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Tuesday, 5 March 2013

March 5th in Queer History


Events this day in Queer History

2009 – PM Gordon Brown host a reception at 10, Downing Street, to mark theUK’s LGBT History Month

Born this day

Mary Garrett  (1854 – 1915) US
Suffragette, who helped found the Bryn Mawr College for women. She also endowed the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and secured the rights of women to attend thus making it the first co-educational, graduate-level medical school in the United States. At her death, she gave $15,000,000 to M. Carey Thomas, the president of Bryn Mawr College, with whom she was romantically involved and had been living together with at the time

Josephine Herbst (1892 1969) US
Writer and journalist with pronounced socialist or communist leanings, active from 1923 to near the time of her death. In life, she tried to hide her sexuality, but Elinor Langer's biography of Herbst, candidly describes her lesbian relationships with the radical muralist Marion Greenwood and other women.

Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922 – 1975) Italian
A mu;ti-talented film director, poet, writer, and intellectual, Pasolini demonstrated a unique and extraordinary cultural versatility, becoming a highly controversial figure in the process.
While openly gay from the very start of his career, Pasolini rarely dealt with homosexuality in his movies. In 1963 he met "the great love of his life," fifteen-year-old Ninetto Davoli whom he later cast in his 1966 film Uccellacci e uccellini. Even though their sexual relations lasted only a few years, Ninetto continued to live with Pasolini and was his constant companion.

In 1975, Pasolini was murdered by being run over several times with his own car on the beach at Ostia.

Jack Cassidy  (1927 – 1976)  US
Stage, film and screen actor. Cassidy was married twice, but his son David wrote about his father's bisexuality in his autobiography, a fact he discovered only after his father's death.

Michael Rumaker  (1932 – ) US
Author, most of whose fiction concerns his life as a gay man, beginning withthe volumes A Day and a Night at the Baths (1979) and My First Satyrnalia (1981).

Laurie Toby Edison  (1942 –  ) US
Internationally exhibited portrait photographer. Her three suites of photographs include a series of nudes of fat women, a series of nudes of a very diverse cross-section of men, and a series of clothed portraits of women living in Japan.

Geert Dales  (1952 –  ) Dutch
Politician, who entered local politics after a career as a civil service. He served on the Amsterdam city council from to , and as deputy mayor from , and as mayor of Leeuwarden from . During his term of office, he became prominent in public debates on same - sex marriage. Having taken advantage of the law himself, he expressed opposition to marriage officials who, as a matter of principle, did not wish to conduct them.

Thomas Hermanns  (1963 –  ) German
TV-presenter, director, TV-author and comedian. He is known for his comedy-show Quatsch Comedy Club.
Hermanns has been in a relationship for 14 years with Wolfgang Macht, whom he married in 2008.

Matt Lucas  (1974 –  ) UK
English comedian, screenwriter and actor best known for his acclaimed work with David Walliams in the television show Little Britain. In May 2007, he was placed eighth in the list of the UK's 100 most influential gay men and women, by British newspaper The Independent.

Died this day



 Richmond Barthe  (1901 - 1989) US
African American sculptor,closely associated with the Harlem Rennaissance. He is known for his many public works, including the Toussaint L’Ouverture Monument in Port-au-Prince, Haiti and a sculpture of Rose McClendon for Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater House.
Throughout his career, many of his patrons and subjects were other gay men, and the exploration of both race and eroticism were central to his work.

Juan Boza Sanchez (1941 - 1991) Cuban / US
Afro-Cuban-American artist specializing at painting, drawing, engraving, installation and graphic design.

Cyril Collard  (1957 - 1993) French
Author, filmmaker, composer, musician and actor. Openly bisexual, Collard was one of the first French artists to speak openly about his HIV-positive status.

Sir Hardy Amies  (1909 - 2003) UK
Dressmaker to Queen Elizabeth II, and founder of the fashion house of his name.




