Somehow those crazy mixed up Trump/MAGA zombies have fallen for the propaganda that Drag Queen’s groom our kids to be LGBT. When in fact it is nothing more than a harmless performance art that goe back Centuries.
The origin of the term drag is uncertain But female impersonation can be traced back at least as far as ancient Greece. There was little to no gender equity then and women held a lower social status. This meant male actors would play female roles during theatrical performance. his tradition continued for centuries but began to be less prevalent as motion pictures became popular.
In the age of Shakespearean theatre, during the late 16th century. At the time, the church was heavily connected to the stage and only allowed men to perform, and so it was that any female roles were played by the men in the cast dressed as women.
During the era of vaudeville it was considered immodest for women to appear on stage. Due to that circumstance, some men became famous as “female impersonators”, the most notable being Julian Eltinge. At the peak of his career he was one of the most sought after and highest paid actors in the world. Meanwhile, in San Francisco, Bothwell Browne was the top female impersonator of the West Coast. He performed at the Grand Opera House and Central Theater, among other venues, went on tour with United Vaudeville, and later appeared in the film Yankee Doodle in Berlin (1919), produced by Mack Sennett.
In the early to mid-1900s, female impersonation had become tied to the LGBT community and thus criminality, so it had to change forms and locations.
In the 1940s and 1950s, Arthur Blake was one of the few female impersonators to be successful in both gay and mainstream entertainment, becoming famous for his impersonations of Bette Davis, Carmen Miranda, and Eleanor Roosevelt in night clubs.[ At the invitation of the Roosevelts, he performed his impersonation of Eleanor at the White House.](I guess he groomed the Roosevelts) He also impersonated Davis and Miranda in the 1952 film Diplomatic Courier.
Even today many male stars have dressed in drag in movies and theatre. Some Like It Hot, the 1959 Billy Wilder classic, remains a comedy favorite in part because of the hilarious pairing of Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon in drag!, John Travolta played voluptuous and bubbly Edna Turnblad in the 2007 musical remake of John Water’s cult film Hairspray. Even in the In 1999’s The Boondock Saints, Paul Smecker (Willem Dafoe) tries saving the day by showing up at a dangerous location dressed as a woman.
And there are so many more they are literally too many to list.
So did Travolta, Curtis, Lemmon and Dafoe groom anyone?
No. They acted. They are performers, thespians, and artists.
Back2Stonewall.com went live for the first time on December 12, 2008.
In the past 8 years we have tried to educate our readers by remembering our gay history and motivate them into action by reminding them that our future and equality relies on our continual fight until we archive our goal.
We have brought you the good news and bad news, the funny and the sad. But we have done it with integrity and honesty without bowing to any group, organization, or agenda.
And while we may not have become as large as some other LGBT new sites and weblogs but we have stayed true to our independent roots and have made an impact to our cause and on our community beyond our wildest dreams. In the past 8 years Back2Stonewall has been referenced in such notable media venues as the BBC News, The Washington Post, MSNBC, The Daily Beast, The Hollywood Reporter, Variety, VICE, Raw Story, The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times proving that bigger is not always better.
It has been a wild 8 years and we thank you our readers for supporting us and helping us grow.
Will will continue to connected to bring you truth and honesty in reporting and unlike other media sites we will not bog you down with ads, sponsored posts, or paid agenda items from any LGBT groups.
Thank you so much for making our site a success and we look forward to the next 8 years of bringing you the most honest and unabashed gay journalism on the internet.
Will Kohler Back2Stonewall.com
***Back2stonewall does not recive any outside funding. If you would like to donate any amount to help keep us going and to help cover expenses PLEASE use the following link and help support independent LGBT news and history there is so much more work that is needed to be done. www.paypal.me/Back2Stonewall
Watch honest and fearless Howard Dean call out the Right Wing propaganda machine on MSNBC’s ridiculously stupid Morning Joe and watch Scarborough and Mika act as though he has said something preposterous even though they know he’s 100 percent correct so not to piss off the Tea Party loons.
