Account of a School Celebrating History Month 2008

A recent survey of 1,145 young people conducted by the Schools Health Education Unit for Stonewall reported that 92% of gay, lesbian and bisexual pupils have experienced verbal abuse, 41% physical bullying and 17% have been subject to death threats. And it is important to remember that homophobic bullying does not only touch LGBT pupils but any child appearing to be different from the norm, regardless of their sexual orientation.

Although Section 28, the aim of which was to prevent local authorities from "promoting homosexuality" was repealed in 2004, many teachers still find it difficult to broach the subject of homosexuality in the classroom. Others feel helpless to challenge homophobic behaviour.

Elly Barnes is not one of those teachers. The openly lesbian music teacher and head of year teaches at Stoke Newington School, a non-selective, state school, specialising in Arts, Maths, and Science in the London Borough of Hackney. For the past three years, thanks to Elly's remarkable energy and vision, the school has been celebrating LGBT History Month by integrating it to the curriculum. This year, thanks to the success of the initiative, the wider community has also been involved and other schools in the Borough have expressed interest in marking History Month themselves.

You can find Elly's account of this year's celebration of the month, together with pictures here.

Richard Chopping Dies

Richard Chopping
1917 - 2008

Richard Chopping was an illustrator specialising in plants. He is probably most famous however for the covers he design for several of Ian Fleming's James Bond books. in the late 1950. He and his life long partner where the first couple to sign a Civil Partnership in Wivenhoe (near Colchester) where they lived for over 60 years. They also founded an artists community, the members of which included Francis Bacon and famous literary figures.

The Proceedings of the Old Bailey Online

The fully searchable accounts of thousands of trials from 1834 to 1913 have gone online today, thus completing the project of making the records of the Old Bailey available over the Internet.

The Old Bailey Proceedings Online makes available a fully searchable, digitised collection of all surviving editions of the Old Bailey Proceedings from 1674 to 1913, and of the Ordinary of Newgate's Accounts, 1690 to 1772. It allows access to over 210,000 trials and biographical details of approximately 3,000 men and women executed at Tyburn, free of charge for non-commercial use.

The trials featured include those of Oscar Wilde and the suffragettes but also those of hundreds of men sent to the pilory and hard-labour or the gallows for attempted buggery or buggery.

Professor Tim Hitchcock, from the University of Hertfordshire, said: "If you want to know how to order a plate of oysters in an East End pub, or what not to wear to church in Islington, the information is all here. Besides the desperate drama of crimes punished, the Proceedings give us a new and remarkable access to the everyday."

The records can be found at www.oldbaileyonline.org

The press release from the researchers from the Universities of Sheffield, Hertfordshire and The Open University involved in the project is here.

Canadian Elderly Priests Marry

Two retired Anglican priests, Ruth Pogson, 83, and Beth Aime, 79, exchanged vows yesterday in a civil ceremony at the Island View nursing home where Pogson has been a resident until now. She will be transfered to a care home in Vancouver later this week. Aime already lives in Vancouver but the two will still live apart.

The newly wed have been in a relationship since 1995 and wanted to make their relationship official.
“What we’re here for is about justice and it’s about bringing a community into an inclusive community rather than being shut out all the time,” Aime told their guests. “We’re here to hopefully bring this world somewhere where we’re all equal.”

They are now hoping to see their union blessed by the Church but are still facing obstacles.

Find out more here.

Proud Heritage Online Museum Launched

After three years of careful research and development, Proud Heritage, the national museum for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender history and cultural ancestry, opened its doors online officially on 18 April. There was a special preview event for the public on the 14th which featured a biographic interview with Peter Tatchell.

During the event, organised in partnership with the Natural History Museum, Proud Heritage set out its future plans and unveiled its first public phase - a cutting edge online museum that breaks new ground, and not just for being queer!

Jack Gilbert, Executive Director commented,"Proud Heritage has already established itself as an expert agency in the heritage sector, now it is ready to go live. And now it needs public support. Find out how to give memory or memorabilia, how to
volunteer and how to become a Friend! Be Proud!"

Peter Tatchell said:"I regard it as a visionary project of critical importance for the integration of queer history and heritage into British cultural life."

The online museum is organised very simply into four "wings", each containing sections or galleries to explore. Members of the public are invited to give time and money to the project but perhaps more importantly, they can also give memories and materials to be included to the museum itself.

Proud Heritage

Study Day - Section 28: Hiding Homosexuality

International Day Against Homophobia (IDAHO) will be taking place on Saturday May 17th. To mark the day and as a commemoration of the twentieth anniversary of the implementation of Clause 28, in May 1988, the Lesbian and Gay Newsmedia Archive (LAGNA) is organising a study day. This will also be an opportunity for LAGNA to launch their new website.

Section 28: Hiding Homosexuality will take place at the Dragon Hall, 17, Stukeley Street, Covent Garden, London, WC2B 5LT, between 3-30 and 8-30.

There will be an exhibition of press material from the period, covering the tabloid backlash against the lesbian and gay policies (actual and apocryphal) of a number of local authorities, the social impact of HIV and AIDS, and the routine and recurrent homophobia of Fleet Street's finest (George Gale, Jean Rook, 'Mills the Angry Voice' et al).

Later in the day, there will be a raffle to raise necessary funds for LAGNA, with the chance to win a signed photo of Sue 'Rather Invaded' Lawley among the prizes.

Refreshments will be provided.

