From White Crane
MAY 26
Today is Memorial Day. is a federal holiday in the United States for
remembering the men and women who died while serving in the armed
forces. The holiday, which is celebrated every year on the last Monday
of May, was formerly known as Decoration Day and originated after the
Civil War to commemorate the Union and Confederate soldiers who died
in the war. By the 20th century, Memorial Day had been extended to
honor all Americans who have died while in the military service. It
typically marks the start of the summer vacation season, while Labor
Day marks its end.
In 1915, following the Second Battle of Ypres, Lieutenant Colonel John
McCrae, a physician with the Canadian Expeditionary Force, wrote the
poem, “In Flanders Fields". Its opening lines refer to the fields of
poppies that grew among the soldiers' graves in Flanders. As a result,
wearing poppies became associated with Memorial Day.
In Flanders Fields
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
1647 - ALSE YOUNG (sometimes cited as ACHSAH YOUNG or ALICE YOUNG)
died (b. 1600); Another victim of Leviticus, Alse Young was from
Windsor, Connecticut, and was the first person in the records executed
for witchcraft in the thirteen American colonies.
Witch hunts are seen as an attempt to eliminate female midwifery
skills and as a historical explanation why modern gynecology -
surprisingly enough - came to be practiced almost exclusively by males
in state run hospitals. In this view, the witch hunts began a process
of criminalization of birth control that eventually lead to an
enormous increase in birth rates that are described as the “population
explosion"" of early modern Europe.
1938 – PAULINE PARKER, New-Zealandic murderess, born; A woman from
Christchurch, New Zealand who, together with her friend Juliet Hume,
murdered her mother, Honora Parker, on June 22nd1954. It is believed
that the two girls killed Honora because Juliet and her father were
leaving shortly for South Africa and, though Pauline wanted to
accompany them, her mother forbade it. According to their own
accounts, Pauline and Juliet were devoted friends who collaborated on
a series of adventure novels which they hoped would be bought by a
Hollywood studio and made into epic films. The girls' friendship was
documented in detail by Pauline in a series of diaries during her
teenage years.
During their friendship, the girls invented their own personal
religion, with its own ideas on morality. They rejected Christianity
and worshipped their own saints, envisioning a parallel dimension
called “The Fourth World,” essentially their version of Heaven. The
Fourth World was a place that they felt they were already able to
enter occasionally, during moments of spiritual enlightenment. By
Pauline's account, they had achieved this spiritual enlightenment due
to their friendship. Eventually, the girls formulated a plan to flee
to Hollywood.
Shortly prior to this, Juliet had discovered her mother was having an
affair and her parents were separating. This devastated Juliet as well
as Pauline, who, due to having spent so much time with the Hulmes,
thought of Juliet's parents as her own. Both girls were unaware of the
fact that both sets of parents were collaborating at the time in an
effort to separate the girls, viewing their close friendship as
potentially unhealthy or homosexual (which, in 1950's, was thought of
both as a crime and a mental illness). The girls' story was made into
a film, Heavenly Creaturres, by Lord of the Rings producer-director
Peter Jackson, in 1994. Pauline was played by Melanie Lynskey and
Juliet by Kate Winslet.
1951 - SALLY KRISTEN RIDE was born on this date (d: 2012) was an
American physicist and a former NASA astronaut.. Ride joined NASA in
1978, and in 1983 became the first American woman to enter space. Age
32 at the time of that mission, she also became, and remains, the
youngest American to enter space. In 1987, she left NASA to work at
Stanford University's Center for International Security and Arms
Control.
Ride was one of 8,000 people to answer an advertisement in a newspaper
seeking applicants for the space program. As a result, she joined NASA
in 1978. Prior to her first space flight, she was subject to media
attention even being asked during a press conference "Do you weep when
things go wrong on the job?"
During her career, Ride served as the ground-based Capsule
Communicator (CapCom) for the second and third Space Shuttle flights
and helped develop the Space Shuttle's robot arm. On June 18, 1983,
she became the first American woman in space as a crew member on Space
Shuttle Challenger for. (She was preceded by two Soviet women,
Valentina Tereshkova in 1963 and Svetlana Savitskaya in 1982.) On the
first Challenger flight, during which the five-person crew deployed
two communications satellites and conducted pharmaceutical
experiments, Ride was the first woman to use the robot arm in space
and the first to use the arm to retrieve a satellite.
