Box Turtle Bulletin

The Daily Agenda for Monday, February 6

It’s Waitangi Day in New Zealand, a public holiday commemorating the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi. This treaty, regarded as the founding document for New Zealand, made the islands a part of the British Empire and granted the Māori the rights of British subjects and land rights. Unfortunately, the white settlers largely ignored the treaty and in 1877 Chief Justice James Pendergast declared it to be a “legal nullity.” It remained so until 1975, when an act of New Zealand’s Parliament restored the treaty’s legal standing.

TODAY’S AGENDA:
Uganda Parliament May Discuss Anti-Homosexuality Bill: Kampala, Uganda. According to a report published last week on UGPulse, an online news portal, the Business Committee of the Ugandan Parliament is expected to discuss a number of bills which were revived last fall by the Ninth Parliament after they had come to an end with the closure of the Eighth Parliament. Among those bills being revived is the draconian Anti-Homosexuality Bill, which, among its many, many provisions, adds the death penalty for gay people under certain circumstances, and even makes knowing someone who is gay without reporting them to the police a criminal offense.  There have been a number of false reports that the death penalty provisions had been removed from the bill. In fact, no changes have been made to the bill itself because the previous Parliament expired before proposed changes could be voted on. But even if those proposed changes had been accepted by Parliament, the death penalty would have remained firmly in place.

TODAY IN HISTORY:
Reagan Orders AIDS Report: 1986. In a message sent to Congress two days after the State of the Union Address, President Ronald Reagan made his second public mention of AIDS:

We will continue, as a high priority, the fight against Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS). An unprecedented research effort is underway to deal with this major epidemic public health threat. The number of AIDS cases is expected to increase. While there are hopes for drugs and vaccines against AIDS, none is immediately at hand. Consequently, efforts should focus on prevention, to inform and to lower risks of further transmission of the AIDS virus. To this end, I am asking the Surgeon General to prepare a report to the American people on AIDS.

Reagan’s first mention of AIDS was on September 17, 1985 during a news conference. That last sentence in the report to Congress came as a surprise to Surgeon General C. Everett Koop. As he wrote in Koop: The Memoirs of America’s Family Doctor, the White House had worked keep him out of the loop during the AIDS crisis. So when Reagan made the public announcement, Koop jumped at the tasks, working feverishly to complete the report, and to thwart administration official’s attempts to delaye or shelve it. The Surgeon General’s Report, which called on schools and parents to have “frank, open discussions” with very young children and teens about AIDS, was finally released in October (see Oct 22).

TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Ramón Novarro: 1899. The Mexican leading man was hailed as the next male sex symbol after Rudolph Valentino died. His first major success was in the 1923 silent film Scaramouche, but his greatest fame came with 1925’s Ben-Hur. His transition to talkies was mildly successful, but not enough for MGM to renew his contract in 1935. Besides, MGM feared trouble: Novarro had already rejected Louis B. Mayer’s demand that he enter into a “lavender marriage.” From 1935, Novarro worked only sporadically in films and television, but fortunately he made some wise investments in real estate early in his career. He was murdered in 1968 by two brothers who he solicited for sex, but who beat him mercilessly in an attempt to get him to reveal where he kept his money. They left with $20, leaving Novarro to choke to death on his own blood.

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The Daily Agenda for Sunday, February 5

TODAY’S AGENDA:
Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Melbourne, VIC.

Also This Weekend: Belgian LGBT Film Festival: Brussels, Belgium; Whistler Ski Week, Whistler, BC.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
William S. Burroughs: 1914. A canonical figure of the Beat Generation, the novelist, poet, and spoken word performer’s best known work is his third novel, Naked Lunch. Published in 1959, it was immediately controversial for its obscene language, unabashed portrayal of Burroughs’s heroin addiction and frank descriptions of sex, including his own homosexuality. Naked Lunch was banned in Los Angeles and Boston, where it became last the work of literature to be prosecuted for being obscene in Massachusetts. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court lifted the ban in 1966, following a series of trials that included testimony by Allen Ginsberg and Norman Mailer in support of Burroughs.

If there was a secret to Burroughs’s art, it was this: He simply put his chaotic life to paper. A longtime heroin addict, he and his wife fled to Mexico in 1950 after Louisiana police discovered letters between himself and Allen Ginsberg discussing a drug delivery. While there, he shot and killed his wife while playing “William Tell” at a party. He was eventually able to avoid imprisonment after witnesses testified that the gun went off accidentally. For the several decades, he was in and out of drug rehab and financially destitute much of the time before finally kicking the habit, temporarily, in the mid-1970s. It was at about that time when friends hit on the idea of booking him to read from his works in bookstores and other small performance spaces. His career as a performance artist was launched, which also revived his literary career. He went on to collaborate with Laurie Anderson, Throbbing Gristle, Kurt Cobain, Ministry, and Sonic Youth. He also appeared in Gus Van Sant’s 1989 film Drugstore Cowboy. He died in 1997 following a heart attack.

