Box Turtle Bulletin

Today In History, 1954: Miami News Reports On Trial of Gay Informant

That summer, greater Miami was swept up by an unprecedented wave of media-driven anti-gay hysteria, triggered, in part, by the murder of a male Eastern Airlines flight attendant earlier in August (Aug 3, Aug 11). Bars and beaches were being raided and gay men were  being convicted under various vague public nuisance laws or the similarly vague “lewd and lascivious” law. (Prosecutions and convictions under Florida’s sodomy law were very rare, but mere threat of being charged with that felony often induced guilty pleas to lesser offenses.) The Miami News on August 12 reported on one such case involving a gay man and a reputed police informant who was apparently himself gay. Because The News’s report leaves open far more questions than it answers, I will just repeat it in full.

Informant Escapes Jail Term in Pervert ‘Turnabout’ Trial.

By Larry Birger
Miami Daily News Staff Writer

A self-styled police informer escaped trial on sex charges today when a convicted homosexual refused to press a complaint which he had filed at the suggestion of City Judge Cecil C. Curry.

Odom’s photo from the Miami News

The case against truck driver Leonard M. Odom, 24, of 3523 SW 14th Ter., was dispatched so quickly that the name of the complainant’s attorney escaped reporters.

The convicted homosexual, Walter G. Quester, changed his mind and dropped charges against Odom of committing lewd and lascivious acts.

Judge Curry asked the unidentified attorney for Quester: “Why did you drop the charges?”

“I don’t know,” the lawyer replied. “I wasn’t here yesterday.”

The attorney was referring to the unusual court session at which the judge had turned on the chief witness against the defendant at Quester’s hearing on charges of lewd and lascivious acts.

On the basis of Odom’s testimony, concerning a “date” he claimed he’d had with Quester to get information for the police, Quester was convicted and sentenced to 60 days in jail.

Then Curry told Odom, “It looks to me as if you’re just as guilty as the defendant.” He suggested to Quester that he file counter-charges against Odom, which was done.

Before today’s hearing Odom’s lawyer, Morey A. Rayman, said he would move that Curry disqualify himself as presiding judge on grounds he had prejudged the defendant.

This report raises all sorts of questions. Was Odom really working as a police informant? Or did he decide to try to claim that’s what he was doing in order to try to get out of being charged himself? What — or who — led Quester to drop the charges against Odom?  And with Odom’s name, address, and photo published in the paper, what happened to him after the trial was over?

It really is quite possible that there were two victims in the sordid mess, each one trying to make the best of a very bad, no-win situation. These are the kinds of stories that appear briefly in newspapers across the country and then, just as quickly, disappear. These are also the kinds of stories I would love to be able to track down. In searching Ancestry.com, there was a Walter G. Quester who died in 1987 in Broward County, Florida, and a Leonard M. Odom who died in Madison, Florida in 1997. Were these the guys mentioned in this article?

Today In History, 1968: “Gay Is Good” Adopted As National Gay Rights Slogan

The North American Conference of Homophile Organizations (NACHO), an umbrella group with representatives from twenty-six local and national gay rights organizations, was formed two years earlier, and from the very beginning they were hampered by squabbles between the member groups. When they met in Chicago just a few weeks before the contentious Democratic National Convention, a whole host of fault lines had emerged: along generational lines with younger members being influenced by civil rights and anti-war protests; along gender lines as lesbians became increasingly impatient and distrustful as the dominant male leadership gave short shrift to their concerns; and along geographic lines between the more “militant” East Coast and the less confrontational West Coast factions.

Although the delegates failed to form a unified national organization, they did manage to accomplish two things. First, they passed “Homosexual Bill of Rights”, which was proposed by the Resolutions Committee chaired by Daughters of Bilitis president Shirley Willer (Sep 26). The Homosexual Bill of Rights consisted of these five points:

1. Private consensual sex between persons over the age of consent shall not be an offense.
2. Solicitation for any sexual acts shall not be an offense except upon the filing of a complaint by the aggrieved party, not a police officer or agent.
3. A person’s sexual orientation or practice shall not be a factor in the granting or renewing of federal security clearances or visas, or in the granting of citizenship.
4. Service in and discharge from the Armed Forces and eligibility for veteran’s benefits shall be without reference to homosexuality.
5. A person’s sexual orientation or practice shall not affect his eligibility for employment with federal, state, or local governments, or private employers.

