Grand Prince Vasili III of Russia

During the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries, Russian society embraced the greatest visibility and tolerance of homosexuality since ancient Greek and Roman times. When diplomats and foreign visitors came to Russia, they were shocked by the openness of homosexual behavior by Russian men of all social classes. When the English poet George Turberville traveled to Moscow with a diplomatic mission in 1568, he was astounded by the open homosexuality of the male peasants.

Homosexual behavior was also rife among the Russian ruling classes. Vasili III (1479-1533 shown in etching at left), who reigned as Grand Prince of Moscow from 1505 to 1533, was actively homosexual all his life. As a monarch, he was expected to produce an heir, but his sexual orientation made this a problem. It took him two marriages and over twenty years to accomplish this task.

By the time Vasili was forty-seven years old, his first wife of twenty years had yet to bear a child, so Vasili deflected blame by publicly pronouncing her barren and banishing her to a convent (where she later bore a son – not Vasili’s). After his controversial divorce, Prince Vasili shaved off his beard, which at the time was a signal to other homosexuals that he was one of them.

The powerful boyars suggested that Vasili take a new wife, so he divorced his first wife and married Princess Elena Glinskaya, the daughter of a Serbian princess. The Russian Orthodox clergy strongly opposed this marriage, since the princess was of Roman Catholic faith.

Vasili was able to achieve sexual intercourse with his new wife only when one of the officers of his guard stripped naked and joined them in bed for a little sexual “inspiration.” This unconventional arrangement did finally produce a male heir, Ivan IV, known to history as Ivan the Terrible. Vasili was so proud of this accomplishment that he built a church to commemorate the birth of his heir.

Prince Vasili was a powerful ruler and annexed previously autonomous territories for Russia. He captured Smolensk from Lithuania, had success in Crimea and established Russian influence along the Volga. Before he died from an abscess in his right hip at age 54, Vasili asked to be made a monk. Taking on the name Varlaam, Vasili died nine days later, at midnight on December 4, 1533, when his son Ivan was just three years old. The Russian nobles ran the country until Ivan was crowned at age sixteen, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Kevin Jennings

Activist, teacher and author Kevin Jennings (b. 1963) responded to his anger over being taunted as a young student by founding the first organization to address gay bullying in the U.S. As leader of the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (GLSEN), Jennings campaigned tirelessly to educate teachers, parents, students, and community members about ending bias in K-12 schools. Although Jennings left his post as executive director of GLSEN in 2008, his legacy lives on in the GLSEN chapters that proliferate throughout the country.

Constantly bullied by his brothers, teachers and fellow students, at the start of the tenth grade Jennings, with the assistance of his mother, transferred to a high school for gifted and talented students. There he joined the debate team and had his first sexual experience with another male. Jennings’ father, a Baptist preacher, had died of a heart attack when Kevin was nine years old, and his mother struggled to support her children as a single, uneducated parent working at a fast food restaurant. Just before his high school junior year, Kevin and his mother moved to Hawaii to live with his sister, because his mother was exhausted from trying to scrape by on a minimum wage. When it came time to consider college, Jennings applied to Harvard and was accepted. Kevin thrived in that collegiate atmosphere and did well academically. He somehow gained the confidence to come out of the closet and subsequently told his mother that he was gay. She did not take the news well, and for years afterward they had a strained relationship.

After graduating from Harvard in 1985, Jennings accepted a teaching job in Rhode Island. Two years later he took a position on the faculty of Concord Academy in Massachusetts, where he came out to the entire campus in a Chapel Talk in the fall of 1988. His students embraced his bravery and convictions. One of his students, a girl whose mother was lesbian, asked Jennings to help her start a "Gay-Straight Alliance" at the academy. Jennings took up the cause and thus began his two-decade effort to support, protect and encourage glbtq students, and today there are more than 4,200 Gay-Straight Alliances. As he accepted speaking engagements at other schools, he was convinced that a national organization was needed to address the concerns of glbtq students, and in 1990 Jennings was one of four founders of GLISTeN, the Gay and Lesbian Independent School Teacher Network. The next year the organization changed its name to GLSTN, Gay and Lesbian School Teachers Network.

Massachusetts Governor Bill Weld asked Jennings to serve on the Governor's 1992 Commission on Gay and Lesbian Youth. The following year the state board of education voted to make the Commission's recommendations the official policy of the state. This program, called Safe Schools for Gay and Lesbian Students, was the first of its kind.

Jennings was awarded a Klingenstein Fellowship at Columbia University's Teachers College. After receiving his M.A., he began work to make GLSTN a national organization. Jennings met financial consultant Jeff Davis, his life partner, at GLSTN's first event in NYC in 1994. Kevin also published two books that chronicled the stories of gay students and teachers. Four other books on related issues followed later in his career.

Shortly thereafter Jennings conceived, helped write and produce a documentary called Out of the Past, a film based on the story of Kelli Peterson, a lesbian student who tried to start a Gay-Straight Alliance at a Utah high school in 1996. The incident, in which the school system banned all school clubs to prevent Kelli’s success, grabbed national headlines. The film went on to win the Audience Award for Best Documentary at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival.

