Category: Queer

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington has just inaugurated an exhibit that focuses on the Nazi persecution of homosexuals, the first of a series highlighting non-Jewish groups killed during the twelve years of the National Socialist regime.

The Nazi campaign against homosexuality targeted the more than one million German men who, the state asserted, carried a “degeneracy” that threatened the “disciplined masculinity” of Germany. Denounced as “antisocial parasites” and as “enemies of the state,” more than 100,000 men were arrested under a broadly interpreted law against homosexuality. Approximately 50,000 men served prison terms as convicted homosexuals, while an unknown number were institutionalized in mental hospitals. Others—perhaps hundreds—were castrated under court order or coercion. Analyses of fragmentary records suggest that between 5,000 and 15,000 homosexual men were imprisoned in concentration camps, where many died from starvation, disease, exhaustion, beatings, and murder.
In the racist practice of Nazi eugenics, women were valued primarily for their ability to bear children. The state presumed that women homosexuals were still capable of reproducing. Lesbians were not systematically persecuted under Nazi rule, but they nonetheless did suffer the loss of their own gathering places and associations.
Nazi Germany did not seek to kill all homosexuals. Nevertheless, the Nazi state, through active persecution, attempted to terrorize German homosexuals into sexual and social conformity, leaving thousands dead and shattering the lives of many more.

For the homosexuals, the Nazi terror continued long after the war when the camps were emptied of other victims.

As the Allies swept through Europe to victory over the Nazi regime in early 1945, hundreds of thousands of concentration camp prisoners were liberated. The Allied Military Government of Germany repealed countless laws and decrees. Left unchanged, however, was the 1935 Nazi revision of Paragraph 175. Under the Allied occupation, some homosexuals were forced to serve out their terms of imprisonment regardless of time served in the concentration camps. The Nazi version of Paragraph 175 remained on the books of the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) until the law was revised in 1969 to decriminalize homosexual relations between men over the age of 21.

Thousands of miles and decades away from the tragedy, let’s not be smug. A number of U.S. states still criminalize homosexuality, others have kept such laws on the books even as courts have at least temporarily rendered them null, and there is no federal law on the subject.
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Both the Museum’s site and that of Scott Safier (linked to the “pink triangle” in the caption above) have excellent, no, really awesome, texts and visuals.

A gay man in the Chicago area, Nicholas Gutierrez, killed a religious woman he worked with, Mary Stachowicz, when he became enraged as she tried to talk him out of his homosexuality. Her harangues had reportedly evoked the painful memory of similar debates he had with his mother.

Friends and family said that it would have been in character for Stachowicz, who has a lengthy list of volunteer work to reach out to someone she thought needed help.
“Those of us who knew her immediately hear her soft voice saying something like, `God wouldn’t approve of the way you’re living your life,”‘ said Mary Coleman, a friend and neighbor. “That’s how Mary did things.”
It wouldn’t have been out of character for Stachowicz to see homosexuality as a lifestyle problem, said Alice Kosinski, 43, Stachowicz’s younger sister.
“Because she’s so Catholic, there’s no room for being gay in the Catholic church,” Kosinski said.

Cook County Assistant State’s Attorney Nancy Galassini told the judge at Gutierrez’ hearing on sunday, “This would most likely be a capital case.”
The woman who did such great evil is dead, but unfortunately the evil and the church and the society which creates it is not, and it will continue to destroy Nicholas Gutierrez and many others. I shake, safely sitting here at home, fully understanding, and fully familiar with, the horrible impact her words must have had for a man already so terribly damaged by his society, and his own mother.
For another take on the tragedy, one which has my own sympathies, see Barry.

Like, we can afford to throw away linguists, arabic or otherwise, at a time like this, or any time!

Nine Army linguists, including six trained in Arabic, have been dismissed from the military because they are gay, even as the military faces a critical shortage of translators and interpreters for the war on terrorism, gay rights advocates say.
Seven of the soldiers were discharged after telling superiors that they are gay; two others were caught together after curfew, said Steve Ralls, spokesman for the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, a group that defends homosexuals in the military.

Barry found this wonderful photo and story.
A proposed law would essentially restrict French prostitutes from looking like they are marketing themselves, supposedly making everybody else feel so much better. The Interior Minister of the new center-right government argues that his bill is necessary to “guarantee the security of the French people.”
Prostitutes as terrorists. Sound familiar?

But this is England! Every bloke there plays with his mates and now and again, and besides, everybody was gay in the eighties, weren’t they?

