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
October 3rd, 2012
TODAY’S AGENDA:
Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Asheville, NC; Baltimore, MD (Black Pride); Belgrade, Serbia; Cymru UK; Dallas, TX (Black Pride); Ft. Worth, TX; Johannesburg, South Africa; Memphis, TN; Miami Beach, FL (Hispanic Pride); Orlando, FL.
AIDS Walks This Weekend: Columbus, OH; Dallas, TX.
Other Events This Weekend: Gay Days, Anaheim, CA; Alaska Pride Conference, Anchorage, AK; Floatilla, Hong Kong, China; Key West Bear Fest, Key West, FL; Black and Blue Festival, Montreal, QC; OctoBEARfest, New York, NY; Chéries-Chéris Film Festival, Paris, France; Rainbow Festival, Phoenix, AZ.
TODAY IN HISTORY:
Congressman Pleads No Contest For Soliciting a Teen Male Prostitute: 1980. Rep. Bob Bauman (R-MD) had a history of voting for anti-gay bills in Congress. He voted twice to deny federal funds to lawyers dealing with gay rights itsues, and he backed a “family protection bill” that would have explicitly legalized discrimination in housing and employment based on sexual orientation. He was one of the brightest stars of the far right, serving as chairman for the American Conservative Union. But on this date in history, Bauman was charged by D.C. police for “soliciting sex from a sixteen-year old boy.” It turns out he had a habit of cruising gay bars in Washington, D.C., a habit he blamed entirely on alcohol. A judge bought his story and accepted his not guilty plea in exchange for entering a six-month alcohol rehabilitation course. Voters in his district didn’t buy it though. Despite the Ronald Reagan-led Republican landslide in November, Bauman lost his Congressional seat, and his wife walked out the following June.
In 1986, he wrote his memoir, The Gentleman from Maryland, not because he wanted to tell his story but because he was broke. He wrote that his downfall was orchestrated by the Carter administration, House Speaker “Tip” O’Neill and a Maryland senator who considered him a potential rival. As for himself, he told one interviewer, “I still don’t like being gay. If I had my druthers, I wouldn’t be gay.” But he did begin to accept himself and, for a while in the mid-1080s, tried to organize a conservative gay rights organization. That effort fell apart when other gay Republicans refused to go public or write checks to support the group. (Some would, however, donate smaller amounts in cash because it couldn’t be traced.) Bauman is now an attorney for the Sovereign Society, a group which provides expatriation services for Americans looking for offshore tax havens.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Gore Vidal: 1925. Okay, I mean seriously. Where does one begin? I guess you can start with his writing: his 1946 novel Williwaw
But as famous as he was for his writing, he was probably just as famous — and maybe even moreso — for his public appearances, for which Gore could always be counted on to say something shocking. Most famous of his public appearances, perhaps, came in 1968 when ABC Nes invited Gore and William F. Buckley, Hr. to provide political analysis during the Republican and Democratic conventions. It was during one of those discussions, carried live on national TV, that Gore responded to Buckley’s complaint about “pro-Nazi” protesters with, “As far as I’m concerned, the only sort of pro-crypto-Nazi I can think of is yourself.” An obviously livid Buckley then replied, “Now listen, you queer. Stop calling me a crypto-Nazi, or I’ll sock you in the goddamn face and you’ll stay plastered.” The Gore and Buckley feud continued to play out in competing essays in Esquire and in court where they sued each other for libel.
When Gore died in earlier this year, many obituaries identified him as either gay or bisexual. If he were alive, he would have loudly railed against pinning an identity on him. He hated the very idea of identity, particularly a gay one, believing that they were inherently false. He believed more in the ninetheenth-century concept which saw sex and sexuality as simply something one does, and he had no patience whatsoever for those who sought to build an identity — let alone a movement — over something called gay. In that way, he had much in common with anti-gay activists who believe that the very concept of “orientation” is some sort of a homosexual plot to change the world. And yet, Gore’s own promiscuous pansexuality — he said that he had had more than a thousand liaisons before the age of 25 — underscored his own comfort with ignoring the constraints that others would put on him. And yet, he was also an iconoclast’s iconoclast: he maintained a loving, loyal and long-term relationship with his partner, Howard Austen, for fifty-two years until Austen died in 2003. Gore said that the secret to their longevity was that they only had sex once, in the beginning, and then no more. He explained it this way: “t’s easy to sustain a relationship when sex plays no part & impossible, I have observed, when it does.”
Jake Shears: 1978. He was born in Arizona, but grew up north of Seattle on San Juan Island. When he turned fifteen, he sought out Dan Savage for advice on whether he should come out to his parents. Savage gave him what he later called the worst advice he has ever given:
And after he told me everything I was like: “Oh, they know. They’re just waiting for you to tell them. You should tell them. Just come out to them. They’re waiting. They’re ready.” And he came out to them and they didn’t know and it was a big disaster and they threatened to pull him out of school and they were really angry and so he called me. I had a radio show and he called me and I got him off the air and got his mother’s phone number and called my mother and gave my mother Jake’s mother’s phone number and had my mom call him mom and yell at her. And it helped, but yeah, I gave him so really shitty advice.
(Savage now says that “not everybody is in a position where that is wise or safe and we have to tell these gay teenagers to take a cold, hard look at who their families are and where they live before they take that step.” But this isn’t about Savage, it’s about Shears.) When Jake was nineteen, he traveled to Lexington, Kentucky to meet up with a former classmate, and that’s where he met Scott Hoffman (a.k.a Babydaddy). They hit it off immediately, and that turned into Shears’s second great turning point in his life. They move to New York the following year, where they immediately immersed themselves into the city’s gay nightlife. In 2000, they formed the Fibrillating Scissor Sisters and began performing in underground clubs. When Ana “Ana Matronic” Lynch joined the duo in 2001, they dropped the word “Fibrillating” from their name and began performing as the Scissor Sisters. They were soon joined by Derik “Del Marquis” Gruen on lead guitar and Patrick “Paddy Boom” Seacor on drums, the band’s token heterosexual. In 2002, th band cut a single, “Electrobix” which proved to be less popular than its B-side, a cover of Pink Floyd’s “Comforably Numb.”
That got the attention of major record labels, and by 2003 they were recording for Polydor. They proved popular in Britain, but their success in America was thwarted by conservative radio programmers and Wal-Mart, then the largest music seller in the country. Wal-Mart, in particular, objected to the song “Tits On the Radio,” which they described as a “snarling, swaggering attack on conservatism,” and demanded the band record a “clean” version. The band refused.
Their latest album, Night Work, came out in 2010, includes vocals by Kylie Minogue and a spoken word segue by Ian McKellen. Later that year, Shears contributed a video to Dan Savage’s “It Gets Better” project, where he talked about the abuse he suffered in high school after coming out, and how he channels those memories into his energetic performances today. The Scissor Sisters are currently on a world tour in support of their latest album, Magic Hour, which features the single “Only the Horses.”
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 2nd, 2012
TODAY IN HISTORY:
Baltimore Police Arrest 162 in Bar Raid: 1955. At 200 N. Gay Street — an appropriate address if there ever was one — stood the Pepper Hill Club, a nightclub popular with gay people. Because of its reputation, the Pepper Hill Club quickly became a target for the city’s vice squad. At 11:00 p.m., Lt.Byrne and officer Edgar Kirby stopped in to check on the club, looked around, then left. Less than an hour later, police descended on the club and arrested all 162 patrons, employees and owners for “lewd behavior,” which consisted of male couples hugging, dancing and kissing. “We were met by a human wall,” Sgt. Hyman Goldstein later testified. “We found complete disorder, and in the rear of the place there was no light at all. Back there we found several couples.” He also testified that most of those arrested were from Washington. “We have received word that Washington police are conducting a drive on homosexuals; apparently some of them are coming to Baltimore for their entertainment.”
The raid, which was billed as “the largest night club raid ever conducted in Baltimore,” took place in direct contravention of police policy. Just a few weeks earlier, police had conducted a mass raid at a straight nightclub, and outrage over that raid led police commissioner James Hepbron to ban mass raids. And so when the courts acquitted nearly everyone in the Pepper Hill case — only five were convicted of disorderly conduct — Circuit Judge James K. Cullen sharply reprimanded the police department for the mass arrests. Commissioner Hepbron agreed with the judge and promised that it wouldn’t happen again, saying that the department’s policy against wholesale arrests would be “reiterated, re-emphasized and, if necessary, re-enforced.” The following year, the state legislature passed what became known as the “Pepper Hill Law” which formally outlawed mass arrests during bar raids.
Federal Panel Urges Decriminalizing Homosexuality:1969. A fourteen-member panel of doctors, lawers, and social and behavioral scientists led by UCLA’s Evelyn Hooker released a report urging the United States abolish all laws forbidding private same-sex relationships among consenting adults. The panel found, “Homosexuality presents a major problem for our society largely because of the amount of injustice and suffering entailed in it not only for the homosexual but also for those concerned about him.”
About existing anti-gay laws on the books, the panel noted, “There is evidence to indicate that entrapment is not uncommon, that existing laws are selectively enforced, and that serious injustice often results.” The report added, “Many homosexuals are good citizens, holding regular jobs and leading productive lives. The existence of legal penalties relating to homosexual acts means that the mental health problems of homosexuals are exacerbated by the need for concealment and the emotional stresses arising from this need and from the opprobrium of being in violation of the law.”
At the time the report was issued, homosexuality was a criminal offense in every state except Illinois. Between 1971 and 1980, twenty-two more states would descriminalize homosexuality. But progress slowed with the onset of the AIDS hysteria, when only fifteen states and the District of Columbia removed their anti-homosexuality statutes from the books between 1981 and 2003, when Lawrence v. Texas finally struck down anti-gay laws nationwide.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Annie Leibovitz: 1949. “My mother and father took photographs and made eight-millimeter home movies when I was growing up, but I didn’t start taking pictures myself until the late Sixties when I was studying at the San Francisco Art Institute,” she explained in her 2006 monograph, A Photographer’s Life: 1990-2005
While she liked that work, her personal style of reportage was distinct from photo-journalism. “I’m not a journalist,” she wrote. “A journalist doesn’t take sides, and I don’t want to go through life like that.” Her point of view took her all over the world, including the Sarajevo siege in 1993 and the world’s capitals to photograph kings, queens and celebrities. It’s hard to pick one photo as a perfect example of her intimate style — the touching photos that she took of her lover Susan Sontag on her death bed are particularly poignant — but the most iconic photo perhaps is the 1980 portrait of John Lennon and Yoko Ono that appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone. It turned out that Leibovitz would be the last person to professionally photograph John Lennon on that fateful December day: Lennon was murdered five hours later outside his apartment building in New York City.
In 2001, Leibovitz became a mother for the first time at the age of 52, but the years following would prove to be difficult for her. She spent most of 2004 taking care of Sontag, who was dying of myelodysplastic syndrome which evolved into leukemia. Sontag died the following December. Leibovitz’s father died six weeks later. Editing the photos for A Photographer’s Life: 1990-2005 was an important part of her grieving process. “I would go into (her workshop) every morning and cry for ten minutes or so and then start working, editing the pictures. I cried for a month. I didn’t realize until later how far the work on the book had taken me through the grieving process.”
Her grieving wasn’t over: her mother died in 2008, and in 2009 Leibovitz fell into serious financial difficulties. She borrowed $15.5 million, using the rights to all of her photographs as collateral. The New York Times< tried to figure out how an artist of such renown could be in such financial trouble. It cited several personal issues, including the recent loss of her father, mother, and Sontag, who died in 2004, and a costly renovation of her townhouses in Greenwich Village. Eventually she was able to negotiate her way through her financial problems and retain control of her work.
In 2011, she published her latest book Pilgrimage
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 1st, 2012
TODAY’S AGENDA:
Will the U.S. Supreme Court Kill Prop 8 Today? That’s the question on everyone’s mind this morning. We do know that Hollingsworth v. Perry, which is the Federal case challenging the constitutionality of California’s Proposition 8, was up for consideration for last week’s U.S. Supreme Court conference. And we know that the case did not appear on the list of cases which the Supreme Court has accepted to hear. Today, we will learn whether it will appear on another list of cases which the Supreme Court has decided not to accept. If it appears on that list, then that means that the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal’s ruling which upheld the lower court’s striking down Prop 8 as unconstitutional will stand and gay couples in California will soon have their right to marriage restored. But if it doesn’t appear on today’s list, then that means that the Supreme Court is still weighing whether to hear the case or not. The court’s next conference to decide the cases to accept is Friday, October 5. There is some speculation that the court may refuse to hear the case due to the very narrow constitutional basis of the Ninth Circuit Court’s opinion. There is also speculation that the court may not decide to take any action on the case until after the November elections.