Their second accomplishment would prove to be more enduring; the adoption of Frank Kameny’s “Gay is Good” slogan as the official slogan of the movement. The full resolution read:

BECAUSE many individual homosexuals, like many of the members of many other minority groups suffer from diminished self-esteem, doubts and uncertainties as to their personal worth, and from a pervasive false and unwarranted sense of an inferiority and undesirability of their homosexual condition, and from a negative approach to that condition; and

BECAUSE, therefore, many individual homosexuals, like many of the members of many other minority groups, are in need of psychological sustenance to bolster and to support a positive and affirmative attitude toward themselves and their homosexuality and to hae instilled into them a confident sense of the positive good and value of themselves and of their condition; and

BECAUSE it would seem to be very much a function of the North American Homophile Conference to attempt to replace a wishy-washy negativism toward homosexuality with a firm no-nonsense positivism, to attempt to establish in the homosexual community and its members feelings of pride, self-esteem, self-confidence, and self-worth, in being the homosexuals that they are and have a moral right to be (these feelings being essential to true human dignity), and to attempt to bring to bear a countervailing influence against negative attitudes toward homosexuality prevalent in the heterosexual community; and

BECAUSE the Negro community has approached similar problems and goals with some success by  the adoption of the motto or slogan: Black is Beautiful

RESOLVED: that it is hereby adopted as a slogan or motto for NACHO that

GAY IS GOOD

The vote was unanimous, perhaps the only point of unanimity in the convention. Kameny saw his slogan’s adoption as being a critical step toward changing the internal self-perceptions that many in the gay community had of themselves. Just a few years earlier, he persuaded his own group, the Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C., to pass a resolution declaring that homosexuality was not a mental illness (Mar 4), a vote that was very controversial locally and nationally (May 11). This showed Kameny that if the gay community wanted mental health professionals to stop regarding gay people as mentally ill, then gays and lesbians themselves would have to change how they saw themselves:

A sign at a gay rights demonstration in Albany, New York, 1971 (Source)

In order that we might hear something good to offset all this negativity, I came up with the slogan “Gay is good” in 1968, in parallel with the slogan “Black is beautiful” coined around the same time for similar psychological reasons. Upon careful analysis, it quickly became clear that as long as we were classified by organized psychiatry as being mentally ill or emotionally disturbed, we were never going to be granted any kind of remedy for the cultural ills besetting us. Society was not going to offer protection to a bunch of “loonies,” which is what psychiatry of that day made of us…

Psychiatry would eventually change its mind about five years later. For countless millions of gay people, it would take longer. But Kameny didn’t just fight to change how the laws pr psychiatry treated gay people. He fought so that gay people to see themselves as fully equal to everyone else as people. In 2007 when his papers and artifacts were accepted by the Smithsonian Institution, Frank reflected in an email to me:

I’ve said, for a long time, that if I’m remembered for only one thing, I would like it to be for having coined “Gay is Good.” But never did I expect that that would make its way to the Smithsonian. I feel deeply contented.

[Sources: Ronald Bayer. Homosexuality and American Psychiatry: The Politics of Diagnosis 2nd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987):89-91.

Frank Kameny. “How It All Started.” Journal of Gay & Lesbian Mental Health 13, no. 2 (2009): 76-81.]

Born On This Day, 1880: Radclyffe Hall

(d. 1943) Influenced by the writings of Havelock Ellis (Feb 2), Radclyffe Hall described herself as a “congenital invert,” typically dressing in masculine clothing and living her lesbianism on her sleeve. Her nickname, “John,” was bestowed on her by her first partner, the German singer Mabel Batten. When Batten died in 1916, Hall had already fallen in love with Batten’s cousin, the sculptor Una Troubridge, and the two of them would remain together for the rest of Hall’s life. Hall’s first novel, the long and dreary The Unlit Lamp, didn’t sell well. But her next books — a comedy titled The Forge, a more serious volume titled Unlit Lamp, and another comic novel A Saturday Life, established Hall as a novelist of serious talent.

Her lasting fame came with her 1928 novel The Well of Loneliness. It was the only one of her eight novels with an overt lesbian theme, although the subject had come up in some of her short stories. There was nothing sexually explicit about he novel, yet it became the subject of a sensational obscenity trial in Britain which resulted in all copies of the novel being ordered destroyed. Its publication in the U.S. came about only after a long court battle. After the fireworks were over, the New York Court of Special Sessions cleared the book for publication in 1929 (Jul 27), and it has been continuously available in the U.S. ever since then.

Radclyffe Hall (right) with Una Troubridge

Hall and Troubridge were important figures in lesbian circles in London, Paris and elsewhere in Europe, where Hall was easily recognized by her tailored jackets, ties, socks and close-cropped hair. Her appearance wasn’t particularly shocking in the 1920s, where androgynous appearance among women was considered tres chic. But as the decades wore on, it became her most consistent visual identity, in keeping with her self-identification as a member of “the third sex.” Britain’s sensational press was only too happy to play up that image. During the height of the furor over the British obscenity trials, newspapers routinely published photos of her in the most masculine way possible, often cropping the photo above her waist on the many occasions when she wore a skirt with a man’s jacket.

The Well of Loneliness would be the only source of information about lesbianism for many women right on through the 1960s. Hall herself said that she had received more than 10,000 letters about her novel, many of them thanking her from grateful lesbians. When she died in 1943 of colon cancer, The Well of Loneliness had been translated into fourteen languages and was selling more then 100,000 copies per year. The Ladder, the newsletter for the Daughters of Bilitis, often wrote of The Well of Loneliness in the 1950s in reverential tones, and many anonymous letters to the editor from across America citing the book as a lifeline for women coming to terms with their sexuality.

Born On This Day, 1907: Gladys Bentley

(d. 1960) The Harlem Renaissance blues singer was known as the “Brown Bomber of Sophisticated Songs.” Her “sophisticated songs” were obscene parodies of famous blues standards and popular songs. She sang them in the speakeasies of Harlem, often while brazenly flirting with the women in the audience. She was famous for her powerful voice, her girlfriends, and her manner of dress, especially her signature tuxedo and top hat. In the 1930s, she headlined the Harlem’s Ubangi Club, an “exotic” (read: gay) club where she performed with a chorus line of drag queens as backup. She was successful enough to acquire a Park Avenue apartment, a fancy car, servants, and, as she claimed at one time, a white wife in New Jersey.

But by 1937, the popularity of Harlem began to wane, so she moved to Los Angeles to be with her mother. She continued to carve out a place for herself there in the underground gay scene, performing at such popular lesbian bars as Joquins’ El Rancho in Los Angeles and Mona’s in San Francisco.

But when the straight-laced fifties came around, Bentley abandoned her trademark tuxedo. She began wearing dresses, and, in a 1950 article for Ebony, claimed to have cured her lesbianism through hormone treatments. She also said that she married J. T. Gibson, a newspaper columnist who later denied that they had ever met. She did marry a man who was sixteen years her junior, although they eventually divorced. In 1960, she was on the verge of being ordained a minister for the Temple of Love in Christ when she died of pneumonia at age 52.

Sometime in the 1950s, she appeared on Grocho Marx’s You Bet Your Life.

Today’s Agenda Is Brought To You By…

From David, a Florida gay lifestyle and photography magazine, May 1972, page 44.

The Alley Room was part of a three-bar complex in Miami Beach. The main bar in front was the South Wind Lounge, with the Cub Room off to the side and the Alley Room in the back. The bar and a neighboring liquor store were gutted by a fire on June 2, 1975. The fire broke out at about 3:30 a.m. and a dozen or so patrons and employees made it safely out as flames engulfed the building and shot through the roof, lighting the night sky throughout the area and attracting a crowd of spectators from nearby hotels and apartment buildings. “Miami Beach Fire Chief Albert Bishop said that the flames apparently were fed by the contents of hundreds of bottles of liquor which burst under the heat,” reported the Miami News. A hardware store and a bingo parlor on the same block sustained smoke damage. The liquor store was able to undergo repairs and get back into business, but the South Wind and Alley Room are now an empty lot.

Today In History, 1954: Miami Police Detective Calls On City to “Face Pervert Problem”

The murder earlier this month of William T. Simpson, a 27-year-old Eastern Airlines flight attendant (Aug 3) blew open another round of frantic anti-gay hysteria in Miami, particularly after the Miami Daily News wrote that the murder revealed a hitherto-unknown “colony of some 500 male homosexuals, congregating mostly in the near-downtown northeast section and ruled by a ‘queen’.”

Not to be outdone, the Miami Herald jumped into the fray with a front-page article by Miami police detective Chester Eldredge titled, “Official urges society to face pervert problem.” He wrote that Miami had been lucky, so far: “We are extremely fortunate that there have been no more violent crimes in Miami involving them. The sex pervert or deviate is an individual who has reached the age of reason, yet knowingly disregards the idea of reproduction. They compromise a group that ranges from relatively harmless homosexuals to the fierce sadist who horribly mutilates and tortures his victims.” He estimated that there were somewhere from five to eight thousand homosexuals in Miami, and urged the state to build more psychiatric hospitals “so they can be removed as a social blight and become useful citizens.”

[Source: Edward Alwood. Straight News: Gays, Lesbians and the News Media (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996): p 3.]

Today’s Agenda Is Brought To You By…

This Month In History, 1888: Transman Discovered In Iowa Prison Hospital

The outer walls and a guard tower of the old Ft. Madison Penitentiary (Source.)

A regular column in the nineteenth-century journal The Medical Standard included a roundup of items submitted by doctors from each of the 38 states, several territories and a number of Canadian provinces. Many of the notices amounted to little more than gossip: the practice of a “voodoo doctor” in Georgia, a doctor in Illinois who was charged with criminal assault “by a hysterical female,” a “magnetic healer” in Kentucky “who is ‘curing’ hypochondriacs and hysterical females in great numbers at Bowling Green.” (Women were commonly diagnosed with “hysteria” in the nineteenth century; its cure was sometimes a hysterectomy.) Among those notices was this case from Iowa:

A case of sexual perversion has been discovered in the Ft. Madison penitentiary. A woman from her early youth had dressed in male attire, was universally regarded as a man, married and lived with a woman as a husband. She was recently arrested for horse-stealing and sent to the penitentiary; in the hospital of which her sex was discovered.

This is all I know about the man in question, although I’ll certainly keep my eyes open. The Ft. Madison penitentiary was established in 1839, seven years before Iowa’s statehood. The old facility, expanded several times over the years, is still in use today as the Iowa State Penitentiary, making it the oldest operating prison west of the Mississippi, although that distinction is set to end in a few months when a new facility opens and the 175-year-old facility will finally be retired.

[Source: “State Items. Iowa.” The Medical Standard 4, no. 2 (August 1888): 60. Available online at Google Books here.]

This Month In History, 1965: Therapist Confuses Transwoman For a Gay Man

The New Mexico State Hospital, now the Behavioral Health Institute.

Throughout much of the twentieth century, the mental health professions were exceptionally slow to come to grips with the distinction between sexual orientation (defined according to the gender one is attracted to) and gender identity (defined according to the gender in which one views oneself). Until relatively recently, it was broadly believed that every man who “wanted” to be a woman was gay, and that every gay man secretly wanted to be a woman. The magnitude of suffering inflicted on gay and transgender people due to this ignorance is incalculable; it is also illustrated by a letter that one psychiatrist, Rodolfo M. Bramanti, of the New Mexico State Hospital in Las Vegas, New Mexico, wrote to a probation officer. Bramanti published the letter in the August, 1965 edition of the journal Southwestern Medicine to discuss “some of the medical, legal and social problems that homosexuality creates”:

Dear Mr. M …… .

This letter is in reference to Mr. Peter M., a previous patient in this Unit, who was released on ….. , I have been quite concerned ever since in trying to secure the best solution to his problem, and, as I promised you in our telephone conversation, in the following I will try to discuss this case and summarize the conclusions at which I have arrived.

…I think he belongs to the group that modern psychiatry knows as sociopathic personality, sexual deviation (also called sexual perversion), in whom the only manifestations of the disorder are in the sexual sphere. The pervert suffers from an anomaly of the sexual drive and gets satisfaction either in some other activity than that of complete heterosexual intercourse, or, in some deviant activity, acts that are not accepted bv our morals, customs or laws.

Peter, as the generality of homosexuals, has a tendency to be immature in his reactions, is easily depressed and discouraged, frequently frustrated, emotionally unstable, dependent and self-indulgent, and involved in love affairs with other men which end in disappointments, frustrations and suicidal thoughts. These could have the appearance of psychotic symptoms, but, altogether, do not constitute the well-defined picture that characterizes the schizophrenic.

…The problem, as I see it from a practical standpoint, is that we are dealing with a youngster, who at the present time shows all the emotional feelings of a female, even though he has the complete appearance of a male. Due to his abnormal urges he has been indulging in homosexual relations and creating a difficult problem in his community.

Bramenti launched into a long and wide-ranging dissertation on the attitudes of society towards homosexuality, a dissertation that cites the Judeo-Christian tradition, the 19th century Napoleonic code (which dropped all sanctions against homosexuality), and, somewhat surprisingly, the rigidity of gender binaries, leading Bramanti to conclude that “our laws and the community attitudes in this respect are not only unscientific but unjust.”

Bramanti then discussed the range of therapeutic options available to Peter, and it is here that it becomes rather obvious to anyone reading it today that Peter’s problem wasn’t so much that he was a gay man in a homophobic society, but that she was a transgender person among professionals who hadn’t the slightest clue about what that distinction meant:

Peter came to this hospital with the idea that an operation could be performed to make him apparently, at least, more female — In other words, he completely refused the idea to become a male: even more, he was disgusted, disappointed because his physical appearance did not fit with his female mind and he thought that medical science could convert him into what he has been longing to be.

Bramanti briefly describes the case of Christine Jorgensen (who Bramanti insists on calling “Chris Jorgenson”), the first celebrity transgender person to be written about in the popular press (May 30). Bramanti considered the option of gender reassignment for Peter:

Can we advise such an operation in the case of Peter M … ? There are many factors to be considered. In fact, could we legally sanction such an operation? Should a surgeon agree to perform it? Is it justified from the religious point of view to try to transform what God decided? In the event that the operation is performed, should he be considered as a man or as a woman in spite of the fact that he will be lacking the male sexual characteristics as well as those of a female.

I feel that with all these drawbacks, we can hardly advise such a porcedure and, practically, we rule it out as a prospective solution of this problem.

Investigating the option of gender reassignment, in hindsight, appears to be the most logical course of action based on what we know today. Had Peter been under the care of a mental health professional who was knowledgable about gender identity issues, there may well have been a more positive outcome. But just when Bramanti brought up the most logical option, he retreated from a scientifically-valid position to an entirely religious-based one.

Bramanti then considered other therapeutic options for Peter: hormone treatments to “accentuate the masculine characteristics,” electroconvulsive therapy, and psychoanalysis, all of which he rejected because he believed they would fail to provided the hoped-for outcomes. Convinced as Bramanti was that he is dealing with a homosexual problem, he even quoted, in its entirety, Sigmund Freud’s famous letter to an American mother (Apr 9), the very letter in which Freud said that homosexuality was “nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation.”

That letter didn’t seem to phase Bramanti, since he then considered institutional options for Peter. He discussed an institution in California “that takes care of sexual perverts,” but ruled it out when he discovered that they only handled people who were genuinely psychotic. He also considered “Labortherapy,” which, he said, “may also be, as you very well pointed out, good.” Bramanti contacted the head of the Vocational Rehabilitation Department, who told him that Peter “could have good chances for such a program, provided that he wear clothes according to his sex, which, as you know, the patient refuses to do.”

After considering that there is nothing that can be done clinically to “change Peter’s condition,” Bramanti made the following six recommendations, which, given the tortuous journey he took to getting to them, turned out to be somewhat-for-1965 enlightened:

1) Take an understanding attitude toward his sexual behavior by explaining to his family, his relatives and members of the community that Peter M. should be accepted the way that he is.

2) Alleviate his emotional tensions, his frustrations, anxieties and periods of depression. In this sense, psychotherapy, adjusting him to his inversion, is the type of therapy recommended, if financially feasible. Some psychopharmacologic agents could also help him in achieving this end.

3) Punishment is by no means indicated. The best thing one can do is treat him as politely as one would anyone else. He, on his part, of course, should be expected to abide by the ordinary rules of decency such as applied to relationship between men and women, namely, he should not seduce others nor force himself on people who are not interested in his company. He should not flaunt his desires in public by dressing in clothes of the opposite sex or otherwise and he should not embarrass those around him by making love or about it in public.

If he behaves himself and controls himself as discreetly as people with heterosexual desires are expected to do, his private life should be of no more concern to anyone else than should a normal person’s. Putting him in jail or in a hospital results only in providing him and the other inmates or patients with added opportunities for abnormal sexual activity.

4) Due to the tendencies of being immature in his reactions, easily depressed, discouraged and frequently frustrated, he could be a suicidal risk: therefore, close supervision by the Probation Officer is in order.

5) The tentative idea of placing him in Vocational Program for the purpose of training him as a beautician should be encouraged, if he would agree to dress as a man during the training period.

6) It is also felt that a priest could help by providing him with support.

[Source: Rodolfo M. Bramanti. “Letter to a probation officer on a case of homosexuality.” Southwestern Medicine 46, no. 8 (August 1965): 253-257.]

Born On This Day, 1953: Mark Doty

“I’ve always been a poet who wrote about urban life because I love the layers and surprises and the jangly complexities of cities,” he once said. “I feel at home in cities, being a gay man. It’s a place of permission and possibility.” He is the author of several collections of poetry, notably his 1995 award-winning Atlantis, which was inspired by his partner’s death from AIDS the year before. 1997’s Heaven’s Coast: A Memoir also chronicles his partner’s diagnosis, illness and death, as well as Doty’s grief afterwards. Another memoir, Dog Years, is about two dogs that Doty had acquired as companions for his dying partner. The book is not only about the character of his dogs, and also about “everything we cannot talk about,” as one reviewer put it. In the end, the book was less about how Doty took care of his partner and the dogs, but of how the dogs took care of him. It is truly a dog-lover’s love song.

In 2008, he won the National Book Award with Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems. His 2010 The Art of Description: World into Word is reflection not just on the art of writing, but also on the art of seeing what one wishes to write about. His latest book of poetry, Deep Lane: Poems, was published last April.

Born On This Day, 1963: Andrew Sullivan

The British transplant to America is an author, political commentator and a seminal blogger, having begun blogging before blogging was cool, with The Dish being one of the highest trafficked blogs on the net. Sullivan describes his views as politically conservative — he supports a flat tax, privatizing social security, and supports free markets in health care. If you read him with 1995 in mind, you’d pretty much agree: he’s conservative. And he has developed conservative arguments against the use of torture, his opposition to capital punishment, his concerns over the growing influence of “Christianism” (as he distinguishes it from Christianity) in American politics, his grudging support for Obamacare. His conservatism also led him to become a strong advocate for same-sex marriage several years before same-sex marriage was cool.

Because conservatism has changed to such a radical extent in America, those positions have opened him up to accusations of being a raving liberal. He supported George W. Bush in 2000, but went with Kerry, reluctantly, in 2004 over disagreement with Bush’s conduct of the wars and his position on the Federal Marriage Amendment. In 2008, Sullivan enthusiastically supported Obama and developed a fixation on the weirdness that was Sarah Palin. He supported Obama again in 2012, and appears to have all but given up hope for a reformed GOP. In 2013, he took The Dish completely independent, financially and technically, from the Daily Beast. After thirteen years of relentless blogging, Sullivan finally put The Dish down in 2015.

