Via FB

A Statement of Allyship from Love Serve Remember Foundation

"Silence is itself an act of acquiescence to a system."
 

- Ram Dass -

Via White Crane Institute / HARVEY FIERSTEIN

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The inimitable Harvey Fierstein

1952 -

HARVEY FIERSTEIN, American actor, born; An American Tony Award-winning and Emmy Award-winning actor, playwright, and screenwriter is perhaps known best for the play and film Torch Song Trilogy, which he wrote and starred in and originating the role of Edna Turnblad in the Broadway musical Hairspray.

The 1982 Broadway production won him two Tony Awards, for Best Play and Best Actor in a Play, two Drama Desk Awards, for Outstanding New Play and Outstanding Actor in a Play, and the Theater World Award, and the film earned him an Independent Spirit Award nomination as Best Male Lead. Fierstein also wrote the book for La Cage aux Folles (1983), winning another Tony Award, this time for Best Book of a Musical, and a Drama Desk nomination for Outstanding Book. Legs Diamond, his 1988 collaboration with Peter Allen, was a critical and commercial failure, closing after 72 previews and 64 performances.

His other playwriting credits include Safe Sex, Spookhouse, and Forget Him. Fierstein developed a new musical titled A Catered Affair in which he starred with Faith Prince, Leslie Kritzer, and Tom Wopat. Fierstein is an occasional columnist writing about Gay issues and appears regularly on the PBS series In The Life. He was out at a time when very few celebrities were. His most recent Tony was for Kinky Boots, with Cindy Lauper.

Via White Crane Institute / THOMAS MANN

This Day in Gay History

June 06

Born

Nobel Laureate Thomas Mann

1875 -

THOMAS MANN, German writer, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1955); a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate, known for his series of highly symbolic and ironic epic novels and mid-length stories, noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and intellectual.

His analysis and critique of the European and German soul used modernized German and Biblical stories, as well as the ideas of Goethe, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer.

 

Mann's diaries, unsealed in 1975, tell of his struggles with his sexuality, which found reflection in his works, most prominently through the obsession of the elderly Aschenbach for the 14-year-old Polish boy Tadzio in the novella Death in Venice (Der Tod in Venedig, 1912).

 

Anthony Heilbut's biography Thomas Mann: Eros and Literature (1997) was widely acclaimed for uncovering the centrality of Mann's sexuality to his oeuvre. Gilbert Adair's work The Real Tadzio describes how, in the summer of 1911, Mann had been staying at the Grand Hôtel des Bains in Venice with his wife and brother when he became enraptured by the angelic figure of Władysław Moes, an 11-year-old Polish boy. Considered a classic of homoerotic passion (if unconsummated) Death in Venice has been made into a film and an opera. Blamed sarcastically by Mann’s old enemy, Alfred Kerr, to have ‘made pederasty acceptable to the cultivated middle classes’, it has been pivotal to introducing the discourse of same-sex desire to the common culture.

 

Mann himself described his feelings for young violinist and painter Paul Ehrenberg as the "central experience of my heart." Despite the homoerotic overtones in his writing, Mann chose to marry and have children; two of his children, Klaus, also a writer, who committed suicide in 1949, and Erika, an actress, and writer who died in 1969 and who was married to W.H. Auden for 34 years, were also Gay. His works also present other sexual themes, such as incest in The Blood of the Walsungs (Wälsungenblut) and The Holy Sinner (Der Erwählte).

Via Be Here Now Network / Francesca Maximé – ReRooted – Ep. 29 – Legacy Burden, Implicit Racism, and Activism with Dr. Richard Schwartz

Dr. Richard Schwartz joins Francesca to discuss legacy burden, implicit racism, privilege, social activism, and healing the planet. Richard Schwartz, PhD, is the founding...

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Via Daily Dharma: Transforming Actual Lives

If spiritual or transcendent insight doesn’t lead to healing and transformation in our actual daily lives, it is clearly incomplete.

—Henry Shukman, “Light and Dark”

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