Box Turtle Bulletin

The Daily Agenda for Tuesday, October 15

The first issue of ONE, January 1953.

TODAY IN HISTORY:
ONE Magazine Founded: 1952. The idea of publishing America’s first nationally-distributed magazine dedicated to issues confronting gay people took root when bored Mattachine members in Los Angeles were questioning whether the Society would ever amount to much. Martin Block, who was one of the earliest society members, recalled “We had these meetings and we’d kick some ideas around and sometimes they would be very stimulating but very often they wouldn’t be.”

Dale Jennings (see Oct 21) was similarly board and “didn’t have the patience to sit there night after night and hear everybody whine over and over again how tough it was to be homosexual.” Not that it wasn’t tough: Jennings had just come off of a rare victory when he was acquittal by a jury after being falsely entrapped by police on a morals charge (see Jun 23). But that, too, was part of the problem. Another member, Dorr Legg (a.k.a Bill Lambert, whose  home they were meeting in) agreed. “We were just in a fury and everybody began sputtering: ‘We’ve got to tell them!’ Up speaks this little pipsqueak: ‘Well, you need a magazine.’ It was just like a match to gasoline.”

Here is how ONE later picked up the story:

The following Wednesday an ardent handful of vaguely enthusiastic people assembled just a stone’s throw from Hollywood’s Sunset Strip. They decided that a mimeographed newsletter with exposes of local police methods, general articles and some news Items might be tried. There was much desultory talk about Art, Oppression and The Partisan Review.

The following day the host for the evening, whose chance remark it was that had set off the whole chain reaction, resigned. He found, on reflection, that the whole Idea was unintelligent, philosophically untenable and useless! This is just a little sidelight on the history of ONE, illustrating a type of the problems encountered.

Quite undaunted, the remaining few met with an attorney a few nights later. They asked some floundering questions that now look rather absurd but then seemed Important. And during the rest of 1952 they continued meeting every few days, right on through the holidays as well. Supporters resigned, or just plain “fell by the wayside”. New faces appeared, and then were seen no more. Time was wasted on trivia, even frivolity. Yet, through it all their leitmotif, “There MUST be a magazine,” somehow persisted.

What would be its name? This was a tedious, wearying hassle, over endless cups of coffee. The “dignified and ambiguous” school argued against the “Iet’s-be-frank” group, The thesaurus and the Oxord Dictionary became the constant companions of everyone in the group.

You will laugh at some of the proposals. We did. Such as “Raport” — (too much like a Bronx family name, someone quipped). “The Bridge” — (is it an engineering journal?) There were many others, and even more preposterous. It was finally voted, in sheer desperation — for it had to be admitted that it hardly seemed sensible to debate endlessly over the name for a publication that did not yet exist — that the unborn infant would be christened, “The Wedge.” But try as best we might there was little enthusiasm about the decision.

The next assignment had been to discover a masthead-slogan. So the researches began again. Guy Rousseau, a hard-working young negro member of the group came up with one from Thomas Carlyle. It ran, “A mystic bond of brotherhood makes all men one.”

The masthead for ONE’s inaugural issue, January 1953. The Thomas Carlyle quote would be featured in every issue throughout ONE’s existence. (Click to enlarge.)

As a flash of inspiration it hit everyone at once. That was it! For there was the rapport. There was the wedge. And the bridge. “Makes all men one.” The name would be … ONE, for that is what everyone had wanted all along, a means for bringing about oneness, a coming together with understanding. The bitterness and hatreds, the persecution and injustices and discrimination would be stopped by dispelling ignorance , by showing THE OTHERS that all of us are humans alike, all of us living together on the same earth, under the same skies.

Surely there was “a mystic bond of brotherhood,” and ONE would tell them about it, at last all should see that men are brothers indeed, slde-by-side, all of them reaching toward the very same stars in the heavens. ONE would do this!

It was a rather dramatic moment. The little handful sat looking at each other in startled discovery. Something tremendous loomed up and around and among them, a challenge, electric with power and momentum. They well realized that there were obstacles before them, obstacles of almost terrifying proportions. There was no one who felt very confident. But a new concept had been born, a concept that thenceforth took possession of their loyalties and irresistibly carried them along.

Don Slater, W. Dorr Legg, and Jim Kepner. Circa 1957-1958. (via ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives)

Legg became ONE’s business manager. Three others present were Martin Block (he became ONE’s president), Dale Jennings (vice president) and Don Slater (secretary, see Aug 21)), who together made up ONE’s Editorial Board. Guy Rousseau (real name: Bailey Whitaker) became circulation manager. Jean Corbin (as “Eve Ellore”) joined the group as the magazine’s primary artist. Other important contributors included Jim Kepner, Fred Frisbie (as “George Mortenson”), Irma “Corky” Wolf (as “Ann Carll Reid”), and Stella Rush (as “Sten Russell”). As you can tell, pseudonyms were common, though not always for reasons you might think. While some authors consistently wrote under one pseudonym, Jennings, Block, Legg, Kempner and others often wrote under multiple personas, often in addition to their real names, in order to give readers the impression that ONE’s staff was larger than it actually was.

ONE debuted in January of 1953, and included an article by Dale Jennings describing his 1952 arrest by Los Angeles police. In 1958, ONE made history when it won an important Supreme Court victory when the Court decided that the U.S. Post Office could not refuse to distribute ONE because homosexual content, per se, was not pornographic (see Jan 13). ONE, Inc. also established the ONE Institute of Homophile Studies, which sponsored a series of seminars and graduate studies programs. ONE ceased publication in 1968.

[Sources: James T. Sears: Behind the Mask of the Mattachine: The Hal Call Chronicles and the Early Movement for Homosexual Emancipation (New York: Harrington Park Press, 2006): 166-167.

“How ONE began.” ONE 3, no. 2 (February 1955): 8-15.]

Press conference announcing the formation of the National Gay Task Force. Front row L-R: Ron Gold, Howard Brown, Bruce Voeller, Nathalie Rockhill. Seated behind L-R: Martin Duberman, Barbara Gittings, Frank Kameny. (Click to enlarge.)

40 YEARS AGO: Press Conference Announcing Formation of National Gay Task Force: 1973. Dr. Howard Brown made the front page of The New York Times two weeks earlier when the the former Health Administrator for New York Mayor John Lindsay’s administration came out of the closet. Brown had resigned in 1967 when he learned than an investigative reporter planned to expose homosexuals in City Hall.  His secret was not revealed, which meant the reasons for his resignation remained a mystery until he came out 1973. The response, he said, was overwhelmingly favorable, so much so that he decided to establish a new gay advocacy group. This new group, the National Gay Task Force (later to become the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, or NGLTF) would be the first such organization with a truly national scope. According to an article in The Village Voice:

The Gay Task Force will work nationally on gay civil rights legislation and discrimination against gay parents in custody and visitation cases, and will coordinate information from all parts of the country about the progress toward gay civil rights. According to a spokesman for the group, a major coming out of the closet of other well-known people is expected in the near future.

Dr. Bruce Voeller served as its first Executive Director. Other leaders of the new organization included historian Martin Duberman, pioneering activist Barbara Gittings, and Ronald Gold who would had already played a pivotal role in the APA’s pending delisting of homosexuality as a mental illness later that year.

“No I don’t have it. Do you?” White House Spokesman Larry Speakes plays the comedian over AIDS.

AIDS a Laughing Matter at the White House: 1982. The very first public mention of AIDS at the White House was not an auspicious one. It was the subject of jokes and laughter between the press and White House Deputy Press Secretary Larry Speaks:

Q: Larry, does the President have any reaction to the announcement ­ the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, that AIDS is now an epidemic and have over 600 cases?

SPEAKES: What’s AIDS?

Q: Over a third of them have died. It’s known as “gay plague.” (Laughter.) No, it is. I mean it’s a pretty serious thing that one in every three people that get this have died. And I wondered if the President is aware of it?

SPEAKES: I don’t have it. Do you? (Laughter.)

Q: No, I don’t.

SPEAKES: You didn’t answer my question.

Q: Well, I just wondered, does the President ­

SPEAKES: How do you know? (Laughter.)

Q: In other words, the White House looks on this as a great joke?

SPEAKES: No, I don’t know anything about it, Lester.

Q: Does the President, does anyone in the White House know about this epidemic, Larry?

SPEAKES: I don’t think so. I don’t think there’s been any ­

Q: Nobody knows?

SPEAKES: There has been no personal experience here, Lester.

Q: No, I mean, I thought you were keeping ­

SPEAKES: I checked thoroughly with Dr. Ruge this morning and he’s had no ­ (laughter) ­ no patients suffering from AIDS or whatever it is.

Q: The President doesn’t have gay plague, is that what you’re saying or what?

SPEAKES: No, I didn’t say that.

Q: Didn’t say that?

SPEAKES: I thought I heard you on the State Department over there. Why didn’t you stay there? (Laughter.)

Q: Because I love you Larry, that’s why (Laughter.)

SPEAKES: Oh I see. Just don’t put it in those terms, Lester. (Laughter.)

Q: Oh, I retract that.

SPEAKES: I hope so.

Q: It’s too late.

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?

Moldova Quietly Repeals “Homosexual Propaganda” Law

On May 23, Moldova’s parliament approved a so-called “homosexual propaganda” law modeled after the one that became law in Russia in June. In contrast to Russia, Moldova lawmakers passed theirs much more quietly. President  Nicolae Timofti signed it on July 5. Local activists didn’t learn of it until the law was officially published on July 12, the day it went into effect. The law however jeopardized Moldova’s bid to earn Association status with the European Union, so lawmakers quietly rescinded it last Friday:

The decision on October 11 was made by lawmakers while dozens of Orthodox priests and Communist lawmakers were blocking the entrance to the Palace of the Republic in Chisinau, trying to thwart the parliament session. The lawmakers entered the building through the back door.

The Orthodox faithful were protesting the parliament’s discussion of a European Union-backed law on nondiscrimination that would guarantee the rights of Moldova’s gay citizens.

Gay-baiting political group identified and fined

A group founded to use gay-baiting tactics against San Diego Republican mayoral candidate Carl DeMaio has been fined for failing to follow campaign laws. (LATimes)

Conservatives for Gay Rights Supporting Carl DeMaio for Mayor 2012 paid for “robo-calls” and leaflets reminding voters that DeMaio is gay.

The calls asked voters twice, “If you knew Carl DeMaio was the first openly gay man to be elected to our San Diego City Council, would you be more likely or less likely to vote for Carl DeMaio or does this fact make no difference?”

