Uncle Frank Rich on Ancient Gay HIstory

The man in the image here is Clayton Coots and you'll read more about him in this powerful story by Frank
Rich in New York Magazine. Though published in May, I've saved it for Pride Month, so enjoy.

In a new century dominated by terrorism and recession, few would deny two big bright spots: the election of an African-American president and the expansion of gay civil rights. The first arrived nearly 150 years after the Civil War. The second happened with the speed of a fever dream. The modern gay-rights movement only got going in 1969, after the Stonewall riots. Now a dozen states have legalized same-sex marriage, a concept unknown in political discourse a mere quarter-century ago. More astounding is the likelihood that a conservative-leaning Supreme Court will expand those marital rights, however incompletely, next month—it took more than a century after the Emancipation Proclamation to end all bans on interracial marriage.
As we just learned, a man can still be murdered for being gay a few blocks away from the Stonewall Inn. But the rapidity of change has been stunning. The world only spins forward, as Tony Kushner wrote. And yet as we celebrate the forward velocity of gay rights, I think we must glance backward as well. History is being lost in this shuffle—that of those gay men and women who experienced little or none of today’s freedoms. Whatever the other distinctions between the struggles of black Americans and gay Americans for equality under the law—starting with the overarching horror of slavery—one difference is intrinsic. Black people couldn't (for the most part) hide their identity in an America that treated them cruelly. Gay people could hide and, out of self-protection, often did. That’s why their stories were cloaked in silence and are at risk of being forgotten.
This history is not ancient. My own concern about its preservation comes not from some abstract sense of social justice but from my personal experience. I grew up in the Washington, D.C., of the sixties, where the impact of racism was visible everywhere, front and center in my political education. But gays—what gays? No one I knew ever saw them or mentioned them. Not until the eighties—when, like many Americans of that time, I was finally forced by the rampaging AIDS crisis to think seriously about gay people—did I fully recognize that a gay man had been my surrogate parent in high school, when I needed one most. Not that I ever thought to thank him for it.
For younger Americans, straight and gay, the old amnesia gene, the most durable in our national DNA, has already kicked in. Larry Kramer was driven to hand out flyers at the 2011 revival of The Normal Heart, his 1986 play about the AIDS epidemic, to remind theatergoers that everything onstage actually happened. Similar handbills may soon be required for The Laramie Project, the play about the 1998 murder of the gay college student Matthew Shepard. A new Broadway drama, The Nance, excavates an even older chapter in this chronicle: Nathan Lane plays a gay burlesque comic of 1937 who is hounded and imprisoned by Fiorello La Guardia’s vice cops. Douglas Carter Beane, its 53-year-old gay author, is flabbergasted by how many young gay theatergoers have no idea “it was ever that way.”
Clayton Coots, the gay man who changed my life, fell somewhere between The Nance and The Normal Heart on this time line. He was one of countless gay people who were hiding back then, sometimes in plain sight, from their friends, neighbors, relatives, students, and colleagues. In historical terms, back then was only yesterday. Yet much as we might want to reclaim these invisible men and women from the shadows, they continue to slip away. It’s one thing to retrieve the story of a gay American from the pre-AIDS era who was famous or notorious. It’s quite another to track down a closeted gay American of no renown who lived shortly before the gay-rights revolution took hold. I have spent more than twenty years off and on trying to piece together Clayton’s life. Even in death he is still in hiding.

The story continues HERE. Trust me, it is a "must read" for all.

And so it goes.
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What If...? Indeed, What If?

I am still processing the past weekend's events and a post will be forthcoming, but this arrived in my inbox and took my breath away.  I wanted to share.



If we could only imagine such a world. What if all these people were long-lived?  What might they have accomplished and given to the world?

But, they're not here.

And so it goes.
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NC Rep. Calls Matthew Shepard Hate Crime "A Hoax"

Glue sniffing, illiterate Congresswoman makes a dumb-ass statement about the already debunked story linked to Matthew's murder. This crap continues to sicken and anger me, and as I get older I find less and less patience for this kind of stupidity and wanton blissful ignorance.

First, there's this:

Summary: On April 29, 2009, in a speech on the House floor, Rep. Virginia Foxx claimed that Matthew Shepard's death was merely the result of a robbery gone bad. While his killers Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson did rob him, they also admitted that they were well aware of his sexual orientation and pretended they were gay to lure him away from the bar he was in at the time. The most striking feature of the case, of course, is that during the course of a normal, simple robbery, the victim is not generally beaten, tied to a post, and left for dead.

And this:

Rep. Foxx: "The bill was named after a very unfortunate incident that happened, where a young man was killed, but we know that that young man was killed in the commitment of robbery. It wasn't because he was gay. The bill was named for him, the hate crimes bill was named for him, but it's, it's really a hoax, that that continues to be used as an excuse for passing these bills."[House Floor Speech, 4/29/09]

All the evidence clearly indicates that this was a vicious hate crime, not a robbery gone bad.

Shepard's Killers Lured Him "Out Of A Bar By Saying They Were Gay." According to the New York Times: "According to the local police and prosecutors, the two men lured Mr. Shepard out of a bar by saying they were gay. Then, the Laramie police say, the pair kidnapped Mr. Shepard, pistol-whipped him with a .357 Magnum, and left him tied to a ranch fence for 18 hours until a passing bicyclist spotted Mr. Shepard, who was unconscious." [New York Times, 10/12/98]

OK Rep. Sally Kern should enjoy the company of Ms Foxx. I could spit nails right now. Read the rest for yourself at Media Matters for America.

Clearly, I am waaaaaaaaaay over stressed these days.

And so it goes.

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Matthew Shepard - It's been 10 Years!

From the Progressive via Common Dreams, by Steve Ralls:

It has been 10 years since openly gay college student Matthew Shepard was brutally killed in Wyoming. On Oct. 6, 1998, he was beaten and strung up on a fence. He died six days later.

Unfortunately, little has been done to curb such attacks, and elected leaders at the state and federal level are largely missing-in-action when it comes to protecting our lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) loved ones.

In the days and weeks immediately following Shepard's death, numerous elected leaders promised swift action to pass federal hate crimes legislation that would protect LGBT Americans.

Ten years later, the bill, which bears Shepard's name, has never become law.

The need for the law is as urgent now as it was in 1998. Hate crimes against the LGBT community increased 24 percent nationwide last year, according to the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs. Especially startling increases occurred in Michigan (up 207 percent), Minnesota (up 135 percent) and even in Los Angeles, which saw a 100 percent increase in anti-gay violence in 2007.

Anti-gay murders doubled, the coalition reported.

In California, student Lawrence King was gunned down in his school by a classmate who believed King was gay.

In Colorado, Angie Zapata, a young transgender woman, was attacked and killed while on a date.

In South Carolina, Sean Kennedy was viciously beaten outside a local gay bar, and later died from his injuries.

And now Matthew's autopsy results are among missing records in Wyoming.

If you have never seen The Laramie Project - on stage or the film, please do. If you want to support the fight against hate go to the Matthew Shepard Foundation and learn more.

And so it goes.
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Judy Shepard to Sally Kern

I wonder if sweet Sally even knows who Matthew Shepard was. Matt's mom responds to Sally's ignorance:

Sally Kern’s comments hit me like a punch to the gut. I was enormously saddened that someone—anyone, really, but especially an elected official—could say such mean things about other human beings. We have so much to deal with already—the incessant dreary news about war, about the economy, about shocking crimes. I’m amazed that someone like Sally Kern found the time to push a whole new theory about who we should fear.

But as despicable as Sally Kern’s ideas are, she is of course free to shout them from the rooftops. One of the oddest responses of people who agree with her has been that we are trying to restrict her freedom of speech. In reality, the Victory Fund gave her a megaphone. If she’s that proud of her speech, she must be thrilled that more than 1 million people have listened to it.

