Allen Ginsberg

Beat poet and seminal censorship trial victor Allen Ginsberg (and his most famous work Howl) hold a respected place in United States literary history. His poetry’s challenging themes, including communism, graphic sexuality, and drug use, put a political spin on his writings that culminated in his publisher being sued for obscenity and a precedent-setting ruling that Howl was acceptable on the grounds of its artistic value. Ginsberg was also a committed Buddhist and participant in the Hare Krishna movement. Following the beginning of his fame, Ginsberg began tailoring his letters with the expectation that they would be collected and read widely; his predictions proved accurate, as his archivist later published several biographical works, including the aforementioned letters.

Although he is frequently classified as a gay writer, Ginsberg had multiple relationships with women (see here for several examples); for that reason, he is classified here as both gay and bisexual.

Historiography Saturday: Beth Elliott

Transgender lesbian folk singer Beth Elliott was the youngest ever officer of the San Francisco chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis, where she reigned as Vice President from 1971-1972 before being forced to resign due to controversy over a sexual harassment claim. Although she helped organize the West Coast Lesbian Conference for the following year, she left after her scheduled performance following protests; the keynote speaker even referred to her as a ‘male transvestite’ and a ‘rapist’. Elliott went on to compose a memoir under a pseudonym (rereleased under her own name) and advocate against sodomy laws and other exclusionary policies.

Locating reliable information on Elliott online is a challenge because she has been a polarizing figure for over four decades; thus, she is a useful case study in the challenge of writing a piece on someone when narrative-shaping facts are in dispute. Reading blogs composed by members of the contingent that has continually opposed Elliott’s inclusion in lesbian spaces gives one a very different impression of her than does reading transgender blogs. This is a rare puzzle: most entries to this blog are plagued by nothing worse than minor factual inaccuracies or a dispute over the identity marker that best suits someone from an alternate cultural context. When researching Elliott and other figures at the center of community culture wars it pays to be prudent and pay special attention to the veracity and agendas of available sources.

Dean Spade

Named one of the Advocate‘s “Forty Under 40” in 2010 and one of Utne Reader‘s “50 Visionaries Who are Changing Your World” in 2009, transgender attorney and law professor Dean Spade has been getting attention for his work in areas of queer rights that have largely been ignored by the broader public, such as the rights of queer immigrants and prisoners. He founded the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, a nonprofit organization that offers legal assistance to trans people who have difficulty accessing services. His writings, including the book Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics and the Limits of the Law, are geared toward criticism of capitalism and social structures such as monogamy and military service.

Spade’s Facebook page is available here and his Twitter feed is available here. His personal website where he links to his writing is here.

Robyn Ochs

There is a certain irony in bisexual activist Robyn Ochs having received national media attention for her “lesbian marriage,” one of the first to be performed in Massachusetts. A contributor to several anthologies on bisexuality and spoken at queer conferences (including keynoting at the Midwest’s largest queer youth gathering), Ochs has been out and visible since college, “because nobody was talking about it!” While her most commonly cited topic of expertise is – naturally – bisexuality, she also focuses on trans people and other groups who are marginalized by both ends of supposedly binary systems. On the steady job front she worked for several decades as an administrator with student advisory duties at Harvard University. She has been honored with a suite of awards evenly dispersed throughout her career.

Her website is available here and her Twitter feed is available here.

 

 

Historiography Saturday: Julie Bindel

Julie Bindel is an English columnist whose work on gender and feminism is frequently featured in The Guardian and several other prominent publications. Sex trafficking and prostitution are among her specific areas of interest and subjects of original research. She identifies as a political lesbian and has written a book on generational changes in the gay community where she argues that heterosexuality is enforced by societal pressure. In addition to the controversy over the origins of homosexuality, Bindel has received criticism for her views on transsexuality.

While this blog takes no stance on the origins of same-sex attraction and gender variance, its existence does presuppose the importance of those categories as identities with consistent meanings. The tag “lesbian” usually indicates a woman who is primarily or exclusively attracted to other women; however, according to the political lesbian text Love Your Enemy?, lesbianism is defined not by the presence of an attraction to women but by the absence of sexual conduct with men. While political lesbianism is a relatively fringe viewpoint, other definitional debates exist in the queer community (e.g. what degree of attraction to which gender qualifies someone as bisexual, or if there is a difference between transgender and transsexual), creating a challenge for anyone whose work requires drawing boundaries between the categories.

Jessica and Robin Wicks

United States case law is inconsistent in its treatment of married couples where one of the spouses is transgender. In 1999 the state of Texas ruled that the gender listed on a resident’s birth certificate was definitive. The case, Littleton v. Prange, which voided a marriage between a cisgender man and a transgender woman, had the unintended consequence of validating same-sex marriages in which one of the partners is transgender. Jessica and Robin Wicks were the first couple to publicly take advantage of this loophole and were married in 2000. They were denied a license in their home county but, after seeking legal advice, were granted one in the county where Littleton was decided. Although driven primarily by affection for each other, they were fully cognizant of the precedent they were setting (although a lesbian couple in Vermont may have preceded them by a short period of time).

Their attorney, Phyllis Frye, was herself a trans woman and the attorney for Littleton in the precedent-setting case; part of her stated motivation for assisting the Wicks was to draw attention to the Littleton case’s contradictions and open an equal protection argument. Other cases drawing on Littleton and the Wicks have since arisen.

 

Virginia Prince

Although sources crediting her with inventing the term ‘transgender’ may be mistaken, Virginia Prince was a pivotal figure in 20th century American trans and crossdressing circles. Following her arrest for transvestisism, Prince – a pharmacologist with access to rare for the time medical documents on gender variance – founded the first club for male transvestites, followed by a journal that lasted twenty years and a number of other branching societies. Her advice on gender variance was taken by Dr. Harry Benjamin, among others, and became a source of conflict between her and the transgender community because her works did not include heterosexual trans women and denounced gender reassignment surgery, which she herself declined to get.

Although Prince refused the label of transsexual, she lived as a woman and used female pronouns from her mid-50s to her death; for that reason, she is categorized here as both a transvestite (her preference) and transgender.

Bayard Rustin

American civil rights activist Bayard Rustin, onetime advisor to Martin Luther King, Jr., and the head organizer of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, was nearly deemed too controversial to lead his own protest march. A gay pacifist with a history of communist beliefs who had done time for violating the Selective Services Act, Rustin’s inclusion in the movement as a public figure was a sensitive proposition, even though he had been the one to popularize nonviolent protests as a tactic. He was among the first to make the Journey of Reconciliation alongside fellow gay man Igal Roodenko, but following his arrest for homosexual acts, he was fired from the Fellowship of Reconciliation, one of the sponsoring organizations. A documentary chronicling the tension between his achievements and his status as an eternal outsider was later produced to some acclaim. He was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013.

Igal Roodenko

Gay American peace activist Igal Roodenko played a part in protesting some of the 20th century’s most famous conflicts, from segregation to the Vietnam war. He was stationed with Civilian Public Service in lieu of military deployment during World War II, but his hunger strike and refusal to work in protest of government mail censorship led to his imprisonment; the resulting appeal became one of four to be heard by the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled against him and his fellow litigants. Undaunted even after his prison term, he struck out on the Journey of Reconciliation where he was again arrested and awarded triple the sentence of his black counterparts because the judge objected to “Jews from New York” joining with black riders in solidarity.

Roodenko passed away in 1991 after decades spent with the War Resisters League and other pacifist organizations. An in-depth audio interview with Roodenko is archived here.

Frank Mugisha

Ugandan activist Dr. Frank Mugisha’s first achievement was coming out to his family as a teenager. Although the Anti-Homosexuality Act of 2014 would not be passed for nearly two decades, Uganda still retained archaic statutes from British colonial rule that criminalized sex between men. While attending university he started the student group Icebreakers Uganda to support queer Ugandans in the process of coming out. Since then, he has taken over leadership of Sexual Minorities Uganda, an organization working to reverse the stigma against homosexuality, and been honored with international recognition for his openness in a country that briefly had a law on the books making homosexual conduct punishable by life imprisonment or death. Among Mugisha’s current projects is a lawsuit against Scott Lively, an evangelical minister who is alleged to have violated international human rights laws through his orchestration of the Anti-Homosexuality Act. Mugisha was named one of 2014’s “40 Under 40” by the Advocate.

His Twitter feed is available here; his Facebook page is available here.