Box Turtle Bulletin
News and commentary about the anti-gay lobby“Now you must raise your children up in a world where that union of man and box turtle is on the same legal footing as man and wife…”
News and commentary about the anti-gay lobbyDecember 31st, 2012
Well I have to admit I’m shocked. Barney Frank and I agree on something.
Retiring gay Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) announced on Monday that he strongly opposes the nomination of Chuck Hagel as defense secretary based on the former senator’s 1998 anti-gay comments and record on LGBT issues.
And even more surprising is that it goes against my impression of him as the ultimate partisan hack (or, as the blade put it):
Frank has a reputation for being a loyalist to the Democratic Party and President Obama, so the statement against Obama’s potential pick for defense secretary is particularly noteworthy.
Well maybe I’ll have to keep a bit more of an open mind about Barney.
December 31st, 2012
TODAY IN HISTORY:
Is Homosexuality Normal or Not?: 1971. That was the burning question for Life magazine, and they tackled it pretty much the way everyone did back then: by talking to a lot of straight people about gay people, but without quoting from a single gay person. Featured in the article was noted anti-gay therapists Edmund Bergler (despite being dead for nearly ten years), Lawrence Hatterer (who conducted electric shock aversion therapy), Irving Bieber, and Charles Socarides — who would later go on to co-found the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH). The article tried to present a rundown on what makes gay men gay (there was virtually no mention of lesbians in the article), and then, without quoting from a single “homosexual militant”, asserted that these militants opposed all research on homosexuality. All of this led to the article’s final two paragraphs:
Whether liberationists choose introspection, militancy, or violence as a course of action, the basic stumbling block remains the same: heterosexual antipathy to homosexuality. Will this ever change? Dr. Hatterer has observed that society’s tolerance of homosexuality is increasing but he doubts that we will ever accept it as a desirable “alternative lifestyle.” Nonetheless he and virtually all other psychiatrists advocate repealing the laws that violate this minority’s civil rights.
On the question of “normality,” much remains to be learned. In opposing all inquiry, the militants expose fears of what science might find out about them. Dr. (Evelyn) Hooker’s task force on homosexuality makes the sensible recommendation that the National Institute of Mental Health fund a center for the study of all sexual behavior. “It is essential,” says the report, “that a study of homosexuality be placed within the context of the study of the broad range of sexuality, normal and deviant.”
You can read the article here.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Jennifer Higdon: 1962. Who says playing flute in a Tennessee high school band is a dead end? It certainly wasn’t for Jennifer Higdon, who majored in the instrument at Bowling Green State University where she also began composing. After graduation, she served as Composer-in-Residence with the Pittsburgh Symphony, the Gren Bay Symphony, the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Fort Worth Symphony. Her one-movement tone poem blue cathedral, inspired by her brother’s death from cancer, has become among the most performed modern orchestral works by a living American composer. Her Violin Concerto, which premiered in 2009 in Indianapolis, was awarded the 2010 Pulitzer Prize. That same year, her Percussion Concerto won a Grammy for Best Contemporary Classical Composition. Higdon lives with her high school sweetheart, Cheryl Lawson, in Philadelphia, where Higdon teaches composition at the Curtis Institute.
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).
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December 30th, 2012
I missed this bit of news, coming as it did late on Friday afternoon before Christmas, but Rep. Richard Hanna (R-NY) announced that he would sign on as co-sponsor for the Respect for Marriage Act, the proposed bill to overturn DOMA. Hanna, who was just elected to a second term, joins Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) in backing DOMA’s repeal.
Meanwhile, a spokesperson for Rep. Charlie Bass (R-NH) confirmed that he has become the third Republican to sign on as co-sponsor of a bill to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act. Unfortunately, he waited until after he lost his bid for re-election last month to Democrat Annie Kuster. So, you know, whatever. Bass voted for DOMA in 1996.
A commentary.
December 30th, 2012
And in the process, they have gone all-in on political hack-dom.
Last Thursday, the GOP advocacy group — they are no longer a GOP LGBT advocacy group — took out a full page ad in The New York Times attacking former Sen. Chuck Hagel’s (R-NE) possible nomination as Defense Secretary to succeed Leon Panetta, who is expected to step down soon. LCR’s ad calls Hagel “Wrong on Gay Rights, Wrong on Iran, Wrong on Israel.” It comes to that conclusion after quoting Hagel’s 1998 denunciation of openly gay James Hormel as US Ambassador to Luxembourg and implores readers to donate to LCR so that they can “create a stronger and more inclusive Republican Party.”
Oh, and to tell Obama that Hagel is “wrong for Defense Secretary.”
