Category Archives: General Interest

History Forgot This Rogue Aristocrat Who Discovered Dinosaurs and Died Penniless.

Article, biography, General Interest, History, , , ,

Now fallen into shadow, the Romania-born Baron Franz Nopcsa was a groundbreaking scientist, adventurer — and would-be king

Sacel Castle, in a part of Transylvania known locally as the Land of Hateg, is not open to the public, but Dacian Muntean, my guide, has arranged for us to get in. I’ve seen the entryway in old photographs—Persian rugs, a piano, a grand staircase lit by a round, cathedral-like window of leaded glass.

That is nothing like what I find before me. If it weren’t for the window, I wouldn’t recognize it at all. Swallows fly through where the panes once were and sunshine pours down on stairs now covered in rubble. Two huge ceiling beams have fallen and are lying askew on the landing. Others are detached on one side and hang down precariously.

“Is it safe to go up?” I ask Dacian. He considers. “Yes,” he says. “I think so.” A dog with matted fur follows us, along with her lame puppy. It’s clear that this crumbling, abandoned castle is their home. They scamper over the rubble; one stops to pee on a pile of debris.

Upstairs, every window is gone. The floorboards are rotten. The walls are pockmarked with holes where treasure seekers, hearing a legend of hidden gold inside, have punched through. We come into what was once a stately library. Dacian points at a bay window. A breeze blows through the sockets. “I like to imagine him here reading,” he says. In the corner, an ornate wrought-iron spiral staircase leads up to nowhere, and I see light coming through a hole in the roof.

The castle was once the family home of Baron Franz Nopcsa von Felso-Szilvas, an Austro-Hungarian aristocrat born in 1877. Baron Nopcsa was a notorious figure in his day. A wild genius with a flair for the dandyish and the dramatic, he was an explorer, spy, polyglot and master of disguise. He crossed the Albanian Alps on foot and befriended local mountain men, sometimes involving himself in their tribal feuds. Once, he was nearly crowned King of Albania. It was said that he would disappear for months at a time only to arrive for polite tea at posh European hotels dressed as a peasant. Along with a younger man whom he called his secretary, he traversed swaths of the Balkans on motorcycle. He kept up years-long correspondences with famous and learned men all across Europe. Later in his life, he was known for chasing villagers from his estate with a pistol.

It is easy for the intrigue and romance of Nopcsa’s exploits, and the manner of his tragic death, to obscure the quieter fact that the baron was one of the great scholars and scientific minds of his time—and was largely self-taught. He was one of the first scientists to look at fossilized dinosaur bones and see a living, social creature. In fact, he was a staunch believer in the evolutionary relationship between birds and dinosaurs, decades before the idea became widely accepted among paleontologists. His overall contributions to the field have led some to call him the forgotten father of dinosaur paleobiology. “Nopcsa was asking questions nobody else was asking,” says David Weishampel, a paleontologist at the Center for Functional Anatomy and Evolution at John Hopkins University School of Medicine.

Nopcsa was equally brilliant as a structural geologist. While most of the scientific community still scoffed at the theory of continental drift, he provided some of the strongest evidence for such movement. He mapped the geology of Albania and became one of the country’s foremost ethnographers and historians. “It would be no exaggeration to say that he knew the country and its people better than any foreigner of his day,” says Robert Elsie, a scholar of Albania and the translator and editor of Nopcsa’s memoirs, published in English in 2014.

Over his career, Nopcsa published several tomes and more than 150 scientific papers. Yet his name barely appears in textbooks. No historical plaque adorns any of the places he lived or taught. Even his grave is unmarked.

Baron Franz Nopcsa von Felső-Szilvás was one of the first to consider the biology of dinosaurs. His work helped him found the field of palaeobiology. Image via Wikimedia Commons

Nopcsa was born to a wealthy noble family, the eldest of three children raised at Sacel. He had a typical upbringing for an aristocrat in a provincial backwater of an aging empire. At home he spoke Hungarian and learned Romanian, English, German and French. His father, Alexius, had fought in Mexico against Benito Juárez, in 1867, as a hussar in the army of Maximilian, Archduke of Austria and Emperor of Mexico. Later Alexius became a vice-director at the Hungarian Royal Opera, in Budapest. Nopcsa’s mother, Matilde, came from an aristocratic family from the nearby city of Arad.

In 1895, Nopcsa’s sister Ilona was walking along a riverbank near the family home when she found an unusual-looking skull, and she brought it to her teenaged brother. It soon became his obsession.

The skull belonged to a previously undiscovered duck-billed herbivore from the dusk of the Mesozoic, around 70 million years ago, and was buried in sediment before a mass extinction that would wipe out three-quarters of all plant and animal species on earth. Crushed by geological forces, the skull was in terrible shape.

In the fall, Nopcsa entered the University of Vienna and took the skull with him. Like a cat with a gift rat, he presented it to his professor, a famous geologist, expecting him to take it from there. But the professor sent Nopcsa back to Transylvania and told him to figure it out for himself. Whether it was lack of interest or funding or the cunning strategy of a master teacher, it was the making of a great scientist.

In the library of Sacel Castle, Nopcsa taught himself geology, physiology, anatomy and neurology. He wrote to scientists all over Europe asking for more books. At the time, very few European dinosaurs had been found. Unable to compare his fossils with others, he relied on his imagination. Working along the river strata, he began to excavate, preparing the fossils he found with homemade glue. From the tiniest scratch on the fossilized braincase, he speculated about the relationship between the pituitary gland, which regulates growth, and an organism’s size, applying what he’d learned of soft tissue and blood circulation. Drawing on the jaw mechanics of lizards and alligators, he rearticulated his dinosaur’s jaw and envisioned its musculature. In this, he was breaking new ground—comparing his dinosaur to living things.

Later, he would look at the pelvis and hind limbs of crocodiles to understand the mechanics of how running flight may have evolved in early birds. From watching birds themselves, he recognized brooding patterns in dinosaur nests, reasoning that since the hatchlings were too undeveloped at birth to defend themselves from predators, some dinosaurs must have parented their young. These ideas, too, were utterly new.

Nopcsa returned to Vienna and, at the age of 22, presented his work to the Austrian Academy of Sciences, one of the foremost scientific bodies in the world. His entry onto the international stage was anything but discreet. During his lecture, Nopcsa skewered the dinosaur classification system of a prominent scientist named Georg Baur with little concern for etiquette or empathy. His genius was clear, but so was his colossal talent for rudeness, which would shape his academic relationships throughout his life.

In time, Nopcsa would identify 25 genera of reptiles and five dinosaurs—the duck-billed Telmatosaurus transylvanicus, the beaked and bipedal Zalmoxes robustus, the armored Struthiosaurus transylvanicus and Magyarosaurus dacus and the meat-eating Megalosaurus. Four of these would become the “type specimens” of their species, the fossil blueprints against which all examples would be judged.

The Hateg dinosaurs turned out to be unique. They were unusually small—in some cases nearly miniatures. Nopcsa’s titanosaur belonged to a family of massive sauropods reaching lengths of 100 feet and weights of 80 tons, yet M. dacus was the size of a horse. His Telmatosaurus was smaller than a crocodile. Others were roughly an eighth the size of their non-Romanian cousins. The question was, why?

The most obvious possibility was that Nopcsa had found juveniles. Yet he didn’t believe this to be the case, and he was determined to prove otherwise. Certain bones grow together with age, and a good comparative anatomist, which Nopcsa was, can tell the developmental age of an organism by examining these sutures—so long as he has the right bones. But paleontologists don’t get to choose their bones, and Nopcsa’s Transylvanian miniatures presented either the wrong ones or were crushed beyond analysis. Looking for other ways to discern age, Nopcsa began to examine slices of bone under a microscope to study cell structure.

“Bones grow from the inside out, like trees,” explains Weishampel. “It’s possible to guess an age by counting the rings.” Today this method is known as paleohistology, and Nopcsa’s significant early contributions, particularly in determining which bones are most useful for analysis, remain largely uncredited, according to Weishampel.

Certain that his dinosaurs weren’t juveniles, Nopcsa looked to explain why they seemed unable to grow beyond a certain size. And he began to formulate the argument that Hateg was once an island—another claim supported by research after his death. Hateg Island’s environmental pressures, he concluded, limited the dinosaurs’ development.

“Islands are unique places, where biology gets a free hand,” says Weishampel. “Large animals tend to get smaller—for example, the dwarf elephants of Malta, hippos in the Mediterranean.” And, as it happens, the dwarf dinosaurs of Transylvania. The theory is that fewer food options lead to the success of animals with smaller anatomies. “And small animals,” Weishampel continues, “tend to get larger, like Komodo dragons, boas and tortoises in the Galápagos.” Nopcsa correctly identified the first set of conditions, and the second, scientists now speculate, can be explained by the idea that animals whose body sizes are held in check by predators on large landmasses tend to expand on an island with fewer of them. Nopcsa’s theory of what he called “island insularity” developed into what scientists now know as the “island rule.”

But though Nopcsa possessed many talents, he also possessed a private affliction, the symptoms of which can be discerned in letters he sent to Arthur Smith Woodward, the famous geological curator of the British Museum. The two men corresponded more or less monthly from 1901 until Nopcsa’s death in 1933. Nopcsa’s tone is touchingly deferential no matter how close the men became: The baron never failed to address his elder as “sir.”

Leafing through the great cache of letters, each page preserved between sheets of plastic and bound in a dozen volumes now held in an archive at the Natural History Museum in London, you can see the places where Nopcsa’s customary scrawl becomes spidery, as though his thoughts were turning in on themselves. Once, in 1910, after Nopcsa failed to arrive in London for a meeting, Smith Woodward received a note instead from Nopcsa’s mother, the baroness. As if excusing a child from school, she explained that her son was unable to visit due to a recurring illness.

Nopcsa’s life continued to be punctuated by periods of extreme productivity, extensive fieldwork and prolific writing, but over time his illness worsened. He later referred to what devastated him as “shattered nerves.” Today we would likely call it manic depression.

**********

Even as Nopcsa was establishing himself as a scientist, he became enthralled by tales of Albania’s mountain tribesmen, whom he first heard about from a man thought to be his first lover, Louis Draskovic, a Transylvanian count two years his senior. Nopcsa soon determined to visit the mountains and study the land and the people there.

At the turn of the 20th century, fieldwork wasn’t funded as it might be today, with university grants or stipends. And in this fundamental way Nopcsa’s aristocratic status cannot be separated from his life as a scientist. He had social access and money for schooling. He met Smith Woodward through his parents, and his first geological foray into Albania, in 1903, was paid for by his uncle, a favorite courtier of Empress Elisabeth of Austria. In the years to come many of Nopcsa’s Albanian adventures were paid for by the Austro-Hungarian Empire itself, the fruit of a different kind of relationship: At some point Nopcsa began to work for the vast and crumbling empire as a spy.

Albania was then the buffer zone between Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire. As tensions rose in the run-up to World War I, the Austrian Imperial Council felt that it would be useful to have an accurate geographical and cultural map of the country. Nopcsa’s resulting studies and photographs documenting the country’s highland culture would become canonical for future ethnographers.

In 1906, while planning a trip, Nopcsa hired a young Albanian man to be his secretary. Bajazid Elmaz Doda was from a shepherd’s village high in the mountains. Nopcsa wrote in his journal that Doda was “the only person who has truly loved me” since Louis Draskovic. The feeling was apparently mutual. Nopcsa would later name a species of ancient turtle after Doda—Kallakobotion bajazidi, or “beautiful and round Bajazid.”

From the time they met until the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Doda and Nopcsa were often on the road. Nopcsa became fluent in local Albanian dialects and built friendships with the tribesmen. He was fascinated by their sense of honor. In a letter to Smith Woodward, he describes with great admiration witnessing a man take tea with the murderer of his son and saying nothing, because both were guests in another’s house—a feat of self-restraint, Nopcsa wrote, that no European gentlemen could have matched.

Doda, left, and Nopcsa, circa 1931. They spent nearly 30 years together. (Hungarian Natural History Museum)

Nopcsa continued to do collecting in the Haţeg Basin, at least until the beginning of the First World War. Among the fossils that Nopcsa studied were the duck-billed Telmatosaurus transylvanicus, the bipedal and beaked Zalmoxes robustus, the armored Struthiosaurus transylvanicus, and the sauropod Magyarosaurus dacus. In addition, he made extensive travels across much of Europe to visit palaeontological museums and to meet fellow scientists. In his field trips Nopcsa was now accompanied by Elmas Doda Bajazid, whom Nopcsa met in Albania and convinced to become his secretary. The men spent nearly 30 years togheter.

On 25 April 1933, Nopcsa’s body and that of his secretary Bajazid were found at their Singerstrasse residence. Nopcsa left a letter to the police: ”The motive for my suicide is a nervous breakdown. The reason that I shot my longtime friend and secretary, Mr Bayazid Elmas Doda, in his sleep without his suspecting at all is that I did not wish to leave him behind sick, in misery and without a penny, because he would have suffered too much. I wish to be cremated.”

References:

David B. Weishampel & Oliver Kerscher (2012): Franz Baron Nopcsa, Historical Biology: An International Journal of Paleobiology, DOI:10.1080/08912963.2012.689745

CSIKI, Z. & BENTON, M.J. (2010): An island of dwarfs – Reconstructing the Late Cretaceous Haþeg palaeoecosystem. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 293: 265 – 270 doi:10.1016/j.palaeo.2010.05.032

Dumbravă, M. D. et al. A dinosaurian facial deformity and the first occurrence of ameloblastoma in the fossil record. Sci. Rep. 6, 29271; doi: 10.1038/srep29271 (2016).

Smithsonian Magazine, July 2016, By Vanessa Veselka; Photographs by Cristian Movilă, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/history-forgot-rogue-aristocrat-discovered-dinosaurs-died-penniless-180959504/

Gay History: Here are 46 more weird and wonderful facts from LGBTI history

Article, Gay Interest, General Interest, History, ,

Know your herstory

1. Olive oil was used for many things in Ancient Greece, including as a popular lube for anal sex.

2. Christmas has its origins in Saturnalia, a Roman festival around first century BC. Instead of family lunch, it was a celebration of sex, fertility and homosexuality. During the festivities, men ran around naked, tops became bottoms and masters waited on servants.

3. There is no record whatsoever of Jesus or Muhammad preaching against homosexuality.

4. St Paulinas of York, who was bisexual, invented the tradition of bells calling parishioners to church.

5. The earliest form of same-sex marriage was a Christian ceremony called adelphopoiesis. St Sergius, a commander in the Roman army in the third century, and St Bacchus, his second in command, were lovers who had their union in this way. The Catholic Church stripped them of ‘saint’ status in 1969.

St Sergius and St Bacchus

6. William II was ‘addicted to every kind of vice, particularly lust and especially sodomy’, according to early records. He kept his male courtiers hair long, and reportedly promoted them based on their talents in bed.

7. Eleanor Rykener, who may have been a trans woman, was a 14th century prostitute working in London. Arrested in 1395 for cross-dressing, this is the only surviving legal records from that age which mentions sodomy. Rykener claimed to have many clients, and preferred priests as they ‘paid better than others’.

8. Leonardo Da Vinci was arrested for gay sex, twice, at 24 years old. He was acquitted. If he had been killed, the world would never have had the Mona Lisa or The Last Supper.

9. In around 1600, William Shakespeare wrote As You Like It and Twelfth Night. Both feature women who cross-dress as men. It is thought this was a direct response to a Puritan campaign that objected to the ‘gay’ practice of young boys cross-dressing on stage.

10. At the first ever trial in Canada for homosexuality in 1648, a gay military drummer was sentenced to death. His life was spared on the condition he accepted the position of New France’s first permanent executioner.

11. Catharina Linck, in 1721, was executed for being gay in Germany, who would dress as a man. It was found she had been sleeping with women using a leather stuffed horn. Acting as a funnel, it also allowed her to urinate standing up.

Catharina Linck

12. Deborah Sampson joined the Continental Army in 1782 and served 17 months as ‘Robert Shurtliff’, living, dressing and fighting as a man. They also reportedly had a lot of sex with women. A renowned soldier, they also once carved a bullet from their thigh.

Frontispiece of The Female Review: Life of Deborah Sampson, the Female Soldier in the War of Revolution.

13. Charles Dickens went to a London prison in 1835 and visited the last two men hanged for homosexuality in the UK.

14. Japan has one of the shortest-lived sodomy laws in the world. The statute was in place from 1873 to 1883. Samurai warriors, who had a long tradition of same-sex relations, mounted strong opposition to the law and helped to get it repealed.

15. Using ‘they’ as a third person gender-neutral singular was the most popular pronoun in the English language until the 1800s, when ‘he’ and ‘she’ became widespread to make English more like Latin.

16. The author of America the Beautiful, Katharine Lee Bates, was an ardent feminist who lived for 25 years with another woman believed (based on Bates’ own writing) to be her lesbian partner.

17. The Duke of Kent, the bisexual younger brother of British kings George VI and Edward VIII, was arrested alongside theatre legend Noel Coward under suspicion of prostitution. They had been going around Soho in London dressed as women.

The Women’s Auxiliary Air Force in 1942

18. When a desperate mother asked Sigmund Freud to cure her gay son in 1935, he wrote her back explaining why her son had nothing to be ashamed of.

19. There was an attempt to make a film adaptation of The Children’s Hour, about the dangers of homophobia. However censors demanded any mention of homosexuality were completely removed.

20. In early 1940, a Women’s Auxiliary Air Force report came to a conclusion on lesbianism: ‘Naturally, it is a vice that is going to be impossible to keep out of the WAAF altogether.’

21. In 1970, the State of Connecticut denied a gay man a driver’s license on the basis that his sexuality made him dangerous to other drivers.

22. Dusty Springfield, one of the biggest superstars at the time, came out as bisexual in 1970. ‘I know that I’m as perfectly capable of being swayed by a girl as by a boy’

23. Wendy Carlos, a transgender woman, helped to pioneer electronic music. In 1968 she experimented with a series of recordings of compositions by JS Bach played on a Moog synthesizer.  She won three Grammys and recorded music for the soundtrack of Clockwork Orange.

Wendy Carlos

24. Years before Stonewall in New York City, there was a queer rebellion against police harassment in San Francisco in 1966. Trans people fought back against police outside Compton’s Cafeteria in San Francisco.

25. Bayard Rustin, an openly gay black man, inspired Martin Luther King Jr’s use of non-violent protest from which Bayard learned in India taking part in Ghandi’s movement.

Rustin at a news briefing on the March on Washington in Washington, D.C., on August 27, 1963

26. A young stripper named Shelly Bauman lost her leg in a freak confetti cannon accident. She sued and used the money from the settlement to open Seattle’s first gay bar, which she named ‘Shelly’s Leg’.

Shelly’s Leg sign in the Museum of History and Industry.

27. The first openly gay LGBTI person to be elected to office was not Harvey Milk. It was Kathy Kozachenko, in 1974, who won a seat on the Ann Arbor, Michigan city council.

28. Shakuntala Devi wrote the first study of homosexuality in India, The World Of Homosexuals, in 1977. It treated homosexuality in an understanding light and is considered pioneering.

29. Singer Johnny Mathis came out as gay in a 1982 magazine article, but the magazine had to retract the statement because Mathis received numerous death threats.

30. In a private cemetery in Arkansas, Ruth Coker-Burks single-handedly buried and gave funerals to more than 40 gay men during the height of the AIDS epidemic. She had to do this because their families wouldn’t claim them.

31. When scientists first realized American gay men and Africans in France were both suffering from AIDS, French researchers sent over a sample to be tested. But a scientist with a grudge against the French institute switched out the sample, setting research back years.

32. An official Star Trek novel was published with scenes depicting Kirk and Spock as lovers in 1985. While these parts were supposed to be edited out, the wrong version was printed. It then became a collector’s item.

33. OJ Simpson’s father was a gay drag queen who died of AIDS.

(L-R) O.J. Simpson and his father.

34. Before Matt Groening created The Simpsons, he created a cartoon featuring a gay couple.

35. Dorian Corey, the older drag queen featured heavily Paris Is Burning, kept a mummified corpse in her apartment for an untold amount of years. Shot in the head, wrapped in fake leather and stuffed in a suitcase, it was only discovered after her death.

36. The first primetime male gay kiss in the US is up for debate. While many consider it to be Dawson’s Creek in 1995, On Will & Grace, Will and Jack kissed (for political reasons) three months earlier.

37. Sailor Moon in Japan had a lesbian couple, Sailor Uranus and Sailor Neptune. In the English translation this is censored, stating they are cousins instead. Due to the dubbing the flirting that was left in, this meant some viewers thought their relationship was incestuous.

Haruka in her Super Sailor Uranus form, as seen in the anime.

38. George Clooney once was asked if he would ever play a gay role. His response was: ‘I already did — as Batman’.

39. When asked if Bert and Ernie were gay in 1994, Sesame Streett CEO Gary Knell replied ‘They are not gay, they are not straight. They are puppets. They don’t exist below the waist.’

40. Man! I Feel Like A Woman was inspired by Shania Twain’s visit to a drag bar.

41. Oscar, the character from the US version of The Office, was not originally intended to be gay. This choice was inspired by an early episode in which he wore a pink shirt.

