Band of Thebes

Born May 14: Magnus Hirschfeld

The next time people claim the gay rights movement is a recent invention or that you’re anachronistically imposing a modern concept on a pre-Stonewall era that could not possibly have supported the idea, remind them of Magnus Hirschfeld. In 1896, he wrote and published a pamphlet on homosexual love called Sappho and Socrates. In 1897 with the leaders of the gay journal Der Eigene, Hirschfeld founded the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, whose motto was “Justice through science.” Their first goal was to overturn the notorious 1871 German law Paragraph 175, criminalizing male homosexuality. Not only did they campaign openly and publicly, they urged prominent people to sign their petition to repeal the law. Among the 5,000 signatories were Einstein, Tolstoy, Mann, Hesse, and Rilke. When the bill to repeal came before the Reichstag in 1898, it failed, and, infuriated by their hypocrisy, Hirschfeld contemplated outing various members of parliament who had voted against it. Undaunted by the defeat, the committee continued to get the bill reintroduced repeatedly over the next decades. 
        Thirty-four years before Kinsey, Hirschfeld collected detailed information about sexual behavior in surveys from 10,000 people and published the results in his 1914 book Homosexuality in Men and Women. Extending his push for gay rights into other media, in 1919 Hirschfeld wrote and acted in a movie called Different from the Others starring Conrad Veidt, whose character comes out to thwart his extortionist gay ex-lover but then loses his job and kills himself. That same year, the government gave Hirschfeld a former royal palace in Berlin to house his Institute for Sexual Research, which offered medical and psychological consultations, marriage counseling, contraception, sex education, and promoted women’s emancipation and rights for gay and transgender people. The institute’s ongoing success inevitably drew the attention of the Nazis. One of the Nazis' early actions, on May 6, 1933, was to ransack the archives and confiscate names and addresses. On May 10, the Nazis returned to hold a massive book burning in Opernplatz on Unter den Linden, destroying the invaluable collection of 20,000 volumes and 5,000 images depicting “deviants” and ideas that were “un-German.” Hirschfeld was on a lecture tour of the United States and never returned home. In Nice in 1935, on his sixty-seventh birthday, he had a heart attack and died, survived by his partner, colleague, former student, and heir, Li Shiu Tong, who lived until 1993.

"Aids Caused Gay Marriage": Positive Pictures, A History

Fran Lebowitz's remark, "Nobody ever says it, but AIDS caused gay marriage," got Paul Schulz wondering about the relationship between those two topics and he discovered he agreed with her. The result is his photography book about the fight against aids co-authored with Christians Lütjens, Positive Pictures - A Gay History. In their essay they endorse another famous quote, Larry Kramer's insistence that it is "the greatest sociocultural achievement of a minority in human history that gay men saved themselves -- that we did not all die."

Between the striking photos, the book also features essays by queer art curator Jonathan D. Katz, cultural critic Jan Kunemund, porn director Jorg Andreas, Deutsche Aids-Hilfe's Tino Henn and Carsten Schatz, as well as the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence's Katharina Laetitiam Donans, among others.

The publisher says, "Aids changed everything about the way gay men live: how we love, how we make love, how we see ourselves and others. Schulz and Lütjens collect images from three decades of fighting, fucking and winning. Heartbreaking, moving, inspiring."

Born May 5: Del Martin

Del Martin died in August 2008 at 87, widowing a wife with whom she spent 55 years championing the rights of the denigrated and disenfranchised. In 1955, when homosexuality was illegal, she, her life partner Phyllis Lyon, and six other lesbians founded the Daughters of Bilitis in her native San Francisco. By 1960 DOB chapters were active in nine cities nationwide and their magazine, The Ladder, was thriving despite most readers' need for secrecy. Even in friendly waters, they had to fight the tides against lesbians, both among straight women in NOW and gay men in the queer equality movement. Martin addressed the latter situation in her landmark article, "Goodbye, My Alienated Brothers," which appeared in the Advocate in 1970. Two years later, she and Lyon were instrumental in forming the Alice B. Toklas Democratic Club, and they published their seminal book Lesbian/Woman. In 1979 they were honored by a group of medical professionals who wanted to start a clinic for lesbians who lacked health care, and they chose the name Lyon-Martin Health Services. In 1995 they were named separately as delegates to the White House Conference on Aging. Ever the trailblazers, Martin [above right, left left] and Lyon were the very first gay couple to be married in San Francisco in February 2004. If there is anything good about her death, it's that she did not have to see Prop 8 pass three months later. Click here to watch them describes the early hurdles they faced in forming and growing DOB during a time when they could not advertise their existence.

