20 Queer Facts for LGBT History Month UK

Happy LGBT History Month UK. Here’s 20 more queer facts you may or may not know. Ideal for quiz questions at your History Month celebration.

1) The agamoi were unmarried Spartan men over the age of 30. The Spartans claimed they showed no interest in fathering children and spent too much time in each other’s company. Even though Spartan men followed the cultural norm of having boy lovers as well as wives they considered the agamoi to be perverted because they didn’t have wives as well. Because of this the agamoi were banned from attending the regular naked sport festivals, but were allowed to compete in their own – in the middle of winter, also naked.

2) L. Craig Schoonmaker (1944-2018), the person who first came up with the term “gay pride”, ran for President of the USA in 2000 as an independent candidate.

3) “Star Trek” legend and lgbt activist George Takei (b.1937) is also an athlete. He joined the Los Angeles Frontrunners (an lgbt athletics club) before he came out publicly in 2005. In 2006 he won a gold medal at the Gay Games in Chicago in the 4x100 meters relay. His team was called the Trekeys.

4) Openly lesbian British Olympic BMX cyclist Shanaze Reade (b.1988) entered the Guinness Book of World Records live on British television on 28th March 2016. She became the fastest person to cycle round a “Wall of Death” at a speed of 26.8 miles an hour.

5) A cinaedus was a male dancer in the Roman Empire who twerked! The erotically-charged shaking of the back side during the dance led to the association of that name cinaedus with passive sexual male partners.

6) The world’s first ever variety/light entertainment programme on television was “Looking In” on the BBC on 23rd April 1933. It was produced by Eustace Robb (1899-1985) who went on to produce one variety programme a week for a year. He was an openly gay ex-army officer who lived on a country estate in Oxfordshire where the Duke and Duchess of Sussex once rented a house until hounded out by paparazzi.

7) In the 2nd century BC King Alexander Balas of the Seleucid Empire (modern Turkey, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and bits of Pakistan) consulted an oracle who told him to “beware of the place that bore the two-formed one”. Alexander was later assassinated in Abrae in Greece. Abrae was the home of a male warrior called Diophantus, who had been born female.

8) In 2011 Dr. Bryan Lessard (b.1988), an openly gay entomologist, named a species of fly Scaptia beyonceae after the singer Beyoncé because it has a prominent “bootylicious” rear end. Bryan is something of a celebrity in entomology circles and is known as “Bry the Fly Guy”. He works at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Organisation in Sydney, Australia, and in 2019 organised a group of colleagues to take part in the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras parade.

9) Fans of the 1980s series “Man from Atlantis” may like to know that the majority of the underwater swimming scenes were not done by the show’s star, Patrick Duffy, but by an openly gay, national swimming champion called Tom Reudy (b.1955). Tom has also won over a dozen medals at the Gay Games since 1986.

10) The Byzantine Empire created several high-ranking and influential positions at court for eunuchs. These eunuchs could be either castrated men (called ektomiai) or naturally-born intersex (called spadones, or thladai). There were even noble ranks created for them. Several of them became Patriarchs, heads of the Greek Orthodox Christian Church, equivalent to an archbishop.

11) The famous line “Me Tarzan, you Jane” from the iconic 1932 film “Tarzan the Ape Man” starring Johnny Weismuller didn’t appear in any of the 26 Tarzan books written by Edgar Rice Burroughs. It was a line created by gay songwriter Ivor Novello (1893-1951) during his short time as a scriptwriter for MGM studios.

12) Ganymede is the biggest moon in the solar system, bigger than the planet Mercury. It is one of over 70 known moons that orbit Jupiter. Those that have been named are named after sexual partners and female descendants of Jupiter/Zeus – except Ganymede. He is the only male lover of Jupiter after whom a moon is named.

13) The iconic Union Flag (or Union Jack, its makes no difference – trust me, I’m a member of the Flag Institute) is based on the original flag of the union of the thrones of England and Scotland in 1601. That original was chosen by the gay “Queen” James I who wanted a new flag to be flown from ships of the unified navy. He asked for a design which combined the flags of England and Scotland so that neither had precedence. Despite this, the finally accepted design gives the Scottish flag precedence in heraldic terms (James was Scottish), being the blue base on which the English cross is placed.

14) Figures from the Ministry of Justice of England and Wales published in November 2019 revealed that more than half of the prisons in England and Wales (62 out of 121) had at least one transgender inmate. This does not include inmates who had received a legal Gender Recognition certificate.

15) The influential queer statesman, philosopher and scientist Sir Francis Bacon, Viscount St. Alban, (1561-1626) was a pioneer in experimental research. His final experiment was to see if snow would preserve a dead chicken. Conducting the experiment on a cold and snowy Sunday in April he caught a chill and died of pneumonia three days later.

16) Despite popular belief Harvey Milk was NOT the first openly lgbt person to be elected to public office in the USA. He was, at the very least, the 4th. Nancy Wechsler and Jerry DeGriek were elected to the Ann Arbor city council in Michigan on 3rd April 1972. They both came out as lesbian and gay respectively four months later. They didn’t stand for re-election in 1974 but supported Kathy Kozachenko in her successful campaign to become the first openly lesbian elected official on 2nd April 1974. Harvey Milk wasn’t elected to public office in San Francisco until 1978.

17) Modern democracy was founded in response to the murder of a gay couple, Harmodius and Aristogeiton. They were lovers in ancient Athens during the tyranny of Hipparchus and Hippias. During the ceremonial procession at the Panathenaic Games in 514 BC they killed Hipparchus. Harmodius and Aristogeiton were then murdered by Hippias in retaliation. Hippias was then overthrown and the new rulers created the first modern democracy. They erected a statue in honour of the murdered gay couple.

18) Carl Austen-Behan (b.1972) holds an interesting combination of honours and titles. As an RAF firefighter he won a Royal Humane Society Bronze Medal for rescuing a pilot from a crashed military aircraft in 1992 (he was dismissed in 1997, when it was illegal to be gay in the RAF). In 2001 he was voted Mr Gay UK. In 2016 he became Lord Mayor of Manchester (he was host to the national service of commemoration for the Battle of the Somme centenary). In 2020 he was awarded an OBE (Officer of the Order of the British Empire) for services to charity, the lgbt community and Manchester. He was also appointed a Deputy Lieutenant of Greater Manchester by the Lord Lieutenant (the Queen’s representative).

19) Spintry is an old word for a male prostitute and gay sex. The word was used in England during the 17th century. It originates from a Greek work for a bracelet. The allusion is that a hand goes through the bracelet – I’ll leave you to guess why it became used for gay sex and prostitution.

20) Lt. Robert Jones (c.1740-after 1780) of the Royal Artillery popularised figure skating, if not even inventing the modern sport. He designed the first modern ice skate, which had the blade attached to the boot (previously blades were strapped onto ordinary walking boots). In 1772 his book “A Treatise on Skating” was published - during his trial for sodomy. He was found guilty and sentenced to death. However, King George III must have been a skating fan because he granted Jones a royal pardon – on condition he left the UK for good.

Light A Candle For The Femminielli

Today is Candlemas. It’s the official last day of the Christian Christmas (not to be confused with the 12 Days of Christmas or Epiphany). Around the world, especially in Catholic churches, there are special services and processions.

Candlemas takes its name from the blessing and lighting church candles on this day. It also has several other names – the Feast of the Purification of the Virgin Mary, and the Feast of the Presentation of Christ in the Temple. Both of these names have religious significance which need not concern us today, as it’s the Candlemas procession which is of interest.

In the rural Italian village of Ospedaletto d’Alpinolo, 60 kilometers from Naples, there’s an age-old annual celebration of Candlemas. Every year on February 2nd the people of Ospedaletto go up the nearby mountain of Montevergine to the Benedictine abbey which sits high up at 1,480 meters above sea level. This is the same abbey who gave a controversial Nativity scene, or presepio, to the Vatican in 2017 which was featured in my Advent series in December. Like Candlemas itself, the celebrations at Montevergine has another name - the Juta dei Femminielli, the Ascent of the Femminielli.

The Juta is a procession created as an act of worship to honour the Madonna of Montevergine. The abbey contains a famous icon of the Virgin Mary, one of the Black Madonnas, so called because the pigments have darkened over the centuries. Among the many thousands of pilgrims to the shrine is a community after whom the Juta dei Femminielli is named.

The femminielli are an Italian third gender community specific to the Naples area that has survived the enforced binary gender stereotypes of the medieval period. The community has enjoyed a level of tolerance and acceptance that is still often denied to others. Femminielli are male-born individuals who exhibit or possess a feminine identity and may often cross-dress. They do not recognise themselves as gay or transgender.

The abbey at Montevergine is said to have been built in 1120 on the site of an ancient temple to the goddess Cybele. Italy has many such temples and we’ll encounter another one in my “80 More Gays” series next month. What these temples of Cybele had in common was that their priestesses were either transgender or eunuch.

It would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to prove any continuity from those ancient priestesses to the modern femminielli. When the abbey was founded the temple ruins had long been abandoned and cult of Cybele long forgotten. There are no contemporary texts in Italy which mention them or the femminielli, assuming people had access to any ancient text that existed. The first mention of the femminielli comes in the 16th century. There’s no evidence anyone knew of the ancient third gender priestesses before then – they were only recognised as such in recent decades when our concept of gender diversity emerged. Today we know about Cybele’s priestesses, and we know about the modern femminielli. We fill in the centuries between them ourselves on the irrational assumption that the two must be connected. Other sites of ancient Cybele temples have no similar third gender community in modern times.

The Juta dei Femminielli has its origin in a legend dated 1256. It tells of a couple of two men who were secretly in love. At Candlemas they joined the annual procession up to the abbey. In a quiet place they held hands and kissed, but they were seen. A crowd of angry villagers attacked the couple, stripping them, beating them, and dragging them out into the mountain woods. They tied the naked couple to a tree and left them there to die from hypothermia or to be eaten by wolves.

In the morning the couple awoke to find their wounds were healed, their bonds were free and their bodies warm. A later variation of the legend days they celebrated in the only way they could – they had sex.

The couple returned to Ospedaletto d’Alpinolo where the people were astonished to see them alive. The villagers began to believe that the Madonna of Montevergine, at whose shrine in the abbey they had all visited the day before, had miraculously saved them. They took it as a sign that gay love should be accepted, and ever since that day the Candlemas procession has also been a celebration of gay love.

This may be just a myth, who knows? Exactly when the femminielli became associated with the procession isn’t known either, nor is the first occasion when it became known as the Juta dei Femminielli.

The modern lgbt community around Naples has adopted the Madonna of Montevergine as their patron saint and the abbey welcomes their participation in the annual procession and acts of worship at her shrine - except in 2002. In 2002 the abbot threw a group of lgbt pilgrims out of the shrine because he didn’t think their noisy presence, banging drums and clicking castanets in the traditional manner, was appropriate for a holy shrine. The local community was outraged, and so was the Naples lgbt community. Two weeks later, on Candlemas, they flocked up to the abbey to join the Candlemas procession. A similar incident occurred in 2010.

The 2002 incident provoked a well-known Italian transgender actor, Vladimir Luxuria, to join the procession. Needless to day, her presence caused something of a media event. After she became the first transgender member of a European parliament in 2006 the media attention rocketed. Today the Italian media features the Juta dei Femminielli every year.

Last year the municipal council of Ospedaletto d’Alpinolo granted Vladimir Luxuria honorary citizenship in recognition of her services to the lgbt community.

In recent years the Juta dei Femminielli has become a feature of the Neapolitan lgbt community’s annual celebrations of Candlemas. They receive a welcome from the local community and the abbey itself. Below is the poster for their 2015 celebrations.

There are many videos of the Juta dei Femminielli on YouTube. It may not be what you expect, as there is no organised parade like you see in a modern Pride march. In its own way the Juta dei Femminielli is as much a celebration of openness and acceptance as any Pride march. The main reason may be religious rather than secular but it is, perhaps, the worlds longest continuously held parade in the lgbt community.

Out of Her Tree: Echoes Into the Past

Most of the focus in the lgbt community on Holocaust Memorial Day has often been towards the thousands of gay men imprisoned and killed by the Nazis. It should be remembered that lesbians were also persecuted.

One of the many lesbian victims who were lost in history re-emerged in the 1990s when she became the subject of a book called “Aimée and Jaguar” by Erica Fischer. It was the true story of a lesbian couple who were separated because one of them was a Jew.

Felice Schragenheim and Lilly Wust met in 1942. Felice was a Jewish Resistance fighter and Lilly was the wife of a Nazi soldier. They fell in love and Lilly left her husband. The two women lived together and signed a form of marriage declaration in 1943.

In 1944 Felice was betrayed to the Gestapo and she was sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp and later transferred to Auschwitz. Felice is thought to have died on the death march from Auschwitz to another camp in December 1944.

In the meantime Lilly was under constant observation by the Nazi authorities. Despite this she managed to hide three Jewish women in her home. They all survived the war, and in 1995 Lilly was recognised as Righteous Among the Nations by Israel, an honour given to non-Jews who risked their own lives to help Jews escape Germany during the war. Lilly died in 2006 and on her gravestone there is also an inscription in memory of Felice Schragenheim.

Felice was arrested because she was a Jew rather than her sexuality, and her ancestry shows a long history of her ancestors’ persecution because of their faith.

Felice’s family on both of her parents’ side fell victim to the Nazis. Her maternal grandmother had been sent to Theresienstadt, the same camp Felice was later sent to. Sadly, her grandmother died there in 1942.

Her father’s cousin, Ludwig Feuchtwanger, had a very close association with Adolf Hitler in the early 1930s. They were actual next-door neighbours. Ludwig’s son, the eminent professor Edgar Feuchtwanger (b.1925) remembers encountering Hitler outside their homes. Ludwig’s brother, Lion Feuchtwanger, became a prominent author and playwright, and wrote anti-Nazi propaganda. Naturally, once Hitler gained power the Feuchtwangers were persecuted and Lion was arrested. He managed to escape disguised as a woman and found asylum in the USA.

The Feuchtwangers, the family of Felice Schragenheim’s paternal grandmother, take their surname from the city of Feuchtwangen in Bavaria. All through the Middle Ages Jews were persecuted in many European cities. In 1555 Feuchtwangen conducted a pogrom (persecution and attacks on an ethnic, usually Jewish, minority) and expelled all remaining Jews. Felice’s ancestors fled to Fürth, a city about 60 kilometers away. There the family took the name of Feuchtwanger. In the middle of the 19th century the family moved to Munich.

Also in Fürth was the Fränkel family who had fled Vienna in 1650. Jakob Löw Feuchtwanger (d.1809) married Hanna Fränkel. The Feuchtwangers and Fränkels intermarried over several generations. The Fränkels were an influential family that extended into Poland and what is now the Czech Republic. Many male members of the family became rabbis.

A son of Jakob and Hanna was Seligmann Aharon Meir Feuchtwanger (1786-1852). He married Fanny Vogele Wassermann (1799-1875). She belonged to a wealthy family. Her father Amschel Elkan Wassermann was the court agent to the Duke of Öettingen-Wallerstein. He founded a bank in 1785 which became a leading German bank before Hitler’s rise to power.

Seligmann and Fanny’s son Jakob (1821-1890) married Auguste Hahn (1824-1896). The Hahns were, like a large number of Felice’s ancestors, from Frankfurt. Frankurt was a major centre of the European Jewish community in medieval times. Being centrally situated on trade routes that crossed the continent it attracted a large number of merchants and traders.

There were around 200 Jews in Frankfurt by 1241. There was no Jewish ghetto at that time and they travelled freely and had certain protections given to them by the emperor. However, in May 1241 unrest over the enforced Christian baptism of some Jewish children led to the citizens conducting one of the many pogroms against the Jews in Frankfurt. It is said that 180 Jews were killed and the handful that survived submitted to baptism.

The community managed to revive, aided by an influx of Jewish families from other parts of Germany escaping similar pogroms. By 1270 the community was once again flourishing. However, persecution continued to affect them, and they were taxed more heavily than the Christian community. More religious unrest led to another pogrom in 1349.

In 1462 the Jews were forcibly relocated into the Judengasse (Jew’s Alley), a street enclosed in a wall with entrance gates. It was the first ghetto in Frankfurt. As time went on and the population grew the ghetto became overcrowded, even though the ghetto limits had been expanded.

Despite the overcrowding and the persecution some Frankfurt Jewish families became some of the most influential in Germany. Many well-known modern families originated in the Judengasse – Oppenheimer, Rothschild, and Goldschmidt, among others. All of them feature in Felice Schragenheim’s ancestry.

In almost every generation of Felice’s ancestry there was anti-semitism. Some of her family bloodlines were affected more than others, but all of them show the resilience of the Jewish community that is echoed through many other families in other countries. Today, on Holocaust Memorial Day, we should remember that persecution of Jews existed before the Nazis. Let us hope that Felice Schragenheim was a member of the last generations of her family to suffer under a regime of hate.

80 More Gays Around the World: 3) Greek Wonders

Last time on “80 More Gays”: 4) Sir Frederick Ashton (1904-1988) left the fights and royalties to his ballet “Les Patineurs” to 5) Brian Shaw (1928-1992), for whom Ashton created a role in a ballet based on the life of 6) Tiresias, who was blinded by 7) Athena.

One of the variations in the myths of 6) Tiresias is that 7) Athena blinded him as punishment for accidentally seeing her bathe naked. This seems to have been first written down by the poet Pherecydes in the 450s BC.

Both Tiresias and Athena also appear in the epic poem “The Odyssey” by Homer, both taking on the role of advisor to Odysseus. Tiresias appears when Odysseus summons up the spirits of the dead in the hope that they may provide directions to get him back home. He had been advised that he must not speak to any ghost, even that of his mother, until he had spoken to the spirit of Tiresias first.

Tiresias explains to Odysseus that his difficult journey home was being manipulated by the god Poseidon as punishment for blinding his Cyclops son. He offers advice on how to tackle future dangers and warns Odysseus of the difficult affairs back home with the many unwanted suitors of his wife Penelope.

Athena was also keen to advise Odysseus, as well as his son Telemachus. On several occasions she appeared to them in the form of a man. The Greek gods were frequent shape-shifters. Only on very rare occasions did they change gender temporarily. This is in contrast to several Asian deities whose transgender manifestations tend to be permanent.

Athena’s transformation was to disguise her identity rather than as an expression of her sexuality. She chose to appear in the form of one specific person, a friend of Odysseus called Mentor. The two friends had served in the army together, and when Odysseus went off to fight in the Trojan War he left Mentor to watch over his palace, his wife Penelope and is son Telemachus.

Whether the real Mentor was any good as a guardian is uncertain, but it was Athena in his form who encouraged Telemachus to stand up to his mother’s unwanted suitors. She, as Mentor, also suggested to Telemachus that he should find out what had really happened to his father.

The role of Athena as Mentor came to be regarded as a model for the type of personal advisor that now bears his name. I wonder how many people who regard themselves as a mentor realise they are following in the footsteps of female deity who transformed herself into a man for the purpose.

Athena also had an important influence as the patron of the city of Athens. A legend tells how the founder of the city, rather unusually, didn’t name it after himself but said it would be named after the god who gave the city the best gift. Athena and Poseidon stepped up to the challenge. Poseidon hit the ground with his trident and produced a never-ending supply of water – salt water. Other myths say he created the first horse. Athena, on the other hand, created the first olive tree. The citizens chose the olive tree as the best gift and named their city Athens.

Athens is the home to one of the most magnificent temple sites in ancient Greece dedicated to Athens, and the most famous. The Parthenon stands proudly on top of the Acropolis and had several huge statues of Athena which have long since been destroyed. At least three statues of Athena were made by the same artist, 8) Phidias (living 5th century BC), often stated to have been the greatest sculptor in ancient Greece, and the man who created a style that is still being copied in modern buildings.

Phidias acted as chief architect and designer of the temple complex on the Acropolis. It is his most famous work, but another work that has also long since been destroyed, earned a spot on the famous list of the Seven Wonders of the World. This was another massive statue, this time to Zeus, in the temple at Olympia where the ancient Olympics took place. During my 2012 Olympic Countdown series I wrote about this statue and the fact that Phidias carved a little inscription onto it saying “Pantarkes is gorgeous”. Pantarkes was one of Phidias’s apprentices, aged around 12, who was also his eromenos – boy lover. Pantarkes was also the boys wrestling champion at the Olympic Games of 436 BC, the year before Phidias completed his statue of Zeus.

Today the Seven Wonders are well-known. Before Phidias’s day, however, only three of the Wonders on the traditional list were in existence – the Great Pyramid at Giza, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus. No-one listed any Wonders until over 300 years after Phidias died and there was never any consensus of what went on the list until the Renaissance and the invention of printing and the spread of printed books. There may easily be some long lost list of Ancient Wonders that included Phidias’s temple complex on the Acropolis and its huge statues in addition to his statue of Zeus.

Some ancient writers, however, didn’t share the view that these structures were anything to wonder at. They regarded them as evidence of the tyranny of rulers. One of these writers was the famous Aristotle. He criticised the construction of all huge monuments and buildings, even temples, because their construction meant taxing the citizens to pay for them. That’s not entirely true and Aristotle is over-simplifying the motives of the rulers who constructed them. But it’s a criticism that is still often levelled in modern times when new, big construction projects begin.

Among the structures Aristotle criticised were the pyramids, the monuments in Corinth and the statue of Zeus in Athens (not the same at the statue at Olympia by Phidias), among others. Aristotle singled out one tyrant by name in his list, 9) Polycrates of Samos (d.522 BC).

Next time of “80 More Gays”: We develop a psychological complex and visit the opera to see the revival of an ancient king.