Box Turtle Bulletin

Born On This Day, 1919: Merle Miller

(d. 1986) The Iowa native was marked from the beginning: bookish, played the violin and piano, work thick glasses. The other kids called him sissy from the moment he started school. “I heard that word at least five days a week for the next 13 years until I skipped town and went away to college.” He studied at the University of Iowa and the London School of Economics. During World War II, he was a war correspondent and editor for Yank, The Army Weekly. After the war, he was an editor at Time and Harper’s magazine, and he wrote several best-selling novels, including his classic That Winter (1948), which portrayed the difficulties of veterans’ post-war readjustment. His non-fiction books included We Dropped the A-Bomb (1946), which was based on interviews with a crewman for one of the three B-29s that bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In 1952, he exposed the workings of the Hollywood blacklist in a book commissioned by the ACLU and published by Doubleday, The Judges and the Judged. “A large segment of one of this country’s largest industries remains panicked, partly by the hysteria of the times, partly by what is, relatively, one of the country’s smallest corporations, American Business Consultants, and a handful of supporters. All of the 151 lists are stained with the same careless red paint.” Miller knew very well the damage that inclusion in the McCarthy-inspired blacklist: he himself ended up on it, which kept him from developing a nascent career as a script writer.

One of his most famous books began as a series of interviews that he recorded with former President Harry Truman in 1962. His original plan was to produce a television documentary series bot all three networks turned it down. He suspected that his having been blacklisted in the 1950s may have been a contributing factor. Miller filed the tapes and notes away, not sure of what to do with them. When Truman died in 1972, the TV networks invited Miller to appear on camera and share some of his Truman stories, which he had been telling to entertain his friends and colleagues for the past decade. That’s when he decided the time was right to write that book. It would be no ordinary biography, but a book of conversations between Miller and Truman titled Plain Speaking. When it came out in 1974 (after at least eight publishers turned it down), it rose to number one on the New York Times best-selling list, and it remained on the list for over a year.

Miller remained closeted throughout most of his career, but the heady days of the post-Stonewall era changed that. In October 1970, Harper’s magazine, Miller’s former employer, published a homophobic screed by Joseph Epstein calling  gay people “an affront to our rationality …  condemned to a state of permanent niggerdom among men.” (Oct 27)  While meeting with two New York Times editors for lunch, Norman complained bitterly about the article. The other editors didn’t see anything wrong with it, and couldn’t understand why Miller was so upset. “Look, goddamn it, I’m homosexual … and I’m sick and tired of reading and hearing such goddamn demeaning, degrading bullshit about me and my friends.” The editors were taken aback, but a few days later, they approached Miller about writing a piece for The New York Times Magazine (which then enjoyed complete editorial independence from the Times newspaper).

His essay, “What It Means To Be A Homosexual,”was a bombshell in the mainstream press (Jan 17).The Times’s mailroom was inundated with more than 2,000 letters in the first six weeks, a record. Almost all of them from gay people and their parents expressing their gratitude for Miller’s honesty. It also opened the eyes of a number of straight readers, who were able to see gay people as just people. One reader, who was careful to avoid using epithets for racial, ethnic and religious minorities, admitted, “Yet for every time I’ve said homosexual, I’ve said ‘fag’ a thousand times. You’ve made me wonder how I could have believed that I had modeled my life on the dignity of man while being so cruel, so thoughtless to so many.” Later that year, his essay was published again in book form as On Being Different: What It Means to Be a Homosexual. Penguin Classics re-issued it again in 2012 with a foreword by Dan Savage and afterword by Charles Kaiser.

Born On This Day, 1929: Jill Johnston

(d. 2010) She hired on as a dance critic for the Village Voice in 1959, and became a fixture among dancers, composers, artists, poets, performance artists and the avant-garde generally in the city. Her dance column soon evolved to encompass a much wider scale. “I had a forum obviously set up for covering or perpetrating all manner of outrage,” she later wrote.

