Box Turtle Bulletin

Nevada Gov and AG pull state’s defense of marriage ban

Although Nevada generally allows its residents and visitors a greater degree of personal freedom, it was the fourth state to pass a constitutional amendment disallowing gay citizens equal access to marriage.

In 2000, 70% of voters passed the following language: “Only a marriage between a male and female person shall be recognized and given effect in this state.” As Nevada requires two votes of the public to amend their constitution, it was brought back to the ballot in 2002, where it passed by 67%.

In 2012, several same-sex couples sued the state in Federal court, arguing that the ban violated the equal protections provisions of the US Constitution. On November 29, 2012, Judge Robert C. Jones, an active member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (the Mormons), denied the plaintiffs’ claims in Sevcik v. Sandoval, asserting that “a meaningful percentage of heterosexual persons would cease to value the civil institution as highly as they previously had and hence enter into it less frequently.”

The couples appealed to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

The named defendants were three county clerks and Governor Brian Sandoval (R). Sandoval is represented by the State Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto (D). Also given intervenor status was the Coalition for the Protection of Marriage, an anti-gay group.

In January, Cortez Masto filed the state’s defense before the Ninth Circuit. Many gay activists were angered by the Democrat’s language, which they believed compared homosexuality with bigamy and incest.

On January 21st, the Ninth Circuit issued it’s position on a jury selection case resulting from a dispute between two pharmaceutical companies. The result hinged on the court’s determination that gay civil rights cases are to be held to heightened scrutiny, a position that had, until then, been undetermined.

A few days later, Carson City District Attorney Neil Rombardo (acting on behalf of Carson City Clerk-Recorder Alan Glover) pulled his defense of the marriage ban. His opposition had been related to his fears of a slippery slope. But now that gay persons are affored legal status different from bigomists, polygamists, and the like, they were no longer on the same slope. (Las Vegas Review Journal)

Rombardo said Carson City’s initial concern was not that gay marriage should be banned, but rather that legal standards could have invited challenges to other state marriage laws, specifically prohibitions against polygamy.

“I did not oppose equal rights marriage,” Rombardo said. “I do oppose polygamy. I do not think they are one and the same.”

But the 9th Circuit’s decision in the SmithKline case essentially said that homosexuals are a protected class and that heightened judicial scrutiny applies in cases involving alleged discrimination, Rombardo said.

“Any concern I had regarding the previous analysis was gone,” he said.

Now the heightened scrutiny ruling has also caused the Attorney General Cortez Masto and Governor Sandoval to pull their support for the ban. (NY Times)

Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto, a Democrat, in a motion filed with the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, said Nevada’s legal arguments defending the ban voters approved in 2002 are not viable after the court’s recent ruling that potential jurors cannot be removed during jury selection solely because of sexual orientation. “The state has determined that its arguments grounded upon equal protection and due process are no longer sustainable,” she said.

Gov. Brian Sandoval, a Republican seeking re-election this year, said he agreed.

“It has become clear that this case is no longer defensible in court,” Mr. Sandoval said in an email to The Associated Press.

This leaves the defense of Nevada’s ban solely in the hands of the Coalition for the Protection of Marriage.

The Ninth Circuit is likely to decide in the favor of the plaintiffs. However, in the Proposition 8 case, the Supreme Court ruled that private groups do not have standing to defend a state, so there is no one to take such a ruling to the Supreme Court.

So the most likely result is that marriage equality will come to Nevada, but that this will not be the case on which nation-wide equality is achieved.

Scott Lively Blames Russian Gay Bashings on “Ultra-Macho” Gay Nazis

Scott Lively has a long history of blaming gay people when they become hate crime victims. So it comes as no surprise that in a rambling blog post at Matt Barber’s website, Lively says that the recently viral compilation of videos posted by Russian anti-gay extremists of their gay bashings are fake because Nazis!

I have one final, very important point to make in this article.  I am NOT saying that all of the incidents described in the video are fakes. While it is true that “gay” activists are masters of public deception, and their ranks include not just veteran political propagandists but also billionaires like George Soros and movie producer David Geffin — with the capability of staging any possible scenario flawlessly –  I believe some of the incidents depicted on the film are probably real.

But that raises the question, who are these perps?  Q. What sort of men go out of their way to find and harass effeminate “gay” men on the public streets?  A. They are, literally, NAZIs!  Ultra-Macho Nationalists, of which Russia has many.  Q. And who makes up a significant part of the Nationalist movement everywhere in the world through all of modern history?  A. Masculine oriented homosexual men of the very same sort that created the Nazi Party of Germany.

In the infamous 2009 anti-gay conference in Kampala, Uganda which ultimately led to the introduction of the draconian Anti-Homosexuality Bill in that nation’s Parliament, Lively blamed the 1994 Rwandan Genocide on “super-macho” homosexuals.

The compilation of videos assembled by Human Rights Watch that Lively refers to is here:

The Daily Agenda for Tuesday, February 11

TODAY’S AGENDA is brought to you by:

From The Advocate, March 15, 1972, page 7.

 
Before San Francisco’s Eureka Valley rebranded itself for the Castro Theater that remains its most prominent landmark, gay life in San Francisco centered on Polk Street, particularly the area between Geary and Union known locally as Polk Gulch. California Hall, at Polk and Turk, saw an important event in San Francisco gay history when police raided a New Years Day Mardi Gras ball sponsored by the Council on Religion and the Homosexual. The ensuing uproar forever changed LGBT politics in the city. Polk Street was also the location for the first Gay Pride parade in 1972. The Town Squire, a clothing store that opened in 1960, was just one of scores of popular businesses catering to the gay trade.

A couple walks past police officers to attend the New Year’s Mardi Gras ball.

TODAY IN HISTORY:
SF Judge Acquits Four From New Years Day Raid: 1965. On New Years Day, San Francisco police raided a ball hosted by the Council on Religion and the Homosexual, a coalition of of gay and straight people of faith in the Bay area (see Jan 1). The raid took place despite negotiations between ball organizers and the SFPD which resulted in an empty promise by SFBD not to harass attendees or arrest anyone arriving at the ball in costume, including those in drag. Instead, police snapped photos of everyone trying to enter the building and later demanded entrance. Three CRH lawyers explained that the party was a private party under California law and that police could not enter without buying tickets or showing a warrant. The lawyers were arrested, along with a ticket-taker, and charged with obstructing an officer.

