Tag: Gay history

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A Love Affair with Clio by Nicholas

According to Greek mythology, Clio, the muse of history, is
the daughter of Zeus and Memory. She guides mortals in the art of contemplating
their pasts.
History happens in the present, not in the past; it’s an
interaction of the present and the past. History makes the past knowable. We
are sequestered in history, prisoners of our pasts, but while we are bound to
it, history liberates us from the past.
I wrote those words while in a doctoral program in history
back in the 1970s. I find them still to be true though I’ve lost all
involvement with academic life. I find them real on a personal level now.
When I finally decided to embrace my sexuality and came out,
shortly after I left academics, I saw that as entering my history. Coming out
was a getting into. Not only was I facing my own personal past and its hold on
my present, I was joining an on-going experience of countless people before me.
I was now a member of some vague thing called “gay history.” It was bigger than
me but also something I lived each small minute of each day. What went on long
before I came onto the scene suddenly was relevant to what I might do, the
dilemmas I would face, the opportunities I would have, the choices I would
make. Being gay is my entry point. It is my entry point to real life,
happiness, community and history.
I love history. I believe William Faulkner was right when he
said, “History is not the dead hand of the past. It’s not dead. Hell, it’s not
even past.” I loved studying history and always felt that the more I knew about
it, the more I knew about me.
When I was younger—college age and in my 20s—I very much felt
a part of another kind of history. Everybody did back then even without knowing
it. We were a massive movement to expand civil rights, end poverty, explore new
ways of relating to god and man and woman, and end a war that as unjust as it
was unjustified. Because of what we, a generation, did, the world was changing.
It was not my one voice but a generation’s, a culture’s. We were history. Win
or lose, we were making history.
The knowing of history and the living of it was in some way
to be in control of it. I had a sense of impact on something much larger than
me.
I’m not sure about that anymore. I don’t doubt history and
its force in shaping the present and future. And I don’t doubt that knowing
history empowers me in living my daily life. But as I age, I increasingly get
the feeling that history is simply passing me by. History passes up everybody,
of course, and every generation sees its dreams and accomplishments fade like a
vaporous cloud on a summer day.
Some I don’t care about—pop culture, for example, is too
superficial to worry about. Some I just think what fools people are not to keep
what is now dismissed as old-fashioned—like speaking and writing in full
sentences. We say we value communication but seem unable to communicate with
all our devices. New ways are not always better ways—as some old fart once said.
But sometimes I get anxious that if I don’t climb onto whatever
bandwagon is going by today, I will be lost in some cobwebby existence of
nostalgia, just me and Clio, my imaginary friend. I fear a day, for example,
when all life and all connections will depend on an i-phone or something like
it. Will I be friendless because I’m not on Facebook? As I’m writing this
piece, my home phone is out of order and I feel as though I am marooned on an
ice floe in the Arctic. Totally cut off.
History, I believe, is best met on a mundane level. It might
be global climate change but I will see it in my withering tomato plants that
just can’t cope with day after day of super-hot temperatures. That mundane
level is usually where history is lived.

© Sep
2012

About the Author 
Nicholas grew up in
Cleveland, then grew up in San Francisco, and is now growing up in Denver. He
retired from work with non-profits in 2009 and now bicycles, gardens, cooks,
does yoga, writes stories, and loves to go out for coffee.
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Anger by Pat Gourley

It was often noted in my teens and twenties in particular that I had quite the Irish temper. This seems to have greatly diminished over the years and now is an emotion I rarely indulge in. Much of the anger I have expressed over the years has really been not much more that self-indulgent bravado. Often the sort of flash in the pan display that passes quickly usually followed by regret and at times an appropriate apology.

There have however been at least two instances in my life where my anger was sustained and in one of those seems at times to persist to this day. Both of these involve the suicides of two people close to me, one professionally and the other a dear friend of many decades. Today I will address the suicide of a co-worker from over twenty years ago. The other death will be the focus of an upcoming piece.

Even this anger, at a tragic death, certainly seems to have a quality of indignant rage – ‘how could you do this to me’ which in some respects seems quite silly since they are the ones who are dead, but then so much of my life has always really been about me.

This first suicide involved a psychiatric nurse who worked in the AIDS Clinic at Denver Health in the early 1990’s. She was a lesbian woman who on the surface seemed very strong and as put together as anyone I knew. Unbeknownst to me, but not to several others in her life, she purchased a handgun I believe in late 1992, saying she feared for her safety around the passage by referendum of Amendment Two by the voters of Colorado which read as follows:

Neither the State of Colorado, through any of its branches or departments, nor any of its agencies, political subdivisions, municipalities or school districts, shall enact, adopt or enforce any statute, regulation, ordinance or policy whereby homosexual, lesbian or bisexual orientation, conduct, practices or relationships shall constitute or otherwise be the basis of or entitle any person or class of persons to have or claim any minority status, quota preferences, protected status or claim of discrimination. This Section of the Constitution shall be in all respects self-executing.

I thought after the fact that if I had known about her gun purchase and the stated reason for it I would certainly have confronted it for the bullshit it turned out to be. Even back then I was sort of the resident out radical queer in an AIDS Clinic no less a place full of ACT Up members in 1992 and I would have said “oh honey all they are doing is finally being honest about how they hate us”. The statewide vote on the referendum was something like 53% in favor of literally codifying discrimination across the board based solely on sexual preference and 47% opposed. We were simply being put on notice to a fact that had always been the reality. This was of course challenged in court and overturned eventually by the United States Supreme Court in the case Evans vs. Romer in 1996.

I would in hindsight have been right to call her on this purchase since she used the gun along with some alcohol and prescribed medications as lubrication to drive up to St. Mary’s Glacier in early January of 1993 and blow her brains out. I would hope I would have insisted on a better reason, than homophobes run amok, for buying a lethal weapon by a person who was in many instances a very out and proud queer woman.

