Web site celebrates gay, lesbian icons
How many times have I seen and admired the quote that defines Margaret Mead?
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world.”
Even so, reading it as part of the Oct. 9 installment for GLBT History Month made Mead’s sentiment more real than ever. The designers and writers who developed the Web site celebrating gay and lesbian icons could be one of those small groups.
The small but faithful band of board members for the Inland Northwest LGBT Center, who promoted the icons Web site locally, could be one of those committed groups.
The 31 men and women featured on the site through today, though not all alive at the same time, could be one of those small groups. Seen together, they are certainly a cohort of committed citizens who changed the world as artists, writers, athletes, politicians and scholars who happened also to be gay, lesbian or transgender.
Mead, an anthropologist who studied and reported on the sexual attitudes of other cultures, helped pave the way for the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Letters published after her death tell of the long and romantic relationship she shared with a woman for 22 years.
Stories detailed on glbthistorymonth.com are inspirational, informative and, like in the case of playwright Tony Kushner, plain fun. In 2003 he exchanged vows with his partner and the two were the first gay couple to be featured in The New York Times Vows column.
The name Georgina Beyer didn’t in the least sound familiar, which made me more curious to watch the video and read the biography than of some of the recognizable icons.
In 1999, Beyer became the first transgender member of a national legislature when she was elected to the New Zealand Parliament. Born as a biological male, Beyer had sex reassignment surgery in 1984 and enjoyed a career as a film and television actor before moving into politics.
One of the more enigmatic installments focused on Alice Walker. Details of her success as a novelist and poet included descriptions of her work on behalf of women’s rights and first-of-their-kind university courses she taught on African-American women writers. Walker married a Jewish civil rights lawyer – they were to first interracial couple to wed in Mississippi – had one daughter and eventually divorced him in 1976.
That’s it. No mention of a female partner or work on behalf of LGBT rights. No doubt Alice Walker is an icon of the 20th century, I’m just left wanting a little more of the story in this particular case.
Each entry on the site begins with a quotation from the featured person. My favorite by far were the thoughts of Randy Shilts, the first openly gay journalist to cover LGBT issues for the mainstream media and author of the prize-winning book And the Band Played On: Politics, People and the AIDS Epidemic.
“History is not served when reporters prize trepidation and propriety over the robust journalistic duty to tell the whole story.”