Tag Archives: gay martyrs

Gay History: Martyrs Among Us: Deifying Matthew Shepard, Harvey Milk + more

Article, Gay Interest, , , , , ,
IMAGE ABOVE: JAKE GYLLENHAAL AND HEATH LEDGER IN BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN; COVER STORY IMAGE: HILLARY SWANK IN BOYS DON’T CRY

When news broke that Matthew Shepard’s remains were finally buried at the National Cathedral some 20 years after his death, we were reminded of the collective grief the nation felt after the brutal, senseless murder of the waiflike 21-year-old. In the intervening years since he happened into a bar where he met up with two men who lured him into their truck, robbed him, and drove him to a desolate stretch of highway outside Laramie, Wyoming where they pistol-whipped him, tied him to a wooden fence and left him for dead in the cold night air, Shepard had become more than an emblem of the senseless hate crimes perpetrated against the gay community, he had become a martyr.

Matthew Shepard was an openly gay student at the University of Wyoming who was brutally attacked in a hate crime at the age of 21.

Shepard’s place among sacrificial victims was solidified when more than 5,000 people gathered on the steps of the Capitol to mourn his death and cemented when Congress passed the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, which broadened existing law to include crimes triggered by sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, race and disability. Byrd was an African American man murdered by three white supremacists in Jasper, Texas. On June 7, 1998, they dragged his body for three miles behind their pickup truck. Although Byrd wasn’t gay, his inhumane murder serves to remind us of the hate that permeates society.

In his book, Dying to Be Normal: Gay Martyrs and the Transformation of Sexual Politics, author Brett Krutszch theorizes that LGBTQ activists are using religion to make the argument that gays are essentially the same as straights and deserve the same equal rights. He points to the veneration of Shepard, Harvey Milk and other high profile gay victims, as well as campaigns like the It Gets Better Project, which he believes promotes the notion that “like Christ’s suffering on the cross, one’s trials today can lead to a better tomorrow.” Krutszch says that national tragedies like Orlando’s Pulse nightclub shooting show how activists use headline-grabbing deaths to gain acceptance, shape the debate over LGBTQ rights and foster assimilation.

Krutszch maintains that Mr. Shepard’s 1998 murder is steeped in religious imagery. Just the thought of the all-American boy-next-door tied to a fence conjures up images of the crucifixion. He concludes that Matthew Shepard’s resulting canonization is due to the interplay of religion, death and LGBTQ politics and that “martyrs as emblems can be changed into more respectable figures than they were in their lifetime.” We may never know if Mr. Shepard was the innocent victim most people believe he was, or as The Book of Matt: Hidden Truths About the Murder of Matthew Shepard indicates, he was a meth dealer who not only knew his killers, but was sexually involved with one and that his death was the result of a drug robbery gone bad.

Whatever the motive for his murder, Shepard has become a shining symbol in the pantheon of almost exclusively white gay martyrs. The group dates back to the 4th century when Sergius and Bacchus, two Roman Christian soldiers who happened to be lovers, took part in a rite called adelphopoiesis (the ancient equivalent of same sex marriage) and refused to attend sacrifices for Zeus, thereby revealing their Christianity. The pair was paraded through what is now Syria. They were dressed in women’s clothing and tortured to death. They lived on through fervent followers and the churches that were dedicated to them throughout The Byzantine Empire.

Any conversation about modern-day martyrs would not be complete without mentioning Harvey Milk. He was the first openly gay elected official in California. Krutszch described Milk as “a secular Jewish, Yiddish-speaking, anti-monogamist” who was transformed by activists who “downplayed his Jewishness, depicted him as committed to fidelity and presented him as someone whose death, like Christ’s crucifixion, transformed the world.” One can argue the validity of that characterization, but it is hard to deny the contributions Milk made as San Francisco’s District 5 Supervisor. Those included defeating Proposition 6 that would have banned lesbian and gay educators from teaching in California public schools, and his efforts to pass legislation that prohibited discrimination in housing and employment based on sexual orientation.

Harvey Milk

Tyler Clemente may be less well known than Milk and Shepard, but like their deaths, his was another flashpoint. You may remember reading about his suicide in 2010. Clemente was an 18-year-old Rutgers University student who jumped from the George Washington Bridge after his roommate used a webcam to spy on him kissing another man. The video was posted on Twitter.

Most homosexual martyrs are white, but they are not all men. Brandon Teena, born Teena Renae Brandon, became famous when Hilary Swank played him in Boys Don’t Cry. The 21-year-old Teena was living a quiet transgender life in Humboldt, Nebraska, dating 18-year-old Lana Tisdel and hanging out with two ex-convicts John Lotter and Marvin Thomas “Tom” Nissen. Everything was fine until December 19, 1993, when Teena was arrested for forging checks. He used his one phone call to call Tisdel. She got the surprise of her life when she came to bail him out and was directed to the women’s prison where Teena was being held.