Jennings was invited to the White House in 1997, at the request of  President Clinton’s liaison to the glbtq community. Clinton wanted to repair his relationship with that constituency after he was unable to keep his promise to end the ban on gays in the military.

Jennings went on to be named to Newsweek Magazine's "Century Club" a compendium of 100 people to watch in the new century. He was also the recipient of the Human and Civil Rights Award of the National Education Association.

In 2005, Jennings suffered a heart attack after coming off the ice in a game with the New York Gay Hockey Association. Although Kevin and his partner Jeff Davis reside in NYC, Jennings joined the Obama administration as Assistant Deputy Secretary of Education and director of the Office of Safe & Drug-Free Schools in 2009. That appointment sparked a series of hysterical and libelous attacks by conservative activists (example at right), abetted by irresponsible reporting from the Washington Times newspaper and Fox News Network. Fortunately Jennings received strong support from President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan. The challenges from right wing activists spurred him on to ever more ambitious plans to prevent bullying in schools.

When a spate of suicides by bullied gay youths occurred in 2009, Jennings helped convene the first White House Conference on Bullying Prevention, headlined by the President and Mrs. Obama. In 2011, Kevin resigned his position at the Department of Education in order to head a new non-profit organization, "Be the Change," dedicated to addressing the growing problem of economic inequality in the country (Jennings had grown up dirt poor). A deciding factor was his ability to return to NYC to spend more time with his partner. Jennings has said that the anti-bullying movement he started has enough momentum and resources to go on without his active participation.

Note: This post is a condensation of an article by Victoria Shannon on the www.glbtq.com web site.

Montague Glover

Montague "Monty" Charles Glover (1898-1983) was an English freelance architect who is best remembered as a private photographer whose images chronicled London’s homosexual underground during the first half of the twentieth century. It is notable that Glover's photographs and personal relationships crossed strict social class barriers of the time, since he was primarily sexually attracted to working class men. His work documented rough trade, the male prostitutes of the period, and members of the military. Glover himself served with distinction as an officer in the British Army during WWI, being awarded the Military Cross for bravery. In the photo above, Glover is on the right, offering shoulder support to another WWI soldier.

Glover's work as an architect mostly involved projects for the British government. Monty had numerous affairs with working class men, to whom he was particularly attracted. These liaisons were with builders, road-workers, dockers, laborers, young military men and even rent-boys in Trafalgar Square

However, Monty is also remembered for his daring photographic record of his partnership with Ralph Hall (1913-1987, portrait at right), providing one of the rare documented examples of a long-term homosexual relationship prior to the legalization of homosexuality in Britain in the 1960s. The two met in 1930, and Monty subsequently employed Hall as his manservant, in order to provide a socially acceptable alibi for two men living together. Their relationship lasted for more than 50 years, surviving WWII (Hall was drafted into the Royal Air Force in 1940).

Hall was himself a cheerful working-class lad from London’s East End, fifteen years younger than Glover. Every year of their life together was documented in loving snapshots. Ralph was poorly educated, but absolutely devoted to Monty. The strikingly good looking Hall posed for Glover in outdoor settings, yielding photographs that were so suggestive that they could not be shared with the general public. While Ralph was serving for four years in the Royal Air Force, he sent Monty hundreds of love letters – the same sort of letters that countless boys sent to their sweethearts back home to bolster their spirits during the war. Ralph preserved them, and they were published after his death.

Much of their later years were spent at Glover's country house in a village near Coventry, where his sister lived with them until her death in the 1950s. Glover himself died in 1983 at the age of 86, leaving Ralph Hall as his sole heir. Hall died four years later after suffering a gradual decline in health. Friends of the couple described Monty as "charming, if somewhat reserved", and Ralph as an "outgoing cheerful cockney".

Montague's possessions were put up for auction in 1988 by Hall's heirs. One lot was a box that contained a collection of negatives from Glover’s photographs taken since serving in the trenches during WWI, as well as journals and correspondence from his many lovers spanning a period of several decades. Among them were letters from Hall written during his air force  service in WWII. Much of the collection was published in a book with text by James Gardiner – A Class Apart: The Private Pictures of Montague Glover (1992), and it gives great insight into the underworld of gay British society in the early twentieth century. Many of the photographs are sexually charged, but stop short of being pornographic. Any Internet search for Glover's photographs will yield dozens of examples.

A portrait of Glover's lover Ralph Hall is shown on the book's cover.

 

Special thanks to blog reader Michael for bringing this photographer to my attention.

Monty Glover's partner Ralph Hall (below):

Two boys in Victoria Park in London's East End (1930s):

Necktie and salaciously tight shorts:

London delivery boy (1920s):

Rough trade in the then notorious cruising ground of Trafalgar Square, London:

Another portrait of Monty's partner, Ralph Hall: