Everyday’s a good day to do that!Jeff Tiedrich included this in his substack today about the President’s grad speech at West Point. I also linked that below this snippet, if anyone’s interested in that. It’s TMI for me today, but very good; I read his most days. Meanwhile, back to the Army news: -A
Ronald Reagan was even involved in this largely-forgotten tradition.
By Dan Tracer Friday, June 21, 2024 · Updated on June 22, 2024
Long before RuPaul’s Drag Race, Drag Queen Story Hour, or any one of the countless drag shows gracing the stages of LGBTQ+ bars around the world, there was another popular spot for performative gender-bending: U.S. military bases in the 1940s.
During World War II, the military embraced drag shows as a unique form of entertainment and a morale-boosting activity. These officially sanctioned events featured all-male performances with soldiers often dressing in women’s attire. According to author Allan Bérubé, GIs staged these shows everywhere from makeshift platforms to grand theater stages, incorporating popular female impersonation routines of the day.
Due to the official segregation of the armed forces, service-member theater productions had no option but to cast men in female roles.
One of the most iconic productions of the era, “This is the Army,” was initially a Broadway musical designed to raise funds for troops. It later became a sensation as a 1943 film starring Ronald Reagan, 37 years before he was elected President of the United States. These shows not only provided soldiers with much-needed diversion during the stresses of conflict but also served as a safe haven for gay service members, as explained by Joe E. Jeffreys, a drag historian and professor at New York University’s New School. (snip; a little MORE with video)
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elderly golfer’s brain goes fuckity-bye in batshit West Point speech by Jeff Tiedrich
Donny can’t be bothered to act like a human being Read on Substack
The entire article is saying that the public schools should be for everyone … except LGBTQ+ kids and parents of those kids. Yes gay and trans children exist and need / deserve to see themselves represented in the community just as much as straight cis kids do. This is a hate bill, banning a group because the majority in charge doesn’t like them. The flags they say are ok to fly like the Gladstone flag or the thin blue line flag are not neutral and they most definitely represent a political ideology. Again this is about erasing the LGBTQ+ kids / people from society to make the Christian fundamentalist and insecure parents who know they can’t have produced a gay / trans kid feel better about themselves. It is a desire to force the fundamentalist view point on every one regardless if they believe it. It is a desperate attempt to return to the 1950s. Hugs
The law effectively bans Pride flags and other LGBTQ flags from being flown at schools or government buildings. In 2019, Gov. Steve Bullock, D-Montana, flew a Pride flag over the state Capitol, which drew criticism from Republicans.
Language in the bill does allow flags like the Gadsden flag and other “official historical flags” to be flown. It also allows flags for law enforcement officers and fallen officers, like the “Thin Blue Line” flag, which Gov. Gianforte, R-Montana, flew above the Montana Capitol on Thursday, May 15, 2025.
When HB 819 was debated on the floor of the Montana House of Representatives, Mitchell said the bill was intended to ensure government entities remain a place of neutrality and was not to impact an individual’s free speech.
“Government buildings, schools and public facilities serve all citizens and should not be used to promote political, ideological or activist messaging,” said Mitchell during the March 6 floor debate.
Critics of HB 819 say the bill targets free speech by allowing provisions for specific flags like the Gadsden “Don’t Tread on Me” flag to be flown, while others were prohibited. Rep. Pete Elverum, D-Helena, said under the language, a Confederate flag could be flown.
“What we’re doing here is we’re expressly prescribing what speech is allowed, ‘these flags’, and what speech is not allowed, ‘these other flags’,” said Rep. Pete Elverum, D-Helena, on March 6. “And as for the definition of ‘promoting a certain ideology,’ those [flags] are expressly prohibited, but at the exact same time we’re sitting here with a bill proclaiming to be about free speech, we’re expressly prohibiting some and promoting others.”
Flags of tribal nations, foreign countries, military service branches, the POW/MIA flag and official school or government entities’ flags are also permitted under the law.
HB 819 went into effect immediately after Governor Greg Gianforte signed it.
This year, both Utah and Idaho have passed similar laws restricting or banning Pride flags on government property or at schools.
New Montana law decides which flags fly in public schools.
I keep meaning to get them posted, then I don’t get it done. Here they are; readers can pick and choose, or read each one in your own time. Enjoy!
