Happy All Fools Day

Les Poissons d' Avril

Unlike most of the other nonfoolish holidays, the history of April Fool's Day, sometimes called All Fool's Day, is not totally clear. There really wasn't a "first April Fool's Day" that can be pinpointed on the calendar. Some believe it sort of evolved simultaneously in several cultures at the same time, from celebrations involving the first day of spring.

The closest point in time that can be identified as the beginning of this tradition was in 1582, in France. Prior to that year, the new year was celebrated for eight days, beginning on March 25. The celebration culminated on April 1. With the reform of the calendar under Charles IX, the Gregorian Calendar was introduced, and New Year's Day was moved to January 1. However, communications being what they were in the days when news traveled by foot, many people did not receive the news for several years. Others, the more obstinate crowd, refused to accept the new calendar and continued to celebrate the new year on April 1. These backward folk were labeled as "fools" by the general populace. They were subject to some ridicule, and were often sent on "fools errands" or were made the butt of other practical jokes

.

The butts of these pranks became known as "poissons d'avril" or "April fish" because a young naive fish is easily caught. In addition, one common practice was to hook a paper fish on the back of someone as a joke. It's still the favorite April Fool trick of most French and Québecois children to stealthily attach a paper fish to the back of a copain to this day.

This harassment evolved, over time, into a tradition of prank-playing on the first day of April. The tradition eventually spread to England and Scotland in the eighteenth century. It was later introduced to the American colonies of both the English and French. April Fool's Day thus developed into an international fun fest, so to speak, with different nationalities specializing in their own brand of humor at the expense of their friends and families.

In Scotland, for example, April Fool's Day is actually celebrated for two days. The second day is devoted to pranks involving the posterior region of the body. It is called Taily Day. The origin of the "kick me" sign can be traced to this observance.

Mexico's counterpart of April Fool's Day is actually observed on December 28. Originally, the day was a sad remembrance of the slaughter of the innocent children by King Herod. It eventually evolved into a lighter commemoration involving pranks and trickery.

Pranks performed on April Fool's Day range from the simple, (such as saying, "Your shoe's untied!), to the elaborate. Setting a roommate's alarm clock back an hour is a common gag. Whatever the prank, the trickster usually ends it by yelling to his victim, "April Fool!"

April Fool's Day is a "for-fun-only" observance. Nobody is expected to buy gifts or to take their "significant other" out to eat in a fancy restaurant. Nobody gets off work or school. It's simply a fun little holiday, but a holiday on which one must remain forever vigilant, for he may be the next April Fool!

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Today in Gay History

Happy 70th Birthday

March 31, 1940

Congressman Barney Frank
Turns '70' today!

United States congressman Barney Frank is known for his intelligence, his quick and acerbic wit, and his spirited defense of his social and political beliefs. He has been a leader not only in the cause of gay and lesbian rights, but also on issues including fair housing, consumer rights, banking, and immigration.

Frank was born on March 31, 1940 in Bayonne, New Jersey, where his father owned a truck stop. As a youngster Frank developed an interest in politics. He did not, however, foresee a career in government for himself because he observed in politics a dismaying amount of corruption and an inhospitable attitude toward Jews. He had, moreover, realized at the age of thirteen that he was gay, which also seemed an obstacle to a political career.

Frank first ran for the United States House of Representatives in 1980, when the incumbent, Father Robert Drinan, retired. Drinan endorsed Frank to succeed him, but Boston's Humberto Cardinal Medeiros tried to mobilize Catholics to vote against him because of his pro-choice stance. With narrow victories in both the primary and general elections, Frank became the Representative of the Fourth District of Massachusetts and began his career on the national stage.

The liberal freshman congressman zealously defended programs that protected low-income people, the elderly, and other groups at risk, and he was also a vigorous opponent of initiatives by the Reagan administration to give tax breaks to large corporations, especially those in the oil industry, at the expense of the general populace. One commentator noted that Frank showed "a combination of humor and conviction that left even ideological opponents paying him grudging respect."
Although always an advocate for gay and lesbian rights, Frank was closeted at the beginning of his political career. Fearing that disclosing his sexual orientation would jeopardize his chances for election, Frank "made a conscious choice for a political career over a personal life." Gradually, however, he came out to various friends and colleagues, but it was not until 1987 that he commented publicly, when questioned by a reporter from the Boston Globe. The response of Frank's constituents was overwhelmingly favorable; letters of support outnumbered those critical of him by a margin of six to one.

