June 15, 2020 will become an historic day for the many Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender people who have waited over 50 years to be given the same legal protection from discrimination in the workplace as other disenfranchised groups in America. The Supreme Court of our United States voted 6 to 3 to include Gay and Transgender people in the Civil Rights legislation of 1964.

This legislation includes the well-known wording in Title VII that states that it is illegal “for an employer to fail or refuse to hire or to  discharge  any  individual,  or  otherwise  to  discriminate against  any  individual  with  respect  to  his  compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such  individual’s  race,  color, religion, sex, or national origin.”   

Justice Gorsuch  delivered the opinion of the Court, in which Justices Roberts, Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, Kagan joined. Justice Kavanaugh’s dissenting opinion was based on his belief that the matter should have been settled in Congress rather than in the Court.  However, the language in his dissenting opinion was supportive:

“Not withstanding my concern about the Court’s transgression of the Constitution’s separation of power, it is appropriate to acknowledge the important victory achieved today by gay and lesbian Americans. Millions of gay and lesbian Americans have worked hard for many decades to achieve equal treatment in fact and in law.  They have exhibited extraordinary vision, tenacity, and grit–battling often steep odds in the legislative and judicial arenas, not to mention their daily lives.  They have advanced powerful policy arguments and can take pride in today’s results.”

At Inclusity we believe that everyone in this country deserves fair and equal treatment under the law and in action.  We stand proud with our Gay and Lesbian and Transgender brothers and sisters to celebrate this important day in our nation’s history!

One privilege that many of us have, whether we know it or not, is the presence of other people like us who can give us support when we need it. This feeling of community can be a great source of strength; in fact, for those who have encountered constant discrimination and hatred from strangers, the support of their peers has often been their principal source of strength. But this support sometimes comes with strings attached: opinions you may be expected to share or , even if you disagree with them privately. Having to choose between the benefits of belonging and your own ideals is a terrible strain for anyone, but it’s a choice that many people are forced to make, including Randy Shilts.

Randy Shilts was born on August 8, 1951 in Davenport, Iowa, growing up in Aurora, Illinois as part of a large working-class family. His parents were socially conservative, and Shilts didn’t come out as gay until he went to college at the University of Oregon. He eventually graduated with a bachelor’s degree in journalism, but as an openly and even outspokenly gay man he was unable to obtain employment at a major newspaper on the West Coast. Shilts’ career instead began at small, independent periodicals with a focus on gay issues; one major story he covered both in print and on television was the 1978 assassination of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay city commissioner in the United States.

Shilts finally broke into mainstream print journalism in 1981, when the San Francisco Chronicle hired him as a national correspondent. By 1983, he had convinced his bosses to let him cover the AIDS epidemic in the U.S. full-time, and his tireless reporting on this issue culminated in the creation of his best-known piece of writing, And The Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic, published in 1987. In this book Shilts criticized the apparent indifference that many people and organizations displayed toward the spread of AIDS, which in his opinion kept it from being effectively contained. He attributed the out-of-control epidemic not only to the federal government’s refusal to fully acknowledge it, but also to behavior within the gay community itself; in particular, Shilts was opposed to the gay bathhouses in San Francisco that he thought catered to people like the infamous “Patient Zero”, a man who knew he had AIDS but continued to have unprotected sex with hundreds of partners a year.

If Shilts had confined his criticisms to large organizations and a culture of homophobia, he might have been hailed as a hero of gay liberation. As it happened, the stress he put on individual responsibility earned him widespread scorn from the gay community. Many claimed that he was “blaming the victim,” and a fellow journalist called him a “traitor to his own kind.” When he walked through the Castro District of San Francisco, he was shouted at and spat upon. Nevertheless, And the Band Played On was a success in the broader American community and drew a great deal of attention to the AIDS epidemic and those who struggled with it. His insistence on maintaining an independent stance prevented the general public from dismissing the book as propaganda and made everyone, both outside and inside the gay community, take his thoughts seriously.

Throughout his career Shilts’ emphasis was on proper reporting and personal integrity. While working on the manuscript for And the Band Played On, Shilts himself was tested for AIDS, but he deliberately avoided seeing the results until the manuscript was finished, so that his personal health wouldn’t affect his opinions on the subject. His later articles and books also brought new journalistic issues, one of which was his refusal to “out” several prominent individuals who were thought to be gay. Many felt that awareness of these individuals would help to legitimize the gay movement in the public eye, but Shilts saw this as a violation of journalistic ethics; revealing details of someone’s personal life, just to score political points, was a betrayal of the trust that many placed in the news media.

Randy Shilts was the kind of man who stands out in a crowd. He was an openly gay correspondent at a major newspaper in the early ‘80s, quite a rarity at the time. He also had a strongly idiosyncratic personal style, wearing striped shirts and floral ties to the office. Perhaps what stood out the most about him was his principled stance on controversial issues. Discussing the contentious issues of our time draws attention, and if our ideas have any substance at all much of that attention can be negative or even hostile. Sometimes we hide our opinions in order to keep enjoying the good will of those around us, but sometimes we are moved to speak up, even at the risk of causing offense. In doing so, we face the kind of dilemma that Shilts summed up for the New York Times in 1993:

“If I criticize the gay community, then I’m part of the establishment. I sold out, rather than just having a different opinion. There’s no room in the gay community for people of good intention having different opinions. Either you have the opinion or you’re nothing.”

