Hispanic Heritage Month

Today the USA begins a month-long celebration of it’s Hispanic heritage. This is an ideal opportunity for me to celebrate with them and look at the rich heritage the Hispanic lgbt community has made around the world.

I feel quite attached to things Spanish. I love the history and culture of the country (shame about the food!) and I’ve dated a couple of Spanish guys. When I’m not cheering for the UK, Canada or Ireland I’m cheering for Spain. Why? Because I’ve got a lot of Spanish ancestry. Admittedly it goes back to medieval times and King Edward III of England. Through him I descend from the royal dynasties (both Christian and Muslim) of Castile, Leon, Aragon and Navarre, and I know that at least one inch of the miles of DNA in my body in inherited from El Cid. But then, I’m sure you have as well, you just haven’t found out.

The size of the Spanish Empire manes that Hispanic culture has spread to every continent on the planet, even to the Argentine and Chilean claims in Antarctica. It seems unreasonable not to celebrate without, as the same time, ignoring the other side of the coin – persecution of native cultures, slavery, invasion. All of these have influenced modern Hispanic countries and the lgbt communities.

The National Hispanic Heritage Month in the USA originates way back in the 1960s as a weak-long celebration. President Ronald Reagan expanded it to a calendar-month in length in 1988, making this it’s 25^th anniversary.

The reason why 15^th September was chosen to begin the celebration is because it is the date in 1821 when several central American countries declared independence from Spain – Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. Other Hispanic countries became independent in the following week. The heritage month last until a few days after the anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of the Americas on 12^th October 1492.

Over the course of this heritage month I’ll take each continent in turn and look at its lgbt heritage and cultural development. I’ll take them in a kind of chronological order according to expansion, beginning with Europe, then Africa, the Americas, and finally Asia-Oceania.

Before that I want to bring in this year’s overall science theme. There are many lgbt scientists of Hispanic heritage. Here are just three.

When considering those of Hispanic heritage in the lgbt community the best place to start is with Juana Maria Rodriguez, Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. In her 2003 book “Queer Latinidad” Juana pointed out that it is impossible to take gender out of Hispanic culture because it’s very language is heavily gender based. As a means of unifying, or perhaps eliminating, the gender differentiation of the male Latino and female Latina identities Juana adopted the “@” symbol to produce a new word – Latin@ - to describe the whole Hispanic community.

Juana is one of the world’s leading experts on the Latin@ community in the lgbt world, though much of her work comes from research in her native California. The remarkable aspect of this is that Juana had no academic aspirations after school. It was only after a chance meeting with an old teacher in a gay bar that her interest in going into higher education and university was sparked.

One Hispanic scientist making another splash in the world, quite literally in his case, is Luis Eduardo Bahamon. Originally from Colombia Luis has both Hispanic and native Colombian blood. He is, perhaps, better known in the sporting lgbt community for his achievements in swimming and diving than for his work as a clinical cytogeneticist with Kaiser Permanente in California. Cytogenetics is the branch of genetics which deals with chromosomes and health conditions, such as hereditary diseases and DNA research.

Luis was a keen diver from childhood. He won his first medal, a bronze, at the age of 16 in high school in Colombia. Since then he has competed for his adopted country of the USA in both diving and swimming. Currently Luis is a member of West Hollywood Aquatics and is an adviser to International Gay and Lesbian Aquatics on diving issues. He competes regularly in US Masters competitions and lgbt events such as the Gay Games and Outgames. His most recent diving medals have been 2 silvers at the Gay Games in Cologne in 2010.

And last, but not least, a quick mention of Dr. Diana Eva Azcarate. She is a research scientist at the Institutio Argentino de Radioastronomia in Berazategui near Buenos Aries. Diana is one of just a handful of transgender scientists, and is a campaigner for transgender rights in Argentina.

The Body of a God - Part 2

My second look at the way the muscular male body has been used as an icon for the perfect body image and homoerotic fantasy starts in the Renaissance.

During the early centuries of Christianity naked images that were common place in Ancient Greece and Rome came to be seen as “corrupting”. Nudity took people’s minds off spiritual thoughts and on to carnal ones. The idea of a perfect healthy body was secondary to having a healthy mind. Medieval Christian art deliberately avoided full nudity, nudity being seen as indicative of “heathen savages” outside Christian Europe.

