AHMED TEVFIK PASHA, the last Ottoman grand vizier, born (d: 1922?); He held office during two different periods before his last (a total of four different periods officially since his first office also saw a change of sultan). This first office was from April 13, 1909 to May 5, 1909 under Abdullahmid II in the beginning, and then under Mehmed VI Reşad.

His two other prime ministries were between November 11, 1918 – March 3, 1919 and October 21, 1920 – November 4, 1922, in the interval of which Damat Ferid Pasha held office. Aside from his wild, gay youth, from which he apparently “recovered” to please his English masters under whom he ruled, there’s little here worth reporting. Once you’ve seen one wild, gay youth, you’ve seen them all.

TAMMY BALDWIN, American politician, born; American politician, was a Democratic member of the U.S. House of Representatives elected in 1999, representing Wisconsin’s 2^nd congressional district and in 2013 was elected as the junior Senator from Wisconsin. She is an out Lesbian. She and partner Lauren Azar separated in 2010.

Baldwin was the first woman elected to Congress from the state of Wisconsin, and served five terms before winning the Senate seat, defeating former Wisconsin governor and one-time presidential hopeful, Tommy Thompson, becoming the first out gay person to be elected to the Senate.

On August 1, 2007, Baldwin cosponsored H. Res. 333, a bill proposing articles of impeachment against Vice President Dick Cheney, and H Res. 589, a bill proposing the impeachment of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

On January 20, 2008, Baldwin wrote in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that on Dec. 14, 2007, "I joined with my colleagues on the House Judiciary Committee, Reps. Robert Wexler (D-Fla.) and Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.), in urging Chairman Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) to conduct hearings on a resolution of impeachment now pending consideration in that committee." Although some constituents "say I have gone too far," others "argue I have not gone far enough" and feel "we are losing our democracy and that I should do more to hold the Bush administration accountable for its actions."

Seems almost nostalgic now, doesn't it?

TODAY’S GAY WISDOM

From Harry Hay's Radically Gay, edited by Will Roscoe:

Harry Hay's Gay politics represent an alternative to postmodernist, queer theory and dogmatic Constructionism. Indeed, Hay is the only contemporary Gay thinker who could be said to offer a unified theory of Gayness -- one that begins by defining its subject in multidimensional terms and then accounts for its individual and historical origins, its diverse forms and their history, the psycho-social development of Gay individuals, and the nature and sources of Gay oppression. Postmodernism offers at best a politics of resignation, one that rejects the possibility of an "outside" to power, of a subject-SUBJECT alternative to subject-OBJECT social relations, and the means of getting there is through a politics that affirms Queer identities and cultures.

Hay is not bothered if his ideas are called Essentialist or if his activism is deemed "identity politics" — he is happy to emphasize his differences with Social Constructionism and Queer theory — provided that the word radical precede these labels. The original meaning of this word, "to the root," serves well to convey the underlying theme of his philosophy and politics. The key principles of Harry's radical Essentialism can be summed up as follows:

• It is, first and foremost, Gay-centered — a "situated knowledge" (to borrow Donna Haraway's terminology) reflecting the social standpoint of contemporary sexual minorities. It is not neutral on the question of Queer well-being; it seeks to create knowledge that contributes to that end.
• It posits Gay presence rather than absence in the usual state of human society.
• It conceives of its subject in multidimensional terms — not merely as sexual preference but as a difference manifest in gender roles, social identity, economic roles and sometimes religious roles, as well.
• It seeks to tell history from the bottom up, using those documents, records and artifacts that reveal the common experience of the largest number of Queer folk and not only the discourse of elite heterosexuals and social institutions.
• It recognizes various levels of meaning — individual, social, trans-cultural, and spiritual. It does not assume that the way an individual describes herself will be identical to the institutional definition of labels that have been applied to her.
• It is multicultural and comparative. Rather than a unitary instance — "the modern homosexual" — it employs the notion of a family tree (like Wittgenstein's concept of "family resemblance") to conceptualize the relationship between the Queer identities and roles of different cultures and historical periods.
• It views history as a process of continuity-within-change rather than as a series of sharply defined periods of ruptures. Concept/labels like "Sodomite" and "Urning," "homosexual," and "Gay," have overlapped in their usage. Neither can be defined without reference to the other.
• It focuses on praxis. It seeks to analyze the interaction between individuals and their societies and cultures. It looks for instances of symbols and ideas in action as well as in discourse.

The mass coming-out that transformed the quiescent homophile movement of the 1960s into the dynamic Lesbian/Gay liberation and civil rights movements of the 1970s and 1980s was in large measure a function of joining a community where a negative label could be replaced with an affirmative identity. Hay's writings show that this was no accident. The cultural minority model was a carefully thought out political analysis and strategy on the part of the Mattachine founders.