Trial for the four began on February 8 with Marshall Krause, an attorney from the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, demanding that the police state in detail what the four did to interfere with the officers. Three inspectors and one officer were called to the stand and questioned extensively. According to the testimony, the officers had, in fact, gained entrance to the hall, but were stopped inside when the four asked for search warrants as required under the Constitution. When asked why police were taking pictures of guests arriving at the ball even though no crime had occurred, one official replied that police “wanted pictures of these people because some of them might be connected to national security.” He also claimed that the more than two dozen officers and two photographers were necessary “just to inspect the premises.” On February 11, their testimony ended, and Krause moved that the case be dismissed because the prosecution’s contention that the charges against the defendants lacked merit. Judge Leo Friedman agreed, and directed the jury to return not guilty verdicts.

The raid and resulting acquittals would be a major turning point for the gay rights movement in San Francisco. City officials, embarrassed by the obvious police misconduct, responded by designating officer Elliot Blackstone as the first liaison between the department and the LGBT community. One of the lawyers who had been arrested and charged, Herb Donaldson, would go on to become San Francisco’s first openly gay judge. Two years later, the Los Angeles Advocate would contrast the differing political climates for the gay community in Los Angeles to San Francisco and credit the “unbelievably inept harassment of a big New Year’s Eve Ball a few years ago” for “triggering the homosexual resurgence, and the organizations were quick to capitalize on the police bungling.”

[Sources: Kay Tobin. “After the ball…” The Ladder 9, no. 5 (February 1965): 4-5.

Unsigned. “Cross currents.” The Ladder 9, no. 9 (June 1965): 14-16.

Unsigned. Editorial: “Politics by the bay.” The Los Angeles Advocate 1, no. 4 (December 1967): 6.]

Time magazine, Feb 9,1976.

Newspapers Pull “Doonesbury” Over Gay Character: 1976. Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury, which had been in syndication for little over five years, had gained a reputation for taking on a host of controversial subjects: sex, drugs, the Vietnam War, race, women’s lib, Watergate, you name it. In 1975, Trudeau won a Pulitzer for Editorial Cartooning, making Doonesbury the first regular comic strip to be so honored. Trudeau was, you might say, the Jon Stewart of his day. President Gerald Ford, who was often skewered in Doonesbury, remarked, “There are only three major vehicles to keep us informed as to what is going on in Washington—the electronic media, the print media and Doonesbury, and not necessarily in that order.” On February 9, 1976, Time magazine put the cast of Doonesbury on its front cover, and noting, “The panels are so volatile that half a dozen editors regularly run the strip on the editorial page.”

As if to prove that volatility, just two days later newspaper editors across the country were confronted with what to do with that day’s latest Doonesbury installment. The strip was, by today’s standards, pretty innocuous: a simple conversation between Walden College law student Joanie Caucus and classmate Andy Lippincott, with whom Joanie has developed a crush. Andy sits down with her and explains the situation: he’s gay.

That panel sent dozens of newspaper editors over the cliff. At least three major newspapers — The Columbus (Ohio) Citizen-Journal, The Cleveland Press and The Houston Post — and an unknown number of smaller ones suspended the strip. Thomas Boardmen of The Cleveland Press tried to put a thoughtful, but ultimately self-contradictory spin on their decision: “The subject of homosexuality is one of the most important issues facing our society today and it deserves special treatment. We are not shying away from it but we do not believe that it is proper for the comic page.”

Charles Egger, editor of the Citizen-Journal said simply, “We felt the subject matter was not appropriate for the comic page.” After the Citizen-Journal’s switchboard was flooded with thousands of complaints, it offered to mail copies of the deleted strip to those who requested it. In Houston, The Post editors also called the strip “inappropriate on a comic page,” but a local radio station responded by reading it over the air, as did member of the Gay Activist Alliance at the University of Houston when anyone called their office number. “We’ve been getting about 50 calls a day,” said an unnamed GAA spokesman. All three papers resumed publishing the strip by the following Monday.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Tammy Baldwin: 1962. Her political career began in 1986 when she won a seat to the Dane County (Madison, Wisconsin) Board of Supervisors. In 1992, she won a race for the Wisconsin State Assembly by defeating two other candidates while garnering 59% of the vote. She was one of only six openly gay politicians nationwide to win a general election that year, and she was the first openly lesbian Assembly member. When Congressman Scott Klug announced his retirement in 1998, Baldwin ran for that seat and won, making her the first woman to be sent to Congress from Wisconsin, and the first person to enter Congress as an openly gay representative. She would go on to represent the 2nd District for seven terms. In 2013, she became the first openly gay Senator in history after defeating former Gov. Tommy Thompson to represent Wisconsin in the U.S. Senate.

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?

Matt Barber’s Offensive

Uber anti-gay Matt Barber has gone on the offensive with his own website called BARBWIRE. Whether that moniker’s another sad attempt to bolster his tough masculine toughness, or just his drag name, I can’t say. But it is a hoot. Bryan Fischer (!) has a column on “defeating Darwinism in four easy steps” and it’s marvelous display of studied ignorance. Scott Lively (!) has an article proving that the anti-gay violence in Russia is probably perpetrated by other gays because, well, Nazis.

Think twice before you visit, though. I already wasted too much time today in the comments, feeding my outrage addiction. You know, one paranoid theory on the right is that the Democratic party pays its minions to post comments on right-wing fringe websites (where’s my money?) but I could almost entertain an opposing and corresponding theory that these sites are set up just to suck us into channeling our energy there instead of into more useful activism.

Hell, it’s almost more plausible than thinking these folk could be for real.

Nevada AG Asks to Withdraw Brief Defending Marriage Ban

Nevada Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto is asking the Ninth Circuit Court to allow her to withdraw a brief that had been filed on behalf of Gov. Brian Sandoval defending the state’s constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. In the statement, Cortez Masto cited last month’s ruling by the Ninth Circuit Court which held that discrimination based on sexual orientation warrented heightened scrutiny. That ruling in an unrelated case concerning jury selection had a huge impact on Nevada’s arguments:

“After thoughtful review and analysis, the State has determined that its arguments grounded upon equal protection and due process are no longer sustainable,” Cortez Masto said in Monday’s statement.

