge the important literary contributions of Oscar Wilde, James Baldwin, W.H. Auden, Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee and others. But then Time effectively dismissed those artists with a quote from The New York Times Drama Critic Clive Barnes: “Creativity might be a sort of psychic disturbance itself, mightn’t it? Artists are not particularly happy people.”
Time identified, broadly, six types of homosexuals, starting with “The Blatant Homosexual”:
This is the eunuch-like caricature of” femininity that most people associate with homosexuality. In the 1960s he may be the catty hairdresser or the lisping, limp-wristed interior decorator. His lesbian counterpart is the “butch,” the girl who is aggressively masculine to the point of trying to look like a man. Blatants also include “leather boys,” who advertise their sadomasochism by wearing leather jackets and chains, and certain transvestites, or “Tvs.”
“The Secret Lifer”:
The other 90% of the nation’s committed inverts are hidden from all but their friends, lovers, and occasionally, psychiatrists. Their wrists are rigid, their “s’s” well formed; they prefer subdued clothes and close-cropped hair, and these days may dress more conservatively than flamboyant straights. Many wear wedding rings and have wives, children and employers who never know. … To lead their double lives these full or part-time homosexuals must “pass” as straight, and most are extremely skilled at camouflage. They can cynically tell — or at least smile at — jokes about “queers”; they fake enjoyment when their boss throws a stag party with nude movies.
“The Desperate”:
Members of this group are likely to haunt public toilets (“tearooms”) or Turkish baths. They may be pathologically driven to sex but emotionally unable to face the slightest strains of sustaining a serious human relationship, or they may be married men who hope to conceal their need by making their contacts as anonymous as possible.
“The Adjusted”:
By contrast, they lead relatively conventional lives. They have a regular circle of friends and hold jobs … Their social lives generally begin at the gay bars or in rounds of private parties. Often they try to settle down with a regular lover, and although these liaisons are generally short-lived among men, some develop into so-called “gay marriages.” …
“The Bisexual”:
Many married homosexuals are merely engaging in “alibi sex,” faking enjoyment of intercourse with their wives. Some researchers, however, have found a number of men and women who have a definite preference for their own sex but engage in occasional activity with the opposite sex and enjoy it.
“The Situational-Experimental”:
He is a man who engages in homosexual acts without any deep homosexual motivation. The two Kinsey reports found that almost 40% of white American males and 13% of females have some overt sexual experience to orgasm with a person of their own sex between adolescence and old age. Yet a careful analysis of the figures shows that most of these experiences are only temporary deviations. In prisons and occasionally in the armed forces, for example, no women are available.
But for all of Time’s attempts to paint a comprehensive overview of this “newly understood” minority, Time betrayed an abysmal lack of actual understanding. “The homosexual subculture, a semi-public world, is, without question, shallow and unstable,” it concluded, before devoting several more paragraphs to conjectures of what causes homosexuality. Virtually of the “experts” that Time consulted on cited early childhood experiences as the cause. It also concludes with the verdict that homosexuality is, at the very best, a “crippling maladjustment”:
A violently argued issue these days is whether the confirmed homosexual is mentally ill. Psychoanalysts insist that homosexuality is a form of sickness; most homosexuals and many experts counter that the medical concept only removes the already fading stigma of sin, and replaces it with the charge — even more pejorative nowadays — that homosexuality is pathological. The answers will importantly influence society’s underlying attitude. While homosexuality is a serious and sometimes crippling maladjustment, research has made clear that it is no longer necessary or morally justifiable to treat all inverts as outcasts. The challenge to American society is simultaneously to devise civilized ways of discouraging the condition and to alleviate the anguish of those who cannot be helped, or do not wish to be.
Time’s article is available to subscribers here.
Gay Advocates Protest San Francisco Examiner: 1969. This was the year when gay activists across the U.S. were declaring that a new day had come and they would no longer remain silent over outrages against the gay community. In San Francisco, the Hearst-owned San Francisco Examiner had long been a bitter foe of the gay community. Over several weeks in October, 1969, the paper had run a series of article’s about the city’s so-called “breakfast clubs,” after-hour underground clubs that sold low-grade liquor without a license. Most of those articles targeted straight clubs, but an October 24 installment in the series called attention to “The Dreary Revels of S.F. ‘Gay’ Clubs,” which describe the city’s “deviant establishments”:
The Corral is now, appropriately enough, home to the Holy Cow night club (via Goole Street View)
San Francisco has more than a fare share of “gay” breakfast clubs. The “gay” clubs are gay in name only. Actually, the are sad, dreary after-hours traps here homosexuals and weird “straight” types gather for their sick, sad revels. … Take the Corral at 1535 Folsom Street. … Here the virile, ultra-male is wined and dined and wooed by other semi-males with flexible wrists and hips, and bona fide females have a strictly zero rating. The bar and outlying tables are occupied by types who undulate and wriggle, whose voices are an octave higher or lower than they should be, and whose manual contacts with their associates are lingering and tender.
Folsom street became “Queer street,” and the article was particularly obsessed with drag queens and cross-dressers. They were “drag-darlings,” “the pseudo-fair sex,” “hybrid blossoms,” and “counterfeit femininity.”
One week later, sixty members of the newly-formed Gay Liberation Front (GLF) and the long-standing Society for Individual Rights (SIR) began a peaceful picket at the Hearst Building demanding, among other things, that the paper fire reporter Robert Patterson. About an hour into the protest, someone inside the building opened a third floor window and dumped a bag of purple printer’s ink onto the protesters below. In response, the protesters began blotting the windows and sides of the building with purple handprints, and someone smeared the words “Gay Power!” on the white wall. SIR president Larry Littlejohn later recalled:
The old Hearst Building today.
At that point, the tactical squad arrived — not to get the employees who dumped the ink, but to arrest the demonstrators who were the victims. The police could have surrounded the Examiner building and found out who did it but, no, they went after the gays. It was just incredible how stupid the police could be. Somebody could have been hurt if that ink had gotten in their eyes, but the police came racing in with their clubs swinging, knocking people to the ground. It was unbelievable.
The pitched battle quickly became bloody. Two officers threw a lesbian into the asphalt and then arrested her for obstructing traffic. Many others were knocked against the curb and suffered head wounds. Another lost his teeth when he was thrown into the paddy wagon. Twenty-one protesters were arrested; no one from The Examiner was charged.
[Source: Edward Alwood. Straight News: Gays, Lesbians and the News Media
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October 30th, 2012
THIS MONTH IN HISTORY:
The Treatment of Homosexuality by Aversion Therapy: 1966. Doctors had been using painful jolts of electricity to try to torture homosexuality out of people since 1935 (see Mar 15 and Sep 6), and so the report that appeared in the October 1966 edition of Medicine, Science and the Law (remember, homosexuality was still against the law in most states, Canada and the UK) is depresingly similar to so many other cases that have been published in the medical literature. In this one, “The Treatment of Homosexuality by Aversion Therapy,” Dr. Northage Mather, a consultant psychiatrist at Crumpsall Hospital in Manchester, England, described “a particular technique in behaviour therapy for homosexuality, developed over the past three and a half years”:
The patient, to whom the treatment is carefully explained, is then shown a large series of slides and a number of films of both males and females, clothed and unclothed, from which he selects a number of both sexes in varying degrees of attractiveness to him. Each patient thus draws up his own particular hierarchies for both sexes. He then lies on a bed in a darkened room, watching a screen upon which these slides are thrown. The slide first used is that of a male which is only mildly attractive, and the patient has in his hand a switch by means of which he can remove the slide from the screen. If after eight seconds he has not removed it, he receives an electric shock which has previously been determined as unpleasant to himself. The shock continues until he presses the switch. During the eight seconds anxiety and tension are created and relief is obtained by an active movement on his part. Once the patient is regularly performing avoidance responses to a male slide in this way he is placed on a schedule of reinforcement so that one-third of his attempts to avoid are successful (reinforced), one-third are delayed for varying intervals of time (delayed), and onethird are held up for so long that he does receive a shock (non-reinforced). These three types of trial are randomly alternated. The purpose of this schedule is to reduce the likelibood of relapse.
In an endeavour to make females less unattractive, especially as many homosexuals also experience anxiety with females, or with the thought of sexual contact with females, relief from anxiety is associated with the immediate presentation of a picture of the female as soon as the patient himself removes the male slide by means of the switch. In two-fifths of the trials the pressing of the switch therefore by the patient not only removes the male slide but replaces it with the female slide which is the most attractive one in the hierarchy which he has previously drawn up. The female slide is removed by the therapist after approximately ten seconds, and before the request of the patient, so that eventually the patient is motivated to request the return of the female slide. This is granted in a random manner to prevent the patient predicting the consequences of removing the male slide.
Each treatment session lasts about twenty minutes, twenty-five presentations being given. Inpatients receive two sessions of trealment per day, outpatients according to patients’ own convenience.
