Category Archives: Article

Teddy Girls: The Style Subculture That Time Forgot.

Article, General Interest, History, , , ,

We trace the history of the 50s girl gangs that rebelled against austerity, trading in their ration books for Edwardian frills.

The Last of the Teddy GirlsPhotography by Ken Russell

On reflection, the paring of the aristocratic flamboyancy of an Edwardian gent with the rebellious attitude of American rock and roll shouldn’t have worked – but it did. This sartorial hybrid, engineered by the Teddy Boys of the 1950s and later adopted by their feisty female counterpart, Teddy Girls (also known as Judies) – created a strangely alluring visual identity, one which set them apart from their contemporaries in a decade where youth culture was finally carving out an aesthetic of its own. Sharply-suited Teds (whose name derives from ‘Edwardian’) might look remarkably smart to a contemporary eye – particularly when positioned against fellow groups of teenagers, like the punks who threatened to puncture the fabric of society with their safety pins – but their reality was more rebellious than it initially seems.

Like the gangs of youths who’d pace the streets in Dr Martens or Reebok Classics in decades to come, the odd report of fights quickly led to the sweeping generalisation that all Teds were trouble. In response, some venues implemented “no Edwardian dress” policies that echoed the “no trainers or football colours” door criteria of today. Contrary to what one might assume, smart dress didn’t make the Teds more respectable – it actually rendered them intimidating, in the same way that a suited Al Capone could coolly induce panic with a tip of his straw boater. “I remember my dad would threaten me for not doing what I was told by saying he would set the Teds on me,” remembers Magnum photographer, Chris-Steele Perkins who went on to photograph the second wave revival of the teds in the seventies.

The Last of the Teddy GirlsPhotography by Ken Russell

Rebellious Decadence

The Teds had a put-together smartness that at first feels at odds with the idea of a rebellious teenager, but they were, in fact, ripping up the rulebook (or ration book, as it were) by rejecting the austere approach of a post-war economy. Their decadence was also a two fingers up to the ruling class, as the Teds took ownership of the Edwardian Drape jacket – which was marketed by Savile Row tailors to young Mayfair men in 1949 – much to the horror of the posh boys: “Absolutely the whole of one’s wardrobe immediately becomes unwearable,” complained one. Despite the aristocratic origins of the dandyish Drape, this item was almost always thrifted by the Teds, else paid for in incremental instalments. The Teddy Boys and Girls originated from then working-class areas in East or West London, areas still bearing the wounds of the war with still-to-be rebuilt bombsites punctuating their areas. After an era of fashion taking a back seat to function, what better way to sartorially rebel than with the impractical frivolity of a tiny clutch bag; the must-have accessory for a Teddy Girl?

The Last of the Teddy GirlsPhotography by Ken Russell

Working Girls

Most Teddy Girls left school at 14 or 15, taking secretarial jobs in London, or working in factories on the outskirts. Their hard-earned cash was not wasted on expensive clothes, as original London Teddy girl Mary Toovey – who, herself worked in the Kegoo factory having left school at 15 – told writer Eve Dawoud: “Turn-up jeans, a coat and something to tie around your neck, those were the Teddy Girl essentials. My friends and I would buy similar clothes when we shopped on the Portobello Road. It was all second hand then, we couldn’t afford new. Smart’s, the local pie and mash shop on Goldborne Rd, was where we went to eat out if we had the money.” 

Toovey was photographed by Altered States Director Ken Russell, who documented a group of Teddy Girls local to him in Notting Hill. It was thought the images were lost forever but they were uncovered in 2005. “No one paid much attention to the Teddy Girls before I did them, though there was plenty on teddy boys,” He recalled. “They were tough, these kids, they’d been born in the war years and food rationing only ended in about 1954 – a year before I took these pictures. They were proud. They knew their worth. They just wore what they wore.”

The Last of the Teddy GirlsPhotography by Ken Russell

Androgynous New Age

Perhaps more significant than the boy’s subversion of upper-class clothing was the girls’ appropriation of masculine styles. Whilst the pants worn by working women during the war were mostly shed in relief, replaced by the welcome femininity of silhouette-skimming skirts, the Teddy Girls clung to the new sartorial codes that the adoption of menswear for women ushered in: boxy single-breasted jackets and the slicked back quiff hairstyle, a proto-mohawk that would eventually give way to the more extreme hairstyles of punk. Despite their non-conformist style and rebellious attitude, “I never thought of those kids as anything but innocent,” Ken Russell told The Evening Standard. “Even the Teddy Girls [from the 1955 series The Last of the Teddy Girls], all dressed up, were quite edgy, and that interested me; they were more relevant and rebellious — but good as gold. They thought it was fun getting into their clobber, and I thought so too.”

TThough Ken Russell wanted to be a ballet dancer, his father wouldn’t hear of it—no son of his would ever be seen in tights—so the young Russell turned his attention to photography, a craft he thought he could make his name with. He attended Walthamstow Technical College in London, where he was taught all about lighting and composition. Russell would later claim that everything he did as a trainee photographer broke the rules—a trend he continued throughout his career as a film director when producing such acclaimed movies as Women in Love, The Music Lovers, The Devils, Tommy, Altered States and Crimes of Passion.

Russell became a photographer for Picture Post and the Illustrated Magazine, and during his time with these publications took some of the most evocative photos of post-war London during the 1950s. He spent his days photographing street scenes and his nights printing his pictures on the kitchen table of his rented one-bed apartment in Notting Hill.hough Ken Russell wanted to be a ballet dancer, his father wouldn’t hear of it—no son of his would ever be seen in tights—so the young Russell turned his attention to photography, a craft he thought he could make his name with. He attended Walthamstow Technical College in London, where he was taught all about lighting and composition. Russell would later claim that everything he did as a trainee photographer broke the rules—a trend he continued throughout his career as a film director when producing such acclaimed movies as Women in Love, The Music Lovers, The Devils, Tommy, Altered States and Crimes of Passion.

Russell became a photographer for Picture Post and the Illustrated Magazine, and during his time with these publications took some of the most evocative photos of post-war London during the 1950s. He spent his days photographing street scenes and his nights printing his pictures on the kitchen table of his rented one-bed apartment in Notting Hill.

All above photos by Ken Russell

Reference

Gay History: 30 Years Later, a Look at the First AIDS Drug.

Article, Gay Interest, HIV/AIDS, , , , , , , ,

The FDA approved AZT in a record 20 months, a move that remains controversial today

All these years on, we are finally telling the truth about this insidiously poisonous drug, and the great marketing job by Big Pharma to sell it to a desperately ill population of people, and doctors who were also desperate, to provide some hope for their patients! The movie “Dallas Buyers Club” tells some of the story, of those who wanted something better than AZT to assist them in staying alive until something beneficial came along – which it eventually did! Things were not quite so bad here as far as pricing went, as with our Medicare system, the drugs were listed on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme as soon as they became available, and cost a mere couple of dollars per script to buy. But the big sell by Big Pharma also happened here, as did the results of several badly run trials. Like many, the biggest mistake I ever made back in those early days of drug treatments was to let my doctor eventually talk me into taking AZT – against my better judgement! And it’s not just me, but many others who will attest that all our immune system and declining health problems started at the same time we decided to take AZT. It’s not as if we were only on a couple of pills a day – we were on massive doses, and as I have already said, this drug was poison…”human Ratsac” was how it was described in a report from the “Concorde” trial…another unethically run trial, but one that didn’t sugar-coat the truth about AZT. Those who took the massive doses of AZT back in the late 80s/early 90s suffered from problems such as anaemia, peripheral neuropathy, and renal problems…and still do to this day!

