Box Turtle Bulletin

The Boy Scouts’ coming confrontation

There are a lot of “firsts” when it comes to Boy Scout troops. There’s the “first Boy Scout troop”, the first to be chartered under the Boy Scouts of America, the oldest continually chartered, and Los Angeles’ Troop Ten which “is said to be the oldest Boy Scout troop in the United States sponsored continuously by the same organization.”

It’s sponsor is St. James in the City Episcopal Church, which has been shepherding boys to manhood on campouts and badge earning exercises since 1914. You may recall that I mentioned St. James before as an example of a church that is thriving and joyous and teaching the sort of Christian values that you would want your children to learn.

They also have this emphatically stated on their celebration of their long Boy Scout tradition:

In keeping with the policies of Saint James’ Church and School, Troop Ten and Pack Ten do not discriminate against any person on the basis of race, religion, national origin or sexual orientation in the conduct of their activities or choice of leadership.

So far the BSA has not ousted Troop 10, nor has St. James kowtowed to bigotry. I get the feeling that St. James feels that it answers to a higher authority than the current leader of the Boy Scouts of America.

And this raises an interesting situation.

Many of the oldest troops in the Boy Scouts were started by churches that are part of denominations that are increasingly finding that discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation is a violation of God’s commandments. It’s not just the 1,200 Episcopal Church sponsored groups or the 1,800 UCC troops, who have an official policy of pressuring the BSA to drop their bigoted position. Growing segments of Lutherans (with 3,900 troops), Methodists (with 11,000 troops), and Presbyterians (with 3,600 troops) will soon find that they are being required to teach their youth values that are in contradiction with their beliefs about Justice, Mercy, and the message of Christ. And devout believers take such matters very seriously.

And then there are the secular troops. Thirty percent of the boy scouts are affiliated with civic or educational groups. Without the demands of a prophet in Utah or a Holy Father in Rome directing their position, they will increasingly find discrimination masked as moralizing to be distasteful.

Sure, the 38,000 Mormon troops (about 16% of all Boy Scouts) dominate the organization. And with their new political allies, the Catholic Church, there are another 8,500 troops that at least nominally can back the LDS. But they may want to tread softly. With their obsessive drive to be considered mainstream and to fit in as “real Christians”, the Mormon Church probably doesn’t want to be known as “The Church that Destroyed the Boy Scouts”.

Does Marriage Equality Lead to Higher Income (even for opposite-sexers)?

Oh, time to panic. Thomson Reuters is the latest company to come out against Minnesota’s proposed marriage amendment:

We believe the Minnesota Marriage Amendment, if passed, would limit our ability to recruit and retain top talent. For this reason, we do not believe that the Amendment would be good for Thomson Reuters or the business community in the state.

Maggie Gallagher and NOM have pounced on this, presumably because they know more about running a business than the people who run businesses, and they rebut Reuters with:

…nine out of ten of the top states for business (according to a new CNBC ranking) have marriage amendments [banning same-sex marriage].

I’ve previously taken a swipe at NOM’s ludicrous and simplistic analysis. Business climate depends on a myriad of factors (tax policy? cheap labor?) and no one claims that marriage equality alone will wholly determine a state’s ranking. I even pointed out that 4 of the 5 healthiest states recognize same-sex marriage — which, if you credit this sort of flawed analysis, should make our opponents think twice before crying out that we’re promoting an unhealthy homosexual lifestyle.

But Maggie has inexplicably ignored my advice (I’m hurt, Maggie, hurt) and she keeps promoting this ridiculous proof-by-ranking analysis. So I decided to do a little ranking of my own.

Wikipedia has categorized the 50 states according to their marriage laws. I compared those groups based on:

• Per capita income in 2010
• Projected 2013 median income for a 4-person household
• Percentage of population living in poverty in 2010

Guess how those rankings turned out:

I swear, those were the only three measures I checked. The results were remarkably consistent and the conclusion is obvious: same-sex marriage increases income and lowers poverty.

Wait — no, no, no, no, no. It doesn’t say that at all. Real life is much more complicated, and correlation is not causation. Probably what’s going on here is that factors (like education) which lead to higher income are also correlated with support for marriage equality. Just as opposition to marriage equality is correlated with the same conservative demographic that creates a pro-business economic climate.

Think of it like this: Men are more likely than women to arm wrestle drunk and to get testicular cancer. That doesn’t mean drunk arm wrestling causes testicular cancer, just that it’s correlated with it.

But NOM isn’t going to make fine logical distinctions like that. Or even broad ones. And they’re certainly not going to give up their silly ranking argument. So I have to wonder: how will they respond to this? I’d love to hear NOM’s steel-trap brainiacs: “Uh, we said marriage amendments are good for businesses, not for people. Oh, and businesses are people. So there!”

But that’s a pipe dream. We’d never hear anything so honest from NOM.

Note: To get these figures, I simply averaged the numbers for each group of states, without weighting the states by population. For the purposes of this faux-analysis, the number of people in each state did not matter, or any other factor except each state’s marriage law.

NOM’s breakfast dump heaps up

It’s been a week since I brought you the exciting news of how the National Organization for Marriage’s big Dump General Mills project just keeps going on and on. And in that time the number of those dedicated souls who vow that they will “look for substitutes” has grown by a colossal 18%, all the way to 23,054.

Much of the growth can be attributed to support by the American Family Association, whose followers number at least ten thousand. And one thing you can say about the AFA supporters, when it comes to the cause of protecting the family from the militant homosexual lobby, they are committed. Or, at least, if they are not yet committed, they certainly should be.

Another thing about “good people”

The Boy Scouts of America:

Scouting believes that good people can personally disagree on this topic and still work together to achieve the life-changing benefits to youth through Scouting.

The Boy Scouts of America specifically state that gay people may NOT “still work together to achieve the life-changing benefits to youth through Scouting”. Guess who the BSA does NOT consider to be “good people”.

Can good people disagree?

“Scouting believes that good people can personally disagree on this topic…”

But can “good people” personally disagree “on this topic”?

The careful wording euphemistically avoids mentioning what “this topic” we are discussing. In fact, “this topic” is not explicitly stated anywhere within the Boy Scout’s press release. As a piece of diversionary and obfuscatory rhetoric, it is brilliant. It says almost nothing:

After careful consideration of a resolution asking the Boy Scouts of America to reconsider its longstanding membership standards policy, today the organization affirmed its current policy, stating that it remains in the best interest of Scouting and that there will be no further action taken on the resolution.

This decision follows a nearly two-year-long examination, started in 2010, of the policy commissioned by the Chief Scout Executive and national president. Under their leadership, the BSA convened a special committee of volunteers and professional leaders to evaluate whether the policy continued to be in the best interest of the organization.

The committee included a diversity of perspectives and opinions. The review included forthright and candid conversation and extensive research and evaluations – both from within Scouting and from outside the organization. The committee’s work and conclusion is that this policy reflects the beliefs and perspectives of the BSA’s members, thereby allowing Scouting to remain focused on its mission and the work it is doing to serve more youth.

“The vast majority of the parents of youth we serve value their right to address issues of same-sex orientation within their family, with spiritual advisers, and at the appropriate time and in the right setting,” said Bob Mazzuca, Chief Scout Executive, Boy Scouts of America. “While a majority of our membership agrees with our policy, we fully understand that no single policy will accommodate the many diverse views among our membership or society.”

Following the recommendation to affirm the BSA’s membership policy, the executive committee of the BSA National Executive Board released the following statement: “Scouting believes that good people can personally disagree on this topic and still work together to achieve the life-changing benefits to youth through Scouting. While not all Board members may personally agree with this policy, and may choose a different direction for their own organizations, BSA leadership agrees this is the best policy for the organization and supports it for the BSA.”

Resolutions asking the BSA both to affirm and reconsider this policy have been raised throughout the years. With any resolution, regardless of subject, the BSA may or may not refer it to a committee for review or may immediately determine no further action is necessary. [emphasis added]

This policy, the policy, WHAT policy?

The only semi-direct reference would suggest that there was some question about whether or not parents value the right to address issue of same-sex orientation. The uninformed could be forgiven for assuming that the Boy Scouts chose not to incorporate a new sex education program. Or maybe they have chosen not to end their policy of opposing bullying. Or their policy supporting bullying. Or their policy of creating intentionally vague and deceptive press releases.

The Boy Scouts of America have good reason to be less than direct. Because the policy to which they take great strides to hide is shameful and an embarrassment and if stated plainly is offensive.

Not that they ever put that policy in words. In fact, the words “homosexual” or “gay” (other than as a name) are no where to be found on their website. Instead it is a policy that exists in insinuation, an understood but unstated policy, one which relies on long held exclusion of those who know full well that they are unwanted.

So let me do the BSA a little favor. Let me put their policy in words (as honestly as I can based on the comments of the Boy Scouts of America and their actions).

The Boy Scouts of America believes that possessing the quality of being attracted to the same rather than to the opposite sex is an indication of insufficient moral character. The BSA therefore forbids any same-sex attracted persons, irrespective of relationship status – even if committed to celibacy – from participation in any way in the Boy Scouts or its programs. This blanket exclusion applies to all aspects, troops, groups, or subsets of the BSA and includes –

– Boy Scout members
– Troop leaders
– Den mothers
– Participation by parents
– Scout Sponsors (for example, an MCC church)
– Any other conceivable connection whatsoever to the BSA, its leadership, or its programs

Put in honest and unambiguous language, this is a reprehensible policy. And contrary to the assertions of the BSA spokesman, I very much doubt that it is supported in its entirety by “a majority of the parents”. And I think few boys would smile and agree if told, “Should any of your friends turn out to be gay, we will consider them to be undesirable and will kick them out.”

This unstated policy makes no pretense to being based on any connection to the interests of the boys involved. They don’t even quote the usual collection of bogus fear claims or trot out the ookie-spookie “HOMOSEXUAL MEN with LITTLE BOYS in the WOODS”. They simply run with, “we don’t like you, and we don’t have to, so go away”.

Which brings me back to my original question, can “good people” personally disagree “on this topic”?

If the topic is generically about homosexuality, its etiology, culture, social position, expression, morality of expression, history, political standing, structure of relationship and matters along that line, then sure. Good people can and do differ on a whole host of aspects of understanding about human sexuality.

But when it comes to a blanket exclusion of a group of people based on an benign attribute, that’s a different matter. That is bigotry. And no, bigots don’t count as “good people”.

Boy Scouts Affirm Gay Ban

…after a “confidential two-year review“:

An 11-member special committee, formed discreetly by top Scout leaders in 2010, “came to the conclusion that this policy is absolutely the best policy for the Boy Scouts,” the organization’ national spokesman, Deron Smith, told The Associated Press.

Smith said the committee, comprised of professional scout executives and adult volunteers, was unanimous in its conclusion — preserving a long-standing policy that was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2000 and has remained controversial ever since.

…The Scouts did not identify the members of the special committee, but said in a statement that they represented “a diversity of perspectives and opinions.”

Why such a closeted review? Why the secrecy? Why is such an important decision being made literally in the dark? And why were there no opportunities for opponents of the gay ban to weigh in — or to even know that a “confidential review” was taking place? The Dallas Voice has some inside-baseball which may explain today’s announcement:

The outgoing (Boy Scouts of America) president was Rex Tillerson, better known as CEO of ExxonMobil, a company with the lowest possible rating on LGBT equality from the Human Rights Campaign.

The incoming BSA president is Wayne Perry, who is retired from McCaw Cellular, which became a part of Dallas-based AT&T — a company that receives the highest possible score from HRC.

Today’s announcement smells like Tillerson’s trying to shut off the debate before Perry takes over.

This so-called two-year review comes on the heels of an announcement by James Turley, global chairman and CEO of tax firm Ernst & Young, who also sits on the board of directors at Boy Scouts of America, that he will fight to lift the gay ban. AT&T’s chairman and CEO Randall Stephenson, who also sits on the board, is also on record as being against the ban. Stephenson and Turley both reiterated their opposition to the ban last week.

Geography of Tolerance

Click to enlarge.

Richard Florida has updated his rankings of U.S. metro areas on the Tolerance Scale for The Rise of the Creative Class–Revisited. Tolerance is one of the three “T’s,” along with Technology and Talent, which Florida contends makes up the necessary ingredients for the “creative class” to take root in a metropolitan area., Florida’s Tolerance Scale ranks U.S. metro areas in three key areas: the share of immigrants or foreign-born residents, the Integration Index (which measures the degree segregation between ethnic and racial groups), and the Gay Index (the concentration of gays and lesbians). Why a Gay Index?

Openness to gays and lesbians similarly reflects an ecosystem that is open to new people and new ideas. It’s amazing how consistently people have misconstrued what my colleagues and I have had to say about the connection between gays and economic growth. They miss the point. A strong and vibrant gay community is a solid leading indicator of a place that is open to many different kinds of people. Ronald Inglehart, who has studied the relationship between culture and economic growth for some four decades, has noted that the lack of societal acceptance of gays is the most significant remaining bastion of intolerance and discrimination around the world. Accordingly, communities that have long been more accepting and open to gay people have an underlying ecosystem which is also more likely to be accepting of new ideas and different types of people, including the eggheads and eccentrics who invent new things and start new enterprises. As Bill Bishop put it, “where gay households abound, geeks follow.”

The Daily Agenda for Tuesday, July 17

TODAY’S AGENDA (Ours):
Camp Pride: Nashville, TN. Today is the first day of Camp Pride, a leadership and personal growth experience for LGBT undergraduate college students. A project of Campus Pride, Camp Pride seeks to equip campus leaders with the skills needed to create safer and more inclusive college campuses across the U.S. Camp Pride takes place on the campus of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, and will continue through Sunday.

TODAY’S AGENDA (Theirs):
Family “Research” Council’s Values Bus Tour: Concord, NH. The Family “Research” Council, an SPLC-certified hate group, is bringing its Values Bus Tour to the “Live Free or Die” state — complete with marriage equality — with the FRC’s peculiar brand of social bossiness. Today, the bus will camp out at the NewHampshire State House to “hear conservative female leaders speak out!” Who they are and what they’er speaking out about is anybody’s guess. But they’ll be there from 9:15 a.m. to 11:00 a.m.

TODAY IN HISTORY:
APA Refuses To Meet With Gay Rights Groups: 1963. One of the top goals of the early gay rights movement was to get the mental health professions to remove homosexuality from their list of mental disorders. As long as homosexuality remained listed, governmental agencies and private companies had all the excuse they needed to discriminate against gays and lesbians. In 1957, Psychologist Evelyn Hooker began publishing the results of a series of tests which demonstrated that gays and lesbians who weren’t patients of mental health professionals were indistinguishable from heterosexuals. Before then, the mental health community thought that gays were mentally deficient because all of the prior research had only studied people who were confined to mental hospitals or were seen in clinical settings.

Despite the strength of this new evidence, it would still take many years for it to sink in. In 1963, the American Psychological Association was preparing to meet in Philadelphia for their annual convention. Leading gay activists, under the banner of the East Coast Homophile Organizations (ECHO) also planned to meet in Philadelphia at the same time, and they proposed a meeting with members of the APA. But the APA convention’s organizing committee declined the invitation. In a very brief letter to leading gay rights activist Frank Kameny and the Washington, D.C., Mattachine Society, the APA simply said, “This problem” — yes, the APA saw the meeting as a problem — “has already been considered by the Convention Committee and it was decided that it was not in the best interests of the APA to meet with you, nor to publicize your meetings.”

Another nine years would pass before Kameny and Daughters of Bilitis New York activist Barbara Gittings would appear with Dr. John E. Fryer (as “Dr. H. Anonymous.”) on a panel discussion on homosexuality with the American Psychiatric Association (the other APA, which is the keeper of the list of mental disorders known as the DSM). That appearance nearly a decade later would wind up being a key moment leading to the elimination of homosexuality as a mental illness.

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?

Truvada and politics

The Food and Drug Administration has now just approved the use of Truvada, an AIDS drug, as a preventative medication for some high-risk HIV-negative people. To my way of thinking, this is WONDERFUL, yet another tool in our arsenal for slowing and preventing the spread of the virus.

Not everyone agrees. (Wall Street Journal)

In a media call after the decision was announced, the AIDS Healthcare Foundation called the FDA decision “a catastrophe in the fight against HIV in America” and said it was likely to lead to more, not fewer, HIV infections.

The organization has opposed FDA approval for Truvada’s use in preventing HIV in healthy people. Gilead Sciences is the maker of Truvada, which was already approved to treat people who are infected with HIV.

Michael Weinstein, co-founder and president of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, later told the Health Blog that healthy people should be required to show proof of a negative HIV test before getting Truvada as a prevention medicine.

[UPDATE: Sorry, I left out essential information] However, Weinstein is not just demanding testing, a condition that was announced a month ago. He and AHF have led a campaign against this step altogether.

Weinstein and AHF are a bit, well, peculiar. I don’t want to trash an organization that works hard to encourage testing, but sometimes I think that Weinstein’s brand of politics is based more in micromanaging the lives of others than in utilizing tools to prevent the spread of AIDS. (He has collected enough signatures to put a proposition on the city ballot to ban the production of all porn in the city of Los Angeles that does not feature condoms. He thinks this will reduce non-condom porn – gay or straight – from being produced and marketed; I know it will simply cause a multi-billion dollar industry to move somewhere else at a time in which our city is in financial panic mode. Porn producers will provide for demand.)

Here’s what I know: some people will behave irresponsibly for a time. Here’s what I believe: that irresponsibility does not deserve sero-conversion as some sort of punishment or moral judgment. If we can limit their transmission rate, that is a good thing EVEN IF they are bad bad boys who don’t have sex the way that Michael Weinstein thinks appropriate.

HIV is not an automatic presumption for unsafe sex. And I get the impression that Weinstein – who has for years sang the mantra that condoms must be worn every time – would prefer that we act out of fear rather than truth. And here is some truth that he surely will not appreciate.

• HIV is not an every-time transmission even if anal sex is unsafe and the top is positive.
• Oral sex has such a low transmission rate that it remains more in the realm of biological plausibility than of likelihood.
• Medications are very effective and many HIV positive people have so low a viral load that they are “undetectable”. It is theorized (and widely rumored) that undetectable people cannot pass on the virus.

And I firmly believe that too many young gay men have thought “yeah, well I screwed up so I’ve probably become infected by now so why should I even try to protect myself this time”. Truth is a tool that allows us to respond and it has always infuriated me that the AIDS prevention community has been less than forthright.

I am not suggesting, hinting, implying, or advocating for giving up rule number one which is “wear a condom”. And the inclusion of counseling and risk management as a requirement for prescription is, I believe, a wise move. And there are many unanswered questions including cost of the medication, availability, and the extent to which some will see it as a magic shield.

But I also am realistic enough to know that safer sex will not always happen. Sorry, that’s just the truth. And I also know that some serodiscordant couples negotiate the risks they are willing to take so as to allow some measure of spontaneity and enhanced intimacy and I’m not going to stand in their bedroom with a clipboard and a bureaucratic tone. If this gives them an additional tool to decrease the odds of infection, then by all means allow them the tool.

I agree with AHF that everyone really needs to be tested. I would love to see a massive governmental effort (yeah, I said it) to test every single person in the country above the age of 13, regardless of who they are (preferably using the nucleic acid test twice over a two month period). I believe that people are basically decent and that knowledge of one’s status would go a long way to avoiding infecting others.

And I want to praise that organization for being on Santa Monica Boulevard in a ‘testing bus’ during the evenings when the bars are packed while the institutional (and increasingly pointless) Gay and Lesbian Center offers testing in West Hollywood from noon to 7 PM four days a week for up to 20 people per day. I also appreciate Weinstein’s support of the newly approved at-home HIV simple swab test that requires only 20 minutes and no outside participation.

I also pledge that if Weinstein proves right and sero-conversions increase rather than decrease, I will apologize and join him in calling for a reversal of the FDA’s position. But for me, fewer transmittable and fewer infectible people means less virus transmission which makes me want to stand up and dance around the table.

I think that FRC and Weinstein need to let go of the nanny instinct and find ways to utilize new tools to maximize results rather than seek to mold behavior. Because you don’t want to find yourself wondering why you feel sad, angry, and in objection on the day that we finally find an effective vaccine for this vir

When ignorant and stupid combine with privileged and entitled

In one of the most truly stupid and whiny complaints I’ve heard this week, Russell and Lauryn Mark, both shooters representing Australia in the Olympics, are all upset that they can’t room together.

That’s not the whiny part – actually, I think the Olympic committee should find a way to allow couples to room together. If maximizing comfort and readiness are important to their performance, then that would probably be a smart move (though I’m sure the Australian Olympic Committee cares very little about my opinion on the subject).

The whiny part is this (Herald Sun):

But Mark says there is a clear double standard given many gay sportspeople on elite teams are in relationships but a heterosexual couple cannot room together.

“The stupid part of this, which I have argued to them, is that there are tons of gay couples on the Olympic team who will be rooming together so we are being discriminated against because we are heterosexual.” Mark said.

Ah, yes, tons of gay couples on the Olympic team. Tons and tons.

But this isn’t a case of stupid husband, tolerant wife. Nope, he truly found his match when he married Lauryn.

“I am very frustrated because in sport there are a lot of same sex couples and its OK to be partners with someone of the same sex but if you are heterosexual you are penalised.”

And let me guess… they also think it’s unfair that they had to pay for their wedding license when same-sex couples don’t have to pay for a license at all, right?

Ignorant. Stupid. Privileged. Entitled. Whiny. Jerks.

From Mormon Bishop to LGBT Ally

The “Aha”  moment for Kevin Kloosterman, who was a sitting Mormon Bishop in Illinois, came from re-runs of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy:

As is sometimes typical for Mormons on a variety of issues, I was late.  I didn’t see it until a year or two ago, when it went into syndication. …I would watch the show and imagine what it would be like for them to be in a Mormon bishop’s home, which is probably considered the heart of enemy territory by some in the gay community since Proposition 8. There was something about the spirit of these men that seemed to break barriers of orientation, politics, and even religion. Perhaps like every other fan, I considered them to be more familiar than reality would dictate. Then something that Carson said in his cheeky manner struck me like a thunderbolt.  He said, “We are very pro traditional marriage.” Those words echoed in my mind for months and months. It seemed to disrupt and challenge a deeply held belief that the traditional family was under attack by a so called “gay agenda.”

That belief was dismantled at that moment and I realized that these good men had no desire to hurt me, my marriage, or my family. On the contrary, if they were in my home, I could only see them supporting me, my traditional marriage, and my family.

At some point, Kloosterman began familiarizing himself with LGBT issues, where he found himself “quite frankly embarrassed at how little I knew or understood. When I heard last summer of three separate violent attacks on gay men in Utah, I could no longer shake my head and say “how awful.” I could no longer be silent.” The chronology in Kloosterman’s essay isn’t exactly clear, but at some point he flew to Salt Lake City to try to engage his fellow religionists to reach out and do more for the LGBT community:

When the story broke that a sitting bishop had flown from Illinois to Utah to call for straight members to do more to reach out to LGBT individuals in and out of the church, the two major newspapers in Utah saw the talk in radically different ways, which created controversy. The reaction continued to be mixed as the story moved to talk radio. Mormons of the more conservative variety called for me to be excommunicated. There was one extremist blog even wishing “apostates could be executed” juxtaposed with my name, my wife’s name, our home address and work address for all to see as well as calling for “blood atonement,” which is primitive Mormon talk for execution.

Kloosterman filed a police report on the blog and it was taken down soon after.

Kloosterman spoke at the first “Circling the Wagons” Mormon pro-LGBT conference which took place in Salt Lake City in in 2011. You can find a video and a written transcript of that talk here. He came under fire for using the word “atrocity” to describe the experiences of gay Mormons after hearing their first-hand accounts.

The Daily Agenda for Monday, July 16

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS:
Tony Kushner: 1956. He is most acclaimed for his Pulitzer prize-winning play, Angels In America, the seven-hour epic about the AIDS crises in the Koch- era of New York. Kushner wrote the play for eight actors, but stipulated that each of the actors was to play multiple roles (including multiple genders) throughout the production. When he adapted the play for an HBO miniseries starring Meryl Streep and Al Pacino, the same construct was applied. In addition to the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Kushner won the Tony Awards for Best Play in 1993 and 1994 (Angels In America is actually in two parts, Millennium Approaches and Perestroika, each having its own separate Broadway debut.)

After the turn of the new millennium, Kushner began writing for film, co-writing the screenplay for Steven Spielberg’s Munich. He is currently reportedly working on another screenplay for Spielberg, this time an adaptation of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln In 2006, a documentary about Kushner, Wrestling With Angels premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. His latest play, The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures played in New York last year for a little over a month to somewhat mixed reviews.

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?

I am celebrating Frank Ocean

I don’t know much about urban music. Sure I know Beyonce’s music and can probably sing along to an Usher song or two, but beyond that I’m at a loss.

However I have, in a small way, been paying attention the way in which the attitudes of American black youth about sexuality are reflected in music and writing and I believe that I have been detecting a significant change.

In the Pre-8 world it seemed to me that black males loudly and proudly trumpeted their homophobia and black women either made the mildest of protests or offered excuses. That is no longer the case.

In the past four years we have witnessed a number of highly respected and influential black men – politicians, writers, sports legends, musicians, spiritual leaders, and even the President- have expressed their support for gay equality. The most established symbols of masculinity have made it clear that they do not see gay people as weak or inferior or less a part of the authentic black experience.

And it has impacted the community.

In the past, any suggestion that a rap artist might be gay put him outside the mainstream. If not totally ostracized, he was relegated to a niche and ignored (women have fared better, but only if they stayed semi-closeted). But when Frank Ocean released a statement revealing that his first love had been another man, the response has been noticeably different.

Writing for The Root, Helena Andrews says

“I could never make him love me,” Ocean sings on “Bad Religion,” the song about feeling alone in a non-relationship that first sparked the questions about his sexuality. Funny, listening to the track, one can hardly distinguish the anguish from the issue, or vice versa. Is he upset that he fell in love with a man or that he fell in love with someone who won’t love him back?

In the end, none of it really matters when your eyes are closed, eavesdropping on emotions that could easily be your own. And therein lies the strength of Ocean’s Channel Orange: You can choose to forget who he’s singing to or choose to unravel every allusion and turn of phrase. Either way, it’s good music.

Perhaps it is that he is skilled and talented. Perhaps it is the stark honesty within the poetry of his lyrics. Perhaps it was just the right moment. But the urban music world has coalesced around Ocean in a nearly universally supportive way.

And for what may be the first time in that genre, Ocean may have benefitted from his sexual honesty. His album is selling very well.

This is encouraging and a blessing in so many ways. Obviously, as a confirmation of the polls that show a shift in support for marriage equality among African American voters, this bodes well for future marriage votes – particularly in Maryland this November.

But even more importantly, this new attitude holds promise for those most impacted by HIV, young gay black men. Perhaps the single greatest factor in avoiding seroconversion are the voices in our heads, our perceptions of our own worth, and our sense of belonging. And for many young black men, acceptance of their own sexuality as being of equal value to heterosexuality comes too late.

I may be reading too much into this moment. Maybe I too desperately want it to be true. But I have hope that things have changed and I am celebrating the change I see.

The Daily Agenda for Sunday, July 15

TODAY’S AGENDA (Ours):
Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Bournemouth, UK; Bristol, UK; Charleston, SC; Glasgow, UK; Munich, Germany; Peel, ON; Reading, PA; and Rochester, NY.

AIDS Walk This Weekend: San Francisco, CA.

Other Celebrations This Weekend: Rocky Mountain Regional Rodeo, Golden, CO; QFest Film Festival, Philadelphia, PA; Bear Week, Provincetown, MA.

TODAY IN HISTORY:
New York’s WBAI Radio Broadcasts Talk Show Featuring Seven Gay Men: 1962. There had long been an inherent tension among the various local chapters of the Mattachine Society between those who, because of their experience with the McCarthy-led Lavendar Scare witchhunt in the early 1950s, feared public scrutiny and exposure, and those who argued for greater visibility. The latter group sought increased public exposure for two reasons. First, to let other gay people across the country to understand that they weren’t alone. And also so that society at large could get to know gay people, which, they argued, was necessary if attitudes were every going to change. Randy Wicker, a recent Texas college student who moved to New York to become involved with that city’s Mattachine Society, was a natural at public relations, and he pushed to get the Society’s activities publicized in the local press. “Randy was very young and wild-eyed,” one Mattachine member recalled. “He has very radical and did things that the rest of us didn’t have the guts to do. Many of other people in our group were professionals, and I think they thought Randy was moving too fast. We weren’t sure things were ready for someone like him yet. But her certainly made us sit up and take notice.”

To get around some of the group’s objections, Wicker established an organization called the Homosexual League of New York, an organization that consisted solely of himself. This way, if Mattachine members became too uncomfortable with his actions, he could just switch and do them under the guise of the alternative “group.” One of his first projects was to talk WBAI, a listener-supported radio station, to air a ninety-minute program with gay people as part of the panel. He proposed this after the station had already aired an hour-long special, “The Homosexual In America,” featuring a panel of psychiatrists who described gay people as being sick and in need of a cure. When WBAI agreed to air Wicker’s follow-up program, the New York Journal-American went ballistic. Jack O’Brian, the paper’s radio-TV columnist, wrote that the station should change its callsign to WSICK for agreeing to air an “arrogant card-carrying swish. …We’v heard of silly situations in broadcasting, but FM station WBAI wins our top prize for scraping the sockly barrel-bottom.”

WBAI went ahead despite the controversy, and exactly fifty years ago today, New York radio listeners, for the first time, heard Wicker and six other gay men talk for ninety minutes about what it was like to be gay. They talked about the difficulties in maintaining careers, the problems of police harassment, and the social responsibility of gays and straights alike. The following morning, The New York Times’s Jack Gould called the program “the most extensive consideration of the subject to be heard on American radio” — a statement that betrays his own unawareness of several similar programs which had already aired on radio and television in San Francisco and Los Angeles years earlier. Newsweek called the program “96 minutes of intriguing, if intellectually inconclusive listening.” A group of listeners lodged a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission and challenge the station’s broadcast license. When the FCC recognized the broadcast as a legitimate exercise in free speech, it signaled to other radio and television stations that homosexuality was an acceptable topic for broadcast.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS:
Samuel Reber: 1903. He was a well-regarded American diplomat who spent twenty-seven years in the Foreign Service. During World War II, Reber scored a significant diplomatic success by getting Vichy France to agree that French colonies and possessions, ships and planes in the Caribbean would not be used by the Axis powers, an agreement which underscored Vichy’s weakness as a French power. Reber then joined the Allied Control Commission in Italy, and from there he served as the U.S. representative to the Allied French government in 1944. By 1946, he was a political adviser to the U.S. delegation at the Council of Foreign Ministers Conference in Paris, in 1947 he was director of the State Department’s Office of European Affairs, and in 1950 he joined in the Allied High Commission as an adviser for the U.S. High Commissioner for Germany.

Beginning in 1948, Reber faced his greatest diplomatic challenge working t for an Austrian peace treaty while enduring years of threats and insults from the Soviet Union. His work ultimately laid the groundwork for an independent Austria remaining outside of the Soviet block. But the treaty guaranteeing that independence wouldn’t come about until two years after Reber was forced out of the State Department in 1953. That’s when Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s Red Scare — and the accompanying Lavender Scare — was in full force in the U.S. Senate. McCarthy charged that the upper ranks of the State Department were filled with communists and homosexuals, prompting a wide-ranging witch hunt within the department. Reber was called in for a polygraph test and interviews on March 17 and 19, 1953. That investigation uncovered “a lot of admissions” about homosexuality. When McCarthy threatened to reveal allegations of Reber’s homosexuality, Reber promptly announced his retirement in May 1953, effective July 15 when he turned 50.

But because of Reber’s high profile, the reasons for his resignation quickly became well known in diplomatic and political circles. In 1954, McCarthy would use Reber’s resignation against his brother, Major General Miles Reber, who was called to testify on the first day of the Army-McCarthy hearings. According to Time magazine:

Returning to twist the dirk already thrust into the Reber brothers, McCarthy asked General Reber: “Are you aware of the fact that your brother was allowed to resign when charges that he was a bad security risk were made against him as a result of the investigation of this committee?” Jenkins roared in protest. McClellan roared in protest. McCarthy talked on, stuck to his question. General Reber sat in silence, gripping the edges of the witness table until his knuckles showed white. Finally, McCarthy, having made his point over radio and television, dismissed the entire question as unimportant, and grandly said he would withdraw it.

But West Pointer Reber would not have it so. In a voice thick with emotion, he asked to be allowed to answer the “very serious charge” made against his brother. After another long argument, Reber said simply: “. . . As I understand my brother’s case, he retired, as he is entitled to do by law, upon reaching the age of 50 … I know nothing about any security case involving him.” With a sigh of relief, Chairman Mundt dismissed Reber, thanking him for his frank manner—a remark to which McCarthy, who seemed determined to resent any civility, made a formal objection.

David Cicilline: 1961. When he was elected mayor of Providence, Rhode Island, in a landslide in 2002, David Cicilline became the first openly gay man to become mayor of a state capital. in 2010, he was elected to Congress to represent Rhode Island in the U.S. House of Representatives, becoming one of four openly gay representatives in the House.

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The Daily Agenda for Saturday, July 14

TODAY’S AGENDA (Ours):
Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Bournemouth, UK; Bristol, UK; Charleston, SC; Glasgow, UK; Green Bay, WI; Munich, Germany; Peel, ON; Reading, PA; Rochester, NY; and Tacoma, WA.

AIDS Walk This Weekend: San Francisco, CA.

Other Celebrations This Weekend: Rocky Mountain Regional Rodeo, Golden, CO; QFest Film Festival, Philadelphia, PA; Bear Week, Provincetown, MA.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS:
Arthur Laurents: 1917. The three-time Tony Award winning playwright, director and screenwriter started out by writing scripts for radio shows and training films for the U.S. Army during World War II. One photograph of GIs in the South Pacific jungle inspired him to write Home of the Brave about anti-Semitism in the military. The play opened on Broadway in 1945 and ran for sixty nine performances. (When the play was adapted for the 1949 film, the topic switched from anti-Semitic to anti-black bigotry.) That first run wasn’t a long one, but its controversial subject would come back to haunt him later when he was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee and was placed on the infamous entertainment blacklist during the McCarthy red scare.

His tenure on the list was relatively brief, and by the mid-1050s, Laurents was in Broadway and Hollywood’s good graces again. Good thing, because he went on to write West Side Story and Gypsy, and the script for Alfred Hitchcock’s The Rope. He also wrote the scripts for the films The Way We Were and The Turning Point, and directed the 1983 stage production of  La Cage Aux Folles.  Laurents died just this past May in New York of pneumonia at the age of 93. His partner of more than fifty years, Tom Hatcher, had preceded him in 2006. In honor of Laurents’s career, the lights on Broadway were dimmed at 8:00 p.m. on May 6, 2011.

My Mom: 1940. Happy Birthday Mom!

Jane Lynch: 1960. Nobody does bitter sarcasm like Jane Lynch. Since 2009, she has played the role of Sue Sylvester on Glee, where her Emmy- and a Golden Globe-winning performance is the only rational reason why anyone would want to watch Glee (in my opinion at least). She has also appeared in The 40-Year-Old Virgin and has a recurring role in The L Word. In 2010, Lynch married clinical psychologist Dr. Laura Embry in Sunderland Massachusetts. You can see their video for Dan Savage’s “It Gets Better” project here. Just this past Wednesday, it was announced that Lynch joined tennis legend Billie Jean King and a handful of other celebrities to form LPAC, which bills itself as “the first of it’s kind Lesbian Political Action Committee.”

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?