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September 26, 2017 600 × 315 Tom-Villard-1

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Building Connections & Community for Gay Men since 1989

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Gay Wisdom – Today in Gay History

Born

1874 -

British novelist and playwright W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM was born in Paris. The famous playwright was twenty-one when Oscar Wilde was put on trial. It was enough to make him "publicly straight." He later said that his biggest mistake was "I tried to persuade myself that I was three-quarters normal and that only quarter of me was queer — whereas it was the other way around." Despite his wealth, his fame, and his secretary-companion Gerald Haxton, Maugham died a bitter man.

1892 -

Lesbian writer VIRGINIA WOOLF was born in London. The most celebrated of the Bloomsbury set, her writing is cerebral, and subtle. Woolf's greatest love was probably Vita-Sackville West. Although married to Leonard Woolf, the ethos of Bloomsbury discouraged sexual exclusivity, and in 1922, Woolf met the poet and novelist Vita Sackville-West. After a tentative start, they began a relationship that lasted through most of the 1920s. In 1928, Woolf presented Sackville-West with "Orlando," a fantastical biography in which the eponymous hero's life spans three centuries and both genders. It has been called by Nigel Nicolson, Vita Sackville-West's son, "the longest and most charming love letter in literature." After their affair ended, the two women remained friends until Woolf's death in 1941.

1908 -

Legendary French jazz violinist STEPHANE GRAPPELLI was born (d. 1997). Grappelli is best known as the cofounder of the Quintette du Hot Club de France with guitarist Django Reinhardt. It was one of the first (and arguably the most famous) of all-string jazz bands.

Born Stephane Grappelly (he didn't change his name to "Grappelli" until the 1960s), his collaboration with Reinhardt produced a musical pairing that was sort of the jazz equivalent of Lennon-McCartney or Jagger-Richards. A foil worthy of literature, Grappelli was openly Gay, fastidiously a tidy pianist and violinist.

Grappelli was born in Paris, France to Italian parents: his father, Marquess Ernesto Grappelli was born in Alatri (Lazio). His mother died when he was four and his father left to fight in World War I. As a result he was sent to an orphanage. Grappelli started his musical career busking on the streets of Paris and Montmartre with a violin.

He began playing the violin at age 12, and attended the Conservatoire de Paris studying music theory, between 1924 and 1928. He continued to busk on the side until he gained fame in Paris as a violin virtuoso. He also worked as a silent film pianist while at the conservatory and played the saxophone and accordion. He called his piano "My Other Love" and released an album of solo piano of the same name. His early fame came playing with the Quintette du Hot Club de France with Django Reinhardt, which disbanded in 1939 due to World War II. In 1940, a little-known jazz pianist by the name of George Shearing made his debut as a sideman in Grappelli's band.

After the war he appeared on hundreds of recordings including sessions with Duke Ellington, jazz pianists Oscar Peterson, Michel Petrucciani and Claude Bolling, jazz violinist Jean-Luc Ponty, jazz violinist Stuff Smith, Indian classical violinist L. Subramaniam, vibraphonist Gary Burton, pop singer Paul Simon, mandolin player David Grisman, classical violinist Yehudi Menuhin, orchestral conductor André Previn, guitar player Bucky Pizzarelli, guitar player Joe Pass, cello player Yo Yo Ma, harmonica and jazz guitar player Toots Thielmans, jazz guitarist Henri Crolla and fiddler Mark O'Connor. He also collaborated extensively with the British guitarist and graphic designer Diz Disley, recording 13 record albums with him and his trio, and with now renowned British guitarist Martin Taylor. In the 1980s he gave several concerts with the young British cellist Julian Lloyd Webber.

Grappelli made a cameo appearance in the 1978 film King of the Gypsies, along with noted mandolinist David Grisman. Three years later they performed together in concert, which was recorded live and released to critical acclaim. Grappelli's music is played very quietly, almost inaudibly, on Pink Floyd's album Wish You Were Here. In 1997, Grappelli received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. He is an inductee of the Down Beat Jazz Hall of Fame. Grappelli is interred in Paris' famous Père Lachaise Cemetery.