You must remember this was in 1993 and the peak of the AIDS nightmare. So many of our clients were valiantly struggling to often just stay alive for one more day and this crazy-ass women who I loved and admired, in excellent physical health as far as we knew, goes and kills herself. It was a great blow to many of my staff and her clinic patients to whom she provided psychotherapy. It was difficult for me to even speak her name for many months but we did finally put up a plaque in her memory when our own unbelievably raw feelings subsided and perhaps I personally better appreciated whatever the mental anguish she was suffering from. There were apparently major relationship issues in her life and perhaps these involved anger on her part or maybe it was simply an overwhelming depression made worse by well intentioned use of psychiatric medicines that unfortunately proved to be disinhibiting in the long run and maybe even direct facilitators in pulling the trigger. Suicides seem to often to be impulsively facilitated in our society by the criminally easy access to guns along with alcohol and certain psychotropic medications most often legally prescribed.

My feelings around suicides of people in my life are not however universal and do not always involve anger. In those days in particular end of life decisions to speed the dying process along by many suffering terribly from the ravages of AIDS were not uncommon. For those unfamiliar with this time and its nearly unbearable realities I would encourage you to see the current HBO movie version of Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart, visually at least it is much more riveting and intensely in your face than the play ever was.

The best suicides as I recall from those days were well thought out and often involved much support from lovers, family and friends. The act was rarely impulsive, rarely to my knowledge involved a gun and rarely if ever done in isolation. News of these passing when they would reach the clinic often invoked great sadness and sometimes a sense of relief but no anger.

If this is to be an act with integrity it seems to me it should never occur as a result of subterfuge and certainly not as an expression of anger toward others or one’s self. That itself seems to be a very angry last dance that certainly does not affect in any positive fashion others in your life, many of who may care deeply about you. It strikes me as not only very angry but selfish. I appreciate that deep depression can often set the stage but a common caveat about suicide is that it is mostly the choice when one is coming out of depression.

As mentioned above I will again explore suicide in a future piece, one by a dear friend of many decades and my own personal feelings about it. Most days I tend to take a Buddhist approach that suicide will only result in another reincarnation something to be avoided and continued samsara on the wheel of death and rebirth, which could go very wrong with one perhaps returning as a banana slug.


June, 2014

About the Author

I was born in La Porte, Indiana in 1949, raised on a farm and schooled by Holy Cross nuns. The bulk of my adult life, some 40 plus years, was spent in Denver, Colorado as a nurse, gardener and gay/AIDS activist. I have currently returned to Denver after an extended sabbatical in San Francisco, California.

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Falling among Forbidden Fruit by Gillian

Oh, Adam and Eve have a lot to answer for! Things have gone downhill ever since she gave him that damn apple. Much of humankind seem to consider themselves sufficiently righteous to sit in judgment of others; not to say that applies to all of the people all of the time, but sadly it’s probably true for most of the people most of the time. Equally sadly, it’s not confined to those who proclaim themselves to be Christians, either, so we cannot hold Adam and Eve completely responsible.

We judge others to be different and therefore inferior, but worse than that we fear and hate them. Why, I have never understood. I’m sure I have my parents to thank for that, as they never understood it either. It may also be, at least partly, in our case, that we simply did not encounter these ‘others.’ I grew up in a very homogeneous area, as perhaps many of us of our generation did, and so was really not challenged in acceptance until I left home for college. One would like to believe that a university is not the place where one learns prejudices, so all in all I think I was fairly well sheltered from bigotry until a later stage of maturity by which time I was pretty well protected against acquiring it.

The bigots of this world make ‘them’ the forbidden fruit. In this country, as in many others, it was anyone of a different national origin, ethnicity, language, religion, and especially race. And now, of course, the big battle over same-sex relationships. Multiple prejudices been writ large throughout the history of this ‘melting pot’ of which we are so proud. I observed the horror of it in amazement. I have no more comprehension of it now than I have ever had. I simply cannot get inside the head of prejudiced hate-mongers and so have little hope of gaining any understanding. The very beast inclusivity we can hope for from most people seems to be the old joke,

“Oh yeah I guess they,” whichever particular ‘they’ you may be discussing, “are OK. But you wouldn’t want your sister to marry one!”

So it was with further amazement that I suddenly found myself to have fallen among forbidden fruit.

When I came out, I suddenly realized; I am now one of the Undesirables. I intuited that I should not talk about what I did at the weekend; people might not want to hear it. I had become that person who wouldn’t be coming to dinner; at least not unless I could be trusted to keep my mouth shut and ‘act normal.’ As forbidden fruit I could lie on the orchard floor and rot. Quickly understanding that I was allowing myself to be victimized by the judgment of others, I ceased to modify my reality for their comfort and relaxed.

Then, in 1992, along came Amendment 2. I cried, as I’m sure many of us did, waking in the morning following Election Day and finding myself to be, and really feel to be, someone who could be discriminated against. Legally. It hit me like a ton of bricks that I was one of God knows how many throughout the world and over the ages. I had sympathized with them, but until that moment never actually empathized. And my problems were essentially non-existent compared with those of so many others. I was not immediately threatened with death, imprisonment, or deportation. I would not lose my home nor would I lose my job. Practically, I had no fear that the passage of Amendment 2 would effect my life in any way. Yet I felt insulted and violated. Also, luckily, I was very, very, angry.

That was the final point, I think, in my total ‘outing’ process. I will not let these ignorant bigots make me feel like this. I will not be their victim. I will not let the attitude of others make me feel bad about myself. I will not apologize, even to myself, no, above all not to myself, for who I am. I know I have done nothing wrong and that is all that matters.

And if I have become forbidden fruit to others, it is their problem and not mine.

I will not lie silently, invisibly, under the tree and rot, while the wasps buzz hungrily, angrily, around me.

I will pick myself up and dust myself off, and mix with pride with the rest of the beautiful shiny forbidden fruit, enclosed in that strongly woven basket of understanding, support, and caring that fills me with pure joy at what and who I am, without one single ounce of regret.

April, 2014

About the Author

I was born and raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S. and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder area since 1965, working for 30 years at IBM. I married, raised four stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself as a lesbian. I have now been with my wonderful partner Betsy for 25 years.

