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Gay Wisdom – Today in Gay History

Born

1923 -

NED ROREM, American composer, born; He is most well-known and praised for his song settings. He was born in Richmond, Indiana and received his early education in Chicago at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools and the American Conservatory and then Northwestern University. Later, Rorem moved on to the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia and finally the Juilliard School in New York City.

During the time he lived in Morocco and Paris (1949-57), his song texts came from several languages. An avid diarist, in 1969 he published his Paris Diary, which, with his later diaries, has brought him some degree of notoriety, as he is honest about his and others' sexuality, describing his relationships with Leonard Bernstein, Noel Coward, Samuel Barber, and Virgil Thomson, and outing at least a few people. Rorem has written extensively about music as well. These essays are collected in anthologies such as "Setting the Tone", "Music from the Inside Out", and "Music and People". His music prose is much admired, not least for its barbed observations about prominent musicians such as Pierre Boulez. Rorem has composed in an unapologetically tonal idiom throughout his career, and he is not hesitant to attack the orthodoxies of the avant-garde.

1945 -

MAGGI HAMBLING CBE is a British artist born on this date. Though principally a painter her best-known public works are the sculptures A Conversation with Oscar Wilde and A Sculpture for Mary Wollstonecraft in London, and the 4-metre-high steel Scallop on Aldeburgh beach. All three works have attracted controversy.

Hambling is known for her intricate land and seascapes, including a celebrated series of North Sea paintings. Among her portraits, several works are held by the National Portrait Gallery, London.

In 1980 Hambling became the first artist in residence at the National Gallery, after which she produced a series of portraits of the comedian Max Wall. Wall responded to Hambling's request to paint him with a letter saying: "Re: painting little me, I am flattered indeed – what color?" She has taught at Wimbledon School of Art.

Women feature prominently in her portrait series. Hambling was commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery to paint Professor Dorothy Hodgkin in 1985. The portrait features Hodgkin at a desk with four hands, all engaged in different tasks. Her wider body of work is held in many public collections including the British Museum, Tate Collection, National Gallery, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art and the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Hambling is known for painting the dead, including portraits of her parents and Henrietta Moraes in their coffins, saying that she "found it rather therapeutic to go on painting them after death". George Melly was the subject of a series that documented his approach to death, and said she would go down in history as "Maggi 'coffin' Hambling". Her work is spurred through anger—for the destruction of the planet, about politics, for social issues.

Hambling's 1998 outdoor sculpture at Charing Cross in central London as a memorial to dramatist Oscar Wilde, the first public monument to him outside his native Ireland.

Derek Jarman first suggested a memorial in the 1980s and a committee chaired by Sir Jeremy Isaacs including actors Dame Judi Dench and Sir Ian McKellen and the poet Seamus Heaney, raised the money and commissioned Hambling. Her design features Wilde rising from a polished green granite coffin holding a cigarette. The coffin is intended to serve as a public bench rather than the more conventional stone plinth, hence Hambling's name for the memorial A Conversation with Oscar Wilde, as visitors sit next to the writer's effigy. The work bears a quotation from Lady Windermere's Fan: "We are all in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars."

Scallop (2003) celebrates the composer Benjamin Britten and stands on the beach outside Aldeburgh, Suffolk, near Britten's homes and not far from Hambling's village. The 13 foot tall, cast stainless steel sculpture is in the form of the two fractured halves of a scallop shell, etched with the quotation from Britten's opera Peter Grimes: "I hear those voices that will not be drowned."

In May 2018, Hambling was chosen to create a statue commemorating Mary Wollstonecraft, the “foremother of feminism”. The Mary on the Green campaign was working to erect a permanent memorial to the philosopher and author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman since 2011. It chose Hambling for the sculpture unanimously. Hambling's design features a figure – described as an everywoman – emerging out of organic matter. It is inspired by Wollstonecraft's claim to be “the first of a new genus”. Wollstonecraft's famous quotation, “I do not wish women to have power over men but over themselves”, appears on the plinth.

She has also been chosen by The Friends of Edward Carpenter, an English group dedicated to establishing a permanent memorial to Edward Carpenter, an early gay rights pioneer, in Sheffield City Center, recognizing his historical and social importance and his unique association with the city.

