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 lobbyDecember 27th, 2013
It’s amusing to see just how desperate the National Organization for Marriage has become. And cynical.
An organization that at one time attempted to persuade those who might have been uncertain about marriage equality, NOM now has given up. Now they exist solely to funnel money from the Catholic Church unknown sources to anti-gay political campaigns and candidates. And their rhetoric has devolved to name-calling and rants against “the homosexual lobby” and “radical activists judges”.
For example, in today’s money-beg, Brian Brown complains:
As I mentioned right before Christmas, a federal judge (an Obama appointee) in Utah has issued a ruling invalidating their state constitutional amendment defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman.
So send money money money to “help us defend marriage from radical judges seeking to overturn the will of We the People and to impose their radical social agenda on ordinary Americans!”
And he goes on to explain
This ruling just underscores the importance of the work that NOM is already planning for 2014. I wrote to you earlier this month about the critical importance of retaking the United States Senate in the coming election year. Securing a majority of pro-marriage Senators would allow us to block President Obama’s appointments of extremist, activist judges and ensure that he doesn’t continue to stack the courts all across the country with activists who want to impose same-sex marriage on every one of us.
Brian Brown is politically savvy enough to know that this is an absurd statement. He knows that not only would a GOP majority have refused to block the appointment of “extremist, activist” Judge Richard Shelby, but that his nomination came from Orrin Hatch (R – Utah) and was strongly supported by Mike Lee (R – Utah).
But Brown thinks that NOM’s supporters are not sophisticated enough to discover this for themselves. He thinks they are stupid enough not to notice that it’s not just Obama appointees that are ruling for marriage.
He may be right.
December 27th, 2013
Uganda’s Daily Monitor provides a round-up of religious leaders Christmas messages. The draconian Anti-Homosexuality Bill, which was hurriedly passed by Parliament last Friday, received special mention by these three Anglican bishops:
“In Uganda, there are so many injustices like child sacrifice, domestic violence, drug abuse which are now a big issue in our schools… I want to thank Parliament for passing the Anti-homosexuality Bill. I want the world to understand what we are saying,” the Archbishop of the Church of Uganda, the Most Rev Stanley Ntagali, said.
…”Can you imagine your son brings another man at home for introduction?… The church preaches forgiveness, reconciliation and transformation. I do not want people to look at us and say the church is against the homosexuals. We love everybody. The homosexuals, and lesbians are all children of God but we want them to repent and have eternal life,” Archbishop Ntagali said.
At St Paul’s Cathedral Namirembe, Bishop Wilberforce Kityo Luwalira commended MPs for passing the anti-gays Bill but asked them to object the proposed law to legalise abortion describing it as murder.
The Bishop of Mbale, the Rt Rev Patrick Gidudu, asked Ugandans and political leaders who are against the Bill to seek God, repent and renew fellowship to save the country from God’s wrath.
The round-up also includes comments from a Pentecostal pastor in Mbale who praised House Speaker Rebecca Kadaga for calling for the snap vote on the Anti-Homosexuality Bill.
December 27th, 2013
Last Friday’s passage of the draconian Anti-Homosexuality Bill by Uganda’s Parliament caught quite a lot of people by surprise including, it would appear, members of President Yoweri Museveni’s government. The bill was nowhere to be found on Parliament’s Order Paper for the day (RTF: 131KB/5 pages), and there is still some question of whether Parliament actually had a proper quorum when Speaker Rebecca Kadaga (who is among the bill’s more vigorous defenders) called for a snap vote. Warren Throckmorton points to this article by Uganda’s Observer which gives us a few clues about the plan to bring the bill up by stealth:
But promoters of the bill were encouraged by the recent passage of similar laws in Russia and Nigeria. Sources said the final onslaught was planned mid last week, and on Thursday evening. The bill’s promoters sent out messages to supportive MPs from both NRM and opposition.
“I went to bed knowing that this bill was coming up, they sent me a message yesterday [Thursday],” Dr Lulume Bayigga (DP, Buikwe South) told The Observer.
At least four MPs: Fox Odoi (West Budama North), Sam Otada (Kibanda), Krispus Ayena (Oyam North) and Abdul Katuntu (Bugweri) were known to be against the bill, having dissented from the position of the Legal and Parliamentary Affairs committee, and wrote a minority report against the bill. The minority report was, however, signed only by Odoi and Otada, who were not in the House to defend their position.