At Town Bloody Hall

She perpetrated her most famous outrage in 1971, during a panel discussion in New York’s Town Hall on feminism with Normal Mailer, Germaine Greer, Diana Trilling and Jacqueline Ceballos, who was then the National Organization for Women’s president. The debate was called in reaction to Mailer’s anti-feminist rebuttal, The Prisoner of Sex. Johnston took to the lectern and recited a poetic manifesto (titled “On a Clear Day You Can See Your Mother”) and announced that “all women are lesbians except those who don’t know it yet,” After Johnston exceeded her allotted ten minutes, Mailer became impatient and demanded she leave the stage. “Come on, Jill, be a lady,” Mailer mocked, before calling for a vote to determine whether she should continue. That’s when two other women joined Johnston on the stage, and the three began kissing and hugging, and soon they were rolling on the floor. When Mailer got up to introduce the next speaker from the lectern, the trio quietly left the stage, having successfully upstaged Mailer and rendering the rest of the debate mostly forgettable. Feminist author Kate Millett later said, “Jill made a wonderful performance art piece out of it. She wasn’t going to debate anything.” That performance has since been immortalized in a 1979 documentary as “Town Bloody Hall“.

Jill Johnston with Dick Cavett, 1973

In 1973, Johnston collected a series of Village Voice essays for her radical lesbian feminism manifesto, Lesbian Nation: The Feminist Solution.. In it, she began championing a separatist brand of lesbian feminism, labeling women’s relationships with the men a collaboration with the enemy. “Many feminists are now stranded between their personal needs and their political persuasions,” she wrote. “The lesbian is the woman who unites the personal and political in the struggle to free ourselves from the oppressive institution [of marriage] …. By this definition lesbians are in the vanguard of the resistance.”

What she wrote was only somewhat more controversial than how she wrote.  Her Voice columns were famous for following the hippie-freeform esthetic of the era, which one critic described as “part Gertrude Stein, part E. E. Cummings, with a dash of Jack Kerouac thrown for good measure.” She spurned paragraphs, capitalization, and punctuations, and adopted a style that she described as “collage-like assemblages.” Her method was so controversial that in the late 1960s, Andy Warhol and other avant-garde artists held a panel discussion about her work titled “The Disintegration of a Critic.” She later described those days as her “east west flower child beat hip psychedelic paradise now love peace do your own thing approach to the revolution.”

But by the time she wrote those word in 1973, she was already moving to a more conventional tone. She began writing for the magazine Art in America and the New York Times Review of Books, and she published two personal memoirs, Mother Bound (1983) and Paper Daughter (1985). She described her 1996 book Jasper Johns: Privileged Information as “my first ‘mature’ work. Its publication was very controversial, ostensibly because I used so much biography in backing up my views and descriptions of the artist’s work, but possibly more because of the radical reputation that preceded me. …Retrospectively, I see Lesbian Nation as a period piece.” In The New Yorker, she described herself as “an R.L.F.W. — a recovering lesbian from the feminist wars.”

By the 1990s, she had become something of traitor to her 1970s self. Having scorned marriage in Lesbian Nation, she married her spouse, Ingrid Nyeboe, in Denmark in 1993, and again in Connecticut in 2009. She also became an ardent Obama supporter in 2005 with her book At Sea on Land: Extreme Politics, which led to her passing over a chance to support Hillary Clinton in 2008. If she was now a reformed separatist lesbian, the emphasis should probably be placed on reformed, which is not at all synonymous with abandoned: “The centrality of the lesbian position to feminist revolution — wildly unrealistic or downright mad, as it still seems to most women everywhere — continues to ring true and right.”

Born On This Day, 1950: Howard Ashman

(d. 1991) Playwright and lyricists, Ashman first achieved acclaim for his collaboration with Alan Menken on Little Shop of Horrors. That collaboration put the songwriting duo on a course for greater hits to come. In 1986, Ashman wrote the screenplay for the film adaptation and wrote the lyrics for two new songs, “Some Fun Now” and “Mean Green Mother From Outer Space, both of which received an Academy Award nomination.

