Same-Sex Marriage Gets Its Due on "The Simpsons" (February 20, 2005)

On the February 20, 2005 episode of The Simpsons (titled "There's Something About Marrying") same-sex marriage was legalized in Springfield as a way to attract tourists.  This results in Marge's sister, Patty Bouvier, coming out and announcing her intention to marry her partner Veronica, a pro golfer.  When Homer learns how much he can earn performing same-sex ceremonies he becomes a minister and marries Patty (which is ironic since Patty, as well as her twin sister Selma, have nothing but contempt for Homer).  Alas, it was later revealed that Veronica was a man.

 

Having same-sex marriage as a storyline on a mainstream TV show (a favorite with young men) was an important milestone in the fight for legalization of same-sex marriage.  The attendant publicity brought awareness up a few more notches - anathema to the religious right, which frets whenever gay issues gain exposure.      

 

 

This episode of The Simpsons aired a little more than a year after Massachusetts became the first U.S. state to legalize same-sex unions.  And it just so happens that there is a city named Springfield in the state.  However, the show's writers have never indicated in which state their Springfield is located (there are 38 cities, towns and townships named Springfield in the U.S.).

 

 

First Lady Jackie Kennedy Gives Televised Tour of the White House (February 14, 1962)

On Valentine's Day 1962, 32-year-old First Lady Jackie Kennedy gave a televised tour of the White House.  It aired on CBS and NBC (and on ABC a number of days later).  In addition to discussing the renovations and redecorating she was overseeing, the program also served as a lesson in U.S. history as Jackie told anecdotes about a number of the presidents.  This broadcast marked the first time a First Lady had been given TV airtime.  Not surprisingly, the special was very popular and drew an audience of 56 million (back when the US had 140 million fewer people than it does today).  

 

 

My first exposure to the special was in college in 1976 when it was shown on Friday "movie night".  I was so surprised by Jackie's soft voice, peculiar accent and her almost childlike demeanor.  However, there was charm in her youth and the simplicity of her presentation.  And her outfit resembled something First Lady Michelle Obama might wear today (especially the flats).   

 

 

This special was incorporated into the storyline of an episode of Mad Men during its second season (in 2008).  It amused me because it showed the show's various female characters entranced by the broadcast - as well as closeted gay character Sal (played by out actor Bryan Batt) who seemed more excited about watching it than his girlfriend!

 

 

 

President Clinton Announces Plan to End Military's Ban on Gay Soliders (January 29, 1993)

Just a week into President Clinton's first term he called his first press conference on January 29, 1993 to announce his plan to lift the U.S. military's longstanding policy banning gay men and lesbians from serving in the Armed Services.  This created a firestorm of opposition from the military and conservatives who were dead set against this change in policy.  They used all of the shoddy and innacurate ammuntion in their arsenal to prevent the president's plan from coming to fruition.

 

Integration of gays into society was anathema to conservatives, especially if it showed them in a positive, patriotic light.  Instead, they wished to perpetuate the stereotype of gay men as nothing more than silly drag queens at Gay Pride parades.  Giving them the opportunity to be seen as defenders of the nation did not sit well with homophobes of the right wing.

 

 

 

Six months later, despite the president's good intentions, the infamous "don't ask, don't tell" directive was unveiled.  It would be 18 years before this deeply flawed policy was repealed.  During these intervening years 14,000 soldiers were investigated and expelled from the various branches of the military, wasting billions of taxpayer dollars.  The closed mindedness of conservatives had trumped the nation's security.

Reviewing the Year in Gay History: 2013

 

Jan 1 - The first same-sex marriages take place in Maryland.

Jan 13 - At the Golden Globes, Jodie Foster sorta/kinda comes out while accepting a lifetime achievement award.

 

 

Jan 15 - 80-year old actor/singer Jim Nabors, most famous for playing the title role in the 1960's CBS sitcom, Gomer Pyle, marries his partner of 38 years in Seattle.

Jan 21 - In his inaugural address, President Obama makes a reference to Stonewall and is the first president to mention gay rights in an inaugural address.