HIV was first reported in 1981, but it wasn’t until six years later—in March 1987—that a drug to fight the virus was approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). On the 30th anniversary of this milestone, Time magazine takes a look at the story behind the controversial med azidothymidine, commonly known as AZT.

Also known as Retrovir or zidovudine, the compound AZT was not originally created with HIV in mind but was developed in the 1960s to battle cancer. Decades later, scientists at pharmaceutical giant Burroughs Wellcome made a version of AZT to fight HIV.

To fast-track the med, the drugmaker conducted a trial with 300 people who had AIDS. After 16 weeks, it was halted because those taking AZT were doing so much better than those not on the med. The results were considered a breakthrough, and the FDA approved the drug on March 19, 1987, in a record 20 months, according to Time.

The approval was granted despite many questions remaining unanswered—for example, how long did the benefits last?—and despite other issues surrounding the trial itself. In fact, Time notes, the trail remains controversial today.

Then came a bigger controversy: the price tag. At about $8,000 a year ($17,000 in today’s dollars), AZT was unattainable to many.

Today, we have more than 41 drugs to treat HIV, many in combo form and with much fewer side effects.

Reference

Gay History: When Gay Journalists Were Closeted: A History of AIDS Coverage at ‘The Times’

Article, Gay Interest, HIV/AIDS, , , , ,

Mark Frankel

November 23, 2015
Days after New York State approved marriage equality in 2011, Samuel G. Freedman, a School of Journalism professor and former reporter for The New York Times, mused to friends about how the world had changed since he had worked at the paper in the 1980s.
Now an enthusiastic proponent of gay marriage, The Times was then a place where gay reporters feared being exiled to obscure beats and watching their careers wither. Freedman’s musings centered on his friend and mentor, Jeff Schmalz, a brilliant Times reporter dying of the disease who in 1992 and 1993 produced groundbreaking articles about people living with AIDS.
“Jeffrey who?” people often asked. Out of those encounters has come Freedman’s eighth book, Dying Words: The AIDS Reporting of Jeff Schmalz and How it Transformed The New York Times.
Produced as an oral history of dozens of Schmalz’s colleagues and friends, the book and an accompanying radio documentary focus on how journalism responded to the AIDS crisis in the 1980s and early ’90s, when many gay and lesbian journalists felt tremendous professional pressure to remain closeted, and discrimination against them was widespread. It also recounts the moment AIDS became a full-fledged health crisis, breaking out of the gay and IV-drug communities into the larger population.
“Jeff’s reporting played a real role in starting to turn opinion, certainly within The Times, but also within the broader public, from fear, suspicion, finger-pointing and blaming gays, to empathy and acceptance,” said Freedman. The 60-minute radio program will be broadcast on some two dozen public radio stations as part of events marking World AIDS Day on December 1. That same day, Freedman will host a panel on Dying Words at 6 p.m. at the Journalism School.
Schmalz was a rising star at the Times in the 1980s, a consummate journalist and skilled newsroom politician and mentor to younger journalists. When Freedman arrived at the paper in 1981, he soon was among those taken under Schmalz’s wing.
Though out of the closet to close friends at the paper, Schmalz kept his orientation hidden from higher-ups such as Abe Rosenthal, its executive editor from 1977 to 1986, and then-publisher Arthur Sulzberger.
“Abe Rosenthal hired me and promoted me, and I owe him a lot, but in doing this research I became very aware of his antipathy toward gay staffers at The Times,” said Freedman. “And it also became apparent that, in a less visible way, Punch Sulzberger also had a blind spot about gays.”
Critics inside and outside the newsroom accused the paper of being late to cover the AIDS crisis.
In December 1990, Schmalz, then deputy national editor, suffered a seizure in the newsroom. The diagnosis was full-blown AIDS, then a death sentence. For Schmalz, the closet was no longer an option. “Jeff commanded tremendous authority at the Times. So for him to come out had a tremendously sensitizing effect on the paper,” recalled Freedman.
When Schmalz returned to the paper in mid-1992, he was sick but determined to report on AIDS. By then, the paper had a new editor and publisher and, Freedman said, was more accepting of its gay and lesbian employees.
Over the next 15 months, Schmalz captured the many faces of AIDS, gay and straight, in some three dozen articles. He profiled Magic Johnson, the Los Angeles Lakers forward who quit basketball when he was diagnosed as HIV-positive, and AIDS activists Mary Fisher and Larry Kramer. “In a weird way, the diagnosis set him free,” recalled his sister, Wendy Schmalz Wilde. “He found a new empathy for other people who were sick and dying.”
Schmalz’s reporting took AIDS “from a medical story, a public health story, a science story, and made it a deeply human story,” said Freedman. “He got on the beat right when this was a disease crossing the lines of race, class and sexual orientation.” His articles also raised the bar on the paper’s AIDS coverage, setting a standard for other news organizations. His last story, which decried growing public complacency, appeared several weeks after his death in November 1993.
Freedman teamed with veteran radio producer Kerry Donahue to produce the radio documentary, which will be distributed by the Public Radio Exchange. Funds came from the Journalism School and a Kickstarter campaign that raised $28,000. A significant backer was current New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., who contributed his own reminiscences to Dying Words.
Schmalz’s death still haunts Freedman. “Jeff was an example of a supremely talented person who died at 39,” he said. “The world is still losing incredibly talented people at young ages. It’s a reminder of the continuing need to do the research that will cure the disease and of the role that journalists need to play.”

In December 1990, Schmalz, then deputy national editor, suffered a seizure in the newsroom. The diagnosis was full-blown AIDS, then a death sentence. For Schmalz, the closet was no longer an option. “Jeff commanded tremendous authority at the Times. So for him to come out had a tremendously sensitizing effect on the paper,” recalled Freedman.

When Schmalz returned to the paper in mid-1992, he was sick but determined to report on AIDS. By then, the paper had a new editor and publisher and, Freedman said, was more accepting of its gay and lesbian employees.

Over the next 15 months, Schmalz captured the many faces of AIDS, gay and straight, in some three dozen articles. He profiled Magic Johnson, the Los Angeles Lakers forward who quit basketball when he was diagnosed as HIV-positive, and AIDS activists Mary Fisher and Larry Kramer. “In a weird way, the diagnosis set him free,” recalled his sister, Wendy Schmalz Wilde. “He found a new empathy for other people who were sick and dying.”

Schmalz’s reporting took AIDS “from a medical story, a public health story, a science story, and made it a deeply human story,” said Freedman. “He got on the beat right when this was a disease crossing the lines of race, class and sexual orientation.” His articles also raised the bar on the paper’s AIDS coverage, setting a standard for other news organizations. His last story, which decried growing public complacency, appeared several weeks after his death in November 1993.

Freedman teamed with veteran radio producer Kerry Donahue to produce the radio documentary, which will be distributed by the Public Radio Exchange. Funds came from the Journalism School and a Kickstarter campaign that raised $28,000. A significant backer was current New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., who contributed his own reminiscences to Dying Words.

Schmalz’s death still haunts Freedman. “Jeff was an example of a supremely talented person who died at 39,” he said. “The world is still losing incredibly talented people at young ages. It’s a reminder of the continuing need to do the research that will cure the disease and of the role that journalists need to play.”

