At yahoo.com recently, I stumbled upon a short documentary produced by the site. Lately, Yahoo has gotten into the production of content. As I'm not much into TV these days, I haven't paid much attention to this new content. However, this particular offering caught my interest immediately. It's called Uniquely Nasty: The U. S. Government's War on Gays, by Michael Isikoff, and it's about the history of the government's campaign of persecution of GLBT people from the mid-20th Century. A review of this documentary on LGBT history is appropriate as we celebrate Pride Month.
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Here's the trailer:
The documentary begins with the account of Charles Francis, Jr., whose family were long-time friends of the Bushes. Long before George W. Bush ran for president, Francis had been a congressional aide and a Republican operative for a very long time. Much of his career history is not pretty. Be that as it may, Francis made the choice to come out as a gay man to G. W. Bush, who reassured his friend that he had suspected for years, and that this would not change their friendship.
When Bush decided to run for President, he ask Francis to form a team of gay and lesbian Republicans, called the Austin Twelve, whose purpose was to persuade LGBT voters in some blue states to vote for Bush. Part of the deal was to assure that there would be gay and lesbian appointees in the Bush administration, and after the first election, there were. However, things went south in 2004, when Bush proposed an anti-marriage equality amendment to the U. S. Constitution, and the Republicans were using anti-marriage equality amendments to state constitutions on the ballot in 11 states to draw as many Evangelicals as possible to the polls. The gay and lesbian members of the Bush administration were "thrown overboard" (to quote Francis).
After severing his ties to Bush and leaving the GOP, Francis began to investigate how the government sought to destroy the lives of various gay people and their families. The FBI under J. Edgar Hoover relentlessly pursued gay government employees. Hoover placed plants in the various federal agencies to pick up and track down any rumors regarding the homosexuality of any employees. Hundreds of lives were ruined, including the career of Frank Kameny, who had worked for the federal government as an astronomer, and who would become one of the first openly gay activists in the country.
One incident focussed upon in the documentary involved Senator Lester Hunt, a Democrat from Wyoming in the 1940s and 50s. His son, Lester Jr., was arrested on a morals charge for soliciting an undercover police officer in Lafayette Park in Washington, DC. This was in 1954, and Hunt was running for re-election. McCarthy and his allies got hold of this information and prepared to destroy Hunt's reputation, so as to have an opportunity to flip his seat to the GOP to avoid losing control of the Senate. Senator Hunt committed suicide. Not many actually remember the actual incident, but Allen Drury used the story as the basis for his novel Advise and Consent, which won a Pulitzer Prize. That novel frightened many gay men (not so much women in those days) from politics.
The last segment of the documentary focusses on the little-remembered case of Charlie Baker, who was fired from his job at the National Bureau of Standards back in 1971. (Baker was, and still is, openly gay.) He approached Frank Kameny for help, and he won a court challenge to his firing. The court determined that the federal government could not fire someone on the basis of his or her sexual orientation when it had no impact on job performance. It was a big surprise to me that there was an LGBT victory this early. This is the first I'd ever heard of this case, and I try to pay attention to these things.
There are interviews with various individuals involved in each of these stories, such as Lester Hunt, Jr., and Charlie Baker (who just married his partner of many years this year), as well as review of official documents related to the stories. It's important to recall this shameful chapter in American history. Unfortunately, it's not possible to embed the video, but I can provide a link:
http://news.yahoo.com/...
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June 24, 2015
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