2017-11-25

Yukio Mishima’s Death Poem

Masurao ga
Tabasamu tachi no
sayanari ni
Ikutose taete
Kyo no hatsushimo

The sheaths of swords rattle
As after years of endurance
Brave men set out
To tread upon the first frost of the year.
—Yukio Mishima

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Born

0320 BCE -

As any student of literature knows, THEOCRITUS developed the verse form known as “the pastoral,” a stylized and artful poem in which shepherds and cowherds sing of their love and friendship. Whereas Greek shepherds really did sing to their flocks, it’s doubtful that they were ever quite so philosophical about screwing as Theocritus and his followers pretended they were. In many of his Idylls, Theocritus is praising the love of boys, and these poems are really quite beautiful, even in English translation.

Theocritus’s pastoral was widely imitated in the Renaissance, but, by the 18th century a few wiseacres were already beginning to see the form as inherently silly. Jonathan Swift, bless his cantankerous hide, once lampooned the pastoral mercilessly. In his poem, the shepherd boy takes his fair shepherdess into the field to do more than merely philosophize about love. Before he mounts her, the shepherd, a realist like Swift, spreads plenty of paper around so as not to roll, as he puts it, in the sheep shit. And he warns his true love to take care that she doesn’t get any rocks up her butt. Not too long after, the pastoral died a merciful death.

Noteworthy

1933 -

In Germany, the Nazis stage massive public book burnings, beginning early with MAGNUS HIRSCHFELD’s Institute for Sexual Research (Institut für Sexualwissenschaft) in Berlin. By the time of the book burning, Hirschfeld had long since left Germany for a speaking tour that took him around the world; he never returned to Germany.

The last of Hirschfeld's books published during his lifetime, L'Ame et l'amour, psychologie sexologique [The Human Spirit and Love: Sexological Psychology] (Paris: Gallimard, 1935), was published in French in late April 1935; it was his only book that was never published in a German-language edition.

In the preface, he described his hopes for his new life in France: “In search of sanctuary, I have found my way to that country, the nobility of whose traditions, and whose ever-present charm, have already been as balm to my soul. I shall be glad and grateful if I can spend some few years of peace and repose in France and Paris, and still more grateful to be enabled to repay the hospitality accorded to me, by making available those abundant stores of knowledge acquired throughout my career.”

Born

1960 -

ANGELA MADSEN, was an American Paralympian sportswoman in both rowing and track and field born on this date. In a long career, Madsen moved from race rowing to ocean challenges before switching in 2011 to athletics, winning a bronze medal in the shot put at the 2012 Summer Paralympics in London. Madsen and teammate Helen Taylor were the first women to row across the Indian Ocean. She died in June 2020 while attempting a solo row from Los Angeles to Honolulu. Her heroic story rivals Greek tragedy.

At 6 feet 1 inch tall, Angela excelled at basketball and played for the Marine Corps women’s team. During practice one day, she fell forward and someone stepped on her back. She had two ruptured disks and a damaged sciatic nerve and for a time could not walk.

With therapy, she slowly recovered. She found work as a mechanic in the Sears automotive department and later at U-Haul. But she could not keep up such physically demanding work and took a desk job as a mechanical engineer.

Then in 1992 she broke a leg and some ribs in a car accident. Already suffering from spinal degeneration from the basketball injury, she had corrective surgery the next year, which left her with both legs paralyzed.

After the surgery, the woman who had been her romantic partner for four years left, saying she “did not sign on to be with someone in a wheelchair,” according to Ms. Madsen’s memoir, “Rowing Against the Wind” (2014).

The partner took her car, her disability checks and her savings, Ms. Madsen wrote. With no money for rent, she was evicted. She stored a few possessions in a locker at Disneyland and lived on the streets with her dog for a couple of months, until she was helped by the Paralyzed Veterans of America. Then came an accident in the San Francisco subway in which she plunged headfirst from her wheelchair onto the train tracks. It left her with a mild brain injury but led her to realize that she had more to be grateful for than sorry about, and she resolved to shape her own destiny.

Always athletic, she turned to competitive sports. She got involved with the Veterans Wheelchair Games, and in 1995 won three gold medals: in swimming, the wheelchair slalom course and billiards.

