Thursday, July 13, 2023 GLBT Historical Society Museum 4127 18th Street San Francisco, CA 941147:00 PM | General Reception 7:30 PM | Remarks by curator Julia RosenzweigTickets are $10.00 or free for members. Click here to reserve your ticket.
About the ExhibitionThe landscape of lesbian cartoons in the 1990s was small yet vibrant; full of passion, satire, self-deprecation, and deep-cutting political and social commentary. Publishing these cartoons in the early years of Curve magazine (which was named Deneuvemagazine between 1991-1995) was a natural fit, aligning with the pivotal lesbian publication’s cheeky voice and journalistic integrity, and enhancing both the aesthetics of the pages and its witty content. In the 1990s, these alternative artists had few platforms to publish their voices and their art. Curve magazine is proud to have been at the forefront of amplifying these marginalized voices and allowing them to further spread lesbian representation, culture, and humor.Artists showcased in this exhibit include Kris Kovick, Jennifer Camper, Hope Barrett, Rhonda Dicksion, Alison Bechdel, Cari Campbell, Andrea Natalie, Joan Hilty, Paige Braddock, Debby Earthdaughter, Diane DiMassa, Fish, Elizabeth Watasin, and Roberta Gregory.
LGBTQ+ Victory Fund, the only national organization dedicated to electing LGBTQ+ leaders to public office, endorsed 19 more out LGBTQ+ candidates. Victory Fund has now endorsed 145 candidates running in the 2023 cycle and 11 candidates running in the 2024 cycle.
LGBTQ rights activist, psychotherapist, and documentary filmmaker Lilli Vincenz, who played an important role in helping to organize groundbreaking gay rights protests outside the White House and Philadelphia’s Independence Hall in the 1960s, died June 27 of natural causes at her residence in an assisted living center in Oakton, Va. She was 86.
Vincenz is believed to be the first known lesbian to participate in a gay rights protest in front of the White House in April 1965, when she joined pioneering gay rights leader Frank Kameny, seven other gay men, and a bisexual and straight woman in a first-of-its-kind White House protest calling for equal rights for homosexuals.
The protest took place about two years after Vincenz also is believed to have been the first lesbian to join the Mattachine Society of Washington in 1963, which was D.C.’s first significant gay rights organization co-founded by Kameny and gay activist Jack Nichols in 1961. The Mattachine Society of Washington led the 1965 White House protest and other 1960s era gay protests in D.C.
According to a biographical write-up on Vincenz by lesbian historian Lillian Faderman for the current Mattachine Society of Washington that was reconstituted years later by D.C. gay rights advocate Charles Francis and others, Vincenz participated in other protests in the 1960s in support of what was then known as the homophile movement.
Among them were protests outside the Pentagon and the U.S. Civil Service Commission in Washington, which oversaw enforcing the federal government’s policy at the time of firing gay men or lesbians found to be working at federal government agencies.
Vincenz joined Kameny and other D.C. Mattachine Society members in another historic first in a protest outside Philadelphia’s Independence Hall beginning in the mid-1960s in support of homosexual rights.
Faderman’s biographical write-up on Vincenz says that in 1968, Vincenz brought her 16-millimeter movie camera to the Independence Hall gay protest to film what became the fourth annual Remembrance Day gay picketing at Independence Hall.
It would become the start of Vincenz’s practice as an amateur filmmaker to film other early gay rights protests and other gay events, including the 1970 gay and lesbian rights march in New York City to commemorate the first anniversary of the 1969 Stonewall riots in New York’s Greenwich Village that’s credited with rapidly advancing the modern LGBTQ rights movement.
In 1966, according to Faderman, Vincenz was named editor of the D.C. Mattachine Society’s monthly newsletter called The Homosexual Citizen. In 1969, Vincenz and D.C. lesbian activist Nancy Tucker co-founded an independent gay newspaper as a spinoff of the Mattachine newsletter called the Gay Blade, which later evolved into the Washington Blade.
Vincenz was born in Hamburg, Germany in 1937 and lived through World War II and the fall of the Nazi regime before immigrating to the U.S. in 1949 with her mother and sister at the age of 12.
She earned her bachelor’s degree in French and German at Douglas College in New Jersey in 1959 and a master’s degree in English at Columbia University in New York City in 1960, according to a biography on her by the LGBTQ organization Equality Forum.
The biography says Vincenz enlisted in the U.S. Army’s Women Corps or WAC after completing her master’s degree. But she was discharged from the Army after serving nine months at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in D.C. on grounds of homosexuality. According to the Equality Forum write-up, she was outed by her roommate, which led to a general discharge under honorable conditions.
While involved in gay rights endeavors in the 1970s, Vincenz received a second master’s degree in psychology from George Mason University in Virginia in 1976. In 1990, she received her Ph.D. in human development at the University of Maryland, according to a write-up on her background by the Library of Congress.
