gay history Archives

Ulster’s Lesser Spotted Queer Protestant

21/03/2021 By ACOMSDave Leave a Comment

In this talk, in conjunction with the LGBT History Club, let Richard O’Leary take you in search of Ulster’s Lesser Spotted Queer Protestant

About this Event

The existence of the LSQP has long been hidden by shy historians and denied by conservative Christians but Dr O’Leary will present evidence to challenge the orthodox, missionary position. Drawing on newly accessed archival material he presents both an objective and subjective view. Imagine a 19th century Ulster same sex couple, erasure, Billy Elliot, pseudonyms, the whack of the crozier, exile and love.

This talk will be followed by a Q&A.

Dr Richard O’Leary is Coordinator of NI’s LGBT Heritage Project and a Visiting Scholar at Queen’s University Belfast. A performance storyteller of true fairy stories, his solo shows include ‘There’s a Bishop in my Bedroom’ (MAC theatre).

German gay literature’s use of suicide to make political points

14/01/2016 By ACOMSDave Leave a Comment

Published by Gay History –

by Paul

15436

A still image from the 1919 German film Anders als die Andern (Different from the Others) depicting a concert violinist who killed himself because of adverse publicity about his homosexual orientation | 15436

Historian Samuel Clowes Huneke has discovered that gay suicide is a historical phenomenon, with a distinct and varied past. Huneke is the first scholar in the field of modern German history to examine the relationship between suicide and gay identity. He is also the first to historicize gay suicide and trace the ways in which it pervades the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

“A striking trend of gay suicide evolved in German culture in the late 19th and early 20th centuries,” he said. Through a close examination of German suicide notes, letters, diaries, medical records, gay literary magazines and novels, Huneke has identified clear connections between the suicide trope and the development of gay identity in modern Germany.

“In the late 1860s, just at the moment when the earliest texts on homosexuality began to appear, German doctors, activists, and writers also began to discuss and depict gay suicide with increasing frequency.” This phenomenon of linking homosexuality with suicide sparked the beginning of what he sees as a trend in poetry, plays and novels in which suicide is a recurring theme. This group “pointed to a handful of gay suicides in order to claim that there was an epidemic of gay men killing themselves because of anti-sodomy laws and fear of exposure.”

Klaus Mann, the first prominent German gay novelist in Western history, was the son of writer Thomas Mann. Klaus Mann published in the 1920s, and his work treated homosexuality openly. The suicide of gay characters recurs in most of Mann’s books. In his novel Treffpunkt im Unendlichen (Meeting-Point at Infinity, 1932), the unrequited love of a gay man for a heterosexual man leads the gay character to take his own life. Mann chose to make the suicide appear romantic and gentle: The gay man committed suicide in the straight man’s bed, in what Mann describes as a wedding-night scene. “It’s seen as a romantic fulfillment of life … instead of depicting something like suicide as a brutal, tragic act, it is depicted as a grand capstone to a miserable life. As if the best thing this character has done with his life is to kill himself.”

Klaus Mann himself committed suicide in a hotel in Cannes, in 1949.

http://phys.org/news/2015-11-historian-uncovers-historical-insidious-gay.html

John Gielgud’s little porn play

10/01/2016 By ACOMSDave Leave a Comment

John Gielgud, pictured in 1950 | Jane Bown | 15408
A gay porn film based on a screenplay written by the late Sir John Gielgud has finished production, despite opposition from his estate. Trouser Bar is set in a menswear shop where an orgy takes place and stars Nigel Havers and Julian Clary as passersby. The screenplay was secretly written by Gielgud – known for his roles in Julius Caesar and Arthur – for Peter de Rome. David McGillivray, the producer, told The Guardian:

“Pornography is still a stigma in this country, but Sir John loved porn and, in his letters, he talks about visiting gay cinemas,” he said. “I was shocked when the trust didn’t give me permission. We stuck to Sir John’s script very tightly when we made the film a couple of weeks ago. He was very specific about the clothes he wanted the actors to wear.”
The script, written in the late 1970s, was passed on from de Rome to McGillivray before his death last year. The low-budget feature now risks a legal battle before finding an audience. “They have come down heavily on me,” McGillivray said. “They are using intellectual copyright as an excuse.”

