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Gay Wisdom – Today in Gay History

Born

0017 -

MONTY WOOLLEY, born. (d: 1963) American actor. Born Edgar Montillion Woolley in New York City, Woolley was a professor and lecturer at Yale University (one of his students was Thornton Wilder). Best known for his starring role in 1942's "The Man Who Came to Dinner."

He was an intimate friend of Cole Porter. According to Bennett Cerf in Try and Stop Me, Woolley was at a dinner party and suddenly belched. A woman sitting nearby glared at him; he glared back and said, "What did you expect -- chimes?" Cerf said that Woolley liked the line so much he insisted that it be added to the script of his next stage role.

1907 -

EDWARD William Frank JAMES was a British poet and arts patron born on this date (d: 1984) known for his patronage of the surrealist art movement. He was described by Salvador Dalí as “crazier than all the Surrealists together”.

James was the only son of William James (who had inherited a fortune from his father, merchant Daniel James) and Evelyn Forbes, a Scots socialite. He was reputedly fathered by the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII) and in his anecdotal reminiscences, recorded in Swans Reflecting Elephants – My Early Years, Edward James also puts forward this hypothesis. In his memoirs he wrote "I was not, I was, in fact, his grandson" saying that it was his grandmother that had an affair with the Prince of Wales. However, there was also popular belief that Forbes was one of the Prince of Wales's mistresses and there was a much-quoted ballad by Hilaire Belloc intimating this at the time.

Edward James had four older sisters: Audrey, Millicent, Xandra, and Silvia. He was educated at Lockers Park School, then briefly at Eton, then at Le Rosey in Switzerland, and finally at Christ Church, Oxford, where he was a contemporary of Evelyn Waugh (Waugh attended Hertford College) and Harold Acton, a fellow student at Christ Church. When his father died in 1912 he inherited the 8,000-acre (3,200 hectares) West Dean House estate in Sussex, held in trust until he came of age. He was also left a large sum in trust when his uncle John Arthur James died in 1917.

In the early 1930s, James married Tilly Losch, an Austrian dancer, choreographer, actress and painter. He had several productions created expressly for her, the most notable of which was Les Ballets 1933, which included Kurt Weill, Lotte Lenya and George Balanchine. He and Boris Kochno commissioned that year Brecht and Weill's last collaboration, The Seven Deadly Sins, which Balanchine produced, directed and choreographed.

James divorced Losch in 1934, accusing her of adultery with Prince Serge Obolensky, an American hotel executive; her countersuit, in which she made it clear that James was homosexual, failed. James was in fact bisexual. After the divorce, James joined a social set in England which included the Mitford sisters and the composer Lord Berners.

James is best known as a passionate supporter of Surrealism, a movement that evolved from Dada and the political uncertainty and upheaval of WWI and the following years. With a mix of Dada irreverence for the traditional political, religious, and bourgeois values of western civilization that they believed had led the world (and themselves as veterans of the war) to the First World War; the surrealist explored the possibilities that had been opened up by Sigmund Freud regarding the subconscious mind, and the idea of "pure thought", unfiltered and uncensored by political, religious, moral, or rational principles.

He sponsored Salvador Dalí for the whole of 1938 and his collection of paintings and art objects subsequently came to be accepted as one of the finest collection of surrealist work in private hands. He also provided practical help, supporting Dalí for about two years. They collaborated on the Mae West Sofas and Lobster Telephones, which James had installed in his private home near West Dean House.

Salvador Dali put James in touch with the Belgian surrealist painter René Magritte. James later hosted Magritte for three weeks at his home on 35 Wimpole Street, London in February and March 1937, where Magritte painted a number of gouaches and oils, some of which were new, others were copies of his own earlier work. The terms agreed on were that Magritte was to be paid 250 pounds to paint copies or variations of three paintings selected by James from photographs On the Threshold of Liberty (1929), The Red Model (1935), The Youth Illustrated (1936), and pay his own travel expenses, while James was to provided a studio space above his garage as well as art supplies and canvases. James intended to install the paintings behind backless mirrors, so as to only be observable in bright light. The new version of The Red Model painted at James request was a large canvas (72 x 52.5 in.) of higher quality than the original and given a British touch with the addition of a few English coins scattered in the dirt. It is now in the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam along with the 1937 version of The Youth Illustrated (79 x 60 in.). Ultimately Magritte went on to paint at least seven versions of The Red Model. Magritte also enlarged and reformatted the 1937 version of On the Threshold of Liberty (94 x 73 in.), now in the Art Institute of Chicago, from horizontal to vertical in order to fit the intended installation site for James. In a letter to Louis Scutenaire and Irène Hamoir (February 18, 1937), Magritte wrote "London is a revelation. Of course, I'm only just beginning to discover it. But until now, everything is perfect (of course I don't speak English, but "there's something"). Yesterday evening we went to visit Henry Moore, a charming sculptor, sort of Arp-Picasso..."

