LGBTQ* Breaking News You May Have Missed

Following from CNN.com

UK lawmakers approve same-sex marriage in first vote

(picture source) 

LGBTQ* News You May Have Missed

(Read Full AP News Article Here)

Gay marriage in Spain affirmed by top court

Justices reject appeal to knock down 2005 law

By Associated Press, Updated: Tuesday, November 6, 1:28 PM

MADRID — Spain’s Constitutional Court upheld the legality of the country’s gay marriage law on Tuesday, rejecting an appeal contending that marriage in the Spanish constitution means only the union of a man and woman.

The county’s top court voted 8-3 to dismiss the appeal of the conservative Popular Party filed shortly after Spain became the world’s third country to approve gay marriage.

Spain’s Parliament passed the gay marriage law in 2005 when it was Socialist-controlled, with Popular Party deputies opposed. The Popular Party took power late last year after the Socialists were ousted over their handling of the economy.

The gay marriage law angered the predominant Roman Catholic Church but opinion surveys showed most Spaniards backed it. Belgium and the Netherlands approved gay marriage laws before Spain.

More than 22,000 gay marriages have taken place in Spain.

LGBTQ* Stories of Survival

“I’m living proof that Hitler didn’t win.

I’m aware of that every day.” The speaker is Friedrich-Paul von Groszheim. (pictured above) At the age of eighty-eight, this charming gay man celebrates his birthday twice a year. “You never know,” he says.

One can hardly imagine the suffering he endured. Von Groszheim was among 230 men arrested in Lübeck in the course of a single evening in 1937. The police hauled him from his home and imprisoned him for ten months. He was released, but re-arrested. This time, the Nazi authorities forced him to choose between castration, or incarceration at the concentration camp in Sachsenhausen. He submitted to castration.

His nightmare had not ended, however. In 1943, von Groszheim was arrested a third time, and was put into a satellite camp of Neuengamme. He survived that ordel, but half a century would have to pass before he started to tell his story.

— Dr. Klaus Müller

Introduction to THE MEN WITH THE PINK TRIANGLE

LGBTQ* History in Art

Subject: Knight von Hohenberg  and his lover, a squire, burned at stake. 

Charge: Sodomy

Painting: 1482 - Painter Unknown (from Zurich Central Library)

LBGTQ* History Through Photographs

Nazis burn the library of Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin, 1933.

In doing so countless texts and documentation of early 20th century LGBTQ* history disappears.

Remember, it’s never “just some books.”

LGBTQ* (Canon) Novels You Should Know

NIGHTWOOD - Djuna Barnes

Nightwood, Djuna Barnes’ strange and sinuous tour de force, “belongs to that small class of books that somehow reflect a time or an epoch” (Times Literary Supplement). That time is the period between the two World Wars, and Barnes’ novel unfolds in the decadent shadows of Europe’s great cities, Paris, Berlin, and Vienna—a world in which the boundaries of class, religion, and sexuality are bold but surprisingly porous.

The outsized characters who inhabit this world are some of the most memorable in all of fiction—there is Guido Volkbein, the Wandering Jew and son of a self-proclaimed baron; Robin Vote, the American expatriate who marries him and then engages in a series of affairs, first with Nora Flood and then with Jenny Petherbridge, driving all of her lovers to distraction with her passion for wandering alone in the night; and there is Dr. Matthew-Mighty-Grain-of-Salt-Dante-O’Connor, a transvestite and ostensible gynecologist, whose digressive speeches brim with fury, keen insights, and surprising allusions. Barnes’ depiction of these characters and their relationships (Nora says, “A man is another persona woman is yourself, caught as you turn in panic; on her mouth you kiss your own”) has made the novel a landmark of feminist and lesbian literature.  ( cover of reprint in 2006)

LGBTQ* Historical Novels To Keep On Your Radar

Aimée & Jaguar: A Love Story, Berlin 1943

BASED ON A TRUE STORY

Written by: Erica Fischer (Edna McCown translator)

Acclaimed in Germany and England, this tragic and remarkable real-life love story won a Lambda Literary Award when it was first published in America in 1995. Lilly Wust (“Aimée”) was a conventional middle-class mother of four, estranged from her philandering husband, when she met Felice Schragenheim (“Jaguar”) in 1941. Their passionate affair unfolded against the backdrop of the deportation of Jews from Berlin, but several months passed before Felice could even bring herself to tell Lilly that she was Jewish and living illegally on the streets. “I knew, of course, what it meant,” Lilly recalled in old age. “Not for a moment did I think that I too could be in danger. On the contrary, all I wanted to do now was to save her.” Lilly’s heroic efforts to conceal and protect Felice through the next two years make for painful and inspiring reading. Felice was arrested in August 1944 and sent her last letter to Lilly four months later. In 1981 Lilly was awarded the German Federal Service Cross, though no one could read this as a happy ending. —Regina Marler

Shag Safely, Play Safely, Love Safely

UK’s Gay Men’s Health Charity

Gay Liberation Front

On 13 October 1970, the Gay Liberation Front was founded in Britain. It was a modest beginning, with 19 people meeting in a basement in the London School of Economics. But it grew rapidly and proved to be a defining, watershed moment in British queer history. From 1970 onwards, thanks to GLF, the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) mindset changed forever, from victims to victors.

(text from: Peter Tatchell)

Read A Personal Account — http://londonprogressivejournal.com/article/777/the-gay-liberation-front’s-social-revolution

Homosexuality - Legal/Illegal Map

from glen.ie (gay and lesbian education network)

Map from early 2010 — update version needed.

colors -

Gray: no information

(Homosexuality Legal)

Dark Blue : same-sex marriage

Blue: same-sex unions

Light Blue: no same-sex unions

(Homosexuality Illegal)

Beige: minimal penalty

Dark Beige: large penalty

Dark Orange: life in prison

Red: death penalty

Dark Gray: no information on penalty

First Time on Celluloid:

First dramatization of lesbian and/or gay lives on film came from EUROPEAN silent films.

The earliest example still intactis THE WINGS (1916) by Swedish film and gay director Mauritz Stiller. The film is about a sculpture who falls in love with one of his male models (played by Nils Asther *featured above*). It was based on the book Mikael.