Fantastic news.

 Check this out. http://www.windycitymediagroup.com/gay/lesbian/news/ARTICLE.php?AID=28244

 Round three to the good guys and two more rounds to go folks.

 I just wanted to say farewell to this wonderful lady. She stood beside MLK during his famous speech in Washington and later she worked with Coretta Scott King for LGBT rights.

 So has anyone been checking the news. What do you think about the Town which cancelled prom so that a girl couldn't wear a tux and bring a girl as a date? Now the other parents are planning a private prom by invitation only so she can't go, BTW her mother is a lesbian too. And what about the kid in Georgia who got permission to bring a boy to his prom as a date and now his parents have thrown him out? Antone here reading any of this stuff?

 So did anyone go to Washington for the National Equality March? 

 Hello evryone,
So yesterday I went to the second "Out at Plimoth" event in Plymouth Mass at the Plantation. It was bigger than last year with a new speaker who did a talk which was motivated by lesbianism in the Colonies period but ended up more about transmen in England and America during this period.
There was once again a talk on same sex relationships for men from this period with a focus on how the language of same sex relationship can be hidden within everyday language. And Harlan was back from the Two Spirit Society for the native American people. 
Some of you may remember me being upset because the Native Contingent was pulled out of the NYC pride parade this year for a while and one of the people was kept out because he stood up to the police; that was Harlan, gotta love 'im.

 In 2007 in the September issue of Journal of Modern History published a study of historical evidence showing that as long ago as six centuries same sex male couples could have had formalized and legally recognized relationships. The evidence includes documents and gravesites and to say the least this interpretation of that material is contentious.

The question concerns a type of legal contract known in French as affrèrement which translates as enbrotherment. This contract was originally designed to allow brothers to become equal holders of inherited property but also came to be used by more distant relatives and even by men who were unrelated. The pair entering into this contract became legally one in that they owned property in common and could set up their own mutual household and they also became heirs to one another. This was considered by legal writers of the time to be similar to marriage and allowed for the forming of households which were recognized though not of the standard husband/wife model.

Allan A. Tulchin of ShippensburgUniversity also points out that they were often granted upon the partners making assurances of their deep mutual affection. They even ended up at times being buried next to one another in churchyards.

It is not possible to prove that some of these relationships were romantic but it is also not possible to prove that at least some of them were not. But what we do know is that six hundred years ago in France two single, unrelated men could go before a notary with witnesses and avow a deep mutual affection and the result would be a legal arrangement which recognized these men as a family unit. They lived together, worked together, owned property together and were accepted by their community who even buried them together.

Was this a same sex union? Definitely! Did it mean that the men had a deep affection? Yes! Does it automatically mean that the men were in a homosexual relationship? No! Could some of them have been in a homosexual relationship? Yes! Is it likely that at least some of these were homosexual romantic relationships? Hmn?

 1914 saw the first published (that I can find) use of the term faggot to refer to a person who has an orientation toward the same sex. It was published on Oregon in a dictionary of criminal slang terms.

 

Now the term ‘gay’, well that one would have to wait a while longer to enter popular culture in the US. It had started to be used in the 17^th century to describe someone who was addicted to sins of the flesh but at this point it was used for straight people who had trouble keep their pants up or skirts down, men and women respectively one would assume.

 

In 1922 Gertrude Stein may have made the first use of the term in a play to indicate lesbianism but she may have just as easily meant happiness. But a 1929 musical by Noel Coward was a bit clearer and had four dressed up dandies singing about pretty boys and talking about wearing a green carnation as symbol of being why the 1890s were gay. A hint about the way homosexual men in the 19^th century used specific items of attire to identify one another maybe?

 

In 1938 Cary Grant used it in a movie to clearly mean homosexual for the first time. And then it started to be used more and more in popular culture.  The word was still used in entertainment with traditional meanings but usage as a term for homosexually oriented became more and more common. By the 1960s it was starting to be heavily used in a general way as a term identifying people as having homosexual orientations.

 

As the term became more and more publicly identified with men who were exclusively homosexual in orientation the term became less functional as an umbrella term. Eventually lesbians, bisexuals and transgendered people would increasingly become less willing to be identified by the use of this term and would work toward the use of more specific terms.

 Merry Christmas December, 1924 in Chicago when the State of Illinois issued a charter to a new organization called Society for Human Rights inspired by and named after a movement in Germany. SHR was the first official publicly recognized organization in the U.S.A. dedicated to achieving rights for people who have homosexual orientations. The new organization was founded by Henry Gerber after his encounters with the homosexual movement while stationed in Germany as a soldier serving in the occupation forces.

 

Numerous obstacles beset the new attempt to start a movement. The short lived project created a newsletter called Friendship and Freedom which only saw two issues reach publication. An early challenge was actually from people who had homosexual orientations and who had always lived in an air of secrecy, some of which responded that they liked the secrecy to which they were accustomed. Inevitable challenges to finances would also strike quickly.

 

The organization decided to embrace a purely homophile identity and excluded others from their efforts, even though they would eventually find out that their vice president was bi and had a wife and two children. A quote from a 1962 letter published by Gerber:

 

 We had agreed to make our organization a purely homophile Society, and we had argued and decided to exclude the much larger circle of bisexuals for the time being. Neither I nor John, our elected president, had been conscious of the fact that our vice-president, Al, was that type.

 

In 1925 the three leaders were arrested, one found with another man. Gerber was taken into custody by a policeman who was accompanied by a reporter. There was a sensational news paper attack upon the men and the organization. In the subsequent trial the judge admonished the prosecution because the men had been arrested without a warrant. One man had pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct. Gerber was released and his confiscated property returned with the exception of his diaries which were turned over to the postal service. Postal investigators threatened to charge the men for misusing the postal system and Gerber was dismissed from his job at the Post Office for conduct unbecoming a postal employee.

 

And so, the first official “homophile” rights organization in the U.S.A. ceased to exist.

 

Authors’ note: I did not use the term ‘gay’ here because the term was not yet being commonly used and so I use the terms used by the people at the time and who were involved.