Box Turtle Bulletin

The Daily Agenda for Friday, July 20

TODAY’S AGENDA (Ours):
Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Charlotte, NC (Black Pride); Colorado Springs, CO; Frankfurt, Germany; Hull, UK; Kitsap, WA; Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, UK; Portland, OR (Latino Pride); Rochester, MN; San Diego, CA; Tampere, Finland; York, UK

Other Events This Weekend: Sand Blast Weekend, Asbury Park, NJ; Outfest Film Festival, Los Angeles, CA; QFest Film Festival, Philadelphia, PA.

TODAY IN HISTORY:
Panel Discussion on Homosexuality Airs in L.A.: 1958. KTLA’s Crime Story was one of those very serious, topical panel discussion programs which aired in the graveyard time slot of 11:00 p.m. on Sunday Nights. Topics for discussion included drugs, law enforcement, prison reform, international crime, and, on this night, homosexuality, which itself was a crime under California law. The program picked a topic, and moderator Sandy Howard would assemble a panel of “experts” — typically from among the KTLA staff, since real experts weren’t eager to schlep to the studio late at night for a low-rated program. In previous episodes when the subject of homosexuality came up, the tone was almost entirely negative and the opinions offered were ill-informed.

But on this night, things were different. Sitting in for Howard was Bill Bradley, who this time actually managed to assemble a panel of real people who actually had experience on the topic, including Herbert Selwyn, attorney for the Los Angeles Chapter of the Mattachine Society. Also on the panel were two psychiatrists (both of them working for state penal systems), and a private detective and former L.A. policeman who also free-lanced for the scandal magazine Confidential. After the announcer made clear that the opinions expressed on the program were not those of KTLA, Bradley asked the panel to define “sex crime.” Right off the bat, one of the two psychiatrists, Dr. Isidore Ziferstein of the Iowa State Penitentiary, declared that he didn’t consider sex between consenting adults to be criminal — a radical idea in 1948. When Fred Otash, the private detective, began explaining that California’s penal code defined “sex perversion” as including, more specifically, “copulation by mouth,” Ziferstein declared, “yes, the penal code regarding sex acts would make nearly every American citizen a sex criminal.” The other psychiatrist, Dr. William Graves of San Quentin, then joined Ziferstein in agreement.

Bradley then asked whether all homosexual men — lesbians were never mentioned during the entire program — were sex criminals. Otash jumped in and said yes, according to the letter of the law, and rightly so. Otash explained that homosexuals bred other homosexuals simply by contact. Because homosexuals could not keep to themselves, they “preyed on normal men” and made them gay. He then got tired of saying the word “homosexual,” over and over. “You may call them homosexuals, I call them ‘fags’,” he declared. That, for the most part, was the extent of his “expertise.”

Selwyn, confident that the two psychiatrists would answer the question of whether “normal men” could be turned so easily, turned the topic instead to the problem of police entrapment, which was rampant in Los Angeles. If a policeman could strike up a conversation with a gay man in a bar and get the man to suggest that they retire to his apartment, he was liable to find himself in handcuffs and facing a fifteen year sentence.

The program ended with the two psychiatrists agreeing that homosexuality should not be against the law, but debating whether homosexuality was a neurosis or not. Ziferstien said that society wasn’t just anti-gay, but anti-sex, and that this produced an abundance of “sex deviates,” including homosexuals. Graves pushed back, and pointed out that because society was so anti-gay, it would be unsurprising of some gay people didn’t become in some way disturbed or distressed over the situation. In other words, Graves was explaining the concept of homophobia some ten years before the word itself was invented. By this point in the program, the panelists were regularly ignoring Otash as they lamented the way the law and society treated gay people. A review by ONE magazine, the nation’s first gay magazine, commented that viewers “may have been gratified, if surprised, by the unexpectedly friendly attitudes toward homosexuality expressed on the program. … The members of the qualified panel made effective, intelligent observations, and many positive and constructive points.”

Rep. Gerry Studds Censured: 1983. On this date in history, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to censure Reps. Gerry Studds (D-MA) and Daniel Crane (R-IL), both of whom admitted to having sexual affairs with pages. Crane admitted to having sex with a 17-year-old female page three years earlier, while Studds acknowledged a relationship with a 17-year-old male page ten years earlier. (In both cases, the pages were above the age of consent.) In Studds’s case, the page himself defended the relationship as consensual and not intimidating. When Studds returned home to his district following his censure, he was met with standing ovations at his first town meeting. He would continue to be re-elected to Congress where he fought for AIDS funding, gays in the military, and marriage equality, right up until his retirement in 1997. When Studds died in 2006, his legally married husband was denied Studd’s pension, the same pension which is provided to all other surviving spouses of former members of Congress.

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?

The Daily Agenda for Thursday, July 19

TODAY’S AGENDA (Ours):
Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Charlotte, NC (Black Pride); Colorado Springs, CO; Frankfurt, Germany; Hull, UK; Kitsap, WA; Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, UK; Portland, OR (Latino Pride); Rochester, MN; San Diego, CA; Tampere, Finland; York, UK

Other Events This Weekend: Sand Blast Weekend, Asbury Park, NJ; Outfest Film Festival, Los Angeles, CA; QFest Film Festival, Philadelphia, PA.

TODAY’S AGENDA: (Theirs):
Courage/EnCourage Conference 2012: Emmitsburg, MD. Exodus International certainly manages to get the lion’s share of attention in the ex-gay world, but it is far from being the only religiously-based organization with the goal of keeping gay people out of the so-called “homosexual lifestyle.” Courage is the Roman Catholic counterpart to the Evangelical Exodus, while EnCourage is an auxiliary group “dedicated to the spiritual needs of parents, siblings, children, and other relatives and friends of persons who have same-sex attractions.” Beginning today they will hold a conference on the campus of Mount St. Mary’s College and Seminary in Emmitsburg, MD, and it will be a decidedly Catholic affair, mixing daily Masses, Confessions, Benedictions and Eucharistic Adoration with the more conventional line-up of plenary talks and workshops. The conference kicks off at 5:00 p.m. today with a Mass and continues through Sunday.

Eagle Forum Collegians Summit: Washington, D.C. It’s that time of year again when 87-year-old Phyllis Schlafly throws her annual hootenanny for conservative college students.  Her two-day circuit party known as the Annual Eagle Forum Collegians Summit begins today at The Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., and features a lineup that is guaranteed to elicit squeals of delight from the assempled co-eds, including: Sens. Rand Paul (R-KY), Jim Inhofe (R-OK), Jim DeMint (R-SC), Mike Lee (R-UT), and Reps. Allen West (R-FL), Michele Bachmann (R-MN), Ann Marie Buerkle (R-NY), Steve King (R-IA), Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX), Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ). Don’t be jealous!

TODAY IN HISTORY:
Medical Journal Describes “Perverted Sexual Instinct”: 1884. One of the many startling things one encounters in nineteenth-century medical journals is the terminology which writers deployed to describe something which heretofore had no name. The German word Homosexualität wouldn’t make its way into the English language for another decade when Dr. George F. Shrady, editor of The Medical Record, penned a short article describing those whose inclinations were not toward procreation:

SIR THOMAS BROWN once wrote, platonically, that the act of procreation was “the foolishest act a wise man commits in all his life. Nor is there anything that will more deject his cooled imagination.” The physician learns, however, that man, so far from tending toward this ideal, is more apt to show instincts of a violently opposite character, and finds, far down beneath the surface of ordinary social life, currents of human passion and action that would shock and sicken the mind not accustomed to think everything pertaining to living creatures worthy of study. Science has indeed discovered that, amid the lowest forms of bestiality and sensuousness exhibited by debased men, there are phenomena which are truly pathological and which deserve the considerate attention and help of the physician.