1944 -

Angela Davis was born on this date in Birmingham, Alabama. The American socialist organizer and professor was associated with the Black Panther Party and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Davis was also a notable activist during the Civil Rights Movement, and a prominent member and political candidate of the Communist Party USA. In recent years, she no longer identifies as a Communist, but rather a democratic socialist, and is currently a member of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism.

She first achieved nationwide notoriety when a weapon registered in her name was linked to the murder of Judge Harold Haley during an effort to free a black convict who was being tried for the attempted retaliatory murder of a white prison guard who killed three unarmed black inmates. Davis fled underground and was the subject of an intense manhunt. Davis was eventually captured, arrested, tried, and then acquitted in one of the most famous trials in recent U.S. history.

Davis is currently a graduate studies Professor of History of Consciousness at the University of California and Presidential Chair at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She works for racial and gender equality and for Gay rights and prison abolition. She is a popular public speaker, nationally and internationally, as well as a founder of the grassroots prison-industrial complex-abolition organization Critical Resistance.

1952 -

Australian-born, British gay rights campaigner, social worker, journalist and author PETER TATCHELL was born. Born in Footscray, Melbourne, Australia. In March 2001 Tatchell tried to make a citizen’s arrest of the Zimbabwaen President Robert Mugabe in the Hilton Hotel in Brussels, Belgium on charge of torturing Ray Chote and Mark Chavundula. Tatchell was beaten up and knocked unconscious by Mugabe's bodyguards. He led protests in Moscow against anti-gay policies of the Russian government and suffered beatings at the hands of security police.

In April 2007 he became the Green Party prospective parliamentary candidate in the constituency of Oxford East. In February of 2010, the UK's Guardian newspaper reported that Tatchell had to withdraw as a Green Party candidate for Parliament, due to the cumulative effects of the repeated beatings he has suffered. He told the Guardian: "I have problems with my memory, concentration, balance and co-ordination...I'm slower, I make mistakes more easily and I don't quite have the drive that I once had. I'm now prone to a bit of depression, but it's manageable. Tatchell's website is at www.petertatchell.net

1966 -

AARON FRICKE was born in Providence, Rhode Island. At the age of seventeen Frick decided to take a male date to the high school prom. "The simple thing would have been to go to the senior prom with a girl. But that would have been a lie — a lie to myself, to the girl, and to all the other students."

He recounts the battle over that date in Reflections of a Rock Lobster: A Story About Growing Up Gay. Fricke successfully sued his high school for not allowing him to bring his boyfriend to the senior prom at Cumberland High School in Cumberland, Rhode Island. He later collaborated with his father, Walter, on a book about their relationship and of the elder Fricke's coming to terms with his son's homosexuality.

That book, Sudden Strangers: The Story of a Gay Son and His Father, was published in 1989. It can be ordered here: http://www.amazon.com/Sudden-Strangers-Father-Stonewall-Editions/dp/0312078552/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1294856924&sr=1-1

The suit brought by Aaron Fricke against his school is considered a major milestone in the history of gay rights. Each year cases of young same-sex couples being discriminated against by their schools happen around the world, and when these cases are brought to court, the suit first brought by Aaron Fricke and Paul Guilbert is invariably cited by the plaintiff's counsel.

Noteworthy

1993 -

South Africa adopted its post-Apartheid constitution. The breathtaking freedoms declared in this document made South Africa the first nation to bar discrimination based on sexual orientation.

Died

1999 -

American composer ROBERT SHAW died in New Haven, Connecticut. Born in Red Bluff, California he is most famous for his work with his namesake Robert Shaw Chorale, with the Cleveland Orchestra and Chorus, and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Chorus. Shaw received 14 Grammy awards, the first Guggenheim Fellowship ever awarded to a conductor, the George Peabody Medal for outstanding contributions to music in America, the American National Medal of Arts, France's Officier des Arts et des Lettres, England's Gramophone Award, and was a 1991 recipient of the Kennedy Center Honors.

