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News and commentary about the anti-gay lobby“Now you must raise your children up in a world where that union of man and box turtle is on the same legal footing as man and wife…”
News and commentary about the anti-gay lobbyPosts Tagged As: Daily Agenda
October 19th, 2015
TODAY’S AGENDA is brought to you by:
From ONE, May 1959, page 15.
The June 1966 edition of The Ladder with photo of Dob vice president Ernestine Eckstein. Photo by Kay Tobin (Kay Lahusen, see Jan 5).
The Daughters of Bilitis’ official magazine The Ladder first appeared in October, 1956 as a twelve-page typewritten, mimeographed and hand-stapled newsletter. One hundred and seventy-five copies of that first issue were sent out, and from those humble beginnings, The Ladder went on to become first nationally distributed lesbian publication in the U.S. In Different Daughters: A History of the Daughters of Bilitis and the Rise of the Lesbian Rights Movement
EMPHASIS MINE:
To commemorate the tenth anniversary of the founding of the Daughters of Bilitis, The Ladder published five of the Pierre Louy’s “Sings of Bilitis, from the translation by Mitchell S. Buck of The Collected Works of Pierre Louis (New York, Liveright, 1926). The Ladder added:
Our cover photo this month (by Herner Neumeister) was taken at the Spoleto, Italy premiere of John Butler’s ballet “Les Chansons de Bilitis” (“Songs of Bilitis”), set to Debussy’s music. The dancers are Vera Zorina and Carmen de Lavallade. We are grateful to Mr. Butler for the photo and permission to use it.
LIV
The Past Which SurvivesI will leave the bed as she has left it, unmade and rumpled, the covers tangled, so that the form of her body may remain impressed beside mine.
Until tomorrow, I will not go to the bath, I will not wear any garments, I will not comb my hair, for fear lest I efface her caresses.
This morning, I will not eat, nor this evening; and upon my lips I will place neither rouge nor powder, in order that her kiss may remain.
I will leave the shutters closed and I will not open the door, for fear lest the remembrance which she has left might fly out upon the wind.
LXIV
The SleeperShe, sleeps in her unbound hair, her hands joined behind her neck. Does she dream? Her mouth is open; she breathes gently.
With a bit of white swan’s-down, I wipe away the perspiration of her arms, the fever of her cheeks, but without awakening her. Her closed eyelids are two blue flowers.
Very softly, I will arise; I will go draw water, milk the cow and ask fire of the neighbors. I would arrange my hair and dress before she opens her eyes.
Sleep, dwell for long between her fair, curved eyelids, and continue the happy night with a dream of good augury.
LXI
TendernessesClose thine arms, gently, like a girdle about me. 0 touch, touch my skin thus! Neither water nor the breeze of noontide are so soft as thy hand.
Today, cherish me, little sister; it is thy turn. Remember thou the tendernesses which I taught thee in the night past, and kneel thou near me, silently, for I am weary.
Thy lips descend upon my lips. All thine unbound hair follows them like a caress after a kiss. It glides over my left breast, it hides thine eyes from me.
Give me thy hand; it is hot. Press mine; hold it always. Hands better than mouths unite, and their passion is equaled by nothing.
LXIX
Words in the NightWe rest, our eyes closed; the silence is deep about our couch. Ineffable nights of summer! But she, believing me asleep, lays her warm hand upon my arm.
She murmurs: “Bilitis, thou sleepest?” My heart throbs, but, without response, I respire regularly like a woman couched in dreams. Then she begins to speak:
“Because thou hearest me not,” she says, “Ah! How I love thee.” And she repeats my name: “Bilitis… Bilitis…” And she touches me with the tips of her trembling fingers.
“It is mine, this mouth! Mine alone! Is there another so beautiful in the world? Ah! My happiness, my happiness! Mine are these naked arms, this neck, this hair…”
LXXVI
Evening Near the FireThe winter is hard, Mnasidika. All is frozen except our bed. But arise and come with me, for I have lit a great fire with dead branches and broken wood.
We will warm ourselves, crouching quite naked, our hair over our backs, and we will drink milk from the same cup and we will eat cakes with honey.
How gay and noisy the flame is! Are thou not too near? Thy skin reddens. Let me kiss it wherever the fire has burned it.
Amidst the ardent firebrands, I will heat the iron and I will dress thy hair here. With a dead ember I will write thy name upon the wall.
— “Songs of Bilitis.” The Ladder 10, no. 3 (December 1965): 10-11.
A Daughters of Bilitis breakfast, 1959. L-R: Del Martin, Josie, Jan, Marge, Bev Hickok, Phyllis Lyon.
TODAY IN HISTORY:
► 60 YEARS AGO: Daughters of Bilitis Founded: 1955. Phyllis Lyon remembered the phone call in September. Rose Bamberger was on the other end, asking, “would you like to be a part of the group of six of us that are putting together a secret society for Lesbians?” Lyon recalled later, “We said ‘Yes!!’ Because we would immediately know five more lesbians and we did, which was…. AMAZING.” The “we” were Lyon (see Nov 10) and her partner, Del Martin (see May 5). They had known each other since meeting in Seattle in 1950, and lived together in San Francisco since 1953. But they felt isolated because they hadn’t made any other friends who were lesbians. So when Rose, whom they met earlier that summer through a gay male couple they knew, suggested they start a secret club, Lyon and Martin jumped at the chance. “She wanted it to be in people’s homes and she wanted it to be so we’d be able to dance … so that we wouldn’t get caught up in police raids and we wouldn’t be stared at by tourists and so on. You couldn’t dance in the bars in those days. And she loved to dance. That was the whole idea behind it.”
Over the month of September, four couples, including Martin and Lyon, met to make plans for forming the club. Their first decision to make was the club’s name. Several were suggested: Que Vive, Habeas Corpus, Plus Two, Amazon — but all of them were rejected. Then someone suggested Daughters of Bilitis, named for the work of nineteenth century poet Pierre Louys, whose Songs of Bilitis spoke of lesbian love. Lyon had never heard of him. “Del and I went to the library to look up Bilitis, and of course found nothing. They had said it would be a great name because no one would know what it meant.” The second important decision was how to pronounce it. They rejected Bill-EYE-tis because they thought it sounded too much like a disease. So Bill-EE-tis it was.
The small group met several more times to begin putting some organization behind the idea: bylaws, membership rules (no one under 21, males welcome only as guests on specific occasions), and a tentative schedule. Business meetings would be held on the first Wednesdays of each month at 8:00 p.m. “Qui vive” became the club’s motto, sapphire blue and gold the colors, and an triangular insignia was chosen — that was serendipitous; they didn’t know that the pink triangle marked homosexuals in Nazi concentration camps. And then they named interim officers: Del Martin was president, Noni Frey was vice president, Phyllis Lyon was secretary, Rosemary Sliepen was treasurer, and Marcia Foster was trustee.
The first official meeting took place on October 19, 1955. It was awkward. The women quickly realized that they would be welcoming other women into their homes with whom they had very little in common except their sexuality. But more meetings followed, and the members became more comfortable with each other, they also became more confident. Within a year, they began reaching out to the local Mattachine Society and the staff of ONE magazine in Los Angeles. When they joined the Mattachine Society to lobby for a change in California’s sex laws, they began to get involved in local advocacy and cooperation with other homophile groups.
But they remained focused for providing a social and intellectual outlet for women within the larger gay movement. In 1956, DoB began publishing The Ladder, first as a typewritten and mimeographed newsletter, then as a nationally distributed magazine which became a lifeline to lesbians across the country and around the world. Soon, there were DoB chapters in dozens of other cities, including one in Melbourne, Australia, which was the first openly gay political organization in that country. Beginning in 1960, the Daughters convened the first of their biennial conventions in San Francisco.
DoB remained active until 1970, when the national organization disbanded but allowed the remaining local chapters to continue under the name. The Ladder survived the national organization by two years, until it went under due to a lack of financial support in 1972. But as many as twenty local DoB chapters continued in several American cities, with New York, Boston and the original San Francisco chapters remaining particularly active. The original San Francisco chapter folded in 1978, and its files, which included both the local and national archives, were turned over to the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco. At last report, the Boston Chapter, since moved to Cambridge, was still in existence as of 2004, but it appears to have gone dormant sometime since then.
[Source: Marcia M. Gallo. Different Daughters: A History of the Daughters of Bilitis and the Rise of the Lesbian Rights Movement
“Downtown” Markleeville, Alpine County’s unincorporated county seat.
► 45 YEARS AGO: Gay Liberation Front Plans Takover of Alpine County: 1970. Los Angeles gay activist Don Jackson was quite serious when he suggested the idea at a meeting of fellow West Coast Gay Liberation Front members in December of 1969. Tiny Alpine Count California, located high up in the Sierra Nevadas and not far from Reno, had a population of just a little over 400 residents and only 384 eligible voters. Why not get a bunch of gay people together and move to Alpine? It would only take a few hundred people to move there and, after ninety days of residency, the could register to vote, mount a recall campaign against current officeholders, and elect gay members to the five-person county board, as well as judges and sheriff. In short, they could take over the entire county and create a “gay mecca.”
When Jackson proposed the idea at the West Coast GLF conference in Berkeley, the idea didn’t catch on. Other gay leaders denounced the effort because it would, in effect, create a new gay ghetto. It would further reinforce the feeling of separation that gay people felt “rather than breaking down walls.” Los Angeles activist Morris Kight, who was himself no stranger to cockamamie ideas for the sake of publicity, didn’t like this one. “I thought they were all crazy. We can’t do that, we can’t go into the country. We’d starve to death.”
Undaunted, Jackson pressed ahead with the idea. And it certainly had a certain appeal for some. With homosexuality still a criminal act in California (it would remain so until 1975: see May 12), having power over law enforcement would be a really big deal. As Jackson explained, “A gay Superior Court Judge would have great discretionary powers. A gay district attorney could choose which laws and which criminals he wished to prosecute. … It would mean a … gay civil service and a county welfare department which made public assistance payments to refugees from prejudice.” Before long, 479 gay people had signed up and promised to move into the county by January 1, 1971.
By the summer of 1970, even Kight came around, sort of. As one of the leaders of the Los Angeles GLF, he still thought the idea was silly. But the LA GLF’s “A Demonstration A Day” campaign had failed to garner any media attention. “You have to hit them over the head with a two-by-four before they’ll pay attention to our issues,” he complained. ” A gay and lesbian takeover of a whole county: now that would certainly be a two-by-four!” “So I brought together Jon Vincent Platania, Stanley Williams, and Don Kilhefner. The four of us met over at 1501 North Hoover, next door to KCET-TV and I said, ‘Let’s do it. Let’s take over Alpine County, but don’t. Let’s agree among ourselves that we’ll fake it. That we’re going to be serious, we’ll stare into the camera and we’ll say that we’re taking over Alpine Count ‘…And so we held a press conference.”
Platania later remarked, “people were just homophobic enough to believe and fear it.” On October 19, the wires services picked up the story and it ran it in papers nationwide, quoting extensively from GLF’s press release:
The GLF statement said: “Housing could be created under public housing laws with funds furnished by the state and federal governments. A new county health service and hospital could provide for our sick.
“It would mean a … gay civil service and a county welfare department which made public assistance payments to refugees from prejudice.” … “The new gay (community) could bring a large income from the tourist trade, “Jackson wrote. “Communications media could be relied upon to give the gay colony worldwide publicity on account of the uniqueness and the controversy it is sure to cause.”
Controversy indeed, especially among those who already called Alpine County home. Hubert Bruns, chairman of the county’s Board of Supervisors, joined four other officials in a closed-door meeting with Gov. Ronald Reagan’s assistant legal affairs secretary to try to figure out what options were available to them. The news wasn’t good. Bruns told reporters, “If these people come up here and abide by the laws, there’s nothing in the world we can do to prevent them from coming and registering. Today, to the best of our knowledge, we don’t have gay people here. We do not need that kind of business.”
Bruns predicted a chilly reception. “We thought it was a joke,” Bruns said. “Today we don’t think it is a joke. They will receive a hostile reception when they come,” adding “apples and peaches don’t grow very well” in the cold climate. “No fruit is very welcome in our particular county.” When asked how he would know which of the new residents were fruits, Bruns replied, “We’re going to make every attempt to find out. I’m sure we’ll know some of them.” Other observers noticed that the cool reception wouldn’t just be from county residents. The planned January 1 start date would have coincided with the dead of winter when it’s not uncommon to have twenty-five feet of snow on the ground.
The LA GLF was ecstatic over the publicity. As a GLF writer crowed in their newsletter Front Lines:
The lid really blew off the establishment’s teapot when the GLF-LA told the world about the plans for taking over the tiny county of Alpine, California. Everyone in the state power structure from Ronnie Reagan to the Board of Supervisors of Alpine to “Dr.” Carl MacIntire, organizer of the recent “Victory in Vietnam” fiasco in Washington D.C. have been running around like lunatics trying to find some legal (or even not so legal) way to prevent the takeover of the otherwise insignificant area by gays.
Not everyone in the gay community was on board either. The Gay Liberation Front of Berkeley voted against the proposal. They gave the same reason they gave for everything else they opposed: it was “sexist” and “racist.” And “impractical,” something that they had not been known to be worried about before. Alpine County sheriff Stewart Merrill expressed relief that Berkeley withdrew from the plan. But Berkeley’s vote didn’t bother L.A.’s Don Kilhefmer though. “All the Berkeley vote means is that they don’t dig the idea, while San Francisco and Los Angeles is going ahead.” By then, Kinhefmer added, more then 500 had signed up to move, including some from Las Vegas, Witchita and Washington, D.C. Kight and other L.A. activists saw the whole idea as nothing but a hoax, albeit one that had an important result: the mainstream media — including NBC television, which sent one of their top reporters to Alpine County to cover the news — was now discussing anti-gay discrimination, bigotry, and other issues important to the gay community.
But the plan fizzled as winter approached, as Kight and other L.A. activists knew it would. Jackson, on the other hand, was completely serious about what he called his Stonewall Nation high up in the Sierras, and he continued his organizing efforts, in vain, well into the New Year. That January, Alpine County was blanketed in eight feet of snow in the worst snowstorm in nineteen years.
Postscript: Whatever reservations Alpine County residents had towards gay people in 1970, those attitudes changed remarkably by 2008, when Alpine County was one of just three interior counties in California to vote against Prop 8. County residents disapproved of the discriminatory ban on same-sex marriage by 379 to 293.
[Additional sources: Associated Press. “Homosexual group plans gay takeover.” The Daily Review (Hayward, CA), October 19, 1970.
Associated Press. “Mountaineers fear gay takeover.” The Milwaukee Journal, October 22, 1970. Available online here.
United Press International. “Alpine County seeks Reagan’s aid in blocking gay invasion.” Lodi (CA) News Sentinel, October 22, 1970. Available online here.
United Press International. “Gay Front turns down plan to seize county.” Youngstown (OH) Vindicator, November 4, 1970. Available online here.
Associated Press. “Liberation group still intends to go to Alpine County.” St. Joseph (MO) Gazette, November 6, 1970. Available online here.]
TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS:
► Robert Reed: 1932-1992. Poor Carol Brady. How could she know that her husband was gay? Actually, Florence Henderson, who played “the lovely lady” in The Brady Bunch, later said she figured it out the first time they shared a screen kiss in the first episode.
Reed was already a well-established character actor, appearing in episodes of more television series than anyone can count. He also worked on Broadway, in Neil Simon’s Barefoot In the Park. Reed never liked his role on The Brady Bunch, thinking that the schmaltzy show was beneath him. He often sparred with the show’s producer, Sherwood Schwartz over the silly scripts and nonsensical story lines. But Reed liked his co-stars and filled the role of father figure to the six younger cast members whenever he could. After the third season wrapped, he even brought the entire cast on vacation to New York and a cruise on the Queen Elizabeth II to London. Most of the cast members knew he was gay, but they were very protective of the fact. After all, in the 1970s it would have been a career-killer. When he died in 1992 of colon cancer and lymphoma, the media reported that he had died of AIDS (he had tested positive for HIV the year before but it had not progressed to AIDS). His Brady family was taken aback by the sensational reporting surrounding his death. As he was a father figure to the Brady cast in life, they returned the favor by being something of a family-figure to him. The cast attended his memorial, while many of his actual relatives stayed away.
► 70 YEARS AGO: Divine: 1945-1988. He was born as Harris Glenn Milstead, but everyone knew him as Divine, the Drag Queen of the Century who practically defined what a John Waters movie was all about. Divine described his character as “just good, dirty fun, and if you find it offensive, honey, don’t join in.” But he drew a clear distinction between his private life and his performance. “My favorite part of drag is getting out of it,” he said. “Drag is my work clothes. I only put it on when someone pays me to.” And yet whether he was in or out of drag, he was always Divine: he even had it put on his passport.
His most famous character, that of Edna Turnbald in the film Hairspray, was so popular that the character has been played by a male in drag in every adaptation since then, whether on the stage or the 2007 film remake. But not all of his characters were in drag; he also appeared as the racist TV station manager Arvin Hodgepile in Hairspray and as Earl Peterson, the fat man driving an Edsel station wagon who picks up Divine while hitchhiking. Divine was nominated for a Razzie Award for playing Rosie Velez in Lust In the Dust, which Tab Hunter both produced and starred in. I think he should have won an Oscar, with Lainie Kazan receiving special kudos for playing Divine’s step sister. He died, much too soon, of heart failure in 1988 at the age of 42.
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October 18th, 2015
TODAY’S AGENDA:
Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Nashville, TN (Black Pride).
AIDS Walks This Weekend: Atlanta, GA; Philadelphia, PA; Watertown, NY.
Other Events This Weekend: Louisville LGBT Film Festival, Louisville, KY; Rainbow Festival, Phoenix AZ; Seattle Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, Seattle, WA.
TODAY’S AGENDA is brought to you by:
From Northwest Gay Review, July 1974, Seattle section page 13.
This is one of those places that I haven’t been able to find much information about. It’s quite a shame because I found a couple of interviews which mention the Seattle tavern in the late 1950s, and any place that’s been around for perhaps as long as two decades is bound to have some stories attached to it. There’s no trace of the tavern today. The entire block was redeveloped into the Washington State Convention Center complex.
HM Prison, Brixton
TODAY IN HISTORY:
► Two Suggestions for Curing Homosexuality: 1947. Dr. F.H. Taylor had published a paper in the October 4, 1947 edition of the British Medical Journal in which he described treatment outcomes for 96 people who had been sent to His Majesty’s Prison in Brixton. Of those committed, 66 were identified as “pseudo-homosexual,” with 34 showing some signs of mental illness (although his definitions were somewhat surprising: three “epileptics,” twelve with “personality defects”, and five as “dull and backward”). The “pseudo-homosexuals” were those who Taylor described as “hav(ing) heterosexual tendencies and in whom the homosexual offence was in the nature of a substitution for the normal heterosexual act.” He described twelve more as bisexuals (“not so much by way of a perversion in the psychiatrical sense, but rather an indication of sheer depravity”), five as prostitutes (which he considered situational, much like his “pseudo-homosexuals”) and thirteen cases as “true inverts.”
His paper focused on that last group. Of those thirteen, seven showed no improvement in treatment, and three refused it altogether. Of the remaining three, one was “too dull to be able to co-operate in any form,” and another ” had already been considered by a clinic and a consultant psychiatrist and turned away as unsuitable.” That left one last man, whose ” offence was directly attributable to heavy consumption of alcohol,” was considered a good prospect for treatment. “Thus out of 13 cases, in only one was there any indication that psychotherapy would be of any value whatsoever — and then only as a palliative, not as a cure.”
Taylor’s article prompted a a couple of letters to the editor two weeks later. Dr. Clifford Allen of London wrote that it was no wonder that Taylor’s views on treating gay people were so pessimistic “since in prison psychiatry the hopeless cases and failures are most likely to be met, while the successfully treated ones live normal lives.” Allen then offered:
My own solution to this problem is that there should be a definite clinic for psychosexual conditions to which the courts send these cases for psychotherapy. The psychiatrists working on this one type of case would be certain to become more skilled than otherwise, and the patients more likely to be cured.”
How Allen believed that his solution would be any difference from Taylor’s, he didn’t explain. The second letter, from L.M.M. Beadnell was equally non-sensical:
SIR,–Dr. F. H. Taylor’s article (Oct. 4, p. 525) on homosexual offences makes me wonder once again why one never sees any mention of gonadal treatment in these cases; surely it must have some effect on at least a proportion.
A few years ago on transferring to a new area I came across a health visitor, aged about 35, who had a very deep voice and a distinct moustache. She had had a major operation, presumably a hysterectomy, about a year previously for dysmenorrhoea. About a year after I met her she was forced to leave the district as there had been several complaints from the mothers of girl guides in a company which she ran. I do not know exactly what these complaints were, but it was common local gossip that the girl was a homosexual. I feel sure that if this girl; had been given appropriate hormone treatment at the time of and subsequently to her operation she would not have become a Lesbian.
I should be interested to know if others have any experience of these cases being prevented or alleviated by hormone therapy.–I am, etc.
L.M.M. Beadnell
Rushden, near Buntingford, Herts.
► 25 YEARS AGO: Justice Powell Regrets Bowers Ruling: 1990. In 1986, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Bowers v. Hardwick to uphold Georgia’s sodomy law, and with it similar laws in twenty-five other states and the District of Columbia (See Jun 30). It had been reported that Justice Lewis Powell, Jr., had originally voted to strike down the law, but a few days later he changed his mind and became the deciding vote in the court’s 5-4 decision. His retirement the following year gave him plenty of time to think about what he had done. Four years after Bowers, Powell spoke before a group of law students at New York University where he was asked how he reconciled his vote in Bowers, which limited the right to privacy, with his vote in Roe v. Wade, which extended a woman’s right to privacy to include whether she wanted to have an abortion. “I think I probably made a mistake on that one,” Powell said of his Bowers decision.
Powell later explained to a law journal, “I do think I was inconsistent in a general way with Roe. When I had the opportunity to reread the opinions a few months later, I thought the dissent had the better of the arguments.” But Powell refused to consider his deciding vote all that important. “I thought it was a frivolous case. I still think it was a frivolous case.” He considered his decision as “one of little or no importance,” because, he said, no one had actually been prosecuted for homosexual conduct.
