Box Turtle Bulletin

The Daily Agenda for Friday, September 5

TODAY’S AGENDA:
Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Bloomington, IN; Las Vegas, NV; Lincoln City, OR; Roanoke, VA; Stavanger, Norway; Worcester, MA.

Other Events This Weekend: Pride Night Kings Island, Cincinnati, OH (Friday Night Only); Womenfest, Key West, FL; Gay Ski Week, Queenstown, New Zealand; Bears on Ice, Reykjavic, Iceland; Sierra Stampede Gay Rodeo, Sacramento, CA; North Louisiana Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, Shreveport, LA; International Bears Week, Sitges, Spain.

TODAY’S AGENDA is brought to you by:

From The Fifth Freedom (Buffalo, NY), May 1975, page 12.

The softball game was sponsored by Buffalo’s Gay Community Center as part of a three-week long Gay Visibility Celebration in June 1975. The Fags won, 19-14.

THIS MONTH IN HISTORY:
► The Many Names for Gay: 1998. To demonstrate the persistence of “derogatory language” used to describe gay people in publications that “have the potential to influence popular prejudices, Lisa Bennet analyzed the 356 articles about gays and lesbians that appeared in Time and Newsweek from 1947 to 1997 and published the list of terms she found in her study, “The Perpetuation of Prejudice in Reporting on Gays and Lesbians.” They are:

1947-1959 (23 articles): aberrant, abnormal, abominable, abomination, corrupt, criminal, degenerate, degraded, depraved, deviant, dirty pansy, disgusting, evil, extreme medical disorder, fairy, filthy, horrible, indecent, infamous crime against nature, invert, misdeed, neuropsychiatric case, pervert, psychopath, queer, sex criminal, sex deviant, sex offender, sodomite, undesirable, unmentionable subject, unnatural, unspeakable crime, vice, victim, vile, wicked.

1960s (25 articles): aberrant, abomination, butch, crime against nature, crime of deviation, dandified sissy, detestable, deviant, deviate, effeminate, emotionally immature, fag, gay, hair fairies, homme-femme, homophile, invert, le vice anglais, lesbian, moral malady, pederast, pervert, psychic masochist, psychopath, queen, queer, sodomite, swish, third sex, transvestite, tweedy lesbian, unnatural.

1970s (62 articles): aberrant, abomination, admitted homosexual, avowed homosexual, committed homosexual, confessed homosexual, deviant, drag queen, fag, fairy, flaming fag, fruit, homophile, human garbage, human rot, mental aberration, militant homosexual, queer.

1980s (95 articles): avowed gay, consensual grossness, deviant, deviate, dyke, faggot, faggot bitch, fairy, fruit, homophile, militant gay, militant homosexual, oddwad, pervert, prissy sissy, professed homosexual, queer.

1990-1997 (151 articles): abnormal, acknowledged gay, acknowledged homosexual, avowed gay, avowed homosexual, biker dyke, butch, butt pirate, degenerate, diesel dyke, dyke, fag, faggot, fascist pervert from hell, femme, go-go boys, lipstick lesbian, the love that dare not speak its name, pervert, poofter, professed homosexual, queer, queer dyke bitch, sexual nonconformist, sinner, sodomite, unnatural, vanilla lesbian, wicked, a willful choice of godless evil.

[Source: Lisa Bennett. The Perpetuation of Prejudice in Reporting on Gays and Lesbians: Time and Newsweek: The First Fifty Years. (Cambridge, MA: The Joan Shirenstein Center of the Press, Politics and Public Policy, September 1998). Available online here (PDF: 257KB/24 pages).]

TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
► John Cage: 1912-1992. His best-known work, 4’33”, is also his most controversial. Composed in 1952 for any instrument or combination of instruments and divided into three movements. The lengths of each movement varies, depending on the manuscript you’re consulting — the causes of the discrepancies aren’t currently understood since the original manuscript has been lost — but the first movement is about 30 seconds in length, the second about 2 minutes and twenty-three seconds in length, and the fourth movement is about a minute forty in length. Each movement is nothing but silence. When pianist David Tudor premiered the work in 1952, he marked the beginning of each movement by closing the lid on the keyboard, and then opened it gain at the end of each movement. The premiere was highly controversial, with many in the audience walking out. It has remained controversial to this day. Cage remembered the premiere in 2003:

They missed the point. There’s no such thing as silence. What they thought was silence, because they didn’t know how to listen, was full of accidental sounds. You could hear the wind stirring outside during the first movement. During the second, raindrops began pattering the roof, and during the third the people themselves made all kinds of interesting sounds as they talked or walked out

Cage discovered chance as a musical device when a friend and fellow composer in “the New York school” of composition presented him with a copy of the I Ching or The Book of Changes, an ancient Chinese divination guide which sought to illuminate order in chaotic events. The first results of his new method of composition could be found in Imaginary Landscape No. 4 for twelve radio receivers, and Music of Changes for piano, which calls for consulting the I Ching to determine the starting sounds, durations and dynamics, which then defines how the rest of the composition is to be performed.

But with 4’33”, Cage, the performer, and the I Ching are all removed as elements of determining chance, leaving nothing but chance itself. With 4’33”, Cage challenged the definition of music much as Rothko challenged the definition of landscapes and Magritte challenged the definition of a pipe. But where Rothko and Magritte relied on the languages of abstraction expressionism and surrealism respectively, Cage set his question of what constitutes music in the most direct way possible. He also succeeded in deconstructing our notions of silence. After all, what is silence when you are surrounded by traffic, HVAC systems, nature, the blood in your ears or the thoughts in your head? And that also makes 4’33” arguably the most intimate composition ever created, leaving the listener alone with his own thoughts, perceptions, and, in many cases, emotions — especially when that emotion is anger or disgust at the piece.

Cage’s unorthodox compositions required a new approach to musical notation for his manuscripts. This is part of the score for Music for Piano 1-85 (1952).

Cage was born in Los Angeles where, just before graduating from high school, he gave a prize-winning speech at the Hollywood Bowl suggesting that America establish a day of silence. “By being hushed and silent, ‘we should have the opportunity to hear what other people think”, he said. That speech anticipated 4’33” by more than three decades. While in college in 1928, he learned his first lesson in chance when he noticed all of his classmates reading copies of the same book in the library. “Instead of doing as they did, I went into the stacks and read the first book written by an author whose name began with Z. I received the highest grade in the class. That convinced me that the institution was not being run correctly. I left.”

He went to Europe where he studied art, architecture, painting, and poetry. He then took up music composition and discovered that “the people who heard my music had better things to say about it than the people who looked at my paintings had to say about my paintings.” He studied composition at The New School in New York, and then studied under Arnold Schoenberg, the modernist atonal composer who developed the twelve-tone technique. It was at about that time that he met the Alaska-born Russian artist Xenia Andreyevna Kashevaroff. They married in 1935. The couple moved to Seattle in 1938, where Cage worked as a composer and dance accompanist on piano for the Cornish College of the Arts. It’s where he met dancer Merce Cunningham, who would later become Cage’s lifelong collaborator and partner after Cage divorced Kashevaroff in 1945. By then, Cage was in New York and Cunningham was a member of the Martha Graham dance company. The two collaborated on a number of ballets, most notably 1947’s The Seasons which was commissioned by the New York City Ballet.

Cage went on teach experimental music at Wesleyan University in the early 1960s. He also taught at the School for Social Research in New York and, briefly, at the highly innovated Black Mountain College outside of Asheville, North Carolina. He continued composing throughout the rest of his life, including the massively multimedia work HPSCHD in 1969 for seven harpsichords, fifty-two sound tapes, sixty-four slide projectors and forty films. He continued working up through the 1980s, but declining health took its toll. He suffered a a stroke in 1992 while preparing tea for himself and Cunningham, and died the next morning.

As a fitting coda, in 2010 a Facebook group formed in Britain encouraging everyone to purchase a recording of 4’33” in the hopes that it would prevent the winner of the seventh series of the X Factor from topping the U.K. Singles Chart for Christmas Day, which traditionally is the most prestigious time to reach number one for the entire year. (This phenomenon inspired the Band Aid charity single, “Do They Know It’s Christmas” in 1984.) The Facebook group’s goal was not only to deny the X Factor the top spot for Christmas, but also to “make December 25 a ‘silent night’.” 4’33” failed to reach number one, peaking instead at 21 on the U.K. Singles Chart.

► Freddie Mercury: 1946-1991. So there we were during my freshman year in high school, my classmates and me in our quiet Appalachian town, just minding our business when all of the sudden “Bohemian Rhapsody” came screaming out of our radios like space aliens from a distant planet. Nobody was quite sure what to make of it — Scaramouche, Scaramouche, will you do the Fandango? — it was hard at first to be too enthusiastic about this very flamboyant song, mostly because we couldn’t figure out what it all meant. Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds? Sure, we had that figured out. Mama Got A Squeeze Box? Got it. Stairway to Heaven? We were still working on that, but it didn’t seem too far out of reach. Just few more tokes one a Saturday night by the river and we’d get it. But Bismillah? Beelzebub? Why are they singing about Galileo? We didn’t even know where to start. But we always turned it up whenever it came on the radio. And it didn’t take long at all before we were hooked.

Queen had already been very popular in the U.K. for several years, but for most Americans “Bohemian Rhapsody” was our introduction. And we had almost nothing to prepare us for — well, I’ll say it again — the openly flamboyant lead singer. Even the band’s name was provocative. One of my friends bought a Queen teeshirt at a concert in Dayton, but his mother prohibited him from wearing it. It was “too homosexual.” And so was Freddie — maybe. Except he had a girlfriend, as the press went, so maybe he wasn’t. Maybe it was all an act, we told each other (and ourselves). You know, a character like David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust or Alice Cooper or any of the members of Kiss. Whatever he was, he flaunted it, as it went in our vernacular, but as long as it was a character he was flaunting, maybe it was okay. It helped that Queen’s follow-on hits — “You’re My Best Friend,” “Someone To Love” — were sufficiently “normal” while unmistakably Queen to calm things down a bit. By the time News of the World came out and the testosterone-laden “We Will Rock You/We Are The Champions” became my high school’s unofficial anthem the same year that we won the state AA basketball championship, everyone had chilled. Those of us in that small town and school who were easily freaked out over the very possibility of homosexuality — including us homosexuals — were well served by our sometimes willful naiveté. Without it, it would have been socially impossible to enjoy the music.

Freddie hoodwinked those of us who wanted to be hoodwinked, just enough so we could enjoy the music and the spectacle. The hits kept coming: “Fat Bottomed Girls,” Crazy Little Thing Called Love,” “Another One Bites The Dust,” “Under Pressure” (with David Bowie, of course). By the time it dawned on me that he really was gay, I had long since left home and it no longer mattered socially whether I was a fan or not. And by the time it was announced that he had AIDS and would die very shortly, nobody was surprised but everyone was saddened. It seems that there are some people who are too outsized in our world to remain in it for very long, and Freddie was one of them. On November 25, 1991, the day after he died, Britain’s tabloid The Sun carried a very simple headline: “Freddie Is Dead.” It’s hard to believe, but if he had survived he’d be just a few years shy of seventy.

If you know of something that belongs on the agenda, please send it here. Don’t forget to include the basics: who, what, when, where, and URL (if available).

And feel free to consider this your open thread for the day. What’s happening in your world?