The programme for the day:

3-30 Doors open
4-20 Introduction by Robert Thompson (Chair of LAGNA)
4-30 Professor Jeffrey Weeks: the political context of Clause 28
5-00 Lisa Power: the campaigns against the Clause
5-30 Break and film footage, including the lesbian invasion of the BBC news studio on the day the Clause was passed
6-00 Eve Featherstone (Haringey Council Equalities and Diversities) and Stella Hillier (a teacher in the borough at the time): Haringey's Positive Images strategy in the mid 1980s, and the media backlash to its implementation
6-30 Elly Barnes (Stoke Newington School): current initiatives on the issue of the teaching of LGBT issues in the education sector
7-00 LAGNA website demonstration and results of the raffle
7-30 Music

Attendance is free, although places need to be pre-booked. Please provide names of attendees by email to enquiry@lagna.org.uk.

Lesbian and Gay Newsmedia Archive www.lagna.org.uk
International Day Against Homophobia www.idaho.org.uk
Section 28

Hockney Donates his Biggest Painting to Tate

David Hockney, one of Britain's leading contemporary artist, has donated one of his latest works to the Tate Gallery. The painting, which represents a winter landscape in the North of England, is itself composed of 50 smaller canvases and at 4.6 by 12.2 meters (15 by 40 feet) is the biggest the artist has ever produced.

Hockney choose to the device of smaller canvases because it allowed him to do the work without having to use a ladder. He had however to enlist the help of a digital camera and a computer.

"Bigger Trees near Warter or/ou Peinture sur le motif pour le Nouvel Age Post-photographique" will be on display at Tate Britain in the autumn of 2009.

David Hockney
Bigger trees near Warter or/ou Peinture sur le motif pour le Nouvel Age Post-photographique 2007
© David Hockney. Photo: Richard Schmidt
Oil on 50 canvas
50 canvases (36 x 48'' EA.) 180 x 480'' Overall

Find out more here.

Calpernia Addams: Widowed by Hate

Ten years ago, Private Barry Winchell's captivation for a young and beautiful show girl from Nashville Tennessee cost him his life. Two fellow soldiers decided that dating a trans woman made him gay and a candidate for summary execution in his sleep. US media and anti-hate crime campaigners decided it was easier to cast his trans girlfriend as a gay man too. And thus the die was cast for the erasure of two lives, and the nature of their love (Their story has been told in the 2003 film Soldier's Girl).

Ten years later Calpernia Addams has recovered from those horrific events and is making a rapid ascent as a US media personality. She was in Britain last week for the screening of her short film on media misrepresentation, Casting Pearls, and to attend a packed panel discussion at the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival.

Christine Burns was in London too and recorded an in-depth one to one interview with Calpernia where she talks about growing up, her spell in the US Navy, Barry’s murder, her blossoming career, and the representations of trans people in film and on TV.

You can listen to the interview here.

Calpernia Addams - Wikipedia
Calpernia's website

Was Clark Gable 'Gay for Pay"?

David Bret’s angle on Clark Gable is this: Gable was “gay for pay” and “rough trade,” and he enjoyed having sex “for bucks.” [...] If these tidbits from the book’s first few pages aren’t too much information for you, you’re in luck. This breathtakingly trashy biography does not skimp on sordid anecdotes.

Read the full (fairly graphic) review of David Bret's new biography of Clark Gable, Tormented Star, in the New York Times here.

Clark Gable: Gay for Pay? - Afterelton
Clark Gable - Wikipedia

Cuneiform Clay Tablet Gives Key to Sodom and Gomorrah Story

The biblical story relating the destruction of the town of Sodom and Gomorrah is often sited by religious people as an indication of the Christian god's displeasure at homosexual acts. Indeed one of the cities even gave its name to the "sin" of sodomy.

A group of scientists from the University of Bristol might have just put pay to the theory of a divine intervention. A cuneiform clay tablet that has puzzled scholars for over 150 years has been translated for the first time. The tablet is now known to be a contemporary Sumerian observation of an asteroid impact at Köfels, Austria. The tablet was found by Henry Layard in the remains of the library in the Royal Palace at Nineveh, and was made by an Assyrian scribe around 700 BC.

With modern computer programmes that can simulate trajectories and reconstruct the night sky thousands of years ago the researchers have established what the Planisphere tablet refers to. It is a copy of the night notebook of a Sumerian astronomer as he records the events in the sky before dawn on the 29 June 3123 BC (Julian calendar).

Although the impact took place in Austria, the trajectory of the asteroid meant that the back plume from the explosion (the mushroom cloud) would be bent over the Mediterranean Sea re-entering the atmosphere over the Levant, Sinai, and Northern Egypt. Mark Hempsell, Senior Lecturer in Astronautics at Bristol University, explains that “The ground heating, though very short, would be enough to ignite any flammable material – including human hair and clothes. It is probable more people died under the plume than in the Alps due to the impact blast.“

Dr Hempsall add that dozens of ancient myths record devastation that would tally with the asteroid’s impact. This includes the Old Testament tale of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and the Ancient Greek myth of how Phaeton, son of Helios, fell into the River Eridanus after losing control of his father’s sun chariot.

Then the Lord rained on Sodom and Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of Heaven; and he overthrew those cities and all the valley, and all the inhabitants of the cities . . . [Abraham] looked down toward Sodom and Gomorrah and toward all the land of the valley, and beheld, and lo, the smoke of the land went up like the smoke of a furnace. Genesis 19:24-28

Contrary to many Christian, classical Jewish texts do not stress the homosexual aspect of the attitude of the inhabitants of Sodom but rather focus on their cruelty and lack of hospitality to the "stranger" as the reason for the destruction of the city. The people of Sodom were seen as guilty of many other significant sins. Rabbinic writings affirm that the Sodomites also committed economic crimes, blasphemy and bloodshed.

The press release from the University of Bristol giving details on asteroid impact and the translation process of the tablet and the is available here.
Clay tablet identified as asteroid that destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah - The Times
Sodom and Gomorrah - Wikipedia