No, the question isn’t whether she has a right to spew hateful rhetoric. The question is whether she ought to.

My son died nearly ten years ago at the hands of people whose hatred changed many lives that day. It hardened hearts and brought others to their knees. It shook a nation and enraged millions. At that time, I knew there was a window of opportunity that I could use Matthew’s story and my voice in replacing hate with understanding, compassion and acceptance. Through the Matthew Shepard Foundation, we are reaching young people who are at risk of being poisoned by the dark ideas of people like Sally Kern.

I don’t know why Sally Kern is proud of comparing gay people to cancer or terrorism, but count me as someone who’s listening now to people like her. She may be free to say people like my son are a threat to America, but when she does she puts other mothers’ sons in danger. I pray she doesn’t say it anymore.

I am so tired of all this...

Story from HERE.

And so it goes.
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Gay Bashings Are Up

It figures:

Hate crimes against gays made up 16 percent of total documented hate crimes across the U.S. in 2006, up from 14 percent in 2005, the FBI reported Monday.

The rate of all bias-motivated crimes increased 8 percent in 2006. Hate crimes based on sexual orientation are the third most common type behind those based on race and religion, according to the annual report.

In May the House of Representatives passed the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act -- known as the Matthew Shepard Act -- in a bipartisan vote, and the Senate approved it as well. If enacted, the proposed law would give the federal government expanded jurisdiction to investigate and prosecute violent crimes based on a person's race, color, religion, or national origin as well as their sexual orientation, gender identity, gender, and disability. It also provides assistance to local law enforcement to investigate and prosecute bias-motivated violence, according to a Human Rights Campaign press release. Existing federal hate-crimes law covers only those based on a victim's race, color, religion, and national origin.

"This FBI report confirms what the Human Rights Campaign has known for over a decade -- that hate-crimes protections for the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender community are long overdue," HRC president Joe Solmonese said in a statement. "We urge Congress to send this legislation immediately to the president's desk, and for the president to sign it into law." (The Advocate)

I have nothing. I survived another 12 hour Black Friday. Time for Dinner and a cocktail (not necessarily in that order.

More later.
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Indiana's Own Matthew Shepard

But, with a twist...Absolutely Disgusting. This from KOS:

Three young men in Jackson County Indiana said they were so freaked out when 'propositioned' by Aaron Hall on April 12th, that they proceeded to beat the 100 pound, 5'4 man for hours, using their fists, boots, dragging him down a staircase while his head slammed into each step, and then throwing him in a ditch and leaving. Aaron managed to crawl out of the ditch and out into a nearby field, where he died, alone and naked.

Sound familiar? A bit like the story of Matthew Shephard? Then why no coverage outside of Jackson County, Indiana?

Is the lack of coverage due, perhaps, to allegations that Hall is gay? Or that no one is sure that these allegations are even true?

You see, the story is even stranger than it appears. Some contend that the young men made up the story about having been propositioned so as to use the 'gay panic defense,' in hopes of getting a more lenient sentence. Apparently the thinking was that exposure to homosexuality is so frightening that well... heck, anyone would go crazy and beat the hell out of a guy for hours, then toss him in a ditch to die.

A number of Hoosier bloggers have wondered at the lack of local coverage. In the interest of promoting this case, I thought I'd bring it out here for your perusal. This is a horrific crime, and while I don't promote the kind of overdone sensationalism (carried on for weeks at a time) evidenced on CNN and Fox News, this man's death should draw some notice. It should serve as a warning, at the very least. Whether Hall was or wasn't gay isn't the point. The fact that the teenagers used this as their defense... speaks volumes.

This from the Bloomington Alternative... one paper that did cover the story:

Crothersville is a town of 1,500, located midway between Louisville and Indianapolis just off Interstate 65 in the southeast corner of Jackson County.

