hunter of justice

Critical moments in New England campaigns for marriage equality

The Boston History Project sponsored a panel discussion recently in which GLAD Legal Director Gary Buseck posed questions to two of the leading advocates for gay marriage: GLAD lawyer Mary Bonauto and Vermont Freedom to Marry lawyer Beth Robinson.  The result is a window into the history of the litigation and legislative efforts across New England, beginning more than a decade ago. Listening to the video below (excerpts of the discussion, compiled by GLAD) reminded me of how profoundly local these decisions are. I found especially interesting the background on the civil unions law in Vermont - its enactment and the almost successful attempt to repeal it. And there's a very funny story about then Vermont Governor Howard Dean at the end of the first excerpt.

Happy 89th birthday to women's right to vote

The Nineteenth Amendment - women's suffrage - was ratified on August 26, 1920, when Tennessee put the campaign to secure ratification of two-thirds of the states over the top. It seems like another world, until one realizes, as Hillary Clinton noted of her mother, that a fair number of little old ladies among us were born before women could vote.

Here's the NY Times coverage:

Washington, Aug. 26 -- The half-century struggle for woman suffrage in the United States reached its climax at 8 o'clock this morning, when Bainbridge Colby, as Secretary of State, issued his proclamation announcing that the Nineteenth Amendment had become a part of the Constitution of the United States.

The signing of the proclamation took place at that hour at Secretary Colby's residence, 1507 K Street Northwest, without ceremony of any kind, and the issuance of the proclamation was unaccompanied by the taking of movies or other pictures, despite the fact that the National Woman's Party, or militant branch of the general suffrage movement, had been anxious to be represented by a delegation of women and to have the historic event filmed for public display and permanent record.

Secretary Colby did not act with undue haste in signing the proclamation, but only after he had given careful study to the packet which arrived by mail during the early morning hours containing the certificate of the Governor of Tennessee that that State's Legislature had ratified the Congressional resolution submitting the amendment to the States for action.

None of the leaders of the woman suffrage movement was present when the proclamation was signed. "It was quite tragic," declared Mrs. Abby Scott Baker of the National Woman's Party. "This was the final culmination of the women's fight, and, women, irrespective of factions, should have been allowed to be present when the proclamation was signed. However the women of America have fought a big fight and nothing can take from them their triumph."

Leaders of both branches of the woman's movement- the militants, headed by Miss Alice Paul, and the conservatives, led by Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt -- some of whom had been on watch nearly all night for the arrival of the Tennessee Governor's certification, visited the State Department, and the militants sought to have Secretary Colby go through a duplication of the signing scene in the presence of movie cameras. This Mr. Colby declined to do, on the ground that it was not necessary to detract from the dignity and importance of the signing of the proclamation by staging a scene in imitation of the actual signing of the proclamation....

At the same time Mr. Colby congratulated the women of the country on the successful culmination of their efforts in the face of discouragements, and declared the day "marks the opening of a great and new era in the political life of the nation."

"I confidently believe," said the Secretary, "that every salutary, forward and upward force in our public life will receive fresh vigor and reinforcement from the enfranchisement of the women of America. To the leaders of this great movement I tender my sincere congratulations. To every one, from the president, who uttered the call to duty, whenever the cause seemed to falter, to the humblest worker in this great reform, the praise not only of this generation but of posterity will be freely given."...

Late this afternoon Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt, head of the National American Suffrage Association, and Mrs. Helen H. Gardiner, another active worker in that organization, were received at the White House by President and Mrs. Wilson. The National Woman's Party, known as the militants and a rival organization to that headed by Mrs. Catt, was not represented.....

A mass meeting [and jubilee at Poll's Theatre tonight] was attended by women from every section of the country and a number of officials of the administration, including members of the Cabinet, were present.

Contesting birth certificates and "gender permanence"

A new paper by Paisley Currah and Lisa Moore on the struggle between transgender advocates and New York City agencies over the designations on birth certificates has just been published:

Currah, Paisley and Lisa Jean Moore. 2009.  “‘We Won’t Know Who You Are’: Contesting Sex Designations on New York City Birth Certificates.” Hypatia 24:3 (Summer 2009): 113-135. 

