Strong and virile and uninhibited

Mention the name Touko Laaksonen and you’ll get a lot of blank looks. Mention Tom of Finland and the eyes of gay men (of a certain age) will light up. My second movie of the weekend was a the bio-pic Tom of Finland.

I went to Cinema Detroit to see it. Normally, when I go for a matinee I walk directly to the box office and have a wide choice of seats. Not this time. There was a line at the box office. And most seats in the 90 seat theater were taken. All but a handful were gay men. And I didn’t see any youngsters learning about gay history.

The movie starts with Touko as a Lieutenant in the Finnish Army in WWII. He learns which other men in his outfit are also gay – and that includes his commanding officer. After the war, Touko still has a hard time because gays are frequently assaulted and that includes by the police. Touko has artistic talent and gets a job in and advertising company.

But it is the art he draws for himself and a small circle of friends that helps him get through daily life. This art is of gay men, strong and virile and uninhibited – gay and proud. Many are in leather or in uniform or in the clothes of masculine occupations.

Touko finds a lover, who urges him to get his pictures published. They do find a publisher – in Los Angeles. Touko becomes Tom of Finland.

In America the art is appreciated. Doug is able to meet Jack because Jack has one of Tom’s pictures in his gym locker and Doug is able to show he has one too. Doug becomes Tom’s American agent.

The year of any particular event isn’t identified. I kept wondering how much time had passed. Though the year was obvious when we got to the start of the AIDS epidemic.

Tom is indeed celebrated because his art showed it was OK to be gay.

I first encountered the art of Tom of Finland probably back in the 1980s. I paged through one of his books in a bookstore. At the time I didn’t feel comfortable enough being gay to actually buy the book and take it home. It was too risky and risque. To see some of his art for yourself just go to Amazon and search for Tom of Finland books. The covers will show enough.

I’m delighted that this movie is Finland’s entry to the 2018 Oscars in the Best Foreign Language Film category. Gays in Finland are treated a whole lot better today than they were after WWII.

Correct answer: I'm a progressive

Stuff that's been accumulating in my browser tabs...

I'm not on Facebook (though I have to figure out what to do with my dad's account) because it is too invasive of privacy. Even so, the company can do some interesting things with all that data. For example, it has tracked the number of people who have changed their profile to "express a same-gender attraction or custom gender." That rate of coming out was fairly steady through March of this year, then began rising. There is also a huge spike the day that the Supremes announced marriage equality.

Facebook also created a map showing the percentage of Facebook users who have identified as LGBT in each state. At the top are New York and Nevada at over 4% and Mississippi is at the bottom at 2%. Michigan is at the low side of the middle around 3%.



The State of Michigan has paid over $1.9 million in legal fees to the team that challenged Michigan's same-sex marriage ban. There was also a great deal spent by the state to defend the ban.



The students of Oak Park High School in Kansas City, MO elected a transgender student as homecoming queen. Westboro Baptist Church showed up to protest. The counterprotest was so strong that WBC fled after only a few minutes.



Evan Wolfson was the head of Freedom to Marry, an organization that was instrumental over the long term in bringing marriage equality to America. Freedom to Marry has already celebrated its "going out of business" party. But Wolfson's job isn't done. US embassies in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland have invited him to be a consultant. These three countries have civil unions and not full marriage equality and appear open to Wolfson's help. Wolfson's services might also be useful in Northern Ireland, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, and Malta (these have civil unions) as well as Bulgaria, Cyprus, Greece, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia (these have no partner recognition).



Worth thinking this one through. From Ragen Chastain of Dances with Fat:

Nobody can prove that fat causes the health issues that it gets blamed for. Nobody knows for sure why nearly every health problem that is correlated with being fat is also correlated with being under constant stress. Nobody knows for sure the long term health effects of living in a society that constantly stigmatizes you and tells you that you can’t possible be healthy. Nobody knows what would happen to fat people’s health if they didn’t live in a society that constantly stigmatizes them. Nobody knows of a single study in which more than a tiny fraction of people have maintained long-term weight loss, and nobody knows what that weight loss means for people’s health since it has not been studied.

That’s a lot of “nobody knows”.

I had written that the Alabama Secretary of State had decided to close all but four branch offices due to budget constraints. I had also written that such a move was quite suspicious for a state that requires an ID to vote. Here's another mighty suspicious detail:

Every single county in which blacks make up more than 75 percent of registered voters will see their driver license office closed. Every one.

Terrance Heath has a few things to say about the recent debate by Democratic presidential candidates. Progressives have been envious of the power the Tea Party holds over the GOP (see the current House Speaker mess). Though progressive movements haven't been in the news as much as the Tea Party, that debate shows their work has moved the candidates. The correct answer for a Dem candidate is now "I am a progressive." The candidates saw that it was politically expedient to oppose the Trans Pacific Partnership trade deal because of the work of progressives. For the same reasons candidates have embraced the Black Lives Matter movement and are learning how to deal with structural racism. And none of the candidates were asked about LGBT issues – because there was no need to ask. The party's pro-gay stance is already well known.



Dr. Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, has been a fierce opponent of gay people. So when he says that reparative therapy doesn't work, that's a big deal.

Timothy Kincaid of Box Turtle Bulletin says Mohler might be a bit surprised by the implications of that statement. It prompts the question: What is homosexual sin? The answer to that used to be easy. The Southern Baptists say that Johnnie getting his jollies (as my mother used to say) while looking at pictures of women is a sin, but not worth special mention from the pulpit. But what if Johnnie is looking at pictures of men? The younger generation is much more willing to point out any disparity in treatment. There are rules for heterosexual dating (no kissing). What about rules for gay dating? There are rules about no sex before marriage. What to tell gay kids who are currently told they can't ever get married in the church? This debate could get very interesting to watch.

Same-sex partnerships are a human right

The latest poll from Gallup shows that support for same-sex marriage has fallen only slightly since the Supremes ruled that such marriages must be legal across the country. The high point for support was reached in May at 60%. It is now at 58%. Strangely, Gallup says approval percentages are most likely not done shifting. Of course, support will keep changing and for the better! Wait, did you think Gallup was implying support would sharply decline?



The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that same-sex partnerships are a human right and governments are required to offer some kind of legally recognized same-sex unions. This ruling applies to European Union countries – Italy was the one named in the suit – and also to all countries that have signed the European Convention on Human Rights. In particular, that means Russia and Turkey, though it might be hard to enforce the ruling there.



Houston, TX has a lesbian mayor, Annise Parker. I think she is nearing the end of her second term and cannot run again. As part of her legacy she and the city council passed HERO, the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance. This being Texas, there were many who were outraged at being denied the right to discriminate against sexual minorities. So they gathered signatures to put the ordinance on the ballot. That effort failed because too many of the signatures were declared forged. HERO went into effect.

But the opposition wasn't done. They took their petitions to the Texas Supremes, where all justices were appointed by Republicans. The justice used a technicality to rule that city must stop enforcing HERO and that the city council must either repeal it or put it on the ballot. Houston is the last major city without protections for sexual minorities.

Slovakia — sigh

The Parliament in Slovakia has approved a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriages. It passed by a wide margin 102-18. The ban is contrary to what is going on in the European Union but matching what happened in Poland and Croatia.

Three great things in one day

News of the past week…

Yesterday I went to Ann Arbor to listen to Frank Schaefer speak. He is the pastor who was defrocked last fall. My report is posted to my brother blog.



David Mixner is delighted about three great things that happened yesterday.

* Same-sex marriages in Arkansas.

* Conchita Wurst, a gender-defying singer from Austria, won the Eurovision! contest (much to the horror of eastern European countries).

* Michael Sam was drafted by the St. Louis Rams to be the first openly gay player in the National Football League. He was chosen 249th out of (I think) 256, but he was still chosen.




A campaign was started in Michigan to get a repeal of the state's same-sex marriage ban on the ballot for 2016. This is in case the legal challenges fail.



Amy Sandler and Niki Quasney are a lesbian couple in Indiana. Quasney is terminally ill and they sued the state so that Amy would be listed as the spouse when Quasney dies. A federal judge agreed, though saying his ruling applies to only this one couple. A ruling on the state ban on same-sex marriage may come later.

As we've come to expect, a stay was requested and an appeal filed with the 7th District Court. The stay was requested because the state doesn't want to raise false hopes in other same-sex couples. That last bit was denounced as a "shameful display of cruelty."

Refuse to propagate the race

From a flyer in my email I saw this was a good week to visit the Holocaust Memorial Center in Farmington Hills several miles north of me. Dad has remarked from time to time that he would like to see it too. So we agreed to visit today as I took a break from grading final exams. Mom came too. We had lunch together, visited the Center for most of the afternoon, then had an early and fast supper before he joined rush hour traffic for the trip home.

We paid for admission (sheesh, even I got the senior discount) and joined a tour that started shortly before we got there. It took us through the main exhibit sequence. I appreciated hearing what the guide had to say but I missed studying some of the displays. At the end of the day we went back into the main exhibit to look in more detail as time permitted.

Displays in the main exhibit are expected for such a place -- a bit of Jewish history and life up through the 1920s (including a list of Nobel prizes held by Jews -- 27% of the total), the rise of Hitler, the development of the Ghettos (especially in Warsaw), the concentration camps (with boxcar), what was found when the camps were liberated, what happened to the Jews when the war was over (some were not welcomed home), and displays of those who defied the Nazis to help Jews. The tour ended with a talk by a survivor, about how she endured and how she came to America. Alas, she was boring.

So I went on to the special exhibit hall (and soon followed by Mom and Dad). The flyer mentioned before was about this exhibit, with indications that it ends this Sunday. This hall had panels describing the Nazi treatment of homosexual men. That all centered around Paragraph 175 of the criminal code, which had been around for a long time and made homosexual acts illegal. There was talk of repealing #175 in 1920s Berlin. But when the Nazis took power they instead made it more severe. One prominent Nazi was gay and helped Hitler to power, but it didn't take Hitler long to turn on his ally.

A few things I learned or understood more clearly today:

A big reason for the rise of the Nazis and WWII was because Germany, the center of civilization (in their eyes), was soundly defeated in WWI. After the first war, Germans started wrestling with how could we, such a great nation, have possibly lost? Who on our side betrayed us? Who didn't believe correctly or strongly enough in our cause to help us win? (That last one reminds me a lot of Christian conservatives and their view of America.) From those questions and others like them came the need to purify the race, to eliminate the undesirables and the weak. That meant the Jews because, well, they're Jews. It also meant homosexuals because they were immoral and by their actions refused to propagate the race. The image was for manly men who ran everything and for women to stay home, support their men, and produce lots of Aryan babies. Lesbians were frowned upon, but not made illegal.

Decriminalized across Europe

When I got up this morning the thermometer showed -4F. I checked the college website and saw it is closed today. So I get a free afternoon. I got on to Weather.com for their temperature map. The light blue band that meanders from Virginia through Arkansas and beyond is in the range 10 to 20F. The map shows how far south the cold is stretching. The marker at Detroit is over a darker purple showing -10 to 0F. The paler area in Minnesota and Wisconsin is below -20F.

The Turkish part of Cyprus has repealed the law that criminalized gay sex. That means there are no such laws in all of Europe. North America and Australia are the other continents free of such laws.



The Brokeback Mountain opera will premier soon. Production photos are now available and the opera will be streamed over the internet for 90 days starting February 7th. Alas, it might be a week before I have an evening free to see it.

Gays in America and in Europe

American gays may look longingly at Europe where many countries have instituted gay marriage and many more have created civil unions that are almost as good. Europe is much more secular than America. If gay marriage produces stable, productive, law-abiding citizens, why oppose it. Danish kids may less likely be raised by a married couple, but they are more likely married by both their parents. Europe is dissolving traditions that make homosexuality a problem. America is making great strides in a much more difficult project -- reconcile homosexuality with traditional structures and morality. The glue in Europe is ethnic. In America, where people are free from their ethnic roots, the glue is what a person believes and who they believe it with, in faith communities. This means social issues take center stage and homosexuality must work its way between civic equality and social tradition. It is a slow process. We're making great strides.