January 30 THIS DAY IN GAY HISTORY

/ / | \ \ | / / | \ \
GAY WISDOM for Daily Living...

from White Crane a magazine exploring
Gay wisdom & culture http://www.Gaywisdom.org

Share this with your friends...
\ \ | / / | \ \ | / /

THIS DAY IN GAY HISTORY

Once again I had a brain fart (they seem to be coming more frequently!) and I accidentally sent out today's date along with the full weekend. The good news: I figured it out this morning. The bad news: My bad.

Wishing you all a great week.

January 30

THIS DAY IN GAY HISTORY

Dear Readers,

The Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the City University of New York Graduate Center (CLAGS/CUNY) and the Harry Hay Centennial Committee are sponsoring a conference: The Life and Visionary Legacy of Harry Hay from September 27 to September 30, 2012, in New York City.

The call for papers asks for brief proposals and CV's by January 31^st but in all likelihood that call will be extended by several weeks. Here is the link to the call:

http://web.gc.cuny.edu/clags/pages/hay.html

There are commitments from historian John D'Emilio, Urvashi Vaid and author Will Roscoe as confirmed keynote speakers as well as a tentative agreement with Tony Kushner to read and discuss a scene from his recent play The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures.

The intentions for the conference are wide-ranging and manifold. Among these are:

• to secure Harry Hay's legacy in the history of LGBT studies;

• to look at the emergence of the LGBT movement in 20th Century America through the lens of the dialectics of the Left; to discuss the place of coalitions, identity politics, sexual liberation & gay rights in the development of the movement; to explore the processes used by gay communities and groups to develop and sustain themselves;

• to explore the search for LGBT identity as a separate people whose time has come; to look at essentialism, social constructivism and assimilation; queer archetypes; gay consciousness;

• to chronicle LGBT participation in the arts, both avant garde (John Cage, Rudi Gernreich, Merce Cunningham, James Broughton) and popular (New Song Movement) and the development of a queer artistic sensibility;

• to trace the spiritual dimensions of our sexuality – in the pre-monotheistic and indigenous world and in the creation of new spiritual paradigms and communities.

The Editors of Daily GayWisdom encourage our readers to participate in this important conference.

1847 - The city of Yerba Buena, California is renamed SAN FRANCISCO a place that still holds a magical aura for gay people everywhere and where, the case of Perry v Schwarzenegger will both overturn Prop 8 and decide the future of marriage equality, probably for the entire nation after appeals.

1855 - HOWARD OVERING STURGIS the novelist and eccentric was born on this date. A millionaire American expatriate, Sturgis passed his life in England knitting, embroidering and writing novels. He is best known for two: Tim: A Story of Eton and Belchamber. Affable and witty, Sturgis was a favorite with Henry James, Edith Wharton, and A. C. Benson, and the subject of a memorable sketch by E. M. Forster. Sturgis maintained a lifelong relationship with a much younger man, William Haynes-Smith, familiarly known as "the Babe", to whom his novel "Belchamber" is dedicated.

1859 - EDWARD MARTYN was born on this date. (d: 1923); Martyn was the first president of Sinn Fein, the Irish republican movement's political party, serving from 1904 to 1908. He was homosexual and the son of a wealthy Catholic family from Tillyra Castle in County Galway.

A pillar of the Celtic Renaissance, in 1899 Martyn co-founded, with the poet W.B. Yeats, what became Ireland's famous national theater, the Abbey. the Irish Literary Theatre (1899), which was part of the nationalist revival of interest in Ireland's Gaelic literary history. He was the first President of Sinn Féin, which he co-founded with Arthur Griffith. He was a cousin and friend to George Moore, though their relationship was often antagonistic.

Violently opposed to British rule in Ireland, he was the center of a court case in 1905 as the result of an off-the-cuff remark in which he stated that "All Irishmen who join the English army ought to be flogged". He died in 1923, unmarried, and after donating his body to science, was buried at his own request in a pauper's grave. He was related to the Hungarian artist and sculptor, Ferenc Martyn (1899-1986).

Martyn was outed by his friend George Moore (1852-1933), a prolific novelist, critic, and polemicist, in his three-volume masterpiece "Hail and Farewell" (published between 1911 and 1914). Moore, who was attracted to the handsome young Yeats, later fell in love with the celebrated French painter Edouard Manet, who painted three portraits of him. Moore was influenced by the homosexual Oxford critic Walter Pater, and Moore's 1879 work, Flowers of Passion, already contained references to Lesbianism. Moore's 1887 novel, A Mere Accident, also has a homosexual theme and its central character is again based on Martyn.

1925 - The poet JACK SPICER was born in Hollywood, California. Most often identified with "the San Francisco Renaissance," he is associated with other poets of the era like Robin Blaser and Robert Duncan.and studied Old Norse, Anglo-Saxon, and German to prepare for a career in linguistics. This putative career was blighted by Spicer's refusal to sign the 'Loyalty Oath', a legal provision that required all California state employees (including graduate teaching assistants at Berkeley) to swear loyalty to the United States.

Although writing and living in the middle of the Beat movement, Spicer and Duncan stood oddly set apart from it, maintaining an approach to poetry and art that wedded aesthetics to intellect. Spicer's relations with his Gay contemporaries Allen Ginsberg and Frank O'Hara remained antagonistic: Ginsberg was too 'populist'; O'Hara a superficial versifier.

The lyric beauty, intellectual power, and formal invention of Spicer's poetry attracted a core of disciples who met in the North Beach bars and the San Francisco parks he favored. The open homosexuality of his core group, the 'Spicer Circle', resulted in the marginalization of some of the most moving love poetry produced in this century.

1948 - Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated in New Delhi, India by a Hindu religious extremist. Gandhi had ended British rule in India through nonviolent resistance. "Non-violence is not a garment to be put on and off at will. Its seat is in the heart, and it must be an inseparable part of our very being," he stated in 1926. His teachings were used during many of the Gay demonstrations of the 60s and 70s and were a major influence on Martin Luther King, through his gay cohort and fellow organizer, Bayard Rustin, who studied with Gandhi and brought the idea of satyagraha (a synthesis of the Sanskrit words Satya (meaning "truth") and Agraha ("insistence", or "holding firmly to"). back to the American civil rights movement Today, the Gay Christian group Soulforce continues the uses Gandhi's non violence practices in its demonstrations against Christian churches that discriminate against GLBT people.

Advocates of nonviolence believe cooperation and consent are the roots of political power: all regimes, including bureaucratic institutions, financial institutions, and the armed segments of society (such as the military and police); depend on compliance from citizens. On a national level, the strategy of nonviolence seeks to undermine the power of rulers by encouraging people to withdraw their consent and cooperation. The forms of nonviolence draw inspiration from both religious or ethical beliefs and political analysis. Religious or ethically based nonviolence is sometimes referred to as principled philosophical or ethical nonviolence, while nonviolence based on political analysis is often referred to as tactical, strategic, or pragmatic nonviolence. Commonly, both of these dimensions may be present within the thinking of particular movements or individuals

2003 - On this date Belgium became the second country in the world to legally recognize same-sex marriage, with some restrictions. . According to the Belgian Official Journal, approximately 300 same-sex couples were married between June 2003 and April 2004 (245 in 2003 and 55 in 2004). This constituted 1.2 percent of the total number of marriages in Belgium during that period. Two thirds of the married couples were gay male couples; the remainder were lesbian couples. On 22 July 2005, the Belgian government announced that a total of 2,442 same-sex marriages had taken place in the country since the extension of marriage rights to same-sex couples two and a half years earlier.

2006 - Coretta Scott King died in Rosarito Beach, Mexico on this. The great civil-rights activist and tireless supporter of gay rights succumbed to complications from a stroke and ovarian cancer. In arguing against a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage King said, "Gay and lesbian people have families, and their families should have legal protection, whether by marriage or civil union. A constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriages is a form of gay bashing and it would do nothing at all to protect traditional marriage." In 2003, she invited the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force to take part in observances of the 40th anniversary of the March on Washington and Martin Luther King's "I Have A Dream" speech. It was the first time that an LGBT rights group had been invited to a major event of the African American community. King said her husband supported the quest for equality by gays and reminded her critics that the 1963 March on Washington was organized by Bayard Rustin, an openly gay civil rights activist.

[{(o)}]|[{(o)}]|[{(o)}]|[{(o)}]|[{(o)}]