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January 8, 2018 843 × 581 dimitris-geros-cavafy-the-next-table

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Gay Wisdom – Today in Gay History

Born

1768 -

MARIA CAROLINA, Queen of Naples and the Two Sicilies, was born in the Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna (d: 1814); Emma Hamilton, wife of Sir William Hamilton, ambassador to Naples, is well known as the mistress of Horatio Nelson, who risked career and reputation to be with her. Less known is her liaison with the Neopolitan Queen Maria Carolina, over whom she exercised considerable influence.

This affair, aided and abetted by Maria Caroline’s sister, Marie Antoinette (yes, THE Marie Antoinette) was well known to Sir William Hamilton, who found his wife’s Lesbianism an invaluable aid to his diplomatic mission in Naples. Ironically, no matter how “modern” and independent a spirit Lady Hamilton appears to us today, her every nonconforming move was made possible only by its profitability in flesh or influence to powerful men.

And no....we don't know what that is on her head.

1812 -

EDWARD LEAR, British poet, born (d: 1888); Whether Lear was Gay or not is of little consequence. His nonsense poetry has never been equaled, nor have his whimsical illustrations. No one who reads his limericks, a form that he virtually perfected, can doubt that he was anything other than a comic genius on the order of Lewis Carroll, his contemporary.

Still, all the signs of probable queerness are present. What he called his “natural affinity for children” went well beyond garden-variety naturalness and beyond mere affinity. His entire life is characterized by close friendships with handsome young men many years his junior, by dozens of reasons – from poor eye sight to a big nose – found or invented for never marrying, and by references in his journal to intense suffering each time one of his pretty young men married.

If you weren’t brought up on Lear, you’ve missed one of the joys of childhood; if you still don’t know his as an adult, get out there and start reading “How pleasant to know Mr. Lear! / Who has written such volumes of stuff: / Some think him ill-tempered and queer, / But few think him pleasant enough.

That’s Lear to a T. Queer, pleasant and very funny. One more...

There was an old man with a beard/Who said "It is just as I feared!"/Two owls and a hen, four larks and a wren/Have all built their nests in my beard!

1859 -

KATHARINE LEE BATES, American songwriter, born (d: 1929); Bates is remembered as the author of the words to the anthem "America the Beautiful”. She popularized Mrs. Santa Claus through her poem Goody Santa Claus on a Sleigh Ride (1889). Bates was born in Falmouth Massachusetts, the daughter of a Congregational pastor. She graduated from Wellesley College in 1880 and for many years was a professor of English literature at Wellesley. While teaching there, she was elected a member of the newly formed Pi Gamma Mu honor society for the social sciences because of her interest in history and politics, which she had also studied.

Bates lived at Wellesley with Katharine Coman, who was a history and political economy teacher and founder of the Wellesley College Economics department. The pair lived together for twenty-five years until Coman's death in 1915. It is debated whether their relationship was an intimate lesbian relationship as different sources maintain or platonic (sometimes called a "Boston Marriage") as the local historical society of her birthplace maintains. In the years following Coman's death, Bates wrote Yellow Clover: A Book of Remembrance, to Katharine Coman. Almost all the poems there contained refer to the relationship between Bates and Coman. She was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1970. Fundamentalists continue to conveniently ignore the fact that one of their favorite American “hymns” was written by a Lesbian.

1867 -

EDITH HAMILTON, born. Classicist, Mythology. (d:, 1963) There is, arguably, no more important figure in the study of mythology than Edith Hamilton. A classicist and educator before she became a writer on mythology, her most famous books are The Greek Way (1930) and Mythology (1942). Mythology remains in print after six decades and is still used as an introductory text to mythology in high schools and colleges; a mark of its status is that study guides to the book exist.

Edith Hamilton was born in Dresden, Germany and grew up with her parents in Fort Wayne, Indiana. When she was seven, her father began to teach her Latin and added French, German. And Greek to her curriculum. Her education continued at Miss Porter's School in Farmington, Connecticut and Bryn Mawr College (M.A. 1894). In the following year, Edith and her sister Alice became the first female students accepted at the German universities of Leipzig and Munich.

Upon her return to the United States in 1896, Edith Hamilton became the headmistress of Bryn Mawr School for Girls in Baltimore, MD, to which she devoted all her energies until her retirement in 1922. Upon retiring, she moved to New York City with her life partner Doris Fielding Reid, and wrote and published various articles about Greek drama.

Reid (1895 - 1973) was vice president of the investment firm Loomis Sayles & Company. Hamilton dedicated her first book, The Greek Way, to her. Doris was a former student of Hamilton’s, and eventually became her biographer. The two women cohabited in Maine, on Park Avenue in New York City, and finally in Washington, D.C. Together, they raised Reid’s nephew, Dorian. Edith Hamilton's correspondence and papers are at Princeton University. After her death, in 1963, her long-time companion Doris Fielding Reid published the book Edith Hamilton: An Intimate Portrait. Doris died ten years later in Lenox Hill, New York.

1880 -

RADCLYFFE HALL, British author born (d. 1943) British poet and author of eight novels, including the seminal Lesbian novel, The Well of Loneliness. Published in 1928, The Well of Loneliness deals with the life of Stephen Gordon, a masculine Lesbian (possibly loosely based on Standard Oil heiress Joe Carstairs) who, like Hall herself, identifies as an invert. It is badly written, dated, and God knows it has perpetuated the myth that a Lesbian is a man in a woman’s body, but it still the book about Lesbians that everyone knows, largely because it was the first undisguised Lesbian novel.

Although Gordon's attitude toward her own sexuality is anguished, the novel presents Lesbianism as natural and makes a plea for greater tolerance. While The Well of Loneliness is not sexually explicit, it was nevertheless the subject of an obscenity trial in the UK, which resulted in all copies of the novel being ordered destroyed.

The United States allowed its publication only after a long court battle. It is currently published in the UK by Virago and by Anchor Press in the United States. Hall was listed at number sixteen in the Top 500 Lesbian and Gay Heroes in The Pink Paper, September 26, 1997 edition, issue 500. The Well of Loneliness was number seven on a list of the top 100 Lesbian and Gay novels compiled by The Publishing Triangle in 1999.

What very few people know is why The Well of Loneliness, as well as all of Radclyffe Hall’s other books are dedicated “To the three of us.” Radclyffe’s first lover was Veronica Batten, a woman more than twenty years her senior. Known to her friends as “John,” Radclyffe Hall, throughout her life, in fact, was remarkably promiscuous (Editor’s Note: the definition of “promiscuous”: anyone who has more sex than you.)

Enormously wealthy, she had the means to pursue whatever she wanted, whether fast cars or beautiful women. Although Veronica Batten knew of her lover’s adventures, she was undisturbed as long as none of these affairs developed into meaningful friendships. Her worst fears were realized when Hall met Lady Una Troubridge. Their friendship, it seemed, was going beyond mere sexual pleasure, and Veronica Batten determined that Una Troubridge would have to go. She quarreled with her lover and then dropped dead from a heart attack.

To assuage her guilt, Radclyffe Hall took up spiritualism in a vain attempt to contact Veronica and beg forgiveness. Failing this, she forever dedicated all her books “To the three of us.”

1890 -

VENERABLE JOHN HENRY CARDINAL NEWMAN, died (b: 1801) was an Anglican who converted to the Roman Catholic Church in 1845, later made a cardinal, and in 1991 proclaimed “Venerable” on his way to sainthood. More on this in a moment.

In early life he was a major figure in the Oxford Movement to bring the Church of England back to its Catholic roots. Eventually his studies in history persuaded him to become a Roman Catholic. Both before and after his conversion he wrote a number of influential books, including Via Media, Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, Apologia Pro Vita Sua and The Grammar of Assent.

We include him here because Vatican hierarchs, once again demonstrating there are no limits to their homophobia, have now ordered the parting of Cardinal John Henry Newman from his long-time priest friend Fr. Ambrose St. John, in their shared grave in a secluded cemetery on the outskirts of Birmingham, England.

The cardinal's human remains are to be disinterred, separated from his close friend’s, and buried again in a sarcophagus in the centrally located Birmingham Oratory. For more than a century, John and Ambrose together have rested in the peace of a mutually shared grave -- close friends during life, and close friends even after death. That their intimate human friendship, as soul mates while living, could now be disrupted by unsentimental Vatican politics concerning the "proper protocols" pertaining to the process of sainthood, really reveals the deep suspicion and disaffection that Vatican officials sustain in themselves.

It was Cardinal Newman's dying wish that he be buried with his closest friend in the grounds of the house they had shared as priests. But now, nearly 120 years after his death, Britain's most famous convert to Roman Catholicism is to be re-interred in a sarcophagus in preparation for his becoming a saint, leaving the remains of his friend behind.

The sexuality of Newman and his circle has long been a subject for conjecture. Much of the evidence is ambiguous. Charles Kingsley’s famous attack on Newman in 1864, which spurred Newman to write his Apologia Pro Vita Sua, contains much of Kingley's sexualized language; this attack may be interpreted as a conflict over meanings of masculinity. Others wrote of Newman’s lack of virility and his ‘characteristically feminine nature’.

