Wednesday, February 26, 2020

A Cozy Cottage Soup


Awoke to find snow! It is still winter so how about a nice warm soup? The name for this is a play on words. After the recipe find a quick hidden history of the “T Room” or as they call it in the UK, cottaging!




We keep this soup simple. A basic mix with tender juicy beef, onions, carrots, white beans, and spinach. Healthy and hardy. Plus easy on the diets!


Ingredients:
2 ½ lbs roast
2 yellow onions
5oz. fresh baby spinach
3 carrots
1 can great northern beans
32 oz. beef broth, no salt added


Directions:
Pre-heat the oven to 225 degrees and spray a Dutch oven. 



Do your cutting: rough chop the onions and trim the roast of big chunks of fat and cut into bite sized cubes.



Place the onions in the bottom of the pot and spread the beef on top. Sprinkle with salt & pepper, cover and let slow roast for 2 and a half to 3 hours. This lets the collagen break down in the meat.




Remove from oven. You will have plenty of cook beef, so take out about a third to save for other recipes. Bag and refrigerate or even freeze if you wish.





While that is roasting, cut the carrots and pull the stem off the spinach.


On stove top, add the carrots, beans, and the beef broth. Cover and let come up to a simmer.



Add the spinach by handfuls, stirring between each to wilt the greens into the soup.





Cover and let slow simmer for an hour to blend the flavors.
Taste and adjust any seasonings.
Serve with a crusty bread.


Just the thing for when mother nature surprises you with more winter!



socialslave

To satisfy and restore.
To nourish, support and maintain.
To gratify, spoil, comfort and please,
to nurture, assist, and sustain
..I cook!

Please buy slave's cookbook:

The Little Black Book of Indiscreet Recipes by Dan White http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00F315Y4I/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_vAT4sb0934RTM via @amazon





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A Pit Stop History of T-Rooms



The building of the very first “Public Lavatories”( or privies, bog houses, etc) brought an unexpected phenomenon, gay sex!
Back in Victorian times, “cottage” (small, cozy home) came to refer to a public toilet.

By the 1960s this use had become an exclusively gay slang term in the UK. Gay men in the United States, refer to these lavatories as “t-rooms”.(T = toilet)

Cottaging” refers to to anonymous sex between men in a public lavatory (a "cottage", "tea-room"), or cruising for sexual partners with the intention of having sex elsewhere.

One of the earliest public privies in London was the Lincoln's Inn bog house built in the late 17th century. It quickly became a popular molly (gay) cruising area, perhaps because of the law students who frequented it. The front-page editorial of The London Journal in 1726 exposed "the nocturnal Assemblies of great Numbers of the like vile Persons at Lincolns-Inn Bog-houses, where they make their Bargains, and then withdraw into some dark Corners to indorse, as they call it, but in plain English to commit Sodomy".
In 1728 one John Bennet was found guilty of attempted sodomy "in the Bog-House at Lincoln's-Inn".

Thus public latrines have been convenient for cruising for centuries. For example, Arnold of Verniolle in the early fourteenth century made some of his pick-ups in the portico connecting the dormitory and latrines of the convent of Pamiers and the baths of Ax-les-Thermes. In Amsterdam in the 1760s many sodomites were arrested in the public toilets that were built under the city's numerous bridges.




Urinals have acquired special cultural significance among gay men. Jean Genet, who lived as a prostitute cruising the toilets in the beggars' quarter near the harbor in Barcelona in the 1930's, remembers an incident when an outdoor urinal was condemned, a group of about thirty queens called the Carolinas dressed in mantillas and silk dresses; marched to the spot and placed a bouquet of red roses beside it." 




T Rooms were and are located in places heavily used by many people insuring the anonymous nature of such acts. Often glory holes are drilled in the walls between cubicles. 



Foot signals — tapping a foot, sliding a foot slightly under the divider between stalls, attracting the attention of the occupant of the next stall — are used to signify that one wishes to connect with the person in the next cubicle. 




To combat theses atrocities from happening authorities have reduced the height of or even removed doors from the cubicles of popular cottages, or extended the walls between the cubicles to the floor to prevent foot signaling.




Starting in the 60's, pin hole cameras were sometimes installed to trap the monsters for prosecution.

In the summer of 1962, the Mansfield, Ohio Police Department set up a sex sting by filming men having sex in a public restroom under the main square of the city. A cameraman hid in a closet and filmed the clandestine activities through a two-way mirror. The police filmed over a three-week period, and the resulting movie was used to obtain the convictions of over 38 local men on charges of sodomy.




All of the 38 men were convicted of sodomy.  They were publicly humiliated and found themselves ensnared by the state’s Ascherman Act, which ordered all felons deemed a danger to society to be institutionalized for a potentially indefinite period; all were required to serve the minimum sentence, even those judged by medical professionals to be “cured” prior to that time. The treatment involved a number of now-discredited methods, including electroshock and various other aversion therapy techniques, and drugs with known severe side effects. 

After their release few recovered from the trauma and many were ostracized from families and friends. Some committed suicide.  



Before the gay liberation movement, many, if not most, gay and bisexual men at the time were closeted and there were no public gay social groups for those under legal drinking age. As such, “T Rooms” were among the few places where men too young to get into gay bars could meet others whom they knew to be gay. 



Sexual acts in public rest rooms are outlawed by most jurisdictions. It is likely that the element of risk involved in “cruising the T-rooms” makes it an attractive activity to some.

Historically in the United Kingdom, public gay sex often resulted in a charge and conviction of gross indecency, an offense only pertaining to oral sexual acts committed by males.

Anal penetration was a separate and much more serious crime that came under the definition of buggery. Buggery was a capital offense between 1533 and 1861 under UK law, although it rarely resulted in a death sentence.

Importuning was an offer of sexual gratification between men, often for money. The Sexual Offenses Act 1967 permitted sex between consenting men over 21 years of age when conducted in private, but the act specifically excluded public lavatories from being "private".

The Sexual Offenses Act 2003 replaced this aspect with the offense of "Sexual activity in a public lavatory" which includes solo masturbation.

In many of the cases where people are brought to court for “cruising the T-Rooms”, the issue of entrapment arises. Since the offenses are public but often carried out behind closed doors, the police used undercover officers who would frequent toilets posing as homosexuals in an effort to entice other men to approach them for sex. These men would then be arrested for indecent assault.

Such practices were severely curtailed after a few court cases decided the police officer had consented to the contact if he had desired and required the defendant to touch him with sexual intent in order to have evidence of a crime.


While on a cross-country trip in 1957, Dr. Frank Kameny was arrested in San Francisco in a typical entrapment. A stranger approached and groped him at the urinal in the men's room of the bus terminal. Then plain clothes police arrested the victim. He was assured that if he served three years' probation, his criminal record would be expunged. That is IF: he did not fight the charges (also a typical legal lie of the day).
Upon learning of his San Francisco arrest, Kameny was brought in for questioning by the Civil Service Commission. He refused to answer anything about his sexual orientation. Kameny was fired soon afterward. In January 1958, he was barred from future employment by the federal government. To show how powerful that was, he was never again able to hold a paying job and he lived to 2011!

However Kameny's reaction and fighting spirit changed the course of history! He took his case to the Supreme Court. While they eventuly turned down his petition. It was a poivital point in our legal history. It the first time a civil rights case based on sexual orientation was presented before a U.S. court. His appeal is an uncompromising assertion of his rights and normality. It set his direction and work for the next 50 years!

Dr. Kameny not only led a frontal attack on previously unquestioned persecution of homosexual's by divisions of the federal government but revolutionized the homosexual movement itself. It would no longer be seeking assimilation and apologies for homosexuality. It would instead become a demand of being recognized as normal and an uncompromising campaign for full citizenship rights.

Out of his unjust arrest and dismissal, Dr. Frank Kameny became one of the most important leaders of the LGBT Civil-rights Movement. 



In the 1940s and 1950s, police surveillance was only the linchpin of a broader social system that punished people who were discovered to be gay. While the arrests themselves left some men in tears and others furious, almost every man taken into custody feared the possible extralegal consequences more than the legal process itself.

Above all, these men feared that their families or their employers would learn they were gay if word of their arrest reached them, as sometimes happened when the police or court officials contacted them or a newspaper published the man’s name. The courts might punish a man with a fine or 30 days in jail. It was nothing compared with the threat of losing a job, a career, or a family’s love and support.


While this is past history, lets look at the news from just 4 years ago.
A Los Angeles Superior Court judge ruled that the Long Beach Police Department discriminated against gay men by ensnaring them in a homophobic sex sting operation. Before that, it was the New York Police Department that was in hot water for similar discriminatory policing. And before that, it was police in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
Now, it’s the San Jose Police Department.

John Ferguson was hanging out at Columbus Park in San Jose in 2014 when a man approached him outside a restroom and asked, “How often do you come here?”
Some witty talk ensued before Ferguson followed the man into the empty bathroom. A few minutes later, they were joined by a third man, who unbuttoned his pants.

That’s when a fourth man stormed in, introducing himself as Officer Adam Jenkins of the SJPD. The man Ferguson had been flirting with then whipped out his badge and announced himself as Officer Samuel Marquardt.

And just like that, both Ferguson and the other man became eligible for the sex offender registry.

Ferguson was slapped with a citation, which prohibits hanging around public restrooms with the intention of “engaging in a lewd or lascivious act.” It’s classified as a sex crime, which usually means a $1,000 fine and/or community service, giving up one’s Fourth Amendment rights, and registering as a sex offender.

But here’s where the story takes a bit of twist.
Ferguson was one of 19 other gay men the SJPD slapped with the same citation over a 17-month period. 18 of those 19 citations were made by the same same officer, Samuel Marquardt.
According to state transparency records, Marquardt makes $251,186.46 a year in salary, overtime and benefits.

Ferguson spent nearly two years fighting the charges against him. Earlier this summer, a judge finally acquitted him, along with 12 others, then slammed SJPD for its blatantly homophobic practices:
By conducting themselves in a way that mimics ‘cruising’ behavior of the suspects targeted, the undercover officers demonstrated the intent to target this group to the exclusion of other perpetrators of lewd conduct. … Unpopular groups have too often been made to bear the brunt of discriminatory prosecution or selective enforcement. The unconstitutional selective enforcement of the law as seen in the cases before this court undermine the credibility of our legal system and risks eroding public confidence in our ability to achieve just results.

From what we can tell, SJPD has not released a statement about the matter; however, Officer Marquardt does remain employed with the department, collecting his quarter of a million dollars each year.

As for sex in the T-rooms: What are the odds that young men with their penises in their hands will think about sex?






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