Reference

Gay History: S.W. Fores and the ‘Arse-Bishop’ – Scandal at the Printshop Window

Article, Gay Interest, History, , , , ,

theprintshopwindow's avatarThe Printshop Window

Concerns about the potential dangers associated with the public display of caricature prints were raised almost as soon as printsellers’ windows became features of note among eighteenth-century urban landscape. The critics ranged from those who simply saw displays of satirical prints as a crowd-drawing nuisance, to those who considered them to pose a fundamental threat to the moral and spiritual wellbeing of the nation. Those who fell into the latter group often described caricatures as if they possessed a hypnotic quality and were capable of seizing hold of the minds of those who happened to pass by the printsellers window and corrupting them.

This argument was clearly articulated by one critic, calling himself ‘Perambulator’, whose thoughts on the subject were published in the Morning Post and Daily Advertiser of 5th September 1780. The author claims to have observed the crowds passing before the window of “the large [print] shop in St Paul’s Churchyard”…

View original post 2,024 more words

Gay History: The ”Gay Bob” Doll. NSFW

Article, Gay Interest, Humour, , , ,

Gay Bob is a doll created in 1977. It was billed as the world’s first openly gay doll. Bob was created by former advertising executive Harvey Rosenberg and marketed through his company, Gizmo Development. Gay Bob was bestowed an Esquire magazine “Dubious Achievement Award” for 1978.

Bob stands 13 inches tall and came wearing a flannel shirt, tight jeans and cowboy boots. He had one ear pierced. Bob’s box was shaped like a closet and included a catalog from which consumers could order additional outfits. Creator Rosenberg described the doll as resembling a cross between Paul Newman and Robert Redford. Bob is anatomically correct.

The Story Behind Gay Bob, the World’s First Out-And-Proud Doll

He debuted in the ’70s, to both acclaim and outrage.

“IT’S ANOTHER EVIDENCE OF THE desperation the homosexual campaign has reached in its effort to put homosexual lifestyle, which is a deathstyle, across to the American people.”

A lobby group called Protect America’s Children made this statement in 1978—about a doll.

That year, the release of Gay Bob, billed as the world’s first openly gay doll, caused a minor sensation. Enraged consumers complained that a toy with a homosexual backstory would lead to other ”disgusting” dolls like “Priscilla the Prostitute” and “Danny the Dope Pusher.” Esquire awarded Gay Bob its “Dubious Achievement Award.” And anti-gay organizations across the United States blustered.

Gay Bob, who was meant to resemble a cross between Robert Redford and Paul Newman, was blond, with a flannel shirt, tight jeans, and one pierced ear. The doll gave anti-gay organizations plenty to fear; intrinsic within it was a celebration of gay identity, evidenced by Gay Bob’s programmed speech. “Gay people,” Bob said, “are no different than straight people… if everyone came ‘out of their closets’ there wouldn’t be so many angry, frustrated, frightened people.”

In a cheeky move, the box in which Gay Bob was packaged came in the outline of a closet, so that when he left his box, he was literally coming out of the closet. Gay Bob explained: “It’s not easy to be honest about what you are — in fact it takes a great deal of courage… But remember if Gay Bob has the courage to come out his closet, so can you.”

A 1978 advertisement for the Gay Bob Doll (OE Wolf /CC By NB-2.0)

The affirming message was no accident. The doll’s creator, Harvey Rosenberg, a former advertising executive who developed marketing campaigns for various corporations, wanted Gay Bob to “liberate” men from “traditional sexual roles.” He created the doll soon after a series of shocks rocked his life: in quick succession, his marriage fell apart and his mother became seriously ill. He decided that his next projects would need to be of great personal significance.

Though Gay Bob was certainly humorous—the doll was designed to be anatomically correct, and prominent gay activists such as Bruce Voeller told reporters that people should “deal with [the doll] lightly and enjoy it”—Rosenberg’s intentions seem to have been sincere. When asked why he would pour $10,000 of his money into the Gay Bob’s production, he replied, “we had something to learn from the gay movement, just like we did from the black civil rights movement and the women’s movement, and that is having the courage to stand up and say ‘I have a right to be what I am.’”

When Gay Bob hit stores in 1978, that right to be gay and equal was once again under attack, most notably from Anita Bryant, a singer and well-known brand ambassador who mobilized opposition to a Dade County, Florida ordinance that outlawed discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Fixating on its impact on public schools, Bryant claimed that the existence of LGBT school teachers would threaten the well-being of local students. “Homosexuals will recruit our children,” she warned. “They will use money, drugs, alcohol, any means to get what they want.” In June 1977, she had the rule repealed, and her anti-gay crusade—which gained widespread media attention—sparked similar ventures in Minnesota, Oregon, Kansas, and California.

Gay Bob, which sold 2,000 copies in its first two months, appeared in the heat of these political battles. It was no real flashpoint of its own, but it served as a humorous trophy—and a sign of changing times—for those fighting against Bryant.

Initially sold through mail-order ads in gay-themed magazines, Gay Bob soon expanded into boutique stores in New York and San Francisco. Rosenberg even pitched it to major department store chains, one of which liked the idea (but ultimately did not purchase it). And, it turns out, those consumers who feared the introduction of more “disgusting” dolls were partially correct—Rosenberg soon gave Gay Bob a family of his own, with brothers Marty Macho, Executive Eddie, Anxious Al, and Straight Steve (who lived in the suburbs and wore blue suits), and sisters Fashionable Fran, Liberated Libby, and Nervous Nelly. 

There is currently one for sale on Ebay for $293.00!

References

Gay History: How ‘Gay’ Came To Mean ‘Homosexual’

Article, Gay Interest, , , ,

The word “gay” seems to have its origins around the 12th century in England, derived from the Old French word ‘gai’, which in turn was probably derived from a Germanic word, though that isn’t completely known.  The word’s original meaning meant something to the effect of “joyful”, “carefree”, “full of mirth”, or “bright and showy”.

However, around the early parts of the 17th century, the word began to be associated with immorality.  By the mid 17th century, according to an Oxford dictionary definition at the time, the meaning of the word had changed to mean  “addicted to pleasures and dissipations.  Often euphemistically: Of loose and immoral life”.  This is an extension of one of the original meanings of “carefree”, meaning more or less uninhibited.

Fast-forward to the 19th century and the word gay referred to a woman who was a prostitute and a gay man was someone who slept with a lot of women (ironically enough), often prostitutes. Also at this time, the phrase “gay it” meant to have sex.

With these new definitions, the original meanings of “carefree”, “joyful”, and “bright and showy” were still around; so the word was not exclusively used to refer to prostitutes or a promiscuous man.  Those were just accepted definitions, along with the other meanings of the word.

Around the 1920s and 1930s, however, the word started to have a new meaning.  In terms of the sexual meaning of the word, a “gay man” no longer just meant a man who had sex with a lot of women, but now started to refer to men who had sex with other men.  There was also another word “gey cat” at this time which meant a homosexual boy.

By 1955, the word gay now officially acquired the new added definition of meaning homosexual males.  Gay men themselves seem to have been behind the driving thrust for this new definition as they felt (and many still do), that “homosexual” is much too clinical, sounding like a disorder.  As such, it was common amongst the gay community to refer to one another as “gay” decades before this was a commonly known definition (reportedly homosexual men were calling one another gay as early as the 1920s).  At this time, homosexual women were referred to as lesbians, not gay.  Although women could still be called gay if they were prostitutes as that meaning had not yet 100% disappeared.

Since then, gay, meaning homosexual male, has steadily driven out all the other definitions that have floated about through time and of course also has gradually begun supplementing the word ‘lesbian’ as referring to women who are homosexual.

While the use of gay did become used in reference to homosexuality it was by far NOT the most common term in use, nor the prefered term prior to about 1970.

In the aftermath of the Stonewall Riots in 1969, The Gay Liberation Front was formed to fight for homosexual rights.

The name chosen by this important early activist group is the main reason gay became the politically correct term instead of any of the many more common terms in use before then.

Bonus Facts:

▪ The abstract noun ‘gaiety’ has somehow largely steered clear of having any sort of sexual connotation as with the word “gay”.  It still keeps its definition as meaning something to the effect of “festive”.

▪ Male homosexuality was illegal in Britain until the Sexual Offenses Act of 1967.  Because even mentioning someone was a homosexual was so offensive at the time in England, people who were thought to be gay were referred to as “sporty” with girls and “artistic” for boys.

▪ Bringing Up Baby in 1938 was the first film to use the word gay to mean homosexual.  Cary Grant, in one scene, ended up having to wear a lady’s feathery robe.  When another character asks about why he is wearing that, he responds an ad-libbed line “Because I just went gay”.  At the time, mainstream audiences didn’t get the reference so the line was thought popularly to have meant something to the effect of “I just decided to be carefree.”

Reference

Gay History: I Saw The Sign: LGBT Symbols Then And Now: From A Lesbian Perspective.

Article, Gay Interest, History, Political, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

You’re sitting in your day parlor, sipping a cup of tea and needlepointing a screen with your female relatives. Then, a maid enters the parlor and informs you that you have a visitor waiting for you in the drawing room. You excuse yourself and enter the drawing room where you find Elizabeth Bennett, holding a bouquet of violets that she picked just for you.

BY KEENA

JUNE 21, 2012

Welcome to my fantasy. For years I’ve daydreamed about what gift Elizabeth Bennett might bring me to express her true intentions (which ranged from a beautifully-written letter sealed in wax to a corgi puppy in basket), but now I know she would bring me violets. Violets are beautiful and adorable flowers in general, but they’re also one of the more famous symbols of female homosexuality, possibly dating back to a poem in which Sappho describes herself and her lover wearing garlands of violets:

If you forget me, think

of our gifts to Aphrodite

and all the loveliness that we shared

all the violet tiaras

braided rosebuds, dill and

crocus twined around your young neck

Sappho

In the early 20th century, women used to give each other violets as a way of telling each other, “Hey, I LIKE like you,” in times when it wasn’t easy or accepted to say so in a more overt manner. And, though the historic origins of the violet as a symbol of women liking women may have faded, the color purple is still often associated with homosexuality, particularly in the naming of the Lavender Menace and in the use of the term “lavender lads” to describe gay men during the “Lavender Scare” in the 1950s in the U.S.

Sadly, as we all know, it’s only recently that open displays of homosexuality have begun to be accepted by society, and obviously there are still many places in the world where they are still met with disapproval, violence, and/or legal and social persecution. But! The good thing is that even in unfriendly societies, us homos have always managed to find our way to each other (call it the silver lining in the lavender cloud, if you will). We’ve done so in a variety of ways, though visual symbols are often among the most recognizable. Some of these symbols may be familiar to you, but even if they aren’t, perhaps they’ll give you an idea of how to decorate your messenger bag or expand your tattoo sleeve.

The Greek Symbol “Lambda”

Lambda was selected as a symbol by the Gay Activists Alliance of New York in the 1950s and was declared the international symbol for gay and lesbian rights by the International Gay Rights Congress in 1974. It’s unclear how exactly lambda was adopted by the LGBT community or what it actually means but some popular theories include: the charged energy of the gay and lesbian rights movement (since lambda symbolizes “energy” in chemistry and physics), the Roman interpretation meaning “the light of knowledge shining into the darkness of ignorance,” or “the notion of being on different wavelengths when it comes to sex and sexuality.” There’s also this idea kicking around that lambda appeared on the shields of Spartan and/or Theban warriors in ancient Greece. The Thebes version is more popular because, as legend has it, the city-state organized the Theban Army from groups of idealized lovers, which made them exceptionally fierce and dedicated soldiers–though eventually the army was completely decimated by King Philip II, the father of Alexander the Great. Lending credence to this theory is the fact that the 1962 version of “300” depicted soldiers with lambdas on their shields. I never saw the 2006 version so someone else will have to confirm or deny the perpetuity of lambda in that whole situation.

The Rainbow Flag(s)

Gilbert Baker

In the 1970s, San Francisco artist Gilbert Baker recognized the need for a gay symbol that could be used during the Pride Parade each year. Baker drew inspiration for the first version of the iconic rainbow flag from a variety of sources and came up with a flag with eight color stripes, each representing a different aspect of gay and lesbian life: hot pink for sexuality, red for life, orange for healing, yellow for the sun, green for nature, blue for art, indigo for harmony, and violet for spirit. Baker and 30 volunteers hand-dyed and stitched the original flag, but had to remove the pink stripe for mass production due to a lack of commercially-available pink dye. When Harvey Milk was assassinated later that year, the 1979 Pride Parade Committee selected Baker’s flag as the symbol for the gay community to unite in honor of Milk’s memory.

The Original Rainbow Flag

In the 1979 San Francisco Pride Parade, the color indigo was also removed so the colors could be evenly-distributed along the parade route, leaving us with the flag we know today, with stripes of red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple. Today, there are many, many varieties of the rainbow flag–you can stick a lambda on it, a colored triangle, a star of David, whatever you want! People seem particularly fond of the rainbow flag/rainbows in general because they are all-encompassing: a rainbow flag endorses gay rights without making a statement about the person displaying it. And this, to me, is the most rockin’ thing about rainbow flags. If you chose not to, you don’t have to say anything about yourself, your sexytime partners, your experiences, thoughts or feelings–you’re just rocking a rainbow, and under the rainbow we’re all family. Rainbow flags and stickers are often used to denote gay-friendly businesses, gay-friendly health facilities and really, who doesn’t want to paint their face in rainbow colors and go to a parade filled with like-minded rainbow-philes? No one, that’s who. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a member of the LGBT community or simply a supporter of gay rights, rainbows mean love for everyone and are therefore wonderful.

Black Triangles

One of the oldest symbols associated with the LGBT community is the triangle, which originated as one of the symbols used in Hitler’s Nazi concentration camps as a way to label prisoners: male homosexual prisoners were made to wear a pink triangle, while women imprisoned for “arbeitsscheu” (“antisocial behavior”, including feminism, lesbianism and prostitution) were made to wear black triangles. Though there isn’t definitive evidence to prove that the black triangles were worn by lesbians in the same way that pink triangles were worn by gay male prisoners, over time the black triangle has evolved into one of the more prominent symbols of lesbianism, contemporaneously symbolizing defiance against repression and discrimination.

Labrys

I know you all totally know what a labrys is already, but juuuust in case you don’t: a labrys is a double-headed axe. The labrys was first associated with the Greek goddesses Artemis (goddess of the hunt) and Demeter (goddess of the harvest) and used in battle by Scythian Amazon warriors. The Amazons ruled with a dual-queen system and were known for being ferocious in battle. Though the labrys originally stood for independence/strength/chopping prowess, it has also been appropriated as a symbol of lesbianism.

