Category Archives: General Interest

Gay History: There Goes The Gaybourhood; Stories Of Gay Neighbourhoods From Around The World

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SYDNEY: Big city gaybourhoods: where they come from and why they still matterIn London, there is Soho; in New York, Chelsea and Greenwich Village; and in San Francisco, there is the Castro. In Sydney, there is Darlinghurst and, more specifically, Oxford Street. These are neighbourhoods of large cities that have, since at least the 1950s and often earlier, developed a reputation as queer spaces.

In more recent years, those reputations have begun to fade and the enduring meanings of the “gaybourhood” have come into question.

But what each of these places represents is the centrality of urban space to the emergence of visible, “out and proud” lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer identities and communities.

The 1978 Mardi Gras march was a key moment for queer urban visibility. AAP/Australian Lesbian and Gay Archives

Queer Sydney in the ‘Golden Mile’ era

The peak years of Oxford Street’s queer life extended from the mid-1970s until the mid-1990s. In the years after the second world war, many gay men in Sydney socialised in CBD hotels, including the Hotel Australia.

A guide to the ‘Golden Mile’ published in the Oxford Weekender News, one of many ‘bar rag’ newspapers that circulated the 1980s queer scene. Author provided

The first LGBTQ clubs on Oxford Street were Ivy’s Birdcage and Capriccio’s, which both opened in 1969. By the beginning of the 1980s, Oxford Street was home to a string of bars, clubs, saunas and cafes and had become known as Sydney’s gay “Golden Mile”.

The emergence of this gay heartland represents extraordinary social change. Male homosexuality remained illegal in New South Wales until 1984. The homosexual men socialising in 1950s CBD hotels were required to do so with discretion – the consequences of discovery could be devastating.

In contrast, the queerness of a venue like Capriccio’s was defiantly visible and undeniable. As more venues were opened along the Golden Mile, the street itself became a gay space, as did the surrounding neighbourhoods where LGBTQ people – particularly gay men – made homes in the terraces and apartments of Darlinghurst and Paddington.

A simple walk along the street became an act of participation in an emerging community.

Ivy’s Birdcage at 191 Oxford Street was one of Darlinghurst’s first drag bars. Sydney Pride History Group, Author provided

Members of a marginalised social group were thus using urban space to resist oppression and build a community. For some, this produced a kind of utopia. In an interview with Sydney’s Pride History Group, DJ Stephen Allkins described his first visit to the Oxford Street disco Patch’s as a teenager in 1976. He remembers:

I was home. That was it. It was the most fabulous place I’d ever been in my life … It’s full of gay people and they’re all dressed to the nines. They’re not hiding under a rock … They’re expressing and happy.

Finding a place in the Queer community

But these feelings of joy at having found such a space can be complicated by a range of factors. The gay community was certainly not free from sexism, racism and transphobia, meaning that some within the LGBTQ community were granted far easier access to these spaces than others.

Indeed, although Golden Mile-era Oxford Street included venues popular with lesbians, including the women-only bar Ruby Reds, the surrounding neighbourhood was more identifiably gay than lesbian.

Inner-west suburbs including Leichhardt and Petersham were far more significant urban spaces in the lives of many queer women. Lesbian share-houses in these neighbourhoods became central sites of feminist politics, activism, sex and romance.

Penny Gulliver, a resident of legendary 1970s share-house “Crystal Street”, has remembered that women “who were just coming out, because there was nothing like a counselling service then, they’d come to Crystal Street”.

Into the new millennium, Oxford Street’s place as the gay heart of Sydney became less certain. As LGBTQ businesses failed and venues closed, questions emerged as to whether a community now more a part of the mainstream still needed its own spaces.

For a time, King Street in Newtown dominated as a queer alternative. In 1983 gay publican Barry Cecchini took over the Milton Hotel on Newtown’s King Street, renamed it Cecchini’s and launched it as the area’s first gay venue. Shortly after, the Newtown Hotel, just across the road, also became a gay pub. Cecchini told the Sydney Morning Herald in 1984 that gays were leaving “the scene” of Oxford Street looking for a “more cosmopolitan mix” in Newtown.

Through the following decades, venues including The Imperial in Erskineville (made famous as the site from which three drag queens launched their adventures in a bus named Priscilla) and the Sly Fox in Enmore, home to a popular lesbian night, further developed the area’s queer reputation.

Protecting Queer space

In recent years, however, a range of factors, including changes to licensing laws, have produced significant challenges for queer socialising in that neighbourhood.

Newtown sits outside the zone of the so-called “lockout laws”. Late-night partiers who might once have ventured to Kings Cross are instead heading to pubs along King Street, and reports of anti-LGBTQ abuse and violence have increased.

In response, a campaign called “Keep Newtown Weird and Safe” has attempted to maintain the queer meanings of this urban space.

Despite changes in Oxford and King streets, efforts to keep Newtown “weird” highlight the continued value of urban space to LGBTQ communities. Indeed, among a younger generation, new forms of queer identity continue to inspire the search for spaces in which to celebrate difference.

In pockets of the inner west, for example, young queer, transgender and genderqueer people are creating spaces of activism, partying, performance and everyday life. This new generation is exploring the fresh possibilities of queer identity and developing their community. Access to urban space remains central to this.

Like the city itself, the LGBTQ community continues to be less a fixed entity than a process of movement, adaptation and change.

MELBOURNE: Gay Old Time

An asio report from the 1950s, Homosexuals as Security Risks, includes information from an anonymous man about Melbourne’s secret gay subculture. As well as educating the authorities about queer terminology, the source expresses his hope “to find an affectionate, stable and confiding relationship with another homosexual”. The prospect, he acknowledges, is “a probably unattainable dream-wish”.

His account appears in Camp as . . . Melbourne in the 1950s, a Midsumma Festival exhibition. Through photographs, interviews and historical documents, Camp as provides an insight into what homosexual life was like during a grimly repressive era in which gay men and women had reason to cower in the closet.

Homosexuality was not only socially unacceptable in the 1950s, it was also a criminal offence. By 1957 the state vice squad had dedicated a third of its resources to cracking down on what it perceived as a growing problem in Victoria. Throughout the decade, the number of those arrested and jailed continued to grow as officers raided parties or entrapped gay men in public toilets and other popular beats.

Meanwhile, the Truth newspaper attempted to whip up moral outrage by running lurid scare stories about “prowling pests” and “park menaces”. But Graham Willett, a Melbourne University lecturer and curator of the exhibition, suggests that, despite the fear of discrimination and arrest, a tight-knit gay community still evolved during the 1950s. “We’ve constructed this image of Melbourne back then as this terrible place,” he says, “But what’s quite amazing is that people managed, through courage or circumstances, to find ways of meeting other people like themselves and constructing reasonably nice lives.”

Certainly the exhibition challenges the assumption that gay people of the period led lonely, desperate lives. In one photo, for example, a drag queen flounces defiantly about the stage wearing a pink dress and a flower in his hair. “In the ’50s there was no gay scene in a public way,” Willett says, “but there were still places you could go to in the city that accepted the presence of gay men.”

One of the most surprising gay sanctuaries was the Myer department store, thanks to the director of the store’s display unit, Freddie Asmussen, whose sexuality was an open secret. Bald and bespectacled, Asmussen was renowned for the extravagant decor of his South Yarra home, which boasted 13 chandeliers, a black-and-silver dining room and a colour-coded garden in which he would tolerate only white flowers. His willingness to employ young men of a similar sexual orientation turned Myer into an unlikely haven for the gay community.

Hotel Australia on Collins Street was the closest that Melbourne had to a gay bar. The upstairs area catered to a smart, discreet crowd while the downstairs bar, known as “the snake pit”, was aimed at rough trade. An alternative was Val’s, a bohemian coffee lounge on Swanston Street, with a royal-blue carpet and mauve furniture. Val was a flamboyant lesbian who walked the streets dressed in a homburg hat and tailored suit while brandishing a silver-topped cane.

Willett says that during this era there was more pressure on lesbians to conform to these stereotypes. “Lots of women talk about living as butches or femmes in the ’50s and ’60s,” he says. “But women’s liberation challenged a lot of that. It said, ‘You can be what you want to be. You don’t have to conform to these roles.’ ”

Other fragments of queer culture featured in the exhibition are similarly blatant. In the Australian Gay and Lesbian Archives, Willett discovered a stash of magazines promoting body building as a form of homoerotic stimulation. The cartoons in Physique Pictorial devise utterly ridiculous situations to justify the inevitable displays of male nudity. One features a muscle-bound builder, who falls off a roof and lands on a pile of nails, thereby requiring his workmate to extract them from his buttocks. “It just gets more and more camp,” Willett admits.

The brazen nature of such material would seem to suggest a growing confidence within the community. And yet during the 1950s there was just a single attempt to challenge the legal status quo that failed to gain sufficient support. “For most of these people, the idea of changing the law would have seemed impossible,” Willett says. “It would have just seemed inconceivable that you would do that.”

The gay-rights movement only began to emerge in Australia in the 1960s, developing as part of a broader liberal trend that also sought reform on social issues such as abortion, censorship and Aboriginal rights. Victoria didn’t decriminalise homosexuality until 1980, while Tasmania didn’t suit until 1997. Over the past 50 years, gay culture has undergone a makeover as radical as anything on Queer Eye For A Straight Guy. By exploring the formative days of the community, Willett’s exhibition reinforces how much has changed, while presenting an intriguing social history of Melbourne’s secret past.

CANADA & NORTH AMERICA: Dwindling gaybourhoods

Author Amin Ghaziani looks into the future of North American gay villages

Credit: Paul Dotey

Four and a half years ago, Shawn Ewing and her wife left their apartment in Vancouver’s West End to move to the suburbs. For the Ewings, leaving the gaybourhood for Surrey was a question of simple math.

“Two thousand square feet and a yard versus a little under 700 feet in an apartment,” she says. “Accessibility to the party downtown wasn’t important to us anymore. What was important was a house and having a yard and a garden and all of that good stuff.”

Ewing, a former president of the Vancouver Pride Society, is now vice-president of Surrey’s Pride organization. She says that despite Surrey’s conservative reputation and some early fears that they might have to “straighten up,” her family has had no problems at all.

“We haven’t changed any of our behaviour,” she says. “I don’t have a problem holding my wife’s hand when we’re walking down the street or giving her a kiss in my front yard.”

“I probably got called out more living downtown about being a dyke than I certainly have been in Surrey,” she says.

From Vancouver’s Davie Village to Toronto’s Church Street to Montreal’s Le Village, everyone has their own opinion about Canada’s gay neighbourhoods, but few seem to disagree that they are in decline.

Whichever name you call it — the gaybourhood, gayvenue, gay district, gay mecca, gay ghetto — the question of its future isn’t limited to Canada. Across the border in the United States, many notable gay districts are also fading into shadows of their former selves, from San Francisco’s Castro to Chicago’s Boystown to Seattle’s Capitol Hill to countless more.

In his recently released book There Goes the Gayborhood?, Amin Ghaziani, an associate professor of sociology at the University of British Columbia, examines the changing face of the gay neighbourhood. His research is based on census data, opinion polls, more than 600 newspaper articles and more than 100 interviews with gaybourhood residents.

“I myself lived in Chicago’s Boystown district for nearly a decade, starting in 1999. I remember feeling uneasy in those years as I read one headline after another about the alleged demise of my home and other gayborhoods across the country. The sight of more straight bodies on the streets became a daily topic of conversation among my friends — an obsession to be honest,” Ghaziani writes.

“As the years went by, my friends and I bemoaned, perhaps most of all, feeling a little less safe holding hands with our partners, dates, or hookups — even as we walked down what were supposed to be our sheltered streets. I had been called a ‘fag’ on more occasions than I still care to remember, and I was shocked at the disapproving looks that I would receive when walking hand in hand with another man. I knew I could not escape this menacing straight gaze altogether, but I was so angry that I had to deal with it in Boystown. This was supposed to be a safe place,” he writes.

According to statistics, the days where the gay community was drawn to live and work in a single neighbourhood are ending. American census data shows that same-sex-couple households have become “less segregated and less spatially isolated across the United States from 2000 to 2010,” Ghaziani writes. “This is a restlessness that clearly appears in cities across North America. To wonder where gayborhoods are going, debate whether they are worth saving, or question their cultural resonance — all of this announces to us that they are in danger.”

Although gay bars have been around since the start of the 1900s, gaybourhoods are a fairly recent phenomenon. It wasn’t until after the Second World War that they really began to flourish in North America, buoyed first by the thousands of men and women dishonourably discharged from the military for their presumed homosexuality and later by migrating single gay men and lesbians from smaller towns in search of a place to call home. Gaybourhoods promised safety and freedom, as well as places to find love and sex.

