Twelve years before Stonewall...

I cannot tell you what it does to me to hear "pre-Stonewall". And even in our literature, even in the art, "pre-Stonewall", "post-Stonewall". I wrote three books pre-Stonewall and a dozen more post-Stonewall. There’s no demarcation. Gay history is centuries and centuries from the Romans to the Greeks to Oscar Wilde to all kinds of outrages. And those seem to be put back and "pre-Stonewall" is passive. "Post-Stonewall" is brave and dignified. I actually have heard things like that. I’ve talked, I’ve lectured and I’ve been invited all the way from Harvard to USC. And I talk about what it was like, what we had to survive.

Look, "pre-Stonewall" produced Alan Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Oscar Wilde, and I could go on. "Post-Stonewall" produced Bret Easton Ellis, who jumps out of the closet only now and then and then rushes back in, and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, where we’re reduced to clowns for straight people. ...It embarrasses me, it embarrasses me very much because that’s what people expect a gay man to do, to be very precious, and that’s not what we are. A good solid queen I will protect forever, they are heroes. - author John Rechy, interviewed for LA Mag

A fascinating story emerged on the BBC website this morning - the unearthing of a set of photographs of what appears to be a "gay wedding" from 1957, a time when homosexuality was illegal on both sides of the Atlantic and persecution, bullying and discrimination were not merely rife, but state-sanctioned. Apparently, the photos languished in the archives of a photographic processing store in Philadelphia due to the refusal of a member of staff to process them - and when researchers came across their existence they embarked upon a quest to find any trace of the subjects of the photos (presumably with a view of reuniting them with the by-now-in-their-eighties couple) - visit the Our One Story website for more.

The story has only now hit the media over here because, of course, being in America, there are plans to make a "reality TV" show out of the quest. Groan. Do people not do documentaries anymore?!

Regardless, the very fact that such a ground-breaking ceremony took place at all in such a repressive era, and that photographic evidence of it survived, is indeed testimony to Mr Rechy's wise words above - there was a whole gay world, filled with rebels and non-conformists, long before the first handbag was thrown fifty years ago in downtown New York...