As Timothy Kincaid noted, there are a number of very good reasons to be concerned about a possible Defense Secretary Hagel, most of which I share. Hagel attacked Hormel for being incapable of “representing our lifestyle, our values, our standards” because “it is an inhibiting factor to be gay — openly, aggressively gay.” Whatever that was supposed to mean. Hagel’s attack on Hormel stood for more than fourteen years through debates over marriage, DOMA, and DADT repeal — which incidentally a Secretary Hagel would oversee its continued implementation. Hagel supported DADT up until his retirement in 2009, although he now says that he is “pro-ending” DADT. His belated apology notwithstanding — for being “insensitive” rather than for being wrong — I find him a troublesome choice for Defense Secretary.
Log Cabin Republicans find him problematic as well, and they’ve spent an incredible amount of scratch to say so. Believe it or not, but after a highly contentious election year, they just happened to find that they had somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred grand that was till laying around in their coffers to put towards a full-page ad in The New York Times.
That’s an incredible amount of money to tell everyone that Hagel is “wrong on gay rights.” Especially when it comes only two months after LCR decided that Mitt Romney was the right choice “for our members, our community, and for the nation as a whole” — despite Romney’s running on the most homophobic platform in GOP history and his personal endorsement for NOM’s five-point attack plan against the LGBT community.
It’s time to face simple facts. Log Cabin Republicans is no longer an LGBT rights group. At one time, they were. They withheld their endorsement of President George Bush in 2004 because he called for the passage of the Federal Marriage Amendment, and they endorsed John McCain in 2008 partly because he opposed the Federal Marriage Amendment. They also sued the federal government in court over the constitutionality of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” That is what accountability and advocacy used to look like for gay Republicans within the GOP.
But this year, LCR endorsed Romney for holding exactly the same policies as Bush, while Hagel gets a full-page attack ad over fourteen-year-old comments — for which Hagel at least managed to muster some kind of a half-hearted apology, which, as weak as it was, is still far better than anything we’ve heard out of Romney.
And what makes the LCR’s actions all the more unbelievable is that just two weeks ago, when Hagel’s comments were first coming to light, LCR Executive Director R. Clarke Cooper was singing his praises:
Speaking for himself and not for LCR, Cooper wrote in an email, “I recall working with Senator Chuck Hagel and his staff during the Bush administration and he was certainly not shy about expressing his criticisms. But despite his criticisms, Hagel voted with us most of the time and there was no question he was committed to advancing America’s interests abroad. As for his nomination to be secretary of defense, it is well worth noting that Senator Hagel is a combat veteran who has hands-on experience in the field. The battlefield is not just theory for him.”
Anyone can hold some unbelievably inconsistent positions, and many of us do. But LCR is putting some serious muscle behind its sterling silver forked tongue. According to tax returns filed at Guidestar (registration required), LCR’s annual revenue amounts to something in the neighborhood of $800,000, while a full-page ad at the New York Times can run in excess of $100,000. Which means that LCR doesn’t just hold a glaringly inconsistent position, they purchased their double-platinum double standard at the cost of upwards of an eight of their annual budget.
Or so they would have us believe. Which, frankly, I find preposterous. To believe that, I would have to swallow the idea that in the closing days of an election year, this particular political organization still had an eighth of its budget unspent. Really? Nobody has that much money laying around at the end of the year. But LCR did. Or, more likely, the necessary funds just happened to materialize right at the moment when it was needed to cover LCR’s highest priority as of last week.
All of this raises some very legitimate questions about what kind of an organization the Log Cabin Republicans really is. We know they don’t give a shit about the LGBT community; they amply demonstrated that two months ago. They are now just using “gay rights” as just another angle to support the broader Party Line, whatever the Party Line is. And that Party Line is to support Party Causes, Party Campaigns and Party People, regardless of whatever their actual positions on gay rights happens to be. If it means supporting The Party’s anti-gay presidential candidate, then shut up and get in line. If it means providing cover for The Party’s opposition to a somewhat less anti-gay turncoat who would dare to work in a Democratic administration, then here’s a boatload of cash to do it with. Gay rights? Shmay rights! As long as it provides cover for The Party’s larger goals.
As a postscript: It’s worth noting that on the day after that the LCR ad appeared in The New York Times, the LCR board announced that Cooper was stepping down as Executive Director effective Dec 30. Their Party Line is that Cooper made that decision last October.
December 30th, 2012
TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Beauford Delaney: 1901. His mother had been born into slavery and never learned to read or write. Because of her experiences, and in keeping with the family’s hard-fought position of respectability in Knoxville where his father was a Methodist minister, the values of dignity, education and a keen awareness of injustices were paramount in the Delaney household. Beauford and his younger brother, Joseph, developed an interest in art at an early age, when they drew copies of pictures they saw on Sunday school cards and the family Bible. As a teenager, Beauford got a job at a local sign company, where his work was noticed by Lloyd Branson, Knoxville’s best known artist. Delaney became Branson’s apprentice and, with Branson’s backing, moved to Boston to study art in 1924. His escape from the Jim Crow south opened up a huge world, where he learned the essentials of painting techniques, was first exposed to the black activist politics, and experienced his first intimate encounter with another young man.
Beauford Delaney, “Can Fire In The Park”, 1946
By 1929, Beauford used up Boston and moved to Harlem, which coincided with the great artistic and political flowering known as the Harlem Renaissance. Despite being penniless during the early crushing years of the Great Depression, Delaney found an affinity with the “multiple of people of all races [who] spend every night of their lives in parks and cafes.” As he wrote in his journal, their courage inspired him to believe that “somehow, someway there was something I could manage if only with some stronger force of will I could find the courage to surmount the terror and fear of this immense city and accept everything insofar as possible with some calm and determination.”
That calm and determination became the subject of some of his greatest works. Delaney eventually found work here and there — as a bellhop, telephone operator, doorman, janitor — while also finding, slowly, an audience for his paintings. He rubbed shoulders Georgia O’Keefe and Henry Miller, and became close friends with author James Baldwin (see Aug 2), and yet he remained an isolated individual, presenting carefully crafted faces to the people he encountered depending on where he was. To his neighbors in Greenwich Village, where his studio was, he was part of a larger gay (and mostly white) circle of friends; in Harlem, he kept his other life hidden. The decidedly macho world of modernist and impressionist art in New York undoubtedly added to his isolation. Those who knew him saw an introverted and private person, one who had apparently never formed any lasting romantic relationships.
Beauford Delaney, “Nativity Scene,” 1961.
In 1953, Delaney moved to Paris where he found a greater sense of freedom in an already well-established expatriate community of ex-patriate African-American artists. His paintings shifted from the figurative images of his New York period to more of an abstract impressionist exploration of color and light. But by 1961, his mental and physical health began to deteriorate, problems which were compounded by continuing poverty, hunger, and heavy drinking. Baldwin remembered, “He has been starving and working all of his life – in Tennessee, in Boston, in New York, and now in Paris. He has been menaced more than any other man I know by his social circumstances and also by all the emotional and psychological stratagems he has been forced to use to survive; and, more than any other man I know, he has transcended both the inner and outer darkness.”
Delaney returned briefly to the U.S. in 1969 to visit family, but he was dogged by paranoia and hallucinations. He returned to Paris in 1970 and tried to resume working, but it became increasingly clear to his friends that he was no longer capable of living independently. In 1975, he was hospitalized, then committed to St. Anne’s Hospital for the Insane. He died there in 1979, and was buried in an unmarked grave.
Denaley’s work was mostly forgotten through much of the 1970s and 1980s, despite his influence on fellow artists. In 1986, Baldwin wrote that Delaney was “the first living proof, for me, that a black man could be an artist. In a warmer time, a less blasphemous place, he would have been recognised as my Master and I as his Pupil. He became, for me, an example of courage and integrity, humility and passion. An absolute integrity: I saw him shaken many times and I lived to see him broken but I never saw him bow.”
December 29th, 2012
TODAY’S AGENDA:
Marriages Begin In Maine. Elections matter, which is why beginning today at the stroke of midnight, marriage equality became the law of the land in the Pine Tree State. Many towns and cities have announced special hours for couples to pick up their marriage licenses, with Falmouth and Portland announcing that they will open their offices at midnight. Bangor, Brunswick and Augusta will also hold special Saturday hours.
John Addington Symonds (left) and Edward Carpenter (right)
TODAY IN HISTORY:
Letter from John Addington Symonds to Edward Carpenter: 1892. Symonds was an English poet and literary critic who, although married and a father, was an early advocate of male homosexuality (see Oct 5). Edward Carpenter was a poet, socialist philosopher, and an early gay advocate — and among the very few who lived openly as a gay man (see Aug 29) in Victorian England. In 1892, Symonds was beginning his collaboration with sexologist Havelock Ellis for Ellis’s first installment of his six-volume Studies in the Psychology of Sex, when Symonds wrote to Carpenter to discuss some of the topics he intended to cover. While Ellis intended to stick strictly to a psychological discussion on homosexuality (or Sexual Inversion, as it was called at the time), Symonds wanted to open the topics up to historical and ethical considerations:
It is a pity that we cannot write freely on the topic. But when we meet, I will communicate to you facts which prove beyond all doubt to my mind that the most beneficial results, as regards health and nervous energy, accrue from the seuxal relations between men: also, that when they are carried on with true affection, through a period of years, both comrades become united in a way which would be otherwise quite inexplicable.
The fact appears to me proved. The explanation of it I cannot give, & I do not expect it to be given yet. Sex has been unaccountably neglected. Its physiological & psychological relations even in the connection between man & woman are not understood. We have no theory which is worth anything upon the differentiation of the sexes, to begin with. In fact, a science of what is the central function of human beings remains to be sought.
This, I take it, is very much due to psychologists, assuming that sexual instincts follow the build of the sexual organs; & that when they do not, the phenomenon is criminal or morbid. In fact, it is due to science at this point being clogged with religious & legal presuppositions.
…My hope has always been that eventually a new chivalry, i.e.., a second elevated form of human love, will emerge & take its place for the service of mankind by the side of that other which was wrought out in the Middle Ages.
…How far away that dream seems! And yet I see in human nature stuff neglected, ever-present — pariah and outcast now — from which I am as certain as I live, such a chivalry could arise.
Whitman, in Calaumus, seems to strike the key-note. And though he repudiated (in a very notable letter to myself) the deductions which have logically to be drawn from Calamus, his work will remain infinitely helpful.
[Source Chris White’s Nineteenth-Century Writings on Homosexuality: A Sourcebook
Catholic Church Reaffirms Opposition to Homosexuality: 1975. It wasn’t the first time, and it certainly wouldn’t be the last. But on this date in 1975, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith — think of it as the Vatican’s equivalent of the Justice Department (so to speak) — issued Persona Humana, addressing “certain questions concerning sexual ethics.” On the subject of homosexuality, the Congregation stated:
A distinction is drawn, and it seems with some reason, between homosexuals whose tendency comes from a false education, from a lack of normal sexual development, from habit, from bad example, or from other similar causes, and is transitory or at least not incurable; and homosexuals who are definitively such because of some kind of innate instinct or a pathological constitution judged to be incurable.
In regard to this second category of subjects, some people conclude that their tendency is so natural that it justifies in their case homosexual relations within a sincere communion of life and love analogous to marriage, in so far as such homosexuals feel incapable of enduring a solitary life.
In the pastoral field, these homosexuals must certainly be treated with understanding and sustained in the hope of overcoming their personal difficulties and their inability to fit into society. Their culpability will be judged with prudence. But no pastoral method can be employed which would give moral justification to these acts on the grounds that they would be consonant with the condition of such people. For according to the objective moral order, homosexual relations are acts which lack an essential and indispensable finality. In Sacred Scripture they are condemned as a serious depravity and even presented as the sad consequence of rejecting God. This judgment of Scripture does not of course permit us to conclude that all those who suffer from this anomaly are personally responsible for it, but it does attest to the fact that homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered and can in no case be approved of.
The same statement also reaffirmed the Church’s opposition to premarital sex, extramarital sex and masturbation (which is also branded “an intrinsically and seriously disordered act”).
TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Billy Tipton: 1914. It wasn’t until his death in 1989 when it became widely known that the American jazz pianist, saxophonist and bandleader was a transman. Early in his career, Tipton performed as a man while continuing to present as a woman otherwise, but by the 1940s, he had transitioned his gender identity fully to male — except for when he went home to his family, where he became Dorothy again, leading fellow musicians to believe he was lesbian.
By the 1950s, Tipton was identifying solely as a man. It was during that time when he was awarded a recording contract with Top records, for whom he recorded two albums of jazz standards. The albums were reasonably successful, and he was given the opportunity to sign a contract for four more. He declined the offer, and took his Billy Tipton Trio to Spokane where he performed weekly at a downtown nightclub called Allen’s Tin Pan Alley and worked as a talent broker at the Dave Sobol Theatrical Agency. He also entered into at least five heterosexual relationships, including a common-law marriage with Kitty Kelly with whom Tipton adopted three sons. One son, William, remembered Billy as a good father who loved to go on Scout camping trips. It was William who would learn that his father had been born a woman, when he was looking on as paramedics tried to resuscitate him after collapsing with a hemorrhaging peptic ulcer.
If you know of something that belongs on the agenda, please send it here. Don’t forget to include the basics: who, what, when, where, and URL (if available).
And feel free to consider this your open thread for the day. What’s happening in your world?
December 28th, 2012
December 29th is the day scheduled for the first same-sex marriage licenses to be issued in Maine. So starting at 12.01 the Portland city Clark’s office will open to allow marriages to begin.
This is a symbolic gesture of support from the city in celebration of a historic moment. It should be a joyous time.
But it also has a very pragmatic aspect. There are but a few days left in this year and it may well be that by marrying in 2012 they can take advantage of tax laws that benefit married couples. This is certain for state returns and I think likely to be the case for federal takes after SCOTUS rules on the Windsor DOMA3 case.
It’s not very romantic, but tax consequences are something that many straight couples must consider when picking a wedding date. So too must Maine’s gay couples (with much delight and a heart full of love) consider the mundane.
As for the rest of us, we will celebrate with Mainers of all stripes who now live in a freer, more equal, state.
December 28th, 2012
TODAY IN HISTORY:
Closeted Anti-Gay Activist Dies of AIDS: 1986. Terry Dolan, who helped to found the National Conservative Political Action Committee, was pretty well known in elite gay circles. According to Randy Shilts’s And the Band Played On
Among those awful things was sending out fundraising letters for NCPAC, which claimed that “Our nation’s moral fiber is being weakened by the growing homosexual movement and the fanatical E.R.A. pushers (many of whom publicly brag they are lesbians).” Meanwhile, Dolan had, at the time of that 1984 encounter with Kramer, had just ended an affair with a male epidemiologist at the New York City Health Department, and was then enjoying everything the gay social scene had to offer.
Dolan knew how to raise money. “The “shriller you are,” he said in 1982, “the easier it is to raise money.” That’s been the recipe for anti-gay activists ever since. But four years later, Dolan himself was dead of AIDS at the age of 36. The following May, The Washington Post published an article about “the cautious closet” of Terry Dolan. His brother, Reagan White House speechwriter Anthony Dolan was livid, and took out an two-page ad in The Washington Times, arguing that “the greatest and most malicious falsehood in this story was its entire thrust, its basis: the claim that my brother lived and died a homosexual.” But he did live and die a homosexual, and a deeply closeted one at that. But despite his and the family’s best efforts, the secret was out, and no amount of wishful thinking otherwise would ever change that.
If you know of something that belongs on the agenda, please send it here. Don’t forget to include the basics: who, what, when, where, and URL (if available).
And feel free to consider this your open thread for the day. What’s happening in your world?
December 27th, 2012
It has long been tradition for Presidents to reward supporters and activists with an ambassadorship post to a friendly and strategically non-controversial nation. And so, in 1998, President Clinton nominated James Hormel, a philanthropist and Democratic Party activist, to be the US Ambassador to Luxembourg, a nation about the size of Connecticut and with the population of Tuscon.
But one small problem, James Hormel is gay. And so the usual suspects raised a ruckus, spittle flew, and homophobia stopped its ugly feet all over the place. The Family Research Council and the Catholic League found him simply unacceptable for a Catholic Country and Trent Lott (R-MS), the Senate Majority Leader blocked the nomination.
Luxembourg weighed in saying that they have laws which prohibit anti-gay discrimination in employment (a polite way of saying “we think you’re being asses”) and that Hormel would be welcome. And eventually, in May 1999, Clinton used a recess appointment to put him in the post. As best we can tell, the Ambassador wore the right clothes to all the right dinners and our relationship with the Duchy of Luxembourg survived the ordeal.
But these little events can often be useful. They can give you the measure of a person’s character and the considerations they include in their decision making. And they can have long long legs and former Senator Chuck Hagel (R-NB) is learning just how long.
While some Senators questioned Hormel’s positions, in 1998, Hagel was one of those who opposed Hormel solely on the basis of his orientation. He believed that this, and this alone, was enough to disqualify Hormel from representing the United States in the tiny European nation. Because, you see, ambassador posts are “sensitive”.
They are representing America. They are representing our lifestyle, our values, our standards. And I think it is an inhibiting factor to be gay — openly, aggressively gay like Mr. Hormel — to do an effective job.
Not that he’d oppose all gay ambassadors, you see. No nothing like that. But this is a Catholic country.
I want to be fair to Hagel and he does not have a completely anti-gay record. Along with John McCain, Hagel opposed the anti-gay Federal Marriage Amendment in 2005 (and I thank him for that):
I’m a conservative. I believe the sanctity of the Constitution of the United States is very important, I don’t think you need a constitutional amendment defining marriage. That’s a state issue.
But, for the most part, Hagel has politely and ever-so-nicely opposed every concession towards equality or protection that the gay community has requested. Not out of animus (no, no, assuredly not), but there was always some reason, some explanation why this time gay people had to go without.
And, of course, Hagel is happy to move with the tail end of progress. And the idea of denying an ambassadorship to a qualified candidate based on his or her orientation has been a non-starter since George W. Bush’s appointment of Michael Guest to Romania in 2001.
So, now that he’s in consideration for the role of Secretary of Defense, Chuck Hagel rushed to offer a 14 years stale apology:
My comments 14 years ago in 1998 were insensitive. They do not reflect my views or the totality of my public record, and I apologize to Ambassador Hormel and any LGBT Americans who may question my commitment to their civil rights.
And those ideologically aligned with the administration have been quick to say, “good enough for me”. The New Yorker called objections to Hagel an “ugly attack” and MSNBC assured us that it was all a long time ago in a different era. And even James Hormel – after describing it as insincere – “accepted” the apology.
Even the Human Rights Campaign decided that this apology illustrates “a change of heart on LGBT issues” and declared Hagel a new ally in our ranks.
But I just can’t get my feet to do the Hagel dance.
Don’t get me wrong. I am a big believer in redemption. I’m first in line to applaud those who wish to repudiate former beliefs and to atone. I am generous in my welcome and effusive in my congratulations to those who have a change of heart.
But I’m not seeing a change of heart. I see an apology for a few words driven by political expediency.
You see, I happen to disagree with Chuck Hagel. I think that his 1998 statement actually does reflect his views and the totality of his public record.
This is not a man who is repudiating his record. He’s not suggesting that any of his votes should have gone differently. This is not a situation of atonement and redemption. He’s just apologizing because his comments were “insensitive”.
But my measure of Hagel’s ability to fairly include gay civil servants and gay service people as Secretary of Defense is not based on comments made 14 years ago – or on this week’s apology. It is based on a career of votes that suggests to me that Chuck Hagel sees himself as a polite and kind man who holds no animus but who, when decisions are made, always has a reason why gay people cannot be treated equally.
And that is how I think he would be as Secretary of Defense.
December 27th, 2012
THIS MONTH IN HISTORY:
Masturbate Your Way To Heterosexuality: 1970. The basis of Behavioral Therapy is that the experience of rewards and punishments were a determining factor for a wide range of human behaviors. In the late 1960s when Behavioral Therapy rivaled classic Freudian psychoanalysis as the predominant school of thought in the mental health professions, BTs began to exhibit some of the same kinds of hubris that they had accused psychoanalysts of exemplifying, especially when BTs began classifying all forms of human thoughts and feelings as “behavioral” and, therefore, amenable to modifications through punishment and rewards. As we now know, much of those punishments were appallingly cruel, torturous, and ineffective. (One example is illustrated in our award-winning report “What Are Little Boys Made Of?”, about the tragic aftermath of Kirk Murphy’s treatment at the hands of a Behavioral Therapist by the name of George Rekers.)
But some patients, if they were lucky I suppose, underwent Behavioral Therapy that emphasized the “reward” end of the punishment/reward dichotomy. Some of those patients were clients of Dr. John N. Marquis, a psychologist at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Palo Alto, California. His paper appeared in the December 1970 issue of the Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, in which he argued that by encouraging clients to think of opposite-sex partners while masturbating, he could change their “behavior” — remember, to Behavioral Therapists, sexual orientation was nothing but “behavior” — to heterosexuality. He didn’t rule out aversion therapy (i.e. electric shock, etc.) if he thought it was needed — “often… aversive conditioning to the perverse stimuli are indicated…” — but he felt that it was best to hold that off until at least some level of “behavior” — by which he meant attractions — was exhibited towards the opposite sex. And how was that accomplished?
The client is instructed to masturbate to the point where he feels the inevitability of orgasm using whatever fantasy is most arousing. Then he is to switch to the appropriate fantasy. He is warned that he may experience some difficulty at first, but that he will not lose his sexual arousal at that point. After he has successfully shifted to the appropriate stimulus four or five times (this is arbitrary but seems to work) he is instructed to start moving the introduction of the appropriate fantasy backward in time toward the beginning of masturbation. An attempt is made at the outset to get a commitment from the client never to continue picturing the inappropriate fantasy through the occurrence of an orgasm, whether in masturbation or overt sexual behavior.
That was the procedure. Dr. Marquis also had some practical advise:
If the client is generally tense he is instructed to relax before masturbating, because sexual arousal and anxiety are incompatible. If he reports feeling guilty after masturbating he is instructed to relax after masturbating as well. It may be suggested that he increase the frequency of masturbation in order to speed the process of reorientation or to decrease the frequency in order to increase drive level if he masturbates more than once a day. It is often helpful to suggest the use of a lubricant to enhance physical stimulation.
Marquis wrote that he had been prescribing this therapy for patients since 1965, and that “all of the cases described below were seen because they were suffering human beings seeking help, and not as experimental subjects.” That, of course, is crucial: it’s your first clue that this is by no means a controlled, scientific study. He provided detailed case studies of two of his patients, and brief descriptions of twelve more. All but one were “successes” to varying degrees, although only one case had anything remotely resembling a long-term follow-up. And that only happened because Marquis happened to run into that former client and his new wife three years later at a cocktail party. At least some of those successes were dubious, and not all of them involved gay people. One was a pedophile, another woman enjoyed “sado-masochistic masturbation” which, Marquis explained, were not “normal heterosexual fantasies” (although he doesn’t mention whether her fantasies involved men or women), and one was someone we would today see as just another socially-awkward nerd:
Case 13. A 24-year-old male computer programmer who was very shy had had intercourse rarely but had frequently masturbated to fantasies and pictures of beautiful girls. As a result he was completely unattracted to girls who were not strikingly beautiful. This was a serious problem since he was homely and inarticulate. Orgasmic reconditioning led to considerable improvement, but he remains a little bit too particular.
As you can see, the measurements that would constitute “considerable improvement” are what real scientists would call “anybody’s guess.” The only thing we can know from this study is that Marquis believes that most of his clients are able to masturbate to a “normal heterosexual fantasy.” We know nothing about any actual changes in his clients’ preferred masturbatory fantasies, let alone any actual or even perceived changes in sexual orientation. But that flimsy standard is precisely the kind of evidence that the National Association for Research and Treatment of Homosexuality holds in very high esteem. When NARTH published their 2009 “journal”, they claimed to have “examined more than 100 years of professional and scientific literature from 600-plus studies and reports,” all of it proving, in their minds at least, that “sexual orientation can be changed.” And of course, Marquis’s paper made the cut.
[Source: John N. Marquis. “Orgasmic reconditioning: Changing sexual object choice through controlling masturbation fantasies.” Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry 1, no. 4 (December 1970): 263-271.]
If you know of something that belongs on the agenda, please send it here. Don’t forget to include the basics: who, what, when, where, and URL (if available).
And feel free to consider this your open thread for the day. What’s happening in your world?
December 26th, 2012
In June, Erika Munson, a straight church-going Mormon wife and mother decided that saying you love doesn’t mean crap if you don’t show it. So she decided that she would march in Salt Lake City’s Gay Pride March. And after she tossed her idea on the internet, a few other Mormons decided to join her. Three hundred of ’em. They came straight from church in their Sunday clothes with kids in strollers waving gay flags.
Now the Salt Lake Tribune has recognized Mormons Building Bridges as the most impactful Utahns of 2012:
They called themselves Mormons Building Bridges. They were not out to debate politics or doctrine, organizers said, but to promote love and listening. Still, their simple yet potent gesture echoed around the globe, setting an example for fellow believers who then took up the style, if not the name, in 15 other Pride parades. They also attracted national and international media attention, well-known enough even for spoofing in the satirical magazine The Onion.
December 26th, 2012
TODAY IN HISTORY:
Body Build of Male Homosexuals: 1959. In many ways, just about everyone (including most of the mental health community) saw gay people, particularly gay men, as being so alien as to almost constitute a different species. Well, maybe not a different species literally, but for some, gay men were at least some sort of a mutation of homo sapiens, and were not like just any common man on the street. On December 26, 1959, the august British Medical Journal published a short paper by Dr. A.J. Coppen, of the Institute of Psychiatry in London who believed that he had proven, on the basis of physical measurements of just thirty-one gay men, that there was a distinct body build associated with homosexuality in men — and it was the same body build associated with mental patients.
He came to this determination by measuring the shoulders and hips of three groups of people. “The homosexual group,” he wrote, “consisted of 31 patients who had been either exclusively homosexual or predominantly homosexual, with only occasional heterosexual activity. The patients had attended the Maudsley Hospital primarily for homosexuality; the majority had been referred from the courts after they had been convicted of homosexual offences.” Because a number of them had “psychiatric symptoms” of “mainly depression or anxiety” (is there any wonder?), he included “another control group of 22 heterosexual neurotics, … as any differences found in the homosexuals may be related to the differences widely reported in psychiatric patients rather than to their specific sexual abnormalities.” The third group, a control group, consisted of 53 members of a business organization “who were attending for mass radiography,” and who agreed to be part of the study.
For all three groups, they measured around their shoulders (biacromial) and hips (bi-illiac), calculated an equivalent diameter (he doesn’t say how), and used those measurements to determine what was called an “androgyny score” (3 x biacromial – x bi-iliac diameters, in cm.). And with those measurements, Coppen found:
The results show that homosexuals have a decreased androgyny score and biacromial diameter compared with the control group. This difference, however, is not specific for homosexuality, as the neurotic patients in this study also differ from the controls to approximately the same extent as regards both androgyny and biacromial width. The androgyny score does not discriminate between homosexuals and controls better than does the biacromial diameter, though, as the Chart shows, three homosexual patients have very low androgyny scores, outside the range of the other two groups. It appears, therefore, that homosexuals are similar to people with other psychiatric disorders in having decreased breadth measurements, but that their sexual abnormality is not specifically related to these. Rather it seems that the homosexual is influenced by the similar (unknown) factors that produce the abnormalities in body-build found in other psychiatric patients.
This article from 1959 is an interesting holdover from an early path of investigation that is reminiscent of nineteenth-century Phrenology. That discarded science is perhaps best known today for its busts and diagrams of human skulls with dotted outlines of areas denoted with labels like “Friendship” or “Adhesiveness.” Phrenologists believed that different areas of the brain consisted of “organs” relating to different character traits. Early on, they also believed that it was possible to determine the different developmental levels of these “organs” by relating them to the shape of an individuals skull with its various bumps and bulges. That last theory was soon discarded, but the idea that an individual’s character traits could somehow be imprinted on that person’s physical development was firmly established in the scientific imagination. The appearance of children with Down’s Syndrome, of course, only seemed to confirm the theory. Texts on homosexuality through the 1950s often had several paragraphs dwelling on the physical characteristics of their study subjects, and some even included nude photos to demonstrate how “feminine” some of the subjects were.
By the 1950s, those descriptions had mostly disappeared from the literature, which make this 1959 article something of an interesting anachronism. But today, with researchers now investigating the connection between body-build, body self-image, and health factors in our body-conscious society, some of those physical descriptions and measurements are starting to make a comeback. Nude pictures, however, have not re-appeared in the professional literature.
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December 25th, 2012
All of us at Box Turtle Bulletin wish you a very fabulous Christmas.
And speaking of fabulous…
TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Quentin Crisp: 1908. He was always a gender-bending raconteur, even going back to when he was the object of endless teasing in elementary school. In 1926, he studied journalism at King’s College London, but switched to art at Regent Street Polytechnic. He also visited the cafes and pubs of Soho’s Old Compton Street, which is still the heart of the gay community in London. It was then that he decided that his life’s work would be “making the existence of homosexuality abundantly clear to the world’s aborigines,” and he did so by developing the flamboyant style that would become his signature. When World War II broke out, he tried to join the Army, but was rejected on medical grounds — “sexual perversion” was the diagnosis. He remained in London during the Blitz, and placed himself at the service of American G.I.’s, so to speak. That’s where Crisp picked up his love for all things American.
In 1968, he achieved success with his third book, an autobiography he titled The Naked Civil Servant
Here he is in a Q&A session in Los Angeles following a lecture on style:
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).
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December 24th, 2012
TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS:
Lee Daniels: 1959. The actor, producer and director became the first African-American to solo produce an Academy Award winning film with 1992’s Monster’s Ball
His latest film, 2012’s The Paperboy, a 1960s erotic thriller starring Matthew McConaughy, Zac Efron, Nicole Kidman, John Cusack, David Oyelowo, Macy Gray and Scott Glenn, opened to decidedly mixed reviews. The strong cast appears to have saved the film from ignominy. The Village Voice Film Poll sprinkled best actor/actress nominations for jsut about about the entire cast, but nominated Lee Daniels for Worst Film.
Ricky Martin: 1971. Born Enrique MartÃn Morales, the Puerto Rican singer first achieved fame as a member of boy band Menudo before embarking on a solo career in 1991. His early popularity in Latin markets was boosted by his appearance in the second season of a Mexican telenovela, Alcanzar Una Estrella (“Reach for a Star”) in which he played the part of a member of a boy band which achieves fame and fortune. In 1999, Martin found crossover appeal with “Livin’ la Vida Loca” and “She’s All I Ever Had,” form his first English language album. That was followed with “She Bangs” in 2000. In 2007, he took a break from his career, but returned again with a new album in 2010, along with his autobiography, Me
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December 23rd, 2012
From China Post
The Taipei High Administrative Court (å°åŒ—高ç‰è¡Œæ”¿æ³•é™¢) was expected to rule yesterday on a landmark case of two Taiwanese men, Nelson Chen (陳敬å¸) and Kao Chih-wei (高治瑋), who are seeking a legal marriage.
The High Court announced yesterday that it has not reached a verdict, but that the case could be handed to the Council of Grand Justices, a 15-justice body that serves as Taiwan’s constitutional court.
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