That Shrady used the word “pathological” shows that already he had been influenced by various German authors — Carl Westphal, Karl Heinrich Ulrich, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, to name a few — who had already made a name for themselves in the study of Homosexualität (or Urnings, a term that was more widely used in Germany.) Before homosexuality became the subject of serious study, it had been written off as mere evil or vice. Viewing it as pathology invited society to consider that homosexuals weren’t criminals, but were merely acting upon what came naturally to them.

And what was the name of this condition? American writers tended to use the term “perverted sexual instinct,” with “perverted” taking on its original meaning as something which “has been corrupted or distorted from its original course, meaning, or state.” In the nineteenth century, all sorts of things could be “perverted,” including the understanding of religious doctrine (its original meaning), the application of economic incentives or the course of justice. It would only take another decade or so before “perverted sexual instinct” became shortened to “perversion,” and the “pervert” would become synonymous with gay people.

But back to Shrady’s 1894 paper. He reviewed the literature and found:

Up to that time (1883) only twenty-one cases were on record, three being reported by Americans, the rest mainly by Germans, and none at all by English observers. In a recent number of the Irrenfreund (vol. xxvi., No. I, 1884), Krafft-Ebing has reported six more cases. …In the reported cases of congenital perversion, the abnormal instinct begins oftenest as early as the eighth or ninth year, but shows itself at first, perhaps, only in an inclination to adopt the manners and practices of girls or women. The victims show the somatic basis of their trouble in various ways. There is often an hereditary psychopathic or neuropathic taint. Epilepsy is sometimes present. There are noticed in some cases, though not often, defects of the genital organs, such as hypospadias or epispadias, small or defective testicles. The hair on the face is sometimes thin, the voice almost always soft. The” Urnings” have a mincing gait, and sometimes the hips are broad like those of women. Exacerbations of the perverted feeling appear periodically. It may be accompanied with melancholia and end in insanity or suicide.

The mental peculiarities of these unfortunates have much in common. They are of the artistic, poetical. and imaginative temperament, often exhibiting a tendency to rather weak philosophizing. Sometimes they are of a vigorous understanding. In most cases there is great mental distress felt through a consciousness of their unnatural instincts. Two or three have, like Ulrichs, boldly defended their practices.

As for what to do about these individuals:

If congenital perverted sexual instinct is a pathological rather than a vicious condition, the query arises whether there is any remedy for it. The history of cases reported shows that sometimes the instinct is cultivated and intensified by bad surroundings in childhood, such as, for example, the exclusive society of women and immoral nurses. Excessive sexual indulgence seems to increase it, and we may question whether in a few cases the condition would have ever developed, were it not for an early abuse and misdirection of the sexual powers. In conditions of nervous exhaustion and weakness, the symptoms are exaggerated, and Krafft-Ebing, in his last communication, reports the case of a married man, previously healthy, who experienced an entire change in the sexual feeling, which lasted for twenty-five years. He was then cured by general faradization and other tonic measures.

“Faradization” refers to the use of electrical instruments to induce an electrical current or magnetic field. The late nineteenth century belief in the power of electricity and magnetism to cure all sorts of maladies gave rise to a thriving industry geared toward providing doctors with all sorts of “quack” instruments. “Tonic measures,” of course, refers to who knows what sort of snake oil which would may have been prescribed to restore masculine vigor to the unfortunate soul. (One wonders why NARTH hasn’t looked into these.) Shrady closes with this description:

In conclusion, we believe it to be demonstrated that conditions once considered criminal are really pathological, and come within the province of the physician. We have undertaken, therefore, the disagreeable task of laying some of the facts regarding sexual perversion before our readers. The profession can be trusted to sift the degrading and vicious from what is truly morbid.

We cannot do better than append the conclusions which Krafft-Ebing has reached upon this subject. He says: ” 1. There exists a congenital absence of sexual feeling toward the opposite sex, at times even disgust of sexual intercourse. 2. This defect occurs in a physically differentiated sexual type and with a normal development of the sexual organs. 3. Absence of the psychical qualities corresponding to the anatomical sexual type, but the feelings, thoughts, and actions of a perverted sexual instinct. 4. Abnormally early appearance of sexual desire. s. Painful consciousness of the perverted sexual desire. 6. Sexual desire toward the same sex. 7. The sexual desire remains purely platonic or finds gratification in mutual onanism, or in feeling of the object of the affections. Often there is self-pollution, but for the want of something better. 8. There are symptoms of a morbid excitability of the sexual desires, together with an irritable weakness of the nervous symptoms, so that sensuous feelings, magnetic sensations, and even pollutions occur in simply touching the object of the affections. 9. The perverse sexual impulse is abnormally intense and rules all thought and sensation. The love of such individuals is excessive even to adoration, and is often followed by sorrow, melancholy, and jealousy. 10. People afflicted with this abnormity frequently possess an instinctive power to recognize one another.”

In this last conclusion we cannot agree. The power of mutual recognition is not instinctive but acquired.

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The Daily Agenda for Wednesday, July 18

TODAY’S AGENDA:
Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Charlotte, NC (Black Pride); Colorado Springs, CO; Frankfurt, Germany; Hull, UK; Kitsap, WA; Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, UK; Portland, OR (Latino Pride); Rochester, MN; San Diego, CA; Tampere, Finland; York, UK

Other Events This Weekend: Sand Blast Weekend, Asbury Park, NJ; Outfest Film Festival, Los Angeles, CA; QFest Film Festival, Philadelphia, PA.

TODAY IN HISTORY:
Psychiatrist Denounces Anti-Gay Witchhunt: 1950. A Senate subcommittee under Joseph McCarthy investigating the federal employment of gay Americans was warned that their investigation would have negative consequences on government functioning. “The immediate effect of the probe is to threaten the emotional security and mental health of many government employees, warned Dr. Henry P. Laughlin of the Washington Psychiatric Society. “This is indeed unfortunate, tending to lower the efficiency and work production of those who have some actual or imagined basis for concern, and especially for those people whose homosexual experiences have been isolated or of a token nature or perhaps never occurred.”

Laughlin however emphasized that he was only speaking for himself and not the Society, before continuing on a line rarely heard in 1950: “Sexual orientation doesn’t enter into a person’s ability or capacity to do work. I am sure that many persons in government, as well as in industry and other areas of endeavor, have made significant contributions, although their orientation happens to be homosexual.” Laughlin’s testimony would fall on deaf years. Tens of thousands of people would be hounded out of their jobs over the next several decades, whether they were gay, suspected of being gay, or simply accused of being gay for other reasons.

President Clinton Unveils DADT Policy: 1993. “Let me say a few words now about this policy. It is not a perfect solution. It is not identical with some of my own goals. And it certainly will not please everyone, perhaps not anyone, and clearly not those who hold the most adamant opinions on either side of this issue.” With those words, President Bill Clinton unveiled a new “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy in compliance with a law that had been passed by Congress earlier that year.

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?