The idea that the Oxford Movement contained a significant stream of homoeroticism was popularized by Geoffrey Faber in Oxford Apostles (1933), in which he portrayed Newman as a sublimated homosexual with feminine characteristics. Certainly the Oxford Movement attracted a number of fervent young men and produced some intense masculine friendships, although in the self-contained male world of Oxford University this was hardly surprising.

Newman did not shun friendships with women, but these were invariably at a distance. There is no evidence that he was ever drawn to a heterosexual union. From the age of 15 he was convinced that it was the will of God that he should lead a single life. In Oxford he taught that celibacy, for the priesthood, was ‘a high state of life, to which the multitude of men cannot aspire’. His deepest emotional relationships were with younger men who were his disciples. The most significant of these were the flamboyant Richard Hurrell Froude, who died in 1836, and Ambrose St John, who lived with Newman from 1843. He preceded Newman into the Roman Catholic Church and became a member of the Birmingham Oratory, where he lived until his death in 1875.

Newman was profoundly affected by the loss of these intimate friends. Newman wrote after the death of Ambrose St John in 1875: "I have ever thought no bereavement was equal to that of a husband's or a wife's, but I feel it difficult to believe that any can be greater, or any one's sorrow greater, than mine." At his own request, he was buried in the same grave as St John.

Born

1928 -

MAUREEN COLQUHOUN, born on this date was British economist and Labour politician. She was Britain's first out lesbian member of Parliament.

She was educated at a local convent school, a commercial college in Brighton, then at the London School of Economics and later worked as a literary research assistant. She joined the Labour Party in her late teens.

Colquhoun contested Tonbridge at the 1970 general election. She served as a councillor in Shoreham-by-Sea, from 1971 to 1974. The only female Shoreham councillor at the time, she was blocked by Conservative opponents from sitting on any of the authority's committees. In January 1970, a decision by Shoreham Urban District Council to block her from appointments as a primary school manager, school governor and library committee membership, on the grounds that she talked too much, was overruled.

Colquhoun was elected as the Member of Parliament (MP) for Northampton North at the February 1974 general election, and identified with the Tribune Group, and served as the group's treasurer. Arguing in favor of daycare facilities for female delegates at the following year's Labour conference, she said in October 1975: "It is outrageous that we have to ask for this. The Labour Party pays mere lip service to International Women's Day. ... Young women are deterred from coming because there is no provision for their babies. Those who do are not even allowed to bring their toddlers into the gallery."

In 1975, she introduced the Balance of Sexes Bill with the objective to require men and women on public bodies in equal numbers. She had identified 4,500 jobs appointed by Ministers, and 174 public bodies that were almost entirely male. In her speech to introduce the second reading of the Bill, she commended changes that had been made to the nominations process for the 'central list' from which candidates for government bodies could be selected, although she doubted that it was sufficiently broad to encourage applications from all areas of society. The Bill did not become law.

In 1976, Colquhoun was among nine Labour MPs advocating in a letter to The Times an "alternative policy" on Northern Ireland, including the removal of British troops from the country. She drew a negative response from members of her constituency party, in an area with a significant non-white population, for appearing to defend Enoch Powell in January 1977. "I am rapidly concluding", she said, "that Mr Powell, whom I had always believed to be a racialist before I went into the House of Commons, is not one". She thought that sometimes it was wrong for members of her party to stop listening to what he was saying, and that the "real bogeymen are in the Labour Party" who do not improve the conditions for people in the multi-racial inner-cities. In February 1977, she expressed regret for her comments to her constituency party, withdrew any suggestion she supported Powell's opinions, and affirmed her support for a multi-racial society.

In 1979, she introduced the Protection of Prostitutes Bill into the House of Commons, turning up with 50 prostitutes to campaign for the decriminalization of prostitution.

Colquhoun was Britain's first openly lesbian MP. In 1973, as a married mother of three teenage children, she left her husband, Sunday Times journalist Keith Colquhoun, for the publisher of Sappho magazine, Babs (Barbara) Todd.

In February 1976, Colquhoun asked the then Commons Speaker George Thomas to refer to her as "Ms." instead of "Mrs". It was the first time such a request had been made. Mr Speaker Thomas responded by letter: "In the interests of the House, I think I must continue to use some form of prefix, but I will endeavour to slur it in such a way as to reduce, if not entirely eliminate, the audible distinction between 'Mrs' and 'Miss'". The next month, gossip columnist Nigel Dempster contrived to gain an invitation to Colquhoun and Todd's housewarming party. Colquhoun complained to the Press Complaints Commission, which ruled in the two women's favour. In December 1976, she punched a car park attendant in a row about a parking ticket.

