At the Club: Lotg Early Black Gay AIDS Activism Washgton, D.C.

Contents:

• WASHGTON, D.C.'S HIDN GAY HISTORY IS UNVERED 'SECRET CY'
• FIRG OF GAY CATHOLIC SCHOOL TEACHER ULD TT LATT SUPREME COURT LG
• AT THE CLUB: LOTG EARLY BLACK GAY AIDS ACTIVISM WASHGTON, D.C.
• KEV MAXEN, JAGUARS ASSISTANT STRENGTH ACH, OUT AS FIRST OPENLY GAY MALE ACH NFL
• JAGUARS ACH OUT AS GAY A FIRST FOR U.S.-BASED PRO LEAGU
• GAY WATER, A NEW NNED CKTAIL, WANTS TO BE THE ANTI-BUD LIGHT

WASHGTON, D.C.'S HIDN GAY HISTORY IS UNVERED 'SECRET CY'

WorldTwo nights Bangkok: The spectm of Thailand’s sex dtryMeet Poland’s out gay lawmaker fightg for LGBTQ rightsVenezuelan police arrt 33 men at gay snaPut signs law banng transn therapy and surgery RsiaIsraeli lawmakers approve judicial reform bill. Books‘Gray Love’ looks at datg after 60‘Leg’ reunts gay man’s experience wh cerebral palsyTe crime fans will love new book ‘What the Dead Know’Celebratg 40 years of ‘Dyk to Watch Out For’A mp novel filled wh the plex reali of our time. SportsTwo trans nonbary athlet make historyKev Maxen is first openly gay male NFL achEuropean Court of Human Rights l favor of Caster SemenyaMegan Rapoe to retire om soccerBaltimore Orl host annual Pri Night.

HealthGay, bi men have better heart health sr than straight men: studyAMA strengthens genr affirmg re policiGilead awards $5 ln grant to HRC’s HIV and health equy programsNew CDC data shows HIV fectns dropped, but mostly among whOfficials eye mpox preventn, vaccatn iativ for this summer’s LGBTQ events.

NewsGay, bi men have better heart health sr than straight men: studyAMA strengthens genr affirmg re policiGilead awards $5 ln grant to HRC’s HIV and health equy programsNew CDC data shows HIV fectns dropped, but mostly among whOfficials eye mpox preventn, vaccatn iativ for this summer’s LGBTQ events. CongrsCountry’s print on May 29 signed Anti-Homosexualy Act Nearly a dozen members of Congrs this week asked the World Bank Group to spend loans to Uganda rponse to the untry’s Anti-Homosexualy Act.

FIRG OF GAY CATHOLIC SCHOOL TEACHER ULD TT LATT SUPREME COURT LG

Elegantly fillg a snug 600-square foot floor-through above Big Pla Comics, s walls adorned wh allurg homoerotic art, Licht’s look and character were spired part by gay bars and fés Hurd experienced while livg and workg Germany. “Secret Cy: The Hidn History of Gay Washgton, " by Jam Kirchick, is a 654-page tome that took years of rearch and an exhstive vtigatn to printial archiv, historil terviews and once-classified ernment rerds. “I realized that all the stori I was readg, and the personali and phenomena, whether was McCarthyism or the Reagans, FDR or JFK, that there were the gay stori lurkg the background, ” Kirchick said.

“It was the specter of homosexualy that provoked the first and only suici by a member of Congrs his Capol Hill office, ed Lyndon Johnson to et that his historil lead would evaporate, and seized the paranoid md of Richard Nixon send only to the plots of his ever-expandg enemi list, ” Kirchick wr. ” Rumors of homosexualy were tastrophic to those who were acced of , but Kirchick also asks the rear to nsir the broar human and societal impact of such wch hunts on gay Amerins workg ernment. “To asss the full sle of the damage that the fear of homosexualy wrought on the Amerin polil landspe, one mt take to acunt not only the reers ed and the liv cut short, but somethg vaster and unquantifiable: the possibili thwarted, ” Kirchick wr.

Although openly LGBTQ people have ma their way to the hight ranks of ernment today, was not long ago that spected homosexuals workg for the feral ernment were hunted down, publicly huiated and termated wh the full force of the ernment. The possibily that Kemp uld jo the ticket was evince that there was a “homosexual rg” around Reagan and that he was “the ventriloquized pawn of shadowy and sister forc, ” Kirchick wr.

AT THE CLUB: LOTG EARLY BLACK GAY AIDS ACTIVISM WASHGTON, D.C.

” Wh those words, Clton would do somethg that would have seemed unfathomable to most, if not all, of his precsors: make an explic appeal to gay Amerins for their support a printial electn. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circu Richmond is an early tt of how that major Supreme Court cisn ptg ee speech agast anti-discrimatn laws will play out beyond the hypothetil suatn that se, which volved a platiff who had never actually ma weddg webs or been asked to do so by a gay person. “The Court rejected the dissent’s assertn that s cisn opened the door to discrimatn employment, ” ACLU attorney Josh Block wrote a reply to Becket’s the exampl raised the Supreme Court did not clu a relig anizatn or a gay employee, and Gorsuch repeatedly voked a 2000 cisn allowg the Boy Suts to expel a gay volunteer on “exprsive associatn” grounds.

“We all said that thoands of relig anizatns all across the untry ask their employe to uphold their tradnal view of marriage word and ed, and if you terpret the statute that way, ’s gog to unleash lots of lawsus agast them, ” Goodrich the Supreme Court has specifilly said preventg racial discrimatn is a pellg ernment tert that jtifi rtrictg First Amendment eedoms, he noted that the Supreme Court has rejected such a fdg on discrimatn agast gay or transgenr people. This historic appotment has s roots an extraordary moment 1957 when Frank Kameny, a young astro-physicist, cid to stand his ground when the feral ernment dismissed him om his job for beg gay.

In The Deviant’s War, Cervi firsthand acunts, classified FBI rerds, and personal documents, predomantly om the Frank Kameny Papers at the Library of Congrs, to give the rear an sight to the 1960s when the Mattache Society of Washgton, the group Kameny found, beme the first anizatn to prott the systematic persecutn of gay feral employe. As reviewed Washgton History, this volume b Kameny’s own words, cludg approximately 150 documents om his personal papers om 1958 to 1975, wh ntextual analysis and mentary to explore the evolutn of gay rights strategy. Johnson explor the the experienc and ristance of the DC gay muny at the ontl of the ernment’s attempt to purge LGBT people om the Civil Service both before and durg the McCarthy era.

KEV MAXEN, JAGUARS ASSISTANT STRENGTH ACH, OUT AS FIRST OPENLY GAY MALE ACH NFL

Addnal llectns have been acced and/or ma accsible sce this gui’s creatn, cludg the digal llectns available through The People’s Archive, DC Public Library: Digized edns of the Washgton Bla, DC’s prcipal LGBT newspaper sce s first issue October 1969; and digized edns of Blacklight, an pennt newspaper servg DC’s Black gay muny. This say asks, how did black gay men who were disloted om the center of AIDS service and public-health outreach (by discrimatn or by choice) the early years of the epimic receive rmatn about the vis’s impact?

Drawg on archival materials, oral-history narrativ, and close textual analysis, I show how racial and class stratifitn stctured Washgton’s gay nightlife scene the 1970s and early 1980s. Communy-based narrativ about the vis’s transmissn through terracial sex, upled wh public-health officials’ neglect of black gay neighborhoods AIDS outreach, stctured the black gay muny’s belief that the vis was a whe gay disease that would not affect them as long as they mataed separate social and sexual works anized around shared geographic lotns.

JAGUARS ACH OUT AS GAY A FIRST FOR U.S.-BASED PRO LEAGU

The ClubHoe—DC’s most famo black gay and lbian nightclub—beme a key se of AIDS activism bee of s prr visibily as the center of Ain Amerin lbian and gay nightlife and as a lol venue for black lbian and gay activist efforts. And although natnal media attentn ntued to foc on the impact of AIDS on whe gay men, the ClubHoe emerged as a lol se where the vastatg impact of the vis on black same-sex-sirg men was both regnized and felt. On several ocsns sce whe gay-owned bars like the Pier, the Way Off Broadway, and the Lost and Found opened the 1970s, DC’s Commissn for Human Rights ced them for discrimatn agast women and blacks.

” Many black gay men wnsed whe patrons walk to the tablishments whout showg ID, while black patrons were asked to show multiple piec of ID, only to be told that the intifitn was unacceptable for admissn. DC’s leadg LGBT-themed newspaper, the Washgton Bla, reported the mayor’s reactn upon learng about the black gay muny’s experienc of racial discrimatn whe gay-owned tablishments: “Barry, who had not prevly met wh Black Gay lears, seemed surprised to hear about discrimatn by Whe Gay tablishments. ”[4] In an edorial the DC-based, black, LGBT-themed magaze Blacklight, Sidney Brkley, the magaze’s publisher and founr of the first LGBT anizatn at Howard Universy, noted how equently this had been happeng whe gay bars particular, “As Black Gay people, we know all too well about discrimatn ‘whe’ Gay bars.

”[5] Yet this practice, though occurrg often wh whe gay-owned tablishments, received ltle media attentn prr to black gay and lbian activist efforts to brg public attentn to the issue. In the feature story of the December 1980 issue of Blacklight, tled “Cliqu, ” the thor, who chose to rema anonymo, explaed how black gay muny formatn Washgton, DC, shifted om private social clubs the mid- to late ’60s to more public venu the mid-’70s and early ’80s, g “cliqu” to emerge based on shared social spac like church, bars, neighborhoods, and apartment plex.

GAY WATER, A NEW NNED CKTAIL, WANTS TO BE THE ANTI-BUD LIGHT

[6] While the persistence of facto forms of segregatn DC’s gay scene and the cultural stigma attached to homosexualy wh black muni did shape the formatn of discrete social and sexual works among black gay men DC, many of the men preferred to socialize based upon shared geographic spac and mon racial and class inti. In the mid-1970s, Washgton, DC, veloped a vibrant black gay nightlife scene, wh nightclubs and bars such as the ClubHoe, Delta Ele, Brass Rail, and La Zambra emergg var bs and rintial districts throughout the cy.