2005-05-31

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Gay Wisdom – Today in Gay History

Died

1859 -

ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT, German naturalist and explorer, died (b: 1769); The one, the only the great. Perhaps one of my own favorite personages in this almanac. He was the younger brother of the Prussian minister, Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835) Alexander von Humboldt's work on botanical geography is considered foundational to the fields of bio-geography, physical geography and meteorology.

Von Humboldt is a prime example of a Renaissance man of the sciences, studying in astronomy, vulcanology, and geology. Thomas Jefferson called him, “The most important scientist I ever met.” 19th century Freethinker, Robert G. Ingersoll said, "He was to science what Shakespeare was to the drama." If he were alive today, he would be another candidate for "The Most Interesting man in the World" commercial.

In the 19th Century, Alexander von Humboldt was one of the most famous men in Europe and is remembered for not only his own scientific achievement, but for his nurturing and mentoring of young, up-and-coming scientists. The American painter Rembrandt Peale painted him, between 1808 and 1810, as one of the most prominent figures in Europe at the time. There are a dozen species names in his honor and Humboldt Bay, California, Humboldt Park (in Chicago) are among dozens of other places and schools, named after him in the U.S.

Between 1799 and 1804, Humboldt traveled extensively in Latin America, exploring and describing it for the first time in a manner generally considered to be a modern scientific point of view. His description of the journey was written up and published in an enormous set of volumes over twenty-one years. He was one of the first to propose that the lands bordering the Atlantic Ocean were once joined (South America and Africa in particular). His five-volume work, Kosmos (1845), attempted to unify the various branches of scientific knowledge.

Among his myriad accomplishments, Humboldt is considered to be the "second discoverer of Cuba" due to the scientific and social research he conducted on the island. During an initial three-month stay at Havana, his first tasks were to survey Havana city and nearby towns. He befriended Cuban landowner and philosopher Francisco Arrango y Parreno, and together they visited south Havana, the valleys of Matanzas Province, and the Valley of the Sugar Mills in Trinidad.

Much of Humboldt's private life remains a mystery because he destroyed his private letters, but throughout his life Humboldt formed strong emotional attachments to men. In 1908 the sexual researcher Paul Näcke, who worked with sexologist and researcher Magnus Hirschfeld, gathered reminiscences of him from people who recalled his participation in the homosexual subculture of Berlin. A travelling companion, Francisco Jose de Caldas, accused Humboldt of frequenting houses where 'impure love reigned', of making friends with 'obscene dissolute youths', and giving vent to 'shameful passions of his heart'. Sounds like a man who knew how to have a good time.

To the soldier Reinhard von Haeften he wrote: "I know that I live only through you, my good precious Reinhard, and that I can only be happy in your presence." He never married. He was strongly attached to his brother's family; and in his later years formed a matrimonial bond to an old and faithful servant named Seifert. Indeed, four years before his death, he executed a deed of gift transferring the absolute possession of his entire estate to Seifert.

Edgar Allan Poe dedicated his last major work, Eureka: A Prose Poem, to von Humboldt. Charles Darwin makes frequent reference to Humboldt's work in his Voyage of the Beagle, where Darwin describes his own scientific exploration of the Americas. He went on to say, “He was the greatest travelling scientist who ever lived." – "I have always admired him; now I worship him."

On, May 6th 2009, according to a press release forwarded by GayWisdom reader David Kerlick, (himself a Humboldt Fellow in Germany, 1975-1977), the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation officially commemorated its name-giver on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the death of Alexander von Humboldt:

“Together with Humboldt University and the Office of the Governing Mayor of Berlin, the Humboldt Foundation is holding a ceremony in the Senate Hall at Humboldt University. Following a welcome address by the State Secretary for Cultural Affairs in the Office of the Governing Mayor of Berlin, André Schmitz, the President of Humboldt University Professor Christoph Markschies, the Ambassador of the Republic of Chile, Professor Álvaro Rojas Marín, and the President of the Humboldt Foundation, Professor Helmut Schwarz, will read from Humboldt’s writings. The ceremonial address, “The Brightness Of The Stars – Alexander Von Humboldt Narrating The World & The Universe,” will be held by the Honorary President of the Humboldt Foundation, Professor Wolfgang Frühwald. “

Virtually every time you see the name "Humboldt" on something, it is named after this man who loved men.

Noteworthy

1869 -

Marks the first known published use of term “homosexuality” by Károly Mária Kertbeny, a German-Hungarian advocate, in a letter to Karl Ulrichs. The neologism “heterosexuality” came later. The word homosexual is a Greek and Latin hybrid. The prefix homo is not from the Latin homo "man" but from the Greek homos, which means "the same," thus giving the word homosexual its definition of "same sex relationship." Homosexual is not as widely accepted because it emphasizes the word as just a sexuality but not as a cultural and social attitude which gay and lesbians have and it has the overtones of pathology derived from its original usage to define it in medical terminology. Gay generally refers to male homosexuality, but may be used in a broader sense to refer to all LGBT people. In the context of sexuality, Lesbian refers only to female homosexuality. The word Lesbian is derived from the name of the Greek island Lesbos, where the poet Sappho wrote about her emotional relationships with young women.

Born

1895 -

RUDOLPH VALENTINO (1895) romantic silent film actor, born Rudolfo Alfonzo Raffaelo Pierre Filibert Guglielmi di Valentina d’Antonguolla, Valentino was such a slab of packed beef that it’s difficult to know where fact begins and legend leaves off. His undeniable good looks and animal appeal, his foreignness in the land of the WASP, and the very plots of his films made women dream of submitting to the fate worse than death of Valentino if he would only draw his sword. And rumor had it that he wielded a weapon even longer than his name.

But the press, and men in general, would have nothing of this un-American dream. He was ridiculed as a “pink powder puff,” and we all know what that means. The consensus is that Valentino was most likely gay. But there are those who disagree. The film historian Kevin Brownlow is one of them. In one of the strangest passages ever written by a serious scholar, Brownlow, who was born many years after Valentino died, tells us that the Latin Lover couldn’t have been “that way” since he had a sense of humor. Ummmm….what?

Died

1939 -

KONSTANTIN ANDREYEVICH SOMOV was was a Russian artist associated with the Mir iskusstva who died on this date (b: 1869); Born into a family of a major art historian and Hermitage Museum curator Andrey Ivanovich Somov, he became interested in 18th-century art and music at an early age.

Somov studied at the Imperial Academy of Arts under Ilya Repin from 1888 to 1897. While at the Academy, he befriended Alexander Benois, who would introduce him to Sergei Diaghilev and Leon Bakst. When the three founded the publication World of Art, Somov liberally contributed to its periodicals. Somov was gay, like many of the World of Art members.

Inspired by Watteau and Fragonard, he preferred to work with watercolors and gouache. For three years he worked on his masterpiece, Lady in Blue, painted in the manner of 18th-century portraitists.

During the 1910s, Somov executed a number of rococo harlequin scenes and illustrations to the poems by Alexander Blok. Many of his works were exhibited abroad, especially in Germany, where the first monograph on him was published in 1909.

Following the Russian Revolution, he emigrated to the United States, but found the country "absolutely alien to his art" and moved to Paris. He was buried at the Sainte-Genevieve-des-Bois Cemetery.

On June 14, 2007, Somov's landscape "The Rainbow" (1927) was sold at Christie's for US$7.33 million, a record for a work at an auction of Russian art

1963 -

MONTY WOOLLEY, American actor, died (b: 1888); Born Edgar Montillion Woolley in New York City, Woolley was a professor and lecturer at Yale University (one of his students was Thornton Wilder) where Cole Porter was an intimate friend and classmate. He began acting on Broadway in 1936.

He was typecast as the wasp-tongued, supercilious sophisticate. His most famous role is that of the cranky radio wag forced to stay immobile because of a seemingly-injured hip in 1942's The Man Who Came to Dinner, which he had performed onstage before taking it to Hollywood. In the film, he caricatured Alexander Woollcott, a radio and press celebrity of the 1930s and 1940s.

Like Clifton Webb (another larger-than-life personality), Woolley signed with 20th Century Fox in the 1940s and appeared in many films through the mid-1950s. He played himself in Warner Brothers' highly fictionalized and execrable film biography of Cole Porter, Night and Day (1946), which left out Porter's (and Woolley's) sexuality. Woolley and Cole Porter enjoyed many amusing disreputable adventures together in New York and on foreign travels.

According to Bennet Cerf in his 1944 book Try and Stop Me, Woolley was at a dinner party and suddenly belched. A woman sitting nearby glared at him; he glared back and said, "What did you expect--chimes?" Cerf said that Woolley liked his own impromptu line so much he insisted that it be added to the script of his next stage role.

White Crane Institute

2005-05-31

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