Box Turtle Bulletin

Born On This Day, 1602: Jérôme Duquesnoy

Jérôme Duquesnoy, Crucifix in ivory

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

Born On This Day, 1925: Merv Griffin

(d. 2007) I vividly remember the moment I figured out that Merv Griffin was gay. It was sometime in the mid to late 1970s. I was in high school, off on summer break. I walked into the TV room. No one else was in there, but the TV was turned to The Merv Griffin Show. I think it was a holiday special of some kind. Fourth of July, maybe. There were a bunch of male Polynesian dancers on stage. But these were’t your typical just-off-the-islands Polynesian dancers. These were, like, from the islands of West Hollywood — muscular, buff, defined, hot!. I was transfixed, although I knew I shouldn’t be. The dancers finished their particularly athletic-style of Polynesian dancing and left the stage to a standing ovation from the mostly-older, mostly-female audience. Griffin walked out and started bantering with the ladies in the front row, as he often did. This time, it was about the dancers, about how good they were, about how good-looking they were, about how ohmygod how hot they were. This went on and on and on. It’s like he couldn’t stop talking about them. And that’s when it hit me.

“Ohmygodohmogodohmogodohmygod!!!!,” I exclaimed to — thank God — no one in the room. “Merv Griffin is GAY!” And nothing after that would ever convince me otherwise, not matter how many times he was photographed supposedly canoodling with Eva Gabor.

Like that other famously closeted Las Vegas celebrity Liberace, Merv Griffin entered show business early as a child prodigy on the piano. He started singing on the radio at age 19 in 1944. Avoiding the draft because of a heart murmur, Griffin earned enough to start his own record label the following year, and began touring. His first hit, a novelty tune called “I’ve Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts” reached number one in 1950.

He got a few minor film roles, but he found television more to his liking. He hosted a number of game shows from the 50s until the early 60s, when he switched to producing them rather than hosting. He guest-hosted the Tonight Show before Johnny Carson took over, then launched his own syndicated talk show in 1965. Griffin would continue to host various talk shows for the next two decades. He was praised by critics for taking on controversial topics with controversial guests, a trait that got him fired from a talk show gig at CBS in 1969. He was fired on a Friday, but was back on the air the following Monday as host of a new syndicated talk show, produced by Merv Griffin Enterprises, without skipping a beat. Meanwhile, his production company would produce some of the most successful shows on television: Jeopardy!, Wheel of Fortune, and Dance Fever. His real estate operations owned the Beverly Hilton and the Resorts Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City. By 2003, Griffin was a veritable Hollywood mogul, said to be worth around $1.2 billion dollars.

That Appalachian high school kid who saw Merv Griffin gushing over his Polynesian dancers wasn’t the only one to figure out that he was gay. Rumors had long circulated about his sexuality. Those rumors burst into the open in 1991, when Dance Fever host Deney Terrio sued him for sexual harassment. That same year, Griffin’s longtime bodyguard/horse trainer/driver Brent Plot filed a $200 million palimony suit. Griffin evaded questions from the press, and both suits were ultimately dismissed. Michelangelo Signorile alluded to Griffin in his 1993 book Queer in America, where he described an unnamed Hollywood “Mogul” who fired men from his company for being openly gay.

When Griffin died in 2007, his secret might have died with him. But Ray Richmond’s obituary in the Hollywood Reporter, said everything that needed to be said in the headline: “Merv Griffin Died a Closeted Homosexual.” Reuters then picked it up, as Richmond pondered the legacy that might have been:

What a powerful message Griffin might have sent had he squired his male companions around town rather than Eva Gabor, his longtime good friend and platonic public pal. Imagine the amount of good Merv could have done as a well-respected, hugely successful, beloved and uncloseted gay man in embodying a positive image. …

If you’re Griffin, why would you think a judgmental culture would be any more tolerant as you grew into middle and old age? Even in the capital of entertainment — in a business where homosexuality isn’t exactly a rare phenomenon — it’s still spoken of in hushed tones or, more often, not at all. And Merv’s brush with tabloid scandal no doubt only drove him further into the closet.

While it would seem everything has changed today, little actually has. You can count on the fingers of one hand, or at most two, the number of high-powered stars, executives and public figures who have come out. Those who don’t can’t really be faulted, as rarely do honesty and full disclosure prove a boon to one’s showbiz livelihood.

But Signorile saw it differently:

First off, Griffin’s closet kept him shockingly silent while he had access to the president of the United States as his own people were dying. This man was intimate with the Reagans (and Nancy Reagan in particular) during the height of the AIDS epidemic in 80s, with few treatments available and fear-mongering having gripped the media. …

Secondly, Griffin’s closet had him engaging in workplace sexual harassment, something that, as I showed in my 1993 book Queer in America, is common among closeted powerful men, who often are simply seeking outlets for sex….

Finally, Griffin’s closet had him firing gay men who’d actually made it up through the ranks of his own company, simply because they were openly gay. There is a story in Queer in America about a man identified as “The Mogul” who did just that. I can now reveal that The Mogul is Merv Griffin. Open homosexuality is a threat to the closeted, and powerful people in the closet like Merv Griffin will often do whatever it takes to squash those who are open and who might advocate that all among the powerful should come out.

Today’s Agenda Is Brought To You By…

Akyra Money Murray, 18 years old.

Akyra was the youngest to die in the Pulse gay night club shooting. She had graduated from West Catholic Prep in Philadelphia. An honors student and a standout basketball star — she graduated third in her class and had a full-ride scholarship to Mercyhurst College in Pennsylvania — she was in Orlando with her parents, a four-year-old sister and other family members to celebrate her graduation. They had arrived in Orlando that Saturday. That night, Akyra, her cousin and a friend said they wanted to go out dancing, so her parents dropped them off at Pulse.