42. In 2004, a Mario game had a transgender playable character with a subplot about being accepted by her family. This was censored in the American version.

43. Eminem gave Elton John a pair of diamond studded cock-rings as a wedding gift.

44. A Nigerian ‘scientist‘ claimed he had ‘proved’ being gay was wrong by using magnets in 2013. He then promptly demanded to be given the Nobel prize for his research. He didn’t get one.

45. Satanists performed a ‘Pink Mass‘ on the grave of Fred Phelps’ mother in order to turn her into a lesbian in the afterlife.

46. A woman in Nebraska tried to sue all gay people in 2015. Her appeal had no legal references, but quoted Webster’s Dictionary and the Bible. It obviously did not succeed.

References

Gay History: The Berlin Story.

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

How the Germans invented gay rights—more than a century ago.

Magnus Hirschfeld and two cross-dressers, outside the Institute for Sexual Science.Courtesy Photo Hirschfeld / Voilà / Gallimard

On August 29, 1867, a forty-two-year-old lawyer named Karl Heinrich Ulrichs went before the Sixth Congress of German Jurists, in Munich, to urge the repeal of laws forbidding sex between men. He faced an audience of more than five hundred distinguished legal figures, and as he walked to the lectern he felt a pang of fear. “There is still time to keep silent,” he later remembered telling himself. “Then there will be an end to all your heart-pounding.” But Ulrichs, who had earlier disclosed his same-sex desires in letters to relatives, did not stop. He told the assembly that people with a “sexual nature opposed to common custom” were being persecuted for impulses that “nature, mysteriously governing and creating, had implanted in them.” Pandemonium erupted, and Ulrichs was forced to cut short his remarks. Still, he had an effect: a few liberal-minded colleagues accepted his notion of an innate gay identity, and a Bavarian official privately confessed to similar yearnings. In a pamphlet titled “Gladius furens,” or “Raging Sword,” Ulrichs wrote, “I am proud that I found the strength to thrust the first lance into the flank of the hydra of public contempt.”

The first chapter of Robert Beachy’s “Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity” (Knopf) begins with an account of Ulrichs’s audacious act. The title of the chapter, “The German Invention of Homosexuality,” telegraphs a principal argument of the book: although same-sex love is as old as love itself, the public discourse around it, and the political movement to win rights for it, arose in Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This message may surprise those who believe that gay identity came of age in London and New York, sometime between the Oscar Wilde trials and the Stonewall riots. The brutal repression of gay people during the Nazi period largely erased German gay history from international consciousness, and even from German memory. Beachy, a historian who teaches at Yonsei University, in Seoul, ends his book by noting that Germans hold gay-pride celebrations each June on what is known as Christopher Street Day, in honor of the street where the Stonewall protest unfolded. Gayness is cast as an American import.

Ulrichs, essentially the first gay activist, encountered censorship and ended up going into exile, but his ideas very gradually took hold. In 1869, an Austrian littérateur named Karl Maria Kertbeny, who was also opposed to sodomy laws, coined the term “homosexuality.” In the eighteen-eighties, a Berlin police commissioner gave up prosecuting gay bars and instead instituted a policy of bemused tolerance, going so far as to lead tours of a growing demimonde. In 1896, Der Eigene (“The Self-Owning”), the first gay magazine, began publication. The next year, the physician Magnus Hirschfeld founded the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, the first gay-rights organization. By the beginning of the twentieth century, a canon of gay literature had emerged (one early advocate used the phrase “Staying silent is death,” nearly a century before aids activists coined the slogan “Silence = Death”); activists were bemoaning negative depictions of homosexuality (Thomas Mann’s “Death in Venice” was one target); there were debates over the ethics of outing; and a schism opened between an inclusive, mainstream faction and a more riotous, anarchistic wing. In the nineteen-twenties, with gay films and pop songs in circulation, a mass movement seemed at hand. In 1929, the Reichstag moved toward the decriminalization of homosexuality, although the chaos caused by that fall’s stock-market crash prevented a final vote.

Why did all this happen in Germany? And why is the story not better known? Beachy, focussing on Berlin’s social fabric, doesn’t delve too deeply into larger philosophical questions, but the answers are hardly elusive. The inclination to read German history as an extended prelude to Nazism—the “heading for Hitler” narrative—has tended to exclude countervailing progressive forces, especially those of the Wilhelmine period, from 1871 to 1918. The towering legacy of German idealism and Romanticism, which helps to explain why the gay-rights movement took root in Germany, has itself become somewhat obscure, especially outside the German school system. And so we are surprised by the almost inevitable. Nowhere else could a figure like Ulrichs have made his speech, and nowhere else would cries of “Stop!” have been answered by shouts of “No, no! Continue, continue!”

In Leontine Sagan’s 1931 film “Mädchen in Uniform,” the first sympathetic portrayal of lesbians onscreen, a boarding-school pupil named Manuela plays the title role in a school production of Friedrich Schiller’s 1787 play “Don Carlos,” an emblematic Romantic tale of forbidden love and resistance to tyranny. “A moment passed in paradise is not too dearly bought with death,” Manuela declaims onstage, conveying Don Carlos’s love for his stepmother. Afterward, fortified by punch, Manuela announces her love for one of her teachers, precipitating a scandal. The episode suggests the degree to which the German cultural and intellectual tradition, particularly in the Romantic age, which stretched from Goethe and Schiller to Schopenhauer and Wagner, emboldened those who came to identify themselves as gay and lesbian. (“Schiller sometimes writes very freely,” an elderly woman worriedly observes in Sagan’s film.

Close to the heart of the Romantic ethos was the idea that heroic individuals could attain the freedom to make their own laws, in defiance of society. Literary figures pursued a cult of friendship that bordered on the homoerotic, although most of the time the fervid talk of embraces and kisses remained just talk. But the poet August von Platen’s paeans to soldiers and gondoliers had a more specific import: “Youth, come! Walk with me, and arm in arm / Lay your dark cheek on your / Bosom friend’s blond head!” Platen’s leanings attracted an unwelcome spotlight in 1829, when the acidly silver-tongued poet Heinrich Heine, insulted by anti-Semitic remarks that Platen had lobbed at him, satirized his rival as a womanly man, a lover of “passive, Pythagorean character,” referring to the freed slave Pythagoras, one of Nero’s male favorites. Heine’s tone is merrily vicious, but he inserts one note of compassion: had Platen lived in Roman times, “it may be that he would have expressed these feelings more openly, and perhaps have passed for a true poet.” In other words, repression had stifled Platen’s sexuality and, thus, his creativity.

Gay urges welled up across Europe during the Romantic era; France, in particular, became a haven, since statutes forbidding sodomy had disappeared from its books during the Revolutionary period, reflecting a distaste for law based on religious belief. The Germans, though, were singularly ready to utter the unspeakable. Schopenhauer took a special interest in the complexities of sexuality; in a commentary added in 1859 to the third edition of “The World as Will and Representation,” he offered a notably mellow view of what he called “pederasty,” saying that it was present in every culture. “It arises in some way from human nature itself,” he said, and there was no point in opposing it. (He cited Horace: “Expel nature with a pitchfork, she still comes back.”) Schopenhauer proceeded to expound the dubious theory that nature promoted homosexuality in older men as a way of discouraging them from continuing to procreate.

Not surprisingly, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs seized on Schopenhauer’s curious piece of advocacy when he began his campaign; he quoted the philosopher in one of his coming-out letters to his relatives. Ulrichs might also have mentioned Wagner, who, in “Die Walküre” and “Tristan und Isolde,” depicted illicit passions that many late-nineteenth-century homosexuals saw as allegories for their own experience. Magnus Hirschfeld, in his 1914 book “The Homosexuality of Men and Women,” noted that the Wagner festival in Bayreuth had become a “favorite meeting place” for homosexuals, and quoted a classified ad, from 1894, in which a young man had sought a handsome companion for a Tyrolean bicycling expedition; it was signed “Numa 77, general delivery, Bayreuth.” Ulrichs had published his early pamphlets under the pseudonym Numa Numantius.

Encouraging signals from cultural giants were one thing, legal protections another. The most revelatory chapter of Beachy’s book concerns Leopold von Meerscheidt-Hüllessem, a Berlin police commissioner in the Wilhelmine period, who, perhaps more than any other figure, enabled “gay Berlin” to blossom. Meerscheidt-Hüllessem’s motivations remain unclear. He was of a “scheming nature,” a colleague noted, and liked nothing better than to gather masses of data on the citizenry, like a less malignant J. Edgar Hoover. His Department of Homosexuals, founded in 1885, maintained a carefully annotated catalogue of Berliners who conformed to the type. He evidently was not gay, although his superior, Bernhard von Richthofen, the police department’s president, is said to have had a taste for young soldiers. Meerscheidt-Hüllessem might have reasoned that it was better to domesticate this new movement than to let it become politically radicalized or overtaken by criminal elements.

For whatever reason, Meerscheidt-Hüllessem took a fairly benevolent attitude toward Berlin’s same-sex bars and dance halls, at least in the better-heeled parts of the city. He was on cordial terms with many regulars, as none other than August Strindberg attested in his autobiographical novel “The Cloister” (1898), which evokes a same-sex costume ball at the Café National: “The Police Inspector and his guests had seated themselves at a table in the centre of one end of the room, close to which all the couples had to pass. . . . The Inspector called them by their Christian names and summoned some of the most interesting among them to his table.” Meerscheidt-Hüllessem and his associates also showed solicitude for gay victims of blackmail, and went so far as to offer counselling. In 1900, the commissioner wrote to Hirschfeld expressing pride that he had saved people from “shame and death”: blackmail and suicide. A week later, in a grim irony, this enigmatic protector killed himself—not on account of his homosexual associations but because he was exposed as having taken bribes from a millionaire banker accused of statutory rape.

Hirschfeld’s Scientific-Humanitarian Committee probably could not have existed without Meerscheidt-Hüllessem’s tacit approval. (The commissioner was invited to the organization’s first meeting, although he probably did not attend.) Hirschfeld, who was born in 1868, a year after Ulrichs’s speech in Munich, began his radical activities in 1896, publishing a pamphlet titled “Sappho and Socrates,” which told of the suicide of a gay man who felt coerced into marriage. The next year, Hirschfeld launched the Committee, and soon afterward reprinted Ulrichs’s writings. Building on Ulrichs’s insight that same-sex desire was a congenital trait, Hirschfeld developed a minutely variegated conception of human sexuality, with a spectrum of “sexual intermediaries” appearing between the poles of the purely male and the purely female. He felt certain that if homosexuality were understood as a biological inevitability then the prejudice against it would disappear. “Through Science to Justice” was his group’s motto.

Beachy is candid about Hirschfeld’s limitations. His scientific work blended research and advocacy to an uncomfortable degree, and some of his confederates employed suspect methodologies. (One associate’s study of male prostitution in Berlin involved sleeping with at least one hustler.) But Hirschfeld’s knowledge of sexuality was vast, and Beachy has several incisive pages comparing him favorably to Sigmund Freud, whose influence was, of course, far greater. Freud rejected the congenital hypothesis, believing homosexuality to be a mutation of childhood development. Although Freud professed sympathy for gay people, American psychoanalysts later fostered the destructive notion that homosexuality could be cured through therapy. Freud was grandly systematic in his thinking; Hirschfeld was messily empirical. The latter got closer to the intricate reality of human sexuality.

Hirschfeld had enemies in Berlin’s gay scene. His interest in effeminacy among homosexual men, his attention to lesbianism, and his fascination with cross-dressing among both gay and straight populations (he coined the word “transvestism”) offended men who believed that their lust for fellow-males, especially for younger ones, made them more virile than the rest of the population. Being married to a woman was not seen as incompatible with such proclivities. In 1903, the malcontents, led by the writers Adolf Brand and Benedict Friedlaender, formed a group called Gemeinschaft der Eigenen, or Society of Self-Owners, the name referencing a concept from the anarchist philosophy of Max Stirner. Der Eigene, Brand’s magazine, became their mouthpiece, mixing literary-philosophical musings with mildly pornographic photographs of boys throwing javelins. In the same camp was the writer Hans Blüher, who argued that eroticism was a bonding force in male communities; Blüher made a particular study of the Wandervogel movement, a band of nature-hiking youth. Nationalism, misogyny, and anti-Semitism were rampant in these masculinity-obsessed circles, and Hirschfeld’s Jewishness became a point of contention. He was deemed too worldly, too womanly, insufficiently devoted to the glistening Aryan male.

Beachy celebrates the inclusivity of Hirschfeld, who welcomed feminists into his coalition. Unfortunately, women are largely absent from “Gay Berlin.” There is no mention, for example, of the theatre and music critic Theo Anna Sprüngli, who, in 1904, spoke to the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee on the subject of “Homosexuality and the Women’s Movement,” helping to inaugurate a parallel movement of lesbian activism. Sex between women was never explicitly outlawed in imperial Germany—Paragraph 175, the anti-sodomy law, applied only to men—but lesbians found it no easier to live an open life. Employing the alias Anna Rüling, Sprüngli proposed that the gay-rights and feminist movements “aid each other reciprocally”; the principles at stake in both struggles, she wrote, were freedom, equality, and “self-determination.” References to George Sand and Clara Schumann in her speech betray an essentially Romantic vision.

This story has a melancholy epilogue, as the historian Christiane Leidinger has discovered. After Sprüngli gave her historic speech—one that may have exacerbated the split between the “masculinist” and the “sexological” factions of the gay movement, as Beachy calls them—she said nothing more about lesbianism. Instead, she fell into a conventional, even conservative, journalistic career, adopting a jingoistic tone during the First World War and concealing her radical past in the Nazi era. Perhaps she remained as openly lesbian as circumstances permitted; almost nothing is known of her later life. Yet her sudden silence suggests how quickly gains can slip away.

During the golden years of the Weimar Republic, which occupy the last chapters of “Gay Berlin,” gays and lesbians achieved an almost dizzying degree of visibility in popular culture. They could see themselves onscreen in films like “Mädchen in Uniform” and “Different from the Others”—a tale of a gay violinist driven to suicide, with Hirschfeld featured in the supporting role of a wise sexologist. Disdainful representations of gay life were not only lamented but also protested; Beachy points out that when a 1927 Komische Oper revue called “Strictly Forbidden” mocked gay men as effeminate, a demonstration at the theatre prompted the Komische Oper to remove the offending skit. The openness of Berlin’s gay scene attracted visitors from more benighted lands; Christopher Isherwood lived in the city from 1929 to 1933, enjoying the easy availability of hustlers, who, in Beachy’s book, have a somewhat exhausting chapter to themselves.

Within the gay community, the masculinist-sexological split persisted. Hirschfeld was now at the helm of the Institute for Sexual Science: a museum, clinic, and research center, housed in a handsome villa in the Tiergarten district. Widening his sphere of interests, Hirschfeld offered sex advice to straight couples, advocated more liberal divorce laws and birth control, collaborated on the first primitive sex-change operations, and generally acquired a reputation as the “Einstein of sex,” as he was called on an American lecture tour. To the masculinists, Hirschfeld appeared to be running a sexual freak show. Adolf Brand published crude anti-Semitic attacks on Hirschfeld in the pages of Der Eigene. Some of Brand’s associates were flirting with Nazism, and not just in a metaphorical sense; one of them later became the lover of Ernst Röhm, the head of the Brown Shirts.

After the First World War, a new figure entered the fray: Friedrich Radszuweit, an entrepreneur who established a network of gay publications, including the first lesbian magazine, Die Freundin. Radszuweit hoped to heal divisions and establish a true mass movement—one from which he stood to make a great deal of money. In 1923, he took the lead in forming the Human Rights League, a consortium of gay groups. Distancing himself both from Hirschfeld’s emphasis on gender ambiguity and from Brand’s predatory focus on boys, Radszuweit purveyed a vision of “homosexual bourgeois respectability,” in Beachy’s words. Fearful of displaying political bias, Radszuweit attempted to placate the Nazis, believing that they, too, would see the light.

In fact, the driving force behind the Brown Shirts was a member of the Human Rights League, as Radszuweit must have known. Röhm never made a secret of his homosexuality, and Hitler chose to overlook it; although the Nazi leader had denounced Hirschfeld and the gay movement as early as 1920, he was too dependent on Röhm’s army of thugs to reject him. In the early thirties, German leftists tried to tarnish the Nazis by publicizing Röhm’s affiliations and affairs. Brand, having finally grasped the ruthlessness of Hitler’s methods, joined the assault. “The most dangerous enemies of our fight are often homosexuals themselves,” he sagely observed. Hirschfeld, though, disliked the campaign against Röhm, and the conflation of homosexuality and Fascism that it implied. The practice of outing political figures had surfaced before—notably, during a prewar scandal surrounding Kaiser Wilhelm II’s adviser Prince Philipp zu Eulenburg-Hertefeld—and Hirschfeld had criticized the tactic, which was known as the “path over corpses.”

Nazism brought Berlin’s gay idyll to a swift, savage end. Hirschfeld had left Germany in 1930, to undertake a worldwide lecture tour; wisely, he never returned. In May, 1933, a little more than three months after Hitler became Reich Chancellor, the Institute for Sexual Science was ransacked, and much of its library went up in flames during Joseph Goebbels’s infamous book-burning in the Opernplatz. Röhm, who became less indispensable once Hitler took power, was slaughtered in 1934, during the Night of the Long Knives, the first great orgy of Nazi bloodlust. Hirschfeld, who had watched the destruction of his life’s work on a newsreel in Paris, died the next year. Brand somehow survived until 1945, when he fell victim to Allied bombs. Vestiges of Paragraph 175 lingered in the German legal code until 1994.

In the decades after the Second World War, German historiography fell under the sway of the Sonderweg, or “special path,” school, which held that the country was all but doomed to Nazism, because of the perennial weakness of its bourgeois liberal factions. Since then, many historians have turned against that deterministic way of thinking, and “Gay Berlin” follows suit: Germany here emerges as a chaotic laboratory of liberal experiment. Beachy’s cultivation of the “other” Germany, heterogeneous and progressive, is especially welcome, because the Anglophone literary marketplace fetishizes all things Nazi. Appearing in the same month as “Gay Berlin,” last fall, were “Artists Under Hitler,” “Hitler’s Europe Ablaze,” “Atatürk in the Nazi Imagination,” “The Jew Who Defeated Hitler,” “Islam and Nazi Germany’s War,” “Nazi Germany and the Arab World,” and—an Amazon Kindle special—“The Adolf Hitler Cookbook.”

At the same time, Beachy enlarges our understanding of how the international gay-rights movement eventually prospered, despite the catastrophic setbacks that it experienced not only in Nazi Germany but also in mid-century America. Significantly, it was a German immigrant, Henry Gerber, who first brought the fight for gay rights to America, in the nineteen-twenties; Gerber’s short-lived Society for Human Rights, in Chicago, took inspiration from Hirschfeld and perhaps lifted its name from Radszuweit’s group. The Human Rights Campaign, a powerhouse of contemporary gay politics, which was first formed as a political action committee, in 1980, also echoes the German nomenclature, intentionally or not. Furthermore, Radszuweit’s determination to project a well-behaved, middle-class image anticipated the strategy that has allowed the H.R.C. and other organizations to achieve startling victories in recent years. German homosexuals—especially well-to-do men—began to win acceptance when they demanded equal treatment and otherwise conformed to prevailing mores. In this respect, Germany in the period from 1867 to 1933 bears a striking, perhaps unsettling, resemblance to twenty-first-century America.

I closed “Gay Berlin” with a deepened fondness for Hirschfeld, that prolix and imprecise thinker who liked to pose in a white lab coat and acquired the nickname Aunt Magnesia. The good doctor had a vision that went far beyond the victory of gay rights, narrowly defined; he preached the gorgeousness of difference, of deviations from the norm. From the beginning, he insisted on the idiosyncrasy of sexual identity, resisting any attempt to press men and women into fixed categories. To Hirschfeld, gender was an unstable, fluctuating entity; the male and the female were “abstractions, invented extremes.” He once calculated that there were 43,046,721 possible combinations of sexual characteristics, then indicated that the number was probably too small. He remains ahead of his time. ♦

This article appears in the print edition of the January 26, 2015, issue.

References

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: 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: The Photo That Changed The Face Of HIV/AIDS!

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

By Savannah Cox

Published August 1, 2015

Updated July 18, 2017

Source: Time

Nearly 25 years ago, David Kirby lay on the cusp of death. Kirby, 32, had nearly reached the end of his fatal fight against HIV/AIDS when journalism student Therese Frare took the photo seen above.

In the photo, Kirby’s gaze appears vacant; he is a man resigned to a fate that his family–also broken by HIV/AIDS–just cannot bring itself to see. For many, the raw anguish radiating from this photo exemplified the tragedy of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, which at this point in time had struck millions around the world.

The photo, which was later published in Life and then used by clothing company United Colors of Benetton in an advertising campaign, is said to have changed the face of AIDS.

When published, public understanding of HIV/AIDS was minimal. Many thought the disease confined its victims to those who identified as homosexual; few considered the damage it inevitably inflicted on an AIDS victim’s family. This photo helped change that.

Frare recently sat down with Time to discuss the photo, and her memories of living through–and documenting–a span of years that devastated countless families. We provide an excerpt below:

“I started grad school at Ohio University in Athens in January 1990. Right away, I began volunteering at the Pater Noster House, an AIDS hospice in Columbus. In March I started taking photos there and got to know the staff — and one volunteer, in particular, named Peta — who were caring for David and the other patients.

