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Yes, friends, it’s a world turned upside-down, via Towleroad: Jesse Helms estate tries to recast late senator as gay rights hero.
“Efforts to lift the ban were blocked by a 1993 Congressional amendment introduced by Senator Jesse Helms, Republican of North Carolina. Those who fought the law say Mr. Helms, who died in 2008, perpetuated decades of discrimination. But just as the ban has disappeared, the curators of Mr. Helms’s legacy are trying to touch up the relevant history. Some want him seen as a savior to those with AIDS and a defender of gay rights. Despite Mr. Helms’s storied opposition to ‘a homosexual lifestyle,’ the Jesse Helms Center in Wingate, N.C., is challenging the idea that he was a “homophobe” or obstructive in the AIDS fight.According to the center’s Web site, ‘It was Senator Helms who worked most tirelessly to protect the very principles of freedom that homosexuals are denied in many other nations.’ John Dodd, president of the Jesse Helms Center Foundation, recently disputed an editorial in the British newspaper The Guardian that vilified Mr. Helms for his role in the ban. Mr. Dodd argued that ‘two million Africans were alive’ because of the senator’s work fighting H.I.V.”
W.T.F. are they smoking? Helms fought needle exchanges and other programs to curb the spread of the disease; all of his homophobic bigotry was raised just last year when Elizabeth Dole tried to have an AIDS relief bill named after the deceased former senator.
Helms didn’t soften his stance about fighting AIDS at home among people who acquired the infection through homosexual activity.“I don’t have any idea on changing my views on that kind of activity, which is the primary cause of the doubling and redoubling of AIDS cases in the United States,” Helms said.
He also famously opposed Roberta Achtenberg’s nomination to be assistant secretary for fair housing at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, saying:
“she’s a damn lesbian. I’m not going to put a lesbian in a position like that. If you want to call me a bigot, fine.”
That hardly sounds like a gay rights champion.
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I would watch good old Jesse back in the day when he was a commentator on WRAL in Raleigh. I remember as a child listening to him rail on race on our black and white TV. I wondered why this man was so hateful. You didn’t have to be an adult to get the clear message that he didn’t like black folks encroaching on his lily-white world. They belonged in their place.
And those nasty homos…Jesse had no use for them, except when he hired “good fags” to run racist campaigns like Arthur Finkelstein, who worked with Jesse Helms on his Senate run against Charlotte Mayor Harvey Gantt in 1990. That was the campaign with the infamous “white hands commercial” by political consultant Alex Castellanos showing a close up pair of a flannel-shirtsleeved white hands crumpling a termination notice, with an ominous voiceover explaining that a well-deserved job went to someone else because of affirmative action. This appealed to the blue collar, textile working folks in the rural areas, and Helms won handily.
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Let the record reflect…this two page article in Q-Notes, the Carolinas LGBT print paper, when Helms died.
http://goqnotes.com/513/buryin…
While the truth needs to be toldI think it’s telling (and delightful) that the Helms estate feels the need to try to clean up the record, even by lying through their teeth.
If we’ve come to the point that being anti-gay is so distasteful that people feel that to honor the memory of someone like Helms they need to rewrite history, it shows how very much progress we’ve made.
Helms was an advocate for gay rights like Truman was an advocate for quality-of-life in Hiroshima.
It is a bit ironicBut as an out college student in the mid-80s I remember how truly vile Helms was. At the height of the AIDS crisis his call to put gays into concentration camps was a real and horrifying prospect. I had a plan for getting across the border into Canada in case the government announced a round up.
The terror Helms worked so hard to instigate has colored my attitude towards the government my entire adult life. When someone asks why I live in Seattle my response is because it’s a beautiful place with progressive values. But there’s a little voice inside that adds, “and it’s only two hours to the Canadian border…just in case.”
I don’t say this lightly: the attempt to whitewash Jesse Helms’ legacy is the equivalent of trying to portray Hitler as Archie Bunker. I rejoiced when he died.
He was certainly not a lovable old curmudgeon with some out-of-date views. The man wanted gay people dead and black people in their place — he did everything in his power to make it so. Go ahead and invoke Godwin’s Law, I don’t care. The man was evil and his only value is as an example of the damage an unscrupulous hatemonger can cause.
Condom on his houseHe was such an AIDS champion, I remember when activists put a rather HUGE condom on his home in 1991. :\
Ridiculous.
The fact that *his* estate is trying to clean him up for posterity . . . . . . should sound a tocsin to all those Republican Teabaggers in Congress. This paltry attempt to change history may muddy the waters somewhat, but future historians in search of the truth will easily find the facts, rather than the revisionism.
Perhaps these congresscritters ought to learn to clean up their acts while they are alive and still in office, rather than waiting for their estates to try to make them look better after they are dead. Judith Kaye, former Chief Justice of the New York Court of Appeals, concluded her dissent in the 2006 Hernandez v. Robles decision in New York, with the sentence “I am confident that future generations will look back on today’s decision as an unfortunate misstep.”
The “unfortunate missteps” taken by most of the Republicans in Congress on so many issues will be looked upon by future generations with disbelief and derision. Perhaps some might attempt to place these legislators into an “historical perspective” that many of us already see as belonging in the dustbin of history, much as we might admire Thomas Jefferson today while still deploring his ownership of slaves in geneal, or his sexual impositions on his slave Sally Hemings as him being a “product of his times.”
Clearly, if Jesse Helms’ estate is already trying to clean up his corpse’s corpus of evildoing while alive, maybe these Republicans shouldn’t wait until they, too, have passed on to their eternal damnation. Their times, if they are a product of them, have already long passed – they need to step aside for history to march on over their discredited ideas.
The primary effect of the revisionist history coming from the Helms estate will be for future members of the Texas Board of Education, when they establish standards for elementary and secondary school history texts at some future time when they want to cover up yet another shameful part of American history. We already know how they tend to change history down in Texas. Those revisionist folks are inspired by Josef Stalin, as well as Orwell’s Big Brother (We have always been at war with Eastasia . . .).
cue up the ACT UP video of Helm’s home with condom over it
The only thing Helms deserves is AN UNMARKED GRAVE.
A ghastly, disgusting, disreputable old man.But it’s nice to see that his curvivors are trying to clean the moral excrement off his tombstone, well aware that his name will live in infamy otherwise.
Write ‘emWhile three of my friends in NC were dying of AIDS, Jesse was busy fighting against their care and their rights.
Write his conservation center and tell them you don’t buy his “humanitarian efforts” for one minute.
info@jessehelmscenter.org
HorseshitLet’s see them try and spin the specific, Helms-initiated exclusion of Trans folks (and LGB Folks) from the ADA.
Not gonna happen so long as I live.