At about 2:00 a.m., Akyra texted her mother saying that she and her cousins wanted to be picked up because there had been a shooting. Akyra’s friend said that when the gunfire started, she and Akyra made it safely outside, but when Akyra realized her cousin wasn’t with them, they went back in. They found her cousin and fled to the bathroom to hide. The shooter went in also and shot all three. Moments later, Akyra called her mother. “She was saying she was shot and she was screaming, saying she was losing a lot of blood,” her mother said. The friend and cousin survived their injuries, but Akyra did not.

Eddie Jamoldry Justice, 30 years old.

Eddie was an accountant and had his own condo in a high-rise development in downtown. “Lives in a sky house, like the Jeffersons,” his mother said He was normally a homebody but that night he went to Pulse.

The first words he texted to his mother at 2:06 a.m. were:

Mommy I love you

In club they shooting

U ok

Trapp in bathroom

What club

Pulse

Downtown

Call police

Im gonna die

She talked briefly to Eddie on the phone and then called the police. “I could hear a lot of people crying” in the background”, she told a reporter. She said Eddie told her, “He has us, and he’s fixin’ to kill us.” She called 911, while continuing to exchange text messages with Eddie:

Call them mommy

Now

I’m tell I’m bathroom

He’s coming

I’m gonna die

…

The police is in There let me no when u see the police

Hurry

He’s in the bathroom with us

Women’s bathroom is

Is the man in the bathroom wit u

He’s a terror

Yes

Are u hurt

Stay there he don’t like gay people

Text me please

I love you.

He never answered.

Today In History, 1999: PFC Barry Winchell Murdered

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, Glover made several disparaging remarks about blacks and gays to another prisoner.

In fact, there is little reason to believe that PFC Winchell was gay. 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 a 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 for Showtime, Soldier’s Girl, which portrayed the romance between Winchell and Calpernia Addams which led up to Winchell’s murder.

Born On This Day, 1794: Sylvester Graham

(d. 1851) He only had your best interests at heart when he invented the Graham Crackers you loved so much as a kid. His namesake snack was scientifically designed to keep you from masturbating. It obviously didn’t work. I can tell just by looking at you:

This general mental decay continues with the continued abuses, till the wretched transgressor sinks into a miserable fatuity, and finally becomes a confirmed and degraded idiot, whose deeply sunken and vacant glassy eye, and livid, shriveled countenance, and ulcerous, toothless gums, and fetid breath, and feeble broken voice, and emaciated and dwarfish and crooked body, and almost hairless head—covered, perhaps, with suppurating blisters and running sores — denote a premature old age — a blighted body — and a ruined soul! — and he drags out the remnant of his loathsome existence, in exclusive devotion to his horridly abominable sensuality.

And…

The sight becomes feeble, obscure, cloudy, confused, and often is entirely lost — and utter blindness fills the rest of life with darkness and unavailing regret.

Besides the whole wanking-is-bad thing, most of Sylvester Graham’s then-radical ideas would barely merit a shrug among the Birkenstock-clad, hemp bag-toting shoppers at Trader Joe’s. Organic foods? Check. Exercise freak? Check. Vegetarianism? Why, he helped to found the American Vegetarian Society in 1850. He also advocated frequent bathing and daily tooth-brushing — all fundamental components of hygiene today but very rare practices in the early part of the nineteenth century. Other crazy ideas included fresh air, clean drinking water, and fresh home-grown fruits and vegetables. These ideas are positively wholesome today. But back in the day, folks in New England didn’t just see them as radical or crazy. They were dangerous.

Graham was born in Suffield, Connecticut, the seventeenth child of a minister. He was ill during most of his young life, which may be why he had such a driving passion to discover the secrets of good health. He was ordained a Presbyterian minister in 1826, but decided to become a clergymen-physician at a time when a lack of medical training wasn’t much of an impediment to entering the profession. At about that time, he came to believe — with good reason — that bakers were poisoning the general public by using finely ground processed flour which was bleached with alum and chlorine. This was a common practice to make bread whiter in color, and therefore more appealing to a growing middle class who came to regard darker shades of bread suitable only for country rubes. White bread — and the softer the better — became a status symbol, and the complicated processes for making it meant that it was no longer homemade, but purchased from a baker. And that was bad because because it was a scientific fact (according to Graham) that alum and chorine increased the sex drive.

In 1829, Graham came up with his own recipe for what came to be known as Graham bread, a firm dark bread using unsifted course-ground flour, which he regarded as much healthier than the commercially-bought white bread. He also urged his followers to avoid meat, spices, coffee, tea, and alcohol. He argued that there was a strong link between diet and overall health, which is true, although it was a radical idea at the time. But he went further, drawing a strong link between diet and morality. For example, spicy foods might lead to a spicy temperament, leaving one open to the temptations of drinking, gambling, prostitution, and venereal excesses, especially self-pollution, as it was called in his day:

Among the causes of extensive and excessive self-pollution, at such places and elsewhere, as I have already stated, the most important ones are—

1. Improper diet — the free use of flesh, with more or less of stimulating seasonings and condiments, together with coffee, tea, rich pastry, and compounded and concentrated forms of food; and too often, chewing and smoking tobacco, and drinking wine and other intoxicating liquors; — all of which unduly stimulate and irritate the nervous system, heat the blood, and early develope a preternatural sensibility and prurience of the genital organs.

2. Excesses in quantity of aliment. …Subsisting as most children do, on a variety of dishes, variously and often viciously prepared — too generally warm, and requiring little mastication, they are sure to eat too rapidly, and swallow, in a very imperfectly masticated condition, far too great a quantity of food. This not only produces permanent injury in the digestive organs, but the whole constitution is much impaired by it, and the sexual appetite rapidly developed and strengthened.

3. A want of proper exercise to promote the equal distribution of the blood, and develope and invigorate the several organs and parts of the system, and firmly establish the healthy condition and conduct of the constitution. Their sedentary and inactive, and too generally indolent habits, lead to sluggishness of capillary circulation, and an undue detention of blood in the vessels of the abdomen and lower parts of the body, including the genital organs; by which means the parts become heated and debilitated, and thus again, a preternatural sensibility and excitability are augmented in the organs of generation…

There’s more, but you get the drift. Following his advice would save children from growing up “with a body full of disease, and with a mind in ruins, the loathsome habit still tyrannizing over him, with the inexorable imperiousness of a fiend of darkness.” Of all of the sexual excesses, Graham regarded masturbation as the worst. But he considered as dangerous any sexual act undertaken more often than necessary because of the “violent paroxysms” that accompanied an orgasm:

The convulsive paroxysms attending venereal indulgence, are connected with the most intense excitement, and cause the most powerful agitation to the whole system that it is ever subject to. The brain, stomach, heart, lungs, liver, skin, and the other organs, feel it sweeping over them with the tremendous violence of a tornado. The powerfully excited and convulsed heart drives the blood, in fearful congestion, to the principal viscera, producing oppression, irritation, debility, rupture, inflammation, and sometimes disorganization; — and this violent paroxysm is generally succeeded by great exhaustion, relaxation. These excesses, too frequently repeated, cannot fail to produce the most terrible effects.

And so even among the married, he suggested:

As a general rule, it may be said to the healthy and robust, it were better for you not to exceed, in the frequency of your indulgences, the number of months in the year; and you cannot habitually exceed the number of weeks in the year, without in some degree impairing your constitutional powers, shortening your lives, and increasing your liability to disease and suffering.

Graham published his teachings in A Lecture To Young Men On Chastity, A Treatise on Bread and Bread-Making, and Lectures on the Science of Human Life. His followers, calling themselves Grahamites, established the Graham Journal of Health and Longevity to promote his ideas beyond the Northeast. Graham societies flourished in Boston, New York and on the campuses of Oberlin, Wesleyan and Williams Colleges. At Oberlin College in Ohio, the Graham diet was made mandatory between 1837 and 1841, until a rebellion by students and teachers forced the college to back down. Graham’s supporters included Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson (who called Graham “the poet of bran and pumpkins”), Horace Greeley, and Joseph Smith, who would go on to found the Mormon Church.

He also had his detractors. One New York journalist warned that “this wild Fanaticism will sweep through the land overthrowing every social comfort, every physical enjoyment, every pleasure that springs from sense and refers to sense.” A New England newspaper referred to Graham as “Dr. Bran, the philosopher of sawdust pudding.” Rancorous arguments raged back and forth in the pages of the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal (the forerunner to the New England Journal of Medicine). One set of articles charged “Grahamism a Cause of Insanity,” while another countered, “Grahamism Not a Cause of Insanity.” According to newspaper accounts, women fainted when he lectured on the evils of sexual incontinence and the wearing of corsets. Bakers and butchers, fearing a loss of business if his ideas caught on, regularly threatened to riot and break up his lectures.

Over time, Graham was eventually dismissed as a crackpot and he fell out of favor. Undoubtedly, the apostle of longevity’s reputation was further dented when he died at age 57. But many of his ideas managed to live on in several new religious movements. In addition to the Latter Day Saints, his theories informed the dietary practices Seventh-Day Adventism and, to a lesser extent, early adherents to Christian Science. They also were a profound influence on John Harvey Kellogg, who created a breakfast cereal he called “granola,” based on Graham’s bread recipe and designed to address many of the same sexual concerns.

Ironically, Graham’s thin, coarse Graham bread eventually became a cracker which, by 1900, was sold by the same commercial backers he so reviled. To add insult to injury, the National Biscuit Company (you know it as Nabisco) added sugar and white flour to Graham’s recipe. Later, they began marketing a version that included an evil spice, cinnamon. Next thing you know, you were combining Graham crackers, Hershey bars and roasted marshmallows to make s’mores around the campfire when you were a kid. Good lord, no wonder you’re such a mess!

[All quotations are from: Sylvester Graham. A Lecture to Young Men on Chastity, 4th ed. (Boston: George W. Light, 1838). Available online via Google Books here.]

Born On This Day, 1889: Jean Cocteau

Jean Cocteau. Photo by Man Ray, 1922.

(d. 1963) Most artists work in just one or two mediums; Cocteau — 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. His reputation was cemented in 1917 when, as part if Ballets Russes, he collaborated with Pablo Picaso and Eric Satie for the ballet Parade. 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), La Belle et la Bête (a very pre-Disney 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 such belle époque luminaries as Marcel Proust (Jul 10), André Gide, Guillaume Apollinaire, Pablo Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani, Sergei Diaghilev (Mar 31) and Raymond 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. Cocteau died on October 11, 1963, of heart failure, shortly after recording a radio tribute in honor of his beloved Piaf, who had also passed away earlier that morning.

Fly Your Flag. It’s Independence Day.

Today’s Agenda Is Brought To You By…

Jonathan Antonio Camuy Vega, 24 years old.

L-R: Jonathan, William, Yilmary

Jonathan graduated from Universidad de Puerto Rico-Arecibo with a degree in television and radio communications. He took a job at Telemudo Puerto Rico, before moving on to better opportunities in Orlando. “He turned out to be a very good producer. He had goals to do something more,” said a former teacher. “In Puerto Rico, sadly, our young people are leaving to the States to go to a better place and look at the better place he got.”

He began working as an assistant producer for Telemundo’s Yo Soy el Artista, then joined the production team for La Voz Kids, a popular children’s singing competition program based on NBC’s The Voice.