BuzzFeed has asked a spokeswoman for Sandoval for comment on Monday’s filing. The Associated Press reported, “Republican Gov. Brian Sandoval says he agrees with the move, saying it’s clear the state’s arguments are no longer defensible in court.”

Eight couples are suing the state of Nevada in Federal Court challenging the state’s marriage ban. A Federal Judge granted Gov. Sandoval’s motion to dismiss in 2012. Lambda Legal has taken the case to the Ninth Circuit on appeal.

This latest move follows the earlier decision by Carson City Clerk-Recorder Alan Glover to ask to withdraw his brief for the same reasons. With both defendants out of the picture, it leaves the Coalition for the Protection of Marriage as the sole defender of the ban. The Coalition was allowed to intervene by the U.S. District Court. But with the U.S. Supreme Court last summer turning back the Prop 8 challenge because outside intervening supporters lacked standing, it would seem that Nevada is on the cusp of letting Elvises marry gay couples in Vegas.

Indiana Senate Committee Passes Amended Marriage Ban Proposal

In a straight 8-4 party line vote, the Indiana Senate Rules Committee gave its approval to a proposed constitutional amendment which, if approved by voters, would ban same-sex marriage. Crucually, the committee opted against restoring a second sentence to the proposed constitutional amendment that would also ban civil unions and domestic parternships. That second sentenced was stripped from the wording by the Indiana House in January.

The absence of that second sentence is crucial in determining when the proposed amendment would go before the voters. Indiana’s constitution requires that the identical language must pass two separately elected General Assemblies before a proposal can be placed on the ballot. The prior General Assembly passed the ban with the second sentence included in 2011. If both houses opted to keep the language intact, then then the proposed ban would hit the ballot box during the 2014 mid-term elections. But if the full Senate passes the newest version of the proposed ban, then the clock gets reset and the same ban would have to pass the next elected legislature as well. That would mean the earliest the amended ban could get to the ballot box would be during the 2016 elections, when voters will turn out to elect a president as well as Indiana governor.

Gov. Mike Pence (R) strongly supports the marriage ban, and has made it clear that he wants it decided “once and for all” this year rather than have it as a campaign issue while he’s trying to seek re-election in 2016.

Same-sex marriage opponents will have one more opportunity to try to restore the civil union ban when the measure goes before the full Senate. If they are successful, then the differences between the House and Senate versions would have to be hashed out in committee.

Email of the Day

It was a dark and stormy night.

It’s been a while since I’ve gotten one of these. I think his emails have been getting swept into the spam bucket. But this one made it through the gauntlet yesterday, in which Eugene Delgaudio resurrects an oldie but goodie while trying to get his minion to sign his sad little petition and, of course, to send him money.

One stormy night, I drove to a mailshop hidden deep in a nearly deserted stand of warehouses.  I’d heard something was up and wanted to see for myself. As I rounded the final turn, my eyes nearly popped.  Tractor-trailers pulled up to loading docks, cars and vans everywhere and long-haired, earring-pierced men scurrying around running forklifts, inserters and huge printing presses. Trembling with worry, I went inside.  It was worse than I ever imagined.

Row after row of boxes bulging with pro-homosexual petitions lined the walls, stacked to the ceiling.

My mind reeled as I realized hundreds, maybe thousands, more boxes were already loaded on the tractor-trailers.  And still more petitions were flying off the press. Suddenly a dark-haired man screeched, “Delgaudio, what are you doing here?” Dozens of men began moving toward me.  I’d been recognized.

As I retreated to my car, the man chortled, “This time, Delgaudio, we can’t lose!”

Driving away, my eyes filled with tears as I realized he might be right.  This time the Homosexual Lobby could win it all.

I’ve been warned hundreds of thousands of pro-homosexual petitions will soon flood Congress.

And my friends in Congress tell me that the tens of millions of pro-Family Americans have remained virtually silent.

Will you remain silent?

Last summer, Delgaudio was finally disciplined by his fellow conservative boardmembers of the Loudin County (VA) Board of Supervisors. Delgaudio was censured, stripped of his staff and budget, and barred from serving on committees for illegally using taxpayer-paid staff for his anti-gay fundraising activities, although last January he was put back onto the county’s Transportation and Land Use Committee. He is now fighting a court petition by Loudin County residents in his district seeking to have him removed from office.

The Daily Agenda for Monday, February 10

TODAY’S AGENDA:
Global Day of Action Against Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill. Last December, the Ugandan Parliament gave its approval to the Anti-Homosexuality Bill, which would reinforce the penalty of life imprisonment for homosexuality, and greatly expands the criminalization of all advocacy on behalf of LGBT people. Even though President Yoweri Museveni hasn’t yet singed the bill into law, human rights activists in Uganda say that conditions had dramatically deteriorated for LGBT people there:

Since the Bill was passed, Ugandan civil society groups have documented at least seven arrests of LGBTI people. Two were required to have anal examinations to ‘prove’ they are engaging in same-sex sexual activity. These examinations are tantamount to torture and scientifically invalid. Ugandan civil society organizations report that anal examinations are becoming a routine procedure for men arrested on suspicion of engaging in sex with other men. LGBTI people are also increasingly being harassed and some individuals have been attacked by mobs.

The Global Day of Action was organized by Ugandan civil society and LGBT advocates to call on Museveni to reject the bill. Sexual Minorities Uganda has posted a list of eight things you can do to show solidarity with the Ugandan LGBT community, including a Twitter blast to the Prime Minister, the President’s office, and Parliament with one simple message: “Don’t Prosecute; Protect LGBT Ugandans: The world is watching” (Twitter handles are: Prime Minister: @AmamaMbabazi Parliament of Uganda: @Parliament_UG President @StateHouseUg).

TODAY’S AGENDA is brought to you by:

From The Advocate, March 3, 1983, page 45

When Backstreet opened its doors in Atlanta in 1975, it immediately set about defining an important element of the disco sound. Celebrities flocked to the club whenever they were in town, including Liza Minnelli, Peter Allen, Paul Lynde, Farrah Fawcett-Majors and Cher. Gladys Knight showed up for a Sylvester performance. She also performed, as did Mary Wilson. As a private club, Backstreet was also one of Atlanta’s rare twenty-four hour clubs, a distinction it held until 2004, when the city of Atlanta began enforcing strict new ordinances requiring private clubs to close at 3:00 a.m. For the first time in its history, the DJ at Backstreet had to announce a last call to a confused audience. That move sealed its fate, along with long-running complaints from some of its gentrified neighbors. In a familiar story repeated in cities across the country, the very nightlife that drew people to the dilapidated Midtown in the 1980s brought new residents that complained about the noise from a never-ending party that drew them there in the first place. Later that year, the club that never closed, closed its doors for good, and was razed and promptly replaced by yet another high-rise condo development.

