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GAY WISDOM for Daily Living...
GAY WISDOM for Daily Living...
from White Crane
Exploring Gay Wisdom & Culture
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THIS DAY IN GAY HISTORY
MAY 5
Today is CINCO
DE MAYO. It is celebrated in the United States and in Mexico, primarily
in the state of Puebla, where the holiday is called El Día de la Batalla de Puebla (English: The Day of the Battle of
Puebla).
It originated with Mexican-American communities in the American
West as a way to commemorate the cause of freedom and democracy during the
first years of the American Civil War, and today the date is observed in the
United States as a celebration of Mexican heritage and pride. In the state of
Puebla, the date is observed to commemorate the Meican army’s unlikely victory
over French forces at the Battle of Puebla on May 5, 1862, under the leadership
of General Ignacio Zaragoza Seguin. Cinco de Mayo is not Mexico’s Independence
Day—the most important national patriotic holiday in Mexico—which is celebrated
on September 16.
The
American Cinco de Mayo
celebration originated in the Mexican-American communities of the American West,
Southwest, and Northwest in the 1860s. Mexicans and Latinos living in
California during the American Civil War are credited with being the first to
celebrate Cinco de Mayo in the United States. It grew in popularity and evolved
into a celebration of Mexican culture and heritage, first in areas with large
Mexican-American populations, like Los Angeles, Chicago and Houston. Eventually
it expanded across the United States. On June 7, 2005, the U.S. Congress issued
a Concurrent Resolution calling on the President of the United States to issue
a proclamation calling upon the people of the United States to observe Cinco de
Mayo with appropriate ceremonies and activities.
1891 – CARNEGIE
HALL (then known as "the Music
Hall") has its grand opening and first public performance, with Pyotr
Ilyich TCHAIKOVSKY as guest conductor.
1913 - TYRONE
POWER was born on this date in
Cincinnati, Ohio. Handsome, but not much of an actor, Power led a busy bisexual
life in Hollywood and kept the studio busy keeping his name out of the papers.
1903 - The American
chef and food writer JAMES BEARD
was born. Recognized by many as the father of American gastronomy,
throughout his life he pursued and advocated the highest standards, and served
as a mentor to emerging talents in the field of the culinary arts.
According to the James Beard Foundation, "After a brief stint
at Reed College in Portland," (from which he was expelled in 1922 for
homosexual activity) "in 1923 Beard went on the road with a theatrical
troupe. He lived abroad for several years studying voice and theater, but
returned to the United States for good in 1927." He trained initially as a singer and actor,
and moved to New York City in 1937. Not having much luck in the theater, he and
his friend, Bill Rhodes, capitalized on the cocktail party craze by opening a
catering company, "Hors D'Oeuvre, Inc.", which led the publication of
Beard's first cookbook, Hors D'Oeuvre and Canapés, a compilation of his
catering recipes. In 1946, he appeared on an early televised cooking show, I
Love to Eat, on NBC, and thus began his rise as an eminent American food
authority. Beard began lecturing,
teaching, and writing books and articles. Child states, "Through the years
he gradually became not only the leading culinary figure in the country, but
`The Dean of American Cuisine'." In 1955, he established The James Beard
Cooking School and taught cooking for the next 30 years around the country. He
was a tireless traveler, bringing his message of good food, honestly prepared
with fresh, wholesome, American ingredients, to a country just becoming aware
of its own culinary heritage.
James Beard is the central figure in the story of the establishment
of an American food identity. He was an eccentric personality who brought
French cooking to the American middle and upper classes in the 1950s. Many
consider him the father of American-style cooking. His legacy lives on in
twenty books, numerous writings, his own foundation, and his foundation's
annual Beard awards in various culinary genres.
Julia Child accurately sums up Beard's personal life in an brief
description: "Beard was the quintessential American cook. Well-educated
and well-traveled during his eighty-two years, he was familiar with many
cuisines but he remained fundamentally American. He was a big man, over six
feet tall, with a big belly, and huge hands. An endearing and always lively
teacher, he loved people, loved his work, loved gossip, loved to eat, loved a
good time." Child's summary makes two significant omissions. The first is
that he was Gay. Beard's memoir states: "By the time I was seven, I knew
that I was Gay. I think it's time to talk about that now." The second was
Beard's own admission of possessing "until I was about forty-five, I guess
a really violent temper." The New York Times food columnist Mark Bittman
(who did not know Beard personally) describes him in a similar way: "In a
time when serious cooking meant French cooking, Beard was quintessentially
American, a westerner whose mother ran a boardinghouse, a man who grew up with
hotcakes and salmon and meatloaf in his blood. A man who was born a hundred
years ago on the other side of the county, in a city, Portland, that at the
time was every bit as cosmopolitan as, say, Allegheny PA." Craig
Claiborne, Beard's contemporary (his birthday is tomorrow on this list!) called
Beard "an innovator, an experimenter, a missionary in bringing the gospel
of good cooking to the home table.
Physically he was the connoisseur's connoisseur. He was a giant panda,
Santa Claus and the Jolly Green Giant rolled into one. On him, a lean and
slender physique would have looked like very bad casting."
Beard died January 21, 1985 in New York City, New York, United
States of heart failure at the age of 81. He was cremated, and his ashes were
scattered over the beach in Gearhart, Oregon, United States, where he spent his
summers as a child.
After Beard's death in 1985, Julia Child had the idea to preserve
his home in New York City as the gathering place it was throughout his life.
Peter Kump, a former student of Beard's and the founder of the Institute of
Culinary Education (formerly Peter Kump's New York Cooking School), spearheaded
the effort to purchase the house and create the James Beard Foundation. Beard's renovated brownstone is located at
167 West 12th Street, in the heart of Greenwich Village. It is North America's
only historical culinary center, a place where Foundation members, the press,
and the general public are encouraged to savor the creations of both
established and emerging chefs from across the country and around the globe.
The annual James Beard Foundation Awards are given at the industry's biggest
party, part of a fortnight of activities that celebrate fine cuisine and
Beard's birthday. Held on the first Monday in May, the Awards ceremony honors
the finest chefs, restaurants, journalists, cookbook authors, restaurant
designers, and electronic media professionals in the country. It culminates in
a reception featuring a tasting of the signature dishes of more than 30 of the
James Beard Foundation's very best chefs.
The foundation also publishes a quarterly magazine, Beard House, a
comprehensive compendium of the best in culinary journalism. The foundation
also publishes the James Beard Foundation Restaurant Directory, a directory of
all chefs who have either presented a meal at the Beard House or have
participated in one of the foundation's out-of-House fundraising events.
1921 - DEL MARTIN, feminist and Gay rights pioneer, was born on this date
(d. 2008). Born Dorothy Louise Taliaferro "Del" Martin, along with
her wife Phyllis Ann Lyon they were an American Lesbian couple known as
feminist and gay-rights activists. They were a couple until Del Martin's death
on August 27, 2008 and two of the single most important pioneers in the LGBT
Civil Rights movement, on a par with harry Hay
Martin and Lyon met in 1950, became lovers in
1952, and moved in together on Valentine's Day 1953 in an apartment on Castro
Street in San Francisco. They had been together for three years when they
founded the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB) in San Francisco in 1955, which became
the first social and political organization for lesbians in the United States.
They both acted as president and editor of The Ladder until 1963, and remained
involved in the DOB until joining the National Organization for Women (NOW) as the first lesbian couple to do so.
Both women worked to form the Council on
Religion and the Homosexual (CRH) in northern California to persuade ministers
to accept homosexuals into churches, and used their influence to decriminalize
homosexuality in the late 1960s and early 1970s. They became politically active
in San Francisco's first gay political organization, the Alice B. Toklas
Democratic Club, which influenced Dianne Feinstein to sponsor a citywide bill
to outlaw employment discrimination for gays and lesbians. Both served in the
White House Conference on Aging in 1995.
They were married on June 16, 2008 in the
first same-sex wedding to take place in San Francisco after the California
Supreme Court's decision in In re Marriage Cases legalized same-sex marriage in
California. Martin died from complications of an arm bone fracture in San
Francisco.
1933 - on this date in Berlin, the Nazi Youth
of the Deutsche Studentenschaft made an organised attack on Magnus Hirschfeld's
Institute of Sex Research. The "Institut für Sexualwissenschaft" or
Institute for Sexology was a private sexology research institute which included
a research library and a large archive, and included a marriage and sex
counseling office. In addition, the institute was a pioneer worldwide in the
call for civil rights and social acceptance for Homosexual and Transgender
people. A few days later the Institute's library and archives were publicly
hauled out and burned in the streets of the Opernplatz. Around 20,000 books and
journals, and 5,000 images, were destroyed. Also seized were the Institute's
extensive lists of names and addresses of LGBT people. In the midst of the
burning, Joseph Goebbels gave a political speech to a crowd of around 40,000
people.
1958 - Pop-artist, muralist and graffiti genius KEITH
HARING born. Born in Reading,
Pennsylvania, Haring studied graphic art in Pittsburg. After coming out, he
moved to New York where he became influenced by graffiti art. With his
distinctive style, he quickly moved from the streets to international art
galleries. His work is part of the iconography of the 1980s. He was a tireless
AIDS campaigner and, tragically, succumbed to the disease himself in 1990 at
the age of 31. Shortly before he died, he established the Keith Haring
Foundation to maintain and enhance his legacy of supporting children's and AIDS
organizations.
1967 – Today is the birthday
of Canadian Member of Parliament SCOTT BRISON. Canadian
MP for Kings-Hants Nova Scotia, he was born in Windsor, Nova Scotia. He came
out in December of 2002 to keep from being outed. He was Minister of Public
Works and Government Services under Paul Martin and ran to succeed Martin as
party leader in the 2006 Liberal leadership convention. He dropped out after
the first ballot and endorsed first Bob Rae, then Michael Ignatieff. It was
announced in October 2005 that he and his partner, Maxime Saint-Pierre,
intended to marry. They were married on August 18, 2007.
1968 - The American actor
and director ALBERT DEKKER died on this date (b. 1904). Born in
Brooklyn, New York, as Albert Ecke, his films include the classics The Man in the Iron Mask (1939), Beau Geste (1939), The Killers (1946), The Sound
and the Fury (1959), Suddenly, Last
Summer (1959), and The Wild Bunch
(1969).
He replaced Lee J. Cobb as Willy Loman in the
original production of Arthur Miller's Death
of a Salesman, and during a five-year stint back on Broadway in the early
1960s, he played the Duke of Norfolk in Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons.
Dekker appeared in some seventy films from
the 1930s to 1960s, but his four most famous screen roles were as a mad
scientist in the 1940 horror film Dr. Cyclops, as a vicious hitman in the The Killers, as a dangerous dealer in
atomic fuel in the 1955 film noir Kiss Me
Deadly, and as an unscrupulous railroad detective in Sam Peckinpah's
western The Wild Bunch. He was rarely cast in romantic roles, but in the film
Seven Sinners, featuring a romance between Marlene Dietrich and John Wayne,
Dietrich sails off with Dekker's character at the end of the film. Dekker's
role as Pat Harrigan in The Wild Bunch
would be his last screen appearance.
Dekker's off-screen preoccupation with
politics led to his winning a seat in the California State Assembly for the 57th
Assembly District in 1944. Dekker served as a Democratic member for the
Assembly until 1946. During the McCarthy era he was an outspoken critic of U.S.
Senator Joseph McCarthy's tactics; to avoid being blacklisted he spent most of
the blacklist working on Broadway rather than Hollywood. For his contribution to the motion picture
industry, Dekker has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6620 Hollywood
Boulevard.
1979 - On this date DAVID KLOSS was "crowned" the first International Mister
Leather in Chicago, Illinois.
2010 - On this date a court
in Lithuania blocked the parade permit for a weekend gay pride event in
Vilnius. Amnesty International condemned the move to ban the parade. On March 1st
a new Lithuanian law went into effect that bans the "spread of homosexual
propaganda" to minors.
2009 - The Swedish parliament was presented with legislation that
would allow Gay couples to marry in civil ceremonies or in the Lutheran Church,
which until 2000 was the official church of Sweden. "The main proposal in
the motion is that ... a person's gender will no longer have any bearing on
whether they can marry. The marriage law and other laws concerning spouses will
be rendered gender neutral according to the proposal," a statement from
Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt's conservative Moderates said.
The proposal had wide backing in parliament and is expected to be
adopted, though a date has yet to be set for a vote. While heterosexuals in
Sweden can choose to marry in either a civil ceremony or a church ceremony,
homosexuals are currently only allowed to register their
"partnerships" in a civil ceremony. Civil unions granting Gays and
Lesbians the same legal status as married couples have been allowed in Sweden
since 1995. If the new legislation is adopted, Sweden, already a pioneer in
giving same-sex couples the right to adopt children, would become the first
country in the world to allow Gays to marry within a major Church. Under the
proposal, Lutheran pastors will be able to opt-out of performing Gay marriages
if they have personal objections.
2009 - On this
date an ABC television station in Los Angeles refused to air a Public Service
Announcement about Gay Families claiming it was "too controversial"
to run during inauguration coverage.
KABC-TV in Los Angeles refused to run public service announcements from
Get To Know Us First, a group that promotes acceptance of LGBT families.
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