Box Turtle Bulletin

The Daily Agenda for Friday the 13th

TODAY’S AGENDA: Events This Weekend: Belgium Leatherpride, Antwerp, Belgium; Cologne Street Carnival, Cologne, Germany; Gay Mardi Gras, New Orleans, LA; Arizona Gay Rodeo, Phoenix, AZ; Sitges Carnival, Sitges, Spain.

TODAY’S AGENDA is brought to you by:

From This Week In Texas, July 2, 1977, page 30.

THIS MONTH IN HISTORY:
► 55 YEARS AGO: Magazine cover provokes outrage: 1960. Fifty-five years ago, ONE magazine published yet another issue, just like it always did every month. This one, as issues go, was rather ordinary: A couple of poems, two short stories, an article about the organization of families, another one asking “Can we be worthy of a free erotic life?”, a scathing book review of Edmund Bergler’s 1000 Homosexuals (Bergler, a homo-obsessed psychoanalyst, was delightful combination of Paul Cameron and Scott Lively of his day), an advice column by psychologist Blanche Baker titled “Toward Understanding,” a brief commentary on England’s long-running debate over the Wolfenden Report’s recommendation that Parliament rescind the nation’s sodomy laws (see Sep 4), and a few letters to the editor. It was a decent issue, but mostly unremarkable. But the following month, one reader felt compelled to complain about that issue:

Dear ONE:

Good grief, Charley Brown! The cover of the February issue is simply TOO MUCH! For months now , with a snarl on my lips and no joy in my heart, I have been looking at those effeminate line drawings, girlish youths and that awful photograph of a nelly cop an ONE cover without so much as a line of protest to you. Looking back I can’t find anything like a real male figure all the way back to that sailor drawing in ’57. And now these weird creatures! They’re enough to steam a saint!

ONE, May 1957.

I know that many people have a positive predilection for effeminancy, as opposed to true femininity. I don’t have such a feeling; in fact an overdose of male girlishness gives me the vapors. If real male art is hard to come by couldn’t you canvass friends? Nobody wants ONE to ape the muscle mags with sweaty weightlifters all over the place, but this shouldn’t deny us the opportunity of seeing on occasional attractive man in your pages.

One last item: I think all this grotesquely womanish art is bad psychologically for those of your readers who are battling to free themselves from self-identication with the popularly-held homosexaul stereotype. Please help them remember once in a while that the average person with homosexual preferences looks, and is, as male as the next guy.

ONE, February 1958.

The Daughters of Bilitis insisted that women wear proper skirts instead of jeans or slacks at DoB events. Police often entered lesbian bars to make sure women wore blouses with the buttons on the left instead of the right. Men had fewer  imposed fewer dress code restrictions (outside of drag, anyway), but they were no less scrutinized and judged if they otherwise fell afoul of gender norms. And many of those judgments often came from gay men and women toward other gay men and women, in many cases just as harshly as those coming from the police or others outside the gay community.

Those who violated those gender norms — and those norms were much more restrictive fifty-five years ago — were seen as garish neon signs that drew far too much unwanted attention. A man who was romantically inclined towards other men was already violating far more gender norms than anyone could count. And in 1960, the last thing most of such men (and women) wanted to see was other people whose gender-role variance they perceived as being  more visible than their own.

Grant Wood, self-portrait, 1932.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
► Grant Wood: 1891-1942. Born a few miles outside of Anamosa, Iowa, the great expanse of the upper great plains and the solid simplicity of its people would always be near to his heart. He studied at the Art Institute in Chicago, and from 1920 to 1928, he made four trips to Europe where he studied Impressionism and Post-Impressionist styles of painting, but his heat never strayed far Iowa, nor did his style stray from simplicity and directness which are the bedrock of Iowa’s people. His style became known as Regionalism, which depicted rural American themes in a style which recalled the severe Calvinism of Northern Renaissance paintings.

American Gothic, 1930.

This is best exemplified in his iconic 1930 painting American Gothic, perhaps among the best known, best loved, and best parodied of American paintings. Art critics, at least those who assumed the painting was meant to be satire of small-town life, praised it. When a copy was printed in the Cedar Rapids Gazette, locals denounced their depiction as “pinched, grim-faced, puritanical Bible-thumpers.” Wood himself defended the painting as simply a a depiction of the American pioneer spirit. He also became a vocal critic of modernist trends and the dominance of the East coast art world. No other American artist before or since has earned such national fame without ever showing his work in New York.

In 1932, he founded the Stone City Art Colony to help other artists get through the Great Depression, and from 1934 to 1941 he taught at the University of Iowa’s School of Art, where his teaching career was very nearly derailed over accusations that Wood was gay. The only report that contains the complete details of those accusations was buried in a time capsule of the Art and Art History Building in 1934, and the details will remain hidden until the cornerstone is opened some twenty years from now. New allegations arose in 1941 when university colleagues, most of whom embraced the European trends that Wood so clearly disdained, tried to get Wood removed from the faculty. Their accusations centered around a very brief marriage that ended in divorce in 1938 and the handsome young roommates who lived in his home. When a reporter from Time came sniffing, the university president managed to get the story spiked, and reorganized the Art Department so that Wood would be placed in an entirely separate division and away from his detractors. But before Wood could resume teaching, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and died in February 12, 1942.

Most biographies which have come out since Wood’s death have either avoided his homosexuality or dismissed it. Tripp Evans’s 2010 Grant Wood: A Life changes that by delving into previously unreleased documents and taking a closer look at Wood’s highly symbolic paintings, some of which toy with cross-gender depictions.

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?