Ghaziani points to several factors that are changing these areas today: the increased acceptance of gay men and lesbians by society and under the law, allowing many people to feel safer moving to more spacious accommodations in the suburbs; growing development and gentrification, leading to rising property value and rents, driving some people out of downtown areas; and the increased migration of straight people back into desirable urban areas.

Ron Dutton has lived in Vancouver’s West End for 40 years and has never once wanted to leave. “I like the diversity of people, the sense of openness,” he says. In his opinion, changes are constant, and except for the rapidly increasing cost of living, he doesn’t think the changes are negative.

“Individual businesses come and go, but I don’t see the neighbourhood becoming any less welcoming,” he says. Still, Dutton laments that many seniors on fixed incomes have been leaving the area against their will as rents continue to skyrocket.

As some gay people resist the tide and stay in gay neighbourhoods, many more are undeniably leaving — even as North American cities begin to recognize their cultural and, especially, potential financial value.

The permanent rainbow crosswalks in Vancouver and now in Toronto and the newly installed rainbow LED strip lights in Vancouver are all being used to promote these villages as destinations, to locals and tourists alike. These efforts at urban renewal can also contribute to the gentrification that eventually prices many gays and lesbians out of these areas.

To many, especially to the younger generation, the notion of a single gay district seems antiquated. As gay people, men especially, increasingly turn online to find sexual and romantic connections, their need for gay bars and physical places to meet and hook up diminishes. As the world becomes safer for some sexual minorities, the need for the protective embrace of the gaybourhood also begins to decline. In the early 1990s, there were 16 gay bars in Boston. By 2007, that number had dropped by half.

Ghaziani references these phenomena as part of the “post-gay” era, where gays are being accepted by society and are choosing to assimilate into the mainstream. He says it’s changed the way many of us think about ourselves.

As an example, he points to statistician Nate Silver, who was named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in 2009. In a 2012 interview with Out magazine, Silver said that his friends saw him as “sexually gay, but ethnically straight.”

Ghaziani’s book defines “post-gay” partly as an assertion that who a man has sex with “is not necessarily related to his self-identity or to the cultural communities in which he participates.” He compares this sort of sexual identity with white ethnic identity: “optional, episodic and situational.”

In reviewing media interviews with various gay people — often couples — who have chosen not to live in gaybourhoods and who say they are fitting in, he notes that their tones are often laced with some shame. He wonders why the opposite of “blending in” is having a “scarlet letter on our heads” or being “those people?”

“Assimilation into the mainstream is always accompanied by infighting within a minority group, especially between those who are eager to blend in and those who are determined to hold on to what makes them different,” he writes.

Interestingly, Ghaziani’s book also includes interviews from some of the straight people living in gaybourhoods. He finds that many are “benignly indifferent” to their gay neighbours, while a minority feel that they are victims of reverse discrimination.

He found the responses of straight people so repetitive and almost rehearsed that it was hard to tell if they were being honest about being indifferent or if they were just being politically correct. One single, straight 28-year-old in Boystown told Ghaziani that he would like to see the rainbow pylons and flags taken down because, in his opinion, self-segregation was hurting the gay movement politically.

Ghaziani argues that even while many outgrow them, gaybourhoods remain “culturally relevant as refuges for queer youth of colour, transgender individuals and queers who hail from small towns, because antigay bigotry still affects their everyday life.”

Despite having left the confines of Vancouver’s gay village, Ewing agrees that there will always be a need for the gaybourhood, but she stresses the importance of it needing to be about more than just bars. She would like to see more places that include non-drinkers and youth.

Ghaziani suggests that it’s unreasonable to expect gaybourhoods — or any neighbourhood, for that matter — to remain stable and unchanged but that it’s equally unreasonable to declare them dead.

Neighbourhoods often move, reform and migrate, he says. Toronto’s “Queer West” and Vancouver’s Commercial Drive are two such examples. Many young queer people may want to live in a gay area, but they settle where they can afford the rents, even if that means congregating in — and queering — new neighbourhoods.

Ghaziani further theorizes that these gay-friendly neighbourhoods could eventually become full-fledged gay neighbourhoods in their own right. If the old gaybourhood was an island, these new models are archipelagos. These new villages may eventually supersede the older ones, or they may all coexist.

Dutton says that while we have gained a lot of freedom under the law, that doesn’t negate the need for the gaybourhood. “I think there is much to be said for an accepting environment where people can feel free to dress unusually or where they can express their affection for one another openly. That would be regretful if those things were lost over time,” he says.

“I don’t think the times have progressed to the point where we’re all just equal,” he continues. “There is much to be said for having a place within the city where people can come from elsewhere and feel that this is home — this is where my people congregate.”

CHICAGO: People from LGBT community face subtle discrimination even in ‘gaybourhoods’

Prejudice and discrimination still exist- it’s just more subtle and difficult to detect.(Shutterstock)

Straight people living in neighbourhoods mostly populated by LGBT folks say they support gay rights in theory, but their street interactions contradict those sentiments.

Gaybourhood, or traditionally gay neighbourhood, still face a subtle form of discrimination from ‘straight’ people. According to a study conducted by the University of British Columbia, straight people living in such neighbourhoods, say they support gay rights in theory, but many interact with their gay and lesbian next-door fellas on the street in ways that contradict those sentiments. “There is a mistaken belief that marriage equality means the struggle for gay rights is over,” said Amin Ghaziani, the study’s senior author. “Prejudice and discrimination still exist- it’s just more subtle and difficult to detect.”

The researchers interviewed 53 straight people, who live in two Chicago gaybourhoods – Boystown and Andersonville. They found the majority of residents saying that they support gay people. However, the researchers found their progressive attitudes were misaligned with their actions. While many residents said they don’t care if people are gay or straight, some indicated that they don’t like gay people who are “in your face”.

When asked about resistance from LGBTQ communities to the widespread trend of straight people moving into gaybourhoods, some of the people interviewed responded with accusations of reverse discrimination and described gay people who challenged them as “segregationist” and “hetero-phobic.” Some said they believed they should have open access to cultural gay spaces, and were surprised that they felt “unwelcome” there. “That feeling of surprise, however, exemplifies a misguided belief that gay districts are trendy commodities when they are actually safe spaces for sexual minorities”, added Ghaziani.

When the researchers asked residents if they had done anything to show their support of gay rights, such as marching in the pride parade, donating to an LGBTQ organization, or writing a letter in support of marriage equality to a politician, the majority said they had not. Many also expected their gay and lesbian neighbours to be happy and welcoming of straight people moving into gaybourhoods, expressing sentiments like, “you wanted equality- this is what equality looks like.”

With gay pride celebrations fast approaching around the world, Adriana Brodyn, the study’s lead author, said it is important to pause and reflect on the state of LGBTQ equality. “I hope that our research motivates people against becoming politically complacent or apathetic,” she said. “If we do not motivate ourselves to be aware of this subtle form of prejudice, then it will just continue to perpetuate.” The study appears in the journal City and Community.

REYKJAVIK: Where’s The Gaybourhood?

I’ve asked around. Though the sample size is hardly one that would hold up under intense scrutiny, a pattern has begun to emerge. The question “Where’s the gaybourhood?”, when raised in Reykjavík, will most likely be met with the response (after several, strangely long seconds of quiet contemplation): “Well—it’s a very small city.” Whether my interlocutor is heterosexual, or part of the alphabet soup, the answer is the same.

This strikes me as odd for a number of reasons. The first being that, while yes, relative to some far more populous cities of the world—Shanghai, Istanbul, Lagos, São Paulo, New York City, etc. (thanks, Wikipedia!)—Reykjavík’s approximate 120,000 is rather small. Further, this question also deals greatly with historical population growth over time—go back to 1901, and the population was only a bit over 6,300.

But, still… A population of 120,000 seems significant to me—though to be fair, I did grow up in a small-ish town (15,000 in a good year). And I can think of plenty of cities with populations smaller than Reykjavík’s that foster vibrant gay scenes, if not full-fledged gaybourhoods.

And yeah, the development of “gaybourhoods” was historically aided (though not exclusively) by the existence of a highly trafficked urban space with large international shipping ports, naval and military bases and heavy involvement in major wars, as well as a significant history of cosmopolitanism, internal migration and immigration from abroad, and…

Well, I think I just answered my own question, didn’t I? And it’s nothing against Iceland—that’s just not how things worked here. Historically, at least.

I don’t buy that culture is born exclusively as an act of defiance, or out of need for defence, and thus dies out when the need for shielding is gone.

There are a few historical spaces I was able to read up on. Known to those “in the know,” ya know? Informally, and before LGBT+ was even a conceivable acronym. Walking through Reykjavík, I feel as though I’m surrounded by hidden histories. Historical gay spots, as far as I could find, were highly secretive and unofficial, rarely documented, and limited in number and size out of necessity—this wasn’t especially news to me.

What struck me more, as I learned to accept that a lot of what I was looking for in terms of historical narrative would remain in permanent obscurity, was the following: where exactly were the present scenes? I mean, it’s one thing for a “gaybourhood” to not have existed in the past—but where’s the presence now? Why does it appear as though not much new is forming?

It wasn’t long before I started to find various explanations for the lack of gaybourhood, queer scene, or various cultural presence in contemporary Reykjavík via the wonderfully enlightening netherworld of tourist-information websites. One of the more striking quotations I found goes as follows, taken from Guide to Iceland’s website:

As for gay-culture, there isn’t much, because there does not need to be. Gays participate as regular members of society, and in Iceland there are openly gay people in all sectors and levels of society. And as such, there is no gaybourhood…

Forgetting (as much as I’d prefer not to) the use of “gay” in place of a wide variety of different identities and experiences, I wonder how much truth there is to this sentiment. Yes, Iceland is ahead of the curve in many ways in terms of LGBT+ legal rights—impressively so. But legal rights are hardly the same thing as acceptance (which, by the way, is hardly a victory—see the Riddle Scale), and certainly legal rights are not the same thing as actual safety, security, comfort, self-determined expression, etc. I don’t buy that culture is born exclusively as an act of defiance, or out of need for defence, and thus dies out when the need for protection is gone (which, mind you, it certainly is not).

So, to answer my question, the “gaybourhood” as of now exists alongside the straightbourhood (i.e. the World). Reykjavík has the outward appearance of an assimilationist’s utopia—lesbian beside queer beside trans beside intersex beside bisexual beside gay beside straight beside etc., all dancing contentedly in the same small club, no difference between them. Except that there are differences—different experiences, different wants and needs, different discrete identities and worldviews. And there is no way that everyone can or should always exist together like this.

It’s great that all spaces are open to us, and that many (though not all) can feel relatively safe living as ourselves. But no one wants only to co-mingle—with heterosexuals, or with adjacent letters. In speaking to LGBTQ+ persons of Reykjavík (while knowing there are still many more to talk to, and still much, much more to hear), one does seem to detect a want and a need for them to carve out discrete spaces for themselves. Though I wonder how much room here there actually is to do so.

VANCOUVER: ‘Gaybourhoods’ are expanding, not disappearing: UBC study

Sociology professor Amin Ghaziani says as couples diversify, so does where they call home

The corner of Davie Street and Bute Street in Vancouver, B.C. (Wikimedia Commons)

Gay and lesbian spaces, commonly known as “gaybourhoods,” are expanding across cities, rather than disappearing, a new B.C. study says.

Gaybourhoods, such as Vancouver’s Davie Village, are nothing new. A common perception has been that major cities have just one neighbourhood where all gay people live.

But new research by University of British Columbia sociology professor Amin Ghaziani, released Thursday, shows that members of the LGBTQ community are diversifying where they live, choosing what he calls “cultural archipelagos” beyond the gaybourhood. Only 12 per cent of LGBTQ adults live in a gaybourhood, while 72 per cent have never.

Ghaziani used data from the 2010 U.S. census to track location patterns of lesbians, transgender people, same-sex couples with children, and LGBTQ people of color.

He found queer communities of colour have emerged in Chicago and the outer boroughs of New York. That’s because African-American people in same-sex relationships are more likely to live in areas where there are higher populations of other African-Americans, rather than other LGBTQ people, he found.

Rural areas draw more same-sex female couples than male couples, and female couples tend to live where the median housing price per square foot is lower, which Ghaziani attributed to a possible reflection of the gender pay gap.

The study focuses on the U.S., but the findings are similar to data released in the last Canadian census.

There were 73,000 same-sex couples in the country in 2016, an increase of more than half over the last decade.

Meanwhile, major cities that were historically popular for same-sex couples, such as Toronto and Montreal, saw a nearly five per cent dip in the same time period, while areas such as Victoria are seeing an increase.

CANADA: Same-sex marriages rise, as gaybourhoods change

There were nearly 73,000 same-sex couples in 2016 in Canada, about a 61 per cent increase

The number of same-sex couples in Canada increased by more than half in the last decade, with three times more couples choosing to get married, census data shows.

There were nearly 73,000 same-sex couples in 2016 – about a 61 per cent increase from the 43,000 reported in the 2011 census.