By 1998 she had discovered adaptive rowing for athletes with physical disabilities, and by 1999 she had joined her first ocean rowing regatta.

Even cancer and a double mastectomy did not slow her down.

She trained, raced, coached and surfed, as a 2015 documentary on her achievements makes clear. She founded the California Adaptive Rowing Program. She won four gold medals with the U.S. rowing team at the world championships and competed in three Paralympic Games, winning a bronze medal for the shot put in London in 2012.

Ms. Madsen aimed to be the first rower with paraplegia, the first openly gay athlete and, at 60, the oldest woman to do so.

She was two months in and halfway to Hawaii when she discovered a problem with the hardware for her parachute anchor, which deploys in heavy seas to stabilize the craft.

She met Debra Moeller, a social worker, in 2007 when Debra brought a disabled and abused child to Angela’s adaptive rowing program. They married in 2013.

She had been in constant contact with her wife in Long Beach, Calif., by text and satellite phone, and Angela was posting pictures and observations on social media for those following her voyage. Debra said in an interview that when she warned that a cyclone was coming, Angela knew she had to fix the hardware, which would require tethering herself to the boat and getting in the water.

“Tomorrow is a swim day,” Angela posted on Twitter on Saturday, June 20. On Sunday, there were no messages from her. As the day wore on, Debra grew more worried. She could tell from tracking data that the boat was not being rowed. At around 10:30 p.m. she texted Angela that their friend Soraya Simi, who is making a documentary about Angela, was calling the Coast Guard.

At around 8 p.m. Monday, the Coast Guard spotted her in the water, lifeless and tethered to her boat.

The plane couldn’t land. But the Coast Guard had already diverted a German-flagged cargo ship en route, to Tahiti from Oakland, to retrieve her. The ship was able to recover Ms. Madsen’s body on Monday night, but not her boat. The ship reached Tahiti on Tuesday.

Debra Madsen said she may never know what happened, unless Angela, who was keeping a video diary, had turned on one of her cameras.

She said Angela might have been caught in her tether, or developed hypothermia without knowing it. She might also have had a heart attack or other illness.

The answer may lie in the boat, still adrift in the Pacific. Debra is trying to arrange for its retrieval, which will be costly, and for Angela’s body to be transported to Hawaii for cremation and burial at sea with military honors.

“I want her to complete her journey,” she said.

Image

1978 -

TODD GLORIA is an American politician who is serving as the 37th mayor of San Diego. Gloria is a Democrat.

Gloria was first elected to public office representing District 3 of the San Diego City Council. He was president of the nine-member council from 2012 through 2014. In his role as council president, Gloria served as interim Mayor of San Diego from the August 2013 resignation of Mayor Bob Filner until the March 2014 inauguration of Mayor Kevin Faulconer. Gloria was then elected to represent California's 78th State Assembly district, which encompasses much of San Diego. While on the Assembly, he served as House Majority Whip.

Gloria is a third-generation San Diego of Native American, Filipino, Puerto Rican and Dutch descent and the son of a hotel maid and gardener. He was co-chair of the CA LGBT Legislative Caucus.

Gloria received the most votes in the 2020 primary election and advanced to the general election against runner up Barbara Bry. He was then elected mayor in the November 3, 2020 election, making him the first Native American and Filipino-American mayor elected in a US city of over a million people, as well as the city's first mayor of color and the city's first openly gay mayor.

Noteworthy

1990 -

On this date OUTRAGE!, a United Kingdom direct action group is formed. OutRage! is a direct action campaign group in the United Kingdom formed to fight for what they saw as the rights of Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual people. It is a radical group which has frequently been criticized for being extremist; members have been arrested on some OutRage! actions. For a time in the mid-1990s, some OutRage! actions were perceived as being a version of outing, where Gay activists assert the alleged private homosexuality of public figures as part of a political campaign.

2002 -

On this date Canadian Gay teenager MARC HALL won an injunction permitting him to bring his boyfriend to his prom.

Died

2012 -

GEORGE BIRIMISA an American playwright, actor and director who contributed to the explosion of Gay theater in the mid-1960s during the early years of Off-Off-Broadway died on this date (b:1924);

Birimisa’s works feature sexually explicit, emotionally charged depictions of working class Gay men, often closeted, in the years before the Stonewall uprising (1969) triggered a national and international gay rights movement.

Contemporary Authors said that "Birmisa's plays feature themes of human isolation, frustrated idealism, and rage against needless suffering, usually centered around homosexual characters. According to critic and playwright Michael Smith, Birimisa's writing “links the pain of human isolation to economic and social roots.”

Birimisa’s first produced play, Degrees (February 1966), a portrait of a Gay relationship, premiered at Theater Genesis in the East Village, Manhattan. At the time, Gay plays usually received no serious artistic or critical attention. “For years,” the playwright recalls, “even Gay people would ask me, ‘When are you going to write your first real play?’ Degrees included autobiographical elements, which became stronger and more explicit in Birimisa's later works. Above all, he writes out of a need to tell the truth about his own life. "I don't agree that there are ‘shades of truth,’” he says. “We all know the truth, deep inside ourselves. As artists, we have a responsibility to reveal who we truly are, not to work in shades of gray. This truth includes our sexual beings.”

Birimisa directed and acted in his best-known Off-Off-Broadway play, Daddy Violet (1967), a semi-improvised indictment of the Vietnam War. Daddy Violet opened at the Troupe Theatre Club, premièred in June 1967 at the Caffe Cino, Joe Cino’s's famous coffeehouse in Greenwich Village that is generally acknowledged as the birthplace of Off-Off-Broadway. The play subsequently toured colleges in the United States and Canada and appeared at the 1968 International Theater Festival in Vancouver. Birimisa acknowledged that he wrote Daddy Violet as a parody of the abstract, improvisational theater then in vogue Off-Off-Broadway, an attempt to “out avant-garde everyone else.” For a revival at the Boston Conservatory in 2006, Birimisa revised the script to refer to the war in Iraq.

In 1969, George became the first out Gay playwright to receive a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. This enabled him to attend rehearsals for the London production of his first two-act play, Mr. Jello (April 1968), an arrangement of realistic vignettes that intersect to form a surrealistic social statement, with characters that include a female impersonator, a Gay married man, and a hustler.

In 1976, Birimisa moved to Los Angeles, California. He dismisses the three plays he wrote there, A Dress Made of Diamonds (1976), Pogey Bait (1976), and A Rainbow in the Night (1978) as inferior to his earlier works. However, A Rainbow in the Night, an autobiographical portrait of two Gay men living in New York City’s Bowery in 1953, won a 1978 Drama-Logue Award, and Pogey Bait, a comedy based on Birimisa’s wartime experiences as a Gay apprentice seaman, received subsequent productions in Minneapolis, San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles.

Birimisa moved to San Francisco in 1980 and did not write another play for almost 10 years. Then he began a revised version of A Rainbow in the Night titled The Man With Straight Hair (1994), which premiered at the Studio at Theater Rhinocerous.

A one-man play, Looking for Mr. America (1995), debuted at Josie’s Cabaret and Juice Joint and subsequently played in New York at the La Mama Experimental Theater Club. Birimisa himself performed the show at age 71, in the role of a man recounting his lifelong sexual addiction. Dean Goodman's review noted that the play offers “an eloquent and touching portrait of a particular Gay man’s journey through the last half of the 20th century.”

Viagra Falls (2005) received a concert performance at La MaMa E.T.C. on September 17, 2007, under the direction of Daniel Haben Clark. The play chronicles a young Gay man's long-term sado-masochistic relationship with a closeted opthamologist.

With Steve Susoyev, Birimisa edited Return to Caffe Cino (2007), an anthology of essays and plays by writers associated with the Cino. The book won a 2007 Lambda Literary Award for Theater and Drama.

Birimisa: Portraits, Plays, Perversions (2009), an anthology of collected works and essays about Birimisa's personal life and career, includes an unproduced screenplay, The Kewpie-Doll Kiss, which chronicles Birimisa's childhood loss of his father, abandonment by his mother, and discovery of his sexuality, subjects explored earlier onstage in A Dress Made of Diamonds.

George Birmisa taught Creative Writing since 1983, sponsored by New Leaf Services. He received the 2004 Harry Hay Award in recognition of his writing and community service. At the time of his death, he was writing an autobiography titled Wildflowers. His unpublished manuscripts are in the Joe Cino Memorial Library at Lincoln Center Library for the Performing Arts in New York.

White Crane Institute

2017-11-25

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