Category Archives: Gay Icon

April 19, 2011

Si Mis Manos Pudieran Deshojar

By Joe

Si Mis Manos Pudieran Deshojar by Federico García Lorca
— With English Translation

tumblr_lhlh2fp1Ua1qe5yzqo1_1280Yo pronuncio tu nombre
En las noches oscuras
Cuando vienen los astros
A beber en la luna
Y duermen los ramajes
De las frondas ocultas.
Y yo me siento hueco
De pasión y de música.
Loco reloj que canta
Muertas horas antiguas.

Yo pronuncio tu nombre,
En esta noche oscura,
Y tu nombre me suena
Más lejano que nunca.
Más lejano que todas las estrellas
Y más doliente que la mansa lluvia.

tumblr_lj1ejbORua1qdcsbjo1_400¿Te querré como entonces
Alguna vez? ¿Qué culpa
Tiene mi corazón?
Si la niebla se esfuma
¿Qué otra pasión me espera?
¿Será tranquila y pura?
¡¡Si mis dedos pudieran
Deshojar a la luna!!

————-

If My Hands Could Defoliate

I pronounce your name
on dark nights,
when the stars come
to drink on the moon
and sleep in tufts
of hidden fronds.
And I feel myself hollow
of passion and music.
Crazy clock that sings
dead ancient hours.

zzzzzzzzzSimonVroemena

I pronounce your name,
in this dark night,
and your name sounds
more distant than ever.
More distant that all stars
and more doleful than a calm rain.

Will I love you like then
ever again? What blame
has my heart?
When the mist dissipates,
what other passion may I expect?
Will it be calm and pure?
If only my fingers could
defoliate the moon!






Federico García Lorca

Many recognized his homosexuality from the start, but for decades Spain’s literary establishment, and even his own family, refused to acknowledge that the country’s best loved poet, Federico Garcia Lorca, was gay. His biographer, Ian Gibson, has conclusive evidence that Lorca’s poetic achievements sprang from his lifelong frustration at concealing his homosexuality.

lorcaIn Lorca y el mundo gay (Lorca and the Gay World), published in Spanish on Monday, Gibson describes how the poet’s works were censored to conceal his sexuality. It was not until the late 1980s that Lorca’s sexual identity became grudgingly acknowledged, in the face of denials and evasions. Gibson blames the decades of silence on a deep-seated Spanish homophobia. “Spain couldn’t accept that the greatest Spanish poet of all time was homosexual. Homophobia existed on both sides in the civil war and afterwards; it was a national problem. Now Spain permits same-sex marriage that taboo must be broken.”

Some academics who recognized the truth “suggested the poet’s homosexuality was alien to his poetic creativity”, Gibson writes of the man he’s studied for 40 years. Scholars colluded in the cover-up for fear of losing access to the poet’s archives, or antagonizing the family, he says. “All his poetry turns around frustrated love. His tormented characters who can’t live the life they want are precisely the metaphor for his sorrow. He was a genius who turned his suffering into art.”

After Lorca was assassinated by death squads in August 1936, at the start of Spain’s civil war, his brother Francisco and sister Isabel made every effort to expunge any trace of homosexuality from his life and work, Gibson claims.

A family spokeswoman, Laura Garcia Lorca, says they never talked of her uncle’s homosexuality when her father was alive. “We didn’t want his murder to be considered a sexual crime but to stress it was a political crime. It was difficult for my father to accept the homosexuality of his brother. However my Aunt Isabel [who died in 2002] spoke openly in her later years about homosexuality, and came to accept it as something natural. I imagine my father spoke of it among friends, but never publicly,” she said recently.

As late as 1987, a long introduction to a standard textbook of Lorca poems, The Poet in New York, contained not a word about his sexuality. But that US trip in 1929, which produced an explosion of anguished creativity, was the result of a failed love affair with the sculptor Emilio Aladrén, Gibson reveals. The beautiful sculptor abandoned the poet to marry an English woman, Elizabeth Dove, which plunged Lorca into a deep depression.

Poems written shortly before his death were finally published in the mid-1980s. But the title, Sonnets of a Dark Love (to read this sonnet, click “Read more” below), was softened to Love Sonnets, even though the verses clearly referred to a man: “You will never understand that I love you/ because you sleep in me and are asleep./I hide you, weeping, persecuted/ by a voice of penetrating steel.” The masculinity is clear in Spanish, in which nouns have gender.

Gibson says he went back to the beginning and re-read all of Lorca’s earliest poems for this latest book. “I discovered an anguished, tortured – gay – love … Those who deny his homosexuality must now shut up, or at least question their prejudices. It’s a relief after so many decades of obfuscation and silence, to reveal the truth.”

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/news/lorca-was-censored-to-hide-his-sexuality-biographer-reveals-1644906.html

Sonnet of Dark Love

tumblr_lj6slwV4sg1qgucp7o1_400Oh secret voice and song of a dark love!
Oh lowing without lambs! Oh hidden wound!
Oh needle of bile, cankered camellia!
Oh storm without a sea, town without walls!
Oh nights of iron darkness that descend
on mountains of mourning, proud peaks of grief!
Oh hound in the heart, the heart’s forbidden cry,
song ripening in silence without end!
Fly from my throat, you voice of burning ice,
yet don’t abandon me here in the wild
where flesh and sky mate without bearing fruit.
Don’t haunt the heavy ivory of my skull–
take pity and strip off this strangling shroud,
I who am love, I who am nature’s child!

8 Comments | posted in Gay Icon, History, Nudity, Poetry

March 26, 2011

Tennessee Williams: Born March 26, 1911

By Joe

463px-tennessee-williams-with-cake-nywtsOne hundred years ago today, Edwina and Cornelius Williams gave birth to Thomas Lanier Williams III in Columbus, Mississippi.  Tom Williams grew up to become the greatest American playwright of the 20th century and is known to us today as Tennessee Williams.  Williams is my personal favorite playwright.  His plays, A Streetcar Named Desire, Suddenly, Last Summer, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Night of the Iguana, The Glass Menagerie, and his novel, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone have inspired countless productions, numerous movies, and a host of enjoyment for millions.  The richness of his stories, though set in a time before my birth, are timeless and never lose their appeal.

Tennessee was close to his sister Rose, who was a slim and beautiful woman with a host of mental illnesses from a young age, including schizophrenia, for which she was later institutionalized and spent most of her adult life in mental hospitals. After various unsuccessful attempts at therapy, her parents eventually allowed a prefrontal lobotomy in an effort to treat her. The operation, performed in 1943, in Washington, D.C., went badly, and Rose remained incapacitated for the rest of her life. Rose’s failed lobotomy was a hard blow to Tennessee, who never forgave his parents for allowing the operation. It may have been one of the factors that drove him to alcoholism.

20081023_080741_ae24menagerie_300Characters in his plays are often seen to be direct representations of his family members. Laura Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie is understood to be modeled on Rose. Some biographers say that the character of Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire is based on her as well. The motif of lobotomy also arises in Suddenly Last Summer. Amanda Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie can easily be seen to represent his mother. Many of his characters are autobiographical, including Tom Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie and Sebastian in Suddenly Last Summer.

In his memoirs, the playwright claims he became sexually active as a teenager; his biographer Lyle Leverich maintained this actually occurred later, in his late 20s. His first sexual affair with a man was at Provincetown, Massachusetts with a dancer named Kip Kiernan. He carried a photo of Kip in his wallet for many years. Having struggled with his sexuality throughout his youth, he came out as a gay man in private. When Kip left him for a woman and marriage, Williams was devastated. Williams was outed as gay by Louis Kronenberger in Time magazine in the 1950s.

