This Whole Gay Business Started in the 60s, Right?

There's not much of a history to it, is there?

From the top:

-from the Tomb of the "Brothers." Old Kingdom Egypt (2 men buried together who were manicurists to the Pharaoh; you decide).

-The Tyrannicides, Harmodios and Aristogeiton, the gay couple who spoiled everything by murdering the last tyrant of Athens and opening the way to history's first democracy.

-A lovely couple from Hellenistic antiquity

-Longtime couple Marc Allegret and writer Andre Gide in the early 20th century

-Jack Nichols and Liege Clark, an activist couple from the Stonewall era. Jack started even before that in the "homophile" protests against anti-gay hiring practices by the federal government in the early 1960s

-a contemporary gay male family

-a pair of lovely lesbians in London this year.

Those Ephemeral Gay Relationships

Dell Martin and Phyllis Lyon before and after 50 years.

Who knows? Maybe it'll work out.

Sunday High Church

A Buddhist Fire Ceremony from Kagoshima, Japan.



I must admit that I know nothing about this ritual. It appears to be part of those esoteric forms of Buddhism that found their way into Japan centuries ago from India and Tibet.

The Boys in Purple

Well, maroon anyway.

Farewell Lambeth!

Lambeth Comes to an End

And so far, the best commentary on it is over at Padre Mickey's Dance Party.

Love to All the Anglican Bishops at Lambeth and GAFFCON

My (very hetero) cousin in Austin sent me this. It's so wonderfully gay and Post Modern that I just had to share it, especially with all those frumpy bishops in the Anglican Communion. So c'mon sweeties! Put on those episcopal purple Speedos and go go boots and LET'S DANCE!

"The Images Ye Have made of Me!"

Above is a photograph by Lewis Hine of a child laborer in a textile mill at the beginning of the 20th century. So many of the artists that I've discussed, Pugin, Morris, and more to come, were deeply shocked by the brutality of early modern industrialism.

Is the harsh cruelty of early capitalism a thing of the past, a thing of museums, history books and old photographs that look sad, but harmlessly quaint?

No, it is still very much here. That past is not yet past at all. We are as much in the middle of it as the early 19th century artists I've discussed ever were.  So often even now, our convenience depends on someone else's misery.

Here is an article from the NY Times from July 27th about the shutdown of a kosher meat packing plant in Postville, Iowa. It has immigrant laborers, child labor, brutality, dangerous working conditions, crackdowns on the workers while the company goes unpunished, everything you would find in a muckraking expose from a century ago by Upton Sinclair.

Here is something close to home for me, from a Frontline documentary. It's Tyler Pipe in Tyler, Texas, reputed to have one of the highest death and injury rates in the country. The last time I was in Tyler about 3 years ago, I went by that plant. It was surrounded by a very high fence topped with barbed wire and covered with canvas so no one could see in or out. It reminded me of a labor camp.

Jacob Riis began his famous expose of poverty in New York City, How the Other Half Lives, with this poem by James Russell Lowell:

"With gates of silver and bars of gold
Ye have fenced my sheep from their father's fold;
I have heard the dropping of their tears
In heaven high these eighteen hundred years."

"O Lord and Master, not ours the guilt,
We build but as our fathers built;
Behold thine images, how they stand,
Sovereign and sole, throughout all our land"

Then Christ sought out an artisan,
A low-browed, stunted, haggard man,
And a motherless girl, whose fingers thin
Pushed from her faintly want and sin.

These set he in the midst of them,
And as they drew back their garment-hem,
For fear of defilement, "Lo here,' said he,
'The images ye have made of me!"