Vicki Marlane

Near the end of her life at the age of 74, San Franciscan Vicki Marlane was known as “possibly the oldest living, continuously performing, transgender entertainer in the country.” She began her career dancing in Minnesota before cycling through assorted gigs and ending her journey in the Bay Area. Her act at the bar Aunt Charlie’s earned her the nickname “the girl with the liquid spine.” Although she considered herself a transgender woman since at least the 1980s, she continued performing drag until the year of her death.

Marlane’s interview with the New York Times and a documentary about her life brought her national attention. In 2014, a block in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood was renamed after her following a petition by the Harvey Milk LGBT Democratic Club; she is the first transgender person in the city to be given such an honor.

Marlane’s old Facebook group contains photographs and footage of her act.

 

Historiography Saturday: Jane Addams

Jane Addams, the woman who would go on to earn the nickname Saint Jane and the Nobel Peace Prize, began her work after a period of despondency at the prospect of never contributing anything of worth to society. Originally from a rich family, she attempted to attend medical school but dropped out due to health complications, and seized on the fledgling settling house movement as a way to make a difference. The result of her hard work was Hull House, a national model for settlement houses and the home base for Addams’ studies and social reforms. When she wasn’t helping run the House’s programs (music school, a gymnasium, clubs, etc.), Addams was active in Progressive politics, pacifism, American Pragmatism, anti-sex slavery, and suffrage work.

Recently, Addams has become a controversial addition to the LGBT historical canon. Hull House itself now advertises programming that paints Addams as a vital part of Chicago’s LGBT history, billing it as “The Queerest House in Chicago?” She shared a lifelong romantic friendship with Ellen Gates Starr, who slept in her bed and encouraged her in her work. However, romantic friendships existed in a context where high degrees of affection between women were looked upon as normal, making it difficult to pin down lesbian relationships: physical contact and even displays of undying devotion were commonplace. Researchers can find no definitive evidence one way or another of a sexual relationship between Addams and Starr, but also disagree on whether that would be necessary to establish that Addams was a lesbian given the length and exclusivity of their partnership.

Tamara Ching

Tamara Ching, the “God Mother of Polk [Street]”, is an advocate for transgender, HIV, and sex work-related causes, and has been for decades. Active in the trans community since before the Compton’s Cafeteria riot – a San Francisco protest by trans women against police raids that predated Stonewall -, Ching has played a role in everything from letter-writing campaigns to presenting on the challenges faced by LGBT seniors. She was interviewed for the Compton’s documentary Screaming Queens (by filmmaker Susan Stryker) and was selected by California state Senator Leland Yee for inclusion in the book Women With Impact: A collection of  stories about women who made a difference in the lives of senators. In honor of her high-impact consulting work, Ching has been featured in a Mission neighborhood mural that casts San Franciscan transgender women as deities, golden halos and all.

Harvey Milk

Harvey Milk, the first openly gay public official in California, served only eleven months on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, a far shorter span of time than the five years he spent campaigning. During his time in the city he helped turn the Castro neighborhood into a powerful economic and political force, an achievement that led him to style himself ‘The Mayor of Castro Street’ (also the name of Milk’s biography by journalist Randy Shilts); while in office, he helped champion a gay anti-discrimination law and a dog feces ordinance, and defeat a statewide ballot initiative that would have made firing gay teachers mandatory. Shortly before his assassination by a former fellow supervisor, Milk recorded three monologues, one containing a memorable, fatalistic line: “If a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door in the country.”

Milk’s death and the subsequent (often misunderstood) leniency of his murderer’s sentence inspired the White Night Riots and enshrined him as a martyred figure in the gay popular consciousness. His name is now attached to one of two queer San Francisco Democratic Clubs, a nonprofit advocacy group, and a host of other works.

Sonya Renee

Sonya Renee, a poet and activist, got her start on the stage by accident. She was recruited to perform at a small work event and fell in love with the open mic style. Things kept escalating, and she began collecting titles like International Poetry Slam Champion. Her work has appeared in numerous spoken word and gender-related publications, and she published her own anthology in 2010. (This was on top of her other work in HIV outreach.) In 2011 she launched a new project called The Body Is Not An Apology intended to foster positive self-image; it even comes with a 30-day challenge.

Renee identifies as queer, and cites it as an integral part of her work. Her Twitter is here; her Facebok here; and her YouTube channel here.