On the day David died, I was visiting Peta. Some of the staff came in to get Peta so he could be with David, and he took me with him. I stayed outside David’s room, minding my own business, when David’s mom came out and told me that the family wanted me to photograph people saying their final goodbyes.

I went in and stood quietly in the corner, barely moving, watching and photographing the scene. Afterwards I knew, I absolutely knew, that something truly incredible had unfolded in that room, right in front of me.

Early on, I asked David if he minded me taking pictures, and he said, ‘That’s fine, as long as it’s not for personal profit.’ To this day I don’t take any money for the picture.

But David was an activist, and he wanted to get the word out there David Kirby was born and raised in a small town in Ohio. A gay activist in the 1980s, he learned in the late Eighties — while he was living in California and estranged from his family — that he had contracted HIV. He got in touch with his parents and asked if he could come home; he wanted, he said, to die with his family around him. The Kirbys welcomed their son back.about how devastating AIDS was to families and communities. Honestly, I think he was a lot more in tune with how important these photos might become.”

David Kirby was born and raised in a small town in Ohio. A gay activist in the 1980s, he learned in the late Eighties — while he was living in California and estranged from his family — that he had contracted HIV. He got in touch with his parents and asked if he could come home; he wanted, he said, to die with his family around him. The Kirbys welcomed their son back.

Peta, for his part, was an extraordinary (and sometimes extraordinarily difficult) character. Born Patrick Church, Peta was “half-Native American and half-White,” Frare says, “a caregiver and a client at Pater Noster, a person who rode the line between genders and one of the most amazing people I’ve ever met.”

“On the day David died, I was visiting Peta,” Frare, who today lives and works in Seattle, told LIFE. “Some of the staff came in to get Peta so he could be with David, and he took me with him. I stayed outside David’s room, minding my own business, when David’s mom came out and told me that the family wanted me to photograph people saying their final goodbyes. I went in and stood quietly in the corner, barely moving, watching and photographing the scene. Afterwards I knew, I absolutely knew, that something truly incredible had unfolded in that room, right in front of me.”

“Early on,” Frare says of her time at Pater Noster House, “I asked David if he minded me taking pictures, and he said, ‘That’s fine, as long as it’s not for personal profit.’ To this day I don’t take any money for the picture. But David was an activist, and he wanted to get the word out there about how devastating AIDS was to families and communities. Honestly, I think he was a lot more in tune with how important these photos might become.”

Frare pauses, and laughs. “At the time, I was like, Besides, who’s going to see these pictures, anyway?”

Over the past 20 years, by some estimates, as many as one billion people have seen the now-iconic Frare photograph that appeared in LIFE, as it was reproduced in hundreds of newspaper, magazine and TV stories — all over the world — focusing on the photo itself and (increasingly) on the controversies that surrounded it.

Frare’s photograph of David’s family comforting him in the hour of his death earned accolades, including a World Press Photo Award, when published in LIFE, but it became positively notorious two years later when Benetton used a colorized version of the photo in a provocative ad campaign. Individuals and groups ranging from Roman Catholics (who felt the picture mocked classical imagery of Mary cradling Christ after his crucifixion) to AIDS activists (furious at what they saw as corporate exploitation of death in order to sell T-shirts) voiced outrage. England’s high-profile AIDS charity, the Terrence Higgins Trust, called for a ban of the ad, labeling it offensive and unethical, while powerhouse fashion magazines like Elle, Vogue and Marie Claire refused to run it. Calling for a boycott of Benetton, London’s Sunday Times argued that “the only way to stop this madness is to vote with our cash.”

“We never had any reservations about allowing Benetton to use Therese’s photograph in that ad,” David Kirby’s mother, Kay, told LIFE.com. “What I objected to was everybody who put their two cents in about how outrageous they thought it was, when nobody knew anything about us, or about David. My son more or less starved to death at the end,” she said, bluntly, describing one of the grisly side effects of the disease. “We just felt it was time that people saw the truth about AIDS, and if Benetton could help in that effort, fine. That ad was the last chance for people to see David — a marker, to show that he was once here, among us.”

David Kirby passed away in April 1990, at the age of 32, not long after Frare began shooting at the hospice. But in an odd and ultimately revelatory twist, it turned out that she spent much more time with Peta, who himself was HIV-positive while caring for David, than she did with David himself. She gained renown for her devastating, compassionate picture of one young man dying of AIDS, but the photographs she made after David Kirby’s death revealed an even more complex and compelling tale.

Frare photographed Peta over the course of two years, until he, too, died of AIDS in the fall of 1992.

“Peta was an incredible person,” Frare says. Twenty years on, the affection in her voice is palpable. “He was dealing with all sorts of dualities in his life — he was half-Native American and half-White, a caregiver and a client at Pater Noster, a person who rode the line between genders, all of that — but he was also very, very strong.”

As Peta’s health deteriorated in early 1992 — as his HIV-positive status transitioned to AIDS — the Kirbys began to care for him, in much the same way that Peta had cared for their son in the final months of his life. Peta had comforted David; spoken to him; held him; tried to relieve his pain and loneliness through simple human contact — and the Kirbys resolved to do the same for Peta, to be there for him as his strength and his vitality faded.

Kay Kirby told LIFE.com that she “made up my mind when David was dying and Peta was helping to care for him, that when Peta’s time came — and we all knew it would come — that we would care for him. There was never any question. We were going to take care of Peta. That was that.

“For a while there,” Kay remembers, “I took care of Peta as often as I could. It was hard, because we couldn’t afford to be there all the time. But Bill would come in on weekends and we did the best we could in the short time we had.”

Kay describes Peta, as his condition worsened in late 1991 and 1992, as a “very difficult patient. He was very clear and vocal about what he wanted, and when he wanted it. But during all the time we cared for him, I can only recall once when he yelled at me. I yelled right back at him — he knew I was not going to let him get away with that sort of behavior — and we went on from there.”

Bill and Kay Kirby were, in effect, the house parents for the home where Peta spent his last months.

“My husband and I were hurt by the way David was treated in the small country hospital near our home where he spent time after coming back to Ohio,” Kay Kirby said. “Even the person who handed out menus refused to let David hold one [for fear of infection]. She would read out the meals to him from the doorway. We told ourselves that we would help other people with AIDS avoid all that, and we tried to make sure that Peta never went through it.”

“I had worked for newspapers for about 12 years already when I went to grad school,” Therese Frare says, “and was very interested in covering AIDS by the time I got to Columbus. Of course, it was difficult to find a community of people with HIV and AIDS willing to be photographed back then, but when I was given the okay to take pictures at Pater Noster I knew I was doing something that was important — important to me, at least. I never believed that it would lead to being published in LIFE, or winning awards, or being involved in anything controversial — certainly nothing as epic as the Benetton controversy. In the end, the picture of David became the one image that was seen around the world, but there was so much more that I had tried to document with Peta, and the Kirbys and the other people at Pater Noster. And all of that sort of got lost, and forgotten.”

Lost and forgotten — or, at the very least, utterly overshadowed — until LIFE.com contacted Frare, and asked her where the photo of David Kirby came from.

“You know, at the time the Benetton ad was running, and the controversy over their use of my picture of David was really raging, I was falling apart,” Frare says. “I was falling to pieces. But Bill Kirby told me something I never forgot. He said, ‘Listen, Therese. Benetton didn’t use us, or exploit us. We used them. Because of them, your photo was seen all over the world, and that’s exactly what David wanted.’ And I just held on to that.”

After the Benetton controversy finally subsided, Therese Frare went on to other work, other photography, freelancing from Seattle for the New York Times, major magazines and other outlets. While the world has become more familiar with HIV and AIDS in the intervening years, Frare’s photograph went a long way toward dispelling some of the fear and, at times, willful ignorance that had accompanied any mention of the disease. Barb Cordle, volunteer director at Pater Noster when David Kirby was there, once said that Frare’s famous photo “has done more to soften people’s hearts on AIDS than any other I have ever seen. You can’t look at that picture and hate a person with AIDS. You just can’t.”

References

Gay History: When Hate Came To Town!

Article, Gay Interest, General Interest, History, Opinion Piece, Political, , , ,

My Thanks To Robert French, who posted this on Lost Gay Sydney:

This flyer, from the latter half of the 1970’s, turned up when a friend was sorting his personal papers recently.

Charming, isn’t it…not!

That such hate, such violence, such bile, such vitriol could exist in this world – let alone Australia – is almost beyond comprehension. Unfortunately, as a gay man, I am more than aware of its existence! Perhaps not quite as bad as it used to be back then, but don’t worry…it’s still there…hiding under rocks, and in dark corners, lurking down dank corridors!

The only good thing to be said about this is that the National Socialist Party had a very brief existence, was bogged down in disarray when it was around, and had very few members. These views, and the Nazi symbolism just don’t work in this country! A small blessing!

For, despite not finding roots here, the same hate has – and still does – exist in other countries, under many guises. Call it what you like, but it’s name is…disgust! That the lives of a very small social minority could foster such hate in someone shows more our strength as a community, for our lives go on, than your delusion that hate and discrimination will win out! A group of people who want nothing more than to be left alone to get on with their lives.

As a Buddhist, my road to enlightenment is pock-marked by people and events like this! I should feel sorrow for this person, look for the good in them! But I can’t with this sort of hate! It leaves a sour taste in the mouth, gets under your skin and leaves a savage itch that must be scratched to get it out! There is no good here…no redemption!

I can’t help but wonder (wish?) what kharma had in store for this person, but I reckon it would have been swift, and brutal! It tends to be unforgiving!

There is no place for this kind of hate in this world! It can only weigh you down, consume you, bar your way to progressing yourself down your path! It twists and distorts, poisons and bruises your soul! It is a lesson for all of us that – in the long run- hate cannot…and will not…win out!

Tim Alderman 2019

National Socialist Party of Australia

The National Socialist Party of Australia (NSPA) was a minor Australian neo-Nazi party that operated between 1967 and early 1970s. It was formed in 1967 as a more moderate breakaway from the Australian National Socialist Party (ANSP). The NSPA was led by Ted Cawthron

Cawthron and Frank Molnar launched the party in late 1967, explicitly rejecting the “jackbooted ‘Nazi’ image” associated with Arthur Smith’s ANSP. They focused particularly on Smith’s criminal convictions from a 1965 raid on ANSP headquarters. Although there were a number of attempts to reunite the two parties, the NSPA eventually attracted a number of other Australian national socialists disenchanted with Smith’s leadership.[2]

In May 1968, Smith resigned as leader of the ANSP and his successor, Eric Wenberg, merged the ANSP into the NSPA. Wenberg was accepted into a leadership position in the party, alongside Molnar as chairman, Cawthron as director of publications, Les Ritchie, and John Stewart. Early in 1969, however, Cawthron and Molnar fell out, with Molnar accusing Cawthron of being a closet Bolshevist. Molnar was expelled from the party.[3]

In early 1970, the party’s third congress in Canberra was attended by around 30 members. Later in the year, Cawthron became the first national socialist in Australia to run for public office, contesting the May 1970 ACT by-election. Cawthron came last out of seven candidates with 173 votes (0.32%),[4] but claimed to be content with the result considering the minimal nature of the NSPA’s campaign.

The party also ran three Senate teams for the 1970 Senate election: John Stewart and Michael McCormick in New South Wales, Ken Gibbett and Kevin Thompson in Queensland, and Cass and Katrina Young in Victoria. The Queensland team won the first place on the ballot paper and benefited from the donkey vote and received over 10,000 votes (1.51%), while the results for the other teams were insignificant.[5] The national NSPA vote was 24,017 (0.43%).[6] However, the actual support may be understated as NSPA did not field candidates nation-wide.

By 1972 the party was collapsing. The strong Queensland branch collapsed through infighting, and the involvement of three party members in a bomb attack in April on the Queensland offices of the Communist Party of Australia.[7] Establishment of a Sydney branch was frustrated by standover tactics of former members of ANSP. The Western Australian branch had collapsed and the ACT branch went into total eclipse. Only Victorian and South Australian branches survived the initial schism for a time, and even South Australia had to import a candidate from Melbourne.[5]

Jim Saleam, then only 17 years of age, was deputy leader of the party between 1972 and 1975, after Molnar was expelled from the party, under Cawthron‘s leadership. After the demise of NSPA, Saleam went on to found National Action in 1982, which existed until 1991, and then the Australia First Party in 1996.

Australia First Party

The Australia First Party (NSW) Incorporated (normally referred to as Australia First Party or AFP) is an Australian far-right political party founded in 1996 by Graeme Campbell and currently led by Jim Saleam. The policies of Australia First have been described as nationalistic, anti-multicultural and economic protectionist. The party’s logo includes the Southern Cross of the Eureka Flag.

Saleam is a convicted criminal, a former member of the neo-Nazi National Socialist Party of Australia and founder of the militant Australian white supremacist group National Action.

Campbell era

The Australia First Party was established in June 1996 by Graeme Campbell, and registered as a political party by the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) on 13 September 1996. Campbell had been the federal Labor member for Kalgoorlie since 1980. However, he was disendorsed by the ALP in 1995, and continued to sit in parliament as an independent. He was reelected as an independent at the 1996 Australian federal election, and formed AFP soon after. However, AFP was not successful at the 1998 federal election and Campbell lost his seat, blaming his loss on Australia First being eclipsed by One Nation. In 2009, he claimed that, if not for the presence of a One Nation candidate, he would have picked up an additional 8.5% of the vote, which would have been enough to keep him in the race.

Campbell remained Australia First’s leader until June 2001, when he left the party to stand (unsuccessfully) as a One Nation Senate candidate in Western Australia. At the 2004 federal election, Campbell attempted unsuccessfully to regain his old federal seat as an independent. He again stood for the Senate in Western Australia at the 2007 federal election as an independent, but only achieved 0.13% of the vote.[3]

Salem era

Saleam has served two jail terms, one for property offences and fraud in 1984 and one for being an accessory before the fact in 1989 for his involvement in the shotgun attack on the home of African National Congress representative Eddie Funde.[4]

In 2002, Jim Saleam ran as an AFP candidate for a seat on Marrickville council, New South Wales, claiming “to oppose Marrickville being a Refugee Welcome Zone”. Later that year the party formed its youth wing, the Patriotic Youth League. AFP was deregistered by the AEC on 13 August 2004 for failing to nominate candidates at elections for four years. By 2007, Saleam had reestablished AFP, and in July 2009, Saleam claimed that the party had 500 members, and announced that he was registering its New South Wales branch, Australia First Party (NSW) Incorporated, with the AEC. The branch was registered by AEC on 13 June 2010, in time for the 2010 federal election.[5]

At the 2013 federal election, AFP was involved in Glenn Druery’s Minor Party Alliance. Saleam stood in the seat of Cook on a platform to end refugee intakes, running against Scott Morrison, and received 617 votes, or 0.67% of the vote.[6]

On 14 July 2015, the AEC de-registered the AFP due to its failure to demonstrate the required 500 members. It was re-registered on 1 March 2016 as “Australia First Party (NSW) Incorporated”.[7]

AFP contested the 2016 federal election, without any success. Saleam stood in the seat of Lindsay, New South Wales, receiving 1068 votes or 1.2% of the vote. In October 2016, the Australia First Party joined with the Australian Protectionist Party, Nationalist Alternative, Eureka Youth League, and Hellenic Nationalists of Australia to form the Australian Coalition of Nationalists, as a framework for cooperation between these entities.[8]

Saleam also stood for AFP in the 2018 Longman by-election, receiving 709 votes or 0.8% of the vote.[9]

Saleam stood in the seat of Cootamundra, New South Wales, in the 2017 by-election as an independent, though still a member of Australia First, as the party was not registered for NSW elections. He received 453 votes, 1% of the total. He again stood in the seat at the 2019 New South Wales state election as an independent. Saleam’s platform included the reintroduction of the White Australia policy and opposition to Chinese immigration.[10]

On 2 May 2014 the party aligned itself with the Golden Dawn party of Greece, a Metaxist fascist organisation, and on 24 July 2016, the party endorsed former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan David Duke for the 2016 Louisiana election via Twitter.[11]

Policies and electoral performance

The party stands on a nationalist, anti-multicultural and economic protectionist platform.[12]

The Australia First Party has been largely unsuccessful electorally. It has been elected to two local council seats, one in City of Penrith and one in City of Prospect. Saleam ran as a candidate in the 2018 Longman by-election, receiving 684 votes or 0.8% of the vote.[13]

In the 2019 Australian federal election, the party put up three candidates: Susan Jakobi in Lalor, Peter Schubeck for Longman, and Michael Chehoff for Swan.[14]

Activities

General

The Australia First Party’s activities have mainly consisted of distributing pamphlets and protesting. AFP members have repeatedly distributed racist pamphlets and stickers, on some occasions attempting to deny having done so in the aftermath. The AFP have also held numerous rallies, most of which have been labelled racist by the media and opponents, some of these rallies have ended in violent altercations. AFP claim that 150 members and supporters attended the Cronulla Riot.[15][16][17]

Patriotic Youth League

The Patriotic Youth League (PLY) was formed in 2002 by former One Nation activist Stuart McBeth as the youth wing of the Australia First Party. It has been described by numerous media commentators and academics as a far right, white nationalist youth organisation that has been linked to neo-Nazism, including the now-disbanded US-based Volksfront, and hate crimes.[18]

Nathan Sykes arrest

On 20 March 2019, Australia First member Nathan Sykes, described as a “prolific online troll and a lieutenant of Australia’s most prominent white supremacist Jim Saleam”, was charged with at least eight offences, after allegations that he made repeated and detailed violent threats to Melbourne journalist and lawyer Luke McMahon. He had previously made numerous racist and intimidating online comments targeting high-profile Australians, including ex-Racial Discrimination Commissioner Tim Soutphommasane, activist Mariam Veiszadeh and Guardian journalist Van Badham.[19]

Racism allegations

Australia First Party is as of March 2019 led by convicted criminal and neo-Nazi Jim Saleam. Saleam was a member of the short-lived National Socialist Party of Australia as a teenager during the early 1970s and the founder of the militant Australian white supremacist group National Action.[20][12]

Australia First also endorsed independent candidate John Moffat, who was later criticised by B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation Commission chairman Michael Lipshutz, Cronulla Liberal MP Malcolm Kerr and Lebanese Muslim Association spokesman Jihad Dib for “inciting racial hatred”.[21]

On 10 July 2009, the Sydney Morning Herald reported that David Palmer, the Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan in Australia, said several Klan members had secretly joined Australia First. Palmer said Australia First had been identified as an Aryan party and would prove useful “in case the ethnics get out of hand and they need sorting out.” The Australia First Party later endorsed former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan David Duke for the 2016 Louisiana election via Twitter.[22]

In July 2010, it was reported that Australia First was distributing leaflets comparing Africans to monkeys, and “blaming Africans for the social problems in Sydney’s west”. Australia First denied responsibility for the leaflets, claiming that they had been distributed in an attempt to discredit the party.[23]

The Australia First Party used Sinophobia and fear of “African Australians” in their campaign during the 2019 election.[14][24]

References

^1 Henderson, Peter (November 2005). “Frank Browne and the Neo-Nazis”. Labour History (89): 73–86. JSTOR 27516076.

2 ^ Harcourt, David (1972). Everyone Wants to be Fuehrer: National Socialism in Australia and New Zealand. Angus and Robertson. pp. 25–28. ISBN 978-0207124150.

3 ^ Harcourt, pp. 31-32.

4 ^ Historic Glebe mansion Lyndhurst, once Australia’s Nazi Party headquarters, on market for $7.5m

5 ^ a b Harcourt, David (2007). “An assault on the jew‐democratic nut‐mad house”. Politics. 8: 111–112. doi:10.1080/00323267308401333.

6 ^ Harcourt, pp. 36-39.

7 ^ Brisbane’s Radical Books

Australia First Party

^ 1 “Identity Independence Freedom”. 14 September 2012. Retrieved 16 March 2016.

2 ^ “Policy 2: Rebuild Australian Manufacturing Industries”. Australia First Party. Retrieved 29 June 2016.

3 ^ Cambell Era:

• Scott Bennett (16 February 1999). “The Decline in Support for Australian Major Parties and the Prospect of Minority Government”. Archived from the original on 13 July 2010. Retrieved 24 January 2010.

• ?Antony Green (2007). “Senate Results Western Australia”. Federal Election 2007. ABC News. Retrieved 24 January 2010.

• Australian Electoral Commission

• Antony Green (21 December 2007). “Kalgoorlie”. Australia Votes 2007. ABC News. Retrieved 24 January 2010.

4 ^ Gibson, Jano; Frew, Wendy (12 January 2008). “No apology for white Australia policy”. The Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved 4 February 2013.

5 ^ Marrickville Council:

• West, Andrew (29 February 2004). “White separatist takes on Marrickville”. The Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved 14 July 2006.

• Jensen, Erik (9 July 2009). “Right-wing genie out of the bottle”. Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved 9 July 2009.

• “Parties and Representatives”. AEC redirection page – Australian Electoral Commission.

6 ^ 2013 election:

• “Bitter dispute erupts over Senate preferences in Queensland”. ABC. 5 September 2013.