You read it right: inpatients and outpatients. Of the thirty-six subjects in these experiments, fourteen were directly or indirectly referred by a court, and six more were patients at the psychiatric hospital. Only sixteen appeared to be there of their own accord. Eight more beyond the thirty-six had dropped out. One of the dropouts was “of hysterical personality (and) was so frightened of the treatment that he only attended twice.” Another insisted that he receive electric shock therapy under an anesthetic, which of course would have negated the effects of the treatment. Mather attributed three other dropouts to their “gross personality disorders with histories of antisocial and psychopathic behaviour.” What that is supposed to mean is unclear, particularly considering that Mather described homosexuality as “giv(ing) rise to a considerable amount of individual suffering, as well as being responsible for many anti-social acts such as larceny, blackmail, robbery with violence and murder.” And in Mather’s view, if someone was homosexual, then it was obvious that there was something wrong with them. Of each of the patients he evaluated, he was determined to find some kind of problem, even if it was an undefined “self-insecure obsessional personality trait.” Being sent to a shock doctor at a psych ward can have that effect on people.
The treatments continued until the patient managed to show “a change of interest occurs or it becomes clear that no change is likely.” That usually happened after about fifteen to twenty “treatments,” although some were subjected for up to thirty. If a patient was found to have slipped up during a years’ worth of follow-ups, more “booster” treatments were administered. It’s no surprise then that Mather reported that twenty-five showed some “improvement.” The extent of that change however is hard to judge, given the skimpy details he provided, almost all of which were self-reports from patients who were being subjected to torture. “Honest, Doc, I love women now!”, you can easily imagine the conversation going. As for the eleven who stubbornly refused to “improve,” well, it wasn’t the doctor’s fault. They were the ones with “weak-willed personality disorders” or “hysterical or attention-seeking personality disorders.” Naturally.
Mather would go on to become a well-respected leader in Britain’s psychiatric profession. In 1981, he was elected president of the Manchester Medical Society. His 2003 obituary in the British Medical Journal states that during his thirty years at Crumpsall Hospital (now North Manchester General Hospital), he had “(built) up a well known department.” He also was involved in criminal investigations and prosecutions, and served on the parole board.
By the way, forty-three years later, the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homoseuxality (NARTH) cited this very study among a host of other obsolete aversion therapy studies to claim that people can change their sexual orientation.
[Source: Northage John de Ville Mather. “The treatment of homosexuality by aversion therapy.” Medicine, Science and the Law 6, no. 4 (October 1966): 200-205.]
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October 29th, 2012
THIS MONTH IN HISTORY:
A Letter from an Invert: 1919. 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). One of the professional journals to actively investigate all aspects of sexology was the Journal of Urology and Sexology under the editorship of William J Robinson, a physician, sexologist , birth control advocate, and department head of Genito-Urinary Diseases at Bronx Hospital Dispensary.
But it was rare to hear from “inverts” themselves. Last July, we reprinted one letter to the editor from 1919 which gave some indication of the frustration that many felt due to the severe societal disapproval that was prevalent a the time (see July 30). Three months later, that same journal published another letter “from an invert”:
To the EDITOR:
I know you will disagree with me, but it is my belief that two men who love each other have as much right to live together as a man and woman have. Also that it is as beautiful when looked at in the right light and far more equal!There are many men who believe as I do. One might say they are abnonnal. Does that have anything to do with the right or wrong of the question? To sleep all day, to work all night, is an abnormal condition. It isn’t natural. Does that go to prove that the one who does it is right or wrong? There is that abnormal condition; to bring in a moral question would be foolishness. “Wrong” and “abnormal” seem to mean the same thing to many people. Or shall I put it — “wrong” and “unnatural”? From the way people look at me who know my belief, you would think me a leper or a negro! *
May I not have as high an ideal in my love toward men, as a man has towards a woman? Higher, no doubt, than most men have toward women? Higher, no doubt, than most men have toward women!
The idea people hold is making me bitter. All that I might be is being killed. I can understand the thoughts of Jean Valjean, who held to his high ideals and asked only to be left alone — yet had to lose his whole life fleeing, ever fleeing, from people.
I wish the question might be discussed in your magazine. I have never known of any other magazine which gave its readers the liberty of expressing their own opinions, as gladly as your magazine does.
There are reasons (position, etc.) why it would be better to withhold my name. You need not doubt the good faith in which this letter is written.
A MAN [?].
Jean Valjean is the protagonist in Victor Hugo’s 1862 novel Les Misérables, which follows his 19-year-long struggle with the law for stealing bread to feed his sister’s children. The editor appended this footnote to the letter:
* This sentence shows that the writer is no more broadminded on the racial question than most people are on the subject of sexual abnormalities and perversions.-W. J. R.
[Source: American Journal of Urology and Sexology 15, no. 10 (October 1919): 454-455.]
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October 28th, 2012
TODAY’S AGENDA:
Other Events This Weekend: MIX Copenhagen Film Festival, Copenhagen, Denmark; Florence Queer Film Festival, Florence, Italy; Halloween in New Orleans, New Orleans, LA; Side By Side LGBT International Film Festival, St. Petersburg, Russia.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Frank Ocean: 1987. Christopher “Lonny” Breaux was born in Long Beach but grew up in New Orleans, where he listened to local jazz music and his mom’s Celine Dion and Phantom of the Opera Soundtrack CDs. After Hurricane Katrina hit, Lonny moved to L.A., and became a songwriter for Justin Bieber, Brandy and others while working on his debut solo album for Def Jam records. But when his album remained unreleased, Lonny changed his name to Frank Ocean, joined alt-hip hop collective Odd Future, and rediscivered his DIY drive. He released his debut mixtape, Nostalgia, Ultra as a free download — unknown to Def Jam — on his Tumblr, and the buzz quickly began to spread throughout the music industry with Diddy, Jay-Z, Kanye West and Beyonce singing his praises. Critics compared Nostalgia, Ultra with Marvin Gaye’s Here, My Dear and Prince’s ballads. Rolling Stone’s Jonah Weiner called him a “gifted avant-R&B smoothie.”
On July 4, 2012, Ocean issued his declaration of independence when he posted on his Tumblr that his first love, at the age of nineteen, was with another young man of the same age. As Ocean explained to The Guardian: “I was thinking of how I wished at 13 or 14 there was somebody I looked up to who would have said something like that, who would have been transparent in that way. But there’s another side of it that’s just about my own sanity and my ability to feel like I’m living a life where I’m not just successful on paper, but sure that I’m happy when I wake up in the morning, and not with this freakin’ boulder on my chest.”
Tyler the Creator, another member of Odd Future, took to Twitter to congratulate his fellow artist, which was significant because Tyler had’s debut album had him repeating the word “faggot” and other anti-gay epithets 213 times. Hip hop impressario Russell Simmons’s support for Ocean was effusive: ” “Today is a big day for hip-hop. It is a day that will define who we really are. How compassionate will we be? How loving can we be? How inclusive are we? … Your decision to go public about your sexual orientation gives hope and light to so many young people still living in fear.”
On July 10, 2012, Ocean’s studio-released album Channel Orange debuted on iTunes for download and was streamed for free from his blog before becoming available as a CD a week later.
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October 27th, 2012
TODAY’S AGENDA:
Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Taipei, Taiwan.
AIDS Walks This Weekend: Washington, DC.
Other Events This Weekend: MIX Copenhagen Film Festival, Copenhagen, Denmark; Halloween Street Party, Dallas, TX; Florence Queer Film Festival, Florence, Italy; Halloween in New Orleans, New Orleans, LA; Side By Side LGBT International Film Festival, St. Petersburg, Russia.
TODAY IN HISTORY:
Gay Activists Stage Protest At Harper’s Magazine: 1970. The cover of Harper’s September 1970 issue was just the beginning: a closeup side view of a male chest, dressed in an unusually feminine fabric but with the shoulder pulled back to reveal a highly developed and flexed arm. Across the triceps, the magazine featured the title of only one article, Joseph Epstein’s “Homo/Hetero: The Struggle for Sexual Identity,” an incredibly homophobic tour-de-force in which the author details every encounter he has ever had with a gay man, every encounter he has ever imagined having with a gay man, and every encounter that people he knew who had contact with gay men. And every one of them are predatory, sex-obsessed, and a flagrant affront to a civilized society, exemplifying the ethos to “smoke it, swallow it, eat it, wallow in it, screw it, kick it, stomp it to death, and never mind what ‘it’ is.” After exhausting eleven pages to air his disgust, he concludes in his final paragraph:
They are different from the rest of us. Homosexuals are different, moreover, in a way that cuts deeper than other kinds of human differences — religious, class, racial — in a way that is, somehow, more fundamental. Cursed without clear cause, afflicted without apparent cure, they are an affront to our rationality, living evidence of our despair of ever finding a sensible, an explainable, design to the world. One can tolerate homosexuality, a small enough price to be asked to pay for someone else’s pain, but accepting it, really accepting it, is another thing altogether. I find I can accept it least of all when I look at my children. There is much my four sons can do in their lives that might cause me anguish, that might outrage me, that might make me ashamed of them and of myself as their father. But nothing they could ever do would make me sadder than if any of them were to become homosexual. For then I should know them condemned to a state of permanent niggerdom among men, their lives, whatever adjustment they might make to their condition, to be lived out as part of the pain of the earth.
