Moving to WanderMonkey

Gay stuff I work on will now be posted along with my other work at WanderMonkey.


As might be expected, I'm finding it too difficult to keep up with many blogs at once, and I've decided I really don't need or want to have my volunteer work at the Tretter collection sectioned off in my mind or on the internet from my more formal work as a PhD student in Chinese history and literature, and so I will cease this blog and fold everything into my other work blog (tagged with the word "queer," bien sûr).

HRC

HRC's Logo -- wonder where this came from?

Looking at Tretter's boxes of stuff on the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), I think I can see a little more clearly what they have accomplished, and I'm thinking it won't be hard at all to produce a quality panel about them.

Basically, HRC is a lobbying group, also known as a "political action committee" (PAC). Much of their effectiveness comes from imitating previous powerful PACs like the Christian Coalition. Of course, not all GLBT advocates agree that this imitation was the right path for the GLBT rights movement.
Portrait of an Issue: 15 years of ENDA

HRC began helped introduce the Employee Non-Discrimination Act to Congress in 1994, and they have been fighting to get it through ever since. Will it finally pass in 2009?

Pink slip for Cheryl Summerville of Georgia. Without ENDA, she can't do anything about losing her job for being "gay."

Cheryl Summerville

HRC Lobbyists

Stephen Endean, who began organizing GLBT campaign contributions to supportive candidates in Minnesota, and later founded HRC in Washington, DC in 1980.

Candace Gingrich, who went on a speaking tour in 1994 after her brother Newt became Speaker of the House

Elizabeth Birch, Executive Director in 1994, when HRC helped to protect AIDS research funding from Republican lawmakers who wanted it cut.

Leaders who worked with HRC

Senator Jim Jeffords of Vermont, then a Republican, supported ENDA from the beginning

Wall of Shame: Leaders HRC opposed

Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina, a legendary bigot that HRC attacked for years

Saint Sebastian

"Many people have often wondered why St. Sebastian has always had a special attraction, for gay men in particular. It's the pictures, stupid! I mean, where did you think Calvin Klein got his ideas for all those underwear ads, Divine Inspiration?" -- Bob Racozky, The Gay Book of Saints

In a way, Racozky is right. The figure of Sebastian moved very early from being an icon in the Catholic church to being an icon for men whose ultimate ideals included a form of penetration that was simultaneously ecstasy and deathly pain; i.e. a gay icon.



Version by Lorenzo Costa, 1491



Louis Bourdechon, 1509



Version by "Il Sodoma," 1525



Ludovico Carracci, San Sebastiano, 1599, Gravina (Bari), Fondazione Pomarici-Santomasi.



Still from Derek Jarman's film Sébastiene (1976)

Joan of Arc

Joan of Arc, whose visions of God led her to save 14th century-France just in time for Charles, her prince, to give her up to the English. They promptly tried her and burned her at the stake for the wickedness of transgressing the hetero-normative gender ideals of the age. Little did the English know that they were creating a martyr for gender-transgression in centuries to come.


Joan of Arc, Franco-Flemish school, fifteenth century (Archives Nationales, Paris/Bridgeman Art Library, London)

The English lesbian Vita Sackville-West was electrified enough by the legend of the woman warrior Joan that she wrote a novel-like biography filled with Joan's thoughts and desires. Contemporary and later readers would criticize Sackville-West's implication that Joan might have been a lesbian; they also rejected Vita's notion that Joan was probably an unattractive woman. Her biography is still in print.

Vita Sackville-West, Joan of Arc (1936)





Milton Waldman, Joan of Arc (1935) Waldman's book, from around the same time as Vita Sackville-West's, remembers her in a more feminine mode (Joan as Shepherdess, Bibliotheque nationale).




More recent works like Joan of Arc: A Military Leader by Kelly Devries (2002; Jacket front: La Pucelle! by Frank Craig (1874-1918)) show that the concept of a young girl who is also a good soldier, a traditionally masculine role, is what keeps the figure of her so alive in our minds.

Saints and Sinners

"Pope Joan" －－ The legend of a 9th century female pope might be a bit of papal satire, or it might have actually happened. Either way, it begs the question: why do all popes need to be men?

Oscar Wilde

The British writer Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) has become an international icon of homosexuality as an aesthetic sensibility, a taboo form of desire, and a tragically heroic part of an individual's nature that was never acceptable in the cruel, hypocritical and class-obsessed world of Victorian-era England.

Oscar Wilde

Lord Alfred Douglas

The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Civil Rights And Gay Rights

Bayard Rustin

Not many people know that one of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s most tireless, intelligent, and effective advisors and organizers was a gay man. Bayard Rustin was always by Dr. King's side, and his knowledge of Gandhi's protest techniques helped shape Dr. King's strategies of nonviolence.








Civil Rights, Equal Rights, Human Rights: Resonant Social Movements

The United States of America has a proud history as a breading ground of grassroots organizing that has changed the character of American politics and society again and again. To understand the history of the fight for equal rights for GLBT Americans, it is crucial to understand deeply resonant movements among African-American and immigrant communities, and the tremendous impact of organizing among American women, as well.

Refugees from authoritarian regimes like Cuba often include GLBT individuals whose sexual orientation or gender non-conformity makes them targets of violence in their home countries. In 1980, the GLBT communities of the Twin Cities helped to welcome and support GLBT refugees from Cuba. can