Box Turtle Bulletin
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
December 29th, 2013
John Addington Symonds (left) and Edward Carpenter (right)
TODAY IN HISTORY:
“The Most Beneficial Results Accrue from the Sexual Relations Between Men”: 1892. John Addington Symonds was an English poet and literary critic who, although married and a father, was an early advocate of male homosexuality (see Oct 5). Edward Carpenter was a poet, socialist philosopher, and an early gay advocate — and among the very few who lived openly as a gay man (see Aug 29) in Victorian England. In 1892, Symonds was beginning his collaboration with sexologist Havelock Ellis for Ellis’s first installment of his six-volume Studies in the Psychology of Sex, when Symonds wrote to Carpenter to discuss some of the topics he intended to cover. While Ellis intended to stick strictly to a psychological discussion on homosexuality (or Sexual Inversion, as it was called at the time), Symonds was keen to open the topic up to historical and ethical considerations:
It is a pity that we cannot write freely on the topic. But when we meet, I will communicate to you facts which prove beyond all doubt to my mind that the most beneficial results, as regards health and nervous energy, accrue from the sexual relations between men: also, that when they are carried on with true affection, through a period of years, both comrades become united in a way which would be otherwise quite inexplicable.
The fact appears to me proved. The explanation of it I cannot give, & I do not expect it to be given yet. Sex has been unaccountably neglected. Its physiological & psychological relations even in the connection between man & woman are not understood. We have no theory which is worth anything upon the differentiation of the sexes, to begin with. In fact, a science of what is the central function of human beings remains to be sought.
This, I take it, is very much due to psychologists, assuming that sexual instincts follow the build of the sexual organs; & that when they do not, the phenomenon is criminal or morbid. In fact, it is due to science at this point being clogged with religious & legal presuppositions.
…My hope has always been that eventually a new chivalry, i.e.., a second elevated form of human love, will emerge & take its place for the service of mankind by the side of that other which was wrought out in the Middle Ages.
…How far away that dream seems! And yet I see in human nature stuff neglected, ever-present — pariah and outcast now — from which I am as certain as I live, such a chivalry could arise.
Whitman, in Calaumus, seems to strike the key-note. And though he repudiated (in a very notable letter to myself) the deductions which have logically to be drawn from Calamus, his work will remain infinitely helpful.
[Source Chris White’s Nineteenth-Century Writings on Homosexuality: A Sourcebook
Catholic Church Reaffirms Opposition to Homosexuality: 1975. It wasn’t the first time, and it certainly wouldn’t be the last. But on this date in 1975, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith — think of it as the Vatican’s equivalent of the Justice Department (so to speak) — issued Persona Humana, addressing “certain questions concerning sexual ethics.” On the subject of homosexuality, the Congregation stated:
A distinction is drawn, and it seems with some reason, between homosexuals whose tendency comes from a false education, from a lack of normal sexual development, from habit, from bad example, or from other similar causes, and is transitory or at least not incurable; and homosexuals who are definitively such because of some kind of innate instinct or a pathological constitution judged to be incurable.
In regard to this second category of subjects, some people conclude that their tendency is so natural that it justifies in their case homosexual relations within a sincere communion of life and love analogous to marriage, in so far as such homosexuals feel incapable of enduring a solitary life.
In the pastoral field, these homosexuals must certainly be treated with understanding and sustained in the hope of overcoming their personal difficulties and their inability to fit into society. Their culpability will be judged with prudence. But no pastoral method can be employed which would give moral justification to these acts on the grounds that they would be consonant with the condition of such people. For according to the objective moral order, homosexual relations are acts which lack an essential and indispensable finality. In Sacred Scripture they are condemned as a serious depravity and even presented as the sad consequence of rejecting God. This judgment of Scripture does not of course permit us to conclude that all those who suffer from this anomaly are personally responsible for it, but it does attest to the fact that homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered and can in no case be approved of.
The same statement also reaffirmed the Church’s opposition to premarital sex, extramarital sex and masturbation (which is also branded “an intrinsically and seriously disordered act”).
TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Billy Tipton: 1914-1989. It wasn’t until his death in 1989 when it became widely known that the American jazz pianist, saxophonist and bandleader was a transman. Early in his career, Tipton performed as a man while continuing to present as a woman otherwise, but by the 1940s, he had transitioned his gender identity fully to male — except for when he went home to his family, where he became Dorothy again, leading fellow musicians to believe he was lesbian.
By the 1950s, Tipton was identifying solely as a man. It was during that time when he was awarded a recording contract with Top records, for whom he recorded two albums of jazz standards. The albums were reasonably successful, and he was given the opportunity to sign a contract for four more. He declined the offer, and took his Billy Tipton Trio to Spokane where he performed weekly at a downtown nightclub called Allen’s Tin Pan Alley and worked as a talent broker at the Dave Sobol Theatrical Agency. He also entered into at least five heterosexual relationships, including a common-law marriage with Kitty Kelly with whom Tipton adopted three sons. One son, William, remembered Billy as a good father who loved to go on Scout camping trips. It was William who would learn that his father had been born a woman, when he was looking on as paramedics tried to resuscitate him after collapsing with a hemorrhaging peptic ulcer.
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December 28th, 2013
TODAY IN HISTORY:
Closeted Anti-Gay Activist Dies of AIDS: 1986. Terry Dolan, who helped to found the National Conservative Political Action Committee, was pretty well known in elite gay circles. According to Randy Shilts’s And the Band Played On
Among those awful things was sending out fundraising letters for NCPAC, which claimed that “Our nation’s moral fiber is being weakened by the growing homosexual movement and the fanatical E.R.A. pushers (many of whom publicly brag they are lesbians).” Meanwhile, Dolan had, at the time of that 1984 encounter with Kramer, had just ended an affair with a male epidemiologist at the New York City Health Department, and was then enjoying everything the gay social scene had to offer.
Dolan knew how to raise money. “The “shriller you are,” he said in 1982, “the easier it is to raise money.” That’s been the recipe for anti-gay activists ever since. But four years later, Dolan himself was dead of AIDS at the age of 36. The following May, The Washington Post published an article about “the cautious closet” of Terry Dolan. His brother, Reagan White House speechwriter Anthony Dolan was livid, and took out an two-page ad in The Washington Times, arguing that “the greatest and most malicious falsehood in this story was its entire thrust, its basis: the claim that my brother lived and died a homosexual.” But he did live and die a homosexual, and a deeply closeted one at that. But despite his and the family’s best efforts, the secret was out, and no amount of wishful thinking otherwise would ever change that.
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December 27th, 2013
THIS MONTH IN HISTORY:
“Exaggerated Human Nature”: 1895. Degeneracy theory was of the more powerful theories guiding psychiatry in the nineteenth century was. A kind of pseudo-scientific theory of evolution in reverse, Deteneracy theory held that the technological advancements of the nineteenth century was bringing about an entire race of coddled people who, without the benefit of natural seleciton, were producing offspring of a “de-generated” nature — that is, a nature that represents a reversion to a much more primitive state of human development. For proof, argued the Degenerists, all you had to do was to look at the teeming slums of the urban cities to see all the evidence you needed to prove the theory. Where there was once a fair and hardy people of industry and upstanding values in the farms and hamlets, now you see their sons and daughters in crowded tenements, drunk, filthy, and of low morals. And without the positive intervention of higher civilization, mankind was destined to “degenerate” into lower, more primative and savage orders of existence with each succeeding generation. According to Degeneracy theory, all sorts of things — intelligence, criminality, morality, educational attainment, just to name a few examples — were believed to be both hereditary and also capable to leaving a hereditary mark on future generations. A ne’er-do-well from a well-bred family was destined to pass his criminality on to his progeny along with his blue eyes and blond hair.
An abandoned building of the Norfolk State Hospital, via Flickr.
Dr. J.H. Mackay, superindendent of the State Hospital for the Insane in Norfolk, Nebraska, obviously had degeneracy theory in mind when he gave his address before the Missouri Valley Medical Association in Kansas City. That address was then published in the December 1895 edition of the journal Medical Arena where it received a much wider audience. Dr. Mackay began with the premise that all mental illness was an exaggeration of primitive human nature that mankind was destined to revert to unless something was done to reverse the degeneration of the generations.
Said a patient in the Norfolk (Nebraska) Hospital: “I am not insane; this man is not insane; that man is not insane. There is no such thing as insanity; it is simply an exaggerated form of human nature.” Insanity is a type of civilization, the offspring of humanity’s progress, the step-child of Nature, the penalty inflicted for brain-development. Indeed, it is in itself an abnormal form of brain-development, an exaggerated type of human nature. It is a little plant that has sprung from the footworn pathway traversed by the mighty cavalcade coming down the yast reaches of human civilization, human culture and human competition. It may be regarded as a proud flesh of the mind — a preternatural development or derangement of the protoplasmic cells. When the clock of civilization struck its sunrise hour, man everywhere was an unclad savage, drunken, greedy, treacherous and beastly. To flll his stomach and to flnd a comfortable place to sleep completed the apex of his ambitions and gratifications. It was his normal state. When he commenced to enlarge his cranial sphere, when he began to expand the hOrizon of his thought-realm, he started the development of a subtle, an inscrutable agency, which has developed rough corners, exaggerated eccentricities and uncontrollable proclivities. In the slow and leisurely peregrination or the mad stampede at times of humanity adown the corridors of the past, in the jostle, the clash, the strife, the crowd, the crush, the greed, the vices and the mistakes, do we wonder that here and there should occur exaggerations, €xcrescences and abnormal protuberances of the functions of the mind?
Mackay went on to list the various “atrophies or atavisms of growth and development” that were evidence of the degeneract phenomenon. Those atrophies incuded “pyromania, kleptomania, fanaticism, melancholia, dementia, hypocondriasis … and moral
strabismus that leads to crime and vice, and all the vagaries of the mind, perverted sexualisms and quasi, pseudo, rank, rancid, distorted and inflamed genius of our genus.” He continues:
Two-thirds of all the patients are sexual perverts. Homosexuality, sexual inversion, masturbation, urnings et id omnia genus ail nauseam are the rule. Personally, I believe there can be no brain disturbance without a lesion of the instrument of thought. I believe there can be no crime committed without the existence of an abnormal condition of the brain. There exists a moral obliquity, a weak corner or a perverted or depraved condition of the functions of the cells in every criminal.
Poor breeding was the culprit:
Two-thirds of all the patients in the Norfolk Hospital are scrubs, and frequently the runts of scrub families — driftwood, biped animal toadstools; fiat-chested, thin-legged, lop-shouldered, sway-backed, hump-shouldered, knock-kneed, bow-legged, loose-jointed, slab-sided, mud-moulded, squint·eyed, monkeyheaded assortment of nondescript, anthropoid allies, without energy, ambition or prospect. Two-thirds are foreigners who have drifted hitherward, croweded out of the walks of life and harboring a hereditary taint. A brother and sister from two different families are in the hospital. The brother and sister from one family are married. The sister had a child a few months after coming to the hospital. The brother’s wife also had a child about the same age. The mother and an aunt of these patients were insane. A father and his daughter, an uncle and his niece, are among the inmates of the asylum, and these have families at home.
And then there were the “men haters”:
There are men-haters among the women — women whose sexual system has been starved or perverted or abused; old maids with acquired or inherited sexual perversion, starvation or inversion; married women whose maternal instinct and sexual nature have been extinguished by hard work, poor diet, frequent child-bearing and nursing, and the dreary, monotonous, pleasureless, changeless grind of a quarter of a century, more or less, of married life. Little difference exists in the condition of the males. Religion is the great disturbing factor, or, at least, it is the predominating theme of their ravings.
And what should be done about them?
It goes without saying that to be effective any effort to improve the physical characteristics of our race must antedate the birth of the individual. We need laws to abridge the life of all monsters that do not conform to the type of man, to quarantine or prohibit the public exhibition of museum freaks. and to prevent, as far as possible, the birth of such. A judicious inspection by the state of all children before reaching puberty would serve the double purpose of discovering abnormal conditions of mind and body, and afford an opportunity for the application of means, as far as possible, to remedy them, and the segregation of those totally unsuited mentally or morally to propagate their species. In this way only can we hope to prevent insane and half-witted girls becoming pregnant. Rigid restraint, quarantining and unsexing of criminals. insane, rapists, imbeciles and those who spread specific diseases.
Degeneracy theory would have both its positive and negative aspects. It provided the “scientific” arguments in favor of universal education, public hygiene and sanitation, child labor laws, and tenement reform. But it also left a much darker mark when its theories led directly to the establishment of the Eugenics movement, which grew rapidly at the turn of the century and led to state-enforced sterilizations and, in its most extreme form in Nazi Germany, the wholesale slaughter of those deemed subhuman, racially tainted, and otherwise undesirable.
[Source: J.H. Mackay. “Exaggerated human nature.” Medical Arena 4, no. 12 (December 1895): 353-361. Available online via Google Books here.]
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December 26th, 2013
TODAY IN HISTORY:
Body Build of Male Homosexuals: 1959. In many ways, just about everyone (including most of the mental health community) saw gay people, particularly gay men, as being so alien as to almost constitute a different species. Well, maybe not a different species literally, but for some, gay men were at least some sort of a mutation of homo sapiens, and were not like just any common man on the street. On December 26, 1959, the august British Medical Journal published a short paper by Dr. A.J. Coppen, of the Institute of Psychiatry in London who believed that he had proven, on the basis of physical measurements of just thirty-one gay men, that there was a distinct body build associated with homosexuality in men — and it was the same body build associated with mental patients.
He came to this determination by measuring the shoulders and hips of three groups of people. “The homosexual group,” he wrote, “consisted of 31 patients who had been either exclusively homosexual or predominantly homosexual, with only occasional heterosexual activity. The patients had attended the Maudsley Hospital primarily for homosexuality; the majority had been referred from the courts after they had been convicted of homosexual offences.” Because a number of them had “psychiatric symptoms” of “mainly depression or anxiety” (is there any wonder?), he included “another control group of 22 heterosexual neurotics, … as any differences found in the homosexuals may be related to the differences widely reported in psychiatric patients rather than to their specific sexual abnormalities.” The third group, a control group, consisted of 53 members of a business organization “who were attending for mass radiography,” and who agreed to be part of the study.
For all three groups, they measured around their shoulders (biacromial) and hips (bi-illiac), calculated an equivalent diameter (he doesn’t say how), and used those measurements to determine what was called an “androgyny score” (3 x biacromial – x bi-iliac diameters, in cm.). And with those measurements, Coppen found:
The results show that homosexuals have a decreased androgyny score and biacromial diameter compared with the control group. This difference, however, is not specific for homosexuality, as the neurotic patients in this study also differ from the controls to approximately the same extent as regards both androgyny and biacromial width. The androgyny score does not discriminate between homosexuals and controls better than does the biacromial diameter, though, as the Chart shows, three homosexual patients have very low androgyny scores, outside the range of the other two groups. It appears, therefore, that homosexuals are similar to people with other psychiatric disorders in having decreased breadth measurements, but that their sexual abnormality is not specifically related to these. Rather it seems that the homosexual is influenced by the similar (unknown) factors that produce the abnormalities in body-build found in other psychiatric patients.
This article from 1959 is an interesting holdover from an early path of investigation that is reminiscent of nineteenth-century Phrenology. That discarded science is perhaps best known today for its busts and diagrams of human skulls with dotted outlines of areas denoted with labels like “Friendship” or “Adhesiveness.” Phrenologists believed that different areas of the brain consisted of “organs” relating to different character traits. Early on, they also believed that it was possible to determine the different developmental levels of these “organs” by relating them to the shape of an individuals skull with its various bumps and bulges. That last theory was soon discarded, but the idea that an individual’s character traits could somehow be imprinted on that person’s physical development was firmly established in the scientific imagination. The appearance of children with Down’s Syndrome, of course, only seemed to confirm the theory. Texts on homosexuality right up through through the 1950s often had several paragraphs dwelling on the physical characteristics of their study subjects, and some even included nude photos to demonstrate how “feminine” some of the subjects were.
By the late 1950s, those descriptions had mostly disappeared from the literature, which make this 1959 article something of an interesting anachronism. But today, with researchers now investigating the connection between body-build, body self-image, and health factors in our body-conscious society, some of those physical descriptions and measurements are starting to make a comeback. Nude pictures, however, have not re-appeared in the professional literature.
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December 25th, 2013
All of us at Box Turtle Bulletin wish you a very fabulous Christmas.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
170 YEARS AGO: Albert Cashier: 1843-1915. It’s unclear when Jennie Irene Hodgers undertook a male identity, but by 1862 the Irish native was living in Illinois when he decided to enlist in the union army. He enlished as Albert Chashier and served in Company G as part of the Army of the Tennessee under Gen. Ulysses S. Grant. Company G fought in the siege of Vicksburg, the Red River Campaign and at Guntown, Mississippi. Cashier’s fellow soldiers noticed that he was small and standoffish, but thought little about it. He was once captured by the Confederate army, but escaped back to Union lines after overpowering a guard. He remained in the Union army until he and the rest of his company were mustered out in 1865.
After the war, Cashier worked as a private handyman for Illinois State Senator Ira M. Lish at his estate in Saunemin. Cashier also workd as a farm hand, church janitor, and cemetery worker. As a man, Cashier registered and voted in elections long before women’s suffrage came into being, and he claimed a veteran’s pension. He successfullly maintained his male identity until 1911, when he was hit by a car and broke his leg. The attending physician discovered his biological gender, but in an amazingly forward-thinking move, the physician decided to respect Cashier’s privacy, sharing the secret only with the superintendent of the Soldiers and Sailors Home at Quincy, where Cashier was then living. It was only after Cashier’s mind deteriorated and he was moved to Watertown State Hospital in 1913 when attendants discovered his birth gender and forced him to wear a dress. But when Cashier died on October 10, 1915, he was buried in his Civil War uniform and given a full military funeral. His grave stone in Saunemin cemetary simply reads: “Albert D.J. Cashier. Co. G., 19 Ill. Inf.” Sometime in the 1970s, a second tombstone was placed with Cashier’s birth name added.
105 YEARS AGO: Quentin Crisp: 1908-1999. He was always a gender-bending raconteur, even going back to when he was the object of endless teasing in elementary school. In 1926, he studied journalism at King’s College London, but switched to art at Regent Street Polytechnic. He also visited the cafes and pubs of Soho’s Old Compton Street, which is still the heart of the gay community in London. It was then that he decided that his life’s work would be “making the existence of homosexuality abundantly clear to the world’s aborigines,” and he did so by developing the flamboyant style that would become his signature. When World War II broke out, he tried to join the Army, but was rejected on medical grounds — “sexual perversion” was the diagnosis. He remained in London during the Blitz, and placed himself at the service of American G.I.’s, so to speak. That’s where Crisp picked up his love for all things American.
In 1968, he achieved success with his third book, an autobiography he titled The Naked Civil Servant
Here he is in a Q&A session in Los Angeles following a lecture on style:
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December 24th, 2013
TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS:
Brenda Howard: 1946-2005. “The next time someone asks you why LGBT Pride marches exist or why Gay Pride Month is June tell them “A bisexual woman named Brenda Howard thought it should be.” That’s how New York area gay rights activist Tom Limoncelli euglogized Brenda Howard shortly after her death in 2005. Howard was among the thirty-seven women and men who founded the more militant Gay Liberation Front shortly after the Stonewall rebelion in 1969. She helped to organize a one-month anniversary commemoration of Stonewall, and then created the Christopher Street Liberation Day March a year later for Sonewall’s first anniversary. She later pushed to expand the commemoration to a whole week, to be known as “Pride Week” and encouraged similar observances in cities across American. Those efforts led to her being known as “The Mother of Pride.”
After GLF broke up, Howard moved over to the Gay Activists Alliance to chair its Agitprop Committee and Speakers Bureau with it’s message, “Gay is great, be proud if you’re gay, don’t mess with us if you’re not.” In 1987, she helped to found the New York Area Bisexual Network and became active in BiPAC and BiNet USA. She died of cancer on June 28, 2005, on the very day of the thirty-fifth Pride Parade of New York.
Lee Daniels: 1959. The actor, producer and director became the first African-American to solo produce an Academy Award winning film with 1992’s Monster’s Ball
His 2012 film The Paperboy, a 1960s erotic thriller starring Matthew McConaughy, Zac Efron, Nicole Kidman, John Cusack, David Oyelowo, Macy Gray and Scott Glenn, opened to decidedly mixed reviews. The strong cast appears to have saved the film from ignominy. The Village Voice Film Poll sprinkled best actor/actress nominations for jsut about about the entire cast, but nominated Lee Daniels for Worst Film. His 2013 film, The Butler, is a historical fiction centered on an African-American White House butler Cecil Gaines (Forest Whittaker). It opened to much more positive reviews and top box office sales during its first three weeks.
Ricky Martin: 1971. Born Enrique MartÃn Morales, the Puerto Rican singer first achieved fame as a member of boy band Menudo before embarking on a solo career in 1991. His early popularity in Latin markets was boosted by his appearance in the second season of a Mexican telenovela, Alcanzar Una Estrella (“Reach for a Star”) in which he played a member of a boy band which achieves fame and fortune. In 1999, Martin found crossover appeal with the singles “Livin’ la Vida Loca” and “She’s All I Ever Had,” from his first English language album. That was followed with “She Bangs” in 2000. In 2007, he took a break from recording, but returned again with a new album in 2010, along with his autobiography, Me
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December 23rd, 2013
The Arrow’s front page for December 23, 1931. (Click to enlarge.)
TODAY IN HISTORY:
“Organized Male Depravity in Sydney”: 1931. The Arrow, published in Sydney, New South Wales between 1906 and 1933, was the successor paper to two earlier broadsheets, The Dean Bird and Bird O’Freedom. The sporting weekly often augmented its sports and racing coverage with attention-grabbing stories of a scandalous nature. And as one headline from 1931 demonstrates, there was nothing more scandalous and attention-grabbing than examples of “perversion becoming rampant.” On December 23, 1931, Sydney readers were regaled by an allegedly eyewitness account of the annual crowning of the queen of a “kamp kult:”
At a recent gathering held a few nights ago, at which a representative of “The Arrow” had the singular experience of being present, apologies for unavoidable absence were received from “he-shes” and “she-he’s” from all over Australia.
The occasion was a very important one in the annals of organised male depravity in the city of Sydney. It was no less than the ceremony of crowning the Queen of the “Kamp-Kult,” as this body of male flappers describes itself. The ceremonial takes place once a year, and the queen, curiously enough in this assemblage of inverted males, is a buxom and rather impressive-looking woman. The “Kamp Kult” holds high revel, not, as might be assumed, in the vicinity of its members’ nightly perambulations, amid the bright lights of King’s Cross, but in a western suburb, far removed. This, no doubt, for the sake of safety.
The Arrow’s intrepid reporter then sidetracked into an exercise of protesting-too-much before going on to describe the “legendary revels”:
The visitor had gained his invitation by devious means, through a relative. He confesses that, much as the performance that he witnessed appealed to his sense of the bizarre, and astonishing as he found the spectacle of sixty or more devotees of this most ancient and decadent of vices, he did not feel entirely at ease until he had left the scene far behind. For, aside from the dread of personal familiarities which he experienced, and the physical nausea which the spectacle caused within him, was a fear of a massed attack by these Saturnalian revellers if the object of his visit had been even remotely guessed.
The reporter then got back to the proceedings:
Presently amid much excitement the Princess Royal, elect of the Kamp Kultur boys, was announced. An attractive, smartly-gowned brunette was she, immediately recognisable as a young gentleman from the city. Cheers from the assemblage of frocked he-maidens greeted the arrival or the Princess, who was welcomed with showers of kisses. To the astonishment of at least one visitor the Princess disrobed in full view of the guests, and changed into her ceremonial garments. A page in velvet knee breeches and a “Royal” (as the ultra male perverts are called) in the full canonicals of a bishop, completed the ensemble.
The weird gathering was marshalled into the assembly room by the bishop, who played the part of M.C. in the ceremony. A dignified figure, his expression denoting a full sense of the importance of the occasion, he arranged the principals in their places before an altar draped and bedecked with flowers, keeping the guests in the background. They, chattering like magpies, giggling in the manner of schoolgirls, and adopting various feminine poses, and calling each other by endearing names, indulged in the small talk of a hens’ convention. Some walked arm-in-arm, embracing lovingly and examining with interest one another’s beautiful frocks fitting so closely to the figure. Cigarettes were held between manicured fingers or puffed between carmined lips. Some wore false hair, with marcel waves, others the boyish Eton crop. They addressed one another as “Marie” or “Sibyl.” Their talk was mingled with strange expressions, and there were frequent references as to how “trading” was going.
…The Bishop and attendants, the Princess and ladies(?)-in-waiting, took their places. The bishop opened the proceedings by reading apologies from those unable to be present. Descending from the dais, the bishop read from a large book, the cover of which sported a huge “K,” the vows which the Princess was required to take. As a specimen of Rabelaisian ordure, the contents of that book were enough to make a hardened sinner blush. This part of the ceremony was carried out amid a babel of chatter in the mincing tones that inverts adopt in familiar conversation. There were frequent retirements outside, presumably for a little love-making.
When the crowning of the Princess Royal was over, she addressed the assembly. In well-modulated tones she told them how happy she was to be with them, and how she regretted the lost years before she became a Kamp member. … Then the beer flowed, and the fun started. It was surprising to discover what musical talent was there. Many of those present gave evidence of refinement and education. The dancing of some of the “she-he’s” was delightful.
However ” delightful” the dancing may have been, the Arrow of course wasn’t above tisk-tisking the whole thing on behalf of its titillated readers:
This is the answer to those who would say, “These people are different. They cannot help what they are. Let them live their own life.” That is just what we cannot do. For the pervert is like the drug fiend in this, that he would corrupt the world and drag everyone to his own level. The Queen is the occupant of the house where these obscene revels are held. It is stated that homosexual marriages and divorces are held in this house, with as much ceremony as the performance here described.
Said a convicted homo-sexual on one occasion to “The Arrow”: “I have been in gaol and have just been released. But I know I shall do it again. I cannot help myself. What should I do?” The advice given him was: “Go and live in some country where they do not mind these things. But get out of Ausralia. You are not wanted here.”
It is time the police took a hand with these social pests. There is plenty of work in this direction for idle policemen. Instead of being placed on duty guarding either Nellie Cameron or Parliament House. A clean up of Sydney’s perverts is overdue.
[Source: “Organized Male Depravity in Sydney. Perversion Becoming Rampant — Sodom and Gomorrah Revels Shock Community. Man ‘Married’ to a Man.” The Arrow (Sydney, NSW, December 23, 1931): 1, 4. Available online here.]
Wild Bill Dannemeyer’s Op-Ed on Gays in the Military: 1991.The debate was well underway over whether the Defense Department should rescind its policy barring gays in the military. In the pre-DADT era, the ban was a matter of DoD policy, not the law. Conservatives, joined by a large number of fearful moderates and even a few liberals, wanted to keep the ban in place. But few were more hard core about it — or more obnoxious — than Rep. William Dannemeyer (R-CA). On December 23, 1991, he was true to form in his op-ed lambasting gay people with his usual class:
A very poor joke asks: What is meaner than a pit bull with AIDS? The guy who gave the dog AIDS, of course. This could be the fightingest son-of-a-gun in the whole Army. But should he be?
I have seen how aggressive the lunatics of ACT-UP can be-rioting in the streets, smashing windows, fighting with anyone in disagreement-and have often thought how effective they might be on the front lines of combat. But does this prowess and compunction for destruction automatically certify the few and the proud?
…Many people still believe that homosexual sodomy is a perverse behavior, that someone choosing to do so isn’t playing with a full deck. Survey after survey of military personnel supports this belief. …For homosexuals to blame others for reacting adversely to their chosen lifestyle is absurd. The notion of punishing “homophobes” (the label applied to people who find homosexual sodomy repugnant) in the military as perverts rather than those persons who define their very existence by a sex act is itself perverse…
Those were the arguments against gays in the military in the early 1990s. When Bill Clinton ran for President, he promised to overturn the ban. But as soon as he was sworn into office, he ran into a buzz saw of opposition led by fellow Democratic Sen. Sam Nunn of Georgia. In 1993, Congress shifted the ban from administrative policy to legal imperative with the passage of that year’s Defense Authorization Bill, which included the codification of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” into law. According to Servicemembers United, 14,346 soldiers, sailors and airmen/women would be discharged under “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” over the next eighteen years before its repeal finally went into effect in 2011 (see Sep 20).
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December 22nd, 2013
TODAY IN HISTORY:
President Obama Signs DADT Repeal Into Law: 2010. It all came down to the wire during the closing days of the 111th Congress. If it hadn’t been for the heroic efforts of Sens. Susan Collins (R-ME) and Joe Lieberman (I-CT) when all hope for DADT’s repeal appeared to be dead, President Barack Obama never would have been able to place his signature on the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Repeal Act of 2010. But sign it he did, and that act kicked off a nine month process to implement DADT’s repeal. Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell officially came to an end on September 20. Since then, DADT’s end has been largely considered a non-event within the military. Even Marine Corps Commandant Gen. James Amos, who had been on record as opposing DADT’s repeal, now says he is “very pleased with how it has gone.”
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December 21st, 2013
TODAY IN HISTORY:
Time Magazine’s “Opportunistic Diseases”: 1981. Nearly seven months had passed since the CDC had issued its first notice of a puzzling new condition that was appearing in gay men (see Jun 5). A month after the CDC raised the alarm, the New York Times picked up the story (see Jul 3). But beyond that, the news was slow to spread outside of a few gay publications (and most of them were gun shy). In fact, the media seemed to go out of its way to keep from looking at AIDS. Randy Shilts described the problem in And the Band Played On
The difference, (the CDC’s James W.) Curran knew, was media attention. Once Toxic Shock Syndrome hit the front pages the heat was on to find the answer. Within months of the first MMWR report, the task force had discovered the link between tampons and the malady. Back in 1976, the newspapers couldn’t print enough pictures of flag-draped coffins of dead American Legionnaires. However the stories just weren’t coming on the gay syndrome. The New York Times had written only two stories on the epidemic, setting the tone for noncoverage nationally. Time and Newsweek were running their first major stories on the epidemic now, in late December 1981. There was only one reason for the lack of media interest, and everybody on the (CDC’s) task force knew it: the victims were homosexuals. Editors were killing pieces, reporters told Curran, because they didn’t want stories about gays and all those distasteful sexual habits littering their newspapers.
The December 21 edition of Time (which featured Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi on the cover) placed the article titled “Opportunistic Diseases” deep inside. The article provided little context, information, or hope. Truth be told, there was little to give of any of those thus far. No one knew what caused it, nor did they even know what to call it. Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome wouldn’t get its official name until July 1982. Time, instead, focused on the prevailing image of gays as diseased, while simultaneously expressing surprise that lesbians weren’t coming down with the strange new infections. Of the speculations about the disease, Time wrote:
One possible culprit in the syndrome is cytomegalovirus, which is known to weaken immune defenses and can be transmitted in semen more than a year after infection. In a recent study, traces of CMV were found in 94% of homosexual men, as opposed to 54% of heterosexual men. U.C.L.A.’s Dr. Michael Gottlieb believes that CMV does contribute to the immune deficiency, but, he points out, both the virus and homosexuality “have been around for thousands of years.” Thus, he concludes, “there is a piece of the puzzle missing.”
The missing link could be “poppers,” drugs like amyl nitrate and butyl nitrate, which are said to enhance orgasm. More than 85% of the CDC patients admitted to inhaling them. Another possible explanation is the so-called immunologic overload theory, says San Francisco’s Dr. Robert Bolan. Homosexuals with many sexual partners often contract numerous venereal diseases, intestinal disruptions (gay bowel syndrome), mononucleosis and other infections, explains Bolan. “This constant, chronic stimulation to their immune system may eventually cause the system to collapse.”
All of those theories would soon be proven wrong, although some of them would continue to linger among the conspiratorially-minded AIDS deniers who insist, against all evidence to the contrary, that the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) doesn’t cause AIDS. It’s been said that there is no such thing as bad publicity. Time proved that aphorism wrong.
Kirk Murphy, in 2003
10 YEARS AGO: “The darkness keeps calling and I must go”: 2003. With those words written on a suicide note, Kirk Andrew Murphy ended his life in a New Delhi apartment. “”I’ll never forget this as long as I live,” said Frank, his supervisor back in Phoenix, Arizona. He was the first outside of India to receive the news. “I got a phone call from the account manager who reported to me. It was midnight or one o’clock in the morning. I was totally shook up.” Frank contacted Kirk’s sister, Maris, in New York, and together they went to India for the funeral.
What happened seemed utterly senseless to Maris, but seven years later she would learn something that would suddenly make so many things about her brother click. That’s when she learned that in 1970, when Kirk was just about to turn five years old and Maris herself was just an infant, their mother took Kirk to see a specialist at UCLA’s Gender Identity Clinic after a well-known researcher appeared on television to warn parents that gender-variant children would grow up to be homosexual. According to that researcher, UCLA had a new program, paid for with federal grants, to prevent homosexuality in children. Kirk’s mother saw that program and made an appointment. Kirk came under the care of a young grad student by the name of George Rekers, who worked with Kirk for about nine months before pronouncing him “cured.” Rekers went on to build a career on Kirk’s case, which Rekers mentioned in nearly twenty journal articles, chapters, and books. As late as 2009, referring to Kirk as “Craig,” Rekers wrote:
Follow-up psychological evaluations three years after treatment indicates that Craig’s gender behaviors became normalized. An independent clinical psychologist evaluated Craig and found that post-treatment he had a normal male identity. Using intrasubject replication designs, this published case was the first experimentally demonstrated reversal of a cross-gender identity with psychological treatment, and the journal article on this case was among the top 12 cited articles in clinical psychology in the 1970s
Kirk, at the age of 4 years and 6 months, just a few months before entering treatment at UCLA’s Feminine Boy Project (Photo courtesy of the Murphy family)
Nothing could be further from the truth. Well, it is true that Rekers’s initial case report did become one of the most widely cited articles in the 1970s. But to say that Kirk had “become normalized” according to Rekers’s definition turned out to be misleading, to put it extremely mildly. Rekers’s went on to become an important anti-gay activist. He co-founded the Family Research Council in 1983 and served as its first chairman and CEO. He also became an important figure in the ex-gay movement, serving on the Scientific Advisory Committee and the Board of Directors for the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH). All that came to an end in 2009 when Penn Bullock and Brandon K. Thorp, two from the alternative newsweekly Miami New Times, photographed Rekers at Miami International Airport as he returned from a European vacation in the company of a handsome male escort.
In 2011, BTB was privileged to bring you the real story of Rekers’s most famous case history. In our award-winning investigation, What Are Little Boys Made Of?, we interviewed Kirk’s family, friends and associates, and we revealed the horrible treatment that Kirk and his brother went through while under UCLA’s care, and we learned of its terrible aftermath. We also investigated the state of psychology in 1970 and its evolution in the decades since, we looked into the claims that Kirk received “independent” follow-up evaluations indicating that he was healthy and straight, and we tried to get to the bottom of who exactly was in charge of Kirk’s treatment at the hands of that inexperienced grad student.
You can find all of that information here, along with statements from Kirk’s brother and sister, eulogies from family and friends, links to original published reports about Kirk’s case and the controversy it generated among behavioral therapists, and more information on the ex-gay movement and attempts to change sexual orientation.
If Kirk were alive today, he would be 48. He is still missed by his mother, sister, brother, and everyone who knew him.
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December 20th, 2013
TODAY IN HISTORY:
Frank Kameny Fired From Government Job for Being Gay: 1957. Frank Kameny was a World War II veteran and Harvard-trained astronomer working for the Army Map Service. In Eric Marcus’s compendium of oral histories, Making History
When I was on assignment in Hawaii in November or December of 1957, I got a call from my supervisor in Washington, D.C., to come back at once. I told him that whatever the problem, it could wait a few days, and I returned to Washington at the end of the week. As soon as I got back, I was called in by some two-bit Civil Service Commission investigator and told, “We have information that leads us to believe that you are a homosexual. Do you have any comment?” I said, “What’s the information?” They answered, “We can’t tell you.” I said, well, then I can’t give you an answer. You don’t deserve an answer. and in any case, this is none of your business.” I was not open about being gay at that time — no one was, not in 1957. But I was certainly leading a social life. I went to the gay bars many, many evenings. I’ve never been a covert kind of a person, and I wasn’t about to be one simply because I was working for the government. I’ve never been one to function on the basis that Big Brother may be looking over my shoulder.
So they called me in, and ultimately it resulted in my termination. They did it the way the government does anything: They issued a letter. They said they were dismissing me for homosexuality. I was in shock.
…Keep in mind I had been training all of my life for a scientific career, for this kind of occupation. I was not at all familiar with the job market. When I was thrown out, I had nowhere to go. Perhaps if this had happened five or ten years later, I would have had a professional reputation to fall back on, but in this case I didn’t. For a long time I applied for jobs in astronomy, but there was nothing. Ultimately, in 1959, I got a job doing something in physics. My bachelor’s degree is in physics, in the area of optics.
But meanwhile, I had decided that my dismissal amounted to a declaration of war against me by my government. First, I don’t grant me government the right to declare war on me. And second, I tend not to lose my wars.
Kameny launched a string of appeals, first through the Civil Service commission itself, then through the courts. He took his appeals all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court — writing his own brief (which is available here
Kameny went on to co-found the Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C., which in 1963 launched a long campaign to overturn the federal employment ban on gay people and to overturn the district’s sodomy law. In 1965, he organized the first picket line in front of the White House in support of gay rights (see Apr 17), followed by several other protests throughout that year. He was also an instrumental player in the fight to remove homosexuality from the American Psychiatric Association’s list of mental disorders. In 1971, he became the first openly gay candidate for the U.S. Congress when he ran for D.C’s non-voting Congressional delegate (see Feb 22). In 1975, the U.S. Civil Service Commission notified him that they had changed their policies and were now allowing gay people to work in federal jobs (see Jul 3). In 2009, the U.S. government officially repudiated Kameny’s firing when John Berry, the openly gay Director of the Office of Personnel Management, delivered a formal apology during a special OPM ceremony in his honor. Upon receiving the apology, Kameny tearfully replied, “Apology accepted.” He passed away in 2011 at the age of 86. You can read his full biography here.
Vermont Supreme Court Rules State Must Recognize Same-Sex Unions: 1999. In a unanimous decision, the Vermont Supreme Court ruled that the state must provide the same benefits, protections and obligations to same-sex couples as it does to heterosexual couples. The Supreme Court left it up to the legislature to decide how it would end the discrimination, either through marriage or through civil unions. Most state political leaders opted for the latter. State Attorney General William Sorrell, predicted, “It would likely be a civilly sanctioned relationship that would, for all intents and purposes, have the benefits and protections a traditionally married couple would have but wouldn’t be called a marital relationship. They wouldn’t be called spouses, they’d be called domestic partners, and for a number of people, that makes an enormous difference.” Gov. Howard Dean concurred, saying that same-sex marriage “makes me uncomfortable, the same as anybody else.” Beth Robinson, the lawyer for the winning plaintiffs, dismissed that idea and pressed for full marriage. “The Legislature will come to understand that as a practical matter, you can’t call it something different and have it be truly equal.”
It would take another decade before the Legislature would come to that understanding, opting instead to go for civil unions, which Gov. Dean signed into law 0n April 26, 2000. It took effect on July 1, 2000. In 2009, the Legislature revisited the issue again and passed a same-sex marriage bill with bipartisan support, only to see it vetoed by Gov. Jim Douglas (R). The legislature then overturned the governor’s veto, and same-sex marriages finally became available in the Green Mountain State on September 1, 2009.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Elsie de Wolfe: 1865-1950. She was the legendary interior designer who finally put gloomy victorian styles out of its misery. And for that, she is hailed as America’s first decorator and her designs, nearly a century later, are still just as fresh today as they were bold in at the turn of the last century. She began her creative life as an actress in the 1890s, but her appearances were appreciated more for her stylish clothes than her performing abilities.
At about 1887, she began what was called “A Boston marriage” with Elisabeth “Bessie” Marbury — a New York socialite, literary agent, and business manager with such illustrious clients as Oscar Wilde (see Oct 16), George Bernard Shaw, and Sarah Bernhardt. The two bought and restored Villa Trianon in Versailles, France, where de Wolfe became enamored with the light colors and brightly-lit rooms that defined French style. She then drew on those influences as she set about redecorating Marbury’s New York home by throwing out all of that dark Victorian furnishings and cluttering bric-a-brac, and people took notice. When a group of wealthy women formed the exclusive Colony Club, de Wolfe was tapped to design the clubhouse’s interiors. The Colony opened in 1907 and with it, de Wolfe’s reputation was set.
A photo from A House In Good Taste, 1913.
Instead of the dark paneled rooms and heavy atmosphere common with men’s clubs, The Colony featured light draperies, pale walls, wicker furniture, chintz — she became known as “the Chintz Lady” — and light, lots of natural light. Her design practice exploded overnight, with commissions for private houses, clubs, opera boxes, and a dorm at Barnard College. Her 1913 book, The House in Good Taste
De Wolfe was an iconoclast in many ways. She single-handedly turned the design profession from a “man’s world” into one in which women could excel. She embroidered her own pillows with the motto, “Never complain, never explain.” At her home in France, she had a dog cemetery where each headstone carried the epitaph, “The one I loved the best.” And speaking of France, When World War I came along, she broke from all expectations by volunteering to become a nurse — where she was awarded the Croix de Guerre and the Legion of Honor for her work with mustard gas victims. In 1926, she scandalized French society with her grand entrance to a society ball dressed as a Moulin Rouge dancer while turning handsprings — at the age of 61 — her many years of practicing yoga did well for her. Her marriage that same year to the diplomat Sir Charles Mendl was also a surprise because, as The New York Times dryly observed, “When in New York she makes her home with Miss Elizabeth [sic] Marbury at 13 Sutton Place.” Her marriage now made her Lady Mendl, immortalized in the Cole Porter lyric:
When you hear that Lady Mendl, standing up
Now turns a handspring landing up-
On her toes
Anything goes!
When World War II broke out, Mendl and de Wolfe moved to Hollywood. After the war, they returned to Villa Trianon where de Wolfe died in 1950.
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December 19th, 2013
TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Michelangelo Signorile: 1960. After graduating with a degree in journalism at at Syracuse University, the Brooklyn native returned to New York where he got his first job at a public relations firm which specialized in placing stories about their entertainment clients in gossip columns. That naturally meant that he was collecting and trading in gossip, which is where he noticed the double standard in how the media glamorized the heterosexuality of celebrities while maintaining a veil of silence around anything that might be remotely gay. But it wasn’t until his friends began dying in the early years of the AIDS crisis that he began to draw a line from gay invisibility to the ease with which media and public officials could turn a blind eye on what was happening. He became an activist in 1988 when he joined ACT UP, which led to his arrest during a speech by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (later to become Pope Benedict XVI) who was the Vatican’s point man on Catholic orthodoxy and the author of papers against homosexuality and against condom use to prevent the spread of AIDS. Signorile had gone simply to watch the protesters, but as he heard the Cardinal speak, he thought of the homophobia he had experienced growing up in the church, and he couldn’t contain himself. As he wrote later in Queer In America: Sex, The Media, and the Closets of Power
Suddenly, I jumped up on one of the marble platforms, and looking down, I addressed the entire congregation in the loudest voice I could. My voice rang out as if it were amplified. I pointed at Ratzinger and shouted, “He is no man of God!” The shocked faces of the assembled Catholics turned to the back of the room to look at me as I continued: “He is no man of God—he is the devil!'”
So yeah, he was arrested, and another gay rights activist was born.
Signorile is considered the pioneer of the controversial act of outing public figures. He was the co-founding editor of OutWeek, where, in a weekly column called “Gossip Watch,” a watch column of the city’s gossip columns, he railed against the media’s double standard on how they treated gay and straight public figures, and he argued that this double standard drove the gay community to invisibility in the midst of an growing health catastrophe. He outed Hollywood producer David Geffen, who was promoting Guns ‘N’ Roses and comedian Andrew Dice Clay, two acts which were attacked for crude anti-gay lyrics and “jokes” about the AIDS crisis. He also outed gossup columnist Liz Smith and publishing tycoon Malcolm Forbes. It was actually Time magazine which coined the term “outing”, but Signorile always considered the term itself biased. He preferred to call what he did “reporting,” and insisted that it was no different from the same kind of reporting that media outlets routinely do with straight people.
Signorile later worked at the Advocate and Out magazines, and he also wrote columns for Gay.com. In 2000 he began working in internet radio, and that led to hosting The Michelangelo Signorile Show on SiriusXM OutQ beginning in 2003. This past year, his program moved to a broader audience on SiriusXM’s Progress 127, from 3:00 to 6:00 p.m. EST. He has written three other books, including Life Outside: The Signorile Report on Gay Men
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December 18th, 2013
TODAY IN HISTORY:
New York Court of Appeals Strikes Down Sodomy Law: 1980. New York became the twenty-fourth state in the nation to legalize homosexuality when the Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court, struck down the New York’s consensual sodomy law. In a 5-2 decision, the court ruled that the law violated Constitutional rights to privacy and equal protection, noting that the law banned anal and oral sex only when those acts were performed by unmarried couples. Married couples were exempt under the law. Writing for the majority, Judge Hugh Jones wrote:
“We express no view as to any theological, moral or psychological evaluations of consensual sodomy. It is not the function of the Penal Law or our governmental policy to provide for the enforcement of moral or theological values. …the People have failed to demonstrate how government interference with the practice of personal choice in matters of intimate sexual behavior out of view of the public and with no commercial component will serve to advance the cause of public morality or do anything other than restrict individual conduct and impose a concept of private morality chosen by the State.”
TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Jay Bakker: 1975. Having grown up in front of television cameras as the son of televangelists Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker at their Christian theme park home in Charlotte, North Carolina, he was deeply affected when his father’s empire came crashing down. His father was sent to prison for financial irregularities and mail fraud, and his family was subsequently ostracized by fellow Evangelicals. For Jay, that led to a downward spiral of rebellion and drug abuse. But he eventually turned his life around and committed himself to a different vision of Christianity, one with God as a loving and accepting being rather than a God of judgment and wrath. In the process, he became a very different kind of minister, an “evangelical punk preacher,” as he describes himself. Jay’s experience of being outcast informed his own philosophy of inclusiveness which extends to LGBT people. In the 2006 documentary One Punk Under God, Jay is seen explaining why he supports same-sex marriage to a congregation that is not ready to accept that message:
In 2011, Jay Bakker released his book, Fall to Grace: A Revolution of God, Self and Society
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December 17th, 2013
TODAY IN HISTORY:
50 YEARS AGO: New York Times: “Growth of Overt Homosexuality In City Provokes Wide Concern”: 1963. Randy Wicker was a brash young activist who, beginning in 1958, decided it was time to shake things up if the gay community was ever going to get anywhere. As a grad student, he volunteered with the New York Mattachine Society hoping to move the organization’s advocacy efforts in a much stronger direction. When the group scheduled a talk on “The Homosexual and the Law,” Wicker took it upon himself to print up some signs and post then throughout Greenwich Village to publicize the event. Mattachine members, who were more accustomed to the more closeted word-of-mouth method of getting the word out, found Wicker a “disturbing acquisition to the movement,” as the group’s president later said. To get around the Mattachines’ fearfulness, Wicker created a one-man advocacy “group” he called the Homosexual League of New York, so that whenever he had a project that the Mattachines felt was too far out there, his “League” could ride to the rescue. It was under that guise that Wicker appeared on WBAI radio in 1962 (see Jul 15), where New York radio listeners, for the first time, heard Wicker and six other gay men talk for ninety minutes about what it was like to be gay.
Wicker was always looking for ways to generate attention, and so when Robert Doty of The New York Times contacted him asking for help on a story about homosexuals — Doty explained that he actually knew very little about the subject — Wicker was eager to help. He took Doty on something on a field trip of gay bars in New York, and he provided him with articles from ONE magazine about Evelyn Hooker, the UCLA psychologist whose research challenged the prevailing view that homosexuality was an illness (see Aug 30 and Sep 2). As Wicker later recalled, “I told him, ‘Look, I understand that the majority opinion in the psychiatric community says that homosexuality is a disorder and that these people are out claiming they can change people. All I want is equal treatment. At least give some exposure to the minority voices that say homosexuality is not necessarily a pathology.”
Unfortunately, equal treatment was not on offer when Doty’s story appeared on the Times’ front page on a brisk Tuesday morning in December:
The problem of homosexuality in New York became the focus yesterday of increased attention by the State Liquor Authority and the Police Department.
The liquor authority announced the revocation of the liquor licenses of two more homosexual taverns that had been repeatedly raided by the police. The places were the Fawn, at 795 Washington Street near Jain Street, and the Heights Supper Club at 90 Montague Street, Brooklyn.
The city’s most sensitive open secret — the presence of what is probably the greatest homosexual population in the world and the increasing openness of its manifestations — has become the subject of growing concern by psychiatrists and religious leaders as well as law enforcement officers. One division of the organized crime syndicate controls bars and restaurants that cater to the homosexual trade. Commenting yesterday on the attack on such places and the attention being directed at their habitues, Police Commissioner Michael J. Murphy said:
“The police jurisdiction in this area is limited. But when persons of this type become a source of public scandal, or violate the laws, or place themselves in a position where they become the victims of crime they do come within our jurisdiction.”
Mr. Hostetter said the Heights supper Club had a signal light system “that warned the boys to stop dancing with one another” when a newcomer was suspected of being a policeman. The Fawn had a back room to which an admission was charged and where as many as 70 to 80 deviates had parties on Friday and Saturday nights. Most of the patrons were males, but on police found women dancing with women.
There were 19 police visits this year resulting in summonses and complaints of a noisy jukebox, disorderly premises, insufficient lighting and dancing without a cabaret license, and an arrest for degeneracy.
Before Doty could even broach the subject of homosexuality as a mental illness — and he did devote much of his article to that very topic — he introduced New Yorkers to homosexuals as criminals, or at least as associating with the criminal element. Doty wrote that homosexuality had been, until now, “protected by taboos on open discussion,” which allowed it to become “an obtrusive part” of New York society. As for balance, Doty provided this:
Two conflicting viewpoints converge today to overcome the silence and promote public discussion. The first is the organized homophile movement — a minority of militant homosexuals that is openly agitating for removal of legal, social and cultural discrimination against sexual inverts. Fundamental to this aim is the concept that homosexuality is an incurable, congenital disorder (this is disputed by the bulk of scientific evidence) and that homosexuals should be treated by an increasingly tolerant society as just another minority.
This view is challenged by a second group, the analytical psychiatrists, who advocate an end to what it calls a head-in-the-sand approach to homosexuality. They have what they consider overwhelming evidence that homosexuals are created — generally by ill-adjusted parents — not born. They assert that homosexuality can be cured by sophisticated analytical and therapeutic techniques.
More significantly, the weight of the most recent findings suggest that public discussion of the nature of these parental misdeeds and attitudes that tend to foster homosexual development in children could improve family environments and reduce the incidence of sexual inversion.
Wicker’s copies of ONE magazine featuring articles about Evelyn Hooker’s research on homosexuality did make one small appearance in Doty’s article: “The homosexual has a range of gay periodicals that is a kind of distorted mirror image of the straight publishing world.” That was it. Doty then went on to describe, in a very stereotypical fashion, the homosexuals who “throng Manhattan’s Greenwich Village”:
They have their favored clothing suppliers who specialize in the rights slacks, short-cut coats and fastidious furnishings favored by mane, but by no means all, male homosexuals. There is a homosexual jargon, once intelligible only to the initiate, but now part of New York slang. The word “gay” has been appropriated as the adjective for homosexual.
… The list of homosexuals in the theater is long, distinguished and international. It is also self-perpetuating. There is a cliquishness about gay individuals that often leads one who achieves influential position in the theater — and many of them do — to choose for employment another homosexual candidate over a straight applicant, unless the latter has an indisputable edge of talent that would bear on the artistic success of the venture.
But back to that thing about homosexuality as a mental illness. A year earlier, Dr. Irving Bieber published the highly influential book, Homosexuality — A Psychoanalytic Study of Male Homosexuals, in which he and a team of seventy psychiatrists claimed a success rate of 27% in curing gay people through psychoanalysis. It would take several more years before many of Bieber’s colleagues and former patients to come forward to dispute those claims.But Doty devoted the remaining half of his lengthy article to Bieber’s views, including his theory that homosexuality was the result of of bad parenting:
In almost every homosexual case they found some combination of what they termed a “close-binding, intimate” mother and/or a hostile, detached or unresponsive father, or other parental aberrations.
Unsaid, though was that in almost every homosexual case they also found a gay man or a lesbian who was deeply distressed at being gay, so much so that they paid some very expensive psychoanalyst in a desperate attempt to get rid of it. What their so-called study said about those who didn’t seek their services, nobody bothered to ask. To back Bieber up, Doty turned to another psychoanalyst, Dr. Charles Socarides — the same Charles Socarides who would co-found the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH) in 1992 and whose son, Richard, would come out as gay. In Doty’s article, Socarides denounced the efforts of gay activists to win social acceptance for what he called a kind of “normal abnormality.” The homosexual is ill,” he said, “and anything that tends to hid that fact reduces his changes of seeking and obtaining treatment. If they were to achieve social acceptance it would increase this difficulty.”
“I thought it was a terrible betrayal,” said Randy Wicker of Doty’s article. “Because he was a man I had given all the information to and when it came out it was disgusting. He didn’t give any mention — not one mention — that there was a division among psychiatrists — not one word.” The Daughters of Bilitis’s The Ladder wrote that the story was designed to frighten readers into believing that gay people were flooding the streets of New York and “threatening to engulf the normals.” But Newsweek saw the article positively: “While straining for objectivity, a Times trademark, Doty nevertheless tried to explode a favorite myth propagated by some homosexuals that their condition is incurable and innate.”
[Sources: Edward Allwood. Straight News: Gays, Lesbians, and the News Media
Robert Doty. “Growth of Overt Homosexuality In City Provokes Wide Concern.” The New York Times (December 17, 1963): 1ff.
Jack Nicols. “Randolphe Wicker (1938- ).” In Vern L. Bullough’s (ed.) Before Stonewall: Activists for Gay and Lesbian Rights in Historical Context
TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Paul Cadmus: 1904-1999. When he died in 1999 at the ripe old age of 94, his New York Times obituary read:
Paul Cadmus, an American artist noted for a virtuosic figurative style that he applied to subjects ranging from biting social satire to moralizing allegories to sensual, sometimes sentimental male nudes, died on Sunday at his home in Weston, Conn. He was 94.
Mr. Cadmus found his inspiration in the art of Italian Renaissance painters like Mantegna and Luca Signorelli. His career was remarkable for its unruffled stylistic consistency over 70 years, from his days as a precocious student in New York in the 1920’s through his incendiary stint in the 30’s with the federal Public Works of Art Project, later folded into the Works Progress Administration, and up to the present. Although he stopped painting a few years ago, he continued to sketch.
The Fleet’s In!, 1934 (Click to enlarge)
It took the Times’s Holland Cotter four paragraphs before he could work his readers up to Cadmus’s favorite subject matter: the frank depiction of gay men as free and happy people. His “incendiary stint” came about over his 1934 PWAP commission, The Fleet’s In!, which portrayed sailors on shore leave in New York picking up local “trade”. That painting became the center of “the Battle of the Corcoran” when Navy Secretary Claude Swanson condemned it as “a most disgraceful, sordid, disreputable, drunken brawl” and ordered it seized from the gallery. The painting remained out of public view until 1981, but the outcry cemented Cadmus’s career as a satirist. For the rest of his life, he maintained that he was grateful for the publicity.
What I Believe, 1947 (Click to enlarge)
His cartoonish style became known as “magical realism,” and his themes nearly always touched on sexuality in some form, with homosexual themes nearly always present as either a subtext (glances and signals of cruising in otherwise ordinary scenes) or as an overt subject. His 1947 painting What I Believe, inspired by an E.M. Forster essay by the same name, was his visual manifesto. It depicts nude and contented gay couples in the center and left side of the painting in bright sunlight while reading, drawing, playing music, and conversing. That paradisal scene contrasted with the almost hellish right third of the painting, where heterosexual couples reclined in bare dirt and misery — not unlike traditional renderings of the final judgment. The painting, he said, celebrated “the sensitive, the considerate, and the plucky. Its members are to be found in all nations and classes, and all through the ages, and there is a secret understanding between them when they meet. They represent the true human condition, the one permanent victory of our queer race over cruelty and chaos.”
In an interview with the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art, Cadmus quoted the French artist Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres: “People say my paintings are not right for the times. Can I help it if the times are wrong?” Times have changed. The Fleet’s In!, the painting that started all the controversy, is now in the permanent collection of The Navy Art Gallery in Washington, where it is among its most popular attractions.
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December 16th, 2013
Miami Mayor Abe Aronovitz
TODAY IN HISTORY:
Miami Officials Testify Before Senate Committee About Anti-Gay Crackdown: 1954. It has been quite a year for Miami’s long-running witch hunt in that city (see Aug 3, Aug 11, Aug 12, Aug 13 (twice that day), Aug 14,Aug 26, Aug 31, Sep 1, Sep 2, Sep 7, Sep 15, Sep 19, Oct 6 Oct 20, and Nov 12), and Miami’s Mayor Abe Aronovitz got one more shot in before the year was out. He and several other Miami officials testified before the Senate Juvenile Delinquency Subcommittee about the “alarming” rise in young people running afoul of the law. Several problems were discussed: a growing crime rate, the lack of resources in the county sheriff’s office, runaways appearing in Miami from other parts of the country, and, of course, homosexuals.
Daniel Sullivan, chairman of the Greater Miami Crime Commission, complained to the subcommittee that there had been a “tremendous increase” in the number of “perverts” making the Miami area their “headquarters.” He cited recent estimates of the number of homosexuals there at 8,000 (out of about 500,000 for all of Dade County). Sullivan blamed the “increase” on the number of bars and nightclubs that cater to gay people.
Miami Mayor Abe Aronovitz chimed in, criticizing Police Chief Walter Headly’s preferred policy of allow gay bars to operate in certain areas, saying that this was, in effect, an open invitation “to homosexuals from all over the nation.” But Chief Headly countered that while he had obeyed the mayor’s orders to break up such gatherings (see Sept 2), but he believed that all that he had actually accomplished was to “scatter” the problem elsewhere in the area rather than actually getting rid of the “perverts.” Aronovitz saw it differently, telling the committee that the crackdown “temporarily improved” the situation, but said, “the federal government should spend money to help local governments battle the problem.”
TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Noël Coward: 1899-1973. He first appeared on the stage at the age of eleven, and his stage work as a teenager — along with his (possibly romantic) relationship with the painter Philip Streatfeild — opened the doors for the precocious son of a house maid to London’s high society, and his embrace of that society cemented his image for the rest of his life. “I am determined to travel through life first class,” he often remarked. Coward went on to write fifty plays, over a hundred songs, and a dozen musical theater works. He never acknowledged his homosexuality, but given his body of work he hardly had to. His 1924 hit play, The Vortex, offered a daring portrayal of a nymphomaniac society woman and her drug-addicted son. The play shocked London sensibilities with its portrayal of drugs and hints of gay life in high society, but that shock leaned more toward titillation than outrage. Coward spent the rest of his life walking that balance.
Ever the fervent anti-Fascist, Coward enlisted with British Intelligence in 1938. For his first assignment in Paris he was given the cover story of working in the British Propaganda office, where he famously critiqued the quality of its work. “If the policy of His Majesty’s Government is to bore the Germans to death I don’t think we have time,” he said. His next assignment was to go to America and use his wit and celebrity status to sway popular opinion to support the British. He also used that tour to gauge public sentiment and political leaders’ opinions about the war and report those findings back to Bletchley Park. Coward’s next assignment was to travel the world to entertain the troops, another assignment which provided perfect cover:
“I was the perfect silly ass,” (Coward) said. “Nobody … considered I had a sensible thought in my head, and they would say all kinds of things that I’d pass along.”
It was a senior diplomat named Robert Vansittart, routinely dismissed in the Foreign Office as an anti-Nazi Cassandra, who in late 1937 or 1938 spotted how to use Coward’s flamboyance, intelligence and flawless memory to help tend an unofficial, off-the-books anti-Nazi intelligence network he had set up across Europe. Vansittart dispatched Coward on tour in such un-Cowardy places as Warsaw, Moscow and Helsinki, where he sang songs, gauged Nazi influence among star-struck V.I.P.’s and (very likely) contacted sources on the ground. If he fooled the V.I.P.’s, Coward failed to fool the Nazis. He was soon on the Gestapo’s list of people to be “liquidated” when Britain fell.
King George VI had recommended Coward for a knighthood during the war, but Prime Minister Winston Churchill vetoed it. Coward was too “flamboyant” for Churchill’s tastes. After the war, Coward continued to find success in Britain and America. He also fell in love with actor Graham Payn and they remained together for the next thirty years. The two became tax exiles and moved first to Bermuda, then Jamaica. He never did acknowledge his sexuality, believing that any direct discussion of sex was tasteless. Besides, he said, “There are still a few old ladies in Worthing who don’t know.” He was finally knighted in 1969. That year, Time wrote of him, “Coward’s greatest single gift has not been writing or composing, not acting or directing, but projecting a sense of personal style, a combination of cheek and chic, pose and poise.” He died in 1973, in the company of his partner Graham. His diaries
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December 15th, 2013
TODAY IN HISTORY:
US Senate Committee Issues Report on “Employment of Homosexuals and Other Sexual Perverts”: 1950. The Senate Committee on Expenditures in the Executive Departments issued an interim report which would prove to become a major document of the 1950s anti-gay witch-hunts. The next day, The New York Times carried a story on the report:
“A Senate investigating group labeled sexual perverts today as dangerous security risks and demanded strict and careful screening to keep them off the Government payroll. It said that many Federal agencies had not taken “adequate steps to get these people out of Government.” …
Stressing the risks that the Government takes in employing a sex deviate or keeping one on the payroll, the subcommittee said:
“The lack of emotional stability which is found in most sex perverts, and the weakness of their moral fiber, makes them susceptible to the blandishments of foreign espionage agents.”
The report also noted that perverts were “easy prey to the blackmailer.” It said that Communist and Nazi agents had sought to get secret Government data from Federal employees “by threatening to expose their abnormal sex activities.”
The subcommittee criticized the State Department particularly for “mishandling ninety-one cases of homosexualism among its employees.” It said that many of the employees were allowed to resign “for personal reasons,” and that no steps were taken to bar them from other Government jobs. …
The committee said that it was unable to determine accurately how many perverts now held Federal jobs. It added, however, that since Jan. 1 1947, a total of 4,954 cases had been processed, including 4,380 in the military services and 574 on Federal civilian payrolls. …
In addition to strict enforcement of Civil Service rules about firing perverts, the subcommittee recommended tightening of the District of Columbia laws on sexual perversion, closer liaison between the Federal agencies and the police and a thorough inquiry by all divisions of the Government into all reasonable complaints of perverted sexual activity.
APA “Cures” Nation’s Gay Population: 1973. After years of research demonstrating that gays and lesbians are not mentally ill simply because they are gay, the American Psychiatric Association’s board of trustees approved a resolution that said, in part, “by itself, homosexuality does not meet the criteria for being a psychiatric disorder. … We will no longer insist on a label of sickness for individuals who insist that they are well and demonstrate no generalized impairment in social effectiveness.”
In a compromise to those who fought the finding, the APA agreed to define “sexual orientation disturbance” to describe “individuals whose sexual interests are directed toward people of their own sex and who are either disturbed by, in conflict with or wish to change their sexual orientation.” That diagnosis would provide cover for therapists to continue to try to “cure” gay people, with some of those “therapies” still involving electric shock aversion therapy. In 1980, that diagnosis would be changed to “ego dystonic homosexuality” before it was finally removed in 1986. Today, virtually all major medical and mental health professional organizations agree that homosexuality is not an illness to be “cured” or treated with the goal of trying to change one’s sexual orientation.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
W. Dorr Legg: 1904-1994. Born William Dorr Lambert Legg, Dorr Legg (who also sometimes wrote as Bill Lambert) took a rather intellectual approach to things when he finally joined up with the homophile movement in the 1950s. While studying landscape architecture and music at the University of Michigan in his home town of Ann Arbor, Legg reputedly read Marchel Proust’s Remembrances of Things Past in the original French, just so he could learn something about gays in Europe. After graduating, and after a stint in Florida, he settled in New York City While there, he became involved with the local gay scene, but he was put off by what he saw as fussy queens. But he also discovered the speakies and drag balls in Harlem, and that’s where he became interested in the intersection of gay life with similarly taboo interracial relationships.
In 1935, Legg moved to Corvallis, Oregon, where he took a teaching position at Oregon State College’s landscape architecture program. He remained there until 1942, when the draft claimed so many students that the landscape architecture program came close to collapse. Legg moved back to Ann Arbor where he met Marvin Edwards, and the two became lovers. But with Edwards being African-American, the sight of the two of them together sometimes raised the eyebrows of local police whenever they were out together. So in 1948, they decided to move to Los Angeles, where they felt that the more diverse culture there would be more to their liking.
Once they arrived in L.A., they quickly began to meet other gay African-Americans. Somewhere along the way, Edwards left and Legg met Merton Bird, another African-American, and the two of them founded the Knights of the Clock as a social and support group for interracial gay couples. That made Legg and Bird pioneers in the nascent gay rights movement in more than one way, but Legg gave Bird the credit. He later wrote, “Hostility and harassment were the daily lot of interracial same-sex couples in 1950. … [Bird’s] idea was that by coming together to form a mutual aid society, the group could at the very least offer each other encouragement.”
Legg also learned about the Mattachine Society, and he became one of that group’s early members. A few years, following a Mattachine Society discussion group that Legg hosted at his home, Legg, Don Slater (see Aug 21), Martin Block, and Dale Jennings (see Oct 21) stayed after the meeting was over and brainstormed about the pressing need for gay people across the country to have access to news and information about themselves and others. Out of that discussion, ONE Magazine was born (see Oct 15), and Legg became its business manager When ONE debuted in January 1953 as America’s first pro-gay magazine, it sported a very sophisticated look with bold graphics and professional typeset and design. ONE’s slick offering quickly caught the attention gays and lesbians across the country, and circulation jumped to nearly 2,000 within a few months — with most subscribers paying extra to have their magazine delivered in an unmarked wrapper.
ONE Magazine, October 1954.
ONE also caught the notice of federal officials. The FBI tried to shut the magazine down, but abandoned the idea after deciding the magazine wasn’t worth their efforts. But the Post Office was another matter. The Los Angeles Postmaster ordered the August 1953, held for three weeks while deciding if it violated federal laws. (Ironically, the cover story for that issue was on “homosexual marriage,” an issue that is still contentious more than fifty years later.) Three weeks later, the Post Office decided no laws were violated and allowed its distribution. ONE, in its typically brash fashion, proclaimed “ONE is not grateful” on its October cover. A year later, its October 1954 issue was confiscated and this time the Post Office decided that the issue was illegal. Ironically, that issue’s cover proclaimed “You Can’t Print It!” ONE sued, and the case went all the way up to the Supreme Court. On January 13, 1958, the U.S. Supreme Court delivered its first ever pro-gay ruling in ONE Inc. v. Olesen, a landmark decision that allowed a magazine for gays and lesbians to be sent through the U.S. mail. (You can read more about that landmark case here.)
While ONE magazine was perhaps the most visible part of ONE, Inc., Legg envisioned the organization’s main mission as educational rather than publishing. At Legg’s behest, ONE, Inc. established the ONE Institute of Homophile Studies in 1956, which became the first institution to provide LGBT studies in the US. The ONE Instutute began conducting annual seminars known as the Midwinter Institute, and published the ONE Institute Quarterly as an academic journal dedicated to the study of homosexuality. Legg, as “Marvin Cutler,” also wrote Homosexuals Today: A Handbook of Organizations and Publications about the nascent gay rights movement.
Legg’s interest in the educational side of the organization at the expense of ONE magazine, coupled with his increasingly authoritarian style, created tensions within the group, principly between Legg and Don Slater, ONE Magazine’s editor and the organization’s librarian. While Slater also saw ONE’s mission as being educational, he also felt that the magazine as playing an indispensable role in that mission. He also feared for the integrity of ONE’s archives, which he believed were the heart and soul of the organization. By 1965, the split on ONE’s board became irreconcilable, and on Easter Sunday, Slater and two others entered ONE’s offices and moved the magazine’s assets and archives out and to another location.
For the next four months, two competing ONE magazines hit the streets: Slater’s ONE was sent to subscribers using the organization’s subscriber list, and Legg’s ONE arrived after Legg re-assembled a rival subscriber list from memory and detective work. Legg and Slater were soon in court, where Legg’s overbearing demeanor, it’s been said, alienated the judge who might have otherwise ruled in his favor. Instead, ONE, Inc., retaining the right to publish ONE Magazine, while Slater’s The Tangent Group, which by then had change the name of their magazine to Tangents, retained ownership of the archives. ONE finally ceased publication in 1969.
Legg’s first-hand experience with police raids and harassment, FBI surveillance and intimidation, and Post Office censorship gave him a deep and abiding distrust of government. That distrust informed his libertarian politics. In 1977, he became a founding member of the Log Cabin Club, a group of California gay Republicans who organized to oppose the Brigg’s Initiative which would have banned gays, lesbians, and their supporters from teaching in the public schools. The Log Cabin Club later changed its name to Log Cabin Republicans. Legg’s libertarian political beliefs however, contrary to stereotypes about gay conservatives, did not amount to an assent to assimilation. He forcefully opposed the idea that gay people should “desperately contort themselves into simulacra of heterosexuality.”
Legg died in 1994. By then, the ONE Institute had stop offering classes due to another legal dispute with a prominent donor. After Legg died, the remnants of ONE, Inc. merged with the International Gay and Lesbian Archives. The ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives today is housed at the University of Southern California, and the ONE Archives Gallery & Museum is located in West Hollywood.
[Sources: Wayne R. Dynes. “W. Dorr Legg (1904-1994).” In Vern L. Bullough’s (ed.) Before Stonewall: Activists for Gay and Lesbian Rights in Historical Context
Martha E. Stone. “Unearthing the ‘Knights of the Clock’.” The Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide 17, no. 3 (May 2010). Available online here.]
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