Today’s batch of headlines included claims that Charles, the Prince of Wales, hushed up the rape of a manservant by one of his closest aides, that courtiers regularly brought male prostitutes into royal palaces and that Paul Burrell, the former butler to Diana, had once taken a male lover of his own on a tour of the queen’s private apartment.

My own interesting sidebar: The butler’s lover in the eighties was Yahoo Serious (sometimes known as Greg Pead), the fetching creator and star of the Australian film, “Young Einstein” (1988). Both Burrell and Serious are, of course, married, and quite publicly so.

[“Queer” and “Culture!”]
Beautiful.
Wonderful art, theatre and activism and love. We should all be so fortunate as to be as creative and bold as Patricia Cronin and Deb Kass!
For more, see the three links in the highlighted names above.
Bill Dobbs’ email report to friends included the additional information on the New York Post‘s coverage of the sculpture project:

Those who popped fifty cents for the paper’s print edition (or acquired a copy from the trash) were treated to a nearly half-page pic of the sculpture along with a shot of the artist and her partner. Those not so lucky will have to settle for a small photo by using the link below [JAW–see “beautiful” above]. The Post also deprived its online readers of the sidebar story concerning “The Beautiful Women of Woodlawn” cemetery, illustrated by three fascinating photos.

Headline of the day:
British navy ‘bursting with gay seamen in 1960’

[London, October 31] – A strict enforcement of the Royal Navy’s policy of banning homosexuality would have rendered the fleet ineffective in the 1960s, according to Britain’s Public Records Office.
“Senior naval officers have warned me that about 50 percent of the fleet have sinned homosexually,” the navy’s senior legal officer wrote in the reports. He wryly remarked that it was “only the paucity of the director of naval security’s investigating resources that prevents paying off a good many ships”.

[This comes from a South African news site, and thanks to Otto.]
But there’s much more in these just-released naval papers to amuse and delight us sophisticates of the twenty-first century (after all of the hurt produced in the last one). The BBC delights in the story, of course.

One sailor reportedly picked up a prostitute who he believed to be female. Realising he wasn’t who she appeared to be, the sailor reportedly declared: “Blimey, you’re all there!” Nevertheless, he apparently became “infatuated”.
This kind of incident led admirals to argue that most of the men accused were only inadvertently homosexual, rather than dangerous “perverts”.

In London, the head of the Western Fleet in London wrote to all commanders,

“I have a strong [belief] that many of the men are not perverts but basically normal men whose standards of behaviour are thoroughly lax.”

The then head of naval law, quoted in the South African site’s story at the top, seems to have had a fairly reasonable attitude about the imagined threat to national security.

While the policy of discharging offenders involved in public acts of indecency in front of “hand-clapping audiences” was valid, there should be more flexibility in the rules, he argued.

In Britain, the ban on homosexuals serving in the armed forces was lifted in January 2000 after a protracted human rights battle, but unfortunately even the “more flexibility” of the Royal Navy 1960s is still alien in the benighted precincts of the U.S.

Michael Bronski has written a sharp essay on the real Harry Hay and his “uneasy relationship with the gay movement.”
Hay believed that “queer sexuality had an essential outsider quality that made the outcast homosexual the perfect prophet for a heterosexual world lost in strict gender roles, enforced reproductive sexuality, and numbingly straitjacketed social personae.”

During [the seventies], Hay spoke out against what he saw as the increasing conservatism of the gay-and-lesbian movement. As he saw it, the gay — and now, lesbian — movement was far more interested in electing homosexuals to government positions than in making the government responsible to the needs of its people. It was more interested in making sure that gay people were represented in commercial television and films than in critiquing the ways mass culture destroyed the human spirit. It was too interested in making strategic alliances with conservative politicians, rather than exposing how most politicians were working hand in glove with bloodless, destructive corporations.

After he founded the Radical Faeries in 1979 (“something of a cross between born-again queers and in-your-face frontline shock troops practicing gender-fuck drag”), the movement as a whole treated him as a “benign crackpot,” when it did not ignore him altogether. Gays, no less than all other Americans, could stomach his long history of involvement with the American Communist Party and political radicalism in general, but he seemed to irritate everyone with his persistent support of the right of the North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) to be represented in the movement.

Even many of Hay’s more dedicated supporters could not side with him on this. But from Hay’s point of view, silencing any part of the movement because it was disliked or hated by mainstream culture was both a moral failing and a seriously mistaken political strategy. In Harry’s eyes, such a stance failed to grapple seriously with the reality that there would always be some aspect of the gay movement to which mainstream culture would object.
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In death, though, Harry Hay’s critics have finally been able to do what they couldn’t do when he was alive: make him presentable [witness the laudatory press releases and eulogies even from the institutions most antithetical to his life’s work]. . . . But it’s important to remember Hay — with all his contradictions, his sometimes crackpot notions, and his radiant, ecstatic, vision of the holiness of being queer — as he lived. For in his death, Harry Hay is becoming everything he would have raged against.