Today’s Agenda Is Brought To You By…

Emphasis Mine

Shortly after receiving a fund-raising permit from the District Columbia, Frank Kameny, president of the Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C., sent the following letter to all members of the House of Representatives:

The Mattachine Society of Washington,
Washington, D.C., August 28, 1962.

Hon. __________,
House of Representatives,
Washington, D.C.

DEAR __________: Enclosed, for your interest and information, is a formal statement of the purposes of the Mattachine Society of Washington, a newly formed organization, devoted to the improvement of the status of our country’s 15 million homosexuals.

Included, also, is a copy of our news release, which was submitted to the Washington newspapers and others, and to the various press services.

The question of homosexuality, and the prejudice against it, both personal and official, is a serious one, involving, as it does, more than 1 out of every 10 American citizens, including roughly a quarter-million in, each, the Federal civil service, the Armed Forces, and security-sensitive positions in private industry, and at least 10 percent at your constituents.

We feel that the Government’s approach is archaic, unrealistic, and inconsistent with basic American principles. We feel, in addition, that it is inexcusably and unnecessarily wasteful of trained manpower and of the taxpayers’ money.

We realize that this area presents you with many potential problems, some of them quite subtle and touchy ones of politics and public relations, and that they are not always subject to easy solution, but policies of repression, persecution, and exclusion will not prove to be workable ones in the case of this minority, any more than they have, throughout history, in the case of other minorities. This is a problem which must be worked with, constructively, not worked against, destructively, as is now the case. A fresh approach by the Federal Government is badly needed.

We welcome any comment which you may have on this subject.

We will be pleased to meet with you personally, at your convenience, to discuss these and related matters.

Thank you tor your consideration of our position.

Sincerely yours,
Franklin E. Kameny,
President.

Today In History, 1963: Frank Kameny Becomes First Openly Gay Man to Speak Before a Congressional Committee

Frank Kameny

In yesterday’s episode, Rep. John Dowdy (D-TX) had introduced legislation that singled out the Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C. to strip it of its financial solicitation permit that had been granted by city officials the year before under the Charitable Solicitations Act. Mattachine had qualified for the permit as an educational organization advocate for the end of laws against homosexuality and to advocate for laws to protect gay people from discrimination. The House Subcommittee for the District of Columbia had convened to hear testimony for Dowdy’s proposed legislation, but adjourned due to a quorum call on the House floor just as Mattachine president Frank Kameny was about to speak.

When the subcommittee resumed, Dowdy declared that opposition to the bill that had been expressed the day before left him “shocked and speechless.” He then demanded that Kameny turn over the Mattachine’s list of members. Kameny refused. Dowdy then charged that the Mattachine Society, like the Communist Party, was a secret organization “dedicated to changing laws that were designed for the public good.”

Kameny responded the Mattachine Society’s goal was, in fact, to legalize private acts between consenting adults. He also protested that the issue before the subcommittee was not the morality of homosexuality, but the right of the Society to advocate for gay people through “the legal exercise of its freedom of expression.”

Rep. John Dowdy (D-TX)

Dowdy exploded: “What kind of expression are you talking about? Are you taking about sexual expression?” He later added, “Down in my country if you call a man a queer or a fairy, the least you can expect is a black eye.” Kameny replied that even Texas had gay people. Dowdy retorted, “Maybe, but I never heard anyone brag about it.”

Kameny was joined by Monroe Freedman, a lawyer with the Washington, D.C. chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU’s national policy, adopted six years earlier, placed the organization on record as supporting the constitutionality of sodomy laws, a position that it would maintain until 1967. Freedman emphasized that he didn’t necessarily support the Mattachine Society’s goal of changing those laws. “The issue,” he told the committee, “is not whether we agree with the aims of the Mattachine Society, but whether we are going to interfere with their right of free speech. The National Capital Area Civil Liberties Union is not concerned with the success of failure of the Society in presenting its views. It is concerned solely with its freedom of expression.”

