Box Turtle Bulletin

Today In History, 1961: San Francisco Police Raid Tay-Bush Inn

55 YEARS AGO: San Francisco Mayor George Christopher faced a serious challenge to his re-election in 1959 from city Assessor Russ Wolden, Jr., who planted a story under a banner headline, “Sex Deviates Make S.F. Headquarters,” in the weekly San Francisco Progress (Oct 7). Wolden charged that Christopher allowed “this unsavory wicked situation … to fester and spread like a cancerous growth on the body of San Francisco.” If Wolden hoped to bring the entire city up on arms, he was successful beyond his dreams — but not in the way he planned. Over the next three weeks, San Francisco’s three dailies investigated the story and backed the incumbent, condemning Wolden for acting “beyond the pale of decent politics.” The concern wasn’t that Wolden had attacked a persecuted minority, but that he had “stigmatized the city” and “degraded the good name of San Francisco.”

Christopher won re-election by a landslide, but he was determined that he would never again be susceptible to charges of being soft on vice. One way of demonstrating his commitment was to launch a series of highly publicized gay bar raids, with the San Francisco Police Department coordinating their attacks with the California Alcohol and Beverage Control Board. The ensuing series of raids through the summer culminated in the largest vice raid in the city’s history, when 89 men and 14 women were arrested at the Tay-Bush Inn just a few bocks northwest of Union Square. Witnesses reported that police first allowed “respectable looking” and politically connected customers to leave quietly before beginning the round-up. Hal Call (Sep 20), the San Francisco gay rights activist who headed the Mattachine Society, recalled, “Ethel Merman just missed getting busted on that night by about fifteen minutes. She was starring in Gypsy, and she’d gone up to the Tay-Bush with some gay friends after the show.”

The San Francisco Chronicle said the raid “was reminiscent of the old speakeasy days of Prohibition,” The Chronicle wrote: “Three paddy wagons shuttled back and forth between the inn and the city prison – seven loads in all – and apartment house dwellers watched from their windows.” It was, the Chronicle said, “vaguely reminiscent of leading sheep from a packed corral.” Despite 103 arrests, authorities complained that another 139 intended detainees managed to slip away. Those arrested included actors, actresses, dancers, a state hospital psychologist, a bank manager, an artist and an Air Force purchasing agent, with the San Francisco Examiner listing every one of their names, addresses, occupations and employers.

All were charged with frequenting a disorderly house. The evidence, according to prosecutors: “The majority of the males affected swishy-hipped walks, limp-wristed gestures, high-pitched voices and wore tight pants…. The women were mannish.” About one in five or six were given an additional charge of lewd conduct, because they were seen dancing together or kissing. And because five or six couples were dancing, the Tay-Bush Inn was fined $400. The Mattachine Society paid for lawyers, and the disorderly house charges were eventually dropped for all but two. Mayor Christopher responded, “We found as always that some arrests are very difficult of prosecution because Courts demand total, complete, and unequivocal evidence, but we think we’re on the right track.”

But Christopher’s train soon derailed. The Chronicle’s reporting on the administration’s campaign against gay bars had been becoming increasingly critical against the police. Before the Tay-Bush raid, one columnist questioned where gay people would go if police succeeded in closing down all the gay bars. One possibility was unpalatable to readers: they might end up going to straight bars. When the Tay-Bush was raided, the Chronicle portrayed the patrons sympathetically, as ordinary middle-class, otherwise respectable citizens. It also described Bob Johnson, the Tay-Bush’s twenty-seven-year-old owner, as something of a martyr, who “seemed more concerned about his patrons than himself.” Columnist Herb Caen mocked the “courageous raid” and wrote, “The mayor is pleased. ‘Something is being done!’ Nothing is being done: The fashionable Ones don’t give themselves away. The only moral, if it’s a question of morals: Don’t be a poor One. Don’t be a poor anything.”

Responding to growing media criticism, Christopher pressured police chief Thomas Cahill to tone down the publicity and abandon the department’s massive, centrally-coordinated raids.

[Sources: Christopher Lowen Agee. The Streets of San Francisco: Policing and the Creation of a Cosmopolitan Liberal Politics, 1950-1972 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014): 98-101.

Edward Allwood. Straight News: Gays, Lesbians, and the News Media (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996): 39.

Hal Call. “Calling Shots.” Mattachine Review 7, no. 9 (September 1961): 12-14.