The screed caused an uproar throughout New York’s gay community, which had been organizing over the previous year to confront a number of daily insults to the community since the Stonewall rebellion the year before. The Gay Activist Alliance formed in December 1969 by dissident members of the Gay Liberation Front who disagreed with the GLF’s disorganized decision-making process and its distractions with other non-gay political causes. Members of GAA sent a letter to Harper’s Editor in Chief Willie Morris to demand that the magazine publish a another article, comparable in length, to provide a counterweight to Epstein’s diatribe. Morris claimed to be open to the idea, but he kept rejecting each draft that was submitted.
After several weeks with no resolution in sight, the GAA had enough. Forty GAA activists — including Vito Russo, Morty Manford, Jim Owles, Arnie Kantrowitz, David Ehrenstein and GAA’s president Arthur Evan– met at 9:00 a.m. on October 27, and quietly made their way into Harper’s eighteenth floor offices, with a film crew from WOR, which the GAA had notified ahead of time, following them in. As GAA’s Peter Fisher explained, “We were very aware that if we could make something visually amusing or find some way to get the press in on it — preferably TV — that was what we had to do. One of the main thrusts was to show ourselves as individual human beings — the man or the woman next door or a coworker.” Toward that end, the group commandeered a table in the reception area and set up coffee and donuts, while others went into the office areas and scattered leaflets on the desks. As employees arrived, GAA members offered them refreshments and a greeting — and all the while, cameras were rolling.
But all decorum evaporated when, as the cameras kept rolling, Evans confronted Midge Dector, the editor of the Epstein article, and unleashed a tirade: “You know that the article would contribute to the suffering of homosexuals! You knew that! And if you didn’t know that, you’re inexcusably naive and should not be an editor. If you you knew that those contribute to the oppression of homosexuals, then damn you for publishing it, and we have a right to come in here and hold you politically and morally responsible for doing that. You’re a bigot, and you are to be held responsible for that moral and political act!”
Dector denied that the article reinforced anti-gay prejudice. A decade later, she would write a similarly virulent anti-gay screed, “The Boys on the Beach,” for Commentary, Norman Podhoretz’s magazine, who also just happened to be her husband. The only regret that she expressed about her encounter over Epstein’s “elegant and thoughtful essay” was that the protesters lacked the “dash and high taste” she had come to expect from summers she spent earlier that decade in the Pines. Harper’s, too, remained unrepentant. Even though it is one if my favorite magazines, to this day it has never addressed or expressed regret over Epstein’s article.
But the outcry over “Hetero/Homo” did have an important galvanizing effect. Merle Miller, an author and a former Harper’s managing editor, was having lunch with two New York Times editors when the topic turned to the Harper’s article. During the heated discussion, Miller said, “Look, goddamn it, I’m homosexual, and most of my best friends are Jewish homosexuals, and some of my friends are black homosexuals, and I’m sick and tired of reading and hearing such goddamn demeaning, degrading bullshit about me and my friends.” A few days later, one of those editors asked Miller if he would write an article for The New York Times Magazine, which operated almost as a separate publication from The Times (and was therefore under different editors from The Times’ notoriously homophobic editors). His groundbreaking essay, “What It Means To Be A Homosexual,” became the first article written by a self-acknowledged gay person to be published in a major mainstream publication.
[Sources: Edward Alwood. Straight News: Gays, Lesbians and the News Media
Midge Decter. “Boys On the Beach.” Chapter 93 in Larry Gross and James D. Woods (eds.) The Columbia Reader on Lesbians & Gay Men in Media, Society, and Politics
Joseph Epstein. “Homo/Hetero: The Struggle for Sexual Identity.” Harper’s Magazine (September 1970): 37ff.
Merle Miller. On Being Different: What It Means to Be a Homosexual
Dorothy Hajdys with a photo of her son, Allen Schindler
Murder of Radioman Petty Officer 3rd Class Allen R. Schindler, Jr.: 1992. By the time his fellow sailors got done with him, the only identifiable feature left intact was a tattoo on his arm. While on shore leave in Sasebo, Japan, two drunken shipmates followed Schindler into a public restroom in a park. Airman Charles Vins watched — and occasionally joined in — as Airman Apprentice Terry Helvey kneed Schindler in the arm, punched him repeatedly on the floor, and stomped on him with the heel of his boot. The pathologist described Schindler’s body as the worst case he had ever seen, and compared the damage to that of a “high-speed auto accident or a low-speed aircraft accident.” He also said that it was worse than another case he had seen, that of a man who had been trampled to death by a horse. The pathologist’s report chronicled a litany of lacerations, contusions and abrasions of the forehead, eyes, noes, lips, chin, neck, Adam’s apple, trachea, lungs, liver (which was “like a smushed tomato”) and, tellingly, penis. All but two ribs were broken, and both his lungs and brain had hemorrhaged.
The Navy stonewalled the investigation. The murder occurred just as the pre-DADT debate was getting started over allowing gays to serve in the military. The Navy refused to confirm how Schindler died or whether a weapon was involved. At one point, a Navy senior officer leaked the story that Schindler’s murder was the result of a romance with Helvey gone bad. Meanwhile, Schindler’s mother, Dorothy Hajdys, was kept in the dark by Navy officials about what happened to her son or about the investigation. They even tried Vins without her knowledge and sentenced him to four months in the brig. All the information Dorothy received about her son’s case came from the press. “If one more reporter calls me with information before you do,” she told the Navy commander in charge of the case, “you haven’t even heard me scream!” Two months after the murder, Navy officials finally admitted that Schindler had been killed in a gay bashing.
The Navy denied that they had received any complaints of harassment. But as the investigation continued, it was slowly revealed that Schindler’s ship, the amphibious assault ship Belleau Wood, was a living nightmare for him. His locker had been glued shot and he was the brunt of frequent comments, like, “There’s a faggot on this ship and he should die.” Schindler requested a separation from the Navy, but his superiors insisted he remain aboard ship until the process was finished. During Helvey’s trial , it was revealed that Helvey told one investigator that he had no remorse for the killing. “I don’t regret it. I’d do it again. … He deserved it.” Helvey avoided the death penalty by pleading guilty to “inflicting great bodily harm,” and was sentenced to life in prison. The ship’s captain who had tried to keep the crime quiet was demoted and transferred to Florida. And Dorothy, virtually overnight, became an outspoken advocate for hate crime protections and for gays being allowed to serve in the military.
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October 26th, 2012
TODAY’S AGENDA:
Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Taipei, Taiwan.
AIDS Walks This Weekend: Washington, DC.
Other Events This Weekend: MIX Copenhagen Film Festival, Copenhagen, Denmark; Halloween Street Party, Dallas, TX; Florence Queer Film Festival, Florence, Italy; Halloween in New Orleans, New Orleans, LA; Side By Side LGBT International Film Festival, St. Petersburg, Russia.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Keith Strickland: 1953. He is a founding member of the B-52s, starting off as the drummer before switching to guitar after Ricky Wilson died in 1985. Strickland has also played keyboards and bass guitar on many B-52s recordings. He also writes most of the music, while leaving the lyrics to the other band members. The band’s music has always had a fun, quirky factor, which Strickland says is the essence of what the B-52s are all about: “The underlying message of the B-52’s is, it’s okay to be different.” Strickland lives in Key West, Florida, with his partner and their Prius.
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October 25th, 2012
TODAY’S AGENDA:
OutServe’s International Leadership Conference: Orlando, FL. OutServe, a worldwide 5,000-member association of actively-serving LGBT military personnel, will hold its second annual International Leadership Conference, and this yaer it will take place at the U.S. military’s own Shades of Green Resort in Orlando, Florida. The goal of the conference is it provide an international forum for building respect for LGBT people within the military, provide an opportunity for professional networking, sharing best practices, and developing strategies to support LGBT personnel and their families. OutServe will also host an job fair that will be open to veterans and employers. OutServe events will take place at various locations on Walt Disney World properties. The conference begins today and continues through Sunday.
Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Taipei, Taiwan.
AIDS Walks This Weekend: Washington, DC.
Other Events This Weekend: MIX Copenhagen Film Festival, Copenhagen, Denmark; Florence Queer Film Festival, Florence, Italy; Halloween in New Orleans, New Orleans, LA; Side By Side LGBT International Film Festival, St. Petersburg, Russia.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Claude Cahun: 1894. She was born Lucy Schwob in Nantes, France, but in 1919 she chose the gender-ambiguous name (in French) of Claude Cahun in keeping with her photographic self-portraits that she began making at the age of sixteen. Her self-portraits in different guises expressed a range of sexual self-expression, from the close-cropped hair and stubbled chin in her masculine appearance to the exaggerated femininity in china-doll perfection, to a range of androgyny inbetween. When surrealism became fashionable, she fit right in, declaring that she had “always been a surrealiste.”
In 1937, she and her stepsister/partner, Suzanne Malherbe moved to the Isle of Jersey in the English Channel, which would see Nazi occupation during the war. Cahun became active in the resistance by writing and distributing anti-German leaflets. She and Malherbe would sometimes dress up and attend German military events in Jersey, and sneak leaflets into soldiers’ pockets. They were arrested in 1944 and sentenced to death, but the sentences were never carried out. Much of Cahun’s photographic work, including plates and negatives, were destroyed with the army raided her home. While Cahun and Malherbe both survived the war, Cahun’s health had deteriorated due to her detention and she died in 1954.