Sodomy in history, March 5th


1842 — Florida passes a sodomy law with a mandatory sentence of death.
1904 — In Ohio, a man is sent to the State Reformatory for being the victim of a sexual assault. He spends two years there.
1927 — A California appellate court upholds the oral copulation conviction of a gas station operator who violently resisted arrest.
1954 — A new criminal code in Greenland decriminalizes consensual sodomy, but creates a discriminatory age of consent.
1957 — The West Virginia Supreme Court reverses a sodomy conviction for committing cunnilingus because of lack of proof of actual penetration.
1970 — A federal court in Tennessee upholds the state’s crime against nature law solely because it was unaware of any other court that had struck one down, even though courts in Alaska and Texas had.
1971 — A New Mexico appellate court upholds a sentence of life imprisonment for sodomy under the state’s Indeterminate Sentencing Act.
1985 — The North Carolina Court of Appeals upholds that state’s loitering law and rejects a claim that it discriminates in favor of Gay men.


Sources:

Monday, 4 March 2013

March 4th in Queer History


Born this day

Sir Hector Archibald MacDonald 1853- 1903)Scotland
Military General 

Emilio Prados (1899 –  1962) Spanish
Poet / Editor

Judith Furse   (1912 – 1974) UK
Actress

Jean O’Leary   (1948 –  2005) US
Originally intending to be a Catholic nun, O'Leary left the convent without completing her training. She later became a pioneer activist for lesbian and gay rights.

Svend Robinson  (1952 – ) Canadian
Politician / Activist / Lawyer

Boris Moiseev  (1954 - ) 
Russian Dancer / Choreographer / Singer

Wash West  (1966 –  ) UK
Director / Screenwriter

Chaz Bono  (1969 – )   US
Trans activist [daughter of Sonny & Cher]

Traver Rains  (1977 –  ) US
Fashion Designer

Died this day


Nestor Almendros – Spanish
Cinematographer (1930 - 1992/5)

Glenn Hughes (1950 - 2001) US
Singer

Bob Hattoy   (1950 - 2007)  US
Activist

Sodomy in history, March 4th


1903 — In a prosecution for consensual sodomy in New York, two men are listed in the indictment as having assaulted each other.
1904 — The Georgia Supreme Court interprets the state’s "crime against nature" law to include fellatio. It claims that the reason for the 1817 English case with the opposite conclusion was that fellatio "was not known to the law then.
1909 — Congress passes the Assimilative Crimes Act which makes any act done on federal property within a state a federal crime if the state has a law against it. This makes sodomy a crime only on federal property located within states.
1955 — New Mexico amends its "crime against nature" law to cover oral sex.
1996 — The California Supreme Court rules that Gay men selectively prosecuted for solicitation can challenge their prosecution.


Sources:

Sir Hector Archibald MacDonald, Military General, Scotland

b. March 4, 1853
d. March 25, 1903



Hector Archibald Macdonald was born of humble parentage on a farm Muir of AllanGrange, Ross-shire. His father William MacDonald was a crofter and a stonemason. His mother was Ann Boyd, the daughter of John Boyd of Killiechoilum and Cradlehall, near Inverness. He was, as were most people in the area at the time, a Gaelic speaker and in later life went by the name Eachann nan Cath "Eachann of the Battles".

At the age of 15, MacDonald was apprenticed to a draper in Dingwall, and at the age 17 moved on to the Royal Clan Tartan and Tweed Warehouse in Inverness, an establishment owned by a Mr. William Mackay. He rose rapidly through the ranks and ultimately became a major-general. MacDonald first saw action, and was commissioned as an officer, in the Second Afgan War in the late 1870s, then distinguished himself in the battle of Majuba Hill in Sout Africa in 1881.

After postings in Britain and Ireland, he was sent to Egypt in 1884. Here he recruited and trained a battalion of Sudanese soldiers, whom he led into several victorious battles, including one of the most legendary in British imperial history, Omdurman. In 1902 the army sent MacDonald to India to tke up a regional command, but he was there only briefly before being moved to Ceylon (actual Sri Lanka) as Commanding Officer of British forces.

But after only 11 months MacDonald was summoned and told he must return to England to answer "grave, very grave charges". Although details remain unclear, MacDonald was alleged to have committed sexual improperties with four Ceylonese youths or (in a different version) to have exposed himself in a train carriage with 70 schoolboys.