That write-up came about shortly after Vincenz donated her papers and the films she had made of LGBTQ rights events in 2013 to the Library of Congress. The donation included some 10,000 papers, photographs, 16-mm movies, and memorabilia collected over a period of more than 50 years.
The Library of Congress statement says the donation of Vincenz’s papers and memorabilia was made through her agent, Charles Francis, the co-founder of the Kameny Papers Project, which facilitated the donation of Kameny’s papers to the Library of Congress in 2006.
It was at the time of her discharge from the Army in 1963 that Vincenz became involved with the Mattachine Society of Washington, according to the Library of Congress statement. Her LGBTQ rights activities continued through the 1970s while she also began her private psychotherapy practice with a focus on mental health issues faced by lesbians and bisexual women.
In 1971, Vincenz supported Frank Kameny’s campaign for the D.C. congressional seat in his role as the first known openly gay person in the country to run for public office. Kameny lost the election but is credited, through help from Vincenz, with opening the way for other LGBTQ candidates to run for and win election to public office.
Through most of the 1970s Vincenz hosted the Gay Women’s Open House in D.C. as a means of providing a safe space for lesbians to socialize and discuss what was then referred to as gay activism. She continued her activism in the 1980s and 1990s and during the peak of the AIDS epidemic she provided support for gay men through her psychotherapy practice, according to fellow activists and friends. Among the organizations she became involved with was the Daughters of Bilitis, a national lesbian rights organization.
People who knew Vincenz have said she and her domestic partner since 1986, Nancy Davis, hosted many LGBTQ-related events in their Arlington, Va., home where the two founded an organization in 1992 called the Community for Creative Self-Development.
D.C.’s Rainbow History Project says in a write-up on the two women that they called the organization a “holistic learning community for empowering gay women and men and all gay-friendly people, creatively, spiritually, and psychologically.”
Davis died of natural causes in 2019 at the age of 82.
“Lilli honored us all by donating her thousands of pages of papers, photographs, and iconic historical documentaries, ‘The Second Largest Minority’ (1968) and ‘Gay and Proud’ (1970) to the Library of Congress,” Francis said. “Through her gift, Lilli’s films now belong to the American people as does her legacy.”
Vincenz’s friend Bob Brown said Vincenz is survived by a nephew and three nieces and many friends. He said plans for a memorial service for Vincenz would be announced sometime later.
The current day Mattachine Society of Washington produced a film on Vincenz’s life that focuses on her role as one of the first to film historic LGBTQ events, especially her film ‘Gay and Proud’ that captured the gay march in 1970 in New York to commemorate the first anniversary of the Stonewall riots.
Among those interviewed in the Mattachine film and who praised Vincenz’s work were U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisc.), lesbian historian Faderman, and gay historian Eric Cervini. The film, which Mattachine official Charles Francis says captures the essence of Vincenz’s work and legacy, can be viewed on YouTube.
As the U.S. Supreme Court continues to save its most controversial rulings that reshape American society for the end of its session like a cliffhanger at the end of a television season, it once again issued a ruling that upends decades of precedent. With the ultraconservative court’s ruling that ends affirmative action in college admissions in the U.S., experts and advocates warn that the unintended consequences of the ruling will be detrimental to many, including Black and brown queer college students.
One of the most concerning outcomes of the ruling is the effect that it will have on historically Black colleges and universities, they say.
Human Rights Campaign HBCU program director Leslie Hall says that it’s imperative to highlight that the effects of this ruling will result in fewer queer Black students accessing higher education while also adding strain to historically Black colleges and universities as students seek refuge in environments where their abilities are valued.
“The University of California did this a couple of years ago, even without this case,” Hall tells The Advocate. “They said they’d no longer use race as a checkbox on the admission criteria. And what happened is what everybody knew was going to happen. The BIPOC numbers in the UC system have gone down precipitously.”
He says that to understand how the court got to this point, one needs to know why HBCUs exist.
“It’s because Black folks in particular were unable, were not allowed by practice or by law to go to the predominant national public institutions, and even when the Civil Rights Act was passed, they were still putting very Jim Crow-esque things in place to continue to keep [Black students] out. And so that prevented qualified Black folks, African Americans, from being accepted into some of the elite institutions.”
He notes that innate human biases are entrenched in admissions policies and with the admissions counselors themselves.
“So this affirmative action decision is now basically asking, What would happen if y’all do it on your own because it’s just morally the right thing to do?”
He points to the hypocrisy of the Supreme Court’s conservative justices, who recently ruled that Alabama Republicans needed to redraw their congressional districts because of racism that disadvantaged Black communities in the state.
