Category: Queer

Since the nineteenth century, the Mount Morris bathhouse has survived punctured realty bubbles, white flight, home plumbing, moral crusades, wars, racism, depression, fashion, homelessness and AIDS. A beautiful article in the NYTimes today helps us to understand how.

The Mount Morris bathhouse, the only one in the city that caters to gay blacks, has been operating continuously since 1893 and survived the [early 80’s bathhouse crackdown when panicked state officials banned many homosexual gathering places, but did little else] essentially for two reasons. First, it is far from the city’s gay meccas, on a quiet, unassuming block of Madison Avenue at East 125th Street, across the street from the offices of the Rev. Al Sharpton. Second, it has matured through the years, remaining a place to meet new people and enjoy a steam, but with the reality of the city health code’s prohibition on open sex.
“I always tell the clients, `If I can’t bring my wife down here, it isn’t right,’ ” said Walter Fitzer, who owns the place.

These particular baths offer much more than a place to “meet new people and enjoy a steam.”

It may also be the only bathhouse anywhere to employ an education director. His name is Dr. Eugene A. Lawson, and he has worked as a principal at a handful of New York public and private schools.
Five nights a week, Dr. Lawson, whose degree is in education, oversees a lecture series in the back room, where speakers from advocacy groups like the Gay Men’s Health Crisis and the Minority Task Force on AIDS discuss topics of particular interest to gay men. There are lectures on being gay in high school and on gay men raising families.
“A lot of our fellows are bisexual,” Dr. Lawson said, “so we have lectures on that subject, too.”
Six years ago, Dr. Lawson persuaded a handful of teachers, all bathhouse regulars, to start a G.E.D. program for local youths who had dropped out of school. Today, the program counts 270 students.
“It’s a community thing,” Dr. Lawson said proudly.
Mr. Fitzer does his own work for the community. He allows a dozen or so homeless men to pay $20 a night to sleep in the bedrooms, not much bigger than telephone booths, which once had holes drilled in their walls to facilitate anonymous gay sex.
“They have to be out in the morning and everything they have goes with them,” Mr. Fitzer said. “I can’t run a hotel, but it’s the least that I can do.”

In a great essay in this week’s Village Voice, “Persecuting Pee-wee
A Child-Porn Case That Threatens Us All,” Richard Goldstein manages to sort out a lot of scary stuff, and he warns us that Paul Reubens is the canary in the mine.

Most of Reubens’s collection would be considered softcore by current standards, but nestled among the many portraits of naked bronco busters and javelin throwers in posing straps—typical of the types that graced the pages of physique magazines—were a few dozen photos that could be contraband today, though they were quite legal when they first appeared.

I like to think of myself as a proud activist queer with an enormous interest in history, but the awesome story of Willem Arondius [alternatively, “Arondeus”] and his friends was completely unknown to me until this week. It played itself out across the screen of my laptop only because I had been going through the website of the Holocaust Museum in connection with their latest special exhibit, “Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals, 1933-1945.”
What follows is the story I composed as a collage, quoting and editing accounts from several web sources which deal with Arondius.

During the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, on the evening of March 27, 1943, a resistance unit comprised of artists, students and two young doctors raided the Bevolkingsregister [residents’ registration office] in Amsterdam. One of them, costume designer Sjoerd Bakker, had himself tailored [German] police uniforms for the entire unit. The leader of the group, artist and writer Willem Arondius, wore the uniform of a police captain. With the aid of these disguises, they managed to gain entrance to the building without attracting any attention and immediately set to work disarming all the guards posted there. While doing so, they took extra care not to harm any of them. The guards were temporarily rendered immobile after being injected with harmless amounts of a tranquilizing substance. After dragging the anaesthetized guards outside and laying them down in a garden, the next few minutes were spent planting incendiary benzole compounds all over the building that were then ignited by remote control. After five detonations, fire broke out in all the rooms. All the arsonists involved managed to escape the scene undetected.
The bombing of Amsterdam’s Bevolkingsregister had an enormous psychological effect on the Dutch people: Even if all files were not destroyed by the flames, the German occupiers were now extremely nervous, and many Resistance groups throughout the country felt encouraged to follow suit with similar actions. The Netherlands had been occupied by the Wehrmacht (regular German army) since May 1940, and from the beginning of July 1942, deportations of Jews to the Polish death camps had already begun. Approximately 25,000 of the ca. 140,000 Jews living at that time in Holland resided there illegally. Most of them were forced by the circumstances to live in hiding-places and be provided for by non-Jews. The artists active in the Resistance were mainly busy with fashioning forged identity cards for these victims of persecution. However, even perfectly made I.D. imitations could be dangerous for their holders, as soon as they were compared with the duplicates that existed in the bevolkingsgregister. Thus came the idea of bombing the registration office, in order to destroy as many of those files as possible.
The homosexual writer and artist Willem Arondius was the chief coordinator of the operation. Two other gay comrades-in-arms were the tailor Sjoerd Bakker and the writer Johan Brouwer. They were later betrayed by a person or persons unknown, arrested and sentenced to death. During the Nazi show trial Willem Arondius assumed full responsibility for the bombing. The only ones to survive the Nazi era, by their receiving long sentence terms instead of the death penalty, were the two doctors (Cees Honig and Willem Beck) who had tranquilized the guards.
Shortly before his execution Willem Arondius had his lawyer promise that she would pass the following words on to others so that future generations might not forget: [In Dutch: “Homo’s hoeven niet minder moedig te zijn dan andere mensen“] “Homosexuals aren’t any less courageous than other people.”
Even in the liberal Netherlands it took until April 1990 for the larger part of the population to receive this message. Toni Bouwman’s highly praised 1990 documentary on Arondius’ life was broadcast that year on Dutch television:[“Na het feest, zonder afscheid verdwenen–Notities uit het leven van Willem Arondius“] “After the Party: Gone Without Saying Good-Bye.–Notes from the Life of Willem Arondius.”
[slightly edited from the Ben Boxer’s Silver Foxe Clubhouse site’s excellent account]