► 25 YEARS AGO: White Supremacists Found Guilty In Seattle Gay Nightclub Bombing Plot: 1990. Robert John Winslow, a twenty-nine year old former infantryman from Laclede, Idaho had it all figured out. He used a towel spread out on a table top to represent the area around Seattle’s Neighbours Disco, a popular nightclub in the Capitol Hill gayborhood, as he explained to Rico Valentino how it would all go down. They’d plant four bombs in the alley adjacent to Neighbours’ rear entrance. They’d paint them black and hide them in the shadows, on opposite sides of the alley. They could even use propane to create a “fireball effect.” Then someone would phone the bar with a bomb threat and everyone would evacuate out into the alley. “Fag burgers!” Winslow laughed. Why? Winslow said that homosexuals in America were threatening “white Christianity.” They also talked about bombing the Anti-Defamation League, cars owned by Jews, and businesses owned by blacks and Chinese.
They began planning the operation on April 20, 1990, during an Aryan Nation’s celebration of Hitler’s birthday, and now they were ready to do it. Winslow, Stephen Nelson, 35, and Procter Baker, 58, who had served as master of ceremonies for the birthday observance, were members of the Church of Jesus Christ Christian (Aryan Nations) at Hayden Lake, Idaho. But Valentino, a former professional wrestler, was a paid informant who had been working undercover for three years for the FBI. He wore a wire as Winslow laid out the plans. He also collected evidence at the Aryan Nations compound in Idaho. On May 12, 1990, Winslow and Nelson were arrested after driving with Valentino to Seattle. FBI agents trailed the van and arrested them in a motel parking lot near Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. Agents found pipe-bomb components, a .38-caliber pistol, a 12-gage shotgun and white-supremacist literature. Baker was arrested at his home in Coeur d’Alene. A search of his cabin in Kendrick turned up a partially assembled pipe bomb.
On October 18, 1990, Nelson, Winslow, and Baker were convicted of conspiracy and manufacturing and possessing pipe bombs. Nelson and Winslow were also found guilty of using interstate commerce in a conspiracy and possessing firearms during a violent crime. Winslow was sentenced to nine years, Nelson eight, and Baker to two years. The sentence was considered light: they had faced 20 to 25 years. But U.S. District Judge Harold Ryan rejected prosecutors contention that their actions amounted to “domestic terrorism,” and he also declined the government’s request to add time to the sentenced based on the intended victims.
In a case of history nearly repeating, Neighbours was very nearly the target of a disastrous arson fire last New Years Eve when a few minutes after midnight, Musab Masmari poured gasoline onto a stairway leading to the balcony and lit it on fire. There were about 750 people in the club at the time. The fire was quickly put out with a fire extinguisher. A security camera caught the whole thing. Masmari was sentenced to ten years in prison,
► Navy Apologizes for USS Iowa Blast Accusation: 1991. On April 19, 1989 in the Number Two 16-inch gun turret aboard the USS Iowa exploded, killing 47 crewmen who were inside the turret. Iowa crewmen were ordered to remov the bodies, throw damaged equipment overboard and repaint the damaged turret the next day — all without taking photos or gathering any evidence. Investigators immediately set out the theory that Second Class Gunner’s Mate Clayton Hartwig, was killed in the blast, had committed suicide by detonating the explosion after an alleged affair with another male soldier ended. As far as the Navy was concerned, that explained everything and the case was closed.
But Congress and the general public weren’t satisfied. After mounting criticism, Navy Secretary J. Lawrence Garett III ordered the service to reopen the investigation and hand it over to independent investigators. During that investigation, a sample of gunpowder of the same type used on the USS Iowa exploded during a ram test, which simulated the process of raming bags of gunpowder into the gun during loading. With that, the original investigation, which was based on circumstantial evidence, also went up in smoke. The Navy was left with nothing to do but apologize. “For this, on behalf of the U.S. Navy, I extend my sincere regrets to the family,” said a statement from Adm. Frank Kekso, chief of naval operations. “The Navy will not imply that a deceased individual is to blame for his own death, or the death of others.” He also apologized to the other families of those who died because “such a long period has passed, and despite all efforts, no certain answers regarding the cause of this terrible tragedy can be found.”
TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
► Tim Gill: 1953. In 1984, Apple introduced the revolutionary Macintosh, the first mass-market computer with an operating system based on a graphical user interface and a mouse. It was also the first computer to make desktop publishing a breeze. PageMaker was the first Mac desktop publishing application. PageMaker was fine for printing birthday invitations, but it would be QuarkXPress, which debuted in 1987, which was adopted by professional page designers, typesetters and commercial printers. Tim Gill’s Quark, Inc., which he started in 1981 with a $2,000 loan from his parents, revolutionized the publishing industry and made him a millionaire many hundreds of times times over.
Gill became involved with political activism during the 1992 fight against Colorado’s Amendment 2, which prohibited all non-discrimination protections based on sexual orientation. He created the Gill Foundation in 1994, which is one of the largest LGBT-rights funding sources in the U.S. He also founded the Gill Action Fund in 2005 to support both Republican and Democratic pro-LGBT political candidates in local, state and national offices and to lobby for gay rights laws across the nation. Gil lives in Denver with his husband, Scott Miller.
► Martina Navratilova: 1956. Billie Jean King called her “the greatest singles, doubles and mixed doubles player who’s ever lived.” During her career, she became the all-time record-holder of 31 Grand Slam women’s doubles titles, in addition to 18 Grand Slam singles titles and 10 Grand Slam mixed doubles titles. She reached the Wimbledon singles final twelve time, including nine consecutive years from 1982 through 1990. She also won the women’s singles title at Wimbledon a record 9 times, and with Kink won 20 Wimbledon titles, another all-time record.
In 1975, the Czechoslovakia native sought political asylum in the United States after Czech sports authorities decided that she had become “too Americanized.” She was stripped of her Czech citizenship when she defected. Naveratilova became a U.S. citizen in 1981. That same year, she came out publicly as a Lesbian, In 2008, her Czech citizenship was restored, although she has not renounced her American citizenship, nor does she plan to. Last month, she proposed to Julia Lemigova, her longtime girlfriend, at the U.S. Open.
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October 17th, 2015
TODAY’S AGENDA:
Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Bakersfield, CA; Nashville, TN (Black Pride); Sarasota, FL; Tucson, AZ; Winston-Salem, NC.
AIDS Walks This Weekend: Atlanta, GA; Philadelphia, PA; Watertown, NY.
Other Events This Weekend: Louisville LGBT Film Festival, Louisville, KY; Rainbow Festival, Phoenix AZ; Seattle Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, Seattle, WA.
TODAY’S AGENDA is brought to you by:
From the Calendar (San Antonio, TX), October 7, 1983, page 15.
TODAY IN HISTORY:
► 25 YEARS AGO: Henry Hyde Slurs Barney Frank During House Debate: 1990. It was just another one of those ordinary debates taking place on the floor of the House of Representatives which would have otherwise passed into history unnoticed. One congressman accused another congressman from the other party of flip-flopping, this time a Democrat accusing a Republican of changing his stance on taxes. Barney Frank (D-MA) remarked that he wasn’t in the chamber earlier when the subject came up but read in the Congressional Record that ten days earlier “someone passing himself off as the Republican leader” urged a vote on new taxes, but then eight days later said that taxes should not be raised. Frank said, sarcastically, that there must be a security problem in the house that allowed an impostor to speak for Republican leader Robert Michel (R-IL). Henry Hyde (R-IL) leaped to his fellow Illinoisan’s defense and said that the reason Frank hadn’t heard Michel was because “he (Frank) was in the gymnasium doing whatever he does in the gymnasium and he wasn’t available.” The remark was made in reference to an unsubstantiated allegation by a male prostitute (and former roommate, who Franks kicked out three years earlier when he learned the roommate was still escorting) that he had sex with Frank in the House gym.
Rep. Craig Washington (D-TX) called out Hyde, saying he was appalled at Hyde’s remark. “Great minds think about ideas, average minds think about things, and small minds think about people,” he said. A few minutes later, Hyde apologized to Frank: “What I said was in anger. One should never speak in anger. It was out of line.” Frank accepted the apology.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS:
► 95 YEARS AGO: Montgomery Clift: 1920-1966. His on-screen reputation was for playing what The New York Times described as “moody, sensitive young men.” You know what that means. Despite that, his riveting performance opposite Elizabeth Taylor in A Place In the Sun, regarded as one of his finest performances as a Method actor, fueled rumors that he and Elizabeth were dating. His next movie, Alfred Hitchcock’s I Confess, was less successful. Clift played a priest who was romantically involved with a woman, and that proved too controversial. But he rebounded in 1953 with From Here to Eternity. He lost the Academy Award for Best Actor to William Holden (for Stalag 17), which surprised everyone, including Holden.
The major turning point in his life was in a 1956 car accident, which severely injured his face, requiring plastic surgery. His looks were different because of the accident, but that’s not what led to his career’s down downward spiral. The accident exacerbated his alcoholism and left him addicted to pain killers, which affected his health and led to what some observers called “the longest suicide in Hollywood history.”
He did keep working though, making as many movies after the accident as he did before. He appeared in Lonelyhearts, The Young Lions, Suddenly Last Summer, and The Misfits with Marilyn Monroe who, referencing her own emotional problems, described Clift as “the only person I know who is in ever worse shape than I am.” Director Stanley Kramer recalled that in 1961, during filming for a twelve-minute part in Judgment at Nuremberg Clift kept forgetting his lines. Kramer finally told Clift to ad-lib them if he had to. It worked, and Clift was nominated for an Oscar for best supporting actor. He died in 1966 of a heart attack in New York City.
Matt Bomer is slated to play Montgomery Clift in an upcoming HBO biopic.
► Rebecca Wight: 1959-1988. She would have turned fifty-five today, but she didn’t even live to see her twenty-ninth birthday. She was murdered on May 13, 1988, by Stephen Roy Carr while camping along the Appalachian Trail in Pennsylvania with her partner, Claudia Brenner. Carr, described as a “mountain man” who often lived in a cave in Michaux State Forest, ran into Wight as she walked into a restroom near the couple’s campground. Thinking that no one was around, she was nude except for her shoes. After a brief conversation — he asked her for a cigarette although she clearly didn’t have one on her — she ran back to the tent to tell Brenner that someone else was there.
They got dressed, packed up, and decided to hike to a more secluded spot. During the hike, they stopped to look at a map. They kissed, and Carr appeared from behind them with a rifle slung over his shoulder and asked if they were lost. They said no and went on. By evening, they found a more secluded spot — after looking around to make sure they were alone — pitched their tent, had dinner, and then began to have sex. But they weren’t alone. Carr watched from about 80 feet away, and fired eight shots from his rifle. Brenner was shot five times but survived. Wight was shot twice, but was more seriously wounded. Carr, believing that both women were dead, left. Brenner hiked three miles to the nearest road where she was able to get a ride to the police station, where she gave a quick statement and was airlifted to Hershey Medical Center. But while she was gone, Wight died from her wounds. Police found her body that night.
Carr fled to a Mennonite community and hid. Because that particular community didn’t read the news or watch television, they didn’t know they had a murder suspect in their midst until one member happened to recognize Carr while surreptitiously watching a news broadcast and called police. In court, he claimed that he had been enraged at the sight of the two women having sex. Prosecutors sought the death sentence, but after the judge ruled that the nature of the two women’s relationship was irrelevant, the defense accepted a plea deal and Carr was sentenced to life without parole.
Brenner went on to write a book about the shooting in 1995. Titled, Eight Bullets: One Woman’s Story of Surviving Anti-Gay Violence
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October 16th, 2015
TODAY’S AGENDA:
Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Bakersfield, CA; Nashville, TN (Black Pride); Sarasota, FL; Tucson, AZ; Winston-Salem, NC.
AIDS Walks This Weekend: Atlanta, GA; Philadelphia, PA; Watertown, NY.
Other Events This Weekend: Louisville LGBT Film Festival, Louisville, KY; Rainbow Festival, Phoenix AZ; Seattle Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, Seattle, WA.
TODAY’S AGENDA is brought to you by:
From the GLC Voice (Minneapolis, MN), December 1979, page 6.
TODAY IN HISTORY:
► Excessive Masturbation May Cause Your Sex To Change: 1725. The West’s preoccupation with the dangers of masturbation is historically tied with the broader preoccupation with non-procreative sex generally. But masturbation was seen as particularly dangerous because it was believed to be responsible for an individual’s moral, mental and physical collapse. (See Sep 16 for some of the reasons masturbation was believed to be so dangerous.)
In the early 1700s, an unknown London doctor and clergyman wrote an important book which brought all of those beliefs together in one place, and it became, for several future generations, the primary source for information about all of the moral, physical and mental dangers that masturbation posed. Titled, Onania; or, the Heinous SIN of Self-Pollution, and All its Frightful Consequences, in both SEXES, Consider’d. With Spiritual and Physical Advice to Those, who have already injur’d themselves by this abominable Practice. And seasonable Admonition to the Youth of the Nation, (of both SEXES) and those whose Tuition they are under, whether Parents, Guardians, Masters, or Mistresses, the book went through several editions. Each successive printing expanded from the previous with the inclusion of letters from readers and responses from the quack doctor. The added supplemental material had the effect of firehosing any objections which may have arisen in the meantime. The ninth edition, published in 1722, closed with the author’s statement that there would be no further additions made to future printings, but in 1725, he added a letter from a young lady, dated October 16, 1726, in which she describes herself practicing masturbation with herself and another lady friend:
Just as this supplement, was as ’twere printed off, the following letter from a young Lady, was left for me at the booksellers, which, for the particularity of the case, and ingenuity of the writer, I thought I could do no less than make room for.
To the commendable Author of the ONANIA, Oct. 16, 1725,
SIR,
This Letter comes from a young female creature, but an old transgressor of the practice of that filthy pleasure which you have so justly exploded and condemned, in your ingenious book Onania, which I happily met with about 10 days ago: but in all the cases therein enumerated, there is not one that is parallel to mine, which as my welfare requires it, I must be obliged to relate, and is what I question, Sir, whether you have ever once met with: nor could I tell it, though at the same time I bless the opportunity, but that I am sure you no more know the writer of it, nor ever will, than I know the author of Onania, or desire it.
I began, sir, the folly at 11 years of age, was taught it by my mother’s chambermaid, who lay with me from that time all along until now, which is full seven years, and so intimate were we in the sin, that we took the opportunities of committing it, and invented all the ways we were capable of to heighten the titillation, and gratify our sinful lusts the more. We, in short, pleasured one another, as well as ourselves, but whether by the hard usage of my parts by her, or myself, or both, or whether from any thing in nature more in my make, than is customary to the sex, I don’t know, but for above half a year past I have had a swelling that thrusts out from my body [here, she describes her clitoris — JB], as big, and almost as hard, and as long or longer than my thumb, which inclines me to excessive lustful desires, and from it there issues a moisture or slipperiness to that degree that I am almost continually wet, and sometimes have such a forcing, as if something of a large substance was coming from me, which greatly frightens both me and my maid. She went to a midwife about it, but did not, she says, tell her of our practice; the midwife said it was a bearing down of the womb, by weakness, and told her what I should do, which I did, but to no purpose. Ever since I have been so, I have not had the course of nature [menstruation], have great pain in my back, and my belly is swelled, am not near so strong as I was, my countenance much paler, and appetite less. It has almost distracted me, and unfits me for my learning, and am afraid I am so hurt, as that it cannot be remedied.
O! that I should be so wicked, I, who have had a much nobler education (and should know better) than is common to most of my sex; that am versed in the classics, and designed by my friends, who are very rich, for something above the common station of my sex; I say, that I should so filthily debase myself, wrong my body, and, which is worse, my soul, is surprising even to myself. Had I read more the Bible, and less in Martial, Juvenal, Ovid, &c it had been better form, but those books Rochester [a famous sexual libertine], and Plays, at first debauched my silly fancy. But I hope, as now, both myself and maid have, on consulting your curious discourse of Self-Pollution, abandon’d the practice, and resolved, through God’s Grace, to commit it no more, we shall find pardon, and my infirm body, from your hands, good sir, relief. She ails nothing, is a strong wench of twenty-seven, myself of a tender make, and naturally inclined to be weakly, and but just turned of eighteen. I have with this, sent you a guinea fee, and desire your cordial advice, what I had best to do, and your opinion of my case, sealed up safe, directed to Mrs E.N. and I will send for it tomorrow morning, at the bookseller’s where this is left; and, sir, I must needs desire you to send me this letter back, that I may have the satisfaction of committing it to the flames myself. According to your answer, you shall hear further from,
SIR,
Your ever obliged, and
Most obedient humble Servant,
E.N.
NOT, sir, but you may copy my letter first, and if you think worthwhile, to print it also in your next edition, as a caution to others; but would not that my hand be seen by any besides your self, the circumstances of the relation, so as not to be know ’tis me, I have taken care of and guarded against.
The un-named author and “doctor” responded with the warning that the if she persisted in these “unnatural practices,” she may experience an unwanted change of sex.
THIS young lady’s case, though the height of her lust, and force and frequency of abusing herself, and probably the unnatural proponderance of the part, is no more, according to the account she gives, than a relaxation of the Clitoris, a thing common to many of the sex, both in the single and married, who are vigorous and lustful, and have given up themselves to the practice of Self-Pollution for any time. In some women it extends itself, and is enlarged when inflated to the exact likeness and size of a human Penis erect, except that it has no perforation (though it really looks, by the natural impression at the end, as if there was a passage) nor is altogether so long, but yet it erects and falls as that does, in proportion to the venereal desire or inclination of the woman. I have had in my time one or two under this circumstance, by the same practice, for cure, who upon their living afterwards chaste, and using some astringent foments, and a few internals, to regulate the inordinate and enraged venereal desires, have been brought to rights, and the parts restored to their pristine, natural state and condition. It was the like case of this lady’s, that gave rise to the report of two Nuns at Rome, having changed their sex, and which had made such a noise in that city, that the Pope, upon hearing of it, gave orders for their being inspected by some cardinals. Dr Carr, in his medicinal epistles, translated by Dr Quincy, has in his answer to a letter sent him by a divine, upon the subject of it, wrote his opinion at large, which as it may confirm mine, in relation to the aforesaid lady’s case, and be of some use both to practitioners and patients, I shall not think much to transcribe it, and give it to the reader, verbatim. It is his 6th Epistle, entitled, Concerning two nuns reported to have changed their sex.
A gay couple in Berlin, ca 1930. (via the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum)
► German Reichstag Committee Approves Repeal of Paragraph 175: 1929. Magnus Hirschfeld (see May 14) co-founded the Wissenschaftlich-humanitäre Komitee (Scientific-Humanitarian Committee), the world’s first gay rights organization, in 1897. The WhK’s first project was to lobby for the repeal of Germanys infamous Paragraph 175, which criminalized homosexuality between men (women were unmentioned in the anti-gay code). After three decades of lobbying, the WhK came tantalizingly close to achieving its goal when the Reichstag’s Commission for Law Reform voted 15 to 13 in favor of a resolution to repeal §175.
But the crash of world stock markets two weeks later and the resulting Great Depression and political instability quickly overwhelmed the Reichstag, which suddenly found itself with more pressing matters to contend with. By 1930, Germany was besieged by massive unemployment and the Nazi party became the second-largest party in the Reichstag following the September elections. The rest, as they say, is history. The Nazi’s expanded §175’s reach in 1935, resulting in a tenfold increase in convictions with authorizaiton to incarcerate gay men in concentration camps. In 1950, Communist East Germany abolished the Nazi amendments, but West Germany kept them until 1969 when it effectively decriminalized consenstual relationships for those above the age of 21. East Germany finally decriminaized consenstual relationships between gay men in 1988, and a reunited Germany followed suit in 1994.
► FBI Warns of Extortion Ring: 1959. With consensual same-sex relationships criminalized in all fifty states, and when the discovery of one’s homosexuality typically resulted in being fired from one’s job and evicted by one’s landlord, there was a great deal of money to be made in blackmailing gay people — a fact which was, itself, often used to further justify the wholesale ban on federal employment and security clearances for gay people. But regardless of the victims, blackmail was still against the law, as demonstrated by this FBI warning that appeared in The Washington Post:
The FBI warned last night that a man believed the co-leader of a Nationwide extortion ring is reported heading for Washington. He is George Brooks, 55, charged with extorting $25,000 from a man in Tucson, Ariz. Brooks is named on a warrant also charging William Tavenner, 26, a former Washington resident, whose present location is unknown.
The FBI said the men are believed to head an extortion ring of 25 people who prey on homosexuals by posing as policemen. They have been operating in Phoenix. Portland. Los Angeles, Miami and Chicago.
Tavenner. whose last known address here was listed at 1400 Fairmont St. NW, is reported by the FBI to have a record including charges of impersonating a police officer, narcotics violation, assault and disorderly conduct.
[Source: “Extortionist ring believed coming here.” The Washington Post (October 17, 1959): D4.]
TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS:
► Oscar Wilde: 1854-1900. His wit and flamboyance, tinged twith an undercurrent of rebellion, made him one of the most popular celebrities of his day. His three comedies of society, written between 1892 and 1895, lampooned Victorian values and enjoyed tremendous success in the London theater. But that just prepared the ground for his masterpiece, 1894’s The Importance of Being Earnest, and that made Wilde a superstar. That acclaim, combined with his embrace of aestheticism, belief that the pursuit of beauty was a virtue in itself, placed him at the forefront of London’s high fashion, a rare position for a man to take. He was a flashy dresser and he entertained lavishly. “I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china,” he once quipped. The life he lived, however, was not seen as manly, and his high profile meant that he quickly became an easy target for those who saw him as a dangerous threat to Britain’s moral bearing. Just a few days after Earnest’s premiere, a series of events began which would ultimately see Wilde tried for sodomy and gross indecency. His first criminal trial, which quickly became regarded as the trial of the century, is famous for the question that was put to him, a question that was on everyone’s mind:
Prosecutor: What is “the love that dare not speak its name?”