The Daily Agenda for Tuesday, July 17

TODAY’S AGENDA (Ours):
Camp Pride: Nashville, TN. Today is the first day of Camp Pride, a leadership and personal growth experience for LGBT undergraduate college students. A project of Campus Pride, Camp Pride seeks to equip campus leaders with the skills needed to create safer and more inclusive college campuses across the U.S. Camp Pride takes place on the campus of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, and will continue through Sunday.

TODAY’S AGENDA (Theirs):
Family “Research” Council’s Values Bus Tour: Concord, NH. The Family “Research” Council, an SPLC-certified hate group, is bringing its Values Bus Tour to the “Live Free or Die” state — complete with marriage equality — with the FRC’s peculiar brand of social bossiness. Today, the bus will camp out at the NewHampshire State House to “hear conservative female leaders speak out!” Who they are and what they’er speaking out about is anybody’s guess. But they’ll be there from 9:15 a.m. to 11:00 a.m.

TODAY IN HISTORY:
APA Refuses To Meet With Gay Rights Groups: 1963. One of the top goals of the early gay rights movement was to get the mental health professions to remove homosexuality from their list of mental disorders. As long as homosexuality remained listed, governmental agencies and private companies had all the excuse they needed to discriminate against gays and lesbians. In 1957, Psychologist Evelyn Hooker began publishing the results of a series of tests which demonstrated that gays and lesbians who weren’t patients of mental health professionals were indistinguishable from heterosexuals. Before then, the mental health community thought that gays were mentally deficient because all of the prior research had only studied people who were confined to mental hospitals or were seen in clinical settings.

Despite the strength of this new evidence, it would still take many years for it to sink in. In 1963, the American Psychological Association was preparing to meet in Philadelphia for their annual convention. Leading gay activists, under the banner of the East Coast Homophile Organizations (ECHO) also planned to meet in Philadelphia at the same time, and they proposed a meeting with members of the APA. But the APA convention’s organizing committee declined the invitation. In a very brief letter to leading gay rights activist Frank Kameny and the Washington, D.C., Mattachine Society, the APA simply said, “This problem” — yes, the APA saw the meeting as a problem — “has already been considered by the Convention Committee and it was decided that it was not in the best interests of the APA to meet with you, nor to publicize your meetings.”

Another nine years would pass before Kameny and Daughters of Bilitis New York activist Barbara Gittings would appear with Dr. John E. Fryer (as “Dr. H. Anonymous.”) on a panel discussion on homosexuality with the American Psychiatric Association (the other APA, which is the keeper of the list of mental disorders known as the DSM). That appearance nearly a decade later would wind up being a key moment leading to the elimination of homosexuality as a mental illness.

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The Daily Agenda for Monday, July 16

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS:
Tony Kushner: 1956. He is most acclaimed for his Pulitzer prize-winning play, Angels In America, the seven-hour epic about the AIDS crises in the Koch- era of New York. Kushner wrote the play for eight actors, but stipulated that each of the actors was to play multiple roles (including multiple genders) throughout the production. When he adapted the play for an HBO miniseries starring Meryl Streep and Al Pacino, the same construct was applied. In addition to the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Kushner won the Tony Awards for Best Play in 1993 and 1994 (Angels In America is actually in two parts, Millennium Approaches and Perestroika, each having its own separate Broadway debut.)

After the turn of the new millennium, Kushner began writing for film, co-writing the screenplay for Steven Spielberg’s Munich. He is currently reportedly working on another screenplay for Spielberg, this time an adaptation of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln In 2006, a documentary about Kushner, Wrestling With Angels premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. His latest play, The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures played in New York last year for a little over a month to somewhat mixed reviews.

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).

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The Daily Agenda for Sunday, July 15

TODAY’S AGENDA (Ours):
Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Bournemouth, UK; Bristol, UK; Charleston, SC; Glasgow, UK; Munich, Germany; Peel, ON; Reading, PA; and Rochester, NY.

AIDS Walk This Weekend: San Francisco, CA.

Other Celebrations This Weekend: Rocky Mountain Regional Rodeo, Golden, CO; QFest Film Festival, Philadelphia, PA; Bear Week, Provincetown, MA.

TODAY IN HISTORY:
New York’s WBAI Radio Broadcasts Talk Show Featuring Seven Gay Men: 1962. There had long been an inherent tension among the various local chapters of the Mattachine Society between those who, because of their experience with the McCarthy-led Lavendar Scare witchhunt in the early 1950s, feared public scrutiny and exposure, and those who argued for greater visibility. The latter group sought increased public exposure for two reasons. First, to let other gay people across the country to understand that they weren’t alone. And also so that society at large could get to know gay people, which, they argued, was necessary if attitudes were every going to change. Randy Wicker, a recent Texas college student who moved to New York to become involved with that city’s Mattachine Society, was a natural at public relations, and he pushed to get the Society’s activities publicized in the local press. “Randy was very young and wild-eyed,” one Mattachine member recalled. “He has very radical and did things that the rest of us didn’t have the guts to do. Many of other people in our group were professionals, and I think they thought Randy was moving too fast. We weren’t sure things were ready for someone like him yet. But her certainly made us sit up and take notice.”

To get around some of the group’s objections, Wicker established an organization called the Homosexual League of New York, an organization that consisted solely of himself. This way, if Mattachine members became too uncomfortable with his actions, he could just switch and do them under the guise of the alternative “group.” One of his first projects was to talk WBAI, a listener-supported radio station, to air a ninety-minute program with gay people as part of the panel. He proposed this after the station had already aired an hour-long special, “The Homosexual In America,” featuring a panel of psychiatrists who described gay people as being sick and in need of a cure. When WBAI agreed to air Wicker’s follow-up program, the New York Journal-American went ballistic. Jack O’Brian, the paper’s radio-TV columnist, wrote that the station should change its callsign to WSICK for agreeing to air an “arrogant card-carrying swish. …We’v heard of silly situations in broadcasting, but FM station WBAI wins our top prize for scraping the sockly barrel-bottom.”

WBAI went ahead despite the controversy, and exactly fifty years ago today, New York radio listeners, for the first time, heard Wicker and six other gay men talk for ninety minutes about what it was like to be gay. They talked about the difficulties in maintaining careers, the problems of police harassment, and the social responsibility of gays and straights alike. The following morning, The New York Times’s Jack Gould called the program “the most extensive consideration of the subject to be heard on American radio” — a statement that betrays his own unawareness of several similar programs which had already aired on radio and television in San Francisco and Los Angeles years earlier. Newsweek called the program “96 minutes of intriguing, if intellectually inconclusive listening.” A group of listeners lodged a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission and challenge the station’s broadcast license. When the FCC recognized the broadcast as a legitimate exercise in free speech, it signaled to other radio and television stations that homosexuality was an acceptable topic for broadcast.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS:
Samuel Reber: 1903. He was a well-regarded American diplomat who spent twenty-seven years in the Foreign Service. During World War II, Reber scored a significant diplomatic success by getting Vichy France to agree that French colonies and possessions, ships and planes in the Caribbean would not be used by the Axis powers, an agreement which underscored Vichy’s weakness as a French power. Reber then joined the Allied Control Commission in Italy, and from there he served as the U.S. representative to the Allied French government in 1944. By 1946, he was a political adviser to the U.S. delegation at the Council of Foreign Ministers Conference in Paris, in 1947 he was director of the State Department’s Office of European Affairs, and in 1950 he joined in the Allied High Commission as an adviser for the U.S. High Commissioner for Germany.

