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Gay Wisdom – Today in Gay History

Born

REGIE CABICO (U.S.) poet and spoken word pioneer was born on this date (though we can’t seem to find the year…so I’m guessing at an approximate insertion here). Cabico, who has been called the "Lady Gaga of Spoken Word" won the Nuyorican Poets Café Grand Slam in 1993. Television appearances include two seasons on HBO’s “Def Poetry Jam.” His work appears in over 30 anthologies. He co-edited Poetry Nation: A North American Anthology of Fusion Poetry (1998). He has directed two plays for the 2007 and 2008 Hip Hop Theater Festival, Elegies in the Key of Funk and The Other Side.

He has been artist-in-residence for New York University’s Asian American Studies program and at Deanza College. He is the artistic director of Sol & Soul, an arts and activist organization in Washington, D.C.

1913 -

The French singer, songwriter and writer, CHARLES TRENET was born on this date (d. 2001). Born in Narbonne. He was one of France most famous chansonniers.

Trenet wrote his first song when he was ten. He studied at the Academie des Arts Decoratives in Paris and made his first recording in 1934, together with Swiss singer Johnny Hess as the duo 'Charles et Johnny'.

Trenet was known as 'Le Fou Chantant' ("The singing fool"). Hits: La Mer (popularized in the U.S. by Bobby Darin in 1960 under the title 'Beyond The Sea' and recently by Robbie Williams), Douce France (1943), Menilmontant, Printemps a Rio, Boum! Albums: Olympia 1975, Le Fou Chantant 1937-1950, Mon coeur s'envole (1994)

1925 -

ROBIN BLASER - Author and poet Robin Francis Blaser born (d: 2009) A noted writer in both the United States and Canada, Blaser grew up in Idaho, and came to Berkeley, California, in 1944. There he met Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan, and became a key figure in the so-called San Francisco Movement of the 1950s and early 1960s. He moved to Canada in 1966, joining the faculty of Simon Fraser University; he held the position of Professor Emeritus. He lived in the Kitsilano neighborhood of Vancouver, British Columbia.

Blaser was also well known as the editor of The Collected Books of Jack Spicer, which includes Blaser's essay, The Practice of Outside. The 1993 publication The Holy Forest represents his collected poems to that date. In 2006, Blaser received a special Lifetime Recognition Award given by the trustees of the Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry, which also awards the annual Griffin Poetry Prize. Blaser won the Prize itself in 2008. Blaser passed away on May 7th 2009.

1934 -

DON BACHARDY was born. The lifelong partner of writer Christopher Isherwood, Bachardy is one of the most respected portrait artists in the U.S. and a widely respected artist in his own right.

Born in Los Angeles, Bachardy began drawing as a child. By his early teenage years, he was specializing in portraits rendered in ink and acrylics. Bachardy attributes his interest in looking at people to his childhood obsession with movies, a passion carried into his adult life. The close-ups of screen actors upon which he gazed as an impressionable child are at least partially responsible for his lifelong interest in portraiture.

Bachardy was only eighteen years old when he met Isherwood, who was thirty years his senior. The discrepancy in their ages shocked many of their friends; but in his memoir My Guru and His Disciple (1980), Isherwood observes that "I myself didn't feel guilty about it, but I did feel awed by the emotional intensity of our relationship, right from its beginning; the strange sense of a fated, mutual discovery. I knew that, this time, I had really committed myself."

Through his relationship with Isherwood over the years in Hollywood, Bachardy came in contact with most of the major names of the day, and painted their portraits. The book Stars in My Eyes catalogs some of the most famous of these fine line pen and ink drawings. He has moved on to full blown acrylic paintings of his subjects (this writer included). When I asked Don about the pen and ink drawings Bachardy simply said that he wanted to be “confident of my drafting skills” so he could move on to paint. He is the recent subject of a lovely documentary about his relationship with Isherwood, Chris and Don.

If you can find it, Bachardy's stunning collection of daily portraits of his dying lover, Last Drawings of Christopher Isherwood is a stunning study of love, devotion, art and death. A masterwork.

