#glbt issues

[nerdygaymormon]

The LGBTQ community has seen controversy regarding acceptance of different groups (bisexual and transgender individuals have sometimes been marginalized by the larger community), but the term LGBT has been a positive symbol of inclusion and reflects the embrace of different identities and that we’re stronger together and need each other. While there are differences, we all face many of the same challenges from broader society.

In the 1960′s, in wider society the meaning of the word gay transitioned from ‘happy’ or ‘carefree’ to predominantly mean ‘homosexual’ as they adopted the word as was used by homosexual men, except that society also used it as an umbrella term that meant anyone who wasn’t cisgender or heterosexual. The wider queer community embraced the word ‘gay’ as a mark of pride.

The modern fight for queer rights is considered to have begun with The Stonewall Riots in 1969 and was called the Gay Liberation Movement and the Gay Rights Movement.

The acronym GLB surfaced around this time to also include Lesbian and Bisexual people who felt “gay” wasn’t inclusive of their identities. 

Early in the gay rights movement, gay men were largely the ones running the show and there was a focus on men’s issues. Lesbians were unhappy that gay men dominated the leadership and ignored their needs and the feminist fight. As a result, lesbians tended to focus their attention on the Women’s Rights Movement which was happening at the same time. This dominance by gay men was seen as yet one more example of patriarchy and sexism. 

In the 1970′s, sexism and homophobia existed in more virulent forms and those biases against lesbians also made it hard for them to find their voices within women’s liberation movements. Betty Friedan, the founder of the National Organization for Women (NOW), commented that lesbians were a “lavender menace” that threatened the political efficacy of the organization and of feminism and many women felt including lesbians was a detriment.

In the 80s and 90s, a huge portion of gay men were suffering from AIDS while the lesbian community was largely unaffected. Lesbians helped gay men with medical care and were a massive part of the activism surrounding the gay community and AIDS. This willingness to support gay men in their time of need sparked a closer, more supportive relationship between both groups, and the gay community became more receptive to feminist ideals and goals. 

Approaching the 1990′s it was clear that GLB referred to sexual identity and wasn’t inclusive of gender identity and T should be added, especially since trans activist have long been at the forefront of the community’s fight for rights and acceptance, from Stonewall onward. Some argued that T should not be added, but many gay, lesbian and bisexual people pointed out that they also transgress established gender norms and therefore the GLB acronym should include gender identities and they pushed to include T in the acronym. 

GLBT became LGBT as a way to honor the tremendous work the lesbian community did during the AIDS crisis. 

Towards the end of the 1990s and into the 2000s, movements took place to add additional letters to the acronym to recognize Intersex, Asexual, Aromantic, Agender, and others. As the acronym grew to LGBTIQ, LGBTQIA, LGBTQIAA, many complained this was becoming unwieldy and started using a ‘+’ to show LGBT aren’t the only identities in the community and this became more common, whether as LGBT+ or LGBTQ+. 

In the 2010′s, the process of reclaiming the word “queer” that began in the 1980′s was largely accomplished. In the 2020′s the LGBTQ+ acronym is used less often as Queer is becoming the more common term to represent the community. 

[waitingforthet]

They Were Roommates: Once again, Brantley makes a meeting of the University of Minnesota GLBT (Gay Legendary Beasts Trans) club all about him and his personal issues.

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[olympic-paris]

THIS DAY IN GAY HISTORY

based on: The White Crane Institute's 'Gay Wisdom', Gay Birthdays, Gay For Today, Famous GLBT, glbt-Gay Encylopedia, Today in Gay History, Wikipedia, and more …

September 12

1704 – Stephen Fox-Strangways, 1st Earl of Ilchester (d.1776) was a British peer and Member of Parliament.

Ilchester was the son of Sir Stephen Fox and his second wife Christiana Hope. Henry Fox, 1st Baron Holland, was his younger brother and Charles James Fox his nephew. He was elected to the House of Commons for Shaftesbury in 1726, a seat he held until 1741. The latter year he was raised to the peerage as Lord Ilchester, of Ilchester in the County of Somerset, Baron of Woodford Strangways in the County of Dorset. Six years later he was created Lord Ilchester and Stavordale, Baron of Redlynch, in the County of Somerset, and in 1756 he was even further honoured when he was made Earl of Ilchester. The peerages were created, in default of male issue of his own, with remainder to his younger brother Henry. In 1763 he was admitted to the Privy Council.Stephen Fox was the lover of Lord Hervey for a period of ten years, from 1726 to 1736. There exist many passionate letters between the two. Hervey initially favoured Stephen's brother, Henry Fox, but when charmingly rebuffed paid infatuated court to Stephen. His relationship with Lord Hervey ended only when a marriage was arranged with thirteen-year-old Elizabeth Horner, daughter of Thomas Strangways Horner and Susanna Strangways, in 1735. In 1758, Lord Ilchester assumed the additional surname of Strangways. He died in September 1776, aged 72, and was succeeded by his son Henry Thomas Fox-Strangways.

1772 – The Marquis de Sade is sentenced to death in absentia for sodomizing a servant and is burned in effigy.

1857 – UK: The word gay, which appears in a pictured cartoon in Punch magazine, is used to refer to prostitution. It arrived in English during the 12th century from Old French gai, most likely deriving ultimately from a Germanic source.

It was apparently not until the 20th century that the word was used to mean specifically "homosexual," although it had earlier acquired sexual connotations. The word may have started to acquire associations of immorality as early as the 14th century, but had certainly acquired them by the 17th. By the late 17th century it had acquired the specific meaning of "addicted to pleasures and dissipations", an extension of its primary meaning of "carefree" implying "uninhibited by moral constraints". A gay woman was a prostitute, a gay man a womanizer, and a gay house a brothel.

The use of gay to mean "homosexual" was often an extension of its application to prostitution: a gay boy was a young man or boy serving male clients. Similarly, a gay cat was a young male apprenticed to an older hobo, commonly exchanging sex and other services for protection and tutelage.

A passage from Gertrude Stein's Miss Furr & Miss Skeene (1922) is possibly the first traceable published use of the word to refer to a homosexual relationship. Bringing Up Baby (1938) was the first film to use the word gay in apparent reference to homosexuality. By the mid-20th century, gay was well established in reference to hedonistic and uninhibited lifestyles and its antonym straight, which had long had connotations of seriousness, respectability, and conventionality, had now acquired specific connotations of heterosexuality.

In the case of gay, other connotations of frivolousness and showiness in dress ("gay apparel") led to association with camp and effeminacy. This association no doubt helped the gradual narrowing in scope of the term towards its current dominant meaning, which was at first confined to subcultures. Gay was the preferred term since other terms, such as queer, were felt to be derogatory.

Homosexual is perceived as excessively clinical, since the sexual orientation now commonly referred to as "homosexuality" was at that time a mental illness diagnosis in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). The sixties marked the transition in the predominant meaning of the word gay from that of "carefree" to the current "homosexual".

1889 – Maurice Chevalier, born in Paris (d.1972), was a French actor, singer, and popular vaudeville entertainer. He is noted as a Sprechgesang (spoken-song) performer. Chevalier's signature songs included "Louise", "Mimi", "Valentine", and "Thank Heaven for Little Girls". His trademark was a boater hat, which he always wore on stage with a tuxedo.

Chevalier was born in Paris. He made his name as a star of musical comedy, appearing in public as a singer and dancer at an early age before working in four menial jobs as a teenager. In 1909, he became the partner of the biggest female star in France at the time, Fréhel. Although their relationship was brief, she secured him his first major engagement, as a mimic and a singer in l'Alcazar in Marseille, for which he received critical acclaim by French theatre critics. In 1917, he discovered jazz and ragtime and went to London, where he found new success at the Palace Theatre.

After this, he toured the United States, where he met the American composers George Gershwin and Irving Berlin and brought Dédé to Broadway in 1922. He also developed an interest in acting, and had success in the operetta Dédé. When talkies arrived, he went to Hollywood in 1928, where he played his first American role in Innocents of Paris. In 1930, he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor for his roles in The Love Parade (1929) and The Big Pond (1930), which secured his first big American hit, Livin' in the Sunlight, Lovin' in the Moonlight.

In 1957, he appeared in Love in the Afternoon, which was his first Hollywood film in more than 20 years. In the early 1960s, he made eight films, including Can-Can in 1960 and Fanny the following year. In 1970 he made his final contribution to the film industry where he sang the title song of the Disney film The Aristocats. He died in Paris, on January 1, 1972, aged 83.