 

Next Post: Margaret Bourke-White, a pioneering industrial photographer and chronicler of world history.

Hollywood has always been many things to many people, a “dream factory” where countless stories and influences from around the world are transformed into films that flow back into the world and influence it in turn. Like the people who make its films, Hollywood has exhibited a diverse panorama of moods and styles. One of its most popular and enduring, although deplored by many as lowbrow, is the campy style of B-movie horror that began in the 1930s and lasted through the 1950s. And it happens that the pioneer of this style was also a pioneer in the social world, the openly gay film director James Whale.

Whale was an outsider to Hollywood in many ways, born to a poor family from the industrial town of Dudley in the West Midlands of England. His father worked as a blast furnaceman and his mother as a nurse, and Whale himself began his career as a cobbler. He had no experience in the theater until his mid-twenties, and then under very unusual circumstances. With the outbreak of World War I he had enlisted early and had fortunately been able to go through officer training; later, near the end of the war he was captured and sent to a German POW camp in Holzminden. With little else to do, he and his fellow prisoners staged several amateur theatrical productions, an undertaking that Whale found he enjoyed immensely. And when the war was over, he used money that he had won in prison poker games to fund a budding artistic career.

From that point on Whale’s trajectory follows a familiar pattern: first acting in the theater, then directing theatrical productions, and finally coming to the attention of Hollywood producers in America. His first big project was a film version of Journey’s End, a successful theatrical production he had put on in the U.K., and soon after that he signed a five-year directing contract with Universal Pictures. Whale was offered his pick of properties to direct, and he made a fateful choice: the horror classic Frankenstein.

Whale actually directed movies in many styles, including what is now considered the best film version of the musical Show Boat; it just so happens that his flair for horror was so strong that movies like Frankenstein, The Invisible Man and Bride of Frankenstein are remembered while Whale’s other efforts (along with most movies from that time) have been forgotten. Whale had a knack for casting talented but obscure actors, choosing the practically unknown British actor Boris Karloff to play Frankenstein and also giving Claude Rains his first big break in Hollywood, as the voice of the Invisible Man. His taste in set design and cinematography was also striking and exceptional, taking cues from German Expressionist film and marrying them to the older aesthetic of Gothic horror. A single minor detail from one of his movies, the “lightning bolt” haircut worn by Elsa Lanchester in Bride of Frankenstein, has become so iconic that dozens of fictional characters and real-life Halloween costumes have imitated it.

Whale was remarkable for more than his aesthetic. He made no bones about his homosexuality, living in Hollywood with the film producer David Lewis throughout the ‘30s and ‘40s. Some critics have speculated that it was this that eventually ended his film career, although conflicts with producers and a few major flops likely had more to do with it. While several other prominent directors from that period, notably George Cukor, are now known to have been gay, few were willing to jeopardize their careers or social lives by being frank about it.

Yet he also didn’t allow himself to be pigeonholed or defined by his sexuality; while several modern critics have analyzed his work from a gay perspective, it has a broader appeal that stems from craftsmanship and attention to detail. Whale’s films are known and loved by millions who hardly know his name, let alone the details of his personal life. And it’s likely that, as an artist, he did not and would not care what his viewers thought about him personally; what mattered to him was the work itself.

James Whale was a unique figure in Hollywood in many ways: his family background, his approach to filmmaking and his taste in actors as well as his sexuality. To quote his partner David Lewis:

“Jimmy was first and foremost an artist, and his films represent the work of an artist—not a gay artist, but an artist.”

Next Post: Maria Bergson, the secretary turned industrial designer who stood the test of Time.

Our hearts go out to everyone who has lost family members and loved ones in the Ferguson and NYC tragedies. While we do not believe that it is our place to weigh in on the court’s decision about the shooting and choking incidents themselves, we do want to comment on the aftermath of the verdicts and the responses they elicited from both the white and black communities.

We think it is important for Ferguson and NYC not to be thought of in isolation, but rather as two of many occurrences over the past several hundred years. We understand that the emotions triggered and demonstrated as a result of the legal findings in these two cases were a result of a long history of oppression towards black men in this country. We would urge White America to listen and ask questions of our African-American colleagues, family members and friends rather than to judge or criticize the behavior of a few.

We do not condone violence of any sort. However, we appreciate that built up feelings of frustration, powerlessness, and hopelessness can lead to violent behaviors. Our Relationship Dynamics TM Model clearly demonstrates that when individuals or groups are subordinated over time, they bury their anger and do whatever is needed to survive. When these feelings become overwhelming, they may see no other course of action than to lash out against those closest to them. All too often those “closest to them” are the people in their own community. We are not excusing this behavior, but we do believe that it needs to be understood in order to make it change.

It is time for White America to stop denying the reality of racism. Systemic racism must be addressed if it is ever to be eradicated. Years of oppression have never been directly resolved. The pain carried by the African American community is like an infected wound—its scab yanked off every time another racially charged incident occurs. Then, when African Americans demonstrate their pain over this reality, they are often met with criticism, condemnation and misunderstanding. This creates further pain and mistrust, and the wound never heals.

At Inclusity, we believe that truth telling, safe places for open dialogue, and commitment from all people to work together to end discrimination is the only solution. It is time for us to treat this wound with the care it deserves rather than allowing it to scab over until the next “Ferguson incident” occurs, and the same cycle begins again. Please join with us at Inclusity to create safe places for conversation, trust-building, and hope for a truly equal America.