1943 -

STEVEN ARNOLD, a multi-media artist, was born on this date to a seamstress mother, and a hardware clerk father in Oakland, California. At four or five years old, he found a chest of theatrical costumes and make-up belonging to his uncle in the attic of his parent's house, and from then on devoted himself to the art of transformation, constantly dressing up to amuse himself, his fashion model sister, and his babysitter. His parents encouraged his fantasies, and allowed him to build sets and puppets to put on shows for the neighborhood children, to whom, he said, he never related.

In the fall of 1958 Arnold entered Oakland Technical High School, where he met his lifelong friend, muse, and collaborator, Pandora. The pair became inseparable, and would spend hours in Steven's bedroom drinking champagne and Romilar cough syrup, smoking opium, marijuana, and cigarettes, dressing up, and playing with make-up. Steven's bedroom in 1959, as Pandora remembers, was "like Louis XIV – beyond belief for a child". Steven and Pandora's high school art teacher, Violet Chew, was the pair's mentor and main source of inspiration. Chew taught her students by ancient Chinese methods, which worked from the inside out, encouraging students to confront problems on a soul-level, and to use their art as a means of exploring and solving these problems. She also introduced the young Steven to antique and junk shopping, art history, cutting-edge fashion, and Eastern spiritual traditions, which made a lasting impact on Arnold's philosophy and art. She saw great potential in her student, and arranged for Arnold to drop homeroom and physical education in order to spend three periods with her each day. It was also around this time that Violet Chew's friend, artist Ira Yeager, noticed that "it was Steven who actually initiated ‘hippie’ dress in San Francisco, before it was fashionable."

After graduating from high school in the spring of 1961, Arnold won a full scholarship to the San Francisco Art Institute. In the spring of 1964, after earning perfect grades for two years at the Institute, Arnold took a break to study abroad in Paris and enrolled at École des Beaux-Arts. Feeling confined by the stiff, traditional curriculum at École des Beaux-Arts, Arnold and a group of American classmates rented villas on the small island of Formentera off the coast of Spain. For the next several months the group lived communally, taking LSD daily, experimenting with paints and costumes, taking up residence in caves, and exploring the small island. Arnold recalls: “This new drug was so euphoric and visionary, so positive and mind expanding… I ascended to another dimension, one so beautiful and spiritual that I was never the same.” Arnold also began keeping sketchbooks around this time, a practice he maintained throughout his life.

Returning to San Francisco in the spring of 1965, Arnold resumed his studies at the San Francisco Art Institute, turning his eye on film-making. He wrote, directed, and designed three short films over the next two years. By late 1967 Arnold was about to receive his BFA, and his final student film, Messages, Messages (starring Ruth Weiss), was drawing critical attention. The film went on to win invites to Cannes' Directors' Fortnight, the Chicago International Film Festival, and the Toronto International Film Festival. Due to the critical success of their film, Arnold and collaborator Michael Wiese decided that Messages, Messages was worthy of a more elaborate hometown premiere than the San Francisco Art Institute could provide. So in February 1968, shortly before their graduation, the pair rented the Palace Theatre in San Francisco's North Beach for the occasion. In addition to Messages, Messages, Arnold also curated "a rare collection of early surrealist films by Man Ray, Melies, and old French animations." The evening was such a success that the theater owner offered to allow Arnold to continue holding screenings. This led to the March 1968 inauguration of Arnold's Nocturnal Dreamshows, the first of the weekly midnight movie showcases that became nationally popular in the 1970s. The Nocturnal Dreamshows also launched The Cockettes, a psychedelic San Francisco drag troupe, into underground fame. Since 1967, Arnold had also been illustrating posters for local businesses, and was among the original group of rock poster artists in San Francisco, creating some of the first rock posters for the famed Matrix nightclub, which was later credited for originating the "San Francisco sound" of the psychedelic ’60s.

