Gay Life: January 2005 Archives

The Good - Last week, the Virginia Supreme Court ruled that the state's fornication law was invalid. The ruling was based on the precedent of Lawrence v Texas which overturned the nation’s sodomy laws and was part of the reasoning behind the Massachusetts’ court decision to allow same-sex marriage. Harvard Law Professor and FindLaw columnist Joanna Grossman:

"...fornication laws are a relic of a past in which most non-marital sexual conduct was considered criminal behavior. Yet laws still persist on the books in about twenty percent of the states.
Virginia was right to invalidate such an antiquated law, and other fornication laws, if challenged in court, are very likely to be invalidated as well.

The Bad - Last week in Pennsylvania U. S. District Judge Gary L. Lancaster, a Clinton nominee, dismissed federal obscenity charges against a hard-core pornographic video business that produces and distributes graphic videos depicting rape and murder (the decision and news links are gathered here). From Monday's Nightline transcript:

JAKE TAPPER (Voice Over): Judge Lancaster...repeatedly referred in his ruling to the 2003 US Supreme Court decision in Lawrence V. Texas, which struck down that state's law against gay sodomy. Though, the minority on the court argued the state had the right to establish a moral code, they lost.

The Ugly - Allow gay tolerance and you have to allow "bigamy, same-sex marriage, adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, bestiality, and obscenity," Scalia wrote in the Lawrence dissent. This case appears to confirm that; not good for gay people. And it shouldn't come to pass. Joanna Grossman again:

[Scalia] certainly overstated Lawrence's intended scope, and he probably overstated its eventual reach as well.
In truth, laws against sodomy and fornication are the only sex laws that do not implicate any of the boundaries the Supreme Court tried to limn [sic] in Lawrence. The Court strongly suggested that laws affecting the institution of marriage, involving minors, or involving sexual activities that are conducted in public or for commercial purposes would not be within the bounds of the "private relationships" protected by the Fourteenth Amendment - and thus will not be struck down under a Lawrence-like analysis.

I hope she's right.

In December it was Snowball, now it's "Postcards From Buster." But this time they had government encouragement. From CNN.com:

The nation's new education secretary denounced PBS on Tuesday for spending public money on a cartoon with lesbian characters, saying many parents would not want children exposed to such lifestyles.

HRC denounces her intolerance. PBS pulled the show:

A PBS spokesman said late Tuesday that the nonprofit network has decided not to distribute the episode, called "Sugartime!," to its 349 stations. She said the Education Department's objections were not a factor in that decision.

Of course not.

UPDATE: PBS pulled the epidode's web page. Google cached it. Josh Marshall found it.

Phillip Nobile wrote to wish that I link to his reply to Andrew Sullivan, whom I quoted approvingly in my last Lincoln post. After reading it all yet again, Nobile's 2001 HNN posting, Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Publish: Homophobia in Lincoln Studies? followed by his Weekly Standard Review and finally Sullivan's New Republic essay, I have to say I come down once again on the side of Sullivan.

Details are in the extended entry.

The Athens Banner Herald reports that a Fulton County judge will hear arguments today about whether Georgia's anti-gay marriage amendment was legally written.

Doug's young niece in Mississippi voted in favor of their amendment. She didn't see her vote as intolerant. "I'm sure lots of folks voted 'no' but weren't being judgmental." I believe she's right. Now how do we make them understand otherwise?

Maybe this conservative argument in favor of gay marriage will help. Pass it on.

When Nightline is good it is very good. Last night it was very good. (Full transcript in extended entry.) In a portrait of a gay 17 year old Oklahoma boy, Michael Shackelford, his family, church and community come to terms with his sexuality. There was no correspondent; the people told their story. And what a story it was.

Shackelford was the subject of Anne Hull's 4 part Washington Post series, Young and Gay in Real America. That made him the target of Fred Phelp's Westboro Baptist Church (found at www.godhatesfags.com). Phelps most recently thanked God for 3,000 dead Americans in the Tsunami, but was probably seen by most Americans in news coverage of Matthew Shepard's murder, where he picketed the funeral. He's been around forever, a staple at Gay rallies and news events nationwide. When Phelps and his crew targeted the Baptist church Shackelford's family attends, Nightline was there.

