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 14th, 2013
The Milwaukee Journal, Dec 14, 1954. (Click to enlarge.)
TODAY IN HISTORY:
Milwaukee Doctor Faced Blackmail: 1954. The Milwaukee Journal reported that Anthony Roy, 26, was charged with attempting to extort $500 from a Milwaukee physician in exchange for not “exposing” him for being gay. He also made similar extortion attempts against a jeweler and an osteopath. These blackmail attempts took place at a time when even rumors that someone was gay might result in the complete ruining of that person’s reputation. In the case of the doctor and osteopath, it might have even resulted in their licenses being revoked. After all, in 1954 they were both legally criminals and (according to the APA) mentally ill. The Journal described how Roy was caught:
Roy was seized in a public toilet at 1905 E. North av. The doctor, co-operating with police, had placed there a fake money package containing a dye powder. Officers said Roy’s hands were stained blue and the package was in his topcoat.
Police said the three professional men received a total of 10 extortion notes. Payment of $500 each was demanded from the physician and the jeweler and $1,000 from the osteopath. None of the intended victims is a homosexual, police said.
CA State Sen. Briggs Urges Appointment of Non-Gay To Succeed Harvey Milk: 1978. San Francisco Mayor Diane Feinstein released a telegram sent to her from California State Sen. John Briggs urging her to fill the vacancy left by San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk’s assassination with a “non-homosexual.” Briggs, who was the driving force behind an unsuccessful 1978 ballot measure (see Nov 7) which would have banned gays, lesbians, and anyone who supported them from working in public schools, responded that he was a “little shocked” that Mayor Feinstein made the telegram public. Feinstein, who had been elected mayor to fill the vacancy left by the Nov. 27 shooting deaths of Milk and Mayor George Moscone, had said that she was considering appointing another gay person to fill Milk’s vacancy. Briggs responded via telegram:
“I am appalled by your apparent desire to use the quota system in appointing supervisor Harvey Milk’s successor ‘as the only moral thing to do.’ Surely merit not sexual preference should be the criterion. Supervisor Milk always insisted to be considered a human being first and a homosexual second. As an attractive alternative, perhaps now is the time to provide fair representation for San Francisco’s Oriental, black or Chicano populations.”
It’s pretty rich that Briggs wanted her to consider gay people “a human being first and a homosexual second,” given that his ballot measure, Proposition 6, would have done precisely the opposite. Feinstein ignored Briggs’s advice, and on January 8, 1979, she appointed Harry G. Britt, a former United Methodist minister and “avowed homosexual,” to fill Milk’s vacancy to represent the Castro district.
Dr. Robert Bernstein
Texas Health Department Gives Tentative Approval to AIDS Quarantine: 1985. The Texas Board of Health voted 12-5 to give tentative approval for a rule which would allow “incorrigible” people with AIDS to be declared as a public health threat and be placed under quarantine. Dr. Robert Bernstein, the state health commissioner, proposed the rule two months earlier (see Oct 22) to ensure the “isolation or separation” of those who refused to curtail their sexual activity or drug use. “This does not deal with the average AIDS patient,” he told the press. “This is not aimed at a disease. It is aimed at individuals who have the disease and might be incorrigible in a public health way. Whether we’ll use this, I don’t know.”
Board member Dr. Barry Cunningham, a Round Rock dentist, was more blunt: “We have a moral obligation to protect the people of Texas against a disease that is 100 percent fatal.”
Bernstein emphasized that the proposed rule would only be used as a “last resort.” Local health officials would have to first get the state commissioner’s approval before imposing a quarantine. He justified the proposal by citing a Houston male prostitute with AIDS who had initially refused to stop working. The man later accepted counseling from a local gay advocacy group and admitted himself into a hospital.
Several Texas doctors spoke out against the proposal. Dr. Phillip Anderson, and Austin physician whose practice was about 60% gay, said, “The law is clearly outdated and inappropriate.” Board chairman Dr. Ron Anderson of Dallas, who voted against the proposal, said, “It’s not really scientifically what would help us very much.” Others noted that quarantines had historically been imposed on people with diseases which were spread through casual contact, and that HIV/AIDS is not a casually-spread disease. A hearing was set for public comment for January 13.
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?
December 13th, 2013
Two years ago, Michigan Representative Dave Agema (R – Grandville) sponsored a bill called the Public Employee Domestic Partner Benefit Restriction Act (real name) which was designed to do exactly that: probit the government closest to the people (cities, counties, library commissions) from enacting protections for the people (firemen, assessors, librarians). Specifically, it provided that “a public employer shall not provide medical benefits or other fringe benefits for an individual currently residing in the same residence as an employee of the public employer” unless they were the opposite sex.
And being a pretty despicable bunch, the Michigan GOP representatives passed it with a party-line vote (plus one Democrat) and Governor Rick Snyder signed the bill into law.
As the bill was an obvious violation of the US Supreme Court decision in Romer v. Evans, this June a judge issued an injunction against its implementation. It is assumed that the bill is dead.
Well now Dave Agema is not longer in the state legislature. But at last year’s GOP state convention, the party decided that he was an ideal representative to send to the Republican National Central Committee, ousting their former party chair who had been a national RNC candidate but, apparently, just wasn’t batpoop nuts enough.
So now they have Dave Agema making news by trotting off to the Berrien County Republican Party Holiday Reception this week, and saying the following:
… I stand for traditional marriage, not homosexual ones. (audience applause) … the basic unit of government in society.
“When you tear the family apart, you tear the country apart. I worked with these individuals for almost 30 years with American (Airlines). I know what they do. I know what happened to American Airlines when San Francisco said we could not land in San Francisco and do business with American Airlines unless we paid same sex unmarried benefits.
“The pilots said, ‘Bologna. Don’t go there anymore.’
“Can’t do it. Too big a market. Can’t do it. Well, what happened? Say me and, what’s your name again, first name? Martha. I’m a flight attendant. You have AIDS. You come to me and say, ‘hey, tell them I’m your lover for the last six months.’ You get on our health care. American Airlines spends $400,000 before you die of AIDS. And he goes on to the next, and the next, and that’s what was happening.
“Folks, they want free medical because they’re dying between 38 and 44 years old. It’s a biggie. So, to me it’s a moral issue. It’s a Biblical issue. Traditional marriage is where it should be and that is in our platform, so people that are opposed on that issue within our party are wrong. It’s in our platform. (audience applause)”
Well that there’s a whole lot of crazy. Not a word of fact, but a great big serving of hot juicy crazy hate ladled over a holiday pastry. And the Berrien County GOP biddies just lapped it right up, burped, and asked for more.
But outside the context of hardcore party extremists in county committees, crazy hate just doesn’t sell very well anymore. And as his statements started hitting the blogs, normal folk were a bit shocked.
And though the party joyfully voted for the bill generated by Agema’s radical hatred, now the Michigan GOP politicians have began backpedaling. (MLive)
House Speaker Jase Bolger, R-Marshall, said Wednesday that he respects religious beliefs that may not make room for gay marriage. “But I do not respect, and frankly am disgusted by, anyone who demonizes someone because of their sexual orientation,” he continued.
Senate Majority Leader Randy Richardville, R-Monroe, said he had not heard Agema’s comments directly but had picked up on the basic tenor.
“He’s not speaking on behalf of me, or I think most of the people who call themselves Republicans, when he says stuff like this,” said Richardville. “It’s not the first time. Hate isn’t one of my values.”
Naturally, Log Cabin called for his resignation. Jason Watts, secretary of Allegan County’s Republican Party, has drafted a resolution that the state party (which meets this weekend) disavow those who “espouse demagogic rhetoric that is incendiary and unbecoming of civil discourse.”
And the Governor, who signed the anti-gay bill two years ago, now rebuffs Agema’s agenda. (MLive)
Snyder, the state’s top ranking elected Republican, “feels comments like that are unfortunate, discriminatory and that we can and must do better and make sure everyone is treated with respect and dignity,” spokesman Sara Wurfel told MLive.
Wurfel was even more direct with the MIRS subscription news service, calling Agema’s remarks “extreme” and saying that there “shouldn’t be room for that in any political party, period.”
Just a week ago I discussed how the extra-special brand of crazy right-wing nutcases can be useful. And Agema is proving to be particularly so.
Michigan Republicans are seriously considering updating Michigan’s Elliott-Larsen Civil Rights Act to include anti-discrimination protections for gays and lesbians. And Agema’s outburst couldn’t come at a better time.
This gives GOP members on the fence a clear choice, do they want to move along with the rest of the country in the direction of inclusion, respect, and equality, or do they want, like Dave Agema, to stay a pretty despicable bunch? Do they think that protecting gay employees in Michigan would result in Agema’s bizarre pipe-dream or to they reject his blatant bigotry?
Thanks to Dave Agema, they know that their constituents will be paying close attention.
December 13th, 2013
The leader of the center-right political party in India, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has announced support for the newly-reinstated sodomy laws. (Telegraph of India)
BJP president Rajnath Singh today said his party “unambiguously” endorsed the re-criminalisation of gay sex — the first conclusive statement from the party that makes the legislative option difficult for the UPA.
“We will state (at an all-party meeting if it is called) that we support Section 377 because we believe that homosexuality is an unnatural act and cannot be supported,” Rajnath Singh told The Telegraph tonight.
The United Progressive Alliance (of which The Congress is the leading party) has about 261 of 543 seats in Parliament. National Democratic Alliance (of which BJP is the leading party) has about 151 seats. So any legislation may be determined by smaller parties.
December 13th, 2013
Getty image from BBC
Indian gays are angry and dismayed over the Indian Supreme Court’s decision to reinstate sodomy laws and have taken to the streets. But there is another somewhat-unexpected group that also seems to feel betrayed and upset by the ruling: Indian politicians.
In July 2009, when the New Delhi Court ruled that the colonial era sodomy laws were a violation of the Constitution, there was little formal objection. In September of that year Prime Minister Manmohan Singh decided to let the decision apply to the rest of the nation and the government and the political parties heaved a huge sigh of relief. While they recognized that individual rights demanded that the laws be lifted, they also knew that doing so would anger various conservative or religious factions. So they stayed silent on the issue, did not appeal the decision, and were happy that the courts had taken it off their shoulders.
But a collective of religious groups appealed and, to the surprise of nearly everyone, the courts overturned the New Delhi decision, stating that the law was constitutional and that if it sodomy laws were to be abolished it would be up to the legislature.
So now legislators and politicians are back in an uncomfortable position. They are made even more so by the near-universal outcry of the nation’s newspapers. (Caveat: I’m judging this by English-language papers. While Hindi is the official language of India’s government, English is also has official status and is the language of business, journalism, and the judiciary and is the common language across India’s many regional dialects.)
Now it appears that the government may channel the outrage to try and reverse the high court’s decision – especially if they can do so without actually passing laws themselves.
From the Times of India (the world’s largest-selling English language newspaper)
“The government is considering all options to restore the (Delhi) high court verdict on (Section) 377 (of IPC). We must decriminalize adult consensual relationships,” law minister Kapil Sibal said.
Finance minister P Chidambaram said the Supreme Court ruling was “wrong” and all options would be looked at to set right the Supreme Court order.
Terming the judgment “disappointing”, he said the court should have applied “current social and moral values” in the case.
He said the government should file a review or curative petition and that the matter should be heard by a five-bench judge.
And the nation’s most influential politician is also on board.
Amid an uproar over the Supreme Court verdict on gay rights issue, Congress chief Sonia Gandhi on Thursday said she was disappointed that the apex court and hoped Parliament would address the matter.
“I hope that Parliament will address the issue and uphold the constitutional guarantee of life and liberty to all citizens of India, including those directly affected by the judgement,” the UPA Chairperson said.
It would be very difficult to get the law reversed in Parliament, but if the request for judicial review is not successful, it may be pursued. India is a significant player in the global marketplace and is determined to be a modern and progressive nation and while the culture is still largely homophobic, recent years have shown an increase in tolerance for homosexuality in India and the surrounding region.
December 13th, 2013
THIS MONTH IN HISTORY:
What Probation Officers Can Do For Homosexuals: 1949. Until Illinois became the first state in the nation to decriminalize homosexuality in 1961 (see Jul 28), it was illegal, and often a felony, in all fifty states and the District of Columbia. When caught, some were imprisoned, some were sent to mental institutions, some were fined (and some were blackmailed and forced to pay bribes), and some were placed on probation. Which meant that the question of what to do with gay people became a probation officer’s problem, whose task it was to serve multiple roles: law enforcer, social worker, employment counselor, and psychologist. Naturally, probation officers sought the opinions of psychologists and psychiatrists on how to deal with the many problems that they encountered.
In December 1949, the professional journal Federal Probation published an article by Dr. Manly B. Root, staff psychiatrist at the U.S. Penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, which the journal’s editor emphasized, “is must reading for all probation officers.” Dr. Root wrote that one of the more perplexing questions confronting probation officers is “how a normal baby with all potentialities for good grows into an individual whose lax moral standards, thoughtless hedonism, callous conscience, and rebellious aggressiveness make of his character and personality a person who has to be locked up by society for its own protection.” And among the different characters Root addressed were alcoholics, drug addicts, psychopathic personalities, neurotics, psychotics, and “sexual deviates.” Of the latter, he identified four categories:
Root defined the second and third categories this way:
Active homosexuality.– These persons have as their sexual object a person of the same sex; as their sexual aim, sexual union with the other person. They desire the masculine role, acting toward their homosexual lover as a normal person would toward a lover of the opposite sex.
Passive homosexuality.– These persons have as their sexual object a person of the same sex; as their sexual aim, sexual union with the other person. They desire the feminine role, acting toward their lovers as normal persons would toward lovers of the opposite sex.
Remember these distinctions: the active homosexual (when a man) treats a male lover as though he were a female. The passive homosexual (when a man) treats the male lover as though the lover were a male, and he (the passive homosexual) a female. All three of these types [Here, Root includes “uncontrolled heterosexuals”] may be aggressive or not; that is, they may seek the lover or may respond to the lover’s seeking. All three may be constantly true to their abnormal type, or may be what we call facultative; that is, sometimes “normal” and sometimes “abnormal.” In the field of personality distortions hardly anyone is the same sort of person all of the time.
As you can see, in 1949, the gender role men played (and it was mostly men who were convicted) was still deemed to be of great significance, even though the advice Root gave was undifferentiated based on whether the individual was “active” or “passive.” His first piece of advice, aside from suggesting that probation officers read Freud’s Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex, was to “advise and discuss, but do not be ‘preachy’. Almost everyone has some peculiarities and worries and guilt feelings and conflicts about his or her sex life.” He also reminded his readers that “you cannot control another person’s sex life. You can only give guidance and leadership.” He continued:
Much of the good done by doctors, by friends, and by priests at the confessional, comes from what psychoanalysts call catharsis — letting off steam and relieving tension by talking to a sympathetic listener. Another point to remember is that the tension caused by a person tortured by psychosexual pathology can be relieved in only four ways, as follows:
(1) Frank acceptance of the abnormal sexual desires and frank yielding to them. This results in the individual becoming an overt participant in his particular kind of sexual pathological activity. He is then no longer ashamed of his longings and activities, enjoys them, and considers the people we call normal as narrow-minded. Tension leaves him for he has avoided conflict about the matter.
(2) Frank acceptance of the abnormal sexual desires but refusal to yield to them. This results in some tension because of the constant restraint, but the acceptance of the abnormal desires does away with the more serious conflict which always occurs when an individual refuses to admit his personality or character peculiarities, sexual or otherwise. His mental state is then to be compared on a heterosexual level to the normally sexed man or woman who for some reason remains unmarried and continent. He is consciously exercising self-control, not fighting an inward conflict.
(3) Relief of tension by sublimation. This word, which is taken from physics, refers to the purification of an impulse or tendency or desire into a socially acceptable form of activity. This is not done consciously like the solution discussed under (2), but is an unconsciously developed mechanism. Its explanation lies in the field of psychoanalytic theory, not at all universally accepted. It is pretty generally believed, however, that many people find happiness by satisfying their antisocial tendencies in a way which does good instead of harm. To give specific examples of this sublimation in a paper prepared for nonmedical readers might cause embarrassment. Suffice it to say here that any overpowering interest or vocation or avocation which your clients show may lead the way to a possible sublimation of antisocial or abnormal sexual tendencies.
I’m going to pause here to wonder aloud what he meant when he said that giving examples of sublimation “might cause embarrassment” for the reader. Which reader did he have in mind? Did he sense there were a number of probation officers with “abnormal sexual desires”? Judges? Social workers? Anyway, he continued:
(4) Repression of the sexual conflict. Another and always tragic solution of an individual’s conflict about his sexual peculiarities involves its repression. According to psychoanalytic theory, at least, such a person is actually able to repress his conflict. Thus a homosexual, for instance, comes to believe that he is not a homosexual at all. If this were all, it would be a happy solution. Unfortunately for such a patient — for such persons then become psychotic — the repressed desires remain active and seek expression in some way. These ways take place through delusions and hallucinations in which homosexual threats seem to come from other persons. Depending upon the subject’s personality makeup, varied symptoms may develop and the individual becomes the victim, as he sees it, of a hostile world which is trying to force him into homosexuality, and of hallucinations and voices which accuse him of the very perversions he has repressed. Thus a person cannot safely repress his desires without becoming psychotic or exhibit some sex deviation.
Root concluded that “the only safe way of keeping his mental health are the first three alternatives,” ruling out the fourth for obvious reasons. But he advised probation officers to try to direct their charges to the second and third alternatives because “it is probable that we can do little to help the probationer as to the way in which he solves the conflict.” He left unmentioned that the first option might get the probationer in trouble with the law all over again, an option that the very audience Root is writing to would reject out of hand. Besides, Root added, “He is never as effective an individual as is the man who accepts his peculiarities and succeeds in controlling them” — and by “controlling them,” he meant “not doing it.” Easy advice for Root to dispense; he went home every night to his wife Dorothy and son Charles.
[Source: Manly B. Root “What the probation officer can do for special types of offenders.” Federal Probation 13, no. 4 (December 1949): 36-46.]
Masturbate Your Way To Heterosexuality: 1970. The basis of Behavioral Therapy is that the experience of rewards and punishments were a determining factor for a wide range of human behaviors. In the late 1960s when Behavioral Therapy rivaled classic Freudian psychoanalysis as the predominant school of thought in the mental health professions, BTs began to exhibit some of the same kinds of hubris that they had accused psychoanalysts of exemplifying, especially when BTs began classifying all forms of human thoughts and feelings as “behavioral” and, therefore, amenable to modifications through punishment and rewards. As we now know, much of those punishments were appallingly cruel, torturous, and ineffective. (One example is illustrated in our award-winning report “What Are Little Boys Made Of?”, about the tragic aftermath of Kirk Murphy’s treatment at the hands of a Behavioral Therapist by the name of George Rekers.)
But some patients, if they were lucky (I suppose), underwent Behavioral Therapy that emphasized the “reward” end of the punishment/reward dichotomy. Some of those patients were clients of Dr. John N. Marquis, a psychologist at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Palo Alto, California. His paper appeared in the December 1970 issue of the Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, in which he argued that by encouraging clients to think of opposite-sex partners while masturbating, he could change their “behavior” — remember, to Behavioral Therapists, sexual orientation was nothing but “behavior” — to heterosexuality. He didn’t rule out aversion therapy (i.e. electric shock, etc.) if he thought it was needed — “often… aversive conditioning to the perverse stimuli are indicated…” — but he felt that it was best to hold that off until at least some level of “behavior” — by which he meant attractions — was exhibited towards the opposite sex. And how was that accomplished?
The client is instructed to masturbate to the point where he feels the inevitability of orgasm using whatever fantasy is most arousing. Then he is to switch to the appropriate fantasy. He is warned that he may experience some difficulty at first, but that he will not lose his sexual arousal at that point. After he has successfully shifted to the appropriate stimulus four or five times (this is arbitrary but seems to work) he is instructed to start moving the introduction of the appropriate fantasy backward in time toward the beginning of masturbation. An attempt is made at the outset to get a commitment from the client never to continue picturing the inappropriate fantasy through the occurrence of an orgasm, whether in masturbation or overt sexual behavior.
That was the procedure. Dr. Marquis also had some practical advice:
If the client is generally tense he is instructed to relax before masturbating, because sexual arousal and anxiety are incompatible. If he reports feeling guilty after masturbating he is instructed to relax after masturbating as well. It may be suggested that he increase the frequency of masturbation in order to speed the process of reorientation or to decrease the frequency in order to increase drive level if he masturbates more than once a day. It is often helpful to suggest the use of a lubricant to enhance physical stimulation.
Marquis wrote that he had been prescribing this therapy for patients since 1965, and that “all of the cases described below were seen because they were suffering human beings seeking help, and not as experimental subjects.” That, of course, is crucial: it’s your first clue that this is by no means a controlled, scientific study. He provided detailed case studies of two of his patients, and brief descriptions of twelve more. All but one were “successes” to varying degrees, although only one case had anything remotely resembling a long-term follow-up. And that only happened because Marquis happened to run into that former client and his new wife three years later at a cocktail party. At least some of those successes were dubious, and not all of them involved gay people. One was a pedophile, another woman enjoyed “sado-masochistic masturbation” which, Marquis explained, were not “normal heterosexual fantasies” (although he doesn’t mention whether her fantasies involved men or women), and one was someone we would today see as just another socially-awkward nerd:
Case 13. A 24-year-old male computer programmer who was very shy had had intercourse rarely but had frequently masturbated to fantasies and pictures of beautiful girls. As a result he was completely unattracted to girls who were not strikingly beautiful. This was a serious problem since he was homely and inarticulate. Orgasmic reconditioning led to considerable improvement, but he remains a little bit too particular.
As you can see, the measurements that would constitute “considerable improvement” are what real scientists would call “anybody’s guess.” The only thing we can know from this study is that Marquis believes that most of his clients are able to masturbate to a “normal heterosexual fantasy.” We know nothing about any actual changes in his clients’ preferred masturbatory fantasies, let alone any actual or even perceived changes in sexual orientation. But that flimsy standard is precisely the kind of evidence that the National Association for Research and Treatment of Homosexuality holds in very high esteem. When NARTH published their 2009 “journal”, they claimed to have “examined more than 100 years of professional and scientific literature from 600-plus studies and reports,” all of it proving, in their minds at least, that “sexual orientation can be changed.” And of course, Marquis’s paper made the cut.
[Source: John N. Marquis. “Orgasmic reconditioning: Changing sexual object choice through controlling masturbation fantasies.” Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry 1, no. 4 (December 1970): 263-271.]
TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS:
Richard Isay: 1934-2012. The American Psychiatric Association decided in 1973 that homosexuality was not an illness in need of a cure. The American Psychological Association followed suit two years later. But the American Psychoanalytic Association was very slow to get on board. Until 1992 psychoanalists were still treating gay people as though they were ill, and openly gay candidates were barred from enrolling in the group’s training institutes, which is a requirement for certification. That the APsaA waited so long to finally join the modern era is incredible. Who knows how much longer it would have taken for the APsaA to change its ways without the badgering, prodding, and legal threats of Dr. Richard Isay.
A native of Pittsburgh, Isay studied medicine at Haverford College and the University of Rochester, then completed his psychiatry residency at Yale. From there, he completed training for psychoanalysis at the Western New England Psychoanalytic Institute. Early in his own career, he was troubled by his own sexuality and underwent psychoanalysis in a quest for a cure. But after ten years, now with a wife and two sons, he realize that he was no more straight than he was before he started. After meeting the man who would become his life partner, he came out to his wife in 1980. They decided to stay married for another nine year for the sake of the children, and then they divorced once the children were grown.
While he remained closeted, he began working with gay patients — not to make them straight, but to help them accept themselves. He also began writing about homosexuality as something normal, and not as an illness or a deficiency in development. In 1989, he published his groundbreaking book, Being Homosexual: Gay Men and Their Development
Finally, after years of trying to prod the APsaA to end its discrimination against gay candidates in its training institutes, Isay met with the American Civil Liberties Union and began laying plans for a lawsuit. That finally got the organization’s attention. In 1991, the the APsaA finally adopted a policy prohibiting its training institutes from discriminating against gay candidates. After that, changes came quickly for the organization. In 1997, the APsaA became the first mental health organization to endorse same-sex marriage, and in 1999 it opposed therapy aimed at changing sexual orientation.
This undoubtedly came as a shock to those psychoanalysis who continued to believe that homosexuality was a disorder. Among mental health professionals who held that view, psychoanalysts made up a disproportionately large group. In 1992, a dissident group of psychoanalysts led by Dr. Charles Socarides founded the ex-gay organization, National Association for Research and Treatment (later changed to Therapy) of Homosexuality (NARTH). “Reparative Therapy,” the particular form of ex-gay therapy challenged by many in NARTH, remains rooted in older psychoanalytic theories, even as mainstream psychoanalysts have adopted insights from biology and psychiatry to form a more comprehensive and nuanced view of how — rather than why — gay people develop.
As for Dr. Isay himself, he continued working as a full professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College and as a faculty member of the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. He also continued his advocacy for gay people. In his 1997 memoir, Becoming Gay: The Journey to Self-Acceptance
Allen R. Schindler, Jr.: 1969-1992. When “little Allen” was growing up, his step-father regaled him with stories of surviving the sinking of the battleship USS Arizona in Pearl Harbor. And so when he decided to enlist in the Navy on turning eighteen, it came as no surprise to his mother. He was ecstatic to learn that he would be assigned to the aircraft carrier Midway, but in 1991 he was transferred to the Belleau Wood, a smaller ship with a reputation for poor discipline. On October 27, 1992 while on shore leave in Sasebo, Japan, two drunken shipmates from the Belleau Wood followed Schindler into a public restroom in a park. Airman Charles Vins watched — and occasionally joined in — as Airman Apprentice Terry Helvey kneed Schindler in the arm, punched him repeatedly on the floor, and stomped on him with the heel of his boot. The pathologist described Schindler’s body as the worst case he had ever seen, and compared the damage to that of a “high-speed auto accident or a low-speed aircraft accident.” He also said that it was worse than another case he had seen, that of a man who had been trampled to death by a horse. The pathologist’s report chronicled a litany of lacerations, contusions and abrasions of the forehead, eyes, nose, lips, chin, neck, Adam’s apple, trachea, lungs, liver (which was “like a smushed tomato”) and, tellingly, penis. All but two ribs were broken, and both his lungs and brain had hemorrhaged. The only thing recognizable about Allen’s body was a tattoo on his right arm, of the USS Midway.
The Navy stonewalled the investigation. The murder occurred just as the pre-DADT debate was getting started over allowing gays to serve in the military. The Navy refused to confirm how Schindler died or whether a weapon was involved. At one point, a Navy senior officer leaked the story that Schindler’s murder was the result of a romance with Helvey gone bad. Meanwhile, Schindler’s mother, Dorothy Hajdys, was kept in the dark by Navy officials about what happened to her son or about the investigation. Her journal told the story: “Oct. 30: Heard nothing. Nov. 1: Sill heard nothing.” Meanwhile, the Navy tried Vins without her knowledge and sentenced him to four months in the brig. All the information Dorothy received about her son’s case came from the press. That’s how she learned her son was gay and had been killed by his shipmates in an anti-gay orgy of violence. “If one more reporter calls me with information before you do,” she told the Navy commander in charge of the case, “you haven’t even heard me scream!” Two months after the murder, Navy officials finally admitted that Schindler had been killed in a gay bashing.
The Navy denied that they had received any complaints of harassment. But as the investigation continued, it was slowly revealed that Schindler’s ship, the amphibious assault ship Belleau Wood, was a living nightmare for him. His locker had been glued shut and he was the brunt of frequent comments, like, “There’s a faggot on this ship and he should die.” Schindler requested a separation from the Navy, but his superiors insisted he remain aboard ship until the process was finished. During Helvey’s trial , it was revealed that Helvey told one investigator that he had no remorse for the killing. “I don’t regret it. I’d do it again. … He deserved it.” After confessing to the murder, he wrote in a four page statement, “Homosexuality is disgusting, sick and scary and I hate homosexuals.” When the investigator suggested that he might want to consider expressing remorse, he wrote, “I regret this incident happened and I feel like it could have been averted had homosexuals not been allowed in the military.”
Helvey avoided the death penalty by pleading guilty to “inflicting great bodily harm,” and was sentenced to life in prison. The ship’s captain who had tried to keep the crime quiet was demoted and transferred to Florida. Dorothy, virtually overnight, became a fierce advocate for hate crime protections and for gays being allowed to serve in the military. Helvey is still serving his lifetime sentence. In 1994, two years after the murder, he still had no regrets. He told a reporter:
We were just doing the Navy thing … We were drinking and fighting. It happened so many times, I can’t count them. That’s all we ever did was drink and fight. I was having fun and this dude ended up dying.”
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?
December 12th, 2013
Or so says popular Ghanaian Pastor, Rev. Ebenezer Opambour Adarkwah Yiadom of the Ebenezer Miracle Worship Center in Kumasi, if Ghana repeals its sodomy laws. In an interview with News-One, he explains why Ghana should not follow the lead of Western countries: (GhanaWeb)
The fingers are not equal and should not be made to do some things simply because they are all fingers? And it is not every leaf that is medicinal, so the fact that a foreign country is okay with gays does not mean we should do same here. We should also talk about the earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, fire outbreak, volcanoes and the bad things that happen in the Western countries and see if we are ready to have that here. Gays are destroying Ghana with their same sex activities because God hates it, and God punishes people who love the things He hates. This is biblical, and we need to pray Ghana does not fully legitimize homosexual activities.
December 12th, 2013
TODAY IN HISTORY:
“The Lancet” Publishes Article By Gay Physician: 1959. Through much of the previous five years since the Home Secretary appointed the Wolfenden Commission to examine Britain’s laws criminalizing homosexual relationships, there had been a great deal of discussion in the popular and professional press about what it means to be gay, whether being gay was equivalent to being mentally ill, and whether male homosexual relationships should be decriminalized. (Lesbian relationships had never been illegal in Britain.) The Wolfenden Commission in 1957 recommended that Parliament rescind its laws which criminalized homosexual behavior (see Sep 4), but the debate over whether it should continue to be regarded a mental illness raged on. On December 12, 1959, an interesting article appeared in that week’s issue of the medical journal The Lancet, titled simply “Male Homosexuality” by an un-named “medical practitioner.” The reason for the unnamed authorship became clear in the article’s first two paragraphs:
A true picture of male homosexuality in the community cannot be given if — as in most medical publications — it is based on material drawn only from psychiatric practice, prisons, mental hospitals, and venereal-disease clinics. So long as the only doctors who write on this subject are heterosexual, so long as public opinion is based on emotional prejudice, so long as the law makes it dangerous for the homosexual himself to express an opinion, the present profound ignorance of the subject-both inside and outside the medical profession-will continue.
As a general practitioner and a homosexual, I have over the past thirty years discussed the subject intimately in an atmosphere of mutual understanding and confidence with several hundred homosexual men of many nationalities, colours, cultures, and creeds. The following case histories provide, I believe, a typical cross-section of male homosexuality in the community.
He then went on to provide brief case histories of sixteen gay men. Some lived their lives in secret, others were quite open about their sexuality. Some had married and later divorced, some were bisexual and successfully married, some were partnered with other men in stable relationships, other relationships were not so stable, and others were lifelong bachelors. Some were faithful to their wives or partners, others sought discreet affairs, and others still were quite promiscuous. They came from all walks of life: doctors, businessmen, an airline pilot, a farmer, an artist, and one did the housekeeping for his partner. Most were well-adjusted, although two battled depression. One of the two was struggling with what we would now recognize as gender dysphoria. Ages ranged from 21 to the mid-80s.
The picture that emerged was a highly heterogeneous one, with very little tying them all together except, perhaps, the overall lack of conformity with prevailing stereotypes. Most critically, according to the author, “None of them has ever been on a police charge for a homosexual offence. None of them knows of any reason why they are homosexually orientated, and all agree that seduction in childhood by older persons was not the cause. I have attended most of them professionally, but none of them consulted me because of homosexuality.” He also discounted the possibility of “curing” people of their homosexuality:
As far as I am aware homosexually deviated instincts have never been permanently reorientated into heterosexual channels. Claims have been made but none have ever been submitted to the criteria for other medical claims — namely, independent scrutiny and adequate lapse of time to prove permanence. To accept marriage, or an intention to marry, as a criterion of cure is unrealistic.
He ended his discussion with a note on the the the public’s perceptions about the morality of male homosexuality:
In discussions of homosexuality the physical aspects tend to be overemphasised while the emotional aspects are overlooked. Yet these may be as intense as those experienced by heterosexuals. Many homosexual friendships, like many heterosexual friendships, do not include physical acts. The homosexual liaison — unlike marriage is unsupported by legal, social, economic, or family considerations tending to encourage permanency. I do not believe that homosexuals are inherently more promiscuous than heterosexuals would be if they had to live under similar conditions of loneliness and sexual insecurity.
Lesbianism, fornication, adultery, rape, even murder can usually be discussed calmly and objectively, but male homosexuality rarely. It seems likely that the illogical and disproportionate emotional reaction produced in some people –usually men, not women — by this subject is caused by unresolved conflicts. It is widely believed among homosexuals that exaggerated revulsion is an indication of latent homosexual tendencies.
Homosexual problems are often the cause of alcoholism and suicide, though the basic reason for these tragedies is rarely disclosed and usually unsuspected.
I make no attempt to defend the immorality disclosed in many of the case-histories, beyond suggesting that it should be judged alongside heterosexual immorality.
[Source: A Medical Practitioner. “Male Homosexuality.” The Lancet Lancet 274, no. 7111 (December 12, 1959): 1077-1080.]
Danish Surgeon Dies Of Mysterious Disease: 1977. AIDS has often been mischaracterized as a gay man’s disease, but it’s quite possible that the first gay person to die from it was actually a lesbian. Dr. Margrethe P. Rask — her friends called her Grethe –was a indomitable woman who was as intense as she was relentless in the care that she gave to her patients in the remote Zairian villages near the Congo River basin. She had worked in Zaire in 1964, and she returned again in 1972, to a primitive rural hospital in northern Zaire delivering much-needed surgery to her patients amid appalling poverty and severe shortages. Everything was in short supply: syringes, antiseptics, even surgical gloves. Supplies were used and re-used until they wore out, and it wasn’t unusual for her to perform emergency surgeries with her bare hands. After putting together a simple jungle hospital in the remote village of Abumombaz and bringing it into operation, she took on a job as head surgeon at the Danish Red Cross Hospital in Kinshasa in 1975.
A fellow doctor and friend, Dr. Ib Bygbjerg, became worried over Gerthe’s weight loss. She was suffering from persistent diarrhea and fatigue since 1974, but given the host of often unknown tropical diseases which were common in northern Zaire, her condition was overlooked at first. But when standard treatments only temporarily alleviated the symptoms without actually restoring her health, Bygbjerg looked further and found that her lymph nodes, the glands that play an essential role on the body’s immune system, were completely out of whack. They had been swollen for nearly two years for no apparent reason.
In July 1977, Grethe took a vacation to South Africa to try to rest up from her constant fatigue, but her condition got worse. She became short of breath and was flown immediately back home to Denmark. Some of Denmark’s best doctors worked frantically to try to figure out what was wrong with her, but the more they looked, the mysteries surrounding her health only deepened. The inside of her mouth was covered with yeast infections, staph infections spread throughout her body, and blood tests showed that her T-cells, which are the main component of a body’s immune system, were completely gone. When that happens, the natural assumption was lymph cancer, but biopsies ruled out that as a cause for her immune system’s collapse. On December 12, her body finally gave out and she died.
An autopsy revealed that her lungs were filled with Pneumocystis carinii, a yeast-like fungus which causes a severe pneumonia. Because it is one of the easiest organisms for an immune system to fight off, it is extremely rare in healthy people. And even in the rare cases where people did catch it, it was usually treatable. It’s one of those diseases that nobody dies from, but Gerthe did. It was just one more conundrum added to a host of mysteries.
Five years later, gay men, Haitians, hemophiliacs, and intravenous drug uses also began to die in very large numbers of the same type of pneumonia that people almost never caught, let alone died from before. This time, Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia became so common its acronym, PCP, entered into the lingo of the gay community along with KS (Kaposi’s sarcoma, a previously rare form of cancer), and AIDS. American epidemiologists were mostly looking at AIDS as an American disease however, and with most of the people coming down with AIDS coming from stigmatized populations, the disease itself was similarly stigmatized. It was, in the popular mind anyway, a “gay plague.” But in 1983, Dr. Bygbjerg recalled his colleague and friend, and had in mined a more likely source for the disease. He published Gerthe’s medical case history in the April 23, 1983 issue of The Lancet and concluded:
“During my stay in Zaire in 1976 I was impressed by the epidemiological and virological flying teams from the USA and Europe who quickly identified Ebola virus. Perhaps such teams should search for another African virus, albeit slow killing, and explore the possible connection between endemic and epidemic AIDS/KS in Africa and America.”
[Sources: Randy Shilts. And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic
Ib C. Bygbjerg. “AIDS in a Danish surgeon (Zaire, 1976).” Lancet 1, no. 8330 (April 23, 1983): 925.]
TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS:
90 YEARS AGO: José Sarria: 1923-2013. He was a real drag queen, one who had studied opera, could reach high C in his normal voice, and who always sang in his own voice whenever he performed. No lame karaoke for him. He began entertaining at San Francisco’s famed Black Cat in North Beach in 1946, shortly after leaving the Army after serving in World War II, and while he was studying to become a teacher. But an arrest at the men’s room at the St. Francis Hotel by a vice squad officer put the kibosh in his teaching aspirations. Sarria always maintained his innocence, noting that the arresting officer knew him personally. But they had to make an example of somebody … I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.” Since he was now officially a homosexual — and, therefore, a “queen” — he decided to become “the best goddam queen that ever was!”
José Sarria performing at the Black Cat in the early 1960s. (via the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives. Click to enlarge.)
And he was, performing three or four shows a night at the Black Cat, where he was affectionately known as “the Nightingale of Montgomery Street.” He wrote much of his own material for his Black Cat performances, typically popular torch songs and arias. He re-worked Bizet’s Carmen, set in modern-day San Francisco with Carmon cruising in Union Square while dodging the vice squad. And he exhorted his audience to be as “out” as possible, telling them, “United we stand, divided they catch us one by one.” At closing time, he’d lead the crowd with a rousing rendition of “God Save Us Nelly Queens” — sometimes taking the crowd outside during the final verse to sing to the men in the jail across the street who had been arrested in raids earlier that night. When police often tried to harass and arrest drag queens, especially during the city’s famous Halloween parties, for violating an old city ordinance banning cross-dressing with an “intent to deceive,” Sarria had labels printed up for the queens to wear reading “I am a boy,” which prevented many a queen’s arrest.
With Sarria being the most famous homosexual in all of San Francisco, it would only be natural that he would become involved with LGBT advocacy early on. In 1960, he founded the League for Civil Education as a support group for gay men facing public discrimination, ostracism, and police arrests. In 1961, he became the first openly gay person to run for the city’s Board of Supervisors (see Nov 7). He lost the race, but garnered some 6,000 votes, proving to the political establishment that there was a real gay voting bloc worth noticing. In 1962, he, along with several bar owners and employees, formed the Tavern Guild, the country’s first gay business association. In 1963, as the Black Cat was finally going out of business, Saria helped to found the Society for Individual Rights, which provided both social outlets and a venue for political organizing.
In 1964, the Tavern Guild crowned Sarria the Queen of the Beaux Arts Ball, which prompted Sarria to state that he was already a queen, so he proclaimed himself, “Her Royal Majesty, Empress of San Francisco, José I, The Widow Norton.” That “Widow Norton” part recalled a 19th century San Francisco eccentric who had declared himself Joshua Norton the First, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico. San Francisco’s newspapers amused themselves by treating Norton with all the deference due an emperor — or at least as San Francisco’s most colorful character. Sarria decided to take that page from history and found the Imperial Court System, both as a outlet for gays to make fun of themselves, and as a network of non-profit charitable organizations. The Imperial Court System expanded into dozens of courts nationwide and around the world, and raised millions of dollars for charity. Sarria’s Imperial Court became a colorful form of activism and street theater that preceded the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence by some fifteen years.
Members of the Imperial Court at José Sarria’s funeral in 2013.
In 1995, Sarria and members of his court appeared in To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar, as judges for the film’s opening “Drag Queen of the Year Contest” scene. In 2005, he was honored with the San Francisco LGBT Pride Celebration Committee’s Lifetime Achievement Grand Marshal Award, and the city of San Francisco renamed a section of 16th Street in the Castro to José Sarria Court. In 2007, he finally abdicated the throne of the Imperial Court, turning it over to the Empress Nicole the Great, Queen Mother of the Americas (a.k.a Nicole Murray-Ramirez, a San Diego-based transgender/gay activist). Sarria donated most of his papers and memorabilia, along with some of his costumes, to the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco. When he died in 2013, his lavish, imperial funeral at San Francisco’s Grace Episcopal Cathedral was attended by thousands of mourners, including leaders of the Imperial Court System and the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence in full regalia, with the regulations for the Court’s formal mourning dress determined by Sarria before he died.
Brandon Teena: 1972-1993. This would be his forty-first birthday today, if it weren’t for the fact that on December 31, 1993, Marvin Thomas Nissen and John L. Lotter, angry over Brandon’s transgender identity and the fact that he reported them to the sheriff for raping him a week earlier, tracked him down and murdered him.
Much of Brandon’s life was difficult. He began identifying as a male in high school in Lincoln, Nebraska, an identity which his mother rejected. His school was no help either. He was constantly in trouble with his Catholic high school for violating the school’s dress code by dressing as a male. He was expelled three days before graduation. He tried to volunteer for the Army, but he was rejected for identifying as a male. After high school, the pressures mounted. He entered a mental health facility for three days on suicide watch, diagnosed with having a severe “sexual identity crisis,” whatever that was supposed to mean.
Om 1993, he tried to start over anew by moving to Fall City, Nebraska, where he was known only as a man. He began dating Lana Tisdel, but also began associating with Nissen and Lotter, both of whom were ex-cons. In December, he was arrested for forging checks and placed in the female section of the jail. Lana learned that he was transgender when she came to bail him out.
Brandon’s arrest was in the local papers, under his birth name, and that led to that fateful Christmas Eve Party at Nissen’s home, where Nissen and Lotter grabbed him and forced him to drop his pants to prove to Lana that Brandon was a “girl.” They then force Brandon into a car, drove him to a meat-packing plant, and assaulted and raped him. After they returned to Nissen’s home, Brandon escaped through a bathroom window and went to Tisdel’s house. He called the police and went to the emergency room. The sheriff interviewed him about the rape, but seemed more interested in Brandon’s gender than the crime. The sheriff later questioned Nissen and Lotter but declined to arrest them due to lack of evidence when Brandon’s rape kit was lost.
Early in the morning of December 31, Nissen and Lotter went to the home of Lisa Lambert, Brandon’s roommate, and demanded to know where Brandon was. Lambert refused to tell them, but they found Brandon under a blanket on the floor. Nissen and Lotter rounded up all the adults in the house — Brandon, Lisa and Philip DeVine — and shot them in front of Lisa’s 8 month old son. When they saw Brandon twitching, Nissen stabbed him to finish him off.
Nissen and Lotter were arrested later that afternoon. The trial proved to be just about as convoluted as the events leading up to Brandon’s death. Nissen accused Lotter of committing the murders, and in exchange for testifying against Lotter, Nissen was sentenced to life imprisonment — even though Nissen delivered Brandon’s coup ‘de grâce, as it were. Lotter received the death penalty. Nissen later recanted his testimony against Lotter, and Lotter tried to use that to appeal his sentence. But the Nebraska Supreme Court rejected that appeal, saying that because they were both guilty of murder, the specific identities were irrelevant. Lotter remains on death row.
Brandon’s story became the subject of a 1998 documentary The Brandon Teena Story
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).
As always, please consider this your open thread for the day.
December 11th, 2013
Only the Federal Parliament can provide same-sex marriage, says the High Court:
The judges found the ACT law could not operate alongside the federal law as only the Federal Parliament had the power under the constitution to legislate on same sex marriage. They said the federal Marriage Act did not allow or recognise marriages between same sex couples.
The court held the ACT’s act provided for marriage equality for same sex couples, not, as the territory argued, for a form of legally recognised relationship that was different from marriage. The finding means the ACT act cannot operate concurrently with the federal act.
“Because the ACT act does not validly provide for the formation of same sex marriages, its provisions about the rights of parties to such marriages and the dissolution of such marriages cannot have separate operation and are also of no effect,” the statement said. “The court held that the whole of the ACT act is of no effect.”
The marriages of those who were joined together the past five days have been dissolved by the Court’s action.
It all seemed like something of a longshot. In Australia, marriages are regulated by the Federal government, and not the individual states and territories, a reversal of the legal framework in the U.S. Under Federal law, marriage in Australia is explicitly between opposite sex couples, thanks to a 2004 amendment to the Marriage Act that was imposed by the Liberal Party (which is actually the socially and economically conservative party). The Australia Capital Territory (ACT) enacted what they argued was a completely separate institution called “same-sex marriage,” which, their argument went, was completely different and independent from the Federally-defined and regulated institution of marriage. The High Court didn’t buy that argument.
The Liberal government immediately challenged the ACT law as soon as it was enacted. Liberal Prime Minister Tony Abbot has resisted calls for allowing a conscience vote on a marriage equality bill in the Federal Parliament.
December 11th, 2013
Officials in Minsk, capital of the Northern European nation of Belarus, have disallowed a Gay Pride march and rally. (rferl)
Authorities in Minsk have banned two gay-rights events, but Belarusian activists have vowed to go ahead anyway.
Authorities blamed their decision not to allow a lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) march planned for December 11 and a gay-rights rally planned for December 12 on “technical” and timing problems.
And, naturally, the authorities refused to discuss ways to work around the timing problems. This is part of a larger difficulty in Belarus for gay activists to gain visibility. The federal government of self-proclaimed homophobe President Alyaksandr Lukashenka has threatened and terrorized gay rights leaders in the country.
December 11th, 2013
Georgetown University’s Eric Voeten looks at comparisons between social acceptance of homosexuality and legality. (WaPo)
Voeten’s interesting article discusses how international pressure impacts nations with low tolerance and how the decision by India’s courts could have challenging consequences.
December 11th, 2013
So says the respected novelist, poet, and leading LGBT rights campaigner Vikram Seth to one of India’s leading commercial broadcasters:
Indian human rights advocates are calling today a “black day” following the country’s Supreme Court decision to reinstate the country’s colonial era sodomy law. In 2009, the Delhi High Court ruled that the 153-year-old law, known as Section 377, was unconstitutional, and for the next four years LGBT people in a country representing more than 17% of the world’s population were free from the threat of arrest and imprisonment for up to ten years. Today’s Supreme Court decision reinstates Section 377 and throws the whole issue to Parliament, and has shocked human rights advocates in India and around the world. Pink News has reaction:
“Such a decision was totally unexpected from the top court. It is a black day,” said Arvind Narrain, a lawyer for the Alternative Law Forum gay rights group.
“We are very angry about this regressive decision of the court.”
Ashok Row Kavi, of the activist group Humsafar Trust, said: “This is a very sad day for us, we are back to square one in our fight for the democratic rights of the gay community.”
…”One would never expect the supreme court of India to make such a retrograde order, that is so against the trend internationally,” said rights lawyer Colin Gonsalves.
“This takes us back to the dark ages. This is a day of mourning for us in India.”
Photo by Kabi
“Retrograde” seems to be the most common expression Indians are using to describe today’s decision. Protests have broken out in the financial capital of Mumbai. Observers doubt that India’s government will take up repeal of Section 377 anytime in the foreseeable future. Parliament is currently hopelessly deadlocked, much like our Congress. Elections are coming up in May, and the socially conservative Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) are seeing gains in the polls as it is.
The Times of India has a good primer on the case and asks:
Here’s a pop quiz. Which century are we living in? 21st you say! But it seems the Supreme Court of India doesn’t agree with this logical fact. What else can explain the dogmatic and regressive verdict of the SC today in which they have upheld section 377 of the Indian Penal code that says that sexual relationship against the order of the nature is an offence. They also ruled that the courts should not intervene and that it was up to parliament to legislate on the issue. Wow, another wonderful responsibility on the able shoulders of our educated, socially sensitive and logical MPs-deciding how India’s citizen should lead their private lives!
The Times continues:
The verdict has been shocking on many levels.
Firstly, landing a major blow to India’s claim of being a country with a modern outlook, the fact a law made by Britishers in the 1860’s has been upheld in 2013 makes for a strange sentence.
Secondly, with many countries now equating gay equality with the rights for same-sex marriage, the Supreme Court ruling puts India back in the company of most nations in the Islamic world and many African countries which criminalise homosexuality. The only country in South Asia where gay sex is now legal is Nepal.
“It is highly embarrassing for the country because now we will be among the dirty dozens of the world,” said Narayan, the lawyer from the Alternative Law Forum.In most western countries, the debate about same-sex couples has shifted on to their rights to marry. More than a dozen countries now allow homosexuals to wed.
Thirdly, it is a blow to people’s right to equality. Just because gays have made a different lifestyle choice, they do not deserve to be put in jail. They are also entitled to their privacy and dignity. They do face widespread discrimination and ignorance from a largely homophobic Indian society. And with this verdict, the law has also deserted them.
Fourthly, by putting the ball in the Parliament’s court, the Supreme Court has now granted power to decide how India’s citizens should lead their private lives, in the hands of those MPs who are yet to become sensitive even to the gender equality issue.
December 11th, 2013
TODAY IN HISTORY:
40 YEARS AGO: Gay Rights Advocate Interrupts CBS Evening News Broadcast: 1973. Among the issues that gay rights advocates faced in the early 1970s was the way gay people continued to be portrayed in the press and on television — if they bothered to cover gay issues at all. The New York Times, which was supposedly the newspaper of record for the city, had never even bothered to mention the Stonewall uprising four years earlier until several months later. To call attention to the problem, Mark Segal of the Philadelphia-based Gay Raiders posed as a reporter for the Camden State Community College newspaper and called CBS asking permission to watch the broadcast of the CBS Evening News with the legendary Walter Cronkite from inside the studio. The network agreed and granted Segal access to the studio. And so on December 11, 1973, he briefly interrupted the broadcast about halfway through by running up in front of the camera with a yellow sign reading “Gays Protest CBS Prejudice”:
“I sat on Cronkite’s desk directly in front of him and held up the sign while the technicians furiously ran after me and wrestled me to the floor and wrapped me in wire — on camera,” (Segal) recalled in an interview. “The network went black while they took us out of the studio.”
Ever the professional, Cronkite reported on the event. “Well, a rather interesting development in the studio here — a protest demonstration right in the middle of the CBS News studio,” Cronkite told viewers. He later explained: “The young man was identified as a member of something called Gay Raiders, an organization protesting alleged defamation of homosexuals on entertainment programs.” Segal was charged with trespassing.
The “zap” payed off. After Segal’s trial for trespassing in which his attorneys subpoenaed Cronkite the testify, the news anchor began to take an interest in Segal’s grievance. He arranged a meeting at CBS where Segal could air his complaints to management, and Cronkite’s broadcast on May 6, 1974 featured a segment on gay rights, reporting on the ten cities throughout the country that had passed legal protections for gay people.
Segal went on to become publisher of Philadelphia Gay News, and remembered his friendship with Walter Cronkite days after his passing in 2009:
“He was the kind of man who believed in human rights for everyone,” Segal said of Cronkite. “I am amazed and humbled by his willingness to reach out to me. He was a bridge between the gay movement and major media. We remained friends, and it was a privilege knowing him.”
15 YEARS AGO: American Psychiatric Association Rejects Ex-Gay Therapy: 1998. The American Psychiatric Association’s board unanimously rejected therapy aimed solely at changing gay people straight, saying it can cause depression, anxiety and self-destructive behavior. Dr, Nada Stotland, head of the APA’s joint committee on public affairs, said, “The very existence of therapy that is supposed to change people’s sexuality, even for people who don’t take it, is harmful because it implies that they have a disease. There is evidence that the belief itself can trigger depression and anxiety.”
The APA’s move was, in part, a response to a massive nationwide push by Focus On the Family and Exodus International to publicize the ex-gay movement, complete with a Newsweek cover the prior August featuring ex-gay spokesman John Paulk and his ex-lesbian wife Anne. Paulk who was the so-called gender specialist at Focus On the Family and organizer of the Love Won Out ex-gay roadshows, denounced the APA’s move. “This makes it more difficult for clients who want to be treated for unwanted homosexuality,” Paulk complained. “Furthermore, no scientific study has given conclusive evidence that homosexuality cannot be successfully treated.” Less than two years later, Paulk himself would be found in a Washington, D.C. gay bar flirting with patrons (see Sep 19). Earlier this year, Paulk renounced his prior association with the ex-gay movement and issued a formal apology to the “countless people (who) were harmed by things I said and did in the past.” Exodus International announced its closure in June, 2013.
The 1998 APA statement, along with a 2000 follow-on statement, can be found here.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
100 YEARS AGO: Jean Marais: 1913-1998. The French actor first met the writer, poet and film director Jean Cocteau (see Jul 5) when Marais was auditioning for a small role in a revival of Cocteau’s play, Oedipe-roi (Oedipus Rex). Marais was 24, half of Cocteau’s age, but the two fell in love and were together as partners, both personally and professionally, for the next twelve years. Midway through their relationship, Cocteau wrote the screenplay for L’Éternel retour (The Eternal Return) specifically for Marais. The 1943 film was critical and commercial success for Cocteau, and an important milestone in Marais’s career.
Marais continued acting while Germany occupied France, but once Paris was liberated he joined France’s Second Armored Division, driving fuel trucks to the front line and earning the Croix de Guerre for his service. After the war, Marais returned to Cocteau and acting, appearing in Cocteau’s 1946 film La Belle et la bête (Beauty and the Beast), which introduced both Marais and Cocteau to American audiences, and garnering Marais a legion of fans among teen girls and gay men. Marais made four more films with Cocteau, and with other important French directors. By 1949, the personal half of his partnership with Cocteau cooled, but the two remained lifelong friends and collaborators until Cocteau’s death in 1963. Through the 1950s, Marais became the French Eroll Flynn, through his roles in a series of swashbuckling films in which he performed his own stunts.
When Marais’ film career wound down in the 1970s, he took to the stage, took up painting and sculpture, and wrote several volumes of memoirs, including one of Cocteau titled, L’Inconcevable Jean Cocteau under the authorship of “Cocteau-Marais.” In 1998, Marais was awarded the Legion of Honor for his work in French film, and died two years later, on November 8, 1998, survived by his adopted son, Serge.
85 YEARS AGO: Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton: 1928-1984. Like so many blues singers, the Montgomery, Alabama, native’s musical heritage was in the church: her father was a preacher, her mother sang in the choir, and her brother, later known as “Harp” Thornton, played drums and harmonica. Her mother died when Willie Mae was fourteen. She took a job cleaning a saloon and was soon singing. In 1941, she joined Atlanta music promoter Sammy Green’s “The Hot Harlem Revue” where she was billed as the “New Bessie Smith.” In 1948, she left the Revue, moved to Houston and played in several clubs there. Her ability to sing and play multiple instruments led, in 1951, to a five-year contract with Peacock Records, which was known for its wide selection of popular “race” artists like Johnny Ace and a young and up-and-coming Little Richard. She began touring the “chitlin’ circuit” in the south, culminating in a legendary performance at New York’s Apollo Theater in 1952.
Relatively open about her lesbianism, she preferred men’s clothing over women’s, although on the stage she was usually talked into wearing a dress. Whatever she wore seemed to make little difference: her bigger than life presence always meant that she would never be a pretty little thing. Big all her life, she topped 300 pounds by the time she hit the Apollo, and her billing became “Big Mama Thornton” at about that time. In later years, she would often appear on stage in a man’s straw hat, which became something of a signature for her.
Her biggest hit was 1953’s “Hound Dog,” written for her by the before-they-were famous songwriting team of Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller. Her original recording of “Hound Dog” featured her growling voice and openly sexualized lyrics. It topped Billboard’s R&B charts, but Thornton got only $500 for her recording and no royalties. When Elvis Presley cleaned it up, covered it in 1956 and made a fortune, Thornton began adding the line, “Bow wow to you, too” at the end of her performances as a swipe against Presley’s appropriation.
Presley’s success with “Hound Dog” was part of a much larger shift in America’s musical tastes. R&B had always been a bit too raw for white audiences, but Rock and Roll was able to fill in the gap between the races. As R&B declined in popularity, so did Thornton’s career. But a second life came along in the 1960s as artists like Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton and Janis Joplin actively promoted a revival in interest in traditional blues and R&B. She toured Europe in 1965 which resulted in the albums, Big Mama Thornton: In Europe, with backing by legendary artists like Buddy Guy, Walter Horton, and Fred Below. Her 1967 album Big Mama Thornton with the Chicago Blues Band also featured a stellar lineup of Muddy Waters, Sam “Lightnin'” Hopkins and Otis Spawn.” The title song from 1968’s Ball and Chain became a signature song for Janis Joplin.
Thornton continued performing and recording into the 1970s, but by now her heavy drinking was taking its toll. Her 1979 performance at the San Francisco Blues Festival earned rave reviews, despite her requiring assistance to get on the stage. After a serious auto accident, she appeared at the 1983 Newport Jazz Festival, with Muddy Waters, B.B. King and Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson. That legendary performance was memorialized in the live recording The Blues—A Real Summit Meeting. It would also be her last appearance on stage. She died of a heart attack in 1984, at the age of 57. That same year, she was inducted into the Blues Foundation Hall of Fame.
[Sources: Tina Spencer Dreisbach. “Willie Mae ‘Big Mama’ Thornton.” Encyclopedia of Alabama. (June 13, 2008, updated April 5, 2011). Available online here.
Ruth M. Pettis. “Thornton, Willie Mae “Big Mama” (1926-1984).” glbtq.com (October 8, 2007). Available online here.]
John Preston: 1945-1994. Today’s Fifty Shades of Gray fans owe Preston a particularly long-overdue acknowledgement. The award-winning writer, essayist, and journalist is probably best known for his Leather S&M gay erotica, a genre that Preston was proud of and which he felt made him a better, more honest writer. As he explained in his 1993, Harvard lecture, which he titled “My Life as a Pornographer” (and which he later published in an essay compilation by the same name
Leather S&M porn activism may seem like an odd field of endeaver, but activism came naturally to the Medfield, Massachusetts native, who by age fourteen had already volunteered as a Freedom Rider in Alabama and a tutor in Chicago’s projects. He graduated from Lake Forest College in Illinois, was certified as a sexual-health consultant by the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities Medical School, and he also studied theology at the United Theological Seminary in Dayton, Ohio, and Northwestern Lutheran Seminary in St. Paul. After moving to Minneapolis in 1969, he founded Gay House, one of the first gay and lesbian community centers in the country. He served as its first director until 1972, when he founded Gay Community Services.
By the mid 1970s, he moved to Los Angeles and became the editor of The Advocate. Then at about 1978, he moved to New York and took up fiction writing with a short pornographic story about a young man, Jaime, who becomes the sexual property of a Master named Aristotle Benson. He sent the story to Drummer magazine, which asked him to write an entire series on the exploits of Jaime and Benson. Those monthly episodes, which explored Manhattan’s Leather and S&M scene, were immensely popular, with t-shirts reading “Looking for Mr. Benson” — some with a question mark, some without — appearing in gay bars across the country. Mr. Benson
But S&M porn was far from his only literary interest. Working as a journalist and essayist, he wrote for a number of gay magazines and penned a column about gay life in Maine after abandoning Manhattan for a refurbished warehouse in Portland. He wrote straight men’s adventure novels which, in a bizarro-world twist, his publisher insisted on publishing under a pseudonym lest his straight readers find out who wrote them. He then took what he learned from writing those books to write similar action adventure novels featuring gay characters, with story lines that addressed the difficulty gay teens experienced. When AIDS came along, Preston quickly adapted and became among the first to popularize safe sex stories by editing a safe sex anthology, Hot Living in 1985. He co-wrote, with Glenn Swann, a badly-needed safe-sex guide, Safe Sex: The Ultimate Erotic Guide, and two other rather unorthodox advice books: 1984’s Classified Affairs: A Gay Man’s Guide to the Personals and 1994’s Hustling: A Gentleman’s Guide to the Fine Art of Homosexual Prostitution
Preston edited several critically acclaimed anthologies, including Hometowns: Gay Men Write About Where They Belong
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).
As always, please consider this your open thread for the day.
December 11th, 2013
A colonial-era law criminalising homosexuality will remain in effect in India, a top court said, dealing a blow to gay activists who have argued for years for the chance to live openly in India’s deeply conservative society.
The Supreme Court threw out a 2009 New Delhi High Court decision that struck down the law as unconstitutional, saying it was for lawmakers – and not the courts – to decide the matter.
This is a serious set-back for rights in India.
December 10th, 2013
Those of you who have felt concern for the physical safety of Michael Glatze and his family can rest at ease. After some communication, it has become clear that Glatze either cannot or will not confirm that he has actually ever received a direct threat to his personal life or wellbeing.
He has read unkind things written about him on the internet and he’s hurt. And he does appear anguished that people may doubt that he loves his God.
I also believe that he genuinely does think that his testimony is relevant and challenging and that gay people want him dead. But the threats – as best I can tell – are amorphous and the fear seems otherwise based.
I wish Michael Glatze peace and healing. I think the kindest thing is to give him our best wishes and hope that his marriage and his life go well.
December 10th, 2013
Same-sex couples in England and Wales can plan a spring wedding: (BBC)
The first same-sex weddings can take place from 29 March 2014, Equalities Minister Maria Miller says.
Initially it was thought the first same-sex marriage in England and Wales would not take place until the summer.
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.
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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!
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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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