Edward II

Edward II born 25 April 1287 (d. 1327)

Edward II of Caernarfon, was King of England from 1307 until deposed in January 1327. His tendency to ignore his nobility in favour of low-born favourites led to constant political unrest and his eventual deposition.

Edward lacked the drive and ambition of his overbearing father, who was a notable military leader. His main interest was in entertainment, though he also took pleasure in athletics and mechanical crafts. He had been so dominated by his father that he had little confidence in himself, and was often in the hands of a court favourite with a stronger will than his own.

Edward is perhaps best remembered for his murder - the details of which are unsubstantiated by contemporary accounts - and his 'alleged' homosexuality and relationship with his 'favourite', a Gascon knight named Piers Gaveston. Edward also managed to produce an heir - Edward III - another son and two daughters with his wife, Isabella of France, and even produced an illegitimate son.

Edward II was the first monarch to establish colleges in the universities of Oxford and Cambridge; he founded Cambridge's King's Hall in 1317 and gave Oxford's Oriel College its royal charter in 1326.

The most famous fictional account of Edward II's reign is Christopher Marlowe's play Edward II. Edward has long been regarded as something of a gay martyr, and Derek Jarman's cinematic version of the play utlilised 20th century clothing and gay rights marches as an aspect of the story.

Roger Casement

Roger Casement born 1 September 1864 (d. 1916)

Sir Roger David Casement was an Irish patriot, poet, revolutionary and nationalist by inclination. He was a British diplomat by profession and is famous for his activities against abuses of the colonial system in Africa and Peru, but more well known for his dealings with Germany prior to Ireland's Easter Rising in 1916.

Casement resigned from colonial service in 1912. The following year, he joined the Irish Volunteers. When WWI broke out in 1914, he attempted to secure German aid for Irish independence, sailing for Germany via America. He viewed himself as a self-appointed ambassador of the Irish nation. While the journey was his idea, he managed to persuade the exiled Irish nationalists in the Clan na Gael to finance the expedition. Many members of the Clan na Gael never trusted him completely, as he was not a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and held views considered by many to be too moderate.

Casement drafted a 'treaty' with Germany, which stated that country's support for an independent Ireland. Most of his time in Germany, however, was spent in an attempt to recruit an 'Irish Brigade' consisting of Irish prisoners-of-war in the prison camp of Limburg an der Lahn, who would be trained to fight against England. The effort proved unsuccessful, as all Irishmen fighting in the British army did so voluntarily, and was abandoned after much time and money was wasted. The Germans, who were sceptical of Casement but nonetheless aware of the military advantage they could gain from an uprising in Ireland, offered the Irish 20,000 guns, 10 machine guns and accompanying ammunition, a fraction of the amount of weaponry Casement had hoped for.

Casement did not learn about the Easter Rising until after the plan was fully developed. The IRB purposely kept him in the dark, and even tried to replace him. Casement may never have learned that it was not the Volunteers who were planning the rising, but IRB members such as Patrick Pearse and Tom Clarke who were pulling the strings behind the scenes.

The German weapons never reached Ireland. The ship in which they were travelling, a German cargo vessel, the Libau, was intercepted, even though it had been thoroughly disguised as a Norwegian vessel, the Aud Norge. All the crew were German sailors, but their clothes and effects, even the charts and books on the bridge, were all Norwegian. The British, however, had intercepted German communications and knew the true identity and exact destination of the Aud. After it was intercepted, the ship's captain scuttled the ship.

Casement left Germany in a submarine, the U-19, shortly after the Aud sailed. Believing that the Germans were toying with him from the start, and purposely providing inadequate aid that would doom a rising to failure, he decided he had to reach Ireland before the shipment of arms, and convince his friend Eoin MacNeill (who he believed was still in control) to cancel the rising.

In the early hours of 21 April 1916, two days before the rising was scheduled to begin, Casement was put ashore at Banna Strand in County Kerry. Too weak to travel (he was ill), he was discovered and subsequently arrested on charges of treason, sabotage and espionage against the Crown.

Following a highly publicised trial, he was stripped of his knighthood. To the authorities' embarrassment it had been found difficult to find a law to prosecute Casement under since his activities against the crown had been carried out in Germany and the Treason Act seemed to imply that activities carried out away from British soil were not within its purview. However closer reading of the medieval document allowed for a more flexible interpretation leading to the accusation that Casement was 'hanged by a comma' as the court followed the letter of the unpunctuated document rather than its obvious sense. After an unsuccessful appeal against the death sentence, he was hanged at Pentonville Prison in London on 3 August 1916, at the age of 51.

Prior to his execution, pages of a diary which the Crown claimed belonged to Casement were circulated to those urging the commuting of his death sentence. These pages, supplied to King George V, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and others in Britain, Ireland and the United States, suggested that Casement had engaged in homosexual activity, which was a crime in most countries at the time. The effect of what became known as the 'Black Diary' killed off much support for Casement's case.

Most Irish people believed that the diaries were forgeries, much as Charles Stewart Parnell had been the target of the Pigott forgeries implicating him in the Phoenix Park Murders. However a recent study comparing his 'White Diaries' (ordinary diaries of the time) with the 'Black Diaries', which allegedly date from the same time-span, judged, on the basis of detailed handwriting analysis, that the Black Diaries were genuine and had been written by Casement. This study remains controversial.

It has also been claimed that the Black Diaries describe an extremely active homosexual sex life which is unlikely to be genuine, but it has been argued that this does not refute the authenticity of the diaries, as they may have been sexual fantasies. Whilst there are some minor inconsistencies between the Diaries and external records of Casement's life, overall they do appear overwhelmingly congruent with his known movements.

Source: Wikipedia

Federico García Lorca

Federico García Lorca born 5 June 1898 (d. 1936)

Federico García Lorca was a Spanish poet and dramatist, also remembered as a painter, pianist, and composer. An emblematic member of the Generation of '27, he was killed by Nationalist partisans at the age of 38 at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War.

Born into a family of minor, but wealthy, landowners in the village of Fuente Vaqueros, Granada, García Lorca was a precocious child, although he did not excel at school. In 1909, his father moved the family to the city of Granada, Andalusia where in time he became deeply involved in local artistic circles. His first collection of prose pieces, Impresiones y paisajes, was published in 1918 to local acclaim but little commercial success.

Associations made at Granada's Arts Club were to stand him in good stead when he moved in 1919 to the famous Residencia de estudiantes in Madrid. At the School of Philosophy of the University of Madrid (current-day Universidad Complutense de Madrid) he would befriend Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, amongst many others who were or would become influential artists in Spain. Here he met Gregorio Martínez Sierra, the Director of Madrid's Teatro Eslava, at whose invitation he wrote and staged his first play, El maleficio de la mariposa, in 1919-20. A verse play dramatising the impossible love between a cockroach and a butterfly, with a supporting cast of other insects, it was laughed off stage by an unappreciative public after only four performances and soured García Lorca's attitude to the theatre-going public for the rest of his career; he would later claim that 1927's Mariana Pineda was his first play.

Over the next few years García Lorca became increasingly involved in his art and Spain's avant-garde. He published three further collections of poems including Canciones (Songs) and Romancero Gitano (1928, translated as 'Gypsy Ballads', 1953), his best known book of poetry. His second play Mariana Pineda, with stage settings by Dalí, opened to great acclaim in Barcelona in 1927.

However, towards the end of the 1920s, García Lorca fell victim to increasing depression, a situation exacerbated by his anguish over the increasingly unsuccessful concealment of his homosexuality from friends and family. In this he was deeply affected by the success of his Romancero gitano, which increased—through the celebrity it brought him—the painful dichotomy of his life: he was trapped between the persona of the successful author, which he was forced to maintain in public, and the tortured self, which he could only acknowledge in private.

Growing estrangement between García Lorca and his closest friends reached its climax when surrealists Dalí and Buñuel collaborated on their 1929 film Un chien andalou (An Andalusian Dog), which García Lorca interpreted, perhaps erroneously, as a vicious attack on him. The film ended Lorca's affair with Dalí, along with Dalí meeting his future wife Gala. At the same time, his intensely passionate but fatally one-sided affair with the sculptor Emilio Aladrén was collapsing as the latter became involved with his future wife. Aware of these problems (though not perhaps of their causes), García Lorca's family arranged for him to take a lengthy tour of the United States in 1929-30.

García Lorca's stay in America, particularly New York City, where he studied briefly at Columbia University School of General Studies, was his first adult experience of a democratic society, albeit one he considered to be dominated by rampant commercialism and the social oppression of minority groups, and it acted as a catalyst for some of his most daring work. His collection of poems Poeta en Nueva York explores his alienation and isolation through some graphically experimental poetic techniques, and the two plays Así que pasen cinco años and El público were far ahead of their time—indeed, El público was not published until the late 1970s and has never been published in its entirety.

His return to Spain in 1930 coincided with the fall of the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera and the re-establishment of the Spanish Republic. In 1931, García Lorca was appointed as director of a university student theatre company, Teatro Universitario la Barraca ('The Shack'). This was funded by the Second Republic's Ministry of Education, and it was charged with touring Spain's remotest rural areas in order to introduce audiences to radically modern interpretations of classic Spanish theatre. As well as directing, Lorca also acted. While touring with La Barraca, García Lorca wrote his best-known plays, the 'rural trilogy' of Bodas de sangre ('Blood Wedding'), Yerma and La casa de Bernarda Alba. He distilled his theories on artistic creation and performance in a famous lecture entitled 'Play and Theory of the Duende', first given in Buenos Aires and Havana in 1933, in which he argued that great art depends upon a vivid awareness of death, connection with a nation's soil, and an acknowledgment of the limitations of reason. La Barraca was the first to produce Lorca's 'rural trilogy' plays. The group's subsidy was cut in half by the new government in 1934, and la Barraca's last performance was in April 1936.

When war broke out in 1936, García Lorca left Madrid for Granada, even though he was aware that he was almost certainly heading toward his death in a city reputed to have the most conservative oligarchy in Andalucía. García Lorca and his brother-in-law, who was also the socialist mayor of Granada, were soon arrested. He was executed, shot by Falange militia on August 19, 1936 and thrown into an unmarked grave somewhere between Víznar and Alfacar, near Granada. There is a large controversy about the motives (personal non-political motives are also suggested) and details of his death. The dossier compiled at Franco's request has yet to surface.

The Franco regime placed a general ban on his work, which was not rescinded until 1953 when a (heavily censored) Obras completas was released. That Obras did not include his late Sonnets of Dark Love, written in November 1935 and performed only for close friends — these were lost until 1983/4 when they were finally published. It was only after Franco's death in 1975 that García Lorca's life and death could be openly discussed in Spain.

Today, García Lorca is honored by a statue prominently located in Madrid's Plaza de Santa Ana.

Ernst Röhm

Ernst Röhm born 28 November 1887 (d. 1934)

Ernst Julius Röhm was a German military officer, and the commander and co-founder of the Nazi Sturmabteilung, or storm troopers — the SA, also known as 'Brownshirts'.

Ernst Röhm was one of the most prominent of a number of early Nazi party members who was a homosexual, and his homosexuality was ultimately the pretext used for his removal during the purge of the SA. The real reason was the threat he eventually posed to Hitler's authority. Having been outed in 1925, Röhm made little attempt to hide his sexuality. Despite Hitler's pretense of shock upon discovering his deputy's sexual orientation, he had in fact long known - probably since 1919 - that Röhm was homosexual.

During Röhm's tenure at the head of the SA, it has been suggested that a number of homosexual men (notably Karl Ernst, a former bouncer at a gay nightclub, and Edmund Heines) were appointed to and promoted within the SA as a result of high-level liaisons with powerful SA figures. Röhm's Brownshirt militia - mostly undisciplined soldiers and roughnecks from the city-slums - contained many gay men, and there was debauchery in the ranks. This was despite the openly anti-gay policies of the Nazis, exemplified by their strengthening of Paragraph 175 (criminalising homosexual acts) of the German Criminal Code of 1871.

Röhm was executed without trial during the purge of the SA — the so-called 'Night of the Long Knives' in June 1934.

In the wake of Röhm's execution, Hitler ordered the registration of homosexuals and the Gestapo was charged with the responsibility of creating dossiers on homosexuals and other 'asocials' in the Third Reich. The beginning of the Nazi terror against homosexuals was marked by the murder of Ernst Röhm.

Ernst Röhm
The Gay Holocaust - Nazi Persecution: The Röhm Affair

On a personal note, I gave considerable thought as to whether I wanted to feature a leading Nazi in Gay For Today - this site has always been intended to mark and celebrate the contributions of gay men to (usually) the worlds of the arts, media, sport, politics and entertainment and so on - but a Nazi? And Hitler's deputy to boot. However, the story of Ernst Röhm's openness about his sexuality, his leading role in the early days of the Nazis - he very much believed in the 'socialist' part of National Socialism - and the way Hitler tolerated this powerful homosexual as long as he was useful to him and then ruthlessly snuffed him out and purged the SA and then Germany of homosexuals is interesting and significant.

In the end, yes, Ernst Röhm was a gay man and a Nazi but he ultimately became a victim of the Nazis and his death, as it says above, marked the real beginning of the still tragically under-told story of the Nazi terror against homosexuals - an intensely dark period in the long, dark history of gay persecution and oppression.