Thursday, June 6, 2024
Via Daily Dharma: Standing on Your Own
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Via Dhamma Wheel | Right Action: Reflecting upon Social Action
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Via White Crane Institute // *0 Years - D-Day
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Noteworthy
1944 -
Today was D-DAY. The Normandy landings (code named Operation Neptune)
were the landing operations on Tuesday, June 6, 1944 (termed D-Day) of
the Allied Invasion of Normandy in Operation Overlord during World War
II. The largest seaborne invasion in history, the operation began the
liberation of German-occupied northwestern Europe from Nazi control, and
contributed to the Allied victory on the Western Front. Nearly 5,000
landing and assault craft, 289 escort vessels, and 277 minesweepers
participated. Nearly 160,000 troops crossed the English Channel on
D-Day, with 875,000 men disembarking by the end of June.
Allied casualties on the first day were at least 10,000, with 4,414 confirmed dead. The Germans lost 1,000 men.
Caen, a major objective, was still in German hands at the end of
D-Day and would not be completely captured until July 21. The Germans
had ordered French civilians, other than those deemed essential to the
war effort, to leave potential combat zones in Normandy. Civilian
casualties on D-Day and D+1 are estimated at 3,000 people.
On June 6, 1944, a 20-year-old closeted gay American GI named Ferris LeBlanc sheltered with his Army unit—the 665th Ordnance Ammunitions Company—at a remote base near Manchester. Across the English Channel, approximately 156,000 Allied soldiers stormed the beaches of Normandy in one of the largest amphibious assaults in human history: D-Day. Men like LeBlanc waited their turns. Chills ran down spines as they wondered whether the Germans would beat their friends back into the cold waters.
LeBlanc, a California boy, had seen much since his enlistment in Sacramento. His unit, the 665th, was duly activated in April 1943 at Camp Maxey, Texas, and he participated in that year’s Louisiana Maneuvers, a major military exercise in the backwoods of the Pelican State. He shipped out to Europe aboard US Navy Transport NY 198 on February 27, 1944 and passed the Statue of Liberty on his way to Bristol, where a British Army band and one lone American Red Cross attendant provided a solemn welcome. Chow was powdered food and spam until he tasted the candy in his invasion pack on June 25, 1944, when his troop transport ship slipped the docks of Southampton, destination Utah Beach.
Weeks blurred into months on the European mainland as his unit ran Depot 100 for the First Army and then headed west to Depot 13 in Brittany. There, they supplied “hurry-up” ammunition to General George S. Patton as the Third Army made its mad dash across France and Belgium. Nearly trapped behind advancing Germans in the Battle of the Bulge, the 665th was ultimately saved when Patton’s Third Army reached Bastogne and broke the counteroffensive. One of LeBlanc’s final posts, Depot 0-609, was situated in a former German concentration camp surrounded by barbed-wire fences, providing a stark reminder of the stakes of the conflict. LeBlanc made it through the war uninjured, at least physically, and with his sexuality undiscovered. His core unit, the 665th, suffered but one casualty.
Decades later, after he had embraced his sexuality and resettled in Louisiana, Ferris LeBlanc would burn to death in a notoriously, infamously, unsolved arson fire at a second-story gay bar on the fringe of New Orleans’ French Quarter, known to us today as THE UPSTAIRS LOUNGE FIRE.
LeBlanc, who had just celebrated his 50th birthday, would be identified among the dead through an anonymous phone caller, who was too closeted or fearful to say anything more. Thus was Ferris LeBlanc, an honorably discharged veteran who had served in the European theater, buried without a flag ceremony or a grave marker alongside three unidentified fire victims that July 31. Despite pleas from a local church willing to take responsibility for his remains, the City of New Orleans interred Ferris LeBlanc in a remote potter’s field for the unclaimed and indigent dead called Resthaven. News of the death never reached his family back in California, in large part because local authorities never thought to examine LeBlanc’s military records.
And there he rested in obscurity, behind a chain-link fence in a field off Old Gentilly Road in New Orleans East. For years, LeBlanc’s younger sister Marilyn wondered what happened to her brother, his absence a painful question mark, until she learned with horror in January 2015 about the circumstances of his passing. LeBlanc’s remains still lie in Resthaven today, despite a campaign from the family to fight Louisiana bureaucracies, exhume his body, and bring him home for a hero’s burial. The major logistical challenge? Neither city nor cemetery can produce the records that would identify his burial plot.
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Gay Wisdom for Daily Living from White Crane Institute
"With the increasing commodification of gay news, views, and culture by powerful corporate interests, having a strong independent voice in our community is all the more important. White Crane is one of the last brave standouts in this bland new world... a triumph over the looming mediocrity of the mainstream Gay world." - Mark Thompson
Exploring Gay Wisdom & Culture since 1989!
www.whitecraneinstitute.org
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| This Day in Gay History | ||||
June 06Born 
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). |8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8 Gay Wisdom for Daily Living from White Crane Institute "With the increasing commodification of gay news, views, and culture by powerful corporate interests, having a strong independent voice in our community is all the more important. White Crane is one of the last brave standouts in this bland new world... a triumph over the looming mediocrity of the mainstream Gay world." - Mark Thompson Exploring Gay Wisdom & Culture since 1989! |8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8 | ||||
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