990528.garden.pbAfter the success of The Glass Menagerie, Thomas Lanier Williams, later known as Tennessee, spent time in Mexico in late 1945. “I feel I was born in Mexico in another life,” he wrote in a letter from Mexico City. Over the years, other writers—from Katherine Anne Porter to Williams’ mentor, Hart Crane— had expressed the same sentiment. But luck was with Williams as he crossed la frontera at Piedras Negras/Eagle Pass: He met Pancho Rodriguez, a young Mexican American. The tale of that meeting would later be embellished—with Williams’ car breaking down and a border guard’s son helping to rescue a manuscript that border guards had confiscated.  The rising 34-year-old playwright was immediately smitten with the 24-year-old Pancho—the border guard’s son—and invited him to New Orleans as his live-in muse. The rest, as they say, is history. But the chronicle of their relationship was forgotten and, to a large extent, whitewashed from Williams’ life story.

frank_merloHis physical and emotional relationship with his secretary, Frank Merlo, lasted from 1947 until Merlo’s death from cancer in 1961, and provided the stability during which Williams produced his most enduring works. Merlo was a balance to many of Williams’s depressions, especially the fear that like his sister, Rose, he would become insane. The death of his lover drove Williams into a deep decade-long depression.

Conflicted over his own sexuality, Tennessee Williams wrote directly about homosexuality only in his short stories, his poetry, and his late plays. Williams’s gayness was an open secret he neither publicly confirmed nor denied until the post-Stonewall era when gay critics took him to task for not coming out, which he did in a series of public utterances, his Memoirs (1975), self-portraits in some of the later plays, and the novel, Moise and the World of Reason (1975), all of which document, often pathetically, Williams’s sense of himself as a gay man.

tennessee_williams-by-lessignetsdotcomThere are several volumes of witty, confessional letters to friends Donald Windham and Maria St. Just and a raft of cynical, exploitative kiss-and-tell books by men who claimed to know Williams well in his later, declining years. However, anyone who had read his stories and poems, in which Williams could be more candid than he could be in works written for a Broadway audience, had ample evidence of his homosexuality.

Tennessee Williams’s work poses fascinating problems for the gay reader. At his best, Williams wrote some of the greatest American plays, but though homosexuals are sometimes mentioned, they are dead, closeted safely in the exposition but never appearing on stage.  In his post-Stonewall plays, in which openly homosexual characters appear, they serve only to dramatize Williams’s negative feelings about his own homosexuality. In the 1940s and 1950s, Williams presented in his finest stories poetic renderings of homosexual desire, but homoeroticism was always linked to death. Only in his lyric poetry does one find positive expression of homoerotic desire.

bhon5lThese contradictions are not presented to damn Williams for not having a contemporary gay sensibility but to say that his attitude toward his own homosexuality reflected the era in which he lived. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the McCarthy era, during which Williams wrote his best work, homosexuality branded one a traitor as well as a “degenerate.”

Williams’s best work was an expression of his homosexuality combined with the intense neuroses that fueled his imagination and crippled his life. Gay critics have debated in recent years whether Williams’s work is marked by “internalized homophobia” (Clum) or whether he is a subversive artist whose work can be best interpreted through the lens of leftist French theorists like Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault (Savran).
David Bergman sees Williams’s characteristic linking of homosexuality and cannibalism as both religious (the homosexual as martyr) and Freudian (homosexuality as accommodation to and rebellion against the father figure), as well as part of a central American gay literary tradition that has its roots in the work of Herman Melville.

The diverse but complementary work of these critics can be read as necessary counters to the heteTennessee Williamsrosexist critics of the past who either ignored Williams’s homosexuality altogether or saw it as the root of his personal and artistic failings.
Williams died on February 25, 1983 at the age of 71. Reports at the time indicated he choked on an eyedrop bottle cap in his room at the Hotel Elysee in New York. The reports said he would routinely place the cap in his mouth, lean back, and place his eyedrops in each eye. The police report, however, suggested his use of drugs and alcohol contributed to his death. Prescription drugs, including barbiturates, were found in the room, and Williams’ gag response may have been diminished by the effects of drugs and alcohol.

Suggested Further Readings:

For a more intimate look at Williams, click “More” below.
pajama
Here’s a rare find. Original PAJAMA (Paul Cadmus, Jared French, Margaret French) vintage gelatin silver print by Jared French (1905-1987) from the collection of Paul Cadmus.

A rare image of a nude Tennessee Williams (lower right) and Donald Windham to (upper left) dated 1943.

2 Comments | posted in Gay Icon, History

March 24, 2011

F. Holland Day: 1864-1933

By Joe

day-youthstoneThe extremely controversial F. Holland Day is all but forgotten today as his fin de siécle images of young nude men—like the one pictured here— were eclipsed by rivals such as Alfred Steigltiz and other moderns. An American, he was the first in the U.S.A. to advocate that photography should be considered a fine art.
Day spent much time among poor immigrant children in Boston, tutoring them in reading and mentoring them. One in particular, the 13-year-old Lebanese immigrant Kahlil Gibran, went on to fame as the author of The Prophet.
day (1)Fred Holland Day was a wealthy eccentric and philanthropist from Massachusetts. As partner in the publishing firm Copeland and Day, which he founded in 1884, Day indulged his passion for English literature, publishing exquisite small-edition, hand-bound volumes by the likes of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Day’s friend Oscar Wilde. Although Copeland and Day published ninety-eight books and periodicals, the firm was never financially successful.
Day began to photograph in 1886; and he wrote extensively about photography’s position as a fine art and organized international photography exhibitions to further his claim. He asked: “And if it chance that [a] picture is beautiful, by what name shall we call it? Shall we say that it is not a work of art, because our vocabulary calls it a photograph?”
fhdnudeFrederick Holland Day’s photographs of the male body concentrated on mythological and religious subject matter. In these photographs he tried to reveal a transcendence of spirit through an aesthetic vision of androgynous physical perfection. He reveled in the sensuous hedonistic beauty of what he saw as the perfection of the youthful male body. In the photograph “St. Sebastian,” for example, the young male body is presented for our gaze in the combined ecstasy and agony of suffering. In his mythological photographs Holland Day used the idealism of Ancient Greece as the basis for his directed and staged images. These are not the bodies of muscular men but of youthful boys (ephebes) in their adolescence; they seem to have an ambiguous sexuality. F.-Holland-Day5The models genitalia are rarely shown and when they are, the penis is usually hidden in dark shadow, imbuing the photographs with a sexual mystery. The images are suffused with an erotic beauty of the male body never seen before, a photographic reflection of a seductive utopian beauty seen through the desiring eye of a homosexual photographer.
His style was Pictorialist, and he favored platinum prints, which are distinguished by their fine detail and ability to render a full range of soft tones. He lost interest in photography when a shortage of platinum during World War I made printing prohibitively expensive and eventually impossible. He died twenty years later, in relative obscurity.
Day

3 Comments | posted in Art, Gay Icon, History, Nudity

March 23, 2011

Goodbye, Elizabeth Taylor

By Joe

alizElizabeth Taylor, the legendary actress famed for her beauty, her jet-set lifestyle, her charitable endeavors and her many marriages, died this morning. She was 79.