Chely Wright: 1970. She had her first Top 40 Country in 1997 when “Shut Up and Drive,” peaked at Number 14. In 1999, she hit #1 in the U.S. and Canadian Country charts with “Single White Female,” from her album by the same name. Those successes however came during a rather complicated time in her personal life. Chely had been in a off-and-on committed relationship with a woman that she described as “the love of my life,” — even during a period when the woman had married a man during part of that time. They lived together during their final five years together, from about 1999 to 2004, despite both women being closeted and both of them believing that gay relationships were wrong.
In 2000, Chely’s already complicated life became even more so when she started an affair with fellow country singer Brad Paisley. She liked him, loved him even, but wasn’t in love with him. But, as she later wrote in her autobiography, “If I figured I’m going to live a less than satisfied life, this is the guy I could live with. If I’m gonna be with a boy, this is the boy.” But in the end, she she wound up with a lot of remorse over how she treated him, “I have a lot of regret for how that [relationship] began and had a middle and ended. I had no business being in a relationship with him.”
Beginning in 2004, she began coming out to members of her immediate family and close friends. In 2007, she finally decided to come out publicly when she began writing her autobiography
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October 24th, 2012
TODAY’S AGENDA:
Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Taipei, Taiwan.
AIDS Walks This Weekend: Washington, DC.
Other Events This Weekend: MIX Copenhagen Film Festival, Copenhagen, Denmark; Florence Queer Film Festival, Florence, Italy; Halloween in New Orleans, New Orleans, LA.
THIS MONTH IN HISTORY:
A Doctor Looks At Love and Life: 1926. The October 24, 1926 edition of The New York Times reviewed a book that was somewhat unusual for its day. Dr. Joseph Collins was a physician and neurologist for the New York Neurological Institute, and also something of a polyglot. He was the first to review James Joyce’s Ulysses for The New York Times, and his earlier books included Sleep and the Sleepless (1912), My Italian Year (1919), The Doctor Looks at Literature (1923) and The Doctor Looks at Biography (1925). His latest endeavor, The Doctor Looks at Love and Life, had a clear division between the first part, “Love” which was specific to the issues of sex and matrimony, and the second part, “Life,” in which Collins took a literary view of psychology and education. For us, our interest lies in the first part of the book, particularly in chapter IV which is titled “Homosexuality,” a chapter which marked Collins as something of transitional figure in the nascent knowledge of homosexuality in the popular literature during the first decades of the twentieth century:
It will probably be difficult to convince the generation succeeding ours that, when this country was at the zenith of her commercial prosperity, it was improper to utter the word homosexuality, prurient to admit its existence and pornographic to discuss the subject. It was proper to read novels in which it was treated more or less openly if the setting was European: decadent people in decadent countries. Here, if it existed at all, it could not flourish; our soil is unfavorable, our climate prejudicial, our people, too primitive, too pure.
…It is impossible to make the average American believe that homosexuality is not necessarily a vice, or that its possessor is not what is called a degenerate. It may be a vice and the possessor of it may be immoral or unmoral, but the majority of homosexuals, male and female, are not degenerates, to use that word in its colloquial sense. Genuine homosexuality is not a vice, it is an endowment. …I have known many well-balanced homosexuals of both sexes. Some of them have made distinctive positions for themselves in various fields of activity from arms to the pulpit. … As a rule, they are persons of taste, refinement and sensibility. Many of them seek aid to be relieved of a burden which they find intolerable; if they attempt to deliver it in the way nature suggests to them, the State puts them into prison.
It is important to say that while Collins was a transitional figure, he was not a transformative one. He sharply criticized much of what had been written before about homosexuality: that it was a viscous crime, a sign of madness, or the result (or cause) of hereditary degeneracy of a race whose evolution was being adversely disrupted by the modern world (see Sept 3 for a brief discussion of degeneracy theory). But suggesting that homosexuality is an endowment is not to suggest that homosexuality is normal. “They are not nature’s elect, but deviates who will one day disappear from the world when we shall have guessed the last riddle of the sympathetic nervous system and the ductless glands,” he wrote with the typical optimism that infected virtually the entire medical profession of his day. But on the other hand, he believed that it wasn’t just nature that gave gay people a raw deal; society also had its share of guilt:
They are not degenerates… The rank and file of the world considers them degenerates, a blot on its escutcheon, a bar sinister in its pedigree. The world may do them an injustice, but nature has done them a far graver one. They are victims of Fate, the only ones that do not excite our compassion: and all because we cannot or will not distinguish between the work of God and Satan. … We are shorter of tolerance in this country than of any other virtue.
As I said, Collins was not a transformative figure. While he argued strongly that society should break from the past in how it regarded gay people, he could not accept the views coming out of Europe which held that homosexuality was just another variation of human sexuality. Those views he considered “pornographic” and dangerous, and on this point Collins suddenly becomes positively Victorian, if not Puritan:
Moreover, there has grown up around it an enormous literature, some of which may have been begotten in the interest of science, but most of which has been claimed by pornography. Strangely enough, this literature has come largely out of the country that precipitated the World War and that was decimated by the war. Ulrichs, Krafft-Ebing, Freud, Stekel and dozens of their countrymen have flooded the Western world with it. Their writings were promptly translated and published in this country, and though it has been claimed that their sale is restricted to clergymen, physicians, lawyers, social workers, etc., the books have been sold to high grade imbeciles, esthetes and flappers, pruriency mongers and potential perverts, to their great injury. To those for whom it is said they were intended they have been a fountain of misinformation, a flood of misrepresentation. One might readily gather from reading the latest one from Vienna that there were no normal people left in the world.
This is what makes Collins’s book so fascinating. Unlike the books by Ulrichs, Krafft-Ebing, etc., — the sale of which was often restricted to professional readers for fear of running afoul of obscenity laws — Collins’s book was marketed directly to the average lay reader in homes across America. Unlike other books which were also marketed to the mass market, Collins refrains and even denounces the kind of demonization of gay people which so many other “expert” doctors foisted on the American public. And it is in that sense that I argue that Collins was a transitional figure. Through the rest of his chapter, he makes clear that it is the duty of science to figure out how to cure and prevent homosexuality’s development (and he optimistically believed, in 1926, that science stood at the threshold of that very accomplishment). And yet it would take many more years before other books on sexuality and relationships targeting the mass market readership would begin to provide this kind of outlook:
I have but small hope that I shall be able to convince the majority of my readers that urnings are not monsters in human form whose salutations should be met with sneers and overtures to friendship with a kick; nevertheless, in view of the fact that my experience has taught me that they are not necessarily morbid or mad, and that many of them suffer through their sex-allotment, I construe it to be my duty to interpret them as it is society’s duty to understand them.
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October 23rd, 2012
Lt. Gen. Lewis B. Hershey
TODAY IN HISTORY:
Draft Board Head Says Being Gay Is One Way To Beat the Draft: 1965. Lt. Gen. Lewis B. Hershey, 72, had headed the Selective Service System since 1940, when he organized the Service after Congress authorized the draft for World War II. Establishing a national system of local draft boards was challenging, so was keeping the system operating while balancing the concerns, more or less, of five president, Republican- and Democratic-led Congresses, and millions of families whose sons would find themselves the recipient of a letter from Uncle Sam with the salutation, “Greetings!” Part of the systems success could be found in the autonomy that was granted to local draft boards. The Selective Service Law gave those local draft boards complete discretion in deciding to grant or deny deferments.
But as the Vietnam War escalated and students became restive with anti-draft demonstrations, Hershey found himself with a new set of challenges. In 1965, Hershey was still unfazed, calling the early anti-draft movement “a complete flop.” But he did express one concern to a United Press International reporter: “My real concern is that some local boards may react to all of this agitation by canceling student deferments. I hope that won’t happen. It would be unwise, because the national interest is served by keeping young men in college to complete their education.”
As for the “agitators,” Hershey said that of the two million college men, “only a tiny fraction of one percent have been involved in staging protest parades, burning draft cards or other demonstrations of unwillingness to serve in the armed forces. … The effect on our ability o meet draft calls has been negligible, and I am confident it will remain negligible.” Hershey had also learned that some young men were trying to beat the draft by deliberately flunking the mental and physical exams. “We also have ingenious ways of detecting these little frauds,” he said. “There are always some people who try to fool the examiners. But only a very few get away with it.” And with draft calls shooting up to 45,000 men a month, the armed forces had relaxed their examination requirements somewhat. “A man with a high school diploma is now virtually assured of acceptability,” Hershey said.
But there was still one sure-fire way to beat the draft: “If he tells the examiner that he’s a homosexual, he’ll be rejected. We recognize that he might be lying, but a person who’ll say that has certainly got something wrong with him. We have enough men to defend this country without having to draft self proclaimed homosexuals.”