“The court is saying it needs to step in there because racism exists, but in the affirmative action ruling, the court is saying racism doesn’t exist or, better yet, that if left to their own devices, people would do the right thing,” he says.
He adds that the promise of America is that “all men are created equal,” which, as defined at the time the Constitution was written, excluded women, brown and Black people.
“Wo here we are in a situation the enrollment of HBCUs has been steadily climbing because of all the racial things that are happening, but when we look at some of the national public institutions, it really boils down to access,” Hall says.
“Will a valedictorian of an all-Black high school even feel empowered to apply for admission to some of these places?” he asks. “When has this country ever been color-blind?”
He says it has never been.
“So when you try to appeal to the best conscience of America, that is a noble ideal, but no, when have we demonstrated that?”
Hall notes that there might be a silver lining in that HBCUs may get additional talented students who otherwise would have applied at a non-HBCU but who chose to forgo that option.
“HBCUs don’t exist for the lowest quartile of Black folks who apply. Howard is considered a selective institution, but you’ve talked to students; they’re almost like 80 percent Pell Grant eligible, given the economic backgrounds that some of these students have,” he says. Pell Grants come from a federal program that helps students who have extreme financial need.
He adds, “So first, schools will have to lean more into their scholarship offerings to get some of these students in. But two, I think students will be able to see the real benefit of going to a historically Black college or university.”
Libraries in Greenville County, S.C., have been ordered to remove all displays after a manager refused to take down a Pride one.
Nathan Schmaltz , the manager of the Travelers Rest branch, rejected the library administration’s order to remove a “Read with Pride” display, prompting the board to vote to remove all displays from libraries in the district. The decision came just three months after the board instated a new policy that requires displays to be approved by the library system’s executive director.
Last year, the library system removed LGBTQ+ displays from several libraries in the district, until they were quickly returned after public backlash. Schmaltz told local news outlet The Post and Courierthat since then, no other displays have triggered action from the board.
He said that he refused to remove the display because he did not want to cause the LGBTQ+ community any more “pain or distress,” and that their branch had received comments from community members overwhelmingly in support of the display, and only one threatening phone call.
“I’m very thankful for the support the community has given us. It’s been overwhelmingly positive,” Schmaltz said. “[The board] wrote the policy. They could have written it better.”
The order from the board is temporary, and all Pride materials currently displayed can remain up until the end of June. The board also designated $25,000 for extra security at the Travelers Rest branch if needed over possible threats to the library.
At the conference following the vote, many citizens were unable to speak out against the board’s decision after Chair Allan Hill abruptly ended the meeting. Hill had allowed a Baptist pastor to ramble about “sexual proclivities” past the allotted three minutes, but forbade Stephen Shelato, a former librarian and frequent attendee, from speaking, as he had exceeded his time limit in a past meeting. Hill ordered officers to remove Shelato, then suddenly adjourned.
One patron who was unable to speak, Danielle Harbor, who frequents the Travelers Rest branch, shared her prepared remarks with The Post after the chaotic meeting.
“It is a symbol to indicate to the LGBTQ population that has so often not felt like part of the community, that they are welcome, accepted, and safe,” she said. “Is that really something you want to take away?”
U.S. Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and U.S. Rep. Chris Pappas (D-N.H.) introduced legislation on Monday that would prohibit all U.S. federal courts from allowing use of the LGBTQ panic defense, a legal tactic that has been banned in 16 states and D.C.
In criminal trials involving violent crimes against LGBTQ people, the so-called “gay panic,” “trans-panic,” or more broadly, “LGBTQ panic” defense is raised to argue for more lenient sentencing or otherwise in an attempt to lessen the defendant’s culpability in the eyes of a judge or jury.
These types of arguments, which are widely considered outdated and offensive, both exploit and work to perpetuate homophobia and transphobia in the criminal justice system, the lawmakers said in a press release Monday announcing their bill.
Markey and Pappas noted LGBTQ panic defenses have been used in criminal law for decades, perhaps most famously after the 1998 murder of gay college student Matthew Shepard. During trial, counsel for the defense argued their client was triggered by an unwanted sexual advance by Shepard.
The case would galvanize calls to take action against bias-motivated violence, eventually leading to Congress’s passage in 2009 of the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act.
Nevertheless, use of LGBTQ panic defenses has persisted. The lawmakers noted a prominent recent example with the 2019 prosecution of the man who murdered 17-year-old Washington teen Nikki Kuhnhausenthe. Law enforcement noted during trial that the defendant was “shocked,” “uncomfortable” and “disturbed” upon learning Kuhnhausenthe was transgender.
The LGBTQ panic defense “is not only antiquated, but actively legitimizes violence against the LGBTQ+ community and encourages homophobic and transphobic bigotry within our legal system,” Markey said.