In June of that same year, Magritte painted some portraits of James including Not to be Reproduced and The Pleasure Principle. In the first, James looks into a mirror which shows the back of his head; in the second James's head is an enigmatic radiating light. Magritte painted Pleasure Principle from photographs of James taken by Man Ray, following Magritte's precise staging instructions. The Pleasure Principle was based on a small ink sketch from the year before, titled Failed Portrait [of Paul Éluard]. In Not to be Reproduced, the book sitting on the mantle is the French edition of Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket.

As well as Dalí and Magritte, his art collection included works by Hieronymus Bosch, Giorgio de Chirico, Paul Klee, Leonora Carrington, Pavel Tchelitchew, Pablo Picasso, Giacometti, Max Ernst and Paul Delvaux, amongst others. Most were sold at a well-publicized sale at Christie's two years after his death.

His intellectual interest in surrealism is demonstrated by his sponsorship of Minotaure, a lavish Surrealist magazine published in Paris. His refurbishment of Monkton House, in a part of the West Dean Estate, was a Surrealist dream. It was done in collaboration with the pioneering British decorator, Syrie Maugham, and has some of the most iconic Surrealist works on display, including the large Mae West Lips Sofa to which Dalí gave the form and colour of the actresses lips, and his Lobster Telephone in white. (The surrealist tradition at Monkton House was maintained when the Interior designer, Derek Frost, did extensive work to the house and designed more custom pieces of furniture in the late 1980s.) James donated these two items (among others) to the Brighton Museum & Art Gallery. James most fantastic surrealist creation was realised in the Mexican rain forest, a surrealist Sculpture garden, "Las Pozas".

In 1940, James stayed in Taos, New Mexico, United States, as a guest of Mabel Dodge Luhan, where he was known for his amusing, clever eccentricity and effeminate manner. In Taos, he met the Hon. Dorothy Brett, an impoverished British aristocrat and painter, who in 1941 sold him nine paintings for $580. He later invited the 70-year-old Brett (as she was known) to return to Britain and reside at West Dean, but she declined.

After Taos, James traveled to Los Angeles where, in that city of dreams, he came upon the notion to build a “Garden Of Eden”, but instead, he decided to try Mexico, a more romantic and cheaper place than Southern California.

James and his Mexican boyfriend, Plutarco Gastélum, a handsome young manager of the telegraph office in Cuernavaca, were exploring the Huasteca Potosina when they were surrounded by a cloud of butterflies while they were bathing together in a stream. James interpreted this event as a magical sign. So, in 1947, he began the construction of his vision.

Employing more than 100 laborers, he spent the next two decades transforming this very remote jungle location (the nearest airport is over three hours away) into a sensual Surrealist folly, funding the construction by selling off his world-class collection of paintings, including Carringtons, Dalís, and Magrittes.

After a freak frost destroyed Gastélum and James’s orchid plantation (locals thought the frost was volcanic ash), the men began their construction of the thirty-six surreal buildings, with no utilitarian purpose, that were fully integrated to the naturalness of the place filled with lush native plants, waterfalls and natural pools. Las Pozas ("the Pools"), near the village of Xilitla, San Luis Potosí, more than 2,000 feet (610 m) above sea level, in a subtropical rainforest in the Sierra Gorda mountains of Mexico, is a garden created by James. It includes more than 80 acres of natural waterfalls and pools interlaced with towering Surrealist sculptures in concrete. Massive sculptures up to four stories tall punctuate the site. The many trails throughout the garden site are composed of steps, ramps, bridges, and narrow winding walkways that traverse the valley walls. Construction of Las Pozas cost more than $5 million. To pay for it, James sold his collection of Surrealist art at auction.

In 1964, James gave his English estate which included West Dean House at West Dean to a charitable trust. The Edward James Foundation comprises West Dean College, a centre for the preservation of traditional arts and crafts, through short courses and full-time Diplomas and MAs. One of only two professional tapestry weaving studios in the UK and an art gallery are housed on a 6,400-acre (26 km²) estate which is open to the public through the West Dean Gardens.