According to the U.S. Census, it is 97.6 percent white, and 75.4 percent of its residents 25 or older have high school educations. The national average is 80.4.

It's not the sort of place that makes big news often. One of the more recent times was in 2005 when a 10-year-old Crothersville girl named Katie Collman was kidnapped, sexually assaulted and murdered.

"Ironically, it was Terry Gray, Garrett Gray's father, who served as the Collman family spokesman during the investigation and court proceedings," the Times reported.

The Collman case was big news. Indianapolis Star-columnist-turned-Internet-blogger Ruth Holliday noted on May 8 that it "had a lot of twists and turns." A search of the Star Web site turns up more than a dozen stories.

Yet the Star has left the Hall murder to the Jackson County media, the never-to-be-trusted Indianapolis and Louisville television stations and bloggers like Advance Indiana's Gary Welsh, who has covered the story in depth and, along with Holliday, has questioned the lack of major media attention.

A search of the Star Web site for Aaron Hall returned zero stories.

On May 3, Welsh, who is an advocate for hate crimes legislation in Indiana, wrote a column titled "Why Won't the Star Cover The Hate Crime Killing of Aaron Hall?" He noted that the paper "has been silent" about the Hall case but that editorial writer RiShawn Biddle argued in his May 1 Star blog that a hate crimes law would not have prevented Hall's murder.

And this from Gabriel Rotello at HuffPo: The Gruesome Death of Shorty Hall: Indiana’s Matthew Shepard

The story of a horrifying murder in rural Indiana has begun making the rounds of the blogs, where it's being compared to the crucifixion of Matthew Shepard.

The victim in this new outrage wasn't called Aaron 'Shorty' Hall for nothing. Shorty was 5-foot-4 and weighed a mere 100 pounds. In beefy rural Indiana, that passes for almost invisible.

On April 12, Shorty was allegedly beaten to death by Coleman King, 18, and Garrett Gray, 19. They subsequently confessed to police that the beating began when Shorty allegedly made a gay pass at them while they were all drinking beer at Gray's home.

The description of what happened next is horrific, a savage assault that eerily echoes the tortuous death of Matthew Shepard. This time it took the form of a relentless beating that went on for several hours at Gray's house before Shorty was finally dragged down the wooden stairs, his head banging loudly on each step.

King and Gray told cops they beat Hall again at the bottom of the stairs, threw him into a pickup truck and continued beating him as they drove down a remote dirt road.

Once there, one of them had the audacity to send a friend a cellphone photo of the dying Shorty. Then they dumped him, naked but still alive, in a ditch. According to weather reports, it was 39 degrees that night.

The next morning they returned and found Shorty's broken and lifeless body in a field near the ditch. He had apparently crawled out for help, found none, and died alone in the dirt.

A few days later they returned, wrapped the body in a tarp and hid it in Gray's garage, where police found it after being alerted by the recipient of the cellphone photo.

A sensational torture/murder hate crime like this seems like a slam dunk for major media attention, but so far it has received almost none.

Perhaps part of the reason is one of the case's odd twists: Some have publicly suggested that in fact Shorty made no sexual advance on Gray and King and that he was not, in fact, gay.

Instead, it's been suggested that the two teens cooked up the gay angle because they believed that in homo-hating Indiana, it would help excuse their murder.

In the twisted teenage wasteland of their minds, the theory goes, the so-called 'gay panic' defense is still operative in Indiana: If you simply say your murder victim made a queer pass at you, you'll probably get off lightly.

It's impossible to tell if this version is true. But that's no reason for the media to ignore this story. In fact, in a weird way the tale is at least as significant if Shorty was not gay.

The reason begins with the fact that Indiana remains one of just five states that refuses to enact a hate crimes bill. Why? Because such a bill would cover -- you guessed it -- gays.

The latest version failed in the state legislature again this February, and the executive director of the antigay American Family Association of Indiana, Micah Clark, credited "concerned Christians" with scuttling it.

