This Day In Gay Utah History November 26th

November 26

1901 Ogden Standard Examiner State News page 8 DAMAGES Nov 25 John Humphrey charged with a sheep stealing was acquitted by the jury. The case against John F Maxwell charged with a “Crime Against Nature” was dismissed. Both these defendants threaten suit against the prosecuting witnesses for slander

Jane Alexander & Gena Rowland

1978-ABC aired a lesbian themed movie, A Question of Love, about a custody battle for one of the women's children. Starred  Gena Rowland and Jane Alexander

1988  During the night Charles Van Dam who brought an accusation of sexual misconduct of Gordon Hinckley had an AIDS related stroke and lost his verbal communication skills.  Taken to Holy Cross Emergency room he was attended to by Dr. Kristen Reis.  He would die within 3 weeks

Saturday, November 26, 1988 FILLMORE JP PLACES GAG ORDER ON SLAYING OF A CEDAR CITY MAN  By Joyce Cutler and Brent Israelsen, Staff Writers Authorities are being extremely secretive about the beating death of a Cedar City man whose body was found Wednesday in a desolate area beside I-15 near Kanosh, Millard County. Michael Anthony Archuleta, 26, was arrested Friday afternoon, and Lance Conway Wood, 20, was arrested Friday morning at the Iron County Jail, the sheriff's office said in a prepared statement. Both men are in the Millard County Jail on capital homicide, aggravated assault, aggravated kidnapping and car theft charges. Though Fillmore Justice of the Peace Ron Hare ordered the entire criminal case sealed, the Millard County sheriff's office was allowed to release the names of the men charged in the slaying of Gordon Ray Church. Hare said he signed a gag order Friday afternoon prohibiting prosecutors and law enforcement officers from discussing the case. He said he has also ordered the criminal information sealed. The justice of the peace, however, would not say why he issued the secretive orders in a case that is usually open to the public. "I can't comment on that. I would be violating my own gag order." Deputy sheriffs, acting on an anonymous tip, early Wednesday found the body of Church, 28, Cedar City, about a half-mile from Exit 138 on I-15. Evidence at the scene and information from the source indicate the killing was at least partially sex-related, said Millard County Sheriff Ed Phillips. A tire iron and a car jack found at the scene near the body were believed used in the killing, officials said. An autopsy on Church, a theater arts major at Southern Utah State College, determined he died of massive head injuries. The two men, one of whom was described by Sheriff's Capt. Robert Dekker as possibly a transient from Utah County, were charged in the bludgeoning death, which officials said occurred between Monday and early Tuesday. Wood was arrested in Iron County Jail where he was being held for a parole violation. The hometowns of the defendants were not released. Millard County officials were criticized for their handling of the August 1985 Sharon Sant murder case, in which an SUSC coed was hacked to death. Charges against one of the men charged in the ax murder were dropped in exchange for his testimony. It was later determined he helped dismember the woman's body. His cohort was convicted of second-degree murder.

Neil Hoyt

1989 A Utah Stonewall Center committee meeting was held. In attendance was Neil Hoyt, Chuck Whyte, Ben Williams, Garth Chamberlain.  The Utah Stonewall Center was a project of the Gay and Lesbian Community Council of Utah.

Russ Lane

1989 Russ Lane, founder of Wasatch Affirmation, farewell was held at First Unitarian Church 1300 East. He was moving out of state. Duane Dawson was elected Chapter Director.

Paul Phillips &
Ron Romanovsky

1991 Gay folk singing dual Romanovsky and Phillipsperformed in Salt Lake City promoting their new album Be Political Not Polite.

• Tuesday I saw David Sharpton out and about at the Romanovski and Phillips concert. The creme `le creme of the Gay activists were there and I introduced Jeff Workman to David and all the old and new activists in the community. After the concert we went to Cafe Rude and there were standing room only. The place was packed. When I was about to leave David angrily hollered at me, "Ben

  

  David Sharpton

  Williams, don't you dare leave without coming over and speaking with me." We sure have been through a lot together. It is so hard for me to see David this way. It wounds my heart. But he was holding court at his end of the cafe so I knew he was in his element.  Ron Romanovsky gave me a kiss. [Journal of Ben Williams]

1993 A Nevada man has been bound over for trial in

Douglas Koehler

the slaying of Douglas C. Koehler, who was found shot to death last August near ParkWest ski resort. At a Tuesday hearing, 3rd Circuit Judge Michael Burton ordered David Nelson Thacker, 26, of Unionville, Nev., to appear before 3rdDistrict Judge Homer Wilkinson on Dec. 13 to be arraigned on a charge of murder.  During the first part of a preliminary hearing last month, Clint Crane testified that he and Thacker met Koehler at a bar on Aug. 22. The trio drank, played pool together and sniffed cocaine, Crane said.  After the bar closed, they drove to a condominium in Park City. Later, Thacker kicked Koehler out of the apartment and told Crane that Koehler had tried to kiss him.  Some time later, Crane said, Thacker grabbed Crane's .22-caliber revolver and they both drove toward ParkWest, where Koehler was staying. They spotted Koehler just 50 feet from his condominium and pulled up next to him. Thacker called Koehler over to the truck, pulled out a gun and shot him, Crane testified. (11/26/93  Page: D8 SLTribune)

1995- Sunday - Brian Bevan Zelenka died of AIDS age 34 He loved gardening and landscaping, giving special care and attention to his orchids. He was a funny, sensitive, and caring man, with an enthusiasm for life that he enjoyed sharing with others.

1995 Page: E1``Angels in America: Part I, Millennium Approaches,'' making

its Utah premiere Wednesday at Salt Lake Acting Company. byline: By Nancy Melich THE SALT LAKE TRIBUNE Tony Kushner’s ``Angels in America'' is opening this week in Salt Lake City.  ``Angels in America,'' the two-part, seven-hour epic about love, politics in the '80s, AIDS, Mormons, Jews and gay liberation, is the most heralded American play in decades --some say the century. `Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes'' is for mature audiences. Part I, ``Millennium Approaches,'' is 3 1/2 hours long with two intermissions.  Part II, ``Perestroika,'' which opens March 6, is of similar length.

2012 Gay activist using Utah as a political laboratory Jim Dabakis chairs the Utah Democratic Party in Salt Lake City, Utah. Aside from politics, he has a passion for collecting Russian art. By Jason Horowitz  — The pork chop in front of Jim Dabakis grew cold as he talked. And talked. And talked. “I have a passion to say stuff,” he explained.  There is, in his defense, a lot of stuff to say. Dabakis is a former Mormon who is gay and wealthy and also happens to be the chairman of the state Democratic Party in this reddest of red states. He believes that even meager gains among significant Mormon populations in swing mountain states such as Nevada and Colorado could have national ramifications in close elections. Utah is his laboratory. Since becoming chairman in summer 2011, Dabakis has doubled his party’s budget and begun building bridges into Mormon congregations across the state. He credited some of those new Mormon Democrats with reelecting Jim Matheson to the House over the Republican future-star-who-fizzled Mia Love. He launched the group LDS Dems, a national chapter that Mormon Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.) inaugurated at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte.  The state Senate candidate in Saturday’s special election discussed his modest upbringing as a gangly Greek son of a depressed Massachusetts shut-in, his conversion at 11 to Mormonism and his coming out as gay to one of the top apostles in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. After a description of his ill-fated missionary gambits at San Francisco Bay Area sporting events, the 58-year-old art dealer explained his decision decades ago to leave Brigham Young University and his adoptive faith for a life as a radio talk-show host, television personality, gay activist, gadfly, collector of Russian art and political player who made a temporary home and lasting fortune in St. Petersburg. But what Dabakis really wants to talk about are his efforts to make the Democratic Party — and himself — viable in a state where liberals are a peculiar people, where more than 70 percent of voters are Mormon, and where the state legislature, governorship and both U.S. Senate seats are Republican sinecures. “There is a pragmatic issue here,” Dabakis said, describing the traditional Democratic strategy of anti-Mormonism as wrongheaded. “As long as that continues, we’ll be the party that has no power,” he said. 

Many Republicans dismiss Dabakis as a talk-show loudmouth. But others admire his approach. “He doesn’t like me, but I kind of like him,” said Orrin G. Hatch, Utah’s senior Republican U.S. senator, who is also Mormon. “He has a tough job, but he has handled it better, in my opinion, than any Democratic chairman in my 36 years.” A key to Dabakis’s recruitment of plausible candidates is his relationship with powerbrokers in a church that many gay-rights activists have written off. In 2009, the Mormon Church aggressively and successfully supported Proposition 8, which called for banning gay marriage in California. The blowback was intense. “Prop. 8 was a catastrophe for them,” he said. The church may have come to the same conclusion. Dabakis describes receiving an unexpected call from the church to “get together” even though the church had rebuffed such entreaties from him for more than a decade. The talks bore fruit. In November 2011, church spokesman Michael Otterson spoke in favor of an anti-discrimination ordinance in Salt Lake’s city council. The church also took no visible part in opposing the legalization of same-sex marriage in Maine, Maryland and Washington. “I believe them when they say they simply have not gotten involved since Prop. 8,” Dabakis said. Otterson said the relationship with Dabakis and discussions on gay issues reflected that although the faith has its doctrinal standards, “we can still have mutual respect. We can still be inclusive.” Although Dabakis is no longer a Mormon, he says the church played a pivotal and positive role in his life. He and his three sisters grew up in Springfield, Mass., where his father worked as a machinist and his mother, afflicted with mental illness, rarely left her room. Some Mormon kids from a nearby church took notice of the 11-year-old’s lanky 5-foot-11 frame and invited him to play on the church team, which allowed one non-Mormon player on the floor at a time. All was well until a better non-Mormon player entered the picture and ate up Dabakis’s court time. “So the coach came to me and he said, ‘Well, Jimmy, there’s a way you can play,’ ” said Dabakis, who went home and asked his mother if he could be baptized to play on the team. “ ‘You know you’re Greek Orthodox,’ ” Dabakis recalled her saying before giving her consent. “ ‘Be home by 5, and don’t tell your father.’ ”  His father eventually found out but appreciated the strong foundation the church provided his son. In 1971, he enrolled in BYU and stopped in at church headquarters in Temple Square to share his concerns about his sexual orientation. “Does this have to do with boys or girls?” Dabakis recounted the receptionist asking. “Boys,” he answered, and he was led to the office of Mark Petersen, one of the church’s 12 apostles, who told him to study and do a mission and that things would work out. Dabakis asked whether he had to tell his teachers or bishops. “No, it’s between us,” Peterson encouragingly responded. “And if they have any problem with it, have them call me.”  Dabakis was sent on a mission to the San Francisco Bay Area. In an early sign of the panache he has brought to his professional and political career, Dabakis replaced the traditional door knocking with public relations stunts. Not all of them went well. At a Golden State Warriors basketball game, Dabakis arranged for a halftime raffle to win a manual instructing families how to spend time together and live more righteously. Directly beforehand, an appliance store held a raffle for a washing machine and refrigerator. The winner of the manual, who ran down the stands in “The Price Is Right” style, thought she, too, had won a major appliance. “What is this s---?” she said upon receiving the manual. “Cut the mike! Cut the mike!” Dabakis urged. Back at BYU, Dabakis increasingly felt out of place and left the school to pursue his dream of becoming a radio talk-show host in Salt Lake City, where he soon became a well-known personality. After several of his friends died from AIDS-related illnesses in the early 1980s, he started speaking out and gave the epidemic a face by bringing people with HIV onto the show. He and his partner, Stephen Justeson, began traveling through the Eastern Bloc and Russia, where Dabakis had been organizing tours for years. (“I didn’t know anything about Russia,” he acknowledged.) The couple collected art by then-relatively unknown painters such as Arkady Plastov and the Tkachev Brothers and moved to St. Petersburg in 1991. For three years, Dabakis taught business at the local university and invested in the newly opened markets. (“We ended up being one of the biggest sellers of urea.”) In 1994, he returned to Salt Lake City a rich man, invested in his old radio stations and sold them for a bundle after deregulation. That reputation as a successful businessman has burnished his credibility with the business-friendly church. But his credentials with liberals are also impeccable. He served as a founder and first chairman of the Pride Center and Equality Utah. He didn’t exactly deny the whispers in Washington that he turned down the top job at the gay lobbying powerhouse the Human Rights Campaign. “They got the right man,” he demurred.  These seemingly separate strains came together in the post-Proposition 8 glasnost and have formed the Mormon-outreach agenda that has been central to Dabakis’s campaigns for party chairman and now state senator. “As I’ve met with the church, I’ve said ‘Look, I don’t come with a clenched fist,’ ” Dabakis said, finally cutting into the pork chop. “ ‘A lot of the good in my life came from the training and the embrace and the wonder that you guys picked up this kid off the streets in Massachusetts.’ ”

Laura Santurri

2013 Bisexual college women in the U.S. are significantly more likely to deal with depression and consider suicide than their heterosexual peers, and they suffer from those problems more often than lesbian college students, according to a new study co-written by a Weber State University assistant professor."Clearly, the data shows lesbian women have poor mental health outcomes versus heterosexual women," said Laura Santurri, assistant professor of health promotion and human performance. But "bisexual women have even greater odds" of becoming depressed or suicidal. The study found that lesbian women were 4.4 times more likely to have attempted suicide than their heterosexual counterparts — but bisexual women had a 5.1 times greater chance of having tried to kill themselves. Salt Lake Tribune