I’m watching that documentary “Before Stonewall” about gay history pre-1969, and uncovered something which I think is interesting.
The documentary includes a brief clip of a 1954 televised newscast about the rise of homosexuality. The host of the program interviewed psychologists, a police officer, and one “known homosexual”. The “known homosexual” is 22 years old. He identifies himself as Curtis White, which is a pseudonym; his name is actually Dale Olson.
So I tracked down the newscast. According to what I can find, Dale Olson may have been the first gay man to appear openly on television and defend his sexual orientation. He explains that there’s nothing wrong with him mentally and he’s never been arrested. When asked whether he’d take a cure if it existed, he says no. When asked whether his family knows he’s gay, he says that they didn’t up until tonight, but he guesses they’re going to find out, and he’ll probably be fired from his job as well. So of course the host is like …why are you doing this interview then? and Dale Olson, cool as cucumber pie, says “I think that this way I can be a little useful to someone besides myself.”
1954. 22 years old. Balls of pure titanium.
Despite the pseudonym, Dale’s boss did indeed recognize him from the TV program, and he was promptly fired the next day. He wrote into ONE magazine six months later to reassure readers that he had gotten a new job at a higher salary.
Curious about what became of him, I looked into his life a little further. It turns out that he ultimately became a very successful publicity agent. He promoted the Rocky movies and Superman. Not only that, but get this: Dale represented Rock Hudson, and he was the person who convinced him to disclose that he had AIDS! Hewrote the statement Rock read. And as we know, Rock Hudson’s disclosure had a very significant effect on the national conversation about AIDS in the U.S.
It appears that no one has made the connection between Dale Olson the publicity agent instrumental in the AIDS debate and Dale Olson the 22-year-old first openly gay man on TV. So I thought I’d make it. For Pride month, an unsung gay hero.
dude had guts, someone needs to update his Wikipedia page
Black travel is big business, contributing more than $48 billion annually to the national economy, according to a 2011 study by Mandala Research. A significant part of that is heritage tourism, which the National Trust for Historic Preservation defines as “traveling to experience the places, artifacts, and activities that authentically represent the stories and people of the past and present.” “Authentically” is where most of these sites probably fall short for black tourists.
To be sure, the history grappled with by all these new and updated museums and historical sites can be complicated and painful—not necessarily what you’d consider tourist-friendly content. But for black tourists and visitors, these places are valuable not only because they’re honest but also because they open up space for us to just be. No extra legwork, no correcting the historical record, no deciding whether to visit a museum based on how much we can tolerate being lied to on that particular day of our trip. As I look toward planning my next trip, it’s heartening to know that I can choose from more than a few places where honesty has found a foothold and visitors like me are no longer tasked with sifting out historical truths from expedient fictions.
My girlfriend Marna has been a queer activist since the late 80s. She’s told me about the incredible deliberation and debates LGBTQ+ activists had, in the late 90s and early 00s as the community began to see past the AIDS crisis and immediate goals of “surviving a plague” and “burying our dead.” There were a lot of things we wanted to achieve, but we had to decide how to allocate our scarce reserves of money, labour, publicity, and public goodwiil. Those were the discussions that decided the next big goals we’d pursue were same-sex marriage equality and legal recognition of medical gender transition.
From hearing her tell it, it seems like it was actually a wrenching decision, because it absolutely left a lot of people in the dust. A lot of people, her included, had broad agendas based on sexual freedom and the rights of people to do whatever they wanted with their bodies and consenting partners—and they agreed to put their broader concerns aside and drill down, very specifically, onto the rights of cis gays and lesbians to marry, and the ability to legally change your sex and gender.
As a political tactic it was terrifically effective. In less than two decades, public opinion in many countries has totally reversed on gay marriage, and we’ve won some truly enormous legal landmarks. Gender transition has entered public consciousness and the first landmark battles allowing people to define their own gender have been won. Marriage equality means that husbands and wives are protected from being banned from their dying spouse’s bedside, being forcibly separated from their children, or not being recognized as an important part of their spouse’s life.
The LGBTQ+ community knew they were taking a gamble, focusing so exclusively on marriage equality, and trans activists knew that they wouldn’t be able to achieve anything else until they’d gotten basic medical transition recognized. By and large, prioritizing things this way paid off. But they knew going in that there would be costs—and we’re reaping them.
Activists of 20 years ago chose to sideline and diminish efforts to blur and abolish the gender binary. Efforts to promote alternative family structures, including polyamorous families and non-sexual bonds between non-related adults. Efforts to fight the Christian cultural message that sex is dirty, sinful, bad, and in need of containment. Efforts to promote sexual pleasure as a positive good.
Those efforts have been going on for the last 20 years, but they’re marginalized—activists who had to decide where their finite time, money, publicity, and social capital went literally sat in committee meetings and said, “Marriage equality is our top priority. Legal gender transition is our top priority. Everything else will have to wait.”
This happened especially because sex education, sex positivity, and youth outreach were incredibly dangerous areas. Our enemies have been saying for years that all LGBTQ+ people are pedophiles, perverts, seeking to corrupt and recruit children to our cause; anyone trying to teach children basic facts about how to avoid disease, what’s happening to their own bodies, or what possibilities they have for identity and orientation, risks having their name, career, and life ruined. As a sex educator in the 90s, Marna had to tell teenagers, “I can’t answer your questions about safe sex now. Come back when you turn 18.”
So kids who grew up being told that girls and boys are different and ought to lead different lives, and sex is dangerous and sinful and gross, and you definitely shouldn’t want sex UNTIL you get married to your One True Love, only had that message tweaked a little bit. Now you can cross the floor from the Girl Side to the Boy Side or vice-versa. Now your One True Love doesn’t have to be a different gender from you. But those kids could survive with the rest of their worldview relatively intact. And I think that’s what we’re seeing in fandom, with an emphasis on “pure” OTP ships, on only including LGBT+ identities that use crisp, clear gender binaries and result in nuclear family life. The rest of those cultural messages about sex and love remain: men’s and women’s worlds are and should be different, “impure” sex degrades and defiles you, sexual urges that do not contribute to your One True Love and family life should be repressed, shamed, or destroyed, and sexual thoughts are every bit as bad as acting on them.
This isn’t because kids today are bad or stupid. It’s because as a community, we had to decide where our effort was going, and now we need to pay down the debt we’ve racked up over years of prioritizing marriage equality and legal trans recognition over sex positivity, sex education, and deconstructing gender.
TERFs, SWERFs, exclusionists, and transmedicalists have stolen a march over liberal queers because they’re doing the work to educate youth. While liberal queers have been staging protests and lobbying politicians, half a dozen of my undergraduate professors were radical feminists. Communities of exclusionists and anti-sex activists have honed their expertise at engaging teenagers with their ideas and theories. They’re the ones writing the FAQs, answering the asks, and doing the groundwork of saying, “Here is a basic framework of sexual ethics for you to follow.”
If we want to win back the culture wars, we have to step up our own efforts. Go back to the sex educators and gender activists whose good work has been ignored or underfunded for all this time and support them. Let major LGBTQ+ activist organizations know that their work so far is very nice, but it’s time to renew our focus on youth outreach and mentoring young activists. Brainstorm a way to help angry, isolated, disenfranchised young people form communities based around positive action and a sense of belonging. Get into mentorship or education yourself. Help us pivot as a community, to reach out to the kids who have obviously been underserved.
First of all, “…they were surrounded on all sides by echoes and images of themselves, in a world where image and object had not yet torn themselves apart” is one of the most poetic phrasings I’ve ever heard.
Third, the original opens with: “Every so often, I get the urge to drag someone into a cave, and show them something unspeakable.”
I had another point, but it got lost in the artful prose of this article.
I feel like “every so often, I get the urge to drag someone into a cave and show them something unspeakable” is something that’s okay for a paleolithic cave art expert to say, but like, absolutely no one else
everything about this is fucking hilarious. i’m sorry, random pompeii man, but your death was some looney tunes bullshit and the framing of this photograph isn’t helping.
You ever read some shit so evil it kinda pumps the brakes on the rest of your day?
Are you fucking ready for this knowledge? To my exasperated followers, give me a break, I haven’t given a good historical rant about her in a few months. Also who the hell uses the word ‘vegetable’ anymore? Yeah, I’m taking over this post. Here we go:
Rosemary Kennedy was JFK’s sister. Joseph Kennedy manipulated his children for years, always wanting them to be the picturesque family to help gain political traction. “Oh, they’re so pretty, oh, they’re so well-behaved, oh, they’re the definition of family ideals” that stuff.
For the most part, the rest of the Kennedy children obliged.
Rosemary?
Rosemary left her boarding school to go on dates.
…Yeah. Yeah, that was it. Rosemary left the boarding school and went on dates. That was her “rebellious nature”. She was a tad bit clumsy, she might have actually had borderline Asperger’s due to her inability to pick up on social cues, and she left her boarding school to go on dates with boys. That last one pissed off Joseph so that, by the time Rosemary was twenty-three (the above cruce post makes it seem like she was a teenager but no, she was twenty-three, I’m not saying this to diminish anything, I’m saying that she was a fully-grown adult and still under her father’s manipulations), he took her to Walter Jackson Freeman without consulting his wife. If you haven’t been privy to any of my rants, Walter Jackson Freeman was a man who used icepicks and knives to cut into people’s heads, chopping off pieces of their brain, a process known as the frontal lobotomy. Icepicks. The things you used to chip ice. Icepicks. Although I’m pretty sure he used a kitchen knife on Rosemary because, you know, that’s so much better. Anywho, not only was she forced into the operation, not only was she forced to sing God Bless America, but she was forced to say The Lord’s Prayer. The. Lord’s. Prayer. Until. She. Couldn’t. Because. They. Paralyzed. Her.