Edie Windsor
Another same-sex marriage case before the Supreme Court, Windsor v. USA, challenges the constitutionality of Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act. It was brought by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of Edie Windsor, who is required to pay $363,000 in federal estate taxes following the death of her legally-wedded wife in 2007. If she had been in an opposite-sex marriage, her estate tax bill would have been zero. The lower court ruled that, based on a rational basis review, Section 3 of DOMA is unconstitutional. While the case is being appealed to the Second District Court of Appeals, Windsor’s attorneys have filed a petition or certiorari directly to the Supreme Court asking for the cast to be reviewed without waiting for the Second Circuit’s review because of Windsor’s age (she is 83) and poor health. There are currently four other DOMA challenges making their way through the Appeals courts, and the U.S. Department of Justice has asked the Supreme Court to hear three of those cases along withWindsor for a more comprehensive look at DOMA’s constitutionality. Therefore it is likely that the Supreme Court may decide to delay acting on Windsor v USA until it can also hear one or more of the other cases as well.
NOM’s Brian Brown (left), Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer (right)
There are two other LGBT related cases before the court. In Diaz v. Brewer, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decided that Arizona’s Republican Gov. Jan Brewer cannot withdraw domestic parner benefits from state employees without violating the Constitution’s Equal Protection clause. And in National Organization for Marriage v. McKee, NOM is again trying to get the Supreme Court’s attention in its efforts to circumvent Maine’s finance disclosure laws. Neither case appeared on last week’s order papers for cases which the Supreme Court accepted, and like the others, we may learn today whether the court has decided to reject those appeals. The Supreme Court refused to hear an earlier similar challenge from NOM in February.
TODAY IN HISTORY:
Denmark Begins Registering Partnerships: 1989. Axil and Eigil Axgil made world history when they became the first gay couple to enter into a Registered Partnership in Copenhagen, after 40 years together. The Axgils, who had been living under the same surname (an amalgamation of their given names) for 32 years, were among ten couples registered that day when Denmark became the first country in the world to provide legal recognition for same-sex couples.
While the new law provided many of the rights and obligations of marriage, Registered Partnerships remained a second class institution by omitting adoption rights, artificial insemination availability, or religious wedding ceremonies in state-run Lutheran Churches. In 1996, Registered Partnerships were extended to Greenland. Several bills which would provide full marriage equality have been debated in the Folketing over the past several years, with the most recent bill being rejected by the ruling coalition in June 2010, but the Folketing did decide to extend adoption rights to Registered Partnerships a month later.
In July of 2012, the Folketing approved a bill legalizing same-sex marriage by a vote of 85-24. The law took effect on July 15. Axil and Eigil didn’t live to see full marriage equality in Denmark; Eigel passed away in 1995 and Axel joined him in 2011.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
George Cecil Ives: 1867. The Sacred Band of Thebes, the army of ancient Thebans instituted in 387 B.C., was an elite force of 150 pairs of male lovers. The theory went that soldiers would fight harder and better if they were defending a lover. The Sacred Band met its end fifty years later when the rest of the Theban army fled the forces of Philip II of Macedonia at the battle of Chaeronea. The Sacred Band, instead of fleeing, fought to its death. And so when, in 1897, the German-English poet, writer, and early gay-rights campaigner decided to found a secret society for gay men, he named it the Order of Chaeronea in honor of the brave Sacred Band.
George Ives was already well connected with England’s gay scene, having probably had a brief fling with Oscar Wilde followed, later, with a brief affair with Lord Alfred Douglas. Wilde’s sensational run-in with the law, which dominated the papers of London in 1895, undoubtedly had an affect on Ives. After Wilde was released from prison, he wrote Ives, that he believed that a more humanitarian climate may slowly emerge. “I have no doubt we shall win, but the road is long, and red with monstrous martyrdoms,” Wilde wrote. “Nothing but the repeal of the Criminal Law Amendment Act would do any good.” Ives was ready to take on the work of changing society and laying the grounds for repeal, but he couldn’t convince Wilde to join him in what he called the “Cause.” Wilde, his health broken from two years at hard labor, had already given his measure of martyrdom. We don’t know how many other people Ives managed to enlist into the “Cause,” but we do know that some of the members included the Uranian poets Charles Kains Jackson and John Gambril Nicholson, the Rev. Samuel Elsworth Cottam (an Anglican priest who published a gay magazine called Chameleon), and the eccentric Catholic priest and occult expert Montague Summers.
Ives’s Order was influenced greatly by the Aesthetic movement — of which Wilde was but one very visible proponent — which mixed philosophy, idealism and art as part of what Wilde’s biographer, Neil McKenna, described as “a new gospel of Beauty.” Members of the Order of Chaeronea observed an elaborate system of rituals, ceremonies, seals, codes, passwords, and a calendar dating from the year of the Battle of Cheronea (1897 was written as C2235). New members swore that “you will never vex or persecute lovers,” and that “all real love shall be to you as sanctuary.”
In 1914, Ives co-founded the British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology with Edward Carpenter and Magnus Hirschfeld, to promote the scientific study of sex and with it a more rational attitude toward sexual matters. Ives was very interested in the penal reform movement, and wrote several articles and lectures on the subject. When he died in 1950, he left behind a large archive covering his lfie and work, including 122 volumes of diaries 45 volumes of scrapbooks, the latter consisting of clippings on such topics as sensational crimes, penal methods, cross-dressing, homosexuality and cricket scores. His diaries have been a treasure trove of information for historians examining the early gay rights movement in England. His papers were purchased in 1977 by the Harry Ransom Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin.
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?
September 30th, 2012
TODAY’S AGENDA:
Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Hong Kong, China.
AIDS Walks This Weekend: Ann Arbor, MI; Chicago, IL; San Deigo, CA.
Other Events This Weekend: Get Wet, Willemstad, Curaçao; Everybody’s Perfect LGBTIQ Film Festival, Geneva Switzerland.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Truman Capote: 1924. He taught himself to read and write before he entered his first year at school. When he was about ten years old, he submitted his first short story, “Old Mrs. Busybody,” to the Mobile Press Register for a children’s writing contest. Capote later remembered, “I began writing really sort of seriously when I was about 11. I say seriously in the sense that like other kids go home and practice the violin or the piano or whatever, I used to go home from school every day, and I would write for about three hours. I was obsessed by it.” He remained the lifelong friend of author Harper Lee, who was a neighbor in Monroeville, Alabama. “Her father was a lawyer,” he remembered, “and she and I used to go to trials all the time as children. We went to the trials instead of going to the movies.” Those trials not only influenced Lee’s book, To Kill a Mockingbird, but also helped lead to Capote’s greatest literary triumph, In Cold Blood.
Truman Capote in 1948, contemplating some outrage against conventional morality, no doubt.
His first novel however, was autobiographical; 1948’s Other Voices, Other Rooms
He remained busy for the next decade, adapting novels for Broadway and churning out articles for The New Yorker. Then he struck gold again in 1958 with his collection, Breakfast at Tiffany’s: A Short Novel and Three Stories
He loved the limelight, although it did take its toll. In the 1970s, he sank into drug and alcohol abuse, which got in the way of working on his epic novel, Answered Prayers. He bragged about it often, but years went by without any sign of the work. He finally adapted portions of it for a series of short stories in Esquire. The second of those stories, “La Côte Basque 1965,” would make him personal non grata among the Jet Set, with its salacious details of the personal lives of William S. Paley and Babe Paley, who had been among his close society friends. It was seen as a betrayal of confidences among Capote’s friends, and two more short stories resulted in Capote’s being cut off from the high society he craved. He died in 1984 of liver cancer at the home of Joane Carson, the ex-wife of TV host Johnny Carson. His royalties continued to support his boyfriend Jack Dunphy until his death, and then went toward establishing a literary prize in honor of Newton Arvin, a former boyfriend, author and professor whose life was ruined when he was fired from Smith College for being gay.
The Velvet Voice
Johnny Mathis: 1935. Chances are the last time you heard one of his songs was on television or in film, where his music is capable of setting just the right mood or sense of nostalgia. While he is frequently described as a romantic singer, his first love was jazz. It was during a performance at The Blackhawk club in San Francisco that he caught the attention of Columbia Records’ jazz producer George Avakian, who sent a telegram to the head office, “Have found phenomenal 19-year-old boy who could go all the way. Send blank contracts.” While Mathis enjoyed singing, the opportunity posed something of a dilemma for the San Francisco State College student: the track and field star was about to try out for the 1956 Olympics in Melbourne, Australia. He had to decide: the Olympics or a recording session. It was one or the other; it couldn’t be both. After consulting with his father, Mathis chose the recording career.
His first album Johnny Mathis: A New Sound In Popular Song, was a jazz album. It didn’t sell well. His second album, produced by Mitch Miller, focused on soft, romantic ballads backed by the Ray Conniff Orchestra. That would prove to be the signature Mathis sound. In Late 1956, he recorded his two most popular songs, “Wonderful! Wonderful!” and “It’s Not For Me To Say,” followed soon by “Chances Are,” which hit Number 1 on the Billboard chart. By by the end of the 1950s, hit singles were no longer his forte; his strength was as an album artist. Heavenly, released in1959, hit #1 in the Billboard album chart and went multi-platinum. A year earlier, he released Johnny’s Greatest Hits, the first ever Greatest Hits album in music history, spent 491 consecutive weeks on the Billboard top 100 album charts, earning him a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records.. At one point, he had five albums on the Billboard charts simultaneously. His last #1 single was 1978’s “Too Much, Too Little, Too Late,” a duet he recorded with Deniece Williams.
Mathis, who never married, managed to keep his personal life out of the public eye. Maybe the fact that he had been an Olympic-calibre athlete helped to keep some of the rumors at bay. Nevertheless, the rumors were out there, which he acknowledged in a 1982 interview with Us Magazine, where he was quoted as saying “Homosexuality is a way of life that I’ve grown accustomed to.” But when he started receiving death threats because of that interview, he prevailed on Us Magazine to retract the statement. In 2006, Mathis again acknowledged his sexuality, saying that his reticence on the topic was “generational.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cd3pDM2f6Y8If 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?
September 29th, 2012
TODAY’S AGENDA:
Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Cumbria, UK; Gainesville, FL; Hong Kong, China; Moab, UT; Richmond, VA; Sedona/Cottonwood, AZ; Soweto, South Africa.
AIDS Walks This Weekend: Ann Arbor, MI; Chicago, IL; Indianapolis, IN; Jackson, MI; San Deigo, CA; Wilmington/Rehoboth, DE.
Other Events This Weekend: Get Wet, Willemstad, Curaçao; Everybody’s Perfect LGBTIQ Film Festival, Geneva Switzerland; Queer Lisboa Film Festival, Lisbon, Portugal; Queer Fest 2012, St. Petersburg, Russia.
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?
September 28th, 2012
TODAY’S AGENDA:
Here is this week’s rundown of what’s happening with the four marriage ballot campaigns:
Maryland Question 6: If passed, Question 6 will provide marriage equality while guaranteeing that “each religious faith has exclusive control over its own theological doctrine regarding who may marry within that faith.” Marylanders for Marriage Equality is fighting for Question 6’s passage. Last Friday, Rev. Delman Coates of Clinton, Md., hosted a news conference at the National Press Club featuring nearling a dozen prominent African-American clergy, including Rev. Al Sharpton, to endorse Question 6. As Rev. Sharpton put it, “It’s not about forcing people that have religious views to do something they don’t agree with, it’s about truly believing that we are all equal under the law. Religious groups must still be able to maintain their spiritual and moral option to either give or withhold a religious or sacred blessing to such unions.” Gov. Martin O’Malley lent his hand in the fundraising effort to pass Question 6, saying, “We do need to raise another couple of million dollars, and if we’re able to do that I believe that we will pass this. And raising those dollars is critically important for our ability to be able to defend this at the ballot.” Toward that end, Ravens linebacker Brendon Ayanbadejo, who came out as a strong supporter for Question 6, will host a Monday Night Football party, with Marylanders for Marriage Equality holding a raffle for a chance to attend.
What you can do: You can enter a raffle for a chance to attend Ayanbadejo’s Monday Night Football party, sign up for a volunteer vacation in Maryland, commit to volunteering during their Weekends of Action, or donate here.
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. This week, they released an ad featuring four firefighters, one of whom is gay, talking about why they’re all voting “Yes” on Question 1. The Christian Civil League is already trotting out the ususal junk science: “When a girl doesn’t have a father to fill that role she’s more likely to become promiscuous in a misguided attempt to satisfy her inborn hunger for male attention and validation.” And in a conference call to Question 1 opponents, Frank Schubert, an out-of-state consultant who led California’s campaign to pass Proposition 8, slipped up and called himself the “manager” of the campaign in Maine.
