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evanssymposiumcover

December 4, 2018 864 × 1296 White Crane Books

The Evans Symposium by Arthur Evans

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Gay Wisdom – Today in Gay History

  • Born
  • 1859 -

    A.E. HOUSMAN English scholar/poet, born, (d: 1936); Alfred Edward Housman was a classical scholar and poet of note. He was once viewed as a "great grey presence," divorced from the flesh and married to the mind. Young men read A Shropshire Lad and wondered. Was he or wasn’t he? There was no way to find out.

    Later, he was painted as a sad recluse, sighing quiet sighs over a straight friend, Moses Jackson, and jerking off the Muse in unrequited love. In this view, Houseman was “in the grip of the ‘cursed trouble’ that soured the wells of his life, produced his poetry, and urged him to the topmost heights of scholarly renown.

    Now we learn that the scholarly Cambridge don, far from being “cursed” used to make merry with a string of Venetian gondoliers supplied by his friend Horatio Brown, and was as well a regular patron of the male brothels in Paris. Can it be that the myth of the scholar virgin is just that, a myth?

    Because I Liked You
    Because I liked you better
         Than suits a man to say,
    It irked you, and I promised
         To throw the thought away.
     
    To put the world between us
         We parted, stiff and dry;
    'Good-bye,' said you, 'forget me.'
         'I will, no fear', said I.
     
    If here, where clover whitens
         The dead man's knoll, you pass,
    And no tall flower to meet you
         Starts in the trefoiled grass,
     
    Halt by the headstone naming
         The heart no longer stirred,
    And say the lad that loved you
         Was one that kept his word.
    A.E. Housman
  • Died
  • 1892 -

    WALT WHITMAN, American poet died (b. 1819); Whitman is among the most, if not actually the most influential poets in the American canon, often called the "father of free verse" and as close to a Gay  saint as we might ever hope to see. His work is and has always been controversial, particularly his poetry collection Leaves of Grass, which has been described as obscene for its overt homoerotic sexuality.

    Walt Whitman has been claimed as the "poet of democracy", a title meant to reflect his ability to write in a singularly American character. A British friend of Walt Whitman, Mary Smith Whitall Costelloe, wrote: "You cannot really understand America without Walt Whitman, without Leaves of Grass... He has expressed that civilization, 'up to date,' as he would say, and no student of the philosophy of history can do without him."

    Modernist poet Ezra Pound called Whitman "America's poet... He is America." Andrew Carnegie called him "the great poet of America so far". Whitman's vagabond lifestyle was adopted by the Beat movement and its leaders such as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac in the 1950s and 1960s as well as anti-war poets like Adrienne Rich and Gary Snyder. 

    Whitman also influenced Bram Stoker, author of Dracula, and was the model for the character of Dracula! Stoker said in his notes that Dracula represented the quintessential male which, to Stoker, was Whitman, with whom he corresponded until Whitman's death.

  • Born
  • 1911 -

    TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, American dramatist was born (d. 1983); born Thomas Lanier Williams III, Tennessee Williams, was a major American playwright of the 20th century who received many of the top theatrical awards for his work. He moved to New Orleans in 1939 and changed his name to "Tennessee," the state of his father's birth because he thought “Thomas Lanier Williams” sounded “like it might belong to the sort of writer who turns out sonnet sequences to Spring,” Tennessee won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama forA Streetcar Named Desire in 1948 and for Cat On A Hot Tin Roof in 1955. In addition, The Glass Menagerie (1945) and The Night of the Iguana (1961) received New York Drama Critics' Circle Awards. His 1952 play The Rose Tattoo (dedicated to his lover, Frank Merlo), received the Tony Award for Best Play.

    Williams is nothing less than the stuff of theater history, on and off the stage. If at times Williams appeared to be his own worst enemy, he long lived with the pressure of having been the first publicly-known gay celebrity in America. It cannot have been much fun to watch his great Blanche DuBois undressed in quest for her penis by homophobic critics obsessed with proving that gay men know nothing about straight love. His other heroines have been similarly violated. If all writers pay a price for fame, Williams, being open and out as a gay man, paid more than his fair share.

    Williams's relationship with Frank Merlo, a second generation Sicilian American who had served in the U.S. Navy in World War II, lasted from 1947 until Merlo's death from cancer in 1963. With that stability, Williams created his most enduring works. Merlo provided balance to many of Williams' frequent bouts with depression and the fear that, like his sister Rose, he would go insane.

  • 1973 -

    T.R. KNIGHT, American actor, born; An Emmy Award-nominated and Screen Actors Guild Award-winning American actor Knight's most high-profile role to date is his current role as "Dr. George O’Malley" on ABC's top-rated, hit medical soap opera Grey’s Anatomy. Rumors over Knight's sexuality gained momentum when news reports surfaced in October 2006 that Grey's Anatomy co-stars Patrick Dempsey and Isaiah Washington were involved in an argument during which, Knight and others allege, Washington used an anti-Gay slur directed at an unnamed co-star. Washington later apologized, stating "I sincerely regret my actions and the unfortunate use of words during the recent incident on-set".

    Knight, who is Gay, did not disclose his sexuality to the public until October 2006 — after the kerfuffle — when he released a statement through People magazine stating, in part, “I guess there have been a few questions about my sexuality, and I'd like to quiet any unnecessary rumors that may be out there. While I prefer to keep my personal life private, I hope the fact that I'm Gay isn't the most interesting part of me.” Knight was in People’s Top 50 Sexiest Man Alive of 2007.

    In February, 2008 Knight and his then boyfriend, Mark Cornelson, attended the 2008 Elton John AIDS Foundation Oscar Party held at the Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood. Knight starred as Leo Frank in a production of the musical Parade, which opened October 2009, at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. He returned to Broadway in David Mamet's A Life in the Theatre in 2010, where he played the role of John, opposite Patrick Stewart. In 2019, he voiced Sir Cedric, the gay protagonist in the animated series The Bravest Knight.

    In October 2013, Knight married Patrick B. Leahy, a ballet dancer and writer, in Hudson, New York. They had been living together for six years.

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