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Cavafy – Gay Poet by Louis Brown

Prompt: Poetry

Consider the following:
(1) Constantine P. Cavafy, 20th Century gay Greek poet
(2) Alexander the Great
(3) New York City Civic Center: poetry reading of Constantine P. Cavafy poetry
(4) Our golden age in ancient Greece.
(5) Sappho, ancient Greek Lesbian poet; the Amazons
(6) Modern Era Lesbian poet was Gertrude Stein (February 3, 1874 – July 27, 1946) was an American writer of novels, poetry and plays.
(7) Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud; in the American ‘60’s, Alan Ginsbergh.

When I was at SAGE New York, I looked at the Community Bulletin Board, and I noticed that there was going to be a public reading of the poetry of Constantine P. Cavafy. I guess over the years we have heard some mention of gay poets, Alan Ginsbergh, and in 19th Century France, Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine. I wonder if Sylvester Stallone knows that his character Rambo has the same last name a gay French poet?

When I saw the ad for the reading of Cavafy’s poetry, I said to myself that an insightful gay libber did a good deed in trying to popularize Constantine Cavafy’s poetry. Right now for our community, he is the most interesting gay poet, the hottest potato, for several reasons. Like the work of 19th century homophile writers John Addington Symonds in America, Magnus Hirschfield in Germany, Edward Carpenter and Havelock Ellis in England, Cavafy’s poetry has a specific reference to ancient gay history.

Briefly, ancient Greece was our golden age. To read between the lines, the deal back then was heterosexual men and women got a “deferment” from military service. They stayed home, made babies and took care of them. Gay men were expected to become soldiers. They ran the military both in Athens and Sparta. As a result, gay men also ran the original Olympic games, they were in charge of the academies and all the sacred temples. Same sex love was considered a more refined, a more noble form of love-making. It was public policy. My guess is this all came about because of Alexander the Great (whose military boyfriend was Haephestus). Also much was made of women becoming warriors, remember the Amazons. The most noted ancient Lesbian poetess was of course Sappho. That was the other side of the coin.

When the Italian Renaissance came along in the 16th Century, thanks in part to liberal Pope Julius V, there was a renewed interest in Graeco-Roman history. Remember Leonardo DaVinci, Michaelangelo Buonaroti, Sandro Botticelli, I think it is safe to assume that same sex love in antiquity was an important contributing factor to the interest of the patrons of the très gay Italian Renaissance.

Constantine P. Cavafy; [1] also known as Konstantin or Konstantinos Petrou Kavafis, or Kavaphes; Greek:  April 29 (April 17, OS), 1863 – April 29, 1933) was a Greek poet who lived in Alexandria and worked as a journalist and civil servant. He published 154 poems; dozens more remained incomplete or in sketch form. His most important poetry was written after his fortieth birthday.

He wrote in Greek; scholars will have to vie to become the best translator of his work.

“Ithaca”

When you set sail for Ithaca, 
wish for the road to be long, 
full of adventures, full of knowledge. 
The Lestrygonians and the Cyclopes, 
an angry Poseidon — do not fear. 
You will never find such on your path, 
if your thoughts remain lofty, and your spirit 
and body are touched by a fine emotion. 
The Lestrygonians and the Cyclopes, 
a savage Poseidon you will not encounter, 
if you do not carry them within your spirit, 
if your spirit does not place them before you. 
Wish for the road to be long. 
Many the summer mornings to be when 
with what pleasure, what joy 
you will enter ports seen for the first time. 
Stop at Phoenician markets, 
and purchase the fine goods, 
nacre and coral, amber and ebony, 
and exquisite perfumes of all sorts,
the most delicate fragrances you can find.
 To many Egyptian cities you must go,
 to learn and learn from the cultivated. 
Always keep Ithaca in your mind. 
To arrive there is your final destination. 
But do not hurry the voyage at all. 
It is better for it to last many years, 
and when old to rest in the island, 
rich with all you have gained on the way, 
not expecting Ithaca to offer you wealth. 
Ithaca has given you the beautiful journey. 
Without her you would not have set out on the road. 
Nothing more does she have to give you. 
And if you find her poor, Ithaca has not deceived you. 
Wise as you have become, with so much experience,
 you must already have understood what Ithaca means.

Historical Poems 
These poems are mainly inspired by the Hellenistic era with Alexandria at primary focus. Other poems originate from Helleno-romaic antiquity and the Byzantine era. Mythological references are also present. The periods chosen are mostly of decline and decadence (e.g. Trojans); his heroes facing the final end.

Sensual Poems
The sensual poems are filled with the lyricism and emotion of same-sex love; inspired by recollection and remembrance. The past and former actions, sometimes along with the vision for the future underlie the muse of Cavafy in writing these poems.

Philosophical Poems
Also called instructive poems they are divided into poems with consultations to poets and poems that deal with other situations such as closure (for example, “The walls”), debt (for example, “Thermopylae”), and human dignity (for example, “The God Abandons Antony”).

If only our community could get its act together and promote lesbian and gay cultural history in more depth and popularize it; that would be progress.

30 June 2014

About the Author

I was born in 1944, I lived most of my life in New York City, Queens County. I still commute there. I worked for many years as a Caseworker for New York City Human Resources Administration, dealing with mentally impaired clients, then as a social work Supervisor dealing with homeless PWA’s. I have an apartment in Wheat Ridge, CO. I retired in 2002. I have a few interesting stories to tell. My boyfriend Kevin lives in New York City. I graduated Queens College, CUNY, in 1967.
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Stories of GLBT Organizations

My thirty-year career at Ford Motor Company reached its culmination at the end of the last century, coincident with the last of my 26 years of being in a straight marriage and the birth of the GLBT organization that has played the largest part in my personal journey toward wholeness. That organization is Ford GLOBE.

GLOBE is an acronym for Gay, Lesbian, Or Bisexual Employees. It was hatched in the minds of two Ford employees, a woman and a man, in Dearborn, MI, in July of 1994. By September, they had composed a letter to the Vice President of Employee Relations–with a copy to Ford CEO, Alex Trotman–expressing a desire to begin a dialogue with top management on workplace issues of concern to Ford’s gay, lesbian and bisexual employees. They were invited to meet with the VP of Employee Relations in November.

