Band of Thebes

ONE Archivist Glimpses Some 1950s Pride

                  

Kyle Morgan, an archivist at the must-visit ONE Archives in Los Angeles, posts photos from 1953 on TIME's Lightbox page. He writes:

"The image is part of the ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the University of Southern California Libraries – the largest repository of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer materials in the world. The picture was once owned by the young man on the right-hand side of the image above, Joseph John Bertrund Belanger. Belanger, for most of his life, was a devoted collector of LGBT history. Born in Edmonton, Canada, in 1925, he served in the Royal Canadian Air Force and was a member of the Mattachine Society – an early instance of what today would be called an LGBT organization — in the early 1950s. It is thanks to his passion and foresight that the image survives today."

The ever-growing bibliography of books of archival gay photos includes, most recently, The Invisibles: Vintage Portraits of Love and Pride. Gay Couples in the Early Twentieth Century, as well as James Gardiner's Who's a Pretty Boy, Then?: 150 Years of Gay Life in Pictures, Russell Bush's Affectionate Men: A Photographic History of a Century of Male Couples, 1850-1950, John Ibson's Picturing Men: A Century of Male Relationships in Everyday American Photography, David Deitcher's Dear Friends: American Photographs of Men Together, 1840-1918, Montague Glover's private photos of gay Brits 1914-1950 in A Class Apart, and Jonathan Ned Katz's Love Stories: Sex between Men before Homosexuality. 

Born June 23: Alan Turing, David Leavitt

Anyone tallying the cost of Britain's homophobia must include all the things Alan Turing didn't solve or invent because he killed himself at 41. The brilliant mathematician had already broken the Germans' Enigma code during WWII, become an OBE, laid the groundwork for the modern computer by designing the Automatic Computing Engine, and devoted himself to the mathematical biology field called morphogenesis (specifically, discerning the Fibonacci numbers in plant structures). In 1952 his home was burgled by two men, one of whom was a 19 year-old Turning had slept with, and as a result of their break-in he was charged with gross indecency under the same 1885 law that felled Oscar Wilde. To avoid prison, he was forced to undergo painful injections of estrogen as a form of chemical castration. He died by eating a poisoned apple. His mother strongly believed the cyanide in the fruit was accidental, owing to her son's legendary carelessness, but his death was ruled a suicide. Timothy Ferris points out that Turing's favorite fairy tale was Snow White. The best short biography of him is The Man Who Knew Too Much by David Leavitt...

 

Raised in Palo Alto, David Leavitt graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Yale at 21, by which time he had already published a gay themed short story in The New Yorker. His first collection, Family Dancing, appeared the following year and was nominated for an NBCC (losing to Louise Erdrich) and the PEN/Faulkner Award (won by Tobias Wolff). Since then he's published eight novels, among them another PEN/Faulkner finalist, The Indian Clerk; three other collections of stories or novellas; his collected stories; a brief book on Florence; and, a short biography of gay birthday-mate Alan Turing. He is a professor at the University of Florida, where he and his partner Mark Mitchell co-edit the excellent literary journal Subtropics whose fiction is regularly gay and often selected among the year's best. Leavitt and Mitchell also co-edited an anthology of gay fiction from 1748 to 1914, Pages Passed From Hand to Hand. They divide their time between Florida and Tuscany and in their spare time have co-written two other books about Italy. He was named a NYPL Literary Lion. Earlier this month Bloomsbury released the paperback of his much-praised gay/bi novel of Lisbon during the war, The Two Hotel Francforts, which was a finalist for both the Ferro-Grumley and a Lammy.

Born June 8: Marguerite Yourcenar

By the time she was eight, Brussels-born Marguerite Cleenewerck de Crayencour was reading Aristophanes. By ten she was learning Latin, and at twelve, Greek. In 1929, when she published her first novel, Alexis, about a closeted gay man leaving his family, she chose to write under an anagram of her surname, Yourcenar. In 1937, she and her American translator, Grace Frick, fell in love and remained together forty-two years until Frick’s death in 1979. The following year, Yourcenar became the first woman ever elected to the French Academy, established in 1635, suppressed in 1793, and restored in 1803. To date, 726 people have been elected “immortals,” eight of them women. Among the many renowned French writers who were never elected to the Academy are Moliere, Balzac, Zola, and Proust. Yourcenar wrote novels, stories, poems, essays, a book-length study of Mishima, and three volumes of her autobiography, yet her exalted reputation is based mainly on her masterpiece, Memoirs of Hadrian. Like Mary Renault, Yourcenar chose to address homosexuality in her work through male characters, especially those in antiquity, and her novel fully describes Hadrian’s great love for Antinous, a youth of astonishing beauty and athletic grace. She and Frick first vacationed on Mount Desert Island, Maine, in 1942, and moved there full-time in 1950, in a house they called Petite Plaisance, which today survives as a museum.

Trans Man Wins Authors' Club Best First Novel of the Year

"...Thrillingly erudite and infectiously entertaining, completely compelling and morally unsettling. The voice never falters, and the execution is masterful. What a marvellous book – a tour de force," said judge Isabel Wolff of Jack Wolf's debut The Tale of Raw Head and Bloody Bones [and Kindle], which just won the Authors' Club Best First Novel award in London. Previously, Wolf's novel was a finalist for the Polari First Book Prize. According to TLC,

"Jack Wolf, who wrote the novel as a woman and has since transitioned to being a man, has fully embraced both the language and ideas of eighteenth-century England to create a beautiful and startling novel that contemplates questions of good and evil, faith and science, that are still relevant today. Moreover, while it does not explicitly deal with issues of gender identity, Wolf’s experience of transitioning from female to male is reflected in the writing, in particular in its focus on identity and what it feels like to be uncomfortable in one’s own skin.

"The year is 1751 and Tristan Hart, a precociously talented student of medicine is studying under the legendary Dr. William Hunter in London. Tristan is fascinated by the nature of pain and preventing it; the relationship between mind and matter and the existence of God. He is a product of the Enlightenment, a rational man on a quest to cut through darkness and superstition with the scientific method.

"But that is just one side of Tristan. Tristan is also a psychopath and a deviant, obsessed with

John D'Emilio's In a New Century

The terrific historian and co-honcho at Out History.org, John D'Emilio's In a New Century [and Kindle] collects his recent essays on queer history, gay politics, and community life. University of Wisconsin Press says:

"For gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people in the United States, the twenty-first century has brought dramatic changes: the end of sodomy laws, the elimination of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” a move toward recognition of same-sex marriage, Gay-Straight Alliances in thousands of high schools, and an explosion of visibility in the media and popular culture. All of this would have been unimaginable to those living just a few decades ago. Yet, at the same time, the American political system has grown ever more conservative, and increasing economic inequality has been a defining feature of the new century.
            "A pioneering scholar of gay history, John D’Emilio reflects in this wide-ranging collection of essays upon the social, cultural, and political changes provoked by LGBT activism. He offers provocative questions and historical analyses: What can we learn from a life-long activist like Bayard Rustin, who questioned the wisdom of “identity politics”? Was Richard Nixon a “gay liberationist”? How can knowing local stories—like those of Chicago in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s—help build stronger communities and enrich traditions of activism? Might the focus on achieving actually be evidence of growing conservatism in LGBT communities?
            "In a New Century provides a dynamic, thoughtful, and important resource for identifying changes that have occurred in the United States since 1960, taking stock of the work that still needs to be done, and issuing an urgent call to action for getting there."

Born May 31: Walt Whitman

You could make a case that the Big Bang moment of the modern lgbt universe was Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, which he self-published in 1855 when he was 36. His open celebration of love between men was a major inspiration to Oscar Wilde and to Edward Carpenter and to scores of other towering queer leaders who have turned the tide of human history. Born in Long Island the second of nine children, he moved frequently with his poor and unlucky family and dropped out of school at 11. He jumped from job to job, teaching, journalism, government clerk. He was fired from his post at the Bureau of Indian Affairs after the new Secretary of the Interior read his book. Whitman became a nurse during the Civil War and in 1866 met his beloved Peter Doyle, a streetcar conductor. He lived until 1892. For the full story, read Gary Schmidgall's MLA Prize winning biography, Walt Whitman: A Gay Life. Ignore the generations of scholars who have tried to degay him, the contemporary critics who claim his homosexuality is "irrelevant," and his own late life prevarications about his having had a wife and children. Also, read the poems.

 

Lost Early LGBT Photos Seen Anew in The Invisibles

After winning the Cesar for best documentary, Sebastien Lifshitz finally gets a US release this week for the companion volume The Invisibles: Vintage Portraits of Love and Pride. Gay Couples in the Early Twentieth Century. Lifshitz collected the snapshots over twenty years of trawling flea markets, junk shops, and ebay in France, Germany, Portugal, and the United States. He says, "With each discovery I was stunned, for these images didn’t match the official history of homosexuality as it has been conveyed to us. As a teenager, when I dreamed of my adult life, if I stuck to the literature or the few films that existed on the subject, the future promised to be dark. To be gay or lesbian meant belonging to a genealogy of suffering, to have a dramatic, if not a tragic, destiny. Despite the many battles and certain victories that ensued, the homosexual remained a victim in the collective consciousness; a hidden man. Yet, these images, which I've found through the years, were telling another story -- one about a homosexuality without inhibitions, gentle and playful." 

Gay History Week: New Mattachine, Normal Heart, Milk Stamp

Two big gay profiles in today's New York Times: 1) Larry Kramer on the decades-long journey to film The Normal Heart, airing on HBO this Sunday, and 2) the successful efforts of the newly revived Mattachine Society of Washington DC, headed by my husband Charles Francis, to find and bring forth hidden legal and political documents of the early and recent gay rights battles. The story, Uncovered Papers Show Past Government Efforts To Drive Gays from Jobs, is currently the third-most-emailed feature on the paper's Nation page. Obviously not every topic could make the article but I was particularly sorry they cut Charles' praise for Allan Berube, the MacArthur genius who wrote Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II, and the invisible gay blogger who turned Charles on to degayed history and introduced him to Berube's work his fellow Mattachine board members Rick Rosendall and Pate Felts, as well as the many pro bono attorneys at MWE including Lisa Linsky.

Tomorrow is Harvey's 84th birthday and the official release of the Milk stamp.

Armed Forces Day

Soldier or sailor? Take your pick—or do both—with Evan Bachner's kind of amazing troves of archival army and navy photos from 1939-45. He has plucked the finest of the fittest for At Ease: Navy Men of World War II and Men of World War II: Fighting Men at Ease. (He also published Making WAVES: Navy Women of World War II.) More after the jump.

   

The Sixth Extinction and a Central Problem of Gay History

Although it covers many die-offs old and new (especially the current demise of frogs and bats -- perversely, I wanted more catastrophe), Elizabeth Kolbert's ripping good read The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History [and Kindle] really is more interested in trickier questions like how people notice mass events that might be very quick in geologic time -- a couple hundred years -- given that each generation accepts its circumstances as baseline normal. Perception is crucial. She opens chapter five recounting a 1949 Harvard experiment that flashed regular playing cards with two alterations in the deck: a red spade and a black diamond. Students could not figure out what they were seeing. They couldn't determine the color ("purple," "brown," "rusty") or the suit of the changed cards. Inspired by that work, Thomas Kuhn studied how people deal with disruptive information. "Their first impulse is to force it into a familiar framework... Signs of mismatch are disregarded..."

"The pattern was, Kuhn argued, so basic that it shaped not only individual perceptions but entire fields of inquiry. Data that did not fit the commonly accepted assumptions of a discipline would either be discounted or explained away for as long as possible. The more contradictions accumulated, the more convoluted the rationalizations became. 'In science, as in the playing card experiment, novelty emerges only with difficulty,' Kuhn wrote."

To my mind nowhere is this syndrome more obvious or more prevalent than when historians or scientists are confronted with gay material. Scholars read Shakespeare's love sonnets to a young man and, exactly as Kuhn notes, they force it into a familiar framework ("friendship") and the more contradictions that accumulate (126 loving sonnets to him and the book dedicated to him vs. only 26 angry and unhappy sonnets to the dark lady), the more convoluted their rationalizations become. Historians find Lincoln in bed with a handsome young soldier while his wife is away or they read one of Eleanor Roosevelt's few surviving love letters to lesbian journalist Lorena Hickok, and suddenly they can't see what they're seeing. Even worse is scientists' global disregard of the 1,500 species of animals that engage in foreplay, mounting, penetration, pair-bonding, or co-parenting in same-sex couples. Rather than create outlandish excuses why some animals primarily have sex and pair with their own gender when the opposite gender is available, heteroists simply erase it. A profound and entertaining rescue is Bruce Bagemihl's phenomenal book, Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity.

British Library Posts 1200 Treasures: Wilde, Byron, Hardy, Austen, Eliot

Ex your ennui -- it's always a thrill to see a favorite author's handwritten manuscripts and letters. The British Library has posted 1,204 newly digitized items plus two dozen videos like the Brontes at Haworth or Jane's tight pages or the origins of A Christmas Carol or Blake's radicalism. Among others, you can explore:

Oscar Wilde (a first edition of Dorian Gray, Roger Luckhurst on perversion and degeneracy)

Jane Austen 

William Blake

Lord Byron

Lewis Carroll

George Eliot

Charles Dickens

Thomas Hardy

Robert Louis Stevenson 

Smithsonian's US History in 101 Objects: LGBT Protest Signs, Aids Quilt

For once, we're part of the mainstream historical narrative. The Smithsonian's History of America in 101 Objects features Pocahontas' portrait, slave shackles, the Declaration of Inpendence, John Deere's plow, Lewis & Clark's compass, Bell's telephone, Edison's lightbulb, a suffragist's banner, a klansman's hood, Louis Armstrong's trumpet, Babe Ruth's baseball, Dorothy Gale's ruby slippers, Muhammad Ali's boxing gloves, Neil Armstrong's space suit, Julia Child's kitchen, Apple's Mac, panels from the aids quilt, and picket signs from the Mattachine's lesbian and gay rights picket at the White House in 1965. Each entry has photos and a related essay.

Essential as it is to be acknowledged on equal footing in the story of America, it must be said most selections are thuddingly unoriginal. Unlike every page of Neil MacGregor's A History of the World in 100 Objects, nothing here is a surprise or even a stretch. Redundantly, the curators include separately the Wright Brothers' plane and Lindbergh's plane but completely omit newspapers & magazines; oil and energy; any form of theater; any religion after 1846; the Homestead Act; the 19th century labor movement; the Dust Bowl; environmentalism; on and on.

For a dose of the American wonder, richness, and intrigue missing above, here is Slate's brand new map of each state's most common language after English and Spanish:

Recovering the Gay Past: The New Mattachine Society's Archive Activism

From tomorrow's Washington Blade:

"...the group’s mission to conduct archival research to uncover long forgotten government documents that show in chilling detail how federal policies were put into place to ban gays from the federal workforce.

“We believe the importance of these documents is the enormous evidentiary and educational value that they have,” Mattachine president Charles Francis told the Blade.

“The evidentiary and educational value of the original archival documents show the persecution of gay people without regard to any valid government purpose,” he said. “Only malicious persecution over and over, and we see that beginning in 1953.”

"Francis was referring to what Kameny and other veteran gay leaders called the infamous Executive Order 10450 issued by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1953 – possibly at the request of then FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.

"The order, among other things, barred from the federal workforce individuals found to be involved with “any criminal, infamous, dishonest, immoral, or notoriously disgraceful conduct, habitual use of intoxicants to excess, drug addiction, or sexual perversion.”

"Although the order didn’t specifically mention homosexuality or homosexuals, it was interpreted by the U.S. Civil Service Commission to mean homosexuals were barred and should be summarily dismissed from any federal government job.

"The order for the first time “equated gays and lesbians with disloyalty,” Francis said. “And that was a catastrophe for gay and lesbian Americans” that “much too little has been written about and much too little is actually known about it,” Francis said.

"One expert who does know about it, gay rights advocate and University of South Florida professor David K. Johnson, author of The Lavender Scare, is scheduled to be one of two featured speakers at a Mattachine Society of Washington forum scheduled for May 21.

"Joining Johnson as a speaker at the event, to be held at the offices of the D.C. law firm McDermott Will & Emery, will be David S. Ferriero, who serves as Archivist of the United States and director of the National Archives and Records Administration."

Read the full story here.

Born May 14: William Percy, Magnus Hirschfeld

One of the best, most jolting, and cruelly overlooked gay books from 2012 was Benjamin Wise's William Alexander Percy: The Curious Life of a Mississippi Planter and Sexual Freethinker [and Kindle]. Born in 1885, Percy was, "a queer plantation owner, poet, and memoirist. Though he is best known as a conservative apologist of the southern racial order, in this telling Wise creates a complex and surprising portrait of a cultural relativist, sexual liberationist, and white supremacist. We follow Percy as he travels from Mississippi around the globe and, always, back again to the Delta. Wise's exploration brings depth and new meaning to Percy's already compelling life story--his prominent family's troubled history, his elite education and subsequent soldiering in World War I, his civic leadership during the Mississippi River flood of 1927, his mentoring of writers Walker Percy and Shelby Foote, and the writing and publication of his classic autobiography, Lanterns on the Levee: Recollections of a Planter's Son. This biography sets Percy's life and search for meaning in the context of his history in the Deep South and his experiences in the gay male world of the early twentieth century. In Wise's hands, these seemingly disparate worlds become one."

The next time people claim the gay rights movement is a recent invention or that you’re anachronistically imposing a modern concept on a pre-Stonewall era that could not possibly have supported the idea, remind them of Magnus Hirschfeld. In 1896, he wrote and published a pamphlet on homosexual love called Sappho and Socrates. In 1897 with the leaders of the gay journal Der Eigene, Hirschfeld founded the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, whose motto was “Justice through science.” Their first goal was to overturn the notorious 1871 German law Paragraph 175, criminalizing male homosexuality. Not only did they campaign openly and publicly, they urged prominent people to sign their petition to repeal the law. Among the 5,000 signatories were Einstein, Tolstoy, Mann, Hesse, and Rilke. When the bill to repeal came before the Reichstag in 1898, it failed, and, infuriated by their hypocrisy, Hirschfeld contemplated outing various members of parliament who had voted against it. Undaunted by the defeat, the committee continued to get the bill reintroduced repeatedly over the next decades. 
        Thirty-four years before Kinsey, Hirschfeld collected detailed information about sexual behavior in surveys from 10,000 people

Today's Dose of Keatsian Porn Is a Joy Forever

It's not every porn movie that pulls its name from a line of Keats, uses classical music in its trailer, and generally looks like a poor man's Miramax doing an all-gay sex romp -- Il Postino with three-ways by the sea. (Watch the sundrenched R rated trailer, nothing X.) Partners of fifteen years, Jake Jaxson and RJ Sebastian, released the movie last year (above) and now have published an explicit photobook (below), also called A Thing of Beauty, which confusingly is not necessarily outtakes from their film of the same name. Dudes just love their Keats.

Four other brand-new gay photobooks scratch your changing moods. Scruffy: Raunch. Pretty: Anticipation by Joe Mozdzen, with a preface by Greg Gorman. Fratty: Fond Memories by Mark Lynch. Brazily: Rio Men by Leo Castro. You won't confuse any of these with the high art of Peter Hujar: Love & Lust.

In another class altogether, finally coming later this month is Sebastien Lifshitz's collection The Invisibles: Vintage Portraits of Love and Pride. Gay Couples in the Early Twentieth Century, the companion volume to his Cesar-winning gay documentary.

Born March 23: Steven Saylor/Aaron Travis, J.C. Leyendecker

London's Sunday Times says Steven Saylor "evokes the ancient world more convincingly than any other writer of his generation," evident across the twelve novels and two story collections of his Roma Sub Rosa series about Gordianus the Finder, including two CWA Historical Dagger Award finalists, Last Seen in Massilia and The Judgment of Caesar, the Lammy nominee The Venus Throw, and the Lammy winner Catilina's Riddle. Saylor may be best known for his 1,200-year epics Roma and Empire, international bestsellers published in twenty-two languages. He has also written two novels of his native Texas, most notably A Twist at the End about O. Henry and a series of murders in Austin in the 1880s. Last month came his sixteenth novel, Raiders of the Nile, which USA Today calls "exuberantly entertaining." He and Rick Solomon, partners since 1976, divide their time between Austin and Berkeley. An essay about their long relationship appears in My Mother's Ghost.

Earlier, Saylor was the bestselling gay erotica writer Aaron Travis. Maybe you don't want academic approval of your taboo-busting porn, but you do want results: Michael Bronski says Slaves of the Empire [Kindle] is "a high point of gay male writing in the second half of the twentieth century" that has achieved "near-mythological status," and he calls Blue Light [Kindle only 99 cents] "a contemporary supernatural masterpiece as frightening as anything H.P. Lovecraft or Stephen King ever wrote." Susie Bright agrees, saying it's "perhaps the most fantastic supernatural erotic thriller ever written." She selected his stories for at least two volumes of her mainly straight Best American Erotica series and to celebrate its tenth anniversary she asked readers to name their favorite piece from all ten volumes: The winner was The Hit [Kindle], which Saylor notes was inspired by the movies Carnival Story and Murder by Contract. William Burroughs' and John le Carré's work partially prompted Crown of Thorns about an American spy in Istanbul who submits to "a brutal Turkish stevedore." Other titles in the newly digitized Aaron Travis Erotic Library are Short, Brainy & Hot, Wild West, Wrestling Tales, Military Discipline, Eden and the horrifying Kudzu.

 

In the early 20th century when Arrow had 94% of market share, much of the shirtmaker's success could be laid with illustrator J.C. Leyendecker -- he used his chiseled boyfriend as the model for the archetypal Arrow Collar Man. Born in Germany in 1874, Leyendecker moved with his family to Chicago when he was eight. He and his brother enrolled at the city's Art Institute before studying art nouveau at the Académie Julian in Paris. They returned to Chicago early in 1899 and by May Leyendecker received his first commission for a cover of the era's most famous magazine, The Saturday Evening Post. Throughout his career he would draw 321 more covers for them, creating the genre of "adorable" domestic chaos, stirring patriotism, family holidays, lovers' foibles, and youthful high spirits (with scrawny nudity) that today we associate with his Eve Harrington protege and successor Norman Rockwell. Leyendecker was slight and disliked confrontation; when his friends warned him Rockwell was stealing his style, he didn't protest. (Being a gay man and an immigrant in the early 20th century may also have amplified his instincts to avoid trouble.) One area in which he maintained preeminence was the blatant homoerotic. Leyendecker's men eternally give one another penetrating looks inside, outdoors, and on deck, and they're always thrusting elongated objects at happy angles from their bodies. He never met a muscle that didn't need to beef up, ripple, or glisten under his expert touch. As his biographers  explain, “Neighboring artists shared models with the brothers, which meant a seemingly endless train of attractive Greenwich Village lads parading through their chilly studio in the buff.” One was named Charles Beach. He was 17 and Leyendecker was 28. By all accounts Beach was both hot and not, given to self aggrandizing claims that he did Leyendecker's work (despite not being able to draw), along with the more typical fits of jealousy, insecurity, and tyranny. Margo Channing Norman Rockwell complained he never heard Beach say anything intelligent and called him "stupid." Nevertheless, Leyendecker and Beach moved into a New Rochelle mansion together and threw luxe parties attended by the jazz age set including Scott and Zelda. Inevitably, times changed, the commissions dwindled, and the money ran out. They had to dismiss their staff yet they stayed together a total of 49 years, until Leyendecker's death in 1951 when he instructed his private papers be destroyed. For more, read J.C. Leyendecker or, yes, J. C. Leyendecker.

Leyendecker's artist brother F.X. Leyendecker also had an eye for masculine muscle, as with this barechested blacksmith, and for strategically placed missiles between shirtless swabbies (compare below). He became addicted to drugs and killed himself at 47.

    

    

Born March 20: John Boswell

When Publishing Triangle ranked the 100 Best LGBT Nonfiction Books of all time, they included works by Plato, Freud, Foucault, Faderman, Duberman, et al., and their undisputed choice at #1 was Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality by John Boswell, a history professor at Yale. He was 33 when it was published in 1980. Newsweek said it was, "an astonishing work of scholarship that ranges with ease over fourteen centuries...What makes the work so exciting is not simply its content -- fascinating though that is -- but its revolutionary challenge to some of Western culture's most familiar moral assumptions." Specifically, he proved that the Roman Catholic Church hadn't always been antigay, had either been indifferent to or had actually celebrated male - male love until the twelfth century. No surprise, Boswell was attacked by some conservative academics who thought he was promoting a gay agenda and by some gay people who said he was a Church apologist. Ultimately the complaints only added to the book's popularity because it was impeccably researched; it won the 1981 American Book Award for history.

After writing the first book about the widespread practice of child abandonment in medieval times, Boswell returned to gay topics and the early Church in another groundbreaking work, Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe. This time he argued the Church actually condoned certain male - male relationships with ceremonies that could be seen as precursors to gay marriage. Again, the book was brilliantly researched; again, the uproar; but the public debate was cut short: Boswell died of aids in December 1994 when he was 47. At Yale, he helped start the Lesbian and Gay Studies Center, and his pre-modern history courses were immensely popular, among the top ten in enrollments.

How Degayed Is The Monuments Men?

 

"Based on a True Story:" Clooney transforms a 38 year-old, tall, gay stud into a tiny 68 year-old weakling.

The list of what I'd endure for Thebes does not extend to sitting through writer-director-star George Clooney's "tepid" (USA Today), "lifeless" (Variety), "pandering" (NYT), "self-congratulatory" (AV Club), "failure" (EW, which gave it a C-) of "threadbare formula and sentimental cliches" (Wash Post), The Monuments Men, so I can't report the exact extent to which he's degayed the real men and women who rescued art stolen by the Nazis. One clue can be found here: The character based on the imposing, six-foot, broad-shouldered uber queer Lincoln Kirstein age 38 in May 1945 is played by five-foot-five, 68 year-old Bob Balaban who in these interviews says he didn't study Kirstein for his role as "Preston Savitz" and no Q or A mentions anything gay. Nor do critics. Balaban hints "many of his key characteristics weren’t necessarily written into my part of the movie." But he's small and sensitive and struggles to climb a wall and he's the only one of them who wears spectacles, so audiences will get it, right? Why be honest about actual gay heroics in history when you can rely on stale signifiers and sissy stereotypes?

While still shy of gay contributions, the better telling of these events is in Lynn Nicholas' NBCC winning The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe's Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War which was made into this documentary.

1,000-Page Stanwyck Bio "Does Not Explore Issues of Personal Sexuality"

Why are critics giving Victoria Wilson a pass for degaying A Life of Barbara Stanwyck [Kindle]? Is it because she's an editor at Knopf? Or is it because they know diehard fans don't like their icons outed? At 1,044 pages this volume covers only half of the closeted actress's life and apparently avoids her orientation altogether. The very, very exhaustive index lacks entries for sexuality, homosexuality, lesbian, gay, or rumors, and the NYT critic hurries past the colossal implications in noting, "Ms. Wilson does not explore issues of personal sexuality. What she does tackle is the outrageous ways in which sexual stereotypes were marketed to pitch movies." 

In a long interview, Lara Fowler asked if Stanwyck's second marriage to Robert Taylor was to cover up their mutual homosexualities and Wilson only denies Taylor's queerness... with the "proof" of Harry Hay's word. [As Mattachine founder and fiery Communist, Hay possibly was not welcome in all Hollywood circles. Stanwyck was an ice-cold conservative.] Wilson said, with appalling nerve if the NYT is accurate that her book avoids personal sexuality,:

"I had one ambition for my biography of Barbara Stanwyck, and that was to write a book that reflected the truth about my subject and her world, regardless of what it was. I have written quite detailed portraits of Stanwyck’s two marriages; the first to Frank Fay; the second to Robert Taylor. Each marriage was complex and came about because of complex reasons – and stayed in tact because of equally complicated reasons; neither marriage came about because of homosexuality. I asked many people who would have a somewhat informed inkling about Robert Taylor’s sexuality, people who knew him at the time, or would have heard about the (then, of necessity) underground truth of his sexuality and nowhere did I come across any hint of his being gay, including interviewing Harry Hay, founder in 1950 of the Mattachine Society. If anyone would have known, or heard about the truth of Taylor’s sexuality over the years, it would have been Harry Hay. . ."

For a more honest look, get William Mann's Behind the Screen: How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood, 1910-1969 or Boze Hadleigh's Hollywood Lesbians.

Born November 14: Adolf Brand

When was the world's first gay journal published? Congratulations if you said 117 years ago, in 1896. That's when Adolf Brand, at 22, started Der Eigene in Berlin. Originally cloaked as a journal of "male culture," within two years it went exclusively gay. In 1900, Brand published Elisar von Kupffer's landmark anthology of gay poems, Lieblingminne und Freundesliebe In der Weltliteratur, including works from Ancient Greece and Rome, Renaissance Italy, Elizabethan England, 19th century Germany, as well as Arab and Japanese texts. Brand and his colleagues were constantly harassed and frequently prosecuted for their articles and photography, but he never backed down. Indeed, the first of his three prison sentences was for having attacked a member of parliament with a dog whip. His second prison term, eighteen months, was for libel, after reporting the affair between the German chancellor Prince von Bülow and the Privy Councilor Max Scheefer. His third prison term was two months, after he was convicted of violating Paragraph 175 for printing "lewd writings" in Der Eigene. The journal lasted thirty-six years. (Compare that with ONE, nineteen years; The Ladder, sixteen years; or 10 Percent magazine, four years.) His life's work destroyed and left in financial ruin, Brand gave up his activism in the 1930s. He spent two years in the German army and married a nurse, Elise Behrendt, who knew he was gay. He and Elise were killed together on February 2, 1945 when an Allied bomb exploded their home.