Friday, March 25, 2011

Andrew Goldstein

Andrew Goldstein born 25 March 1983

Andrew Goldstein is the first American male team-sport professional athlete to be openly gay during his playing career.

He had been a professional lacrosse goalkeeper for the Long Island Lizards of Major League Lacrosse. He was originally drafted by his hometown team, the Boston Cannons. As of 2007, he is in graduate school in Los Angeles.

A two-time All-American at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, Goldstein made headlines off the field in 2005 when he was dubbed by ESPN to be 'the most accomplished male, team-sport athlete in North America to be openly gay during his playing career.'

He is also noted to be the only goalie to have scored a goal in an NCAA tournament game in the last three decades of the tournament.

In 2006, Goldstein was honored by being named to the OUT 100. He also received a prestigious 2006 GLAAD Media Award for the feature entitled 'Andrew Goldstein' which aired on ESPN 's Sportscenter.

Goldstein hails from a family of talented athletes as his father, Irwin Goldstein, an internationally renowned physician who was the lead author of the first paper on Viagra as it applied to erectile dysfunction, and sister played hockey for Brown University while his brother played lacrosse for Amherst.

A biochemistry and molecular biology major at Dartmouth, Goldstein will be pursuing a Ph.D in biology at UCLA with a specific focus on cancer.

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Wednesday, February 02, 2011

Havelock Ellis

Havelock Ellis born 2 February 1859 (d. 1939)

Henry Havelock Ellis was a British doctor, sexual psychologist and social reformer.

Ellis was born at Croydon, then a small town south of London. His father was a sea captain, his mother, the daughter of a sea captain, and many other relatives lived on or near the sea. At seven years of age his father took him on one of his voyages, during which he called at Sydney, Callao and Antwerp. After his return Ellis went to a fairly good school, the French and German College near Wimbledon, and afterward attended a school in Mitcham.

In April 1875 he left London on his father's ship for Australia, and soon after his arrival in Sydney obtained a position as a master at a private school. It was discovered that he had had no training for this position and so he became a tutor for a family living a few miles from Carcoar. He spent a year there, doing a lot of reading, and then obtained a position as a master at a grammar school in Grafton. The headmaster had died and Ellis carried on the school for that year, but was too young and inexperienced to do so successfully.

At the end of the year, he returned to Sydney and, after three months training, was given charge of two government part-time elementary schools, one at Sparkes Creek and the other at Junction Creek. He lived at the school house on Sparkes Creek for a year - the most eventful year of his life as he was afterwards to call it: 'In Australia I gained health of body; I attained peace of soul; my life task was revealed to me; I was able to decide on a professional vocation; I became an artist in literature . . . these five points covered the whole activity of my life in the world. Some of them I should doubtless have reached without the aid of the Australian environment, scarcely all, and most of them I could never have achieved so completely if chance had not cast me into the solitude of the Liverpool Range.'

Ellis returned to England in April 1879. He had decided to take up the study of sex and felt his first step must be to qualify as a medical man. He studied medicine at St Thomas's Hospital, but never had a regular medical practice. He joined The Fellowship of the New Life in 1883, meeting other social reformers Edward Carpenter and George Bernard Shaw.

In November 1891, at the age of 32, and still a virgin, Ellis married the English writer and proponent of women's rights, Edith Lees. From the beginning, their marriage was unconventional (Edith Ellis was openly lesbian), and at the end of the honeymoon, Ellis went back to his bachelor rooms in Paddington, while she lived at Fellowship House. Their 'open marriage' was the central subject in Ellis's autobiography, My Life.

According to Ellis in My Life, his friends were much amused at his being considered an expert on sex considering the fact that he suffered from impotence until the age of 60, when he discovered that he was able to become aroused by the sight of a woman urinating. Ellis named the interest in urination 'Undinism' but it is now more commonly called Urolagnia.

His Sexual Inversion, the first English medical text book on homosexuality, co-authored with John Addington Symonds, described the sexual relations of homosexual men and boys, something that Ellis did not consider to be a disease, immoral, or a crime. The work assumes that same-sex love transcends age as well as gender taboos, as seven of the twenty one examples are of intergenerational relationships. A bookseller was prosecuted in 1897 for stocking it. Although the term itself is attributed to Ellis, he writes in 1897, '"Homosexual" is a barbarously hybrid word, and I claim no responsibility for it.' Other psychologically important concepts developed by Ellis include autoerotism and narcissism, both of which were later taken on by Sigmund Freud.

Ellis's magnum opus was Studies in the Psychology of Sex (7 vols., 1897-1928). Until 1935 his work was legally available only to the medical profession.

Ellis was a supporter of eugenics. He served as vice-president to the Eugenics Education Society.

The last years of his life Ellis spent in retirement near Ipswich, in Suffolk. Ellis died on July 8, 1939 in Hintlesham, Suffolk. Havelock Ellis's library was purchased by Yale University in 1941. The Papers of Havelock Ellis are held at the University of Birmingham Special Collections.

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Monday, January 17, 2011

Thomas Anthony Dooley

Thomas Anthony Dooley born 17 January 1927 (d. 1961)

Thomas Anthony Dooley III was an American Catholic who, while serving as a physician in the United States Navy, became increasingly famous for his humanitarian and anti-Communist activities in South East Asia during the late 1950s until his early death from cancer. Based on his experiences working in Vietnam and Laos, he authored a number of popular anti-communist books in the years preceding the Vietnam War.

Dooley was born in St Louis, Missouri and raised in a Catholic Irish-American household. He attended St Louis University High School, went to college at the University of Notre Dame in 1944 and enlisted in the United States Navy's corpsman program, serving in a naval hospital in New York. In 1946 he returned to Notre Dame, and in 1948 entered the St Louis University Medical School. When he graduated in 1953, after repeating his final year of medical school, he re-enlisted in the navy. He completed his residency at Camp Pendleton, California and then at Yokusuka, Japan. In 1954 he was assigned to the USS Montague which was travelling to Vietnam to evacuate refugees.

While Dooley was working in refugee camps in Haiphong, he came to the attention of Lieutenant Colonel Edward G. Lansdale, head of the CIA detail in Saigon. Dooley was chosen as a symbol of Vietnamese-American cooperation, and was encouraged to write about his experiences in the refugee camps. He also reportedly collected intelligence for the CIA.

In 1956 his book Deliver Us from Evil was released, establishing Dooley as a strong anti-communist in the United States. While on a promotional tour for the book, Dooley was accused and investigated for participating in homosexual activities, and was forced to resign from the navy in March 1956. The story of his forced resignation from the military can be found in the book Conduct Unbecoming by Randy Shilts.

After leaving the navy, Dooley went to Laos to establish medical clinics and hospitals under the sponsorship of the International Rescue Committee. Dooley founded the Medical International Cooperation Organization (MEDICO) under the auspices of which he built hospitals at Nam Tha, Muong Sing, and Ban Houei Sa. During this same time period he wrote two books, The Edge of Tomorrow and The Night They Burned the Mountain about his experience in Laos.

In 1959 Dooley returned to the United States for cancer treatment; he died in 1961 from malignant melanoma. Following his death John F. Kennedy cited Dooley's example when he launched the Peace Corps. He was also awarded a Congressional Gold Medal posthumously. There were unsuccessful efforts following his death to have him canonised as a Roman Catholic saint.

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