Colquhoun was deselected due to her sexuality and feminist views. In late September 1977, members of her constituency party's General Management Committee voted by 23 votes to 18, with one abstention, to deselect her, citing her "obsession with trivialities such as women's rights". The local party chairman Norman Ashby said at the time: "She was elected as a working wife and mother ... this business has blackened her image irredeemably". "My sexuality has nothing whatever to do with my ability to do my job as an MP", Colquhoun insisted in an article for Gay News in October 1977. "Being a lesbian has ruined my political career," she told Woman's Own in 1977.

The vote by her constituency party was overruled in January 1978, as supporters of Colquhoun appealed to the National Executive Committee, who agreed that Colquhoun had been unfairly dismissed owing to her sexual orientation. Colquhoun wanted to put the past behind her and work with her local party, but the Vice-Chair of the General Management Committee said he thought that was impossible as many members were unwilling to work for Colquhoun's re-election, the prospects for which he thought were not promising. At the 1979 general election, she lost her seat to the Conservative Antony Marlow on an 8% swing.

She commented in her memoirs, A Woman in the House that she had “an uncomfortable ability for upsetting equally my friends and my enemies” Colquhoun moved to the Lake District where she was a member of the Lake District's National Park Authority between 1998 and 2006. During that time, she campaigned for speed limits on Lake Windermere and argued that members of the park authority should disclose their membership of the Freemasons. Colquhoun also served as a parish councillor on Lakes Parish Council standing in the Ambleside ward until May 2015, when she was un-seated in that year's elections. By the time of her death, she had returned to Sussex.

Her autobiography, Woman in the House, was published in 1980 about which she commented, "The erasure of lesbians has troubled generations of feminist historians."

Colquhoun died in February 2021, at the age of 92. In a tribute to her at that time, a group representing sex workers said that, like them, "Maureen Colquhoun knew what it was like to be treated as an outcast."

Died

1992 -

JOHN CAGE, American composer died (b. 1912) An American composer, Cage was a long-term collaborator and romantic partner of choreographer Merce Cunningham. He is perhaps best known for his 1952 composition 4’33”, whose three movements are performed without a single note being played. He was a pioneer of chance music, non-standard use of musical instruments and electronic music. Though he remains a controversial figure, he is generally regarded as one of the most important composers of his era.

One of Cage's works, Organ2/ASLP ("as slow as possible"), is currently being performed near the German township of Halberstadt, in an imaginative interpretation of Cage's directions for the piece. The performance is being done on a specially-constructed autonomous organ built into the old church of St. Burchardi. It is scheduled to take a total of 639 years after having been started at midnight on September 5, 2001. The first year and half of the performance was total silence, with the first chord ‒ G-sharp, B and G-sharp ‒ not sounding until February 2, 2003. Then in July 2004, two additional Es, an octave apart, were sounded and were scheduled to be sounded on May 5, 2007. But at 5:00 p.m. (16:00 GMT) on Thursday, January 5, the first chord progressed to a second -- comprising A, C and F-sharp -- and is to be held down over the next few years by weights on an organ being built especially for the project.

In addition to his composing, Cage was also a philosopher, writer, print maker and avid amateur mycologist and mushroom collector.

Cage self-identified as an anarchist in a 1985 interview: "I'm an anarchist. I don't know whether the adjective is pure and simple, or philosophical, or what, but I don't like government! And I don't like institutions! And I don't have any confidence in even good institutions."

Noteworthy

2004 -

New Jersey Governor JAMES S. MCGREEVEY comes out publicly as a Gay man.

2017 -

Today is the peak of the PERSEID METEOR SHOWER. a prolific meteor shower. associated with the comet Swift-Tuttle. The Perseids are called so because the point they appear to be coming from, called the radiant, is in the constellation of Perseus. However, they can be spotted all around the sky. Because of the positioning of Swift-Tuttle's orbit, Perseids are mostly visible on the northern hemisphere.

The shower is visible from mid-July each year, but the bulk of its activity falls between August 8 and 14 with a peak on August 12. During the peak, rates of a hundred or more meteors per hour can be registered.

Meteor showers can be seen when Earth moves through a meteor stream. The stream in this case is called the Perseid cloud and it stretches along the orbit of the Comet Swift-Tuttle. The cloud is composed of particles ejected by the comet as it passed by the Sun. Most of the dust in the cloud today is approximately a thousand years old.

However, there is also a relatively young filament of dust in the stream that boiled off the comet in 1862. The approximate rate of meteors originating from this filament is much higher than normal. The famous Perseid meteor shower has been observed for about 2000 years, with the first known information on these meteors coming from the far east. In early Europe, the Perseids came to be known as the "tears of St. Lawrence." To experience the Perseid shower in its full, one should observe in the dark of a clear moonless night, from a point far outside any large cities, where stars are not dimmed by light pollution.