SOME OF MY LGBT ACTIVISM. PAST AND PRESENT

 

Thomas Leonard

June 24, 2014  · 

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Tom attending Pride Scotia, June 21st, 2014

7Julie McGarvey, Scott Forster and 5 others

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• Cheenghee Masaki Koh

  Oh, are you also part of the LGBTQ+ community? I know three statisticians (my other two PhD-leveled statistician friends and me, a master-leveled statistician) so far who are also part of the LGBTQ+ community. We statisticians don't really talk about t… 

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  Thomas Leonard

  I was an LGBT activist in Wisconsin during the 1980s.

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  Thomas Leonard

  Tom Leonard - The Life of a Bayesian Boy

  The Field House, UW Madison… 

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• Tom Leonard - The Life of a Bayesian Boy

  The Field House, UW Madison

  APPENDIX

  A primary-source document relating to a full meeting of the faculty of the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the

  UW Field House on 4th December 1989, which received national attention.

  ‘They’re in for it now!’ as John Nohel, the Director of the Army’s Math Research Center, said, following my speech, to Professor James Koutsky of the UW Department of Chemical Engineering, and our faculty responded by, quite unexpectedly, voting against the military, by about 350 votes to 250. Several of their officers were sitting in full regalia in the front row. Professor David Runyon from UW Whitewater took a film for his television channel and lodged it in the State Archives, and several people ran up to me in the street to thank me for my contribution, which was generally acknowledged as completely turning the tables on the military at the end of an otherwise insipid and quite unconvincing debate.

  During my surprisingly devastating speech, I reported that a U.S. army captain had advised me, at an otherwise convivial Second Thursday reception, that ‘these freaks have never even opened a bible’. I also discussed a high-flying naval student in Annapolis who’d been stripped of his degree simply because he expressed his fears to his chaplain that he might be gay. I more generally objected to the intrusions perpetrated by the US military on the innermost thoughts of American students.

  Assistant Attorney General for Winconsin, Daniel O’Brien congratulated me afterwards, and he’s visited me in Edinburgh since. The leaders of Madison’s gay community, who were none too keen to raise their own heads above the parapet, congratulated themselves, and gave each other prestigious awards. So much for philanthropy.

   "Gay Discrimination in the Military

  The item "ROTC under fire" by David M. Halperin describes the enormous impact of the faculty vote. The reports by Professor Joe Elder of the UW Department of Sociology are incomplete in several respects.

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  Thomas Leonard

  The Field House Madison. Scene of Full Faculty Meeting, December 4th 1989. Seminal for gay people everywhere

  

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  Thomas Leonard

  https://web.mit.edu/activities/thistle/v9/9.14/rotc-uf.html

  WEB.MIT.EDU

  9.14 - ROTC Under Fire

  9.14 - ROTC Under Fire

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  ROTC Under Fire

  The campus movement to end anti-gay discrimmination in the US armed forces

  by David M. Halperin

  The following article is reprinted from Blueboy, published in June,
  1991. MIT Professor David M. Halperin chronicles the move by colleges
  and universities across the country to eliminate discrimination on the
  basis of sexual orientation from the military, and specifically from
  ROTC. The statements and subsequent policies of higher education
  institutions with regard to withdrawing campus support for ROTC are
  discussed below, providing an important historical perspective as MIT
  convenes its ROTC Task Force.
  	The most recent, and perhaps the most serious, challenge to
  the Department of Defense policy that bars from military service all
  those who do not conform to a standard of exclusive heterosexuality in
  their sexual practices has come from an unanticipated quarter -- the
  nation's colleges and universities. What has made this movement
  possible is the presence on some five hundred campuses of the Reserve
  Officers Training Corps, or ROTC. ROTC offers tuition scholarships,
  monetary stipends, textbook allowances, and other material benefits to
  qualified college students who agree to undergo military training
  while in school and to serve in the officer corps of the Armed
  Services upon graduation. In conformity with current US military
  policy, lesbians and gay men, as well as bisexuals (who, according to
  military definitions, do not exist as such and are simply assumed to
  be "homosexuals"), are ineligible to join ROTC or to obtain the
  various material benefits it provides non-gay undergraduates.
  	The current nationwide movement to force ROTC, and by
  extension the Department of Defense, to stop discriminating against
  sexual non-conformists or to get off campus began in 1982, when
  Wisconsin became the first state to pass a lesbian and gay civil
  rights law. Two students at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee,
  Eric Jernberg and Leon Rouse, decided to ask their school to adhere to
  the spirit of the new law by suspending participation in the ROTC
  program if that program continued to violate the terms of the
  statute. They eventually succeeded in getting their motion passed by
  the Faculty Senate, but at a subsequent meeting of the general
  faculty, their motion was voted down. This defeat outraged Richard
  L. Villaseor, who in the summer of 1986 was about to begin his
  sophomore year at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. After
  arduous efforts to build an effective campaign and to organize the
  faculty, Rick managed to reverse the Milwaukee scenario: his motion
  was initially defeated in the Faculty Senate, but he got three times
  the necessary votes to convene a meeting of the general faculty, and
  on December 4, 1989, several months after Rick had graduated, the
  faculty of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, by a vote of 386 to
  248, asked the Regents of the University to sever its contracts with
  ROTC by June, 1993, unless "those programs no longer discriminate on
  the grounds of sexual identity." (The Regents ultimately rejected the
  motion, but they lobbied the Wisconsin congressional delegation to
  demand that the policy be changed at the Federal level, and the
  University appointed a task force to work with other colleges and
  universities to put pressure on Washington.)
  	The Wisconsin vote touched off an explosion of activism on
  campuses around the country. Local protests and actions took place at
  colleges and universities throughout the spring of 1990. On May 4,
  1990, at 1:30 p.m. Central Standard Time, student leaders on 32
  different campuses read an identical statement, distributed by Jordan
  Marsh, University Affairs Director at the Wisconsin Student
  Association in Madison, protesting Defense Department policy on sexual
  orientation. On November 9, 1990, less than a year after the Wisconsin
  vote, the American Civil Liberties Union sponsored a national
  organizing conference at the University of Minnesota called "About
  Face: Combating ROTC's Anti-Gay Policy." By that time, more than
  eighty schools were involved in the movement. Pitzer College in
  southern California had eliminated ROTC from its campus, and Rutgers
  University had decided to suspend financial participation in the ROTC
  scholarship program. Dramatic developments had also taken place at
  many other schools, among them the Massachusetts Institute of
  Technology, which is where I teach.
  	I first became interested in the issue in May, 1989, when
  Robert Weinerman, a former MIT student on the staff of the Admissions
  Office, showed me a letter he had written to a committee investigating
  the relationship between MIT and ROTC, in which he argued that ROTC's
  overt and formalized policy of discrimination violated the spirit of
  MIT's non-discrimination clause. I quickly realized that this was one
  lesbian/gay-rights issue on which academic personnel could have a
  decisive influence at the national level: if your school has an ROTC
  program, you have a direct line to Washington. In January, 1990, after
  the Wisconsin vote -- widely reported in the lesbian and gay press --
  I started up a group called Defeat Discrimination at MIT, or
  D-DaMIT. With Robert as our strategist, we orchestrated a campus-wide
  petition campaign, modeled on the Wisconsin faculty resolution. But
  before we were far advanced, Robert L. Bettiker, a senior in Navy
  ROTC, came forward with a startling story. It seems that Robb, who had
  not realized he was gay when he joined NROTC, had come out to his
  commanding officer in November, had duly been expelled from the
  program, and had just been ordered by the Secretary of the Navy --
  over the recommendation of the local NROTC board, which had found that
  Robb had not intended to deceive the Navy about his sexual orientation
  when he joined -- to repay nearly $40,000 in NROTC scholarship
  support. On March 5, 1990, the day his story appeared in a progressive
  MIT student newspaper and the first day of our petition campaign, the
  New York Times reported that James Holobaugh, an Army ROTC cadet at
  Washington University in St. Louis and former ROTC poster-boy, had
  been order to repay $25,000 for identical reasons. The news quickly
  became a national scandal.
  	D-DaMIT had soon gathered more than two thousand
  signatures. In a student referendum that involved half the
  undergraduate student body, a majority of those who voted and who
  expressed an opinion favored removing ROTC from campus within four
  years unless it ceased discriminating on the basis of sexual
  orientation -- perhaps the first time such a referendum succeeded on a
  college campus. On April 10, 1990, the Provost of MIT, John Deutch, a
  former Undersecretary of Energy under the Carter administration and a
  Department of Defense insider for many years, wrote a letter to
  Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney, in which he criticized DOD policy
  on sexual orientation and deplored efforts to recoup scholarship funds
  from ROTC cadets disenrolled for being gay. This letter, which D-DaMIT
  made public, may represent the first time a major Defense Department
  figure had visibly dissociated himself from the policy. In the
  resulting glare of media attention, the Navy withdrew its demands for
  repayment from Bettiker and another NROTC midshipman, while the Army
  backed down in the case of Jim Holobaugh. On October 17, 1990, the MIT
  Faculty, with explicit support from the students, the administration,
  and the Chairman of the board of trustees, approved without dissent a
  resolution opposing anti-gay discrimination in ROTC. The resolution
  provided for a five-year lobbying effort to eliminate the
  discriminatory policy; toward the end of the five-year period, the
  President of MIT will appoint a task force to assess the situation,
  "with the expectation that inadequate progress toward eliminating the
  DOD policy on sexual orientation will result in making ROTC
  unavailable to students beginning with the class entering in 1998."
  	The struggle is not over. The military continues to pursue its
  discriminatory policy ruthlessly and vindictively. As of the summer of
  1990, eight cadets in the Navy alone found themselves precisely in
  Robb Bettiker's former situation. In 1987 the Navy, seeking to recoup
  $25,600 from Peter Laska, a midshipman who had been forced by
  systematic harassment to drop out of NROTC at the University of
  Pennsylvania, placed a lien on the home of his parents, who discovered
  in this manner that their son was gay. And only recently, a
  19-year-old Marine Corpswoman, suspected of being lesbian, targeted by
  a military investigation, and threatened with all sorts of punishments
  if she dId not reveal the names of her friends, unable to face her
  parents and unwilling to betray her comrades, took her own life with a
  service-issue firearm.
  	How long must we wait before colleges and universities will
  take steps to protect students, their parents, and the quality of
  campus life from such institutionalized harassment? The time to act is
  now.
  	And in 1995, after a promise to lift the ban on gays in the
  military, after a federal policy of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell, Don't
  Pursue," the struggle is still not over, and the time to act is still
  now. The suspected inadequacy of Clinton"s compromise on
  discrimination in the armed forces has been realized over the last two
  years as witch-hunts and persecutions of military personnel suspected
  of being gay, lesbian, or bisexual continue, often in blatant
  disregard of the executive order (see "How is Clinton's Plan Working?
  Don't Ask...," this page). As MIT gathers together yet another group
  of students and faculty to form its ROTC Task Force, it is imperative
  that this campus remains vigilant to the fact that discrimination on
  the basis of sexual orientation is alive and well regardless, and in
  some cases because, of the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" order. The fact
  that the DOD policy on gays in the military is in direct conflict with
  MIT's non-discrimination policy is well-known; what remains then is
  for the MIT community to remedy this campus of ROTC.
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