Box Turtle Bulletin

The Daily Agenda

Beginning today, we will institute a new feature here at BTB called Today’s Agenda, in which we highlight different things going on in the world which impact the LGBT community, as well as an overview of what happened on this date in history. If you have anything that needs to be added to the calendar, please let me know.

TODAY’S AGENDA:
Anti-Discrimination in Adoption and Foster Parenting: Rep. Pete Stark (D-CA), Ranking Member of the Ways and Means Health Subcommittee, will host a press conference and expert panel discussion today to reintroduce the Every Child Deserves a Family Act. This act would ensure that states do not impose discriminatory restrictions on prospective foster and adoptive parents, blocking them from caring for kids who need a stable home. Virginia, Illinois and Arizona have moved prevent people from becoming foster or adoptive parents based on sexual orientation or marital status. Discriminatory restrictions in other states, including Florida and Arkansas, have been the subject of ongoing legal action.

The press conference will begin at 2:30 pm (EST) and the panel begins at 3:00 pm at the U.S. Capitol’s Cannon House Office Building, room 234. 

Community Forum on LGBT Youth Homelessness: Some estimates have it that as many as a quarter of all LGBT teens who come out to their parents were told they had to leave home. Reliable data is hard to come by, but surveys suggest that LGBT youth make up a disproportionate share of the homeless. To address those concerns, there will be a Community Forum on LGBT Youth Homelessnessthis evening in New York at the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center, Room 101; 208 W. 13th St. from 7:00-9:00. Cathy Renna will moderate a panel featuring:

• Nico Sifra Quintana, co-author of the report On the Streets; The Federal Response to Gay and Transgender Homeless Youth by the Center for American Progress
• Tobias Barrington Wolff, law professor at the University of Pennsylvania
• Kai Wright, editorial director of Colorlines.com and author of Drifting Toward Love: Black, Brown, Gay, and Coming of Age on the Streets of New York.
• Lewis Fidler, New York City Councilmember for the 46th district
• Carl Ciciliano, founder and Executive director of the Ali Forney Center, the largest organization dedicated to homeless LGBT youth in the U.S.

BIRTHDAYS:
William Inge, Pulitzer prize-winning playwright, 1913.

Sir Francis Bacon, looking fabulous as always

TODAY IN HISTORY:
1621: Sir Simonds D’Ewes publishes his political biography of Sir Francis Bacon, in which he accuses the great lawyer, scholar and “father of empiricism” of “his most abominable and darling sin.” D’Ewes continued, “I should rather bury in silence than mention it, were it not a most admirable instance of how men are enslaved by wickedness and held captive by the devil.” D’Ewes accused Bacon of “keeping still one Godrick, a very effeminate-faced youth, to be his catamite and bedfellow… deserting the bed of his Lady.” That same year, Bacon resigned as Lord Chancellor over accusations that he accepted payment from litigants, which, while against the law, was a widespread and accepted practice at the time. He quickly confessed to accepting payments, a confession that may have been prompted by threats to charge him with the capital offense of sodomy.

1921: Dr. Clarence P. Oberndorf, a New York City psychoanalyst, spoke at the Annual Meeting of the Medical Society of the State of New York in Brooklyn about one of his patients, a 74-year-old Civil War veteran who suffered from depression, saying “For sixty years I have been leading a double life.” He became aware of his feelings for other men at a very early age. “He preferred rough, coarse men, like longshoremen, husky and full of vitality. These he sought at intervals, while his acquaintances knew him as a refined gentleman interested in art and literature.” He never married. “In my younger days,” he remarked, “I used to grieve because of my affliction, but in later years I have become indifferent.”

Oberndorf’s goal was not to cure homosexuality per se. “Where treatment is undertaken for passive homoerotism in the male,” — active homosexuals, or “tops,” were not considered truly homosexual in the early 20th century — “psychoanalysis may powerfully influence the attitude of the patient toward his malady by removing some of the urgent neurotic fears which accompany the inversion. After analysis such an invert at least feels himself more reconciled to his passive homoeroticism than previously. I have had male passive homoerotics seek treatment with just such stipulations — not to be cured but to be made more content with their lives.”