In 1969, while working on his MFA at San Francisco Art Institute, Arnold began filming Luminous Procuress, which went on to win him the 1972 New Director's award at the San Francisco Film Festival, an extended exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and a second invite to Cannes’ Director's Fortnight. Salvador Dalí was so impressed with the film that he arranged a private screening at the St. Regis Hotel, to which he invited New York's elite, including Andy Warhol, who also praised the film's genius. Arnold became a favorite of Dalí's, and in 1974 he went to live and study with Dali in Spain, helping Dali to embellish and inaugurate his Teatro-Museo Dalí . Dalí dubbed Arnold the 'prince' of his Court of Miracles, which included other counter-culture icons such as Donyale Luna, Andy Warhol superstar Ultra Violet, Amanda Lear, Marianne Faithful, David Bowie and Mick Jagger.

After returning to California, and failing to make any progress on other film projects, Arnold was driven to find new modes of expression. So he established his Los Angeles photography studio and west coast salon, Zanzibar. From 1982 to 1989, Arnold found his niche, designing and shooting tableau-vivants for four books; he left thousands of living tableau photographs and negatives unpublished. He nurtured close friendships with kindred spirits such as actress Ellen Burstyn and Simon Doonan. Arnold adored the vast cross-section of society represented at his nightly Salons, but also culled inspiration from his dreams, world religions, sexuality, fine art masterpieces, Jungian archetypes, social attitudes, excess, and artifice, working all night, and waking each afternoon to sketch dreams and visions into his growing collection of sketchbooks. In addition to his photography, Arnold also translated these his drawings into a large body of paintings and assemblage sculpture between 1990 and his death in 1994.

Arnold was diagnosed with AIDS in 1988 at the height of his popularity and died in 1994. His works are in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, Frankfurter Kunstverein in Germany, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, Cinematheque Francaise in Paris, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SF MoMA), the Oakland Museum of California, the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archive and Museum in Los Angeles, and the Cincinnati Art Museum.

A documentary of his life Steven Arnold: Heavenly Bodies, narrated by Anjelica Huston, and interviews with Ellen Burstyn, Simon Doonan, Stuart Comer, Holly Woodlawn, Theodora Vanrunkle, Ed Moses, and many others. It may be found (or may not...it may have been removed) here: https://vimeo.com/355230919

Noteworthy

1964 -

LANFORD WILSON'S The Madness of Lady Bright premiered at the Caffe Cino in New York. It was followed by a string of revolutionary gay plays long before The Boys in the Band or Angels in America. For more: http://caffecino.wordpress.com/1920/01/01/gay-plays-at-the-cino/

1970 -

JACK BAKER and MICHAEL MCCONNELL went to the Hennepin County Courthouse in Minneapolis, Minnesota to apply for a marriage license on this date. County Clerk Gerald Nelson refused to issue the license because Jack and Michael were a same-sex couple, and marriage equality was unheard of.

Jack and Michael filed a lawsuit to force Nelson to issue the license, because Minnesota’s marriage laws had no explicit gender requirements that the applicant’s must be opposite-sex couples.

The District Court dismissed Baker v Nelson, and the case was appealed to the Minnesota Supreme Court.

In October 1971 the state Supreme Court dismissed the appeal, and said that restricting marriage to opposite-sex couples did not violate the Due Process Clause, because procreation created a compelling state interest that marriage preserved.

Born

1987 -

MONDAIRE JONES is an American attorney and politician, born on this date, serving as the U.S. representative for New York's 17th congressional districut since 2021. The district includes most of central and western Westchester County and all of Rockland County. A member of the Democratic Party, he and Ritchie Torres are the first openly gay Black members of Congress.

Jones was born in Nyack, NY, and grew up in Spring Valley, New York where he was raised by a single mother. After his mother became ill, Jones lived with his grandparents, who worked multiple jobs to support him. He earned his bachelor's degree from Stanford University in 2009 and his Juris Doctor from Harvard Law School in 2013.

Jones worked in the U.S. Department of Justice during the presidency of Barack Obama. He also worked for Davis, Polk & Wardwell, as a law clerk for Andrew L. Carter, Jr. of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, and for the Westchester County law department. Jones also provided pro bono legal aid through The Legal Aid Society.

Jones came out as gay when he was 24. He is a member of the First Baptist Church of Spring Valley. In June 2020, in honor of the 50th anniversary of the first LGBTQ Pride parade, Queerty named Jones among the fifty heroes "leading the nation toward equality, acceptance, and dignity for all people.