 

 

Feb 3 - Hungarian-born, gay porn superstar Arpad Miklos is found dead in his Manhattan apartment, apparently the victim of a suicide.  He was just 45 years old.

 

 

Feb 20 - In a new TV commercial for the Amazon Kindle Paperwhite, a woman reading at the beach informs a man, whom she thinks is flirting with her, that her husband is at the bar getting her a drink.  The fellow then replies that his husband is at the bar as well!

 

 

Feb 24 - The Gay Men's Chorus of Los Angeles appears very briefly during the opening of tonight's Academy Awards telecast, joining host Seth MacFarlane in a song called I Saw Your Boobs. 

Feb 25 - Gay divorce is the cover story of this week's issue of New York Magazine (cover date 3/4).

 

 

March 6 - Mexico's Supreme Court rules that anti-gay expressions like 'maricon' are not protected under the constitution's Freedom of Expression.

March 15 - In a blow to the Republican party's anti-gay platform, Republican senator Rob Portman of Ohio reverses his stand against same-sex marriage in support of his gay son.

April 6 - Liza Minnelli makes a guest appearance as herself on tonight's episode of Smash.

 

 

April 17 - New Zealand becomes the 13th nation to legalize same-sex marriage.

April 29 - NBA veteran Jason Collins becomes the first active player of one of the Big Four sports leagues to come out.  He did it in an interview in Sports Illustrated, which hit newsstands today.

 

 

May 2 - Rhode Island becomes the 10th state to legalize same-sex marriage.

May 7 - Less than a week after Rhode Island, Delaware's governor signs into law legislation legalizing same-sex marriage there. 

May 7 - Famed club DJ and music producer, Peter Rauhofer, dies from a brain tumor at the age of 48.

 

 

May 10 - Despite sporting the Ryan Murphy pedigree, his NBC sitcom about gay parenting, The New Normal, is cancelled after one season.

May 14 - Minnesota becomes the 12th state to legalize same-sex marriage.  56 million Americans, or 18% of the US population, now live in states that allow gay couples to marry.

May 17 - Michael Musto, the Village Voice's iconic entertainment and gossip columnist, is let go by the paper after nearly 30 years.

 

 

 

May 18 - France becomes the 14th nation to legalize same-sex marriage.  With a population of 65 million, it passed South Africa as the most populous country where same-sex couples can marry.

May 18 - On Saturday Night Live, a parody TV commercial airs for "Zanax for Gay Summer Weddings", formulated for heterosexuals attending gay weddings who feel insecure because of how perfect they are.

 

 

May 23 - The Boy Scouts of America vote to allow openly gay youths as members, while continuing its policy of excluding openly gay adult leaders. 

May 26 - The TV movie, Behind the Candelabra, airs on HBO.  It looks at the relationship of Liberace (played by Michael Douglas) and his much younger lover, Scott Thorson (played by Matt Damon).

June 3 - The Fosters, a drama about a lesbian couple raising their family of inter-racial children, debuts on ABC Family.

June 20  - Exodus International, a ministry that claimed people could change their sexual orientiation from homosexual to heterosexual through reparative therapy, announces it will shut down after 37 years of operation.  Its president also issues a profuse apology.

 

 

 

June 26 - In two landmark decisions, the U.S. Supreme Court overturns DOMA and also upholds an earlier Circuit court ruling that invalidated Prop 8 in California, thus restoring same-sex marriage in the nation's most populous state.

June 30 - In honor of Gay Pride Day and the legalization of gay marriage in Washington state, the Seattle Mariners become the first Major League Baseball team to fly the rainbow flag at a game.

 

 

June 30 - Russian president, Vladimir Putin, signs into law legislation that bans gay "propaganda".

July 1 - This week's issue of the New Yorker celebrates week's Supreme Court regarding same-sex marriage by showing Bert & Ernie on its cover snuggling in front of the TV.  

July 11 - Orange is the New Black, a drama set in a women's prison, debuts on Netflix.