Jonathan was at Pulse night club with a friend, Yilmary Rodriguez Solivan and her brother in law, William Sabad Borges, who posted a photo of the three of them on social media that night before the attack. Jonathan and Yilmary were both shot and killed. William was shot twice but survived. He said Jonathan died a hero; his body was found shielding Yilmary.

Yilmary Rodriguez Solivan, 24 years old.

Yilmary was a mother of two and married to race car driver Juan Borges. He youngest son is just three months old. Yilmary had gone out with her brother-in-law, William Borges and her friend, Jonathan Camuy. Yilmary suggested they go to Pulse because of the shooting death the night before of Christina Grimmie, a singer who had appeared on NBC’s The Voice. Grimmie had been shot on Friday night outside the Plaza Live Theater in Orlando. Yilmary wanted to go someplace with a lower profile. “Let’s go to a gay club because they’re killing at the other clubs,” she suggested.

Today In History, 1855: Walt Whitman Publishes “Leaves of Grass”

First edition of Leaves of Grass, 1855.

The first edition of Leaves of Grass was a modest affair: self-published (he did much of the typesetting himself), consisting of only twelve unnamed poems in 95 pages (he wanted the book to be small enough to carry in a pocket), and only 800 copies. Whitman’s name appeared nowhere in the volume, just an engraving showing him in work clothes and a hat. The book’s title was a pun: “leaves” were the name publishers used for the pages of a book, and “grass” was a term given by publishers for minor, quickly forgotten works that they nevertheless relied on to pay the bills.

But Whitman’s book was not destined to be consigned to insignificance. He lost his job as a clerk at the Bureau of Indian Affairs after Interior Secretary James Harlan found a copy on Whitman’s desk. “I will not have the author of that book in this Department”, he said, and threatened to resign if the President were to order Whitman’s reinstatement. Critic Rufus Wilmot Griswold reviewed Leaves of Grass for The Criterion, writing, “It is impossible to image how any man’s fancy could have conceived such a mass of stupid filth.” Griswold charged Whitman of “the vilest imaginings and shamefullest license” and “degrading, beastly sensuality.” He also switched to Latin to accuse Whitman of “that horrible sin, among Christians not to be named.” Whitman would defiantly include that review in a later edition.

Frontispiece to the first edition.

Whitman wrote Leaves of Grass partly in response to an 1844 essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson, who recognized a need for a distinctly American poet to write about the new nation’s qualities. “I was simmering, simmering, simmering; Emerson brought me to a boil,” Whitman said. He sent Emerson a copy of Leaves of Grass, who wrote back with effusive praise. “I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom American has yet contributed,” he wrote. “I am very happy in reading it, as great power makes us happy.” Encouraged, Whitman immediately set about greatly expanding Leaves of Grass for a second edition, which was published the following year.

The expanded version now came in at 384 pages and sold for a dollar. Subsequent editions followed, each different from before. His fourth edition in 1867 was supposed to the last one of his “unkillable work!” But no, the work arose again for another three or five more editions, depending on how you count them. When Whitman was preparing the 1882 edition, a Boston district attorney threatened to prosecute thelocal publisher for obscenity unless Whitman removed two poems and altered ten others, including “Song of Myself,” and “I Sing the Body Electric.” Whitman refused and found a new publisher. When that edition came out, several prominent booksellers and department stores refused to carry it. But the controversy drove increased sales, and the first printing sold out on its first day. That edition then went on through four more printings.

Whitman completed his final edition in 1891. It became known as his “deathbed edition. “L. of G. at last complete — after 33 y’rs of hackling at it, all times & moods of my life, fair weather & foul, all parts of the land, and peace & war, young & old”. It was published in 1892, and the edition had grown to include more than 400 poems. Two months before Whitman died, the New York Herald published an announcement declaring the 1892 edition the definitive one:

Walt Whitman wishes respectfully to notify the public that the book Leaves of Grass, which he has been working on at great intervals and partially issued for the past thirty-five or forty years, is now completed, so to call it, and he would like this new 1892 edition to absolutely supersede all previous ones. Faulty as it is, he decides it as by far his special and entire self-chosen poetic utterance.

The full first edition is available online at the Walt Whitman Archive.

Today In History, 1965-1969: “Annual Reminder” Pickets at Philadelphia’s Independence Hall

The first Annual Reminder, 1965.

The Fourth of July commemorates the day in which a group of second class citizens decided that it was finally time to not only declare their independence, but also their dignity for having been created equal and endowed with the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Of course, not all Americans gained their freedom on that date in 1776. Instead, that marked the starting point for a long struggle, one which nearly destroyed the union almost a century later, and one which continues today. The 1960s will be long remembered as an important era in that struggle as racial barriers began to fall across the nation. But barriers against gay people held fast. 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.

The first Annual Reminder, 1965. Photo by Kay Lahusen. (Source)

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. Forty-four activists, including Frank Kameny (May 21), Barbara Gittings (Jul 31), Kay Tobin Lahusen (Jan 5) and Craig Rodwell, 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.”

Craig Rodwell, a member of New York’s Mattachine Society and owner of the first gay bookstore in the United States (Nov 24), is credited for coming up with the idea. He envisioned the protest morphing into a kind of a gay holiday. “We can call it the Annual Reminder — the reminder that a group of Americans still don’t have their basic rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” he suggested. Kameny, Gittings and the others eagerly agreed. Kay Lahusen described the picketing in the Daughters of Bilitis’ magazine The Ladder:

Barbara Gittings and Randy Wicker picketing at Independence Hall on July 4, 1966. Photo by Kay Lahusen. (Source)

“We are not,” asserted one picketer, “wild-eyed, dungareed  radicals throwing ourselves beneath the wheels of police vans that have come to cart us away from a sit-in at the Blue Room  of the White House.” The firm rules followed by homosexual picketers are, in part: “Picketing is not an occasion for an assertion of personality, individuality, ego, rebellion, generalized non-conformity or anti-conformity. …Therefore the individual picketer serves merely to carry a sign or to increase the size of the demonstration; not he, but his sign should attract notice. …Dress and appearance will be conservative and conventional.” And so they have been. Women wear dresses; men wear business suits, white shirts and ties.

