Pope Julius III (born Giovanni Maria Ciocchi del Monte), boy-loving pope.

b. 10 September 1487
r. 7 February 1550 to 1555
d. 23 March 1555)

In his early career in the Church Julius established a reputation as an effective and trustworthy diplomat, and was elected to the Papacy as a compromise candidate when the Papal Conclave found itself deadlocked between the rival French and German factions. As Pope he lost, or failed to show, any of the qualities which had distinguished his previous career, devoting himself instead to a life of personal pleasure and indolence.  His lasting fame, or notoriety, rests rather on his relationship with the 17 year old boy whom he raised to the position of Cardinal-Nephew, and, it was said at the time, with whom he shared his bed

At the start of his reign Julius had desired seriously to bring about a reform of the Catholic Church and to reconvene the Council of Trent, but very little was actually achieved during his five years in office; apologists ascribe the inactivity of his last three years to severe gout.

In 1551, at the request of the Emperor Charles V, he consented to the reopening of the council of Trent and entered into a league against the duke of Parma and Henry II of France (1547–59), but soon afterwards made terms with his enemies and suspended the meetings of the council (1553). (For the history of papal conflicts with councils, see conciliar movement).

The Innocenzo scandal

Julius's particular failures were around his nepotism and favouritism. One notable scandal surrounded his adoptive nephew, Innocenzo Ciocchi Del Monte, a 13 or 14-year old beggar-boy whom the future Pope had picked up on the streets of Parma some years earlier and with whom he had allegedly fallen in love.On being elected to the Papacy Julius raised the now 17-year old but still uncouth and quasi-illiterate Innocenzo to the cardinalate, appointed him cardinal-nephew, and showering the boy with benefices

Artistic legacy

Julius spent the bulk of his time, and a great deal of Papal money, on entertainments at the Villa Giulia, created for him by Vignola. Julius extended his patronage to the great Renaissance composer Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, whom he brought to Rome as his maestro di cappella, Giorgio Vasari, who supervised the design of the Villa Giulia, and to Michelangelo, who worked there.

Louis II of Bourbon, Royal Prince , Master General

b. Sep 8, 1621
d. Nov 11, 1686

Called "The Great Condé", Louis de Condé was a prince of royal blood, the son of Henri de Bourbon, Prince de Condé and Charlotte Marguerite de Montmorency, and cousin to the king. At the age of twenty-two Condé was victorious during the Thirty Years' War at the Battle of Rocroi (Ardennes, 1643), and later at Lens (1648), which prevented France from being invaded by the Spanish armies in the north.

He rebelled in 1651 taking the side of the Fronde, which on occasions served the enemy, and entered the Spanish service. Pardoned in 1660, he commanded Louis XIV's armies against the Spaniards and the Dutch.

It is on his military character that the Grand Condé’s fame rests. Unlike his great rival, Turenne, Condé was equally brilliant in his first battle and in his last. The one failure of his generalship was in the Spanish Fronde, and, in this, everything united to thwart his genius; only on the battlefield itself was his personal leadership as conspicuous as ever.

That he was capable of waging a methodical war of positions may be assumed from his campaigns against Turenne and Montecucculi, the greatest generals opposing him. But it was in his eagerness for battle, his quick decision in action, and the stern will which sent his regiments to face the heaviest losses, that Condé is exalted above all the generals of his time. Upon the Grand Condé’s death, Louis XIV pronounced that he had lost "the greatest man in my kingdom."

In 1643 his success at the Battle of Rocroi, in which he led the French army to an unexpected and decisive victory over the Spanish, established him as a great general and popular hero in France. Together with the Marshal de Turenne he led the French to victory in the Thirty Years' War.

During the Fronde, he was courted by both sides, initially supporting Mazarin; he later became a leader of the princely opposition. After the defeat of the Fronde he entered Spanish service and led their armies against France. He returned to France only after the Treaty of the Pyrenees in 1659, but soon received military commands again.

Condé conquered the Franche-Comté during the War of Devolution and led the French armies in the Franco-Dutch War together with Turenne. His last campaign was in 1675, taking command after Turenne had been killed, repelling an invasion of an imperial army.

He is regarded as one of the premier generals in world history, whose masterpiece, the Battle of Rocro is still studied by students of military history.

Condé was a proud, imperious man whose personal gain came before the general interest. Despite being of a violent disposition and a bisexual libertine (he was married and had several affairs with his soldiers), he was also a cultured man, including in his circle many men of genius such as Molière, Racine, Boileau, La Fontaine, Nicole, Bourdaloue and Bossuet.

Matt & Andrej Koymasky - Famous GLTB

6th September: Jane Addams (U.S.A.) Social reformer

b. September 6, 1860 

d. May 21, 1935

Born in Cedarville, Illinois, Jane Addams graduated from Rockford (Ill.) Female Seminary in 1881 and was granted a degree the following year when the institution became Rockford College. The death of her father in 1881, her own health problems, and an unhappy year at the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania left her depressed and aimless for some years. She traveled in Europe in 1883-85, but neither there nor during her stay in Baltimore (1885-87) did she find a vocation.

In 1887-88 Addams returned to Europe with a Rockford classmate and close friend, Ellen Gates Starr. On a visit to the Toynbee Hall settlement house (founded 1884) in London's East End, Addams' vague leanings toward reform work crystallized. The two women returned to the United States and settled in Chicago. By September 1889 they had moved into the decrepit residence, built by Charles Hull in 1856, that came to be known as Hull House.

 The building was located in the midst of a teeming immigrant ward. Eventually the settlement included 13 buildings, with literary clubs, art gallery, a summer school for women, a day nursery, a gymnasium, a community kitchen, a kindergarten, public baths, a library, a chemist, an employement bureau, a cooperative apartment for young working women, and a Juvenile Protective Association working on issues of sexual morality, prostitution and drug abuse.

Moreover there was a playground, as well as a summer camp near Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. Many prominent social workers and reformers such as Julia Lathrop, Florence Kelley, Grace and Edith Abbott, came to live at Hull House, as did others who continued to make their living in business or the arts while helping Addams in settlement activities.

Hull House offered college-level courses in various subjects; furnished training in art, music, and crafts such as bookbinding; and sponsored one of the earliest little-theater groups, the Hull House Players. In addition to making available services and cultural opportunities for the largely immigrant population of the neighborhood, Hull House afforded and opportunity for young social workers to acquire training.

 Throughout her life Addams was close to many women and was very good at eliciting the involvement of women from different classes in Hull House's programmes. Her closest adult companion, friend and lover was Mary Rozet Smith (see picture at the left), who nurtured and supported Addams and her work at Hull House, and with whom she owned a summer house in Bar Harbor, Maine.

Addams worked with labor as well as other reform groups toward goals including the first juvenile-court law, tenement-house regulation, an eight-hour working day for women, factory inspection, and worker's compensation. She strove in addition for justice for immigrants and blacks, advocated research aimed at determining the causes of poverty and crime, and supported woman suffrage.

In 1910 she became the first woman president of the National Conference of Social Work, and in 1912 she played an active part in the Progressive Party's presidential campaign for Theodore Roosevelt. At The Hague in 1915 she served as chairman of the International Congress of Women and consequently helped establish the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. She was also involved in the founding of the American Civil Liberties Union (1920).

By 1926 she was a semi-invalid as a result of a heart-attack, but continued to receive numerous commendations for her work. In 1931 she was the co-winner of the Nobel Prize for Peace. She died of cancer in Chicago, just four yers later.

The establishment of the Chicago campus of the University of Illinois in 1963 forced the Hull House Association to relocate its headquarters. The majority of its original buildings were demolished, but the Hull residence itself was preserved as a monument to Jane Addams.

Source: Andrej & Matt Koymasky

John Cage

b. September 5, 1912
d. August 12, 1992

“I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones.”

 

A fascination with Taoism I’m frightened of the old ones.” and Zen Buddhism led John Cage to chance music. Based on the “I Ching”— the Zen book of changes— and the flip of a coin, he created compositions solely by chance

Twentieth century composer John Cage pushed the boundaries of traditional music, experimenting with sound, environment and audience perception. His avant-garde work influenced music, painting, dance, performance art and poetry.

Cage was born in Los Angeles. He was playing piano on the radio regularly by the time he was 12. The son of an inventor, Cage developed a reputation for innovation and originality—qualities that became the hallmarks of his career.

In 1930, after two years at Pomona College, Cage left for a less traditional education in Europe. Settling in Paris, he spent 18 months painting, writing poetry and composing music, before returning to California to focus on music.

From 1931 to 1936, Cage’s composition teachers included Adolph Weiss, Henry Cowell and Arnold Schoenberg. Schoenberg declared the young man “not a composer, but an inventor of genius.”

In 1937, Cage worked as a dance accompanist in Seattle, where he met dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham. The two became professional and life partners for the next 50 years.

In 1938, Cage began to experiment. He composed pieces for the prepared piano—a piano he created with objects placed on and between the strings to alter sound. He also used record players and phonographs as instruments.

In the 1940’s, Cage continued to pursue unorthodox techniques. His fascination with Taoism and Zen Buddhism led him to chance music. Based on the “I Ching”—the Zen book of changes—and the flip of a coin, Cage created compositions solely by chance.

In 1948, Cage joined the Black Mountain College faculty and began collaborating with David Tudor and Robert Rauschenberg, among others. He composed his most controversial piece “4’33’,” three scores of silence over 4 minutes and 33 seconds. The intended “music” of the piece is the unintentional sound created by the audience and the environment.

Cage continued to compose and collaborate with other artists. In his later years, he focused on electronic music, often using radios and “Happenings,” as he called them—pieces that are mostly unwritten, except for timed intervals in which a note, a sound or silence is scheduled.

John Cage was also a writer, philosopher, visual and performance artist, and cofounder of the New York Mycological Society for the study, collection and appreciation o www.glbtHistoryMonth.com f mushrooms and fungi.

Bibliography

• Biography Base: John Cage. 3 May, 2009
• Compositions by John Cage. 5 May, 2009
• "John Cage" Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. 3 May, 2009
• PBS American Masters: John Cage. 5 May, 2009
• "Who2 Biography: John Cage"  Answers.com. 5 May, 2009
• IndeterminacyJohn Cage: Early Piano Music with Herbert Henck
• John Cage: In a Landscape
• John Cage: Music for Prepared Piano, Vol. 2 with Boris Berman
• John Cage: One11 with 103 
• John Cage - The Seasons / Leng Tan, Russell Davies, et al with American Composers Orch, Davies, and Margaret Leng Tan
• Variations VII by John Cage: E.A.T. - 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering

Books About John Cage

• The Roaring Silence: John Cage: A Life by David Revill (1993)
• The Music of John Cage (Music in the Twentieth Century) by James Pritchett (1993)
• John Cage: Composed in America by Marjorie Perloff and Charles Junkermanm  (1994)
• John Cage Visual Art: To Sober and Quiet the Mind by Kathan Brown (2001)
• Conversing with John Cage by Richard Kostelanetz (2003)
• John Cage by David Nicholls (2007)

Books By John Cage

• Silence: Lectures and Writings (1961)
• A Year from Monday: New Lectures and Writings (1968)
• M: Writings, 1967-72 (1973)
• Empty Words: Writings, 1973-78 (1979)
• X: Writings, 1979-82 (1983)
• Anarchy (1988)
• Composition In Retrospect (1993)

Music & Performances by John Cage

• 4'33" with John Harrison, Lou Cage, Carlos Chavez, and Edgard Varese 
• Cage: Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano with Boris Berman
• John Cage’s “4’33”” performed by David Tudor
• John Cage discusses his inspirations
• John Cage on silence
• One of John Cage’s earliest appearances

Other Resources

• A database of John Cage’s works
• "John Cage: From Zero" (1995)

5th September: Freddie Mercury

b.  5 September 1946

d. 24 November 1991

Freddie Mercury (born Farrokh Bulsara ) was a British musician, singer and songwriter, best known as the lead vocalist of the rock band Queen. As a performer, he was known for his flamboyant stage persona and powerful vocals over a four-octave range.As a songwriter, Mercury composed many hits for Queen, including "Bohemian Rhapsody", "Killer Queen", "Somebody to Love", "Don't Stop Me Now", "Crazy Little Thing Called Love" and "We Are the Champions". In addition to his work with Queen, he led a solo career, penning hits such as "Barcelona", "I Was Born to Love You" and "Living on My Own". Mercury also occasionally served as a producer and guest musician (piano or vocals) for other artists. He died of bronchopneumonia brought on by AIDS on 24 November 1991, only one day after publicly acknowledging he had the disease.

Thom Gunn, poet

b. 29 August 1929 
d. 25 April 2004

The Anglo-American writer Thom Gunn was a major gay poet and a perceptive critic of gay poetry.

Gunn was born in Gravesend, Kent, and educated at University College School, Bedales and Trinity College, Cambridge. After coming to the United States in 1954, he studied at Stanford and taught at the University of California, Berkeley. He won a number of prestigious awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the W. H. Smith Award, the Forward Press Award, and the MacArthur Prize.

Gunn's poetry has a popular reputation for sex and drugs and leather. This comes largely from the repeated anthologizing of his early poems from the collections Fighting Terms (1954) and The Sense of Movement (1956). In both books, a heroic masculine posing is celebrated as preferable, existentially, to the dull passivity of conformity. His leather boys in the poem "On the Move" are "always nearer by not keeping still." The voice of "Carnal Knowledge" admits that "even in bed I pose."

Posing does not disappear entirely from Gunn's later poems; there is often the sense of looking at looking at looking. And this perspective is exacerbated in the collections after Moly (1971) by hallucinogenic drugs' revelation of a self that can no longer be hidden in a costume.


Probably his greatest poem is the title work of the collection Jack Straw's Castle (1976), a poem in which his poetic ego descends into the maelstrom of dream worlds and nightmare visions: "But night makes me uneasy: floor by floor / Rooms never guessed at." In this maelstrom, Charles Manson (Gunn's one-time neighbor) says to him, "dreams don't come from nowhere: it's your dream / He Says, you dreamt it."


Gunn returned to this experience of nightmare vision with more sense of irony in another long poem, "The Menace," in the next collection, The Passages of Joy (1992). There "the one who wants to get me" turns out to be the reflection of himself in a store window and leads to a comic reflection on our construction of ourselves.


Constant in Gunn's poems from Touch (1967) onward, however, is what one critic has called "imaginative naturalness and greater openness of feeling." This increased naturalness entailed both a loosening of the traditional poetic forms with which he began to write and a greater freedom with the life of the senses and with feeling.


In the title poem, "Touch," a warmth surfaces from "the restraint of habits" and "the black frost / Of outsideness." And twenty-five years later, this warmth reappeared, in a poem addressed to his more-than-forty-years lover, recalling "the stay of your secure firm dry embrace."


From his embrace of the physical came both an ability to risk and some of the finest gay elegies ever written: the poems that give the title to The Man With Night Sweats (1992).


Once again, these poems are characterized by the contemplation of AIDS sufferers contemplating the bodies that they thought they knew. Here the bodily shields are now cracked and the pleasures "the hedonistic body basks within / And takes for granted" have gone away. But so have we who are left:


        dizzy from a sense
Of being ejected with some violence
From vigil in some white and distant spot.

The loss is not simply personal but also of a community that Gunn describes as having been a "supple entwinement of the living mass." We are the Holocaust survivors filing past what leaves us "less defined," "unconfined," and "abandoned incomplete." And yet the greatness of these poems, as works of art, contradicts their ostensible theme of loss.


As a major gay poet, Gunn's influence can be seen on such other gay poets as Edgar Bowers, Michael Vince, Jim Powell, Robert Wells, and Gregory Woods.


But he was also a prose writer and critic of great distinction who wrote some of the most intelligent criticism of such gay poets as Whitman, Ginsberg, James Merrill and Robert Duncan.


Collected Poems and a collection of prose, Shelf Life, were published in 1994. Frontiers of Gossip appeared in 1998 and Boss Cupid in 2000.


Gunn died in his sleep at his home in San Francisco on April 15, 2004. He is survived by his companion of over 52 years, Mike Kitay.

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844 - 1889) U.K. Poet, Jesuit priest

b. 28 July 1844 

d. 8 June 1889

In some of the most original poetry of the Victorian period, the sexually-repressed Gerard Manley Hopkins celebrated male beauty as one of the most splendid witnesses to the divine.

Born at Stratford, Essex, Hpkins grew up in refined and pleasant circumstances. Always an exceptional student, he distinguished himself at Highgate School then, from 1833, at Balliol College, Oxford. Here he developed a deep infatuation for Digby Dolben, the cousin of his close friend and later literary executor, Robert Bridges. It was with Dolben that Hopkins came closest to physical relationship with another man.

According to his diary, Hopkins was unable to keep himself from masturbating after meeting Dolben, and he generally struggled with feelings of self-loathing because he was often excited and aroused by strangers.

He was converted in 1866 to Roman Catholicism, and in 1868 began to train as a Jesuit. He preached and ministered as a priest in Ireland and England and subsequently taught. He died of typhoid.

His poetry is profoundly religious and records his struggle to gain faith and peace, but also shows great freshness of feeling and delight in nature. A complete edition, including the perhaps best-known poems, The Wreck of the Deutschland (1876), and The Windhover (1877), was issued in 1918. His employement of "sprung rhythm", allied to the Old and middle English alliterative verse, has greatly influenced later 20th century poetry.

He experienced a life-long tension between being a poet with homoerotic feelings, and a Jesuit priest. His poetry was written in secret, and published 30 years after his death by his friend Robert Bridges.His Journals and Papers were published in 1959, and three volumes of letters in 1955-56.