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Gay Wisdom – Today in Gay History

Born

1903 -

MARGUERITE YOURCENAR, French author was born (d. 1987); Marguerite Yourcenar is the pseudonym of Belgian novelist Marguerite Antoinette Jeanne Marie Ghislaine Cleenewerck de Crayencour. Her first novel, Alexis, was published in 1929. Her intimate companion at the time, a translator named Grace Frick, invited her to America, where she lectured in comparative literature in New York City. She and Frick became lovers in 1937, and would remain so until Frick's death in 1979. In 1951 she published, in France, the French language novel Mémoires d’Hadrien (translated as Memoirs of Hadrian), which she had been writing with pauses for a decade. The novel was an immediate success and met with great critical acclaim.

In this novel Yourcenar recreated the life and death of one of the great rulers of the ancient world, the Roman Emperor Hadrian, who writes a long letter to Marcus Aurelius, his successor and adoptive son. The Emperor meditates on his past, describing both his triumphs and his failures, his love for Antinous, and his philosophy. This novel has become a modern classic, a standard against which fictional recreations of Antiquity are measured.

However, some Israeli critics objected to Yourcenar's "underplaying" Hadrian's harsh repression of the Bar Kokhba revolt in Judea, for which this emperor is remembered as a villain in Jewish tradition. Yourcenar was elected as the first female member of the Académie Francaise, in 1980.

One of the most respected writers in French language, she published many novels, essays, and poems, as well as three volumes of memoirs. Yourcenar lived much of her life at Petite Plaisance in Northeast Harbor on Mount Desert Island, Maine. Petite Plaisance is now a museum dedicated to her memory.

1923 -

MALCOLM BOYD, American Episcopal Priest and author, was born (d: 2015); Author of more than thirty books, Boyd began as a producer in Hollywood, working with screen legend Mary Pickford. In 1951, he entered the seminary and became a priest. Malcolm became identified by the media as “the Coffeehouse Priest” and “the Espresso Priest.”

Also in 1959 came Malcolm’s first major encounter with the emerging civil rights movement. He was asked to be the convocation speaker for Religious Emphasis Week at Louisiana State University. In his opening address he made a clear, unequivocal statement opposing racial segregation. He was later invited to speak at an Educational Spring Conference in Louisiana under the sponsorship of the Student Christian Council of L.S.U. But when the conference was abruptly cancelled, the New York Times reported the incident under the headline: NORTHERN CLERIC BARRED IN SOUTH.

This was the beginning of a decade of active involvement for Boyd in the civil rights movement. In 1965 his book of prayers, Are You Running with Me, Jesus? was published. At the time no one knew it would become a runaway national bestseller with one million copies in print and translation into a number of different languages. Malcolm gave many public readings from the book accompanied by musicians including Oscar Brown, Jr., Vince Guaraldi and guitarist Charlie Byrd. (Columbia Records issued two albums of Boyd and Byrd working together).

In 1966 Malcolm found himself in a major media event when he read his prayers (and engaged in a dialogue with audiences on faith issues) in the famed San Francisco nightclub the hungry i. Dick Gregory headlined the bill and it ran for a full month. The New York Times Magazine printed this observation: “Malcolm Boyd is a latter-day Luther or a more worldly Wesley, trying to move religion out of ‘ghettoized’ churches into the streets where people are.”

On February 6, 1968, Malcolm was with Martin Luther King, Jr., for the last time in a nonviolent protest against the Vietnam War. They had gathered in Washington, D.C. in response to a call from Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam. All stood together inside Arlington Cemetery, directly below the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

In 1977 Malcolm came out publicly as a Gay man. A news magazine described how many had viewed him: “blunt, restless, eloquent and above all, open.” Yet it noted the brooding presence of a mask in his public life: “He kept one aspect of his life deeply private: his homosexuality.”

White Crane published A Prophet in His Own Land: A Malcolm Boyd Reader and re-released Are You Running With Me Jesus? in a new edition. Malcolm lived in Los Angeles, California with his long-time partner and husband, the Gay activist and author Mark Thompson. Boyd served on the Advisory Board of White Crane Institute and was a frequent contributor to White Crane, the Gay Wisdom and Culture magazine. Malcolm passed peacefully in February 2015 at the age of 92. Mark followed about a little over a year later in 2016. Both were great friends, advisors and colleagues to this writer and to White Crane and it's mission. We loved them and they loved us well. I miss them deeply.

1943 -

KENNETH LEWES was an Renaissance scholar who became a psychologist who went on toe question modern psychoanalysis of homosexuality. He was born on this date and grew up in a post-World War II working-class neighborhood of the northeast Bronx, the son of an immigrant couple who never got beyond grade school. He guessed even before he entered junior high school that he was gay.

But it wasn’t until he was nearly 50 — and publishing what would become a critically acclaimed takedown of post-Freudian psychoanalytic theories of homosexuality — that he confided his sexual orientation to his parents.

“I remember finding my way to the local public library and checking out books on psychology and human development,” he said in an interview in 2019 with the Journal of Gay & Lesbian Mental Health, “in hopes of finding some reassurance that my interest in handsome boys was only a stage that I would soon pass through.”

Dr. Lewes was married at 23 and divorced by 32 — the age when he had his first homosexual experience. “It seemed only natural for me to be out of the closet to my friends, colleagues and family,” he said, “with the important exception of my parents, who, it had become clear over the years, did not want to hear anything on that particular subject. I came out to them almost 15 years later.”

Dr. Lewes’s major work, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Male Homosexuality (1988), traced the evolution of the prevailing view that homosexuality was a curable illness and explored what he called the psychoanalytic establishment’s “century-long history of homophobia.” The book’s title was changed to Psychoanalysis and Male Homosexuality in later editions.

Drawing on some 500 primary sources, Dr. Lewes’s book, which expanded on his doctoral dissertation, found that most analysts had adhered to “popular prejudice” against gay people and clichés about them. “Many analysts,” he concluded, “have violated basic norms of decency in their treatment of homosexuals.”

He said he had been unable to find a single analysis of the subject written by a psychoanalyst who identified as gay.

Dr. Lewes found that the Oedipus complex could lead to 12 alternative resolutions, six of them heterosexual and six homosexual. “All results of the Oedipus complex are traumatic,” he wrote, “and, for similar reasons, all are ‘normal.’”

Noteworthy

1984 -

Homosexuality is declared legal in the state of New South Wales, Australia.