LOL. I'm wondering what a Roy Cohn Award is?
Roy Cohn was Senator McCarthy's legal hit man--and completely gay, tolerated as long as he maligned janitors as communist subversives. He got the job Bobby Kennedy wanted. That was when Bobby was more right wing than Reagan ever was. He died--apparently of AIDS, disbarred, disgraced, but with lots of money in accounts under other people's names. His name liveth for evermore in the Roy Cohn award--along with, I suspose, the Larry Craig Memorial Glory Hole.
Mr. Beetstra : Yeah, I know all about the Cohn saga, but I wondered what nominates one to get it.
Hypocrisy above and beyond the call of any moral notion of duty. A good example is someone who supports a Republican anti-gay agenda who himself is gay all the while benefitting himself handsomely while injuring others sexually no different from him.
Same thing as the Foly Commendatory E-Mail Award and the Senator Craig Memorial Stall Wall.
So...that should be anybody who is gay and supports a Democrat anti-gay agenda too? Or is it just reserved for Republicans?
MJ: Sometimes I wonder where people with your mentality are generated; i wouldn't just ask"are you stupid?"since I suspect that perverse motives other than simple ignorance promote them. A sort of rhetorical slowwittedness.
Your query seems to indicate an overabundance of ignorance about nature of Gay rights. As a marginal group, who have by and large been denied an open and equal-uncloseted place in the manstream, like any other wasp-deviant group-when we only recently ceased to be criminals for who we are: we stand firmly in the left , except for those persons who place their gold before their integrity. Persons who would actually respect Dweebs like this ass who sided with the insane Fascists like McCarthy or licked the butts of any of that cadre of swine
who make it their business to disenfrachise people, are pretty much the same as Jews who were gas engineers for the Nasis.
Your question is mote because it's source is the hogbarn of right wing mental contortions. Good luck slopping around-don't come out smelling like a rose,
It is possible that a democrate would, in the odd moment, support what is percieved as an "antigay "
issue, but I hardluy think that he would ling be regarded as a democrate. Hopefully this country will catch up with the rest of civilisation and have a socialist democrate party, since the Democrates have more and more forgotten what their role is in the world. As we see in other socialist countries ,Gay riights are welcome.
DEAR M.S.
I'm old enough and was socially "connected" enough to have met Roy Cohn several times before his death from AIDS in the late 80's. He was the most homophobic gay man I ever met. Even as he was dying from AIDS he was in complete denial about his sexual orientation. If you perhaps explain to your younger listeners that the homophobic gay lawyer in Angels in America - the one who had pushed for the death penalty for the Rosenbergs, and who was later an "intimate" of the Regan White House. (In the movie - Angels in America the Cohn character calls the first lady (Nancy Regan) to get help obtaining the then experimental drug AZT as he's hospitalized for the last time.
That story is absolutely true. I knew his NYC internist quite well and know some of the details. The internist talked to the writers of Angels after Cohn's death and much of the material in Angels about Cohn was NOT fictional at all. It was based on the truth about what really happened!
I don't know how you tell your listeners that Cohn was the most evil, vile, homophobic gay man of the 20th Century but he was. I remember meeting him for the first time when I was about 21 and in pre-med. He started his "fatherly" routine with me, and within minutes had his hand on my crotch, under the table of course. I was instantly invited to go back to his place. I declined. He continued to hit on me - sparing no details about what it was he wanted sexually - every time I saw him for the next several years. Several of my friends joked that I was one of the few that ever said "NO" to RC and walked away unscathed. (My field was NOT law or political and hence he could do very little in terms of rejection/ vengeance.
While back then I was into older men - somehow I had the sense of extreme evil present in him and being around him was difficult. The thought of spending a night with him or having sex with him was so repulsive to me that I could do nothing other than politely decline over and over again. It is rumored even now that Cohn was partly responsible for Regan not even mentioning the word AIDS until well into his second term and then only after C Everette Koope forced him to do so. If you could find a better example of self-loathing by a gay man I would be amazed - and yet, sadly, he was able to influence the national policy on AIDS/HIV via his connection with Ronald and Nancy Regan.
Your younger listeners may not understand that because of the official denial from the White House on down, the research and provision of care for the infected was delayed by almost eight years. How many tens of thousands of gay men were killed by the virus being spread thru unsafe sex during that time, we'll never know. That was Cohn's final legacy to the gay community even as he lay dying from the disease himself.
ALMOST FORGOT...
Please explain to your listeners - so many of whom have no idea who Roy Cohn was or what he did to harm so many with HIV/AIDS via his being friends with and intimately involved with the REGAN administration.
The ROY COHN award is one of real shame and disloyalty and destruction to the LGBT community. It is NOTHING to be proud of. Very few can merit receiving this vile award. But those few who do must be able to match the level of malice and hatred originally demonstrated by Roy Cohn during his lifetime.
And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic
I don't think the indomitable Randy Shilts should be forgotten. Regarding the Reagan era inability to deal with HIV/AIDS Shilts' work should still be considered a standard.
You can get it through Amazon.
(Paperback)
by Randy Shilts (Author), William Greider (Introduction) "Tall sails scraped the deep purple night as rockets burst, flared, and flourished red, white, and blue over the stoic Statue of Liberty..." (more)
Key Phrases: core antibody testing, retrovirus lab, other gay leaders, San Francisco, New York, Bill Kraus (more...)
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