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Vocabulary > Gays, Gay rights, Homosexuality
Shirley Gerow, 66, kisses her partner Robin Burkhardt, 72,
from Central Valley, N.Y., as they watch the gay pride parade
on June 26, 2011 in New York.
Gerow and Burkhardt have been together for 16 years.
Tina Fineberg/AP
Boston Globe > Big Picture > LGBT pride
parades July 8, 2011
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2011/07/lgbt_pride_parades.html
homosexuality
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/21/health/21freedman.html
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article5391794.ece
http://music.guardian.co.uk/pop/comment/story/0,,2158800,00.html
homophobia
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/mar/03/homophobia-schools-study
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/may/02/homophobic-attack-hatred
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/apr/12/ian-mckellen-gay-tour-schools
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/nov/29/rupert-everett-madonna-carole-cadwalladr
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2009/oct/16/dailymail-stephen-gately
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1220756/A-strange-lonely-troubling-death--.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/jun/24/homophobia-racism-northern-ireland
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/mar/10/homophobia-pupil-behaviour
homophobic
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/29/opinion/sunday/homophobic-maybe-youre-gay.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/shortcuts/2011/dec/21/hip-hop-losing-homophobic-image
homophobic attacks
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/may/02/homophobic-attack-hatred
homophobic bullying
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/23/opinion/why-cyberbullying-rhetoric-misses-the-mark.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/13/us/13bully.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/oct/26/gay-history-lessons-bullying-schools
homophobic bullying in K schools
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/nov/10/school-hard-place-gay-bullying
gay-bashing
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/oct/26/paul-haggis-scientology-prop-8
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/oct/16/stephen-gately-jan-moir
antigay prejudice
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/13/opinion/l13gay.html
antigay adverts
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/apr/12/anti-gay-adverts-boris-johnson
gay men
http://money.guardian.co.uk/news_/story/0,,1692755,00.html
lesbian
http://money.guardian.co.uk/news_/story/0,,1692755,00.html
female homosexuality
Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness
1928
http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,6109,1382145,00.html
homophobic abuse > gay children > schools
http://education.guardian.co.uk/schools/story/0,5500,1479383,00.html
gay
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/nov/10/school-hard-place-gay-bullying
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/19/magazine/my-ex-gay-friend.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/19/opinion/19dowd.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/16/nyregion/16gays.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/11/nyregion/11bias.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/09/nyregion/09bias.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/jul/17/g2-interview-rupert-everett
http://www.guardian.co.uk/gender/0,11812,670739,00.html
http://www.ilga.org/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,1432039,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/gayrights/0,12592,835305,00.html
gay parents
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/29/us/for-bishops-a-battle-over-whose-rights-prevail.html
gay students
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/19/us/19gays.html
video games > gay relationships / characters > Dragon Age II
2011
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/apr/04/videogames-gay-characters
London lesbian and gay film festival
http://www.bfi.org.uk/llgff/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2011/mar/30/gigola-london-lesbian-gay-film-festival
The annual London Gay Pride parade
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/gallery/2010/jul/03/london-gay-pride-parade
Boston Globe > Big Picture > LGBT pride parades
July 8, 2011
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2011/07/lgbt_pride_parades.html
Watch James May in a London Pride ad
October 2008
Top Gear presenter fronts campaign for Fuller's beer brand.
Created by ad agency DCH
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/video/2010/oct/08/james-may-london-pride-ad
Matthew Shepard
USA
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/matthew_shepard/index.html
Alan Turing
1912-1954
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/people/alan_turing
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/alan-turing
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/mar/27/pass-notes-alan-turing
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/video/2011/mar/01/pilot-ace-computer-alan-turing
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/feb/25/turing-papers-auction-bid-bletchley
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-manchester-16061279
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/grrlscientist/2011/dec/19/1
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/sep/11/pm-apology-to-alan-turing
John Geddes Lawrence Jr.
USA 1943-2011
His bedroom encounter with the police in Texas
led to one of the gay rights movement’s signal triumphs,
the Supreme Court’s 2003 decision in Lawrence v. Texas.
(...)
The Lawrence decision struck down a Texas
law
that made gay sex a crime and swept away sodomy laws in a dozen other states.
The decision reversed a 17-year-old precedent, Bowers v. Hardwick,
which had ruled that there was nothing in the Constitution
to stop states from making it a crime for gay men
to have consensual sex at
home.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/24/us/john-lawrence-plaintiff-in-lawrence-v-texas-dies-at-68.html
Arthur Evans
USA 1942-2011
Arthur Evans helped form and lead the
movement
that coalesced after gay people and their supporters protested a 1969 police
raid
on the Stonewall Inn, a Greenwich Village gay bar
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/15/us/arthur-evans-68-leader-in-gay-rights-fight-is-dead.html
gay activist > Robert Earl Carter, priest and
gay activist USA
1927-2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/15/nyregion/15carter.html
gay activist > Harvey Milk
USA
1930-1978
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/m/harvey_milk/index.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/theater/a-play-inspired-by-slain-san-francisco-mayor-moscone.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/oct/13/schwarzenneger-law-harvey-milk-day
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2008/dec/15/harvey-milk-film-gay-rights
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/jan/16/harvey-milk-gus-van-sant
http://www.time.com/time/time100/heroes/profile/milk01.html
gay rights
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/gay-rights
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/24/us/john-lawrence-plaintiff-in-lawrence-v-texas-dies-at-68.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/sep/13/gay-rights-world-of-inequality
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/sep/07/iran-executes-men-homosexuality-charges
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/22/us/22legal.html
The Supreme Court strikes down Texas law banning sodomy
2003
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/26/politics/26CND-GAYS.html
gay community
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/jan/16/harvey-milk-gus-van-sant
gay couples
http://www.guardian.co.uk/gayrights/story/0,12592,1582547,00.html
gay adoptions
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/23/us/23adopt.html
queer
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/mar/10/homophobia-pupil-behaviour
straight
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/jul/17/g2-interview-rupert-everett
bisexual
coming out
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-02-07-gay-teens-cover_x.htm
come out of the closet
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/27/a-republican-comes-out-of-the-closet/
out of the closet
http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/03/in-the-barracks-out-of-the-closet/
stay in the closet
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/19/magazine/therapists-who-help-people-stay-in-the-closet.html
lesbian
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/21/arts/21johnston.html
lesbian mothers
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/dec/12/lesbian-mothers-my-two-mums
lesbian feminism > Jill Johnston
1929-2010
a longtime cultural critic for The Village Voice
whose daring, experimental prose style mirrored the avant-garde art she covered
and whose book “Lesbian Nation: The Feminist Solution”
spearheaded the lesbian separatist movement of the early 1970s
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/21/arts/21johnston.html
The IoS Pink List 2009
It's back - as controversial and, we believe, as necessary as ever.
Here is this year's roster of the 101 most influential gay and lesbian people in
Britain today
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/news/the-iiosi-pink-list-2009-1721869.html
cartoons > Cagle > don't ask, don't tell repeal
USA December 2010
http://www.cagle.com/news/DADT10/main.asp
"don't ask, don't tell''
USA
The policy known as "don't ask, don't tell'' was made law in 1993
amid a debate over the role of gays in the military.
