Ways to wank LGBT+ rights

Co-author of what, exactly?



No because homosexuality wasn't illegal because of the lack of consent. It was illegal under sodomy laws, which often also criminalized heterosexual anal intercourse. It wasn't a question of consent but of the practice itself.
Technically defining sexual consent could unintentionally negate the sodomy laws, depending on how the ruling is written.
 
Co-author of what, exactly?
Jeremy Bentham tried to get this rich guy Englishman who was both an author and probably gay himself to co-author either about a ten-page essay, or a book in which he (Bentham) presented a case that at least some of the disciplines of the New Testament and maybe Jesus himself were gay. Wow! Daring stuff! Yes, it was.

This rich guy author said no and took a pass.

On this proposed book, I think Bentham had a tin ear politically. He would have been better off arguing matter-of-factly for the rather traditional English principle, that if you're not hurting anyone else, you have a right to be left alone.

* Bentham's book is Not Paul, But Jesus. Apparently, the part which talks about sexuality was only published in 2013!
 
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It's too much. Trying to 'capture' a religious figure as it were, saying that he shares this characteristic and is therefore an advocate for your cause, it's too much. People take it very personally.

It's better to make the case, for example, that Alexander the Great was probably gay. And therefore it's not the case that allowing gay persons to live openly will hurt military preparedness. This will more getting people thinking.

And that Leonardo de Vinci was probably gay, and Walt Whitman. In fact, I think this is a relatively common and effective form of activism. To first, make the case that all kinds of famous persons have been in the group we have been treating as second-class citizens. And secondly, to make the case that a person shouldn't have to be famous to be treated courtesy and respect.
 
galexand.jpg


http://rictornorton.co.uk/greatgay/greatgay.htm

Alexander the Great (356-323 BC) King of Macedon
Conquered most of Greece, Persia, Asia Minor, India & Egypt (founded the city of Alexandria), transmitted Hellenic values across the civilized world. Mourned the death of his lover Hephaestian with extravagant funeral rites.
And I do think this is effective activism.

You make the case that a person being lesbian or gay is more common, more 'normal,' than we've generally told in schools, in courts, in standard tax forms, and in various other types of officialdom.
 
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To prevent HIV / AIDS you'ld have to go back before 1929, and stop the Belgian colonisation of the Congo, and even stopping that colonisation would not necessarily stop HIV. Current estimates based on Virus mutation show HIV transforming from Chimpanzee SIV and entering human populations four different times in the 1910's, probably towards the end of the First World War. The dreadful conditions in the Congo allowed it to spread and and multiply, with the first HIV / AIDS epidemic occurring in the Congo in the 1930's (not recognised at the time as hey it was only black labourers dying young for the colonists . The Belgian Congo has a lot to answer for).

No Belgian colonisation would not necessarily have stopped HIV entering human populations but without the conditions in the Congo (abysmal living conditions for men and 50% of African women in the cities being prostitutes) it may have burnt itself out in the remote areas where it originated (as has likely happened many times). The introduction of vaccinations using one needle also spread HIV far more than sex alone. Blood to blood transmission is is virtually a 100% chance of contracting HIV. For sex the highest chance of contracting HIV is receiving Anal Sex, which is about a 1 in 30 chance, for Vaginal Sex it's about a 1 in 60 chance. If a man is circumcised the risk to the man reduces tenfold, and there is smaller reduction for a woman or man receiving anal or vaginal sex (no chance of blood vessels breaking in the foreskin, so no blood to blood transmission).
 
The AIDS Epidemic — Considerations for the 21st Century

Anthony S. Fauci, M.D.

New England Journal of Medicine, 341:1046-1050 September 30, 1999.

http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199909303411406#t=article

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The Origins of HIV
Recent molecular epidemiologic data have clearly indicated that HIV type 1 (HIV-1) evolved with the Pan troglodytes troglodytes subspecies of chimpanzee and was present in that subspecies for centuries.[4] The virus apparently does not readily cause disease in the chimpanzee. As is the case with many viruses, HIV at a particular point (or points) in time “jumped” species to infect human beings; hence, it almost certainly originated as a zoonotic infection. HIV type 2, the less prevalent and less virulent species of HIV, is remarkably similar genetically to the simian immunodeficiency virus that is endemic among sooty mangabeys.[5]

The most likely mechanism of transmission of HIV-1 from chimpanzees to humans was by contamination of a person's open wound with the infected blood of a chimpanzee, probably when the chimpanzee was being butchered for the purposes of consumption.[6] . . .

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This sounds likely and reasonable to me. If I'm hungry, of course I'm going to hunt bush meat. And if I'm lucky enough to kill a chimpanzee, I might well be wrist deep in the animal's carcass trying to pull out the tasty liver, etc, etc. And if I have any little cut or scratch on my knuckles, yes, I can see how this would be a likely way to transmit a virus.
 
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If the Nazis never take power, nor does some socially-conservative analogue that isn't as bugnuts-insane, you might have the liberal Weimar cabaret culture go on for awhile longer.
 
If the Nazis never take power, nor does some socially-conservative analogue that isn't as bugnuts-insane, you might have the liberal Weimar cabaret culture go on for awhile longer.

There is something to be said about that. I think the one-two-three punch of first the rise of fascism then the Second World War then a retreat to an imagined conservative idyll did a lot to undermine the progress that had been made in the first quarter of the 20th century.
 
Wales: A tale of two ladies ahead of their time

Telegraph, 4 May 2002.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/d...A-tale-of-two-ladies-ahead-of-their-time.html

' . . . together to Wales in 1778 . . . '

' . . . Their names were Lady Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby, but they were better known as the Ladies of Llangollen, "the two most celebrated virgins in Europe".

'Although the Ladies wished to live in "delightful retirement" - reading, writing, drawing and gardening - the fashionable world soon beat a path to their cottage door. Their visitors included the Duke of Wellington, Lady Caroline Lamb, Josiah Wedgwood, William Wordsworth, Thomas de Quincey, Prince Paul Esterhazy and the Duke of Gloucester; their pen-friends included Queen Charlotte, Lord Byron and Louis XVI's aunt. There were many days when the Ladies had up to 20 visitors in relays, entertaining literally morning, noon and night. . . . '

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' . . . (elope did not have the same marital connotation that it does today, it just meant run away). . . '

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They may have been lovers, they may not. Either way, they were accepted and appreciated. :)
 
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Maybe George Takei gets outed (or just comes out) in the early 1970s. He becomes an effective voice for AIDS in the mid-to-late 1980s, and Ted Turner, hoping to use his fame to kick off CNN, gets him on a "Crossfire" type show with Pat Robertson or another prominent evangelical figure who argues AIDS is caused by the "gay lifestyle". Takei's performance helps change minds about gay rights.
 
Maybe George Takei gets outed (or just comes out) in the early 1970s.

I think his agent would beg him not to come out, predicting that if he did his career would be destroyed. And if Takei did come out anyway, the agent's prediction would come true.

Seriously, I think the time-line for gay and lesbian acceptance is really impervious to Great Man influence. I know some people try to prove the opposite by pointing to Rock Hudson and Liberace's illnesses being revealed(followed within a decade by the "gay 90s"), but when you think about it, the people in the 1980s who would have been most receptive to the idea of glbq equality would have been Gen X and to a lesser extent the Baby Boom, people for whom Hudson and Liberace were irrelevant relics from a vanishing era.
 
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I think his agent would beg him not to come out, predicting that if he did his career would be destroyed. And if Takei did come out anyway, the agent's prediction would come true.

Seriously, I think the time-line for gay and lesbian acceptance is really impervious to Great Man influence. I know some people try to prove the opposite by pointing to Rock Hudson and Liberace's illnesses being revealed(followed within a decade by the "gay 90s"), but when you think about it, the people in the 1980s who would have been most receptive to the idea of glbq equality would have been Gen X and to a lesser extent the Baby Boom, people for whom Hudson and Liberace were irrelevant relics from a vanishing era.

I really do think that if you're going to advance the timetable you're going to need to avoid the whole second quarter of the 20th century, which saw the West descend (for a variety of reasons) into a new conservatism.
 
. . . Seriously, I think the time-line for gay and lesbian acceptance is really impervious to Great Man influence. . .
What about the above two ladies from the early 1800s in Wales?

I think society ebbs and flows regarding acceptance. Low ebbs can probably be damaged-controlled. But I definitely think high ebbs can be built upon.
 
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