hi everyone im still pissed we never learnt in school that shakespeare was bi and wrote the sonnets about a dude and a woc he was into
hi everyone im still pissed that we were told emily dickinson was a spinster when she spent her whole life writing love letters to a woman
hi everyone im still pissed about the fact that we never got taught any of the super super gay Greek myths. it seems impossible to think they managed to pick all the hetero myths when Greece was just THAT gay but guess what? they did.
hi everyone virginia woolf was also bi im still pissed that so much of literature is queer and has queer coding within it that deserves to be analysed through that lens in the same way that we don’t ignore the gender of an author, but sexuality is never mentioned in highschool literature classes
On the night of May 21, 1979, it was announced that Dan White
had been convicted of voluntary manslaughter, the lightest sentencing possible for
his assassination of Harvey Milk. San Francisco’s heartbroken gay community
responded in a series of violent demonstrations now known as the White Night
Riots.
The San Francisco Police Department clash with protesters during the 1979 White Night Riots. In the background hangs a banner, reading “STOP ATTACKS ON LESBIANS & GAYS” (x).
When Harvey Milk won a seat on the San Francisco Board of
Supervisors in 1977 he changed American history by becoming the first openly gay person
to be elected to public office. By 1970, not only had cities such as San
Francisco become a much-needed safe haven for the LGBT community, but Harvey Milk
had ascended to icon status for the community, symbolizing hope, progress, and optimism for his
people. Harvey represented the huge population of gay men in the city, but his
campaigns also achieved a sense of solidarity between San Francisco’s gay community and
its lesbian community. He surrounded himself with popular lesbian activists
such as Anne Kronenburg and Sally Miller Gearheart. His assassination on
November 27, 1978 was met with a city-wide grief.
San Francisco residents react to the conviction of Dan White with a banner that reads “HE GOT AWAY WITH MURDER” (x).
That grief morphed into rage when it was announced that not
only was Harvey’s murderer, Dan White, receiving the lightest sentence possible,
but that he had won over the judge with the now infamous “Twinkie defense.” Dan
White’s attorney claimed that the amount of Twinkies and other junk food that
he had consumed before the assassination was a sign of his depressed mental
state, and therefore the reasoning behind his heinous crimes. The LGBT populations of San Francisco were outraged and what started out as
a peaceful march through the Castro District grew into a violent riot once the
protesters reached the San Francisco City Hall. Cars were lit on fire, tear gas
was thrown, and the SFPD went head to head with over 5,000 protesters. Dan
White’s past as a former police officer coupled with the SFPD’s history of
homophobic attacks simply added fuel to the (quite literal) anti-police fire of the
riots. When Cleve Jones, a famous gay activist from the 1970s, recalled the
night of the White Night Riots in 1984, he said:
“The rage in people’s face—I
saw people I’d known for years, and they were so furious. That to me was the
scariest thing. All these people I’d know from the neighborhood, boys from the
corner, these people I’d ridden the bus with, just out there, screaming for
blood.”
Today, the White Night Riots are remembered as a night – second only to
Stonewall – where LGBT made the world take notice of the amount of violence and visceral power
they were able to yield.
In 1968, the AmeriCong announced that a dog would be burned alive in front of University of Pennsylvania’s Van Pelt Library. 2000 people showed up in protest. They were given leaflets.
“Congratulations on your anti-napalm protest. You saved the life of a dog. Now, how about saving the lives of tens of thousands of people in Vietnam.”
From his birth in an internment camp to marching as a high schooler in Selma and being brutalized by horseback police to starting the Critical Path Project to educate people living with HIV/AIDS on health and activism to his 1999 suit, Kuromiya v United States, for the right to medical marijuana, Kiyoshi Kuromiya’s life is a celebration of direct action and education.
On this day in 1726, three men were hanged by the neck until they were dead on the infamous gallows of Tyburn.
Their names were Thomas Wright, Gabriel Lawrence & William Griffin. They have been lost to history, joining the ranks of thousands upon thousands of men, women and children who were sentenced to death in the long 18th century. No portraits of these men survive, only recorded court testimonies and savage witness condemnation. But Wright, Lawrence and Griffin represent more than simply the fall out of a harsh criminal justice system. They had been caught up in the famous Sodomy Trials of the 1720s, specifically an investigation into the mollyhouse (gay brothel) of Mother Margaret Clap, on Field Lane, Holborn, London. This area of London was famous for its gay community, often dubbed Sodomite’s Walk. When the Reformation societies, deeply, deeply Protestant in creed, decided to take on the perceived vice of London (not just gay communities, but poor prostitutes too), it was here that they aimed their bow. They used spies, men who entered suspected gay men’s confidence and followed them to their favoured haunts and snap them up in the act. It was a vicious, dishonest trap but it managed to catch Mother Clap, the male sex workers she presided over, and the customers she served, in its claws.
Wright, Lawrence and Griffin were unfortunately sold out by hidden informants, spies, their bribed and manipulated lovers (often promised to be saved from death themselves if they spoke out against their male lovers and dubbed them as rapists) or a combination of all three. Not even the three men’s character witnesses, who all stated that the men were honest, kind and upstanding could save them. Wright, Lawrence and Griffin were the only men who ended up being executed, the rest who were found guilty, either of sodomy or some other sexual misdemeanour, were sentenced to time in the pillories where the public were given the freedom to pelt them with rotten fruit, animal corpses etc. (bearable but disgusting), though these three men were certainly not the first or last men to be executed simply for their lifestyle. Unlike other public hangings which were often treated as forms of entertainment and days out in these days, the mood was sombre. People were not keen to celebrate.
Their hanging marked a change in the opinions of the general public. Whilst it didn’t totally change their views on homosexuality to those of tolerance, the general public felt particularly attacked by Reformation societies, their nosey and interfering practices, and the utter insanity of execution as a punishment for one’s private lifestyle. Whilst sodomy was nowhere near being decriminalised, independently minded Londoners, who in the 18th century were marked out by their strong sense of British liberty, began to believe wholeheartedly in bodily autonomy. Put plainly: people should be allowed to do what they wanted with their bodies. This was no longer the age of religious superstition and fear, it was an age of science and progress, no matter what the Reformation societies did or said. Moreover, the hypocrisy of heterosexual sodomy not ever being punished was indisputable.
This revelation was too late for Wright, Lawrence and Griffin, but their deaths were not in vain. The brutality they endured posed a new, lasting idea to the British public. In fact, another man caught up in the Mother Clap Sodomy trials (he escaped execution for a spell in the pillories) would state at his own trial, when asked to defend his actions, that he was and would continue to do what he wanted with his own body and life and for that, there could and should be no punishment.
Sources:
• The Secret History of Georgian London // Dan Cruickshank
• Georgian London: Into the Streets // Lucy Inglis
“MY SON IS BI…I DON’T ASK WHY.” – “MY MOTHER IS STRAIGHT…BUT SHE DON’T HATE.,” Michael Szymansky and his mother, March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation, Washington, D.C., April 25, 1993. Photo by Lynn Harris Ballen (@lynnharrisb), c/o @onearchives. #lgbthistory #HavePrideInHistory #CrystalPepsi (at Washington, District of Columbia)
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