What you can do: Ever wanted to see New England’s famed fall colors? You can do that when you sign up for a volunteer vacation or donate miles so someone else can travel. You can also buy stuff from their online store, or you can donate here.
Minnesota Marriage Amendment: The ballot proposal to amend the state constitution to ban same-sex marriage is known simply as “the marriage amendment.” Minnesotans United for All Families is the main group fighting against the amendment’s passage in November. This past week, they’ve released their second television ad after the first one began airing last Thursday. Minnesota Congressman Tim Walz and co-chairs Jeff and Lori Wilfahrt, whose son was a gay soldier who died in Afghanistan in 2011, launched Veterans United at the State Capitol. The new coalition, which will mobilize veterans who oppose limiting the freedom to marry in the state constitution, began its statewide tour this week. Meanwhile, Catholic bishops in Minnesota sent letters to 400,000 Catholic households asking for them to donate money to Minnesota for Marriage, the group fighting to write discrimination into the state’s constitution. Chuck Darrell, who serves as Minnesota for Marriage’s Communications Director, said that the only way for the proposed amendment to fail would be if amendment opponents “find a whole lot of atheists.”
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 sign up to volunteer, sign up to run the Big Gay Race on Saturday, or simply donate here.
Washington Referendum 74: If Referendum 74 is approved, same-sex couples will be able to marry just like everone else in Washington state. Washington United for Marriage has put up a new its television ad this past week, and just yesterday they held a press conference featuring several faith leaders announcing their support for R74. All told, R74 has the support of more than 120 faith groups across Washington. Meanwhile, NOM has officially donated $250,000 to Preserve Marriage Washington, whose campaign chair, Joseph Backholm, recently went on record with more questionable claims about Washington’s bipartisan marriage law during a debate on broadcast television in Seattle. The Approve 74 campaign wasted no time unleashing a little marriagefactcheck.com on his assertions.
What you can do: You create your own “Raising Millions for Marriage” page to encourage your family, freinds and neighbors to help support the fight for marriage equality, sign up for one of 50 weekly phone banks across Washington, or you can donate here.
Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Cumbria, UK; Gainesville, FL; Hong Kong, China; Moab, UT; Richmond, VA; Sedona/Cottonwood, AZ; Soweto, South Africa.
AIDS Walks This Weekend: Ann Arbor, MI; Chicago, IL; Indianapolis, IN; Jackson, MI; San Deigo, CA; Wilmington/Rehoboth, DE.
Other Events This Weekend: Get Wet, Willemstad, Curaçao; Everybody’s Perfect LGBTIQ Film Festival, Geneva Switzerland; Queer Lisboa Film Festival, Lisbon, Portugal; Queer Fest 2012, St. Petersburg, Russia.
TODAY IN HISTORY:
A Same-Sex Marriage in Nevada: 1877. The LGBT acronym that we often toss about reflects the fact that we today understand ourselves as though we were measured along two distinct axis. The first axis (the L/G/B one) speaks of the gender of those to whom we are attracted; this defines us as gay, straight, or somewhere in between. The second axis (often lamented as the silent “T” by transgender advocates), describes how we see ourselves: we are male or female, and for most of us (cisgenders) our self-understanding of our gender matches our bodily appearance; for a few (transgenders), it doesn’t. Taken together, these two sets of descriptions — of one’s sexual orientation and gender identity as separate categories — have been adequate for most of us to describe who we are as sexual beings.
But notice what they do: they also describe states of being rather than things we’re doing. And this is a very modern way of thinking. Until very recently, one was much more defined — and one’s available life choices were much more restricted — according to one’s gender role, which defined who one is according to what one does and vice versa. And until fairly recently, it was madness to consider that the two could be seperable. And so gender roles went like this: the male gender role meant that men wore men’s clothing and cut their hair, they left the home every day to make a living, and they loved and/or married women. The female gender role meant that women kept the house, did the cooking, raised the children, wore dresses and petticoats, and they loved and/or married men.
Because there was no option to separate out one’s sexual orientation, gender identity, or career aspirations from one’s gender role, it gets very complicated when we try to assign historical figures into today’s modern categories. There are countless stories of women who, in order to pursue career paths that would be closed to them (and this would include just about everything besides teaching, nursing and domestic work), take on the male gender role simply because they couldn’t do what they wanted to do as women (see July 25 for one possible example). We have far fewer examples of men taking the female gender role for similar reasons, but that is probably because there were almost no career restrictions for men. But we also find examples of both men and women adopting the opposite gender role when entering what would otherwise be a same-sex relationship. Not everyone did this, but when they did, their examples are much trickier to understand: are we seeing a straight relationship with a transgender person, or are we seeing a gay or lesbian relationship where one adopts an opposite gender role in order to allow the relationship to go unnoticed?
Today’s story opens with that very question. On September 28, 1877, Sarah Maud Pollard,as Samuel M. Pollard, married Marancy Hughes in Tuscarora, Elko County, Nevada Territory. My friend Homer Thiel, a Tucson archaeologist and historian, wrote about that marriage in a guest post last year:
Sarah Pollard was born in 1846 in New York, the daughter of a middle class merchant family. After working in a shoe factory in Massachusetts and sewing shirts in New York, she headed west to Colorado in the 1870s. She caused a stir because of her masculine appearance. Around 1876 she moved to Nevada and took up wearing male clothing in order to find work and she started calling herself “Sam.” She met young Marancy Hughes, born in 1861 in Missouri, and actively courted her. Hughes’ family hated Pollard and the couple eloped on September 28, 1877.
New Orleans Times-Picayune article about the Pollard marriage, June 23, 1878. (Click to enlarge.)
They were happily married for six months, and then Marancy broke the secret. The small silver-mining town of Tuscarora, Nevada was transfixed by the story. The matter ended up in court and after Marancy testified, a dramatic re-union took place. Stories about the troubled marriage were carried in newspapers across the country (even appearing in a New Zealand paper). The couple broke up two more times, before Marancy moved on to a marriage with a man in 1880.
Pollard’s story appears to have had a happy ending:
Sarah moved to Minnesota to start a new life by 1883, working by herself on a farm. The story of her successful farming career again made national newspapers, which noted she wore a bloomers-type outfit while plowing. By the 1890s she had met a woman named Helen Stoddard, a schoolteacher who was born in 1864 in Vermont. In later census records Helen was listed as her partner or companion. Sarah died in 1929, and Helen paid for her arrangements at a local funeral home, the owners puzzling over the relationship of the two women.
If all we knew about Pollard was restricted to the events in Nevada, we would be left with an open question: Was she lesbian or was he transgender? But as the second half of the story reveals, the question itself was mistaken. What she did in Nevada was adopt a male gender role which allowed her to do male things: make a living and marry a woman. But a decade later, she decided to forget about gender roles and just live — she farmed (a man’s job), wore bloomers while plowing (a woman’s garment) and became a partner to a female schoolteacher — with Helen maintaining a traditionally female gender role but with Sarah’s gender role remaining flexible. No wonder the funeral home’s owners were puzzled by the relationship.
US Civil Service Refuses To Meet With Washington Mattachine Society: 1962. Frank Kameny and Jack Nicholes founded the Washington, D.C. chapter of the Mattachine Society in 1961, soon after Kameny’s appeal of his 1957 firing by the U.S. Army’s Map Service was rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court. The federal government’s ban on employment of gays and lesbians was firmly in place, but Kameny didn’t let a small thing like the Supreme Court stop him from demanding the lifting of the ban. In 1962, the Mattachine Society requested a meeting with the U.S. Civil Service Commission to discuss the federal employment ban, but in a letter dated September 28, 1962, they were turned down cold:
UNITED STATES· CIVIL SERVICE COMMISSION
Washington 25, D.C.
Sep 28 1962
Mr. Bruce Schuyler, Secretary
The Mattachine Society of Washington
P. O. Box 1032
Washington 1, D.C.Dear Mr. Schuyler:
Your letter of August 28, 1962 and attachments relating to the purposes of the Mattachine Society of Washington have been read with interest. It is the established policy of the civil Service commission that homosexuals are not suitable for appointment to or retention in positions in the Federal service. There would be no useful purpose served in meeting with representatives of your Society.
Sincerely yours,
(signed)
John W. Macy, Jr.
Chairman
Lifting the ban would remain one of the highest priorities of the Mattachine Society for the next thirteen years. Campaigning for the ban’s elimination would lead to the first ever gay rights pickets in front of the White House, the Pentagon and the Civil Service Commission in 1965, and would finally end with the ban’s lifting in 1975 (see July 3). In 2009, Frank Kameny received a formal apology from the openly gay director of the Office of Personnel Management, the modern-day successor to the Civil Service Commission.
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?
September 27th, 2012
TODAY’S AGENDA:
Radically Gay: Centenary of Harry Hay: New York, NY. This year is the centenary of Harry Hay (see Apr 7), founder of the Mattachine Society, which became the first successful organization for gay men (and, sometimes, women). A former member of the Communist Party in the late 1930s, he became involved with union organizing and promoting civil rights for African-Americans. In 1948, he conceived of the idea of creating a gay activist group, and while his first effort failed to attract a following, his second attempt, in 1950, bore fruit when the Mattachine Society was birthed on November 11, 1950 in his home in Silver Lake, California. The new group’s success however exceeded his grasp; newer members were more conservative than him, and they feared that his past ties with the Communist party (which he had left because it didn’t allow gay members) would bring the government’s hammer down on the organization. In 1953, Hay was forced out of the Mattachines, and after a period of exile and study, he re-emerged in the early 1960s to devote the rest of his life to developing, promoting and personifying a radical gay identity.
In observance of Hay’s centenary, the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studys at the City University of New York today kicks off a four-day conference called “Radically Gay: The Life and Visionary Legacy of Harry Hay” exploring Hay’s controversial life and ideas, and his impact on the LGBT movement that he pioneered. The conference is organized around four major themes — the arts, political activism, spirituality and sexual identities — and includes panels, lectures, films, and live performances from scholars, activists, and artists, exploring the growth and development of LGBT life in the 60-some years since Hay founded the modern LGBT movement. The conference begins this evening at 7:00 p.m. at the CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Ave in Manhattan.
Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Cumbria, UK; Gainesville, FL; Hong Kong, China; Moab, UT; Richmond, VA; Sedona/Cottonwood, AZ; Soweto, South Africa.
AIDS Walks This Weekend: Ann Arbor, MI; Chicago, IL; Indianapolis, IN; Jackson, MI; San Deigo, CA; Wilmington/Rehoboth, DE.
Other Events This Weekend: Get Wet, Willemstad, Curaçao; Everybody’s Perfect LGBTIQ Film Festival, Geneva Switzerland; Queer Lisboa Film Festival, Lisbon, Portugal; Queer Fest 2012, St. Petersburg, Russia.
TODAY IN HISTORY:
Six men pilloried in London for Homosexuality: 1810. In early 19th century Britain, the penalty for homosexuality was death. If a judge felt lenient, he might instead sentence the accused to stand time at the pillory. The September 27, 1810 entry in the Annual Register describes the pillorying of six members of what we might describe today as a gay hangout known as the Vere Street Club. That description goes like this:
Such was the degree of popular indignation excited against these wretches, and such the general eagerness to witness their punishment, that, by ten in the morning, the chief avenues from Clerkenwell Prison and Newgate to the place of punishment were crowded with people; and the multitude assembled in the Haymarket, and all its immediate vicinity, was so great as to render the streets impassible. All the windows and even the very roofs of the houses were crowded with persons of both sexes; and every coach, waggon, hay-cart, dray, and other vehicles which blocked up great part of the street, were crowded with spectators.
The Sheriffs, attended by two City Marshals, with an immense number of constables, accompanied the procession of the Prisoners from Newgate, whence they set out in the transport caravan, and proceeded through Fleet-street and the Strand; and the Prisoners were hooted and pelted the whole way by the populace. At one o- clock four of the culprits were fixed in the pillory, erected for and accommodated to the occasion, with two additional wings, one being allotted for each criminal; and immediately a new torrent of popular vengeance poured upon them from all sides. The day being fine, the streets were dry and free from mud, but the dfect was speedily and amply supplied by the butchers of St. James’s-market. Numerous escorts of whom constantly supplied the party of attack, chiefly consisting of women, with tubs of blood, garbage, and ordure from their slaughter-houses, and with this ammunition, plentifully diversified with dead cats, turnips, potatoes, addled eggs, and other missiles, the criminals were incessantly pelted to the last moment. They walked perpetually round during their hour [the pillory swivelled on a fixed axis]; and although from the four wings of the machine they had some shelter, they were completely encrusted with filth.
Two wings of the Pillory were then taken off to place Cooke and Amos in the two remaining ones, and although they came in only for the second course, they had no reason to complain of short allowance, for they received even a more severe discipline than their predecessors. On their being taken down and replaced in the caravan, they lay flat in the vehicle; but the vengeance of the crowd still pursued them back to Newgate, and the caravan was so filled with mud and ordure as completely to cover them.
No interference from the Sheriffs and Police officers could refrain the popular rage; but notwithstanding the immensity of the multitude, no accident of any note occurred.
The six men were relatively lucky. Depending on the ferocity of the crowd, death at the pillory wasn’t out of the question. The pillory was formally abolished in England in 1837.
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?
September 26th, 2012
TODAY’S AGENDA:
Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Cumbria, UK; Gainesville, FL; Hong Kong, China; Moab, UT; Richmond, VA; Sedona/Cottonwood, AZ; Soweto, South Africa.
AIDS Walks This Weekend: Ann Arbor, MI; Chicago, IL; Indianapolis, IN; Jackson, MI; San Deigo, CA; Wilmington/Rehoboth, DE.
Other Events This Weekend: Get Wet, Willemstad, Curaçao; Everybody’s Perfect LGBTIQ Film Festival, Geneva Switzerland; Queer Lisboa Film Festival, Lisbon, Portugal; Queer Fest 2012, St. Petersburg, Russia.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Shirley Willer: 1922. Her childhood was hard. Her father, a judge in CHicago, was also a violent alcoholic abuser. When Shirley was nine, her mother packed up and left, taking Shirley and her younger sister with her. As Shirley got older, she managed to scrape enough money together to go to nursing school, where she learned about other women who shared some of the same romatic desires she did. When she told her mother that she was a leasbian, her mother went out and purchased a copy of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliniess, a remarkably understanding act for a woman in the 1940s.
Willer’s oversized personality matched her physicality. She was heavyset with short cropped hair and tailored clothing, all of which made her “butch” — a term she hated for its stereotypical role-playing connotations. “Because I was heavy,” she later explained, “I looked much better in tailored clothes.” Her appearance once got her trouble with the police one night while she was headed to a gay bar. “Just the assumption that I was gay was justification enough for one policeman to pick me up by the front of my shirt and slap me back and forth. He called me names, the same ones they used now. ‘You god-damned pervert. You queer. You S.O.B.’ … I was so angry at the policeman I could have killed him! I wasn’t frightened; I was angry! He had no right to do that to me! and that’s been my attitude all my life. They have no right!”
After watching a male nurse die after being horribly treated by a Catholic hospital because he was gay, Willer was driven to become an advocate for gay rights. “Barney’s death probably had a great deal to do with my aggressiveness,” she said. She and five other women talked about forming a group, but they decided it was too dangerous to do so. But by the late 1950’s, Willer began hearing about other groups being established around the country. She learned that there was a chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis in New York City, so when she turned forty, she decided to move to the Big Apple. Upon arrival, she wrote to the DOB chapter, and Marion Glass answered with details about their next meeting. Willer and Glass met at that meeting and quickly became lovers and partners. The two turned out to be perfect complements to each other: Glass was as thoughtful as Willer was brash; where Glass was quiet, Willer was bold. Together, with Glass serving as Willer’s mentor and advisor, Willer quickly grew into a leadership role for the New York chapter. Willer become the chapter’s president in 1963, and three years later she was elected the national president of DOB
Willer’s passion as DOB president was in travelling across the country planting as many DOB chapters as possible. She was aided in that effort through the generosity of an wealthy closeted lesbian, known only as “Pennsylvania,” who wanted to contribute to DOB anonymously. Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, co-founders of the original Daughters of Bilitis group in San Francisco, were among the very few who had met “Pennsylvania.” Lyon remembered, “She was so nervous when we started talking about lesbians… up until then, she had been very poised and sophisticated, but when we started talking about lesbians she couldn’t even look at us. She started blushing and fidgeting.”
Over a five year period, “Pennsylvania” wrote more than $100,000 in checks of $3,000 each, made out to differnt DOB members each time. Those checks, in turn were turned over to the national organization with Willer being the conduit through whom those checks flowed. “Pennsylvania’s” money was first used to turn the DOB’s newsletter The Ladder into a a slick, professionally typeset magazine available on newsstands. She also funded the establishment of new DOB chapters across the country, along with Willer’s travel expenses to get them started. Willer said, “There wasn’t an operating chapter of the Daughters that didn’t receive at least six thousand dollars to put toward a building fund or toward office expenses or toward publications. … Nobody was supposed to talk about our benefactor or what she did. And this woman will never take credit for her contribution to the movement, which amounted to more than one hundred thousand dollars. But she does have the satisfaction of being able to go down the street and see a couple of guys or a couple of girls walking hand in hand, and seeing the Mafia lose control of the gay bars, of seeing homosexuality become much more acceptable.”
But Willer’s traveling in those pre-cell phone/pre-Twitter/pre-text message days meant that members of already existing chapters weren’t able to reach her when problems arose. In 1968 when Philadelphia police raided a popular lesbian bar, the local DOB chapter could’t reach Willer to coordinate a response. The resulting inaction led to the fracturing of Philadelphia’s homopbile movement (see Aug 7). Another sticking point was the DOB’s official position against picketing, a controversial position which put Willer in a no-win situation. “This split between those who wanted to make noise and those who wanted to do things quietly affected me very directly,” she recalled in 1989. “During the second half of the 1960s, I was more and more at odds with the official position of DOB.”
It was increasingly clear that for the local chapters to thrive, they needed the freedom to quickly respond without having to gain approval from the national organization, particularly when the local chapters wanted to act outside of the DOB’s restrictive one-size-fits-all policies. Marion Glass (under the pseudonym Meredith Grey) proposed a massive reorganisation in the August 1968 issue of The Ladder. Under this proposal, all DOB chapters would be autonomous and the national organization’s sole role would be limited to publishing The Ladder. But there was a hitch: the change would require the approval of the membership, and that issue of The Ladder still had no announcement of where that year’s national DOB Convention would be held. When the DOB’s finally convened their biennial convention in Aurora, Colorado on short notice, only fifteen members showed up. With so few members on hand to make such a momentous decision, the group decided to defer until the next biennial cnvention in 1970.
Willer was frustrated by the delay and decided not to stand for re-election as the Daughters’ national president. She also withdrew from gay activism altogether, and with her witdrawal, “Pennsylvania’s” dollars stopped flowing as well. Two years later, the DOB did finally vote to disband its national organization and set all of its individual chapters free. But by then, it was too late: by then only a few DOB chapters remained, and The Ladder only had another couple of years before it too went belly-up. Meanwhile, Willer and Glass retired to Key West, Florida, where they ran a rock shop for tourists and became involved with the growing local LGBT community. Willer died on New Years Eve in 1999.
[Sources: Del Martin and PHyllis Lyon. “Shirley Willer (1922-1999).” In Vern L. Bullough’s Before Stonewall: Activists for Gay and Lesbian Rights in Historical Context
Eric Marcus. Making History: The Struggle for Gay and Lesbian Equal Rights: 1945-1990. An Oral History
Marcia M. Gallo. Different Daughters: A History of the Daughters of Bilitis and the Rise of the Lesbian Rights Movement
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?
September 25th, 2012
J. Edgar Hoover and Clyde Tolson at the San Deigo’s Del Mar Turf Club, 1947.
TODAY IN HISTORY:
J. Edgar Hoover’s Personal Interest in Gay Movements Revealed: 1984. An earlier cache of secret files detailing FBI surveillance on gay people had been released two years earlier (see September 9), but that release offered only a small glimpse of the magnitude of governmental spying. It would take an ACLU lawsuit on behalf of the International Gay and Lesbian Archives (now the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives) for the more important cache to be released under the Freedom of Information Act. That later release consisted of more than 5,800 papers, most of it very boring details of gay pride picnics and parades, and photocopies of magazines that were publicly sold on newsstands. Most documents focused on the Mattachine Society and ONE Magazine, the first openly gay magazine in America.
But one interesting set of papers revealed J. Edgar Hoover’s interest in the gay movement. According to a memo dated January 26, 1956, the Los Angeles field office had been asked to check on the November 1955 issue of ONE, which talked about gay people who worked for Time and The New Yorker. The LA field office concluded that the articles statement was “baseless” and recommended that “no reply be made.”
But scrawled in handwriting below the typewritten recommendation was the sentence, “I think we should take this crowd and make them ‘put up or shut up’.” Markings indicated that the handwritten statement was made by Hoover’s chief aide and lifelong special “friend” Clyde Tolson. Hoover and Tolson worked closely together in the day, ate all their meals together in the evening, were seen socializing in nightclubs, and took vacations together. When Hoover died in 1971, Tolson inherited Hoover’s estate, and accepted the flag that draped Hoover’s coffin. Tolson’s grave is just a few discrete yards away from Hoover’s in Congressional Cemetery.
Hoover also weighed in on the 1956 memo. Next to Tolson’s recommendation to keep the case files open and continue investigating was another inscription. “I concur,” it read, with the single letter “H” underneath. The next day, a telegram went to the Los Angeles office. “You are instructed to have two mature and experienced agents contact Freeman (the pseudonym for the article’s author), in the immediate future and tell him the bureau will not countenance such baseless charges appearing in this magazine, and for him to either ‘put up or shut up’.” It was signed, simply, “Hoover.”
TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Pedro Almodóvar: 1952. Born in a small town in La Mancha, the trajectory of his life was rather unremarkable in the late Franco era. He went to Catholic boarding school in preparation for the priesthood, but instead found his education in the local cinema. In 1967, he moved to Madrid with the goal of becoming a film director, but since Franco had just closed the National School of Cinema, Almodóvar got a job at the state telephone company where he worked for the next twelve years. But they weren’t wasted years; he also became involved with the underground experimental theater and cinema, learning his craft using a Super-8 camera he bought from his first paycheck from the phone company.
His first feature film didn’t come until 1980. Pepi, Luci, Bom y Otras Chicas del Montón (Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls on the Heap) was filmed on a shoestring budget by a team of volunteers working on the weekends. He later described the film as “full of defects. When a film has only one or two, it is considered an imperfect film, while when there is a profusion of technical flaws, it is called style. That’s what I said joking around when I was promoting the film, but I believe that that was closer to the truth.” Seventeen more films followed, most of them celebrating the sexy exhilaration of modern Spain. International fame came with Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, which established Almodóvar as a “women’s director” for his ability to solicit powerful performances from his actresses, which has brought about comparisons to George Cukor. It also introduced the world to Spanish actor Antonio Banderas. Banderas was featured again in 1990’s Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, a controversial film for its sadomasochistic theme which earned a controversial X-rating in the U.S.
The decade’s end brought increasing critical acclaim, with 1999’s All About My Mother (with Penélope Cruz) earning an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, 2002’s Talk to Her winning an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay and a Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film, and 2009’s Broken Embraces (this time starring Penélope Cruz) and 2011’s The Skin I Live In (starring Antonio Banderas) earning Golden Globe nominations. His next film, I”m So Excited, which Almodóvar describes as “a light, very light comedy,” is due for release in 2013.
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?
September 24th, 2012
TODAY’S AGENDA:
Supreme Court May Consider Hearing Prop 8, DOMA Appeals: Washington, DC. The U.S. Supreme Court had been scheduled to decide today whether they will hear the appeal of Hollingsworth v. Perry — the new name for the Perry v. Brown, which was previously Perry v. Schwarzenegger — which challenges the constitutionality of California’s Proposition 8. That state ban on same-sex marriage was declared unconstitutional in Federal District Court, and the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld that ban. If the Supreme Court declines to take the case, then Prop 8 would be overturned and Californian same-sex couples would be allowed to marry again. But if the Court decides to take the case, the earlier rulings will almost certainly be stayed until the court can settle the matter once and for all.
Also scheduled for consideration is Windsor v. USA, which challenges the constitutionality of Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act. As things stand right now, Section 3 of DOMA has been declared unconstitutional, and that decision has been upheld by the First U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
That said, there is some uncertainty as to whether the court will actually decided today whether to take up those cases. If they don’t decide today, the next conference to consider these challenges (and perhaps as many as four other DOMA challenges making their way to the Supreme Court) is scheduled for October 5. Some believe that the court may wait until then to consider all of the challenges related to same-sex marriage in one conference. If the Supreme Court decides to take either of the two cases under consideration today, then we will likely know about it tomorrow. But if the court decides to either reject the cases or hold them for later consideration, we won’t learn about their decision until October 1.
Supreme Court to Consider National Organization for Marriage’s Financial Disclosure Appeal: Washington, DC. The US Supreme Court has a fairly busy docket for today’s conference. In addition to the marriage cases above, another case of interest is NOM v. McKee, in which the lower courts have ruled that NOM is required to comply with Maine law, which requires that groups which raise and spend money in state election campaigns must organize as a political action committee for that activity and disclose those who donate more than $100 to those campaigns. The Court refused to consider an appeal earlier this year, but NOM is back with a slightly different approach to whether they must comply with Main’s law. If the Court refuses again, then NOM is back where it started from. If the court decides to take the case, we may know as early as tomorrow.