Note from commenter Nancy: The labrys is actually even older than Artemis as goddess of the hunt, it goes all the way back to the Minoan civilization on crete around the 15th century BCE, although we are not really sure what it meant then because it is sooo long ago! And while there were definitely women warriors in Scythia and nearby regions, it’s super speculative that they had the whole two-queen system and everything…that comes out of some quasi-history written by guys like Herodotus.

Double Venus

The double Venus symbol takes the scientific symbol for “female” (or “Venus”) and doubles it–two females = girl and girl; Bette and Tina; Ellen and Portia, etc.

Bisexuality Symbols

In 1998, the official Bisexuality Flag was designed by Michael Page to represent the bisexual community. The magenta stripe represents same-sex attraction and the blue stripe at the bottom represents opposite-sex attraction, while the smaller deep lavender (lavender!) stripe in the middle represents attraction to both genders. Overlapping pink and blue triangle are also used to symbolize bisexuality.

Transgender Symbols

In 2000, Monica Helms designed the first Transgender Pride flag, which debuted at the Phoenix Pride Parade in Arizona. Helms planned the flag to represent the spectrum of trans* experience. “The light blue is the traditional color for baby boys, pink is for girls, and the white in the middle is for those who are transitioning, those who feel they have a neutral gender or no gender, and those who are intersex. The pattern is such that no matter which way you fly it, it will always be correct. This symbolizes us trying to find correctness in our own lives.” Another popular symbol used to identify members of the the transgender community comes from the same roots as the double Venus: a circle with an arrow projecting from the top-right, as per the male symbol, and a cross projecting from the bottom, as per the female symbol, with an additional striked arrow (combining the female cross and male arrow) projecting from the top-left.

The Other Stuff

Purple Rhinoceros: In the 1970s gay activists in Boston chose the rhinoceros as their symbol because, like the gay rights movement, while the rhino is often misunderstood it is actually a docile and intelligent animal until it is attacked–at which point it’s probably going to steamroll your car. And guess what? It’s purple. Bam. Purple rhino.

Hare, Hyena and Weasel: These three animals were mentioned in an apocryphal text of the Bible, Barnabus, in which God warns against eating the flesh of the hare (associating it with anal sex), the hyena, which was at the time was believed to change gender once a year, and the weasel, which was associated with lesbian sex. Why? Who knows. Look how cute, though!

Thumb Rings: Popular culture seems to believe that if a woman wears a silver thumb ring, she’s telling the world she’s a big ole lesbian–though there seems to be some confusion over whether to wear it on the left or right thumb and what that signifies.

Purple String: In some places, wearing a piece of purple string or hemp around your wrist is a sign of liking other girls: wear it on your left wrist if you are single, right if you are in a relationship. But then sometimes girls from the UK say that this is reversed in Europe, adding to the dilemma of what to do when you go to London on vacay.

Sign Language for “Lesbian”: On one forum I read, a girl said that she and her friends signal “lesbian” by the American Sign Language sign,” which involves making your thumb and forefinger into an ‘L’ and sticking your chin between the two. I find this amusing and wonderful and will use it all the time.

Nautical Star Tattoo: In the 1940s, many lesbians got a nautical star tattooed on their inner wrist to advertise their sexuality. But then so did sailors and punk rockers. Not that the groups are mutually exclusive by any means (if you are lesbian sailor punk rocker, I want to meet you). What does seem to be a defining feature of tattoos indicating lesbianism is that they were often on the inner wrist, so ladies could cover them up with a watch during the day and expose them at night when they were out.

Also, dolphins: In almost every online discussion I read, some sad-sounding girl would chime in to ask, “I thought dolphins were symbols of lesbianism. What about dolphins?” Um, PREACH. Lack of historic precedent be damned, I say if we want dolphins, we can have dolphins. DOLPHINS!

LGBT symbols are ever-evolving as time, culture and civil rights allow. While it’s crucial to give a nod to the historic significance of using LGBT symbols during times and in places where one had to be covert, the use of symbols, raised some interesting questions that maybe you have thoughts about. How effective is an LGBT symbol if members of the community may not recognize what it means? At what point do “symbols” merge into the larger topic of gaydar?

It really depends on what you want, whether it be acknowledging the struggle of the past, your personal feelings about your own present, or pride in and of itself. In the end symbolism and the use of symbols is just that–it’s the user of the symbol who gives it meaning and significance. Ultimately it’s a pretty wonderful thing that in many places, we don’t have to use symbols to say what we mean and feel. But I’m just sayin’–if I see a girl with an Autostraddle ‘A’ sticker on her laptop, I’m going over to say hi.

Reference

Gay History: Here are 51 more weird and cool facts from LGBTI history.

Article, Gay Interest, General Interest, History, HIV/AIDS, Political, , , , , , , ,

Did you know the pope in the 1400s legalized gay sex during the summer months? Discover more here

1 Some of the world’s oldest rock paintings which were discovered in Sicily, made about 10,000 years ago, showed two male phallic figures having sex.

2 Ancient Roman historian Plutarch wrote about The Great Mother, an intersex deity depicted with both sets of genitals. Her sacred priestesses, as found in the earliest civilizations in Babylonia and Akkad, were eunuchs and trans women.

3 In ancient Assyrian society, if a man were to have sex with another man of equal status, it was thought that trouble would leave him and he would have good fortune.

4 A Hindu medical text dating back to at least 600 BC made several explicit references to gay people; kumbhika – men who bottom during anal sex; asekya – men who swallow semen; and sandha – men who speak and act like women. The text also claimed it was possible for two women to create a child together but said it would end up being ‘boneless’.

The Hindu god Shiva is often represented as Ardhanarisvara, a unified entity of him with his consort Parvati. This sculpture is from the Elephanta Caves near Mumbai.

5 In Egypt 1503 BC, Hatshepsut became the second woman to rule and chose to take the title of king. She donned male clothing and wore a false beard.

Statue of Hatshepsut on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

6 Julius Caesar and Claudius were considered ‘abnormal’ for refusing to take male lovers. Julius had, at least, an affair with Nicomedes, the king of Bithymia, as a youth.

7 Ancient Celtic men openly preferred male lovers. According to Diodorus in the 1st century BC, he wrote ‘young men will offer themselves to strangers and are insulted if the offer is refused’. Sex between men was very likely an important ‘bonding ritual’.

8 One of the first Roman emperors, Elagabalus, could have been transgender. Before dying at the age of 18, it was reported the emperor had married a male athlete and would go out disguised as a prostitute.

9 Wales had a gay king. King Maelgwn of Gwynedd of the sixth century was described as ‘addicted very much to the detestable vice of sodomy’.

10 St Thomas Aquinas, a priest from the 1200s, is considered the father of homophobia. At a time when homosexuality was often treated as an ‘open secret’, he preached widely that it was ‘unnatural’, similar to bestiality, and argued sodomy is second only to murder in the ranking of sins.

11 Pope Sixtus IV, of the 1400s, was reported to have legalized sodomy during the summer months.

Posthumous portrait of Pope Sixtus IV by Titian

12 In the Klementi tribe of Albania, first observed in the 1400s, if a virgin swore before 12 witnesses that she would not marry, she was then recognized as male, carried weapons and herded flocks.