Eric Marcus. Making History: The Struggle for Gay and Lesbian Equal Rights, 1940-1990. An Oral History (New York: HarperCollins, 1992): 39.

Del Martin. “Editorial: Fire Hoses Next? The Ladder 5, no. 12 (September 1961): 14-15.]

Today In History, 1985: Los Angeles Enacts AIDS Non-Discrimination Ordinance

The Los Angeles City Council unanimously approved an ordinance protecting people with AIDS from discrimination in employment, housing and health care, making L.A. the first major city in the U.S. to pass such a measure. Before the vote, Councilman Joel Wachs, who introduced the measure, told the council, “We have an opportunity to set an example for the whole nation, to protect those people who suffer from AIDS against insidious discrimination.”

Wachs said that discrimination was a pressing problem. “There are a large number to cases of discrimination out there, where people are being fired, evicted and can’t get into an apartment because they have AIDS,” he said. Wachs also noted that half of the people with AIDS who file complaints die before their complaints are investigated. The city council opted for civil penalties instead of criminal penalties because civil proceedings are much faster. The ordinance provided for compensation for actual damages, costs, and attorney fees, and also provided for punitive damages. Councilman Ernani Barnardi hoped that the ordinance would have the effect of educating the public and calming the hysteria.

Wachs served on L.A.’s city council from 1971 to 2001. He came out in 1999 as he was preparing a 2001 run for the Mayor’s office.

Born On This Day, 1840: Richard von Krafft-Ebing

(d. 1902) The Austro-German psychiatrist’s principal work, Psychopathia Sexualis was more than just the Kinsey Report of 1886; it single-handedly established sexology as a serious field of study. The last edition, his twelfth, included 238 case histories of human sexual behavior, and popularized such terms as sadism, masochism, fetishism, and the newly-coined word, homosexuality (May 6). He wrote it specifically for psychiatrists, physicians, and judges, using a dense academic style in order to discourage its purchase by lay readers. The most sordid parts, he wrote in Latin to further discourage casual reading.

A native of Baden, Germany, Krafft-Ebing studied medicine and psychiatry at the University of Heidelberg. He taught at the Universities of Strasbourg, and then at Graz, where he also served as superintendent of the Feldhof mental asylum. When he arrived at the asylum, he found that it was operated more as a dungeon than a treatment facility, and he fought for its reform, a fight which was ultimately unsuccessful. But it led him to publish the Text-Book of Insanity in 1879 to promote therapy rather than imprisonment for the mentally ill.

In Krafft-Ebing’s study of insanity, he often encountered sexual practices which were routinely characterized as causes of insanity or dismissed as vile criminal practices, but which were otherwise little studied. This deficiency in the scientific literature led to what would turn out to be his life’s work. Psychopathia Sexualis catalogued a wide range of sexual practices, from masturbation, impotence, fetishisms, necrophilia, lust-murder — you name it. The practices were carefully categorized as paradoxia (sexual desire at the wrong time of life), hyperaesthesia (excessive sexual desire), anaesthesia (absence of sexual desire) and, the largest, paraesthesia (which he called the perversion of the sexual instinct).

Krafft-Ebing’s notable achievement with Psychopathia Sexualis is that it allowed psychiatry to claim authority over sexual knowledge, where previously it was seen as a religious or criminal problem. Before Psychopathia Sexualis, sexual behavior that was not directed toward procreation — especially promiscuity and masturbation — was believed to cause insanity. Psychopathia Sexualis flipped that understanding around, and argued that “deviant” sexual behaviors were the result of a more fundamental disorder. For homosexuals in particular, he concluded that gay people were suffering from a kind of a biologically-based anomaly, one which occurred sometime during gestation, which resulted in a “sexual inversion” of the brain.

Despite Krafft-Ebing’s efforts at objectivity, he was never able to escape the nineteenth-century assumptions that regarded recreational sex as a perversion of the sex drive. But in his later years, Krafft-Ebing’s opinions became more lenient toward gay people. He was among the first to sign Magnus Hireschfield’s petition for the repeal of Germany’s Paragraph 175, which criminalized sexual behavior between men. In his last article on homosexuality, published in Hirschfeld’s Yearbook for Intermediate Sexual Types, Krafft-Ebing described his earlier views of homosexuality as pathology as being one-sided, and argued that gay people should be treated with sympathy and compassion. However condescending that viewpoint was, it was also, at least, an improvement. But in the end Krafft-Ebing’s work had the practical effect of extending Victorian morality for most of the next century by merely replacing religious moralism with a scientific gloss. It would take nearly nine decades after Psychopathia Sexualis’s publication before the American Psychiatric Association would finally cut through that gloss once and for all and remove homosexuality from its list of mental disorders (Dec 15).