Taylor died “peacefully today in Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles,” said a statement from her publicist. She was hospitalized six weeks ago with congestive heart failure, “a condition with which she had struggled for many years. Though she had recently suffered a number of complications, her condition had stabilized and it was hoped that she would be able to return home. Sadly, this was not to be.”

Taylor starred in Tennessee Williams’ classic, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof as Maggie the Cat in late February 1958. cat_on_a_hot_tin_roofNot only is Tennessee Williams one of my favorite playwrights, this is one of my favorite plays. When Taylor made the movie, she was straight from a trip around the world, she was happily married to Mike Todd and was the mother of three very small children under the age of 5. It looked as though she was going to retire from her contractual obligations at MGM Studio’s and work exclusively for Mike Todd. Life seemed perfect. Too perfect. Three weeks after production began, Mike Todd was tragically killed in a plane crash and Elizabeth Taylor’s world fell apart. His death caused such a tear in her life that it would take four years to mend. Elizabeth Taylor’s performance in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is one of her finest. She garnered her second Academy Award nomination. She literally threw herself into her work as detraction from her tragedy. Her role boiled with subdued and expressed emotion.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was not the only Tennessee Williams play that Taylor made into a movie.  She also acted in Suddenly Last Summer.  Both plays deal with gay men and the trials and tribulations they dealt with during William’s lifetime.  l_53318_fde66d34Williams himself was gay and often, homosexuality was a subtest of his plays.  Paul Newman’s character in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof never recovered from the love he had for a boyhood friend, which frustrates Taylor’s character Maggie.  In Suddenly, Last Summer, Taylor played Catharine Holly, a young woman who seems to go insane after her cousin Sebastian dies on a trip to Europe under mysterious circumstances. Sebastian’s mother, Violet Venable, trying to cloud the truth about her son’s homosexuality and death, threatens to lobotomize Catharine for her incoherent utterances relating to Sebastian’s demise. Finally, under the influence of a truth serum, Catharine tells the gruesome story of Sebastian’s death by cannibalism at the hand of local boys whose sexual favors he sought, using Catharine as a device to attract the young men (as he had earlier used his mother). The clip below features Taylor and Montgomery Clift, who happened to be Taylor’s best gay friend and a marvelous actor.

After her acting career faded, she devoted herself to charity. In 1985, she organized a benefit dinner to raise money for her friend Rock Hudson, who was dying of AIDS. The project eventually led to the American Foundation for AIDS Research (amFAR); in 1991, she began the Elizabeth Taylor HIV/AIDS Foundation. “The Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation” funds programs and organization that give direct care to the population of millions affected with HIV/AIDS,whether it is direct care or related/ associated services. So many people are now living longer with AIDS/HIV due to advances in viral medication technology, but the impact of living a life with AIDS is far reaching. AIDS affects all of us, in one way or another. Generations of young people are not conscious of the 1980’s. The face of AIDS has changed since the time when those who were ill were visibly stigmatized, akin to being lepers. Now, those with HIV/AIDS live life among the general population attempting to cope with the disease. Sometimes, silently. Emotionally, the impact is just the same as those first diagnosed. Fear. The only solution is to rid the world of this disease, therefore opening a technological highway aimed to ignite the remedy to so many other diseases as well.

elizabeth_taylor_gallery_40

logo_headerThe Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation
c/o Derrick Lee 
 Reback Lee & Company, Inc. 
 12400 Wilshire Blvd #1275 
 Los Angeles,  CA. 90025

2 Comments | posted in Gay Icon, Movie Review, Video

March 17, 2011

Oscar Wilde and Jefferson Davis

By Joe

In continuing my look at Oscar Wilde for St. Patrick’s Day, I came across this very interesting.  As a southerner, It amazes me that Wilde and Davis met 1882. (My look at Cavefy will continue tomorrow).

Oscar Wilde
Playwright, wit, and gay icon

      meets

Jefferson Davis
Politician, traitor, and Confederate icon

tumblr_l5cpzhR0er1qcqz6qo1_1280

While on his tour of the United States in 1882, there was one man Wilde wanted to meet above all others. No, not Walt Whitman (although the two did meet—and share a kiss—at Whitman’s New Jersey home that January). It was Jefferson Davis, former president of the Confederacy. Wilde finally got his chance on June 27, 1882, when he blew through Beauvoir, Mississippi on his way to Montgomery, Alabama to deliver a lecture on “Decorative Art” at the local opera house. The seemingly mismatched pair actually found they had a lot in common. Wilde remarked on the similarities between the American South and his native Ireland: both had fought to attain self-rule and both had lost. He went on to declare that “The principles for which Jefferson Davis and the South went to war cannot suffer defeat.”

As for the ensuing lecture, that proved to be something of a letdown. “An immense assemblage of the morbidly curious will greet him,” declared the Selma Times in an article previewing the event. The Montgomery Advertiser was also eager to hear what the famous wit had to offer.  “No lady has heard of Mr. Wilde that is not anxious to see and hear him; and, ‘tis said, he ‘adores the fair sex.’” But the Irishman’s observations on aesthetics, delivered in such a strange and exotic accent, were wasted on the Southern audience. “The lecture was one of the peculiar nature that should be heard to be appreciated,” the Advertiser summed up afterwards, “and a synopsis or even a brief sketch will not be attempted.

1 Comment | posted in Gay Icon, History

March 17, 2011

Oscar Wilde’s Influence on Gay Identity

By Joe

In honor of St. Patrick’s Day, I thought it would be appropriate to post this piece on the most famous Irish homosexual (it was Oscar Wilde or Graham Norton, I chose to be a bit more serious, LOL).  Happy St. Patrick’s Day!!!

After his 1895 trial for gross indecency, Oscar Wilde’s name became a byword for immorality. But in the 20th century, gay men embraced Wilde as an icon of gay history.

555314_com_ow1Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) was an Irish poet, playwright, critic, essayist, novelist, and the preeminent aesthete of the Victorian era, whose unparalleled genius for witty conversation and a well-turned aphorism elevated him to the height of English society in the 1880s and 1890s. But his 1895 trial for “gross indecencies” (homosexual acts), and his defense of love between men, made Wilde an inadvertent hero of the 20th century’s gay rights movement.

Wilde’s Impact on Victorian Social Propriety

Wilde studied with the critic Walter Pater at Oxford’s Magdalen College and adopted Pater’s appreciation of “Art for Art’s sake”—that is, to worship Beauty simply because it is beautiful. Some of Pater’s critics insinuated that Aestheticism was merely a euphemism for homosexuality.

oscar wilde sentenceWilde himself was the opposite of the stereotypically strapping, hale Victorian male: he wore his hair in long waves; the London World reported he favored a costume of “open-work embroidered shirt showing black silk lining, a large yellow silk handkerchief thrust in the breast of the coat, and a high stock [stocking] of the past ages,” and always wore an ostentatious flower (a lily, a green carnation) in his buttonhole.

Wilde’s only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), told the fable of a young aesthete who embraces Youth and Beauty while his soul, embodied in a portrait of himself, reveals the depths of his moral decay. Nevertheless, young men in 1890s London knowingly imitated Wilde’s unique style of dress and comportment, perhaps recognizing Wilde’s coded homosexuality under a socially-acceptable veneer of aesthetic admiration.