Hambling describes herself as "lesbionic" (her term). She formed a relationship with a fellow artist, Victoria ("Tory") Dennistoun, from a family of horse racing jockeys and trainers, who was married to John Lawrence (Lord Oaksey), an aristocrat and horse-racing journalist. Their marriage broke up in splashy, and unhappy fasion in the mid-1980s. Lawrence and Hambling have been together ever since, living in a cottage in Suffolk. The house was left to Hambling by Lady Gwatkin, widow of Norman Gwatkin.

For the last year of the life of Henrietta Moraes, she and Hambling were in a relationship. The artists' model, muse and memoirist died in 1999 and Hambling produced a posthumous volume of charcoal portraits of her.

1950 -

CHRISTOPHER DAVIS is an American writer born on this date. He is best known for his HIV/AIDS-themed novels Valley of the Shadow, which was a shortlisted nominee for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction at the 1st Lambda Literary Awards in 1989, and Philadelphia (1994), a novelization of the 1993 drama film Philadelphia.

Christopher Davis was educated at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Institute, the Art Students League in New York, the Art Foundation Barnes in Philadelphia, the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, and the University of Pennsylvania .

He is the nephew of the late American composer Marc Blitzstein (1905-1964).

His novels include Joseph and the Old Man, and Valley of the Shadow and the collection of short stories The Boys in the Bars.

1954 -

ANG LEE, Taiwanese-born director born; Lee decided to take on a small-budget, low-profile independent film based on Annie Proulx’s Pulitzer Prize-finalist short story originally published in The New Yorker, Brokeback Mountain. In a 2005 article by Robert K. Elder, Lee was quoted as saying, "What do I know about Gay ranch hands in Wyoming?" In spite of the director's removal from the subject at hand Brokeback Mountain showcased Lee's skills in probing depths of the human heart.

The 2005 movie about the forbidden love between two Wyoming cowboys immediately caught public attention and initiated intense debates. The film was critically acclaimed at major international film festivals and won Lee numerous Best Director and Best Film awards worldwide. In addition, "Brokeback" became a cultural phenomenon and a box office hit. "Brokeback" was nominated for a leading eight Oscars and was the front-runner for Best Picture heading into the March 5 ceremony, but lost out to Crash, a story about race relations in Los Angeles, in a controversial upset. There was speculation that the film's depiction of homosexuality might have been the reason for that upset, while others speculate that Crash was simply a better movie. Lee said he was disappointed that his film did not win Best Picture, but was honored to win Best Director, becoming the first Asian to ever win the award.

1965 -

AUGUSTEN BURROUGHS, American writer, born; an American writer, known for his bestselling memoir Running with Scissors (2002), which spawned a feature film of the same name. Burroughs is the son of poet and writer Margaret Robison and the late John G. Robison, head of the philosophy department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His mother sent him to live with her psychiatrist’s family in western Massachusetts.

His books are published by St. Martin's Press (hardcover) and Picador (trade paperback). Some of his childhood experiences were chronicled in Running with Scissors; the book spurred a June 2005 lawsuit in which the Turcotte family of Cambridge, Mass., whom Burroughs had disguised and renamed the "Finch" family in the book, claimed that various family members — particularly the deceased Dr. Rodolph Turcotte, Burroughs' former legal guardian — were defamed by the book's portrayal of the eccentric Finch family. The family recently settled with Sony over the film adaptation, which was written and directed by Ryan Murphy and stars Joseph Cross as Burroughs. In August, 2007, the Turcotte family settled with Burroughs, who emerged victorious, being required only to make trivial word changes in the memoir's front matter. Burroughs lives in New York City, and Amherst, Mass., with his partner of many years, Dennis Pilsits, and their French bulldogs, Bentley and The Cow.

Noteworthy

1973 -

The Watergate Scandal: US President Richard M. Nixon agrees to turn over subpoenaed audio tapes of his Oval Office conversations about the scandal.

Ahhhh…the good old days of…what was that word? Oh yeah…accountability. Ever since, the Republican party has decided that every Democratic President has to be harassed to the brink of impeachment. But Republican Presidents have to shoot someone in the middle of...oh....wait...not even that.