Box Turtle Bulletin

The Daily Agenda for Friday, July 25

TODAY’S AGENDA:
Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Braunschweig, Germany; Ft. Wayne, IN; Halifax, NS; Harrisburg, PA; London, ON; Mainz, Germany; Norwich, UK; Nottingham, UK; Pride Pittsburgh, PA (Black Pride); Raleigh-Durham, NC (Black Pride); Stuttgart, Germany; Tórshavn, Faroe Islands.

Other Events This Weekend: Hotter Than July, Detroit, MI; Gay Day at Valley Fair and Soak City, Minneapolis/St. Paul, MN; Newfest Film Festival, New York, NY; Family Week, Provincetown, MA; Up Your Alley, San Francisco, CA; Zia Regional Rodeo, Santa Fe, NM.

TODAY’S AGENDA is brought to you by:

Ad from David, May 1972, page 54; photo from David, July 1974, page 11.

David, a Jacksonville-based glossy gay photo/lifestyle magazine, described The Saloon of Ft. Lauderdale this way two years later in 1974:

Downtown Fort Lauderdale, the Saloon has been pleasing gays for years with bartender, Fluffy’s campy liveliness. Especially popular around cocktail time daily , the bar, tucked neatly in a quaint arcade has recently remodeled for a cruisy, cheerful look. The Saloon does not feature dancing, d.j. or entertainment but counts on lively conversation to spark up the afternoons and succeeds very well.

That block has undergone a complete redevelopment since then.

New South Wales. View of Sydney, from the East Side of the Cove. No.2, by John Eyre, 1810

TODAY IN HISTORY:
► Australian Court Convicts Two Of “Most Disgusting and Abominable” Crime: 1808. On July 31 of that year, the Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser offered this brief report:

Court of Criminal Jurisdiction.

On Monday the Court assembled, and proceeded to the trial of

Richard Moxworthy, charged with the commission of an offence, of the most disgusting and abominable kind.

In support of the accusation many witnesses were called, the most favorable of whom went considerably to strengthen the material circumstances of the charge; which after a long and painful investigation, left not on the minds of the Court a doubt of actual guilt.

John Hopkins, his accomplice in the crime, was also indicted on the charge, and found guilty

Australian gay rights activist, journalist, artist and historian Bob Hay delved into the story and uncovered (PDF: 398KB/10 pages) the events that led up to the trial:

Not so lucky were Dubliner, Richard Moxworthy and Bristol-born John Hopkins who came into Sydney on board the US ship Hero on July 10, 1808. Moxworthy was second mate on this privateer and trader and was aged 42. Hopkins was only 16. The two were caught having sex when the ship was somewhere off Mexico. They were immediately relieved of duty and placed in irons until the Hero arrived in Sydney.

It’s not clear why the Australian Court felt that it had jurisdiction over a crime that happened on an American vessel, but New South Wales was a penal colony at the time and I guess that’s what you do: you take criminals to prison. Australia’s law mirrored English law, which included the “abominable crime” as a capital offense all the way up until the latter part of the nineteenth century (even though Britain dropped its death penalty for sodomy in 1862). The Sydney Gazette doesn’t explicitly report that Moxworthy and Hopkins were sentenced to death, but that’s a reasonable conclusion, especially considering a brief notice that appeared two weeks later:

His honor the Lieutenant Governor has been pleased to extend the Royal Clemency to the two persons who were convicted capitally before the last Court of Criminal Jurisdiction.

Hay picks up the story from there:

After receiving a Conditional Pardon, Moxworthy again went to sea, this time as coxswain of the government sloop Blanche. Hopkins was not so successful: on April 26, 1822 the Sydney Gazette carried an advertisement offering £10 reward for the capture of John Hopkins who had absconded from his parole and was wanted for “diverse and other robberies”. There is no evidence that he was ever captured and that is the last we have heard of him.

► Dr. Barry’s Death Reveals a Lifelong Secret: 1865. Before Britain’s Inspector General of Military Hospitals Dr. James Barry’s death, he left strict instructions that no one was to change him out of the clothes in which he died. But the charwoman sent to prepare his corpse had no room for such nonsense. And so when she pulled his nightshirt up to wash his body, she screamed: “The devil! It’s a woman!”

Dr Barry, while alive, was known as a fierce and demanding doctor, and in the process became one of the most highly respected and feared surgeons in Victorian England, feared for his combative temper and fierce determination. He famously got in a bitter argument with Florence Nightingale, who called him a “brute” and “the most hardened creature I ever met throughout the Army.” As Inspector General, he fought for better food, hygiene, sanitation and proper medical care for soldiers and for prisoners. His reforms undoubtedly saved thousands of lives. He became the top-ranking doctor in the British Army, where despite his argumentative personality, he was also reputed to have an very good bedside manner. Many who knew him also remarked on his high, soft voice and his diminutive stature — he stood barely five feet tall on special stacked-soled shoes. His black manservant, who joined Barry’s employment in South Africa and would remain with him for the next fifty years, was entrusted with the task of laying out six small towels every morning that Barry used to conceal his curves and broaden his shoulders.

Despite the charwoman’s discovery upon his death, his secret remained tightly held and he was buried under the only name he had gone by since his early twenties. It wouldn’t be until the 1950s when his British Army records were unsealed that it was revealed that Barry had been born in Ireland as Margaret Buckley to a forward thinking family who were staunch supporters of women’s rights. But whatever ideals the family may have had about what women were capable of achieving, society’s limitations said otherwise and women were barred from studying medicine. So Margaret became James Barry shortly after she, then he, beginning training to become a doctor. And in every respect, he remained a man in what was very much a man’s world until the day he died.

Barry’s life and career is the subject of Rachel Holmes’s 2007 book, The Secret Life of Dr James Barry: Victorian England’s Most Eminent Surgeon.

► Rock Hudson’s AIDS Diagnosis Confirmed: 1985. The rumors had been swirling for some time, long before Rock Hudson entered a Paris hospital for what was clearly a very serious illness. He had appeared on July 16 at a news conference in Carmel, California, alongside his 1959 Pillow Talk costar to promote Day’s new animal companion program on the Christian Broadcasting Network, Doris Day’s Best Friends, with Hudson as her first guest. Hudson was so late for the press conference, many of the reporters had already left when he finally arrived. Those who stayed were shocked by what they saw: sunken cheeks, poor complexion, unsteady on his feet, his speech barely intelligible and his clothing several sizes too large for his now skeletal body. Day embraced her former co-star and Hudson taped the show a few days later, although he was so weak they had to stop several times.

A few days later, Hudson flew to Paris where he was no stranger to the medical establishment there. In 1984, he had a scratch on his neck that wouldn’t heal, so he went to a doctor. The doctor told him that was no scratch, but Kaposi’s sarcoma, a rare form of skin cancer and a common opportunistic infection among AIDS patients. Hudson went to Paris to receive treatment with HPA-23, an experimental drug unavailable in the U.S. which was supposed to inhibit an enzyme that allows the AIDS virus to multiply. Now a year later, he had made arrangements to return for another appointment with Dr. Dominique Dormont, the specialist who had treated him the year before. The appointment was set for July 22, but Hudson collapsed in his room at the Ritz the day before. The hotel summoned A doctor, who assumed that Hudson was experiencing heart problems and rushed him to the American Hospital of Paris. The doctors there, ignorant of his AIDS condition, noticed that his liver function was poor and suspected some kind of liver disease, prompting Hudson’s publicist, Yanou Collart, to tell reporters that he was suffering from liver cancer.

Rock Hudson’s return to Los Angeles.

When Dormont finally arrived at the hospital, he determined that Hudson was too weak to undergo any more HPA-23 treatments. Hudson decided to return to Los Angeles as soon as possible. He also decided to announce that he had AIDS.  “The hardest thing I ever had to do in my life was to walk into his room and read him the press release,” said Collart. “I’ll never forget the look on his face. How can I explain it? Very few people knew he was gay. In his eyes was the realization that he was destroying his own image. After I read it, he said simply, ‘That’s it, it has to be done.'”

At first, Collart acknowledged Hudson’s disease, but not his sexuality.  “He’s lucid. He’s talking, He’s joking… He’s feeling much better and in quite good spirits,” Collart said. “He doesn’t have any idea now how he contracted AIDS. … Nobody around him has AIDS.” But in 1981, Hudson had undergone open heart surgery at Cedars-Sinai Hospital, near West Hollywood, where he had received several blood transfusions. That would have been during the earliest days of what would soon become a major blood-borne epidemic, but before anyone understood what loomed ahead. This meant that his sexuality may have been coincidental to his AIDS, but nobody really knew, then or now. But at the very least, that explanation provided a path to plausible deniability.

And so the dancing around his sexuality would continue for another three weeks. Finally, and with Hudson’s blessing, close friends Angie Dickinson, Robert Stack and Mamie Van Doren acknowledged Hudson’s sexuality in a supportive article in People magazine. Messages of support and a procession of visitors followed: Morgan Fairchild, Joan Rivers, Nancy Walker, Tony Perkins, Carol Burnett, and, of course, Elizabeth Taylor. Hudson’s death less than three months later provoked another wave of sympathy and galvanized much of Hollywood, with Elizabeth Taylor’s prodding, to undertake the task of reducing the stigma surrounding HIV/AIDS.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS:
► 170 YEARS AGO: Thomas Eakins: 1844-1916. Born and raised in Philadelphia, he studied drawing and anatomy at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and anatomy and dissection at Jefferson Medical College. His interest in the human body led him to briefly consider a career as a surgeon, but after studying art in Paris, he took his interest in the human anatomy in a very different direction and he became one of the finest painters of the human form. As for the particular human form he found fascinating, he made that clear while still a student in Paris:

“I can conceive of few circumstances wherein I would have to paint a woman naked, but if I did I would not mutilate her for double the money. She is the most beautiful thing there is — except a naked man, but I never yet saw a study of one exhibited… It would be a godsend to see a fine man model painted in the studio with the bare walls, alongside of the smiling smirking goddesses of waxy complexion amidst the delicious arsenic green trees and gentle wax flowers & purling streams running melodious up & down the hills especially up. I hate affectation.”

Salutat, 1898.

Eakins saw nudity as the essence of truthfulness, which in turn was the underpinning of the realist style in which he worked. That insistence on truthfulness got him into trouble. In 1886, he was forced to resign from the faculty of the Pennsylvania Academy after he removed the loincloth of a male model in a class which included female students. Despite the public outcry, several students left the Academy in protest over Eakins’s departure. They formed the Art Students’ League of Philadelphia, and enlisted Eakins as their instructor. He also taught at several other institutions, but his teaching career ended by 1898, just three years after being dismissed from the Drexel Institute for, again, using a fully nude male model.

Eakins married Susan Hannah MacDowell, one of his students, in 1884. Their marriage was childless, but they both shared a love of painting (Susan was a skilled artist in her own right) and photography, which Eakins had taken up in the 1880s. Amid further controversy, his photography often involved nude subjects (including a full-frontal nude photo of his friend and fellow Philadelphia, Walt Whitman), as works of art themselves, or as studies for his paintings. His entire body of work can be seen as a yearning for freedom — from what or for what, we can only guess. But looking at the obvious homoeroticism of his art, that guess is not a difficult one to make.

► 135 YEARS AGO: J. Warren Kerrigan: 1879-1947. While little-known today, Kerrigan had been a very popular silent film star, appearing in films for Essanay, Biograph, and later Universal. He typically played a leading role, as a modern, well-dressed man-about town, and his films were enourmously successful. Photoplay magazine named him the most popular male star among its readers in 1914, the same year he became the first movie star to publish his autobiography. In 1916, the magazine Motion Picture Classic declared him the most popular star in the world.

He nearly killed his career in 1917 over a glib remark about his refusal to enlist in World War I. He resisted enlisting because he didn’t want to leave his mother alone. But that’s not what he told a Denver reporter. Maybe he was tired — it was at the end of a four-month long publicity tour — or maybe he was just tired of dodging the question. At any rate, his answer was a public relations disaster, saying that “first they should take the great mass of men who aren’t good for anything else, or are only good for the lower grades of work,” rather than those who were capable “of adding to the beauty of the world.”

It took six years and a bold move by director James Cruze to salvage his reputation when Cruze, surprising everyone, cast Kerrigan for the lead role in the Paramount western epic The Covered Wagon, which became the most popular film in North America that year. The Covered Wagon’s massive scale and budget — the silent feature was filmed on location over several months at a cost of $783,000 — set a new benchmark for filmaking. That success opened the doors to five more reasonably successful films for Kerrigan in the next year, ending in the swashbuckling 1924 film Captain Blood. Those films, along with his cautious investments and his eschewing the lavish Hollywood lifestyle, meant that his financial future was secure. He retired from filmmaking and lived quietly with his devoted partner of forty years until Kerrigan died in 1947 at the age of 67.

► 40 YEARS AGO: Gareth Thomas: 1974. Nicknamed “Alfie,” the Welsh rugby player was the first professional rugby union player to announce publicly that he was gay. He told The Daily Mail, “I don’t want to be known as a gay rugby player. I am a rugby player, first and foremost I am a man.” I think he succeeded. Since I don’t know squat about rugby I’ll just quote from Wikipedia, which says:

He was the most capped Welsh rugby union player, with 100 test match appearances until he was overtaken by Stephen Jones in September 2011. He is currently ranked 12th among international try scorers and is the second highest Wales try scorer behind Shane Williams. He also won 4 rugby league caps for Wales, scoring 3 tries.He played rugby union for Bridgend, Cardiff, the Celtic Warriors, Toulouse, Cardiff Blues and Wales as a fullback, wing or centre. In 2010 he moved to rugby league, playing for the Crusaders RL in the Super League, and for Wales.

He broke his arm during a match in July 2011. After failing to recover in time for the Rugby League Four Nations Tournament in October, he announced his retirement.

If you know of something that belongs on the agenda, please send it here. Don’t forget to include the basics: who, what, when, where, and URL (if available).

And feel free to consider this your open thread for the day. What’s happening in your world?