13 The French called homosexuality the ‘Italian vice’ in the 16th and 17th centuries, the ‘English vice’ in the 18th century, the ‘Oriental vice’ in the 19th century, and the ‘German vice’ starting from 1870 and into the 20th century.

14 Most people know the origins of the word ‘gay’, but the word ‘lesbian’ was first used from around 1590 to mean a tool – a stick made of lead (from the isle of Lesbos) used by stonemasons. It was flexible so it could be used to measure or mold objects to irregular shapes. A ‘lesbian rule’ was also used to mean being flexible with the law.

15 Julie D’Aubigny was a 17th century bisexual French opera singer and fencing master who fought and won at least 10 life-or-death duels, performed nightly shows on the biggest opera stage in the world and once took the Holy Orders just so she could sneak into a convent and have sex with a nun.

16 An 18th century English term for sex between women was the ‘Game of Flats’.

17 A molly house was an 18th century English term for a room or bar where gay men would meet. Patrons of the molly house would enact mock weddings and children being born.

Molly-houses were often considered as brothels in legal proceedings.[1] A male brothel, illustration by Léon Choubrac (known also as Hope), included in Léo Taxil’s book La prostitution contemporaine, 1884, pg. 384, Plate VII

18 Trans man Albert Cashier fought for the Union in the American Civil War. At one point, he was captured by the Confederates but managed to escape by overpowering a prison guard.

(November, 1864)[1]

19 A Boston marriage, in the 19th century, referred to two women living together financially independent of a man.

Sarah Ponsoby and Lady Eleanor Butler, also known as the Ladies of Llangollen, lived together in a Boston marriage.

20 The word ‘homosexual’ (coined in 1869) is older than the word ‘heterosexual’ (1892).

21 Edward White Benson, the Archbishop of Canterbury from 1883 to 1896, was thought to have been repressing his homosexuality. His wife, brother-in-law and five of his six children were also gay.

22 Dude used to be a homophobic slur.

23 UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill, when he was 21, was accused of ‘gross immorality of the Oscar Wilde type’.

24 Doctors in the early 1900s thought bicycles would turn women gay.

25 Wings, the first Oscar-winning film in 1920, featured a man-on-man kiss.

Richard Arlen in Wings

26 In the 1930s, a Disney comic strip showed Mickey Mouse as a violent homophobic thug. In the strip, he beats up an effeminate cat and called him a ‘cream puff inhaler’.

27 The British secret intelligence service tried to spike Hitler’s carrots with female hormones to ‘turn’ him into a woman.

28 Sister Rosetta Thorpe, a bisexual black woman, is credited with inventing rock n roll.

29 World War 2 genius and cryptographer Alan Turing said he had lost a mystery box of treasure in Bletchley Park but could no longer find it as he couldn’t crack his own code.

30 The 1948-53 Kinsey study found a third of men had a homosexual experience.

31 A drag queen was the first openly gay candidate to run for US public office. José Sarria won 6,000 votes in his 1961 campaign for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.

Jose Sarria dines in Kenmore Square during 2010 visit to Boston

32 The death and funeral of Judy Garland is credited with inspiring the Stonewall Riots.

33 Pride in New York City was never really ‘Gay Pride’. The first was mainly organized by bisexual woman Brenda Howard.

34 The original name for Pride was ‘Gay Power’. Other suggested names included ‘Gay Freedom’, ‘Gay Liberation’ and ‘Christopher Street Liberation Day’.

The Stonewall Inn located in Greenwich Village was the site of the June 1969 Stonewall riots. That event in New York City’s queer history has served as a touchstone for various social movements, as well as the catalyst for Pride parades around the world.

35 Dracula author Bram Stoker married Oscar Wilde’s first girlfriend.

36 One of the first openly gay athletes was Dodgers outfielder Glenn Burke in the late 1970s. He told his teammates, who apparently didn’t care, and was officially outed in 1982. He is also credited with creating the high-five.

37 A man who saved President Ford from assassination had his life ruined when the media outed him as gay.

38 L Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, had a son Quintin who was tasked to take over from the Church of Scientology. When Quintin came out as gay, he died of an ‘apparent suicide’ in 1976.

Geoffrey Quentin McCaully Hubbard

39 Mel Boozer, the African American human rights activist, became the first openly gay person ever nominated for the office of Vice President of the United States in 1980.

Melvin “Mel” Boozer

40 Sally Ride was the first American woman to go into space. She was also the first LGBTI astronaut and remains the youngest American to have traveled to space at the age of 32.

41 In the 1980s, religious groups tried to ban Dungeons and Dragons for being satanic as it ‘promoted homosexuality’.

42 In 1987, Delta Airlines apologized for arguing in plane crash litigation that it should pay less in compensation for the life of a gay passenger than for a heterosexual one because he may have had AIDS.

43 Princess Diana went to a London gay bar, accompanied by Freddie Mercury, disguised as a man.

44 The Etoro tribe in Papua New Guinea is where homosexuality is the norm and heterosexuals are excluded. They believe young men only become adults if they have a daily intake of semen to ‘properly mature’.

45 Queen’s The Show Must Go On was recorded as Freddie Mercury was dying due to complications from AIDS. According to Brian May, Mercury said: ‘I’ll fucking do it, darling’ – vodka down – and went in and delivered the incredible vocal.

46 When Ellen DeGeneres came out on her sitcom, Birmingham in Alabama refused to show it. A local LGBTI group sold out a 5,000-seat theatre so people could watch it via satellite.

Ellen DeGeneres, an Emmy winner, came out, as well as her fictional counterpart.

47 Stephen Hillenburg, one of the creators of Spongebob Squarepants, revealed in 2002 that Spongebob is asexual.

48 The couple in Lawrence vs Texas, the case that stopped sodomy being punishable in the US in 2003, didn’t actually have sex. They weren’t even a couple.

49 The country that watches the most gay porn is Kenya, a 2013 study found. In a recent poll, 92% of Kenyans claimed they thought homosexuality should be illegal.

50 Fun Home, the award-winning, lesbian musical, is the first in the history of the Tonys to be written entirely by women.

51 In 2015, it was announced a crater on Pluto’s moon will be named after George Takei’s Star Trek character, Sulu.

An area of Charon will named Sulu

Reference

Gay History: The 50 weirdest and coolest facts from LGBTI history

Article, Gay Interest, General Interest, History, Humour, Political, , , ,

Did you know churches blessed gay marriages in the ‘Dark Ages’? Discover more here

1. The world’s oldest porn, which dates back over 3,000 years, features both male/male, female/female and male/female couples

2. The oldest ever known chat up line was apparently said between two men. A mythological story from the 20th dynasty of Ancient Egypt is between Horus and Seth, who quarrelled for 80 years on who should rule. Seth attempted to persuade Horus to sleep with him, saying: ‘How lovely are your buttocks! And how muscular your thighs!’ They then have sex.

3. In Egypt, two male royal manicurists named Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep were found buried together in a shared tomb similar to the way married couples were often buried. Their epigraph reads: ‘Joined in life and joined in death’. Having lived in 2400 BC, they are believed to be history’s oldest recorded gay couple.

4. Some historical gay and bi figures have turned their lovers into gods. Alexander the Great wanted to make his boyhood lover Hephaestion a god when he died, but was only allowed to declare him a Divine Hero. The Roman Emperor Hadrian, of wall-building fame, was successful in making his lover, Antinous, a god after he drowned in the Nile.

5. The church sanctified gay marriages in the so-called Dark Ages, with one being the Byzantine Emperor Basil 1 (867-886) and his partner John.