The leaflets showed DeMaio standing near a man dressed in drag.

The group was comprised of neither conservatives nor supporters of Carl DeMaio. While the Los Angeles Times declined to print the names of those responsible, the San Diego Union-Tribune was more forthcoming: (SDUT)

The Ethics Commission investigation revealed that Democratic consultant Jesus Cardenas and Cynara Velazquez, a Democratic organizer with ties to medical marijuana advocacy groups, directed the group’s activities. Cardenas’ company, Innovation Media Group, received tens of thousands of dollars last year for its work on behalf of the San Diego County Democratic Party. Velazquez organized a fundraiser for Filner’s mayoral bid on behalf of the Patient Care Association in April 2012. She had organized an Oct. 20 event for City Councilman David Alvarez’s current mayoral bid, but a release from the campaign said the event has been canceled.

Filner beat DeMaio in November 51% to 49%, but it isn’t possible to know to what extent the gay-baiting tactics by Candenas and Velazquez play a role, if any, in the outcome.

Filner’s term was brief. On August 23rd he resigned after fourteen separate women from around the country came forward with stories of sexual harassment and impropriety, including a member of his staff and several women who had met with him in his official capacity as mayor and formerly as a House of Representatives member.

DeMaio is currently running in the Republican primary for the 52nd Congressional District.

The Daily Agenda for Monday, October 14

Dr. Norman Reider

TODAY IN HISTORY:
When Gay Men Fake Their Cures: 1956. Dr. Norman Reider, who headed the Department of Psychiatry at San Francisco’s Mt. Zion Hospital, gave a very perceptive (for 1956) talk at a meeting of the California Academy of General Practices in Los Angeles. He began his talk, titled “Problems of Homosexuality,” by reminding his audience that the problems were as much society’s problems as they were the homosexuals’ problems:

Hardly any medical subject is more ambiguous and confused than that of homosexuality, and it is a most difficult subject for the clinician to delineate in a scientific or even empirical way. For centuries homosexuality has been more a moral and legal than a medical concern. Throughout the ages people have tried to make criminal law enforce their ambitions regarding moral law, especially in their attempts to control sexual behavior. Among sex laws, none are so punitive or inequitable as those concerning homosexual acts, particularly male homosexual activities. Religious traditions and attitudes against homosexuality have thus been extended into substantive law out of all proportion to the social damage involved in most homosexual acts. Sin is confused with crime, and vague laws about sexual behavior give law enforcement officers a dangerous discretionary power. …

The great majority of homosexual acts do not endanger the social structure or disrupt the family. No doubt many early societies considered homosexual activity a threat to family and societal solidarity, and taboos arose; but when these are examined they can be seen as part and parcel of man’s fears of his own impulses-drives for which he sought controls. Modern studies like those of the late Dr. Kinsey and his associates serve to show that society has little to fear from homosexual activity. Yet the fear remains, in that a homosexual person continues to be the object of extraordinary punishment or the butt of derisive jokes and contempt. We should remember, when we participate in such attacks, that we follow the age-old formula of trying to fight off or laugh off something that we either do not understand or fear.

Later in his talk, Reider explained how the overwhelmingly hostile attitudes toward gay men in particular have preventing the medical community from understanding exactly how ineffective they have been in trying to “cure” them. One such avenue that was tried in the 1940s and 1950s was hormonal treatment, particularly with the administration of androgens such as testosterone, on the theory that gay men were gay because they weren’t “masculine” enough:

A story of my clinical experience in southern California some years ago will illustrate the complications involved in the evaluation of hormonal treatment. The medical literature at that time contained favorable reports of treatment of homosexuality by androgens, and it acquired a certain vogue. Several California jurists who knew the futility of sentencing homosexuals to jail began sentencing the convicted person to undergo treatment. Some persons were sentenced to have hormonal treatment, others to have psychiatric treatment. As a result of these efforts further articles reported successful treatment with androgens — successes that I as a psychiatrist envied.

One day a young man came to my office to consult me about a problem that only skirted on his homosexuality. A confirmed homosexual, he had little anxiety about his activities because he considered himself a constitutional homosexual and felt relatively blameless. In the exploratory course of our discussion he said that he had once been treated by androgens, not entirely of his own will, as the result of a court sentence. He then described how he and several of his associates had contrived to “respond” to the treatment, varying their stories so as to give them the hue of veracity. He said that he arrived late for his first appointment and grumbled at the injection. The nurse reminded him to return for his next one “or else.” Next time he complained of noticing no improvement at all. On the third visit he told the nurse he was depressed and said that he and his boy friend had fallen out and might separate. Next time he was more depressed and was moving out, he said, because he could not tolerate his boy friend. The fifth time he carefully implied he was less depressed, and reported no difference except that he had no desire for anything or anybody. On the sixth visit he told the nurse: “A simply fantastic thing happened. I’ve been going to a local bookstore for years and never noticed before a very pretty girl who works as a clerk there.” By the seventh visit he reported making a date with the girl and at the end of treatment he claimed satisfactory sexual relations with her. This case figured in a published report of successful treatment. Meantime this patient and his companions who had also been treated went on with their homosexual activities, except that some of them suffered from an increased drive — the result of the injections of androgens.

Unfortunately, Reider doesn’t provide a reference for the published report which featured this patient.

[Sources: Norman Reider. “Problems of homosexuality.” California Medicine, 86, no. 6 (June 1957): 381-384. Available online here.]

Anita Bryant Gets a Pie in the Face: 1977. After leading a successful campaign to revoke Miami’s anti-discrimination ordinance earlier that summer (see Jun 7), anti-gay activist Anita Bryant and her husband, Bob Green, took their show on the road to repeal other local anti-discrmination ordinances in St. Paul, MN (see Apr 25), Wichita, KS (see May 9), and Eugene, OR.

The Miami campaign had been particularly nasty, even by the standards of the day with Bryant claiming that because “homosexuals cannot biologically reproduce children, therefore they must recruit our children.” That campaign forever linked Bryant’s name with vicious homophobia, and made her public enemy number one in the gay community. But during an appearance in Des Moines, Iowa, Bryant’s was trying to soft-pedal her message: “If we were going to go on a crusade across America to try to do away with the homosexuals, then we certainly would have done it on June the eighth after one of the most overwhelming victories in the country. But we didn’t. We tried to avoid it…” Thank you, Anita, for small favors, I guess.

Thom Higgins of Minneapolis wasn’t so thankful. It was about at that point, with television cameras rolling, when he threw a pie directly into her face. Stunned at first, Bryant tried to make light of it by saying “At least it was a fruit pie.” At Green’s suggestion, Bryant began praying for God to forgive the activist’s “deviant lifestyle” before bursting into tears. Green urged that no one retaliate against Higgins, but later in the parking lot Green caught up with the protesters and threw a reserve banana cream pie at them.

First Gay Rights March on Washington: 1979. About 75,000 people from across the country and around the world marched down Pennsylvania Avenue for a rally at the Washington Monument for the first national gay rights march in U.S. history. The parade itself featured a 100-piece Great American Yankee (GAY) Freedom Band from Los Angeles, which was accompanied by a 20-member drill team and two male baton twirlers. The Los Angeles Gay Men’s Chorus also provided entertainment from the stage on the mall, where dozens of speakers called for an end to homophobia and discrimination. Demands included the repeal of sodomy laws, approval of a proposed expansion of the Civil Rights Act to cover sexual orientation, and an end to discrimination in child custody cases.. They also called on President Jimmy Carter to issue an Executive order ending the ban on gays in the military and ending discrimination in the civil service and among government contractors.

Steve Ault, the march’s organizer, declared “This rally marks the first time that the gay constituency has pulled together on a national level and that is a very important political step for us.”

Anti-gay religious leaders also saw the importance of the march, and called a news conference and prayer session in a nearby congressional office building. Rev. Jerry Falwell told reporters that christians nationwide prayed for the marchers, “asking the Lord to deliver them from their lives of perversion.” He likened gay people to bank robbers, thieves and other “sinners, and said that they represented “an outright assault on the family.” His biggest sound-bite though was not particularly creative: “God did not create Adam and Steve, but Adam and Eve,” he said. It made about as little sense then as it does today.

The entire demonstration went off peacefully, with a few minor exceptions. Just as the last few hundred were leaving the Mall, someone fired a tear gas canister. Amy Clark, 21, from Brattleboro, Vermont, said, “Everybody thought it was just a smoke bomb, but then the people around me started choking. The wind soon blew the fumes away.

Congress Bans Federal Funds for AIDS Programs that “Promote Homosexuality”: 1987. The U.S. Senate voted 94-2 on an an amendment proposed by Sen. Jesse Helms to restrict federal funds for AIDS education to materials stressing sexual abstinence and which did not “promote homosexuality.” Citing comic books produced by the Gay Men’s Health Crisis in New York — material that had not been paid for by federal funds — Helms complained, “If the American people saw these books, they would be on the verge of revolt.” He claimed the books showed “graphic detail of a sexual encounter between two homosexual men. The comic books do not encourage a change in that perverted behavior. In fact, the comic books promote sodomy.”

The only senators voting against the measure were Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY) and Sen. Lowell Weiker (R-CT), who said, “If you’re going to censor that education, you’ve got no solution” to the AIDs crisis. The amendment would later be approved by the House on a 358-47 vote. It would remain the law of the land until 1992, when a federal court ruled that the restrictions were so vague they violated AIDS service organizations’ First and Fifth Amendment rights.

Gay Son Denounces California Marriage Ban Sponsor: 1999. When California State Sen. Pete Knight was first elected to the state Senate in 1996, he twice tried but failed to pass an amendment to the California Family Law statute to restrict marriage to a man and a woman. Those failures convinced Knight that the only way to pass his cherished legislation was to go around the legislature entirely and put the proposed law on the ballot as a state initiative. He then formed a campaign committee which spent  eleven months collecting thousands of signatures.  In November of 1998, the popularly-called Knight Initiative qualified for the March 2000 ballot as Proposition 22. That marked the start of a bruising campaign aimed squarely, once again, at California’s gay community.

There was one person in the gay community who took Knights efforts more personally than anyone else. That was Knights son, David Knight, a Gulf War veteran who published an op-ed in The Los Angeles Times, blasting his father for pushing Prop 22 to further his conservative political ends despite having a gay son, as well as a gay brother who died of AIDS.  “I believe, based on my experience, that his is a blind, uncaring, uninformed knee-jerk reaction to a subject about which he knows nothing and wants to know nothing about but which serves his political career,” the younger Knight wrote. He also said that three years earlier — you can do the math: that would be at about the time Knight first tried to ban same-sex marriage in the state legislature — David told his father that he was gay and had a life partner. From that point on, “my relationship with my father was over. I can’t begin to explain the hurt that has come from this rejection.”

The elder Knight’s response to his son’s op-ed could barely conceal his embarrassment. “I regret that my son felt he needed to force a private, family matter into the public forum through an editorial. Although I don’t believe he was fair in describing the true nature of our relationship, that is a subject which should remain between the two of us. I care deeply about my son.”

Prop 22 would go on to pass in March of 2000, 61% to 39%. But because it was an initiative rather than a constitutional amendment, it could be struck down if the California Supreme Court were to decide that it ran contrary to the state constitution. The Court did precisely that on May 15, 2008, which then opened the fight for Prop 8 later that year.

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?

The Daily Agenda for Sunday, October 13

TODAY’S AGENDA:
Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Ashland, OR; Atlanta, GA; Baltimore, MD (Black Pride); Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

AIDS Walks This Weekend: Beijing, China; Louisville, KY; Tucson, AZ.

Other Events This Weekend: Iris Prize Film Festival, Cardiff, UK; MIX Copenhagen Film Festival, Copenhagen, Denmark; Octobearfest, Denver, CO; Ft. Lauderdale Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, Ft. Lauderdale, FL; QCinema Film Festival, Ft. Worth, TX; Black and Blue Festival, Montréal, QC; Seattle Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, Seattle, WA.

TODAY IN HISTORY:
Protest at U.S. Supreme Court: 1987. Somewhere around 500,000 people had gathered for the second March on Washington that weekend, making it the largest gay-rights demonstration in U.S. history (see Oct 11). In the final act of the weekend’s demonstrations on Sunday, between two and three thousand people staged a demonstration outside of the U.S. Supreme Court to protest the Bowers V. Hardwick decision a year earlier (see Jun 30). The protest itself was very orderly: after listening to speakers at the Capital Building’s East Steps, groups of between twenty and thirty protesters marched across the street to the Supreme Court plaza where they were met by police and arrested. This went on for wave after wave of demonstrators from 10:00 a.m. and about 2:00 p.m. Ignoring advice from health experts, police wore surgical gloves as they made the arrests, which only fueled shouts from the crowd of “‘Shame, shame!” and ”Your gloves don’t match your shoes!” Among those arrested was Michael Hardwick, whose arrest had led to the Supreme Court case.

By the end of the day, the protest resulted in the the largest mass arrest at the Supreme Court building since the May Day anti-war protest in 1971. It was also a remarkably disciplined act of civil disobedience.  “Civil disobedience is not new to gays and lesbians,” said Pat Norman of San Francisco, a co-chairman of the march. “Each and every day we commit the act of civil disobedience by loving each other.”

France Approves Civil Partnerships: 1999. After spending two years debating one of the most bitterly-contested pieces of legislation in years, France’s National Assembly passed the Civil Solidarity Pact by a vote of 315-249. The bill allowed unmarried couples to register their union to access some of the tax, legal and social welfare benefits of marriage. The bill however explicitly excluded adoption rights, and it was broadened to include any pair of adults living in the same household — including brothers and sisters or an elderly parent and a child — in an attempt to placate the opposition. Following its enactment, most of couples taking advantage of the Solidarity Pact were heterosexual couples. In 2013, France legalized full marriage equality for same-sex couples.

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?

The Daily Agenda for Saturday, October 12

TODAY’S AGENDA:
Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Ashland, OR; Atlanta, GA; Baltimore, MD (Black Pride); Ft. Meyers, FL; Jacksonville, FL; Memphis, TN; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Tucson, AZ.

AIDS Walks This Weekend: Beijing, China; Louisville, KY; Tucson, AZ.

Other Events This Weekend: Alaska Pride Conference, Anchorage, AK; Iris Prize Film Festival, Cardiff, UK; MIX Copenhagen Film Festival, Copenhagen, Denmark; Octobearfest, Denver, CO; Ft. Lauderdale Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, Ft. Lauderdale, FL; QCinema Film Festival, Ft. Worth, TX; Black and Blue Festival, Montréal, QC; Seattle Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, Seattle, WA; Tampa International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, Tampa, FL.

TODAY IN HISTORY:
Special Police Squad Trained to Target Gays: 1961. Gay bars were treacherous places. They were, for most patrons, the only place where they could socialize, but they couldn’t socialize freely. You always had to be on your guard. If you were to see someone you liked, and you struck up a conversation and felt that certain chemistry, and if he put his hand on your knee and you took that as an opening to invite him to your place, that invitation to an undercover agent in California would lead to a raid and the state’s Alcoholic Beverage Control Department (ABC) revoking the bar’s license.

Things used to be easier for the ABC. There was a time when all they had to do to shut a bar down was to demonstrate that the patrons were mainly gay. But the state Supreme Court ruled in 1951 that the ABC had to provide evidence that there were “offensive and disorderly acts” taking place (see Aug 28). And so the ABC deployed undercover agents to dig up that evidence, which often consisted of nothing more than an invitation to retire elsewhere — or accepting such an invitation from an agent. Those agents were particularly aggressive in San Francisco, so much so that they became fairly well known. Their covers mostly blown, the ABC turned to the San Francisco police department, which was already happily conducting raids on gay bars on its own (see Aug 13). A report by the San Francisco Examiner revealed that the ABC agreed to train handsome young officers who were new to the force (and were therefore not well known) “on what to look for, and how to act and dress” while undercover. The Examiner reported that the joint operation was showing results, with charges field against three more “alleged ‘gay’ bars.”

The accusations, base d largely on observations and experiences of undercover policemen, were filed by the ABC against the Hideaway, 438 Eddy St.; the Jumping Frog, 2111 Polk St., and Cal’s Tavern, 782 O’Farrell St.

Norbert Falvey, ABC supervisor here, said city policemen are being used because “our manpower is limited, and our State liquor agents here are known.”

Falvey said the liaison and joint “attrition” by his department and Police Chief Thomas Cahill is showing results, with the number of “gay” bars decreasing. Last year, there were 30 such establishments here. That number now has dropped to 18, with 15 license revocation proceedings pending, Falvey said.

The timing of The Examiner’s article hit a particular nerve, as San Francisco was experiencing a wave of robberies and assaults on the Muni system, including one horrific murder the previous April. The mayor ordered the Chief Cahill to step up patrols, but the chief said he was short of personnel. Letters poured in to The Examiner’s editor from concerned citizens complaining about the department’s skewed priorities. One letter writer, protesting that while he would never himself go into a gay bar, denounced “these Gestapo-like tactics (as) inimical to the American way of life, an infringement on the basic constitutional rights of every citizen to free assembly and free speech.” A mother of four teenagers said that she “would rather have my children protected on Muni buses than from the dangers in bars where they would never go in the first place.” And a doctor, recalling the murder on the “J” line in April, asked:

If the present attempts to revoke licenses are a success, then the closing of gay bars will be synonymous with a great increase in contacts with teen-agers in the streets by evicted homosexuals resulting in more muggings, extortion and other types of brutality a la “J” line. Are law-enforcement agencies not exchanging one evil for a far more serious one?”

[Source: Ernest Lenn. “Revoking Evidence Sought: Special Cops for ‘Gay’ Bars.” The San Fransisco Examiner (October 12, 1961). As reprinted with accompanying unsigned commentary in The Mattachine Review 7, no 11 (November 1961): 4-8.]

15 YEARS AGO: Matthew Shephard Died: 1998. For a week Matthew Shepard’s family had been maintaining a vigil at his bedside as he lay in a coma following a brutal assault at an open field outside of Laramie, Wyoming (see Oct 6). He suffered fractures from the back of his head to the front of his right ear from being pistol-whipped by a 357-Magnum more than twenty times. He had severe brain stem damage which affected his body’s ability to control heart rate, breathing, temperature, and other involuntary functions. There were lacerations around his head, face and neck. He had welts on his back and arm, and bruised knees and groin. He had also suffered from hypothermia. His injuries were too severe for doctors to operate. They did however insert a drain into Matthew’s skull to relieve the pressure on his brain. Finally, the Poudre Valley Hospital’s CEO Rulon Stacey released this medical update during a hastily called press conference at 4:30 a.m.:

At 12 midnight on Monday, October 12, Matthew Shepard’s blood pressure began to drop. We immediately notified his family who were already at the hospital. At 12:53 a.m. Matthew Shepard died, his family was at his bedside.

Matthew arrived at 9:15 p.m. Wednesday, October 7, in critical condition. Matthew remained in critical condition during his entire stay at Poudre Valley Hospital. During his stay, efforts to improve his condition proved to no avail. Matthew died while on full life support measures.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Michael Sandy: 1977. He would have turned thirty-six years old today if it hadn’t been for the fact that on October 8, 2006. he was lured to a secluded Plumb Beach in Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn by four others who he met in an AOL chat room. When he arrived at the beach, the four pulled him out of his car and assaulted him. When he tried to escape, they chased him toward a busy freeway while he tried to call for help on his cell phone. They caught up with him at a guardrail. One of them pushed him over the guard rail and into the right lane, and punched him again. He fell back into the middle lane and was struck by an SUV. His attackers then dragged him back to the side of the road, where one of them riffled through his pockets before they fled.

Sandy was taken to Brookdale Hospital and put on a respirator. He remained on life support for five days without regaining consciousness. He died on October 13, just one day after his twenty-ninth birthday, after his family decided to remove life support.

The police investigation showed that the four selected Sandy because he was gay, believing that a gay man would hesitate to resist or call the police. Gary Timmins, 17, pleaded guilty to attempted robbery with a hate crime enhancement. As part of his plea agreement, he testified against his friends in exchange for a four-year prison sentence. John Fox, 20, who posed as a gay man in the chat room, was found guilty of manslaughter and first degree attempted robbery, both as hate crimes. He was was sentenced to between 13 and 21 years in prison. Anthony Fortunato, 21, tried to avoid the hate crime enhancement by claiming he was gay himself. He was the one who initiated contact with Sandy in the Internet chat room. He was convicted of manslaughter and petty larceny, and was sentenced to 7 to 21 years. Ilya Shurov, 21, pleaded guilty to manslaughter and attempted robbery as hate crimes. He was the one who pulled Sandy out of his car, punched him, and led the chase onto the freeway. He also went through Sandy’s pockets at the side of the freeway. Before accepting his plea deal, he had been charged with felony murder as a hate crime and was facing a life sentence. He was sentenced to 17½ years.

Before the sentences were handed down, Sandy’s father, Zeke Sandy, stood up in court and said, “These hate crimes become a cancer; it’s a disease. I don’t know why we have to go butcher one another because we don’t like what they are, who they are.” Despite the police and prosecutor’s determination that this was a hate crime, Michael Sandy’s high-profile death was not included in the FBI’s 2006 hate crimes statistics.

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?

Harvey Milk Gets a Stamp

Stuart Milk, the gay nephew of slain San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk, made the announcement on Facebook:

Breaking! It is official! The USPS will confirm this week that my uncle, Harvey Milk will be commemorated on a 2014 US postage stamp. Another first! My deep gratitude to everyone that supported this effort! More details including the image to come via USPS soon! “Hope Will Never Be Silent” and that enduring message of hope will be on millions of letters represented by Harvey’s image!

The first openly gay American citizen to appear on a US stamp, as far as I know, is Bayard Rustin’s in 2001. (Please speak up in comments if you know of an earlier one.) Milk will be the first openly gay elected official to appear on a US postage stamp. So now when you sit down at your chippendale desk to pen your letter to the Family Research Council on lavender-scented stationary, you’ll once again have an appropriate stamp to adorn your envelope.

UPDATE: My source was wrong. There was no Bayard Rustin stamp. That’s a gross oversight that should be corrected. However, we do have these:

– Poet Walt Whitman: 1940
– Blues singer Bessie Smith: 1994
– Playwright Tennessee Williams: 1995
– Conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein: 2001
– Artist Andy Warhol: 2002
– Author James Baldwin: 2004

The Daily Agenda for Friday, October 11

TODAY’S AGENDA:
National Coming Out Day: Everywhere. Today is the twenty-fifth annual National Coming Out day. The date was chosen to commemorate the second March on Washington, which drew some half a million LGBT people and their supporters to the nation’s capital (see below), That march inspired the blossoming of a number of LGBT advocacy groups around the country. Among them was a group of 100 LGBT advocates who, four months later, gathered in the D.C. suburb of Manassas, Virginia, to figure out how to ensure that the energy from that March didn’t just dissipate into thin air. Dr. Robert Eichberg, an author and psychologist from New Mexico, and Los Angeles LGBT advocate Jean O’Leary, hit on the idea of a national day to celebrate those who came out and to encourage others to begin to take their first steps toward visibility. As Dr. Eichberg later explained:

Most people think they don’t know anyone gay or lesbian, and in fact everybody does. It is imperative that we come out and let people know who we are and disabuse them of their fears and stereotypes.”

The first National Coming Out Day was on October 11, 1988, the first anniversary of the second March on Washington, and it quickly expanded to all fifty states.  Is there anyone you still need to come out to?

“God Loves Uganda” Documentary Theatrical Debut: New York, NY. God Loves Uganda exposes the role that the American Evangelical movement has played, in partnership with Ugandan preachers and politicians, in trying to eliminate “sexual sin” in that country, with a special emphasis on LGBT people. As the Anti-Homosexuality Bill, with its death penalty still intact, gained widespread support in Uganda, God Loves Uganda follows its impact on Ugandans and the American preachers who have whipped up support for its passage:

Through verité, interviews, and hidden camera footage – and with unprecedented access – God Loves Uganda takes viewers inside the evangelical movement in both the US and Uganda. It offers a portrait of Lou Engle, creator of The Call, a public event that brings tens of thousands of believers together to pray against sexual sin. It provides a rare view of the most powerful evangelical minister in Uganda, who lives in a mansion where he’s served by a white-coated chef. It goes into a Ugandan church where a preacher whips a congregation into mass hysteria with anti-gay rhetoric.

God Loves Uganda records the culture clash between enthusiastic Midwestern missionaries and world weary Ugandans. It features a heartbreaking interview with gay activist David Kato shortly before he was murdered. It tells the moving story of Bishop Christopher Senyonjo, a minister excommunicated, ostracized and literally spat on for being tolerant – and chronicles his remarkable campaign for peace and healing in Uganda. Shocking, horrifying, touching and enlightening, God Loves Uganda will make you question what you thought you knew about religion.

Longtime readers of BTB who followed our extensive reporting on leading up to the introduction of the Anti-Homosexuality Bill and its aftermath will recognize many of the names mentioned and the roles they played. (Disclosure: I played a role in helping the producers obtain raw video of the infamous 2009 conference that started it all, although it looks to me they were ultimately able to get a higher resolution version elsewhere.) This weekend, God Loves Uganda will open in theaters across the country, starting tonight in New York at the Bow Tie Cinemas in Chelsea. Future theatrical screenings are scheduled for Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Nashville, Seattle, San Francisco, Pleasantville, NY, and Columbus, OH, with other screenings elsewhere. I haven’t seen the final film, but I look forward to doing so as soon as possible. You can find a screening near you here.

Legacy Walk Dedication: Chicago, IL. In 1988, a community project began erecting seventeen rainbow-colored Art Deco pylons along North Halstead Street in the heart of Chicago’s Boystown. Today, those iconic pylons are the site of what the Legacy Project calls the “the world’s only outdoor museum walk celebrating the diverse accomplishments of the GLBT community.” Last year, cast bronze plaques were affixed to eighteen of those pylons, with each plaque consisting of a laser-case image of an honoree along with a brief description of that individual’s contributions. Those plaques honored such diverse figures as Alvin Ailey, Jr., James Baldwin, Barbara Gittings, Christine Jorgensen, Leonard Matlovich, Harvey Milk, Bayard Rustin, Alan Turing, and Oscar Wilde.

Today, Legacy Walk will dedicate five more bronze plaques honoring poet Walt Whitman, playwright Lorraine Hansberry, Gay Games founder Tom Waddell, youth advocate Ruth Ellis, and gay rights activist Frank Kameny. The dedication will take place this afternoon, beginning at 5:30 p.m. at the pylon located at 3342 N. Halsted for the first plaque, and continuing on to the final plaque at 3617 N. Halsted. A celebration reception, hosted by WGN-TV’s Sean Lewis, will be held tomorrow from 3:00 to 6:00 p.m. at Sidetracks, 3349 N. Halsted. Click here for more information.

Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Ashland, OR; Atlanta, GA; Baltimore, MD (Black Pride); Ft. Meyers, FL; Jacksonville, FL; Memphis, TN; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Tucson, AZ.

AIDS Walks This Weekend: Beijing, China; Louisville, KY; Tucson, AZ.

Other Events This Weekend: Alaska Pride Conference, Anchorage, AK; Iris Prize Film Festival, Cardiff, UK; MIX Copenhagen Film Festival, Copenhagen, Denmark; Octobearfest, Denver, CO; Ft. Lauderdale Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, Ft. Lauderdale, FL; QCinema Film Festival, Ft. Worth, TX; Black and Blue Festival, Montréal, QC; Seattle Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, Seattle, WA; Tampa International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, Tampa, FL.

ECHO ’64 conference program. (via Frank Kamey’s papers)

TODAY IN HISTORY:
Future Ex-Gay Leader Speaks At Gay Rights Conference: 1964. The day before, the East Coast Homophile Organizations (ECHO) kicked off a pivotal two-day conference in Washington, D.C. which would lay the groundwork for a much more confrontational style of gay rights advocacy than had ever been seen before (see Oct 10). In prior pro-gay gatherings, gay rights organizations used to portray themselves as “impartial” and “reasonable” by inviting speakers from “both sides” of an issue. This meant that attendees often had to endure talks and panel discussions featuring lawyers, mental health professionals and religious leaders explaining that gay people were criminal, sick, or sinful. By 1964, this practice had come to an end. Mostly.

There was, however, one throwback to earlier days on the second day of the ECHO conference when six clergymen were invited to participate in a panel discussion titled “Alienation of the Homosexual from the Religious Community.” This issue, as big a deal as it is today for many gay people, was a much bigger issue in 1964 when Americans, including gay Americans, were much more religiously-observant. Panel members were Rabbi Eugene Lipman of Washington, D.C.’s progressive Temple Sinai, Rev. Berkley Hawthorn of the similarly progressive Foundry Methodist Church, Rev. Ernest Martin of the (again, progressive) Swedenborgian Church of the Holy City, Rev. Kenneth Marshall of the (obviously progressive) Davies Memorial Unitarian Church, Rev. Robert J. Lewis of the (ditto) River Road Unitarian Church, and Father John F. Harvey, who was then teaching Moral Theology at DeSales Hall High School and who stuck out like a sore thumb among the other panelists. Everyone else discussed the ostracization that many gay people feel in their churches and temple, and provided suggestions for congregations and gay people on how to address the problem. But according to the write-up in the Daughter of Bilitis’s newsletter The Ladder, Halvey characterized that alienation as an inherent feature of homosexuality:

Father John F. Harvey (Catholic), Instructor in Moral Theology at DeSales Hall, Hyattsville, Md., claimed the homosexual is alienated not only from the church, but also from the secular community, from family, and from self. From adolescence, the homosexual knows he “should be attracted by the opposite sex.” He assimilates society’s scorn and becomes “filled with revulsion toward himself.” Later, “supported by homosexual literature and friends … conscience all the while being smothered,” he withdraws further. Hopelessness often tempts him to suicide or alcohol. He feels hostile toward the church. Alienation is furthered by his bitterness toward God Who allows a “mystery of suffering” and by the harsh attitude of many clergymen. Father Harvey urged that the homosexual accept himself and seek spiritual guidance to devise a life plan (excluding marriage, since conversion to heterosexuality is rarely possible) of service to the community and to God. Ageing homosexuals might reveal their condition to demonstrate “that they led Christian 11ves despite their deviate impulses.” Father Harvey advised the Homosexual should “re-direct (his) will to supernatural values …love of God must be the driving force.”

Rabbi Lipman acknowledged that his congregation ran a referral service to direct gay people to psychiatrists and other therapists with “goal one (as) heterosexuality.” He added that the second goal, if the first cannot be achieved, would be “to accept happy homosexuality. … I don’t consider the second one a defeat, but I consider it second.” Halvey asked about the chances of success for reorientation therapy. Lipman replied “The old saw that homosexuality is the hardest of the emotional problems to do much about is true … So far nobody appears to know what succeeds and what doesn’t. The formulas aren’t here yet.” Harvey agreed with that assessment.

When the panel moderator asked, “In the eyes of the churches, does a person have the right to practice homosexuality?”, all of the panelists, save one, gave varying shades of affirmative answers:

Father Harvey gave the only categorical “no,” since to the Catholic Church homosexual acts are immoral. Nevertheless, he said, many Catholics feel these acts should not be illegal because “the prosecution and the way it takes place in many instances is a great abuse.”

In 1980, Harvey founded Courage, the Roman Catholic ex-gay organization, and headed the group until 2008. Under Harvey’s leadership, Courage’s approach to reorientation was somewhat confused. Officially, the group promoted celibacy as the primary legitimate goal for gay and lesbian Catholics while downplaying the prospect for change in sexual orientation, although there was some fudging here and there. Harvey also relied heavily on theories from the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH) whenever he wrote about what he believed were the causes of homosexuality. Since Harvey’s death in 2010, Courage may be slowly drifting toward the change model.

[Source: Lily Hansen, Barbara Gittings. “ECHO Report ’64, Part 2: Highlights of ECHO.” The Ladder 9, no. 4 (January 1965): 7-11, 15-20. See Jul 31 for Barbara Gittings’s bio.]

American Nazi Party Member Tries to Disrupt ECHO Conference: 1964. As if the 1964 Conference of the East Coast Homophile Organizations (ECHO) in Washington, D.C., wasn’t already fascinating enough (see above and Oct 10), a couple of other things happened which everyone would remember for years to come. Staff at the Sheraton Park Hotel learned that members of the American Nazi Party planned to disrupt the conference, so the hotel requested additional protection from Washington police. So when the conference began, ECHO leaders actually felt reassured when police arrived, although they were surprised to see a plainclothes officer from the department’s Morals Division. As the Daughters of Bilitis’s The Ladder informed its readers:

A handsome chap moving among many handsome chaps, he might have gone through the conference unnoticed, but for the sharp memory of a Washington Mattachine member. This member reportedly looked the plainclothesman in the eye and said in effect “I know who you are.” Shorn of his cover, undercover officer Graham phoned his boss at the Morals Division to say he’d been recognized and what should he do? “Continue on assignment” was his order — and continue he did, staying for the entire ECHO conference.

The word spread about Graham’s presence, and he became a curiosity, Why was he there, if not to memorize faces? Despite suspicion of the motives of the plainclothesman, many ECHO registrants went out of their way to talk hospitably with him and to discuss the speeches, Here, some thought, was an educating job to be done. Officer Graham was a captive listener, sitting politely among homosexuals and friends of homosexuals and hearing speakers denounce our absurd sex laws and the peculiar tactics our police resort to in trying to enforce them.

Everything went well on the conference’s first day, although unidentified Nazis continued to call the ECHO suite to warn of disruptions. That attempted disruption came the next day, at about 2:30 that afternoon when attendees were waiting for the religion panel to begin. Now, if this were to happen today, it would be captured on camera phones and posted to YouTube within minutes. That technology didn’t exist then, but The Ladder provided the next best thing thanks to Kay Lahusen (see Jan 5), who had just turned on a tape recorder to record the panel discussion. With her transcription of that tape, we can now re-enact our own YouTube drama:

Cast, in order of appearance: A Nazi, conference coordinator Bob Belanger (under the pseudonym “Robert King”), Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C. founder Frank Kameny (see May 21)), an unidentified blonde girl, future ex-gay leader Fr. John Harvey (see above), future DoB president Shirley Willer (as “Shirley W”, see Sep 26), and Det. Graham.

Scene: A “blond, good-looking, well-built, quietly dressed” man walked into the room, carrying a large gift-wrapped box marked “Queer Convention.” Two of his cohorts waited outside the door.

And, action:

NAZI: Would somebody call Rabbi Lipman, please? Is Rabbi Lipman in the house? (Rabbi Lipman is one of the clergymen on ECHO’s religious panel. He has not yet arrived.) I’ve got 24 quarts of vaseline here to deliver to Rabbi Eugene Lipman. I believe all you queers will be able to make use of it. (He starts toward the inner room, carrying the box. ECHO leaders, moving according to plan, link arms in the CORE fashion and stop him from going further. Others join the line. A crowd gathers. The line begins to inch forward.)

ROBERT KING: You must either pay an admission or get out. You are trespassing. (Plainclothes officer Graham leaves the room to telephone police officers specifically stationed in the hotel to protect ECHO from the Nazis.)

NAZI: Would you quit pushing me, you queers… I see you’ve got queer rabbis and priests and reverends and everything here today… Would somebody please bring the queer Rabbi here for me to deliver this vaseline to him? (He smiles, partly turns, digs in his heels, presses back against the line.) The Rabbi’s waiting for his vaseline… Are there any lesbians here? (A blonde girl joins the line.) Are you a lesbian too?

BLONDE GIRL: As much as you are!

NAZI: If you queers don’t stop pushing me I’m going to charge you with assault.

FATHER HARVEY: Sir, you are trespassing. Would you please leave? (Father Harvey is one of the religious panel members.)

NAZI: Sir, would you like some vaseline too? This vaseline is for the rabbi, but I’m sure he wouldn’t mind sharing it with his cassock friends.

DR. KAMENY: You are being asked to leave.

ROBERT KING: The authorities are on the way.

NAZI: I’m only a delivery boy. I had to leave church today in order to bring this vaseline over to you queers. (He pushes back against the line, continues to smile.)

SHIRLEY W.: Sir, you’re stepping on my foot. Would you please move.

NAZI: I believe you’re trying to kick me, aren’t you, lesbian?… There’s a queer for LBJ. He looks like a kike, too. Are there many kike queers here? A dog himself shouldn’t be subjected to you bunch of queers. (A cameraman from WTOP-TV enters and begins filming. The station has apparently been alerted by the publicity-hungry Nazis.)

SHIRLEY W. Please, sir, you’re stepping on my foot. Would you mind leaving?

NAZI: I heard the Rabbi was out of vaseline. Is that right? (Enter plainclothesman Graham. Ironically, he is forced to do the apprehending because the special police sent to prevent a disturbance are too far away at the moment in the huge hotel.)

GRAHAM: I’m a police officer and I want to talk to you alone right now.

NAZI: Do you have some identification?

GRAHAM: Right. (He produces badge.)

NAZI: Am I under arrest?

GRAHAM: No.

NAZI: Well, I have to deliver this case of vaseline to…

GRAHAM: You ARE under arrest. (The Nazi, still hefting the gift-wrapped carton marked QUEER CONVENTION, is escorted out of the ECHO room. Applause breaks out for Graham’s action.)

The Ladder reported that the Nazi — his name was never identified — was booked on a charge of disorderly conduct and fined $10 (about $75 in today’s dollars). The disruption lasted less than five minutes. WTOP decided against showing the film during its news broadcast.

[Sources: Warren D. Adkins, Kay Tobin (Kay Lahusen). “ECHO Report ’64, Part 1: Sidelights of ECHO.” The Ladder 9, no. 4 (January 1965): 4-7.

Kay Tobin (Kay Lahusen). “ECHO Report ’64, Part 3: A Nazi stunt fails.” The Ladder 9, no. 4 (January 1965): 20-22.]

AIDS Quilt Debuts During Second March on Washington: 1987. Somewhere around half a million LGBT people descended onto the Mall in Washington for the largest gay rights demonstration in history. The top demands were for an end to discrimination and more federal money for AIDS research and treatment. About a hundred members of Congress and other prominent civic, labor and religious leaders signed letters endorsing the March, and the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who had declared himself a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, spoke and promised to support the gay community. Reps. Barney Frank (D-MA) and Gerry Studds (D-MA), both openly gay members of Congress, also spoke.

With AIDS at the forefront of everyones’ concern, the march marked the public debut of the Names Project AIDS Memorial Quilt. The quilt occupied the equivalent of two city blocks, and included 1,920 panels commemorating more than 2,000 persons who had died of AIDS. Since then, the AIDS Memorial Quilt has become the world’s largest community art project, encompassing 1.3 million square feet and commemorating the lives of over 94,000 people who died of AIDS.

But even the quilt couldn’t break through the national reticence to discuss the epidemic or the concerns of gay people. Despite the enormity of the gatherings, the three national news magazines — Newsweek, Time and U.S. News & World Report — neglected to mention any of it, which longtime advocate Barbara Gittings described as “an appalling example of media blindness.”

25 YEARS AGO: ACT-Up Occupies the FDA: 1988. The gay community was feeling the pressure of a ticking time bomb, with someone in the U.S. dying of AIDS every two hours. AZT had been approved by the U .S. Food and Drug Administration in 1987, but it was prohibitively expensive and required taking a pill every four hours around the clock. European health officials had been approving new treatments for AIDS, but the FDA continued to cling to its multi-year approval process. And as the FDA dithered, more names were being added to the AIDS quilt. By 1988, frustration and anger had built to a boiling point, and more than a 1,200 demonstrators, led by ACT-Up activists, invaded the FDA’s grounds in Rockville, Maryland, for a nine-hour protest demanding quicker action on drug approvals. About 175 demonstrators were arrested

Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, later recalled that the protest had left a deep impression. He later told PBS’s Frontline:

“After a little while, I began to get beyond the rhetoric and theater of the demonstrations and the smoke bombs, to really listen to what it is that they were saying, and it became clear to me, quite quickly, that most of what they said made absolute sense, was very logical and needed to be paid attention to. … Interacting with the constituencies was probably one of the most important things that I had done in my professional career.”

Eight days later, the FDA announced new regulations to cut the time it took to approve new drugs for treating HIV/AIDS.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
95 YEARS AGO: Jerome Robbins: 1918-1998. Born Wilson Rabinowitz, the Broadway producer, director and choreographer’s career in show business began soon after dropping out of New York University, where he had been studying chemistry, in order to pursue dance. Just a couple of years later, he was already dancing the chorus of several Broadway shows, including George Balanchine’s Keep Off the Grass. In 1940, he left the theater in favor of ballet, but soon returned to choreograph 1944’s On the Town (with music by Leonard Bernstein, just one of several collaborative efforts between the two men). In 1947, he won his first Tony Award for Choreography for the Keystone Kops comedy/ballet High Button Shoes.

Through most of the next decade, Robbins continued to choreograph several hit shows, alternating between Broadway and ballet as choreographer for the American Ballet Company and the New York City Ballet. But his career was threatened in 1950 when he was scheduled to appear on Ed Sullivan’s show. The show’s sponsor, Ford Motor Company, forced him to cancel because he had been a member of the Communist Party between 1943 and 1947, joining, like many other Americans, when the U.S. was an ally of the Soviet Union during World War II. He tried to go to the FBI to clear his name, but when Sullivan publicly urged the House Committee on Un-American Activities to subpoena Robins, he fled to Paris for a year.

He returned to the U.S in 1951 to choreograph The Pied Piper, The King and I, and several other classical ballet pieces. But in 1952, the House Un-American Activities committee caught up with him and subpoenaed him to appear. While everyone knew about one of those skeletons in his closet — his Communist Party membership — he also feared that the other skeleton — his homosexuality — would come tumbling out. He not only personified the twinned Red and Lavender Scares of the McCarthy era, but he also harbored a great deal of internalized shame over his Jewish immigrant roots, which he felt made him insufficiently American in other people’s eyes. Years later, he wrote:

”It was my homosexuality I was afraid would be exposed I thought. It was my once having been a Communist that I was afraid would be exposed. None of these. I was & have been — & still have terrible pangs of terror when I feel that my career, work, veneer of accomplishments would be taken away (by HUAC, or by critics) that I panicked & crumbled & returned to that primitive state of terror — the facade of Jerry Robbins would be cracked open, and behind everyone would finally see Jerome Wilson Rabinowitz

Robbins named the person who recruited him into the Communist Party, along with several other actors, playwrights and critics who were party members. Rep. Gordon Scherer (R-OH) congratulated him, saying he “‘was going to see The King and I that very night and would now appreciate it all the more.” Robbins’s career was preserved: he choreographed and/or directed Peter Pan, Bells are Ringing, West Side Story, Gypsy, Funny Girl, and Fiddler on the Roof, and over the course of his career, he won two Academy Awards, four Tony Awards, five Donaldson Awards, two Emmys, the Screen Directors’ Guild Award, and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. But none of those accomplishments could expiate his guilt over his HUAC testimony. In the mid-1970s, when he spent three weeks at a mental hospital for depression, he described himself as “a Jewish ex-commie fag who had to go into a mental hospital.” He died following a stroke in New York on July 29, 1998.

Cleve Jones: 1954. How appropriate is it that today would also happen to be Cleve Jones’s birthday? Born in West Lafayette, Indiana and reared in Scottsdale, Arizona, he moved to San Francisco to study political science at San Francisco State University where he also became an intern for Harvey Milk’s political campaigns and became active in the city’s gay rights scene. Years later, Jones recalled what a heady time that was:

I think what was most exciting was that it was all brand-new. All of us who were participating in it were doing so with an awareness that what we were doing had never been done before. So many of the things that people take for granted now, like gay marching bands and pride parades and gay churches and gay synagogues and gay newspapers and gay film festivals — I remember when the first of each of those happened. There was a wonderful sort of self-awareness among everyone that what we were doing had never been seen before.

It was a political revolution; it was a social revolution; it was a sexual revolution. For those of us who were part of it, there was a wonderful sense of self-discovery, because I think I’m a member of the last generation [of] people who spent our childhood thinking we were the only ones. That doesn’t happen anymore. But when I was a child I thought I was the only one, and so when I discovered that I was not the only one, that there were thousands upon thousands of people just like me, it was incredibly liberating and exhilarating.

Jones learned his gay activism chops from Milk, who gave him his first bullhorn. “When he got elected to public office, he said: ‘You keep people on the street. I’ll be working on the inside; you keep them screaming on the outside, and we’ll get more done.'” But the next several years were traumatic. First, there was Milk’s 1978 assassination (see Nov 27), then there were people coming down with all sorts of illnesses. “I have memories from 1978 and 1979 of friends of mine contracting diseases that I’d never heard of, or that I’d heard of but only in the context of impoverished countries. I remember a friend came down with meningitis, and that seemed to me to be odd. There was also quite a bit of hepatitis going around.” Then the CDC became aware of what was going on in 1981 (see Jun 5). “My memory of it, when I think back, it seems like it was just an avalanche. It was like one week we’d never heard of it, and then the next week everybody started to die. Now, I know that’s not really the way it was, and it unfolded a little more slowly than that, but it was so sudden, and people didn’t talk about it. They were too frightened. Even in our community, there was a great deal of cruelty. So people began to vanish.”

Jones decided to try to “fill the vacuum left by the government’s response” by co-founding the San Francisco AIDS Foundation and becoming one of the earliest frontline advocates for people with AIDS in the city. When an antibody test became available and he found out he was HIV-positive, he went public with his diagnosis on CBS’s 60 Minutes. As a result, he received death threats and was nearly killed when he was attacked with a knife. Jones then determined that one of the keys to making an apathetic public pay attention the the epidemic was to humanize the problem. And so during a candlelight memorial for Harvey Milk in 1986, Jones came up with the idea for an AIDS memorial quilt. He had learned that 1,000 San Franciscans had died of the disease, he asked fellow marchers to write the names of friends and loved ones onto placards that were taped onto the wall of the Federal Building. That patchwork of names that reminded him of his grandmother’s quilts. He established the Names Project Foundation which debuted the AIDS Memorial Quilt during the second march on Washington for gay rights (see above).

Jones currently lives in San Francisco, where he works as a community organizer for UNITE HERE, an international union representing hotel, casino, food service and restaurant workers. He is also serves as an adviser for the Courage Campaign and is on the advisory board for the American Foundation for Equal Rights.

Matt Bomer: 1977. “When I was in high school, there was no safe haven, there was no outlet for you to speak your mind. So I did what any self-preserving 14-year-old would do — I signed up for the school play and also the football team to cover my tracks.” That’s how White Collar star Matt Bomer recently described his high school years in Klein, Texas, outside of Houston. After graduating from Carnegie Mellon University in 2001 with a degree in Fine Arts, Bomer moved to New York City where he landed a small role on All My Children, followed by a three year stint on Guiding Light. Since 2009, he has played the lead role of Neal Caffrey on USA Network’s White Collar.

In 2011, Bomer joined John Lithgow, Morgan Freeman, and many other prominent actors for an all-star world premiere of Dustin Lance Black’s new play “8”, and in 2012, Bomer got to shake his money-maker for the Steven Soderbergh film Magic Mike with Matthew McConaughey and Channing Tatum. He had long been the subject of rumors about his personal life, and his approach to the subject was to neither confirm nor deny. But in February 2012, Bomer finally decided to uncover his tracks when he thanked his partner and their three children during an acceptance speech for a Steve Chase Humanitarian Award. It was recently announced that Bomer will play actor Montgomery Clift in a new indie biopic which, if financing can be arranged, will start shooting in 2014.

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NJ Judge: no stay in marriage ruling

When Judge Mary Jacobson ruled that civil unions and marriages no longer are afforded the same rights and benefits (due to the new federal recognition of same-sex marriages) and that the state of New Jersey must allow and recognize marriages between same sex couples, she gave a date for when her ruling would come into effect: October 21, 2013.

When Governor Chris Christie appealed that ruling, he also requested that at stay be placed on the ruling such that it does not come into effect until the Supreme Court had weighed in on her decision. Today Judge Jacobson denied that request. (WaPo)

A judge refused Thursday to delay the start of same-sex marriage in New Jersey until a legal appeal can be settled, denying efforts by Gov. Chris Christie’s administration to put off gay weddings.
…
“Granting a stay would simply allow the state to continue to violate the equal protection rights of New Jersey same-sex couples, which can hardly be considered a public interest,” Judge Mary Jacobson wrote.

Christie will now appeal the denial of stay to a higher court. And that may be the decision that brings New Jersey into the Equality State column.

If the higher court overrides Jacobson and puts a stay on her ruling pending appeal, then we will all have to wait until the case runs its course. However, if they refuse to place a stay – as I suspect they may do – then it’s pretty much a done deal. Yes the official ruling will be delayed until the process is complete, but once marriage start they are not going to stop.

There is zero chance that the court will allow marriages to proceed without stay, only to later reverse Judge Jacobson’s decision.

Bad news for Lonegan

Today brings some very bad news for former Bogota Mayor Steve Lonegan, who is running as the Republican candidate for US Senate in New Jersey’s special election next week.

No, it’s not that he’s 12 points behind Newark Mayor Corey Booker (D). Actually Lonegan’s been whittling away at what was once a large advantage for Booker.

It’s not that New Jersey is a blue state in registration and state representative. After all Chris Christie is trampling all over his Democratic opponent.

No, today’s bad new is that the National Organization for Marriage is gloriously declaring that Lonegan can win. And they are throwing their support behind him. (NOMblog)

I’m talking about the US Senate special election in New Jersey next week. Marriage, life, and family values are on the ballot in New Jersey one week from yesterday on October 16th — and every marriage champion across the country can play a part to make sure those values come out on top.

Next Wednesday voters in New Jersey need to make a special effort to get out and vote for the only US Senate candidate who will protect and promote marriage, life, and family on the national stage — Steve Lonegan.

…All the polls show that momentum is with Lonegan, meaning by this time next week it could well be a dead heat.

What will push Steve — and marriage, life, and family — over the top?

Well, I suppose that something could. It’s possible, of course.

But we all know what happens when NOM gets behind your campaign.

The Daily Agenda for Thursday, October 10

TODAY’S AGENDA:
Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Ashland, OR; Atlanta, GA; Baltimore, MD (Black Pride); Ft. Meyers, FL; Jacksonville, FL; Memphis, TN; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Tucson, AZ.

AIDS Walks This Weekend: Beijing, China; Louisville, KY; Tucson, AZ.

Other Events This Weekend: Alaska Pride Conference, Anchorage, AK; Iris Prize Film Festival, Cardiff, UK; MIX Copenhagen Film Festival, Copenhagen, Denmark; Octobearfest, Denver, CO; Ft. Lauderdale Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, Ft. Lauderdale, FL; QCinema Film Festival, Ft. Worth, TX; Black and Blue Festival, Montréal, QC; Seattle Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, Seattle, WA; Tampa International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, Tampa, FL.

TODAY IN HISTORY:
Newsweek’s “Queer People”: 1949. In the mid-twentieth century, reactions to homosexuality fell into two camps. On one side were those who held that such “sexual perversion” was a criminal act which should be treated harshly by the courts. The other side, which saw themselves as more enlightened, saw homosexuality as a mental illness which merited pity rather than punishment. On October 10, 1949, Newsweek published an editorial titled “Queer People,” which came down squarely in the first camp:

The sex pervert, whether a homosexual, an exhibitionist, or even a dangerous sadist, is too often regarded merely as a ‘queer’ person who never hurts anyone but himself. Then the mangled form of one of his victims focuses public attention to the degenerate’s work. And newspaper headlines flare for days over accounts and feature articles packed with sensational details of the most dastardly and horrifying crimes.

The editorial reviewed The Sexual Criminal, a book by J. Paul DeRiver who headed the Los Angeles Police Department’s Sex Offenses Bureau. Newsweek lauded the “factual scientific book” with 43 case histories, including “lots of very queer people” including “the sadistic pedophile,” “zoophiles, psychopaths who performed sadistic acts on animals, and the necrophiles, who …commit acts of moral degeneracy upon or in the presence of dead bodies.” Eugene D. Williams, a California “special assistant attorney general,” wrote the introduction to the book, in which he warned that “the semihysterical, foolishly sympathetic, and wholly unscientific attitude of any individual engaged in social work and criminology to regard sex perverts as poor unfortunates who are suffering from disease and cannot help themselves, has a tendency to feed their ego.” To which Newsweek added:

A sterner attitude is required, if the degenerate is to be properly treated and cured. Williams suggests that the sex pervert be treated, not as a coddled patient, but as a particularly virulent type of criminal. “To punish him,” he concludes, “he should be placed in an institution where the proper kind of rehabilitory work can be done so that, of capable of being brought to the realization of the error of his ways, he may be brought back to society prepared to live as a normal, law-abiding individual, rather than turned out as he now is from the penitentiary, confirmed in his perversion.

ECHO ’64 conference program. (via Frank Kameny’s papers)

East Coast Homophile Organizations (ECHO) Hosts Conference Calling for Direct Action: 1964. The early major “Homophile” gay-rights groups established in the 1950s saw their main purpose was not so much to advocate for changes in the law which criminalized same-sex relationships in all fifty states, but to confront the regular police abuses and day-to-day acts of discrimination which effectively kept just about everyone in the closet. The tactic those groups espoused was “education.” It was thought that by educating the general public about homosexuality and gay people, the public would come around to accepting gay people as equals. The Daughters of Bilitis’s statement of purpose, which appeared in the front of every issue of The Ladder, included the “Education of the public at large through acceptance first of the individual, leading to an eventual breakdown of erroneous taboos and prejudices.” Likewise, when the Mattachine Society was first founded in 1950, it considered it part of its mission to “EDUCATE … for the purpose of informing and enlightening the public at large.” ONE, Inc., which published the first nationally-distributed gay magazine in America, considered education so important that it established the ONE Institute of Homophile Studies.

One problem, though, was that the “education” was not always particularly uplifting.  For one, the goal of education was supposed to be “understanding” of the “problems” that homosexuals faced. But in many of the early homophile literature, one could easily replace the word “understanding” with “pity,” and not alter the view being expressed one bit. Consequently, the educational approach tended to be one that valued being “reasonable” and “impartial ” over carrying any significantly useful information. And homophile organizations, eager to prove their reasonableness and impartiality, often invited speakers from “both sides” of an issue — which meant that gays and lesbians attending homophile conferences often had to sit through lawyers, mental health professionals and religious leaders explaining that gay people were criminal, sick, or sinful. As Barbara Gittings (see Jul 31) later commented, “At first we were so grateful just to have people — anybody — pay attention to us that we listened to everything they said, no matter how bad it was…. It was essential for us to go through this before we could arrive at what we now consider our much more sensible attitudes.”

By 1964, those more sensible attitudes were on display when four organizations — the Daughters of Bilities, the Janus Society of Philadelphia, and the Mattachine Societies of New York and Washington, D.C., met in the nation’s capital for the second conference of the East Coast Homophile Organizations (ECHO), a loose confederation formed in 1962. Attendance was light: only about a hundred people showed up at the Sheraton Park Hotel, thanks to ECHO’s difficulty in getting the word out about where the event would take place. The Mattachine Society of Washington (MSW), which was hosting the conference, saw three other hotels cancel their bookings and three newspapers refusing to run ads for the conference. Those who showed up were charged up and impatient with the old ways of doing things. The DoB’s newsletter, The Ladder, set the scene:

“I’m an activist,” said a handsome young man present at the ECHO conference for 1964. “I’ve read nearly 75 books in the New York Mattachine Society library, and I’m fed up with reading on the subject of homosexuality.” His statement seemed to typify the attitude pervading this serious conference.

Any disappointment over the small attendance (less than 100 persons) could be offset by the fact that this was a down-to-business meeting attended primarily by those dedicated to immediate action. It was a gathering of men and women impatient to remedy the discriminations against the homosexual citizen in our society.

We talked with a long-time friend of one of the sponsoring organizations, and his remarks confirmed our view. “A few years ago,” he said, “ours was a sweeter, clubbier, less insistent organization. Now there seems to be a militancy about the new groups and new leaders. There’s a different mood.”

Signs of that different mood were everywhere, beginning with MSW’s Robert King’s prescient keynote address , which described that growing new mood. He said that gay people were asking for “the rights, and all the rights, afforded the heterosexual. We are still in the asking stage. We will soon reach the demanding stage. (… A) dormant army is beginning to stir.” J.C. Hodges, president of the Mattachine Society of New York, challenged the prevailing timidity of previous homophile leaders to get involved with politics, declaring that “politics is everybody’s business.” He urged attendees to throw themselves into established political organizations. “Involve yourself if  you are to have any voice on your own behalf.”

The African-American civil rights movement, which was celebrating its successful March on Washington a year earlier followed by the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that summer, was held up as an example for gay activists to follow. A lawyer from the ACLU advised, “I wanted to emphasize today the importance of recognizing your solidarity with other minority groups and your vital stake in maintenance and development of a society with freedom and justice for all.” During a panel discussion about legal issues moderated by MSW’s Frank Kameny (see May 21) asked if the panelists would be willing to form a board to look at creating a “multi-attorney approached to planned legal strategy” in challenging anti-gay laws. The panel agreed, with the National Capital Area ACLU chairman, David Carliner, recommending the establishment of a legal defense fund modeled after the NAACP’s. 

The conference also had a bit of fun at the expense of Congressman John Dowdy (D-TX), who had introduced legislation in the House to strip MSW of its charitable status (see Aug 8, Aug 9). That bill led to Kameny becoming the first gay man in history to address a Congressional committee when the House Subcommittee for the District of Columbia held hearings on Dowdy’s bill. ECHO issued a cordial citation in Dowdy’s honor. “We want to acknowledge that Rep. Dowdy caused more attention to be called to the homosexual problem than anyone else,” a spokesman told the Washington Post. The Post also reported, “A spokesman for the Congressman said Dowdy has not received an invitation, wasn’t going to attend in any case and viewed the award as an attempt to ’embarrass’ him.”

But if you really want to see the stirrings of what we would recognize as the modern gay rights movement, you would look to another panel discussion — a debate, really — between Frank Kameny and Dr. Kurt Konietzko, a psychologist and member of the Philadelphia Board of Parole, which questioned the entire raison d’etre of the homophile organizations until then. The topic was “Education or Legislation,” although The Ladder said that “‘Act or Teach?’ might better describe the alternatives.” On the “act” side, naturally, was Kameny, who argued that emphasizing education, as homophile groups had done, relies on the “naive assumption that in matters of ingrained prejudice, the majority of people are rational and amenable to reason. They aren’t. Prejudice is an emotional commitment, not an intellectual one, and is little if at all touched by considerations of reason. Study upon study…has shown this.” The Ladder continued:

Dr. Kameny cited one recent study which he said “showed that tolerance is only slightly promoted by more information, that communication of facts is generally ineffective against predisposition.” Large numbers of people “hate our guts,” he warned. In terms of their deep prejudices in this area, they are “uneducable and noninformable.” Anyone doubting this need only read the transcript of the Dowdy subcommittee hearings on HR 5990. “That’s entrenched prejudice in very high places!”

He pointed out that “the Negro tried the education/information approach for 90 years and got almost nowhere. In the next ten years, by a vigorous social-protest, social-action, civil-liberties type of program, he achieved in essence everything for which he had been fighting. Let not this lesson be wasted upon us.”

Dr. Konietzko countered that he believed education was essential to “the basic human question of how we get people to live together harmoniously. He also noted that educators, particularly religious leaders, were “charged specifically with instilling in the young the attitudes of the larger society … Prejudices are learned. And if they are learned, they are taught. And if you can change the teaching, then you can change society.” Konietzko cautioned that pushing “aggressively” would result in a backlash. “The more you threaten, the less they’re able to think straight, and the less willing they become to grant you anything.” He also recommended that homophile groups rely on outside experts to get their messages across — even though, as one audience member pointed out, “the ‘experts’ are constantly making pronouncements to the public which contradict the subjective knowledge of so many homosexuals.” That’s when Kameny delivered what would be his signature rallying cry for decades to come:

A place to start is for the homophile organizations to realize that in the last analysis — and I am knowingly oversimplifying — we are the experts and the authorities. And we had better start educating the public to the fact that when they want reliable information on homosexuals and homosexuality, they come not to the psychiatrists, not to the ministers, and not to all the rest — they come to us. (Applause) We are coming to be more and more called on to speak in our own behalf, and it’s time we started a coordinated program to do so. We must get across to the public that we are the ones to come to, not the psychiatrists or all the rest with their utter lack of information and their distorted viewpoints.

Five months later, Kameny’s rallying cry would inspire a groundbreaking resolution approved by the Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C., which declared that “in the absence of valid evidence to the contrary, homosexuality is not a sickness, disturbance, or other pathology in any sense…” (see Mar 4). Gay activism then entered a new era as ECHO and its member organizations embarked on a string of pickets in New York (see Apr 18), Philadelphia (see Jul 4) and Washington D.C. (see Apr 17, May 19, Jun 26, Jul 31) calling for equal rights for gays and lesbians.

[Sources: Warren D. Adkins, Kay Tobin (Kay Lahusen). “ECHO Report ’64, Part 1: Sidelights of ECHO.” The Ladder 9, no. 4 (January 1965): 4-7. See Jan 5 for Kay Lahusen’s bio.

Lily Hansen, Barbara Gittings. “ECHO Report ’64, Part 2: Highlights of ECHO.” The Ladder 9, no. 4 (January 1965): 7-11, 15-20. See Jul 31 for Barbara Gittings’s bio.

Kay Tobin (Kay Lahusen), Barbara Gittings. “ECHO Report ’64, Part 4: ‘Act or Teach’?” The Ladder 9, no. 5 (February 1965): 13-17.

Jean White. “Homophile Groups Argue Civil Liberties.” The Washington Post (October 11, 1964): B10.]

5 YEARS AGO: CT Supreme Court Declares Ban on Same-Sex Marriage Unconstitutional: 2008. In Kerrigan v. Commissioner of Public Health, the Connecticut Supreme Court ruled in a 4-3 vote that the state’s constitution , 289 Conn. 135, 957 A.2d 407, is a 2008 decision by the Connecticut Supreme Court protects the right to same-sex marriage. The decision made Connecticut the third state, after Massachusetts and California, to have its state supreme court declare a constitutional right to same-sex marriage. California’s decision would be repealed by Proposition 8. In accordance with the Connecticut Supreme Court’s order, the state began issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples on November 12, 2008.

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The Daily Agenda for Wednesday, October 9

TODAY’S AGENDA:
Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Ashland, OR; Atlanta, GA; Baltimore, MD (Black Pride); Ft. Meyers, FL; Jacksonville, FL; Memphis, TN; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Tucson, AZ.

AIDS Walks This Weekend: Beijing, China; Louisville, KY; Tucson, AZ.

Other Events This Weekend: Alaska Pride Conference, Anchorage, AK; Iris Prize Film Festival, Cardiff, UK; MIX Copenhagen Film Festival, Copenhagen, Denmark; Octobearfest, Denver, CO; Ft. Lauderdale Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, Ft. Lauderdale, FL; QCinema Film Festival, Ft. Worth, TX; Black and Blue Festival, Montréal, QC; Seattle Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, Seattle, WA; Tampa International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, Tampa, FL.

TODAY IN HISTORY:
15 YEARS AGO: South Africa Strikes Down Sodomy Law: 1998. South Africa’s penal code defined sodomy as a Schedule 1 offense, like murder or rape, and was punishable by life imprisonment. Another law, Section 20A of the Sexual Offenses Act, which outlawed any behavior “at a party” — defined as a gathering of two or more men — that would be an invitation to sexual activity. Under that law, any hint of a proposition or even a glance, could lead to an arrest. The laws had been mostly ignored — South African cities had been host to Gay Pride parades for more than a decade — but that didn’t stop two prisoners in Cape Town from being charged with sodomy after engaging in consensual sex in 1997. But South Africa’s Constitutional Court responded to a suit brought by the National Coalition for Gay and Lesbian Equality and struck down the country’s harsh sodomy law along with Section 20A of the Sexual Offenses Act.

The ruling, written by Judge Lori Ackerman with a concurring ruling by Judge Albie Sachs, held that the decision violated South Africa’s new post-Apartheid 1996 constitution which made South Africa one of the first countries in the world to outlaw discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. The justices ruled that the decision was “part of a growing acceptance of difference in an increasingly open and pluralistic South Africa,” which included gays already serving openly in the military and the police force providing domestic partnership benefits for same-sex couples. The ruling African National Congress had earlier decided not to oppose the lawsuit. The ruling was made retroactive to the adoption of an interim constitution of 1994, which also prohibited discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS:
Simeon Solomon: 1840. When he was about ten years old, Solomon, the youngest child of a prominent London Jewish family, began to learn to paint from his older brother. A few year later, he attended Carey’s Art Academy, and later, as a student at the Royal Academy, he became a prominent member of the Pre-Raphaelite Circle. He held several acclaimed exhibitions at the Royal Academy between 1858 and 1872, with many of his paintings drawing from his Jewish background with scenes from the Hebrew Bible and ordinary Jewish life. His paintings also explored affections between men. In 1871 Simeon Solomon privately published his erotic poem “A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep,” and the images he evoked in the poem would re-appear in his paintings for the rest of his career. John Addington Symonds would note that the themes of same-sex love in the poem was “the key to the meaning of his drawings.”

The Sleepers, and the One that Watcheth (1870, click to enlarge)

Solomon’s career though was ruined in 1873 when he was arrested at a public toilet and fined £100 (about £4,600 or UD$7,400 today) for attempted sodomy. He was arrested again the next year in Paris and was sentenced to three months in prison. He never recovered. From then on, he was hobbled by alcoholism and poverty. He would pass his remaining years in and out of the workhouse where he continued to paint, but both the quality and quantity of his work was severely impaired by his drinking. He finally collapsed in central London and died of bronchitis and alcoholism in 1905. Poet and critic Arthur Symons, on learning of Solomon’s death, lamented, “There is nothing in this world so pitiful as a shipwreck of a genius.”

Nona Hendryx: 1944. The Trenton, New Jersey-born singer, producer, songwriter, author and actress was one third (with Patti LaBelle and Sarah Dash) of the trio Labelle, whose greatest hit was 1974’s “Lady Marmalade.” Beginning in 1977, Hendryx embarked on a solo career, but struggled to repeat the success of LaBelle. She wasn’t without work though, as she provided background vocals for the Talking Heads and became a part of New York’s underground rock, R&B and dance scene. As the eighties progressed, she collaborated with Keith Richards, Peter Gabriel and Prince for several of he solo release. In 2001, she came out as bisexual in an interview with The Advocate, and added gay rights to her repertoire.

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Iowa bistro sues to deny access to gay couples

The Görtz Haus Gallery operates a “bistro, art gallery, frame shoppe and floral shoppe” out of what used to be the St. Peter Lutheran Church in Grimes, IA. The bistro is in what was once the sanctuary and is an attractive setting that is occasionally rented out for weddings.

But when Lee Stafford wanted to rent out the bistro for his wedding to his fiance Jared, the owners, Betty and Richard Odgaard refused. And after Stafford filed a claim with the Iowa Civil Rights Commission, the Odgaard’s sued. They are represented by the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty. (Quad City Times)

Emily Hardman, spokeswoman for the Becket Fund, said the organization doesn’t want to eliminate “sexual orientation” as a protected class in Iowa and said the Odgaards are opposed to hosting the ceremony because of their Mennonite beliefs.

“The Odgaards have long hired and served gays and lesbians, and are happy to serve all persons regardless of their sexual orientation,” Hardman wrote in an email. “The only remedy they are seeking is not to be forced by the government to host a religious ceremony that would violate their own beliefs. The Iowa Civil Rights Act supports this remedy, as it expressly states that the Act is not intended to force individuals to recognize same-sex marriage.”

I tend to err on the side of individual rights and I am no fan of non-discrimination laws in general. They tend to pit people against each other and the blurry line between my right to get what I want and your right to do what you want with your property, time and body tends to leave all sides feeling imposed upon.

But I’m having a hard time finding sympathy for the Odgaards. Their feelings of entitlement run far beyond the right to refuse service based on religious (or any other) convictions or beliefs. (HuffPo)

In an interview, Betty Odgaard defended her decision to turn away the couple, saying it came from “our faith, our convictions.”

“Can I have my beliefs without being ostracized for that? I think I have my right … to stand firm to my convictions and beliefs,” Odgaard, who said she and her husband have received threatening emails and calls in response to the news, noted.

Well, no, Betty. You can’t have your beliefs without being ostracized; that’s what ostracization is for. When your beliefs result in hurtful behavior to other and attitudes that society finds to be counter-productive, the right and proper response is to ostracize you. Or, perhaps, as a Mennonite you’d prefer the term ‘shunning’.

And then there’s all the quivering hurt about having to ‘host a religious ceremony’.

Nonsense.

This isn’t like Elain Photography where Elaine Huguenin would have had to physically participate in the event. Or one of those cake bakers who object to putting same-sex cake toppers atop their confectionary creation. It’s not even one of those bed-and-breakfast people who don’t want to be under the same roof as a couple of guys who are doing… you know… it!

It’s a bistro, a friggen room, Betty, and you don’t have to “host”. You don’t even have to be there. If you absolutely must have someone on the premises to make sure no one stills the artwork, you can turn that task over to one of those many gays and lesbians that you’ve hired.

And about that “religious ceremony”… who said it was religious?

Now maybe Lee and Jared wanted incense, blown shofars, latin incantations, the ubiquitous Whether Thou Goest sung badly by a relative and a sermon carefully distinguishing between Lutheranism and Calvinism, followed by saptapadi. But I’m guessing that if they were wanting a ‘religious ceremony’ then they would have chosen a religious venue. And whatever it is that they wanted, you can bet it wasn’t a Mennonite service, and since anything else is not kosher for her anyway it’s no skin off Betty’s nose.

Now I know that the Becket folk will try for an emotional appeal. Mumble mumble former church. Mumble mumble art gallery free speech. Mumble mumble Mennonites and candles and horse-drawn buggies and religious freedom!!

But when it comes right down to it, this is a bistro that doesn’t want to rent out the dining hall to Lee and Jared because they are gay. Period, end of conversation.

Are Pittsburgh police stalling on gay bashing?

Sometimes you read something wrong. Then you read it again wrong. Then you get all indignant and snarky and write a commentary.

And then someone points out that you read it wrong and you feel kinda stupid.

This is one of those times.

Sorry, folks, no story here.

NOM quotes Laurie Higgins; claims it’s Chicago Tribune

Once a voice for those who opposed marriage equality in a somewhat civil tone, the National Organization for Marriage is racing down the fast lane towards anti-gay extremism. In the past few months, as it has became unavoidable clear that equality is the near future, NOM has abandoned all pretense of principled opposition on the issue of marriage and has been edging towards becoming just another of the shrill voices screaming about the homosexual agenda and ranting about what the evil radical homosexual lobby is trying to do to destroy America and harm Christians (as they define them).

Today is another example: (NOMblog)

Same-sex ‘marriage’ radicals are at it again… the latest example comes from Chicago.

In what the Chicago Tribune rightly called “a stunning public admission” openly homosexual Democratic State Representative Greg Harris of Chicago, outright admitted in a public debate that the proposed law in Illinois redefining marriage did NOT provide religious liberty or conscience protections for individual Christian business owners.

The article continued, saying that “it was clear that both he and homosexual Chicago Alderman Deb Mell (a former state representative and co-sponsor of SB 10) oppose any such protections.” (emphasis added).

That seemed odd to me, as the Trib hasn’t referred to someone as “homosexual Chicago Alderman” since the 90’s. This is the rhetoric not of reporters or even editorial boards, but of anti-gay activists. So I did a little searching and, sure enough, this didn’t come from the Chicago Tribune’s reporters or editorial staff at all.

It came from Laurie Higgins of the Illinois Family Institute, one of only 34 groups listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an active anti-gay group (a “hate group”). And that “stunning public admission”, yeah that was only Laurie being “stunned”.

Now most of us can pretty easily distinguish between raging bias-based ranting and news coverage. But it is becoming increasingly evident that Brian Brown and others at the National Organization for Marriage live in a world where anti-gay epithets and paranoid raging against gay Americans seems normal and ordinary.