Grrrl Power

With March being International Women’s History Month I’d like to concentrate for the next few weeks on the contribution to music made by lgbt women. The profession of composer has traditionally been associated with men, but there are a few female composers who are equally of significance. I’ll be covering this subject a bit more fully later in the month.

To begin it seems obvious that the best place to start is with a movement formed by and for women which has influenced, and still continues to influence, modern music – the Riot Grrrl movement.

The global Women’s Lib movement of the 1970s gave awareness of the place women wanted to have in society. There wasn’t the same prominent fight for awareness and equality in culture – music, art, theatre. Music in particular portrayed female singers as either operatic divas or girls-next-door. Even though some women made a name in the rock and early punk movement they were basically following the female stereotype that wasn’t perceived as a threat to the male-dominated rock/punk industry.

In the early 1990s in the USA some more political and protest messages began to effect the feminist cultural world. This was the basis of the riot grrrl movement, which included direct activism and political involvement within art and media. The name of the movement came from the title of a fanzine created by Allison Wolfe, Molly Neuman, Kathleen Hanna and Tobi Vail in 1991. “We’re not anti-boy, we’re pro-girl”, Molly once said.

The original movement was deliberately an underground one. The last thing riot grrrls wanted was to have the male-dominated commercial rock industry dictating to them how their music should be presented or marketed. Because of this a new vibrant and creative culture developed as more women found their talents in art, music and writing became the major elements in the riot grrrl movement around the world. Several independent record labels were created by some of the riot grrrl pioneers (see below). Eventually, some male record producers with personal connections to members of the movement also began producing their music and their audience grew.

The movement spread quickly, but like all things that involve increasing numbers of people differences began to emerge – not the riot grrrl message, but the way in which it was presented and the way the movement interacted with mainstream media. It didn’t help when the media began to take an interest in other so-called “girl power” groups such as the Spice Girls who perpetuated the old sexual stereotypes of what a girl singer should be. This stereotype continues today in the sexually-overt antics of many young female singers in their videos.

The riot grrrls had a strong beginning and created much positive debate in sexual politics though it’s time came and went in a short time. New styles and movements developed out of it in a natural evolution that means that the legacy of the early riot grrrl members is still felt today, and many of them are still active.

It would be negligent of me not to mention that the riot grrrl movement was not exclusive to lesbian, bi or other female lgbt artists. It did attract many of these to its ranks and many of them form an unofficial subculture of the riot grrrl/queercore cross-over artist (I’ll write about queercore later in the year).

To end this article here’s just a few names of artists who helped to make the riot grrrl movement one which influences music today and will for a good many years to come. All of these names are contained in two online lists. These are the Afterellen list of “The 50 Most Important Queer Women in Music” published in 2010, and About.com Lesbian Life’s list of “The Top 30 Lesbian/Bisexual Musicians” (date unknown).

Common to both lists are Donna Dresch, Carrie Brownstein and Kaia Wilson. Donna was one of the pioneers of riot grrrl/queercore music forming the band Team Dresch. One member of the band, Kaia, went on to form another influential band, The Butchies (watch out for a future reference to Kaia in my Medal Quest series). Donna and Kaia both formed their own record labels which released albums from other pioneer bands as well as their own, such as Sleater-Kinney of which Carrie was a member.

The 10 Greatest Gay Composers?

Today the Sydney Mardi Gras parade takes place. During last year’s Mardi Gras the Australian classical music and arts magazine “Limelight” published an article on its website called “The 10 Greatest Gay Composers: Mardi Gras Special!”

The 10 composers (actually 11!) listed were, in ascending order :

10        Franz Schubert

9          George Frideric Handel

8          Aaron Copland

7          Ethel Smyth

6          Francis Poulenc

5          Peter Tchaikovsky

4          Arcangelo Corelli

3          Michael Tippett

2          Samuel Barber and Gian Carlo Menotti

1          Benjamin Britten

I’m sure there are composers absent from the list which you think should be there, or that some composers should be placed in a different position. Most of these composers have been known to be lgbt for many years. Several have been openly gay throughout their own lifetime, and perhaps one or two may come as a surprise.