Wilde’s Trials and Defense of Love Between Men

wildeIn 1891, Wilde had met and fallen in love with handsome Oxford student Lord Alfred Douglas (Bosie to his friends) to the unending chagrin of Bosie’s pugnacious father, the Marquess of Queensberry. In 1895 the Marquess accused Wilde of being a sodomite; Wilde sued him for libel and lost. Soon afterwards, the government charged Wilde with “gross indecencies.” Wilde was asked to define “the love that dare not speak its name,” a phrase from one of Bosie’s own poems:

“It is beautiful; it is fine; it is the noblest form of affection. It is intellectual and has existed repeatedly between an elder and a younger man when the elder has the intellect and the younger has all the joy and hope and glamour of life. That it should be so the world does not understand. The world mocks at it and sometimes puts one in the pillory for it.”

Victorian society, unfortunately, made a moral example of Wilde. He was convicted in May 1895 and sentenced to the maximum penalty of two years’ hard labor. Upon his conviction, producers erased his authorship from playbills, and his name connoted immorality, in particular the disgrace of homosexuality, for years after his death in 1900.

Gay men in the first few decades of the twentieth century, identifying with the symbol of homosexuality’s consequences, internalized the shame and self-loathing imposed on Wilde. In E.M. Forster’s novel Maurice, set in the Edwardian period, the title character seeks a cure for his homosexual feelings, admitting that he is “an unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort.”

Wilde’s Revival in Mid-to-Late Twentieth Century

As the infamy of his trial faded from memory, and as sexual mores relaxed after World War I, a more sympathetic light was cast on Wilde.

770093_com_owbWhen the gay rights movement erupted in the United States and Europe, LGBT people sought historical icons with which to identify. Wilde’s life seemed to encompass the extremes of being homosexual: possessing brilliance, wit, and beauty, but suffering shame, opprobrium, and fear in the name of love. Gays embraced this iconography in the 1960s and 1970s. As one example of Wilde’s reclamation, the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop opened in New York’s Greenwich Village in 1967, one block from where the Stonewall rebellion would take place two years later. The bookstore closed on March 29, 2009.

Read more at Suite101: Oscar Wilde’s Influence on Gay Identity: Wilde’s Impact on 19th and 20th Century Gay Culture

2 Comments | posted in Gay Icon, History

March 16, 2011

Constantine Cavafy

By Joe

Duane Michals-The Adventures of Constantine CavafyDuane Michals. “The Adventures of Constantine Cavafy”

Born 29 April 1863 – 29 April 1933

Background: Constantine P. Cavafy was born Konstantinos Petrou Kavafis (or Kabaphs) in Alexandria, Egypt, into a wealthy merchant family. Originally the family came from Constantinople, Turkey, where Cavafy lived from 1880 to 1885. After his father’s death in 1872 he was taken to Liverpool, England, for five years. Apart from the years in Istanbul (1882-85), he spent the rest of his life in Alexandria. “Whatever war-damage it’s suffered, / however much smaller it’s become, / it’s still a wonderful city,” Cavafy once wrote of his cosmopolitan home town – perhaps not without ironic attitude.

cavafy50Work: When the family’s prosperity declined, Cavafy worked 34 years intermittently as journalist, broker, and in the Irrigation Service, from which he retired in 1922.

Enjoying his family’s respectable position in the cosmopolitan society of Alexandria, Cavafy led an uneventful life of routine, which was interrupted only by short trips to Athens, France, England, and Italy. His first book was published when he was 41, and reissued five years later with additional seven poems. He published no further works during his lifetime.

As a writer Cavafy was perfectionist – he printed his poems by himself and delivered them only to close friends. The poems had sometimes handwritten corrections. Main themes in his works were homosexual love, art, and politics. He started writing poetry under the influence of late-Victorian and Decadent European models, but then abandoned his attempts to compose in foreign tongues.

Fourteen of Cavafy’s poems appeared in a pamphlet in 1904. The edition was enlarged in 1910. Several dozens appeared subsequent years in a number of privately printed booklets and broadsheets. These editions contained mostly the same poems, first arranged thematically, and then chronologically. Close to one third of his poems were never printed in any form while he lived. ‘One Night,’ written 1907, was one of the erotic poems Cavafy wrote during the years in Alexandria, and referred to a passing sexual encounter. It showed the poet’s devotion to a sensual pleasure, free and joyous.

And there on that common, humble bed,
I had love’s body, hand those intoxicating lips,
red and sensual, red lips of such intoxication
that now as I write, after so many years,
in my lonely house, I’m drunk with passion again.

In book form Cavafy’s poems were first published without dates before World War II and reprinted in 1949. PIIMATA (The Poems of Constantine P. Cavafy) appeared posthumously in 1935 in Alexandria. Cavafy died on April 29, 1933 in Alexandria. Nowadays the cafés that the poet frequented on the Rue Misalla (now Safiya Zaghlul) have been largely replaced by shops.

prt09973_david_hockney_signed_print_portrait_of_cavafy_in_alexandria_iCavafy composed rhymed as well as free verse, but never loose, unstructured, or irregular poems. He used iambic, eleven-syllable measures, including the popular fifteen-syllable verse of the demotic tradition. After giving up experiments with different literary models, Cavafy mixed the demotic and pure Greek called katharevousa, and used his wide knowledge of the history of East Roman and Byzantine empires as the basis of his themes.

Like in Oscar Wilde, aestheticism and skepticism marked Cavafy’s work. One of his central motifs was regret for old age: Past and present, East and West, Greek and ‘barbarian’ were fused into sophisticated commentaries on paganism, Christianity, and decadent modern world. Cavafy sketched a rich gallery of historical, semi-obscure, or fictitious characters, whom he used as personae acting, or being discussed, in the episodes of his poems. Often his style was dramatic, as in the famous ‘Waiting for the Barbarians.’ Among his confessional poems with homosexual theme is ‘The Bandaged Shoulder,’ much admired by Lawrence Durrell.

Friends & Relationships: His first love affair was with his cousin, George Psilliary, in 1882. he would often visit male brothels or the Café Al Salam where there were plenty of available young men – in particular a handsome young car mechanic called Toto. His only long-term lover was Alexander Singopoulos whom he made his heir and literary executor. Although he was upset when Alexander got married he later became fond of his wife Rika.
Cavafy held afternoons from 5 until 7 at his flat with metses and ouzo or whisky and he would observe quietly his friends and his handsome youths.
Cavafy lived in West London for three years from 1873 – 1876. He died on his seventieth birthday after a long fight against throat cancer. His last act was to place a dot into the center of a circle he had drawn. In Hidden Things he predicted:

Later, in a more perfect society, Someone else made just like me
Is certain to appear and act freely.

http://www.circa-club.com/gallery/gay_history_icons_constantine_cavafy.php

Leave a comment | posted in Art, Gay Icon, Poetry

November 24, 2010

Two Male College Students Break Guinness World Record, Raise GLBTQ Awareness

By Joe

image

The Guinness Book of World Records may have a new entry.

Matty Daley and Bobby Canciello, both gay men, have apparently broken the record for the world’s longest kiss after locking lips for nearly 33 hours. The record was formerly held by Nicola Matovik and Kristina Reinhart, a German couple.

As they said on their website, “After years of fighting bigotry and discrimination, it’s time to put down our words and demonstrate otherwise. When there’s nothing left to say, say it with a kiss.”

