June 17-23
1996
U.S.: Cheryl Dunye, director of the lesbian love story The Watermelon Woman, which features a steamy lesbian love scene, upsets conservatives because it received a federal grant of $31,500 from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1995. * The San Francisco Lesbian and Gay Film Festival celebrates its 20th season by showing 207 titles from locales as farflung as Cuba, Serbia, China and Kazakhstan. The opening-night selection includes the British director Nigel Finch's Stonewall, a dramatization of the seminal 1969 event in gay liberation history. * The Los Angeles Gay Psychotherapist Association host their 2nd Annual Gay & Lesbian Psychology Conference at Hotel Sofitel during Gay Pride Weekend in West Hollywood, Calif. Speakers include: Betty Berzon, Ph.D., Andrew Mattison, Ph.D., Marny Hall, Ph.D., and Brian Miller, Ph.D. * Australia: In Canberra, Parliament in the conservative Australian state of Tasmania yet again rejects efforts to legalize gay sex. * Germany: Berlin's Roman Catholic Cardinal George Sterzinsky expresses disgust at plans by the city's gay community to spoof Pope John Paul's visit with a mock mass conducted by a prostitute known as the "popess." Sterzinsky denounced the event as a Satanic mass that recalled the anti-religious excesses of the French Revolution and the communist era.
1991
U.S.: A California Appeals Court in Los Angeles upholds a $5.5 million award to Marc Christian, a former lover of Rock Hudson. Christian had sued Hudson's estate because the star allegedly had unprotected sex with him without informing him that he had AIDS.
1986
U.S.: The National Coalition of Black Lesbians publish the first issue of their new magazine, Black/Out, which replaces their former publication Habari-Daftari. * A unique Hollywood play, AIDS/US: Portraits in Personal Courage, plays to full audiences at the Skylight Theatre in Los Angeles. The cast includes both gay and non-gay people, and about half are PWA's. The actors are ordinary people; the roles they portray are their actual lives. * An estimated 75 men and women demonstrate outside the popular gay club Kurt's in Philadelphia. They are protesting a recently enacted dress code specifying that women wear dresses and forbidding open-toed shoes after 10 p.m., while men are required to wear shirts that are not ripped. * In Palm Springs, Calif., after a four-year struggle, gay father Frank Batey is awarded custody of his 15-year-old son Brian. Superior Court Judge Judith McConnell officially closed the struggle Batey waged to retrieve Brian from his ex-wife Betty Batey, a fundamentalist Christian who had abducted Brian four years before.
1981
U.S.: Senator Roger Jepson ( R-Iowa ) introduces the "Family Protection Act" in Congress. The bill mandates that no person who is homosexual, or even intimates that homosexuality is an acceptable lifestyle, can receive funds under such programs as Social Security, welfare, veteran's benefits, or student assistance. It also requires that all textbook materials used in public schools reinforce the "traditional role of men and women." Jepson loses his 1984 bid for reelection, after revelations about his membership of a private spa that turned out to be a house of prostitution. * Reflections of a Rock Lobster by Aaron Fricke is in bookstores. * The 1st Mr. Black Midwest Contest takes place in Chicago at the Ritz Bar. The MC is Ralph Paul, and the winner is Kenneth Eric Hoskins.