6. In a creation myth by Aristophanes, there were three sexes: those with two male heads (which were descended from the sun), those with two female heads (from the earth) and those with a male and a female head (descended from the moon). Displeased with them, Zeus crippled them by chopping them in half. Since that day, according to the story, we are looking for the other half to create our whole. This is known as the Origin of Love.

7. Mercury represents male and female principles in harmony. In mythology, Mercury fathered Hermaphroditus, who had both male and female sex organs.

8. Ancient Greeks didn’t believe in heterosexual and homosexual. However they did believe in passive and active. The most common form of same-sex relationships were when an older male, the erastes, acted as a mentor and lover to a younger boy, the eromenos. They believed sperm was the source of knowledge and it was able to be ‘passed on’.

9. There was a band of 150 gay couples from Thebes who defeated a Spartan army, and went undefeated for 30 years.

10. In ancient China, homosexuality was referred to as ‘the cut sleeve’ and ‘pleasures of the bitten peach’.

11. Until the late 1400s the word ‘girl’ just meant a child of either sex. If you had to differentiate between them, male children were referred to as ‘knave girls’ and females were ‘gay girls‘.

12. The word drag is apparently an acronym, a stage direction coined by Shakespeare and his contemporaries meaning ‘Dressed Resembling A Girl’.

13. The Virginia Court in 1629 recorded the first gender ambiguity among the American colonists. A servant named Thomas(ine) Hall was officially declared by the governor to be both ‘a man and a woman’. To stop everyone else from being confused, Hall was ordered to wear articles of each sex’s clothing every day.

14. In early 17th century London, there was a gay brothel on the site where Buckingham Palace is today.

15. Nicholas Biddle, an early explorer of America, found in 1806 that among Minitarees (Native American tribe), ‘if a boy shows any symptom of effeminacy or girlish inclinations, he is put among the girls, dressed in their way, brought up with them and sometimes married to men’.

16. Uganda had a gay king. King Mwanga II, who reigned from 1884 to 1888, is widely reported to have had affairs with his male servants.

17. In the 19th century the word gay referred to a woman who was a prostitute and a gay man was a man who slept with a lot of women.

18. Homosexual men in 1900s London made up an entire slang language so they could communicate in public without fear of being arrested – Polari. Some words survived into today’s slang, such as ‘naff’ – meaning lacking style, TBH, standing for ‘to be honest’ or ‘to be had’, and tjuz, meaning to primp or improve.

19. Carmilla, a story of a lesbian vampire that preyed on young women, was written 25 years before Dracula.

20. The US has apparently already had a gay president, James Buchanan. He shacked up for 10 years with a future VP, William Rufus King, and was referred to by President Andrew Jackson as ‘Miss Nancy’ and ‘Aunt Fancy’.

21. The modern use of gay comes from gaycat, a slang term among hobos meaning a boy who accomapnies an older, more experienced tramp, with the implication of sexual favors being exchanged for protection.

22. While the monocle might have gone out of use, it had a huge following in the ‘stylish lesbian circles of the earlier 20th century’.

23. The first celebrity to come out as openly gay was Billy Haines, who came out in 1933.

24. The oldest surviving LGBT organization in the world is Netherlands’ Center for Culture and Leisure (COC), which was founded in 1946, and used a ‘cover name’ to mask its taboo purpose.

25. Gay male victims of the Holocaust, who wore the downward-facing pink triangle, were still considered to be criminals when they were freed from concentration camps. They were often sent back to prison to serve out their terms.

26. Mensa, launched in 1946, claims its name was always chosen to mean ‘table’ in Latin to demonstrate the coming together of equals. Really, it was intended to be called ‘Mens’, meaning ‘mind’. They changed it in order to avoid confusion with a men-only magazine. Not so smart.

27. The 1950s saw gay people try to change ‘homosexual’ to ‘homophile’. They hoped an emphasis on same-sex love, instead of sex, would help.

The October 1957 edition of The Ladder, mailed to hundreds of women in the San Francisco area, urged women to take off their masks. The motif of masks and unmasking was prevalent in the homophile era, prefiguring the political strategy of coming out and giving the Mattachine Society its name.

28. Playboy has been loved by straight men for decades, but it was a gay short story that built its reputation. Hugh Hefner was the only one to accept a science fiction story about heterosexuals being the minority against homosexuals in 1955. When letters poured in, he said: ‘If it was wrong to persecute heterosexuals in a homosexual society, then the reverse was wrong too.’

29. The Royal Navy commissioned a class of fast patrol boats during the 1950s which were prefixed with the word ‘gay’. Names included the Gay Bruiser and the Gay Charger.

HMS Gay Bombardier, fitted out in the motor torpedo gunboat design, undergoing trials in Portsmouth Harbour in 1953

30. While many know the handkerchief code, it was popular for gay women to wear blue stars on their wrists in the 1950s and the 1970s to identify themselves in clubs.

31. Jimi Hendrix pretended to be gay to get out of the army in 1962.

32. A 1969 sci-fi novel accurately predicted the mainstream acceptance of LGBTI people. It also predicted rise of China as a global economy, the EU, TiVO, satellite TV, laser printers and the popularity of marijuana.

33. In the 1960s, the term AC/DC became a popular slang for bisexual. It came from the abbreviations for two types of electrical currents.

34. Barbara Jordan was the first African American to be elected in Texas in 1973. She was also a woman, a Democrat, and gay. She later became the first black woman to give the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention.

35. A serial killer, the Doodler, targeted gay men in 1970s San Francisco. He would sketch his victims nude before murdering them. While three victims survived, and a suspect was identified, no one was willing to out themselves in order to convict the suspect.

36. Bruce Banner’s name was changed to David Banner in 1970s show The Incredible Hulk, as ‘Bruce’ was considered a stereotypically gay name.

37. The first openly gay doll, Gay Bob, was launched in 1977. He had a pierced ear and his box was shaped like a closet.

38. Leonard Matlovich was the first gay US service member to come out. When he died, he was buried without a name and known only as Gay Vietnam Veteran. His epitaph reads: ‘When I was in the military, they gave me a medal for killing two men and a discharge for loving one.’

39. In the early 1980s, a book claims the Naval Investigative Service was investigating homosexuality in Chicago. Having heard gay men refer to themselves as ‘friends of Dorothy’, they went on a futile search for the elusive woman clearly at the center of a homosexual ring.

Judy Garland in her role as Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz is one of two likely origins for the phrase “friend of Dorothy” referring to a gay man or LGBT person.

40. The 1985 film Back To The Future had a deleted scene where Marty tells Doc that he’s worried hitting on his mother could make him gay.

41. Ben Affleck’s 1993 directorial debut was titled: ‘I Killed My Lesbian Wife, Hung Her on a Meat Hook, and Now I Have a Three-Picture Deal at Disney’.

42. The US government considered making a ‘gay bomb’. Scientists figured in 1994 that discharging female sex pheromones over enemy forces would make them sexually attracted to each other.

43. Doctor Who actor John Barrowman nearly got the role of Will in Will and Grace in 1998. But he lost the part when producers thought he was ‘too straight’. Barrowman is gay and Eric McCormack, who got the part, is straight.

44. Peter Tatchell, an Australian gay rights activist living in Britain, attempted a citizen’s arrest on Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe in 1999. He walked up to Mugabe, grabbed the dictator by the arm, and said: ‘President Mugabe, you are under arrest for torture’.

