Today In Gay History MONDAY, JUNE 24

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Today In Gay History

MONDAY, JUNE 24, 2013

1850 - HORATIO KITCHENER, the 1st Earl Kitchener of Khartoum and British field marshal was born on this date (d. 1916). A decade after Alan Turing's death, the same Brits who had pushed the mathematician over the precipice, howled in outrage at the publication of Douglas Plummer's "Queer People", a general history of homosexuality that sought to prove to the English people that Gayness was not limited to Oscar Wilde and a few assorted French couturiers. The book named names, among them, Kitchener, one of the great heroes of English Imperialism.

The proponents of the case point to Kitchener's friend Captain Oswald Fitzgerald, his "constant and inseparable companion," whom he appointed his aide-de-camp. They remained close until they met a common death on their voyage to Russia. From his time in Egypt in 1892, he gathered around him a cadre of eager young and unmarried officers nicknamed "Kitchener's band of boys." He also avoided interviews with women, took a great deal of interest in the Boy Scout movement, and decorated his rose garden with four pairs of sculptured bronze boys. According to Hyam, "there is no evidence that he ever loved a woman."

A contemporary journalist remarked that Kitchener "has the failing acquired by most of the Egyptian officers, a taste for buggery". J. B. Priestley noted in his book on "The Edwardians" that one of Lord Kitchener's personal interests in life included planning and decorating his residences. He was also known to collect delicate china with a passion (such allusions to an 'artistic temperament' were a common code for implying homosexuality at that time).

1901 - the American composer and instrument builder HARRY PARTCH, was born on this date (d. 1974). Partch was one of the first twentieth-century composers to work extensively and systematically with microtonal scales, writing much of his music for custom-made instruments he built himself, tuned in 11-limit just intonation. It is said that Partch was sterile, probably due to childhood mumps. Most of Partch's loving relationships were with men. 

Interested in the potential musicality of speech, Partch found it necessary to build instruments that could underpin the intoning voice and develop notations that accurately and practically instructed players what to play. His first instrument was the "Monophone," later known as the "Adapted viola". Harry Partch's desire to use a different system of tuning inspired him to modify existing instruments and create new ones. He was, in his own words, "a philosophic music-man seduced into carpentry".

His adapted instruments include the Adapted Viola (a viola fitted with a cello neck which extends the range by a fourth, and has changeable bridges to allow triple-stops to be sustained) and three Adapted Guitars: a guitar with the equal tempered frets replaced by a complex system of justly tuned frets, a guitar tuned in octaves, or 2/1's, played by moving a pyrex rod along the strings, much like a slide guitar, and a 10-string fretless guitar played in a similar manner to his other fretless guitar, but with a wildly different tuning.

He retuned the reeds of several reed organs and labeled the keys with a color code. The first one was called the Ptolemy, in tribute to the ancient music theorist Claudius Ptolemaeus, whose musical scales included ratios of the 11-limit, as Partch's did. The others were called Chromelodeons, a portmanteau of chrome (meaning "color") and melodeon. Partch also designed and built many instruments from raw materials:

In 1990, Dean Drummond's Newband became custodians of the original Harry Partch instrument collection, and frequently perform with and commission new pieces for Partch's instruments. The instruments have been housed in the Harry Partch Instrumentarium at Montclair State University in Montclair, New Jersey since 1999. In 2004, the instruments crossed campus into the newly constructed Alexander Kasser Theater, which provides a large studio space in the basement. Concerts by Newband and MSU's Harry Partch Ensemble may be viewed several times a year in this concert hall.

1909 - the American writer SARAH ORNE JEWETT died on this date (b. 1849). An American novelist and short story writer, best known for her local color works set in or near South Berwick, Maine, on the border of New Hampshire, which in her day was a declining New England seaport. She published her first important story in the Atlantic Monthly at age 19, and her reputation grew throughout the 1870s and '80s. Her literary importance arises from her careful, if subdued, vignettes of country life that reflect a contemporary interest in local color rather than plot. Jewett established a close friendship with writer Annie Fields (1834-1915) and her husband, publisher James T. Fields, editor of the Atlantic Monthly. After the sudden death of James Fields in 1881, Jewett and Annie Fields lived together for the rest of Jewett's life in what was then termed a "Boston marriage." Some modern scholars have speculated that the two were lovers. In any case, "the two women found friendship, humor, and literary encouragement" in one another's company, traveling to Europe together and hosting "American and European literati." Jewett never married. On September 3, 1902, Jewett was injured in a carriage accident that all but ended her writing career. She died three months after being paralyzed by a stroke in 1909. The Jewett family home in South Berwick, built in the late eighteenth century, is preserved as a National Historic Landmark.

1973 - One of the most shocking, maddening, and tragic stories we've ever recounted happened on this date.  Many people, gay or straight, don't know the history.  But it deserves to be known and retold as a horrific testament to the hatred and homophobia that Gay people have endured in the United States.

The TRAGEDY of the UPSTAIRS LOUNGE in NEW ORLEANS

(this account is adapted from Eric Ose's blog post at the Huffington Post)

On the last Sunday in June, a gay bar in New Orleans called the UpStairs Lounge was firebombed. The resulting blaze killed 32 people. At the time, the bar served as the home for a fledgling New Orleans congregation of the Metropolitan Community Church. Founded in Los Angeles in 1968, MCC was the nation's first gay-welcoming and affirming church.

The Upstairs Lounge firebombing was the third fire at a MCC church during the first half of 1973 and the church's Los Angeles headquarters was destroyed in January.  That Sunday was the final day of Pride Weekend and the fourth anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising of 1969. There was no Gay Pride Parade in New Orleans in 1973 as gay life in the Crescent City remained mostly underground.

The Upstairs Lounge had one entrance up a wooden flight of stairs. After a day of festivities, there were 60 people left in the bar, mostly members of the congregation.  Members had prayed and sung in the bar and every Sunday night they gathered around the piano for a song they had adopted as their anthem, "United We Stand," by The Brotherhood of Man.

They sang the song that evening, with David Gary on the piano, a pianist who played regularly in the lounge of the Marriott Hotel across the street. The congregation members repeated the verses again and again, swaying back and forth, arm in arm, happy to be together at their former place of worship on Pride Sunday, still feeling the effects of the free beer special.

Around 8 pm a buzzer from downstairs sounded, the one that signaled a cab had arrived. No one had called a cab, but when someone opened the second floor steel door to the stairwell, flames rushed in. An arsonist had deliberately set the wooden stairs ablaze, and the oxygen starved fire exploded. The still-crowded bar became an inferno within seconds.

The emergency exit was not marked, and the windows were boarded up or covered with iron bars. A few survivors managed to make it through, and jumped to the sidewalks, some in flames. Rev. Bill Larson, the local MCC pastor, got stuck halfway and burned to death wedged in a window, his corpse visible throughout the next day to witnesses below.

Bartender Buddy Rasmussen led a group of fifteen to safety through the unmarked back door. One of them was MCC assistant pastor George "Mitch" Mitchell. Then Mitch ran back into the burning building trying to save his partner, Louis Broussard. Their bodies were discovered lying together.

29 lives were lost that night, and another three victims later died of injuries from the fire. The death toll was the worst in New Orleans history up to that time, including when the French Quarter burned to the ground in 1788. It was almost assuredly the largest mass murder of gays and lesbians to ever occur in the United States.

Yet the city tried mightily to ignore it. Public reaction was grossly out of proportion to what would have happened if the victims were straight. The fire exposed an ugly streak of homophobia and bigotry. It was the first time New Orleans had to openly confront the existence of its own gay community, and the results were not pretty.

Initial news coverage omitted mention that the fire had anything to do with gays, despite the fact that a gay church in a gay bar had been torched. What stories did appear used dehumanizing language to paint the scene, with stories in the States-Item, New Orleans' afternoon paper, describing "bodies stacked up like pancakes," and that "in one corner, workers stood knee deep in bodies...the heat had been so intense, many were cooked together." Other reports spoke of "mass charred flesh" and victims who were "literally cooked."

The press ran quotes from one cab driver who said, "I hope the fire burned their dress off," and a local woman who claimed "the Lord had something to do with this." The fire disappeared from headlines after the second day.

A joke made the rounds and was repeated by talk radio hosts asking, "What will they bury the ashes of queers in? Fruit jars." Official statements by police were similarly offensive. Major Henry Morris, chief detective of the New Orleans Police Department, dismissed the importance of the investigation in an interview with the States-Item. Asked about identifying the victims, he said, "We don't even know these papers belonged to the people we found them on. Some thieves hung out there, and you know this was a queer bar."

In the days that followed, other churches refused to allow survivors to hold a memorial service for the victims on their premises. Catholics, Lutherans, and Baptists all said no.

William "Father Bill" Richardson, the closeted rector of St. George's Episcopal Church, agreed to allow a small prayer service to be held on Monday evening. It was advertised only by word of mouth and drew about 80 mourners. The next day, Richardson was rebuked by Iveson Noland, the Episcopalian bishop of New Orleans, who forbade him to let the church be used again. Bishop Nolan said he had received over 100 angry phone calls from local parishioners, and Richardson's mailbox would later fill with hate letters.

Eventually, two ministers offered their sanctuaries - a Unitarian church, and St. Mark's United Methodist Church in the French Quarter. It was here that a July 1 memorial service was held attended by 250 people, including the Louisiana's United Methodist bishop, Finis Crutchfield, who would die of AIDS fourteen years later at the age of 70.

Although called on to do so, no elected officials in all of Louisiana issued statements of sympathy or mourning. Even more stunning, some families refused to claim the bodies of their dead sons, too ashamed to admit they might be gay. The city would not release the remains of four unidentified persons for burial by the surviving MCC congregation members. They were dumped in mass graves at Potter's Field, New Orleans' pauper cemetery. 

No one was ever charged with the crime, and it remains unsolved.

Press Coverage of that day (CBS & NBC national news)  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvvRJNQolYM  

The anthem they sang before the fire was "United We Stand" and the lyrics are pretty chilling and moving to hear.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=460INShy3BU

2007 - on this date the wife of one of the leading candidates for the Democratic nomination for president went on the line for Marriage Equality.  The setting was the Alice B. Toklas LGBT Democratic Club in San Francisco where she gave the keynote address.  Facing the reporters afterwards, she broke with the party line and with her husband's position on the issue.

"I don't know why somebody else's marriage has anything to do with me. I'm completely comfortable with Gay marriage. If he's pleasant to me on the street, if his children don't throw things in my yard, then I'm happy. It seems to me we're making issues of things that honestly don't matter."  

The speaker of these candid, sane words was ELIZABETH EDWARDS, wife of Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, who responded by saying that he loves the way his wife always speaks her mind, but he didn't support Gay marriage.  Of course as history would show Edwards wasn't exactly a supporter of his own marriage.  So given that we now know what he was doing at the time, it's pretty clear who was the more honest and ethical of the two.

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