If such Christians hadn't furiously lobbied the Indiana Statehouse about this bill, Clark said, it "would have passed easily." He smugly added, "The good guys won on this issue."

Shorty Hall's lonely death indicates otherwise.

I'm not suggesting that if Indiana had passed a hate crimes bill last February then this horrific murder would not have happened. But I am suggesting what law schools have taught for generations: "The law is a great teacher."

One of the reasons for hate crimes laws is to teach: to send a powerful lesson that the kind of savage bigotry that leads to violence and murder based on race, ethnicity and other factors -- including sexual orientation -- is a profound offense against the moral foundations of our society.

Hate crime laws send the lesson that violators will not be treated more lightly for such crimes, as they traditionally were, but punished more sternly.

When a state like Indiana stands almost alone by refusing to send such a message, it unavoidably sends the opposite message. And in rural Indiana it does so in a place teeming with vengeful right wing Christians who continue to infect the young with a vile hatred of gays. That leads to a combustible combination.

So in this tragic case, whether Shorty was gay or not, or made a pass or not, isn't the larger point.

The larger point is that Shorty's killers appear to have imbibed a profound lesson from the homo-hating Christians of their state and the simpering cowards in their state legislature, who would apparently pass a hate crimes bill "easily" if it didn't include the gays despised by so-called concerned Christians.

That lesson is this: If a queer comes on to you in Indiana and you kill him, pipe up about it because you just might get a pass. And hey, if you happen to kill someone who isn't queer, just call him queer anyway and you still might get a pass.

Concerned Christians in Indiana may have no problem with that. But I'm betting that Jesus would take a dimmer view.

And so am I. If you read this pass it on.

More later.

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Falwell – Fare(not so)well!

I have remained silent on the death of our pasty, porcine pastor for a self-selected proper length of time. Sort of like sitting Shiva with a tambourine. (And wouldn't the very idea of Shiva drive him batshit crazy?) When I read that he was found dead not long after gorging himself on a breakfast of all kinds of pork flesh, well I thought, if his bloated "vessel" made it across the river Styx, Lucifer probably planned a pig roast and party in hell that day. Oh, maybe even all week.

No longer in mourning black and back in my festive purple, here is offered a few of his many hits:

From the Carpetbagger Report

March 1980: Falwell tells an Anchorage rally about a conversation with President Carter at the White House. Commenting on a January breakfast meeting, Falwell claimed to have asked Carter why he had “practicing homosexuals” on the senior staff at the White House. According to Falwell, Carter replied, “Well, I am president of all the American people, and I believe I should represent everyone.” When others who attended the White House event insisted that the exchange never happened, Falwell responded that his account “was not intended to be a verbatim report,” but rather an “honest portrayal” of Carter’s position.

August 1980: After Southern Baptist Convention President Bailey Smith tells a Dallas Religious Right gathering that “God Almighty does not hear the prayer of a Jew,” Falwell gives a similar view. “I do not believe,” he told reporters, “that God answers the prayer of any unredeemed Gentile or Jew.” After a meeting with an American Jewish Committee rabbi, he changed course, telling an interviewer on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that “God hears the prayers of all persons…. God hears everything.”

July 1984: Falwell is forced to pay gay activist Jerry Sloan $5,000 after losing a court battle. During a TV debate in Sacramento, Falwell denied calling the gay-oriented Metropolitan Community Churches “brute beasts” and “a vile and Satanic system” that will “one day be utterly annihilated and there will be a celebration in heaven.” When Sloan insisted he had a tape, Falwell promised $5,000 if he could produce it. Sloan did so, Falwell refused to pay and Sloan successfully sued. Falwell appealed, with his attorney charging that the Jewish judge in the case was prejudiced. He lost again and was forced to pay an additional $2,875 in sanctions and court fees.

October 1987: The Federal Election Commission fines Falwell for transferring $6.7 million in funds intended for his ministry to political committees.

