Today In Gay History WEDNESDAY, JUNE 2

/|\=/|\=/|\=/|\=/|\=/|\=/|\=/|\=/|\=/|\=/|\

Gay Wisdom for Daily Living

 from White Crane Institute 

    Exploring Gay Wisdom        

  & Culture for over 20 Years!   

      www.gaywisdom.org       

\|/=\|/=\|/=\|/=\|/=\|/=\|/=\|/=\|/=\|/=\|/

Today In Gay History

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 2, 2013

323 BCE - on this date ALEXANDER THE GREAT died (b: 356 BCE). King of Macedonia and conqueror of a kingdom extending from Greece to Persia, Egypt and India, Alexander the Great is one of the most fascinating men of all times. He was not only a great soldier, but he was also renowned for his love of his comrade-in-arms Hephaestion. The handsome and courageous Alexander was already, in antiquity, the subject of many histories, some written by people who had known him, most unfortunately lost. The irrefutable achievements of his short life are so extraordinary that they seem almost legendary. It is therefore difficult to distinguish the truth from the many myths that coalesced around such an appealing figure. Alexander's father Philip was himself a brilliant general who had greatly strengthened his kingdom and brought it to dominate the Greek city-states; his dream was to lead them against the Persian Empire, the arch-rival under whose rule Greek colonies on the coast of Asia had fallen. Many of the noblemen with whom he was raised and tutored were to become his comrades in arms, his generals, and the governors of his empire.

One of them, Hephaestion, was clearly his lover. Alexander, like many ancient Greeks, cultivated an ideal of heroic friendship that did not exclude sexual expression. He carried with him on his conquests a copy of the Iliad, and sought to emulate its heroes. When he first crossed into Asia and reached Troy, he sacrificed on the tomb of Achilles while Hephaestion did the same on that of Patroclus. So close did Alexander feel to Hephaestion that when the captured women of the Persian King's household mistakenly threw themselves at Hephaestion's feet rather than at his own, he found no offense in this and excused them by saying that his friend was another Alexander. Finally, his grief at the death of Hephaestion, one year before his own, was also -- in its intensity and public display -- to parallel that of the Homeric lovers.

Alexander died in the palace of Nebuchadrezzar II of Babylon. He was just one month short of attaining 33 years of age.

1911 - the British playwright TERENCE RATTIGAN, was born on this date (d. 1977). One of England's most popular 20th century dramatists, he was born in London of Irish extraction, educated at Harrow and Trinity College, Oxford, and his plays are generally situated within an upper middle class background. His plays were more or less pushed off the stage by the works of Osborne, Wesker, Pinter and Arden and were considered passé in the 60s, never really received his due as a playwright. Yet, his plays have held up very well, even as the reputations of his once-revolutionary successors have declined a bit. Rattigan's The Browning Version (1948), an effective and masterful study of failure, may be seen as a precursor of Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The horror of a particular type of marriage, in which the pain inflicted on each partner is ultimately the pleasure of both, is as fully explored in Rattigan's one-act play as it is in Albee's much longer drama. It is not difficult to understand why Rattigan so admired the talents of Joe Orton and was instrumental in helping to get the young writer's early plays produced. A recent review of a New York production of The Browning Version implied, snidely, that a more balanced view of marriage might have come from a heterosexual playwright (yeah…right). Until that review, there were probably no more than three New York theater-goers who ever conceived of Terence Rattigan as anything but straight.

It has been claimed that his work is essentially autobiographical, containing coded references to his sexuality, which he kept secret from all but his closest friends. There is some truth in this, but it risks being crudely reductive, for example the repeated claim that Rattigan originally wrote The Deep Blue Sea as a play about male lovers, turning into a heterosexual play at the last minute, is unfounded. His female characters are written as females and are in no sense 'men in drag'. Fifteen years after his death, largely through a revival of The Deep Blue Sea, at the Almeida Theatre, London, directed by Karel Reisz, Rattigan has increasingly been seen as one of the century's finest playwrights, an expert choreographer of emotion, and an anatomist of human emotional pain. A string of successful revivals followed, including Man and Boy at the Duchess Theatre, London, in 2005, with David Suchet as Gregor Antonescu, and In Praise of Love at the Chichester Festival Theatre and Separate Tables at the Royal Exchange, Manchester, in 2006.

1922 - JUDY GARLAND, the American musical actress and singer was born today (d. 1969). Need we say anything more? No. We need not.

1928 - American writer and illustrator MAURICE SENDAK was born on this date. Best known for his book Where the Wild Things Are, published in 1963, Sendak was born in Brooklyn. 

Where the Wild Things Are won the 1964 Caldecott Medal. In 1970 he won the Hans Christian Andersen Award for children's book illustration, and in 2003 he shared the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award with Christine Nöstlinger, the first time it was awarded. He was awarded a National Medal of Arts in 1996.

Sendak hates anything to do with God or religion, and Judaism in particular ("We were the `chosen people,' chosen to be killed?") He's also fonder of dogs then people. ("I hate people," he told one interviewer, extolling the superior company of dogs, like his sweet-tempered German shepherd, Herman, named after Melville). Sendak is, at heart, a curmudgeon, but a delightful one, with a vast range of knowledge, a wicked sense of humor and a talent for storytelling and mimicry. His fascination with the kidnapping, like many of the other details of his life, has been repeated endlessly over the years in the hundreds of interviews he has given. Was there anything he had never been asked? He paused for a few moments and answered, "Well, that I'm Gay."

Sendak lived with Eugene Glynn, a psychoanalyst, for 50 years (Glynn died in 2007). A Gay artist in New York is not exactly uncommon, but Mr. Sendak said that the idea of a Gay man writing children books would have hurt his career when he was in his 20s and 30s. He spends his days pondering his heroes: Mozart, Keats, Blake, Melville and Dickinson. He admired and yearned for their "ability to be private, the ability to be alone, the ability to follow some spiritual course not written down by anybody."

Sendak died earlier this year.

1976 - on this date WEST VIRGINIA became the 16th state to repeal its sodomy laws.  Unlike many states where it took the Supreme Court ruling in Lawrence v. Texas to rule sodomy laws unconstitutional.

1986 - MERLE MILLER, the American biographer and novelist, died on this date (b. 1919). Best known for his biographies of Presidents Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson. Three years before his best-selling book Plain Speaking: An Oral Biography of Harry S. Truman (1974), he wrote a personal account "What It Means to Be a Homosexual" published in The New York Times Magazine on January 17, 1971. His other books include The Sure Thing (1949); A Gay and Melancholy Sound, Only You, Dick Daring! (1964); The Warm Feeling (1968); A Secret Understanding On Being Different (1971); and Lyndon: An Oral Biography (1980).

2008 - on this date three islanders from the isle of LESBOS told a Greek court that Gay women insult their home's identity by calling themselves Lesbians. The plaintiffs - two women and a man - were seeking to ban a Greek Gay rights group from using the word "Lesbian" in its name.  The Lesbians didn't win their suit.  I mean the Lesbians from Lesbos Lesbians.

/|\=/|\=/|\=/|\=/|\=/|\=/|\=/|\=/|\