Today In Gay History TUESDAY, JUNE 18

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Today In Gay History

TUESDAY, JUNE 18, 2013

1769 – ROBERT STEWART, Second Viscount Castlereagh, was born on this date, (d: 1822). Why did Britain's nominal head of state slit his throat with a penknife on the night of August 12, 1822?  Was it, in fact, because he had suffered a nervous breakdown after numerous political defeats, as was the official explanation for his death? Or was it the threat of public exposure as a homosexual? If the latter, as many continue to believe, was Castlereagh actually Gay? Or was he the victim of an extraordinary scam by a gang of blackmailers who, knowing Castlereach's weakness for whores, tricked him in to a rendezvous with a wench who was actually a boy in female attire? For the answers to these and other questions, don't tune in tomorrow, but turn instead to J. Montgomery Hyde's The Strange Death of Lord Castlereagh, a non-fiction mystery as absorbing as any detective novel.

1779 — on this date THOMAS JEFFERSON prepared a draft of Virginia's criminal statute, envisaging that the punishment for sodomy should be castration. The bill read: "Whosoever shall be guilty of rape, polygamy, or sodomy with a man or woman, shall be punished; if a man, by castration, a woman, by boring through the cartilage of her nose a hole of one half inch in diameter at the least."  You have our permission to take it out on a nickel today.

1903 - the French author and lover of Cocteau, RAYMOND RADIGUET, was born on this date (d. 1923).  Radiguet was born close to Paris, the son of a caricaturist. In 1917 he moved to the city. Soon he would drop out of the Lycée Charlemagne, where he studied, in order to pursue his interests in journalism and literature. He would associate himself with the Modernist set, befriending Picasso, Max Jacob, Juan Gris and especially Jean Cocteau, who would become his lover and mentor.   Hemingway wrote that Radiguet employed his sexuality to advance his career, being a writer "who knew how to make his career not only with his pen but with his pencil."   He wrote his first French masterpiece 'The Devil in the Flesh' at the age of fifteen,  his second novel 'Count d'Orgel's Ball' at nineteen and  died from typhoid at twenty.

Jean Cocteau Wrote:  "Raymond Radiguet was born on June 18th, 1903; he died, without knowing it, on December 12th, 1923, after a miraculous life. The literary tribunal has found his heart arid. Raymond Radiguet's heart was hard, and like a diamond it did not react to the least touch. It needed fire and other diamonds, and ignored the rest. Do not accuse fate. Do not speak of injustice. He belonged to the solemn race of men whose lives unfold too quickly to their close. "True presentiments," he wrote at the end of The Devil In The Flesh, "are formed at a depth that the mind does not reach. Thus they sometimes make us do things that we misinterpret....A disorderly man who is going to die and does not know it suddenly put his affairs in order. His life changes. He sorts his papers. He rises and goes to bed early. He gives up his vices. His friends are pleased. Then his brutal death seems all the more unjust to them. He would have lived happily." For four months Raymond Radiguet became meticulous; he slept, he sorted, he revised. I was stupid enough to be glad of it; I had mistaken for a nervous disorder the intricacies of a machine that cuts crystal."

1981 - on this date the AIDS EPIDEMIC was formally recognized by medical professionals in San Francisco, California.

- also on this same date the McDONALD AMENDMENT passed the U.S. House of Representatives. The amendment would bar the Legal Service Corporation from assisting in any case which seeks to "promote, defend or protect" homosexuality.  You see how long we've been fighting this garbage?  The amendment was named after its author, the right-wing Georgia Democratic congressman Larry McDonald.  The second president of the right-wing extremist John Birch society, McDonald also (unsurprisingly) opposed honoring Martin Luther King, Jr. with a national holiday saying the FBI had evidence that King "was associated with and being manipulated by communists and secret communist agents."  What a peach.  McDonald died two years later as a passenger on the Korean Air Lines flight 007 shot down by Soviet interceptors.

1982 - the American short-story writer JOHN CHEEVER, died on this date (b. 1912). Sometimes called "the Chekhov of the suburbs" or "the Ovid of Ossining," his fiction is mostly set in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the Westchester suburbs, and old New England villages based on various South Shore towns around Quincy, Massachusetts, where he was born. Cheever is perhaps best remembered for his short stories (including "The Enormous Radio," "Goodbye, My Brother," "The Five-Forty-Eight," "The Country Husband," and "The Swimmer"), but also wrote a number of novels, such as The Wapshot Chronicle (National Book Award, 1958), The Wapshot Scandal (William Dean Howells Medal, 1965), Bullet Park, and Falconer. His main themes include the duality of human nature: sometimes dramatized as the disparity between a character's decorous social persona and inner corruption, and sometimes as a conflict between two characters (often brothers) who embody the salient aspects of both--light and dark, flesh and spirit. Two of Cheever's children, Susan and Benjamin, became writers. Susan Cheever's memoir, Home Before Dark (1984), revealed Cheever's Bisexuality, which was confirmed by his posthumously published letters and journals.

1992 - PETER ALLEN, the Australian singer and songwriter died on this date (b. 1944).  In the 1970s, Peter Allen gained recognition both as a composer of romantic ballads such as "I Honestly Love You" and "Don't Cry Out Loud" and, contrastingly, as a flamboyant stage performer. He was discovered by Judy Garland and made a star.  He married her daughter Liza. Enough said.

In 1998 a musical based on Allen's life, titled The Boy from Oz, opened in Australia. Using his largely autobiographical songs to form the soundtrack, the production continued on to a successful run on Broadway in 2003, becoming the first Australian musical ever to be performed there. In this production Allen was played by Hugh Jackman, who won a Tony Award for his portrayal in 2004.

1992 - on this date the American soap opera ONE LIFE TO LIVE aired the first openly Gay teen character when Billy Douglas, a high school student, tells his best friend, Joey Buchanan, that he is Gay.

1997  - on this date the Southern Baptist Convention called for a boycott of the Walt Disney Co., protesting what the convention called "Gay-friendly" policies.

2006 - on this date MARY CHENEY, daughter of (at the time) Vice President Dick Cheney, released her memoir "My Turn" in which she attempted to make sense of her inaction and silence during the Bush/Cheney administration and its anti-Gay record.   The book's sales were miserable, prompting the blogger Andrew Sullivan to write:" "There are flops, almighty flops and then there are books by Mary Cheney. Despite saturation media coverage, network interviews, cable interviews, blanket newspaper profiles, blog support, podcast interviews, the book "My Turn" had a very low first week's sales of 2,445. Last week, a grand total of 574 books were sold. Not too shabby for a first author with not a huge amount to say. But recall that this manuscript cost its publishers a cool $1 million. The publisher therefore spent around $170 for every book sold without even counting the marketing budget."

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