…”I didn’t know you people had problems like these.” exclaimed one man after reading the leaflet. His response gratified the key expectation of every picketer. A front-page mention of the demonstration in the Philadelphia Inquirer and coverage on local CBS-TV possibly multiplied his comment a thousandfold. Picketing had drawn public attention to long-hidden injustices.

This dignified protest, which startled many a citizen into fresh thought about the meaning of Independence Day, might well have been applauded by our Founding Fathers, who were intent on making America safe for the differences.

Peter Ogren (probably) and Craig Rodwell, marching at the Annual Reminder march in 1968. Photo by Randy Wicker. (Source)

East Coast activists had already staged several pickets elsewhere that year before descending on the City of Brotherly Love. Actually, the first was in 1964, when a small band of activists protested in front of a New York City army induction center (Sep 19). That action was followed in 1965 with pickets in front of the White House (Apr 17,  May 29), the Civil Service Commission (Jun 26), and the United Nations in New York City (Apr 18). But Philadelphia’s protests would be an annual event, taking place every July 4th in front of  Independence Hall for the next four years.

But with 1969’s Stonewall rebellion, the gay community gained an independence day all of its 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, a victim by the rising tensions between the old ways of doing things and the rebelliousness of the younger generation. For previous marches, Kamany insisted on a strict, conservative dress code — suits and ties for men, dresses for women — and a strictly businesslike behavior among the marchers.

Two women holding hands during the fifth Annual Reminder, 1969. Photo by Nancy Tucker. (Source)

But during the 1969 march, Kamany and Rodwell got into an argument when Kameny separated two lesbian picketers after they began to hold hands. Rodwell was no longer interested catering to Kameny’s insistence on appearing “respectable.” Rodwell grabbed his partner’s hand and continued marching, as did several other New York-based picketers. That incident led the New York activists, energized by the Stonewall rebellion six days earlier, to regard the Annual Reminder as an increasingly irrelevant relic. As New York Mattachine Society president Dick Leitsch explained in a letter to Barbara Gittings:

We cannot support a demonstration that pretends to reflect the feelings of all homosexuals while excluding many homosexuals from participating in the demonstration. Since our membership covers all the spectrum of gay life, we encompass drag queens, leather queens, and many, many groovy men and women whose wardrobe consists of bell-bottoms, vests, and miles of gilt chains. Rather than risk the embarrassment and insult of having some of our people rejected (as did happen a few years ago), we choose neither to participate nor support the demonstrations and to make our reasons plain in our publication…

The Annual Reminder held out such promise at its inception, and I am sorry to see it become the personal property of a few who would set themselves up as an “establishment,” no less bigoted and exclusionary than the real “Establishment” we’re supposedly fighting.

During the train ride back home, Rodwell began tossing around the idea of holding an annual march in in New York where they could do things their way — without a dress code. As Rodwell described it, their march wouldn’t be “a silent plea for rights but as an overt demand for them.” He also came up with the idea of calling it the Christopher Street Liberation Day, to take place on June 28 to commemorate the first anniversary of the rebellion. As it happens, along with the many bell-bottomed, vested, leathered, dragged, and shirtless marchers who walked from Christopher Street to Central Park on June 28, 1970, was Frank Kameny, wearing tan slacks and a polo shirt and holding a sign reading “Gay is Good” while leading a contingent of members of the Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C.

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 the first historical marker to recognize and celebrate LGBT history in commemoration of those early protests in front of Independence Hall.

You can see a short film shot by gay rights activist Lilli Vincenz in 1968 of the Annual Reminder march for that year here.

[Additional sources: “Kay Tobin” (Kay Lahusen). “Picketing: the impact and the issues.”  The Ladder 9, no. 12 (September 1965): 4-8.

Simon Hall. “The American gay rights movement and patriotic protest.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 19, no. 3 (September 2010): 536-562.

Michael G. Long (ed.) Gay is Good: The Life and Letters of Gay Rights Pioneer Franklin Kameny (Syracuse, New York; Syracuse University Press: 2014): 93, 201. ]

Today’s Agenda Is Brought To You By…

Javier Jorge Reyes, 40 years old.

Javier’s Facebook profile renders his name as Harvey George Kings, an English translation of his name. But his friends called hin Javi. He worked as a salesman for Gucci, who made the arrangements for his final trip back to Puerto Rico for his funeral and burial.

He was born in Juayama, Puerto Rico. He studied business administration at Academia San Antonio de Guayama, and tourism at Universidad del Sagrado Corazón. He started working at an Orlando Guess? store in 2001 as co-manager, and left to become a supervisor at a Gucci store in 2013. Co-workers described him as “an amazing salesman” who was style-conscious and customer oriented.

“He liked to go out,” one friend said. “He was proud to be Latino, super proud.” Friends arranged for a private viewing at an Orlando funeral home before he was flown back to Puerto Rico. As loved ones streamed into the funeral home, the parking lot was ringed with tattooed bikers, sheriff’s deputies, members of the LGBT community and allies who used posters and rainbow-colored sheets to prevent potential disruptions by members of Westboro Baptist, who threatened to protest the memorial service. About 100 people people were there, ready and waiting, but Westboro failed to show up.

Martin Benitez Torres, 33 years old.

