Advent 4: Witches, Burning Effigies, Sex and Peaches

After three Sundays of Christmas trees and decorations let’s skip to the other end of the Twelve Days of Christmas and take a trip to Italy.

Among over 170 seasonal gift-bringers around the world that I’ve researched, one of the most famous is la Befana of Italy.

This is an edited version of an essay I have written for my personal Christmas files about la Befana. It is one of many, more academically-based, pieces I have written on various Christmas characters following several years of research. As such it contains more information and sources than I would normally include on this blog. La Befana is one of those characters whose history is so complex and massive that cutting it down has been difficult, but I hope you find what follows is of interest. I’ve expanded information on various lgbt+ aspects of la Befana’s history. So settle down for a longer read than normal.

Today, la Befana is depicted as a witch or old hag. Her name has become synonymous with witches, but not the scary Hallowe’en type but as a kindly old woman.

There are several variations of the legend behind la Befana’s gift-bringing activities. They all date back several centuries. The most common version is that she was an old woman who lived in the Holy Land during the time of Christ’s birth. The Three Kings arrived one night, after being told that la Befana was her village’s best hostess. They told la Befana that they needed to rest overnight on their way to visit the baby Jesus and give him gifts. They invited la Befana to go with them the following morning, but she declined saying there was some housework she needed to do.

The following morning she waved the Three Kings off on their journey. But their mission prayed on her mind and she couldn’t concentrate on her housework, so she decided to go and join them. Gathering up some small gifts to give to the baby Jesus she headed out into the village. But she soon realised that the Kings didn’t tell her which direction they were going. La Befana walked through every town and village looking for the baby Jesus, hoping to give her gifts to Him. Eventually, exhaustion took its toll and she collapsed and died. The baby Jesus, in one of those mysterious events that often occur in legends, took pity on la Befana’s fate and decided that from then on her spirit would be His gift-giving representative in Italy. Today, la Befana leaves gifts for all children in the hope that one of them may be the baby Jesus.

But how did she become a gift-bringer specific to Italy? And what involvement did a gay poet have in her development?

The most generally accepted origin of La Befana’s name is that it comes from the Italian word “Epifania” (=Epiphany), which is a Christian festival celebrated on 6th January and commemorates the arrival of the Three Kings at the Nativity. “Epifania” ultimately derives from the Greek word “epifaneia”, meaning “manifestation, or appearance”. The history of Epiphany is long and complicated and I won’t go into all of it – except for one thing: it’s the original date chosen by Gnostics in the 2nd century as the one on which the birth of Christ was celebrated.

In 2018 I wrote about Christmas and the Gnostics. Basically, the Gnostics were various small sects of Christians spread around the eastern Roman Empire. They didn’t celebrate Christ’s death at Easter, but celebrated his birth instead. Christians didn’t celebrate birthdays, mainly because of high infant mortality rates – they preferred to remember their deaths (like modern memorials and individual burials). Gnostics believed that the world and its inhabitants were evil, and the birth of Christ was a manifestation of God’s goodness, hence they adopted the word “epihaneia” for a special day of prayer and worship to celebrate the event (the name Christmas for Christ’s birth was adopted by Western Roman Christians much later).

One of those eastern Gnostic sects were the Carpocratians in Egypt. They believed that if the world and its people were evil then procreative sex was bad and non-procreative sex (specifically with the same gender) would bring them salvation. Western Christians accused them of being promiscuous and of having gay orgies, but there’s nothing to indicate they were having any more sex than anyone else.

The Gnostics, including the Carpocratians, are believed to be the first to celebrate Christ’s birth on January 6th. When the Western Christian authorities in Rome realised that the eastern Gnostic worship of Christ’s birth was becoming too popular they decided that rather than ban celebrating Christ’s birth they decided to come up with their own date. Unlike the Gnostics, the Western Roman Church used various clues in the New Testament and traditional dates of Christ’s crucifixion to came up with December 25th. Even though the Gnostics eventually faded away, their date of January 6th for Christ’s birth still survives in some east African and central Asian denominations (Eastern Orthodox Christianity also celebrates Christmas Day on January 6th, but it has nothing to do with the Gnostics).

To complicate matters, Roman Christians decided to keep Epiphany as the celebration of the “manifestation” of Christ, the doctrine that Christ was revealed to the world as its Saviour through the arrival of the Three Kings, and this eventually led to many Roman churches, particularly those around the Mediterranean where the Gnostics had been most influential, adopting January 6th as a gift-giving day, They later moved it to St. Nicholas’s Eve, December 5th, and that’s another story on its own.