The article has a light-hearted touch to it, though it gives an excellent overview of each composer’s sexuality or current thinking about it.

I hope to cover most of these composers throughout the year, if I haven’t already done so. For now I’ll leave you to enjoy the article here.

Dragging It Out With Music

On Tuesday night I joined my colleagues on the Nottinghamshire Rainbow Heritage project at the council house in Nottingham for our annual celebration of LGBT History Month. Part of the celebration featured a performance by two members of a local energy company who entertained the capacity audience with their drag double act. It’s highly appropriate that drag cabaret formed part of the celebration because, as I’ve mentioned before, Nottingham was the home city of one of the UK’s most famous drag performers and cabaret artists of the 20^th century – Douglas Byng (1893-1987).

Douglas Byng features a lot in my lgbt tours of Nottingham. There are plenty of stories about him that I can use, not all of them on the same tour. For today I want to pull some of these together into one article.

We’ll start with his birth – where else? Douglas wasn’t born in the city centre but in a suburb called Carrington about a mile away, too far away to actually take the tour on foot. His father Joseph Byng was the manager of the Nottingham Joint and Stock Bank which was in the city centre just behind the council house. The bank is now a branch of the French Connection fashion store. I explain on my tours a little about Douglas’s family background in front of this store, of how appropriate it is that Douglas became interested in fashion, and how Joseph and his first wife and 10 children lived in an apartment on the top floor. After the death of his wife the family moved out to a new house in Carrington, where Joseph lived with children and his 2^nd wife, and where Douglas was born.

The road out of the city centre to Carrington is called Mansfield Road. At the end of the Victorian period and into the start of the 20^th century this road was the place to be seen on a Sunday afternoon. After church and Sunday lunch people would dress up in their finest and walk up and down Mansfield Road (its quite a long road) during what was called the Sunday Parade.

While he was still a youngster Douglas decided he’d take part in this Sunday Parade. Wearing a wig made from hemp matting, a purple overcoat and a tall cane he strolled up Mansfield Road and back down again. He waved to passers-by and greeted imaginary friends, and then encountered a very real neighbour who recognised him. Douglas was deeply embarrassed at being discovered and never took part in the Sunday Parade again. Considering this is now the route of the annual Nottingham Pride march from the city centre to the Pride site it seems that Douglas wasn’t the last gay man to dress up and be noticed on Mansfield Road.

This interest in dressing up didn’t impress Douglas’s parents, however. They sent him off to live with his eldest brother in Germany in an effort to curb his enthusiasm for theatrics. There Douglas studied music which would become a vital part of his later career in cabaret. Also putting the kibosh on his parents’ intentions Douglas grew more interested in costume as his brother owned a lace factory (Nottingham was a leading lace-making centre at the time and it’s lace-makers were in demand around the world).

Douglas returned to England before the First World War and began his career as a theatrical costume designer. In 1914 he took to the stage himself in a seaside concert party. He first appeared in pantomime in 1921, and in 1924 played his first Dame role in “Dick Whittington”. For those unfamiliar or confused by British panto the Dame is a comedy role played by a man in drag, usually quite grotesque or eccentric in character. It was in the Dame role that Douglas was to make his name in the 1930s and it enabled him to use his design skills to create ever increasingly outlandish costumes, something that has now become essential in British panto.

Dames had previously been played “straight” as men dressed as little old ladies (think of Old Mother Riley, or a comedy version of Norman Bates from “Psycho”). Douglas brought more fun, imagination, and indeed glamour, to his costumes, often parodying the fashion of the time. In the 1930s there was a fashion for short fox-fur capes complete with rows of fox tails. My grandmother had one, it was creepy!

Douglas parodied these capes by designing one made out of bathroom loofahs instead of fox tails. It presented problems a couple of years later when World War II broke out because loofahs were imported, and they became difficult to obtain. Douglas realised that his loofah cape was in danger of being stolen. There were plenty of Black Marketeers who’d think nothing of stealing it and selling the loofahs at a profit. So Douglas decided to lock the cape away in a safe when it wasn’t needed for performances. Needless to say, this made the cape more valuable than the real fox-fur capes, and a valuable asset.

