Long lost photos of Harvey Milk debating, Republican state Sen. John Briggs of Orange County, on Sept. 15, 1978, at Northgate High School over the Briggs Initiative — a state proposition that would have made it mandatory for school boards to fire openly gay and lesbian teachers have been unearthed.
Also called California Proposition 6 the initiative was on the California State ballot on November 7, 1978 The Briggs Initiative was the first failure in a movement that started with the successful campaign headed by Anita Bryant and her organization Save Our Children in Dade County, Florida, to repeal a local gay rights ordinance.
A diverse group of politicians including (shockingly) Ronald Reagan, Jerry Brown, Gerald Ford, United Farm Workers leader Cesar Chavez, Giants owner Bob Lurie and then-president Jimmy Carter all opposed the bill.
At the debate, Harvey Milk dismantled each of Briggs’ arguments with facts and shamed the senator for his most archaic talking points.
You normal people — who have a family, who have children — do you want a sexually disoriented person teaching your children?” Briggs asked, to hisses and boos from the audience.
Milk countered: “Child molesters are heterosexual, rapists are heterosexual. … Most murderers are heterosexual. Do you want those people teaching your children? You’re lying through your teeth and you know it.”
At one point, Milk asked Briggs who should be allowed to counsel a gay boy at a public high school such as Northgate.
“I would like him to go to a preacher,” Briggs responded, “or a pastor or a psychologist who could lead him out of that.”
Chronicle photographer John Storey who attended the event took dozens of pictures that were never published.
The recently discovered images reveal a dramatic and oddly staged event. Milk and Briggs sat on school-issued chairs in the middle of the Northgate High basketball court, facing a handful of media members. The audience, made up of community members young and old, sat in the bleachers on the side.
The Briggs Initiative was soundly defeated on Nov. 7, 1978, losing by more than a million votes.
Disney fired back at Florida’s fascists’ Governor Ron DeSantis on Thursday and boy was it a doozy. Disney is scrapping plans to build a $1 billion office complex in Florida, and the addition of over 2000 workers citing “changing business conditions”.
The announcement comes a week after Disney CEO Bob Iger said an ongoing dispute with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis raised questions about the company’s continued investment there. In a conference call with analysts, Iger said actions by DeSantis and Republican lawmakers amounted to a “campaign of government retaliation” against Disney.
The New York Times reports that people briefed on the matter said the company’s dispute with DeSantis “figured prominently” in the decision to cancel the project.
This move comes as a relief to many of the 2000 workers who were supposed to relocate to Florida to staff the campus. It wasn’t popular with affected employees, some of whom reportedly quit.
As for Governor Ron DeSantis.
We ask all fellow LGBTQ’s and Allies to sign on, share, and participate in a Boycott of Florida travel, tourism, and products.
May 12, 1975 – California decriminalizes same-sex acts between consenting adults. Assembly member Willie Brown and state Senator George Moscone (who will later in his be assassinated along with gay civil rights leaders Harvey Milk in San Francisco) co-sponsor AB 489, the “Consenting Adults Bill,” which decriminalizes sexual activity between consenting adults. But not between persons of the same sex.
Governor Jerry Brown signs the bill into law on May 12, 1975, and it goes into effect January 1, 1976.
Prior to 2003, sodomy was not legal in California. And could not be made so while it was illegal on the Federal level. The monumental Supreme Court case, Lawrence v Texas, ruled that systematically criminalizing sodomy is unconstitutional. The case serves as a precedent, and most U.S. states responded by decriminalizing gay sex.
In 2014, California became the first state in the U.S. to officially ban the use of gay panic and transgender panic defenses in murder trials.[ Public schools are also required to teach about the history of the LGBT community and transgender students are allowed to choose the appropriate restroom or sports team that match their gender identity.
California is seen as one of the most liberal states in the U.S. in regard to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT) rights, which have received nationwide recognition since the 1970’s
Derrick Patterson, was charged with more than 30 counts of robbery, burglary, grand theft and assault, according to the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office for using using the gay hookup site GRINDR to lure more than 20 gay men into dates that tuned into robberies, sometimes at knife point, over the past two years, according to an indictment unsealed Monday.
Via The LA Times: Patterson used a profile with a different person’s picture to arrange hookups with men in their homes. Often times, he’d tell his victims he needed to use their cellphones to watch porn to get aroused.. Once he had access to their phones, Patterson would use payment apps such as Venmo to send himself money or send money to the accounts of other victims whose phones he’d stolen. Sometimes Patterson would order the men to leave their doors unlocked and wait for him in a bedroom, then begin ransacking their homes. In cases in which victims realized Patterson’s intentions were criminal rather than sexual, Patterson threaten them or claim he had accomplices waiting outside who would lay waste to their homes if they didn’t comply.
Deputy Dist. Atty. Richard Ceballos. filed a hate crime enhancement against Patterson, noting he would specifically target gay victims because he believed they were “soft targets” and sometimes used anti-gay slurs during the attacks. In some cases, Patterson would have sex with the victims and steal money by using their phones during sex.
Ceballos also expressed frustration with GRINDR. He said the app was not responsive after several victims raised safety concerns about Patterson’s account and claimed that when police obtained a search warrant for information about Paterson’s account, the app said it had nothing to turn over.
A spokesman for GRINDR said the company takes all reports of abuse seriously and cooperates with law enforcement and that “We encourage users to be careful when interacting with people they do not know”
If convicted of all charges, Patterson faces up to 60 years in prison,
The Satyrs Motorcycle Club was founded in 1954 at the home of Chapin “Smitty” Smith along with seven founding members. The club’s incarnation began around a pool-party a few weeks before after a night of drinking, party and sex. It is the oldest continuously operating gay organization in the United States. It was the first gay organization with a set of Bylaws and a Club Constitution.
Though American motorcycle culture had begun in the late 1940s and early 1950s, homosexuality was illegal at the time, making gay motorcycle clubs unique organizations seen as outlaws on two counts—their motorcycling and their homosexuality. As John Laird, member of the Satyrs since 1961 explained, motorcycling offered men an escape from the bars “because in those days the LAPD was on a real hunt for gay men.”
Gay motorcyclists, encouraged by visual media, created and embraced a masculine gay identity, one that countered the preconceived feminine aesthetic of “fairies.”of that era.
Campgrounds became the members meeting spaces and gave the men the freedom to express themselves sexually. Because of the constant possibility of police raids while at home or in town, the early days of the Satyrs were very secretive: “minutes could be taken but no names could be used. Secrecy was a detrimental to the club in the highly repressive 1950’s. From the first club founding in 1954 until the mid-1980s, gay motorcycle clubs did not want to be mentioned in any gay publication, because it might result in the outing—and firing—of members who worked for the government.
Four years after the founding of the Satyrs in 1954, discontented Satyrs founded a second gay motorcycle club: the Oedipus Rex Motorcycle club. Most copied the Satyrs’ model. Indeed, the Blue Max Motorcycle Club, founded in 1968, modeled its constitution almost exactly after that of the Satyrs, as did the Buddy Motorcycle Club, founded in 1965, and many others. As their model spread in the 1970’s, motorcycle clubs as far away as New York City began asking for founding help from the Satyrs. The founders of the Satyrs started a phenomenon of gay motorcycle clubs that by 1979 had grown to over twenty clubs in California and many more throughout the country.
Like other clubs, gay motorcycle clubs donated money and put on events to benefit the community. The Blue Max Motorcycle Club supported the Los Angeles Times’ Summer Camp Fund, providing summer camp to “underprivileged youngsters” and also had a yearly run that benefited The Spastic Children’s Foundation Training Center, for children with cerebral palsy. Outsiders were invited and encouraged to experience the innerworkings of the clubs, ideally to whet their appetite and make them want to join the club. 52 Several gay motorcycle clubs during the 1970 Christmas season threw toy parties to benefit children and senior citizens in need. Even today, 63 years after its founding The Satyrs continues to sponsor activities including the Labor Day, Badger Flats Run which is one of their most well known activities, charity fundraising activities, and involvement community activities.
Watch – Original Pride: The Satyrs Motorcycle Club below and learn more.
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“Huntington Beach leaders were met with a mix of boos and cheers on Tuesday night as they axed plans to fly the Pride flag this coming June over city hall with a new policy that only allows government flags at city hall. Republican Councilman Pat Burns, who sponsored the debate, said the city should stick to the practice of only flying the city, state and national flags, along with occasionally flying the county flag and flags supporting prisoners of war and each branch of the military. Republican Councilman Pat Burns, who sponsored the debate, said the city should stick to the practice of only flying the city, state and national flags, along with occasionally flying the county flag and flags supporting prisoners of war and each branch of the military. “
Despite a large crowd packing Tuesday night’s meeting for the flag issue — the majority calling for council members to continue flying the pride flag each spring city leaders voted 4 to 3 to remove the standard from the city’s rotation.
Although Burns’ proposal did not specifically mention the pride flag, Councilmember Dan Kalmick said it clearly targeted the flag that represents “a group of folks who have been marginalized throughout history.
Connie Boardman, who served on the Huntington Beach City Council for eight years and was mayor twice, was one of dozens who spoke against the pride flag measure. Boardman noted that the item would prevent the city from flying the Olympic flag; Huntington Beach hopes to host the surfing competition when the Olympics come to Los Angeles in 2028.
The only flag Hunting Beach should fly is a VERY WHITE Flag of Surrender to Trump and the MAGA crew.
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The AIDS Plague years is the darkest chapter in gay history. The moments of pain, horror, and degradation that gay men suffered is all but forgotten today except by those who lived through it and survived.
One of those dark moments happened in California in 1986 when paranoid perennial Presidential candidate and nutjob Lyndon LaRouche at the height of the hysterical anti-gay backlash that had sprung up against the growing AIDS epidemic, founded his Prevent AIDS Now Initiative Committee (PANIC), which gathered enough signatures to place Proposition 64 onto the ballot. Prop 64, also known as the LaRouche Initiative, would have placed AIDS onto California’s list of communicable diseases under the state’s public health law, and that would have effectively forced anyone who was HIV-positive out of their jobs and schools and into a quarantine.
LaRouche and his followers claimed that such measures were required because AIDS was “worse than the Black Death” and was “more deadly to mankind than a full-scale thermonuclear war.” “A person with AIDS running around is like a person with a machine gun shooting up a neighborhood,” LaRouche told a San Francisco radio program. He also charged that “AIDS is the first known epidemic which could potentially wipe out the entire human race” and that his detractors were “guilty of one of the most evil cover-ups in medical history.”
Luckilydespite support by Congressman William E. Dannemeyer, Prop 64 lost in a landslide, 71% to 29%. LaRouche brought it back again in 1988 as Prop 69, and lost by an even wider margin. He also made that AIDS quarantine the centerpiece of his 1988 presidential campaign, which again he lost. But losing never stopped LaRouche from making other heinous lunatic remarks.
1889: Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau, French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, playwright, artist avant-garde French artist, is born in Maisoms-Lafitte, France. Cocteau is best known for his novel Les Enfants terribles (1929), and the films Blood of a Poet (1930), Les Parents terribles (1948), Beauty and the Beast (1946) and Orpheus (1949). His lover of many years was actor, Jean Marais.
1977: Canada’s Fifth Annual National Gay Rights Conference closes in the prairie city of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan
1978: A gang of anti-gay youth, went storming through The Rambles area of Central Park in New York City with baseball bats, bashing any men they thought were gay that came across their path. By the end of the night five men were hospitalized with serious injuries including Dick Button, former Olympic ice-skating star and sportscaster.
For many years a section of the west side 30-acre section of Central Park known as The Rambles was notorious for being a meeting and sex playground for gay men after dark.
The nighttime sex scene in the Ramble is conducted in silence, lest the voice dissipate the mutual fantasy evoked by the look, the pose, the costume, the attitude. Body language is the only language needed for success here. Some night people prefer a particular quiet corner, for one-on-one encounters. Others gravitate toward the Tunnel, that part of the Bridle Path which runs under the 77th Street overpass. The Tunnel is the most active group-sex scene in that area of the park. Some nights it will be crowded wall to wall with men until four in the morning. Some nights, too, the cops decide to come full speed down the Bridle Path in their squad cars covered with hgv insurance, headlights and spotlights blazing, barely giving those in a close encounters time to pick up their pants and run—before being run over. “For their own protection,” say the cops.
In the wake of themost recent gay beatings, there was much bitterness voiced against the police by gays—and straights—who frequent the Ramble. “They said only five gays were attacked, and that’s bullshit,” said Don, a young, straight doctor with a large gay practice in the neighborhood. “I’ve already heard about three other guys—one of them came to me—who were beaten by that same bunch. But at least they could walk.” Why don’t they go to the cops? “For what?” snorts Dr. Don. “If it happened on Central Park West, okay. The guys at the 20th Precinct are pretty good. But the cops in the park have seldom given gays anything but harassment. Go to them and you, the victim, are made to feel like a criminal.”
Dick Button to this day has never come out .
1980: The National Convention of the Liberal Party, one of Canada’s large mainstream political parties, adopts resolution to include sexual orientation in Canadian Human Right Act.
1987: James Donovan, a New York state senator, suggested that giving teens rosary beads would prevent the spread of AIDS more effectively than the distribution of condoms.
1996: The New Zealand Presbyterian Church rules that lesbian and gay people may not be licensed or ordained as elders or ministers or put in positions of leadership. The decision is also referred back to churches for a decision in two years.
1999: 21-year-old American soldier Pfc. Barry Winchell is bludgeoned to death while sleeping on his cot in Fort Campbell, Kentucky, by a fellow solider who thought he was gay.
The harassment was continuous until the Fourth of July weekend, when Winchell and fellow soldier, Calvin Glover, fought after Winchell accused a boasting Glover of being a fraud. Both were drinking beer throughout the day. Glover was soundly defeated by Winchell, after being taunted about being beaten by “‘a fucking faggot’ Glover took a baseball bat from a locker and struck Winchell in the head with it as he slept on a cot outside near the entry to the room Winchell shared with Fisher. Winchell died of massive head injuries on July 6 at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center.
Glover was later convicted of Winchell’s murder and is serving a life sentence in a military prison.
The top military officers at Fort Campbell who were aware of the harassment were cleared of any wrongdoing.
2007: George Melly, British bisexual jazz singer, music critic, author, anarchist, lush, and raconteur, dies in London, England, of lung cancer at age 80. He was also an art lecturer specializing in surrealism, a Distinguished Supporter of the British Humanist Association, and widely noted for his loud suits, louder ties and the image he cultivated of a hard-drinking throwback to the jazz age
2011: Assembly Speaker John Perez, D-Los Angeles, the first openly gay Speaker of the California State Assembly, urged lawmakers to approve a measure requiring public schools to teach the historical contributions of gay Americans, in Sacramento, CA. California becomes the first state in the nation to require public schools to add lessons about gay history to social studies classes, after Gov. Jerry Brown (D) signs the landmark bill into law the next week.
Derrick Patterson, 22, was taken into custody by the FBI and is charged in a federal criminal complaint. The robberies occurred between November 2019 and March 2022 after Patterson allegedly contacted people using Grindr and arranged to meet at their homes or hotel rooms, purportedly for sex, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office and KTLA. Officials said he would then draw different weapons, such as knives or a taser gun, and demand their wallets and cell phones.
Patterson is accused of stabbing a man in the chest in October 2020. The victim survived and was able to identify Patterson to the police.
Patterson faces up to 20 years in federal prison.
The FBI is looking for other victims of Patterson. They can contact the FBI’s Los Angeles Field Office at (310) 477-6565.
PLEASE always be careful when using social media for sex hook-ups.
A whopping group of about 50 seriously deranged quislings marched last night in West Hollywood to proclaim their support for Donald Trump. The homo-CON group the Log Cabin Republicans put together the event billed the march as “Gays and Housewives Take Over WeHo.”
The group many of them mask less, gathered at the Pacific Design Center on San Vicente Boulevard around 9:30 p. m. and at 10 p.m. began their march north to Santa Monica Boulevard, chanting “gays for Trump. They also walked along Santa Monica Boulevard, attracting angry shouts from people dining outside Fiesta Cantina, and also walked down Robertson Boulevard past the Abbey.
No injuries were reported during the march but some serious shade was thrown at the marchers..
You can watch rare sighting of the species known as MagaGayus Self-hateratus below.
One man yells at Lady MAGA, a Trump supporting drag queen, saying that other drag queen died for her right to walk in her heels pic.twitter.com/59VwZciDfk
