Born August 28: Nancy Kulp, Karl Ulrichs

Which gay genius saw the potential in a short-haired young lesbian, a former Florida newspaper reporter who had interviewed Clark Gable and the Duke & Duchess of Windsor but now was stuck working a desk job in the studio's publicity department, and asked her to be in his new picture? George Cukor cast skinny Nancy Kulp as, what else, the comic spinster -- at 30! -- and variations on that theme were the mainstay of her career for the next thirty-eight years. Although she wrung every drop of humor from the wet cliche of the sexless, manless old maid, midcentury critics could be cruel in their critiques of Kulp, describing her as TV's most homely girl with the "face of a shriveled balloon, the figure of a string of spaghetti, and the voice of a bullfrog in mating season." Undaunted, she played her thin parts with brio, building from bit roles in Shane, Sabrina, and A Star Is Born, to her biggest success on television. After three seasons on his Bob Cummings Show, writer-producer Paul Henning cast Kulp in his next project, The Beverly Hillbillies. Surely her Miss Jane Hathaway is one of the immortal early queer characters, and while audiences were invited to laugh at her highly unlikely pining for hot Jethro (when he wasn't in drag as his sister Jethrine), Kulp gave her character all the dignity befitting the scholarly, single secretary who was happiest with her women-only birdwatching society. Finally, critics appreciated her and she was rewarded with an Emmy nomination in 1967 and, following the series' end in 1971, roles on The Brian Keith Show, Sanford & Son, and The Love Boat. In her early sixties, she returned to her native Pennsylvania and ran for Congress as a Democrat in 1984. Her former Hillbillies costar Buddy Ebsen did ads attacking her as "too liberal" and her Republican opponent won in the Reagan re-election landslide. Closeted her whole career, Kulp finally came out in a carefully controlled way to interviewer in 1989, reprinted in Boze Hadleigh's book Hollywood Lesbians. She died of cancer in February 1991 at sixty-nine. YouTube's Mister Esoteric has compiled these clips honoring her as a forerunner to Lily Tomlin, Sandra Bernhard, and Ellen.

 

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, 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.”

Comments

[Michael Bedwell]

With respect, unless you have documentation contradicting Hubert Kennedy's "Ulrichs: The Life and Works of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs," I don't understand the assertion that the great Ulrichs "came out" during his attempt to speak to the Congress of German Jurists or that he "demand[ed] they repeal their anti-gay laws" when Kennedy writes that he was shouted down BEFORE he could make clear to the 500 lawyers and judges—and a Bavarian prince—present what he was actually talking about. He’d sent a written proposal to the Congress for the repeal of laws against same sex acts two years before, but it had been declared "not suitable to be considered by the Congress." Now, he’d been given permission to speak at one of their 1867 Munich meetings but the moment those aware of that proposal realized he was attempting to address the same issue, they shut him down. After explaining that “a proposal” had been repressed, he was only able to refer to the "persecution of an innocent class of persons" who "in Germany is numbered in the thousands, a class of persons to which many of the greatest and noblest intellects of our and other nations have belonged ... exposed to an undeserved legal persecution for no other reason than that mysteriously disposing creating nature has planted in them a sexual nature that is the opposite of that which is in general usual...." He also said that it was “a question…of damming a continuing flood of suicides, and that of the most shocking kind.” After his reference to “sexual nature,” he was actually asked by the Congress chairman to continue only in Latin so as not to offend less educated delicate ears. When asked to read the actual proposal he could only reply that it had been confiscated by the police months before. One member from Dresden who had been involved in suppressing it wouldn’t explain any more when he rose to defend their rejection than, “[I]t is in contradiction to the current laws [and] offends modesty. Just by being read it would have aroused the indignation of this assembly! A blush would have come to our faces! And since we are to speak in Latin, I will tell you that it is of a sexual nature.” While Ulrich failed to make his cause clear to the Congress, to change the law—I agree his heroism then and in so many other ways should never be forgotten.