James Wagner

This news arrived in our home only today, from Rex Wockner‘s list, and for that I find great fault with the queer media. Unless I have missed a lot, there have been no reports here of the death of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf this past April.
Charlotte von Mahlsdorf lived, entirely openly and openly fully, as a cross-dresser under the twentieth century’s two most repressive regimes, the Nazis and the Communists. She was, in her own words, “my own woman.”
Wockner’s notice:

FAMED GERMAN TRANSVESTITE DIES
Germany’s most famous transgendered person, Charlotte
von Mahlsdorf (Lothar Berfelde), died in Berlin April
30 of a heart attack. She was 74.
Von Mahlsdorf was awarded the Federal Cross of Honor
(Bundesverdienstkreuz), the nation’s highest civilian
honor, in 1992 for founding East Berlin’s Grunderzeit
Museum which preserves furniture and household
appliances from the period 1870-1900.
“I am not at all keen on medals,” she said at the
time. “But what I find even more important is that a
homosexual, a transvestite, is honored in this way.
.. I hope this encourages other gays and lesbians and
demonstrates to heterosexuals that we too can achieve
things.”
Von Mahlsdorf emigrated to Sweden in 1997 after the
museum was attacked by anti-gay hoodlums. She was on a
visit to Berlin when she died.

She was both subject and actress in Rosa von Praunheim’s 1992 film, “Ich Bin Meine Eigene Frau [I am my own woman].”

So, the life of a lesbian, ok, a woman, even an attractive, vigorous, healthy middle class woman, and even in San Francisco, isn’t worth a dog’s life, to the dog’s owner. What’s next, the murderers suing the murdered for lack of the canine companionship of the euthanized dogs? Accounts from early this year of the horrorible assault and of the owners’ culpability left little to the imagination or to reasonable doubt.

The five-week trial gripped much of the nation as prosecutors described a horrific attack in which Whipple was bitten all over her body — her throat ripped, her clothes torn off — by at least one of the dogs.
The jury of seven men and five women saw graphic photos of the victim’s ravaged body, with wounds visible from her ankles to her face, and pictures of the blood-stained hallway where the attack occurred.
….
Don Newton, the jury foreman, said the number of prior incidents involving the dogs undermined the defense claim that the mauling was nothing more than a tragic accident.
“It was a series of actions — a series of failures to heed warnings, a series of careless taking of the dogs out and allowing them to lunge at people and attack people, that they had fallen into a pattern of actions which were inevitably leading to this result,” Newton said.

In today’s report, once again the defendent present when the dogs attacked that fatal day, “. . . insisted she had no idea her ‘loving’ pets were capable of such an attack.”

Ok, I’ll admit to a certain interest in the creative out-sized flower arangements (the cigar, the martini, the poker hand, the race horse, etc.), and where else is there a demand for those retro flower car limos (yikes, the very latest model Cadillacs!) we saw in the photographs?
But let’s try to put this into proportion. The Daily News let Thomas Hackett try today, but for whatever reason the paper fails to include the story in its online site. I will manually enter the complete text here:

It was sometimes hard to remember John Gotti had been convicted of killing six men and was believed to have had a hand in dozens more deaths in his storied career as New York’s most famous mob boss. The Catholic Church refused Gotti a funeral Mass, citing canon law that forbids holy services for a “manifest sinner.” But its verdict on Gotti’s immorality did nothing to dampen in some cases fawning media coverage of his death in a federal prison hospital from cancer at age 61. Before spending the last 10 years in prison, Gotti had reveled in his celebrity. “This is my public,” he once told his right-hand man about the gawkers who stared everywnere he went in New York. “They love me.” It didn’t matter that he was a thug from first to last, graduating from petty street crimes to hijacking to murder; or that extorting millions of dollars from unions and manufacturers drove business from New York; or that his reckless vanity invited the FBI scrutiny that left his organization in shambles.

The last clause about the FBI seems out of place in a litany of sins against society, but I can vouch for the comment about the impact of his extortions, having had some experience with the “cost of doing business,” even very conservative and legitimate business, here in New York. Gotti and “celebrities” like him hurt all of us more than we know.