Richard Goldstein made it onto the NYTimes Op-Ed page again today, this time using Harry Hay’s death to remind us all of the American blackout of queer history.

Why are the gay movement’s roots so obscured? The reason is the invisibility of gay history. With rare exceptions, schools fail to acknowledge that there even is such a thing. Only university students who opt for elective courses — if they are offered — learn that, in the 1920’s, gay liberation was an important part of Emma Goldman’s radical agenda. You won’t find that mentioned in the film “Reds,” in which Goldman was a prominent character. Nor can you deduce from “Cabaret” (film or play) that gay people in the Weimar Republic did more than patronize kinky nightclubs. The gay community was a very visible part of Berlin’s political landscape, and its leader Magnus Hirschfeld was an emblem of the liberal society that the Nazis smashed. The famous photo of storm troopers burning books is widely thought to have been taken at Mr. Hirschfeld’s library.

Harry Hay died today.

HARRY HAY, PAVED THE WAY FOR MODERN GAY ACTIVISM, DIES AT 90
Henry “Harry” Hay, known as the founder of the modern American gay movement, has died at age 90. The pioneering gay activist devoted his life to progressive politics and in 1950, he founded a state-registered foundation and secret network of support groups for gays known as the Mattachine Society. He was also a co-founder, in 1979, of the Radical Faeries, a movement affirming gayness as a form of spiritual calling. A rare link between gay and progressive politics, Hay and his partner of 39 years, John Burnside, had lived in San Francisco for three years after a lifetime in Los Angeles. Hay had been diagnosed weeks earlier with lung cancer. Despite his illness, he remained lucid and died peacefully in his sleep in the early hours of October 24.
“Harry Hay’s determined, visionary activism significantly lifted gays out of oppression,” said Stuart Timmons, who published a biography of Hay in 1990.”All gay people continue to benefit from his fierce affirmation of gays as a people.”
Hay is listed in histories of the American gay movement as first in applying the term “minority” to homosexuals. An uncompromising radical, he easily dismissed “the heteros,” and never rested from challenging the status quo, including within the gay community. Due to the pervasive homophobia of his times (it was illegal for more than two homosexuals to congregate in California during the 1950s) Hay and his colleagues took an oath of anonymity that lasted a quarter century until Jonathan Ned Katz interviewed Hay for the ground-breaking book Gay American History. Countless researchers subsequently sought him out; in recent years, Hay became the subject of a biography, a PBS-funded documentary, and an anthology of his own writings.
Previous attempts to create gay organizations in the United States had fizzled – or been stamped out. Hay’s first organizational conception was a group he called Bachelors Anonymous, formed to both support and leverage the 1948 presidential candidacy of Progressive Party leader Henry Wallace. Hay wrote and discreetly circulated a prospectus calling for “the androgynous minority” to organize as a political entity. Hay’s call for an “international bachelor’s fraternal order for peace and social dignity” did not bear results until 1950. That year, his love affair with Viennese immigrant Rudi Gernreich, (whose fashion designs eventually made him a TIME cover-man) brought Hay into gay circles where a critical mass of daring souls could be found to begin sustained meetings. On November 11, 1950, at Hay’s home in the Silver Lake district of Los Angeles, a group of gay men met which became the Mattachine Society. Of the original Mattachine founders, Chuck Rowland, Bob Hull, Dale Jennings pre-deceased Hay; Konrad Stevens and John Gruber are the last surviving members of the founding group.
“Mattachine” took its name from a group of medieval dancers who appeared publicly only in mask, a device well understood by homosexuals of the 1950s. Hay devised its secret cell structure (based on the Masonic order) to protect individual gays and the nascent gay network. Officially co gender, the group was largely male; the Daughters of Bilitis, the pioneering lesbian organization, formed independently in San Francisco in 1956. Though some criticized the Mattachine movement as insular, it grew to include thousands of members in dozens of chapters, which formed from Berkeley to Buffalo, and created a lasting national framework for gay organizing. Mattachine laid the ground for rapid civil rights gains following 1969’s Stonewall riots in New York City.
Harry Hay was born in England in 1912, the day the Titanic sank. His father worked as a mining engineer in South Africa and Chile, but the family settled in Southern California. After graduating from Los Angeles High School, he briefly attended Stanford, but dropped out and returned to Los Angeles. He understood from childhood that he was a sissy – different in behavior from boys or girls – and also that he was attracted to men. His same-sex affairs began when he was a teenager, not long after he began reading 19th Century scholar Edward Carpenter, whose essays on “homogenic love” strongly influenced his thinking.
