Box Turtle Bulletin

Eagle Scouts live up to the title

As we noted earlier, the Boy Scouts of America says that five Eagle Scouts have sent back their pins and resigned their membership over the dishonorable decision by the BSA to continue its discriminatory anti-gay membership policy. However, Eagle Scouts Returning Our Badges has a growing list that is much much longer than five:

September 4 – 1; total 155
September 3 – 1; total 154
September 2 – 1; total 153
September 1 – 1; total 152
August 31 – 2; total 151
August 30 – 1; total 149
August 28 – 1; total 148
August 27 – 2; total 147
August 26 – 1; total 145
August 25 – 1; total 144
August 23 – 11; total 143
August 22 – 1; total 132
August 21 – 2; total 131
August 20 – 1; total 129
August 19 – 2; total 128
August 18 – 3; total 126
August 17 – 1; total 123
August 16 – 1; total 122
August 15 – 7; total 121
August 14 – 1; total 114
August 13 – 9; total 113
August 12 – 1; total 104
August 10 – 3; total 103
August 9 – 5; total 100
August 8 – 6; total 95
August 7 – 1; total 89
August 6 – 3; total 88
August 5 – 2; total 85
August 4 – 1; total 83
August 3 – 7; total 82
August 2 – 7; total 75
August 1 – 10; total – 68
July 31 – 10; total – 58
July 30 – 12; total – 48
July 29 – 10; total – 36
July 28 – 10; total – 26
July 27 – 4; total – 16
July 25 – 1; total – 12
July 24 – 2; total – 11
July 23 – 5; total – 9
July 22 – 2; total – 4
July 20 – 1; total – 2
July 17 – 1; total – 1

UPDATE: You have to read some of these letters. All of them (that I’ve seen) from straight men. And all of them credit their decision to disassociate from the BSA to the values they learned as Eagle Scouts.

The Daily Agenda for Wednesday, September 5

TODAY’S AGENDA:
Pride Celebrations This Weeked: Collingswood, NJ; Humboldt/Eureka CA; Las Vegas, NV; Limerick, Ireland; Lincoln City, OR; Mankato, MN; New Castle, DE; Reading, UK; Rehoboth Beachm DE; Savannah, GA; Torbay, UK.

Other Events This Weekend: Folsom Europe, Berlin, Germany; Womenfest, Key West, FL; North Louisiana Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, Shreveport, LA; International Bears Week, Sitges, Spain.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Freddie Mercury: 1946. When I was a freshman in high school, my classmates and I were just minding our own business in our quiet Appalachian town when all of the sudden “Bohemian Rhapsody” came screaming out of our radios like an alien from outer space. Nobody was quite sure what to make of it — Bismilla! Beelzebub! Will you do the fandango? — it was hard at first to be too enthusiastic about this very flamboyant song. But we always turned it up whenever it came on the radio. And it didn’t take long at all before we were hooked.

Queen had already been very popular in the U.K. for several years, but for most Americans “Bohemian Rhapsody” was our introduction. And we had almost nothing to prepare us for — well, I’ll say it again — the openly flamboyant lead singer. Even the band’s name was provocative. One of my friends bought a Queen teeshirt at a concert in Dayton, but his mother prohibited him from wearing it. It was “too homosexual.” And so was Freddie — maybe. Except he had a girlfriend, as the press went, so maybe he wasn’t. Maybe it was all an act, we told each other (and ourselves). You know, a character like David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust or Alice Cooper or any of the members of Kiss. Whatever he was, he flaunted it, as it went in our vernacular, but as long as it was a character he was flaunting, maybe it was okay. It helped that Queen’s follow-on hits — “You’re My Best Friend,” “Someone To Love” — were sufficiently “normal” while unmistakeably Queen to calm things down a bit. By the time News of the World came out and the testosterone-laden “We Will Rock You/We Are The Champions” became my high school’s unofficial anthem the same year that we won the state AA basketball championship, everyone had chilled. Those of us in that town and school who were easily freaked out over the very possibility of homosexuality — including us homosexuals — were well served by our sometimes willful naiveté. Without it, it would have been socially impossible to enjoy the music.

Freddie hoodwinked those of us who wanted to be hoodwinked, just enough so we could enjoy the music and the spectacle. The hits kept coming: “Fat Bottomed Girls,” Crazy Little Thing Called Love,” “Another One Bites The Dust,” “Under Pressure” (with David Bowie, of course). By the time it dawned on me that he really was gay, I had long since left home and it no longer mattered socially whether I was a fan or not. And by the time it was announced that he had AIDS and would die very shortly, nobody was surprised but everyone was saddened. It seems that there are some people who are too outsized in our world to remain in it for very long, and Freddie was one of them. On November 25, 1991, the day after he died, Britain’s tabloid The Sun carried a very simple headline: “Freddie Is Dead.” It’s hard to believe, but if he had survived he would have turned sixty-five last year.

If you know of something that belongs on the agenda, please send it here. Don’t forget to include the basics: who, what, when, where, and URL (if available).

And feel free to consider this your open thread for the day. What’s happening in your world?

Quote of the Day

If farmers and blacksmiths could win independence from an empire…if immigrants could leave behind everything they knew for a better life on our shores…if women could be dragged to jail for seeking the vote…if a generation could defeat a depression, and define greatness for all time…if a young preacher could lift us to the mountaintop with his righteous dream…and if proud Americans can be who they are and boldly stand at the altar with who they love…then surely, surely we can give everyone in this country a fair chance at that great American Dream. — Michelle Obama’s speech Tuesday night at the Democratic National Convention

Jeremy Hooper is attending the Democratic National Convention as a credentialed blogger and has a rundown of LGBT mentions in tonight’s speeches.

Chile’s gay rights group sues for marriage

Santiago Times

The lawsuit, which Movilh says is the first of its kind, was presented to the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights. The lawsuit claims Chile violated several parts of the American Convention of Human Rights, which obliges its states to “respect every recognized right and liberty” in the mentioned text “and to guarantee them to every person subject to its jurisdiction, without any discrimination.”

More than half of Chileans support equality.

Christian Post runs article lauding Paul Cameron’s fraudulent claims

They should know better. They really should know better.

By this point, everyone in media from Mother Jones to the National Review, from the Catholic Register to the American Atheist Magazine, everyone should know that quoting Dr. Paul Cameron will bring embarrassment and make you the subject of public ridicule.

After Cameron was booted from the Nebraska Psychological Association and the American Psychological Association for distorting the research of others, it should have been obvious. After Bill Bennett stupidly relied on Cameron (and had to publicly apologize), it should have been obvious. After the Lincoln police called his bluff about a “four-year-old boy who has had his genitals almost severed from his body at Gateway [mall] in a restroom with a homosexual act”, it should have been obvious. After making a complete fool of himself in Sacha Baron Cohen’s mockumentary film Brüno, it should have been obvious.

I guess it isn’t obvious. Or not to the Christian Post. They think that Cameron has discovered that gay folks are mentally ill.

Cameron has decided to “debunk” Dr. Evelyn Hookers seminal research into the mental health of gay men. Her study went like this: (APA)

She recruited 30 exclusively homosexual and 30 exclusively heterosexual men, matched for age, IQ scores and education. With the aid of the Mattachine Society, one of the first gay-rights organizations, access to homosexuals was no problem, but finding heterosexual men who would agree to participate was very difficult. She could not conduct the study on the UCLA campus in spite of pressure to do so. The nature of the research required strict confidentiality, so she used a small study on her spacious Los Angeles estate on Saltair Avenue. She approached firemen, policemen, maintenance workers, any heterosexual men she could persuade to participate. Her husband said, “No man is safe on Saltair Avenue.”

Each participant took three projective tests: The Rorschach, the Make a Picture Story Test (MAPS) and the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT). After scoring the tests herself, she then gave the test protocols with all identifying information removed to experts in those tests: Bruno Klopfer for the Rorschach, Edward Shneidman, the inventor of MAPS, and Mortimer Meyer for the TAT. An adjustment rating was assigned to each participant based on the test scores, and then the experts were given paired Rorschach protocols, one from a gay participant, one from a straight participant and asked to identify the homosexual. As with heterosexuals, homosexuals’ adjustment varied from superior to disturbed. Two-thirds of the research participants in each group were judged as having average or better adjustment. Further, experts were unable to identify the gay participant’s protocol from the matched pairs at better than chance accuracy. There was no association between homosexuality and psychological maladjustment. One of her experts, who was sure he could distinguish the groups, asked for another chance to review the protocols, but was no more successful the second time than the first.

Ah, but according to the Christian Post:

FRI’s close research, however, led the organization to believe in a different outcome.

“The Hooker study stands as the major reason for why they (homosexuals) are okay. We wanted to look at that very carefully, and we discovered that not only is it riddled with holes, but it is being covered for – not only by the American Psychological Association. Many other people either can’t read, or their mind glazes over, when they are told that this is an important study,” Dr. Cameron told CP.

He explained: “Hooker was a professor – she had friends who were homosexual and they implored her to do a study on them to prove that they were normal. What they were supposed to do was talk about pictures, talk about ink blots, without showing that they were homosexual. It appears that every single one of them was unable to talk for about two hours without revealing their homosexuality.”

Really. Truly. Stupid.

A three minute Google of Hooker would illustrate just how distorted that statement is from reality. Another three minute Google of Cameron would illustrate just how dishonest (and perhaps deranged) that Cameron’s claims have been over the years.

They really should know better.

UPDATE:

The Christian Post has doubled down on their stupidity, running a “disclaimer” that is more of a defense:

Disclaimer: Cameron, a former member of the American Sociological Association, left the organization in 1983 after branding it “more of a ‘liberal PAC’ than a professional society.” The ASA then passed a resolution in 1986 condemning Cameron for “consistent misrepresentation of sociological research.” The Nebraska Psychological Association also disassociated itself from Cameron and his work in 1984.

Poland considers partner recognition

In a bit of a surprise move, Poland’s controlling centrist party, Platforma Obywatelska (Civic Platform), is backing a bill to offer limited partner recognition to same-sex couples: (gay star news)

After several months of discussion, the PO decided last week to put to the vote a draft bill in both chambers of the Polish parliament, the Sejm and Senate.

The proposed draft bill of registered civil partnership is similar the current French Pacte civil de solidarité (PACS).

The bill includes a range of benefits which currently are only granted to married heterosexual couples, including protections and responsibilities, inheritance, pension funds, notary, and medical rights. Joint tax benefits and adoption rights are not included in the bill.

Although PO had opposed previous bills, this one does not offer joint tax benefits, citizenship or adoption, and thus may avoid the members’ greatest objections. Even so, the bill has opposition from within the party (and from some others).

The bill is expected to be supported by the Alliance of the Democratic Left (SLD) whose previous bill was rejected by the PO and right wing parties. The Polish People’s Party (PSL) is not expected to oppose the bill.

The main opposition party, the right-wing conservative ‘Law and justice’ (PiS) party, is expected to strongly oppose the bill.

To pass, it would need support from at least two thirds of PO along with the smaller party and independent legislators.

Expedia supports equality

And the list keeps growing:

Washington United for Marriage, the coalition working to defend the state’s bipartisan marriage law, today announced that Expedia, the world’s largest online travel company with household brands like Expedia.com, Hotels.com, Classic Vacations and Hotwire, has endorsed the freedom to marry and the effort to approve Referendum 74 this November.

Headquartered in Bellevue, Expedia has 2,270 employees in Washington State and 8,900 worldwide. In its statement President and CEO Dara Khosrowshahi wrote, in part:

“As the world’s largest online travel company — with operations in well over 30 countries — we know firsthand that the world is a diverse place. Much like our customers, clients, partners, and suppliers, our employees represent a multitude of locations, cultures and experiences. …

“We strive to actively promote equality in our workplace and are committed to treating one another with respect and dignity. … Today, we add our voice to the topic of marriage equality. We thoughtfully engage in this public discussion because it has significant impact on our employees, customers, and partners, all with whom we interact daily. Supporting the legislation recently passed in Washington State — which provides same-sex couples with the same right to civil marriage that opposite sex couples already enjoy — is a natural extension of our ongoing commitment to the LGBT community.”

You know, it’s an indication of just how quickly that this issue is shifting that so many companies who did not come out to support the domestic partnership bill just three years ago are now willing to announce their support for full marriage equality.

But I guess that means that the National Organization for (some people’s) Marriage will stick with the Roaming Gnome.

For now.

Occuidiots

I guess every movement has it’s fair share of idiots.

Remember when some portion of the Occupy movement decided to protest Wells Fargo Bank during San Francisco Pride? Yeah, that was pretty stupid. But not nearly as stupid as the latest from the Occupy movement’s idiot fringe.

From the Oakland Tribune:

An offshoot of Occupy Oakland, upset that the city’s Pride Festival was charging for admission, went on a vandalism spree Sunday, breaking windows at a Bank of America branch and tagging buildings and a police vehicle with anarchist graffiti, police said.

There is a certain mindset which thinks that they are admirable and noble for engaging in vandalism and the destruction of property. They certainly don’t want their property destroyed or their neighborhood tagged with someone else’s views, but when they do deplorable acts it’s for good, you see.

And while they might insist that they be compensated for their efforts (“dude, I friggen grew it myself”), it’s evil capitalism that the Pride committee expects everyone to kick in to help cover costs.

They are idiots.

The Sears at Broadway and 20th Street was tagged with red spray paint that read “Destroy Capitalism” and “Queer Riots Now.” A vacant building on the corner of 19th and Broadway was tagged with “Queer Revolt.”

Less than a block down on Broadway, the Community Bank of the Bay was tagged with an anarchy symbol and the words, “Queers: Burn Banks.”

Yeah, idiots.

Gay banners after Katrina

Hurricane Isaac has reminded the anti-gays about Katrina and the damage that she caused. They seem to think Katrina was God sending his wrath against Teh Gheys and Southern Decadence.

So here’s a picture to cue them that if God was doing some smiting, they’ve miscalculated about his target. This is Rampart Street after hurricane force winds blew through. You may notice what banners are still hanging perfectly.

(picture courtesy of BTB reader Jim Hlavac)

Democrats Issue Official Platform

The Democrats have issued their official 2012 Platform, and it includes several planks of interest to the LGBT community. As we go through the document from the beginning, our first stop is under “Health Care”:

…We Democrats have increased overall funding to combat HIV/AIDS to record levels and will continue our nation’s fight against HIV/AIDS. President Obama established the first-ever comprehensive National HIV/AIDS Strategy for responding to the domestic epidemic, which calls for reducing HIV incidence, increasing access to care, optimizing health outcomes, and reducing HIV-related health disparities. This is an evidence-based plan that is guided by science and seeks to direct resources to the communities at greatest risk, including gay men, black and Latino Americans, substance users, and others at high risk of infection. And we will continue to support America’s groundbreaking biomedical researchers in their lifesaving work.

Next is Civil Rights:

The Daily Agenda for Tuesday, September 4

THIS MONTH IN HISTORY:
The Severe Effects of Masturbation: 1914. Non-procreative sex has long been seen as a terrible problem in Western society. Biblical prohibitions against adultery, onanism (masturbation), and lying with a man as one lies with a woman are obvious sources for that disdain on sex for sex’s sake. Add to that, the scourge of the clap (gonorrhea) and, worse, the pox (syphilis), both of which were uncurable for several centuries, only reinforced the perceived dangers of non-procreative sex, including masturbation. Today, we see the manual method as being perhaps the safest of safe-sex practices, but until the first second third of the twentieth century, that was far from being an accepted idea, even among scientists and medical authorities. And believe it or not, those who warned against the health dangers of masturbation had science — well, proto-science, anyway — to back them up.

Before the mid 1800’s, when germ theory began to take root, the mechanisms by which syphilis and gonorrhea were spread were poorly understood, but one thing that many people could understand that those who were more likely to contract these diseases were those who had a lot of sex. And in a time when people didn’t talk about the deed, those who “had a lot of sex” were those who were famously having a lot of sex — particularly those who were patronizing prostitutes, but also young men with, shall we say, time on their hands. And what happens when time is up? Two things: seed is spilt and exhaustion sets in, at least momentarily. And it was the second thing: that momentary “weakening,” was believed to be the very opportunity which diseases seized upon to enter the body and take root. The reasoning went this: since weak people got sick, and sex made people weak, it’s only logical that sex, especially lots of sex, makes people sick.

But it wasn’t the momentary exhaustion following orgasm — that afterglow we call it today — that made people weak in the knees. According to medical science — science! — the loss of semen was also the problem. And that belief had its root in a book that was published in the early 1700s by an unknown London doctor and clergyman. The title was, quite simply, Onania; or, the Heinous SIN of Self-Pollution, and All its Frightful Confequences, in both SEXES, Confider’d. With Spiritual and Phyfical Advice to Thofe, who have already injur’d themfelves by this abominable Practice. And feafonable Admonition to the Youth of the Nation, (of both SEXES) and thofe whofe Tuition they are under, whether Parents, Guardians, Mafters, or Miftreffes. 

The title page alone will leave you spent.

Where were we? Oh, yeah, the loss of semon itself resulted in a loss of strength by putting an inordinate strain upon the blood supply:

The blood is made into Seed, which is further elaborated and purify’d in the Epidydimides, from whence by the Vafa deferensin, it is carried into the Veficulæ Seminales, where it is laid up till by contractions of thofe Veficulæ, it is carried through the Proftate into the Urethra, and forc’d through the Capuit Galinaginis, which hinders the voluntary running of it. The oftner these Veficulæ Seminales are emptied, the more is made for the Tefticles, and  consequently the greater Confumption of the fineft and moft Balfamick part of the Blood.

Blood was well-recognized as the, well, lifeblood of the human body. When blood was spilled, life was in danger, and it often ended. And so it stood to reason that if the “finest Baslamic part of the Blood” was used to replenish the supply of semen, then male vigor was threatened any time that precious supply was squandered. Do it too often, and life itself was at peril.

Let’s fast forward some two hundred years. The microscope confirmed the presence of germs and viruses as causes of diseases, and antiseptics made hospitals places where people recovered, not places where they went to die. As for beliefs about non-procreative sex, many in the medical profession began to understand that the spilling of a little seed here and there wasn’t something to get too worked up about. But it took a long time for that knowledge to become universal, even among medical professionals, and part of the reason for it is that now the feared harms of masturbation were no longer just physical. The fears over masturbation in the mid-1800s were swept up by the rushing waters of Degeneracy Theory (see yesterday’s Agenda for an introduction to the theory) to produce a new worry: That masturbation was not just physically harmful, but its assault on the nervous system resulted in mental and emotional harm, and that those harms could then be  passed down through the generations.

“The results of masturbation”: the Blum is off.

By 1914, Degeneracy Theory had mostly run its course, but its aftermath was still running heavy in medicine and the social sciences. And so it was that the September 1914 issue of the American Journal of Urology included an article by Dr. Victor Blum of the Vienna General Polyclinic, in which he concluded his four-part series about the deleterious effects of masturbation. In his final installment, titled simply “Results of Masturbation,” he posed the question: “Is masturbation a primary affection, or is it the result of a special neuropathic disposition?” An answer of “neither” was quickly ruled out:

It is denied by some authors that the act of masturbation is essentially different from the normal satisfaction of the sexual needs. Both arise from the same source, the human sexual instinct; both are physiologically and mechanically very similar actions; and yet clinical experience teaches that masturbation has an entirely different effect upon the nervous system from natural coitus. We have considered this question thoroughly elsewhere, and came to the conclusion, that habitual masturbation in some way represents an injury, in spite of the apparent identity of the two actions in their individual acts, because it 1s an abnormality of the sexual life.

The severe effects of masturbation, however, only occur when the injury affects an originally non-resistant nervous system, that is, when the unnatural sexual life is added as a specific agent to a nervous constitution.

When masturbation leads to severe nervous disorders in otherwise quite normally constituted men, we must suppose the cause of this to be the immoderate sexual activity in early youth, a time when the sensitive organism cannot bear without injury the repeated severe shocks to the nervous system resulting from the sexual acts and perhaps also from the frequent seminal losses.

As you may have guessed, these breathtaking conclusions were not arrived at by anything remotely resembling the Scientific Method. No experiments, no studies, no controls, no analysis. Just one declarative statement following upon another. And while the rise of Degeneracy Theory did add an additional concern to the effects of masturbation, there still lurked the belief that shocks to the nervous system weren’t the only problem. Semen loss was still an issue, but not with Dr. Blum. The journal’s editor, William J. Robinson, felt compelled to interject with a parenthetical paragraph to re-introduce the eighteenth-century “fact”:

It is my positive conviction that in some people the mere withdrawal of a certain amount of semen can have a disastrous effect on the economy. … For as soon as the seminal vesicles and the testicles are emptied of their reserve semen, the latter at once begin to elaborate new semen, and in the process of elaboration valuable vital material is withdrawn from the economy, material which evidently is of great importance to the brain and spinal cord-in short, to the entire nervous system.

Didn’t we just read something very similar to that from two hundred years earlier?

Blum’s concern was also with masturbation’s effect on the central nervous system.:

The principal injurious effect manifested is upon the nervous system, from the early suffered and frequently repeated severe shocks of the sexual act, and upon the general health, since in every sexual activity a cooperation of other organs is unavoidable. Thus we see disturbances occur in the circulatory and respiratory systems and in the functions of the visceral organs. The results of onanism upon the individual organs we have already reported in the chapter on sexual neurasthenia. The relations between masturbation and mental and psychic changes in the youthful masturbator have also been treated in that chapter.

If the reader has any doubts, Blum closes with the case of a twenty-year-old “unfortunate, who made his confession in the form of a letter”:

“My present state is a sad one. Unfounded fears, quick  exhaustion of the entire body, especially of the hands and feet; poor memory, anger at the least trifle and especially pleasure in quarreling. I am fond of seeking lonely places, where I can sit all day and meditate on my lost happiness of youth. I should be happy to wander, if I could only go far, far away from Vienna.

“I get up in the moming more tired than when I went to bed, and have a morbid sleepiness so that I often sleep during my office hours. My complaints are: pain in urinating, pain in the feet and hands, then also in the hips and the head. The way in which I seek satisfaction is to rub the penis so long or to move to and fro so long on the bed until the pleasure comes, often in the reclining position, often in the standing during the day three or four times and alas! oftener sometimes. The penis will not relax until the semen is emptied, which causes terrible pains. When the semen has been evacuated I am weak and cannot recover for twenty to thirty minutes, while the heart beats strongly and I have difficulty in breathing. Afterwards I can urinate only with difficulty, often with tears in my eyes.

“…To conclude, I fear that the end of these sad youthful errors will be madness; as the books all say at the end, there is no hope for me, and the madhouse threatens me. I have come to this supposition by reading the so-called popular scientific books — thus incurable! Especially the book entitled ‘Masturbation and its Terrible Results,’ let no other thoughts arise in me than those of the madhouse.”

So let that be a warning to you.

[Sources:  Anonymous. Onania: or, the Heinous Sin… 9th ed. (London: Fliz. Rumball: 1723). Available online here.

Victor Blum. “Results of masturbation.” American Journal of Urology 10, no. 9 (September 1914): 410-414. Available online here.]

If you know of something that belongs on the agenda, please send it here. Don’t forget to include the basics: who, what, when, where, and URL (if available).

And feel free to consider this your open thread for the day. What’s happening in your world?

Aside from … you know…

The Daily Agenda for Monday, September 3

Lewis Hine’s “Power house mechanic working on steam pump,” 1920. (Click to enlarge)

Today is Labor Day, a day that is set aside both to honor the sacrifices of American laborers in the past who fought for fair wages and decent working conditions, and to celebrate the social and economic contributions of workers today. The holiday had already been celebrated in thirty states when Congress in 1894 declared it a Federal holiday as an olive branch to organized labor in honor of those who died at the hands of the U.S. military and U.S. Marshals during the Pullman Strike that year. For today’s workers and their families, this extended weekend also marks that last hurrah of summer. I hope your Labor Day is a relaxing one.

TODAY’S AGENDA:
Pride Celebrations Today: Atlanta, GA (Black Pride); Calgary, AB and Duluth, MN.

Other Events Today:Splash Days, Austin, TX; Burning Man, Black Rock Desert, NV; Southern Decadence, New Orleans, LA.

THIS MONTH IN HISTORY:
The Degeneracy of Women’s Suffrage: 1895. For many decades, the word “degenerate” took on a very specific meaning: gay people were “degenerates,” as were almost anyone else who radically deviated (negatively) from what was considered normal and wholesome. Everyone — doctors (see Aug 2), police investigators (see May 19, Jun 1), newspaper columnists (see Mar 23), housewives (see Jun 29) and Newsweek (see Oct 10) — thought nothing of using the word “degenerate,” and by the middle of the twentieth century its usage became much more specific to describe gay people.

But what was lost by that time was a recollection of where the word “degenerate” came from. It was the last vestige of a proto-scientific theory which was universally accepted by social scientists, doctors and early geneticists in the nineteenth century. Degeneracy Theory described a body of beliefs that held that human beings, through the natural course of evolution, would naturally produce children who “de-generated” some of their parent’s characteristics in an imperfect form — think of a xerox copy of a xerox copy. Degeneracy didn’t always yield lesser children; geniuses were examples of a kind of positive “de-generation.” They may have greater powers of reasoning than others, but they nevertheless deviated from the norm, and that deviancy was a sign of degeneration. Besides, geniuses often had other quirks as part of their personalities, and those quirks were seen as offsetting signs of degeneracy, a price, if you will, paid for their genius. It was also believed that degenerates, whether positive or negative, also bore physical markers, known as the “stigmata of degeneration,” in the form of various skull shapes, facial features, and other bodily characteristics which, if one looked closely enough, might provide further evidence of degeneracy. That’s why detailed physical descriptions were an important part of the scientific literature. In fact, those descriptions were considered so important and became so commonplace that the practice lasted well the 1960s, long after the very theories which required such descriptions were long dead and forgotten.

The product of degeneracy was described as a “reversion to the atavistic type” — in other words, a natural tendency of a species to return to a more primitive state. For humans, it would mean a descent into poverty, ignorance and criminality which nineteenth century tenaments, according to Degeneracy Theorists, provided ample proof. But as pessimistic as the theory went, it did have its positive contributions: it spawned the hygiene movement which began mandating safe housing, clean food, proper sanitation, limitations in child labor and other protections, and universal education. In the glass-half-empty category, Degeneracy Theory marked the beginning of the shift from regarding homosexuality as a crime to be severely punished, but as a malady to be addressed “scientifically” — namely by the nation’s doctors and insane asylums, along with the brave few who countered that gay and gender-variant people harmed no one and should be left alone. But far more darkly, Degeneracy Theory would soon give rise to Eugenics, which would cast an especially dark shadow over much of the early twentieth century.

The September 1895 edition of The American Naturalist included a classic anti-femininst tract, steepend in Degeneracy Theory, which tied the emerging feminist movement (which was then fighting for voting rights and for the prohibition of alcohol) with homosexuality, communism, and “female government.” Dr. James Weir, Jr.’s, article, “The effects of female suffrage on posterity,” argued that feminism was just another result of ongoing degeneracy in society which would, in turn, bring about a new impetus toward a “regression to the atavistic state,” which, he argued, included matriarchy, communism, “free love,” and homosexuality. He began his monograph, in typical Degeneracy Theory fashion, by describing the atavistic swamp from which modern society first arose:

In the very beginning woman was, by function, a mother; by virtue of her surroundings, a house-wife. Man was then as now, the active, dominant factor in those affairs outside the immediate pale of the fireside. Life was collective; “communal was the habitation, and communal the wives with the children; the men pursued the same prey, and devoured it together after the manlier of wolves; all felt, all thought, all acted in concert.” Primitive men were like their Simian ancestors which never paired, and which roamed through the forests in bands and troops. This collectivism is plainly noticeable in certain races of primitive folks which are yet in existence, notably the Autocthons of the Aleutian Islands. Huddled together in their communal Kachims, naked, without thought of immodesty, men, women and children share the same fire and eat from the-same pot.

Weir’s description of atavistic societies then became rather contradictory and confusing:

Frequent wars must have occurred between hostile tribes of primitive men, during which, some of them (physically or numerically weaker than their opponents) must have been repeatedly vanquished, and many of their females captured, for, in those old days (like those of more recent times, for that matter) th-e women were the prizes for which the men fought. Under circumstances like these, the few remaining women rmust have served as wives for all the men of the tribe; and, in this manner polyandry had its inception.

Under circumstances like these, the few remaining women rmust have served as wives for all the men of the tribe; and, in this manner polyandry had its inception. Polyandry gives woman certain privileges which monandry denies, and she is not slow to seize on these prerogatives and to use them in the furtherance of her own welfare. Polyandry, originating from any cause whatsoever, will always end in the establishment of a matriarchate, in which the women are either directly or indirectly at the head of the government.

Weir then ignored the vast preponderancy of male-dominated societies to find a few matriarchal ones (including, specifically, the Nair of India) which, he claimed, proved his point. Then, turning to the subject of genius — “retrogressive genius” in particular — which he said gave rise to feminism. Weir wrote:

There are two kinds of genius; the first is progressive genius, which always enunciates new and original matter of material benefit to the human race and which is consequently healthy; the second is retrogressive genius, which is imitative and which always enunciates dead and obsolete matter long since abandoned and thrown aside as being utterly useless. The doctrines of communism and of nihilism are the products of retrogressive genius and are clearly atavistic, inasmuch as they are a reversion to the mental habitudes of our savage ancestors. The doctrines of the matriarchate are likewise degenerate beliefs, and if held by any civilized being of to-day, are in evidence of psychic atavism. Atavism invariably attacks the weak; and individuals of a neurasthenic type are more frequently its victims than are any other class of people. Especially is this true in the case of those who suffer from psychical atavism. The woman of to-day, who believes in and inculcates the doctrines of matriarchy, doctrines which have been, as far as the civilized world is concerned, thrown aside and abandoned these many hundred years, is as much the victim of psychic atavism as was Alice Mitchell who slew Freda Ward in Memphis several years ago [see Jan 25], and who was justly declared a viragint by the court that tried her.

This, of course, is where Weir touched on homosexuality and tied it to the feminist movement. The English language was still relatively bereft of easily understandable terms to describe homosexuality. The love that dare not speak its name was only just then acquiring its name in English when Weir wrote his monograph in 1895 (see May 6), and so the scandalous murder of Freda Ward by her lesbian lover stood in as the widely understood euphemism for lesbianism in particular, and somewhat tenuously, homosexuality in general. And it is here that Weir begins to tie it all together:

I think that I am perfectly safe in asserting that every woman who has been at all prominent in advancing the cause of equal rights in its entirety, has either given evidences of masculo-feminity (viraginity), or has shown, conclusively, that she was the victim of psycho-sexual aberrancy. Moreover, the histories of every viragint of any note in the history of the world, show that they were either physically or psychically degenerate, or both. Jeanne d’Arc was the victim of hystero-epilepsy, while Catharine the Great was a dipsomaniac and a creature of unbounded and inordinate sensuality.

…Viraginity has many phases. We see a mild form of it in the tom-boy who abandons her dolls and female companions for the marbles and masculine sports of her boy acquaintances. In the loud-talking, long-stepping, slang-using young woman we see another form, while the square-shouldered, stolid, cold, unemotional, unfeminine android (for she has the normal human form, without the normal human psychos) is yet another. The most aggravated form of viraginity is that known as homo-sexuality; with this form, however, this paper has nothing to do. Another form of viraginity is technically known as gynandry, and may be defined as follows: A victim of gynandry not only has the feelings and desires of a man, but also the skeletal form, features, voice, etc., so that the individual approaches the opposite sex anthropologically, and in more than a psycho-sexual way.

Even if feminists weren’t lesbians, they were, as far as Weir was concerned, only a few steps away from it, a prospect that he clearly didn’t want to spend too much time thinking about (“…with this form, however, this paper has nothing to do”).  Weir had bigger things to worry about. Aside from lesbianism, equal rights for women would bring about all manner of degeneration — moral, psychical, and physical — due to the stresses of increased responsibility:

The effects of degeneration are slow in making their appearance, yet they are exceedingly certain. The longer woman lived amid surroundings calling for increased nervous expenditure, the greater would be the effects of the accruing degeneration on her posterity. …The inherited psychical habitudes handed down through hundreds and thousands of years would prevent the immediate destruction of that ethical purity for which woman is noted, and in the posession [sic] of which she stands so far above man. …(But) there would come a time when the morality of to-day would be utterly lost, and society would sink into some such state of existence as we now find en evidence among the Nairs….

The baneful effects resulting from female suffrage will not be seen tomorrow or next week, or week after next, or next month, or next year, or a hundred years hence, perhaps. It is not a question of our day and generation; it is a matter of involving posterity. The simple right to vote carries with it no immediate danger, the danger comes afterward; probably many years after the establishment of female suffrage, when woman, owing to her increased degeneration, gives free rein to her atavistic tendencies, and hurries ever backward toward the savage state of her barbarian ancestors. I see, in the establishment of equal rights, the first step toward that abyss of immoral horrors so repugnant to our cultivated ethical tastes — the matriarchate. Sunk as low as this, civilized man will sink still lower — to the communal Kachims of the Aleutian Islanders.

[Source: James Weir, Jr. “The effect of female suffrage on posterity.” The American Naturalist 29, no 345 (September 1895): 815-825.]

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David Koch’s Support for Marriage Equality Is Not New

From The New Yorker in 2010:

In some ways, David Koch’s political views resemble those of the wealthy crowd with whom he socializes in New York. He thought the Iraq War was folly, and supports stem-cell research and gay marriage.

I have no idea what last week’s announcement was all about, but it mimics almost word for word what The New Yorker said in 2010, and even then The New Yorker’s tone suggest that his support for marriage equality wasn’t new then. Maybe this latest “news” is Koch’s way of making his and his brother’s election-buying appear less ominous. I certainly don’t see this as a hopeful sign myself since there is zero evidence that Koch allows these views to influence the brothers’ hundreds-of–millions-of-dollar political investments over the years.

The Daily Agenda for Sunday, September 2

TODAY’S AGENDA:
Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Atlanta, GA (Black Pride); Calgary, AB; Duluth, MN;  Oakland, CA and Québec City, QB.

Other Events This Weekend: Splash Days, Austin, TX; Burning Man, Black Rock Desert, NV; Show-Me State Rodeo, Cleveland, MO; Southern Decadence, New Orleans, LA.

TODAY IN HISTORY:
“Perverts Vanish” from Miami: 1954. By now, the ongoing anti-gay hysteria that gripped Miami for the past month (see Aug 3, Aug 11, Aug 12, Aug 13 (twice that day), Aug 14, Aug 26, Aug 31, and yesterday) began taking on a Keystone Kops mentality. On August 26, Miami mayor Abe Aronovitz blasted City Manager E.A. Evans and Police Chief Walter Headley — who were both out of town on vacation — for “coddling homosexuals” in the city, and said that he would give Evans just one week rom the time he returns to “clean out certain pervert nests in Miami proper.” Evans returned on August 31 and met with Aronovitz, promising to “put pervert hangouts out of business by tomorrow.” Tomorrow came yesterday, and Evans was forced to clarify that no, they weren’t going to put anyone out of town that day, but that what he was really going to do was meet with Chief Headley to come up with a plan. Headley, for his part, threw up his hands, saying that he was hamstrung by the law. “We can’t put those places out of business unless someone passes a law that it’s illegal to serve homosexuals,” he told a reporter for The Miami News. His detective, Benjamin Palmer, suggested that maybe there was another way to get rid of all the homosexuals. “Practically all of the homosexuals work in Miami. If people wouldn’t hire them, they’d go away.”

That long review of increasingly comical events brings us to today, because it turns out that while Chief Headly didn’t have a new plan up his sleeve, he could at least put into practice the plan they always had: try another round of pointless police checks at known gay bars. They did exactly that later that evening, and on September 2, City Manager Evans claimed success. As The Miami News reported:

Did anyone look in South Beach?

Miami’s many perverts have been chased “underground or out of town,” City Manager E.A. Evans declared today. Evants said his edict to the Police Department to harass bar owners catering to these characters had resulted from their disappearance from downtown streets.

“They have just disappeared,” said Evans. “Extra men have been added to police details and a check reveals only a few customers at bars where the homosexuals gather.”

Evans admitted that giving the city’s gay community a week’s notice through public arguments in the newspapers probably tipped them off to the coming raids, but he promised that the patrols weren’t “just for a few days. This is a long range proposition.” Neighboring Miami Beach’s Police Chief Romeo Shepard reacted to his larger neighbor’s crackdown. “We don’t want Miami’s homosexuals running over here. We’re making special plans to keep them out.”

Miami’s crackdown continued that night, but the results were paltry. The following day, The Miami News reported that four bartenders were arrested for liquor law violations — two for serving minors, one for “serving a drunk,” and one for having a “noisy juke box” — along with a 20-year-old Marine who as found drunk and turned over to military authorities and another man arrested at Bayfront Park. Meanwhile, police complained that they didn’t have enough laws to keep gay people in check. Chief Headley repeated his call for  a new law “forbidding them to congregate or buy drinks.” But they did claim success in one area. Police told The News that “the notorious Moulin Rouge bar, formerly the Singing Bar, was closed down some time ago, and its new operators reportedly plan to reopen the place for ‘normal’ trade.”

TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Evelyn Hooker: 1907. Dr. Hooker, the psychologist who is widely credited for establishing that gay people are not inherently mentally ill, knew what it meant to overcome long odds. Born the sixth of nine children in North Platte, Nebraska, she had to overcome uncountable barriers to women in academia and psychology throughout the first half of the 20th century. In 1942 while a teacher at UCLA, one of her students introduced her to other members of the gay community and challenged her to study “people like him” — homosexuals who were neither troubled by their homosexuality and who had none of the features commonly associated with mental illness. Among those she came to know was noted author Christopher Isherwood, would rented a guest house from her. “She never treated us like some strange tribe,” he recalled later, “so we told her things we never told anyone before.” Hooker quickly became convinced that most gay men were socially well-adjusted, quite unlike the homosexuals that had been written about in the scientific literature until then. By 1953 — at the peak of the McCarthy “lavender scare” period — she decided that this could be proven through psychological testing.

For her groundbreaking study, she gathered two groups of men. The first were members of the local Mattachine Society, and the second were heterosexual men. She administered three sets of psychological tests, and presented the 60 unmarked sets of data to a team of three expert evaluators. The evaluators were unable to tell the difference between the members of the two groups. When she presented her paper, “The adjustment of the male overt homosexual“, at the 1956 annual meeting of the American Psychological Association in Chicago (see Aug 30), her results were met with incredulity. It was a well-established orthodoxy in psychology that all gays were mentally ill, and that the disturbances would have been obvious in the test results. But until Hooker’s study was published, there was no scientific data available about non-imprisoned, non-patient homosexuals. For the first time, Hooker’s peer-reviewed study — it would soon appear in the March 1957 edition of the Journal of Projective Techniques and Personality Assessment — would prove that there were well-adjusted, normal and healthy gay men, and lots of them.

Hooker’s research into the subject didn’t end with just that single paper. In 1958, her paper “Male Homosexuality in the Rorschach” challenged whether the Rorschach inkblot test could weed out gays from straights as claimed by its backers. In 1959, she published “What Is A Criterion?”, in which she again reiterated that the three most popular tests then in use for personality assessments were incapable of picking gay men out of a crowd, despite claims to the contrary. She argued that part of the problem was that “we need to get beyond the fact that the individual is homosexual, to the kind of homosexual that he is,” adding:

It will have become evident by this time that I am not greatly disturbed by the fact that projective techniques diagnosing homosexuality are not demonstrably valid means for diagnosing homosexuality. In fact, I am rather encouraged by this because I hope it will force us to re-examine the much over-simplified picture we have had and encourage us to remind ourselves that the first goal of science is understanding, with prediction and control as secondary to it.

Her 1969 paper, “Parental relations and male homosexuality in patient and non-patient samples,” refused the widely accepted claim that parents were the cause of their children’s homosexuality.  That same year, she chaired the National Institute of Mental Health’s Task Force on Homosexuality, which recommended the decriminalization of homosexuality and its removal from the APA’s list of mental disorders. The APA finally acted on that recommendation in 1973, but it would take another thirty years before the U.S. Supreme Court would finally eliminate the remaining sodomy laws across the nation.

In 1991, the American Psychological Association honored Dr. Hooker with its Award for Distinguished Contribution to Psychology in the Public Interest, saying: “Her research, leadership, mentorship, and tireless advocacy for an accurate scientific view of homosexuality for more than three decades has been an outstanding contribution to psychology in the public interest.” She died in 1996.

Billy Preston: 1946. As a three-year-old, little Billy began playing the piano while sitting on his mother’s lap. By age ten, the child prodigy was playing the organ for such noted gospel singers as Mahalia Jackson and James Cleveland (who, it was later revealed, was also gay — which is a different story for another time). At age eleven, he appeared on Nat King Cole’s national TV program singing Fats Domino’s “Blueberry Hill, and at age twelve, he started with Cole in the film St. Louis Blues, playing a younger W.C.Handy. In the 1960s, he became a much sought-after studio musician, playing organ for Sam Cooke, Ray Charles, and the Beatles, whom he had met while performing in Hamburg in 1962.

When Preston joined up with the Fab Four again in 1969, the four weren’t quite so fab. In fact, they were on the verge of breaking up and were struggling to complete Abbey Road and Let It Be. George Harrison brought Preston in, and his gregarious personality and musicianship briefly calmed the tensions in the studio, so much so that John Lennon proposed making Preston an official “Fifth Beatle.” (Paul reportedly countered that it was bad enough with four.) Preston did join the band for its final rooftop concert at Abbey Road studio, and his prominent eclectic piano solo on “Get Back” earned him a credit on the resulting single as “The Beatles with Billy Preston.”

Preston didn’t join the Beatles, but he did join their record label, Apple Corps, which released his 1969 album That’s the Way God Planned It... His 1970 release, Encouraging Wordsincluded Eric Clapton and Ringo Starr as guest musicians. After his departure from Apple for A&M, Preston continued his collaboration with George Harrison in The Concert for Bangladeshand toured with Harrison during his 1974 North American tour. Meanwhile, Preston’s start as a solo artist began to shine, with his 1972 instrumental “Outa-Space” winning a Grammy Award for Best Pop Instrumental Performance. That was followed by his number one hits “Will It Go Round In Circles” in 1972 and “Nothing from Nothing” in 1974.

While Preston continued released solo albums throughout his career, his spotlight as a solo artist was relatively short-lived. But his collaborations with other musicians remained strong, including an extended stint with The Rolling Stones for several albums and concert tours through the seventies. Keith Richards, in his recent autobiography Life, recalled, “He was gay at a time when nobody could be openly gay, which added difficulties to his life. Billy could be, most of the time, a bundle of fun. But sometimes he would get on the rag. I had to stop him beating up his boyfriend in an elevator once. Billy, hold it right there or I’ll tear your wig off. He had this ludicrous Afro wig. Meanwhile, he looked perfectly good with the Billy Eckstine look underneath.”

Soem of Preston’s difficulties undoubtedly was rooted in his background in Gospel music. While his main success came in secular music, he remained in touch with the Black Gospel world, including playing organ for Donny McClurkin’s self-titled debut album in 1996. That was before McClurkin announced in 2002 that he was gay but had “experienced God’s power to change my lifestyle.” Preston’s remaining foot in Gospel only added to the pressure to remain publicly closeted. As a close friend said, “Billy was gay. He didn’t wear it on his sleeve. How could he? He was a black man that came from the church. The church would have destroyed him. [But] he wasn’t ashamed of who he was.” While Preston keenly felt the need to remain closeted, there is a good reason why he may have felt at home in the Gospel world. He once quipped to a friend in Gospel music that the Black church choir was “the original gay-straight alliance.” Here, Preston plays “How Great Thou Art” at Gospel Celebration 1988:

Preston continued collaborating with other musicians through the remainder of his life. When George Harrison died, Preston played for the 2002 commemorative Concert for George in Londpn. He also collaborated with Johnny Cash for 2002’s American IV: The Man Comes Around and on Ray Charles’s 2004 Genius Loves Company. Preston died in 2006 of complications from malignant hypertension and kidney failure, despite having undergone a kidney transplant in 2002.

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David Koch endorses marriage equality

From Fox News

Billionaire businessman David Koch has helped direct millions to Republican candidates but he disagrees with the party on gay marriage.
…
“I believe in gay marriage,” the 72-year-old Koch told Politico. He was in Tampa as a New York delegate and to attend an event held by Americans for Prosperity — the political advocacy group he helps fund and lead.

And that could make things interesting. When a billionaire speaks, politicians listen.