Martin Benitez Flores (foreground) and his boyfriend, Michael Morales

Martin, originally from San Juan, Puerto Rico, had just arrived a few days earlier to visit family in Orlando. He posted videos to Facebook on Saturday morning, showing him cooking in the kitching with family members, and he recorded a walking tour of the apartment grounds to show friends and family back in Puerto Rico. He had enrolled at the Tampa campus of Sistema Universitario Ana G. Méndez to become a pharmacy tech, and was one of four Ana G. Méndez students from its Orlando and Tampa campuses who were victims that night.

Before moving to Tampa, he worked as a travel agent in Puerto Rico. His favorite holiday was Halloween, and he organized themed parties for his co-workers and created his own costume. “His infectious energy would soon have us all dressed up for the occasion,” said one friend and co-worker. He used those same talents to create costumes for local beauty pageant contestants.

Martin was at Pulse that night with his boyfriend, Michael Morales. Michael was seriously injured in the shooting.

Today In History, 1969: Village Voice: “Gay Power Comes to Sheridan Square”

The front page of The Village Voice, July 3, 1969.

As I said earlier (see Jun 28), much of what we know about the Stonewall Rebellion comes to us from two articles published by the Village Voice on July 3, 1969. The Voice was perfectly situated, both temperamentally and geographically, to alert its counter-cultural audience to the events that unfolded a virtual stone’s throw from its offices. Lucian Truscott IV’s colorful description of the rise of “the forces of faggotry” during the wee hours of Saturday morning got the bigger headline. His liberal use of the words “fags”  and other epithets along with an often contemptuous tone would soon result in protests by those very same newly-created gay activists at the Voice’s offices just two months later (see Sep 12). Howard Smith’s much more straightforward account of what happened inside the Stonewall Inn also managed to squeeze its first two paragraphs on the front page.

To set the scene, Truscott reported that the police raid on the Stonewall was the second on that week. It started small, with only two detectives, and two male and two female police officers. They detained the patrons inside, and began releasing some of them one by one as a crowd gathered in the street. The crowd at first was somewhat festive, but when a police paddywagon arrived, the mood changed:

Three of the more blatant queens — in full drag — were loaded inside, along with the bartender and doorman, to a chorus of catcalls and boos from the crowd. A cry went up to push the paddywagon over, but it drove away before anything could happen. With its exit, the action waned momentarily. The next person to come out was a dyke, and she put up a struggle — from car to door to car again. It was at that moment that the scene became explosive. Limp wrists were forgotten. Beer cans and bottles were heaved at the windows, and a rain of coins descended on the cops. At the height of the action, a bearded figure was plucked from the crowd and dragged inside. It was Dave Van Ronk, who had come from the Lion’s Head to see what was going on. He was charged with throwing an object at the police.

Many believe that the “dyke” was probably Stormé DeLarverie, a drag king performer of the 1950s and 1960s, who  later worked as a bouncer at several of the city’s lesbian bars. There’s also this anacronism that bears explanation: why did the crowd throw coins? Most likely they were mostly throwing pennies — copper pennies — against the “coppers” in uniform, using the least valuable coin available as a both a taunt and a projectile. It was not an unusual practice in the 1960s.

This would be a good point to switch to Howard Smith’s account from inside the bar. He had been sticking close to Inspector Seymour Pine, the officer in charge of the raid, when the paddy-wagon left and the crowd grew angry. As bottles began flying, Pine ordered his officers inside the bar for cover, and convinced Smith to come inside where “you’re probably safer.”

In goes me. We bolt the heavy door. The front of the Stonewall is mostly brick except for the windows, which are boarded within by plywood. Inside we hear the shattering of windows, followed by what we imagine to be bricks pounding on the door, voices yelling. The floor shudders at each blow. “Aren’t you guys scared?” I say.

“No.” But they look at least uneasy.

The door crashes open. Beer cans and bottles hurtle in. Pine and his troop rush to shut it. At that point the only uniformed cop among them gets hit with something under his eye. He hollers, and his hand comes away scarlet. It looks a lot more serious than it really is. They are all suddenly furious. Three run out in front to see if they can scare the mob from the door. A hail of coins. A beer can glances off Deputy Inspector Smyth’s head.

Pine, a man of about 40 and smallish build, gathers himself, leaps out into the melee, and grabs someone around the waist, pulling him downward and back into the doorway. They fall. Pine regains hold and drags the elected protester inside by the hair. The door slams again. Angry cops converge on the guy releasing their anger on this sample from the mob. … And while the other cops help, he (the cop who was cut) slaps the prisoner five or six times very hard and finishes with a punch to the mouth. They handcuff the guy as he almost passes out. “All right,” Pine announces, “we’ll book him for assault.” The door is open again. More objects are thrown in. The detectives locate a fire hose, the idea being to ward off the madding crowd until reinforcements arrive. They can’t see where to aim it, wedging the hose in a crack in the door. It sends out a weak stream.”

That man who was dragged inside was Dave Van Ronk, who Truscott mentioned in his article. Switching back to Truscott’s narrative:

Three cops were necessary to get Van Ronk away from the crowd and into the Stonewall. The exit left no cops on the street, and almost by signal the crowd erupted into cobblestone and bottle heaving. The reaction was solid: they were pissed. The trashcan I was standing on was nearly yanked out from under me as a kid tried to grab it for use in the window smashing melee. From nowhere came an uprooted parking meter — used as a battering ram on the Stonewall door. I heard several cries of “Let’s get some gas,” but the blaze of flame which soon appeared in the window of the Stonewall was still a shock.

Back inside, Smith describes how that fire very nearly led to the police shooting into the crowd:

Pine places a few men on each side of the corridor leading away from the entrance. They aim unwavering at the door. One detective arms himself in addition with a sawed-off baseball bat he has found. I hear, “We’ll shoot the first motherfucker that comes through the door.” … I can only see the arm at the window. It squirts a liquid into the room, and a flaring match follows. Pine is not more than 10 feet away. He aims his gun at the figures.

He doesn’t fire. The sound of sirens coincides with the whoosh of flames where the lighter fluid was thrown. Later, Pine tells me he didn’t shoot because he had heard the sirens in time and felt no need to kill someone if help was arriving. It was that close.

With backup on hand, police cleared the streets. According to Truscott, the immediate battle was over in forty-five minutes, although other accounts describe running street battles continuing for the rest of the night, with police cars damaged, trash cans set ablaze and windows broken out in area banks and storefronts. According to Truscott, thirteen were arrested taht night, and two police officers were injured. Quiet was restored that night, and the Stonewall’s management quickly got the bar ready to re-open and get everything back to normal for Saturday night, as it always had before. But this time occupiers of Sheridan Square had other plans. Again, Truscott:

Friday night’s crowd had returned and was being led in “gay power” cheers by a group of gay cheerleaders. “We are the Stonewall girls/ We wear our hair in curls/ We have no underwear/ We show our pubic hairs!” The crowd was gathered across the street from the Stonewall and was growing with additions of onlookers, Eastsiders, and rough street people who saw a chance for a little action. …As the “gay power” chants on the street rose in frequency and volume, the crowd grew restless. The front of the Stonewall was losing its attraction, despite efforts by the owners to talk the crowd back into the club….

The people on the street were not to be coerced. “Let’s go down the street and see what’s happening, girls,” someone yelled. And down the street went the crowd, smack into the Tactical Patrol Force, who had been called earlier to disperse the crowd and were walking west on Christopher from Sixth Avenue. Formed in a line, the TPF swept the crowd back to the corner of Waverly Place where they stopped. A stagnant situation there brought on some gay tomfoolery in the form of a chorus line facing the helmeted and club-carrying cops. Just as the line got into a full kick routine, the TPF advanced again and cleared the crowd of screaming gay powerites down Christopher to Seventh Avenue. The street and park were then held from both ends, and no one was allowed to enter — naturally causing a fall-off in normal Saturday night business, even at the straight Lion’s Head and 55. The TPF positions in and around the square were held with only minor incident — one busted head and a number of scattered arrest — while the cops amused themselves by arbitrarily breaking up small groups of people up and down the avenue. The crowd finally dispersed around 3:30 A.M.

Other accounts have the Saturday night uprising as being more widespread and more violent than Truscott’s description. People were beaten with nightsticks, and tear gas was deployed in front of the Stonewall to try to break up the crowd.

Youths gather in front of the Stonewall Inn on Sunday night, June 29 for a photo that appeared in the front page of the Village Voice.

The crowds gathered again on Sunday night, but according to Truscott, it was a somewhat quieter night with police and TPF out in force. In fact, unrest and police confrontations would go continue for another three nights. But Truscott’s account ended on a triumphal note Sunday:

Allen Ginsberg and Taylor Mead walked by to see what was happening and were filled in on the previous evenings’ activities by some of the gay activists. “Gay power! Isn’t that great! ” Allen said. “We’re one of the largest minorities in the country — 10 per cent, you know. It’s about time we did something to express ourselves.”

Ginsberg expressed a desire to visit the Stonewall — “You know, I’ve never been in there ” — and ambled on down the street, flashing peace signs and helloing the TPF. It was a relief and a kind of joy to see him on the street. He lent an extra umbrella of serenity of the scene with his laughter and quiet commentary on consciousness, “gay power” as a new movement, and the various implications of what had happened. I followed him into the Stonewall, where rock music blared from speakers all around a room that might have come right from a Hollywood set of a gay bar. He was immediately bouncing and dancing wherever he moved.

He left, and I walked east with him. Along the way, he described how things used to be. “You know, the guys there were so beautiful — they’ve lost that wounded look that fags all had 10 years ago.” It was the first time I had heard this crowd described as beautiful.

We reached Cooper Square, and as Ginsberg turned to head toward home, he waved and yelled, “Defend the fairies!” and bounced on across the square. He enjoyed the prospect of “gay power” and is probably working on a manifesto for the movement right now. Watch out. The liberation is under way.

[Sources: Lucian Truscott IV. “Gay Power Comes to Sheridan Square.” Village Voice 14, no. 38 (July 3, 1969): 1, 18. Available online via the Google Newspaper Archive here.

Howard Smith. “View from Inside: Full Moon Over the Stonewall.” Village Voice 14, no. 38 (July 3, 1969): 1, 25, 29. Available online via the Google Newspaper Archive here.]

Today In History, 1969: The New York Times Tries One More Time to Report on Stonewall

The New York Times, which has always prided itself as being the newspaper of record for the city, had failed miserably in its previous attempts to provide its readers with a coherent description of what had been happening in Sheridan Square the past few days (Jun 29, Jun 30). If all we had were these Times stories to document this history, it’s quite possible that the Stonewall rebellion might have faded from memory. Instead, the Village Voice’s extensive, if sometimes colorful, documentation of those days’ events preserved much of what we know today about those seminal confrontations with police (above).

But on the same day the Village Voice came out with its in-depth stories about Stonewall, the Times published its third attempt to tell its readers what was happening. By now though, the Grey Lady seemed tired and could barely muster three paragraphs, buried on page 19 between an article about the death of Rolling Stone Brian Jones and an ad for the long-running Broadway musical, Hello, Dolly!

Hostile Crowd Dispersed Near Sheridan Square

At least four persons were arrested and charged with harassment last night in the Sheridan Square area of Greenwich Village, where the police dispersed a hostile crowd for the third time in the last week.

The confrontations resulted from a police raid last weekend on a local bar, the Stonewall Inn, at 53 Christopher Street. which the police said was well known for its homosexual clientele and was allegedly operating without a liquor license.

Last night a chanting crowd of about 500 persons was scattered by members of the Tactical Patrol Force and police of the Charles Street station who were the targets occasionally of bottles and beer cans. A few fires were set in trash baskets along Christopher Street.

Today In History, 1975: U.S. Civil Service Commission Begins Hiring Gay People

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 (Apr 27). 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 (Jul 1) and organized several protests and meetings at the commission’s Washington, D.C. headquarters throughout the next two decades (Sep 28, Jun 26).

While Kameny’s case was the first legal challenge, it wasn’t the last. Several others followed suit, and in 1969, the U.S. Court of Appeals forced the Civil Service Commission to prove that being gay would directly impact that person’s ability to perform his or her job. (Jul 1). This threw a significant wrench in the Commission’s works. The CSC’s chief counsel warned in 1971 that newer cases “appear to be indefensible and could, if pursued, provide a vehicle for issuance of a legal decisions we could not live with.” In 1973, a federal judge in California, acting on a class action lawsuit rather than the case of an individual, ordered the commission to cease labeling gay people as unfit for federal employment.

The writing was now on the wall: the CSC’s anti-gay policy’s days were numbered. In 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. The new guidelines said that current or perspective federal employees could not longer “be found unsuitable based on unsubstantiated conclusions concerning possible embarrassment for the Federal service, a person may be dismissed or found unsuitable where the evidence exists that sexual conduct affects job fitness.” 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, Frank Kameny learned of the change via a phone call on a Thursday before the Fourth of July weekend. Federal personnel officials “surrendered to me on July 3rd, 1975,” he recalled. “They called me up to tell me they were changing their policies to suit me. And that was the end of it.”

Today In History, 1981: Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals

That was the headline the New York Times used to announce a new set of illnesses stalking gay men. The Times article, the first mainstream media report about of what would eventually become known as AIDS, came out just a month  after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) first announced that five gay men had died of a rare form of pneumonia in Los Angeles (see Jun 5). Now the CDC issued another notice of gay men in New York and California being stricken with Kaposi’s Sarcoma in the July 3 edition of the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report:

During the past 30 months, Kaposi’s sarcoma (KS), an uncommonly reported malignancy in the United States, has been diagnosed in 26 homosexual men (20 in New York City [N YC ]; 6 in California). The 26 patients range in age from 26-51 years (mean 39 years). Eight of these patients died (7 in NYC, 1 in California)—all 8 within 24 months after KS was diagnosed. The diagnoses in all 26 cases were based on histopathological examination o f skin lesions, lymph nodes, or tumor in other organs. Twenty-five of the 26 patients were white, 1 was black. …

Skin or mucous membrane lesions, often dark blue to violaceous plaques or nodules, were present in most of the patients on their initial physician visit. However, these lesions were not always present and often were considered benign by the patient and his physician. …

Seven KS patients had serious infections diagnosed after their initial physician visit. Six patients had pneumonia (4 biopsy confirmed as due to Pneumocystis carinii [PC]), and one had necrotizing toxoplasmosis of the central nervous system. One of the patients  with Pneumocystis pneumonia also experienced severe, recurrent, herpes simplex infection; extensive candidiasis; and cryptococcal meningitis.

This report, which noted that gay men were developing KS “during the past 30 months” confirmed rumors that had been swirling in New York of a “gay cancer.” Until then, KS had been extremely rare, affecting mainly older men of Mediterranean descent, Africans in the equatorial belt, and transplant patients who were on anti-rejection drugs that suppressed their immune systems. The CDC report also updated their count of gay men with Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP) from the prior month, from five to fifteen.

The New York Times story mostly repeated information gleaned from the CDC’s two released reports on the “gay pneumonia” and the “gay cancer,” but it did try to provide some additional context to those reports:

Cancer is not believed to be contagious, but conditions that might precipitate it, such as particular viruses or environmental factors, might account for an outbreak among a single group.

The medical investigators say some indirect evidence actually points away from contagion as a cause. None of the patients knew each other, although the theoretical possibility that some may have had sexual contact with a person with Kaposi’s Sarcoma at some point in the past could not be excluded, (Dr. Alvin E. Friedman-Kien of New York University Medical Center) said.

(CDC spokesman Dr. James Curran) said there was no apparent danger to nonhomosexuals from contagion. ”The best evidence against contagion,” he said, ”is that no cases have been reported to date outside the homosexual community or in women.”

This may have been the first time the New York Times noticed the disease, but the brief story was buried inside the paper. As the story’s author, Dr. Lawrence Alman, reflected on the story’s 20th anniversary in 2001:

Looking back with the wisdom of hindsight, it seems as if doctors, the public, journalists and governments were shockingly slow to recognize an epidemic in the making and take steps to try to contain it.

Most doctors overlooked a basic fact of biology, that a new infectious disease could appear at any time. When it became clear that AIDS could be sexually transmitted, many people, including doctors, patients and public health officials, hesitated to speak frankly about it. Many members of the public denied that such a disease could occur in their communities.

The Times ran only two more articles on the new epidemic that year, and a story about AIDS didn’t appear on the paper’s front page until 1983. Much of the gay and gay-friendly press was little better. A columnist for the Village Voice denounced the Times story as “the despicable attempt of The New York Times to wreck the July 4 holiday break for every homosexual in the Northeast.” The New York Native, which actually published the very first story about AIDS (May 18) even before the CDC made their first report about it public (Jun 6), would later destroy its reputation over its publisher’s obsession with countless outlandish conspiracy theories about AIDS.

[Sources: A. Friedman-Kein, L. Laubenstein, M. Marmor, et al. “Epidemiologic Notes and Reports: Kaposi’s Sarcoman and Pneumocystis Pneumonia among homosexual men — New York City and California.” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 30, no. 25 (July 3, 1981): 305.308. Available online here (PDF: 705KB/12 pages).

Lawrence K. Altman. “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexual Men.” New York Times (July 3, 1981): 20. Available online here.]