Tag Archives: AIDS

Gay History Flashback – The Infamous Adonis Movie Theater NYC, NY (1975 – 1988) NSWF

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An oldie but a goodie. 

The 1,433-seat Adonis Theater was originally built as the Tivoli Theater in 1921 by Billy Rose for Fanny Brice of all people and it was one of a kind.  But as time went by the grandly opulent vaudeville house turned movie theater on Eighth Avenue and 51st Street in its declining years became famous for anonymous stud romping, porn, and SEX SEX SEX. 

Adonis Theatre in New York, NY - Cinema Treasures

It was a cinema palace that survived by giving Doris Day and Rock Hudson (oh the irony of it all) the pink slip and bringing in and out and in again Jack Wrangler, Kip Knoll, Richard Locke, and the infamous Falcon Video-Pac guys to survive and became one of New York’s most popular ALL-GAY adult theater in the 1970s and early 1980’s.

Not much history remains of the Adonis in books or on the internet just a few fading memories of those who who wandered its dark interior in days and nights of an era long gone by.

The Adonis came complete with a grand lobby and a balcony flanked by solid two-story Ionic columns.  Even as men prowled the aisles looking for sex the vast if not somewhat faded grandness of the theater could not be overlooked. Even Variety went so far as to peg it as the largest and most lavish gay porn theater in New York City.

In the late 70’s the Adonis was a sexual amusement part.  While the images of Jack Wrangler and Movies by Joe Gage flickered on the screen men in the aisles, the seats, the balcony, the bathrooms, and anywhere they could find would act out their sexual fantasies.  Sundays were so crowded that it was hard to find a seat in Adonis but that was all that was hard to find. Patrons would avoid the seats under the balcony’s edge at busy times for fear of being showered with semen from high above.

The Adonis was crowded at most times of the day, and night. Sleazy, and dark, it attracted a fun, fast crowd. Instead of popcorn, you could buy small tubs of lube, cock rings, and poppers at the concession stand. And for “boys on a budget” If one didn’t have the $7 admission you could easily meet someone in front of the theater to pay your entrance fee.

The Adonis’ house manager had a stake in the career of iconic porn star Jack Wrangler.  So in 1977, a  film called A Night at the Adonis was shot in the theater.  Theater employees such as Bertha the cashier acted in bit roles, and as soon as a print was readied it was on the screen at The Adonis.

A net posting by Oliver Penn recalls the movie.  . . “it was rather odd to be in the exact theater that was being depicted on the screen, sort of a movie coming to life all around you. What was happening on the screen was also happening in real life as you were watching the film.”

But the theater’s size, age, and the outbreak of the AIDS epidemic took its toll.  There were also some serious structural problems because of its age and lack of upkeep.  In the mid-’80 the balcony collapsed. Luckily no one was hurt

Real estate developers that had a stake in the neighborhood and deeply closeted Mayor Ed Koch who was using the AIDS epidemic to clean up Times Square trying to get the theater closed down to tidy it up for the building of the monolith Worldwide Plaza, soon to be built on the next block. One prospective tenant, a homophobic law firm Cravath, Swain & Moore, stipulated that the theater had to close before Worldwide Plaza was built. The plaza’s developer, William Zeckendorf, subsequently bought up the site, and that was the beginning of the end of the Adonis.

Later a little-known bizarre postscript to this story surfaced when a partner in said law firm David Schwartz—instrumental in shuttering the Adonis—was murdered by an 18-year-old male prostitute whom he’d spent the day with at his Connecticut summer home and then took to a sleazy Bronx motel. Schwartz had been stabbed 27 times.  It turned out that this moral pillar of the community who had a wife and three children liked rough street trade and had been living a double life for years.

But The Adonis did live on for a bit longer and transferred its name to another theater owned by further south on Eighth Avenue, at 44th Street which was quickly outfitted with campy Greek statues and Roman columns but it wasn’t the same.  Not long after the city of New York was doing its best to close down every gay sex establishment in NYC and “new” Adonis was eventually closed in 1994 by the City’s Health Department after a raid revealed high-risk sexual activities taking place among patrons.

The grand old Adonis Theatre would stand like a grey ghost until the spring of 1995 on its corner of 8th Avenue and 51st Street until it was demolished. Now its memory is a ghostly reminder of the heyday of gay sexual freedom in a now scared and scary post-AID world.

Do you have stories about The Adonis or other forgotten NYC gay places?  If so leave them in the comments.

Bijou Blog - AT THE ADONIS
Adonis Theatre in New York, NY - Cinema Treasures
Inside The Adonis Theater, December 1994
Lost Adult Theaters of New York: Then and Now - The Rialto Report

The Hateful Legacy of Ronald Reagan Who Let Gay Men Die In The Name Of "God".

