The BEST of Lifelube - "Who's that Queer?" From Thursday, December 11, 2008

Who's that Queer?

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Gore Vidal is an American novelist, screen writer, playwright, and politician. Early in his career he wrote the ground-breaking The City and the Pillar (1948) that outraged mainstream critics as one of the first major American novels to feature unambiguous homosexuality.


In 1956, Vidal was hired as a contract screenwriter for MGM, and collaborated with Christopher Fry, reworking the screenplay. Vidal later claimed that in order to explain the animosity between Ben-Hur and Messala, he had inserted a gay subtext suggesting that the two had had a prior relationship, but that actor Charlton Heston was oblivious.

As a political activist, in 1960, Gore Vidal was an unsuccessful Democratic candidate for Congress (running as Eugene Gore), losing an election in New York's 29th congressional district, a traditionally Republican district, by a margin of 57% to 43%. He received the most votes any Democrat in 50 years in that particular district.

Who's That Queer? [Anton Hysén]

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Anton Hysén is a Swedish football player who plays in the Swedish fourth division for Utsiktens BK and is a former member of the Swedish national under-17 association football team.



Anton came out as gay to the Swedish football magazine Offside in March 2011. Daily Mail has described Anton as the "first high-profile Swedish footballer to announce that he is gay".[4] French magazine Têtu stated that Anton may be only the second professional football player to be openly gay, after English footballer Justin Fashanu.

Read more about Anton's coming out.

Who's That Queer? [Nomi]

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Nomi Ruiz is a Nu-disco and Hip hop singer from New York City who is most famous for being among the cast of vocalists that contributed to Hercules and Love Affair's debut album. Ruiz has also collaborated with dance music trio The Ones.




Nomi Ruiz was featured on the songs "You Belong", "Hercules Theme", and "I'm Telling You" for album Hercules and Love Affair. Pitchfork Media placed "Hercules Theme" at #21 on The 100 Best Tracks of 2008. She toured extensively with the band in support of the album, singing her song contributions as well as those of Antony Hegarty. The Guardian described Ruiz as "boasting the spookily effortless air of a future pop icon."

Nomi Ruiz released her debut album Lost In Lust on her own independent label Park Side Records. The album is a song-oriented downbeat electronic album steeped in the grittier ends of early-'90s hip-hop and R&B production. Since its debut, she had been able to tour with other artists such as Debbie Harry and CocoRosie. She also toured with Antony & The Johnsons and has been apart of their "Turning" project.


Read more about Nomi here.

Who's That Queer? [Andrew Sullivan]

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Andrew Michael Sullivan is an English author, editor, political commentator and blogger. He identifies as a political conservative. He is gay and a Catholic.



Sullivan is a speaker at universities, colleges, and civic organizations in the United States. He has been a guest on national news and political commentary television shows in the United States and Europe. Born and raised in England, he has lived in the United States since 1984 and currently resides in Washington, D.C. and Provincetown, Massachusetts.

Sullivan is sometimes considered a pioneer in political weblog journalism, being one of the first prominent political journalists in the United States to start his own personal blog. He is a former editor of The New Republic and the author of five books.

Read more about Andrew here.

Who's That Queer? [Andrej Pejić]

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Andrej Pejić is a Bosnian-born model of Serbian Ethnicity from Melbourne, Australia. He is notable for his androgyny. In the Paris fashion shows of January 2011 he walked both the men's and women's shows for Jean-Paul Gaultier and the men's shows for Marc Jacobs.

As of March 2011, he ranks no. 13 on the models.com Top 50 Male Models list.

Read more about Andrej at models.com.

Who's That Queer? [David Cicilline]

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David N. Cicilline is the U.S. Representative for Rhode Island's 1st congressional district. He is formerly the Mayor of Providence, Rhode Island, and was the first openly gay mayor of a U.S. state capital.