It limits the military's ability to ask service members about their sexual
orientation (don't ask)
and allows homosexuals to serve provided they keep quiet about their sexual
orientation (don't tell)
and refrain from homosexual acts.
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/d/dont_ask_dont_tell/index.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/19/us/politics/19cong.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/19/opinion/19dowd.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/01/opinion/01wed1.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/22/us/22legal.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/22/us/politics/22cong.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/22/opinion/22wed1.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/10/us/10gays.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/25/us/politics/25tell.html
Steve Greenberg
Cagle
26 June 2010
Related
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/03/us/politics/03military.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/10/opinion/10sat1.html
John Lawrence, Plaintiff in Gay Rights Case, Dies at 68
December 23, 2011
The New York Times
By ADAM LIPTAK
John G. Lawrence, whose bedroom encounter with the police in
Texas led to one of the gay rights movement’s signal triumphs, the Supreme
Court’s 2003 decision in Lawrence v. Texas, died at his home in Houston on Nov.
20, his partner said on Friday. He was 68.
The cause was complications of a heart ailment, said his partner, Jose Garcia.
Aside from a posting on a funeral home’s Web site that did not mention the
Supreme Court decision, Mr. Lawrence’s death apparently received no immediate
publicity. It came to light when a lawyer in the case, Mitchell Katine, sought
to reach Mr. Lawrence with an invitation to an event commemorating the ruling.
The Lawrence decision struck down a Texas law that made gay sex a crime and
swept away sodomy laws in a dozen other states. The decision reversed a
17-year-old precedent, Bowers v. Hardwick, which had ruled that there was
nothing in the Constitution to stop states from making it a crime for gay men to
have consensual sex at home.
But Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, writing for five justices in the 6-to-3 Lawrence
decision, said, “The petitioners are entitled to respect for their private
lives.”
“The state,” he wrote, “cannot demean their existence or control their destiny
by making their private sexual conduct a crime.”
Paul M. Smith, who argued in the Supreme Court on behalf of Mr. Lawrence, said
the decision “laid the foundation for all the good things that have happened
since,” including decisions from state courts endorsing same-sex marriage and
the repeal of the military’s policy forbidding gay men and lesbians from serving
openly.
The logic of the Lawrence decision, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in dissent,
supported a constitutional right to same-sex marriage.
The case began on Sept. 17, 1998, when police investigating a report of a
“weapons disturbance” entered Mr. Lawrence’s apartment. They said they saw Mr.
Lawrence and Tyron Garner having sex and arrested them for violating a Texas law
prohibiting “deviate sexual intercourse with another individual of the same
sex.”
The two men were held overnight and each fined $200. Texas courts rejected their
constitutional challenges to the state law, relying on the Bowers decision.
In a new book, “Flagrant Conduct: The Story of Lawrence v. Texas,” which will be
published in March by W. W. Norton & Company, Dale Carpenter, a law professor at
the University of Minnesota, writes that the conventional understanding of what
happened that night is flawed.
In interviews for the book, police officers gave contradictory accounts of the
sex act they saw. Mr. Lawrence, for his part, told Professor Carpenter that he
and Mr. Garner, who died in 2006, had not had sex, then or ever, and were seated
perhaps 15 feet apart when the police arrived.
“If the police did not observe any sex,” Professor Carpenter wrote, “the whole
case is built on law enforcement misconduct that makes it an even more egregious
abuse of liberty than the Supreme Court knew.”
What is clear is that the arrest infuriated Mr. Lawrence.
“I don’t think he appreciated the constitutional issues,” said Mr. Katine, a
Houston lawyer who represented Mr. Lawrence. “He was upset about how he was
treated, physically and personally, that night. The fire stayed in him. When he
was vindicated in the Supreme Court, he felt he got justice.”
Suzanne B. Goldberg, who represented Mr. Lawrence as part of her work at Lambda
Legal, a national gay rights advocacy group, said Mr. Lawrence “was not your
typical test-case plaintiff.”
“He had not been active in the gay rights movement or even out as a gay man to
all of his co-workers and family,” said Professor Goldberg, who now teaches at
Columbia Law School. “Instead, this was something that happened to him. The
police came into his bedroom and put him into the middle of one of the most
significant gay rights cases in our time.”
John Geddes Lawrence Jr. was born on Aug. 2, 1943, in Beaumont, Tex. He served
four years in the Navy and worked as a medical technician until his retirement
in 2009. In addition to Mr. Garcia, he is survived by his brother, Charles W.
Lawrence, and a sister, Mary Jane Rodriguez, both of Kountze, Tex.
Mr. Lawrence attended the Supreme Court argument in his case, his lawyers
recalled, mingling with the people who had waited in line all night to see it,
alive with excitement, pride and a sense of history. “He was willing to be the
real-life face of injustice,” Mr. Katine said.
Mr. Lawrence reflected on his case years later in an interview with Professor
Carpenter. “Why should there be a law passed that only prosecutes certain
people?” he asked. “Why build a law that only says, ‘Because you’re a gay man
you can’t do this. But because you’re a heterosexual, you can do the same
thing’?”
John Lawrence, Plaintiff in Gay Rights
Case, Dies at 68, NYT, 23.12.2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/24/us/john-lawrence-plaintiff-in-lawrence-v-texas-dies-at-68.html
Franklin Kameny, Gay Rights Pioneer, Dies at 86
October 12, 2011
The New York Times
By DAVID W. DUNLAP
Franklin E. Kameny, who transformed his 1957 arrest as a
“sexual pervert” and his subsequent firing from the Army Map Service into a
powerful animating spark of the gay civil rights movement, died on Tuesday at
his home in Washington. He was 86.
His death was confirmed by the United States Office of Personnel Management,
which formally apologized two years ago for his dismissal.
A half-century ago, Mr. Kameny was either first or foremost — often both — in
publicly advocating the propositions that there were homosexuals throughout the
population, that they were not mentally ill, and that there was neither reason
nor justification for the many forms of discrimination prevalent against them.
Rather than accept his firing quietly, Mr. Kameny challenged his dismissal
before the Civil Service Commission and then sued the government in federal
court. That he lost was almost beside the point. The battle against
discrimination now had a face, a name and a Ph.D. from Harvard.
Though he helped found the Mattachine Society of Washington, an early advocacy
group, Mr. Kameny was not content to organize solely within the gay community.
He welcomed and exploited the publicity that came from broader — if foredoomed —
political efforts, like running in 1971 for the delegate seat representing the
District of Columbia in the House of Representatives.
He also claimed authorship of the phrase “Gay is good” a year before the 1969
Stonewall uprising in New York, widely regarded as the first milestone in the
gay rights movement. Many of the tributes that began to appear on the Web on
Wednesday noted that Mr. Kameny’s death coincided with National Coming Out Day.
Mr. Kameny has been likened both to Rosa Parks and to Gen. George Patton, two
historical figures not frequently found in the same sentence. “Frank Kameny was
our Rosa Parks, and more,” Richard Socarides, the president of the advocacy
group Equality Matters, said on Wednesday. During the Clinton administration,
Mr. Socarides was the special assistant for gay rights in the White House,
outside which Mr. Kameny and others had picketed in 1965 to protest their
treatment by the government.