The increase in the number of reported same-sex couples could be due to attitudes liberalizing dramatically since gay marriage was approved in 2005 in Canada and 2013 in the U.S., according to Amin Ghaziani, Canada Research Chair in Sexuality and Urban Studies at the University of British Columbia.

New census data shows a rapid increase in same-sex couples tying the knot – with one-third of couples reportedly being married – including Vancouver-area residents Laura and Jen O’Connor.

The pair got married for all the romantic, fairy-tale reasons: after seven years together, they were deeply in love and wanted to start a family. But on another level, they thought it might just make their life together a little easier.

After all, being gay comes with its own unique set of challenges – challenges they hoped might be easier to navigate if they shared a last name.

“It’s one less thing, one less obstacle that you have to deal with,” says Jen, 27, during an interview in a sun-drenched backyard at Laura’s parents’ house in Cloverdale.

They decided to move in to save money after spending $15,000 on three unsuccessful rounds of in vitro fertilization.

The pair are currently saving up to buy a home of their own in the Vancouver area – the third-most popular metropolitan city for same-sex couples to live in across the country, behind Toronto and Montreal.

Gaybourhoods are nothing new, including Vancouver’s Davie Street – a well-known destination for LGBTQ members in B.C., but are seemingly becoming less of the hotspots they once were, according to Ghaziani.

“Acceptance produces more of a dispersion,” he said, adding that cultural and social factors work hand-in-hand with the economics of where same-sex couples and singles look to live.

Acceptance is only one factor in the decision-making process, though, as real estate prices remain high and unaffordable for many, especially those with children.

Lesbians are considered the trailblazers of LGBTQ migration, Ghaziani said, historically finding trendy neighbourhoods that are progressive, cheaper and have nearby sustainable resources like grocery and book stores.

Due to the gender wage gap and 80 per cent of same-sex couples with kids being female, lesbians are usually the first to be pushed out of neighbourhoods once late-stage gentrification begins, he said.

For example, as Davies Street tends to offer single occupancy units at higher rent – leaving the one-eighth of same-sex couples with children most likely looking to more affordable non-urban areas.

And as more traditional gaybourhoods change, others seem to be beginning in other parts of the province. More than 1,200 same-sex couples resided in Victoria in 2016, according to the census data, compared to about 700 in 2006.

With files from Laura Kane from The Canadian Press

AUSTRALIA: Australia’s biggest ‘Gaybourhoods ‘

Australia’s “gaybourhoods” are rapidly changing and relocating. We took a look at some of the most prominent LGBTI locales with the help of Australian Census data on same-sex couples.

1. Potts Point (NSW)

Gone are the days Darlinghurst held the crown as Sydney’s queer capital. While the Oxford Street strip still hosts Sydney’s annual Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras Parade, a few suburbs over to the east of the CBD you’ll find the beating heart of the city’s LGBTI culture in Potts Point. In the 2011 Australian Census, Potts Point had the second-highest concentration of male same-sex couples in capital city suburbs, only .1 of a percentage point off the then leader (Darlinghurst).

Potts Point in Sydney (Greg Wood/AFP/Getty Images).

2. Daylesford (Victoria)

Home to Australia’s largest rural LGBTI festival, ChillOut, Daylesford is a couple of hours outside of Melbourne and is known for its many mineral springs. It’s a popular spot for visitors and mature same-sex couples looking to settle down and invest in a tree-change. People in same-sex couples tend to be more mobile than people in opposite-sex couples. In 2011, 63 per cent of people in same-sex couples lived somewhere else five years ago compared with 40 per cent of people in opposite-sex couples.

A world record attempt at the largest ever simultaneous massage in the popular Victorian spa town of Daylesford in 2010. (Scott Barbour/Getty Images)

3. New Farm (Queensland)

Found in the inner suburbs of Brisbane alongside its winding river, New Farm plays host to the annual Brisbane Pride Festival and is close to the gay nightlife of Fortitude Valley. Brisbane had more than 3500 self-identifying same-sex couples in the 2011 Census, many of whom call New Farm’s leafy streets home.

New Farm Park in Brisbane (Photo by Glenn Hunt/Getty Images)

4. Brunswick (Victoria)

Brunswick isn’t just a hipster hotspot, it’s home to a great many LGBTI people who’ve traded Prahran’s Chapel Street for the northern suburbs of Melbourne. Its culinary and nightlife options have blossomed as Prahran’s famous Commercial Road strip has dwindled in recent years. It also has a higher proportion of female same-sex couples than its southern rival.

Brunswick, Victoria (Mat Connolley/Wiki Commons).

5. Newtown/Erskineville (NSW)

The Newtown/Erskineville area in Sydney’s Inner West is home to the majority of the nation’s female same-sex couples. In fact, if you were to take in the neighbouring suburbs of St Peters and Enmore, you’d account for a whopping 22.4 per cent of female same-sex couples as a percentage of Australia’s capital cities. Its famous terraces and pocket bars also account for 11 per cent of male same-sex couples.

Cyclists along King St, Newtown (Mark Kolbe/Getty Images)

LONDON: London’s hottest Gaybourhoods

SOHO

Revitalised by the gay community “two or three recessions ago”, according to Coote, but now thoroughly commercialised and “de-gayed”, in the words of photographer Adrian Lourie. Still home to a large collection of clubs and pubs, of course — the Admiral Duncan, Shadow Lounge, G-A-Y — and therefore still a mecca for tourists and out-of-towners. The lesbian Candy Bar closed last year but new bar She Soho is “quite seismic in that it’s the first lesbian bar actually on Old Compton Street”, according to Sophie Wilkinson, news editor of The Debrief.

VAUXHALL

Hot in Vo-zhawl: the Royal Vauxhall Tavern in the heart of SE11 (Pic: Adrian Lourie) ( Adrian Lourie )

The Royal Vauxhall Tavern has been a welcoming destination for gays since the Second World War, and the adjoining Pleasure Gardens contain a popular canoodling hummock more recently dubbed Brokeback Mountain. Vauxhall — formerly VoHo, now Vo-challe or Vo-zhawl — is now home to a sizeable residential community and a massive nightlife scene based around the clubs, bars and saunas under the railway arches: Barcode, Chariots, Fire etc… Possibly on the turn thanks to rising rents. “Going through Vauxhall recently I saw that a gay specialist leather shop had become a halal butcher’s, which is probably the sort of thing that would keep Mr Farage awake at night,” says Ben Summerskill.

HAMPSTEAD

Historically a gay area due to the Heath (before mobile apps made hook-ups easier) and the men’s bathing pond, it’s still beloved of older, wealthier, boho gay residents as well as younger blow-ins or those forced to settle for nearby Kilburn. “It has an upmarket village feel — in a non-Village People way — with a fine housing stock and plentiful high street,” says TV journalist Stefan Levy. There’s also a venerable gay pub, the King William IV (the Willy).

CLAPHAM

As with Hampstead Heath, above, so with Clapham Common: plus, The Two Brewers nightclub and Kazbar remain pivotal venues on the London gay scene. Gays smitten by the “Vale of Cla’am” and able to get on the property ladder there have stayed amid the rising tide of yummy mummies.

SHOREDITCH

A prime example of pioneering gays subsumed within a wider influx of cool, followed by commercialism. The Joiners Arms was a totemic gay venue when Shoreditch felt like “the middle of nowhere” (Summerskill). Then came the Young British Artists, the hipsters, the pop-ups, the City boys and the big chains. Still an LGBT favourite, though, thanks to a thriving art/design and alternative bar/club scene (Sink the Pink nights, etc), though high rents mean gays and lesbians are more likely to settle in Dalston or Hackney (see below). Sophie Wilkinson says Shoreditch is “one of the few pockets of London where I feel I can walk hand in hand with another woman without fear of attack”, along with Soho, Waterloo and Dalston (there are infrequent lesbian club nights at Dalston Superstore).

STOKE NEWINGTON

Home to a sizeable London lesbian community, with social life focused on the nearby parks and the iconic Blush bar on Cazenove Road. Stoke Newington School pioneered the teaching of LGBT History month.

BERMONDSEY

A mixture of Vauxhall and Shoreditch, minus the club culture (though XXL, the club for “bears, cubs and their admirers”, is a short lollop away). It’s near the river but with a large amount of ex-council accommodation and do-up-able warehouse space, plus a burgeoning foodie culture.

CHISWICK

Google “gay Chiswick” and the only result is a car park recommended on a cruising website. But anecdotal reports suggest that many gay air crew — those who can afford it — settle in Chiswick due to its combination of bucolic charm and proximity to Heathrow. One resident claims a W4 postcode is an asset when chatting someone up.

And finally…

PECKHAM

“Definitely the next place!” according to Lourie. His view is echoed by QX magazine, which notes the area’s multicultural vibrancy and arty/student scene fed by Goldsmiths and Camberwell, as well as the queer night Garçonne at the Bussey Building and live art nights at The Flying Dutchman, plus LGBT-friendly bars. Wilkinson also mentions Tooting and Nunhead as potential hotspots as all young creative/club types — not just LGBTQ+ ones — are priced out of central north, west and east London. The next gaybourhood? Look south…

References

Gay History: The “Lavender Scare”.

Article, Gay Interest, General Interest, History, Political, , , , , ,

Interrogations of one’s sexuality became commonplace in the 1950s and 1960s’ federal workplace. Questions like “Do you identify as a homosexual or have you ever had same-sex sexual relations?” were commonplace as employers attempted to root out LGBT employees. This period of time is often known as the Lavender Scare—the interrogation and firing of LGBT-identifying civil servants.

Before the Lavender Scare and post-World War II, LGBT individuals from rural towns began congregating to cities where they could keep anonymity. This newfound peace and community, however, was disturbed in 1947 when the United States Park Police created a Sex Perversion Elimination Act. Primarily targeting these communities in parks, at least five hundred people were arrested and 76 were charged.

As a part of the broader Red Scare that targeted communists, the Lavender Scare’s development was in large fault due to Senator McCarthy, who brought to the Senate his famous list which gave the names of two hundred and five federal employees, two of which were homosexual individuals. While federal agents began to investigate Senator McCarthy’s federal employment list, much of the Red Scare rhetoric also invoked the ideas of morality connected with queer and homosexual people to those of communists. At the time, homosexuals were viewed as sinful and perverted and the public perception of homosexuality shared many similarities with the public view of communists, who were similarly viewed lacking in both moral and mental strength. For the federal government, LGBT employees began to pose a security risk: if they were living double lives, then they may not be loyal nor mentally stable enough to keep government secrets.

Eventually, Senators Wherry and Hill, who were supported by McCarty, interrogated the two LGBT individuals on McCarty’s list, leading to their discharge. In March 1952, the federal government announced its removal of 162 civil servants suspecting of being homosexual. And about a year later on April 27, 1953, President Dwight Eisenhower signed Executive Order 10450, expanding on Truman’s federal employment regulations with a statement to exclude federal employees of “sexual perversion.” Because of this Executive Order, it is estimated that at least ten thousand civil servants lost their jobs.

The Lavender Scare made being publicly LGBT difficult. Although homosexuals were largely closeted before the Lavender Scare, being publicly LGBT during the 1950s was largely challenging and near impossible without staggeringly high consequences. Not only were LGBT federal employees fired, but many others were also simply fired for “guilt of association” in knowing someone who was LGBT. Because of the resulting stigma within federal government as well as in larger public culture, many of the federal investigations and resulting firings lead to dismissed employees’ suicides — most of which were later covered up by the federal interrogators.

Several LGBT people later stepped up to challenge federal government’s “sexual perversion” components, including civil servant Frank Kameny who took his case to the Supreme Court. Although Kameny lost, a few federal courts began ruling in his favor by 1969. More gay rights organizations also developed such as the Mattachine Society (1950) as well as the Daughters of Bilitis (1955). The Lavender Scare’s effects, however, were still lasting.

The Lavender Scare not only broke up and quieted the cities’ queer communities who were afraid of federal employment discrimination and potential hate crime, but it also resulted in a largely conservative, homogenous culture within the government. While most federal organizations overturned their policies on LGBT discrimination, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and National Security Alliance (NSA)’s bans on homosexuals lasted into the 1990s, until they were officially overturned by President Bill Clinton in 1995. Later, as recent as 2015, Secretary of State John Kerry apologized to the LGBT community on behalf of the federal government’s Lavender Scare interrogations, stating: “I apologize to those who were impacted by the practices of the past and reaffirm the department’s steadfast commitment to diversity and inclusion for all our employees, including members of the LGBTI community.”

Homosexuals at the State Department

In the 1950s and 60s, security within the U.S. government, including the State Department, was on high alert for internal risks, particularly Communists and what were considered to be sexual deviants—homosexuals and promiscuous individuals. Investigating homosexuality became a core function of the Department’s Office of Security, which ferreted out more people for homosexuality than for being a Communist.