He may have Chevalier "thanked Heaven for little girls" and have had several public affairs with women, but it is believed he had a long-time relationship with his "valet" Felix Paquet, to whom he went home every night. He is also thought to have had a homosexual relationship with a soldier in WWI. There are also claims he had the hots for his fellow French actor, Charles Boyer.

Actress Kay Francis claimed that"Chevalier is lousy in bed, and always attacks homosexuals so as to throw suspicion from himself."

1944 – David Hurles, born in Cincinnati (d.2023), was a gay pornographer, whose one-man company, run from a private mailbox, was called Old Reliable Tape and Picture Company. His work, produced primarily in the 1970s and 1980s, falls into three categories: photographs, audio tapes, and videotapes. Hurles' models were typically ex-cons, hustlers, drifters, and lowlifes.

At age 20, inspired by John Rechy's just-published novel City of Night, David left Cincinnati, and moved to Berkeley.

In the 1960s, he appeared in movies and magazines, with Guild Press, Washington D.C., for whom he was also a photographer.

In 1975, already filming in Super-8 format used by his mentor and longtime friend Bob Mizer of Athletic Model Guild, he met and became a great friend of Jack Fritscher, editor of Drummer magazine, who described David as "my longtime pal and housemate". The character Solly Blue in Fritscher's novel Some Dance to Remember has much in common with Hurles.

Hurles has written of San Francisco at the time: "Perhaps you had to be there...the 70's, San Francisco, the blossoming and peak of the gay sexual culture. It was a rare time; everything, it seemed, was perfect. So perfect, in fact, that those of us there could not have possibly imagined it might ever be otherwise!" Jim Stewart describes his encounter with Hurles, and the neighborhood they both lived in, in the first chapter of his Folsom Street Blues.

His first published pictures appeared in Drummer; no other magazine would touch them. He also shot many covers and centerfolds for Fritscher's zine Man2Man Quarterly (1980-1982), whose mailing address was Hurles' San Francisco apartment. Subsequently Hurles' photos have appeared in dozens of gay magazines.

His models were recruited among ex-convicts and addicts. David liked psychos. Nude ones. Money-hungry drug addicts with big dicks. Rage-filled robbers without rubbers. And of course, convicts. Many of them were dangerous — he wanted them to be, that was a key part of their attractiveness for him — but part of David's skill, which no one since has duplicated, was being able to manage them so that they would perform as instructed and not attack him.

Hurles chose to downplay technical fireworks with his camera in order to focus on the emotional pyrotechnics of his models. His models, picked up on the street or sent to him by referral, would come to his apartment, get naked, and masturbate. They were distinguished by "attitude" - straight, in your face, angry, contemptuous of fags, dangerous, smoking cigars, giving the finger, flexing their biceps. "Rough trade is too tame a word", was the description of John Calendo. Getting robbed by his models, or having his equipment stolen, he viewed as part of the cost of doing business.

A wrestling accident in 1990 led to the gradual loss of eyesight in one eye, a disaster for a photographer. Shortly thereafter, the arrival of pornography on the Internet destroyed most of the market for Hurles' material, at the same time that AIDS (and drugs) killed many models and potential models. "I know where a great many of them [my models] are. Six feet under". His company folded, and he lived on welfare and food stamps. In 2008 he had a massive stroke, and until his death was "is the most popular resident of a state-funded nursing home in East Hollywood".

1954 – Sculptor Robert Gober is among only a few openly gay American artists to achieve an international reputation as one of the great artists of our time. Significantly, Gober's art proceeds from his sensibilities and experiences as a gay man. In 2001, Gober represented the United States at the 49th Venice Biennale, the key international exhibition of modern and contemporary art since the beginning of the twentieth century. His haunting art weaves together themes of childhood, sexuality, memory, loss, and spiritual redemption.

Gober was born on September 12, 1954 in Wallingford, Connecticut and raised in a devout Catholic family. His father, a skilled tradesman, taught him early how to make things with his hands. Gober knew he was gay when very young. Almost fifteen years old at the time of the Stonewall Riots in New York in 1969, he came of age when homosexual identity was becoming more open.

He took art classes in high school and went on in the early 1970s to study literature and fine art during his undergraduate years at Middlebury College in Vermont. He took his junior year abroad in Rome at the Tyler School of Art, a division of Temple University. Gober settled in New York City in 1976 to begin a career as a painter. He initially earned his living as a carpenter, renovating lofts and building stretchers for artists.

In 1984, Gober began to make handcrafted, everyday objects. Starting with a series of plumbing fixtures consisting of sinks, wash basins, and urinals (1984-86), which quickly established his reputation, he continued through the decade to produce, among other simulated objects, door sculptures, dog baskets, baby cribs, playpens, slip-covered armchairs, cast body fragments, and facsimile wallpapers, newspapers, and commercial box containers. Gober meticulously made these objects with great attention to detail. At first they seem to be the actual manufactured commodity; yet, they are always handmade and altered in form. Their meanings, too, go well beyond the mundane. Gober called one category of these objects his "psychological furniture." Gober made Subconscious Sink (1985) by coating plaster over wire lath and then covering it with semi-gloss white enamel paint to resemble porcelain. The odd form of the sink hints at the nightmarish and at domestic discord.

A good friend was dying of AIDS at the time Gober was fabricating Subconscious Sink at the very beginning of the epidemic. The sink suggests cleansing rituals, although with no running water there is no ability to wash clean or purify. In this regard, a font of Holy Water comes to mind, but one disabled with no blessed water to sanctify--not an implausible association given Gober's Catholic background and the emergence in the 1990s of overt religious imagery in his work.

The artist's Catholicism, although lapsed, is the basis for a genuine spiritual dimension of his art, most especially as set in uneasy alliance with Gober's homosexuality.

An intensely private man, Gober, who continues to reside in New York City, protects the details of his personal life. At the same time, however, he has from early in his career been open about his homosexuality and its deep relevance for his work. In February 2003, he appeared at Yale University in one of the first art "events" sponsored by the Larry Kramer Initiative for Gay and Lesbian Studies, "A Conversation with Robert Grober," thus explicitly acknowledging the connection between his sexuality and his art.

1956 – Leslie Cheung (d.2003) first gained legions of fans in Asia as a pop singer. He went on to a successful career as an actor, appearing in sixty films, including the award-winning Farewell My Concubine. Androgynously handsome, he sometimes played sexually ambiguous characters, as well as romantic leads in both gay- and heterosexually-themed films.

Leslie Cheung, born Cheung Kwok-wing on September 12, 1956, was the tenth and youngest child of a Hong Kong tailor whose clients included Alfred Hitchcock and William Holden. At the age of twelve Cheung was sent to boarding school in England. While there he adopted the English name Leslie, in part because he admired Leslie Howard and Gone with the Wind, but also because the name is "very unisex."

Cheung studied textiles at Leeds University, but when he returned to Hong Kong, he did not go into his father's profession. He entered a music talent contest on a Hong Kong television station and took second prize with his rendition of Don McLean's American Pie. His appearance in the contest led to acting roles in soap operas and drama series, and also launched his singing career. After issuing two poorly received albums, Day Dreamin' (1977) and Lover's Arrow (1979), Cheung hit it big with The Wind Blows On (1983), which was a bestseller in Asia and established him as a rising star in the "Cantopop" style. He would eventually make over twenty albums in Cantonese and Mandarin.

Quickly gaining an enthusiastic fan following, Cheung played concerts in packed theaters, auditoriums, and stadiums. Although never as well known in North America, Cheung drew full houses for his concerts at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas in 2000, the tickets for which cost as much as $238.

Cheung also embarked on a movie career. His first film was the soft-porn Erotic Dream of the Red Chamber (1978). In his next film, Patrick Tam's Nomad (1982), Cheung played a young man fixated on his mother. The initial version included a scene in which Cheung's character, clad only in underwear, fondled himself while talking on the telephone with his mother. Hong Kong censors objected, and the scene had to be reshot with Cheung in trousers.

Cheung had a featured role as a rookie policeman in John Woo's 1986 crime thriller A Better Tomorrow, one of the films that established the Hong Kong action genre. He also appeared in the movie's two sequels (1987 and 1989). Cheung was one of the stars of Stanley Kwan's Rouge (1989). In this stylish drama, he played a young man who falls in love with a courtesan who is dressed as a man when he first encounters her.

Cheung also starred in Wong Kar-Wai's Days of Being Wild (1990), this time as a callous, womanizing playboy, a role that earned him the Best Actor Prize at the Hong Kong Film Awards. Shortly after this success, Cheung announced his retirement from his singing career and moved to Vancouver, British Columbia for a short time.

Chen next went to China to make Chen Kaige's Farewell My Concubine (1993), which won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film but was banned in China because of its homosexual theme. In Farewell My Concubine Cheung played a young actor at the Peking Opera who specialized in women's roles.

Cheung played one of a pair of gay lovers in Wong Kar-Wai's Happy Together (1997), an ironically titled piece because the couple, who make a trip to Argentina to rekindle their relationship, fail to find their longed-for happiness. Cheung's personal situation was more fortunate. After making Happy Together, he came out publicly and acknowledged his lover, Tong Hock Tak, a banker. Speculation about Cheung's sexual orientation had been rife for some years, but he had always dodged questions, fearing that revelation of his relationship might be deleterious to Tong's career. By this time, however, Cheung's fortune--skillfully managed by Tong--had grown to the point that Tong was able to retire from his job. Still, coming out was not without risk for Cheung since very few star Asian entertainers are openly gay. In this case, reported Ronald Bergan, "the move did nothing to diminish his following; it only increased it."

In the late 1990s Cheung resumed his singing career with great success, and several more bestsellers followed. He returned to the concert stage as well, and in 2000 played a year-long "Passion" tour, in which his onstage wardrobe featured eight outfits by Jean-Paul Gaultier, including a white tuxedo with angel wings, gold hot pants, and a "naughty skirt." In reviving his singing career, Cheung made music videos, one of which "featured a pas de deux (with a Japanese male ballet dancer) so sexy that it was banned by TVB, Hong Kong's top channel."

In his last film, Law Chi-Leung's Inner Senses (2002), Cheung played a psychiatrist tempted by evil spirits to kill himself. Thus, fans who heard of Cheung's suicide on April 1, 2003, hoped at first that the story might be a macabre April Fool's Day joke. But soon they learned that Cheung had indeed taken his own life by jumping from a twenty-fourth floor balcony at Hong Kong's Mandarin Oriental Hotel. Cheung, who had long suffered from depression and had reportedly tried to commit suicide by taking an overdose of sleeping pills the previous year, left a note in which he thanked Tong, his family, and his friends, but concluded poignantly, "I have not done one single bad thing in my life. Why is it like that?"

Disconsolate fans quickly created a shrine at the spot of Cheung's death. Their memorial offerings of flowers, notes, personal mementos, and photographs covered half a block. Admirers of all ages joined in paying tribute to the popular artist.

1992 – Connor Franta is an American YouTuber, entrepreneur, entertainer, and writer.

As of November 2015, his self-named main channel on YouTube has 5 million subscribers. Franta was formerly a member of YouTube group Our Second Life (stylized Our2ndLife and O2L) under the Fullscreen Network, but is now an independent member of the Big Frame network, managed by Andrew Graham.

Franta has recently become involved in various entrepreneurial enterprises, including a clothing line, music curation, as well as a coffee and lifestyle brand named Common Culture. His debut book, a memoir titled A Work in Progress, was released on April 21, 2015. In July 2015, details of Heard Well, a record label Franta co-founded, were announced.

On December 8, 2014, Franta came out as gay in a YouTube video, stating he has accepted who he is and is "happy with that person". He also spoke on the help he got from others on the Internet, and wanted to give people struggling with their sexuality similar advice. This six-minute long video, titled "Coming Out", has over 11 million views and over 949 thousand likes, being the second most viewed video on Franta's channel as of August 16th 2017.

[iphigeniacomplex]

rejoice! the glbt historical society has a digital archive collecting the writing of camille moran, a transgender activist for psychiatric survivor rights who advocated for the removal of gender identity disorder from the dsm

you may be familiar with moran from her statement in the fall '93 issue of ex-patient newsletter dendron, "why a transgendered woman calls for psychiatry's destruction". (if not, it can be accessed here, on page 17.) her writing on the psychiatric abuse she experienced as a transgender woman is crucial reading for anyone interested in the psychiatric survivors movement or anti-psychiatric perspectives.

[whatevergreen]

The Ladder, A Lesbian Review (Daughters of Bilitis) June 1966

"The cover of this issue of The Ladder, features a portrait of Ernestine Eckstein (1941–1992), vice president of the New York chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis, the first lesbian organization in the United States. The issue also features an extensive interview with Eckstein, who was one of the first African American leaders of the LGBTQ movement in the United States.

The monthly journal of the Daughters of Bilitis, The Ladder, was published from 1956 until 1972. It was the third nationally distributed magazine produced by what was then known as the homophile movement."

GLBT Historical Society, San Francisco

[pep-the-artemis]

When people say that LGBT and BLM or even LGB and T shouldn't be connected since they're separate issues they're dumb

Even ignoring how on a fundamental level they're all linked in a weird cobweb of problems, that doesn't matter. What matters is that the groups are being suppressed and discriminated against, we may be fighting different battles but it's all the same war.

For example, two things which couldn't be much more different are gay rights and miners rights but guess who stood by the miners when Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher waged a class war against miners, who stood besides them... the GLBT community (or as we know them today the LGBT community but thats a story for another day).

The only reason to divide is to the advantage of our enemy, divide and conquer.

[placegrenette]

Longing for Dick and Laughing at Death: The Story of Diseased Pariah News

All right, Tumblr, gather round. This is not my usual style here, and I have missed World AIDS Day by a number of days, but I searched for “Diseased Pariah News” on this nonsense site and got all of two coherent hits, and that does not sit right with me. So let me tell y’all a story of black humor, porn, a pre-venture-capital-overrun Bay Area, lovingly photographed penises, recipe testing, friendship, and death. It’s all true but I wasn’t there; sources are linked throughout and compiled at the end.

Cover of Issue #3. This and all illustrations courtesy of the GLBT Historical Society and Calisphere, the online archives of the University of California. Support your librarians and archivists, kids!

“It’s My Party and I’ll Die If I Want To”

The short version of the story is: Diseased Pariah News was a zine that ran for eleven issues, all published between 1990 and 1999. It was edited almost completely by, and addressed pretty much exclusively to, PWAs, or People With AIDS.

To remind you whippersnappers: to know you were HIV positive in 1990 was to know that you were going to die a lot sooner than average, and probably not peacefully. As Jonathan Kauffman wrote in “Get Fat, Don’t Die,” a 2020 Hazlitt essay on DPN: “So many of the narratives of the time circled around two themes: memorializing the terror and adulterated sweetness of being alive as everyone they knew was dying, and shearing through the cordon of dehumanizing indifference that the public had erected around plague-struck communities. The experience of daily diarrhea or constant nausea may have been too visceral, too private, or simply too grinding to fit into the arc of a plot.” The diarrhea could go on for months, by the way. And that was separate from debilitating fatigue, potential blindness (from CMV retinitis), or constant prickly pain in your hands and feet (from peripheral neuropathy).

This was years before the development of protease inhibitors and “the cocktail” could prevent HIV-positive patients from developing full-blown AIDS; AZT could slow things down, but it came with nasty side effects. AIDS was not like the tuberculosis, or rather like the romantic conception of tuberculosis, in which one’s dying status could be signaled by paleness and the occasional discreet cough. AIDS was painful, and complicated.

So somebody had to have a sense of humor about all this.

Co-founder, original Serene Editor, and the guy who gets the credit for having the idea in the first place, Tom Shearer

Tom Shearer was a computer hardware engineer living in San Francisco, running a zine on the side called GAWK (it stood for Gay Artists and Writers Kollective) when a reader named Beowulf Thorne (more on him later) complained that GAWK looked terrible. Shearer challenged Thorne to do better; Thorne rose to the challenge; one thing led to another and the pair ended up collaborating on a whole new zine, this one focused on the experience of dealing with AIDS. Shearer got the title from an Advocate comic in which a flight attendant asked a passenger: “Would you like the smoking, non-smoking, or diseased pariah section?” (This was during a time when airlines not only had smoking sections but were occasionally refusing outright to transport PWAs.)

From the very beginning, Diseased Pariah News was meant to be funny, helpful, and obsessed with dick. Page 3 of the first issue lists a number of practical steps PWAs can take (“Call Pac Bell for low income phone rates”). There was also a Resources page, dedicated to advocacy groups, support groups, even mail-order pharmacies easy to work with, anyone whom the editors judged would treat PWAs fairly and not waste their time. In between those two was the debut of the column, “Get Fat, Don’t Die!,” dedicated to high-calorie recipes specifically designed to combat wasting disease, illustrated by a naked man in a come-hither pose; the debut of the column “Porn Potato,” which reviewed porn videos while keeping a much better sense of narrative than its subjects; a short-short story titled “I Fisted Jesse Helms”; and a contest to guess Shearer’s T-cell count. (Not included yet was the centerfold feature, which would include the model’s history of infections and T-cell count alongside his full-frontal glory; that would come in later issues.)

Shearer died in April 1991, as the second issue of DPN was going to press. (”Thanks to Mike for guessing optimistically high,” ran the conclusion to the T-cell count contest.) Issue #3 starts with Thorne recounting the aftermath of his death, including a visit to “Akbar and Jeff’s Cremation Hut,” and then, contemplating taking over DPN by himself, allowing himself a rare show of mourning:

Seriously though, the reality of Tommy's death isn't funny. But then, neither is it funny that the first President to preside over the age of AIDS couldn't make himself say the name of the syndrome. Or that a septuagenarian senator would obstruct prevention programs because he would rather see his nation's children die than "promote deviant sexual behavior" (all the while forcing us to endure tobacco subsidies and its retinue of smoking related deaths). Or...well, you know enough about this yourself, you fill in the blanks. What can I say about this situation? You can either laugh or cry, but crying gives you crow's feet.

Fortunately Thorne wasn’t alone for the rest of the ride: as “Cranky Editor,” he was joined by Tom Ace, christened “Humpy Editor,” and Michael Botkin, who already had a reputation around the Bay Area as a suffering-no-fools journalist and critic, as “Sleazy Editor.” DPN had found an eager audience to begin with--Shearer and Thorne had to double back to the printer when the first print run of the first issue sold out--but at its peak it had a circulation of 5,000 and could be bought in dozens of bookstores across multiple countries. The guys were dedicated and passionate without being self-important, and it showed.

Left to right: Sleazy, Cranky, and Humpy, in an undated photo (1994?), for a DPN Christmas card.

All eleven issues have been archived and can be read in PDF form courtesy of the Gay and Lesbian Historical Society and the University of California’s online archiving efforts. Highlights include “AIDS Barbie,” in #8; an interview with playwright and ACT UP co-founder Larry Kramer in #9; Thorne’s evisceration of And the Band Played On author Randy Shilts (who had himself just died of AIDS) also in #9; and the Opportunistic Infection Merit Badges (OIMBs), introduced by Botkin in #10:

The outcome will be an array of badges and ribbons which tell the educated viewer, at a glance, just how progressed your HIV disease is. It will be particularly useful for health care providers, who instead of taking lengthy histories will instead be able to briefly study a PWA's array of service ribbons, badges, etc.... a careful study of my OIMBs would quickly reveal my obscenely low T-cell count (17 at last testing), the fact that I've had PCP, peripheral neuropathy, MAC, wasting syndrome, cryptococcal meningitis, and herpes, and that I've taken every nucleoside analogue known to man. This would allow those who want to fawn over or avoid me to act accordingly, and avoid the frustration of mistaken acquaintanceship.

I can’t speak for you, but the badges were what stuck in my mind: humor black enough to communicate the bleakness of its source. It’s funny how history can seem incommunicable. Odds are you reading this are young enough that if I try to tell you what it felt like to look down Lexington Avenue on the afternoon of September 11, 2001, and see a great column of smoke and no cars, you can place the reference but probably not the devastation. People dealing with the aftereffects of COVID now are having a hard time gaining empathy for what it feels like to have their body betray them; the distance of a couple decades or so is not going to help. To take history at all seriously is to admit that the various horrors of the past are ungraspable. But the badges allow you a glimpse of what it was like to live in the midst of this particular horror.

Which is not to say that the DPN guys were particularly concerned with history. Hamilton-style musings about legacies would have left them cold. History had, in a sense, been stolen from them, and so they were going to embrace the present they had left. Especially Thorne, who would be the guiding force behind DPN for the rest of its run.

The Story-within-a-Story of Beowulf ��Biffy Mae” Thorne, Writer, Editor, Graphic Designer, Illustrator, Cartoonist, Recipe-Tester, Critic, Know-It-All, and Horndog Extraordinaire

and also, a babe. I don't care what your gender/sexuality combination is, you would've been at risk of doing some pining.

Beowulf Thorne--no, that wasn’t his birth name, but it seems to have been the name he used exclusively during DPN’s run, so that’s what we’ll stick with--was born in 1964 and grew up in southern California, but fled to the Bay Area in 1983. I saw one source say he tested HIV-positive as early as 1986, which is to say before the term “HIV” was even in widespread use. Suffice to say, dude had to start contemplating his mortality far, far earlier than he should have. He was enrolled at UC-Santa Cruz for a while, studying biology, but that whole contemplating-his-mortality part led him eventually to focus on graphic design and advocacy: first with various condom-promoting organizations, such as the Condom Resource Center in Oakland, and then DPN.

If he hadn’t been doomed, Thorne probably would’ve been one of those guys resented by his acquaintances, just for the sheer number of things he was good at. He was not only DPN’s chief writer and editor but its layout artist and the designer of its related merchandise (not to mention the OIMBs). While working as a graphic designer for Addison-Wesley, he would occasionally piss textbook authors off by pointing out errors in their text, even though he wasn’t supposed to be factchecking: he just couldn’t help it. He did full-page, multi-panel “Captain Condom” comics for several DPN issues; that takes some time and effort now, never mind with Adobe Illustrator as it was three decades ago. He tested all of the “Get Fat, Don’t Die!” recipes. He was a gardener who specialized in orchids, cacti, and meat-eating plants, and beautifully detailed plant sketches are scattered in his collected papers.

1994 version of the Condom Educator's Guide, co-written by Thorne and Daniel Bao (who would later work on DPN issues) and designed by Thorne on "his trusty Macintosh."

And he could write. Reading him, you’d never guess the man wasn’t a trained writer, or is now twenty-three years dead: his voice is unstoppable. I’m not the type who laughs out loud at books easily, and while reading the DPN back issues, I found myself giggling repeatedly at the turns of phrase in Thorne’s porn reviews.

Oh, yeah: he also was Porn Potato. And just generally an unabashed horndog. He and Ace met when Ace saw Thorne’s personal ad: “Relatively stable 25-year-old design student seeks other adventurous good-looking men for mutual sodomy and oral copulation.” When a POZ writer asked Thorne about this in 1997, Thorne--who by this point was dealing with neuropathy and killer candida that ate his gums down to the bone--said cheerfully of Ace: “He’s quite buxom. I’ve always had a letch on him.” If Thorne and DPN stood for anything, it was the conviction that an AIDS diagnosis could not take away the right and responsibility to live, and living included being sexual.

But You Already Know the End of the Story

The hardest issue of DPN to read is the eleventh and last one, which came out in 1999, three years after #10. “In the eternity since DPN #10 appeared,” ran a note under the masthead, “66.67% of the editorial staff expired.” Botkin had died in 1996; that left Thorne and Tom Ace. By this point there was a new set of treatments available, but they worked a lot better if you hadn’t already been fighting HIV (plus the side effects of AZT) for over a decade.

One of the last DPN pieces Thorne wrote was on viatication, the practice of selling your life-insurance policy to be able to collect cash while you’re still alive. His health was failing pretty fast at that point--another of the last pieces is about CMV retinitis blinding him--but the article is practical, funny, and devoid of self-pity. It will break your heart nonetheless.

Deciding to viaticate my policy started with some soulful contemplation. The first thing I had to face was my own impending mortality. It was as though signing the paperwork obliged me to kick the bucket on some kind of schedule. For an obsessive taskmaster such as myself, there were some control issues....

Finally, there's a little roulette. The closer to death's door you are—on an actuarial basis—the more moolah you get. You don't want to cash in too early for a measly 50% (two-year life expectancy). On the other hand, if you wait for that 80% jackpot (six-month life expectancy), you might croak before you can enjoy it all. I was feeling pretty grim at that point, so the time seemed right.*

* For all you voyeuristic sickies, It was necrotic periodontitis.

He died on May 8, 1999. Reportedly his friends tried and failed to create a snowglobe with some of his ashes and Astroglide lube.

Tom Ace, miraculously, is still in possession of his mortal coil, or at least was as of 2010, when Vice interviewed him. Kauffman was able to talk to several of Thorne’s friends for his 2020 Hazlitt article. Beyond that I didn’t find a lot of easily accessible information about DPN’s survivors, either editors or readers.

Why Remember Diseased Pariah News

It’s not for everyone, I’ll grant you that. It never was. Even setting aside the sharp (necessary) line it drew between PWAs and HIV-negative onlookers, it was very much a product of a small, dedicated group with its own goals. If you are not a white gay cis man, you were not going to feel seen, as the modern saying goes, reading DPN. And if you don’t draw as strong a link between sex and vitality as its editors did, the repeated explicit celebration of dick might well put you off.

It’s still worth remembering, and celebrating. DPN is the kind of work that’s not easy to preserve. There were thousands and thousands of zines in the 1990s, and we’ve got no hope of learning from all of them, or even a good percentage of them. Eventually the people who can remember getting zines in the mail (my husband still sometimes uses the term “trib,” short for “minimum acceptable contribution”) will be gone. Our ability to communicate has expanded so much in the last three decades that it’s hard to archive and learn from all that communication--think of all the lost MySpace and Geocities pages, bulletin boards, emails. Preservation will be by definition selective, and later generations’ sense of what was actually happening thereby skewed, but we ought to preserve what we can.

But also: these guys were trying to bring laughs, help, and comfort to a vulnerable population, and in 2022 we like to think we approve of that kind of thing. Meanwhile they themselves were vulnerable, far more so than they should have been, and they recognized the unfairness of their situation but they did not whine. They were brave in the face of death, which is hard, and physical pain and the deterioration of the body, which is even harder. And we still in these supposedly enlightened times don’t have a good mechanism for thinking of campy gay men as brave. They weren’t looking to be remembered. We should remember anyway.

Sources

All the back issues of DPN are archived on Calisphere, the archives of the University of California, with Beowulf Thorne’s papers. Direct links: #1 (1990), #2 (1991), #3 (1991), #4 (1991), #5 (1992), #6 (1992), #7 (1992), #8 (1993), #9 (1994), #10 (1996), #11 (1999). Some of the information comes from this collection of contemporary articles Thorne clipped.

Tom Ace, “Thorne on Our Side,” POZ, August 1, 1999

Mark Allen, “That’s Not Funny, Or Is It?,” Vice, December 31, 2010

Jonathan Kauffman, “Get Fat, Don’t Die,” Hazlitt, April 28, 2020

Greg Lugliani, “Last Laughs,” POZ, October 1, 1997

[pashterlengkap]

Retired gay couple awarded for launching organization supporting LGBTQ+ elders of color

On November 12, Paul Glass and Charles D. Evans of Falmouth were honored with this year’s AARP Andrus Award for Community Service. It’s AARP’s most prestigious and visible state volunteer award for community service. They are the first married and Black gay couple in AARP’s history to receive the award. AARP, formerly the American Association of Retired Persons,  is one of the largest organizations in the country. With a membership of over 38 million members as of 2018, it focuses on issues affecting Americans over the age of fifty. The AARP Andrus Award for Community Service is an annual awards program developed to honor individuals whose service is a unique and valuable contribution to their community and society, reflecting AARP’s vision and mission. Related: This tiny market in East Texas is made for LGBTQ+ people In one of the most conservative corners of the country, queer folks are supporting each other. “I am beyond honored and grateful for this recognition. I feel we are not put on this earth to exist but to be of service to others and our community,” Evans told LGBTQ Nation. Get the Daily Brief The news you care about, reported on by the people who care about you: Subscribe to our Newsletter When AARP Massachusetts was looking to honor the state’s top volunteer, Glass and Evans’s names rose to the top. They have made a difference in the lives around them, sharing their knowledge, experience, talent, and skills to enrich the lives of our community. Since childhood, their indefatigable spirit to give back to their community was ingrained in them.  “Paul and Charles have channeled the many negative experiences they endured into positive, healing, and inspiring volunteer work and leadership,” wrote Barrie Atkin of Swampscott, who nominated the couple. “Their signature work co-founding LGBTQ+ Elders of Color in 2013 in Massachusetts was innovative, unusual, and courageous. No such organization existed at that time. In collaboration with the LGBTQ+ Aging Project, they identified the need and turned the need into a reality. They didn’t just co-found the organization along with others. Their continued leadership inspires many others to be involved.”  People of color are underrepresented and underserved when it comes to aging services and resources. Paul and Charles understand the intersectional challenges and complexities of growing older as African-American gay men. LGBTQ+ senior communities with multiple identities confront multiple challenges. Their organization, LGBTQ+ Elders of Color, fills the gap missed by Massachusetts LGBTQ+ organizations and local, state, and federal public health systems. Outreach is essential because the challenges facing Black LGBTQ+ seniors intensify with age. According to Services and Advocacy for GLBT Elders (Sage) and the Movement Advancement Project (MAP), approximately one-third of LGBTQ+ elders live at or below 200 percent of the federal poverty level, with 40 percent being Black. These seniors often feel more vulnerable, invisible, and isolated by retirement. Historical and ongoing discrimination has created significant lifelong challenges for this demographic: limited wealth and savings, low wages, few labor protections, housing instability, food insecurity, stigma, immigration, HIV status, and higher mortality from treatable conditions. All have contributed to a lack of well-being and a lower quality of life. By 2050, POC seniors will comprise over 40 percent of the elderly population, and approximately 3 million seniors will identify as LGBTQ+. With this projection, specific cultural and linguistic competence training and nondiscrimination policies are needed to support a rapidly growing demographic group that has experienced a lifetime of health, educational, and economic disparities. In 2018, Massachusetts legislators passed “An Act Relative to LGBT Awareness Training for Aging Services Providers” mandating LGBTQ+ cultural awareness training for all… http://dlvr.it/SzJfYC

[olympic-paris]

THIS DAY IN GAY HISTORY

based on: The White Crane Institute's 'Gay Wisdom', Gay Birthdays, Gay For Today, Famous GLBT, glbt-Gay Encylopedia, Today in Gay History, Wikipedia, and more …

August 18

1774 – Meriwether Lewis (d.1809) was an American explorer, soldier, politician, and public administrator, best known for his role as the leader of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, also known as the Corps of Discovery, with William Clark.

Their mission was to explore the territory of the Louisiana Purchase, establish trade with, and sovereignty over the natives near the Missouri River, and claim the Pacific Northwest and Oregon Country for the United States before European nations. They also collected scientific data, and information on indigenous nations. President Thomas Jefferson appointed him Governor of Upper Louisiana in 1806. He died of gunshot wounds in what was either a murder or suicide, in 1809.

Lewis had no formal education until he was 13 years of age, but during his time in Georgia he enhanced his skills as a hunter and outdoorsman. He would often venture out in the middle of the night in the dead of winter with only his dog to go hunting. Even at an early age, he was interested in natural history, which would develop into a lifelong passion.

The two-year exploration by Lewis and Clark was the first transcontinental expedition to the Pacific Coast by the United States. When they returned to Washington DC, they had an immense amount of information, plus plant and animal specimens. They demonstrated that it was possible to travel overland to the Pacific Ocean. The success of their journeyed strengthened the American concept of “Manifest destiny”, the idea that the USA was destined to reach all the way across North America from Atlantic to Pacific.

Meriwether Lewis seems to have been stereotypically gay, at least by modern standards. When he worked as Thomas Jefferson‘s secretary, he was a noted dandy who wore the latest fashions and hair style; very metrosexual. He was also kind of ”queenie”: gossipy, edgy, excitable, temperamental.

Lewis was never married or showed any interest in women. He was well-built, handsome, and a genuine American hero, but he preferred the company of men. Something about his personality sent women screaming in the other direction. At 35-years-old, he described himself as a ”musty, fusty, rusty old bachelor”. ”Bachelor” was a code word for gay even in the early 19th century.

Lewis’s letters and journals reveal a man profoundly uncomfortable with women. When writing about Native-American women, Lewis seems positively repulsed, especially by the naked Clatsop women on the Pacific Coast "who exposed their bubbies and battery of Venus for the world to see."

However, Lewis wrote detailed observations of the Nez Perce men, noting that they were"hardy, strong, athletic and active". That’s four glowing adjectives!

In the historical novel, I Should Be Extremely Happy In Your Company (2003), Brian Hall uses the premise that Lewis was gay and had unrequited love for Clark. Lewis’s suicide in 1809 adds to the conjecture. Many queer people have experienced the haunting loneliness that comes with certain social ostracism if their gayness would become known. What better explanation of Lewis’s tragic death?

On September 3, 1809, Lewis set out for Washington, D.C., where he hoped to resolve issues regarding the denied payment of drafts he had drawn against the War Department while serving as governor of the Louisiana Territory, leaving him in ruinous debt. After the expedition, he had started to drink heavily and use opium.

Lewis stopped at an inn on the Natchez Trace about 70 miles from Nashville on October 10, 1809. In the early morning of October 11, the innkeeper’s wife heard gunshots. Servants found Lewis badly injured from multiple gunshot wounds to his head and stomach. He bled out on his buffalo hide robe and died shortly after sunrise.

Lewis may have committed suicide that morning because Clark had recently gotten married. Lewis was already severely depressed after their trip and never fully readjusted to life back in civilization.

There are intriguing hints in his journals that Lewis had a much more intense feeling of comradeship for Clark than Clark did for him.

When Jefferson asked him to lead the expedition, Lewis wrote to Clark:

"Believe me there is no man on earth with whom I should feel equal pleasure in sharing them as with yourself. I should be extremely happy in your company and will furnish you with every aid for your return from any point you might wish it."

1721 – Germany: Catherina Margaretha Linck is executed for female sodomy. She was a Prussian woman who for most of her adult life presented herself as a man named Anastasius Lagrantius Rosenstengel. She married 18-year-old Catharina Margaretha Mühlhahn, and, based on their sexual activity together (court records detail their sexual activities), was convicted of sodomy and executed by order of King Frederick William I. Linck’s execution was the last for lesbian sexual activity in Europe and an anomaly for its time. Linck’s story was the subject of a play, Executed For Sodomy: The Life of Catharina Linck, performed at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2013.

1852 – Guglielmo Plüschow (d.1930), born Wilhelm Plüschow was a German photographer who moved to Italy and became known for his nude photos of local youths, predominantly males (but also young and rather androgynous looking girls).

Plüschow was the cousin of Wilhelm von Gloeden, who, despite taking up nude photography later than Plüschow, soon overshadowed him. Plüschow was several times at odds with the law and charged with corruption of minors. Today, his photography is recognised for its artistic merits, even though it is generally considered somewhat inferior to von Gloeden's on account of his less graceful handling of lighting and the sometimes strangely stilted poses of his models. His photographs are more erotic and less 'artistic' than von Gloeden's.

Not much is known about Plüschow's early life, except that he was born in Wismar as the eldest of seven brothers and sisters. His father Friedrich Carl Eduard Plüschow was an illegitimate child of Friedrich Ludwig von Mecklenburg-Schwerin and the family home was Schloss Plüschow.

In the early 1870s, he moved to Rome and changed his first name from 'Wilhelm' to its Italian equivalent 'Guglielmo'. Initially making a living as a wine merchant, he soon turned to male and female nude photography. Later he also worked in Naples, among others doing contract work like taking pictures of Nino Cesarini, the young lover of Baron Jacques d'Adelswärd-Fersen at the latter's house Villa Lysis on Capri.

Nino Cesarini

In 1902, Plüschow was charged with 'common procuration' and 'seduction of minors' and had to spend eight months in jail. Another scandal followed in 1907: Plüschow was arrested for his portrayal of a nude minor twelve-year old boy, after which he 'converted' to photographing landscapes. He never stopped producing the erotic images, but learned to be discreet. In 1910 Plüschow left Italy for good and returned to Berlin.

1906 – The master of "poetic realism," Marcel Carné (d.1996) was a prodigy who created some of the defining films of French cinema from 1936 until 1945, including the Dadaist comedy-thriller Drôle de drame (1937; American title: Bizarre Bizarre); the fatalistic melodrama Quai des brumes (1938; American title: Port of Shadows); the intricate, flashback-structured tragedy Le jour se lève (1939), the medieval allegory Les Visiteurs du soir (1942), and his masterpiece, the magnificent theatrical epic Les Enfants du paradis (1945; American title: Children of Paradise).

Working with a powerful team of collaborators (the poet Jacques Prévert as scenarist, the designer Alexandre Trauner, the composers Maurice Jaubert and Joseph Kosma, the editor Henri Rust, and the cinematographer Roger Hubert), Carné provided the French cinema with some of its most emblematic images, including Michele Morgan with trenchcoat and beret walking through the fog in Port of Shadows, Jean Gabin waiting for the police alone in his attic room in Le jour se léve, and the mime sequences, with Jean-Louis Barrault's lovesick Baptiste pining for Arletty's statuesque Garance, in Children of Paradise.

Carné's last feature film, Le Merveilleuse visite (1974), about a beautiful young man who turns out to be an angel visiting Earth, is an allegory in which male beauty is used as an indicator of innocence. A man noted for his generosity and sensitivity, in his private life Carné tended to place personal relationships above political considerations: on the sets of Les Visiteurs du soir and Children of Paradise, there were artists who would later be tried for collaborating with the Nazis, as well as artists who were members of the Underground resistance and Jews in hiding who were given shelter.

During the 1970s, however, Carné issued several statements to the press indicating that he wished the openness of the post-Stonewall era had been available to him earlier in his career. Although he regretted that he had not infused his work with a political consciousness, he believed that his partiality to themes of impossible romance derived from his acute awareness of the societal oppression of homosexuals.

He was an outspoken champion of filmmakers such as Pier Paolo Pasolini and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who politicized questions of gender and sexual orientation. Although his career was uneven, Carné will be remembered, above all, for Children of Paradise. The latter, indisputably one of the classics of French cinema, was recently voted one of the greatest films in French history by a poll of French film critics in the year 2000.

1927 – Ricardo J. Brown (d.1999) was an American journalist who wrote one memorable book: The Evening Crowd at Kirmser's: A Gay Life in the 1940s. which was published posthumously.

Brown was born near St. Paul, Minnesota, and was in high school when he realized that he was gay. He moved to Greenwich Village in New York, but was upset by the openly gay culture and joined the U.S. Navy. He was discharged in 1945 after revealing his homosexual orientation to his commanding officer.

Returning to St. Paul, he looked for other people like himself and discovered Kirmser's, a small neighborhood bar owned by a German immigrant couple. Working-class customers frequented the bar during the day, but at night it was the unofficial meeting place of the gay community.

Brown writes of various customers, including queen Bette Boop; his friend Dale, who lost his job when someone told his employer that he was gay; Flaming Youth, a middle-aged man whose nickname of earlier years had stuck; and Dickie Grant, a gentle young man who was imprisoned for writing bad checks and was murdered there.Brown recalls an incident when he intervened as Flaming Youth was being bashed by two bullies. In this pre-Stonewall era, when gays chose not to rally to each other's aid, he was asked by another gay man named Lucky why he had gotten involved. Brown writes that he "was stricken silent by the question. Why? What did he mean, why did I get into it? I didn't know how to reply to such a stupid question. Were we all supposed to sit there while two guys kicked the shit out of an old man like Flaming Youth? Could we call the cops? Not us. We were the criminals."

1950 – Randal MacDonnell (d.2019) was an architectural historian who styled himself Count Randal MacDonnell of the Glens.

MacDonnell was not too bothered by how others saw him. He regarded his only tweed jacket, his permanent choice of apparel, to have been a lifetime investment and he subscribed to the 18th century view that real grandees only took a bath once a year, whether they needed to or not. The olfactory consequences earned him the nickname the Count de Camembert. Moreover, he lived openly as a homosexual in conservative Catholic Ireland.

When asked by a friend how he could possibly survive in Dublin on so little money MacDonnell replied: "Dear boy, when I walk down Grafton Street I do so wearing an imaginary coronet." The coronet in question derived from his claim to the ancient title of The MacDonnell of the Glens, in which he persisted to the great annoyance of the Earls of Antrim and other MacDonnells with legitimate claims to ancient Irish titles.

MacDonnell claimed his comital title had its origins in the Holy Roman Empire and his preferred form of address was "My Lord Count". But those versed in the world of ancient Irish genealogy observed that he had originally arrived in Ireland sporting the title Baron Randal MacDonnell of the Isles, so few took his claims seriously.

Randal MacDonnell was born somewhere in England, though his exact origins remained a mystery due to his habit of obfuscation and invention. His mother Kathleen (nee Dolan) was one of the first women employed as a continuity announcer on radio.

MacDonnell often claimed his father worked on the early episodes of Coronation Street, but in what capacity remains unclear. So too does Randal's education: as the mood took him, he would lay claim to having attended Eton or Stonyhurst. What is certain is that MacDonnell arrived at Trinity College Dublin to read law but, preferring the Buttery Bar to the lecture theatre, he failed to get a degree.

On the rare occasions he turned up for lectures he did so wearing a kilt, and on other days he could be seen cycling into college wearing the mantle of the Knights of Malta, rumoured to have been hired from a theatrical costumiers. On one occasion in the late 1960s he and a group of like-minded students hired a helicopter to attend the College Races, a sporting event attended by guests including the octogenarian President Eamon de Valera. The helicopter hovered over the sports field while MacDonnell slid down a rope. Even the near-blind de Valera could not fail to notice that he was wearing his kilt in the traditional manner as he landed in the presidential box.

He claimed to have been Noel Coward's private secretary, and his capacity for name-dropping could reach Olympian proportions. Sentences regularly began with "as Orson Welles/Noel Coward/ Debo Devonshire/ the King of Greece", or whoever took his fancy, "said to me &hellip"

Despite his claims to past grandeur, his financial situation remained precarious, often requiring the adoption of ingenious strategies to keep a roof over his head.

MacDonnell had a lucky break when he was engaged by his friend, the Guinness heir Garech Browne, to advise on the restoration of his house, Luggala, in Co Wicklow. Things went splendidly until a blistering row broke out between the two friends over the disappearance from the house of items of Georgian silver and other valuable chattels.

In an effort to avoid the scandal surrounding the "silver teapot affair", as it became known, in about 2005 MacDonnell decamped to Prague, where he set up home in a room in a crumbling Baroque palace.Later he moved to Tangier in Morocco, a city which easily accommodated his peculiar type of genius, and where he found a whole new audience for his stories. On one occasion his entertaining conversation caused the distinguished historian Norman Stone to miss a boat departing Tangier for Spain.

MacDonnell died penniless, broken in health and, though he never showed it, in spirit. His last years were spent living in terrible conditions among Tangier's poor in a tiny rented room in the Kasbah.

1965 – Bob Harper is an American personal trainer and author. He appears on the American television series The Biggest Loser.

Harper was born in Nashville, Tennessee. After reading the book Skinny Bitch, Harper became a vegetarian. In 2010, he then became a vegan for a year. That same year, PETA voted him sexiest male vegetarian of the year. Harper stopped following a vegan diet in 2011 and now eats animal products again due to wanting "something more."

Harper has worked as a personal trainer for celebrity clients, including Jennifer Jason Leigh. In 1999, he was cast as an extra in Melissa Etheridge's hit video for the song "Angels Would Fall" from her album Breakdown. He is featured as a trainer on the United States version of The Biggest Loser reality television series. He has been a trainer on the NBC show since 2004.In addition to working on the show, Harper has appeared in several Biggest Loser DVD workouts. Harper also appeared on the first three seasons of the Australian version of the show. In addition to his appearances, speaking dates, and writing duties, Harper still teaches regular classes in Los Angeles and works as a yoga instructor.

Harper publicly came out as gay in the seventh episode of the fifteenth season of The Biggest Loser, while talking to a contestant who was having difficulty telling his parents about his sexuality. Harper revealed he came out to his parents at 17, but that this was his first time ever addressing his sexuality publicly in his career. The episode aired on November 26, 2013.

1983 – Mika, born Michael Holbrook Penniman, Jr, is a British singer-songwriter.

After recording his first extended play, Dodgy Holiday EP, Mika released his first full-length studio album, Life in Cartoon Motion. In 2007. Life in Cartoon Motion sold more than 5.6 million copies worldwide and helped Mika win a Brit Award—winning Best British Breakthrough act, and receive a Grammy Award nomination. In 2006, Mika started up his company, Dodgy Holiday Tours Limited. Two years later Mika released his second extended play, Songs for Sorrow, of which limited edition copies are now sold out worldwide. In 2009 Mika released his second studio album, The Boy Who Knew Too Much. Finishing his worldwide tour, Mika started writing and recording material for his third album, The Origin of Love, stating it will be "more simplistic pop, less layered than the last one". The album will be released on 16 September 2012.

Mika was born in Beirut, the third of five children born to a Lebanese mother and an American father. When he was a year old his family was forced to leave war-torn Lebanon and moved to Paris. At age seven, he wrote his first song, which he describes as an "awful" piano instrumental called "Angry".

The family moved to London when he was nine years old. There, he attended the Lycée Français Charles de Gaulle, where he experienced severe bullying. He also had problems with dyslexia. In response to these experiences Mika was home-schooled by his mother at the age of 12, for six to eight months. He then attended St Philip's School in Kensington, where he was the head of the Schola Cantorum (the St. Philip's Choir). Later he attended Westminster School and the Royal College of Music, which he left to record his first album at Casablanca Records. He has also slightly altered his given name, Mica, changing the "c" to a "k" because he was frustrated by how often people would mispronounce it.

Mika denied allegations that he is steering clear of sexual taboos in order to appeal to the US market, pointing to the song "Billy Brown", which is about a married man who has an affair with another man. He is quoted as saying, "If I was worried about sexual taboos I certainly wouldn't have made the record I made. It has nothing to do with that. It has more to do with self-respect." In an interview in the US gay magazine Out he stated that "there is a way of discussing sexuality without using labels."

In a September 2009 interview in Gay & Night Mika commented on his sexuality: "I've never ever labelled myself. But having said that; I've never limited my life, I've never limited who I sleep with... Call me whatever you want. Call me bisexual, if you need a term for me..." Later he stated in an interview with This Is London "I consider myself label-less because I could fall in love with anybody - literally - any type, any body. I'm not picky." In an August 2012 interview with the magazine Instinct, the singer confirmed that he is gay.

1988 – The Center for Disease Control announced that syphilis and hepatitis B among gay men decreased dramatically since 1982, but had increased among heterosexuals.

1993 – Sicily: Giuseppe Mandanici, 33, was shot three times but survived the attack. Police believed it to be an act of random violence until they discovered that his father had paid a hit man $1 million lire (approx. $700 US) to kill his son because he could not come to terms with his son’s homosexuality.

[border2borderentertainment]

WHAT WE'RE WATCHING - 'BEYOND GAY The Politics of Pride' - A doc that examines the role and relevance of Pride celebrations around the world, which now have turned into a global fight for human rights.⠀ ⠀ This feature length documentary follows the Vancouver Pride Society's (VPS) Parade Director Ken Coolen and his VPS colleagues as they travel to places where Pride is still steeped in protest to personally experience the rampant homophobia that still exists. They also travel to Sao Paulo Brazil for the world's largest gay parade and New York City, the birthplace of the modern gay liberation movement.⠀ ⠀ Increasingly the Pride movement is globalizing. Coolen and many Pride organizers in North America and Europe, where celebration has overtaken political action, strive to remind their communities that Pride is at its heart a global fight for human rights.⠀ ⠀ Despite the hundreds of thousands of people cheering in the streets, Pride is much, much more than a parade and a party. It is a giant step on the road to true equality. The GLBT community during Pride is an entertaining and engaging multi- ethnic group than can bring attention to the issue of human rights with diversity, insight, and of course plenty of fabulousness.⠀ ⠀ #lgbtq🌈 #GayRights #HumanRights #documentary #queerfilm #queerfilmmakers https://www.instagram.com/p/CmPCGhQJURt/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[abitmoredetail]

[URBAN NOTE] Eight Toronto links

[URBAN NOTE] Eight Toronto links

Samantha Edwards writes at NOW Toronto about the controversy surrounding the visit of transphobe author Meghan Murphy to give a speech at the Palmerston library, with authors even threatening a boycott of the network.

Natasha Tusikov writes at The Conversation about how Sidewalk Labs’ proposals for the Port Lands would give it great and unaccountable political power.

blogTO looksat the 1945…

[progressivejudaism]

I believe that same-sex couples may not only be permitted but may indeed have a religious obligation to marry the one they love & are fully and exclusively committed to. It's true that according to one Talmudic approach, the purpose of marriage is to procreate together. But another Talmudic approach explains that the purpose of marriage is to liberate one another from the depths of existential loneliness. Indeed, this is a deep religious insight of the rabbis that marriage is just not just about family but also deeply existential. In Jewish thought, love is not a strange emotion to be conquered. Rather, love is a spiritual value to be cherished & celebrated wherever it is found. "Rav Nachman said in the name of Shmuel that even though a man has many children, he may not remain without a wife, as it says: ‘It is not good that man be alone.’ But others say that if he does have children then he may abstain from procreation and he may even abstain from taking a wife altogether," (Yevamot 61b). תלמוד בבלי מסכת יבמות דף סא עמוד ב מסייעא ליה לרב נחמן אמר שמואל, דאמר: אע"פ שיש לו לאדם כמה בנים - אסור לעמוד בלא אשה, שנאמר: +בראשית ב'+ לא טוב היות האדם לבדו. ואיכא דאמרי: הא יש לו בנים - בטיל מפריה ורביה ובטיל נמי מאשה

Rabbi-Shmuly Yanklowitz (Orthodox Rabbi and Activist)

[lesbianishstuff]

Today I came out to one of my docs at work. She high fived me

[padawan-historian]

Decolonized Booklist - Queer Edition

Lil Nas X is letting y'all know that queerness is not a "white people thing." 💁🏾‍♀️🌈

Queerness is ancestral || queer folks existed in pre-colonial spaces, struggled and resisted under colonialism, and are kicking down barriers in the 21st century.

Here are some must reads by scholars, poets, and activists who are sharing the histories, lived experiences, and ancestral-liberation work of those who came before and those blooming and yet to come~

Find their works listed below on my Neighborhood Historian bookshop.

Top Picks

Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches - Audre Lorde (1984)

Freedom To Love For ALL: Homosexuality is not Un-African - Yemisi Ilesanmi (2013)

Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity -  C Riley Snorton (2017)

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous - Ocean Vuong (2019)

Black Girl, Call Home - Jasmine Mans (2021)

The Transgender Issue: An Argument for Justice - Shon Faye (Pre-Order)

Queer History, Activism, and Liberation in the United States (by time period)

Female Husbands: A Trans History - Jen Manion (2020)

Arresting Dress: Cross-Dressing, Law, and Fascination in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco - Clare Sears (2014)

We've Been Here All Along: Wisconsin's Early Gay History - R. Richard Wagner (2019)        

Welcome to Fairyland: Queer Miami Before 1940 - Julio Capó (2017)

Her Neighbor's Wife: A History of Lesbian Desire Within Marriage - Lauren Jae Gutterman (2019) 

Queer Clout: Chicago and the Rise of Gay Politics - Timothy Stewart-Winter (2017)        

The Deviant's War: The Homosexual vs. the United States of America - Erin Cervini (2021)

We Are Everywhere: Protest, Power, and Pride in the History of Queer Liberation - Matthew Riemer and Leighton Brown (2019)

Queer Twin Cities - collected by Twin Cities Glbt Oral History Project (2010)

Queerness Across Borders and Generations

We Have Always Been Here: A Queer Muslim Memoir - Samra Habib (2019)

Queer and Trans Migrations: Dynamics of Illegalization, Detention, and Deportation - (2020)

Tolerance and Risk: How U.S. Liberalism Racializes Muslims - Mitra Rastegar (Pre-Order)

Lived Experiences and Memories in Marginalized Spaces

Visibility Interrupted: Rural Queer Life and the Politics of Unbecoming - Carly Thomsen (2021)

Living Queer History: Remembrance and Belonging in a Southern City - Gregory Samantha Rosenthal (Pre-order)

Girl, Woman, Other: A Novel - Bernardine Evaristo (2019)

On Being Different: What It Means to Be a Homosexual - Merle Miller (1971)

Black Girl Dangerous on Race, Queerness, Class and Gender - Mia McKenzie (2014)

Steel Closets: Voices of Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Steelworkers - Anne Balay (2016)

Rust Belt Burlesque: The Softer Side of a Heavy Metal Town - Erin O'Brien and Bob Perkoski (2019)

Study Resources

We Will Always Be Here: A Guide to Exploring and Understanding the History of LGBTQ+ Activism in Wisconsin - Jenny Kalvaitis and Kristen Whitson (2021)

New Daughters of Africa: An International Anthology of Writing by Women of African Descent - edited by Margaret Busby (2019)

Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology - E. Patrick Johnson (2005)

[transparenttriumphzombie]

African-American Transgender History-50's Style

One of the beauties of surfing the Net is that from time to time, you'll stumble across a nugget of history or some photo that you weren't even aware existed. I've mentioned that JET, EBONY and the now defunct HUE magazines when they first started back in the day served as historical chroniclers of the Black experience in America. Google just negotiated a deal in which they will be digitizing pre-1960's EBONY and JET magazines so that you can access their content on the Net. One of the things I discovered to my delight is that in order to fulfill their mission of documenting the Black experience, EBONY and JET also covered events and discussed Black GLBT issues. In addition to asking pointed questions about the Black GLBT experience, they also covered the New York and Chicago drag balls as well. The other night while searching through Flickr and other places for photos of African-American transwomen for future posts, I stumbled across some African-American transgender history. Most of it is the coverage of Chicago's Finnies Ball and the New York ones. I chuckled when I saw the HUE article that asks if you can tell the difference between female illusionists and genetic women. I also noted the incorrect pronouns and the 'her' in quotation marks used in some of the articles. While it was atrocious in the 50's, I noted that by the 70's, JET was doing a better job of discussing transgender issues with accuracy and sensitivity two decades before the AP Stylebook guidelines even were published. But unfortunately some of the attitudes reflected in those articles are still expressed by some of my people. Some of my peeps think that me and my fellow transpeople aren't serious about this path we're taking, or think it's a joke. It's serious business. Why would anyone subject themselves to the amount of ridicule, physical violence and abuse if they weren't serious about this? The other fallacy that keeps popping up is that Black transgender people are a new phenomenon. These articles dating back to the early 50's and the history of the Harlem Renaissance say otherwise.

[maneaterwithtail]

Actual question:

What’s your opinion on fangbill??

(No need to answer if you don’t want to)

I do not want to, because did before

Okay but more genuinely

Thank you i needed to update that.

2nd, I have a conflict similar to ones people had with glbt shipping and recharacterization dominating The Discourse as shared in last year of Encanto and Luca

I know where comes from but i am just not as sympathetic anymore as was in past as know from experience all that real erasure and oppression isn't redressed or lessened and has less to do with lack as to the horny or other shipping drama or lusts. I have known since the dread days of Zutara and the surprisingly same rationalizations it got to many slash ships.

That all said have also reblogged and complimented good takes on the idea.

Including partially patronizing

@reddish-raccoon 's webcomic on it for a time.

So not hate. More fearful of the effect of it being so dominate nothing else attended to or gets in.

Not least, knowing how shipping works, doubt get the fun growing up and boyish adventures and development of the story i loved happening if the driving goal is make them go at it like mad greased squeeclaws in a sack.

Character, culture, worldbuilding speculation, interactions, and more will die for the want of the ship to please the shippers pretending to be activists to immunize their shipping. As will suffer any nonromantic theming and can encourage misreads of any conflict resolution as projecting the very real and difficult actions glbt folk more often need to do of defying society, breaking tradition, or dissolving family bonds. Or frame any chide or restraint on Character seen as validating hate as to being a story about recognizing and healing generational trauma in columbian/sa culture.

Where glbt meets shipping alot of myopic self righteousness ( and yes exaggerated attacks for the presence of glbt) follows at loss of all else. Primarily due to shielding with real glbt justice issues and moderator and net culture favor

This is my third attempt to post a response so i am coming off more irked than i really intend to.

Just very much not tie my own sexuality's worth and validation to a ship. And foresee fancreated gayships interrupting what enjoyment i can get from Moar Fangbone by twisting fancontent to fulfill something other properties or just activities could do better for me (glbt romance, culture, representation) without loss what i uniquely like anout Fangbone. Such as the fun boyish planetary romance adventure, alt worldbuilding, two worlds colliding, cheesey retro s&s or gaming fun, and reverse isekai without harem nonsense adventures