Tu Er Shen

In Chinese mythology, Tu Er Shen (兔兒神 or 兔神) is the god of male homosexual love. As the story goes, he was once an ordinary man named Hu Tianbao, who fell madly in love with an attractive imperial inspector, which he kept to himself because they were socially unequal; when he was caught watching the object of his affection through a bathroom wall and confessed to his infatuation, he was punished with death by beating. What might have been a tragic gay-bashing tale instead has a happy ending: The lord of the underworld judged Hu’s crime to have been love, which was no crime at all, and appointed him the deity of gay romance. He then appeared as a rabbit (hence the name Tu Er Shen, which means “The Leveret Spirit”) in a dream to a man from his hometown and prompted him to erect a shrine in the new god’s honor.

Worship of the Leveret Spirit has continued on and off since its 18th century inception. This website lists traditional methods of praying to Tu Er Shen, including offerings of paper charms and description of the deity’s generous nature. An online vendor now sells love spells named after Tu Er Shen (the website even includes handy instructions for determining if you are homosexual).

Freddie Mercury

Born Farrokh Bulsara in the now-defunct Sultanate of Zanzibar, Mercury grew up covering Bollywood and rock singers on the piano with his high school band. His family emigrated to Britain during the Zanzibar Revolution, where he studied art and cycled through a series of bands before helping launch Queen. He would go on to sing the lead vocals, play piano and a spot of guitar (and piano-like instruments such as the harpsichord), and compose both lyrics and instrumentals for much of the band’s music. Mercury’s legendary stagecraft was on full display during Queen’s 1985 Live Aid concert, available for viewing here, in which he cavorts around the stage and coaxes his audience of thousands to clap along in unison.

During his lifetime Mercury had relationships with both men and women, including Mary Austin and Jim Hutton. The former was the subject of Mercury’s song “Love of My Life“; the latter, his partner of six years. Soon after learning that he had contracted HIV he threw (in the opinion of the linked article) the most decadent party the isle of Ibiza had ever seen. He hid the truth of his illness from the public until the day before he passed away from AIDS-related complications.

 

Zeus

The Grecian “Father of the Gods and Men” gained his title after freeing his siblings from their cannibalistic father’s digestive tract, then banishing him and his fellow Titans to the underworld. As he is a mythological figure, there are no shortage of tales and variations on his deeds: Wikipedia’s list reads like a series of Chuck Norris jokes, with each legend more outrageous than the last. (“When Hera gave birth to Hephaestus, Zeus threw him off the top of Mount Olympus because of his repulsive appearance.”)

Zeus’s extensive (and often upsetting) sexual history is a story in itself. The mating practices of the Greek gods combined the drama of a human soap opera with the fantastical, creating scandals like the birth of Athena, goddess of wisdom, who sprung fully-formed from Zeus’s head after he swallowed her mother whole. Nowadays Zeus might be classified as bisexual because his liaisons included the pedaristic relationship he shared with Ganymede, the world’s most handsome boy, whose Latin name Catamitus was the origin for the term catamite. (Interestingly, Zeus also plays a pivotal role in Plato’s speech on the origin of love in his Symposium, in which he inadvertently creates both hetero- and homosexuality, along with the opening number of the musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch.)

Historiography Saturday: Anne Frank

The story of Anne Frank needs little introduction. A Jewish girl raised in Amsterdam, she and her family took refuge in a hidden pair of rooms she called the “Secret Annex,” where she documented her cloistered life in a diary over two years. Her entries, spanning from age 13 to 15, are so compellingly written that they were subject to intense scrutiny for authenticity after her father had them published following her death in a concentration camp. The Diary of Anne Frank is now considered a classic work on the Holocaust: it has been translated into over 60 languages and is widely taught in schools.

Frank appears on this blog due to controversies surrounding the unabridged edition of her diary. The original publication had been edited to remove, among other things, passages concerning her emerging sexuality. She describes a budding romance with a male fellow refuge-seeker, but also expresses a vivid appreciation for the female form (the section in question is quoted here). Her possibly implied homo- or bisexuality has led the book to be censored in schools, although no definitive confirmation exists that the paragraph in question refers to anything other than aesthetic appreciation.

Kamal Al-Solaylee

Canadian author and professor of journalism Kamal Al-Solaylee made his way into the public eye with his memoir about growing up gay in Yemen during its time of transition following British decolonization. His family fled to Egypt after their property was confiscated; after a brief return to Yemen in his early 20s, Al-Solaylee accepted admission at the University of Nottingham in Britain to complete a Ph.D. in Victorian Literature, then emigrated to Canada where he worked as a journalist at a number of publications.

Intolerable: A Memoir of Extremes was published in 2012; it was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award and won the Toronto Book Award. A book review by the National Post that addresses Al-Solaylee’s sense of cultural tension can be found here.