Le Journal de Montreal’s front page coverage of the Truxx and Le Mystique raids (click to enlarge)
Demonstrations Against Montreal Police Raids: 1977. About two thousand of Montreal’s gay community took to the streets and jammed downtown Ste. Catherine Street very early on Sunday morning shouting “fascist dogs” and “gestapo” at motorcycle police who were called to clear the area. The focus of the anger was the brutal “morality squad” raids early Saturday morning at Truxx and Le Mystique, two gay bars. Police barged in wielding machine guns and bullet-proof vests as they arrested 144 men for being in a “bawdy house” or for “gross indecency” — common charges for anyone who was thought to be gay. Those raids capped two years of nearly constant police harassment and raids which had begun as a campaign to “clean up” the city in preparation for the 1976 Olympics. But with this latest raid, the gay community fought back in what was later dubbed, “Quebec’s Stonewall.” Also different this time, gays and lesbians had the news media’s support. By the end of the year, the Parti Québéois adopted Bill 88 which ensured that sexual orientation would be covered under the province’s Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms which prohibited all forms of discrimination. However, the change failed to have much of an appreciable affect, and police raids would continue until Montreal’s “other” Stonewall rebellion in 1990 following a riotous raid of a loft party.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS:
Jean Acker: 1893. She appeared in several silent films in the 1910s and 1920s, thanks, in part, to a relationship she struck up with another silent film actress, Alla Nazimova, who introduced Acker to a group of lesbian and bisexual actresses known as the “sewing circle.” Acker’s greatest claim to fame, however, is in her real-life role as Mrs. Rudolph Valentino. They married in 1919 after a two month courtship, but the marriage was reportedly never consummated (it’s said that she locked him out of the hotel bedroom on their wedding night). They filed for divorce a few years later. In 1923, Acker met former Ziegfeld Follies girl Chloe Carter, and they remained together for the rest of their lives. Acker died in 1978 of natural causes and was buried next to Carter.
Lilyan Tashman: 1896. The actress got her start in vaudeville and Broadway before moving to Hollywood to become a well-known film star. Most of her roles were that of a “bitchy” other woman or as a sharp, clever villainess. She married a vaudevillian performer in 1914, but they divorced in 1921. In 1925, she married openly gay actor Edmund Lowe, and they had what Hollywood reporters described, perhaps with a bit of snark, as an “ideal marriage.” The couple entertained lavishly at their home, where their weekly parties reportedly becoming “full-blown orgies.” One reporter described her as “the most gleaming, glittering, moderne, hard-surfaced, and distingué woman in all of Hollywood.” She died young, at the age of 37, of cancer shortly after filming her final film in New York in 1934.
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October 22nd, 2012
TODAY IN HISTORY:
Surgeon General Urges Frank Sex Ed to Combat AIDS: 1986. While the Reagan White House would become widely remembered for its reticence to discuss the AIDS epidemic, the administration’s point man on health matters, Surgeon General C. Everett Koop had no qualms about addressing the topic head on. On October 22, 1986, Dr. Koop issued what The New York Times called “an unusually explicit report to the nation” calling on schools and parents to have “frank, open discussions” with very young children and teens about AIDS.
Koop wrote in the report, “Many people, especially our youth, are not receiving information that is vital to their future health and well-being because of our reticence in dealing with the subjects of sex, sexual practices and homosexuality. ‘This silence must end. We can no longer afford to sidestep frank, open discussions about sexual practices — homosexual and heterosexual. Education about AIDS should start at an early age so that children can grow up knowing the behaviors to avoid to protect themselves from exposure to the AIDS virus.” His report also addressed several myths that were floating around about AIDS, stressing that HIV was not spread by common everyday contact like shaking hands, hugging, kissing, coughing or sneezing, nor is it spread from contact with toilet seats, food prepared by people with AIDS, or eating utensils.
This report marked the end of a long and puzzling period of silence about the AIDS epidemic, both from the administration and from Koop himself. He later wrote in Koop: The Memoirs of America’s Family Doctor
TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Lord Alfred Douglas: 1870. Nicknamed “Bosie,” Douglas was best known as the lover of Oscar Wilde. Their affair began at around 1891 even though Wilde was already married and had two sons. Friends described Douglas as spoiled, reckless and extravagant, perhaps in a bid to emulate Wilde’s own flamboyance. Douglas’s father, The Marquess of Queensberry, soon became suspicious of the relationship between his son and Wilde, and tried to disown him. Douglas refused, and tensions escalated. When Queensberry publicly insulted Wilde by leaving a visiting card at a club on which he had written, “For Oscar Wilde posing as a sodomite,” Wilde responded by suing Queensberry for libel. When Queensberry was declared not guilty, attention then turned to Wilde himself, who was arrested and tried for sodomy and “gross indecency” based on evidence presented at Queensberry’s trial. Wiled was convicted in 895 and sentenced to two years of hard labor. Douglas was forced into exile in Europe.
While Wilde was in prison, he wrote his famous letter, De Profundis, to Douglas, describing in detail what he felt about him, and making clear in no uncertain terms that the two men were lovers. He was never allowed to send it while in prison, although he may have sent a copy after his release. After Wilde’s death, portions of De Profundis were published in 1912, which led Douglas to denounce Wilde as “the greatest force for evil that has appeared in Europe during the last three hundred and fifty years.” He also began a “litigious and libelous career,” suing and being sued for criminal libel over the next decade. In 1923, he was convicted of libeling Winston Churchill, saying Churchill was part of a Jewish conspiracy to kill the British Secretary of State for War, for which Douglas spent six months in prison. Apparently that experience made him more sympathetic to Wilde’s experience, and his attitude softened. He died in 1945 at the age of 74.
Robert Rauschenberg: 1925. Born to a blue-collar, fundamentalist family in Port Arthur, Texas, Rauschenbeg studied at the Kansas City Art Institute, the Académie Julian in Paris, and at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. It was at Black Mountain College where Rauschenberg studied painting under Josef Albers, a Bauhaus founder, but the strict Bauhaus principles of “uninfluenced experimentation” taught Rauschenberg to do “exactly the reverse.” The otherwise experimental nature of Black Mountain however encouraged him to explore and collaborate with a wide range of interdisciplinary artists, including performances with composer John Cage and choreographer Merce Cunningham.
Monogram (1955-1959)
He had married, briefly from 1950 to 1953, and that union produced a son. After that marriage ended, he spent a year with painter Cy Twombly before embarking on a personally and professionally fruitful relationship with Jasper Johns. Rauschenberg and Johns remained together for the next eight years, exchanging ideas, critiquing each other’s work, and together establishing a new approach to art. Their personal relationship and professional collaboration would end up defining a new approach to art, one which sought to bridge the gap between art and life — especially the deeply introspective and sometimes obtuse art of Abstract Expressionists. Their approach was to combining found common objects — quilts, newspapers, tires, brooms, and all kinds of salvaged objects — with images from pop culture, as a kind of foreshadow for Andy Warhol’s work a decade later. Rauschenber called his works “combines,” and some of his most famous ones were Monogram (1955-1959, which included a stuffed goat with a tire around its abdomen) and Canyon (1959). In Factum I (1957), he created a painting that the spontaneous drips, splashes and smears of paint popularized by Action Painters like Jackson Pollack, and then questioned the entire process by faithfully reproducing his painting in Factum II.
After Rauschenberg’s relationship with Johns ended in 1961, Rauschenberg began working with silkscreen printing for a series of paintings what included news photographs. He designed sets and costumes for Merce Cunningham, and other experimental choreographers. In 1983, he won a Grammy Award for his album design for the Talking Heads’ Speaking in Tongues. In 1998, the Vatical commissioned a work based on the Apocalypse to commemorate the controversial Franciscan priest Padre Pio of Pietrelcina, who reputedly displayed stigmata on his hands, feet and side, and who had died in 1968. That work covers a massive window of Pio’s new pilgrimage church in Pio of Pietrelcina, which was designed by Architect Renzo Piano. The work was a particular challenge for Rauschenberg, who grew up in the austere Church of Christ and who hadn’t attended church since his twenties. “I bet you’ll be a Catholic before you finish the project,” the Franciscan prior in charge of the project told Rauschenberg. “And I suppose you’ll be an artist,” Rauschenberg replied. He died in 2008 at his home on Captiva Island, Florida.
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October 21st, 2012
TODAY’S AGENDA:
Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Jacksonville, FL; Nashville, TX (Black Pride).
AIDS Walks This Weekend: Atlanta, GA; Austin, TX; Philadelphia, PA; Phoenix, AZ.
Other Events This Weekend: MIX Copenhagen Film Festival, Copenhagen, Denmark; World Gay Rodeo Finals, Ft. Worth, TX; Seattle Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, Seattle, WA.
TODAY IN HISTORY:
The Bishop of Clogher Defrocked for “Sodomitical Practices”: 1822. On July 19, 1822, Bishop Percy Jocelyn, the Anglican Bishop of Clogher in the Church of Ireland was caught in, shall we say, a most compromising position with a Grenadier Guardsman, John Moverly, at the White House Pub’s back room (apparently, they had ’em even then) in Westminster. They were caught by the pub’s proprietor, and dragged through the streets by a mob, mostly naked as they were found, to a nearby jail. Bishop Clogher was granted bail a few days later, but the soldier remained in jail:
Lord Sefton when to see the soldier in prison. He says he is a fine soldierlike man and has no the air which these wretches usually have. The Bishop took no precautions, and it was next to impossible he should not have been caught. He made a desperate resistance when taken away, and if his breeches had not been down they think he would have got away. It seems that the soldier will be proceeded against with the greatest vigour, and the Magistrate is much blamed for having taken such small bail as that which he required. The Duke will not spare the Soldier. Lord Lauderdale said the other day that the greatest dissatisfaction would pervade the public mind at the escape of the Bishop and the punishment of the Soldier, and the people, who cannot discriminate, or enter into nice points of the law, will only see in such apparent injustice a disposition to shield the offender in the higher classes of society from the consequences of his crime, while the law is allowed to take its course with the more humble culprit.