Supreme Court to Consider Appeal of Arizona’s Revocation of Domestic Partnership Benefits: Washington, D.C. When Republican Gov. Jan Brewer took over from Democrat Janet Napolitano, she wasted no time whatsoever in taking steps to revoke domestic partnership benefits for state employees which had been instituted by her predecessor. Equality advocates sued, and the lower courts have determined so far that the Governor’s actions, backed by a reactionary GOP-dominated legislature, violates the equal protection of same-sex couples. Arizona is appealing, and now the U.S. Supreme Court will decide today whether to take up the case.
TODAY IN HISTORY:
“Your Elongated Protruberance”: 1826. In May of 1826, Jeffrey Withers, a twenty-two year old law student at South Carolina College, wrote to his dear friend, James Hammond, 18, a letter which is both playful and quite frank about the physical nature of their relationship (see May 15). Hammond responded on June 3, but that letter appears to have been lost. Instead, what we do have is a follow-up letter from Withers which allude to that letter, which Withers praised for having “too much honesty of purpose” and in which Hammond, apparently, weighed the pros and cons of marriage. Withers’s reply to Hammond on September 24 went like this:
Your excellent Letter of 13 June arrived … a few weeks since … Here, where anything like a systematic course of thought, or of reading, is quite out of the question — such system as leaves no vacant, idle moments of painful vacuity, which invites a whole Kennel of treacherous passions to prey upon one’s vitals … the renovation of spirit which follows the appearance of a friend’s Letter — the diagram of his soul — is like a grateful shower from the cooling fountains of Heaven to reanimate drooping Nature. Whilst your letters are Transcripts of real–existing feeling, and are on that account peculiarly welcome — they at the same time betray too much honesty of purpose not to strike an harmonious chord in my mind. I have only to regret that, honesty of intention and even assiduity in excition [?] are far from being the uniform agents of our destiny here– However it must, at best, be only an a priori argument for us to settle the condemnation of the world, before we come in actual contact with it. This task is peculiarly appropriate to the acrimony of old age — and perhaps we had as well defer it, under the hope that we may reach a point, when ’twill be all that we can do–
l fancy, Jim, that your elongated protruberance –your fleshen pole — your [two Latin words; indecipherable] — has captured complete mastery over you — and I really believe, that you are charging over the pine barrens of your locality, braying, like an ass, at every she-male you can discover. I am afraid that you are thus prostituting the “image of God” and suggest that if you thus blasphemously essay to put on the form of a Jack — in this stead of that noble image — you will share the fate of Nebuchadnezzar of old. I should lament to hear of you feeding upon the dross of the pasture and alarming the country with your vociferations. The day of miracles may not be past, and the flaming excess of your lustful appetite may drag down the vengeance of supernal power. — And you’ll “be dam-d if you don’t marry “? — and felt a disposition to set down and gravely detail me the reasons of early marriage. But two favourable ones strike me now — the first is, that Time may grasp love so furiously as totally [?] to disfigure his Phiz. The second is, that, like George McDuffie, he may have the hap-hazzard of a broken backbone befal him, which will relieve him from the performance of affectual family-duty — & throw over the brow of his wife, should he chance to get one, a most foreboding glooming — As to the first, you will find many a modest good girl subject to the same inconvenience — and as to the second, it will only superinduce such domestic whirlwinds, as will call into frequent exercise rhetorical displays of impassioned Eloquence, accompanied by appropriate and perfect specimens of those gestures which Nature and feeling suggest. To get children, it is true, fulfills a department of social & natural duty — but to let them starve, or subject them to the alarming hazard of it, violates another of a most important character. This is the dilemma to which I reduce you — choose you this day which you will do …
Hammond, the young man of “flaming excess” and “lustful appetites” would, in his later years, become one of the South’s most prominent moralists and defenders of slavery. Hammond would indeed choose to marry, and through his wife he became the owner of a 10,000 acre plantation and 220 slave. Hammond’s arguments in support of that “peculiar institution” of slavery were highly influential, and led ultimately to his state becoming the first state in the South to secede at the start of the Civil War. He was, over the course of his career, Governor, Congressman and Senator from South Carolina. Withers also reached a measure of prominence as a journalist and “nullifier,” a lawyer and as a judge of the South Carolina Court of Appeals.
[From Martin Duberman, “‘Writhing Bedfellows’: 1826.” Journal of Homosexuality 6, no. 1 (1981): 85-101. Also available online here.]
A candlelight vigil at the Backstreet Cafe following the shooting.
Mass Shooting in Gay Bar Kills One, Injures Six: 2000. Ronald Edward Gay spent his entire life hearing jokes about his surname. A former Vietnam vet, he become an alcohol and drug abuser, and had just been divorced for the sixth time. His children changed their last names, he claimed, to escape the jokes. So when he finally had had enough, he decided to turn it around and take it out not on his tormentors, but on those who he believed had ruined his name. On September 24, 2000, the fifty-three-year-old drifter walked into the Backstreet Cafe in Roanoke, Virginia, pulled a 9mm handgun from his black trench coat and opened fire. One of the bar’s patrons, Anna Sparks, described the terror. “The guy was standing there with a trench coat on, and the gun was going pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, and people were falling over everywhere, trying to get behind booths. He just stood there for a couple of seconds, then lowered the gun and walked out like nothing had happened.” When the shooting spree ended, Danny Lee Overstreet, 43, was dead in a pool of blood and six others were injured, one critically.
Danny Lee Overstreet (left), Ronald Edward Gay (right)
Gay had been at a different bar earlier that night asking where the city’s nearest gay bar was, telling patrons he wanted to shoot some gay people. One person gave him directions and then called the police, who arrived at the Backstreet Cafe shortly after the shooting. They found Gay about two blocks away. “He said he was shooting people to get rid of, in his term, ‘faggots,'” Lieutenant William Althoff of the Roanoke police was quoted as saying. He told authorities that he became obsessed with fulfilling four “missions”: to stop corruption, to stop communism, the bring all Vietnam vets “out of the mountains”, and to stop the spread of AIDS by forcing all gay people to move to San Francisco. Gay pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and six malicious wounding charges and on July 23, 2001 was given to four life sentences.
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?
September 23rd, 2012
TODAY’S AGENDA:
Pride Celebrations This Weekend: St. Cloud, MN; Sunderland, UK.
AIDS Walks This Weekend: Amherst, NS; Brampton, ON; Calgary, AB; Catham, ON; Corner Brook, NL; Dryden, ON; East Lansing, MI; Edmonton, AB; Ft. McMurray, AB;Halifax, NS; Moncton, NB; New Glasgow, NS; New Hope, CA; Niagara, ON; Oklahoma City, OK; Portland, OR; Red Deer, AB; Regina, SA; St. Catharines, ON; St. John, NB; St. Johns, NL; Thunder Bay, ON; Toronto, ON; Traverse City, MI; Truro, NS; Vancouver, BC; Windsor, ON; Winnipeg, MB.
Other Events This Weekend: Everybody’s Perfect LGBTIQ Film Festival, Geneva, Switzerland; Queer Lisboa Film Festival, Lisbon, Portugal; OctoBEARfest, Munich, Germany; Queer Fest 2012, St. Petersburg, Russia; Folsom Street Fair, San Francisco, CA.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
George C. Wolfe: 1954. The playwright and director grew up in Frankfort, Kentucky, where he first pursued his theater interests in high school. After college, he taught for several years in Los Angeles in New York, and earned an MFA in dramatic writing and musical theater at New York University. He began to gain national attention for the 1991 musical Jelly’s Last Jam, a story about jazz musician Jelly Roll Morton, which received eleven Tony nominations. In 1993, he directed Tony Kushner’s Angels in America: Millennium Approaches, which won a Tony for best play that year. He also directed the sequel Perestroika the following year.
In 1995, Wolfe created Bring In ‘da Noise, Bring In ‘da Funk at the Off-Broadway New York Shakespeare Festival/Public Theater, and took it to Broadway the following year. The musical tells the story, through tap dance, video montages, and commentary, of Black history from slavery to the present. The New York Times called it “beautiful and the dancing exuberant, but Funk is serious business, with vicious, funny send-ups of Uncle Tomism in Hollywood.” Bring In ‘da Noise received nine Tony nominations; the production won four Tony’s, including Wolfe’s for Best Direction of a Musical.
Wolfe continues to direct plays, including Tony Kushner’s Caroline, or Change and a 2011 Broadway revival of Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart, which won a Tony for Best Revival.
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?
September 22nd, 2012
TODAY’S AGENDA (Ours):
Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Austin, TX; Burlington, VT; Derbyshire, UK; Enid, OK; Holyoke, MA; Nelson Mandela Bay, South Africa; St. Cloud, MN; Spartanburg, SC; Sunderland, UK.
AIDS Walks This Weekend: Amherst, NS; Bay City, MI; Brampton, ON; Calgary, AB; Catham, ON; Corner Brook, NL; Dryden, ON; East Lansing, MI; Edmonton, AB; Flint, MI; Ft. McMurray, AB; Fredericton, NB; Grande Prairie, AB; Halifax, NS; Happy Valley/Goose Bay, NL; Kamloops, BC; Kingston, ON; Moncton, NB; Namaimo, BC; New Glasgow, NS; New Hope, CA; Oshawa, ON; Niagara, ON; Oklahoma City, OK; Portland, OR; Prince George, BC; Red Deer, AB; Regina, SA; St. Catharines, ON; St. John, NB; St. Johns, NL; San Antonio, TX; Seattle, WA; Smithers, BC; Sydney, NSW; Thunder Bay, ON; Toronto, ON; Traverse City, MI; Truro, NS; Vancouver, BC; Windsor, ON; Winnipeg, MB.
Other Events This Weekend: Everybody’s Perfect LGBTIQ Film Festival, Geneva, Switzerland; Queer Lisboa Film Festival, Lisbon, Portugal; Gay Day at LA County Fair, Los Angeles,CA; OctoBEARfest, Munich, Germany; Queer Fest 2012, St. Petersburg, Russia; Folsom Street Fair, San Francisco, CA; Out In the Park Six Flags, Springfield, MA.
TODAY’S AGENDA (Theirs):
Restored Hope Network Conference: Fair Oaks, CA. Exodus International, the main network of Evangelical-aligned ex-gay ministries, has been undergoing tremendous changes over the past year. Those changes began last January when Exodus president Alan Chambers acknowledged that, “the majority of people that I have met, and I would say the majority meaning 99.9% of them, have not experienced a change in their orientation.” That acknowledgment along had a host of ex-gay leaders howling. Their howls rose to shrieks when Chambers suggested that he might run into a few gay Christians in heaven. And so for the past several months, there has been a steady exodus from Exodus of some of the more hard-line members of the Exodus network, and many of them have formed a rival group they’re calling the Restored Hope Network. Sadly for them, all of the good easy-to-remember domain names based on “restored hope” have all been taken, so all this new baby network has is a Facebook page. Fortunately, you don’t have to “like” them to find out that they are in quite a rush to sign up every ministry they can dig out of the woodpile to become part of their network. They plan on showing off their network at their first conference this weekend in the Sacramento area, at Sunrise Community Church in Fair Oaks. It began last night, but the main portion takes place through the day today from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m..
Exodus International’s Love Won Out Conference: Harrisburg, PA. While Restored Hope is holding their little coming-out party — so to speak — Exodus International is holding its one-day Love Won Out conference in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. This conference is more of a traveling roadshow, a kind of an ex-gay 101 introductory session into what Exodus has to offer rather than a conference geared toward people who are already in the ex-gay movement. If past is any indication, most of those attending the conference are likely to be parents and family members of gay people, rather than gay people themselves. Exodus has been retooling its message since last fall, and the agenda for this conference seems to reflect that retooling. It also seems to have been scaled back in scope compared to previous Love Won Out conferences. In the past, Exodus typically puts on about a half a dozen conferences this year, but if I’m not mistaken, this is the only Love Won Out to be scheduled for this year after an Albuquerque event was cancelled last spring. Love Won Out will take place today at Westshore Church in Mechanicsville, Pennsylvania, just outside of Harrisburg.
Evergreen International Regional Conference: Salt Lake City, UT. Not to be outdone by all of this ex-gay activity, Evergreen International, the Mormon ex-gay organization, is also holding a conference today. Evergreen appears to be either scaling back its activities or making itself much less visible — Transparency has never been its strong suit, so it’s hard to tell the difference. This time last year, they held an annual conference at the Joseph Smith Memorial Building Salt Lake City with a featured talk by LDS elder Jay Jensen, of the First Quorum of the Seventy. But this year, things appear to be much lower key. Evergreen appears to have abandoned its old website and started afresh at thessavoice.com (The SSA Voice, with “SSA” a pseudo-clinical sounding acronym for “same-sex attraction.) And instead of holding an annual conference, this year Evergreen is holding four regional conferences, with the Salt Lake Area conference taking place today followed by a devotional tomorrow. Today’s conference consists of just three all-day workshops: “Becoming a whole man,” “The gift of growth” and “The dance of marriage.” Make of that what you will.
TODAY IN HISTORY:
Senator Lashes Out at “Wreckers and Destroyers”: 1954. In the past decade, we’ve seen each successive election year bring with it worse examples of character assassination, blatant bold-faced lies, and other examples of negative campaign tactics than ever before. Each time, it just seems to get worse, and we often wish we could turn back the clock to a more innocent and civil time when Americans could always find a way to get along regardless of their differences. You know, like in the 1950s.
Yeah, like in the 1950s, when Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) was labeling his political enemies radical communists and “sexual perverts.” And when Sen. Everett M. Dirksen (R-IL), who was then serving as the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee for the upcoming 1954 mid-term elections, declared during a meeting of 1,100 Republican women that “never were the destroyers and traitors in government so busy” as during the 20 years of Democratic rule from 1933 to 1953. He told the women that since then, Republicans like himself and McCarthy (who was Dirksen’s political ally during the previous four years) were left to root out “the wreckers and destroyers, the security risks and homosexuals, the blabbermouths and drunks, the traitors and saboteurs.” It’s 2012, and another election is upon us. And sadly, some things never change.
It is important to note though that ten years later, Sen. Dirksen, who by then was Senate Minority Leader, played a crucial role in delivering enough Republican votes to break an 83-day filibuster by southern Democrats and pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The press hailed Dirksen’s selfless bipartisanship for making possible one of the Johnson Administration’s signature pieces of legislation. Some things never change, but other things do.
Oliver Sipple pushes Sara Jane Moore as she fired as shot at President Ford. (Click to enlarge.)
Gay Man Saves President Ford’s Life: 1975. President Gerald Ford was in San Francisco to deliver a luncheon speech to a foreign affairs group at the St. Francis Hotel. Outside, Oliver Sipple, an ex-Marine Vietnam veteran, was in a crowd of about 3,000 people waiting for Ford to exit the building. Standing next to Sipple was Sara Jane Moore, although they didn’t know each other. Moore, ironically, was also working as an FBI informant, where she provided information on illegal firearms purchases. Earlier that day, she called federal authorities threatening to “test” Ford’s security, but she was ignored. The day before, San Francisco police picked her up on a misdemeanor charge of carrying a concealed weapon, but they released her after federal authorities stepped in and said they would handle the matter. The Secret Service interviewed her that night, but let her go.
So there she was, and as Ford left the hotel, Moore pulled a .38 Smith & Wesson revolver from her purse, pointed it at the President, and fired a shot. As she fired, Sipple reached out and grabbed her arm. Her shot missed Ford by just five feet. It was the second assassination attempt in a month — nearly thee weeks earlier, a follower of mass murderer Charles Manson had tried to take a shot at him in Sacramento. That time, the gun didn’t fire. This time it did, and Sipple was a hero. “All I did was react,” he said. “I’m glad I was there. If it’s true I saved the President’s life, then I’m damn happy about it. But I honestly feel that if I hadn’t reached out for that arm, somebody else would have.”
Sipple had been a fixture in San Francisco’s gay community for several years. He was friends with Harvey Milk, and worked on Milk’s first unsuccessful attempt at winning a seat on the city’s Board of Supervisors. He was out to his friends, but closeted to his family in Detroit. Milk and other gay writers in San Francisco saw Sipple’s heroism as a perfect moment to gain some positive visibility for the gay community, but Sipple asked the press to keep his sexuality off the record. Nevertheless, The San Francisco Chronicle’s Herb Caen broke the story and it was soon picked up by wire services. Sipple’s Baptist mother publicly disowned him, and he soon found himself besieged by reporters. Sipple sued The Chronicle, Caen, and several other newspapers for invasion of privacy, but lost. The courts ruled that he had become a public figure on the day of the assassination attempt, and that his sexual orientation was part of the story.
Sipple, who was on psychological disability because of wounds suffered in Vietnam, declined in the years following the assassination attempt. He drank heavily, became obese, and expressed regret for grabbing Moore’s gun. He died, alone, of pneumonia in his Tenderloin District apartment in 1989.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Hans Scholl: 1918. Like all German children, he joined the Hitler Youth in 1933, where he quickly became a squad leader in charge of 150 boys. He also formed a special elite squad to train other future leaders in the movement. Reflecting, perhaps, his own growing apprehensions about the Nazi movement, his training squad became quite unorthodox. Based on a soon-to-be outlawed Deutsche Jungenschaft, Scholl’s squad took a decidedly irreverent stance. A favorite joke within the group was to ask, “What is an Aryan?” The answer was, “Blond like Hitler, tall like Goebbels, and slim like Goering.” After the Nazis launched a crackdown on dissent, Scholl’s squad was disbanded and several members were arrested. It was during those interrogations that authorities learned that Scholl was gay. He was brought up on charges of violating paragraph 175, Germany’s longstanding law prohibiting homosexuality between men. This time, Scholl was lucky: the judged dismissed Scholl’s relationship with another squad member as “a youthful failing” and acquitted him of all charges.
Scholl and his younger sister, Sophie, both became committed anti-Nazis. As war broke out, Hans was studying medicine in Munich, and Sophie joined him there to study biology and philosophy in 1941. Her boyfriend, Fritz Hartnagel, was an officer in the Wehrmacht fighting on the eastern front. Through extensive letter exchanges between Fritz and Sophie, historians have been able to piece together Sophie’s growing pacifism and Fritz’s alarm over the participation of German soldiers in mass killings of Jews and other atrocities. Meanwhile, Hans and two other students began a pacifist resistance movement called the White Rose, where they co-authored six anti-Nazi leaflets. When Sophie learned of her brother’s activities, she joined the group, which would grow to about a dozen members. As a woman, she was much less likely to be stopped by police while carrying stacks of leaflets to be distributed in several cities and through the mails.
Left to right: White Rose members Hans Scholl, Sophie Scholl and Christoph Probst.
In the summer of 1942, Hans and some of the other members of the White Rose was deployed to the Eastern Front to act as medics during the university’s summer break. When they returned, the group resumed its leafleting campaign, producing between 6,000 and 9,000 copies of their fifth leaflet, written by Hans and titled “Appeal to All Germans!”, using a hand-cranked duplicating machine. The leaflet warned that Hitler was leading Germany to ruin and urged the people to join the struggle for “freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and protection of the individual citizen from the arbitrary action of criminal dictator-states.” The sixth leaflet was written by Christoph Probst after the German defeat at Stalingrad, and announced that the day of reckoning was about to come for “the most contemptible tyrant our people has ever endured.” It was while the group was dumping thousands of those leaflets around the University of Munich that a custodian spotted Hans and Sophie. They were arrested and interrogated, along with several other members of the group. On February 22, 1943, Hans, Sophie and Probst were found guilty of treason and sentenced to death.
The sentence was carried out that very same day by guillotine at Stadelheim Prison. Sophie was first to be executed. Before the blade fell, she shouted, “The sun is still shining!” Hans’s last words were “Es lebe die Freiheit!” — Long live freedom! Over the next few weeks, other White Rose members were rounded up and were either executed or sent to prison camps. But the last word would be left for the White Rose itself. Copies of that last leaflet were smuggled out of Germany and handed to the Allies, who then air-dropped millions of copies all over Germany, ensuring that the White Rose would remain an unforgettable part of German history.
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?
September 21st, 2012
TODAY’S AGENDA (Ours):
Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Austin, TX; Burlington, VT; Derbyshire, UK; Enid, OK; Holyoke, MA; Nelson Mandela Bay, South Africa; St. Cloud, MN; Spartanburg, SC; Sunderland, UK.
AIDS Walks This Weekend: Amherst, NS; Bay City, MI; Brampton, ON; Calgary, AB; Catham, ON; Corner Brook, NL; Dryden, ON; East Lansing, MI; Edmonton, AB; Flint, MI; Ft. McMurray, AB; Fredericton, NB; Grande Prairie, AB; Halifax, NS; Happy Valley/Goose Bay, NL; Kamloops, BC; Kingston, ON; Moncton, NB; Moricetown, BC (Today); Namaimo, BC; New Glasgow, NS; New Hope, CA; Oshawa, ON; Niagara, ON; Oklahoma City, OK; Portland, OR; Prince George, BC; Red Deer, AB; Regina, SA; St. Catharines, ON; St. John, NB; St. Johns, NL; San Antonio, TX; Seattle, WA; Smithers, BC; Sydney, NSW; Thunder Bay, ON; Toronto, ON; Traverse City, MI; Truro, NS; Vancouver, BC; Windsor, ON; Winnipeg, MB.
Other Events This Weekend: Everybody’s Perfect LGBTIQ Film Festival, Geneva, Switzerland; Queer Lisboa Film Festival, Lisbon, Portugal; Gay Day at LA County Fair, Los Angeles,CA; OctoBEARfest, Munich, Germany; Queer Fest 2012, St. Petersburg, Russia; Folsom Street Fair, San Francisco, CA; Out In the Park Six Flags, Springfield, MA.
TODAY’S AGENDA (Theirs):
Eagle Forum Council: St. Louis, MO. Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum will gather for their 41st annual Eagle Council beginning this afternoon at the St. Louis Hilton Frontenac and will continue through Sunday. Rep. Todd Akin (R-MO) who is currently running for the U.S. Senate, will be there. I can only assume he’s there to thrill the crowd with a discussion of what “legitimate rape” is all about. Also speaking at the event is Pam Tebow, wife mother of a mediocre NFL quarterback; Ted Cruz, a former Texas Solicitor General who is also running for the U.S. Senate; Elane Donnelly, who is still trying to figure out how to stay relevant now that “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” is over and done with; and Wisconsin Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kelfis.
TODAY IN HISTORY:
San Francisco Police Raid the Alamo Club: 1956. The raid on the Alamo Club (also popularly known as Kelly’s) could have been just another raid by San Francisco’s police on just another gay or lesbian club. As raids go, it wasn’t particularly remarkable. Thirty-six women were arrested during the Friday night raid, hauled to the city jail, and booked on charges of frequenting a house of ill repute, which was a rather typical charge that was levied against gay bar patrons in the 1950s and 1960s. They were held over the weekend until the following Monday, when they were finally brought before a judge. All but four pleaded guilty; that, too, was typical. While the charge was frequenting a house of ill-repute, many of those arrested that night undoubtedly believed they were actually guilty of the anti-prostitution law simply because being a lesbian itself also held quite a lot of “ill-repute” in society. Pleading guilty also had its practical merits: it meant no trial and no jail sentence. Just pay a fine and you’re on your way.
If anything was different about this raid, it was made different because the Daughers of Bilitis had decided to begin publishing a newsletter in October. The Ladder’s second issue in November included a very brief account of the raid at Kelly’s — about as brief as what I just described — while lamenting that only four of those arrested chose to plead not guilty. “We feel that this was not due to actual guilt on the part of those so pleading but to an apalling (sic) lack of knowledge of the rights of a citizen in such a case.” The Ladder reported that the raid was the topic for the DoB’s October 23 discussion meeting where a local attorney, Benjamin Davis, volunteered to speak on “The Lesbian and the law,” with special emphasis on citizen’s rights in case of arrest. And in a separate article in that same newsletter, The Ladder urged “positive and constructive action” in response to the raid:
Certainly there is a marked reaction of fear and retrenchment among the Lesbian population of San Francisco after the recent raid… A paralyzing fear has been heaped puon an ever-present dread of detection. The persecuted are seeking cover once again. The innocent are convinced of their guilt. The tolerant became intolerant of their fellows. Growth is stultified by a sludge of misunderstanding.
Where will it lead? To a miserable half-existence of apprehension, self-pity, cynicism, hopelessness and paralysis? In some cases, perhaps.
BUT THIS NEED NOT BE! NOT IF REACTION IS REPLACED BY ACTION — POSITIVE AND CONSTRUCTIVE ACTION!
In the days before Miranda v Arizona, the 1966 Supreme Court case which required that arresting officers brief those under arrest their rights (“You have the right to remain silent…), police often took advantage of suspects’ ignorance of the law. The following month, The Ladder reported on the attorney’s talk with an article boldly titled “Citizen’s Rights,” reporting that Davis emphasized the points that a decade later would become part of the mandatory statement every arresting officer must make when placing a suspect under arrest.
“DON’T PLEAD GUILTY” was the recurrent theme that was sounded by San Francisco attorney, Ben Davis at the first public discussion meeting held by this organization in October. Mr. Davis stresses three primary rules to remember if ever arrested: Don’t plead guilty; call your attorney; don’t volunteer information — in fact, don’t talk to anyone about anything.
And to drive the point home, The Ladder reprinted a list of specific rights that are guaranteed to everyone under arrest. Because most people in the 1950s were probably unaware of their rights, The Mattachine Review had published an identical list eight months earlier for its mostly male gay readers who were targets for police entrapment. The list, formulated by “the National Association for Sex Research, Inc., Hollywood, Calif.”, included these thirteen points:
CITIZEN’S RIGHTS IN CASE OF ARREST
1. An officer cannot arrest you without a warrant unless you have committed a crime in his presence or he has reasonable grounds to believe that you have committed a felony. (Calif. PC 836)
2. If he has a warrant, ask to see it and read it carefully. If you are arrested without a warrant, ask what the charge is.
3. You are not required to answer any questions. You may, but do not have to give your name and address. If you are accused of a crime of which you are innocent, deny the charge. Go along, but under protest. Do not resist physically.
4. Do not sign anything. Take the badge numbers of the arresting officers.
5. If you are taken to jail, ask when you are booked what the charges are and whether they are misdemeanor or felony charges.
6. Insist on using the telephone to contact your lawyer or family.
7. You have the right to be released on bail for most offenses. Have your attorney make the arrangements or ask for a bail bondsman.
8. After an arrest without a warrant, a person must without unnecessary delay, be taken before the most accessible magistrate in the area where the arrest is made. The magistrate must hear the complaint and set bail. (Calif. PC 849)
9. Report any instances of police brutality which you observe to your attorney.
10. If you do not have an attorney by the time you are brought before a judge to plead, ask for additional time to obtain an attorney; or if this is not possible, plead not guilty and demand a jury trial.
11. You are entitled to a written statement of the charges against you before you are required to enter a plea.
12. You are not required to testify againat yourself in any trial or hearing. (5th Amendment, U.S. Constitution)
13. If you are questioned by any law enforcement officer including the FBI, remember that you are not required to answer any questions concerning yourself or others. (5th Amendment, U.S. Constitution)
[Sources: Unsigned articles, The Ladder 1, no. 2 (November 1956): 5, 8.
Unsigned. “Citizen’s Rights.” The Ladder 1, no. 3 (December 1956): 2-3.
Unsigned. “A Citizen’s Rights In Case of Arrest.” Mattachine Review 2, no 2 (April 1956): 51.]
Amanda Bearse Comes Out Of the Closet: 1993. The Married… With Children star made headlines across the country when she became the first prime time actress to come out of the closet. Rumors about her sexuality had been floating around in the tabloids since 1991, but she wasn’t ready to deal with it. “The day I was outed was the anniversary of my brother’s death. I had woken up that morning thinking about my brother, and in the grand scheme of things, being outed didn’t matter.”
She came out under her own steam two years later in an interview with The Advocate. “I would love this interview to be the impetus for someone else to come forward,” she told reporter Steve Greenberg. “There are numerous celebrities, gay and straight, who contribute to our community. That buys us a lot of political power. I have friends who are more active who have… respected my pace. I guess with this interview I’ve stepped on the gas.”
Older, and presumably with more insurance.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Fannie Flagg: 1944. Born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama, Patricia Neal quickly discovered when she began her acting career that she would’t be able to use her perfectly good birth name — the other already famous Patricia Neal had won an Academy Award for Best Actress in 1963. So at her grandfather’s and best friend’s suggestions, she became Fannie Flagg. She broke into doing local commercials and then became the host for a local morning television program.
Acting quickly gave way to comedy and writing, and in 1964 she joined Alan Funt’s Candid Camera as a staff writer. Her southern charm and sharp wit soon landed her spots on Password and the Match Game. She performed on Broadway and in a few mobies, but perhaps her most interesting acting gig was as the beard for then-closeted Bewitched star Dick Sargent (see Apr 19); they were supposedly engaged to be married and were even introduced on the game show Tattletales by host Bert Convey as “Dick Sargent and his lady, Fannie Flagg.” Fannie herself was outed by her longtime lover, Rita Mae Brown, after the couple split in the late 1970s.
When the 1980s rolled around, Flagg turned more seriously to writing, which she describes as her first love. But that meant that she had to confront a huge hurdle — her severe dyslexia. She gave up her public appearances to focus on writing, and she very nearly became financially destitute in the process. The result was worth it though; her best-known novel, 1987’s Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe: A Novel
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?
September 20th, 2012
TODAY’S AGENDA:
Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Austin, TX; Burlington, VT; Derbyshire, UK; Enid, OK; Holyoke, MA; Nelson Mandela Bay, South Africa; St. Cloud, MN; Spartanburg, SC; Sunderland, UK.
AIDS Walks This Weekend: Amherst, NS; Bay City, MI; Brampton, ON; Calgary, AB; Catham, ON; Corner Brook, NL; Dryden, ON; East Lansing, MI; Edmonton, AB; Flint, MI; Ft. McMurray, AB; Fredericton, NB; Grande Prairie, AB; Halifax, NS; Happy Valley/Goose Bay, NL; Kamloops, BC; Kingston, ON; Moncton, NB; Moricetown, BC (Tomorrow); Namaimo, BC; New Glasgow, NS; New Hope, CA; Oshawa, ON; Niagara, ON; Oklahoma City, OK; Portland, OR; Prince George, BC; Red Deer, AB; Regina, SA; St. Catharines, ON; St. John, NB; St. Johns, NL; San Antonio, TX; Seattle, WA; Smithers, BC; Sydney, NSW; Thunder Bay, ON; Toronto, ON; Traverse City, MI; Truro, NS; Vancouver, BC; Victoria, BC (Today); Windsor, ON; Winnipeg, MB.
Other Events This Weekend: Everybody’s Perfect LGBTIQ Film Festival, Geneva, Switzerland; Queer Lisboa Film Festival, Lisbon, Portugal; Gay Day at LA County Fair, Los Angeles,CA; OctoBEARfest, Munich, Germany; Queer Fest 2012, St. Petersburg, Russia; Folsom Street Fair, San Francisco, CA; Out In the Park Six Flags, Springfield, MA.
Triangulator In Chief
TODAY IN HISTORY:
President Clinton Announces Signing of DOMA Into Law: 1996. President Clinton announced his signing of the so-called Defense of Marriage Act, which outlaws federal recognition of same-sex marriage, and allows states to ignore the Full Faith and Credit Clause of the U.S Constitution when they want to refuse to recognized valid marriages from other states. Clinton said that he signed DOMA to head off a federal constitutional amendment, but LGBT advocates grumbled that the act was less a defense of marriage and more a defense of his 1996 reelection campaign. Those suspicions were confirmed when the Clinton campaign released a radio ad bragging about his signing of DOMA and ran it on Christian radio stations across the country. In response to loud protests from LGBT advocates, the Clinton campaign pulled that ad two days later.
Serving, defending.
DADT Repeal Goes Into Effect: 2011. It was an joyous celebration for the nation’s LGBT military service personnel when at the stroke of midnight, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was finally tossed into the dustbin of history where it rightfully belongs. One servicemember stationed in Germany famously came out to his father — and to his unit — via YouTube. Another Navy officer married his partner at precisely one minute after midnight, and the co-founder of OutServe, “J.D. Smith” came out and revealed that he was actually Air Force First Lieutenant Josh Seefried. Naturally, not everyone welcomed the breath of fresh air. The Family “Research” Council predicted that the demise of the ban on gays serving openly would lead to a rash of “new victims of sexual harassment or assault, the soldiers exposed to HIV-tainted blood, the thousands of servicemembers who choose not to reenlist rather than forfeit their freedom of speech and religion, and the untold number of citizens who choose never to join the military.” We’re still waiting for word on any of that happening.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Harold “Hal” Call: 1917. Born and raised in Missouri, Call knew that he was gay from the age of twelve. But when he was inducted into the Army during World War II, he knew that sex would be out of the question. “If people were caught engaging in homosexual acts, some of them were shipped back to the states with less-than-honorable discharges. I thought it was a waste.” He went through Officer Candidate School and was promoted to Lieutenant before being shipped to the Pacific Theater. As an officer, if he had encountered people who were gay, he would have had to ship them back home. But his approach was of a don’t-ask-don’t-tell variety. “Who was harmed? Nobody,” he recalled later. “That’s the way the armed forces should look at it. The armed forces could not operate without homosexuals. Never could. Never has. Never will.” He was wounded and received the Purple Heart, and left the Army as a captain in 1945.
He returned to Missouri and worked at several newspapers including the Kansas City Star. In August of 1952, he went to Chicago, where he and three friends were arrested for “lewd conduct.” After paying an $800 bribe, the charges were dismissed, but he was fired from the Star when his supervisor found out. So he and his boyfriend at the time packed up the car and moved to San Francisco, where Call quickly became involved with the Mattachine Society. He began attending meetings in February, and quickly rocketed up to the top leadership.
It turns out that 1953 was a pivotal year for the group, which had been founded as something of a secret society. Unfortunately, that secrecy inhibited the Mattachine’s growth. Part of the secrecy was an outgrowth of some of the Society’s original founders, some of whom (Harry Hay, in particular), had been members of the Communist Party. That secrecy — and those early connections — opened a wedge between the founders and many of the newcomers like Call, with many of the newcomers fearing where the founders might take the organization. As Call later recalled:
“Public protests were not part of our program. Not at all. we wanted to see changes come about by holding conferences and discussions and becoming subjects for research and telling our story. We wanted to assist people in the academic and behavioral-science world in getting the truth out to people who had an influence on law and law enforcement, the courts, justice, and so on.”
Everything came to a head in the summer of 1953. Many in the old guard, including Hay, realized that their time had come to an end and that it was in the Mattachine’s best interest to leave the underground and come up for air. The old guard resigned, and Call became president of the Society. It may seem ironic, then, that the “conservative takeover” of the society would lead to its leader being among the most publicly visible homosexuals in the country. In 1954, Call created and edited the Mattachine Review, and he founded Pan-Graphic Press, a publishing and book service company that became the Mattachine Review’s printer. Chronically underfunded, the Society nevertheless had a number of public relations successes, largely due to Call’s persistence. In 1961, Call appeared on a documentary program produced by San Francisco’s Public Television station KQED called “The Rejected” (see Sep 11), And in 1964 when Life magazine wanted to do a photographic spread on the gay community in the San Francisco area (see Jun 26), Call made the arrangements with local bar owners for the photo shoots.
Hall Call, in the upstairs office of the Circle J Cinema. (1999)
Mattachine business wasn’t Call’s only interest. In the 1960s, Call’s Pan-Graphic Press printed a bar directory that had been compiled by a local bar owner by the name of Bob Damron, and anyone who knows anything about Damron’s Address Book knows the rest of that story. Call also became involved in local porn production (both in print and in 16mm film) and became the owner of a few private sex clubs in the Bay area.
Those interests soon surpassed his work in the Mattachine Society. It had already ceased to exist as a national organization in 1961, although several independent groups in several cities continued to use the Mattachine name well up into the 1970s. One of those surviving Societies was Call’s outfit, which continued in name only into the 1990s, when Call described it as “in limbo. It has a board of directors, and I’m the head queen, but we don’t have the strength of a powder puff.” Call’s energies, by then, was devoted to running the Circle J Cinema in San Francisco’s tenderloin district, a theater which was exactly what you would imagine a theater with that name to be.
Over his lifetime, Call amassed over 5,000 gay men’s sex videos and films, and he was an outspoken advocate for sexual freedom. He died in San Francisco in 2000. His papers are part of the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives in Los Angeles.
[Source: Eric Marcus. Making History: The Struggle for Gay and Lesbian Equal Rights. An Oral History. (New York: HarperCollins, 1992): 59-69.]
Rocking the Paradise
Chuck Panozzo: 1948. Do you remember the band Styx? I’m not sure how much play they get on classic rock radio these days, but they were huge from the mid-1970s to the early 1980s. They were my favorite band in high school; I thought 1977’s The Grand Illusion was, you know, so deep. Anyway, basist Chuck Panozzo co-founded the band with his fraternal twin brother, John Panozzo. In 2001, Chuck came out as gay and as a person living with HIV, and since then he has been involved with AIDS awareness campaigns. His autobiography, The Grand Illusion: Love, Lies, and My Life with Styx
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?
September 19th, 2012
TODAY’S AGENDA:
Southern Comfort Conference: Atlanta, GA. Southern Comfort Conference, which takes place every year in Atlanta, is the world’s largest transgender social, educational, and entertainment conference. Southern Comfort began on Wednesday and continues through the weekend. For the past 22 years, it has provided the transgender community with a place to meet and discuss issues directly relevant to the community, and to just have some fun and catch up on friendships along the way. The five-day conference begins today at the Crowne Plaza Hotel | Atlanta Perimeter at Ravinia.
