THIS DAY IN GAY HISTORY APRIL 29

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THIS DAY IN GAY HISTORY

APRIL 29

1863 – CONSTANTINE P. CAVAFY, Greek poet (d. 1933); A major modern Greek poet who worked as a journalist and civil servant. He has been called a skeptic and a neo-pagan. In his poetry he examines critically some aspects of Christianity, patriotism, and homosexuality, though he was not always comfortable with his role as a nonconformist. He published 154 poems; dozens more remained incomplete or in sketch form. His most important poetry was written after his 40^th birthday. Cavafy has been instrumental in the revival and recognition of Greek poetry both at home and abroad. His poems are, typically, concise but intimate evocations of real or literary figures and milieux that have played a role in Greek culture. Uncertainty about the future, sensual pleasures, the moral character and psychology of individuals, homosexuality, and a fatalistic existential nostalgia are some of the defining themes.

Cavafy, who was gay, wrote many sexually explicit poems. W.H. Auden noted as much in his introduction to the 1961 volume The Complete Poems of C. P. Cavafy when he wrote, “Cavafy was a homosexual, and his erotic poems make no attempt to conceal the fact.” Auden added: “As a witness, Cavafy is exceptionally honest. He neither bowdlerizes nor glamorizes nor giggles. The erotic world he depicts is one of casual pickups and short-lived affairs. Love, there, is rarely more than physical passion… At the same time, he refuses to pretend that his memories of moments of sensual pleasure are unhappy or spoiled by feelings of guilt.” 

 

At The Theatre

C.P. Cavafy

I got bored looking at the stage

and raised my eyes to the box circle.

In one of the boxes I saw you

with your strange beauty, your dissolute youthfulness.

My thoughts turned back at once

to all they’d told me about you that afternoon;

my mind and body were aroused.

And as I gazed enthralled

at your languid beauty, your languid youthfulness,

your tastefully discriminating dress,

in my imagination I kept picturing you

the way they’d talked about you that afternoon. 

1933 – ROD MCKUEN, American poet and composer; There’s Cavafy...and then there’s Rod McKuen. If McKuen is the Edgar Guest of our day, so what? He’s never pretended that he writes poetry; in fact he claims that poetry doesn’t even appeal to him. “You have to use a dictionary,” he complains, “People don’t understand it. It’s outdated.” What’s very much of our time, however, are such verses as “Those of us who walk in light/must help the ones in darkness up/For that’s what life is all about/and love is all there is to life.” After all, people don’t need a dictionary in order a greeting card to buy. McKuen calls himself a “stringer of words,” and that seems fair enough. But don’t infer he is insensitive to the meaning of words. As he has said, “I have had sex with men; does that make me Gay?” Nevertheless, and to his credit, he risked alienating a million readers by taking a public stand against Anita Bryant in the 70s.

1946 – JOHN WATERS, American film writer, born; Recognizable by his pencil-thin moustache this American filmmaker, actor, writer, personality, visual artist and art collector, rose to fame in the early 1970s for his transgressive cult films and has, against all intuition and all odds has become the toast of Broadway with not one, but two major musicals based on his cinematic oeuvre. For his 16^th birthday, Waters received an 8mm movie camera from his maternal grandmother, Stella Whitaker. His first movie was Hag in a Black Leather Jacket. According to Waters, the film was shown only once in a "beatnik coffee house" in Baltimore. Waters was a student at New York University (NYU) in New York City.

In January 1966, Waters and some friends were caught smoking marijuana on the grounds; they were soon expelled. Waters returned to Baltimore, where he began work on his next film, Eat Your Makeup, which was filmed that year. Waters' films would become Divine's primary star vehicle. Waters' early films were all shot in the Baltimore area with his company of local actors, the Dreamlanders. In addition to Divine, the group included Mink Stole, Cookie Mueller, Edith Massey, David Lochary, Mary Vivian Pearce, and others. These early films were among the first picked up for distribution by New Line Cinema. Waters' films premiered at the Baltimore Senator Theater and sometimes at the Charles Theater.

Waters' early campy movies present filthily lovable characters in outrageous situations with hyperbolic dialogue. His early films, Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble and Desperate Living, which he labeled the Trash Trilogy, pushed hard at the boundaries of conventional propriety and movie censorship. A particularly notorious final segment of Pink Flamingos, simply added in as anon sequitur to the end of the film, featured, in one take, without special effects, a small dog defecating and Divine dipping a finger in and eating the feces.

His 1981 film Polyester starred Divine opposite closeted, once-teen-idol Tab Hunter. Since then, his films have become less controversial and more mainstream, although works such as Hairspray, Cry-Baby and Serial Mom still retain his trademark inventiveness. The film Hairspray was turned into a hit Broadway musical, which swept the 2003 Tony Awards, and a movie adaptation of the Broadway musical was released in theaters in 2007.

Waters' most recent film, the NC-17-rated A Dirty Shame, is a move back toward his earlier, more controversial work of the 1970s. He also had a cameo in Jackass: Number Two, which starred Dirty Shame co-star Johnny Knoxville. Waters has stated that his next movie will be a children's film titled "Fruitcake". It began shooting in January 2008. A gay American, Waters is an avid supporter of Gay rights and Gay pride.

 

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