THIS WEEKEND IN GAY HISTORY JULY 19

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THIS WEEKEND IN GAY HISTORY

JULY 19

LUCARIA. Roman festival - The Lucaria was an ancient Roman feast, solemnized in the woods, where the Romans, defeated and pursued by the Gauls, retired and concealed themselves; it was held, on July 19, in a wood, between the Tyber and the road called Via Salaria. This is a time to honor the woodlands and the spirits that protect them, the Genii Loci or the Fae as they are known in English. It is important that we develop a good relationship with the Genii Loci of the land on which we live. This day is known as Midsummer to most of the English-speaking world, and this day is honored in a similar manner, celebrating the Apollo at his Zenith, the sacrificial God, Bacchus, and the Earth Goddess, Ceres, pregnant with the harvest.

1692 – SALEM WITCH TRIALS: Five women (and unknown numbers of homosexual men) are hanged for witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts.

1834 – EDGAR DEGAS (né Hilaire Germain Edgar de Gas) born (d: 1917); In Gay Geniuses, a strange book published a few years ago now, the author W.H. Kayy comes to the conclusion that the great Impressionist painter and sculptor Degas was Gay because he was obsessed with buttocks, both of ballet dancers and of horses. Moreover, Kayy repeats the old canard (are there young canards?) about Degas as a woman-hater because he painted his ballet dancers in tortured poses. Now any woman-hater who also likes tushies is, according to Kayy, ipso facto, homosexual. There are of course, several things wrong with this theory. In the first place, more than a few straight studs have been known to refer to a woman as a "piece of ass," and, what's more, seem pretty obsessed by buttocks themselves. Second, most dance positions are pretty tortuous in and for themselves and are hardly dictated by the artist who paints or sculpts merely what the choreographer creates.  And if you don't believe that most dance poses are painful, try a couple if your body is not in perfect shape. Third, why are homosexuals automatically deemed woman-haters? Are the victims of battered-wife syndrome all married to Gay men? Yes, Degas painted many ballerinas bending down to tie a slipper, massage a leg, but these are common scenes in the backstage world of dance. Why does this make the artist buttock-crazed? It seems to us as if Degas has been given a bum rap.

1848 – WOMEN'S RIGHTS: The first, two day Womens Rights Convention opens in Seneca Falls, New York and the "Bloomers" are introduced at the feminist convention. It still took another 72 years before women were "granted" the vote.

1888 - FABIAN STRACHAN WOODLEY, British poet (d: 1957) was a poet of the Uranian school. He was born in Bristol and educated at Oxford. After fighting in World War I (during which he won the Military Cross), he taught English at several schools. His only book of poetry, A Crown of Friendship, was published in 1921.

2005 - The Iranian Government publicly executed two teenage boys on July 19^th 2005, in the city of Mashad. Their names were Mahmoud Asgari and Ayaz Marhoni, one 18 and the other 17 or possibly 16 years old. They were accused of raping a 13-year-old boy, but it has been established that the authorities invented the charge of rape to prevent public sympathy for the true reason for their execution, that they were Gay. After their arrest the two boys endured a year of imprisonment and torture before the high court of Iran upheld their sentence and their execution by hanging was carried out in a public square in the city of Mashad. International outrage was met with arrogance and impunity by the religious and conservative Iranian government, and a systematic persecution soon began against Gays, which has led to an unverified report of a second execution, and untold numbers of arrests and torture. These events indicate that the worldwide struggle for Gay Freedom has not decreased but has become more violent and inhumane.

JULY 20

ORPHEUS: traditional date of birth. Orpheus was the son of Calliope and either Oeagrus or Apollo. He was the greatest musician and poet of Greek myth, whose songs could charm wild beasts and coax even rocks and trees into movement. He was one of the Argonauts, and when the Argo had to pass the island of the Sirens, it was Orpheus' distractions that prevented the crew from being lured to destruction. This much of the legend of Orpheus is fairly certain. It's the final days of Orpheus, however, that are the subject of varying stories. One such version justified Orpheus' inclusion here. The celebrated Thracian musician became a follower of Dionysius and, it is believed, soothed the Argonauts with means other than mere melodies, thus introducing homophile love into Greece. As a result, Orpheus was soundly hated by Aphrodite who considered him a competitor and rival. Orpheus met his end at the hands of the women of Thrace who, because the handsome hunk refused to pay them any attention, tore him to pieces. And…speaking of charming Thracians…

356 BCE – ALEXANDER THE GREAT, Greek king and military leader, born in Thrace; One of the most successful military commanders in history, undefeated in battle. By his death, he had conquered most of the world known to the ancient Greeks (d. 323 BCE) After traveling to Ecbatana to retrieve the bulk of the Persian treasure, his beloved, Hephaestion, died of an illness, or possibly of poisoning. Alexander mourned by Hephaestion's side for six months.