National Black Justice Coaliiton’s OUT On the Hill Black LGBT Leadership Summit: Washington, D.C. The National Black Justice Coalition convenes its third annual OUT On the HIll summit today. The focus this year is to make an expanded effort in recruiting emerging Black LGBT leaders to “educate our Congressional leaders, the Obama Administration and federal agencies on public policy concerns of Black LGBT people and our families.” This year’s conference includes participation in the Black LGBT Leaders Day at the White House this afternoon and an opportunity to participate in the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s Annual Legislative Conference (CBCF-ALC) on Saturday. OUT on the Hill is being held at the Washington Marriott Wardman Park and continues through Saturday.
Gay and Lesbian Medical Association Conference: San Francisco, CA. Clinicians, researchers, public health professionals and policymakers will convene today in San Francisco for the thirtieth annual GLMA Conference. Topics presented at the conference include clinical health and primary care issues, education and training, health policy and public health programs, emerging LGBT health issues, health disparities, model programs and other original research. The conference kicks off today with a Welcome reception, with a full schedule beginning tomorrow and lasting through Sunday.
Africa Sexual Health and Rights Conference: Windhoek, Namibia. The 5th Africa Conference on Sexual Health and Rights will meet to evaluate status of sexual health and rights, with particular focus on women, girls, adolescents and youth, and will include discussions on the problems faced by Africa’s LGBT communities. The conference is being hosted by the Namibia Planned Parenthood Association (NAPPA), an affiliate member of the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) under the auspices of the African Federation for Sexual Health and Rights. The three day conference will continue through Saturday.
Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Austin, TX; Burlington, VT; Derbyshire, UK; Enid, OK; Holyoke, MA; Nelson Mandela Bay, South Africa; St. Cloud, MN; Spartanburg, SC; Sunderland, UK.
AIDS Walks This Weekend: Amherst, NS; Bay City, MI; Brampton, ON; Calgary, AB; Catham, ON; Corner Brook, NL; Dryden, ON; East Lansing, MI; Edmonton, AB; Flint, MI; Ft. McMurray, AB; Fredericton, NB; Grande Prairie, AB; Halifax, NS; Happy Valley/Goose Bay, NL; Kamloops, BC; Kingston, ON; Moncton, NB; Moricetown, BC (Friday); Namaimo, BC; New Glasgow, NS; New Hope, CA; Oshawa, ON; Niagara, ON; Oklahoma City, OK; Portland, OR; Prince George, BC; Red Deer, AB; Regina, SA; St. Catharines, ON; St. John, NB; St. Johns, NL; San Antonio, TX; Seattle, WA; Smithers, BC; Sydney, NSW; Thunder Bay, ON; Toronto, ON; Traverse City, MI; Truro, NS; Vancouver, BC; Victoria, BC (Tomorrow); Whitehorse, YT (Today); Windsor, ON; Winnipeg, MB.
Other Events This Weekend: Everybody’s Perfect LGBTIQ Film Festival, Geneva, Switzerland; Queer Lisboa Film Festival, Lisbon, Portugal; Gay Day at LA County Fair, Los Angeles,CA; OctoBEARfest, Munich, Germany; Queer Fest 2012, St. Petersburg, Russia; Folsom Street Fair, San Francisco, CA; Out In the Park Six Flags, Springfield, MA.
Mayor Abe Aronovitz
TODAY IN HISTORY:
Miami Mayor Dismisses Constitutional Concerns Over Anti-Gay Drive: 1954. Miami’s ongoing hysteria over discovering the presence of gay people in their midsts (see Aug 3, Aug 11, Aug 12, Aug 13 (twice that day), Aug 14, Aug 26, Aug 31, Sep 1 Sep 2, Sep 7 and Sep 15) received further attention on the editorial page of The Miami News when staff writer Jane Woods highlighted the many battles between the combative mayor Abe Aronovitz and others on the City Commission and the local community:
Homosexuals brought the next trouble. In the pre-Kefauver days, says the Mayor, there were numerous bars in downtown Miami with gambling rooms upstairs or in the back. After open gambling was closed down, some of these bar operators turned these upstairs rooms into parlors, where homosexuals congregated, met each other, made love.
After Miami had a series of shocking crimes this summer, it was brought to the Mayor’s attention that many homosexuals took an intense pleasure in starting innocent young people off into an abnormal life. Many teen-age boys, to make money, had learned to feign abnormality to milk older homosexual men for all the money they could. Bar operators calculatingly making money from this traffic in human misery in the heart of downtown appalled him (Aronovitz), he says.
“The only effective step I knew to take was to bring the most intense public pressure to bear on Chief Headley (see Aug 26, Aug 31 and Sep 1.) I have affection, and respect for Walter Headley and his ability. But I hoped that the men in the district, under him, directly able to do something about these bars, might be spurred into action if they felt the chief’s job as at stake. I knew they could, if they would, use technicalities of the law to force these places out of existence.
“What response do I get from my fellow commissioners? Mr. Hearn tells me that I am doing millions of dollars worth of harm by bad publicity, making it appear we are a houseful of perverts in Miami. Chief Quigg suggests that the intense police drive I advocate might violate constitutional rights of some men.”
Totally straight.
An Ex-Gay Leader Walked Into A Bar: 2000. In 1998, the supposedly “ex-gay” John Paulk and his “ex-lesbian” wife Anne were the centerpieces of a massive publicity push by Focus On the Family to promote the pray-away-the-gay therapy offered by Exodus International. Paulk was the manager of Focus’ Homosexuality and Gender division, and he had also served as Board Chairman for Exodus since 1995. As part of their publicity campaign, the Paulks appeared on 60 Minutes and Oprah, as well as in full-page newspaper ads and on a 1998 cover of Newsweek. Their 1999 book, Love Won Out, became the title for a series of promotional ex-gay conferences put on jointly by Focus and Exodus.
On September 19, 2000, John Paulk traveled to Washington, D.C. on Focus business when he walked into a dark and seedy gay bar known as Mr. P’s in the heart of D.C.’s Dupont Circle gayborhood. A few of the patrons there, employees at the Human Rights Campaign, recognized him immediately and watched as Paulk ordered a drink and struck up conversations with other bar patrons. One of the HRC staffers called Wayne Besen, who was also working at the HRC at the time and who had already written about the ex-gay movement. When Besen arrived twenty minutes later, he found Paulk on a barstool chatting with patrons. Besen confronted Paulk and tried to photograph him, but the bar’s bouncer, citing house rules prohibiting photography, stepped in and asked Besen to leave. Besen waited outside the bar and when Paulk finally came out the front door, Besen snapped another photo as Paulk was leaving.
Fleeing Mr. P’s.
Besen immediately called several reporters. The first to express an interest was Southern Voice’s Joel Lawson, who broke the story two days later. In Paulk’s first public statement, he claimed that he only went to Mr. P’s to use the restroom, despite the presence of brightly lit coffee shops and hotels with public restrooms on the very same block. Besen countered, “I didn’t know that using the bathroom involved 40 minutes of socializing in a bar and offering drinks to strangers.” Paulk was called back to Focus headquarters in Colorado Springs where he was placed on probation and removed as Board Chair at Exodus International (although he remained a member of the board on probationary status). But he somehow managed to weather the controversy. Paulk remained in his position at Focus, and he continued to be the principle organizer and featured speaker at Love Won Out conferences for another three years. In 2003, he finally decided to step down from Focus. Today, Anne Paulk continues to write and advocate for ex-gay ministries, but John has disengaged completely from the movement. He is instead a catering chef in Portland, Oregon.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Brian Epstein: 1934. He was already well on the way to becoming a successful businessman while managing the record departments at his father’s chain of radio and hi-fi stores in Liverpool, when he began to hear the buzz surrounding a local band. He decided to attend a lunchtime concert at the Cavern Club and was taken in by what he heard. “I was immediately struck by their music, their beat, and their sense of humor on stage — and, even afterwards, when I met them, I was struck again by their personal charm. And it was there that, really, it all started.” The band called themselves the Beatles. Epstein signed on as their manager, and within five months he had paid Decca records out of his own pocket to record a studio demo. He shopped it around, but none of the major labels were interested until George Martin at EMI’s tiny Parlophone label heard them. He liked what he heard and signed the band. The rest, as they say, is history.
Epstein’s sexuality wasn’t generally known until several years after his death in 1967. The band, of course, figured it out right away, probably owing to Epstein’s interest in the band’s appearance on stage. Epstein is credited for creating the early Beatles’ look — the collarless suites and ties, the mod haircuts, the synchronized bow at the end of their performances. John Lennon was known to make a few sarcastic comments about Epstein’s sexuality, but the band mostly accepted him as one of their own. Rumors later swirled that Lennon and Epstein had an affair while vacationing in Barcelona in 1963, but Lennon denied it in a Playboy interview in 1980. “It was never consummated, but we had a pretty intense relationship,” he said. Lennon and his first wife, Cynthia, (Eptstein had been John’s best man when they married in 1962) have always maintained that the relationship was platonic.
When Epstein died in 1967 from an overdose of the barbiturate Carbitral, the band began its downward spiral. Much of that downfall was attributed to tensions between McCartney and Lennon, who argued over who should take over the band’s management. They were never able to come to an agreement on that point, and the relationship between the two men continued to deteriorate.
Eighteen years after the Beatles broke up, they were among the earliest entrants into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Paul McCartney credits Epstein for making the Beatles one of the most successful bands in the world. “If anyone was the Fifth Beatle, it was Brian,” he told a BBC documentary in 1997. But to this day, Epstein is still not included in the Hall’s Non-Performer’s Section.
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?
Featured Reports
In this original BTB Investigation, we unveil the tragic story of Kirk Murphy, a four-year-old boy who was treated for “cross-gender disturbance” in 1970 by a young grad student by the name of George Rekers. This story is a stark reminder that there are severe and damaging consequences when therapists try to ensure that boys will be boys.
When we first reported on three American anti-gay activists traveling to Kampala for a three-day conference, we had no idea that it would be the first report of a long string of events leading to a proposal to institute the death penalty for LGBT people. But that is exactly what happened. In this report, we review our collection of more than 500 posts to tell the story of one nation’s embrace of hatred toward gay people. This report will be updated continuously as events continue to unfold. Check here for the latest updates.
In 2005, the Southern Poverty Law Center wrote that “[Paul] Cameron’s ‘science’ echoes Nazi Germany.” What the SPLC didn”t know was Cameron doesn’t just “echo” Nazi Germany. He quoted extensively from one of the Final Solution’s architects. This puts his fascination with quarantines, mandatory tattoos, and extermination being a “plausible idea” in a whole new and deeply disturbing light.
On February 10, I attended an all-day “Love Won Out” ex-gay conference in Phoenix, put on by Focus on the Family and Exodus International. In this series of reports, I talk about what I learned there: the people who go to these conferences, the things that they hear, and what this all means for them, their families and for the rest of us.
Prologue: Why I Went To “Love Won Out”
Part 1: What’s Love Got To Do With It?
Part 2: Parents Struggle With “No Exceptions”
Part 3: A Whole New Dialect
Part 4: It Depends On How The Meaning of the Word "Change" Changes
Part 5: A Candid Explanation For "Change"
At last, the truth can now be told.
Using the same research methods employed by most anti-gay political pressure groups, we examine the statistics and the case studies that dispel many of the myths about heterosexuality. Download your copy today!
And don‘t miss our companion report, How To Write An Anti-Gay Tract In Fifteen Easy Steps.
Anti-gay activists often charge that gay men and women pose a threat to children. In this report, we explore the supposed connection between homosexuality and child sexual abuse, the conclusions reached by the most knowledgeable professionals in the field, and how anti-gay activists continue to ignore their findings. This has tremendous consequences, not just for gay men and women, but more importantly for the safety of all our children.
Anti-gay activists often cite the “Dutch Study” to claim that gay unions last only about 1½ years and that the these men have an average of eight additional partners per year outside of their steady relationship. In this report, we will take you step by step into the study to see whether the claims are true.
Tony Perkins’ Family Research Council submitted an Amicus Brief to the Maryland Court of Appeals as that court prepared to consider the issue of gay marriage. We examine just one small section of that brief to reveal the junk science and fraudulent claims of the Family “Research” Council.
The FBI’s annual Hate Crime Statistics aren’t as complete as they ought to be, and their report for 2004 was no exception. In fact, their most recent report has quite a few glaring holes. Holes big enough for Daniel Fetty to fall through.
“Google” is a trademark of Google Inc.
© Box Turtle Bulletin. All Rights Reserved.
Posts 
Posts via daily email: