It’s easy to forget that  just 50 years ago, gay people weren’t even allowed to dance in public.

From the AskHistorians sub-reddit:

“It wasn’t just Stonewall. In the 1960s, the Mafia (and specifically the Genovese mob family) was behind pretty much every bar in Manhattan that courted a gay clientele. And it wasn’t just $3500 startup–it was $1200 a month after that, to ensure that the police and State Liquor Authority would allow Stonewall to reopen after each very frequent raid.

“The repeal of Prohibition may have restored Americans’ right to drink alcohol, but municipalities and states found various ways to curtail gay people’s ability to drink together in public. In San Francisco, Sal Stoueman’s Black Cat Cafe (made particularly famous by Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg) handed out “I’m A Boy” nametags to patrons, so undercover cops could not arrest its drag performers, “gay screaming queens” (TM Ginsberg), or even “gray flannel suit types” for female impersonation with intent to defraud or deceive someone into sex. Los Angeles undercover cops would count the seconds they saw people kiss (in greeting, on New Years’ Eve, whatever) and arrest or brutalize whatever they considered to transcend the line from celebration to queer. The favored tactic of the New York SLA, of course, was to raid and shutter bars declared “disorderly,” such an excellent weasel word.

“Things might have reached a breaking point around 1960. Out in California, a group of San Francisco gay bar owners had banded together to go public about the massive bribes they were paying police in order to remain open, the effect being, they exposed significant police corruption. This resulted in the effective closure of SF’s 50 or so gay bars–but had ramifications across the country, too. In New York, only one bar managed to survive an initial 1960s shakedown and mass closure.

“The good half of the story, from there, is that the 1960-61 bar closures marked some of the most important pre-Stonewall gay rights protests and publicly broadcast activism. The Black Cat’s famous drag-performing singer, Jose Sarria, was the first openly gay candidate for public office in the US (SF city supervisor). Several bar owners’ groups (the Tavern Guild in particular) formed to lobby specifically for the rights of owners to court a gay clientele; even The Advocate started publication in response. In New York, a massive group of gay men staged a public protest of, essentially, “being gay in public” in midtown until cops and politicians basically allowed bars to operate for a period of time so they would go be queer out of sight.

“But the earlier entrenched corruption of statutory violation, raid, bribe, reopen cycle became even more vicious in most places. In the 1960s in particular, therefore, the Mafia pretty much made New York’s gay bar scene a treasured racket. They charged ridiculous cover fees and generally served cheap, lousy alcohol in exchange for the masquerade of protection from police raids. In fact, gay bars were raided as often as ever; just, protection fees like the $1200 Stonewall paid monthly meant the bars would be allowed to reopen afterwards. Stonewall’s bribe was particularly high, generally rumored the highest, because of all the other shady business that went on or allegedly went on (blackmail of customers, a prostitution ring, possibly a pedophile ring that accompanied a reputation in the heterosexual NY community of Stonewall as a place to go “tourist slumming.”)

“Word of mouth that Stonewall (Cherry Lane Theater, Fifth Avenue Bar, etc) were ‘periodically safe’ places for gay people to drink and be gay in public was crucial for the Mafia to keep their gay bars profitable, particularly a complete dive like Stonewall for which the space was really the only attraction.

“But it wasn’t just a one-way street, obviously. The gay community had its own formal means of communication, like the Mattachine Society’s Gay Scene Guide that informed readers the Stonewall Inn was one of a very few (maybe the only?) gay bar that allowed dancing and welcomed people obviously dressed in drag or otherwise flouting gender, not just sexuality, norms. The publication itself warned potential patrons that Stonewall was not safe (don’t give out your real name or address; the bar owners and workers are not on your side, either; the cops will raid periodically)–conditions fostered in large part by the mob ownership and oversight.

“In the middle of the 20th century, gay bars were a hot moneymaking opportunity for any shady criminal businessman or corrupt cop. In New York, the Mafia took particular control of the situation in the 1960s, including the fateful cultivation of Stonewall into the trashiest yet in some ways most emotionally significant in terms of “freedoms” permitted queer-clientele bar in the city.”

Full discussion in context with suggested readings.

Image from Encyclopedia Brittanica.

From a thread about Trump ruining the GOP brand:

“Trump isn’t an anomaly who squeaked through the GOP’s primary process, Trump was exactly what conservative leaders engineered their base to accept.

“Trump himself isn’t the story. Thump is an unthinking virus, a rabid dog, a scorpion who only knows how to sting. He is a child in a man’s body who had obscene privilege and wealth and no one who cared enough to equip him to be an adult with integrity and dignity. Trump really isn’t important in the story, just as a hurricane itself isn’t blamed as much as forecasting and first response and recovery.

“No, the story is about the conservative base, and the twisted, cynical and desperate ghouls who have manipulated these people over the last decades. The focus should be on how Republicans have whispered racism and hatred and fantasies of loss of unearned power and status in the ears of fearful and ignorant white people. Conservative leaders “primed the pump”^TM for the base to accept a spoiler, an unthinking thug who babbles comforting populist nationalism and division from enemies and impossible promises of MAGA nonsense. Trump is exactly what conservatives have been building towards, even if they didn’t recognize how exactly it would manifest.

“Trump is a disaster. He is as dangerous as a snake in a crib or a grenade in a munitions dump or a sociopath in the White House. But it’s not his fault. Sadly, Trump is incapable of understanding his position. If he’s indicted, he literally may not be convicted because of mental incompetence.

“Let that sink in.

“No, we must focus on the actual culprits, the conservative leaders in Washington and state governor’s offices and legislatures and conservative local governments who have colluded to create these conditions. They vilify education and facts, they downplay science and critical thinking, they scare their aging base into thinking that government is evil and full of minorities that are out to get them. And, to their eternal shame, they bought it.

“So let’s shift attention from Trump to the real culprits. Let me state this clearly so that there is no misunderstanding:

• If you voted for Trump, despite the warnings of over half of the country, you are a dumb, miserable sucker.
• If you continue to support Trump, despite daily evidence of corruption, incompetence and self-sown confusion, you are an awful, hate-filled person. And you are the reason this is happening and continues to happen. Until you join the rest of us in condemning Trump, your conservative leaders will dither and remain silent on Trump’s ruin. And if you are OK with the country burning because you feel it will somehow hurt your liberal neighbors more, you are an irredeemable piece of filth, along with Trump and the leaders of the Right.”

Full discussion in context.

Image of Reince Prieus from this Politico article.

One more political bit for the day:

“They want to believe that they’ll be super awesome once the bad people stop fucking them over, we can offer the actual bad people (CEO’s, banksters, Wall Street scumbags, etc) as scapegoats.

“Democrats: You’re a hero and a winner and a potential millionaire if only those fuckers in management and up on Wall Street would stop keeping you down, we’ll kick their asses for you and you can become awesome all by yourself. oh and also there’s some social programs we totally know you don’t need you bold bootstrapper you, but if you should happen to know someone who needs help they can get it here”

Discussion in context.

Archive photos of FDR campaign.

Documentarian Adam Curtis on the 2016 election:

“America is not sliding into fascism. That’s just hysteria by the liberals who can’t face up to the fact that they lost the election, so they either have to blame the Russians or giant historical forces. Basically, a right-wing president has been elected, and he’s created a brilliant machine that captures liberals and keeps them completely preoccupied. What he does is he wakes up in the morning, tweets something that he knows isn’t true, they get very upset and spend the whole day writing in big capital letters on social media, “This is outrageous. This is bad. This is fascism.” What they’re not facing up to is the real question, which is why did Donald Trump win the election? What other forces in the country had they, the liberals, not seen?

“They weren’t defeated by something as grand as fascism. They were defeated by a man who’s connected with a disaffected group in America, like the people who voted for Brexit in my country. I think there’s a great deal of narcissism which Mr. Trump has worked at how to play on beautifully.

…

“What I was trying to argue, or imply in this film gently, was that we may be in a very similar situation where we know that the system has become somewhat corrupted. But more than that, we know that those in charge don’t really believe in the system any longer, have no vision of the future. And what’s more, they know that we know that.

“What Trump is doing is playing with the fakery. It may be instinctive. He’s saying things that he knows that we know aren’t true, at which point everyone gets locked into a game of what’s true and what’s not true. This misses the real point of politics, which is to tell a powerful story that offers a vision of the future. I don’t think Trump has a vision of the future. I think he’s the last of the old politicians.

…

“I think you should pay more attention to the traditional, hard-right-wing people who have risen to power with Trump. Donald comes from the world of finance and he is doing what finance wants to do. I would argue that actually it shows that really nothing has changed, which is a very hypernormal situation.”

Full interview on Alternet, quoted in a Metafilter discussion.

