Band of Thebes

Historic! Smithsonian Highlights Gay Signs from 1965

Thanks to the extraordinary efforts of the Kameny Papers Project, twelve of the picket signs used to protest anti-gay policies in 1965 during White House demonstrations organized by Frank Kameny and Barbara Gittings are part of the Smithsonian's collection and two of them are now on display. Earlier this week, the Smithsonian National Museum of American History updated their new acquisitions showcase to include a teapot protesting the Stamp Act, Joe Lewis's boxing gloves, and two signs reading "Discrimination Against Homosexuals Is As Immoral As Discrimination Against Negroes & Jews" and "First Class Citizenship for Homosexuals." Three buttons accompany the pickets, including one with the famous slogan "Gay Is Good."

      The display case is part of a larger exhibit called Treasures of American History on view in the Air & Space Museum because the history museum is closed for renovations until next summer. A quick look at the exhibit--which has 150 items including R2-D2, C-3PO, Abraham Lincoln's bullet-riddled tophat, George Washington's military coat, Muhammad Ali's boxing gloves, Ray Charles's sunglasses, a draft of the Declaration of Independence, a panel from the aids quilt, Jackie's inauguration ball gown, and Dorothy's ruby slippers-- appears below.

Best of the Larry Craig Comedy Clips

With the Broadway musical AVENUE Q

Born September 1: Emma Stebbins

Emma Stebbins, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition—more’s the pity if you fail to recognize this as the opening of Emma, but it’s equally true of Miss Stebbins as it was for Miss Woodhouse—was a painter until she left America for Rome in 1857 when she was forty-one. There, she became a sculptor and fell in love with the most famous actress of their time, Charlotte Cushman. After ten years in Italy with a wide circle of lesbian friends, they returned to the U.S., where Emma’s brother was head of the New York Stock Exchange and president of the board of commissioners of Central Park. In that role he may have helped secure the offer for Stebbins’ best-known statue, Angel of the Waters, for the biblical “healing waters of Bethesda,” which is why the work is commonly called Bethesda Fountain. Using Cushman as her model for the angel of healing was particularly poignant in 1873, as Stebbins had stopped working from 1869-1871 to nurse her partner through her bout with breast cancer. Cushman died in 1876, after which Stebbins never made another sculpture.

Born August 29: Edward Carpenter

Ardent socialist (author of the anthem England Arise, founding member of the Independent Labour Party), feminist (saying, “there is no solution except the freedom of woman,” he considered traditional marriage to be a form of prostitution), gay activist (his groundbreaking books like My Days and Dreams and The Intermediate Sex go far beyond earlier essays by his friend John Addington Symonds), pacifist, nudist, mystic, poet, and the first person to introduce sandals to modern Britain, Edward Carpenter’s greatest legacy may be how he lived his life. Utterly changed after reading Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass in 1863, he began to dream of a brotherhood of manly love that would erase class lines and give rise to a true democracy. After graduating from Cambridge and leaving a position vacated by Leslie Stephen, Virginia Woolf’s father, Carpenter gave public lectures in Leeds intended for the working class (but attended only by the middle class, who didn’t warm to his ideas) and sought to befriend laborers, unsuccessfully. Finally in 1891, after meeting by chance on a train, he and uneducated George Merrill became lovers. In 1898, when Carpenter was fifty-four and Merrill was thirty-two, they established a house together, absolutely unheard of in an England still hysterically antigay in the aftermath of the Oscar Wilde trials. They lived together openly as a couple for thirty years until Merrill’s death, and their cross-class love was the direct inspiration for their friend E.M. Forster’s novel Maurice, as well as D.H. Lawrence’s heterosexualized version, Lady Chatterly’s Lover. Not all authors were so enamored. In the decade after Carpenter’s death, George Orwell ridiculed “every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal wearer [and] sex maniac” among the Socialists. Yet an American Communist, Harry Hay, credited Carpenter’s writings for galvanizing him to start the first gay rights group, The Mattachine Society, in Los Angeles in 1950.

Born August 28: Karl Heinrich Ulrichs

                               

Karl Heinrich Ulrichs had an affair with his riding instructor when he was fourteen, was forced to quit his civil servant job for being gay when he was thirty-four, and began publishing pamphlets explaining and defending same-sex love when he was thirty-seven. Five years later, the day after his forty-second birthday, he addressed the German congress, coming out publicly and demanding they repeal their anti-gay laws. It was 1867, one hundred two years before Stonewall, and he was shouted down before he could finish his speech. Though his books were banned in Saxony and Berlin he continued writing on the subject for the rest of his life. In 1870, he published Araxes, which lays out all of the modern arguments for the rights of gay citizens. In 1879, he published the twelfth volume of his ongoing project, Research on the Riddle of Man-Manly Love, and moved to Italy, which was more hospitable. Indeed, Ulrichs was awarded an honorary degree by the University of Naples shortly before he died, one month prior to his seventieth birthday. Today, streets are named for him in Bremen, Hanover, and Munich, where this afternoon they will celebrate with their annual street party and poetry reading in Karl-Heinrich-Ulrichs-Platz. In his final years, he wrote

“Until my dying day I will look back with pride that I found the courage to come face to face in battle against the spectre which for time immemorial has been injecting poison into me and into men of my nature. Many have been driven to suicide because all their happiness in life was tainted. Indeed, I am proud that I found the courage to deal the initial blow to the hydra of public contempt.”

Born August 27: Jeanette Winterson, Tom Ford

Feisty Jeanette Winterson wrote her landmark first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, in two months because she needed money. It won the Whitbread Prize for best first book in 1985 and has become a modern queer classic. (The television version, adapted by Winterson, won the BAFTA for best drama in 1990.) Her finest novel is The Passion, which takes place in France and Venice during the Napoleonic Wars, and her most ambitious novel is Sexing the Cherry, which touches down in several centuries but is most firmly rooted in the Restoration. All of her fiction combines elements of history, religion, myth, and magic realism to form a sort of quicksilver anti-reality, and her real life is equally exciting. From 1988 to 2000, she  was partners with Margaret Reynolds, notwithstanding Winterson's affair with Pat Kavanagh, who is still married to London literary star, Julian Barnes, and happens to be Winterson's agent. Many believe that relationship to be the inspiration for her novel about an affair, Written on the Body, published in 1992 and dedicated "to Peggy Reynolds with love." When asked by an influential British newspaper to name the best book of the year, she chose her own. More recently she has published Gut Symmetries, The Powerbook, which she adapted as a play for the Royal National Theatre, and Lighthousekeeping. Her website, with frequent updates and a monthly letter, is among the best of any writer's. In 2006, she received an OBE. Her new novel, The Stone Gods, will be published in Britain on September 27.

Tom Ford brought sexy back in 1994 when little Justin Timberlake was still a castmember of the Mickey Mouse Club. On the plus side: Ford took charge of the ailing Gucci company, which was nearly bankrupt and dead as a brand, and within a year made it a fashion sensation. By 1999, it was valued at $4.3 billion. He had a similar success turning around Yves Saint-Laurent. Thanks to his brilliant hiring of Carine Roitfeld, he knew what was hot before anyone else on the planet. And he's had the extreme good taste to stay with his partner, Richard Buckley, fourteen years his senior, for nearly twenty years. On the minus side: What has he done since leaving the Gucci group in 2004? Last year when he guest edited Vanity Fair he put himself on the cover with two naked young women. (Tacky.) And when W let him do whatever he wanted with the Karshner triplets, he opted for cold and stale. (Unforgivable.) Now he has launched his own fashion brand, starting with his tremendously popular luxury sunglasses, and a menswear line available exclusively at his enormous Madison Avenue store, every inch of which looks like it's trying too hard. Not to worry, he'll find his way back.


   

Born August 21: Mart Crowley

The parade of caricature, self loathing, and internalized homophobia known as The Boys in the Band opened off Broadway in 1968, caused a sensation, and ran for 1,002 performances. Although the play was groundbreaking for its frank  look at a certain kind of Greenwich Village queer life a year before Stonewall, its most famous line is, "Show me a happy homosexual and I'll show you a gay corpse." In 1970 the movie adaptation, again written by Mart Crowley, starred all of the same actors from the play and was directed by William Friedkin (immediately prior to his making The French Connection and The Exorcist, and, later, Cruising.) Crowley wrote several more plays, all of which flopped. In 2002, he premiered a sequel to The Boys in the Band called The Men from the Boys. It opened in San Francisco, where it was not a success, and never made it to New York.

Born August 16: T.E. Lawrence

    
The conventional story about the private life of the dashing T.E. Lawrence is that he was a lifelong celibate who could not bear to be touched. Yet undisputedly, his greatest love was for Selim Ahmed, called Dahoum (“little dark one”) and the S.A. to whom The Seven Pillars of Wisdom is dedicated. In 1911, when Lawrence was at Carchemish doing archeology work, Dahoum was a self-supporting youth of fourteen working as a waterboy. Lawrence taught him English and math, he taught Lawrence Arabic. They traveled together. Lawrence hired him as his assistant. When Dahoum was sixteen and Lawrence twenty-five, they moved in together. Lawrence carved a limestone gargoyle in the Notre Dame style using Dahoum’s full-body likeness, naked. It was all a bit much for the Brits in charge of the archeological dig, but the Arabs working on the site were merely “tolerantly scandalized.” That summer Dahoum traveled to England with Lawrence as he spoke at a series of public lectures to highlight the dire plight of the Arabs. The following summer, 1914, Lawrence made Dahoum custodian at the Carchemish site and departed for Britain in order to join the war effort. Upon his return in 1918 he learned Dahoum had recently contracted typhus and died. Lawrence lived seventeen more years, never as happy or as at home in the world as he had been in Carchemish before the war, and died of injuries from a motorcycle accident when he was forty-six.
      Early biographers indignantly “defend” Lawrence against the “charges” of homosexuality, while more current historians assume their relationship was also a sexual one. Two poems Lawrence wrote about Dahoum may help to decide your opinion. The first is very public, Lawrence’s dedication to S.A. in his most famous book, and the second is private, from his diary about Dahoum sometime after his death.

                To S. A.

I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands
and wrote my will across the sky in stars
To earn you Freedom, the seven-pillared worthy house,
that your eyes might be shining for me
When we came.
Death seemed my servant on the road, till we were near
and saw you waiting:
When you smiled, and in sorrowful envy he outran me
and took you apart:
Into his quietness...

     A Photograph from Carchemish

I gaze at you now, my darling, my brother
the pistol asleep in your young groin,
your lips pulled back in a mighty grin.
My little Hittite, after you there can be no other.

In your dark eyes, my darling, my brother,
The world was created from the waters of Chaos;
now black waves of tears
crash upon the beaches of my sleep
and drown my dreams forever.

The Onion on Gays in the Military

'Gays Too Precious To Risk In Combat,' Says General

Born August 14: Horst P. Horst

Always working outside of mortal, linear time, Horst P. Horst patriotically joined the U.S. army as a photographer in July 1943, three months before he was U.S. citizen. By then he had been famous for eleven years, thanks initially to Janet Flanner's New Yorker review of his Paris show in 1932, and had already shot Dietrich, Davis, Coward, Schiaparelli, Chanel, and Garbo, as well as his most famous photograph, The Mainbocher Corset. He had already had an affair with his mentor George Hoyningen-Huene, who took the above photo of Horst age twenty-five in 1931 and had dated future-filmmaker Luchino Visconti; and he was five years into his relationship with former British diplomat Valentine Lawford, with whom he would stay for sixty-one years. Together, they adopted and raised a son, Richard J. Horst. Continuing to work until close to his death at ninety-three in 1999, Horst took the flower photo below a decade earlier.
 

Born August 13: Herb Ritts

A classicist in the tradition of George Platt Lynes, Herb Ritts' elegance was always overshadowed by his popularity. His friendships with superstars were somehow more newsworthy than his ability to capture the iconic instant and transform mortals into myth. More than any other photographer, Ritts defined style for the ten years from 1982 to 1992 on the covers of Vanity Fair, Vogue, Rolling Stone, GQ, as well as countless ad campaigns and more than a dozen music videos (Love Will Never Do Without You, Wicked Game, Cherish) but because his subjects were celebrities and supermodels he was deemed shallow and superficial. Openly gay throughout his career, he was a major force in fundraising for aids groups like Amfar long before it was fashionable. Forthright about his own hiv-positive status, he died of pneumonia fifteen years ago and is survived by his partner, Erik Hyman. A print that was $500 then is $9,800 now.

More Signals "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" Is On Its Way Out

The Los Angeles Times summarizes the growing shift away from the military's anti-gay "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy. No new news but a decent recap. Discussing the ban, the incoming Joint Chiefs chairman, Navy Admiral Michael Mullen, said, "I'd love to have Congress make its own decision with respect to that." Obviously, Mullen's attitude is more evolved than departing Joint Chiefs chairman Peter Pace's notorious comments about immorality.  Somehow, Pace is already portrayed as distant history:

"Just like in the general population, there is a generational shift within the military," said Paul Rieckhoff, a former Army platoon commander in Iraq who is now executive director of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, a group largely composed of younger retired soldiers. "The average 18-year-old has been around gay people, has seen gay people in popular culture, and they're not this boogeyman in the same way they were to Pete Pace's generation."

The LAT reporters point out another cost of Bill Clinton's refusal to fight for what was right:

Despite the change in attitudes, ending the ban will probably be more difficult than creating it was in 1993. As part of the compromise reached by the Clinton administration, the ban on gays and lesbians serving openly -- once just a Pentagon rule -- was encoded in U.S. law, meaning that unless a court strikes it down, legislation would have to be passed to repeal it.

It is disingenuous for any current candidate to claim the 1993 policy was intended as temporary. The "permanence of law" was a major selling point at the time.

The Queer Vote Matters More Because More Queers Vote

Just in time for tonight's historic HRC forum of Democratic presidential candidates, Community Marketing released the results of their survey about voter turnout among lesbians and gay men. First, the national averages. According to the non-partisan Center for the Study of the American Electorate based at American University, in the 2004 presidential election,  61% of eligible U.S. voters cast a ballot, and in the 2006 midterm elections the figure was roughly 40%. Community Marketing's research found that in 2004 almost 91% of lesbians polled said they voted and 92.5% of gay men, and for the 2006 elections, of lesbians polled 78% had voted, and 84% of gay men. Their wide-spread survey polled more than 10,000 lesbians and more than 12,000 gay men and claimed an error margin of plus or minus 1%.

Born August 8: Randy Shilts

In 1981, Randy Shilts became the first journalist at a major newspaper to cover the gay community full-time. In 1999, five years after his death from aids, the NYU Department of Journalism ranked his reporting on the disease for the San Francisco Chronicle 44th of the top hundred works of journalism in the twentieth century. His exhaustive, meticulous book on aids, And the Band Played On, is universally regarded as a modern classic. Gary Wills said Shilts’ book “will be to gay liberation what Betty Friedan was to early feminism and Rachel Carson's Silent Spring was to environmentalism." It covers what were then believed to be the origins of the disease in Africa in the 1970s [now known to be 1959 in Kinshasa; with the first U.S. death in 1969 in St. Louis] to 1985, when Rock Hudson’s announcement that he had aids finally got mass culture’s attention. Shilts examines the years between, detailing the ignorance, denial, hostility, and indifference of medical, health, and government officials as the unknown “gay cancer” ravaged America, as well as profiling the pioneering doctors and gay activists who fought for funding, research, and public awareness as tens of thousands died around them. HBO’s 1993 adaptation of And the Band Played On was nominated for twenty awards and won nine, including the Emmy for best made-for-tv movie. Conduct Unbecoming, his next book, again as monumental, examined through thousands of interviews the U.S. military’s treatment of its lesbian and gay servicemembers. At the time of his death in 1994 he was planning a book on homosexuality in the Catholic Church. His groundbreaking first book, a biography of Harvey Milk called The Mayor of Castro Street, has been in development as a feature film for more than fifteen years. Currently it is in rewrites with the very busy Bryan Singer, the openly gay director of X-Men, X-2, Superman Returns, now filming Valkyrie with Tom Cruise, while producing House M.D. on television and prepping Superman: Man of Steel, a remake of Logan’s Run, and I, Lucifer with Daniel Craig and Ewan McGregor.

Arlington OKs Ex-Gay Propaganda to Schoolchildren

After first refusing an ex-gay advocacy group permission to distribute its materials to high school students, Arlington County, Virginia is now allowing the group to give its leaflets to schoolchildren as young as five. The group, Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays and Gays (PFOX), promotes "conversion therapy," claims that no scientific study shows that people are born gay, and offers "ex-gays" as "living proof that homosexual orientation is not fixed permanently." Their leaflets can now be distributed in any elementary or junior high school in the county. Arlington's school spokesperson Linda Erdos told AP, "If there's anything distributed that's upsetting to parents, they would need to address those concerns to PFOX."

Born August 7: Anna Weirauch

Nine years before London's 1928 deluge of lesbian fiction (Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness, Compton MacKenzie's Extraordinary Women, Virginia Woolf's Orlando, Elizabeth Bowen's The Hotel, and Djuna Barnes' Ladies Almanack), Anna Weirauch published The Scorpion in Germany. It was the first of three novels following Mette Rudolph from childhood to adulthood. In the first volume Mette has an affair with Olga, who breaks up with her and kills herself. When Mette's parents enlist a psychiatrist to "cure" her, she dismisses the idea that lesbians are sick or need treatment. In the next two volumes she encounters most of the social ills of Weimer Berlin, including  drug abuse, alcoholism,  and  rampant promiscuity but in the end, she finds contentment by leaving the city. Once she's settled in a rural area, she's ready to really love another woman. An abridged translation, titled Of Love Forbidden, was published in America in 1933. A facsimile edition is available from Ayer Company, a reprint publisher of rare titles.

Record Crowds at Amsterdam's Gay Pride, First Youth Float

Of the 375,000 to 500,000 people at Saturday’s gay pride flotilla parade in Amsterdam, none was happier than Danny Hoekzema. For three years he’s been fighting for the right to have a boat in the parade. Earlier this year, the mayor said, No way. Danny is fourteen and he wanted a boat for gay kids under the age of sixteen. The mayor relented after organizers agreed that the young people’s boat would be far away from the more provocative adult boats and that the kids’ parents would be on their boat with them. This year forty young people rode on the float [right]. Among the seventy other boats were barges for mentally disabled gay people, the Pink Police, and heterosexuals against homophobia. Antigay attacks have risen in the city, with sixteen so far this year compared to ten all last year. Some Dutch people are blaming the rise in attacks on the increased number of Arab immigrants; of those apprehended many have been Moroccan young men. A proposed new law, similar to one enacted against soccer hooligans, would ban gay bashers from going near gay establishments. Many more photos here.

Anti-Gay Violence in Iraq Worse Since Invasion

Molly Hennessy-Fiske of the Los Angeles Times files a long report from Baghdad, interviewing many Iraqis who say that gay life was better and more open during Saddam's reign and that anti-gay harassment, beatings, and murders have increased substantially since the U.S.-led invasion of their country in 2003. Human rights groups and the United Nations report that increasingly the attacks against gay people are being perpetrated by militia and the police. This follows the October 2005 fatwa against homosexuality by a leading Shiite Muslim cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, who said anyone having sex with same gender partners "should be killed in the worst, most severe way." An Iraqi gay-rights advocate based in London, Ali Hili, runs a website on the issue, including memorials to the murdered. Iraq's minister of human rights, Wijdan Mikaeil said her office has not received complaints of attacks on gays.   

Read the fully story here.

Born August 6: Andy Warhol

For an artist so often and blithely dismissed, Andy Warhol’s work remains a permanent feature of the twentieth century. The way Andy saw the world shaped what the world has become. You can’t say that about Pollock or Motherwell or Rothko or Rauschenberg or Johns (the last two of which—gay, closeted, dating each other—didn’t want to be seen with Andy because he wasn’t butch enough). You might say it about Picasso, but Picasso didn’t make movies (sixty-six shorts and features, many with Paul Morrissey) or start magazines (Interview, still being published today) or produce bands (The Velvet Underground) or have his own show on MTV or coin a phrase as widely-used as fifteen minutes of fame. Born Andrew Warhola in Pittsburgh in 1928, he was an illustrator for Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and the New Yorker before he could support himself by his art. His first submissions to galleries were drawings of male nudes that were deemed too gay; his first solo show, in 1952, was called Fifteen Drawings Based on the Writings of Truman Capote. Within four years his work was shown in a group exhibition at MoMA. In the Sixties he made his silk screens of soup cans, Marilyns, Elvises, and Jackies, and in 1968 he was shot, almost fatally. His death, in 1987, followed routine gall bladder surgery and several hospital missteps such as overloading him with fluids and failing to monitor his condition. He had avoided and postponed the operation because he did not trust doctors and hospitals.

                   

Seen in Homer, Alaska