In London, Lord Roberts, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff ordered him to return to Ceylon to face a court-martial. In his way back, MacDonald comitted suicide in a Paris hotel. MacDonald had secretly married in 1884 and fathered a son, although he saw his wife on only four brief occasions in 19 years and never revealed his marriage to his military superiors.

Rumors circulated about a supposed affair with a male Boer prisoner in a concentration camp over which MacDonald had authority in South Africa in 1900, and about an unspecified irregular sexual activities in India in 1902. There were also rumors about his friendship with a Burgher (mixed-race) Ceylonese family, expecially with the two sons whom some said were his catmites. Nevertheless, there is no firm evidence concerning homosexual activities, and the Scottish verdict of "not proven" seems appropriate concerning MacDonald's homosexuality.

Sunday, 3 March 2013

March 3rd in Queer History


Events this day in Queer History

2009 – Ban on gays in the military ends in the Philippines

Born this day

Francois Raucourt (1815 - 1756),  French
Eighteenth-century French actress Françoise Raucourt became a favorite of Queen Marie-Antoinette. Widely admired for her talent and beauty, Raucourt never made a secret of her lesbianism. During the final years of the doomed monarchy, she lived openly with a series of lovers. After suffering through the French Revolution, she eventually became director of Napoleon's imperial theaters in Italy.

Edmund Lowe (1890 – 1971) US
Actor

Adrian (1903 –  1959), US
Costume Designer for over 250 films, whose most famous costumes were for The Wizard of Oz and other Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer films of the 1930s and 1940s.
Though he was openly gay, he married Janet Gaynor in 1939, possibly in response to the anti-gay attitudes of the movie studio heads and the sex-negative atmosphere created by the Production Code.

James Merrill (1926 - 1995) US
Poet, whose significance as a gay writer lies in his deliberate use of a personal relationship to fuel his poetry. He contends, in Mirabell, that gay love actuates the creation of poetry and music."The Black Swan", a collection of poems that Merrill's Amherst professor (and lover) Kimon Friar published privately in Athens, Greece in 1946, was printed in just one hundred copies when Merrill was 20 years old. This is Merrill's scarcest title and considered one of the 20th century's most collectible literary rarities. Later,Merrill's partner of more than four decades was David Jackson, also a writer.
His awards include the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1977) for "Divine Comedies".


Perry Ellis (1940 – 1986), US
Fashion Designer who founded a sportswear house in the mid-1970s.

Roy London (1943 – 1993), US
Actor, acting coach and teacher. London's partner in life and work for his last ten years was Tim Healey, with whom he had a commitment ceremony in 1988.

Andris Grinbergs (1946 – ), Latvian
Bisexual performance artist and filmmaker

Benjamin Cruz  (1951 – ),  Guam
Judge and politician. His nomination as a Judge in 1984 was marked with protests from evangelical and Baptist church groups because he is gay. Cruz was later confirmed and led the Family Court for nearly 10 years. He revealed a longstanding homosexual relationship in a magazine article published in 1995. Cruz eventually became Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Guam.

Christer Lindarw  (1953 – ), Swedish
clothes designer, drag queen entertainer, and the leader of dragshow group After Dark.

Yasmine   (1972 – 2009), Belgian
Hilde Rens, better known by her stage name Yasmine, was a Belgian singer, presenter and television personality. She came out as a lesbian in 1996, becoming an established LGBT icon for Flemish and Dutch youth.

Died this day

Danny Kaye (1913 - 1987) US
A celebrated American actor, singer, dancer, and comedian. His best known performances featured physical comedy, idiosyncratic pantomimes, and rapid-fire nonsense songs.
There are persistent rumors that Kaye was either homosexual or bisexual, and some sources claim that Kaye and Laurence Olivier had a ten-year relationship in the 1950s while Olivier was still married to Vivien Leigh.These rumours have been widely denied.

Richard Plant  (1910 - 1998) German / US
A German-American writer. He is said to have written, in addition to the works published under his own name, several detective novels or Kriminalromane, on which he collaborated with Dieter Cunz and Oskar Seidlin, and which were published under the collective pen-name of Stefan Brockhoff.
Plant is the author of The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War Against Homosexuals.

Louis Edmonds  (1923 - 2001) US
Actor, best known for his roles in Dark Shadows and All My Children. Though he'd never hidden his sexuality to those he met, he came out publicly in the biography Big Lou by Craig Hamrick, published while Edmonds was in his 70's.

Gerald Edwards  (??? - 2009) UK
Hate Crime Victim 

Sodomy in history, March 3rd


1785 — Massachusetts revises its sodomy law and rewords it so that it applies only to two males.
1849 — The Minnesota Territory is created and receives all the laws of Wisconsin, setting the sodomy penalty at 1-5 years.
1886 — New York amends its sodomy law to include oral sex.
1901 — The District of Columbia receives a new criminal code from Congress. Sodomy is not mentioned, but common-law crimes specifically are recognized, with a penalty of up to 5 years in prison and/or a $1,000 fine.
1973 — Two California police officers have a shootout in a restroom after one attempts to arrest the other for "an act of oral copulation.
1975 — Arkansas passes a new criminal code that repeals the state’s sodomy law, making it the first state in the South to do so. The repeal doesn’t last; the law is reinstated two years later.


Sources:

Saturday, 2 March 2013

March 2nd in Queer History


Events this day in Queer History

2008 – The Justin Campaign against homophobia launched in the UK
2009 – Ban on gays in the military ends in Argentina

Born this day

John Gray  (1866 –  1934), UK
English poet, who may have been the inspiration behind Oscar Wilde's fictional Dorian Gray. His life partner was Marc André Raffalovich, also a poet and a notable early defender of homosexuality - which he called "unisexuality", but insisted remained at its best when chaste.
Gray and Raffalovich both converted to Catholicism, and Gray was ordained a Catholic priest in 1901. After Gray was moved to a parish in Edinburgh, Raffalovich followed him. The pair continued in a close, but chaste relationship until they died four months apart in 1934

Marc Blitzstein (1905 –  1964) US
Composer, who won national attention in 1937 when his pro-union musical The Cradle Will Rock, directed by Orson Welles, was shut down by the Works Progress Administration. He is known for The Cradle Will Rock and for his Off-Broadway translation/adaptation of The Threepenny Opera by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill.

Bernard Price  (1925 –  2000) UK
Actor, and a founder member of the Gay Switchboard

Pat Arrowsmith  (1930 –  ) UK
Author and peace campaigner, who was a co-founder of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

Lou Reed (1942 – ),  US
Rock musician, songwriter, and photographer. He is best known as guitarist, vocalist, and principal songwriter of The Velvet Underground, and for his successful solo career, which has spanned several decades.

Hollis Sigler  (1948 – 2001),  US
Chicago-based openly lesbian artist whose paintings addressed her life with breast cancer.

Adrianne Pieczonka  (1963 – ),  Canadian
Opera Singer (soprano)

Femke de Jong  (1975 – ) Dutch
Dutch radio reporter with Omroep Brabant. In 2002 she married radio host Cindy de Koning.

Florencia de la V    (1976 – )   Argentine
Actress / Editor

Amanda Ireton  (1979 – ),  US
Comedian / Reality TV [A Taste of Love ... with Tila Tequila]

Matthew Mitcham  (1988 – ) Australian
Diver,the 2008 Olympic champion in the 10 m platform, having received the highest single-dive score in Olympic history. He is the first Australian male to win an Olympic gold medal in diving since Dick Eve at the 1924 Summer Olympics, and one of few openly gay athletes at the 2008 Summer Olympics, where there were only 11 openly gay athletes out of a total of over 11,000 competitors.

Mitcham was chosen 2008 Sports Performer of the Year by the Australian public. The same year, Australia GQ named him Sportsman of the Year. After accepting the GQ award, Mitcham joked, "Oh, my God, I’m a homo and I just won the sports award!"

Died this day


Randolph Scott  (1898 - 1987), US
Film actor whose career spanned from 1928 to 1962. As a leading man for all but the first three years of his cinematic career, Scott appeared in a variety of genres, but his most enduring image is that of the tall-in-the-saddle Western hero. For some years, he lived with Cary Grant, in a beach house in Malibu that became known as "Bachelor Hall" supposedly "because they were friends and wanted to save on living expenses."

In his book, Cary Grant: Grant's Secret Sixth Marriage (2004), Marc Eliot claims Grant had a sexual relationship with Scott after they met on the set of Hot Saturday. In Hollywood Gays (1996), Boze Hadleigh, author of numerous books purporting to "out" the sexual orientation of celebrities, makes various claims for Scott's homosexuality. He cites homosexual director George Cukor who said about the homosexual relationship between the two: "Oh, Cary won't talk about it. At most, he'll say they did some wonderful pictures together. But Randolph will admit it – to a friend."

Sandy Dennis (1937 - 1992), US
Theater and film actress. In 1966, she won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. Throughout her career, she was the subject of persistent rumors that she was lesbian, but never confirmed the rumors.

Dusty Springfield (1939 - 1999)
Mary Isobel Catherine Bernadette O'Brien OBE, known professionally as Dusty Springfield and dubbed The White Queen of Soul, was a British pop singer from the late 1950s to the 1990s.
The fact that Springfield was never reported to be in a relationship recognised by the public meant that the issue of her being "bisexual" was raised continually throughout her life.[98] In 1970, Springfield told the Evening Standard:
“ A lot of people say I'm bent, and I've heard it so many times that I've almost learned to accept it....I know I'm perfectly as capable of being swayed by a girl as by a boy. More and more people feel that way and I don't see why I shouldn't. ”
By the standards of 1970, that was a very bold statement.”

In the 1970s and 1980s, Springfield became involved in several romantic relationships with women in Canada and the US that were not kept secret from the gay and lesbian community. She had a love affair with singer-musician Carole Pope of the rock band Rough Trade.

Malcolm Williamson  (1931 - 2003) UK
Composer, and the Master of the Queen's Music from 1975 until his death.

Sodomy in history, March 2nd

1799 — Congress adopts a law to "suppress all dissolute, immoral, and disorderly practices" on Naval ships.
1853 — The Washington Territory is created and given all laws of Oregon. Since Oregon doesn’t have a sodomy law, Washington doesn’t get one, either.
1895 — The legal case of Oscar Wilde begins with the arrest of the Marquess of Queensberry on criminal libel charges for having accused Wilde of being a sodomite. Through three trials the truth of the charge comes out and Wilde is convicted of "gross indecency" and sent to prison for two years.
1931 — An Ohio appellate court upholds a sodomy conviction based on the "overwhelming" evidence of guilt: the accused placed his hand on his head, asked for water, and began perspiring.
1943 — The Florida Supreme Court upholds a cunnilingus conviction under the crime against nature law.
1955 — Arkansas lowers the minimum penalty for sodomy from 5 years to one year. The law is passed as an emergency measure with the emergency clause stating that juries have been unwilling to convict under such a severe law.
1965 — The Florida Court of Appeals overturns a sodomy conviction because the defendant’s dishonorable discharge for being Gay was raised in the trial to bias the jury.
1967 — The Washington Supreme Court upholds the constitutionality of the state’s sodomy law, saying that the law is necessary for the public welfare.
1982 — The Texas Court of Appeals overturns the lewdness conviction of a man for being fondled by another.


Sources:

Marc-André Raffalovich UK

b. September 11, 1864
d, February 14, 1934

Born in Paris into a wealthy and cultivated Russo-Jewish family, Raffalovich went to England in 1882. His original intention had been to take his degree at Oxford University, but instead he settled in London. There, in his mansion in Mayfair, he entertained on a lavish scale with the object of founding a salon for writers and artists.



Oscar Wilde and others were amused by his attempts to push himself into the literary world through dinner parties. Wilde's jibe became famous: "Dear André! He came to London to found a salon and only succeeded in opening a saloon." Undeterred, and exemplifying the newly fashionable notion of homosexual as a poet, Raffalovich continued to pursue his literary interests.

Between 1884 and 1896 he published five volumes of verse, two novels and many articles, none of which received much recognition. In 1892 he met and fell in love with young poet John Henry Gray. The couple then dropped out of Wilde's circle.

In 1896 Raffalovich was received into Roman Catholic Church, taking the baptismal name of Sebastian. For the rest of his life he was a devout Catholic and a benefactor of the Dominican Order. When Gray went to Rome to study for the priesthood, Raffalovich paid his expenses.

In 1905 he followed Gray to Edinburgh and there he financed the building of St Peter's Church in Morningside, where Gray had been appointed rector and where he attended Mass every morning. The two men maintained separate households. Their friendship was intimate, though in public they treated each other with studied formality and detachement.

Raffalovich's exposition of the view that a homosexual orientation is both natural and morally neutral was a notable contribution to the late 19th century literature on the subject. But it was a mixed message, deeply impregnated with Roman Catholic moralism.



Source:
and: Aldrich R. & Wotherspoon G., Who's Who in Gay and Lesbian History, from Antiquity to WWII, Routledge, London, 2001

Also see:
Father Brocard Sewell, Two Friends, John Gray and André Raffalovich, Saint Albert's Press, 1963

Friday, 1 March 2013

March 1st in Queer History


Events this day in Queer History


1972 – The Body Politic magazine first published (Canada)
1982 – Anti-discrimination laws introduced covering employment and provision of goods & services in Norway
1986 – Anti-discrimination laws introduced covering all other areas not already covered in Norway
2008 – Homosexuality legalised for the second time in Nicaragua
2008 – Homosexuality legalised in Panama
2010 – Mexico City legalises same-sex marriage (effective this day) (Mexico)

Born this day

Jacob Schorer (1866 – 1957) Dutch
Lawyer / Activist

Lytton Strachey  (1880 –  1932) UK
Author / Poet / Critic

Mercedes de Acosta  (1893 –  1968), Cuban / US
Poet / Playwright


Dimitri Mitropoulos 1896 - 1960 Greek  

Greek conductor, pianist, and composer. Mitropoulos was noted as a champion of modern music, such as that by the members of the Second Viennese School. He wrote a number of pieces for orchestra and solo works for piano, and also arranged some of Johann Sebastian Bach's organ works for orchestra. In addition he was very influential in encouraging Leonard Bernstein's interest in conducting performances of Mahler's symphonic works. He also premiered and recorded a piano concerto of Ernst Krenek as soloist (available on CD), and works by composers in the U.S. such as Roger Sessions and Peter Mennin. In 1952 he commissioned American composer Philip Bezanson to write a piano concerto, which he premiered the following year.


Oliver Baldwin, 2nd Earl Baldwin of Bewdley  (1899 –  1958) UK
Politician

Nuala O’Faolain (1940 –  2008), Irish
Journalist / Author

Michael Sundin  (1961 – 1989), UK
Trampolinist / Actor / Presenter / Dancer

Kevin Tsai  (1962 – )  Chinese
Presenter

Bryan Batt  (1963 – )  US
Actor

Miss Shangay Lily  (1963 – ), Spanish
Drag Queen / Writer / Director / Actor

Paco Vidarte (1970 – 2008 ) Spanish
Author / Activist / Philosopher

Thomas Ades  (1971 – ) UK
Composer / Pianist / Conductor


Died this day


Mikhail Kuzmin  (1872 - 1936) Russian
Poet / Musician

Frank Sargeson (1903 - 1982) New Zealand
Author

Kristian Digby (1977 - 2010)  UK
Presenter / Director / Columnist 

Sodomy in history, March 1st:

1642 — In Plymouth, Edward Michell and Edward Preston are found guilty of "lewd and sodomitical practices" for engaging in frottage. Both are flogged.
1656 — New Haven Colony makes sexual relations between women a capital offense. This is the only of the English colonies to do so.
1665 — After a temporary takeover of New Netherland by the English, the governor of what is now called New York issues a proclamation making sodomy a capital crime. The law also covers New Jersey.
1780 — Pennsylvania eliminates the discrimination in its sodomy law between whites and blacks.
1902 — Puerto Rico passes its first criminal code as a U.S. possession. It outlaws sodomy with a possible life sentence and abrogates common-law crimes.
1955 — The Arizona Supreme Court upholds a sentence of 60-100 years in prison for 20 counts of consensual sodomy.
1965 — The U.S. Supreme Court refuses to hear a challenge to the Louisiana sodomy law.
1969 — Jim Morrison is arrested in Miami for obscenity after his on-stage performance of pretending to fellate his guitarist, and then allegedly exposing himself to the audience.



Sources: