title: Wilhelm Steinitz

text: Steinitz's long lay-off caused some commentators to suggest that Zukertort, who had scored some notable tournament victories, should be regarded as the world chess champion. As an example, The "Chess Player's Chronicle" in July 1883 opined that 'Steinitz was, at one time, fairly entitled to the position of champion...He has just taken an inferior place to Zukertort, in a tournament, and for the time being Zukertort, in the opinion of some, becomes champion'.


title: Wilhelm Steinitz

text: Steinitz returned to serious competitive chess in the Vienna 1882 chess tournament, which has been described as the strongest chess tournament of all time at that point. Despite a shaky start he took equal first place with Szymon Winawer, ahead of James Mason, Zukertort, George Henry Mackenzie, Blackburne, Berthold Englisch, Paulsen and Mikhail Chigorin, and drew the play-off match.


title: Wilhelm Steinitz

text: Steinitz visited the US, mainly the Philadelphia area, from December 1882 to May 1883. He was given an enthusiastic reception. Steinitz played several exhibitions, many casual games, and a match for stakes of £50 with a wealthy amateur. He also won three more serious matches with two New World professionals, Alexander Sellman (Steinitz won both) and the Cuban champion Celso Golmayo Zúpide. The match with Golmayo was abandoned when Steinitz was leading (eight wins, one draw, one loss). His hosts even arranged a visit to New Orleans, where Paul Morphy lived.


title: Wilhelm Steinitz

text: Later in 1883, Steinitz took second place in the extremely strong London 1883 chess tournament behind Zukertort, who made a brilliant start, faded at the end but finished three points ahead. Steinitz finished 2½ points ahead of the third-placed competitor, Blackburne. Zukertort's victory again led some commentators to suggest that Zukertort should be regarded as the world chess champion, while others said the issue could only be resolved by a match between Steinitz and Zukertort.


title: Wilhelm Steinitz

text: In 1883, shortly after the London tournament, Steinitz decided to leave England and moved to New York City, where he lived for the rest of his life. This did not end the "Ink War": his enemies persuaded some of the American press to publish anti-Steinitz articles, and in 1885 Steinitz founded the "International Chess Magazine", which he edited until 1895. In his magazine he chronicled the lengthy negotiations for a match with Zukertort. He also managed to find supporters in other sections of the American press including "Turf, Field and Farm" and the St. Louis "Globe-Democrat", both of which reported Steinitz's offer to forgo all fees, expenses or share in the stake and make the match "a benefit performance, solely for Mr Zukertort's pecuniary profit".


title: Wilhelm Steinitz

text: Eventually it was agreed that in 1886 Steinitz and Zukertort would play a match in New York, St. Louis and New Orleans, and that the victor would be the player who first won 10 games. At Steinitz's insistence the contract said it would be "for the Championship of the World". After the five games played in New York, Zukertort led by 4–1, but in the end Steinitz won decisively by 12½–7½ (ten wins, five draws, five losses), becoming the first official world champion on March 29. The collapse by Zukertort, who won only one of the last 15 games, has been described as "perhaps the most thoroughgoing reversal of fortune in the history of world championship play."


title: Wilhelm Steinitz

text: Though not yet officially an American citizen, Steinitz wanted the United States flag to be placed next to him during the match. He became a US citizen on November 23, 1888, having resided for five years in New York, and changed his first name from Wilhelm to William.


title: Wilhelm Steinitz

text: In 1887 the American Chess Congress started work on drawing up regulations for the future conduct of world championship contests. Steinitz actively supported this endeavor, as he thought he was becoming too old to remain world champion – he wrote in his own magazine "I know I am not fit to be the champion, and I am not likely to bear that title for ever".


title: Wilhelm Steinitz

text: In 1888 the Havana Chess Club offered to sponsor a match between Steinitz and whomever he would select as a worthy opponent. Steinitz nominated the Russian Mikhail Chigorin, on the condition that the invitation should not be presented as a challenge from him. There is some doubt about whether this was intended to be a match for the world championship: both Steinitz's letters and the publicity material just before the match conspicuously avoided the phrase. The proposed match was to have a maximum of 20 games, and Steinitz had said that fixed-length matches were unsuitable for world championship contests because the first player to take the lead could then play for draws; and Steinitz was at the same time supporting the American Chess Congress's world championship project. Whatever the status of the match, it was played in Havana in January to February 1889, and won by Steinitz (ten wins, one draw, six losses).


title: Wilhelm Steinitz

text: The American Chess Congress's final proposal was that the winner of a tournament to be held in New York in 1889 should be regarded as world champion for the time being, but must be prepared to face a challenge from the second or third placed competitor within a month. Steinitz wrote that he would not play in the tournament and would not challenge the winner unless the second and third placed competitors failed to do so. The tournament was duly played, but the outcome was not quite as planned: Mikhail Chigorin and Max Weiss tied for first place; their play-off resulted in four draws, and Weiss then wanted to get back to his work for the Rothschild Bank, conceding the title to Chigorin.


title: Wilhelm Steinitz

text: However, the third prize-winner Isidor Gunsberg was prepared to play for the title. The match was played in New York in 1890 and ended in a 10½–8½ victory for Steinitz. The American Chess Congress's experiment was not repeated, and Steinitz's last three matches were private arrangements between the players.


title: Wilhelm Steinitz

text: In 1891 the Saint Petersburg Chess Society and the Havana Chess Club offered to organize another Steinitz–Chigorin match for the world championship. Steinitz played against Chigorin in Havana in 1892, and won narrowly (ten wins, five draws, eight losses).


title: Wilhelm Steinitz

text: German Dr. Siegbert Tarrasch turned down an opportunity in 1892 to challenge Steinitz in a world championship match, because of the demands of his medical practice.


title: Wilhelm Steinitz

text: Around this time Steinitz publicly spoke of retiring, but changed his mind when Emanuel Lasker, 32 years younger and comparatively untested at the top level, challenged him. Lasker had been earlier that year refused a non-title challenge by fellow German, Dr. Siegbert Tarrasch, who was at the time the world's most dominant tournament player.


title: Wilhelm Steinitz

text: Initially, Lasker wanted to play for $5,000 a side, and a match was agreed at stakes of $3,000 a side, but Steinitz agreed to a series of reductions when Lasker found it difficult to raise the money, and the final figure was $2,000 each, which was less than for some of Steinitz's earlier matches (the final combined stake of $4,000 would be worth about $114,000 at 2016 values). Although this was publicly praised as an act of sportsmanship on Steinitz's part, Steinitz may have desperately needed the money.


title: Wilhelm Steinitz

text: The match was played in 1894, at venues in New York, Philadelphia and Montreal, Canada. The 32-year age difference between the combatants was the largest in the history of world championship play, and remains so today. Steinitz had previously declared he would win without doubt, so it came as a shock when Lasker won the first game. Steinitz responded by winning the second, and was able to maintain the balance until the sixth. However, Lasker won all the games from the seventh to the 11th, and Steinitz asked for a one-week rest. When the match resumed, Steinitz looked in better shape and won the 13th and 14th games. Lasker struck back in the 15th and 16th, and Steinitz was unable to compensate for his losses in the middle of the match. Hence Lasker won with ten wins, five losses and four draws. Some commentators thought Steinitz's habit of playing "experimental" moves in serious competition was a major factor in his downfall.


title: Wilhelm Steinitz

text: After losing the title, Steinitz played in tournaments more frequently than he had previously. He won at New York City 1894, and was fifth at Hastings 1895 (winning the first brilliancy prize for his game with Curt von Bardeleben). At Saint Petersburg 1895, a super-strong four player, multi-round-robin event, with Lasker, Chigorin and Pillsbury, he took second place behind Lasker. Later his results began to decline: 6th in Nuremberg 1896, 5th in Cologne 1898, 10th in London 1899.


title: Wilhelm Steinitz

text: In early 1896, Steinitz defeated the Russian Emanuel Schiffers in a match (winning 6 games, drawing 1, losing 4).


title: Wilhelm Steinitz

text: In November, 1896 to January, 1897 Steinitz played a return match with Lasker in Moscow, but won only 2 games, drawing 5, and losing 10. This was the last world chess championship match for eleven years. Shortly after the match, Steinitz had a mental breakdown and was confined for 40 days in a Moscow sanatorium, where he played chess with the inmates.


title: Wilhelm Steinitz

text: There is a long-running debate among chess writers about whether Steinitz's reign as World Chess Champion began in 1866, when he beat Anderssen, or in 1886, when he beat Zukertort. In April 1894 the "British Chess Magazine" described Steinitz as holding "the chess championship of the world for 28 years". However, there is no evidence that he claimed the title for himself in 1866, although in the 1880s he claimed to have been the champion since his win over Anderssen. It has been suggested that Steinitz could not make such a claim while Paul Morphy was alive. Morphy had defeated Anderssen by a far wider margin, 8–3, in 1858, but retired from chess competition soon after he returned to the US in 1859, and died in 1884. The 1886 Steinitz vs. Zukertort match was the first that was explicitly described as being for the World Championship, but Howard Staunton and Paul Morphy had been unofficially described as "World Chess Champion" around the middle of the 19th century. In fact one of the organizers of the 1851 London International tournament had said the contest was for "the baton of the World's Chess Champion", and in mid-1840s Ludwig Bledow wrote a letter to Tassilo von Heydebrand und der Lasa suggesting they should organize a world championship tournament in Germany. Some commentators described Steinitz as "the champion" in the years following his 1872 match victory against Zukertort. In the late 1870s and early 1880s some regarded Steinitz as the champion and others supported Johannes Zukertort, and the 1886 match was not regarded as creating the title of World Champion, but as resolving conflicting claims to the title. On the other hand George Alcock MacDonnell hailed Joseph Blackburne as "World Champion" for his win in the 1881 Berlin Tournament, George Henry Mackenzie as having "won the Chess Championship of the World" in 1887, and Isidore Gunsberg as "among the champions of the world" following his win at "Bradford Place" in 1888. However, Steinitz regarded G.A. MacDonnell as "one of my bitterest and most untruthful persecutors".


title: Wilhelm Steinitz

text: Steinitz lived with Caroline Golder (born 1846) in the 1860s, and their only daughter Flora was born in 1866. Flora died in 1888 at the age of 21, and Caroline died in 1892. He married his second wife a few years later, and had two children by her. In 1897 he dedicated a pamphlet to the memory of his first wife and their daughter.


title: Wilhelm Steinitz

text: In February 1897, the "New York Times" prematurely reported his death in a New York mental asylum. Some authors claim that he contracted syphilis, which may have been a cause of the mental breakdowns he suffered in his last years. In the months prior to his death, he spent some time in institutions as a result of his failing mental health. His chess activities had not yielded any great financial rewards, and he died a pauper in the Manhattan State Hospital (Wards Island) on August 12, 1900, of a heart attack. Steinitz is buried in the Cemetery of the Evergreens in Brooklyn, New York. His second wife and their two young children were still alive at the time of his death.


title: Wilhelm Steinitz

text: The book of the Hastings 1895 chess tournament, written collectively by the players, described Steinitz as follows:


title: Wilhelm Steinitz

text: Mr. Steinitz stands high as a theoretician and as a writer; he has a powerful pen, and when he chooses can use expressive English. He evidently strives to be fair to friends and foes alike, but appears sometimes to fail to see that after all he is much like many others in this respect. Possessed of a fine intellect, and extremely fond of the game, he is apt to lose sight of all other considerations, people and business alike. Chess is his very life and soul, the one thing for which he lives.


title: Wilhelm Steinitz

text: Steinitz's play up to and including 1872 was similar to that of his contemporaries: sharp, aggressive, and full of sacrificial play. This was the style in which he became "world number one" by beating Adolf Anderssen in 1866 and confirmed his position by beating Zukertort in 1872 and winning the 1872 London International tournament (Zukertort had claimed the rank of number two by beating Anderssen in 1871).


title: Wilhelm Steinitz

text: In 1873, however, Steinitz's play suddenly changed, giving priority to what is now called the positional elements in chess: pawn structure, space, outposts for knights, the advantage of the two bishops, etc. Although Steinitz often accepted unnecessarily difficult defensive positions in order to demonstrate the superiority of his theories, he also showed that his methods could provide a platform for crushing attacks. Steinitz's successor as world champion, Emanuel Lasker, summed up the new style as: "In the beginning of the game ignore the search for combinations, abstain from violent moves, aim for small advantages, accumulate them, and only after having attained these ends search for the combination – and then with all the power of will and intellect, because then the combination must exist, however deeply hidden."


title: Wilhelm Steinitz

text: Although Steinitz's play changed abruptly, he said he had been thinking along such lines for some years: Some of the games which I saw Paulsen play during the London Congress of 1862 gave a still stronger start to the modification of my own opinions, which has since developed, and I began to recognize that Chess genius is not confined to the more or less deep and brilliant finishing strokes after the original balance of power and position has been overthrown, but that it also requires the exercise of still more extraordinary powers, though perhaps of a different kind to maintain that balance or respectively to disturb it at the proper time in one's own favor.


title: Wilhelm Steinitz

text: During his nine-year layoff from tournament play (1873–1882) and later in his career, Steinitz used his chess writings to present his theories – while in the UK he wrote for "The Field"; in 1885 after moving to New York he founded the "International Chess Magazine", of which he was the chief editor; and in 1889 he edited the book of the great New York 1889 tournament (won by Mikhail Chigorin and Max Weiss), in which he did not compete as the tournament was designed to produce his successor as World Champion. Many other writers found his new approach incomprehensible, boring or even cowardly; for example Adolf Anderssen said, "Kolisch is a highwayman and points the pistol at your breast. Steinitz is a pick-pocket, he steals a pawn and wins a game with it."


title: Wilhelm Steinitz

text: But when he contested the first World Championship match in 1886 against Johannes Zukertort, it became evident that Steinitz was playing on another level. Although Zukertort was at least Steinitz's equal in spectacular attacking play, Steinitz often outmaneuvered him fairly simply by the use of positional principles.


title: Wilhelm Steinitz

text: By the time of his match in 1890–91 against Gunsberg, some commentators showed an understanding of and appreciation for Steinitz's theories. Shortly before the 1894 match with Emanuel Lasker, even the "New York Times", which had earlier published attacks on his play and character, paid tribute to his playing record, the importance of his theories, and his sportsmanship in agreeing to the most difficult match of his career despite his previous intention of retiring.


title: Wilhelm Steinitz

text: By the end of his career, Steinitz was more highly esteemed as a theoretician than as a player. The comments about him in the book of the Hastings 1895 chess tournament focus on his theories and writings, and Emanuel Lasker was more explicit: "He was a thinker worthy of a seat in the halls of a University. A player, as the world believed he was, he was not; his studious temperament made that impossible; and thus he was conquered by a player ..."


title: Wilhelm Steinitz

text: As a result of his play and writings Steinitz, along with Paul Morphy, is considered by many chess commentators to be the founder of modern chess.


title: Wilhelm Steinitz

text: Lasker, who took the championship from Steinitz, wrote, "I who vanquished him must see to it that his great achievement, his theories should find justice, and I must avenge the wrongs he suffered."


title: Wilhelm Steinitz

text: Vladimir Kramnik emphasizes Steinitz's importance as a pioneer in the field of chess theory: "Steinitz was the first to realise that chess, despite being a complicated game, obeys some common principles. ... But as often happens the first time is just a try. ... I can't say he was the founder of a chess theory. He was an experimenter and pointed out that chess obeys laws that should be considered."


title: Wilhelm Steinitz

text: Steinitz was the main chess correspondent of "The Field" (in London) from 1873 to 1882, and used this to present his ideas about chess strategy. In 1885 he founded the "International Chess Magazine" in New York City and edited it until 1891. In addition to game commentaries and blow-by-blow accounts of the negotiations leading to his 1886 match with Johann Zukertort and of the American Chess Congress's world championship project, he wrote a long series of articles about Paul Morphy, who had died in 1884. He wrote the book of the 1889 New York tournament, in which he annotated all 432 of the games, and in 1889 he published a textbook, "The Modern Chess Instructor".


title: Wilhelm Steinitz

text: Steinitz also allegedly wrote a pamphlet entitled "Capital, Labor, and Charity" while confined at River Crest Sanitarium in New York during the final months of his life.


title: Wilhelm Steinitz

text: Statistical rating systems are unkind to Steinitz. "Warriors of the Mind" gives him a ranking of 47th, below several obscure Soviet grandmasters; Chessmetrics places him only 15th on its all-time list. Chessmetrics penalizes players who play infrequently; opportunities for competitive chess were infrequent in Steinitz's best years, and Steinitz had a few long absences from competitive play (1873–1876, 1876–1882, 1883–1886, 1886–1889). However, in 2005, Chessmetrics' author, Jeff Sonas, wrote an article which examined various ways of comparing the strength of "world number one" players, using data provided by Chessmetrics, and found that: Steinitz was further ahead of his contemporaries in the 1870s than Bobby Fischer was in his peak period (1970–1972); that Steinitz had the third-highest total number of years as the world's top player, behind Emanuel Lasker and Garry Kasparov; and that Steinitz placed 7th in a comparison of how long players were ranked in the world's top three. Between his victory over Anderssen (1866) and his loss to Emanuel Lasker (1894), Steinitz won all his "normal" matches, sometimes by wide margins; and his worst tournament performance in that 28-year period was third place in Paris (1867). (He also lost two handicap matches and a match by telegraph in 1890 against Mikhail Chigorin, where Chigorin was allowed to choose the openings in both games and won both.)


title: Wilhelm Steinitz

text: Initially Steinitz played in the all-out attacking style of contemporaries like Anderssen, and then changed to the positional style with which he dominated competitive chess in the 1870s and 1880s. Max Euwe wrote, "Steinitz aimed at positions with clear-cut features, to which his theory was best applicable." However, he retained his capacity for brilliant attacks right to the end of his career; for example, in the 1895 Hastings tournament (when he was 59), he beat von Bardeleben in a spectacular game in which in the closing stages Steinitz deliberately exposed all his pieces to attack simultaneously (except his king, of course). His most significant weaknesses were his habits of playing "experimental" moves and getting into unnecessarily difficult defensive positions in top-class competitive games.


title: Wilhelm Steinitz

text: "Traditional" accounts of Steinitz describe him as having a sharp tongue and violent temper, perhaps partly because of his short stature (barely five feet) and congenital lameness. He admitted that "Like the Duke of Parma, I always hold the sword in one hand and the olive branch in the other", and under severe provocation he could become abusive in published articles. He was aware of his own tendencies and said early in his career, "Nothing would induce me to take charge of a chess column ...Because I should be so fair in dispensing blame as well as praise that I should be sure to give offence and make enemies." When he embarked on chess journalism, his brutally frank review of Wormald's "The Chess Openings" in 1875 proved him right on both counts.


title: Wilhelm Steinitz

text: His personal correspondence, his own articles and some third-party articles, however, show that he had long and friendly relationships with many people and groups in the chess world, including Ignác Kolisch (one of his earliest sponsors), Mikhail Chigorin, Harry Nelson Pillsbury, Bernhard Horwitz, Amos Burn and the Cuban and Russian chess communities. He even co-operated with the American Chess Congress in its project to regulate future contests for the world title that he had earned.


title: Wilhelm Steinitz

text: Steinitz strove to be objective in his writings about chess competitions and games; for example, he attributed to sheer bad luck a poor tournament score by Henry Edward Bird, whom he considered no friend of his, and was generous in his praise of great play by even his bitter enemies. He could poke fun at some of his own rhetoric; for example: "I remarked that I would rather die in America than live in England. ... I added that I would rather lose a match in America than win one in England. But after having carefully considered the subject in all its bearings, I have come to the conclusion that I neither mean to die yet nor to lose the match." At a joint simultaneous display in Russia around the time of the 1895–96 Saint Petersburg tournament, Emanuel Lasker and Steinitz formed an impromptu comedy double act.


title: Wilhelm Steinitz

text: Although he had a strong sense of honour about repaying debts, Steinitz was poor at managing his finances: he let a competitor "poach" many of his clients in 1862–63, offered to play the 1886 world title match against Johannes Zukertort for free, and died in poverty in 1900, leaving his widow to survive by running a small shop.


title: Richard Marquand

text: Richard Alfred Marquand (22 September 1937 – 4 September 1987) was a British film and television director active in both US and UK film productions, best known for directing 1983's "Return of the Jedi". He also directed the critically acclaimed 1981 drama film "Eye of the Needle", the quiet Paris set romance "Until September", and the hit 1985 thriller "Jagged Edge".


title: Richard Marquand

text: Marquand was born in Llanishen, Cardiff, Wales. He was the son of Rachel E. (née Rees) and Hilary Marquand, an economist and Labour MP who served as Minister of Pensions and later Minister of Health under Prime Minister Clement Attlee. He is the younger brother of David Marquand, who also served as a Labour MP.


title: Richard Marquand

text: Marquand was educated at Emanuel School, London, the University of Aix-Marseille in France and King's College, Cambridge, where he read modern languages, and where one of his tutors was E. M. Forster. During National Service he studied Mandarin and was posted to Hong Kong where he also read the news on the English language Hong Kong Television.


title: Richard Marquand

text: By the late 1960s, Marquand had begun a career directing television documentaries for the BBC, where he worked on projects such as the 1972 series "Search for the Nile" and an edition of "One Pair of Eyes" (1968), about the novelist Margaret Drabble who had been a friend of his at Cambridge. He collaborated with the celebrated foreign correspondent James Cameron on a long-running series called "Cameron Country" for BBC television and also with John Pilger on a series of films for ITV. In 1979, Marquand incorporated many of his documentary techniques in his biographical television movie "Birth of the Beatles". He directed several films specifically for children including the 1977 Emmy winning "Big Henry and the Polka Dot Kid".


title: Richard Marquand

text: On the strength of his direction of the 1981 feature, "Eye of the Needle", Marquand was hired by writer-producer George Lucas to direct "Return of the Jedi". In his commentary track on the DVD, Lucas explains that Marquand "had done some great suspense films and was really good with actors. "Eye of the Needle" was the film I'd seen that he had done that impressed me the most, it was really nicely done and had a lot of energy and suspense."


title: Richard Marquand

text: Marquand subsequently directed the 1985 courtroom thriller "Jagged Edge", starring Jeff Bridges and Glenn Close.


title: Richard Marquand

text: In 1960, Marquand married screenwriter Josephine Elwyn-Jones, the daughter of Labour MP Elwyn Jones and author and illustrator Pearl Binder. They had two children, Hannah Rachel and James Elwyn, before they divorced in 1970. James Marquand is a film editor who has also worked as a director. In 1981, Marquand married fellow film director Carol Bell, with whom he had another two children, Sam Adair and Molly Joyce. Marquand was a fan of Liverpool Football Club.


title: Richard Marquand

text: According to a 2014 Wales Online interview with his son James, Marquand wrote a screenplay for "a Welsh western" in the late 1970s at the South Wales branch of Pinewood Studios. The screenplay told the story of a young orphan girl in Victorian Mid Wales who enlists two local men to help her wreak revenge on those who killed her father; Marquand used to tell the story to his children when they were on holiday at the family's cottage near Tregaron. Marquand reportedly pitched it to Hollywood producers who expressed interest in making it into a film; however, Marquand declined the offer because the producers insisted the story be relocated to the Rocky Mountains in the United States. In the interview, James Marquand expressed interest in adapting his father's screenplay into a film.


title: Richard Marquand

text: Marquand was driving his children home when he suffered a stroke brought on by an embolism. He reached the destination before collapsing, and died in hospital in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, on 4 September 1987, 18 days shy of his 50th birthday. His last film, "Hearts of Fire", starring Bob Dylan, was released posthumously.


title: East Timor genocide

text: The East Timor genocide refers to the "pacification campaigns" of state terrorism which were waged by the Indonesian New Order government during the Indonesian invasion and occupation of East Timor. The majority of sources consider the Indonesian killings in East Timor to constitute genocide, while other scholars disagree on certain aspects of the definition.


title: East Timor genocide

text: From the start of the invasion in August 1975, the TNI forces engaged in the wholesale massacre of Timorese civilians. At the start of the occupation, FRETILIN radio sent the following broadcast: "The Indonesian forces are killing indiscriminately. Women and children are being shot in the streets. We are all going to be killed ... This is an appeal for international help. Please do something to stop this invasion." One Timorese refugee told later of "rape [and] cold-blooded assassinations of women and children and Chinese shop owners". Dili's bishop at the time, Martinho da Costa Lopes, said later: "The soldiers who landed started killing everyone they could find. There were many dead bodies in the streets – all we could see were the soldiers killing, killing, killing." In one incident, a group of fifty men, women, and children – including Australian freelance reporter Roger East – were lined up on a cliff outside of Dili and shot, their bodies falling into the sea. Many such s took place in Dili, where onlookers were ordered to observe and count aloud as each person was executed. It is estimated that at least 2,000 Timorese were massacred in the first two days of the invasion in Dili alone. In addition to FRETILIN supporters, Chinese migrants were also singled out for execution; five hundred were killed in the first day alone.


title: East Timor genocide

text: The mass killings continued unabated as Indonesian forces advanced on the Fretilin-held mountain regions of East Timor. A Timorese guide for a senior Indonesian officer told former Australian consul to Portuguese Timor James Dunn that during the early months of the fighting TNI troops "killed most Timorese they encountered." In February 1976 after capturing the village of Aileu - to the south of Dili - and driving out the remaining Fretilin forces, Indonesian troops machine gunned most of the town's population, allegedly shooting everyone over the age of three. The young children who were spared were taken back to Dili in trucks. At the time Aileu fell to Indonesian forces, the population was around 5,000; by the time Indonesian relief workers visited the village in September 1976 only 1,000 remained. In June 1976, TNI troops badly battered by a Fretilin attack exacted retribution against a large refugee camp housing 5–6,000 Timorese at Lamaknan near the West Timor border. After setting several houses on fire, Indonesian soldiers massacred as many as 4,000 men, women and children.


title: East Timor genocide

text: In March 1977 ex-Australian consul James Dunn published a report detailing charges that since December 1975 Indonesian forces had killed between 50,000 and 100,000 civilians in East Timor. This is consistent with a statement made on 13 February 1976 by UDT leader Lopez da Cruz that 60,000 Timorese had been killed during the previous six months of civil war, suggesting a death toll of at least 55,000 in the first two months of the invasion. A delegation of Indonesian relief workers agreed with this statistic. A late 1976 report by the Catholic Church also estimated the death toll at between 60,000 and 100,000. These figures were also corroborated by those in the Indonesian government itself. In an interview on 5 April 1977 with the "Sydney Morning Herald", Indonesian Foreign Minister Adam Malik said the number of dead was "50,000 people or perhaps 80,000".


title: East Timor genocide

text: The Indonesian government presented its annexation of East Timor as a matter of anticolonial unity. A 1977 booklet from the Indonesian Department of Foreign Affairs, entitled "Decolonization in East Timor", paid tribute to the "sacred right of self-determination" and recognised APODETI as the true representatives of the East Timorese majority. It claimed that FRETILIN's popularity was the result of a "policy of threats, blackmail and terror". Later, Indonesian Foreign Minister Ali Alatas reiterated this position in his 2006 memoir "The Pebble in the Shoe: The Diplomatic Struggle for East Timor". The island's original division into east and west, Indonesia argued after the invasion, was "the result of colonial oppression" enforced by the Portuguese and Dutch imperial powers.


title: East Timor genocide

text: Thus, according to the Indonesian government, its annexation of the 27th province was merely another step in the unification of the archipelago which had begun in the 1940s.


title: East Timor genocide

text: As a result of the destruction of food crops, many civilians were forced to leave the hills and surrender to the TNI. Often, when surviving villagers came down to lower-lying regions to surrender, the military would execute them. Those who were not killed outright by TNI troops were sent to receiving centers which were prepared in advance. These camps were located in close proximity to local military bases where Indonesian forces "screened" the population in order to single out members of the resistance, often with the aid of Timorese collaborators. In these transit camps, the surrendered civilians were registered and interrogated. Those who were suspected of being members of the resistance were detained and killed.


title: East Timor genocide

text: These centers were often constructed of thatch huts with no toilets. Additionally, the Indonesian military barred the Red Cross from distributing humanitarian aid and no medical care was provided to the detainees. As a result, many of the Timorese - weakened by starvation and surviving on small rations given by their captors - died of malnutrition, cholera, diarrhea and tuberculosis. By late 1979, between 300,000 and 370,000 Timorese had passed through these camps. After a period of three months, the detainees were resettled in "strategic hamlets" where they were imprisoned and subjected to enforced starvation. Those in the camps were prevented from traveling and cultivating farmland and were subjected to a curfew. The UN truth commission report confirmed the Indonesian military's use of enforced starvation as a weapon to exterminate the East Timorese civilian population, and that large numbers of people were "positively denied access to food and its sources". The report cited testimony from individuals who were denied food, and detailed destruction of crops and livestock by Indonesian soldiers. It concluded that this policy of deliberate starvation resulted in the deaths of 84,200 to 183,000 Timorese. One church worker reported five hundred East Timorese dying of starvation every month in one district.


title: East Timor genocide

text: World Vision Indonesia visited East Timor in October 1978 and claimed that 70,000 East Timorese were at risk of starvation. An envoy from the International Committee of the Red Cross reported in 1979 that 80 percent of one camp's population was malnourished, in a situation that was "as bad as Biafra". The ICRC warned that "tens of thousands" were at risk of starvation. Indonesia announced that it was working through the government-run Indonesian Red Cross to alleviate the crisis, but the NGO Action for World Development charged that organisation with selling donated aid supplies.


title: East Timor genocide

text: In 1981, the Indonesian military launched "Operasi Keamanan" (Operation Security), which some have named the "fence of legs" program. During this operation, Indonesian forces conscripted 50,000 to 80,000 Timorese men and boys to march through the mountains ahead of advancing TNI troops as human shields to foreclose a FRETILIN counterattack. The objective was to sweep the guerillas into the central part of the region where they could be eradicated. Many of those conscripted into the "fence of legs" died of starvation, exhaustion or were shot by Indonesian forces for allowing guerillas to slip through. As the "fence" converged on villages, Indonesian forces massacred an unknown number of civilians. At least 400 villagers were massacred in Lacluta by Battalion 744 of the Indonesian Army in September 1981. An eyewitness who testified before the Australian Senate stated that soldiers deliberately killed small children by smashing their heads against a rock. The operation failed to crush the resistance, and popular resentment toward the occupation grew stronger than ever. As FRETILIN troops in the mountains continued their sporadic attacks, Indonesian forces carried out numerous operations to destroy them over the next ten years. In the cities and villages, meanwhile, a non-violent resistance movement began to take shape.