The late actor’s estate are trying to block the film.
The actor and theatre director Sir Arthur John Gielgud, OM, CH was born on 14 April 1904 and died on 21 May 2000. With Ralph Richardson and Laurence Olivier, he was one of the trinity of actors who dominated the British stage for much of the 20th century. He was born into a large theatrical family, one of his brothers, Val, securing a job at the BBC as head of BBC radio drama. Sir John’s acting career began in 1921.
Wikipedia notes

After his return from America in February 1937 Gielgud starred in He Was Born Gay by Emlyn Williams. This romantic tragedy about French royalty after the Revolution was quite well received during its pre-London tour, but was savaged by the critics in the West End.

On the evening of 20 October 1953, Gielgud, just knighted, usually highly discreet about casual sex, was arrested in Chelsea for cruising in a public lavatory. Gielgud was fined.
http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/oct/28/john-gielgud-scripted-gay-porn-film-still-faces-estate-opposition

How WWII Started The Modern Gay Rights Movement

21/10/2015 By ACOMSDave 1 Comment

Long before Stonewall, the quest for community began.

Kira BrekkeAssociate Editor, HuffPost Live

Posted: 10/13/2015 01:55 PM EDT | Edited: 10/13/2015 02:21 PM EDT

We often attribute the 1969 Stonewall Riots as being the birthplace of the modern gay rights movement. But the first time gay people started coalescing was during World War II, according to USC gender studies professor Chris Freeman.
In honor of October’s lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) history month, Freeman explained to HuffPost Live’s Alex Miranda that after the draft began, the army started screening people in the early 1940s for homosexuality. It was a term many had never heard before.
“It helped in a certain way to solidify an identity, or it gave a name to an identity, that they just had feelings for,” Freeman said. “And then, through the context of being in the all-male or all-female environments that they wound up in, they found each other.”
After the war, Freeman explained, many of those homosexual relationships remained, and as people resettled in cities rather than “going back to the farm,” early gay communities were created.
“Public sex and gay people meeting each other for that purpose has been perpetual, forever,” Freeman said. “But forming organizations and forming community around it as a modern identity and a modern community village is really a post-WWII phenomenon.”
Watch the full HuffPost Live conversation on gay history here.

The Lost Pink Triangles

06/07/2015 By ACOMSDave Leave a Comment

An exhibition of Nazi persecution of homosexuals goes on display in NYC.

BY JAMES MCDONALD

JULY 06 2015 5:00 AM ET

A traveling exhibition produced by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals 1933–1945,” is now on view at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City.
The show tells the story of Nazi persecution of homosexuals during World War II: Hitler’s genocide resulted in the death of 6 million Jews and millions of other people, with an estimated 5,000 to 15,000 sent to concentration camps because of their sexual orientations — the vast majority of them being gay men.
The story of these victims, commonly known as the Pink Triangles, has begun attracting attention relatively recently. Despite noted works like the play Bent, which was adapted into a film starring Clive Owen in 1997, and memoirs by former camp prisoners Gad Beck and Pierre Seel, gay stories have largely failed to become part of mainstream Holocaust narratives.
“The exhibition explores why homosexual behavior was identified as a danger to Nazi society and how the Nazi regime attempted to eliminate it,” says exhibition curator Edward Phillips.
“The Nazis believed it was possible to ‘cure’ homosexual behavior through labor and ‘re-education.’ ” Phillips says. “Their efforts to eradicate homosexuality left gay men subject to imprisonment, castration, institutionalization, and deportation to concentration camps.”
Between 1933 and 1945, more than 100,000 gay men were arrested for violating Nazi Germany’s ban on homosexuality. The exhibition includes personal accounts, photographs, and detailed information spanning this dark period of LGBT history.
MJHNYC.org, through October 2, 2015.

Gay History: 50 years ago today, gay rights activists took to the streets

05/07/2015 By ACOMSDave Leave a Comment

Nick Duffy
4^th July 2015, 5:48 PM

It has been 50 years since the first protests

Today marks 50 years since one of the largest early gay rights protests in the US.
On July 4, 1965, activists from the Mattachine Society and Daughters of Bilitis held their first Annual Reminder – a demonstration calling for equal rights for gay people.
Protesters carried signs insisting that “Homosexuals should be judged as individuals”, calling for “an end to government hostility” and “equality before the law”.

The protest in front of Independence Hall took place at a time when the US government was still actively discriminating against LGBT people in employment and the law – meaning the protesters were taking a great risk.
A small protest was held outside the White House earlier in the same year, but the Independence Hall protest was the largest ever seen at the time.
Gay rights pioneer Frank Kamney, who was discharged from the Army Map Service in 1957 because he was gay, was key in organising both the protests. Barbara Gittings also pioneered the protests.
In contrast to the later Stonewall Riots, the Annual Reminders were calm and orderly – with protesters dressed traditionally.
A special ceremony is being held to commemorate the anniversary – with Jim Obergefell, the plaintiff in the case that brought same-sex marriage to all 50 states, laying a wreath at the site in a special ceremony.
A number of other gay rights heroes are at the event, including Judy and Dennis Shepard – the parents of murdered gay man Matthew Shepard – Bishop Gene Robinson, the first gay Episcopal bishop, and Edie Windsor, whose case struck down the Defense of Marriage Act.
Wanda Sykes and America’s Got Talent star Jonathan Allen are both set to appear.
Memorial site LGBT50 notes: “On July 4, 1965, a group of courageous gay and lesbian activists from New York, Washington, DC, and Philadelphia laid the foundation for the organized LGBT civil rights movement with demonstrations in front of Independence Hall.
“In 2015 we proudly commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Annual Reminders, the Gay Pioneers who staged them, and a half century of LGBT civil right progress.”

Remembering Karl Heinrich Ulrichs

18/03/2015 By David McFarlane Leave a Comment

by Robert Beachy Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, an engraving taken from “Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen, (“Yearbook of sexual intermediates”), vol. 1″, 1899 | Geschichtswerkstatt | 15031
Karl Heinrich Ulrichs was a German writer and lawyer who played key roles both in defining homosexuality and establishing the movement for gay rights.
Hans Rollman, reviewing the book “Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity” by Robert Beachy, explains.

Amazon | 15032

A homosexual himself, his promising legal career was cut short when rumours began to spread about his sexual activities with other men. Shut out of the legal profession, he gradually rebuilt himself a career in journalism and writing. But as Beachy points out, he was a true product of the Protestant Reformation (his family were ardent Lutherans), with its drive to question accepted traditions in the search for truth. No matter which way he looked at it, he couldn’t find anything wrong with his sexual attraction to other men, and concluded that it was normal behaviour, and that some people are simply born homosexual.
All this was, of course, highly revolutionary for his time, as was his decision to begin campaigning for an end to the existing anti-sodomy laws and moral persecution which accompanied them. He first opened up a remarkable correspondence with his own family in what was essentially the first documented coming-out in history. He tested his own theories on them, and while they clearly disapproved and urged him to change, they didn’t reject him and even re-affirmed their love and support for him.
Thus bolstered, he began issuing a series of anonymous pamphlets, arguing that homosexuality, or ‘Urning’, as he called it, was natural behaviour. In 1867 he ratcheted things up a notch, giving an address to the Association of German Jurists where he presented his views and argued for revision of the sodomy laws. He was shouted down and unable to finish his speech, but he had opened the dialogue, and at the same time emerged as its public spokesperson. As he continued his courageous campaign, he also refined his theories of sexuality to embrace a diversity of sexual and gender identities.

Karl Heinrich Ulrichs was born on 28 August 1825 and died on 14 July 1895