There’s apparently only a little more available on the net in English, and this is just about all of that:

Arondius had been born in Amsterdam in 1895. An artist and author, Arondius [fabulous photo!] was commissioned to do a mural for the eighteenth-century villa then serving as provincial capital, or Provinciehuis, for North Holland in Haarlem in the 1920’s (which still survives) and later published a biography of Dutch painter Matthijs Maris. But he would never become a really successful artist. One account says that he was subject to mood changes and that he suffered from a inferiority complex [actually, the words used are “He suffered from a minority complex,” but although I believe they really meant, “inferiority complex,” I entirely understand the heavy impact of the other possibility, and it may say even much more]. He seemed to both love and hate the capital. He moved a couple of times to the countryside, but always returned. Prior to World war II he lived with Jan Thijssen, the son of a green grocer, in the countryside near Apeldoorn, but they moved to Amsterdam in the late thirties.
Arondius joined the “Raad van Verzet” resistance movement shortly after the invasion. This underground unit specialized in falsifying registration papers.
The efforts and courage of such units of the resistance are attested to in works such as The Diary of Anne Frank. Monuments to the resistance commemorate the brave acts of Dutch citizens who participated in the general strike that brought the country to a standstill in reaction to the Nazi’s violent attacks on the Jewish community in Amsterdam. Streets are named after the brave leaders of the resistance who gave their lives in defense of others. However, the social attitude towards Gays in post-war Europe made recognition of a homosexual such as Arondius more difficult.
The world that survived the war was not ready to endure a homosexual hero.
[edited largely from the account found on Lambda‘s site and including material from the site of Hans and Thomas {see another, more conservative, photo of Arondius}]

Would we be able to do as much as did Willem, his friends and so many others?
__________
Those who can read Dutch may want to look at the brief biographical text from the Instituut voor Nederlandse Geschiedenis [Institute for Netherlands History] site.
__________
Willem was of course not alone. The story of at least one other member of his circle. Frieda Belinfante, will need her own post.

The United States Holocaust Museum in Washington currently includes an exhibit on the Nazi persecution of homosexuals, the first in a series on specific groups other than Jews who were victimized by the regime.
The numbers of victims identified with a pink triangle never rivalled those of Jewish victims*, but there was a particular horror awaiting those who managed to survive in the camps until “liberation,” and for the world’s memory of those who did not survive.

As the Allies swept through Europe to victory over the Nazi regime in early 1945, hundreds of thousands of concentration camp prisoners were liberated. The Allied Military Government of Germany repealed countless laws and decrees. Left unchanged, however, was the 1935 Nazi revision of Paragraph 175. Under the Allied occupation, some homosexuals were forced to serve out their terms of imprisonment regardless of time served in the concentration camps. The Nazi version of Paragraph 175 remained on the books of the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) until the law was revised in 1969 to decriminalize homosexual relations between men over the age of 21.
The continued legal and social prohibitions against homosexuality in Germany hindered acknowledgement that homosexuals were victims of Nazi persecution. In June 1956, West Germany’s Federal Reparation Law for Victims of National Socialism declared that internment in a concentration camp for homosexuality did not qualify an individual to receive compensation. Homosexuals murdered by the Nazis received their first public commemoration in a May 8, 1985, speech by West German President Richard von Weizsäcker—the fortieth anniversary of the war’s end. Four years after re–unification in 1990, Germany abolished Paragraph 175. In May 2002, the German parliament completed legislation to pardon all homosexuals convicted under Paragraph 175 during the Nazi era.

