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September 8, 2018 1280 × 720 christopher-wylie-1
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Gay Wisdom – Today in Gay History

  • Noteworthy
  • 1226 -

    Saint Francis of Assisi died (b. 1181)

  • Born
  • 1925 -

    GORE VIDAL, American author, born (d: 2012); American raconteur and  author of novels, stage plays, screenplays, and essays. The scion of a prominent political family, Gore was an outspoken critic of the American political establishment and a noted wit and social critic. Gore wrote the The City and The Pillar in 1948, which created controversy as the first major American novel to feature unambiguous homosexuality. His mother Nina married Hugh D. Auchincloss, who later was stepfather of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy. Gore Vidal is a fifth cousin of Jimmy Carter, and a distant cousin of Al Gore. Mortal enemy of Truman Capote, he said, “I can’t read him; I’m diabetic.”

    Because of his matter-of-fact treatment of homosexual relations in such books as The City and The Pillar, Vidal is often seen as an early and unrelenting champion of sexual liberation. Sexually Speaking: Collected Sex Writings, a representative sampling of his views, contains literary and cultural essays that document his long campaign to mock and subvert conventional American attitudes toward sex. Focusing on, in his view, the anti-sexual heritage of Judaeo-Christianity, irrational and destructive sex laws, feminism, heterosexism, homophobia, Gay liberation, and pornography, the essays frequently return to a favorite Vidal motif: the fluidity of sexual identity. Vidal argues that "although our notions about what constitutes correct sexual behavior are usually based on religious texts, those texts are invariably interpreted by the rulers in order to keep control over the ruled." In repudiating this kind of rigid, narrow moralism,

    Vidal argued that "sex is a continuum" made up of "different phases along life’s way" and thus "everyone is potentially bisexual." He explained that "the human race is divided into male and female. Many human beings enjoy the sexual relations with their own sex, many don't; many respond to both. The plurality is the fact of our nature and not worth fretting about." Therefore, "there are no homosexual people, only homosexual acts." Given the diversity of human desire, Vidal predictably resisted any effort to categorize him as exclusively "homosexual"— either as writer or human being — and instead celebrated this polymorphous eroticism as natural and inevitable. For much of the late twentieth century, Vidal divided his time between Ravello, Italy, on the Amalfi Coast and Los Angeles, California. In 2003, he sold his cliff side Ravello villa (La Rondinaia, The Swallow's Nest) for health reasons, and moved to Los Angeles. In November 2003, Howard Austen, Vidal's life partner since 1951, died. In February 2005, Austen was buried in a plot maintained for himself and Vidal at Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington, D.C. Gore Vidal is buried next to him.

    After Vidal's death, tributes immediately poured in from various media sources. The New York Times described him in his obituary as being in his old age "an Augustan figure who believed himself to be the last of a breed, and he was probably right. Few American writers have been more versatile or gotten more mileage from their talent."The Los Angeles Times described him as a "literary juggernaut" whose novels and essays were considered "among the most elegant in the English language"The Washington Post remembered him as a "major writer of the modern era" and an "astonishingly versatile man of letters".

    We will not likely see his like again for a long long time.

  • 1928 -

    ERIK BRUHN, Danish dancer and choreographer born (d. 1986) Born in Copenhagen, Denmark, he began training with the Royal Danish Ballet at the age of nine. He later joined the company at the age of eighteen and was promoted to soloist two years later. He was best known for his roles in La Sylphide, Giselle, and Swan Lake, in which he combined subtle precision with a flair dance style. He appeared in a Russian-style pas de deux with French ballerina Zizi Jeanmaire in the 1952 Goldwyn film Hans Christian Andersen which starred Danny Kaye. It was his first trip to the US. Erik Bruhn met Rudolph Nureyev, the celebrated Russian dancer, who was on a tour in Denmark. Bruhn became Nureyev's lover, his closest friend, and his protector for many years.

  • Noteworthy
  • 1957 -

    Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems is ruled not obscene.

  • Born
  • 1978 -

    JAKE SHEARS, singer (Scissor Sisters) born; the male lead vocalist for the American music group Scissor Sisters. Shears and Scott Hoffman formed the Scissor Sisters in 2001 as a kind of performance art lark, playing outrageous shows in clubs like Luxx, the heart of the electroclash scene in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where Shears lived. After a couple years struggling in New York (working with record label A Touch of Class, who produced "Comfortably Numb" and "Filthy/Gorgeous"), the Sisters finally found success in the UK and Ireland - ending 2004 with the biggest-selling album of the year in the UK.