In 1995, the group, now flying in full view of corporate radar and growing, elected a five-member board, adopted its formal name of Ford GLOBE; designed their logo; adopted mission, vision, and objective statements; and adopted bylaws. The fresh-faced Board was invited to meet with the staff of the newly-created corporate Diversity Office. Soon after, “sexual orientation” was incorporated into Ford’s Global Diversity Initiative. Members of Ford GLOBE participated in the filming of two company videos on workplace diversity. Also that year, Ford was a sponsor of the world-premier on NBC of Serving in Silence, starring Glenn Close as Army Reserve Colonel Margarethe Cammermeyer. By September of 1996, Ford GLOBE chapters were forming in Great Britain and Germany.

In March of 1996, Ford GLOBE submitted to upper management the coming-out stories of 23 members in hope of putting a human face on what had been an invisible minority. Along with the stories came a formal request for Ford’s non-discrimination policy to be rewritten to include sexual orientation. At the time, only Ford of Britain had such a policy.

Ford GLOBE was beginning to network with similar interest groups at General Motors and Chrysler, including sharing a table at the 1996 Pridefest and walking together in the Michigan Pride Parade in Lansing. After two years of discussion between Ford GLOBE and top management, on November 14, 1996, Ford CEO, Alex Trotman, issued Revised Corporate Policy Letter # 2, adding “sexual orientation” to the company’s official non-discrimination policy. To this day, some of our largest and most profitable corporations, including Exxon Mobile, have refused to do the same.

My involvement with Ford GLOBE began sometime in 1997. For that reason and the fact that I have scrapped many of my records of this period, I have relied heavily on Ford GLOBE’s website for the dates and particulars of these events.

In February of 1998, I attended a “Gay Issues in the Workplace” Workshop, led by Brian McNaught, at Ford World Headquarters, jointed sponsored by GLOBE and the Ford Diversity Office. I remember a Ford Vice President taking the podium at that event. He was a white man of considerable social cachet and I assumed that the privilege that normally goes with that status would have shielded him from any brushes with discrimination. In fact, he told a story of riding a public transit bus with his mother at the height of World War II. His family was German. His mother had warned him sternly not to speak German while riding the bus. Thus, he, too, had known the fear of being outed because of who he was. The experience had made him into an unlikely ally of GLOBE members over 50 years later.

In 1999, Ford GLOBE amended its by-laws to make it their mission to include transgendered employees in Ford’s non-discrimination policy and gender identity in Ford’s diversity training. Ford Motor Company was the first and only U.S. automotive company listed on the 1999 Gay and Lesbian Values Index of top 100 companies working on gay issues, an achievement noted by Ford CEO Jac Nasser. It was about this time that retired Ford Vice Chairman and Chief Financial Officer Alan Gilmore came out as gay. The Advocate named Ford Motor Company to its list of 25 companies that provide good environments for gay employees in its Oct. 26 edition.

Having earlier written the contract bargaining teams for Ford Motor Company, United Auto Workers, and Canadian Auto Workers requesting specific changes in the upcoming union contracts, Ford GLOBE was pleased to see that the resulting Ford/CAW union contract included provision for same-sex domestic partners to be treated as common law spouses in Canada, for sexual orientation to be added to the nondiscrimination statement of the Ford/UAW contract, and that Ford and the UAW agreed to investigate implementation of same-sex domestic partner benefits during the current four-year union contract.

The year 2000 was not only the year that I became Board Chair of Ford GLOBE but also the year that marked a momentous event in automotive history as Ford, General Motors, and the Chrysler Division of DaimlerChrysler issued a joint press release with the United Auto Workers announcing same-sex health care benefits for the Big Three auto companies’ salaried and hourly employees in the U.S. As the first-ever industry-wide joint announcement of domestic partner benefits and largest ever workforce of 465,000 U.S. employees eligible in one stroke, the historic announcement made headlines across the nation. It was truly a proud moment for all of us in the Ford GLOBE organization.

On January 1 of 2001, my last year with the company, Ford expanded its benefits program for the spouses of gay employees to include financial planning, legal services, the personal protection plan, vehicle programs, and the vision plan.

Since my departure from the company, Ford and GLOBE have continued to advance the cause of GLBT equality and fairness both within the corporation and without. I am fortunate to have been supported in my own coming out process by my associates within the company, both gay and straight, and to Ford GLOBE in particular for the bonds of friendship honed in the common struggle toward a better and freer world.

About the Author

I came to the beautiful state of Colorado out of my native Kansas by way of Michigan, the state where I married and I came to the beautiful state of Colorado out of my native Kansas by way of Michigan, the state where I married and had two children while working as an engineer for the Ford Motor Company. I was married to a wonderful woman for 26 happy years and suddenly realized that life was passing me by. I figured that I should make a change, as our offspring were basically on their own and I wasn’t getting any younger. Luckily, a very attractive and personable man just happened to be crossing my path at that time, so the change-over was both fortuitous and smooth. Soon after, I retired and we moved to Denver, my husband’s home town. He passed away after 13 blissful years together in October of 2012. I am left to find a new path to fulfillment. One possibility is through writing. Thank goodness, the SAGE Creative Writing Group was there to light the way. 

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Tchaikovsky: Gay Music from Despair by Will Stanton

The Romantic music of Tchaikovsky is some of the most deeply emotional music ever written. Like millions of listeners spanning more than a century since his death, I have held a deep appreciation for his musical genius. More so, and ever since I was a child, I have deeply sensed the true meaning lying within his final composition, his “Pathétique” symphony. Whether or not my musical sense or Tchaikovsky’s ability to communicate is responsible for my insight, that sense now has been proven to be accurate, which I’ll explain further along.

Tchaikovsky’s music ranges from apparent joy and love to the darkest abyss of despair. Now that additional information has come to light, we at last understand that the full extent of Tchaikovsky’s musical creativity most likely never would have found expression had it not been for the fact that he was homosexual, an orientation that, at that time and place, caused him life-long torment and depression.

Pytor Ilyich Tchaikovsky, composer

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, born in Votkinsk, Russia, experienced a childhood of misery. Although his father was minor aristocracy and a civil servant, the family was poor and eventually became destitute. Already an extremely sensitive and introspective child, his mother’s unhappiness affected Tchaikovsky, especially after they moved to Moscow when he was eight. She died when he was only fourteen, a contributing factor to his depression.

He first enrolled in, what was called, the Imperial School of Jurisprudence, an all-boys school that prepared them for civil service, engineering, and the military. Here, he was exposed to much sexual experimentation among the boys, and he soon realized that this was his own preference. At that time in Russia, and especially in the capital of Moscow, clandestine homosexual acts did occur, but the terrible sin was being caught.

Tchaikovsky changed the direction of his career upon attending a performance of Mozart’s opera “Don Giovanni,” an experience that greatly impressed him and resulted in his enrolling in the Saint Petersburg Conservatory. Upon graduation, he returned to Moscow to join its conservatory. In such an environment, he found his career flourishing but, at the same time, having to live in a city that biographers have described as “violently homophobic.” Consequently, he suffered frequent bouts of self-doubt and depression, fearing exposure. He revealed to his younger brother Anatoly that his homosexual tendencies, caused “an unbridgeable gulf between the majority of people and myself. They impart to my character…a sense of alienation, fear of others, timidity, excessive shyness, mistrustfulness, which make me more and more unsociable.” Increasingly, these feelings found expression in his music.

Despite his fears of exposure, Tchaikovsky could not suppress his desires. He became deeply in love with fifteen-year-old Eduard Zak. Eduard, however, suffered his own despair and committed suicide at nineteen. Sometime later, Tchaikovsky wrote in his diary, “How amazingly clearly I remember him: the sound of his voice, his movements, but especially the extraordinarily wonderful expression on his face at times. I cannot conceive that he is no more. The death of this boy, the fact that he no longer exists, is beyond my understanding. It seems to me that I have never loved anyone so strongly as him.”

Stories of love, and doomed love, found expression in his music. Musicologists feel that Eduard was the inspiration for his composition “Romeo and Juliet,” based upon the tragedy by Shakespeare and written at the time Tchaikovsky was in love with Eduard.

Tchaikovsky himself had a doomed marriage, an attempt to appear and to feel “normal.” He wrote to his brother Modest that he would marry absolutely anyone, which he did at age thirty-seven. He attempted to propose to his new wife having simply a platonic relationship, which apparently she did not understand. This experiment failed and contributed further to his depression. They separated within a few months but never officially divorced because the legally required infidelity never had occurred.

One woman became his unseen patron, Nadezhda von Meck, widow of a wealthy railroad tycoon. Although they never met face to face, they frequently wrote to each other. This abruptly came to an end at age fifty when von Meck’s relatives, jealous of the money given to Tchaikovsky, blackmailed her with the threat of public exposure of Tchaikovsky’s homosexuality unless she ceased supporting him, which she did rather than risk that exposure. He was not told of this blackmail and became dismayed and embittered by the sudden severing of their relationship.

The most emotional and despondent music composed by Tchaikovsky was his final work, the Symphony No. 6 referred to as the “Pathétique.” The first movement begins with a solemn and even ominous introduction by bassoons. It then leads into one of the most beautiful yet heart-rending melodic themes, very much like a soulful remembrance of love.

The fourth and final movement is unusual in that it is the opposite of the expected exuberant ending. Instead, it begins with total resignation, climbs to a peak of angst and despair, and then, in a dramatically long and ever-descending passage, plummets into a deep, final abyss, much like a jumbo-jet falling from the sky, plunging into the sea, and sinking to the bottom. Recent research since the fall of the Soviet Union reveals why.

In Tchaikovsky’s fifty-third year, the final year of his life, he had an affair with Alexandre Vladimirovich Stenbok-Fermor, the eighteen-year-old son of Count Alexei Alexandrovich Stenbok-Fermor. The great sin of exposure came to pass. The count discovered the liaison and wrote an angry letter denouncing Tchaikovsky to Czar Alexander III, his close friend. The count’s lawyer, rather than delivering the letter immediately to the Czar, instead, contacted his powerful legal and political colleagues, all alumni from the Imperial School of Jurisprudence. They convened a “Court of Honor” and summoned Tchaikovsky to appear before them. He was told that they were prepared to deliver the damning letter to the Czar, thereby destroying his reputation and exposing him to censure and shame. They then informed him that the only way for him to avoid scandal and disgrace was to commit suicide.

Tchaikovsky was confronted with this shock and ultimatum while he was composing the “Pathétique.” It now appears that he completed the symphony as a farewell to life. His death by arsenic poisoning was slow and painful. To prevent the public from learning the facts behind Tchaikovsky’s death, the word went out that he died from cholera.

Anyone who truly cares for other people must be empathetic for Tchaikovsky and regret his having lead such a tortured life. His brother Modest speculated that composing music was “an attempt to drive out the somber demons that had so long plagued him.” We might wish that the man never have suffered so greatly. Yet, without a life of suffering, we might never have had given to us such extraordinary music. I’ll go further; it is safe to say that this “symphony of defeat,” and especially the suicidal fourth movement, never would have been written as it was. As for myself, who have appreciated the beauty and power of the “Pathétique” for so long, it is a sad consolation to have my sense, from the very first hearing, of what Tchaikovsky was saying confirmed. I heard his voice; I felt his despair.

Click on the link below to watch the final
movement of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony Number 6, the “Pathétique”: Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra, V. Gergiev, conductor, 13:20 minutes.  

The “Pathétique” 


January, 2014

About the Author

I have had a life-long fascination with people and their life stories. I also realize that, although my own life has not brought me particular fame or fortune, I too have had some noteworthy experiences and, at times, unusual ones. Since I joined this Story Time group, I have derived pleasure and satisfaction participating in the group. I do put some thought and effort into my stories, and I hope that you find them interesting.

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Revelation–The Key to Our Revolution by Pat Gourley

Yes, Dorothy, there is a homosexual agenda. It is not, however, fueled by the paranoid fantasies of the homophobic that we are in the business of recruitment. No it is something much more powerful than that. Our true agenda is one of personal revelation and the ripples of awesome change that naturally occurs as a result.

