Box Turtle Bulletin

Prop 8 may be decided at 10 a.m. tomorrow

Tomorrow at 10 a.m. (Pacific Time), the California Supreme Court will advise the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals as to whether the anti-gay activist organizations that are seeking to step in place of the State of California to defend Proposition 8 have standing, under California law, to do so.

Should the CA Supremes advise that the Proponents of Proposition 8 have no standing, and should the Ninth Circuit accept that advice, then the case is over. Proposition 8 will be dead and marriage equality will return to California.

The Daily Agenda for Wednesday, November 16

TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Glenn Burke: 1952. He was known as “the guy who invented high fives,” when in a game in 1977, Burke was standing on deck fellow Dodger Dusty Baker was rounding third and headed for home after hitting a home run. As Baker crossed home plate, Burke raised his had. Baker responded by raising his also, and when the two slapped hands, history was made. Believe it or not. And to make the scene complete, Burke then stepped up to the plate and hit a home run of his own.

Burke made another kind of history, after a fashion: he is believed to be the first gay ballplayer who was out to his team mates. According to his 1995 autobiography, Out at Home, Dodgers General Manager Al Campanis offered to pay for his honeymoon if Burke agreed to get married. Burke said no. He also angered manager Tommy Lasorda by hanging out with Lasorda’s estranged gay son. The Dodgers soon traded him to the Oakland A’s, where manager Billy Martin called him a faggot in front of his teammates. He retired in 1979. In 1982, Burke became the first professional league player to come out as gay. He was a hero in his adopted community in San Francisco’s Castro, but without baseball his life soon spiraled downhill. He struggled with drug addiction, and for a while became homeless. He spent several months in prison for grand theft and possession of a controlled substance. His final months were spent with his sister before succumbing to AIDS in 1995 at the age of 42.

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).

As always, please consider this your open thread for the day.

Oh Stop Whining And Just Pay The Lady

John Becker wrote about going undercover as an “ex-gay” patient at Marcus Bachmann’s clinic. After publishing the results, he also, as you can imagine, decided not to go back for any more “treatments.” Becker called to cancel his three remaining sessions, but apparently the receptionist only cancelled one. Which means that Bachmann is now is demanding payment for Becker’s two no-shows. He really wants that $150, and left this message on Becker’s voicemail:

Hello John Becker, this is Doctor Marcus Bachmann (emphasis his); I received a message from our billing department asking if we would write off the two no-show fees for 7/7/11 and 7/12/11. We will not (emphasis his) be writing those off, so you do owe those no-show fees, and we would expect payment as soon as possible, otherwise we will have to turn it over to collections. If you have any questions you can call …

Totally reasonable if you ask me. After all, those bills from Nordstrom can really add up fast.

Ugandan Health Officials Claim Human Rights Groups Are “Spoiling Our Response to HIV/AIDS”

Daily Monitor, Uganda’s largest independent newspaper, reports that the Uganda Network of AIDS Service Organizations (UNASO) has identified several deficiencies in the country’s fight against HIV/AIDS. Among the shortcoming cited include a shortage of qualified health workers, anti-retroviral medications, and test kits. But the Ministry of Health sees another culprit:

However, Ministry of Health is blaming the stagnant HIV prevalence rates in the country on uncoordinated response to the epidemic by pro-gay and lesbian civil society organisations. Uganda’s HIV prevalence rates have remained between 6.5 and 7 per cent for about two years.

According to Dr Zainab Akol, the coordinator of the national Aids Control Programme, the number of Ugandans dying from Aids-related infections has reduced significantly over the last two decades; but added that the fight is now being derailed by the civil society.

“They are spoiling our response to HIV/Aids. They are derailing us by dragging us to human rights issues of homosexuals. We in the health ministry do not want to know your sexual orientation. We treat everyone so long as that person is sick,” she said.

Akol claims that Uganda was denied a US$270 grant from the Global Fund to Fight Tuberculosis, Malaria and HIV/AIDS due to lobbying by human rights groups. A major AIDS NGO however denies the charge:

However, Mr Godfrey Tuwesigye of HURINET Uganda, described Ms Akol’s comments as misleading. “We have never called for cutting funding for HIV/Aids activities. We are just telling the ministry to streamline lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) in HIV/Aids activities. If in future we get a new type of virus among homosexuals, will they say they were not aware?” Mr Tuwesigye said.

Two months ago, we learned that Health Minister Christin Ondoa is also a pastor at Life Line Ministries, where she works under the direction of apostle Julius Peter Oyet. He is one of the most influential evangelical leaders in Uganda you’ve never heard of. Oyet was present in the gallery when the Ugandan Parliament first considered the introduction of the Anti-Homosexuality Bill in 2009, and he has been very open about his belief that homosexuality should be a capital offense. Oyet, who is also President of the Ugandan branch of the U.S.-based College of Prayer (or COP, which itself is a ministry of Rev. Fred Hartley’s Lilburn Alliance Church in Atlanta), was made a member of M.P. David Bahati’s staff to lobby Parliament for the bill’s passage. While Bahati is the bill’s author and sponsor, Oyet played a crucial role in its drafting.

The Daily Agenda for Tuesday, November 15

Frank Kameny (Washington Blade/Michael Key)

TODAY’S AGENDA:
Frank Kameny Memorial Service: Washington, D.C. Organizers had originally planned a celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Washington Mattachine Society (see Today In History below), complete with a short talk by the Society’s founder, Frank Kameny. But Frank’s passing last month has prompted a change in plans. The planned commemoration will, fittingly, now become a memorial to Frank’s lifelong fight for gay equality. According to a statement released by the organizers:

Friends and allies of Dr. Kameny, and members of the general public, need no invitation to attend this service on Capitol Hill, capacity permitting. This spacious and historic venue was made available through the generous support from leaders of the Congressional LGBT Equality Caucus, allies in LGBT equality and national service.

This historic date – November 15, 2011 – is the half-century anniversary of Dr. Kameny’s co-founding of the Mattachine Society in Washington D.C., considered the earliest “homophile” rights organization established in the Nation’s Capital and among the earliest in the United States. Fifty years ago in 1961, Dr. Kameny also filed the first gay civil rights brief before the U.S. Supreme Court. His original brief is now preserved at the Library of Congress.

The memorial will take place in the Cannon Caucus Room, Room 345 in the Cannon House Office Building beginning at 4:30 p.m. EST. The Cannon House Office Building is located south of the Capital, bounded by Independence Avenue, First Street, New Jersey Avenue, and C Street S.E.

Nigerian Embassy, London

Kiss-In At Nigerian Embassy To Protest Bid to Criminalize Same-Sex Marriage: London. Nigeria’s Same Gender Marriage (Prohibition) Bill seeks to outlaw same-sex marriage. It stipulates three years jail for a person who enters into a same-sex marriage, and five years jail plus fines for anyone who “witnesses, abet and aids” a same-sex marriage. A Kiss-in in front of the Nigerian Embassy in London is being organized by Nigerians in the diaspora. It will take place this afternoon from 4:00 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. at Nigeria House, 9 Northumberland Avenue, London Wc2N 5BX.

Frank Kameny (center) marching with members of the Washington Mattachine Society in 1970.

TODAY IN HISTORY:
First Official Meeting of the Washington Mattachine Society: 1961. On this date in history, gay rights pioneer Frank Kameny and several others held the first official meeting of the Washington Mattachine Society. The Washington Mattachines, unlike other Mattachine Societies elsewhere in the country, brought a new, aggressive approach to the fight for gay rights. Frank Kameny later reflected on the society’s founding in an essay he contributed to Eric Marcus’s Making History: The Struggle for Gay and Lesbian Equal Rights : 1945-1990 : An Oral History:

Meanwhile, other things were going on with Mattachine. The national structure of Mattachine collapsed in March of that year. The San Francisco Mattachine had cut loose all the other affiliates and wished them well, urging them to change their names and to keep on working. The Denver group became The Neighbors and disappeared. The New York group retained its name and incorporated as a nose-thumbing gesture to San Francisco. It be came the Mattachine Society, Incorporated, of New York versus the Mattachine Society in San Francisco. It was all very petty.

…That following November, on November 15, 1961, we had our first official meeting ofthe Washington Mattachine. I was the organizer and founder. We did all the things that an organization does when it gets going. We took out a back account, got a post-office box, wrote our constitution, elected our officers, set up our meeting structure, and chose a name. I opted against using the Mattachine name, but I was outvoted. I wanted something that was more explicit and expressive, but would’t have used the word gay then. While it was an in-group word, it hadn’t yet gone public.

Now the movement of those days was very unassertive, apologetic, and defensive. I don’t say this critically, and not necessarily derogatorily, but it was a different era. First of all, up to this time, homosexuality had never been publicly discussed. Let me give you an illustration of that. As you’re aware, the question of queers int he government was very much part of the grist of the mill for McCarthy in his hearings in the early 1950s. When McCarthy was riding high, I was still in graduate school at Harvard. I read the Boston Herald every day. I read the New York Times every Sunday. I listened to the radio all the time. I read Time magazine weekly. Yet I did not learn until somewhere around 1958 or 1959 that homosexuality had been a theme of those hearings because it was not widely reported.: the word homosexual was not fit to print or discuss or be heard. Virtually from one end of the decade to the other, outside the medical books, there was nothing anywhere on the subject. It was blanked out, blacked out. It wasn’t there!

Because there was no publicity, there was no way of getting to people. The people in the small movement at that time were only talking to themselves. There was absolutely nothing whatsoever that anybody heard at that time, anywhere that was other than negative! Nothing! We were sick; we were sinners; we were perverts. And so the movement, predictably, in retrospect, did not take strong positions. It gave a hearing to everybody, saying, “As long as it deals with homosexuality, all views must be heard, even those that are the most harshly and viciously condemnatory to homosexuals. We have to defer to the experts.” My answer to that was, “Drivel! We are the experts on ourselves, and we will tell the experts they have nothing to tell us!” Giving all views a fair hearing didn’t suit my personality. And the Mattachine Society of Washington was formed around my personality.

So we at the Washington Mattachine characterized ourselves within the movement as an activist militant organization. Those were very dirty words in those days in the movement, such as it was. You weren’t supposed to be militant. And we were, both in our actions and our goals. Our statement of purposes set out our goals, which were generally to achieve equality for homosexuals and homosexuality against heterosexuals and heterosexuality. Equality was the primary issue.

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).

As always, please consider this your open thread for the day.

About that last post…

I don’t know if I need to say this outright, but that last post was entirely satirical.  The TempFlow salesman didn’t blink an eye when I mentioned my same-sex partner.  He was great.

In that post, I was mocking our opponents who accuse us of flaunting our sexuality when we’re merely talking about our lives with conventional frankness.  I was pointing out the absurd lengths to which we’d have to go in order to mollify them.

I forgot, however, that this isn’t genuinely absurd at all — in fact, in too many places and for too many people it’s a daily reality.

Don’t beat yourself up if you didn’t take it as satire.  The fault is mine.  The fact is, some of our opponents — “respectable” ones, who are paid to write columns, who appear as experts on cable shows — have views so oppressive that my satire is no exaggeration of them at all.

Trying Not To Shove It Down Their Throats

I feel awful. I just flaunted my sexuality to a stranger.

It’s time for a new bed. Tempur-Pedics are pricey and apparently make some people feel overheated. I researched an alternative called TempFlow, which has a factory showroom near my work. They arranged to have a salesman waiting for me, so I warned them:

I won’t be buying today. I can’t buy anything until my partner checks it out. He’d kill me if I bought a bed without letting him test it.

The salesman laughed in commiseration. Our opponents, though, have taught me that deep inside he must have been suffering: I’d just shoved my sexuality down his throat! Since then I’ve pondered how I could have phrased that without violating his religious freedom to work in a place free of the homofascist harassment and bullying I’d just subjected him to.

Obviously, as a first step, I could choose not to refer to Will as “he.” That’s still leaves the problematic “partner,” though — who besides homosexuals refers to their partner as “partner”?

Finally I came up with this:

I won’t be buying today. I can’t buy anything until the person with whom I share my bed checks it out. The person with whom I share my bed kill me if I bought a bed without letting person with whom I share my bed test it.

There. That’s perfectly natural and not awkward at all. I feel like such an ogre for not plotting this out beforehand, perhaps typing it up so that I could read it from my computer screen, alongside inoffensive versions of a few hundred other comments I might have needed.

Now if I can just figure out an inoffensive way to lie down on the showroom bed and check it out with Will…

[UPDATE:  Please see http://www.boxturtlebulletin.com/2011/11/14/38790.]

Dominionism Is Not A Myth, Ctd.

Yes, you can actually buy one of these so you can remind “both Americans and those abroad, of the Virtue that this Great Nation was founded on.”

High Crimes

I’ve said this before and I’ll probably say it again a thousand more times: I cannot fathom what it is that gets into people who think that the appropriate response to witnessing the commission of a felony is not to call the police. Instead, they “report” it to a bureaucrat of an institution in whose best interest it is for the “scandal” — no, it’s not a scandal, it’s a crime — to be brushed under the rug and kept out of the newspapers. For decades, children were molested by Catholic priests and nobody thought to call the police. For decades, gay kids have been feloniously assaulted in the schools and an administrator is called upon to do what the prosecuting attorney is legally constituted to do.

And so we see the familiar pattern repeated again at Penn State. A grad student witnessed Penn State’s defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky raping a ten-year-old boy in the football team’s shower room and what was his response? If you had guessed that the burly former star Penn State quarterback stepped in to rescue a defenseless child from a rapist, you’d be wrong. Instead, he told Joe Paterno, who told someone in the administration, and everyone along the line let the matter drop after, I assume, a stern scolding of Sandusky. “Don’t do that again!”, I’m sure they told him. Except he did, of course, for more than ten more years and who knows how many more victims. Meanwhile, Mike McQueary, that grad student, went on to become an assistant coach. And Paterno, that paragon of virtue and civic responsibility, y0u know his response would have been very different had McQueary told him that something funny was going on between Sandusky and Paterno’s grandson. But that’s not who the victim was, and so Paterno revealed that all of his virtues went toward defending Penn State, and not an innocent young rape victim at the hands of his former employee in his own shower room.

Sandusky has finally been arrested, along with two Penn State officials who covered up his crimes and enabled him to continue raping God knows how many more kids in the decade since McQueary and Paterno’s shrug. The more he know about Sandusky, the more we can see that he fits an exceptionally well-defined pattern of a pedophile. First off, this case shows that heterosexual adult men — Sandusky is married and the upstanding father of six adopted children — can and do abuse boys. In fact, it’s the norm. Sandusky’s targets were mostly prepubertal males between the ages of 7 to 12. (Gay men, if they do engage in sexual conduct with underage males, are much more likely to choose post-pubescent males, not pre-pubescent ones.) A pedophile typically prefers a specific pre-pubertal male or female body type, but will sometimes abuse the other gender if their preferred type is not available, To a pedophile, pre-pubertal children’s bodies are sufficiently similar. He carefully selected his victims and “groomed” them with gifts, tickets to Penn State games, and access to the child’s football heros before and after the game. Plying them with gifts like these not only won over their trust — and their parents’ trust as well — but also ensured their silence when payback time came around:

The coach’s actions, according to his accusers, followed a pattern. He’d invite them places, pick them up in his car and then, they say, place his hand on their thigh while driving.

At the Penn State football facility, the grand jury alleges, he’d take them to work out and then suggest they shower together, where the touching progressed: soap fights, back rubs and naked bear hugs. It would allegedly lead to more.

Some accusers described a basement room in Sandusky’s house where they stayed overnight. He’d lie down and tickle them, rub their backs, and blow on their stomachs, they said. One alleged victim, now 24, told the grand jury he “would roll over on his stomach to prevent Sandusky from touching his genitals.”

If any of the boys tried to avoid him, the coach would stalk them by calling dozens of times and by visiting their homes, according to the grand jury report.

He’d try to regain their favor by buying them gifts: shoes, electronics, clothes, anything a kid might want.

Sandusky’s tactics didn’t always work. Many boys resisted. But others didn’t. And in the most insidious aspect to this whole mess, Sandusky set up an entire charity which may well have done some good in the lives of some of these young boys, but we also know it served as a conduit of victims for Sandusky’s ongoing criminal activities. That alone makes this case rather unique. Most pedophiles don’t have the resources to create their own supply chain. But other than that, Sandusky’s case represents a textbook case of what has been identified as a “regressed” type pedophile. For more information into this phenomenon, please see our report, Testing the Premise: Are Gays A Threat To Our Children?

And finally, some on the extreme right are taking this case as a reason why gays and lesbians shouldn’t be around children. That reaction is as predictable as it is nonsensical. If there had been a nationwide ban on gays being within 100 yards of a child, these crimes would have still gone on undetected. Remember, he was married and would have been completely protected by both this imaginary ban and the ongoing collusion of Penn State officials. This has about as much to do with homosexuality as the Charles Manson murders has to do with gun control or John Lennon.

The Daily Agenda for Monday, November 14

TODAY’S AGENDA (THEIRS):
Opening of the U.S. Catholic Bishops Conference: Baltimore, MD. As the American Catholic bishops gather for their annual fall meeting, one of the issues almost certainly to be discussed is the Church’s growing antagonistic campaigns against marriage equality. According to USA Today:

The bishops’ strategy is centered around their new Committee for Religious Liberty. It was unveiled just days after the bishops’ president, New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan, warned President Obama that his decision not to defend a federal ban on gay marriage could “precipitate a national conflict between church and state of enormous proportions.”

A group of leading American bishops took that same dire message to Pope Benedict XVI and Vatican officials this week to rally support for their efforts, which they see as key to averting an era of religious persecution.

As you can see, the tone of the conference is the claim that granting LGBT people equality under the law somehow amounts to “religious persecution,” a theme that various Catholic bishops have been taking up with increasing stridency. But this stridency can perhaps be best seen as a sign of their growing frustration and sense of irrelevance among the Catholic laity. Divorce and birth control have long ceased to be controversial among Catholics in the pews (with the exception of a very tiny fringe minority), with 78% rejecting the church’s stance on birth control and 69% disagreeing on the church’s position on divorce and remarriage. In other words, those debates are over as far as Catholics are concerned, and the bishops lost. And with about half of all Catholics supporting marriage equality, the bishops look to be set to lose yet another round.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Albrecht Becker: 1906. Albrecht Becker was an actor and production designer who lived with his parter of ten yeas in Würzburg in Bavaria. In 1935, he came under the notice of the Gestapo when they were investigating another Würzburg resident, Dr. Leopold Obermayer, a Swiss national who was both Jewish and gay. During the course of the Gestapo’s investigation, they found several photos of young men, including Albert Becker, in his possession. Obermeyer was sent to Manthausen concentration camp, where he ultimately perished. Becker was also tried under Germany’s notorious Paragraph 175 and sentenced to a three year term in Nürnburg Prison. In 1940, he joined the German army and sent directly to the Eastern front where soldiers weren’t expected to survive. But survive he did, and was able to return to Germany and work in the film industry after the war. He became an internationally recognized photographer, production designer and actor for German television. His story is one of six personal histories recounted in the 2000 documentary, Paragraph 175, about the Nazi persecution of gay men. He died in 2002 in Hamburg at the age of 95.

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).

As always, please consider this your open thread for the day.

The Daily Agenda for Sunday, November 13

To tell you the truth, the only thing I have marked on my calendar for today is the fact that this is Fred Phelps’s birthday. Born in 1929, he has spent his entire life tormenting more souls than the Prince of Darkness himself. The mark of a life well spent is the degree to which one has made the world a better place for those around him. Phelps’s mark is such that his name will forever be synonymous with the worst brand of hatred known to man or beast. Virtually every anti-gay bigot in the world claims at least one measure of self-defense: “I’m nothing like Fred Phelps.” Except, in truth, many of them are just as bad as he, and some are worse. Evil may be banal, but each instance of evil is unique in its own way. Phelps is just one of far too many.

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).

As always, please consider this your open thread for the day.

The Daily Agenda for Saturday, November 12

TODAY’S AGENDA:
Gone: The Disappearance of Aeryn Gillern: Discovery Investigation. In 2007, Kathy Gilleran received a call from Austria reporting that her gay son, Aeryn, was missing. A retired policewoman, Kathy immediately flew overseas to aid in the search, but was shocked to learn that local police had no interest in helping. The story that Austrian detectives told Kathy was that Aeryn had been at an exclusive men’s sauna on October 29, 2007, when he suffered a sudden emotional breakdown, fled the sauna naked and then jumped to his death into the Danube Canal. They claimed that Aeryn committed “spontaneous” suicide, but to Kathy, the explanation made no sense, especially because no body was recovered. Honing her instincts as a mother and her skills as a cop, she ultimately discovers her own strength to keep fighting to learn her son’s fate — even to this day, more than four years after he went missing. Gone: The Disappearance of Aeryn Gillern debuts tonight at 9:00 p.m. EST on Investigation Discovery.

"A martini, honey, and don't waste any space with those olives!"

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS:
Megan Mullally: 1958. “What’s this? What’s going on here? What’s happening?” Oh sure, some might have thought the sitcom Will & Grace were about the two characters, Will and Grace. But if that were true, the entire sitcom would have been largely forgettable. Another gay man and his fag hag. Yawn. So if you ask me (and I’m acutely aware that you didn’t), Megan Mullally’s portrayal of booze-guzzling, pill-popping, boob-flashing, gold-digging Karen Walker (alias, “Anastasia Beaverhausen”) is what really made the series an essential part of NBC’s Must See TV. To say that Karen was narcissistic was, well, as Karen would say, “That’s like saying Prada’s are just shoes or vodka is just a morning beverage.” Mullally started out in Chicago theater before moving to Los Angeles in 1985. She made minor guest appearances in a long, long list of sitcoms, including Seinfeld, Frasier, Wings, and Mad About You. After her eight year run on Will & Grace, she had her own short-lived talk show and has stayed busy with several guest appearances. She also returned to the stage, starring in Mel Brook’s Broadway musical adaptation of Young Frankenstein, and in a production of Adam Bart’s The Receptionist in Los Angeles.

The most feared Man on Capital Hill

Mike Rogers: 1963. “The Most Feared Man On Capital Hill” is known for his ability to snoop out closeted anti-gay politicians and expose them long before the mainstream media catches on. Rogers’s targets have included Virginia Congressman Edward Schrock, Montana Idaho Senator Larry Craig, and former RNC chair Ken Mehlman. Some have criticized him for it, but he says what others call “outing” he calls “reporting.” In 2009, Rogers appeared on a local Washington, D.C. news program with host Doug McKelway, who criticized Rogers and said that he would like to “take you (Rogers) outside and punch you across the face.” Rogers demanded an apology, but never got one. Ask him what his favorite movie was, and he will tell you it is Outrage, the 2009 documentary by Kirby Dick which discusses the hypocrisy of closeted politicians who work against the gay community.

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).

As always, please consider this your open thread for the day.

Happy All-Veterans Day

There is a specialness that happens when an worthy event becomes even more so, when an asterisk marring an otherwise admirable effort is removed.

So today is a very special Veterans Day. It is the day we honor all Veterans who fought for the interests of our nation without discounting any because of their race or gender or orientation. Perhaps gender identity will also some day be dropped from consideration, and we will be even prouder. But on this, the first Veterans Day after the termination of more than 200 years of restriction and exclusion, I am a bit prouder and a bit more appreciative of those who don a uniform and stand between me and those who wish me harm.

(Recruitment poster was by JC Leyendecker, a Saturday Evening Post illustrator who gave us such iconic images as the New Year’s Baby and Santa Claus (as currently dressed). He also had other patrons, including several branches of the US Military. Leyendecker is known for his idolization of the male form – often in ways that would be considered too suggestive today. His most famous advertising campaign was his creation of The Arrow Collar Man, based on his long-term companion, Charles Beach.)

Lesbian Advocate Barbara Grier Dies at 78

Barbara Grier, longtime lesbian author, editor, advocate and founder of what was once the world’s largest publisher of gay and lesbian literature, died of cancer Thursday at a hospital in Tallahassee, Florida. She was 78.

Barbara was born on November 4, 1933 in Cincinnati. She said she came out as a lesbian at twelve years old, and spent the rest of her life finding out as much about lesbians as she could. She told her mother she was homosexual, but as she later recalled, her mother replied, “No, because you’re a woman, you’re a lesbian. And since 12 years old is too young to make such a decision, let’s wait six months before we tell the newspapers.” Her book collection began when her mother gave her a copy of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness when she turned sixteen. Barbara’s love for lesbian literature, which she called Lesbiana, would serve as the guiding force for her life’s work, not the mention the basis for her massive personal book collection.

Barbara began her career at The Ladder, the in-house newsletter for the Daughters of Bilitis, in 1957. She mostly wrote book reviews for works of fiction in which lesbians were characters, and like most gay and lesbian authors at that time, she used multiple pen names, including Gene Damon, Lennox Strong, and Vern Niven. When she took over as editor of The Ladder in 1968, she sought to broaden its appeal by dropping the word “lesbian” from the front cover and expanding coverage to include more feminist themes. At this time, the Daughters of Bilitis themselves were in conflict about the organizations direction; the founders wanted a more conservative, assimilationist approach, which conflicted with the younger, more separatist feminists. Grier was solildly in the latter camp, and when the Daughters of Bilitis folded, Grier retained the subscription lists without the knowledge of DOB’s founders, causing an uproar. The Ladder ultimately folded in 1972.

In 1973, Barbara and her partner, Donna McBride, founded Naiad Press, which mostly published Lesbian fiction. Naiad published anything from pulp fiction to poetry, mysteries and romance novels. Barbara’s goal was for lesbians in the midwest to have books to read that reflected who they were. Naiad Press launched the careers of a number of successful lesbian authors, and Naiad also drew from Barbara’s own vast collection of out-of-print works by Renée Vivien and Gertrude Stein. But Naiad became best known for publishing Rosemary Curb and Nancy Manahan’s groundbreaking nonfiction Lesbian Nuns: Breaking Silence. The book, which was banned in Boston and heavily criticized by the Catholic Church, was a collaboration with 51 former and then-current nuns in religious communities.

Barbara and Donna sold the company to Bella Books in 2003 and retired. They also donated their collection of literature to the San Francisco Public Library. It consisted of an entire tractor trailer full of 14,000 books.

Barbara and Donna married in California on September 5, 2008, during the brief period in which same-sex marriages were available. Barbara’s body was cremated, and there will be no funeral services.

The Daily Agenda for Friday, 11/11/11

TODAY’S AGENDA (OURS):
Veterans Day: Nationwide. This will be the first Veterans Day commemoration since the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” which means that this will be the first Veterans Day commemoration in which gay and lesbian servicemembers will be able to participate fully. I know of two cities  in which LGBT veterans will be celebrated as part of the mainstream events:

• San Diego, CA: San Diego LGBT Pride extends its welcome to all LGBT veterans, active duty servicemembers, and their families and supporters to walk with us in the San Diego Veterans Day Parade. The contingent will meet at 10am on the west side of the north Parking lot of the Country Administration Building, 1600 Pacific Hwy, San Diego CA 92101. The Parade will kick off at 11am.
• San Francisco, CA: Today’s 92nd annual Veterans Day Parade will be led by San Francisco Freedom Day Marching Band. “It’s just the right thing to do,” said Wallace Levin, the parade coordinator. “Future generations of Americans will look back on this issue and wonder what all the fuss was about.” The parade begins at 11:00 a.m. at the corner of Market and Montgomery streets, and will go down Market Street to McAllister Street and then continue up McAllister to the reviewing stand across from City Hall.

I’m sure there are others. If you know of any, please let us know in the comments.

Lou Engle at TheCall in Nashville, 2007

TODAY’S AGENDA (THEIRS):
Lou Engle’s TheCall Rally: Detroit, MI. Engle is apparently transfixed by certain numbers when they repeat themselves on the calendar. When July 7, 2007 rolled around, Engle held a TheCall rally in Nashville which he believed would mark the end of a forty year period of rebellion since the “Summer of Love” in 1967. Apparently believe that God conforms himself to the man-made western Gregorian calendar, Engle has managed to read some sort of significance into the date 11/11/11, although what that would be is anybody’s guess. Targeting the substantial Arab-American community of Dearborn, Engle’s goal for TheCall Detroit is the conversion of “millions of Muslims” to Christianity and what he calls the transformation of “urban communities.” And gays. Don’t forget the gays, although it looks like he really has his sights set on Muslims this time. He took care of the gays in 2010 at a rally in Kampala, Uganda, where he lent tactical support for the proposed “Kill the Gays” Bill.

Today’s rally begins tonight at 6:00 p.m. and continues for twenty-four hours until tomorrow night at 6:00 p.m. And Engle has issued some pretty crazy warnings if he doesn’t get a massive turnout in Detroit: ” If we actually have The Call and you don’t sustain prayer ongoing you open a vacuum for demons seven times worse to come in. If black and white can’t move together in prayer and sustain it, forget it let’s not even go there, you get demons seven times worse.” So yeah, there’s that to chew on.

TODAY IN HISTORY:
Woman Who Posed As Man 60 Years, Dead: 1907. That was the headline in The Trinidad (Colorado) Advertiser above this news item:

Katherine Vosbaugh, who for sixty years posed as a man, wearing male garb, living the rough life of the pioneers in the Southwest and who even “married” another woman, died yesterday morning at the San Raphael Hospital in this city, where she had been a county charge since he secret of her life was discovered by Dr. T.J. Forham, of this city two years ago.

Born nearly four-score years ago in France of a good family, this remarkable woman donned male garb when but a slip of a girl, came to America and worked as a back clerk, bookkeeper, restauranteur, cook, and sheep herder for over half a century without her sex being known.

In July, two years ago, “Frenchy,” a cook and sheep herder on the Sam Brown ranch, near this city, was taken with pneumonia and brought to the hospital where her secret was revealed. Even then, this strange woman refused to wear skirts. Clad in regulation man’s attire, she has since worked about the hospital and was known by the nickname of “Grandpa.”

Katherine Vosbaugh was left an orphan at the age of twenty years. Her father, a well educated man of considerable means, gave her an excellent business education. At hi death she was an expert accountant and spoke her native tongue, English, German, and Hungarian. Her only motive in assuming the disguise at first seems to have been to enable her more easily to secure employment.

She worked in several cities all over the country before settling at Joplin, Mo., where she worked for fifteen years as a bank clerk, and it was in this city where she married. The name of her “wife” was never learned, but the ceremony seems to have taken place for the purpose of saving the woman’s good name. A few months after the marriage a child was born to the wife, which died after a few months.

Shortly after the death of the child the two women came to this city and opened a restaurant on Commercial street. Here she was known as “Frenchy” and the establishment was one of the most popular restaurants in the Southwest.

Wheat became of “Frenchy’s” wife is not known. She drifted away and her “husband” refused until the time of her death to reveal the woman’s name.

After leaving here the woman secured a position as cook on a big sheep ranch near Trinche ranch. The eccentricities of youth became more pronounced as she grew older and more and more she came to look like a man. For years she lived with men on the ranch, cooking for them, assisting them in the ranch work, and sleeping in the same rooms, but her secret was never suspected.

Two years and four months ago she was stricken with pneumonia, and it was then that her secret was discovered. Since then she failed rapidly in body and mind and her death was due to a general breakdown.

From Jonathan Ned Katz’s Gay/Lesbian Almanac (New York: Harper & Row, 1983), pages 323-324.

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