The 1894 English translation of Psychopathia Sexualis, which is credited with introducing the word “homosexuality” into the English language, is available for free at Google Books here

Born On This Day: 1876: Sibilla Aleramo

140 YEARS AGO: (d. 1960) Reared outside of Milan where her father managed a glass factory, young Rina Faccio was unable to continue her education beyond the elementary level. At fifteen, she began seeing a man ten years her senior, who raped her at her father’s factory. Rina didn’t tell her parents what happened, and instead wound up marrying him. A year and a half later, she had a son, and eight years later she left her husband and moved to Rome. Her new lover, the journalist Giovanni Cena, convinced her to turn her story into a fictionalized memoir, Una Donna (A Woman), which she published in 1906 under the pen name of Sibilla Aleramo.

Aleramo became active in politics and the arts, which is how she came to meet the Italian feminist Lina Poletti at the First National Congress of Women in Rome. The two women entered what is described as a volatile relationship, even as Aleramo remained with Cena. In her letters to Poletti, she wrote that she didn’t feel at all guilty about being in love with both of them at the same time; Poletti answered that the dual relationships threatened Aleramo’s sanity. Aleramo’s relationship with Poletti ended after a year. Aleramo went on to become one of Italy’s leading feminists, and Una Donna is now considered an Italian classic as the first outspokenly feminist Italian novel. She remained active in feminist politics until her death in 1960.

Born On This Day, 1906: Horst B. Horst

110 YEARS AGO: (d.1999) The German-American fashion photographer was born Horst Paul Albert Bohrmann in Weißenfels-an-der-Saale, Germany. He studied at Hamburg’s Kunstgewerbeschule before going to Paris to study under Le Corbusier. That’s where he met Vogue photographer Baron George Hoyningen-Huene and became his photographic assistant and lover. In 1931, Horst began working with Vogue directly, and in 1932 he had his first exhibition in Paris. It was a sensational success, and in the next two years he would photograph Bette Davis, Marlene Dietrich, Noël Coward, Cole Porter, Daisy Fellows, and a whole passel of European royalty and near-royalty.

In 1937, Horst moved to New York. He met Coco Chanel and photographed her fashions for the next three decades. The following year, he met the British diplomat Valentine Lawford, and they built a life together as a couple until Lawford’s death in 1991. Horst also adopted a son.

The Mainbocher Corset (1939)

Horst’s 1939 photo of the exceptionally controversial Mainbocher Corset is perhaps his most famous photo. The corset itself created a furor in pre-war Paris, where it marked an abrupt break from the past due to its radical silhouette and its reintroduction of an article of clothing that is more associated with the Victorian era. Horts’s photo of the corset however was anything but Victorian.

In 1941, Horst applied for U.S. citizenship, and in 1943 he joined the U.S. Army as a photographer, three months before he took the oath of citizenship when he officially became Horst P. Horst, partly, it is said, because his surname sounded too much like top Nazi official Martin Bormann’s. After the war, Horst’s photos illustrated international high society for Vogue. Subjects included every First Lady beginning with Bess Truman, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Oscar de la Renta, Andy Warhol, Yves Saint Laurent, Doris Duke, Cy Twombly, and just about every European royalty still in existence. Madonna’s 1990 music video for her song “Vogue” recreated many of Horst’s photos, including the Mainbocher Corset, much to the displeasure of Horst who was angered that she neither sought permission to use his photos nor acknowledged his work. His last photograph for British Vogue was in 1991, of Princess Michael of Kent. He died in 1999 at the age of 93.

