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
July 5th, 2012
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: Pearisburg, 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 Giles High School in Pearisburg, Virginia, where the stop will feature Pastor Shahn Wilburn of Riverview Baptist Church talking about ” the importance of protecting religious freedom and how we can Save the American Dream!” Complete with exclamation point! The event takes place this evening from 7:00 to 9:00 p.m.
Tomorrow, the bus will head to Harrisonburg, VA for a monthly GOP luncheon, and continue on to Woodstock for a rally Friday evening.
TODAY IN HISTORY:
PFC Barry Winchell Murdered: 1999. He had enlisted in the Army in 1997 and was transferred to Ft. Campbell, Kentucky in 1999 where he was assigned to the 2/502nd Infantry of the 101st Airborne Division. He learned to fire a .50-caliber machine gun so well that he became the best marksman in his company. He hoped one day to become a helicopter pilot, but that dream was cut short, brutally, on July 5, 1999 when he was bludgeoned to death with a baseball bat as he was sleeping in his cot in the barracks. Pvt Calvin Glover, 18, was arrested and charged with Winchell’s murder after admitting to the beating. While in custody, he made several disparaging remarks about blacks and gays to another prisoner.
In fact, there is little reason to believe that PFC Winchell. In the ensuing investigation, Sgt Eric Dubielak, Winchell’s commanding officer, testified that he knew that Winchell had been experiencing daily harassment from fellow soldiers over rumors of his perceived homosexuality, rumors that had been spread by Winchell’s roommate, Spc. Justin Fisher, when Winchell began dating an MtF transgender woman from Nashville. But Dubielak never intervened, nor did any of the other superior officers who admitted that they were aware of the abuse. “Nothing was done, sir,” said Sgt. Michael Kleifgen, who told of one fruitless effort to complain to the post’s inspector general when a master sergeant referred to Winchell as “that faggot.” But when asked why he himself didn’t order his platoon members to stop harassing Winchell, Kleifgen responded, “Everybody was having fun.” As for Winchell himself, he didn’t lodge a formal complaint, and for good reason. Doing so would have likely put him afoul of the “Don’t Tell” part of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” given his superior officers’ demonstrated inability to distinguish between sexual orientation and gender identity.
Glover was eventually court-martialed and given a lifetime sentence. He is still behind bars. Fisher, who had goaded Glover into attacking Winchell and participated in an attempted cover-up, was sentenced to 12½ years in prison and was released in 2006. But Ft. Campbell’s commanding officer at the time of the murder, Major General Robert T. Clark, refused to take responsibility for the anti-gay/trans climate under his command. Furthermore, the Defense Department under President George W. Bush exonerated Clark of any wrongdoing, and he was promoted to Lieutenant General in 2003. The year 2003 also saw the release of the Peabody Award-winning film film for Showtime, Soldier’s Girl
Jean Cocteau. Photo by Man Ray, 1922.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Jean Cocteau: 1889. Most artists work in just one or two mediums; Cocteau excelled in nearly everything he touched. The French poet, novelist, author of plays, ballets and operas, clothing designer, interior designer, graphic designer, painter, illustrator, filmmaker and actor excelled in just about everything he did. The title of his 1929 novel Les Enfants Terrible, about two siblings who create a game out of hurting each other’s feelings, has become a shorthand expression to describe those who go out of their way to shock others. His 1940 play, Le Bel Indifférent, created for his life-long friend Edith Piaf, enjoyed enormous acclaim. His films, which included Blood of a Poet (1930), Les Parents Terribles (1948), Beauty and the Beast (1946), and Orpheus (1949), are credited for introducing the avant-garde into French cinema.
His circle of friends and collaborators included Marcel Proust, André Gide, Guillaume Apollinaire, Pablo Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani, Sergei Diaghilev and Rayond Radigue. His personal life was similarly varied, which included an affair with Princess Natalie Paley (which ended when Paley aborted her pregnancy with Cocteau’s child) and long term relationships with actors Jean Marais and Édouard Dermit, the latter of whom Cocteau formally adopted. He died on October 11, 1963, of heart failure, just an hour after learning of Piaf’s death.
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July 4th, 2012
Jasper Johns. White Flag, 1955.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
Perhaps the most famous words written in America, the Declaration of Independence has inspired fights for liberty since its signing in 1776. It’s instructive that a decade later, delegates from those thirteen original colonies would gather again for the purposing of forming “a more perfect union.” Not a perfect union, but something at bit closer to that goal. We’ve been striving for that more perfect union since then. Today, as we continue to press for our own unalienable rights, it is good to recall that we are in good company:
We gathered and held our breath as the attendants rolled back the shroud. Where one might expect a pair of legs were wooden sticks. Nicked and numbered, the sticks were not attached to a corpse but a neat pile of well-aged picket signs, hand-lettered, “First Class Citizenship for Homosexuals.” Frank Kameny stood silent, at near attention. And this man was rarely silent. The pickets, carried in 1965, were delivered at that moment in 2006 from his attic to the nation’s — the vault of the National Museum of American History of the Smithsonian Institution.
The pickets were placed on the platform. The Smithsonian curator laid them alongside the writing table where Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence; the inkwell used by Lincoln when signing the Emancipation Proclamation; and the pin worn by Alice Paul who went to jail picketing the White House for women’s suffrage. “Frank, this is where the pickets fit into American history,” the Smithsonian curator said.
TODAY’S AGENDA:
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 IN HISTORY:
“Annual Reminder” Pickets at Philadelphia’s Independence Hall: 1965-1969. The Fourth of July commemorates the day in which a group of second class citizens decided that it was finally time to declare not only their independence, but also their dignity for having been created equal and endowed with the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Of course, not all Americans gained their freedom on that date in 1776. Nearly two centuries later, that struggle to form a more perfect until was still, for many, just beginning. In 1965, gay people were prohibited from holding jobs with the federal government by an Executive Order, homosexuality was illegal in every state in the country except Illinois, and gay people were regarded as mentally ill by the American Psychiatric Association.
To protest those conditions, LGBT activists under the collective name of the East Coast Homophile Organizations (ECHO) met at Philadelphia’s Independence Hall on July 4, 1965 for a demonstration to remind their fellow Americans that LGBT people did not enjoy some of the most fundamental of civil rights. Thirty-nine activists, including Frank Kameny, Barbara Gittings, and Kay Tobin, picketed in front of Philadelphia’s potent symbol of freedom, carrying signs reading “15 million homosexual Americans as for equality, opportunity, dignity,” and “homosexuals should be judged as individuals.
Barbara Gittings picketing at Independence Hall on July 4, 1966.
Dubbed the “Annual Reminder,” the picketers returned to Independence hall every year from 1965 to 1969, using the occasion of the American Independence Day to remind Americans that freedom was still an elusive dream for many of their fellow citizens. But with 1969’s Stonewall rebellion, the gay community gained an independence day all of their own. The “Annual Reminder” for 1969, occurring just a few days after that declaration of freedom on Christopher Street in New York, would be the last. In 1970, organizers decided to end the July 4 pickets in favor of the Christopher Street Liberation Day celebration on June 28 to commemorate the first anniversary of the riot. We’ve been celebrating Pride as a commemoration of our declaration of independence ever since. But the Annual Reminder hasn’t been forgotten. In 2005, the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission erected what is reported to be the first historical marker to recognize and celebrate LGBT history to commemorate those early protests in front of Independence Hall.
Happy Independence Day.
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July 3rd, 2012
TODAY IN HISTORY:
Civil Service Commission Begins Hiring Gay People: 1975. In 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower responded to both the “Red Scare” and the “Lavender Scare” stoked by Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist and anti-gay hearings by signing an executive order mandating the firing of all federal employees who were found guilty of “sexual perversion” — government-speak for homosexuality. Untold thousands lost their jobs in the ensuing decades, including one astronomer by the name of Frank Kameny, who was fired in 1957 (see Dec 20). He protested his firing, and argued his case in federal court all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court. The high court refused to hear the case in 1961, making his firing permanent. Kameny went on to become a leading gay-rights activist, and while his efforts extended to opposition to all aspects of discrimination and oppression, the federal employment ban never strayed far from his top concerns. Kameny supported others who had been fired in their efforts to get their jobs back and organized several protests and meetings at the commission’s Washington, D.C. headquarters throughout the next two decades (see, for example, Sept 28).
While Kameny’s case was the first legal challenge, it wasn’t the last. Several others followed suit, but most federal judges sided with the government’s position upholding the Civil Service Commission’s rules. But in 1973, after a federal judge in California ordered the commission to cease labeling gay people as unfit for federal employment, the commission decided to review its policies. By 1975, the commission finally amended its regulations and ended its ban on employing gays in the federal government. The decision however was not accompanied by a formal announcement. Instead, supervisors were quietly instructed that no one was to be barred for homosexuality. But news of the change did slowly leak out. According to Joyce Murdoch and Deb Price in their book Courting Justice: Gay Men And Lesbians V. The Supreme Court
NY Times: “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals”: 1981. Barely a month had passed since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced that five gay men had died of a rare form of pneumonia in Los Angeles, when there was another health alert from the CDC (PDF: 184KB/2 pages) about another 41 gay men in Los Angeles and New York who had been diagnosed with a previously rare form of cancer. Rumors had been swirling in New York of a “gay cancer” long before the news hit the pages of the New York Times, but seeing it in print lent a greater sense of panic in the gay community. Before 1981, the cancer, known as Kaposi’s Sarcoma (KS), was extremely rare, affecting mainly older men of Mediterranean decent, as well as Africans in the equatorial belt. Today, we now know that that part of Africa is the geographic origin of the AIDS virus, but in 1981 doctors had yet to connect any of those dots. In fact, the New York Times article, which is believed to be the first major news report of what would become known as AIDS, didn’t connect the new cancer cases with the reported pneumonia cases from the month earlier. (The CDC however, did notice that many of the gay men with KS also suffered from Pneumocystis pneumonia (PCP). They also updated their count of PCP patients from five a month earlier to fifteen.) But there was already one detail reported that would clue scientists to a common thread: nine of the victims had been found to have had severe defects in their immune systems.