Shackelford's mother, sister, preacher and classmates were interviewed, as were the Westboro protestors - whose bigotry was so extreme and explicit that it helped most of those who knew Shackelford come to support him. They didn't change their mind about the sin of homosexuality, but hated the sin not the sinner. Progress. The preacher said from his pulpit that God loves everyone. The congregants applauded. Real progress. And in a real life ending that avoided sentimentality it was revealed that Shackelford had dropped out of high school and is now working towards a GED.

These stories are true to the experience of people I know living here now in Middle Georgia. Milledgeville is 30 miles from the nearest Interstate, a town dominated by a state hospital, 6 prisons and a liberal arts college. The college tempers us somewhat, but here and in towns all around here, growing up gay, coming out and finding acceptance is tough. I have a young acquaintance right now struggling with exactly the issues raised in the Nightline piece and Washington Post series. Isolated and facing rejection from his family, he still chose to come out. I've saved the show for him and will direct him to the Post series.

The NYTimes review of "The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln" sure made it sound like the book was convincing. Lincoln, in today's vernacular, was gay. One thing I wondered about at the time was the author, C. A. Tripp, had a falling out with his original co-author, Phillip Nobile, who charged plagiarism. Nobile wouldn't comment for the Times, promising his own article. It's here and it's scathing, if ultimately unconvincing. Andrew Sullivan calls the Nobile "review" appearing in The Weekly Standard a hatchet job, points to an earlier Nobile essay that contradicts his Standard piece, does side by side comparisons of the earlier essay and the review, then concludes:

So the Weekly Standard's reviewer was a strong proponent of the view that Lincoln was bisexual. He had his own book in the works on the subject. Tripp beat him to the punch - and is now dead so cannot challenge Nobile's account of the editorial process. Isn't this a conflict of interest that the Standard should have disclosed? Isn't it relevant background for understanding Nobile's own motives for trashing a book by a scholar whose exhaustive research on the subject may have made Nobile's own book largely redundant?

Indeed it is. So that's that. But then there's this in The New Republic (included in full in the extended entry) by Princeton's Christine Stansell. She starts out by asking, who cares? and what would it matter anyway? then walks through the evidence dismissively ("what did it really mean for people to sleep together in small beds?"), calls it all "conjecture amplified by conjecture," and explains away his affinity for men as "like the great majority of nineteenth-century men." Her conclusion:

In his very naïveté, however, Tripp compiles a dossier of ambiguities--not truths, but ambiguities--worth considering. He wants to trumpet the unassailable truth of Lincoln's homosexuality--or, in his more nuanced moments, what he implies to be bisexuality. His bullish proclamations are easily countered, and not just by the heterosexists and the homophobes whose attacks he predicts will result from his revelations. But he puts forward some oddities. Too insubstantial in themselves to prove anything about Lincoln, they do add to a larger body of evidence concerning sex before sexuality--that is, bodily life before the advent of the modern notion of an all-encompassing state that lies at the core of identity.

No, it can't be incontrovertibly proved, and yes Tripp may make too much of his gaydar, but yes Stansell's insubstantial oddities are quite enough for me. He was gay. If not gay, bi.

Andrew Sullivan pointed to this comment by Susan Sontag from a May 2000 Guardian piece:

It's simple, she says. "As I've become less attractive to men, so I've found myself more with women. It's what happens. Ask any woman my age. More women come on to you than men. And women are fantastic. Around 40, women blossom. Women are a work-in-progress. Men burn out."

My experience hints it's true...er, the women blossom part!

Sullivan also pointed to this Bay Windows piece by Michael Bronski and this explanation by the New York Times on why it didn't note Sontag's lesbianism in her obituary. SoVo Blog notes others omitted it too and later revisited the subject again here.

John Aravosis comments on the recent firing of Cheryl Jacques as Executive Director of the Human Rights Campaign after less than a year in the position. He's heard that she was a bad boss; her side says she was fired for being too aggressive. He's doubtful:

I can't name a single large gay group that was aggressive last year other than the gay Republican group, Log Cabin Republicans. The notion that HRC was "too aggressive" and "too edgy" last year strikes me as laughable. I WISH our groups were so aggressive as to be accused of being TOO truly aggressive, we should be so lucky. So it doesn't ring very true in my ear that Jacques was forced out for being too aggressive. I just don't buy it....

The issue isn't whether HRC was TOO aggressive last year. The issue is why HRC wasn't MORE aggressive last year. The issue is why the other gay groups weren't more aggressive last year. Why the other liberal groups, women, anti-guns, civil rights, enviros, weren't more aggressive. And why the Democratic party and John Kerry weren't more aggressive.