The Commons votes to criminalise lesbianism and the Lords decides it is safer not to mention it, a judge strikes down Proposition 8, and a gay rodeo opens in Reno against a petition to ban it and threats of snipers.
1921
Nine Hundred and Ninety-Nine Women
The Commons votes to criminalise lesbianism
Sex between men had been a crime in Britain since 1885. Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of that year made gross indecency between males an offence carrying up to two years with hard labour, and it is the law Oscar Wilde was convicted under ten years later. Women were never mentioned in it.
On August 4, 1921, the Commons tried to close that gap.
Frederick Macquisten, the Conservative MP for Glasgow Springburn, moved a new clause into a bill then going through Parliament. Any act of gross indecency between female persons should be a misdemeanour, punished exactly as it was when men did it. He told the House that abandoned females were seducing wives and breaking up families, and that a collapse in feminine morality had brought down Greece and Rome and would do the same to the British Empire.
The Commons passed it, 148 votes to 53.
It went to the Lords on August 15, and there it died.
The objection was not that the law would be cruel. It was that it would be publicity. Lord Birkenhead, the Lord Chancellor, told the House that of every thousand women in England, 999 had never even heard a whisper of these practices. Putting the offence into a statute would tell them. Other peers argued there was no research on the subject and that prosecutions would be vanishingly rare, and that the safest thing was to say nothing at all.
The clause failed. Lesbianism stayed legal in Britain because Parliament decided that naming it was more dangerous than allowing it.
Seven years later Radclyffe Hall published The Well of Loneliness, a novel about a woman who loves women. It was prosecuted for obscenity and every copy was ordered destroyed. Parliament had refused to criminalise lesbians. The courts could still suppress a book about one.
Vaughn Walker, then Chief Judge of the US District Court for the Northern District of California, in 2008. Photo: Mike Linksvayer, CC BY 2.0. Source.
California’s own Supreme Court legalised same-sex marriage in May 2008, and about 18,000 couples married. That November, voters passed Proposition 8, which wrote a definition of marriage as between a man and a woman into the state constitution and stopped the weddings.
Two couples sued in federal court: Kristin Perry and Sandra Stier, and Paul Katami and Jeffrey Zarrillo.
The trial ran for three weeks in January 2010 in San Francisco, in front of Chief Judge Vaughn Walker. The state of California declined to defend Proposition 8, so the official proponents of the ballot measure had to defend it themselves. They called two expert witnesses. The plaintiffs called a succession of historians, psychologists and economists, and Walker made both sides prove their claims with evidence rather than assert them.
On August 4, 2010, he released a 136-page decision. Most of it is findings of fact - numbered, specific conclusions about what marriage has been, what gay couples are, and what Proposition 8 actually did to them. Findings of fact are hard to overturn on appeal in a way that legal argument is not, and Walker wrote his to be difficult to dislodge.
He held Proposition 8 unconstitutional under both the due process and the equal protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment, and found no rational reason behind it beyond disapproval of gay people.
Walker retired the following February. In April 2011 he said publicly that he was gay, and had been in a relationship with a man for around ten years.
The proponents of Proposition 8 asked for the whole ruling to be thrown out, on the grounds that he should never have heard the case. Chief Judge James Ware refused, and said that requiring a gay judge to stand aside from this case would set a dangerous precedent.
The Supreme Court ended it on June 26, 2013. It did not rule on whether Proposition 8 was constitutional. It held, 5-4, that the proponents had no standing to appeal at all, because they could not show that anything happened to them personally when other people married. That left Walker’s decision in place. Two days later the weddings started again in California, and the four plaintiffs married.
The National Reno Gay Rodeo opens against a campaign to stop it
Phil Ragsdale was the first Emperor of the Silver Dollar Court, a charity drag court in Reno, and in 1975 he decided Nevada should have a gay rodeo.
Getting the animals was the problem. Nearly three dozen ranchers turned him down once they heard who the rodeo was for. The night before it opened he drove out to Fallon and bought five cows, ten calves and one Shetland pony from a rancher who would sell to him.
A hundred and fifty people came to that first rodeo, on October 2, 1976, at the Washoe County Fairgrounds.
It grew. Ten thousand in 1981. More than twenty thousand in 1982, with Joan Rivers as grand marshal. It raised money for the Muscular Dystrophy Association, Nevada Services to the Blind, and the veterans’ hospital in Reno.
By 1983 there was an organised campaign to stop it. The Pro-Family Christian Coalition collected nearly 7,500 signatures for a ban. The Independent American Party joined in, and so did a group calling itself Patriots to Normalize Reno. Daniel Hansen, who founded the Independent American Party, compared gay people to termites and parasites that would destroy the body politic if left alone. Others called the visitors perverted, poop-packing punks. A pastor suggested a biblical remedy. Nevada’s lieutenant governor, Myron Leavitt, announced his strong opposition to gay people using public property, which he called illegal, unnatural and abnormal behaviour.
A public debate at the University of Nevada drew more than 450 people. The county commission held its hearing with armed security. There were threats of snipers.
What saved it was a lawyer. A chief deputy district attorney for Washoe County advised that refusing the rodeo access to public land, while allowing it to everyone else, would violate the First Amendment.
The rodeo opened on August 4, 1983, and ran four days. Twelve thousand people came. The organisers had expected fifty-five thousand.
Contestants gave half their winnings to the Muscular Dystrophy Association and half to a gay charity of their own choosing. Most of them chose the AIDS Foundation.
The 1984 rodeo lost money and left the state fair association an unpaid bill of $7,530. There was no rodeo in Reno in 1985, or for years after that. But by then Reno had seeded gay rodeo associations in ten other states, and in 1985 they founded the International Gay Rodeo Association, which is still going.