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The Daily Agenda for Saturday, February 4

TODAY’S AGENDA:
Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Melbourne, VIC.

Also This Weekend: Belgian LGBT Film Festival: Brussels, Belgium; Whistler Ski Week, Whistler, BC.

TODAY IN HISTORY:
AIDS Cases Discovered from 1976: 1988. Common wisdom today, even with all that we know about the history of the epidemic, still often sets the start of AIDS with the June 1981 report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention describing five gay men who had died of a mysterious disease in Los Angeles. When the HIV virus was isolated in 1984 and a test for the virus became available in 1985, several avenues of research opened up to try to figure out where this virus came from. Doctors in Paris and Brussels, who had long been treating wealthy African patients from their former colonies bearing all of the hallmarks of the new disease, pointed to Africa as a possible source for the virus. On February 4, 1988, the New England Journal of Medicine published a report by Dr. Nzila Nzilambi from Kinshasa, Zaire and other doctors from Belgium and the CDC which strongly suggested an African source of the virus, and revealed that AIDS had been a persistent health problem in rural Zaire as early as the mid 1970s.

In 1976, there had been an outbreak of Ebola in the northeastern Zaire province of Équateur along the Congo river. In the course of the medical investigations, hundreds of serum samples were collected from people throughout the area. Those samples remained preserved Zaire and were flown to Atlanta for testing. Investigators then went back out to Équateur in 1986 and collected more samples from as many people as possible, 388 in all. Ninety of them had also been among the 659 samples collected in 1976. Five of the samples from 1976 tested positive for HIV. Two were still alive; one was healthy, but the other was already showing signs of a suppressed immune system. Three were dead. One woman tested positive in 1976 was confirmed dead, “after a prolonged illness characterized by weight loss, fever, cough, and diarrhea” — all common symptoms of diseases associated with AIDS. Another woman “died in 1981 after a long illness associated with fever, weight loss, skin rash, and oral lesions.” Again an apparent death from AIDS. The third was a child who was seven years old in 1976, who in 1981 “died of pneumonia and weight loss at the age of 16.”

The doctors concluded: “The results of our study showed that HIV infection was already present in an isolated area of the Equateur province of Zaire in 1976 and that the prevalence of infection in the general population there did not change significantly over the 10-year observation period.”

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The Daily Agenda for Friday, February 3

Today is Rissun, a minor traditional holiday in Japan marking the traditional transition from winter to spring. It’s also known as “the bean throwing festival,” because in Shinto shrines lucky beans are thrown at congregants who try to catch them. At home a male family member will perform the Mamemaki ritual, which consists of repeating “demons out, good luck in” while scattering beans around the house.

TODAY’S AGENDA:
Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Melbourne, VIC

Also This Weekend: Belgian LGBT Film Festival: Brussells, Belgium; Whistler Ski Week, Whistler, BC.

Portriat of Gertrude Stein by Pablo Piccaso

TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Gertrude Stein: 1874. I guess you could say she was a bon vivant’s bon vivant. She would say “a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.” She was, in any case, the embodiment of a life of art, and the art of life. The novelist, poet, and art collected literally defined — and named — the “Lost Generation” of illuminati who frequented the Parisean salons of the early twentieth century. Her art collection was particularly bold, including works by Renoir, Mattise, Picasso, Gauguin, Cézanne, Toulouse-Lautrec, and many other notable impressionists, post-impressionists and other contemporary artists. In 1903, she wrote one of the first personal coming-out stories in her autobiography QED, although it wasn’t published until 1950, four years after her death. Her longtime relationship with Alice Toklas however was nobody’s secret. They met in 1907 and remained together until Stein died in 1946. Ernest Hemmingway, who himself was among the glitterati at Stein and Tolkas’s salons, wrote of Toklas as Stein’s wife, and remarked that when Hemmingway and his wife visited, Stein and Hemmingway would visit together and leave the “wives” to chat with each other. Stein and Toklas are buried next to each other in Père Lachaise.

Nathan Lane: 1956. He’s been in a few films and television shows, but he’s mainly known for his work on Broadway, with roles in The Producers, Guys and Dolls, and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. His big break though was in film, playing opposite Robin Williams in The Birdcage. He  also reprised his broadway role for the film version of The Producers. When Lane came out to his mother at age 21, she responded, “I’d rather you were dead.” Lane replied, “I knew you’d understand.” When a reporter asked if he was gay, Lane said, “I’m 40, single and work a lot in the musical theater. You do the math.”

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The Daily Agenda for Thursday, February 2

TODAY’S AGENDA:
Ninth Court of Appeals To Rule On Prop 8 Tapes: San Francisco, CA. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has announced that they will issue their ruling this morning regarding the public release of the video tapes that were made during trial of Perry v. Schwarzenegger, which ultimately led to the court’s ruling that Prop 8 was unconstitutional. Anti-gay supporters of Prop 8 have been fighting to keep the video tapes out of public view over embarrassment over the very poor performance of their star witnesses. The ruling will be released at 10:00 a.m. PST.