    In concert, Shears is known for provocative dancing, flamboyant outfits, and near-nudity. (It is noted that during his early years while he was struggling to make it in New York, he would often earn extra money as a Go-Go dancer and mal erotic dancer at gay-oriented strip clubs.) His musical influences include ABBA, David Bowie, Duran Duran, Roxy Music, The New York Dolls, Queen, Madonna, and Dolly Parton.

  • Died
  • 1998 -

    RODDY MCDOWELL, English actor died (b. 1928); Unmarried. A close friend of Elizabeth Taylor’s...need we say more? McDowell was one of the few child actors who successfully transitioned into adult stardom, notably in heavy makeup as various "chimpanzee" characters in four of the Planet of the Apes movies (1968 – 1973) and in the 1974 TV series that followed. Other film appearances included Cleopatra (1963), in which he played Octavian (the later Emperor Augustus); It! (1966), in which he played a Norman Bates character reminiscent of Psycho; The Poseidon Adventure (1972), in which he played Acres, a dining room attendant; Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry (1974); Class of 1984 (1982); Fright Night (1985), in which he played Peter Vincent, a television host and moderator of telecast horror films; and Overboard (1987) in which he played a kind-hearted butler.

  • Today's Gay Wisdom
  • 2021 -

    Howl (excerpt)

    BY ALLEN GINSBERG

    For Carl Solomon

    I

    I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
    dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
    angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
    who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,
    who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
    who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,
    who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,
    who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,
    who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,
    who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night
    with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls,
    incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the motionless world of Time between,
    Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,
    who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo,
    who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford’s floated out and sat through the stale beer afternoon in desolate Fugazzi’s, listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,
    who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge,
    a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills off Empire State out of the moon,
    yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,
    whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the Synagogue cast on the pavement,
    who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall,
    suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grindings and migraines of China under junk-withdrawal in Newark’s bleak furnished room,   
    who wandered around and around at midnight in the railroad yard wondering where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts,
    who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward lonesome farms in grandfather night,
    who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy and bop kabbalah because the cosmos instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,   
    who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary indian angels who were visionary indian angels,
    who thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,
    who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma on the impulse of winter midnight streetlight smalltown rain,
    who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the brilliant Spaniard to converse about America and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to Africa,
    who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in fireplace Chicago,
    who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the FBI in beards and shorts with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incomprehensible leaflets,
    who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism,
    who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square weeping and undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed,
    who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and trembling before the machinery of other skeletons,
    who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in policecars for committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,
    who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts,
    who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,
    who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love,
    who balled in the morning in the evenings in rosegardens and the grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may,
    who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath when the blond & naked angel came to pierce them with a sword,
    who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman’s loom,
    who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a candle and fell off the bed, and continued along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,
    who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning but prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sunrise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake,
    who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver—joy to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses’ rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely petticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too,
    who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and picked themselves up out of basements hung-over with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemployment offices,
    who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the East River to open to a room full of steam-heat and opium,
    who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall be crowned with laurel in oblivion,
    who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of Bowery,
    who wept at the romance of the streets with their pushcarts full of onions and bad music,
    who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in their lofts,
    who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded by orange crates of theology,
    who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish,
    who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht & tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable kingdom,
    who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg,
    who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade,
    who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were growing old and cried,
    who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,
    who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,
    who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of the subway window, jumped in the filthy Passaic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the street, danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed phonograph records of nostalgic European 1930s German jazz finished the whiskey and threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans in their ears and the blast of colossal steamwhistles,
    who barreled down the highways of the past journeying to each other’s hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation,
    who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity,
    who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who came back to Denver & waited in vain, who watched over Denver & brooded & loned in Denver and finally went away to find out the Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,
    who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each other’s salvation and light and breasts, until the soul illuminated its hair for a second,
    who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for impossible criminals with golden heads and the charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet blues to Alcatraz,
    who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the daisychain or grave,
    who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hypnotism & were left with their insanity & their hands & a hung jury,
    who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism and subsequently presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instantaneous lobotomy,
    and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy pingpong & amnesia,
    who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia,
    returning years later truly bald except for a wig of blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible madman doom of the wards of the madtowns of the East,
    Pilgrim State’s Rockland’s and Greystone’s foetid halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a nightmare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon,
    with mother finally ******, and the last fantastic book flung out of the tenement window, and the last door closed at 4 A.M. and the last telephone slammed at the wall in reply and the last furnished room emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger in the closet, and even that imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination—
    ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you’re really in the total animal soup of time—
    and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use of the ellipsis catalogue a variable measure and the vibrating plane,
    who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus
    to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head,
    the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here what might be left to say in time come after death,
    and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the suffering of America’s naked mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio
    with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.
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