Post cards by J.C. Leyendecker, 1900.

THIS MONTH IN HISTORY:
A New Homosexual Trait?: 1920. That’s the question that Dr. Walter Courtenay Rivers sought to explore in the February, 1920 issue of Medical Review of Reviews:

A sexuological brochure published in 1913 brought me some correspondence both home and foreign. Among the writers of these letters was an English public school ‘coach,’ whom later I met. I then found that altho he had written he was glad my book had appeared, he was an invert himself; not only that, but a member of a homosexual coterie; and besides, one who physically indulged his abnormality. Upon which I felt that his acquaintance and correspondence were too potentially compromising for my as yet extremely slight scientific name. I asked him to send his ‘case’ to Dr HAVELOCK ELLIS (to whom I wrote about him also), and declined further communication with regret, for of course clinical experience is the only road to discovery. However, one clue I did get. He kept a large cat of which he seemed very fond, and he remarked that many of his friends had the same taste in pets.

The “brochure” that Rivers mentioned was a booklet published in 1913, titled Walt Whitman’s Anomaly, which explores exactly what its title implied: that Walt Whitman was a sexual invert or, in the still-newfangled terminology of the medical literature, a homosexual. Rivers was undoubtedly surprised by his “coach’s” interest in the book, as its sale was “restricted to members of the legal and medical professions. This was quite common at a time when anything which might be remotely construed as non-condemning of the “abominable vice” was routinely banned as obscene. Havelock Ellis’s early works were not immune from such official attentions (see Feb 2). And so Rivers’s nervousness over merely maintaining a correspondence with an invert was neither out of the ordinary nor out of line.

And yet, Rivers’s articles and writings were among a growing body of literature which was just beginning to  try to figure out who these homosexuals were that they kept encountering. Given how little was really known about gay people, coupled with reluctance of the overwhelming majority of gay people to make themselves known, every tiny clue took in a huge significance. Including cats.

Since [Magnus] HIRSCHFELD’S (see  May 14) exhaustive work does not mention such a trait, the matter seemed worth inquiry, and it is attacked here in the following way: First I have taken HIRSCFIELD’S list of eminent men who were of inverted disposition, and looked for record of their affection’ for cats as pets; secondly I have taken eminent persons who are stated to have been cat lovers, and looked for evidence of inversion in them.

Rivers encountered several difficulties in the first approach; Hirschfeld’s list went back into antiquity; Hirschfeld didn’t see pet ownership as an important detail to record, some names on Hirshfeld’s list weren’t prominent enough for such details to survive. But Rivers did find four worth mentioning: the 18th-century art historian and Member of Parliament Horace Walpole, the English poet Edward Fitzgerald, the French poet Charles Baudelaire, and the English essayist Walter Pater, for whom Rivers provided the following evidence of homosexuality:

The evidence of PATER’S inverted disposition might first be briefly given. He never smoked and never married; he was entirely averse to outdoor games altho not physically weak; he wore always a green tie; his works show passim a special sensibility to young male beauty.

But about their cats:

Four out of thirty-one is a proportion of one in eight. Is one out of every eight men, or, for the matter of that, one out  of every eight distinguished men, devoted to cats? I imagine most people would say no. Some men, and particularly distinguished men, have notoriously a horror of them. These four, by the way, were all writers, and HAVELOCK ELLIS states that inversion is particularly frequent amongst authors. They were also pretty exclusively homosexual; there is no evidence of a bisexual disposition

Rivers then compiled his list of known cat-lovers in history “taking only those who have been dead some time” — undoubtedly to avoid impugning the reputation of a living person and opening himself up to charges of libel. Rivers then lists them:

Pope GREGORY the GREAT, HOKUSAI, TASSO, A. DE MUSSET, PAUL DE KOCK, PETRARCH, COWPER, WORDSWORTH, LISTON the SURGEON, RICHELIEU, CIIATEAUBRIAND, T. GAUTIER, DR. JOHNSON, SIR WALTER SCOTT, DUMAS the ELDER, SHELLEY, JEREMY BENTHAM.

Of how many of these may inversion be deemed a likely characteristic?

The quest now is much more difficult. To begin with, of none can we expect the trait looked for to be recorded outright. It will be a matter of inferring its presence from other, and commonly associated, characteristics, such as friendship enthusiasm, feminine tastes, aversion to women, physical stigmata of degeneration, and so forth; while even these may easily escape biographical mention. Again, bisexuality, physical attraction to men and women both, may mask inversion. Perhaps for these reasons, none of these cat lovers figure in HIRSCHFELD’S list of eminent inverts already spoken of.

You will notice Rivers’s referring to “physical stigmata of degeneration,” a reference to degeneracy theory that I’ve mentioned elsewhere in these historical notes (see, for example, Sep 3, Jan 25, Feb 7). It was a medical axiom in those days that homosexuality, along with many other physical and mental ailments, were the result of evolution gone wrong. Before the industrial era, natural selection meant that the fittest survived. But modern society was now allowing all sorts of lesser-fit people to survive and breed, resulting in a kind of reversal of evolution — they called it “de-generation” — in which mankind was de-evolving or “degenerating” to a more primitive, less advanced state. The theory further held that degeneracy was not only imprinted on the brain, but  the “physical stigmata” or signs of the degeneracy could also be found on the body as well, whether it was a physical abnormality, or the shape of the head, the cut of the brow, the width of the nose — you can see racially where this went, can’t you?

At any rate, River’s struck two from his list immediately as not being gay, and concluded that only three were definitely gay. Three of seventeen now brings the ratio to somewhere closer to one in five. Clearly, he thought, he was onto something. But why cats?