The Hateful Legacy of Ronald Reagan Who Let Gay Men Die In The Name Of “God”.

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As Republicans remember and celebrate the revisionist life history of Ronald Reagan let us, the friends, the family, and the loved ones of the victims of Reagan’s bigotry and homophobia remember the REAL legacy of genocide, war-mongering, and poverty that he left behind all in the name of “God”.

Ronald Reagan was and always should be remembered as the President who helped bring back poverty to the masses, the President who changed American foreign policy, by selling arms to Iran and forwarding the profits to right-wing Central American dictators to help fund their death squads, and most of all as the President who is personally responsible for the deaths of thousands who died of AIDS and wiped out almost an entire generation of gay men.

Ronald Reagan deliberately ignored one of the deadliest diseases in the history of the world which is now affecting over 70 million people around the globe all in the name of God, bigotry, and homophobia.

In 1981 with the emergence of the AIDS epidemic also came the emergence of the Christian Right, which Reagan ushered into power and seized the moment that AIDS was a sign of God’s abhorrence for gay men. Reagan, saw the first signs of the AIDS epidemic in 1981, his first year in office, and said “Maybe the Lord brought down the plague because illicit sex is against the Ten Commandments.”

Ronald Reagan may have done laudable things but he was also a monster and, in my estimation, responsible for more deaths than Adolf Hitler. He is one of the persons most responsible for allowing the plague of AIDS to grow from 41 cases in 1981 to over 70 million today. He refused to even say the word out loud for the first seven years of his presidency and when he did speak about it it was with disdain. He was, in the words of his domestic policy adviser, Gary Bauer, “irrevocably opposed to anything having to do with homosexuality” (personal communication from the White House office in April of 1983). The Tragedy of Today’s Gays (Penguin, 2005),

“I can locate no work of any urgency, or indeed, much work at all, on AIDS” during his entire presidency, thus allowing many millions of gay men all over the world to be exposed to the virus without so much as a warning from anyone in his government. Those of us on the front lines can attest to this stone wall that was unbreachable. – Larry Kramer.”

AIDS research was chronically underfunded at the beginning of the outbreak when money for research and treatment was most needed.  When doctors at the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health asked for more funding for their work on AIDS, they were routinely denied.  Between June 1981 and May 1982, the CDC spent less than $1 million on AIDS and $9 million on Legionnaire’s Disease. At that point more than 1,000 of the 2,000 reported AIDS cases resulted in death; there were fewer than 50 deaths from Legionnaire’s Disease. This drastic lack of funding would continue through the Reagan years.

Newly unearthed audio of Ronald Reagan’s White House Press Secretary in daily meetings with the Press Corps from that period puts a face on the homophobic Reagan administration and proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that because AIDS affected mostly gay men that the Regan administration could not be bothered and did could care less that American citizens dying because of their homophobic bigotry.

It would not be until  October 1987 when pushed that Reagan would publicly speak about the AIDS epidemic in a major policy address. By the end of that year, 59,572 AIDS cases had been reported and 27,909 of those women and men had died. He and his administration did almost nothing during the first seven years of the epidemic.

In 1986, Reagan ordered Surgeon General C. Everett Koop to prepare a major government report on AIDS. Critics attacked Reagan for ordering the report on the same day he submitted requests to reduce the AIDS budget, according to the Globe. Koop’s report called for mandatory sex education for children as early as elementary school, but Reagan’s education secretary, William Bennett, and his undersecretary of education, Gary Bauer, strenuously opposed those efforts, calling for abstinence-oriented education.

With AIDS research being underfunded community education and prevention programs were routinely denied federal funding and would have been even more so if Regan had had his way. Only when pushed did Reagan offer any assistance.

Finally, in 1986 Reagan requested $85 million for AIDS research, but Congress horrified at the low number bumped that figure up to $244 million only to have Reagan then unsuccessfully try to rescind $50 million of that figure, according to the Boston Globe, but he ultimately agreed to Congress’ figure.  In 1987, Reagan proposed cutting the research budget for AIDS down to $214 million. Congress again responded dramatically against Reagen by raising it to about $400 million.

The Boston Globe reported that in 1986 – 1987 that AIDS patients were dying at a rate of about 80 per week.

As Barbra Streisand put it in an address to an AIDS Project Los Angeles fundraiser in 1992: “I will never forgive my fellow actor Ronald Reagan for his genocidal denial of the illness’ existence, for his refusal to even utter the word AIDS for seven years, and for blocking adequate funding for research and education which could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives.”

