Today in Gay History

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September 20

Born
1968 -

NORAH VINCENT was an American writer who was born on this date (d: 2022); Vincent was a weekly columnist for the Los Angeles Times and a quarterly columnist on politics and culture for the national gay and lesbian news magazine The Advocate. She was a columnist for The Village Voice and Salon.com. Her writing appeared in The New RepublicThe New York Times, New York PostThe Washington Post and other periodicals. She gained particular attention in 2006 for her book, Self-Made Man, detailing her experiences when she lived as a man for eighteen months.

Her book Self-Made Man (2006) retells an eighteen-month experiment in the early 2000s in which she disguised herself as a man. This was compared to previous undercover journalism such as Black Like Me. Vincent was interviewed by Juju Chang on the ABC News program 20/20 and talked about the experience in HARDtalk extra on BBC in April 2006, where she described her experiences in male-male and male-female relationships. She joined an all-male bowling club, joined a men's therapy group, went to a strip club, dated women, and used her knowledge as a lapsed Catholic to visit monks in a monastery.

Vincent wrote that the only time she has ever been considered excessively feminine was during her stint as a man. Her alter ego, Ned, was assumed to be gay on several occasions. Features which had been perceived as butch when she presented as a woman were perceived as oddly effeminate when she presented as a man. Vincent asserted that, since the experiment, she had more fully realized the benefits of being female and the disadvantages of being male, stating, "I really like being a woman. ... I like it more now because I think it's more of a privilege."

Vincent also stated that she had gained more sympathy and understanding for men and the male condition: "Men are suffering. They have different problems than women have but they don't have it better. They need our sympathy, they need our love, and they need each other more than anything else. They need to be together."

Vincent later wrote two novels: Thy Neighbor (2012), described by The New York Times as "a dark, comic thriller", and Adeline (2015), which imagines the life of Virginia Woolf from when she wrote To the Lighthouse until her suicide in 1941.

Vincent, a lesbian, was briefly married to Kristen Erickson, but soon divorced. Ms. Vincent is survived by her mother and her brothers, Alex and Edward. From 2000 to 2008, her domestic partner was Lisa McNulty, a theater producer and artistic director.

Vincent was described as a libertarian who was critical of postmodernism and multiculturalism. She did not believe that transgender people were the sex they identified as, leading her to be accused of bigotry. In an article for The Village Voice, she wrote: "[Transsexuality] signifies the death of the self, the soul, that good old-fashioned indubitable 'I' so beloved of Descartes, whose great adage 'I think, therefore I am' has become an ontological joke on the order of 'I tinker, and there I am.'"

In Voluntary Madness, Vincent details her decade-long history with treatment-resistant depression, saying: "...my brain was never quite the same after I zapped it with that first course of SSRIs.” The mental strain of maintaining a false identity during the making of Self-Made Man ultimately caused a depressive breakdown, leading Vincent to admit herself to a locked psychiatric facility.

Vincent died via assisted suicide at a clinic in Switzerland on July 6, 2022, aged 53. Her death was not reported until August 2022.


Noteworthy
Daughters of Bilitis
1958 -

The New York chapter of DAUGHTERS OF BILITIS is formed by a group of Lesbians which includes the late Barbara Gittings. For a time, Daughters of Bilitis and The Mattachine Society joined together in "Common Cause". Some women even wrote for Mattachine's ONE Magazine. As the women's movement began to grow in the U.S., it became apparent that the men of Mattachine showed little desire to champion women's issues. At the same time, the women's movement was not particularly welcoming. The National Organization for Women (N.O.W.) was afraid that Lesbian involvement would only bring further hostility from the media and a male dominated world. They called Lesbians "the lavender menace" and sought to eject them from the movement.

With such choices, the direction of the Daughters of Bilitis was split. Some members favored focusing their energies on Gay rights, while others favored women's issues. Just before the 1970 National Conference of D.O.B., the publishing group for The Ladder was secretly moved to another location and devoted itself to feminist issues instead of Gay issues. The group never really recovered after this, and in time the individual chapters began to die out.


Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs
1973 -

In their so-called "Battle Of The Sexes," tennis star Billie Jean King defeated Bobby Riggs in straight sets, 6-4, 6-3, 6-3, at the Houston Astrodome.


1996 -

President Bill Clinton announced his signing of a bill outlawing homosexual marriages, DEFENSE OF MARRIAGE (DOMA) but said it should not be used as an excuse for discrimination, violence or intimidation against Gays and Lesbians.  No…of course not. Who would do such a thing? Thanks for nothing, Bill. Guess you had your fingers crossed for that “equal protection” part?

In 2013 the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 to strike down DOMA. The Obama administration, which had declined to defend the law, took steps to insure the Federal government, including the Internal Revenue Service, recognized marriages from states where LGBT marriage is legal. Under the Full Faith and Credit section of the Constitution. We shall overcome!


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