GetEQUAL to Protest National Prayer Breakfast: Washington, D.C. According to a press release from GetEQUAL:

“On Thursday, Feb. 2, GetEQUAL will protest “The Family” and their agenda of persecuting LGBT people around the world by demonstrating outside the National Prayer Breakfast. The National Prayer Breakfast is an annual event hosted and attended by members of Congress, business leaders and international heads of state. It is organized by a secretive, shadowy religious group called “The Family” (also known as “The Fellowship Foundation”), which pursues a viciously homophobic agenda in the United States and around the world. GetEQUAL will make the point that attendance at this event helps prop up this fringe group, and implies an endorsement of the anti-LGBT agenda of “The Family.”

The protest will take place from 7:00 to 10:00 a.m. EST outside of the Washington Hilton, 1919 Connecticut Avenue, N.W., Washington, DC.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Havelock Ellis: 1859.When it came time to chose a career, he chose an unorthodox one for a Victorian Englishman: that of a sexologist. To prepare, he studied to be a physician. When he joined the Fellowship of the New Life, a social group influenced by Emerson and Thoreau, he met Edward Carpenter, whose unabashed homosexuality must surely have been a great influence on him. Another influence: his wife, women’s rights activist Edith Lees, who was openly lesbian, and who insisted on an open marriage, an arrangement to which he readily agreed although he himself was impotent until the age of 60. When in 1896 he co-authored the first installment of his six-volume Studies on the Psychology of Sex, that volume, titled Sexual Inversionbecame the first English medical textbook on homosexuality. He originally published it in German, and then translated it into English in 1897 in a bid to avoid British censors. German scholars, by then, had already written several influential works on homosexuality, making German the de facto language of sexology. It was thought that by translating a German work, censors might look the other way. They didn’t. A bookseller was prosecuted for stocking Sexual Inversion, but the charges were eventually thrown out.

Ellis can claim several firsts. He was the first to study what we today recognize as transgender identities as a distinct phenomenon from homosexuality. He is also credited for creating the ideas of narcissism and autoeroticism, concepts which were later adopted by psychoanalysis. He is also often credited for introducing the word “homosexual” into the English language, but in fact he hated the word. Made up of a mixture of Greek and Latin roots, he complained, “‘Homosexual’ is a barbarously hybrid word, and I claim no responsibility for it.” He wrote instead about “sexual inversion,” and in ways that no major English writer had done before: as an objective field of study without characterizing it as a disease, immorality or a crime.

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The Daily Agenda for Wednesday, February 1

TODAY’S AGENDA:
New Hampshire Legislature May Vote On Marriage Repeal: Concord, NH. Word has it that the New Hampshire legislature may bring a bill to repeal marriage equality up for a vote today. While Republicans hold veto-proof majorities in both houses, it’s unclear whether they will have the votes to override Gov. John Lynch’s (D) promised veto. A number of Republicans have come out against repealing marriage equality, while others are keeping mum simply because they want the whole issue to go away. As one former Republican House speaker explained, “It’s kind of one of those issues we’re going to have to deal with but wish we didn’t have to, in my opinion.” Marriage equality has been the law of the land since January 1, 2010.

Washington Senate to Vote On Marriage Equality: Olympia, WA. At the other end of the country from New Hampshire, the Washington state Senate is expected to vote on marriage equality later this afternoon or early evening. Twenty-five Senators, including two Republicans, have pledged their support for the proposal, providing the minimum needed for passage in that chamber. A similar bill is awaiting committee action in the House.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Langston Hughes: 1902.  He was one of the innovators of a new form of poetry: jazz poetry. And it’s his poetry that he is best known for. Born in Joplin, Missouri, he moved to New York City to attend Columbia, but was more interested in the goings-on in Harlem. He traveled throughout the world, and while his writings reflect those travels, he remained rooted in the experience of the Harlem Renaissance. His 1934 collection of short stories, The Ways of White Folks, tells of the intersection of black and white, and his screen play for Way Down South came out in the same year as Gone With the Wind. He remained closeted for his entire life, although some say that if you ignore the pronouns you can see hints of homoeroticism in some of his poems. Other unpublished poems appear to have been written to a black male lover. Another short story, Blessed Assurance,” deals with a father’s anger over his son’s “queerness.” But his finances were always precarious, and he would not have been able to afford the fallout of openness about his sexuality. He died in 1967 after abdominal surgery, and his ashes are interred at the Arthur Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem.

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The Daily Agenda for Tuesday, January 31

TODAY IN HISTORY:
“Suitcase Murderer” Found Guilty: 2005. Witnesses saw Josh Cottrell, 22, and Guinn “Ritchie” Phillips, 36, eating lunch at a restaurant in Elizabethtown on July 17, 2003. Seven days later, Phillips’s truck and other belongings were found abandoned in southern Indiana. The next day, two fishermen pulled a suitcase out of Rough River lake, opened it, and found Phillips’s body inside. When police arrested Cottrell on June 27, they charged him with murder and announced they would seek the death penalty in the case. And by all rights he probably should have been convicted very easily. He confessed to bludgeoning Phillips to death and stuffing him into the suitcase. Family members testified that Cottrell planned to kill Philips because he was gay, and lured Phillips into his hotel room where the murder took place.

