Premier league club tackles homophobia in football

Reading FC has become one of the first football clubs to actively implement the new Football Association and Gay Footballers Supporters' Network initiative to combat homophobia in football.

The GFSN said it is delighted with the response that Reading has made to the initiative, and urged all other Premier League and Football League clubs to follow Reading's excellent example in their work to tackle homophobia.

GFSN Liaison Officer Richard Howgill said, "These are important steps to tackle homophobia in football.

"There are thousands of gay football fans who regularly attend matches and our objective is to promote a non-discriminatory atmosphere which encourages gay people to participate actively in our national sport.

"Reading prides itself in welcoming people of all walks of life to Madejski Stadium in a relaxed and non-threatening environment and we are grateful for their backing."

The new football season started earlier this year and homophobic abuse is against the rules in every Premier League and Football League club for the first time.

As part of the Football Association's commitment to tackling homophobic abuse at all levels of the game, the decision to amend the ground regulations was approved after consultation with the Premier League and Football League in the early part of last season.

The scheme, in which volunteer liaison officers work with football clubs across England, has received support from all the agencies involved in the game, including the police and the Professional Footballer's Association.

The FA/GFSN initiative is appointing volunteers from the various gay football teams to act as liaison officers with each of the 92 English League Clubs.

The role of each officer will be to work alongside and advise the relevant staff at their assigned club of how best to discourage the homophobic abuse and behaviour that is prevalent at every level in the game.

It is hoped that this scheme will facilitate similar social and attitude change to that of the successful anti-racism campaigns in the last few decades.

The initiative will to bring together the various UK gay football organisations to work together to promote gay football while tackling the on going problems at every level of the game.

More than fifty volunteers from gay teams such as Birmingham Blaze FC, GFC Bournemouth, Leftfooters FC, Leicester Wildecats FC, London Falcons FC, London Titans FC, Merseyside Marauders FC, Nottingham Ball Bois FC, Village Manchester FC, Stonewall FC and Yorkshire Terriers FC last month went to The Valley, home of Charlton Athletic, for a day of workshops and discussions that will form the initial basis of the project.

With thanks to here.

See also the homophobia page on the Football Association's website here.

Gay rabbi hits out at Bible-inspired homophobia

An Orthodox American rabbi spoke out against using the Bible to justify prejudice in a sermon yesterday.

Steven Greenberg, America's first openly gay rabbi, shared his belief that the Bible is open to interpretation and should not be used to condemn homosexuality.

According to The Columbus Dispatch, Mr Greenberg said: "No one can say, 'It says in the Scripture,' to ground any policy. "All we can say is, 'My community says this.'"

Mr Greenberg is the author of a book, Wrestling with God and Men: Homosexuality in the Jewish Tradition, which challenges religious principles that forbid same-sex relationships.

He admits that most difficult to overcome is Leviticus 18:22 which states: "Do not lie with a man as one lies with a woman; it is detestable."

But according to Mr Greenberg, this passage refers to violent acts of humiliation rather than our present day understanding of what it means to lie with a man.

The talk was given as part of a lecture series at St Stephen's Episcopal Church on the campus of Ohio State University. Reverend George Glazier, pastor of St Stephen's, praised Greenberg's sermon.

Denise Williams, a member of the church said that she was surprised to hear Mr Greenberg say that the Bible is not "truth with a capital T". "But," she continued, "after he went on and described what he meant, I understood. It was given to us to decipher."

Mr Greenberg who was raised in Columbus, Ohio, was the first person to declare his homosexuality while claiming adherence to Orthodox Judaism.

Given Judaism's views on homosexuality, which sees same-sex relationships as an abomination, this has made Mr Greenberg a symbol for the growing Jewish gay movement.

with thanks to PinkNews.co.uk

GayWise Festival

GFest - gayWise LGBT Arts Festival will take place between 14th and 20th November in London. The festival showcases Queer/LGBT Arts created by Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender (LGBT) artists and practitioners from diverse backgrounds. Events include screenings of short films, performances, exhibitions and workshops.

For more information, visit www.gaywisefestival.org.uk

The Global Politics of LGBT Human Rights - International Conference

The international conference 'The Global Politics of LGBT Human Rights' will be held on Friday 16 November 2007 at the University of Glasgow. This is being co-organised Kelly Kollman, Lecturer in Politics (Department of Politics), and Matthew Waites, Lecturer in Sociology (Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Applied Social Sciences), both at University of Glasgow.

This conference will bring together academics, non-governmental organisations and activists to explore recent global, European, UK and Scottish developments related to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) human rights governance, activism and discourse. The conference presenters will address the global politics of ‘LGBT Human Rights’ from a social theory perspective, as an empirical problem to be explained and interpreted, and/or from the perspective of political campaigning. Some papers will problematise what is meant by ‘LGBT Human Rights’, and the heteronormative aspects of human rights conventions and discourses. Sessions will consider how ‘LGBT Human Rights’ is situated in contemporary global politics and examine how norms, legal principles and networks of activists form across borders and within international institutions. A panel on Scotland and the UK will discuss the relationship of global developments to domestic political processes, dialogue and social understandings of gender and sexuality.

Full details are in the programme which can be downloaded here (Word document).

The conference is free but places are likely to be limited. To register for a place, email Lesley Scott at the follwoing address: lesley.scott@lbss.gla.ac.uk . Please include details of your relevant interests and organisational affiliations in case numbers have to be limited.

Centre for Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Glasgow

HIV strain 'came from Haiti'

The strain of the HIV virus which predominates in the United States and Europe has been traced back to Haiti by an international team of scientists.

Find out more here.

Sammy Duddy Dies

Sammy Duddy
1945 - 2007

Paramilitary and drag artist.

Sammy Duddy was initially known in Belfast for his drag queen act, performing in the city's clubs as 'Samantha'. However his initial role in loyalism had been during the late 1970's and early 1980's when he served as the public relations officer for the then legal Ulster Defence Association (UDA). Duddy went on to serve as the editor of UDA magazine Ulster for a time and published a book of poetry entitled Concrete Whirlpools of the Mind which received praise for its sensitive treatment of the problems for young working class men drawn into violence.

He died of a heart attack on 17 October and is survived by his second wife, Joyce, and three children.

Links to newspaper obituaries are available from the link above.

Reflections on Gay History

The launch of the LGBT History Month 2006 took place in November 2005 at the Empress State Building in West London under the aegis of the Metropolitan Police Service. Among the speakers who took part in the launch, Rictor Norton, writer and historian of gay culture, spoke about the need for a history month. the following essay is based on his contribution.

As I reflect on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender History Month, two questions constantly recur to me: What is gay history, and Who is it for?

The history of gay history shows up some of the difficulties of striking a balance between two different uses of gay history: one which celebrates the lives of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender people, and is aimed at building pride among LGBT people; and one which exposes the prejudices against LGBT people, and is aimed at raising awareness among straight society at large.

Studies of the history of homosexuality began in Germany in the nineteenth century, and were motivated partly by gay men’s anger at being outlawed. The pioneering history of homosexuality was published in 1836 by Heinrich Hoessli. He was an amateur scholar and a professional milliner and interior decorator. He was prompted to engage in his historical research following the execution in 1817 of a man for killing his male lover in a fit of jealousy. Hoessli believed, perhaps naively, that a knowledge of the noble love of the ancient Greeks might have prevented this sort of incident.

Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, another major writer on gay history in the 1860s, began his research following the prosecution of an acquaintance for homosexual indecency. The other major writings on the history of homosexuality appeared in the Yearbook of the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee under the leadership of Magnus Hirschfeld. Hirschfeld was motivated to begin his studies and his campaign to reform the laws against homosexuality following the suicide of one of his patients, a soldier who was being compelled by his family to get married.

From 1899 to 1923, Hirschfeld’s journal published major articles on gay history, using extensive historical research and anthropoligal investigations, as well as articles on contemporary gay life. Hirschfeld himself wrote a fascinating article on the lesbian subculture of Berlin. Hirschfeld took an all-inclusive attitude towards homosexual history, including not only lesbians and bisexuals as well as gay men, but also transgender individuals. He was a qualified physician, and extensively studied the biological development of what he called “intersex” individuals. He himself was affectionately called “Auntie Magnus”.

Similarly thorough-going studies of LGBT history were undertaken in the Netherlands, in Italy, in France, and even in England and Japan, all of which drew heavily on this German research. But the rise of Nazism put a stop to most serious homosexual research. There is a famous picture of Nazi youths burning books in Opera House Square in Berlin in 1933, but it is seldom realised that most of the books on that bonfire were works that had been looted from Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science.