February 1988: The U.S. Supreme Court strikes down a $200,000 jury award to Falwell for “emotional distress” he suffered because of a Hustler magazine parody. Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, usually a Falwell favorite, wrote the unanimous opinion in Hustler v. Falwell, ruling that the First Amendment protects free speech.

February 1993: The Internal Revenue Service determines that funds from Falwell’s Old Time Gospel Hour program were illegally funneled to a political action committee. The IRS forced Falwell to pay $50,000 and retroactively revoked the Old Time Gospel Hour’s tax-exempt status for 1986-87.

March 1993: Despite his promise to Jewish groups to stop referring to America as a “Christian nation,” Falwell gives a sermon saying, “We must never allow our children to forget that this is a Christian nation. We must take back what is rightfully ours.”

1994-1995: Falwell is criticized for using his “Old Time Gospel Hour” to hawk a scurrilous video called “The Clinton Chronicles” that makes a number of unsubstantiated charges against President Bill Clinton — among them that he is a drug addict and that he arranged the murders of political enemies in Arkansas. Despite claims he had no ties to the project, evidence surfaced that Falwell helped bankroll the venture with $200,000 paid to a group called Citizens for Honest Government (CHG). CHG’s Pat Matrisciana later admitted that Falwell and he staged an infomercial interview promoting the video in which a silhouetted reporter said his life was in danger for investigating Clinton. (Matrisciana himself posed as the reporter.) “That was Jerry’s idea to do that,” Matrisciana recalled. “He thought that would be dramatic.”

November 1997: Falwell accepts $3.5 million from a front group representing controversial Korean evangelist Sun Myung Moon to ease Liberty University’s financial woes.

April 1998: Confronted on national television with a controversial quote from America Can Be Saved!, a published collection of his sermons, Falwell denies having written the book or had anything to do with it. In the 1979 work, Falwell wrote, “I hope to live to see the day when, as in the early days of our country, we won’t have any public schools. The churches will have taken them over again and Christians will be running them. What a happy day that will be!” Despite Falwell’s denial, Sword of the Lord Publishing, which produced the book, confirms that Falwell wrote it.

January 1999: Falwell tells a pastors’ conference in Kingsport, Tenn., that the Antichrist prophesied in the Bible is alive today and “of course he’ll be Jewish.”

February 1999: Falwell becomes the object of nationwide ridicule after his National Liberty Journal newspaper issues a “parents alert” warning that Tinky Winky, a character on the popular PBS children’s show “Teletubbies,” might be gay.

September 2001: Falwell blames Americans for the 9/11 terrorist attacks. “The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the Pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America. I point the finger in their face and say, ‘You helped this happen.’”

November 2005: Falwell spearheads campaign to resist “war on Christmas.”

February 2007: Falwell describes global warming as a conspiracy orchestrated by Satan, liberals, and The Weather Channel.

More later.

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Sign the Petition

WASHINGTON (AP)—Supporters of hate-crimes legislation said Thursday they expect Congress to enact a law this year expanding federal penalties for acts of violence against homosexuals.

They have renamed their latest proposal in honor of Matthew Shepard, the gay college student who died after he was beaten and tied to a fence in Wyoming in 1998.

‘’I can’t think of a better way to honor Matthew’s memory. He was a 21-year-old college student just living his life,’’ said Shepard’s mother Judy Shepard, who now heads a foundation in her son’s name.

Click on the banner above to read the rest of the article and then sign the petition.

More later.

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Matthew Passion: A New Play with Music

Now this is an intriguing bit of theatre news.

From the press release: “Matthew Passion tells the story of the passion of Christ; the story of Matthew Shepard being picked up, beaten up and left for dead on a hillside in Laramie, Wyoming, and the story of a middle-aged HIV positive survivor who outlives his life expectancy. Although the three stories take place in three different locations, and are two thousands years apart, they all reflect one another and converge in the final scene”

Go HERE.

More later.

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