The Patton analogy was made by Dudley Clendinen and Adam Nagourney in their 1999
book “Out for Good: The Struggle to Build a Gay Rights Movement in America.”
(Mr. Nagourney is a reporter for The New York Times, and Mr. Clendinen is a
former Times reporter.)
“Franklin Kameny had the confidence of an intellectual autocrat, the manner of a
snapping turtle, a voice like a foghorn, and the habit of expressing himself in
thunderous bursts of precise and formal language,” the authors wrote. “He talked
in italics and exclamation points and he cultivated the self-righteous arrogance
of a visionary who knew his cause was just when no one else did.”
Franklin Edward Kameny was born May 21, 1925, in New York City. He entered
Queens College, served in the Army in the Netherlands and Germany during World
War II and was awarded his doctorate from Harvard in 1956. He was hired as an
astronomer the next year by the Army Map Service, but lasted only five months
when the government learned he had been arrested by the morals squad in
Lafayette Park, across from the White House, which was known as a gay cruising
ground.
At the time, under an executive order signed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower
in 1953,“sexual perversion” was considered grounds for dismissal from government
employment. Mr. Kameny contested his firing through level after level of legal
appeal, until the Supreme Court declined to hear his case in 1961.
Unable to get another job in his field, he became radicalized, he told Eric
Marcus, who interviewed him for the 1992 book “Making History: The Struggle for
Gay and Lesbian Equal Rights, 1945-1990.” Mr. Kameny said his personal manifesto
emerged from the petition he prepared for the Supreme Court.
“The government put its disqualification of gays under the rubric of immoral
conduct, which I objected to,” Mr. Kameny said. “Because under our system,
morality is a matter of personal opinion and individual belief on which any
American citizen may hold any view he wishes and upon which the government has
no power or authority to have any view at all. Besides which, in my view,
homosexuality is not only not immoral, but is affirmatively moral.
“Up until that time, nobody else ever said this — as far as I know — in any kind
of formal court pleading.”
After this loss, Mr. Kameny recognized that the American Psychiatric
Association’s classification of homosexuality as a sickness posed a high hurdle
to the movement.
“An attribution of mental illness in our culture is devastating, and it’s
something which is virtually impossible to get beyond,” he said to Charles
Kaiser, who interviewed him in 1995 for his book “The Gay Metropolis:
1940-1996.” He was among those who lobbied for its reversal.
In December 1973, the psychiatric association’s board of trustees approved a
resolution declaring that homosexuality, “by itself, does not necessarily
constitute a psychiatric disorder.”
Leading psychiatrists who believed otherwise, like Dr. Charles W. Socarides (the
father of Richard Socarides), pushed for a membership-wide referendum in the
hope of overturning the resolution. In April 1974, 5,854 of the association’s
roughly 20,000 members voted to support the trustees’ position, 3,810 to oppose
it. The result left Mr. Kameny “ecstatic,” he said.
As for his firing, Mr. Kameny lived long enough to receive and accept an apology
from John Berry, the director of the United States Office of Personnel
Management, successor to the Civil Service Commission. Speaking of Mr. Kameny on
Wednesday, Mr. Berry said:
“He helped make it possible for countless of patriotic Americans to hold
security clearances and high government positions, including me.”
Franklin Kameny, Gay
Rights Pioneer, Dies at 86, NYT, 12.10.2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/13/us/franklin-kameny-gay-rights-pioneer-dies-at-86.html
Bullying as True Drama
September 22, 2011
The New York Times
By DANAH BOYD and ALICE MARWICK
THE suicide of Jamey Rodemeyer, the 14-year-old boy from
western New York who killed himself last Sunday after being tormented by his
classmates for being gay, is appalling. His story is a classic case of bullying:
he was aggressively and repeatedly victimized. Horrific episodes like this have
sparked conversations about cyberbullying and created immense pressure on
regulators and educators to do something, anything, to make it stop. Yet in the
rush to find a solution, adults are failing to recognize how their conversations
about bullying are often misaligned with youth narratives. Adults need to start
paying attention to the language of youth if they want antibullying
interventions to succeed.
Jamey recognized that he was being bullied and asked explicitly for help, but
this is not always the case. Many teenagers who are bullied can’t emotionally
afford to identify as victims, and young people who bully others rarely see
themselves as perpetrators. For a teenager to recognize herself or himself in
the adult language of bullying carries social and psychological costs. It
requires acknowledging oneself as either powerless or abusive.
In our research over a number of years, we have interviewed and observed
teenagers across the United States. Given the public interest in cyberbullying,
we asked young people about it, only to be continually rebuffed. Teenagers
repeatedly told us that bullying was something that happened only in elementary
or middle school. “There’s no bullying at this school” was a regular refrain.
This didn’t mesh with our observations, so we struggled to understand the
disconnect. While teenagers denounced bullying, they — especially girls — would
describe a host of interpersonal conflicts playing out in their lives as
“drama.”
At first, we thought drama was simply an umbrella term, referring to varying
forms of bullying, joking around, minor skirmishes between friends, breakups and
makeups, and gossip. We thought teenagers viewed bullying as a form of drama.
But we realized the two are quite distinct. Drama was not a show for us, but
rather a protective mechanism for them.
Teenagers say drama when they want to diminish the importance of something.
Repeatedly, teenagers would refer to something as “just stupid drama,”
“something girls do,” or “so high school.” We learned that drama can be fun and
entertaining; it can be serious or totally ridiculous; it can be a way to get
attention or feel validated. But mostly we learned that young people use the
term drama because it is empowering.
Dismissing a conflict that’s really hurting their feelings as drama lets
teenagers demonstrate that they don’t care about such petty concerns. They can
save face while feeling superior to those tormenting them by dismissing them as
desperate for attention. Or, if they’re the instigators, the word drama lets
teenagers feel that they’re participating in something innocuous or even funny,
rather than having to admit that they’ve hurt someone’s feelings. Drama allows
them to distance themselves from painful situations.
Adults want to help teenagers recognize the hurt that is taking place, which
often means owning up to victimhood. But this can have serious consequences. To
recognize oneself as a victim — or perpetrator — requires serious emotional,
psychological and social support, an infrastructure unavailable to many
teenagers. And when teenagers like Jamey do ask for help, they’re often let
down. Not only are many adults ill-equipped to help teenagers do the
psychological work necessary, but teenagers’ social position often requires them
to continue facing the same social scene day after day.
Like Jamey, there are young people who identify as victims of bullying. But many
youths engaged in practices that adults label bullying do not name them as such.
Teenagers want to see themselves as in control of their own lives; their
reputations are important. Admitting that they’re being bullied, or worse, that
they are bullies, slots them into a narrative that’s disempowering and makes
them feel weak and childish.
Antibullying efforts cannot be successful if they make teenagers feel victimized
without providing them the support to go from a position of victimization to one
of empowerment. When teenagers acknowledge that they’re being bullied, adults
need to provide programs similar to those that help victims of abuse. And they
must recognize that emotional recovery is a long and difficult process.
But if the goal is to intervene at the moment of victimization, the focus should
be to work within teenagers’ cultural frame, encourage empathy and help young
people understand when and where drama has serious consequences. Interventions
must focus on positive concepts like healthy relationships and digital
citizenship rather than starting with the negative framing of bullying. The key
is to help young people feel independently strong, confident and capable without
first requiring them to see themselves as either an oppressed person or an
oppressor.
Danah Boyd is a senior researcher at Microsoft Research and a
research assistant professor at New York University. Alice Marwick is a
postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft Research and a research affiliate at
Harvard University.
Bullying as True Drama,
NYT, 22.9.2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/23/opinion/why-cyberbullying-rhetoric-misses-the-mark.html
In Suburb,
Battle Goes Public on Bullying of Gay Students
September 13, 2011
The New Yrk Times
By ERIK ECKHOLM
ANOKA, Minn. — This sprawling suburban school system, much of
it within Michele Bachmann’s Congressional district, is caught in the eye of one
of the country’s hottest culture wars — how homosexuality should be discussed in
the schools.
After years of harsh conflict between advocates for gay students and Christian
conservatives, the issue was already highly charged here. Then in July, six
students brought a lawsuit contending that school officials have failed to stop
relentless antigay bullying and that a district policy requiring teachers to
remain “neutral” on issues of sexual orientation has fostered oppressive silence
and a corrosive stigma.
Also this summer, parents and students here learned that the federal Department
of Justice was deep into a civil rights investigation into complaints about
unchecked harassment of gay students in the district. The inquiry is still under
way.
Through it all, conservative Christian groups have demanded that the schools
avoid any descriptions of homosexuality or same-sex marriage as normal, warning
against any surrender to what they say is the “homosexual agenda” of recruiting
youngsters to an “unhealthy and abnormal lifestyle.”
Adding an extra incendiary element, the school district has suffered eight
student suicides in the last two years, leading state officials to declare a
“suicide contagion.” Whether antigay bullying contributed to any of these deaths
is sharply disputed; some friends and teachers say four of the students were
struggling with issues of sexual identity.
In many larger cities, lessons in tolerance of sexual diversity are now routine
parts of health education and antibully training. But in the suburbs the battle
rages on, perhaps nowhere more bitterly than here in the Anoka-Hennepin School
District, just north of Minneapolis. With 38,000 students, it is Minnesota’s
largest school system, and most of it lies within the Congressional district of
Ms. Bachmann, a Republican contender for president.
Ms. Bachmann has not spoken out on the suicides or the fierce debate over school
policy and did not respond to requests to comment for this article. She has in
the past expressed skepticism about antibullying programs, and she is an ally of
the Minnesota Family Council, a Christian group that has vehemently opposed any
positive portrayal of homosexuality in the schools.
School officials say they are caught in the middle, while gay rights advocates
say there is no middle ground on questions of basic human rights.
“I think the adults are much more interested in making us into a political
battlefield than the kids are,” said Dennis Carlson, the superintendent of
schools. “We have people on the left and the right, and we’re trying to find
common ground on these issues.”
“Keeping kids safe is common ground,” he said, pointing to district efforts to
combat bullying and to new antisuicide efforts.
Gay children, and some parents and supporters, say these efforts are undercut by
what they call the district’s “gag order” on discussion of sexual diversity — a
policy, adopted in 2009 amid searing public debate, that “teaching about sexual
orientation is not part of the district-adopted curriculum” and that staff
“shall remain neutral on matters regarding sexual orientation.”
The lawsuit was brought in July on behalf of six current and former students by
the Southern Poverty Law Center and by the National Center for Lesbian Rights.
It charges that district staff members, when they witnessed or heard reports of
antigay harassment, tended to “ignore, minimize, dismiss, or in some instances,
to blame the victim for the other students’ abusive behavior.”
One of the plaintiffs, Kyle Rooker, 14, has not declared his sexual orientation
but was perceived by classmates as gay, he said, in part because he likes to
wear glittery scarves and belt out Lady Gaga songs. In middle school he was
called epithets almost daily, and once he was urinated on from above the stall
as he used the toilet.
“I love attention, but that’s the kind of drama I just can’t handle,” Kyle said,
adding that when he was threatened in the locker room, school officials had him
change in an assistant principal’s office rather than stopping the bullying.
The district’s demand of neutrality on homosexuality, the suit says, is
inherently stigmatizing, has inhibited teachers from responding aggressively to
bullying and has deterred them from countering destructive stereotypes.
“This policy clearly sends a message to LGBT kids that there is something
shameful about who they are and that they are not valid people in history,” said
Jefferson Fietek, a drama teacher at Anoka Middle School for the Arts, using the
abbreviation for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.
Mr. Fietek, the adviser to a recently formed Gay-Straight Alliance at his
school, said he knew of several gay and lesbian students who had attempted or
seriously considered suicide.
Colleen Cashen, a psychologist and counselor at the Northdale Middle School,
said that by singling out homosexuality, the policy created “an air of shame,”
and that contradictory interpretations from the administration had left teachers
afraid to test the limits, seeing homosexuality and the history of gay rights as
taboo subjects. “I believe that the policy is creating a toxic environment for
the students,” she said.
Mr. Carlson, the superintendent, agreed that bullying persists but strongly
denied that the school environment is generally hostile. He said he welcomed
further initiatives that could result from negotiations over the lawsuit or with
the federal investigators. “We want all students to feel welcome and safe,” he
said.
But conservative parents have organized to lobby against change. “Saying that
you should accept two moms as a normal family — that would be advocacy,” said
Tom Prichard, president of the Minnesota Family Council. “There should be no
tolerance of bullying, but these groups are using the issue to try to press a
social agenda.”
A group of district parents who are closely allied with the family council
declined to be interviewed. Their Web site says that depression among gay
teenagers is often the fault of gay rights advocates who create hopelessness:
“When a child has been deliberately misinformed about the causes of
homosexuality and told that homosexual acts are normal and natural, all hope for
recovery is taken away.”
In Suburb, Battle Goes
Public on Bullying of Gay Students, NYT, 13.9.2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/13/us/13bully.html
Alfred
Freedman, a Leader in Psychiatry, Dies at 94
April 20,
2011
The New York Times
By WILLIAM GRIMES
Dr. Alfred
M. Freedman, a psychiatrist and social reformer who led the American Psychiatric
Association in 1973 when, overturning a century-old policy, it declared that
homosexuality was not a mental illness, died on Sunday in Manhattan. He was 94.
The cause was complications of surgery to treat a fractured hip, his son Dan
said.
In 1972, with pressure mounting from gay rights groups and from an increasing
number of psychiatrists to destigmatize homosexuality, Dr. Freedman was elected
president of the association, which he later described as a conservative “old
boys’ club.” Its 20,000 members were deeply divided about its policy on
homosexuality, which its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
II classified as a “sexual deviation” in the same class as fetishism, voyeurism,
pedophilia and exhibitionism.
Well known as the chairman of the department of psychiatry at New York Medical
College and a strong proponent of community-oriented psychiatric and social
services, Dr. Freedman was approached by a group of young reformers, the
Committee of Concerned Psychiatrists, who persuaded him to run as a petition
candidate for the presidency of the psychiatric association.