Douglas performed in Nottingham several times in pantomime at the Theatre Royal, another stop on my tours. After retiring to Brighton on the south coast he still visited Nottingham to see his siblings, several of whom lived well into their 90s, and a brother who died in 1983 at the age of 103. Douglas himself died at the age of 94.

To end this article I’ll show you this video of Douglas Byng in action doing one of his cabaret acts. It’s not very crisp in either sound or vision I’m afraid. Rather than appear in full drag as he did in his usual cabaret act, Douglas gives the suggestion of drag with a few simple items of clothing in this old film from 1932.

Medal Quest : A Vancouver Double

Eighty days to go before the Darwin Outgames, and Medal Quest returns to the subject of medal design with one lgbt artist who has designed medals for both the Winter Olympic-Paralympic Games and the Outgames that have been held in Vancouver, Corrine Hunt. I mentioned Corrine briefly in my article last year on the Vancouver Outgames. Here is a closer look at her Olympic-Paralympic medals.

A major factor in the decision to award the Vancouver Olympic medal design to Corrine was her work in traditional First Nation art of her native Vancouver Island and heritage. Her artistic background is as influential as is her cultural background. Four of Corrine’s uncles from both sides of her family are First Nation artists in their own right, and it was one of these uncles who gave Corrine her first interest in jewellery making in metal.

It was also this uncle who introduced Corrine to the history and use of art by the people of her First Nation ancestry, the Kwak-waka’-wakw nation. Through her grandmother Corrine also has ancestry from the Alaskan Tlingit nation which also has an influence on her work.

From her home on Vancouver Island Corrine went to study anthropology at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver City. In 1985, inspired by her uncle, she began making her own engraved metal jewellery. Personally, I find Corrine’s style pleasing to the eye and gives an organic nature to the metalwork which makes it come alive.

So, how did Corrine come to design the Olympic medals? In 2008 the Vancouver Organising Committee (VANOC) asked for design proposals. Corrine was one of 48 artists who submitted ideas. This group was then short-listed to 8. No actual designs were submitted at this time. Corrine’s idea that each Olympic and Paralympic medal should have a unique design taken from a larger work appealed to VANOC, as was her idea of using the orca as symbolic of power and strength, and the raven as an expression of speed. Both the orca and the raven are major emblems in her First Nation heritage.

Another Vancouver artist was chosen to help bring Corrine’s designs to reality. Omer Arbel is an industrial designer who developed the process by which each of Corrine’s medals was cast with individual undulations, reflecting the individual design on the medal faces and reminiscent of the rolling Canadian landscape on the ski slopes. This made all the medals doubly(!) unique – no two medals had the same design or the same undulations.

The Paralympic medals were made in exactly the same way, each one individual and unique. They were more square in shape than the Olympic medals and went through the same 30-step process of manufacture. In total there were 615 Olympic and 399 Paralympic medals struck. Incidentally, all of them were made from recyclable materials. The metal came from old computer circuit boards and televisions which would otherwise have gone to land-fill sites. There is an excellent short video on this website which describes the creation process of the medals.

Shortly after the Paralympic Games ended Corrine received the Aboriginal Achievement Awards for the Arts.

Less than six months later she was asked to design more Vancouver medals – a Vancouver Double. This time the request came from the organising committee of the 2^nd North America Outgames. Once again the symbolic representation of the orca and raven, joined by the wolf’s tail, were used.

Turning Corrine’s artwork into the design to be struck onto the medals was a fellow lesbian artist from the Vancouver area, Carol Weaver. I hope to write more about Carol and her work later in the year, as she also fits in nicely with the overall theme for 2014 of music with her being a musician and music therapist.

Winter Whistler



If ever a Winter Gay Games or Outgames were to be organised one of the leading candidates for the first host city would surely be Whistler in British Colombia, Canada. It has a well-established place in international sports history as being the co-host of the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Winter Games and a host of other world sports festivals, including the summer Gay Games and Outgames. But what Whistler also has is a long history of a highly successful annual lgbt (non-competitive) winter sport festival, currently known as WinterPRIDE.

From its modest beginnings in 1992 WinterPRIDE has grown into an internationally renowned event attended by several thousand people (on a par with the Winter Olympics) with highly popular après ski entertainment. But it nearly collapsed through tragedy ten years ago when it’s founder and organiser Brent Benaschak died unexpectedly.

It all began when the state of Colorado introduced legislation which allowed employees and landlords  to discriminate against members of the lgbt community. Colorado was the home of the highly popular gay ski week at the famous Aspen resort. Brent Benaschak had been to the Aspen event several times but in 1992 he wondered why he’d want to visit Colorado and spend his cash to the benefit of a state that openly discriminated against gay men. Many American skiers are said to have boycotted Aspen in 1993.

At the time Brent was director of his own travel company called Out of the Slopes which specialised in skiing holidays. He also owned a Bed-and-Breakfast house with his partner on Fire Island in New York State. Having had a love of skiing from the age of 16 Brent owned another Bed-and-Breakfast house in Whistler, and encouraged his Fire Island guests to stay at his Whistler house rather than go to Aspen.

Brent came up with the idea of a gay ski week in Whistler. He gave it the name Altitude. That first event over one weekend in January 1993 attracted less than a hundred people but it was successful enough for Brent to decide to produce another.

Altitude quickly became a popular event with attendance figures rising each year. The city of Whistler itself welcomed this new addition to its winter calendar. Brent collected together a handful of staff to help organise the event and with the help of up to a hundred volunteers Altitude looked in good shape when the unexpected happened.

Brent Benashack died on 30^th December 2003, just one month before the next Altitude was due to begin. The circumstances surrounding his death from a fall from his apartment were not certain, but at the age of 41 it came as a big shock.

The whole future of Altitude was thrown into doubt. The most pressing question was could the event go ahead as planned? Would Brent’s family, who had now inherited Out of the Slopes, Brett’s travel business which owned the rights to Altitude, be happy for it to proceed? The family was happy for Altitude 2004 to go ahead but after that they wanted to hand it over to another company. Enter Lee Bergeron.

Lee Bergeron was a San Diego-based businessman who had been coming to Altitude for several years and offered to buy Out on the Slopes and Altitude from the Benaschack family. Negotiations and legal paperwork took eleven months to complete during which time Bergeron set about organising Altitude 2005.

It was a fraught handover for those who had been involved in organising previous Altitudes as various accusations of blocked bids and secrecy flew around Bergeron’s purchase. Despite, perhaps, having the best of intentions Bergeron found Altitude difficult to control from his San Diego base and decided to stop producing it.

Back in Whistler itself a group of people who had helped Benaschak organise the pre-2005 events banded together to save Altitude. In just 12 days they put together a business plan and successfully bought the event from Bergeron. They formed a new company called Alpenglow Productions which has run the event since 2006.

In partnership with Vancouver Pride and Gaywhistler.com Altitude became WinterPRIDE. The regeneration of the event came at a perfect time. In 2010 the Olympic Games came to Vancouver and Whistler, and the team who produced WinterPRIDE organised the first official Pride House venues at the Olympic and Paralympic Games (an lgbt centre organised at the Barcelona 1992 Olympics was a much smaller venture). The venues for the Vancouver Pride House provided a massive boost to both the lgbt community in the area and showed the Olympic movement what level of lgbt support for the games there was in the community.

Sandwiched between the Olympic and Paralympic Games WinterPRIDE 2010 welcomed many more athletes from around the world and ensured its continued success, with several events having to be moved to larger venues in subsequent years.

Perhaps the time is right for Whistler to offer its services to host a one-off joint Winter Out/Gay Games?



Skating On Thin Ice

Long before Oscar Wilde’s trial for gross indecency the trial of Captain Robert Jones for sodomy in 1772 hit the headlines and caused a stir. In the social circles of Georgian London he was well-known and the early press made his story known up and down the whole of England.

Capt. Jones became famous for more than just being convicted of sodomy. In the same year he published a book which paved the way for 14 lgbt Winter Olympians to compete in one particular sport – figure skating.

First, a brief history of skating as a sport which will reveal why Capt. Jones’s book “A Treatise on Skating” was such a pivotal moment.

People living in the frozen icy areas of the world have been skating on ice for thousands of years. Children have played on ice for just as long, but it wasn’t until the 13^th or 14^th century in Holland that the rough skates they all wore were given sharp edges. The freedom of movement generated by the sharp-edged skates meant you didn’t need to push yourself along with sticks (similar to skiing), so people could now skate more freely around the ice.

It wasn’t long before skating races became possible, and this is the origin of speed skating. It probably isn’t a coincidence (I don’t believe in coincidence) that the most successful speed skaters in history have been Dutch. In fact, 4 of the 9 known lgbt Olympic speed skaters are Dutch.

Robert Jones was born in north Wales in around 1740 (a character witness at his 1772 trial said he’d known Jones since he was about 15 or 16 some 17 years previously). By the time this witness first met Robert, the Jones family were living in London where Robert’s father was a tailor.

From hearsay reports that appeared in the press during his trial it seems that young Robert also had a fascination for fireworks which were popular forms of entertainment at the time. Because of his fascination none other than the future Prime Minister, William Pitt the Elder, enlisted Robert into the army – where else but into the artillery – and he joined the barracks at the Woolwich arsenal. From there Robert was to rise through the ranks to Lieutenant (not captain, as he was often reported as being and the rank under which his books were published). His love of fireworks stayed with him, and in 1765 published “A New Treatise on Artificial Fireworks”.

It was his second book, “A Treatise on Skating” which gave Capt. Jones his place in sporting history. This book was the first published instruction book for skaters. Robert Jones was an accomplished ice skater from his youth and gained such a good working knowledge of the sport. In his book Jones described how to score circles and figure 8s into the ice. I don’t know if this was a new idea, but it is generally accepted that the publication of the book was the moment at which figure skating was born.

But we have to wait almost a century before we see jumps, twists and movements in figure skating which we see in modern championships like the Olympics. There were popularised by an American skater called Jackson Haines in the 1860s. Music accompaniment and more dance-like movements were introduced a little later.

One element that has since been dropped from major competitions is the skating of figures as described by Capt. Jones in his book and after which the sport got its name.

Jones’s “Treatise on Skating” was published in the same year as his trial. Details of the trial and a great deal of background information can be found here on Dr. Rictor Norton’s lgbt history site. Sodomy was punishable by death in Jones’s day, so the fact that he was having sex with a 12-year-old boy several times meant that he was putting his reputation and life at risk if it was discovered. You could say he was skating on thin ice!

That ice finally cracked and gave way when the boy confessed to his family and Jones was put on trial. He was found guilty and sentenced to death. His execution was all set for the second week in August 1772 when his plea to King George III was successful in obtaining for him a royal pardon. However, there was a condition, that Jones should leave the country for good.

There are various reports of Capt. Jones’s whereabouts after his exile, though none, apparently, from himself. A newspaper report of June 1773 claimed that he was at that time living in Lyons, France, in some grandeur with “a lovely Ganymede” (his servant). Later reports in The Times of 1788 seem to place him in Constantinople. But we’ll never know for sure where he died.

Capt. Robert Jones’s “Treatise on Skating” is still in print, including a 2010 edition in which the whole of the first edition of 1772 has been digitised. HIs legacy to sport is the establishing of one of the most popular of today’s winter sports. Without him we would never have seen the likes of Peggy Fleming, Sonia Hennie, Scott Hamilton, Torvil and Dean and Evgeny Plyushenko, not to mention great gay skaters like John Curry, Ondrej Nepela and Brian Boitano.



Medal Quest : Out of Their Trees Special - John Curry

One of the athletes who first got me interested in the Olympics was the British figure skater John Curry. The year John would have celebrated his 65^th birthday, and as he died 20 years ago I though he was a suitable candidate for an Olympic “Out of Their Trees” article. Fortunately, I did quite a bit of research a couple of years ago when I did a lot of Olympians’ ancestries so have found out a lot about his family tree. It illustrates just how much genealogy can bring up unexpected surprises, and the were several with John Curry.

