Tag Archives: Homosexuality

Gay History – May 23, 1920: Harvard University’s “Secret Court” Expels 10 Students for Homosexuality.

Featured, Gay History, Of Interest, , , , , , ,

On May 13, 1920, Cyril Wilcox a Harvard undergraduate committed suicide after telling his older brother, George, that he had been having an affair with another man. Shortly after Cyril’s death, George intercepted two letters from a Harvard student and a recent graduate.  George, a clerk at the granite mills in Fall River, decided to act. He tracked down his brother’s former lover, Harry Dreyfus, who lived in Boston. Dreyfus, after he was beaten by George Wilcox, denied responsibility for Cyril’s suicide but gave three names of other men involved: Roberts, Harvard Dental School student Eugene R. Cummings and Pat Courtney, a non-Harvard man living in Boston.

George took these letters to Harvard’s Acting Dean, Chester N Greenough, and shared with him what he knew. After consulting with Harvard President Abbot Lowell, Greenough formed a special five-man tribunal on this date in history which became known as the “Secret Court.”

The court launched a wide-ranging witch hunt, with Greenough summoning each witness one by one with a brief note. Thirty-seven men testified before the Court, including a tutor, an assistant professor, Harvard students, and several Boston men. 

The Court’s inquiry was exhaustive, posing questions about masturbation practices, sex with women or men, cross-dressing, overnight guests, parties, and reading habits. The scope of the inquiry soon expanded to area businesses, cafés, and bars. Eight students were expelled, ordered to leave Cambridge, and reported to their families. They were also told that Harvard would disclose the reasons for their expulsion if employers or other schools sought references. Four others unconnected to Harvard were also deemed “guilty.” The school couldn’t punish them directly, but they did pressure one café to fire a waiter.

In 2002, a researcher from Harvard’s daily newspaper, The Crimson, came across a box of files labeled “Secret Court” in the University’s archives. After pressure from the newspaper staff the University finally released five hundred documents related to the Court’s work, and The Crimson published its findings in November of that year. Harvard’s president Lawrence H. Summers responded to the revelations, expressing deep regret for the anguish the students and families experienced.

 Based on actual court documents, “Perkins 28” the video documentary below dramatizes the testimony from the Secret Court Files of 1920,  Filmed in Cambridge, MA, and starring Harvard undergraduates. 

.
Gay History - May 10, 320 BC: Greek Poet Theocritus Is Born.

Gay History – May 10, 320 BC: Greek Poet Theocritus Is Born.

Featured, Gay History, , , , , ,

May 10, 320 BC. Theocritus is born in Syracuse and is credited with being the first and greatest filthy pastoral poet.

In the history of homosexual literature ancient Greece holds a unique place. Here was a society relatively hospitable to the love love between men and youths. Such affections formed a significant part of its culture. Theocritus developed the verse form known as the “bucolic” or “pastoral” poem a stylized and artful form usually about shepherds or cowherds who sing of love and friendship and were  highly homoerotic.

Thirty (nearly) complete poems and twenty-five epigrams are attributed under the name “Theocritus.”

Seven of the thirty poems (idylls) completed by Theocritus are homoerotic. In the fifth idyll two shepherds good- naturedly accuse each other of pederasty (one accusing the other of anal rape in the bushes), using colloquial expressions that are “obscene” enough to be printed in Latin in some modern English translations.

In Theocritus seventh idyll; Aratus is passionately in love with a boy. In the twelfth idyll a lover addresses his absent beloved and describes a kissing contest amongst boys in honor of Diocles, lover of Philolaus. In the thirteenth idyll Hercules frantically searches for his beloved Hylas. In the twenty-third idyll a lover commits suicide and is revenged by a statue of Eros falling upon his faithless beloved. In the twenty-ninth idyll a lover speaks to his inconstant and immature beloved. And in the thirtieth idyll a rejected suitor reflects upon the heartbreak caused by the love of lads.

Theocritus portrayed the homosexual lover as one who experiences fleeting moments of gaiety ending in dejected frustration and pensive memory – the very same way in which he portrays heterosexual lovers. His work was highly regarded in his own time, and he was celebrated by later poets, including the Roman poet Ovid.

Please continue to this link to read the great Oscar Wilde’s: Theocritus: A Villanelle

Gay History 1961 – WATCH: “The Rejected” The Long Lost First Aired Television Documentary About Homosexuality

Entertainment, Featured, Gay History, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

While there were  a few previously produced television panel discussions about homosexuality  The Rejected was the first ever full-length televised  documentary about the then controversial subject.