“I was not aware that it was coming because it [was] not reflected on the [hard] copy and the electronic copy of the order paper that was sent to my email,” Odoi said when contacted.
As Parliament voted to pass the bill, (M.P. David) Bahati, the promoter, paced the corridors, following proceedings on TV, and only appeared after it was passed to join his colleagues in celebration.
“This is the perfect Christmas gift we could give Ugandans, I want to thank the speaker for her courage that led to the passing of this bill,” Bahati told journalists.
He later told The Observer that it was tactical not to include the bill on the order paper because they feared government would block it.
“We knew that if it were to be included on the order paper, they [government] would scheme against it, it was in our plan that members request for it and the speaker uses her prerogative to have it included on the order paper,” Bahati told us on Friday.
…(Pentecostal pastor Martin) Ssempa was part of the group that planned the final onslaught. He said the plot was hatched on Wednesday, but they agreed to keep it secret.
“If we had let it out, we couldn’t have handled the resistance of gay activists; by this time, this place [Parliament] would be flooded by whites resisting the law,” he said.
Journalist Andrew Mwenda, founder of Uganda’s Independent newspaper, appeared on NTV to give his thoughts on Parliament’s move on what he calls “a very primitive law”:
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
The next step for the State of Utah in their quest to halt same-sex marriages is to appeal to the Supreme Court for a stay on enforcing Judge Richard Shelby’s ruling overturning the state’s constitutional amendment banning marriage equality. But while I expected that to happen immediately this morning, it seems that there will be a delay. (fox13)
A spokesman for the Utah Attorney General’s Office told FOX 13 the office is not expected to file an emergency request with the U.S. Supreme Court to halt same-sex marriage licenses from being issued “for a few days.”
The state had said Tuesday it would file a request with U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, after the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver rejected the request. On Thursday, attorney general’s spokesman Ryan Bruckman said the office was coordinating with outside counsel before proceeding.
Having finally recognized that they are completely inept and that they have bungled every step of the way, the state is now seeking to craft a request that will speak to the concerns of the Supreme Court justices.
But after a week of equality and a thousand marriages, getting a stay may be increasingly difficult with each day that passes.
December 26th, 2013
The Ugandan tabloid Red Pepper says:
(President Yoweri) Museveni said he, “will first go through the bill and if it is right, he will sign it into law but if he finds it not right, he will send it back to parliament”.
If cooler heads prevail, there are multiple ways in which cooler heads can slow-walk the Anti-Homosexuality Bill through its paces after it was impulsively passed by Parliament last week. Uganda’s constitution requires that Parliament sends the bill with all amendments incorporated to the President’s office “as soon as possible,” after which the President has thirty days to assent to the bill or send it back to Parliament with his objections. Since we don’t know how soon “as soon as possible” is, it’s not clear when that thirty day clock starts. If Museveni does send it back to Parliament, then Parliament will have the opportunity to consider changes to the bill, but will only have to pass it again with a simple majority to send it back to the President. If the President objects again, then he can send it back again, but this time it would take a two-thirds vote of Parliament for the bill to become law.
Anti-gay sentiment in Uganda is high enough that reaching the two-thirds bar would not be at all difficult. So the main opportunities to derail the bill would be to slow-walk it through its paces between now and 2016 when the current Parliament expires. Those four years may seem like an extraordinarily long time in most democracies, but Uganda’s Parliament runs on “Uganda time,” where bills have languished for a decade or more.
As for grounds that Museveni may use if he should decide to send the bill back to Parliament, he can find them in the minority report drafted by members of Parliament’s Legal and Parliamentary Affairs committee, which examines each clause of the Anti-Homosexuality Bill and provides legal and constitutional grounds for rejecting the entire bill.
December 26th, 2013
Solomon Male is a complex person. The Pentecostal pastor is as anti-gay as they come. In 2012, he was convicted by a Uganda court, along with anti-gay extremist pastors Martin “Eat Da Poo Poo” Ssempa, Michael Kyazze and three others, of conspiring to tarnish a rival pastor’s reputation by accusing him of homosexuality. Male (pronounced “MAHL-leh”). His appearance in the above clip from a 2011 BBC documentary further enhanced his anti-gay credentials with Western observers. But what has set him apart from other anti-gay extremists in Uganda is his long-repeated opposition to the Anti-Homosexuality Bill that was recently passed by Uganda’s Parliament. Yesterday, Daily Monitor, Uganda’s largest independent newspaper, reported that Male had taken a “U-turn” on the anti-gay bill:
“It is unfortunate that our MPs seem not to be serious with what to do with their time. They gave Ugandans the impression that there was no law to deal with homosexuality which was not true. Secondly the Bill they passed waters down the existing law and will simply give homosexuals opportunity to petition the constitutional court to strike it and other legal provisions out,” Pastor Solomon Male of the Arise for Christ Ministry told the Daily Monitor yesterday.
“His excellency shouldn’t bother assenting to it. They (MPs) have failed to deliver and instead opted for populism to cover up their failures,” the cleric asserted. Religious leaders from across the denominations have extolled the Speaker Rebecca Kadaga and the House for passing the Bill.
Male’s reasons for opposing the bill, as reported by Daily Monitor, are largely consistent with prior statements and can hardly be characterized as a “U-turn.” As I said, he is as ignorant and anti-gay as any other anti-gay cleric in Uganda. But just last year, he voiced his opposition to the Anti-Homosexuality Bill when it appeared at the top of Parliament’s agenda:
“The basis of our anti-homosexuality initiatives since 2006, which culminated in the formation of our organisation was to sensitise the public about the challenge and dangers of homosexuality and sexual abuses,” he said. “It led to some politicians coming up with a hurried populist, opportunistic and hypocritical bill against homosexuality, which is now before parliament.”
Male said their organisation was set up to fight for the rights of victims of homosexuality. He claimed many youths were being lured into homosexuality while at school and in churches. However, Male accused security agencies of covering up for prominent people who behind the activities. He accused MP David Bahati who originated the bill of riding on the popularity of their campaign to further his political interests.
“As the national campaign against homosexuality became popular, Honourable David Bahati and his team came up with the anti-homosexuality bill 2009,” Male said. “Although it may have been well intentioned, we feel that it will not achieve what many Ugandans think it will achieve. It is a waste of precious time, financial and other resources that should have been applied more productively elsewhere.”
Jeff Sharlet’s indispensable book from 2011, C Street: The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy
Kyazze and Pastor Male are nothing if not ambitious. Their only critique of the bill is that it is actually too soft on homosexuality. They see a clause forbidding the media from exposing victims of gay rape as evidence there’s a gay infiltrator within their ranks. Even (James Nsaba) Buturo the (former) minister of ethics and integrity and chairman of the Fellowship group from which the bill emerged, is suspect in their eyes. They don’t think he’s gay, but they wonder whether he’s protecting powerful homosexuals. Like many Ugandans, both pastors believe the bill’s timing has as much to do with a massive corruption inquiry that has brushed closer to the dictator than any other.
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
As important as the fact that the Tenth Circuit denied the state of Utah’s request for stay from Judge Shelby’s ruling that the state’s gay-marriage ban is unconstitutional, is the reason they did so.
A stay pending appeal is governed by the following factors: (1) the likelihood of success on appeal; (2) the threat of irreparable harm if the stay is not granted; (3) the absence of harm to opposing parties if the stay is granted; and (4) any risk of harm to the public interest. Homans v. City of Albuquerque, 264 F.3d 1240, 1243 (10th Cir.2001); 10th Cir. R. 8.1. The first two factors are the most critical, and they require more than a mere possibility of success and irreparable harm, respectively. Nken v. Holder, 556 U.S. 418, 434-35 (2009).
Having considered the district court’s decision and the parties’ arguments concerning the stay factors, we conclude that a stay is not warranted.
In other words, the Tenth Circuit looked primarily at two things. They asked themselves if the state was likely to succeed on appeal and found the answer to be “no”. And they took the state’s chief argument for stay – that allowing marriages now will harm the gay people who will only have their marriages reversed later – and said “we don’t think so.”
We don’t know why the Court delayed responding until so late in the day. It may be that they made efforts to determine or ponder the general feeling of the other circuit members. But even if not, considering that the two judges considering stay, Holmes and Bacharach, are among the conservative members of the Tenth Circuit, this may bode well for the appeal.
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
The Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals has given the state of Utah it’s answer. They will not stay Judge Shelby’s ruling.
Merry Christmas!
Now they will petition Justice Sotomayor for a Supreme Court stay. But in the meanwhile marriage moves on.
December 24th, 2013
Considering all the excitement of the past week, Christmas seems almost anticlimactic. But here’s wishing that your joys at Christmas are as wondrous as the lead up has been.
December 24th, 2013
As we slide into the final hours before the Christmas holiday, the Tenth Circuit remains closed-lipped about whether or not there will be a stay of Judge Shelby’s ruling. In the meanwhile, county clerks continue to issue marriage licences to same-sex couples, including several clerks who had refused to do so yesterday.
I’m curious as to the delay in announcing their decision. Decisions released in the afternoon before a holiday tend to get little attention and I wonder if this is a consideration (judges are, to some extent, politicians).
My wild hope is that the Tenth Circuit will refuse the stay based on the state’s inability to show any likelihood of winning the appeal. It’s a lot to hope for. But the timing couldn’t be better; by the time anyone pays attention, it will be a week down the road.
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
A federal judge allowed a challenge to that state’s marriage ban move forward (wtvr)
A federal court denied a motion from the Staunton Circuit Court Clerk today seeking dismissal of a lawsuit challenging Virginia’s ban on marriage for same-sex couples.
The court today also removed the governor as a named defendant in challenging the case but is allowing it to continue with the other two defendants. They are listed as Staunton Circuit Court Clerk Thomas Roberts, and Janet Rainey, the state registrar of vital records.
Featured Reports
In this original BTB Investigation, we unveil the tragic story of Kirk Murphy, a four-year-old boy who was treated for “cross-gender disturbance” in 1970 by a young grad student by the name of George Rekers. This story is a stark reminder that there are severe and damaging consequences when therapists try to ensure that boys will be boys.
When we first reported on three American anti-gay activists traveling to Kampala for a three-day conference, we had no idea that it would be the first report of a long string of events leading to a proposal to institute the death penalty for LGBT people. But that is exactly what happened. In this report, we review our collection of more than 500 posts to tell the story of one nation’s embrace of hatred toward gay people. This report will be updated continuously as events continue to unfold. Check here for the latest updates.
In 2005, the Southern Poverty Law Center wrote that “[Paul] Cameron’s ‘science’ echoes Nazi Germany.” What the SPLC didn”t know was Cameron doesn’t just “echo” Nazi Germany. He quoted extensively from one of the Final Solution’s architects. This puts his fascination with quarantines, mandatory tattoos, and extermination being a “plausible idea” in a whole new and deeply disturbing light.
On February 10, I attended an all-day “Love Won Out” ex-gay conference in Phoenix, put on by Focus on the Family and Exodus International. In this series of reports, I talk about what I learned there: the people who go to these conferences, the things that they hear, and what this all means for them, their families and for the rest of us.
Prologue: Why I Went To “Love Won Out”
Part 1: What’s Love Got To Do With It?
Part 2: Parents Struggle With “No Exceptions”
Part 3: A Whole New Dialect
Part 4: It Depends On How The Meaning of the Word "Change" Changes
Part 5: A Candid Explanation For "Change"
At last, the truth can now be told.
Using the same research methods employed by most anti-gay political pressure groups, we examine the statistics and the case studies that dispel many of the myths about heterosexuality. Download your copy today!
And don‘t miss our companion report, How To Write An Anti-Gay Tract In Fifteen Easy Steps.
Anti-gay activists often charge that gay men and women pose a threat to children. In this report, we explore the supposed connection between homosexuality and child sexual abuse, the conclusions reached by the most knowledgeable professionals in the field, and how anti-gay activists continue to ignore their findings. This has tremendous consequences, not just for gay men and women, but more importantly for the safety of all our children.
Anti-gay activists often cite the “Dutch Study” to claim that gay unions last only about 1½ years and that the these men have an average of eight additional partners per year outside of their steady relationship. In this report, we will take you step by step into the study to see whether the claims are true.
Tony Perkins’ Family Research Council submitted an Amicus Brief to the Maryland Court of Appeals as that court prepared to consider the issue of gay marriage. We examine just one small section of that brief to reveal the junk science and fraudulent claims of the Family “Research” Council.
The FBI’s annual Hate Crime Statistics aren’t as complete as they ought to be, and their report for 2004 was no exception. In fact, their most recent report has quite a few glaring holes. Holes big enough for Daniel Fetty to fall through.
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