Wilde: “The love that dare not speak its name” in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare. It is that deep spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect. It dictates and pervades great works of art, like those of Shakespeare and Michelangelo, and those two letters of mine, such as they are. It is in this century misunderstood, so much misunderstood that it may be described as “the love that dare not speak its name,” and on that account of it I am placed where I am now. It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an older and a younger man, when the older man has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope and glamour of life before him. That it should be so, the world does not understand. The world mocks at it, and sometimes puts one in the pillory for it.
That case ended in a mistrial, but a second trial a month later saw him convicted of gross indecency and sentenced to two years’ hard labor. Wilde’s health declined sharply during the term. He collapsed from illness and hunger at one point, and suffered a rupture in his right ear drum during another mishap that would later contribute to his early death. When he was released in 1897, he was broken, both financially and physically. He moved to the continent, where he wandered during the last three years of his life. He spent the last months of his life in a run-down hotel in Paris. “My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death,” he told an acquaintance. “One of us has got to go.” Not long after, he developed cerebral meningitis and died in November 30, 1900. He was only 46 years old.
► 70 YEARS AGO: Paul Monette: 1945-1995. The author, poet, and memoirist spent more than half of his life in the closet, the doors of which flug open when he met his future partner Roger Horwitz in 1974. That was the basis of his appropriately-named 1992 memoir, Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story
Monette’s writings weren’t all so mordant. In addition to other volumes of poetry and “silly novels,” as he called them, he also wrote the novelizations for the films Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979), Scareface (1983), Predator (1987), and Midnight Run (1988). But he still had his own story to tell, with 1995’s Last Watch of the Night: Essays Too Personal and Otherwise
► 55 YEARS AGO: Bob Mould: 1960. He was the guitarist, vocalist and songwriter for the 1980s band Hüsker Dü, and for Sugar in the 1990s. Beginning in the late 1990s, Mould detoured from heavy sounds of his earlier work to dance music and electronica. Lately he had been performing as a live DJ with Rich Morel in Washington, D.C., and other events around the country under the collective name, Blowoff, but this year the duo announced that their hectic schedules could no longer accomodate future Blowoffs. His homosexuality was always something of an open secret, but the secrecy was dropped in 1994 when he outed himself in Spin after the magazine’s reporter threatened to out him. His memoir, See a Little Light: The Trail of Rage and Melody
If you know of something that belongs on the agenda, please send it here. Don’t forget to include the basics: who, what, when, where, and URL (if available).
And feel free to consider this your open thread for the day. What’s happening in your world?
October 15th, 2015
TODAY’S AGENDA:
Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Bakersfield, CA; Nashville, TN (Black Pride); Sarasota, FL; Tucson, AZ; Winston-Salem, NC.
AIDS Walks This Weekend: Atlanta, GA; Philadelphia, PA; Watertown, NY.
Other Events This Weekend: Louisville LGBT Film Festival, Louisville, KY; Rainbow Festival, Phoenix AZ; Seattle Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, Seattle, WA.
TODAY’S AGENDA is brought to you by:
From the Cornell Daily Sun, Ithaca, NY, March 19, 1970, page 7.
Morris Angell had no intention of opening a gay bar. But it became one anyway when members of Cornell’s Gay Liberation Front discovered Morrie’s, conveniently located just a block or so from the campus, and adopted it as their own. It quickly became one of their favorite watering holes, mainly because, unlike other bars in town, Angell more or less left them alone. Angell didn’t want his bar to gain a reputation as a gay bar, so as long as they didn’t show affection or dance together, everything was fine. Then one day in October of 1970, a rather nasty letter to the editor of the campus newspaper said that Morrie’s was the place to go for those who appreciate “fag aesthetics.” That very night, Angell refused to serve drinks to his gay patrons and ordered them to leave. That act became a galvanizing moment for Cornell’s GLF (see below).
The address is now home to Dunbar’s, a straight bar with free popcorn and scary bathrooms.
The first issue of ONE, January 1953.
TODAY IN HISTORY:
► ONE Magazine Founded: 1952. The idea of publishing America’s first nationally-distributed magazine dedicated to issues confronting gay people took root when bored Mattachine members in Los Angeles were questioning whether the Society would ever amount to much. Martin Block (see Jul 27), who was one of the earliest society members, recalled “We had these meetings and we’d kick some ideas around and sometimes they would be very stimulating but very often they wouldn’t be.”
Dale Jennings (see Oct 21) was similarly bored and “didn’t have the patience to sit there night after night and hear everybody whine over and over again how tough it was to be homosexual.” Not that it wasn’t tough: Jennings had just come off of a rare victory when he was acquitted by a jury after being falsely entrapped by police on a morals charge (see Jun 23). Another member, Dorr Legg (a.k.a Bill Lambert, whose home they were meeting in; see Dec 15) agreed. “We were just in a fury and everybody began sputtering: ‘We’ve got to tell them!’ Up speaks this little pipsqueak: ‘Well, you need a magazine.’ It was just like a match to gasoline.”
Here is how ONE later picked up the story:
The following Wednesday an ardent handful of vaguely enthusiastic people assembled just a stone’s throw from Hollywood’s Sunset Strip. They decided that a mimeographed newsletter with exposes of local police methods, general articles and some news Items might be tried. There was much desultory talk about Art, Oppression and The Partisan Review.
The following day the host for the evening, whose chance remark it was that had set off the whole chain reaction, resigned. He found, on reflection, that the whole Idea was unintelligent, philosophically untenable and useless! This is just a little sidelight on the history of ONE, illustrating a type of the problems encountered.
Quite undaunted, the remaining few met with an attorney a few nights later. They asked some floundering questions that now look rather absurd but then seemed Important. And during the rest of 1952 they continued meeting every few days, right on through the holidays as well. Supporters resigned, or just plain “fell by the wayside”. New faces appeared, and then were seen no more. Time was wasted on trivia, even frivolity. Yet, through it all their leitmotif, “There MUST be a magazine,” somehow persisted.
What would be its name? This was a tedious, wearying hassle, over endless cups of coffee. The “dignified and ambiguous” school argued against the “Iet’s-be-frank” group, The thesaurus and the Oxord Dictionary became the constant companions of everyone in the group.
You will laugh at some of the proposals. We did. Such as “Raport” — (too much like a Bronx family name, someone quipped). “The Bridge” — (is it an engineering journal?) There were many others, and even more preposterous. It was finally voted, in sheer desperation — for it had to be admitted that it hardly seemed sensible to debate endlessly over the name for a publication that did not yet exist — that the unborn infant would be christened, “The Wedge.” But try as best we might there was little enthusiasm about the decision.
The next assignment had been to discover a masthead-slogan. So the researches began again. Guy Rousseau, a hard-working young negro member of the group came up with one from Thomas Carlyle. It ran, “A mystic bond of brotherhood makes all men one.”
The masthead for ONE’s inaugural issue, January 1953. The Thomas Carlyle quote would be featured in every issue throughout ONE’s existence. (Click to enlarge.)
As a flash of inspiration it hit everyone at once. That was it! For there was the rapport. There was the wedge. And the bridge. “Makes all men one.” The name would be … ONE, for that is what everyone had wanted all along, a means for bringing about oneness, a coming together with understanding. The bitterness and hatreds, the persecution and injustices and discrimination would be stopped by dispelling ignorance , by showing THE OTHERS that all of us are humans alike, all of us living together on the same earth, under the same skies.
Surely there was “a mystic bond of brotherhood,” and ONE would tell them about it, at last all should see that men are brothers indeed, slde-by-side, all of them reaching toward the very same stars in the heavens. ONE would do this!
It was a rather dramatic moment. The little handful sat looking at each other in startled discovery. Something tremendous loomed up and around and among them, a challenge, electric with power and momentum. They well realized that there were obstacles before them, obstacles of almost terrifying proportions. There was no one who felt very confident. But a new concept had been born, a concept that thenceforth took possession of their loyalties and irresistibly carried them along.
Don Slater, W. Dorr Legg, and Jim Kepner. Circa 1957-1958. (via ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives)
Legg became ONE’s business manager. Three others present were Martin Block (he became ONE’s president), Dale Jennings (vice president) and Don Slater (secretary, see Aug 21)), who together made up ONE’s Editorial Board. Guy Rousseau (real name: Bailey Whitaker) became circulation manager. Jean Corbin (as “Eve Ellore”) joined the group as the magazine’s primary artist. Other important contributors included Jim Kepner (see Feb 14), Fred Frisbie (as “George Mortenson”), Irma “Corky” Wolf (as “Ann Carll Reid”), and Stella Rush (as “Sten Russell”). As you can tell, pseudonyms were common, though not always for reasons you might think. While some authors consistently wrote under one pseudonym, Jennings, Block, Legg, Kempner and others often wrote under multiple personas, and sometimes in addition to their real names, in order to give readers the impression that ONE’s staff was larger than it actually was.
ONE debuted in January of 1953 with an article by Dale Jennings describing his 1952 arrest by Los Angeles police. In 1958, ONE made history when it won an important Supreme Court victory when the Court decided that the U.S. Post Office could not refuse to distribute ONE because homosexual content, per se, was not pornographic (see Jan 13). ONE, Inc. also established the ONE Institute of Homophile Studies, which sponsored a series of seminars and graduate studies programs. ONE ceased publication in 1968.
[Sources: James T. Sears: Behind the Mask of the Mattachine: The Hal Call Chronicles and the Early Movement for Homosexual Emancipation
“How ONE began.” ONE 3, no. 2 (February 1955): 8-15.]
(Leilani Hu, Cornell Daily Sun.)
► Cornell University’s Gay Liberation Front Launches a Boycott and Sit-In at Morrie’s Bar: 1970. Morris Angell most certainly didn’t set out to run a gay bar when he opened Morrie’s just across the street from Cornell University in the spring of 1969. In fact, that was probably the last thing on his mind. But members of Cornell’s Gay Liberation Front had other ideas. Noticing the lack of social options, the decided to pick a public place and make it gay by just showing up. Janis Kelly later remembered how the GLF went about picking Morrie’s:
We were sitting around moaning about why we didn’t have a gay bar, and there was this notice that what had been the Eddygate restaurant was going to be reopening as Morrie’s bar. So Bob [Roth] said, “That would be the perfect place for a gay bar; it’s too bad it’s not a gay bar.” … And somehow Bob just had this inspiration, “Well, shouldn’t it be a gay bar? What does it take to make a gay bar? A bar full of gay people. This is not difficult. So then why can’t gay people just go to this bar? Why can’t we make it a gay bar? Well, because nobody ever did it before. And people will go in and it will be full of straight people.” So then he said, “Well, we’ll just call everybody we know of and tell ’em a gay bar is opening.” … So we all went home and spent the whole afternoon on the phone calling everybody we knew with a perfectly straight face and saying “Hey, I hear there is a gay bar opening. You want to go to the bar? We’re all going to go at 11:00 on Saturday.” And sure enough, when the bar opened, it was packed to the gills with queers. It was great.
So that’s how Morrie’s became a gay bar. Angell was willing to tolerate his customers, but that tolerance only went so far since he didn’t want his business to become publicly identified as a gay bar. He prohibited same-sex dancing, kissing, or other obviously-gay carrying-on, rules which the gay students more or less were willing to accept. They were even careful to keep Morrie’s out of their newsletters and other written material, lest the bar gain a reputation that would be uncomfortable for their host.
That quiet arrangement held for more than a year until October 14, 1970, when the campus paper, the Cornell Daily Sun, published a wildly homophobic letter to the editor by Doron Schwartz, a student member of the Sun’s student board. Addressed to a Sun’s journalist who accused him of being anti-gay, he then proceeded to prove her point. “I have nothing against fags or dykes,” he wrote. “Some of my best friends know some. One such friend, Luigi, even takes his wife to Morrie’s to watch your type. They both appreciate fag aesthetics.” That very night, Angell ordered Robert Roth, the GLF’s unofficial leader (although the press often identified him as the group’s president), and several friends to “get out and don’t come back,” saying he didn’t want “their kind” in his bar.
Morris Angel (left) watches as Capt. Raymond Price talks to protesters. (David Krathwohl, Cornell Daily Sun.)
They left, but the GLF did what it always does: they held a meeting and decided to return the following night for a sit-in. About fifty supporters crowded into the bar that night and refused to order drinks, while several hundred supporters outside chanting their support. Angell ordered everyone out and the doors locked, orders that everyone ignored. Angell then called the police. Captain Raymond Price arrived, talked with GLF members, and then informed Angell, “You can’t insult these people. You can’t just refuse to serve them.” Angell agreed to back down, reluctantly. “I don’t say you’re welcome,” he told the crowd, “but I’ll have to serve you.” Janis Kelly responded, “We’re going to be back her tomorrow. If he refuses to serve us, he’s going to have to close the bar.” But for the time being, the crisis was over with Cornell’s GLF scoring a major victory.
[Sources: Brett Beemyn. “The Silence Is Broken: A History of the First Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual College Student Groups.” Journal of the History of Sexuality, 12, no. 2 (April 2003): 205-223.
Doron Schwartz. Letter to the Editor. Cornell Daily Sun (October 14,1970): 4. (All issues of the Cornell Daily Sun are available online here.)
Philip Dixon. “GLF Holds Sit-In at Eddy St. Bar.” Cornell Daily Sun (October 16, 1970): 1, 10.]
Press conference announcing the formation of the National Gay Task Force. Front row L-R: Ron Gold, Howard Brown, Bruce Voeller, Nathalie Rockhill. Seated behind L-R: Martin Duberman, Barbara Gittings, Frank Kameny. (Click to enlarge.)
► Press Conference Announcing Formation of National Gay Task Force: 1973. Dr. Howard Brown made the front page of The New York Times two weeks earlier when the former Health Administrator for New York Mayor John Lindsay’s administration came out of the closet. Brown had resigned in 1967 when he learned than an investigative reporter planned to expose homosexuals in City Hall. His secret was not revealed, which meant the reasons for his resignation remained a mystery until he came out 1973. The response, he said, was overwhelmingly favorable, so much so that he decided to establish a new gay advocacy group. This new group, the National Gay Task Force (later to become the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, or NGLTF) would be the first such organization with a truly national scope. According to an article in The Village Voice:
The Gay Task Force will work nationally on gay civil rights legislation and discrimination against gay parents in custody and visitation cases, and will coordinate information from all parts of the country about the progress toward gay civil rights. According to a spokesman for the group, a major coming out of the closet of other well-known people is expected in the near future.
Dr. Bruce Voeller served as its first Executive Director. Other leaders of the new organization included historian Martin Duberman, pioneering activist Barbara Gittings, and Ronald Gold who had already played a pivotal role in the APA’s pending delisting of homosexuality as a mental illness later that year.
“No I don’t have it. Do you?” White House Spokesman Larry Speakes plays the comedian over AIDS.
► AIDS a Laughing Matter at the White House: 1982. The very first public mention of AIDS at the White House was not an auspicious one. It was the subject of jokes and laughter between the press and White House Deputy Press Secretary Larry Speaks:
Q: Larry, does the President have any reaction to the announcement the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, that AIDS is now an epidemic and have over 600 cases?
SPEAKES: What’s AIDS?
Q: Over a third of them have died. It’s known as “gay plague.” (Laughter.) No, it is. I mean it’s a pretty serious thing that one in every three people that get this have died. And I wondered if the President is aware of it?
SPEAKES: I don’t have it. Do you? (Laughter.)
Q: No, I don’t.
SPEAKES: You didn’t answer my question.
Q: Well, I just wondered, does the President
SPEAKES: How do you know? (Laughter.)
Q: In other words, the White House looks on this as a great joke?
SPEAKES: No, I don’t know anything about it, Lester.
Q: Does the President, does anyone in the White House know about this epidemic, Larry?
SPEAKES: I don’t think so. I don’t think there’s been any
Q: Nobody knows?
SPEAKES: There has been no personal experience here, Lester.
Q: No, I mean, I thought you were keeping
SPEAKES: I checked thoroughly with Dr. Ruge this morning and he’s had no (laughter) no patients suffering from AIDS or whatever it is.
Q: The President doesn’t have gay plague, is that what you’re saying or what?
SPEAKES: No, I didn’t say that.
Q: Didn’t say that?
SPEAKES: I thought I heard you on the State Department over there. Why didn’t you stay there? (Laughter.)
Q: Because I love you Larry, that’s why (Laughter.)
SPEAKES: Oh I see. Just don’t put it in those terms, Lester. (Laughter.)
Q: Oh, I retract that.
SPEAKES: I hope so.
Q: It’s too late.
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October 14th, 2015
TODAY’S AGENDA:
Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Bakersfield, CA; Nashville, TN (Black Pride); Sarasota, FL; Tucson, AZ; Winston-Salem, NC.
AIDS Walks This Weekend: Atlanta, GA; Philadelphia, PA; Watertown, NY.
Other Events This Weekend: Louisville LGBT Film Festival, Louisville, KY; Rainbow Festival, Phoenix AZ; Seattle Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, Seattle, WA.
TODAY’S AGENDA is brought to you by:
From GPU News (Milwaukee, WI), September 1979, page 40. (Source)
They came by planes, trains, automobiles and busses from across the country to attend the first ever March on Washington for lesbian and gay rights. According to Milwaukee’s GPU News:
Rev. Troy Perry, founder of MCC, and feminist-comedienne Robin Tyler will headline a whistlestop tout aboard Amtrak’s Gay Freedom Train to the march. Joining them for station rallies in Oakland, San Fransisco, Ogden (UT). Reno, Cheyenne, Denver, Lincoln, Omaha, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Harrisburg, Philadelphia, and Wilmington will be representatives from many local and national gay organizations. Greg Carmack of the National March Transportation Office in Houston commented: “Planes, trains, and buses from all parts of the country are filling up, so people should call the Information Center soon to learn what travel options are available from their home area and buy tickets early.”
Dr. Norman Reider
TODAY IN HISTORY:
► When Gay Men Fake Their Cures: 1956. Dr. Norman Reider, head of the Department of Psychiatry at San Francisco’s Mt. Zion Hospital, gave a very perceptive (for 1956) talk at a meeting of the California Academy of General Practices in Los Angeles. He began his talk, titled “Problems of Homosexuality,” by reminding his audience that the problems were as much society’s problems as they were the homosexuals’ problems:
Hardly any medical subject is more ambiguous and confused than that of homosexuality, and it is a most difficult subject for the clinician to delineate in a scientific or even empirical way. For centuries homosexuality has been more a moral and legal than a medical concern. Throughout the ages people have tried to make criminal law enforce their ambitions regarding moral law, especially in their attempts to control sexual behavior. Among sex laws, none are so punitive or inequitable as those concerning homosexual acts, particularly male homosexual activities. Religious traditions and attitudes against homosexuality have thus been extended into substantive law out of all proportion to the social damage involved in most homosexual acts. Sin is confused with crime, and vague laws about sexual behavior give law enforcement officers a dangerous discretionary power. …
The great majority of homosexual acts do not endanger the social structure or disrupt the family. No doubt many early societies considered homosexual activity a threat to family and societal solidarity, and taboos arose; but when these are examined they can be seen as part and parcel of man’s fears of his own impulses-drives for which he sought controls. Modern studies like those of the late Dr. Kinsey and his associates serve to show that society has little to fear from homosexual activity. Yet the fear remains, in that a homosexual person continues to be the object of extraordinary punishment or the butt of derisive jokes and contempt. We should remember, when we participate in such attacks, that we follow the age-old formula of trying to fight off or laugh off something that we either do not understand or fear.
Later in his talk, Reider explained how the overwhelmingly hostile attitudes toward gay men in particular have preventing the medical community from understanding exactly how ineffective they have been in trying to “cure” them. One such avenue that was tried in the 1940s and 1950s was hormonal treatment, particularly with the administration of androgens such as testosterone, on the theory that gay men were gay because they weren’t “masculine” enough:
A story of my clinical experience in southern California some years ago will illustrate the complications involved in the evaluation of hormonal treatment. The medical literature at that time contained favorable reports of treatment of homosexuality by androgens, and it acquired a certain vogue. Several California jurists who knew the futility of sentencing homosexuals to jail began sentencing the convicted person to undergo treatment. Some persons were sentenced to have hormonal treatment, others to have psychiatric treatment. As a result of these efforts further articles reported successful treatment with androgens — successes that I as a psychiatrist envied.
One day a young man came to my office to consult me about a problem that only skirted on his homosexuality. A confirmed homosexual, he had little anxiety about his activities because he considered himself a constitutional homosexual and felt relatively blameless. In the exploratory course of our discussion he said that he had once been treated by androgens, not entirely of his own will, as the result of a court sentence. He then described how he and several of his associates had contrived to “respond” to the treatment, varying their stories so as to give them the hue of veracity. He said that he arrived late for his first appointment and grumbled at the injection. The nurse reminded him to return for his next one “or else.” Next time he complained of noticing no improvement at all. On the third visit he told the nurse he was depressed and said that he and his boy friend had fallen out and might separate. Next time he was more depressed and was moving out, he said, because he could not tolerate his boy friend. The fifth time he carefully implied he was less depressed, and reported no difference except that he had no desire for anything or anybody. On the sixth visit he told the nurse: “A simply fantastic thing happened. I’ve been going to a local bookstore for years and never noticed before a very pretty girl who works as a clerk there.” By the seventh visit he reported making a date with the girl and at the end of treatment he claimed satisfactory sexual relations with her. This case figured in a published report of successful treatment. Meantime this patient and his companions who had also been treated went on with their homosexual activities, except that some of them suffered from an increased drive — the result of the injections of androgens.
Unfortunately, Reider doesn’t provide a reference for the published report which featured this patient.
[Sources: Norman Reider. “Problems of homosexuality.” California Medicine, 86, no. 6 (June 1957): 381-384. Available online here.]
► Anita Bryant Gets a Pie in the Face: 1977. After leading a successful campaign to revoke Miami’s anti-discrimination ordinance earlier that summer (see Jun 7), anti-gay activist Anita Bryant and her husband, Bob Green, took their campaign on the road to repeal other local anti-discrimination ordinances in St. Paul, MN (see Apr 25), Wichita, KS (see May 9), and Eugene, OR (see May 23). The Miami campaign had been particularly nasty, even by the standards of the day with Bryant claiming that because “homosexuals cannot biologically reproduce children, therefore they must recruit our children.” That campaign forever linked Bryant’s name with vicious homophobia, and made her public enemy number one in the gay community.
But during an appearance in Des Moines, Iowa, Bryant’s was trying to soft-pedal her message: “If we were going to go on a crusade across America to try to do away with the homosexuals, then we certainly would have done it on June the eighth after one of the most overwhelming victories in the country. But we didn’t. We tried to avoid it…” Thank you, Anita, for small favors, I guess.
Thom Higgins of Minneapolis wasn’t so thankful. It was about at that point, with television cameras rolling, when he threw a pie directly into her face. Stunned at first, Bryant tried to make light of it by saying, “At least it was a fruit pie.” At Green’s suggestion, Bryant began praying for God to forgive the activist’s “deviant lifestyle” before bursting into tears. Green urged that no one retaliate against Higgins, but later in the parking lot Green caught up with the protesters, grabbed a reserve banana cream pie from one of the protesters and threw it back at them.
► First Gay Rights March on Washington: 1979. Somewhere between 75,000 and 100,000 people from across the country and around the world marched down Pennsylvania Avenue for a rally at the Washington Monument for the first national gay rights march in U.S. history. The parade itself featured a 100-piece Great American Yankee (GAY) Freedom Band from Los Angeles, which was accompanied by a 20-member drill team and two male baton twirlers. The Los Angeles Gay Men’s Chorus also provided entertainment from the stage on the mall, where dozens of speakers called for an end to homophobia and discrimination. Demands included the repeal of sodomy laws, approval of a proposed expansion of the Civil Rights Act to cover sexual orientation, and an end to discrimination in child custody cases. They also called on President Jimmy Carter to issue an Executive order ending the ban on gays in the military and ending discrimination in the civil service and among government contractors.
Steve Ault, the march’s organizer, declared, “This rally marks the first time that the gay constituency has pulled together on a national level and that is a very important political step for us.”
Anti-gay religious leaders also saw the importance of the march, and called a news conference and prayer session in a nearby congressional office building. Rev. Jerry Falwell told reporters that Christians nationwide prayed for the marchers, “asking the Lord to deliver them from their lives of perversion.” He likened gay people to bank robbers, thieves and other “sinners,” and said that they represented “an outright assault on the family.” His biggest sound bite though was not particularly creative: “God did not create Adam and Steve, but Adam and Eve,” he said. It made about as little sense then as it does today.
The entire demonstration went off peacefully, with a few minor exceptions. Just as the last few hundred were leaving the Mall, someone fired off a tear gas canister. Amy Clark, 21, from Brattleboro, Vermont, said, “Everybody thought it was just a smoke bomb, but then the people around me started choking. The wind soon blew the fumes away.”
► Congress Bans Federal Funds for AIDS Programs that “Promote Homosexuality”: 1987. In a 94-2 vote, the U.S. Senate approved an amendment to the Health and Human Services appropriations bill proposed by Sen. Jesse Helms to restrict federal funds for AIDS education to materials stressing sexual abstinence and which did not “promote homosexuality.” The bill contained $946 million for AIDS education efforts, prevention and research, and it marked a major expansion in the federal government’s response to the emerging pandemic. But Helms cited AIDs educational comic books produced by the Gay Men’s Health Crisis in New York — material that had not been paid for with federal funds — and said, “If the American people saw these books, they would be on the verge of revolt.” He claimed the books showed “graphic detail of a sexual encounter between two homosexual men. The comic books do not encourage a change in that perverted behavior. In fact, the comic books promote sodomy.”
The only Senators voting against the measure were Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY) and Sen. Lowell Weicker (R-CT), who said, “If you’re going to censor that education, you’ve got no solution” to the AIDs crisis. The amendment would later be approved by the House in a 358-47 vote. It would remain the law of the land until 1992, when a federal court ruled that the restrictions were so vague they violated AIDS service organizations’ First and Fifth Amendment rights.
► Gay Son Denounces California Marriage Ban Sponsor: 1999. When California State Sen. Pete Knight was first elected in 1996, he twice tried but failed to pass an amendment to the California Family Law statute to restrict marriage to a man and a woman. Those failures convinced Knight that the only way to pass his cherished legislation was to go around the legislature entirely and put the proposed law on the ballot as a state initiative. He then formed a campaign committee which spent eleven months collecting thousands of signatures. In November of 1998, the popularly-called Knight Initiative qualified for the March 2000 ballot as Proposition 22. That marked the start of a bruising campaign aimed squarely, once again, at California’s gay community.
There was one person in the gay community who took Knight’s efforts more personally than anyone else. That was Knight’s son, David Knight, a Gulf War veteran who published an op-ed in The Los Angeles Times. The younger Knight blasted his father for pushing Prop 22 to further his conservative political ends despite having a gay son, as well as a gay brother who died of AIDS. “I believe, based on my experience, that this is a blind, uncaring, uninformed knee-jerk reaction to a subject about which he knows nothing and wants to know nothing about but which serves his political career,” he wrote. He also said that three years earlier — you can do the math: that would be at about the time Knight first tried to ban same-sex marriage in the state legislature — David told his father that he was gay and had a life partner. From that point on, “my relationship with my father was over. I can’t begin to explain the hurt that has come from this rejection.”
The elder Knight’s response to his son’s op-ed could barely conceal his embarrassment. “I regret that my son felt he needed to force a private, family matter into the public forum through an editorial. Although I don’t believe he was fair in describing the true nature of our relationship, that is a subject which should remain between the two of us. I care deeply about my son.”
Prop 22 would go on to pass in March of 2000, 61% to 39%. But because it was an initiative rather than a constitutional amendment, it could be struck down if the California Supreme Court were to decide that it ran contrary to the state constitution. The Court did precisely that on May 15, 2008, which then opened the fight for Prop 8 later that year.
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October 13th, 2015
TODAY’S AGENDA is brought to you by:
From Gay Community Center (Baltimore, MD), October 1979, page 5.
TODAY IN HISTORY:
► Protest Against Bowers Decision at U.S. Supreme Court: 1987. Somewhere around 500,000 people had gathered for the second March on Washington that weekend, making it the largest gay-rights demonstration in U.S. history (see Oct 11). In the final act of the weekend’s demonstrations on Sunday, between two and three thousand people staged a demonstration outside of the U.S. Supreme Court to protest the Bowers V. Hardwick decision a year earlier (see Jun 30).
Police in riot gear and surgical gloves.
The protest itself was very orderly: after listening to speakers at the Capital Building’s East Steps, groups of between twenty and thirty protesters marched across the street to the Supreme Court plaza where they were met by police and arrested. This went on for wave after wave of demonstrators from 10:00 a.m. and about 2:00 p.m. Ignoring advice from health experts, police wore surgical gloves as they made the arrests, which only fueled shouts from the crowd of “‘Shame, shame!” and ”Your gloves don’t match your shoes!” Among those arrested was Michael Hardwick, whose 1982 arrest in Georgia on sodomy charges had led to the Supreme Court case (see Aug 3).
By the end of the day, the protest resulted in the largest mass arrest at the Supreme Court building since the May Day anti-war protest in 1971. It was also a remarkably disciplined act of civil disobedience. “Civil disobedience is not new to gays and lesbians,” said Pat Norman of San Francisco, a co-chairman of the march. “Each and every day we commit the act of civil disobedience by loving each other.”
► France Approves Civil Partnerships: 1999. After spending two years debating one of the most bitterly-contested pieces of legislation in years, France’s National Assembly passed the Civil Solidarity Pact by a vote of 315-249. The bill allowed unmarried couples to register their union to access some of the tax, legal and social welfare benefits of marriage. The bill however explicitly excluded adoption rights, and it was broadened to include any pair of adults living in the same household — including brothers and sisters or an elderly parent and a child — in an attempt to placate the opposition. Following its enactment, most of couples taking advantage of the Solidarity Pact were heterosexual couples. In 2013, France legalized full marriage equality for same-sex couples.
The Anti-Homosexuality Bill, 2009 (PDF: 847KB/16 pages)
► “Kill the Gays Bill” Introduced into Uganda’s Parliament: 2009. It was introduced into Parliament by M.P. David Bahati, an evangelical Christian with extensive ties with a secretive American Christian movement known simply as “The Fellowship” or “The Family”. (The group is perhaps best known for sponsoring the annual National Prayer Breakfast.) The Anti-Homosexuality Bill itself was a particularly draconian piece of legislation. about as draconian as it could get. It called for life imprisonment for anyone convicted of homosexuality, which itself was defined in such a loose way as to endanger virtually anyone who touched another person, whether fully clothed or not. It also provided for the death penalty for anyone convicted of “aggravated homosexuality,” which included, among other things, anyone who was HIV-positive (irrespective of consent or safe sex practices) and anyone who was a “repeat offender.” That clause gave the bill its popular nickname, the “Kill the Gays Bill.”
But the bill went much further than just targeting gay people. It penalized anyone who “aided and abetted” gay people and their relationships, including landlords, medical practitioners, and potentially their lawyers. It also penalized anyone who advocated for LGBT rights, and anyone who didn’t report family members to police. It even had extradition and extraterritorial clauses, which endangered Ugandan citizens and legal residents abroad as well as at home.
The bill produced an immediate firestorm of controversy both inside and outside of Uganda. European, Canadian and U.S. officials roundly condemned the bill, and several countries threatened to cut aid if the bill should become law. It also split American Evangelicals, whose deep connections with Bahati, President Yoweri Museveni, and other Ugandan political leaders came to light. Saddleback Church pastor Rick Warren, author of A Purpose-Driven Life and a significant player in missionary work in Uganda, at first refused to condemn the bill before eventually opposing the bill two weeks later. Many American religious leaders opposed the bill, but some lent their support, including
Scott Lively, whose talk at an infamous anti-gay conference eight months earlier that helped set the stage for the bill, said that, aside from the death penalty, it was “a step in the right direction.” Other avowed supporters of the bill included Andrew Wommack, World Net Daily’s Molotov Mitchell, pastor Lou Engle and American Family Association radio host Bryan Fischer.
The bill languished in and out of Parliament for the next several years, before being revived and passed just before Christmas in 2013. By then, the death penalty for so-called “aggravated homosexuality” has been removed and replaced with a life sentence (as though spending a lifetime in the notorious Luzira prison was much better). But other criminal sanctions remained in what soon became Anti-Homosexuality Act when Museveni signed it into law on February 24, 2014. The law remained in effect until August 1, when it was annulled by Uganda’s Constitutional Court, which faulted Parliament for passing the bill into law without a proper quorum. The bill’s sponsors have vowed to reintroduce it back into Parliament for another vote, although no such moves have been made yet.
You can see BTB’s extensive coverage of the Anti-Homosexuality Bill here.
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October 12th, 2015
TODAY’S AGENDA is brought to you by:
From theMichelle International drag pageant souvenir program, San Francisco, November 1962. (Source.)
TODAY IN HISTORY:
► Special Police Squad Groomed to Target Gay Men: 1961. Gay bars were treacherous places. They were, for most patrons, the only place where they could socialize, but they couldn’t socialize freely. You always had to be on your guard. If you were to see someone you liked, and you struck up a conversation and felt that certain chemistry, and if he put his hand on your knee and you took that as an opening to invite him to your place, that invitation to an undercover agent in California would lead to a raid and the state’s Alcoholic Beverage Control Department (ABC) revoking the bar’s license.
Things used to be easier for the ABC. There was a time when all they had to do to shut a bar down was to demonstrate that the patrons were mainly gay. But the state Supreme Court ruled in 1951 that the ABC had to provide evidence that there were “offensive and disorderly acts” taking place (see Aug 28). And so the ABC deployed undercover agents to dig up that evidence, which often consisted of nothing more than an invitation to retire elsewhere — or accepting such an invitation from an agent. Those agents were particularly aggressive in San Francisco, so much so that they became fairly well known. Their covers mostly blown, the ABC turned to the San Francisco police department, which was already happily conducting raids on gay bars on its own (see Aug 14). The San Francisco Examiner revealed that the ABC agreed to train handsome young officers who were new to the force (and were therefore not well known) “on what to look for, and how to act and dress” while undercover. The Examiner reported that the joint operation was showing results, with charges field against three more “alleged ‘gay’ bars.”
The accusations, base d largely on observations and experiences of undercover policemen, were filed by the ABC against the Hideaway, 438 Eddy St.; the Jumping Frog, 2111 Polk St., and Cal’s Tavern, 782 O’Farrell St.
Norbert Falvey, ABC supervisor here, said city policemen are being used because “our manpower is limited, and our State liquor agents here are known.”
Falvey said the liaison and joint “attrition” by his department and Police Chief Thomas Cahill is showing results, with the number of “gay” bars decreasing. Last year, there were 30 such establishments here. That number now has dropped to 18, with 15 license revocation proceedings pending, Falvey said.
The timing of The Examiner’s article hit a particular nerve, as San Francisco was experiencing a wave of robberies and assaults on the Muni system, including one horrific murder the previous April. The mayor ordered the Chief Cahill to step up patrols, but the chief said he was short of personnel. Letters poured in to The Examiner’s editor from concerned citizens complaining about the department’s skewed priorities. One letter writer, protesting that while he would never himself go into a gay bar, denounced “these Gestapo-like tactics (as) inimical to the American way of life, an infringement on the basic constitutional rights of every citizen to free assembly and free speech.” A mother of four teenagers said that she “would rather have my children protected on Muni buses than from the dangers in bars where they would never go in the first place.” And a doctor, recalling the murder on the “J” line in April, asked:
If the present attempts to revoke licenses are a success, then the closing of gay bars will be synonymous with a great increase in contacts with teen-agers in the streets by evicted homosexuals resulting in more muggings, extortion and other types of brutality a la “J” line. Are law-enforcement agencies not exchanging one evil for a far more serious one?”
[Source: Ernest Lenn. “Revoking Evidence Sought: Special Cops for ‘Gay’ Bars.” The San Fransisco Examiner (October 12, 1961). As reprinted with accompanying unsigned commentary in The Mattachine Review 7, no 11 (November 1961): 4-8.]
► Matthew Shephard Died: 1998. For a week Matthew Shepard’s family had been maintaining a vigil at his bedside as he lay in a coma following a brutal assault at an open field outside of Laramie, Wyoming (see Oct 6). He suffered fractures from the back of his head to the front of his right ear from being pistol-whipped by a 357-Magnum more than twenty times. He had severe brain stem damage which affected his body’s ability to control heart rate, breathing, temperature, and other involuntary functions. There were lacerations around his head, face and neck. He had welts on his back and arm, and bruised knees and groin. He had also suffered from hypothermia. His injuries were too severe for doctors to operate. They did however insert a drain into Matthew’s skull to relieve the pressure on his brain. Finally, the Poudre Valley Hospital’s CEO Rulon Stacey released this medical update during a hastily called press conference at 4:30 a.m.:
At 12 midnight on Monday, October 12, Matthew Shepard’s blood pressure began to drop. We immediately notified his family who were already at the hospital. At 12:53 a.m. Matthew Shepard died, his family was at his bedside.
Matthew arrived at 9:15 p.m. Wednesday, October 7, in critical condition. Matthew remained in critical condition during his entire stay at Poudre Valley Hospital. During his stay, efforts to improve his condition proved to no avail. Matthew died while on full life support measures.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
► 
Michael Sandy: 1977-2006. He would have turned thirty-eight years old today if it hadn’t been for the fact that on October 8, 2006. he was lured to a secluded Plumb Beach in Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn by four others who he met in an AOL chat room. When he arrived at the beach, the four pulled him out of his car and assaulted him. When he tried to escape, they chased him toward a busy freeway while he tried to call for help on his cell phone. They caught up with him at a guardrail. One of them pushed him over the guard rail and into the right lane, and punched him again. He fell back into the middle lane and was struck by an SUV. His attackers then dragged him back to the side of the road, where one of them riffled through his pockets before they fled.
Sandy was taken to Brookdale Hospital and put on a respirator. He remained on life support for five days without regaining consciousness. He died on October 13, just one day after his twenty-ninth birthday, after his family decided to remove life support.
The police investigation showed that the four selected Sandy because he was gay, believing that a gay man would hesitate to resist or call the police. Gary Timmins, 17, pleaded guilty to attempted robbery with a hate crime enhancement. As part of his plea agreement, he testified against his friends in exchange for a four-year prison sentence. John Fox, 20, who posed as a gay man in the chat room, was found guilty of manslaughter and first degree attempted robbery, both as hate crimes. He was was sentenced to between 13 and 21 years in prison. Anthony Fortunato, 21, tried to avoid the hate crime enhancement by claiming he was gay himself. He was the one who initiated contact with Sandy in the Internet chat room. He was convicted of manslaughter and petty larceny, and was sentenced to 7 to 21 years. Ilya Shurov, 21, pleaded guilty to manslaughter and attempted robbery as hate crimes. He was the one who pulled Sandy out of his car, punched him, and led the chase onto the freeway. He also went through Sandy’s pockets at the side of the freeway. Before accepting his plea deal, he had been charged with felony murder as a hate crime and was facing a life sentence. He was sentenced to 17½ years.
Before the sentences were handed down, Sandy’s father, Zeke Sandy, stood up in court and said, “These hate crimes become a cancer; it’s a disease. I don’t know why we have to go butcher one another because we don’t like what they are, who they are.” Despite the police and prosecutor’s determination that this was a hate crime, Michael Sandy’s high-profile death was not included in the FBI’s 2006 hate crimes statistics.
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October 11th, 2015
TODAY’S AGENDA:
National Coming Out Day: Everywhere. Today is the twenty-fifth annual National Coming Out day. The date was chosen to commemorate the second March on Washington, which drew some half a million LGBT people and their supporters to the nation’s capital (see below), That march inspired the blossoming of a number of LGBT advocacy groups around the country. Among them was a group of 100 LGBT advocates who, four months later, gathered in the D.C. suburb of Manassas, Virginia, to figure out how to ensure that the energy from that March didn’t just dissipate into thin air. Dr. Robert Eichberg, an author and psychologist from New Mexico, and Los Angeles LGBT advocate Jean O’Leary, hit on the idea of a national day to celebrate those who came out and to encourage others to begin to take their first steps toward visibility. As Dr. Eichberg later explained:
Most people think they don’t know anyone gay or lesbian, and in fact everybody does. It is imperative that we come out and let people know who we are and disabuse them of their fears and stereotypes.”
The first National Coming Out Day was on October 11, 1988, the first anniversary of the second March on Washington, and it quickly expanded to all fifty states. Is there anyone you still need to come out to?
Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Ashland, OR; Atlanta, GA; Little Rock, AR; Medford, OR; Paramaribo, Suriname; Philadelphia, PA.
Other Events This Weekend: Iris Prize Film Festival, Cardiff, UK; MIX Copenhagen Film Festival, Copenhagen, Denmark; Octobearfest, Denver, CO; Ft. Lauderdale Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, Ft. Lauderdale, FL; World Gay Rodeo Finals, Las Vegas, NV; Black and Blue Festival, Montréal, QC; Seattle Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, Seattle, WA; AIDS Walk, Tucson, AZ.
TODAY’S AGENDA is brought to you by:
From G-Milwaukee, November 1975, page 3.
Green Bay’s Roxy Lounge appears to have operated between 1974 and 1978. That’s just about all the information I can find about it. If Google Maps is accurate, it looks like the entire area near the Fox River waterfront has been re-developed and that particular section of Pine Street was closed off and replaced with this monstrosity.
ECHO ’64 conference program. (via Frank Kamey’s papers)
TODAY IN HISTORY:
► Future Ex-Gay Leader Speaks At Gay Rights Conference: 1964. The day before, the East Coast Homophile Organizations (ECHO) kicked off a pivotal two-day conference in Washington, D.C. which would lay the groundwork for a much more confrontational style of gay rights advocacy than had ever been seen before (see Oct 10). In prior pro-gay gatherings, gay rights organizations used to portray themselves as “impartial” and “reasonable” by inviting speakers from “both sides” of an issue. This meant that attendees often had to endure talks and panel discussions featuring lawyers, mental health professionals and religious leaders explaining that gay people were criminal, sick, or sinful. By 1964, this practice had come to an end. Mostly.
There was, however, one throwback to earlier days on the second day of the ECHO conference when six clergymen were invited to participate in a panel discussion titled “Alienation of the Homosexual from the Religious Community.” This issue, as big a deal as it is today for many gay people, was a much bigger issue in 1964 when Americans, including gay Americans, were much more religiously-observant. Panel members were Rabbi Eugene Lipman of Washington, D.C.’s progressive Temple Sinai, Rev. Berkley Hawthorn of the similarly progressive Foundry Methodist Church, Rev. Ernest Martin of the (again, progressive) Swedenborgian Church of the Holy City, Rev. Kenneth Marshall of the (obviously progressive) Davies Memorial Unitarian Church, Rev. Robert J. Lewis of the (ditto) River Road Unitarian Church, and Father John F. Harvey, who was then teaching Moral Theology at DeSales Hall High School and who stuck out like a sore thumb among the other panelists. Everyone else discussed the ostracization that many gay people feel in their churches and temple, and provided suggestions for congregations and gay people on how to address the problem. But according to the write-up in the Daughter of Bilitis’s newsletter The Ladder, Halvey characterized that alienation as an inherent feature of homosexuality:
Father John F. Harvey (Catholic), Instructor in Moral Theology at DeSales Hall, Hyattsville, Md., claimed the homosexual is alienated not only from the church, but also from the secular community, from family, and from self. From adolescence, the homosexual knows he “should be attracted by the opposite sex.” He assimilates society’s scorn and becomes “filled with revulsion toward himself.” Later, “supported by homosexual literature and friends … conscience all the while being smothered,” he withdraws further. Hopelessness often tempts him to suicide or alcohol. He feels hostile toward the church. Alienation is furthered by his bitterness toward God Who allows a “mystery of suffering” and by the harsh attitude of many clergymen. Father Harvey urged that the homosexual accept himself and seek spiritual guidance to devise a life plan (excluding marriage, since conversion to heterosexuality is rarely possible) of service to the community and to God. Ageing homosexuals might reveal their condition to demonstrate “that they led Christian 11ves despite their deviate impulses.” Father Harvey advised the Homosexual should “re-direct (his) will to supernatural values …love of God must be the driving force.”
Rabbi Lipman acknowledged that his congregation ran a referral service to direct gay people to psychiatrists and other therapists with “goal one (as) heterosexuality.” He added that the second goal, if the first cannot be achieved, would be “to accept happy homosexuality. … I don’t consider the second one a defeat, but I consider it second.” Halvey asked about the chances of success for reorientation therapy. Lipman replied “The old saw that homosexuality is the hardest of the emotional problems to do much about is true … So far nobody appears to know what succeeds and what doesn’t. The formulas aren’t here yet.” Harvey agreed with that assessment.
When the panel moderator asked, “In the eyes of the churches, does a person have the right to practice homosexuality?”, all of the panelists, save one, gave varying shades of affirmative answers:
Father Harvey gave the only categorical “no,” since to the Catholic Church homosexual acts are immoral. Nevertheless, he said, many Catholics feel these acts should not be illegal because “the prosecution and the way it takes place in many instances is a great abuse.”
In 1980, Harvey founded Courage, the Roman Catholic ex-gay organization, and headed the group until 2008. Under Harvey’s leadership, Courage’s approach to reorientation was somewhat confused. Officially, the group promoted celibacy as the primary legitimate goal for gay and lesbian Catholics while downplaying the prospect for change in sexual orientation, although there was some fudging here and there. Harvey also relied heavily on theories from the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH) whenever he wrote about what he believed were the causes of homosexuality. Since Harvey’s death in 2010, Courage has been slowly drifting toward the change model.
[Source: Lily Hansen, Barbara Gittings. “ECHO Report ’64, Part 2: Highlights of ECHO.” The Ladder 9, no. 4 (January 1965): 7-11, 15-20. See Jul 31 for Barbara Gittings’s bio.]
► American Nazi Party Member Tries to Disrupt ECHO Conference: 1964. As if the 1964 Conference of the East Coast Homophile Organizations (ECHO) in Washington, D.C., wasn’t already fascinating enough (see above and Oct 10), a couple of other things happened which everyone would remember for years to come. Staff at the Sheraton Park Hotel learned that members of the American Nazi Party planned to disrupt the conference, so the hotel requested additional protection from Washington police. So when the conference began, ECHO leaders actually felt reassured when police arrived, although they were surprised to see a plainclothes officer from the department’s Morals Division. As the Daughters of Bilitis’s The Ladder informed its readers:
A handsome chap moving among many handsome chaps, he might have gone through the conference unnoticed, but for the sharp memory of a Washington Mattachine member. This member reportedly looked the plainclothesman in the eye and said in effect “I know who you are.” Shorn of his cover, undercover officer Graham phoned his boss at the Morals Division to say he’d been recognized and what should he do? “Continue on assignment” was his order — and continue he did, staying for the entire ECHO conference.
The word spread about Graham’s presence, and he became a curiosity, Why was he there, if not to memorize faces? Despite suspicion of the motives of the plainclothesman, many ECHO registrants went out of their way to talk hospitably with him and to discuss the speeches, Here, some thought, was an educating job to be done. Officer Graham was a captive listener, sitting politely among homosexuals and friends of homosexuals and hearing speakers denounce our absurd sex laws and the peculiar tactics our police resort to in trying to enforce them.
Everything went well on the conference’s first day, although unidentified Nazis continued to call the ECHO suite to warn of disruptions. That attempted disruption came the next day, at about 2:30 that afternoon when attendees were waiting for the religion panel to begin. Now, if this were to happen today, it would be captured on camera phones and posted to YouTube within minutes. That technology didn’t exist then, but The Ladder provided the next best thing thanks to Kay Lahusen (see Jan 5), who had just turned on a tape recorder to record the panel discussion. With her transcription of that tape, we can now re-enact our own YouTube drama:
Cast, in order of appearance: A Nazi, conference coordinator Bob Belanger (under the pseudonym “Robert King”), Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C. founder Frank Kameny (see May 21)), an unidentified blonde girl, future ex-gay leader Fr. John Harvey (see above), future DoB president Shirley Willer (as “Shirley W”, see Sep 26), and Det. Graham.
Scene: A “blond, good-looking, well-built, quietly dressed” man walked into the room, carrying a large gift-wrapped box marked “Queer Convention.” Two of his cohorts waited outside the door.
And, action:
NAZI: Would somebody call Rabbi Lipman, please? Is Rabbi Lipman in the house? (Rabbi Lipman is one of the clergymen on ECHO’s religious panel. He has not yet arrived.) I’ve got 24 quarts of vaseline here to deliver to Rabbi Eugene Lipman. I believe all you queers will be able to make use of it. (He starts toward the inner room, carrying the box. ECHO leaders, moving according to plan, link arms in the CORE fashion and stop him from going further. Others join the line. A crowd gathers. The line begins to inch forward.)
ROBERT KING: You must either pay an admission or get out. You are trespassing. (Plainclothes officer Graham leaves the room to telephone police officers specifically stationed in the hotel to protect ECHO from the Nazis.)
NAZI: Would you quit pushing me, you queers… I see you’ve got queer rabbis and priests and reverends and everything here today… Would somebody please bring the queer Rabbi here for me to deliver this vaseline to him? (He smiles, partly turns, digs in his heels, presses back against the line.) The Rabbi’s waiting for his vaseline… Are there any lesbians here? (A blonde girl joins the line.) Are you a lesbian too?
BLONDE GIRL: As much as you are!
NAZI: If you queers don’t stop pushing me I’m going to charge you with assault.
FATHER HARVEY: Sir, you are trespassing. Would you please leave? (Father Harvey is one of the religious panel members.)
NAZI: Sir, would you like some vaseline too? This vaseline is for the rabbi, but I’m sure he wouldn’t mind sharing it with his cassock friends.
DR. KAMENY: You are being asked to leave.
ROBERT KING: The authorities are on the way.
NAZI: I’m only a delivery boy. I had to leave church today in order to bring this vaseline over to you queers. (He pushes back against the line, continues to smile.)
SHIRLEY W.: Sir, you’re stepping on my foot. Would you please move.
NAZI: I believe you’re trying to kick me, aren’t you, lesbian?… There’s a queer for LBJ. He looks like a kike, too. Are there many kike queers here? A dog himself shouldn’t be subjected to you bunch of queers. (A cameraman from WTOP-TV enters and begins filming. The station has apparently been alerted by the publicity-hungry Nazis.)
SHIRLEY W. Please, sir, you’re stepping on my foot. Would you mind leaving?
NAZI: I heard the Rabbi was out of vaseline. Is that right? (Enter plainclothesman Graham. Ironically, he is forced to do the apprehending because the special police sent to prevent a disturbance are too far away at the moment in the huge hotel.)
GRAHAM: I’m a police officer and I want to talk to you alone right now.
NAZI: Do you have some identification?
GRAHAM: Right. (He produces badge.)
NAZI: Am I under arrest?
GRAHAM: No.
NAZI: Well, I have to deliver this case of vaseline to…
GRAHAM: You ARE under arrest. (The Nazi, still hefting the gift-wrapped carton marked QUEER CONVENTION, is escorted out of the ECHO room. Applause breaks out for Graham’s action.)
The Ladder reported that the Nazi — his name was never identified — was booked on a charge of disorderly conduct and fined $10 (about $75 in today’s dollars). The disruption lasted less than five minutes. WTOP decided against showing the film during its news broadcast.
[Sources: Warren D. Adkins, Kay Tobin (Kay Lahusen). “ECHO Report ’64, Part 1: Sidelights of ECHO.” The Ladder 9, no. 4 (January 1965): 4-7.
Kay Tobin (Kay Lahusen). “ECHO Report ’64, Part 3: A Nazi stunt fails.” The Ladder 9, no. 4 (January 1965): 20-22.]
► AIDS Quilt Debuts During Second March on Washington: 1987. Somewhere around half a million LGBT people descended onto the Mall in Washington for the largest gay rights demonstration in history. The top demands were for an end to discrimination and more federal money for AIDS research and treatment. About a hundred members of Congress and other prominent civic, labor and religious leaders signed letters endorsing the March, and the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who had declared himself a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, spoke and promised to support the gay community. Reps. Barney Frank (D-MA) and Gerry Studds (D-MA), both openly gay members of Congress, also spoke.
With AIDS at the forefront of everyones’ concern, the march marked the public debut of the Names Project AIDS Memorial Quilt. The quilt occupied the equivalent of two city blocks, and included 1,920 panels commemorating more than 2,000 persons who had died of AIDS. Since then, the AIDS Memorial Quilt has become the world’s largest community art project, encompassing 1.3 million square feet and commemorating the lives of over 94,000 people who died of AIDS.
But even the quilt couldn’t break through the national reticence to discuss the epidemic or the concerns of gay people. Despite the enormity of the gatherings, the three national news magazines — Newsweek, Time and U.S. News & World Report — neglected to mention any of it, which longtime advocate Barbara Gittings described as “an appalling example of media blindness.”
(Source.)
► ACT-Up Occupies the FDA: 1988. The gay community was feeling the pressure of a ticking time bomb, with someone in the U.S. dying of AIDS every two hours. AZT had been approved by the U .S. Food and Drug Administration in 1987, but it was prohibitively expensive and required taking a pill every four hours around the clock. European health officials had been approving new treatments for AIDS, but the FDA continued to cling to its multi-year approval process. And as the FDA dithered, more names were being added to the AIDS quilt. By 1988, frustration and anger had built to a boiling point, and more than a 1,200 demonstrators, led by ACT-Up activists, invaded the FDA’s grounds in Rockville, Maryland, for a nine-hour protest demanding quicker action on drug approvals. About 175 demonstrators were arrested
Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, later recalled that the protest had left a deep impression. He later told PBS’s Frontline:
“After a little while, I began to get beyond the rhetoric and theater of the demonstrations and the smoke bombs, to really listen to what it is that they were saying, and it became clear to me, quite quickly, that most of what they said made absolute sense, was very logical and needed to be paid attention to. … Interacting with the constituencies was probably one of the most important things that I had done in my professional career.”
Eight days later, the FDA announced new regulations to cut the time it took to approve new drugs for treating HIV/AIDS.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
► Jerome Robbins: 1918-1998. Born Wilson Rabinowitz, the Broadway producer, director and choreographer’s career in show business began soon after dropping out of New York University, where he had been studying chemistry, in order to pursue dance. Just a couple of years later, he was already dancing the chorus of several Broadway shows, including George Balanchine’s Keep Off the Grass. In 1940, he left the theater in favor of ballet, but soon returned to choreograph 1944’s On the Town (with music by Leonard Bernstein, just one of several collaborative efforts between the two men). In 1947, he won his first Tony Award for Choreography for the Keystone Kops comedy/ballet High Button Shoes.
Through most of the next decade, Robbins continued to choreograph several hit shows, alternating between Broadway and ballet as choreographer for the American Ballet Company and the New York City Ballet. But his career was threatened in 1950 when he was scheduled to appear on Ed Sullivan’s show. The show’s sponsor, Ford Motor Company, forced him to cancel because he had been a member of the Communist Party between 1943 and 1947, joining, like many other Americans, when the U.S. was an ally of the Soviet Union during World War II. He tried to go to the FBI to clear his name, but when Sullivan publicly urged the House Committee on Un-American Activities to subpoena Robins, he fled to Paris for a year.
He returned to the U.S in 1951 to choreograph The Pied Piper, The King and I, and several other classical ballet pieces. But in 1952, the House Un-American Activities committee caught up with him and subpoenaed him to appear. While everyone knew about one of those skeletons in his closet — his Communist Party membership — he also feared that the other skeleton — his homosexuality — would come tumbling out. He not only personified the twinned Red and Lavender Scares of the McCarthy era, but he also harbored a great deal of internalized shame over his Jewish immigrant roots, which he felt made him insufficiently American in other people’s eyes. Years later, he wrote:
”It was my homosexuality I was afraid would be exposed I thought. It was my once having been a Communist that I was afraid would be exposed. None of these. I was & have been — & still have terrible pangs of terror when I feel that my career, work, veneer of accomplishments would be taken away (by HUAC, or by critics) that I panicked & crumbled & returned to that primitive state of terror — the facade of Jerry Robbins would be cracked open, and behind everyone would finally see Jerome Wilson Rabinowitz
Robbins named the person who recruited him into the Communist Party, along with several other actors, playwrights and critics who were party members. Rep. Gordon Scherer (R-OH) congratulated him, saying he “‘was going to see The King and I that very night and would now appreciate it all the more.” Robbins’s career was preserved: he choreographed and/or directed Peter Pan, Bells are Ringing, West Side Story, Gypsy, Funny Girl, and Fiddler on the Roof, and over the course of his career, he won two Academy Awards, four Tony Awards, five Donaldson Awards, two Emmys, the Screen Directors’ Guild Award, and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. But none of those accomplishments could expiate his guilt over his HUAC testimony. In the mid-1970s, when he spent three weeks at a mental hospital for depression, he described himself as “a Jewish ex-commie fag who had to go into a mental hospital.” He died following a stroke in New York on July 29, 1998.
► Cleve Jones: 1954. How appropriate is it that today would also happen to be Cleve Jones’s birthday? Born in West Lafayette, Indiana and reared in Scottsdale, Arizona, he moved to San Francisco to study political science at San Francisco State University where he also became an intern for Harvey Milk’s political campaigns and became active in the city’s gay rights scene. Years later, Jones recalled what a heady time that was:
I think what was most exciting was that it was all brand-new. All of us who were participating in it were doing so with an awareness that what we were doing had never been done before. So many of the things that people take for granted now, like gay marching bands and pride parades and gay churches and gay synagogues and gay newspapers and gay film festivals — I remember when the first of each of those happened. There was a wonderful sort of self-awareness among everyone that what we were doing had never been seen before.
It was a political revolution; it was a social revolution; it was a sexual revolution. For those of us who were part of it, there was a wonderful sense of self-discovery, because I think I’m a member of the last generation [of] people who spent our childhood thinking we were the only ones. That doesn’t happen anymore. But when I was a child I thought I was the only one, and so when I discovered that I was not the only one, that there were thousands upon thousands of people just like me, it was incredibly liberating and exhilarating.
Jones learned his gay activism chops from Milk, who gave him his first bullhorn. “When he got elected to public office, he said: ‘You keep people on the street. I’ll be working on the inside; you keep them screaming on the outside, and we’ll get more done.'” But the next several years were traumatic. First, there was Milk’s 1978 assassination (see Nov 27), then there were people coming down with all sorts of illnesses. “I have memories from 1978 and 1979 of friends of mine contracting diseases that I’d never heard of, or that I’d heard of but only in the context of impoverished countries. I remember a friend came down with meningitis, and that seemed to me to be odd. There was also quite a bit of hepatitis going around.” Then the CDC became aware of what was going on in 1981 (see Jun 5). “My memory of it, when I think back, it seems like it was just an avalanche. It was like one week we’d never heard of it, and then the next week everybody started to die. Now, I know that’s not really the way it was, and it unfolded a little more slowly than that, but it was so sudden, and people didn’t talk about it. They were too frightened. Even in our community, there was a great deal of cruelty. So people began to vanish.”
Jones decided to try to “fill the vacuum left by the government’s response” by co-founding the San Francisco AIDS Foundation and becoming one of the earliest frontline advocates for people with AIDS in the city. When an antibody test became available and he found out he was HIV-positive, he went public with his diagnosis on CBS’s 60 Minutes. As a result, he received death threats and was nearly killed when he was attacked with a knife. Jones then determined that one of the keys to making an apathetic public pay attention the the epidemic was to humanize the problem. And so during a candlelight memorial for Harvey Milk in 1986, Jones came up with the idea for an AIDS memorial quilt. He had learned that 1,000 San Franciscans had died of the disease, he asked fellow marchers to write the names of friends and loved ones onto placards that were taped onto the wall of the Federal Building. That patchwork of names that reminded him of his grandmother’s quilts. He established the Names Project Foundation which debuted the AIDS Memorial Quilt during the second march on Washington for gay rights (see above).
Jones currently lives in San Francisco, where he works as a community organizer for UNITE HERE, an international union representing hotel, casino, food service and restaurant workers. He is also serves as an adviser for the Courage Campaign and is on the advisory board for the American Foundation for Equal Rights.
► Matt Bomer: 1977. “When I was in high school, there was no safe haven, there was no outlet for you to speak your mind. So I did what any self-preserving 14-year-old would do — I signed up for the school play and also the football team to cover my tracks.” That’s how White Collar star Matt Bomer recently described his high school years in Klein, Texas, outside of Houston. After graduating from Carnegie Mellon University in 2001 with a degree in Fine Arts, Bomer moved to New York City where he landed a small role on All My Children, followed by a three year stint on Guiding Light. Since 2009, he has played the lead role of Neal Caffrey on USA Network’s White Collar.
In 2011, Bomer joined John Lithgow, Morgan Freeman, and many other prominent actors for an all-star world premiere of Dustin Lance Black’s new play “8”, and in 2012, Bomer got to shake his money-maker for the Steven Soderbergh film Magic Mike with Matthew McConaughey and Channing Tatum. He had long been the subject of rumors about his personal life, and his approach to the subject was to neither confirm nor deny. But in February 2012, Bomer finally decided to uncover his tracks when he thanked his partner and their three children during an acceptance speech for a Steve Chase Humanitarian Award.
Last year, he appeared in HBO’s adaption of Larry Kramer’s A Normal Heart, for which he earned an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Miniseries or Movie. Bomer has also been tapped to play actor Montgomery Clift in a new indie biopic for HBO.
If you know of something that belongs on the agenda, please send it here. Don’t forget to include the basics: who, what, when, where, and URL (if available).
And feel free to consider this your open thread for the day
October 10th, 2015
TODAY’S AGENDA:
Legacy Walk Dedications: Chicago, IL. If you’ve been looking for something to do in the Windy City this weekend, regular BTB reader, gay rights activist and Executive Director of the Legacy Project Victor Salvo alerts us to an interesting and informative event that will take place tomorrow afternoon on North Halsted Street. The Project will dedicate five new plaques for what is billed as the “the world’s only outdoor museum walk celebrating the diverse accomplishments of the GLBT community.” That museum currently consists of thirty bronze plaques affixed to ten pairs of twenty-five foot art-deco pylons which mark the heart of Chicago’s LGBT community. Each plaque commemorates the life and work of notable LGBT people who have changed the world
This year’s bronze plaques will commemorate Leonard Bernstein, Josephine Baker, Rudolf Nureyev, Billy Strayhorn, and the homosexual victims of Nazi persecution. The dedications begin this afternoon at 3:00 p.m. at the pylon located at 3245 N. Halsted. They will welcome each new plaque onto the street in a small ceremony conducted by youth participants in the Legacy Project Education Initiative (LPEI). The traveling celebration will move north toward the final dedication at 3656 N. Halsted. Participants may either meet at the first location and move as a group up Halsted, or gather at the pylon of their choosing to await the arrival of the co-celebrants. The ceremonies will wrap up at about 5:00 p.m., then move to the rooftop of the Center on Halsted for a post-ceremony pizza party. Click here for more information.
Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Ashland, OR; Atlanta, GA; Ft. Lauderdale, FL; Ft. Meyers, FL; Little Rock, AR; Medford, OR; Oceanside, CA; Orlando, FL; Paramaribo, Suriname; Philadelphia, PA.
Other Events This Weekend: Iris Prize Film Festival, Cardiff, UK; MIX Copenhagen Film Festival, Copenhagen, Denmark; Octobearfest, Denver, CO; Ft. Lauderdale Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, Ft. Lauderdale, FL; QCinema LGBT Film Festival, Ft. Worth, TX; World Gay Rodeo Finals, Las Vegas, NV; Black and Blue Festival, Montréal, QC; Seattle Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, Seattle, WA; Tampa International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, Tampa, FL; AIDS Walk, Tucson, AZ.
TODAY’S AGENDA is brought to you by:
From GPU News, April 1978, page 25.
Little Jim’s started it all when it opened in 1975 as the very first gay bar on Chicago’s famed North Halsted street. The tiny hole-in-the-wall was soon joined by several other establishments catering to LGBT people and within just a few years, Boystown was born. As the years went by, it was often overshadowed by the larger and flashier establishments that sprouted up around it. The bar’s original owner, Little Jim Gates, sold the joint in 2014, but the new owners vowed to keep running it more or less as it was been for the past forty years.
TODAY IN HISTORY:
► Newsweek’s “Queer People”: 1949. In the mid-twentieth century, reactions to homosexuality fell into two camps. On one side were those who held that such “sexual perversion” was a criminal act which should be treated harshly by the courts. The other side, which saw themselves as more enlightened, saw homosexuality as a mental illness which merited pity rather than punishment. On October 10, 1949, Newsweek published an editorial titled “Queer People,” which came down squarely in the first camp:
The sex pervert, whether a homosexual, an exhibitionist, or even a dangerous sadist, is too often regarded merely as a ‘queer’ person who never hurts anyone but himself. Then the mangled form of one of his victims focuses public attention to the degenerate’s work. And newspaper headlines flare for days over accounts and feature articles packed with sensational details of the most dastardly and horrifying crimes.
The editorial reviewed The Sexual Criminal, a book by J. Paul DeRiver who headed the Los Angeles Police Department’s Sex Offenses Bureau. Newsweek lauded the “factual scientific book” with 43 case histories, including “lots of very queer people” including “the sadistic pedophile,” “zoophiles, psychopaths who performed sadistic acts on animals, and the necrophiles, who …commit acts of moral degeneracy upon or in the presence of dead bodies.” Eugene D. Williams, a California “special assistant attorney general,” wrote the introduction to the book, in which he warned that “the semihysterical, foolishly sympathetic, and wholly unscientific attitude of any individual engaged in social work and criminology to regard sex perverts as poor unfortunates who are suffering from disease and cannot help themselves, has a tendency to feed their ego.” To which Newsweek added:
A sterner attitude is required, if the degenerate is to be properly treated and cured. Williams suggests that the sex pervert be treated, not as a coddled patient, but as a particularly virulent type of criminal. “To punish him,” he concludes, “he should be placed in an institution where the proper kind of rehabilitory work can be done so that, of capable of being brought to the realization of the error of his ways, he may be brought back to society prepared to live as a normal, law-abiding individual, rather than turned out as he now is from the penitentiary, confirmed in his perversion.
ECHO ’64 conference program. (via Frank Kameny’s papers)
► East Coast Homophile Organizations (ECHO) Hosts Conference Calling for Direct Action: 1964. The early major “Homophile” gay-rights groups established in the 1950s saw their main purpose was not so much to advocate for changes in the law which criminalized same-sex relationships in all fifty states, but to confront the regular police abuses and day-to-day acts of discrimination which effectively kept just about everyone in the closet. The tactic those groups espoused was “education.” It was thought that by educating the general public about homosexuality and gay people, the public would come around to accepting gay people as equals. The Daughters of Bilitis’s statement of purpose, which appeared in the front of every issue of The Ladder, included the “Education of the public at large through acceptance first of the individual, leading to an eventual breakdown of erroneous taboos and prejudices.” Likewise, when the Mattachine Society was first founded in 1950, it considered it part of its mission to “EDUCATE … for the purpose of informing and enlightening the public at large.” ONE, Inc., which published the first nationally-distributed gay magazine in America, considered education so important that it established the ONE Institute of Homophile Studies.
One problem, though, was that the “education” was not always particularly uplifting. For one, the goal of education was supposed to be “understanding” of the “problems” that homosexuals faced. But in many of the early homophile literature, one could easily replace the word “understanding” with “pity,” and not alter the view being expressed one bit. Consequently, the educational approach tended to be one that valued being “reasonable” and “impartial ” over carrying any significantly useful information. And homophile organizations, eager to prove their reasonableness and impartiality, often invited speakers from “both sides” of an issue — which meant that gays and lesbians attending homophile conferences often had to sit through lawyers, mental health professionals and religious leaders explaining that gay people were criminal, sick, or sinful. As Barbara Gittings (see Jul 31) later commented, “At first we were so grateful just to have people — anybody — pay attention to us that we listened to everything they said, no matter how bad it was…. It was essential for us to go through this before we could arrive at what we now consider our much more sensible attitudes.”
By 1964, those more sensible attitudes were on display when four organizations — the Daughters of Bilities, the Janus Society of Philadelphia, and the Mattachine Societies of New York and Washington, D.C., met in the nation’s capital for the second conference of the East Coast Homophile Organizations (ECHO), a loose confederation formed in 1962. Attendance was light: only about a hundred people showed up at the Sheraton Park Hotel, thanks to ECHO’s difficulty in getting the word out about where the event would take place. The Mattachine Society of Washington (MSW), which was hosting the conference, saw three other hotels cancel their bookings and three newspapers refusing to run ads for the conference. Those who showed up were charged up and impatient with the old ways of doing things. The DoB’s newsletter, The Ladder, set the scene:
“I’m an activist,” said a handsome young man present at the ECHO conference for 1964. “I’ve read nearly 75 books in the New York Mattachine Society library, and I’m fed up with reading on the subject of homosexuality.” His statement seemed to typify the attitude pervading this serious conference.
Any disappointment over the small attendance (less than 100 persons) could be offset by the fact that this was a down-to-business meeting attended primarily by those dedicated to immediate action. It was a gathering of men and women impatient to remedy the discriminations against the homosexual citizen in our society.
We talked with a long-time friend of one of the sponsoring organizations, and his remarks confirmed our view. “A few years ago,” he said, “ours was a sweeter, clubbier, less insistent organization. Now there seems to be a militancy about the new groups and new leaders. There’s a different mood.”
Signs of that different mood were everywhere, beginning with MSW’s Robert King’s prescient keynote address. He said that gay people were asking for “the rights, and all the rights, afforded the heterosexual. We are still in the asking stage. We will soon reach the demanding stage. (… A) dormant army is beginning to stir.” J.C. Hodges, president of the Mattachine Society of New York, challenged the prevailing timidity of previous homophile leaders to get involved with politics, declaring that “politics is everybody’s business.” He urged attendees to throw themselves into established political organizations. “Involve yourself if you are to have any voice on your own behalf.”
The African-American civil rights movement, which was celebrating its successful March on Washington a year earlier followed by the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that summer, was held up as an example for gay activists to follow. A lawyer from the ACLU advised, “I wanted to emphasize today the importance of recognizing your solidarity with other minority groups and your vital stake in maintenance and development of a society with freedom and justice for all.” During a panel discussion about legal issues moderated by MSW’s Frank Kameny (see May 21) asked if the panelists would be willing to form a board to look at creating a “multi-attorney approached to planned legal strategy” in challenging anti-gay laws. The panel agreed, with the National Capital Area ACLU chairman, David Carliner, recommending the establishment of a legal defense fund modeled after the NAACP’s.
The conference also had a bit of fun at the expense of Congressman John Dowdy (D-TX), who had introduced legislation in the House to strip MSW of its charitable status the year before (see Aug 8, Aug 9). That bill led to Kameny becoming the first gay man in history to address a Congressional committee when the House Subcommittee for the District of Columbia held hearings on Dowdy’s bill. ECHO issued a cordial citation in Dowdy’s honor. “We want to acknowledge that Rep. Dowdy caused more attention to be called to the homosexual problem than anyone else,” a spokesman told the Washington Post. The Post also reported, “A spokesman for the Congressman said Dowdy has not received an invitation, wasn’t going to attend in any case and viewed the award as an attempt to ’embarrass’ him.”
But if you really want to see the stirrings of what we would recognize as the modern gay rights movement, you would look to another panel discussion — a debate, really — between Frank Kameny and Dr. Kurt Konietzko, a psychologist and member of the Philadelphia Board of Parole, which questioned the entire raison d’etre of the homophile organizations until then. The topic was “Education or Legislation,” although The Ladder said that “‘Act or Teach?’ might better describe the alternatives.” On the “act” side, naturally, was Kameny, who argued that emphasizing education, as homophile groups had done, relies on the “naive assumption that in matters of ingrained prejudice, the majority of people are rational and amenable to reason. They aren’t. Prejudice is an emotional commitment, not an intellectual one, and is little if at all touched by considerations of reason. Study upon study…has shown this.” The Ladder continued:
Dr. Kameny cited one recent study which he said “showed that tolerance is only slightly promoted by more information, that communication of facts is generally ineffective against predisposition.” Large numbers of people “hate our guts,” he warned. In terms of their deep prejudices in this area, they are “uneducable and noninformable.” Anyone doubting this need only read the transcript of the Dowdy subcommittee hearings on HR 5990. “That’s entrenched prejudice in very high places!”
He pointed out that “the Negro tried the education/information approach for 90 years and got almost nowhere. In the next ten years, by a vigorous social-protest, social-action, civil-liberties type of program, he achieved in essence everything for which he had been fighting. Let not this lesson be wasted upon us.”
Dr. Konietzko countered that he believed education was essential to “the basic human question of how we get people to live together harmoniously. He also noted that educators, particularly religious leaders, were “charged specifically with instilling in the young the attitudes of the larger society … Prejudices are learned. And if they are learned, they are taught. And if you can change the teaching, then you can change society.” Konietzko cautioned that pushing “aggressively” would result in a backlash. “The more you threaten, the less they’re able to think straight, and the less willing they become to grant you anything.” He also recommended that homophile groups rely on outside experts to get their messages across — even though, as one audience member pointed out, “the ‘experts’ are constantly making pronouncements to the public which contradict the subjective knowledge of so many homosexuals.” That’s when Kameny delivered what would be his signature rallying cry for decades to come:
A place to start is for the homophile organizations to realize that in the last analysis — and I am knowingly oversimplifying — we are the experts and the authorities. And we had better start educating the public to the fact that when they want reliable information on homosexuals and homosexuality, they come not to the psychiatrists, not to the ministers, and not to all the rest — they come to us. (Applause) We are coming to be more and more called on to speak in our own behalf, and it’s time we started a coordinated program to do so. We must get across to the public that we are the ones to come to, not the psychiatrists or all the rest with their utter lack of information and their distorted viewpoints.
Five months later, Kameny’s rallying cry would inspire a groundbreaking resolution approved by the Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C., which declared that “in the absence of valid evidence to the contrary, homosexuality is not a sickness, disturbance, or other pathology in any sense…” (see Mar 4). Gay activism then entered a new era as ECHO and its member organizations embarked on a string of pickets in New York (see Apr 18), Philadelphia (see Jul 4) and Washington D.C. (see Apr 17, May 29, Jun 26, Jul 31, Oct 23) calling for equal rights for gays and lesbians.
[Sources: Warren D. Adkins, Kay Tobin (Kay Lahusen). “ECHO Report ’64, Part 1: Sidelights of ECHO.” The Ladder 9, no. 4 (January 1965): 4-7. See Jan 5 for Kay Lahusen’s bio.
Lily Hansen, Barbara Gittings. “ECHO Report ’64, Part 2: Highlights of ECHO.” The Ladder 9, no. 4 (January 1965): 7-11, 15-20. See Jul 31 for Barbara Gittings’s bio.
Kay Tobin (Kay Lahusen), Barbara Gittings. “ECHO Report ’64, Part 4: ‘Act or Teach’?” The Ladder 9, no. 5 (February 1965): 13-17.
Jean White. “Homophile Groups Argue Civil Liberties.” The Washington Post (October 11, 1964): B10.]
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October 9th, 2015
TODAY’S AGENDA:
Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Ashland, OR; Atlanta, GA; Ft. Lauderdale, FL; Ft. Meyers, FL; Little Rock, AR; Medford, OR; Oceanside, CA; Orlando, FL; Paramaribo, Suriname; Philadelphia, PA.
Other Events This Weekend: Iris Prize Film Festival, Cardiff, UK; MIX Copenhagen Film Festival, Copenhagen, Denmark; Octobearfest, Denver, CO; Ft. Lauderdale Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, Ft. Lauderdale, FL; QCinema LGBT Film Festival, Ft. Worth, TX; World Gay Rodeo Finals, Las Vegas, NV; Black and Blue Festival, Montréal, QC; Seattle Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, Seattle, WA; Tampa International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, Tampa, FL; AIDS Walk, Tucson, AZ.
TODAY’S AGENDA is brought to you by:
From Michael’s Thing (New York, NY), April 29, 1974, page 35.
Michael Giammetta, publisher of the weekly New York gay bar guide Michael’s Thing, wrote this review of The Alley in 1974:
Just ask anyone in Queens where they go when they want to have a royal time dancing and partying, and they’ll mention The Alley Opened over a year ago, this swinging bar is already a legend. The Alley takes its picturesque name from nearby Vaseline Alley, Queen’s version of Christopher Street where the cruising goes on like crazy. But the action on the streets can’t hold a candle to the sophisticated love-looks exchanged on the dance floor of this exciting bar.
“We never have to go to the city anymore,” a group of attractive boys told me. “We have everything we want right here in Queens. The disc jockeys play the latest and greatest rock hits and everybody is beautiful and together. The boys knew what they were talking about. Unlike many bars out in the boroughs, The Alley was filled with a lot of hip kids in the latest fashions. Here one could find the greased flat-top, rolled up jeans, and muscle shirts of the fifties freak-out movement so popular with flamboyant Manhattanites. But if that’s not your style, enough handsome hippies, glamorous boys, and dapper men frequent this bar to keep everyone happy. …The Alley gets four stars. One for fun. One for flair. One for frivolity. And one for fantabulous!
The Alley appears to have closed sometime in the first half of 1976. The address today is the home of a branch of the Habib American Bank, a subsidiary of a prominent Pakistani bank.
TODAY IN HISTORY:
► South Africa Strikes Down Sodomy Law: 1998. South Africa’s penal code defined sodomy as a Schedule 1 offense, like murder or rape, and was punishable by life imprisonment. Another law, Section 20A of the Sexual Offenses Act, which outlawed any behavior “at a party” — defined as a gathering of two or more men — that would be an invitation to sexual activity. Under that law, any hint of a proposition or even a glance, could lead to an arrest. The laws had been mostly ignored — South African cities had been host to Gay Pride parades for more than a decade — but that didn’t stop two prisoners in Cape Town from being charged with sodomy after engaging in consensual sex in 1997. But South Africa’s Constitutional Court responded to a suit brought by the National Coalition for Gay and Lesbian Equality and struck down the country’s harsh sodomy law along with Section 20A of the Sexual Offenses Act.
The ruling, written by Judge Lori Ackerman with a concurring ruling by Judge Albie Sachs, held that the decision violated South Africa’s new post-Apartheid 1996 constitution which made South Africa one of the first countries in the world to outlaw discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. The justices ruled that the decision was “part of a growing acceptance of difference in an increasingly open and pluralistic South Africa,” which included gays already serving openly in the military and the police force providing domestic partnership benefits for same-sex couples. The ruling African National Congress had earlier decided not to oppose the lawsuit. The ruling was made retroactive to the adoption of an interim constitution of 1994, which also prohibited discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS:
► Simeon Solomon: 1840-1905. When he was about ten years old, Solomon, the youngest child of a prominent London Jewish family, began to learn to paint from his older brother. A few year later, he attended Carey’s Art Academy, and later, as a student at the Royal Academy, he became a prominent member of the Pre-Raphaelite Circle. He held several acclaimed exhibitions at the Royal Academy between 1858 and 1872, with many of his paintings drawing from his Jewish background with scenes from the Hebrew Bible and ordinary Jewish life. His paintings also explored affections between men. In 1871 Simeon Solomon privately published his erotic poem “A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep,” and the images he evoked in the poem would re-appear in his paintings for the rest of his career. John Addington Symonds would note that the themes of same-sex love in the poem was “the key to the meaning of his drawings.”
The Sleepers, and the One that Watcheth (1870, click to enlarge)
Solomon’s career though was ruined in 1873 when he was arrested at a public toilet and fined £100 (about £4,600 or UD$7,400 today) for attempted sodomy. He was arrested again the next year in Paris and was sentenced to three months in prison. He never recovered. From then on, he was hobbled by alcoholism and poverty. He would pass his remaining years in and out of the workhouse where he continued to paint, but both the quality and quantity of his work was severely impaired by his drinking. He finally collapsed in central London and died of bronchitis and alcoholism in 1905. Poet and critic Arthur Symons, on learning of Solomon’s death, lamented, “There is nothing in this world so pitiful as a shipwreck of a genius.”
► Nona Hendryx: 1944. The Trenton, New Jersey-born singer, producer, songwriter, author and actress was one third (with Patti LaBelle and Sarah Dash) of the trio Labelle, whose greatest hit was 1974’s “Lady Marmalade.” Beginning in 1977, Hendryx embarked on a solo career, but struggled to repeat the success of LaBelle. She wasn’t without work though, as she provided background vocals for the Talking Heads and became a part of New York’s underground rock, R&B and dance scene. As the eighties progressed, she collaborated with Keith Richards, Peter Gabriel and Prince. In 2001, she came out as bisexual in an interview with The Advocate, and added gay rights to her repertoire.
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October 8th, 2015
TODAY’S AGENDA:
Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Ashland, OR; Atlanta, GA; Ft. Lauderdale, FL; Ft. Meyers, FL; Little Rock, AR; Medford, OR; Oceanside, CA; Orlando, FL; Paramaribo, Suriname; Philadelphia, PA.
Other Events This Weekend: Iris Prize Film Festival, Cardiff, UK; MIX Copenhagen Film Festival, Copenhagen, Denmark; Octobearfest, Denver, CO; Ft. Lauderdale Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, Ft. Lauderdale, FL; QCinema LGBT Film Festival, Ft. Worth, TX; World Gay Rodeo Finals, Las Vegas, NV; Black and Blue Festival, Montréal, QC; Seattle Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, Seattle, WA; Tampa International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, Tampa, FL; AIDS Walk, Tucson, AZ.
TODAY’S AGENDA is brought to you by:
From Our Community (Dallas, TX), October 1971, page 7.
Like a lot of bars of its day, it featured a large dance floor and drag acts. Unlike the other bars though, MAARS didn’t serve alcohol. It was strictly BYOB, which meant that it could stay open long after the other bars closed. It had also meant that the club could welcome teenagers when it opened earlier in 1971, although the policy seems to have changed to eighteen-and-up by October. Later that month, MAARS hosted a special party for the Ice Capades touring company. According to a write-up in Our Community:
And speaking of great shows, 86 members of the Ice Capades Company were recent guests at the Maars Bar for a party and special performance given in their honor. The grand entertainers pulled out all the stops to give the skaters and company members a hearty Texas welcome.
The John F. Kennedy Learning Center, a pre-kindergarten through fifth grade elementary school, now sits on the block where MAARS used to hold court.
TODAY IN HISTORY:
► Gay Activists Alliance Protests Aversion Therapy: 1972. There are many schools of psychology, and nearly all of them have one thing in common: in one form or fashion, they typically examine at least some aspect of an individual’s interior life in order to understand that person’s motivation for feeling or behaving the way he does. By understanding and working with what is going on inside — by discovering why the patient feels or thinks the way he does — the therapist hopes to modify what happens on the outside. Behavioral Therapy, however, flips that inside-to-outside model around, by focusing solely on re-directing or re-training the patient’s external behaviors directly. In fact, classical Behavioral Therapy cared little about what was going on in the inside. When taken at its purest form, Behaviorism isn’t much concerned with anyone’s interior life at all, let alone changing it. In fact, some Behaviorists went so far as to argue that what happened internally was irrelevant. The only thing that mattered, they argued, was external behavior.
Schematic diagram of Louis William Max’s device for inducing a powerful electric shock. (Click to enlarge.)
In the 1930s, Behavioral Therapy got a very important tool when New York University’s Louis William Max unveiled his new invention safely administer a painful electric shock to his patient (see Mar 11). The idea was that by administering an electric shock under undesirable conditions, the patient would associate that undesired condition with the painful shock, and would change his behavior to avoid that condition in the future. In 1935, Dr. Max delivered another lecture to describe his first usage for his electric shock apparatus: “Breaking up a homosexual fixation” (see Sep 6).
From then on, behavioral therapists connected thousands of gay men to electrodes and their penises to measurement devices. One twitch of arousal while looking at gay porn would result in a powerful electric shock. While some gay men could work up an aversion to gay sex that way, they rarely became straight. They just became very sick or nervous homosexuals, many of them undoubtedly further burdened with therapy-induced PTSD. Of all of the various types of therapies for “curing” gay people, aversion therapy, as this particular form of behavioral therapy was known, was obviously the most torturous.
And so when the Association for the Advancement of Behavior Therapy (AABT) met for their annual convention in New York City, about a hundred members of the Gay Activists Alliance demonstrated in front of the New York Hilton, shouting slogans and distributing pamphlets. They also performed a bit of guerrilla theater, in which they asked heterosexuals to volunteer to submit to aversion therapy to cure them of their heterosexuality. After about an hour, the protesters marched inside the hotel and confronted about 50 delegates in one of the seminars. Several of the demonstrators compared the AABT’s work to Stanley Kubrick’s film, “A Clockwork Orange.” UCLA’s Dr. Robert Liberman, who served as the convention’s program chair, defended aversion therapy. “The therapists here have no moral quarrel with homosexuality,” he said. “All we want o do is to offer assistance for homosexuals to lead a more comfortable, spontaneous and creative life.” Another delegate, who refused to identify himself, claimed that “aversion therapy is entirely voluntary.”
But GAA spokesman Ron Gold countered that aversion therapy was a form of social engineering. “It is brainwashing,” he said. “You can’t deal with an individual homosexual’s problem without also dealing with the antiquated mores of society. Change must come at a broader, society-wide level.”
In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association would finally remove homosexuality from its list of mental disorders (see Dec 15). When the AABT met again in 1974, its president, Dr. Ian Evans, told the membership that providing treatment to clients seeking to change their sexual orientation was morally wrong generally, and he singled out aversion therapy for particular criticism. Evans’s comments were not well received, and aversion therapy continued for a several more years, including at least one research program at Brigham Young University using aversion therapy on gay students continued through at least 1976.
One of the last papers to be published in the medical journals evaluating electric shock therapy to “cure” homosexuality appeared in 1981. Australia’s Nathanial McConaghy and his colleagues acknowledged “ethical objections to the use of behavior therapy in homosexuality,” but dismissed them and went on to present 10 cases in which men underwent electric shock aversion therapy for “compulsive homosexual urges.” By 1981, aversion therapy had mostly died out and McConaghy’s paper appeared as a strange anachronism.
[Sources: “Therapy scored by homosexuals: ‘Aversion cure’ is protested at psychiatrists’ meeting.” The New York Times (October 9, 1972): 32.
Ian M. Evans. “The effect of values on scientific and clinical judgment in behavior therapy.” Behavior Therapy 28, no. 4 (Fall 1977): 483-493.
Max Ford McBride. “Effect of visual stimuli in electric aversion therapy.” Unpublished doctoral dissertation. (Brigham Young University: August 1976). Available online here.
Nathaniel McConaghy, Michael S. Armstrong, Alex Blaszczynski. “Controlled comparison of aversive therapy and covert sensitization in compulsive homosexuality.” Behaviour Research and Therapy 19, no. 5 (1981): 425-434.
You can also learn more about the role of Behavioral Therapy in attempts to “cure” homosexuality in Blind Man’s Bluff, an epilogue to our award-winning original investigation, What Are Little Boys Made Of?]
► Major Advertisers Boycott Controversial “Marcus Welby., M.D.” Episode: 1974. By the early 1970s, the National Gay Task Force had positioned itself as the primary watchdog of the national media’s portrayal of gay people, and because of that, some producers and networks began soliciting advice from the group whenever plots involved gays and lesbians. But whether they accepted the advice from the NGTF or not was another matter altogether, as evidenced by one of the earliest consultations from ABC. The network was planning an episode of Marcus Welby, M.D. called “The Outrage,” which depicted a junior high school boy named Ted who was forcibly raped by a male science teacher. The storyline was unusually graphic for its time, describing Ted’s intestinal damage and hemorrhaging. Ted refuses to talk about what happened, fearing that being raped meant that he was gay. While Ted is in surgery, police arrest the teacher for trying to molest another boy. Ted awakes from surgery ready to testify, and the investigating officer congratulates him for handling the situation like a “real man.” ABC defended the episode by saying it was about pedophilia, not homosexuality. But the storyline played much too closely to the old stereotype of gay men forcibly preying on children.
This wasn’t the first time Marcus Welby, M.D. had drawn the ire of gay activists. The year before, an episode titled “The Other Martin Loring” featured a man whose alcoholism, weight problems, depression and diabetes were blamed on his repressed homosexuality, which itself was depicted as a mental illness (see Feb 20). By the end of that episode, Dr. Welby advised Loring to see a psychiatrist so that Loring will win his “fight” to live a “normal” life. About three dozen gay activists occupied ABC’s offices, but the network refused to alter the episode.
With “The Outrage,” ABC may have wanted to avoid a repeat of that noisy experience, but why they decided to consult with the NGTF is a mystery since the network refused to take the NGTF’s concerns seriously. The only positive outcome of that consultation was that it gave the NGTF, along with the Gay Activist Alliance, a head start in organizing a massive national campaign aimed not only at the network itself, but also at its affiliates and advertisers. On that last point, the GAA had a particular advantage: one of its members worked in ABC’s computer room and had access to the network’s advertising accounts. Whenever an advertiser cancelled, the employee would pass the information on to the GAA, and it would soon appear in major newspapers — sometimes before the network’s vice president knew about it.
Meanwhile gay advocacy groups around the country staged noisy protests outside of stations in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Denver, and Washington, D.C., along with several smaller market stations in Ohio, Iowa, Mississippi, Texas and Idaho. The first station to announce it was dropping the episode was Philadelphia’s WPVI, which was under intense pressure from the city’s very active gay community. Mark Segal, who had already established himself as a masterful “zapper” of live television when he interrupted Walter Cronkite’s CBS newscasts (see Dec 11), may well have been a strong motivator behind WPVI’s decision. “We are gratified by Channel 6’s decision,” he told the press.” It is the first time they have made such a decision in regard to us and we salute them. We hope it will be the first step between us and the station that will result in a better understanding of our position.”
Altogether, seventeen ABC affiliates ended up dropping the episode, and nearly a dozen sponsors had pulled out, including Bayer, Gallo Wine, Listerine, Ralston Purina, Colgate-Palmolive, Shell Oil, Lipton, American Home Products, Breck, Sterling Drug and Gillette. (Ralston Purina even wrote the NGTF sending “best regards” and added, “We do not wish to sponsor a program not welcome in everyone’s home.”) The protest was marked as a success in newspapers across the country, but it proved to be a very temporary one: just one month later, NBC would air an episode of Police Woman titled, “Flowers of Evil” (see Nov 8), which TV Guide called “the single most homophobic show to date.”
If you know of something that belongs on the agenda, please send it here. Don’t forget to include the basics: who, what, when, where, and URL (if available).
And feel free to consider this your open thread for the day. What’s happening in your world?
October 7th, 2015
TODAY’S AGENDA:
Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Ashland, OR; Atlanta, GA; Ft. Lauderdale, FL; Ft. Meyers, FL; Little Rock, AR; Medford, OR; Oceanside, CA; Orlando, FL; Paramaribo, Suriname; Philadelphia, PA.
Other Events This Weekend: Iris Prize Film Festival, Cardiff, UK; MIX Copenhagen Film Festival, Copenhagen, Denmark; Octobearfest, Denver, CO; Ft. Lauderdale Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, Ft. Lauderdale, FL; QCinema LGBT Film Festival, Ft. Worth, TX; World Gay Rodeo Finals, Las Vegas, NV; Black and Blue Festival, Montréal, QC; Seattle Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, Seattle, WA; Tampa International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, Tampa, FL; AIDS Walk, Tucson, AZ.
TODAY’S AGENDA is brought to you by:
From the San Francisco Hotel Greeter’s Guide, 1958, page 47.
A list of must-sees for San Francisco tourists in the late 1950s aren’t much different from today’s tourists: Fisherman’s Wharf, the famous Cable Cars, Coit Tower and, for many, a dip into the city’s gay culture. Finocchio’s was never, strictly speaking, a gay bar, but this advertising in a tourist guide placed in hotel rooms is testimony to the night club’s popularity with tourists. The club started as Club 201, a speakeasy during Prohibition, and moved to larger quarters in 1936 and changed its name to that of the club’s owner, Joe Finocchio, which also just happens to be a nice Italian word for fennel and a not so nice Italian word for gay. Since the 1930s, Finocchio’s was the most famous drag club in the entire country, featuring many drag acts by both gay and straight performers. Joe Finocchio died in January 1986, and his widow finally decided to close the club in 1999 due to rising rents and dwindling audiences.
“I don’t want to marry anyone for at least two years.”(Click to enlarge.)
TODAY IN HISTORY:
► Liberace’s Girl Meets Mom: 1954. So here’s something I’m sure you’ll get a kick out of:
Liberace’s Girl Meets Mom, But No Wedding, By George!
Hollywood, Calif., Oct 7. — Pianist Liberace says that “there isn’t a word of truth to the report that I am engaged” to marry dancer Joanne Rio.
The report popped up yesterday and Liberace promptly denied it.
He said: “I was misquoted and I am very embarrassed for Joanne, who is a lovely girl and an understanding friend.
“I don’t want to marry anyone for at least two years — until I’ve made the motion picture I am planning for Warner Brothers and have a chance to tour Europe, which I plan to do next year.”
Friends say he dates other girls, but that Joanne is the only one he brings home to mother.
Miss Rio is a pretty brunette. She is the daughter of Eddie Rio, West Coast head of the American Guild of Variety Artists.
Liberace had no sooner announced his engagement to Rio when he quickly backtracked before the day was out. It appears that Joanne Rio was something of an on-again/off-again for Lee. They appeared together a month later on the cover of TV Guide, where Rio was introduced as Liberace’s “favorite date.” “If it’s God’s will that Liberace and I get married, then we will. I’m leaving everything in God’s hands,” she told the magazine. God’s hands, apparently, were busy elsewhere.
San Francisco Progress headline for October 7, 1959.
► S.F. Mayoral Candidate Charges Incumbent With Allowing City to Become “Deviate Headquarters”: 1959. The Mattachine Society’s sixth annual convention in Denver, conducted over the Labor Day weekend in September that year, was judged to be one of the more successful conventions in the organization’s history. It featured a good roster of speakers, positive publicity from the Denver press, and little jostling among factions. Even the business meeting was rather routine, with a few dull resolutions passed, often unanimously, along with the announcement that the next convention, in 1960, would be held in San Francisco, where the Society was headquartered.
But one of those quiet, noncontroversial resolutions became headline news as San Francisco was gearing up for the mayoral elections in November, when the tiny The San Francisco Progress’s October 7 edition blared, “Sex Deviates Make S.F. Headquarters,” and placed the blame for it on incumbent mayor George Christopher:
A just-completed survey of vice conditions in San Francisco discloses that this city, during the Christopher administration, has become the national headquarters of the organized homosexuals in the United States. It is a sordid tale, one which will revolt every decent San Franciscans, but one which the San Francisco Progress believes is of vital importance to our city, and therefore must be told.
The survey was made in an effort to determine the truth or falsity of George Christopher’s claim that he has given the people a “clean city.”
The facts are that some of the big call girl operations and a number of minor bookmakers have been put out of business. But in their place another form of vice – – homosexualism — has been allowed to flourish to a shocking extent, and under shocking circumstances.
Last month at a convention of deviates in Denver, Colorado, a resolution, passed unanimously, praised the mayor of San Francisco — by name — for an “enlightened administration” which has permitted the group to flourish here.
The paper published a photocopy of the official resolution, which praised “the efforts of law enforcement authorities in San Francisco based upon an officially administered entity, enlightened, and just City Government and Police Force,” and expressed its appreciation “to Mayor George Christopher and Police Chief Thomas Cahill for their persistent and consistent efforts to conduct their administration with these high ideals foremost in mind.” City Assessor Russell L. Wolden, the Democratic candidate who was challenging Mayor Christopher in the November election, immediately jumped on the issue, telling The Progress:
“This is a matter of grave concern for every parent,” Russell L. Wolden, assessor and candidate for mayor, declared today. “It exposes teenagers to possible contact and contamination in a city admittedly overrun by deviates. For a city administration to permit this situation to exist is nothing less than scandalous. The whole rotten mess cries for investigation.”
Wolden repeated his accusations against Christopher in a speech broadcast on radio that night, and described the Mattachine as an organization that “conducted classroom instruction for deviates” and published literature of “the most lurid, disgusting and distasteful sort.”
William P. Brandhove (left) with Russell L. Wolden.
But the very next day, the entire campaign against Christopher began to fall apart when city’s three major newspaper, The Chronicle, The Examiner and The News-Call-Bulletin all uncovered the identity of man responsible for the resolution. William P. Brandhove, a Wolden campaign worker, had signed himself up as a Mattachine member just days before the convention, where he introduced his resolution to the executive board. “We thought it was just an innocent expression in favor of tolerance in San Francisco,” Mattachine secretary Donald Lucas told the newspapers. “We had no idea that it was intended or might be used for any political purpose.”
When reporters tried to find Brandhove for comment, they found that he had quickly checked out of the Grand Hotel in San Francisco’s Tenderloin, which was then the heart of the gay community. They eventually tracked him down in his Wolden campaign bumper sticker-plastered car. Brandhove admitted that he had, in fact, attended the convention. “I’m not a homosexual but I joined the Mattachine Society only to find out about its activities.” He also tried to distance the Wolden campaign from his activities, although he admitted to turning over copies of the resolution to his attorney, Ralph Taylor — who also just happened to be Wolden’s campaign treasurer — telling Taylor to “make sure it’s used.”
Brandhove’s name was already well known among San Francisco’s political establishment. He had been involved in a similar smear campaign in a 1948 congressional contest and the 1949 mayor’s race. He was also wrapped up in a local blackmail trial involving a small-time publisher of a scandal magazine who extorted large sums of money in exchange for agreeing not to print allegations of homosexual affairs. The Chronicle said Brandhove was “known to police and the underworld as an unreliable stool pigeon,” and noted that he had been arrested in 1930 in Jersey City, New Jersey on a charge of sodomy.
“Want some feelthy campaign issues?” San Francisco Chronicle editorial cartoon.
The papers immediately branded the entire operation a “smear,” which not only tarnished the good name of the honorable mayor, but the city itself and its citizenry, a charge underlined by the mayor himself. “In a blind drive for office, my opponent has degraded the city,” said Christopher. “Under no circumstances would I covet any office so much that I would stoop to maligning somebody.” Democrats also lambasted Wolden, with Democrat Club president Franklyn K. Brann saying “I didn’t know the Mattachine Society was running for Mayor.” The Chronicle and The News-Call-Bulletin called for Wolden to withdraw from the race. The Examiner blasted him for offending “the tenets of political decency of the Democratic Party that he so recently joined.” But instead of calling for Wolden to withdraw, The Examiner instead called on voters to kick him out.
And so they did. Seventy-one percent of registered voters turned out on November 3 and re-elected Christopher with in a 61% to 39% landslide. Meanwhile, the Mattachine Society, which had lodged a $1 million lawsuit against Wolden, reported that they were “deluged with telephone calls and visits from friends, well-wishers, curiosity-seekers and others” as a result of the controversy. Wolden managed to stay on as the city’s assessor until 1966 when, after twenty-seven years in office, he was convicted on eight counts of bribery and one of conspiracy for accepting payoffs in exchange for lower tax assessments.
[Sources: Wes Knight. “Smear Drive.” The Mattachine Review 5, no. 11 (November 1959): 12-15.
“Sex deviates make S.F. Headquarters: ‘Enlightened’ city rule earns praise.” San Francisco Progress (October 7, 1959). As reprinted in The Mattachine Review (November 1959): 15-24.
Yancey Smith. “‘Mystery man’ seen in ‘smear’.” The San Francisco News-Call-Bulletin (October 8, 1959). As reprinted in The Mattachine Review (November 1959): 24-25.
George Draper. “Praise of Mayor’s policy on deviates engineered by ex-police informer.” The San Francisco Chronicle (October 9, 1959). As reprinted in The Mattachine Review (November 1959): 26-29.]
► Top Johnson Aid Outed In Sex Scandal: 1964. Walter Jenkins and Lyndon B. Johnson went way back, all the way back to 1939 when Johnson was still a young member of the U.S. House of Representatives. For the next 25 years, Jenkins was Johnson’s right hand man and top administrative assistant as Johnson rose through the ranks as Senator, Senate Majority Leader, Vice President, and ultimately President following John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Journalist Bill Moyers, who was Johnson’s press secretary praised Jenkins’s political skills: “When they come to canonize political aides, [Jenkins] will be the first summoned, for no man ever negotiated the shark-infested waters of the Potomac with more decency or charity or came out on the other side with his integrity less shaken. If Lyndon Johnson owed everything to one human being other than Lady Bird, he owed it to Walter Jenkins.”
But Johnson would effectively wind up losing his right arm during the final weeks before the 1964 presidential election when District of Columbia police arrested Jenkins at a YMCA restroom and charged him with disorderly conduct. That was not-so-subtle code for going down on a stranger in a men’s room. Jenkins paid the $50 fine. Republican operatives tried to shop the story to the press, but those were the days when a fellow’s private life was still considered off-limits. The Chicago Tribune and the Cincinnati Enquirer both refused the story. But on October 14, an editor for the Washington Star called the White House seeking comment on the arrest. White House staff tried to lobby all three Washington newspapers not to run the story, but that only confirmed the rumors. Administration staffers then tried to chalk the incident up to exhaustion and stress, but it soon came out that Jenkins had been arrested in 1959 on similar charges. The Star ran its story and a shocked President Johnson obtained Jenkins’s resignation that same day.
But a scandal that could have caused significant damage to the presidential campaign was soon pushed off of the front pages by two back-to-back international crisis. Nikita Khrushchev was unceremoniously dumped as Soviet Premier that same day, and China detonated a nuclear bomb two days later. Some members of the Goldwater campaign made a half-hearted effort to drum up outrage over Jenkins — it issued bumper stickers reading “All the way with LBJ but don’t go near the YMCA” — but Goldwater himself declined to make the incident a campaign issue. “It was a sad time for Jenkins’ wife and children, and I was not about to add to their private sorrow,” he later wrote.
Jenkins’s career may have been over, but the genuine good feelings held by Johnson administration insiders were undiminished. Jenkins received a large number of letters of support from administration officials and a personal endorsement from Lady Bird, who wrote an open letter that was published by several newspapers: “My heart is aching today for someone who has reached the end point of exhaustion in dedicated service to his country.”
Jenkins and his wife, Marjorie, moved back to Texas and remained together until separating in the early 1970s, although the two never divorced. Meanwhile Jenkins’s absence at the White House was keenly felt. Johnson Press Secretary George Reedy once commented, “A great deal of the president’s difficulties can be traced to the fact that Walter had to leave…. All of history might have been different if it hadn’t been for that episode.” Attorney General Ramsey Clark felt that Jenkins’s resignation “deprived the president of the single most effective and trusted aide that he had. The results would be enormous when the president came into his hard times. Walter’s counsel on Vietnam might have been extremely helpful.”
TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
► Dan Savage: 1964. The Chicago native grew up attending Archbishop Quigley Preparatory Seminary North, which is described as a high school for young men considering the priesthood. (Other graduates include Cardinal Edward Egan and sociologist/novelist Fr. Andrew Greeley.) After graduating from the University of Illinois in Urbana, Savage moved to Madison, Wisconsin, where he got to know Tim Keck, co-founder of The Onion, who was about to go to Seattle to establish the alt-weekly The Stranger. Savage told him to make sure the paper had an advice column because “everybody claims to hate ’em, but everybody seems to read ’em.”
To Savage’s surprise, he ended up being that columnist, when his sex advice column “Savage Love,” appeared in the very first edition of The Stranger in 1991. Since then, “Savage Love” has been the source of a number of well-known neologisms: GGG (good, giving, game, to describe an ideal sex partner), Monogamish, Pegging, “The Campsite Rule” (when starting a relationship with a younger partner, leave them in better emotional and physical shape than when you started), Saddlebacking (the phenomenon of Christian teens engaging in unprotected anal sex in order to preserve their virginities), and, his most famous one, Santorum.
In late 2010, when Billy Lucas became the latest in a tragic line of teens who had killed themselves because of anti-gay bullying, Savage wrote:
I wish I could have talked to this kid for five minutes. I wish I could have told Billy that it gets better. I wish I could have told him that, however bad things were, however isolated and alone he was, it gets better. But gay adults aren’t allowed to talk to these kids. Schools and churches don’t bring us in to talk to teenagers who are being bullied. Many of these kids have homophobic parents who believe that they can prevent their gay children from growing up to be gay—or from ever coming out—by depriving them of information, resources, and positive role models.
Why are we waiting for permission to talk to these kids? We have the ability to talk directly to them right now. We don’t have to wait for permission to let them know that it gets better. We can reach these kids.
The way to reach those kids was through videos uploaded on the Internet. Since 2010, the It Gets Better project has hosted some 50,000 videos from around the world with a simple message: just hold on and it will get better. The project was given a special 2012 Emmy award for “strategically, creatively and powerfully utilizing the media to educate and inspire.”
Savage is editor of The Stranger, and his “Savage Love” column appears in alternative weeklies across North America. He writes his advice column at the desk once owned by Eppie Lederer, better known as Ann Landers. Savage also records a weekly Savage Lovecast podcast. He has written six books, edited another, contributed op-eds for The New York Times, and has made numerous appearances on talk shows and news programs. His latest book, American Savage: Insights, Slights, and Fights on Faith, Sex, Love, and Politics
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October 6th, 2015
TODAY’S AGENDA is brought to you by:
From This Week In Texas, July 2, 1977, page 31.
Mayor Abe Aronovitz
TODAY IN HISTORY:
► Miami Mayor: “Deviates Are Leaving The City”: 1954. Miami’s ongoing media-driven hysteria over discovering the presence of gay people in their midst (see Aug 3, Aug 11, Aug 12, Aug 13 (twice that day), Aug 14, Aug 15, Aug 16, Aug 26, Aug 31, Sep 1, Sep 2, Sep 7, Sep 15, and Sep 19) appeared to be on the wane, with Mayor Abe Aronovitz telling The Miami News that the city’s highly publicized raids on gay bars and beaches were finally having their effect:
Mayor Claims Deviates Are Leaving City
Miami is the cleanest town in the area so far as homosexuals go, it was claimed by Mayor Abe Aronovitz, who said, “but we are not solving it from a humanitarian standpoint because we are only clearing it up as far as Miami is concerned.”
“There is no solution from a humanitarian standpoint, however, because I have received complaints from both Broward County on the north and Monroe County on the south that the homosexuals are just drifting out of Miami.”
The City Commission later today is expected to pass on second reading an ordinance aimed at controlling homosexuals and also jeopardizing liquor licenses of establishments serving people known to have homosexual tendencies.
It was passed on the first reading two weeks ago.
And that is why there are no homosexuals in Miami anymore.
► Rev. Troy Perry Holds First Metropolitan Community Church Service: 1968. Perry’s life had always been difficult. His bootlegger father died when Perry was twelve. His mother married an alcoholic who reduced the family to poverty and was physically abusive. Troy ran away from home and stayed with relatives, who introduced him to Pentecostalism. In 1959, the nineteen-year-old Perry married a Church of God pastor’s daughter and became the pastor of a CoG church in Jolliet, Illinois — all this despite knowing that he was gay and was sexually active with other men. He merely told himself that it was a phase and that he wasn’t really gay. After all, it was impossible to be both gay and Christian, his superiors in the church had reassured him. But his cover didn’t last long in Jolliet though, and when his secret came out, he was told by church leaders to leave the church and tell his wife, who decided to stay with him.
The couple moved to California, where they joined the Church of God of Prophecy, another Pentecostal denomination. When he finally decided to tell his superiors in that denomination that he was gay, they acted as CoG had: they kicked him out. This time though, his wife left him, taking their two young sons with her. Perry spent the next several years trying to figure out what he was: was he gay, or was he Christian? In 1967, he tried to kill himself after breaking up with a boyfriend. The following year, he was on a date at a gay bar called The Patch near Long Beach when when Los Angeles police decided to randomly arrest two of the bar’s patrons (see Aug 17) . His date, broken and demoralized by the experience, decided that no one cared about gay people, including God. That’s when Perry decided it was time to show that young man, and all gay people, differently.
From The Los Angeles Advocate. October 1968, page 20.
And so on October 6, 1969, he held his first worship service in the living room of his Huntington Park home. Twelve people attended. Nine were friends of his, who showed up to support him. Three were there in response to an ad that Perry placed in that month’s edition of The Los Angeles Advocate. The next week, there were twelve. Pretty soon, the fledgling congregation was growing so quickly that finding larger quarters became a weekly endeavor. “You better attend church every Sunday if you want to know where the church is going to be,” members joked.
Soon the congregation moved to the Encore Theater on Melrose Avenue, and they quickly filled all 385 seats in the house. By the time the MCC bought its first genuine church of its own in the West Adams area, the congregation had swelled to 1,000. That purchased also made the MCC the gay organization in the U.S. to own a piece of real estate. In 1996, Perry remarked, “If you had told me twenty-eight years ago that the largest organization in the world touching the lives of gays and lesbians would be a church, I would not have believed you.” Over the years, twenty-one MCC churches were targets of arsonists and four MCC clergy were murdered. But in 2000, Perry repeated his vow: “We will never, ever, be chased out of a city; we’ve never, ever left a city where we’ve faced persecution.” The MCC currently has 172 churches in 37 countries.
[Source: Lee Arnold. “Troy Perry (1940- ).” In Vern. L. Bullough’s (ed.) Before Stonewall: Activists for Gay and Lesbian Rights in Historical Context
► San Francisco Police Sweep The Castro: 1989. ACT-UP had put on a number of protests and marches before in San Francisco, almost all of them without incident. This one was small: about 150 people showed up at the Federal Building a few blocks from City Hall. After a brief rally, they marched to City Hall, then up Market Street to the Mint Building before ending at Castro Street. Typically during marches like this one, the Police department would assign a handful of officers to help block traffic and ensure the safety of protesters and onlookers. But one marcher, Gerard Koskovich, noticed something was different about this march:
“The march turned non-routine the minute it left the federal plaza. Hordes of San Francisco police officers on foot and on motorcycles emerged as soon as the protesters started marching on the street. They attempted to force the march to stay on the sidewalk,” said Koskovich, who wrote an essay about the Castro Sweep in the 2002 anthology Out in the Castro: Desire, Promise, Activism
. “The first arrest happened a block away from the federal building. The tactical coordinator for ACT UP stepped out into the street to talk to the commanding officer and he was immediately grabbed, thrown face down on the asphalt, handcuffed, and then taken away. No one had seen anything like this at a queer protest in San Francisco for a number of years.”