The committee then pressed Freedman for details of his own personal life and whether he was acting as the group’s lawyer. Seven times during the hearing he denied being a member or acting on behalf of the Society. Dowdy then asked Freedman whether his superiors at George Washington University knew he was defending the Society’s rights before the committee. “No,” Freedman replied after a long pause, “but I’m sure they will be before very much longer.”

Dowdy’s bill passed the House but died in the Senate. Kameny never turned over the Society’s membership list to Congress or anyone else, but he did relish the free publicity the hearings gave to his group, thanks to two days of coverage in Washington newspapers and a favorable editorial in the Washington Post.  As for Dowdy, he retired from Congress in 1973 following convictions on conspiracy, bribery and perjury charges.

[Source: John M. Goshko. “House Group Continues Homosexuality Hearing.” Washington Post (August 10, 1963): C2.]

Today In History, 1982: USOC Blocks the Gay Olympics from Using the Word “Olympic”

Two posters: One with the “Gay Olympic Games” title intact, and one with the word “Olympic” blacked out.

Dr. Tom Waddell got the idea for the Gay Olympics while running across a gay bowling tournament on television. He envisioned a quadrennial sports festival open to all, regardless of sex, sexual orientation, age, or skill level. He and a few friends formed the United States Gay Olympic Committee in 1980 and began making plans. Their first challenge would illustrate one of the key problems that would dog the committee for the next two years. They tried to incorporate as the Golden State Olympic Association, but the state of California said they couldn’t use the word “Olympic” in the name. They incorporated instead as San Francisco Arts and Athletics, Inc.

Waddell then sought permission from the United States Olympic Committee in 1981 to use the word “Olympic.” At about the same time, the USOC got wind of the group’s plans and sent a letter demanding that the group stop using the name. Waddell at first agreed to to the USOC’s demands, but changed his mind after attorneys from the ACLU told him the USOC was on shaky legal ground. He resumed calling the event the Gay Olympics, and even got San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein to proclaim August 28 to September 5 the “Gay Olympics Games Week.” The USOC sued, claiming trademark infringement, and on August 9, a judge issued an injunctions prohibiting the San Francisco group from using the word “Olympic.”

Waddell was incredulous. Before a gathering of reporters, he listed the many other Olympics that didn’t raise the USOC’s ire: the Special Olympics, Wheelchair Olympics, Junior Olympics, Police Olympics, Armchair Olympics, Explorer Scout Olympics, Xerox Olympics, Rat Olympics, Armenian Olympic, and a Crab Cooking Olympics. “The bottom line is that if I’m a rat, a crab, a copying machine or an Armenian, I can have my own Olympics. If I’m gay, I can’t.” Others were similarly surprised. Sports Illustrated pointed out the irony that “the ancient Olympics, an all-male event in which participants competed in the nude, was staged by a society in which homosexuality flourished. ”

Athletes taking part in the 1982 Gay Games’ swimming events.

The games opened officially as the Gay Games, but Congressman Phillip Burton and San Francisco Supervisor Doris Ward defined the court order during the opening ceremony and called the games the Gay Olympics. The games themselves were a success, with 1,300 athletes from 12 countries participating.

Meanwhile the lawsuit made its way through the court system. The Federal District Judge not only found for the USOC, but ordered the SFAA to pay the USOC’s court costs. When the SFAA came up short, the USOC placed a lien on Waddell’s House. The SFAA appealed, and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the lower court’s decision, ruling that the USOC’s trademark ownership trumped the Gay Games’ First Amendment rights to the word “Olympic.” The case finally made its way up to the U.S. Supreme Court, which on June 25, 1987, upheld the USOC’s trademark in a 7-2 decision, and ruled for the USOC on the SFAA’s Equal Protection claim in a 5-4 decision. Waddell died sixteen days later of AIDS. After he died, the USOC finally lifted its lien against his house.