“Whether it was ACT UP organizing civil disobedience at the height of the government ignorance of the AIDS epidemic in the late ’80s, or Get Equal members chaining themselves to the White House fence to push the president on ‘don’t ask, don’t tell,’ it took brave people who put their reputations, their privacy, their futures, their jobs, their families and sometimes literally their own bodies on the line to push things forward. They withstood attack not just from antigay zealots,the police and the media, but from the gay establishment, telling them to just be good little boys and girls.
“Sometimes these champions weren’t even gay themselves but were allies of gay rights as well: When San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom began marrying couples in San Francisco in 2004, the Democratic establishment, and the gay establishment which is very much a part of it, went ballistic. It affected Newsom’s political career, but there’s no doubt Newsom is a hero of marriage equality whose action was pivotal.
“If not for grass-roots activists pressuring President Obama, gay leaders seemed likely to have given him a pass on ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ repeal in his first term and on defending DOMA in court, let alone moving forward on marriage equality. So let’s not forget these brave people as we watch all the talk shows and read the media interviews which highlight the very gay leaders who were often opposed to the exact strategy they’re now embracing.” – Michelangelo Signorile
Remember way back when in May 2009, when AMFER (who as led by Chad Griffin before he sold out to HRC lined up Ted Olson and David Boies to argue the shit out of Prop 8′s unconstitutionality, America and California’s Gay Inc. groups were furious.
HRC joined Freedom to Marry, ACLU, Lamda Legal, GLAAD, Log Cabin Republicans, and PFLAG in denouncing the Perry v. Schwarzenegger lawsuit, saying in an open letter, “Rather than filing premature lawsuits, we need to talk to our friends, family and neighbors, and help them understand why denial of the freedom to marry is wrong.”
They bitched and moaned and wanted no part of it. UNTIL it looked like it might actually win and then they made a 360 and started taking credit for it.
These Gay Inc. groups proved that while they remain sometimes SLIGHTLY useful, they are not necessary to securing LGBT rights.
That has been proven, And that is the way it should be.
Matt Dallas, best known for playing the titular character on the ABC Family series Kyle XY has started off the New Year by coming out of the closet and announcing his engagement to boyfriend Blue Hamilton, an independent musician based in Los Angeles on his Twitter account.
Dallas in the past has denied being gay. But it seems that love will not only set you free but will also kick down the closet doors.
Congrats to Matt and Blue on thier engagement ad to Matt Dallas for finally being true to himself and embracing who he is.
32 years ago on June 5, 1981, that the Center for Disease Control first published a report on the mysterious epidemic that we have now come to know as AIDS.
And while today Republicans and the Tea Party proudly wallow in the revisionist life history of Ronald Reagan let us, the friends, the family, and the also the victims of this mans bigotry and homophobia remember the truth and continue to shout it from the rooftops so it is never forgotten of the integral part that Ronald Reagan played that killed almost an entire generation of gay men.
Ronald Reagan was and always should be remembered as the President who helped bring back poverty to the masses, the President who changed American foreign policy by selling arms to Iran, and forwarding the profits to right-wing Central American dictators to help fund their death squads, and most of all as the President who is GUILTY of the Genocide and Murder of the gay community and is personally responsible for the deaths of thousands who died of AIDS
Ronald Reagan deliberately ignored one of the deadliest diseases in history of the world which is now affecting over 70+ million people around the globe all in the name of God, bigotry and homophobia.
In 1981 with the emergence of the AIDS epidemic also came the emergence of the Christian Right, who which Reagan ushered into power and seized the moment as a sign of God’s abhorrence for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. Reagan, who saw the first signs of the AIDS epidemic in 1981, his first year in office, . said “maybe the Lord brought down the plague because illicit sex is against the Ten Commandments.”