Beginning in 1948, Reber faced his greatest diplomatic challenge working t for an Austrian peace treaty while enduring years of threats and insults from the Soviet Union. His work ultimately laid the groundwork for an independent Austria remaining outside of the Soviet block. But the treaty guaranteeing that independence wouldn’t come about until two years after Reber was forced out of the State Department in 1953. That’s when Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s Red Scare — and the accompanying Lavender Scare — was in full force in the U.S. Senate. McCarthy charged that the upper ranks of the State Department were filled with communists and homosexuals, prompting a wide-ranging witch hunt within the department. Reber was called in for a polygraph test and interviews on March 17 and 19, 1953. That investigation uncovered “a lot of admissions” about homosexuality. When McCarthy threatened to reveal allegations of Reber’s homosexuality, Reber promptly announced his retirement in May 1953, effective July 15 when he turned 50.

But because of Reber’s high profile, the reasons for his resignation quickly became well known in diplomatic and political circles. In 1954, McCarthy would use Reber’s resignation against his brother, Major General Miles Reber, who was called to testify on the first day of the Army-McCarthy hearings. According to Time magazine:

Returning to twist the dirk already thrust into the Reber brothers, McCarthy asked General Reber: “Are you aware of the fact that your brother was allowed to resign when charges that he was a bad security risk were made against him as a result of the investigation of this committee?” Jenkins roared in protest. McClellan roared in protest. McCarthy talked on, stuck to his question. General Reber sat in silence, gripping the edges of the witness table until his knuckles showed white. Finally, McCarthy, having made his point over radio and television, dismissed the entire question as unimportant, and grandly said he would withdraw it.

But West Pointer Reber would not have it so. In a voice thick with emotion, he asked to be allowed to answer the “very serious charge” made against his brother. After another long argument, Reber said simply: “. . . As I understand my brother’s case, he retired, as he is entitled to do by law, upon reaching the age of 50 … I know nothing about any security case involving him.” With a sigh of relief, Chairman Mundt dismissed Reber, thanking him for his frank manner—a remark to which McCarthy, who seemed determined to resent any civility, made a formal objection.

David Cicilline: 1961. When he was elected mayor of Providence, Rhode Island, in a landslide in 2002, David Cicilline became the first openly gay man to become mayor of a state capital. in 2010, he was elected to Congress to represent Rhode Island in the U.S. House of Representatives, becoming one of four openly gay representatives in the House.

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?

The Daily Agenda for Saturday, July 14

TODAY’S AGENDA (Ours):
Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Bournemouth, UK; Bristol, UK; Charleston, SC; Glasgow, UK; Green Bay, WI; Munich, Germany; Peel, ON; Reading, PA; Rochester, NY; and Tacoma, WA.

AIDS Walk This Weekend: San Francisco, CA.

Other Celebrations This Weekend: Rocky Mountain Regional Rodeo, Golden, CO; QFest Film Festival, Philadelphia, PA; Bear Week, Provincetown, MA.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS:
Arthur Laurents: 1917. The three-time Tony Award winning playwright, director and screenwriter started out by writing scripts for radio shows and training films for the U.S. Army during World War II. One photograph of GIs in the South Pacific jungle inspired him to write Home of the Brave about anti-Semitism in the military. The play opened on Broadway in 1945 and ran for sixty nine performances. (When the play was adapted for the 1949 film, the topic switched from anti-Semitic to anti-black bigotry.) That first run wasn’t a long one, but its controversial subject would come back to haunt him later when he was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee and was placed on the infamous entertainment blacklist during the McCarthy red scare.

His tenure on the list was relatively brief, and by the mid-1050s, Laurents was in Broadway and Hollywood’s good graces again. Good thing, because he went on to write West Side Story and Gypsy, and the script for Alfred Hitchcock’s The Rope. He also wrote the scripts for the films The Way We Were and The Turning Point, and directed the 1983 stage production of  La Cage Aux Folles.  Laurents died just this past May in New York of pneumonia at the age of 93. His partner of more than fifty years, Tom Hatcher, had preceded him in 2006. In honor of Laurents’s career, the lights on Broadway were dimmed at 8:00 p.m. on May 6, 2011.

My Mom: 1940. Happy Birthday Mom!

Jane Lynch: 1960. Nobody does bitter sarcasm like Jane Lynch. Since 2009, she has played the role of Sue Sylvester on Glee, where her Emmy- and a Golden Globe-winning performance is the only rational reason why anyone would want to watch Glee (in my opinion at least). She has also appeared in The 40-Year-Old Virgin and has a recurring role in The L Word. In 2010, Lynch married clinical psychologist Dr. Laura Embry in Sunderland Massachusetts. You can see their video for Dan Savage’s “It Gets Better” project here. Just this past Wednesday, it was announced that Lynch joined tennis legend Billie Jean King and a handful of other celebrities to form LPAC, which bills itself as “the first of it’s kind Lesbian Political Action Committee.”

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?

The Daily Agenda for Friday, July 13

TODAY’S AGENDA (Ours):
Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Bournemouth, UK; Bristol, UK; Charleston, SC; Glasgow, UK; Green Bay, WI; Munich, Germany; Peel, ON; Reading, PA; Rochester, NY; and Tacoma, WA.

AIDS Walk This Weekend: San Francisco, CA.

Other Celebrations This Weekend: Rocky Mountain Regional Rodeo, Golden, CO; QFest Film Festival, Philadelphia, PA; Bear Week, Provincetown, MA.

TODAY’S AGENDA (Theirs):
Journey Into Manhood Weekend: San Bernardino, CA. The city of San Bernardino made news yesterday when the county sheriff’s office announced a criminal investigation to look into allegations of misconduct following the city’s announcement it would file for bankruptcy. It turns out that there are all kinds of bankruptcy lurking around San Bernardino’s environs, and not just of the financial sort. Journey Into Manhood will bring its bankrupt hodge-podge of psychobabble and Richard Cohen-style cuddling into the nearby wilderness for a weekend retreat for men who don’t want to be gay. What could possibly go wrong with that? Just ask Ted Cox, a straight journalist, who went undercover for a JIM weekend in Arizona where he discovered that during one of those cuddling sessions, well…

I don’t remember exactly when I felt his erection pressing into my back. It might have been while he whispered in my ear, “Long ago, you were the Golden Child. But, somehow, that Golden Child was hurt, and you put up a wall to protect yourself.”

…I sat on the floor between the outstretched legs of a camp guide, my head leaning back against his shoulder. The guide sat behind me, his arms wrapped around my chest. This hold was called “The Motorcycle.” Five men surrounded the two of us, their hands resting gently on my arms, legs and chest.

And for all of that and $650, JIM claims a 79% success rate. I guess it depends on how you define “success.” One of JIM’s life coaches, Alan Downing, was accused by two of his clients of inappropriate behavior and sexual impropriety. One staffer at an Arizona JIM weekend was none other than Lee Caleb Brundidge, one of the three American extremists who travelled to Kampala in 2009 to host the explosive ex-gay conference that set the stage for the proposed Anti-Homosexuality Bill. I think you get the picture. The whole psychologically-bankrupt manly-man’s he-man butchout and cuddle camp starts today at an undisclosed location somewhere near that other epicenter of bankruptcy, and continues through Sunday.