Before I start I should like to offer my congratulations to John’s mother Mrs. Rita Curry (pictured left) who celebrated her 100^th birthday on 28^th December. Her ancestry gave me the biggest surprise of all.

All of John’s immediate ancestors came from the English Midlands. All 8 of his great-grandparents were born in either Warwickshire, Shropshire or Worcestershire. It is not, however, where the Curry family originated. They came from Drumraney in County Westmeath in Ireland.

The first to settle in England was Joseph Curry, He arrived sometime before 1830 for it was in that year that he married fellow Irish immigrant Frances Chambers in Birmingham. Their eldest son, also called Joseph, became a plasterer like his father, but a young son called John entered the jewellery industry that made Birmingham world famous (making him an earlier John Curry who has a connection with precious metals!).

My first surprise when researching the Olympic champion’s ancestry came when I identified the wife of Joseph Curry junior. In 1863 he married the widowed Mrs. Elizabeth Smith. And the surprise came with the name of her father Benjamin Wigley. Wigley is a name I was familiar with because just before beginning this research I had researched the ancestry of my then partner. He has Wigley ancestors as well. It’s not a common surname, so could it be that they were related?

I can’t find Benjamin Wigley’s birth record so can’t say where he was born, but I do know that he wasn’t born in Staffordshire where he was living with his family at the 1841 census. My partner’s ancestors came from neighbouring Derbyshire, and there are dozens of Benjamin Wigleys in the parish records there. Unfortunately there’s not enough evidence to prove that John Curry’s ancestor is one of them. The common use of the name Benjamin in the Wigley family makes it almost certain that John’s ancestor is indeed a member of the Derbyshire family, yet in spite of searching records for the past 2 years I can’t find any actual proof. That’s one of the risks we genealogist have to take sometimes – to put our knowledge and experience on the line to make a probable link. However, I firmly believe he is one of the Derbyshire Wigleys.

From my research into my partner’s ancestry we find that Benjamin Wigley could actually give John Curry an ancestry going back as far as you can go. That’s because the Wigleys are “gateway ancestors” – the term given to families who link to many aristocratic and royal lineages and have an already established long family tree. Even though I can’t confirm Benjamin’s place in the Wigley family it’s almost certain that he descends from Ralph Wigley (d.1628), who gives John Curry a royal descent from King Henry II, and also a line of descent from Piers Gaveston, the lover of King Edward II.

But the link to my partner wasn’t the biggest surprise. That came when I traced Mrs. Rita Curry’s lineage.

Mrs. Curry’s grandmother was Maria Anne, the daughter of a wealthy coal merchant who lived in Worcester called Joseph Hodgetts. When Maria was about 10 a Mormon missionary called Thomas Smith, the brother of the Mormon founder, came from Salt Lake City in Utah to preach in England in 1849. In Worcester he succeeded in converting many to Mormonism, including most of the Hodgetts family. The exception was Joseph Hodgetts, who remained staunchly Anglican, though he supported his family’s decision to convert. He even hosted several visiting missionaries in his home.

The eldest Hodgett son went to Utah and became a missionary. On a return trip home he persuaded the rest of the family (except his father) to go back with him. Joseph persuaded his wife and youngest children to stay behind after he had chased them across the Midlands to Liverpool and onto a steam ship to intercept their sailing vessel to the USA. It really did surprise me to discover that John Curry’s great-grandmother Maria Hodgetts was one of the pioneer British Mormon settlers in Utah.

Maria had only been in Utah for a short time before news of her mother’s illness arrived and she returned to Worcester. Her mother died a few months later. Widowed Joseph lived with Maria, and later with Maria and her husband John Richards, and died in 1881. Maria’s youngest son, Harvey Richards, was Mrs. Rita Curry’s father.

The whole story of the Hodgetts’ conversion to Mormonism and their emigration to the USA can be found all over the internet. It would have made a great episode of “Who Do You Think You Are?”