Some of this history is current events in the U.S., where “don’t ask, don’t tell” remains the law of the land, where homosexual activity remains a crime punishable by prison in many states, where there is no federal protection for homosexuals and where gays have always been generously tolerated during wartime but hunted out at other times when seeking careers in military service.

With the reintroduction in 1935 of conscription for all men ages 18 to 45, Germany’s homosexual men became liable for service in the armed forces, the Wehrmacht. The German military code did not bar homosexuals, even convicted homosexuals, from serving in the armed forces. As a result, thousands of homosexual men were drafted to serve a regime that persecuted them as civilians.
Homosexual activity in the military was regulated by §175 and §175a. As huge numbers of men were called up, convictions rose, but the long–held fear that homosexuality would spread as an epidemic through the often–isolated all–male military proved to be unfounded. Still, arrested soldiers faced brutal punishments. Individuals convicted as “incorrigibly homosexual” or for abuse of authority under §175a were discharged, imprisoned, then dispatched to a concentration camp. Those sentenced for having “erred by seduction” served terms in prison and returned to service.
As an option to enduring the notoriously wretched military prisons, men convicted for any but the worst crimes under §175 could petition to join the “cannon-fodder” battalions. Commanders mercilessly used such troops in battles that in most cases were suicide missions.

From its founding the Museum has always been extraordinarily inclusive about the area of its concern, making available materials and literature on the persecution of homosexuals, the handicapped, Gypsies, Poles, Soviet prisoners of war and Jehovah’s Witnesses.
The Museum website exhibit, which includes primary source material and photographs, is as excellent as it is horrible.
After it closes in D.C. on March 16, the entire installation travels to New York, San Francisco, other cities and in fact to any additional venues which might still request it (check the site for that information). We were planning a special visit south this winter until hearing the exhibit would be coming here. Actually, as enthusiastic patrons of the Washington Museum, we may decide to travel anyway, take the family, and go back with friends when it gets here.
In any event, the Museum itself should be visited by everyone who possibly can, ideally with some frequency, for the permanent as well as the changing exhibits.
__________
* Umm. When I went to link here to Yad Vashem as a source for the numbers of Jewish victims (usually given as around six million), I failed at first to find a specific figure. While distracted by other information I did notice that wihin the site there are various references to other victims of the Nazis, and that all but one of the usual categories are enumerated specifically. The category of homosexuals is not included. In fact, with further effort, using their own search engine, to locate any reference to homosexual, homosexuality, gay, queer, paragraph 175 or the pink triangle, I only turned up, repeatedly, the answer, “No documents matching your query were found.” I was shocked and not a little angry.

In the current (December 30) issue of The Nation there is a brilliant piece of writing about a brilliant man writing about a brilliant generation of queers, and you’ll feel brilliant if you read it. Richard Kim writes about Douglas Crimp writing about AIDS activists, but unfortunately this particular article is not available online, so I can’t link anything here.
Well, they can use your money, and the $2.95 will be money well spent. Better yet, on the basis of Kim’s review, you and I should probably both spring for Crimp’s book itself.

It is this expansive vision that has guided all of Crimp’s work on AIDS, and thus, read end-to-end, Crimp’s essays are more than individual polemics: They present a counterhistory of the AIDS epidemic. Throughout, Crimp demonstrates an unflinchingly critical gaze in the face of crisis and a determination to articulate a genuinely humane political vision.

The expected villains are attacked in Crimp’s essays, but it seems that the real excitement begins when he discusses the self-righteous and moralistic Andrew Sullivan, Gabriel Rotello and Michelangelo Signorile, as he continues to outline the lessons of the past and an assignment for the future.

The task becomes especially treacherous when one takes on sacred cows like Randy Shilts, Larry Kramer and the NAMES Project AIDS quilt, or the deeply ambivalent contradictions within the art and activist worlds from which Crimp writes.

Oh oh.

Yuck.
So the Catholic Church was “fiercely lobbying” up to the last minute to defeat the modest, and decades-overdue, extension of the New York State Nondiscrimination Act (to include homosexuals and bisexuals).
It managed to pass yesterday, although minus any protection for the transgendered, and it was signed into law by the governor.
Yesterday’s short Daily News article doesn’t mention the notorious word, “lifestyle,” but it’s permanently etched in the minds of religious and conservative bigots, and in fact it’s the basis for their rejection of a good portion of humanity. Next time I or anyone else gets a chance to do some serious lobbying against state protection and encouragement of religion, something which actually is a lifestyle, I want to see the kind of consideration and protection that the Church always enjoys.