By the time the rally reached the Castro, the marchers were met by hundreds of police officers. It was a sign of how the night would end.
“When I got there I saw the single largest mass of San Francisco police officers I had ever seen at that point. The entire intersection of Castro and Market streets was filled with officers standing in rank,” said Koskovich. “At this point it was still a peaceful march of people staying on the sidewalk. It was completely perplexing why the police force brought out a horde of officers.”
Angered by the police confrontation, marchers sat down in the middle of Castro Street near Market. One group staged a die-in, and others spray-painted stenciled slogans and body outlines on the pavement as a “permanent AIDS quilt” on the street. Police then announced that the demonstration was an “illegal action” and began a sweep action, marching in unison down Castro toward 18th street, forcing thousands inside the Castro’s homes, stores, bars and restaurants under virtual house arrest. As Koskovich wrote in OutWeek a month later:
The police soon charged in earnest. I saw one officer advance with his baton in a jabbing position, a technique that the San Francisco Police Commission banned after an officer using it nearly killed Farmworkers Union co-founder Delores Huerta last year. Others pushed with the sides of their batons, knocking the front of the crowd off balance. I fell against the person to my left, scraping my ear, then regained my footing.
After a partial withdrawal and a second effort to clear the area, the police announced that the entire block of Castro from Market to 18th St., including the sidewalks, had been declared an illegal assembly area. The crowd held its ground, milling into the street and repeatedly chanting “Cops go home” and “Racist, sexist, anti-gay, SFPD go away.” A group of officers reacted by ramming their motorcycles through the center of the crowd.
In the confusion, I lost sight of the friends I had been standing with and made my way to the opposite side of Castro St. From that vantage, I watched an officer break ranks, approach a man standing peacefully in the street, and beat him over the shoulder. Shortly thereafter, I saw a second officer pin a bystander against a news box, then club him to the pavement. Other cops joined in, one of them so eager to land a blow that he carelessly clubbed a fellow officer.
Minutes later, I heard someone calling out my name and spotted Alex Chee, one of the friends I had marched with, leaning from an ambulance moving slowly through the police lines. “I’m going to the hospital with Mike,” he shouted. With a sinking feeling, I pushed to the back window; inside, I could see another friend, Michael Barnette—a 19-year-old who was attending his first ACT UP demonstration—strapped motionless on a stretcher.
Michael received several stitches to close a gash across his eyebrow. According to witnesses, an officer identified as a captain in the SFPD Tactical Unit and an event commander for the October 6 protest clubbed Michael on the head as he stood on the sidewalk on the west side of Castro St. From the opposite corner, I had heard protesters chanting the officer’s helmet number—1942— but had not seen the beating.
This went on from 8:00 to 10:00 p.m. in an action which reminded everyone of the White Night riots ten years earlier, when San Francisco police rioted in the Castro following the conviction of Dan White of manslaughter for the assassination of Harvey Milk (see May 21).
The following night, 1,500 protesters demonstrated the police action in the Castro. Mayor Art Agnos issued a statement to the Bay Area Reporter saying that previous night’s police action was “deeply disturbing, and if even 25 percent of the allegations turn out to be true then what happened October 6 is unacceptable.” Deputy Police Chief Jack Jordan was demoted, and he resigned the following month. Other high-ranking officers were re-assigned and reprimanded. The Tactical Squad was relived of one of its primary responsibilities, crowd control. “Civil disobedience did occur,” Police Chief Frank Jordon said, but the response was “inappropriate” and represented a command breakdown. Three years later, the city settled a series of lawsuits brought by victims for $250,000.
► Matthew Shepard Assaulted: 1998. At around 6:30 PM, Aaron Kreifels was riding his bicycle on Snowy Mountain View Road, just outside of Laramie, Wyoming, when he wiped out near the end of a rough buck-and-rail fence. In the fall, he severely damaged his front tire. Aaron got up to try to figure out how to get back into town when he was startled by what he thought was a scarecrow. He took a closer look and discovered that it wasn’t a scarecrow, but a 5-foot-2, 102 pound University of Wyoming student by the name of Matthew Shepard. Aaron was further surprised to see that the bloody figure was still alive, though barely. Matthew was comatose, breathing “as if his lungs are full of blood,” Aaron would later testify. It had been a very cold day that day with a 30-degree freezing wind the night before, and it was now evening again. Matthew had been there for more than 18 hours, laying on his back, head propped against the fence, his legs outstretched. His hands were tied behind him, and the rope was tied to a fence post just four inches off the ground. His shoes were missing.
Aaron, in a state of panic, ran to the nearby home of Charles Dolan. From there, they called 911, and then the both of them returned to Matthew to wait for the sheriff’s deputy to arrive. Deputy Reggie Fluty later testified that the only spots not covered in blood on Matt’s brutally disfigured face were tracks cleansed by his tears. She told the barely breathing victim, “Baby, I’m so sorry this happened.”
Matthew was rushed to Poudre Valley Hospital’s intensive care unit in critical condition. He suffered fractures from the back of his head to the front of his right ear from being pistol-whipped by a 357-Magnum more than twenty times. He had severe brain stem damage which affected his body’s ability to control heart rate, breathing, temperature, and other involuntary functions. There were lacerations around his head, face and neck. He had welts on his back and arm, and bruised knees and groin. He had also suffered from hypothermia. His injuries were too severe for doctors to operate. They did however insert a drain into Matthew’s skull to relieve the pressure on his brain.
By the end of the day, Matthew Shepard was laying quietly in a soft, warm bed with clean sheets after having spent eighteen hours in the freezing high plains of Wyoming tied to a fence post. He was breathing with the aid of a ventilator.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
► Bruno Balz: 1902-1988. He wrote some of Germany’s most famous songs for film despite his career being hampered by official persecution for his homosexuality. When Balz was arrested by Nazi authorities for violating Germany’s Paragraph 175 outlawing male homosexuality, he was released after several months’ imprisonment on the condition that his name not be mentioned in public. When he was arrested again in 1941 and tortured in Gestapo headquarters, his songwriting partner, Michael Jary, appealed to authorities to release him, saying that he could write songs to lift German morale as part of the war effort. He wrote two of his greatest hits just days after his release. And while his songs would be criticized later for aiding the war effort, gays in Germany were buoyed by what they saw as double meanings in some of his songs. One song in particular, his 1938 classic “Kann denn Liebe Sunde sein?” (“Can Love Be a Sin?”), became something of an anthem for Germany’s underground gay community:
Every little Philistine makes my life miserable, for he’s always
talking about morality. And whatever he may think and do, you can
see that he just doesn’t want anyone to be happy…. Whatever
the world thinks of me, I don’t care, I’ll only be true to love.
Can love be a sin?
Can’t anybody know when you kiss,
When you forget everything out of happiness?
Balz’s troubles continued even after the war and the fall of Nazism. After all, Paragraph 175 remained the law of the land until 1994 after Germany’s reunification, which meant that the strictures on him remained in effect preventing him from receiving his due credit for his music. Balz died in 1988. There is now a Bruno Balz theater named for him in Berlin.
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October 5th, 2015
TODAY’S AGENDA is brought to you by:
From GPU News (Milwaukee, WI), May 1978, page 40.
TODAY IN HISTORY:
► Vasco Núñez de Balboa Feeds “Men Dressed Like Women” To His Dogs: 1513. The Spanish conquistador and explorer Vasco Núñez de Balboa is a revered figure in Panama, where you can buy a bottle of Balboa beer for about 1.50 Balboas (which is used interchangeably with the U.S. Dollar, also legal currency there). His name graces Panama City’s main port at the Pacific entrance to the Panama Canal as well as numerous avenues and parks throughout the country.
Balboa first explored the South American coast from present-day Columbia to Nicaragua in 1501, before settling on the island of Hispaniola to become a farmer. When Balboa returned to the South American continent in 1509, he did so as a stowaway from Hispaniola — a bankruptcy refugee, to be exact — but he quickly proved his worth with his knowledge of geography and local native culture, thanks to his earlier expedition. In 1510, Balboa founded the city of Santa Maria la Antigua del Darién on the northern coast of present-day Colombia near today’s border with Panama, and in 1511, he declared himself governor of Veragua, which roughly covered the Caribbean coast of present-day Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama. Balboa then spent the next three years exploring his domain, defeating various native tribes and befriending others, always remaining on the lookout for gold.
In 1513, Balboa arrived at the region in present-day Panama controlled by the chief Careta, whose forces Balboa defeated and whom Balboa befriended. Together, Balboa and Careta defeated a rival chief, Ponca, and made an alliance with another chief, Comagre, whose son told them that if they really wanted to find lots of gold, they needed to conquer the tribes living on the coast of “the other sea” on the other side of the Isthmus of Panama. Balboa and his hordes set off to conquer their way south, and on September 20, when Balboa stood on a summit on the mountains alongside the Chucunaque River, he became the first European to see, on the distant horizon, the Pacific Ocean. Nine days and one battle later, Balboa walked knee-deep into the ocean with his sword in one hand and his battle standard in the other, and claimed possession of the “South Sea” and all of its adjoining lands for Spain.
While Balboa continued his journey along Panama’s Pacific coast, conquering and discovering as he went, he discovered, after killing chief Quarega and entering his village, what Balboa perceived to be the famously relaxed attitude among Quarega’s people toward the Peccatum illud horribile, inter christianos non nominandum. I say perceived, because it’s not exactly clear that Balboa’s men correctly interpreted what they saw. Sure, native groups throughout Panama had a reputation for tolerance of homosexuality and cross-gender behavior, so it’s not inconceivable that he found some of those goings-ons in Quarega’s court. But some scholars doubt that Balboa’s men actually managed to come across two full score of them in a single village. Some speculate that the Spaniards mistook the ceremonial attire of members of Quarega’s court for women’s clothing. Others suggest that in the political vacuum following Quarega’s death, there may have been some finger-pointing among political rivals who were savvy to the Spaniards’ disgust for the “sin so horrible.”
At any rate, at least forty of them — Gay men? Transgenders? Cross dressers? Or disgraced officials on the losing end of political score-settling? — were rounded up and devoured by Balboa’s dogs, in what has been described as the first recorded instance of Spanish punishment of homosexuality in the New World. About a century later, Antonio de la Calancha, a Spanish official in Lima, was still singing his praises, albeit somewhat inaccurately, of the man who “saw men dressed like women; Balboa learnt that they were sodomites and threw the king and forty others to be eaten by his dogs, a fine action of an honorable and Catholic Spaniard.”
[Sources: Charles C. Mann 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created
Ward Stavig. “Political ‘abomination’ and private reservations: the nefarious sin, homosexuality, and cultural values in colonial Peru.” In Pete Sigal’s (ed.) Infamous Desire: Male Homosexuality in Colonial Latin America
Walter Williams. “The abominable sin: the Spanish campaign against ‘sodomy’ and its results in modern Latin America” in ): in Larry Gross and James D. Woods’ (eds.) The Columbia Reader on Lesbians & Gay Men in Media, Society, and Politics
► California Studies Treatment for “Sex Deviants”: 1951. An item appeared in The Los Angeles Times describing efforts that promised “the eventual solution of one of California’s most difficult problems – the sex offender.” California had tried to “legislate sexual offenses out of existence” through more severe penalties, but lawmakers were “finally persuaded medical research might bring results,” and passed the Sexual Deviation Research Act in 1950. And with that, according to The Times, efforts were now fanning out to “several laboratories, schools, hospitals, and clinics throughout the State.” The Dean of UCLA’s Medical School was already bragging of research breakthroughs. “It is now possible, he states, to predict with a fair degree of accuracy, through blood and urine tests, the onset of a sexually psychopathic ‘attack’.” What, exactly, was being studied was obviously very sensitive; it took eight paragraphs before the LA Times writer finally got around to describing what these “sexual deviations” might be:
Another study underway is concerned with diagnosis and treatment of homosexual males. The purpose of this research is twofold: (1) to make physical, psychiatric, glandular and mental studies of the types of homosexuals who affect feminine behavior and (2) to investigate such psychological factors in homosexuality as the personal, family, social and cultural histories of patients. Results of these studies, it is felt, should greatly add to more accurate diagnosis of types of homosexuality and its treatment.
Research would continue for at least another thirty years in California and throughout the western world, all to no avail. When the American Psychiatric Association finally determined in 1973 that homosexuality was not a mental illness in need of a cure, efforts to change sexual orientation in the scientific community slowly began to wane over the course of the next decade — with the notable exception of a very tiny religiously-motivated dissident minority, and their efforts to change sexual orientation still come up short. California’s law mandating research into curing homosexuality remained on the books, ignored and forgotten, until it was finally repealed in 2010. In 2012, California began moving toward the opposite direction when Gov. Jerry Brown signed legislation which prohibits licensed professionals from providing conversion therapy to minors.
► 25 YEARS AGO: Cincinnati Museum Acquitted of Pornography Charges over Mapplethorpe Exhibit: 1990. Before the late 1980s, photographer Robert Mapplethorpe was known for his brilliant black and white photographs of achingly beautiful subjects: orchids, lilies and celebrities, including Richard Gere, Laurie Anderson, Peter Gabriel, Andy Warhol, Grace Jones and Patti Smith. But when he began putting together his 1989 exhibit, The Perfect Moment, he decided to include some of his more recent works, photos that he had begun taking since the early 1980s of very sexually explicit images of homoeroticism and sadomasochism. The exhibit, funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, sparked immediate outrage among social conservatives. Sen. Jesse Helms (R-NC) tried to de-fund the NEA entirely, and wound up settling for yet another of those many “Helms Amendments” that wound up littering the legal landscape for decades to come. This amendment barred the NEA from funding “obscenity,” a nebulous mandate which cast a chilling effect on the arts for more than a decade.
The controversy led the Corcoran Gallery to cancel The Perfect Moment, in the summer of 1989, but the Washington Project for the Arts stepped in to host the show. Thanks to the publicity, some forty thousand people attended. The show’s next step was the University Art Museum in Berkeley, which hosted the show without incident. From there, it went to the Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati, but police closed the exhibit on opening day in order to videotape the exhibit on orders from Hamilton County Prosecutor Arthur Ney. Later that day, Ney got an indictment from the grand jury charging the CAC and its director, Dennis Barrie, on charges of pandering obscenity and child pornography. If convicted, the museum faced fines of up to $10,000 and Barrie faced up to a year in prison and $2,000 in fines.
A demonstration in downtown Cincinnati immediately after the trial ended.
As far as anyone knew, no other museum in the country had ever been indicted on similar charges. The controversy had an immediate impact in the city and on the museum. When the exhibit reopened with seven portraits removed and replaced with black placards, crowds descended on the small museum to see what the fuss was all about. One farmer arrived with mud on his boots and overalls and presented a check for $20, saying that he’d fought in World War II for the freedom of expression exemplified by the exhibit. Nearly 80,000 people attended the exhibition, making it one of the most successful shows ever for the CAC.
When the trial got underway in late September, the jurors were subject to a crash course on art history and photography from some of the country’s leading museum directors. Martin Friedman, director of Minneapolis’s Walker Art Center, expounded on the formalism behind Mapplethorpe’s composition and lighting. Janet Kardon, the exhibit’s curator, testified, “No matter what the subject matter, he brought a sense of perfection to it. And all of the attributes one characterizes a good formal portrait by, that is composition and light and the way the frame is placed around the image, all of those things are brought to every image.” One of those images, was Mapplethorpe’s 1978 Self Portrait (NSFW), which featured what Kardon described as a “figure study” in which “the human figured is centered. The horizontal line is two-thirds of the way up, almost the classical two-thirds to one-third proportions … it’s very symmetrical, which is characteristic of his flowers.” Of course, none of his flowers had a bull whip inserted in the ass.
Evan Turner, from the Cleveland Museum of Art, told the jury, “I think with these difficult images, one way of judging their quality … is to look at them as abstract, which they are, essentially.” Robert Sobieszek, photography curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, placed the portraits in biographical terms: “They reveal, in very strong, forceful ways, a major concern of this creative artist; a major part of his life, a major part of his psyche or psychology, his mental make-up and perhaps, they say to me, some troubled portion of this life that he was trying to come to grips with… IT’s not unlike Van Gogh painting himself with his ear torn off, or cut up.”
Surprisingly, the prosecution called only one “expert” witness, the anti-gay activist and author Judith Reisman, who was then a paid “researcher” for the American Family Association’s. Her artistic background, as the defense repeatedly pointed out, was limited to writing songs for Captain Kangaroo.
Dennis Barrie hugs his attorney H. Louis Sirkin after hearing the verdict.
After less than two hours of deliberation, the mostly blue-collar jury returned verdicts of not guilty. Defense lawyer H. Louis Sirkin called the verdict “a signal to everybody that before they start shutting down museums and telling people what they can say and what they can see, they better realize there is a protection out there, and it is the greatest document ever written.” A visibly relieved Barrie reacted, “This was a major battle for art and for creativity, for the continuance of creativity in this country. Mapplethorpe was an important artist. It was a beautiful show. It should never have been in court.” Meanwhile, the CAC came out of the controversy stronger than ever. It had overgrown its previous digs at the Mercantile Center and in 2003 moved into a splendid new building which the New York Times described as “the best new building since the Cold War.”
[Additional source: Richard Meyer. Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art
TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
► 175 YEARS AGO: John Addington Symonds: 1840-1893. He fulfilled the expectations of Victorian England by marrying and having a family, but the poet and literary critic was always conscious of “men constituted like me.” As an early proponent of what was then called “male love,” Symonds was among the first to publish works for general audiences with direct references to homosexuality. His 1876 Studies of the Greek Poets, Second Series, included praise for Greek “friendship,” which led to withering condemnation from critics. One critic decried Symond’s “phallic ecstasy” and his “palpitations at male beauty.”
While Symonds became more circumspect in identifying himself with “male love,” he nevertheless continued to explore the theme. Symonds’s 1878 translation of Michelangelo’s Sonnets corrected, for the first time, the proper male pronouns which had been rendered female by previous translators. And in that same year, he published his poem “The Meeting of David and Jonathan” (1878), where Jonathan, “In his arms of strength / Took David, and for some love found at length / Solace in speech, and pressure and breath / Wherewith the mouth of yearning winnoweth /Hearts overcharged for utterance. In that kiss / Soul into soul was knit and bliss to bliss.”
Whew!
But Symonds kept most of his writings on homosexuality private, first in letters to Walt Whitman, Edmund Gosse, and Edward Carpenter, and later in privately-circulated works like Male Love: A Problem in Greek Ethics (1883) and A Problem in Modern Ethics (1891), where he wrote in the introduction this answer to those who argued that the only good homosexual was a celibate homosexual:
I have taken no vow of celibacy. If I have taken any vow at all, it is to fight for the rights of an innocent, harmless, downtrodden group of outraged personalities. The cross of a Crusade is sewn upon the sleeve of my right arm. To expect from me and from my fellows the renouncement voluntarily undertaken by a Catholic priest is an absurdity, when we join no order, have no faith to uphold, no ecclesiastical system to support. We maintain that we have the right to exist after the fashion which nature made us. And if we cannot alter your laws, we shall go on breaking them. You may condemn us to infamy, exile, prison -– as you formerly burned witches. You may degrade our emotional instincts and drive us into vice and misery. But you will not eradicate inverted sexuality.”
In 1893, he began to publish more openly about homosexuality in Walt Whitman: A Study, and he began a collaboration with Havelock Ellis, who was then embarking on his landmark study, Sexual Inversion. Symonds died in 1893, ten months into that collaboration. When Sexual Inversion made its English debut in 1897, Symonds was listed as co-author. But Symonds’s executor, scandalized at the association, prohibited his name from being further associated with the book. Symonds was credited as “Z” in the second 1897 printing, and his essay “A Problem in Greek Ethics” was deleted. Interest in Symonds was revived in 1963 when Phyllis Grosskurth won the 1964 Canadian Governor General’s Award for John Addington Symonds: A Biography. Twenty years later, she would also bring The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds to print for the first time in 1984, ninety-one years after his death.
► David Pallone: 1951. Major League Baseball umpires never become household names. But a few can somehow find ways to become memorable. That happened to Pallone on April 30, 1988, when he was umpiring at first base in Cincinnati when, in the ninth inning, he called New York Mets outfielder Mookie Wilson safe on a delayed call. That delay allowed another Mets runner to score the winning run. Reds’ manager Pete Rose rushed to Pallone to argue the call. Tempers escalated, one thing led to another, Pallone might have touched Rose, Rose definitely shoved Pallone, and Pallone immediately ejected him from the game. Fans showered the field with trash for the next fifteen minutes and Pallone had to be taken out of the game to ease tension. Rose was suspended for 30 days and fined $10,000.
Later that year, Pallone was forced to resign when a New York Post article outed him as gay and claimed that he was part of a teenage sex ring. Those charges were later proven groundless, but Pallone says in his memoir Behind the Mask: My Double Life in Baseball
► Thomas Roberts: 1972. The former CNN Headline News anchor became the first national anchorman to come out as gay when, in 2006, he spoke at the annual convention of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association in Miami Florida during a panel discussion titled “Off Camera: The Challenge of LGBT TV Anchors.” Describing his appearance on that panel as the biggest step he had taken publicly to be out, he had been coming out at CNN over the past several years. But he found the tension between his public life and private life to be difficult to balance. “When you hold something back, that’s all everyone wants to know,” he told the gathering.
Roberts stayed at CNN until 2007, when he resigned to move to Washington, D.C. to pursue other opportunities. In late 2010, he began guest-anchoring for MSNBC, and became a full-time anchor in December. He currently anchors MSNBC Live with Thomas Roberts weekdays from 1:00 to 3:00 E.T. In 2012, Roberts married Patrick Abner in New York, making Roberts the first (and the most handsome) national anchor to marry a same-sex partner.
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