This one has 2: 120, and 120a! -A
Queer History 120: Sappho by Wendy🏳️⚧️🏳️🌈🌈
How a woman from ancient Lesbos changed literature and sexuality forever Read on Substack
Queer History 119: Dr Alan Hart, Trans Guy Super Power by Wendy🏳️⚧️🏳️🌈🌈
“What does it feel like to save countless lives while being forced to hide who you really are? To revolutionize medicine while living in constant fear of being “discovered”? To fight a deadly disease that ravaged millions while battling a society that treated your very existence as a fucking scandal?” Read on Substack
Queer History 118: The Tragedy of Carmen Carrasco (1932) by Wendy🏳️⚧️🏳️🌈🌈
“In a Spain teetering between progress and persecution, one woman’s death exposed the brutal reality faced by those who dared to love differently.
The day they found Carmen Carrasco’s body, Madrid whispered.” Read on Substack
Queer History 117: The Boys of Boise Scandal by Wendy🏳️⚧️🏳️🌈🌈
“In 1955, the sleepy city of Boise, Idaho became ground zero for one of the most fucked-up anti-gay witch hunts in American history. What began as arrests of three men exploded into a moral panic that would rip families apart like wet paper, crush reputations under its boot, and drive some to blow their brains out—all under the bullshit guise of ‘protecting the children.'” Read on Substack
Queer History 116: Natalie Clifford Barney by Wendy🏳️⚧️🏳️🌈🌈
How an American heiress built a lesbian literary empire in the heart of French culture while telling society to go fuck itself Read on Substack
Queer History 115: The Radical Queer Brotherhood in Walt Whitman’s Revolutionary Circle by Wendy🏳️⚧️🏳️🌈🌈
How America’s “Good Gray Poet” built a secret society of gay intellectuals that changed literature forever Read on Substack
“I am most grateful that…I was born long enough ago to have known people who lived in the ancient way before everything started to change.” –Mourning Dove
Maybe it was because she was born in a canoe on Idaho’s Kootenai River. Or because she was multiracial. Or because she went to a convent school to learn English as a ten-year-old. Whatever the reason, Christine Quintasket, whose Salish language name was Hum-ishu-ma (Mourning Dove in English, which she adopted as her literary name as an adult), wrote stories about the hostility white people had toward Native Americans and the confusion they suffered when educated in white schools.
Born around 1884 to Sinixt/Colville Lucy Stukin of the upper Columbia River and Okanagan/Irish Joseph Quintasket of British Columbia, the future writer grew up speaking the Salishan dialect in her mother’s home near Kettle Falls, Washington, according to her autobiography. Mourning Dove’s grandmother taught her the traditional customs of Columbia Plateau natives. Teequalt, an older woman who lived with the family, introduced her to tribal spirituality, and Jimmy Ryan, an adopted white orphan, taught her to read English through dime novels.
As a young girl, Mourning Dove remembered sitting by a campfire and listening to the animated voice of a tribal storyteller imitating an animal. “We thought of this as all fun and play, barely aware that tale-telling and impersonations were part of our primitive education,” she recalled decades later.
Mourning Dove’s indigenous education ended in 1894 when she went to the Sacred Heart School at the Goodwin Catholic Mission near Kettle Falls. When her mother died in 1902, the writer returned home to care for her younger siblings. After her father remarried in 1904, she moved to Great Falls, Montana to attend the Fort Shaw Industrial Indian School. In 1908 Mourning Dove sorrowfully watched the last roundup of America’s wild bison herd as the Old West faded. “One magnificent fellow fought like a lion as they tried to crowd his wonderful shaggy head into a box car,” she told an interviewer. She later incorporated the roundup in her writing. (snip-MORE, not too long to read, and it’s really interesting!)
May 23, 2025, 3:13 PM EDT; Updated: May 23, 2025, 3:35 PM EDT
Allie Reed
Correspondent
A large transgender flag with signatures and messages during a protest.
Photographer: Manaure Quintero/Bloomberg
The Trump administration must republish two Harvard Medical School professors’ papers it censored because they contained words related to gender ideology, a federal judge ruled Friday.
“The plaintiffs are likely to succeed in proving that the removal of their articles was a textbook example of viewpoint discrimination by the defendants in violation of the First Amendment,” Judge Leo Sorokin wrote for the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts.
The US Department of Health and Human Services took down peer-reviewed articles by doctors Gordon Schiff and Celeste Royce from the now-inactive Patient Safety Network website, run by the HHS’s Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.
PSNet said the articles were taken down in accordance with President Donald Trump’s executive order directing agencies to remove content that promotes “gender ideology.” Schiff’s article, on suicide risk assessment, and Royce’s, on endometriosis, both referenced transgender people.
“This is a flagrant violation of the plaintiffs’ First Amendment rights as private speakers on a limited public forum,” Sorokin wrote.
The government can only restrict speech on a limited public forum like PSNet in a way that is reasonable and viewpoint neutral, the order said, and the administration’s restrictions were not.
Sorokin said it is not within his discretion “to evaluate the wisdom of restricting access to peer-reviewed scientific information that enhances patient safety by fostering more informed and timely diagnostic care—or of eliminating entirely a free, online repository of patient-safety resources accessed each year by thousands of medical professionals seeking to provide better, safer care to their patients in the United States. Those are matters for the political branches of government to decide.”
The preliminary injunction applies to Schiff and Royce’s articles, as well as other content removed from PSNet in a similar manner.
The Trump administration is asking a federal judge to reject a challenge from two Harvard University Medical School physicians seeking to block the government’s removal of research papers because they included terms related to the LGBTQ communities. https://t.co/Bj8Wuuu8c7
A U.S.-born citizen who was wrestled into the dirt, handcuffed and detained in a vehicle as part of an immigration raid had a REAL ID on him that was dismissed as fake, the man’s cousin said Friday.
Video of the arrest, aired by Noticias Telemundo, showed authorities grabbing Leonardo Garcia Venegas, 25, while at a job site in Foley, Alabama, on Wednesday and bending his arms behind him. Someone off-camera can be heard yelling, “He’s a citizen.”
Garcia told Noticias Telemundo that authorities took his ID from his wallet and told him it was fake before handcuffing him. REAL ID is the identification U.S. citizens are required by law to have in order to travel through airports and enter federal buildings. It is considered a higher security form of identification.
“Apparently a REAL ID is not valid anymore. He has a REAL ID,” his cousin Shelah Venegas said. “We all made sure we have the REAL ID and went through the protocols the administration is asking for. … He has his REAL ID and then they see him and I guess because his English isn’t fluent and/or because he’s brown it’s fake, it’s not real.”
Garcia had told Noticias Telemundo that “they grabbed me real bad” and the handcuffs were placed “very hard” on him.
Garcia said he was released from the vehicle where he was held after he gave the arresting officials his Social Security number, which showed he is a U.S. citizen.
The arrest has left Garcia, who was born in Florida, shaken, particularly because the officers also arrested and detained his brother, who is not in the country legally, Venegas said. She added that Garcia lived with his brother. Their parents are from Mexico.
Leonardo Garcia Venegas.Telemundo
“He was actually pretty sore when he got back,” Venegas said of Garcia. “He said his arms were hurting and his hands. His wrists, you could see where he had all the marks from the handcuffs. … The way they put him on the ground, his knees also were hurting.”
She said they have been trying to find a lawyer but local ones have told them that it is nearly impossible to sue a federal agent. It is not clear from the video whether the authorities were federal immigration agents or local law enforcement carrying out enforcement duties.
The Department of Homeland Security said in a statement to NBC News that Garcia interfered with an arrest during a targeted worksite operation.
“He physically got in between agents and the subject they were attempting to arrest and refused to comply with numerous verbal commands,” said Tricia McLaughlin, DHS assistant secretary. “Anyone who actively obstructs law enforcement in the performance of their sworn duties, including U.S. citizens, will of course face consequences which include arrest.”
The response did not address the dismissal of Garcia’s identification.
Garcia denied that he interrupted an arrest. He told NBC News that he was trying to take out his phone when an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent took it and threw it to the ground and then an agent began grabbing him.
Venegas said Garcia’s brother has signed deportation papers because the family didn’t want him detained “forever” as they’ve seen happen to another family member, who was held for months in a Louisiana detention center.
“It’s inhumane, what they are doing to our people. They are treating them as if they were murderers,” she said.
Venegas said the immigration arrests are creating repercussions among Hispanics, even among U.S. citizens.
“It’s about race now. It’s not about whether you are here legally or not,” she said.
Her family owns a fairly large contracting company, she said, “and a lot of the people that work with us are not working. … They are refusing to go to work. They said they are not going to go until this stuff calms down.”
Venegas added that the majority of her family is self-employed and “we do the same thing every other citizen does.”
“It’s just insane we can’t be different, the color that we are. We contribute to this country the same way every other citizen does with their taxes,” she said. “But we have to be the ones that every time we go to work, we are going to be scared that we’re going to get discriminated.”
“I think about my family,” she said. “Even though a lot of them are citizens, I think about how we all work in the same area in construction and they can’t sit out there because they could literally get harassed or attacked the way my cousin did.”
ICE wrestled Alabama worker to the ground & detain him for hours—he is a U.S. citizen.
Young man was begging & shouting, "I am a U.S. citizen"—but that didn't stop ICE agents from dragging him off to a detention center.
May 24, 1774 The Virginia House of Burgesses declared this a day of “fasting, humiliation and prayer” in reaction to the British closure of the Port of Boston.
May 24, 1906 Dora Montefiore British suffragist Dora Montefiore protested the lack of women’s right to the vote by refusing to pay taxes, and barricading her house against bailiffs sent to collect. Dora Montefiore biography
May 24, 1917 An Anti-Conscription Parade was held in Victoria Square, Montreal, Quebec, in resistance to a Canadian draft to send soldiers to the European war. Riots nearly a year later resulted in the death of four demonstrators in Quebec City. Anti-Conscription Parade, Victoria Square
May 24, 1964 Senator Barry Goldwater (R-Arizona), running for the Republican Party nomination for president, gave an interview in which he said he would consider the use of low-yield atomic bombs in North Vietnam.
May 24, 1968 Four protesters, including Phil Berrigan and Tom Lewis, were sentenced in Baltimore, Maryland, to six years each in prison for pouring blood on draft records.
May 24, 1971 At Fort Bragg, North Carolina, an anti-war newspaper advertisement, signed by 29 U.S. soldiers supporting the Concerned Officers Movement, resulted in controversy. The group had been formed in 1970 in Washington, D.C. by a small group of junior naval officers opposed to the war. The newspaper advertisement at Fort Bragg was in support of the group’s members, who had joined with anti-war activist David Harris and others in San Diego to mobilize opposition to the departure of the carrier USS Constellation for Vietnam. No official action was taken against the military dissidents, though many were forced to resign their commissions. GI resistance to the Vietnam War
May 24, 1981 (since 1981) International Women’s Day for Disarmament was declared, calling for the peaceful resolution of conflict, and an end to the horror and devastation of armed conflict. IFOR’s Women Peacemakers Program
May 24, 1982 More than 200,000 people participated in a massive anti-nuclear demonstration in Tokyo, Japan.
May 24, 2000 Israeli troops completed their withdrawal from southern Lebanon, ending 18 years of occupation. Prime Minister Ehud Barak: “From now on, the government of Lebanon is accountable for what takes place within its territory, and the Lebanese and Syrian governments are responsible for preventing acts of terror or aggression against Israel, which is from today deployed within its borders.”
Kansas Department for Children and Families denied a request by the federal government for access to personal data of a food assistance program. (Submitted)
TOPEKA — State officials have denied a federal request to disclose personal information of Kansans using the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
On May 6, the Kansas Department for Children and Families received a letter from the U.S. Department of Agriculture that demanded “unfettered access to comprehensive data from all State programs that receive federal funding.” DCF spokeswoman Erin LaRow shared a copy of that letter and other communications in response to an inquiry from Kansas Reflector.
The USDA letter specified that information to be collected for each SNAP applicant or recipient included name, Social Security number, date of birth, personal address and records to calculate the amount of SNAP benefits participants received over time. It was signed by Gina Brand, senior policy advisor for integrity at USDA’s Food, Nutrition and Consumer Services division.
The requested data would cover the time period from Jan. 1, 2020, to the present, the letter said.
DCF’s SNAP data is held by a third-party database administrator, Fidelity Information Services LLC. That company notified DCF on May 9 that a formal request for Kansas SNAP records had been made from USDA and that because of federal guidance, they were required to disclose that information.
“As such, FIS intends to fully cooperate with the USDA in facilitating its request for information, as required by applicable law and the guidance,” wrote Prashant Gupta, FIS senior vice president. He then asked for DCF’s written consent.
DCF stopped the process in a letter dated May 14, sent by Carla Whiteside Hicks, the DCF director of economic and employment services.
“Please be advised that we do not consent to your providing the USDA the requested information at this time,” Whiteside Hicks told FIS. “As you know, our obligation to maintain these records in confidence is paramount and may only be disclosed to the USDA for specific program-related reasons. At this time, we are unsure as to the reason for the USDA’s request. As such, we are unable to consent to your turning the information over.”
Whiteside Hicks also said DCF will be asking the USDA to contact DCF directly in the future. She asked FIS to turn over any information that they may have already provided to the USDA and to also provide DCF with any written communications the company has received from USDA.
LaRow said DCF is reviewing the request from USDA related to the personally identifiable data of Kansans.
“Security of Kansans’ personal information is paramount to the agency, and we are committed to maintaining confidentiality consistent with state and federal law,” she said.