Born On This Day, 1964: Mark Pokan

Pocan became active in local politics in Madison soon after graduating from college in 1986 when he was gay-bashed by two men with baseball bats as he was leaving a gay bar. He worked in the local LGBT community before serving on Dane County’s Board of Supervisors from 1991 to 1996. In 1998, he succeeded Tammy Baldwin (Feb 11) when she gave up her seat in the Wisconsin State Assembly to run for U.S. House of Representatives. In 2013, Pocan again succeeded Baldwin when she vacated her seat in the House of Representatives and was sworn in as Senator. As a result, Pocan made history by becoming the first openly gay representative to take over a House seat from another openly gay representative. This also made Wisconsin the first state to send openly gay legislators to both Houses of Congress. In 2006, Pocan married his partner in Toronto, even though their marriage wasn’t recognized in Wisconsin. That changed in 2015 when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned bans on same-sex marriages nationwide.

Today In History, 1954: Thirty-Five Arrested in Miami Beach Raid as Governor Threatens to Replace Sheriff

The wave of anti-gay hysteria in Miami continued apace (Aug 3, Aug 11, Aug 12), with Florida’s acting governor, Charley E. Johns, getting in on the act. Johns became acting governor when Gov. Dan McCarty died in 1953, and would later return to the State Senate and head the infamous Johns Committee which revived a statewide Lavender Scare. The Miami News reported that Johns was looking for an excuse to replace Dade County sheriff Thomas J. Kelly for allowing “wide open” gambling and for “failing to prevent the concentration of sex perverts in the county which had become emphasized recently.” The News continued: “Public indignation over two recent sex murders and police revelations that Miami is host to a colony of some 5,000 homosexuals might be used to accuse the sheriff of lax law enforcement.”

In a separate report that same day, The Miami News reported that Miami Beach Police had raided a section of the beach the day before:

Two of six suspected homosexuals arrested by Miami Beach police in a raid on the 22nd Street bathing area were convicted of disorderly conduct today and ordered to pay $10 fines.

Beach police arrested 35 men yesterday afternoon in a raid planned by Police Chief Shepard. All but six were released after questioning at headquarters. The six kept in custody were charged with disorderly conduct by reason of failure to give a good account of their actions.

City Judge Lawrence Hoffman dismissed cases against four of the six today but warned them to stay away from the 22nd Street bathing area.

“Chief Shepard intends to make good his plan to make Miami Beach undesirable to homosexuals,” Judge Hoffman told the suspects.

ONE magazine, quoting from an article in The Miami Herald, paraphrased the Miami Beach action this way:

Miami Beach Police Chief Romeo Shepard personally led a”flying squad of raiders” who fearlessly “swooped down on the public bathing area at 22nd street and the ocean and herded 35 males to headquarters for questioning.” Two headed for the deep sea but were pulled in by lifeguards … “The raid was executed with all the advance planning and secrecy of an amphibious landing”; … Romeo explained there’d been “numerous complaints” of “males who ‘act mighty like girls.'” Six were booked for disorderly conduct for failing to give a good account of themselves. (What does that mean? A cash transaction, perhaps? — L.P.) The rest released after questioning. Charges later dropped against all but two, who were fined $10 each. Some had worn bathing suits “that caused snickers from police” — bikinis and such, “shocking pink, daring cerise and leopard skin pattern.”

[Additional sources: Lyn Pedersen (pseudonym of Jim Kepner (Feb 14)). “Miami Hurricane.” ONE 2, no. 9 (November 1954): 4-8.

Fred Fejes. “Murder, Perversion and MoralPanic: The 1954 Media Campaign against Miami’s Homosexuals and the Discourse of Civic Betterment.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 9, no. 3 (July 2000): 305-347.]

Today’s Agenda Is Brought To You By…

From The Voice (Southern California edition), January 15, 1982, page 11.

The name pretty much says it all. Jack Fritscher’s memories of the Brothel Hotel was published in Drummer in 1979:

The Brothel is an attitude. In the best sense of the word. You can and probably will use your room as much for those quiet nights when you need real rest as for those nights when you want to swing from the Victorian chandeliers. Attitude, about tattoos and legs muscled-up on roller skates, has taught Brothel entrepreneurs Bobby and Conrad about the hot mix of turning the shell of an old apartment building into a truly professional hostelry.

They’ve got the bead on BUTCH ELEGANCE.

Why should queens have all the aMENities? The Brothel has very much the feel of a gentlemen’s residence club–and every gentleman is an adventurer.

