Today in Gay History

HAPPY 27TH BIRTHDAY

FRED C. MARTINEZ

March 15, 1985

- One of our martyrs, our many martyrs, FRED C. MARTINEZ was born on this date. Martinez was a 16-year-old Navajo boy who thought of himself as female. Another term for Martinez among indigenous peoples is nadleehi or "two-spirit." His friends adored him. Had he been born a woman, one of his teacher's said, he'd have been the most popular girl in town. They also feared what a violent world might have in store for someone like Fred C. Martinez Jr. Martinez died on June 16, 2001 at the hands of a man who beat him to death because he was different. He was beaten to death by one Shaun Murphy who bragged about the killing. Murphy was later sentenced to 40 years in prison for murdering Martinez. Martinez's mother spoke about his son a few days after his murder: No one could say it better:

- "I am his mother and now I want to make sure the truth is told about Fred by people who loved him. With more and more talk about his death, the police looking into his murder, and the details of my son's personal life in the media, it is time to speak the truth about Fred's life. The most important thing I can say is that I loved Fred. I loved my son exactly for who he was, for his courage in being honest and gentle and friendly. It is sad that he had to face pain in his daily life and in school. "What I wanted for my son was for him to be accepted and loved, just like I accepted and loved him. Fred was always proud to be Navajo. Fred did not struggle with who he was, but he was hurt because of the people who had problems with my son expressing himself honestly. I hope that the police and the District Attorney will talk about this and bring justice for the death of my son. I am grateful to Fred's friends for accepting him the way he was and remembering him for who he was. Fred's family loved and cared deeply for all of who he was. We firmly believe that Fred's murder was a hate crime. Because he was different his life was taken from him, and we will never know the person Fred would have become."

An excellent documentary film was made about this called Two Spirit Directed by Lydia Nibley. Also Known As: Two Spirits: Sexuality, Gender, and the Murder of Fred Martinez a trailer can be seen and a DVD is available for sale here: http://www.facebook.com/l/48e31stPoxHfoXCqR77Gvg5qufA/twospirits.org

Mardi Gras In the Country~ Terrence Simien and the Zydeco Experience

	Terrance Simien - Mardi Gras in the Country .mp3
	Found at bee mp3 search engine

Père LeDoux Chant Nöel

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On the 33rd Anniversary of the Asassination of Harvey Milk

An old poem from the Civil War about a deeply wounded vet~

Wisperin’ Bill

So yer takin' the census, eh Mister.
Lemme tell ye about my son.
He was a soldier thet fought fer the North
Until the war wuz won.

This dooryard's now his battlefield.
Lesee, he wuz nigh sixteen
When Sumpter fell and as likely a boy
As this world's ever seen
And what with the news of battles lost
And shoutin' and all the noise
Ah giss every farm in the neighborhood
Lost a part of it's crop of boys.

‘Twas harvest time when Bill left home
Every stalk in the field of rye
Seemed to stand tip toe to see him off
And wave him a fond goodbye.
His momma used to tell him
When she knowed he wuz goin' away
That God’d surely take care of him
If'n he didn't fergit to pray.

And on the bloodiest battlefields
When bullets whizzed through the air
And Bill wuz a-fightin' desprit
He used to whisper a prayer.
His comrads has often tol' me
That Bill never flinched a bit
When every second a gap in the ranks
Showed where a ball had hit.

Then one night when the field wuz covered
With the awful harvest of war,
They found my boy 'mongst the martyrs
Of the cause he wuz fightin' for.

His fingers wuz clutched in the dewy grass,
Oh no Sir, he wasn't dead.
He just lay there sort of helpless and crazy
With a rifle ball in his head.
And if Bill had only died that night
I'd give all I got worth givin'
'Cause ya see that bullet killed his mind
But left his body livin’.

An officer he wrote and told us
How the boy'd been hurt in a fight
But he said that the doctors reckoned
They could bring him 'round alright.

Well, we waited and watched fer a month or more.
The summer wuz almost past
When we got a letter one day that said
Bill had started fer home at last.

I'll ne'er fergit when Bill come home,
"Twas harvest time again.
The air blowing o’er the yaller fields
Was sweet with the smell of grain.
The dooryard wuz full of neighbors
That come to share our joy
And we all set out a rousin' cheer
At the sight of that solier boy.

Then all of a sudden some-one said,
"My God, don't that boy know his mother?"
And Bill stood a-whisperin' fearful like
And starin' from one to another.

"Don't be afraid Bill." said he to himself
As he stood in his coat of blue.
"God'll take care of you, Bill
God'll take care of you."

Bill seemed to keep loadin' and firin' a gun
And actin' like a man who hears
The awful sounds of the battlefield
A-poundin' in his ears.
Ten thousand ghosts from that bloody day
Was a-marchin' through his brain
And his feet they kind of picked their way
As if they could feel the slain.

He ain’t never knowed us since that day
Nor his sweetheart and never will.
Mother and father and sweetheart,
We all the same to Bill.

And he groans like a wounded soldier
Sometimes the whole night through
And we just smooth his head and say, "Yes Bill,
God'll take care of you."

Irving Batchelder (written in the 1860's during civil war)

Today in Gay History ~~THANK YOU PRESIDENT OBAMA

For Keeping Your Promise. Without your leadership, who knows when, if ever, this injustice would have ended.

Why Labor Day?

Le Jour de Gloire est Arrivée !

Today in Gay History

Happy 194th Birthday
July 12th
Henry David Thoreau, (1817-1862)



For more go to glbtq.com to which credit gratefully acknowledged for following excerpts:

. . . .Thoreau is perhaps best known for his stay at Walden Pond, chronicled in Walden (1854), and his night in jail after refusing to pay a poll tax to a government that supported the Mexican War and endorsed slavery. He wrote about this latter act of protest in "Resistance to Civil Government," popularly known as "Civil Disobedience," an essay that has inspired many, including Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.
. . . .

Biographers remain undecided about Thoreau's sexuality. He never married. He proposed to Ellen Sewall in 1840, but she rejected his offer. Some believe he was a "repressed" homosexual and others that he was asexual and remained celibate all of his life.

But his Journals, his essay "Chastity and Sensuality," and the long discourse on "Friendship" in A Week are prolific expressions of the beauty, and the agony, of love between men.

Some of these discussions are said to refer to his brother or to Ralph Waldo Emerson. Others clearly refer to two men whom Thoreau found particularly attractive: Tom Fowler, whom Thoreau chose as a guide on a trip to the Maine woods; and Alek Therien, the Canadian woodchopper who visited Thoreau at Walden Pond.

The passion evident in his discourses on love and friendship, and the utter lack of reference to women in his writings, has made Thoreau of great interest to scholars of gay and lesbian literature. Jonathan Katz included a section on Thoreau in his Gay American History. Walter Harding, the distinguished Thoreau scholar, argued quite convincingly in 1991 that Thoreau's "actions and words . . . indicate a specific sexual interest in members of his own sex."

Complicating matters concerning Thoreau's sexuality is historical research suggesting that homosexual identity is a late nineteenth-century phenomenon. But, as Michael Warner suggests, Thoreau's writing resists normalization even within nineteenth-century "rhetorics of romance and sexuality."

Although Thoreau may not have identified as "homosexual" in the way a twentieth-century gay man might, his rhetoric of sexual difference strikes a chord with gay readers and anticipates an emerging homosexual identity: "I love man with the same distinction that I love woman--as if my friend were of some third sex--some other or some stranger and still my friend" (Journal 2:245).

H a p p y B i r t h d a y U S A

Today in Gay History

June 24, 1973 in New Orleans

32 People Murdered in
Firebombing of
Upstairs Lounge

See HERE for a good summary of this unsolved tragic crime and a sense of the intolerance of the time.

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Today in Gay History

Today in Gay History

Happy 81st Birthday!

Harvey B. Milk
May 22, 1930 - November 27, 1978

Harvey Milk was the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in the United States (and only the second openly homosexual, after Massachusetts State Assembly member Elaine Noble). His tragic assassination in San Francisco's City Hall made him the American gay liberation movement's most visible martyr.

I ask my gay sisters and brothers to make the commitment to fight. For themselves, for their freedom, for their country ... We will not win our rights by staying quietly in our closets ... We are coming out to fight the lies, the myths, the distortions. We are coming out to tell the truths about gays, for I am tired of the conspiracy of silence, so I'm going to talk about it. And I want you to talk about it. You must come out. Come out to your parents, your relatives...

Stonewall anniversary speech 1978

Harvey Milk Speech
- Watch more Videos at Vodpod.

On April 28, 1990 -



A pipe bomb exploded in Uncle Charlie's, a Greenwich Village Gay bar, injuring three people. In protest, Queer Nation mobilized 1,000 protesters in a matter of hours. Angry marchers fill the streets, carrying the banner "Dykes and Fags Bash Back."

Credit GayWisdom.com and White Crane Institute

Today in Gay History

Happy 128th Birthday
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES

1946 - the British economist John Maynard Keynes died on this date (b. 1883). Also known as 1st Baron Keynes, his ideas have had a major impact on modern economic and political theory as well as on many governments' fiscal policies. He advocated interventionist government policy, by which the government would use fiscal and monetary measures to mitigate the adverse effects of economic recessions, depressions and booms. His ideas are the basis for the school of thought known as Keynesian economics. Time magazine named him as one of the greatest minds of the 20th century. Keynes's early romantic and sexual relationships were almost exclusively with men. Attitudes in the Bloomsbury Group, in which Keynes was avidly involved, were relaxed about homosexuality. One of his great loves was the artist Duncan Grant (they're together in the photo above), whom he met in 1908, and he was also involved with the writer Lytton Strachey.

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Today in Gay History

Happy 121st Birthday

Justice Frank Murphy
b. April 13, 1890

Former Michigan governor and U.S. Supreme Court Justice FRANK MURPHY was born April 13, 1890 (d. 1949). Born William Francis Murphy, he was a politician and jurist from Michigan. He served as First Assistant U.S. District Attorney, Eastern Michigan District, Recorder's Court Judge, Detroit. Mayor of Detroit, the last Governor-General of the Philippines, U.S. High Commissioner of the Philippines, the 35th Governor of Michigan, United States Attorney General, and United States Supreme Court Associate Justice. Murphy was pretty beloved in Michigan.

Murphy was elected the Governor of Michigan in 1936 and served one two-year term. During his two years in office, an unemployment compensation system was instituted and mental health programs were improved. The United Automobile Workers engaged in an historic sit-down strike at the General Motors' Flint plant. The Flint Sit-Down Strike was a turning point in national collective bargaining and labor policy. After 27 people got injured in a battle between the workers and the police, including 13 strikers with gunshot wounds, Murphy sent the National Guard to protect the workers. The governor didn't follow a court's order requesting him to expel the strikers, and refused to order the guards troops to suppress the strike. Murphy successfully mediated an agreement and end to the confrontation; G.M. recognized the U.A.W. as bargaining agent under the newly adopted National Labor Relations Act. This had an effect upon organized labor. In the next year the UAW saw its membership grow from 30,000 to 500,000 members. As later noted by the British Broadcasting System, this strike was "the strike heard round the world."

Murphy was first nominated by Franklin Delano Roosevelt to be Attorney General and then in 1940 Roosevelt promoted him to the Supreme Court where he served till his death in 1949. Murphy authored 199 opinions: 131 majority, 68 in dissent and took an expansive view of individual liberties, and the limitations on government he found in the Bill of Rights.

Opinions differ about him and his jurisprudential philosophy. He has been acclaimed as a legal scholar and a champion of the common man. Justice Felix Frankfurter disparagingly nicknamed Murphy "the Saint", criticizing his decisions as being rooted more in passion than reason. It has been said he was "Neither legal scholar nor craftsman" who was criticized "for relying on heart over head, results over legal reasoning, clerks over hard work, and emotional solos over team play."

Murphy's support of African-Americans, aliens, criminals, dissenters, Jehovah's Witnesses, Native Americans, women, workers, and other outsiders evoked a pun: “tempering justice with Murphy.” As he wrote in Falbo v. United States (1944), “The law knows no finer hour than when it cuts through formal concepts and transitory emotions to protect unpopular citizens against discrimination and persecution.”

The reason Murphy's being mentioned here is for his lifelong companion and roommate, Edward Kemp. The two met while in college, attended law school together, started a law practice together and were basically inseparable for Murphy's entire life. They travelled overseas together, and lived together before and during Murphy's time on the Supreme Court. Kemp said he was only Murphy’s personal assistant and political advisor. That's odd because Justices have clerks for personal assistants and, with lifetime tenure, Murphy had little need for political advisors. We can at least hope they were happy together.

CREDIT: Entire text to~ Dan Vera of GAY WISDOM for Daily Living... from White Crane Institute

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Today in Gay History

HAPPY 99^th BIRTHDAY APRIL 7TH
Harry Hay

(April 7, 1912 – October 24, 2002)

Chief Founder of the Mattachine Society and Radical Faeries.

"We pulled the ugly green frog skin of heterosexual conformity over us, and that's how we got through school with a full set of teeth," Hay once explained. "We know how to live through their eyes. We can always play their games, but are we denying ourselves by doing this? If you're going to carry the skin of conformity over you, you are going to suppress the beautiful prince or princess within you."

For a great deal more, see previous post here:

Today in Gay History

On March 19, 2010 celebrity Kathy Griffin headlined a rally at Freedom Plaza in DC calling for the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell. Openly gay West Point graduate, Lt. Dan Choi, and Capt. James Pietrangelo marched from the rally site to the White House and handcuffed themselves to the fence. They were arrested and spent the night in jail, being denied the right to make a phone call and bail until the next day. "But what I was taught at West Point and learned in war is -- hope is not a strategy. As officers, James and I both find it a dereliction of our moral duty to remain silent while thousands of our brothers and sister are not allowed to serve openly and honestly." Within a year, the Democratic Congress voted to repeal the 18 year old policy, and before he signed the bill into law, President Obama stated that ending the ban will mean that "thousands of patriotic Americans" won't be forced to leave the military "despite years of exemplary performance, because they happen to be gay…" and that gay people will no longer be be "asked to live a lie in order to serve the country they love."

Today in Gay History

On March 10-12, 1987, ACT UP is founded by Larry Kramer.



Credit to GayWisdom.org
1987 - ACT UP was formed [on March 12,1987 following a meeting-speech on March 10th] at the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center in New York. The writer Vito Russo wrote at the time that "living with AIDS in this country is like living through a war that's happening only for those people in the trenches. Every time a shell explodes you look around to discover that you've lost more of your friends. But nobody else notices, it isn't happening to them." Larry Kramer had been asked to speak at the Lesbian and Gay Community Center as part of a rotating speaker series, and his well-attended speech focused on action to fight AIDS. Kramer spoke out against the Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC), which he perceived as politically impotent. Kramer had actually co-founded the GMHC but had resigned from its board of directors in 1983. According to Douglas Crimp, Kramer posed a question to the audience: "Do we want to start a new organization devoted to political action?" The answer was "a resounding yes." Approximately 300 people met two days later [March 12] to form ACT UP.

They became confrontational about the government's complete lack of urgency towards the plight of the thousands of Gay men dying of AIDS. That was the face of AIDS at the time and no one seemed to care that so many were dying. And many were actively blocking (as many still do) the use of condoms for AIDS prevention. They called out Ronald Reagan and Cardinal O'Connor and Pope John Paul for their responsibility in the deaths of millions while they prevented treatment and prevention. Because of ACT UP, political leaders and the media were forced to pay attention to what was happening. Because of ACT UP things moved for the care and treatment of people living and dying with AIDS. Their work is not finished and their model is one that has been replicated by many dealing with entrenched hostility and animus.