Eventually, the soldier was released on bail as well. Both fled the city and were never seen again (although the Bishop was reportedly later seen in Paris as though nothing had happened). The Bishop’s ecclesiastical trial was set for October 21, and it went on despite his absence. According to the court record:
…It [the evidence] also proved the fatal and depraved purposes for which he associated himself with a private soldier, wholly beneath him in rank and station, as the unworthy and vicious partner of his depravity and guilt. The place chosen by him for that base purpose was also unfitted to him as a prelate of the church, the man of high rank and station; it was a common alehouse, situate in St. Alban’s-place in the city of Westminster. In his career of vice, he was very fortunately stopped, before he had perpetrated the last foul act, or crime, which he himself designed; and by which, if committed, his life would have been forfeited to the offended law of the country. Being found by the watchman and others, in a situation disgraceful and degrading to him, he was made a prisoner, in order to be removed to the watch-house of the district.
The bishop wasn’t actually convicted of the capital offense of sodomy itself because English law required that the act be, err, fully consummated, a standard of proof that was difficult to reach. Hence the observation that he was caught before perpetrating “the last foul act, or crime” of the, um, emission of seed. But the evidence was strong enough to strip the bishop of his office for “the crimes of immorality, incontinence, Sodomitical practices, habits, and propensities, and neglect of his spiritual, judicial, and ministerial duties.”
It’s almost impossible for a scandal to unravel worse than this one. First, the fact that a Bishop was caught in flagrante delicto was itself quite shocking. That was compounded by the perception that he had been given preferential treatment with his early release with very low bail. And if all that wasn’t enough, the Bishop was a well-known member of the Society for the Suppression of Vice. All of this hypocrisy was too much for Londoners to bear, and for many weeks afterward it was unsafe for members of the clergy to be seen on the streets. But it all made great material for satirists:
The Devil to prove the Church was a farce
Went out to fish for a Bugger.
He baited his hook with a Frenchman’s arse,*
And pulled up the Bishop of Clogher.
*Moverly was from a French family.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Dale Jennings: 1917. If anyone knows anything about Jennings, it’s probably limited to just one thing: his false arrest in February of 1952, from within his own home, on charges of soliciting a police officer for immoral acts. It wasn’t the fact that he was arrested which was so notable, but that he chose to fight the charges while also refusing to deny that he was gay. A gay man arguing before a jury that he was innocent was so unusual it made headlines across the country. Those headlines only got bigger when the jury deadlocked 11-1 for acquittal and the charges were dismissed (see Jun 23).
If he was known for anything else, then perhaps it was because two years earlier, Jennings helped to found the Mattachine Society with Harry Hay, Chuck Rowland, Rudi Gernreich, and Hay’s student at the California Labor School, Bob Hull, who happened to be Jenning’s boyfriend at the time. Jennings had met Hay and Gernreich while involved with the Communist Party in Los Angeles. When Jennings was arrested in 1952, it was the Mattachines who came to his rescue by raising money, hiring a lawyer, and generating enough publicity about the case that it would come to the attention of those newspapers which wrote about it. The case also had the effect of raising the Mattachine Society’s profile among gay people who previously hadn’t known about the secretive group, and its membership skyrocketed.
That it was Jennings who galvanized the Mattachines and gave it a sense of purpose is, perhaps, the greatest irony. Jennings, despite his flirtations with Communism, had little patience for the political theorizing and navel-gazing that took place in the early Mattachine meetings. One early Mattachine member recalled that as the group droned on about “the pain and sorrow, the desperate loneliness of being homosexual and afraid, always having to lie and hide,” Jennings “struggled not to laugh out loud.” He also had little patience for Hays’s insistence that homosexuals made up a distinct minority who were inherently and qualitatively different from heterosexuals. Jennings maintained that there were no differences whatsoever between men who preferred sex with women and men who preferred sex with men. “How could you construct a cultural minority out of a group of people with little in common except what they did in bed?”, he asked. Where Hays wanted the right to be publicly gay, Jennings wanted nothing more than the right to be left alone.
Jennings may expressed a desire to be left alone, but his combative nature ran counter to any desire he might have had to leave things well enough alone. As a budding novelist and playwright, he felt like he had a lot to say and wanted to say it. And so during another one of the interminable Mattachine meetings, he found himself drifting into the kitchen where a smaller group of people were discussing the need for a nationally-distributed magazine (see Oct 15) — a real magazine, professionally typset and graphically designed rather than the typewritten and mimeographed newsletters that had tried to pose as pale imitations. Jennings’s contributions would prove to be crucial: he was the only one of that small group who knew the first thing about the mechanics of publishing: editing, layout, typesetting, artwork, advertising, and so forth. He also provided access to the magazine’s first printing press: the first issue was printed by Jennings’s sister and brother-in-law in their basement.
Jennings wound up serving on the editorial board of ONE Magazine when it made its debut in 1953. As was common practice with ONE in its early days, Jennings not only wrote under his own byline, but under other pseudonyms as well to provide the illusion that ONE’s staff was larger than it really was. That first issue included his first-person account of his arrest and acquittal under his own name, along with two other articles as “Heironymus K.” and “Elizabeth Lalo.” In ONE’s third issue, as “Jeff Winters,” Jennings wrote “Homosexuals Are Not a People,” which, as the title suggested, reiterated his contention that homosexuals did not make up a distinct minority (“Homosexuality is today’s great irrelevancy.”). As “R. Noone,” he lambasted President Eisenhower’s executive order barring the employment of gay people in the federal government (see Apr 27), and in 1954, again as “Jeff Winters,” he wrote “Can Homosexuals Organize?”, a very critical history of the Mattachine Society which had just kicked out its founders and reorganized itself as a much more conservative organization (“The present Society however invites certain destruction by denial of all those things for which the Mattachine was founded. …From the trembling president on down to the least officer, they are terrified.”).
Jennings tenure as ONE’s first editor-in-chief was short-lived. He was headstrong and opinionated, which led to constant fights with business manager Dorr Legg (a.k.a. Bill Lambert), Don Slater (see Aug 21), and others. That divisiveness — and Legg’s unease over Jennings’s Communist ties — led to Jennings’s departure in March of 1954. (He was replaced as Editor in Chief by Irma “Corky” Wolf, who went by the pseudonym Ann Carll Reid.) As Jennings acknowledged nearly three decades later to Slater:
Bill Lambert got rid of me at almost the precise time that the local red cell took my membership card away from me for being a carnivore (gay) and hence a security risk. Naturally both organizations were quite correct and should have been more circumspect about letting me come near them in the very beginning.
After leaving the Mattachines and ONE, Jennings more or less dropped out. In 1968, he published his first novel, The Ronin
Jennings bought a ranch outside of Los Angeles, but then lost it in a lawsuit to a former lover. He then moved to northern California, but decided in the 1980s to move back to southern California and reconnect with the gay community. But by then, the gay community had long since moved on and had forgotten him. Not only that, but the gay community had moved left politically while Jennings moved hard to the right. He did manage to reestablish contact with Don Slater in the 1980s, and they maintained a correspondence that lasted until Slater died in 1997. In 1984, Jennings sent one Christmas card to Slater lamenting, “When I was a loud-mouthed commie, people fled the Mattachine in the thousands; now that the prevailing shade this season is red, my conservatism is worse than damned: it’s ignored.”
Through the 1990s, Jennings became reclusive, surly, and a heavy drinker. He spent every day working on his memoirs on a word processer, but he often lost an entire day’s work by shutting the machine off without remembering to hit save. He began losing his memory, but was cognizant enough to ensure that his papers would go to Slater’s Homosexual Information Center Archives, which are currently housed at California State University at Northridge. He died on May 11, 2000 at the age of 82.
[Source: C. Todd White. “Dale Jennings (1917-2000): ONE’s Outspoken Advocate.” In Vern L. Bullough (ed.) Before Stonewall: Activists for Gay and Lesbian Rights in Historical Context
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October 20th, 2012
TODAY’S AGENDA:
Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Columbia, SC; Jacksonville, FL; Nashville, TX (Black Pride).
AIDS Walks This Weekend: Atlanta, GA; Austin, TX; Philadelphia, PA; Phoenix, AZ.
Other Events This Weekend: MIX Copenhagen Film Festival, Copenhagen, Denmark; World Gay Rodeo Finals, Ft. Worth, TX; Seattle Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, Seattle, WA.
TODAY IN HISTORY:
“Homosexual Ring” of Service Women Broken Up: 1953. According to a newspaper report, “army investigators have ‘broken up a ring’ of approximately 25 women members of the armed forces who, the investigators charged, engaged in abnormal sex practices. It said the crackdown stemmed from charges made last month by a 19-year-old WAC private who is currently under treatment at a local (Washington, D.C.) army hospital. Half a dozen of the group were said to have confirmed the WAC’s disclosures. Most of the 25 were said to be WACS, but ‘three our four’ were reported as navy WAVES. All were described as enlisted personnel.”