The completely renovated Brothel is located three blocks from Polkstrasse but enjoys its own quiet Pacific Heights neighborhood. A quarter on a MUNI bus, or a mondo cheapo taxi ride can putt you off to the nightlife of Folsom or to the afternoon Castronaughtiness where over the intersection of 18^th and Castro you can watch the bubbles from the bubble machine that once caused us to laugh at the campy Lawrence Welk show.

Meanwhile, back at 1500 Sutter, you can be taken in the gym, sweat it out in the new steam room, or graze in the intimate new coffee shop. A complete travel agency on the premises manfully handles your itinerary for both local and Grand Tours. In short, the whole joint is presentable. Your mother could pick you up in the lobby with nary a blush. So could men as butch as your ma!

In the upstairs halls, business suits brush elbows with well-cured leather. Every man is one man by day and another by night. Gentlemen never tell. They just do it. That’s the adventure!

The hotel building was built in 1902 as the Majestic Hotel. Miraculously, it not only survived the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, it remained open throughout the calamity. The building was purchased in 1985 and has made over into the luxury Hotel Majestic. Its history page somehow manages to quietly pass over the property’s interlude as the Brothel.

Today In History, 1954: “A Disease Worse Than Alcohol”

Dr. Paul Kells

On the same day that The Miami News printed the front-page article about the nineteen queers who had been arrested in Miami Beach, the paper still wasn’t finished with its anti-gay crusade. Across the bottom of the front page was the first of a series of three articles purporting to inform the general public about the “condition” of homosexuality. Titled “Psychiatrist Looks At Deviates: A Disease ‘Worse Than Alcohol’,” the article featured Dr. Paul Kells, a “noted Miami psychiatrist, whom The Miami Daily News asked to supply answers to questions regarding sexual deviates.” The News introduced the subject this way:

In the past few days Miamians have learned that this community has become infected by a large colony of sexual deviates. The word “infected” is used advisedly, since homosexuality is a social disease. It can be worse than drug addiction or alcoholism. There is little hope for returning the established homosexual to a socially acceptable pattern.

Most of the article follows a Q&A format, with the first question appearing to draw some sort of a line between homosexuals and “sexual psychopaths.” What line exactly is drawn however is anybody’s guess:

Q Are all homosexuals potential child molesters, sadists (those who enjoy causing others pain) and masochists (those who enjoy pain and humiliation for themselves?)

A. No. The sexual psychopath, of which homosexuality is only one form, is the extreme sex deviate classification from which emerges the child molester and sadist. The sexual psychopath has no feeling of social responsibility, much in the manner of the hardened criminal who has no understanding or regard for the law, the psychiatrist explained.

The sexual psychopath preys on both sexes. He or she might consort with homosexuals as a means of getting money or any other objective. The psychopathic personality frequently has a feeling of great superiority over others, disregarding at all times the need of conforming to social laws.

As for whether homosexuals were born that way:

No. …”It is usually a matter of experience which makes a person a homosexual,” the doctor stated. “It’s ‘possible’ for anyone to become a homosexual, but people are not born to be such.”

It is in this statement that Miamians can clearly see their problem. In a community where there are only a few homosexuals, the chance for exposure to such practices are negligible.

Not all homosexuals want to gain converts, but those who do can be extremely aggressive, the doctor explained. The most aggressive is the psychopathic personality, who also lacks understanding of social responsibility.

“The shy homosexual has a sense of social responsibility and will go to great extremes to conceal his plight,” said the psychiatrist. “This type lives in constant fear of being exposed and will marry and have families to conceal its sexual behavior.”

… Dr. Kells pointed out that “normal” homosexuals are acceptable to society when their sex behavior is not known. “The sexual psychopath is never acceptable,” he said. “And there is the important question involved in creating laws. The ‘normal’ homosexual should be separated from the sexual psychopath.”

Q. Do perverts tend to congregate in the same area or town?

A. Yes, but only certain types.

Today In History, 1996: “No Obits”

20 YEARS AGO: For the first time in more than seventeen years, the San Fransisco weekly Bay Area Reporter made the news because of a lack of news: there were no obituaries of AIDS victims in the August 13, 1996 edition. The rate of obituaries had been declining for the previous two years following the introduction of the so-called AIDS cocktail (Dec 6), which surprised scientists and AIDS advocates alike for its effectiveness in halting and even reversing the health declines of those on medications. According to an AP article at the time, “The few days leading up to Monday’s deadline for submitting obits were tense at the newspaper. In the previous two weeks, none had been delivered until the last minute. ‘It was like watching a no-hitter in baseball unfolding,’ (news editor Mike) Salinas said. ‘We didn’t really want to discuss it until it became obvious that it was going to happen. We held our breath waiting.'” But the obit never came by the time the deadline arrived, and the paper celebrated with a front-page headline proclaiming “No Obits.”