Ronald Reagan may have done laudable things but he was also a monster and, in my estimation, responsible for more deaths than Adolf Hitler. He is one of the persons most responsible for allowing the plague of AIDS to grow from 41 cases in 1981 to over 70 million today. He refused to even say the word out loud for the first seven years of his presidency and when he did speak about it it was with disdain. He was, in the words of his domestic policy adviser, Gary Bauer, “irrevocably opposed to anything having to do with homosexuality” (personal communication with me in his White House office in April of 1983). As I write in my book The Tragedy of Today’s Gays (Penguin, 2005), “I can locate no work of any urgency, or indeed, much work at all, on AIDS” during his entire presidency, thus allowing many millions of gay men all over the world to be exposed to the virus without so much as a warning from anyone in his government. Those of us on the front lines can attest to this stone wall that was unbreachable. – Larry Kramer
AIDS research was chronically under-funded. When doctors at the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health asked for more funding for their work on AIDS, they were routinely denied. Between June 1981 and May 1982 the CDC spent less than $1 million on AIDS and $9 million on Legionnaire’s Disease. At that point more than 1,000 of the 2,000 reported AIDS cases resulted in death; there were fewer than 50 deaths from Legionnaire’s Disease. This drastic lack of funding would continue through the Reagan years and help the disease spread and strengthen.
Finally 5 years after the initial outbreak in 1986, Reagan ordered Surgeon General C. Everett Koop to prepare a major government report on AIDS. On that very same day Reagan submitted requests to Congress to reduce the AIDS budget. Koop’s report called for mandatory sex education for children as early as elementary school, but Reagan’s education secretary, William Bennett, and his undersecretary of education, Gary Bauer, strenuously opposed those efforts, calling for abstinence-oriented education.
But Reagan still remained silent about AIDS to the public
Finally near the end of 1986 Reagan requested $85 million for AIDS research, but Congress horrified at the low number bumped that figure up to $244 million only to have Reagan then unsuccessfully try to rescind $50 million of that figure. Reagan ultimately agreed to Congress’ figure.
In 1986 there were over 31,741 cases of AIDS in Americas
In 1987, Reagan gain proposed cutting the research budget for AIDS down $30 million to $214 million. Congress again responded dramatically and criticised Reagan harshly and raised it to about $400 million. It was that time, only when pushed that Reagan publicly spoke about the AIDS epidemic in a major policy address.
By the end of 1987, 59,572 AIDS cases had been reported and 27,909 of those women and men had died. And AIDS patients in the United States were dying at a rate of about 80 per week.
Reagan his administration did almost nothing during the first seven years of the epidemic. AIDS research was chronically underfunded. Community education and prevention programs were routinely denied federal funding and would have been even more so if Regan had had his way. Only when pushed did Reagan offer any assistance.
As Barbra Streisand put it in an address to an AIDS Project Los Angeles fundraiser in 1992: “I will never forgive my fellow actor Ronald Reagan for his genocidal denial of the illness’ existence, for his refusal to even utter the word AIDS for seven years, and for blocking adequate funding for research and education which could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives.”
One of the most memorable and disgusting Reagan AIDS moments was at the 1986 centenary re dedication of the Statue of Liberty. The Reagan’s were there sitting next to the French Prime Minister and his wife, Francois and Danielle Mitterrand and Bob Hope was on stage entertaining the all-star audience. In the middle of a series of one-liners, Hope quipped, “I just heard that the Statue of Liberty has AIDS, but she doesn’t know if she got it from the mouth of the Hudson or the Staten Island Fairy.” As the television camera panned the audience, the Mitterrand’s looked appalled. Ronald and Nancy Reagan were laughing.
At that time nearly, 115,786 women and men had been diagnosed with AIDS in the United States– and more than 70,000 of them had died.
Ronald Reagan died on June 5th 2004.
Within 3 years of Reagan’s death the Center of Disease Control in 2007 would estimates the cumulative number of deaths of persons with AIDS in the U.S. to be 583,298, including children.
How many of these victims our LGBT family, our friends, our lovers, our brothers and our sisters would be alive today if Ronald Reagan had acted as not only a President but a human being should have in the midst of that deadly epidemic is unknown. But with proper funding and aggressive research and treatments when the AIDS epidemic reared its ugly head would have made a great difference and many of those we have lost would be with us today.
On this World AIDS Day let us not forget Ronald Reagan’s role in the genocide of hundreds of thousands of or brothers in our community, and let us never forget.
I say the following the every fiber and the very being of my soul.
On Sunday’s season finale of HBO’s The Newsroom no punches were held as fictional news anchor Will McAvoy called the Tea Party “the American Taliban.” and proved the fact beyond a shadow of the doubt.
If only REAL news programs were this truthful.
Please take note ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN.
Who knows the truth and honest reporting might actually help your abysmal ratings.
In an interview appearing over at MetroWeekly. Chris Geidner sat down with , longtime gay activist, novelist, playwright and co-founder of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis Larry Kramer and as only Larry could do, he let it all out about what he believes wrong with “gay activism” today.
Here are some excerpts of what Larry says:
I remember in ACT UP, everything was so bad all the time that we just sort of had to make it up as we went along, what we were going to do. Because today’s emergency wasn’t necessarily tomorrow’s emergency, or the other way around. People who were in one job one day weren’t there the next, and you were constantly having to educate people.
People always ask me, ”What was it like?” I don’t look back. I look to today and to what we still have to do in the days to come. What we achieved in the past has always been haphazard and more often by luck than by skill……
I know that there’s a lot more sympathy for Obama than I’m prepared to show him. We still haven’t got these things, you know. I don’t consider ”Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” some major victory. It’s a small, dishonest political move that Clinton did to enchain us, and it’s been unknotted. But it’s for a very small percentage of us. Everybody acts as if it’s a major thing for all of us, and it isn’t. And he knows that. It’s been a small gift he’s given us to throw us a bone. The big gifts, he’s not giving us – no one’s giving us. And that hurts. I don’t see that changing…….
I think we should have learned by now that this “pebble at a time” attempt to make right is just that. They’re pebbles. We need bricks. Until we’re ready to throw bricks, we’re not going to get anywhere. You can name any kinds of wonderful things [HRC has] done, but they still have not changed the basic problem: We are not equal. We do not have equality. They do not look at the big picture, they look at the small picture. As does every other gay person, who is just happy to go home at night and go back into their state of denials.
It’s a very, very passive population, and that is our great tragedy. I love being gay, I love gays. It hurts me to say this. These are all lessons that I’ve learned painfully since 1981, but until we learn to fight back we get what we deserve.
BRAVO LARRY KRAMER!
The interview at MetroWeekly is one of the most forthright, honest and brillant interviews I have seen with Kramer
Larry Kramer is a gay hero and in my opinion 100 percent correct and we all should listen to his words.
And on that note I would like to leave you with what Kramer says about the Human Rights Campaign:
KRAMER: I think HRC is the dregs. I think it’s the toilet of the gay movement…..What more can be said? I find them useless, and I find them perpetuating con jobs on all of us. Ass-kissers extraordinaire.
Yesterday on the 10th Anniversary of the day that changed our country forever, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, writing for the New York Times wrote a column so truthful in its expose of of how Bush, Cheney and the GOP turned 9/11 into media event for their own gain and turned the aftermath of 9/11 into the crime of this century for nothing more than self greed and power.
“What happened after 9/11 — and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not — was deeply shameful. The atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue. Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror. And then the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons. A lot of other people behaved badly. How many of our professional pundits — people who should have understood very well what was happening — took the easy way out, turning a blind eye to the corruption and lending their support to the hijacking of the atrocity? The memory of 9/11 has been irrevocably poisoned; it has become an occasion for shame. And in its heart, the nation knows it.”
Hopefully this will finally open a dialouge between true Americans to re-examine all the LIES and hyperbole that led us to attack Iraq and hold accountable the craven media, along with all the criminals and neocons of Bush & Comany who cheered and profited from it.
If we really wanted to show respect for the victims of 9/11, it would be to redeem their loss, by holding accountable and brining to justice those who have used them, and that horrible fateful day to further their own profit margins and have tortured and committed the murders of hundreds of thousands of innocents for nothing more than greed.
In what had to be one the most truthful comments ever James Carville, prominent liberal pundit and political stratagist said what most of us have been thinking for almost the past two years.
“If Hillary gave up one of her balls and gave it to Obama, he’d have two,”.
Carville who was discussing Obama’s stances on taxes and the military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy is sticking by the harsh assessment. “If I offended anybody, I am not sorry and I do not apologize,” Carville told CNN’s John King on Thursday, although he said the comment was meant as a joke.
I TOTALLY AGREE with you James/ But I’m NOT joking.
victims of this mans bigotry and homophobia remember the truth and continue to shout it from the rooftops so it is never forgotten of the integral part that Ronald Reagan played that killed almost an entire generation of gay men.