Miscellaneaopolis

The miscellanea that doesn't quite fit elsewhere........

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THIS DAY IN GAY HISTORY

based on: The White Crane Institute's 'Gay Wisdom', Gay Birthdays, Gay For Today, Famous GLBT, glbt-Gay Encylopedia, Today in Gay History, Wikipedia, and more …

June 11

1877 - Born: Renée Vivien (d.1909), who had many affairs with women, openly celebrated lesboerotic love in her poetry and dreamed of women-controlled spaces in an era when most women were still domestically confined.

Vivien was born Pauline Mary Tarn in Paddington, England, into a prosperous family of merchants. Pauline and her sister attended school in Paris until their father died when Pauline was nine. Their mother decided to return to England, which dismayed Pauline since she already identified herself as French, a fact that would influence her writing and thinking. Her life in England was not pleasant. Her mother tried to have Pauline declared insane in order to acquire the money left directly to her daughter. The magistrates sided with Pauline, who was made a ward of the court until she reached her majority in 1898 and returned to Paris. Once there, Pauline changed her name, first to René or R. Vivien, to signify her "rebirth."

Though she had begun writing in English at the age of six, as an adult she wrote only in French, and at first pretended that the romantic sonnets contained in Etudes et Préludes (Etudes and Preludes, 1901), and Cendres et Poussières (Ashes and Dust, 1902), were written by a man. In 1903, she altered her first name slightly to the feminine Renée on the cover of Evocations (1903), a transformation that initially took her readers by surprise.

At the end of 1899, Vivien's childhood friend, Violet Shilleto, introduced her to Natalie Clifford Barney, the wealthy and beautiful American, who was already leading an active lesbian life in Paris. As Vivien recounted in her novel Une Femme m'apparut (A Woman Appeared to Me, 1904), she was almost instantly fixated by the magnetic personality of Barney:

"I would evoke over and over again the faraway hour when I saw her for the first time, and the shudder which ran down my spine when my eyes met her eyes of mortal steel. ... I had a dim premonition that this woman would determine the pattern of my destiny, and that her face was the fearful face of my Future."

Much of Vivien's work was inspired by their relationship. In the summer of 1900, they studied classical Greek for several weeks. Vivien, the apter pupil, was soon writing verse imitative of Sappho's, and her first book, Etudes and Préludes, was published in 1901.

Vivien was tormented by Barney's infidelities and by the death in 1901 of Violet Shilleto, who was one of the major inspirations for Vivien's poetry, which is filled with images of the purple flower. While Barney was away in Bar Harbor, Vivien, on hearing false rumors of Barney's impending marriage, broke with Barney and then tried, for the second or third time in her life, to commit suicide.

At the end of 1901, Vivien met the Baroness Hélène de Zuylen de Nyevelt, a Rothschild, with whom she would spend the next several years. Most of Vivien's work is dedicated to "H.L.C.B.," the initials of the Baroness's first names.

But Barney briefly reignited her affair with Vivien in 1904 when the two ran off together to Lesbos, where they hoped to establish a Sapphic circle of artists. The project was abandoned when Vivien decided to rekindle her relationship with the Baroness.

In 1906, the Baroness ended her relationship with Vivien, who went on to have affairs with a singer and at least two members of the demimonde. Eventually, she spent most of her time shut up in her apartmenton the Bois de Boulogne. There she nailed the windows closed and filled the rooms with buddhas and incense. At other times, she traveled widely, including to many parts of Europe and Asia as well as to Turkey, Mytilene, and Hawaii.

Despite her erratic lifestyleshe continued to write prolifically. She became increasingly alcoholic and anorexic and, after making a deathbed conversion to Catholicism, she died of those two diseases on November 18, 1909.

Jimmy Donahue with Duchess of Windsor

1915 – James Paul Jimmy Donahue Jr. (d.1966) was an heir to the Woolworth estate and a noted New York City socialite.

Jimmy Donahue was the second son of James Paul Donahue (1887-1931), the scion of an Irish American family which had made a fortune in the fat rendering business (Retail Butchers’ Fat Rendering Company), by his wife Jessie Woolworth Donahue (1886-1971), one of the three daughters of Frank Winfield Woolworth, founder of the Woolworth retail chain. His older brother was Woolworth Donahue (1913-1972) who brought a cheetah to Cannes following a safari.

Donahue was a nephew of Edna Woolworth (1883–1917), a wealthy socialite[4] and a nephew by marriage of Franklyn Laws Hutton (1877–1940), a co-founder of the brokerage firm E. F. Hutton & Co. He was also the first cousin and confidante of the American socialite Barbara Hutton (1912–1979).

Donahue was a high school dropout. He initially attended the Hun School at Princeton, NJ, and after his parents were advised to remove him from there, he was shifted to Choate Rosemary Hall in Connecticut. However, he was expelled from that school at age 17. Following his expulsion from Choate he took tap dance lessons with the tap dance master Bill "Bojangles" Robinson.

Having been born into a wealthy family, Donahue never felt the need to earn a living, and indeed he lived lavishly, travelling the world with a valet in tow and staying at the most expensive hotels. He was known within his circle by the nickname "Jeem".

A playboy by nature, he was a gay man although he claimed he had had a five-year affair with Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor, the wife of the Duke of Windsor and former King Edward VIII. This claim is endorsed by Lady Pamela Hicks, daughter of Earl Mountbatten of Burma and a cousin of the Duke of Windsor. Jessie Donahue had several mansions built, including one on Palm beach, Florida where the Duke and Duchess stayed. Jimmy also reportedly kicked the Duchess in the shin during the Windsors visit from the Bahamas where the duke was governor during the war."The Windsor Story," by Charles J.V. Murphy and J. Bryan III, portrays the former king as a man utterly dominated by his wife, who often treated him with contempt. They describe her five-year relationship with Jimmy Donahue Jr., a playboy and homosexual. When the duke complained, she reportedly said, "What could possibly be more harmless? Everybody knows what Jimmy is. Why, his friends call me the Queen of the Fairies."

He is buried in the Woolworth Family Mausoleum at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, New York, having died in 1966 at the age of 51.

Morris Foote (front second from right) at early Pride rally

1925 – Morris Foote fled Boise, Idaho's gay witchhunt in 1955 but returned to help build the gay community.

When Boise, Idaho’s “homosexual panic” was ignited in the pages of the Idaho Statesman newspaper in November 1955, Morris Foote was a thirty-year-old elevator operator at Idaho’s state capitol building. He had no idea that what he’d been doing with other consenting adult men could get him arrested. But after reading about the first arrests of homosexual men and allegations of a homosexual ring involving a group of adult men and 100 teenagers, Morris Foote wasn’t going to wait around to see what happened. He left Boise for his hometown of Middleton, Idaho, and didn’t set foot in Boise again for more than two decades.

The police questioned nearly fifteen hundred Boise citizens and gathered the names of hundreds of suspected homosexuals by the time the investigation ran its course the following year. All told, sixteen men were arrested on charges ranging from “lewd and lascivious conduct with minor children under the age of sixteen” to “infamous crimes against nature.” Of the sixteen, ten went to jail, including several whose only crime had been to engage in sex with another consenting adult male.

During the years Morris Foote spent in self-imposed exile he worked as a farmer and lived just down the road from the house where he grew up. In the late 1970s, after hearing about a gay bar in Boise, he returned to the city from which he’d fled and made his way into the LGBT civil rights movement through the Metropolitan Community Church (MCC), a Christian church whose membership is primarily LGBT.

In the early 1980s, Morris attended his first public protest against the virulently anti-gay Rev. Jerry Falwell and in 1990, as a board member of Your Family, Friends and Neighbors, helped to plan Boise’s first Gay and Lesbian Freedom Parade and Festival, which was held on Saturday, June 23, 1990.

1947 – Allan Gurganus is an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist whose work, which includes Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All and Local Souls, is often influenced by and set in his native North Carolina.

Gurganus was born in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. He first trained as a painter, studying at the University of Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. He served three years with the United States Navy during the Vietnam War and began writing during his time on the USS Yorktown. He says of that time: "Imagine 4,000 men, ages 18 to 23 … floating around in the South China sea for 35 days … the mischief and the energy and the volatility and the testosterone and the erotic swill." After that, he graduated from Sarah Lawrence College where he studied with Grace Paley. He studied with John Cheever and Stanley Elkin at the University of Iowa in the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Cheever sold Gurganus's short story "Minor Heroism" to The New Yorker without telling Gurganus beforehand.

His best known work is his 1989 debut novel, Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, which was on the New York Times Best Seller list for eight months. It won the Sue Kaufman Prize from The American Academy of Arts and Letters, was a main selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club, and sold over four million copies. It was made into a CBS television play, with Cicely Tyson winning one of its four Emmy Awards as best supporting actress in the role of the freed slave Castalia. The novel was also adapted for a one-woman Broadway play, starring Ellen Burstyn, in 2003.

He followed it with a collection of stories called White People, and, finally, a second novel in 1997, the all-gay Manhattan comic tragedy Plays Well with Others. A very fine quartet of novellas came in 2001, The Practical Heart, followed by Local Souls, a trio of novellas, again returning to the fictional Falls of his native North Carolina.

Brady (with Stephens) receives Légion d'Honneur

1959 – Stephen Brady is a former Australian career diplomat. In 1999 he and his partner Peter Stephens became the world's first officially acknowledged same sex ambassadorial couple, when they were presented to Queen Margrethe II of Denmark at the start of Brady's posting as Australian Ambassador to Denmark. From September 2008 to June 2014 he was the Official Secretary to the Governor-General of Australia. During this time he was also Secretary of the Council of the Order of Australia and Secretary of the Bravery Decorations Council. In March 2014 his appointment as Ambassador to the French Republic, with concurrent accreditation to the Kingdom of Morocco, Algeria, Mauritania and the Principality of Monaco was announced.

Brady was born in London on 11 June 1959 to Geoffrey Vincent Brady and his wife Susanne. The family moved to Australia in 1960, where Brady was educated at Canberra Grammar School and the Australian National University. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree with Honours in international relations in 1981.

In February 1999 he made headlines as Australia's and the world's first openly gay ambassador when he formally presented his partner Peter Stephens to Queen Margrethe II of Denmark. Stephens' passport was initially endorsed "Bearer is a member of the domestic household of the Ambassador", until Brady, who had been in a committed relationship with Stephens since 1982, insisted that it be changed.

On 31 March 2014 his appointment as Australian Ambassador to France was announced. In May 2015 he reportedly offered his resignation (which was not accepted) to Australia's DFAT after an incident in which he refused to follow an instruction given by the travelling party of the Australian Prime Minister, after his partner Peter Stephens was told to stay in the car and not greet Prime Minister Abbott at an unofficial airport arrival in France. Prime Minister Abbott later described Brady as 'a fine servant of Australia.'

Towards the end of his posting in Paris, the French State appointed Brady as a Commandeur of the Légion d'Honneur for his outstanding leadership of the bilateral relationship, only the second Australian civilian to receive the level of award after the Rt Hon Sir Ninian Stephen, a former Governor-General.

2008 - Norway first granted its LGBT citizens the right to civil unions way back in 1993. Today in 2008 it legalized same-sex marriage. Members of of Parliament in Norway approved a bill that finally allowed same-sex couples to marry. It was approved by 84 votes to 41. The new law made marriage in Norway gender neutral. The Scandinavian country already allowed Gay and Lesbian couples to enter into civil partnerships, but LGBT rights groups had long complained the law did not go far enough. Now it does.

2010 - Iceland approved Gay Marriage. Most strikingly it was the first country to do so with a Unanimous Vote! Iceland, the only country in the world to have an openly gay head of state, passed the law allowing same-sex partners to get married in a vote which met with no political resistance. The Althingi parliament voted 49 to zero to change the wording of marriage legislation to include matrimony between "man and man, woman and woman,"

in addition to unions between men and women. Iceland, a socially tolerant island nation of about 320,000 people, became the first country to elect an openly gay head of state in 2009 when Social Democrat Johanna Sigurðardóttir became prime minister after being nominated by her party. "The attitude in Iceland is fairly pragmatic," said Gunnar Helgi Kristinsson, a political scientist at the University of Iceland. "It (gay marriage) has not been a big issue in national politics — it's not been controversial."

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The Perseus Cluster of Galaxies

Credits: Jean-Charles Cuillandre, CFHT, Giovanni Anselmi, Coelum Astronomia, Hawaiian Starlight

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[parisartyparisexy]

THIS DAY IN GAY HISTORY

based on: The White Crane Institute's 'Gay Wisdom', Gay Birthdays, Gay For Today, Famous GLBT, glbt-Gay Encylopedia, Today in Gay History, Wikipedia, and more …

June 10

323 BC – Alexander The Great died (b.356 BC). Alexander was not only a great soldier, but he was also renowned for his love of his comrade-in-arms Hephaestion.

Hephaestion was clearly his lover. Alexander, like many ancient Greeks, cultivated an ideal of heroic friendship that did not exclude sexual expression. He carried with him on his conquests a copy of the Iliad, and sought to emulate its heroes. When he first crossed into Asia and reached Troy, he sacrificed on the tomb of Achilles while Hephaestion did the same on that of Patroclus. So close did Alexander feel to Hephaestion that when the captured women of the Persian King's household mistakenly threw themselves at Hephaestion's feet rather than at his own, he found no offense in this and excused them by saying that his friend was another Alexander. Finally, his grief at the death of Hephaestion, one year before his own, was also — in its intensity and public display — to parallel that of the Homeric lovers.

Alexander died in the palace of Nebuchadrezzar II of Babylon. He was just one month short of attaining 33 years of age.

1566 – Switzerland: Bartholome Tecia, 15, is convicted of sodomy and drowned in the Rhone River. On 10 June 2013, at the initiative of Network, a Swiss non-governmental organization, a commemorative plaque was unveiled on the banks of the Rhone in Geneva at the site of Bartholome's murder.

"In 1566, as Bartholomé was led to his death, no one stood, as we stand today, to decry the State-sanctioned killing of a child on suspicion of homosexuality," said Marcia V.J. Kran of the UN Human Rights Office. "No one was prepared, as we are today, to challenge homophobic prejudice, to insist on the equal worth and equal rights of every person, irrespective of their sexual orientation and gender identity. It would be beautiful to think that out of this one sad, lonely death in the Rhone, more than four centuries ago, might come some good; that passers-by who see this plaque will pause and reflect on the folly of homophobia; and that we can all draw from Bartholomé's story the strength to continue our modern day struggle to achieve equality for LGBT people everywhere."

1911 – The British playwright Terence Rattigan, was born on this date (d.1977). One of England's most popular 20th century dramatists, he was born in London of Irish extraction, educated at Harrow and Trinity College, Oxford, and his plays are generally situated within an upper middle class background. His plays were more or less pushed off the stage by the works of Osborne, Wesker, Pinter and Arden and were considered passé in the 60s, so he never really received his due as a playwright.

Yet, his plays have held up very well, even as the reputations of his once-revolutionary successors have declined a bit. Rattigan's The Browning Version (1948), an effective and masterful study of failure, may be seen as a precursor of Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The horror of a particular type of marriage, in which the pain inflicted on each partner is ultimately the pleasure of both, is as fully explored in Rattigan's one-act play as it is in Albee's much longer drama.

It is not difficult to understand why Rattigan so admired the talents of Joe Orton and was instrumental in helping to get the young writer's early plays produced. A recent review of a New York production of The Browning Version implied, snidely, that a more balanced view of marriage might have come from a heterosexual playwright. Until that review, there were probably no more than three New York theater-goers who ever conceived of Terence Rattigan as anything but straight. Rattigan was homosexual, with a string of lovers but no long-term partners.

It has been claimed that his work is essentially autobiographical, containing coded references to his sexuality, which he kept secret from all but his closest friends. There is some truth in this, but it gets distorted; for example, the repeated claim that Rattigan originally wrote The Deep Blue Sea as a play about male lovers, turning into a heterosexual play at the last minute, is unfounded. His female characters are written as females and are in no sense 'men in drag'.

Fifteen years after his death, largely through a revival of The Deep Blue Sea, at the Almeida Theatre, London, directed by Karel Reisz, Rattigan has increasingly been seen as one of the century's finest playwrights, an expert choreographer of emotion, and an anatomist of human emotional pain. A string of successful revivals followed, including Man and Boy at the Duchess Theatre, London, in 2005: In Praise of Love at the Chichester Festival Theatre; and Separate Tables at the Royal Exchange, Manchester, in 2006.

1922 – Actress Judy Garland, born Frances Gumm (d.1969), is widely considered a gay icon; The Advocate has called Garland "The Elvis of homosexuals." The reasons frequently given for her standing as an icon among gay men are admiration of her ability as a performer, the way her personal struggles seemed to mirror those of gay men in America during the height of her fame, and her value as a camp figure. Garland's role as Dorothy Gale in The Wizard of Oz is particularly noted for contributing to this status.

The tragic aspects of gay identification with Garland were being discussed in the mainstream as early as 1967. Time magazine, in reviewing Garland's 1967 Palace Theatre engagement, disparagingly noted that a "disproportionate part of her nightly claque seems to be homosexual." It goes on to say that "[t]he boys in the tight trousers" (a phrase Time repeatedly used to describe gay men, as when it described "ecstatic young men in tight trousers pranc[ing] down the aisles to toss bouquets of roses" to another gay icon, Marlene Dietrich)would "roll their eyes, tear at their hair and practically levitate from their seats" during Garland's performances. Time then attempted to explain Garland's appeal to the homosexual, consulting psychiatrists who opined that "the attraction [to Garland] might be made considerably stronger by the fact that she has survived so many problems; homosexuals identify with that kind of hysteria" and that "Judy was beaten up by life, embattled, and ultimately had to become more masculine. She has the power that homosexuals would like to have, and they attempt to attain it by idolizing her."

In discussing Judy Garland's camp appeal, gay film scholar Richard Dyer asserts Garland is camp because she is "imitable, her appearance and gestures copiable in drag acts". He calls her "ordinariness" in her early MGM films camp in their "failed seriousness" and her later style "wonderfully over-the-top." Garland herself acknowledged her camp appeal during her lifetime, saying "When I die I have visions of fags singing 'Over the Rainbow' and the flag at Fire Island being flown at half mast."

Other connections between Garland and LGBT people include the slang term "Friend of Dorothy", which likely derives from Garland's portrayal of Dorothy Gale in The Wizard of Oz and became a code phrase gay people used to identify each other. Dorothy's journey from Kansas to Oz "mirrored many gay men’s desires to escape the black-and-white limitations of small town life...for big, colorful cities filled with quirky, gender-bending characters who would welcome them."

Another connection is the rainbow flag, symbol of the LGBT communities which may have been inspired, in part, by Garland's song "Over the Rainbow." Garland's performance of this song has been described as "the sound of the closet," speaking to gay men whose image "they presented in their own public lives was often at odds with a truer sense of self that mainstream society would not condone."

Judy Garland's father and other significant people in her life were also gay. Frank Gumm would apparently seduce or at least keep company with very young men or older teens, then move on when told to leave or before his activities could be discovered. Garland's husband Vincente Minnelli was rumored to be a closeted bisexual. From the beginning of her Hollywood career, Garland liked to visit gay bars with openly gay friends Roger Edens and George Cukor, to the chagrin of her handlers at MGM. While Garland did not specifically attempt to connect with gay audiences, she was known to accept and respect gay people, giving them a visibility they did not often enjoy.

1964 – Born: Ben Daniels, an English actor who has won a Laurence Olivier Theatre Award. Born in Nuneaton, Warwickshire, England, the six-feet tall, blonde-haired and blue-eyed Daniels trained at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art for three years.

Since then, has appeared in many UK television shows and dramas, such as The Lost Language of Cranes (1991), Soldier Soldier (1991-1997), A Touch of Frost (1992-present), Outside Edge (1994), Cutting It (2002-2005) (as the philanderer Finn Bevan), and The Virgin Queen (2005). He played the role of Mercutio in the 1994 TV production of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, and the part of Jonathan in the 1997 Emmy-nominated TV film, David. In Ian Fleming: Bondmaker (2005), Daniel performed as the famous English author and journalist Ian Fleming. He appeared in the BBC television mini-series The State Within (2006).

Daniels may be best known to American audiences for his portrayal of Tony in the 1996 gay film Beautiful Thing, written by Jonathan Harvey and based on his play of the same name.

Daniels is openly gay and lives in south London. He remarked: "Out? I've never been in." He lives with actor Ian Gelder. They began seeing each other during a 1993 production of Joe Orton's Entertaining Mr Sloane.

Daniels was already sure of his sexuality in his teens, although he did not discuss the matter with his parents because they did not have a very close emotional relationship. He was "cautious about mentioning it when I left drama school, because AIDS was terrifying everyone and there was a huge homophobic backlash". He decided to come out at the age of 24, while appearing in an all-star benefit performance of Martin Sherman's Bent.

Daniels said in an interview:

"Homophobia is still shockingly prevalent in film and TV. I know I've lost work because of being gay, and it is always an issue. Even on a serious BBC Two drama, there will be some suit in some office going, "Hmmm, isn't he a poof?" I don't consider myself politically gay, but whenever I catch a whiff of that now, I'm on it like a ton of bricks."

1974 – Dustin Lance Black is an American screenwriter, director, film and television producer, and LGBT rights activist. He has won two Writers Guild of America Awards for his work on the television series Big Love and an Academy Award for the 2008 film Milk.

Black was born in Sacramento, California and grew up in a Mormon household, in San Antonio, Texas and later moved to Salinas, California when his mother remarried. His father had been the Mormon missionary who had baptized Black's mother earlier.

Growing up surrounded by Mormon culture and military bases, Black worried about his sexuality. He told himself, "I'm going to hell. And if I ever admit it, I'll be hurt, and I'll be brought down" when he found himself attracted to a boy in his neighborhood at the age of six or seven. He says that his "acute awareness" of his sexuality made him dark, shy and at times suicidal, but he came out in his senior year of college.

Black attended the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Theater, Film, and Television (UCLA) while apprenticing with stage directors, taking acting jobs and working on theater lighting crews.

In 2000, he wrote and directed The Journey of Jared Price, a gay romance film, and Something Close to Heaven, a gay coming-of-age short film. In 2001, he directed and was a subject in the documentary On the Bus about a Nevada road trip and adventure at Burning Man taken by six gay men. Raised as Mormon, he was hired as the only such writer on the HBO drama series Big Love about a polygamistic family.

Black had first visited San Francisco in the early 1990s, while AIDS was devastating the city's gay community. Black said that, "Hearing about Harvey was about the only hopeful story there was at the time." He had first viewed Rob Epstein's documentary The Times of Harvey Milk when he was in college, and thought, "I just want to do something with this, why hasn't someone done something with this?" Researching Milk's life for three years, Black met with Milk's former aides Cleve Jones and Anne Kronenberg, as well as former San Francisco Mayor Art Agnos, and began to write a feature film screenplay encompassing the events of Milk's life. The screenplay was written on spec, butGus Van Sant signed on to direct the feature. which eventually won an Academy Award for Black.

Black has been in a relationship with British Olympic diver Tom Daley since 2013. They live together in London. In October 2015, it was announced that Black and Daley had become engaged. Daley and Black married at Bovey Castle in Devon on 6 May 2017.

In 2014, Black was one of eight potential commencement speakers invited by Pasadena City College, and he accepted. After school officials learned of nude pictures of Black having unprotected gay sex were leaked online, the college announced that Black had not been officially invited and that the unofficial invitation was "an honest error". Following talks between Black's and PCC's attorneys, the college board of trustees apologized and formally invited him.

1979 – (Donald Joseph) DJ Qualls is an American actor, producer, and model. He is best known for his work in films including Road Trip (2000), The New Guy (2002), Hustle & Flow (2005), and The Core (2003), and for several appearances on television series such as Breaking Bad, Supernatural, Scrubs, Lost, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, and The Big Bang Theory. He co-starred in the FX comedy series Legit, the Syfy horror series Z Nation, the Amazon Studios show The Man in the High Castle and CW’s Supernatural, where he plays fan-favorite recurring character Garth Fitzgerald IV.

Qualls was born in Nashville, Tennessee, one of five children. He was raised in Manchester, Tennessee, and attended school nearby. He was diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma at age fourteen; after two years of treatment, his cancer was said to be in remission. According to Qualls, the chemotherapy at an early age sped up his metabolism and impacted his growth, "It stopped my development," which explains his slender frame.

After graduating from Coffee County Central High School, where he was an active member in the Red Raider Band, Qualls attended King's College, London, where he studied English language and English literature. He returned to Tennessee enrolling at Belmont University in Nashville, where he also began acting in a local theater company.

In January 2020, Qualls came out as gay on his Twitter account, stating: Yep, I’m gay. Been gay this whole time. Tired of worrying about what it would do to my career," after announcing it at a Jim Jefferies show in San Diego. Qualls has been friends with Jeffries for several years. He has appeared on Jeffries’ comedy show before, in 2018, and worked with the Australian-born comedian’s series “Legit” in 2013.

Qualls revealed in May 2024 that he is currently in a relationship with fellow Supernatural actor Ty Olsson, and that the two have plans to get married.

2013 – The Cherry Grove Community House and Theatre, on Fire Island, opened in 1948, was added to the National Register of Historic Places. The theater was cited for being the oldest continuously operating gay and lesbian theater in the United States.

Lesbians and gay men were living freely and openly in a place called Cherry Grove, decades before the 1969 Stonewall riots in New York City helped launch the gay rights movement. The seaside resort on Fire Island, about 60 miles east of Manhattan, was known as far back as the late 1940s as a sanctuary where gay writers, actors and businesspeople from the city and beyond escaped to relax, hold hands and show affection in public.

Cherry Grove and the nearby Pines neighborhood are the predominantly gay communities on Fire Island, although the Pines developed its reputation as a haven decades after Cherry Grove.