title: East Timor genocide

text: The failure of successive Indonesian counterinsurgency campaigns led the commander of the Dili-based Sub regional Military Resort Command, Colonel Purwanto to initiate peace talks with FRETILIN commander Xanana Gusmão in a FRETILIN-controlled area in March 1983. When Xanana sought to invoke Portugal and the UN in the negotiations, ABRI Commander Benny Moerdani broke the ceasefire by announcing a new counterinsurgency offensive called "Operational Clean-Sweep" in August 1983, declaring, "This time no fooling around. This time we are going to hit them without mercy."


title: East Timor genocide

text: The breakdown of the ceasefire agreement was followed by a renewed wave of massacres, summary executions and "disappearances" at the hands of Indonesian forces. In August 1983, 200 people were burned alive in the village of Creras, with 500 others killed at a nearby river. Between August and December 1983, Amnesty International documented the arrests and "disappearances" of over 600 people in the capital city alone. Relatives were told by Indonesian forces that the "disappeared" were sent to Bali.


title: East Timor genocide

text: Those suspected of opposing integration were often arrested and tortured. In 1983 Amnesty International published an Indonesian manual it had received from East Timor instructing military personnel on how to inflict physical and mental anguish, and cautioning troops to "Avoid taking photographs showing torture (of someone being given electric shocks, stripped naked and so on)". In his 1997 memoir "East Timor's Unfinished Struggle: Inside the Timorese Resistance", Constâncio Pinto describes being tortured by Indonesian soldiers: "With each question, I would get two or three punches in the face.


title: East Timor genocide

text: When someone punches you so much and so hard, it feels as if your face is broken. People hit me on my back and on my sides with their hands and then kicked me... [In another location] they psychologically tortured me; they didn't hit me, but they made strong threats to kill me.


title: East Timor genocide

text: They even put a gun on the table." In Michele Turner's book "Telling East Timor: Personal Testimonies 1942–1992", a woman named Fátima describes watching torture take place in a Dili prison: "They make people sit on a chair with the front of the chair on their own toes. It is mad, yes. The soldiers urinate in the food then mix it up for the person to eat. They use electric shock and they use an electric machine..."


title: East Timor genocide

text: Indonesian military abuses against women in East Timor were numerous and well-documented. In addition to suffering arbitrary detainment, torture, and extrajudicial execution, women faced rape and sexual abuse—sometimes for the crime of being related to an independence activist. The scope of the problem is difficult to ascertain, owing to the intense military control imposed during the occupation, compounded by the shame felt by victims.


title: East Timor genocide

text: In a 1995 report on violence against women in Indonesia and East Timor, Amnesty International USA wrote: "Women are reluctant to pass on information to non-governmental organizations about rape and sexual abuse, let alone to report violations to the military or police authorities."


title: East Timor genocide

text: Other forms of violence against women took the form of harassment, intimidation, and forced marriage. The Amnesty report cites the case of a woman forced to live with a commander in Baucau, then harassed daily by troops after her release. Such "marriages" took place regularly during the occupation. Women were also encouraged to accept sterilisation procedures, and some were pressured to take the contraceptive Depo Provera, sometimes without full knowledge of its effects.


title: East Timor genocide

text: In 1999 researcher Rebecca Winters released the book "Buibere: Voice of East Timorese Women", which chronicles many personal stories of violence and abuse dating to the earliest days of the occupation. One woman tells of being interrogated while stripped half-naked, tortured, molested, and threatened with death. Another describes being chained at the hands and feet, raped repeatedly, and interrogated for weeks. A woman who had prepared food for FRETILIN guerrillas was arrested, burned with cigarettes, tortured with electricity, and forced to walk naked past a row of soldiers into a tank filled with urine and feces.


title: East Timor genocide

text: During a memorial mass on 12 November 1991 for a pro-independence youth shot by Indonesian troops, demonstrators among the 2,500-strong crowd unfurled the Fretlin flag and banners with pro-independence slogans, and chanted boisterously but peacefully. Following a brief confrontation between Indonesian troops and protesters, 200 Indonesian soldiers opened fire on the crowd killing at least 250 Timorese.


title: East Timor genocide

text: The testimonies of foreigners at the cemetery were quickly reported to international news organisations, and video footage of the massacre was widely broadcast internationally causing outrage. In response to the massacre, activists around the world organised in solidarity with the East Timorese, and a new urgency was brought to calls for self-determination. TAPOL, a British organisation formed in 1973 to advocate for democracy in Indonesia, increased its work around East Timor. In the United States, the East Timor Action Network (now the East Timor and Indonesia Action Network) was founded and soon had chapters in ten cities around the country. Other solidarity groups appeared in Portugal, Australia, Japan, Germany, Ireland, The Netherlands, Malaysia and Brazil.


title: East Timor genocide

text: Coverage of the massacre was a vivid example of how growth of new media in Indonesia was making it increasingly difficult for the "New Order" to control information flow in and out of Indonesia, and that in the post-Cold War 1990s, the government was coming under increasing international scrutiny. A number of pro-democracy student groups and their magazines began to openly and critically discuss not just East Timor, but also the "New Order" and the broader history and future of Indonesia.


title: East Timor genocide

text: Sharp condemnation of the military came not just from the international community, but from within parts of the Indonesian elite.


title: East Timor genocide

text: The massacre ended the governments 1989 opening of the territory and a new period of repression began. Warouw was removed from his position and his more accommodating approach to Timorese resistance rebuked by his superiors. Suspected Fretilin sympathisers were arrested, human rights abuses rose, and the ban on foreign journalists was reimposed.


title: East Timor genocide

text: Hatred intensified amongst Timorese of the Indonesian military presence. Major General Prabowo's, "Kopassus" Group 3 trained militias gangs dressed in black hoods to crush the remaining resistance.


title: East Timor genocide

text: Precise estimates of the death toll are difficult to determine. The 2005 report of the UN's Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation in East Timor (CAVR) reports an estimated minimum number of conflict-related deaths of 102,800 (+/- 12,000). Of these, the report says that approximately 18,600 (+/-1,000) were either killed or disappeared, and that approximately 84,000 (+/-11,000) died from hunger or illness in excess of what would have been expected due to peacetime mortality. These figures represent a minimum conservative estimate that CAVR says is its scientifically based principal finding. The report did not provide an upper bound, however, CAVR speculated that the total number of deaths due to conflict-related hunger and illness could have been as high as 183,000. The truth commission held Indonesian forces responsible for about 70% of the violent killings.


title: East Timor genocide

text: Researcher Ben Kiernan says that "a toll of 150,000 is likely close to the truth," although one can throw out an estimate of 200,000 or higher. The Center for Defense Information also estimated a total close to 150,000. A 1974 Catholic church estimate of the population of East Timor was 688,711 people; in 1982 the church reported only 425,000. This led to an estimate of 200,000 people killed during the occupation, which was widely reported around the world. Other sources such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch also support an estimate of over 200,000 killed.


title: East Timor genocide

text: According to specialist Gabriel Defert on the basis of statistical data available from the Portuguese and Indonesian authorities, and from the Catholic Church, between December 1975 and December 1981, approximately 308,000 Timorese lost their lives; this constituted about 44% of the pre-invasion population. Similarly Indonesian Professor George Aditjondro, formerly of Salatiga University in Java, concluded from his study of Indonesian Army data that in fact 300,000 Timorese had been killed in the early years of the occupation.


title: East Timor genocide

text: Robert Cribb of the Australian National University argues that the toll was significantly exaggerated. He argues that the 1980 census that counted 555,350 Timorese, although "the most reliable source of all," was probably a "minimum" rather than a maximum estimate for the total population. "It is worth recalling that hundreds of thousands of East Timorese disappeared during the violence of September 1999, only to reappear later," he writes. The 1980 census becomes more improbable in the face of the 1987 census that counted 657,411 Timorese – this would require a growth rate of 2.5% per year, nearly identical to the very high growth rate in East Timor from 1970 to 1975, and a highly unlikely one given the conditions of the brutal occupation, including Indonesian efforts to discourage reproduction. Noting the relative lack of personal accounts of atrocities or of traumatised Indonesian soldiers, he further adds that East Timor "does not appear—on the basis of news reports and academic accounts—to be a society traumatized by mass death...the circumstance leading up to the Dili massacre of 1991...indicate a society which retained its vigor and indignation in a way which would probably not have been possible if it had been treated as Cambodia was treated under Pol Pot." Even Indonesian military strategy was based on winning the "hearts and minds" of the population, a fact that does not support charges of mass killing.


title: East Timor genocide

text: Kiernan, starting from a base population of 700,000 Timorese in 1975 (based on the 1974 Catholic Church census) calculated an expected 1980 population of 735,000 Timorese (assuming a growth rate of only 1% per year as a result of the occupation). Accepting the 1980 count that Cribb regards as at least 10% (55,000) too low, Kiernan concluded that as many as 180,000 may have died in the war. Cribb argued that the 3% growth rate suggested by the 1974 census was too high, citing the fact that the church had previously postulated a growth rate of 1.8%, which would have produced a figure in line with the Portuguese population estimate of 635,000 for 1974.


title: East Timor genocide

text: Although Cribb maintained that the Portuguese census was almost certainly an underestimate, he believed it to be more likely correct than the church census, due to the fact that any church attempt to extrapolate the size of the total population "must be seen in light of its incomplete access to society" (less than half of Timorese were Catholic). Assuming a growth rate in line with the other nations of South East Asia, then, would yield a more accurate figure of 680,000 for 1975, and an expected 1980 population of slightly over 775,000 (without accounting for the decline in the birth rate resulting from the Indonesian occupation). The deficit remaining would be almost exactly 200,000. According to Cribb, Indonesian policies restricted the birth rate by up to 50% or more, thus around 45,000 of these were not born rather than killed; another 55,000 were "missing" as a result of the Timorese evading the Indonesian authorities who conducted the 1980 census. A variety of factors—the exodus of tens of thousands from their homes to escape FRETILIN in 1974–5; the deaths of thousands in the civil war; the deaths of combatants during the occupation; killings by FRETILIN; and natural disasters—diminish further still the civilian toll attributable to Indonesian forces during this time. Considering all this data, Cribb argues for a much lower toll of 100,000 or less, with an absolute minimum of 60,000, and a mere tenth of the civilian population dying unnaturally, for the years 1975–80.


title: East Timor genocide

text: Kiernan responded, however, by asserting that the influx of migrant workers during the occupation and the increase in the population growth rate typical of a mortality crisis justifies accepting the 1980 census as valid despite the 1987 estimate, and that the 1974 church census—though a "possible maximum"—cannot be discounted because the church's lack of access to society might well have resulted in an undercount. He concluded that at least 116,000 combatants and civilians were killed by all sides or died "unnatural" deaths from 1975 to 1980 (if true, this would yield the result that about 15% of the civilian population of East Timor was killed from 1975 to 1980). F. Hiorth separately estimated that 13% (95,000 out of an expected 730,000 when accounting for the reduction in birth rates) of the civilian population died during this period. Kiernan believes that the deficit was most probably around 145,000 when accounting for the reduction in birth rates, or 20% of East Timor's population. The mid-value of the UN report is 146,000 deaths; R.J. Rummel, an analyst of political killings, estimates 150,000.


title: East Timor genocide

text: Many observers have called the Indonesian military action in East Timor an example of genocide. Oxford held an academic consensus calling the event genocide and Yale University teaches it as part of their "Genocide Studies" program. In a study of the word's legal meaning and applicability to the occupation of East Timor, legal scholar Ben Saul concludes that because no group recognized under international law was targeted by the Indonesian authorities, a charge of genocide cannot be applied.


title: East Timor genocide

text: However, he also notes: "The conflict in East Timor most accurately qualifies as genocide against a ‘political group’, or alternatively as ‘cultural genocide’, yet neither of these concepts are explicitly recognised in international law." The occupation has been compared to the killings of the Khmer Rouge, the Yugoslav wars, and the Rwandan genocide.


title: East Timor genocide

text: Accurate numbers of Indonesian casualties are well-documented. The complete names of around 2,300 Indonesian soldiers and pro-Indonesian militias who died in action as well as from illness and accidents during the entire occupation is engraved into the Seroja Monument, located in TNI Headquarters in Cilangkap, East Jakarta.


title: Amarna letters

text: The Amarna letters (; sometimes referred to as the Amarna correspondence or Amarna tablets, and cited with the abbreviation EA, for "El Amarna") are an archive, written on clay tablets, primarily consisting of diplomatic correspondence between the Egyptian administration and its representatives in Canaan and Amurru, or neighboring kingdom leaders, during the New Kingdom, spanning a period of no more than thirty years between c. 1360–1332 BC (see here for dates). The letters were found in Upper Egypt at el-Amarna, the modern name for the ancient Egyptian capital of "Akhetaten", founded by pharaoh Akhenaten (1350s–1330s BC) during the Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt. The Amarna letters are unusual in Egyptological research, because they are written not in the language of ancient Egypt, but in cuneiform, the writing system of ancient Mesopotamia. Most are in a variety of Akkadian sometimes characterised as a mixed language, Canaanite-Akkadian; one especially long letter—abbreviated EA 24—was written in a late dialect of Hurrian, and is the longest contiguous text known to survive in that language.


title: Amarna letters

text: The known tablets total 382, of which 358 have been published by the Norwegian Assyriologist Jørgen Alexander Knudtzon in his work, "Die El-Amarna-Tafeln", which came out in two volumes (1907 and 1915) and remains the standard edition to this day. The texts of the remaining 24 complete or fragmentary tablets excavated since Knudtzon have also been made available.


title: Amarna letters

text: The Amarna letters are of great significance for biblical studies as well as Semitic linguistics because they shed light on the culture and language of the Canaanite peoples in this time period. Though most are written in Akkadian, the Akkadian of the letters is heavily colored by the mother tongue of their writers, who probably spoke an early form of Proto-Canaanite, the language(s) which would later evolve into the daughter languages of Hebrew and Phoenician. These "Canaanisms" provide valuable insights into the proto-stage of those languages several centuries prior to their first actual manifestation.


title: Amarna letters

text: These letters, comprising cuneiform tablets written primarily in Akkadian – the regional language of diplomacy for this period – were first discovered around 1887 by local Egyptians who secretly dug most of them from the ruined city of Amarna, and sold them in the antiquities market. They had originally been stored in an ancient building that archaeologists have since called the Bureau of Correspondence of Pharaoh. Once the location where they were found was determined, the ruins were explored for more. The first archaeologist who successfully recovered more tablets was Flinders Petrie, who in 1891 and 1892 uncovered 21 fragments. Émile Chassinat, then director of the French Institute for Oriental Archaeology in Cairo, acquired two more tablets in 1903. Since Knudtzon's edition, some 24 more tablets, or fragments, have been found, either in Egypt, or identified in the collections of various museums.


title: Amarna letters

text: The initial group of letters recovered by local Egyptians have been scattered among museums in Germany, England, Egypt, France, Russia, and the United States. Either 202 or 203 tablets are at the Vorderasiatisches Museum in Berlin; 99 are at the British Museum in London; 49 or 50 are at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo; 7 at the Louvre in Paris; 3 at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow; and 1 in the collection of the Oriental Institute in Chicago. A few tablets are at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and Royal Museum of Art and History in Brussels.


title: Amarna letters

text: The archive contains a wealth of information about cultures, kingdoms, events and individuals in a period from which few written sources survive. It includes correspondence from Akhenaten's reign (Akhenaten who was also titled Amenhotep IV), as well as his predecessor Amenhotep III's reign. The tablets consist of over 300 diplomatic letters; the remainder comprise miscellaneous literary and educational materials. These tablets shed much light on Egyptian relations with Babylonia, Assyria, Syria, Canaan, and Alashiya (Cyprus) as well as relations with the Mitanni, and the Hittites. The letters have been important in establishing both the history and the chronology of the period. Letters from the Babylonian king, Kadashman-Enlil I, anchor the timeframe of Akhenaten's reign to the mid-14th century BC. They also contain the first mention of a Near Eastern group known as the "Habiru", whose possible connection with the Hebrews—due to the similarity of the words and their geographic location—remains debated. Other rulers involved in the letters include Tushratta of Mitanni, Lib'ayu of Shechem, Abdi-Heba of Jerusalem, and the quarrelsome king, Rib-Hadda, of Byblos, who, in over 58 letters, continuously pleads for Egyptian military help. Specifically, the letters include requests for military help in the north against Hittite invaders, and in the south to fight against the Habiru.


title: Amarna letters

text: Early in his reign, Akhenaten, the pharaoh of Egypt, had conflicts with Tushratta, the king of Mitanni, who had courted favor with his father, Amenhotep III, against the Hittites. Tushratta complains in numerous letters that Akhenaten had sent him gold-plated statues rather than statues made of solid gold; the statues formed part of the bride-price that Tushratta received for letting his daughter Tadukhepa marry Amenhotep III and then later marry Akhenaten.


title: Amarna letters

text: I...asked your father Mimmureya [i.e., Amenhotep III] for statues of solid cast gold, ... and your father said, 'Don't talk of giving statues just of solid cast gold. I will give you ones made also of lapis lazuli. I will give you too, along with the statues, much additional gold and [other] goods beyond measure.' Every one of my messengers that were staying in Egypt saw the gold for the statues with their own eyes. ... But my brother [i.e., Akhenaten] has not sent the solid [gold] statues that your father was going to send. You have sent plated ones of wood. Nor have you sent me the goods that your father was going to send me, but you have reduced [them] greatly. Yet there is nothing I know of in which I have failed my brother. ... May my brother send me much gold. ... In my brother's country gold is as plentiful as dust. May my brother cause me no distress. May he send me much gold in order that my brother [with the gold and m]any [good]s may honor me.


title: Amarna letters

text: From the internal evidence, the earliest possible date for this correspondence is the final decade of the reign of Amenhotep III, who ruled from 1388 to 1351 BC (or 1391 to 1353 BC), possibly as early as this king's 30th regnal year; the latest date any of these letters were written is the desertion of the city of Amarna, commonly believed to have happened in the second year of the reign of Tutankhamun later in the same century in 1332 BC. Moran notes that some scholars believe one tablet, EA 16, may have been addressed to Tutankhamun's successor Ay. However, this speculation appears improbable because the Amarna archives were closed by Year 2 of Tutankhamun, when this king transferred Egypt's capital from Amarna to Thebes.


title: Amarna letters

text: A small number of the Amarna letters are in the class of poetry. An example is EA 153, (EA is for 'el Amarna'). EA 153, entitled: ""Ships on hold"", from Abimilku of Tyre is a short, 20-line letter. Lines 6–8, and 9-11 are parallel phrases, each ending with ""...before the troops of the king, my lord.""-('before', then line 8, line 11). Both sentences are identical, and repetitive, with only the subject statement changing.


title: Amarna letters

text: The entire corpus of Amarna letters has many standard phrases. It also has some phrases, and quotations used only once. Some are parables: (EA 252: ""...when an ant is pinched (struck), does it not fight back and bite the hand of the man that struck it?""...)


title: Plotter

text: A plotter is a machine that produces vector graphics drawings. Plotters draw lines on paper using a pen, or in some applications, use a knife to cut a material like vinyl or leather. In the latter case, they are sometimes known as a cutting plotter.


title: Plotter

text: In the past, plotters were used in applications such as computer-aided design, as they were able to produce line drawings much faster and of a higher quality than contemporary conventional printers. Smaller desktop plotters were often used for business graphics. Printers with graphics capabilities took away some of the market by the early 1980s, and the introduction of laser printers in the mid-1980s largely eliminated the use of plotters from most roles.


title: Plotter

text: Plotters retained a niche for producing very large drawings for many years, but have now largely been replaced by wide-format conventional printers. Cutting plotters remain in use in a number of industries.


title: Plotter

text: Digitally controlled plotters evolved from earlier fully analog XY-writers used as output devices for measurement instruments and analog computers.


title: Plotter

text: Pen plotters print by moving a pen or other instrument across the surface of a piece of paper. This means that plotters are vector graphics devices, rather than raster graphics as with other printers. Pen plotters can draw complex line art, including text, but do so slowly because of the mechanical movement of the pens. They are often incapable of efficiently creating a solid region of color, but can hatch an area by drawing a number of close, regular lines.


title: Plotter

text: Plotters offered the fastest way to efficiently produce very large drawings or color high-resolution vector-based artwork when computer memory was very expensive and processor power was very limited, and other types of printers had limited graphic output capabilities.


title: Plotter

text: Pen plotters have essentially become obsolete, and have been replaced by large-format inkjet printers and LED toner-based printers. Such devices may still understand vector languages originally designed for plotter use, because in many uses, they offer a more efficient alternative to raster data.


title: Plotter

text: An X–Y plotter is a plotter that operates in two axes of motion ("X" and "Y") in order to draw continuous vector graphics. The term was used to differentiate it from standard plotters which had control only of the "y" axis, the "x" axis being continuously fed to provide a plot of some variable with time. Plotters differ from Inkjet and Laser printers in that a plotter draws a continuous line, much like a pen on paper, while inkjet and laser printers use a very fine matrix of dots to form images, such that while a line may appear continuous to the naked eye, it in fact is a discrete set of points.


title: Plotter

text: Electrostatic plotters used a dry toner transfer process similar to that in many photocopiers. They were faster than pen plotters and were available in large formats, suitable for reproducing engineering drawings. The quality of image was often not as good as contemporary pen plotters. Electrostatic plotters were made in both flat-bed and drum types. The electrostatic plotter uses the pixel as a drawing means, like a raster graphics display device. The plotter head consists of a large number of tiny styluses (as many as 21760) embedded in it. This head traverses over the width of the paper as it rolls past the head to make a drawing. The resolutions available may be 100 to 508 dots per inch. Electrostatic plotters are very fast with plotting speed of 6 to 32 mm/s, depending on the plotter resolution.


title: Plotter

text: Cutting plotters use knives to cut into a piece of material (such as paper, mylar film, or vinyl film) that is lying on the flat surface area of the plotter. The cutting plotter is connected to a computer, which is equipped with cutting design or drawing computer software programs. Those computer software programs are responsible for sending the necessary cutting dimensions or designs in order to command the cutting knife to produce the correct project cutting needs.


title: Plotter

text: In recent years the use of cutting plotters (generally called die-cut machines) has become popular with home enthusiasts of paper crafts such as cardmaking and scrapbooking. Such tools allow desired card and decal shapes to be cut out very precisely, and repeatably.


title: Plotter

text: A number of printer control languages were created to operate pen plotters, and transmit commands like "lift pen from paper", "place pen on paper", or "draw a line from here to here". Three common ASCII-based plotter control languages are Hewlett-Packard's HP-GL, its successor HP-GL/2, and Houston Instruments DMPL. Here is a simple HP-GL script drawing a line:


title: Plotter

text: This program instructs the plotter, in order, to take the first pen (SP1 = Select Pen 1), to go to coordinates X=500, Y=500 on the paper sheet (PA = Plot Absolute), to lower the pen against the paper (PD = Pen Down), to move 1000 units in the Y direction (thus drawing a vertical line - PR = Plot Relative), to lift the pen (PU = Pen Up) and finally to put it back in its stall.


title: Plotter

text: Programmers using FORTRAN or BASIC generally did not program these directly, but used software packages, such as the Calcomp library, or device independent graphics packages, such as Hewlett-Packard's AGL libraries or BASIC extensions or high end packages such as DISSPLA. These would establish scaling factors from world coordinates to device coordinates, and translate to the low level device commands. For example, to plot X*X in HP 9830 BASIC, the program would be


title: Plotter

text: One of the earliest plotter was Konrad Zuse's computer-controlled and transistorized Graphomat Z64 in 1958, also shown at the Hannover Messe in 1961.


title: Plotter

text: Early pen plotters, e.g., the Calcomp 565 of 1959, worked by placing the paper over a roller that moved the paper back and forth for X motion, while the pen moved back and forth on a track for Y motion. The paper was supplied in roll form and had perforations along both edges that were engaged by sprockets on the rollers.


title: Plotter

text: Another approach, e.g. Computervision's Interact I, involved attaching ball-point pens to drafting pantographs and driving the machines with stepper motors controlled by the computer. This had the disadvantage of being somewhat slow to move, as well as requiring floor space equal to the size of the paper, but could double as a digitizer. A later change was the addition of an electrically controlled clamp to hold the pens, which allowed them to be changed, and thus create multi-colored output.


title: Plotter

text: Hewlett Packard and Tektronix produced small, desktop-sized flatbed plotters in the late 1960s and 1970s. The pens were mounted on a traveling bar, whereby the y-axis was represented by motion up and down the length of the bar and the x-axis was represented by motion of the bar back and forth across the plotting table. Due to the mass of the bar, these plotters operated relatively slowly.


title: Plotter

text: In the 1980s, the small and lightweight HP 7470 introduced the "grit wheel" mechanism, eliminating the need for perforations along the edges, unlike the Calcomp plotters two decades earlier. The grit wheels at opposite edges of the sheet press against resilient polyurethane-coated rollers and form tiny indentations in the sheet. As the sheet is moved back and forth, the grit wheels keep the sheet in proper registration due to the grit particles falling into the earlier indentations, much like the teeth of two gears meshing. The pen is mounted on a carriage that moves back and forth in a line between the grit wheels, representing the orthogonal axis. These smaller "home-use" plotters became popular for desktop business graphics and in engineering laboratories, but their low speed meant they were not useful for general printing purposes, and different conventional printer would be required for those jobs. One category, introduced by Hewlett Packard's MultiPlot for the HP 2647, was the "word chart", which used the plotter to draw large letters on a transparency. This was the forerunner of the modern Powerpoint chart. With the widespread availability of high-resolution inkjet and laser printers, inexpensive memory and computers fast enough to rasterize color images, pen plotters have all but disappeared. However, the grit wheel mechanism is still found in inkjet-based, large format engineering plotters.


title: Plotter

text: Plotters were also used in the Create-A-Card kiosks that were available for a while in the greeting card area of supermarkets that used the HP 7475 six-pen plotter.


title: Plotter

text: Plotters are used primarily in technical drawing and CAD applications, where they have the advantage of working on very large paper sizes while maintaining high resolution. Another use has been found by replacing the pen with a cutter, and in this form plotters can be found in many garment and sign shops.


title: Plotter

text: Changing the color or width of a line required the plotter to change pens. This was either done manually on small plotters, but more typically the plotter would have a magazine of four or more pens which could be automatically mounted.


title: Plotter

text: A niche application of plotters is in creating tactile images for visually handicapped people on special thermal cell paper.


title: Plotter

text: Unlike other printer types, pen plotter speed is measured by pen speed and acceleration rate, instead of by page printing speed. A pen plotter's speed is primarily limited by the type of pen used, so the choice of pen is a key factor in pen plotter output speed. Indeed, most modern pen plotters have commands to control slewing speed, depending on the type of pen currently in use.


title: Plotter

text: There are many types of plotter pen, some of which are no longer mass-produced. Technical pen tips are often used, many of which can be renewed using parts and supplies for manual drafting pens. Early HP flatbed and grit wheel plotters used small, proprietary fiber-tipped or plastic nib disposable pens.


title: Plotter

text: One type of plotter pen uses a cellulose fiber rod inserted through a circular foam tube saturated with ink, with the end of the rod sharpened into a conical tip. As the pen moves across the paper surface, capillary wicking draws the ink from the foam, down the rod, and onto the paper. As the ink supply in the foam is depleted, the migration of ink to the tip begins to slow down, resulting in faint lines. Slowing the plotting speed will allow the lines drawn by a worn-out pen to remain dark, but the fading will continue until the foam is completely depleted. Also, as the fiber tip pen is used, the tip slowly wears away on the plotting medium, producing a progressively wider, smudged line.


title: Plotter

text: Ball-point plotter pens with refillable clear plastic ink reservoirs are available. They do not have the fading or wear effects of fiber pens, but are generally more expensive and uncommon. Also, conventional ball-point pens can be modified to work in most pen plotters.


title: Plotter

text: A vinyl cutter (sometimes known as a cutting plotter) is used to create posters, billboards, signs, T-shirt logos, and other weather-resistant graphical designs. The vinyl can also be applied to car bodies and windows for large, bright company advertising and to sailboat transoms. A similar process is used to cut tinted vinyl for automotive windows.


title: Plotter

text: Colors are limited by the collection of vinyl on hand. To prevent creasing of the material, it is stored in rolls. Typical vinyl roll sizes are 15-inch, 24-inch, 36-inch and 48-inch widths, and have a backing material for maintaining the relative placement of all design elements.


title: Plotter

text: Vinyl cutter hardware is similar to a traditional plotter except that the ink pen is replaced by a very sharp knife to outline each shape, and may have a pressure control to adjust how hard the knife presses down into the vinyl film, preventing the cuts from also penetrating the backing material. Besides losing relative placement of separate design elements, loose pieces cut out of the backing material may fall out and jam the plotter roll feed or the cutter head. After cutting, the vinyl material outside of the design is peeled away, leaving the design on the backing material which can be applied using self-adhesion, glue, lamination, or a heat press.


title: Plotter

text: The vinyl knife is usually shaped like a plotter pen and is also mounted on a swivel head so that the knife edge self-rotates to face the correct direction as the plotter head moves.


title: Plotter

text: Vinyl cutters are primarily used to produce single-color line art and lettering. Multiple color designs require cutting separate sheets of vinyl, then overlaying them during application; but this process quickly becomes cumbersome for more than a couple of hues.


title: Plotter

text: Sign cutting plotters are in decline in applications such as general billboard design, where wide-format inkjet printers that use solvent-based inks are employed to print directly onto a variety of materials. Cutting plotters are still relied upon for precision contour-cutting of graphics produced by wide-format inkjet printers – for example to produce window or car graphics, or shaped stickers.


title: Plotter

text: Large-format inkjet printers are increasingly used to print onto heat-shrink plastic sheeting, which is then applied to cover a vehicle surface and shrunk to fit using a heat gun, known as a vehicle wrap.


title: Plotter

text: A static cutting table is a type of cutting plotter used a large flat vacuum table. It is used for cutting non-rigid and porous material such as textiles, foam, or leather, that may be too difficult or impossible to cut with roll-fed plotters. Static cutters can also cut much thicker and heavier materials than a typical roll-fed or sheet-fed plotter is capable of handling.


title: Plotter

text: The surface of the table has a series of small pinholes drilled in it. Material is placed on the table, and a coversheet of plastic or paper is overlaid onto the material to be cut. A vacuum pump is turned on, and air pressure pushes down on the coversheet to hold the material in place. The table then operates like a normal vector plotter, using various cutting tools to cut holes or slits into the fabric. The coversheet is also cut, which may lead to a slight loss of vacuum around the edges of the coversheet, but this loss is not significant.


title: Plotter

text: In the mid-to-late 2000s artists and hackers began to rediscover pen plotters as quirky, customizable output devices. The quality of the lines produced by pens on paper is quite different from other digital output techniques. Even 30-year-old pen plotters typically still function reliably, and many were available for less than $100 on auction and resale websites. While support for driving pen plotters directly or saving files as HP-GL has disappeared from most commercial graphics applications, several contemporary software packages make working with HP-GL on modern operating systems possible.


title: Plotter

text: As use of pen plotters has waned, the large-format printers that have largely replaced them have sometimes come to be called "plotters" as well.


title: Sheila Kuehl

text: Sheila James Kuehl (born February 9, 1941) is an American politician and retired actress, and served as the member of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors for the 3rd District and as board chair and chair pro tem. Kuehl was California's first openly gay state legislator, having previously served in the California State Senate and the California State Assembly, where she was the Assembly's first female speaker pro tem.


title: Sheila Kuehl

text: Kuehl was born Sheila Ann Kuehl in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Her father, Arthur, was an airplane construction worker at Douglas Aircraft. He was Catholic and her mother, Lillian, was Jewish. As a child actress, Kuehl performed under the stage name Sheila James.


title: Sheila Kuehl

text: At age seven, Kuehl began to take tap dancing lessons. In one recital, Kuehl played an assistant in a skit called "The Old Sleuth" where she sat under a table listening for clues. To indicate she was listening, Kuehl made faces, which caused the audience to laugh and encouraged her to make more faces, resulting in more laughter. The skit was ruined, but the drama teacher, Mrs. Meglin, was impressed. Kuehl later recalled that Meglin told her mother, 'The kid's pretty funny. Can she read?' And my mother said, 'Oh, yeah, she can read, she skipped two grades, she's really very good.' Mrs. Meglin said, 'There's a radio series holding interviews...at an agent's office on Sunset Boulevard. Would you be interested in taking her to the interview? All she has to do is read...'


title: Sheila Kuehl

text: So we went for the interview and there were like 150 or 200 kids there and all you did was read. And I was called back...and eventually I got the part in what probably was the last family radio series before it went all music and news...'"


title: Sheila Kuehl

text: Having landed the role at the age of eight, Kuehl (billed as Sheila James) starred with radio and film veterans Penny Singleton, Gale Gordon, Bea Benaderet, and Jim Backus on the family radio program "The Penny Williamson Show" airing live from Studio B of the NBC studios in Hollywood. Airing in the adjacent studios were the popular drama "The Cisco Kid" and "The Bob Hope Show" with Doris Day (whom Kuehl admired). Kuehl would later cite her interaction with the other NBC radio talent as influential in forming her professionalism and comedy skills. The show centered around Singleton playing Penny Williamson, a widow selling real estate in a small town to support two daughters (played by Kuehl and Mary Lee Robb). The show was "a light-hearted pitch for women's liberation, portraying Penny and her daughters as highly competent, self-sufficient females" dealing with bungling suitors competing for Penny's affections.


title: Sheila Kuehl

text: Due to her radio talent, Kuehl's agent convinced her parents to take her to auditions for a television role. Kuehl was signed to play Jackie, Stuart Erwin's tomboy daughter, in the television series "The Stu Erwin Show" (also known as "Trouble with Father"), which ran from 1950 to 1955. Kuehl later recalled "The same 200 kids I think were there for the interview [as had been for the radio audition] and I was called back and called back and called back and eventually I got that part. And beginning in 1950, I did that series for six years."


title: Sheila Kuehl

text: After "The Stu Erwin Show" ended, Kuehl continued to work as an actress while going to school. Her academic success allowed her to skip two grades; by sixteen she was attending the University of California, Los Angeles. As her college studies continued she moved into a sorority house and began spending summers as a counsellor for a children's camp. At the age of eighteen, while working at the camp, Kuehl met a twenty-one year-old counsellor named Kathy and fell in love. Kuehl would later recall "It was just a funny attraction that neither of us would acknowledge. Then, one night she and I were sitting together at her place. She was rubbing my back and we just, like, went to bed. It was wonderful. But then we stayed up all night wondering if we were really sick." They concluded that they were "sick" but that nothing could be done. Kuehl later recalled "There was no movement then. There was nothing to read. I knew no lesbians. We just figured this was a rare thing and that we were two women who'd fallen in love and that we had to keep it a secret because nobody would approve. We didn't dare tell a soul." After that summer, with Kathy going to school in San Diego, the two exchanged passionate letters daily for a year.


title: Sheila Kuehl

text: During this time, Kuehl began acting the role she is probably best known for – her portrayal of teen-aged genius Zelda Gilroy, the wannabe girlfriend of the title character in the television series "The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis", which aired on CBS from 1959 to 1963. Zelda was originally intended to be a one-shot character in the early "Dobie Gillis" episode "Love is a Science," but "Dobie" creator Max Shulman liked Kuehl and had her signed on as a semi-regular cast member.


title: Sheila Kuehl

text: Kuehl later recalled how she landed the part. "Well, when you're an actor with an agent, no matter how old you are, you go on interviews. I went on lots of interviews for lots of guest shots…and I had done two [episodes] on "Love that Bob" ["The Bob Cummings Show"] with Bob Cummings and Dwayne Hickman, who played his nephew, and the director Rod Amateau, so I had met all the people who eventually were going to be much of the team for "Dobie Gillis". In 1959, I was at UCLA, and I went on an interview for "Dobie Gillis" and I walked on the set and they all said 'Oh, hi, we know your work, you're fine. Just go across the street and meet Max Schulman [the writer director].' As it turned out, Max and I were the same height, and he was like buried behind the desk when I walked in. And he said, 'What's the first line?' And I said, 'I love you.' And he said, 'You're hired!'"


title: Sheila Kuehl

text: Signing a contract with "Dobie" producer 20th Century Fox Television required Kuehl, then 18 and in college studying theater, to change her major to English, so that Shulman, also a successful author, could act as her proctor on set to allow her to continue her studies. Kuehl earned a bachelor's degree in English from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1962, during the show's final season.


title: Sheila Kuehl

text: Having signed a contract in 1960 to do 21 shows for the next season of "Dobie", that same year Kuehl was elected an officer in both the university student government and in her sorority. Despite this success, things became difficult that summer when love-letters to Kathy that she had accidentally left at the sorority house were found by the cleaning staff and turned over to the alumnae council of the sorority. When she returned from summer vacation the council (while speaking in coded language and carefully avoiding the word "lesbian") confronted Kuehl with the letters demanding an explanation. Kuehl later recalled that at first she tried to deny it and failing that "I then just clammed up and took my sorority pin off and put it on the table and left. I cried all the way home." She was officially expelled from the sorority and despite assurance that no one would be told why, she was aware that rumors were spreading. Some of the members of the sorority refused to speak to her afterwards and avoided her. Kuehl moved back in with her parents under the cover story that she was homesick, but was still a member of the sorority which they knew she loved being a part of. Whenever her parents knew of a sorority meeting taking place, to prevent discovery, Kuehl would go to a coffee shop during that time and return with a story about the events of the meeting that she had not attended.


title: Sheila Kuehl

text: Despite Kathy moving to L.A. and their being able to see each other daily, the social sacrifices Kuehl was contemplating put a strain on their relationship. Kuehl later recalled "By then the whole idea of being queer was so overwhelming and scary. Not the sexuality, but the loss of everything. To be that way for good meant no family, no children, no career, nor normalcy, no parents. It seemed at that point that I should really get out of it. I told [Kathy] I didn't want to see her any longer." Kuehl had seen a man casually on and off during her relationship with Kathy and began working to make it more serious. They kissed but they did not have sex and they almost got engaged. Kuehl couldn't get Kathy off her mind and broke up with the man to resume the relationship with her. Kuehl's closeted relationship with Kathy continued until the beginning of the 1970s, and had lasted 12 years before they broke up.


title: Sheila Kuehl

text: After "Dobie Gillis" ended its run, Kuehl (as "Sheila James") co-starred with Kathleen Nolan, formerly of "The Real McCoys", in the short-lived ABC television series "Broadside", a female version of "McHale's Navy", in its 1964–65 season.


title: Sheila Kuehl

text: Opportunities for acting work steadily diminished and Kuehl was forced to sell her Malibu house. She later recalled this period saying "I couldn't even get a commercial." Due to worries about her career and being closeted she fell into a serious depression and developed a drinking problem. She was able to move forward after seeking help. She then moved in with her then-girlfriend, Kathy, and began working at the UCLA student activities office helping students organize around the rising political movements of the 1960s.


title: Sheila Kuehl

text: Kuehl was able to make television guest appearances on "National Velvet", "McHale's Navy", "The Donna Reed Show", "The Beverly Hillbillies", "Petticoat Junction", "The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet", "Marcus Welby, M.D." and "The Ed Sullivan Show" from 1963 to 1970. By the end of the decade, acting roles had dried up for her. Though Kuehl "can't state with certainty that she was blacklisted" from further acting jobs over her sexuality, she claims that afterwards, "with few exceptions, the phone stopped ringing." A pilot for a "Dobie Gillis" spin-off, in which the character Zelda was the lead, was produced, but the president of CBS, Jim Aubrey, thought Kuehl was "too butch" to be a star for their network. Subsequently, the pilot was not promoted and did not sell, but Kuehl was not told about this immediately. Rather, she was informed by the director, Rod Amateau, when she arrived to shoot the following episodes. She was devastated by the news.


title: Sheila Kuehl

text: Kuehl's only acting roles beyond 1970 were in two "Dobie Gillis" reunion projects: a 1977 sitcom pilot produced by James Komack, "Whatever Happened to Dobie Gillis?", and a 1988 television movie sequel, "Bring Me the Head of Dobie Gillis". In both productions, Dobie had married Zelda and the two were running the Gillis family grocery store and raising a teenage son named Georgie Gillis.


title: Sheila Kuehl

text: Reflecting on the lasting impact of her role as Zelda, Kuehl told an interviewer "First, there were no smart girls on television, period. All the girls were better looking than me, but dumb. I didn't mean the actresses were dumb, but that was sort of what you had to be in those days. So, a smart girl, brash, did not know she was a loser, which was sort of the theme for all the characters on "Dobie Gillis"…you just keep doing what you are doing because you don't know there's anything wrong with you. And the other thing, of course, 20 years later I started getting letters from young women saying 'You were such a role model for me,' and now that the women's movement had started I could see why. An independent, smart girl, knew what she wanted, went after it, but not in a mean way. And always by the end of the show if you were doing anything dishonest against your friends, you would repent. Because friendship was always the most important thing."


title: Sheila Kuehl

text: After leaving the acting profession in the early 1970s, Kuehl became an adviser to students in campus activist groups at her alma mater, UCLA, and eventually became an associate dean of students. When Kuehl was passed over for a promotion that was given to a man, Kuehl felt that her treatment had been unfair and became interested in a legal career to address the position of women in the workplace.


title: Sheila Kuehl

text: In 1975, at age 34, after being denied admission into UCLA, Kuehl was accepted at Harvard Law School. In her third year she was elected class marshal and president of the student council. She received her J.D. in 1978. During her final year, she chaired the celebration of the 25th anniversary of the first group of women to be admitted to the law school, and became the second woman to win Harvard's prestigious Ames Moot Court Competition, judged by a panel including Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. Kuehl recalled that the Justice "strode over to me, clasped my hand in his two huge hands and said, 'Lady, I like your style.'" Kuehl was recognized in the ABA's Law Student Division magazine as one of the nation's top five law students.


title: Sheila Kuehl

text: After law school, Kuehl became an associate at Richards, Watson & Gershon in Los Angeles, where her practice focused on municipal law. She later became an associate at Bersch & Kaplowitz in Beverly Hills, practicing family, anti-discrimination, and civil rights law.


title: Sheila Kuehl

text: While working in private practice in Los Angeles Kuehl began fund-raising for the Sojourn Center for Battered Women (which she eventually served as chair). Staff from other shelters soon began asking Kuehl for legal advice and training in domestic-violence law. Kuehl later recalled this time saying "I had to learn what there was, which wasn't much." She then joined a handful of other lawyers in trying to assist in crafting legislation on the issue which included a bill that required judges in custody cases to consider evidence of domestic violence.


title: Sheila Kuehl

text: In the 1980s Kuehl became an adjunct law professor at the University of Southern California, and later an associate professor at Loyola Law School where she taught courses on family law, sex discrimination, and education.


title: Sheila Kuehl

text: During her 1986 inauguration as president of the Women Lawyers' Association of Los Angeles, Kuehl introduced Torie Osborn as her partner in the same manner that previous presidents had introduced their husbands. The incident became the lead story of California's daily law journal. (The pair would later separate in 1991, but remained close friends).


title: Sheila Kuehl

text: In 1989, along with Abby Leibman and Jenifer McKenna, Kuehl formed the California Women's Law Center to promote gender issues, including expanding the rights of divorced women and reforming hiring procedures in male-dominated professions, such as law enforcement.


title: Sheila Kuehl

text: Kuehl was elected to the California State Assembly in 1994, becoming the first openly gay person elected to the California legislature. While running for office Kuehl found she was able to offset some negative stereotypes people had about lesbians thanks to their familiarity with her role as Zelda. She told an interviewer "When people know gay people personally, they tend to feel differently about the whole community. And all of a sudden, here's a person that they knew very well that they found out was lesbian."


title: Sheila Kuehl

text: In office Kuehl became a founding member of the California Legislative LGBT Caucus. She recalled "My Democratic colleagues were enormously welcoming. I mean it was more than I could have expected. I walked into my first Democratic caucus and Antonio Villaraigosa, Kevin Murray, Barbara Friedman, John Burton and probably three or four other folks came up to me and said, 'We don't want you to have to eat lunch by yourself so we are the honorary Gay and Lesbian Caucus.' It was lovely."


title: Sheila Kuehl

text: When Kuehl was elected as a Democrat to the California Assembly in 1994 a Republican majority was seated for the first time in 20 years. This was due largely as an out-flowing of the enthusiasm stoked up by Newt Gingrich's strategy supporting Republicans for Congressional and U.S. Senate seats. Kuehl recalled "The Republican majority was quite a different kind of Republican, not a moderate, not a Rockefeller Republican. They were primarily Bible-thumpers and very right-wing. So it was not the most welcoming Republican group, though they loved Zelda Gilroy, and it was very difficult for them because they already liked me so much…. And to their surprise, we all got along very well. ...The Republicans were pretty horrible about LGBT stuff. They all virtually said stuff like, 'Well, they're all spawn of the devil, oh, but not you, Sheila….'"


title: Sheila Kuehl

text: One of the first acts Kuehl did while in the Assembly was to introduce a bill (The Dignity for All Students Act – AB 222) to protect public school students from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. The bill was supported by most of her fellow Democrats whom Kuehl later recalled were brought "into a space where they were in a civil rights movement where they had never been at their age and they were feeling it and felt good about themselves when they would stand up and support me." The debate was cited by the media, such as the LA Times, for its moving speeches, most notably Assemblyman Tom Torlakson's support of the bill which included a here-to unknown revelation that his brother had been bisexual and died of AIDS. The bill failed to pass the Assembly by one vote (it was opposed by 37 lawmakers, including seven Democrats). Supporters of the bill blamed "a state-wide public relations campaign by anti-gay groups aimed at moderate Democrats" which "featured mailers, newspaper ads and protests largely targeted at Latino lawmakers." Kuehl's opponents also held that the "proposal would open the door to a sweeping gay agenda in public schools." Republican Assemblyman Bruce Thompson claimed the bill wasn't about "civil rights, but it's about special rights [for homosexuals]," and it's "the issue that will divide this state and country more than any other."


title: Sheila Kuehl

text: While in the Assembly Kuehl served as Speaker pro tempore during the 1997–98 legislative session, becoming the first woman in California history to hold the position. Kuehl served three full terms (six years) in the California Assembly which was the maximum allowed under term limits that had been adopted in 1990.


title: Sheila Kuehl

text: After three terms in the Assembly, she was elected to the California State Senate in 2000, beating Assemblyman Wally Knox in the Democratic primary and becoming the first openly gay person elected to the Senate. Re-elected in 2004 with 65.7% of the vote, she was repeatedly voted the "smartest" member of the California Legislature.


title: Sheila Kuehl

text: In 2002 Kuehl co-authored the Religious Freedom and Civil Marriage Protection Act that defined marriage as a civil contract between two persons. The bill went on to pass the state legislature – the first time a state legislative body in the USA voted to approve same-sex marriage rather than respond to a court order to do so. The bill was vetoed on September 7, 2005, by Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. who held that the matter should be decided by the courts or by popular referendum.


title: Sheila Kuehl

text: In 2004, Gavin Newsom, the mayor of San Francisco, held that denying homosexuals the right to marry was a violation of the due process clause in the California Constitution and allowed them to go forward (until a later Court order was made). After the mayor's announcement Kuehl presided over a number of same-sex marriages on the steps of San Francisco's City Hall rotunda. Among those whose wedding she officiated was Assemblymember Jackie Goldberg (who authored AB 205, a sweeping domestic partner benefits law) and her partner for twenty-eight years Sharon Stricker (a poet and activist). The couple's newly married son and daughter-in-law were in attendance. Kuehl also officiated over the weddings of Torie Osborn and her partner, Lydia Vaias; Jehan Agrama and Dwora Fried; Patti Giggans and Ellen Ledley; Barrie Levy and Linda Garnets; and Avi Rose and Ron Strochlic. Assemblymember Mark Leno (who had recently introduced a bill to change the family code to allow marriage equality) also attended the ceremonies giving a blessing in English and Hebrew to the couples.


title: Sheila Kuehl

text: Also in 2004, Kuehl authored Senate Bill 1234, an omnibus act intended to protect Californians from hate crimes, which the bill defined as criminal acts committed in whole or in part because of the victims' actual or perceived disability, gender, nationality, race or ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation or association with persons with any of those characteristics. The bill targeted crimes, not First Amendment-protected speech. It also protected undocumented immigrants from deportation due to reporting hate crimes, increased civil protections from discrimination, and provided for law enforcement training concerning crimes against homeless persons and law enforcement response to homelessness, bill was later enacted into law.


title: Sheila Kuehl

text: In 2006, Kuehl sponsored a bill to prohibit the adoption by any school district in California of any instructional material that discriminates against persons based on their gender or sexual orientation.


title: Sheila Kuehl

text: Throughout her career as a legislator, Kuehl took a leadership role on health care policy. Her foremost objective was securing passage of legislation to establish a single-payer health care system in California. SB 840 passed both houses of the legislature in 2006, but was vetoed by Schwarzenegger; it was reintroduced in 2007. SB 840 passed both houses of the California legislature in August 2008 and was, again, vetoed by Schwarzenegger.


title: Sheila Kuehl

text: On January 28, 2008, "The New York Times" reported that Kuehl planned to vote against a health care plan sponsored by Governor Schwarzenegger and supported by a majority of Democrats in the Assembly, while opposed by a majority of Republicans. Her opposition along with the opposition of Senator Leland Yee led the "Times" to predict that California's widely touted healthcare bill – widely but inaccurately called "universal" coverage – would be effectively killed. However, by the time the bill came to the Senate Health Committee, chaired by Kuehl, all but one of the Democratic Senators on the committee had grave doubts about the bill and, after an eleven-hour hearing on the bill and an intervening week to caucus, on January 28, 2008, one Democrat voted yes, three abstained and three (including Kuehl), along with all Republicans, voted in opposition.