None of the women were identified in the article, but the article went on to say that the women were “rounded up and questioned. Disciplinary action is pending. The group under investigation was said to have used two taverns located in the Georgetown area (of Washington) as ‘hangouts’ where meetings and ‘dates’ were arranged during off-duty hours.” An Army spokesman said that cases like these “are a continuing problem in the army,” and that military regulations required that persons found guilty of homosexuality were to be discharged as undesirables, except in some cases “where psychiatric examinations show that medical treatment or disciplinary action is warranted.”
Miami Formally Outlaws Gay Bars: 1954. Miami’s ongoing hysteria over the shocking discovery that there were gay people in the city (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, and Oct 6) reached an important legal milestone when the Miami City Commission passed new ordinance which prohibited liquor establishments from employing gay people or allowing “homosexuals or perverts” to congregate. The ordinance provided up to 60 days in jail, a fine of $500 (that’s about $4,000 in today’s money) and the loss of their liquor licenses. This latest ordinance came about after a previous proposal by Mayor Abe Aronovitz (see Oct 6) was rejected for being “too broad.” The vote on the revised ordinance was unanimous, and because it was adopted as an emergency ordinance it went into effect immediately.
And in another move to protect the morals of Miami’s children, the City Commission also made it illegal to sell horror comic books to children under the age of seventeen.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS:
Edward John Barrington Douglas-Scott-Montagu, 3rd Baron Montagu of Beaulieu: 1926. Okay, first of all: how can you not love a name like that? Lord Montagu has been a Conservative member of Britain’s House of Lords since 1947. He knew from a very early age that he was bisexual, but he always tried to keep his affairs with men quiet. That proved impossible when in 1954 he and two others were convicted and imprisoned for twelve months for “conspiracy to incite certain male persons to commit serious offenses with male persons.” Britain, like America, was then in the midst of a massive anti-gay witch hunt. The Sunday Times had editorialized that “its eruption… is today a serious and growing criminal problem,” while a Daily Mail headline read, “Homosexuality spreading like a foul growth in our midst.” As many as 1,000 men were arrested every year for violating the country’s anti-gay laws, and Home Secretary Sir David Fyfe urged magistrates to inflict maximum penalties on those who were found guilty.
But with Montagu protesting his innocence even after his conviction, the trial ended up provoking a sharp debate in British popular opinion. Kinglsy Martin exemplified a growing discomfort over Britain’s gross indecency laws when he wrote in New Statesman & Nation, “It is a social evil but its bad effects are greatly aggravated by our savage criminal law … There should be no penalties attached to adult males consorting together who, in private, decide to live a homosexual life… I believe there are Members of Parliament who’d be willing to make this change in the law.”
Parliament instead decided to study the issue by establishing a special commission to look into Britain’s laws against homosexuality and prostitution. Chaired by Lord John Wolfenden, the commission met over the next three years, and in 1957 issued its report recommending that “homosexual behaviour between consenting adults in private should no longer be a criminal offence.” The report also found that “homosexuality cannot legitimately be regarded as a disease, because in many cases it is the only symptom and is compatible with full mental health in other respects.” It would take another ten years before Parliament would act on the report’s recommendations and decriminalize homosexuality.
As for Lord Montagu, the distress over having been arrested and imprisoned never faded. He never talked about it, saying that he abhors the idea of becoming “a professional convict.” He married his first wife in 1958, and the couple had one son and one daughter before divorcing in 1974, when he turned around and married wife number two, who bore him another son in 1975.
But when Britain’s Channel Four was preparing to air a documentary about the trial in 2007, Lord Montagu felt that it was time to speak up. “I am slightly proud that the law has been changed to the benefit of so many people. I would like to think that I would get some credit for that. Maybe I’m being very boastful about it but I think because of the way we behaved and conducted our lives afterwards, because we didn’t sell our stories, we just returned quietly to our lives, I think that had a big effect on public opinion.”
Allan Horsfall: 1927. He was born in the tiny mining village of Laneshaw Bridge in Lancashire where he was raised by his grandparents, whom he described has “God-fearing Conservatives and fervent upholders of law and order.” Like most gay men who grew up in small towns, it was during his time in military service — the RAF, in particular, where Horsfall discovered other gay men. One man, in particular, he met in an ex-Servicemen’s Club in 1947: Harold Pollard, a primary school teacher, would remain his life partner until Harold’s death in 1996. But unlike a lot of gay men who grew up in small towns, Horsefall didn’t flee to the big city. He decided instead to return back to his small town, take up residence in a simple miner’s cottage and become a clerk for the National Coal Board.
Horsfall settled in to a rather non-descript life until 1956. when the Suez Crisis inspired him to enter politics. He joined the Labour Party and won an election as a councillor in Nelson. After the Wolfenden Report was released in 1957 with its recommendation that homosexuality be decriminalized, Horsfall immediately became involved with the London-based Homosexual Law Reform Society. When he decided that the HLRS was too hidebound, closeted and aloof to be effective, Horsfall helped to found the North West Committee for Homosexual Law Reform in 1964. In doing so, he made it clear that he believed gay people shouldn’t remain closeted in order to support law reform. His North West Committee also rejected the national campaign’s opinion that gays were “unfortunates” who deserved pity. Again, against the advice of friends, he used his home address and phone number as the public point of contact. But he found that there was actually very little hostile reaction. If anything, his experience harkened back to the days of Edward Carpenter from the turn of the century (see Aug 29), who lived openly and undisturbed in the mining vilage of Milthorpe while Oscar Wilde was being prosecuted for “gross indecency” in London.
After Britain finally decriminalized homosexuality in 1967 (see July 28), the London-based HLRS, believing that its work was done, floundered for a few years before folding. But Horsfall’s North West Committee kept going and evolved into the Campaign for Homosexual Equality which, in 1971, took part in the first major gay rights demonstration in London. Horsfall’s main focus, by then, was on increasing the social support for gay people by establishing membership clubs in the north of England. Modelled after Working Men’s Clubs, his proposed Esquire Clubs were intended to function as a combination community center and pub for rural and small-town gays and lesbians. The clubs themselves were unsuccessful, but his fight to establish them paid a very different kind of dividend. In Burnley, Horsfall’s CHE organized a public meeting to confront the local Christian Alliance, which had formed to prevent the opening of an Esquire club there. During the packed meeting, Horsfall asked all of the homosexuals to stand up. Over one hundred did so, making it one of the first mass coming-out demonstrations in the U.K. It also marked a coming-of-age for the gay rights movement in Britain. CHE went on to become the UK’s largest LGBT-rights organization, with over 5,000 members in more than 100 local groups across England and Wales.
Horsfall suffered a heart attack in 1970, and by 1974 he began withdrawing from the front lines of the gay-rights movement. As a sign of the respect he commanded, he was named President for Life of CHE. In 1998, he became involved in the case of the Bolton Seven, a group of gay men who were prosecuted because, while homosexuality was legal, group sex between men was not. He also campaigned for an end the ban on gays serviing openly in the military, the equalization of the age of consent, and allowing gays to adopt children. He also became involved with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament during the 1980s.
Horsfall died on August 27, 2012 of heart failure at the age of 84. His web site, Gay Monitor, has been selected for preservation by the British Library’s UK Web Archive.
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October 19th, 2012
TODAY’S AGENDA:
Go Purple for Spirit Day: Everywhere. In 2010, Canadian teenager Brittany McMillan came up with the idea of having everyone wear the color purple to show their support for LGBT young people who are victims of bullying. From that first Spirit Day observance — named for the purple stripe of the Rainbow Flag which represents “spirit” — the observance has spread to include a number of entertainers and celebrities, including late-night talk show hose Craig Ferguson, the casts of Days of Our Lives and Degrassi, Margaret Cho, Kathy Grifffen, LaToya Jackson, Mario Lopez, Reba McEntire, dog-whisperer Cesar Milan, Shaquille O’Neil, — and Snooki. Even the Las Vegas Strip will go purple. What about you?
Affirmation LGBT Mormon Conference: Seattle, WA. Affirmation, the LGBT-affirming group for members and former members of the Mormon faith, will begins its its annual conference in Seattle beginning today with a welcoming receptions featuring opening remarks by Emmy-wining filmmaker Kendall Wilcox. He helped to produce last spring’s the “It Gets Better” video for Brigham Young University’s unofficial LGBT affinity group. The conference will include a variety of workshops dealing on topics of particular importance for LGBT Mormons and ex-Mormons, particularly in areas surrounding spirituality, bridge building, and relationships. The conference takes place at the Renaissance Sattle Hotel and continues through Sunday with a morning Devotional and a closing luncheon.
Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Columbia, SC; Jacksonville, FL; Nashville, TX (Black Pride).
AIDS Walks This Weekend: Atlanta, GA; Austin, TX; Philadelphia, PA; Phoenix, AZ.
Other Events This Weekend: MIX Copenhagen Film Festival, Copenhagen, Denmark; World Gay Rodeo Finals, Ft. Worth, TX; Seattle Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, Seattle, WA..
