Back when I was starting thinking about coming out and transiting I attended Twenty Club (XX Club) meetings in the early 2000s and I was lucky to hear the history of the Twenty Club by the Rev. Canon Clinton R. Jones and Dr. Higgins.
Rev. Cannon Jones told about starting a support group at the YMCA in Hartford in the early sixties called “Project Homosexual” and in the lobby they put up a sign on meeting days that pointed the way to the meeting room. The sign said “Project Homosexual” with an arrow. After the first couple meetings the management of the Y came up to Rev. Jones and said that they want to support the group but could they please change the name to “Project H.”
At the meetings there were some men who said they wanted to be women. The reverend realized that these men were not gay but were in the term of the era transsexual. Rev, Cannon Jones, Dr. Higgins a psychologists, an endocrinologists who I don’t know, and a surgeon who I believe was Dr. Snow and Dr. Snow I think worked with Dr. Harry Benjamin at John Hopkins, Rev. Cannon Jones and Dr. Snow formed the Gender Identity Clinic of New England (GICNE) in the mid-sixties and .
On the website Timeline they write,
Besides starting GICNE they also started the XX Club back in the late sixties or early seventies which makes the XX Club one of the oldest continuous trans, if not the oldest support groups in the nation.
The LGBT Religious Archive Network had this to say about the XX Club,
For me my first contact was in the summer of 2000 at a picnic that the XX Club held each year at Stratton Brook State Park, in my diary I wrote…
Rev. Cannon Jones told about starting a support group at the YMCA in Hartford in the early sixties called “Project Homosexual” and in the lobby they put up a sign on meeting days that pointed the way to the meeting room. The sign said “Project Homosexual” with an arrow. After the first couple meetings the management of the Y came up to Rev. Jones and said that they want to support the group but could they please change the name to “Project H.”
At the meetings there were some men who said they wanted to be women. The reverend realized that these men were not gay but were in the term of the era transsexual. Rev, Cannon Jones, Dr. Higgins a psychologists, an endocrinologists who I don’t know, and a surgeon who I believe was Dr. Snow and Dr. Snow I think worked with Dr. Harry Benjamin at John Hopkins, Rev. Cannon Jones and Dr. Snow formed the Gender Identity Clinic of New England (GICNE) in the mid-sixties and .
On the website Timeline they write,
By 1979, only 30 surgeries had actually been performed at Hopkins itself, but the clinic consulted on more than a thousand surgeries at different hospitals, training doctors along the way. By the time the Hopkins clinic closed, between 15 and 20 medical centers were performing the surgery.And one of those was GICNE and the surgeries were performed at Mount Sinai Hospital
Besides starting GICNE they also started the XX Club back in the late sixties or early seventies which makes the XX Club one of the oldest continuous trans, if not the oldest support groups in the nation.
The LGBT Religious Archive Network had this to say about the XX Club,
In 1968-69, Canon Jones studied counseling at the Postgraduate Center for Mental Health in New York City and completed an S.T.M. degree at New York Theological Seminary. He subsequently began a counseling ministry at the Cathedral as well as gathering an extensive library on homosexuality there. In his ministry he came into contact with a number of transgendered persons. Along with Dr. George Higgins, professor at Trinity College, Canon Jones and other professionals developed an extensive program of counseling and psychological services for persons seeking gender reassignment. The "Twenty Club," a support group for transgendered persons was created at the Cathedral and met for more than 30 years and has since continued at the GLBT Community Center.And the article was written in 2005 so now it will 40 years old.
Big update. First I did go to the XX Club picnic and had a real great time. Meet a lot of new friends…This is history that needs to be told; we need to preserve our history or it will be lost forever.
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Now back to the picnic and some pictures of course.
I’m the undefeated Backgammon Champion of the XX Club picnic.
The picnic was really nice, it was the first time I went to any of the functions of the XX Club. You got to understand that COS [Connecticut Outreach Society, another support group] is the minor leagues and the XX Club is the major leagues. COS is open to all transgender people and the XX Club is for transsexuals only, both MTF and FTM’s. They were supposed to get the pavilion at Stratton Brook State Park but got there to late to get the pavilion. The family that got there first was kind enough to let them have part of it. I wonder what they thought about all of the TS’s that descended upon them ( well it was that many only fifteen or twenty ). As I mentioned before I had a great time sitting around talking and playing backgammon. It was different from the COS meetings in that there was talk about the “operation”, what doctor does the best work, about cost and hormones. Because of the weather the turnout was low according to them last year they had about forty people there. One more observation a lot of the members seems to be involved with motorcycles and a number of them were in the military. Hmm…
Thanks for this article. During the 1999 exhibition Challenging and Changing America: The Struggle for LGBT Civil Rights 1900-1999 our community had the honor of hearing Canon Jones give a lecture about the early days in Hartford. We also were invited to the Christmas party of the XX Club that year and visited with our friend Mariette Pathy Allen who gave a talk. Many of our early gay rights liberation fighters in both the Kalos and Gay Liberation Front of Hartford had attended Project H and Canon's counseling sessions. In fact John Crowley once remarked to me, "We had to learn to like ourselves before we could become political." Rev. Cannon Jones donated the papers from the George Henry Foundation and from his own archives and these are housed at the Elihu Burritt Library at CCSU. A great collection to read up on our fascinating stories. Here is a link to the collection. https://library.ccsu.edu/help/spcoll/equity/henry/index.php
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