October 24, 1960 (a Monday)

Today is the birthday of Asian-American actor B[Bradley]. D[Darrell]. Wong, who was born in San Francisco in 1960. The only actor to win the Tony Award, the Drama Desk Award, the Outer Critics Circle Award, the Clarence Derwent Award, and the Theater World Award for the same performance, he came to prominence with his extraordinary performance in the title role of David Hwang’s M. Butterfly (1988).

Wong is a fourth-generation Chinese-American who grew up in the San Francisco Bay area. Following high school graduation, he traveled to New York City to pursue his dream of becoming an actor. His career did not shift into high gear until he returned to the West Coast as a member of the cast of the Los Angeles production of the Jerry Herman-Harvey Fierstein musical La Cage aux Folles.

In his subsequent Broadway debut in M. Butterfly, Wong played a male Chinese spy who successfully poses as a woman in a twenty-five year relationship with a French male diplomat. He conveyed the racialized stereotype of the Asian man as an emasculated “sissy” and the Asian woman as a submissive object of desire, while also turning the stereotypes on their heads.

Wong is a notably versatile actor who, despite the paucity of roles specifically written for Asian Americans, has kept busy on both the large and small screens. He has taken seriously his status as one of the few well-known Asian-American actors in Hollywood. He told an interviewer that he is very much connected to his Chinese heritage “but in a very American way.” He frequently lectures on diversity issues, particularly on the problem of racial self-hatred and rejection.

 

 

Wong also very strongly identifies as a gay man. Hence, he has been a visible presence at AIDS-related charity functions and in gay and lesbian community events, as well as at events sponsored by the Asian Pacific Islander communities. He has appeared at the GLAAD Awards, made promotional spots for the gay and lesbian television newsmagazine In the Life, and worked in various ways to further understanding among both Asians and non-Asians, gays and non-gays, about the experience of being both gay and Asian. In 2003, Wong published a memoir, Following Foo: (The Electronic Adventures of the Chestnut Man), which tells the story of how he and his life partner, talent agent Richie Jackson, created their family. The couple later broke up but they still share joint custody of their son, Jackson Foo Wong.

 

 

I am grateful for the work Mr. Wong has done, both as an actor and in helping to eradicate stereotypes of Asians and gay men.

September 10, 2009 (a Thursday)

On this date, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown issued an apology for the homophobic persecution by the British government of World War II-era mathematician and code-breaker Alan Turing. It gave definitive affirmation to a lengthy campaign aimed at restoring the reputation of a famous victim of homophobia. Most famous for his work on breaking the German Enigma codes, Turing was convicted of “gross indecency” in 1952 and sentenced to chemical castration.

The apology was prompted by a petition, begun by a well-known English computer programmer, John Graham-Cumming, in August, 2009, demanding that the British government apologize to Turing. It quickly gained thousands of signatures, leading Prime Minister Gordon Brown to issue a formal apology. The statement appears below:

2009 has been a year of deep reflection – a chance for Britain, as a nation, to commemorate the profound debts we owe to those who came before. A unique combination of anniversaries and events have stirred in us that sense of pride and gratitude which characterise the British experience. Earlier this year I stood with Presidents Sarkozy and Obama to honour the service and the sacrifice of the heroes who stormed the beaches of Normandy 65 years ago. And just last week, we marked the 70 years which have passed since the British government declared its willingness to take up arms against Fascism and declared the outbreak of World War Two. So I am both pleased and proud that, thanks to a coalition of computer scientists, historians and LGBT activists, we have this year a chance to mark and celebrate another contribution to Britain’s fight against the darkness of dictatorship; that of code-breaker Alan Turing.

Turing was a quite brilliant mathematician, most famous for his work on breaking the German Enigma codes. It is no exaggeration to say that, without his outstanding contribution, the history of World War Two could well have been very different. He truly was one of those individuals we can point to whose unique contribution helped to turn the tide of war. The debt of gratitude he is owed makes it all the more horrifying, therefore, that he was treated so inhumanely. In 1952, he was convicted of ‘gross indecency’ – in effect, tried for being gay. His sentence – and he was faced with the miserable choice of this or prison – was chemical castration by a series of injections of female hormones. He took his own life just two years later.

Thousands of people have come together to demand justice for Alan Turing and recognition of the appalling way he was treated. While Turing was dealt with under the law of the time and we can’t put the clock back, his treatment was of course utterly unfair and I am pleased to have the chance to say how deeply sorry I and we all are for what happened to him. Alan and the many thousands of other gay men who were convicted as he was convicted under homophobic laws were treated terribly. Over the years millions more lived in fear of conviction.

I am proud that those days are gone and that in the last 12 years this government has done so much to make life fairer and more equal for our LGBT community. This recognition of Alan’s status as one of Britain’s most famous victims of homophobia is another step towards equality and long overdue.