Family “Research” Council’s Values Bus Tour: Lisbon Falls, ME. Maine will hold an election this fall to determine whether gays and lesbians should be allowed to marry. So kind of a coincidence is it that the Family “Research” Council, an SPLC-certified hate group, is bringing its Values Bus Tour to the Pine Tree State? The bus, which is part voter registration drive and part campaign platform, will spend this evening and tomorrow at Lisbon Falls as part of that town’s Moxie festival, named for a unique soft drink — and one of the nation’s first mass-produced soft drinks — which is still sold locally. Moxie started out as a patent medicine, which supposedly cured “paralysis, softening of the brain, nervousness, and insomnia.” FRC will be there to sell their own version of snake oil. They will be at Lisbon High School tonight from 6:30 to 9:00 p.m., and the bus will participate in the festival’s parade tomorrow morning.

TODAY IN HISTORY:
Gay Pub Raided in London: 1810. From The Times of London: “The existence of a Club, or Society, for the purpose so detestable and repugnant to the common feelings of our nature, that by no word can it be described without committing an outrage upon decency, has for some time been suspected by the Magistrates of Bow-street; who cautiously concealing the odious secret, abstained from taking any steps on the information they had received, until an opportunity should offer of surprising the whole gang. About 11 o’clock last Sunday evening, three separate parties of the patrole, attended by constables, were detached from Bow-street on this service. … The enterprise was completely successful. — We regret most deeply, that the information given at the office was found to be so accurate, that the Officers felt themselves justified in seizing no fewer than 23 individuals, at a public-house, called the White Swan, in Vere-street, Clare-market.”

Two men were found guilty of sodomy and were hanged. Six more were found guilty of attempted sodomy and were made to stand at the pillory. The crowds who turned out for the pillory were particularly violent, throwing rotten fish, dead cats, “cannonballs” made of mud, and vegetables at the convicted men. The men were severely injured and barely survived their allotted time at the pillory.

“Brothers” Debuts: 1984. The first American television program featuring a gay lead character finally debuted on Showtime. The show, set in Philadelphia, centered around the three Waters brothers: Lou was a typical blue-collar construction foreman, Joe was a retired placekicker for the Philadelphia Eagles and owner of a sports bar, and Cliff, who in the first episode left his bride at the altar and came out to his family as a gay man. ABC and NBC had already turned down the series out of fear of portraying homosexuality on prime time, but when Showtime decided to begin producing original television series, they saw Brothers as the perfect fit. After a successful first season, Showtime decided to pick up the series for a second season. Showtime also offer the series for syndication to over-the-air broadcast stations, and the fledgling Fox network decided to jump on that deal. Brother would go on for a full five seasons and 115 episodes.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS:
Robert Gant: 1968. He was Ben Bruckner in the American version of “Queer as Folk.” His HIV-positive character gave the series an opportunity to explore anti-AIDS hysteria and stigma, both outside and inside the gay community. He has had numerous television guest roles, and he acted and produced in Save Me, the film staring Chad Allen about the ex-gay movement. Gant and Allen, along with Christopher Racster, are partners in the production company Mythgarden. He is active in LGBT elder issues, supporting SAGE (Senior Advocacy for GLBT Elders) and GLEH (Gay and Lesbian Elder Housing).

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The Daily Agenda for Thursday, July 12

TODAY’S AGENDA:
Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Bournemouth, UK; Bristol, UK; Charleston, SC; Glasgow, UK; Green Bay, WI; Munich, Germany; Peel, ON; Reading, PA; Rochester, NY; and Tacoma, WA.

AIDS Walk This Weekend: San Francisco, CA.

Other Celebrations This Weekend: Rocky Mountain Regional Rodeo, Golden, CO; QFest Film Festival, Philadelphia, PA; Bear Week, Provincetown, MA.

Van Cliburn's historic performance at the first Tchaikovsky Piano Competition in Moscow, 19589

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS:
Van Cliburn: 1934. In 1958, the Soviet Union, flush with the technological success of Sputnik, inaugurated the first International Tchaikovsky Competition to showcase the Soviet’s cultural superiority. But twenty-four year old Van Cliburn’s astounding performance of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 and Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3 resulted in a standing ovation lasting eight minutes. With an American clearly the crowd favorite to take what was supposed to have been a Soviet showcase, the judges reportedly sought Khrushchev permission. “”Is he the best? Then give him the prize!” so the story goes. Cliburn returned to the U.S. to a hero’s welcome, becoming the first and only classical musician to be treated to a New York ticker-tape parade. His 1958 Grammy-winning recording of Tchaikovsky’s first Piano Concerto became the first classical album to go platinum and was the best-selling classical album for more than a decade. It would eventually go on to go triple platinum and is still available for download in the internet age.

Van Cliburn's return to Moscow, 2011

In 1962, he became the artistic adviser for his own namesake competition, the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, held every four years in Ft. Worth, Texas. His own competition now rivals the Tchaikovsky in international stature. He continued performing and recording through the 1960s and 1970s, but after the deaths of his father and manager, he took a hiatus from public life. He came out of retirement in 1987 to perform at the White House for President Ronald Reagan and Soviet president Mikhael Gorbachev. In 2011, Van Cliburn returned to the XCI Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow, where he served as an honorary juror and was treated like a rock star.

Cheyenne Jackson: 1975. He was named for show business, named by his father after a 1950s Western television series. He is a talented actor and singer, working on stage, film and television. His biggest role to date was as gay 9/11 hero Mark Bingham in the 2006 Oscar nominated United 93, though he was not yet out yet. Publicly at least. He came out to his parents at the age of 19. His conservative Christian family — including his brother who pastors a large evangelical church and often appears on Pat Robertson’s CBN — encouraged him to enroll in an Exodus International program, but he quietly refused. Fortunately, his family has mostly come around since then.

Jackson came out publicly in 2008, in an interview with the New York Times. That same year, he appeared in a New York production of Damn Yankees with Jane Krakowski and Sean Hayes. In 2009, he opened on Broadway in a revival of Finian’s Rainbows. He has also had recurring roles on television with NBC’s 30 Rock and Fox’s Glee. In 2009, he released a CD with Michael Feinstein, The Power Of Two. He is an avid LGBT rights supporter and an ambassador for amfAR (The Foundation for AIDS Research), and in 2011, he appeared in the New York stage reading of Dustin Lance Black’s play, 8, based on on the Proposition 8 trial transcript. Last September, he married his husband, physicist Monte Lapka, after New York legalized same-sex marriage. The couple have been together since 1999.

Jackson’s immediate future remains bright. In June, it was announced that he will appear in NBC’s The Munsters remake, Mockingbird Lane, where he will play Scout Master Steve, a widower who falls in love with Lily Munster. Later this year, he will appear in an as-yet undisclosed role for HBO’s Liberace biopic, Behind the Candelabra. And he will also return to Broadway in The Performers, a comedy about the porn industry. And because all of that isn’t enough, his solo album Drive is due out next month.

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The Daily Agenda for Wednesday, July 11

TODAY’S AGENDA:
Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Bournemouth, UK; Bristol, UK; Charleston, SC; Glasgow, UK; Green Bay, WI; Munich, Germany; Peel, ON; Reading, PA; Rochester, NY; and Tacoma, WA.

AIDS Walk This Weekend: San Francisco, CA.

