CHRISTINA ROSSETTI, English poet and sister of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, born (d: 1894); religious and “delicate” (a favorite Victorian word) the shy Christina in her simple Quaker-like dress stands in relief against the rich and intricately patterned Pre-Raphaelite tapestry that was her brother’s background. Her Monna Innominata is one of the great sonnet sequences in English. Much of Christina Rossetti’s poetry has been seen by critics from Willa Cather to Jeannette Foster as “variant,” one poem in particular, “Goblin Market,” is a classic of (unconscious?) Lesbian writing. The poem is convincingly interpreted in Foster’s Sex Variant Women in Literature, and an excerpt here is sufficient for the flavor of her work. Two sisters are tempted by hideously ugly and deformed male goblins to eat some luscious fruit that they know to be “forbidden.” One sister yields to temptation and eats the fruit, all of which is carefully selected to suggest the vagina (cherries, figs). The sister who eats goes wild, “She sucked their fruit globes, fair or red…sucked and sucked and sucked…until her tongue was sore…” It’s quite a poem.

MARGARET CHO, American comedian and actress, born; A comedian, fashion designer and actress. Cho is known for her stage performances, recordings, and concert movies. Her shows are a mixture of her comedy stylings with strong political and cultural commentary. Apart from these shows she has also directed and appeared in music videos, and started her own clothing line. She has also frequently supported gay rights and identifies herself as bisexual, winning several awards for her humanitarian efforts. Cho was born to a Korean-American family in San Francisco, CA. Named "Moran," she was frequently called "Moron" by other children.

Cho grew up in a culturally diverse neighborhood in the 1970s and 1980s, which she described as a community of "old hippies, ex-druggies, burnouts from the '60s drag queens, and Chinese people. To say it was a melting

Cho has dated Quentin Tarantino (who appeared on an episode of her sitcom), Chris Isaak, and Garrett Wang. Cho has also spoken about her relationships and sexual experiences with women, and identifies herself as bisexual. In 2003, she married Al Ridenour, an artist involved in the creation of Cacophany Society and the Art of Bleeding; she was featured in an Art of Bleeding performance in March 2006. Cho began getting major tattoo work done in 2006 and has become an enthusiast; as of March 2007 she estimates that 15-20% of her body is currently covered.

In 2000, the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) awarded her with a Golden Gate award and described her as an entertainer who, "as a pioneer, has made a significant difference in promoting equal rights for all, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity." In 2001, she was given a Lambda Liberty Award by Lambda Legal for "pressing us to see how false constructions of race, sexuality, and gender operate similarly to obscure and demean identity."

JUSTIN ELIZABETH SAYRE is a playwright and performer who Michael Musto called, “Oscar Wilde meets Whoopi Goldberg.” Sayre is a fixture of the Downtown Cabaret Scene in New York, first with their long-running monthly show, The Meeting of The International Order of Sodomites, (Bistro Award-winning & 2 MAC nominations), and now with new shows at Joe’s Pub/The Public Theatre like Peaches, Eggplants, and Tears & The gAyBC’s, a five-part series on which their book is based.

As a playwright, Sayre’s work has appeared at Dixon Place, The Wild Project, The Celebration Theatre, Dynasty Typewriter, and La MaMa Experimental Theatre. Most recently with the 12-part-epic Ravenswood Manor, a Camp-Horror-Soap-Opera, called “a sharply written and well-acted exemplar of the horror-comedy genre,” by the LA Times. The project is currently being developed with Sony Television. 

Sayre also hosted and wrote, Night of a Thousand Judys, a benefit honoring the legacy of Judy Garland and raising money for The Ali Forney Center for Homeless LGBT Youth in New York. Sayre has written a series of YA Novels, Husky, Pretty, and Mean, released by Penguin Books. 

Thet have written a wonderful historical collection of LGBTQ people titled From Gay to Z: A Queer Compendium (Chronicle Books). The book is a humorous collection of the rich legacy of gay culture, told through the letters of the alphabet. From ABBA to addiction, hair and makeup to HIV, Fannie Flagg to fierce, Sayre offers their own perspective on the things that have influenced gay culture today, including iconic figures, historical moments, ongoing issues in the LGBTQIA+ community, and everything in between. 

Sayre also writes for Television, working with Michael Patrick King on his Hit CBS comedy, 2 Broke Girls and most recently on Fox's The Cool Kids. Sayre appeared on HBO’s The Comeback with Lisa Kudrow. They live in a world in a world of their own and they have been blocked by Meghain McCain on Twitter. 

They live in Los Angeles.

VACHEL LINDSAY, American poet died (b. 1879); His exuberant recitation of some of his work led some critics to compare it to jazz poetry despite his persistent protests. Because of his use of American Midwest themes he also became known as the "Prairie Troubador." Today, his poetry is no longer fashionable, which is too bad since it contains a rhythmic vitality that has all but gone out of contemporary cerebral poetry  He is probably best known for this poetic apostrophe to the Salvation Army in “General William Booth Enters Heaven,” although it is questionable whether he ever made it past the pearly Gates himself, since he not only liked boys too much by ended his days a suicide, both offenses that would remove his verses from today’s suburban libraries if the PTAs only knew.

