Gay History -- How We Got Here

[michaelflanagansf]

1890?  Pffff!  A latecomer!  [so to speak]

The Gay Love Letters of Saint Anselm
Excerpts from My Dear Boy: Gay Love Letters through the Centuries (1998), Edited by Rictor Norton

Anselm was born in Italy in 1033 and joined the Benedictine monastery of Bec in Normandy in 1056. He became its prior in 1063 and then its abbot in 1078. In 1093 he became Archbishop of Canterbury, where he died and was buried in 1109. In 1494 he was canonized. Most of the following letters were written during his early residence at Bec, though he was already becoming noted for his scholarship and philosophy, infectious enthusiasm, and spiky personality (his high principles would eventually create friction with his English rulers, William II and Henry I. There is little reason to doubt the purity of Anselm's theological concept of friendship, or even his celibacy, but neither can we deny the erotic force behind his yearning and frustrated desire, his heartbreak and even jealousy. The intensity of his emotional experience with his pupils and the `beloved lover' (dilecto dilectori) to whom he addresses his epistles makes clear his gay sensibility. Gundulf (c. 1024–1108) was Anselm's immediate superior at Bec; at the time of the letters quoted, Anselm feared for Gundulf's participation in the crusades, but Anselm successfully persuaded Gundulf to go with him to Canterbury in 1070; he became Bishop of Rochester in 1077. Gilbert Crispin also moved from Bec to Canterbury, and became Abbot of Westminster in 1085. Little is known of Brother William, a young monk at La Chaise-Dieu, near St-Etienne. The Council of London in 1102 wanted to enact ecclesiastical legislation which declared – for the first time in English history – that homosexual behaviour was a sin, and they recommended that offending laymen be imprisoned and clergymen be anathematized. But Anselm as Archbishop of Canterbury prohibited the publication of their decree, advising the Council that homosexuality was widespread and few men were embarrassed by it or had even been aware it was a serious matter; he felt that although sodomites should not be admitted to the priesthood, confessors should take into account mitigating factors such as age and marital status before prescribing penance, and he advised counselling rather than punishment. St Anselm's letters appeared during the last flowering of homosexual love before fanatical anti-gay prejudice swept across Europe in the twelfth century, as documented by John Boswell in Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality (1980).

continues:

http://rictornorton.co.uk/anselm.htm

[Nikki]

Lesbian and gay archive emerges for anniversary in Australia
•   Dewi Cooke
•   August 23, 2008
 

THEIRS is a quiet life filled with friends, hobbies and a cat named Jessie.

But a "bond of steel" has welded Mac Ronan and Geoff Allingham to each other for the past 60 years and, even though he shudders at the cliche, it is the best way 82-year-old Mac can think to describe his lifelong relationship with Geoff, 81.

It is a bond that emerged almost as soon as they met, outside Melbourne's Princess Theatre in 1948, but was properly forged in 1953 when they were two young lovers on a year-long global adventure.

Tuberculosis had felled Mac in Switzerland and doctors prescribed 15 months of bed rest in a Melbourne sanatorium. It was left to Geoff to tend to Mac and restore order to their lives.

"Ever since then I've known that something iron-clad existed," Mac says. "I don't think I've ever put this into words to Geoff but when something like that happens a corner is turned and you just don't see life in any other way except together."

Now, six decades after they first spotted one another in the theatre foyer, they are living out their twilight years in a neat house in the eastern suburbs.

"We never felt persecuted, some people felt that they did but we didn't," Mac says of their 60-year relationship. "We had a suburban, domesticated life … and we just took for granted that we had the right to do so as two guys living together."

Last night the couple were honoured at a dinner celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Australian Lesbian and Gay Archives, a volunteer-run organisation that has painstakingly collected and maintained documents and memorabilia from Australia's queer community history over three decades.

Included in the archives are a book of handwritten 1920s love poems, photos from camp 1940s parties, protest banners from the 1970s, posters, books and rare editions of early 1970s gay and lesbian magazines

"It's been an extraordinary story of progress, but, of course, there's still a lot to be achieved," archives president Graham Willett said. "I came out in a fairly political period, it was about demonstrations and so on, and there were big arguments in the 1980s about whether we should relate to people in the gay scene and whether they were political enough. Nowadays we see the different aspects (of people) and it really is more of a community in that sense."

It is a community that Mac and Geoff say they were active in socially but were only on the fringes of politically. Yet they were behind the first GayDay festivals celebrating gay law reform in the 1980s.

More than anything, Mr Willett says, it was events such as these and people's increasing willingness to be public with their sexuality that brought the fight for equal rights to the fore.

"You think about the laws against men having sex going back to Henry VIII in the 1500s and yet we've overturned them starting 1972. By 1997 that's gone and then we start to move towards equality laws, anti-discrimination laws — unimaginable when you think about it, and yet it happened," he says

There are tens of thousands of items charting those social changes in the archive....
The organisation receives no government or private funding and estimates it would need a space at least three times its present size to store all the archival material.
It is hoping to find a benefactor this year.

http://home.vicnet.net.au/~alga/collection.htm

[url]http://www.theage.com.au/national/lesbian-and-gay-archive-emerges-for-anniversary-20080822-40ee.html?page=-1]http://www.theage.com.au/national/lesbian-and-gay-archive-emerges-for-anniversary-20080822-40ee.html?page=-1][url]http://www.theage.com.au/national/lesbian-and-gay-archive-emerges-for-anniversary-20080822-40ee.html?page=-1[/url]

Tony, a truly romantic story - touching and poignant.  How wonderful that their lives were never marred by homophobia!!

[Nikki]

At the time when Papal infallibility was promulgated by the Catholic church (in 1800s), Newman was at a gathering and proposed the following toast (loosely paraphrased) "Gentlemen, let's drink to infallibility.  But first let's drink to conscience."  Supremacy of Conscience was never a 'get out of jail' ticket.  It was to be used by serious, conscientious, careful Catholics who acted on their conscience rather than by rote doctrine.

[michaelflanagansf]

Here's an interesting site that I've come across recently - I link here to the pages in the 60s, but the whole site is worth a look:

http://cowboyfrank.net/archive/ComingOut/03.htm

[michaelflanagansf]

Although Randy Wicker is identified as being the first person to be interviewed as openly gay on a national television program (in 1964), in that last website, it's important to note that Dale Olson (as 'Curtis White') appeared on 'Confidential File' in Los Angeles as a gay man in April, 1954.  He was fired from his job the next day:

http://books.google.com/books?id=q7A9MIXiQyEC&pg=PA37&lpg=PA37&dq=%22dale+olson%22+%22curtis+white%22&source=web&ots=wQWX4-EP0d&sig=OKK3UEJXn-3cIh1zfmQ3vkRUy7U&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=1&ct=result

http://oneofthesethings.blogspot.com/2008/01/gross-up-from-invisibility.html

[tfferg]

Significant gay literature of the early 20th century omitted by John Updike in yhe New Yorker

http://bandofthebes.typepad.com/bandofthebes/2008/09/index.html

[michaelflanagansf]

Significant gay literature of the early 20th century omitted by John Updike in yhe New Yorker

http://bandofthebes.typepad.com/bandofthebes/2008/09/index.html

Actually, I really liked the article on Frank Kameny's papers at that site.  That might make it worthwhile to make a trip to Washington, DC.

[fritzkep]

Come pay us a visit, Michael!

[tfferg]

Significant gay literature of the early 20th century omitted by John Updike in yhe New Yorker

http://bandofthebes.typepad.com/bandofthebes/2008/09/index.html

Actually, I really liked the article on Frank Kameny's papers at that site.  That might make it worthwhile to make a trip to Washington, DC.

Yes, I thought of making a post about it too, but it was late and I was getting tired. It's interesting that it has taken so long for LGBT material to be properly archived in the US given that the history is so important, both for US people and people in other countries.

[michaelflanagansf]

This new book looks fascinating....

The Strange History of Sodomy Laws
By Margot Canaday, The Nation. Posted September 16, 2008.

In "Dishonorable Passions", William Eskridge offers the first comprehensive historical analysis of sodomy law in America.

On the June day in 2003 when the Supreme Court announced its landmark decision in Lawrence v. Texas holding state sodomy laws to be unconstitutional, I was working in the library of the Kinsey Institute in Bloomington, Indiana, as part of a summer workshop for historians of sexuality. This was an appropriate place to be at that particular moment. Dr. Kinsey, after all, had been in his day a fierce critic of those laws. And the setting was even more fitting because our party of historians included several who -- led by George Chauncey -- had written an amicus brief in the case that was influential in Justice Kennedy's majority opinion. So when one of our group checked the headlines and then alerted the rest of us that the Court had announced its decision, we all clustered excitedly around a computer monitor, checking the available news. A joint cheer went up. But that was really it. Minutes later, we shuffled back to our tables and quietly resumed our research.

That the moment seemed both earth-shattering and surprisingly anticlimactic has much to do with the nature of the sodomy laws, which, for LGBT Americans, have simultaneously meant so much and so little. I suspect that no one in our predominantly queer group thought it even remotely possible that they might be arrested (under these basically unenforced laws) for consensual sexual activity with an adult member of the same sex. Yet we also understood the significance of the Court's decision as far more than symbolic politics. That anal and sometimes oral sex were, in 2003, still illegal in thirteen states had been used to justify a much broader array of discrimination against us. It was as presumptive criminals that gays and lesbians were kept out of the military; as presumptive criminals, gay and lesbian teachers lost their jobs, and parents lost custody of their children.

In Dishonorable Passions, William Eskridge offers the first comprehensive history of sodomy law in America. Eskridge is a historian and a law professor at Yale who also wrote a brief that was cited repeatedly in Kennedy's opinion, and the energy in the book barrels toward Lawrence. It's hard, really, to imagine how it could be otherwise, especially as the Lawrence decision provides Eskridge with a gay civil rights story that has a beginning and an end (such stories being fewer and farther between than you might realize). In writing from the vantage point of Lawrence and gay civil rights, Eskridge treats sodomy in a way that mirrors our culture's treatment of sodomy more generally. Both make it fundamentally about homosexuality. But sodomy, as Eskridge told the Court -- and also tells readers -- technically isn't about homosexuality at all. Rather, it's about sex without procreative possibility (which can be hetero as well as homo sex). Because sodomy has come to be seen as emblematic of homosexuality, however, much of the career of sodomy law in modern America has been a command performance as something other than what it really is. And that is what allowed historians -- called upon to show that policing homosexual behavior was not, in fact, the time-honored tradition conservatives claimed it to be -- to assume center stage in Lawrence. All those years in the archives: who knew they would matter so much?

continues:

http://www.alternet.org/sex/99092/the_strange_history_of_sodomy_laws/

[BayCityJohn]

Gay Rights Activist, Teleidoscope Inventor John Burnside Dead at 91

John Burnside, noted gay rights activist, partner of the late gay rights pioneer Henry Hay, and the inventor of a kaleidoscope-like device called the teleidoscope, died Sunday at his home in San Francisco. He was 91.

But it is for his relationship with Hay that gays and lesbians will best remember Burnside. Hay had started the Mattachine Society, a pioneering gay rights organization in Los Angeles, in the 1950s. The couple was together for 39 years.

Burnside and Hay were a highly visible activist couple in Los Angeles throughout the ’60s. Together, they formed the Southern California Council on Religion and the Homophile in 1965. A year later they took part in one of the country’s first gay rights demonstrations -- a 15-car motorcade through downtown L.A. protesting the barring of gay men from serving in the military.

http://advocate.com/news_detail_ektid61818.asp

[jack]

Gay Rights Activist, Teleidoscope Inventor John Burnside Dead at 91

John Burnside, noted gay rights activist, partner of the late gay rights pioneer Henry Hay, and the inventor of a kaleidoscope-like device called the teleidoscope, died Sunday at his home in San Francisco. He was 91.

But it is for his relationship with Hay that gays and lesbians will best remember Burnside. Hay had started the Mattachine Society, a pioneering gay rights organization in Los Angeles, in the 1950s. The couple was together for 39 years.

Burnside and Hay were a highly visible activist couple in Los Angeles throughout the ’60s. Together, they formed the Southern California Council on Religion and the Homophile in 1965. A year later they took part in one of the country’s first gay rights demonstrations -- a 15-car motorcade through downtown L.A. protesting the barring of gay men from serving in the military.

http://advocate.com/news_detail_ektid61818.asp

well... i feel older now.  the next thing you will be telling me is that elizabeth taylor is gone.  sigh.

[Rob in Puyallup]

Ah... Jack... She's not, is she?

[michaelflanagansf]

Ah... Jack... She's not, is she?

Not quite yet.

I think we might need 'John's Mausoleum' or maybe 'John's Columbarium' , don't you?

John Burnside appears in this film:

http://cart.frameline.org/ProductDetails.asp?ProductCode=T533

[There isn't a general release of this, sadly...so watch your PBS stations in June is my suggestion...and sorry, I don't have an overseas suggestion.]

And here's a search of Amazon with 'John Burnside' and 'Harry Hay' as search terms - it should give many books still available with info about Mr. Burnside it it:

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=john+burnside+harry+hay&x=0&y=0

[jack]

Ah... Jack... She's not, is she?

no, she hangs in there, and apparently was rolled on into the ABBEY just a few days ago.  when she goes, it will be with a gay flame.