Other Celebrations This Weekend: Rocky Mountain Regional Rodeo, Golden, CO; QFest Film Festival, Philadelphia, PA; Bear Week, Provincetown, MA.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS:
Dorothy Wilde: 1895. She was born in London three months after her uncle Oscar Wilde’s arrest for homosexuality, and she inherited her uncle’s talents for witty conversation and charm, talents which held her in good stead in the salons of Paris between the wars. She first traveled to France in 1914 to serve as an ambulance driver during World War I, and it was during the war that she had an affair with another ambulance driver, Standard Oil heiress Marion “Joe” Carstairs, who after the war become a renowned speedboat racer (“the fastest woman on water”). Her longest relationship though began in 1927 and lasted until her death, with the American writer Natalie Clifford Barney. Dolly was a gifted storyteller and writer, but she never pursued a career in writing. Her drinking and addiction to heroin may have gotten in the way. In 1939, she was diagnosed with breast cancer, but refused surgery. The next year when Germany invaded France, Dolly fled to London, where she died in 1941 of “causes unascertainable,” a possible allusion to a drug overdose or to alternative treatments she sought for her cancer.

Tab Hunter: 1931. Born Arthur Gelien in New York, he was given his stage name by his first agent. His good looks quickly made him a teen idol in the 1950s as he appeared in more than forty films throughout his career. That career was threatened however when, in 1955, Confidential magazine reported Hunter’s 1950 arrest in an innuendo-laden article, but Hunter’s studio-arranged “romances” with Natalie Woods and Debbie Reynolds succeeded in rescuing his reputation. In his 2005 memoir, Tab Hunter Confidential: The Making of a Movie Star, Hunter talks about his relationships with Anthony Perkins, Rudolph Nureyev and champion figure skater Ronnie Robertson, along with many anecdotes about the stars that he met: Roddy McDowell, Tallulah Bankhead, Robert Mitchum, Fred Astaire, Linda Darnell. But by 1959, his career was on the downhill slope towards spaghetti westerns and dinner theater. His career was revived when he co-starred with Divine in John Water’s Polyester and my favorite, Lust In the Dust, making him a new kind of icon. “Making out with Divine, that’s beyond the bravery of coming out,” he said. “But he had a sense of humor about the glamour he was caught in. He’s a great sport, and a great star.” He described his work with John Waters and Divine as “a high point in my professional life.” He now lives near Santa Barbera with his longtime partner of more than thirty years.

Yevgeny Kharitonov: 1941. Born in Novosibirsk, he embarked on a very brief career as an actor, but went from there to playwriting. Although none of his works were published in his lifetime by the Soviet press, he is now recognized as a founder of modern Russian gay literature. His sexuality, which was criminalized at the time, mirrored the Soviet experience in which the mere existence of a lot of people was grounds for state repression. . His dissident writing and his sexuality made him a double target, and he was placed under close surveillance by the KBG. When he was called to the KGB for his first “interview,” he fainted. When he died of a heart attack in 1981, many believed that his death was hastened over the pressure of official scrutiny. When he died, he was carrying a manuscript for “Under House Arrest,” which scattered and blew down the street when he collapsed. Other versions of the manuscript survived and was published several years after his death.

Kharitonov claimed his sexuality as a gift that gave him special insight into the human condition. In his brief gay manifesto, The Leaflet, Kharitonov compares the repression that gay people experienced in Russian society to the anti-Semetism experienced by Russia’s Jews. He also saw the artistry of Russia’s Jews and gays as being the product of that repression. “The best flower of our shallow people is called like no other to dance the dance of impossible love and to sing of it sweetly.”

Vito Russo: 1946. He was an LGBT activist and film historian, best known as the author of the 1981 book The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies. The book was the result of a live lecture with film clips that he had presented at colleges, universities and small art-house cinemas throughout the 1970s. His concern over how LGBT people were presented in the popular media led to his becoming a co-founder for the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD). He became involved as a gay rights activist immediately following the Stonewall uprising — in fact, he was among the crowd as the rebellion broke out. He went on to become a leading figure in the Gay Activists Alliance, one of the early pro-gay groups to form in New York City in Stonewall’s wake. In the 1980s, he became involved in ACT-UP as a result of increasing frustration over city, state, and federal government inaction and footdragging in the face of a mounting AIDS epidemic. He died in from AIDS in 1990 but his work continued to gain a wider audience when HBO created a documentary film version of The Celluloid Closet narrated by Lilly Tomlin. In 2011 a family-authorized biography by Michael Shiavi, Celluloid Activist: The Life and Times of Vito Russo, was published by the University of Wisconsin Press. And two weeks from now, HBO returns with another feature about Russo, this time a documentary titled simply Vito, which will premiere on July 23.

Esera Tuaolo: 1968. The Samoan from Hawaii was an NFL defensive lineman for nine years, beginning with the Green Bay Packers and the Minnesota Vikings. After a stint with the Jacksonville Jaguars in 1997, he went to Atlanta, where he reached the Super Bowl in 1999. He ended his career the following season with the Carolina Panthers. In 2002, he announced that he is gay on HBO’s Real Sports, making him the third NFL player to come out (after David Kopay and Roy Simmons). In 2006, he released his autobiography, Alone in the Trenches: My Life As a Gay Man in the NFL, and he has actively campaigned on ending homophobia in sports. In 2010, he was arrested on a domestic violence charge with his boyfriend, but those charges were dropped with his boyfriend saying it was all a misunderstanding.

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The Daily Agenda for Tuesday, July 10

TODAY’S AGENDA (Ours):
Press Conference on US Domestic AIDS Policy: Washington, D.C. A press conference featuring leading national experts on domestic policy efforts to fight HIV/AIDS will be held tomorrow at 10:00 a.m. at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. This is just one of several events which will lead up the the XIX International AIDS Conference, which will be held in the United States later this month for the first time in history now that the HIV travel ban has been lifted. This briefing for reporters will assess current federal policy issues including the implementation of health care reform and funding that would impact the fight against AIDS. Speakers include: Carl Schmid of The AIDS Institute, A. Cornelius Baker of the National Black Gay Men’s Advocacy Coalition, Julie Scofield of the National Alliance of State and Territorial AIDS Directors, and Ronald Johnson of AIDS United.

TODAY’S AGENDA (Theirs):
Family “Research” Council’s Values Bus Tour: Richmond, VA. The Family “Research” Council, an SPLC-certified hate group, continues its Values Bus Tour in conjunction with the Heritage Foundation through the the Old Dominion. Today’s stop is in Richmond for a Conservative Coalition meeting at the Virginia Institute for Public Policy from 10:00 to 11:45 a.m. The bus will remain on hand for a press conference titled, “Conservative Women Leaders Speak Out,” to held at the Virginia Institute from 12:15 to 1:15 p.m.

TODAY IN HISTORY:
A Discovery of a Very Extraordinary Nature: 1766. The following story was reported in the July 10, 1766 issue of London’s Gentleman’s Magazine:

A discovery of a very extraordinary nature was made at Poplar, where two women had lived together for six and thirty years, as man and wife, and kept a public house, without ever being suspected; but the wife happening to fall sick, and die, a few years before she expired, revealed the secret to her relations, made her will, and left legacies to the amount of half what she thought they were worth. On application to the pretended, she at first endeavoured to support her assumed character, but being closely pressed, she at length owed the fact, accommodated all matters amicably, put off the male, and put on the female character, in which she appeared to be a sensible well-bred woman, though in her male character she had always affected the plain plodding alehouse-keeper. It is said they had acquired in business money to the amount of £3000. Both had been crossed in love when young, and had chosen this method to avoid further importunities.

