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  • THIS DAY IN GAY HISTORY NOVEMBER 20 « MasterAdrian’s Weblog
    http://masteradrian.com/2012/11/20/this-day-in-gay-history-november-20

    THIS DAY IN GAY HISTORY NOVEMBER 20
    November 20, 2012

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    GAY WISDOM for Daily Living…

    from White Crane a magazine exploring
    Gay wisdom & culture http://www.Gaywisdom.org

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    THIS DAY IN GAY HISTORY

    NOVEMBER 20

    TRANSGENDER DAY OF REMEMBRANCE (since 1999) set aside to memorialize those who were killed due to anti-transgender hatred or prejudice (transphobia). The event is held on November 20, founded by Gwendolyn Ann Smith, to honor Rita Hester, whose murder in 1998 kicked off the “Remembering Our Dead” web project and a San Francisco, California candlelight vigil in 1999. Since then, the event has grown to encompass memorials in hundreds of cities around the world.

    1858 – SELMA LAGERLÖF, Swedish author, Nobel laureate (d. 1940); Swedish author and the first woman writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Known internationally for a story for children, The Wonderful Adventures of Nils, in 1909 Selma Lagerlöf won the Nobel ”in appreciation of the lofty idealism, vivid imagination and spiritual perception that characterize her writings.” In 1914 she also became a member of the Swedish Academy, the body that awards the Nobel Prize in literature. At the start of World War II, she sent her Nobel Prize medal and her gold medal from the Swedish Academy to the government of Finland to help them raise money to fight the Soviet Union. The Finnish government was so touched that it raised the necessary money by other means and returned her medal to her. Her first novel, The Story of Gösta Berling, was adapted into an internationally acclaimed motion picture starring Greta Garbo.

    She lived in Sunne, where two hotels are named after her. Her home, Mårbacka, is now preserved as a museum. She wrote a copious amount of letters to her two partners, Sophie Elkan and Valborg Olander.

    1873 – DANIEL GREGORY MASON, American composer, born (d: 1953); Mason came from a long line of notable American musicians, including his father Henry Mason. He studied under John Knowles Paine at Harvard University from 1891 to 1895, continuing his studies with George Chadwick and Goetschius. In 1894 he published his Opus 1, a set of keyboard waltzes, but soon after began writing on music for his primary career. He became a lecturer at Columbia University in 1905, where he would remain until his retirement in 1942, successively being awarded the positions of assistant professor (1910), MacDowell professor (1929) and head of the music department (1929-1940). He was the lover of composer-pianist John Powell.

    1910 – The American civil rights advocate, lawyer, poet and teacher and the first ordained African-American woman ordained as a priest PAULI MURRAY was born on this date (d. 1985). The Reverend Dr. Anna Pauline (Pauli) Murray was an American civil rights advocate, feminist, lawyer, writer, poet, teacher, and ordained priest was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1910, to William H. and Agnes Georgiana (Fitzgerald) Murray. When Pauli Murray was three years old, her mother died, and she went to live with her aunt and maternal grandparents, the Fitzgeralds, in Durham, North Carolina. Pauli graduated from Hunter College, and in 1938 was denied admission into the University of North Carolina law school because of her race. She later entered Howard University Law School and graduated in 1944. She sought admission to Harvard University for an advanced law degree but was denied admission because she was a woman. She then studied at the University of California, Berkeley, where she received her Masters of Law degree.

    A contemporary and friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, she was a professor of American studies at Brandeis University from 1968 to 1973. She was the author of the 1950 book “States’ Laws on Race and Color,” which catalogued state statutes discriminating against African Americans, Native Americans, Asians and other groups.

    Murray was one of the founders of the Women’s Rights Law Reporter, the first legal periodical to focus exclusively on women’s rights.

    Pauli Murray contributed to the NAACP’s litigation strategy in Brown v. Board of Education and in 1961 she was appointed to the President’s Commission on the Status of Women. While serving on the commissions and studying at Yale Law School (where she was the first African American to earn a J.S.D.) Murray authored a series of papers outlining a legal strategy for challenging sex discrimination by states. These arguments were first published in an article co-authored with Mary Eastwood after the passage of Title VII entitled “Jane Crow and the Law.” [2]

    She testified on discrimination against women before the 91st Congress of the United States.[3] She was the first African-American woman Episcopal priest and a co-founder of NOW, the National Organization for Women.

    Pauli Murray died of cancer on July 1, 1985 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her autobiography Song in a Weary Throat: An American Pilgrimage was published posthumously in 1987. In 1990, the Pauli Murray Human Relations Award was established in her honor to commemorate her life work.

    1926 – KAYE BALLARD, American comic actress, born; an actress who has appeared on Broadway and on television. From 1967 to 1969, she co-starred in the NBC sitcom, The-Mothers-in-Law, with Eve Arden. In 2005, she appeared in a road company production of Nunsense, which was written by Dan Goggin. She has never married.

    1941 – The man who saved a President’s life was born today OLIVER SIPPLE saved President Gerald Ford’s life. Sara Jane Moore attempted to assassinate U.S. President Gerald Ford outside the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco, just seventeen days after Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme had also tried to kill the president. Moore was forty feet away from Ford when she fired a single shot at him. The bullet missed the President because bystander Oliver Sipple grabbed Moore’s arm and then pulled her to the ground, using his hand to keep the gun from firing a second time. Sipple said at the time: “I saw [her gun] pointed out there and I grabbed for it. I lunged and grabbed the woman’s arm and the gun went off.” The single shot which Moore did manage to fire from her .38-caliber revolver ricocheted off the entrance to the hotel and slightly injured a bystander.

    Sipple, a decorated Marine and Vietnam War veteran, was immediately commended by the police and the Secret Service for his action at the scene. The news media portrayed Sipple as a hero but would eventually report on his outing by Harvey Milk and other San-Francisco gay activists. Though he was known to be Gay by various fellow members of the gay community, Sipple had not made this public, and his sexual orientation was a secret from his family. He asked the press to keep his sexuality off the record, making it clear that neither his mother nor his employer had knowledge of his orientation; however, his request was not complied with.

    The national spotlight was on him immediately, and Milk responded. While discussing whether the truth about Sipple’s sexuality should be disclosed, Milk told a friend: “It’s too good an opportunity. For once we can show that Gays do heroic things, not just all that ca-ca about molesting children and hanging out in bathrooms.” Milk contacted the newspaper.

    Several days later Herb Caen, a columnist at The San Francisco Chronicle, exposed Sipple as a Gay man and a friend of Milk. Sipple was besieged by reporters, as was his family. His mother, a staunch Baptist in Detroit, refused to speak to him. Although he had been involved with the Gay community for years, even participating in Gay Pride events, Sipple sued the Chronicle for invasion of privacy. President Ford sent Sipple a note of thanks for saving his life. Milk said that Sipple’s sexual orientation was the reason he received only a note, rather than an invitation to the White House.

    Sipple filed a $15 million invasion of privacy suit against Caen, seven named newspapers, and a number of unnamed publishers, for publishing the disclosures. The Superior Court in San Francisco dismissed the suit, and Sipple continued his legal battle until May 1984, when a state court of appeals held that Sipple had indeed become news, and that his sexual orientation was part of the story.

    According to a 2006 article in The Washington Post, Sipple went through a period of estrangement with his parents, but the family later reconciled with his sexual orientation. Sipple’s brother, George, told the newspaper, “(Our parents) accepted it. That was all. They didn’t like it, but they still accepted. He was welcomed. Only thing was: Don’t bring a lot of your friends.”

    Sipple’s mental and physical health sharply declined over the years. He drank heavily, gained weight to 300 lb (140 kg), was fitted with a pacemaker, became paranoid and suicidal. On February 2, 1989, he was found dead in his bed, at the age of forty-seven. Earlier that day, Sipple had visited a friend and said he had been turned away by the Veterans Administration hospital where he went concerning his difficulty in breathing. His $334 per month apartment near San Francisco’s Tenderloin District was found with many newspaper clippings of his actions on the fateful September afternoon in 1975. His most prized possession was the framed letter from the White House.

    Sipple held no ill will toward Milk, and remained in contact with him. The incident brought him so much attention that, later in life, while drinking, he would regret grabbing Moore’s gun. Sipple, who was wounded in the head in Vietnam, was also diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic according to the coroner’s report.

    Sipple’s funeral was attended by 30 people, and he was buried in Golden Gate National Cemetery in San Bruno, California. A letter addressed to the friends of Oliver Sipple was on display for a short period after his death at one of his favorite hangouts, the New Belle Saloon:

    “Mrs. Ford and I express our deepest sympathy in this time of sorrow involving your friend’s passing…” President Gerald Ford, February, 1989

    In a 2001 interview with columnist Deb Price, Ford disputed the claim that Sipple was treated differently because of his sexual orientation, saying: “As far as I was concerned, I had done the right thing and the matter was ended. I didn’t learn until sometime later — I can’t remember when — he was Gay. I don’t know where anyone got the crazy idea I was prejudiced and wanted to exclude Gays.”

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  • THIS DAY IN GAY HISTORY NOVEMBER 19 « MasterAdrian’s Weblog
    http://masteradrian.com/2012/11/19/this-day-in-gay-history-november-19

    THIS DAY IN GAY HISTORY NOVEMBER 19
    November 19, 2012

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    GAY WISDOM for Daily Living…

    from White Crane a magazine exploring
    Gay wisdom & culture http://www.Gaywisdom.org

    Share this with your friends…
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    THIS DAY IN GAY HISTORY

    NOVEMBER 19

    1828 – FRANZ SCHUBERT, died; TheAustrian, classical composer, born (1797) as Franz Peter Schubert in Vienna was, arguably, one of the great masters of 19th century classical music. Not much about Schubert’s life would immediately suggest anything resembling a modern gay man. But so what? An entire book in 1998 by musicologist and theorist, Lawrence Kramer, Schubert: Sexuality, Subjectivity, Song, is, if not entirely devoted to the subject, addresses it at length with chapter titles like: The Ganymede Complex: Schubert’s Songs and the Homoerotic Imagination, and Mermaid Fantasies: Schubert’s Trout and the “wish to be woman.” No, seriously. As NY Times writer, Edward Rothstein wrote in 1992:

    “By the end of the all-day symposium on Schubert at the 92d Street Y … the audience was getting feisty. The last two hours of discussion on “Schubert the Man: Myth vs. Reality,” were concerned with Schubert’s possible homosexuality. The historical evidence was made available throughout the weeklong Schubertiade festival in a carefully argued 1989 paper by Maynard Solomon. … The second movement of the “Unfinished” Symphony had been analyzed to show its possible homosexual character by the feminist musicologist Susan McClary. And the “marginalization” of Schubert in 1820′s Viennese society had been debated by the panel.

    So by the evening’s end, comments were getting more heated. One frustrated listener asserted that “heterosexuals are more repressed than homosexuals.” Another, speaking with irony, asked whether the fact that Schubert was a “short, fat man” had affected the way he wrote music.

    On the stage, a few of the seven panelists exchanged barbs as well. But controversy was to be expected; this type of discussion is among the most important of our time; musical analysis is becoming less abstract, and critical interpretation steadily draws the most innocent of compositions into the hothouse world of contemporary politics. Crucial questions were raised, though not satisfactorily addressed: Is there any musical importance to a composer’s homosexuality? Can we generalize about homosexual taste? If so, do we risk imposing contemporary notions on a different era?

    The only thing agreed upon, probably, was that Schubert’s personality is not well understood. As for me, I sat through most of Sunday’s talks with a consistent mixture of interest and strong disagreement. Joseph Horowitz, who planned [the 1992] festival, began by summarizing the ambition of the Schubertiade itself. Schubert, he argued, has been trivialized; he has been turned into an innocent, sweet-tempered melodist. But his early music was actually “daring” and “extreme,” Mr. Horowitz said, and he was a promiscuous homosexual who died of syphilis.“

    Aren’t we really saying something like, “If you have to ask…”?

    1889 – CLIFTON WEBB (d: 1966) was an American actor, dancer and singer born Webb Parmelee Hollenbeck in a rural part of Marion County, Indiana, which would, in 1906, become Beech Grove, a self-governing city entirely surrounded by Indianapolis. Webb’s parents were Jacob Grant Hollenbeck, the son of a grocer from a multi-generational Indiana farming family, and Mabelle A. Parmelee, the daughter of a railroad conductor. In 1892, Webb’s formidable mother, Mabelle, moved to New York City with her beloved “little Webb,” as she called him for the remainder of her life. She dismissed questions about her husband Jacob, a ticket clerk who, like her father, worked for the Indianapolis-St. Louis Railroad, by saying, “We never speak of him. He didn’t care for the theater.”

    Webb was in his mid-fifties when actor/director Otto Preminger chose him over the objections of 20th Century Fox chief Darryl F. Zanuck to play the classy, but evil, radio columnist Waldo Lydecker, who is obsessed with Gene Tierney’s character in the 1944 film noir, Laura. His performance was showered with acclaim and made him an unlikely movie star. Despite Zanuck’s original objection, Webb was immediately signed to a long-term contract with Fox. Two years later he was reunited with Tierney (with whom he shares this birthdate) in another highly praised role as the elitist Elliott Templeton in Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge (1946). He received Academy Award nominations for Best Actor in a Supporting Role for both. Webb received an Oscar nomination for Best Actor in a Leading Role in 1949 for Sitting Pretty, the first in a three-film series of comedic Mr. Belvedere features with Webb portraying the snide and omniscient central character.

    Webb’s elegant taste kept him on Hollywood’s best-dressed lists for decades. Even though he exhibited comically foppish mannerisms in portraying Mr. Belvedere and other movie characters, his scrupulous (read “deeply closeted, highly repressed”) private life kept him free of scandal. The character of Lynn Belvedere is said to have been very close to his real life — he had an Oedipal devotion to his mother Mabelle, who was his companion and who lived with him until her death at age ninety-one. Webb’s mourning for his mother continued for a year with no signs of letting up, prompting Noël Coward to remark of Webb, “It must be terrible to be orphaned at 71.”

    Among the many stories, once, he and Tallulah Bankhead were smitten with the same handsome Austrian army officer and vied for the uniformed stud’s favors. While Tallulah did her stuff vamping him, Webb retreated for a moment, and returned with an armload of roses. To Tallulah’s amusement and the officer’s shock, Webb danced around the man and began pelting him with flowers. Tallulah won.

    1942 – CALVIN KLEIN, American clothing designer, born; Calvin Richard Klein was born in The Bronx to Jewish-Hungarian immigrant parents. He attended the High School of Industrial Arts and matriculated, but never graduated, from New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology, receiving an honorary Doctorate at the graduation ceremony in 2003. He did his apprenticeship in 1962 at an old-line cloak-and-suit manufacturer, and spent five years designing at other New York shops. He later launched his first company with a childhood friend, Barry K. Schwartz.

    Klein was one of several design leaders raised in the Jewish immigrant community in the Bronx, New York along with Robert Denning and Ralph Lauren. Cal became a protégé of the ever-so-flaming editor of Town & Country Baron de Gunzburg, through whose introductions he became the toast of the New York elite fashion scene, even before he had his first mainstream success with the launch of his first jeans line. Later, speaking in an interview with Bianca Jagger and Andy Warhol for Interview magazine, published shortly after the Baron’s death, Klein said: “He was truly the greatest inspiration of my life… he was my mentor, I was his protégé. If you talk about a person with style and true elegance — maybe I’m being a snob, but I’ll tell you, there was no one like him. I used to think, boy, did he put me through hell sometimes, but boy, was I lucky. I was so lucky to have known him so well for so long.” Calvin Klein was immediately recognized for his talent after his first major showing at New York Fashion Week. Klein was hailed as the new Yves Saint-Laurent, and was noted for his clean lines.

    His wildly homoerotic advertisements transformed the men’s fashion advertising and fashion industry. Married twice, he has never actually come out. But come on…does anyone really think this man is heterosexual? Even a little?

    1953 – THOMAS LOUIS VILLARD (d: 1994) was an American actor best known for his television role in the 1980s series We Got It Made as Jay Bostwick. His best known film role was in the 1986 film One Crazy Summer, as Clay Stork. He also starred in the 1991 horror film, Popcorn, and the 1992 movie Shakes the Clown with his One Crazy Summer” co-stars Joel Murray and Bob Goldthwait. Villard also appeared in the 1994 comedy movie In The Army Now.

    Villard made numerous guest appearances on TV shows as well and was a panelist on two weeks’ worth of To Tell The Truth in the early ’90s. He was a celebrity guest on Super Password and The Match Game as well as appearances in episodic television on CHiPS, Taxi, The Golden Girls, The A-Team and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Villard was out gay and died of complications of HIV-AIDS November 14, 1994 in L.A..

    1962 – JODIE FOSTER, American actress, born; Foster began acting in commercials at 3 years old, and her first significant role came in the 1976 film Taxi Driver as the preteen prostitute, Iris, for which she received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. She won for Best Actress in 1989 for playing a rape survivor in The Accused. In 1991, she starred in The Silence of the Lambs as Clarice Starling, an FBI trainee assisting in a hunt for a serial killer. This performance received international acclaim and her second Academy Award for Best Actress. She received her fourth Academy Award nomination for playing a backwoods hermit in Nell (1994). She has also won three Bafta Awards, two Golden Globes, a Screen Actors Award and a People’s Choice award as well as two Emmy nominations.

    Foster is, as the phrase goes, “intensely private” about certain aspects of her personal life, notably her sexual orientation, which has been the subject of speculation. She has two sons but has never revealed the identity of the children’s father(s).

    In December 2007, Foster made headlines when, during an acceptance speech at Hollywood Reporter’s “Women in Entertainment” event, she paid tribute to film producer Cydney Bernard, referring to Bernard as “my beautiful Cydney, who sticks with me through the rotten and the bliss.” Some media interpreted this as Foster coming out, as Bernard was believed to be her girlfriend since both met in 1992 during the filming of Sommersby. Foster and Bernard never attended premieres or award ceremonies together, nor did they ever appear affectionate with one another. Bernard, however, was seen in public with Foster’s children on many occasions. In May, 2008, several news outlets reported that Foster and Bernard had “called it quits. Oh Jody, Jody Jody…are you really going to let Ellen be the “It” Lesbian in town?

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    GAY WISDOM for Daily Living...

    from White Crane a magazine exploring
    Gay wisdom & culture http://www.Gaywisdom.org

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    THIS DAY IN GAY HISTORY

    NOVEMBER 9

    1923 - Poet JAMES SCHUYLER, born, (d: 1991); A native of Chicago, Schuyler moved to New York City in the late 1940s where he worked for NBC and first befriended W.H. Auden. In 1947, he moved to Ischia, Italy, where he lived in the rented Auden’s apartment and worked as Auden’s secretary. Between 1947 and 1948, Schuyler attended the University of Florence.

    After returning to the United States and settling in New York City, he roomed with John Ashberry and Frank O’Hara. From 1955-1961, he was a “curator of circulating exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art.” He was also an editorial associate and critic for Art News. Modern art was a major influence in his writing as well as the writings of Whitman.

    Reading an account of how a visit by Walt Whitman inspired Logan Pearsall Smith to literary ambition in his Unforgotten Years, Schuyler said “I looked up from my book, and the whole landscape seemed to shimmer.” The personal epic of Whitman’s “Song of Myself” and the vital force of landscape become major concerns of Schuyler’s mature poetry.

    Like Whitman, Schuyler was not known for revealing much about his personal life. He was Gay, and because he was manic-depressive, suffered several years of psychoanalysis and had a life that seemed to be riddled with traumatic experiences. One of these includes a"near detah experience" in a fire which was caused by him smoking in bed. Schuyler received the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for his 1980 collection The Morning of the Poem. He also coauthored a novel, A Nest of Ninnies, with John Ashberry in 1969. Shuyler also received the Longview Foundation Award in 1961, and the Frank O’Hara Prize for Poetry in 1969 for Freely Espousing.

    Schuyler was a Guggenheim Fellow and a fellow of the American Academy of Poets. His poem The Morning of the Poem is considered to be among the best long poems of the postmodern era. His papers are maintained at the University of Connecticut.

    1931 – Broadway Brevities probes the long and storied history of Lesbian clubs in New York City with the front page article “Sapphic Sisters, Scram!” as written by “Connie Lingle.” The publication, generally credited as America’s first national weekly gossip tabloid, was launched in New York in 1916 and edited by a Canadian named Stephen G. Clow. Brevities started out covering high society and the A-list of the New York theater world, but by the 1930s had begun covering more general vice and ran splashy features on sex, drugs, gang violence and crime. This was possibly the first time a gossip magazine had made real efforts to attract readers who weren’t members of the elite classes; it didn’t presume its readers had a close familiarity with any given social or professional world. In 1932, New York City banned newsstands from selling the racy tabloid, and it appears to have folded sometime around late 1933.

    NOVEMBER 10

    1879 – VACHEL LINDSAY, poet, born (d: 1931); His exuberant recitation of some of his work led some critics to compare it to jazz poetry despite his persistent protests. Because of his use of American Midwest themes he also became known as the “Prairie Troubador.” Today, his poetry is no longer fashionable, which is too bad since it contains a rhythmic vitality that has all but gone out of contemporary cerebral poetry He is probably best known for this poetic apostrophe to the Salvation Army in “General William Booth Enters Heaven,” although it is questionable whether he ever made it past the pearly Gates himself, since he not only liked boys too much by ended his days a suicide, both offenses that would remove his verses from today’s suburban libraries if the PTAs only knew.

    In his 40s, Lindsay lost his heart to the dazzlingly good-looking Australian composer and pianist, Percy Grainger, as had the Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg before him. Lindsay killed himself (horribly, swallowing Lysol) in 1931, the year before Hart Crane leapt into the sea. His only biography was published during the Eisenhower years, a decade before homosexuality was officially invented. If it took biographers almost a century to acknowledge Whitman’s Gayness, Lindsay should be due for a really serious biography around 2021.

    1892 – Russian designer, ERTÉ, born (d: 1990); born Romain de Tirtoff, Erté is perhaps most famous for his elegant fashion designs which capture the art deco period in which he worked. His delicate figures and sophisticated, glamorous designs are instantly recognizable, and his ideas and art influence fashion into the 21st century. His costumes and sets were featured in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1923, many productions of the Folies Bergere, and George White’s Scandals. In 1925, Louis B. Mayer brought him to Hollywood to design sets and costumes for a film called Paris. There were many script problems so Erté was given other assignments to keep him busy. He designed for such films as Ben-Hur, The Mystic, Time, the Comedian, Dance Madness and La Boheme.

    Erté is virtually synonymous with Art Deco, which is unfortunate as his work represents the extreme of the style and not the style itself. It’s perhaps not an exaggeration to say that Erté’s creations made the most outrageous clothing designed by MGM’s Adrian look like nuns’ habits. Erté’s name can safely be added to that small list of gay male favorites – Judy Garland, Bette Davis, Angela Lansbury, Bette Midler – that either sends one swooning with rapture or jumping for cover behind the nearest sofa.

    1913 - JAMES BROUGHTON poet, poetic filmmaker, and practitioner of “Big Joy,” a pansexual Dionysian approach to life, born. He’s been called the father of the West Coast experimental film movement in the wake of World War II, was part of the San Francisco Renaissance, a literary movement that included Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Duncan, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and others. He was an early bard of the Radical Faeries.

    Despite many creative love affairs during the San Francisco Beat Scene, Broughton put off marriage until age 49, when, steeped in his explorations of Jungian psychology, he married Susanna Hart in a three-day ceremony on the Pacific coast documented by his friend, the experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage. Susanna’s theatrical background and personality made for a great playmate; they had two children. They built a great community among the creative spirits of Alan Watts, Michael McClure, Anna Halprin, and Imogen Cunningham.

    In 1967’s “summer of love,” Broughton made a film, The Bed, a celebration of the dance of life which broke taboos against frontal nudity and won prizes at many film festivals. It rekindled Broughton’s filmmaking and led to more tributes to the human body (The Golden Positions), the eternal child (This is It), the eternal return (The Water Circle), the eternal moment (High Kukus), and the eternal feminine (Dreamwood). “These eternalities praised the beauty of humans, the surprises of soul, and the necessity of merriment,” Broughton wrote.

    God and Fuck belong together
    Both are sacred and profane
    God (the Divine) a
    dirty word used for damning
    Fuck (the sublime) a
    dirty term of depredation

    God and Fuck are so much alike
    they might be synonymous glories
    I’d even go so far as to say
    God is the Fuck of all Fucks
    And boy He has a Body
    like you’ve never seen

    from Special Deliveries by James Broughton published by Broken Moon Press

    But Broughton spent the greater part of his life with his life partner, artist, Joel Singer, with whom he made many films and traveled the world.

    He died in May, 1999 with champagne on his lips, in the house in Port Townsend, Washington where he, and Singer, lived for 10 years. Before he died, he said, “My creeping decrepitude has crept me all the way to the crypt.” His gravestone in a Port Townsend cemetery reads, “Adventure — not predicament.” In 2006 White Crane Books published selected writings of Broughton edited by San Francisco poet and radio host, Jack Foley titled ALL: A James Broughton Reader [ISBN 1-59021-020-4] as part of the White Crane Gay Wisdom Series. It is available at www.gaywisdom.org

    1924 – PHYLLIS LYON, Lesbian activist, born; Phyllis Lyon was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She holds a degree in journalism from the University of California, Berkeley, earned in 1946. During the 1940s, she worked as a reporter for the Chico Enterprise Record, and during the 1950s, she worked as part of the editorial staff of two Seattle magazines.

    Her name is now almost always paired with that of her partner, Del Martin. Martin and Lyon met in Seattle in 1950 when they began working for the same magazine. They became lovers in 1952 and entered into a formal partnership in 1953 when they moved to San Francisco together although technically unable to legally marry.

    On February 2, 2004, Martin and Lyon were granted the first marriage license given to a same-sex couple in the U.S.. The license was granted in violation of California state law by the City and County of San Francisco after mayor Gavin Newsom ordered that marriage licenses be given to same-sex couples who requested them. The licenses were voided on August 12, 2004.

    In 1955, Martin and Lyon and six other Lesbian women formed the Daughters of Bilitiss, the first major Lesbian organization in the United States. In 1956, DOB issued a twelve-page, mimeographed newsletter called The Ladder, edited by Lyon. Within five years of its origin, the Daughters of Bilitis had chapters around the country, including Chicago, New York, New Orleans, San Diego, Los Angeles, Detroit Denver, Cleveland and Philadelphia. There were 500 subscribers to “The Ladder,” but far more readers, as copies were circulated among women who were reluctant to put their names to a subscription list.

    An acommodationist organization, soon to be closely associated with the Mattachine Society, a predominantly male homophile group, DOB became the first national Lesbian society; and The Ladder, the first overtly Lesbian journal, achieved national circulation. Because of the conservative climate of the 1950s, membership in DOB was secret, and Lyons used a pseudonym for her work on the first few issues of The Ladder. Martin took over editorship of the newsletter from 1960 to 1961, and was then replaced by other editors until the newsletter ended its connection with the Daughters of Bilitis in 1970.

    Lyon and Martin remained leaders of the DOB until the late 1960s, when they were replaced by women who were perceived as more radical and who had different goals for the organization. The Daughters of Bilitis disbanded not long after Martin and Lyon’s leadership ended

    Martin and Lyon have been active in the National Organization for Women (NOW) since 1967. Del Martin was the first openly Lesbian woman elected to NOW. Lyon and Martin worked to combat the homophobia they perceived in NOW, and encouraged the National Board of Directors of NOW’s 1971 resolution that Lesbian issues were feminist issues.

    NOVEMBER 11

    1872 - Massachusetts Senator David Ignatius Walsh, the chairman of the Senate Naval Affairs Committee, Walsh was discovered to be having regular affairs at a male brothel not far from the Brooklyn Navy Yard. In The Homosexual Matrix, C.A. Tripp tells the sad story of how the government raided what it called “a male brothel” (a bathhouse, perhaps?) near the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Arrested was the manager, Gustave Beekman, who was told he could expect a lighter sentence if he cooperated with the government in naming clients, especially foreign agents who were suspected of blackmailing Gay Navy men in an attempt to gain military secrets. Several foreign agents were, in fact, arrested. Also named as a regular patron of the “house on Pacific Street” was Senator Walsh, chairman of the Senate Naval Affairs Committee. Walsh, whose name was plastered across tabloids for weeks, was cleared by his colleagues in the Senate (something about a “wide stance”) after a favorable report from the FBI. Beekman, whose position was not exactly one of privilege, was tried on sodomy charges and sentenced to 20 years in prison, every day of which was served.

    1950 – The first meeting of the MATTACHINE SOCIETY; As Senator Joseph McCarthy railed against homosexuals in the State Department, Harry Hay, working on the Henry Wallace presidential campaign in 1948, wrote a startling document, declaring homosexuals an oppressed minority. While the idea is widely accepted today, at the time the notion of homosexuals as a minority was considered absurd. But it was this key concept that would eventually bring the Gay and Lesbian rights movement together.

    Harry’s platform for the Wallace campaign was never voted on, but he remained determined to organize homosexuals to fight for their equal rights. Two years later, he met Rudi Gernreich (later to be the noted fashion designer) and together they canvassed beaches in the Los Angeles area known as homosexual gathering places, inviting people to a discussion group about the just released Kinsey Report. In November 1950, Harry showed the plank written for the Wallace campaign to Bob Hull, a student in his Southern California Labor School class. Bob shared the document with two of his friends, Chuck Rowland and Dale Jennings, and on November 11, 1950, the five met for the first time to discuss forming a political group that would later become the Mattachine Society. All of the founding members identified themselves as leftist. The group meets again two days later, on Nov. 13th.

    Given the fearful political climate, Mattachine Society meetings often took place in secret with members using aliases. Like the Communist Party, the organization was organized in a cell structure that was non-centralized so that should a confiscation of records occur only limited information would be available to the authorities.

    Over the course of the next two years, the Mattachine Society worked to organize and increase regional chapters throughout most of Southern California, but it was not until the arrest of member Dale Jennings on police entrapment charges that the Mattachine Society took on its first political battle. Police entrapment was a common form of harassment against homosexuals during that period. Suspects’ names were printed in the newspapers, which caused many to lose their jobs and become estranged from their families. By standing up to defend Jennings, the Mattachine Society not only rose to the defense of one of their members, but also took on the notorious Los Angeles Police Department for its pattern and practice of homosexual harassment.

    1985 — After a year of cold feet, “An Early Frost” airs on NBC. Writers DAN LIPMAN and RON COWEN (later to produce “Sisters” and “Queer as Folk”) attempt to create the first TV movie to deal with both homosexuality and the impact of AIDS on a beleaguered community of Gay men. The suburban Pierson family not only deals with closeted workaholic son Nick’s dual secret (along with the unfaithfulness of his partner Peter), but also the anger, resentment and frustrations of mother Kate and sister Susan. While it draws an amazing 1/3 of the viewing audience, the daring broadcast loses NBC about a half million dollars in ad revenue. And while many consider the broadcast a success, others feel the film’s directness stalls nationwide discussion of AIDS, “because it achieved its narrative and informational goals so well.”

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