Star-Gayzing: Dressed For Space

I’m back. The history exhibition of my home village that I produced with my siblings was a modest success. It’s still creating a buzz on the village history Facebook page. But now I must return to this blog and reveal more hidden or forgotten aspects of lgbt history.

Earlier this year I wrote about lgbt costume designers in the “Star Wars” and “Star Trek” franchises. Today we look at another science fiction television series, one which celebrates its 50th anniversary today. That series is “Space: 1999”.

“Space: 1999” is one of my favourite shows, and I saw that very first episode on 4 September 1975. What appealed to me most, apart from the theme tune and opening credits, were the costumes. In particular, the costumes of the crew of Moonbase Alpha, the protagonists of the series.

But first, I want to give an update on my Time Lord cosplay. I mentioned on May 4th that I was dusting off the costume and doing repairs. Well, one week before I was intending to wear it at EmCon I changed my mind. I was still going to cosplay a Time Lord, but now I wanted to cosplay Ncuti Gatwa as Doctor Who himself. Specifically, in the costume he wore in his final episode that was broadcast exactly a week before the convention. Below is a couple of screenshots I took to help me make the costume. All I had was a white, short-sleeved top, so I had 6 days to come up with something that looked like that.

A black pin-striped waistcoat and black trousers that I already had would be substitutes for the blue, denim ones Ncuti wore. All I needed was to buy enough denim material to make the kilt, and as I own a genuine kilt I knew that it required a LOT of material.

Below in the finished costume. I was very pleased with the end result, even though it wasn’t an exact copy, and I had enough material left over to make a denim waistcoat in the future. Unlike the purple Time Lord robes, I wasn’t embarrassed walking through the busy Saturday morning streets of Nottingham city centre to the convention half a mile away. The success of my endeavours was proven by people recognising the costume, including actor Jemma Redgrave who co-starred with Ncuti Gatwa in the final episode.

You may think all that was irrelevant, but you’ll be surprised just how much it isn’t.

Back to “Space: 1999”. The Moonbase Alpha uniforms were designed by openly gay designer Rudi Gernreich (1922-1985). Rudi was one of the most well-known fashion designers of the 1960s and ‘70s. He was born in Austria and, as a Jew, was forced to flee to the USA with his mother when Nazi Germany annexed Austria in 1938.

Rudi’s talent in fashion was sparked as a child by visiting his aunt’s dress shop in Vienna. He would spend hours sketching the high society dresses that his aunt sold. These sketches caught the attention of Ladislaus Czettel, a costume designer who had recently returned to Austria after having found it difficult finding work in Germany because he was Jewish. Czettel offered Rudi an apprenticeship in London, but Rudi’s mother though he was too young to travel abroad (Rudi was only 12).

Rudi’s fashion career in the USA started in Hollywood, but he hated it. Likewise, he worked for various fashion designers and disliked the fact that he was required to follow “house design” and current fashion trends. However, during this period he was also designing and selling some of his own designs.

By 1960 he was able to found his own design house, G. R. Designs (later renamed Rudi Gernreich Inc.). Now he was able to let his own ideas about fashion turn him into a leading figure of the 1960s fashion revolution with daring experiments in fashion theory, design and colours. In particular he advocated the wearing of unisex clothing, something that seems quite normal today, but some of his ideas may strike us as being unusual (his monokini still attracts controversy among fashion historians).

It was the unisex look that Rudi came up with for the “Space: 1999” Moonbase Alpha uniforms. It was a simple plain, beige two-piece – trousers and long-sleeved top. The only indications or rank or occupation was in the colour of one sleeve and subtle rank markings (photo below). He also designed a vesion with a skirt. These were worn through the first sries, but another designer altered them for the second.

Rudi became something of a celebrity in the 1960s. He even appeared as himself in an episode of the classic television series “Batman”. A screenshot of that appearance is below.

But, wait. Haven’t I seen that orange and brown plaid combination recently? Actually, yes, I have, and it brings us back to Ncuti Gatwa’s costumes as Doctor Who.

The first costume anyone ever saw Ncuti Gatwa wearing was in the publicity photos released in 2022 to reveal what his Doctor would look like. It consisted of an orange sweater and brown plain coat (pictured below). It’s one of several costumes Ncuti wore it in his first full episode as the Doctor, “The Church on Ruby Road”, broadcast on Christmas Day 2023, and he wore in a later episode called “Dot and Bubble”.

This similarity may have been just a coincidence, except that I don’t believe in coincidence. The costume designer for Ncuti Gatwa’s Doctor was Pam Downes. Pam hasn’t admitted in any interview that I’ve read that the orange sweater and brown plain coat combination was inspired by Rudi’s costume in the “Batman” episode, but I’ll leave it up to you to make your own conclusion.

However, Pam has said that she tried to experiment with the Doctor’s costume. One design element she was keen to include, as was the show’s producer, Russell T. Davies, was the use of kilts or skirts for he Doctor. Ncuti’s Doctor wore several kilts throughout his tenure. Pam said she was inspired by the look of the “men in skirts” of 1970s New York. Guess who was the leading advocate for men wearing skirts in the 1970s? Yes, Rudi Gernreich.

There are other lgbt costume designers in science fiction to write about and they will appear next year, where we will encounter the late Queen Elizabeth II and a long lost “Doctor Who” story (not together).

Heraldic Alphabet 2025

Happy International Heraldry Day, and welcome to my annual batch of lgbt+ coats of arms.

I won’t give an introduction to explain all the rules, terms and formats this time. I’ll try to keep it simple. Last year’s list may give any information you need. Several things do need to be emphasised:-

1) Arms with a black surround are of people who have passed away in the past 18 months;

2) A diamond next to a letter indicates the arms are of an unmarried or divorced woman, specifically in England;

3) Not everyone who is entitled to a coat of arms is necessarily aware of it, especially if it is inherited from an ancestor they’ve never heard of.

A) April Ashley, MBE (1935-2021) – British transgender pioneer and activist. Marital arms, being those of her 1st husband, Arthur Corbett (1919-1993), 3rd Baron Rowallan from 1977. Ravens (also called corbies) are a common heraldic pun for Corbett. The blue quarters are the Polson arms of whom the Corbetts were heirs. The red label across the top indicates that during this marriage Arthur’s father was still alive. April would have borne these arms before the marriage was annulled in 1970. Her subsequent remarriage removed this entitlement anyway.

B) Rev. Pat Buckley (1952-2024) – Irish Independent Catholic bishop. Personal arms granted by the Chief Herald of Ireland, 5th October 2000. Bulls are a common pun used in Bulkeley and Buckley family arms. The sheep is a variation of the Paschal Lamb (also L). Here the lamb (or rather, sheep) is black, probably because Buckley saw himself as a “black sheep” of the Roman Catholic Church (being excommunicated in 1998 for conducting same-sex marriages). The sheep holds a bishop’s crozier, indicating Buckley’s position as a bishop.

C) Colette (1873-1954), full name Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette – French author. Marital arms, being those of her 2nd husband, Henry de Jouvenal (1876-1935). These are arms of the old Jouvenal des Ursins family whose male line had died out. Henry’s family are not related to them, but his grandfather obtained a decree from the French Council of State granting him the right to adopt them arms for himself and his family.

D1) Sir Michael Duff, 3rd Bt. (1907-1980) – British baronet (hereditary knight). Personal arms. The green quarters are the arms of the Duffs. The others form a grand quarter (a quarter that is quartered), meaning that they should always be shown like this. The arms are those of Smith (blue background) and Assheton (white background) families. The Duffs inherited the Assheton-Smith estates and adopted their name. Sir Michael readopted the Duff name in 1948. His wife, Lady Caroline, is listed next.

D2) Lady Caroline Duff (1913-1973) – British aristocrat. Inherited arms, being those of her father, the Marquess of Anglesey. Her family, the Pagets, were originally called Bayly. In 1769, after the marriage of Sir Nicholas Bayly to heiress Caroline Paget, the family adopted her name and arms. The Pagets were granted arms on 21 March 1552 and are a variation of an unrelated Paget family. During her marriage Lady Caroline could also place her arms on the right half of a shield with her husband’s on the left.

E) Philipp, 1st Prince of Eulenburg and Hertefeld (1847-1921) – Germany statesman. Personal arms. The Eulenburg family arms are those on the small central shield and had been used by Philipp’s ancestors since the 14th century. On the main shield, the white quarters with the hart are those of the Barons von Hertefeld (“herte” being German for “hart”, another heraldic pun) of which Philipp’s mother was heir. The other quarters are those of the Swedish Counts Sandels, a title he acquired through his marraige.

F) Hon. Ismay Fitzgerald (1870-1946) – Irish aristocrat. Inherited arms, being those of her father, Baron Fitzgerald of Kilmarnock, granted to him on 8th June 1882. There is no established link between Ismay’s family and the Fitzgerald dynasty whose coat of arms is commonly called “St. Patrick’s Cross”. Having been granted by the Principal Herald of Ireland at the College of Arms before Irish independence, Ismay could also bear them after Irish independence (see J). They are registered in the official records of the current Chief Herald of Ireland.

G) Christopher Gibbs (1938-2018) – British interior designer. Family arms. The quarters with the black axes are the Gibbs arms, granted by the College of Arms in 1876 for the living male-line descendants of Anthony Gibbs (1756-1815). Granted with them were arms of his wife’s family, the Hucks (blue chevrons and owls), to which their children were heirs. The quarter with the cross and discs is that of the Durants family, whose heiress married Christopher’s grandfather. Christopher could have added several cadency marks. Often, multiple cadency marks are not used, as here, because they clutter up the design.

H) Sir Arthur Hobhouse (1886-1965) – British local government official. Personal arms as senior member of his branch of the family. The background of the shield was originally all blue and probably not used officially. The College of Arms confirmed this blue and red version to Sir Arthur’s great-grandfather in 1812.

J) Mainie Jellett (1897-1944) – Irish artist. Not Mainie’s arms, but those of a junior branch of her family. These are a variation of the arms of an unrelated family, the Gilliotts of Nottinghamshire. The English College of Arms often extends the right to use arms to male line descendants of the individual’s paternal grandfather. However, when granted on 24th April 1904 by the Principal Herald of Ireland (see F) these arms were specifically limited to descendants the individual’s father. This excluded his uncle, Mainie’s grandfather. It is just possible that the Jellett’s were using a coat of arms unofficially before this which Mainie’s grandfather may have used. Research is continuing.

K) Olha Kobylyanska (1863-1942) – Russian author and feminist. Family arms. Although Olha’s ancestry cannot be traced with certainty beyond her grandfather the family is known to belong to the clan or tribe descended from the Sas (or Szász) family of medieval eastern Europe. These are the Sas clan/tribe arms, first recorded in 1548. One of Olha’s partners was Lesia Ukrainka (see U).

L) Tory (Victoria) Lawrence (1938-2024) – British artist. Marital arms, being those of her ex-husband John Lawrence, Baron Oaksey and Trevethin (1929-2012). Even after divorce, English law entitled Tory to retain her title and arms until remarriage (which didn’t occur). The arms includes a standard Paschal Lamb (see B). Before her passing, I had written Tory Lawrence into a future instalment in my “80 Gays” series with regard to number 78 on the list, Maggi Hambling. The instalment will appear some time next year.

M) Rory More O’Ferrall (1947-2024) – Anglo-Irish diamond industry executive. Inherited arms. The green grand quarters (see D1) show the arms of the O’Ferrall and More families who both use a gold lion on a green background. The only difference is that the Mores place 3 stars above the lion. Rory’s O’Ferrall ancestor married the More heiress in 1751. Their son Ambrose married the Bagot heir (white quarters with the birds). The crescent indicates Rory’s descent from Ambrose’s 2nd son. Rory’s male line ancestors were the Irish Princes of Annaly. In 1618 they were forced to surrender their title to that old “queen”, King James I. If we follow popular convention whereby titles abolished by republics are still used unofficially (e.g. current German, French and many European princes), Rory was Prince Rory U’Fhearghall of Annaly.

N) Philip Normal – fashion designer, Mayor of Lambeth 2020-21. Arms of office during his term as mayor. These are the arms of the London Borough of Lambeth, granted by the College of Arms on 22nd April 1922. The bishop’s mitre and staff on the central stripe represent Lambeth Palace the official London residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury.

O) Kajsa Ollongren (b.1967) – Deputy Prime Minister of the Netherlands 2020-22. Inherited family arms. The Ollongrens descend from the Finnish/Swedish noble family of Ållongren. After fleeing Finland during the Russian Revolution in 1917, Kajsa’s grandfather arrived in the Netherlands. The family were admitted into Dutch non-titled nobility in 2002. These arms, used by the family for several centuries, show acorns, yet another heraldic pun on the first part of their name “Ollon-” - in Swedish, “acorn” is “ekollon”. The arms are recorded with the High Council of Nobility in the Netherlands.

P) William Plomer (1903-1973) – South African author and literary editor. Inherited arms. The design with the chevron and birds was granted in the early 1600s by the College of Arms to the family of the first Plomer baronet (originally coloured black and white). William’s family claim descent from the baronet’s brother. This red and yellow version first appears in relation to William’s ancestor, a Lord Mayor of London in 1781. The Lord Mayor’s grandson married William Pagan’s heir. Her arms have the red border. William Plomer descends from the 3rd son (indicated by the central star) of this Plomer/Pagan marriage.

R) Margaret Thomas, 2nd Viscountess Rhondda (1883-1958) – Welsh politician and suffragette. Personal arms as Viscountess Rhondda, a title and arms she inherited from her father. However, after her father’s death in 1918 the Viscountess attempted to take her seat in the House of Lords but was denied. Female hereditary peers were banned from the Lords until 1963. I haven’t located a date on which these arms was granted, but I assume it was around the time that Margaret’s father was created a baron in 1916.

S) Adrian Stephen (1883-1948) – pioneering British psychoanalyst. Inherited personal arms. The younger brother of Virginia Woolf, featured in the 2015 Alphabet. The arms are a variation of those used by their ancestors, the Stephens of Ardendraught, Scotland. The College of Arms permitted Adrian’s and Virginia’s father the use of these arms in England. The crescent signifies that Adrian was his father’s 2nd son.

T) Hon. Stephen Tomlin (1901-1957) – British artist. Personal arms as the 3rd son (signified by the star) of Baron Tomlin of Ash. These arms have been used by the Tomlins since the late 1700s. Stephen’s wife, Julia Strachey (1901-1979) was the niece of gay author Lytton Strachey (1880-1932) and her step-mother was Adrian Stephen’s (see S) sister-in-law.

U) Lesia Ukrainka (1871-1913), born Larysa Kosach – Ukrainian writer and political activist. Inherited arms. Daughter of Petro Kosach, a member of the Korczak family, whose coat of arms these are. The arms are first recorded in 1142 and were originally used by the Princes of Slavonia. Their descendants and associated families across Hungary and Poland, including the Korczaks, adopted these are their “herb” or clan arms. Lesia was the one-time partner of Olha Kobylyanska (see K).

V1) Filipp Vigel (1786-1856) – Russian civil servant and memoirist. Inherited family arms. The Vigels descend from nobility in the former Swedish territory which is now Estonia. The region was invaded by Russia in 1710. Filipp’s father registered these arms in the “Noble Genealogy Book of the Kiev Province” in 1803 after his petition was accepted by the Noble Deputy Assembly in 1802.

V2) Ernst von Pfuel (1779-1866) – Prussian Chancellor, pioneer of the breaststroke. Inherited family arms. Family tradition says that these arms originate at the same time as their earliest ancestor is recorded in 1215. Variations of the design over the centuries include a blue background and the rainbows not touching the edges.

W) Rt. Rev. James Ingall Wedgwood (1883-1951) – Presiding Bishop of the Liberal Catholic Church. Personal arms. A cousin in Dame Veronica Wedgwood, featured in 2023’s Alphabet. As mentioned in 2023, these arms were confirmed, not granted, in 1576. This indicates that the family had been using them unofficially and that the College of Arms let them keep them. When James became bishop he changed the background from red to blue. I cannot find any official grant which confirms this, so it may have been “granted” by the authority of the Liberal Catholic Church. I’ll be going over the Wedgwood family’s links to the lgbt+ community in a future instalment of my “80 Gays” series.

Y) Kirstie Yallop (b.1986) – New Zealand footballer and Olympian. Possible family arms and marital arms of her wife, fellow Olympic footballer Tameka Yallop. Kirstie traces her ancestry back to Richard Yallop of Norfolk, England, before 1674. The only Richard in the records who matches the date was a brother of Sir Robert Yallop from the same area. Sir Robert and 3 of his brothers were granted arms on 10 November 1664 by the College of Arms. Their brother Richard wasn’t named, though he is known to have been alive. Was he disinherited? I believe the 2 Richards are the same, even though I don’t have proof. Research is continuing. The Yallop arms are the red quarters with the little rectangles. The Yallop brothers were also granted arms as heirs to their mother’s family, the Giles (the diagonal stripe). These arms first appeared in print in an atlas published by Thomas Blome in 1673.

Making an Exhibition of Myself

Earlier this year I took on the task of organising an exhibition of the history of the village where I was raised, Misterton, which will be produced later in the summer. It will actually be a revised version of an exhibition my family put on in 2001.

There is a lot of revising, editing, and researching to do, as well as sourcing exhibits and making models. This means that I will have less time for this blog. Articles I have already started to write will be put aside for a couple of months, though my next scheduled posting will go ahead on 10th June – my annual Heraldic Alphabet. Hopefully, everything will be back to normal in September.