David was raised in Providence before moving to Narragansett. In high school, he served as president of his graduating class before heading to Brown University, where he established a branch of the College Democrats with his classmate, John F. Kennedy Jr. He took a degree in political science, graduating magna cum laude in 1983. He then went to Georgetown University Law Center where he earned a J.D., remaining in Washington, D.C. for a while to work for the Public Defender Service.

In 1994 he was elected to the Rhode Island House of Representatives, representing the 4th district on Providence's East Side. He won the Democratic primary to succeed retiring Rep. Linda J. Kushner with 56% of the vote and was unopposed in the general election. He took office in January 1995 and served a total of four terms in the legislature, during which time he came out as a gay man.

Cicilline was elected mayor of Providence in a landslide in November 2002 with 84% of the vote, following the downfall of controversial mayor Vincent Cianci. He was re-elected in 2006.

On February 13, 2010, Cicilline announced his candidacy for the U.S. House of Representatives to represent Rhode Island's 1st congressional district which is being vacated by fellow Democrat Patrick J. Kennedy. In the Democratic primary held on September 14, Cicilline defeated three opponents and won the party's nomination. He faced Republican John Loughlin.
Cicilline won the race with 81,098 votes to Loughlin's 71,443 and will represent Rhode Island in the 112th Congress.

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Who's That Queer? [David Wojnarowicz]

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David Wojnarowicz was a painter, photographer, writer, filmmaker, performance artist, and activist who was prominent in the New York City art world of the 1980s. Wojnarowicz died of AIDS-related complications on July 22, 1992 at the age of 37.


In November 2010, G. Wayne Clough, Secretary of the Smithsonian, removed Wojnarowicz's short silent film A Fire in My Belly (available online) from the exhibit "Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture" at the National Portrait Gallery after complaints from the Catholic League and Rep. John Boehner.

In response, The Andy Warhol Foundation, which had co-sponsored the exhibition, announced that it would not fund future Smithsonian projects, while several institutions, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art scheduled showings of the removed work.

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Who's That Queer? [Siegfried Sassoon]

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Siegfried Sassoon was an English poet and author. He became known as a writer of satirical anti-war verse during World War I, but later won acclaim for his prose work. The novel, Regeneration, by Pat Barker, is a fictionalized account of this period in Sassoon's life, and was made into a film starring Jonathan Pryce as W H R Rivers, the psychiatrist responsible for Sassoon's 'recovery'. Rivers became a kind of surrogate father to the troubled young man, and his sudden death in 1922 was a major blow to Sassoon.


After serving in World War I, Sassoon became a pacifist. Meanwhile, he was beginning to practice his homosexuality more openly, embarking on an affair with the artist, Gabriel Atkin. He also had a succession of love affairs with men, including the actor Ivor Novello; Novello's former lover, the actor Glen Byam Shaw; German aristocrat Prince Philipp of Hesse; the writer Beverley Nichols; and Stephen Tennant.

He remains an enigmatic figure in gay history: in his younger years homosexual but later, he lived comfortably as a conservative, religious, aristocratic heterosexual.

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Who's That Queer? [Cleve Jones]

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Cleve Jones is an American AIDS and LGBT rights activist. He conceived of the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt which has become, at 54 tons, the world's largest piece of community folk art as of 2009. In 1983, at the onset of the AIDS pandemic Jones co-founded the San Francisco AIDS Foundation which has grown into one of the largest and most influential People with AIDS advocacy organizations in the United States.


His career as an activist began in San Francisco during the turbulent 1970s when he was befriended by pioneer gay rights leader Harvey Milk. He worked as a student intern in Milk’s office while studying political science at San Francisco State University.

In 1983, when AIDS was still a new and poorly understood threat, Jones co-founded the San Francisco AIDS Foundation. Jones conceived the idea of the AIDS Memorial Quilt at a candlelight memorial for Harvey Milk in 1985 and in 1987 created the first quilt panel in honor of his friend Marvin Feldman. The AIDS Memorial Quilt has grown to become the world’s largest community arts project, memorializing the lives of over 85,000 Americans killed by AIDS.

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Who's That Queer? [Stephin Merritt]

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Stephin Merritt is an American singer-songwriter based in Los Angeles best known as the principal singer and songwriter in the band The Magnetic Fields.


Merritt is gay, and his lyrics are known for bending and blurring gender lines; examples include the song "When My Boy Walks Down the Street", which contains the lyric "and he's going to be my wife." He is fascinated with the undead, often making veiled or explicit references to vampires. Other frequent motifs in his lyrics include the age 17, dancing, seasons (most often summer), youth, old age, cities (especially New York City and Paris), the moon, the sun, the stars, rain, the night, marriage, blue eyes, faces, trains and railroads, the road, crying, murder, drinking, musical instruments, and love.

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Who's That Queer? [Pedro Almodóvar}

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Pedro Almodóvar is an openly gay Spanish film director, screenwriter and producer. He is the most successful and internationally known Spanish film maker of his generation, having won numerous Academy Awards, BAFTAS, Golden Globes and many more both as writer and director.


Almodóvar’s films enjoy a worldwide following and he has become a major figure on the stage of world cinema. The success of his movies has brought awareness to the cause of equal rights. He can also be credited with bringing two Spanish stars to an international audience - Antonio Banderas and Penelope Cruz.

Read more at Gay for Today.

Who's That Queer? [George Washington Carver]

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George Washington Carver was a groundbreaking agricultural scientist, known for discovering innovative uses for peanuts, sweet potatoes and clay. A black man born during the Civil War, Carver overcame racism to establish himself as a preeminent scientist and renowned academic. Throughout his career rumors about his sexuality ran rampant, and he ultimately left his estate to a close personal and professional partner, Austin Curtis.



Carver never married or expressed interest in dating women, and rumors circulated about his sexuality at Tuskegee Institute while he was an employee. In particular, his enjoyment of giving “therapeutic” peanut oil massages to and engaging in horseplay with handsome men was seen as unusual. Late in his career, Carver established a life and research partnership with another male scientist—Austin W. Curtis, Jr.. The two men kept details of their lives discreet, and as such historians know little about how these men understood their relationship. Nonetheless, the fact that Carver willed his assets to this man (consisting of royalties from an authorized biography by Rackham Holt) testifies to the importance of each other in their lives.

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Who's That Queer? [Eric Alva]

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Marine Staff Sgt. Eric Alva was the first American wounded, losing his leg in the war in Iraq and was awarded a Purple Heart and received a medical discharge from the military. After being honorably discharged, Alva came out as gay, and has been one of the most vocal veterans to speak out against the military's "Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell" policy.

Having survived a war injury, Alva felt he’d been given a second chance at life. He discovered a new calling. “I had to use my voice,” he says. “I had fought and nearly died to secure rights for others that I was not free to enjoy. I had proudly served a country that was not proud of me.”

In 2003, Alva received the Heroes and Heritage Award from La Raza. People magazine honored him with the Heroes Among Us Award (2004). He received the Patriot Award from the city of San Antonio (2004), and the Public Citizen Award from the National Association of Social Workers (2008).

Alva earned a Bachelor of Social Work in 2008, and is studying for a master’s degree in that field. He lives in San Antonio with his long-term partner, Darrell Parsons.

Who's That Queer? [Lynn Conway]

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Lynn Conway is an American computer scientist, electrical engineer, inventor, trans woman, and activist for the transgender community.

Conway is notable for several technical achievements, including the Mead & Conway revolution in VLSI design, which incubated an emerging electronic design automation industry. She worked at IBM in the 1960s and is credited with the invention of generalised dynamic instruction handling, a key advance used in out-of-order execution, used by most modern computer processors to improve performance.

Conway was recruited by IBM Research in Yorktown Heights, New York in 1964. She was soon selected to join the architecture team designing a multiple-issue out-of-order dynamic instruction scheduling while working there. The Computer History Museum has stated that "the ACS machines appears to have been the first superscalar design, a computer architectural paradigm widely exploited in modern high-performance microprocessors.

After learning of the pioneering research of Dr. Harry Benjamin in transgender treatment and realizing that a full gender transition was now possible, Conway sought his help and became his patient. After suffering from severe depression over her situation, Conway contacted Dr. Benjamin, who agreed to counsel her and prescribe hormones. Under Dr. Benjamin's care, she began preparing for transition.

Although she hoped to be allowed to transition on the job, IBM fired Conway in 1968 after she revealed to them that she was transsexual, and was planning on transitioning to a female gender role.

Read the rest at Wikipedia.

Who's That Queer? [Allen Ginsberg]

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Irwin Allen Ginsberg was an American Beat poet. Ginsberg is best known for Howl (1956), a long poem about the self-destruction of his friends of the Beat Generation and what he saw as the destructive forces of materialism and conformity in United States at the time.

One contribution that is often considered his most significant and most controversial was his openness about homosexuality, including his love of youths. Ginsberg was an early proponents of freedom for men who loved other men, having already in 1943 discovered within himself 'mountains of homosexuality'. He expressed this desire openly and graphically in his poetry. He also struck a note for gay marriage by listing Peter Orlovsky, his lifelong companion, as his spouse in his Who’s Who entry. Later homosexual writers saw his frank talk about homosexuality as an opening to speak more openly and honestly about something often before only hinted at or spoken of in metaphor.

Read the rest at Gay for Today.

Who's That Queer? [Dan Savage]

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Daniel Keenan Savage (born October 7, 1964 is an American author, pundit and journalist. Savage writes the internationally syndicated relationship and sex advice column Savage Love. Its tone is frank in its discussion of sexuality, often humorous, and hostile to social conservatives. Savage, who is gay, has often been the subject of controversy regarding some of his opinions that pointedly clash with cultural conservatives.

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Who's That Queer? [Ken Mehlman]

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Kenneth Brian Mehlman is an American businessman, attorney, and political figure who served as the campaign manager for the 2004 re-election bid of George W. Bush and Chairman of the Republican National Committee from 2005 to 2007. On August 26, 2010, Mehlman came out as gay, making him one of the most prominent openly gay figures in the Republican Party.

Prior to coming out, rumors about Mehlman's orientation had circulated since at least 2004. In May 2006, Mehlman denied that he was gay, saying, “I’m not gay, but those stories did a number on my dating life for six months.” On November 8, 2006, comedian Bill Maher made an appearance on Larry King Live, during which he referred to Mehlman as a closeted gay man. The incident became controversial because CNN edited out Maher’s comments in later taped editions and removed the reference to Mehlman's sexual orientation from the transcript of the show. The day after Maher's comments, Mehlman announced he would step down as chairman of the RNC (although reports said that his resignation had been expected for some time)

Almost four years later Mehlman told the press that he is in fact gay, and that he plans to be an advocate for legalizing same-sex marriage. This disclosure followed years of him avoiding and denying inquiries about his sexual orientation. During his RNC chairmanship, Mehlman supported social positions of the Republican Party, including opposition to same-sex marriage. Mehlman claimed that he could not have gone against party consensus, but acknowledged that, had he come out of the closet earlier, he could have impacted Republican efforts to pass state initiatives and referenda banning same-sex marriage.

Source: Wikipedia

Who's That Queer? [Karl Heinrich Ulrichs]

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Karl Heinrich Ulrichs - the first modern theorist of homosexuality - is seen today as a pioneer of modern lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender movements.


Ulrichs was born in Aurich (Kingdom of Hannover), Germany in 1825. Using the pseudonym Numa Numantius he published in 1864-1865 five booklets under the collective title Forschungen über das Rathsel der mannmännlichen Liebe (Researches on the Riddle of Male-Male Love). They set forth a biological theory of homosexuality, the so-called third sex theory, which he summed up in the Latin phrase anima muliebris virili corpore inclusa (a female psyche confined in a male body).

Using his real name in his next booklet, Ulrichs described his appearance at a Congress of German Jurists in Munich, where on August 29, 1867, he urged repealing the anti-homosexual laws. He was shouted down and not allowed to finish, but this was the first time that a self-acknowledged Urning/homosexual spoke out publicly for his cause. Thus Ulrichs was not only the first theorist of homosexuality, but also the first homosexual to 'come out' publicly.

Ulrichs's series of twelve booklets continued until 1879. His goal was to free people like himself from the legal, religious, and social condemnation of homosexual acts as unnatural, and for this he invented a new terminology that would refer to the nature of the individual and not to the acts performed.

Twice imprisoned for his public protests against the invasion and annexation of Hannover by Prussia in 1866, Ulrichs fought not only for the equal rights of homosexuals, but also for the rights of ethnic and religious minorities, as well as for the rights of women, including unwed mothers and their children.

But his one-man campaign against the legal oppression of homosexuals was unsuccessful. Indeed, the harsh Prussian anti-homosexual law was extended to the unified Germany in 1872.

Ulrichs left Germany in 1880 for voluntary exile in Italy, where he devoted the last years of his life to promoting Latin as an international language through the publication of a little Latin journal (Alaudae) written entirely by himself. He died on July 14, 1895 in Aquila, Italy.

Ulrichs's original biological theory of homosexuality has since been abandoned, but for more than a century some form of biological determinism has prevailed, both in the popular mind and in scientific circles; it has been adopted by both homosexual liberationists and their enemies.

Ulrichs will be best remembered for his courageous stand for the equal rights of all and, as Magnus Hirschfeld wrote, 'as one of the first and noblest of those who have striven with courage and strength in this field to help truth and charity gain their rightful place'.

Read the rest at Gay for Today.

Who's That Queer? [Del Marquis]

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Del Marquis (born Derek Gruen in New York) is the lead guitarist for the group Scissor Sisters - and one of three gay band members.



Unlike the outrageously flamboyant stage image of Jake Shears and Ana Matronic, his fellow band members, Del possesses a slightly more subdued image on stage, although still has a recognisable style of his own. He has a keen interest in graphic design and film, is known as an advocate for civil rights and 'liberation concepts', and possesses an unofficial fan group who call themselves the Deltoids, with whom he has a relatively good relationship.

Read the rest at Gay for Today.

Who's That Queer [Colonel Margarethe Cammermeyer]

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Margarethe "Grethe" Cammermeyer (born March 24, 1942) is a former colonel in the Washington National Guard and a gay rights activist.


Born in Oslo, Norway, she became a United States citizen in 1960. In 1961 she joined the Army Student Nurse Program. She received a B.S. in Nursing in 1963 from the University of Maryland. She furthered her education at the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington, earning a master's (1976) and Ph.D. (1991) from the School of Nursing.

She met her partner, Diane Divelbess, in 1988, when she was 46 — after she had ended a 15-year marriage to a man and had four sons.

In 1989, in response to a question during a routine security clearance interview, she disclosed that she is a lesbian. The "don't ask, don't tell" policy was not yet in effect at the time, and the National Guard began military discharge proceedings against her. On June 11, 1992, she was honorably discharged from the military. Cammermeyer filed a lawsuit against the decision in civil court. In June 1994, Judge Thomas Zilly of the federal district court in Seattle ruled her discharge, and the ban on gays and lesbians serving in the military, unconstitutional. She returned to the National Guard and served as one of the few officially accepted openly gay or lesbian people in the military until her retirement in 1997.

A television movie about Cammermeyer's story, Serving in Silence, was made in 1995, with Glenn Close starring as Cammermeyer. Its content was largely taken from Cammermeyer's autobiography of the same name.

Read the rest at Wikipedia