Box Turtle Bulletin

The Daily Agenda for Wednesday, July 10

TODAY’S AGENDA:
Marriage Equality Bill Resumes Report Stage in House of Lords: Westminster, UK. The House of Lords will resume examining the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill at the Report Stage, as it continues examining 136 proposed amendments. Several of those amendments have been considered “wrecking amendments,” some of which would draw legal distinctions between same-sex and opposite-sex unions (Amendments 1 and 2). Those amendments were voted down. Another amendment would have allowed registrars to opt-out of registering same-sex marriages due to religious objections. That, too, was voted down. Another amendment concerning teachers’ rights to object to same-sex marriage was defeated as well.

As a matter of fact, the Lords worked their way through quite a number of those proposed amendments on Monday, leaving the bill largely intact with only a few minor changes. Only 48 amendments are left for consideration today. Among some of the more contentious amendments remaining include those proposed by Baroness Ruth Deech (amendments 94 and 136), which would extend all tax and other benefits of civil partnerships to all care givers and family members who share a house. And two proposed amendments by Lord Indarjit Singh of Wimbledon (amendments 96 and 134) would require that the entire bill be put to voters in England and Wales in an October referendum before it can take effect.

Once the bill completes the Report Stage today, it will then go to House of Lords for a third and final reading on July 15. If it passes the third reading, it will then go back to the House of Commons due to changes which have been made to the bill by the Lords.

Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Bournemouth, UK; Bristol, UK; Green Bay, WI; Leipzig, Germany; Marseille, France (EuroPride 2013); Munich, Germany; San Diego, CA; San Luis Obispo, CA; Santa Barbara, CA; Tacoma, WA.

Other Events This Weekend: Rocky Mountain Regional Rodeo, Golden, CO; Outfest Film Festival, Los Angeles, CA; QFest Film Festival, Philadelphia, PA; Bear Week, Provincetown, MA Tokyo International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, Tokyo, Japan.

TODAY IN HISTORY:
A Discovery of a Very Extraordinary Nature: 1766. The following story was reported in the July 10, 1766 issue of London’s Gentleman’s Magazine:

A discovery of a very extraordinary nature was made at Poplar, where two women had lived together for six and thirty years, as man and wife, and kept a public house, without ever being suspected; but the wife happening to fall sick, and die, a few years before she expired, revealed the secret to her relations, made her will, and left legacies to the amount of half what she thought they were worth. On application to the pretended, she at first endeavoured to support her assumed character, but being closely pressed, she at length owed the fact, accommodated all matters amicably, put off the male, and put on the female character, in which she appeared to be a sensible well-bred woman, though in her male character she had always affected the plain plodding alehouse-keeper. It is said they had acquired in business money to the amount of £3000. Both had been crossed in love when young, and had chosen this method to avoid further importunities.

[Source: Ian McCormick. Secret Sexualities: A Sourcebook of 17th and 18th Century Writings (London: Routledge, 1997): 234-235)]

Texas Editorial: “We’ll Take Gays Over the KKK”: 1985. It all began in 1984, when the Dallas/Ft. Worth suburb of Arlington was having a problem at Randol Mill Park. It seems that the popular park had become a well-known venue for men (often heterosexually married men) to solicit sex with other men. After a year’s worth of stepped up patrolling and enforcement by Arlington police, the Mid-Cities Daily News reported, “We have not heard nearly as much about the problem as last year.” But for whatever reason, the Klan was still excited over queers in the park. The Klan’s “exalted cyclops” announced that his group would be holding a picnic at the part — sans white sheets — to send a message that gays weren’t welcome. The Daily News responded, “Given the choice between sharing a park with homosexuals or a bunch of white-sheeted, racist, hate-peddling losers, we think we would prefer the homosexuals.”

Well sure, given the choice.

When the Klan held their picnic three days later, Scott Patrick, the exalted cyclops of the Garland klavern, sounded disappointed with what he found. ” I expected the situation to be a little more blatant. I’m sure all the publicity kept it out.” That left him with no choice but to complain about other groups. “Would you believe I actually had a Jew ask if a Jew could come to one of our meetings,” he told a reporter. “I said ‘no.’ A Jew would have about as much chance of attending as a nigger. You’ve got to admit they aren’t as intelligent as we are.”

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS:
Jerry Herman: 1931. The American composer and lyricists is best known for his scores for the Broadway hits Hello Dolly! (1964), Mame (1966) and La Cage aux Folles (1983). The latter earned Herman a Tony for best musical. His most famous song, “Hello Dolly!”, knocked the Beatles from #1 in 1964 when Louis Armstrong recorded it. “When they passed out talent,” Carol Channing said, “Jerry stood in line twice.”A 2008 PBS documentary about him reported that Herman was diagnosed HIV-positive in 1985 when that diagnosis was an automatic death sentence. He was lucky, and is among of the fortunate few to live to see the lifesaving “cocktail” become available in 1995. The AIDS epidemic wiped out half the original La Cage aux Folles chorus before the show’s final run, but the show’s signature anthem “I Am What I Am” can still bring audiences to their feet with its call for dignity and integrity in the face of bigotry and fear.

Neil Tennant: 1954. With bandmate Chris Lowe, he was one half of the electronic dance duo Pet Shop Boys. Their first single, “West End Girls,” was actually recorded twice. The first version was released in 1984 and became a club hit in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Go figure. After the duo signed with EMI, they re-recorded the song, and it became a 1986 number one hit in the U.S. and the U.K. Tennant was coy about rumors over his sexuality throughout the 1980s, but he finally came out in a 1994 interview with a UK gay magazine. Pet Shop Boys are still going strong. On March 14, 2011, they released a double CD of the complete three-act ballet score for The Most Incredible Thing with the WrocÅ‚aw Score Orchestra. Their latest studio album, Electric, which features the single “Axis,” is due out next week.

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?

OMG! If You Never Watch Another Video, You Have To See This

Thanks Homer.

Enraged

This may ramble a bit, and I’m sorry, but I was enraged yesterday — not annoyed, disgusted, or weary, but full-on enraged — and I need to vent it out.

The National Organization for Marriage is promoting the idea that same-sex marriage provides the best possible cover for pedophiles and opens the door to the “new” possibility of creating children expressly for the purpose of being abused.

As loathsome as that is, it’s not what enraged me. Before continuing, though, let me warn you that this posting discusses child sexual abuse and human trafficking.

NOM links to an article at the fiercely anti-gay mercatornet.com, which reports on two gay men who have been convicted of abusing a child born to them through a Russian surrogate.

The pair began sexually abusing the child when he was less than two weeks old. They also took him around the world and allowed him to be abused by at least eight men in several countries. Photographs and videos were uploaded to a paedophile site. The men told the child that the abuse was normal behaviour and coached him on what to say if he were ever questioned.

American police say that the child was created “for the sole purpose of exploitation”. “Personally… I think this is probably the worst [paedophile] rings… if not the worst ring I’ve ever heard of,” was the comment of an investigator from the US Postal Inspection Service.

This is foul and disgusting. How can it not break your heart. But the artitcle’s author, Michael Cook, somehow managed to look past the horror and see it as an opportunity to attack same-sex marriage:

Child abuse, sadly, is nothing new. What is new is bringing children into the world for the express purpose of being abused. The toxic combination of same-sex adoption and surrogate motherhood makes that possible…

Children are created as an industrial product in overseas baby farms. They have no mother. They are brainwashed to accept abuse as normal. Their owners are entitled to a presumption of respectability because of their status as a committed (and perhaps married) couple. And suspicions can be doused by treating them as homophobic paranoia.

Probably only a few of the gay couples who enter same-sex marriage will be paedophiles. But the ghastly story of Newton and Truong suggests that same-sex marriage will be the best possible cover for those who are.

Perhaps Michael Cook is primarily concerned with children, but his anti-gay bigotry is so strong that it overwhelms his ability to think these issues through. Or perhaps when he read the case his first thought was, “Hey, I can get a column out of this!”

Do you see why I call our opponents desperate? This opportunism in the face of a child’s tragedy isn’t just disgusting — it’s fakery as well, which can pass for truth only if you ignore basic, verifiable facts.

First, most abused children are victims of a man in a heterosexual relationship with a relative of the child, a relationship that grants access more easily than the rigors of adoption or surrogacy. This is the best cover for pedophiles. This is what gets ignored when you demonize gay men in committed relationships.

Michael Cook must realize that presenting one horrific case does not establish a trend or persistent danger. So he works hard to link it to something broader, and that’s what makes his article so outrageous. In the article’s comments I responded:

What a terrible article, reducing this child’s tragedy for an illogical and factually wrong attack on same sex marriage. For instance, this:

“Child abuse, sadly, is nothing new. What is new is bringing children into the world for the express purpose of being abused. The toxic combination of same-sex adoption and surrogate motherhood makes that possible.”

The first sentence, sadly is true. The rest is nonsense. Is the author saying that no heterosexual parent has ever brought a child into the world for the purpose of abuse? If so, can we see evidence? As for the idea that “the toxic combination of same-sex adoption and surrogate motherhood makes that possible” — does it not occur to the author that two heterosexuals having sex also makes that possible?

This sort of logical blindness, this apparent psychological handicap that makes some unable to think clearly or see the obvious when it the issue involves homosexuality, is exactly the reason the word “homophobe” was coined.

I was immediately attacked for making “no mention of the evil crime committed against a defenseless child.” Which of course is untrue. A stronger rebuttal came from another source:

So you want evidence of a negative do you? I don’t know what philosophy 101 class you took but you should ask for your money back.

While the notion that you can never prove a negative is nonsense, he’s correct to say I’ve set Michael Cook an impossible task when I ask him to prove no child had before been created for the purpose of abuse, if only because we can’t account for every child ever born.

All this means, though, is that Michael Cook is basing his entire article on an assertion that cannot be proven. How much more damning can you get? Well, a little more damning, as it turns out.

This led Cook’s defender and me into an argument over burden of proof (Does Cook need to prove that this is “new”? Do I need to prove that it’s not?).

But all that was moot when it became clear that children have been created for this purpose. First, I found cases like (WARNING: YOU MAY WANT TO SKIP TO THE NEXT PARAGRAPH): Steven Deuman Jr, who orally raped his 3-month-old daughter to death; a man from Abbots Langley, Hertfordshire, who filmed himself raping his baby daughter; and Danny Friddle who began videotaping himself raping his daughter starting the day she was born. Do we know these men created children expressly to abuse them? I can only say that we have the same evidence that we have for the monsters in Cook’s article: that the abuse began almost immediately after birth.

Then one of our regular readers, “Spunky,” offered a solid link to stories of child exploitation and sex trafficking, which sent me off on a whole new bout of research, which led me to something blindingly obvious.

Slavery.

Children born into slavery become slaves. And slavery isn’t dead, of course. We simply call it by a new name: human trafficking. If you’d like to research this, use the terms “human trafficking” and “intergenerational prostitution.” But be careful. The stories you’ll encounter are what sent me from heated intellectual dispute into actual rage. I added this comment to the article:

I kept researching and researching, and I’ve discovered that this article is promoting an untruth: that “What is new is bringing children into the world for the express purpose of being abused.”

To say such a thing is to show callous disregard for children born to prostitutes who are forced into prostitution themselves. It’s been going on worldwide for years. These women are sexual slaves, and the reason their masters allow them to take a child to term (even if it means reduced earnings from the woman) is so that they can acquire a sexual slave. Google “intergenerational prostitution.” By implying that having children in order to exploit them is something “new” to same-sex adoption, the author is blithely ignoring the plight of these children around the world.

At this point, NOM’s Jennifer Roback Morse entered the fray — which was appropriate, since it through her NOM site that I found the article. She entirely missed the point:

Rob, you do yourself no credit here. No one on this thread, certainly not Michael Cook, would advocate in favor of prostitution, and in favor of prostitutes offering their children to their clients. No one on this thread is “blithely ignoring the plight of these children.” This site is on record as being opposed to human trafficking in all its forms. I feel sure I am speaking for the other commenters here on this point.

Actually, Dr. Morse does herself no credit when she sets up a straw man like this. Of course Michael Cook is opposed to human trafficking — at least, I’d certainly been assuming so. But that simply reinforces my point: Our opponents are desperate. So desperate that they’ll ignore what they know is true; throw out unprovable, easily disproven statements; and blind themselves to great moral evil — as long as it allows them to mount a sad, gasping, despicable attack against us.

ACLU Announces Three Marriage Lawsuits

Fresh off its victory in Windsor v. U.S. which struck down Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act as unconstitutional, the ACLU’s is filing three more lawsuits, in Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Virginia. In Whitewood v. Corbett, the ACLU is challenging Pennsylvania’s statute which bans same-sex marriage. In Fisher-Borne v. Smith, the ACLU will amend its lawsuit seeking adoption rights to include the right to marriage. In the Virginia case, the ACLU and Lambda Legal are still in the planning stages, with plaintiffs and precise details of the case still being worked out. They expect to file that lawsuit later this summer.

Meanwhile, the ACLU and the National Center for Lesbian Rights have filed a motion with the New Mexico Supreme Court, asking it to order state officials to allow same-sex couples to marry. State law is currently silent on the question. Other lawsuits are working their way through Arkansas, Hawaii, Illinois, Nevada, New Jersey and Michigan.

Orson Scott Card Calls for Tolerance — For Him

Geeks Out, a group of LGBT comic and sci-fi enthusiasts, is calling for a boycott of Ender’s Game, a movie coming out in November based on anti-gay Mormon writer and NOM board member Orson Scott Card’s 1985 novel by the same name. Card has responded with a statement to Entertainment Weekly asking for “tolerance” for Card’s radical anti-gay positions:

Ender’s Game is set more than a century in the future and has nothing to do with political issues that did not exist when the book was written in 1984.

With the recent Supreme Court ruling, the gay marriage issue becomes moot.  The Full Faith and Credit clause of the Constitution will, sooner or later, give legal force in every state to any marriage contract recognized by any other state.

Now it will be interesting to see whether the victorious proponents of gay marriage will show tolerance toward those who disagreed with them when the issue was still in dispute.

Orson Scott Card

Card’s idea of tolerance only flows one way. When California’s Prop 8 campaign was still looking close, Card called for the overthrow of the government if Prop 8 failed:

 How long before married people answer the dictators thus: Regardless of law, marriage has only one definition, and any government that attempts to change it is my mortal enemy. I will act to destroy that government and bring it down, so it can be replaced with a government that will respect and support marriage, and help me raise my children in a society where they will expect to marry in their turn.

And to give you an idea of what Card considers tolerance, he wrote this in 2004:

But homosexual “marriage” is an act of intolerance. It is an attempt to eliminate any special preference for marriage in society — to erase the protected status of marriage in the constant balancing act between civilization and individual reproduction.

So if my friends insist on calling what they do “marriage,” they are not turning their relationship into what my wife and I have created, because no court has the power to change what their relationship actually is.

Instead they are attempting to strike a death blow against the well-earned protected status of our, and every other, real marriage.

They steal from me what I treasure most, and gain for themselves nothing at all. They won’t be married. They’ll just be playing dress-up in their parents’ clothes.

And why, according to Card, do we want to marry?

The dark secret of homosexual society — the one that dares not speak its name — is how many homosexuals first entered into that world through a disturbing seduction or rape or molestation or abuse, and how many of them yearn to get out of the homosexual community and live normally.

It’s that desire for normality, that discontent with perpetual adolescent sexuality, that is at least partly behind this hunger for homosexual “marriage.”

But hey, now that he has a major motion picture starring Asa Butterfield, Harrison Ford, Viola Davis and Ben Kingsley on the line, Card wants you to show him how tolerant you are. And it now seems that the only way to do that is to not only keeping silent about what he has written about you, but to actually hand over some of your money to see his movie and buy his action figures.

Right. I’m not a fan of boycotts, but I just don’t see that happening.

At any rate, Card — and Summit Entertainment, the Lionsgate subsidiary which is trying to figure out how to promote Ender’s Game — is definitely feeling the heat:

Now Summit  faces the tricky task of figuring out how to handle Card’s involvement. The first big challenge will be whether to include him in July’s San Diego Comic-Con program. Promoting Ender’s Game without Card would be like trying to promote the first Harry Potter movie without J.K. Rowling. But having Card appear in the main ballroom in front of 6,500 fans could prove a liability if he’s forced to tackle the issue head-on during the Q&A session.

“I don’t think you take him to any fanboy event,” says one studio executive. “This will definitely take away from their creative and their property.”  Another executive sums up the general consensus: “Keep him out of the limelight as much as possible.”

The Daily Agenda for Tuesday, July 9

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS:
David Hockney: 1937. The British artist was born with synesthesia — he brain “sees” colors whenever he hears music. The colors that he sees guides him when he designs stage sets for operatic and ballet productions. In addition to set design, he is a renowned painter, print maker and photographer. While still a student at the Royal College of Art, Hockney’s exhibition Young Contemporariesin 1961, signalled the arrival of British Pop Art. Later that year, he sold two of his prints to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. That same year, he also read the poems of Walt Whitman, which inspired Hockney to paint several paintings on the themes of love and homosexuality, including “We Two Boys Together Clinging,” where the title and some of the text in the painting are lines from the Whitman’s poem of the same name. By the mid 1960s, Hockney moved to Los Angeles, where he made an entire series of paintings of swimming pools rendered in vibrant colors.

In more recent years, Hockney has been exploring the limits of scale. His “A Bigger Grand Canyon” (1998) is actually a series of 60 paintings which, when combined together, produce one enormous painting of 6 3/4 feet by 24 feet. That painting was bought by the National Gallery of Australia for $4.6 million.In 2007, he produced “Bigger Trees Near Warter,” a series of fifty separate canvases which combine to form a 15 feet by forty feet painting. He donated those canvases to the Tate Gallery in London. “I thought if I’m going to give something to the Tate I want to give them something really good. It’s going to be here for a while.” He described it as a “duty” of successful artists to donate some of their work. He had turned down several requests to paint a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II, explaining politely that he was too busy painting her country. But he relented last year while watching the Thames River pageant for the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee on television and donated a printed copy of a digital painting he produced on his iPad to the Royal Collection.

Kelly McGillis: 1957. When the other star of Top Gun came out of the closet in 2009, she said that coming to terms with her sexual orientation had been a long, ongoing process since she was twelve, when she was convinced that God was punishing her. She now says that it’s much easier to become spiritual now that she knows that “God is okay with you being gay.” She graduated from Julliard’s Drama School in 1983 and began landing acting roles right away. Her breakout role was as an Amish mother in 1985’s Witness with Harrison Ford, for which she was nominated for a Golden Globe award. In 1986, she was the flight instructor, Charlie, in Top Gun with Tom Cruse and Val Kilmer. She continued acting in films and television throughout the 1990s before taking a break in 2001. She resumed acting in 2004, and in 2008 she guest starred on Showtime’s “The L Word,” where she played a closeted Army colonel. In 2010, McGilllis entered into a civl union with her partner, and they make their home in Collingswood, New Jersey where McGillis works full-time at a drug and alcohol rehabilitation center. “I think one of the gifts that comes with age, if we survive ourselves, is what we created,” she explained.

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?

Another GOP Pol Takes the Portman Route As Ohio Kicks Off Petition Drive To Reverse Marriage Ban

Former Ohio Attorney General Jim Petro, who oversaw the state’s 2004 ballot initiative that banned same-sex marriage and all other forms of partnership recognition, is now supporting the effort to overturn that ban. As Timothy Kincaid reported last week, the former GOP AG’s endorsement of the ban’s reversal had been expected. But today’s announcement goes much further, with Petro being the star speaker at a news conference announcing the start of a massive signature gathering campaign by Freedom Ohio to get the proposal rescinding of the constitutional amendment onto the ballot for 2014.

Petro said when he was asked to support gay marriage, he “quickly and without hesitation said ‘I’m all for it.’ ” He said he will be active in the 2014 campaign and hopes more Republicans join him.

The 2004 constitutional amendment forbidding same-same marriage is a “roadblock to diversity” and leaves the public and the business community with the impression that that the state is ” intolerant and unwelcoming.”

Petro’s personal reason for his change in position is a familiar one:

Petro switched his position after his daughter, Corbin, legally married a woman in Massachusetts last year.

Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH) announced his support for marriage equality in March after his son came out to him.

Ohio’s process for getting an issue placed on the ballot is a daunting one. Freedom Ohio must collect 385,245 valid signatures — a number that is equal to ten percent of the number of people who voted in the last gubernatorial election. But Freedom Ohio won’t have the luxury of circulating petitions in larger urban areas where support would be expected to be greatest. They will also need to make sure that in at least 44 of Ohio’s 88 counties, they collected enough signatures to equal at 5% of the number of people voting in the last gubernatorial election for that county. Just getting on the ballot is half the battle, and if Freedom Ohio can accomplish it, then it bodes well for tapping into a broad geographic base of support.

Ohio’s Issue 1 of 2004, which banned same-sex marriage and all other legal recognition for same-sec couples, was approved by 62% Ohio voters. Issue 1 was placed on the ballot by the General Assembly. Equality Ohio, which was formed in the aftermath of Issue 1, has so far withheld its support for Freedom Ohio’s campaign:

Ian James, co-founder of Freedom Ohio, said his organization’s executive committee decided to move forward with Ohio campaign next year even there is no consensus among national gay, lesbian and transgender groups about going to the ballot here in 2014 or 2016.

“When we file these petitions and reach the ballot, everybody will be with us,” he said.

Elyzabeth Holford, executive director of Equality Ohio, another LGBT group, said there is ” absolutely no formal commitment at this time” to support a 2014 issue. “Equality Ohio is working with our national partners and we will be going when the time is right.”

It kind of reminds me of when Olsen and Boies announced, over the objections of several national LGBT advocacy orgs, that they were going to challenge Prop 8 in Federal Court.

A similar signature-gathering campaign is also underway in Arizona to overturn constitutional bans are already underway in Arizona, and as similar effort will launch later this month in Oregon. Nevada’s legislature has completed the first steps of a long process to reverse that state’s marriage ban in 2016.

Please Forward / Re-Tweet / Vomit

Right back at you, Pat.

The Daily Agenda for Monday, July 8

TODAY’S AGENDA:
Marriage Equality Bill Reaches Report Stage in House of Lords: Westminster, UK. The Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill will begin the Report Stage in the House of Lords today after completing the Committee Stage line-by-line examination on June 24. One hundred and thirty-six amendments have been proposed for the bill, some of which are so-called “wrecking amendments” which would either stop the bill altogether or derail its progress to eventual passage by changing the bill in ways that would be unacceptable to the House of Commons. Several amendments proposed by Lord Geoffrey Dear were already rejected at the Committee Stage two weeks ago. Two proposed amendments (amendments 4 and 8) would seek to define and establish “traditional marriage” as a separate heterosexual-only institution. One amendment (amendment 46) would protect teachers who would denounce same-sex marriage in the classrooms, and one amendment (amendment 50) would guarantee the right of parents to withdraw students from the classroom anytime same-sex marriage is to be discussed. Two amendments proposed by  Baroness Ruth Deech (amendments 94 and 136) would extend all tax and other benefits of civil partnerships to all care givers and family members who share a house. And two proposed amendments by Lord Indarjit Singh of Wimbledon (amendments 96 and 134) would require that the entire bill be put to voters in England and Wales in an October referendum before it can take effect.

Once the bill completes the Report Stage on Wednesday, it will then go to House of Lords for a third and final reading on July 15. If it passes the third reading, it will then go back to the House of Commons due to changes which have been made to the bill already.

TODAY IN HISTORY:
Lige Clarke’s “Call to Arms”: 1969. Lige Clarke had cut his activist’s teeth as a member of the Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C., where he had lettered nine of the ten picket signs carried by the first White House protest in 1965 (see Apr 17). A protege of Frank Kameny (see May 21)and lover of Jack Nichols (see Mar 16), Clarke moved with Nichols to New York in 1968, where the couple became  regular columnists for Screw magazine. Their column, “The Homosexual Citizen,” is believed to have been the the first regular LGBT column to appear regularly in a non-LGBT publication. In reaction to the two nights of rioting that followed the police raid on the Stonewall Inn, Clarke issued the following “call to arms,” which echoed much of the more radical rhetoric of that rebellious age:

The revolution in Sheridan Square must step beyond its present boundaries. The homosexual revolution is only part of a larger revolution sweeping through all segments of society. We hope that “Gay Power” will not become a call for separation, but for sexual integration, and that the young activists will read, study, and make themselves acquainted with all of the facts that will help them carry the sexual revolt triumphantly into the councils of the U.S. government, into the anti-homosexual churches, into the offices of anti-homosexual psychiatrists, into the city government, and into the state legislatures which make our manner of love-making a crime. It is tome to push the homosexual revolution to its logical conclusion. We must crush tyranny wherever it exists and join forces with those who would assist in the utter destruction of the puritanical, repressive, anti-sexual Establishment.

Austria Decriminalizes Homosexuality: 1971. On July 8, 1971 an amendment to the Austrian criminal code was signed which abolished the criminalization of consensual homosexual contact. Austria’s code had criminalized both male and female same-sex contact under its “crimes against nature” clause. With the new law, male homosexual contacts with a young man under 18, male (same-sex) prostitution, and “advertising” or “encouraging” homosexuality were still criminal after that date. The latter provisions were abolished during the early 1980s to make HIV-prevention easier. The age of consent remained 18 until 2002, when it was held unconstitutional by the Austrian Constitutional Court. It age of consent is now 14 to 16, depending on the age of both parties, and consistent with the age of consent for opposite-sex couples.

Murder Suspect Goes Free Because Gays Fear Coming Out of the Closet: 1977. The Associated Press reported:

(San Francisco) Police say a suspect in 14 homosexual murders has not been charged because three survivors of his knife attacks, including a “well-known entertainer” and a diplomat, won’t “come out of the closet” and testify against him. For the past year, police have been questioning a young man they call “The Doodler” about the 14 slayings and three assaults that occurred in San Francisco’s gay community between January 1974 and September 1975, Inspector Rotea Gilford said Thursday.

Interest in the case surfaced again this week after two Redondo Beach, Calif., men were arrested in Riverside for questioning about as many as 28 slayings linked to homosexual encounters.

The suspect here, his name not released, has talked freely with police but has not admitted the slayings, Gilford said. He said police are “fairly certain” they have the right man, but need the testimony of survivors who may be able to identify “The Doodler.”

In the attacks, the murderer met other men at a number of after-hours gay clubs and restaurants in San Francisco. He usually sketched them men before having sex with them and then stabbing them. Police believe the man committed the murders after feeling shame over his homosexual experiences.

Gilford said the three survivors include the entertainer, the diplomat and a man who left San Francisco and won’t answer letters or phone calls at his new express. “My feeling is that they don’t want to be exposed,” he said.

Harvey Milk, an advocate for homosexual rights, said of the victims who refuse to speak up, “I can understand their position. I respect the pressure society has put on them. Milk said many homosexuals may keep their sexual preference a secret because they fear losing their jobs. “They have to stay in the closet,” he said.

Another spokesman for the gay community, teacher Hank Wilson, said the case represents society’s “double standards” in dealing with crimes involving homosexuals. “You never year about the heterosexual murderer who had killed 12 women after raping them,” he said.

With no witnesses willing to identify him, “The Doodler” was never brought to justice.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Philip Johnson: 1906. He was only twenty-four years old and fresh out of Harvard when he founded the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. He would have been regarded as a great visionary even if that had been his only accomplishment. But Johnson wanted more, and in his travels to Europe he became exposed to such masters of modernism as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, and Walter Gropius. Johnson’s 1932 MOMA show, “The International Style: Architecture Since 1922,” introduced modern architecture to the American public, and Johnson became an evangelist for the International Style. Johnson’s travels to Europe also exposed him to the early ideology of Hitler’s National Socialism, which Johnson also eagerly embraced. He remained enamored with Nazism until Germany’s 1939 invasion of Poland, when he toured that conquered country at Hitler’s invitation. As Johnson later said, “I have no excuse [for] such utter, unbelievable stupidity. … I don’t know how you expiate guilt.”

Philip Johnson’s Glass House

Fortunately for Johnson, there would be a second chapter to his life. After the war, he designed his 1949 masterpiece Glass House as his own private residence in New Canaan, Connecticut. That design put him at the forefront of modernist architecture in America. In the 1950s, he teamed up with his mentor Meis van der Rohe to design the Seagram Building in New York. The steel-and-glass design would define the essential elements of American skyscrapers for the next sixty years. Johnson’s minimalist steel and glass design would also be the defining feature of his Chrystal Cathedral, which he designed for televangelist Robert Schuller in Garden Grove, California (and which was sold sold in a bankruptcy transaction to the Orange County diocese of the Catholic Church in 2011 for $57.5 million. After renovations for liturgical purposes, the building will become Christ Cathedral, the diocese’s official seat.).

From the sublime to the ridiculous: the AT&T Building, 1984.

By the 1980s, Johnson had decided that minimalism had boxed him into a corner, if you will excuse the pun. So in a fit of iconoclasm, he abandoned his minimalist signature by placing a garish Chippendale corbel on top of the AT&T building in New York, thus heralding the utterly lamentable post-modernist geegaws that are the bane of every tacky strip mall in North America. Johnson’s latest design is considerably more redeeming. It is also for the largest LGBT congregation in America, Dallas’s Cathedral of Hope, whose Interfaith Peace Chapel opened to the public in 2010. Johnson didn’t live to see it come to fruition. He died in his sleep at Glass House in 2005, survived by his partner of 45 years.

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The Daily Agenda for Thursday, July 18

TODAY’S AGENDA:
Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Charlotte, NC (Black Pride); Colorado Springs, CO; Frankfurt, Germany; Hull, UK; Kitsap, WA; Leipzig, Germany; Marseille, France (EuroPride 2013); Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, UK; Peel, ON; Plymouth, UK; Portland, OR (Latino Pride); Reading, PA; Rochester, MN; Rochester, NY.

AIDS Walk This Weekend: San Francisco, CA.

Other Events This Weekend: Sand Blast Weekend, Asbury Park, NJ; Outfest Film Festival, Los Angeles, CA; Miami Beach Bruthaz, Miami Beach, FL; QFest Film Festival, Philadelphia, PA; Bear Week, Provincetown, MA.

TODAY IN HISTORY:
Psychiatrist Denounces Anti-Gay Witchhunt: 1950. A Senate subcommittee under Joseph McCarthy investigating the federal employment of gay Americans was warned that their investigation would have negative consequences on government functioning. “The immediate effect of the probe is to threaten the emotional security and mental health of many government employees, warned Dr. Henry P. Laughlin of the Washington Psychiatric Society. “This is indeed unfortunate, tending to lower the efficiency and work production of those who have some actual or imagined basis for concern, and especially for those people whose homosexual experiences have been isolated or of a token nature or perhaps never occurred.”

Laughlin however emphasized that he was only speaking for himself and not the Society, before continuing on a line rarely heard in 1950: “Sexual orientation doesn’t enter into a person’s ability or capacity to do work. I am sure that many persons in government, as well as in industry and other areas of endeavor, have made significant contributions, although their orientation happens to be homosexual.” Laughlin’s testimony would fall on deaf years. Tens of thousands of people would be hounded out of their jobs over the next several decades, whether they were gay, suspected of being gay, or simply accused of being gay for whatever reasons.

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The Daily Agenda for Sunday, July 7

THE DAILY AGENDA:
Pride Celebrations This Today: Budapest, Hungary; Cologne, Geramny; Kolkata, India; Madrid, Spain; Munich, Germany; Prince George, BC; Sundsvall, Sweden; Victoria, BC;

Other Events Today: Tokyo International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, Tokyo, Japan.

Clyde Tolson and J. Edgar Hoover, on vacation.

TODAY IN HISTORY:
Hoover’s Homosexuality Denied Again: 1975. J. Edgar Hoover, the Federal Bureau of Investigations’ 48-year chief, was dogged by rumors of his homosexuality and a suspected longtime affair with his assistant Clyde Tolson, but those rumors were put down as quickly as they arose. When Hoover died in 1972 he left his estate to Tolson, who moved into Hoover’s house. When Tolson died in April of 1975, speculation arose again over what everyone acknowledged as an extraordinarily close relationship with Hoover. In July, the subject came up again on CBS’s “Face the Nation”, according to this UPI article:

Rumors that the late FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was a homosexual “absolutely could not be true,” according to a former top FBI official.

William A. Sullivan, who retired Saturday as assistant FBI director, made the statement in response to a reporter’s question on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”

Hoover never married and maintained a lifetime friendship with his top assistant, Clyde Tolson, who died earlier this year.

CBS reporter Fred Graham told Sullivan it was “common knowledge that there were allegations that J. Edgar Hoover was a homosexual.”

“I wonder, “Graham asked, “can you tell me if that was investigated by any security agency, and can you tell me whether or not the FBI knows whether or not that’s true — was true?”

Sullivan replied: “I think that that is a — that question there is so ridiculous, about the homosexuality of J. Edgar Hoover, that I will just not give any credit to it, because I think it — it just absolutely cannot be true. I don’t believe.”

Graham: “But are you telling me that it was never checked out?”

Sullivan: “Certainly not. It was not checked out. It was so ridiculous that you could not check out something like that.”

George Cukor, on The Philadelphia Story set with Katharine Hepburn.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
George Cukor: 1899.A glance through his filmography shows that Hollywood would not have been Hollywood without George Cukor’s directing many of its landmark films with RKO and MGM.  In 1931, he made his solo directorial debut with Paramount with Tarnished Lady starring Tallulah Bankhead, and went on to work on twenty-six films over the next ten years including, notably, A Bill of Divorcement (1932, debuting Katharine Hepburn), Dinner at Eight (1933), Little Women (1933), David Copperfield (1935), Romeo and Juliet (1936), Camille (1936), The Women (1939), The Philadelphia Story (1940), Gaslight (1944), Adam’s Rib (1949), Born Yesterday (1950), A Star is Born (1954), and My Fair Lady(1964). Cukor had been hired by his mentor, David O. Selznick, to direct Gone With The Windeven before the book was published. But Cukor was fired three weeks into filming after expressing dissatisfaction with the script. (A replacement director was also dissatisfied with it and quit, prompting a complete re-write of the film.)

Cukor had a reputation as a “woman’s director” for his ability to coax great performances from his actresses. He hated the title, perhaps seeing it as a dig at his open secret: just about everyone in Hollywood knew he was gay. He luxurious home was host to weekly Sunday afternoon pool parties attended by closeted celebrities and their guests. Hollywood was — and still is — a very small company town, and word had a way of getting around. Producer Joseph L. Mankiewicz said, “In a way, George Cukor was the first great female director of Hollywood.” But the quality of Cukor’s work belied those who dismissed him because he wasn’t a typical macho director. Twenty-one actors and actresses working under Cukor received Oscar nominations; three actors and two actresses came up winners. Cukor himself earned five Best Direction nominations, finally winning an Oscar for My Fair Lady.

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The Daily Agenda for Saturday, July 6

THE DAILY AGENDA:
Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Arraial, Portugal; Belfast, UK; Budapest, Hungary; Cologne, Geramny; Kolkata, India; Madrid, Spain; Munich, Germany; Lisbon, Portugal; Porto, Portugal; Prince George, BC; Schwerin, Germany; Sheffield, UK; Sundsvall, Sweden; Victoria, BC;

Other Events This Weekend: Tokyo International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, Tokyo, Japan.

TODAY IN HISTORY:
“Homo Nest Raided”: 1969. Coverage of the Stonewall rebellion in New York’s news media was quite scant. The New York Times buried its first day’s coverage with a very small article on page 33. The New York Daily News placed its first small story on page thirty. But on July 6, the Daily News returned to the subject again to give the story the paper’s trademarked sensationalized treatment:

Homo Nest Raided, Queen Bees Are Stinging Mad

By JERRY LISKER

he sat there with her legs crossed, the lashes of her mascara-coated eyes beating like the wings of a hummingbird. She was angry. She was so upset she hadn’t bothered to shave. A day old stubble was beginning to push through the pancake makeup. She was a he. A queen of Christopher Street.

Last weekend the queens had turned commandos and stood bra strap to bra strap against an invasion of the helmeted Tactical Patrol Force. The elite police squad had shut down one of their private gay clubs, the Stonewall Inn at 57 Christopher St., in the heart of a three-block homosexual community in Greenwich Village. Queen Power reared its bleached blonde head in revolt. New York City experienced its first homosexual riot. “We may have lost the battle, sweets, but the war is far from over,” lisped an unofficial lady-in-waiting from the court of the Queens.

“We’ve had all we can take from the Gestapo,” the spokesman, or spokeswoman, continued. “We’re putting our foot down once and for all.” The foot wore a spiked heel. According to reports, the Stonewall Inn, a two-story structure with a sand painted brick and opaque glass facade, was a mecca for the homosexual element in the village who wanted nothing but a private little place where they could congregate, drink, dance and do whatever little girls do when they get together.

Girls. Lisping. Queens. Bleached blonde revolt. The mocking, denigrating descriptions carried throughout the article:

Last Friday the privacy of the Stonewall was invaded by police from the First Division. It was a raid. They had a warrant. After two years, police said they had been informed that liquor was being served on the premises. Since the Stonewall was without a license, the place was being closed. It was the law.

All hell broke loose when the police entered the Stonewall. The girls instinctively reached for each other. Others stood frozen, locked in an embrace of fear.

Only a handful of police were on hand for the initial landing in the homosexual beachhead. They ushered the patrons out onto Christopher Street, just off Sheridan Square. A crowd had formed in front of the Stonewall and the customers were greeted with cheers of encouragement from the gallery.

The whole proceeding took on the aura of a homosexual Academy Awards Night. The Queens pranced out to the street blowing kisses and waving to the crowd. A beauty of a specimen named Stella wailed uncontrollably while being led to the sidewalk in front of the Stonewall by a cop. She later confessed that she didn’t protest the manhandling by the officer, it was just that her hair was in curlers and she was afraid her new beau might be in the crowd and spot her. She didn’t want him to see her this way, she wept.

The crowd began to get out of hand, eye witnesses said. Then, without warning, Queen Power exploded with all the fury of a gay atomic bomb. Queens, princesses and ladies-in-waiting began hurling anything they could get their polished, manicured fingernails on. Bobby pins, compacts, curlers, lipstick tubes and other femme fatale missiles were flying in the direction of the cops. The war was on. The lilies of the valley had become carnivorous jungle plants.

The Village Voice, which was supposed to be the more liberal, counter-cultural paper, was only somewhat more considerate in its choice of language when its coverage hit the streets three days earlier. But at least the Voice’s Lucian Truscott IV was able to capture the riot’s importance: “The forces of faggotry, spurred by a Friday night raid on one of the city’s largest, most popular, and longest lived gay bars, the Stonewall Inn, rallied Saturday night in an unprecedented protest against the raid and continued Sunday night to assert presence, possibility, and pride until the early hours of Monday morning.” Disrespectful language aside, Truscott’s account would become the story of record, while Lisker’s article would be forever remembered for the kind of universal contempt directed toward gay people that gave rise to the rebellion in the first place. Lisker went on to become the sports reporter for the Daily News, New York Post, and Fox Sports. He died in 1993.

Jérôme Duquesnoy (left), Piete, 1654 (right).

TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Jérôme Duquesnoy: 1602. The Flemish artist was, in his day, regarded as one of the finest sculptors of the seventeenth century. In 1644, Duquesnoy was commissioned to create statues for the nave of the Cathedral of St. Michael and St. Gudula in Brussels, and the following year he was appointed “architecte, statuaire et sculpteur de la Cour” to Archduke Leopold William, Regent of the Netherlands. it was during the time where he produced some of his most famous works, many of which depicted strong, muscled male figures in the Hellenic tradition. In 1651, he became Court Architect and Sculptor, and in 1654 he went to Ghent to fulfill several commissions when he was accused of indecencies with his assistants. The Privy Council of Ghent convicted Duquesnoy of sodomy and sentenced him to death. He was bound to a stake in the Grain Market in the center of the city, strangled, and his body reduced to ashes. His reputation was destroyed and his memory repressed. It has only been recently that critical attention has returned to his work.

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Ohio’s Petro to endorse marriage initiate

From the Columbus Dispatch

Republican Jim Petro, Ohio’s former attorney general and state auditor, is expected to endorse a 2014 Ohio ballot measure that would permit same-sex marriages in the state.

Peru legislature votes not to protect gays from hate crimes.

El Pais

El congresista Carlos Bruce propuso en 2011 una modificación al Código Penal para que las agresiones por discriminación de orientación sexual y la identidad de género fueran castigadas con penas agravadas. El proyecto de ley estuvo en la Comisión de Justicia del Legislativo hasta hace un mes, cuando se descartó para evitar el ruido de los lobbies religiosos.

Sin embargo, la noche del jueves el Congreso votó la cuestión: 56 parlamentarios se pronunciaron en contra, entre ellos 26 del oficialista Gana Perú y 16 fujimoristas. “No pensé que la resistencia a este grupo social era tan grande. Es una muestra clara de la homofobia que existe en el Congreso, una homofobia escondida, porque ganamos el debate pero perdimos la votación”, ha declarado Bruce este viernes a EL PAÍS. Durante el debate, dos parlamentarios de confesión evangélica – uno de ellos fujimorista, Julio Rosas – fueron los más reticentes. “No había congresistas que abiertamente expresaron su discrepancia. Salvo dos evangélicos con argumentos débiles, todos los otros se pronunciaban a favor. Pero había una mayoría silenciosa que al momento de la votación se expresó (en contra), en particular la bancada de Gana Perú”, añadió Bruce.

Google Translate:

Congressman Carlos Bruce proposed in 2011 an amendment to the Criminal Code so that the assaults of discrimination sexual orientation and gender identity were punished with severe penalties. The bill was in the Legislative Judiciary Committee until a month ago, when it was discarded to avoid the noise of the religious lobbies.

However, on Thursday night Congress passed the question: 56 MPs voted against, including 26 of the ruling Gana Peru and 16 Fujimori. “I never thought that resistance to this social group was so large. It is a clear example of the homophobia that exists in Congress, hidden homophobia, because we won the debate but lost the vote, “Bruce said Friday at HOME. During the debate, two MPs of evangelical confession – one of them Fujimori, Julio Rosas – were the most reluctant. “There was Congress who openly dissented. Except for two evangelical weak arguments, all others were in favor. But there was a silent majority that when the vote was expressed (against), including the bed of Gana Peru “added Bruce.

Marriage a consideration in Chilean presidential election

In Chile, a president can serve more than once, but not consecutive terms. Former President Michelle Bachelet (2006 – 2010) appears, at present, to be the likeliest winner of this year’s contest. (The Economist)

She ended her presidency in 2010 with a sky-high approval rating of 84%. Barring an upset, Michelle Bachelet looks set to return for a second term next year with her popularity undiminished. On June 30th she comfortably won a primary election in the Concertación, Chile’s centre-left coalition, taking 73% of the vote. Little seems to stand between her and victory in November’s election. She would be the first president in 81 years to win a second term (consecutive terms are not allowed).
…
Ms Bachelet also promises a more liberal approach to social affairs. She says she wants to legalise gay marriage and allow abortion in some limited circumstances (Chile is among the handful of Latin American countries that ban abortion outright, even when the mother’s life is in danger).