Star-Gayzing: May the Force Be With You

This is a different Star-Gayzing entry in that I don’t look at queer stories of stars and planets, or at lgbt+ astronomers. Instead I turn to science fiction and fashion.

Today has become popularly known as Star Wars Day. I like to think that it is day on which we can celebrate all types of science fiction and science fantasy. I’ve watched “Doctor Who” from the day it began in 1963 (I was only 3, but my family always watched it). I’ve been going to Doctor Who conventions since 1978, and have met many cast members, past and present. For the past 6 years I have also been cosplaying as a Time Lord in the ceremonial robes from the 1976 story “The Deadly Assassin”. I wrote about my first time in cosplay here, and here’s an image from 2023.

As I am dusting off my costume and making repairs ready for EmCon in Nottingham next month, I thought about other science fiction franchises. I knew about a couple of lgbt costume designers from famous franchises and looked around to see if there were more. Here is a brief look at some on them.

For the purposes of this article I won’t be looking at monster or alien designs. I will concentrate on costumes worn by humanoid characters.

As this is Star Wars day, let’s start there.

Of the dozen or more costume designers who have made their mark on the Star Wars franchise since the very beginning, the most prominent among the lgbt designers has been Michael Kaplan. He has been designing costumes for science fiction films since 1982. The first film on which he was given screen credit as costume designer was for “Blade Runner”. It was a very illustrious start, because he received a BAFTA (UK film Oscar) for it.

Kaplan’s first venture into the Star Wars franchise was in 2013 when J. J. Abrams chose him as costume designer for the first film of the sequel trilogy “The Force Awakens”, released in 2015. Kaplan was invited back for the remaining two films in the trilogy.

As with all long-running franchises, Kaplan modified previous costume designs to reflect the times and fashions of the era in which the films were being made and to reflect his own style and interpretation of the characters.

Among Kaplan’s other film work are “Flashdance”, “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation” and “Fight Club”. Perhaps it is best to gloss over one of his earliest films, “Can’t Stop the Music” (1980), in which he was credited as “costumier – men”. This film is almost universally panned and was intended to showcase The Village People at the height of their fame. It also featured Caitlin Jenner and the male lead.

“Star Wars” wasn’t the first major science fiction franchise for which Kaplan designed costumes. He had worked for J. J. Abrams before on the first rebooted “Star Trek” film in 2009. One interesting fact merges from this film concerning Mr. Spock actor, Leonard Nimoy, which I’ll elaborate on later.

As with “Star Wars”, there are many costume designers in the “Star Trek” franchise, and there are two lgbt designers who deserve special recognition.

What relaunched “Star Trek” back onto our television screens in the 1980s was “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” (1979). The costume designer for this film, and the three that immediately followed it (“The Wrath of Khan”, “The Search For Spock”, and “The Voyage Home”) was Robert Fletcher (1922-2021).

Fletcher’s designs for the Star Fleet uniforms were quite different to the original distinctive, bold, colour co-ordinated uniforms of the original series. Fletcher’s uniforms were in pastel shades. This was deliberate. The film’s director, Robert Wise, didn’t want the old, bold, colours of the original uniforms to upstage the return of the original cast. For Fletcher’s subsequent three films the Star Fleet uniforms began to regain some of their colour-coding.

For the costumes of many of the alien humanoid races, Fletcher used a lot of fabric that had been used by blockbuster pioneer Cecil B. DeMille that had been in storage since the 1950s, including some of the redesigned Klingon uniforms.

With the success of the films came the return of the television series, starting with “Star Trek: The Next Generation”. For this, the creator of the franchise, Gene Rodenberry, turned to the costume designer from the original 1960s series, William Ware Theiss (1931-1992). The colour-coding of the uniforms came back with a vengeance.

Theiss’s only pre-Star Trek science fiction designs were for the comedy series “My Favourite Martian”. It was another “Star Strek” legend, the writer D. C. Fontana, a close friend of Weiss, who recommended him to Rodenberry when the pilot was being produced.

Which brings me back to Leonard Nimoy, Mr. Spock. He is the only original “Star Trek” character to have worn costumes by lgbt designers in the original series, the original film series, “The Next Generation”, and the Abrams reboot.

I was going to continue with designers in other well-known science fiction franchises, but there are a couple of things I need to fact check first.

An Easter Miracle

Happy Easter.

For practising Christians, the biggest miracle of all was the Resurrection of Christ. Miracles and miraculous events have become part of human culture and feature in every community, whether real or imagined. Here’s an Easter miracle you might like.

Christians have long celebrated Easter with a big feast, long before they celebrated Christmas. It was to mark the end of the period of fasting called Lent. For one medieval Irish abbot the Easter feast led to a truly life-changing miracle.

We only know about this abbot from one source, the “Book of Fermoy”, or “Leabhar Fhear Mai” in Irish Gaelic. This is a collection of poems, genealogies, histories and fables written in Ireland during the mid-15th century. The book gets its name from the home of the Roche family who feature many times throughout the book.

The story of the abbot appears about halfway through the book, sandwiched between an account of the Roman Emperors and a retelling of the Old Testament story of Enoch and Elias. It’s a short story, but will need a bit of explaining to comprehend its relevance.

The story goes like this (and I’ll keep referring to the character as abbot and not abbess, which I’ll explain later):

The protagonist of the tale is a young man who was the Abbot of Drimnagh near Dublin. One day, as preparations were being made for the Easter celebrations, he wanders out to a nearby hill to rest. He puts his sword down beside him and falls asleep. When he wakes the abbot is startled to find that she has become a beautiful woman. Even her sword has changed. It is now a distaff, a spindle for spinning, the occupation traditionally associated with unmarried women (hence an unmarried woman is often called a spinster).

Before she has fully come to terms with her change, and ugly old crone approaches her. The crone listens to the abbot’s story, and she says it is not safe for a young woman like her to be out on the hill as night approaches. Wild animals will attack her. The abbot decides she cannot return to her abbey and seeks shelter in the neighbouring monastery at Crumlin.

On entering the grounds she meets a handsome young man, the monastery’s chief administrator, who immediately falls in love with the abbot. The abbot offers no objection, and very soon the couple are married. Yes, abbots could get married in those days. In fact, this transgender abbot is already married, which will be revealed later.

This unusual couple are married for seven years and they have seven children. Then, as their eighth Easter together approaches, the young monastery administrator is invited to the celebrations in Drimnagh Abbey. The man gathers his entourage together and, with his wife, travels over the hill to Drimnagh.

On top of the hill the abbot feels very sleepy and persuades her husband and the entourage to continue, and she’ll follow them later. She then falls asleep.

A short while later the abbot awakes. Another shock awaits, as he realises he has turned back into a man. Instead of being relieved he is quite distressed. How can he explain himself to his husband and their children? How is he going to explain his seven year absence from his abbey?

Fortunately, the monks at the abbey accept his explanation and he steps back into his role as abbot without question. But what about his husband? Also, what about his own wife? When the abbot explains his long absence to her, his wife can’t understand what he means, because as far as she is concerned he’s only been away for one hour!

The abbot tries to explain to his husband what has happened. His husband seems to accept the situation. He remembers all of their seven years together, and that the abbot is the mother of their children. Again, fortunately, an amicable resolution is achieved, and they agree to let the abbot raise three of their children.

And that’s the end of the story. Firstly, the reason why I chose not to refer to the abbot as an abbess during her transition is to do with monastic governance. Some male monastic institutions could be headed by a woman, usually if there it also includes a separate community of nuns. This would be set out in the institution’s foundation charter. The fact that this character changed into a woman does not negate the terms of his abbey’s foundation charter. Only the head of the monastic order could stop her from being called an abbot, which didn’t happen in this story.

It is clear that this story was not historical but apocryphal. It’s what medieval literature termed a “fool story”. “Fool” in this context means “humble” and refers to what we would call a fable. Some historians think it may be based on real events. The abbot’s children may refer to seven pieces of land a real abbot owned, and that it deals with the division of that land into three and four parts between two monasteries. But, we’ll never know.

However, there are other elements which illustrate early medieval monastic practice. Medieval abbots didn’t have to be celibate. They could marry. There were hereditary abbots in Celtic Christianity who were usually lay members of the religious institution, quite often local aristocracy (perhaps descended from the original founder). One famous hereditary abbot is King Duncan I of the Scots (murdered by Macbeth in Shakespeare’s play) who was the hereditary Abbot of Dunkeld.

The story also contains several examples of medieval fairy lore. Hills have often been regarded as magical locations, particularly in Celtic mythology where they are often said to be the homes of fairies. The ugly old crone is the tale is also a common disguise for a fairy, as is indicated by her meeting the abbot on the fairy hill.