While most college students spent their weekend with friends or catching up on homework, Daley and Canciello, both students at The College of New Jersey (TCNJ), stood kissing from Saturday morning to Sunday night. The kiss was streamed live on the Internet, with thousands of viewers watching. Neither Daley nor Canciello ate, slept, sat, or used the bathroom for the duration (and as per official Guinness rules, neither wore adult diapers or sanitary napkins).

Daley and Canciello stood for the entire kiss under a small tent set up in a central part of the TCNJ campus in full view of people passing by. An audience gathered for the “finale” Sunday night, after which Daley and Canciello took a bow.

Officials from Guinness World Records will now review the taped material to determine if the record has in fact been broken. The record would be published in the 2012 print edition of the book, because the 2011 version was just released this month. If entered into the Guinness Book of World Records, the best-selling book series under copyright of all time, Daley and Canciello will be the first same-sex pairing to hold the record for longest continuous kiss.

3 Comments | posted in Gay Icon, Inspiration

October 31, 2010

October Is GLBT History Month: Finally

By Joe

Eleanor Roosevelt
First Lady
b.  October 11, 1884
d.  November 7, 1962
“No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”
image Eleanor Roosevelt transformed the role of First Lady. She served as a diplomat and was a tireless champion of international human rights.
Roosevelt was born into a wealthy family in New York City. Both her parents died before she was 10; thereafter, she moved in with her grandmother in upstate New York. At the age of 15, she lived in England, where she learned to speak French and Italian fluently.
Soon after her return to New York, Roosevelt met her future husband, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, her father’s fifth cousin. Franklin was attending Columbia Law School. The couple married and had six children, five of whom survived infancy. Franklin took his first leap into politics, winning a seat in the New York State Senate. The family moved to Washington, D.C., when he was appointed Assistant Secretary of the Navy by President Wilson.
Life in the nation’s capital kindled Eleanor’s interests in policy making.  She joined the board of the League of Women Voters in 1924 and became involved in Democratic Party politics. In 1928, after her husband was elected governor of New York, she became actively engaged in domestic and international issues. She wrote a syndicated newspaper column titled “My Day.”
In 1933, Roosevelt became First Lady of the United States, a position she held for 12 years. While she assumed traditional duties, she did not allow them to compromise her ideals. In 1939, she announced in her column that she would resign her membership in the Daughters of the American Revolution, after the group refused to allow Marian Anderson, a black singer, to perform in Washington’s Constitution Hall. “The basic fact of segregation,” Roosevelt wrote, “is itself discriminatory.”
While First Lady, Roosevelt developed an intimate relationship with Lorena Hickock, a journalist who covered the White House. The relationship lasted for the rest of Roosevelt’s life.
Eleanor Roosevelt’s commitment to public service continued after her husband’s death in 1945. President Truman named her a delegate to the United Nations, where she was elected chairwoman of the Commission on Human Rights. In that position, she helped draft the influential Universal Declaration on Human Rights. 
Roosevelt was a member of the Board of Trustees of Brandeis University and delivered the school’s first commencement address. She also authored several children’s books. In her lifetime, she received many civic awards and honorary degrees.
Jalal al-Din Rumi
Sufi Mystic/Poet
b. September 30, 1207
d. December 17, 1273
“Only from the heart can you touch the sky.”
image Jalal al-Din Rumi was a poet, theologian and Sufi mystic. He founded the Order of the Whirling Dervishes, a branch of the Sufi tradition that practicies a gyrating dance ritual representing the revolving stages of life.
Rumi was born in the Persian province of Balkh, now part of Afghanistan. Rumi’s father was an author, a religious scholar and a leader in the Sufi movement—the mystical dimension of Islam.
When Rumi was 12, his father moved the family to escape the impending invasion of Mongol armies, eventually setting in Konya, Anatolia, the westernmost tip of Asia where Turkey is today.
In 1231, after his father died, Rumi began teaching, meditating and helping the poor. He amassed hundreds of disciples who attended his lectures and sermons.
Rumi was married and had one son. After his wife’s death, he remarried and fathered two more children. In 1244, Rumi met a man who changed his life. Shams of Tabriz was an older Sufi master who became Rumi’s spiritual mentor and constant companion. After Shams died, Rumi grieved for years. He began expressing his love and bereavement in poetry, music and dance.
Rumi had two other male companions, but none would replace his beloved Shams. One of Rumi’s major poetic works is named in honor of his master, “The Works of Shams of Tabriz.” Rumi’s best-known work is “Spiritual Couplets,” a six-volume poem often referred to as the greatest work of mystical poetry.
In “Rumi: The Book of Love Poems of Ecstasy and Longing” (2003), Rumi expresses his perception of true love. “Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere. They’re in each other all along.”
Rumi died surrounded by his family and disciples. His tomb is one of the most revered pilgrimage sites in Islam and is a spiritual center of Turkey.
David Sedaris
Writer/Humorist
b. December 26, 1956
“A good short story would take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit.”
image David Sedaris is an award-winning best-selling author whose short stories depict, variously, the life of a young gay man in 20th century America, the experience of an American living abroad and the comedy of family life.
Sedaris, who was one of six children, was born in Binghamton, New York, and grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. In 1983, he graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He began writing and supported himself with odd jobs in Raleigh, in Chicago and eventually in New York. His big break came on National Public Radio, where he read his short stories.
Called the “preeminent humorist of his generation” by Entertainment Weekly, Sedaris is the author of numerous collections: “Barrel Fever” (1994), “Naked” (1997), “Holidays on Ice” (1997), “Me Talk Pretty One Day” (2000), “Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim” (2004) and “When You are Engulfed in Flames” (2008), which was number one on the New York Times best-seller list. He edited a 2005 collection of stories called “Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules,” the proceeds from which benefit a nonprofit writing and tutorial center.
Sedaris is known for his distinctive style, combining elements of memoir, humor and the traditional short story. He is clear that his stories are embellished. “I’m a humorist,” he says. “I’m not a reporter.”
Sedaris is a frequent contributor to the award-winning “This American Life” public radio show. Along with his sister Amy, he is the author of numerous plays written under the name “The Talent Family.” He has been nominated for two Grammy Awards and was named Time magazine’s Humorist of the Year in 2001. In 2008, he delivered the commencement speech at Binghamton University and was awarded an honorary doctorate. 
Sedaris lives in London, Paris and Normandy with his longtime partner, Hugh Hamrick. 
Matthew Shepard
Hero      
b.  December 1, 1976
d.  October 12, 1998
“Every American child deserves the strongest protections from some of the country’s most horrifying crimes.” – Judy Shepard
image As a gay college student, Matthew Shepard was the victim of a deadly hate crime. His murder brought national and international attention to the need for GLBT-inclusive hate crimes legislation.
Shepard was born in Casper, Wyoming, to Judy and Dennis Shepard. He was the older of two sons. Matthew completed high school at The American School in Switzerland. In 1998, he enrolled at the University of Wyoming in Laramie. Soon afterward, he joined the campus gay alliance.
On October 6, 1998, two men—Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson—lured Shepard from a downtown Laramie bar. After Shepard acknowledged that he was gay, McKinney and Henderson beat and tortured him, then tied him to a tree in a remote, rural area and left him for dead. Eighteen hours later, a biker, who thought he saw a scarecrow, found Shepard barely breathing.
Shepard was rushed to the hospital, but never regained consciousness. He died on October 12. Both of Shepard’s killers were convicted of felony murder and are serving two consecutive life sentences.
Despite the outcome of the trial, the men who took Shepard’s life were not charged with a hate crime. Wyoming has no hate crimes law, which protects victims of crimes motivated by bias against a protected class. Shepard’s high-profile murder case sparked protests, vigils and calls for federal hate crimes legislation for GLBT victims of violence.
Shortly after their son’s death, Judy and Dennis Shepard founded The Matthew Shepard Foundation to honor his memory and to “replace hate with understanding, compassion, and acceptance.” Judy Shepard became a GLBT activist and the most recognized voice in the fight for a federal hate crimes bill.
In 2009, more than a decade after Shepard’s murder, The Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act (HCPA) was signed into law. HCPA added sexual orientation and gender identity to the list of protected classes, giving the United States Department of Justice the power to investigate and prosecute bias-motivated violent crimes against GLBT victims.
Dozens of songs have been written and recorded to honor Matthew Shepard’s legacy.  Several films, television movies and plays about him have been produced, including “The Laramie Project” (2002) and “The Matthew Shepard Story” (2002).
Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir
Prime Minister of Iceland
b. October 4, 1942
“Egalitarian policies are the best way to unite and empower people.”
image Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir is the first female prime minister of Iceland and the world’s first openly GLBT national leader.
Sigurðardóttir was born in Reykjavik, where she received the equivalent of a high school diploma from the Commercial College of Iceland. Her first job was as a flight attendant for what is now Icelandair. After six years in that position, she became a union organizer with the airline—a move that served as her entree into Icelandic politics.
Sigurðardóttir was elected to Iceland’s Parliament in 1978. Viewed as a rising star, she was named minister of social affairs in 1987. In 1990, she ran for the top spot in her party, the Social Democrat Alliance. She narrowly lost that race, declaring, “My time will come,” which has become a common catchphrase in Iceland.
In January of 2009, following the collapse of the nation’s economy in the worldwide recession, Iceland’s president asked the Social Democrat Alliance to form a new government, which elevated Sigurðardóttir to the office of the prime minister. At the time of her appointment, she was the longest-serving member of Iceland’s Parliament.
Four months later, Sigurðardóttir’s party, along with its coalition partner, won a majority of seats in the Parliament, handing her a strong mandate to lead Iceland’s economic revitalization efforts and to work toward joining the European Union. While focusing on these important tasks, Sigurðardóttir has not forgotten the value of equity in politics. “A society that does not use the intellectual power of its female population fully is not a wise society,” she says.
Sigurðardóttir was married to a man prior to coming out. She and her ex-husband are the parents of two adult children. On June 11, 2010, by a vote of 49 to 0, Iceland’s Parliament approved same-sex marriage. On June 26, 2010, the first day that legislation became effective, Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir and Jónína Leósdóttir were married. 
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Composer 
b. May 7, 1840
d. November 6, 1893
“Music’s triumphant power lies in the fact that it reveals to us beauties we find in no other sphere.”
image Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky is one of the most popular composers in history. His best-known works include the ballets “Swan Lake,” “The Sleeping Beauty,” and “The Nutcracker”;  the operas “The Queen of Spades” and “Eugene Onegin”; and the widely recognized Fantasy Overture “Romeo and Juliet” and “1812 Overture.”
Tchaikovsky was born in Votinsk, Russia, a small industrial town. His father was a mine inspector. His mother, who was of French and Russian heritage, strongly influenced his education and cultural upbringing.
At age 5, Tchaikovsky began piano lessons. His parents nurtured his musical talents, but had a different career path in mind for their son. In 1850, the family enrolled him at the Imperial School of Jurisprudence in St. Petersburg, where he prepared for a job in civil service.
After working in government for a few years, Tchaikovsky pursued his passion at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. After graduation, he taught music theory at the Moscow Conservatory and worked on new compositions. Tchaikovsky created concertos, symphonies, ballets, chamber music, and concert and theatrical pieces. His passionate, emotional compositions represented a departure from traditional Russian music, and his work became popular with Western audiences.
Despite his career success, Tchaikovsky’s personal life was filled with crises and bouts of depression. After receiving letters of admiration from a former student, Tchaikovsky married her. Historians speculate the marriage took place to dispel rumors that Tchaikovsky was gay. The marriage was a disaster and Tchaikovsky left his wife after nine days.
Tchaikovsky began an unconventional relationship with a wealthy widow, Nadezhda von Mek, who agreed to be his benefactor on one condition: they were never to meet face to face. The couple exchanged more than 1,000 letters, until von Mek abruptly ended their 13-year liaison.
The famed composer died suddenly at age 53. The cause of his death, believed by some to be suicide, remains a mystery.
Rufus Wainwright
Singer/Songwriter
b. July 22, 1973
“It’s important for famous people to be an example for gay teens.”
image Known for his unique style and daring artistic endeavors, Rufus Wainwright is one of the most accomplished singer/songwriters of his generation. He has produced six albums and is the recipient of two Juno Awards and five GLAAD Media Awards.
Wainwright’s musical talent was shaped by his folksinger parents, Kate McGarrigle and Loudon Wainwright III. He was born in Rhinebeck, New York, and holds dual United States and Canadian citizenship. After his parents divorced, he spent most of his youth with his mother in Montreal.
At age 14, Wainwright broke into the entertainment world with a song he composed and sang in the film “Tommy Tricker and the Stamp Traveller,” earning him a Juno Award nomination for “Most Promising Male Vocalist of the Year.” That same year, he was sexually assaulted by a man he met at a bar. Deeply disturbed by the attack, he remained celibate for seven years.
In 1998, following the release of his first album, Wainwright was named “Best New Artist” by Rolling Stone. He composes music for theater, dance and opera, and has contributed to numerous film soundtracks, including “Moulin Rouge” and “Brokeback Mountain.” Additionally, he has acted in “The Aviator” and “Heights,” among other films.
As a collaborator, Wainwright has worked on albums with music greats Rosanne Cash and Elton John. John hailed him as “the greatest songwriter on the planet.” His first opera, “Prima Donna,” premiered in 2009 at the Manchester International Festival and was the subject of a documentary film that premiered on Bravo! in 2010.
Despite fame and success, Wainwright struggled with crystal meth addiction, a habit he eventually recovered from in 2002. With two decades of performing under his belt, Wainwright assures his fans that he won’t be retiring any time soon: “I am a self-sustaining, vibrant, long-term artist, and I’m not going away!” 
Mel White
Minister/Activist
b. July 26, 1940
“I’m perfectly happy going on TV now and saying I’m a gay man. I’m happy and proud to say that.”
image Mel White is an ordained minister who left his career as an adviser to prominent Christian evangelists when he came out during the mid 1990’s. White has dedicated his life to gaining acceptance for GLBT Christians.
In 1962, White graduated from Warner Pacific College. He received a master’s degree in communications from the University of Portland and a Doctorate of Ministry from Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California, where he was also a professor.
Early in his career, White served as a speechwriter for evangelical leaders Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. He married a woman with whom he had one son. When he realized he was attracted to men, he tried to “cure” his homosexuality with therapy and exorcism.  Acknowledging that nothing could alter his sexual orientation, White attempted suicide.
White ultimately accepted his sexuality and amicably divorced his wife. In 1993, he publicly acknowledged that he was gay when he was named dean of the Dallas Cathedral of Hope of the Universal Fellowship at Metropolitan Community Churches. Two years later, he published “Stranger at the Gate,” a book that chronicles his struggles as a gay Christian.
In the early 1990’s, White shifted his focus to GLBT advocacy, both within and outside of the church. In 1996, White led a two-week fast on the steps of Congress as the Senate considered and ultimately passed the Defense of Marriage Act. He moved the fast to the White House, where he was arrested. “How can we stand by in silent acceptance while the president and the Congress sacrifice lesbian and gay Americans for some ‘greater political good’?” he asked.
In 1998, White and his partner of more than 25 years, Gary Nixon, founded Soulforce, an organization whose mission is to “seek freedom from religious and political oppression” for GLBT people. Its name comes from “satyagraha,” a term meaning “soul force” used by Gandhi in to describe his civil rights struggle.
White is the author of nearly 20 books, including “Religion Gone Bad: Hidden Dangers from the Christian Right” (2009). His story is featured in “Friends of God” (2007), a documentary film about evangelical Christians.
In 2008, White and Nixon were legally married in California. In 2009, White and his son, Mike, were a team on the 14th season of “The Amazing Race.”
Emanuel Xavier
Poet   
b. May 3, 1971  
“Being Latino and gay gives me much to write about. Anything that oppresses us as artists is always great fodder for art.”
image Emanuel Xavier is a poet, author and editor. He is one of the most significant openly gay Latino spoken word artists of his generation. 
Xavier was born in Brooklyn, New York, the child of an Ecuadorian mother and a Puerto Rican father who abandoned the family before his son was born. When Xavier was three, he was sexually abused by a family member. At 16, when Xavier came out to his mother, she threw him out of the house.
A homeless gay teen on the streets of New York, Xavier soon turned to sex and drugs for money. He became a hustler at the West Side Highway piers and sold drugs in gay clubs. After landing a job at a gay bookstore, A Different Light, Xavier began to write poetry and perform as a spoken word artist.
“Pier Queen” (1997), Xavier’s self-published poetry collection, established him in the New York underground arts scene. “Christ Like” (1999), Xavier’s novel, was the first coming of age story by a gay Nuyorican (Puerto Rican living in New York) and earned him a Lambda Literary Award nomination. Fellow author Jaime Manrique said, “Once in a generation, a new voice emerges that makes us see the world in a dazzling new light. Emanuel Xavier is that kind of writer.”
“Americano” (2002), another poetry collection and Xavier’s first official published work, advanced his prominence within the literary community of color. Xavier edited “Bullets & Butterflies: Queer Spoken Word Poetry” (2005), for which he received a second Lambda Literary Award nomination. 
In 2005, Xavier was the victim of a random attack by a group of young men. As a result of the beating, he lost all hearing in his right ear, but continued to write and perform.
Xavier reflects on the assault in his poem “Passage”:

Had they known I was gay they would have killed me
None of my poems about peace and unity
would have kept me whole

Also an activist, Xavier focuses his work on homeless gay youth. He has organized benefits for many organizations, including The New York Pier AIDS Education Coalition, Live Out Loud, and Sylvia’s Place, a shelter for homeless GLBTQ youth.
Xavier has appeared on HBO’s “Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry” and “In the Life” on PBS. In 2010, his CD “Legendary—The Spoken Word Poetry of Emanuel Xavier” was released to critical acclaim.

4 Comments | posted in Gay Icon, History, Inspiration, Politics

October 22, 2010

October Is GLBT History Month: Week 3

By Joe

Matthew Mitcham
Olympic Diver
b. March 2, 1988
image“Being ‘out’ for me means being just as I am with nothing to be ashamed about and no reasons to hide.”
Australian diver Matthew Mitcham is one of the few openly gay Olympic athletes. At the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, Mitcham won a gold medal after executing the highest-scoring dive in Olympic history.
Mitcham grew up in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. He competed as a trampoline gymnast before being discovered by a diving coach. By the time he was 14, he was a national junior champion in diving. A few years later, he won medals in the World Junior Diving Championships.
In 2006, after battling anxiety and depression, Mitcham decided to retire from diving. The following year, he returned to diving and began training for the Olympics.
In Beijing, Mitcham won an Olympic gold medal in the 10-meter platform dive. It was the first time in over 80 years that an Australian male diver struck Olympic gold. After his triumph, he leaped into the stands to hug and kiss his partner, Lachlan Fletcher.
Mitcham was the first out Australian to compete in the Olympics. There were only 11 openly gay athletes out of a total of over 11,000 competitors in Beijing.
Mitcham was chosen 2008 Sports Performer of the Year by the Australian public. The same year, Australia GQ named him Sportsman of the Year. After accepting the GQ award, Mitcham joked, “Oh, my God, I’m a homo and I just won the sports award!”
Mitcham competed in the 2010 Gay Games in Cologne. He is studying at Sydney University and training for the 2012 Summer Olympics in London.
“I look at the last 20 years as a long, winding path of lessons and some hardship,” Mitcham said in 2008. “I hope I do have more lessons to learn. I look forward to that.”
Jamie Nabozny
Youth Activist
b. October 14, 1975
image “Kids are becoming a lot stronger, and with my case I hope they realize that they’re not alone.”
Jamie Nabozny was the first student to successfully sue a school district for its failure to protect a student from anti-gay harassment. His 1995 lawsuit helped pioneer the Safe Schools Movement for GLBT students.
Nabozny was emotionally bullied and physically abused as a high school student in Ashland, Wisconsin, after he revealed his sexual orientation. Classmates urinated on him, simulated raping him and beat him to the point that he needed surgery. Although he and his parents reported the bullying repeatedly, Nabozny was told that, because he was openly gay, he should expect such behavior.
“I was numb most of the time, and I had to be numb to make it through,” Nabozny said. He left the school, moved to Minnesota with his family, and passed the GED exam.
His lawsuit against the school was initially dismissed, but the Nabozny family appealed. The appellate court, basing its ruling on the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution, allowed the lawsuit to go forward. A jury then found the school liable for Nabozny’s injuries; the school district eventually agreed to a nearly $1 million settlement.
Nabozny’s story is featured in a documentary film and teaching kit produced by the Southern Poverty Law Center. “Bullied: A Student, a School and a Case that Made History,” and its accompanying materials have been distributed to schools nationwide.
Nabozny has submitted written testimony to Congress and has lobbied lawmakers about school safety for GLBT youth. He was honored for his pioneering efforts by Equality Forum, which recognized him with its 1997 National Role Model Award.
Nabozny lives in Minneapolis. He travels the country speaking to diverse audiences about his experience and the importance of safe schools.
Cynthia Nixon
Actress  
b. April 9, 1966
image “I never felt like there was an unconscious part of me that woke up or came out of the closet. I met this woman and I fell in love with her.”
Cynthia Nixon is a television, film and Broadway actress best known for her role as Miranda on “Sex and the City.” She is one of only 15 performers to receive a Tony, an Emmy and a Grammy Award.
Nixon is a native New Yorker, the only child of Walter Nixon, a radio journalist, and Anne Kroll, an actress and a researcher on the television series “To Tell the Truth.” Cynthia’s first television appearance was at age 9 as an imposter on the show.
At age 12, Nixon began her acting career with a role in an ABC Afterschool Special. Her feature film debut came soon after in “Little Darlings” (1980), followed by her first role on Broadway in “The Philadelphia Story.”
Nixon graduated from Hunter College High School and attended Barnard College. As a freshman, she made theatrical history acting in two Broadway plays at the same time, “The Real Thing” and “Hurlyburly.”
A working actress since the 1980’s, Nixon received a Best Supporting Actress Emmy Award in 2004 for “Sex and the City.” In 2006, she was honored with a Tony Award for Best Leading Actress in “The Rabbit Hole.” In 2008, Nixon received a second Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actress on “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.”
In 2008, “Sex and the City” became a movie franchise. Nixon and her television co-stars reprised their roles in the film and a 2010 sequel, “Sex and the City 2.” The original film grossed over $415 million worldwide, making it one of the most successful R-rated comedies.
Nixon is engaged to Christine Marinoni. The couple plans to tie the knot in Manhattan when  same-sex marriage becomes legal in New York State. “We want to get married right here in New York City, where we live, where our kids live,” Nixon says. She and Marinoni share parenting responsibilities for Nixon’s two children from a previous relationship.
In 2009, Nixon shared a Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album for reading Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth.” In 2010, Nixon received the Vito Russo GLAAD Media Award for promoting equal rights for the gay community.
Nixon is a breast cancer survivor and a spokeswoman for Susan G. Komen for the Cure.
Catherine Opie
Photographer
b. April 14, 1961
image “Let’s push the boundaries a little bit here about what you guys think normal is.”
For over a decade, photographer Catherine Opie has used the power of her lens to create visibility for queer subcultures existing on society’s fringes. Her raw and honest photographs challenge viewers to reevaluate notions of sexuality and societal norms. Her groundbreaking work has adorned gallery walls worldwide, including The Guggenheim in New York and The Photographer’s Gallery in London.