But in court, Cottrell deployed the gay panic defense. He testified that Phillips came to the motel room uninvited and tried to kiss him and force him into oral sex. Phillips panicked, he claimed, and bludgeoned him to death. His lawyers argued that Cottrell was within his rights to defend himself.

After deliberating for nine hours, the jury returned its verdict. They found Cottrell guilty. Of manslaughter, not murder. Phillips’s brother sized it up this way to a local newspaper: “I think they (the jury) were looking at my brother being a homosexual when they made their decision to pick the lesser charge.” The judge sentenced Cottrell to 20 years in prison, the maximum allowed under the law.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS:
Fred Karger: 1950. The political consultant and gay rights activist was largely responsible for drawing attention to the massive Mormon funding of the fight to strip LGBT Californians of their right to marry. Before becoming a gay rights advocate, he was a Republican political consultant at the Dolphin Group, where he worked in the Presidential campaigns of Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush. In 2012, he decided to return to presidential politics, launching his own bid for the GOP presidential nomination. His campaign may seem quixotic, but Karger is serious about his goal to “open up” the Republican party and to send a message to young people to “stand up and be proud in a tough atmosphere”

Moi: 1961.

Portia de Rossi: 1973. That’s her professional name. Another name she goes by is Portia Lee James DeGeneres. The Australian-born actress is best known for her roles as Nelle Porter on Ally McBeal and as Linsay Bluth Fünke on Arrested Development. She married Ellen DeGeneres in 2008, and on August 6, 2010 she field a petition to take Ellen’s name. She became a US citizen last September.

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The Daily Agenda for Monday, January 30

TODAY’S AGENDA:
HUD Bans LGBT Discrimination in Housing: Washington, D.C. The Department of Housing and Urban Development today will finalize non-discrimination rules for LGBT people in federally funded housing programs. The rules, which were first proposed by HUD in January 2011, will cover low-income subsidized housing and FHA mortgage insurance program. As the Washington Blade reports, the new rules will do three things:

1. It prohibits lenders from using LGBT status as a basis to determine a borrower’s eligibility for FHA-insured mortgage financing.
2. It clarifies that “families” otherwise eligible for HUD programs can’t be excluded because one or more members of the family is LGBT, in a same-sex relationship, or is perceived to be such an individual or in such a relationship.
3. It prohibits owners and operators of HUD-assisted housing or housing whose financing is insured by HUD from inquiring about the sexual orientation or gender identity of an applicant or occupant of a dwelling, whether renter or owner-occupied.

The new rules were announced by HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan during a speech at the NGLTF’s Creating Change conference in Baltimore over the weekend.

TODAY IN HISTORY:
NY Times Report AIDS Breakthrough: 1996. The AIDS epidemic had raged unchecked for at least fifteen years with very little hope in sight. For countless numbers of people around the world, an AIDS diagnosis was a death sentence. It wasn’t a matter of if, but when. When the drug azidothymidine (AZT, marketed as Retrovir), first approved in 1987,  was a nucleoside analog reverse transcriptase inhibitor (or “nuke”), which blocked a particular enzyme associated with HIV. It was virtually the only means for fighting the disease for almost a decade, but it’s effectiveness was sorely limited. In 1995, another “nuke”, Lamivudine (3TC, or Epivir) became available, giving doctors a second option for when patients became unresponsive to AZT. But when taken together, AZT and 3TC seemed to offer an additional “punch” for many people than they did when taken separately.

Then in 1996, an entirely new type of drug, Indinavir (marketed as Crixivan) entered the market. Known as a protease inhibitor, it inhibits another HIV enzyme known as the protease enzyme from functioning. The New York Times wrote a very cautious report on the breakthrough. At a meeting of the Infectious Diseases Society of America, a study was presented which found that when combined with AZT and 3TC, Indinavir reduced the amount of HIV swimming around in patients’ blood by about 99 percent, to levels which were undetectable by standard laboratory tests in 92% of patients. Many among the more than 2,100 scientists at the meeting expressed optimism about the findings, in part because it was one of the few bits of good news about AIDS in a long time,” The Times reported. “But, recalling how they had been wrong about several other initially favorable AIDS findings, leading scientists urged caution.”

As tentative as the initial reports were, the results soon proved unmistakeable. When 3TC joined AZT in 1995 as a viable treatment, there was a noticeable plateau in the number of deaths due to AIDS. But in 1996 when the three-drug cocktail became available, the number of deaths due to AIDS would see its first drop since the epidemic began. And it wasn’t a slight drop either — it was a 20% improvement from the year before. People at death’s door began coming back from the abyss. For some who had prepared to die, finding that they were living again presented an entirely new set of challenges. The emotional whipsaw, dubbed “the Lazerus Syndrome” made restarting a life (including an education, careers, or simply a place to live) that had been systematically dismantled through disease, disability and stigma just one more challenge to surmount while still dealing with the anxiety of wondering if the other shoe was yet to drop.

