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Gay Wisdom – Today in Gay History

Born

1837 -

English writer, historian and educational reformer. OSCAR BROWNING was born in London. In 1868 he became the lover of the great English Pre-Raphaelite painter Simeon Solomon. For fifteen years he was a master at Eton College, until he was dismissed in the Autumn of 1875 following a dispute over his "overly amorous" (but purportedly chaste) relationship with a pupil, George Curzon. After Eton he took up a life Fellowship at King's College, Cambridge, where he achieved a reputation as a wit, and became universally known as "O.B.".

He traveled to India at Curzon's invitation after the latter had become viceroy. He resumed residence in 1876 at Cambridge, where he became university lecturer in history. He left Cambridge in 1908 and and in 1914 was visiting Italy when World War I broke out. He spent his later years in Rome where he died in 1923 at the age of eighty-six. A large part of his papers disappeared. These include "all Browning's letters to his mother, diaries that covered the whole of his career from his arrival at Eton in 1851, much of his correspondence as an Eton master, and no doubt also a number of his subject files."

This disappearance has been attributed to Hugo Wortham, Browning's nephew and sole executor and legatee, who took the materials to produce a biography of his uncle, Victorian Eton and Cambridge: being the life and times of Oscar Browning.

1886 -

On this date the British novelist RONALD FIRBANK was born in London. Firbank was a prototype for Evelyn Waugh. His best novels are Caprice (1917) and Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli (1926). Firbank was not without his own eccentricities. He as known to wear two dressing gowns at once, painted his nails, lived in an apartment painted black, and owned only books bound in blue leather. He dined only on champagne and flower petals and died malnourished. His work was championed by a large number of English novelists including E. M. Forster, Evelyn Waugh, Simon Raven and the poet W. H. Auden. Susan Sontag named his novels as constituting part of "the canon of camp" in her 1964 essay "Notes on 'Camp."

1927 -

On this date the American physician and writer TOM DOOLEY was born (d. 1961). Born in St. Louis, Missouri as Thomas Anthony Dooley III, Dooley was an American Catholic who, while serving as a physician in the United States Navy, became increasingly famous for his humanitarian and anti-Communist activities in South East Asia during the late 1950s until his early death from cancer. Based on his experiences working in Vietnam and Laos, he authored a number of popular anti-communist books in the years preceding the Vietnam War.

According to classmate Michael Harrington, Dooley never attempted to hide his same-sex orientation. Even after cancer surgery in 1960, Dooley resorted to the 2nd floor of Bangkok's Erawan Hotel, a "central preserve of his Gay life in Southeast Asia." The best-known victim of military homophobia in Randy Shilts's book Conduct Unbecoming: Gays and Lesbians in the U.S. Military is Thomas A. Dooley, the jungle doctor of Laos and folk hero to millions of American Catholics in the late 1950s.

Shilts describes the U.S. Navy's frenzied investigation of Dooley's sexuality while Dooley was on the American lecture circuit in early 1956, promoting Deliver Us from Evil, the best-selling, highly embellished account of his role in the Navy's 1954 "Operation Passage to Freedom," which transplanted over 600,000 Catholics from North Vietnam to the new regime of Ngo Dinh Diem in the South. Fearing a scandal that would diminish its own prestige, the Navy hounded Dooley into confessing his homosexuality following a campaign of surveillance and perhaps entrapment by Office of Naval Intelligence operatives who bugged Dooley's phone and eavesdropped on his hotel room conversations.

After leaving the navy, Dooley went to Laos to establish medical clinics and hospitals under the sponsorship of the International Rescue Committee. Dooley founded the Medical International Cooperation Organization (MEDICO) under the auspices of which he built hospitals. During this same time period he wrote two books, The Edge of Tomorrow and The Night They Burned the Mountain about his experience in Laos.

In 1959 Dooley returned to the United States for cancer treatment; he died in 1961 from malignant melanoma, just one day after his 34th birthday. Following his death John F. Kennedy cited Dooley's example when he launched the Peace Corps. He was also awarded a Congressional Gold Medal posthumously. There have been efforts following his death to have him canonized as a Roman Catholic saint.