45. Founded in 2004, LGBTI activists in Australia created a micronation called the Gay and Lesbian Kingdom of the Coral Sea Islands. The national flag is the LGBT color flag, the official currency is the Euro, and it still exists today.

46. A group from the Greek island of Lesbos requested a legal injunction to ban gay groups from using the word ‘lesbian’ in their names in 2008, claiming it was ‘insulting’ them around the world. It failed.

47. Chinese news agency Xinhua dubiously reported on the apparent existence of a Swedish town in 2009, a town of 25,000 lesbians forbidden to speak to men. Several Swedish tourism sites crashed due to the number of Chinese visitors.

48. In 2010, Microsoft banned a user from Xbox Live for putting Fort Gay as his address. When he tried to tell them that Fort Gay actually exists in West Virginia, it took an appeal from the town’s mayor for it to be corrected.

49. A Hong Kong billionaire offered $65 million to the man that was able to woo and marry his lesbian daughter. It didn’t work.

50. The first gay kiss to be screened in Saudi Arabia was seen in 2012. It was from UK soap Brookside, the first ever televised lesbian kiss in the UK, which originally aired in 1993. It was only thanks to the London 2012 Olympics opening ceremony.

Reference

Gay History: A Gay World, Vibrant and Forgotten

Article, Gay Interest, ,

It would have been unthinkable 25 years ago for thousands of openly gay fans to cheer openly gay athletes at Yankee Stadium, for openly gay artists to perform to the acclaim of openly gay audiences at Carnegie Hall, or for the mainstream media to provide extensive and sympathetic coverage of it all. Today’s march and the Gay Games and Cultural Festival are testimony to the legacy of the Stonewall rebellion of June 28, 1969 — when a police assault on a Greenwich Village gay bar turned a small civil rights campaign into a mass liberation movement.

But the enshrinement of Stonewall as the genesis of gay culture threatens to deny the richness and resiliency of gay and lesbian life before the late 60’s and to obscure the long history of gay resistance that made the gay-rights movement possible.

Pre-Stonewall lesbians and gay men are often held up as passive victims of social hatred who lived solitary lives (in the “closet”) that kept them vulnerable to anti-gay ideology. Many gay people blame previous generations for not having had the courage to come out of the closet. Or they condescendingly imagine that their predecessors internalized society’s hatred of homosexuality and became self-loathing.

But the systematic suppression of the gay community was not due to some age-old, unchanging social antipathy, nor was it a sign of passivity and acquiescence by gay people. Anti-gay forces created the closet in response to the openness and assertiveness of gay men and lesbians in the early 20th century.

Beginning in the 1890’s, an extensive gay world took shape in the streets, cafeterias, saloons and apartments of New York City, and gay people played an integral role in the social life of many neighborhoods. Openly gay men drank with sailors and other working men at waterfront dives and entertained them at Bowery saloons; well-known gay people casually mixed with other patrons at Harlem’s basement cabarets; lesbians ran speakeasies where Greenwich Village bohemians — straight and gay — gathered to read their verse.

These men and women, who saw themselves as part of a visible, largely working-class gay world, forged a culture with its own language, customs, folk histories, heroes and heroines. In the 1920’s and early 30’s, gay impresarios organized drag balls attracting thousands of gay dancers and straight spectators. Gay writers, actors and musicians produced a distinctive gay literature and performance style. This cultural outpouring was so popular by the late 20’s that gay performers moved from the margins of the city and briefly became the darlings of Broadway.

This flourishing gay world has been forgotten. It was wiped into historical oblivion by a fierce backlash in the 30’s — part of a wider Depression-era condemnation of the cultural experimentation of the 20’s, which many blamed for the economic collapse. With millions of male breadwinners losing their jobs, people were fearful of any additional threats to traditional family hierarchies.

In New York, laws were enacted prohibiting homosexuals from gathering in any state-licensed public place. Bars, restaurants and cabarets were threatened with loss of their liquor licenses if they employed homosexuals, allowed them to gather on the premises or served them drinks — and the State Liquor Authority closed hundreds of establishments for tolerating a gay presence. This continued for decades: nearly every gay bar in the city was closed in the winter of 1959-60 in response to an anti-gay campaign by the newspaper columnist Lee Mortimer, and again in 1964 in a pre-World’s Fair “cleanup.”

The public discussion of gay issues was also censored. In the early 30’s, after a generation of films had dealt with gay images, the new Hollywood production code prohibited gay characters and even talk of homosexuality in films. In the theater, the backlash had started even before the Depression: after the appearance of a lesbian drama on Broadway and Mae West’s threat to stage a farce about transvestites called “The Drag” in 1927, a state law was passed prohibiting the representation or discussion of homosexuality on the stage.

In the 30’s, the New York City police, using a 1923 state law that made it a criminal act for one man to invite another to have sex, began sending good-looking plainclothes officers into gay bars to strike up conversations with men, lead them on and arrest them if the victims suggested going home. (Between 1923 and 1967, when gay activists persuaded Mayor John V. Lindsay to end most entrapment, more than 50,000 men had been arrested on this charge.)

Anti-gay policing around the country intensified in the 40’s and especially the 50’s, when Senator Joseph McCarthy claimed that homosexuals in the State Department threatened national security. Thousands of gay Federal employees were dismissed. Equally without substance, police departments and newspapers around the country began to demonize homosexuals as child molesters; arrest rates increased dramatically.

The degree to which gay men had to fear arrest — and the subsequent exposure of their homosexuality to their families and employers — is almost impossible to understand today. Although New York’s gay world grew in the post-war years, gay life became less visible and gay meeting places more segregated and carefully hidden from the straight public. The state built the closet in the 30’s, and the isolation of homosexuals made it easier for them to be demonized.

Still, some gay people fought for their rights. In the 1930’s, gay bars challenged the prohibitions against them in the courts (unsuccessfully), and in the 1950’s a handful of courageous souls organized political groups, such as the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis, to advocate the homosexual cause. Although most did not speak out so openly, taking this as evidence that they accepted the laws against them misinterprets silence as acquiescence. It construes resistance in the narrowest of terms — as only the organization of formal political groups or protests.

Threatened with police raids, harassment and the loss of their jobs, families and reputations, most people hid their participation in gay life from their straight associates. But this did not necessarily keep them hidden from one other. They developed a sophisticated system of subcultural codes of dress, speech and style that enabled them to recognize one another and to carry on covert conversations. “Gay” itself was such a word until the 60’s, when its homosexual connotations began to be known to nongay New Yorkers.

The tactics gay people devised for communicating, claiming space and affirming their self-worth did not directly challenge anti-gay repression in the way the post-Stonewall movement would, but they allowed many gay people to form a supportive community despite the larger society’s injunction against their doing so. This enabled many lesbians and gay men to build happy, self-confident, loving lives.

That the openness of gay life in the early 20th century was brought to an end after a few decades, and that the memory of it was systematically suppressed, reminds us that the growth of tolerance in recent years cannot be taken for granted. Then as now, increased gay visibility produced a powerful reaction.

But the relative tolerance of homosexuality in the early 20th century also shows that America has not been monolithically and inevitably homophobic, and that social conventions of sexuality are no more natural or timeless than those of race or gender. Attacks on gay men and lesbians have often resulted from broader anxieties in American culture as much as from fears about homosexuality itself. Above all, the last century shows us that attitudes toward gay people can change — and can be changed.

Reference