In 1989, he was co-producer, lyricist and occasional writer for Disney’s The Little Mermaid, the animated blockbuster that had overnight saved Disney from what appeared to be imminent bankruptcy after a long series of flops since the death of Old Walt. It was Ashman’s idea to give Sebastian the Crab a Jamaican accent, and the calypso song, “Under the Sea,” earned Ashman and Menkin the 1989 Oscar for Best Original Song. Ashman died in 1991 of complications from AIDS shortly after completing work on the Disney films Beauty and the Beast from his death bed, and before he could complete Aladdin. After he died, three of the songs from Beauty and the Beast were nominated for Best Song at the Academy Awards, with the title song winning the Oscar. Ashman was posthumously named a Disney Legend in 2001, and Beauty and the Beast is dedicated to him. Ashman was survived by his partner, architect William Lauch.

Born On This Day, 1956: Annise Parker

The Houston native had worked for over 20 years in the oil and gas industry as a software analyst, but she was never far from public service. In 1986, she was president of the Houston GLBT Political Caucus, which is the South’s oldest LGBT organization. Taking the position at the height of the AIDS scare was daunting “It was a scary, very different time,” she said. “The two most visible lesbian activists in Houston were myself and Sue Lovell (who later became a City Council member). We had regular death threats, our tires slashed, vandalism.”

But the narrow focus of LGBT politics wasn’t a good fit for her. “I was bored with gay stuff,” she said. “I threw myself just as hard into 10 years of neighborhood activism.” That neighborhood activism led to her becoming president of the Neartown Association in 1995, and in 1997 she won an at-large seat on Houston’s City council, making her the first openly gay individual elected to citywide office in Houston. In 2003, she won her bid to become city controller, the second highest office in city government. But her greatest triumph came in 2009, when she overcame blistering attacks from anti-gay groups to win the race to become Houston’s mayor on December 12, 2009. When she assumed office on January 2, 2010, Houston became the largest U.S. city to have an openly gay mayor.

Today’s Agenda Is Brought To You By…

Today in History, 1950: “Homosexual Coed Tries to End Life”

That was the headline of a brief United Press article, datelined May 16 in Seattle:

A 25-year-old University of Washington co-ed, who police said admitted being a homosexual for the last eight years, was in jail today after threatening to kill herself.

The pretty coed, whose name police refused to divulge, telephoned the police department late yesterday and told officer Kenneth Dahl she had a high-powered 30.06 rifle “and I’m going to use it.”

“I haven’t anything else to live for,” she sobbed hysterically.

Dahl persuaded her to give him her address and he would try to help her out of her trouble. Meanwhile, four prowl cars were sent speeding to the rooming house district adjacent to the university campus. In the basement of one of the houses officers found the woman with the rifle she had taken from a locker.

Detective L.W. Webb said she begged to be locked up. She said she just “gave up” and after quitting school last week decided she might as well kill herself. The woman told officers she had wanted to become a social worker but every time she applied she was turned down because of her affliction. She said she was from Los Angeles and that she had been studying zoology at the university before she quit.

Webb said the girl would be examined by a psychiatrist today and “probably be committed to a mental institution.”

It’s hard to draw specific causes and effects in cases like this, but it’s worth remembering that the nation was consumed by McCarthy-led lavender scare over the previous several months (see Feb 28, Mar 14,Mar 21, Mar 23, Mar 24, Apr 14, Apr 18, Apr 26, May 2 and May 15). It had gotten so bad that by mid-May, President Harry Truman’s advisers were warning him that “the country is more concerned about the charges of homosexuals in the Government than about Communists.”

Born On This Day, 1898: Tamara de Lempicka

Tamara de Lempicka (top) and “Auto-Portrait (Tamara in the Green Bugatti),” 1925 (bottom)

(d. 1980) The Polish Art Deco painter known as “la belle Polonaise,” she personified the glamor of the Great Gatsby society of the interwar years. In 1978, The New York Times called her the “Steel-eyed goddess of the automobile age.” Her famous self-portrait, Auto-Portrait (Tamara in the Green Bugatti) portrayed a woman who was utterly free, independent, and self-assured. Automobiles provided women with a freedom and mobility that they had never known before, and the portrait’s depiction of a 400 horsepower Bugatti added raw speed and power to the mix.

During the roaring twenties, Tamara lived the bohemian life in Paris, hanging out with Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau, and André Gide. She was famously, infamously bisexual, and she scandalized society with her very public affairs. She reveled in her notoriety. “I live on the fringe of society,” she announced, “and the rules of normal society have no currency for those on the fringe.”