“No one’s sexual orientation or gender identity is a defense for assault or murder,” Pappas said, “and it is time Congress follows the lead of states that have already banned this defense in their courts.”
The lawmakers also highlighted the pervasive problem of violent crimes targeting LGBTQ people, highlighting statistics compiled by the country’s largest LGBTQ advocacy organization, the Human Rights Campaign.
HRC has recorded more than 256 cases of fatal violence against trans Americans, more than 80 percent of whom were people of color. Last year, according to the organization, at least 38 trans people were killed in the U.S., the majority of whom were trans women of color.
Markey also introduces gender-affirming care bill
Also on Monday, Markey introduced the Gender Affirming Care Access Research for Equity (CARE) Act, a bill that would authorize federal health authorities to research barriers to gender affirming health treatments and study the consequences of gaps and disparities to access.
The legislation would provide for the annual allocation of $25 million over five years for the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It comes in response to efforts by lawmakers in conservative states to restrict their trans residents’ access to medically necessary care, Markey noted, with 20 states passing bans targeting youth so far this year.
“Trans health is health, and health care is a human right,” he said. “We have a moral obligation to protect, defend, and expand the fundamental right for transgender and nonbinary people to get the care they need despite the tremendous legal, financial, and social barriers they too often face when accessing their health care.”
According to a press release from Markey’s office, cosponsors for the bill include Democratic Sens. Alex Padilla (Calif.), Mazie Hirono (Hawaii), Elizabeth Warren (Mass.), Peter Welch (Vt.) and Jeff Merkley (Ore.)
At the end of March, Markey introduced the Trans Bill of Rights with U.S. Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), whose provisions include ensuring the community’s access to necessary medical care. The same day, Markey and other Democratic senators sent a letter urging President Joe Biden to shore up federal protections for trans Americans’ access to gender affirming care and health providers administering this care who are “facing threats of violence and limits on their ability to provide care.”
Additionally, last year the Massachusetts senator issued a letter to the U.S. Department of Justice, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, urging them to “lift barriers to testosterone and expand access to gender-affirming hormone therapy for transgender people, including transgender men and transmasculine nonbinary people.”
Gay California state Sen. Scott Wiener (D) and several other Democratic senators walked out of the California Senate on Monday after a Republican honored Ric Grenell, an out gay former official who worked in President Donald Trump’s administration.
On Monday, Senate Minority Leader Brian Jones (R) took to the senate floor to honor Grenell. He praised Grenell’s public service record and his historic appointment as the first out gay man ever to serve on a president’s cabinet. Grenell served as Trump’s U.S. Ambassador to Germany, Special Presidential Envoy for Serbia and Kosovo, and acting Director of National Intelligence (the last one lasted for about two months).
The senate floor “offered mute applause” during the honor, The Sacramento Bee reported. Grenell walked onto the Senate floor and then held a conference alongside Republican legislators on the Capitol steps afterward.
However, Sen. Wiener didn’t applaud Grenell. In fact, he and other California Senate Democrats walked off of the floor during the honor. Wiener also published a tweet noting that when the Democrat-led state senate passed a resolution earlier this month recognizing June as Pride Month, seven of the chamber’s eight Republicans refused to vote on it.
Republicans said they objected to the invitation of Sister Roma, a well-known member of the drag nun activist group the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, calling her presence “a slap in the face to Catholics” and a “distraction” from California’s unresolved social issues.
In his tweet, Weiner wrote, “Today, GOP is honoring Richard Grenell on our Senate floor, after having protested our actual Pride celebration. Grenell is a self-hating gay man. He’s a scam artist pink-washer for Trump & spreads anti-LGBTQ, anti-vax, election-denier conspiracy theories.”
Indeed, Grenell repeated Trump’s lie that the 2020 presidential election was “stolen” due to an unprecedented nationwide conspiracy of voter fraud that only occurred in the states that Trump lost. Grenell refused to provide proof of any such fraud when asked about it on live television. Republicans and Trump’s re-election campaign lost over 60 court cases alleging such fraud — most were thrown out due to lack of evidence. The fraud claims led to numerous death threats against election officials nationwide.
On March 21, 2021, Grenell compared COVID-19 vaccine requirements to Nazism. In May 2021, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum published an open letter signed by 50 Holocaust survivors urging politicians to stop making comparisons between modern social conditions and the Holocaust.
Grenell, while serving as the Republican National Committee’s senior adviser for LGBTQ+ outreach, called Trump “the most pro-gay president ever.” The Washington Post’s fact-checkers called Grenell’s statement “absurd” and awarded it “four Pinocchios” — its highest rating for lies. Grenell also opposes the Equality Act, legislation that would provide federal LGBTQ+ anti-discrimination protections, claiming it would be an attack on religion.