The three-drug cocktail, which became known as Highly Active Antiretroviral Therapy (HAART), wasn’t a cure, but the breakthrough was undeniable. Further improvements in HAART resulted in more effective combinations and dosages which made adherence much simpler. HAART would eventually transform AIDS from a terminal disease to a chronic disease, albeit still a very serious one. More recent research shows that, thanks to HAART, people with AIDS can now expect a near–normal lifespan. And yet, HAART’s side effects can take a brutal toll on the body, and its cost — ranging from $10,000 to $15,00 a year for a single patient — makes life-prolonging medications a severe financial strain for anyone without insurance or governmental assistance. All of which makes finding a cure still as important as ever.

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The Daily Agenda for Sunday, January 29

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS:
Greg Louganis: 1960. During the 1976 Montreal Olympics, he came in second for the tower diving behind Italy’s Klaus Dibiasi. When Dibiasi retired two years later, Louganis won his first world title and was a favorite for the 1980 Olympics. Unfortunately, that was the Moscow Olympics, which the U.S. boycotted overt the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan. But in the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles (which the Soviets boycotted in retaliation), Louganis won his gold metals in springboard and tower diving. During the 1988 Seoul Olympics, he hit his head on the springboard during preliminaries, resulting in a concussion. But he went on to earn a gold during the finals. That same year, he tested positive for HIV. He came out as gay in 1995 — where else? — on The Oprah Winfrey Show, and his 1996 memoir, Breaking the Surface, detailed his trials of competing as a closeted gay man. His book was the basis for a 1997 Showtime movie by the same name starring Mario Lopez.

Sara Gilbert: 1975. Kid sister of Melissa Gilbert, Sara is perhaps best known for her role as the sardonic Darlene Conner on the ABC sitcom Roseanne. While still on the show, Sara also attended Yale where she majored in art photography, with producers accommodating her academic schedule by shooting remote segments on a New York soundstage. She has had a recurring role on The Big Bang Theory, and in 2010 she became the co-host and executive producer of The Talk. That same year, she came out as a lesbian. She and her former partner, TV producer Allison Adler, separated in 2011 after a ten year relationship and two children.

Adam Lambert: 1982. Critics agreed: he had the talent and the chops to win the eighth season of American Idol, but Christian conservatives, appalled by his open sexuality, thought otherwise and mounted a phone campaign to make sure the ‘mo didn’t win. He wound up coming in second place, but his career was set.  (Trivia question: does anyone remember who came in first? No fair Googling.) His first studio album, For Your Entertainment, debuted at number three on the Billboard 200. Subsequent releases cemented his reputation an in 2010 he became the only American Idol contestant so far to headline a worldwide concert tour in the year after appearing on Idol. He’s theatrical, androgynous, and unabashedly flamboyant — in the best, gayest sense of the word. His controversial American Music Awards performance — risqué in ways that was old hat for Madonna and Britney Spears — nearly got him banned from television. ABC relented, but would only allow him to appear on The View in a pre-recorded appearance.

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The Daily Agenda for Saturday, January 28

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS:
Richmond Barthé: 1901. Mississippi-born Richmond Barthé spent his formative years in New Orleans, where his parish priest, Father Harry Kane, encouraged his aesthetic development as a painter. But since he couldn’t enroll in art school during his teenage years because of segregation, he remained self-taught until Kane was able to get him enrolled in the Art Institute of Chicago. During his senior year, Barthé discovered sculpting and never looked back. He moved to New York, won a Guggenheim fellowship (twice), and became a celebrated figure of the Harlem Renaissance. His work explored both race and eroticism. When crime in New York began rising after the war, Barthé moved to Jamaica. Which crime began to rise there in the 1960s, he moved to Switzerland for five years, then to Pasadena. When he moved to an apartment above a garage, the city decided to name the street after him. There, he worked on his memoirs and editioned many of his most important works, with actor James Garner being among his most important patrons. He died in 1989.

Bobbi Campbell: 1952. An early AIDS activist, Campbell was the 16th person in San Francisco to be diagnosed with Kaposi’s sarcoma, one of the more common opportunistic infections associated with AIDS. He came by activism rather simply but boldly: by simply refused to hide his face, he became known as the “KS poster boy” in late 1981 when he began writing a column for the San Francisco Sentinel.  He gained nationwide attention on August 8, 1983 when he appeared with his partner on the cover of Newsweek. That same year, he co-founded the People with AIDS Self-Empowerment Movement, which established the Denver Principles which rejected the notion that people with AIDS (PWA) were “victims” and demanded the inclusion of PWAs in all aspects of organized responses to the epidemic, including the right to make informed decisions with regard to their own care.

