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 lobbyNovember 10th, 2013
Sir Francis Galton
THIS MONTH IN HISTORY:
The Mental Hygiene Aspects of Homosexuality: 1917. The theories behind the Eugenics movement were formulated by Sir Francis Galton, half-cousin of Charles Darwin. Drawing on Darwin’s theories of evolution, Galton sought to create a practical application of those theories in his 1883 book, Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development, in which he suggested that, through carefully considered interventions, the human condition could be improved. He coined a word for these theories, Eugenics, from the Greek words for “good” and “born,” and he emphasized the inheritability of positive and negative traits, both through genetics and through environmental factors. In addition to Eugenics, which took a more narrow genetic human-husbandry approach to improving the population, his ideas also launched a broader “social hygiene” movement which had many positive influences: the regulation and eventual abolition of child labor, mandatory and free primary and (eventually) secondary education, workplace health and safety rules, anti-tenement ordinances, pre-natal care, food safety regulations, immunizations, sanitation, and birth control — although the latter, in some of its manifestations, also had its negative qualities as well, particularly where forced sterilization of “undesired” population groups were concerned.
Eugenics was the dark side of the social hygiene movement, as was its “racial hygiene” component which simply provided a weak scientific gloss over longstanding prejudices and racial policies against “race-mixing.” While not everyone involved in social hygiene programs were eugenicists, there were a great degree of crossed influences between the two areas, and the boundaries between them weren’t very clear. Indeed, few at the time thought that the boundaries needed to be clear; Eugenics didn’t become a toxic topic until the Nazis took those ideas to their more extreme yet logical conclusions.
Dr. William Alanson White
An interesting example of less toxic forms of social hygiene theories can be found in a textbook published in November 1917 by William Alanson White, a professor of nervous and mental diseases at Georgetown University and superintendent at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital for the Insane. In The Principles of Mental Hygiene, he touched on a large number of topics, including homosexuality. That passage is particularly striking because of the way White described homosexuality according to its impact on “the herd.”
THE HOMOSEXUAL
This social group, like the others, is a complex and heterogeneous one and one, too, that we have only recently come to study scientifically. Perhaps no group of individuals have suffered from less understanding, have been treated with greater lack of consideration, than this group. The antipathic emotions have held almost complete sway and so have made the scientific approach to the problem practically impossible. The history of society’s attitude towards the homosexual is much the same as the history of its attitude towards the prostitute except that it has, if possible, been more completely dominated by the antipathic emotions.
Homosexuality has come of late to have a much broader meaning than that usually connoted by the popular speech. It means that degree of attraction for the same sex which turns the individual aside on the path towards a heterosexual goal and therefore away from those activities which naturally lead to procreation and are therefore race-preservative. The term by no means necessarily connotes actual concrete acts of sexual perversion. In this large sense it is readily seen why it should be tabooed by the herd. Its tendency is destructive to the interests of the herd as a biological unit and therefore the reaction against it. The reaction of hate and its congeners is the instinctive way of self-protection and must necessarily precede any judicial, intelligent attitude based upon scientific knowledge which can only come in the course of development when instinct shall have been controlled and directed by reason.
As already intimated, the homosexual group is a large and complex one and we are only beginning to be able to approach its problems with a clear scientific vision, but as we are able to do this we come more and more to an appreciation of how widely this particular type of inefficiency is distributed. Again, therefore, we come to appreciate the emphasis which I have all along put upon the necessity for studying the individual in order that he may be dealt with for what he is rather than perfunctorily classified with this or that social group just because, and for no other reason, the accident of circumstance has found him momentarily identified with it. Distinct homosexual types are found among the insane, the criminal, the feeble-minded, the epileptic, the vagrant, etc., etc., so that we must come to realize that it is a type of reaction, not a label to distinguish a given individual from all others, and try in our investigations to evaluate the part it has played in the social inadequacy of the particular individual under consideration.
Viewed in this way it becomes a problem like all the others and the objects of treatment come out clearly instead of being befogged by a haze of emotion.
The homosexual reaction should be corrected if possible. Psychotherapy is the most hopeful way of approach. Failing this the individual should be taught to use his energies as best he can based upon an understanding of himself. The ideal, next to cure, would be a direction of the energies into socially useful channels, which direction would at the same time afford an adequate fulfilment (sic) of the individual.
Homosexuality, in the broad sense here used, is found as a type of reaction in a great many conditions which constitute or lead to social inadequacy. It, therefore, offers a natural barrier to procreation of the socially inadequate classes the immense value of which, to the herd, has not been appreciated. It is, so to speak, a natural means of sterilization.
[Source: William A. White. The Principles of Mental Hygiene (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1917): 208-211. The book is available in PDF and EPUB versions for free via Google Books here.]
TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Phyllis Lyon: 1924. The Oklahoma native earned a degree in journalism from the University of California at Berkeley in 1946 and worked as a reporter for a California paper before moving to Seattle to work at a trade magazine in 1950. That’s where she met the love of her life, Del Martin (see May 5). They became a couple in 1953 when they moved to San Francisco together. “We really only had problems our first year together,” she later told The Washington Post. “Del would leave her shoes in the middle of the room, and I’d throw them out the window.” Del responded “You’d have an argument with me and try to storm out the door. I had to teach you to fight back.”
Their life together was all about fighting back. In 1955 Phyllis and Del, along with six other women, formed the Daughters of Bilitis, the first national lesbian organization in the U.S. Phyllis was the first editor of the DOB’s groundbreaking newsletter, The Ladder from 1956 to 1960, when Del took over. Pseudonyms were common then, and Phillis edited The Ladder as “Ann Ferguson” for the first few months, but she killed her alter ego in an editorial encouraging their readers not to hide (see Jan 7). By October 1957, they had 400 subscribers across the country. In 1964, they helped found the Council on Religion and the Homosexual, bringing together national religious leaders and gay and lesbian activists for a national discussion of gay rights. Phyllis became the first open lesbian to serve on the board of the National Organization for Women in 1973. Phyllis and Del were also active in San Francisco’s Alice B. Toklas Democratic Club.
On February 12, 2004, Phyllis and Del married for the first time when San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom ordered that marriage licenses be granted to same-sex couples. That marriage lasted until August 12, but not because the couple split up. That was when the California Supreme Court voided several thousand marriage licenses given to same-sex couples. Del and Phyllis were deeply dissapointed. “Del is 83 years old and I am 79,” Phyllis said at the time. “After being together for more than 50 years, it is a terrible blow to have the rights and protections of marriage taken away from us. At our age, we do not have the luxury of time.”
Phyllis Lyon (right) and Del Martin (left) married in San Francisco in 2008, just a few months before voters approved Proposition 8.
But they had the luxury of just enough time. They were married again on June 16, 2008 after the California Supreme Court ruled that prohibiting same-sex marriage was against the state constitution. Del and Phyllis were given the honor of being the first same-sex couple to be married, and they wore the same outfits in which they were first married in 2004. Del passed away two months later, on August 27, 2008.
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November 9th, 2013
Shortly after 10:00 p.m. last night Hawaii time, the state House finally approved a marriage equality bill in a 30-19 vote. The final vote capped a twelve-hour session in which the House turned back sixteen amendments which would have, among other things, further expanded the scope of religious exemptions and delayed in marriage equality by creating a task force to study it. All sixteen amendments were rejected in voice votes.
The Senate had already approved a marriage equality bill in October. This bill will now go back to the Senate for reconsideration due to amendments added by two House committees earlier this week. Senate leaders are leaning toward avoiding further demonstrations by not taking the bill to a conference committee to iron out the differences, and are likely instead hold a concurrence vote next Tuesday.
Gov. Neil Abercrombie said in a statement after the House vote:
“I commend the House of Representatives for taking this historic vote to move justice and equality forward,” Gov. Neil Abercrombie said in a statement. “After more than 50 hours of public testimony from thousands of testifiers on both sides of the issue, evaluating dozens of amendments, and deliberating procedures through hours of floor debates, the House passed this significant bill, which directly creates a balance between marriage equity for same-sex couples and protects our First Amendment freedoms for religious organizations.”
Once the bill clears the Senate and is signed by Gov. Abercrombie, it will go into effect on December 2.
November 9th, 2013
Physique Pictorial, vol 1, no. 2 (Winter, 1952), with a cover illustration by George Quaintance (see Jun 3).
THE DAILY AGENDA:
ONE LGBT Archives Exhibit “Art & Physique Circa Bob & Tom”: West Hollywood, CA. If you’re looking for something informative and entertaining to do in the Los Angeles area, you might want to check out a couple of exhibits that opens tonight. From the press release:
Art & Physique Circa Bob & Tom explores the social and historical context surrounding erotic art and physique photography during the 1940s, 50s and 60s on the occasion of the Museum of Contemporary Art’s retrospective Bob Mizer & Tom of Finland. ONE’s exhibition looks at how producers and consumers of physique photography negotiated silence and censorship to carve out a space for homoerotic content on the sidelines of dominant culture. Using photographer Bob Mizer, founder of the American Model Guild (AMG), and Touko Laaksonen, aka “Tom of Finland,” as a fulcrum, the exhibition looks back to those who preceded the two, influential contemporaries, and more broadly examines how the circulation of underground erotic materials contributed to the rise to queer culture. The exhibition includes numerous bodybuilding and beefcake magazines from the period, as well as original artworks, collages, primary documents, and a range of related ephemera.
The exhibit begins this evening with a reception from 6:00 to 9:00 p.m. at the ONE Gallery (626 North Robertson Blvd., West Hollywood, CA, just down the street from the Abbey). Art & Physique Circa Bob & Tom will continue through January 26, 2014. This reception will coincide with a MOCA members opening for Bob Mizer & Tom of Finland at MOCA Pacific Design Center (8687 Melrose Ave., West Hollywood, CA, just around the corner from the Abbey). That exhibit will also continue through January 26. After these receptions, the City of West Hollywood will presenting a Tom of Finland themed Go-Go Dancer Appreciation Day event at Larrabee (8853 Santa Monica Blvd.)
Events This Weekend: Buenos Aires Pride, Buenos Aires, Argentina; Florence Queer Film Festival, Florence, Italy; Indianapolis LGBT Film Festival, Indianapolis, IN; Mazipatra Queer Film Festival, Prague/Brno, Czech Republic; Bear Pride, San Francisco, CA; Open Mind Fest, Santiago, Chile.
THIS MONTH IN HISTORY:
“They Cannot Whistle”: A European Overview of Sexual Inversion: 1894. Most original thought on homosexuality in the nineteenth century was being published in Germany and France, where obscenity laws declined to interfere with what was billed as “scientific” material. The same was not necessarily true in Britain or the U.S., where authorities were more strict about what could be published. But if a publication first appeared abroad in a foreign language, its translation into English and publication in journals and books sold exclusively to the medical professions was typically allowed. This had the effect of stifling the study of sexuality in Britain and the U.S. and giving the new science of sexology on the continent a multi-decade head start. Consequently, late nineteenth century American and British medical professionals were still dependent on French, German and Italian sources for information on sexuality. And so the November 1894 edition of the American journal Physician and Surgeon included this lecture by Dr. Paul Blocq from Paris on the topic of “sexual inversion”:
Dr. Paul Blocq
It is important, first of all, to explain what we mean by sexual inversion, and show how it differs from the other perversions of the genital instinct. We may arrange these aberrations in three classes: (1) Where the instinct is abolished, impotence and agenisis. (2) When it is exaggerated, satyriasis and nymphomania. (3) Perversions. This last class includes onanism, fetichism, masochism, and sadism. Then comes inversion, which may be defined as a sexual attraction between individuals of the same sex — homo-sexuality. In man we may, according to [Albert] MOLL, give it the name of uranism, keeping the expression, pederast (sodomist) for the group of persons who practice coitus in ano. In woman it is called tribadism, saphism or lesbism [sic], according to the method they may employ to produce the sexual orgasm. [All parentheticals and italics in the original, bracketed info added.]
Acknowledging that “the medical study of this state is quite modern,” homosexuality itself has existed in Biblical times “and in the ancient history of different nations.” He reviewed the European literature on homosexuality (Richard von Kraftt-Ebing, Heinrich Kaan, Albert Moll, Julien Chevalier, Karl Friedrich Otto Westphal, among others), and concluded — not by science but solely by way of analogy — that homosexuality was a pathological condition:
Take hunger, for instance: it recalls to the normal organism the want of food, but of course we know plenty of states where this instinct is wanting and yet the stomach is in a normal condition. It is probably the same in a man whose sexual organs are in a normal state and yet his instinct is perverted. That is to say, it is easy to understand that the genital instinct can present the same abnormalities that the other functions do. Nevertheless, the objection will be made that a person in good health is pushed by nature to perpetuate his species, and one cannot qualify as morbid the absence of sexual desire when its reproduction is possible, for it is known that some uranists have had wives and had children by them. But take up the comparison again. We can see also that there is no sufficient reason for denying the pathological nature of inversion in these facts, for no one, for instance, will deny that the absence of appetite is pathological whether the organism receives the usual quantity of food or not, and the default of sexual propensity is likewise a pathological fact whether coition is possible or not. The comparison is possible also with those persons who have a taste for indigestible substances, such as chalk, lead, et cetera. These are pathological tastes and yet the normal one for nutritive substances may and often does exist with this state.
That is what passed for science in the late nineteenth century and well into the twentieth. His descriptions of gay men is equally based on impressions rather than rigorous scientific study:
The first thing noticed in such patients, as a rule, is effeminacy. This modifies the physiognomy, voice, attitude and walk. It must not be supposed, though, that all persons who act and walk like women are of this class, n0r that there are not any uranists who preserve the normal appearance of man. It is only to be remarked that many of them take the woman type, or at least they imitate it and make efforts to reproduce it artificially by shaving off the beard or moustache, some going so far as to have it pulled out (epilation). If they have not naturally a soprano or alto voice they will try to cultivate one. [Karl] ULRICHS states that they cannot whistle but this sign is not proven. …
They will adopt ladies’ silk stockings, high heeled boots and even wear corsets. The furniture of their rooms will show the same tendency, with a profusion of fans, toys, and perfumes. Some of them will even work at crochet and women’s needlework. GYURKOWECHSKY [?] says that they resemble women more than men by their caprices, changeableness, and facility for telling lies (not gallant) while they have an excessive prudery.
Their intellectual state is not, however, as a rule bad, as they have been known to direct large business enterprises with some ability. They possess a real aversion to women and never approach them if possible. …
As to their sexual feelings, they make ‘psysical manifestations of inversion by making the actual love they seem to feel to the person they have chosen and express their passion just as normal men do for the women of their choice. They seem to feel the same passion as men do for women and express it strongly in letters of which many hundreds are extant. … According to their own confessions they know one another by an oblique look of the eyes, but this sign is certainly very indefinite.
What caused this condition?
A large number of theories have been proposed to account for the genesis of this state. [Paulo] MANTEGAZZA thinks that it is anatomical in its origin. For instance, in passive sodomists, the nervous filaments which should be distributed to the genital organs are given off to the rectal mucous membrane, but there is no demonstration given of this idea. As the normal excitation of these nerves comes from the brain and cord it is more likely that [Valentin] MAGNAN and [Eugene] GLEY are in the right in thinking that it is a corticle trouble. KRAFT-EBING [sic] is also of this opinion, and while we have no confirmation of it by post-mortems, still, it is a possible explanation of the state. Personally, we share the ideas of MOLL, who thinks that there is an abnormal genital instinct in these cases simply because this instinct in degenerated subjects is their locus minoris resistentiæ.
Once a diagnosis is made, what should the physician do then?
About treatment:— Two indications present themselves. In some of these subjects there is a sort of hyperesthesia of the genital organs and this must be met by proper medication. Warm douches, bromides, and camphor combined with lupulin are useful drugs, and in the other cases one can insist on their returning to the normal as regards sexual life. Sometimes this is best carried out by suggestion without hypnotism. Surgical intervention by castration has been suggested.
[Source: Paul Blocq. “Sexual Inversion.” Physician and Surgeon 16, no. 11 (November 1894): 549-553. Available online via Google Books here.]
TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Kate Clinton: 1947. The Syracuse native was raised in a large Catholic family, got her degrees from a hometown Jesuit college and Colgate University in Hamilton, and worked as a high school teacher for eight years. She came out of her closet and began her standup comedy career in 1981, using all of that background, plus her lesbianism and liberal politics, as fodder. (She described her closet has having “a foyer, a turnstile and a few locks.”) It wasn’t easy at first finding mainstream clubs willing to hire a lesbian comedian, but she nevertheless was able to find a receptive audience in the LGBT community through her recordings, including Making Light! (1982), Making Waves! (1984), Live at the Great American Music Hall (1985), Babes in Joyland
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November 8th, 2013
THE DAILY AGENDA:
Hawaii House To Vote on Marriage Equality Bill: Honolulu, HI. After last week’s marathon hearings by the House Judiciary and Finance Committees and the contentious second reading on the House floor Wednesday, the House will conduct its third and final reading today for the marriage equality bill. With the bill passing the second reading by a 30-18 margin, I think it would be reasonable to expect a similar outcome today for the final vote. But as we’ve seen so far, almost anything appears possible with Hawaiian politics. Assuming the bill makes it out of the House alive, it will then return to the Senate for a concurrence vote due to the House’s amendments. This article suggests that the concurrence vote would take place on Tuesday “at earliest.” Today’s House vote will be webcast live, beginning at 10:00 a.m. HST (noon PST, 3:00 p.m. EST).
Events This Weekend: Buenos Aires Pride, Buenos Aires, Argentina; Florence Queer Film Festival, Florence, Italy; Indianapolis LGBT Film Festival, Indianapolis, IN; Mazipatra Queer Film Festival, Prague/Brno, Czech Republic; Bear Pride, San Francisco, CA; Open Mind Fest, Santiago, Chile.
Gladys and Mame (the “bitch and the butch”), two lesbians from the TV episode “Flowers of Evil”.
TODAY IN HISTORY:
Police Woman “Flowers of Evil” Episode Airs: 1974. When NBC’s hour-long action drama Police Woman starring Angie Dickinson began airing in 1974, it was so popular that even its reruns in the spring and summer of 1975 ranked number one in the Nielsen ratings. It was first successful police drama to feature a woman in the starring role. Dickinson’s unabashed sex appeal, undoubtedly, played a far greater role in its success than the plot lines themselves. One particularly odious episode, “Flowers of Evil,” had Dickinson’s character, Sgt. Pepper Anderson, investigating a trio of lesbians who run a retirement home where they murdered and robbed their elderly residents.
To add insult to injury, the Police Woman episode aired one month to the day after a similarly negative plot line appeared on ABC’s Marcus Welby, M.D., in which a child molester was portrayed as gay (see Oct 8). Police Woman’s “Flowers of Evil” was originally scheduled to air on October 25, but after the National Gay Rights Task Force organized national protests and advertisers began canceling, NBC pulled the episode for re-editing. But with the filming wrapped up, the edits were mostly cosmetic. After the episode aired on November 8, TV Guide called it “the single most homophobic show to date.” A week later, a group known as Lesbian Feminist Liberation occupied NBC’s Standards and Practices office overnight, unfurled a banner from an office window reading “Lesbians Protest NBC.” Advocates continued to negotiate with NBC for several more months, and NBC finally agreed in 1975 to not rebroadcast the episode during re-runs and to withhold it from syndication. The “Flowers of Evil” episode did re-appear again, but only after thirty years had passed, in the Season 1 DVD box set
Harvey Milk taking the oath of office.
Harvey Milk Elected to San Francisco Board of Supervisors: 1977. Newspapers across American carried this two-paragraph news item a few days after election day:
Homosexual Elected to Supervisors’ Board
San Francisco (AP) — Harvey Milk Tuesday became the first avowed homosexual to be elected to the city’s board of supervisors, some 25 years afte he was discharged by the navy when it learned he was gay. Mr. Milk, 47, a camera store owner, said Wednesday, “I’m a symbol of hope for gays and all minorities. My election, against all the odds, shows that the system can work and that there is hope.”
Mr. Milk defeated a field of 17 candidates which included several other gays and former San Francisco 49ers football player Bob St. Clair.
This was Milk’s third run for Supervisor. He lost in 1973 and 1975 when all six Supervisor seats were elected in city-wide at-large elections where the top six vote getters joined the board. He also ran for the State Assembly in 1976, but lost in a close race. In 1977, San Francisco switched to single-member districts, and Milk won a seat on the Board of Supervisors on his third try.
Networks Reject PFLAG Ads as Offensive: 1995. Parents, Family and Friends of Lesbians and Gays created at least three television ads to address the effect of anti-gay rhetoric on bullying and suicide. (According to Commercial Closet, the ads were this, this, and this — but only the last one matches the descriptions provided in news reports.) One of those ads, “Guns,” featured a teenage girl rummaging through her parents’ bedroom looking for a gun. Another ad featured a young man being beaten by bullies (that ad does not appear to be online.) Those images were disturbing enough. But what made the ads particularly controversial was that intercut between those images were video clips of Rev. Jerry Falwell, Rev. Pat Robertson, and Sen. Jesse Helms (R-NC). The “Guns” ad, for example, went like this:
(Young woman enters her parents’ bedroom)
Jerry Falwell: Homosexuality is moral perversion and is always wrong. God hates homosexuality.(Young woman frantically searchers dresser drawers and linen closet)
Pat Robertson: Homosexuality is an abomination. The practices of these people is appalling. It is a pathology. It is a sickness.(Young woman finds a gun in a cedar chest)
Jesse Helms: A lot of us are sick and tired of all of the pretenses of injured innocence. They are not innocent.(Young woman holds gun and cries.)
Announcer: It is estimated that thirty percent of teenage suicide victims are gay or lesbian.(PFLAG logo appears)
The ad drew a direct threat from Bruce Hausknecht, associate general counsel for Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcast Network. “The spots contain defamatory material and cast Pat Robertson and CBN in a false light by implying that Pat advocates/promotes heinous crimes against gays or directly caused the suicide of one or more homosexual persons. This is outrageously false and severely damaging to the reputation of Dr. Robertson and this ministry.” Hauskenecht warned that if the ads were aired, CBN would “immediately seek judicial redress against your station,” including injunctions and monetary damages. As a result, the ads were rejected by eight stations in Washington, D.C., Tulsa, Houston and Atlanta, and by CNN, which had tentatively accepted them for Larry King Live. Some of those stations did accept the companion ad depicting the young man being beaten.
PFLAG criticized stations for not airing the ad. Pointing out that talk radio was filled with anti-gay statements on a regular basis, PFLAG’s board president Mitzi Henderson said, “These people (Falwell, Robertson and Helms) are particularly accessible and public. We think they’re representative of a variety of sources. … We wanted to say, ‘Wake up and join us in opposing hate speech.'”
PFLAG executive director Sandra Gillis said that Tulsa, Atlanta and Houston were chosen “because they’re heartland America. Mainstream, middle Americans are not an intolerant lot. They don’t realize the level of abuse and violence against gays and lesbians.” She said the campaign’s message was “watch your words. They can create a climate in which violent people think their violent action is okay.”
Charles Demuth, Self Portrait, 1907.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
130 YEARS AGO: Charles Demuth: 1883-1938. An important modernist watercolorist and oil painter, the Lancaster, Pennsylvania native studied at Drexel University and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine arts before moving on to Académie Colarossi and Académie Julian in Paris. While in Paris beginning in 1907, Demuth became part of the avant-garde scene as one of the first American painters to embrace modernism.
While that exposure proved profoundly influential, Demuth didn’t stay in Paris long, just a little over a year. On returning home, he began a relationship with a longtime friend from Lancaster, decorator-designer Robert Evans Locher, a relationship that would last for the rest of Demuth’s life.
Demuth returned to Paris again in 1912, where he met the painter Marsden Hartley, who introduced Demuth to Gertrude Stein (see Feb 3), Ezra Pound, and Leo Stein. Demuth’s esthetic ideas were further sharpened on his return to American in 1914, where he became close associates with the gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz and artists Georgia O’Keefe and Marcel Duchamp. His first solo exhibit was that same year, at the Daniel Gallery in New York. Later, he would exhibit regularly in Steiglitz’s gallery, where his work was purchased by such important collectors as Louise and Walter Arensberg, Ferdinand Howald, and pharmaceutical industrialist Albert C Barnes.
Charles Demuth, Turkish Bath with Self Portrait, 1918
While Demuth traveled frequently to Provincetown, New York, Philadelphia and, occasionally, to Europe, Lancaster would always be his home base. While in New York, he frequented Lafayette Baths, which likely inspired his 1918 homoerotic Turkish Bath with Self Portrait. In 1919, Demuth began a series of paintings inspired by the architecture and industrial landscape of Lancaster. These larger-scale paintings, which represented a kind of a simplified Cubism established Demuth as an important Precisionist artist which anticipated modern regionalism styles of the 1920s and 1930s.
Demuth returned to Paris in 1921, but ill health forced his return home, where he was treated for diabetes. He become one of the first people in the U.S. to take regular insulin injections, and Barnes often footed the bill for his sanitarium stays. But the debilitating effects of diabetes would plague him for the rest of his life.
Charles Demuth, I Saw the Figure 5 In Gold, 1928.
From the mid- to late 1920s Demeth produced a series of symbolic “poster portraits,” which were intended to depict several of his friends. His most famous painting of this series, I Saw the Figure Five in Gold, was inspired by his friend William Carlos Williams’s poem “The Great Figure.” The Wall Street Journal’s Judith Dobrzynski described its importance:
It’s the best work in a genre Demuth created, the “poster portrait”. It’s a witty homage to his close friend, the poet William Carlos Williams, and a transliteration into paint of his poem, “The Great Figure”. It’s a decidedly American work made at a time when U.S. artists were just moving beyond European influences. It’s a reference to the intertwined relationships among the arts in the 1920s, a moment of cross-pollination that led to American Modernism. And it anticipates pop art.
He created other poster portraits to honor several of his friends: Gertrude Stein, Eugene O’Neil, Georgia O’Keefe, and Marsden Hartley among them.
Charles Demuth, My Egypt, 1927.
In 1927, Demuth returned to his Lancaster landscapes, producing some of his iconic My Egypt (1927), Buildings, Lancaster (1930), Chimney and Water Tower (1931), and And Home of the Brave (1931). Those paintings today are regarded as among the most notable achievements in American art. His last painting in the series, After All, was completed in 1933. By then, the ravages of diabetes were taking their toll. Demuth finally succumbed in 1935 at the age of 51. Demuth’s house on King Street in Lancaster was bequeathed to Locher, who lived there until his own death in 1956. The home is now a museum.
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November 7th, 2013
In the evolution of thinking on marriage equality in Europe, several nations started with a marriage-lite structure, a recognition of couples which stopped short of full rights and obligations of marriage. Ironically, this proved to be popular with some straight couples who wanted a less formal structure, an intro-level recognition while they decided whether they wanted a full marriage.
In 2008, to meet the demand for limited couple recognition, Greece decided, “Yes, let’s do that gay couple thing… but with a twist.” So they created civil partnerships, a formalization of rights of cohabiting couples and – turning the idea on its head – they specifically excluded gay couples.
Several same-sex couples challenged the law in the European Court of Human Rights and the decision has been made. (AFP)
Civil unions should not be reserved for heterosexual couples, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruled Thursday, condemning Greece for creating a “life partner” legal category that excludes gays.
Judges in Strasbourg said that authorities in Orthodox Christian Greece had not offered “convincing and weighty reasons capable of justifying the exclusion of same-sex couples” when passing a 2008 law.
The judges noted that a European Union member of the Council of Europe need not offer marriage rights or even couple recognition to same-sex couples. But if they create new structures as an alternative to marriage, they cannot make restrictions based on sexual orientation.
The ruling applies to Greece and possibly to Lithuania, which also offers straights-only non-marriage couple recognition.
[NOTE: The heading was revised]
November 7th, 2013
In a landmark 64-32 bipartisan vote, U.S. Senate gave its approval to the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA).
Fifty-four Democrats were joined by ten Republicans to support the measure: Sens. Kelly Ayotte (NH), Susan Collins (ME, cosponsor), Jeff Flake (AZ), Orrin Hatch (UT), Dean Heller (NV), Mark Kirk (IL, cosponsor), John McCain (AZ), Lisa Murkowski (AK), Rob Portman (OH), and Pat Toomey (PA). Sen. Bob Casey (D-PA) was absent due to family reasons.
ENDA now includes a significantly broad set of religious exemptions. As The New York Times pointed out in its criticism of the bill last weekend:
The Employment Nondiscrimination Act, however, has a significant flaw — a terribly broad religious exemption. The exemption would extend beyond churches and other houses of worship to any religiously affiliated institution, like hospitals and universities, and would allow those institutions to discriminate against people in jobs with no religious function, like billing clerks, cafeteria workers and medical personnel.
The exemption — which was inserted to appease some opponents who say the act threatens religious freedom — is a departure from the approach of earlier civil rights laws. And though the law would protect millions of workers from bias, the exemption would give a stamp of legitimacy to the very sort of discrimination the act is meant to end.
The Times said that “Any attempt to further enlarge the exemption should be rejected,” but an amendment yesterday offered by Sens. Portman and Ayotte (with McCain co-sponsoring) did just that. Their amendment reads:
A religious employer’s exemption under this Act shall not result in any action by a Federal government agency, or any state or local government agency that receives Federal funding or financial assistance, to penalize or withhold licenses, permits, certifications, accreditation, contracts, grants, guarantees, tax-exempt status, or any benefits or exemptions from that employer, or to prohibit the employer’s participation in programs or activities sponsored by that Federal, state, or local government agency. Nothing in this subsection shall be construed to invalidate any other federal, state, or local law or regulation that otherwise applies to an employer exempt under this section.”
That amendment was approved yesterday. Today, the Senate rejected another amendment by Sen. Tooley that would have expanded the scope of employers exempted from the Act.
The bill now goes to the House, where House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) has already said that he opposes the law, making it unlikely that he will bring it to a vote. Many observers believe that if it did come to a vote, there would be enough bipartisan support to ensure its passage.
November 7th, 2013
Hawaii Democratic state Rep. Jo Jordan — make that openly gay Democratic state Rep. Jo Jordan — seems to be suffering either from some kind of political Stockholm syndrome, some misguided martyrdom complex, or maybe she just feels like she has something to prove. I don’t know. But guess what?
One lawmaker, Democratic Rep. Jo Jordan of Waianae, said on the floor that she would oppose the bill — despite her thoughts and beliefs and gay marriage potentially benefiting her personally.
“No, nobody’s going to beat me up. Nobody’s going to throw me out of my (LGBT) community — I’m not quite sure of that,” Jordan said.
But Jordan said she set aside her beliefs when she listened to five days of testimony during a joint committee hearing and listened with an open heart. Much of spoken public testimony during the hearing came in opposition to the bill.
“I might vote against something that I personally believe in. I personally believe I should have the right,” Jordan said. “You know how hard it is for me to say no? I have to say no.”
Jordan voted “no” during yesterday’s unusually contentious Second Reading. Preliminary celebrations aside, second readings are ordinarily procedural votes to consider amendments and move the bill from committee to the House floor. The real vote, the one that counts, is the Third Reading which is scheduled for tomorrow. But because yesterday’s 30-18 vote was so contentious, I think it gives us a good indication of where things stand for final passage.
Because the House has made a few changes to the bill, it must now go back to the Senate for a concurrence vote. Again, this is ordinarily a simple procedural vote. Last weekend there had been some concerns expressed that the Senate may not go along with the House’s proposed expansion of the religious exemption clauses. But now it looks like the Senate is on board, so concurrence should be no big deal, although this report says that it won’t get to the Senate “until Tuesday, at earliest.” I’m keeping my champagne on ice for a while.
You can track the bill’s progress here.
November 7th, 2013
THE DAILY AGENDA:
Events This Weekend: Buenos Aires Pride, Buenos Aires, Argentina; Florence Queer Film Festival, Florence, Italy; Indianapolis LGBT Film Festival, Indianapolis, IN; Mazipatra Queer Film Festival, Prague/Brno, Czech Republic; Bear Pride, San Francisco, CA; Open Mind Fest, Santiago, Chile.
TODAY IN HISTORY:
José Sarria Runs for San Francisco City Supervisor: 1961. He lost, of course, but he also won by losing. Before throwing his tiara into the ring, José Sarria (see Dec 12) was better known as a drag performer and waiter at San Francisco’s Black Cat bar, where he regaled audiences with campy versions of Italian opera. He fought constantly against police raids against gay men and gay bars — he himself had been arrested in an entrapment case. One tactic was for police to raid gay bars and arrest everyone dressed in drag for violating a city ordinance that barred men from dressing as women with “an intent to deceive.” He printed up buttons for drag queens to wear on their dresses reading, “I am a boy.” That tactic effectively ended the raids on drag queens.
When Sarria decided to run for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1961, he became the first openly gay candidate for public office in the United States. The elections that year were for five at-large seats in which the top five vote-getters citywide were seated. Sarria almost won by default until city officials put out a call for more candidates at the last minute when they realized what was up. Thirty-four candidates ended up running for the five slots. Sarria’s platform was a simple one:
My platform when I ran was “Equality Before the Law.” The San Francisco Court House had just been built and that was the slogan on it and I said, “This is what my slogan will be. I’m going to take it and shove it right down their throat.” I saw that there were two interpretations of the laws and that they were trying to make gay people second rate citizens. I’ve never been a second rate citizen.
Sarria earned nearly 6,000 votes, putting him in ninth place. While he didn’t make it onto the Board of Supervisors, his 6,000 votes effectively defined a significant voting block which could not be ignored in future elections. Sarria’s loss marked a change in San Francisco city politics as a result. As Sarria recalled, “From that day on, nobody ran for anything in San Francisco without knocking on the door of the gay community.”
35 YEARS AGO: Prop 6/Briggs Initiative Defeated: 1978. State Sen. John Briggs had been a part of Anita Bryant’s campaign two years earlier to roll back a gay rights ordinance in Miami, Florida. So when he decided to run for the Republican nomination for California Governorship in 1978, he thought he had hit on the perfect campaign platform: the so-called threat posed by gay teachers in the public schools. He lost the nomination, but managed to get placed on the California ballot Proposition 6, which would have banned gays and lesbians from being teachers. It also would have banned anyone else from teaching, gay or straight, who defended gays and lesbians whether they did so in the schools or outside.
Briggs played to society’s fears of gays as predators. He told the San Francisco Examiner, “One-third of San Francisco teachers are homosexuals. I assume most of them are seducing young boys in toilets.” In September, Prop 6 looked like a sure thing, with 61% supporting the proposal. But several events conspired to lead to the measure’s defeat: with San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk (see May 22) setting the example, thousands of gays and lesbians emerged from the closet for the first time to their friends, families and co-workers. For many gay people, it was their first time engaging in a political campaign. Log Cabin Republicans organized to become a rallying point for other conservative Republicans to oppose the measure, and former Gov. Ronald Reagan came out against it — going so far as to write an op-ed against Prop 6 for the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner. “Whatever else it is, he wrote, “homosexuality is not a contagious disease like the measles. Prevailing scientific opinion is that an individual’s sexuality is determined at a very early age and that a child’s teachers do not really influence this.” Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter also came out against it.
No on 6 poster: “You don’t have to be gay to be fired.” (Click to enlarge.)
But what likely killed the Biggs Initiative was Briggs’s overreach. Briggs started out just wanting to ban gay people from teaching, but he crafted his initiative so broadly that even straight teachers who supported gay rights, publicly or privately, were threatened. Del Martin (see May 5), the San Francisco lesbian-rights activist who had co-founded the Daughters of Bilitis in 1955, showed how Prop 6 threatened to unleash a witch hunt that would hurt everyone. “All you have to do is point your finger and say, ‘you’re gay,'” she said. “That kind of thing is as damaging to heterosexuals as to homosexuals.” For many straight voters, opposition to Prop 6 wasn’t so much a show of support for gay people as it was a vote for self-protection.
When election day came, Prop 6 went down in defeat, 58-42%. Teachers were safe from political witch hunts. But more importantly, the victory helped to usher the emergence of a truly national gay rights movement out of what had been a series of relatively isolated, autonomous local communities. For the first time, gays and lesbians across America began to see themselves as part of a larger community, which would take visible form a year later when 75,000 showed up for with the First National March on Washington (see Oct 14).
Anti-Initiative 13 poster (via Gay Seattle History. Click to enlarge.)
35 YEARS AGO: Seattle Voters Reject Repeal of Gay Rights Ordinances: 1978. While the nation’s eyes were on California’s Briggs Initiative, voters in Seattle were contending with yet another Anita Bryant-inspired effort at the ballot box to eliminate gay rights ordinances. Since Bryant’s 1977 victory in Miami (see Jun 7), she took her anti-gay show on the road to similar victories in St. Paul, Minnesota (see Apr 25); Wichita, Kansas (see May 9); and Eugene, Oregon. Now the steam roller was headed for Seattle.
Seattle had come to the idea of protecting its gay community relatively early, passing a non-discrimination employment ordinance in 1973, and extending discrimination protections to housing two years later. Those bills generated little controversy at the time, but with Bryant’s national barnstorming attracting widespread attention, Seattle Police officers David Estes and Dennis Falk decided to act. They founded a local group, Save Our Moral Ethics (SOME), and launched a campaign to place Initiative 13 on the ballot and repeal the city’s non-discrimination ordinances.
A counter group, Citizens to Retain Fair Employment, rose up the challenge the initiative, but right away they ran into a stark political reality: how do you get straight people to care about such a tiny and reviled minority? CRFE studied the campaigns in Miami and St. Paul and concluded that trying to argue for the civil rights of gay people was a flop. Either the electorate didn’t care or was overtly hostile to that idea. Repeating that same formula in Seattle, they reasoned, would produce the same result. Sure, fighting for civil rights was important, but it would take years — perhaps decades — of dialogue and conversations before the public could be moved to look at gay people as equal citizens. CRFE only had a few months. Clearly they needed a different approach, which that could bring quick results and which hinged on something everyone cared about now. CRFE found that issue: privacy.
So while SOME was throwing mud and claiming that seventy percent of all child molestations were at the hands of homosexuals, CRFE didn’t bother trying to make Seattleites feel good about gay people. Instead, they countered that Initiative 13 would give employers and landlords carte blanche to look into everyone’s private backgrounds, especially those who were single, had roommates, or were just generally not well-liked or thought of as being a little different. One anti-13 poster showed a keyhole with an eye peering through it, while television ads depicted people living in a fishbowl. And nobody’s comfortable with that kind of scrutiny. On election day, Seattle voters drove that point home by defeating Initiative 13 by a whopping 63-37% margin.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Lisa Ben: 1921. Her job as secretary at RKO Studios didn’t involve a lot of work, even though her boss wanted her to look busy. So she used her side project to fill the time. Using five sheets of carbon paper, she would type out her little newsletter twice over, making a total of twelve copies at the most. Each issue consisted of a dozen or so pages of book and film reviews, essays, short stories, opinion pieces, and a smattering of poetry. Between June 1947 to February 1948, she put out nine issues of Vice Versa, which, as modest as that was, is believed to be the first known lesbian publication in the world. She mailed three issues to friends; the rest she hand distributed at her favorite lesbian bars in Los Angeles. And she always encouraged her readers to pass their copies on to others when they were done with them.
Ben grew up an only child on an apricot farm in Santa Clara County. She developed her first crush on another girl while in High School. Devastated when the other girl broke it off, she wen to to her mother for solace, but her mother reacted so badly that she knew she’d never be able to discuss her personal life with her parents again. In 1945, she left Northern California and moved to Los Angeles, where she met other women in her apartment building who were as little interested in boys as she was:
“I don’t know what brought up the subject, but one of the girls turned to me and said, ‘are you gay?’ And I said, ‘I try to be as happy as I can under the circumstances.’ They all laughed. Then they said, ‘No, no’ and told me what it meant. And I said, ‘Well, yes, I guess I am because I don’t really go out and search for boyfriends. I don’t care for that.’ So they said, ‘You must come with us to a girl’s softball game.’ I went with them, but I didn’t tell them that softball bored the tar out of me. I just don’t care for sports. I know that’s very funny for a lesbian to say. But it’s true, I never have cared for sports. I went along to be with the crowd.”
Meeting other lesbians quickly became a priority for her. “The most common way for us to meet others of the same inclination was to frequent the gay bars,” she remembered.” It was easy to form friendships and be invited to the apartments and dwelling-places of these acquaintances … sometimes someone would have a party and invite quite a few friends, who would bring their friends along. There were no lesbian organizations and, of course, one could never place an ad in a personals column!”
There was also no reading material. That’s where she got the idea for Vice Versa, which had the added benefit of helping her to expand her social circle. “When I turned out my first copy I probably knew about four people. And the next month, they introduced me to some more, and I knew, like, ten people. And so on and so on and so on. So it grew. And eventually it grew to more girls than I had copies and I couldn’t turn out anymore!”
From the first issue of Vice Versa (Click to enlarge.)
The first issue of Vice Versa explained what she had in mind for her magazine. She noted that on every newsstand, there were magazines specializing on just about every topic imaginable:
Yet, there is one kind of publication which would, I am sure, have a great appeal to a definite group. Such a publication has never appeared on the stands. News stands carrying the crudest kind of magazine or pictorial pamphlets appealing to the vulgar would find themselves severely censured were they to display those other type of publication. Why? Because Society decrees it thus.
Hence the appearance of VICE VERSA, a magazine dedicated, in all seriousness, to those of us who will never quite be able to adapt ourselves to the iron-bound rules of Convention. The circulation of this publication, under the circumstances, must be very limited, going only to those who, it is felt, will genuinely enjoy such a magazine. … If the contents interest you and please you, that is the purpose of the magazine. If the material included herein seems rather monotonous, please keep in mind that the entire publication was originated and compiled by one person.
Ben had to end her run with Vice Versa after the Valentine’s Day issue in 1948. That’s when Howard Hughes bought RKO, and almost everyone was let go. Ben’s next job was much busier, leaving her with no time to work on Vice Versa. But by then Ben was enjoying her expanded social circle so much that, as she later said, “I wanted to live it rather than write about it.”
An ad for Lisa Ben’s record.
A tiny pebble thrown in the pond — that overused cliché nevertheless perfectly describes Vice Versa’s impact. Copies were passed around and copied some more, like the Samizdat dissident newsletters that were the lifeline of Soviet dissidents half a world away. Very few originals survive; what we have today are almost always copies of copies. Over the next several years, those copies attained near-mythical status as hundreds, then thousands, read Vice Versa. When the Daughters of Bilitis began publishing The Ladder, some of Ben’s Vice Versa material appeared again, this time under her pseudonym “Lisa Ben,” an anagram of “lesbian.” (Vice Versa had carried no byline.) She also wrote some original articles as well for The Ladder.
Writing wasn’t her only talent. After her Vice Versa days were over, she indulged her love of music and began writing and performing a variety of gay-themed parodies. Her aim was to entertain, but to do it in a way that wasn’t demeaning. “I was absolutely appalled at the gay (male) entertainers who would, on stage, make derogatory remarks and dirty jokes about themselves to entertain the non-gay people who came there to be entertained and ‘see how the queers lived,'” she said. “No wonder society had such a bad opinion of us.”
She often based her parodies on older popular songs: “I’m a Boy Being a Girl,” “I’m Gonna Sit Right Down and Write My Butch a Letter”, and “The Vice Squad Keeps On Breaking Up That Old Gang of Mine.” She didn’t take her singing very seriously. But, again, it helped to expand her social circle. “It was always a lot of fun and I found myself attending more and more parties and meeting more and more gay folks, both men and women.” In 1960, two of her songs, “Cruising Down the Boulevard” and “Frankie and Johnnie,” were recorded on 45 rpm and sold by the Daughters of Bilitis through ads in The Ladder and ONE magazine.
But it was those nine issues of Vice Versa that secured her place in history by providing a model for ONE and The Ladder. In 1972, she was honored by ONE, Inc., as “the father [sic] of the homophile movement,” and she appeared in the 1984 PBS Emmy-winning documentary Before Stonewall: The Making of a Gay and Lesbian Community
Lisa Ben still lives in California, and even though her real name is easy to find on the Internet, she still prefers to be known publicly by her pseudonym. And why not? Tab Hunter has his.
[Sources: “Vice Versa, by Lisa Ben.” Queer Music Heritage web site. You can find scans of all nine issues of Vice Versa here.
Eric Marcus. Making History: The Struggle for Gay and Lesbian Equal Rights: 1945-1990. An Oral History
Marcia M. Gallo. Different Daughters: A History of the Daughters of Bilitis and the Rise of the Lesbian Rights Movement
75 YEARS AGO: John Fryer: 1938-2003. You have John Fryer to thank for that fact that you’re not crazy. For many years, he was known only as Dr. H. Anonymous, the disguised gay psychiatrist whose talk at an American Psychiatric Association panel on homosexuality is credited for paving the way for the organization’s removal of homosexuality from its list of mental disorders. But friends who knew him knew a complicated man: gregarious and charming, difficult and biting, always intense.
He knew he was gay from the age of fourteen, and did little to hide it through his high school and college years. But when he became a medical intern at Ohio State, he understood that it was in his best interest to keep his sexuality a secret from his superiors. His psychiatric residency at the Menninger Clinic in Topeka only reinforced his closet door. There were only about 100,000 people in Topeka, and if he went to a gay bar there, he was almost certain to run into someone connected with the clinic — either as a patient or an employee. Menninger was a very homophobic place, and Fryer soon became depressed. A supervisor noticed and set him up with free therapy with a psychoanalyst. Fryer went out on the limb and confessed everything to her. “There is only one solution,” she said. “Did you ever think of leaving Topeka?”
Leave he did, to the University of Pennsylvania in 1964. That residency lasted about six months until his supervisor there found out that he was gay. “You can either resign or I’ll fire you.” Fryer accepted six months’ severance and resigned. He ended up working at Norristown State Hospital in northern Philadelphia, where he was given the worst assignment: Building 11 as the only psychiatrist for 400 male patients, and Building 13 which housed the chronically incontinent. Fryer set up a behavioral program in Building 13 which rewarded patients who controlled themselves with trips to the Poconos. By the time he was finished, he had solved the incontinence problem in Building 13. He also found himself surrounded by staff that could accept the fact that he was gay.
By 1970, he became a part of what was loosely called the Gay-PA, an underground network of closeted gay psychiatrists who attended the annual meetings of the APA. They watched in 1970 when “outside agitators” — Frank Kameny (see May 21), Barbara Gittings (see Jul 31), among others — picketed the APA meeting in San Francisco in 1970 (see May 14). Fryer later recalled, “We in the Gay-PA commented, ‘Isn’t that nice?’ But we weren’t about to do anything that might expose us.”
But things quickly changed for Fryer. The APA asked Barbara Gittings to be a part of a panel on “Lifestyles of Non-Patient Homosexuals.” Barbara’s partner, Kay Lahusen (see Jan 5), noticed that the panel had gays who weren’t psychiatrists and psychiatrists who weren’t gay. What the panel needed, she said, was a gay psychiatrist. Fryer recalled:
Barbara Gittings called and said, “John, we need you to be on a panel [in May of 1972],” and I said, “Tell me about it.” She said, “It’s going to be a panel about homosexuality, and we need a gay psychiatrist.” I said, “Sooo . . . ?!” She responded, “Well look, you…um…think about it.”
He had a lot to think about. His father had died and he was between jobs. This was not a good time for him to expose himself, either emotionally or professionally. But he had already been thrown out of one residency for being gay and lost another job for the same thing. He knew that his fellow psychiatrists needed to hear about that. So he called Gittings back and said he would do it — on one condition: he couldn’t do it as himself. He would need a disguise. His lover at the time, a drama major, devised one: a formal suit several sizes too big — not an easy task for such a big man to begin with — and a wig and rubber mask that was distorted beyond recognition. He also spoke into a special microphone to disguise his voice.
L-R: Barbara Gittings, Frank Kameny, and John Fryer as “Dr. H. Anonymous”
Speaking as “Dr. H. Anonymous,” Fryer opened with the words, “I am a homosexual. I am a psychiatrist.” He talked about just a few of the different closets he was forced to hide in: as a gay man who had to hide his sexuality among his professional colleagues, and as a gay man who had to hide his profession among other gay people. “There is much negative feeling in the homosexual community towards psychiatrists,” he explained. “And those of us, who are visible, are the easiest targets from which the angry can vent their wrath.” He also addressed the “more than a hundred [gay] psychiatrists” attending the convention, urging them to find ways to help change the attitudes of their patients, both gay and straight, towards homosexuality. It would be risky, but “We are taking an even bigger risk, however, not accepting fully our own humanity, with all the lessons it has to teach all the other humans around us and ourselves. This is the greatest loss: our honest humanity.”
The panel was a resounding success. That night, Fryer wrote in his diary:
The day has passed — it has come and gone and I am still alive. For the first time, I have identified with a force which is akin to my selfhood. I am not Black. I am not alcoholic. I am not really addicted. I am homosexual, and I am the only American psychiatrist who has stood up on a podium to let real flesh and blood tell this nation it is so.
The next year, Dr. Robert Spitzer, who was in charge of revising the APA’s Diagnostics and Statistics Manual (DSM) which defined the official list of mental disorders, met with members of the Gay-PA, and those meetings eventually led to the removal of homosexuality from the DSM in 1973.
But for Fryer, life continued to be difficult. After the 1972 APA meeting, he took a job at another psychiatric hospital in Philadelphia. A medical student learned that Fryer was gay — Fryer later hinted that he may have come on to the student but insisted that it went no further — and went to the Administration. Fryer was called in and told, “If you were gay and not flamboyant we would keep you. If you were flamboyant and not gay we would keep you. But since you are both gay and flamboyant, we cannot keep you.” Ironically, that same administrator had sat in the front row at the APA meeting during Fryer’s talk the year before, and had no idea who he was.
Fryer then took a teaching assignment at Temple University. In 1978, he got his associate professorship and with it came tenure. He could no longer be fired. He was free to be out, and he could also, finally, tell the full story behind Dr. H. Anonymous. Fryer retired from Temple in 2000, and died in 2003 at the age of 64. In 2004, the Association of Gay and Lesbian Psychiatrists endowed an award in his name. The first John E. Fryer Award, sponsored by AGLP and given by the APA, was awarded to Frank Kameny and Barbara Gittings in 2006 for their role in that fateful APA panel in 1972.
[Source: David L. Scasta. “John E. Fryer, MD, and the Dr. H. Anonymous Episode.” Journal of Gay & Lesbian Psychotherapy 6, No. 4 (2002): 73-84.
Jeanne Lenzer. “John Fryer.” British Medical Journal 326, no 7390 (March 22, 2003): 662. Available online here.]
If you know of something that belongs on the Agenda, please send it here. Don’t forget to include the basics: who, what, when, where, and URL (if available).
And feel free to consider this your open thread for the day. What’s happening in your world?
November 7th, 2013
After days of testimony and hours of slapping down amendments designed to derail the legislation, the Hawaii House of Representatives has voted.
And finally the second (and most important) vote has passed marriage equality.
There is the formality of the third vote and gubernatorial signatures to come, but tonight Hawaii became state number 16
November 6th, 2013
Retired Bishop Melvin Talbert is one of a number of United Methodist Ministers who are not only speaking out for equality, but defying their denomination to do so. (The Tennesseean)
Despite warnings from his denomination that he’d be violating the faith’s Book of Discipline, Bishop Melvin Talbert traveled from Nashville to near Birmingham, Ala., to perform the Oct. 26 wedding of Joe Openshaw and Bobby Prince. They were legally married Sept. 3 in Washington, D.C., but wanted a church wedding.
Talbert sees his involvement as an act of civil disobedience for a moral cause, and if you want to disagree, you’d better have some pretty big boots.
He volunteered to perform same-sex weddings and urged fellow clergy to do the same. He likens his work to the nation’s civil rights movement, a comparison he doesn’t make lightly. Talbert, now 79, shared an Atlanta jail cell with Martin Luther King Jr. in October 1960 after being arrested at an Atlanta lunch counter sit-in.
Talbert was one of the student organizers who invited King to join their protest. He spent three days and nights in the cell with King, which molded the direction of his life.
See also the Huntsville Times
November 6th, 2013
Although the Illinois Senate had previously passed marriage equality, amendments in the House required a second vote. (NYT)
The measure passed the Illinois Senate in February, but for procedural reasons it had to be voted on there again. On Tuesday, the Senate quickly approved changes the House made to the bill, sending it to the desk of Gov. Pat Quinn, a Democrat who has said he will sign it. Illinois couples could begin marrying on June 1.
November 6th, 2013
It’s been a good year for equality. In the past twelve months, marriage equality has come to Maine, Maryland, and Washington (by popular vote), Rhode Island, Delaware, and Minnesota (by legislative act), New Jersey (by state court ruling), and California (by federal court ruling).
Which was all before yesterday. Tuesday, with the vote for marriage in the Illinois House and the vote for marriage in the Hawaii House Judiciary and Finance Committees, was a most delicious day.
But when there’s a whirlwind day, you can miss some of the less high profile moment. Also yesterday were elections around the country, and here are a few more happy moments.
Ken Cuccinelli, the GOP Virginia gubernatorial candidate, is a man seemingly obsessed with the sex lives of his neighbors. Virulently anti-gay (he tried to reinstate sodomy laws through the argument that he would also enforce them against straights who strayed from the missionary position) he was the hope and darling of wingnuts who see their world vanishing.
Yesterday Cuccinelli did much better than expected, but ultimately Democrat Terry McAuliff, a friend and supporter of the community, prevailed. The takeaway lesson from the election was that Cuccinelli’s social agenda was a drag on his campaign and that victorian morality is a detriment to election. Also losing (badly) was his crazy as a loon running mate, Pastor EW Jackson, who was known mostly for sharing such diamonds of wisdom as
“Their minds are perverted; they’re frankly very sick people psychologically, mentally and emotionally; and they see everything through the lens of homosexuality. When they talk about love, they’re not talking about love, they’re talking about homosexual sex. And so, they can’t see clearly.”
Meanwhile, Chris Christie sailed to victory in his reelection bid for New Jersey Governor. And while Christie has consistently opposed marriage equality (even vetoing a marriage bill in February) he has done so in terms that separated him from Cuccinelli.
Christie has long been an advocate of civil unions (a position that, while outdated, would have placed him in the ‘strong ally’ category a decade ago) and has a good and close relationship with gay organizations in the state. And when confronted with the fact that civil unions no longer brought equality, he presented a legal argument in opposition to marriage that must have made his legal team fall on the floor laughing before signaling retreat on the position at the first moment that it became clear that his absurd legal argument was not being taken seriously.
This example of conservative loss coupled with moderate win is about the last thing that social conservatives in the Republican Party wanted to see.
A small bit of bad news comes from Holland, Michigan, where anti-gay discrimination seems to have won the day. In 2011 the city counsel, in a 5-4 vote, refused to enact a local non-discrimination ordinance, a decision that sharply divided the city. Two of the majority five were opposed in yesterday’s election based on their anti-gay vote, but they – along with the rest of the counsel – were reelected.
But in Washington, Ed Murray, the openly gay state legislator who successfully led the battle to bring marriage equality to the state, appears to have won election as Seattle’s mayor.
One election I did not watch – didn’t even know about – was also in New Jersey, where openly gay Republican Don Guardian beat the incumbent mayor of Atlantic City. The political situation of gay GOP candidates winning or performing well in major cities is now starting to seem less like an anomaly.
Alex Wan, a fiscally conservative gay Democrat in Atlanta easily won reelection, though not with enthusiastic support from Atlanta’s gay community who largely disapproved of Wan’s proposal to ban strip clubs and sex shops along Cheshire Bridge Road.
In Houston, Lesbian mayor Annise Parker easily won her third term.
In Alabama’s 1st District, mainstream Republican Bradley Byrne swept aside TeaParty opponent Dean Young, for his party’s nomination. Young, former exective director of Christian Family Association, defended wackadoodle Judge Roy Moore in 2002 with this statement:
“[Homosexuality is] a deviant lifestyle. It’s a destructive lifestyle,” Young said, according to reports in the Associated Press and the Montgomery Advertiser. “If they don’t like the laws of Alabama … then maybe they need to go back to California or Vermont or wherever they came from.”
I’m certain that there were a good many more I’ve not mentioned so please feel free to add to the list in the comments.
November 6th, 2013
THE DAILY AGENDA:
Events This Weekend: Buenos Aires Pride, Buenos Aires, Argentina; Florence Queer Film Festival, Florence, Italy; Indianapolis LGBT Film Festival, Indianapolis, IN; Mazipatra Queer Film Festival, Prague/Brno, Czech Republic; Bear Pride, San Francisco, CA; Open Mind Fest, Santiago, Chile.
London’s Piccadilly Circus.
TODAY IN HISTORY:
55 YEARS AGO: Britain Lift Ban on Plays Portraying Gay Themes: 1958. The Lord Chamberlain’s office, which acted as the nation’s official censor, notified the Theatres National Committee that the ban on the portrayal of homosexuality in plays in public productions was officially lifted. Previously, plays such as Arthur Miller’s “A View from the Bridge” or Tennessee Williams’ “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” had been produced in London, but only at private theater clubs and not in public theaters. The Earl of Scarborough, Sir Roger Lumley, who was serving as the Lord Chamberlain, wrote in a letter to the Committee, “This subject is now so widely debated, written about and talked of that its complete exclusion from the stage can no longer be regarded as justifiable. In future, therefore, plays on this subject which are sincere and serious will be admitted.”
One couple among many who registered their partnerships on the first day Domestic Partnerships became available.
San Francisco Voters Approve Domestic Partnerships: 1990. The road to providing even limited recognition of same-sex couples was long and plagued by seeming dead ends. In 1983, and in response to numerous reports of longtime partners being barred from their loved ones’ hospital rooms and funerals, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors enacted a Domestic Partnership ordinance. The law created a partnership registry and gave registered partners of city employees the same benefits as those available to spouses of married couples. It also ensured that domestic partners were granted the same visitation rights at city hospitals. But owing to tremendous pressure exerted by Catholic Archbishop John Quinn and much of the rest of the major religious leaders — including the Episcopal bishop — Mayor Dianne Feinstein vetoed the bill, much to the fury of San Francisco’s gay community.
Feinstein left office in 1988, and the following year the Board of Supervisors unanimously passed a Domestic Partnership ordinance which, this time, was signed into law by Mayor Art Agnos. But before it could take effect, the ordinance became the subject of a repeal initiative. That initiative narrowly won by fewer than 2,000 votes with an unusually high turnout for an off-year election. This time the gay community fought back in 1990 with Proposition K, which provided for a more limited version of Domestic Partnership without formal benefits. This time, Prop K prevailed, 60% to 40%. The registry went into effect the following Valentine’s Day.
Sunset Blvd.
West Hollywood Residents Approve Incorporation as a City: 1984. Voters in the an unincorporated area of Los Angeles known as West Hollywood voted to incorporate as a city and elected a city council in a combined election. Attention in the news media focus on the fact that three of the five new council members were gay or lesbian in the new municipality, while many gay leaders hailed the new city with gays making up an estimated 40% of the population as a “gay Camelot.” But the main issue that ignited the incorporation campaign in a city where 90% were renters was the decision by the County of Los Angeles to significantly reduce its rent-control regulations. Nevertheless, gay leaders saw incorporation as yet another stepping stone toward full acceptance.
Valerie Ferrigno, who was selected by the council to serve as mayor for the council-manager city government, became the first known lesbian mayor of an American city. “You don’t have to say avowed lesbian or admitted lesbian,” she said. “I am a lesbian. I won’t deny it.” She then summed up the significance: “We were illegal not too long ago. The first consenting adults bill wasn’t proposed until 1968. Ten years ago I couldn’t have been elected, and not because I was too young. We’ve come a long way in a very short time.” The city’s incorporation took effect on November 29.
1 YEAR AGO: Voters in Maine, Maryland and Washington Approve Marriage Equality: 2012. This year would prove to be Gettysburg of the battle for marriage equality when, for the first time in history, voters in three states turned back aggressive challenges by anti-gay forces and made their states the first in the nation to enact marriage quality by popular vote. In Maine, voters approved Question 1 by 53-47%, in a vote which reversed a 2009 ballot initiative banning same-sex marriage, which had passed by the very same margin. In Maryland, voters approved Question 6 and allowed that state’s marriage equality law to go forward in a 52-48% vote. Washington state voters came through even more strongly for Referendum 74 by approving marriage quality by a 54-46% vote.
And just to add icing on the cake, Minnesota voters voted against Amendment 1, which would have placed a permanent ban on same-sex marriage in that state’s constitution. Minnesotans rejected that ban 53-47%.
This marked the first time in history in which every attempt by anti-gay forces to deny marriage equality to same-sex couples went down in defeat. Same-sex marriages began in Washington on December 6, followed by Maine (December 29) and Maryland (January 1). Five months later, Minnesota joined the marriage equality movement after the legislature and governor gave their approval legalizing same-sex marriage.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS:
Jackie Forster: 1926-1998. She began her adult life as an aspiring actress in London’s West End before becoming (as Jacqueline MacKenzie, her maiden name) a television presenter and reporter in the mid-1950s. In 1957, she went on a lecture tour in North American and entered her first lesbian affair, but it wasn’t enough to convince her she was lesbian:
“I didn’t see myself as being a Lesbian, or her, because I didn’t look as I imagined they did, and nor did she. We weren’t short back and sides and natty gent’s suiting. I got the image from The Well of Loneliness, like we all did. There were drug stores around the States, with these pulp books, lurid stories about lesbians who smoked cigars and had orgies with young girls. I thought, Where are these women? We never met anyone we knew were lesbians. There were no other books that I found about lesbians, no films that we ever saw: nothing at all.”
She returned to Britain and married novelist Peter Forster in 1958. They divorce four years later when she decided she was one of them after all. She joined the Minorities Research Group, an early UK lesbian rights organization, and she came out publicly in 1969 as a member of the Campaign for Homosexual Equality. She was a founding member of London’s Gay Liberation Front in 1970 and co-founded Sappho, whose eponymous magazine became one of Britain’s longest running lesbian publications. In 1992 until her death, she was an active member of the Lesbian Archive and Information Centre, which is currently housed at the Glasgow Women’s Library.
Brad Davis: 1949-1991. Born Robert Davis and known as “Bobby” while growing up, Brad Davis took his stage name after learning that there already was a Bob Davis registered in Actors Equity. Acting was always his ambition, from appearing in productions at Theater Atlanta at the age of sixteen, and moving to New York to study at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and at the American Place Theater. Television roles soon followed, in a short-lived soap opera and in the miniseries Roots
Davis’s career should have taken off. Instead, it languished, somewhat due to homophobia — his bisexuality was generally known if not always acknowledged — and more directly due to his own drug and alcohol abuse. He sobered up in 1981 in time to take a minor role in Chariots of Fire
Michael Cunningham: 1952. He’s gay and he’s a writer, but don’t call him a gay writer. That’s not what he does. He wins Pulitzers for writing novels with the title of The Hours
Born in Cincinnati, raised in Pasadena, Cunningham studied English Lit at Stanford and received a Masters of Fine Arts from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. While studying for his Masters, he had short stories published in Atlantic Monthly (back when Atlantic used to publish short fiction) and Paris Review. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1993 and an NEA Fellowship in 1998. He has taught at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and at Brooklyn College. He currently teaches at Yale. His most recent novel, By Nightfall
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?
November 5th, 2013
After more than 55 hours of debate spread over five full days in which 5,182 Hawaiians sighed up to speak before the House Judiciary and Finance Committees, the last citizen was heard and committee members finally voted to advance the bill to the full House in an 18-12 vote. At least two amendments were made to the bill:
During the decision making process, the House committee amended the bill to broaden a religious exemption that allows “for profit” religious leaders to refuse service for same-sex marriage ceremonies and moved the effective date from Nov. 18 to Dec. 2.
Hawaii News Now adds details on a third amendment:
It also eliminates a provision regarding to parental rights that has been questioned because it would give Native Hawaiian status to children of same-sex couples with a non-biological Native Hawaiian parent that could provide them with undue benefits or privilege.
The bill completed its second reading tonight on the House floor. It will likely come up for a final vote on Thursday. If it survives that vote, it will then have to go back to the Senate for a concurrence vote before being sent to Gov. Neil Abercrombie.
Update: It looks like the bill’s second reading will actually occur tomorrow at 10:00 a.m. HST (noon PST, 3:00 p.m EST). It would put the final vote on Friday, since lawmakers are entitled to 48 hours’ notice due to the amendments.
November 5th, 2013
It's official: Marriage equality is coming to Illinois. #LoveIsLove pic.twitter.com/uAL0UhpCbA
— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) November 5, 2013
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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