Dr. Freedman, much to his surprise, won what may have been the first contested
election in the organization’s history — by 3 votes out of more than 9,000 cast.
Immediately on taking office, he threw his support behind a resolution, drafted
by Robert L. Spitzer of Columbia University, to remove homosexuality from the
list of mental disorders.
On Dec. 15, 1973, the board of trustees, many of them newly elected younger
psychiatrists, voted 13 to 0, with two abstentions, in favor of the resolution,
which stated that “by itself, homosexuality does not meet the criteria for being
a psychiatric disorder.”
It went on: “We will no longer insist on a label of sickness for individuals who
insist that they are well and demonstrate no generalized impairment in social
effectiveness.”
The board stopped short of declaring homosexuality “a normal variant of human
sexuality,” as the association’s task force on nomenclature had recommended.
The recently formed National Gay Task Force (now the National Gay and Lesbian
Task Force) hailed the resolution as “the greatest gay victory,” one that
removed “the cornerstone of oppression for one-tenth of our population.” Among
other things, the resolution helped reassure gay men and women in need of
treatment for mental problems that doctors would not have any authorization to
try to change their sexual orientation, or to identify homosexuality as the root
cause of their difficulties.
An equally important companion resolution condemned discrimination against gays
in such areas as housing and employment. In addition, it called on local, state
and federal lawmakers to pass legislation guaranteeing gay citizens the same
protections as other Americans, and to repeal all criminal statutes penalizing
sex between consenting adults.
The resolution served as a model for professional and religious organizations
that took similar positions in the years to come.
“It was a huge victory for a movement that in 1973 was young, small, very
underfunded and had not yet had this kind of political validation,” said Sue
Hyde, who organizes the annual conference of the National Gay and Lesbian Task
Force. “It is the single most important event in the history of what would
become the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender movement.”
In a 2007 interview Dr. Freedman said, “I felt at the time that that decision
was the most important thing we accomplished.”
Alfred Mordecai Freedman was born on Jan. 7, 1917, in Albany. He won
scholarships to study at Cornell, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in 1937.
He earned a medical degree from the University of Minnesota in 1941 but cut
short his internship at Harlem Hospital to enlist in the Army Air Corps.
During World War II he served as a laboratory officer in Miami and chief of
laboratories at the Air Corps hospital in Gulfport, Miss. He left the corps with
the rank of major.
After doing research on neuropsychology with Harold E. Himwich at Edgewood
Arsenal in Maryland, he became interested in the development of human cognition.
He underwent training in general and child psychiatry and began a residency at
Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan, where he became a senior child psychiatrist.
He was the chief psychiatrist in the pediatrics department at the Downstate
College of Medicine of the State University of New York for five years before
becoming the first full-time chairman of the department of psychiatry at New
York Medical College, then in East Harlem and now in Valhalla, N.Y.
In his 30 years at the college he built the department into an important
teaching institution with a large residency program. He greatly expanded the
psychiatric services offered at nearby Metropolitan Hospital, which is
affiliated with the school and where he was director of psychiatry.
To address social problems in East Harlem, Dr. Freedman created a treatment
program for adult drug addicts at the hospital in 1959 and the next year
established a similar program for adolescents. These were among the earliest
drug addiction programs to be conducted by a medical school and to be based in a
general hospital. He also founded a division of social and community psychiatry
at the school to serve neighborhood residents.
With Harold I. Kaplan, he edited “Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry,” which
became adopted as a standard text on its publication in 1967 and is now in its
ninth edition.
During his one-year term as president of the American Psychiatric Association,
Dr. Freedman made the misuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union one of the
organization’s main issues. He challenged the Soviet government to answer
charges that it routinely held political dissidents in psychiatric hospitals,
and he led a delegation of American psychiatrists to the Soviet Union to visit
mental hospitals and confer with Soviet psychiatrists.
After retiring from New York Medical College, Dr. Freedman turned his attention
to the role that psychiatry played in death penalty cases. With his colleague
Abraham L. Halpern, he lobbied the American Medical Association to enforce the
provision in its code of ethics barring physicians from taking part in
executions, and he campaigned against the practice of using psychopharmacologic
drugs on psychotic death-row prisoners so that they could be declared competent
to be executed.
In addition to his son Dan, of Silver Spring, Md., he is survived by his wife,
Marcia; another son, Paul, of Pelham, N.Y.; and three grandchildren.
Alfred Freedman, a Leader in Psychiatry, Dies at 94, NYT,
20.4.2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/21/health/21freedman.html
Senate Repeals ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’
December 18, 2010
The New York Times
By CARL HULSE
WASHINGTON — The Senate on Saturday voted to strike down the ban on gay men
and lesbians serving openly in the military, bringing to a close a 17-year
struggle over a policy that forced thousands of Americans from the ranks and
caused others to keep secret their sexual orientation.
By a vote of 65 to 31, with eight Republicans joining Democrats, the Senate
approved and sent to President Obama a repeal of the Clinton-era law, known as
“don’t ask, don’t tell,” a policy critics said amounted to government-sanctioned
discrimination that treated gay, lesbian and bisexual troops as second-class
citizens.
Mr. Obama hailed the action, which fulfills his pledge to reverse the ban, and
said it was “time to close this chapter in our history.”
“As commander in chief, I am also absolutely convinced that making this change
will only underscore the professionalism of our troops as the best-led and
best-trained fighting force the world has ever known,” he said in a statement
after the Senate, on a preliminary 63-to-33 vote, beat back Republican efforts
to block final action on the repeal bill.
The vote marked a historic moment that some equated with the end of racial
segregation in the military.
It followed an exhaustive Pentagon review that determined the policy could be
changed with only isolated disruptions to unit cohesion and retention, though
members of combat units and the Marine Corps expressed greater reservations
about the shift. Congressional action was backed by Pentagon officials as a
better alternative to a court-ordered end.
Supporters of the repeal said it was long past time to abolish what they saw as
an ill-advised practice that cost valuable personnel and forced troops to lie to
serve their country.
“We righted a wrong,” said Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, the independent from
Connecticut and a leader of the effort to end the ban. “Today we’ve done
justice.”
Before voting on the repeal, the Senate blocked a bill that would have created a
path to citizenship for certain illegal immigrants who came to the United States
at a young age, completed two years of college or military service and met other
requirements including passing a criminal background check.
The 55-to-41 vote in favor of the citizenship bill was five votes short of the
number needed to clear the way for final passage of what is known as the Dream
Act.
The outcome effectively kills it for this year, and its fate beyond that is
uncertain since Republicans who will assume control of the House in January
oppose the measure and are unlikely to bring it to a vote.
The Senate then moved on to the military legislation, engaging in an emotional
back and forth over the merits of the measure as advocates for repeal watched
from galleries crowded with people interested in the fate of both the military
and immigration measures.
“I don’t care who you love,” Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, said as the
debate opened. “If you love this country enough to risk your life for it, you
shouldn’t have to hide who you are.”
Mr. Wyden showed up for the Senate vote despite saying earlier that he would be
unable to do so because he would be undergoing final tests before his scheduled
surgery for prostate cancer on Monday.