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The Daily Agenda for Friday, January 27

TODAY IN HISTORY:
Rep. Dick Armey Calls Barney Frank “Barney Fag”: 1995. It’s not easy being the biggest ‘mo in the House. In an interview with a group of radio broadcasters, House majority leader Rep. Dick Armey (R-TX), he discussed the acrimonious atmosphere in the House of Representatives, which was then under the leadership of Newt Gingrich. “Newt’s a very patient fellow and able to handle a harangue going on around him better than I,” Armey said. “I like peace and quiet, and I don’t have to listen to Barney Fag — Barney Frank — haranguing in my ear because I made a few bucks off a book I worked on.”

Armey apologized to Frank when word of his remarks got out, first in person and then again on the House floor, but not without a harangue of his own: “I take this exception especially in light of the fact that I went to the press that had the tape and explained to them in the best humor I could that I had simply mispronounced a name and did not need any psychoanalysis about my subliminal or about my Freudian predilections.” He also castigated House Democrats for focusing on what he called a “mispronunciation.” Frank wasn’t inclined to accept the apology. “I don’t think it was on the tip of his tongue, but I do believe it was in the back of his mind,” said Frank. “There are a lot of ways to mispronounce my name. That is the least common.”

TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Alan Cumming: 1965. Well let’s see. He was the M.C. in the 1993 London staging of Cabaret, the evil Boris Grishenko in GoldenEye, and he had roles in Eyes Wide Shut, the Spy Kids franchise, X2, and Gray Matters, among others. He earned two Emmy nominations for his guest role as Eli Gold in The Good Wife, and he won produced the Independent Spirit Award-winning Sweet Land. Where the Scottish actor once described himself as a “frolicky pansexual sex symbol for the new millennium,” he now simply says he’s bisexual. On January 7, 2012, he married his husband Grant Shaffer in New York, on the fifth anniversary of their 2007 civil partnership in London.

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The Daily Agenda for Thursday, January 26

TODAY IN HISTORY:
Government Payments to Maggie Gallagher, Other Columnists Revealed: 2005. Howard Kurtz revealed in a Washington Post story that the Bush Administration had paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to two columnists in a “pay-to-sway” scandal to promote the administration’s policies. In one case, it was revealed that the U.S. Department of Education paid columnist Armstrong Williams $241,000 to promote and talk up the No Child Left Behind Initiative and to encourage other journalists and columnists to write favorable articles on the law. It was also revealed that Maggie Gallagher had accepted $41,500 to promote the Bush Administration’s marriage initiative, which called for abstinence education and premarital counseling. Gallagher responded in a rather creative way: first by defending her role in the contract (“I’m a marriage expert. I get paid to write, edit, research and educate on marriage. If a scholar or expert gets paid to do some work for the government, should he or she disclose that if he writes a paper, essay or op-ed on the same or similar subject? If this is the ethical standard, it is an entirely new standard.”), then by acknowledging that she should have disclosed the contract when she later wrote about the Bush marriage initiative. “But the real truth is that it never occurred to me. … I would have, if I had remembered it. My apologies to my readers.” Nice work if you can get it.

Armstrong was dropped by from syndication by the Tribune Company. Gallagher continued writing for Town Hall as though nothing had happened.

David Kato Murdered: 2011. It seems like yesterday; it seems like a lifetime ago. But it was one year ago today when Ugandan LGBT advocate David Kato was brutally murdered in his home. The murder took place almost four months after his photo appeared on the front page of a local tabloid as one of Uganda’s “top homos” with the tag, “Hang Them!” And the murder took place less than a month after a Ugandan Court issued a permanent ruling baring that tabloid from outing gay people on its pages. The police, before they even had a suspect, were quick to deny that homophobia had anything to do with his murder, and they maintained that position after they settled on a suspect and obtained a “confession.” To seal the deal, the alleged murderer was quickly found guilty and sentenced — in proceedings so rushed that his own lawyer didn’t know he was appearing in court. But LGBT advocates in Uganda know the real score and aren’t buying the government line. On this anniversary, it’s important to pause and remember that there are martyrs for gay rights: Harvey Milk, David Kato, and many others, known and unknown.

In honor of Kato’s memory, the David Kato Vision and Voice Award has been established to recognize those who demonstrate “courage and outstanding leadership in advocating for the sexual rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) people, particularly in environments where these individuals face continued rejection, marginalization, isolation and persecution.” It is awarded annually on December 10, Human Rights Day. The first recipient of the award was Jamaican gay rights activist Maurice Tomlinson

TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Ellen DeGeneris: 1958. She made her own bit of history in 1997 during the fourth season of her sitcom, Ellen, when she came out publicly as a lesbian on the Oprah Winfrey Show. Her character soon came out on her sitcom, and that coming out episode was one of the highest rated episodes of her series. That episode won her her first Emmy, but the show’s popularity dropped soon afterward and was cancelled. Ellen withdrew form television and returned to her roots in stand-up comedy (and taking on a voice-acting stint for the 2003 film Finding Nemo) before re-establishing herself as a popular talk show host on Emmy-winning The Ellen DeGeneris Show, where she often talks about Portia de Rossi, her wife of three years. Her show is very popular with housewives and not a few gay men, with her popularity undoubtedly helped along with segments like this:

In November 2011, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton named her a Special Envoy for Global AIDS Awareness.

If you know of something that belongs on the agenda, please send it here. Don’t forget to include the basics: who, what, when, where, and URL (if available).

And feel free to consider this your open thread for the day. What’s happening in your world?

The Daily Agenda for Wednesday, January 25

TODAY’S AGENDA:
Creating Change Conference: Baltimore, MD. Today is the kickoff for the annual five day Creating Change: The National Conference on LGBT Equality put on by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. LGBT advocates are gathering from all over North America and other parts of the world, including business people, elected officials, students, faith leaders, non-profit groups, and grass roots volunteers. Featured speakers this year are Benjamin Todd Jealous, President and CEO of the NAACP; Ugandan LGBT advocate Val Kalende; Cary Johnson, Executive Director of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commissionl and of course NLGTF Executive Director Rea Carey.

TODAY IN HISTORY:
Alice Mitchell Kills Freda Ward: 1892. Freda Ward was the socialite daughter of a wealthy planter and merchant. Alice Mitchell was the daughter of a retired furniture dealer. Both were well known about town, daughters of two of the best families of Memphis, Tennessee. Alice would later say that as far as she could remember, she had am “extraordinary love” for Freda. According to one newspaper account, “Twice Alice went to visit Freda’s family, during which time the two girls, as witnesses attested, showed “disgusting tenderness” for each other. They were seen to swing together in a hammock by the hour, hugging and kissing each other — “they hugged and kissed ad nauseum”. Alice was ashamed of doing this in public, but Freda upbraided her for this.” Their relationship grew. Alice proposed marriage, but it appears that Freda either refused the offer or was prevented from accepting it by her family.  As Freda was about to leave Memphis to board a steamboat to her family’s home town in Arkansas, Alice waylaid her and killed her on the streets of Memphis.

Newspapers around the country followed every detail of the case and trial. And since this occurred at about the time psychologists and medical professionals were beginning to understand homosexuality and lesbianism as something other than simply criminal acts, the Mitchell-Ward case was dissected in the nation’s medical journals as well. The Memphis Medical Monthly carried an extensive report of the trial in which Mitchell was judged insane. Other medical journals weighed in on the exact nature of her insanity. It was a common nineteenth century belief that insanity was the result of “degeneracy,” which was a body of beliefs that held that human beings, through the natural course of evolution, would naturally produce children who “de-generated” some of their parent’s characteristics in an imperfect form — think of a xerox copy of a xerox copy. Degeneracy didn’t always yield blemished children — according to degeneracy theory, geniuses, also were examples of a kind of positive “de-generation” because they deviated from the norm (and they often also had other quirks as part of their personality). Yet it was an extraordinarily short trip from “de-generation” to degeneracy, and the Mitchell-Ward case literally become one of many textbook examples. Even two decades later, like in the following passage from 1914 by Douglas C. McMurtrie from the American Journal of Urology. He cited other psychologists and sexologists who observed that “congenital sexual inversion is widespread in America, homosexual women being frequently found in societies and clubs.” He then turned his attention to the still talked-about Mitchell-Ward case from two decades earlier:

One of the most widely known cases of violent crimes due to sexual inversion in the female occurred in Memphis, Tenn., approximately in 1891, though the exact date is unknown to me. The facts were typical of sexually inverted affection and are of considerable interest. They have been reported by Comstock. [Here, he quotes a brief account of the crime by T. Griswold Comstock for the New York Medical Times in 1893] … In accounting for the deed, Comstock, while diagnosing Alice Mitchell as a sexual “pervert,” considers her insane. It appears that her mother in her first confinement had child-bed fever and puerperal insanity, and was confined in an asylum, and that before the birth of Alice she was deranged, and this aberration continued until some time after labor. Although no actual determination was made of Alice’s mental state it was decided she was insane.

This may have been the case. In the light of present knowledge regarding this sexual anomaly, however, it may be said that no more insanity might have been involved in this crime of homosexual jealousy than is involved in analogous crimes of heterosexual jealousy which come constantly before the courts.

A full account of the case of Alice Mitchell giving the facts as proved in court and the various testimony of the medical witnesses is given in the Memphis Medical Monthly. The article also contains a report of the direct examination of the defendant. It is noteworthy that in none of the medical evidence was there any mention of there having been a sexual condition chiefly accountable for the crime.

In fact, if there is anything noteworthy about this affair, it is the fact that it wasn’t the nature of the love interest which proved to be the mark of Mitchell’s insanity during her trial even though the lesbian aspects of their relationship were very widely reported. (Indeed, it was the main reason the case was such a sensation in the popular press.) Instead, she was judged insane because her mother was judged insane. She was the unfortunate degenerated offspring of a degenerated mother, and Mitchell’s degeneracy was seen as a more generalized sort which had little to do with her sexuality. The homosexuality of gay men, on the other hand, was often regarded as degeneracy sui generis, with one Texas physician in 1893 advocating castration for those judged to be afflicted with this “trait” so that it could not be passed on to future generations — to “nip it in the bud,” so to speak.