Shaw was a champion of modern music from the beginning of his career. He commissioned a requiem for Franklin D. Roosevelt from the newly naturalized German-born composer Paul Hindemith, who responded with When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d, a setting of Walt Whitman's poem commemorating the death of Lincoln. Shaw led the premiere of the work in 1946 with the Collegiate Chorale and continued to champion the work well into the last decade of his life.

in 1996 he conducted a 50th anniversary performance at Yale University, where Hindemith was a professor when he wrote the work. In 1998 Yale also awarded Shaw an honorary doctorate. He was also a recipient of Yale's Sandford Medal. Shaw also received the University of Pennsylvania’s Glee Club Award of Merit in honor of his vast influence on male choral music

2005 -

Award-winning architect PHILIP JOHNSON died. Born Philip Cortelyou Johnson in 1906. With his trademark thick, round-framed glasses, Johnson was the most recognizable figure in American architecture for decades. In addition to his many large projects, Johnson produced dozens of small works over his long career, on paper and built.

In 1930, he founded the Department of Architecture and Design at MoMA and later (1978), as a trustee, he was awarded an American Institute of Architects Gold Medal and the first Pritzker Architecture Prize, in 1979. He was a student at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

With Henry-Russell Hitchcock he wrote The International Style: Architecture Since 1922 (1932), which provided a description of (and also a label for) post-World War I modern architecture. In 1940 Johnson returned to Harvard (B.Arch., 1943), where he studied architecture with Marcel Breuer.

His real mentor, however, was Ludwig Mies can der Rohe, with whom he worked on the widely-praised Seagram Building in New York City (1958). After WWII Johnson returned to MoMA as director of the architecture department from 1946 to 1954. His influential monograph Mies van der Rohe was published in 1947

Johnson’s reputation was further enlarged by the design of his own residence, known as the Glass House, at New Canaan, Connecticut (1949). The house, which is notable for its severely simple rectilinear structure and its use of large glass panels as walls, owed much to the precise, minimalist aesthetic of Mies van der Rohe but also alluded to the work of 18th- and 19th-century architects. (In addition to the Glass House, Johnson’s New Canaan estate featured a number of other structures, including an art gallery and a sculpture pavilion. He later donated the estate to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and in 2007 it was opened to the public.)

Sadly, Johnson was also an active supporter of Hitler's Third Reich prior to the outbreak of World War II. He was linked with Father Charles Coughlin and the anti-Semitic newspaper Social Justice, writing articles for them. Johnson was also known to have traveled to Nazi Germany to report on the huge rallies that were organized, including the annual Nuremberg rally. He was said to have been enthralled by them and made contacts with key Nazi officials during his visits.

In 1940, the FBI would uncover Johnson’s involvement in driving German propaganda to the US “on the Nazis’ behalf.” Johnson would refer to the destruction of Warsaw as a “stirring spectacle.” He was undoubtedly a Nazi sympathizer, but Johnson would try to distance himself once World War II broke out. Years later, in 2018, The New Yorker wrote that Johnson still professed admiration for Hitler as of 1964 by calling him “better than Roosevelt.”

Johnson was able to sweep his fascist leanings under the rug and it never adversely impacted his career. After the war, he never formally apologized and tried to explain it away as “a young man’s fantasies. However, Johnson did make overtures to Jewish communities. He gave his services to design a synagogue in Port Chester, New York, and he did some design work for the state of Israel.

When Johnson died in January 2005, he was survived by his long-time life partner David Whitney, who died only a few months later on June 12, 2005.

Noteworthy

2009 -

Nearly 2,200 government employees involved in foreign policy issues signed a letter delivered to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton calling on the government to give EQUAL BENEFITS TO SAME-SEX PARTNERS.

The Bush administration had eased some rules, opening up some training to same-sex partners, but had resisted efforts to treat homosexual partners the same as married couples.

But Clinton, during her confirmation hearings, indicated a greater willingness to explore the issue. "I think that we should take a hard look at the existing policy," Clinton, in response to a question from Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.) said "My understanding is other nations have moved to extend that partnership benefit."

The issue achieved prominence in 2007 when a respected ambassador, Michael Guest, resigned after 26 years in the Foreign Service to protest the rules and regulations that he argued gave same-sex partners fewer benefits than family pets. Guest said he was forced to choose "between obligations to my partner, who is my family, and service to my country," which he called "a shame for this institution and our country.

With the overturning of the Defense of Marriage Act by the Supreme Court in 2013, these benefits are now available to married Gay and Lesbian partners. There remains a looming threat, though, that they can be rescinded. The Radical Rightwing Religionists are hard at work to see that this happens. And every day, with this administration, have a judiciary and the Supreme Court they need to accomplish it.