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Category Archives: History

August 18, 2021
History

What Is Drag, Anyway?

By Martin Padgett

Martin Padgett’s first book, A Night at the Sweet Gum Head, tells the story of Atlanta’s queer liberation movement through the alternating biographies of two gay men, runaway–turned–drag queen John Greenwell and activist Bill Smith. In the excerpt below, an underage Greenwell sneaks into a bar and discovers drag.

Another Believer, Eagle Portland interior, 2021, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Huntsville, Alabama

January 1971

John Greenwell could stay in Huntsville and be the town queer, or he could run away and be free, so he ran.

He threw a couple of days’ worth of clothes in a cheap gray briefcase he’d had since high school, counted eleven dollars in his wallet, each bill worn down like him, and flew out of the house that he had never called home.

He had been born in Kentucky, the son of a mother he loved and an abusive, alcoholic father he grew to hate. The family moved whenever the military shipped them to another place: Tennessee, Texas, California, Germany, Alabama. By the time he finished high school in Huntsville, John Greenwell had already lived many lives.

He had been a good student, a Boy Scout, a member of the French club, an actor in a school film about poverty. A graduate. A heterosexual. When he braved the cold and walked to the bus station on the edge of Huntsville and put his dollar on the counter and found a seat on a bus headed east, he put that John Greenwell to death.

He dreamed of becoming a hippie, of growing out his short brown hair, of life with people like him. He wanted to see the world through psychedelic eyes. He wanted to touch the bodies of gods.

The bus rumbled to life. Its air brake hissed as it pulled away. Huntsville dimmed behind it as John’s eyelids flickered. He fell asleep to the urban lullaby he’d learned in eighth grade, Petula Clark’s escape fantasy, “Downtown.”

The bus crossed an imaginary line in the dark and Alabama faded into Georgia. John woke for a moment, decided he would never go back, then drifted off into the comfort of his dreams. Read More
June 18, 2021
History

Celebrating Juneteenth in Galveston

By Clint Smith

Jas. I. Campbell, Historic American Buildings Survey: Ashton Villa, Photograph, 1934. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

The long-held myth goes that on June 19, 1865, Union general Gordon Granger stood on the balcony of Ashton Villa in Galveston, Texas, and read the order that announced the end of slavery. Though no contemporaneous evidence exists to specifically support the claim, the story of General Granger reading from the balcony embedded itself into local folklore. On this day each year, as part of Galveston’s Juneteenth program, a reenactor from the Sons of Union Veterans reads the proclamation at Ashton Villa while an audience looks on. It is an annual moment that has taken a myth and turned it into tradition.

Galveston is a small island that sits off the coast of Southeast Texas, and in years past this event has taken place outside. But given the summer heat, the island’s humidity, and the average age of the attendees, the organizers moved the event inside. A man named Stephen Duncan, dressed as General Granger, stood at that base of the stairwell, with other men dressed as Union soldiers on either side of him. Stephen looked down at the parchment, appraising the words as if he had never seen them before. He looked back down at the crowd, who was looking back up at him. He cleared his throat, approached the microphone, and lifted the yellowed parchment to eye level.

“The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor. The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.”

All slaves are free. The four words circled the room like birds who had been separated from their flock. I watched people’s faces as Stephen said these words. Some closed their eyes. Some were physically shaking. Some clasped hands with the person next to them. Some simply smiled, soaking in the words that their ancestors may have heard more than a century and a half ago.

Being in this place, standing on the same small island where the freedom of a quarter million people was proclaimed, I felt the history pulse through my body. Read More
April 17, 2019
History

In the Name of Notre Dame

By Chris Knapp

Henri Matisse, Notre Dame une fin d’après-midi, 1902

In September 2016, police found a Peugeot with missing plates parked just steps away from Notre Dame; inside the car, they found seven cylinders of gas. The following week, four women—one of whom was carrying a letter declaring allegiance to ISIS and describing the planned attack as a deliberate act of terror and vengeance—were arrested and charged in connection with a plot to destroy the cathedral. As it happened, the eldest of these four women, Ornella Gilligmann, a thirty-nine-year-old mother of three, had been a close acquaintance of my wife’s from childhood, for which reason these events became especially vivid in our minds. If the women hadn’t removed the license plates, we agreed, no one would have noticed the car, and the plot might have come off without a hitch.

“Can you imagine if they got the Notre Dame,” my wife kept repeating. I understood this as a rhetorical question, posed in the same spirit we often invoked at the prospect of a Trump presidency: it was impossible precisely because it was too horrible to imagine.

The fire that nearly destroyed the eight-hundred-year-old cathedral on Monday (which French authorities are investigating as an accident) is not, of course, a catastrophe in the order of the 2016 election. But looking on from the banks of the Seine, it was hard not to experience the fire as a nontrivial data point on the timeline of a slow-motion apocalypse, which from a Western perspective stretches back (depending on whom you ask) to the 2016 elections, to the Brexit referendum, to 9/11, the paroxysms of the early twentieth century, to the intractable dependence on fossil fuels, to Napoleon’s campaigns in Europe, the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment—through all of which, the Notre Dame cathedral stood intact. What would it mean, at a time when civilization itself was starting to seem like a failed idea, for one of civilization’s signal achievements to burn to the ground. Read More
July 4, 2018
History

The Philosopher of the Firework

By Skye C. Cleary and John Kaag

He was looking for a chemical mixture—a potion or tonic perhaps—that would give him eternal youth. Instead, when it caught fire, the ninth-century Chinese alchemist discovered gunpowder. From there, our global obsession with fireworks was sparked. From then on, fireworks were used in celebrations to bring happiness and luck, and also to ward off evil spirits.

Almost a thousand years later, upon signing the Declaration of Independence, John Adams wrote to his wife that the day “ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forever more.” The first anniversary of Independence Day, in 1777, was indeed full of pomp and parade and illuminations. The fireworks were slightly more subdued than the ones that are used today, since colored fireworks, mixed with strontium or barium, would only be discovered in Italy fifty years later. For the first American Independence Day, orange would have to do.

Fireworks, hypnotic and sublime, are used to celebrate national independence around the globe, as signs of sovereignty or political autonomy. They are the window dressing of the modern state. The exploding rainbows are a tribute to the bloody wars that made the celebration possible. They are a reminder that—under that same sky and upon that same land to which the ashes float—we are kinfolk. Read More
May 1, 2018
History

May ’68: A Great Lyrical Community

By Mitch Abidor

Fifty years later, we look back at the student-led protests that shook Paris in May 1968 and have occupied the French political imagination ever since.

May 1968, Paris. Photo: Bruno Barbey.

The events of May 1968 in France emerged seemingly out of nowhere, yet they brought the country to a halt. High schools and universities in all corners of the country were occupied by students, and millions of workers went on strike. Although some have maintained that the uprising was actually an outgrowth of the strike movements that had swept the country in the previous year, May ’68 was not the result of worker discontent: they only joined the fray ten days after the students set it off. The movement emerged from the students. Its premonitory signs appeared at the new University of Nanterre in late 1967 and early 1968 with protests over the right for boys to visit girls’ dorms and vice versa and in defense of the students who were threatened with expulsion for their participation in an anti–Vietnam War demonstration. What would become known as the May events began when students gathered at the Sorbonne in Paris and threw stones at police occupying the courtyard.

Why, in the midst of the trente glorieuses, the thirty glorious years of postwar prosperity, did France suddenly find itself in a revolutionary crisis?

The issues that directly set off the uprising hardly seem to be enough to detonate a revolution. In my book May Made Me, an oral history of the events, I interviewed those involved in the moment in an attempt to understand. Jean-Michel Rabaté, now a professor at the University of Pennsylvania but then a student in Bordeaux preparing his entrance to the École Normale Supérieure, offered his explanation for May. “De Gaulle lied. He lied to everyone … There were so many lies, so many lies about our heroic past. France needed more truth, and that was the effect of May ’68: May ’68 allowed for greater truth.” For Jean-Michel, the goals of the movement were difficult to inscribe on a banner: “May was, We’re going to be more true, and that was the case. We came closer to the truth.” Read More
May 1, 2018
History

May ’68: What Legacy?

By Agnès Poirier

Fifty years later, the time has come to take a measured look at the student-led protests that shook Paris in May 1968 and have occupied the French political imagination ever since.

Student riots in Paris, May 1968.

Of the hundreds of books and essays published about the events of May 1968 in Paris, one of my favorite remains the philosopher Raymond Aron’s La révolution introuvable, written as the events unraveled in July 1968. In this book, whose title translates to The Nowhere-to-Be-Found Revolution, the events are described as a tragicomedy in which “a verbal delirium with no casualties” placed bourgeois students with a “utopian negation of reality” and workers with authentic and legitimate demands on France’s center stage. Raymond Aron was critical of the student protest; however, he was also critical of the centralized Gaullist government, which had failed to anticipate the aspirations of a whole society. A fellow graduate of Jean-Paul Sartre at Ecole normale supérieure in the late twenties, Raymond Aron joined General de Gaulle in London as early as June 1940 and enrolled in the Free French forces. Aron and Sartre were often caught on opposite sides of arguments. Sartre was the committed, politically engaged intellectual of the Left, while Aron was the philosopher of the Right who preferred to observe events at a distance. Though Aron had more accurately predicted the course of Eastern Europe in the fifties through the eighties, it was nonetheless fashionable among French intellectuals to say, “Better be wrong with Sartre than right with Aron.” Sartre was more exciting company. He was a magnet for generations of thinkers, he had the sparkle of the perpetually angry man, while Aron had the calm of a pessimistic humanist.

Today, however, it is clear that Raymond Aron’s quiet yet acute dissection of les evénements of May ’68 offers the best entry point into a critique of ’68’s legacy. Many argue, like Aron, that May ’68 and its heritage are still nowhere to be found, impossible to define even fifty years later. Read More