In 1982, Randy Shilts published his biography of Harvey Milk, entitled "The Mayor of Castro Street".
For those who don't know, Harvey Milk was the first open homosexual to be voted into public office in the state of California.
He was on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.
The biography contains a fair bit of background, not just about Harvey Milk, but about San Francisco's gay community more generally.
In its early years, San Francisco attracted large waves of mainly male migrants motivated by the promise of gold in California.
Boys will be boys, and out of necessity and selectivity, these early migrants tended to be a bit more accepting of homosexuality than the people back east.
The gays among them enjoyed more license, attracting more gays, many of whom abided by the handkerchief code.
As San Francisco grew from a backwater to a bustling city of some 50,000, its licentious attitudes led to gays migrating there just to be around more gays.
This reputation was so renowned that even Oscar Wilde talked about it:
The Spanish-American War saw thousands of young men come to call the city home, and many of these young men learned that they could make extra money escorting older men.
But the bustling gay scene wouldn't last.
In 1906, the earthquake destroyed 80% of the city, including most of the underground gay establishments.
It also attracted church leaders who ran clean-up campaigns that were followed by even more extreme efforts during Prohibition.
The campaigns against gay establishments and establishments that accepted them due to their 'looser morals' were coupled with private efforts to blackmail gay men.
Some navy men would dress up in their tightest uniforms and stake out Market Street, hoping to find gays to extort.
If that weren't enough, the "Lilly Laws" enforced by the police made things much worse.
One method the police used to detect homosexuals was to set up their best-looking men in the Market Street theater, a popular cruising spot.
And, well, just read this:
The gays who got away with living their lives were the lucky ones. Gay living in the city had been effectively snuffed out prior to World War II even though it had such a fruitful beginning.
But notice that I said prior to World War II.
Starting in 1916, the U.S. military started dismissing soldiers who were found to be homosexual.
Gay soldiers, officers, and navy men alike were given blue discharges (aka blue tickets) signifying that they were dishonorably discharged and everyone was to know it.
From the point of discharge, these men had the letter "H" stamped on all of their documents.
And I mean all their documents: if they went to the doctor, the bank, or any potential employers, everyone would know that these men were homosexuals.
World War II was the largest mass conscription event in American history, and it was the first time the military actively sought to purge its ranks of homosexuals.
Because San Francisco was the main Pacific theatre point of debarkation, it's also where these men were dismissed.
Tens of thousands of men from across the U.S. were discharged from the Pacific theatre and they suddenly found themselves taking up residence in San Francisco.
Because of the damage from the big letter "H" on all their documents, it wasn't feasible for most of them to leave.
The result was a community that had no choice but to get on, openly.
If everyone knew you were gay due to the big blue letter branded on everything about you, why act like you're anything else?
So America's largest gay community was born.
This meant gays didn't hide (as often) anymore in San Francisco. This fact also attracted people who didn't want to hide to the city.
What's more, the military labeling gays as gays gave rise to the first truly modern gay bars in America.
After all, why care about getting caught when you've already been found out?
These discharges were a major injustice and their scale remains unknown because the military hasn't owned up to it.
But they are how San Francisco became incredibly gay.
If you want to know more, the book is widely available online. Go give it a read!
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The White House just released a really good executive order on cleaning up America's streets, re-institutionalizing insane people, and ending open air drug abuse and the problems it creates.
Here's a quick overviewđź§µ
The first section is the one I'm most excited for. An alternative name for it could be "Bring Back The Asylums"
It instructs the administration to make it possible to involuntarily commit crazy people again
That crazy hobo pushing a cart full of urine bottles? He's going away!
The next section is one that you'll need to familiarize yourself with if you're interested in 'what happens next'.
This was a never achieved goal in Trump-I.
The idea is to compel cities to do what you want by withholding, barring, and giving discretionary funds for compliance.
What comes after myostatin inhibitors make everyone buff?
One new candidate is:
Safe, cheap, and easily-administered injections that locally remove fat. A new drug that just passed through phase 2 seems to do just thatđź§µ
The new drug is called CBL-514.
It has a counterpart on the market in the form of deoxycholic acid injections—brand name Kybella.
Kybella is FDA-approved, and it works: it helps people to get rid of their double chins. But there's a catch.
Kybella, unfortunately, is not all that safe, and though many patients swear by it, there are notable side effects.
This is predictable, since the way Kybella works is through cytolysis: causing cells to die by rupturing them, releasing their contents, causing inflammation.
Pseudonyms afforded the protection needed to write things that were controversial, to engender debate over things they didn't themselves believe in, and to encourage focus on ideas over reputations
Thread of their known pseudonymsđź§µ
Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay all wrote under the name Publius, after the Roman consul Publius Valerius Poplicola.
This shared authorship became known after Hamilton died, but the individual authors of the Federalist Papers Publius entries remain debated.
John Jay and John Stevens, Jr. shared the Americanus pseudonym when writing various Federalist essays.
One of my favorite papers in recent years included this diagram.
It shows the impact of controlling for three different types of variables: confounders, colliders, and mediators.
With confounders, control is good. With the others, you ruin your result by controlling.
If you have variables with measurement error, you can run into another problematic variable: the proxy.
Proxy variables can make all of these distortions much worse and much more difficult to deal with.
The paper makes this simple observation: statistical control requires causal justification. That's actually the title.
They gave several DAG-based examples. Consider this one: is edutainment a confounder or a mediator? Should you control for it, or would that bias your estimate?
It's so good to see more gene therapies getting worked on.
This one is particularly amazing because it's effectively a one-shot, permanent Exenatide—making humans produce a version of the compound in Gila monster venom like lifelong Ozempic!
In the picture I posted above, you can see the effects of having variants that increase the effect of the gene GLP1R.
This was relevant when I was discussing compositional effects of GLP-1RAs. As you can see, bodyfat *percentage* declines with higher natural GLP-1R agonism.
I went ahead and checked the effects of the same SNPs and an extended set of SNPs on the effects of GLP1R on colorectal cancer risk.
It seemed to reduce it (pic is an excerpt from one of my subscriber-only posts).