In 1958, when native Texan Morris Kight arrived in Los Angeles, he was almost forty and ready to fight for gay rights, but he considered the Mattachine Society elitist. In reaction, he co-founded the third outpost of the Gay Liberation Front, after New York and Berkeley. One of their earliest battles was against a West Hollywood diner called Barney's Beanery which had a painted sign and printed matchbooks with the misspelled warning Fagots Stay Out. After three months of protests, sit-ins, and media glare, the owner removed the original sign, but as soon as the attention subsided, he remounted an identical sign and kept it on display until 1984. In June 1970 to celebrate the first anniversary of Stonewall, Kight helped organize Christopher Street West, which was only permitted after he, Troy Perry, and the ACLU sued reluctant city officials and the hostile police department for the right to have a parade.
Kight's proudest moment came in October 1971, when he and two other activists opened the nation's first gay and lesbian community center. With his sometimes abrasive strategies and leftist politics, Kight had many detractors within the movement. One of those was David Goodstein who transformed the Advocate from a newspaper to a magazine and prohibited his reporters from writing about Kight and other people he thought hurt the image of gay rights. Kight's protest of anti-gay Coors created a public disaster for Outfest, which had finally convinced the brewery to sponsor their film festival. He was also a vocal critic of 1978's proposed amendment to ban gay teachers from public schools. In January 2003, Kight donated his 3,000-item collection of art, papers, and memorabilia to the ONE Institute. Three days later he died, at eighty-three, survived by his partner of twenty-five years, Roy Zucheran.
I met him backstage at the Stonewall 25 rally in New York. He was awesome and very, very cranky when the announcer called him Morris Knight.
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Two global icons of the Glass Closet were born exactly 20 years apart, and both are maybe or maybe not inching their way out: Jodie Foster, 49, publicly thanked her partner "my beautiful Cydney" when she accepted the Sherry Lansing Leadership Award, but that was way back in 2007. And they broke up in 2008, when Jodie left Cydney B. for Cindy Mort, who in turn dumped Jodie to return to her former girlfriend Amanda Demme. This year Jodie had an epic failure with The Beaver, in which she directed and defended her longtime pal, homophobe, sexist, racist, anti-Semite Mel Gibson. Shown on 168 theaters, Gibson's big comeback movie grossed under one million dollars. Jodie can now be seen opposite Kate Winslet in Carnage and next in Elysium the follow-up from the director of District 9.
Calvin Klein is 69 today with his boyfriend of more than a year, model Nick Gruber, who graduated from high school in 2009. In January, Calvin rented Indochine to throw Nick a 21st birthday party with Anna Wintour, Donna Karan, Vera Wang, Daphne Guinness, Ian Schrager, and "100 male models." That doesn't sound so private. They broke up in July, and got back together within three weeks, when they were seen holding hands on the street and kissing in broad daylight in Manhattan. They were still together as recently as October 31 but who can say if these are costumes or their everyday look at home.
If might be good to note that Calvin Klein abandoned the gay community in the 80's during the height of the AIDS epidemic to protect his business from ruin (no one wanted to invest in gay designers because they were afraid they'd all die of AIDS). Calvin not only went back in the closet, he also married a beard. That's when I stopped buying his clothing. I still refuse to purchase anything with his name on it. I don't care how many boy toys he kisses in public in 2011. He abandoned his community when we needed him the most. Shame on you Calvin. Enjoy your millions and the sex and companionship it will buy.
Posted by: Philip | November 19, 2011 at 10:06 AM