In 1950, a subcommittee chaired by Maryland Senator Millard Tydings convened to investigate Joseph McCarthy’s notorious list of “205 known communists.” Tydings worked to discredit McCarthy’s claim, but, in the process, the subcommittee concluded that the State Department was overrun with “sexual perverts,” part of the so-called “Lavender Scare.” 

During the hearings, Nebraska Senator Kenneth Wherry memorably claimed that as many as 3,000 homosexuals were employed at State. By the end of 1950, 600 people had been dismissed from positions at the State Department on morals charges. In 1973 a federal judge ruled that a person’s sexual orientation alone could not be the sole reason for termination from federal employment; two years later, the Civil Service Commission announced that it would consider applications by gays and lesbians on a case-by-case basis.

The following excerpts give a glimpse behind the curtain as individuals in the Security and Personnel offices discuss how they interrogated suspected homosexuals, who were then forced to leave the Service. Norman V. Shute served as the Administrative Officer of the Near East Asian Affairs (NEA) Bureau at the State Department from 1958-1961. His memoir was given to ADST in July 1995. Robert J. Ryan, Sr. served as the Assistant Chief for Foreign Service Personnel from 1953-1955. He was interviewed by Charles Stuart Kennedy beginning November 1991. Robert Woodward served as the Chief of Foreign Service Personnel from 1952-1953 and was interviewed by Kennedy beginning May 1987.

Joseph C. Walsh served as the Director of the Security Office from 1953-1957. He was interviewed by G. Lewis Schmidt beginning April 1989. Charles Anthony Gillespie Jr. served as the Regional Security Officer (RSO) in Manila, Philippines and Jakarta, Indonesia from 1965-1966. He was interviewed by Kennedy beginning September 1995. Edward L. Lee II served as an Agent in the Field Office of the Security Office in the State Department from 1971-1972. He was interviewed by Charles Stuart Kennedy beginning June 1999.

“Homosexuality in the Service has always been a problem”

Norman V. Schute, NEA Administrative Officer, 1958-1961

SCHUTE:  Homosexuality in the Service has always been a problem. I voice no personal opinion on this. Basically, officially it is believed that homosexuality can lead to the compromise of U.S. Government security.

Both German and Soviet intelligence use homosexuals to establish a close relationship with homosexuals in other countries’ services including our own. Those who cohabited on the outside were developed into informants by their lovers.

Others were or were likely to become targets for blackmail and thence informants. “Traitor” is another term used for it. Back in 1946 as I recall, [someone] had to inform Secretary of State Cordell Hull that a very senior officer had been arrested for pederasty [homosexual relationship between an adult male and a minor male] in Lafayette Park [near the White House].

In Rome, two of my colleagues after interviews confessed and were released from the Service. Three members of the original Foreign Service Security group were reported to be deviants and on interview were promptly released.

And in 1947…, Foreign Service Chief Inspector Merle Cochran, later an Ambassador, sent home seven communications personnel, a veritable “daisy and chain” as it is known. And that’s the way it is, or at least was, in my day.

“’How many homosexuals has the Department fired this year?’”

Robert J. Ryan, Sr., Assistant Chief for Foreign Service Personnel, 1953-1955

RYAN: When I was in Departmental Personnel, we had an individual who had been arrested and then the Security Office ran an investigation on him and found that he was an active homosexual. I remember Arch Gean, who was then the Chief of Departmental Personnel, telling me about going up with Jack Peurifoy, who was the Assistant Secretary for Administration, to see General [and Secretary of State George C.] Marshall and going over the file with him.

When they finished their discussion, as it was reported to me, General Marshall said, “Fire the bastard.” And that was where the policy was inaugurated of terminating people with homosexual backgrounds….

On the issue of the homosexuals, of course, one of the unfortunate incidents that occurred following that is that each year at the time the State Department went up for its hearing before the Appropriations Committee, one of the questions from Congressman [John J.] Rooney [D-NY,  pictured], who was Chairman of the State Department Committee, always was “How many homosexuals has the Department fired this year?”

That was a usual question, so it was a matter of public knowledge each year of how many people left the State Department because of allegations of homosexual activities. The Security Office actually had one guy, John Finletter, who spend his full time following up allegations of homosexuality among the employees of the Department.

Robert Woodward, Chief of Foreign Service Personnel, 1952-1953

WOODWARD: The Security Division was caused to set up standards which were very specific and arbitrary. For example, I had gone to great effort to get a deputy Chief of Mission for Saigon….

Ed Gullion was a very able fellow, and I was hunting for a replacement for him. I found a very, very able guy and this was one of the duties of the Chief of Foreign Service personnel, was to try to get very able people for very important assignments. I went to quite a lot of effort to get this man, and I wanted to persuade him — he’d never been in the Far East — I wanted to persuade him of the importance of the assignment. This was, as I recall, just before Dien Bien Phu. It was a very critical time for the French….

Anyhow, the man was going to take up his duties that I considered important, and I think that he’d been persuaded were important. He was about to depart from the United States. I think he was in New York, when I was suddenly informed through Bob Ryan (see above), who was in constant liaison with the security division, that the man had resigned.

Well, I couldn’t understand it, because I had had several talks with him just a few days before, and everything was going according to plan. I discovered that the security division had brought him in and had a very tough interrogation with him.

They had a criterion that if any person in the Foreign Service were found to have had any kind of a homosexual relationship after a date six months after his 21st birthday, that he must be discharged from the Foreign Service. This man that was going to Saigon was 45- 46 years of age, happily married, had children. There was no question of his homosexuality whatever.

But in the course of the interrogation he admitted some kind of a homosexual incident within that narrow margin just after the cut-off date, six months after his 21st birthday. And he was out of the Foreign Service. Of course, there was nothing I could do about it, and I had to find somebody else to go to Saigon.

Joseph C. Walsh, Director of the Security Office, 1953-1957

WALSH: There were multiple problems. When Congress created USIA [U.S. Information Agency] they directed that everyone then in the Agency be cleared for top secret information. Thus, all were subjected to “full-field” investigations by the FBI to determine whether or not their employment was to be continued.

Also, all applicants for employment with the Agency were subject to the same regulation. This investigational processing consumed long 3 periods of time — as much as four months in some cases — which created untenable problems in the hiring procedures.

As a result of these long delays, the Agency lost many especially suitable applicants for employment. The great bulk of the job didn’t set well with the FBI and, with Congressional approval, transferred the full-field investigations to the Civil Service Commission with the stipulation that should an investigation reveal affiliation with Communism or its organizations, such would be returned to the FBI for their more extensive handling.

This measure reduced considerably the waiting time before the required clearance could be made for an individual’s appointment. The clearance process, of course, fell upon the Office of Security. The staff received the FBI and/or Civil Service reports, studied them carefully and, with no obstacles extant, stamped them with full clearance.

The standard of measurement, our bible, was Executive Order 10450 issued by President Eisenhower shortly before our Agency was formed in 1953. The essence of this Order related to Federal employees as affecting the country’s National Security — denial of such employment was spelled out to include anyone associated with communism, homosexuals, drunks and other social aberrants who might be considered threats to the security of the USA.

All this, I’m sure you remember, happened within the days of the broiling McCarthy investigations so thoroughly exposed under TV lights and avidly consumed by a national audience intrigued and scared by the Wisconsin Senator’s accusations.

As to the denials of the security clearances: It seems to be — now, thirty-plus years later — there were, within our Agency, extremely few individuals (employees or applicants) who were denied security clearance due to their association with communism, or its organizations. By far, the major shares of the total number were those admitted homosexuals.

It was a nasty business, seeking out and identifying people suspected of homosexuality. Disquieting features to me — there were several awfully decent and intelligent people who worked within the Agency whom I got to know well and enjoyed working within the Agency programs who, suddenly and peremptorily, dropped out of the picture — disappeared! Under investigation, they had admitted their homosexuality and had resigned.

“The whole idea was to develop information so that you could confront the individual. Then he would resign.”

Charles Anthony Gillespie Jr., RSO, Manila and Jakarta, 1965-1966

GILLESPIE: I learned when I came into security affairs that there were two sorts of secret or highly sensitive, investigative units – or maybe it was one unit with two parts in the State Department security system. One of these units had to do with real, honest to God, counterintelligence….

Either a separate unit or a part of the same unit dealt with nothing but homosexuality. I remember the first time that when I went into that unit and talked to two or three of the people assigned, I felt almost intimidated myself. They were briefing me on the unit’s activities. There were special code words for the special kinds of investigations. These were formal investigations.

We use a code word system today on the distribution of sensitive policy messages. We have “NODIS,” which means “no distribution outside the State Department.” These security units also used “NODIS CHEROKEE,” “NODIS GREEN,” and so forth, which meant that the message dealt with a particular subject. It could involve China, and so forth. In any event, in the security investigative area, communications were labeled. I don’t remember quite what the label was, but a certain label meant that it concerned a homosexuality case.

The whole idea was to develop enough information so that you could confront the individual and get him to agree that he was a homosexual, if that was what you believed. Then he would resign from the Foreign Service. If he didn’t resign, you would pull his security clearance.

I was never directly involved with one of these cases. I don’t know what it was really like to handle one. However, that confrontation technique as described to me was to face these people, get them to admit what they were, and then they would leave the Foreign Service. That was the whole idea.

It was a little more precise than [looking for somebody who was unmarried or talked with a lisp], although those factors were never far away, because I think that people believed in those days, as they probably have for some time, that in terms of our ethic in the United States, you could probably identify people like that. They were visible if you just looked hard enough.

What I was told when I was briefed in this unit was that I should try to find out whether there were any homosexual hangouts, e.g., nightclubs at my post.

If I heard of anybody from our mission who hung out at these places, I should immediately take the following steps:  find out what they were doing at one of these hangouts. Was the allegation really true? If it was true, they told me, notify us, and we’ll open a case on the person concerned. So that was it, and this unit would undertake follow-up action.

When you did a background investigation on someone or you were updating an investigation on a Foreign Service Officer — let’s say, age 43 or 44 — who had never been married, you were enjoined to make sure that you asked all the right questions which would cover what we today would call sexual orientation. The question might be asked, “Why isn’t he married?” “Does he go out with women?” Really subtle, penetrating questions like that — just as we used to ask questions about drinking.

When I first started in as a Security Officer, questions on drug use were practically never asked. I left the security area in the late 1960s when questions about drugs became very important. Investigations of homosexuality were very important matters. They were big deals.

I don’t think that the homosexuality issue would ever have loomed large in most people’s minds. However, for many of them it was a distasteful area…

The idea was that if an individual engages in any behavior which is prohibited by his social or cultural group, and does it surreptitiously, knows that it’s wrong, by that very fact he or she is now susceptible to pressure. That was the whole theory of it.

Now, I will be very blunt and say that I detected, as a human being talking to other human beings — and this is an intuitive kind of judgment — that there were some people who were firmly and solidly convinced that certain kinds of behavior were not only wrong but abominable.

They considered that this kind of behavior should be ferreted out and eradicated. Some of the people holding those views were certainly in the State Department security system at this time. I think that they gravitated to charges of this kind.

“If a person said they were homosexual, that usually meant terminating the interview”

Edward L. Lee II, Field Agent, Security Office, 1971-1972

LEE: There was a law that is still in place called Executive Order 10450. That goes back to the ‘60s. It authorized federal agencies to investigate people that were coming to work for the U.S. government.

There were certain criteria that you would look at. We did not want at that time people that were involved in activity of moral turpitude. We did not want people that were not loyal Americans. What a loyal American is or is not was never quite well defined.

But we were hoping that people would hold up their hand and say they would be loyal to the Constitution and the system of government, they would not attempt to overthrow it, and what have you. Even in the early ‘70s, the Cold War was well underway. There was a threat of communist aggression worldwide. There was a threat of nuclear superiority. So, there were a lot of things we did not want. We did not want spies or homosexuals.

The belief at that time was that if your sexual orientation was other than heterosexual, you could be co-opted, recruited, blackmailed. Thereby, a very senior person in the Department of State could be forced, co-opted, coerced to turn over documents, violate their loyalty to the United State and what have you. We’ve learned a lot since then.

But we did not want people with bad credit, criminal records, homosexuals, drunks… These were all risks that we were not prepared to accept. Unfortunately, during the early periods that I was in the Foreign Service, people didn’t have that many rights. If the Department chose to turn you down for a position, the ability to get equal treatment under the law was not guaranteed…

The period of free love, the period of Haight Ashbury and Woodstock and free expression sort of helped us become who we later were. There was a lot of jaundiced eye looks at people even if their academic background was good and they scored well on the Foreign Service exam and did well on the orals and what have you.

When they got to the point of getting the clearance, that became a very unpleasant experience. There were no real guarantees of what could and could not be asked. If you were asked, “How would you describe your sexual orientation,” quite often people that were raised in the ‘50s or ‘60s would not lie, they would simply tell the truth.