And there is something else relevant to cats which is also relevant to our subject, and that is the close association in the human mind of cats with femininity. One always associates cats with the woman’s world, and of course male inverts are very often of feminine tastes. The former proposition seems the truer and profounder the more one tests it…

A good many readers, perhaps, will agree that fondness for cats does, on the whole, seem entitled to a place among male homosexual characteristics. If it be, then the reason is that it is a woman’s taste. My subject aforesaid, the public school coach, had his cat beside him when pouring out tea; which he did, if not, like COMPTON MACKENZIE’S inverted author WILMOT dispensing similar hospitality. See Sinister Street Vol 1. ‘with a myriad mincing gestures,’ still with quite unmasculine competence, gusto and deliberation; he sucked sweets, smoked only cigarettes. Indeed the tale of male homosexual traits has probably not yet been given anywhere with anything like completeness. For the heart of the inverted man seems always reaching out after something womanish in order to adopt it; or else recoiling from something that reminds him he is bodily a man. Of that unfortunate being it might almost be said:

Femina est: nihil feminitatis a se alienum putat.

I think we can conduct a survey that is as scientific as anything Rivers accomplished. I’m generally a cat person myself — I like their independence — but we have one lovable dogs in the Burroway household: Buster, a purebred feral dog who looks exactly like the wild dogs seen on the nearby Indian reservation, and we still mourn Twister, our beloved bossy beagle mix who went on to happier grassy fields last November. What about you?

[Source: W.C. Rivers. “A new male homosexual trait?” Medical Review of Reviews 26, no. 2 (February 1920): 55-60. Available online via Google Books here.]

TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
John Yang: 1958. The Chillicothe, Ohio native rose quickly though the journalism ranks, beginning with the Boston Globe in 198o, then Time in 1986 and the Wall Street Journal in 1986. In 1990, he moved to the Washington Post and remained there for the next ten years as a political reporter. In 1999, he made the move to television as the D.C. correspondent for ABC News, where he earned a Peabody for his coverage of the 9/11 attacks on the Pentagon. He then became a Middle East correspondent from 2002 to 2004. Yang recalled the phone conversation with Peter Jennings when he got that gig:

“I was extremely flattered because at ABC News, Peter Jennings had veto power over foreign correspondents. And this was an area that Peter cared deeply about. And actually Peter got on the phone …  It’s actually something that Peter said to me,” Yang recalled. “It’s that he thought that — and looking back, you can take what he said a couple of different ways, whether he meant [me] being Asian or being gay — but that he thought that what I would bring to that reporting was an understanding or an insight into … people who are marginalized.”

In 2007, he was once again in Washington, D.C., this time as White House correspondent for NBC News. He is currently based in Chicago.

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?

Welcome Out Michael Sam, University of Missouri Defensive Lineman

Michael Sam, an All-American defensive lineman for the University of Missouri Tigers, has come out as gay in interviews with ESPN and The New York Times. According to statements made to both outlets, Sam came out to his team mates and coaches last August:

“Coaches just wanted to know a little about ourselves, our majors, where we’re from, and something that no one knows about you,” Sam said. “And I used that opportunity just to tell them that I was gay. And their reaction was like, ‘Michael Sam finally told us.’ ”

Asked what that moment felt like, Sam said, “I was kind of scared, even though they already knew. Just to see their reaction was awesome. They supported me from Day One. I couldn’t have better teammates. … I’m telling you what: I wouldn’t have the strength to do this today if I didn’t know how much support they’d given me this past semester.”

Sam was named the Southeastern Conference’s Defensive Player of the Year by the Associated Press, and he was unanimously selected to the first-team All-American. He is already the first Division I college football player in history to come put as gay. If he is picked up on the NFL draft in May, then Sam could become the first openly gay player in NFL history.

The Daily Agenda for Sunday, February 9

TODAY’S AGENDA:
Events This Weekend: The Big Gay Out, Auckland, NZ; Belgium Leatherpride, Antwerp, Belgium; Sydney Mardi Gras, Sydney, NSW.

TODAY’S AGENDA is brought to you by:

From The Los Angeles Advocate, July 1968, pages 12-13.

 
The Los Angeles theater opened in 1911 as the Alvarado Theatre on its namesake street just off MacArthur Park. In the 1960s, it was renamed the Park Theatre when it switched to porn. In 1968, the theater switched to gay-themed movies (including porn as well as art house movies). That switch was announced in June when the theater announced “A Most Unusual Male Film Festival,” which is believed to be the first gay film festival in a regular public theater. The Park continued to show gay films until 1971, when it was renovated into a twin theater and returned to mainstream films. The theater closed in 1986. The building is still there, although its glory days are long gone.

TODAY IN HISTORY:
AIDS Employment Discrimination Declared Illegal in California: 1987. In the first such case in the nation, the California Fair Employment and Housing Commission unanimously ordered that the defense contractor Raytheon pay damages of about $6,000 to a Santa Barbara employee who was denied reinstatement to work following hospitalization due to an AIDS-related illness. John Chadbourne was given medical leave in December 19983 when he was hospitalized with pneumonia. He was diagnosed with AIDS one month later. He recovered from pneumonia and his doctor said he healthy enough to return to work, but his employer would not reinstate him without assurances that other employees would not be endangered. Instead, Raytheon kept him on medical leave, which meant that he retained his benefits (including medical insurance), but was living on significantly reduced income from his disability insurance. The Commission ruled that AIDS is a disability under the law and employers may not discriminate against people with AIDS who are able to work. With that ruling, Chadbourne was vindicated — or at least his estate was. Chadbourne died in January 1985, two years before the Commission’s ruling.

Raytheon went on to significantly improve its policies toward LGBT people and people with AIDS, becoming the first defense contractor to earn a 100% rating on the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index in 2005.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAY’S:
140 YEARS AGO: Amy Lowell: 1874-1925. Her pedigree was impeccable: her family were those Lowells, of Brookline, Massachusetts. Her brother, Lawrence, was president of Harvard; another brother, Percival, was a renowned mathematician and astronomer, founder of the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, and who began the effort which led to the discovery of Pluto fourteen years after his death. Amy, born and reared at Seveneies, the ten-acre family estate, was the baby of the family. Befitting a daughter of a fine Episcopalian family of New England, she was first tutored at home, then attended the best private schools in Boston when she was not touring Europe with her family. At seventeen, her family decided that attending college was not a proper activity for a young woman, so she ensconced herself in the family’s 7,000-volume library at Seveneis and taught herself literature.