Grenell praised Trump’s so-called effort to decriminalize homosexuality “around the globe.” But the Trump administration made no actual substantial efforts to do so. In fact, Trump’s State Department called foreign anti-gay laws a form of “religious freedom” that it vowed to protect.
This coming Sunday, Tiburon’s Community Congregational Church is holding a concert with talented young singers from the Marin School of the Arts and its own music program in support of Marin’s LGBTQ+ community. The concert is free but donation proceeds will go to The Spahr Center and our sibling organization Trans HeartLine, along with the church’s music program. This event will be hosted on Sunday, July 9, at 5:00pm, at the Community Congregational Church in Tiburon.
Many people think anti-sodomy laws were widely used to prosecute gay men before the Supreme Court declared the laws unconstitutional in the landmark 2003 Lawrence v. Texasdecision. But in reality, anti-sodomy laws were mostly used to legally prosecute heterosexual men, according to Yale Law School Professor William Eskridge.
Eskridge wrote the 2008 book Dishonorable Passions: Sodomy Laws in America, 1861-2003, and in his book, he says the Puritan-age laws were long used as a way to punish straight men for public sex and rape. While gay men were more often prosecuted under other vague laws against “lewdness” and “indecency,” Eskridge told LGBTQ Nation, anti-sodomy laws were often pointed to as theoretical proof of queer people’s immorality — and, thus, their unfitness to serve as teachers, Boy Scout leaders, and military members.
To commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Lawrence decision, Eskridge spoke with LGBTQ Nation about the history of sodomy laws, how they went from punishing straight men to punishing gay and bi men, how the Lawrence decision led to the legalization of same-sex marriage, and what would happen if the Supreme Court were ever to overturn Lawrence in the future.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Your book notes that anti-sodomy laws had an impact on both heterosexual and homosexual Americans. How’s that?
Most of the sodomy laws, including the one in Georgia that was upheld and Bowers v. Hardwick (the 1986 Supreme Court decision upholding the constitutionality of a Georgia sodomy that criminalized private oral and anal sex) applied to heterosexual intercourse. So when Bill Clinton was being fellated by Monica Lewinsky in the District of Columbia, that was a felony under the District of Columbia sodomy law.
I think most sodomy prosecutions in American history were against different-sex sodomy. Yes, you might be astounded but that is a fact. The reason is, most sodomy prosecutions were against men for sodomizing women, girls, and boys…. The overwhelming majority of prosecutions were for forcible sodomy, [for] sex with animals — which was a big chunk of the 19th-century ones — and a much bigger chunk was [for] forcible intercourse with unconsenting typically under-age, let’s say under 21, boys and girls, and sometimes unconsenting intercourse with women or men.
It sounds like what you’re saying is that these sodomy prosecutions were more about punishing rape rather than non-vaginal intercourse.
That’s right. Some of the people prosecuted under those laws were indeed gay, lesbian, or homosexual. But if you were gay or lesbian or bisexual or whatnot, it was highly unlikely you were going to be arrested for sodomy because there had to be evidence of penetration. And the evidence — if it was a consenting engagement — the evidence could not be provided by the co-conspirator, in other words, the other adult man. You had to have independent evidence, which meant it had to be in public or have some other witness.
So that meant private, consensual sodomy was almost never prosecuted. If you were engaged in intercourse in public, in 90% of the cases, you would not be arrested for sodomy, but you’d be arrested for one of the other basket of offenses that the police used: indecency, disorderly conduct, lewd vagrancy, those were the main ones. They tended to be misdemeanors and tended to be situations where the police would arrest you… but most did not go to jail. They got off with a warning and public humiliation.
The actual sodomy prosecutions were overwhelmingly nonconsensual, as we would understand it, and were also in public.
What was the purpose of these laws?
Sodomy laws were a Puritan American law from the 19th-century church in colonial America. The following crimes in many of the colonies were punishable by death: fornication, adultery, sodomy or buggery, some form of indecent cohabitation, as well as incest. Almost no one was executed for this, though they were capital offenses.
The point of the laws was… the popular view is that criminal law creates moral guardrails that you should not traverse and it punishes people who are in non-conformance to these moral guardrails. But (gay, French philosopher Michel) Foucault told us that the other point of criminal laws is productive. So when you’re prohibiting fornication, adultery, sodomy, but you’re not really enforcing it, what you are producing is a norm where the only legally acceptable, moral, non-criminal sex is penile-vaginal sex within a procreative marriage.
And remember, there was no such thing as gay or anything like that in the 19th and early 20th centuries — there were people called “degenerates,” “perverts,” “inverts,” and “homosexuals.” The word “gay” was used in the subculture after World War II to some extent, but it was not used in popular culture very much until the late 1960s and early ’70s.
