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News and commentary about the anti-gay lobbyApril 30th, 2012
The Admiral Duncan immediately after the blast (Click to enlarge).
TODAY IN HISTORY:
London Gay Pub Bombed: 1999. It was the start of a bank holiday weekend in Britain, and the venerable Admiral Duncan pub in Soho was packed with people getting an early start. Londoners that Friday evening were only somewhat wary after two unsolved bombings earlier that month in Brixton (April 17) and East London (April 24). Police narrowed the search to neo-Nazi David Copeland based on a CCTV image from the Brixton blast. Some feared that the next target might be Jewish, or possibly gay. One gay pub in Soho had put up a poster warning customers to be vigilant, but most people thought that his motivations were more racist than homophobic. That theory was quickly dispelled at 6:37 p.m. when a nail bomb that had been left in a bag at the Pub’s entrance went off. Jonathan Cash, who would later write a play about the bombing, described it this way:
“The loudest, most alien sound I have ever heard ripped through the pub and smashed into my head. I don’t know how long it went on – a couple of seconds, perhaps – then the most enormous crunch of something structural and solid. I felt no pain, just terror. My eyes were ringing, my nose filled with sulphurous dust and, in the blink of an eye, I saw unrecognisable shapes flying past towards the doors. With the dust and smoke, I could see little more than six inches in front of me. Somehow I was on the floor. Then I heard the screaming. I didn’t make any sound. Or perhaps I did. I can’t remember.”
Four people were killed that night. Andrea Dykes, 27, who was four months pregnant, was killed instantly, along with two friends, Nik More, 31 and John Light, 32. About seventy were injured, including Dykes’s fiancee, who remained in a coma for three weeks. Four of the injured required amputations. Later that night, police were able to track down Copeland and arrest him. On June 30, 2000, he was sentenced to six life sentences, and in 2007 High Court ruled that he should remain in prison for at least 50 years, ruling out his release before the age of 73. There is now a memorial chandelier with an inscription and a plaque in the bar to memorialize those where were killed and injured.
Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas
TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Alice B. Toklas: 1877. Born in San Francisco, she met Gertrude Stein on the very first day that she arrived in Paris, on September 8, 1907. The remained inseparable for the next thirty-nine ears, until Stein’s death in 1946. Together, they hosted on of the more illustrious salons that attracted the best writers and painters of the Paris avant-garde, including American expats Ernest Hemingway, Thorton Wilder, and Paul Bowles. Stein and Toklas also became early patrons of Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. Toklas was Stein’s partner in every way: cook, lover, editor, critic and muse. Stein gave her own autobiography the tongue-in-cheek title of The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas, while Toklas’s 1954 memoir was titled The Alice Be Toklas Cookbook. It was, technically I suppose, a cookbook — there are three hundred recipes, including the famous brownie recipe titled “Haschich Fudge” — but is was more accurately a memoir of the many dinners that Toklas and Stein hosted for their famous friends ove the years. In 1963, Toklas actually did write an autobiography, What Is Remembered, but it ends abruptly with Stein’s death in 1946, much as Toklas’s own life did in many ways. Their relationship being legally unrecognized, Stein’s relatives plundered the couples’ art collection and left Toklas in poor financial and physical health. She died in poverty in 1967 at the age of 89, and is buried next to Stein in the Peré Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.
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David Waite
April 30th, 2012
I remember first reading about Stein’s rapacious relatives’ treatment of Toklas (I think it was in The Daughters of Bilitis) as a teen, several years before Alice’s death. My feelings about it at the time were quite unprintable. Come to think of it, they still are. I remember how relieved I was that Alice was buried next to Gertrude in 1967; I expected Stein’s relatives to make another vulture appearance. I was 25 that year, and burial places still mattered to me then.
StraightGrandmother
April 30th, 2012
Jim B, Scott Lively mentioned you over the week-end. Wayne Beeson taped Scott’s talk and Lively mentions you. Apparently YOU are the main reason for his un-earned bad reputaiton.
Jaime
April 30th, 2012
Jim B,
If so, Bravo! Trying to give kudos if SGM’s observation of responsibility is true. Thank you!
Jim Burroway
April 30th, 2012
The audio is over an hour long so it may be a while before I get a chance to listen to the whole thing. Anyone know at about what time I was name-checked?
Bill Berkowitz
May 1st, 2012
I really enjoy and appreciate BTB so I don’t want to make a Megillah out of this, but no bio of either Alice B. Toklas or Gertrude Stein should leave out the part about how they stayed alive in France thanks to their friendship with Bernard Fay, a known Nazi sympathizer. Fay was a figure in the upper echelons of the Vichy government and helped ensured their safety and that of their art collection. While they lived comfortably in France, tens of thousands of Jews were hauled off to concentration camps. Throughout her life Stein had reactionary politics; she was anti-immigtrant, and a vocal opponent of the Roosevelt presidency. For more details, see “Did You Know Gertrude Stein Allegedly Advocated Adolf Hitler for a Nobel Peace Prize? It Gets Worse.” @ http://blog.buzzflash.com/node/13004.
It has also been written that Stein and Toklas helped Fay escape to Switzerland after the War. A recently published book titled “Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ, and the Vichy Dilemma,” by Barbara Will, tells the full story.
Timothy (TRiG)
May 1st, 2012
Sorry. I can’t help myself.
> more racist that homophobic
than
> Four people were died that night
Either drop were, or change died to killed.
Robert
May 2nd, 2012
The (in)famous ‘hashisch fudge’ recipe is found in the ‘Recipes from Friends’ chapter. Allegedly, when the manuscript was submitted, the publisher insisted on additional pages. Toklas got an assortment of mostly very odd recipes from friends (hence the title of the chapter) and added them. She claimed to have had no idea what Brion Gysin’s contribution signified, and was rather irritated at all the attention it garnered.
Full disclosure – I’ve actually made the recipe. It’s dried fruits and nuts, chopped together with butter and sugar. Not bad, but neither ‘fudge’ NOR ‘brownies’.
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