History – Nicolas Demers

The first gay-positive movie ever

I’d read a bit about the very early homosexual rights movements in Europe, about Magnus Hirschfeld and some of the organisations that operated in the 1910’s and 1920’s. But I didn’t know anything about what they published, or how they made their case to the general population. Well, now I know a little bit more, thanks to Anders als die Andem (Different from the Others), a German silent film released in 1919. Banned a year afterwards, most copies were destroyed when the Nazis took over. Only fragments of this fascinating piece of gay history exist.

What’s striking about this film is how modern its message and presentation are. The characters (including Hirschfeld, appearing as himself) argue for gay rights and dignity in a way that wouldn’t be too out of place in the 50’s or 60’s. Sure, Hirschfeld’s “third sex” scientific theories seem a bit silly now, but emotionally it wasn’t a bad narrative, and the bottom line—that we are all part of one big sexual continuum—is as true now as 100 years ago. It really makes you think: if Fascism hadn’t reared its ugly head then and set civil rights back a generation, how much further along would we be now?

The story revolves Paul Körner, a famous violinist who starts a relationship with Kurt, a student of his. It’s totally consensual and shown in a very positive light, but unfortunately Paul is also being blackmailed; if he doesn’t cough up money on a regular basis, his secret will come out—and in those days, that could mean jail time.

Finally Paul can’t take any more, and takes his blackmailer to court—hey, extortion is a crime too. Though the blackmailer is sentenced to jail, so is Paul. And after his very brief sentence is over, he finds his career is in shambles, his lover is gone, and his family won’t speak to him. Unable to take it anymore, Paul commits suicide.

And here again we see how Anders als die Andem is way ahead of its time, because unlike so many Hollywood films, it places the blame right where it belongs: senseless laws like Paragraph 175, a squeamish and bigoted society, heartless extortionists taking advantage of the system. And, it ends with a passionate call to action:

If you want to honor the memory of your friend, then you mustn’t take your own life, but instead keep on living to change the prejudices whose victim—one of countless many—this dead man has become.

This is the life task I assign to you. Just as Zola struggled on behalf of one man who innocently languished in prison, what matters now is to restore honor and justice to the many thousands before us, with us, and after us.

Through knowledge to justice!

—Magnus Hirschfeld to Kurt, Paul’s lover

Watch it here

(via Slap Upside the Head)

Vancouver Queer Film Festival Review: Queer History Project Retrospective

For all the people (including me) who missed any of the Queer History Project films from past years! I’ve already reviewed the five shorts in Riffs on the Theme of Activism so I won’t cover them here, but it was lovely seeing them again. Given the choice I might have skipped them since it was almost midnight when I came out of the theatre, but I’m not complaining. Too much.

The Love That Won’t Shut Up

Half a dozen elderly gay men and lesbians and one trans man talk about their lives: first sexual experiences, first loves, coming out in the 60’s, all accompanied with archival or personal photos. Fascinating and insightful look at the lives and politics of the time.

The Portside

This gives us a glimpse of a somewhat fictionalised gay/lesbian bar of the 60’s or 70’s (I think inspired by the Vanport) with all the requisite cliches: a tired old drag queen entertainer, asshole straight guys, breakups, closets, politics, raids, and the whole butch/femme thing, all in one glorious night. The acting was a bit wooden and the dialog stilted, but the whole thing is hilarious and cleverly done. A great look at the gay nightlife of yesteryear.

Rex vs. Singh

In 1915 two Sikh men, Naina Singh and Dalep Singh, were accused of “gross indecency” (specifically, propositioning police officers) and brought to court. This movie, done in several part by 3 different directors, tries to get at the truth through court transcripts and other contemporaneous documents by recreating the events as in a courtroom drama. In addition, history professor Brent Ingram discusses some of the wider issues and politics surrounding the case. This was a time of de facto segregation between whites, Chinese, Japanese and South Asians Vancouverites; a time when the Canadian government did its best to limit immigration of non-white people, and policemen regularly used entrapment to charge South Asian men with the terribly vague crime of gross indecency.

We don’t know what really happened. Were the detectives really propositioned? Were Misters Singh and Singh convicted? We don’t have the answers and probably never will, but at least we know enough to ask these questions. All in all, a fascinating look at a long-forgotten and shameful chapter of Vancouver history.

The Gay Spirit

Brand-new this year, a collage of old photos of Pride marches, protests and other Vancouver events, from 1981 (our first Pride march) until today. And hey, the VGVA marched in 1984! It was only 5 years old then!

Davie Village Walk with Gordon Price

How and why is Davie Village a gay neighbourhood? How did gays shape it? And where is it going in the 21st century? All these questions and more were answered last night in a guided history walk hosted by Gordon Price, city councillor from 1986–2002, writer and consultant, who came to Vancouver in 1978 as a fresh-faced gay man.

We started out by English Bay Beach, which was a gay cruising ground back in 1978, known apparently as “the pansy patch.” It wasn’t the only one, though, and gay territories would shift over the years. Cruising spots like parks, beaches and bars were the first gay-identified spaces; it was in these places that gay men explored and celebrated their sexuality, and connected with each other.

(Incidentally: nowadays you could fairly say that everywhere in Davie Village is gay territory.)

Our first stop was corner of Pendrell & Nicola, near Lord Roberts Elementary, where we addressed the question, why here? What made this neighbourhood one that gay men would choose? Well, there were a few factors: lots of rental space (mostly 1-bedroom apartments), plenty of bars and entertainment nearby, and good transit—perfect for a mobile, unattached population with disposable income looking to hook up. You’ll find similar conditions pretty much all gay ghettoes around the world.

We segued into a discussion of the physical history of the Village’s houses and buildings. That street corner was an excellent vantage point to see all the layers, all the decades side by side: a circa-1890 2 ½ storey house just up the street, a lovely 1920’s apartment building on the corner (the Princess Charlotte), plainer highrises built in the 60’s and 70’s… It’s all there.

The Village saw massive construction in the 50’s, 60’s and early 70’s: many of these old homes were razed to make way for modern apartments, communities were displaced, and it was a very traumatic time. But let’s not romanticise the past: these new apartments had running water, electricity, privacy, and at least a kitchenette. Compared to the overcrowded old heritage houses, pretty and historic though they were, this must have been heaven.

Besides, it’s what made it possible for gays to settle here. Can’t argue with results like that.

Next stop: St Paul’s Church, where we discussed the rise of street prostitution in the West End in the 70’s and early 80’s. Long story short, prostitutes (all genders) and their johns were creating a massive nuisance for residents, many of whom by now had a stake in their community, and perceived a very real risk of the Village turning into a red light district. They formed a group, Concerned Residents Of the West End, which succeeded in driving street prostitution out of the West End through some interesting legal tricks. Here again, it was the gays that took charge and reinvented their neighbourhood.

One last short walk, ending up at Bute and Davie. In the shadow of J Lounge and Hamburger Mary’s—checking out the fierce drag queens and pretty muscle boys—we recapped all we’d seen, and asked ourselves where it was all going. Would Davie Village still stay gay? Will young gay men have as easy a time finding a place here as they did 30 years ago?

Bottom line: it’s impossible to tell. The West End has continually reinvented itself, and will continue to do so as long as it exists. New people, new communities, new ideas will pour in; the neighbourhood will absorb them and weave something from the old and the new.

This morning I took the long route to my bus stop, walking up Nicola to Georgia. It was a beautiful stretch, mostly heritage homes and low-rises, until I hit Robson, and then BAM! Back in the big city. The West End is truly a special place, and I feel more connected to it than ever. I am very, very lucky to live where I live, to be part of something like this.

Not a bad way to kick off Pride Week!

Vancouver International Film Festival Review: Palimpsest

Gustav Shpet: Russian philosopher, teacher, writer, polyglot and interpreter; born in Kiev in 1879; exiled to Tomsk, Siberia in 1935; executed in 1937.

This movie is mostly narrated by Shpet’s 92-year old daughter Marina in a series of informal interviews, intercut with contemporaneous film reels, photos and music, as well as Shpet’s letters to Marina during his exile.

Gustav Shpet: Russian philosopher, teacher, writer, polyglot and interpreter; born in Kiev in 1879; exiled to Tomsk, Siberia in 1935; executed in 1937.

We follow Marina as she visits the university (much changed) where her father taught, the church she occasionally attended in the 30’s (hardly changed); tries to visit the apartment where she lived (security wouldn’t even let the film crew and her through the front door); tells the story of her husband, who died one year after her father, working to take down the Russian coat of arms from the Kremlin’s Spasskaya tower and replace it with the tacky red neon star that still shines today.

And we visit a Tomsk museum to Siberian exiles. Shpet is just one of hundreds of names that came to Siberia, one face on a whole wall of faces. The museum curator tells visitors that the NKVD actually planned their purges and ethnic cleanses, with expected minimums (quotas?) of roundups for each region per year.

In the end this is not a story about one man, smart and accomplished though he was. It’s a story about memory, connecting with our past the better to understand our present. And it’s about a past that’s always present no matter how much we try to erase it—streets and buildings, phrases, memories. The Soviet regime did their best to erase ideas, thoughts, and people. To a degree they succeeded, but only to a degree. Shpet told his daughter that “culture, culture, not politics” is what will keep us moving forward. Without going into too much detail, I tend to agree. Culture, memory both individual and collective, this is vitally important to identity and progress.

Palimpsest was preceded by the short Heart in the Wrong Place (original title: Tener el corazón en el lugar equivicado), featuring the extremely awesome experimental filmmaker José Antionio Sistiaga.

Apology to Alan Turing

The UK government apologises for its treatment of Alan Turing.

The UK government apologises for its treatment of Alan Turing:

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.

A pointless feel-good exercise? Too little too late? A fitting tribute to a national hero? I don’t know. Maybe all of the above, but on the whole I’m happy with it. Turing damn well deserves some recognition for being one of the founding fathers of computer science, not to mention his cracking of the Enigma ciphers. And who knows what other contributions he may have made, if he’d lived? In his last years Turing researched neural nets and artificial intelligence, amongst other topics. He might have helped drive not one but two information revolutions.

I read Andrew Hodges’ excellent biography Alan Turing: The Enigma not too long after coming out. Borrowed it from the library, which is a shame because I’d really like to reread it now. An abridged version (also maintained by Andrew Hodges) is available online which, shameless plug, was the basis of an article I co-wrote in my first semester at SFU.

And in all the discussion surrounding this apology, I found a link to an excellent short story that sort of answers my previous question. What might have Turing done, if he’d lived (and was helped by a time traveller)? Check it out

Book Review: The Five Books of Moses Lapinsky

Wow, that took a while. So much for my New Year’s resolution to read a novel a month, eh?

I started on this book in late January, after skipping through three quarters of the Mortal Engines quartet. Then I was taking a class, which left me with very little time and energy for such frivolities. But the class ended, and on Easter weekend I decided to pick it up again. I was immediately hooked, and devoured it in a three-day binge of more-or-less nonstop reading.

Wow, that took a while. So much for my New Year’s resolution to read a novel a month, eh?

I met Karen X. Tulchinsky years ago; she was leading a writing workshop, one night a week for… I don’t remember how many weeks. This was before I started blogging, but I was interested in writing. And meeting guys who were also interested in writing. The workshop didn’t help in that area, but otherwise I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. Ms. Tulchinsky was a great teacher, very friendly and supportive.

Now that I think about it, I’ve gotten the same impression from her previous books—one short story collection and two novels, all dealing with the trials and joys of being a Jewish dyke. I’m rereading some of the stories in In Her Nature, and (to this non-Jewish non-dyke) the history, the culture, the Yiddish, they never seem forced or self-conscious. Just a simple This is who I am. This is who we are. Sure, it’s okay to laugh along.

This latest book is different, though. It’s “queer” only in the loosest sense—only a couple of characters, including the titular narrator, are gay—but it’s still there, part of the tapestry of human experience. Another difference is that it’s not set in the present day (except for the framing narration at the start of each section, most of the action takes place in the 30’s and 40’s), and thus deals much more heavily in presenting Canada as it was then, and Canadian Jews as they were then. We know all the dates and facts about the Depression, about World War II, D-Day, about antisemitism. But the magic lies in making all that history come to life, and Tulchinsky pulls it off, brilliantly mixing the personal dramas with the wide sweep of historical events.

Interesting technique to really grab the reader: Tulchinsky writes in present-tense narration. Nice choice; it felt so natural I took a hundred pages to even notice.

This being a historical novel, the details are made up but the story is true. Toronto youths wearing Swastika badges, fighting Jewish kids; the Christie Pits riot; the disastrous Battle of Dieppe; pogroms in Tsarist Russia. All these things happened. And though Sonny “The Charger” Lapinsky never actually existed, other Jewish boxers lived and fought during the Depression. Though Yacov Lapinsky never existed, the stories he told of his escape from Russia are deeply rooted in reality—a lot more than I realised then, probably. Because, as I said, I’ve been rereading In Her Nature and one of the short stories there (“Canadian Shmadian”) contains some parts of those tales; surely they come courtesy of Tulchinsky’s older relatives.

Most of the novel’s events are related in chronological order, starting on the day after the Christie Pits riot in August 1933. Throughout the book we’re told all the facts, how that day affected the Lapinsky family: Sonny’s anger, Izzy’s brain damage. But in the last chapters take us back to the riot, and even though I knew exactly how things would turn out, I still couldn’t stop reading. Now that’s impressive.

The Five Books of Moses Lapinsky is a masterpiece: engrossing, educational, full of human drama that’s still not without comedy. Tulchinsky has done a wonderful job of honouring her family by creating this ficionalised, though still true, tale.

Dude, Whereâ€™s My Flying Car?

Now here’s an awesome blog I just discovered: Paleo-Future, a look at how past generations saw the future (which is often our present). Domed, weather-controlled cities! Flying cars! Segways!

Now here’s an awesome blog I just discovered: Paleo-Future, a look at how past generations saw the future (which is often our present). Domed, weather-controlled cities! Flying cars! Segways! (seriously) Synthetic food! Robotic servants! (They better have those Three Laws, though…)

As one commenter said about such futurology: “it describes the present, with tailfins.” Heh.

Accidental Community

Iâ€™ve just returned from the first meeting of the Accidental Community project. There was a photo slideshow by local artist John Kozachenko, a very brief overview of the history of gay menâ€™s communities in the West End, Q & A and interactive discussion, and a look at future directions for the project. Fascinating stuff. I learned that the man after whom Davie Street was namedâ€”Alexander Edmund Batson Davie, 8^th Premier of B.C.â€”was rumoured to be gay, though he had a wife and children. But apparently he hung out with gay people who, upon his death, started a social club in his honour and renamed the street after him. The articles I could find online donâ€™t elaborate on just what kind of social club this was.

I was invited to this meeting by one of the project members, whoâ€™d contacted me a couple of months ago via my queer history project, looking for leads for his research (unrelated to mine, but it never hurts to ask). Unfortunately, I couldnâ€™t really help him, since I havenâ€™t kept in touch with the one person I interviewed and all my other sources are publicly available. Still, Iâ€™m enormously flattered that my little project got his attention in the first place.

In addition to some cool history, another thing I got out of this meeting was how disconnected I am to the West End, living way the hell out in the suburbs. True, there are advantagesâ€”itâ€™s much cheaper to live out here, and I do have some (non-gay) friends nearbyâ€”but maybe Iâ€™m missing out on more than I realise. Years ago I voluntarily severed almost all ties with queer communities; Iâ€™ve since eased some of the way back in, and only recently have I realised what a mistake that self-imposed exile was. Where to go from here, though? Thatâ€™s what Iâ€™ll have to figure out.

He Had A Dream

Would you believe I’d never listened to the entire speech before last night?

Happy belated Martin Luther King, Jr. Day from a non-American!

Would you believe I’d never listened to the entire speech before last night?

Happy belated Martin Luther King, Jr. Day from a non-American!

The Stone Snake

This is pretty neat.

Of course, there’s a lot of speculation as to what this stone snake was actually for. Was it indeed the site of religious rituals? What kind of religion did humans have 70,000 years ago? What did they believe, and how did they express it? How much of a language did they have, to tell each other stories? Maybe language didn’t play a big part; still, the collective art of a giant snake is pretty good evidence of abstract thinking (because you have to imagine a snake before you carve it out of the rock)—as is the sacrifice of the spear points, which seem to have been deliberately burned or blunted, because you wouldn’t make a ritual out of it unless you expected something in return: good weather, good hunting, lots of children, or just the Snake God generally smiling upon you.

Actually, that reminded me of similar happenings in the bogs of Northern Europe. I saw an exhibit on them at the Museum of Civilization in Ottawa a few years ago, including a bit on how precious objects were ritually “killed” (e.g.: a pot would have a hole punched through it) before being placed in the bogs.

And I’ll tell you something else: I’ll never look at money thrown in fountains the same way again.