Italy is one of those Mediterranean regions who adopted Epiphany as their original gift-giving date. They called it Pasca Epiphania, Pasca in this sense means “feast”, a Christian term used for a “holy day”, a day of worship, prayer and commemoration of a specific person or event (ultimately derived from the proto-Indo-European word for “god”). Of course “holy day” is where our modern word “holiday” comes from. There’s so much more to say about the Italian Pasca Epiphania and its origins, but we must concentrate specifically on its link to la Befana.

In winter, and often around Epiphany time, many European nations held bonfires as a traditional celebration in winter. On these bonfires they burned effigies of an old woman, said to represent the old year (much like an old man often represents the Old Year today, though he isn’t burned – this can link us to Baby New Year, an image popularised by gay artist J. C. Leyendecker). This bonfire custom still survives in Italy, whether called Guibiana, Panevin (or Pan e vin), or several other names. In medieval Venice, where the bonfire festival was held near Epiphany, the effigy gradually acquired the name reflecting the date – Befana. The name quickly spread across the whole of Italy (much in the same way as the name of the 17th century terrorist Guy Fawkes, still burned on bonfires in England every November 5th, became misappropriated by the USA in the 19th century to mean “man” or “person”). So, the name Befana was just an Italian slang term for an effigy of an old woman, and was later applied to humans in the meaning of a witch or hag.

But why burn an effigy of an old woman in the first place? Well, it is believed that what was originally burned was a large log on which was painted a face. Sound familiar? It’s the most likely origin of the Christmas log, and the Spanish “pooping log”, the Tìo de Nadal which is burned the day after Christmas Day. So, even if some Christmas traditions in different parts of the world seem unconnected, there is a connection if you go back far enough. And why a woman? Well, those bonfires held in winter were also to celebrate the end of harvest. Most cultures had a female deity that presided over harvest, like the Greek goddess Demeter, so burning effigies of female deities represented the gratitude to the goddess of a fruitful harvest and the hope of a good one the next year (modern New Year celebrations are pretty much the same thing).

The first printed use of the word “befana” in the sense of an old woman occurred in 1535 in a poem called “Sonetto in descrizion dell’Arcivescovo di Firenze”, or “A Sonnet Describing the Archbishop of Florence”. It was written by Francesco Berni (c.1497-1536), a satirist and comic poet whose works often included coded sexual references to boys. The sonnet was a sarcastic dig at the archbishop and begins with the words “Chi vuol veder quantunque pò Natura / In far una fantastica befana”. Translated into English this reads “If you could see what Nature does / In making a fanciful witch”. Berni uses the word “befana” figuratively, using it to call the archbishop an ugly and disgusting old woman. He may even have been using it in the sense of a befana puppet. Perhaps both.

Francecso Berni was born in Florence into a well-connected family. In 1517 he went to live with a Catholic cardinal who was a distant cousin. It was in Rome that Berni began writing poetry. In 1523 the cardinal’s nephew “exiled” Berni to a monastery in Abruzzo near the Adriatic coast over some homosexual scandal. Why exiling Berni to a closed community of men would have removed him from any gay impulses is a mystery. As to the exact nature of the scandal there are no surviving details.

However, it is known that Francesco Berni was a member of an influential group that included other gay writers. His works were so distinctive in their satire and coded gay references that his style has been named after him – Bernesque poetry.

Perhaps the most obvious coded gay references Berni used are contained in private letters to his fellow gay friends. In the letters he asked friends to provide, and thanked them for sending him, “hams”, a slang term for buttocks (with their accompanying young men!), and “peaches”, a slang term for the penis. These “hams” and “peaches” were to be “eaten” himself, as he himself put it, or passed on to other friends.

But, let’s get back to la Befana. The first printed reference to the term befana being used to denote Epiphany occurs on a few years after Berni’s reference, in around 1541. It appears in a comedy play called “La Trinunzia” by Berni’s Florentine contemporary and fellow-writer of Bernesque poetry, (who has no known link to enjoying or passing around Berni’s “hams” and “peaches”), Agnolo Firenzuola (1493-1543). In his play a character says the line “Hannomel detto le pecore la notte di befana, che tutte favellano”. This translates into “Hannomel said the sheep on Epiphany night, that they all talk”. This echoes another popular medieval European legend that all animals could talk in human languages on Christmas night.

The use of Befana as the name of an old woman who give gifts at Epiphany, the use we are most familiar with today, comes in another comic poem, a heroic epic called “Il Malmantile Racquistato”, or “Malmantile Recaptured”. It was written by another Florentine writer, Lorenzo Lippi (1606-1665). The poem was published posthumously in 1676.

Lippi’s first reference says: “Le balie si servano della voce befana, per intendere una di quelle larve che nuocono a’bambini, come il bau ecc., e gli persuadono che ci sia la befana cattiva e la buona, e che venga nelle case per la via delcammino.” This translates into English as:” The nurses use the word befana to mean one of those masks that frighten children, like the woof, etc., and they persuade them that there is a bad Befana and a good one, and that she comes into the houses [to reward or punish] along the way.”

That’s the early development of Italy’s “female Santa”, la Befana. There’s so much more history covering her complete transformation into a popular Christmas character, which includes contributions from other Italian gay (or suspected gay) writers such as Giordano Bruno and Count Giacomo Leopardi, but we must leave it at that or we’ll be here until next Advent.

I’ll just conclude by mentioning that la Befana has influenced several other seasonal characters and traditions around the world, which is yet whole new essay in its own right. Briefly, the characters Babushka (Russia), La Vieja de Belen (Dominican Republic), and to some extent Mari Domingi (France), are all old woman with back-stories about hosting the Three Kings and searching for the Baby Jesus.

And that’s it for today, and for 2025. Next year will bring many changes, which you’ll learn about in due course. I want to give you all a BIG THANK YOU for reading my blog, and in particular for reaching the mile-stone of a million page views. I can’t express how humbled and honoured I am that so many people find what I write remotely interesting.

I’ll sign off by wishing you all a Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and wish you all the best for the New Year.

Advent 3: Glittering Trees

One of the more unusual Christmas decorations that has become more prominent in the UK in recent decades is the Christmas spider.

Many people are terrified of spiders, but in a lot of cultures spiders are considered lucky. Here in the UK, for instance, we have what are called “money spiders”. These are tiny spiders that you’d hardly notice, but folk tradition says that if one drops onto your skin, hair or clothes it is a sign that you will be receiving some money soon. Its also bad luck to kill one.

In parts of Eastern Europe and Germany another folk tradition says that you are considered lucky if a spider has spun a web in your Christmas tree. This tradition is the origin of the legend of the Christmas spider.

In the latter part of the 20th century, this legend has spread around the world thanks largely to the internet. The Christmas spider has become so popular that two gay men have written an opera about it. These men are composer Clint Borzoni and librettist John de los Santos.

But before we look at their opera it might be a good idea to recount the most frequently told version of the legend of the Christmas spider for those of you who are not familiar with it.

There was a poor widow who lived with her children near a forest in a small hut. One day a pine cone fell off a tree into the family’s small patch of land outside their front door. Seeing that it had taken root, the widow decided to nurture the sapling, hoping it would grow into a healthy tree by Christmas in a future year. The children were excited and helped their mother to look after the tree as it grew, and after a couple of years it had grown into a beautiful little tree.

However, as Christmas Day approached, the widow had to admit to her children that they would not be able to afford decorations for their tree, not even candles. So, on Christmas Eve the children went to bed somewhat saddened that their Christmas Day will not be as splendid as they had hoped.

Christmas Day dawned, and when the family awoke and went to look outside they saw that frost had developed overnight and that their little Christmas tree was festooned with glittering frost-covered cobwebs.

And here the legends vary. Some say that the light of the dawn had turned the cobweb into strands of gold and silver. Another version says that the Christkind or the local Christmas gift-bringer had made the transformation. Whoever made the change, the result was the same. The poor family had a great Christmas, and afterwards they gathered up the gold and silver strands so that they could buy food to get them through the winter. In yet another version of the legend, the spider filled the tree with her webs in gratitude to the widow for not brushing her out of the tree or killing her.

This legend was probably a 17th century creation to give an origin story to tinsel and lametta, decorations that were first being made at that time in the silver-mining areas of Germany.

Clint Borzoni and John de los Santos brought another interpretation to the legend. Instead of a poor widow, they based their opera on a poor woodcutter and his family. As well as enduring the hardships of a harsh winter, the family were being threatened with eviction from their home by their unscrupulous landlady.

