Friday, 24 February 2012

February 24th in Queer History

Born this day

Marjorie Main  (1890 – 1975) US
Character actress, mainly at MGM, perhaps best known for her role as Ma Kettle in a series of ten Ma and Pa Kettle movies. Although she was married (to Stanley LeFevre Krebs, who died in 1935), three authors, Boze Hadleigh, Axel Madsen, and Darwin Porter, have asserted that Main was a lesbian.According to Keith Stern and Boze Hadleigh, Marjorie Main had a long-term lesbian relationship with actress Spring Byington.

Doric Wilson (1939 – )  US
Playwright, director, producer, critic and gay rights activist. A veteran of the anti-war and civil rights demonstrations of the early 1960s-mid 1970s, Wilson was a participant in the Stonewall Riots (1969) and became active in the early days of the New York Gay Liberation movement as a member of GAA (Gay Activist Alliance). He supported his theatrical endeavors by becoming a "star" bartender and manager of the post-Stonewall gay bar scene, opening such landmark institutions as The Spike, TY's and Brothers & Sisters Cabaret. In 2004, Wilson was named a Grand Marshal of the 35th Anniversary Pride Day Parade in New York City. He was featured in the documentary Stonewall Uprising (2010) by Kate Davis and David Heilbroner.
In 1974, Wilson (with Billy Blackwell, Peter del Valle and John McSpadden) formed TOSOS (The Other Side of Silence), the first professional theatre company to deal openly and honestly with the gay experience.

Tony Holiday  (1951 – 1990) German
Born Rolf Peter Knigge, Holiday was a German pop singer and songwriter, who died of AIDS on Valentines Day, 1990 at the age 38.


Judith Butler  (1956 – )  US
Post-structuralist philosopher, who has contributed to the fields of feminism, queer theory, political philosophy, and ethics. In the field of gender and sexuality, she is best known for her landmark book Gender Trouble, first published in 1990,in which she describes gender not as fixed and given, but as a social construct - as "performance". The book, which sold over 100,000 copies internationally and in different languages, has since had a formative influence on the later development of queer theory, and on related fields, including queer theology.
Butler currently lives with her partner, the political scientist Wendy Brown.

Jennie Livingston  (1962 – )  US
Film director best known for the 1990 documentary about the New York gay and transgender Black and Latino ball culture, "Paris is Burning".


Laurent Ruquier  (1963 – ) French
A popular French journalist, satirical comedian, and TV and radio host. He is also a columnist, lyricist, author, screenwriter, and impresario.


Nitzan Horowitz  (1965 –  ) Israeli
journalist and politician. He was the Foreign Affairs commentator and head of the International desk at News 10, the news division of Channel 10, before being elected to the Knesset on the New Movement-Meretz list in 2009. Horowitz then became the second openly gay Knesset member in Israeli history.


Jolie Justus  (1971 – ) US
Lawyer and politician from Missouri. A Democrat, she is a member of the Missouri State Senate, after being elected in 2006. She is the first openly gay member of the Missouri Senate and only the third ever publicly gay member of the Missouri General Assembly. In 2009, Senator Justus was named to The Advocate's "Forty Under 40" list, a list of forty young leaders of the LGBT community.[
She married Shonda Garrison in Iowa in 2009, when that state legalized same-sex marriage.

Ashley MacIsaac  (1975 – ) Canadian
Professional fiddler and actor from Cape Breton Island,noted for his rock-star bravado and eccentricities.
In 1996, in a Maclean's interview, he claimed that he had discussed his sexual life, including his underaged boyfriend in an interview with the LGBT newsmagazine The Advocate.[11] The Advocate did not print any of the material


Jose Galisteo Spanish
Singer / Musician / Actor / Reality TV [Operacion Triunfo]





Gwen Araujo (2002 - 1985 ) US
Pre-operative teenage transwoman, murdered in a hate crime killing in Newark, California, in October 2002.

Died this day

Malcolm Forbes (1919 - 1990) US
Publisher of Forbes magazine, founded by his father B. C. Forbes and today run by his son Steve Forbes. During life, he was noted for his opulent and lavish lifestyle, but kept his sexuality secret. After his death in 1990, OutWeek magazine published a story with the cover headline "The Secret Gay Life of Malcolm Forbes," by Michelangelo Signorile, which outed Forbes as a gay man.Signorile was critical of the media for helping Forbes publicize many aspects of his life while keeping his homosexuality a secret.


Johnnie Ray  (1927  - 1990) US
Singer, songwriter, and pianist. Popular for most of the 1950s, Ray has been cited by critics as a major precursor of what would become rock and roll, for his jazz and blues-influenced music and his animated stage personality.
Ray was arrested twice for soliciting men for sex, in 1951 in the restroom of the Stone Theatre burlesque house in Detroit, and in 1959, also in Detroit, for soliciting an undercover officer in a bar called the Brass Rail.

Sodomy in history, February 24th

1863 — The Arizona Territory receives the laws of New Mexico, which includes its common-law reception statute, making sodomy a crime punishable by life imprisonment.

1938 — A California appellate court upholds an oral copulation conviction of a man in a hotel after naval investigators listened in and heard his bed squeaking.

1975 — The Louisiana Supreme Court upholds the constitutionality of that state’s sodomy law.


Sources:

No comments:

Post a Comment