The beginning of the Renaissance in the 14^th century saw the rediscovery of Greek art and culture, and the male nude became fashionable again. Taking their cue from Greek statues artists began to produce works in the ancient style. The most famous of these is Michelangelo’s “David”. And this obsession with the body also saw the beginnings of modern science. It is often stated that modern scientific methods were pioneered by people like Sir Francis Bacon or Sir Isaac Newton. But in the century before them pioneers such as Leonardo da Vinci were studying closely the workings of the human body in the name of art (against Christian doctrine at the time) long before doctors were allowed to do it in the name of science.

The Renaissance continued the Greek idea that the more muscular the body the more heroic or god-like the man. Figures such as Zeus or Hercules were always depicted as bigger and more butch than anyone else. Gradually the Church began to accept male nudity in art, mainly because the men depicted were non-Christian (e.g. Jewish, from the Old Testament, such as David or Sampson) or mythical figures. And that’s why, in recent decades, being big and muscular was seen as indicating you were a “real man”.

The Baroque period saw an explosion of male nudes in art, by now all writhing and posing in sensual postures. Artists such as Caravaggio were also encouraged by wealthy patrons, many of whom were semi-closeted gays or bisexuals, to produce such art.

As for musclemen in real life, there was little to see until the 18^th century. People only saw such bodies when the travelling fairs came to town with their strongmen. But these men were popular because of their feats of strength rather than the size of their muscles, and more often than not they were just beefy and stocky rather than muscular.

In the 19^th century there developed a new culture of fitness which resulted in many gyms being established. In these gyms young men developed well-toned and supple bodies which performed as gymnasts and acrobats, but it was not quite bodybuilding.

Out of the fairground circuit and acrobat’s gym came a man who revolutionised muscle development and became the Father of Bodybuilding, a German-born strongman, Eugen Sandow (1867-1925). Sandow moved away from lifting weights to improve his strength and towards weight training to improve muscle mass and definition. In this he was well-known in his early days, and even appeared naked (in silhouette behind a screen) at private “showings”.

The perfect “body of a god” was once again seen as an ideal achievement. Sandow emerged onto the muscleman scene just as weightlifting was being recognised as a sport (it was a sport in the first modern Olympics in 1896 – Team GB’s first Olympic champion was a weightlifter).

“The Great Sandow”, as he was billed, wowed audiences in America in 1893. Building on his popularity and the craze for bodybuilding (the word entered the language at about the same time) Sandow began publishing a magazine and advertised the first bodybuilding contest to be held in the Royal Albert Hall in London on 14^th September 1901 (the anniversary is tomorrow). The judges included Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and the winner was William L. Murray – winner of the Nottinghamshire county heat! From that point bodybuilding became a competitive sport.

David L. Chapman, a bodybuilding historian, wrote a biography of Sandow in 1984. In it he pointed out that, even though he was married and a father, Sandow had a strong personal and working relationship with a young protégé called Martinus Sieveking. Chapman wondered if the relationship was more than platonic. Sandow was an inveterate womaniser, playing on women’s attraction to his physique. Yet he left his wife and went to live with Martinus. Chapman suggests Sandow was bisexual at the very least. Chapman’s authority and respect within the bodybuilding world is enough to persuade me.

Sandow’s influence is still seen today. His “qualities to look for” – muscle development, balance, symmetry, condition and tone – are still the main objectives. Many competitions have been created since his time, the most prestigious being Mr. Olympia (named after a brand of beer, incidentally, not the site of the ancient Olympics). William L. Murray was presented with a statuette of Sandow as his prize in 1901, and a copy of that statuette has been awarded to Mr. Olympia winners since 1977.

And that’s the story up to the birth of bodybuilding. It looks like I need to carry the story into another article. This works well, actually, because I can bring the story up to date on 26^th September, when this year’s Mr. Olympia finals takes place.

Out of Their Tree - Mark Bingham

In remembrance of today's anniversary of the 9/11 attacks I want to return to an individual I mentioned in a previous “Out of Their Trees” article on Clare Balding, Mark Bingham. In that article I mentioned that both he and Clare descend from 2 families of the same name who were among the earliest Dutch settlers in New York, the Hooglandts, later Hoagland and Hoglan. It is this family, that of Mark Bingham’s mother, that has been the subject of my research.

Alice Ann Hoglan descends directly from the Hoaglandts who emigrated from Holland in the 17^th century and settled in New York, then called New Amsterdam. He branch of the family moved to Iowa in the 19^th century.

Mark Bingham has a lot of other Dutch settler ancestry through his mother. Through 2 lines of descent one ancestor was Rev. Everardus Bogardus (his Latinised name, a hangover from Catholic practice), a minister of the Dutch Reformed Church.

The minister was born Everart Bogaert in Utrecht and travelled to New Amsterdam in 1633. One incident recalled on his Wikipedia page tells how the colonial governor wanted to build a new church inside the colony’s fort to protect it from local native American attacks, but he couldn’t afford it. However, when everyone was celebrating the marriage of Rev. Bogardus’s daughter he took advantage of their inebriated state and began a subscription list. Everyone tried to out-do each other in the amount they promised they’d give for the new church and, of course, when they’d all sobered up the following morning began to regret it. The subscription was a legal document and they had to pay up!

Rev. Bogardus was a constant critic of the governor, and the manner of their deaths reveals the colonists’ own feelings. In 1647 both the governor and the minister were sailing back to Europe (incidentally, on the same ship that had brought the new governor, Petrus Stuyvesant, to the colony – he’s an ancestor of gay singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright). The ship’s captain mistook the Bristol Channel for the English Channel and the ship ran aground and sank. Only 21 of the 107 passengers survived. Unfortunately, Rev. Bogardus and the old governor didn’t. In “The Story of Manhattan” by Charles Hemstreet (published 1901) it says : “The people of New Amsterdam mourned for their minister, but there was little sorrow felt for the Governor …”

 Rev. Bogardus’s surname may remind you of the Hollywood star Humphrey Bogart. His name also comes from a Dutch settler family called Bogaert, who are probably not related to Everardus. However, Rev. Bogardus is ancestor of Henry Fonda and his acting dynasty.

 The minister’s wife, Anneke Jans, was at one time thought to have been a grand-daughter of Willem I, Prince of Orange, of the ruling dynasty in the Netherlands, by his mistress Marie Webber. Quite often these “facts” still appear on amateur genealogical websites, despite the fact that they have long been disproved. Anneke’s relationship to Willem I was disproved in 1925.

One of the “Holy Grails” of genealogy for a lot of researchers, amateur and professional, is to find a royal ancestor. By finding one there is likely to be an ancestry that can be traced back hundreds of years. That’s what happened in my case, as I’ve often mentioned on this blog. But I think we must be careful and check the records rather than rely on something someone puts of their own family history site.

Having said that, I’m always looking for people’s royal ancestry. So, now that I’ve discounted Mark Bingham’s Dutch royal line, I’ll look at his English royal line. Through the Warriners family of Monson, Massachusetts, Mark has 2 lines of descent from King Henry I (1070-1135). Other royal ancestors which various internet sites claim for Mark have been easily disproved as rumour.

 Mark’s Warriner ancestors emigrated to Massachusetts from Lincolnshire in 1638. My great-great-grandmother was a Warriner from the Lincolnshire border, so perhaps it is the same family. I haven’t found a link yet.

I’ll end with listing some of the famous lgbt relatives who share his ancestry from the time of the 17^th century colonial settlements from Europe : Clare Balding, Cole Porter, W. H. Auden and Herman Melville.

Heritage Spotlight - LGBT Museums in the UK

It is my dream to open a permanent lgbt museum. This weekend Britain holds the annual Heritage Open Days, when many museums, galleries and tourist sites open free of charge, and otherwise private historical houses and sites open their doors specially for this weekend. Today I put a spotlight on something that doesn’t exist, the thing I dream about – an lgbt museum in the UK.

There have been, and still are, lots of lgbt exhibitions but nothing permanent. There are also lots of local lgbt history projects, including the one I co-founded (Nottinghamshire’s Rainbow Heritage). Several other lgbt history projects funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund have expressed desires for a permanent museum in their own areas, but nothing has emerged.

In the US there are several lgbt museums, including some of specialist interest like the Leather Museum. Some lgbt people have museums dedicated to them alone, both here and around the world (e.g. Andy Warhol), and many memorials (e.g. London’s Blue Plaques, lgbt Holocaust memorials), and plenty of archives and collections, but no actual museum.

There have been major advances in the recognition of items in museums and collections of lgbt interest, especially since the introduction of LGBT History Month in the UK. Museums have compiled guides especially for the month in question. They are this guide to the special Egyptology collection at the small Petrie Museum. The British Museum has also produced a guide. I went down in June when the guide was reissued for London Pride weekend, but I had to ask for a copy at the desk rather than pick one up where all the other guides were on display. The reason, perhaps, was because of pressure and protests by Christian Voice that they were promoting sodomy to school children. Christian Voice had demonstrated outside the museum when they previewed LGBT History Month in 2010.

Activists and academics have been calling for a museum for years. The activist Peter Tatchell made an appeal in The Guardian newspaper in 2004. He first thought about a museum way back in the early 1970s when he campaigned with the Gay Liberation Front. In those days most activists were more interested in the present and the future, and in politics and campaigning, than the past. What research had been done in lgbt history was “hidden away” in universities (in the days before things could be put online) and any artefacts were generally in private collections, many of which were probably discarded or split up on the owners’ deaths.

In the words of Peter Tatchell from 2004, “Queers were people without any sense of a collective past”. Fortunately, he and some fellow history buffs looked for information in every museum, library and archive they had access to. From their research emerged many stories, and also recollections of gay victims of the Holocaust which, Tatchell pointed out, was when they adopted the Pink Triangle as an emblem by German gay rights groups.

And yet, with all the researching, discovering and rescuing of our heritage, no-one was prepared to commit themselves (or their money) to a museum. Even at the turn of the century Tatchell couldn’t find anyone ready to back a museum in London. He even proposed a site – the old Bow Street Police Station where Oscar Wilde was locked up after his arrest in 1895.

Perhaps the UK is more attuned to general museums and collections than specialised ones. Most specialised museums are created on specific sites associated with themes. Military museums are often on old military sites, museums to famous people are at their homes. That could be the problem in the UK – lgbt heritage doesn’t have a single national site to focus on.

The call for established museums to make more of the items of lgbt interest and make them more visible is the focus of the work of people like Professor Richard Sandell of the University of Leicester. For the past few years he has been speaking at conferences on just this subject, and travels the world looking at other museums to see how this can be done and encouraged.

In 2011 Prof. Sandell told a conference in Brighton that not enough was being done to acknowledge the lgbt community in UK collections, despite the fact that the law requires museums to actively acknowledge and display diversity in the community. The success of many lgbt exhibitions held around the UK in recent years clearly shows there is public interest. In the economic climate of recent years museums were, perhaps, not keen to spend money.

Two years later, and the “excuse” of expense is still putting people off. In January a very successful exhibition opened at the Leicester LGBT Centre. Because of it’s success the Centre renewed calls for a permanent museum to be located in the city. The Project Officer, Denis Bradley, recognises that the economic climate is still a stumbling block, but he is hopeful.

An alternative to a one-site museum could be a touring pop-up museum. This concept is growing in popularity. Many city centres have unused shop and business premises which they hire out on a short-time basis to artists, businesses or charities. A pop-up museum is working well in the US. Could this be the most effective solution in the UK? It’s something which needs more discussion or, even better, action.

In the meantime I hope that many more temporary exhibitions continue to be produced. Even now I am planning my next annual display at Nottinghamshire County Hall in February, and looking at the possibility of a producing a pop-up exhibition in the city centre.

I’ll end with these optimistic comments made to me by Professor Sandell: “It seems to me like an exciting – and critical – time for lgbt communities keen to have their lives, art and culture represented in the public sphere. There have been more lgbt themed exhibitions in the last 10 years than in the previous 50. But these are often temporary and more needs to be done to represent sexual and gender diversity as we move forward.”



Out of Their Trees Special

I had already written and planned another family history article for September 11^th when I came across this article from the Lithuania Tribune and thought it was much too special to wait. It’s about the Lithuanian ancestry of Harvey Milk.

I congratulate Clare Dimyon on her fantastic work, and hope that more will be discovered. Milk’s ancestors must surely have stories waiting to be discovered about the problems of being Jewish in Eastern Europe.

As the article suggests it is also a reason for the lgbt community in Lithuania to have a stronger sense of belonging to the worldwide lgbt community.

The Keeper of Einstein's Blackboard

Einstein’s Blackboard – it sounds like something out of Warehouse 13, a physical object imbued with supernatural powers, the paranormal source, perhaps, of Einstein’s genius, to be protected from the outside world by a think glass screen. Actually, it is. Protected behind a thick glass screen, I mean, not the paranormal bit.

The blackboard in question reverses this idea of a supernatural object giving Einstein special powers. It is a blackboard that has acquired priceless and somehow magical status because it was used by Einstein himself. Even his chalk is protected behind glass.

There are several blackboard’s used by Einstein in the UK. The one I have in mind is located at the University of Nottingham. It was used by Einstein in a public lecture he gave there on 6^th June 1930. He had been planning a visit to Nottingham at the invitation of a friend of his who was Reader in Atomic Physics at Nottingham. Illness prevented Einstein from making his first planned visit in 1928, but 2 years later he was staying with Prof. Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington (included in another article this month, and portrayed by David Tennant recently in a BBC film) at Cambridge when he decided to visit Nottingham.

Stopping off at Woolsthorpe Manor, the home of Sir Isaac Newton (more of whom next month), Einstein arrived in Nottingham to give his lecture. On a blackboard – just an ordinary blackboard – Einstein wrote an outline of his lecture. Written in German and signed by the great man himself, here is a representation of it’s content in English.

The visit was a national event, not just of local importance, and was filmed by British Movietone News to be shown in cinema’s across the country the next day.

Apart from Einstein’s visit to Prof. Eddington in Cambridge and to Newton’s home, the biggest lgbt link to the blackboard comes in the person of the Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Nottingham, who is the official Keeper of Einstein’s Blackboard. Between 1999 and 2007 both positions was held by Peter Coles. Professor Coles is one of the few out gay astrophysicists in the UK.

Peter was appointed professor at Nottingham, his first professorship, in 1998 and took up his position on New Year’s Day 1999. A native of Newcastle-upon-Tyne in northern England, Peter spent several years at Queen Mary and Westfield College in London immediately prior to this. He had also studied Natural Sciences at Cambridge before moving down to Brighton on the south coast and the University of Sussex.

It was in Brighton in 1989 that Peter encountered his worst case of homophobia. As a gay teenager in Newcastle he was accustomed to the northern “school of hard knocks” (as I am) and developed a “think skin” as he admits on his blog. It was when he left a Brighton club, alone, in the early hours of the morning that he was attacked by a group of yobs for no other reason that he had left a gay club. Peter was beaten unconscious. Fortunately his injuries weren’t life-threatening and he was helped home by some Good Samaritans. It was an experience he could never forget and influenced his attitude to homophobia.

Brighton is often seen as the southern capital of gay culture in the UK (Manchester being the northern capital), even as long ago as 1989. In fact, it was Brighton Pride in 1994 that was the first in the UK to be headed by the Rainbow Pride flag.

Peter graduated from Brighton with a D.Phil., and completed a subsequent postdoctoral research fellowship about a year later and moved to London and Queen Mary and Westfield College.

Working at Nottingham Peter found an environment comfortable with his sexuality. He founded the university’s astronomical society, which still exists, and delighted in showing off Einstein’s Blackboard to the media, including popular science broadcaster Adam Hart-Davis in his BBC Radio 4 series “The Eureka Years”.

However, once he left Nottingham a former colleague and fellow professor made a comment on Peter’s blog which Peter found homophobic – the use of the word “faggot” in relation to “dead wood” in academia in the UK. An investigation held by the University of Nottingham found that the comment was “isolated” and took no action. It was months before they even bothered telling Peter of their decision.

But that’s all in the past, and Peter is back in Brighton as Professor of Theoretical Astrophysics and Head of the School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences at the University of Sussex. He is also Fellow and council member of the Royal Astronomical Society.



Let's Get Physical

From physicians to physicists. I return to more “hardcore” science this month with a queer look at physics. But first, apologies for posting this a day late – I had a busy weekend and needed to catch up on other things.

It’s difficult not to picture Albert Einstein when the word “physics” is mentioned. Fortunately, there are several lgbt physicists with connections to Einstein to cover, including his friend who proved his theory that gravity bends light, and another who was Keeper of Einstein’s Blackboard.

The subject of physics is not one I readily understand, so if there are unintentional scientific errors in any of my articles this month let me apologise now.

There are quite a few out lgbt physicists around the world. Whether it’s nuclear physics, astrophysics or theoretical physics, I hope to mention a few of them. I can do no better in this introduction than give a timely reminder of an organisation I mentioned at the beginning of the year, NOGLSTP – the National Organisation of Gay and Lesbian Scientists and Technical Professionals. This American organisation provides the best information on lgbt physicists and scientists on the web.

There is also a handful of astrophysicists on this regularly updated list of lgbt astronomers I also mentioned in January. Of particular note for this month is this other list of out lgbt physicists.

These three lists are all from the USA. The doesn’t seem to any similar lists in the UK or elsewhere in the world. Many universities and scientific institutes have lgbt employer and alumni groups but no readily available list.

This is going to be another mixed month. September also includes the UK’s Heritage Open Days weekend, the anniversary of 9/11, and Bisexuality Day, and I’ll be writing something for each of them. From September 15^th we also see the start of the US Hispanic Heritage Month. The Spanish had a world empire which rivalled that of the British. Even though the celebration of primarily based in and around US Hispanic culture it gives the world a chance to reflect and celebrate it’s influence in other countries. For my own little celebration I’ll be doing a continental tour round the world in my articles, taking the 5 traditional continental areas in turn and looking at the influence of, and by, the lgbt community in each area.