There have been a lot of commentaries of this story in recent years which centre on the transgender element and gender identity. Although these may have some validity in the mind of the commentator, modern transgender and identity attitudes shouldn’t be applied to ones that didn’t exist when the story was written. The medieval audience would no more understand the concept of transgender than they would about chocolate or digital technology. There are many stories of magical gender transformation in legends around the world. I’ve written about some of them on this blog. Unlike modern transgender issues, not one of them is the result of a personal choice to change gender (or species) without any supernatural means.

Another common folk motif is time distortion. Even though the abbot’s wife and the monks only think he’s been away for an hour, he and his husband remember seven years together. This time distortion is a common feature of tales involving people falling asleep on a fairy hill.

So, did you like this fable of a medieval Easter miracle? There’s still a lot in it which is difficult for historians to explain, but perhaps they shouldn’t try too hard. Like modern literature and media, the story meant something to the people who wrote it and the people who first heard it. There are clues in there which historians have yet to find, but in the end it’s simply a story. It doesn’t need to be fully explained to be enjoyed.

Homohoax: Pranking Penguins

There can be no better day than today – April Fools day – to present another Homohoax, one of the many hoaxes, pranks, fakes, imposters, conspiracy theories and confidence tricks perpetrated by or upon the lgbt community.

One of my favourite all-time April Fool jokes was the one the BBC pulled off in 2008. They made a short film promoting a non-existent documentary about flying penguins migrating from Antarctica to Australia. With this in mind I thought I’d write about a hoax involving both penguins and Australia.

The homohoax is known as the Ern Malley Hoax, and was carried out in Australia in 1944 by James McAuley (1917-1976) and Harold Stewart (1916-1995), the latter being regarded today, on the internet at least, as Australia’s first gay poet, although he was not out publicly in his lifetime

Let’s begin with the penguins.

There was an art movement in Australia in the 1940s called Angry Penguins, which took its name from the title a journal edited by a modernist surrealist poet called Max Harris (1921-1995). The name “Angry Penguins” came from a line in one of his poems, "as drunks, the angry penguins of the night". Other modernist poets and artists allied themselves to the movement and they became known collectively as the Angry Penguins.

The Angry Penguins were anything but conservative and traditional. Harold Stewart and James McAuley, however, were definitely conservative, and they hated modernism.

Harold Stewart was born and raised in Sydney, Australia. His father was a health inspector with a keen interest in Asia, an interest that he would pass on to his son. Harold showed early promise as a poet when he was a teenager at school. James McAuley was at the same school, and both received the school’s poetry prize, McAuley in1933 and Stewart in 1935

In school Stewart also became aware of his homosexuality, though the prevailing social conventions at the time were very homophobic and he remained in the closet for the rest of his life. It was only revealed in public in 1996, the year after he died. Stewart's school poetry had homoerotic subject matters, which subsequently helped to earn his the title of Australis’ first gay poet. Most of his friends were probably unaware of his sexuality.

After leaving school Stewart studied teaching at Sydney University but found it quite dull, and he abandoned his studies to become a poet. He spent hours in the public library, reading and copying poems, searching for his own poetic identity. He also met with friends around Sydney to recite and discuss their poems with each other.

During World War II, Stewart and McAuley worked in Army Intelligence (in the Directorate of Research and Civil Affairs) in Melbourne. In 1943, while in the army barracks, in just one day, they created the Ern Malley Hoax, a fictitious poet and entire body of work. The poems were deliberately written to be bad, exaggerating the modernist symbolism to the point of ridicule. They actually just wrote down the first thing that came into their heads, whether it made sense or not. They also had a pile of reference books, dictionaries and phrase books from which they lifted words and phrases at random. At the end of the day Stewart and McAulay had written 17 poems and a complete fake biography of Ern Malley.

So, what did Stewart and McAuley come up with for their biography of Ern Malley?

Ernest “Ern” Lalor Malley was born in England on 14th March 1918. His father died when Ern was 2, and his mother migrated to Sydney, Australia, with her two children Ern and Ethel. At the age of 17 Ern moved to Melbourne and had several jobs. In the early 1940s he was diagnosed with Graves' disease. Although not necessarily fatal, this is a serious autoimmune disease that particularly affects the thyroid gland which enlarges and produces hormones causing skin, heart, and muscle problems and, in the most well-known effect, the bulging of eyes. Malley refused treatment and he returned to Sydney to live with his sister in March 1943. He died a few months later on 23 July.