Frank's record on gay and lesbian concerns is second to none, but he is far from a one-issue legislator. He has supported civil rights, gun control, fair housing, reproductive rights, and the medical use of marijuana. He favors a balanced approach toward environmental issues, opposing oil exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge but also arguing against restrictions on the fishing industry that "are too rigid and reflect inaccurate science."

In 2003 Frank became the Ranking Member of the House Financial Services Committee, whose oversight includes issues of banking, insurance, real estate, consumer rights, and financial privacy laws. He has been Chair of that powerful committee since the Democrats regained control of Congress in 2006.

Frank has raised the profile of gays in government by attending White House dinners and other official functions with his partner. Herbert Moses, Frank's companion for over a decade, was the first partner of a gay Representative to be granted spousal access privileges to the Capitol. Frank and Moses parted amicably in 1998, about the same time Frank co-founded the National Stonewall Democrats. For severa years Frank attended events at the White House with his then partner, Sergio Pombo.

A true old school liberal, he is equally beloved by his constituents as by Hill staffers, who named him the "most eloquent," "brainiest," and "funniest" Member of the House in both 2004 and 2006. Frank is sixty-nine today. His current partner, Jim Ready, is forty year-old surfer who runs an awning company in Maine.

Frank is known for his intelligence, integrity, and work ethic. Called a "political theorist and pit bull at the same time" and "one of the most colorful and quotable figures in Congress" because of his quick and often biting wit and his rapid-fire style of speech, the congressman is a force to be reckoned with in debate and is also an engaging public speaker.

Frank calls political engagement and participation the most effective course for glbtq people. "Marches and demonstrations may be fun, but they don't affect politicians," he stated. Those who wish to bring about change should, he said, "vote and let [their] elected officials know [they]'re there."

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Today in Gay History

March 26, 1997

The White House

The first ever official government meeting of people brought together to

discuss gay and lesbian rights is held at the White House;

Bill Clinton is president.

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Today in Gay History

March 24, 1987

ACT UP demonstrates

for first time

On this day in Gay History, ACT UP staged its first major demonstration demanding the establishment acknowledge the AIDS crisis and do something about it. On March 24, 1987, 250 ACT UP members demonstrated at Wall Street and Broadway to demand greater access to experimental AIDS drugs and for a coordinated national policy to fight the disease. An Op/Ed article by Larry Kramer published in the NY Times the previous day described some of the issues ACT UP was concerned with. Seventeen ACT UP members were arrested during this street theatre form of civil disobedience.

This notice had been posted all over the GLBT neighborhoods of New York:

NO MORE BUSINESS AS USUAL!

Come to Wall Street in front of Trinity Church
at 7AM Tuesday March 24 for a

MASSIVE AIDS
DEMONSTRATION

To demand the following

1. Immediate release by the Federal Food & Drug Administration of drugs that might help save our lives.

These drugs include: Ribavirin (ICN Pharmaceuticals); Ampligen (HMR Research Co.); Glucan (Tulane University School of Medicine); DTC (Merieux); DDC (Hoffman-LaRoche); AS 101 (National Patent Development Corp.); MTP-PE (Ciba-Geigy); AL 721 (Praxis Pharmaceuticals).

2. Immediate abolishment of cruel double-blind studies wherein some get the new drugs and some don't.

3. Immediate release of these drugs to everyone with AIDS or ARC.

4. Immediate availability of these drugs at affordable prices. Curb your greed!

5. Immediate massive public education to stop the spread of AIDS.

6. Immediate policy to prohibit discrimination in AIDS treatment, insurance, employment, housing.

7. Immediate establishment of a coordinated, comprehensive, and compassionate national policy on AIDS.

President Reagan, nobody is in charge!

AIDS IS THE BIGGEST KILLER IN NEW YORK CITY
OF YOUNG MEN AND WOMEN.

Tell your friends. Spread the word. Come protest together.

7 AM ... March 24 ... You must be on time!

AIDS IS EVERYBODY'S BUSINESS NOW.

The AIDS Network is an ad hoc and broad-based community of AIDS-related organizations and individuals.

THE NEXT YEAR, on March 24, 1988, ACT UP

returned to Wall Street for a larger demonstration in which over 100 people were arrested.

This activism, modeled on Ghandi and MLK’s Soulforce principles, did much to direct much needed popular and government attention, and eventually action to making HIV treatments more widely available and earlier.

Today in Gay History

Photo left to right: Dr. Frank Kameny, Jack Nichols, and Dr. George Weinberg being honored as Grand Marshalls of New York City's 2004 Heritage of Pride Parade
Happy 72nd Birthday
JACK NICHOLS, ~March 16, 1938 - May 2, 2005


Credit: Thomas Kraemer; see his blog from 2006 @
http://thomaskraemer.blogspot.com/2006/09/jack-nichols-1938-2005.html

Although Jack Nichols affected the lives of all gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Americans with his five decades of gay activism. Jack Nichols died in Florida on May 2, 2005 at the age of 67. Nichols' 1972 book "I Have More Fun With You Than Anybody" was co-authored with his lover Lige Clarke. For many years prior to the publication of this book, Jack and Lige had touched many other gay people with "The Homosexual Citizen" column published in Al Goldstein's very heterosexual "SCREW" newspaper. This column was one of the only sources of gay news available to many Americans. "SCREW" was only sold in adult book stores.

Jack and Lige's column led them to become the editors of "GAY," the first weekly gay newspaper. ("The Advocate" was a biweekly newspaper.) It was often sold in hippie-style bookstores and cigar store newsstands alongside the other radical political publications of the period.

Jack Nichols' activism started years before the 1969 Stonewall rebellion. In 1961 Nichols and Dr. Frank Kameny started the Washington, D.C. chapter of the Mattachine homophile rights organization. Inspired by Martin Luther King's famous 1963 march on Washington organized by Bayard Rustin for black civil rights, Jack and Frank led a protest at Independence Hall on July 4, 1965 calling for homosexual civil rights.

Nichols was the first activist to challenge the medical dogma that homosexuality is a sickness. Nichols worked with Dr. George Weinberg and other activists to get homosexuality removed from the official list of mental disorders. Weinberg coined the term homophobia in the 1960s and initiated psychological research on homophobia.
On March 7, 1967 Nichols was interviewed by Mike Wallace of CBS News for the first nationally televised documentary on homosexuality. Jack Nichols was one of the first homosexual Americans to come out publicly.
Jack Nichols never retired. His gay activism continued into the Internet Age. He edited a daily web publication GayToday.com from 1997 until 2004 that was read by more than 50,000 people worldwide.
In 2002 I sent Jack an email thanking him for his 1972 book. As he seemed to do with everyone who came close, we became friends. Even though he lived on a beach in Florida, the Internet enabled our frequent long distance communications.
Professor J. Louis Campbell of Penn State University has spent the last several years working on a biography of Jack Nichols. A contract with a distinguished book publisher is under negotiation. An early draft of the book promises to preserve this important part of gay history.

Today in Gay History

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, JOHN BARROWMAN

Born March 11: John Barrowman

clipped from Band of Thebes

Uncomfortably straddling the border of irony and stupidity is this true anecdote: The gay and straight producers of Will & Grace rejected finalist John Barrowman, who's gay, to play the gay character Will Truman, because they said he was too straight, and instead they hired Eric McCormick who is straight but acted "gayer." Our loss. Barrowman, who is Scottish, has a perfect American accent because his family moved to Illinois when he was nine. However he kept his Scots pride, which was not always appreciated in the Land of Lincoln: He arrived to pick up his prom date and she dumped him on the spot because he was wearing a kilt.

After losing Will & Grace, he went back to London and was cast in Dr. Who and its spinoff Torchwood, both hugely successful. A frequent star of West End musicals, Barrowman has also released four solo cds, including an album of Cole Porter songs and his 2007 hit, Another Side, in which he cheeses up mid-tempo hits from Carly Simon, Cyndi Lauper, Chicago, Elton John, Eric Carmen, The Police, and, yes, Air Supply accompanied by a full orchestra. Last year he followed it up with a cd called Music Music Music featuring covers of Both Sides Now, I Made It Through the Rain, Uptown Girl, I Am What I Am, and a duet with also out Daniel Boys of I Know Him So Well. (Clip below, both in pink shirts.) Like Celine, Barrowman delivers what the midcounty ladies swoon to. Perhaps more of an entertainer than an artist, he is wildly popular throughout the U.K., where he substitute hosts the morning chat shows and had more than one thousand people queue up in Cardiff for him to sign copies of his autobiography, Anything Goes.

Gorgeous yes, but no dunce. He frequently speaks on behalf of gay organizations, hosted London's pride in 2007, kisses his partner in public, and doesn't mince words about anti-gay discrimination and double standards. He said, "Why would I want a 'marriage' from a belief system that hates me?" He and his statistically improbable partner [equally handsome, above left] of sixteen years, Scott Gill, signed the civil register in December 2006. OK! magazine covered the small, private ceremony rapturously. Barrowman wore a kilt.

Today in Gay History

HAPPY 174th BIRTHDAY

Winslow Homer (February 24, 1836-1910)



One of the most prolific and important American painters and printmakers of the second half of the nineteenth century, Winslow Homer created a distinctly American, modern classical style.

For this and other reasons, his works have often been compared to the achievements of such prominent nineteenth-century American authors as Henry Thoreau, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman.

Very little is known about Homer's "private" life. He consistently refused to answer personal questions from critics and potential biographers, and he left no revealing diaries or other personal papers. His reclusiveness is indicated by the fact that he produced no self-portraits; in contrast, most American and European painters of the nineteenth century eagerly exploited the rapidly growing market for images of artists.

Most historians have adamantly maintained that Homer remained a bachelor because he was extraordinarily "shy" around women. However, such deeply moving and psychologically complex pictures as The Country School (1871) and Mending the Nets (1882), among many others, suggest a respect for and understanding of women that was very unusual for a male artist of the era. Thus, it would seem more plausible to suggest that Homer simply may not have been interested in women sexually.

Constructing Homer as a solitary eccentric, who virtually withdrew from human society, most scholars have overlooked evidence of significant, intimate associations with other men.

One of his closest friends was Albert Kelsey, a fellow artist whom he initially met in 1858 in Massachusetts. In 1867, Kelsey traveled with Homer to Paris, where they lived together for the next two years. A studio photograph, made while they were in Paris, mimics the conventions of marriage portraits, as do so many photographic portraits of male friends of this period. Kelsey inscribed the back of the photograph with the names "Damon and Pythias," famous ancient Greek heroes and lovers.

In the 1890s, Homer remembered their friendship in the humorous and erotically suggestive drawing "Albert Kelsey riding a giant turtle in the Bahamas."

A studio photograph, made while they were in Paris, mimics the conventions of marriage portraits, as do so many photographic portraits of male friends of this period. Kelsey inscribed the back of the photograph with the names "Damon and Pythias," famous ancient Greek heroes and lovers.

In the 1890s, Homer remembered their friendship in the humorous and erotically suggestive drawing "Albert Kelsey riding a giant turtle in the Bahamas."

Homer's closest companion in the final years of his life was an African-American man, Lewis Wright, who worked as his servant and lived at his Prout's Neck, Maine estate from 1895 to 1910. There are indications that some of Homer's acquaintances were disconcerted by the apparent closeness of his friendship with Wright. While most "negative" reactions involved race, other "unmentionable" factors may also have been involved.

Rest In Peace

Sylvia Rae Rivera

8th Anniversary of her Death

1951 - February 19, 2002

Thanks to wikipedia, we learn that Rivera was born July 2, 1952 and raised in New Your City and lived most of her life in or near that city. She was of Puerto Rican and Venezuelan descent. Her birth name was Ray (or Rey) Rivera. She was abandoned by her birth father José Rivera early in life and became an orphan after her mother committed suicide when Rivera was three years old. Rivera was then raised by her Venezuelan grandmother, who disapproved of Rivera's effeminate behavior, particularly after Rivera began to wear women's makeup in fourth grade.^[3] As a result, Rivera began living on the streets at the age of eleven, where she joined a community of drag queens.

She was one of those rabble rousing resisters to queer oppression who literally led the charge at the Stonewall Inn, New York City, on the night of 27th of June, 1969, the night that a riot at the bar, touched off the open radicalization of the Gay Liberation Movement fighting back against police harassment directed at the most visible members of the community. She became a founding member of both the Gay Liberation Front and the Gay Activists Alliance and helped found STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries), a group dedicated to helping homeless young street transwomen, with her friend Marsha P. Johnson.

Rivera spent most of her life at the forefront of both transgender and gay activism, tirelessly advocating and demonstrating for LGBT rights, inclusive social policies and struggling against transphobia.

In 1970 Rivera formed a group called S.T.A.R. - Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries - to fight for the civil rights of transgender people, and provide them with social services support. The S.T.A.R. House lasted for two years until her crack habit caused her to lose the house. It was the first institution of its kind in New York City, and inspired the creation of future shelters for homeless street queens.

In 2000, she reformed S.T.A.R. pressuring the Human Rights Campaign to be more inclusive of transgender people. Even when hospitalized with liver cancer, Rivera never stopped working for the civil rights of transgender people and several hours before she passed away on February 19, 2002 she was meeting with LGBT community leaders.

An active member of the Metropolitan Community Church of New York, Rivera ministered through the Church's food pantry, which provided food to the hungry. Recalling her life as a child on the streets, she remained a passionate advocate for queer youth, and MCC New York's queer youth shelter is called Sylvia's Place in her honor.

February is Black History Month