Her second space flight was in 1984, also on board the Challenger. She
spent a total of more than 343 hours in space. Ride, who had completed
eight months of training for her third flight when the Space Shuttle
Challenger accident occurred, Ride was named to the presidential
commission investigating the accident and headed its subcommittee on
operations. Following the investigation, Ride was assigned to NASA
headquarters in Washington D.C., where she led NASA's first strategic
planning effort, authored a report entitled "Leadership and America’s
Future in Space", and founded NASA's Office of Exploration.
In 1987, Ride left her position in Washington, D.C., to work at the
Stanford University Center for International Security and Arms
Control. In 1989, she became a professor of physics at the University
of California, Davis and Director of the California Space Institute.
During the mid 1990s until her death, Ride led the public outreach
efforts in cooperation with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and UCSD,
which permitted middle school students to study imagery of the Earth
and moon. In 2003, she was asked to serve on the Space Shuttle
Columbia Investigation Board. She was the president and CEO of Sally
Ride Science, a company she founded in 2001 that creates entertaining
science programs and publications for upper elementary and middle
school students, with a particular focus on girls.
According to Roger Boisjoly, the engineer who warned of the technical
problems that led to the Challenger accident, Ride was the only public
figure to show support for him when he went public with his
pre-disaster warnings (after the entire workforce of Morton-Thiokol
shunned him). Sally Ride hugged him publicly to show her support for
his efforts. Ride wrote or co-wrote five books on space aimed at
children, with the goal of encouraging children to study science.
Ride endorsed Barack Obama for president in 2008. She was a member of
the Review of United States Human Space Flight Plans Committee, an
independent review requested by the Office of Science and Technology
Planning (OSTP) on May 7, 2009.
Ride married fellow NASA astronaut Steve Hawley in 1982; they divorced
in 1987. From 1985 until her death, Ride's partner, who is female, was
Tam E. O'Shaughnessy, a professor emerita of school psychology at San
Diego State University, and a childhood friend who met Ride when both
were aspiring tennis players. O'Shaughnessy became a science teacher
and writer and, later, the chief operating officer and executive vice
president of Ride's company, Sally Ride Science. She co-authored
several books with Ride. Their relationship of 27 years was revealed
in Ride's obituary, which was released by Sally Ride Science and
confirmed by Ride's sister. Her sister stated that Ride preferred to
keep this information private during her life
The Challenger commander, Robert L. Crippen, said he chose her for the
1983 mission in part because of her expertise with the device. She was
part of a crew of five that spent about six days in space, during
which she used the arm to deploy and retrieve a satellite.
At Cape Canaveral, many in the crowd of 250,000 that watched the
launching wore T-shirts that said, "Ride, Sally Ride" - from the
lyrics of the song "Mustang Sally."
The next day, Gloria Steinem, editor of Ms. magazine at the time,
said, "Millions of little girls are going to sit by their television
sets and see they can be astronauts, heroes, explorers and
scientists."
When the shuttle landed, Dr. Ride told reporters, "I'm sure it was the
most fun that I'll ever have in my life."
1951 - DONALD MACLEAN and GUY BURGESS, British spies; No…both spies
were not born on the same day. But it is the day that the two British
Foreign Office Officials defected to Russia, setting in motion an
English witch hunt as vicious as America’s contemporary McCarthy
investigations. Unfortunately for their gay brothers, and especially
for their old Oxford classmates, Maclean and Burgess were homosexuals.
Their actions brought new meaning to the dreaded term “security risk”
and cost numerous innocent gay men and women their livelihoods and, in
some cases, (as in the mathematician Alan Turing) their lives. No,
Virginia, not all gay men are good gay men.
1954 – ALAN HOLLINGHURST, British novelist and poet, born; Winner of
the 2004 Booker Prize for The Line of Beauty. His poetry collections
include Isherwood is at Santa Monica from the Oxford: Sycamore Press
and Confidential Chats with Boys, Oxford: Sycamore Press 1982. He was
the was The Times Literary Supplement’s deputy editor from 1982 to
1995. In 1989, he won the Somerset Maugham Award for The Swimming Pool
Library. In 1994, he won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for
fiction with The Folding Star.
1985 - SARAH DILYS OUTEN MBEFRGS is an English athlete and adventurer
born on this date. She is also a motivational speaker in the UK and
internationally. In addition to rowing across the Atlantic Ocean,
Outen was the first woman and the youngest person to row solo across
the Indian Ocean and also the Pacific Ocean, from Japan to Alaska in
2013.
On the North Pacific row she battled dangerous seas, isolation, cargo
ships, sickness and currents that often tossed her boat in the wrong
direction. She was nearly hit by a cargo ship after her radar failed.
Outen described seeing a "big black wall" coming through mist in a
phone interview posted on her website.
On September 23, 2013, after 150 days and 3,750 miles at sea, she
became the first woman to row solo across the North Pacific ocean.
Outen arrived at Adak Island in the Aleutian Islands, rowing to within
half a mile of a rocky coastline before being towed through the
channel between Adak and Kagalaska Island. She was originally bound
for Canada, but punishing currents and inclement weather forced her to
change destinations for Alaska.
She also tweeted about whiteout fog and exhaustion-induced
hallucinations in the final, treacherous miles to Adak. The 3,750
miles took Outen 150 days to complete. In 2009, Outen became the first
woman to row solo across the Indian Ocean. Outen got engaged to her
girlfriend while on the journey.
Tweeted Outen upon arriving on the Alaskan shoreline: "Wobbled my way
ashore, patted Happy Socks. Then hugged... Relief. Joy. Disbelief.
Happy happy days."
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TODAY'S GAY WISDOM
Gay Sensibility
By Bob Barzan
Just how different are Gay men from other men?
How do Gay men in industrial urban societies compare with those who
live in agrarian, rural, tribal or other types of societies? Is there
a universal Gay sensibility that goes beyond our desire to form
affectional and sexual relationships with other men? If there is such
a sensibility, what are its characteristics, and what effect does
oppression and homophobia have on how we express our Gayness?
Much is being written and said about these questions in books, talk
shows and journal articles. Dean Hamer and Peter Copeland's new book,
"The Science of Desire: The Search for the Gay Gene and the Biology of
Behavior," approaches the question from a genetics point of view and
their findings are challenging religious, sexual, social and legal
thinking. In time their discoveries may set the stage for a major
transition of how humans understand their sexuality, but as they also
point out, religious and social biases often keep people from
believing, and often denying, their own experiences.
This issue of White Crane focuses on the notion of Gay sensibility
with several provocative articles. First is an essay from the noted
commentator on contemporary culture, Jamake Highwater. He brings the
discussion of Gayness beyond the myopic U.S. perspective, and
challenges the notion of a transcultural, transtemporal Gay
sensibility. He reminds us that we have more in common with other
humans than we have differences from them, but that Gay men in our
society have a special role as outsiders. The essay comes from his new
book, The Language of Vision: Meditations on Myth and Metaphor.
Following Highwater's article is an interview with Collin Brown,
[former] director of Body Electric School. Collin discusses the long
forgotten spiritual role of sacred intimates and how they teach the
use of the erotic as a doorway to our emotions and creativity. Of
course, it's Gay men who are on the cutting edge of this practice.
Why? Is there something about us, or about our experience, or both,
that primes us for such activity and experimentation in the area of
sex? Collin also discusses how certain men, those who are erotically
gifted, are treated as dysfunctional. Are these men another type of
outsider?
Next is an excerpt of Edward Carpenter's remarkable essay
"Intermediate Types Among Primitive Folk," written in 1914. What's
exceptional about his essay is not so much the noteworthy
anthropological look at the religious role of Gay men in primal
societies world-wide, but rather his methodical and well thought out
speculations about an explanation for this role. Carpenter speculates
that it is not necessarily because of any intrinsic quality that may
make us suited as spiritual guides, but rather a consequence of our
position as outsiders.
It seems to me that some elements of contemporary Gay society have
focused on this difference from the norm in their use of the word
"queer." Unfortunately it sometimes seems that many of us who use this
word are fixated on being different, and both Edward Carpenter and
Jamake Highwater remind us that there is a mythical and prophetic role
in being an outsider; being different is not enough.
An excerpt from White Crane Editor's Note, Issue #23, Winter 1995
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