Brandon Teena

At a Christmas Eve party a few weeks later, Lotter and Nissen forced Teena to remove his pants, proving to Tisdale that he was a woman. Later that night, Lotter and Nissen forced Teena into a car, drove him to a deserted area, attacked and gang-raped him. Fearful that Brandon would file a police complaint, the pair murdered him on New Year’s Eve. While his family buried him as a female (his tombstone reads “Teena R. Brandon, Daughter, Sister and Friend”), the death of Brandon Teena is credited with raising awareness of transgender issues in the same way that Matthew Shepard’s became a clarion call for injustices directed toward gay men.

Teen Lana Tisdale

While real-life suffering seems like a necessary prerequisite for martyrdom, some fictional characters like Brokeback Mountain’s Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar have transcended fictional status to take their place in the cultural zeitgeist. Brokeback author, Annie Proulx, said the characters Jack and Ennis were her first two that felt “really damned real” and “got a life of their own.” She also said, “Unfortunately, they got a life of their own for too many other people, too … the audience that Brokeback reached most strongly have powerful fantasy lives. They can’t bear the way it ends. So they invent all kinds of boyfriends and new lovers and so forth after Jack is killed. They can’t understand that the story isn’t about Jack and Ennis, it’s about homophobia.”

Gay martyrs like Matthew Shepard, Harvey Milk, Brandon Teena and even Brokeback’s fictional characters are often a byproduct of homophobia, when people who find themselves outside the mainstream and are struggling to just be who they are.

Reference

Gay History: Outcry As Secret Gay Life Of Irish Hero Is ‘Proved’

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

Roger Casement’s notorious Black Diaries are genuine, claims writer

English Photographer, (19th century). Medium: black and white photograph. Date: 19th Century. Roger Casement (1864-1916) Irish nationalist and revolutionary; Edward James Glave (1863-95) journalist and explorer; William Georges Parminter (d.1894); Herbert Ward (1863-1919) English sculptor; all of them travelled in Africa and especially the Congo and protested about human rights there; social justice; investigating human rights abuses; Provenance: Private Collection.

Since his execution at Pentonville prison, London, 83 years ago next week**, Sir Roger Casement has been at the centre of a historical controversy involving spies, treason and homosexuality.

Now fresh evidence has been unearthed suggesting that Casement’s so-called Black Diaries, detailing the Irish nationalist leader’s promiscuous homosexual affairs, were in fact genuine.

A Belfast-based writer has discovered a new letter, written only days before Casement died on the gallows, which he claims confirms the existence of a mysterious homosexual lover, alluded to in the Black Diaries as Millar.

The revelation is bound to provoke outrage among nationalist historians, who regard the allegations as slurs conjured up by British intelligence during the Irish war of independence.

The Casement controversy remains so powerful that Bertie Ahern, the Irish Prime Minister, ordered an investigation earlier this year into the authenticity of the diaries.

The Millar letter was written by an MI5 agent to the Home Office four days before Casement was hanged for treason. It was uncovered in the Public Record Office at Kew in London earlier this year by Jeff Dudgeon, an Ulster gay activist who sued the British Government in the European Court of Human Rights 20 years ago over discrimination against gays in Northern Ireland.

Dudgeon points out that in the Black Diaries of 1910-11, Casement allegedly makes a number of references to having sex with Millar. On 8 August, for instance, Casement is supposed to have written: ‘Leaving for Belfast. To sleep with Millar. In at once.’ Three days earlier Casement supposedly wrote: ‘Letter from Millar. Good on for Tuesday. Hurrah! Expecting!’ The diary entries also include references to the two men spending the night together on the day the Titanic sunk.

The agent who wrote the Millar memo, Frank Hall, discovered that Millar was Joseph Millar Gordon, a 26-year-old employee of the Belfast Bank in Donegall Square.

Hall tells his boss, Sir Ernley Blackwell, the chief legal adviser to the Home Office, that he was able to track Casement’s lover down via a motorbike which he bought for Millar for £25.

Hall noted that Millar Gordon lived alone with his mother at Carnstroan, a large Victorian house in Myrtlefield Park in south Belfast.

Four days after the memo’s postmark, Casement was hanged for his part in enlisting German military support for the 1916 Easter Rising.

At least five members of the British war Cabinet, including Home Secretary Herbert Samuel, had known Casement personally when he worked for the Foreign Office. Casement had investigated allegations of slavery and human rights abuses in the Congo and Peru on behalf of the British Government.

Dudgeon points out that the memo, which was only made available to the public at the end of 1998, was secret and would not have been used at the time in the propaganda campaign against the Irish republican icon.

‘Why would the British forge an internal MI5 memo? This letter puts flesh on the bones of the Millar referred to in the diaries. Nobody could have invented him, because he is so well documented. He was a living person from Belfast whom I believe definitely had a relationship with Casement,’ he said.

Dudgeon denied that being a gay unionist has coloured his year-long research programme into the Casement diaries. ‘I came to this subject with an open mind. It has to be said that the diaries, as well as being an important part of Irish history, are also a vital part of gay history in the twentieth century. They are the only body of written evidence of intense gay sexual detail from this time.’

However, Angus Mitchell, author of the most recent book on Casement, insists the Black Diaries are forgeries. Mitchell, who published The Amazon Journal of Roger Casement in 1997, said: ‘You should remember that the diaries came out of the Home Office, too. The diaries are forgeries, of that I have no doubt. So what if there really was a Millar? There are hundreds of others referred to in the diaries who Casement describes and who can be traced as well. It proves nothing.’

Eoin Neeson, the author of a recent book on 300 years of republicanism, Birth of a Republic, claims: ‘No one who knew him believed the allegations and [they] are unanimous about his extremely high sense of moral integrity… The virtual impossibility of his practising the gross degeneracies at all, let alone with the frequency alleged, is demonstrable.’

Dudgeon, who is writing a book based on his research, promises to reveal more material which he claims will prove that subsequent Irish governments covered up evidence to support the authenticity of the diaries.

Millar Gordon, the alleged lover, died in Dublin in 1956, three years before the diaries were first published.

Irish Legal Heritage: Hanged by a comma

Irish revolutionary Roger Casement, the ‘father of 20th-century human rights investigations’, was knighted in 1911 for his investigations into human rights abuses in the Congo and Peru while he worked a British Consul.

An Irish Republican, Casement went to Germany in 1914 in an effort to secure German military support for Irish independence. However, suspicious of the Germans toying with him when they provided significantly fewer arms than they promised, Casement left for Ireland in April 1916 with the hope that he could convince Eoin McNeill to call off the Easter Rising.

Casement travelled to Kerry in a German submarine, but had been suffering from malaria that he had contracted while working in the Congo and was too weak to travel further than a few miles from the coast. Three days before the beginning of the Easter Rising, Casement was arrested by the Royal Irish Constabulary at a site now known as Casement’s Fort near Tralee.

Casement was brought to London where he was tried in the High Court for high treason, contrary to the Treason Act 1351. Since the crimes he was accused of had occurred in Germany, much of Casement’s case hinged on statutory interpretation of the Treason Act 1351, which had been translated from Norman French to state: ‘if a do man levy War against our Lord the King in his Realm, or be adherent to the King’s enemies in his Realm, giving to them aid and comfort in the Realm, or elsewhere, and thereof be probably attainted of open deed’.

It was argued that this meant that the offence of treason included levying war against the king in his realm, or supporting the king’s enemies (located in the Realm, or elsewhere) by giving them ‘aid and comfort’ in the realm.

However, the Court omitted the comma after ‘Realm, or elsewhere’, and interpreted the statute to include a third offence of giving aid and comfort to the King’s enemies outside Britain.

As such, Casement was sentenced to death by hanging after being found guilty of ‘High treason by adhering to the King’s enemies elsewhere than in the King’s realm to wit, in the Empire of Germany, contrary to the Treason Act, 1351’.

** The article is from 1999.

Reference

Gay History: Roger Casement: Gay Irish Martyr or Victim of a British Forgery?

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

A century since he was executed, the story of Irish rebel Sir Roger Casement remains controversial due to the Black Diaries – either a genuine chronicle of his sexual history or a forgery by British officials to discredit him. Two biographers have set out to settle Casement’s case once and for all

Undated library file photo of Sir Roger Casement. Photograph: PA

hanged man was never more popular. One hundred years ago, the British government executed Roger Casement for his participation in a rebellion in Ireland, the Easter Rising of 1916. This year, schoolchildren and tourists by the thousands have visited Casement’s gravesite in Dublin. It is part of a centennial pilgrimage in honour of the Rising, the pivotal event in modern Irish history, marked by headstones, prisons, and rebel redoubts now hard to imagine in jostling traffic. As the First World War raged across Europe, Irish men and women joined the Rising in an attempt to break from a United Kingdom that had bound Ireland for 115 years. In fighting to establish an Irish republic, they battled not just the British government; they also faced the prospect of a civil war against Irish Protestant unionists in the northern province of Ulster who had already spent three years arming themselves against the prospect of political domination by Ireland’s Catholic majority. In the aftermath of the Rising, the British government executed 16 rebel leaders, including Casement. He was hanged and buried on August 3 in the yard of Pentonville Prison in London, England, a land and sea away from his current resting place.

Casement, the last man to be executed, was the first among traitors in the eyes of British officials. Many knew of Casement, an Irish Protestant born outside of Dublin, for his years of work as a Foreign Office official in Africa and South America. This was the Casement who had held a memorial service in a mission church in the Congo Free State in 1901 to commemorate the passing of Queen Victoria; the Casement who was knighted by Victoria’s grandson King George V in 1911 for his humanitarian campaigns on behalf of indigenous peoples on two continents; the Casement who retired from the Foreign Office in 1913 on a comfortable pension that financed his turn to rebellion.

An undated portrait of Sir Roger Casement. Photograph: Courtesy National Library of Ireland

Just over half a century ago, in 1965, Casement’s remains were reinterred, following a state funeral, in Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin. This traitor to the British crown and martyr for the Republic of Ireland remains a memory in motion, stirred by an unforeseen combination of circumstances. The achievement of legal equality for gays in Ireland in 2015, together with the United Kingdom’s recent Brexit vote to leave the European Union, may occasion a new life after death for Casement — as the symbol of a united Ireland. It is the role he had hoped to play even as the trapdoor opened beneath his feet.

Since his adolescence, Casement had been an Irish nationalist of the poetic variety. But his politics hardened after his experiences in the Congo Free State persuaded him that the Congolese and Irish peoples had suffered similar injustices, both having lost their lands to imperial conquest. Like many Irish nationalists, Casement turned to militancy in the years before the First World War, angered both by unionists arming themselves and London’s failure to act upon parliamentary legislation for “home rule,” which would have granted the Irish a measure of sovereign autonomy. In 1914, Casement crossed enemy lines into Germany. There, he attempted to recruit Irish prisoners of war to fight against their former British commanders and sought to secure arms from the Kaiser for a revolution in Ireland itself. Two years later — less than a week before the Rising began — Casement was arrested after coming ashore on the southwest coast of Ireland from a submarine bearing German weapons and ammunition. He was sent to London to be interrogated and tried for treason.

 

As the government reasoned, how could any right-thinking person defend a sodomist?

These days, Casement is chiefly known as the alleged author of the so-called Black Diaries, which are at the center of a long-standing controversy over his sexuality. As Casement awaited execution in London, supporters in the United Kingdom and the United States lobbied the British government to commute his sentence. In response, British officials began to circulate pages from diaries, purportedly written by Casement in 1903, 1910 and 1911, which chronicled in explicit terms his sexual relations with men. Among mundane daily entries are breathless, raunchy notes on Casement’s trysts and, often, the dimensions of his sexual partners. An excerpt from February 28, 1910, Brazil: “Deep screw to hilt … Rua do Hospicio, 3$ only fine room. Shut window. Lovely, young — 18 & glorious. Biggest since Lisbon July 1904 … Perfectly huge.” UK law forbade any sexual relations between men, so, the government reasoned, how could any right-thinking person defend a sodomist? The diaries served to weaken support for clemency for Casement. In the aftermath of his execution a decades-long debate over the authenticity of the diaries ensued.

The leading participants in the debate are two biographers: Jeffrey Dudgeon, who believes that the diaries are genuine and that Casement was a homosexual, and Angus Mitchell, who thinks that the diaries were forged and that Casement’s sexual orientation remains an open question. The stakes of this debate were once greater than they are today. As the debate over the Black Diaries gathered momentum in the 1950s and reached a crisis point in the run-up to the repatriation of Casement’s remains to Ireland in the 1960s, Ireland was both more Catholic in its culture and less assured of its sovereign authority than it is today. The southern 26 counties of Ireland declared themselves the Republic of Ireland in 1949, but the British government continued to treat the Republic as a subordinate member of the Commonwealth, rather than a full-fledged European state, until 1968. In that year, responsibility for British relations with the Republic was assigned to the Western European Department of the newly amalgamated Foreign and Commonwealth Relations Office. Six of the counties of the province of Ulster have remained in the United Kingdom as Northern Ireland, riven by sectarian tension that the Republic and Britain have only ever brought to a stalemate. It is telling that the Irish government has been content to leave the diaries in the British National Archives rather than demand ownership and become accountable for their authenticity.

Casement’s path to political redemption was laid by the Gay Liberation movement. Dudgeon is not just a biographer but a protagonist in one of the movement’s crucial battles. In 1981, he challenged Northern Ireland’s criminalisation of homosexual acts between consenting adult men in a case against the United Kingdom brought before the European Court of Human Rights. The court ruled that the law at issue violated the European Convention of Human Rights, and this decision prompted the British government in 1982 to issue an Order in Council that decriminalised homosexual acts between adult men in Northern Ireland; England, Wales, and Scotland had already passed similar laws. In 1993 the Irish parliament to the south also decriminalised male homosexuality in order to bring the Republic’s law into compliance with the European Convention of Human Rights. And in 2015, the Republic became the first country in the world to legalise same-sex marriage by popular vote. The broader campaign for LGBT rights in Ireland has kept Casement much in the news and proudly represented him as a national son and father.

In their biographies, Dudgeon and Mitchell present two Casements, each with strengths and weaknesses. Dudgeon offers meticulous, well-documented detail, but his book, Roger Casement: The Black Diaries, is for insiders, reading at many points like the notes for a doctoral dissertation, without consistent chronological structure or contextual explanation for those unfamiliar with Irish history in general and Casement in particular. Mitchell likewise offers meticulous documentary evidence in Roger Casement, but within a comparatively fluid and clear narrative history that depends problematically upon his assertion that the British government, from the Cabinet to the National Archive, has pursued an insidious, sweeping policy of individual defamation over the past century.

Were the Black Diaries forged? And if so, was it the work of the British government, seeking to destroy Casement for his betrayal and to deny Ireland a heroic martyr? It must be said that Dudgeon and Mitchell both magnify Casement out of proportion to his significance as a threat to the United Kingdom, a state that was attempting to survive a war on multiple fronts, with flagging morale at home, in 1916. The government had larger fish to fry than this man who never founded or led a political party, never engaged in assassination or led men into combat, and never wrote a popular manifesto or treatise. Moreover, as Dudgeon argues, it would have been a monumental, virtually impossible task in 1916 for officials and civil servants to forge diaries so comprehensive in their account of long-past events — when Casement was not under suspicion — that they could convince even Casement’s associates, who found themselves and their own interactions with Casement mentioned in the text. In a fascinating turn, Dudgeon offers the most successful refutation of forgery to date by systematically verifying the diaries’ contents, relentlessly revealing and cross-referencing new sources to pull together loose ends and flesh out identities from cryptic references and last names, such as that of Casement’s alleged boyfriend: “Millar.” Against the historical backdrop of a government marshalling limited resources in wartime, Dudgeon effectively charges that a forgery so verifiably true to life could not have been a forgery. He is probably correct.

Yet to travel further down this historical rabbit hole risks missing what is most significant about Casement at present: his potential reinvention as a symbol of Irish unity in the future. Casement has been resuscitated by an extraordinary combination of developments in the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom, not just the relative toleration of homosexuality, but the lurch toward Brexit in a popular referendum that found 52% of UK voters in favour and 48% opposed. The decisive support for Brexit was located in England and Wales, while both Scotland and Northern Ireland voted to remain in the EU, the latter by 55.8% to 44.2%. The Republic of Ireland and the UK have long agreed that the political division of Ireland will continue until the majority of Northern Ireland’s citizens vote to sanction secession. Even as Northern Ireland has moved steadily toward a Catholic majority (most of whom support secession), there is still a sizeable minority of Catholics who prefer continued union with Britain in the name of economic and political stability. After the Brexit vote, the disparate communities of Northern Ireland — Protestants and Catholics of all political stripes — may find new common ground in, of all places, Europe. Northern Ireland, like the Republic, benefits substantially from its relationship with the EU, and nationalists and unionists alike are worried about the loss of EU subsidies and markets.

Irish President Eamon de Valera speaking at the funeral of Irish nationalist Roger Casement at Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin, 2nd March 1965. Photograph: Central Press/Getty Images

In the days preceding his execution, Casement asked his family to bury his body near the home of relatives in County Antrim, in what is now Northern Ireland. This was the family that had taken young Roger in after an itinerant childhood and the deaths of his parents. “Take my body back with you and let it lie in the old churchyard in Murlough Bay,” he reportedly stated. Casement’s reinternment at Glasnevin Cemetery was, in fact, a compromise. In 1965 neither the Irish nor the UK governments wished to antagonise Ulster unionists with the burial of a republican martyr in their midst. Among the many tributes laid at Casement’s grave following his burial in Glasnevin was a sod of turf from the high headland over Murlough Bay.

The transfer of Casement’s remains from Pentonville to Glasnevin was conceived by the Irish and UK governments as a symbolic gesture of goodwill that would set the political stage for the Anglo-Irish Free Trade Agreement of 1965. The governments turned to each other for economic support because France had frustrated their attempts to gain entrance into the European Economic Community (EEC), the predecessor organisation of the EU. When both countries joined the EEC in 1973, this trade agreement lapsed. Once more, then, with Brexit, Casement’s bones have been stirred by Anglo-Irish relations with Europe. In Ireland, the effects are likely to be much different this time around. In representing Casement as a man of contradictions, biographers have assessed him in the terms of conflicts in Irish society that persisted long after his death: the sectarian divide between Protestants and Catholics, the troubles between Ireland and Britain, and the discrimination against male homosexuals enforced by religion and law. As these conflicts dissipate, Casement will be recast in a new light. The portrait of a man of contradictions will give way to a composite picture in which the majority of the people of Ireland may see themselves. Should Ireland reunite, whether in the aftermath of Brexit or in a more distant time, the moment of reconciliation, of acceptance and forgiveness, may well occur over a grave at Murlough Bay.

Reference

Gay History: Alan Turing: Gay Man who Saved the World yet Died in Disgrace

Article, biography, Gay Interest, General Interest, Political, , , , ,

What do you do to a homosexual mathematician whose code-breaking genius saved the world during World War II? Not figuratively, but actually saved the world from Nazi domination? You put him on trial, of course! You convict him of gross indecency. You force him to choose prison or chemical castration. You strip him of all dignity and hound him until in shame and despair he swallows a cyanide pill and dies.

The story of Alan Turing is one of the most disgraceful episodes of modern civilization. A man who should have been a hero of the free world and idolized next to Einstein and Newton in the history books was instead hounded to death because of religion-inspired homophobia.

In World War II, Alan Turing’s genius at breaking Nazi secret codes was so successful that the Allies could have sunk almost every single U-boat and convoy that left Germany. Turing’s work was so good it was like cheating at cards: if you win every hand, the other players will quickly figure out that the game is rigged. The Allies had to employ all sorts of tricks to hide their success; if you want a fascinating account, I highly recommend Neal Stephenson’s semi-fictional Cryptonomicon, the story of the rise of modern cryptography.

Alan Turing literally saved the world from Nazi domination. Without his work, WWII would have ended very differently. The Nazi regime might have remained undefeated, still in control of Northern Europe and western Asia. The Japanese might have retained control of East Asia. Our world maps would look vastly different today. And even if we’d won the war, without Turing’s work it’s likely that millions more soldiers and civilians would have died in the fight.

And Turing’s work didn’t end with cryptography. Today he’s best known as the inventor of the modern digital computer, the one who laid down the mathematical foundation for all computer science. His name is even enshrined in two of the most important computer-science concepts, the Turing machine and the Turing test.

If Alan Turing hadn’t been homosexual, his name might be a household word like Einstein, Newton and Galileo. What home doesn’t have a computer? If you count the laptops, cell phones, digital TVs, iPods, digital cameras and microwave ovens in your home, I’ll bet you own more than a dozen computing devices. Every one of them works on the principles laid down by Alan Turing during WWII when he was trying to develop a computing machine to break the enemy’s codes even faster.

Turing’s fall from grace came at the hands of the religious commi-bashing right, the British equivalent of America’s McCarthyism. In 1952 a gay lover helped an accomplice rob Turing’s house. During the police investigation, it came out that Turing was a homosexual. He was arrested and convicted of gross indecency, and given a choice of prison or chemical castration. Turing choose castration.

On June 7, 1954, at just forty two years of age, Alan Mathison Turing killed himself by swallowing cyanide. One of the greatest minds in the history of humankind was lost forever, and one of the greatest heroes of World War II died in shame and disgrace.

But the real shame is on the rest of us, not Alan Turing. In spite of his sexual orientation and consequent hardships he must have experienced, he remained a true patriot and mathematician. He put his mind to work to save the very society that persecuted him. It is possible that he changed history and saved more lives than any other single person in the twentieth century.

On September 10, 2009, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown finally issued a public apology to Turing’s memory:

Thousands of people have come together to demand justice for Alan Turing and recognition of the appalling way he was treated. While Turing was dealt with under the law of the time and we can’t put the clock back, his treatment was of course utterly unfair and I am pleased to have the chance to say how deeply sorry I and we all are for what happened to him … So on behalf of the British government, and all those who live freely thanks to Alan’s work I am very proud to say: we’re sorry, you deserved so much better.

It is stories like Turing’s that keep me writing. It’s easy to have a live-and-let-live attitude toward the immoral “morality” of the Bible. It sounds nice to advocate tolerance and respect. But Alan Turing is dead, and the Bible is where it all started.

Reference

Gay History: The Secret History Of Gay Saints The Catholic Church Doesn’t Want You To Read

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

These LGBTI saints prove you can be gay and Christian

St Sebastian depicted in the 1996 film Lillies.

Some people think you can’t be gay and Christian. What better way to prove them wrong than with a list of LGBTI saints?

The Catholic Church doesn’t want you to read this. They’ve deliberately erased many gay saints from official lists.