In his 40s, Lindsay lost his heart to the dazzlingly good-looking Australian composer and pianist, Percy Grainger, as had the Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg before him. Lindsay killed himself (horribly, swallowing Lysol) in 1931, the year before Hart Crane leapt into the sea. His only biography was published during the Eisenhower years, a decade before “Gay” was officially invented. If it took biographers almost a century to acknowledge Whitman’s Gayness, Lindsay should be due for a really serious biography around 2021.

THE CIVIL PARTNERSHIP ACT comes into effect in the United Kingdom, and the first civil partnership is registered there.

TODAY'S GAY WISDOM

Adam and Steve--Together at Last

Kate Pollit

Will someone please explain to me how permitting Gays and Lesbians to marry threatens the institution of marriage? Now that the Massachusetts Supreme Court has declared Gay marriage a Constitutional right, opponents really have to get their arguments in line. The most popular theory, advanced by David Blankenhorn, Jean Bethke Elshtain and other social conservatives is that under the tulle and orange blossom, marriage is all about procreation. There's some truth to this as a practical matter — couples often live together and tie the knot only when baby's on the way. But whether or not marriage is the best framework for child-rearing, having children isn't a marital requirement. As many have pointed out, the law permits marriage to the infertile, the elderly, the impotent and those with no wish to procreate; it allows married couples to use birth control, to get sterilized, to be celibate. There's something creepily authoritarian and insulting about reducing marriage to procreation, as if intimacy mattered less than biological fitness. It's not a view that anyone outside a right-wing think tank, a Catholic marriage tribunal or an ultra-Orthodox rabbi's court is likely to find persuasive. 

So scratch procreation. How about: Marriage is the way women domesticate men. This theory, a favorite of right-wing writer George Gilder, has some statistical support — married men are much less likely than singles to kill people, crash the car, take drugs, commit suicide — although it overlooks such husbandly failings as domestic violence, child abuse, infidelity and abandonment. If a man rapes his wife instead of his date, it probably won't show up on a police blotter, but has civilization moved forward? Of course, this view of marriage as a barbarian-adoption program doesn't explain why women should undertake it — as is obvious from the state of the world, they haven't been too successful at it, anyway. (Maybe men should civilize men — bring on the Fab Five!) Nor does it explain why marriage should be restricted to heterosexual couples. The Gay men and Lesbians who want to marry don't impinge on the male-improvement project one way or the other. Surely not even Gilder believes that a heterosexual pothead with plans for murder and suicide would be reformed by marrying a Lesbian? 

What about the argument from history? According to this, marriage has been around forever and has stood the test of time. Actually, though, marriage as we understand it — voluntary, monogamous, legally egalitarian, based on love, involving adults only — is a pretty recent phenomenon. For much of human history, polygyny was the rule--read your Old Testament — and in much of Africa and the Muslim world, it still is. Arranged marriages, forced marriages, child marriages, marriages predicated on the subjugation of women — Gay marriage is like a fairy tale romance compared with most chapters of the history of wedlock. 

The trouble with these and other arguments against Gay marriage is that they overlook how loose, flexible, individualized and easily dissolved the bonds of marriage already are. Virtually any man and woman can marry, no matter how ill assorted or little acquainted. An 80-year-old can marry an 18-year-old; a john can marry a prostitute; two terminally ill patients can marry each other from their hospital beds. You can get married by proxy, like medieval royalty, and not see each other in the flesh for years. Whatever may have been the case in the past, what undergirds marriage in most people's minds today is not some socio-biological theory about reproduction or male socialization. Nor is it the enormous bundle of privileges society awards to married people. It's love, commitment, stability. Speaking just for myself, I don't like marriage. I prefer the old-fashioned ideal of monogamous free love, not that it worked out particularly well in my case. As a social mechanism, moreover, marriage seems to me a deeply unfair way of distributing social goods like health insurance and retirement checks, things everyone needs. Why should one's marital status determine how much you pay the doctor, or whether you eat cat food in old age, or whether a child gets a government check if a parent dies? It's outrageous that, for example, a working wife who pays Social Security all her life gets no more back from the system than if she had married a male worker earning the same amount and stayed home. Still, as long as marriage is here, how can it be right to deny it to those who want it? In fact, you would think that, given how many heterosexuals are happy to live in sin, social conservatives would welcome maritally minded Gays with open arms. Gays already have the baby — they can adopt in many states, and Lesbians can give birth in all of them — so why deprive them of the marital bathwater?

At bottom, the objections to Gay marriage are based on religious prejudice: The marriage of man and woman is "sacred" and opening it to same-sexers violates its sacral nature. That is why so many people can live with civil unions but draw the line at marriage--spiritual union. In fact, polls show a striking correlation of religiosity, especially evangelical Protestantism, with opposition to Gay marriage and with belief in homosexuality as a choice, the famous "Gay lifestyle." For these people Gay marriage is wrong because it lets Gays and Lesbians avoid turning themselves into the straights God wants them to be. As a matter of law, however, marriage is not about Adam and Eve versus Adam and Steve. It's not about what God blesses, it's about what the government permits. People may think "marriage" is a word wholly owned by religion, but actually it's wholly owned by the state. No matter how big your church wedding, you still have to get a marriage license from City Hall. And just as divorced people can marry even if the Catholic Church considers it bigamy, and Muslim and Mormon men can only marry one woman even if their holy books tell them they can wed all the girls in Apartment 3G, two men or two women should be able to marry, even if religions oppose it and it makes some heterosexuals, raised in those religions, uncomfortable.

Gay marriage —  it's not about sex, it's about separation of church and state.