Now in the 20th century, the God thing is a decline, the marriage thing is in decline. The percentage of women working that are married increases steadily, and the percentage of women in the workforce increases steadily. And as women go into the workplace, they put off marriage, many of them don’t get married. They put off having children, they have fewer children on the whole, demographically.
So, if you’re a traditionalist and you’re swallowing [unmarried] cohabitation, what are you producing [with modern anti-sodomy laws]? Well, you’re producing heterosexuality.
In Texas, in 1973, they totally redid their criminal code. They eliminated most of the consensual crimes for heterosexual sodomy [both in and outside of marriage]. But they recreated it as a misdemeanor: the homosexual conduct law — only against homosexuals, and it was almost never enforced.
So it’s technically a crime, even though you’re not going to put people in jail for it. So most of the effect of these laws, whether they were called homosexual or not, was to hold up the possibility that you could be disciplined at any point if you were openly gay or lesbian… and the state could create whatever level of criminality it wanted.
You ask, “How much the state is willing to invest in undercover cops who parade around gay resting places — bars, restrooms, or tea rooms — waiting to be molested or invited?” So if it’s all the homosexuals who are taking over the neighborhood, you send in undercover cops and you can arrest a lot of them…. But if you don’t invest all that money in undercover cops, you ain’t got no crime. You might have a nuisance or neighbors complaining, etc., but you got no crime. So that’s the way it worked if the state wanted to go after sexual and gender minorities.
[The anti-gay military ban known as “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” (DADT)] was founded on the idea that lesbian and gay soldiers are presumptive criminals. And therefore, anybody who even has a proclivity toward illegal behavior can be kicked out. What if a school teacher is found to be a lesbian in a lesbian relationship, violating the Texas homosexual conduct law? Theoretically. You don’t catch them. What do you do with her? You fire her!
You know, what happened when [President George W.] Bush fought a war [in Iraq]? When you fight a war, you need the gays. Okay, so [DADT] collapsed. I was told by someone within the Bush administration, “No, we don’t have any interest in enforcing this… We’re at war. It’s stupid.” You need the gays because they speak Arabic. The gays are heavily skilled. If you kick them all out, then you don’t got no intelligence, right?
I’ve heard it said that in order for LGBTQ+ people to win marriage and other civil rights, we first had to strike down the sodomy laws so the public wouldn’t consider us a bunch of criminals. Do you think that’s true?
I don’t think that’s the way I would put it, but I think it was an important domino…. By the time you got to Lawrence, I think there were only about 13 states that made consensual private sodomy, including oral sex, a crime that was usually a misdemeanor.
Why would some schmuck judge agree with some plaintiffs that we should overturn a conceptual sodomy law? [Because] you can win those arguments, because it’s not giving the gays any kind of special privileges, it’s just taking the government off our backs. And you could argue, you know, during [the height of the AIDS epidemic], the doctors were all saying [anti-sodomy criminalization] actually spreads AIDS. The doctors were a united front that it was bad.
The opponents of decriminalization would make sort of wild stupid claims. Like, oh, you know, “If you make them non-criminals they’ll rape children…. It’ll be the end of marriage, etc.” And of course, when you decriminalized it, none of those things ever actually happened. So you would have our side, gathering allies — some types of religious allies, sometimes conservatives, sometimes unexpected people — and the other side making ridiculous points. And then, when the world didn’t end, they look like idiots.
Nearly every single state, [soon after its legislature] decriminalized sodomy, they passed an anti-discrimination law protecting gay people. And this predicted exactly the order in which states would legalize gay marriage.
I think the progression is like a normative progression. When sodomy laws are repealed, more people will come out of the closet. And people come out of the closet as the mother of a lesbian. Then you have a PFLAG (Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) you know, you build up that coalition. More people come out of the closet. And then we get another discrimination law where your job is protected. More people come out of the closet. Then companies come out of the closet, right? It’s gay support. It’s, “Hey, the gays are actually good customers! They’re good employees! They speak Arabic! They’re very handy dandy! The gays are okay! They’re okay!”
So you get more so them [coming out], and then they want to partner up. We’re no longer misfits who can’t be employed, right? But what about you know, getting married? And the straights are like, “Well, let’s compromise with civil unions. Let’s give them a euphemism.” And the gays are like, “Well, okay, but we still want marriage.” And then a lot of them get civil unions and domestic partnerships. They have children and heterosexuals like, “Wow, who, who knew?” because they didn’t know that there were gonna be lesbians with children. They’re like, “Who knew they cared for one another? Why hush my mouth, they have children, biological children! — where’d that come from?” Right? And then people were just flummoxed, and then we ultimately get Obergefell (the 2015 Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage nationwide).
What do you make of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ suggestion that maybe the court should overturn Lawrence? Is this just something he said to excite conservatives or is something else going on?