It is said that on the night before the mother of Alexander, Olympias, was to be married to King Phillip of Macedonia, she dreamt that a thunderbolt struck her body and filled it with power. After the marriage, it is said that Phillip peeked into her chamber, and found her lying with a serpent, and that he afterward dreamt that her womb was sealed and that a lion dwelled within her. And on the night that he was born the great Temple at Ephesus was burned to the ground by a vandal, because the goddess Artemis was away, assisting with the birth of Alexander the Great. He was considered to be the son of Zeus, and this divine origin was what was given as an explanation for the unprecedented conquests that he accomplished.

In his youth Aristotle, a student of Plato, educated him along with his following of young princes, who were later serve as his generals, and the founders of great dynastic monarchies of the Hellenistic world. Foremost of these was his ever loyal and devoted Hephaestion. In one of their first battles, while Phillip was still king, the young Alexander proved himself by defeating the Sacred Band of Thebes, the army of homosexual lovers who were the most famous and courageous warriors of their time. Alexander is said to have wept at their destruction, and buried them with honor, erecting a statue of a Lion over their grave. He would later go one to conquer the entire Eastern world, Asia Minor, Syria, Judea, Egypt, and all of Persian, as far East as India. The Empire of Alexander spread Greek culture throughout the world, and made the communication of far-distant ideas possible so that the new Hellenistic culture that he created, was a combination of classical Greece and of the exotic cultures that were imported from every corner. After the death of Alexander, at only 33 years of age, he was deified by his generals who divided his great Empire among themselves.

1926 - A convention of the METHODIST CHURCH votes to allow women to become priests.

1938 – NATALIE WOOD, American actress born (d. 1981) In addition to her numerous accomplishments as an actress, the teenaged Wood went on studio-arranged dates with actors. In 1956, one of these was Tab Hunter, seven years her senior, with whom she reportedly developed a genuine friendship. They would attend parties to promote the two films they co-starred in that year. Wood biographer and Hollywood screenwriter, Gavin Lambert, also confirms that Wood had studio-arranged dates with Gay or bisexual actors, the first of which was Nick Adams. Hunter in his autobiography elaborates on how a Hollywood studio's publicizing of a sham romance between two actors each under contract to it was a strategy to stimulate public desire for seeing that studio's forthcoming films. According to Lambert, Wood supported Gay playwright Marrt Crowley in a manner that made it possible for him to write his play, The Boys in the Band.

1939 – JUDY CHICAGO, American artist. Chicago's brilliant "The Dinner Party" now on permanent display in the Elizabeth Sackler Center Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum traces the herstory of great women and comprises a massive ceremonial banquet, arranged on a triangular table with a total of thirty-nine place settings, each commemorating an important woman from history. The settings consist of embroidered runners, gold chalices and utensils, and china-painted porcelain plates with raised central motifs that are based on vulvar and butterfly forms and rendered in styles appropriate to the individual women being honored. The names of another 999 women are inscribed in gold on the white tile floor below the triangular table. This permanent installation is enhanced by rotating biographical gallery shows relating to the 1,038 women honored at the table, Pharaohs, Queens and Goddesses is the first such exhibition.

1969 - NEIL ARMSTRONG walks on the moon.

1987 - President Reagan appoints LARRY KRAMER, co-founder of Gay Men's Health Crisis, to a federal panel on HIV-AIDS. Like everything else Reagan did about HIV-AIDS, it was only about seven years too late.

1989 - Photographer ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE'S' show opens at Washington D.C.'s Project for the Arts after the Smithsonian Institution's Corcoran Gallery cancels it.

2005 - CANADA becomes the fourth country in the world to legalize same-sex marriage, after the bill C-38 receives its Royal Assent.

JULY 21

1899 - HART CRANE – American poet, born. Crane's father, Clarence, was a successful Ohio businessman who had made his fortune in the candy business by inventing the Life Saver. Crane was gay and associated his sexuality with his vocation as a poet. Raised in the Christian Science tradition of his mother, he never ceased to view himself as an outsider in relation to society. However, as poems such as "Repose of Rivers" make clear, he felt that this sense of alienation was necessary for him to attain the visionary insight that formed the basis for his poetic work. It is one of the classic Gay archetypes.

Throughout the early 1920s, small but well-respected literary magazines published some of Crane's lyrics, gaining him, among the avant-garde, a respect that White Buildings (1926), his first volume, ratified and strengthened. White Buildings contains many of Crane's best lyrics, including "For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen," and a powerful sequence of erotic poems called "Voyages," written while he was falling in love with Emil Opffer, a Danish merchant marine.

"Faustus and Helen" was part of a larger artistic struggle to meet the modern world with something more than despair. Crane identified T.S. Eliot with that kind of despair, and while he acknowledged the greatness of The Waste Land, he also said it was "so damned dead," an impasse, and a refusal to see "certain spiritual events and possibilities." Crane's self-appointed work would be to bring those spiritual events and possibilities to poetic life, and so create "a mystical synthesis of America." He meant an epic poem. This ambition would finally issue in The Bridge (1930), where the Brooklyn Bridge is both the poem's central symbol and its poetic starting point.

Just before noon on April 27, 1932, on a steamship passage back to New York from Mexico — right after he was reportedly beaten for making sexual advances to a male crewmember — he committed suicide by jumping into the Gulf of Mexico. Although he had been drinking heavily and left no suicide note, witnesses believed Crane's intentions to be suicidal, as several reported that he exclaimed "Goodbye, everybody!" before throwing himself overboard. His body was never recovered. A marker on his father's tombstone in Garrettsville includes the inscription, "Harold Hart Crane 1899-1932 LOST AT SEA" ("Voyager," John Unterecker, 1969). Crane's suicide inspired several works of art by noted artist Jasper Johns, including "Periscope" and "Diver." Hart Crane: Complete Poems & Selected Letters.

2005 - LONG JOHN BALDRY, born John William Baldry, died on this date (b: 1941) And with him died a piece of rock and roll history. Undeniably, Long John was one of the "Founding Fathers of British Blues' in the 1960s and without his presence the scene, particularly the Blues scene, may have been quite different. Long John Baldry was a pioneering blues singer from England and he had a knack for discovering talent. Ginger Baker, Jeff Beck and Brian Jones all worked with him early on as did other Rolling Stones – Charlie Watts, Ron Wood, and Keith Richards.

In 1962, when The Rolling Stones were just getting started, they opened for him in London. Eric Clapton credits Long John Baldry as one of the musicians that inspired him to play the Blues. And for their internationally televised special in 1964, The Beatles invited John to perform his version of 'I Got My Mojo Working'.In 1965, his band, the Hoochie Coochie Men became Steampacket with Baldry and Stewart as male vocalists and Brian Auger on Hammond organ. In 1966, Baldry formed Bluesology featuring one Reg Dwight on keyboards and Elton Dean, later of Soft Machine, as well as Caleb Quaye on guitar. Reg Dwight decided to adopt the name Elton John, taking his first name from Dean and his surname from Baldry's first name. Bluesology broke up in 1968, with Baldry continuing his solo career and Elton John forming a songwriting partnership with Bernie Taupin. In 1969, Elton John attempted suicide after having relationship problems with a woman he was engaged to. Taupin and Baldry found him and in a conversation Baldry talked him out of marrying the woman and helped make John more comfortable with his sexuality. The hit song "Someone Saved My Life Tonight" from Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy was written about the experience. Partial Baldry discography: Baldry's Out! (EMI) (1979) Long John's Blues (United Artists) (1964) Looking at Long John (United Artists) (1966) Let The Heartaches Begin (Pye) (1968) Everything Stops for Tea (Warner Brothers) (1972) Mar Y Sol: The First International Puerto Rico Pop Festival (Atco) (1972) Good To Be Alive (Baldry Album) (GM) (1973)

After spending time in New York City and Los Angeles in 1978, Baldry chose to settle permanently in Vancouver, British Columbia, where he became a Canadian citizen. He regularly toured the Canadian west coast, as well as the U.S. Northwest. Baldry also toured the Canadian east, including one 1985 show in Kingston, Ontario, where audience members repeatedly called for the title track from his 1979 album Baldry's Out!--to which he replied, "I'll say he is!"

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