What They Thought Of Us Then. What They Think Of Us Now.
Some random thoughts on homosexuals and homosexuality from back when I was a struggling gay teen…
I think homosexuals cursed, and I am afraid I mean this quite literally, in the medieval sense of having been struck by an unexplained injury, an extreme piece of evil luck whose origin is so unclear as to be, finally, a mystery.
If I had the power to do so, I would wish homosexuality off the face of the earth. I would do so because I think that it brings infinitely more pain than pleasure who are forced to live it; because I think there is no resolution for this pain in our lifetime, only, for the overwhelming majority of homosexuals, more pain and various degrees of exacerbating adjustment; and because, wholly selfishly, I find myself completely incapable of coming to terms with it.
They are different from the rest of us. Homosexuals are different, moreover, in a way that cuts deeper than other kinds of human differences — religious, class, racial — in a way that is, somehow, more fundamental. Cursed without clear cause, afflicted without apparent cure, they are an affront to our rationality.
…
I do think homosexuality an anathema, and hence homosexuals cursed, and thus the importance, for me if for no one else, of my defining a homosexual as someone who has physical relations, for it leaves room for my admiration for the man who is pulled toward homosexuality and resists, at what psychic price I cannot hope even to begin to imagine.
…
I was stunned, then angry. I was angry, first, at my own lack of judgment and subtlety in not deducing that Richard was a homosexual; and, second, more intensely, at being victimized by his duplicity. We were not close friends, but I liked him, and not it seemed that every moment we had spent together was a huge sham, an elaborate piece of deception to hide the essential, the number one, fact in his life.
…
I have four sons, and while I do not walk the streets thinking constantly about their sexual development, worrying right on through the night about their turning out homosexual, I have very little idea, apart from supplying them with ample security and affection, about how to prevent it. Uptight? You’re damn right. Given any choice in the matter, I should prefer sons who are heterosexual. My ignorance makes me frightened.
-Joseph Epstein, "Homo/Hetero: The Struggle for Sexual Identity," Harper’s, September 1970
…and then, from back when I was a struggling gay young adult…
In the case of the husbands at Fire Island Pines, the homosexuals were right about one thing. Their uneasiness did contain a large component of fear. The fear of straight men in the face of the homosexual community, however, is not that they will be tempted to join in but that they are being diminished by it, diminished in their persons and diminished in their lives. As women in a full company of homosexual men feel devalued and sexually rejected – that is the very reason certain women, they used to be called "fag hags", choose to spend their lives in such company – heterosexual men feel themselves mocked. They feel mocked in their unending thralldom to the female body and thus their unending dependence on those who possess it. They feel mocked by the longing for and vulnerability to and even humiliation from women they have since boyhood permitted themselves to endure, while others apparently just like themselves, slowly assert their escape from these things
They feel mocked most of all for having become, in style as well as substance, fmaily men, caught up in getting and begetting, thinking of mortgages, schools, and the affordable, marking the passage of years in obedience to all the grubby imperatives that heterosexual manhood seems to impose. In assuming such burdens they believe themselves entitled to respect, but homosexuality paints them with the color of sheer entrapment.
In Fire Island Pines they were in fact being mocked explicitly, not so much by individual homosexuals as the reigning homosexual fashion. The essence of that fashion was the worship of youth – youth not even understood as young manhood but rather boyhood (and indeed, the straight women among themselves always referred to the homosexuals as "the boys"). On the beach particularly, this worship became all powerful and inescapable to the eye. It was a constant source of wonder among us, and remains so to me to this day, that by far the largest number of homosexuals had hairless bodies. Chests, backs, arms, even legs, were smooth and silky, an impression strengthened by the fact that they were in addition frequently and scrupulously unguented to catch the full advantage of the sun’s ultra violet. We were never able to determine just why there should be so definite a connection between what is nowadays called their sexual “preference” and their smooth feminine skin. Was it a matter of hormones, or was there some constant special process of depilation? But smooth-skinned they were, and, like the most narcissistic of pretty young girls and women, made an absolute fetish of the dark and uniform suntan, devoting hours, days, weeks, to turning themselves carefully to the sun. Nor was this tanning flesh ever permitted to betray any of the ordinary signs of encroaching mortality, such as excess fat or flabbiness or on the other hand the kind of muscularity that suggests some activity whose end is not beauty. In short, year by year homosexuals of all ages presented a never-ending spectacle, zealously and ruthlessly monitored, of tender adolescence.
…
One thing is certain. To become homosexual is a weighty act. Taking oneself out of the tides of ordinary mortal existence is not something one does from any longing to think oneself ordinary (but only following a different “lifestyle”). Gay Lib has been an effort to set the weight of that act at naught, to define homosexuality as nothing more than a casual option among options. In accepting the movement’s terms, heterosexuals have only raised to a nearly intolerable height the costs of the homosexual’s flight from normality. Faced with the accelerating round of drugs, S-M, and suicide, can either the movement or its heterosexual sympathizers imagine that they have done anyone a kindness?
-Midge Decter, "The Boys On The Beach," Commentary, September 1980
Read a good take down on Epstein over at David Ehrenstein’s site…Here. Ehrenstein was one of the gay activists who stormed the offices of Harper’s Magazine after Harper’s doggedly refused to air any rebuttals to Epstein’s public wish to see homosexuals removed from the face of the earth.
Decter’s theses, if you will, in The Boys On The Beach, is that only a conservative and officially anti-gay culture keeps the innately self destructive impulses of gay men in check, whereas liberalism allows those impulses to become fully realized. Thus, according to Decter, persecuting homosexuals is actually a kindness. Anti-gay persecution is necessary in order to save homosexuals from themselves. This is the position that the American movement conservatives have taken ever since, and Decter’s 1980 essay in Commentary is still regarded warmly in winger circles, as an important work. You see echos of The Boys On The Beach in every opinion piece on homosexuals and homosexuality from the movement conservatives, even now. The premise, often unspoken but there between the lines, that culture and the law must be stacked against gay people, for their own good of course, because of the innately self destructive nature of homosexuality, is so ingrained in their rhetoric now that it’s central premise is taken as a given. It is homosexuality, not the persecution of homosexuals, that is destructive. Therefore, the solution is, surprise, surprise, More persecution.
But the Epstein essay gets to the heart of it: Homosexuals are cursed…they are anathema…they are different from us…they frighten us…if we could, we’d remove them from the face of the earth…because we are incapable of coming to terms with them. Yes we’re cursed alright. Not by our nature, but by their hate. Their calm, cool, thoroughly intellectual hate. There is the bedrock of The Boys On The Beach. There is the stinking rotten core of the secular right’s view of gay people. See how it is not all that different from that of the fundamentalists. Just add God, and you have a James Dobson speaking there. Anyone who thinks there is enough difference between the religious right and the secular right when it comes to gay people, that at least the secularists can be talked to, is just not paying attention.
My Friend Jon Larimore, who himself was once the sysop of the Gay and Lesbian Information Bureau BBS System, informed me the other day that the Internet filters at Panera Bread are still calling this web site pornographic. I admit to feeling a small twinge of pride when Jon and I were sitting down to eat at Panera some months ago, and I first saw that message blocking access to my web site, with the notice that it had been deemed pornographic. I was also given a helpful address where I could appeal their decision if I felt that it was unwarranted. Of course I have no intention of doing that because I know damn well what the problem is. It isn’t that there’s actually anything pornographic anywhere here. At most this site might occasionally get an ‘R’ rating…but most of the time it would only merit a ‘PG’ and that for my tendency to curse a lot when I get angry.
Oh no…the problem is that I am a gay man, writing about my life openly and honestly and I don’t give a flying fuck if any of that bothers the bigots. Remember this: A militant homosexual is a homosexual who doesn’t think there is anything wrong with being a homosexual. A militant homosexual activist is a homosexual acting like they don’t think there is anything wrong with being a homosexual. You don’t have to march in any Pride Day parade. You don’t have to walk a protest line. You don’t have to wave your rainbow flag. All you need to be labeled a Militant Homosexual is believe you have the same right to exist as anyone else. Then you are a militant. And if you push back when you are pushed around by bigotry, then you are a militant activist.
I’m especially proud that this little notice from Jon that I’m still being blocked just coincidentally happened to come near the anniversary of a major milestone in gay history…the day we won the right to send and receive publications written by and for gay folks through the mail.
ONE, Inc. was founded by several members of the Los Angeles Mattachine Society who felt that a strong nationwide voice for education and advocacy was desperately needed. According to ONE, Inc.’s articles of incorporation, “…the specific and primary purposes … are to publish and disseminate a magazine dealing primarily with homosexuality from the scientific, historical and critical point of view, and to aid in the social integration and rehabilitation of the sexual variant.” But this wasn’t going to be just any magazine. Under the inaugural editorial leadership of Martin Block, Dale Jennings, Don Slater and Donald Webster Cory, ONE magazine was to be a first class product, a dramatic departure from the typewritten and mimeographed sheets which were more common at the time.
This Internet you are reading now, with the vast freedom of information and personal knowledge it makes possible, is an amazing, glorious thing to some of us who remember what the world was like once upon a time, when the censors could decide for us what we could and could not read…what we could and could not know…
ONE filled a very critical role for gays and lesbians during a very dark time. ONE’s debut coincided with a major push to rid the U.S. civil service of homosexuals. President Dwight D. Eisenhower would sign Executive Order 10450 in April of that year, which barred gays and lesbians from federal employment with its “sexual perversion” clause. This followed a highly-publicized purge of more than 400 gays and lesbians from the civil service some three years earlier. Homosexuality was criminalized in most states, and it was stigmatized as a mental illness by the psychiatric profession. Gays were not only denounced as security risks, but risks to the very moral fiber of the nation. Homosexuals were treated as subversives, on par with the “Communist menace” on which leading politicians were staking their career. The FBI had launched a major crackdown on homosexuality across the U.S., with many gays and lesbians losing their jobs for merely receiving homophile publications in the mail. And vice squads everywhere were setting up entrapment stings in bars and other meeting places, where a simple proposition or touch could lead to arrest and public exposure.