In their opera, called simply “The Christmas Spider”, the basic legend remains the same. The inclusion of the landlady who is not present in the original legend, provides an essential detail that brings a satisfactory resolution to the plight of the poor family. The YouTube video below gives extracts from the opera itself.

This is not the first opera that the two have produced together. In 2015 they wrote “When Adonis Calls”, based on the works of a gay poet Gavin Dillard (b.1954). The basic premise is unoriginal: an author with writer’s block meets a budding young writer who is a great fan. I saw a comedy thriller with the same premise earlier this year. What makes “When Adonis Calls” different is that the relationship between the two characters develops into erotic fantasy rather than murder.

Borzoni and de los Santos wrote their second opera in 2021. Called “The Copper Queen”, it is based on the real-life story of the Copper Queen Hotel in Bisbee, Arizona, and its resident ghost Julia Lowell, a prostitute, who committed suicide in the hotel in the 1930s.

Next Sunday we move away from Christmas trees and decorations to look how an Italian Renaissance satirist may have influenced the creation of an Italian gift-bringer.

Advent 2: A Forest You Can Wear

We return to Christmas trees this week, but not the ones you can decorate, but ones that decorate you.

There’s a big trend in the UK of wearing tasteless knitted sweaters and jumpers with terrible or over-the-top seasonal designs a lot of them including Christmas trees. Even Tom Daley has been known to design and wear his own awful Christmas jumpers. But what if you want to wear something that is a bit more subtle?

How about brooches. There’s a lot on sale, but let’s keep with the Christmas tree motif.

According to the Guinness Book of World Records the person who holds the record for owning the most Christmas tree brooches is an openly gay man called Adam Wide (b.1953).

Adam is no stranger to Guinness World Records. From 2009 to 2012 he was its Creative Director, responsible for expanding the organisation’s live record breaking attempts, including using social media. On top of that, after he left Guinness, Adam co-founded a gay rugby club called the Berlin Bruisers who, in 2020, broke the Guinness World Record for the most passes thrown per minute (237 in 3 minutes). However, this record has since been broken by other teams.

Little did I know before researching this that I had actually seen Adam Wide before. In the late 1980s he formed as half of a comedy double act with Babs Sutton called Clarence and Joy Pickles. They performed regularly on a popular Saturday night show I watched called “The Noel Edmonds Saturday Roadshow”.

Adam has been collecting Christmas tree brooches since 1984. In another Christmas-related fact, he bought his first brooch in Copenhagen when he was playing as the Sheriff of Nottingham in a Robin Hood-based pantomime called “Big Sis In Watching You” with the London Toast Theatre, am English language theatre company who perform all over Europe. Not only does this give him a connection to my city of residence (and, more personally, to a former real Sheriff of Nottingham) but his father was born in Nottingham. It’s all worthy of forming part of a future “80 Gays Around the World” series.

Just after the Berlin Bruisers were founded Adam commissioned Mark Mercy, the original designer at Stanley Hagler NYC jewellers to design a Christmas tree brooch in purple and white, the team colours of the Bruisers.

Adam first set the world record with his brooch collection in 2008, when he had 542. Since then the record has been broken several times, even by Adam himself five times. When he was last recorded as the Guinness World Record holder in 2021 his collection contained 7,921 brooches.

Such a massive collection needs to be displayed, and that is exactly what happened in 2023 when Chatsworth House, the famous stately home of the Duke of Devonshire, turned them into a “Christmas Forest”. By then, Adam’s collection had increased to 8,250, breaking his own record again.

You can see Chatsworth’s Christmas Forest in this video in which Adam takes us on a tour of the glittering display.

Next week we’ll look at other glittering decorations that are directly associated with Christmas trees, and their surprising origin legend in a popular Hallowe’en item.

Advent 1: A Seasonal Forest

This year’s 4-part Advent series covers several topics – Christmas decorations, music and literature.

Let’s start by decorating the Christmas tree. A quick history lesson first. The Christmas tree began life as the Paradise Tree that was set up in churches during the Middle Ages on Christmas Eve. This was the centrepiece of the Paradise Play, a retelling of the story of Adam and Eve, whose feast day is December 24th. The Paradise Tree represented the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden and could have been an evergreen, or a deciduous tree with fake leaves, it wasn’t important. The tree would also be decorated with apples (hence the original Christmas baubles invented in the 16th century in Germany were made of red glass) and communion wafers.

The common misinformation and propaganda from people who claim that the Christmas tree is a pre-Christian pagan symbol is not verified by any evidence – it is an unproven opinion based on only one fact, that there were sacred trees in pre-Christian times. The only pre-Christian evidence comes from Judaism, which isn’t paganism. Trees and plants have been used are decorative objects all over the world without any religious context. Do you have some in your home today – are they there as objects of worship? Its like saying Pride marches are pagan festivals because people paraded to Stonehenge thousands of years ago to celebrate the solstice.

The first secular Christmas tree, one erected by the people not the Church, originated in Latvia in the 15th century. There’s an excellent little book called “Inventing the Christmas Tree” by Bernd Brunner. It’s a most diligently researched book, and it is available on Amazon.

Today, Christmas trees start appearing in shopping centres and malls as early as the beginning of November, sometimes earlier. A lot of the trees are traditional, but occasionally you might see an imaginative twist on the usual fir or spruce tree.

For imaginative ideas for your own tree you can do no better than get inspiration from the Christmas trees erected in one of London’s poshest hotels, Claridge’s. The Creative Director behind most of them was Michael Howells (1957-2018), who was also responsible for the production design of films such as “Nanny McPhee” and the tv series “Victoria”. For Claridge’s he collaborated with a “Who’s Who” of designers, many of whom, like himself, were members of the lgbt+ community. The first two Claridge’s Christmas trees in 2009 and 2010 were collaborations between Michael Howells and gay Maltese fashion designer John Galliano. Claridge’s own website has a list and images of all their trees.

Another gay designer who has created a tree for Claridge’s is Guy Oliver (b.1967), but it wasn’t a Christmas tree.

In 2014, Claridge’s invited Guy to design the interior of Fera, their new restaurant. Guy removed some of the interior (non-original) walls which had created barriers in the area, and he brought in new lighting. In the centre of the restaurant he placed a sand-blasted tree, a real one.

Guy Oliver has also designed Christmas trees and decorations for other venues, stately homes, and private residences. Despite creating fabulous decorations which cost hundreds of pounds to make, Guy always tries to be economical with his materials wherever possible. In 2020, when the world was still in covid lockdown, Guy came up with several ideas for Christmas decorations which families and individuals at home could make for themselves without having to do a lot of shopping.

These ere simple ideas, ones that may be familiar to you. Some of them I have tried myself over the years, and they are much better than the commercial versions that cost too much. You can discover his ideas here.

I’ve written a couple of entries myself on Christmas decorations on this blog. Here are links to them:

Three Kings decorations.

Danish pleated hearts and silhouette shapes.

To end with, I’ll tell you about my own decorations. Since 2021, when I began in-depth research into Christmas, I’ve been buying or making figures of various characters associated with the festive season (all in proportion so that they matched in height). Figures of Santa Claus and angels were no problem as they are sold everywhere, but I couldn’t find figures of the Dutch Sinterklaas, the Russian Ded Moroz, or even Krampus, so I began to make my own. For figures I did not make from scratch, I bought dolls and action figures and modified them into the characters I desired.

Below is a photo of figures I had bought or made in time for Christmas 2022. From left to right they are (back row): Pelzmärtl (Bavaria, Germany), St. Lucy (from Sweden and northern Italy), an angel, Santa Claus, Snegurochka (Russian Snow Maiden). Front row: an elf, Tió de Nadal (Spain), Julnisse (Scandinavia). It’s easy to see which I’ve modified and which are as bought.

I’ve added more each year, and now I have 27 different Christmas figures dotted around the room, including Sinterklaas, the Australian Wangkarnal, and Mrs. Claus. This year’s new additions (all made from scratch) are the Christmas Spider, Anguleru (Asturias, Spain), Staffan Ställegrang (Sweden) and the Biggeresel (Baden-Württemberg, Germany).

Next Sunday we’ll look at how a German gay rugby club contributed in creating a decorative Christmas Guinness World Record.

Honouring The Dead

Here’s something different to my usual Hallowe’en article. Just for a change, here’s my take on Hallowe’en and how today, All Soul’s Day, is just as important, and how one lgbt community has turned Hallowe’en’s true meaning into a popular celebration.

I’m sure you know that Hallowe’en is short for Hallows Evening, the night before All Hallows (or All Saints) Day, when the lives of Christian saints are honoured. This is followed by today, All Souls Day, when lives of all the departed are honoured. Hallowe’en is the English name for the Festa di Ognissanti, the real name, celebrated in Catholic churches today, and they don’t celebrate it with trick-or-treat and pumpkins (unless they copy the Americans).

I’ve often felt uncomfortable about the way Hallowe’en is celebrated. I know what the word Hallowe’en actually means and what it symbolises, and neither have anything to do with horror, trick-or-treat, or pumpkins. Most modern Hallowe’en practices originate in the USA, and most (not all) of them were appropriated from European Christmas traditions.

As I grew up I went along with the horror aspect of Hallowe’en because I was led to believe by the media that this was how it should be celebrated. When I left school I began research into all things historical, and I realised that what I was told about a lot of things were not completely accurate, including Hallowe’en.

There’s nothing wrong with having a bit of fun at Hallowe’en. I enjoy sitting down to watch “Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy” or “Carry on Screaming”. But, like other genuine Christians, I also mark the day as it should be. No pumpkins, no scary costumes, and definitely no trick-or-treat.

Being quarter Irish, my main misgiving about modern Hallowe’en is the false belief that it is an Irish Celtic pagan festival. Neo-pagans and anti-Christians consistently claim that it originated in something called Samhain. They provide no evidence, except to repeat a lot of unsourced 17th century suppositions.

The name Samhain first appears in the 9th century, AFTER the Catholic Church created All Saint’s Day and Hallowe’en. The idea that Celts had a festival in October or November was first suggested in the 17th century by amateur “historians” who based their history on folklore and legend, not documentary evidence. There isn’t even any evidence to say what Samhain actually was. A festival? A month? A season? People who believe those old “historians” remind me of Mr. Copper in the “Doctor Who” episode “Voyage of the Damned”, who gives this description of Christmas:-

There are many reasons why horror, monsters and gore became associated with Hallowe’en, which will take too long to explain. Most of them don’t come from the Celts but from Germanic Christmas customs, but the Christian Hallowe’en has always been about honouring our ancestors, not being scared by them. Ironically, neo-pagans appropriated this idea for their modern Samhain.

European colonists in the 16th century took the above-mentioned Festa di Ognissanti with other festivals to the New World. The Spanish, in particular, had a large empire in the Americas, and it is in Latin America where we find that the closest observances to the original Hallowe’en are still celebrated. Their celebration is called the Dia de los Muertes. You probably know it better as Day of the Dead.

Let’s have a look at what is probably the longest running lgbt Day of the Dead festival, the Calavera LGBTQ Festival in Los Angeles, California, USA.

Calavera is the name given to representations of the human skull that are decorated with colourful patterns. You’ve probably seen some of these in your area. Originally, in the 18th century, they may have just been sugar candy skulls given to children.

 The Calavera LGBTQ Festival was created by the Latino Equality Alliance (LEA), an organisation founded in 2009 in response to California’s Proposition 8, a state amendment that outlawed gay marriage. LEA’s purpose is to promote equality and community for those of Latin-American heritage.

In 2016 LEA produced their first lgbt Day of the Dead events. First was a workshop where visitors could learn about the meaning and spirituality of the occasion and place small gifts on an ofrenda, an altar traditionally erected to honour the dead. These altars are erected everywhere during Day of the Dead, including people’s homes, in communal areas in streets, and on the graves of family ancestors. Several days later LEA hosted a Calavera Dance Party, where guests painted their faces like calaveras.

The impetus for the creation of this event was the terrible shooting in the “Pulse” nightclub in Orlando, Florida, the previous June in which many young people, mainly lgbtq, were killed. Perhaps LEA was also inspired by their Youth Council, who had set up an ofrenda in October 2015 to honour transgender murder victims.

In 2017 LEA held their second event, renamed the Calavera LGBT Community Celebration, and this marked the start of its annual return. Since then, ofrendas and acts of remembrance have gone alongside celebrations and traditional dances, and at the same time raising money for local lgbt Latin-American causes and charities.

From 2019 the event has had its current name of the Calavera LGBTQ Festival and has been held every year since then. Like many events during the Covid Year, 2020, the festival was held online, and was available to a wider audience. In 2021 the festival returned to its usual format. The most recent festival was held on 18th October.

With the focus of Hallowe’en, All Souls Day, and the Day of the Dead all being on honouring your ancestors it provides a perfect occasion for genealogist and family historians, which is how I usually celebrate these days. I concentrate on doing family history research (which is what I’m going to do after I’ve posted this, particularly research into my great-uncle who was a professional boxer) and placing (plastic) roses around photos of my family. For an alternative celebration you could decorate the walls with lgbtq flags as though it was Pride Month or your local Pride, or celebrate whatever other community you identify with, or all communities.

80 Gays Around the World: Part 7) Death and Democracy

Last Time on “80 Gays”: 19) Adonis, although he had several male lovers, is most associated with 20) Aphrodite, a deity famous for her beauty and less well-known for her male form, 21) Aphroditus, a deity often confused with 22) Hermaphroditus, and in one of her other alternate persona called Aphrodite Urania, there was a statue in the agora of Athens near to those of 23) Harmodius and 24) Aristogeiton.

The story of 23) Harmodius and 24) Aristogeiton was featured on this blog in its first year way back in 2011. It formed part of my series on “The Gayest Games in Ancient Greece”, a brief history of the Panathenaic Games. You can read the relevant section here.

The Panathenaic, or Panthenaean, Games are currently believed to have lasted for eight days. Day 6 was the most spectacular and most eagerly anticipated of the whole festival, apart from the final day with its sacrifices, prize giving and partying. It began as night fell in the sacred olive grove in Akademia outside the city gate. Each of the ten demes, or “tribes”, of Athens has selected a team of four men to take part in this event, the Panathenaic torch relay to the Acropolis. In the Akademia was an altar to the god of love and guardian of same-sex male relationships, Eros.

The tangled sexual web into which Harmodius and Aristogeiton found themselves deserves going over again from the above-mentioned 2011 blog entry. Aristogeiton had a rival for the position of senior partner of Harmodius. That rival was 25) Hipparchus, but Harmodius rejected him. Just to point out what I’ve written before – same-sex relationships in Greece were not what we would call gay today. There were a traditional part of a young man’s passage into adulthood. Every young man who entered the gymnasium or army training academy expected to acquire an older man as a sexual partner. It was perfectly normal for a Greek man to have a young male lover and a wife, as Hipparchus had, at the same time.

Hipparchus’s wife was the daughter of 26) Charmus of Kolyttus, whose own young male lover in the gymnasium was Hipparchus’s brother, 27) Hippias. And, yes, Charmus had previously been the young partner of an older man, and guess who it was? It was the father of Hipparchus and Hippias, 28) Peisistratus.

I’m not surprised if you’re confused, so I’ll add this illustration from 2011 which may make it clearer.

The outcome of this web of relationships was the assassination of Hippias by Aristogeiton and Harmodius, followed by their own deaths, turning them into local heroes and inspiring the people of Athens to introduce a form of democracy, regarded as the birth of democracy in our modern world.

What is relevant for us in relation to this series of “80 Gays” is that all of those named today have some connection to the Panathenian torch relay. Aristogetion, Harmodiius, Hippias and Hipparchus were present at the relay during which three of them were killed, and Charmus and Peisistratus are both connected to the altar of Eros at which the relay torches were lit.

The torches were lit from the sacred flame at the altar of Eros. This altar and shrine were built be either Peisistratus or Charmus. It was most probably built by Peisistratus to honour his former lover Charmus.

Of course, we can’t think of a torch relay these days without thinking about the modern Olympics, introduced by Nazi Germany at the 1936 games. The ancient Olympics never had a torch relay, but there is a connection between those games and the Panathenian torch relay in the person of Phidias (No. 8 in the 2020 series of “80 Gays”). The Panathenian relay ended at the Acropolis, which features many of Phidias’s sculptures on the Parthenon. The modern Olympic torch relay begins at Olympia, the ancient site of the original games, where Phidias made one of the ancient Seven Wonders of the World, the gigantic statue of Zeus.

Even in the ancient world, this statute of Zeus was seen as a great wonder. If it had still existed in the early 20th century I’m sure the Nazis would have tried to add it to their stash of stolen art treasures in Berlin. It had definitely been ear-marked centuries earlier for transportation to Rome and have its head replaced with that of one of the most eccentric Roman emperors, 20) Caligula (12 AD-41 AD).

Next time on “80 Gays”: We ignore a prophecy and get written out of history, and end up being arrested at Moscow Pride.

Extraordinary Life: Robert Culliford, Pirate Captain

Shiver mi timbers! It’s Talk Like a Pirate Day!

A couple of years ago I wrote about the special relationships pirates had which could have been made between either gay or straight same-sex couples. The relationship was called a matiloge.

One couple I mentioned was Robert Culliford and John Swann. I thought Culliford in particular deserved further note. So, here is the first part of the Xtraordinary Life of Pirate Captain Robert Culliford.

But first, what’s the difference between a pirate and a privateer? Well, nothing really, except that a privateer has license (called a letter of marque) from a government to attack ships and ports of nations who were their enemies at the time, and hand over to that government most of the plundered booty. Pirates generally attacked any ship which they thought would have a lot of treasure, and share it out amongst their crew. They had no government backing and were, therefore, breaking maritime law. Putting it like that makes it sounds like there was a lot of difference, but if you happened to be on the receiving end of an attack by either pirate or privateer, you wouldn’t know the difference.

Robert Culliford was born in or around the year 1666 in southwest England, a region renowned for its seafaring heritage. Some of the greatest English sailors of the 16th century came from here – Sir Walter Raleigh, Sir Francis Drake. It was also where the Mayflower Pilgrims set sail for New England in 1620, and there’s still a large Royal Navy presence there.

Culliford may have been born in Devon (NOT Devonshire – that’s the title of a duke, not an English county) where there was prominent family of that name. His early life was so uneventful that there’s no record of it until he was about 23 years old. That was when we first have record of him going to sea.

Somehow he had made his way to Haiti in the Caribbean and joined the crew of a French privateer ship called the Sante Rose, a former Spanish frigate captured by the French. Joining Culliford on the Sante Rose was a Scotsman, William Kidd, someone who would become one of the most famous pirates in history. Also aboard were four or five other Englishmen in an otherwise all French crew.

Relations between England and France were tense at that time. In fact, it was all-out war, with the Nine Years War beginning the previous year. This pitted France against pretty much the rest of western Europe.

Culliford’s first pirate adventure seems to have been attacking a Dutch ship. The Dutch were allies of the English in the war and an enemy of France, so this might not have been comfortable for Culliford. Then a chain of events began which eventually put him in charge of his own ship.

First, there was a mutiny against the captain while the ship was in New York for a refit. Then another war broke out – King William’s War, which was between France and the English American colonists. King William was a Protestant Dutch prince invited by England to become its monarch in 1688, and take over from the Catholic king (William’s wife was next in line of succession and ruled with him, so he was an obvious choice). It was after this that Culliford and William Kidd led a mutiny against their new captain, with Kidd taking his place. They renamed the ship Blessed William. Kidd didn’t remain in charge for long, because Culliford led another mutiny and Kidd was replaced.

Back in New York, the colonial governor issued Blessed William with a letter of marque which authorised it to attack ships or ports of the nation’s enemy. In other words, France. The nearest enemy territory to New York was French Acadia (Canada), so Blessed William sailed north and plundered a couple of French settlements.

During this attack they captured a French frigate, and the captain of Blessed William gave it to Robert Culliford as his first command. He renamed his ship Horne Frigate.

Two ketches (small sailing boats common along the North American coast at the time) were given the task of transporting most of the loot from the attack back down to New York. Unfortunately, the ketches were captured by French pirates. The Horne Frigate sailed back to New York with virtually nothing. It looked like his life as a pirate captain was a failure.

Undaunted Robert Culliford decided he may have better luck on the other side of Africa. He managed to get a position as quartermaster to his old captain on a captured French ship called the Jacob and sailed all the way down the North American coast, past the Caribbean, down the Brazilian coastline, across the Atlantic to Africa, down and round the Cape of Good Hope and up again on the other side into the Indian Ocean.

The year was now 1692. The Indian Ocean had long been a denizen of pirates. Its shores were home to some of the most important trading routes and ports in the world and easy picking. Europe had used these routes for several centuries, and by the 1600s was looking to expand its control and protection of these routes, and the nations which supplied the goods it transported. Piracy was rife, whether it was by Arab, African, Indian or east Asian pirates. The Indian Ocean was an area that was probably more dangerous to shipping than the Caribbean and, consequently, more heavily policed by the European colonial powers.

This was the environment into which Robert Culliford and the Jacob was sailing. Would they have better luck in the Indian Ocean? Would Culliford ever become a captain again? If that was his hope, he was to have mixed results, including imprisonment in an Indian jail, a not-so-pleasant reunion with Captain Kidd, and a much more pleasant encounter with the man who became his life partner.

But that’s for next time. Hopefully, I can return to recount some more extraordinary events in the life of pirate captain Robert Culliford early next year.