Thomas and Alito are very devout Catholics. So Alito believes in this: Sex is procreative and it’s got to be heterosexual, and he believes this is all ordained by God. And if you really believe that’s the most important thing for a polity, then you don’t care if no one agrees with you. You say, “Well, God agrees with me,” and that’s that. So a lot of it is just that. That’s really what they believe.
It would be insane for them to overrule Lawrence vs. Texas. It would just be insane because a lot of sodomy laws would pop back. Texas has never repealed its law. Virginia has never repealed its law. So they would pop back, just like these abortion statutes [did when Roe v. Wade was overturned in June 2022].
You know, in Arizona [in 2014]… the legislature passed a statute [that would allow religious business owners to discriminate against gay people]…. It was all symbolic, you know. The Republican legislature passed it so it could rev up the base or something. And the Chamber of Commerce came down and said, “No, no, no, this is terrible.” The head of the Chamber of Commerce in Arizona — nice Republican old white guy — sits down with [then-Arizona Gov.] Jan Brewer (R) and says, “You cannot sign this piece of legislation.”
The f**king Mormon Church tells her not to sign the legislation. The Mormon legislators, a couple who have voted for the bill, said, “Oh, this was a bad idea. What was I thinking?” Because the Mormon church was now realigning…. Though they bashed the gays [by financing California’s 2008 anti-gay marriage ballot measure] Prop 8. “Oh, who is that? Not us?” [the Mormon Chuch said afterward.] “We don’t bash no gays.” … Jan Brewer — a horrible, right-wing, vicious, horrible Republican governor — vetoes this horrible statute, and then it dies. Like, no one wants to pass another statute. No, no, they won’t touch this issue anymore.
Something kind of similar happened in Arkansas, the same kind of stupid thing happened in Indiana. So you can imagine what s**t these states would take from corporations, from the gays, from women’s groups, from the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union). The Super Bowl — Arizona was gonna lose the Super Bowl over this, and they were scared sh**less over all the repercussions. So yeah, it would be insane. It would be insane. And plus, I don’t think you’d have to have a case where someone was actually arrested under one of the sodomy laws [in order for the issue to reach the Supreme Court], I guess. So no one’s gonna do that.
But this is the most conservative Supreme Court, I think in American history, maybe since Dred Scott (the 1857 decision that declared that Black former slaves weren’t U.S. citizens). And [the current Court is] so out of touch with America on the environment, on abortion, on religion, on about anything. America’s going one way, [and the Court] is moving back in the other direction…. I’ve never seen anything like it in American history.
On the same weekend that saw hundreds of thousands of people flocking to Boston’s Pride parade route, a much quieter walk took placeon the brick-laden backstreets of Beacon Hill. There, a handful of people gathered for the inaugural National Park Service tour honoring a little-known yet pioneering gay rights activist.
The tour explores the life of the late Prescott Townsend, a queer advocatewhose long life spanned the 19th century and the first Pride Parade in New York City in 1970, and who lived an exuberantly out gay life that flew in the face of the social and legal boundaries of his time.
At the tour’s start, on the south slope of Beacon Hill, National Park Service ranger Meaghan Michel explained how Townsend, born in 1894, was part of an old, Boston Brahmin family. He came out as gay to his parents in his teens before following a family tradition of attending Harvard.
“They accepted it, but did warn him to be careful,” said Michel. “But once he entered Harvard, once he was kind of off on his own, that’s when he started to actually act on those feelings that he confessed to them about. We don’t know the name of his first sexual encounter. What we do know is that, apparently, it was a very handsome polo player.”
Michel said Townsend cut short his Harvard studies in 1917 to enlist in the Navy during World War I. After his discharge, he joined the ranks of those who would become known as the “lost generation,” making his way to Paris. It was there he encountered — and embraced — a 1920s bohemian counterculture.
And upon his return to Beacon Hill, he sought to establish an outpost of that culture in his hometown using ample family money.
A bohemian outpost on Beacon Hill
One of the attendees on the inaugural tour was Michel’s partner, Theo Linger, who researched Townsend for a master’s thesis and helped organize the tour for the park service. They said most National Park Service tours on Beacon Hill emphasize the 1800s.
“Maybe occasionally we’ll touch on the fact that … in the later 19th century, it became more of an immigrant neighborhood,” Linger said. “But for some reason, the gay, artsy history had never really come to the forefront before. And I think that’s just an interesting fold of this neighborhood.”
The bohemian outpost sprang up on the more eclectic northern slope of Beacon Hill — another stop on the tour — where Prescott Townsend opened a bar and an experimental theater. Joining forces with a theatre producer, the two started spending a lot of time in Provincetown, Michel said.