[From Ian McCormick’s Secret Sexualities: A Sourcebook of 17th and 18th Century Writings (p 234-235)]

Texas Editorial: “We’ll Take Gays Over the KKK”: 1985. It all began in 1984, when the Dallas/Ft. Worth suburb of Arlington was having a problem at Randol Mill Park. It seems that the popular park had become a well-known venue for men (often heterosexually married men) to solicit sex with other men. After a year’s worth of stepped up patrolling and enforcement by Arlington police, the Mid-Cities Daily News reported, “We have not heard nearly as much about the problem as last year.” But for whatever reason, the Klan was still excited over queers in the park. The Klan’s “exalted cyclops” announced that his group would be holding a picnic at the part — sans white sheets — to send a message that gays weren’t welcome. The Daily News responded, “Given the choice between sharing a park with homosexuals or a bunch of white-sheeted, racist, hate-peddling losers, we think we would prefer the homosexuals.”

Well sure, given the choice.

When the Klan held their picnic three days later, Scott Patrick, the exalted cyclops of the Garland klavern, sounded disappointed with what he found. ” I expected the situation to be a little more blatant. I’m sure all the publicity kept it out.” That left him with no choice but to complain about other groups. “Would you believe I actually had a Jew ask if a Jew could come to one of our meetings,” he told a reporter. “I said ‘no.’ A Jew would have about as much chance of attending as a nigger. You’ve got to admit they aren’t as intelligent as we are.”

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS:
Jerry Herman: 1931. The American composer and lyricists is best known for his scores for the Broadway hits Hello Dolly! (1964), Mame (1966) and La Cage aux Folles (1983). The latter earned Herman a Tony for best musical. His most famous song, “Hello Dolly!”, knocked the Beatles from #1 in 1964 when Louis Armstrong recorded it. “When they passed out talent,” Carol Channing said, “Jerry stood in line twice.”A 2008 PBS documentary about him reported that Herman was diagnosed HIV-positive in 1985 when that diagnosis was an automatic death sentence. He was lucky, and is among of the fortunate few to live to see the lifesaving “cocktail” become available in 1995. The AIDS epidemic wiped out half the original La Cage aux Folles chorus before the show’s final run, but the show’s signature anthem “I Am What I Am” can still bring audiences to their feet with its call for dignity and integrity in the face of bigotry and fear.

Neil Tennant: 1954. With bandmate Chris Lowe, he was one half of the electronic dance duo Pet Shop Boys. Their first single, “West End Girls,” was actually recorded twice. The first version was released in 1984 and became a club hit in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Go figure. After the duo signed with EMI, they re-recorded the song, and it became a 1986 number one hit in the U.S. and the U.K. Tennant was coy about rumors over his sexuality throughout the 1980s, but he finally came out in a 1994 interview with a UK gay magazine. Pet Shop Boys are still going strong. On March 14, 2011, they released a double CD of the complete three-act ballet score for The Most Incredible Thing with the WrocÅ‚aw Score Orchestra. Their new studio album, Elysium, is scheduled to be released in September.

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The Daily Agenda for Monday, July 9

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS:
David Hockney: 1937. The British artist was born with synesthesia — he brain “sees” colors whenever he hears music. The colors that he sees guides him when he designs stage sets for operatic and ballet productions. In addition to set design, he is a renowned painter, print maker and photographer. While still a student at the Royal College of Art, Hockney’s exhibition Young Contemporariesin 1961, signalled the arrival of British Pop Art. Later that year, he sold two of his prints to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. That same year, he also read the poems of Walt Whitman, which inspired Hockney to paint several paintings on the themes of love and homosexuality, including “We Two Boys Together Clinging,” where the title and some of the text in the painting are lines from the Whitman’s poem of the same name. By the mid 1960s, Hockney moved to Los Angeles, where he made an entire series of paintings of swimming pools rendered in vibrant colors.

In more recent years, Hockney has been exploring the limits of scale. His “A Bigger Grand Canyon” (1998) is actually a series of 60 paintings which, when combined together, produce one enormous painting of 6 3/4 feet by 24 feet.  That painting was bought by the National Gallery of Australia for $4.6 million.In 2007, he produced “Bigger Trees Near Warter,” a series of fifty separate canvases which combine to form a 15 feet by forty feet painting. He donated those canvases to the Tate Gallery in London. “I thought if I’m going to give something to the Tate I want to give them something really good. It’s going to be here for a while.” He described it as a “duty” of successful artists to donate some of their work. He had turned down several requests to paint a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II, explaining politely that he was too busy painting her country. But he relented this year while watching the Thames River pageant for the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee on television and donated a printed copy of a digital painting he produced on his iPad to the Royal Collection.

Kelly McGillis: 1957. When the other star of Top Gun came out of the closet in 2009, she said that coming to terms with her sexual orientation had been a long, ongoing process since she was twelve, when she was convinced that God was punishing her. She now says that it’s much easier to become spiritual now that she knows that “God is okay with you being gay.” She graduated from Julliard’s Drama School in 1983 and began landing acting roles right away. Her breakout role was as an Amish mother in 1985’s Witness with Harrison Ford, for which she was nominated for a Golden Globe award. In 1986, she was the flight instructor, Charlie, in Top Gun with Tom Cruse and Val Kilmer. She continued acting in films and television throughout the 1990s before taking a break in 2001. She resumed acting in 2004, and in 2008 she guest starred on Showtime’s “The L Word,” where she played a closeted Army colonel. In 2010, McGilllis entered into a civl union with her partner, and they make their home in Collingswood, New Jersey where McGillis works full-time at a drug and alcohol rehabilitation center. “I think one of the gifts that comes with age, if we survive ourselves, is what we created,” she explained.

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The Daily Agenda for Sunday, July 8

TODAY’S AGENDA (Ours):
Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Budapest, Hungary; Cologne, Germany; London, UK (World Pride); Los Angeles, CA (Black Pride); Prince George, BC; San Luis Obispo, CA; Sitges, Spain; and Victoria, BC.

Other Celebrations This Weekend: Bear Week, Provincetown, MA.

TODAY’S AGENDA (Theirs):
Family “Research” Council’s Values Bus Tour: Roanoke, Lynchburg, VA. The Family “Research” Council, an SPLC-certified hate group, continues its Values Bus Tour with the Heritage Foundation today. The tour is part voter registration drive and part propaganda tour where they will disseminate “materials on defending life, marriage and religious liberty.” The bus tour begins its day this morning at the First Baptist Church in downtown Roanoke from 8:00 a.m. to noon. The bus will then roll merrily along to Lynchburg, with a stop at Heritage Baptist Church (where “Biblical heroes define masculinity“) from 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m.

The bus’s next stop will be in Richmond, Virginia on Tuesday.

TODAY IN HISTORY:
Austria Decriminalizes Homosexuality: 1971. On July 8, 1971 an amendment to the Austrian criminal code was signed which abolished the criminalization of consensual homosexual contact. Austria’s code had criminalized both male and female same-sex contact under its “crimes against nature” clause. With the new law, male homosexual contacts with a young man under 18, male (same-sex) prostitution, and “advertising” or “encouraging” homosexuality were still criminal after that date. The latter provisions were abolished during the early 1980s to make HIV-prevention easier. The age of consent remained 18 until 2002, when it was held unconstitutional by the Austrian Constitutional Court. It age of consent is now 14 to 16, depending on the age of both parties, and consistent with the age of consent for opposite-sex couples.