It is only the third gay-rights landmark to get the federal designation, joining the Stonewall, where gays clashed with the New York Police Department for three days in 1969 over harassment, leading to the modern gay rights movement, and the Washington, D.C., home of Dr. Franklin E. Kameny, who became a gay rights activist after he was fired from his job with the Army Map Service in 1957 for refusing to answer questions about his sexual orientation.

"By the nature of its isolation and beauty, it became a safe haven for gay people, where they could not be afraid of repercussions from work, or anger from their families about being gay," said Thom "Panzi" Hansen, president of the Cherry Grove Arts Project. He and others noted there were occasional raids in which police would enforce laws prohibiting same-sex dancing or ticket people for lewd behavior, but largely because the island was so isolated from the mainland, they were generally left alone.

Landlords and businesses desperate for cash after the Depression, the 1938 hurricane and World War II generally overlooked their tenants' sexual orientation in order to fill what were then largely rental properties, locals said.

Every July Fourth, a ferry filled with men in drag travels from Cherry Grove to the Pines in a fun-loving commemoration of a man in drag being refused service at a bar in the Pines in 1976. The event commemorates the advances of gays, lesbians and transgender people in the ensuing decades.

Today's Gay Wisdom:

Dustin Lance Black:

On February 22, 2009, Black won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for Milk at the 81st Academy Awards. He wore a White Knot to the ceremony as a symbol of solidarity with the marriage equality movement. In his acceptance speech at the Oscar ceremony, he said:

"... When I was thirteen years old my beautiful mother and my father moved me from a conservative Mormon home in San Antonio, Texas to California and I heard the story of Harvey Milk and it gave me hope. It gave me the hope to live my life, it gave me the hope to one day I could live my life openly as who I am, and that maybe even I could fall in love and one day get married...' "I want to thank my mom, who has always loved me for who I am even when there was pressure not to...' "But most of all, if Harvey had not been taken from us 30 years ago, I think he would want me to say to all of the gay and lesbian kids out there tonight who have been told that they are less than by their churches, or by the government, or by their families, that you are beautiful, wonderful creatures of value, and that no matter what anyone tells you, God does love you and that very soon I promise you, you will have equal rights federally across this great nation of ours." "Thank you, and thank you God for giving us Harvey Milk." "... When I was thirteen years old my beautiful mother and my father moved me from a conservative Mormon home in San Antonio, Texas to California and I heard the story of Harvey Milk and it gave me hope. It gave me the hope to live my life, it gave me the hope to one day I could live my life openly as who I am, and that maybe even I could fall in love and one day get married...' "I want to thank my mom, who has always loved me for who I am even when there was pressure not to...' "But most of all, if Harvey had not been taken from us 30 years ago, I think he would want me to say to all of the gay and lesbian kids out there tonight who have been told that they are less than by their churches, or by the government, or by their families, that you are beautiful, wonderful creatures of value, and that no matter what anyone tells you, God does love you and that very soon I promise you, you will have equal rights federally across this great nation ours." "Thank you, and thank you God for giving us Harvey Milk."

[sandmandaddy69]

Alex Raymond

[chernobog13]

Stephen Hickman's fantastic art for the cover of The Shadow Strikes! (vol.1) #26 (December, 1991).

[chernobog13]

The weed of crime bears bitter fruit!

The Shadow in Chinatown by Michael Chukarski.

[vurg]

Flash Gordon(1980)-a poster by Renato Casaro

[chernobog13]

The Shadow by Stephen Hickman.

[crisisofinfinitemultiverses]

Space Encounter by Frank Frazetta (1988)

[chernobog13]

The Shadow by Michael Wm. Kaluta.

[portalibis]

R. Abrahami Eleazaris Uraltes chymisches Werck, c. 1735

Telegram / Facebook / Sacred Ibis fb group / Buy a Coffee

[memories-of-ancients]

Seated dog, Veracruz, Mexico, 550-950 AD

from The San Antonio Museum of Art

[vintagepromotions]

Poster for The Rake's Progress, an opera by Igor Stravinsky at the second annual San Francisco Opera Summer Festival Season (1982). Artwork featuring the Bedlam scene in the opera by David Hockney.

[pmamtraveller]

Astrological Clock (detail). San Marcos, Venice.

[parisartyparisexy]

THIS DAY IN GAY HISTORY

based on: The White Crane Institute's 'Gay Wisdom', Gay Birthdays, Gay For Today, Famous GLBT, glbt-Gay Encylopedia, Today in Gay History, Wikipedia, and more …

June 9

a cannon from the wreck of the Zeewijk

1727 – The merchant vessel Zeewijk wrecked itself on the Houtman Abrolhos islands off the coast of Western Australia on the 9th of June, 1727. Hitting a submerged reef, ten men drowned and two weeks passed before the crew could even launch a rescue boat. The desperate survivors used a single longboat to send 11 of their strongest men to Java for rescue - but they were never seen or heard from again. In the months that followed, the remaining crew were forced to build a new boat from scratch, using wood from the Zeewijk and material from surrounding islands.

During this time, two young sailors, Adriaen Spoor and Pieter Engels, were caught by their crewmen in "the abominable and god-forsaken deeds of Sodom and Gomorrah" and sentenced to death. They were abandoned on separate rocky islands and left to starve while the others escaped in their patchwork ship.

1891 – The American composer and lyricist Cole Porter was born on this date (d.1964). It was typical of the urbane songsmith to have hand-picked Cary Grant to play him in the Hollywood biopic of his life. Grant, then 42, and at the height of his attractive charms, is what Porter would have liked to have looked like. The Grant film, Night and Day, is an atrocity, but fascinating to watch, not only for its lies and deliberate distortions, but for the wild pleasure of watching Grant, in early middle age, attempt to play a Yale freshman. When, with his faintly absurd Cockney accent, he composes "Night and Day" to the accompaniment of amplified raindrops and a symphony orchestra, it is a moment to treasure. Of course the scene doesn't include Leslie Hutchinson, the black Grenadian singer who was Cole Porter's lover at the time and his muse for writing "Night and Day."

The original closet case, Porter was often photographed in the arms of beautiful women. Because he feared that the music-buying public would not take seriously love songs written by a homosexual, he lived the paradoxical life of an openly closeted gay man. Married to socialite Linda Lee Thomas, one of the most beautiful women of her generation (but variously reported as from eight to fourteen years Porter's senior), he publicly maintained a heterosexual facade while privately indulging in weekend all-male gatherings that included chorus boys, wartime servicemen, and Hollywood bit players

He had an affair in 1925 with Boris Kochno, a poet and Ballets Russes librettist. He and Leslie Hutchinson were longtime lovers while living in Paris. He also reportedly had a long relationship with his constant companion, Howard Sturges, a Boston socialite, as well as with architect Ed Tauch (for whom Porter wrote "Easy to Love"), choreographer Nelson Barclift (who inspired "You'd Be So Nice To Come Home To"), director John Wilson (who later married international society beauty Princess Nathalie Paley), and longtime friend Ray Kelly, whose children still receive half of the childless Porter's copyright royalties.

The recent film version of his life, De-Lovely, starring Kevin Cline as the conflicted songwriter of Gay lyrics in love with Ashley Judd who plays the role of Linda Lee Thomas — who in real life was considerably older then Porter and no beauty — was not much an improvement on telling Cole Porter's real life story. So goes Hollywood — but at least the current version does not hide his homosexual affairs under the carpet.

1938 – Charles Wuorinen is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer of contemporary classical music based in New York City.

Wuorinen was born on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City. Wuorinen began composing at age 5 and began piano lessons at 6. At 16 he was awarded the New York Philharmonic's Young Composers' Award and the John Harms Chorus premiered his choral work O Filii et Filiae at Town Hall on May 2, 1954.

His catalog of more than 260 compositions includes works for orchestra, opera, and chamber music, as well as solo instrumental and vocal works. Salman Rushdie and Annie Proulx have collaborated with him. Wuorinen's work has been described as serialist, but he has come to disparage that term as meaningless.

Wuorinen has been active as a performer, a pianist and a conductor of his own works as well as other 20th-century repertoire. His orchestral appearances have included the Cleveland Orchestra, Chicago Symphony, New York Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, and the American Composers Orchestra. He conducted the American, and later the West Coast, premieres of Morton Feldman's monodrama Neither.

Between 2008 and 2012, Wuorinen composed the opera Brokeback Mountain, based on Annie Proulx's short story of the same name and with a libretto adapted by Proulx. The piece premiered on 28 January 2014 at the Teatro Real in Madrid to mixed reviews.

Wuorinen resides in New York City and Long Valley, New Jersey. He is married to his longtime partner and manager, Howard Stokar.

1942 – (Raymond) Ossie Clark (d.1996) was an English fashion designer who was a major figure in the Swinging Sixties scene in London and the fashion industry in that era. Clark is now renowned for his vintage designs by present-day designers.

Clark is compared to the 1960s fashion greats Mary Quant and Biba and influenced many other designers, including Yves Saint Laurent, Anna Sui and Tom Ford. Manolo Blahnik has said of Ossie Clark's work: "He created an incredible magic with the body and achieved what fashion should do — produce desire." Ossie Clark and Ossie Clark for Radley clothes are highly sought after, and are worn by well known models like Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell.

While attending college in Manchester, Clark was introduced to Celia Birtwell by a close friend. The pair started out as just good friends but that friendship soon developed into a love affair. Ossie also became good friends with artist David Hockney during this period. Clark and Hockney took an inspirational trip to New York together while still at college where they made many valuable connections in the fashion, art and entertainment communities. The friends are widely rumored to have been lovers with a volatile relationship.

In the late 1960s, Clark hit a rich vein for his flamboyant clothing range. The fashion press dubbed Ossie "The King Of King's Road". Clark pronounced himself a "master cutter. It's all in my brain and fingers and there's no-one in the world to touch me. I can do everything myself." Clark's great idol was the famous dancer Nijinsky and his love of dance inspired his clothes to be free moving and not to restrict the female form. This style of dressing became quite popular in the 1970s thanks in large part to the popularity of Clark's clothing.

Clark was not just popular in London, but also in New York and Paris. He dressed the rich and famous who inhabited the beau monde of the late 1960s and early 1970s of London. Clark got in on the ground floor of many of the popular performers and actors of the time period and was accepted in their circles when many other designers were not. This gave him many advantages to dress the rich and famous. Clark made many stage costumes for Mick Jagger, the Beatles, Marianne Faithfull and Liza Minnelli, among others.

In 1969, he married Celia Birtwell and had two sons Albert and George, together. Clark had long hoped for a large family of his own and his children were a great joy in his life. However, he also had a number of homosexual affairs.

Clark freely adopted the hedonistic lifestyle of the 1960s and 1970s: his drug use greatly impacted on his emotional state and finances. Clark and Birtwell divorced in the 1970s. This started a slow downward spiral for Ossie, who never recovered emotionally from the separation from Birtwell and his two children. With his family structure and work stability now gone, his creative output became strained.

In 1996, 54 year old Ossie was stabbed to death in his council flat in Kensington and Chelsea, London, by his then 28 year old Italian former lover, Diego Cogolato. Cogolato was convicted of manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility and jailed for six years.

Ossie Clark is featured in David Hockney's 1970 painting Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy (above). It now hangs in the Tate Britain gallery on Millbank and is one of the most visited paintings in Britain.

1958 – Kirk Talley is a Southern Gospel performer/songwriter. He sang for several years with the Cathedral Quartet, The Hoppers and The Talleys.

Born in Johnson City, Tennessee, Talley began performing Southern Gospel Music in 1972. During his time with The Cathedrals, Talley wrote his first #1 song "Step Into the Water". The song remained at the top of the charts for nine months.

While with the Talleys, Kirk wrote the song "He Is Here". The Talleys received the 1992 Dove Award for 'Song of the Year' for this song. The song was also nominated for the 34th annual Grammy Awards that same year.

Kirk began a solo career in 1993. He has been traveling and singing all across the United States and into Canada. Kirk's first "Singing News" #1 as a soloist came from his project titled "I Speak to You". The song, "Joy on the Other Side of Jordan" was only the beginning for Kirk's list of accomplishments.

In 2003 it was revealed that Kirk was experiencing homosexual feelings, which he struggled to suppress. Walbert Keith Farmer was indicted for extortion, after authorities stated he tried to blackmail Kirk by threatening to reveal that the singer was gay. FBI agents arrested 39-year-old Farmer after he met Kirk Talley. An FBI agent's affidavit stated that Farmer told Talley that he would reveal Talley was homosexual, unless Talley paid him nearly 15-thousand dollars.

The agent's affidavit also stated that Talley felt the Internet was the only place he could express his distress about his homosexual feelings. Farmer's attorney says Talley and his client met in an Internet chat room. Kirk admitted this to his fans, and also admitted to the fact that his first marriage ended due to this issue.

Various members of the clergy developed an intense plan to change Kirk's sexual orientation. It is reported that he still experiences homosexual feelings to this day, with which he continues to struggle. He is said to have "pulled his life together", but admits to struggling daily with the temptation to act on his homosexual urges.

1986 – Adamo Ruggiero, born in Mississauga, Ontario, is an Italian-Canadian actor best known for his role of Marco Del Rossi in Degrassi: The Next Generation.

Ruggiero has been acting since the age of seven or eight. He has starred in many plays including Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and Bye Bye Birdie. After initially auditioning for the role of Craig Manning (a role currently played by Jake Epstein), he joined the Degrassi cast in 2002 in the role of Marco Del Rossi, a gay teenager who struggles with coming to terms with his sexuality. In November 2008, it was announced that Ruggiero would star in the gay-themed Christmas film Make the Yuletide Gay, which was released in 2009. He also appeared in Degrassi Goes to Hollywood (2009), and stars in Make the Yuletide Gay 2 (2011).

Ruggiero came out in January 2008, saying "I come from a traditional Italian family but they aren't so traditional that me being gay was a deal breaker." He also landed the cover of the January 23 - February 5, 2008 issue of fab magazine

In 2013, Ruggiero participated in Salvatore Antonio's Truth/Dare: A Satire (With Dance), an interactive audience participation show which featured staged reenactments of scenes from Madonna's 1991 film Truth or Dare, at Buddies in Bad Times during Toronto's Pride Week. The show's cast also included Keith Cole and Gavin Crawford.

1987 – Cheyenne Parker is an American television personality, model, fashion designer, and business owner. He appeared on reality television programs Fire Island and Ex on the Beach. Following those appearances he has continued to work as a model and has launched a clothing brand and luxury concierge service.

Having established a career as a model, and having appeared on an episode of Shahs of Sunset in 2012, Parker was invited to join the cast of Fire Island in 2017 but initially declined. He subsequently agreed to join the cast, and then appeared on season two of Ex on the Beach.

He has modeled for magazines such as DNA.

In 2019, he launched Maison Parker, a furniture design business which has since expanded to include fashion design. In 2021 he established Leisure in Life, a luxury concierge service in Mexico.

Parker is openly gay and is an advocate for the LGBTQ+ community. He had planned to return to the United States in 2021 after a period working abroad, but a COVID-19 scare resulted in him re-routing to Mexico. He now resides at Puerto Vallarta, a Mexican "queer resort".

1998 – Homophobe TV preacher Pat Robertson warned the city of Orlando, Florida that God would punish the city with natural disasters for allowing the display of rainbow flags during Gay Pride Month.

2008 – Calling opposition to homosexuality a "perverse disease", Brazil's President Luiz Inácio Lula Da Silva launched that country's first ever national convention on LGBT rights, the First National Conference of Gays, Lesbians, Bisexuals, Transvestites and Transsexuals (GLBT). The Conference was inaugurated by presidential decree, and Lula (as he is known) called for "a time of reparation" in Brazil. After calling for a universal embrace of the homosexual movement, the president affirmed that "homophobia" is perhaps "the most perverse disease impregnated in the human head."