West Dean College is part of the Edward James Foundation set up in 1971 in response to James' vision of establishing "an educational foundation where creative talents can be discovered and developed, and where one can spread culture through the teaching of crafts and the preservation of knowledge that might otherwise be destroyed or forgotten".

Edward James is buried in the St Roche's Arboretum at West Dean, with the simple inscription Edward James 1907 – 1984 Poet. The stone was carved by John Skelton. An early marble portrait sculpture of Edward James exists, by the sculptor Isamu Noguchi.

1940 -

ALIX DOBKIN was born on this date (d: 2021) in New York City.

She was named after a family member who died fighting against the fascists in the Spanish Civil War. She was raised in Philadelphia and Kansas City.

Dobkin graduated from Germantown High School in 1958 and the Tyler School of Art with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1962.

She began her career by performing on the Greenwich Village coffeehouse scene in 1962 with people like Buffy Ste. Marie.

In 1965 she married the owner of the Gaslight Cafe in Greenwich Village. They moved to Miami and opened The Gaslight South folk club, but moved back to New York in 1968. Her daughter Adrian was born two years later, and the following year the marriage broke up.

A few months later, in 1971, Dobkin came out as a lesbian, which was uncommon for a public personality to do at the time.

Since 1973, she released seven albums as well as three songbooks. She toured throughout the US, Canada, England, Scotland, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand promoting lesbian culture and community through women's music. In 1977, she became an associate of the American nonprofit publishing organization Women's Institute for Freedom of the Press (WIFP).

In 1979, she was the first American lesbian feminist musician to do a European concert tour.

Alix Dobkin was a member of the OLOC (Old Lesbians Organizing for Change) Steering Committee. She spoke out about women-only space and protection for lesbian women. Her criticisms of postmodernism, sadomasochism, the transgender rights movement and other movements appeared in several of her written columns, such as "Minstrel Blood." Her article "The Emperor's New Gender" appeared in the feminist journal Off Our Backs in 2000.

She was called a "women's music legend" by Spin Magazine, "pithy" by The Village Voice, "Biting...inventive... imaginative" by New Age Journal, "uncompromising" in the New York Times Magazine, and "a troublemaker" by the FBI.

Her 2009 memoir, My Red Blood, was published by Alyson Books.

"“The ways we would organize back then just aren’t there now,” Alix Dobkin once said. “But people still come out to my shows and I think about coming together now and what a charge it is. The charge of being connected, of belonging to such a powerful force. Of being together.”

1943 -

MURRAY EDELMAN, Ph.D., A mathematician statistician, founder and central figure of the Chicago Gay Liberation group was born on this date. Murray helped to bring the modern gay liberation movement to Chicago and did crucial work to develop a visible and militant LGBT activism during the early years of the movement in Chicago.

While a graduate student at the University of Chicago, he was instrumental in bringing the modern-day Gay Liberation movement to Chicago. As a founder and important figure of Chicago Gay Liberation, his work was central to developing a public, visible, and militant LGBT activism during the early years of the movement. In addition, he served for more than a decade as director of exit polling at Voter News Service, an organization employed by ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN and the Associated Press in national elections, where he was responsible for the groundbreaking effort to have gay, lesbian, and bisexual self-identification made part of electoral exit polling. His friendship with philosopher-activist Arthur Evans resulted in Edelman providing Evans the monies with which to publish his seminal work, Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture.

As a founder of the first Gay Liberation group in Chicago, which was initially based in Hyde Park, between 1969 and 1972 Edelman helped plan and participated in many early demonstrations and public activities, including pride rallies, media “zaps,” and public dances—the latter, in those years, a daring activity that risked police intervention. In a short span of years, CGL decisively shifted the norms of gay and lesbian life and activism by modeling visibility and coming-out and by acting on the proud principle that militancy in pursuit of justice is reasonable and right.

Perhaps his most significant contribution took place in 1971, when Edelman disrupted a taping of “The Howard Miller Show,” a local Chicago television talk show. Miller’s guest was the deeply homophobic, but best-selling, Dr. David R. Reuben, author of Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex (But Were Afraid To Ask), which had made headlines across the country. Edelman challenged Reuben’s homophobia, and the “zap” became a major local news story in the press and on television. It helped to make “gay lib” a legitimate topic of coverage at a time when few mainstream outlets recognized LGBT issues in any way. The action also helped to put Chicago on the national gay liberation map after The Advocate covered it prominently.

More recently, in the 1990s, as a key director of the polling operations of Voter News Service, Edelman ensured that GLB self-identifiers would be included routinely in exit polls. By facilitating studies of GLB voting behavior, this move has enhanced the leverage and bargaining power of LGBT communities and political organizations. While his role in this has remained largely hidden from the general public, its contribution to our communities’ visibility and political clout has been profound.

For helping to bring the modern Gay Liberation movement to Chicago and working to develop a visible and often militant political activism during the early years of the movement in Chicago as well as enhancing LGBT political visibility in recent years, Edelman has been selected for induction into the Chicago Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame.

1946 -

DAVID MIXNER is an American political activist and author born on this date. He is best known for his work in anti-war and gay rights advocacy.

In the fall of 1964, Mixner enrolled at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona, where he soon became heavily involved in civil rights and anti-war activism, including helping to organize protests against a speech by General William Westmoreland. Prompted by an article he read in The Arizona Republic about city garbage workers who were seeking the right to unionize, in the fall of 1966, Mixner organized from start to finish the first of many protests he would organize over the next thirty years. Mixner rallied hundreds of workers, students and professors and led a march on City Hall. Although the city successfully broke the strike, the workers eventually earned the right to unionize.

Mixner also experienced his first same-sex relationship at ASU, with a man whom he refers to as Kit in his memoirs. A year into their relationship, Kit was killed in an automobile accident. Mixner did not attend the funeral, and Kit's parents never discovered that their son was gay. Mixner was born and grew up in the small town of Elmer, New Jersey. His father Ben worked on a corporate farm, and his mother Mary worked shifts at a local glass factory and later took a job as a bookkeeper for the local John Deere dealership.

Soon after Kit's death, Mixner decided to transfer to the University of Maryland to be closer to Washington, D.C., where he would be able to get more involved in anti-war protests.

Mixner found himself much more interested in activism than in pursuing a college degree. While at Maryland, Mixner was a grassroots organizer for the 1967 march on the Pentagon, which was later captured in Norman Mailer's Armies of the Night.

Later that year, Mixner dropped out of college and began working for the presidential campaign of Eugene McCarthy. One of Mixner's first assignments was organizing the Minnesota operation, helping McCarthy win the Minnesota caucus, defeating incumbent President Johnson. Later, Mixner and other members of McCarthy's campaign team went to Georgia to help select an alternative delegation to send to the national convention in Chicago, challenging Governor Lestor Maddox's hand-picked delegation, which included only seven African-Americans in the 117 person delegation. The Georgia Democratic Party Forum, which sought to challenge Maddox's delegation, held its own convention in Macon, where Congressman John Conyers (D–MI) keynoted their convention before turning over the floor to Julian Bond, the first African-American elected to the Georgia legislature, who would later become Chairman of the NAACP.

At the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, Mixner was beaten by police during the protests held outside the convention center. After Humphrey claimed the nomination, Mixner began seeking out new outlets for his activism. He soon befriended Doris Kearns Goodwin, who introduced Mixner to Senator Ted Kennedy, who would become a lifelong friend.

Mixner's most significant contribution to the anti-Vietnam War effort was his role as one of the head organizers of the Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam. The idea was prompted by Jermoe Grossman, a Massachusetts businessman active in the peace movement. Grossman proposed to Sam Brown, a close friend of Mixner, that they set aside a day in 1969 where “business as usual” would come to a halt, essentially engaging in a strike against everything. Brown decided that the word “moratorium” would be less threatening than “strike” to middle-class Americans, and set to work, setting aside October 15, 1969 as the day of the moratorium. Brown soon enlisted the help of Mixner, David Hawk, another young activist, and Marge Sklencar, who they knew from the McCarthy campaign. Brown, Mixner, Hawk and Sklencar then set about organizing the event.

In September 1969, shortly before the Moratorium, Mixner headed to Martha's Vineyard to meet with fellow activists, many of whom had also worked on the McCarthy campaign. Among those in attendance was Bill Clinton, who had been invited by one of Mixner's friends. At the time, Clinton was studying at Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, attending the Martha's Vineyard retreat with fellow Rhodes Scholars Rick Stearns and Strobe Talbott. Mixner and Clinton were fast friends, and Mixner would play a significant role twenty-three years later in getting the LGBT community to support Clinton.

As the date of the Moratorium approached, it began gathering a great deal of momentum, with Time, Life, and Newsweek magazines featuring it in cover stories. When Clinton subsequently visited the headquarters of the Moratorium and saw what he would be missing by being in London on October 15, he suggested to Mixner that he organize a parallel protest at Oxford. This protest, in which about a thousand people gathered in front of the American embassy in London, would later be a significant issue in his presidential campaign, with President George H. Bush telling Larry King on CNN in October 1992, "Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but to go to a foreign country and demonstrate against your own country when your sons and daughters are dying halfway around the world, I am sorry but I think that is wrong."

The Moratorium drew millions of people throughout the country, who gathered in public places and read the names of the soldiers killed in Vietnam aloud. The day was capped off by a march at the Washington Monument, where Coretta Scott King, the widow of Martin Luther King, Jr., spoke about her late husband's passion for ending the war.

In 1976, Mixner began the process of coming out of the closet, and soon thereafter was a founding member of the Municipal Elections Committee of Los Angeles (MECLA), the nation's first gay and lesbian Political Action Committee. At the time, very few candidates were willing to accept donations from openly gay individuals or gay-affiliated organizations. At the time, Mixner was also serving as the campaign manager for Tom Brady, the mayor of Los Angeles who was seeking reelection, so while he worked to raise funds for MECLA, his involvement was kept secret because of the potential for his sexuality to become an issue in Bradley's campaign.

Soon after Bradley won reelection easily, Mixner turned his focus to fighting Proposition 6, an initiative placed on the California ballot by Orange County State Senator John Briggs that would make it illegal for gays and lesbians to be schoolteachers. Similar initiatives had recently passed throughout the country when Mixner turned his focus to fighting Proposition 6, creating the “NO on 6” organization to fight it; through the process, he would publicly come out. Mixner and his lover Peter Scott secured a meeting with then-Governor Ronald Reagan, whom they convinced to oppose the initiative publicly. As a result, and through the work of Mixner, Scott, legendary gay rights activist and San Francisco City Councilman Harvey Milk, and others, Proposition 6 was defeated by over a million votes, the first ballot initiative of its sort to be shot down.

As a result of this huge success, Mixner and Scott experienced a huge upturn in business for their fledgling political consulting firm, Mixner/Scott, and were asked by Bill Clinton, then running for governor of Arkansas, to host a reception for Clinton at their Los Angeles home.

In 2006, Mixner moved to Turkey Hollow in Sullivan County, New York, where he lived in a bright yellow house with his two cats, Sheba and Uganda. In 2009, Mixner moved to Hell's Kitchen in New York City. He posted blog entries daily on his website, davidmixner.com. His home was featured in the Real Estate section of The New York Times in an article entitled "Do Ask, Do Tell". Mixner was the keynote speaker for the Empire State Pride Agenda's 2007 fall dinner.

In October 2008, Prime Minister Gordon Brown and his wife Sarah, honored Mixner with a luncheon at 10 Downing Sreet. The luncheon in Mixner's honor represented the first time a British Prime Minister honored an LGBT activist in this manor.

Also in October 2008, Mixner was invited to debate American politics by the Oxford Union, Britain's second oldest university union.

Mixner was featured in Ask Not, a 2008 documentary film about the "don't ask, don't tell" policy.

In 2009, Mixner moved back to New York City, where he currently resides near Times Square.

In May 2009, Mixner used his blog to call for a March on Washington to protest the LGBT community's lack of equal rights. Cleve Jones, spurred by Mixner's call to march, led the organizational efforts for the National Equality March, scheduled for October 10–11, 2009. Mixner and Jones both were featured speakers at a rally in front of the Capitol after the March. Over 200,000 people marched on Washington on October 11, 2009.

Mixner was honored by the Point Foundation , an organization that provides college scholarships to LGBT students, with its Legend Award at the foundation's 2009 Honors Gala in New York City. The award was presented to Mixner by Victoria Reggie Kennedy, Ted Kennedy's widow.

In 2011, the Theater at Dixon Place announced a one-man show starring Mixner, From the Front Porch. The show was a benefit for Dixon Place and the Ali Forney Center, an organization benefiting LGBT homeless youth.

Mixner released a memoir of his time in Turkey Hollow, At Home with Myself: Stories from the Hills of Turkey Hollow, in September 2011. The memoir is published by Magnus Books.

There is too much more of David's achievements to include in this space. Happy birthday David. You are a national treasure.

Noteworthy

1988 -

The GENERAL COUNCIL OF THE UNITED CHURCH OF CANADA, meeting in Victoria, BC becomes "the first mainstream church in the world to accept Gay ordination without imposing celibacy."