In 1902, on one of her many tours of Europe, she was inspired to take up poetry. In 1910, her work began appearing in Atlantic Monthly, and her first published collection, A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass, was published two years later. At about that time, she and actress Ada Dwyer Russell entered what was then known as a “Boston Marriage,” and they remained together for the rest of Lowell’s life. It is believed that Russell is the subject of Lowell’s love poems in  ‘Two Speak Together’, from Pictures of the Floating World.

During one of the couple’s European tours, they met the Imagist poet Ezra Pound. Lowell embraced the Imagist style, so named by the precise use of visual images to convey a clarity of expression. It was also marked by free verse, where, according to Lowell, “one must abandon all desire to find in it the even rhythm of metrical feet. One must allow the lines to flow as they will when read aloud by an intelligent reader.” Then an Anglo-American movement, Lowell’s contribution to the style was in what she called “polyphonic prose,” in which the very written structure of the poetry was broken down and rendered as prose, which was then sometimes intermixed with structured verse. Her embrace and promotion of Imagist Poetry was so intense that it actually had the effect of driving a wedge between Pound and the Imagists, who he began derisively calling “Amygists.” His criticism of Lowell became pointedly personal. Referring to her short stature, her glandular-induced weight problems (and, undoubtedly, put off by her habit of smoking cigars), Pound referred to her as the “hippo-poetess” among his friends and accused her of hijacking the movement.

While Lowell remained dedicated to modern poetry, she was also a fan of historical poets as well. In Fir-Flower Tablets, she produced prose-poetry re-workings of the literal translations of ancient Chinese poetry, and she wrote several critical works about French literature. When she died in 1925 of a brain hemorrhage at Seveneies, she left behind an uncompleted two-volume biography of John Keats, with whom she undoubtedly felt a kinship. “The stigma of oddness,” she wrote of him, “is the price a myopic world always exacts of genius.” Her own genius was recognized posthumously with a 1926 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for What’s O’Clock.

80 YEARS AGO: Pat Rocco: 1934. Pasquale Vincent Serrapica was born in Brooklyn and moved with his family to California in 1946, where he quickly got a twice weekly radio show on Pasadena’s KWKW while still a teen. He also completed his high school credits at home after refusing to deny his homosexuality in school. And so it might be surprising to learn that while in his twenties, he met with a local Youth for Christ director, who got him a singing gig for the religious group, a stint for which he even reacorded an album of devotional musice in 1954. By this time, Pasquale became Pat Rocco, and for the remainder of the 1050s he toured for musicals and appeared as a regular for the Tennessee Ernie Ford Show.

During this time, Rocco became interested in photography and film and in 1967, he answered an ad to shoot stills of nude male models. Seeing the potential of a significant money-making enterprise, he created his own business, Bizarre Production, and began creating and selling photos and erotic movies by mail order. The films got the attention of the Park Theater in Los Angeles, which was interested in creating a special lineup of films for a gay audience. Rocco’s Love is Blue premiered on a bill with several other avant-garde gay films on June 26, 1968 as part of A Most Unusual Male Film Festival, in what it is believed to be the first gay film festival in a public theater.

Rocco’s films stood out for not falling into the typical blue movie formulas. His films focused on the beauty of the male form and featured storylines with positive depictions of male intimacy. While his films were explicitly nude, they skirted the edges of soft porn to such a degree that many complained that his movies didn’t go far enough. But others appreciated Rocco’s sensual and more well-rounded approach. Several of Roccos fans formed the Society of Pat Rocco Enlightened Enthusiasts, or SPREE, in 1968, which remained active for the next ten years publishing newsletters and mounting stage and film events. Meanwhile, Rocco’s films were a regular feature at the Park Theatre until 1971, when the Park decided to return to a more mainstream audience.

Rocco also performed an important service for the local gay community by creating short documentaries of gay rights protests and interviews of local figures. But as fictional gay films became more explicit during the 1970s, Rocco spurned the opportunity to go into hardcore porn. Instead, he turned his attention to photographing and documenting events in Southern California for gay publications. He also became increasingly involved with gay rights advocacy. He campaigned for the resumption of the Christopher Street West Pride Parade, and he organized fundraising events for numerous organizaitons and gay rights causes. He developed a special interest in providing emergency housing in Los Angeles and established his own program, Hudson House, to provide housing, job training and meals for homeless LGBT youth. Hudson House soon spread to San Diego, San Francisco, and Hawaii. Rocco and his partner have retired to Hawaii, where they continue to be active in the local community.

Holly Johnson: 1960. When the Liverpool-based band Frankie Goes to Hollywood released its first single “Relax,” with Holly Johnson on vocals, in October 1983, it took a slow three months before it hit the top of the UK singles chart. It’s rise to number one was helped along, ironically, by BBC 1 disk jockey Mike Read, who happened to notice what he called the “overtly sexual” nature of record sleeve and the printed lyrics as the single was playing. He unceremoniously lifted the tonearm, live on air, and denounced it as “obscene.” The BBC followed that with an on-air ban on all of its radio and television outlets (with the narrow exception of its top-40 countdown show). Until then, “Relax” had been a middling top-40 dance hit, but within two weeks it hit number one and remained there for the next five. It became the seventh best selling single in UK single’s history, and the temporarily ubiquitous “Frankie Say” T-shirts became not just a musical statement but a political one as well. The Beeb finally relented and lifted its ban at the end if 1984, just as a re-worked version of “Relax” was enjoying a second bout of popularity with the release of the band’s album Welcome to the Pleasuredome.

Johnson left Frankie in 1987 over differences in the group’s musical direction. After a bitter contract dispute, Johnson was finally able to start a solo career in 1989. His first album, Blast, met with some critical and commercial success, but his 1991 album Dream That Money Can’t Buy tanked. That year, he learned he was HIV-positive and withdrew from public life. Later that decade, he re-emerged as an occasional singer and, mainly, as a painter, with shows at the Tate Liverpool and the Royal Academy.

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Olympics Watch

My favorite part of Opening Ceremonies was at the end, when Putin declared the Games open and they lit the Eye of Sauron.

The Daily Agenda for Saturday, February 8

TODAY’S AGENDA:
Events This Weekend: The Big Gay Out, Auckland, NZ; Belgium Leatherpride, Antwerp, Belgium; Plymouth Winter Pride, Plymouth, UK; Sydney Mardi Gras, Sydney, NSW.

TODAY’S AGENDA is brought to you by:

From The Blade (Washington), June 1976, page 9.

 
Three gay bars and a restaurant managed to squeeze themselves into a single building just off of Philly’s tony Rittenhouse Square. The building today is the site of an Irish pub.

TODAY IN HISTORY:
Modesto Police Round Up Gay Men: 1957. The headline in the local paper read “Modesto Sex Gang Smashed.” That “gang” consisted of a group of local gay men, and the paper played it up for all it was worth while probably ruining a few lives in the process:

A police crackdown on an alleged homosexual ring known as the “Lavender Gang” was revealed today with the arrest of two Modestoans, including a former department store manager.

Police Chief James Neel announced 15 to 20 persons, including some bay area, Salinas and Merced residents, are believed to be members of the ring. He said more arrests were planned.

Charged with lewd and lascivious conduct is Elmer J. Kreuger, 55, who resigned from his managerial post Saturday after being employed by the chain store for 24 years.

Accused of sodomy as well as lewd and lascivious conduct is William Howard Moore, 26, office worker for a diary products distribution firm. … The chief reported Moore admitted he had associated with known homosexuals in Modesto and the bay area and had hosted all male parties.

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).

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Sochi 2014, the Gay Prequel

The Winter Olympics in Sochi officially start today and a lot of digital ink has been spilled in the last six months about Russia’s “gay propaganda” law. Here is a brief recap of some of the highlights:

Box Turtle Bulletin’s coverage, in one convenient link.

Jeff Sharlet of Rolling Stone, GQ, et al, went to Russia and wrote the definitive guide on how bad it really is on the ground for LGBT people — marauding klan-like groups, gay people with children living in fear, jobs being lost, and, most interesting to me, some links between anti-gay groups in the US and the violence in Russia, all here: Inside the Iron Closet: What It’s Like to Be Gay in Putin’s Russia

All the way back in August, the NYT wrote this report on the violence already occurring within two months of the passage of the “gay propaganda” law: Gays in Russia Find No Haven, Despite Support From the West

Scott Long’s dissection of Truths behind the gay torture images from Russia is a good balance to some of the rumors and unsubstantiated stories that have been and will continue to pour out of Russia.

The NYT in its update on Billie Jean King also links to reports on how much the Obama administration has gone out of its way to put LGBT people front and center in Sochi:Billie Jean King Won’t Join U.S. Olympic Delegation – neither Obama or Biden will be in attendance.

Remember the Stoli boycott? The Chicago Phoenix does a recap here including the news that the bar Sidetrack is ending its boycott but will donating a portion of sales to a Russian pro-LGBT fund.

Julia Ioffe, Russian American journalist for The New Republic, writes here of all the schadenfreude over the many problems in Sochi — already, the Twitter account @SochiProblems has more followers than the official Sochi Winter Olympics account. In case you wanted to know, “schadenfreude” in Russian is “злорадство/ zloradstvo” and I don’t think any of us feel very guilty about it.

On that subject, here are some people to follow on Twitter for Sochi/LGBT updates:
Leonid Ragozin
MaxSeddon

Tweets in Russian (& some English):
Masha Gessen, lesbian freelance writer for the NYT et al.
Nikolai Alekseyev who has, it must be said, doggedly put on Pride protests for over 5 years now in Moscow and, apparently, sued the Russian state multiple times over its mistreatment of LGBT people. He’s also a Russian nationalist with a history of anti-semitism.

Last but not least, Box Turtle also has a new Twitter account, follow here.

*Update: already, 4 LGBT activists in St. Petersburg, including a pregant woman, have been arrested.  #CheerstoSochi . . .

The Daily Agenda for Friday, February 7

TODAY’S AGENDA:
National Black HIV/AIDS Awareness Day. Today marks the 13th year for National Black HIV/AIDS Awareness Day, a national HIV testing and treatment community mobilization initiative targeted at the African-American community regardless of sexual orientation. There are four specific focal points: education, testing, involvement, and treatment. Educationally, the focus is educate African-Americans about the basics of HIV/AIDS in their local communities. Testing is at the core of this initiative, as it is hoped that Blacks will mark February 7th of every year as their annual or biannual day to get tested for HIV. Of the nearly 50,000 Americans who test positive for HIV each year, about 20,000 of them are African-Americans, making the Black community’s burden disproportionately high. Health Black Communities, Inc., is the lead organization spearheading events for the day. Click here to learn about events near you.

Events This Weekend: The Big Gay Out, Auckland, NZ; Belgium Leatherpride, Antwerp, Belgium; Plymouth Winter Pride, Plymouth, UK; Sydney Mardi Gras, Sydney, NSW.

TODAY’S AGENDA is brought to you by:

From Michael’s Thing, a biweekly New York City gay bar guide, April 29, 1974, page 22.

 
I haven’t been able to come up with much information about Dirty Edna’s except that it was a rather seedy bar owned by a husband and wife team, reputedly with mob connections (as was typical for a lot of gay bar owners in New York City at the time). Near as I can tell, the location now appears to be a parking lot a block off of Broadway.

Dr. Charles H. Hughes

THIS MONTH IN HISTORY:
Man Seeks Castration To Cure His Homosexuality: 1904. “How often is there delivered from the womb of some noble and grand woman — some little soul, scarred in such manner that stigmatizes its after life and brings a stain so deeply colored as to stamp it in the eyes of the world a ‘social outcast and criminal.'” So begins Dr. Charles H. Hughes’s article in the February 1904 edition of the journal Alienist and Neurologist. (An “alienist” is an archaic nineteenth century term for what today we would call a psychologist or psychiatrist.) Medical journals at the turn of the last century had a very different editorial tone than they do today, with morality holding as much or greater sway over scientific evidence the vast majority of the articles published, particularly where sexual matters were concerned. The scientific method, clearly, had yet to make may inroads into the mental health professions.

Those lines, which opened an article by Hughes of a “homosexualist’s self-description,” were actually penned by the “homosexualist” himself. This particular person, “a gentleman degenerate” of thirty-nine years of age, was an American of Irish ancestry whose father graduated “from one of the old world’s best colleges” before fighting on the losing side in the 1848 Irish rebellion, fleeing to the U.S., marrying, starting a family, and dying young of either “epilepsy or apoplexy.” That the man’s father had epilepsy was considered significant, as Hughes saw it as evidence of inherited degeneracy. That diagnosis was based on Degeneracy theory, a sort of a theory of evolution in reverse which postulated that, thanks to the conveniences of modern society and its advances in medicine and hygiene, modern man was increasingly immune from the natural “culling of the herd.” And because modern man was no longer being culled by natural forces, the human race was actually experiencing a devolution — or “de-generation” — into a more primitive state. Because the letter writer’s father had epilepsy, Hughes concluded that the son’s homosexuality was an expression of a congenital degeneracy inherited from his father.

With the father’s early demise, his mother was left to raise an unspecified number of children. One of those boys, the letter writer, wrote of himself in the third person to Dr. Hughes, and described himself as:

“a regular ‘girl boy’ as he was called, always afraid to tell a fib — never using bad language, never smoking nor chewing, thoroughly honest, shunning the girls and always having some boy friend he fancied for his good looks and endeavoring to show him some kindness in the way of making him presents — never cared for an ugly boy — in fact did not know why he particularly cared for any, always studious, receiving high honors at school for thoroughness in his studies and exemplary deportment. The child mind not understanding the features of certain matters recalls his desire to bunk with any gentleman who might be the guest of his father, and to them, no doubt revelations were made, but naturally ascribed to childish innocence. I felt myself growing stronger in this way. In other words showing a preference for such society and ignoring girls — yet being timid in the presence of both male and female — was frequently twitted about it.”

As the writer grew older, his attractions toward other men grew, along with the horror of knowing that he would never be able to fit in with society as a homosexual. He also lamented the loneliness that being gay brought him in a society with few social opportunities for people like him:

“Haunting the parks, seaside resorts and other localities, a lonely man afflicted, no hope of cure as intimated by physicians and neurologists, this being repeated to me in all localities, large cities and small towns. …

“Twenty-five years of this misery is a long time for such torture, yet the struggle goes on. If the wishes of this lonely man were realized, and he trusts it may not be long before he may find the surroundings illumined and he be enabled to step into the sunlight — a clean and wholesome man — or in the absence of such bliss — his mother’s arm be extended down from the region beyond into which he may be embraced and find that rest which may be emblemized as eternal.”

The image of his mother’s arms extending from “the region beyond” refers to the fact that she died fifteen years earlier, when the letter writer was twenty-four years old. In other words, it was an expression of the writer’s own yearning for death, as perhaps the only way out of his predicament. Hughes tried surgery:

In this case an operation was performed on the filaments of the pudic nerve supplying to testes, but the morbid inclination still persists, notwithstanding the operation and a course of chologogues, antiseptic intestinal treatment and full bromism.

Damaging the pudic nerve would have resulted in blocking the sensations of orgasm. In animals, it was known that this type of operation would have also resulted in a loss of erections. But as Hughes discovered, this operation did little to alter his patient’s sexual attractions. “The case appears to be in the head and not in the genitals,” Hughes concluded, and urged his patient to “do as other men have to do and do do, keep his passionate impulses in abeyance to the higher purposes of his nature and the nobler ambitions of life.” The patient wrote back:

“What you claim to be accomplished through efforts on my part is impossible — of course you will dispute this. Were our positions reversed for a month, you could understand. If the difficulty is with the head, all I have to say is that it has centered there with such vigor and tenacity that it would appear to me that the elimination of the trouble in one center has been doubly concentrated in another.”

By this point, the writer was getting desperate. His employer found out about his condition and fired him. “I will be upon the streets next week — to go where — the Lord only knows.” He against asked Hughes again whether he thought castration would help. “If so,” he wrote,” I will go into a charity hospital and have it done.” Several months later, in January of 1904, the patient wrote again, this time announcing that he decided to commit himself to a sanitarium, although he was still, in his desperation, weighing the option of a full castration:

“I am now convinced that from an experience in St. Louis during my last visit (an experience without consummation) that there is absolutely no avenue of escape from my trouble but to be placed under restraint, and if I can get back to St. Louis it is my intention to place myself in the hands of the authorities irrespective of the consequences, as I am certain to get into trouble, and I can not stand this thing any longer. I know just what Dr. —— and yourself would suggest, yet from the statement of other physicians — the trouble is of the head and there would be no certainty that the operation in question (castration) would be successful. You well know the debilitating experiences through which I passed after the first surgical work. I jumped on a train in St. Louis last night and followed a party clean through to South McAlester. I was expected back at the hospital that night. I spent all my money…

“I came very near getting in serious trouble on the trip. If I am compelled to pass through another surgical operation it will have to be at the city hospital. … I fell terribly over this, as I promised Dr. —— I would conduct myself with decorum. If the remedy he suggested is a sure cure, then I will have to accept it.”

[Source: Charles H. Hughes. “The gentleman degenerate: A homosexualist’s self-description and self-applied title. Pudic nerve section fails therapeutically.” Alienist and Neurologist 25, no. 1 (February 1904): 62-70. Available online via Google Books here.]

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).

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Google Doodles the Rainbow for Sochi

If you go to the Google search page, you’ll see this Google Doodle in place of Google’s logo in honor of the Sochi Olympics, which officially opens tomorrow. In case anyone somehow misses Google’s message in the graphic, they helpfully quote from the Olympi charter:

 The practice of sport is a human right. Every individual must have the possibility of practicing sport, without discrimination of any kind and in the Olympic spirit, which requires mutual understanding with a spirit of friendship, solidarity and fair play.” –Olympic Charter

This appears to be going on Google’s pages worldwide, including such anti-gay hot spots as Uganda, Nigeria, Cameroon, Ghana, Jamaica, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and, most importantly right now, Russia, where Google is likely violating that country’s “anti-propaganda” law.

 
Meanwhile, Britain’s Channel 4 is rebranding its during the duration of the Olympics by dressing its logo in Rainbow colors. And tomorrow, just as the opening ceremonies air on BBC2, Channel 4 will counter with the television debut of its “Gay Mountain” ad campaign:

The tongue-in-cheek ad, which will run for a week, features a “bear” cabaret act singing a song which features lyrics including “good luck gays, on gay mountain”. Using a play on the term “out”, denoting when a person declares publicly that they are gay, the TV ad runs with the strapline “good luck to everyone out in Sochi”.

“This is a typically Channel 4 way of celebrating the start of the Winter Games and showing our support to all of the athletes out in Sochi, gay or straight,” said the Channel 4 chief marketing and communications officer, Dan Brooke.

Something tells me you’re not gonna see anything like this on NBC: