Some bigots sure do have some motivation for keeping them pushing the

same issue, over and over.  Sadly, too often those who are more

intelligent get tired...

Stacey Campfield files retooled homosexuality in classroom bill

Leo Laurence

Here is a very brief mention (page 90) of Leo in Tracy Baim’s new book, Gay Press, Gay Power:

On March 28, 1969, three months before stonewall in New York, Vector’s (SIR San Francisco group’s magazine) editor, Leo Lawrence, called for the “homosexual revolution of 1969.”  He was urging gays to join with the Black Panthers and other radicals, and for this SIR expelled him. 

According to Wikipedia, Laurence then co-founded the Committee for Homosexual Freedom, with Gale Whittington, a man fired from States Steamship Company for being openly gay, after his photo appeared in the Berkeley Barb next to the headline “HOMOS, DON'T HIDE IT!” by Leo Laurence.

It also mentions a second underground paper, the San Francisco Free Press, as it carried Carl Wittman’s column “Refugees from Amerika: A Gay Manifesto.”  This also appeared later in the Chicago Seed.

GLBT law professor (Yale) speaks at Boston University Law Scholl on Same Sex Marriage legal history and progress

(C-SPAN taped 11-15-12)

I am glad C-SPAN taped a talk by Prof. Wm Esheridge (?) of Yale speaking at Boston University Law School on same sex marriage. His book is The Case for Same Sex Marriage, and his speech is going to be published in the (BU) Law Review. He gave a brief history.  It is, like most of the history of the movement to gain equal/civil. rights for homosexual Americans, not a single person or issue or method story.  Since the issue was first discussed in print in ONE Magazine in 1954, there have been many people and views on the issue and how to gain it, and even if it is a good idea to have it

He gives his own views and work on the subject/issue. I think it was 1971 when the Baker case happened in Minnesota. Then he mentions the case in Hawaii and how it was stopped.  He worked on a DC case.  He says that other issues affected this issue, such as Lawrence vs Texas, law changes in Europe, people knowing more lgbt people. He repeats—maybe in a sense it is practical for a non academic group but not a law school group—that Stonewall was a major event, the error that it was the first time we fought back. He says AIDS slowed the progress, but it seems to me that instead it got the movement more sympathy and got people supporting us who would not have done so otherwise.  He  says having same-sex marriage legal in Massachusetts was a great step forward as people saw it in the real world.

An aside, he says to think about the subject by using three TV shows as reference:  Modern Family gives us one view, Revenge another, and then Homeland—the one many rightwingers think of since it means the issue is a Trojan Horse—ruining marriage, as someone is trying to secretly ruin the nation.  (He says give Ellen some credit too.)

He thinks a slow method is best so doubts the court will go too far until a few years, when the public is ready, as in a sense it was for Loving vs Virginia, and he says that case affects same sex marriage as does the thinking (?) in Romer vs Evans.  I think he was thinking that Bowers set us back, and another bad case could do it again.

A questioner asked the obvious: do some in the community/movement think that pushing marriage is too much like being heterosexual and giving up status as an outsider and more free person?  He replied that is an issue, but AIDS should have shown that if we are in a more committed relationship that is more supportive of a safer status and supports the idea of family.

Don Slater and others said that the decision in Connecticut giving women the right to contraceptives removed the issue of sex and/or marriage being only for procreation.

There was also a question about separating the issue of the government concern in marriage and the religious part.  He did not then point out how the Mormons and Catholics defeated the Prop 8 and instead blamed the loss on lousy advertising.

From John Lauritsen...

In 1974 I wrote a monograph entitled Religious Roots of the Taboo on Homosexuality: A Materialist View. I printed it myself on an AB Dick offset press at Come! Unity Press, a quasi-anarchist collective that insisted that every publication printed there be free to anyone who could not afford the cover price.

All of us who used the press had to learn how to make plates, run the press, and bind our publications. Although never advertised or distributed commercially, Religious Roots sold several thousand copies. It was translated and published as a pamphlet in German.

I’ve now re-published Religious Roots as a newly typeset PDF pamphlet, with scans of the original covers, and have added images of 12th century Sicilian mosaics depicting the Destruction of Sodom. 

Destruction of Sodom

In re-reading the pamphlet, I was a little embarrassed by some of the rhetoric (“class struggle,” “bourgeoisie,” etc.) but decided not to change anything.  Religious Roots has historical importance in that it helped bridge the new Gay Liberation movement and the older Freethought and Atheist movements. 

On the basis of this pamphlet, I was asked in 1974 to write an article for the venerable British monthly, The Freethinker, which since then has published many of my writings.

Links to the Religious Roots PDF pamphlet are the first bulleted item on my Gay Liberation and Freethought pages.

Saving issues of the first national publication discussing homosexuality from and by and homosexuals

Written by Billy Glover on 11-17-2012:

What seems to not have been understood is that, except for a few nuts who would find something wrong today even with the good newspapers and magazines in the movement/community, from the first issue, ONE magazine was professional, something even closeted men and women could be proud of.  They didn’t have anything else.  Early Mattachine had been secret except for the front group formed to support Dale Jennings’ court case which he, in a sense, won due to a hung jury—probably the first time someone had said they were homosexual but did not publicly solicit sex with this man.  (He covered this in the first issues and was the first editor as well as a co-founder of Mattachine and ONE. Later he was famous for writing The Cowboys, the movie John Wayne was in.)

The editors asked famous homosexual authors to contribute but none would except Norman Mailer. So no author/writer/media person could later say they did not know there was, at last, a homosexual publication, telling people what was being said and done about homosexuality. And with no apology.

Jim Kepner had a hard job searching for news, since few places—except for printing names of those arrested—would mention or use the word “homosexual.”  As I have pointed out, a search of the Readers Guide to Periodical Index over the decades will show just how little news, articles, etc., there was in the 1950s and 1960s.  Slowly but surely the coverage grew, until today, you would need a whole book to list all the articles.

The most-read parts of ONE and later Tangents were the Tangents news section and the letters to the editor.  The letters were real.  It is still interesting to see/hear people from all over the nation were writing to ONE in those years, saying what they write to Ellen and celebrities today—saying, to new people each year, “You are an inspiration. I did not know anyone else was like me. You give me courage, etc.”  I wonder why editors today do not think readers would like to see the letters they get?

The movement / community has to know that there was a doubt that you could publish such a magazine promoting acceptance of homosexuality—and obviously they were right since ONE had to go to court to protect that right. That court case (when the Post Office stopped an issue, at the urging of a politician) is covered well in the book Courting Justice.

Some young writers and media types were able to test the waters by writing for ONE.  Joseph Hansen is an example. Some fiction was good.  The different views on homosexuality were educational.  There was no other place this discussion was taking place.  We did not censor.  We let the readers hear the opinion and decide for themselves.  I do not think there is an idea or view heard today that was not covered in ONE—such as the early discussion about marriage.

Harry Hay and Radical Fairies in Oregon Commune in the 1970s

Nice historical photo of Harry Hay with Radical Fairies at a commune in Oregon in the late 1970s.

Email exchange between Billy Glover, Paul Cain and Dr. Don Kilhefner on 11-2-2012 regarding Harry Hay
and John Burnside, whether they participated in nudism in their various communes.

Dear Billy and Paul:

 

Greetings.  I hope you are both well.

 

As far as I know, Harry and John

were not into nudism or it was very

marginal to their lives.  Harry talked

a liberationist line when it came to

sex and nudism in public but was

rather prudish in that regard in

private.

 

I lived at the La Cresta Court commune in Los

Angeles with Harry and John for over two

years (1979-82) and there was no nudism

there but also there was no anti-nudism

either--there was mutuality and reciprocity

and we respected each others boundaries

and proclivities.  From time to time a guest

might be nude but it was no big deal to us.

Harry, John, Michael Fleming and I tended

to be clothed even though scantily clothed

sometimes--it was our home.

 

From the very beginning of the Radical Fairies

(1979) to the last gathering I attended (1985)

in Southern California, clothing optional took

many forms including being nude with bells,

glitter, feathers and so forth being used

imaginatively.  But nudism as such was not

an ideology that was practiced.  It was more

liberation in whatever form we personally needed

to be liberated rather than nudism as such.  Nudism

always had a little 19th century and early 20th century

smell to it by 1969--once daring but by the late

20th century somewhat ho-hum to Gay Liberation Revolution.

Nudism was never was never on the agenda of Gay

Liberation in any significant way--Sexual Liberation,

however, was.

 

It is late for me and now I'm off to bed.

 

I'm moving nicely forward on a book tentatively

called You'll Never Be Alone Again: Gay Liberation,

Self-Identity and Community Creation in Los Angeles,

1969-79 in which some of this gets fuller treatment.

 

Thanks for thinking of me.

 

Pacem In Terris.

 

Donald Kilhefner, Ph.D.