The Daily News this morning printed my letter responding to a piece by their own editor, Jonathan Capehart, published last week. Capehart had suggested that Tom Duane was destroying the chances for enacting a state act protecting homosexuals because Duane wanted to include in the statute a category of people understood by very few others.

Just protections
Manhattan: In his Dec. 11 Opinion column, Jonathan Capehart wrote that he doesn’t understand why State Sen. Tom Duane is insisting upon the inclusion of the transgendered among those to be protected by the proposed state Sexual Orientation Non-Discrimination Act. Could the answer be that Duane knows and understands who needs the protection most, and that is* not newspaper columnists and state senators?
James Arthur Wagner

*small syntax quibble: the last line above read “they are” but the News printed “is”
The letter has been edited down, and the published portion does not include these additional questions:

Could it also be that he understands that he serves an entire community, and that he believes that such service demands courage and not merely professional calculation? Unless he realy believes the stuff he writes, Mr. Capehart should be asking himself about courage and calculation. Would Mr. Capehart have suggested to Martin Luther King, Jr., forty years ago that the stuggle for civil rights could collapse if King did not limit his initial objective to securing protections for those blacks who were most white?

More exciting than the appearance of this letter is the fact that the paper decided to print a second letter on the very same subject today, this one also berating their conservative columnist.

Rights for all
Manhattan: State Sen. Tom Duane is right in trying to kill the Sexual Orientation Non-Discrimination Act. The transgendered population should not be excluded from having the same protections under the law as other citizens. Transgendered might be a difficult concept for some to understand. That ignorance should not be justification for this discriminatory bill to pass.
Sean Labbe

____________________
BOX STORY:
If Pennsylvania has done it, New York should do no less.

A remarkable thing has happened in Pennsylvania.
The state legislature passed an amendment to the hate-crimes law that made Pennsylvania only the fifth state in the union to protect not only gays, lesbians, and bisexuals, but also those who are transgendered.
In a state renowned for its heartland conservatism, many people were stunned that the controversial bill, signed early this month by Gov. Schweiker, could triumph.

New York State, we need to be reminded, still has no law whatsoever protecting even lesbians and gays.

It seems appropriate, in the circumstances of the tragic story of a murder in Chicago and the uproar it has caused among certain Catholic zealots, to be reminded of a ten-year-old proclamation which originated with the Vatican Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (once known as the office of The Holy Inquisition).

Most shocking of all, [a 1992 Vatican proclamation authorized by both Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and by Pope John Paul II] suggests that when lesbians and gay men demand civil rights, “neither the Church nor society should be surprised when … irrational and violent reactions increase”.
This implies that by asking for human rights, lesbians and gay men
encourage homophobic prejudice and violence: we bring hatred upon ourselves, and are responsible for our own suffering. The Catholic Church, it seems, blames the victims of homophobia, not the perpetrators.
—from the essay, “Catholic Homophobia,” by Peter Tatchell

A Message, on behalf of all queers, to all strict Roman Catholics, oh, and also to all readers of The National Review:
WE ARE NOT PAGAN BABIES
We will not be baptized and become straight, any more than blacks will be painted white or smart people made stupid, all this regardless of your efforts, regardless of your prayers, and the sooner you realize this, the better the world will be for all of us.

The current issue of The Advocate includes a story about Hispanic Chicago teenagers running a Spanish-language radio show for their GLBTZ peers and a story about the courage of a Kentucky high school gay-staight alliance in fighting the homophobia of an entire county. Both stories were illustrated with the smiling faces of bright, courageous (and, incidently, media-photogenic) youth working as real “advocates.”
The cover story is labelled, “SAPPHIC SALMA,” with the beautiful Salma Hayek behind the sub-headline, “PLAYING BISEXUAL IN HER NEW FILM, FRIDA, SEXY SELMA HAYEK COMES CLEAN ABOUT HER ATTRACTION TO GAY ROLES, HER PASSION FOR STRONG WOMEN, AND KISSING ASHLEY JUDD.”
It sounds like a supermarket tabloid, and The Advocate basically pursues a star-stuck and mostly mindless agenda. Still, the magazine maintains that it represents the gay community, so, instead of cover stories honoring strong people who bravely stick their necks out for what they believe and what they are, why do we so often get cover stories about people whose claim to our attention is not much different from that of, say, an insurance salesman whose bravest gay-positive career decision might include deciding to taking a commission for selling a homo a life policy?
Shamefully, the answer is partly in ourselves, and not in our “stars,” since the commercial media survives on what it believes we want to see and read.
The film and television stars who blind the Advocate editors and their readers are doing [whatever gets our attention] because its their job, while the teenagers in the back pages are doing their stuff in order that they and their peers might survive.