But even more than that, Alan deserves recognition for his contribution to humankind. For those of us born after 1945, into a Europe which is united, democratic and at peace, it is hard to imagine that our continent was once the theatre of mankind’s darkest hour. It is difficult to believe that in living memory, people could become so consumed by hate – by anti-Semitism, by homophobia, by xenophobia and other murderous prejudices – that the gas chambers and crematoria became a piece of the European landscape as surely as the galleries and universities and concert halls which had marked out the European civilisation for hundreds of years. It is thanks to men and women who were totally committed to fighting fascism, people like Alan Turing, that the horrors of the Holocaust and of total war are part of Europe’s history and not Europe’s present.

So on behalf of the British government, and all those who live freely thanks to Alan’s work I am very proud to say: we’re sorry, you deserved so much better.

Of course, one cannot help but think of U.S policy, which excludes gays from military service. While the U.S. diplomatic corps has no prohibition on gay service members,”Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” is still the rule of the U.S. military. Surely the legacy of Alan Turing stands as a lesson against this policy.

June 28, 1969 (a Saturday)

In the early morning hours on this date, police officers raided the Stonewall Inn, a small bar located on Christopher Street in New York City’s Greenwich Village. Although mafia-run, the Stonewall, like other predominantly gay bars in the city, got raided by the police periodically.

But for some reason, the crowd that had gathered outside the Stonewall, a crowd that had become campy and festive and had cheered each time a patron emerged from the bar, soon changed its mood. No one knows for sure who threw the first punch. Some say it was a drag queen, while others claim it was a butch lesbian, who initially defied the police.

 

more about "Stonewall: Footprints in Gay History", posted with vodpod

 

The first Stonewall Riot ended the morning of Saturday, June 28. That night the second riot broke out, as thousands of demonstrators — in the name of Gay Pride — flocked to the streets in front of and around the Stonewall Inn. Once again there were confrontations with the police until the early morning hours. Disturbances continued nightly for several days – the last occurred on the evening of Wednesday, July 2.

Gay and lesbian activism certainly existed prior to this time, but the confrontations between police and demonstrators at the Stonewall Inn in New York City catalyzed the movement and inspired gay men and lesbians to move their cause to entirely new heights utilizing entirely new tactics.

In 1999 the United States government proclaimed the Stonewall Inn as a national historic site. The following year, the status of the Stonewall was improved to “historic landmark,” a designation held by only a small percentage of historical sites.

Forty years after the Stonewall uprising, President Obama became the first president to recognize its significance by declaring June 2009 as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Month:

BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA:
A PROCLAMATION

Forty years ago, patrons and supporters of the Stonewall Inn in New York City resisted police harassment that had become all too common for members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community. Out of this resistance, the LGBT rights movement in America was born. During LGBT Pride Month, we commemorate the events of June 1969 and commit to achieving equal justice under law for LGBT Americans.

LGBT Americans have made, and continue to make, great and lasting contributions that continue to strengthen the fabric of American society. There are many well-respected LGBT leaders in all professional fields, including the arts and business communities. LGBT Americans also mobilized the Nation to respond to the domestic HIV/AIDS epidemic and have played a vital role in broadening this country’s response to the HIV pandemic.

Due in no small part to the determination and dedication of the LGBT rights movement, more LGBT Americans are living their lives openly today than ever before. I am proud to be the first President to appoint openly LGBT candidates to Senate-confirmed positions in the first 100 days of an Administration. These individuals embody the best qualities we seek in public servants, and across my Administration — in both the White House and the Federal agencies — openly LGBT employees are doing their jobs with distinction and professionalism.

The LGBT rights movement has achieved great progress, but there is more work to be done. LGBT youth should feel safe to learn without the fear of harassment, and LGBT families and seniors should be allowed to live their lives with dignity and respect.

My Administration has partnered with the LGBT community to advance a wide range of initiatives. At the international level, I have joined efforts at the United Nations to decriminalize homosexuality around the world. Here at home, I continue to support measures to bring the full spectrum of equal rights to LGBT Americans. These measures include enhancing hate crimes laws, supporting civil unions and Federal rights for LGBT couples, outlawing discrimination in the workplace, ensuring adoption rights, and ending the existing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy in a way that strengthens our Armed Forces and our national security. We must also commit ourselves to fighting the HIV/AIDS epidemic by both reducing the number of HIV infections and providing care and support services to people living with HIV/AIDS across the United States.

These issues affect not only the LGBT community, but also our entire Nation. As long as the promise of equality for all remains unfulfilled, all Americans are affected. If we can work together to advance the principles upon which our Nation was founded, every American will benefit. During LGBT Pride Month, I call upon the LGBT community, the Congress, and the American people to work together to promote equal rights for all, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity.

NOW, THEREFORE, I, BARACK OBAMA, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim June 2009 as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Month. I call upon the people of the United States to turn back discrimination and prejudice everywhere it exists.

IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this
first day of June, in the year of our Lord two thousand nine, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and thirty-third.

BARACK OBAMA

In the forty years since the Stonewall uprising, its anniversary has been celebrated every June, officially or unofficially, in more and more places around the world. This usually involves a parade referred to as a “Gay Pride Parade.” To some non-homosexuals, reserving a day or month to be proud of being gay seems odd – as odd as a “Straight Pride Parade” for heterosexuals would seem.

However, the reason that Gay Pride is necessary today is that for centuries, homosexual men and women have been persecuted, prosecuted, tortured, and killed in many cultures for simply being who they are. Homosexuals were told that they are “worse than” the rest of the population and, conversely, heterosexuals believed that they are “better than” homosexuals. Gay Pride is an effort to tell society that homosexual people are neither worse than nor better than everyone else. In other words, Gay Pride is an effort to normalize the self-esteem of gay people, not to disrespect anyone else.  If the tables are turned and straight people ever suffer similar oppression from homosexuals, then perhaps every straight person will understand the need for Pride events.

June 23, 1912 (a Sunday)

On this date, the mathematician Alan Turing was born.

Turing devised what is known today as the “Turing Test.” The Turing test is a proposal for a test of a machine’s capability to perform human-like conversation. Described by Alan Turing in the 1950 paper “Computing machinery and intelligence”, it proceeds as follows: a human judge engages in a natural language conversation with two other parties, one a human and the other a machine; if the judge cannot reliably tell which is which, then the machine is said to pass the test. It is assumed that both the human and the machine try to appear human. In order to keep the test setting simple and universal (to explicitly test the linguistic capability of some machine), the conversation is usually limited to a text-only channel such as a teletype machine as Turing suggested or, more recently, IRC.

However, Turing also was gay. In 1952, he had a couple of assignations with a man named Arnold Murray, who helped stage a break-in at Turing’s house. Turing went to the police about the robbery, in the process admitting the nature of his connection to Murray. He was, along with Murray, charged with “gross indecency,” a crime at the time. Given the choice between prison and probation, Turing chose the latter—but the deal came with a condition, that he accept hormone “therapy” designed to suppress his sex-drive. After a year of estrogen injections, Turing had developed breasts and lost his reputation. In 1954 he was dead by cyanide poisoning, a presumed suicide.

One-millionth Word?

As an author, I am interested in the English language. Although most predictions about cultural events in the future are difficult to make, I found one that nevertheless seems reasonable: At the current pace of a new English-language word created about every 98 minutes, English will cross the Million Word Mark on June 10, 2009 at 10:22 am (Stratford-on Avon Time).

But what, exactly, is a “word“? It used to be that the expert source on what was or wasn’t a word was the dictionary, such as American Heritage, Webster’s Third, and the Oxford English.  Groups of editors at a dictionary watch specific subject areas, logging the hits a new word gets. A “hit” is a mention in a book, newspaper, or Web site. Dictionaries reject words for being too technical (even the most die-hard Grey’s Anatomy fan will never need to know what a “mammosomatotroph” is) or for being too young (staycation). Nor do they count brand names (Coke, Facebook, Wikipedia) or most foreign words and phrases. Then they put the hits in a database and compare the new terms to words they already have. So although “Facebook,” being a brand name, doesn’t qualify, every word in Shakespeare’s plays does – including “cap-a-pie” (meaning from head to foot) and “fardel” (meaning burden). Being the granddaddy of creative linguistics, Shakespeare invented more than 1,700 words. All of them appear in an unabridged dictionary.

The Global Language Monitor, based in Austin, Tex., has been tracking words for the past five years. According to Paul J.J. Payack, president and chief word analyst at the Monitor, “We went back to the Middle English and saw that the definition of a word was ‘a thought spoken,’ which means if I say a word, and you understand me, it’s a real word.” So Payack counts “staycation,” “Facebook,” and “Wikipedia” as words. But he also follows some of the old rules. For example, words that are both noun and verb, such as “water,” are counted only once. He doesn’t count all the names there are for chemicals, because there are hundreds of thousands.

Once the Monitor identifies a word, it tracks it over time, watching to see where the word appears. Based on that measurement, they decide whether or not the word has “momentum,” that is, whether it’s becoming more popular or if it’s a proverbial flash in the pan. “It’s the same as the old [method], just recognizing the new reality,” Payack says. The Monitor’s method gives a lot more weight to online citations. And it recognizes that English is today truly an international language. English has nearly 400 million native speakers, putting it second in the world, but it has 1.3 billion speakers overall, making it the world’s most widely understood language, explains Payack . It’s spoken by over 300 million people in India as a second language, and by at least that many second-speakers in China.

For example, after director Ang Lee called his movie about two cowboys who fall in love Brokeback Mountain, the word “brokeback” wormed its way into the English vernacular as a synonym for the adjective “gay.” Although “brokeback” may be past its glory days in the United States, the word, with this new meaning, is still popular in China, Payack said. It appears on blogs and Web sites, which means it has momentum, which means it’s a word.

Average Americans use about 7,500 words a day and have a vocabulary of about 20,000 total. Even Shakespeare only knew about 60,000. So the number of words in the English language will always be many, many more than any one person knows or uses. Both Salikoko Mufwene, a linguistics professor at the University of Chicago, and Joe Pickett, executive editor of the American Heritage Dictionary, said English could very well have a million words already. Counting words, after all, is an imprecise science. But it’s also not the dictionary’s science. The job of dictionaries has always been, Mufwene said, “to reflect how people speak, not to teach them how to speak.” “You need people to edit the dictionary and take responsibility for it, so that it’s reliable,” Pickett said. “And I don’t think that’s going to change.”