• “Alliance of micro parties boosts odds for likes of One Nation or Shooters and Fishers gaining Senate spot through preferences”. Daily Telegraph. 5 September 2013.

7 ^ Registration:

• “Deregistered/renamed political parties”. Australian Electoral Commission. Retrieved 14 July 2015.

• “Australia First Party (NSW) Incorporated”. Australian Electoral Commission. 7 March 2016. Retrieved 16 March 2016.

• “Party Formation”. Australia First Party. Retrieved 16 May 2018.

8 ^ The formation of the Australian Coalition of Nationalists

9 ^ Longman by-election:

• Murray, Oliver (26 April 2016). “Far-right-wing parties after your vote on election day”. The Daily Telegraph. Retrieved 3 June 2016.

• Pollard, Krystyna (19 May 2016). “Controversial Saleam to stand for Australia First in Lindsay”. Penrith City Gazette. Retrieved 3 June 2016.

• 26, scheme=AGLSTERMS.AglsAgent; corporateName=Australian Electoral Commission; address=50 Marcus Clarke Street, Canberra, ACT 2600; contact=13 23. “House of Representatives division information”. Australian Electoral Commission. Retrieved 29 July 2018.

10 ^ Cootamundra election:

• Grey, Lachlan (27 August 2017). “Australia First leader Jim Saleam to contest Cootamundra by-election in November”. Cootamundra Herald. Retrieved 10 September 2017.

• “Right wing extremist makes election bid in sleepy NSW ‘cherry capital'”.^ 11^Golden Dawn:

• Gemenis, Kostas; Nezi, Roula (January 2012), The 2011 Political Parties Expert Survey in Greece (PDF), University of Twente, p. 4

• Repoussi, Maria (2009), “Battles over the national past of Greeks: The Greek History Textbook Controversy 2006–2007” (PDF), Geschichte für heute. Zeitschrift für historisch-politische Bildung (1): 5

• Grumke, Thomas (2003), “The transatlantic dimension of right-wing extremism”, Human Rights Review, 4 (4): 56–72, doi:10.1007/s12142-003-1021-x, “On October 24, 1998 the Greek right-wing extremist organisation Chrisi Avgi (Golden Dawn) was the host for the 5th European Youth Congress in Thessaloniki.”

• “Australia FirstParty (@AustFirstParty)”. Retrieved 1 February 2018.

12 ^ a b Greason, David (1994), I was a teenage fascist, pp.283,284,289, McPhee Gribble

13 ^ By-elections:

• “Profile of Cr. Bruce Preece”. City of Prospect. Archived from the original on 19 September 2006. Retrieved 20 January 2007.

• “2006 Local Government Election Results” (PDF). Local Government Association of South Australia. p. 47. Archived from the original (PDF) on 30 June 2007. Retrieved 20 January 2007.

• Schiller, Emma (14 September 2012). “Australia First Party council candidate elected”. Penrith Press. Retrieved 22 September 2012.

14 ^ a b Hood, John (23 January 2019). “Susan Jakobi, Australia First Party for Lalor in 2019”. Australia First Party. Retrieved 14 May 2019.

15 ^ Australia First Denies Racist Mailbox FlyersArchived 20 November 2010 at the Wayback Machine

16 ^ Baker, Richard (14 December 2005). “Australia First: reclaiming the agenda”. The Age. p. 11. Archived from the original on 3 February 2006. Retrieved 25 February 2006.

17 ^ Mulcair, John (10 October 2006). “Rally held at MP’s office”. St. George and Sutherland Shire Leader (Sutherland edition). p. 11. Archived from the original on 7 November 2006. Retrieved 13 October 2006.

18 ^ Patriotic Youth League:

• “Neo-Nazi link to campus anti-foreigner campaign”. Sydney Morning Herald. 2 December 2004. Retrieved 1 July 2010.

• Adam Bennett (19 December 2004). “Race hate group unstuck”. Retrieved 17 May 2018.

• Danny Ben-Moshe (2006). “The Far-Right and the 2005 Cronulla Riots in Sydney”. Retrieved 17 May 2018.

• Ewin Hannan; Richard Baker (13 December 2005). “Nationalists boast of their role on the beach”. Retrieved 17 May 2018.

• Sarah Price (29 August 2004). “Campus racism rises” The Sydney Morning Herald”.

19 ^ McKenzie, Nick; Baker, Richard (22 March 2019). “Police swoop on right-wing troll over alleged violent threats”. Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved 23 March 2019.

20 ^ West, Andrew (29 February 2004). “No Apology For White Australia Policy”. Sydney Morning Herald. Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved 4 February 2013.

21 ^ Roberts, Greg (5 January 2007). “Cronulla candidate campaigns for race hatred”. The Australian. p. 4. Retrieved 18 May 2011.

22 ^ Jensen, Erik (10 July 2009). “We have infiltrated party: KKK”. The Sydney Morning Herald. Fairfax. p. 1. Archived from the original (reprint) on 10 July 2009. Retrieved 10 July 2009.

23 ^ “Racist leaflets not ours: Australia First”. ABC Online. ABC. 27 July 2010. Archived from the original on 25 July 2010. Retrieved 31 July 2010.

24 ^ Campaign poster for Lalor with caption “No China city in Werribee”

Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Vatican Fashion – But Were Too Afraid (Or Too Ambivalent) To Ask!

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

APOLOGY: This is my second post of this blog…tidied up and re-edited. The first post had dot-points all over the place, and I have no reason why! Nothing I do gets rid of them, and the post just got messier and messier. The only way to fix the problem was to redo the entire post. So…here it is as it should be!

GAMMARELLI

His name never appears in the list of Italy’s top fashion designers, who bring worldwide prestige to the country’s high fashion, yet he left a deep mark, and that’s because he created the robes the Pope wore (and still wears).

His name was Annibale Gammarelli.

For over two hundred years the famous Gammarelli family have been at the heart of serving the clergy. From deacons to Popes everyone experiences the same courtesy and attention to detail.There is an old saying, ‘you get what you pay for’ this is certainly true here. Quality is at the heart of the service offered by the Gammarelli family.

Now, after the death of manager Annibale Gammeralli (July 2016), the business will pass to the hands of the sixth generation.

Established in 1798 by Giovanni Antonio Gammarelli, the “Ditta” was founded under Pius VI as a tailor for the Roman clergy. After Giovanni died, management of the shop passed to his son Filippo, and then to Filippo’s son Annibale.

In 1874 Annibale moved the shop from its original location to its current spot on Via Santa Chiara 34,  just steps away from the Pantheon. It’s located inside the building of the Pontifical Ecclesiastical Academy, the institute that forms future Vatican diplomats.

When Annibale died, his sons Bonaventura and Giuseppe decided to keep the name “Ditta Annibale Gammarelli” as a homage to their father – a name that has since become known to clergy throughout Italy and the world.

In an additional act of homage, Bonaventura decided to name his own son after his father: making the late Annibale Gammarelli the second to carry the name of the family business and to carry it forward.

Annibale passed away July 12 in Rome after a long career managing the sartorial workshop, leaving it in the care of his son Stefano Paolo and his nephews Maximillian and Lorenzo, who are the sixth generation to sew garments for the Pope.

During each conclave the Gammerellis are charged with making three white cassocks in different sizes –  small, medium and large – which sit ready and waiting for the new Successor of Peter.

And though Francis doesn’t use it, the white cassocks are always accompanied by the red mozzetta (the papal half-cape of choir dress that buttons in the front and covers the shoulders), as well as the white pellegrina (the buttonless white shoulder cape worn with a cassock and open in front), the white fascia (the waistband typically embroidered with the papal coat of arms, though Francis opted out of this), and the white zucchetto (or skullcap).

(A point worthy of noting is that Popes typically change cassocks more or less every two months, since the silver cross they wear oxidizes, leaving a stain on the white fabric).

In 2000 the Ditta Annnibale Gammarelli was added to the list of historic shops in the city of Rome, and is likely the oldest shop to still be managed by the direct descendants of its founder.

The shop has served thousands of priests and hundreds of bishops and cardinals, and sewn garments for the Roman Pontiffs since Blessed Pius IX, who was elected Bishop of Rome in 1846.

Photos of the past nine Popes decorate the walls inside the workshop, which will continue to dress Popes under the guidance of yet another generation of Gammarellis.

POPE SOCKS: A FAVOURITE ROMAN SOUVENIR

Deep in my heart I still believe that the best gift ever given to anyone in the history of the world was given by me, to my sister.

She was the lucky recipient of a combination bottle opener/toe-nail clipper in the shape of Pope John Paul II’s face.

But in case you missed it because the rock you are living under is pret-ty soundproof, Pope Francis is the new big deal around here.  That means his tailor is a big deal too.

Lest you believe those robes make themselves, I’ll let you in on a little secret: the pope gets all his sweet swag from Gammarelli.

Gammarelli is a small ecclesiastical shop near the Pantheon, that technically anyone can visit.

I say “technically” because, well, it is a little bit awkward to walk into a tiny store that sell exclusively priest clothes when you are dressed like an Italian teenager in ripped jeans and black tennis shoes.

Please, learn from me, and do not wear ripped jeans to Gammarelli’s.  They will be nice about it, but you might (like me) end up weirdly hovering outside while waiting for actual priests to leave the store.

Any. Ways.

The whole reason that you would want to visit the Pope’s tailor is so you can get your hands on Pope socks.

The actual socks that the Pope actually wears. (Bishops and Cardinals, too, no doubt).

Pope socks make an excellent Christmas present or unique Roman souvenir. (Or at least that is what I told my father-in-law when I gave him a pair over the holidays last year).

At €12 (approx A$19) a pop, you get a great story and some excellent quality socks.

HOW MUCH DOES IT COST TO GET OUTFITTED AS A CARDINAL?

On the eve of the next consistory, the six new cardinals may be finding that those red hats don’t come cheap.

On Saturday Benedict XVI will create six new cardinals, just nine months after last February’s consistory. Addressing the Synod’s bishops, the Pope explained the reasons for this “informed” choice of new cardinals, none of whom are European: this is a way for the Church to show its true universality after the batch of cardinals created during the last consistory, who were mainly Curia members or Italian.

The new cardinals are: James Harvey, the American head of the Papal Household; His Beatitude Bechara Boutros Raï, patriarch of the Maronite Church in Lebanon; His Beatitude Baselios Cleemis Thottunkal, head of the Syro-Mankar Church in India; Archbishop John Olorunfemi Onaiyekan of Abuja; Archbishop Rubén Salazar Gómez of Bogota, Colombia and Archbishop Luis Antonio Tagle of Manila in the Philippines.

Even though there are only six of them, Rome’s ecclesiastical tailors started work immediately on the vestments for the Church’s newly elected “princes”. When a bishop is created a cardinal, they stop wearing the violet coloured garments they donned previously and replace these with red coloured ones. Tailors prepare a list of all the garments and accessories cardinals will need. Those who wish to make a gift to a cardinal can consult this list.

Here are the current prices for items prepared by Rome’s most renowned tailor, Gammarelli, which has traditionally been the Pope’s tailor:

*The red mozzetta  which cardinals wear with their choral vestments, costs about 200 Euro (A$319). but the price goes up if one chooses cord buttons  – which are hand made and more sought after (they cost 20 Euro (A$32) each) – instead of cloth buttons.

*The red cassock costs approximately 800 Euro (A$1,274),

*while the three-cornered hat without a bow, which is typical for cardinals, can cost between 80 (A$127) and 120 Euro (A$191).

*The red and golden cord for the pectoral cross costs around 80 Euro (A$127): the price varies according to how elegant it is and the size of the bow on the back.

*The red fascia which is worn with the red cassock and the black cassock with red piping, costs about 200 Euro (A$319).

*A black cassock with red piping costs approximately 600 Euro (A$955),

*while the cardinal’s red zucchetto is priced at around 40 Euro (A$64).

*Finally, the red socks cost about 15 Euro (A$24) for a pair.

 Given that cardinals usually purchase two sets of each of these outfits, they can expect to spend around four to five thousand Euro(A$6371-7964) to complete their wardrobe. The cardinal’s ring is a gift from the Pope.

FROM LIPSTICK-RED LOAFERS TO PONTIFF BLING RINGS; THE MOST FASCINATING PAPAL FASHION CHOICES

On Wednesday, Catholic cardinals in Vatican City ended their 2013 search for the Next Top Catholic by electing Jorge Mario Bergoglio from Argentina as the world’s 266th pope. Bergoglio, who will go by Francis, greeted his following while wearing traditional white vestments, an austere crucifix, and understated glasses on the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica—a sartorial tabula rasa for the vintage accessories and bold-colored papal attire that may be to come. Because, as tradition-bound as the Catholic Church is, its leaders have historically exhibited a daring sense of style over their 2,000 years in the high office. (What other men outside the rap community can get away with red slippers, fur-trimmed caplets, ruby bling, white skullcaps, and engraved chalices?) In anticipation of Pope Francis defining his personal papal style, we look back at some of the highlights in pontiff fashion—the jaunty headware, flamboyant footwear, and designer eyewear that have separated the Carrie Bradshaws of Catholic leaders (Benedict XVI) from the Mirandas (John Paul II).

Red Papal Loafers: Pope Benedict XVI’s decision to incorporate these vintage papal accessories into his daily ensemble~ was so popular that Esquire named him “Accessorizer of the Year” in 2007. Following widespread reports that Pope Benedict’s footwear was Prada, Vatican officials felt the need to clarify that the pope was not a designer-clotheshorse with statements like “he wouldn’t know Gucci from Smoochi” and “[t]he pope, in summary, does not wear Prada, butChrist.”

Saturno, Fedora’s Cousin: While Popes Leo XII, John XXIII, John XIII, and John Paul II have all worn this style of wide-brimmed hat—named for Saturn’s rings, popular in summer, and often constructed from beaver hair or straw—no one looked quite as fly in the style as Benedict XVI. Here he is peacocking during a St. Peter’s Square audience.

Metal-Rimmed “Shop Teacher” Glasses: With thin, rectangular metal frames, John Paul I’s “cheaters” communicated several important messages: “Go easy on the bandsaw” and “Someone clean up that linseed-oil spill.” Although Pope Francis appeared at his first audience wearing a similar style—with what appear to be transition lenses—he had already ditched the outdated eyewear by mass on Thursday morning after what we can only assume was a Vatican-mandated She’s All That–style makeover. For cooler shades, refer to Benedict XVI’s Serengeti sunglasses—a popular brand with Val Kilmer and Jack Nicholson.

Rainbow Vestments: In 1997, French designer Jean-Charles de Castelbajac managed to convince John Paul II and several thousand priests to wear multicolored vestments for a World Youth Day state visit—because the rainbow represented God’s promise of peace to Noah. When Castelbajac also suggested that his design symbolized homosexual liberation, the Vatican responded that no one had a copyright on the rainbow—or, apparently, clever retorts on colorful fashion statements.

The Mozzetta: Of the five versions of the mozzetta—in essence, an elbow-length cape—worn by the pope, the most glam is the winter version, which is red velvet and lined with white ermine fur. (In a pinch, it could also be used as a Christmas-tree skirt.) While the mozzetta has been depicted in portraits of the pope since at least the 14th century, John Paul II—who, preferring cleaner lines, was the Calvin Klein of Catholic leaders—buried it in the back of the papal closet before you-know-who (Benedict XVI) revived the style.

The Camauro (Matching-Accessory Alert!): What better to pair with that red-velvet, white-ermine-fur-trimmed cape than a matching cap? The hat has been part of the papal wardrobe since the 12th century, when it was apparently much more in vogue. Benedict XVI once tried to pull off this look during a 2005 St. Peter’s Square appearance. When he received criticism from both the fashion and eyesight-capable communities—he was cruelly called “Santa Pope” and narrowly avoided appearing in *Us Weekly’*s “What Not to Wear” column—the pope made like a million excuses for the hat and vowed never to wear it again. “I was just cold, and I happen to have a sensitive head,” he was quoted as saying. “And I said, since the camauro is there [in the closet], let’s put it on. But I was really just trying to fight off the cold.” Sure, sure.

Papal Bling Rings: The most famous papal finger jewelry is the “Ring of the Fisherman,” which traditionally shows St. Peter (a fisherman) casting his net. A new ring is cast in gold for each pope and, in the past, was extravagantly destroyed in Thor-like fashion with a silver hammer at the end of his term. (Recognizing that this seems extreme, the Church now just scratches a cross-shaped mark into the ring.) Pope Pius IX, apparently the Paris Hilton of pontiffs, eschewed tradition by reportedly wearing a cameo of himself constructed almost entirely out of tiny diamonds. While it is rare for popes to wear self-portrait signets, it is not uncommon for popes to wear additional ecclesiastical rings set with stones—more ornate depending on the fashion of the era—and pectoral crosses affixed with diamonds, rubies, and sapphires.

The Papal Tiara: The most regal of the papal accessories, the pontiff’s ornamental headpiece seems less like a tiara and more like an extravagantly bejeweled conehead. The three-tiered style (“triregnum”) has many symbolic interpretations and for centuries was most famously exhibited during the traditionally six-hour-long coronation ceremonies. Because they are usually constructed from silver and enriched with, on some occasions, hundreds of jewels, the elaborate neck-straining devices can weigh upwards of 10 pounds. In somewhat fitting tiara trivia, the heaviest papal headpiece was provided by Napoleon, supposed inferiority-complex sufferer, who gifted Pope Pius VII an 18-pound crown. As an added bonus, the triregnum can be melted down for ransom money in emergency situations and used as an easy conversation starter in literally every situation imaginable. (Unlike the camauro, which Benedict XVI discovered the hard way. Learn from his mistake, Francis!).

PAPAL ACCESSORIES

MANTUM

The mantum or papal mantle differs little from an ordinary cope except that it is somewhat longer, and is fastened in the front by an elaborate morse. In earlier centuries it was red in colour; red, at the time being the papal color rather than white. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries the immantatio, or bestowal of the mantum on the newly elected pope, was regarded as specially symbolical of investiture with papal authority: Investio te de papatu romano ut praesis urbi et orbi, “I invest thee with the Roman papacy, that thou rule over the city and the world” were the words used in conferring it at the Papal Coronation. The use of the mantum by the popes ceased under Paul VI, following the reforms of Vatican II. This is the first of the traditional papal vestments restored by the current Pope, Benedict XVI. In the image above we see Pope Benedict XVI wearing the mantum. [Wikipedia]

CAPPELLO ROMANO

A cappello romano (literally Roman hat) or saturno (because it is reminiscent of the ringed planet Saturn) is a hat with a wide, circular brim and a rounded rim worn by Catholic clergy. It is made of either beaver fur or felt, and lined in white silk. Unlike many other articles of ecclesiastical attire, it serves no ceremonial purpose, being primarily a practical item, worn in private life. The pope wears a red cappello with gold cords. Cardinals formerly also had the privilege of wearing a red cappello, but this rule was overturned by Paul VI, and now Cardinals’ cappelli are black, as are those of all other clerics. [Wikipedia]

CAMAURO

In the image above we see Pope Julius II. This is another tradition restored by Benedict XVI. Papal camauros are of red wool or velvet with white ermine trim and are worn, usually in winter, in place of the zucchetto, which in turn takes the place of the biretta worn by other members of the clergy. Like the biretta (priest’s hat) worn by lower clergy and the mortarboard worn by academics, the camauro derives from the academic cap (the pileus), originally worn to protect tonsured clerical heads from the cold. It is often worn with a shoulder winter cloak (mozzetta), also sometimes fur-lined. The papal camauro fell into disuse after the death of Pope John XXIII in 19

PAPAL SLIPPERS

The Papal Slippers are a historical vestment of the Roman Catholic Church traditionally worn by the pope. They are a form of episcopal sandals worn by early bishops. Red in color to symbolize the blood of the martyrs, the slippers altogether symbolized the submission of the pope to the ultimate authority of Jesus Christ. Pope Paul VI discontinued their use in favor of the outdoor red papal shoes. Pope Benedict XVI has chosen to wear the red papal shoes, similar to those worn by Paul VI. [Wikpedia]

FANON

In the photo above we see Pope John XXIII wearing the fanon. The fanon consists of a doubled shoulder-cape (somewhat like a mozzetta) of white silk ornamented with narrow woven golden stripes, so that the colors alternate white and gold. The pope wears it only when celebrating a solemn Pontifical Mass, that is, only when all the pontifical vestments are used. The manner of putting on the fanon recalls the method of assuming the amice universal in the Middle Ages and still observed by some of the older religious orders. [Wikipedia]

PALLIUM

The Pallium or Pall (derived from the Roman pallium or palla, a woollen cloak) is an ecclesiastical vestment in the Roman Catholic Church, originally peculiar to the Pope, but for many centuries bestowed by him on metropolitans and primates as a symbol of the jurisdiction. The modern pallium is a circular band about two inches wide, worn about the neck, breast and shoulders. It has two pendants, one hanging down in front and one behind, which are about two inches wide and twelve inches long, and are weighted with small pieces of lead covered with black silk. The remainder of the pallium is made of white wool, part of which is supplied by two lambs presented annually as a tax by the Lateran Canons Regular. [Wikipedia]