At the age of 9, Opie decided to become a social documentary photographer after studying the work of Lewis Hine. Inspired by Hine’s use of photography as a means to effect social change around child labor, Opie pursued her  passion for documenting the world with her camera. At 18, she left her home in Sandusky, Ohio, to study at the San Francisco Art Institute where she received a BFA in 1985. She earned an MFA from California Institute of the Arts three years later.
In 1995, Opie’s career gained momentum after her provocative portraits of gay fringe groups appeared at the Whitney Biennial, one of the world’s leading art shows. Images of pierced, tattooed and leather-clad members of Opie’s inner circle were presented to the public in a bold and unapologetic fashion. “Looking at her pictures can be uncomfortable,” observed The New York Times, “not because of their confrontational content but because they reveal as much about the beholder as the beheld.”
In addition to documenting sexual minority communities, Opie photographs landscapes and architecture. In her exhibit “Freeways” (1994-95) she explores the intricacies of Los Angeles’s highway system. In “Mini-malls” (1997-98), she reveals the rich ethnic diversity of Southern California’s shopping centers. Combining both landscape and portraiture in her series “Domestic,” Opie traveled nationwide photographing lesbian couples living together.
Opie is a professor of photography at UCLA. She has received various awards, including the Washington University Freud Fellowship in 1999 and the Larry Aldrich Award in 2004. In 2006, she was awarded the prestigious United States Artist Fellowship.
In an exhibit catalog interview, Opie reflects, “I have represented this country and this culture. And I’m glad that there is a queer, out, dyke artist that’s being called an American photographer.”
Sunil Babu Pant
Nepalese Politician
b.  June 28, 1972
image “People in general do not wish to discriminate against their fellow neighbors.”
Sunil Babu Pant is the first openly gay politician in Nepal. His 2008 election to the national legislature followed years of activism on behalf of the Nepalese GLBT community.
Trained as a computer engineer, Pant received a scholarship to study in Belarus. It was there that he first heard the word “homosexual” and identified as a gay man. It was also where he was first exposed to entrenched homophobia, inspiring him to fight for equality in his home country.
In 2002, Pant founded the Blue Diamond Society. The group consists of more than 20 organizations and 120,000 members representing the interests of the country’s GLBT and HIV/AIDS communities. Leaders and members of the society have continued their advocacy in the face of threats of arrest and violence.
The Blue Diamond Society was party to a 2007 case that led Nepal’s highest court to declare that GLBT individuals were “natural persons” who deserve protection and civil rights. The court also ordered the establishment of a commission to study same-sex marriage as well as the addition of a third gender option on official government documents.
Pant was elected to Nepal’s Constituent Assembly as a member of Nepal’s Communist Party United. His legislative goals include equal justice and economic rights. He serves on a committee charged with rewriting Nepal’s constitution. In spite of his many accomplishments, Pant insists that his work is far from complete: “With our progress, however, is the awareness that so many more need to be served.”
In 2005, Pant and the Blue Diamond Society were awarded the Utopia Award, Asia’s leading GLBT honor. In 2007, the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission bestowed the group with its Felippa de Souza Award.
Pant, who lives in Nepal’s capital city, Kathmandu, recently founded Pink Mountain, a company that offers GLBT-geared travel packages to Nepal.
Annise Parker
Mayor of Houston
b. May 17, 1956
image “The voters of Houston have opened the door to history. I know what this means to many of us who never thought we could achieve high office.”
In 2009, when Annise Parker was elected, Houston became the largest city in the nation with an openly gay mayor. Houston is the fourth most populous city in the United States.
Annise Parker was born and raised in Houston. Her mother was a bookkeeper, and her father worked for the Red Cross. Annise received a National Merit Scholarship to Rice University, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in anthropology and sociology.  
After graduation, Parker began a 20-year career as a software analyst in the oil and gas industry. In 1997, she won a seat on the Houston City Council, making her Houston’s first out elected official. In 2003, Parker was elected city controller. She served two additional terms before being elected mayor.
Parker’s mayoral triumph didn’t come without a fight and controversy. Conservative groups criticized Parker for her “gay agenda” and distributed fliers featuring Parker and her partner, asking the question, “Is this the image Houston wants to portray?” Parker campaigned with her partner, Kathy Hubbard, and their three children.
Despite the attacks, Parker won the election in a city that denies its employees domestic partner benefits, and in a state where gay marriage and civil unions are constitutionally banned.
Parker was recognized as Council Member of the Year by the Houston Police Officers Union. In 2008, Houston Woman Magazine named her one of Houston’s 50 Most Influential Women. 
John A. Pérez
Speaker of the California Assembly
b. September 28, 1969
image “Yes I’m gay, and I’m a politician. It’s a descriptor. I don’t think it’s a definer.”
John A. Pérez is the openly gay speaker of the California Assembly. He is the first GLBT person of color to hold such a position and only the third out leader of a legislative body in United States history. 
Pérez was born in working-class Los Angeles, the son of Felipe, a Mexican immigrant who was disabled from a workplace accident, and Vera, who directed a community clinic. At age 14, Pérez became politically active, motivated by government cuts in disability payments to his father and in government subsidies to his mother’s clinic.
After graduating from the University of California, Berkeley, Pérez spent several years as a labor organizer in Southern California. He served as political director for the United Food and Commercial Workers in Orange County.
Before he held an elective office, Pérez was actively engaged in public service. He was integral in founding California’s statewide GLBT organization, now called Equality California. Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush appointed him to the President’s Advisory Council on HIV and AIDS.  Pérez was a gubernatorial appointee to a panel charged with reforming California’s initiative system and a mayoral appointee to the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency.
Pérez was elected to the California Assembly in 2008, winning 85 percent of the vote in his Los Angeles district. Two years later, he was selected as speaker by members of the Democratic Party and formally elected by the Assembly. Assemblywoman Fiona Ma said, “He’s someone who sends a signal to the nation that being gay is no longer a barrier to greatness.”
Pérez is a fan of classical music, art museums and the Los Angeles Dodgers.

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