In 1928, she was commissioned to paint a portrait of the mistress of Baron Raoul Kuffner. By the time she was finished, she replaced the mistress’s position, and eventually became Kuffner’s wife in 1933. In 1939, the couple took an “extended vacation” to America, and ended up staying through the Second World War, where she became a favorite in Hollywood. But by the time the War ended, her style was no longer popular. She switched from using a brush to a pallet knife, but critics savaged her work. She retired from active painting in 1962, determined never to show her work again.

In subsequent years, she not only complained that the paints and materials were now inferior to the “old days,” but that people in the 1970s lacked the qualities and “breeding” that inspired her art. After her husband died, she moved to Cuernavaca, Mexico in 1978 to rejoin the society of aging artists and aristocrats. By then, the art world was rediscovering the Art Deco era along with her paintings, which became highly sought after. She died in 1980, and her ashes were scattered over the volcano Popocatepetl.

Born On This Day, 1919: Liberace

Top: Liberace’s signed photo to his mother. He was always Walter to her. Bottom: Liberace’s transparent closet.

(d. 1987) Born Wladziu Valentino Liberace, he was known as Lee to his friends, Walter to his family, and Liberace to everyone else. His father, a french horn player, loved music but his mother saw it as an unaffordable luxury. His father prevailed, taking his children to concerts and insisting on excellence in their music lessons. Liberace later recalled, “My dad’s love and respect for music created in him a deep determination to give as his legacy to the world, a family of musicians dedicated to the advancement of the art.”

On “Mr. Showmanship’s” terms, the advancement of the art took on an entirely new meaning. The word “synonymous” doesn’t do justice to the connection between Liberace’s name and flamboyance. He raised eyebrows by wearing a relatively simple white tuxedo at the Hollywood Bowl in 1952, and he continued to wear it so he could be easily seen in darkened concert halls. But it didn’t take long before that gave way to sequined jackets, then entire rhinestone-encrusted, fur-trimmed monstrosities that were “just one tuck short of drag,” as he put it. In the 1950’s he installed a Plexiglas lid on his piano so as to not obstruct the view; by the 1960s his pianos were often encrusted with jewels and mirrors. And then there was the candelabrum. Always the rococo candelabrum. His entrances at the start of his Las Vegas shows were legendary. Sometimes he’d step out of a sequined limousine that rolled onto stage (driven by his very young and handsome lover, Scott Thorson), sometimes he flew in by invisible wires. After making a grand runway walk, he’d hold out his arms to show off his outfit and yet, “I hope you like it! You paid for it!” The audience roared back their approval.

He was as out as any closeted gay man could possibly be, and as closeted as every fearful performer was determined to be. His verbal denials aside — he even sued London’s Daily Mirror in 1956 when they questioned his sexuality in print and, incredibly, won! (Jun 17) — Liberace didn’t try too terribly hard to fool his audience. In that respect, Liberace joined a long line of not-entirely-closeted public figures whose non-closeted closets became an essential part if their identities as public figures, daring their audiences to see what was right there in front of them. Art critic Dave Hickey, in his essay “A Rhinestone as Big As The Ritz,” I think, put it best:

He never came out of the closet; he lived in it like the grand hypocrite that he was, and died in it, of a disease he refused to acknowledge. But neither, in fact, did Wilde come out of it, and he, along with Swineburn and their Belle Époque cronies, probably invented the closet as a mode of subversive public/private existence. Nor did Noel Coward come out of it. He tricked it up with the smoke and mirrors of leisure-class ennui and cloaked it in public-school double entendre. What Liberace did do, however, was Americanize the closet, democratize it, fit it out with transparent walls, and take it up on stage and demand our complicity in his “open secret.” …”A bit like cousin Ed, ain’t he,” my grandfather said. Getting it but not saying it.

Fake publicity dates with such celebrities as Mae West, Sonja Henie, Judy Garland, Rosemary Clooney, Susan Hayward, and dancer JoAnn Del Rio, to whom he was rumored to be engaged before Liberace declared that his busy career left no time for marriage (Oct 7) — this all helped to maintain Liberace’s heterosexual public persona. But if straight America danced delicately around “the question,” gay America wasn’t nearly so demure. Gay publications often featured catty comments about His Glittership, like this small notice in Milwaukee’s GPU News in 1973:

Milwaukee’s own Liberace has announced the forthcoming publication of his autobiography called “Why I Never Married.” We wonder if he will reveal that, before television made him famous, he played piano regularly at a local gay bar called “The Red Room”, affectionately remembered by old timers as “The Bed Room.”

Scott Thorson and Liberace

His autobiography that year was simply titled, “Liberace: An Autobiography,” which, suffice it to say, carried no such bombshells.

In 1982, Thorson, by then Liberace’s 24-year-old lover of five years, sued Liberace for $113 million in palimony after they broke up. The lawsuit made for sensation headlines, but Thorson wound up settling for a pittance. Liberace’s closet remained sealed right up until he died in 1987, and after. The official cause of death was cardiac arrest due to congestive heart failure brought on by sub-acute encephalopathy. Before he died, Hank Greenspun, publisher of the Las Vegas Sun, wrote in a front-page story that he had known Liberace for 40 years and that he, Greenspun, had the medical records, laboratory reports and other documentation to prove that Liberace had AIDS. Liberace and his handlers continued to deny the reports. After Liberace’s death, Thorson published a tell-all book, Behind the Candelabra: My Life With Liberace, in which Thorson described the “tender love” he shared with Liberace and their reconciliation at Liberace’s death bed. But despite that, and even despite Betty White’s 2011 revelation that she was a beard for some of Liberace’s dates for publicity’s sake, Wikipedia had maintained entire section devoted to questioning the “allegations of homosexuality” until 2013. That section is still there, but the contents have changed considerably now that the question has been pretty much settled in the public’s mind, when HBO’s biopic, Behind the Candelabra, based on Thorson’s book and starring Michael Douglas as Liberace and Matt Damon as Thorson, premiered that year.

Today’s Agenda Is Brought To You By…

From the Advocate, May 24, 1972, page 11. (Personal collection.)

An off-duty employee lounging in a towel at the Barracks’ coffee shop. (Photo: Vector, December 1973, page 12.)

San Francisco’s South of Market (SOMA) has been the center of the city’s leather scene since the 1960s, when the famous Tool Box opened in 1961. The Barracks opened in 1972 as a combination hotel/bar/bathhouse, with emphasis on the latter and each room set up to cater to a different fantasy. Vector magazine, a San Francisco gay glossy, described it this way in 1973:

Unlike the Continental or the Ritch Street baths here, the Folsom has a very easy and soft trip that lets you run with it. The Folsom is not a programmed environment; it does not impose it’s trip on yours. As a result, the divergence of types and scenes is manifold. At any given minute of the day or night you are likely to find as many different things going on as there are people on the premises. For purists, all of the bath traditionals are there and modern; sauna, showers, coffee shop, lounge, along with some radical innovations such as complimentary cans of Crisco in every room, a free-wheeling staff out to please in every sense of the word, and generous patrons willing to share whatever they may have brought with them to help you get to where you want to go.

By the late 1970s Folsom’s Miracle Mile, as that stretch of Folsom Street came to be known, featured nearly thirty bars, clubs, and retail shops within walking distance of each other. The Barracks closed in 1981 for renovation, but was destroyed in a fire that was described as the worst since the 1906 earthquake.

Today in History, 1826: “Writhing Bedfellows”

Jefferson Withers

Few intimate letters between men survive from the early nineteenth century, which makes this one so remarkable. Back when the nation was young, Jefferson Withers, 22, wrote to his dear friend, James Hammond, 18, a letter which is both frank and playful — even “campy”:

Dear Jim:

I got your Letter this morning about 8 o’clock, from the hands of the Bearer . . . I was sick as the Devil, when the Gentleman entered the Room, and have been so during most of the day. About 1 o’clock I swallowed a huge mass of Epsom Salts — and it will not be hard to imagine that I have been at dirty work since. I feel partially relieved — enough to write a hasty dull letter.

I feel some inclination to learn whether you yet sleep in your Shirt-tail, and whether you yet have the extravagant delight of poking and punching a writhing Bedfellow with your long fleshen pole — the exquisite touches of which I have often had the honor of feeling? Let me say unto thee that unless thou changest former habits in this particular, thou wilt be represented by every future Chum as a nuisance. And, I pronounce it, with good reason too. Sir, you roughen the downy Slumbers of your Bedfellow — by such hostile — furious lunges as you are in the habit of making at him — when he is least prepared for defence against the crushing force of a Battering Ram. Without reformation my imagination depicts some awful results for which you will be held accountable — and therefore it is, that I earnestly recommend it. Indeed it is encouraging an assault and battery propensity, which needs correction — & uncorrected threatens devastation, horror & bloodshed, etc. …

[The letter goes on for two more pages on unrelated matters, then signs off–]

With great respect I am the old
Stud,
Jeff.

James Henry Hammond

Withers would later become a judge in South Carolina and delegate to the conferences that established a provisional government for the Confederacy. He also served as a Congressman for the Confederacy from South Carolina. Hammond became a Congressman, Senator and Governor of South Carolina, and one of the South’s more important advocate for slavery as a Christian institution, as a blessing and a moral good. the greatest of all the great blessings which a kind Providence has bestowed upon our glorious region.” Slavery was also, according to Hammond, “is not only not a sin but especially commanded by God through Moses and approved by Christ through His Apostles.” Hammond’s personal diaries revealed he made sexual advances on his three teenage nieces, and he detailed his sexual relationship with a slave who bore him several children, and his sexual exploitation of her twelve year old daughter who bore several more children. Neither Withers nor Hammond, from the standpoint of American history, come across as admirable people, yet Hammond has become a modern-day hero for David Barton and others who promote the “Christian Nation” view of American history.

But all of that came later. Meanwhile back in 1826, Hammond replied to Wither’s letter on June 3, although that letter is now lost. Withers replied with some more purple prose the following September (Sep 24.)

[Source: Martin Duberman. “‘Writhing Bedfellows’: 1826.” Journal of Homosexuality 6, no. 1 (1981): 85-101. Available online here.]

Today In History, 1871: Germany Enacts Paragraph 175

Gay men wearing the pink triangle as convicts under §175 during the Nazi era.

Germany’s history has been, much more often than not, a history of several separate countries and kingdoms. It had only existed as a unified country for 75 years before it was divided again in the aftermath of World War II. It remained divided until the 1990 reunification, which means that Germany has experienced only a little bit more than a century’s worth of unity. The history of Paragraph 175, the part of the German legal code which criminalized homosexual acts between men, in many ways mirrors Germany’s history of unification and division.

In the early 1800s, what we now know as Germany was actually a fractured realm of some 300 smaller political entities which were, more or less, content to fight or cooperate with each other, as interests and politics dictated. But Napoleon’s invasion of Europe brought about a rising feeling of “Germanness” among the German-speaking people of central Europe. After France’s withdrawal, much of the rest of Germany’s history was marked by increasing competition between the two largest powers, Austria and Prussia, a contest which was finally decided in 1866 when Prussia emerged victorious in the Austro-Prussian war. With Austria sidelined, Prussia formed the North German Confederation with Hanover, Hesse-Kassel, Nassau, and the city of Frankfurt. Baden, Württemberg, and Bavaria formed alliances with Prussia which brought them into its sphere of influence.

The Proclamation of the German Empire at Versailles. Painting by Anton von Werner, 1885.

Now it was France’s turn, as the newest threat to the German states, to play a critical role in Germany’s unification. As France sought to increase its influence in the region, the German states which were still independent became increasingly reliant on Prussia for protection. When tensions finally exploded in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871, France experience something of a nineteenth-century version of the Blitzkrieg. Prussia, whose armies were much more mobile, quickly overwhelmed the disorganized French. Prussia quickly captured an entire French arming, along with Paris and Emperor Napoleon III. On January 18, 1871, the German princes gathered in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles to proclaim King Wilhelm I of Prussia the first German Kaiser.

This new Germany, comprised of what had been four kingdoms, six grand duchies, five duchies, seven principalities, three free cities and the imperial territory of Alsace-Lorraine, each with their own systems of law. Prussia had already begun a process of systematically codifying its laws, and its penal code served as the basis for the penal code of the North German Confederation, which in turn became the basis of the united Germany’s penal code. On May 15, 1871, Paragraph 175 was adopted straight from the Prussia’s Paragraph 143, which read simply:

§ 175 Unnatural fornication

Unnatural fornication, whether between persons of the male sex or of humans with beasts, is to be punished by imprisonment; a sentence of loss of civil rights may also be passed.

§175: The Disgrace of the Century!, 1922, by Kurt Hiller (see Aug 17).

A notable feature of §175 was that lesbians weren’t criminalized under the law. In fact, sexual relations between women were never expressly prohibited. As for the men convicted under §175, they were subject to prison sentences ranging from one to four years. Prussia’s legal code proved a disappointment in some of the more liberal German states, where privacy rights were held in higher regard, and efforts to repeal §175 began almost immediately (May 6, Aug 17, Aug 28.) By the turn of the century, about 350 prosecutions per year for homosexuality were taking place, with a similar number of prosecutions for bestiality. It was about this time that Magnus Hirschfeld (see May 14) co-founded the Wissenschaftlich-humanitäre Komitee (Scientific-Humanitarian Committee) whose first priority was §175’s repeal.

It might seem that the Weimar Republic years, between 1919 and 1930, would have been the best time to bring §175 to its rightful end. After all, the Weimar years are often regarded as the high water mark for homosexual rights advocacy and culture in the early twentieth century. That was especially true in Berlin during the so-called “golden era” of 1923 to 1929. Berlin’s legendary cabarets, theaters and salons saw an explosion of creativity, and dozens of clubs catered almost exclusively to the newly visible gay and transgender communities. But such liberal attitudes weren’t so prevalent outside of Berlin. Criminal charges for homosexuality rose from a little over 200 for 1920 to a peak of more than twelve hundred in 1925 and eleven hundred in 1926.

Arrests and convictions fell by 1929 to about eight hundred, which is when Hirschfeld’s committee almost succeded in its goal. The Reichstag’s Commission for Law Reform voted 15 to 13 in favor of a resolution to repeal it (see Oct 16). But two weeks later, stock markets crashed around the world and Germany was soon overtaken with political instability. The Nazis came to power in 1933 and expanded §175 to punish a broader range of “lewd and lascivious” behavior between men. This broader measure, which no longer required evidence of “fornication,” resulted in over 8,000 convictions annually by 1937. Many of those were sent to concentration camps, marked with a pink triangle.

Down with §175″: A 1973 gay rights poster.

Germany was defeated and Nazism vanquished, but §175 remained in place. While allied armies liberated Jews, Poles and other prisoners from the ghastly concentration camps, gay men were sent to German prisons to serve out the remainder of their sentences. In West Germany, arrests and convictions under the Nazi-era §175 continued apace, averaging between 2,000 and 3,000 each year. In 1969, West Germany modified the code to exempt anyone over the age of 21, although, oddly, those between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one were still subject to up to five years imprisonment. In 1973, the age of consent was lowered to eighteen, leaving §175 only punishing sex with minors of the same gender, although at a different standard than similar convictions for heterosexual acts with minors. Meanwhile East Germany informally reverted its practice back to the original pre-1935 version of §175 in 1950, although the Nazi revision remained officially on the books until 1968 when homosexuality was officially decriminalized between adults.

Germany’s 1871 unification brought §175 into existence. Germany’s 1990 reunification set the stage for finally killing it off for good. The reunited Bundestag finally repealed §175 altogether in 1994 as part of the process of harmonizing the penal codes of East and West Germany. Last Wednesday, the German government announced that it would introducing legislation to overturn thousands of convictions and allow for financial compensation to the men who suffered. Justice minister, Heiko Maas said, “We will never be able to eliminate completely these outrages by the state, but we want to rehabilitate the victims. The homosexual men who were convicted should no longer have to live with the taint of conviction.”

Today In History, 1950: Homosexual Drives As Menstrual Cycles

Rep. Arthur L. Miller (R-NE)

This was a time when Congress was preoccupied with two color-coded scares: the Red Menace of imaginary communists hiding in every cupboard, and the Pink Menace of homosexuals hiding under ever bed (and, incidentally, working in federal offices: Feb 28, Mar 21, Mar 23, Mar 24). Congressman Arthur L. Miller (R-NE) was particularly incensed over the latter. He was also a doctor and surgeon, which made this speech during a committee hearing particularly strange:

Some of these people are dangerous. They will go to any limit. These homosexuals have strong emotions. They are not to be trusted and when blackmail threatens they are a dangerous group. … It is found that the cycle of these individuals’ homosexual desires follow the cycle closely patterned to the menstrual period of women. There may be three or four days in each month that this homosexual’s instincts break down and drive the individual into abnormal fields of sexual practice.

Today In History, 1996: Episcopal Church Allows Ordination of Gay Deacons

An Episcopal Church court threw out a heresy charge and ruled that an Bishop Walter C. Righter, did not violate the church’s core doctrine when he ordained openly gay Barry Stopfel as a deacon, the rank below that of a priest, in the Diocese of Newark in 1990.

Today In History, 2008: California Supreme Court Strikes Ban on Same-Sex Marriages

Phyllis Lyon and and Del Marton

In a 4-3 decision, the California State Supreme Court ruled:

“[T]he language of section 300 limiting the designation of marriage to a union “between a man and a woman” is unconstitutional and must be stricken from the statute, and that the remaining statutory language must be understood as making the designation of marriage available both to opposite-sex and same-sex couples. In addition, because the limitation of marriage to opposite-sex couples imposed by section 308.5 can have no constitutionally permissible effect in light of the constitutional conclusions set forth in this opinion, that provision cannot stand.”

The decision took effect on June 16, 2008, when gay rights pioneers Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin’s 55-year relationship was solemnized by the first official same-sex wedding in San Francisco. But two weeks earlier, California’s Secretary of State reported that marriage equality opponents had turned in enough signatures to place a proposed amendment banning same-sex marriages on the November ballot. Prop 8 passed, but was later declared unconstitutional in Federal Court. This was after the State of California refused to defend Prop 8 and the ProtectMarriage forces, which had sponsored the Prop 8 ballot initiative, stepped in to take over the defense. ProtectMarriage appealed to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which upheld the lower court’s ruling but narrowed its reasoning. The case then reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which refused to rule on the merits because the ADF lacked standing to appeal. That sent the case all the way back to the Federal District Court which had declared Prop 8 unconstitutional in the first place, making that original decision the one that stuck.

Born Today, 1931: Jasper Johns

Jasper Johns’s “Map,” 1961 (Click to enlarge.)

He probably best known for his 1955 painting Flag, which is, just as its name implies, simply a painting of an American Flag. His focus on the mundane as subjects have led some to consider him a pop artist with an abstract impressionist streak, but it’s probably more accurate to see him as a neo-Dadaist. Flag exemplifies that movement by taking an object or a popular image imbued with intense meaning and removing it from its context and thereby reducing it to a simple abstract design. Map (1961) does the same thing. It’s an ordinary map of the United States portrayed in an abstract impressionist style which reduces the iconic image to a series of color splotches and shapes. Flags, maps, stenciled words and numbers — all of these mundane yet symbolic images were subjects for Johns’s paintings.

Jasper Johns receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Johns was born in South Carolina and studied for three semesters at the University of South Carolina before moving to New York to study briefly at the Parson’s School of Design in 1949. After a stint in the military during the Korean War, Johns returned to New York where he met Robert Rauschenberg (Oct 22) and they became lovers for eight years. It was through his connection with Rauschenberg that Johns was discovered by the art world. When prominent gallery owner visited Rauschenberg’s studio in 1958 and saw Johns’s work, he offered Johns a show on the spot. At that debut show, the Museum of Modern Art anointed Johns as a major figure in the art world by purchasing three of his paintings. By the 1980s, John’s paintings fetched higher prices than any other living artist in history. In 2011, Johns was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama, making him the first painter to receive the award since 1977.