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July 2nd, 2012
TODAY IN HISTORY:
State Department Fires 381 Homosexuals: 1953. In the early 1950s, the entire country was in the grips of the Red Scare as Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy was conducting his witch hunts. One of his main platforms would be the Senate’s Subcommittee on the Investigation of Loyalty of State Department Employees. While McCarthy’s main targets were imaginary Communists in the State Department, gay employees were also seen as “subversives” in need of rooting out. Among the more high-profile targets was Samuel Reber, a twenty-seven year career diplomat who announced his retirement in May of 1953 after McCarthy charged that he was a “security risk” — which was a barely-concealed code for homosexual. By then, President Dwight D. Eisenhower had already responded to McCarthy’s witch hunt by signing an executive order mandated the firing of all federal employees who were found guilty of “sexual perversion.” He also announced a re-organization of the State Department. Rep. Charles B Brownson, an Indiana Republican with his own lesser-known witch hunt underway in the House Government Operations Committee, asked the State Department for a progress report in rooting out homosexuals. On July 2, 1953, the State Department’s chief security officer R.W. Scott McLeod revealed that 351 homosexuals and 150 other “security risks” had been fired between 1950 and 1953.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS:
Richard Bruce Nugent: 1906. When the landmark Harlem Renaissance literary magazine Fire!! published his short story “Smoke, Lilies and Jade” in 1926, Richard Bruce Nugent became the first African-American writer willing to declare his homosexuality in print — and he would remain so for the next thirty years. A year earlier, he had been attending the “Saturday Evening” salons of poet Georgia Douglas Johnson in his native Washington, D.C., where he was introduced to the leading African-American thinkers of the day, including W.E.B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, Jean Toomer, and Waldo Frank. He also met poet Langston Hughes (Feb 1), and the two of them became fast friends and moved moved to New York. Nugent, Hughes, Cal Van Vechten (June 17) and several others became integral players in Harlem’s intellectual and artistic life, with Nugent becoming the most notorious. Van Vechten once wrote to Hughes that he saw Nugent at a society dinner in evening clothes “”with his usual open chest and uncovered ankles. I suppose soon he will be going without trousers.”
Nugent wasn’t just a writer, but also a dancer, painter and illustrator. The apartment complex in Harlem that he shared with other artists became known as “Niggeratti Manor,” where Nugent had painted the walls with mural, some depicting homoerotic scenes. Other illustrations appeared in Fire!! as well as two other African-American publications Opportunity and Palms, and other New York art magazines. Meanwhile, he continued to write short stories and even took his turn on the stage, appearing on Broadway and in an early production of the play Porgy (later adapted by George Gershwin for Porgy and Bess) In 1937, he published what is often considered his finest work, “Pope Pius the Only.”
In 1952, he married Grace Marr, with whom he shared accommodations, and with her three brothers. The marriage was her idea; she thought she could “change” him. It’s unclear why he went along with it. He warned her that it was a bad idea, but marry her he did. The relationship was never consummated. Meanwhile, Nugent remained an active booster of Harlem’s literary and arts scene throughout the rest of his life. He was also a harsh critic of the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 1968 exhibition on the Harlem Renaissance which, astonishingly, was put together without the involvement of Harlem artists. In 1983 he was interviewed for the film Before Stonewall. He died in 1987. In 2002 Duke University Press published Gay Rebel of the Harlem Renaissance: Selections from the Work of Richard Bruce Nugent
Dee Palmer: 1937. Jethro Tull fans would know her as composer and keyboardist David Palmer. She had provided orchestral arrangements for several significant Jethro Tull albums, including Aqualung and Thick as a Brick before joining the band as a full time musician in 1976. At the time, she presented herself as an eccentric Englishman, complete with a Sherlock Holmes pipe and a beard. She remained with the band until it broke up in 1980 over Ian Andersion’s decision to release a solo album under the Jethro Tull name.
She was also married. He had told Maggie about her transgender feelings on their second date, and Maggie was accepting. “All of my time with Maggie was blissfully happy,” she later recalled. But after her wife died in 1998, Dee was left alone to confront her sense that something was wrong. “Once she died I sat in the kitchen looking down the garden for a year, then gradually from the outermost part of my body and soul where I had consigned what I was to learn was gender dysphoria started to reassert itself as something that I had to deal with again.”
She finally decided it was time to act on the feelings that she had been having since the age of three. She changed her name to Dee in 2000 and underwent gender reassignment in 2004. The whole process for her was very difficult. “It isn’t for wimps by the way … And it isn’t for people who want to wear a frock and prance around masquerading as a female. It’s nothing to do with that, it’s a light year away from that.” Now that she has transitioned, she feels liberated, and lives with a sense that there was nothing left to hold her back. “it is like jumping from a parachute. At first it’s very easy, but then suddenly the ground is coming up at you and you can’t stop until you’ve reached the end; it’s very much that kind of experience – your writing and performance will take on new dimensions.”
Johnny Weir: 1984. The famous American figure skater is a three-time U.S. National Champion (2004–2006) and a the 2008 Worlds Championship bronze medalist, although for a number of reasons, his Olympic appearances in 2006 and 2010 were disappointing. When he appeared at the 2010 U.S. Championships wearing fox fur as part of his costume, he began to receive death threats from animal rights activists. He defended his decision to wear fur as “a personal choice,” but decided to remove the fur from his costume. By the time the 2010 Winter Olympics came around in Vancouver, he had to change his housing arrangement due to security concerns.
Weir was always a bit different — including the fact that he spins clockwise instead of counter-clockwise like most other figure skaters. He was long suspected of being gay — as are probably most male figure skaters. The fact that he designed some of his own skating costumes in a very androgynous style didn’t do much to quell the rumors. But for most of his career, he preferred to leave the questions unanswered. “It’s not part of my sport and it’s private,” he’d say. But when he published his memoir Welcome to My World
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July 1st, 2012
TODAY’S AGENDA (Ours):
Final Performance of “A Missionary Position”: Los Angeles, CA. Charles McNulty at The Los Angeles Times reviewed Ugandan-American playwright and actor Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine’s A Missionary Position,which premiered Thursday at the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater in the Walt Disney Concert Hall complex. A Missionary Position tells the story of Uganda’s LGBT community as seen through the eyes of a Ugandan government official, a transgender sex worker, a gay priest and a lesbian activist, and portrays their resistance to state-sponsored homophobia and repression. McNulty wrote:
The words of the characters, which include a transgendered sex worker, a gay priest and an accidental lesbian freedom fighter, are largely based on interviews. These monologues are carefully wrought, though they aren’t half as riveting as the onstage costume changes Mwine goes through to transform from one character to the next. The most startling metamorphosis occurs between the brigadier and Serena, the “trans-woman” whose world opens when she discovers a welcoming if dangerous subculture eager to put a price on her flesh. Mwine peels off hyper-masculine black fatigues to reveal a sexy red dress — a contrast that is as psychologically charged as it is theatrically resonant.
As a performer, Mwine possesses an entrancing graciousness. He offers himself as a conduit to other voices. This devotion to the real lives he is in composite form portraying may impede to an extent the dramatic interest of “A Missionary Position.” Reality is the ultimate arbiter of his narrative, not imagination — an inherent challenge for all works of creative nonfiction.
Tonight is the final performance, beginning at 7:00 p.m. Tickets are $20-$25 for general admission, with discounts available for students and groups. You can find more information here.
Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Barcelona, Spain; Cincinnati, OH; Delémont, Switzerland; Dublin, Ireland; Helsinki, Finland; Istanbul, Turkey; London, UK (World Pride); Madrid, Spain; Toronto, ON; and Winnipeg, MB.
Other Events This Weekend: Canadian Rockies International Rodeo, Strathmore, AB; Creativity and Crisis: Unfolding The AIDS Memorial Quilt, Washington, D.C. Eurogames 2012, Budapest, Hungary.
TODAY’S AGENDA (Theirs):
Family “Research” Council’s Values Bus Tour: Liberty Twp, OH. 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 tour leaves Columbus for two stops in Liberty Township, in the norther Cincinnati suburbs. First, the box will stop at Princeton Pike Church of God (6101 Princeton Glendale Rd) from 9:00 a.m. to noon. The bus will remain at the church for a Light Up Liberty festival from 6:00 to 10:00 p.m.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS:
Farley Granger: 1925: One of the best-looking men in Hollywood, he didn’t have the kind of prolific a film career one might expect despite his work being well-regarded. He is best known for his role in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope and Strangers on a Train and for Luchino Visconti’s Senso. In Rope, Granger played a murderer and (implied) lover of an accomplice in a story inspired by the Loeb and Leopold murder. In real life, Granger also enjoyed the attentions of men — as well as women. According to his 2007 autobiography Include Me Out,
Men or women?
“That really depends on the person,” he said impishly. But his follow-up comment left little doubt: “I’ve lived the greater part of my life with a man” — he has been with (Robert) Calhoun in New York since the 1960s — “so obviously that’s the most satisfying to me.”
Granger died of natural causes in New York City at the age of 85 in 2011.
Fred Schneider: 1951. The B-52s front man is probably America’s best known practitioner of sprechgesang. (The Free Dictionary: “a type of vocalization between singing and recitation … originated by Arnold Schoenberg, who used it in Pierrot Lunaire (1912)”) The group’s guy-and-gals call-and-response between Schneider and Kate Pierson and Cindy Wilson have become a trademark ever since “Rock Lobster” hit the charts in 1978. That sound defined the B-52s as the quintessential party band, inviting everyone to pile into the Chrysler as big as a whale. Schneider was coy about his sexuality throughout the 1980s and most of the 1990s, but his reluctance appeared to be more a matter of annoyance than fear. “I’m on the same side the fence as k.d., Elton and Frederick the Great. I just don’t like to share my personal life with the public.” Of course, there wasn’t much sharing needed. His own mother’s reaction when he came out to her probably sums it up for everyone else. “Oh I know, Freddie,” she said, and continued vacuuming without missing a beat.
Roddy Bottum: 1963. The keyboardist for Faith No More since 1982, Bottum came out as gay in 1993 the year after his father died. It’s easy to imagine that his revelation would have come as quite a shock to the hyper-hetero world of heavy metal, but Bottum described it as “a positive and uplifting experience. I guess I expected some of the fans to burn crosses or throw panties at me, but nothing like that ever happened.” One of his hits with Faith No More was “Be Aggressive,” from their 1992 album Angel Dust. The homoerotic song was about oral sex. “It was a pretty fun thing to write, knowing that (lead singer Mike Patton) was going to have to put himself on the line and go up onstage and sing these vocals.” Bottum’s openness about his sexuality didn’t exactly open the floodgates for other heavy metal rockers to come out. “You’d think there’d be a lot more homosexuality in metal with all the dressing up,” he told The Advocate in 1999. By then he had left Faith No More — and metal — to form the indie boy/girl group Imperial Teen. Since 2005, Bottum has written scores for more than a dozen movies and television shows.
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June 30th, 2012
TODAY’S AGENDA (Ours):
“A Missionary Position”: Los Angeles, CA. Ugandan-American playwright and actor Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine’s A Missionary Position,which premiered Thursday at the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater in the Walt Disney Concert Hall complex, continues its run tonight. A Missionary Position tells the story of Uganda’s LGBT community as seen through the eyes of a Ugandan government official, a transgender sex worker, a gay priest and a lesbian activist, and portrays their resistance to state-sponsored homophobia and repression. The curtain rises this evening at 8:30 p.m, with an additional performances tomorrow evening. Tickets are $20-$25 for general admission, with discounts available for students and groups. You can find more information here.
Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Albuquerque, NM; Arraial, Portugal; Bangor, ME; Barcelona, Spain; Cagliari Italy; Cincinnati, OH; Delémont, Switzerland; Dublin, Ireland; Edinburgh; UK; Helsinki, Finland; Istanbul, Turkey; Lexington, KY; London, UK (World Pride); Madrid, Spain; Naples, Italy; Omaha, NE; Oslo, Norway; Paris, France; St. Petersburg, FL; Salem, MA; Sofia, Bulgaria; Swansea, UK; Toronto, ON; and Winnipeg, MB.
Other Events This Weekend: Canadian Rockies International Rodeo, Strathmore, AB; Creativity and Crisis: Unfolding The AIDS Memorial Quilt, Washington, D.C. Eurogames 2012, Budapest, Hungary.
TODAY’S AGENDA (Theirs):
Family “Research” Council’s Values Bus Tour: Columbus OH. 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 tour is spending its second day in Columbus, Ohio as part of the “We the People” Tea Party convention, taking place at the Ohio Expo Center on the Ohio State Fairgrounds.
Exodus Freedom Conference: St. Paul, MN. Today is the final day of Exodus International’s annual Freedom Conference on the campus of Northwestern College in St. Paul, Minnesota. I’ve been attending this conference, talking to a lot of people and attending workshops and general sessions. I can say that everyone I’ve met has been very friendly and, yes, tolerant. I’m checking in regularly on my Twitter feed, although I haven’t been very active on it myself. If you’re in the neighborhood, whether at the conference or elsewhere, give me a shout @jfburroway.
TODAY IN HISTORY:
Urban Renaissance Blighted by “Parading Homosexuals”: 1969. We like to think that gentrification of older urban neighborhoods is something new. For most cities, it is, and for many cities it has been gay people leading the way in rehabbing run-down homes and bringing entire blocks back to life. But New York’s neighborhoods have been in a constant state of reinvention ever since the Indians moved out and the Dutch moved in. In the 1960s, Manhattan’s West Side was in a serious state of decline. In 1969, New York magazine published an article touting the Upper West Side’s “renaissance,” brought on by a new band of urban settlers moving into the very rough neighborhood who were attracted by cheap rents and readily available housing:
“I was ready for war,” one recent brownstone buyer said. “You know, German shepherd, barbed wire, burglar alarms, punji sticks, the works. But we were delighted to find that with a little caution it could be a relaxed place to live.” … Business, of course, has joined and helped to stimulate the movement to the West Side. Flower vendors who set up their cardboard cartons at the top of the neighborhood’s subway stairs claim business is booming. “Only a year ago,” Monroe, a West 86th Street vendor, said between sales, “flowers couldn’t live on the West Side.”
High end stores, restaurants, theaters were returning to the Upper West Side amidst a $700 million building boom. But the transition from a down-in-the-heels neighborhood to a sought-after address was far from complete:
The same kind of young, successful and relatively affluent middle-class families that moved to the suburbs 20 years ago and to the East Side 10 years ago are moving to the West Side today, and while the neighborhood still has an ample supply of teenage muggers, parading homosexuals and old men who wear overcoats in July, the over-all mood of the area seems to have changed.
This article was published just two days after the Stonewall Rebellion, which took place just four short miles to the south in Greenwich Village. Those riots were barely mention in New York’s respectable press, and “parading homosexuals” were still seen as a sign of decay. But just a decade later a new generation of “parading homosexuals” would become highly sought-after pioneers in reviving dying neighborhoods, where today their efforts are often praised by city leaders as evidence of renewed economic and creative vigor.
[Thanks to BTB reader Rob for providing a copy of the New York magazine article.]
Bowers v. Hardwick: 1986. It all started in August, 1982, when Michael Hardwick threw a beer bottle into a trash can outside of an Atlanta gay bar. A police officer cited him for public drinking. When Hardwick failed to arrive for his court date, a warrant was issued for his arrest. Several weeks later — after Hardwick realized his error and paid the ticket — a police officer went to Hardwick’s apparent to serve the arrest warrant. The police officer entered the apartment (accounts differ on how he got in), and discovered Hardwick and a male companion engaged in oral sex, which Georgia defined as “sodomy” under the law. Both men were arrested, but the local district attorney decided not to press charges. Hardwick then sued Georgia attorney general Michael Bowers in federal court seeking to overturn the state’s sodomy law. The ACLU agreed to take the case on Hardwick’s behalf.
A federal judge in Atlanta dismissed the case, siding with the Attorney General. Hardwick appealed to the Eleventh Court of Appeals, which reversed the lower court’s ruling. Bowers then appealed the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled on this date — during pride week — in 1986 that Hardwick’s right to privacy did not extend to private, consensual sexual conduct — at least as far as gay sex was concerned. Justice Byron White, writing for the majority, barely concealed his contempt for gay people. He wrote, “to claim that a right to engage in such conduct is ‘deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition’ or ‘implicit in the concept of ordered liberty’ is, at best, facetious.” Chief Justice Warren Berger, in a concurring opinion, piled on: “To hold that the act of homosexual sodomy is somehow protected as a fundamental right would be to cast aside millennia of moral teaching.”
Justice Lewis Powell was considered the deciding vote. It has been reported that he originally voted to strike down the law but changed his mind after a few days. In 1990, after Powell had retired three ears earlier, he told a group law students that he considered his opinion in Bowers was mistake. “I do think it was inconsistent in a general way with Roe. When I had the opportunity to reread the opinions a few months later I thought the dissent had the better of the arguments.” His mistake would remain the law of the land for another seventeen years, until Bowers itself was held to be “not correct” in Lawrence v. Texas.
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June 29th, 2012
TODAY’S AGENDA (Ours):
“A Missionary Position”: Los Angeles, CA. Ugandan-American playwright and actor Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine’s A Missionary Position,which premiered last night at the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater in the Walt Disney Concert Hall complex, continues its run tonight. According to the press release: “A Missionary Position …incorporates raw video footage and still photography—gathered over recent months on the front lines of the African nation’s LGBT movement—and layers this documentary material with his portrayal of riveting figures drawn from in-person interviews. A Missionary Position reveals Uganda’s LGBT community as seen through the eyes of a Ugandan government official, a transgender sex worker, a gay priest and a lesbian activist, and creates a complex investigation of the burgeoning resistance to state-supported oppression.”
The curtain raises this evening at 8:30 p.m. this evening, with an additional performances Saturday and Sunday. Tickets are $20-$25 for general admission, with discounts available for students and groups. You can find more information here.
Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Albuquerque, NM; Arraial, Portugal; Bangor, ME; Barcelona, Spain; Cagliari Italy; Cincinnati, OH; Delémont, Switzerland; Dublin, Ireland; Edinburgh; UK; Helsinki, Finland; Istanbul, Turkey; Lexington, KY; London, UK (World Pride); Madrid, Spain; Naples, Italy; Omaha, NE; Oslo, Norway; Paris, France; St. Petersburg, FL; Salem, MA; Sofia, Bulgaria; Swansea, UK; Toronto, ON; and Winnipeg, MB.
Other Events This Weekend: Canadian Rockies International Rodeo, Strathmore, AB; Creativity and Crisis: Unfolding The AIDS Memorial Quilt, Washington, D.C. Eurogames 2012, Budapest, Hungary.
TODAY’S AGENDA (Theirs):
Family “Research” Council’s Values Bus Tour: Columbus OH. 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 tour is swinging through the swing state of Ohio, with a stop today and tomorrow in Columbus for the “We the People” Tea Party convention at the Ohio Expo Center on the Ohio State Fairgrounds. The Values Bus will be there all day today and tomorrow.
Exodus Freedom Conference: St. Paul, MN. Today is the second full day of Exodus International’s annual Freedom Conference on the campus of Northwestern College in St. Paul, Minnesota. Unlike other Exodus events which are mostly geared toward recruitment into their “lifestyle,” this one is the real deal for “strugglers” themselves. (They hate the word “ex-gay”. I’ve only heard the word twice; both times it was used disparagingly.) I’ve been attending this conference, and I can tell you that the experience from the inside is somewhat different from what you typically see on the outside — and it’s probably almost the opposite of what you would expect it to be. I’ll have much more on that later, probably next week when I have more time to sit down and write about what I’ve seen and the people I’ve talked to. Meanwhile, if by chance you here also, give me a shout via Twitter (@jfburroway, where I’m following the hashtag #Exodus2012) and say hi. The conference continues through Saturday.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Henry Gerber: 1892. Pro-gay activism in the U.S goes back a very long way, far longer than most realize. Henry Gerber, a Bavarian immigrant to Chicago, served in the U.S. Army’s occupation of Germany following World War I, where he came in contact with the growing German gay rights movement. He read up on German homophile magazines and came in contact with Magnus Hirschfeld’s Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, the first organization in the world working to advance gay rights. When Gerber returned to the U.S. he founded the Society for Human Rights (SHR) in 1924. With an African-American clergyman named John T. Graves as president, SHR is believed to be America’s first gay rights organization. Gerber also founded Friendship and Freedom, the first known American gay publication.
SHR didn’t last very long. The wife of the group’s vice president denounced Gerber and his associates to police, calling them “degenerates.” In July, 1925, police arrested Gerber, Graves and two others as newspaper headlines screamed “Strange Sex Cult Exposed.” Gerber was tried three times, but the charges were eventually dismissed. He was nevertheless ruined, jobless and drained of his life savings. He continued writing about gay rights, sometimes under his own name and sometimes under a pseudonym. He died on New Year’s Eve in 1972 at the age of 80, having lived long enough to see gay rights advocacy take on a new vibrancy in the 1950s and 1960s, culminating in an explosion of advocacy and pride after the Stonewall Rebellion of 1969.
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?
June 28th, 2012
TODAY’S AGENDA (Ours):
“A Missionary Position”: Los Angeles, CA. Ugandan-American playwright and actor Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine’s A Missionary Position,which premiered last night at the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater in the Walt Disney Concert Hall complex, continues its run tonight. According to the press release: “A Missionary Position …incorporates raw video footage and still photography—gathered over recent months on the front lines of the African nation’s LGBT movement—and layers this documentary material with his portrayal of riveting figures drawn from in-person interviews. A Missionary Position reveals Uganda’s LGBT community as seen through the eyes of a Ugandan government official, a transgender sex worker, a gay priest and a lesbian activist, and creates a complex investigation of the burgeoning resistance to state-supported oppression.”
The curtain raises this evening at 8:30 p.m. this evening, with additional performances on Saturday and Sunday. Tickets are $20-$25 for general admission, with discounts available for students and groups. You can find more information here.
Press Conference To Counter Exodus International: St. Paul, MN. Truth Wins Out will hold a press conference to counter the Exodus International’s annual “Freedom Conference,” which is taking place this week in St. Paul, Minnesota [see “Today’s Agenda (Theirs)” below]. TWO’s John Becker will be joined by Jeffry G. Ford, a psychologist and former leader of a Minnesota ex-gay group, and by Monica Meyer of OutFront Minnesota. The press conference takes place today at noon CDT at St. Paul Reformation Lutheran Church, 100 Oxford St. N. in St Paul.
Police Chief, State Officials Join Panel Discussion on Rainbow Lounge Raid: Dallas, TX. On June 28, 2009 — the thirtieth anniversary of the Stonewall uprising — Fort Worth police conducted a raid on the Rainbow Lounge with agents from the Texas Alcohol Beverage Commission. Several customers were detained and one customer, Chad Gibson, received a severe brain injury after agents slammed him against the club’s concrete floor of the bar. Tonight, there will be a screening of Robert Carmina’s documentary, Raid of the Rainbow Lounge, at Dallas’s Magnolia Theater. The screening will be followed by a panel discussion featuring Fort Worth police Chief Jeffrey Halstead, Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission Capt. Charlie Cloud, TABC agent and LGBT liaison Leigh Ann Wiggins, Queer LiberAction founder Blake Wilkinson, Fairness Fort Worth spokesman Jon Nelson and Camina himself. Tickets are $12 and doors open at 7 p.m. The screening begins at 7:30.
Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Albuquerque, NM; Arraial, Portugal; Bangor, ME; Barcelona, Spain; Cagliari Italy; Cincinnati, OH; Delémont, Switzerland; Dublin, Ireland; Edinburgh; UK; Helsinki, Finland; Istanbul, Turkey; Lexington, KY; London, UK (World Pride); Madrid, Spain; Naples, Italy; Omaha, NE; Oslo, Norway; Paris, France; St. Petersburg, FL; Salem, MA; Sofia, Bulgaria; Swansea, UK; Toronto, ON; and Winnipeg, MB.
Other Events This Weekend: Canadian Rockies International Rodeo, Strathmore, AB; Creativity and Crisis: Unfolding The AIDS Memorial Quilt, Washington, D.C. Eurogames 2012, Budapest, Hungary.
TODAY’S AGENDA (Theirs):
Exodus Freedom Conference: St. Paul, MN. Today is the first full day of Exodus International’s annual Freedom Conference on the campus of Northwestern College in St. Paul, Minnesota. This is an annual gathering of real, honest-to-goodness ex-gays — or “strugglers” was they call themselves. You can think of this as Burning Man for guys who no longer want to burn for men. Except there’s women here too, so… okay, I don’t have anything pithy for them. Sorry. It’s late and I’m tired after a long day of traveling. Traveling, because I came here for the conference, meeting new people, making friends, and soaking up the vibes. It’s how I’m spending my summer vacation. If by chance you here also, give me a shout via Twitter (@jfburroway) and say hi. The conference continues through Saturday.
Stonewall, 1969
TODAY IN HISTORY:
Stonewall: 1969. What can I possibly tell you about Stonewall that you don’t already know? It has become our Gettysburg, the iconic battle that represents a significant turning point. As the Civil War has been divided to two eras before Gettysburg and after, so, too, has our history been identified as pre-Stonewall and post-Stonewall. As with the civil war, there were gay rights confrontations before Stonewall, and there have been police raids after, but Stonewall remains the fulcrum on which the weight of gay history shifts from unmitigated fear and oppression to a confident and unrelenting push for dignity and full citizenship.
Stonewall, 2011
Americans made little note of small village of Gettysburg before 1863, and today the minutia of that great battle is mostly left to Civil War buffs. For the rest of us, Gettysburg is our collective shorthand for the ideal of human sacrifice and valor, and of freedom. And so it is also with Stonewall. It used to be a little-known place, and then it was an event. But more so today Stonewall is an idea, one that was partially fulfilled in New York with the enactment of marriage equality last year. But that is only one part of the idea. The higher idea of dignity and the full rights and privileges of citizenship remains elusive for too many people. The promise of Stonewall has not been fulfilled for them — or even for us who live and work where discrimination in its many forms remains perfectly legal. But because of Stonewall and what it has come to mean, we know that there is no turning back. There is only movement forward. Stonewall demands nothing less.
First Gay Pride March to Commemorate Stonewall: 1970. The actual Stonewall uprising received scant attention in the media when it actually happened. There were very few reporters there and only a bare handful of photos taken of the uprising as it occurred. By in the space of a year, Stonewall had already become a singly word that meant more than just a run down bar in the Village. One of the more interesting articles to appear in the mainstream media was a brief description of the parade up Christopher Street on June 28, 1970 that appeared in July 11 edition of The New Yorker:
A number of policemen were standout around, looking benevolent and keeping an eye on things. Many of the marchers were carrying banners that identified them as members of homosexual organizations, like the Gay Liberation Front, the Mattachine Society, and the Gay Acivists Alliance. The symbol of the G.A.A. is a lambda, which physicists use as a symbol for wavelength, and many of the kids were wearing purple T-shirts with yellow lambdas on them.
Most of the marchers chatted in anticipatory tones, and a few reporters were among them looking for interviews. One approached two boys standing together and asked them the question that reporters always ask: “How do you feel?”
One of the boys said, “I feel proud.”
At the head of the parade, one boy stood carrying the American flag. Near him stood a man talking to another man. “Homosexuals are very silly,” said the first man. “They congregate in certain areas and then spend all other time walking up and down the street ignoring each other.”
That first march wasn’t called “Gay Pride.” It was called the Christopher Street Day. But in that participant’s response, you can already see the sense that most people had that “pride” would be the operative word for the day. The author (whose name is not given) reported that marchers carried signs reading “Homosexual is not a four letter word,” “Latent Homosexuals Unite!” and “Hi Mom!” Anti-gay protesters were there as well, one with a sign reading simply “Sodom + Gomorra.” All in all, the parade was not just a success, but cathartic for some:
An eighteen-year-old boy from Long Island who was marching in the middle of the parade with his arms around two friends said, “I’ve been up since six-thirty, I was so excited I couldn’t sleep. I wasn’t going to come, but then I figured I’m gay and I might as well support my people. So here I is!” Sometimes the marchers addressed the onlookers. “Join us!” they called, and “Come on in, the water’s fine!” They got a few grins for this, and once or twice somebody did step out from the crowd to join the parade. These people were roundly cheered by the marchers. Just south of Central Park, a well-dressed middle-aged woman on the sidewalk flashed a V-sign. A marcher, a young man with a mustache, shouted to a cop, also a young man with a mustache, “It isn’t so bad, is it?” The cop shouted back, “No!”
As the parade entered the Park, a young marcher said, “Would you believe it! It looks like an invading army. It’s a gay Woodstock. And after all those years I spent in psychotherapy!”
A friend of his laughed and said, “What will your shrink do without you? He’s dependent on your for the payments on his car.”
The Village Voice has another first-person account of the 1970 celebration.
[Thanks to BTB reader Rob for providing a copy of the New Yorker article.]
TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS:
John Inman: 1935.The quintessential British poofter known for his role as Mr. Humphries in Are You Being Served? He was also a pantomime dame, a distinctly British form of drag performance (Dame Edna is actually Australian, but think of her and you get the idea.) “I’m a tits and feathers man,” he once said in explaining his love for show business. His character’s high camp and trademark high-pitched “I’m free!” in Are You Being Served? became a catchphrase in Britain.
Not everyone was amused. He was picketed by the Campaign for Homosexual Equality because they charged that his character posed a bad image for gay men. Inman said, “they thought I was over exaggerating the gay character. But I don’t think I do. In fact there are people far more camp than Mr. Humphries walking around this country. Anyway, I know for a fact that an enormous number of viewers like Mr. Humphries and don’t really care whether he’s camp or not. So far from doing harm to the homosexual image, I feel I might be doing some good.” In December 2005 he and his partner of 35 years, Ron Lynch, took part in a civil partnership ceremony at London’s Westminster Register Office. Inman died in 2007.
Jim Kolbe: 1942. He is the former Republican Congressman for Arizona’s 8th congressional district — the district more recently held by Rep. Gabrielle Giffords before she resigned after being seriously injured in a 2011 shooting. Kolbe was outed in 1996 after voting for the Defense of Marriage Act. He was reelected to his seat in 1998, and in 2000, he became the first openly gay person to address the Republican National Convention, although his speech did not address gay rights. He also continued to defend his vote for DOMA. “My vote on the Defense of Marriage Act was cast because of my view that states should be allowed to make that decision, about whether or not they would recognize gay marriages,” he said. “Certainly, I belive that states should have the right, as Vermont did, to provide for protections for such unions.” He voted against the Federal Marriage Amendment in 2004 and 2006.
By the time he was wrapping up his congressional service in 2006, Kolbe was a supporter of same-sex marriage, telling local audiences in Tucson that “in a few years,” same-sex marriage would be normal and uncontroversial. In 2008, his good friend Tim Bee, who was the state Senate Majority Leader, announced that he would run against Giffords for Congress, Kolbe agreed to serve in Bee’s election campaign. Kolbe withdrew his support however when Bee cast his tie-breaking vote to place the proposed state constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage on the ballot.
David Kopay: 1942. A former American football running back in the National Football League before retiring in 1972, Davud Kopay became one of the first professional male athletes to come out as gay in 1975. His 1977 biography, David Kopay Story
In 2007, Kopay announced he would leave an endowment of $1 million to the his alma mater University of Washington’s Q Center, a resource and support center for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender students and faculty. He has said that it is one of the most important efforts he will ever undertake.
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?
June 27th, 2012
TODAY’S AGENDA (Ours):
Smithsonian Folklife Festival Features AIDS Quilt: Washington, D.C. Every year during the Independence Day week of festivities in the nation’s capital, the Smithsonian Institution sets up a Folklife Festival on the National Mall. One of this year’s main programs is Creativity and Crisis: Unfolding the AIDS Memorial Quilt. This year marks the 25th anniversary of the AIDS Memorial Quilt, which has grown to more than 48,000 panels and has become the largest piece of folk art in the world. According to the Smithsonian:
Creativity and Crisis: Unfolding The AIDS Memorial Quilt is the first Festival program to focus exclusively on community craft and performance that were directly developed in response to crisis and grief. With The AIDS Memorial Quilt as the anchor and through craft demonstrations, dance and musical performances, interactive discussions, and other activities, this program commemorates the innovative and resourceful ways through which communities have endeavored to educate people and to cope with one of the most complex pandemics in modern history.
The 2012 Smithsonian Folklife Festival will be open from Wednesday, June 27, through Sunday, July 1 and again from Wednesday, July 4, through Sunday, July 8. The Festival will be closed on Monday, July 2 and Tuesday, July 3. It is open to the public from 11:00 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Up to 8,000 panels of the quilt itself will be laid out every morning from 10:00 a.m. to 12:00 noon, and will be taken up every evening from 5:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.,. Evening events on the Festival grounds will begin at 6:00 p.m. and may continue until as late as 9:00 p.m.
All 48,000 panels of the AIDS Memorial Quilt will be shown in various displays around Washington, D.C. over the next month. For more information, check out Quilt2012.org.
Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Albuquerque, NM; Arraial, Portugal; Bangor, ME; Barcelona, Spain; Cagliari Italy; Cincinnati, OH; Delémont, Switzerland; Dublin, Ireland; Edinburgh; UK; Helsinki, Finland; Istanbul, Turkey; Lexington, KY; London, UK (World Pride); Madrid, Spain; Naples, Italy; Omaha, NE; Oslo, Norway; Paris, France; St. Petersburg, FL; Salem, MA; Sofia, Bulgaria; Swansea, UK; Toronto, ON; and Winnipeg, MB.
Other Events This Weekend: Canadian Rockies International Rodeo, Strathmore, AB; Creativity and Crisis: Unfolding The AIDS Memorial Quilt, Washington, D.C. Eurogames 2012, Budapest, Hungary.
TODAY’S AGENDA (Theirs):
Exodus Freedom Conference: St. Paul, MN. Exodus International kicks off it annual Exodus Freedom Conference today on the campus of Northwestern College in St. Paul, Minnesota. The annual conference is, as they say in Minnesota, the real deal — a four-day gathering of ex-gay people (“strugglers” in the parlance of the in-crowd) who will attend worship services, fellowship, workshops and plenary sessions in a kind of a summer camp for those who are trying to avoid the “camp,” so to speak. This year’s theme is “made for more,” and yours truly is boarding a flight bright and early this morning to attend the conference and see for myself what more there is to see. We’ve been documenting several changes to Exodus’s public face oner the past year; this will be my chance to see how things look up close. If you are attending the conference, give me a shout via Twitter (@jfburroway) and say hi. If you’re not attending the conference, give me a shout anyway. The conferences begins tonight and continues through Saturday.
TODAY IN HISTORY:
The McCarren-Walter Immigration and Naturalization Act: 1952. It was sixty years ago today when Congress passed a major overhaul of the nation’s immigration laws, removing the previous quotas which excluded immigrants based on the country of origin, and instead barring those who were deemed unlawful, immoral, diseased in any way, politically radical, and accepting those who were willing to conform to prevailing American political thought. Crafted at the height of the McCarthy Red Scare, it was the political aspects which drove Congress to pass the act. For the next four decades, the U.S. government used the act to prevent hundreds of people each year from visiting the U.S solely because of their political beliefs and associations.
Political beliefs however weren’t the only litmus test the government used. One provision prohibited entry to “aliens afflicted with psychopathic personality, epilepsy, or a mental defect.” Since the American Psychiatric Association listed homosexuality as a mental defect, the Immigration and Naturalization Service took that to mean that gays and lesbians were to be barred from entry into the United States. Even after the APA removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders, the INS continued to bar openly gay people from immigrating. As the years wore on, the ban was enforced haphazardly, but gay immigrants remained subject to deportation at the whim of an immigration judge. It wouldn’t be until the 1990 Immigration Act that homosexuality would be formally removed as grounds for exclusion. But by then, HIV had become the new basis for barring not just immigrants, but HIV-positive business people, HIV/AIDS advocates and even tourists from entering the U.S. for even a single day. That ban remained in place until 2010.
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?
June 26th, 2012
TODAY’S AGENDA:
Defense Department Hosts First Ever LGBT Pride Month Observance: Washington, D.C. This time last year, gay and lesbian servicemembers could be drummed out of the service if their superiors knew they were gay. But since “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was repealed, that is all water under the bridge. Mostly. While trans employees can work openly at the Pentagon, transgender people are still barred from serving. Today, the Defense Department will hold an LGBT Pride event at the Pentagon with DoD’s General Counsel Jeh Johnson as keynote speaker. That will be followed by a panel discussion on “”The Value of Open Service and Diversity.” The event is open to service members, civilian employees, and members of the media and take place from 1:00 to 2:00 p.m. EDT in the Pentagon Auditorium, Room BH650.
TODAY IN HISTORY:
Life Magazine’s “Homosexuality In America”: 1964.
“Homosexuality shears across the spectrum of American life — the professions, the arts, business and labor. It always has. But today, especially in big cities, homosexuals are discarding their furtive ways and openly admitting, even flaunting, their deviation. Homosexuals have their won drinking places, their special assignation streets, even their own organizations. And for every obvious homosexual, there are probably nine nearly impossible to detect. This social disorder, which society tries to suppress, has forced itself into the public eye because it does present a problem — and parents especially are concerned. The myth and misconception with which homosexuality has so long been clothed must be cleared away, not to condone it but to cope with it.”
Over the next fourteen pages, Life magazine explored what they called the “sordid world” of the gay community. The articles provide interesting vignettes and photos of gay life in the pre-Stonewall era, but reading through them today probably tells us more about society’s revulsion towards gay people than it does about gays themselves. At one point, author Paul Welch accompanies a Los Angeles police officer acting as a decoy to try entrap a gay man into propositioning him. Even if the proposition involves going to a private home for the evening — the same type of invitation being made in straight bars all across Los Angeles that very same night — it would end badly with an arrest and possible lifetime registration as a sex offender. LGBT activist Dale Jennings arrest in the privacy of his own home and the city’s embarrassing failure to secure a conviction in a well-publicized case twelve years earlier (see June 23) had done nothing to stem police harassment.
One education pamphlet compiled for Los Angeles police warned that what gay men really want is “a fruit world.” Welch continued: “Although the anti-homosexual stand taken by the Los Angeles police is unswervingly tough, it reflects the attitude of most U.S. law-enforcement agencies on the subject.” On January 1, 1967, gay Angelenos would reach their breaking point and the Black Cat riots would become the high water mark in police harassment in Los Angeles — more than two years before the Stonewall rebellion in New York.
32 Killed in Arson Fire At New Orleans Gay Bar: 1973. It was a Sunday. The UpStairs Lounge, a second floor gay bar in New Orleans’s French Quarter, had hosted members of the local Metropolitan Community Church who attended a beer bust following church services. The evening was still early, not quite eight o’clock when the bartender heard the door buzzer downstairs ring, a sound that usually meant that a cab was outside the take a patron home. When another bar employee went to check on the cab, he found instead that the staircase was engulfed in flames from a molotov cocktail that had been tossed into the entrance, and those flames were rapidly climbing the wooden staircase into the bar.
The bartender, Buddy Rasmussen, led about twenty or thirty people through an unmarked exit which led to the roof, and they were able to hop onto other buildings and make their escape. But more than thirty others in the lounge ran to the windows instead, only to discover they were barred. By the time one of the patrons managed to squeeze through the bars, his body was already in flames and he died right after landing in the street below. Another patron escaped, but when he realized his boyfriend didn’t make it out, he went back in to find him. Fire crews later discovered their burned bodies holding each other. MCC pastor Rev. Bill Larson clung to the bars at a window where he died, his body melted into the window frame. His charred body remained visible from the street below for several hours afterwards.
Twenty-nine people died that night, and three more died later from their injuries. The fire at UpStairs lounge may very well have been the worst mass murder of gays in American history, but aside from the first day’s coverage, New Orleans could barely muster a yawn. Newspaper photos of Rev. Larson’s body against the window frame came to symbolize the city’s apathy toward the tragedy. Talk radio hosts told jokes (“What will they bury the ashes of queers in? Fruit jars.”), and the press quoted on cab driver saying “I hope the fire burned their dresses off.” Not only did the New Orleans Police Department barely investigate the crime, they could hardly be bothered to identify the victims. Major Henry Morris, chief detective of the New Orleans Police Department said, “We don’t even know these papers belonged to the people we found them on. Some thieves hung out there, and you know this was a queer bar.” Churches refused to allow families to hold funerals on their premises. Other families refused to claim their dead sons’ bodies. Four unidentified bodies ended up being dumped in a mass grave. No one was ever charged.
Here are two news reports of the fire, a lengthy film report from CBS news, and a shorter one from NBC:
TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Lance Loud: 1951. PBS aired the groundbreaking documentary series An American Family in 1973 which would become the first reality television series in history. Millions of Americans were glued to their television sets watching the Loud family of Santa Barbara, California, go about their daily lives with film cameras in tow. Lance Loud, the family’s eldest twenty-year-old son who was living in New York City, quickly became the star of the program. He came out to America in the second episode when his mother went to visit him at the Chelsea Hotel, and his daring unconformity became an inspiration for young Americans, gay and straight.
Loud had returned to California by the time the series aired, so he decided to move back to New York City to take advantage of his newfound fame. He formed a band called the Mumps, which played New York’s famed CBGB and Mix, and toured with the Talking Heads, Television, Ramones, Cheap Trick and Van Halen. But after five years and a loyal following, they failed to attract a major recording contract. After the band broke up, Loud returned to Los Angeles and became a writer. His articles were published in Interview, Details, Vanity Fair, among others. He also had a regular column, “Out Loud,” in The Advocate.
Loud found the fame he earned from An American Family to be hollow. Americans had watched as his parents’ relationship careened toward divorce, leading Loud to say, “Television ate my family.” Loud himself went through years of substance abuse. When he was diagnosed with AIDS and hepatitis C, Loud agreed to appear in one final cinema verité documentary for PBS. But this time he made the decision to perform as a role model for what not to do with one’s life. Lance Loud! A Death in An American Family aired in 2003, two years after he died of liver failure.
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?
June 25th, 2012
TODAY IN HISTORY:
Execution in New Netherlands: 1646. The New Netherlands Colony court sentenced “Jan Creoli, a negro,” for a second “sodomy” offense. The record stated: “this crime being condemned of God…as an abomination, the prisoner is sentenced to be conveyed to the place of public execution, and there choked to death, and then burnt to ashes….” The rationale was cited as Genesis c. 19; Leviticus c. 18: 22, 29. The margin of the court record states: “he was executed at New Haven.”
[From Jonathan Ned Katz, Gay/Lesbian Almanac (NY: Harper & Row, 1983), p. 90.]
Supreme Court Declares Physique Magazines Non-Pornographic: 1962. In the 1950s, Herman L. Womack published three beefcake magazines: MANual, Trim and Grecian Guild Pictorial. Although the magazines were marketed to gay men, they made no mention whatsoever of homosexuality, instead presenting themselves as bodybuilding and physique magazines. In 1960, the postmaster in Arlington Virginia seized a shipment of the three magazines and declared that because the magazines were marketed to gay men, they were obscene and therefore “nonmailable,” even though the magazines contained no actual nudity. (Models wore “posing pouches” to conceal their genitalia.) In other words, it wasn’t that the photos themselves were pornographic, but that the gay audience made the photos pornographic and therefore illegal. Womack sued in federal court, but after the court granted the govermnent’s move for summary judgment, he appealed all the way to the Supreme Court.
On June 25, 1962, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in MANual Enterprises v. Day that the materials in question were not pornographic. Writing for the majority, Justice John Marshall Harlan II wrote that the photos themselves were not “patently offensive” or “indecent.” “[We] need go no further in the present case than to hold that the magazines in question, taken as a whole, cannot, under any permissible constitutional standard, be deemed to be beyond the pale of contemporary notions of rudimentary decency.” And since the magazines didn’t reach that level of indecency, it didn’t matter who the materials were being marketed to. The mere portrayal of the male nude — even if it happens to be the portrayal of the gay male nude — “cannot fairly be regarded as more objectionable than many portrayals of the female nude that society tolerates.” If nude or semi-nude photos marketed to straight men weren’t pornographic (Playboy had already been around since 1953), then similar photos marketed to gay men couldn’t be pornographic either.
Rainbow Flag Debuts: 1978. The original rainbow flag, hand-dyed by Gilbert Baker, first flew in the San Francisco Gay Freedom Day parade on June 25, 1978. The original 1978 flag consisted of eight stripes, with each stripe assigned a specific meaning. From top to bottom, the stripes were:
After Harvey Milk’s assassination on November 27, 1978, demand for the flag went up sharply. But since Gilbert had hand-dyed his flag and hot pink fabric wasn’t available as a commercially available color, the top stripe was removed and the flag became a seven stripe flag. Then, the story goes, organizers planned to hang rainbow flags vertically from lamp posts for San Francisco’s 1979 pride celebration and they noticed that the lamp post would obscure the middle stripe. Another version of the story had it that it was cheaper to produce a six-stripe flag because flag makers could sew two stripes together, and then sew together three two-stripe blocks. Whatever the explanation, the turquoise stripe was dropped, the indigo was changed to royal blue, and the rainbow flag became the familiar six-stripe flag we’ve come to know ever since.
The rainbow flag is now a world-wide symbol for LGBT communities everywhere, and it has come to mean many things to many different people. For some, it’s a gesture of visibility, a way of saying we’re here. For others, its a reminder of all that we’ve gone through as a community. And some in the LGBT community consider it a silly expression of separatism and self-segregation from society. In 2007, Gilbert Baker penned an essay to explain what the flag meant to him. He describes growing up gay in Middle America and being harassed while serving in Viet Nam. He was sent stateside to work as a nurse in San Francisco, where he met Harvey Milk:
Stationed in San Francisco as a nurse, I cared for the wounded. I also met my closet [sic] friend and mentor, Harvey Milk. Harvey had an aggressive charm that attracted the wicked and the wise. His charisma and fearlessness are at the heart of all I hold dear.
Harvey was a pioneer, a trailblazer, and with the community by his side, he became a San Francisco Supervisor. One day he said to me that we needed a logo, a symbol. We needed a positive image that could unite us. I sewed my own dresses, so why not a flag? At Harvey’s behest, I went about creating our Rainbow Flag. I had never felt so empowered, so free.
My liberation came at a painful cost. In the ultimate act of anti-gay violence, Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone were assassinated. The bullets were meant for Harvey, to silence him, and, by extension, every one of us. Uniting a community cost him his life.
I remember when I was still coming out how reassuring it was for me to see it and know that it marked a place of safety and refuge. And even now, when I go to a strange town and I see a small sticker on a doorway or a car’s bumper, I know that I’m among friends.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Larry Kramer: 1935. He is probably the most pissed-off gay man in America. He probably has as many reasons to be pissed off as anyone. His gained his confrontational reputation with his 1978 novel Faggots
The fight back found its voice in the founding of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT-UP). Their first target was the Food and Drug Administration, which was accused of moving slowly to approve badly needed AIDS medications that had already been made available in Europe. While controversial at the time, ACT-UP’s confrontational tactics made people with AIDS visible and impossible to ignore. They were no longer faceless patients of victims, but people fighting for life. That visibility is credited by many within the FDA and the National Institutes of Health with effecting real changes in national health policy.
Meanwhile, Kramer kept writing. In 1985, he wrote the mostly-autobiographical play The Normal Heart
In 1989, he published a collection of essays in Reports from the Holocaust: The Story of an AIDS Activist
George Bush won his Presidency of our country by selling our futures. Almost 60 million people whom we live and work with every day think we are immoral. “Moral values” was top of many lists of why people supported George Bush. Not Iraq. Not the economy. Not terrorism. “Moral values.” In case you need a translation that means us. …he new Supreme Court, due any moment now, will erase us from the slate of everything possible in no time at all. Gay marriage? Forget it. Gay anything, forget it. Civil rights for gays? Equal protection for gays. Adoption rights? The only thing we are going to get from now on is years of increasing and escalating hate.
Which goes to show that he’s not always a prophet in the wilderness. Sometimes he’s just plain wrong. But he has used his Cassandra complex to great effect in lighting a fire under an often-complacent gay community. In 2011, he told Metro Weekly’s Chris Geidner that anger is “a wonderfully healthy emotion.” In 2011, The Normal Heart was revived on Broadway and brought to a whole new generation of theater-goers. Ellen Barkin and John Benjamin Hickey won Tony Awards for Best Performance by a Featured Actress and Actor, and the production won Best Revival of a Play. A film version is reportedly in the works for a 2013 release.
George Michael: 1963. He may be a talented performer, but what a hot mess he’s become since 1996’s “Fastlove,” his last single to make it onto the U.S. charts. He started out as half of Wham!, which he formed with his school chum Andrew Ridgeley in 1981. The first album Fantastic reached number 1 on the U.K. charts, and their second album Make It Big hit number one in the U.S. Wham!’s 1985 tour of China was the first by a major Western music group, generating worldwide attention. Two Wham! singles, 1984’s “Careless Whisper” and 1986’s “A Different Corner,” both featured Michael as a solo singer, and were sufficiently successful to guarantee a promising solo career.
Wham! came to an end in 1986, and the following year, Michael’s album Faith featured his sexy voice and his sexy butt to propel the singles “Faith” and “I Want Your Sex” to the top of the charts. But his recording output was sporadic: Listen Without Prejudice came out in 1990, and he waited until 1996 to release Older. Songs from the Last Century came out in 1999 and Patience in 2004. As far as solo albums go, that’s about it.
It was a few years after the release of Older when his personal problems started to become public ones. In 1998, he was arrested for “engaging in a lewd act” in a public toilet in Beverly Hills, a charge which effectively outed him as gay. He was arrested again on similar charges in London’s Hampstead Heath in 2006. In 2007, he was arrested in Northwest London when police found his car blocking traffic and him behind the wheel zonked out on drugs. He’s had several other drug arrests since then.
In 2011, he began his Symphonica tour when his health took a severe turn. He was admitted to a hospital in Vienna on November 21 complaining of chest pains. A few days later he was put in intensive care for over a week after developing pneumonia. After emerging from intensive care, he remained in the hospital for three more weeks, and was finally discharged on December 21. Two days later, he publicly acknowledged that doctors there had saved his life and that he had undergone a tracheotomy. Michael has since announced that he will resume his Symphonica tour where he left off in Vienna in September 2012.
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June 24th, 2012
TODAY’S AGENDA (Ours):
Pride Celebrations Today: Augusta, GA; Berlin, Germany; Chicago, IL; Columbia, SC (Black Pride); Harlem, NY; London, UK (World Pride); Minneapolis, MN; New Orleans, LA; New York, NY; Regina, SK; St. Louis, MO; San Francisco, CA; Santa Fe, NM; Seattle, WA and Wilton Manors, FL.
Other Events Today: Frameline36 LGBT Film Festival, San Francisco, CA.
TODAY’S AGENDA (Theirs):
Family “Research” Council’s Values Bus Tour: Kenosha, WI. 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 tour is scheduled to stop in Kenosha for a “Your Money, Your Values, Your Vote Rally” with local tea party groups. The rally will take place at Lincoln Park from 2:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m.
The first Sydney Gay Mardi Gras march
TODAY IN HISTORY:
Sydney Police Block Pride Parade: 1978. This was supposed to be Sydney’s first Gay Pride Parade, known locally as Mardi Gras, and was planned as a night-time celebration after a morning march and commemoration of the Stonewall riots. (You can see film of the morning march taken with a super-8 camera here.) While homosexuality was still against the law in New South Wales, organizers had obtained all the necessary permits for the celebration beforehand. The evening celebration began simply, with a small crowd walking down Oxford Street on a chilly Australian winter day. The idea was to encourage people to come out from the bars and join the fun. But the crowd aroused suspicions of the police, which had gathered around the group.
Sydney police arresting Mardi Gras marchers.
By the time the small crowd, estimated at between five hundred and a thousand, reached the end of the street, the police confiscated the sound system, removed their identification badges and turned on the crowd. One participant recalled, “There was, you know, pretty serious bashing and kicking and all sort of things going on. It was a real riot.” Fifty-three marchers were arrested. One marcher recalled that while in police custody, he was beaten so badly he began to convulse on the floor.
“They took me along a long corridor in the police station through a U-shaped route into a room and then just beat the hell out of me. There were two police officers who did that – one in particular – bashing me with their fists in the head and saying ‘you’re not so smart now are you’.” Mr Murphy said he was beaten solidly until a blow to the solar plexus floored him. He was thrown into a solitary cell where he could hear protesters gathered outside chanting his name. “They tried to break my leg but fortunately the bones didn’t snap,” he said. “I was (literally) pissing my pants.”
Although most of the charges were dropped, the Sydney Morning Herald published the full names of everyone who was arrested, outing many to their family, friends and employers. Many lost their jobs. More than thirty years later, many of those surviving original marchers are still waiting for an official police apology.
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June 23rd, 2012
TODAY’S AGENDA (Ours):
BBC Marks Centenary of Alan Turing’s Birth: BBC Online. Today is the 100th anniversary of the birth if Alan Turing, the man who nearly single-handedly invented the entire field of computer science. (See my write-up below.) The BBC has a major series of articles and videos to mark the centenary, including:
A contrarian’s view of Turing’s life by his unsympathetic brother, written in the 1960s and 1970s but which remained undiscovered until after his death, has been published in The Daily Beast.
And Google has a Google Doodle of a Turing Machine, containing six puzzles in which the use spells out the name “Google” using machine code. Here’s a video of how to solve the puzzle:
Suze Orman Discusses LGBT Financial Inequality: CNBC. In recognition of Gay Pride month, CNBC financial guru Suze Orman will discuss the financial inequalities that LGBT couples face due to the Defense of Marriage act. Tonight’s program is at 9:00 p.m. and 12:00 midnight EDT on CNBC. You can catch a brief preview here.
Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Augusta, GA; Baton Rouge, LA; Berlin, Germany; Chicago, IL; Cleveland, OH; Columbia, SC (Black Pride); Durango, CO; Harlem, NY; Houston, TX; Knoxville, TN; Lisbon, Portugal; London, UK (World Pride); Minneapolis, MN; New Orleans, LA; New York, NY; Palermo, Italy; Regina, SK; Rome, Italy; Shreveport, LA; St. Louis, MO; San Francisco, CA; Santa Fe, NM; Seattle, WA; Shanghai, China; Valencia, Spain; Wilton Manors, FL and Worcester, UK.
Other Events This Weekend: Life Out Loud, Los Angeles, CA; Frameline36 LGBT Film Festival, San Francisco, CA.
TODAY’S AGENDA (Theirs):
Family “Research” Council’s Values Bus Tour: Sheboygan, WI. 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 tour is scheduled to stop in Sheboygan for a “Your Money, Your Values, Your Vote Rally” with local tea party groups. The rally will take place at the Jaycee Park Swimming Quarry near 3401 Calumet Drive from 11:00 a.m. to 12:00 noon.
Tomorrow, the bus is scheduled to stop in Kenosha before heading off to Ohio for appearances next weekend.
TODAY IN HISTORY:
“5 Beastly Sodomiticall boyes”: 1629. The Puritans were having a particularly rough time of it in Old England in the 1620’s, leading to the first batch of them to board the Mayflower and establish the colony of Plymouth in New England in 1620. For those who remained behind, things only got worse when Charles I became King in 1623. The Rev. Francis Higginson, who was a preacher with a Puritan bent in the Church of England, left his parish and, in 1628, accepted an offer to join the Massachusetts Bay Company. In 1629, the Company was granted a Royal Charter to establish a “plantation” in New England, and Higginson and several of his Puritan followers were given permission to establish a colony — and in the process, remove their troublesome lot from England.
Higginson obtained six ships, each armed with cannons to protect against pirates. The fleet set sail on May 1, 1629, with 350 Puritan settlers, 115 head of cattle, 41 goats and, apparently, five “beastly Sodomiticall boys.” An entry in his diary for June 23, 1629, reads:
Tewsday the wind n:E: a fayre gale. This day we examined 5 beastly Sodomiticall boyes, which confessed their wickedness not to bee named. The fact was so fowl we reserved them to bee punished by the governor when we came to new England, who afterward sent them backe to the company to bee punished in old England, as the crime deserved.
The laws of England held that the crime deserved death by hanging. We don’t know the fate of the “beastly boyes.”
Dale Jennings
Dale Jennings Cleared of Morals Charge: 1952. The nightmare began as many such nightmares did in Los Angeles in the 1950s. In February of 1952, he was in a public men’s room at Westlake Park (now MacArthur Park) when a man walked up to him with his hand on his crotch. Jennings wasn’t interested. “Having done nothing that the city architect didn’t have in mind when he designed the place, I left,” Jennings later explained. The man, however, insisted on striking up a conversation and following Jennings home. When they arrived at Jennings’s house, Jennings said good-bye and went inside, but the man decided to invite himself inside. The stranger continued to make sexual advance to Jennings — in Jennings’s own home — but Jennings refused. “At last he grabbed my hand and tried to force it down the front of his trousers. I jumped up and away. Then there was the badge and he was snapping the handcuffs on with the remark, ‘Maybe you’ll talk better with my partner outside’.”
As Jennings continued the story:
“I was forced to sit in the rear of a car on a dark street for almost an hour while three officers questioned me. It was a particularly effective type of grilling. They laughed a lot among themselves. Then, in a sudden silence, one would ask, ‘How long have you been this way?’ I sat on my hands and wondered what would happen each time I refused to answer. Yes, I was scared stiff. … At last the driver started the car up. Having expected the usual beating before, now I was positive it was coming–out in the country somewhere. They drove over a mile past the suburb of Lincoln Heights, then slowly doubled back. During this time they repeatedly made jokes about police brutality, and each of the three instructed me to plead guilty and everything would be all right.”
Jennings was formally arrested and charged with solicitation. While in jail, he called his friend Harry Hay. The two of them, along with several others, had founded the Mattachine Society two years earlier. Jennings troubles would soon become the fledgling organization’s first gay rights victory. Hay bailed Jennings out and the two set about devising a strategy for Jennings’s trial. Jennings would admit to being gay, but he would refuse to plead guilty and would forcefully defend himself against police witnesses. Meanwhile, the Mattachine Society would support Jennings’s legal fight through its Citizens Committee to Outlaw Entrapment, which raised money for Jennings’s defense. They hired George Shibley, an Arab-American lawyer who was well known for taking on controversial civil rights and union causes in the 1930s and ’40s. As Jennings later wrote:
The attorney, engaged by the Mattachine Foundation, made a brilliant opening statement to the jury in which he pointed out that homosexuality and lasciviousness are not identical after stating that his client was admittedly homosexual, that no fine line separates the variations of sexual inclinations and the only true pervert in the courtroom was the arresting officer. …
…The Jury deliberated for forty hours and asked to be dismissed when one of their number said he’d hold out for guilty till hell froze over. The rest voted straight acquittal. Later the city moved for dismissal of the case and it was granted.
News of that victory spread throughout the Mattachine Society. The following year, Jennings became the first managing editor of ONE magazine, the first nationally distributed publication for a gay audience. His account of his arrest and trial appeared in the magazine’s first issue, which helped to spread the news further. The case didn’t bring an end to official harassment of gay men by the Los Angeles police. That would continue for nearly two more decades. But it did signal to the nation’s fearful gay community that false charges could be fought and defeated. Sixty years ago today, that was big news indeed.
Lawrence v. Texas: 2003. One of the most important gay rights cases to reach the Supreme Court had its beginnings under very unusual circumstances. In 1998, Houston police were called to the apartment of John Geddes Lawrence over what was supposed to be some kind of a”weapons disturbance.” As the story went, police arrived and caught Lawrence and Tyrone Garner having oral sex, or anal sex, or no sex at all, depending on which eyewitness you want to believe. If they were having sex, then that meant that they were breaking Texas’s anti-sodomy law. They were held overnight in jail and charged with violating Chapter 21, Sec. 21.06 of the Texas Penal code, a class C misdemeanor for engaging “in deviate sexual intercourse with an individual of the same sex.”
But in reality, Lawrence and Garner hadn’t had a sexual relationship, as author Dale Carpenter revealed in his 2012 book, Flagrant Conduct: The Story of Lawrence v. Texas
On June 23, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its landmark ruling striking down Texas’s sodomy law, and laws like it in thirteen other states. In the 6-3 decision, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the majority that the decision specifically overruled the 1986 Bowers v. Hardwick decision which upheld Georgia’s sodomy law. “Bowers was not correct when it was decided, and it is not correct today. It ought not to remain binding precedent. Bowers v. Hardwick should be and now is overruled.” Antonin Scalia wrote a scathing dissent, one part of which is very prescient given current court challenges to the Defense of Marriage Act:
If moral disapprobation of homosexual conduct is “no legitimate state interest” for purposes of proscribing that conduct…what justification could there possibly be for denying the benefits of marriage to homosexual couples exercising “the liberty protected by the Constitution”? Surely not the encouragement of procreation, since the sterile and the elderly are allowed to marry.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Alan Turing: 1912. Today is the centenary of Alan Turing’s birth and it’s hard to imagine what the 21st century would have looked like without him. The English mathematician, logician, and cryptanalyst practically invented computer science when he formalized the idea of “algorithm” and “computation” with the what became known as the Turing machine. It was a conceptual device, imagined to consist of an infinitely long tape which would be capable of write, read and changing arbitrary symbols, much as a hard drive can do so today. With that concept defined, he proved that relatively simple Turing machines would be capable of making computations — hence the very term computer that we use today.
A working replica of a Turing Bombe on display at Bletchley Park (Click to enlarge)
Turing became a Fellow at the University of Cambridge just four years after entering as an undergrad. He earned his Ph.D. at Princeton in just two years, just in time to head home to Britain before World War II. After a brief stint at Cambridge, he joined the famous Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park, where he headed the section responsible for German naval cryptanalysis. He devised a number of techniques for breaking German ciphers, the most important of which was the BOMBE, an electromechanical machine that could determine the settings for Germany’s “unbreakable” Enigma machine. Turing’s Bombes were instrumental in Germany’s ultimate defeat when the Enigma code was cracked.
Following the war, Turing worked at the National Physical Lab (NPL) in London on the design of the Automatic Computing Engine (ACE). In 1946, he presented the design for the first stored-program computer. But because his work at Bletchley Park was classified, he found it difficult to translate what he invented there to the NPL. He left NPL in frustration and returned to academia at the University of Manchester, where he devised what is now known as the Turing Test. The Turing Test still serves as a standard for whether a computer could be considered “intelligent.” The test was simple: a computer could be considered a “thinking machine” if a human, through ordinary conversation, could not tell its responses apart from those of another human being. He then set about writing a program to play chess, but he was frustrated by the fact that there was no computer powerful enough to execute it.
It was in Manchester where, in 1952, he met Arnold Murray outside a theater and asked him for a lunch date. After a few weeks, the man spent the night at Turing’s house. Sometime later, Murray stole a gold watch and some other items from Turing’s home. Turing reported the crime to police. When police investigated, they asked Turing how he knew Murray. Turing, who had become relatively open about his homosexuality by that time, acknowledged the sexual relationship.
But with homosexuality being illegal in England, Turing was charged with gross indecency, the same crime for which Oscar Wilde was convicted more than half a century earlier. Turing was given a choice between imprisonment or probation on the condition he underwent chemical castration via estrogen hormone injections. Turing chose the latter, but his conviction led to his security clearance being revoked, which seriously damage both his career and reputation. And as the Red Scare rose its ugly head in the early 1950s, and with gay men coming under growing suspicion for being a danger to national security, Turing found himself under increasing surveillance. His estrogen injections themselves may have added to his feelings of hopelessness; one of the side effects of the synthetic estrogen he was prescribed was depression. Finally on June 7, 1954, Turing’s cleaning woman found him dead in his bedroom with a half-eaten apple laying beside his bed. An autopsy revealed that he died of cyanide poisoning. That apple was never tested for cyanide, but it is believed that this was how he ingested the fatal dose.
After the secrets of Bletchley Park were declassified, Turing’s posthumous reputation as a war hero only added to growing recognition of his impressive contributions to computer science. In 1966, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) began awarding the Turing Prize for outstanding technical contributions to computing. His childhood home in London has been designated a English Heritage site with an official Blue Plaque. Another Blue Plaque was placed at his home in Wilmslow where he died, and today a third will be unveiled in front of King’s College at Cambridge. In 2009, Prime Minister Gordon Brown formally apologized: “On behalf of the British government, and all those who live freely thanks to Alan’s work I am very proud to say: we’re sorry, you deserved so much better.” A petition to have him formally pardon, however was denied by Justice Minister Lord McNally in 2012, who said:
A posthumous pardon was not considered appropriate as Alan Turing was properly convicted of what at the time was a criminal offence. He would have known that his offence was against the law and that he would be prosecuted. It is tragic that Alan Turing was convicted of an offence which now seems both cruel and absurd—particularly poignant given his outstanding contribution to the war effort. However, the law at the time required a prosecution and, as such, long-standing policy has been to accept that such convictions took place and, rather than trying to alter the historical context and to put right what cannot be put right, ensure instead that we never again return to those times.
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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June 22nd, 2012
TODAY’S AGENDA (Ours):
Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Augusta, GA; Baton Rouge, LA; Berlin, Germany; Chicago, IL; Cleveland, OH; Columbia, SC (Black Pride); Durango, CO; Harlem, NY; Houston, TX; Knoxville, TN; Lisbon, Portugal; London, UK (World Pride); Minneapolis, MN; New Orleans, LA; New York, NY; Palermo, Italy; Regina, SK; Rome, Italy; Shreveport, LA; St. Louis, MO; San Francisco, CA; Santa Fe, NM; Seattle, WA; Shanghai, China; Valencia, Spain; Wilton Manors, FL and Worcester, UK.
Other Events This Weekend: Life Out Loud, Los Angeles, CA; Frameline36 LGBT Film Festival, San Francisco, CA.
TODAY’S AGENDA (Theirs):
Family “Research” Council’s Values Bus Tour: Eagle River and Greenleaf, WI. 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 tour is scheduled to stop at Eagle River this morning 10:30 a.m. for a “Your Money, Your Values, Your Vote Rally,” at the Vilas County Fairgrounds at 703 W. Pine Street. For their second stop at Greenleaf, Wisconsin, they will have a barbecue from 5:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m at the Rock K Ranch, 2372 Day Street.
Tomorrow, the bus is scheduled to stop in Sheboygan, with another stop Sunday in Kenosha before heading off to Ohio for appearances next weekend.
TODAY IN HISTORY:
Robert Hillsborough Murdered: 1977. A brutal murder thirty five years ago in San Francisco has been largely forgotten today, but at the time it was credited as being the event that catalyzed the gay community and awoke the larger city to the growing violence against gay people. On the night of June 21, 1977, Robert Hillsborough, 33, and his friend, Jerry Taylor, 27, went out to a disco called The Whiz for a night of dancing, and sometime after midnight they stopped for a burger a few blocks from Robert’s apartment in the Mission District. When they left the burger joint, they were followed in their car by four young men, who attacked them when they parked their car at the sidewalk in front of Robert’s apartment.
Taylor was beaten, but he managed to escape and flee to a friend’s aparment. Robert wasn’t so lucky. He was beaten and stabbed 15 times by 19-year-old John Cordoba while yelling “Faggot! Faggot!” Some witnesses also reported that he Cordoba yelled, “This one’s for Anita!”, although there is some dispute over that. Neighbors were awakened by the commotion, and they rushed to Robert’s aid. But it was too late. Hillsborough died 45 minutes after the 12:45 a.m. attack at Missions Emergency Hospital. The Cordoba and the three other assailants were arrested later that morning.
Hillsborough’s death struck a deep nerve in the gay community, which had sensed increasing violence in the wake of Anita Bryant’s anti-gay campaign in Miami which resulted in the defeat of a gay rights ordinance three weeks earlier (See June 7). “We live in a paranoid state,” said Harvey Milk, who was preparing his run for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, “and the death of Robert is only the culmination of a lot of violence that’s been directed at us.” The tragic event, coupled with Bryant’s win, galvanized the gay community, and San Francisco’s Pride celebration just a few days later attracted a record-breaking 300,000 people. The parade became an impromptu memorial march with participants erecting a makeshift shrine at City Hall.
Cordoba was charged with a single count of murder, along with Thomas J. Spooner, 21. The other two passengers in the car were not charged. Charges were later dropped against Spooner, and Cordoba was convicted of second degree murder and sentenced to 10 years in prison.
T
ODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Jimmy Somerville: 1961. The Scottish pop singer had his moment in the sun in the 1980s as lead singer with the synth pop group Bronski Beat (those of us of a certain age might remember “Smalltown Boy”) and the Communards. After the Communards split in 1988, he embarked on an off-again on-again solo career. His most recent album, 2009’s Suddenly Last Summer
Jai Rodriguez: 1979. He was the “culture vulture” for Bravo’s Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. He’s has also done some acting and some singing. In 2002, he created his own musical cabaret show, titled “Monday Night Twisted Cabaret,” which ran at New York gay club xl for a year. In 2005, he created and performed his own one night stage show, “Jai Rodriguez: xPosed,” told the story of Rodriguez’s life and struggle to come out to his religious family.
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?
June 21st, 2012
TODAY’S AGENDA (Ours):
Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Augusta, GA; Baton Rouge, LA; Berlin, Germany; Chicago, IL; Cleveland, OH; Columbia, SC (Black Pride); Durango, CO; Harlem, NY; Houston, TX; Knoxville, TN; Lisbon, Portugal; London, UK (World Pride); Minneapolis, MN; New Orleans, LA; New York, NY; Palermo, Italy; Regina, SK; Rome, Italy; Shreveport, LA; St. Louis, MO; San Francisco, CA; Santa Fe, NM; Seattle, WA; Shanghai, China; Valencia, Spain; Wilton Manors, FL and Worcester, UK.
Other Events This Weekend: Frameline36 LGBT Film Festival, San Francisco, CA.
TODAY’S AGENDA (Theirs):
Family “Research” Council’s Values Bus Summer Tour Begins: Black River Falls and Shell Lake, WI. The Family “Research” Council, an SPLC-certified hate group, kicks off another 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 tour’s first stop today is supposed to be at Black River Falls, Wisconsin at 1:00 p.m. for a “Your Money, Your Values, Your Vote Rally,” but the web site lists the location as “TBD – please check back for details!”
Where they do have details is a second stop at Shell Lake, Wisconsin at 5:00 p.m. for a rally with the Shell Lake Tea Party, where you can “Find out how to save the American Dream and preserve the values of life, traditional marriage and religious freedom!” (They do like exclamation points, don’t they!) That rally is scheduled to take place at Memorial Park on the shores of Shell Lake.
Tomorrow, the bus tour is scheduled to stop in Eagle River and Greenleaf, Wisconsin.
Meridith Baxter (L) and her girlfriend Nancy
TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Meredith Baxter: 1947. Her first big break on television was in 1972, when she stared as Bridget in the short-lived CBS sitcom Bridget Loves Bernie. After the series was cancelled, she married her co-star, David Birney, which made her Meridith Baxter-Birney. A few years later, she landed a part in the painfully earnest drama Family (the show is credited for inventing what has become the bane of too-self-important television, the “very special episodes”) before lightening up again as Alex P. Keaton’s mom on Family Ties. In between and afterwards, she starred in a number of made-for-TV movies and various television episodes.
Baxter divorced Birney in 1989, and she went back to using Meredith Baxter professionally. She married again in 1995, but divorced five years later. The National Enquirer reported in 2009 that Baxter was spotted on a lesbian cruise with a female friend. The ensuing speculation finally led to her coming out as a lesbianduring an interview with Matt Lauer on Today. “I got involved with someone I never expected to get involved with, and it was that kind of awakening,” she said. “I never fought it because it was like, oh, I understand why I had the issues I had early in life. I had a great deal of difficulty connecting with men in relationships.” Her memoir, Untied: A Memoir of Family, Fame, and Floundering
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And feel free to consider this your open thread for the day. What’s happening in your world?
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