Then the writing of LGBT history pretty well disappeared, and wasn’t taken up again until the 1950s, transplanted to America, in the Journal of Homophile Studies published by One Institute in Los Angeles, and in the writings of Harry Hay, the founder of the Mattachine Society, one of the first gay rights organisations. A typical article by Harry Hay was grandly titled “The Homophile in Search of an Historical Context and Cultural Contiguity”. This emphasis on LGBT culture, history and tradition continued practically unchanged in the pages of the San Francisco journal Gay Sunshine in the late 1960s/early 1970s, which published a large number of articles under the rubric “gay roots”, and to which I made regular contributions.

Most gay writers who did research into gay history were concerned to uncover evidence of a continuous tradition of LGBT culture across historical periods. We believed, and many of us still believe, that this historical continuity does exist, and that knowledge of it is a tool for building a collective identity or community in the present and the future. It is certainly true that LGBT history has been regularly censored, suppressed and studiously ignored by mainstream historians, so at the very least it seems right and proper for us to set the record straight, as it were.

It has to be acknowledged, however, that in terms of personal identity, LGBT history is perhaps not as essential today as it would have been thirty or forty years ago. In the 1950s and 1960s people spent many hours, often frustrating, sometimes exciting, looking through books in the library, trying to find descriptions of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people so that we could sort out our own queer identity. But today we no longer have to search very far for representations of people like us, whom we can readily recognise on television, in newspapers and magazines, and on the internet, and in innumerable gay gatherings.

Today we have access to a wide range of models to choose from as we endeavour to shape our personal sociosexual identity. But I think that LGBT history nevertheless continues to play an important role in the development of community identity and social solidarity. The knowledge that we have survived centuries of suppression is in itself inspiring, and is in itself one of the coping strategies in our determination to achieve social change in the future.

However, the use of LGBT history as a tool in support of social change in the wider society sometimes has unfortunate consequences. I am particularly uneasy when I look closely at some writings on gay history and realise that their subject is not the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, but the oppression of gay people, or society’s prejudice against gay people. In the angriest days of gay liberation some gay historians wrote articles with titles such as “Gay Genocide from Leviticus to Hitler”. But this kind of gay history is not so much the history of homosexuality, as the history of homophobia. We should regularly remind ourselves that these are two distinctly different things, and indeed many of us look forward to a day when homosexuality can exist entirely without homophobia.

A study of the perception and repression of homosexuals is really a history of heterosexuals and their peculiar prejudices. To focus upon social prejudice, rather than the institutions and values of the everyday lives of lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgender persons, is to construct the homosexual as little more than the victim of persecution. It shifts the focus from queers to queerbashers. In the process, gay people can be all too easily lost sight of. LGBT history is too often reduced to the history of persecution and punishment, just as black history is sometimes reduced to the history of slavery, and Jewish history is sometimes reduced to the history of the Holocaust. There is a great risk in the field of all so-called minority histories, of promoting resentment against society more than celebration of oneself and one’s own community.

My own view is that the history of how lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people have built their own identities and relationships and communities is more empowering than the history of how society has oppressed us. The history of homophobia is only a small part of the larger history of homosexuality, and needs to be kept in perspective to avoid a reductive victimology approach to LGBT history. Further, LGBT history will be a greater resource not only for LGBT people but for the whole of society to the degree that it emphasises the intrinsic values and interest of attaining historical knowledge of LGBT people, and is not simply exploited as a tool for social workers.

My own specialised area of research is homosexualitiy in eighteenth-century England. A major source for my information are the trial records at the Old Bailey. Because my resources are mostly criminal records, it would be very easy for me to assemble statistics on the number of men hanged or exhibited in the pillory during this period, and the number of victims of blackmail. However, my aim is to extract gay history from the homophobic context in which it is embedded.

I am not writing a history of the law, but a history of gay people. I am interested not so much in the punishment of gay men, as in how gay men lived their lives during those periods when the law was not interfering in their lives. I am interested, for example, in discovering facts about the life of a man who was called Princess Seraphina by everyone in his neighbourhood, who served as a bridesmaid at a wedding between two men, who regularly borrowed fancy gowns from his neighbourhood dressmaker and went to masquerades at the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, and who lived his life almost entirely within the gay subculture during the 1720s–1730s.

Focusing on just this single individual can reveal a well-organized gay subculture in which gay men regularly went to gay clubs, where they sang and danced together and had a jolly good time, and experienced a sense of camaraderie that even today’s gay community might sometimes envy. It seems to me that once you’ve established that society has been prejudiced against homosexuals throughout most of history, you have barely begun doing gay history.

Reproduced by kind permission. Copyright Rictor Norton. All rights reserved. This essay may not be republished without the permission of the author.

CITATION: If you cite this Web page, please use the following citation:
Rictor Norton, "Reflections on Gay History", Queer Culture. 4 June 2007 http://www.infopt.demon.co.uk/history.htm.


Rictor Norton Ph.D. is a social and literary historian and writer. His doctoral dissertation on homosexual themes in English Renaissance literature was published as The Homosexual Literary Tradition in 1972. He emigrated from Florida to London the following year. After several position in publishing he became a freelance writer and editor in 1995. A new edition of his book Mother Clap's Molly House: The Gay Subculture in England, 1700—1830 was recently published by The Chalford Press.

Rictor Norton's website offers a wide selection of his writings and articles on gay history. The website can be found here.

Little Ashes: Were Dali and Garcia Lorca lovers?

A gay love affair between two of Spain's most celebrated creative luminaries, painter Salvador Dali and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca, will be depicted in the new film, Little Ashes.

Named after a Dali painting, the film chronicles the 18-year-old Dali's arrival in Madrid in the 1920s and his subsequent friendship with the dramatist Lorca.

As the relationship between the two intensifies, the sexually repressed artist is unable to consummate the affair and instead watches as Lorca sleeps with a female friend.

This interpretation of events, by British screenwriter Philippa Goslett, has already sparked controversy among historians and biographers, many of whom deny that the pair's relationship was anything but platonic.

Although their intimacy has been alleged, Dali repeatedly told interviewers that he rejected Lorca's attempts to seduce him.

"He was homosexual, as everyone knows, and madly in love with me," said Dali in an interview with French surrealist poet Alain Bosquet in 1969. "He tried to screw me twice. I was extremely annoyed, because I wasn't homosexual, and I wasn't interested in giving in. Besides, it hurts. So nothing came of it.

"But I felt awfully flattered vis-à-vis the prestige. Deep down I felt that he was a great poet and that I owe him a tiny bit of the Divine Dali's asshole." Goslett is nevertheless positive that their relationship did take a sexual turn. "Having done a huge amount of research, it's clear something happened, no question," she said.

Ian Gibson, a biographer of both Dali and Lorca is, however, sceptical. "It depends how you define as affair," he said. "He [Dali] was terrified of being touched by anyone, so I don't think Lorca got far."

The moustachioed eccentric will be portrayed by Robert Pattison, the 21-year-old actor who played Cedric Diggory in the Harry Potter films, while Lorca will be played by Spanish actor Javier Beltran.

With thanks to PinkNews.co.uk

See also:
Were Spain's two artistic legends secret gay lovers? - The Guardian

Rock Hudson bedded James Dean to win bet with Liz Taylor

A former Hollywood starlet, Noreen Nash, has revealed that actress Elizabeth Taylor made a bet with closeted gay actor Rock Hudson about which one of them could seduce James Dean. Rock Hudson, James Dean and Liz Taylor met on the set of Dean's last film, Giant, in 1955. Taylor apparently lost her bet only a few days into filming.

Rock Hudson bedded Dean to win bet with Liz Taylor

Menier Revives La Cage aux Folles for Christmas

The Menier Chocolate Factory will continue its Christmas tradition of major revivals of classic Broadway musicals this year with Jerry Herman’s La Cage Aux Folles. West End veteran Terry Johnson will direct the new production of the 1983 musical comedy, which opens 3 December 2007 (previews from 23 November) and continues in Southwark until 8 March 2008.

Based on the 1973 French play by Jean Poiret and subsequent 1978 French-Italian screen version, the musical focuses on a gay couple - George, the manager of a St Tropez nightclub featuring drag entertainment, and Albin, his star attraction - and the adventures that ensue when George's son brings home his fiancée's ultra-conservative parents to meet them.

La Cage Aux Folles has a book by Harvey Fierstein (Torch Song Trilogy) and music and lyrics by Jerry Herman, whose other classics include Hello Dolly!, Mame and Mack and Mabel. The score features songs including “I Am What I Am”, “The Best of Times”, “Song on the Sand”, “Maculinity” and the title number.

Cast includes: Douglas Hodge as Albin and Philip Quast as Georges.

La Cage Aux Folles
Menier Chocolate Factory
51/53 Southwark Street
London SE1 1RU
boxoffice: 020 79077060 or online

Menier Chocolate Factory
Review