Today In History, 2004: Australia Amends Marriage Law To Ban Same-Sex Marriage

The opposition Labor party joined the governing right-of-center Liberal Party under Prime Minister John Howard to pass an amendment to Australia’s marriage law to ban same-sex marriage. The amendment specified:

Marriage means the union of a man and a woman to the exclusion of all others, voluntarily entered into for life. Certain unions are not marriages. A union solemnised in a foreign country between: (a) a man and another man; or (b) a woman and another woman; must not be recognised as a marriage in Australia.

The bill had been introduced by Liberal Attorney General Phillip Ruddock just two months after the UK’s Civil Partnership Act had been proposed. Labor shadow Attorney-General Nicola Roxon announced that same day that Labor would not oppose the amendment. Labor’s support wasn’t universal. Anthony Albanese, Labor MP for Grayndler, said the bill was the “result of 30 bigoted backbenchers who want to press buttons in the community.”

The bill’s critics challenged the government’s priorities, asking why there was a such a rush to ban same-sex marriage when the proposed anti-terrorism law hadn’t been voted on yet. Government and Labor responded by switching the schedule for the two bills and passed the anti-terrorism law first before approving the amendment in June. In the Senate, both parties joined to cut off debate, a move that Democrat leader Sen. Andrew Bartlett roundly condemned: “This is just an absolute disgrace … (you are saying) we have to do it now, otherwise society will crumble and the world will end. You are saying, ‘It is urgent that we take away as many freedoms and rights from people as possible and do it really quickly before they notice and get a chance to be upset about it’.” But that is exactly what they did, and on August 13, the measure passed the Senate by a vote of 38-6.

Bills to provide marriage equality have been introduced in Australia’s Parliament in 2006, 2009, 2012, and 2014, but they have gone nowhere. In 2015, Abbot proposed holding a national plebiscite on the question following the 2016 elections. When Abbot’s party deposed him as leader later that year, his replacement, Malcolm Turbull reiterated Abbot’s call for a referendum. After Turbull’s coalition was narrowly re-elected earlier this year, Turnbull hinted that the plebiscite may not happen until 2017.

Born On This Day, 1895: Gluck

Gluck. Just Gluck.

(d. 1978) The British painter was born Hannah Gluckstein, but she insisted on being known only as Gluck — “No prefix, suffix, or quotes.” She resigned as vice president of an art society when her name appeared on the letterhead as “Miss Gluck.” And just as she kept her identification simple, her style of painting was also independent of any particular artistic school. Gluck established herself as a painter of floral arrangements which became popular among interior decorators, including floral designer Constance Spry, who would be Gluck’s lover from 1932 to 1936.

Gluck’s Medallion, 1937

Gluck’s reputation was grounded in her portraits, beginning with her own 1925 self portrait, wearing a shirt, tie, suspenders, beret and smoking a cigarette. Her best known painting, Medallion, is a dual portrait of Gluck and Nesta Obermer, who became Gluck’s partner after her relationship with Spry ended. She painted it in 1936 to commemorate what she called her marriage to Obermer on May 25. Gluck called it her “YouWe” painting, and it was later used as the cover of the Virago Press edition of The Well of Loneliness.

In 1944, Obermer decided to end her relationship with Gluck, complaining that Gluck had become too demanding and possessive. Gluck then entered a tumultuous thirty-year relationship with Edith Shakelton Heald, the first female reporter in Britain’s House of Lords. Gluck’s emotional health deteriorated as she descended into depression, and her painting suffered because of it. But she managed to revive herself in the 1950s when she became alarmed at the declining quality of paints and canvases. With the backing of two important museums and the Arts Council of Great Britain, she embarked on a decade-long campaign to convince the Standards Institution to establish new standards for cold-pressed linseed oil, canvases, and the naming and defining of pigments.

With that success behind her, Gluck returned to the easel using special handmade paints supplied by a manufacturer who agreed to meet her exacting standards. She painted several more paintings, including one of a decomposing fish head on the beach titled, Rage, Rage against the Dying of Light. She mounted a successful solo show in 1973, her first since 1937. It would be her last. She died in 1978.

Born On This Day, 1952: Herb Ritts

Herb Ritts, self portrait.

(d. 2002) The fashion and celebrity photographer is probably known more for who he photographed than for his photos themselves, which is a shame considering the quality of his work. His trademark was in his highly geometric, classic style, often evoking Greek classism. But his access to superstars came naturally, having grown up in Brentwood where many of them were either neighbors or friends of neighbors. His subjects ended up including just about everyone in Hollywood, beginning with photos of his friend, Richard Gere, taken before either of them were famous. When Gere used those photos for publicity, Ritt’s reputation was set. He photographed Brooke Shields for the cover of Elle in 1981, and he shot the cover photo for Olivia Newton-John’s album Physical that same year.

Ricard Gere, 1977

In addition to shooting every star and starlet in Hollywood, Ritts photographed the Dalai Lama, Michael Gorbachev, Ronald Reagan, and Stephen Hawking. His fashion photography included books for Giorgio Armani, Ralph Lauren, Versace, Calvin Klein (including Marky Mark’s famous underwear shoot), Donna Karen, Valentino, and many more. He also directed music videos for Madonna, Janet Jackson, Michael Jackson, Chris Isaak, Mariah Carey, and Jennifer Lopez.

In 1989, Ritts published MEN/WOMEN, a two-volume box set which explored the classic beauty of the male and female bodies. Duo (1991) extended that exploration to nude gay couples. Notorious (1992) saw Ritts return to celebrity portraiture. In 1994, he broke from his typical subjects with the publication of Africa, a study of the stark African landscape, wildlife and the Maasai people who make their home there. In the 1980s and 1990s he also threw himself into fundraising for HIV/AIDS groups like amfAR, and he did so long before Elizabeth Taylor made it fashionable. Always open about his own HIV-positive status, Ritts died in 2002 of pneumonia.

Today’s Agenda Is Brought To You By…

From Arizona Gay News (Tucson, AZ), August 5, 1977, page 4.

The Arizona Gay News provided more details about the big weekend:

This city is putting the welcome mat out for all of its Gay brothers and sisters from Tucson. Plans for a Gay weekend, Friday, Saturday and Sunday, August 12, 13 and 14, have just been completed. Spearheaded by the Ramrod’s congenial owner, Marty, all the Phoenix Gay Community have joined in a united effort to show their hospitality.

Plans have been made through the girls bike club, Riders of the Sun, to host their sisters from Tucson, and the Sons of Apollo [a gay male motorcycle club — JB] will host their gay brothers. If you do not have any accommodations, bring a long a sleeping bag and your hosts will make the necessary arrangements.

Riders of the Sun were to sponsor a buffet at the Unlimited on Friday, and the Sons of Apollo planned on hosting another buffet on Saturday at the Ramrod. Brunch was planned for Sunday at the Nu-Towne Saloon. The Nu-Towne is still in business today, and is known for two things: it is Phoenix’s oldest continually-operating gay bar, and it’s Sunday grill and beer bust is still quite popular.

Today In History, 1833: Captain Nichols Hanged for “Buggery”

Click to view the full broadsheet.

Yes, that was the actual British legal term for homosexual activity, and it was a capital offense until 1861, when the laws were finally relaxed to allow for life imprisonment. But that change came almost thirty years too late for Captain Henry Nichols. In 1833, the London Courier printed the following account:

Captain Henry Nicholas Nicholls, who was one of the unnatural gang to which the late Captain Beauclerk belonged, (and which latter gentleman put an end to his existence), was convicted on the clearest evidence at Croydon, on Saturday last, of the capital offence of Sodomy; the prisoner was perfectly calm and unmoved throughout the trial, and even when sentence of death was passed upon him. In performing the duty of passing sentence of death upon the prisoner, Mr. Justice Park told him that it would be inconsistent with that duty if he held out the slightest hope that the law would not be allowed to take its severest course. At 9 o’clock in the morning the sentence was carried into effect. The culprit, who was fifty years of age, was a fine looking man, and had served in the Peninsular war. He was connected with a highly respectable family; but, since his apprehension not a single member of it visited him.

You can also read a different account from another popular broadsheet by clicking the above image.

[via ExecutedToday.com, which goes to show that there really is a blog for everything.]