A tall and muscular young man, Hay worked as both an extra and ghostwriter in 1930s Hollywood. He developed a passion for theater, and performed on Los Angeles stages with Anthony Quinn in the 1930s, and with Will Geer, who became his lover. Geer took Hay to the San Francisco General Strike of 1935, and indoctrinated him into the American Communist Party. Haybecame an active trade unionist. A blend of Marxist analysis andstagecraft strongly influenced Hay’s later gay organizing.
Despite a decade of gay life, in 1938 Hay married the late Anita Platky, also a Communist Party member. The couple were stalwarts of the Los Angeles Left; Hay taught at the California Labor School and worked on domestic campaigns such as campaigning for Ed Roybal, the first Latino elected in Los Angeles. The Hays occasionally hosted Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie when they performed in Los Angeles, and Hay recalled demonstrating with Josephine Baker in 1945 over the Jim Crow policy of a local restaurant. When he felt compelled to go public with the Mattachine Society in 1951, the Hays divorced. After a burst of activity lasting three years, the growing Mattachine rejected Hay as a liability due to his Communist beliefs. In 1955, when he was called before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, he had trouble finding a progressive attorney to represent him, he felt, due to homophobia on the Left. (He was ultimately dismissed after his curt testimony.) Hay felt exiled from the Left for nearly fifty years, until he received the Life Achievement award of a Los Angeles library preserving progressive movements.
For most of his life Hay lived in Los Angeles. However, during the early
1940s, Hay and his wife lived in New York City; he returned there with John Burnside to march and speak at the Stonewall 25 celebration in 1994. During the 1970s, he and Burnside moved to New Mexico, where he ran the trading post at San Juan Pueblo Indian reservation.
His years of research for gay references in history and anthropology texts lead Hay to formulate his own gay-centered political philosophy, which he wrote and spoke about constantly. His theory of “gay consciousness” placed variant thinking as the most significant trait in homosexuals. “We differ most from heterosexuals in how we perceive the world. That ability to offer insights and solutions is our contribution to humanity, and why our people keep reappearing over the millennia,” he often stressed. Hay’s occasional exhortations that gays should “maximize the differences” between themselves and heterosexuals remained controversial. Academics tended to reject his ideas as much as they respected his historic stature.
A fixture at anti-draft and anti-war campaigns for sixty years, Hay worked in Women’s Strike for Peace during the Viet Nam War as a conscious strategy to build coalition between gay and feminist progressives. He also worked closely with Native American activists, especially the Committee for Traditional Indian Land and Life. Hay was a local founder of the Lavender Caucus of Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition during the early 1980s, determined to help convince the gay community that its political success was inextricably tied to a broader progressive agenda. His decades of agitation for coalition politics brought him increasing appreciation in later life from labor and third-party groups.
A second wind of activism came in 1979 when Hay founded, with Don Kilhefner, a spiritual movement known as the Radical Faeries. This pagan inspired group continues internationally based on the principal that the consciousness of gays differs from that of heterosexuals. Hay believed that this different way of seeing constituted the contribution gays made to society, and was indeed the reason for their continued presence throughout history. Despite his often-combative nature, Hay became an increasingly beloved figure to younger generations of gay activists. He was often referred to as the “Father of Gay Liberation.”
Hay is survived by Burnside as well as by his self-chosen gay family, a model he strongly advocated for lesbians and gays. His adopted daughters, Kate Berman and Hannah Muldaven also survive him. A circle of Radical Faeries provided care for him and Burnside through their later years. Harry Hay leaves behind a wide circle of friends and admirers among lesbians, gays, and progressive activists.
This memorial was generously provided by Stuart Timmons, author of The Trouble With Harry Hay: Founder of the Modern Gay Movement (1990)

“I adored Harry because he remained radical and iconoclastic to the end. Take a moment and think what it must have been like all those decades ago–to cut a path where none existed. What nerve and vision! Each one of us who uses that path has a responsibilty to keep it clear, and to widen the path for those that follow.”
Bill Dobbs

Wonderful photo

The photo credit and caption reads:
“One of the founders of the gay rights movement, Harry Hay, left, brushes the cheek of his partner John Burnside with his hand Friday, July 19, 2002, at their home in San Francisco.”

NYTimes obituary