The Trump segment from Curtis’s documentary, Hypernormalisation:

Discussion on Metafilter:

“You say ‘Hi working class and/or poor white person, I’m here to offer you a higher minimum wage, better healthcare, and free/cheap education so you and your children can have more life opportunities!’ And they say ‘Fuck off and die Commie scum!’

“The Republicans say ‘Hi working class and/or poor white person, I’m here to slash minimum wage, steal your healthcare, and gut your educational opportunities, so the job creators will shower you with super awesome high paying jobs! Also I’ll really stick it to those illegal immigrants, LGBT people, black people and women!‘ And they say ‘Thank you oh great savior, let us shower you with votes and power!’

“The problem is that the Democrats literally can’t offer what the average working class white Republican voter wants, because what they want isn’t a real program that helps them, but a fantasy that makes them feel better (and a chance to put the boot in on groups they hate). The average white Republican voter has been so conditioned to believe that any sort of effective social program is ‘Communism’ that they oppose anything that works.”

Full discussion in context. 

On the rural/urban divide from the 2016 election:

“The Trump voters that I know run a gamut of educational and financial backgrounds but they all have one thing in common: Talk with them long enough and they will say ‘why should I…’. Everyone of them. Guaranteed. My work and my volunteer work puts me into contact with with lots of people, and if you listen to the conversations at the store or a restaurant; it’s a common refrain. I call it Whyshouldism.

“‘Sure, we should be be feeding hungry kids, but why should I be paying for it’ ‘yes, brush burning is bad for the air quality, but why should I pay to haul these leaves to the compost instead’. It goes on.

“This is magnified by the deeply held knowledge by pretty much everyone here that they are very smart and everyone else is not. And since they are smart and cannot figure out a good reason ‘why they should’ no reason must therefore exist. There’s no explaining, because, remember, you’re dumb and they aren’t, and it is very arrogant of you to try explaining things to people smarter than you.

“It is these two things that form the bitter heart of the modern conservative sense of entitlement. And it plays out in such stupid ways here. The state recently changed some regulations on meat handling and storage for restaurants – it wasn’t a huge change, basically temps in coolers and fridges had to be a few degrees lower. But the local pols were ‘there is no reason Capitol City needs to be telling us what standards we should accept, we make our own standards’. No complaint about the actual regulation itself, just that the people here are smarter and wiser than those idiots in Big City and therefore anything they want to do is stupid.

“I think this why the Urban/Rural thing seems prevalent, but you don’t have to take many swings with a dead cat to hit someone like this in say, New Jersey. To me, thinking about is rural/urban is missing the larger picture.

“You watch this and think what the hell has happened ? You can’t even find dems talking like that anymore. What I think has happened is that the generation that overcame the Depression and World Wars by coming together gave rise to the generation that wonders why I have to do anything for those morons. I sort of wonder if it’s a boomer thing – you can kind of draw a line from the 80s ‘Me Generation’ to the current ‘Stupid Entitled Movement’ we have going on, but that does seem a little pat.

“There is, of course, a bit more to it, but this is a comment and not a blog post, so I tried to be brief. But from here, in the middle of nowhere, it seems that whyshouldism has taken firm hold and I just don’t see how a ‘One Nation, Indivisible’ manages to survive that.”

Full comment in discussion.

Commentary on why some Trump followers won’t listen to reality:

“These are the same people that have been voting to gut the social safety net for a solid three decades. When they had great-paying jobs in manufacturing and what-not, then social programs were just the government taking their money to give to lazy (brown) people in these Dickensian inner cities. So they kept electing politicians whose campaigns were designed to one-up the austerity of the one before. But since they were hardworking people, they would never be looking for some kind of government welfare or handout. I mean, they might collect unemployment from time to time, but that’s different, since their taxes paid for that.

“Now that the rich “job creators” have won their propaganda victories and completely upended the economy, suddenly those same folks don’t have jobs like they used to. And now all those social programs and “welfare” and all that aren’t there. But rather than recognize their own short-sightedness, they did what most of us do rather than admit mistake and heard what they wanted to hear. So after getting hosed by the economic elite and corporations while simultaneously voting in droves to undermine the only possible checks on the Greed Class, they’ve now turned to a demagogue from that same Class who suddenly tells them that the government is going to help them. Sure, it’ll “help” them by poisoning the environment, giving even more of their tax dollars to wealthy businesses, and raising taxes on consumer goods (through tariffs).

“But he does one thing that’s even more important: he makes it not their fault. It’s not their fault they (and their parents and grandparents) torpedoed their own school systems, so there was no way for them to adapt to changes in the economy. It’s not their fault they voted time and again to reduce or outright kill social programs, so that when they fell on hard times there’d be nothing there to help. It’s not their fault that they put all their eggs in one economic basket. It’s not their fault that they turned to politicians who, rather than spend taxpayer dollars on re-training them once it became clear that manufacturing was on its way out, decided to give themselves and their fellow rich more tax cuts (and blow a few more hundred billion on military spending). Don’t forget too that the government that’s going to save them also licenses drug dealers, while the corporation that sells narcan has been free to jack the price up through the roof. Instead, our demagogue made it someone else’s fault, namely immigrants. Never mind that this isn’t remotely true, but it fits in with long-established narratives and, again, makes it someone else’s fault. Better to be victims than responsible.

“This mentality, in addition to being poisonous for the communities where it prevails, also makes it hard for other narratives to take hold. The left has done an abysmal job of framing the debate, and explaining why e.g. environmental regulations are not only good for public health, but actually save money. For some reason, though, Democrats are unwilling to talk in these terms, and so it’s easy to paint them as effete and out of touch. When they do address economic issues, it tends to be in ways that don’t really address what folks in the middle part of the country actually see on a day-to-day basis. During the last presidential campaign, Clinton wasn’t able to do much more than give vague platitudes that boiled down to “trust your coastal masters, we know what’s best for you.” Our demagogue, meanwhile, gave these people something they could chew. Never mind that it had little connection to reality, but it made sense in the gut. (The “why”s of Trump’s victory have been done to death, so I won’t belabor that point.)

“At the end of the day, virtue is a hard sell. I’m reading Ron Chernow’s biography of Alexander Hamilton, and a line from one of Hamilton’s letters has stuck with me. John Laurens, a close friend of Hamilton, had proposed that black regiments be raised to fight in the Continental Army in exchange for their freedom. The plan met stiff resistance in Congress, however. Hamilton shared his pessimism with his friend in a letter, saying:
Prejudice and private interest will be antagonists too powerful for public spirit and public good.

“So with all that schadenfreude (and catharsis) out of the way, the more important question is what to do now. I’ve seen plenty of comments from the left that amount to letting these folks reap what they’ve sowed. I get the instinct, but I think that’s both morally wrong in itself and frightfully hypocritical.

“But this is as far as I’ve gotten. I recognize that just sitting here from my educated, East-Coast perch and yelling at people isn’t really productive, however satisfying it may be in the short term. On the one hand I do think we have to try to understand what motivates Trump supporters, but at the same time we shouldn’t make excuses for them either. Maybe all we can do is try to insulate ourselves, but I’m not sure how possible that is. More significantly, I’m not sure it’s possible to do that without torpedoing the country (and I’ll admit to sometimes wondering if this is what the beginning of the decline looks like).

“The usual tools simply don’t work here. I don’t know how you talk someone around when their entire approach to the world is to ignore facts that they dislike. I’m more and more convinced that all we can do is wait for the Fall and hope people will be willing to admit their mistake. I don’t know how the rest of us make that possible in the future while at the same time resisting and fighting against Trump’s harmful policies. Perhaps there is no right answer, and we’re back to trying to insulate ourselves as much as we can from the inevitable collapse. If that’s really the only option, I’m glad I’m a gun owner.”

Full discussion in context.

Photo from The Economist.

Discussion of a photo of a elderly woman doing shots with some beach babes:

“1) First off, she doesn’t give a fuck. She probably saw a war or two in her time and to her life is as precious as it is short. She will walk up to the crowd of the hottest girls by the pool, I am talking the girls you wouldn’t dream of having the balls to talk to, and she will make sure they know who you are.

“2) Now the hottest girls know who you are. She is pointing you out and you are a tad embarrassed. Well don’t be. Fucking grandma will talk you up in a way women not only understand but highly appreciate. She isn’t your best bud who is far too drunk and just tells them how nice and honest you are and how they should give you a chance, she is speaking in fucking women-tongue and they will be interested to talk to you regardless of what you look like or how shy you are.

“3) She WANTS you to get laid. She wants you to find the hottest fucking most gorgeous girl around the pool/pub/bar/whatever because she wants her genes to be not only passed on, but passed UP the genetic lottery chain. She will do everything in her power to make sure her perfect little grandson is seeing a girl she is incredibly proud to say is now her granddaughter in law. She WANTS YOU TO GET LAID.

Read reasons #4 and #5 and full discussion.