“And it’s there that they meet members of the Provincetown players, who are also staging these very interesting Avant Garde theater productions, including plays by Eugene O’Neill,” Michel said. “So Prescott becomes friends with Eugene O’Neill. He becomes friends with these different actors and theater producers. He was very happy to bankroll them. And they were very happy to take his money.”
But Prescott’s financial situation changed abruptly when the stock market crashed in 1929. So he settled into a less entrepreneurial life around the corner from the experimental theater, which he was forced to shut down.
The next tour stop is at 75 Phillips St., where Townsend rented out affordable rooms in a property he owned, often to young, gay men.
Some sources indicate that in those Depression years, Townsend had already begun a life of gay activism by visiting the State House up the hill to ask legislators to decriminalize homosexual acts. But in 1943, during World War II, his life reached a turning point.
From Beacon Hill to behind bars
“He worked at the shipyard in Fall River,” Michel told the tour, “but one day, he was actually arrested for engaging in a sex act with another man here in Beacon Hill. They were caught … And he was actually imprisoned for 18 months out in Deer Island.”
Upon hearing that, one person on the tour, Gastónde los Reyes, suggested there might be an opportunity now to right an old wrong.
“The Park Service should lobby Mayor [Michelle] Wu to essentially pardon him for his crime of being homosexual,” said de los Reyes. “And use him as an example of how far back the need for affordable housing in Boston exists, right?”
Someone pointed out that in Massachusetts, it’s the governor, not the mayor, who holds the power to pardon — prompting a discussion about the nation’s first openly lesbian governor, Maura Healey, and how it would be appropriate for her to weigh in on this during Pride month.
Michel said Townsend’s arrest in the 1940s finally led to him being kicked out of the Social Register, and hence, ‘polite society’ — something he wore as a badge of honor.
Activism begins in earnest
After he was released from prison, Prescott Townsend moved to 15 Lindall Place, a three-story brick house with two bay windows down a short alley.
“Very early on, this house became site to some of the earliest meetings discussing specifically gay issues in Boston,” Michel said in front of the home. “And [it] was the first headquarters of the Boston chapter of the Mattachine Society. So that national society of gay men that organized and came together, there were chapters throughout the United States.”
But Michel added that Townsend balked at the early Mattachine Society members’ respectability politics.
“He was very vocal. He had a lot of opinions. He let people know what they were, and a lot of people in the society very much disagreed with what he was proposing,” Michel said. “He lost his reputation and he had nothing to lose.”
Townsend began to push for a radical acceptance of the full panoply of human sexuality by society at large — and even for the early gay rights advocates of the ’50s and early ’60s, that was just a bridge too far.
“And then in 1969, when the Stonewall riot breaks out, that is really the type of activism that he would relate to the most strongly,” said Michel.
A new generation of gay activists had risen up, and the aging Townsend had found his milieu, she said.
“He was very close to hippies and vagabonds and runaways of the young queer community,” Michel said. “So it makes sense that because he’s close to these people who also have nothing to lose, when they finally decide to fight back and fight for their rights in a different way, he’s totally on board with them.”
A Beacon Hill light shines on
On the one-year anniversary of the Stonewall uprising in New York City, an aging Townsend ventured to New York for the first Pride parade, just days after his 76th birthday.
Toward the end of the National Park Service tour, ranger Meghan Michel shared a black-and-white photograph of Prescott Townsend with her small audience. In it, the once button-down Brahmin of the early 20th century is sporting love-beads and a beret atop his long, shaggy hair, embracing young, gay activists who would walk in the trail he blazed.
An unpublished biography of Townsend, written by Adrian Cathcart and referred to on the tour, describes the advocate as a lover of freedom and “unpopular causes.”
“He loved being a star and the center of attention. He loved Harvard. He loved New England. He was proud to be Prescott Townsend. A state of being that involved not only himself, but also his ancestors. He felt this mattered,” Cathcart writes.
But after that inaugural Pride parade in New York, Townsend’s health declined quickly and he fell on hard times. A series of fires rendered him essentially homeless and destroyed almost all records documenting his extraordinary life. He died in the basement apartment of a friend on Garden Street in his beloved Beacon Hill at the age of 78.
One of the young men standing next to Townsend in that 1970 Pride parade picture was Randolfe “Randy” Wicker. Today an 85-year-old global LGBTQ+ activist, Wicker is set to be a Grand Marshal at this year’s NYC Pride March later this month.
“Well, to me, he has only one legacy, and it’s ‘love, money, uplift.’ And that doing for others brings you happiness. Those are the two most important statements you will ever hear anyone make,” Wicker said of Townsend in an oral history interview with Theo Linger.
The National Park Service says it doesn’t yet have a regular schedule for the historical walking tour of Prescott Townsend. But it’s planning more opportunities, ensuring the story of Townsend’s courage, advocacy and impact are known in his old, cherished neighborhood and beyond.