Murder Suspect Goes Free Because Gays Fear Coming Out of the Closet: 1977. The Associated Press reported:

(San Francisco) Police say a suspect in 14 homosexual murders has not been charged because three survivors of his knife attacks, including a “well-known entertainer” and a diplomat, won’t “come out of the closet” and testify against him. For the past year, police have been questioning a young man they call “The Doodler” about the 14 slayings and three assaults that occurred in San Francisco’s gay community between January 1974 and September 1975, Inspector Rotea Gilford said Thursday.

…In the attacks, the murderer met other men at a number of after-hours gay clubs and restaurants in San Francisco. He usually sketched them men before having sex with them and then stabbing them. Police believe the man committed the murders after feeling shame over his homosexual experiences.

With no witnesses willing to identify him, “The Doodler” was never brought to justice.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Philip Johnson: 1906. He was only twenty-four years old and fresh out of Harvard when he founded the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. He would have been regarded as a great visionary even if that had been his only accomplishment. But Johnson wanted more, and in his travels to Europe he became exposed to such masters of modernism as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, and Walter Gropius. Johnson’s 1932 MOMA show, “The International Style: Architecture Since 1922,” introduced modern architecture to the American public, and Johnson became an evangelist for the International Style. Johnson’s travels to Europe also exposed him to the early ideology of Hitler’s National Socialism, which Johnson also eagerly embraced. He remained enamored with Nazism until Germany’s 1939 invasion of Poland, when he toured that conquerred country at Hitler’s invitation. As Johnson later said, “I have no excuse [for] such utter, unbelievable stupidity. … I don’t know how you expiate guilt.”

Philip Johnson's Glass House

Fortunately for Johnson, there would be a second chapter to his life. After the war, he designed his 1949 masterpiece Glass House as his own private residence in New Canaan, Connecticut. That design put him at the forefront of modernist architecture in America. In the 1950s, he teamed up with his mentor Meis van der Rohe to design the Seagram Building in New York. The steel-and-glass design would define the essential elements of American skyscrapers for the next sixty years. Johnson’s minimalist steel and glass design would also be the defining feature of his Chrystal Cathedral, which he designed for televangelist Robert Schuller in Garden Grove, California (and which has been sold in a bankruptcy transaction to the Orange County diocese of the Catholic Church).

From the sublime to the ridiculous: the AT&T Building, 1984.

By the 1980s, Johnson had decided that minimalism had boxed him into a corner, if you will excuse the pun. So in a fit of iconoclasm, he abandoned his minimalist signature by placing a garish chippendale corbel on top of the AT&T building in New York, thus heralding the utterly lamentable post-modernist gewgaws that are the bane of every tacky strip mall in North America. Johnson’s latest design is considerably more redeeming. It is also for the largest LGBT congregation in America, Dallas’s Cathedral of Hope, whose Interfaith Peace Chapel opened to the public in 2010. Johnson didn’t live to see it come to fruition however. He died in his sleep at Glass House in 2005, survived by his partner of 45 years.

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The Daily Agenda for Saturday, July 7

TODAY’S AGENDA (Ours):
Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Budapest, Hungary; Cologne, Germany; Haarlem, Netherlands; London, UK (World Pride); Los Angeles, CA (Black Pride); Marseille, France; Porto, Portugal; Prince George, BC; San Luis Obispo, CA; Santa Barbara, CA; Sitges, Spain; Tuscany, Italy; and Victoria, BC.

Other Celebrations This Weekend: Bear Week, Provincetown, MA.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
George Cukor: 1899.A glance through his filmography shows that Hollywood would not have been Hollywood without George Cukor’s directing many of its landmark films with RKO and MGM.  In 1931, he made his solo directorial debut with Paramount with Tarnished Lady starring Tallulah Bankhead, and went on to work on twenty-six films over the next ten years including, notably, A Bill of Divorcement (1932, debuting Katharine Hepburn), Dinner at Eight (1933), Little Women (1933), David Copperfield (1935), Romeo and Juliet (1936), Camille (1936), The Philadelphia Story (1940), Gaslight (1944), Adam’s Rib (1949), Born Yesterday (1950), A Star is Born (1954), and My Fair Lady(1964). Cukor had been hired by his mentor, David O. Selznick, to direct Gone With The Wind even before the book was published. But Cukor was fired three weeks into filming after expressing dissatisfaction with the script. (A replacement director was also dissatisfied with it and quit, prompting a complete re-write of the entire film.)

Cukor had a reputation as a “woman’s director” for his ability to coax great performances from his actresses. He hated the title. It may have had to do with the fact that his homosexuality was an open secret in Hollywood. He luxurious home was the site of weekly Sunday afternoon pool parties attended by closeted celebrities and their guests. Hollywood was a very small company town, and word had a way of getting around the industry establishment. Producer Joseph L. Mankiewicz once said, “In a way, George Cukor was the first great female director of Hollywood.” But the quality of Cukor’s work belied those who dismissed him because he wasn’t a typical macho director. Twenty-one actors and actresses working under Cukor received Oscar nominations; three actors and two actresses came up winners. Cukor himself earned five Best Direction nominations, finally winning an Oscar for My Fair Lady.

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The Daily Agenda for Friday, July 6

TODAY’S AGENDA (Ours):
Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Budapest, Hungary; Cologne, Germany; Haarlem, Netherlands; London, UK (World Pride); Los Angeles, CA (Black Pride); Marseille, France; Porto, Portugal; Prince George, BC; San Luis Obispo, CA; Santa Barbara, CA; Sitges, Spain; Tuscany, Italy; and Victoria, BC.

Other Celebrations This Weekend: Bear Week, Provincetown, MA.

TODAY’S AGENDA (Theirs):
Family “Research” Council’s Values Bus Tour: Harrisonburg and Woodstock, VA. The Family “Research” Council, an SPLC-certified hate group, continues its Values Bus Tour with the Heritage Foundation today. The tour is part voter registration drive and part propaganda tour where they will disseminate “materials on defending life, marriage and religious liberty.” Today, the bus tour stops at Harrisonburg, VA for a monthly GOP luncheon from noon to 1:00 p.m. at The Wood Grill (1711 Reservoir St), followed by a “Your Money, Your Values, Your Vote Press Conference” beginning at 2:00 p.m. at the First Presbyterian Church on the Courthouse Square. The bus with then travel a few miles up the road to Woodstock for a “Your Money, Your Values, Your Vote” rally at the Woodstock Courthouse from 4:15 p.m. to 5:15 p.m.

Jérôme Duquesnoy (left), Piete, 1654 (right).

TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Jérôme Duquesnoy: 1602. The Flemish artist was, in his day, regarded as one of the finest sculptors of the seventeenth century. In 1644, Duquesnoy was commissioned to create statues for the nave of the Cathedral of St. Michael and St. Gudula in Brussels, and the following year he was appointed “architecte, statuaire et sculpteur de la Cour” to Archduke Leopold William, Regent of the Netherlands. it was during the time where he produced some of his most famous works, many of which depicted strong, muscled male figures in the Hellenic tradition. In 1651, he became Court Architect and Sculptor, and in 1654 he went to Ghent to fulfill several commissions when he was accused of indecencies with his assistants. The Privy Council of Ghent convicted Duquesnoy of sodomy and sentenced him to death. He was bound to a stake in the Grain Market in the center of the city, strangled, and his body reduced to ashes. His reputation was destroyed and his memory repressed. It has only been recently that critical attention has returned to his work.

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?