We’d always been told that if you tell the truth, how can you be wrong? Well, in telling the truth, you end up not being hired. So, people really looked at the security organization, SY, the Office of Security, as this potential group of thugs that could deprive you of being employed. During the late ‘60s/early ‘70s, we grappled with those things….

If a person said they were homosexual, that usually meant terminating the interview, documenting what had been said, and that would be reviewed by a higher authority. Usually, a woman that was living with someone was viewed very negatively. A woman who was divorced was almost looked at as a prostitute in some circles within the old SY organization. It was a very black-and-white environment

References

Exonerating “Patient Zero”: The Truth About ‘Patient Zero’ And HIV’s Origins

Article, Gay Interest, General Interest, Health Information, HIV/AIDS, , , , ,

The man blamed for bringing HIV to the United States just had his name cleared.

New research has proved that Gaëtan Dugas, a French-Canadian flight attendant who was dubbed “patient zero,” did not spread HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, to the United States.

A cutting-edge analysis of blood samples from the 1970s offers new insight into how the virus spread to North America via the Caribbean from Africa. More than 1.2 million people in the United States currently live with HIV.

The research, conducted by an international team of scientists, was published this week in the journal Nature.

“No one should be blamed for the spread of a virus that no one even knew about, and how the virus moved from the Caribbean to the US in New York City in the 1970s is an open question,” co-author of the research, Dr. Michael Worobey, a professor and head of the ecology and evolutionary biology department at the University of Arizona, said at a news conference Tuesday.

“It could have been a person of any nationality. It could have even been blood products. A lot of blood products used in the United States in the 1970s actually came from Haiti,” he said. “What we’ve done here is try to get at the origins of the first cases of AIDS that were ever noticed. … When you step back in time, you see a very interesting pattern.”

‘Patient zero’ and the power of a name

In 1981, researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention first documented a mysterious disease. In their research, they linked the human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, to sexual activity.

In 1987, the National Review referred to him as the “Columbus of AIDS,” and the New York Post called him “the man who gave us AIDS” on its front page.

“We were quite annoyed by that, because it was just simply wrong, but this doesn’t stop people from saying it, because it’s so appealing. You know, ‘The man who brought us AIDS.’ Well, if it were true, it would be annoying, but since it isn’t true,

Gaëtan Dugas was dubbed “patient zero.”

However, the letter O was misinterpreted as a zero in the scientific literature. Once the media and the public noticed the name, the damage was done.

Dugas and his family were condemned for years. In Randy Shilts’ seminal book on the AIDS crisis, “And The Band Played On,” Dugas is referenced extensively and referred to as a “sociopath” with multiple sexual partners.

In 1987, the National Review referred to him as the “Columbus of AIDS,” and the New York Post called him “the man who gave us AIDS” on its front page.

“We were quite annoyed by that, because it was just simply wrong, but this doesn’t stop people from saying it, because it’s so appealing. You know, ‘The man who brought us AIDS.’ Well, if it were true, it would be annoying, but since it isn’t true, it’s even more annoying,” said Dr. James Curran, dean of Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health and co-director of the university’s Center for AIDS Research.

Curran, who was not involved in the new research, coordinated the AIDS task force at the CDC in 1981 and then led the HIV/AIDS division until 1995.

“The CDC never said that he was patient zero and that he was the first person,” Curran said of Dugas.

“In addition to the potential damage to his reputation, it was also a damage to scientific plausibility. That there would be a single-point source to start the epidemic in the United States is not very likely. It’s more likely that several people were infected,” Curran said. “I think that the concept of patient zero has always been wrong and flawed, and scientists never said it.”

Dugas died in 1984 of AIDS-related complications. Now, more than 30 years later, scientists have used samples of his blood to clear his name.

Going back in time with blood

For the new research, Worobey and his colleagues gathered archival blood samples in New York and San Francisco that were originally collected for a hepatitis B study in 1978 and 1979. The samples came from men who had sex with men.

The researchers screened the samples and noticed that “the prevalence of HIV positivity in these early samples from hepatitis B patients is really quite high,” Worobey said Tuesday.

From the samples, the researchers recovered eight genome sequences of HIV, representing the oldest genomes of the virus in North America. They also recovered the HIV genome from Dugas’ blood sample.

As many of the samples had degraded over time, Worobey’s lab developed a technique called “RNA jackhammering” to recover the genetic material.

The technique involves breaking down the human genomes found in the blood and then extracting the RNA of HIV to recover genetic data about the virus, an approach that’s similar to what has been used to reconstruct the ancient genome of Neanderthals in separate studies.

“The major contribution which interested me the most was their capacity to restore full sequence genomes from very old serum samples using the jackhammer technique,” Curran said of the new research.

After analyzing the genomes, the researchers found no biological evidence that Dugas was the primary case that brought HIV to the United States, and the genome from Dugas appeared typical of the other strains already in the United States at the time.

The researchers discovered strong evidence that the virus emerged in the United States from a pre-existing Caribbean epidemic in or around 1970.

How HIV arrived in the United States

Sequencing genomes allows scientists to take a peek back in time to determine how a virus emerged and where it traveled by examining how many mutations appear in the genome.

Scientists estimate that HIV was transmitting in humans after a chimpanzee infected a single person sometime in the early 20th century in sub-Saharan Africa. The general consensus among scientists is that HIV then crossed the Atlantic and quickly spread through the Caribbean before it arrived in the United States, probably from Haiti, Curran said.

Scientists at the University of Oxford published a separate study in June suggesting that HIV spread through specific migration routes — based on tourism and trade — throughout the past 50 years as it made its way around the world.

The research team behind the new genetic analysis now hopes that its findings may lead to a better understanding of how HIV moved through populations — and how blaming a single patient for the pathogen’s rise remains troublesome.

“In many ways, the historical evidence has been pointing toward the fallacy of this particular notion of patient zero for decades,” Richard McKay, a historian of medicine at the University of Cambridge and a co-author of the new research, said at Tuesday’s news conference.

“The study shines light from different angles to better understand the complexity of an important period in the past,” he said. “In view of this complexity, one of the dangers of focusing on a single patient zero when discussing the early phases of an epidemic is that we risk obscuring important, structural factors that might contribute to its development: poverty, legal and cultural inequalities, barriers to health care and education. These important determinants risk being overlooked.”

Reference

Gay History: Shock the Gay Away: Secrets of Early Gay Aversion Therapy Revealed (PHOTOS)

Article, Gay Interest, General Interest, Health Information, History, , , ,

With the recent announcement from Exodus International that it is closing its doors, and with its leaders offering apologies for their actions, the LGBT community is now left wondering, “Can this really be the end of ex-gay reparative therapy? Is it really over?” While the dust settles on all of this, we have to remind ourselves that it wasn’t too long ago that reparative therapies had less to do with praying the gay away and more to do with physically removing it.

Before the American Psychiatric Association (APA) declassified homosexuality as a mental disorder in 1973, aversion therapy was used routinely in hopes that it would prevent or eliminate homosexual behavior. Devices like the one below were used by therapists treating homosexual patients, and some of them were even available for use in the convenience of your own home.

In the more brutal therapy sessions, the shock was delivered directly to the male patient’s genitals every time the patient experienced any form of positive response to the slides being shown to him. The following excerpt from a Farrall Instrument catalogue advertising electroshock therapy products details how the therapies worked:

Aversive conditioning has proven an effective aid in the treatment of child molesters, transvestites, exhibitionists, alcoholics, shop lifters, and other people with similar problems. Stimulus slides are shown to the patient intermixed with neutral slides. Shock is delivered with stimulus scenes but not with neutral scenes. In reinforcing heterosexual preference in latent male homosexuals, male slides give a shock while the stimulus relief slides of females do not give shock. The patient is given a “slide change” hand button which enables him to escape or avoid a shock by rejecting a shock cue scene.

In the 1940s, homosexuals were also involuntarily committed to psychiatric facilities by their families, with the hospitals promising that the patient would eventually leave the facility cured of their “sexual illness.” Not only were they not allowed to leave, but they were often subjected to cruel and inhumane treatments, including castrations, torture drugs, shock therapy, and lobotomies.

The surgeon most credited for the rise of lobotomies was Dr. Walter Freeman, who was best known for his transorbital lobotomy, or “ice pick lobotomy.” In this procedure, the surgeon entered the prefrontal area through the patient’s eye sockets, using an instrument that resembled a common household ice pick. Out of the thousands of lobotomies Freeman performed, up to 40 percent of them were on homosexuals.

In 1941, he performed a botched lobotomy on U.S. President John F. Kennedy’s sister, Rosemary, to help calm her mood swings and occasional violent outbursts. The results were abysmal. She lived the rest of her life seriously disabled in a private psychiatric hospital, along with most of Freeman’s homosexual patients, who were in perfect health before the surgery. By the end of the 1940s, lobotomies had won the acceptance of mainstream medicine and were being performed at Johns Hopkins, Mass General Hospital, the Mayo Clinic, and other top medical institutions.

Ultimately, the fate of the lobotomy would be decided by a pill. In 1954, a new drug called Thorazine began to make its way through state mental hospitals and was initially marketed as a chemical lobotomy. With a viable alternative now in hand that didn’t require surgery, the medical community turned definitively against lobotomy.

The APA removed homosexuality from its official Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) in 1973. This decision occurred against the backdrop of great cultural shifts brought on by the civil rights movements of the 1950s to the 1970s, beginning with the African-American civil rights movement and then continuing on with the women’s and gay rights movements.

In the late 1960s, Christianity Today began printing articles and editorials concerned with the growing homosexual movement. In the early 1970s, ex-gay ministries began to emerge. In 1973, the first contemporary ex-gay ministry, Love in Action, was started in Northern California. In 1976, the first national conference of “ex-gay” ministries was held, resulting in the formation of Exodus International.

Now, 37 years and 260 ministries later, Exodus International is closing its doors. It remains to be seen whether this is truly the demise of the ex-gay movement. What we at ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives do know for sure is that the LGBT community has persevered, regardless of what was hurled at us physically, psychologically, or spiritually, then and now. We have endured and withstood, and have the history to prove it.

PHOTOS

‘I Was A Homosexual’
Real Magazine, 1953 Courtesy of ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at USC Libraries Discover more images from LGBT history at www.onearchives.org

‘What Is A Homosexual?’

Confidential Magazine, 1957 Courtesy of ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at USC Libraries Discover more images from LGBT history at www.onearchives.org

‘Homosexuality Is A Mental Illness’
Confidential Magazine, 1957 Courtesy of ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at USC Libraries Discover more images from LGBT history at www.onearchives.org
‘New Theory Claims Homosexuality Can Be Cured’
Uncensored Magazine, 1969 Courtesy of ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at USC Libraries Discover more images from LGBT history at www.onearchives.org
‘Spitting Image’
Uncensored Magazine, 1969 Courtesy of ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at USC Libraries Discover more images from LGBT history at www.onearchives.org

Reference

Gay History: Rules From A 1950s Gay Bar

Article, Gay Interest, General Interest, History, Humour, , , ,

An un-named Miami-area bar tried to make light of the hostile anti-gay atmosphere in the 1950s by posting the following set of sarcastic rules for its patrons to follow. They were published in One Magazine in 1955.

Rules and Regulations Covering The Behavior Of Our Customers:

1. First of all-remember that the customer is never right.

bostonspiritmagazine.com

2. Before drinking, each customer is to repeat six times “The customer is never right.”

nyinexile.com

3. When a customer wishes to go to the restroom–please raise hand and barmaid will direct you to proper door.

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4. Mother and daughter customers are not allowed to hold hands, kiss or pat each other on back. On week-ends they are not allowed to even talk to each other.

tucsongaymuseum.com

5. No after-shave lotion or talcum powder allowed on male customers.

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6. Lady customers may smoke only if male customer lights cigarette for them.

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7. Lady customers may smoke only cigarettes with ivory tips, jewelled pipes or “Between the Acts” cigars.

chuckmanchicagonostalgia.wordpress.com

8. Male customers may NOT wave at friends or relatives passing by in the street because we’ll have none of those gestures in this place, my dear.

informercantile.com

9. Female customers may not talk at all–they are required to walk around the bar at least once every five minutes, dropping handkerchiefs and swooning at the far turn.

weheartit.com

10. Male customers must have hair on the chest–if you have none–please bring along another chest with the required hair on it. (We will gladly refrigerate it for you while you’re here).

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11. Men may wear only stiff shirts and tails.

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12. Women must wear make-up-false eyelashes and beauty marks will be provided at the bar for those women customers who have just come from the beach and don’t have their make-up kits with them.

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13. Male customers are required to spit periodically. Since we have no spittoons please use the guy next to you.

14. Any male customer caught buying a beer for another male customer will have to buy a beer for the barmaid too so that the management will know that the man customer is of high moral character and not one of those characters.

Brooklyn-lobular.brooklynpubliclibrary.com

15. Please do not be offended if we do not serve you. Here are but a few of the people we could not serve if they were able to patronize us : Socrates, Wilde, Proust, Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Queen Christina, Lord Tennyson etc. and far on into the night.

queermusicheritage.org

Reference

Shunned, Abused and Tortured: David Berry Portrays What Many Gay Men Endured In 1950s Australia

Article, Gay Interest, General Interest, History, , , , , , ,

Needless to say, this has already screened, but as a fairly accurate portrayal of a gay man’s life in 1950s rural Australia, it is important to acknowledge this truly realistic acting on David Berry’s part, and the affect it had on him.

SHUNNED by society, treated like criminals and tortured. Actor David Berry was deeply impacted portraying what so many gay men endured.

ACTOR David Berry would be so traumatised by his television character some days that he’d break down in hysterics on set.

The 31-year-old star of A Place To Call Home would be totally inconsolable — a sobbing mess. And he began to take the heavy experiences of James Bligh with him at the end of a day’s filming.

It wasn’t just the heavy storylines from the Foxtel period drama, set in 1950s Australia — it was that so much truth was woven in to the fictional heir to a farming fortune.

James is married but gay and, in the previous two seasons, has experienced everything from forbidden love to family disapproval and even horrific “treatments” including electroshock.

“In the beginning, I did a lot of research about what it meant to be a gay man in this era,” Berry said.

“But I also interviewed men who lived through this time, as well as those ordeals — including the so-called therapies. I looked at real stories so I could tell an honest one with these characters.

“That’s why I feel an enormous burden. I have a very real possibility to do James well because there are so many people who can relate to him.”

Elements of truth … David Berry interviewed gay men who lived through a far less accepting era to help shape his character James. Picture: SuppliedSource:Foxte

Berry has heard from many of those men, who say seeing a familiar battle waged on the small screen has had a profound impact.

For many, it helped them to come to terms with the often barbaric events they lived through. A few said they felt closure — an inner peace.

“That’s humbling,” Berry said. “It’s also very scary. I owe these people — they’re invested in the character.”

Those investments include very vivid recollections of being held against their will in hospitals, electrocuted, pumped full of drugs and mentally abused.

Things have certainly changed in 60 years. It’s no longer illegal to be a homosexual, society is far more accepting and horrific medical torture like that no longer takes place.

Shameful treatment … Some doctors in that era tried to “cure” homosexuality with barbaric practices like electroshock and drug aversion. Picture: SuppliedSource:Supplied

But Berry said things are still far from perfect.

“You only need to look at the gay marriage debate to see that,” he said.

“There’s still a certain amount of prejudice in society. I think if James was a character set in present day he’d still have his own battles.”

In fact, he’s heard from young gay men who say James has helped them to accept who they are.

“He’s relatable to those who can’t be who they are, whose families and communities don’t or won’t accept them.”

When Channel Seven axed A Place To Call Home in mid-2014, Berry and the rest of the cast bid farewell to their much-loved personas.

Several months later when Foxtel saved the drama — an unprecedented move in television — most of the actors were ecstatic. But Berry admits he felt sick with anxiety.

“It’s not that I was reluctant … let’s say apprehensive. I didn’t sleep very well. I even developed an eye twitch!”

Dynamic duo … David Berry and Arianwen Parkes-Lockwood, who plays his on-screen wife Olivia Bligh. Picture: Chris PavlichSource:News Limited

It wasn’t just that he’d moved on — Berry was in two war-themed documentaries in that year — but he was nervous to go back.

“Everything that James had gone through, I was terrified about having to live through that again.”

It’s why the actor argued for a progression of his character’s storyline in season three. Berry wanted to see James with a bit more strength, after so many episodes of being the victim.

“At the end of the day, he’s a wealthy and influential heir who’s a born leader. I thought more of that should come through.”

And while it will in the new episodes to air from this Sunday, there’s no shortage of heavy drama either.

Haunting storyline … There’s a scene in the new season of A Place To Call Home that left David Berry an emotional wreck for days. Picture: SuppliedSource:Supplied

There’s one particular scene coming up that Berry said still haunts him.

“I can’t say too much without giving it away, but there’s an argument between James (and his wife) Olivia that gets extremely heated. It really shook me.

“When you see it, I think you’ll understand why.

“For a week after, I had total anxiety. I’d start crying for no reason — just totally bawling on set or at home. I had zero control over it.”

The emotion of someone who doesn’t exist bleeding into his own world was a frightening experience, Berry said.

“I guess that’s all good for the character,” he laughed. “Probably not so much for my wife (in real life).”

Grateful actor … David Berry says he’s thrilled to have a part in such a quality production.Source:News Corp Australia

There are many things about this show that Berry is fond of. The opportunity to tell such a rich story, for one, as well as the high production values and quality feel of the show.

But the young performer has also discovered something a white, heterosexual man rarely does.

“I’ve experienced what it feels like to not be loved or accepted for who you are,” he said.

“That’s a very potent emotion. It’s such a big, important part of life, and not having it is pretty rough — you end up wanting and yearning for it and there’s not a lot of room for anything else.”

But will James ever get the one thing he desperately wants? Berry said to watch this space.

In teasers for the upcoming season, his character is seen in flirtatious situations with a handsome doctor, hinting at a possible romantic dalliance to come.

“I think James will always fight to be at peace. Whether he gets there is another story. It’ll be difficult, given the time and his circumstances.

“But I know I’ll fight to get him there.”

Reference

Gay History: History Of The Ex-Gay Ministries and; The Abominable Legacy of Gay-Conversion Therapy

Article, Gay Interest, General Interest, Health Information, Political, , , , , , ,

For most of the twentieth century, homosexuals were considered mentally ill by the psychiatric profession. This diagnosis was due entirely to prejudice and was not backed by legitimate science. Studies on homosexuality were poorly conceived, culturally biased and often used institutionalized mental patients as study subjects.

After reviewing the evidence, in 1973 the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), which is its list of mental disorders. There was simply no logical or coherent reason to stigmatize gay and lesbian Americans. Not long after, every respected mainstream medical and mental heath association followed the APA’ lead.

Only four years before this monumental decision, the Stonewall riots in New York City’ Greenwich Village ushered in the dawn of the modern gay liberation movement. For the first time, GLBT people began to receive media visibility and coming out finally seemed like a viable option.

As more people chose to live honestly and openly, and gay communities began to flourish in areas such as New York and San Francisco, this presented a challenge to conservative churches, which had long believed that homosexuality was sinful behavior. Many conservative gay Christians were deeply conflicted between their beliefs and their sexual orientation. Their answer to this heart-wrenching dilemma was starting ex-gay ministries. Influenced by the miracle-seeking Jesus Movement, the ex-gay ministries adopted name and claim theology. Essentially, this meant if you kept repeating you had “changed” — even if you had not — God would eventually grant you the miracle of heterosexuality as a reward for your faith.

Love In Action was the first contemporary ex-gay ministry and was founded in 1973 in San Raphael, CA, by three men: John Evans, Rev. Kent Philpott, and Frank Worthen.

Evans ultimately denounced Love In Action after his best friend Jack McIntyre committed suicide in despair over not being able to “change.” Today, Evans assists people in healing from the psychological damage incurred by the ex-gay industry. Frank Worthen still remains with the ex-gay ministries.

Philpott, who is straight, wrote “The Third Sex? ” which featured six people who supposedly converted to heterosexuality through prayer.

Eventually, it was revealed no one in his book actually had changed, but the people reading it had no idea about the unsuccessful outcomes. As far as they knew, there was a magical place in California that had figured out the secret for making gays into straights.

As a result of Philpott’ book, within three years more than a dozen “ex-gay” ministries spontaneously sprung up across America. Two leading “ex-gay” counselors at Melodyland Christian Center in Anaheim, California – Gary Cooper and Michael Bussee – decided to organize a conference where members of the budding ex-gay movement could meet each other and network.

In September 1976, Cooper and Bussee’ vision came to fruition as sixty-two “ex-gays” journeyed to Melodyland for the world’ first “ex-gay” conference. The outcome of the retreat was the formation of Exodus International, an umbrella organization for “ex-gay” groups worldwide.

The group was rocked to its core a few years later when Bussee and Cooper acknowledged that they had not changed and were in love with each other. They soon divorced their wives, moved in together and held a commitment ceremony. In June 2007, Bussee issued an apology at an Ex-Gay Survivors Conference to all of the people he helped get involved in ex-gay ministries.

The Expansion of the Ex-Gay Industry

In 1979, Seventh Day Adventist minister Colin Cook founded Homosexuals Anonymous (HA). But Cook’ “ex-gay” empire crumbled a few years later after he was scandalized for having phone sex and giving nude massages to those he was supposedly helping become heterosexual.

As acceptance for homosexuality grew in the late 1970′, the “ex-gay” ministries had trouble attracting new recruits and growth of these programs stagnated. With the advent of AIDS, however, the ex-gay ministries found fertile growth potential from gay men who were terrified of contracting the virus.

Nonetheless, even as the epidemic spurred new growth, the “ex-gay” ministries remained relatively obscure in mainstream society. This dramatically changed in 1998 when the politically motivated Religious Right embraced the “ex-gay” ministries. Fifteen anti-gay organizations launched the “Truth In Love” newspaper and television ad campaign, with an estimated one million dollar price tag.

But the ad campaign soon backfired after University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard was murdered because of his sexual orientation. Americans began to see the Truth In Love campaign as discriminatory and debated whether it had contributed to a climate of intolerance where hate could flourish. Due to withering criticism in the media, the anti-gay coalition ended its campaign prematurely.

Additionally, “ex-gay” poster boy John Paulk, who the ad campaign sponsors placed on the cover of Newsweek under the large headline, “Gay for Life?,” was photographed in a Washington, DC gay bar in 2000. In 2003, Michael Johnston, the star of the Truth In Love television campaign, stepped down after allegedly having sex with men he met on the Internet. He has since moved to a residential sex addiction facility in Kentucky.

Today, the main financier and facilitator of ex-gay ministries is Focus on the Family, which hosts a quarterly symposium called Love Won Out. Exodus International has also grown to more than 100 ministries and has a Washington lobbyist. Recently, the Southern Baptist Convention has entered the fray by hiring a staff member to oversee ex-gay programs.

Sadly, as long as people are made to feel ashamed for who they are, these groups will exist. The best way to counter their negative influence is showing an honest and accurate portrayal of GLBT life. When people learn that they can live rich and fulfilling lives out of the closet, the appeal of these dangerous and ineffective groups invariably wanes.

The Abominable Legacy of Gay-Conversion Therapy

Joseph Nicolosi, one of the pioneers of the practice, died last week. But his contribution to the field of psychology lives on.

“I don’t believe anyone is really gay,” Joseph Nicolosi told the New York Times in 2012. “I believe that all people are heterosexual, but that some have a homosexual problem.” Nicolosi, a psychologist, had by then written four books, with titles like Healing Homosexuality and A Parents’ Guide to Preventing Homosexuality. In 1992, he founded the National Organization for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality, or NARTH, an organization of psychologists that aims to help gay people “realize their heterosexual potential” through a practice that is alternately known as “conversion therapy,” “reparative therapy,” and “reorientation therapy.” Nicolosi died on Thursday, March 8, at age 70; NARTH’s announcement said that the cause of death was the flu.

Before NARTH’s founding, there was a small but violent history of gay conversion attempts by doctors and psychologists. In the early 20th century, Freud made attempts using hypnosis. In the 1950s, Edmund Berger advocated a “confrontational therapy” approach to gay patients, which consisted of having practitioners yell at them that they were liars and worthless. Other attempts to convert LGBT people to heterosexuality throughout history have included methods like lobotomy, electroshock to the hands, head, and genitals, testicle transplants from dead straight men “bladder washing,” castration, female circumcision, nausea-inducing drugs, and beatings. But it was Nicolosi who brought gay conversion therapy into the mainstream, popularizing it among religious communities and the American right, and turning what was once a scattered practice of abuse into a multi-million-dollar worldwide industry.

Nicolosi grew up in New York; he received a master’s degree from the New School and spoke in a thick Long Island accent. But he spent his career in Los Angeles. He received a PhD in clinical psychology from an obscure school there, and opened his own clinic in Encino in 1980. He seems to have focused his practice entirely on gay conversion attempts. The time was ripe. The social movements of the 1960s and the gay rights activism that flourished after the Stonewall Riots in 1969 ignited profound fear on the American right. Nicolosi found an eager audience for his claim that heterosexuality and traditional gender conformity were not only superior, but that deviations from them were pathological.

What Nicolosi offered was a way for homophobic parents, patients, and psychologists to validate their anti-gay feelings as being legitimated by nature, science, and psychological evidence.