SEDIA GESTATORIA

The sedia gestatoria is the portable throne on which Popes were once carried. It consists of a richly-adorned, silk-covered armchair, fastened on a suppedaneum, on each side of which are two gilded rings; through these rings pass the long rods with which twelve footmen (palafrenieri), in red uniforms, carry the throne on their shoulders. The Sedia gestatoria is an elaborate variation on the sedan chair. Two large fans (flabella) made of white ostrich feathers—a relic of the ancient liturgical use of the flabellum, mentioned in the Constitutiones Apostolicae, VIII, 12—are carried at either side of the sedia gestatoria. In the picture above, we see Pope Pius XII on the throne. [Wikipedia]

PAPAL CROSS

Above we see Pope Saint Sylvester I carrying the traditional Papal cross. The practice of Popes carrying a Crosier (shepherd’s crook) was gradually phased out and had disappeared by the time of Innocent III’s papacy in the eleventh century. In the Middle Ages, popes would carry a three-barred cross (one more bar than on those carried before archbishops), in the same manner as other bishops carried a crosier. This was in turn phased out, but Paul VI introduced the modern papal pastoral staff, which instead of the triple cross depicts a modern rendition of the crucified Christ, whose arms are fixed to a crossbar that is curved somewhat in the manner of an Eastern crozier. [Wikipedia]

RING OF THE FISHERMAN

Above we see Pope Saint Sylvester I carrying the traditional Papal cross. The practice of Popes carrying a Crosier (shepherd’s crook) was gradually phased out and had disappeared by the time of Innocent III’s papacy in the eleventh century. In the Middle Ages, popes would carry a three-barred cross (one more bar than on those carried before archbishops), in the same manner as other bishops carried a crosier. This was in turn phased out, but Paul VI introduced the modern papal pastoral staff, which instead of the triple cross depicts a modern rendition of the crucified Christ, whose arms are fixed to a crossbar that is curved somewhat in the manner of an Eastern crozier. [Wikipedia]

TIARA

The Papal Tiara (Triregnum) is the three-tiered jewelled papal crown, supposedly of Byzantine and Persian origin, that is a prominent symbol of the papacy. The Supreme Pontiff’s arms have featured a “tiara” since ancient times, notably in combination with Saint Peter’s crossed keys. Though not currently worn as part of papal regalia (though still permissible), the continuing symbolism of the papal tiara is reflected in its use on the flag and coats of arms of the Holy See and the Vatican. Although often referred to as the Papal Tiara, historically there have been many, and twenty-two remain in existence. [Wikipedia]

THE EPISCOPAL OR PONTIFICAL GLOVES

(chirothecœ, called also at an earlier date manicœ, wanti) are a Roman Catholic pontifical vestment worn a by bishop when celebrating Solemn Pontifical Mass. They are worn from the beginning of the Mass until the offertory, when they are removed, they can be elaborately embroidered and generally match the liturgical color of the Mass. They are not worn for Good Friday or Requiem Masses. While normally reserved for bishops, other prelates entitled to use pontificals, including abbots, may also use them without a special papal privilege. The gloves are considered symbolic of purity, the performance of good works and carefulness in procedure. The Caeremoniale Episcoporum, as revised in 1984, omits all mention of episcopal gloves, they are very rarely seen today except in celebrations of the 1962 form of the Roman Rite or yet earlier forms by some traditionalist Catholics. Anglo-Catholic and Old Catholic bishops also sometimes make use of the Episcopal gloves.[citation needed] Episcopal gloves are used only at a Pontifical Mass, and then only up to the washing of the hands before the Eucharistic Sacrifice. In the pre-Vatican II rite of consecration of a bishop, the consecrator, aided by the assisting bishops, put the gloves on the new bishop just after the blessing. As of 1909, Episcopal gloves are knitted by machine or hand-woven from silk thread. They are normally ornamented on the back with a cross; the border of the opening for the hand is also, as a rule, embellished; the colour of the gloves must correspond with the liturgical colour of the feast or day in the services of which they are worn; episcopal gloves, however, are never black, as they are not used on Good Friday nor at a Requiem. The use of episcopal gloves became customary in Rome probably in the tenth century, outside of Rome they were employed somewhat earlier. Apparently they were first used in France, as the earliest traces of the custom are found in this country, whence it gradually spread into all other parts and eventually to Rome; the chief reason for the introduction of the usage was probably the desire to provide a suitable adornment for the hands of the bishop, rather than practical considerations such as the preservation of the cleanliness of the hands etc. Episcopal gloves appertained originally to bishops, but at an early date their use was also granted to other ecclesiastics, thus no later than 1070 the abbot of the monastery of San Pietro in Cielo d’Oro at Pavia received this privilege, the first certain instance of such permission. In the Middle Ages these gloves were either knitted or otherwise produced with the needle, or else they were made of woven material sewed together; the former way seems to have been the more usual. Gloves made by both methods are still in existence, as for example, in Saint-Sernin at Toulouse, at Brignoles, in S. Trinità at Florence, in the cathedrals of Halberstadt and Brixen, in New College at Oxford, Conflens in Savoy and other places. In the later Middle Ages it became customary to enlarge the lower end, giving it the appearance of a cuff or gauntlet, and even to form the cuff with a long joint which hung downwards and was decorated with a tassel or little bell; the back of the glove was always ornamented, sometimes with an embroidered medallion or some other form of needlework, sometimes with a metal disk having on it a representation of the Lamb of God, a cross, the Right Hand of God, Saints etc., the disk being sewn on to the glove, or, at times, the ornamentation was of pearls and precious stones. The gloves were generally made of silk thread or woven fabric, rarely of woollen thread, sometimes of linen woven material. Up to the end of the Middle Ages the usual colour was white, although the gloves at New College, Oxford, are red; apparently it was not until the sixteenth century that the ordinances as to liturgical colours were applied to episcopal gloves. Even in the Middle Ages the occasions on which the gloves were worn were not many, but their use was not so limited as later, for in the earlier period they were occasionally worn at the pontifical Mass after Communion, at solemn offices and during processions.

PECTORAL CROSS OR PECTORALE

Pectoral of Pope Paul VI

(from the Latin pectoralis, “of the chest”) is a cross that is worn on the chest, usually suspended from the neck by a cord or chain. In ancient and medieval times pectoral crosses were worn by both clergy and laity, but by the end of the Middle Ages the pectoral cross came to be a special indicator of position worn by bishops. In the Catholic Church, the wearing of a pectoral cross remains restricted to popes, cardinals, bishops and abbots.[1] The modern pectoral cross is relatively large, and is different from the small crosses worn on necklaces by many Christians. Most pectoral crosses are made of precious metals (platinum, gold or silver) and some contain precious or semi-precious gems. Some contain a corpus like a crucifix while others use stylized designs and religious symbols.

THE DALMATIC

Is a long, wide-sleeved tunic, which serves as a liturgical vestment in the Catholic, Lutheran, Anglican, United Methodist, and some other churches. When used, it is the proper vestment of a deacon at Mass or other services. Although infrequent, it may also be worn by bishops above the alb and below the chasuble, and is then referred to as pontifical dalmatic.

Like the chasuble worn by priests and bishops, it is an outer vestment and is supposed to match the liturgical colour of the day. The dalmatic is often made of the same material and decoration as a chasuble, so as to form a matching pair. Traditional Solemn Mass vestment sets include matching chasuble, dalmatic, and tunicle.

A dalmatic is also worn by the British monarch during the Coronation service.

THE EPISCOPAL SANDALS

Also known as the pontifical sandals, are a Roman Catholic pontifical vestment worn by bishops when celebrating liturgical functions according to the pre–Vatican II rubrics, for example a Tridentine Solemn Pontifical Mass.

In shape, the episcopal sandals more closely resemble a pair of loafers than actual sandals. The liturgical stockings (caligae) are worn over the episcopal sandals and cover the episcopal sandals and the ankle. The episcopal sandals and liturgical stockings usually match the liturgical color of the Mass. However, when black vestments are worn, the pontifical footwear is not used.

After the Second Vatican Council, the episcopal sandals fell out of common use following the revisions of the liturgy resulting in the Mass of Paul VI, which is now known as the Ordinary Form of the Roman Rite. While still permitted for use in the Ordinary Form of the Mass, they are rarely used in that context. Today, the use of the episcopal sandals is primarily seen in those celebrating the Tridentine Mass.

The episcopal sandals should not be confused with the velvet papal shoes, which were recently reinstated by Pope Benedict XVI. The papal shoes evolved as the outdoor counterpart of the papal slippers, which are similar to the episcopal sandals, except that the papal slippers are worn by the Pope outside liturgical functions and are always red.

THE MITRE

(British English) (/ˈmaɪtər/; Greek: μίτρα, “headband” or “turban”) or miter (American English; see spelling differences), is a type of headgear now known as the traditional, ceremonial head-dress of bishops and certain abbots in traditional Christianity. Mitres are worn in the Orthodox Church, Roman Catholic Church, as well as in the Anglican Communion, some Lutheran churches, and also bishops and certain other clergy in the Eastern Catholic Churches and the Oriental Orthodox Churches. The Metropolitan of the Malankara Mar Thoma Syrian Church also wears a mitre during important ceremonies such as the Episcopal Consecration.

Three types of mitres are worn by Roman Catholic clergy for different occasions:

• The simplex (‘simple’, referring to the materials used) is made of undecorated white linen or silk and its white lappets traditionally end in red fringes. It is worn most notably at funerals, Lenten time, on Good Friday and by concelebrant bishops at a Mass. Cardinals in the presence of the Pope wear a mitre of white linen damask.

• The auriphrygiata is of plain gold cloth or white silk with gold, silver or coloured embroidered bands; when seen today it is usually worn by bishops when they preside at the celebration of the sacraments.

• The pretiosa (‘precious’) is decorated with precious stones and gold and worn on the principal Mass on the most solemn Sundays (except in Lent) and feast days. This type of mitre is rarely decorated with precious stones today, and the designs have become more varied, simple and original, often merely being in the liturgical colour of the day.

The proper colour of a mitre is always white, although in liturgical usage white also includes vestments made from gold and silver fabrics. The embroidered bands and other ornaments which adorn a mitre and the lappets may be of other colours and often are. Although coloured mitres are sometimes sold and worn at present, this is probably due to the maker’s or wearer’s lack of awareness of liturgical tradition.[dubious – discuss]

On all occasions, an altar server may wear a shawl-like veil, called a vimpa, around the shoulders when holding the bishop’s mitre.

FASHION: THE POPE WEARS PRADA

He may never make the best-dressed lists, but Pope Benedict XVI is nothing short of a religious-fashion icon, riding in the Popemobile with red Prada loafers under his cassock and Gucci shades. But his penchant for designer wear and a move to ditch the papal tailors who have dressed popes for more than 200 years are causing new wrinkles in the Vatican.

Benedict has favored his tailor from his days as cardinal, Alessandro Cattaneo, and the 20-year-old religious-fashion house of Raniero Mancinelli, which has provided the pope with dazzling new vestments (some with shimmering, sequinlike details). At risk of losing the papal-dress contract are the Annibale Gammarelli tailors, who have made papal wear since 1792. But they blundered when Benedict had to make his debut blessing in a cassock that was too short, ending just above his ankles. Subsequent celebratory vestments made by Gammarelli are reported to have made the pope uncomfortable.

The Vatican won’t comment on papal attire, and Gammarelli denies it is getting the ax: “We are still in contact with the Holy Father. Perhaps there was only an occasional gift by some friend of the pontiff,” the tailor says.

THE POPE’S NEW (BESPOKE) SHOES

Say what you will about Pope Benedict XVI, but the man knows his loafers: hand-made, size 42 (8.5, American), and a bright cardinal red, which adds serious panache to a guy who otherwise < target=”_blank”>resembles the emperor from Star Wars. The slippers became his signature look — so much so that we named him the accessorizer of the year in 2007. But now that he’s stepping down and becoming an “emeritus pope,” he’s sadly letting them go.

As most personal papal possessions do — like Benedict’s Serengeti sunglasses, iPod Nano, and a leather-upholstered golf cart (and bulletproof popemobile) — the red shoes came as a gift. When the Pope first donned the shoes, rumors spread that they were Prada, but that turned out not to be the case. In 2005, Adriano Stefanelli, a Roman with a three-generation shoemaking lineage, hand-delivered a pair to Benedict in St. Peter’s Square. Stefanelli, who quickly became Benedict’s cobbler, had given a different style of shoe to John Paul II in 2002, but, as he explains, Benedict chose a ruby red instead of John Paul’s oxblood shade. (Most pontiffs have had unique shoe style — often picking between a cross, golden insignia, or buckles, by way of adornment.)

But as he departs the Vatican, officials say Benedict wil keep the cassock, but leave the reds behind. Apparently he plans to slip into a pair obtained during a trip to Leon, Mexico. Artisanal, of course.

THE POPE DOESN’T WEAR PRADA: VATICAN NEWSPAPER

Pope Benedict wears his Saturno sun hat as he arrives to lead a weekly general audience at the Vatican June 25, 2008. REUTERS/Chris Helgren

ROME (Reuters) – After years of speculation that Pope Benedict wears shoes by Prada, the Vatican’s official newspaper denied such talk as “frivolous”.

Esquire magazine last year named the 81-year-old pontiff “accessorizer of the year” for his red leather loafers that fashionistas had said were probably made by the Italian fashion house.

While the Vatican had never confirmed or denied if the shoes were Prada, continued chatter about the pope’s dress sense led the Vatican daily Osservatore Romano to print a condemnation of media stories it said trivialized the head of the church.

Esquire’s inclusion of the pope on its best-dressed men list was, it said, “of a frivolity that is very characteristic of an era that tends to trivialize and does not understand”.

The article explained that the pope’s shoes, like his range of flamboyant hats, are nothing to do with vanity but all to do with tradition. “The pope, in summary, does not wear Prada, but Christ,” it said.

The article did not say who did make the shoes.

Benedict’s choice of garments has often been striking. On recent drives through St. Peter’s Square he shaded himself from the fierce June sun under a wide-rimmed bright red hat known as a “Saturn” after the planet with the rings.

Around Christmas 2005 he delighted pilgrims by appearing in a red velvet cap trimmed with white fur which, together with a scarlet cape, gave him the look of Santa Claus.

The Osservatore noted that both hats, far from being fashion items, are in fact traditional papal accessories that have been worn at various points in history by previous popes.

THE FABLE OF BENEDICT’S RED SHOES

In 1948 the British masters Powell and Pressburger made a film called The Red Shoes. Moira Shearer played a ballerina whose dream is to perform on stage. She gets her wish, playing in a new production wearing special shoes. They take her places she has never been and always wanted to go.

But she cannot take them off, and is trapped in an unending cycle of dance. Her one hope of escape from this growing nightmare is to take off the red shoes, but can she?

It is a modern fable, based on a story by Hans Christian Andersen. In the original a vain, spoilt girl tricks her adoptive mother into buying a pair of red shoes. She shows them off in church and other places, only to find that the shoes take over. They dance her everywhere. She is cursed by an angel and forced to wear them forever.

Even when her feet are amputated the shoes keep showing up and dancing before her eyes. Only after repeated efforts to seek forgiveness, to be humbled, is the girl finally forgiven.

The Red Shoes would, for obvious reasons, come to my mind during the last pontificate. It’s hard to trace the rumour that Benedict XVI’s shoes were designed by Prada. Perhaps it was just a mischievous allusion to The Devil Wears Prada, but nothing so vulgar! The Pope’s shoes were actually made by a local Vatican shoemaker out the back of Borgo Pio and one thing you had to say about them, they were not the shoes of a fisherman.

Whatever Benedict had in mind when he donned his gay apparel will go with him to the grave, but one reason seems to be a message that popes are unique. Because John Paul II wore brown Polish loafers, and no one paid much mind to his predecessors’ footwear, Benedict’s stepping out caused a sensation. Sydney went seismic.

Popes in previous centuries wore red shoes, hence Benedict’s harking back to an age of papal prestige. He would know that in Byzantium only three people were allowed to wear red shoes: the Emperor, the Empress, and the Pope. They are symbols of imperial power, in keeping with the opulent dress sense exhibited by monarchs. Even on a normal day, Queen Elizabeth II is still the best-dressed person in the room. Power treads the boards.

Benedict is a wily fox, which is why we can be sure his red shoes were there to invite symbolic interpretations. Only thing is, red shoes have a life of their own. They take the wearer where he would not go. He has always wanted total control, but it’s the red shoes that control him.

The only way this giddy madness can stop is by taking them off, which Benedict did on 11 February when he announced his resignation. The cardinals stared at one another in disbelief. They were living in a fable.

Benedict’s close theological friend Rowan Williams teaches a theology of letting go of control. ‘For the Spirit to be free in us, our expectations of possession and understanding and control need to go,’ he says. ‘Our expectations of being in charge have to go, and any experience whether grievous or joyful that begins to break our hold of control, any such experience is the beginning of an opening to the Holy Spirit.’

Letting go of control lets the Spirit in, and something new happens. This is what seems to be happening now that Benedict has taken off the red shoes. Almost anything could happen, and it won’t be easy for anyone.

Williams wears sensible black shoes. When Archbishop of Canterbury he rarely wore a purple shirt, but plain black, itself a break with tradition. To wear black was an example to others about not showing off. It was about sharing the humility of a servant and was of a piece with his reintroduction after 400 years of the practice of the Archbishop himself washing the feet of 12 others at Maundy Thursday services in Canterbury Cathedral.

At foot washing, participants remove socks, whether designer, off-the-rack, or holey, and shoes, black, red, whatever. The iridescent vanities of their life no longer dance before their eyes in perpetual torment; they have been put aside. Each person is on the same level as everybody else. They have let go of control. What now?

VATICAN TAILOR’S, COBBLERS TRY TO ADAPT TO FRANCIS’S “PAPAL ATHLEISURE”

(Credit: Claire Giangravè.)

ROME – An exclusive group of tailors and cobblers who cater to the Vatican are slowly adapting to Pope Francis’s penchant for simple and plain clothing, which has inspired a demand for more practical and comfortable frocks from clergy around the world.

The Argentinian pope’s call for a Church that is dynamic and “on the move” has translated into a preference for religious clothing reflecting that zeal, and is no longer constrained by heavy fabrics and embellishments.

“Maybe once we were a bit excessive, and now slowly…” said Raniero Mancinelli, who has been a tailor for the clergy and popes for decades, in an interview with Crux.

Popes through history have always been fashion trendsetters, since they exercise influence over a vast community and their choice of jewelry and clothing often says a lot about the mission and message of the pontificate.

The past three “foreign popes,” meaning not from Italy, took a unique approach to classic papal style, and, sharing an astute grasp of the media, have left us with iconic images that will last for the ages.

No one could rock a cape like Pope John Paul II, and pictures showing his red mantle billowing in the wind, or gently wrapped around children, have left a lasting impression on Christian and secular culture. Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI, a European, dusted off the classic papal staples and ushered them into the new millennium with his unique sense of style.

Francis’s preference for ‘papal athleisure,’ meanwhile, has already begun to leave its mark on history.

In 2013, the magazine Esquire, which focuses mostly on male fashion, named Pope Francis ‘The Best Dressed Man of the Year.’ The choice was obviously controversial, and the magazine explained it by saying that the pope’s style has “signaled a new era (and for many, renewed hope) for the Catholic Church.”

Adapting to Pope Francis’s style

In a small shop on the Borgo Pio, a picturesque street next door to the Vatican, Raniero Mancinelli slices away at fabric on the counter, scarlet and black scraps falling to the ground with every cut of his scissors.

Over his head, etched in wood is his name and the date the shop was opened: 1962. Mancinelli has been in the business of dressing popes for a long time, and therefore has had a front-row seat to the changes that occurred in religious garb from the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) to this day.

“It’s not as if before the clothes were more luxurious or pricey, maybe a bit more flashy and rich with details,” Mancinelli said. “Today this has changed a bit. Now with Pope Francis’s direction, people want things that are much lighter, simpler and more sober…. and consequently less expensive.”

As an example, the veteran tailor said that the cross usually worn by bishops and cardinals used to be adorned with gems and gold plating.

“Now these are more popular,” he said pointing to plain crosses made of metal and wood. A quick look at the tags shows a significant difference in price.

Asked if this pope is not very good for his business, Mancinelli laughed.

“Yes… a bit,” he said, because the demand has diminished and the clothes are less costly. “A double loss, in a sense.

“It’s not a question of agreeing. One accepts this manner he has of doing things in a simpler fashion,” Mancinelli said.

But the tailor is not saddened by the change, though he admits that, to him, religious clothing has become a little plain.

“Maybe too plain compared to how they were before,” he added.

Mancinelli started his business just as the Church underwent a profound revolution. He was there when Pope Paul VI eliminated the train that cardinals used to wear, which could be up to seven meters long.

He spoke of a time when “a crease could not be ignored,” while today anything is acceptable. Pope Francis’s torn-up sleeve as he returned from a visit to the beach town of Ostia, for instance, took over the Internet in 2013.

“His vestment is very simple, he has had it for a long time,” Mancinelli said, adding that white is a very sensitive color and, by being in close contact with so many people, is susceptible to being ruined.

“I don’t exclude the possibility that in the evening he just puts it to wash, and wears it again the next morning,” he sighed.

Pope Francis also chose to have a smaller sash that is not made of silk, and breaking with tradition he refused to have his emblem etched on it.

“He’s not picky,” Mancinelli said. “I wanted to make him a new pair of trousers. His are black, and I wanted to make lighter pants to wear under the cassock. ‘No,’ he said. ‘These are fine.’

“In everything, the pope has chosen simplicity,” he said. “Things that are not expensive.”

Mancinelli admits that having grown up in a different time, he has a preference for things that are well-fitted and precise, but he also recognizes that “if the pope decided to take this position, it means that there is a reason.

“Maybe now we can concentrate more on the will of God instead of men,” he added.

The two main things to keep in mind when working for the pope, he said, are discretion and adaptability.

“The first day can be a bit shocking,” Mancinelli said, since you have to get used to a different taste and aesthetic, but after a few days he says, “you learn the differences.”

Mancinelli had a good relationship with Pope Benedict XVI. He “used vestments that were a bit more beautiful, let’s say, in the sense that they were more beautiful to look at,” he said.

Now, clergy from around the world ask Mancinelli for Pope Francis-inspired cassocks, ready for the daily wear and tear. But this new style has its advantages when it comes to time consumption.

“Once we only used silk, today the fabrics are simpler. I am making clothes for some cardinals,” Mancinelli added pointing to the scarlet scraps that littered the floor. “The fabric is very simple, made of wool and light [material].”

Silk takes much more time to sow, and the simpler fabrics mean less time to make the clothes, he said.

Pope Francis “is more focused on being a good father, a good shepherd, rather than having a beautiful cassock or pants, or even shoes,” Mancinelli said. “I wish I could live many more years, so I can see what happens next!”

The Case Of The Red Shoes

Any Italian will tell you that one key to a good look is a fine pair of shoes. Footwear is not taken lightly in the Bel Paese, and a poor choice is guaranteed to provoke criticism and directions to some cousin who can fix you up.

Pope Benedict XVI knew the importance of a good pair of shoes, and his custom-made red slippers became a trademark of his style and even earned him the title of ‘Best Accessorizer of the Year’ by Esquire magazine in 2007.

Gossip ran wild with who might be the maker of the ruby-colored papal slippers, with some claiming that they were made by the Italian fashion powerhouse Prada. But in 2005 the rumors were finally put to rest when the a cobbler from a small town in northern Italy presented Pope Benedict XVI with the shoes for all the world to see during a general audience at St. Peter’s Square.

“Dressed in white with that red shoe… it really catches the eye!” Adriano Stefanelli, a cobbler and the creator of the famous slippers, told Crux in a phone interview.

“When it comes to clothes and such things he is a very, very elegant person,” Stefanelli said about the emeritus pope, adding proudly that “the peak of his splendor” took place when he first wore the red shoes.

Italian cobbler Adriano Stefanelli presents Pope Benedict XVI with his custom made red shoes at the Vatican. (Credit: Adriano Stefanelli.)

Stefanelli prepared six shoes in total for the German pope throughout his pontificate. He was commissioned by the Vatican for the first time in late 2013, but the high-ranking client was not satisfied with the order. Stefanelli had made the shoes in claret, the color preferred by the now-saint John Paul II, but the demand was clear: They had to be red.

“During his pontificate I received requests from all over the world for the same slipper, some wanted it red, others black,” Stefanelli said, citing among the buyers the former president of the United States, George Bush, for whom he made an identical pair in black.

The cobbler from Novara defines Pope Francis’s style as “rustic simplicity,” and places him as the “polar opposite of Pope Benedict” in terms of fashion.

“Pope Francis represents humility. Very plain clothing and a simple cross,” Stefanelli said.

“… He doesn’t wear the red shoes.”

Pope Francis opted for the services of his cobbler in Buenos Aires, Carlos Samaria, after he was elected. Speaking to the Italian daily La Stampa, Samaria said that the pope insisted that there be “no red shoes, black as always.”

And again, speaking to his niece Maria Ines, the pope said: “See that I am not wearing the red shoes?”

Stefanelli denies being hurt by the pope choosing not to wear his flamboyant slippers.

“Every man has his style,” he said.

He began his career as a papal cobbler by gifting a pair of shoes to Pope John Paul II, who preferred them to be dark brown and was so pleased with them that he became a regular client.

“Pope Wojtyla is kind of similar to Pope Francis. Maybe Pope Wojtyla was slightly more refined, while Pope Francis views clothing and style in a very humble way,” Stefanelli added.

When asked if he would be happy to make red shoes for Pope Francis, should he ask, Stefanelli said “Gladly. But I have my doubts.”

THE HIDDEN MEANING BEHIND SOME OF THE POPES CLOTHES

Here, Pope Francis wears a cassock. The cassock, also called a soutane, can be worn by all clerics, Beck said, but the papal one is white. According to Beck, legend has it that Pope Pius V was used to wearing a white religious habit and he wanted to keep the tradition going. “And so ever since,” Beck said, “it has remained white.”

The mantum is a long cape that popes sometimes wear as a sign of their authority, Beck said. It’s a vestment that fell out of use, but was revived by Benedict XVI, seen here. The mitre, Beck said, is a cone-like head dress worn by all bishops as a sign of their episcopacy. “Abbots can also wear it,” Beck said. “It is not unique to the pope, but it replaced the tiara on the Papal Coat of Arms with Benedict, and now Francis.”

Pope Benedict XVI, seen here wearing a saturno, blesses the faithful in St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican, in 2006. The saturno is a wide-brimmed red hat that gets its name from its resemblance to the planet Saturn and its rings, Beck said. “It has been used as the summer alternative to the winter camauro, ” he said, but unlike the winter hat, it’s not not unique to the pope.

The zucchetto is a skullcap worn by clerics in the Roman Catholic Church and some other churches, Beck said. Priests wear black zucchettos and prelates wear violet or red, while white is reserved for the pope.

Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury, left, greets Pope Benedict XVI at his official residence, Lambeth Palace, in central London in September 2010. Here, Benedict XVI wears a mozzetta, a cape worn by the pope and some other religious leaders. “The winter one matches the camauro because it is also red velvet or wool and adorned with ermine,” Beck said. “This was also brought back by Benedict XVI after having fallen into disuse. There’s also a white summer version.”

Pope Benedict XVI is seen here wearing the pallium, a woolen cloak with five or six crosses. It’s worn only by the pope and archbishops as a sign of their unity to the pope, Beck said. “It is made from the wool of lambs raised by monks and woven by nuns. It is rich in symbolism, as the pope, who is shepherd, literally carries the ‘sheep’ on his shoulders, especially the lost ones,” Beck said.

Pope Benedict XVI wears a green chasuble in October, 2012. A chasuble is a liturgical vestment worn by all priests, including the pope, when saying mass, Beck said. There are a few liturgical seasons in the church, he said, each of which is associated with a color of chasuble. Green is the color worn most Sundays, known as “ordinary time,” essentially, not during Advent, Lent or Easter.

Pope Benedict XVI arrives to lead the mass for Ash Wednesday, on February 13, 2013. He wore this purple chasuble to open Lent, the 40-day period of abstinence and deprivation for the Christians, before the Holy Week and Easter. Purple is worn during the seasons of Advent and Lent.

The rose-colored chasuble is only used for two Sundays of the liturgical calendar, Beck said: Gaudete Sunday, which is the third Sunday of Advent, and Laetare Sunday, the fourth Sunday of Lent. “During both seasons,” Beck said, “the color diverges from the traditional purple as a sign that both seasons are nearing and end and rejoicing is close at hand.”

It may be hard to tell at first glance, but not all popes dress exactly alike: there are different articles of clothing for different traditions and seasons. And sometimes a pope will inject their own personal style. Pope Francis, for example, prefers a simple iron cross and plain black shoes that are notably more understated than the red pair favored by his predecessor. We spoke with Father Edward Beck, a CNN contributor and Roman Catholic priest of the Passionist order, to find out more about the pope’s wardrobe.

CLOTHES AND THE MAN: HOW POPES COMMUNICATE THROUGH CLOTHING

Satin capes. Leather shoes. Embroidered stoles. Ermine trim. Gold rings. What sounds like a list of extravagant accessories from a fashion magazine inspired much discussion during the recent papal transition. Naturally, news reports and expert analysis focused on the historic nature of Benedict XVI’s resignation and the election of a pope of firsts—first Jesuit, first Francis, first from the Americas. Woven into the media’s narratives, a parallel narrative unfolded as fabric, thread and robes provided a visual account of a church in transition. Even now, more than two months after Pope Francis’ election, the news media follows the pope’s every move to see what he will “say” next through his actions and appearance. Francis has already established himself as a pope of images and dress has proven to be an important part of his vocabulary.  

The richly symbolic garments of Catholic prelates have always been infused with meaning. They speak a language that is theological, historical and structural. A “vestimentary code”—everything from the ermine-trimmed mozetta of the pope to the simple brown habit of Franciscan friars—contributes to a sort of “Catholic dialect” of clothing that communicates within the church itself and to the world at large. Shortly after the election of Pope Francis, Matt Malone, S.J., wrote a piece for America placing the attention to clothing in the context of a “sacramental worldview,” where symbols, and particularly material symbols, matter. He also reminds us that proper Catholic sartorial protocol has been meticulously legislated.

Yet, transitional times often see the challenging and relaxing of past norms, and the establishment of new ones. Clothing participates in conversations about the past and the future. It is not just that clothing matters, but who wears what and when, stitching together a grammar of transition.

The unprecedented circumstances of Pope Benedict’s abdication required new definitions. Unlike the previous two popes who resigned, Benedict was neither coerced by a council nor locked up by his successor. Though he has vowed to remain hidden to the world, he will continue to occupy a position that has not been occupied before. The Vatican spokesperson, Federico Lombardi, S.J., was dogged with questions about new definitions: What would Benedict be called? Where would he live? And what would he wear? At a press conference two days before Benedict’s resignation, Lombardi announced that the pope emeritus would continue to wear the white cassock and skullcap, but without the sash and elbow-length cape known as a mozzetta. The media also made much of Benedict’s decision to put aside his famous red shoes for brown leather loafers made in Leon, Mexico.

For a church with a long history, including a history of rival claimants to the papacy, setting careful precedents was important. The dress of the pope emeritus establishes his identity and relationship to his previous office and to his successor. The white cassock recognizes the place Benedict held in the succession of St. Peter—reverting to the black cassock or the scarlet accessories of cardinals would have been a disrespectful demotion. The absence of the mozzetta carefully distinguishes him from Francis, and from others exercising episcopal authority. Benedict’s removal of the white sash, or fascia—reserved for the reigning pope—signals that he is no longer functioning as part of the church hierarchy. Putting aside red shoes reserves the privileged combination of white and red for the new pope.

Rome’s Tailor

Moving from the clothing of the former pope to those of the future pope, the media became fascinated with Gammarelli’s, the Roman tailor shop charged with making the ensemble for the new pope’s first appearance. A Roman tradition when it comes to papal elections, the display of the papal outfit in three sizes—ready for any size pope!—served almost as a pre-conclave chimney. When the cassocks disappeared from the window, it meant the conclave was ready to begin. The empty garments invited speculation in the days between their unveiling and their disappearance. Which one would be filled and by whom? All three would enter the Vatican, but, as with the cardinals themselves, only one would remain.

Speculation abounded about which cardinals were papabili, and the international media became fascinated by some of the American cardinals. Among these was Boston Archbishop Cardinal Sean O’Malley, a Franciscan, who for a period participated in daily press briefings. Appearing dressed in his brown Franciscan habit, O’Malley was asked if he would swap his current garb for the papal white. O’Malley laughed away the sartorial question, joking that he planned no wardrobe change because he did not expect to be elected. One wonders what the Capuchin would have done if elected. When appointed cardinal in 2006, he made it clear that he would continue to wear his habit, and he joked about the vibrant red he was expected to wear, a stark contrast to his usual earthy brown. The question posed to O’Malley about his choice of clothing, though tongue in cheek, revealed the kind of speculation that accompanied this transition. He was a non-traditional candidate with a shot—not Italian, not European, not even a native Romance language speaker. To many he represented an appealing “alternative pope” and his eschewing of the traditional papal wardrobe, or at least speculation about it, revealed the hopes of some that someone like him, a candidate elected from a religious order, would introduce a new kind of papal leadership. Though O’Malley himself didn’t “expect a change of wardrobe,” in hindsight we know that this kind of speculation was not without merit.

In some more unusual moments, unauthorized clothing was used by some to challenge or disrupt the election process. Photos of a man who posed as a bishop and nearly made his way into the early pre-conclave proceedings circulated on the internet. His clothing temporarily aided him, but ultimately betrayed him. Ralph Napierski (who also went by the name Basilius) claimed to be a legitimately ordained Catholic bishop in the line of the late Archbishop Pierre Martin Ngo Dinh Thuc and head of the otherwise unknown order “Corpus Dei.” (He also has a blog called “JesusYoga.org”). Dressed in a black cassock with a fedora, sash and pectoral cross, Napierski was able to pass through Vatican security and even took pictures with some of the cardinals. But he was ejected when a close look at his clothing gave him away—his cassock was too short and his sash was actually just a scarf. In another incident, Italian police detained Janice Sevre-Duszynska who came to St. Peter’s Square dressed in a white alb and stole carrying a sign that read “Women priests are here.” Even the lack of clothing acted as a voice of protest when a group of topless women protested in the Piazza calling for women’s ordination.

Francis Speaks

From his first appearance, Pope Francis has communicated his vision of the Petrine ministry through a visual code of sartorial choices. When he first appeared on the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica, what he was wearing—and in this case, what he was not wearing—spoke volumes before he even said his now famous “Buona sera!” That Francis chose not to wear the red mozzetta with white ermine trim and the gold embroidered papal stole—a tradition since at least the time of Pope Pius XI’s election in 1922 went unnoticed to most, but to those who understood the language of ecclesiastical garments, this was a shout. Moreover, instead of the gold pectoral cross, Francis emerged wearing the silver cross he had worn as bishop of Buenos Aires. He donned the stole for the papal blessing, then promptly removed it. Like his choice of the name of Francis, the new pope was sending several messages, not all of them immediately clear.

Even St. Francis spoke volumes through clothing. In his youth, he shocked his family and his bishop by stripping naked before them, casting aside his extravagant clothing in a public act of self-dedication to a life of poverty. Pope Francis’ act might be seen in a similar light, as a kind of Franciscan disrobing. Yet there is an ambiguity in the language of dress. Some understood the pope’s choices as indicative of the simplicity and austerity of his namesake, a vestimentary expression of a church that he proclaimed would embrace the poor. Others, however, have seen it as an assault on pre-Vatican II tradition and a renunciation of the efforts of Benedict XVI to advocate a hermeneutic of continuity for understanding the council. Benedict masterfully employed a vestimentary language in service of this vision, reintroducing luxurious papal vestments that had fallen out of use as an expression of the majesty and honor of the Supreme Pontiff. Even in the days following Francis’ election, we learned more about his wardrobe choices. No red shoes, no ornate liturgical vestments and simple mitres. A comparison of Francis’ and Benedict’s vesture at the 2013 and 2012 Easter Urbi et Orbi addresses accentuates the differences.

As a scholar of early Christianity, what brought my attention to all this recent talk about clothing is a current project of mine on the representation of clothing in early Christian literature and art. One piece of clothing in particular, the philosopher’s robe, sparked debate in the early church—was it appropriate apparel for the Christian? Some, like Justin Martyr and Tertullian, found it to be the perfect garment for the Christian sage, while others, like Pope Damasus, condemned it as the garb of the faithless. Meanwhile, images of Jesus and the apostles dressed in the robe decorated churches from west to east. This ancient debate over dress was expressed in words and images, typifying the doctrinal and cultural issues facing the young church. In the current period of transition and expectation, clothing still plays a significant role in the fabric of Catholic Christian life. From mere curiosity to ecclesial vision, papal garments in particular will continue to be observed and decoded for indications of how and where Pope Francis will lead the church.

POPE FRANCIS’ SIMPLE STYLE STATEMENT

The pope eschews many of the rich trappings of his predecessors.

Pope Francis’ personal style is as humble and simple as that of his predecessor, Benedict XVI, was traditional and rich.

Unlike his predecessors, the current pope prefers austere white cassocks to the red velvet “mozzetta,” a short hooded cape trimmed with ermine. Gone, too, are the traditional gold crosses — he wears the same iron model he has donned since his anointment as auxiliary bishop of Buenos Aires in 1992.

He also recycled a ring, known as the Ring of the Fisherman, which was not created specifically for him. According to media reports, the ring “was in the possession of Archbishop Macchi, Pope Paul VI’s personal secretary.” This is a historical departure since traditionally a new ring is cast for each pope. Pope Benedict XVI’s ring was made of gold while Francis’ is made of gold-plated silver.

Pope Benedict was also known to favor red shoes, often by Prada, but Pope Francis only wears sensible black leather shoes, understood to be made by a friend, Carlos Samaria, in Buenos Aires. His basic black watch with a white dial, reportedly a Swatch priced at around $56, has no particular functions. According to one report, when the strap broke, it took some convincing to buy a new one as Francis simply wanted to replace the strap. He agreed to the purchase only when he was assured that a new watch would not have cost more than the strap.

Similarly, Francis in September changed the lenses of his old simple frames, refusing to buy new ones. His visit to the optician in Central Rome made the news, as he was photographed checking out the lenses in the tiny store owned by Alessandro Spiezia.

Francis’ tailor Lorenzo Gammarelli is also in Rome, a sixth generation of papal tailors, near the Pantheon. According to the Web site “Il Mio Papa [My Pope],” Francis “wears exactly the same outfits” throughout the year: Cassocks in heavier, warmer woolen cloth during the winter and lighter woolen fabrics during the summer. “He wants only natural white, not optical, which is obtained only with a dye. Natural wool is cream ivory,” according to the site. Reflecting Francis’ lack of attention to appearance, one photograph earlier this year created a stir as it showed a frayed sleeve. He also wears a simple white wool scarf with fringes and a white wool double-breasted coat, with peak lapels and eight buttons, of which four are decorative.

A further sign that he shuns excess is that his sash does not feature a coat of arms.

Under the sober cassock, Francis wears a shirt, a sweater and pants. In spring time, he wears the “pellegrina,” which is a short mantel open on the front, sewn on the robe, always white.

He shaves more than once a day — even three times — out of respect for those whom he embraces on his visits. His electric shaver is one of the few possessions he carries in his vintage leather briefcase when traveling — and even boarding planes, as seen in photographs circulating in the media. The briefcase is non-branded and has bellows pockets.

“It’s normal. We must be normal…It’s strange that this photo has traveled around the world. We must get used to being normal. It’s the normality of life,” Francis said of the sensation created by the image.

SWISS GUARD MAKE A FASHION STATEMENT WITH DEBUT OF NEW HELMETS

Commander Christoph Graf, of the Vatican’s Swiss Guards. (Credit: Inés San Martín.)

ROME – Just as New York readies to host the biggest night of the fashion world’s annual calendar tomorrow night at the Met Gala, this time with a Catholic theme, back in Rome the Swiss Guard made a fashion statement of its own on Friday.

Perhaps the world’s smallest army, and certainly one of its most celebrated, the Guard debuted an early look Friday at a much lighter version of their traditional cast iron helmets, which are being produced in PVC with the aid of 3D printing technology.

Designed mostly to resemble the old helmets, the new version nonetheless does sport another distinctive touch: The coat of arms of Pope Julius II, who instituted the army in 1506. They should be ready for use sometime in 2019.

Hence the stylish new helmets won’t be worn today for the Swiss Guard’s annual swearing-in ceremony, in which 33 new members will swear to “faithfully, loyally and honorably serve the supreme pontiff,” in a ceremony that, despite the absence of the pope, is usually one of Rome’s hottest tickets during the month of May.

It always takes place on the same day, May 6, on the anniversary of the sack of Rome in 1527. On that date, 147 soldiers died protecting Pope Clement VII.

The ceremony is one of pomp and circumstance. The entire army, close to 110 men on Sunday, will be in full dress uniform, accompanied in the Vatican’s St. Damaso Courtyard by religious personalities and political and military representatives of Switzerland, a country Francis will visit later this year.

The new helmets were presented on Friday in Rome during a press event ahead of Sunday’s ceremony.

The new helmet of the Swiss Guards, the pope’s personal army. Made of PVC, they’re made using 3D printing technology. (Credit: Inés San Martín.)

According to Commander Christoph Graf, the helmets have been purchased through what might be considered an informal crowdfunding campaign, led by layman Peter Portmann, introduced on Friday as a “friend of the Swiss Guards.”

The new helmets come at a price of roughly $1,000, half of what the older ones cost.

Portmann was the man behind the idea of printing this mostly ceremonial element of the uniform, as it’s been some time since a Swiss Guard actually wore one into battle. Together with his friends, he’s paying for the production.

Among the many benefits of the new helmets, which will be used when the pope welcomes a head of state, or an ambassador presenting their credential letters, is the fact that it weighs far less than those cast in iron, which guard members say would overheat during Rome’s summer days and sometimes burn their heads.

Who are the Swiss Guards?

The contingent of highly trained guards was born of an alliance between the Swiss and the Holy Roman empire, and they’ve been protecting the pontiff for more than 500 years.

To be eligible for the job, which pays $1,800 a month courtesy of the pope, one has to be male, Catholic, single, a Swiss citizen, aged between 19 and 30, at least 5’8″, and willing to be a member of the guard for at least two years.

If you run into the Swiss Guards at the Vatican, either guarding the doors or during the pope’s public events in St. Peter’s Basilica and/or Square, don’t let their colored uniforms in shades of blue, red, orange and yellow reminiscent of the Renaissance fool you: All of them have received basic Swiss military training, and are prepared in unarmed combat and small arms.

When it comes to what Graf looks for in new recruits, he said a key thing is their ability to be a part of the group. Since the guards live and work together in very small quarters, being able to get along is central.

Hence, he said, “many forge friendships that last a lifetime.”

Graf said that also fundamental in the life of the guards is their faith, even if “because of the situation in Switzerland,” not all recruits are Mass-going Catholics.

“If we only accepted guards who go to Mass every Sunday, who receive the sacraments regularly, the army wouldn’t exist anymore,” he said.

Therefore, for him, evangelizing is part of his mission: “We need to give the young men the possibility of growing in their faith. I believe that with the closeness to the Holy Father, those who have an open heart are able to discover the faith.”

“It’s part of our job, as officials, to be witness, not to be afraid to talk about our faith, something that is no longer done in Switzerland,” Graf said.

Nicolas Albert, 19, is one of the new recruits who on Sunday will swear to give his life for the pope if necessary. He told Crux that ever since he was a child he “dreamed” of becoming one of the guards with “a shiny armor.”

Eventually the dream was forgotten, but in his junior year of high school, a friend invited him to apply together, reviving that childhood passion. He joined the Swiss army and was eventually admitted to be one of the pope’s private soldiers.

“There’s also a spiritual motivation behind my joining the army, and that’s broadening my faith,” Albert s

Safety concerns, due to terrorism and the pope’s “Latin ways”

Asked about an increased security regarding the constant threats of terrorist attacks in Europe, Graf first said that he didn’t want to talk about it, because “I know what you [journalists] will write.”

However, he acknowledged it’s evident in the area surrounding the Vatican what the Italian government does to guarantee the safety of tourists and pilgrims. Though he didn’t specify, in recent years the presence of military vehicles along with large cement plant-pots blocking access to Via della Conciliazione, the famous avenue that leads to St. Peter’s Square have been obvious.

“We can say that the guards are more attentive,” he said. “I see that 10 or 15 years ago, the Swiss Guards were more at ease, but the situation has unfortunately changed in recent years.”

Despite their training, the men guarding the pope don’t have heavy artillery, tanks or planes.

“What we have is faith, hope and charity,” Graf said, listing the three theological virtues. “We cannot always speak of guns, but also about other ways to defeat war, such as faith and prayer.”

Asked about Pope Francis’s proclivity to go out of his way to greet as many pilgrims as he can wherever he goes, Graf said that at the beginning, they weren’t necessarily ready.

“We, who come from northern countries, found it to be something new. But when you think about it, it’s normal that he wants to hug a person,” he said. “After five years, we’ve gotten used to it.”

THE TRUTH BEHIND THE POPE’S RUBY RED SLIPPERS

If the clothes make the man, then the shoes make the Pope – and more specifically, his ruby red shoes. The scarlet slippers have been reincarnated for thousands of years for his Holiness, and each pair has a story to tell…

But before we delve into the Vatican’s shoe closet, we might note that the Pope usually has two kinds of red shoes: indoor “liturgical slippers” made of silk and gold brocade, and an outdoor, loafer-like pair that is often plain red.

The shoes’ origins go back to Byzantine days, when they were donned by Norman kings as symbols of bloody martyrdom. Their successors, the Roman Emperors, stuck with it – in fact, they became a standard high-fashion accessory for aristocrats. If your shoes were red, you were a somebody.

Now, historically speaking, Vatican life was pretty luxurious. Pope Martin IV spent a fortune to import his favourite delicacies of melon, and eels boiled in wine. Pope Leo X had a pet white elephant named “Hanno.” Extravagance was standard, and not even the Pope’s shoes escaped it. They became more and more ornate, and were even kissed by visitors just as one kisses the ring of the papa today…

Pope Pius X suffered from poor blood circulation, and was in a constant state of shaky health, so his sisters made him a pair of no-fuss, white slippers…

But he also had a red pair prioritising some seriously fluffy comfort.

The shoes also started their fare share of drama. In 1958, Pope John XXIII’s habit of adding golden buckles and crosses to the shoes was given the boot by his successor, Pope Paul VI, in 1969; he also did away with the papal foot kissing, and nixed the indoor slippers entirely. Although we’d sure like to hear him explain this lavish pair from his wardrobe:

As time went by, so did memories of more opulent shoes, with Pope John Paul II opting for a pair of more brownish loafers:

Fast-forward to 2005. Pope Benedict XVI comes on the scene with a pair of swanky, bright red slippers, and for many, their revitalisation is seen as an extension of his traditional, conservative positions within the church. Of all the popes, his may be the most fascinating relationship with the sacred slippers.

Rumour had it that his shoes were designer made, giving him the nickname “Pope Prada.” In 2007, Esquire went so far as to crown him “Accessorizer of the Year.” As it turns out, the shoes were made by Italian Adriano Stefanelli, whose other clients have included Barack Obama and Ferrari:

The media frenzy around the shoes was so nuts that a photo was (serendipitously) released of Stefanelli gifting the Pope his shoes in 2005:

Then, the unthinkable happened. In 2013, Benedict resigned — with lighting even string the Vatican moments after his announcement.  “When Pope Benedict XVI left the Vatican and his papacy,” reported NPR, “he slipped out of his trademark red shoes and put on a pair of Mexican leather loafers. The shoes, actually three pairs, two burgundy and one brown, were a gift to the Pope during his trip last year to Mexico.” It was a symbolic departure from his habitual ways.

Today, we’re in the era of the less traditional Papa Francesco, who has gone back to basics with his sartorial tendencies. Instead of getting a new ring cast (as is typical practice), he chose a hand-me-down. He rides buses, and gives TED Talks. Oh, and his papal shoes? Plain black.

If you’re keen on getting pair of loafers by Stefanelli, they usually start at about €400, and are available for anyone to buy at his little shop in Novara, Italy. Though chances are, they probably won’t come with gilded buckles.

P.S. Is anyone else now itching to watch that Jude Law HBO show, “The Young Pope“?

BENEDICT XVI, THE BEST DRESSED POPE

Pope Benedict XVI, sporting a fur-trimmed hat in the rich red color of a Santa hat, waves to pilgrims upon his arrival in St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican. The red hat with white fur trimming is known in Italian as the “camauro.”(Alessandra Tarantino / Associated Press)

I’m a Catholic, but I’ll admit it (or should I say “confess” it?): When Pope Benedict XVI announced his pending resignation, my first thought wasn’t religious. It was in fact downright superficial. “There goes the best-dressed pontiff ever!”

During his nearly eight years on the throne of St. Peter, Benedict has always looked absolutely perfect, sartorially speaking, whether garbed in elaborate vestments for an Easter liturgy or clad in the simple but meticulously tailored white caped cassock (it’s called a “simar” in church lingo) that he wears on more ordinary occasions. He’s been the Duke of Windsor of popes.

My own fashion sense is nearly nonexistent, but that only makes me more appreciative of Benedict’s. Some highlights: Benedict saying Mass in 2008 at Washington’s Nationals Park stadium in a billowing scarlet satin chasuble (a priest’s outermost liturgical garment) trimmed with crimson velvet and delicate gold piping. Benedict greeting worshipers in Rome, his chasuble this time woven of emerald-green watered silk with a pattern of golden stars. Benedict on Oct. 21 canonizing Kateri Tekakwitha, the first Native American saint, while attired in a fanon, a gold-and-white striped shoulder covering, dating to the 8th century, that only popes may wear.

Benedict’s immediate predecessor, Pope John Paul II, was a saintly figure and a commanding intellectual presence, but he had little interest in clothes, tending to wear whatever was handed to him and shunning elaborate adornments. Pope Paul VI, who reigned from 1963 to 1978, started out dressing fancy, but he gradually simplified his attire, abandoning, for example, the papal tiara, the high triple crown that popes had worn since the early Middle Ages.

Benedict didn’t bring back the tiara, but he has revived many other traditional papal garments and accessories. For his public appearances he almost always wears the bright red shoes that popes have worn since Roman times (John Paul preferred brown or black footwear). Benedict also began wearing the mozzetta, a waist-length cape, and the camauro, a red velvet cap with a white fur border that reminded Americans of a Santa Claus hat. Neither of those items had been seen much on popes since the end of the Second Vatican Council in 1965.

Benedict’s sartorial revivals have offended many liberal Catholics, who argue that he has been trying to “turn back the clock,” as they often put it, on the churchly reforms of Vatican II. The cattiest critic was Hans Kung, the dissident German priest who had once been a colleague of Benedict, or Josef Ratzinger as he was then called, on the faculty of the University of Tubingen. In a 2008 op-ed article for the Italian newspaper La Stampa, Kung called Benedict’s style of dress “pompous” and compared him to Pope Leo X of the 16th century, notorious for selling indulgences and famously painted by Raphael in fur-trimmed mozzetta and camauro.

Others have used the phrases “over the top” and “major bling” to describe Benedict’s taste in vestments, deeming the pope a foppish aesthete. Still others, such as the gay blogger Andrew Sullivan, have speculated that Benedict is himself gay. Catholic conservatives counter that Benedict’s attire exemplifies a “hermeneutic of continuity,” a deliberate symbolic effort to link his 21st century papacy to centuries of Catholic tradition.

My own take on Benedict’s wardrobe is somewhat different. I don’t believe that aesthetics is mere window-dressing. In her 2005 book “The Substance of Style,” economics pundit Virginia Postrel wrote: “Aesthetics is the way we communicate through the senses…. Aesthetics shows rather than tells, delights rather than instructs. The effects are immediate, perceptual and emotional.” Plato argued that the beautiful, while not exactly the same as the good, is a kind of complement to the good that points to the good and shows off the good via sensory media.

That is what I believe is exactly Benedict’s aim. Over the last couple of decades, the Roman Catholic Church has been besmirched with ugliness, scarred by clerical sexual predation abetted by clueless and self-promoting bishops. Benedict has used beauty to demonstrate tangibly that the Catholic faith that he and the members of his church share is itself beautiful and indestructible, and that it shines through despite all human efforts to wreck it.

It is especially fitting for our time that the pope has chosen his own liturgical apparel as an aesthetic medium. In the world of what passes for sophisticated culture these days, beauty and art have become nearly unmoored from each other. Art is supposed to be transgressive, while beauty is judged merely ornamental. Paint a Madonna, and you’ve got calendar kitsch. Paint a Madonna, and add some elephant dung and pictures of female genitalia cut out from porn magazines, and you’ve got a work to be exhibited in an exclusive gallery. Only in the decorative and useful arts — jewelry, fabrics, home furnishings, clothing, the design of cars, machines, and even humble objects — are beauty and fine craftsmanship still the criteria by which we judge value.

Pope Benedict XVI has been the pope of aesthetics, the pope who plays Mozart on the piano for his own private entertainment and who can write theological books in such lucid, limpid prose that ordinary people can read them for pleasure. He has reminded a world that looks increasingly ugly and debased that there is such a thing as the beautiful — whether it’s embodied in a sonata or an altarpiece or an embroidered cope or the cut of a cassock — and that earthly beauty ultimately communicates a beauty that is beyond earthly things.

POPE FRANCIS SAYS IT’S “ABUSE” TO WEAR CRUCIFIX’S AS ACCESSORIES

Pope Francis has criticised those who wear crucifixes as fashion items, labelling it “abuse” in a recent speech.

Speaking at St Peter’s Square in the Vatican after a Sunday Angelus service, the 81-year-old said the religious symbol should be “contemplated and understood” rather than commercialised as a trendy accessory.

“The crucifix is not an ornamental object or a clothing accessory which is sometimes abused,” he said.

“The image of Jesus crucified reveals the mystery of the death of the Son as the supreme act of love, the source of life and salvation for humanity of all times.”

The Pope went on to explain how the cross should be perceived as more than just an aesthetic object, reminding listeners of its potent religious meaning by explaining what it means to him.

“How do I look at the crucifix?” he said, “like a work of art, to see if it’s beautiful or not beautiful?

“Or do I look inside, within the wounds of Jesus up to his heart?

“I look at the mystery of God annihilated to death, like a slave, like a criminal.

“Jesus wants to make it clear that his extreme affair – that is, the cross, death and resurrection – is an act of fruitfulness.

“His wounds have healed us – a fruitfulness that will bear fruit for many.”

Despite Pope Francis’ comments, the crucifix has been a popular sartorial staple for years, with the likes of Madonna, Jennifer Aniston and Naomi Campbell all sporting cross jewellery in the past, typically in the name of style rather than religion.

Madonna pictured wearing crucifix-inspired earrings (SWNS)

Controversies surrounding the growing trend came to a head in 2002, when Pope John Paul II was leader of the Catholic Church.

After noticing a rise in the crucifix’ sartorial popularity, the Vatican released a sternly-worded editorial via Fides, a charity organisation based in the Vatican, that denounced media personalities for wearing crosses as accessories, describing the trend as “the mania of the moment”.

However, just because Pope Francis disapproves of the crucifix being merchandised for sartorial gain does not mean that he’s opposed to self-expression via subversive trends.

Speaking to a group of young students in Rome on Monday, the Pope expressed his approval of tattoos, telling listeners: “Don’t be afraid of tattoos,” adding that Christians have been getting tattoos on their foreheads for centuries as markers of their allegiance to the faith.

“Of course, there can be exaggerations,” he added, “but a tattoo is a sign of belonging,” he said.

CARDINAL FASHION SHOW: THE DO’S AND DON’TS OF VATICAN WEAR THIS CONCLAVE SEASON (PHOTOS)

The Huffington Post casts a tongue-in-cheek observers eye over the 2013 conclave

The Good Book teaches us judge not, lest ye be judged. But we’re going to break that rule to pick apart the couture of 115 stylin’ high-ranking Catholic officials who’ve arrived in Rome to pick the next pope.

The 115 Roman Catholic cardinals filed into the Vatican Monday morning, readying themselves to judge the papabili — possible pontiffs — at the conclave opening tomorrow. We know they answer to a higher authority, but that didn’t stop HuffPost Weird News from filing into our New York offices to judge who’s hot and who’s not when it comes to holy attire.

Whose cassock had the best hem? Who wore the holiest hue of red? And who committed the Cardinal Sin of fashion?

DON’T

Cardinal Odilo Pedro Scherer, right, and compatriot Cardinal Geraldo Majella Agnelo wore matching outfits. They’re practically inseparable. That’s not a faux pas in itself — too bad they copied all the wrong fashions. Leave Alexander VIII’s fashion sense back in 1691, you guys.

DO

That’s the perfect sock for your cassock, Cardinal Bechara Boutros Rai. Comfortable and easy on the eyes yet it makes a bold statement at the same time.

DO

As you can see, Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi is wearing the Jesus line of bling…

DO

… And he knows he’s lookin’ fly.

DON’T

We didn’t come all the way to the Vatican to fade away into obscurity. Rock that man-frock or bust, Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn.

DO

Ain’t nothin’ wrong with overindulging on the Blood of Christ before the pre-conclave party, Cardinal Marc Ouellet. Especially if you lookin’ good.

DO

Cardinal Donald Wuerl chose an interesting take on the classic cassock color scheme: black with a splash of red. Not too much, not too little. All class.

DON’T

Umm, guys… Let’s remember to coordinate next time, you’re all wearing the same thing. How embarrassing! Cardinal Sin, indeed.

DO

Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz’s new beanie is a power move, and is that an Alexander McQueen sash? We can’t tell.

DO

HAHAHAHAHAHA. Oh how we love you, Cardinal Reinhard Marx. You wouldn’t know the difference between a Balenciaga bag and a Gap purse, but we love you all the same. Just look at those dance moves!

DON’T

Ugh, the same cassock AGAIN, Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi? But seriously, the dude in the back has swag. Yellow, blue and red pinstripes? Take note, Cardinal. Take note.

DO

Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle knows how to be subtle with his cuts, but his colors? He’ll be standing out among the more conservative Cardinals.

DON’T

We’re usually stunned by Cardinal Marc Ouellet’s getups. But this? We’re not even sure he ironed whatever THIS is.

DO

Never to be outdone, Cardinals Angelo Scola, left, and Ennio Antonelli have always been fashion forward at shows. The shading in Antonelli’s tunic, the perfection in Scola’s briefcase accessorizing… It’s almost perfect.

DON’T

You can’t come to a fashion show, Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, and not expect to have some pictures taken. He was so reclusive this year.

DON’T

The cape Cardinal Odilo Pedro Scherer chose clashes a little too much with his sash. And what have you done with your collar? Loosen ‘er up, the Pope isn’t here yet.

References and Sources

Gay History: The Vatican’s Secret Life…

Article, Gay Interest, General Interest, History, , , , ,

We all know that gay men & women exist in all areas of the religious life, and in all denominations and faiths. It’s one of those blatantly hypocritical “Don’t ask, don’t tell” situations, so easily instigated by churches, institutions and governments to dispel the “myth” that any gay people could possibly work or minister there! My encounters at boarding school, with the St. John of God brothers, with Catholic clergy in general suggests to me that the high statistical prevalence of gays, quoted in this article, is correct. My thoughts are that, due to societal rejection of gay people, especially up to 1990s, many men and women entered the religious life – both clerical and monastic – as a way to avoid persecution. Of course, it doesn’t quite work that way. Having a religious “calling” is not going to stop your natural sexual urges…but nice try! This article by Michael Joseph Gross, and published in “Vanity Fair” on November 15, 2013 shows the difficult balance between sexuality and the religious life, and how it is viewed within the walls of Vatican City, and amongst the Catholic hierarchy.

Despite headlines about a powerful “gay lobby” within the Vatican, and a new Pope promising reform, the Catholic Church’s gay cardinals, monks, and other clergy inhabit a hidden netherworld. In Rome, the author learns how they navigate the dangerous paradox of their lives.

Naked but for the towel around his waist, a man of a certain age sat by himself, bent slightly forward as if praying, in a corner of the sauna at a gym in central Rome. I had not met this man before, but as I entered the sauna, I thought I recognized him from photographs. He looked like a priest with whom I’d corresponded after mutual friends put us in touch, a man I had wanted to consult about gay clerics in the Vatican Curia. My friends told me that this priest was gay, politically savvy, and well connected to the gay Church hierarchy in Rome.

But this couldn’t be that priest. He had told me that he’d be away and couldn’t meet. Yet as I looked at the man more closely, I saw that it was definitely him. When we were alone, I spoke his name, telling him mine. “I thought you were out of the country,” I said. “How lucky for me: you’re here!” Startled, the priest talked fast. Yes, his plans had changed, he said, but he was leaving again the next day and would return only after I was gone.

During the previous few days, I had heard a lot about this man. I had heard that he is a gossip, a social operator whose calendar is a blur of drinks and dinners with cardinals and archbishops, principessas and personal trainers. Supposedly, he loves to dish male colleagues with campy female nicknames. But I would never have the experience firsthand. The priest was embarrassed: to have been chanced upon at this place; to have had his small evasions revealed. The encounter was awkward. No, he did not wish to discuss the subject I was interested in. No, he did not think the subject worthwhile. These things he made clear. We left the sauna and, after further conversation, civil but stilted, went our separate ways.

I could understand his discomfort. But in Rome these days the topic of gay priests in the upper reaches of the Holy See is hard to avoid. In February of this year, not long before the College of Cardinals gathered in the Sistine Chapel for the conclave to choose the 266th Pope, the largest Italian daily newspaper, La Repubblica, reported that a “gay lobby”—a more or less unified cabal of homosexual power brokers—might be operating inside the Vatican. According to the newspaper, the possible existence of this gay lobby was among the many secrets described in a two-volume, 300-page report bound in red and presented to Pope Benedict XVI by three cardinals he had appointed to investigate the affair known as “VatiLeaks.” That scandal, which raised fresh suspicions of endemic corruption within the Curia, had broken the previous year after Paolo Gabriele, the papal butler, made off with some of Benedict’s private papers and leaked them to the press.

The internal VatiLeaks report, according to La Repubblica, indicated that gay clerics in the Vatican were being blackmailed. The report was also said to document the alleged gay lobby’s social structure and customs. Yet details concerning gay priests’ gatherings added up to old news: the tales had been told in articles previously published by La Repubblica itself. Sensationally, the newspaper suggested that Benedict’s concern about the alleged gay lobby was one reason he had suddenly resigned the papacy.

Months later, another leak of confidential information brought the subject of a gay lobby back into the news. Someone took notes during what was meant to be a private meeting between Latin-American Church leaders and the new Pope, the former cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, Archbishop of Buenos Aires, now known as Francis. In June, those notes were published on a progressive Catholic Web site. Francis was quoted as saying, “The ‘gay lobby’ is mentioned, and it is true, it is there … We need to see what we can do.”

