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 lobbyJune 17th, 2011
TODAY’S AGENDA:
AIDS Walk: Oakland, CA.
Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Baltimore, MD; Bisbee, AZ; Boise, ID; Bozeman, MT; Calderdale, UK; Columbus, OH; Denver, CO; Flagstaff, AZ; Ft. Lauderdale, FL; Grand Rapids, MI; Iowa City, IA; Lancaster, PA; Las Cruces, NM; Louisville, Ky; Memphis, TN (Black Pride); Nashville, TN; Norwalk, CT; Portland, ME; Portland, OR; Providence, RI; Syracuse, NY; Tijuana, BC and Vienna, Austria.
TODAY IN HISTORY:
The Queen: 1968. The documentary The Queen makes its premiere in theaters. The film, shot almost entirely with hand-held cameras, is a primitive pre-Stonewall prequel to Paris is Burning, The film follows the preparations and behind the scenes action of the Miss All-America Camp Beauty Pageant – a competition between some of New York City’s drag queens. If you are ever lucky enough to see it, keep a very sharp eye out whenever the camera pans to the audience. You might just get a quick glimpse of Andy Warhol in his trademark platinum wig.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Carl Van Vechten: 1880. A writer and a photographer, Carl Van Vechten was fascinated with African-American culture and became a patron on the Harlem Renaissance. In 1926, he published his controversial novel Nigger Heaven, which portrayed the intellectuals, political activists, workers, and others who inhabited the “great black walled city” of Harlem. The book split Harlem down the middle: Langston Hughes was among the book’s fans and defenders (Hughes even wrote new poems to replace the songs used in the book’s first printing), while W. E. B. Du Bois and Alain Locke condemned it as an “affront to the hospitality of black folks.” Although Van Vechten had married the Russian-born actress Fania Marinoff in 1914, Van Vechten was gay. This was evident when his papers were unsealed twenty-five years after his death in 1964:
As the 25-year mark drew near, scholars assumed they were about to unveil Van Vechten’s diaries. “They said, ‘Of course, this is going to be exciting, and let’s open those journals and have a party,’ and the curator said, ‘Well, I don’t think so…’ It was a good instinct.” The few people who did attend the 1989 opening, including Willis, were shocked by what they found: 18 scrapbooks of graphic homoeroticism, full of mischief and devoid of explanation.
…Van Vechten collected newspaper clippings chronicling Harlem drag balls, early sex-change operations (“GI Who Turned Woman is a Happy Beauty”), court cases for “morals charges,” and abuse incidents. He assembled more restrained, if still theatrical, black and white photographs of male nudes, both Caucasian and African American, which most scholars think are mostly or entirely the work of Van Vechten. Nothing escaped him: Photos of ambiguously homoerotic Greek vases, labeled in childishly rounded handwriting, nestle against newspaper cutouts of male wrestlers locked in combat.
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Tom O'Connor
June 17th, 2011
Two out of three AIDS cases are gay, and so why not try and help people out of the gay life?
Robert L. Spitzer, M.D. of Columbia University played a central role in eliminating homosexuality as a mental disorder at the American Psychiatric Association (APA) in 1973.
Spizer came to have doubts about this consensus by the APA. At the 1999 APA annual meeting in Washington he talked to several people who were picketing the meeting and claiming that, contrary to a recent APA position statement, change of sexual orientation was possible and should not be discouraged and that they, personally had changed from homosexual to heterosexual.
Spitzer started to wonder, could it be that some homosexuals could actually change their sexual orientation?
After much thought, and realizing that previous studies claiming that such change was possible had all kinds of methodological flaws, he concluded that his curiosity would only be satisfied if he conducted a study of his own.
Spitzer studied 200 people who professed a change from a homosexual to heterosexual orientation. His conclusions were presented to the APA established homosexuals may change their homosexual lifestyle when they realize they have the freedom to act and the will to do so.
The presentation was made at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association, May 9th, 2001 in New Orleans, and was titled Clinical Issues and Ethical Concerns Regarding Attempts to Change Sexual Orientation.
Jim Burroway
June 17th, 2011
You have done a thorough job at completely distorting Spitzer’s work, par for the course for ex-gay proponents like you.
Spitzer, first of all, had no doubts about removing homosexuality from APA’s list of mental disorders whatsoever. It is a position he championed in the early 1970s and maintained throughout his career.
As for his study in 2000, it took him some sixteen months of repeated searching to find the two-hundred participants for the study, and even then, nearly a fifth of those participants were in leadership positions of ex-gay ministries, and many more made public pronouncements about their “transformation†at church functions. The process of determining the degree of change for these participants consisted of a single telephone interview.
At the end of it all, Spitzer concluded that while he concluded that it was possible for some very highly-motivated people in rare cases might be able to undergo some sort of change in sexual behavior or identity, it didn’t demonstrate the critical question of sexual orientation. Spitzer spent the rest of his career trying to defend his study from distortions by ex-gay advocates like you, saying that the difficulty he had in finding study participants told him that evidence for change was exceedingly rare. He told the New York Times:
Spitzer was so upset over distortions from Focus On the Family, like the one you present here, that he finally made a video about it.
And finally, some more than 600,000 people overall have died from AIDS in the U.S., many of them gay. Elsewhere in the world, where AIDS had consumed millions of lives, it is mainly a heterosexual disease. I find it utterly despicable that the response from people like you over the past 30 years have been to perpetuate the stigma against AIDS by reacting to it as a gay plague and an opportunity to advance your anti-gay agenda. It would be as if I used cervical cancer to urge women to adopt a “lesbian lifestyle.” Utterly despicable, but to you AIDS is an opportunity. Again, par for the course. I expect nothing better from you.
Priya Lynn
June 17th, 2011
Tom said “Two out of three AIDS cases are gay, and so why not try and help people out of the gay life?”.
Because contracting AIDS has nothing to do with being gay and everything to do with promiscuity/unprotected sex. There is zero chance of contracting AIDS or any other STD in a monogamous same sex relationship. Such relationships are the only way gay people can achieve bonding and romantic love with another person. To attempt to deprive them of that through coercion or deception is a grave immorality.
Timothy Kincaid
June 17th, 2011
Lesbians have the very lowest rate of AIDS cases, so why not try and help women enter the lesbian life?
Black people are nine times more likely to have AIDS than white people… what should we conclude?
Tom, when you come spouting platitudes that sound oh so right among the anti-gay crowd, you may want to think a bit deeper. Gay folks have heard all of this before and we know a hell of a lot more about the subject than you do.
Richard Rush
June 17th, 2011
Tom,
It appears that you are confused.
http://www.aidstruth.org/denialism/misuse/padian
So, I’ve revised your first sentence for you:
Roughly
Twothree out ofthreefour AIDS cases aregayheterosexual, and so why not try and help people out of thegayheterosexual life?Tom O\\\'Connor
June 18th, 2011
Change is possible, while there’s no such thing as an ex-black.
Timothy Kincaid
June 22nd, 2011
Tom,
Have I mentioned just how foolish you sound when you come here spouting platitudes that have no basis in reality?
Yes change is possible. In fact, change is necessary when parking at a meter. But that’s about the only kind of change you’ll find in an ex-gay group.l
First, there a a good many folk whose race has shifted through a number of identities.
Second, while change in identity is possible, change in orientation is rather elusive. After a seven year study of Exodus, the evangelical Christian researchers found exactly ZERO people who were able to change their orientation into one that the average person would consider heterosexual.
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