The vote came in the final days of the 111th Congress as Democrats sought to
force through a final few priorities before they turn over control of the House
of Representatives to the Republicans in January and see their clout in the
Senate diminished.
It represented a significant victory for the White House, Congressional
advocates of lifting the ban and activists who have pushed for years to end the
Pentagon policy created in 1993 under the Clinton administration as a compromise
effort to end the practice of barring gay men and lesbians entirely from
military service.
Saying it represented an emotional moment for members of the gay community
nationwide, advocates who supported repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” exchanged
hugs outside the Senate chamber after the vote.
“Today’s vote means gay and lesbian service members posted all around the world
can stand taller knowing that ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ will soon be coming to an
end,” said Aubrey Sarvis, an Army veteran and executive director for
Servicemembers Legal Defense Network.
Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona and his party’s presidential
candidate in 2008, led the opposition to the repeal and said the vote was a sad
day in history.
“I hope that when we pass this legislation that we will understand that we are
doing great damage,” Mr. McCain said. “And we could possibly and probably, as
the commandant of the Marine Corps said, and as I have been told by literally
thousands of members of the military, harm the battle effectiveness vital to the
survival of our young men and women in the military.”
He and others opposed to lifting the ban said the change could harm the unit
cohesion that is essential to effective military operations, particularly in
combat, and deter some Americans from enlisting or pursuing a career in the
military. They noted that despite support for repealing the ban from Defense
Secretary Robert M. Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, other military commanders have warned that changing the practice would
prove disruptive.
“This isn’t broke,” Senator James M. Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, said about
the policy. “It is working very well.”
Other Republicans said that while the policy might need to be changed at some
point, Congress should not do so when American troops are fighting overseas.
Only a week ago, the effort to repeal the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy seemed
to be dead and in danger of fading for at least two years with Republicans about
to take control of the House. The provision eliminating the ban was initially
included in a broader Pentagon policy bill, and Republican backers of repeal had
refused to join in cutting off a filibuster against the underlying bill because
of objections over limits on debate of the measure.
In a last-ditch effort, Mr. Lieberman and Senator Susan Collins of Maine, a key
Republican opponent of the ban, encouraged Democratic Congressional leaders to
instead pursue a vote on simply repealing it. The House passed the measure
earlier in the week.
The repeal will not take effect for at least 60 days, and probably longer, while
some other procedural steps are taken. In addition, the bill requires the
defense secretary to determine that policies are in place to carry out the
repeal “consistent with military standards for readiness, effectiveness, unit
cohesion, and recruiting and retention.”
“It is going to take some time,” Ms. Collins said. “It is not going to happen
overnight.”
In a statement, Mr. Gates said that once the measure was signed into law, he
would “immediately proceed with the planning necessary to carry out this change
carefully and methodically, but purposefully.” In the meantime, he said, “the
current law and policy will remain in effect.”
Because of the delay in formally overturning the policy, Mr. Sarvis appealed to
Mr. Gates to suspend any investigations into military personnel or discharge
proceedings now under way. Legal challenges to the existing ban are also
expected to continue until the repeal is fully carried out.
In addition to Ms. Collins, Republicans backing the repeal were Senators Scott
P. Brown of Massachusetts, Richard M. Burr of North Carolina, John Ensign of
Nevada, Mark Kirk of Illinois, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Olympia J. Snowe of
Maine and George V. Voinovich of Ohio.
“It was a difficult vote for many of them,” Ms. Collins said, “but in the end
they concluded, as I have concluded, that we should welcome the service of any
qualified individual who is willing to put on the uniform of this country.”
Mr. Lieberman said the ban undermined the integrity of the military by forcing
troops to lie. He said 14,000 people had been forced to leave the armed forces
under the policy.
“What a waste,” he said.
The fight erupted in the early days of President Bill Clinton’s administration
and has been a roiling political issue ever since. Mr. Obama endorsed repeal in
his presidential campaign and advocates saw the current Congress as their best
opportunity for ending the ban. Dozens of advocates of ending the ban —
including one severely wounded in combat before being forced from the military —
watched from the Senate gallery as the debate took place.
Senator Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat who is chairman of the Armed Services
Committee, dismissed Republican complaints that Democrats were trying to race
through the repeal to satisfy their political supporters.
“I’m not here for partisan reasons,” Mr. Levin said. “I’m here because men and
women wearing the uniform of the United States who are gay and lesbian have died
for this country, because gay and lesbian men and women wearing the uniform of
this country have their lives on the line right now.”
Senate Repeals ‘Don’t
Ask, Don’t Tell’, NYT, 18.12.2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/19/us/politics/19cong.html
The Senate Stands for Injustice
December 9, 2010
The New York Times
On one of the most shameful days in the modern history of the Senate, the
Republican minority on Thursday prevented a vote to allow gay and lesbian
soldiers to serve openly in the military of the United States. They chose to
filibuster a vital defense bill because it also banned discrimination in the
military ranks. And in an unrelated but no less callous move, they blocked
consideration of help for tens of thousands of emergency workers and volunteers
who became ill from the ground zero cleanup after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
The senators who stood in the way of these measures must answer to the thousands
of gay and lesbian soldiers who must live a lie in order to serve, or drop out.
They must answer to the civilians who will not serve their country when some
Americans are banned from doing so for an absurd reason, and to the military
leaders who all but pleaded with them to end this unjust policy. They must
answer to the workers who thought they were aiding their country by cleaning up
ground zero.
The Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, said that he would allow another vote on
repealing the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy in a free-standing bill
later this month. That long shot is likely to be the final test of whether the
Republicans are interested in allowing military equality.
Republicans wanted extra days of debate, demanding the right to amend the
defense bill that contained the repeal provision, and essentially killing the
bill without quite admitting to it by suffocating it of time. Mr. Reid said he
had concluded that they had no intention of repealing the repressive measure, so
he called for a vote.
The outcome was three votes short of the 60 needed to break the filibuster. Only
one Republican, Susan Collins of Maine, voted to end the filibuster. Two
Republicans who said they would vote for repeal, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and
Scott Brown of Massachusetts, voted the other way, as did one Democrat, Joe
Manchin of West Virginia. Ms. Murkowski and Mr. Brown stuck with a Republican
pledge to support no other measures until the tax-cut deal had been dealt with.
Mr. Reid will undoubtedly be second-guessed on his decision to call for a vote,
but given the other-worldly logic of a lame-duck session, it is hard to fault
his hard-bitten calculation of the Republicans’ intentions. Senator Carl Levin
of Michigan, the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said that if debate
on the 850-page defense bill did not begin this week, there would be no time to
finish it in the remaining few days of the session.
The defense bill would also have raised pay for soldiers, improved their medical
care and provided troops in Iraq and Afghanistan with additional equipment and
support. It would be the first time in 48 years that Congress did not approve
such a bill — all because of an irrational prejudice against gay men and
lesbians.
The filibuster on $7.4 billion in medical care and compensation for the workers
at ground zero will be harrowing for the tens of thousands who labored
tirelessly for weeks and eventually had to seek care under a patchwork of
temporary medical and research programs in the city. These police, firefighters
and waves of citizen volunteers need ongoing care for illnesses being traced to
the toxic fumes, dust and smoke at ground zero.
In the House, Democrats also took a wrongheaded vote to ban transfers of
prisoners from Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to detention facilities in the United
States. Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. has urged the Senate to strip the
provision from the final bill.
Another measure of overdue justice — the Dream Act, which would empower the
innocent children of illegal immigrants with education and public service
opportunity — barely survived a Republican filibuster in the Senate after being
tabled by proponents hoping to drum up support in coming days. There is little
sign of encouragement, however, for that good cause or others as the 111th
Congress expires in the grip of Senate Republicans demeaning public service as
an exercise of naysaying.
The Senate Stands for
Injustice, NYT, 9.12.2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/10/opinion/10fri1.html
Military Equality Goes Astray
September 21, 2010
The New York Times
The best chance this year to repeal the irrational ban on openly gay members
of the military slipped away Tuesday, thanks to the buildup of acrimony and
mistrust in the United States Senate.
Republicans, with the aid of two Arkansas Democrats, unanimously voted to
filibuster the Pentagon’s financing authorization bill, largely because
Democrats had included in it a provision to end the military’s “don’t ask, don’t
tell” policy.
Another vote to end the policy could come again in the lame-duck session in
December, but now there is also a chance it will be put off until next year,
when the political landscape on Capitol Hill could be even more hostile to gay
and lesbian soldiers.
The decision also means an end, for now, to another worthy proposal that was
attached to the Pentagon bill: the Dream Act, which permits military service and
higher education — as well as a chance for citizenship — for young people whose
parents brought them to this country as children without proper documentation.
Republicans said the inclusion of both items in the defense bill was a blatant
political attempt by Senator Harry Reid, the Democratic leader, to bolster his
chances for re-election by invigorating the party’s base. This is, in fact, an
election year, but the debate over the military’s discrimination policy has gone
on for years, and the looming balloting does not absolve Congress of the duty to
address this denial of a fundamental American right.
No evidence has been found that open service by gay and lesbian soldiers would
harm the military; in fact, a federal judge recently found the opposite. The
policy has led to critical troop shortages by forcing out more than 13,000
qualified service members over the last 16 years, according to the judge,
Virginia Phillips.
A Pentagon study now under way may help guide the implementation of a
nondiscrimination policy, but it is unlikely to change the basic facts of the
question.
President Obama, the House and a majority of senators clearly support an end to
“don’t ask, don’t tell,” but that, of course, is insufficient in the upside-down
world of today’s Senate, where 40 members can block anything.
The two parties clashed on the number of amendments that Republicans could
offer. Republicans wanted to add dozens of amendments, an obvious delaying
tactic, while Democrats tried to block all but their own amendments. In an
earlier time, the two sides might have reached an agreement on a limited number
of amendments, but not in this Senate, and certainly not right before this
election, when everyone’s blood is up even more than usual.
If the military’s unjust policy is not repealed in the lame-duck session, there
is another way out. The Obama administration can choose not to appeal Judge
Phillips’s ruling that the policy is unconstitutional, and simply stop ejecting
soldiers.
But that would simply enable lawmakers who want to shirk their responsibility.
History will hold to account every member of Congress who refused to end this
blatant injustice.
Military Equality Goes
Astray, NYT, 21.9.2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/22/opinion/22wed1.html
A Stonewall Veteran, 89, Misses the Parade
June 27, 2010
The New York Times
By MANNY FERNANDEZ
At noon on Sunday, thousands of marchers filled Fifth Avenue for New York
City’s annual gay pride parade. Nearly six miles away, on the sixth floor of a
nursing home in Brooklyn, the frail, white-haired woman in beige pajamas and
brown slippers in Room 609 sat motionless at the edge of her bed, staring out
her window.
She touched the medallion on her necklace — an image of St. Jude, the patron
saint of lost causes — and fiddled with one of her rings.
“This one,” she said of the ring on a pinky finger, “I hit a guy so hard I
knocked the stone out, and I hadn’t gotten around to put it back yet.”
She had forgotten that the gay pride march was Sunday. Her mind and her memory
are not as sharp as her wit and her tongue. She said she had been living there,
at the Oxford Nursing Home, for years (she arrived in April). She was not sure
how old she was (she will be 90 in December).
The woman in Room 609, Storme DeLarverie, has dementia. She is but one anonymous
elderly New Yorker in a city with thousands upon thousands of them. And many of
those who marched down Fifth Avenue on Sunday would be hard pressed to realize
that this little old lady — once the cross-dressing M.C. of a group of
drag-queen performers, once a fiercely protective (and pistol-packing) bouncer
in the city’s lesbian bars — was one of the reasons they were marching.
Ms. DeLarverie fought the police in 1969 at the historic riot at the Stonewall
Inn in Greenwich Village that kicked off the gay rights movement. The first gay
pride parade in 1970 was not a parade at all but a protest marking the one-year
anniversary of the Stonewall uprising.
Some writers believe Ms. DeLarverie may have been the cross-dressing lesbian
whose clubbing by the police was the catalyst for the riots (the woman has never
been identified). While others are adamant that Ms. DeLarverie was not that
woman, no one disputes that she was there, and no one doubts that the woman who
had been fighting back all her life fought back in the summer of 1969.
At one point on Sunday, she said she was not struck by the police. At another
moment, she said a police officer had hit her from behind. “He wound up flat on
his back on the ground,” said Ms. DeLarverie, a member of the Stonewall
Veterans’ Association. “I don’t know what he hit me with. He hit me from behind,
the coward.”
Ms. DeLarverie has struggled in recent years with a confluence of housing,
mental health and legal issues. In 2009, a social services group, the Jewish
Association for Services for the Aged, was appointed her legal guardian by a
judge. In March, she was hospitalized after she was found disoriented and
dehydrated at the Chelsea Hotel, her home for decades. No one occupies her room
on the seventh floor of the hotel, but it remains unclear if she will ever
return.
A small group of friends, including some of her neighbors at the Chelsea Hotel,
visit her regularly. A social worker with the nonprofit group SAGE, which
provides services to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender older people, has
been assisting Ms. DeLarverie since 1999, when she was at risk of eviction from
the hotel.
Some of her friends said they had been frustrated by the way she was treated by
the authorities and others, and they expressed disappointment that Ms.
DeLarverie’s troubles have not been a widespread concern for many gay and
lesbian activists.
“I feel like the gay community could have really rallied, but they didn’t,” said
Lisa Cannistraci, a longtime friend of Ms. DeLarverie’s who is the owner of the
lesbian bar Henrietta Hudson, where Ms. DeLarverie worked as a bouncer.
“The young gays and lesbians today have never heard of her,” Ms. Cannistraci
said, “and most of our activists are young. They’re in their 20s and early 30s.
The community that’s familiar with her is dwindling.”
Ms. DeLarverie’s friends said they were disturbed because she spent most of her
days inside the nursing home and they had not been allowed to take her outside,
even for walks.
Leah Ferster, chief services officer for the Jewish Association for Services for
the Aged, said she was not aware that that was a concern among her friends. “We
have to make sure she’s medically capable and able, and if that was true, then
we would be glad to speak with her friends and see if we can come up with a safe
plan and have her go out for a few hours,” she said.
Ms. DeLarverie’s first name is pronounced STORM-ee, like the weather, but in
Room 609 on Sunday, she was calm, chatty, graceful. Her life has been
flamboyant, boundary-breaking, the stuff of pulp fiction.
Friends say she worked for the mob in Chicago. The drag-queen group she
performed with decades ago, known as the Jewel Box Revue, regularly played the
Apollo in Harlem (she dressed as a man and the men dressed as women). She was
photographed by Diane Arbus. She carried a straight-edge razor in her sock, and
while some merely walked to and from the gay and lesbian bars in the Village,
friends said, she patrolled.
Sitting at the edge of her bed, her mind turned again to the parade, where, in
the past, she had been a fixture. She said she had a message for those who took
part in the celebration. “Just be themselves, like they’ve always been,” she
said. “They don’t have to pretend anything. They’re who they are.”
Ms. DeLarverie asked what time it was, and what time the march started. At one
point, she took off her slippers and seemed to look for her shoes. “I think they
started already,” she said. “They’re probably wondering where I am.”
Colin Moynihan contributed reporting.
A Stonewall Veteran, 89,
Misses the Parade, NYT, 27.6.2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/28/nyregion/28storme.html
Supreme Court Strikes Down
Texas Law Banning Sodomy
June 26, 2003
The New York Times
By JOEL BRINKLEY
WASHINGTON, June 26 — The Supreme Court struck down a Texas law today
that forbids homosexual sex, and reversed its own ruling in a similar Georgia
case 17 years ago, thus invalidating antisodomy laws in the states that still
have them.
Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, writing for the majority in the 6-to-3 Texas
decision, said that gay people "are entitled to respect for their private
lives," adding that "the state cannot demean their existence or control their
destiny by making their private sexual conduct a crime."
Justices John Paul Stevens, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G.
Breyer agreed with Justice Kennedy. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor sided with the
majority in its decision, but in a separate opinion disagreed with some of
Justice Kennedy's reasoning.
Justice Antonin Scalia wrote the dissent and took the unusual step of reading it
aloud from the bench this morning, saying "the court has largely signed on to
the so-called homosexual agenda," while adding that he personally has "nothing
against homosexuals." Joining Justice Scalia's dissent were Chief Justice
William H. Rehnquist and Justice Clarence Thomas.
Justice Scalia said he believed the ruling paved the way for homosexual
marriages. "This reasoning leaves on shaky, pretty shaky, grounds state laws
limiting marriage to opposite-sex couples," he wrote.
The court's actions today would also seem to overturn any law forbidding sodomy,
no matter whether it deals with homosexual or heterosexual activity.
The case, Lawrence v. Texas, No. 02-102, was an appeal of a ruling by the Texas
Court of Appeals, which had upheld the law barring "deviate sexual intercourse."
The plaintiffs, John G. Lawrence and Tyron Garner of Houston, were arrested in
1998 after police officers, responding to a false report of a disturbance,
discovered them having sex in Mr. Lawrence's apartment. Mr. Lawrence and Mr.
Garner were jailed overnight and fined $200 each after pleading no contest to
sodomy charges.
In its ruling today in the Texas case and its revisiting of the 1986 Georgia
case, the Supreme Court made a sharp turn.
In 1986, the justices upheld an antisodomy law in Georgia, prompting protests
from gay rights advocates and civil liberties groups. But in the 17 years since,
the social climate in the United States has changed, broadening public
perceptions of gays and softening the legal and social sanctions that once
confronted gay people. Until 1961, all 50 states banned sodomy. By 1968, that
number had dwindled to 24 states, and by today's ruling, it stood at 13.
Even though the court upheld the Georgia antisodomy statute — which had
applied to heterosexual as well as homosexual conduct — a Georgia court
later voided it. But the justices' ruling on the legal principle behind the
Georgia statute continued to stand, so today the court, voting 5 to 4, issued a
new ruling overturning its 1986 decision in the Georgia case.
Of the three current justices who were on the court when it initially ruled in
the Georgia case, in 1986, Justices Rehnquist and O'Connor voted to uphold the
Georgia law in 1986 and Justice Stevens voted to strike it down.
The Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, which works on behalf of gay rights
advocates and related groups, brought the appeal of the Texas ruling to the
court, arguing that it violated equal protection and due process laws. It
described sexual intimacy in the home as an aspect of the "liberty" protected by
the Constitutional guarantee of due process.
Today's ruling "will be a powerful tool for gay people in all 50 states where we
continue fighting to be treated equally," the Lambda fund's legal director, Ruth
Harlow, said. "For decades, these laws have been a major roadblock to equality.
They've labeled the entire gay community as criminals and second-class citizens.
Today, the Supreme Court ended that once and for all."
Some lawyers for the plaintiffs wept in the courtroom as the court made public
its decision today. Several legal and medical groups had joined gay rights and
human rights groups in their challenge to the Texas law.
But traditional-values conservatives reacted angrily to the court's actions,
particularly regarding the prospect that they could open the legal door to gay
marriages.
"If there's no rational basis for prohibiting same-sex sodomy by consenting
adults, then state laws prohibiting prostitution, adultery, bigamy, and incest
are at risk," Jan LaRue, chief counsel for Concerned Women for America, a
conservative group, said. "No doubt, homosexual activists will try to bootstrap
this decision into a mandate for same-sex marriage. Any attempt to equate sexual
perversion with the institution that is the very foundation of society is as
baseless as this ruling."
Nonetheless, today's ruling was not surprising, given the tone of the justices'
questions during oral arguments before the court on March 26, when it appeared
that a majority of the court was even then ready to overturn the Texas law.
Most of the remaining states with antisodomy laws forbid anal or oral sex among
consenting adults no matter their sex or relationship. Texas is one of only four
states whose law distinguished between heterosexual and homosexual consensual
sex.
In the March arguments, the plaintiffs' lawyer, Paul M. Smith, chose to argue
that while the concept of gay rights as such did not have deep historical roots,
a libertarian spirit of personal privacy did reach back to the country's
beginnings.
"So you really have a tradition of respect for the privacy of couples in their
home, going back to the founding," Mr. Smith said. He noted that three-quarters
of the states had repealed their criminal sodomy laws for everyone, "based on a
recognition that it's not consistent with our basic American values about the
relationship between the individual and the state."
Justice Scalia retorted, "Suppose that all the states had laws against flagpole
sitting at one time" and subsequently repealed them. "Does that make flagpole
sitting a fundamental right?"
The district attorney for Harris County, Tex., Charles A. Rosenthal Jr., argued
that "Texas has the right to set moral standards and can set bright-line moral
standards for its people." He asked the court "not to disenfranchise 23 million
Texans who ought to have the right to participate in questions having to do with
moral issues."
But in the ruling today, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote, "A law branding one
class of persons as criminal solely based on the state's moral disapproval of
that class and the conduct associated with that class runs contrary to the
values of the Constitution and the Equal Protection Clause, under any standard
of review."
Supreme Court Strikes Down Texas Law Banning
Sodomy, NYT, 26.6.2003,
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/26/politics/26CND-GAYS.html
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