By the end of 1989, 115,786 women and men had been diagnosed with AIDS in the United States—more than 70,000 of them had died.

This is Ronald Reagan’s TRUE legacy to America.  And every day may we never forget it and remember those who died because of it.

Gay History - June 30: Cincinnati Police Ignore Anti-Gay Public Pool Riot, Bowers v. Hardwick, Jacob de Haan Assassinated, and MORE!

Gay History – June 30: Cincinnati Police Ignore Anti-Gay Public Pool Riot, Bowers v. Hardwick, Jacob de Haan Assassinated, and MORE!

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June 30th…….

1924:  Jacob Israel de Haan, Dutch writer and journalist, is assassinated at age 42 for his contacts with Arab leaders. His killer claims never to have known about Haan’s homosexuality, and said further, “I neither heard nor knew about this,” adding “why is it someone’s business what he does at his home?” According to Gert Hekma, Zionists spread a rumor he had been killed by Arabs because of his sexual relations with Arab boys.

1969: The 3rd consecutive night of rioting takes place in the Sheridan Square area of Greenwich Village at the Stonewall Inn.

1973:  The first lesbian conference in Canada is held at Toronto’s YWCA.

1974:  43,000 attended the 5th Annual Christopher Street Liberation Day Parade, more than double the number from the previous year.  The years parade included floats and themes for the first time./

1975:  Canada’s National Gay Rights Conference sees formation of National Gay Rights Coalition which is renamed the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Rights Coalition / Coalition Canadienne pour les droits des lesbiennes et des gais (CLGRC / CCDLG) in 1978. It folds two years later.

1979:  In London, England, 8,000 join the Gay Pride march from the Embankment to Hyde Park to hear Tom Robinson sing.

1979:  A group of 40 people in Cincinnati Ohio who had reserved a city park pool in the division of Clifton for a Gay Pride party are attacked by local residents who throw rocks and bottles at them. Police arrived, watched for a while and then drove away doing nothing. One man had to be rescued by a television news crew. Police refused to return, even after several calls reporting a riot.

1981:  Moncton, New Brunswick, city council passes a last-minute law to prevent a gay picnic from taking place in Centennial Park to celebrate Canada Day. Groups of gay people hold picnic anyway.

1981:  Governor Bob Graham of Florida signed the Trask Amendment into law which denied state funding to any university or college which allowed gay/lesbian/bisexual student organizations. It would later be struck down by the Florida Supreme Court as unconstitutional.

1984:  The Unitarian Church in the U.S. voted to approve ceremonies uniting same-sex couples.

1986:  The U.S. Supreme Court announced its decision in the case of Bowers v. Hardwick, a case challenging the constitutionality of the Georgia sodomy law.

Michael Hardwick was 29 and tending bar at a gay pub in Atlanta, Georgia, he threw a beer bottle into an outdoor trash can and got cited by the police for public drinking. The cop wrote down the wrong day on his summons. When Hardwick didn’t show up in court as a result, an arrest warrant was issued. An officer later showed up at his apartment to serve the warrant, and a guest who’d been sleeping on the living room couch said he wasn’t sure if Hardwick was home. The cop decided to take a look and found Hardwick in his bedroom, having oral sex with a man and they were both arrested for sodomy.

Hardwick’s case was dismissed without a trial by the district court, and then he actually won on appeal before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, where a panel of judges found that his fundamental right to privacy had been violated. . But when Hardwick’s case came to the Supreme Court, Justice Byron White didn’t frame it in terms of privacy or any other civil right. “The issue presented,” he wrote, “is whether the Federal Constitution confers a fundamental right upon homosexuals to engage in sodomy.” The answer was no. White got there by saying that proscriptions against homosexual conduct had “ancient roots,” stressing that at the time 24 states and the District of Columbia continued to outlaw sodomy

The court voted 5-4 to uphold the sodomy law.

White famously got the fifth vote that made his opinion speak for the majority from Justice Lewis Powell, a moderate, who said at the time that he didn’t know any gay people. (He meant openly gay people, since it turned out he had a gay clerk.).  Four years later, Powell famously told a group of law students that he regretted his decision. “I think I probably made a mistake in that one,” he said.

1986:  Dr. William Haseltine responds to a U.S. justice department memo which claimed that he said that HIV could be casually transmitted. He said his statements had been distorted and that casual contact posed no significant threat. Assistant Attorney General Charles Cooper later apologized to him.

1987:  After spending three years in jail for treason, South African AIDS activist Simon Nkoli was released on bail.

Nikoli founded the Gay and Lesbian Organization of the Witwatersrand in 1988. He traveled widely and was given several human rights awards in Europe and North America. He was a member of International Lesbian and Gay Association board, representing the African region. After becoming one of the first publicly HIV-positive African gay men, he initiated the Positive African Men group based in central Johannesburg.

Nikoli died of AIDS in 1998 in Johannesburg

1989:  Activists protest outside the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington DC because of the cancellation of an exhibit of photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe.

1990:  Gays in London, England, lay a wreath at the Cenotaph in memory of gays killed in Germany during the Holocaust.

1995:  British publication Capital Gay puts out its last issue.

1998:  Lawmakers in Catalonia Spain passed a bill which gives same sex couples the same inheritance and alimony rights as married couples, but stopped short of allowing the adoption of children. Catholic groups condemned the bill, saying it institutionalized immoral behavior.

2000:  David Copeland, 24, is convicted murder for planting a bomb in a London gay bar a year earlier.  Copeland a  Neo-Nazi militant  became known as the “London Nail Bomber” after a 13-day bombing campaign in April 1999 aimed at London’s black, Bangladeshi and gay communities.

2001:  Dozens are injured in Belgrade as roving bands of young thugs attack participants the first gay-rights march in Yugoslavia’s capital.

2005:  Spain becomes the fourth country in the world (after Belgium, the Netherlands and Canada) to legalize gay marriage as the Spanish parliament gives final approval to a bill authorizing same-sex weddings. To no one’s surprise the Catholic Church howled in protest, but the law passed anyway.

2009:  After a strenuous court battle, the Minnesota Supreme Court race was finally decided by a state Supreme Court ruling in favor of Al Franken. Franken is considered a great ally to have in the Senate, as he has spoken numerous times on his intent to vote in favor of expanding rights for gays, and because his vote makes a “filibuster proof” majority.

 

82-02-05 Bush-Trask amendment unconstitutional -
Remembering NYC's "Mineshaft" - 835 Washington St. NYC, NY (1976 - 1985)

Remembering NYC’s “Mineshaft” – 835 Washington St. NYC, NY (1976 – 1985)

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Mineshaft dress code, NYC - Vintage - AdonisMale

At one time New York City’s Mineshaft was the most notorious “members only” gay S&M/B&D gay sex club in history. Today it’s memory is treated more as a dirty little  secret and is almost all but a forgotten.

The building that housed the Mineshaft at 835 Washington Street was constructed in 1927 as an ordinary business office, and would later become one the most incredible sex-palace in the ’70’s.

Opened in October 1976 the Mineshaft was a sexual playground that would have made Caligula blush.

Membership was granted on the spot if one fit in – no designer clothes, no sneakers, no cologne.  Located on Washington Street at Little West 12th Street in the heart of the meatpacking district, it was open around the clock from Wednesday night through Monday morning, featuring a clothes check, dungeons, and shall we say other amenities.

Strolling about naked or in a jockstrap  was encouraged.

The Miineshaft’s nondescript street-level door opened to a stairway which led up to the doorkeeper, sitting on a barstool.  If you could pass muster you were let in.

The Mineshaft had rules of entrance, denim and leather only, no shirts with little alligators, no sneakers, and absolutely no cologne. But once inside everything was fair game.  The Mineshaft existed for one reason and one reasons alone.

SEX. 

Pure hedonistic no-limits sex.

Just inside the door was the big bar area with low lights and pool tables. Behind a partition was the “action” part of the club on two floors. There was an entire wall of glory holes with people kneeling in front of crotch-high holes and servicing disembodied erections.

A whole rabbit warren of small rooms was downstairs, a re-creation of a jailcell, the back of a truck, dungeons and the most infamous room talked about in NYC at the time.  A room where there was a bathtub in which men so inclined would would take turns being pissed on. 

In this day and age to many it’s shocking.  In the gay life in NYC in the late 70s and early 80s it was non-news.

In the early 80s with the outbreak of AIDS the Mineshaft scene turned sour.  NYC swept through the gay sex haunts of the community shuttering establishments left and right under ‘health violations” which in reality they were.  But it was also the chance that NYC needed to rid the city of sex establishments.

The Mineshaft was closed by the New York City Department of Health on November 7, 1985

Were establishments like The Mineshaft, The St. Marks Baths, The Adonis, The David and other X-rated theatres and venues responsible for AIDS?  No, not really.  They certainly didn’t help. But they were not the cause.  The city closed these establishments and still men gay men persisted having unprotected sex. Once one club was closed they moved to one that was still open, after the clubs were gone they went to the porn theatres, and after the porn theatres they went to Central Park, back to the bars and by then the internet came into play.  If half the time, money and effort that NYC spent on going undercover and closing these spots went to Health Education and planning with the gay community  the stigma of gay sex would have been much different.  Now don’t get me wrong.  I am not saying that places like the Mineshaft and others were innocent when it came to the spread of AIDS. But in reality they played a very small part of the overall problem which was the lack of information, education, and research.

So here we are over 20+ years after the height of the AIDS epidemic and there is still no cure.  The memories of places like the Mineshaft have been hidden away and swept under the rug like a dirty family secret, and are slowly being forgotten.  Should we be ashamed of it?  No.  It is part of our history and existed in another time far away from the morally uptight society of today.

I am a survivor of that time. 

I remember, I mourn, and I go on. 

And before they, and myself disappear I post them here so they can live on.

 
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Claims Poppers Cause AIDS.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Claims Poppers Cause AIDS.

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Welcome back to the mid 1980s!

On On April 29, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced his intention to challenge incumbent President Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination for the presidency and since then he has spouted non-stop batshittery about the GLBT population.

In a recent video unearthed by PatriotTakes, a Twitter page “dedicated to monitoring and exposing right-wing extremism and other threats to democracy,” Kennedy is seen once again promoting crazy unfounded or factually inaccurate claims. 

There’s a lot of people that said it is not a virus,” Kennedy said during a riff on the HIV/AIDS epidemic. “The virus is a passenger virus, and these people are dying mainly because of poppers. 

“A hundred percent of the people who died in the first thousand [with] AIDS were people who were addicted to poppers, which are known to cause Kaposi sarcoma in rats. And they were people who were part of a gay lifestyle where they were burning the candle at both ends,” he said.

“There were poppers on sale everywhere at the gay bars. And there were a number of people in the [National Institutes of Health] who said, ‘This is not a viral disease, but it’s a disease that is environmental and is being caused to people who are getting autoimmunity from doing these toxins,’” added Kennedy. “But for Tony Fauci, it was really important to call it a virus because that made it an infectious disease, and it allowed him to take control of it.”

Kennedy was obviously referring to a debunked theory from the 1980s . However, this theory was developed before scientists understood that the virus was spread through unprotected sex and has since been unequivocally disproven. 

Kennedy has also in the past compared the COVID-19 vaccine measures to the Holocaust and blamed antidepressants, like Prozac, for school shootings.

The Democrats really must do something about him.

Gay History- June 19, 1983: Founder of the Moral Majority Jerry Falwell: “AIDS Is God’s Punishment For Homosexuals.”

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June 19, 1983 – In Lynchburg, Virginia, hate-monger Jerry Falwell told his followers that “AIDS is not just God’s punishment for homosexuals, it is God’s punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals.”

Falwell founded Lynchburg Christian Academy (now Liberty Christian Academy) in 1967 and Liberty University in 1971 and co-founded the Moral Majority in 1979 which was the beginning of the LGBT hate groups of the day such as the Family Research Council, Focus on the Family, and the American Family Association.

By 1975, the Internal Revenue Service moved to revoke the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University, which forbade interracial dating (blacks had been denied entry until 1971). The decisions infuriated Falwell. “In some states, it’s easier to open a massage parlor than to open a Christian school”, Falwell complained.

On his evangelist program The Old-Time Gospel Hour in the mid-1960s, Falwell regularly featured segregationist politicians like Lester Maddox and George Wallace. About Martin Luther King he said: “I do question the sincerity and nonviolent intentions of some civil rights leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Mr. James Farmer, and others, who are known to have left-wing associations.”

In speaking of the Brown vs. Board of Education ruling, he said, in 1958:

“If Chief Justice Warren and his associates had known God’s word and had desired to do the Lord’s will, I am quite confident that the 1954 decision would never have been made. The facilities should be separate. When God has drawn a line of distinction, we should not attempt to cross that line.”

In 1977, Falwell supported Anita Bryant’s “Save Our Children” campaign, to overturn an ordinance in Dade County, Florida prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation. In urging the repeal of the ordinance, Falwell told one crowd, “Gay folks would just as soon kill you as look at you. Falwell also supported the similar “Brigg’s Initiative” that Harvey Milk helped defeat in California.

The Moral Majority became one of the largest political lobby groups for evangelical Christians in the United States during the 1980s. The Moral Majority was promoted as being “pro-life”, “pro-traditional family”, “pro-moral” and “pro-American” and was credited with delivering two-thirds of the white, evangelical Christian vote to Ronald Reagan during the 1980 presidential election. It is believed that Falwell’s close ties to Reagan also directly contributed to the Reagan administration’s refusal to recognize AIDS.

Falwell also regularly linked the AIDS pandemic to gay issues.  Among his many remarks over the years, he is probably most known for statements attributed to him about a Teletubby being a homosexual role model for homosexual recruitment and stating that LGBT organizations angered God, thereby in part causing God to let the September 11 attacks happen.

In early 2005, Falwell was hospitalized with a viral infection, discharged, and then hospitalized again on May 30, 2005, in respiratory arrest. President George W. Bush contacted Falwell to “wish him well”.

On May 15, 2007, Falwell was found without a pulse and unconscious in his office at about 10:45 a.m., after he missed a morning appointment, and was taken to Lynchburg General Hospital. “I had breakfast with him, and he was fine at breakfast…He went to his office, I went to mine and they found him unresponsive” said Ron Godwin, the executive vice president of Falwell’s Liberty University. His condition was initially reported as “gravely serious”; CPR was administered unsuccessfully.

Christopher Hitchens  described Falwell as a “faith-based fraud.” Hitchens took special umbrage with a declaration that 9/11 represented God’s judgment on America’s sinful behavior; deeming it “extraordinary that not even such a scandalous career is enough to shake our dumb addiction to the ‘faith-based.'”  Appearing on CNN a day after Falwell’s death, Hitchens said:

“The empty life of this ugly little charlatan proves only one thing: that you can get away with the most extraordinary offenses to morality and truth in this country if you will just get yourself called ‘reverend’.”

On C-SPAN, Hitchens commented that “If Falwell had been given an enema before his death, he could have been buried in a matchbox.“

Gay History – June 17: Liberace: ‘I’M NOT GAY!’, Barry Manilow, Walter Mondale, and NYC Funeral Homes Refuse AIDS Victims.

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June 17:

1883 – Birth date of Mauritz Stiller, the Finnish film director. Stiller was Greta Garbo’s discoverer, mentor, and friend. Tall, lean, gay, with a shock of hair and long expressive hands,  Stiller, was not only gay but a flamboyant man about town…One of Stiller’s most important relationships was with Nils Asther, the Danish actor.  Stiller was in demand in the film industry and his price to come to Hollywood was a contract for the then pudgy Greta Gustafsson.

1943 – Birth date of Barry Manilow, American singer-songwriter, musician, arranger, producer, conductor, entertainer, and performer.  Manilow stayed in the closet for many years, but his sexual orientation was an open secret in the music industry and among the Friends of Dorothy.  When Barry Manilow finally did come out in 2017 at the age of 73,  it really didn’t really matter and was a shock to no one.  

1948 – Anthropologist Ruth Benedict who advocated cross-cultural and racial equality died on this date. She is best remembered for her works on the national character of various cultures including several Native American tribes, and her most famous work on Japan, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword.   Benedict was a sometimes lover and lifelong friend of fellow anthropologist Margaret Mead.

Benedict held the post of President of the American Anthropological Association and was also a prominent member of the American Folklore Society. She became the first woman to be recognized as a prominent leader of a learned profession.

After Benedict passed away Margaret Mead kept the legacy of her lovers work going by supervising projects that Benedict would have looked after, and editing and publishing notes from studies that Benedict had collected throughout her life

1959 – On this date a London court awarded pianist Liberace $22,400 in damages against the “London Daily Mirror” for implying that the flamboyant entertainer was a homosexual by referring to him as a “mincing ice-covered heap of mother love.” The case went to trial, and when Liberace was asked by his own counsel whether he was gay. Liberace said no, saying: “My feelings are the same as anybody else’s.  I am against the practice because it offends convention and offends society.” –

Our only guess to how Liberace won the lawsuit is that the jury was both blind and deaf. 

1976 – In Toronto, the Coalition for Gay Rights in Ontario presents a brief “The Homosexual Minority in Ontario” to the Ontario Human Rights Commission.

1977 – Vice President Walter Mondale angrily left a San Francisco Democratic fund raising event when his speech on human rights in South America was interrupted by a man who demanded to know when he would speak in favor of gay rights. Members of the newly formed San Francisco Gay Democratic Club held up signs demanding a statement on human rights in the United States. The club was created by Harvey Milk.

1981 – Sen. Roger Jepson (R-IA) introduced the Family Protection Act in Congress. It specified that anyone who was homosexual or openly supportive of homosexuals could not receive student aid, social security, or veterans’ benefits; and regulated what public school textbooks could say about human sexuality. It never passed, and Jepson lost his bid for re-election when it was revealed he had a membership at a brothel.

1983 – New York State Funeral Directors Association announced its members would not embalm the bodies of those who had died of AIDS.

From The New York Times: “The state’s largest such group, urged its members yesterday not to embalm victims of AIDS until the government issues guidelines for safe handling of such cases. Governor Cuomo characterized the action as “unfortunate.” He said he had asked state officials to investigate all legal remedies “to insure that the civil rights and human dignities of AIDS victims’ families are not compromised.”

It was HELL.

1985 – Johnny Greene was fired from his job with McDermott International Inc. after writing an article for PEOPLE magazine about his own suspected case of AIDS. “They just walked in and said, ‘Get the hell out,’  Green said. “I hope they were acting out of panic or confusion, not belligerence or homophobia.”

Immediately after being fired, PEOPLE magazine hired Greene and put him under contract to report on the AIDS epidemic.

1989 – Jessie Portis Helm, a columnist for Gentleman’s Quarterly, died 

1990 – Twelve US marines attacked three gay men outside The Remington bar(pg.4) on Capitol Hill, leaving two of them unconscious. Two of the marines were fined $400 and confined to their barracks for 30 days. Despite witness accounts that several of the marines chanted, “Kill the fags,” Marine officials ruled that it was not a gay bashing but a bar brawl.

1990 – Mayor P.J. Morgan of Omaha, Nebraska declared the week of June 17 as “Understanding Our Differences, Respect All People Week.” Though in coincided with gay pride week, he received criticism for not mentioning gays and lesbians in the proclamation.

2005 – On this date the U.S. Roman Catholic Bishops agreed to a five-year extension on their unprecedented policy of permanently barring sexually abusive clergy from church work.  They did not take the opportunity to stop scapegoating gay clergy for the institutional church’s misdeeds. – Obviously the barring of sexually abusive clergy did not work. 

2006 – An estimated 2.4 million people took to the streets of Sao Paulo to celebrate the Brazilian city’s 10th annual Gay Pride parade.The record attendance — the largest in the world, according to organizers — topped 2005’s official crowd count of 1.8 million, and was a far cry from the 2,000 people who took part when Sao Paulo’s first Pride was held a decade ago. Some revelers dressed up as Batman, Elvis Presley, Cinderella or Marie Antoinette; others as gay cowboy lovers Jake and Heath from “Brokeback Mountain”.

Gay History – June 2: Bill Clinton Introduces PRIDE Month, AIDS Tax Introduced in Congress, A Chorus Line, and MORE!

OTD Gay History – June 2: Bill Clinton Introduces PRIDE Month, AIDS Tax Introduced in Congress, A Chorus Line, and MORE!

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June 2:

1983 – US Congressman Lawrence McDonald (D-GA) proposed that a “user-tax” be imposed on people with AIDS to finance research, saying that since they caused the epidemic they shouldn’t expect others to pay for the research necessary to find treatments.

McDonald, who considered himself a traditional Democrat “cut from the cloth of Jefferson and Jackson,” was known for his ultra-conservative views, even by southern standards and was more conservative than many members of the Republican Party at the time.  In fact, one scoring method published in the American Journal of Political Science named him the second most conservative member of either chamber of Congress between 1937 and 2002.

McDonald sponsored amendments to stop government aid to homosexuals and also co-sponsored a bill “expressing the sense of the Congress that homosexual acts and the class of individuals who advocate such conduct shall never receive special consideration or a protected status under law”.

MacDonald was also the second president of the John Birch Society and opposed the establishment of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day saying the FBI had evidence that King “was associated with and being manipulated by communists and secret communist agents.”

On September 1, 1983 Lawrence McDonald boarded Korean Air Lines Flight 007. to attend a celebration of the 30th anniversary of the United States–South Korea Mutual Defense Treaty. McDonald and the rest of the passengers and crew of KAL 007 were killed when Soviet fighters, under the command of Gen. Anatoly Kornukov, shot down KAL 007 near Moneron Island after the plane entered Soviet airspace. All passengers were lost.

1987 – “A Chorus Line” creator Michael Bennett passes away of complications from AIDS at age 44 in Tucson, Arizona.

Following several workshops and an Off-Broadway production, A Chorus Line opened at the Shubert Theatre on Broadway July 25, 1975, directed by Michael Bennett and co-choreographed by Bennett and Bob Avian. An unprecedented box office and critical hit, the musical received twelve Tony Award nominations and won nine, in addition to the 1976 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

The original Broadway production ran for 6,137 performances.

1989 – The first annual Lambda Literary Awards ceremony was held.  The “Lammy” is the most prestigious, competitive, and comprehensive literary award offered specifically to LGBT authors writing about queer lives across multiple genres published by large and small presses.

1998 – The Rhode Island legislature voted to repeal the state’s sodomy law. The prison sentence under the law had ranged from 7-20 years. 

2000 – Bill Clinton, is the first U.S. President to proclaim June as Gay and Lesbian Pride Month. Clinton took the occasion to renew his call for passage of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act and the Hate Crimes Prevention Act. 

President Bill Clinton declared June “Gay & Lesbian Pride Month” in 1999 and 2000. Then from 2009 to 2016, each year he was in office, President Barack Obama declared June LGBT Pride Month. Later, President Joe Biden declared June LGBTQ+ Pride Month in 2021 and 2022 and LGBTQI+ Pride Month in 2023.

Four years earlier in 1996 Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act which prevents the Federal Government from recognizing same sex marriages in America.

2008 – Charges of crimes against nature were dropped against two men who were arrested for having consensual sex in Wake County, N.C. since it was in private. Though the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Lawrence v. Texas in 2003 that consensual gay sex is not a punishable offense, North Carolina still classified sodomy as an illegal activity. Raleigh police were told that they could continue to arrest gay men for having public sex, but not private sex.

MEMORIAL DAY – WATCH: “A Day In The Life Of The AIDS Memorial Quilt” and Remember Our Lost and Fallen.

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There is more than one type of war and those who become causalities of it.

On October 12, 1996. The AIDS Memorial Quilt was unfurled on the National Mall in Washington, DC. and it was the last year that the whole of the AIDS Quilt was small enough to fit.

By 1989 alone 48,582 Americans had died from the acquired immune deficiency syndrome, according to the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control.

A total of 47,355 Americans died in combat during the Vietnam War according to the Department of Defense.

Let us remember our fallen also.

Gay History – May 18, 1981: Dr. Lawrence Mass Becomes The First Person To Report About AIDS.

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Many believe that the New York Times article of July 3, 1981, was the date of the first newspaper-published report about the deadly disease which would later be called AIDS by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.  But actually, the first published report that mentions the mysterious and deadly disease appeared in  New York City’s independent gay newspaper The New York Native three weeks earlier by Dr. Lawrence Mass.

Mass, who wrote a regular health column for the small weekly had heard rumors of a new disease striking down gay men in New York City. Some were coming down with a rare kind of skin cancer that had previously only affected the elderly living in the Mediterranean, Eastern Europe, and Middle Eastern regions called Kaposi’s Sarcoma. Other victims were stricken with a rare form of pneumonia which typically only appeared in people with severely suppressed immune systems such as cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy and transplant recipients. There were also a host of other odd diseases that gay men were coming down with, but so far nobody had figured out that there might be a single cause to link them all together.

Later Dr. Mass was assured by the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta that there was no evidence of an emerging “gay cancer,” Mass wrote an article titled, “Disease Rumors Largely Unfounded,” which began:

Last week there were rumors that an exotic new disease had hit the gay community in New York. Here are the facts. From the New York City Department of Health, Dr. Steve Phillips explained that the rumors are for the most part unfounded. Each year, approximately 12 to 24 cases of infection with a protozoa-like organism, pneumocystis carinii, are reported in the New York City area. The organism is not exotic; in fact, it’s ubiquitous. But most of us have a natural or easily acquired immunity.
“What’s unusual about the cases reported this year, is that eleven of them were not compromised hosts. The possibility there exists that a new, more virulent strain of the organism may have been ‘community-acquired.’” But Mass reported that there was not enough evidence (yet) to make a clear connection between the new disease and the gay community.

But the CDC was wrong and it wouldn’t be long before they realized that and a link was made.  

Mass followed up on his original article in July 1981 with a piece called, “Cancer in the Gay Community,” on the then-new HIV/AIDS epidemic. Chroniclers of the AIDS crisis now recognize Dr. Lawrence Mass as being the first to write about the emerging epidemic in print.

In 1982, Mass joined Larry Kramer, Edmund White, Paul Rapoport, Paul Popham, and Nathan Fain in co-founding Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC), the world’s first and still largest AIDS information and service organization. For 10 years and through four revisions, Mass authored GMHC’s guide, Medical Answers About AIDS, which usually concluded with an appeal for civil liberties for sexual minority persons and the sanctioning of same-sex relationships as “essential considerations in the preventive medicine of AIDS.

Beginning in the late 1990s, Mass extended his public health interests to the bear subculture of the gay community. He has addressed in a regular column a range of health topics of interest to this subculture, initially consisting of middle-aged overweight men, first for American Bear Magazine and later for A Bear’s Life magazine.

Dr. Lawrence Mass still works as an internist physician in New York City, where he resides with his life partner, writer, and activist Arnie Kantrowitz.

The papers of Mass and Kantrowitz are designated for deposit with the New York Public Library.