A Closet with No Door

Gay lobby? It depends on what you mean. The term could refer to a shadowy group like the Illuminati, whose members quietly exercise supreme power. This is the sort of idea that lights up the tinfoil hats of conspiracy theorists, and it doesn’t capture the slow, feudal, inefficient workings of the Vatican. “Gay lobby” is really shorthand for something else. At the Vatican, a significant number of gay prelates and other gay clerics are in positions of great authority. They may not act as a collective but are aware of one another’s existence. And they inhabit a secretive netherworld, because homosexuality is officially condemned. Though the number of gay priests in general, and specifically among the Curia in Rome, is unknown, the proportion is much higher than in the general population. Between 20 and 60 percent of all Catholic priests are gay, according to one estimate cited by Donald B. Cozzens in his well-regarded The Changing Face of the Priesthood. For gay clerics at the Vatican, one fundamental condition of their power, and of their priesthood, is silence, at least in public, about who they really are.

Clerics inhabit this silence in a variety of ways. A few keep their sexuality entirely private and adhere to the vow of celibacy. Many others quietly let themselves be known as gay to a limited degree, to some colleagues, or to some laypeople, or both; sometimes they remain celibate and sometimes they do not. A third way, perhaps the least common but certainly the most visible, involves living a double life. Occasionally such clerics are unmasked, usually by stories in the Italian press. In 2010, for the better part of a month, one straight journalist pretended to be the boyfriend of a gay man who acted as a “honeypot” and entrapped actual gay priests in various sexual situations. (The cardinal vicar of Rome was given the task of investigating. The priests’ fates are unknown.)

There are at least a few gay cardinals, including one whose long-term partner is a well-known minister in a Protestant denomination. There is the notorious monsignor nicknamed “Jessica,” who likes to visit a pontifical university and pass out his business card to 25-year-old novices. (Among the monsignor’s pickup lines: “Do you want to see the bed of John XXIII?”) There’s the supposedly straight man who has a secret life as a gay prostitute in Rome and posts photographs online of the innermost corridors of the Vatican. Whether he received this privileged access from some friend or family member, or from a client, is impossible to say; to see a known rent boy in black leather on a private Vatican balcony does raise an eyebrow.

The Vatican holds secrets so tightly that it can make Fort Meade look like a sloppy drunk. Yet dozens of interviews with current and former gay priests, gay monks, veteran Vatican journalists, Italian aristocrats, and gay men at Roman gyms, bars, nightclubs, sex clubs, and restaurants suggest that, riveting as the more graphic stories are, they convey a limited part of the reality of gay clerical life in Rome. To be gay in the Vatican is no guarantee of success, mark of belonging, or shortcut to erotic intrigue. Most basically it is a sentence of isolation. Gays in the Vatican are creatures of a cutthroat bureaucracy whose dogmatic worldview denies or denigrates their own existence. They live in a closet that has no door. Among recent Popes, Benedict made the most concerted effort to sharpen Church doctrine on homosexuality, which he once called “a more or less strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil.” He tried to cull gays from clerical ranks, most notably in 2005, when men with known “deep-seated homosexual tendencies” were prohibited from being ordained, even if they were celibate.

Denunciation and exposure have made gay priests figures of fascination—though less as people than as symbols—especially to the secular far left and the religious far right. Both sides find these clerics to be politically useful. The left uses them to level charges of hypocrisy. The right sees them as a stain in need of removal. They all got a shock late last July when Francis made his first direct public statement about gay clerics since becoming Pope.

During an impromptu press conference aboard the papal jet, en route from Rio de Janeiro to Rome after his first overseas trip, Francis was asked about the so-called gay lobby. His response, delivered with casual humor and punctuated by shrugs and smiles, was as follows: “So much has been written about the gay lobby. I still haven’t run into anyone in the Vatican who has shown me an identity card with ‘gay’ on it.” He pantomimed holding up such a card in his left hand and then went on: “When you find yourself with a person like that, you have to distinguish between the fact of a person being gay and the fact of somebody forming a lobby. . . . If a person is gay and is searching for the Lord and has goodwill, who am I to judge him?”

He spoke these words with a palpable warmth, unlike the embattled, wary tone that other Popes have adopted. This may well have been the first time in history that a Pope has publicly uttered the term “gay”—the word that most men who feel romantic love for other men use to describe themselves—instead of the pathologizing 19th-century medical term “homosexual.” Then, in a lengthy interview with a Jesuit journal, the Pope went further, stating that the Church’s ministry should not be “obsessed” with a few divisive moral issues such as abortion and gay marriage. “When God looks at a gay person, does he endorse the existence of this person with love, or reject and condemn this person?” the Pope asked rhetorically. “We must always consider the person.”

Every Man for Himself

Tales of gays in the Vatican have been told for more than a thousand years. Pope John XII, who reigned from 955 to 964, was accused of having sex with men and boys and turning the papal palace “into a whorehouse.” While trying to persuade a cobbler’s apprentice to have sex with him, Pope Boniface VIII, who reigned from 1294 to 1303, was said to have assured the boy that two men having sex was “no more a sin than rubbing your hands together.” After Paul II, who reigned from 1464 to 1471, died of a heart attack—while in flagrante delicto with a page, according to one rumor—he was succeeded by Sixtus IV, who kept a nephew as his lover (and made the nephew a cardinal at age 17). Some such stories are better substantiated than others. Even while their reliability is questionable, they demonstrate that playing the gay card (even if you yourself are gay) is an ancient Curial tactic. “There are closeted gay priests who are vipers,” observes the theologian Mark D. Jordan, the author of The Silence of Sodom: Homosexuality in Modern Catholicism. “They are really poisonous people, and they work out their own inner demonology by getting into positions in power and exercising it” against other gay men, women, and anyone whom they perceive to be a threat. “Alongside that are suffering priests who seem sincere all the way down, who are trying to be faithful to God, and also to take care of people and change the institution. They are the ones who are always forgotten, and read out of the story from both sides.”

The Catholic priesthood’s contemporary gay cultural memory begins in the middle of the last century. When Paul VI assumed the throne, in 1963, by one account he took his papal name not from any predecessor but from a former lover, a film actor. That at least was the contention of the provocative gay French writer Roger Peyrefitte, whose 1976 allegations about Paul VI caused such a stir that Paul took to the balcony of St. Peter’s to denounce the “horrible and slanderous” accusations. Paul looked a laughingstock, and the Curia learned a lesson: better to ignore such charges than to amplify them by denial.

Meanwhile, some gay clerics were outgrowing the “particular friendships” that had long been part of monastic life and joining the sexual revolution. By the 1970s, the center of gay life in Rome was a cruising area called Monte Caprino, on the Capitoline Hill. At a small party of gay monks and their friends in Rome last summer, conversation turned to recollections of that place. “It was like its own little city,” one monk remembered, “with hundreds of people—everyone from seminarians to bishops—and then there were, conveniently, bushes off to the side.” The fellow feeling at Monte Caprino was compromised by the air of secrecy around the place. The area was a target for muggers and thieves, who figured rightly that clerics would make ideal victims because they had much to lose by the public act of pressing charges. One gay former seminarian recalled a night when three men beat him up and stole his wallet while numerous men in the crowded park stood by. Left bloodied by the thieves, the seminarian hollered at the bystanders, “There’s three of them and 300 of us!”

He told me this story, with its echoes of the parable of the Good Samaritan—in which a traveler is robbed, beaten, and left by the side of the road, and pious men do nothing to help him—to illustrate the every-man-for-himself dynamic of Rome’s gay clerical culture. Gay clerics often fail to help one another, he says, for the same reason that no one tried to help him the night that he was robbed: solidarity entails the risk of being outed.

“La Maledetta”

Self-centeredness can breed a sense of entitlement. “A certain part of the clergy feels that no one will care what they do if they are discreet,” says Marco Politi, a prominent Italian journalist and longtime Vatican correspondent, and the author of several books about the papacy and the Church. In 2000, Politi published a book-length interview with an anonymous gay priest, entitled La Confessione, republished in 2006 as Io, Prete Gay (I, Gay Priest). “Rumors are O.K., but not scandal,” Politi observes.

There has been plenty of scandal, though. In 2007, Monsignor Tommaso Stenico met a young man in an online chat room and invited him to his Vatican office, where their conversation—in which Stenico denied that gay sex was a sin, touched the man’s leg, and said, “You’re so hot”—was secretly videotaped and then broadcast on Italian television. (Stenico tried to persuade Italian newspapers that he’d just been playing along in order “to study how priests are ensnared” into gay sex as part of “a diabolical plan by groups of Satanists.” He was suspended from his Vatican position.) In 2006 a priest in the Vatican’s Secretariat of State injured police officers and smashed into police cars during a high-speed chase through a district in Rome known for transsexuals and prostitutes. (The priest was acquitted on all charges after claiming that he fled because he feared he was being kidnapped.) In a 2010 investigation of contract fixing for construction projects, Italian police wiretaps happened to catch a papal usher and Gentleman of His Holiness, Angelo Balducci, allegedly hiring male prostitutes, some of whom may have been seminarians, through a Nigerian member of a Vatican choir. (The choir member was dismissed; Balducci was convicted on corruption charges.)

Pope Benedict was rumored to have ordered that prelates who were living double lives be retired or removed from Rome. Marco Politi speculates that perhaps as many as 30 were eased out. The most senior prelate to lose his job was Cardinal Keith O’Brien, the archbishop of St. Andrews and Edinburgh. A staunch opponent of gay marriage who had publicly called homosexuality a “moral degradation,” O’Brien was brought down in February by three priests and one ex-priest who accused him of “inappropriate contact” and predatory behavior when he was their bishop. The episodes recounted by the four men involved such consistent patterns over more than 30 years that some of O’Brien’s colleagues surely must have had their suspicions. When I asked one archbishop if he had known that O’Brien was gay, however, the archbishop said he had not. When I asked the archbishop who among the other cardinals were O’Brien’s closest friends, he coldly answered, “I don’t think he had any.” Every man for himself, indeed.

Even Benedict has been dogged by rumors that he is gay. Though no solid evidence has ever emerged, it is treated as common knowledge by many in Rome, who cite stereotypes galore, including his fussy fashion sense (his ruby-red slippers, his “Valentino red” capes); his crusade to nail down why “homosexual actions” are “intrinsically disordered” (many closeted gay men, from Roy Cohn to Cardinal O’Brien, have made the most extraordinary efforts to condemn homosexuality); and his bromance with Archbishop Georg Gänswein, his longtime personal secretary. (Nicknamed Bel Giorgio, or “Gorgeous George,” the rugged Gänswein skis, plays tennis, and pilots airplanes. He inspired Donatella Versace’s winter 2007 “clergyman collection.”) Perhaps the most vicious of Benedict’s nicknames is “La Maledetta.” The word means “cursed” in Italian, but the pun derives from the fact that the term means the exact opposite of Benedict’s own name in Italian, Benedetto, which means “blessed”—with a gender change achieved in the process.

Neither Benedict nor Gänswein has publicly responded to any of this. The chatter’s main consequence has been not to hurt them personally (though surely it must, at least a little) but to help lock down genuine conversation about the everyday lives of gay priests, whether celibate or not. It is more or less impossible for gay clerics to articulate their affections in any way that does not amount to what an Anglo-Saxon mind might see as hypocrisy. Yet such a dualistic existence is very much a part of Church tradition. “This is almost an aspect of the Catholic religion itself,” Colm Tóibín has written in an essay on gays and Catholicism, “this business of knowing and not knowing something all at the same time, keeping an illusion separate from the truth.” It is also typical of Italian sexuality in general, and Italian homosexuality in particular. This is the country that tolerated the sexual escapades and serial frauds of former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi with scarcely a hint of protest from the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. This is the country where countless married women ignore their husbands’ dalliances with men.

La Bella Figura

The culture of deception operates according to signals and conventions by which gay clerics navigate their lives. Camp is perhaps the most powerful and pervasive of these codes, though it can be difficult to define. Ironic, effeminate self-mockery—allowing priests to exercise some limited rebellion against their own isolation and invisibility—is one form of clerical camp. For fear of laughing out loud, priests sometimes try to avoid making eye contact with one another in church when hymns with titles like “Hail, Holy Queen” are sung. After Bergoglio became Pope Francis, YouTube clips of a sequence from Fellini’s Roma went viral among gay priests in Rome. It shows a plain-looking cardinal watching a runway show of over-the-top clerical attire—which ends when the departed Pope steals the show by appearing in the glorious garb of a Sun God.

One gay former priest, who still lives in Rome, describes clerical camp as “a natural way of expressing [gay identity] while celibate.” Socially, he says, it is “a key that unlocks a further element of trust.” There’s nothing earth-shattering about this—it’s what every institution does—but “the Church has a lot more experience and practice at protecting itself. As far as that goes,” he says, with a nod to Cole Porter, “they’re the tops.”

When this former priest began his education in Rome, a professor told him, “There shouldn’t be a subculture. We are all male here, so it’s inappropriate to say ‘her’ or to refer to other men with feminine pronouns.” The former priest says that “none of this instruction was about our behavior. It was about how we should appear.” He believes that such instruction illustrates a little-noted change in official thinking about Catholic identity, and what should be at its center. “The symbols of the Church should be the sacraments,” such as the Eucharist, he argues, but over time the people who administer the sacraments have come to displace them in prominence. In other words, “the priests become the symbols” that are deemed most important. Which in turn puts a premium on outward appearance and enforces conformity to a certain official ideal. The Church, therefore, is increasingly preoccupied with making sure its leaders are groomed from among “boys who look holy: playing dress-up at the American College and going down to Piazza Navona at nine P.M. to say their Breviaries.” Sacraments and liturgy, the former priest says, are “the kernel of what makes the Church important. This is what makes us powerful. Not the protection of medieval institutions.”

Yet in the Church, as in Italian society, it’s often the case that right appearance—la bella figura—is all. In every detail, parties celebrating appointment to the Vatican and other high Church offices can be lavish—“like a posh girl’s wedding”—with many clerics in attendance being “gay men wearing everything handmade, perfect, queer as it comes,” observes one prominent figure in the Roman art world. But la bella figura matters just as much at ordinary moments. Especially for clerics who break the vow of celibacy, it is crucial to keep up appearances in the normal course of life.

Gay saunas are good places to meet other gay priests and monks. The best times to find clerics at the saunas are late afternoon or evening on Thursdays (when pontifical universities have no classes) or Sundays (after Mass). Some gay celibate clerics use the saunas not for sex but to experience a sense of fellowship with others like themselves. One calls his sauna visits “something to confirm myself as I am.” (Rome has few gay bars, and John Moss, the American owner of the largest and oldest one, the Hangar, says that the rise of Internet cruising, combined with the Vatican’s crackdown on gay priests, has decimated his gay clerical clientele. “There used to be so many seminarians—such beautiful men—who came to the bar, and we would even get hired to take parties to them in some of the religious houses. Now there’s nobody.”)

Once you make a connection, it’s possible to use your monastery cell for sexual assignations, as long as you don’t make much noise. “You can sneak people in, no problem,” one gay monk says, “but try to avoid consistent patterns of movement.” In other words, don’t invite a guy over on the same day of the week, or at the same time of day, very often. That said, “no one has sex” with other residents of his own monastery, a former monk told me, “because it is like a Big Brother house. Everyone knows everything.”

The more senior the cleric, the more likely he may be to play loose with the rules. One leading Vatican reporter (who says that, among journalists on the beat, the two most common topics for gossip about Church officials are “who’s gay and who’s on the take”) describes the logic of such behavior. “Everything is permitted because you are a prince of the court,” he says. “If you are truly loyal and entrusted with the highest level of responsibility, there has to be an extra liberty attached in order to be able to pull it off.”

Vows of celibacy don’t say anything about eye candy. Some Curia officials are said to handpick extremely handsome men for menial jobs in order to make Vatican City more scenic. A layman I know whose job requires frequent trips to the Vatican used to enjoy flirting with a muscular go-go boy who danced on the bar at a gay nightclub in Rome. One day at the Vatican, this layman was amazed to see the dancer out of context, dressed in the uniform of a security guard. When he made to greet the man, the guard signaled him to stay back, raising a finger to his lips in a quiet “Shhhhh … ”

Where silence can’t strictly be kept, word games can compartmentalize the truth. In the Vatican office of a monsignor who I’d been told might have some firsthand knowledge concerning recent gay scandals in the Church, I asked, point-blank, “Are you gay?,” and he serenely answered, “No.” I replied, “I wonder, if a priest is homosexual—but does not participate in mainstream secular gay culture—could he say that he is not ‘gay’ and still think he’s telling the truth?” “What an interesting question,” the monsignor said, immediately standing up and gesturing me to the door. “I’m afraid I don’t have any more time to talk.” He insisted on personally walking me out of the building, and as we passed along a grand hallway I remarked upon its beauty. “I don’t see it,” he replied archly. “To me, other hallways are ‘beautiful.’ ” Was this an innocent remark, or a coded answer to my question? Sometimes talking to gay priests feels like reading stories by Borges.

For those who want it, organized networks can provide some grounding. A few small groups of gay Catholics in Rome operate publicly, but because anyone can come to their meetings, it can be risky for priests, especially Vatican officials, to be part of them. One private group of about 50 gay priests and laymen meets once a year, for a kind of retreat. A Vatican priest I met with—he actually invited me to stop by his office near St. Peter’s because he said he wanted “to show that this is no secret,” though it’s secret enough that he can’t be named—is involved with this group, as part of an unofficial ministry in addition to his official duties. He says that his superiors, including at least one very prominent Vatican official, have long known he is gay, and have even promoted him since learning that fact.

Yet gays in the Vatican, like spies in intelligence services, inhabit boxes within boxes. The priest who helps with the group of 50 raised his eyebrows when I repeated to him something an archbishop had told me. “I know a priest who ministers to people in the Curia in that situation,” the archbishop said, though “he is not assigned officially.”

“That is not me,” the priest said, amazed. “I wonder who it could be.”

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell

As you would expect, the priest I met in the sauna looks rather different with vestments on. When I walked into church a few days later, for Sunday-morning Mass, he was the celebrant—even though, when we met, he had said he was about to leave town. Maybe his plans had changed again.

He was preaching a homily on the Gospel reading, the parable of the Good Samaritan. The priest told the congregation that this story was a challenge. A challenge to accept “risk in favor of compassion.” A challenge to “look more deeply at ‘Who is my neighbor?’ ” A challenge to be generous, unlike “the religious, spiritual person who did nothing to help.” Listening to these words, I could not help but wonder: where, in that parable, does this priest see himself?

From the day after the conclave ended—when Francis went back to his hotel and personally checked out, paid his bill, and picked up his suitcase—the new Pope has surprised people with his actions. During Holy Week, he went to a juvenile prison and washed the feet of inmates, including two girls and two Muslims. One morning, he reportedly made a sandwich for the Swiss Guard who had stood sentinel outside his room all night. He invited 200 homeless people for dinner in the Vatican gardens.

Francis has also said some things that, from a Pope’s mouth, seem extraordinary simply because they are so down to earth—like his choice to end one homily with the untraditional exhortation “Have a good lunch!” Yet the first time this Pope’s words, rather than his actions, made significant headlines was in connection with his comments about the “gay lobby.”

As noted, the phrase first gained currency before Francis came on the scene, but it returned to public discussion just as he got serious about what may be a hallmark of his papacy: a cleanup of Vatican corruption. The scope of his concern about abuse of power seems total. He is reforming everything from the Vatican bank’s bookkeeping to the contents of the papal wardrobe.

For a long time, gay priests have made for convenient scapegoats and handy pawns in Church power games. All of them, whether actively or passively, have helped create these roles for themselves, and they can hardly imagine a different reality—unless they were to emerge from the closet and get thrown out of the priesthood. One monk told me, “A lot of us will not condemn. But not speak out. We’re in a system that controls us. The longer you’re in it, the more it controls, the more you assume the clerical position.” They keep hope small, or snuff it entirely. They believe that nothing and no one could make the Church safe for them. Might this change? “Not in my lifetime,” they all say.

Yet, before he became Francis, Jorge Bergoglio was a Jesuit. As *National Catholic Reporter’*s John Allen, the dean of the American Vatican-watchers, told me, “There’s a kind of Catholic version of ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’ that the Jesuits would be particularly noted for. There are guys in the Jesuit world that everybody knows are gay, but they don’t go around making a big deal out of it.” While Pope Benedict’s Vatican attempted to make sure gays knew they were unwelcome in the priesthood, the Jesuits developed a reputation for tolerating and even protecting their gay brethren.

In the collegial Jesuit spirit, Francis appointed eight cardinals to serve as his core advisers on significant issues, and in the coming years, this group may have as much influence on the situation of gays in the priesthood as Francis himself. When I asked an archbishop how he thinks the cardinals’ conversation about their gay brothers will go, he answered with reference not to the Holy Spirit but to the god of Fortune. “Right now the surest thing I can say is that there’s change in the air,” he said. “If you could say what will happen, you could say who’d win the lottery.”

The next time I heard mention of a lottery was a few days later, at dinner with a gay monk who told me that he had recently fallen in love for the first time, with a man. “Am I a clerical hypocrite? I guess in one way I am,” he said, in the middle of a long and emotional narrative, before bringing the conversation to bedrock reality. “But I’m over 60. I have nothing financially. I can’t leave.” And then he said, “If I won the Powerball lotto, I would leave.”

Note: An alteration was made in the passage about Marco Politi’s La Confessione, republished as Io, Prete Gay, in order to give a more accurate description of the book.

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