And we have to admit it is difficult to find hard historical evidence about most saints. Many of the stories about them are little more than legends.

But if you start looking, there are lots of LGBTI saints and martyrs. Here are just a few of the most famous:

St Joan of Arc

The 1999 movie The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc.

Jeanne d’Arc is not just the most famous LGBTI saint but the most famous saint full-stop.

Joan was just a French peasant. But an angel appeared to her in a vision and told her God wanted her to lead the French fight against the English in the Hundred Years War.

She persuaded the French Prince Charles to let her lead his army, even though she had no military training. And, dressed as a male soldier, she achieved a momentous victory over the English at the city of Orléans in 1429.

Thanks to her, the prince was crowned King Charles VII. But Joan was then captured by the English.

They decided she was a heretic and a witch and burnt her at the stake. She was just 19.

Some refuse to accept Joan was LGBTI.

Was she a trans warrior or did she only cross-dress in male armor through necessity? Either way, she would be part of our gay, trans and gender-fluid family today.

Likewise, the same people who claim she was a virgin admit she liked to share her bed with other young women. And that sounds pretty lesbian to us.

St Sebastian

Gerrit van Honthorst’s depiction of Saint Sebastian.

St Sebastian is the original gay icon. This near-naked, young, muscled man – tied to a post and pierced with arrows – is one of the most famous images in fine art.

He was the commander of a company of archers in the imperial Roman bodyguard. And he was known to be ‘close’ to his male superiors. But he had a secret.

To rescue two other Christian soldiers, he ‘outed’ himself as Christian too. The Emperor Diocletian ordered that he should be shot to death by his fellow archers.

Strangely, that didn’t kill him. The pious St Irene saved him and treated his wounds. But Diocletian caught up with him. He ordered a second execution and Sebastian’s fellow soldiers beat him to death.

There’s no single reason why he became the unofficial gay patron saint. It’s a mix of his rumored sexuality, his ‘coming out’ story and his iconic homoerotic image penetrated with arrows. And homosexuality was once considered an illness while St Sebastian was known to save plague victims.

St Wilgefortis

Conchita (right) brought fresh attention to St Wilgefortis.

Legend says Wilgefortis was the daughter of a king in Portugal who took a vow of chastity.

When her father tried to force her into marriage with the king of Sicily she prayed for help. God saved her by giving her a beard and the Sicilian king refused to marry a bearded wife.

So she is a trans male saint.

Sadly, there is no happy ending. Her father got so angry he crucified her.

Her only reward is to become the patron saint of difficult marriages. After all, it’s a particularly difficult marriage that ends in crucifixion. In Spain she is called Librada because she helps women who want to be ‘liberated’ from difficult husbands.

The Catholic Church plays down St Wilgefortis. But after Conchita – another bearded lady – won the Eurovision Song Contest in 2014 for Austria, depictions of the saint gained short-lived cult status.

St Perpetua and St Felicity

George Hare’s 1890 painting Victory of Faith depicted Perpetua and Felicity in prison.

This North African lesbian couple are the patron saints of same-sex relationships.

Perpetua was 22-year-old noblewoman with a newborn baby. Felicity, who was pregnant, was her slave.

Roman soldiers arrested them in around 203AD because they were Christians. They comforted each other in prison and Perpetua wrote a jail diary, describing the visions she had while inside.

Felicity worried that she wouldn’t be martyred because Roman law forbade the execution of pregnant women. But she gave birth to her daughter in time.

The day came for games to celebrate the birthday of the Emperor Septimus Severus. As part of the entertainment, the pair were taken into the amphitheater in Carthage, North Africa, along with a group of male Christians.

Gladiators whipped them. Then a boar, a bear, and a leopard were set on the men, and a wild cow on the women. That still wasn’t enough to kill them and they gave each other the kiss of peace before a swordsman finished them off.

Perpetua’s diary became the ‘Passion of St Perpetua, St Felicitas, and their Companions’. The story was so popular in North Africa that St Augustine ordered people not to treat it like it was part of the Bible.

St Paulinus

St Paulinus processed through the streets of Nola, near Naples, Italy.

If you’ve ever heard a bell ringing to call you to church, you’ve got the bisexual St Paulinus to thank. He invented that tradition.

He had previously been a married Roman senator. But after his wife died, he became bishop of Nola in Italy from 395AD to 431AD.

When the Vandals raided the region, a poor widow came to Paulinus asking him to help her son who the Vandals had carried off.

He had spent all his money paying ransoms for other captives. So he went to Africa to offer himself to the Vandals in return for the widow’s son. They agreed and made Paulinus a gardener. But when the Vandal king realized his son-in-law’s slave was the Bishop of Nola, he set him free.

What’s not well known is Paulinus also wrote love poems to his boyfriend, Ausonius. In one, he promised there love would last even after his death. And he added:

Thee shall I hold, in every fiber woven,
Not with dumb lips, nor with averted face
Shall I behold thee, in my mind embrace thee,
Instant and present, thou, in every place.

He is still honored every year in Nola when his statue is paraded through the streets. American descendants of Italians from Nola also honor him in the same way in Brooklyn.

St Francis of Assisi

Mickey Rourke as St Francis of Assisi in the movie Francesco.

St Francis is one of the best-loved religious figures in history, famous for hugging lepers and showing compassion to animals.

What you probably don’t know is he encouraged the other Franciscan friars in his 13th century cloister to call him ‘mother’.

Even more surprisingly, he allowed a widow to enter the all-male friary, renaming her ‘Brother Jacoba’.

And it is likely he had at least one same-sex relationship while in his 20s. His partner’s identity is hidden by history but is thought to be Brother Elias of Cortona.

Thomas of Celano, who knew Francis personally and wrote a biography of him in 1230 just four years after his death, wrote:

‘Now there was a man in the city of Assisi whom Francis loved more than any other…

‘He would often take this friend off to secluded spots where they could discuss private matters and tell him that he had chanced upon a great and precious treasure. There was a cave near Assisi where the two friends often went to talk about this treasure.’

St Sergius and St Bacchus

The Passion of Saints Sergius and Bacchus by Elastic Theatre.

Homophobic Christians tell us that same-sex marriage is against their faith. Trouble is they don’t know their own history. Step forward Saints Sergius and Bacchus.

Sergius was a commander in the Roman army in the third century and Bacchus was his second in command.

They were referred to in the earliest records of their story as ‘erastai’, the Greek word for ‘lovers’. And it’s believed they committed themselves to each other in a Christian ceremony called ‘adelphopoiesis’ or ‘brother-making’ which was a kind of same-sex marriage.

But their faith got them in trouble while they were stationed in Syria in 303AD. As Christians, they refused to sacrifice to Jupiter, the Roman’s chief god.

Officials arrested them, dressed them in women’s clothing and paraded them through the street to humiliate them into submission. But they resisted, chanting they were dressed as brides of Christ.

So the Romans turned to torture. They separated them and beat them so severely that Bacchus died.

That wasn’t the end of the story. That night Sergius had a vision.

Bacchus appeared to him in his soldier’s armor and with the face of an angel. He urged Sergius not to give in, saying they would live together as lovers forever in heaven. It’s a unique martyrdom story, because martyrs are always promised they will be with God in heaven, not with their lover.

Over the coming days, Sergius was tortured and finally beheaded.

Christians honored them as saints right up until 1969, the same year as the Stonewall Riots. The Catholic Church stripped them from the official list of saints, perhaps to starve the emerging gay rights movement of their power.

St Aelred

The Name of The Rose movie depicted medieval monastic life.

The patron saint of friendship was erotically attracted to men, and celebrated male relationships, throughout his life.

Aelred was the abbot of a Cistercian abbey in North Yorkshire, England for 20 years until his death in 1167. He wrote about the link between friendship and spirituality, saying ‘God is friendship’.

And he encouraged friendship between his monks comparing it to the love between Jesus and his beloved disciple, and between Jonathan and David.

Aelred advocated chastity. But his passion for male relationships is clear when he wrote: ‘It is no small consolation in this life to have someone who can unite with you in an intimate affection and the embrace of a holy love…’

In the same passage he describes this relationship with another man as one where ‘the sweetness of the Spirit flows between you, where you so join yourself and cleave to him that soul mingles with soul and two become one.’

St Galla and St Benedicta

Women in the Dark Ages faced few choices, as depicted in The Last Kingdom.

Galla had been married but was widowed after just one year. Not wanting another relationship with a man, she grew a beard to ward them off.

And she went even further. St Galla founded a convent in Rome in the sixth century and fellow nun Benedicta moved in with her there.

Then Galla fell seriously ill and St Peter appeared to her in a vision, telling her to prepare for death. She was devoted to God so liked the idea of going to heaven. But she was also devoted to Benedicta and didn’t want to leave her behind.

So she prayed to Peter that Benedicta would swiftly follow her to the afterlife.

Admittedly, by modern standards, praying for your partner’s death seems a bit wrong. But Peter agreed.

Galla died in 550AD of breast cancer and Benedicta’s death came 30 days later, just as St Peter had promised.

Historical note on gay saints

To historians, we would point out there are around 10,000 Catholic saints (though there is no definitive figure). By any impartial standard, some of them are bound to have been LGBTI.

To Catholics, we would say that you accept a saint’s sanctity on the basis of faith, not scientific proof. So why would you not accept their sexuality on the same basis?

Reference