Here's the abstract:

This article examines shifts in the legal, medical, and common sense logics governing the designation of sex on birth certificates issued by the City of New York between 1965 and 2006. The experience of transgender citizens illustrates the problems that result from birth certificates’ dual functions as a) an authenticator of identity and b) an historical record. The analysis of our data, generated from participant observation, ethnography, official reports and minutes, and in-depth interviews identifies two key organizing principles animating the debates over the last forty years. Gender fraud dominated the discussions of the 1960s and 1970s and provided the rationale for rejecting the request of transgender individuals to change the sex on these documents.  The requirement of gender permanence figures most strongly in the most recent debates in New York City, and justified the re-imposition of the policy first articulated around fraud: that the genitals  be surgically modified before the state will re-issue an identity document indicating a change of sex. In an era when the foundational facts that sustain guarantees of identity—biometric, social, historical—can change, emerging state practices of identity management and the technologies enabling its growth and spread create real obstacles for transgender individuals.

NYU to preserve Gay Cable News footage

From Gay City News:

Thousands of hours of video news and features on the LGBT and AIDS movements produced by Lou Maletta for his Gay Cable Network (GCN) over 19 years have been acquired by New York University’s Fales Library for cataloguing and preservation. Maletta, 72, launched the network in 1982 with “Men in Films,” which explored male erotica, and soon went on to develop news programming that gave virtually the only television attention to the nascent AIDS crisis and the ongoing fight for LGBT rights ...

Maletta shut down operations in 2001, but has been paying for storage of the 6,100 hours of videotape in the hopes of selling the archive. While NYU is paying him a small fee for the donation, Marvin Taylor, the Fales director, called it “a major preservation challenge,” saying it could cost as much as $4 million to complete the digitization process — a task that will take many years and for which he is seeking funding.

“NYU has one of the most important gender studies programs in the country,” Taylor said, and the GCN material was a natural fit for the library, complementing its Downtown New York collection that documents the arts scenes from the 1970s through the ’90s, “a world decimated by the AIDS epidemic,” the library’s release said. “This is the age of YouTube,” Taylor said. “These days preserving history through moving images is what we need to be doing. And scholars really want it.”...

“No one else has anything of this nature in the world,” [Maletta] said. Maletta went out and covered everything he could in the community with a sense of mission and the conviction that “the way to educate people was with the greatest tool of all time — television.”

Part of what motivated him to use his video equipment to cover the community was watching a 30-year-old friend “turning into someone who looked 90 six months after being diagnosed with GRID [Gay-Related Immune Deficiency, the first acronym for AIDS] in 1982. No one had seen a KS lesion on TV until we put it on cable.”

From 1984 to 2000, the Gay Cable Network provided team coverage of the Democratic and Republican National Conventions, with reporters on the floor interviewing political leaders from Dick Cheney, Henry Kissinger, and George W. Bush to Jesse Jackson and Ann Richards. The network also covered LGBT and AIDS demonstrations outside the conventions, as well as countless local and national protests including the 1987 and 1993 national marches on Washington and the rise of ACT UP in 1987. Regular weekly updates by AIDS experts, including Frank Oldham, were a vital resource for a community in crisis in the 1980s and ’90s.

But Gay Cable Network also covered the social, cultural, and sexual lives of LGBT people with in-depth interview programs such as “Be Our Guest” and a show on bondage — “In the Dungeon” with Slave Dale, an impish and socially conscious leather man. Some of the notable artists interviewed on the network were Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, Harvey Fierstein, Tony Kushner, director Derek Jarman, Quentin Crisp, writer Vito Russo, Sara Jessica Parker, and Barbara Walters, among an eclectic mix of countless others.

Maletta said that much of the footage he and his crew shot did not make it into the final shows, but will be preserved in the collection. “The cablecast footage along with all the material that has never been shown is a tremendous resource for documentarians and historians,” he said. ...

Maletta and Taylor were introduced by Allen Zwickler, who heads the Phil Zwickler Foundation, named for his late filmmaker brother who made the documentary “Rights and Reactions,” about the passage of the New York gay rights bill in 1986, and was a correspondent for GCN. Phil died of AIDS in 1991.

“It’s more than 6,000 hours of film about civil rights and human rights,” Allen, an NYU alumnus involved in funding AIDS charities, said. “It is so incredible that it had to be preserved.”...

For information on how you can help support the preservation of the Gay Cable Network archive at NYU, contact Marvin Taylor at 212-998-2596 or at fales.library@nyu.edu.

Forty years ago tonight

STONEWALL - the early morning hours of June 28, 1969

Lots of commemorations - An exhibit at the New York City Public Library. Online, OutHistory.org has posted several newly-released police documents. Much of the original press coverage is here. Photos from the last night of the uprising here.  Recollections by a participant and an observer. OutHistory has also posted this letter recounting the street action, which lasted several nights, written at the time by Edmund White:

Well, the big news here is Gay Power. It's the most extraordinary thing. It all began two weeks ago on a Friday night. The cops raided the <SW>, that mighty Bastille which you know has remained impregnable for three years, so brazen and so conspicuous that one could only surmise that the Mafia was paying off the pigs handsomely. Apparently, however, a new public offcial, Sergeant Smith, has taken over the Village, and he's a peculiarly diligent lawman. In any event, a mammorth paddy wagon, as big as a school bus, pulled up to the Wall and about ten cops raided the joint. The kids were all shooed into the street; soon other gay kids and straight spectators swelled the ranks to, I'd say, about a thousand people. Christopher Street was completely blocked off and the crowds swarmed from the Voice office down to the Civil War hospital.

As the Mafia owners were dragged out one by one and shoved into the wagon, the crowd would let out Bronx cheers and jeers and clapping. Someone shouted "Gay Power," others took up the cry--and then it dissolved into giggles. A few more gay prisoners--bartenders, hatcheck boys--a few more cheers, someone starts singing "We Shall Overcome"--and then they started camping on it. A drag queen is shoved into the wagon; she hits the cop over the head with her purse. The cop clubs her. Angry stirring in the crow. The cops, used to the cringing and disorganization of the gay crowds, snort off. But the crowd doesn't disperse. Everyone is restless, angry and high-spirited. No one has a slogan, no one even has an attitude, but something's brewing.

Some adorable butch hustler boy pulls up a parking meter, mind you, out of the pavement, and uses it as a battering ram (a few cops are still inside the Wall, locked in). The boys begin to pound at the heavy wooden double doors and windows; glass shatters all over the street. Cries of "Liberate the Bar." Bottles (from hostile straights?) rain down from the apartment windows. Cries of "We're the Pink Panthers." A mad Negro queen whirls like a dervish with a twisted piece of metal in her hand and breaks the remaining windows. The door begins to give. The cop turns a hose on the crowd (they're still within the Wall). But they can't aim it properly, and the crowd sticks. Finally the door is broken down and the kids, as though working to a prior plan, systematically dump refuse from the waste cans into the Wall, squirting it with lighter fluid, and ignite it. Huge flashes of flame and billows of smoke.

Abortion in 19th century New York

From the NY Times:

At first glance, the recent killing of the abortion provider Dr. George Tiller in Kansas appears to be a modern phenomenon, the heinous byproduct of the politics of the last several decades. In fact, Dr. Tiller is just the latest in a line of brave people who have died for providing abortions. Perhaps the most infamous of these was a midwife named Ann Lohman, who killed herself in New York in 1878 after decades of harassment.

Lohman, who called herself Madame Restell, was an immigrant from Gloucestershire, England, who started out selling “female pills” to “regulate” women. The medicines — mostly herbs, perhaps some opium — promised relief from an “obstructed womb” and “suppressed” menstruation. “Not to be used when *******,” declared one of the many coy ads she placed, “as miscarriage may occur.”

In the event that the pills did not, in fact, induce miscarriage, Lohman offered a procedure in her offices, charging $20 for poor women, and as much as $100 for her increasingly wealthy clientele. She also boarded pregnant ladies, delivered babies, placed infants for adoption and conducted sex education classes.

In partnership with her husband, Charles Lohman — also known as “Dr. Mauriceau,” to appeal to the Francophile vanities of the carriage trade — Madame Restell grew rich from her thriving mail-order business, and even had agents in Boston, Philadelphia and Providence, R.I. She drove her fine carriage through Central Park, creating a scandal. The press delighted in describing her wardrobe, her dresses of silk and velvet, her hat with its red feather, and her ostentatious five-story house, with its lush gardens and stables, its tessellated marble entry and grand fireplaces, which she had built in 1862 on Fifth Avenue and 52nd Street. The neighbors were said to ridicule her tacky window dressings.

Lohman’s wealth and unrepentant behavior made her a tabloid favorite. The New York Herald, The National Police Gazette and The Polyanthos called her a “hag of misery,” “a modern Thug of civilized society,” and the lady of “the death’s head and the marrow bones.” Abortion, with its drama of illicit sex and romance gone sour, was, and remains, a sensation that sells news.

It has also long inspired angry protests. In a riot organized in 1846 by the newspaper publisher George Dixon, a mob surrounded Lohman’s house and chanted, “Hanging’s too good for her!” and “This house is built on babies’ skulls.”

Zealous prosecutors pursued Lohman almost from the start, even though abortion laws were weak and violations difficult to prosecute, as witnesses were reluctant to come forward and early pregnancy could not be proved. Even so, from 1839 to 1877, Lohman was arrested at least five times and jailed for months without bail. She spent countless hours and dollars defending herself against charges and rumors (that there was a special sewer built between her house and the Hudson River, to dispose of corpses; that she was responsible for the unsolved murder of a cigar girl, a case that Edgar Allan Poe used as the basis for a story, “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt”).

She was convicted only once, however, and served a year in the penitentiary on Blackwell’s (now Roosevelt) Island on misdemeanor charges. It was widely believed that she escaped harsher punishment by threatening to reveal the names of her patients — the mistresses, daughters and wives of the rich and powerful.

Her published letters suggest that Lohman was passionately committed to the idea of providing reproductive health care to women. When the authorities moved to stop the publication of ads for her services — on the grounds that birth control and abortifacients corrupted women — Madame Restell wrote to The Herald: “Would your wives, and your sisters, and your daughters, if once absolved from fear, all become prostitutes? I cannot conceive how men who are husbands, brothers or fathers can give utterance to an idea so intrinsically base and infamous.”

Though abortion by the untrained — then and now — is a dangerous procedure, no woman was ever proved to have died at Lohman’s hands. Indeed, testimony in her trials suggested that Madame Restell was a professional who cared deeply for her patients, staying with them overnight and nursing them with kind words. One patient testified that Lohman “told me to take great care, as she should feel anxious until she saw or heard from me.”

But in the 1870s, Ann Lohman finally met her match in the religious crusader Anthony Comstock, who persuaded Congress to prohibit the sale or distribution of materials that could be used for contraception or abortion, or the sending of such materials by mail. As a special agent of the United States Post Office, Comstock entrapped Lohman by posing as a husband seeking abortion services for a lady. When she provided him with some tablets, he returned and arrested her — accompanied by two reporters. She faced years in jail.

Despondent, fearing the shame that would come upon her family during a long trial and convinced that another stint in prison would kill her, Lohman climbed into her marble bathtub on the April morning her trial was to start, and slit her own throat. She was 66.

“A bloody ending to a bloody life,” Comstock commented upon hearing of her death. The newspapers echoed his sentiments. “The end of sin is death,” wrote The New York Tribune, and The Times editorialized that Lohman’s death was “a fit ending to an odious career.”

Lohman’s death did not put an end to abortion, nor to the battle fought over it. The murder of Dr. George Tiller will not accomplish those ends either.

Larry Kramer's latest: keep gender away from gay studies

The always provocative, occasionally astute Larry Kramer used the occasion of a Yale gay alumni event to blast the university for "misusing" a grant from his brother made in his honor, by building up a gender studies program rather than focusing on the study of gay (apparently male) history.  Following are comments on the speech, from Inside Higher Ed. After the jump is Kramer's speech in its entirety.

HT: Minna Kotkin

...The speech caused a bit of confusion [at Yale] because that university's history department has two big-name gay studies scholars who write gay history: George Chauncey and Joanne Meyerowitz. So the idea that literary theorists control gay studies at Yale in a way that diminishes gay history bothers people there and elsewhere. Via e-mail, Chauncey said that the program named for Kramer did end after five years, but that it ended "as planned, when the funding did," and that it left gay studies "much stronger than it had been before."

Added Chauncey: "I teach courses at Yale every year on lesbian and gay history, and I share Larry Kramer's belief in the importance of gay history, even though we often disagree in our interpretation of that history. But LGBT studies is an interdisciplinary field which includes much more than history, and I am proud that the program at Yale offers courses in anthropology, sociology, film, literature, musicology, and other disciplines." Of the link between gay studies and gender studies, Chauncey said that "this is a common pattern across the country, and it seems to me a very good one, since as a curricular matter there are so many links between LGBT studies and gender studies."

John G. Younger, a gay studies scholar who is professor of classics and director of the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at the University of Kansas, called Kramer's talk "rambling" and "shrill," and said he disagreed with it. Kramer's list of famous dead gay people is "not history, that's wish fulfillment," said Younger. He said that Kramer takes "such an essentialist view," when "since we're dealing with people, there's always nuance."

Defining people as gay doesn't make sense, Younger said, without some understanding of their cultures and identities and values....

Porn in 19th century NYC

Kudos to Donna Dennis (Rutgers-Newark) whose book on 19th century erotica snared a review in the April 5 NY Times Sunday book review section. Licentious Gotham: Erotic Publishing and Its Prosecution in Nineteenth-Century New York describes how, by the 1840's, "flash weeklies" had appeared in the city, catering to a sexually cosmopolitan audience.

Here's an excerpt:

Dennis traces the ways in which provocative material was passed off as edifying, like the guides to the city’s prostitutes that purported to steer unknowing rubes away from their clutches. And she also notes that prohibitions of one sort of racy material only led to another innovation, often more popular than the first. From closer restrictions on sexually explicit writing came the success, in the mid-19th century, of the novelist George Thompson, who combined graphically violent scenes set in urban dystopias with coy peekaboo references to sex. Thompson stopped short of describing those scenes but encouraged the reader to imagine them, while mocking the authorities for compelling him to draw the curtain.

Tributes to Mary Dunlap

Ruth Robson has a lovely post at the Con Law Professors blog about the pioneering work of San Francisco  litigator Mary Dunlap, including a remarkable analysis of gender and sexuality she wrote that was published 30 (!) years ago in the Hastings Law Journal: The Constitutional Rights of Sexual Minorities: A Crisis of the Male/Female Dichotomy, at 30 Hastings L. J. 1131. Mary's article was part of a Symposium on Sexual Preference and Gender Identity.

The movie version is on its way. Jonathan Joiner and Robert Martin have completed a short - Gay Olympics: Claiming the Title - that tells the story of the fight to stop the U.S. Olympic Committee from forbidding Tom Waddell, founder of the Gay Olympics (now the Gay Games), from "polluting" their brand. Since Mary was lead counsel on the case, the film is largely about her, and is dedicated to her and Tom. Shout out to Jonathan and Robert for winning a Frameline Films award.

Watch for it - coming soon to ....

Gay rights law ... 50 years ago

Jim Burroway at Box Turtle Bulletin has re-published a fascinating report on a homophile rights conference held in Los Angeles in 1959. The report originally appeared in The Ladder, the publication of the Daughters of Bilitis. What follows is the  portion describing the group's discussion of a recent legal victory in stopping police from closing gay bars, which provides a taste of how important that issue was in the Eisenhower era.

Del Martin, president of the Daughters of Bilitis, San Francisco, gave a resume of the purpose of The Ladder and its contents during the last year.  One of the most recent examples of progress for the homophile was evidenced in the successful legal battle to keep gay bars from being closed down, or any bars, simply because some or most of their clientele happened to be homosexuals. Miss Martin was particularly pleased, not only because the civil rights of homosexuals had been upheld but because the homophiles themselves, by their constructive activities as reported in The Ladder, had been of some help in the case.

Morris Lowenthal, San Francisco attorney, had contacted Miss Martin for copies of The Ladder in work on the Amicus Curiae brief for the “Mary’s First And Last Chance (Bar)” case. The appealing brief gave a history of the homophile movement in the United States and in particular, gave excerpts from the September and October 1958 Ladder issues. It also included the two issues in question as exhibits in the case.

Who invented "the manly man"?

 A gay man, of course.  From the LA Times review of a new book on a little known commercial artist:

The lavishly illustrated J.C. Leyendecker: American Imagist aims to restore the lesser-known Leyendecker to an appropriate place in the pantheon of American artists.

Leyendecker helped create modern branding when, in 1905, he lobbied Arrow to think less about collars and create "a unique male symbol for their products." What was called for was "[n]ot simply a man, but a manly man, a handsome man . . . an ideal American man." Model Charles Beach fit the Arrow Collar man role perfectly. He also happened to be Leyendecker's lover; they remained partners for more than 40 years.

Born in Germany in 1874, Joe Leyendecker moved to Illinois with his family at age 8. A determined youth, he illustrated religious pamphlets during the day while taking night classes at the Art Institute of Chicago. At 22, he won a cover design contest at the Century magazine -- beating Maxfield Parrish -- and used the prize money to help finance a year studying illustration in France with his younger brother, Frank.

Upon his return, Leyendecker's reputation grew; he did his first Saturday Evening Post cover in 1899. In 1900, with Frank and sister Mary in tow, J.C. Leyendecker moved to New York's Washington Square. He and Frank shared a studio where they painted live models. When Leyendecker was 29, 17-year-old Beach walked in the door.

Leyendecker's early style -- a crosshatched brush stroke that turned soft surfaces into sharp planes -- reinforced Beach's chiseled good looks. When his dynamic crosshatching faded into softer fills, Leyendecker enhanced the manliness of his subjects in other ways: He lit a single light and oiled the muscles of his models for dramatic contouring. In an early mock-up of an Ivory Soap ad, an erection is prominent in the folds of a bathrobe. Decades before feminist Laura Mulvey wrote about the male gaze objectifying women, Leyendecker turned his gaze toward handsome men and created widely circulated icons of masculinity.

When Henry almost met Allen - Kissinger and Ginsberg, that is

HT to PageoneQ

Nestled in recently declassified transcripts of former Nixon Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's telephone conversations is an exchange between him and counter-culture icon, peace activist and poet Allen Ginsberg on ending the Vietnam war. Ginsberg was offering to help. Seriously.

Following is the transcript, from April 23, 1971:

Ginsberg: I am calling at the request partly of Senator McCarthy. Senator McCarthy told me to, call you. My idea is to arrange a conversation between yourself, [CIA Director Richard] Helms, McCarthy and maybe even Nixon with Rennie Davis, Dillinger and Abernathy. It can be done at any time. They were willing to show their peaceableness and perhaps you don't know how to get out of the war and who by private meeting --

Kissinger: I have been meeting with many members representing peace groups but what I find is that they have always then rushed right out and given the contents of the meeting to the press. But I like to do this, not just for the enlightment of the people I talk to but to at least give me a feel of what concerned people think. I would be prepared to meet in principle on a private basis.

G: That's true but it is a question of personal delicacy. In dealing with human conscienceness [sic], it is difficult to set limits.

K: You can't set limits to human conscienceness but --

G: We can try to come to some kind of understanding.

K: You can set limits to what you say publicly.

G: It would be even more funny to do it on television.

K: What?

G: It would be even more useful if we could do it naked on television.

K: (Laughter )

G: It might be too __ but under some kind of circumstances. What shall I tell them that would be encouraging?

K: That I would think about it very seriously.

G: Good deal.

K: I will call Senator McCarthy. When did you intend to do this?

G: During the May Day Meetings in Washington. They will be lobbying and they could meet with you. May 2 or 3.

K: May 2nd or 3rd. Damn it! I would like to do it in principle but --

G: It is a good principle.

K: Now wait a minute. I don't know about those dates, I may not be in town. If not, we can do it at some other reasonable date.

G: I gather you don't know how to get out of the war.

K: I thought we did but we are always interested in hearing other views.

G: If you see [CIA Director Richard] Helms, ask him if he has begun meditating yet.

K: [About what. ]

G: [garbled] He promised to meditate one hour a day. I still have to teach him how to hold his back straight.

K: How do I reach you?

G: City Lights, San Francisco.

A tidbit of LA gay legal history

By Joanna Lin

The old, illuminated sign of a black and white smiling cat still beckons patrons into a small windowless bar, the site of one of the nation's earliest gay rights protests four decades ago. [It is now] the Silver Lake bar Le Barcito.

Forty-one years earlier, the Black Cat, as it was known then, offered a rare gathering place for Los Angeles gays. But it was no safe haven: Police commonly raided taverns, targeting patrons for their sexual orientation. In 1967, a police raid at the Black Cat touched off protests that predated by two years the historic Stonewall riots in New York City. The 1969 Stonewall riots, in which gays and lesbians fought back against the police for several nights, are commonly said to have sparked the gay rights movement.

[Recently], the Black Cat cemented its place in history with a city designation as a historic-cultural monument. Alexei Romanoff, who rallied outside the Black Cat in February 1967 with a few hundred demonstrators, said the designation is a reminder of the progress the gay rights movement has made -- and of the work that remains.

"We were terrified at the time," said Romanoff, 72. "It wasn't safe to be a gay man and professing you were gay. . . . We were afraid we would get beat up and, possibly worst of all, be rejected by our own families." The 1967 protest lasted days and came one month after a police raid at the Black Cat and nearby New Faces bar, which Romanoff had owned until a few months before the raid.

Just after midnight on New Year's Eve, as balloons floated down from the ceiling, a trio of singers belted out "Auld Lang Syne" and patrons exchanged embraces and kisses, plainclothes and uniformed Los Angeles Police Department officers swarmed the Black Cat, beating and arresting 14 patrons and bartenders. Two men, who had fled from the raid to New Faces, were chased and arrested there, where the owner and a bartender were also beaten.

Two of the men arrested that night, accused of lewd conduct for kissing another man, were found guilty by a jury and registered as sex offenders. The men appealed, asserting the right of equal protection under the law, but the U.S. Supreme Court did not accept their case.

New wiki for making LGBT history (literally)

Welcome to the web, OutHistory.org! OutHistory, a project of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at CUNY, has just gone live on the web with its initial content. Check it out - the potential here is enormous. The site is organized as a wiki, which means that individuals can register and then create entries for the collection. Entries can either be protected, i.e. not subject to change without the author's approval, or open, i.e. collaborative and changeable in the mode of Wikipedia.

Current "exhibits" include  a series of early 20th century postcards like the two below, which illustrate the  conversation happening in U.S. society between the world wars regarding gender bending men and women. Essays on OutHistory include one by Jonathan Ned Katz (also the site director) on colonial era "sodomitical sin" and one by Esther Newton on 20th century lesbian history.  You will also find features on elected LGBT officials, images of queer youth from 1947 to the present, the pre-gay era (1950s and 60s), and lesbian theater.

Congrats to the CLAGS/OutHistory folks for creating such a terrific new resource!

        

Sex and the Socialist Party, 1952

Historian Christopher Phelps, of the Ohio State University at Mansfield, has discovered an article on "Socialism and Sex" written for the 1952 bulletin of the youth section of the Socialist Party. Articles by Phelps and a number of leading historians discussing its significance, as well as the text of the 1952 document, appear in the summer 2008 issue of New Politics.

GayCityNews - Socialism and Homosex

[Phelps argues that] the article "Socialism and Sex" "prefigured the 1960s. It urged socialists to understand the genesis of political commitment and their ultimate goals in a capacious sense, transcending narrow economic terms. It treated sexuality as a political issue, comprehending the interrelationship between personal and public in a manner strikingly similar to the subsequent feminist position that 'the personal is political.' While the scant intellectual resources available to a young person exploring such questions in the early 1950s lent the article a modest temperament, the document contains in embryonic form the admixture of socialism and gay liberation that would find more militant, revolutionary expression in the post-Stonewall explosion of such groups as the Gay Liberation Front. For all these reasons, 'Socialism and Sex' is a document of great significance in the larger sexual history of the political left... It stands as an arresting forerunner of modern gay civil rights consciousness."

Moreover, in a series of interviews with YPSL and Socialist Party activists from the 1950s, Phelps discovered that the Party came very close to adopting a homosexual emancipation plank in its platform at its 1952 convention. The chairman of YPSL at that time was Vern Davidson, a UCLA senior who had had several same-sex affairs, including with other Party members, and who, he told Phelps, "was instructed by the YPSL to attempt to put a homosexual rights plank before the platform committee." ...

Davidson told Phelps he tried and tried to draft an appropriate platform plank but "I just couldn't write anything that seemed to fit into the platform. So I let it slide by. I had no guidance. We didn't talk about 'discrimination based on sexual orientation' in those days. That phrase would never have come to me. And everything was going fast, we were fighting over the [Korean] war and everything, and it didn't get done. And I take responsibility. But I believe to this day, had I been able to do my job, [Norman] Thomas [then leader of the Socialist Party] would have joined me, and we would have had it back then, in '52."