The field of psychology had never been particularly welcoming to queers, but by the time Nicolosi began practicing, attempts to convert gays had already been relegated to quackery. Freud wrote that the prognosis for heterosexual feeling in homosexual patients was grim (though he did believe that gay impulses could be reduced under some circumstances). In 1932, Helene Deutsch published her study “On Female Homosexuality,” which recounted Deutsch’s attempts to instill heterosexuality in a lesbian, only to find that her patient had begun a relationship with another woman while the study was ongoing. In her conclusion, Deutsch noted that a straight relationship would have been her preferred outcome, but also seemed to acknowledge her patient’s lesbian partnership as psychologically healthy.

In 1948, just a year after Nicolosi was born, Alfred Kinsey published his groundbreaking report Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, which found that homosexual tendencies were much, much more common than had previously been assumed. In 1978, the American Psychological Association removed homosexuality from its list of clinical disorders in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. Anti-gay stigma and bigotry were still rampant, both within the culture and within the field, but establishment psychologists had given up conversion attempts as a lost cause.

What Nicolosi offered was a way for homophobic parents, patients, and psychologists to validate their anti-gay feelings as being legitimated by nature, science, and psychological evidence. He established NARTH in 1992 alongside Benjamin Kaufman and Charles Socarides, two other obsessively anti-gay psychologists, explicitly in reaction to the removal of homosexuality from the DSM. They spoke in appealingly professional jargon, using phrases like “trauma” and “bad attachment.”

The organization became a network for homophobic psychologists, as well as a link between the industry and the growing number of ex-gay ministries and “pray away the gay” programs on the Christian right. Nominally secular, NARTH and Nicolosi frequently embraced religious rhetoric and prayer tactics, and were listed as ministry partners by a number of homophobic Christian organizations. The Thomas Aquinas Psychological Clinic, where NARTH is headquartered, is named after a Catholic saint. “We, as citizens, need to articulate God’s intent for human sexuality,” Nicolosi told Anderson Cooper in 2007. That same year, he told an ex-gay conference, “When we live our God-given integrity and our human dignity, there is no space for sex with a guy.”

Nicolosi’s treatments often involved multiple one-on-one sessions per week. According to accounts given by former patients, he seems to have used a mix of Berger’s “confrontational therapy” methods of emotional abuse with what’s known as aversion therapy. Aversion therapy applies pain or discomfort to patients in conjunction with homosexual impulses or behaviors: Everything from snapping a rubber band around a patient’s wrist to giving them electric shocks to making them vomit. He believed that gay people had bad relationships with their parents in absolutely all cases, and spent a great deal of therapeutic time probing patients for incidents of humiliation, neglect, or contempt in their childhoods.

In his books, he instructed parents to monitor their children for supposed early signs of queerness, including shyness or “artistic” tendencies in boys.

For unclear reasons, he also believed that viewing pornography could cure homosexuality, an idea he repeatedly defended to professional gatherings. Programs associated with NARTH have been found to administer beatings to their patients. The majority of Nicolosi’s patients, like the majority of conversion therapy victims generally, were children and adolescents, forced into his care by parents who were bigoted, sadistic, or merely scared. Nicolosi encouraged these impulses; he claimed to be able to identify and reverse homosexuality in children as young as three. In his books, he instructed parents to monitor their children for supposed early signs of queerness, including shyness or “artistic” tendencies in boys.

But even before Nicolosi died, NARTH was facing a host of challenges. It lost its nonprofit status in 2012, and an important accreditation from the California Board of Behavioral Sciences was revoked in 2011. Prominent members of the group have been embroiled in controversy, including George Rekers, a conversion therapy psychologist who was discovered to have hired a 20-year-old male sex worker in 2010. California outlawed the practice for minors in 2012, cutting deeply into NARTH’s L.A.-based operations; New Jersey, Illinois, New York, Vermont, and Oregon have since passed their own bans. But the group and its imitators continue to harm both children and adults.

Discovering that you are gay, or that your child is gay, is frightening. It means confronting a future that will not look like the one that you expected, and it means realizing that you and people you love will be subjected to stigma, discrimination, harassment, and the punitive whims of the state. It means staring down a life with fewer certainties and more vulnerabilities than a straight person’s. Scared and misguided people went to Nicolosi for help, and he exploited their fear to perpetuate hate, inflicting horrible pain and incalculable psychological damage on his victims in the process. It is unfortunate that his legacy won’t die with him.

References

Controversial Doctrines: Bishop Robert Clayton

Article, biography, General Interest, History, , , , ,

Portrait c.1740 of Robert and Katherine Clayton, by James Latham.

CLAYTON, ROBERT (1695–1758), Irish bishop, born at Dublin in 1695, was a descendant of the Claytons of Fulwood, Lancashire, whose estates came to him by inheritance. He was the eldest of eight children of Dr. Robert Clayton, minister of St. Michael’s, Dublin, and dean of Kildare, and Eleanor, daughter of John Atherton of Busie. Zachary Pearce [q. v.] privately educated him at Westminster School. He entered Trinity College, Dublin, became B.A. 1714, a fellow the same year, M.A. 1717, LL.D. 1722, and D.D. 1730. He made the tour of Italy and France, and on his father’s death in 1728 came into possession of a good estate and married Catharine, daughter of Lord Chief Baron Donnellan. He gave his wife’s fortune to her sister, and doubled the bequest, under his father’s will, to his own three sisters.

A gift of 300l. to a distressed scholar recommended to him by Samuel Clarke (1675-1729) [q. v.] brought him the intimate friendship of Clarke. Clayton embraced Clarke’s doctrines and held to them through life. Queen Caroline, hearing from Dr. Clarke of Clayton’s remarkable beneficence, had him appointed to the bishopric of Killala and Achonry in 1729-1730. In 1735 he was translated to that of Cork and Ross, and in 1745 to that of Clogher. His first literary production was a letter in the ‘Philosophical Transactions,’ August 1738, on a French refugee, in Cork, suckling a child, with an account of a remarkable skeleton. In 1739 he published ‘The Bishop of Corke’s Letter to his Clergy,’ Dublin, 8vo, and ‘A Sermon preached before the Judges of Assize,’ Cork, 4to, and in 1740 ‘ The Religion of Labour,’ Dublin, 4to, for the Society for Promoting English Protestant Schools in Ireland. In 1743 he published ‘ A Replication . . . with the History of Popery,’ &c., Dublin, 4to, directed against the author of ‘A Brief Historical Account of the Vaudois.’ In 1747 appeared ‘The Chronology of the Hebrew Bible vindicated … to the Death of Moses,’ London, 4to, pp. 494. In 1749 he published ‘ A Dissertation on Prophesy . . . with an explanation of the Revelations of St. John,’ Dublin, 8vo; reprinted London, 8vo. This work aimed at reconciling Daniel and Revelation, and proving that the ruin of popery and the end of the dispersion of the Jews would take place in A.D. 2000. Two letters followed, printed separately, then together, 1751, London, 8vo, ‘An Impartial Enquiry into the Time of the Coming of the Messiah.’ In 1751 appeared the remarkable work written by him, though often asserted to be that of a young clergyman of his diocese, ‘Essay on Spirit . . . with some remarks on the Athanasian and Nicene Creeds,’ London, 1751, 8vo. This book, full of Arian doctrine, led to a long controversy. It was attacked by William Jones, Warburton (who described it as ‘the rubbish of old heresies’), Nathaniel Lardner, and many others. The Duke of Dorset, the lord-lieutenant, refused on account of this work to appoint him to the vacant archbishopric of Tuam. Several editions appeared in 8vo and 12mo, 1752, 1753, and 1759. In 1752 a work having appeared called ‘ A Sequel to the Essay on Spirit,’ London, 8vo, Clayton published ‘The Genuine Sequel to the Essay,’ &c., Dublin, 8vo. His next work was ‘A Vindication of the Histories of the Old and New Testament, in answer to the Objections of . . . Bolingbroke,’ pt. i., Dublin, 1752, 12mo. The same year he was made fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, having some years before been elected a fellow of the Royal Society. In 1753 he published ‘A Journey from Grand Cairo to Mount Sinai, and back again. In Company with some Missionaries de propaganda Fide,’ &c., translated from a manuscript which had been mentioned by Pococke in his ‘Travels.’ The chief interest lay in the account of the supposed inscriptions of the Israelites in the Gebel el Mokatab. The work was addressed to the Society of Antiquaries, and the author offered to give 500l., spread over five years, to assist an exploration in Mount Sinai, but the society took no steps in the matter. Mr. Wortley Montagu, however, was induced to visit the spot and give an account of the inscriptions. The same year Clayton published ‘A Defence of the Essay on Spirit,’ London, 8vo. His next work was ‘Some Thoughts on Self-love, Innate Ideas, Freewill,’ &c., occasioned by Hume’s works, London, 1754, 8vo. The same year he brought out the second part of the ‘Vindication of … the Old and New Testament,’ Dublin, 8vo, adorned with cuts. This produced Catcott’s attack on his theories of the earth’s form and the deluge. In 1756 appeared ‘Letters which passed between . . . the Bishop of Clogher and Mr. William Penn concerning Baptism,’ London, 8vo, in which he asserted the cessation of baptism by the Holy Ghost. Clayton’s friend Bowyer obtained a copy of the correspondence and published it. Clayton proposed, 2 Feb. 1756, in the Irish House of Lords, that the Athanasian and Nicene creeds should be expunged from the liturgy of the church of Ireland. His speech, taken in shorthand, was afterwards published, and passed through several editions. Some editions have appeared as late as Evesham, 1839, 12mo, and London, 1839, 12mo. It is also given in Sparke’s ‘Essays and Tracts on Theology,’ vol. vi. 12mo, Boston, U.S., 1826. No proceedings were taken against him until the publication of the third part of the ‘Vindication of … the Old and New Testament,’ Dublin, 1757, 8vo, when he renewed his attack on the Trinity and advanced so many doctrines contrary to the Thirty-nine Articles that the government was compelled to order a prosecution. A meeting of Irish prelates was called at the house of the primate, and Clayton was summoned to attend. Before the appointed time the bishop was seized with a nervous fever, and died 26 Feb. 1758. On being told that he would probably lose his bishopric, he replied that he should never survive the blow.

Clayton’s temper was amiable, his spirit catholic, his beneficence unbounded, and many of his gifts secret till after his death. As a member of the linen board he managed to get steady employment for the poor of his diocese of Clogher. His writings are fanciful, though not without ability.

Dr. Bernard, afterwards dean of Derry, who married Clayton’s niece, and was his executor, had several of his works in manuscript, but they have never been published. He gave copyright of all Clayton’s works for England to the learned printer Bowyer, who issued the three parts of the ‘Vindication’ and the ‘Essay on Spirit,’ with additional notes and index to the scripture texts, in 1 vol. 8vo, London, 1759, pp. 504.

WORKS

His first publication was a letter in the Philosophical Transactions, August 1738. In 1739 he published ‘The Bishop of Corke’s Letter to his Clergy,’ Dublin, and ‘A Sermon preached before the Judges of Assize,’ Cork, and in 1740 ‘The Religion of Labour,’ Dublin, for the Society for Promoting English Protestant Schools in Ireland. In 1743 he published ‘ A Replication . . . with the History of Popery,’ &c., Dublin, directed against the author of ‘A Brief Historical Account of the Vaudois.’ In 1747 appeared ‘The Chronology of the Hebrew Bible vindicated … to the Death of Moses,’ London, pp. 494. In 1749 he published ‘A Dissertation on Prophesy . . . with an explanation of the Revelations of St. John,’ Dublin; reprinted London. This work aimed at reconciling the Book of Daniel and the Book of Revelation, and proving that the ruin of popery and the end of the dispersion of the Jews would take place in 2000. Two letters followed, printed separately, then together, 1751, London, ‘An Impartial Enquiry into the Time of the Coming of the Messiah.’

In 1751 appeared the most notable work written by him (though often asserted to be that of a young clergyman of his diocese), ‘Essay on Spirit . . . with some remarks on the Athanasian and Nicene Creeds,’ London, 1751. This book, full of Arian doctrine, led to a long controversy. It was attacked by William Jones of Nayland, William Warburton (who described it as ‘the rubbish of old heresies’), Nathaniel Lardner, and others. The Duke of Dorset, the lord-lieutenant of Ireland, refused on account of this work to appoint him to the vacant archbishopric of Tuam. Several editions appeared in (1752, 1753, and 1759). In 1752 a work having appeared called ‘A Sequel to the Essay on Spirit,’ London; Clayton published ‘The Genuine Sequel to the Essay,’ &c., Dublin.

His next work was ‘A Vindication of the Histories of the Old and New Testament, in answer to the Objections of . . . Bolingbroke,’ pt. i., Dublin, 1752. In 1753 he published ‘A Journey from Grand Cairo to Mount Sinai, and back again. In Company with some Missionaries de propaganda Fide,’ &c., translated from a manuscript which had been mentioned by Edward Pococke in his ‘Travels.’ It included an account of the supposed inscriptions of the Israelites in the Gebel el Mokatab. The work was addressed to the Society of Antiquaries, and the author offered to assist an exploration in Mount Sinai, but the society took no steps in the matter. Edward Wortley Montagu, however, was induced to visit the spot and give an account of the inscriptions. The same year Clayton published ‘A Defence of the Essay on Spirit,’ London. His next work was ‘Some Thoughts on Self-love, Innate Ideas, Freewill,’ &c., occasioned by David Hume’s works, London, 1754. The same year he brought out the second part of the ‘Vindication of … the Old and New Testament,’ Dublin. This produced Alexander Catcott’s attack on his theories of the earth’s form and the deluge. In 1756 appeared ‘Letters which passed between . . . the Bishop of Clogher and Mr. William Penn concerning Baptism,’ London, in which he asserted the cessation of baptism by the Holy Ghost. Clayton’s friend William Bowyer obtained a copy of the correspondence and published it.

  • Thomas Barnard, later bishop of Limerick, who married Clayton’s niece, and was his executor, had several of his works in manuscript, but they were not published. He gave copyright of all Clayton’s works for England to the printer Bowyer, who issued the three parts of the ‘Vindication’ and the ‘Essay on Spirit,’ with additional notes and index to the scripture texts, London, 1759.

References

Gay History: A Hit Song from the 1950s with a Gay Subtext (May 13, 1958)

Gay Interest, General Interest, Opinion Piece, , ,

From Rob Frydlewicz blog “zeitGAYst” in May 2012.

We’ve probably all seen the TV infomercials for Time-Life Records’ various music compilations, e.g. “Love Songs”, “Groovy 60s”, “Mellow Moods”, etc.  I’ve bought a number of them, and am glad I did, because they introduced me to some great songs.  One in particuar was Secretly by Jimmie Rodgers.  It entered Billboard’s Top 40 today in 1958 and became a #3 hit.  (Rodgers is best known for the song Honeycomb which topped the charts for four weeks the year before.)  It’s a pleasant tune, typical of so many songs from this vanilla decade, but what got my attention was its gender-neutral lyrics.  In my interpretation the song tells the story of two men who, due to the mores of the 1950s, must conduct their romance “secretly”.  Here’s the chorus:

 

“Wish we didn’t have to meet, secretly

Wish we didn’t have to kiss, secretly

Wish we didn’t have to be afraid to show the world that we’re in love

‘Til we have the right to meet openly

‘Til we have the right to kiss openly

We’ll just have to be content to be in love secretly.” 

Of course, these lyrics could also apply to a West Side Story situation between a boy and girl of different races or ethnicities.  Still, I thought the hidden message was a bit daring for the conformist 1950s.  (Reminds me of the secret delight I got when I first listened to the Village People’s innuendo laden songs.)  I’m curious whether the song was popular with homosexuals at the time. 

 Of course, these lyrics could also apply to a West Side Story situation between a boy and girl of different races or ethnicities.  Still, I thought the hidden message was a bit daring for the conformist 1950s.  (Reminds me of the secret delight I got when I first listened to the Village People’s innuendo laden songs.)  I’m curious whether the song was popular with homosexuals at the time. 

 

 Reference

 

10 Strange And Obscure Secret Societies

Article, Gay Interest, General Interest, History, , , , , , , , , , , ,

Secret societies like the Illuminati and the Freemasons always seem to get the limelight. However, a good number of lesser-known groups have their own strange stories to tell that make them just as interesting as their more famous counterparts.

10: The Order Of Chaeronea

The Battle of Chaeronea in 338 B.C. saw the defeat of the Sacred Band Of Thebes, an elite ancient Greek fighting unit consisting of 150 soldiers and their male lovers. Years later, in 1899, Chaeronea lent its name to a slightly related but very different group—the Order of Chaeronea, an English political organization for gay men.

Cecil Ives founded the group as a means to communicate without fear of persecution. He patterned the order like a true secret society, devising ceremonies and passwords for its members. He also devised a strict set of rules, which kept members from using the society for sexual meet-ups.

Many prominent gay intellectuals joined—Oscar Wilde was reportedly a member. The organization soon spread around the world, enabling Ives to promote gay rights through books and numerous lectures. The order became a modern precursor to 20th-century rights organizations. After Ives’s death, the movement faltered, gaining steam again during the 1990s, especially in the US, and inspiring several offshoots.

9: The Knights Of The Apocalypse

This group formed in 1693 to protect the Catholic Church against the supposed coming of the Antichrist. Members were noted for their peculiar habits, such as bringing swords to work and wearing clothing with an elaborately drawn star on the breast.

The society’s strange behavior could be blamed on the founder himself, a merchant’s son by the name of Agostino Gabrino. A certifiably insane man, Gabrino was known to have disrupted two church masses by waving a sword and proclaiming he was the “King Of Glory.” At his group’s founding, he declared himself a “Monarch of the Holy Trinity” and devised a bizarre set of rules for his knights, which included the practice of polygamy and exclusive marriage to virgins.

A year after the group began, one knight betrayed its existence to the Inquisition. The order was disbanded, and its knights were thrown into prison.

8: The Order Of The Occult Hand

This group had just one goal. Its members inserted one particular phrase—“it was as if an occult hand had“—into newspapers and other publications.

The group had its beginnings when Joseph Flanders, a reporter for the Charlotte News, innocently used the phrase in a report. His friends liked the wording so much that they conspired to copy it as often as possible. Pretty soon, other reporters and journalists from all over the world began using the phrase in their own stories.

The conspiracy was undone in 2004, when James Fanega, a reporter for the Chicago Tribune, managed to track down the perpetrators and list the publications they had infiltrated. However, the group bounced back in 2006 when leader Paul Greenberg and the chief members announced that they had picked a new phrase to carry on the tradition. So far, no one has succeeded in finding out the new phrase, which Greenberg claims has already appeared in many major outlets.

7: The Calves’ Head Club

Shortly after the execution of King Charles I in 1649, his opponents formed the Calves’ Head Club to mock his memory. Members met once a year on January 30—the execution’s anniversary—and celebrated a very bizarre dinner, replete with a symbolic axe hung high over the dining room. The menu itself included calves’ heads (which represented the king’s royal office and supporters), a cod’s head (which represented the king himself), and a large pike and boar’s head stuffed with a smaller pike and an apple respectively (which represented the king’s tyranny).

The members had their own anthem that praised the king’s death, and they toasted it with wine from cups made of calf skulls. They also burned a copy of the king’s autobiography while swearing by John Milton’s treatise supporting his execution—Milton himself allegedly founded the group.

After the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, The Calves’ Head Club had to meet secretly. The club finally met its demise in February 1735, when a mob invaded a meeting and almost lynched several members.

6: The Arioi

The Arioi was a secret society that existed in Tahiti well before any Europeans found their way to the island. The group dedicated itself to the worship of its patron deity Oro, and it traveled extensively in search of new recruits.

To attract new applicants, members did elaborate ritual dances. Anyone could ask to join, but only the most handsome and beautiful were eventually selected, since the society linked beauty to spiritual prowess.

Members had to memorize their rituals perfectly to be recognized; otherwise, they were mocked mercilessly. In addition, the society preached a very free lifestyle, as evidenced by some of their sexually charged rituals. Their behavior evidently disgusted Christian missionaries assigned to the place, with one describing them as “privileged libertines who engaged in abominable, unutterable, and obscene exhibitions.”

For all their profligate habits, the Arioi had a strict rule that forbade childbirth; children would interfere with members’ duties. They routinely aborted the unborn and killed infants. Parents whose children did survive were demoted within the society.

Christian proselytizing eventually put an end to the Arioi by the 19th century.

5: The Scotch Cattle

In response to unfair working conditions, Welsh miners in the 1820s formed a secret union called the Scotch Cattle, named for the fearsome breed of Highland cattle. Each mining town in the region had its own chapter, led by a leader called “the Bull.” Together, members intimidated and attacked those perceived to oppose their cause. Their targets were not limited to oppressive bosses; scabs were also fair prey.

The group usually first sent a warning letter to the offending party. If it was ignored, the members—with blackened faces and dressed in cowskins—would invade the unlucky man’s home at midnight and destroy his property. Sometimes, the members would also beat the man; before leaving, the group would always paint a red bull’s head on the vicitm’s front door.

The Scotch Cattle continued its operations until the 1840s, when more organized trade unions took its place.

4: The Order Of The Peacock Angel

This secret society first formed in Britain in the 1960s, founded on the ancient religious beliefs of the Yezidis—a group that has faced accusations of devil worship from Muslims and Christians alike. The group actually worshiped Melek Taus, the Peacock Angel, represented by either a stone statue of a peacock or by a real live bird.

Members believe that the Peacock Angel has the power to answer prayers, and they revere it accordingly. Their meeting room is usually filled with hallowed images of the Peacock Angel; the altar itself is placed in the middle and contains the main symbol of veneration. Members often do a slow ritual dance around the altar while they silently express their wishes. The dance gradually takes on a frenzied pace as religious fervor builds. It ends in ecstatic bliss, with the members satisfied that they are now filled with the Peacock Angel’s divine power.

3: The Leopard Society

Although it had adherents in East Africa, the age-old bloodthirsty Leopard Society thrived mainly in West African nations such as Nigeria and Sierra Leone. Members of this cult engaged in ritual human sacrifice and cannibalism. Dressed up in a leopard skin and armed with sharp metal claws and teeth, a member would ambush and maul an unwary victim to death. Afterward, the leopard-man collected the victim’s blood and used it to make a potion that he believed would give him supernatural powers.

Following a spate of killings after World War I, colonial authorities in Sierra Leone and Nigeria wrongly thought they had successfully suppressed the cult. The Leopard Society again reared its ugly head after the Second World War, killing more than 40 people. Locals refused to provide any information about the cult because they believed in the leopard-men’s invulnerability. Only after the authorities managed to kill a member in 1948 did several witnesses express their willingness to help.

That breakthrough allowed authorities to find the cult’s hideout, imprison 34 members, and hang another 39. To spread the story that the members were just human, the authorities allowed several local chiefs to view the executions.

2: The Bald Knobbers

This secret vigilante group sprang up in response to the rampant crime and lawlessness that plagued southwest Missouri after the Civil War. Led by their founder, a hulking veteran named Nat Kinney, the Bald Knobbers of Taney Count—so-called because they held secret meetings above bare mountaintops—proceeded to take the law into their own hands. Wearing their coats backward and sporting odd, horned masks, the Bald Knobbers employed such heavy-handed tactics as whipping, beating, and even killing suspected criminals. Eventually, some Bald Knobbers began to use their membership to protect their own criminal activities.

The group’s notoriety peaked in 1887 when they killed two critics and injured their families. Authorities arrested 20 members and executed four others. A year later, Kinney—who had already left the group before the shootings—was killed by an opponent of the organization. Although minor conflicts continued after that, the Bald Knobbers had effectively reached their end by 1889.

1: The Secte Rouge

According to Zora Neale Hurston, an African-American author who traveled to Haiti in the 1930s, the Secte Rouge—also known as Cochon Gris or Vinbrindingue—was a secret society that practiced ritual cannibalism and grave robbing. Although she had no firsthand experience with the society, she had three indirect encounters with the cult.

The first occurred in 1936, when Hurston heard an odd beating of drums late one evening. She wanted to go out to investigate, but her house girl warned her to stay inside, or else they’d risk the cult’s wrath. The second time happened when she questioned a man burning rubber tires near her house. The man explained that the tire smoke was to deter the cult members from abducting his child. Finally, she saw militiamen on a secret operation to suppress an unknown group in a remote area of the island.

All this, plus accounts from locals who swore of the group’s existence, painted the portrait of a murderous cult that met at night in a cemetery and engaged in macabre rituals, including waylaying travelers for human sacrifices.

+: The Skoptsy

In line with some of the craziest rituals ever performed in the name of religion, the Skoptsy of Russia castrated themselves in the belief that it would lead to salvation. Founded in the mid-18th century by two peasants named Andrei Ivanov and Kondratii Selivanov, the Skoptsy believed that genitals and breasts appeared only after Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit; consequently, these organs must be removed to live a perfect life.

Shortly after the group’s founding, authorities arrested the two leaders and exiled them to Siberia. Selivanov managed to escape and traveled to St. Petersburg, where he titled himself the Messiah and claimed to be the reincarnation of Tsar Peter III. His preaching attracted many followers. It also attracted renewed attention from the authorities, who arrested him repeatedly and finally locked him up in a monastery for good.

Selivanov’s incarceration and subsequent death did nothing to dampen the sect’s growth. At its height, the Skoptsy were believed to number more than 100,000 and included members of the Russian elite. Following the Communist revolution, the sect’s numbers drastically declined. Today, it is estimated that there are just over 100 left, most located in the sect’s birthplace.

Reference