Joseph was so disgusted by her new state (you know, because she was paralyzed) that he sent her to a far-off asylum where she remained for decades. When JFK ran for his presidency and was asked about the whereabouts of his sister, he said that she was away, teaching and/or studying.
Nobody visited Rosemary for decades.
Nobody visited Rosemary for decades.
When her mother finally visited, Rosemary lunged at her in anger and had to be sedated. Her mother’s response? You ready for this? I mean, seriously, are you ready? Like I know what you’re thinking: “Mate, you just went into a rant by memory (yeah, I’m typing this all by memory) about a woman whose brain was hacked up using a butter knife so that she wouldn’t embarrass her family during their political campaign, only for that woman to become paralyzed and institutionalized without visitors for decades, what the fuck can be worse than that?” Seriously though, brace yourselves.
When Rose Kennedy saw her daughter for the first time in decades (after Rosemary was institutionalized as a result of Joseph’s severe medical abuse), when Rose saw her…her first concern…was that she was fat.
Like I said, I wrote this all from memory, but have a bundle of sources confirming everything:
Rosemary Kennedy’s story (and all lobotomy stories) terrify me because I get this sinking feeling in my gut that had i been born at the wrong time, I would have been a perfect candidate
She took up acting because the malnutrition she suffered under the nazis permanently damaged her health and prevented her from pursuing her dream to be a ballerina. During the war, she danced to raise money for the resistance – even though she was literally starving, she used what strength she had to make sure more nazis got shot.
She and her mom also denounced their royal heritage because of the Nazis in their family
Also Audrey was a humanitarian until her death, though ill with cancer, she continued her work for UNICEF, travelling to Somalia, Kenya, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, France and the United States.
These are things I literally never would have known about. I’m tired of women being painted as just being pretty.
┏┓ ┃┃╱╲ In this ┃╱╱╲╲ house ╱╱╭╮╲╲ we love ▔▏┗┛▕▔ & appreciate ╱▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔╲ TRANS WOMEN OF COLOR WHO MADE PRIDE MONTH POSSIBLE ╱╱┏┳┓╭╮┏┳┓ ╲╲ ▔▏┗┻┛┃┃┗┻┛▕▔
[straight historian voice] they used fond language such as “my lover”, “my darling”, “i miss your arms around me”, “i wish i could marry you”, and “i miss your lips on mine”, though they were never proven to be in a relationship
Sometimes when I hear other people talking about feminism I can’t help but think that they’ve got it all wrong. Feminism is about equality, that’s true, that’s what we can all agree on. If people still think, feminists want women to have power over men, for them to be the superior gender, then they haven’t understood the concept and idea behind feminism. It is about equality and balance. Women and men should be treated equally, no gender should be above the other.
Now that’s not what I want to talk about. There are many feminists, especially the ones working on movies that just put a false idea into people’s heads that is so completely the opposite of what feminism should actually be about. Let’s talk about this basic “feminist” statement:
She’s the man
What does this statement tell you?
It is seen as something positive and admirable. The woman who acts like a man, she’s someone worthy of respect and admiration. The only way a woman can truly earn respect and power is, well, when she is not a woman. When she is a man. That is not feminism. That is pure sexism. This statement claims that “feminine” traits have no worth and value. They are useless and should be erased from humanity. Traditional feminine traits are for example sensitivity, empathy and kindness. But these traits are not appreciated by society, sensitive people are seen as weak and whiny and are not taken seriously. But they fail to realise that humanity only survived because we were willing to understand and sympathise with each other. So because women are generally more sensitive, they try to repress these qualities about them because the one’s with the most influence and power (who are most often men) tell us these characteristics are worthless. That forces women to fight every single “feminine” trait they possess and focus on their “masculine” traits since these are admirable and respected. But does that make women equal to men? When they act like men, when they adapt to men’s standards and internalize that misogynistic thinking? How often have I heard “strong” women talking so poorly about women who are in tune with their femininity, who are nurturing and like needle work and the colour pink. Do these women think they are better? Why? Because they act like men? Because they have internalized the patriarchy we are (still to this day!) living in? How often do I see actresses talking so proudly about the “strong” female characters they’re playing, the ones that basically just kick ass and kill people and have no emotional depth. They are proud because society put that idea into our head that those traits, the ones that make us offensive, egocentric and ruthless, are desirable.
You know what feminism is about? It’s not about “Women can be as strong as Men” but “Women are as strong as Men because they are Women” because feminine traits are as important and useful and valuable as masculine traits. And that is what we should achieve. That society finally realises the importance and value of femininity and appreciates these traits in all of us, women and men. That’s real equality and balance. If we balance the core, the heart of the problem. And that is the lack of appreciation for femininity. We have to start showing the beautiful, valuable and desirable sides of femininity, not just its flaws. And then we can say yes, men and women are truly equal because the traits in women, that were the real cause for inequality, are finally acknowledged and appreciated. I will wait till the day comes when a female character is seen as strong and valuable because she is understanding and sensitive and empathetic and in tune with her feminine side. That will be the day where the feminine and the masculine on the scales are on the same level, where equality is created.
Cheloneuniverse 