So when ONE caught the eye of the FBI, they immediately launched an investigation to try to shut it down. They went so far as to write to the employers of ONE’s editors and writers (they all depended on their day jobs for income), saying that their employees were “deviants” and “security risks.” Fortunately, no one lost their jobs, the FBI decided it wasn’t worth their time, and ONE continued publishing.
The job of shutting down ONE then fell to the U.S. Post Office. Since its inception, Los Angeles postal authorities vetted each issue before deciding whether it was legal to ship under the Post Office’s stringent anti-obscenity standards. And since homosexuality was illegal in most states, ONE had the added problem of possibly being guilty of promoting criminal activity…
In those days, the only voices allowed to publicly speak about homosexuals and homosexuality, were the voices of those who hated us. If we ourselves spoke up, if we published our stories in any form, we risked arrest, exposure, the loss of our jobs, our homes, and jail. This is how censorship and the sodomy laws together maintained the status-quo, by silencing dissent. And back then homosexuals were so universally despised that even the ACLU would not take this case…in fact, it defended the existence of the sodomy laws.
Two things changed all that, and made possible the world we now live in today: a scrappy little gay publication named One, and the supreme court of Chief Justice Earl Warren. The Warren court is almost universally hated today by the American right. From its striking down of the laws allowing race segregation to its striking down of the laws restricting the rights of Americans to freedom of speech and freedom of the press…even extending those rights to a hated minority, there is almost nothing the Warren court did, that the republicans have not vowed to overturn, should they get their chance to stack the court with like-minded right wingers.
So far Bush has given them two more justices. They only need one more.
In the mid-1980s, I was on one local BBS system that had a gay Fidonet echomail board. Called Gaylink, it had participating BBS systems on it all over the world. Back in those days, I had an uncle who was a HAM radio operator, and was trying to interest me in taking up the hobby. He kept trying to tell me about all the people all over the world he was able to communicate with via shortwave radio, and I kept trying to tell him about all the people all over the world I was communicating with via FidoNet.
Gaylink was mostly a social forum. We chatted about this and that…a little politics, a little dishing. It never really got very serious. Then one day a message from a BSS in the Netherlands appeared. It was short and to the point:
I’m 14 years old. I think I might be gay but I’m not sure. How did you know about yourself? What was it like?
And from literally all over the world this kid got coming-out-to-self stories. Some of them were painful to read. Some were hopeful. Some were amazingly nonchalant. There were folks whose parents disowned them. There were others whose parents completely accepted them. Some people struggled for years with it. Others seemed to have always known and accepted it. There was romance. There was heartbreak. I sat down and for the first time ever, really thought about my own experience coming to terms with my sexual orientation, and wrote it down for this kid, and the whole world to see. I could sense that something…wonderful…was happening.
It went on for two weeks. We never heard a peep from the kid throughout that entire time. And the stories, from all over the world, from people in all walks of life, just kept coming and coming. We all began talking to each other, seeing common threads in our lives that we all had, which set us apart from the heterosexual majority. Seeing those things that made each of us unique and at the same time those things we all seemed to share, no matter where we lived, no matter what culture we were raised in. Then the kid spoke up one last time:
Thank you. You’ve all given me a lot to think about.
That was it. We never heard another word from him. Maybe we gave him what he needed to accept himself. Maybe he was just confused about his own awakening sexuality, and what it meant to be homosexual. At that age, who knows? Maybe he wasn’t what he represented himself to be. But as I watched that event unfold I realized that apart from this one Dutch teenager, there had to also be hundreds of others, all over the world, generation upon generation, watching that conversation, hungry for those same answers to that kid’s question. And I saw then what this new technology could do for us as a people. We no longer had to see ourselves through heterosexual eyes.
When I came out to myself in 1971, nearly everything I knew about homosexuals and homosexuality, I’d learned from heterosexuals. In those days, before the Internet, before the World Wide Web, before Blogs and MySpace and Facebook, what you knew depended in large measure on what the popular media wanted to tell you. Before cable TV, there were only three TV networks. You had your local newspaper. You had your local radio stations. You had whatever books and magazines the local stores were selling. And that was it basically. I had to struggle, in a way most of you reading this now probably never had to, to dig up anything factual, anything at all, about homosexuality. The image the popular media put forward of homosexuals was relentlessly negative. We were perverts. We were psychotic deviants. We were dangerous, deranged sexual predators. We raped children and then murdered them. We skulked the shadows looking for unwitting victims. Even we didn’t enjoy the sex we were having. We were mentally ill, psychotic, perverted, sexual compulsives, unable to keep ourselves from engaging in horrible, vile, deviant sex acts that repulsed even us. There is a film, The Detective, about a homosexual murder: watch the murderer’s tortured confession at the end to see what sick monsters the popular media viewed us as being back then.
Now, it seemed in the blink of an eye, all of that had been swept away. Maybe not from the eyes of our heterosexual neighbors, but critically, finally, from our own. We no longer had to see ourselves through heterosexual eyes. You have to appreciate how revolutionary that was back then.
Vince Cervantes, an ex-gay survivor and one of the this year’s Soulforce Equality Riders (and an attender of this summer’s Ex-Gay Survivor Conference), has been sharing his experiences on his blog and through video. In the following two videos he goes into detail about the reasons he pursued a variety of ex-gay therapies and ministries. He really captures the mindset, the motivations and the conflicts that many us experienced when we lived ex-gay lives.
Now we can tell our stories via Internet TV. While the corporate news media is still telling itself its comfortable lies about us, we can tell our own stories, in our own words, to each other, no matter where we live, no matter what our circumstances are. And to anyone who wants to hear it from us, as opposed to heterosexuals talking to each other. You want to know why the gay rights struggle has made so much progress, so quickly, this is why. It isn’t the decline of civilization. It isn’t falling moral standards. It isn’t rampant godlessness. Once upon a time the only image we had of ourselves was the mask heterosexuals made from their own sexual guilt and paranoia to make us wear. Once upon a time they could make us hate ourselves. If you understand nothing else about the gay rights struggle, understand this: those days are over.
They were waning as it was, thanks to the changes brought about after world war II. Jet air travel. Interstate highways. Greater mobility. We could migrate to where it was safer for us to live. There was already a critical mass developing in the major urban centers of America and the western world, to push for change. Where we could live together in relative peace, we could see ourselves as we were, not as the scarecrows of other people’s sexual fears and self loathings. But then the personal computer came along, and computer networks with them, and suddenly no matter where you lived, no matter how isolated you thought you were, you could reach out in an instant, in a heartbeat, and connect to a community of other gay people. All over the country. All over the world. And what we saw when we did that, were not monsters, but people. The first person you come out to is yourself. The first eyes you open to the truth are yours. Your own story is a part of that truth. Every time you share it with another, you defeat hate.
Via Box Turtle Bulletin… You need to understand this…particularly if you’re a younger enough gay person, that you don’t remember much before the Clinton years, and the Supreme Court decision in Lawrence v. Texas, which nullified the sodomy laws: When the homophobes start talking about the "good old days" when homosexuals stayed in the closet, this is what they mean:
I SAT down in Dr Lansley’s surgery. “Well, what seems to be the problem?” he asked.]
I came out with what I’d been saying over and over in my head. This man, with the film-star looks and smart suits, was the first person I had told in my life.
“I … I think I’m a homosexual.”
He looked at me and froze. What was he going to do? I’d heard homosexuals could be sent to prison – was this going to happen to me?
Finally he spoke. “Don’t be stupid. You’re 12 years old. How could you possibly know?”
He smiled. “You’ll grow out of it.”
I left, feeling wretched. Now there was nobody I could tell– certainly not my mum. I was terrified of losing her: one mother had already abandoned me and, as much as she reassured me, I thought she would do the same.
Two years later, I went back to say I was still a homosexual. This time, Dr Lansley gave me some Valium. “Take these, you’ll be all right,” he said.
They made things even harder, as I was terrified of mum finding them, and the way they made me feel scared me. I poured them out of the bottle and flushed them down the toilet.
…
As time went on, there had been one man down in London who had been writing to me regularly. I’d gone off him and he had taken it badly. He had sent me one letter threatening to kill himself if I started going out with someone else – typical drama queen stuff.
I’d read it and hid it in my bureau as I was late in for work at the Cabin club. But it must have slipped out as I closed the door behind me.
After work that day I got a lift back with my boss. It was 3am and I crept into the house. Walking up the stairs, I saw a light on. I thought mum hadn’t been able to sleep, and went in to say goodnight.
She was white. In her hand was a sheet of paper, and she looked absolutely destroyed.
Mum handed the love letter to me. “What does this mean?” she asked.
I felt sick. The letter had fallen out where she could see it. Everything was there, plain as can be. Did I try to lie my way out of this? Did I tell her I was bisexual, even though I knew I wasn’t? It might soften the blow if she could think her son might still settle down and give her grandchildren. No, I thought, that would be another lie – and this has to stop now.
“It’s true, mum,” I said. “I’m a homosexual.”
It was a decision which would lead to me being checked in for aversion therapy – the most horrible experience of my life – but it was something I had to tell her.
She looked at me, then screamed: “Get out of the house!” Then she rushed to the toilet and I heard her throwing up as I ran down the stairs.
How the doc tried to turn me straight
I SAT down in the doctor’s room in a psychiatric hospital in Chester. An old-fashioned Grundy TK 20 tape machine was sitting on his desk.
He started to interview me about sex acts between gay men, taping my answers.
“Don’t you feel degraded about what you are doing?” I remember him asking me.
After he stopped the recording, he told me we would start therapy the next day.
“We’re going to try and put you off looking at men,” he said.
In the morning I was shown into a windowless room with a male nurse. A crate of Guinness arrived, and I was given a stack of dirty magazines showing body builders – not the sort of thing that would have turned me on in a million years.
The nurse started playing the tape of my conversation. I sat and listened, flicking through the books with a pint, not knowing what the hell was going on.
Then he gave me an injection and suddenly I started feeling sick.
“I think I’m going to vomit!” I yelled out. “I need a basin.”
The doctor smiled. “Then be sick.”
“I think I’m going to go to the toilet.”
“Just do it on the bed.”
I screamed: “You’re joking.”
All the while the tape of the doctor’s questions was playing in the background, over and over: “What you do is disgusting.”
It continued for 72 hours – the drink, the injections, the vomiting and excrement – hour after hour.
All I could think was that I wasn’t going to get out alive.
When it ended, I lay there sobbing, the doctor came in.
“Now you’ve got to have the electrodes … ” he said.
Peter Price is a radio personality in the UK. Click on the link above to goto the Liverpool Echo for more, including a link to a place in the UK selling his book. I just checked Amazon and it isn’t there, which makes me doubt you’ll be able to find it at your local gay bookstore either. But hopefully the book will make it to these shores too. This is history every gay person should know.
In the fall of 1955, the citizens of Boise, Idaho were told there was a menace in their midst. On Halloween, three men were arrested — accused of being part of a giant "sex ring" preying on teenage boys. There was no such ring, but the result was a widespread investigation which some people now call a witch hunt.
By the time the investigation ended, 16 men were charged with sex crimes — including men accused of having relations with other consenting adults. But countless other lives were also touched. In some cases, men implicated fled the area. At least one family actually left the country.
The investigation attracted the attention of "Time Magazine" and newspapers across America. In 1966, the book "The Boys of Boise" once again brought the cases to the nation’s attention. The "morals drive" — and the subsequent publicity — left scars which remain to this day.
When people scratch their heads over the behavior of men like Larry Craig, it helps to look back at the world they grew up in. I was lucky enough to have entered adolescence in the late 60s, just as the modern gay rights movement was taking shape, and so I was spared a lot of what those men had to live through. But I was close enough to it to have felt some of the venom, the relentless pathologizing of homosexuals by the culture of the 50s. When I was a kid, it was routine for newspapers, TV shows and movies to portray homosexuals in the ugliest, most psychotic ways possible. In films and on TV, the homosexual characters usually met violent ends, as Vito Russo documented in his landmark book, The Celluloid Closet.
What happened in Boise surely isn’t the only homosexual panic that occurred during the 1950s, that resulted in a witch hunt of gay men. The book, Sex Crime Panic, documents another one that happened, also in 1955, this time in Soux City Iowa. In that one 20 men were rounded up and committed for an indefinite period to a mental institution as "criminal sexual psychopaths", housed in a ward created especially to house homosexual men. Their only crime was being homosexuals, and having affairs with other consenting adults. Not one man incarcerated in that mental ward was there for the crime that originally set off the panic…the abduction and murder of two children. Those killers were never found and brought to justice. But nobody questioned the logic of rounding up a bunch of homosexuals and locking them away as a public safety measure.
It was most likely viewed back then, as the more humane alternative…
"Whoa, whoa, whoa. It ain’t goin a be that way. We can’t. I’m stuck with what I got, caught in my own loop. Can’t get out of it. Jack, I don’t want a be like them guys you see around sometimes. And I don’t want a be dead. There was these two old guys ranched together down home, Earl and Rich…Dad would pass a remark when he seen them. They was a joke even though they was pretty tough old birds. I was what, nine years old, and they found Earl dead in a irrigation ditch. They’d took a tire iron to him, spurred him up, drug him around by his dick until it pulled off, just bloody pulp. What the tire iron done looked like pieces a burned tomatoes all over him, nose tore down from skiddin on gravel."
"You seen that?"
"Dad made sure I seen it. Took me to see it. Me and K.E. Dad laughed about it. Hell, for all I know he done the job. If he was alive and was to put his head in that door right now you bet he’d go get his tire iron…"
-Annie Proulx – Brokeback Mountain
Larry Craig, born in Council, Idaho in July of 1945, would have been 10 when the 1955 Boise homosexual panic happened.
Elizabeth Edwards said Saturday she is troubled by the suspected anti-gay beating death of a Sacramento man, and said the killing of Satender Singh demands renewed condemnations of hate speech in America.
Singh, a 26-year-old Fijian immigrant, died four days after he was attacked July 1 at Lake Natoma by an angry group hurling explicit gay slurs and racial remarks.
Edwards, campaigning in Sacramento for her husband, Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards of North Carolina, said she was so affected by news of Singh’s death that she rewrote a speech on human rights she was due to deliver later Saturday in San Francisco.
“I thought we learned some lessons from Laramie and Matthew Shepard,” Edwards said in an interview, referring to the fatal 1998 beating of a gay college student in Wyoming that triggered an uproar over anti-gay violence.
Oh you did, did you? Well I was just in Laramie lady, and I can tell you for a fact that they are busy trying to forget it ever happened. Learn something? Oh my goodness. How to bury their fucking heads in the sand deeper maybe.
The first time I visited Laramie since the murder, I was driving through on my way back home to Baltimore. I thought I’d swing through the town and see if I could find the place where Shepard was killed and pay my respects. But without knowing exactly where it was, other then a general description of the site, it was hopeless and I had to give up. So I drove through town looking for any sign, any acknowledgment, of what had happened. Maybe a little poster in some window somewhere. Maybe a little plaque. Some notice somewhere, anywhere, that gay folks would be coming here to morn and pay their respects. I found exactly nothing.
Okay, thinks I…next time I come, I’ll know the location beforehand. So I did a small amount of poking around and found the spot where Shepard’s dying body was found and looked it up on a map. Shepard was driven from The Fireside bar near the edge of the downtown part of Laramie, out to Snowy View Road. I’d already read that the property owner had torn down the deer fence that Shepard had been tied too, out of pique that so many people were leaving flowers and tributes there. But I figured I could still stand at the spot for a moment or two and morn.
It was not to be…
The road leading to the site is now marked with signs warning you that it is a private drive, not a public road, and that everyone should keep out. That entire area is now off limits to the public. You can’t get anywhere near the place where Shepard’s dying body was found anymore.
I suppose at some point, they’ll do something like build a condo right on top of the spot where it happened. Or maybe a nice tennis court.
Over and over again in this struggle for our freedom and human dignity, I am put in mind of the words of Malcolm X. He was not anything near the peacemaker that Martin Luther King Jr. was, but he knew what progress meant…
If you stick a knife nine inches into my back and pull it out three inches, that is not progress. Even if you pull it all the way out, that is not progress. Progress is healing the wound, and America hasn’t even begun to pull out the knife.
Progress is healing the wound… Hate crime legislation, anti discrimination laws, same sex marriage…these are all good things, necessary things. But real progress toward gay equality, toward that day when gay people can live side-by side with our heterosexual neighbors in peace and good will, won’t happen, won’t even begin to happen, until straight America is willing to begin healing the wound. And not only are they not pulling out the knife, in Laramie, they’re still trying to make people forget it’s even there.
And this is why gay people are still being murdered every year in America, for no other reason then that they are gay. Too many people hate us enough to kill us, to think of killing us as some kind of sport, or a rite of passage into manhood. And too many other people don’t give a shit. Hate, and it’s lover, Contempt, just keep doing their dance on our lives, their dance over our bodies.
That was why Matthew Shepard was killed, make no mistake. ABC News can get away with helping the religious right whitewash that basic fact of the killing, because few people outside of the gay community will bother making the trip to Laramie to see the place where it all happened for themselves. But last night I drove from about where Shepard was kidnapped to the place where his killers tied him to a fence, put their cigarettes out on his skin, and beat his skull open with the butt of a pistol.
You go out of the downtown section…you drive for blocks…past the university…past the outlying convenience stores…a few fast food joints…some liquor stores…out to the edge of town and beyond. Into the rolling sage. Into the darkness. I know why they turned off onto Pilot Peak Road now. Pilot Peak was their last turn off before the Interstate. They had to make that left, or they would have been on the Interstate and from there it was either drive back toward town or drive for miles to Happy Jack Road. So they took the left onto Pilot Peak Road and drove back into that sub division as far as they could. Into the darkness. Where no one would see. Where their handiwork wouldn’t be discovered for a long time.
You take that drive…out of town…far away from the town lights…into the night…and you start thinking to yourself…This was a robbery? No way. Just. No. Way. There were two of them against one small, 112 pound boy and they passed plenty of nice, quiet, dark places where they could have taken Shepard, robbed him, dumped him, and driven off. Hell…they passed plenty of places where they could have just shot him dead and driven off without being seen. You don’t drive that far out of town, into the middle of nowhere, just to rob a 112 pound kid. You drive him there because you intend to spend a while enjoying yourself beating a faggot to death while he begs for his life and nobody can hear him scream for help, and you don’t want the body discovered before you’ve had a chance to clean up and get rid of the evidence.
That was always the plan, from the moment they got him into the truck. If you doubt that, take the drive yourself some night, from downtown Laramie to Snowy View Road, and try to convince yourself that they only intended to rob him.
Lessons? Lessons? There is no memorial to Matthew Shepard anywhere in Laramie that I could find, the site of this beating is off limits to the public now, and thanks to ABC News, people are calling Matthew Shepard a Meth addict who knew his killers, and maybe even had sex with them once or twice. And the killing goes on. They’re learning how to live with the increasing stench of their own prejudices is what they’re learning. Because that is still preferable to treating homosexuals as their neighbors.
[Edited a tad…]
[Update…] The Good People of Laramie eventually did decide to erect a memorial after all. Ladies and Gentlemen, I hereby present you with the Matthew Shepard Memorial…bench.
That’s something I was taught to consider in a structured analysis and design class I attended once and it’s the kind of thinking that we should all practice. You really need sometimes to look critically at the obvious, the taken-for-granted, those "everyone knows such-and-such is true" truths. They can be delicate, nearly invisible curtains hiding from your eyes the reality that’s staring you back in the face.
Via aTypical Joe, comes this story of 81 words that were once in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), and how they were there in the first place, simply because everyone just assumed they were true. And this particular assumption got its first really critical looking at, when Evelyn Hooker, a psychologist at UCLA, met Sam From, a student…
Evelyn was a psychologist at UCLA and Sam was her student. He was also a homosexual. They started spending time together in the mid 1940s and Sam introduced Evelyn to his group of friends most of whom, like Sam, were gay.
Now, as I said, everyone in this group was homosexual but curiously, none was in therapy. They were all well-adjusted young men who utterly failed to conform to the traditional psychiatric image of the tortured, disturbed homosexual.
This, naturally, got Evelyn thinking.
Now, prior to Evelyn Hooker, all of the research on homosexuality – all of it – was done on people who were already under serious psychiatric treatment. Let me repeat that: In the history of psychiatric research, no one had ever conducted a study on a homosexual population that wasn’t either in therapy, in prison, a mental hospital, or the disciplinary barracks of the armed services.
Evelyn thought about this and decided that this kind of research was distorting psychiatry’s conclusions about homosexual populations. To test her theory, Evelyn came up with an experiment. Through her former student she located 30 homosexuals who had never sought therapy in their lives and matched those homosexuals with a group of heterosexuals of comparable age, IQ and education.
Evelyn then put both groups through a battery of psychological tests including a Rorschach Test, the famous ink-blot test. After disguising her subjects, Evelyn gave the results to three experienced psychiatrists and asked them to identify the homosexuals. She figured that if homosexuals were inherently pathological, the psychiatrists would be able to pick them out easily. But the judges were completely unable to distinguish the homos from the hets.
Equally important was the fact that the judges categorized two thirds of the homosexuals and the heterosexuals as perfectly well-adjusted normally functioning human beings.
Hooker’s study challenged the idea that homosexuality was a pathology in the first place, and in doing this it not only called into question an entire generation of research on homosexuality, it also challenged psychiatry’s basic concept of disease. If you believed Hooker’s data the only conclusion you could come to was that psychiatry was deciding that certain behaviors were diseases, not out of any sort of scientific proof, but based on their own prejudices.
Beside Evelyn Hooker, psychiatrists who wanted to change the DSM really had only one other scientific study on their side: Alfred Kinsey’s famous 1948 sex survey which found that a whopping 37% of all men had had physical contact to the point of orgasm with other men, a finding which – besides shocking the hell out of 63% of the American public – seemed to suggest that homosexual acts were too common to be considered a disease.
In spite of all this work, psychiatry continued to maintain that the homos were sick and steadfastly refused to reevaluate the DSM. And then luck, or maybe fate, intervened.
This is but a small excerpt from a really good This American Life broadcast, which originally aired in January 2002. It’s available for listening at the link above. If you have iTunes it can also be purchased for ninty-five cents. I highly recommend it. The broadcast is the story of the DSM change as told by Alix Spiegel, the granddaughter of the man who was the president elect of the APA when the change occurred. Like many profound historical events, this one is something more, and something less, then the mythologies that have grown up around it. It involved political theater, and behind the scenes activism. It involved many diverse people from many diverse backgrounds…most of them heterosexual, some of them gay. Most of the gays in the APA at that time were in fact, deeply, deeply closeted, and what is probably a striking thing for modern ears to hear is how many of them accepted the prevailing assumptions about the pathology of homosexuality.
But if the internal behind the scenes politics, and the external pressure of gay activists accomplished anything, it was to hasten what the science would eventually compel them to do anyway. That is not to ether dismiss, nor exaggerate the impact of the activism. There is a scene near the end of Alix Spiegel’s story that needs to be in any film or TV recreation of these events, and it is that moment when Robert Spitzer is brought by one of the activists who had been protesting the APA’s categorizing of homosexuality as an illness, uninvited, to a gathering of the closeted gay professionals, and he sees how many distinguished and successful people of his profession are homosexual, people he would never have suspected, people whose accomplishments were considerable, people who would, every one of them, have been drummed out of their profession had their sexual orientation become known then. For Spitzer, it is a profound revelation. And then…a young man in uniform walks in the door.
You should listen to this episode. It’s nearly an hour long but well worth it, to get to that scene. There is a historian toward the end who says that questions of disease and pathology ultimately resolve down to moral questions, not scientific ones. I disagree. Science can certainly tell us whether or not something is or is not harmful to us mentally and physically. And the moral question was answered millenia ago: First Do No Harm… But there is a profound moral question at the bottom of every scientific one and that is the question of truthfulness and letting the evidence speak for itself. Even if means you have to discard a cherished assumption you’ve held on to for years. Even if that assumption has given you the recognition of your peers, fame, and made you a pretty good living.
Robert Spitzer has taken a lot of justly deserved criticism for his so-called study of clients of ex-gay ministries, but you have to give the man credit for that one dazzling moment near the end of this report, when he let the evidence he could clearly see with his own two eyes, finally, speak for itself. Charles Socrades comes off by contrast, as a man so blinded by dogma that he’s even willing to regard himself as a parental failure to his own gay son. But as he says, his business was booming. He speaks with pride toward the end about some parents who took their 16 year old gay son to one psychiatrist after another, only to be told there was nothing wrong with the boy…until they met him.
And now you know what happens to a soul that stops asking questions.
For a change the gay channel Logo had something on that lived up to its (Logo’s) potential. It was a history of the gay migration to Fire Island and The Pines, and it covered parts of the island’s history prior to Stonewall, as well as the changes that came after, and with the AIDS crisis.
There’s a reason why documenting the history of our movement prior to Stonewall is so important, while there are still people alive who lived it first hand. When I was a kid I’d heard about Fire Island…it was practically a byword for queerness. Back then Fire Island and Greenwich Village was where all the queers were. You didn’t go there unless you were queer yourself. Even Mad magazine, which was aimed at teenage males mostly, would toss out Fire Island jokes from time to time in it’s pages and magazines for teens weren’t supposed to so much as breath a word about homosexuality back then. But in those days we all thought Mad was cool, because it was something our parents hated. Two years after Stonewall, this is the image I was getting about gays from Mad…
Mad #145, Sept ’71, from "Greeting Cards For The
Sexual Revolution" – "To A Gay Liberationist"
This is what the pop culture was telling me about gay people when I was 17. Three months later I came out to myself. I have to say in all fairness that Mad Magazine isn’t hostile to gay people now, like it was back when I was a gay teen struggling to understand myself. In fact, they’re positively amazing, even by today’s standards. I suppose they understand now that some of their readers are dealing with their own process of coming out. But the late 60s and early 70s were not nearly so tolerant and it’s hard to grasp now, when we’re to the point of fighting for marriage rights, how bad it was back then. Which is why histories like the one Logo was showing tonight are so important. There are a lot of people who would like to take us all back to those days.
And so here I am, 35 years later, watching this history of Fire Island on Logo raptly. I was too young to be part of the pre-Stonewall era, but not so young that I didn’t hear stuff about homosexuals. And now I’m hearing from them, the people, gay and straight, who experienced that first wave of gay migrations to the island what those times were like from their point of view…
…and I’m hearing about how a certain hotel/club got started there, called The Botel, and how it’s ownership passed into the hands of a gay man…and how the tradition of "Tea Dances" started there (late afternoon, when the dances were held, was called "low tea"…I guess it’s a New England thing…). And I learn that back in those days it was illegal for men to dance with men. Not illegal as in, get a ticket and pay a fine, but illegal as in get arrested and thrown in jail and have your life ruined when your name is printed in the newspapers the next day and suddenly your boss and your neighbors and everyone you know finds out you’re a faggot. That kind of illegal…
…so the male Tea Dancers would form a kind of cabaret line and find one woman…she didn’t need to be heterosexual herself…to dance with all these guys who were really dancing with each other but had to be careful about not dancing too much like they were dancing with each other or they might get arrested. The gay owner of the club would watch the dancers and warn them if they started being too obvious, and tell them they had to stop or leave…
…and there are several people in this Fire Island documentary explaining this as I watch and listen, and one of them explains that the police would regularly raid The Botel anyway, and another man says that sometimes the police would patrol the streets around the club and arrest random young men as they left. On those nights, this man says, the bartenders would get the word somehow and warn people not to leave the club alone, but go out in large groups. Another man says that the police had arrest quotas when then went on these raids. Typically, he says, they had to arrest at least twenty gays…
…and I listen to another man explaining that there was a large telephone pole near the Botel, and that it had a chain fastened to it…and the police would randomly arrest gay men as they found them leaving the Botel and cuff them to this chain…one by one…until they had their twenty for that night…and they would put them all on the boat back to the mainland and to jail.
This happened on Fire Island, in the 1960s, during a time when a lot of gay men and lesbians regarded Fire Island as a place they could go to get away from the oppression they felt in their daily lives. It was a place where could be "among your own kind", the people in the documentary were telling me as I watched. You felt like you were in a world apart, they said. Back home was the closet, the constant fear of discovery, the need to keep your head down. On Fire Island you felt like you were getting away from all that, they said. But you never knew when the police might grab you off the street, handcuff you to a chain with twenty or more other homosexuals, and take you by boat to a jail on the mainland. Because you were a homosexual.
And now you know another reason why Stonewall finally happened.
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