If you pull the religious mysticism crap out of the definition of “revelation” what you are left with at the root is “the revealing or disclosing of some form of truth or knowledge.” It does seem to me that the coming-out process is one of the purest and certainly most powerful forms of revelation.

Another “R” word that I think is closely tied in here with our true agenda is revolution. A lesser definition of this word but one quite applicable to my beliefs here states that revolution is “a dramatic and wide-ranging change in the way something works or is organized or in people’s ideas about it.”

Homosexuality it seems is certainly undergoing such a major paradigm shift in how it is perceived by the larger society. Oh sure Neanderthal pockets of reluctance to accept the inevitable still exist as very dramatically demonstrated by certain members of the state legislature’s of Kansas and Arizona and a couple of African nations to say nothing of the Russian State. The crazies in our neighboring state to the east are certainly being motivated by a sense of desperation. They have to invoke a convoluted sense of victimhood; we queers are impinging on their religious freedoms by asking them to bake us a cake. How ridiculous is that? They can play with poisonous snakes all they want just keep them away from the kids and I’ll bake my own damn cake, thank you.

The desperation of these folks is indicative that they now realize they have really lost the battle. The reason the scales have tipped so much in our favor is very clearly due to “revelation” on our part. I am firm believer that is has been the individual coming out process repeated and repeated millions of times over the past nearly fifty years that has created this tipping point. The repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” the acceptance of gay professional athletes, queers on TV and all the favorable marriage equality rulings are the result not the cause of this dramatic national “sea change”. And let me add I am not speaking about the coming out of the famous sports person, politician, TV or movie personality as the fuel that has sustained this change, but the coming out of the very average queer in every corner of the world. Revealing often with gut wrenching courage their true selves to friends, co-workers and family.

I wrote a piece in August of 1983 titled “Come Out, Come Out Wherever You Are”. It can be found in its original form on my web site www.pjgourley.com, in the Radical Gay Politics section. In a moment of laziness this weekend I thought I might just bring that piece to read but I have rested on my laurels perhaps a few too many times in this group by reading old shit and besides I kind of felt the need to rant a bit.

This article from 1983 was a feeble attempt on my part to try and rally the troops if you will and goose along the need for continuing our waves of revelation that had marked the 1970’s in particular. This was the early days of the AIDS epidemic with fear starting to really creep into the core of the gay male psyche; doubts in the minds of some that maybe the homophobes were right all along and nature was finally going to take care of this “homosexual problem.”

My exhortation was not to retreat into our closets but to start coming out in even greater force. I open the article quoting a Gallop Poll cited in Newsweek magazine from August of 1983 back in a time when Newsweek was actually read by large numbers of people. One question asked in the poll was “Do you have any friends or acquaintances who are homosexual?” 26% answered “Yes” while 74% answered “No.” There was clearly still lots of revealing to do on our part. With AIDS just beginning to creep into the national consciousness and no causative agent yet identified, Jerry Falwell was calling for the quarantining of gay men and I quote “like cattle with brucellosis.”

As it turned out though the community didn’t need my feeble cheerleading with the LGBTQ response to the epidemic being in the long run phenomenally community building and empowering, tragic and horrific as it was.

Harvey Milk
Photo taken in SF Public Library in2010

My personal efforts at “revelation” in this area of my own queerness started in 1967 and after several fitful starts and stops really took off in 1976 with my involvement with an organization called the Gay Community Center of Colorado located on Lafayette street just a block and a half from our current location. So here I am 38 years later still hanging out in this local community center. I ask myself what at this stage of the game I could possibly still have to reveal? Well you see my own personal growth and the ongoing ripening of my own queerness continues to be enhanced by listening to all the revelations here each week and sharing a few of my own. Love and hugs to you all!

© February
2014
About the Author

I was born in La Porte Indiana in 1949, raised on a farm and schooled by Holy Cross nuns. The bulk of my adult life, some 40 plus years, was spent in Denver, Colorado as a nurse, gardener and gay/AIDS activist. I have currently returned to Denver after an extended sabbatical in San Francisco, California.

Read more of Patrick’s blogs at www.pjgourley.com

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All My Exes Live In Texas by Pat Gourley

Actually none of my exes live in Texas, are from Texas or to my knowledge ever had any significant connection to Texas. I have been there only once. That was an overnight stay in Dallas for teaching purposes on a new HIV drug called ddc. We were beginning a study with it at the AIDS clinic where I worked. I believe the year was 1990 or 1991. I seem to recall that this overnighter was in August and other than staying in a very plush hotel it was the throat grabbing heat and humidity that I remember best. The short trip from cab to inside the hotel made me think ‘so this is what hell is like.’

For those of you who have not seen the Dallas Buyers Club, currently playing at the Esquire Theatre one of the drugs they were trying hard to have access to early was ddc. AZT was all that was available early on and many thought it was poison. Ironically it was the high dosage of AZT that was the big problem and in the long run it proved less toxic than ddc. AZT is still in use today in combinations with other drugs and ddc nowhere to be found.

I believe the first buyers clubs were in New York City and on the west coast a direct offshoot of ACT-UP organizing and efforts. They did not originate in Texas.

I strongly recommend the movie which I feel is great validation for folks not sitting by quietly waiting to be saved (or not) but rather taking matters into our own hands and strongly and forcefully demanding change and action. This is something we queers are quite adept at when we put our minds to it. There has been some controversy in the gay press about the movie and after last night’s Golden Globe awards where the best actor and best supporting actor awards were won by the stars of the movie some minor bitching continues. I won’t get into the controversies here other than to say I think it is perhaps a bit “much ado about not much.” Everyone does agree the acting was superb.

In retrospect I do feel bad that I was attending a drug company teaching session on ddc in Dallas in the early 1990’s rather than spending my time visiting their buyer’s club. We of course had to be properly trained on the drug before we could be designated a study site for it. I never got to meet the infamous Ron Woodroof and the charismatic Rayon, the lead characters in the Dallas Buyers Club.

In the movie the main protagonist is a man named Ron Woodroof played by Matthew McConaughey. The other main character is a trans-women played in quite dramatic fashion by Jared Leto named Rayon. A strong subtext throughout the movie is the genuine bonds that developed between her and McConaughey a supposedly straight man. The Dallas Buyers Club itself as an entity doesn’t really take off until Rayon becomes involved and brings in many customers. It needed a bit more legitimate queer street cred, which Rayon brought to it, countering the McConaughey character and his early on really vicious, drug addled homophobia.

Buyer’s Clubs became a quite widespread phenomenon in the late 1980’s and were a force even locally here in Denver until the late 1990’s when protease inhibitors came on the scene. The flawed but immensely better new drugs that actually worked to keep the virus at bay tended to take the desperate energy out of the sails of the various PWA coalitions and the often loosely affiliated buyers clubs.

Locally there was a strong PWA coalition and a loosely associated buyer’s club. I was never involved directly with either though I did on occasion contribute educational pieces for their newsletter called Resolute, my most infamous piece being one titled “Its Chemotherapy Stupid.” I might read it here some day.

I do though recall that our buyer’s club was run in a bit more egalitarian fashion than the Dallas Buyers Club was. Less profit motivated for sure and really queer run here. I only accessed them once and that was the day before my partner David died at Rose Medical Center on September 17th, 1995. His AIDS was quite advanced by this time and David had just been home a few days from a rather lengthy and traumatic hospital stay. He adamantly did not want to return for another stay or to die there if at all possible.

The big issue was controlling pain. All we had at home were morphine tables and plenty of them but they didn’t seem to be working and were a sustained release version. I thought a quicker acting liquid form might be more helpful but it was late in the evening and accessing it through his doc at Rose problematic. So I picked up the phone and called one of my friends, a local buyer’s club member. Within less than an hour our doorbell rang. No one was at the door but there was a small paper bag on the stoop with two bottles of liquid morphine.

Unfortunately, that didn’t work either. So we gave in and went back to Rose for IV pain relief. That did help immensely but David died the next morning at 9 A.M.

I am reminded constantly how lucky I am to be alive today. I turned 65 yesterday. I know that makes me a youngster in this room but in the AIDS community I am an old man. I do think I owe a great debt of gratitude to all the AIDS activists of the 1980’s and 1990’s for speeding up the process of drug development and access to these drugs for people with AIDS. If not for a lot of loudmouthed and uppity queens, including many in Texas, I might very well not be here today.

© January 2014

About the Author



I was born in La Porte Indiana in 1949, raised on a farm and schooled by Holy Cross nuns. The bulk of my adult life, some 40 plus years, was spent in Denver, Colorado as a nurse, gardener and gay/AIDS activist. I have currently returned to Denver after an extended sabbatical in San Francisco, California.

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What is the Real Spirit of Stonewall? by Pat Gourley


Stonewall Inn (Then)
Stonewall Inn 2012

White statues in park across
 from the Stonewall Inn








“Despite his enduring
commitment to gay rights and lifelong dedication to queer scholarship, Duberman
is deeply disappointed in the contemporary LGBT movement, noting that for the
last 20 years it has been focused on marriage equality and repealing “Don’t
Ask, Don’t Tell”. In Duberman’s view, the gay agenda is grossly myopic and its
goals of assimilation counter the spirit of Stonewall and Gay Liberation, which
sought to affirm, rather than obscure gay differences.”
http://slanthere.com

The above quote referenced from the online entity The Slant is from an interview done recently with Martin Duberman. Duberman for those perhaps unfamiliar with the name is a queer, radical activist with a very long and impressive academic background and the author of numerous books and countless articles. He is on faculty as a professor of history emeritus at the City University of New York. The interview was published online June 5th, 2013 and is commemorating the 44th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots. His most recent book is titled The Marin Duberman Reader.

In reading the Duberman interview I found myself hearing similar ideas I was frequently exposed to in the late 1970’s as a result of my budding relationship with Harry Hay, life long gay activist and founder of the Mattachine Society in 1950 and very instrumental in birthing the Radical Fairie movement. It was through contacts at the Gay Community Center of Colorado in 1978 that I was able to connect with Harry and his partner John Burnside who were living in northern New Mexico at that time.

An activity I was involved in during the spring of 1979, through The Center for the week of activities commemorating the Stonewall Riots, was the 3rd annual Lesbian/ Gay Symposium held the Saturday before the Sunday March. We were still marching back then rather than having a pride parade or at least still hotly debating whether it should be a “March or a Parade”.

The symposiums were part of Pride Week activities starting in 1977 and continuing into the early 1980’s working with the support of the Center. They consisted of a single daylong program of workshops. Presentations and discussions were of topical interest to the LGBT community and often fairly broad in scope. Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell was of course not even on the distant horizon yet and marriage equality not even a figment of anyone’s imagination. For many early LGBT activists participation in the military was not consider a desirable pursuit for anyone gay or straight, and marriage was thought to be a rather unsuccessful heterosexual construct meant to primarily control women and property, definitely not something to strive to emulate.

Since I had gotten to know Hay and his loving companion John Burnside in the previous year the awareness of his rich queer activist history led me to pursue him as a keynote speaker at the 1979 Symposium. They were at that time both heavily involved in the planning for the first Radical Fairie gathering that was to take place in the Arizona desert outside Tucson later in the summer. In personal correspondence dated 6-11-79 in typical Hay fashion he agreed to come up for the event. Written letters in 1979 were a viable and frequently used manner of communication and Harry was a master at writing long letters. Regarding my request that he and John be keynote speakers he wrote: “…being ‘keynote people’ scares us. We love to rap with people but we don’t take kindly to the old hetero-imitating formalisms of speeches or addresses.”

Though I have many pages of personal correspondence with Harry in particular I unfortunately never saved my responses back to him. I apparently responded that that would be fine and they came to Denver for that Lesbian and Gay Pride weekend of 1979 and participated in several workshops at the Symposium. He spoke briefly at the rally at the end of the Pride march that Sunday in Civic Center. Harry with bullhorn graces the cover of the July 6, 1979 issue (Vol. IV, #7) Of Out Front Magazine. I do not remember any of his remarks at the rally but the theme of the march that year was “We Are Family” so I suspect he spoke to that.

Much of Hay’s thought on queers at the time focused on the three questions originally raised by the Mattachine society; who are we, where do we come from and what are we for? If we were to be pursuing these questions in earnest at the time, and they are still quite relevant today, assimilation into the larger hetero society with marriage equality and open military service were unlikely to facilitate that exploration.

In the Duberman piece referenced earlier he describes the current “gay agenda” focus on marriage and the military as very myopic and Hay would certainly agree. In fact I heard Harry dismiss both as sadly hetero-imitative and nothing we should be serious about pursuing if we were intent on getting to the root of our difference and bringing our unique gifts and contributions to the larger human banquet.

When Duberman was asked specifically about the influence of queer culture on mainstream America he responded in part: “So far, I don’t think the effect of mainstream culture has been significant, and I think that’s the fault of both the gay movement and the mainstream, which is willing to accept and tolerate us to the extent that we act like good middle class white people”.

If I can be so bold I would say that both Hay and Duberman firmly believe that our real strength comes from being “outsiders”. Perhaps the potential for at least some of the change humanity desperately needs at this juncture can come from queer folk and that will only come about if we relish and explore our differences as possible keys to viable solutions to our immense problems today. Not to throw too much of a burden on us but we really do need to be in the vanguard of a radical restructuring of the entire social order or we are pretty much screwed both as a species and a viable planet.

How wonderful if every June we could renew out commitment to being “other” and recommit to using our unique worldviews to tackling some of the greatest issues we will face in the coming year.

© 30 June 2013

 About the Author 

I was born in La Porte Indiana in 1949, raised on a farm and schooled by Holy Cross nuns. The bulk of my adult life, some 40 plus years, was spent in Denver, Colorado as a nurse, gardener and gay/AIDS activist.  I have currently returned to Denver after an extended sabbatical in San Francisco, California.

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Slang in an Historical Subculture by Will Stanton

Historical evidence shows that a significantly large proportion of homosexual language and labels arises from within or from the margins surrounding a queer subculture, that they are terms indigenous to queer culture, self-generated and self-cultivated. Perhaps one reason why social scientists and psychologists scrupulously avoid using this slang is because they realize that slang arises, at least partly, from within the minority group itself and that, to some extent, empowers it. Homosexuals have not found it very difficult to call themselves fairies, queers, or faggots, whereas they do not generally call themselves perverts, or sexual psychopaths.

Some analyses of campy language are based upon the compensation model: camp changes the real, hostile world into a new one which is controllable and seems to be safer. Camp has been a way for gay men to re-imagine the world around them. It exaggerates and therefore appears to diffuse real threats.

Many theorists believe that, especially with gay men, referring to one another with women’s names or pronouns evolved as a coded, protected way of speaking about one’s personal or sexual life. If one man were to be overheard at a public dinner table saying to another, “You’ll never guess what Mary said on our date last night,” little would be thought of it.” Other theorists believe, however, on the contrary, that more flamboyant gays refer to each other with women’s names almost entirely within a queer context in which no heterosexuals were present. It operated primarily within gay culture and functioned to cement the relations within that culture. All of the camp talk of the eighteenth-century gays (“mollies”), for example, was overheard by police constables who had infiltrated the molly houses. Such talk virtually was unknown outside the confines of a molly house.

Queer language is not something that is new to modern times. In ancient times the transgendered priests of the goddess Cotytto spoke a gay, even obscene jargon of their own.

In the gay subculture of early eighteenth-century London, gay slang was a modification of thieves’ slang and prostitute slang. As today, the mollies would ‘‘make Love to one another’’, and they used other euphemisms such as ‘’the pleasant Deed’’ and ‘‘to do the Story.’’ They had more specific verbs for anal intercourse, such as ‘to indorse’ (from contemporary boxing slang,) and ‘‘caudle-making’’ or ‘‘giving caudle’’ (from the Latin cauda, a tail.) Later in the century, sodomites were called ‘‘backgammon players’’ and ‘‘gentlemen of the back door.’’ Gay cruising grounds were called ‘‘the markets,’’ where the mollies went ‘‘strolling and caterwauling.’’ If they were lucky, they would ‘‘picked up’ partners, or ‘trade’’ (both terms are still in common use today.) Or, they would ‘‘make a bargain’’ or agree to have sex (this derives from a rather obscure game known as ‘‘selling a bargain.’’) Another variation is ‘‘bit a blow,’’ equivalent to the modern phrase ‘‘score a trick.’’ To ‘‘put the bite’’ on someone was to arrange for sex, possibly sex for money, derived from a contemporary phrase implying some sort of trickery, usually financial.

The most striking feature of the eighteenth-century ‘‘Female Dialect’’ was that gay men referred to one another with feminine names such as Madam Blackwell, Miss Kitten, Miss Fanny Knight, Miss Irons, Moll Irons, Flying Horse Moll, Pomegranate Molly, Black Moll, China Mary, Primrose Mary, Orange Mary, Garter Mary, Pippin Mary (alias Queen Irons), Dip-Candle Mary, Small Coal Mary, Aunt Greer, Aunt May, Aunt England, Princess Seraphina the butcher, the Countess of Camomile, Lady Godiva, the Duchess of Gloucester, Orange Deb, Tub Nan, Hardware Nan, Old Fish Hannah and Johannah the Ox-Cheek Woman.

The Maiden Names which the mollies assumed bore little relationship to specific male-female role-playing in terms of sexual behavior. ‘’Fanny Murray’’ was an athletic bargeman, ‘’Lucy Cooper’’ was a Herculean coal-heaver, ‘’Kitty Fisher’’ was a deaf tire repairman, ‘‘Kitty Cambric’ is a coal merchant; Miss Selina, a police office assistant; ‘’Black-eyed Leonora’’ a drummer in the Guards, ‘’Pretty Harriet’’ a butcher; and ‘’Miss Sweet Lips’’ a country grocer.

© 3 March 2011

About the Author

I have had a life-long fascination with people and their life stories. I also realize that, although my own life has not brought me particular fame or fortune, I too have had some noteworthy experiences and, at times, unusual ones. Since I joined this Story Time group, I have derived pleasure and satisfaction participating in the group. I do put some thought and effort into my stories, and I hope that you find them interesting.