 

 

July 17 - With Queen Elizabeth giving her royal stamp of approval to Parliament's legislation, England legalizes same-sex marriage.

July 28 - Just four months into his papacy, Pope Francis makes a surprisingly compassionate comment about gay priests, saying that "If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?" It is also notable that he uses the term "gay" rather than "homosexual".

 

 

Aug 2 - Secretary of State John Kerry announces that effectively immediately the US will treat visa applications of married same-sex couples in the same manner as opposite-sex spouses. 

Aug 11 - Chelsea's popular bar Splash closes after nearly 22 years, unable to staunch the flow of patrons to bars and clubs in Hell's Kitchen. 

Aug 28 - The Internal Revenue Service announces that all same-sex couples who are legally married will be recognized as such for federal tax purposes, even if the state where they live doesn't recognize their union.

Sept 2 - In her fifth attempt, 64-year-old lesbian swimmer, Diana Nyad, successfully swims for 53 hours between Havana, Cuba and Key West - without a shark cage.

Sept 22 - For the third time in the past four years openly gay actor Jim Parsons wins the Emmy Award for Best Actor in a Sitcom for his portrayal of lovable science nerd Sheldon on CBS's The Big Bang Theory.

Sept 26 - In its 11th season, CBS's hit sitcom Two and a Half Men replaces its "half man" with the lesbian daughter of one of the Two Men.

 

 

Oct 3 - For the first time since co-starring on Will & Grace seven years earlier, Sean Hayes returns to NBC in the sitcom Sean Saves the World, playing a gay man raising his teen daughter.  

Oct 21 - The first gay marriages take place in New Jersey, the 14th state to legalize them.

Oct 25 - The lesbian drama, and winner of the Palme de Or at Cannes, Blue is the Warmest Color, opens in US theaters.  Much attention is given to the NC-17-rated movie's explicit 7-minute sex scene.

 

 

Nov 5 - Openly gay Washington state senator Ed Murray is elected mayor of Seattle and delivers his acceptance speech with his husband at his side. 

Nov 20 - Illinois joins 15 other states and DC in legalizing same-sex marriage.

Nov 22 - The movie Philomena opens.  It tells the true story of Philomena Lee, who searched for her son Michael 50 years after she game him up for adoption.  In the course of her search she discovers that he was gay and died of AIDS.

Dec 10 - India's Supreme Court declares homosexual sex illegal, reversing a ruling four years ago that had struck down the ban.  

Dec 19 - To absolutely no one's surprise, figure skating great Brian Boitano, who won a gold medal for the US at the 1988 Winter Olympics, finally came out.  This came two months after he turned 50.

 

 

 

Dec 19 - New Mexico's Supreme Court rules in favor of same-sex marriage, the sixth state to legalize it in 2013 and seventeenth state overall (and DC).

 

 To read about LGBT milestones from other years, double click here.

Illinois is First State to Repeal its Anti-Sodomy Law (January 1, 1962)

It was a wild time in Peoria on January 1, 1962 as Illinois became the first state to repeal its anti-sodomy law.  Ask most anyone on the street what sodomy is and it's likely they won't be able to give you specifics - but they know it has something to do with turning into a pillar of salt.  The fact that the definition refers to any sex act that isn't "natural" is of little help. (The song Sodomy from the Broadway show Hair offered some help.)  Also, many don't realize that such laws pertained to heterosexuals as well as homosexuals (but prosecution was usually reserved for gay men). 

 

40 years after Illinois' repeal 14 states still had anti-sodomy statutes on the books (mostly in the South).  But after upholding Georgia's anti-sodomy law in 1986 (in Bowers V. Hardwick) the Supreme Court in 2003 struck down Texas' law (Lawrence v Texas), thereby invalidating all remaining anti-sodomy laws nationwide.  (The book The Sodomy Cases discusses in detail these landmark cases.)

 

ACT UP Disrupts Sunday Mass at St. Patrick's (December 10, 1989)

 

 

December 1989 was one of the coldest months on record in the New York area.  The month is also remembered for an audacious protest organized by the AIDS activist group ACT UP whereby thousands of its members disrupted Sunday morning Mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral on December 10 to protest the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York's stand on sex education and condom distribution in the wake of the AIDS crisis. 

 

And although this demonstration was perhaps the boldest of any ACT UP protest, others generated considerable publicity as well, e.g. on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange; at the FDA in Washington; at Hearst Publications (protesting an article in Cosmopolitan); at Grand Central Station; and on the sets of CBS Evening News w/Dan Rather and PBS' MacNeil-Lehrer Report.

 

To learn more about the vital role ACT UP played in the fight for improved healthcare and medications for HIV/AIDS sufferers the book Moving Politics: The Emotion & ACT UP's Fight Against AIDS is a worthwhile read.  

Harvey Milk & San Francisco's Mayor Murdered at City Hall (November 27, 1978)

November 1978 was a month like few others for the city of San Francisco.  First, on Nov. 7 voters in California rejected the anti-gay Briggs Initiative which called for a ban on hiring gay teachers.  It was an emotional victory for openly gay San Francisco city supervisor Harvey Milk who had put much energy campaigning against it.  A week-and-a-half later People's Temple cult leader Jim Jones forced more than 900 of his followers to commit suicide in his Jonestown settlement in Guyana.  Jones and many of the victims were former residents of the Bay Area.

 

Then on the Monday after Thanksgiving (11/27), disgruntled former city supervisor Dan White snuck into City Hall that morning and shot mayor George Moscone (pictured, near left) at point blank range and then walked down the hall and did the same to Milk (far left).  In a bizarre coincidence it turned out Moscone and Milk had a connection with Jim Jones who a few years earlier was chairman of the San Francisco Housing Authority.

 

At the time I was in my senior year at Penn State and in the early stages of coming out so Milk's murder was especially sobering for me.  Back then having an openly gay man in such a high profile government position was unheard of, compounding the loss.  In 2009 Sean Penn won the Oscar for his portrayal of Milk in the movie Milk.  The film was based on the biography The Mayor of Castro St. - The Life & Times of Harvey Milk. 

 

Ron Reagan Jr. Gets Married, Eyebrows Are Raised (November 24, 1980)

 

 

Speculation was rife that Ron Reagan Jr. just had to be gay.  After all, he was a willowy dancer with the Joffrey Ballet who grew up among his parents' Hollywood friends, many who were gay.  So, eyebrows were raised among the chattering classes when the 22-year-old son of the newly elected president was married in New York City on Nov. 24, 1980.  He wed Doria Palmieri, whom he had met at a dance studio she managed in Los Angeles.  She was six years older than Ron.

 

 

After his father left office Ron's liberal political leanings became known and he even addressed the 2004 Democratic Convention.  (He also makes occasional appearances on MSNBC.)  In that same year he was interviewed by the Advocate and addressed the gay rumors head on.  Unlike some other figures in the public eye I've never heard reports of any sightings of him in clubs or walking hand-in-hand with another man at a gay resort.  The rumors and hubbub have long since dried up.  Meanwhile Reagan and wife Doria are still married, they have a daughter and live in Seattle.  

 

 

Similar speculation surrounded New York Mets catcher Mike Piazza who felt compelled to call a news conference in the spring of 2002 to deny he was gay.  And in 2014 Green Bay Packers quarterback also called a press conference to squelch rumors that he and his male personal assistant, who lived with Rodgers, were a couple. 

 

Then there was the case of married couple Richard Gere and Cindy Crawford, who took out a full page ad in the Times of London in 1994 to deny rumors that they were splitting up (which they did six months later) and that both were gay.  Curiously, the fact that President Obama's former chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, studied ballet and attended Sarah Lawrence College (after turning down a scholarship to the Joffrey Ballet - the same dance company Reagan performed with) didn't cause speculation about his sexuality.  A sign perhaps that metrosexuals had become fully integrated into society - and that Reagan was ahead of his time.    

 

 

Palm Springs Elects Gay Mayor (November 4, 2003)

The U.S.'s first openly gay mayor, Kenneth Reeves, was elected in 1993 by voters in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  10 years later, on November 4, 2003, Palm Springs, California (population 48,000) elected 53-year old Ron Oden (right) as its mayor, making him the first gay mayor of a gay resort destination. 

 

 

Previously, Palm Springs was most famous for having Sonny Bono as its mayor (1988-92) as well as hosting the Dinah Shore golf tournament, a popular springtime event for lesbians - now known as Dinah Shore Women's Weekend.  Oden also had another thing in common with the nation's first gay mayor - both were black.  (Cambridge has elected two other gay mayors since Reeves.)

 

 

 

U.S. cities which presently have openly gay mayors include Houston; Portland (OR); Providence (RI); Gainesville (FL); and Chapel Hill (NC).  And the newest member of the club, Jim Gray, was elected mayor of Lexington, KY two years ago.

 

Two fun books about Palm Springs are Palm Springs Holiday which provides a kitschy history of the resort from the 1910s through the 1960s and Palm Springs Babylon which recounts tawdry tales of the rich & famous.   

 

TIME Magazine Reports on "The Homosexual in America" (October 26, 1969)

In late October 1969, four months after the Stonewall riot in Greenwich Village ignited the gay liberation movement, TIME Magazine ran a story on homosexuals that was featured on the cover.  Titled "The Homosexual in America", it was the first time a newsweekly gave such attention to America's gay population.  Unfortunately, for the most part it was an unflattering portrayal based on the prevailing negative attitudes of the times.  Its condescending tone was somewhat similar to that of a CBS News documentary that aired in 1967 called "The Homosexuals" which portrayed homosexuals as pitiable creatures. 

 

Reading it today, parts of the article are amusing (e.g, "For many a woman with a busy or absent husband, the presentable homosexual is in demand as an escort — witty, pretty, catty, and no problem to keep at arm's length"), but for the most part it was a troubling depiction of gay men and lesbians.  Throughout the article the terms "homosexuals" and "deviates" were used interchangably.  Perhaps this harsh tone was society's way of pushing back in response to the fledgling gay liberation movement taking shape.

 

Here are some particularly wounding exceprts from the article:

• The late Dr. Edmund Bergler found certain traits present in all homosexuals, including inner depression and guilt, irrational jealousy and a megalomaniac conviction that homosexual trends are universal.  Though Bergler conceded that homosexuals are not responsible for their inner conflicts, he found that these conflicts "sap so much of their inner energy that the shell is a mixture of superciliousness, fake aggression and whimpering. Like all psychic masochists, they are subservient when confronted by a stronger person, merciless when in power, unscrupulous about trampling on a weaker person."

 

• The once widespread view that homosexuality is caused by heredity, or by some derangement of hormones, has been generally discarded.  The consensus is that it is caused psychically, through a disabling fear of the opposite sex. The origins of this fear lie in the homosexual's parents. The mother — either domineering and contemptuous of the father, or feeling rejected by him — makes her son a substitute for her husband, with a close-binding, overprotective relationship.  Thus, she unconsciously demasculinizes him.
  
  
• Homosexuality is essentially a case of arrested development, a failure of learning, a refusal to accept the full responsibilities of life. This is nowhere more apparent than in the pathetic pseudo marriages in which many homosexuals act out conventional roles—wearing wedding rings, calling themselves "he" and "she." 

And here is how the article concluded:

The life of a homsexual is a pathetic little second-rate substitute for reality, a pitiable flight from life.  As such it deserves fairness, compassion, understanding and, when possible, treatment.  But it deserves no encouragement, no glamorization, no rationalization, no fake status as minority martyrdom, no sophistry about simple differences in taste — and, above all, no pretense that it is anything but a pernicious sickness.

10 years later Time would publish another gay-themed a cover story, this one titled "How Gay is Gay", which offered a much more positive and accurate portrayal of our lives. 

(The complete article can found at this link.)