HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — A historic road marker installed less than a year ago honoring a gay rights pioneer has been removed after a state senator at the Pennsylvania State History Agency raised concerns about the 30-year-old’s memories of an early had expressed sexual encounter with another boy.
The Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission had the marker honoring Richard Schlegel removed on June 3 from its location outside his former home, one block from the Capitol in downtown Harrisburg.
The decision came about six months after State Senator John DiSanto, R-Dauphin, wrote that Schlegel’s remarks in a lengthy biographical article were “reprehensible and would be considered criminal regardless of their sexual orientation.”
The commission action and DiSanto’s letter were first reported by Pennlive.com.
Schlegel, who died in 2006 at the age of 79, is a former State Highway Department official who founded the first LGBTQ group in the Harrisburg area. His unsuccessful efforts to have his federal dismissal overturned on grounds of his sexual identity ended when the US Supreme Court declined to take the case in 1970.
DiSanto said Tuesday he was alerted by a constituent to Schlegel’s comments in a 1993 personal story posted online that Schlegel provided to the Philadelphia LGBT History Project.
“I think it shows a story where he treated little boys and involved in pedophilia and sexual activity, including eventually helping to run a magazine with boy files and things like that,” DiSanto said.
The State History and Museum Commission sought other markers previously underrepresented individuals and groupsOffering financial support to markers when their issues relate to women, Hispanics, Latinos, and Asian Americans, or when they relate to Black and LGBTQ history outside of Philadelphia.
“He’s certainly an important figure in the Pennsylvania context,” said Barry Loveland, president of the history project at the Central Pennsylvania LGBT Center. He was the driving force behind the request to honor Schlegel. “There were very few leaders then, if you will — people willing to stick their heads out and get their names out there.”
Schlegel was fired from a civilian job with the Army Transportation Bureau in Hawaii in July 1961 after his sexual activities surfaced during an investigation to qualify for a top-secret clearance.
He appealed his dismissal for “immoral and indecent conduct” to the United States Court of Claims, which upheld the dismissal on the grounds that his sexual orientation in a government job would inevitably make the agency less effective.
“Every schoolboy knows that a homosexual act is immoral, lewd, lewd and lewd,” wrote a county court judge in an October 1969 verdict against him. “Adult people are even more aware that this is true.”
In the personal story told to scholar Marc Stein, now a history professor at San Francisco State University, Schlegel recalled how he was later hired in 1963 under the then-government. Bill Scranton to regulate a highway agency’s “tax and budget situation” and give the governor greater control over the department.
Two years later, he was forced to resign after mail inspectors alerted his superiors to mail he was receiving for the Janus Society, an educational, social and advocacy group founded by gay and lesbian activists in Philadelphia in the early 1960s.
The Marker named Schlegel a pioneering activist whose workplace discrimination case provided key arguments valuable for later judgments.
DiSanto’s December letter to the commission describes a segment of Stein’s interview in which Schlegel recalls a sexual experience he had with a nearby boy while living on a farm in Milroy, a small town about 20 miles east of the State College. Schlegel’s account suggests that he sexually touched the boy when he was 16 and the other boy was 11 or 12 years old.
Schlegel may not have anticipated that his interview with Stein would be available to everyone on the internet. He openly described his sexual history, recalled the controversies surrounding gay publications in which he starred, recounted his interactions with other figures in Philadelphia’s gay culture in the 1960s and 1970s, and shared other stories from his personal and professional life Life.
Schlegel described how some of his acquaintances photographed naked underage boys. In some cases, he says, he reprimanded them, but in other cases he described them to Stein with sympathy.
When Stein said some of the photos he saw in Gay International magazine were of “very young boys,” Schlegel agreed.
“Young, young, young,” he said to Stein. “Of course, back then, there wasn’t this national or international obsession with molesting children.”
A close friend of his was prosecuted for taking photographs of an underage boy at a home in rural Perry County in the late 1960s.
“The boy didn’t seem to object, but it made no difference,” Schlegel told Stein. “I mean, Bob just didn’t have any defense. He was sentenced.”
Stein said in an interview this week that he was appalled by the commission’s decision and expressed doubts as to whether the commission or DiSanto properly understood the legal and historical context in which Schlegel’s decisions and actions took place.
He said DiSanto’s allegation that Schlegel’s actions were criminal was made “without doing enough homework to really establish that.”
As for the Commission, he expressed doubts that their handling of the Schlegel case was consistent.
“So did they examine every single person at a historic site in Pennsylvania to make sure they never did anything wrong that they never expressed regret for?” Stein said.
Loveland said he and the Central Pennsylvania LGBT Center are considering the commission’s offer to submit another nomination. But he said they don’t know how to do that while ruling out Schlegel because his case provides the national importance to justify a marker.
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