A Daughters of Bilitis breakfast, 1959. L-R: Del Martin, Josie, Jan, Marge, Bev Hickok, Phyllis Lyon.
TODAY IN HISTORY:
Daughters of Bilitis Founded: 1955. Phyllis Lyon remembered the phone call in September. Rose Bamberger was on the other end, asking, “would yo like to be a part of the group of six of us that are putting together a secret society for Lesbians?” Lyon recalled later, “We said ‘Yes!!’ Because we would immediately know five more lesbians and we did, which was…. AMAZING.” The “we” were Lyon and her partner, Del Martin. They had known each other since meeting in Seattle in 1950, and lived together in San Francisco since 1953. But since then, Lyon and Martin felt isolated because they hadn’t made any other friends who were lesbians. So when Rose, whom they met earlier that summer through a gay male couple they knew, suggested they start a secret club, Lyon and Martin jumped at the chance. “She wanted it to be in people’s homes and she wanted it to be so we’d be able to dance … so that we wouldn’t get caught up in police raids and we wouldn’t be stared at by tourists and so on. You couldn’t dance in the bars in those days. And she loved to dance. That was the whole idea behind it.”
Over the month of September, four couples, including Martin and Lyon, met to make plans for forming the club. Their first decision was its name. Several names were suggested: Que Vive, Habeas Corpus, Plus Two, Amazon — but all of them were rejected. Then someone suggested Daughters of Bilitis, named for the work of nineteenth century poet Pierre Louys, whose Songs of Bilitis spoke of lesbian love. Lyon had never heard of him. “Del and I went to the library to look up Bilitis, and of course found nothing. They had said it would be a great name because no one would know what it meant. The second decision was how to pronounce it. They rejected Bill-EYE-tis because they thought it sounded too much like a disease. So Bill-EE-tis it was.
The small group met several more times to begin putting some organization behind the idea: bylaws, membership rules (no one under 21, males welcome only as guests on specific occasions), and a tentative schedule. Business meetings would be held on the first Wednesdays of each month at 8:00 p.m. “Qui vive” became the club’s motto, sapphire blue and gold the colors, and an triangular insignia was chosen — that was serendipitous; they didn’t know that the pink triangle marked homosexuals in Nazi concentration camps. And then they named interim officer: Del Martin was president, Noni Frey was vice president, Phyllis Lyon was secretary, Rosemary Sliepen was treasurer, and Marcia Foster was trustee.
The first official meeting took place on October 19, 1955. It was awkward. The women quickly realized that they would be welcoming other women into their homes with whom they had very little in common except their sexuality. But the meeting was also a success, and more followed. As the members became more comfortable with each other, they also became more confident, and within a year began reaching out to the local Mattachine Society and the staff of ONE magazine in Los Angeles. When they joined the Mattachine Society to lobby for a change in California’s sex laws, they began to get involved in local advocacy and cooperation with other homophile groups.
Meanwhile, they remained focused for providing a social and intellectual outlet for women within the larger gay movement. In 1956, DoB began publishing The Ladder, first as a typewritten and mimeographed newsletter, then as a nationally distributed magazine which became a lifeline to lesbians across the country and around the world. Soon, there were DoB chapters in dozens of other cities, including one in Melbourne, Australia, which was the first “openly homosexual political organization” in that country. Beginning in 1960, the Daughters held the first of their biennial conventions in San Francisco.
DoB remained active as a national organization until 1970, when the national organization disbanded but allowed the remaining local chapters to continue under the name. The Ladder survived the national organization by two years, until it went under due to a lack of financial support in 1972. But as many as twenty local DoB chapters continued in several American cities, with New York, Boston and the original San Francisco chapters remaining particularly active. The original San Francisco chapter folded in 1978, and its files, which included both the local and national archives, were turned over to the GLBT Historical Society in Los Angeles San Francisco. At last report, the Boston Chapter, since moved to Cambridge, was still in existence as of 2004, but it appears to have gone dormant sometime since then.
[Source: Marcia M. Gallo. Different Daughters: A History of the Daughters of Bilitis and the Rise of the Lesbian Rights Movement
“Downtown” Markleeville, Alpine County’s unincorporated county seat.
Gay Group Plans Takover of Alpine County: 1970. The Gay Liberation Front in Los Angeles hit on a novel idea: What if enough gay people gathered in one location in numbers sufficiently large enough that they could then take over the area through free elections? On October 19, the group issued a two-page statement announcing their dream of encouraging gay people to move to sparsely-populated Alpine County, California. Located high up in the Sierra Nevadas just south of Reno and Carson City, Alpine County only had a little over 400 residents and 384 eligible voters.
The way GLF member Don Jackson figured it, if they could get a similar number of gay people to move, they could have the county all sewn up with little difficulty. And with homosexuality still a criminal act in California (it would remain so until 1975: see May 12), having power over law enforcement would be an important advantage. “A gay Superior Court Judge would have great discretionary powers. A gay district attornehy could choose which laws and which criminals he wished to prosecute. … It would mean a … gay civil service and a county welfare department which made public assistance payments to refugees from prejudice,” he told reporters. The numbers were in Jackson’s favor; he already had 479 gay people sign up to move into the county by January 1.
As you can imagine, not everyone was thrilled with the idea, especially the people who already called Alpine County their home. Hubert Bruns, chairman of the county’s Board of Supervisors, joined four other officials in a closed-door meeting Gov. Ronald Reagan’s assistant legal affairs secretary to try to figure out what options were available to them. When a reporter asked if they were encouraged by what they learned, Bruns simply replied “No,” then added, “If these people come up here and abide by the laws, there’s nothing in the world we can do to prevent them from coming and registering. Today, to the best of our knowledge, we don’t have gay people here. We do not need that kind of business.”
Bruns predicted a chilly reception. “We thought it was a joke,” Bruns said. “Today we don’t think it is a joke. They will receive a hostile reception when they come.” When asked how he would know which of the new residents were gay, Bruns replied, “We’re going to make every attempt to find out. I’m sure we’ll know some of them.” Other observers noticed that the cool reception wouldn’t just be from county residents. The planned January 1 start date would have coincided with the dead of winter when it’s not uncommon to have twenty-five feet of snow on the ground.
Not everyone in the gay community was on board either. The Gay Liberation Front of Berkeley voted against the proposal. They gavethe same reason they gave whenever they opposed anything else: it was “sexist” and “racist”. And”impractical,” something that they had not been known to be worried about before. Berkeley’s vote didn’t bother L.A.’s Don Kilhefmer though. “All the Berkeley vote means is that they don’t dig the idea, while San Francisco and Los Angeles is going ahead.” But as the deadline approached, the plan fizzled. Good thing, too, because that January the worst snowstorm in nineteen years blanketed Alpine County with more than eight feet of snow.
Postscript: In 2008, Alpine County was one of just three interior counties in California to vote against Prop 8. County residents disapproved of the ban on same-sex marriage by 379 to 293.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS:
Robert Reed: 1932. Poor Carol Brady. How could she know that her husband was gay? Actually, Florence Henderson, who played “the lovely lady” in The Brady Bunch, figured it out the first time they shared a screen kiss in the first episode. Reed was already a well-established character actor, appearing in episodes of more television series than anyone can count. He also worked on Broadway, in Neil Simon’s Barefoot In the Park. Reed never liked his role on The Brady Bunch, thinking that the schmaltzy show was beneath him. He often sparred with the show’s producer, Sherwood Schwartz over the silly scripts and nonsensical story lines. But Reed liked his co-stars and filled the role of father figure to the six younger cast members whenever he could. After the third season wrapped, he even brought the entire cast on vacation to New York and a cruise on the Queen Elizabeth II to London. Most of the cast members knew he was gay, but they were very protective of the fact. After all, in the 1970s it would have been a career-killer. When he died in 1992 of colon cancer and lymphoma, the media reported that he had died of AIDS (he had tested positive for HIV the year before but it had not progressed to AIDS). His Brady family was taken aback by the sensational reporting surrounding his death. As he was a father figure to the Brady cast in life, they returned the favor by being something of a family-figure to him. The cast attended his memorial, while many of his actual relatives stayed away.
Divine: 1945. He was born as Harris Glenn Milstead, but everyone knew him as Divine, the Drag Queen of the Century who practically defined what a John Waters movie was all about. Divine described his character as “just good, dirty fun, and if you find it offensive, honey, don’t join in.” But he drew a clear distinction between his private life and his performance. “My favorite part of drag is getting out of it,” he said. “Drag is my work clothes. I only put it on when someone pays me to.” And yet whether he was in or out of drag, he was always Divine: he even had it put on his passport. His most famous character, that of Edna Turnbald in the film Hairspray, was so popular that the character has been played by a male in drag in every adaptation since then, whether on the stage or the 2007 film remake. But not all of his characters were in drag; he also appeared as the racist TV station manager Arvin Hodgepile in Hairspray and as Earl Peterson, the fat man driving an Edsel station wagon who picks up Divine while hitchhiking. Divine was nominated for a Razzie Award for playing Rosie Velez in Lust In the Dust, which Tab Hunter both produced and starred in. I think he should have won an Oscar, with Lainie Kazan receiving special kudos for playing Divine’s step sister. He died, much too soon, of heart failure in 1988 at the age of 42.
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