 

Born April 7: Harry Hay, R Zamora Linmark

He was born in England, came to America at seven, and, in his twenties, had an affair with Grandpa Walton when that actor was in his thirties: Even now there's so much we don't remember about Harry Hay who started The Mattachine Society in 1950 in Los Angeles. To understand the terror and bravery of such an act, remember, it was illegal for homosexuals to gather in public. A woman accompanied them for cover, or they met in private. Along with Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin, Barbara Gittings and Kay Lahusen, and Frank Kameny, Harry Hay is one of the major reasons we have what we have today. Depending on your view, Hay is the most interesting or the most difficult of the movement's founders because he was permanently opposed to gay assimilation. He was a cofounder of Radical Faeries, and, drawing on his leadership as an eighteen year member of the Communist Party, he was a founding member of Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition. He met his life partner when he fifty-one and died at ninety in 2002. To learn more, read a collection of his own writings, Radically Gay : Gay Liberation in the Words of Its Founder or his biography, The Trouble With Harry Hay.

Today he would be 101. Last April for his centenary, Los Angeles dedicated a staircase "The Mattachine Steps" in his honor.

 

A favorite on Thebes queer lit survey, R Zamora Linmark's Leche [Kindle] is about a young gay Filipano-American returning to the country where he was born and coping with his dual identities. Or, as Kevin Killian says, the novel "takes that old exile-returns cliché and fucks with it till it cries out in ecstasy." Critic Nicholas Boggs said, the book "is a riotous ride through modern-day Manila featuring encounters with a larger-than-life cast of characters including a (perhaps) bisexual cabbie, an activist nun, an acclaimed movie director, and President Corazon Aquino’s actress daughter, also known as the Massacre Queen of the Philippine Cinema.” A two-time Fulbright recipient, Linmark has also written poetry and plays and has taught at the University of Miami and the University of Hawaii. 

Anchorage United for Marriage Equality

  click to enlarge

Alaska is still stuck in the Bronze Age of lgbt rights -- not even a city-wide non-discrimination clause; one of only two states that has never elected an openly lgbt politician at any level of government -- so this afternoon's United for Marriage demonstration in Anchorage was doubly thrilling. A robust crowd of 120 people waved signs at passing cars, and drivers very often waved back, flashed a thumbs up, or honked their support. In the entire hour, the total number of antigay comments shouted back to us was zero. Earlier today, longtime ally Sen. Mark Begich announced his support for marriage equality. That's a courageous stand for someone representing voters overwhelming against it.

Co-host Christopher Constant shared some photos. The event was one of 170 nationwide, many of which can be seen on this tumblr page.

SCOTUS has posted the day's oral arguments. Thankfully, Buzzfeed ranked the 60 best signs outside. At #13: "Jesus had 2 Dads and He turned out fine."

Sony Boss Amy Pascal Nails Hollywood's Dead-Gay Movies, Slurs

The headlines across the web are that Sony chief Amy Pascal called on Hollywood to eliminate anti-gay slurs and stereotypes, but the deeper aspect of her speech last night as she accepted an award from the LA Gay Center at a fundraiser for homeless lgbtq youth was her recognition that film lags years behind television and that most of the very few high-profile gay movies end with a dead queer:

"The Celluloid Closet was made almost 20 years ago and certainly attitudes have changed, but maybe not quite so much as you or I would want or hope. Television has been much more progressive and credit has to be given to producers like Max Mutchnick and David Kohan and Ryan Murphy for really changing things.

"Now movies need to catch up. There are magnificent movies being made about gay subjects with gay characters, like Brokeback Mountain and Milk. Anyone would have been proud to have made those movies. I know I would be. But when you think about some of these films, even our favorite ones, there is a theme that runs through them.

"Brokeback Mountain, Milk, Boys Don’t Cry, Philadelphia, The Hours, Gods and Monsters, The Talented Mr. Ripley, A Single Man, My Own Private Idaho, Cloud Atlas – in all these movies, the main character is murdered or martyred or commits suicide or just dies unhappily. And there are far more pernicious and dangerous images that confront gay kids and their parents: the lesbian murderer, the psychotic transvestite, the queen who is humiliated and sometimes tossed off a ship or a ledge. It’s a big joke. It still happens.

"How many times have you heard a character imply to another that the worst thing about going to prison isn’t being locked up for the rest of your life, it’s the homosexuality? And old stereotypes still exist. The most benign stereotypes would have a gay kid believe that they will end up being the asexual, witty best friend of the pretty girl, or a drag queen, or a swishy hairdresser. The list goes on.

"Of course, there are great images, too, like the family in The Kids Are All Right. The way the boy in Perks of Being a Wallflower and the middle-aged man in Hotel Marigold and the 75-year-old man in Beginners come out to a better, richer, more fulfilled life. It’s treated as a celebration.

"And real credit has to be given to the filmmakers of ParaNorman, Chris Butler and Sam Fell, who had the first gay character in an animated movie, and he was the football hunk and it was totally incidental to the plot.

"Now it’s time for all of us to take that step. Not every gay character needs to be defined by his or her sexuality. Can’t being gay just be one stitch in the fabric of someone’s life? Can’t we depict men and women who just so happen to be gay – perhaps a lawyer or soldier or business executive or scientist or engineer…

"We need to create an atmosphere that encourages people to speak up, so we get this right.

"How about next time, when any of us are reading a script and it says words like fag, or faggot – homo – dyke – take a pencil and just cross it out. Just don’t do it."

The deluge of hostile comments at the industry's go-to site Deadline Hollywood are overwhelmingly anti-liberal, anti-PC, anti-equality, and anti-what Amy said. If you're inclined, add your voice of reason.

Birch on Clinton's Too Little, Too Late Turnaround

Surprising that Elizabeth Birch's hard look back at the Clinton administration's risible DOMA misdeeds hasn't gotten more coverage, but so many people today just want to stay cozy and avoid confrontation. Yes, DOMA passed with a veto-proof majority but Clinton's early, ethusiastic support for DOMA created that majority and gave cover to Democrats who might have been persuaded otherwise.

In President Clinton Says DOMA Is Unconstitutional (So Why Don't I Feel Grateful?) Birch writes:

"I guess it is because DOMA was never constitutional. I guess it is because in the middle of my testimony before Congress on the constitutionality of this horrible law, the Clinton Justice Department, then headed by Janet Reno, had a letter delivered to the committee stating that, in the opinion of the Justice Department, DOMA was constitutional. (I was cut off mid-sentence as one of the more extreme house members read it aloud into the room with glee.)

"I guess it is because, beyond signing the bill into law, the 1996 Clinton campaign decided to run ads on Christian radio bragging that DOMA had become the law of the land. I guess it is because, even after all these years, it still makes me sick that people like Harold Ickes, then a key adviser to Clinton, threatened to leave the ads on the air if I dared to claim victory for demanding they come down. Plenty of people hated the decision to run those ads on Christian radio -- people like George Stephanopoulos, I am told. But it was the president himself who wanted to run them and asked in anger whether he had any say in the matter.

"I know I should shut up. Shut up and be grateful we are making progress. But I guess I am attached to an accurate historic record."

She ends with

"Call me old-fashioned, but couldn't he just say: 1) I was wrong and 2) I am sorry."

Today, she has a longer follow-up on AmericaBlog, refuting Clinton's self-excusing timeline:

"The bottom line is that the politics of DOMA in 1996 were admittedly tough and painful for all of us, but the FMA was simply not a threat at that time.

"President Clinton signed DOMA into law for purely political reasons. I get it. As horrible as it was, I got it then. My point is that now I want the older and wiser President Clinton to reflect more deeply — to challenge himself. I want my friend to say: I was wrong, and you were all served badly by that moment in history.

"Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell’s example is instructive. He lived to deeply regret that he was the swing vote in Bowers vs. Hardwick, a case that famously concluded gay people were not worthy of any constitutional protection. Powell lamented that decision before he died, and said so publicly. That is the brand of reflection I would welcome now from President Clinton.

"When I moved to Washington, because we had shared similar childhoods, I secretly believed I could convince President Clinton of this one thing: that he must rise to the LGBT-civil-right-moment that history had placed in front of him. I talked to him about it every chance I got, and part of me really believed he would rise to that challenge. And I will never deny that he created a whole new emotional context in which LGBT lives could be discussed around the kitchen tables of America.

"But, I do believe the President could have survived a veto. He simply chose not to test history. So, my point is this: While President Clinton could not fully rise to that moment in history, he could at least now report it accurately."

Urvashi Vaid's Bitterness, Optimism for LGBT Movement

Last night in New York, the wonderful activist and intellectual Urvashi Vaid discussed her book Irresistible Revolution: Confronting Race, Class and the Assumptions of LGBT Politics [Kindle]. She opened with two paragraphs charting her change in thinking from a longheld belief that the key to the queer movement was our honesty -- "telling the truth about desire" -- to a more recent hunch that it's actually our "cooptation" -- our strenuous efforts to appear non-threatening, our "uncritical embrace of corporations," and the "pleasure we take in the queering of belonging." Prompted by questions from Tony Kushner about legitimizing the brand-new support from gay and straight Republican powerbrokers, she admitted to mixed feelings. While of course "coalitions are the way we win," she's bitter that the people taking credit now are the same people who did nothing for decades when our friends were dying. Urvashi joked she would start a Dan Savage-style public awareness campaign called "I Get Bitter." 

After riffing how "tradition dogs us at every step in working for change," she reflected that when she was in her 20s she was certain at 54 she would be "living in a big group house with lesbians and gay men in non-monogamous couplings, all raising kids together." Instead, she and Kate have lived together for 25 years in a pretty traditional relationship, though they cling to their theoretical non-monogamy.

Citing her Blakean nature, she insisted she is optimistic about the movement and reminded us that "radicalism is about imagination" and finding "creative resolutions" to form "new ways of family and gender." 

Responding to a worried audience question, she agreed a cautionary tale could be found in the fate of the women's movement, which she called "invisible" in the wake of the summer's outrageous anti-women campaign remarks. She said one problem was the women's movement never addressed race and class and "became an army of lawyers."

Irresistible Revolution suffered by coming in the wake of Linda Hirshman's widely-publicized Victory: The Triumphant Gay Revolution and by its release date tumbling from July to early September to late October. Urvashi Vaid has important things to say and not enough people are hearing her.

Obviously it was troubling to watch Kushner talk about queer radicalism after penning a degayed screenplay that is a lapdog to conformity. But people kept the night's focus on Urvashi's deserving book.

Allan Bérubé's Essay Collection Wins Boswell Prize

Given only in odd years, the Boswell Prize is the most important award for books on lgbt history and the winner for titles from 2011 and 2012 is Allan Bérubé's My Desire for History: Essays in Gay, Community, and Labor History [Kindle] co-edited by John D’Emilio, and Estelle Freedman. The citation says

"My Desire for History elegantly surveys the pioneering work of the late Allan Bérubé and makes clear his genius as a public historian. The essays themselves—part history, part memoir—are wide-ranging, accessible, and powerful, and include several selections from Bérubé’s unpublished manuscript on the history of the Marine Cooks and Stewards Union. Taken together, the pieces offer not only a retrospective of where the field has been, but an agenda for the future in terms of bringing race and class more centrally into LGBT history. D’Emilio and Freedman’s skillful introduction situates Bérubé’s journey within a broader story about the origins of LGBT history in community history projects. It is a moving reminder of the generosity and interdependence that have sustained this field from its earliest days."

My Desire for History was cited on Band of Thebes' queer lit poll by Lucy Jane Bledsoe, Carol Seajay, and Charles Francis.

Among previous Boswell Prize winners are George Chauncey's Gay New York, Margot Canaday's The Straight State, Martin Meeker's Contacts Desired, Lisa Duggan's Sapphic Slashers, Jonathan Katz's Love Stories: Sex between Men before Homosexuality, and Mark Jordan's The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology.

The prize is named for John Boswell, author of Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe and Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, which ranked #1 of Publishing Triangle's all-time best lgbt nonfiction books.

Born January 12: Tracy Baim, Kieron Richardson

In 1985, the year after she graduated from Des Moines' Drake University, Tracy Baim and three men co-founded Chicago's lgbt newspaper Windy City Times. Two years later she left to start a new queer paper, Outlines, which she ran for 12 years until she bought WCT and merged the two publications. While so many other gay weeklies folded, WCT is thriving and Baim is still publisher and executive editor. She was also co-vice chair of Chicago's Gay Games VII from 1999 to 2007, and with her new free time in September 2008 she launched the website ChicagoGayHistory.org in tandem with the release of her book Out and Proud in Chicago [Kindle]. Among her many other books are Obama and the Gays: A Political Marriage [Kindle], Mom: A Tribute to Mothers of LGBTs, Leatherman: The Legend of Chuck Renslow, Jim Flint: The Boy From Peoria, and a novel about lesbians in the military The Half Life of Sgt. Jen Hunter [Kindle]. Baim also produced a lesbian movie starring Sharon Gless called Hannah Free, winner of five Best Feature awards from lgbt festivals in Miami, Philadelphia, Austin, St. Louis, and Montreal. Days ago she released her newest book Gay Press, Gay Power: The Growth of LGBT Community Newspapers in America [Kindle], with an introduction by John D'Emilio and contributions from ten writers including Sarah Toce, Yasmin Nair, and Lou Chibbaro.

After two years of plot twists, fans of the British drama series Hollyoaks finally got what they wanted the week before Christmas: Ste Hay left his husband Doug Carter to return to his Irish ex, Brendan Brady. Former bad boy Ste (prison for car theft) is played by Kieron Richardson who came out at 24 in September 2010. He said he was inspired by Joe McElderry, the X-Factor winner who came out at 19 two months before him.

If Kieron's agent or manager told him to tone it down, he didn't listen. He posed for this cover of Gay Times. He had already skated his way to 3rd place finish wearing tight, hot pink spangles on Dancing on Ice.

Last year he began co-hosting a weekly "lifestyle and entertainment gossip programme" on the Gaydio radio network from Manchester, which you can listen to live every Sunday.

You can also follow him on The Twitter.

A Visit to the ONE Archives in Los Angeles

Saturday morning we researched a project at the ONE Archives in Los Angeles. Highly recommended for their historic holdings, as well as a wonderful sale of duplicate books. If you haven't read it, try Lillian Faderman's and Stuart Timmons' history Gay L. A..

50 People Who Came Out in 2012

Yesterday Towleroad compiled "The 50 Most Powerful Coming Outs of 2012," including many long-postponed announcements from Anderson Cooper, Kristy McNichol, Sally Ride, Mika, Sam Champion, Jim Parsons, and the director of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. You might toggle between enjoying the diversity and questioning the veracity: Nate Silver and Andrew Rannells are two of several listees who were already out; aging opportunist Gillian Anderson isn't queer. I was happy about Omar Sharif Jr., Matt Bomer, Ezra Miller, Wade Davis, Orlando Cruz, and Shaun T [in white trunks, with his husband Scott Blokker in blue].

Many folks were wowed by Lana Wachowski's October speech, which I never posted, so here goes.

The New Yorker Profiles Frank Mugisha

Finally getting the international recognition he deserves after winning an RFK Human Rights award last fall, Ugandan gay activist Frank Mugisha is profiled in the current double issue of The New Yorker. It's another chapter in staff writer Alexis Okeowo's forthcoming book about LGBT Africa. Two weeks ago she compiled a brief list of the 8 Most Fascinating Africans of 2012, mandatory reading for anyone stuck in an all-US/Europe news cycle. Meet Malawi's lady president, Nigerian pop star twin brothers, Cameroon's gay rights lawyer Alice Nkom, and a 19 year-old college girl who, between classes, is a member of Parliament. 

Abstract says: "LETTER FROM UGANDA about activist Frank Mugisha. On a breezy October night two years ago, Frank Mugisha was having a beer with friends in Kampala when he was shown a local tabloid called Rolling Stone, which had outed him and ninety-nine other gay Ugandans. The next morning, Mugisha—who leads Sexual Minorities Uganda, orSMUG, the country’s largest gay-rights organization—scanned the article and e-mailed it to other gay-rights activists and lawyers. The fallout had been immediate. David Kato, at that time Uganda’s best-known gay activist, began receiving threats, and was murdered three months later. In 2009, a year before the article was published, David Bahati, a Ugandan politician, had introduced an anti-homosexuality bill to parliament. When the Rolling Stone article came out, LGBT activists, feeling under attack from the bill, which had not yet been put to a vote, decided to sue the paper for defamation and inciting violence. SMUG led the initiative. In the past two years, SMUG has documented more than fifty cases of discrimination, harassment, and violence against LGBTs in Uganda. In May, gay-activist groups, under SMUG’s leadership, opened the country’s first LGBT health clinic. Ugandans have traditionally been indifferent to homosexuality, as long as it stays in the closet. International disapproval of the Bahati bill has allowed Mugisha and his fellow-activists to strengthen the Ugandan gay-rights movement. The efforts of anti-gay advocates like Bahati are partly informed by outside forces—in particular, by American evangelical missionaries."

Send a Card to Someone Wrongly Imprisoned, Like Pussy Riot

The more you see of holiday shoppers, the more you think the Grinch and Scrooge make valid points. Rekindle your generous spirit by sending a message of hope to a struggling activist or someone wrongly imprisoned on Amnesty International's annual Write for Rights campaign.

Among ths year's fiften cases are: 

EPOC, a South African organization fighting homophobia, one of whose workers, Noxolo Nogwaza, was murdered for being a lesbian. In this case Amnesty asks that you NOT include your name or address.

Gao Zhisheng, high-profile human rights lawyer in China.

Azza Suleiman, an activist recovering from brutal injuries received when soldiers beat her in Tahrir Square.

Mehman Huseynov [pictured], who turns 23 today, facing up to 5 years in prison in Azerbaijan on fake charges of hooliganism for meeting with the EuroSong winner prompting her to speak out about human rights violations in his country.

In the US, Reggie Clemons. "For 19 years, Reggie has sat on death row for a murder that even the prosecution agree he didn’t commit."

Young Women for Change (YWC), the grassroots org in Afghanistan.

Anas al-Shogre, detained in Syria.

And of course PUSSY RIOT, who can receive printed cards or phone text messages. 

Born November 14: Adolf Brand

When was the world's first gay journal published? Congratulations if you said 116 years ago, in 1896. That's when Adolf Brand, at 22, started Der Eigene in Berlin. Originally cloaked as a journal of "male culture," within two years it went exclusively gay. In 1900, Brand published Elisar von Kupffer's landmark anthology of gay poems, Lieblingminne und Freundesliebe In der Weltliteratur, including works from Ancient Greece and Rome, Renaissance Italy, Elizabethan England, 19th century Germany, as well as Arab and Japanese texts. Brand and his colleagues were constantly harassed and frequently prosecuted for their articles and photography, but he never backed down. Indeed, the first of his three prison sentences was for having attacked a member of parliament with a dog whip. His second prison term, eighteen months, was for libel, after reporting the affair between the German chancellor Prince von Bülow and the Privy Councilor Max Scheefer. His third prison term was two months, after he was convicted of violating Paragraph 175 for printing "lewd writings" in Der Eigene. The journal lasted thirty-six years. (Compare that with ONE, nineteen years; The Ladder, sixteen years; or 10 Percent magazine, four years.) His life's work destroyed and left in financial ruin, Brand gave up his activism in the 1930s. He spent two years in the German army and married a nurse, Elise Behrendt, who knew he was gay. He and Elise were killed together on February 2, 1945 when an Allied bomb exploded their home.

   

How We Won This Historic Sweep of Gay Marriage Victories

Welcome to the tipping point. Since DOMA passed in 1996, all 32 state referenda on gay marriage have gone against us. Last night, we won all four: For the first time ever, voters approved gay marriage in Maryland (52% - 48%), Maine (53% - 47%), and Washington (52% - 48%). All the more astounding because Mainers rejected gay marriage just three years ago in 2009. Beyond bringing marriage equality to a total of ten states, the triple victories shatter the argument that judges who rule in favor of gay marriage are imposing something voters are unanimously against. The huge momentum makes it increasingly difficult for Justices Kennedy and Roberts to side with the Court's outdated homophobes when they rule on gay marriage and/or DOMA cases later this session. (On November 20 they select which cases to hear.) Also last night, for the first second time voters rejected a constitutional ban against gay marriage, in Minnesota.   

Other highlights:

• Iowans retained the senate majority so marriage can't be undone there, and the effort to recall a pro-gay marriage judge failed.
• Wisconsin elected the nation's first out US senator, Tammy Baldwin.
• California and New York elected their first openly gay Congressmen, Mark Takano and Sean Maloney. 
• Coloradans flipped the house to democratic control and will have a gay man, Mark Ferrandino, as Speaker of the House, and possibly the senate leader will be Pat Steadman, also gay.

So, how did we go from zero to 100% victories for gay marriage? Nathaniel Frank offers this inside look, which confirms what I've long heard from pollsters: "fairness" is not a motivating concern to the majority of voters.

 "...the key to dismantling the anti-gay myths of the last 40 years. For decades, gay advocates had framed their arguments in terms of equal rights and government benefits, often using rhetoric that was confrontational (“We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it”) and demanding (“We deserve equal rights now!”). Third Way, a centrist think tank working in the coalition with Freedom To Marry, began to unpack exactly how straight people reacted to such tactics. The group found that when straight people were asked what marriage meant to them, they spoke of love, commitment and responsibility. But when asked why they thought gay people wanted to marry, they cited rights and benefits. Tapping into anti-gay stereotypes, they suggested gay people wanted marriage for selfish reasons while they themselves wanted to express love and commitment.

"The gay rights coalition’s response was the “Why Marriage Matters” campaign. Its message was “love, commitment, family,” with no mention of rights or benefits. On the surface, it looks like any garden-variety public education campaign, a little vague, a little sappy. But this message was the result of several years and millions of dollars of research. It signaled a sea change in the way gay advocates pled their case. This was a way to invite straight people to empathize with gay people, to reassure the majority that gay people wanted the same things that they did, and to shift focus from minority rights to points of commonality. The year Why Marriage Matters rolled out, 2011, was also the year that a slew of polls first showed majority national support for same-sex marriage."

Another factor was money. Gay money, straight money, even straight Republican money, went a long way toward helping get out the gay message and countering the other side's scare tactics. Washington's group raised over $12 million from more than 27,000 donors and the most common donation was $25. At the other end of the spectrum Tim Gill, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, Mike Bloomberg, Paul Singer, Cliff Asness, and Brad Pitt were among the many who gave significant six- or seven-figure contributions. A crucial, uncelebrated player is Jennifer Cast, a lesbian whose direct ask to Bezos yielded $2.5 million to Washington United for Marriage, which inspired many other donations.  

Let's also take a moment to reflect on the naysayers, including many gay people, who claimed Obama's support of gay marriage was political suicide. In fact, it helped him seem relevant to disenchanted young voters, who actually comprised a greater share of the electorate yesterday than in 2008. And it must be said the president's support, however delayed and reluctant, prompted the NAACP's and many others' support, hastening the nation's evolving acceptance of gay marriage.

Alex Ross on Gay Political Progress and Cultural Decline

In this week's New Yorker, brilliant critic and MacArthur fellow Alex Ross pens a 7,568 word essay called Love on the March divided into four sections: the Change, the Rise of Gay Politics, the Fall of Gay Culture, and Jesus and the Centurion. His trenchant historical summary covers the spectrum from Karl Ulrichs to the Mattachine Society to ACT UP to Joe Biden quoting Will & Grace. See how deftly he covers half a century:

"The first creaking open of the closet [1900-1920s] led to a colossal shove of repression. Chauncey’s book gives a queasy sense of a progressive society suddenly grinding in reverse: it seems as though the public-spiritedness of the Depression and the Second World War era required certain individuals to be expelled as scapegoats. New York passed laws against cross-dressing, onstage representations of homosexuals, and gatherings of gays in clubs. Police could close a bar if they heard men talking in high-pitched voices. In the thirties, the Motion Picture Production Code banned any hint of homosexuality. Leading psychiatrists, abandoning Freud’s relatively nonjudgmental position, described homosexuals as “sexual psychopaths.” There were experiments in electric and pharmacological shock treatment, hormone injection, castration, and lobotomy. One site of such remedies, Atascadero State Hospital, in California, later became known as “Dachau for queers.”

"The hysteria reached its climax in the fifties, when politicians seized on the idea that lesbians and gays were a security risk. Senator Joseph McCarthy set off the witch-hunt when he noted the presence of homosexuals on his infamous list of Communists at the State Department. In 1953, President Dwight Eisenhower signed Executive Order 10450, which banned, among other things, “sexual perversion” in government; the historian David Johnson estimates that some five thousand gay people lost their jobs as a result. In an episode loosely dramatized in the novel and film “Advise and Consent,” Senator Lester Hunt, of Wyoming, killed himself after Styles Bridges, a senator from New Hampshire, threatened to expose Hunt’s son as a homosexual. Bridges still has a highway named after him.

"Despite the noxious atmosphere, a more forthright gay culture emerged. In fact, the inquisition may have only hastened the process. The question lobbed at prospective soldiers during the Second World War—“Are you homosexual?”—raised consciousness rather than suppressing it. (Wait, am I?)"

Ross looks primarily at three books, Victory: The Triumphant Gay Revolution, How To Be Gay, and Gene Robinson's God Believes in Love: Straight Talk About Gay Marriage. Readers may wish he spent less time on Daniel Halprin in his examine of gay culture. The entire universe of pop music is represented exclusively by Gaga and Carly Rae Jepsen. Plays and indie film are never mentioned. In describing the sweep of hard-won self-acceptance and wider tolerance gay people have gained in the past fifty years, Ross completely ignores gay novels (other than the movie adaptation of Advise & Consent), which were the only at-home entertainment with nuanced, non-stereotypical portrayals of gay life for decades before today, when he says "gay film and TV characters are almost annoyingly ubiquitous."

Nevertheless, his essay is essential reading. Where else are you going to get this:

"In retrospect, my mania for Beethoven may have been a way of forestalling a reckoning with my sexuality: rather than commit myself, I disappeared into a fleshless realm. Halperin sees another dimension to this kind of engagement—a willful resistance to the male-adolescent herd, a form of quasi-political dissidence. It’s a heady idea to attribute political motives to gay children, but Halperin is on to something. The fanatical twelve-year-old aesthete displays something like cultural disobedience."

Stonewall Awards: Best Writer Winterson, Worst Bigot Cardinal O'Brien

Photo of Jeanette Winterson by Jon at Delores Delargo

Bit of a ruckus today after last night's Stonewall Awards in London. Not for Jeanette Winterson winning with Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? [Kindle] but because the UK lgbt rights powerhouse named Cardinal Keith O'Brien the Bigot of the Year. Barclays and Coutts have warned they will stop underwriting the event if the bigot award is continued next year. The night's winning politician, Ruth Davidson, the lesbian Scottish Tory leader, also criticized the bigot award and was booed for it. Stonewall is standing firm:

"Stonewall insisted the award was entirely justified since O'Brien had been consistently abusive and intolerant about gay marriage. The cardinal had likened it to relegalising slavery, said it was an "aberration", and claimed it might clear the way for polygamous marriages and would cause "further degeneration of society into immorality".

"Colin Macfarlane, the director of Stonewall Scotland, said: "We've never called anyone a bigot just because they don't agree with us. But in just the past 12 months, the cardinal has gone well beyond what any normal person would call a decent level of public discourse."

Speaking on BBC Radio Scotland, Macfarlane added: "The people that were nominated for bigot of the year have this year called gay people Nazis, they have compared them to bestialists and to paedophiles, and one of the nominees suggested that gay people should be put in front of a firing squad and shot dead.

"So I think what we are doing is highlighting the very cruel, very nasty, very pernicious language that is being used by some people – and in particular by the cardinal, who won.

"I think we are right to highlight that and to shine a light on that kind of discrimination, and hence why bigot of the year was one of our award categories."

The Pat-on-the-Head gay rights groups in the US lack the guts to call our bigots what they are, and I hope Stonewall continues the award with two fewer sponsors.

Full list of eleven winners:

Hero of the Year
• Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield
• Jackie Crozier
• Tim Franks
• **Rev Giles Fraser
• Jessie J

Writer of the Year 
• Jackie Kay, Reality, Reality
• **Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
• Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles
• Patrick Gale, A Perfectly Good Man
• V G Lee, Always You, Edina

Sports Award of the Year 
• Claire Harvey
• Carl Hester
• Lee Pearson CBE
• Outdoor Lads
• Rugby Football League [right]

Entertainer of the Year
• Evan Rachel Wood
• Frank Ocean
• Marcus Collins 
• **Sue Perkins
• Tom Wilkinson 

Born October 25-26: Dan Mathews, Adam Mars-Jones

 

Adam Mars-Jones (Cambridge) and Alan Hollinghurst (Oxford) were born five months apart in 1954 and each published his first book, boldly gay, in the 80s, both winning a Somerset Maugham Award. Second fictions appeared from each in the early 90s, and Hollinghurst, with his steady output of a novel every six years, became a star, a constant prize winner, and a literary novelist who can debut a book at #1. Mars-Jones disappeared for fifteen years and re-emerged in the era of Twitter snippets with a monumental work rivaling Proust. In 2008, Pilcrow took 544 pages to see its gay, disabled, vegetarian protagonist John Cromer to age 16. Last year, Cedilla added 752 pages, with even stronger reviews, bringing John through Cambridge and his 20s. The Telegraph said, "There isn’t a passage here that doesn’t sparkle." Two more volumes are forthcoming, with an expected total of 2,500 to 3,000 pages devoted to an ordinary gay life. Mars-Jones is a vivid, brainy critic who sometimes dips his pen in acid. Two months ago, after Gore Vidal's death, he remembered he wore a singlet and black leather biker pants to interview the icon in his room at the Dorchester.

A towering outsider with massive insider pull, 6'5" Dan Mathews led the "I'd Rather Go Naked" anti-fur campaign and convinced Morrissey, Pink, Pam, and Paul McCartney to do spots for the love-them-or-hate-them animal rights group PETA. He started poor, was bullied in high school, worked at McDonalds and as a model to put himself through American University, and after graduating started at PETA as a receptionist. His memoir Committed: A Rabble-Rouser's Memoir [[Kindle]] finally pubbed in the UK in 2009, when gay rights living legend Peter Tatchell chose it on Band of Thebes best lgbt book poll saying, "It’s a story full of ideas, action and loads of gossip about the many celebrities who support PETA’s work. Off-beat, hilarious, irreverent, and highly ethical, Committed is a damn good read. It shows how direct action can raise consciousness and secure social change – and be lots of fun."

Howdy, Cowboy #2

Before Stonewall, some of the staunchest gay advocates were purveyors of softcore porn whose homoerotic photos fell asunder of the postal service's rigid moral codes. Read about those early trials and the ultimate happy trails in this massive new coffee table book from the COLT Studios pioneer, Jim French Diaries. The surprising history is further enlivened by French's candor discussing everything from issues of race in adult entertainment to how he judged a potential COLT man. Readers may also enjoy 352 pages of nudity. French pushed butch to such extremes and staged his uber built musclemen in such cliched roles -- cowboy, cop, fireman, leatherman -- some wondered if his true subject wasn't artifice. Either way, you'll have no trouble finding the just the right colt for your lasso or holster.