Originally produced and broadcast  by KQED for National Educational Television (NET) – the predecessor of WNET – and first aired on September 11th 1961, on KQED Ch.9. it includes discussions about sexual orientation from: Margaret Mead (anthropologist, pictured aboved); Dr. Karl Bowman (former President of the American Psychiatric Association); Harold Call, Donald Lucas and Les Fisher of the Mattachine Society;

“We think the swish, or the queen, represents a small minority within the homosexual grouping,” Call states. “These people in most cases are not even liked by their homosexual brethren because they have perhaps rejected themselves and they feel society has rejected them.”

Harold Call calls for a change in laws and restrictions that put the lives and livelihood of gay people in danger, while Lucas emphasized the number and ubiquity of homosexuals living in America, not just clustered within large cities.

But it’s  Call’s closing remarks that resonate most deeply:

“The homosexual is no different than anyone else except perhaps in his choice of a love object. He desires the same kind of right to live his life freely and without interference, to pursue his happiness as a responsible citizen and to receive the benefits of constitutional rights, due process and protection of the law that all of us enjoy.”

The documentary also includes: San Francisco District Attorney Thomas Lynch; Dr. Erwin Braff (Director of San Francisco’s Bureau for Disease Control; Al Bendich; Mr J. Albert Hutchinson and Mr. Morris Lowenthal (who engage in debate); Bishop James Pike and Rabbi Alvin Fine.

This documentary was written by John Reavis Jr., produced by Reavis Jr. and Irving Saraf, directed by Dick Christian, with location photography by Philip Greene.

This copy of The Rejected was lost for many years and has been restored as much as it could.  The Library of Congress states that there were several problems with the edited 2-inch quad videotape master. Many different tape stocks were used to create this program and the quality of these was often poor. The base of the tape is slippery at times, which causes an unstable control track. The stock was also physically heavy, which causes tension during take up. The audio quality is consistent throughout but there are three extended sequences – noted onscreen by subtitles – which feature bad picture quality.  The Library’s Recording Laboratory remastered these 2-inch tapes onto digital.

You can watch The Rejected in its entirety here.

200-Year-Old Diary Discovered in the UK Shows Surprising Acceptance of Homosexuality

200-Year-Old Diary Discovered in the UK Shows Surprising Acceptance of Homosexuality

Featured, Gay History, , ,

The discovery of a 200 year old diary written by a Yorkshire farmer is surprising historians because of the tolerance it shows towards homosexuality in Britain at that time.

Via BBC News:

Historians from Oxford University have been taken aback to discover that Matthew Tomlinson’s diary from 1810 contains such open-minded views about same-sex attraction being a “natural” human tendency.

The diary challenges preconceptions about what “ordinary people” thought about homosexuality – showing there was a debate about whether someone really should be discriminated against for their sexuality.

In this exciting new discovery, we see a Yorkshire farmer arguing that homosexuality is innate and something that shouldn’t be punished by death,” says Oxford researcher Eamonn O’Keeffe.

Tomlinson argued, from a religious perspective, that punishing someone for how they were created was equivalent to saying that there was something wrong with the Creator.

“It must seem strange indeed that God Almighty should make a being with such a nature, or such a defect in nature; and at the same time make a decree that if that being whom he had formed, should at any time follow the dictates of that Nature, with which he was formed, he should be punished with death,” he wrote on January 14 1810.

If there was an “inclination and propensity” for someone to be homosexual from an early age, he wrote, “it must then be considered as natural, otherwise as a defect in nature – and if natural, or a defect in nature; it seems cruel to punish that defect with death”.

Matthew Tomlinson was a widower, in his 40s when he wrote his journal in 1810 – a man of a “middling” class, not a poor labourer but not rich enough to own his own land.

No-one knows how these private diaries, covering 1806 to 1839, ended up in Wakefield Library, but they were there by the 1950s and are presumed to be part of an earlier acquisition of old books and local documents.

5 Gay Men Tortured and Beheaded in Saudi Arabia

5 Gay Men Tortured and Beheaded in Saudi Arabia

Featured, Gay News Domestic & U.S. Politics, , , ,


Saudi Arabia, which carried out the gruesome mass execution of 37 people this week by beheading claimed the barbaric act was over terrorism crimes. But it is coming to light that many were minority Shi’ite Muslims who may not have had fair trials and 5 men were beheaded for being gay,

Homosexuality is punishable by death in the Gulf State, ruled over by King Salman.

A court document obtained by CNN states a man confessed to gay acts and hating the majority Sunni sect. It states: ‘He said that he did all this because he belonged to the Shia sect and because he was against the Sunni sect and because of his hate for the state and its men and its security forces.’

The executions were carried out on Tuesday in the cities of Riyadh, Mecca and Medina. One of the prisoner’s had his body and severed head pinned to a pole in a public square. The deaths were said to act as a warning to others and also a political move to impress the USA.

Many of those executed said they were totally innocent, and that their confessions had been written by the same people who had tortured them.

Tuesday’s mass execution was “another gruesome indication of how the death penalty is being used as a political tool to crush dissent from within” the country’s Shi’ite minority, said Lynn Maalouf, Amnesty International’s group’s research director for the Middle East.

European Union foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini said the executions heightened doubts about respect for the right to a fair trial in Saudi Arabia and could fuel sectarian violence.

New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) said at least 33 of the 37 men put to death were Shi’ites and it was the largest set of executions in the kingdom since January 2016.


Dr. Robert Spitzer, Psychiatrist Credited With Removing “Gay” From List Of Mental Disorders, Dies at 83

Gay News From Around The Globe, , , ,

Dr Robert Spitzer

Dr. Robert Spitzer — a psychiatrist who played a leading role in establishing agreed-upon standards to describe mental disorders and eliminating homosexuality’s designation as one — died Friday in Seattle. He was 83.

Spitzer’s work on several editions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or the D.S.M., defined all of the major disorders . Spitzer came up with agreed-upon definitions of mental disorders by convening meetings of experts in each diagnostic category and taking notes on their observations.

Dr. Spitzer is credited with removing homosexuality from the list of mental disorders in the D.S.M. in 1973. He decided to push for the change after he met with a group of gay activists and determined that homosexuality could not be a disorder if gay people were comfortable with their sexuality.

Spitzer told the Washington Post: “A medical disorder either had to be associated with subjective distress — pain — or general impairment in social function.”

In 2012, Dr. Spitzer publicly apologized for a 2001 study that found so-called reparative therapy on gay people can turn them straight if they really want to do so. He told the  New York Times in 2012 that he concluded the study was flawed because it simply asked people who had gone through reparative therapy if they had changed their sexual orientation.

“As I read these commentaries (about the study,) I knew this was a problem, a big problem, and one I couldn’t answer. How do you know someone has really changed?”

Spitzer’s successful push to remove homosexuality from the list of disorders was a major advance for gay rights and the gay community owe him a debt of thanks for success we have had so far in achieving equality today.

Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni To President Obama: Don’t Tell Me How To Run My House

Featured, Gay News From Around The Globe, , , , , , , ,

Uganda Prez

Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni has responded to President Obama’s denouncement of Uganda’s anti-homosexuality bill, saying, “You can’t tell me how to run my house.” While Museveni has not yet signed the bill, but some reports say he might do so over the next few days.

Museveni also issued a lengthy written response to Obama. Here’s how it begins:

I have seen the statement H.E President Obama of the USA made in reaction to my statement that I was going to sign the anti-homosexual Bill, which I made at Kyankwanzi. Before I react to H.E. Obama’s statement, let me, again, put on record my views on the issue of homo-sexuals (ebitiingwa, bisiyaga in some of our dialects). Right from the beginning of this debate, my views were as follows:

1. I agreed with the MPs and almost all Ugandans that promotion of homosexuality in Uganda must be criminalized or rather should continue to be criminalized because the British had already done that;

2. Those who agreed to become homosexuals for mercenary reasons (prostitutes) should be harshly punished as should those who paid them to be homosexual prostitutes; and

3. Exhibitionism of homosexual behavior must be punished because, in this part of the World, it is forbidden to publicly exhibit any sexual conduct (kissing, etc) even for heterosexuals; if I kissed my wife of 41 years in public, I would lose elections in Uganda.

As for President Obama not being able to tell Museveni  how to “run his house”.  Obama can tell our country to end the millions of dollars a year in aid to Uganda which has reported for years been absconded by its corrupt government and not going to those who need it.

SCIENCE: Northwestern University Researchers Have Found The Genetic Link To Homosexuality

Featured, GayGeek - All Things Gay and Geeky, ,

Gay Jeans Genes

A study of gay men in the US has found fresh evidence that male sexual orientation is influenced by genes. Scientists tested the DNA of 400 gay men and found that genes on at least two chromosomes affected whether a man was gay or straight. A region of the X chromosome called Xq28 had some impact on men’s sexual behavior– though scientists have no idea which of the many genes in the region are involved, nor how many lie elsewhere in the genome. Another stretch of DNA on chromosome 8 also played a role in male sexual orientation – though again the precise mechanism is unclear. Researchers have speculated in the past that genes linked to homosexuality in men may have survived evolution because they happened to make women who carried them more fertile. This may be the case for genes in the Xq28 region, as the X chromosome is passed down to men exclusively from their mothers.”

Michael Bailey, a psychologist at Northwestern University in Illinois, set out the findings at a discussion event held in conjunction with the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Chicago on Thursday. “The study shows that there are genes involved in male sexual orientation,” he said. The work has yet to be published, but confirms the findings of a smaller study that sparked widespread controversy in 1993, when Dean Hamer, a scientist at the US National Cancer Institute, investigated the family histories of more than 100 gay men and found homosexuality tended to be inherited. More than 10% of brothers of gay men were gay themselves, compared to around 3% of the general population. Uncles and male cousins on the mother’s side had a greater than average chance of being gay, too. [snip]

Qazi Rahman, a psychologist at King’s College London, said the results were valuable for further understanding the biology of sexual orientation. “This is not controversial or surprising and is nothing people should worry about. All human psychological traits are heritable, that is, they have a genetic component,” he said. “Genetic factors explain 30 to 40% of the variation between people’s sexual orientation. However, we don’t know where these genetic factors are located in the genome. So we need to do ‘gene finding’ studies, like this one by Sanders, Bailey and others, to have a better idea where potential genes for sexual orientation may lie.”

Interestingly the findings of this study is big news in London and Europe but there has been nary a word of it in any American mainstream media outlets.

Activist gene researchers!

Source: The Guardian:

Pope Francis: The Catholic Church should not “interfere spiritually” with the lives of gay people

Featured, Opinions and Rants, , ,

Pope Francis 2

BOOM! BOOM!

CNN reports:

When Francis was a bishop in Buenos Aires, Argentina, he received letters from gays and lesbians who said they were “socially wounded” by the church, he said. “But the church does not want to do this,” Francis said in the interview. The pope then recalled his comments in July, when he told the media aboard a flight to Rome, “Who am I to judge” gay people?” By saying this, I said what the catechism says,” the pope told Spadaro. The catechism, the Catholic Church’s book of official doctrine, condemns homosexual acts, but says gays and lesbians “must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity.” 

“Religion has the right to express its opinion in the service of the people, but God in creation has set us free: it is not possible to interfere spiritually in the life of a person.” Francis said that someone once asked him if he “approved” of homosexuality. “I replied with another question,” he said. “`Tell me, when God looks at a gay person, does he endorse the existence of this person with love, or reject and condemn this person?’ We must always consider the person. Here we enter into the mystery of the human being.”

“We cannot insist only on issues related to abortion, gay marriage and the use of contraceptive methods,” he told his Jesuit interviewer. “I have not spoken much about these things, and I was reprimanded for that.” But the pope said the church’s teachings on those issue are clear, and he clearly believes in those teachings, so what else is there to say? “It is not necessary to talk about these issues all the time,” Francis said

Those explosions you are hearing are Bill Donohue from the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights and Brian Brown of the National Organization for Marriage’s heads exploding.

Wish I had video.

NOT ONLY RUSSIA: 2 Men In Zambia Face 15 Years In Prison For “Acts Against The Order Of Nature”

Featured, Gay News From Around The Globe, , , , , ,

Zambia gay persecution

Amnesty International reports that two gay men are being held in prison indefinitely while they are awaiting trail for being charged with “Acts Against The Order Of Nature”

Philip Mubiana, a hair dresser and James Mwape, a brick layer, were charged with committing acts “against the order of nature”. They have been in custody for more than four months after being denied bail. If convicted they face a minimum of 15 years in jail. Laws prohibiting consensual, private, same-sex sexual activity criminalise the legitimate exercise of the rights to freedom of expression, conscience, expression and privacy. These are protected in numerous treaties ratified by Zambia including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the African Charter on Human and People’s Right.

In a separate case, human rights activist Paul Kasonkomona also faces charges of “idle and disorderly conduct” after giving a television interview in April urging Zambia to recognize the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex individuals.

U.S. assistance to Zambia has exceeded well over half a billion dollars in recent years.   USAID’s program in Zambia includes HIV/AIDS programs and monies to fight corruption and increase trade under the MCA Threshold Program.

Zambia which is part of the United Nations has been disregarding the U.N’.s Universal Declaration of Human Rights laws for years without suffering any ramifications.