1928 -

On this date the French composer JEAN BARRAQUE was born in the Paris suburb of Puteaux. He studied in Paris with Olivier Messiaen and, through Messiaen, became interested in serialism. The densely dissonant polyphonic texture of his work is often compared to that of Pierre Boulez. Barraque planned a large-scale collection of pieces based on Hermann Broch's novel "The Death of Virgil", a book which Barraque's friend and sometime lover Michel Foucault recommended to him. Barraque's use of tone rows in his work is quite distinctive.

Rather than using a single tone row for an entire piece, as Webern did, or using a number of related rows in one work, as Berg or Schoenberg sometimes did, Barraque started by using one row, and then subtly altered it to get a second. This second row was then used for a while before being slightly altered again to make a third. This process continues throughout the work. He called this technique "proliferating series." The French music critic Andre Hodeir claimed that Barraque's Piano Sonata was perhaps the finest since Beethoven.

Barraque was involved in a car accident in 1964, and his apartment was destroyed by fire in November 1968. He suffered from bad health for much of his life.

Nevertheless, his death in Paris in August 1973, at the age of 45, was sudden and unexpected. His relatively small output has left him as a somewhat obscure figure, although his work is often praised, and the sonata is seen as one of the great pianistic challenges of the twentieth century. Barraque is now recognized as one of the most important and distinctive French composers of the post War period.

Noteworthy

1956 -

The poet ALLEN GINSBERG wrote his intensely personal anti-war, love-hate poem "America" on this date. He later published it in his collection "Howl" it is one of the first poems to deal openly and honestly with homosexuality. America is a largely political work, with much of the poem consisting of various accusations against the United States, its government, and its citizens.

Ginsberg uses sarcasm to accuse America of attempting to divert responsibility for the Cold War ("America you don't want to go to war/ it's them bad Russians / Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. / And them Russians"), and makes numerous references to both leftist and anarchist political movements and figures (including Sacco and Vanzetti, the Scottsboro Boys and the Wobblies). Ginsberg's dissatisfaction, however, is tinged with optimism and hope, as exemplified by phrases like "When will you end the human war?" (as opposed to "why don't you...?").

The poem's ending is also highly optimistic, a promise to put his "queer shoulder to the wheel," although the original draft ended on a bleaker note: "Dark America! toward whom I close my eyes for prophecy, / and bend my speaking heart! / Betrayed! Betrayed!"

Born

1962 -

Today's the birthday of Tony-award winning American actor and singer DENIS O'HARE. O'Hare won a Tony Award for Best Performance by a Featured Actor in a Play for his performance in Richard Greenberg's Take Me Out, where his character's lengthy monologues in which he slowly falls in love with the game of baseball were considered the main reason for his award. He also won the 2005 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Featured Actor in a Musical for his role as Oscar Lindquist in the Broadway revival of Sweet Charity.

In 2004 he played Charles J. Guiteau in the Broadway production of Stephen Sondheim's Assassins, for which he was nominated for the Best Performance by a Featured Actor in a Musical Tony Award. He appeared on Broadway in the 1998 revival of Cabaret. He has appeared as a guest star on several episodes of Law & Order and Brothers & Sisters. His feature film credits include 21 Grams, Garden State, Derailed, Michael Clayton, A Mighty Heart, Half Nelson, and Milk. In 2007, he appeared in the film Charlie Wilson's War. In 2009 O'Hare portrayed Phillip Steele (an amalgam character based on Quentin Crisp's friends Phillip Ward and Tom Steele) in the television biopic on Quentin Crisp, An Englishman in New York.

1966 -

The American singer and songwriter STEPHIN MERRITT was born (The Magnetic Fields, The Future Bible Heroes, The 6ths, and The Gothic Archies). Merritt is openly gay. His lyrics are known for bending and blurring gender lines; examples include the song "When My Boy Walks Down The Street," sung by a male vocalist, which contains the lyric "and he's going to be my wife."

Died

1996 -

Congresswoman, educator and advocate BARBARA JORDAN died due to complications with multiple sclerosis. In 1972, she was elected to the United States House of Representatives, becoming the first black woman from a Southern state to serve in the House. In 1974, while serving on the House Judiciary Committee, Jordan made an influential televised speech supporting the impeachment of President Richard Nixon. She was later mentioned as a possible running mate to Jimmy Carter in 1976.

Her speech at the 1976 Democratic National Convention is considered by many historians to have been among the best convention keynote speech in modern history. She was the first African-American woman to deliver the keynote address. In 1994 Jordan was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Jordan was a Lesbian with a longtime companion of more than twenty years, Nancy Earl; Jordan never publicly acknowledged her sexual orientation, but in her obituary, the Houston Chronicle mentioned her longtime relationship with Earl.

Noteworthy

2009 -

In a New York Times op-ed column on this date, MARY FRANCES BERRY, the chair of the Commission On Civil Rights from 1993-2004, called for the "abolishing" of the commission she headed for eleven years and its replacement with one that will fully address LGBT rights. She wrote:

"The Commission on Civil Rights has been crippled since the Reagan years by the appointments of commissioners who see themselves as agents of the presidential administration rather than as independent watchdogs. The creation of a new, independent human and civil rights commission could help us determine our next steps in the pursuit of freedom and justice in our society. A number of explosive issues like immigration reform await such a commission, but recommendations for resolving the controversies over the rights of Gays, Lesbians, [Bisexual] and Transgendered people should be its first order of business."

Today's Gay Wisdom

2018 -

Allen Ginsberg's

AMERICA

America I've given you all and now I'm nothing.
America two dollars and twenty-seven cents January 17, 1956.
I can't stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb
I don't feel good don't bother me.
I won't write my poem till I'm in my right mind.
America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?
When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?
America why are your libraries full of tears?
America when will you send your eggs to India?
I'm sick of your insane demands.
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?
America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.
Your machinery is too much for me.
You made me want to be a saint.
There must be some other way to settle this argument.
Burroughs is in Tangiers I don't think he'll come back it's sinister.
Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke?
I'm trying to come to the point.
I refuse to give up my obsession.
America stop pushing I know what I'm doing.
America the plum blossoms are falling.
I haven't read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes on trial for
murder.
America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies.
America I used to be a communist when I was a kid and I'm not sorry.
I smoke marijuana every chance I get.
I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet.
When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid.
My mind is made up there's going to be trouble.
You should have seen me reading Marx.
My psychoanalyst thinks I'm perfectly right.
I won't say the Lord's Prayer.
I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.
America I still haven't told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came over
from Russia.

I'm addressing you.
Are you going to let our emotional life be run by Time Magazine?
I'm obsessed by Time Magazine.
I read it every week.
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.
It's always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie
producers are serious. Everybody's serious but me.
It occurs to me that I am America.
I am talking to myself again.

Asia is rising against me.
I haven't got a chinaman's chance.
I'd better consider my national resources.
My national resources consist of two joints of marijuana millions of genitals
an unpublishable private literature that goes 1400 miles and hour and
twentyfivethousand mental institutions.
I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underpriviliged who live in
my flowerpots under the light of five hundred suns.
I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers is the next to go.
My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I'm a Catholic.

America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?
I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as individual as his
automobiles more so they're all different sexes
America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your old strophe
America free Tom Mooney
America save the Spanish Loyalists
America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die
America I am the Scottsboro boys.
America when I was seven momma took me to Communist Cell meetings they
sold us garbanzos a handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and the
speeches were free everybody was angelic and sentimental about the
workers

it was all so sincere you have no idea what a good thing the party was in 1835

Scott Nearing was a grand old man a real mensch Mother Bloor made me cry I once saw Israel Amter plain. Everybody must have
been a spy.
America you don're really want to go to war.
America it's them bad Russians.
Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians.
The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia's power mad. She wants to take
our cars from out our garages.
Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Reader's Digest. her wants our
auto plants in Siberia. Him big bureaucracy running our fillingstations.
That no good. Ugh. Him makes Indians learn read. Him need big black niggers.
Hah. Her make us all work sixteen hours a day. Help.
America this is quite serious.
America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set.
America is this correct?
I'd better get right down to the job.
It's true I don't want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts
factories, I'm nearsighted and psychopathic anyway.
America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.