Band of Thebes

Born May 19: Daniel Guérin

Born in 1904, the upper class Parisian Daniel Guérin became an ardent leftist and socialist in part by having sex with tough guys. He said, "It was there, in bed with them, that I discovered the working class, far more than through Marxist tracts." In the 1930s he became a political and union organizer after hating the colonialism he saw during his travels in Southeast Asia and the Mid-East. In the late 1940s he lived in the United States and was appalled by the treatment of black Americans and, back in France, he fully supported the Algerian drive for independence. Of his many books best known is Anarchism: From Theory to Practice, published in 1965, with later editions carrying an introduction by Noam Chomsky. He did not begin his activism on behalf of gay rights until the 1970s, especially as part of the Front Homosexuel d'Action Révolutionnaire [FHAR], a group from which he later broke. People discouraged by today's apolitical comsumerist gays may do well to remember that a quarter-century ago Guérin was disgusted by the apolitical hedonist gays whose "superficial pursuit of pleasure" was "a million miles from any conception of class struggle." Which is not to say he became anti-sex in his later years. His last significant relationship was with a man sixty years his junior. He died at eighty-three in 1988.

NYT Op-Ed: "How Latin Culture Got More Gay"

Radcliffe Institute fellow and author of The Night Is Young: Sexuality in Mexico in the Time of Aids, Hector Carrillo penned this opinion piece for the NYT asking how the recent great strides for lgbt rights in Central and South America -- including Tuesday's judicial ruling that may lead to marriage equality throughout Brazil -- can be reconciled with "the stereotype of Latin culture as a bastion of religiosity and machismo?"

He writes:

"Since the 1970s, protest movements helped end military dictatorships or long periods of one-party rule; this democratic opening empowered left or center-left governments that have strongly emphasized human rights and individual freedom... gay and lesbian activists piggybacked on this wave of democratization.

"The recent expansion of same-sex marriage rights has come about in part through alliances of left-of-center legislative majorities with progressive executives... judges have played an important role in advancing the cause of gay equality, as evidenced this week in Brazil, where the National Council of Justice, which oversees the judiciary, ruled that notary publics may not refuse to perform same-sex marriage ceremonies. (Judicial appeals, or legislative action, could reverse the decision.)

"These achievements were not inevitable; for decades the left, with ideological roots in class struggle, could be as patriarchal and homophobic as the capitalists and soldiers it condemned. So to understand why the politics changed, we must also look to society.

"In the 1990s, I interviewed dozens of Mexicans, straight and gay, in Guadalajara, the country’s second largest city. They spoke about how they wanted their lives to differ from their parents’. Women wanted to be recognized as sexual beings, with legitimate desires and the ability to pursue them. Men felt the old models of machismo were constraining, not empowering. As the anthropologist Matthew Gutmann found in Mexico City around the same time, this was the first generation of Mexicans for whom machismo was a dirty word.

"This desire for individual autonomy — which in some ways lagged behind the sexual revolution in the United States — extended to gay and lesbian people. The emergence of aids as a global epidemic coincided with a period of energetic democratization. Of course, increased visibility generated homophobic reactions, but it also motivated gays to declare their identities and organize politically."

Here's the essay in full.

For more, read these:

Queering the Public Sphere in Mexico and Brazil: Sexual Rights Movements in Emerging Democracies, Rafeal de la Dehesa

Changing Men and Masculinities in Latin America, Matthew Guttmann

Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About, Carla Trujillo

Gay Latino Studies: A Critical Reader

From Macho to Mariposa: New Gay Latino Fiction

With Her Machete in Her Hand: Reading Chicana Lesbians

Ambientes: New Queer Latino Writing

Compañeras: Latina Lesbians: an Anthology

Virgins, Guerrillas, and Locas: Gay Latinos Writing about Love

Besame Mucho: An Anthology of Gay Latino Fiction

Tortilleras: Hispanic and U.S. Latina Lesbian Expression

Latina Lesbian Writers and Artists

The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue, Manuel Munoz 

And get the current PEN Faulkner winner Everything Begins and Ends at the Kentucky Club by Benjamin Alire Sáenz. Only yesterday on FB, Garth "Mitko" Greenwell and Bob "Selfish and Perverse" Smith were raving about the seven wonders in Everything Begins and Ends at the Kentucky Club. 

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.

Minnesota's Marriage Equality Win Is a Big Deal

Tuesday night Minneapolis' I-35W bridge lit in honor of the marriage equality victory

Late yesterday Minnesota's senate (37-30) followed the house (75-59) in passing a marriage equality bill ahead of the governor's promised signature, and this morning that news is nowhere to be found on the front page of the websites of the NYT, the Washington Post, or USA Today. It's the 12th state - plus DC - to achieve marriage equality and many people think the story is already ho-hum. But as a tipping point, Minnesota is huge: the first heartland state to get same-sex marriage through the legislative process. (Iowa got it via judicial ruling.) It is also a stunning turnaround from six months ago, when voters were asked by the likes of local nut Michele Bachmann to confine marriage to one woman + one man. On election day, only six states allowed same-sex couples to marry. Now it's doubled. 

God bless the trailblazers back east but many of the gay marriage states cluster at the bottom of a ranking by population: Vermont #49, Delaware #45, Rhode Island #43, New Hampshire #42, and Maine #41. With 5.4 million people, Minnesota is one of the more populous states to get marriage equality. 

To understand the state's gay past, read Stewart Van Cleve's Land of 10,000 Loves: A History of Queer Minnesota.

Below, the state's only out senator and author of the marriage bill, Scott Dibble, begins his speech with 54 seconds of Langston Hughes.

Bruce LaBruce's Essay on the Decline, Cooptation of Camp

With the rush to convince straight politicians and judges we're the same as them and worthy of the same institutions and rights, anyone might believe gay people had stopped thinking about the value of difference. Queercore filmmaker Bruce LaBruce adapts his lecture from last year's Camp/Anti-Camp conference in Berlin for an essay in the new issue of Nat. Brut journal. Rictor Norton says it's "the best analysis of camp since Sontag."

LaBruce begins with fifteen lists of subcategories such as bad gay camp (Will & Grace, Adam Lambert), good straight camp (September, 3 Women), bad straight camp (Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, Stanley Tucci in Prada, Hunger Games), ultra camp (Wilde), bad ultra camp (Liza in Sex & the City 2), reactionary camp (Tyler Perry, Eddie Murphy), subversive camp (Pee Wee Herman), quasi-camp (Midnight Cowboy, Cruising), intentional camp (The Shining, Casino Royale), and unintentional camp (J. Edgar, The Iron Lady), among others.

Realizing, "sadly, most of it falls under the category of 'bad straight camp,'" he traces how we got here and blames the new irony:

"...The net result was that much of the general populous (now roughly equivalent to 'pop culture') had adopted the posture as a given to the extent that people generally lost track of its meaning or purpose: there was a kind of ironic detachment from everything. People started routinely to say the opposite of what they meant, and meant it, failing to understand that their new 'sensibility' had become a betrayal of their actual former set of beliefs or tastes, which they even perhaps once held sacred. So in a sense, irony became a malaise, a kind of generalized disaffection that infected the dominant culture. I surmise that this is what opened up the floodgates for the rise of camp culture, or rather the corruption and misinterpretation of camp culture – a certain detached artificiality and forced excess..."

After a stinging critique of Britney, Gaga, Rihanna, Beyonce, and Nikki ("...hyper-referentiality, extreme hyperbole, a crudely obvious, unnuanced female sexuality, and even a vaguely pornographic sensibility which, unhappily, is post-feminist to the point of misogyny...") he laments:

"This new annexation and corruption of the camp sensibility now exists largely without the qualities of sophistication and secret signification that were developed out of necessity by the underground or outsider gay world, which originally created camp as a kind of gay signifying practice... It was developed as a secret language in order to identify oneself to like-minded or similarly closeted homosexuals, a shorthand of arcane and coded, almost kabbalistic references and practices developed in order to operate safely apart and without fear of detection from a conservative and conventional world that could be aggressively hostile towards homosexuals, particularly effeminate males and masculine females. In the contemporary world, in which gays have largely assimilated into the dominant order, such signifying practices have become somewhat obsolete, and the previous forms of camping and camp identification have long since been emptied of camp or gay significance, rendering them easily co-opted, commercialized, and trivialized."

Beyond the arts, his takedown of political camp is fierce:

"...For what are Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Bill O’Reilly, Donald Trump, and Herman Cain other than conservative camp icons enacting a kind of reactionary burlesque on the American political stage? Wholly without substance, their views exaggerated and extremely stylized, and evincing a carefully contrived posture of 'compassionate conservatism,' they function merely as a crude spectacle that mocks the unwashed masses by pretending to be one of them while simultaneously offering them policies that are directly antithetical to their authentic needs."

Building to a high point he concludes, 

"The new tendency of conservative camp runs in diametrical opposition to the impulses of classic gay camp, which sought to celebrate, elevate, and even worship the qualities of deviance, difference, and eccentricity that characterized the highly aestheticized homosexual experience of past eras."

Read the full essay and support online journals like Nat. Brut.

Eisenhower Museum, Biographies Ignore His Antigay Executive Order

Sixty years ago this month, Eisenhower signed the risible Executive Order 10450 banning gay people and other 'perverts' from government service. It established the falsehood that lgbt employees were security risks, authorized FBI investigations of suspected deviants, and destroyed thousands of careers and lives. In an essay posted today, Charles Francis explores its inception and its awful legacy. He investigates the demise of the order's patient zero, Arthur Vandenberg Jr., son the of Senate Foreign Relations Chair. The younger Arthur organized Citizens for Eisenhower and the new administration had already announced his appointment as Secretary to the President, until Hoover smeared him with details of Arthur's hidden gay life, forcing him to abandon public service and leave Washington forever. The essay cites David Johnson, author of The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government, with the White House's 1953 press release stating that within the first four months of the new Order, 1,456 employees had been 'separated from Federal service' for security reasons. 

Charles' essay also reveals the dismaying extent to which this crucial antigay flash point has been erased from history. He read the three most recent Eisenhower tomes -- by Jean Edward Smith (Random House, 2012), Evan Thomas (Little, Brown, 2012), and Jim Newton (Doubleday, 2011) -- only to discover each author had ignored it. The books never mention Executive Order 10450. Pressing further, Charles traveled to the Eisenhower Presidential Library & Museum in Abilene, Kansas. He writes:

"The Eisenhower Museum's version of events appears on a bright-red text board under the heading 'Personal Freedom vs. National Security.' It reads, 'Eisenhower believed that personal initiative and freedom lay at the heart of the American way of life.' Later it continues, 'Eisenhower recognized that internal threats to American national security existed. ... Investigators reviewed thousands of government workers deemed possible security risks, and dismissed around 1,500 between 1953 and 1957. Another 6,000 resigned rather than undergo often far-reaching questioning of their personal lives.'

"I had found my answer. The Eisenhower Museum interprets the executive order by not mentioning the word 'perversion.' The visitor must decode the phrase 'questioning their personal lives.' LGBT Americans remain the invisible human wreckage. Newly declassified documents reveal that the "questioning" was a systematic, sometimes obsessive investigation, managed by Hoover himself, as part of the FBI's 'Sex Deviates in Government Service' program.

In his final paragraph, he calls for the museum to rewrite its official text and include the LGBT citizens excluded by Ike's order.

"There is no remedy for the thousands whose lives were destroyed, the searing and humiliating personal investigations, the untold numbers of men and women driven from public service. But, as in any 'truth and reconciliation' project, let us at least tell the story. The National Archives and Records Administration working with the curators at the Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum should take down that text board for review and a rewrite. Add the words 'sexual perversion.' Following the word 'thousands' insert 'homosexuals.' Then add 'LGBT Americans.'"

As far as Band of Thebes knows, the Eisenhower family has never spoken about Executive Order 10450 and the decades of unjustified government animus against gay and lesbian Americans initiated by their ancestor. Of course no one can be asked to answer for their forerunners, yet in the spirit of greater inclusiveness and simple historical accuracy, we welcome the next generation's thoughts on this aspect of his legacy the next time they are called upon to celebrate his heroics.

(photo by Charles Francis)

Why Is Obama Praising Bush on His Global HIV/AIDS Program?

Pathetic. Of all the half-straws to grasp at in his remarks at yesterday's dedication of the Bush Library in Dallas, why did Obama highlight Bush's global hiv/aids initiative? And why did NPR use this as their soundbyte? Bush's PEPFAR program took money away from NGOs and threw billions to antigay evangelical groups whose solution to the crisis is to promote "abstinence until marriage." Deaths from the disease are said to have decreased under the program but infection rates remain the same. Or new infections are rising. Some close observers have felt the faith-based approach was more about promoting religion and recruiting non-Christians than about teaching prevention to those most at risk. Cary Alan Johnson cites officials' "stunning disregard for the needs of men who have sex with men and other hiv-vulnerable groups." Read his 2007 report "Off the Map: How HIV Programs Are Failing Same-Sex Practicing People in Africa" or Scott Everertz' 2010 paper, "How Ideologogy Trumped Science: Why PEPFAR Has Failed To Meet Its Potential." 

Other point: It's time to end the nonsense of individual presidential libraries. A president's papers belong to nation and ought to be housed in the Library of Congress or the National Archives, not these expensive shrines to vanity.

Marriage Equality: France, RI, DE, NV, Santa Fe, Colombia

Defying antigay mobs outside, and antigay protesters in the gallery (about whom the Speaker said, "Get these enemies of democracy outside parliament!"), the French Assembly approved marriage equality by a wide margin, 331 to 225. It is the 14th nation to legalize same-sex marriage. Three other countries (Mexico, Brazil, and the US) have marriage equality in some states.

Yesterday, Rhode Island's senate passed 26-12. Previously, the house passed a similar measure 51-19, but because the senate bill differs it has to go back to the house. The governor says he will sign it. 

When that bill becomes law in August, 16.1% of US citizens will live in states that recognize marriage equality.

On Tuesday, Delaware's house approved a marriage equality bill in a 23-18 vote. Now it goes to the senate where a close vote is expected. 

Also Tuesday, the Nevada senate voted 12-9 to begin the process to reverse the state's ban on marriage equality. During the debate, lawmaker Kelvin Atkinson came out.

Last night, the Santa Fe City Council voted 5-1 (with two abstaining) to approve marriage equality and urge county clerks to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. The mayor supports the measure, which is seen as largely symbolic .

Yesterday, Colombia's parliament rejected a marriage equality bill 51-17. Armando Benedetti, who drafted the bill, said, “Those who vote against this project ... would have voted in favour of slavery.”

Michael Pollan's Cooked

The other instant bestseller of interest out yesterday is Michael Pollan's Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation [Kindle]. It's his seventh book and, yes, we've been here before with other authors, but as a nature writer Pollan is going to make his usual interesting connections between your kitchen and the wider world.

At least all his success has not co-opted his straight talk. From a chat with New York:

"So you’ve been disappointed in the Obamas?
"I’m disappointed. I think she’s done some very positive things. She’s elevated the conversation. The planting of the garden at the White House was a powerful step... I think that the rest of the administration has been very disappointing—in the East Wing they get it, not in the West Wing so much. They’ve backed off whenever challenged. Even voluntary marketing guidelines have been shot down. Voluntary guidelines! There has been more support for farm to school, there have been some improvements in lunch programs. But it’s not what we needed or what we hoped for."

For more disappointment, read this story posted today about the Obama administration rolling back USDA's oversight of the nation's biggest chicken and turkey slaughterhouses.

"How America Got Past the Anti-Gay Politics of the 90s"

Looking to explain the drastic shift in gay politics over the past fifteen years, the Atlantic's Garance Franke-Ruta finds the recent nadir was, in the words of Frank Rich, "the homophobic epidemic of 1998, which spiked with the October murder of Matthew Shepard." All that summer we had been forced to listen to one anti-gay Republican troll after another howl against the possibility of openly gay James Hormel becoming ambassador to Luxembourg:

"Senator Jesse Helms, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman well known for his public opposition to the "homosexual lifestyle" and the people he called, in Newsweek in 1994, "degenerates" and "weak, morally sick wretches," vowed to block the appointment. Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott of Mississippi on June 15, 1998, added fuel to the fire, comparing being gay to a condition "just like alcohol...or sex addiction...or kleptomania'' -- a pathology in need of treatment. House Majority Leader Dick Armey chimed in to support Lott, affirming, "The Bible is very clear on this." Assistant Senate Majority Leader Don Nickles of Oklahoma told "Fox News Sunday " on June 21, 1998, that Hormel "has promoted a lifestyle and promoted it in a big way, in a way that is very offensive." Against that backdrop, the comments of Republican Chuck Hagel, U.S. senator from Nebraska, didn't stand out as idiosyncratic. Ambassadors "are representing our lifestyle, our values, our standards. And I think it is an inhibiting factor to be gay -- openly aggressively gay like Mr. Hormel -- to do an effective job," Hagel, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said after meeting with Hormel, according to a July 3, 1998 Omaha-World Herald story.

"In September of that year, Salon revealed that House Judiciary Committee Chairman Henry Hyde -- who had helped rush the Defense of Marriage Act through in 1996 as part of the Gingrich Revolution with the justification that same-sex unions were "illegitimate" and "immoral" -- had broken up another man's marriage by having an affair with his wife. (Newt Gingrich, who worked to push DOMA through and impeach the adulterous president who'd signed it, was later revealed to have also been having affair at the time.)"

The essay also asks questions central to any true reconciliation:

"How does America address its homophobic past as it moves forward into a more tolerant future? If American views on gays have changed -- and they have, with shocking rapidity -- that means there are a lot of people in this country who used to hold more deeply anti-gay views than they do today, and who may be ashamed of what they once thought and said in what now seems a distant and unenlightened era."

Here, she studies the case of bigtime homophobe Chuck Hagel, who three times earned a zero rating from HRC:

"Not only had Hagel spoken disparagingly of Hormel, but he had "a zero-per-cent rating (three times) from the Human Rights Campaign, the leading gay-rights lobby," according to Richard Socarides. "Among other things, Hagel voted against extending basic employment nondiscrimination protections and the federal hate-crimes law to cover gay Americans."  

"Hagel was the man who would manage the oversight of the end of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," as well as the winding down of the war in Afghanistan. His views, so common in 1998, were seen as bluntly prejudiced in 2013 -- and as such, anathema to both gay conservatives eager to tar a potential Obama nominee, and gay liberals infuriated that the reward for their electoral support would be the nomination of someone who talked like that about them.

"Hagel recognized the severity of the situation and apologized before he was even nominated. "My remarks 14 years ago in 1998 were insensitive," he said in a statement. "They do not reflect my views or the totality of my public record, and I apologize to Ambassador Hormel and any L.G.B.T. Americans who may question my commitment to their civil rights. I am fully supportive of 'open service' and committed to L.G.B.T. military families."

Later, she says:

"What's happening now is a wholesale repudiation of the 1990s move to eject gay people from the American family, writ large. The reason for DOMA was anti-gay animus by a group of men who showed their respect for marriage by divorcing multiple times and having affairs. The reason to undo DOMA is a rejection of that animus, and the growing recognition there is no way to argue against same-sex marriage that is not ultimately an argument for the moral inferiority of gay people. As of Friday, only four Democrats in the U.S. Senate had not come out in favor of gay marriage."

Read the entire essay at The Atlantic.

Born March 31: Diaghilev, Chamberlain, Frank, Westenhoefer

  

Celebrate with the brilliant biography of cultural impresario, founder of the Ballets Russes, and Nijinsky lover Sergei Diaghilev [Kindle] who turns 141 today, or with Barney Frank: The Story of America's Only Left-Handed, Gay, Jewish Congressman, 73, or a memoir by the Beverly Hills native and long-closeted mini-series sensation Richard Chamberlain, 79, or a cd from a lesbian comic who came out early, Suzanne Westenhoefer, 52.

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."

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."

Watch Live: Parliament Debates Gay Marriage Ahead of Tonight's Vote

Facing a revolt from his party but bolstered by late support from five 'Cabinet Heavyweights' turning pro-equality, the Conservative PM's gay marriage bill heads to a crunch vote tonight. Watch Parliament debate it here, or scroll the live-blogging recaps at Pink News.

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."

Born December 16: Noël Coward, Kanako Otsuji

At fourteen in 1913 Noël Coward began an affair with Philip Streatfeild, a thirty-four year old society painter whom he met only because his mother was Streatfeild's charwoman. Two years later, Streatfeild was dying of tuberculosis and urged Mrs. Astley Cooper to nurture the "delicate" Coward, which she did. He began appearing in plays, was discharged from WWI service for ill health, and had his first writing success at twenty-five with The Vortex, scandalously popular in London and New York for its wit and veiled hints of drugs and gay life. While the times changed, Coward did not; he kept that veil cemented in place for the next five decades.

Although many of his sophisticated, camp comedies play peekaboo with the closet, especially the threesome in Design for Living (1932) and less popular later works like Song at Twilight (1966), the urbane Coward never actually came out. A friend of King George, Coward traveled widely to perform for WWII troops and secretly worked as a spy, hiding behind his high life persona. The press attacked him for his excesses during wartime. The king suggested a knighthood, but Churchill disliked his "flamboyance" and blocked it. After the war, Coward fell in love with the actor Graham Payn and they stayed together nearly thirty years. In 1956 they became tax exiles, landing first in Bermuda then in Jamaica where they were neighbors to the constantly bickering Mr. & Mrs. Ian Fleming. Coward enjoyed a revival in the 1960s and finally was knighted in 1970. He died in Jamaica in 1973, still with Payn. You can read his biography or go right to his diaries, letters, plays, or the The Noël Coward Reader.

Born in Kobe in 1974, Kanako Otsuji was a junior karate champion in Asia, opting to attend university in Korea to study tae kwon do. Although she failed to make the Japanese olympic team in 2000, three years later she became one of only seven women -- and the youngest person ever -- elected to the 110-member Osaka Assembly. She came out the day before Tokyo Pride in 2005 by publishing her memoir. That same year she succeeded in changing the law that previously allowed only married couples to rent public housing in Osaka; now lgbt couples can too. In April 2007 she did not stand for re-election and two months later she married her partner Maki Kamura in an outdoor, public ceremony, although Japan does not recognize same-sex marriage. (Adorable wedding photos here and here.) In 2009, filmmaker Naomi Hiltz premiered her documentary about Otsuji at the Vancouver Queer Film Festival.

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.

   

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."

Born October 11: Eleanor Roosevelt

In addition to being one of the most energetic humanitarians of the 20th century, requiring mind-warping amounts of travel -- 40,000 miles in three months, for example -- Eleanor Roosevelt was also an inexhaustible writer. She wrote her syndicated column My Day six times a week for twenty-seven years, missing only four days when her husband died. Always insightful, she was usually decades ahead of her time and frequently funny. Read her column from October 1947 about Hollywood and HUAC by clicking here. Detractors obfuscate ad nauseum but there is no question that she and Lorena Hickok, her closest friend for thirty years, were lovers. Read excerpts from their correspondence below, remembering that their most intimate letters were destroyed, many by Hickok herself, after Eleanor’s death in 1962.

Hick darling,

All day I've thought of you & another birthday I will be with you, & yet tonight you sounded so far away & formal. Oh! I want to put my arms around you. I ache to hold you close. Your ring is a great comfort to me. I look at it and think she does love me, or I wouldn't be wearing it.
_________________________________________

[Eleanor to Hickok]

I wish I could lie down beside you tonight & take you in my arms.

_________________________________________

[Hickok writing to Eleanor after a long separation...]

Only eight more days . . . Funny how even the dearest face will fade away in time. Most clearly I remember your eyes, with a kind of teasing smile in them, and the feeling of that soft spot just north-east of the corner of your mouth against my lips. . . .

Brainyquote.com lists seventy-four of her most memorable sayings. Three are:

"Sometimes I wonder if we shall ever grow up in our politics and say definite things which mean something, or whether we shall always go on using generalities to which everyone can subscribe, and which mean very little."

"Women are like teabags. We don't know our true strength until we're in hot water!"

"I once had a rose named after me and I was very flattered. But I was not pleased to read the description in the catalog: no good in a bed, but fine up against a wall."

Obviously, the place to start is Blanche Weisen Cook's Eleanor Roosevelt, Vol. 1: 1884-1933, then Eleanor Roosevelt: Volume 2 , The Defining Years, 1933-1938. When she won Publishing Triangle's lifetime achievement award in 2010, she promised she was about to finish volume 3.

Straight Men's Pro-Gay Anger: F---ing Get Used To It, You Bigoted A--!

Note: Different recipes call for different ingredients. This one's a little salty.

 You don't think attitudes about gay marriage are seismically changing? Meet Brendon Ayanbadejo. The NFL linebacker is 36, he's black, and he's badass. Swear to god he named his kid Amadeus Prime Ayanbadejo. You do not fuck with him. 

Brendon loves gay marriage. He wrote about it for Huff Post. And he made an ad about it for Marylanders for Marriage Equality.

Baltimore County state delegate Emmett Burns hates gay marriage so much that the 72 year-old black Democrat is not supporting Obama's re-election. And last week he wrote a letter to Ravens team owner Steve Bisciotti to say, basically, muzzle your bitch:

"I find it inconceivable that one of your players, Mr. Brendon Ayanbadejo, would publicly endorse Same-Sex marriage, specifically as a Ravens football player," Burns writes.

"I am requesting that you take the necessary action, as a National Football League Owner, to inhibit such expressions from your employees and that he be ordered to cease and desist such injurious actions. I know of no other NFL player who has done what Mr. Ayanbadejo is doing."

The technical football term here is Whoopsie daisy.

Enter 30 year-old white boy Chris Kluwe, punter for the Vikings, who shared his feelings in an open letter to Delegate Burns:

"I've also been vocal as hell about the issue of gay marriage so you can take your I know of no other NFL player who has done what Mr. Ayanbadejo is doing and shove it in your close-minded, totally lacking in empathy piehole and choke on it. Asshole."

More from Chris:

"Holy fucking shitballs. Did you seriously just say that, as someone who's "deeply involved in government task forces on the legacy of slavery in Maryland"? Have you not heard of Kenny Washington? Jackie Robinson? As recently as 1962 the NFL still had segregation, which was only done away with by brave athletes and coaches daring to speak their mind and do the right thing, and you're going to say that political views have "no place in a sport"?" 

More:

"...not only are you clearly violating the First Amendment, you also come across as a narcissistic fromunda stain. What on earth would possess you to be so mind-boggingly stupid? It baffles me that a man such as yourself, a man who relies on that same First Amendment to pursue your own religious studies without fear of persecution from the state, could somehow justify stifling another person's right to speech. To call that hypocritical would be to do a disservice to the word. Mindfucking obscenely hypocritical starts to approach it a little bit."

The most quoted parts of Chris's letter addresses the potential cockmonster within:

"If gay marriage becomes legal, are you worried that all of a sudden you'll start thinking about penis? "Oh shit. Gay marriage just passed. Gotta get me some of that hot dong action!" ... I can assure you that gay people getting married will have zero effect on your life. They won't come into your house and steal your children. They won't magically turn you into a lustful cockmonster. They won't even overthrow the government in an orgy of hedonistic debauchery because all of a sudden they have the same legal rights as the other 90 percent of our population—rights like Social Security benefits, child care tax credits, Family and Medical Leave to take care of loved ones, and COBRA healthcare for spouses and children. You know what having these rights will make gays? Full-fledged American citizens just like everyone else, with the freedom to pursue happiness and all that entails. Do the civil-rights struggles of the past 200 years mean absolutely nothing to you?"

The full letter is more rambling, and more arrogant ("you may want to hire an intern to help you with the longer words"). Do not waste time worrying about the tone. Blunt, aggressive vulgarity is how one segment of the population talks to each other. We're never going to win this fight if we're limited to the bleached, offend-nobody monotone of NPR and PBS.

For his part, Ayanbadejo responded to Burns' attempt to silence him by tweeting: "Football is just my job it's not who I am. I am an American before anything. And just like every American I have the right to speak!!!"