GERTRUDE STEIN, American writer, was born (d. 1946); Like the cubist paintings she knew so well, Gertrude Stein was multi-faceted, complicated and occasionally impenetrable. So much as been written about her (see White Crane issue #74 Lovers) it is difficult to know exactly what to make of this extraordinary woman, whose long and happy life with Alice B. Toklas she once summed up by writing, “I love my love with a b because she is peculiar.”

Was she a genius, a fraud, a bitch, a saint, over-rated, under-rated or a little of each? What she was more than anything else was honest, scrupulously so, perhaps the most honest writer of her time. Her early fiction, Q.E.D. and Three Lives, offers us the first realistic portrait of Lesbianism in the English language that is not veiled in misty metaphor or drowned in sickly sentiment.

The very act of creating these books required an heroic courage that is inconceivable today. What she risked in breaking new ground, in writing about a subject scarcely known, no less understood, was the creation of works destined to cause shock and be called “ugly.” As she later wrote in her inimitable style, “…When you make a thing, it is so complicated making it that it is bound to be ugly, but those that do it after you they don’t have to worry about making it and they can make it pretty, and so everyone can like it when the others make it.” Gertrude Stein was first. We keep her memory green.

KENNETH ANGER, American Underground Filmmaker, born; One of America's first openly Gay filmmakers, and certainly the first whose work addressed homosexuality in an undisguised, self-implicating manner, Kenneth Anger occupies an important place in the history of experimental filmmaking. His role in rendering Gay culture visible within American cinema, commercial or otherwise, is impossible to overestimate.

In 1947, Anger gained instant notoriety with Fireworks, a homoerotic nightmare/reverie in which a muscle-bound sailor enjoys posing for the protagonist's (Anger's) delectation, but then, with four others, bashes the youth in a public restroom. Despite the horrific scenario, the ending suggests redemption with milky fluid spattering Anger's body, a sympathetic sailor's crotch spewing white sparks from a Roman candle, and Anger resurrected, wearing a flaming Christmas tree headdress.

Some early Anger works never made it to the controversial screening stage because negatives were confiscated and destroyed by self-policing labs to which he had sent film for processing. Conversely, other viewers were overly appreciative of Anger's eroticism, pirating and showing his films in nightclubs during an era when Gay porn was largely unavailable.

Similarly, the pervasiveness of iconic Gay imagery in Anger's work, such as the leather-clad bikers of Scorpio Rising (1963), often caused his films to be grossly oversimplified as depictions of homosexual "pathology," rather than understood as critiques of American mass culture, particularly as it was propagated by Hollywood movies and the rock-and-roll music that Anger used for his soundtracks in pioneering ways, critically anticipating the music-video genre.

In unfinished film projects such as Puce Moment (1949), with its close-up sequence of women's gowns, and Kustom Kar Kommandos (1965), in which a youth caresses a hot-rod with a powder puff, Anger inventories American culture's most fetishized objects, evoking a profoundly camp sensibility. Elsewhere, in Eaux d'artifice (1953), whatever Gay content does exist--Anger cites Ronald Firbank's novel Valmouth as inspiration and has likened the fountain imagery to sexual watersports--is subordinate to the film's elegant visual abstractions.

Although Fireworks and Scorpio Rising had earned him a reputation as an underground Gay filmmaker, through the late 1960s and 1970s, Anger's films expressed less specifically Gay content. His longtime fascination with the writings of occultist Aleister Crowley, which had imparted a dark, ritualistic atmosphere to even his earliest films, propelled works such as Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969) and Lucifer Rising (1973). Collaborative projects with Mick Jagger and Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page recalled Anger's earlier professional engagements with Jean Cocteau, Anaïs Nin, and other iconoclasts, but the results fell short of Anger's expectations and, indeed, abilities.

Through the 1980s, Anger became known to a broader public through the film adaptation of his lurid book Hollywood Babylon (1958), which chronicled scandals of the film industry. Hollywood Babylon is, in essence, a counter-accusation of indecency and intemperance against America's self-righteous film establishment, an institution that at mid-century was so fearful of scandal that only underground filmmakers risked depicting overtly sexual content and exploring radical cinematic forms.

NATHAN LANE, (nee Joseph Lane) American actor, born; a Tony Award- and Emmy Award-winning actor of the stage and screen. When he was 21 and told his mother he was gay, her reply was: "I'd rather you were dead." Lane shot back: "I knew you'd understand". His professional association with his close friend the playwright Terrence McNally includes roles in Lips Together, Teeth Apart, The Lisbon Traviata [Drama Desk and Lucille Lortel Awards], Bad Habits, Love! Valor! Compassion! [Obie, Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle Awards ], and Dedication.

Lane, who came out publicly after the death of Matthew Shepard, jokingly describes himself as "one of those old-fashioned homosexuals, not one of the newfangled ones who are born joining parades." When he was asked once by a reporter whether he was Gay, rather than providing a blunt yes-or-no answer, he famously declared, "I'm 40, single and I work a lot in the musical theatre. You do the math." 

He has been a long-time board member of and fundraiser for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights Aids, and he has been honored by The Human Rights Campaign, GLAAD, and The Trevor Project for his work in the gay community. Lane lives in New York, and on November 17, 2015, married his long-time partner, theater producer and writer Devlin Elliott.

MARLON RIGGS, poet, journalist and filmmaker was born. Riggs was inducted into the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association Hall of Fame in 2006. He produced many documentaries for public television, some of which were controversial like Tongues Untied, being protested by media watchdog groups because they were produced with money from the National Endowment for the Arts. One of his notable students was San Francisco-based documentary filmmaker Sam Green. Marlon Riggs died from HIV/AIDS related illness in 1994.

His death came prior to completion of his final work, Black Is…Black Ain’t, a film about sexism and homophobia in African-American communities. It is a poorer world without his voice and vision.

The Gay author and community builder JOHN R. STOWE passed away on this date. Active in the Gay Spirit Visions conference. Over the years Stowe was a frequent contributor to White Crane and we were glad to review his books in our pages. They include the Lambda Literary Award winner Gay Spirit Warrior: An Empowerment Workbook for Men Who Love Men (1999). His other books include Earth Spirit Warrior: A Nature -based Guide to Authentic Living (2002), The Findhorn Book of Connecting with Nature (2003), Handbook of Chakra Balancing Oils (1988), Planets Alive! A Guide to Planetary Flower Oils (1990).