Degeneracy theory, which provided a theoretical basis for eugenics, would eventually die with the worst excesses of the eugenics movement. People with physical, mental, emotional or other anomalies — whether those anomalies were in the direction of weakness or strength — would soon lose the tag of “degenerate.” Everyone except for gay people. For them, the last remnant of this discarded theory would live on as the name commonly used against them — degenerates — until well into the late twentieth century. And in some circles, still today.

The Daily Agenda for Tuesday, January 24

TODAY’S AGENDA (Ours):
Maryland Gov. Highlights Support for Marriage Equality: Annapolis, MD. Gov. Martin O’Malley is scheduled to host a breakfast this morning at Government House with same-sex couples as invited guests. That will be followed by a news conference afterward, in which he will discuss his introduction of a marriage equality bill for this year’s legislative session which begins this month. A marriage bill passed the Senate last year but failed in the House of Delegates. Aides have told reporters that this year’s bill will have more protections for religious organizations in a bid to attract more support. House Majority Leader Kumar P. Barve says that the bill is still three votes short of a majority in the House.

New Jersey Senate Holds Committee Hearing on Marriage Equality: Trenton, NJ. The New Jersey Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing on S. 1, the Marriage Equality and Religious Exemption Act. The committee is expected to vote on the bill at the end of the hearing. Garden State Equality has lined up witnesses to testify for equality.  Anti-marriage forces are also expected to make their presence known. The hearings begin this morning at 11:00 a.m. EST in Committee Room 4 at the State House.

TODAY’S AGENDA: (Theirs):
Exodus International Equiping Event: Atlanta, GA. Whenever Exodus puts on a Love Won Out conference, they always host what they call an “equiping event” about a month ahead of time to introduce Exodus to area pastors and to share their “35 years of experience in providing ministry support for people dealing with unwanted same sex attractions.” This morning, Exodus President Alan Chambers and team are in the Atlanta suburb of Villa Rica to provide a condensed version of Love Won Out in preparation for the real deal scheduled for February 18. Both events take place at Midway Church, an Exodus Church Association member which hosts an Exodus International Support Group (PDF) twice a month (including this evening at 7:00 p.m. after the equiping event). Midway Church is located at 3915 Carrollton-Villa Rica Hwy, about 40 miles west of downtown Atlanta.

If you know of something that belongs on the agenda, please send it here. Don’t forget to include the basics: who, what, when, where, and URL (if available).

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The Daily Agenda for Monday, January 23

Happy New Year! The Chinese New Year marks the end of the winter season and the start of spring according to the traditional calendar. Today’s holiday also marks the start of a fifteen-day festival which ends with the Lantern Festival. For today’s festivitites, fireworks are the order of the day, although there is concern this year that the pyrotechnics may cause Beijing’s notorious air pollution levels to skyrocket.

Depending on how the years are numbered where you are, today marks the start of the year 4710, 4709 or 4649. That’s not important though, as the Chinese calendar is traditionally cyclical rather than continuously numbered. And this year marks the year of the Dragon, in particular, the Yang Water Dragon, which only occurs once every sixty years. In Chinese Astrology, the year’s Earthly Branch (represented by one of twelve animals) is combined with one of ten cycling Heavenly Stems (represented by Yin and Yang in combination with five elements) to complete the picture. The Dragon, being a mythical creature, represents the spectacular and bigger-than-life. While that can mean successes, it can also mean spectacular failures. But because this year is the year of the Water Dragon, it is believed to be a year of especially good luck, because water nourishes the dragon’s fixed element of wood. Whatever. Dragon or no, it promises to be a very interesting year, and, no offense, but I don’t think you needed Chinese astrology to tell you that.

Today is also New Year’s Day for Korea (Seollal) and in Viet Nam (Tết).

TODAY’S AGENDA:
Washington State Lawmakers to Consider Marriage Bill: Olympia, WA. House and Senate Committees today will hold hearings on a bill to provide marriage equality in the state of Washington. The Senate Committee on Government Operations will hold hearings this morning at 10:00 a.m., with the House Committee on Judiciary expected to take up that chamber’s bill at 2:30 p.m. Anti-gay forces, including members of the local Tea Party will hold a noontime rally in opposition to the bills, and predict that their rally will draw as many as 10,000 people. Joseph Backholm of Washington Family Policy Institute said that the goal of the rally was to “convince them to be more afraid of us than of the other side.” NOM’s Brian Brown has promised, “If the legislature forces through same-sex marriage, they need to know that marriage will be on the ballot in November and the people of Washington will hold them accountable.” NOM has threatened to spend $250,000 on primary challenges against pro-equality GOP legislators.

The marriage bills are expected to clear the respective committees in both Houses, with a vote coming possibly next week. Marriage equality, which enjoys bipartisan support in the state legislature, is expected to pass in the House. But supporters say that it is still a vote shy in the Democratic-controlled Senate, with six Senators still uncommitted.

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?