After Ern’s death, Ethel found some poems he had written. She wrote to Max Harris and asked for his opinion of them. Ethel was, of course, actually Stewart and McAuley. Harris was excited. He showed them to his Angry Penguin friends, and they fell for the hoax hook, line and sinker, just as Stewart and McAulay had hoped. They all agreed that Malley was a genius. Harris decided to rush out a special edition of the “Angry Penguins” journal and commissioned noted Australian artist Sidney Nolan to paint the cover illustration based on one of Malley's poems.

While the modernist poets praised Malley and his poems, the University of Adelaide’s student newspaper ridiculed the poems, suggesting that Harris had written them as a hoax. Then the Adelaide Daily Mail expressed the same opinion. The next week the “Sunday Sun” ran a front page story correctly alleging that the Malley poems had been written by McAuley and Stewart.

Then things turned serious. The police impounded the special “Angry Penguins” issue and prosecuted Harris for publishing obscene material. Several distinguished expert witnesses were called to defend Harris, but he was found guilty. His fine by today’s standard was pretty light - £5.

Understandably, the whole Malley hoax effected the course of the modernist and surrealist movement in Australia. Support of the Australian modernist and surrealist movement took a blow, and the “Angry Penguins” journal lost readership and soon went out of business. However, Max Harris later took advantage of the affair, and in the mid-1950s he published another literary magazine called “Ern Malley's Journal”. He was always adamant that Malley’s poems, even though he knew they were fake, still had merit and he republished them in 1961. He wrote, "Sometimes the myth is greater than its creators." His opinion was influential. Even today, over 70 years later, the Malley poems are regarded as legitimate surrealist poems. They have inspired many other poems and artists. In fact, the artist Sidney Nolan said the Malley poems inspired him to create his “Ned Kelly” series of paintings.

In 1974 there was an exhibition of Sidney Nolan’s art called "Ern Malley and Paradise Garden" at the Art Gallery of South Australia's Adelaide Festival Exhibitions. More recently an exhibition called "Ern Malley: The Hoax and Beyond" was mounted at the Heide Museum of Modern Art in 2009. The “Washington Post” has gone so far as to call the Ern Malley Hoax as the greatest literary hoax in the 20th century (I would challenge this – the Hitler Diaries had a more global effect).

After the hoax, Stewart worked in a Melbourne bookshop and collected many Eastern books, as his late father’s interest in Asia began to become a bigger part his own life. He began to study and pursue Japanese Buddhism and haiku poetry.

He first visited Japan in 1961. He was almost ordained as a Jōdo Shinshū priest in 1963 but changed his mind at the last minute. From 1966 Stewart became a permanent resident in Japan, becoming an expert on the history, culture and art of Kyoto. He wrote a series of poems with prose commentaries on Kyoto’s history in 1981. Earlier, in the 1960s, he published two translations of haiku poetry which proved popular.

Harold Stewart died in Kyoto on 7th August 1995 after a short illness. His body was cremated and his ashes scattered in the Higashiyama mountains.

One of the ironic twists is that the Ern Malley poems have become the most well-known poems by Harold Stewart, more so than the poems he wrote under his own name. I wonder if that qualifies as a hoax that backfired.

80 Gays Around the World: Part 6) Greek Beauties

Last time on “80 Gays”: 15) Father Markus Furhman (b.1971) became the first openly gay Franciscan “bishop” after ministering in Cologne, home of the alleged relics of the Three Kings, 16) Caspar, 17) Melchior, and 18) Balthazar, the latter’s gift to the Baby Jesus traditionally being myrrh, an aromatic resin from a plant named after the mother of 18) Adonis.

The name of 18) Adonis has become a byword for male physical beauty. With the ancient Greeks putting so much emphasis on same-sex activity in the training of athletes and soldiers, it comes as no surprise that Adonis was the sexual partner of both male and female deities.

As a young teenager Adonis was the lover of two Greek gods with many gay connections of their own – Apollo (who features many times on this blog), and Dionysos (also featured several times).

Perhaps Adonis’s most well-known lover was the goddess 19) Aphrodite. It may seem strange that the goddess of love and feminine beauty should have some queer connections, but in this other “Star-Gayzing” entry I point out the dual nature of Aphrodite’s sexuality. There I explain how her birth from the severed genitals of Uranus led her to become a kind of patron goddess of same-sex couples.

At the beginning of this series of “80 Gays” I commented that a lot of botanical connections cropped up. Last time I mentioned how Adonis’s mother Myrrha gave her name to the plant myrrh. Another plant connection comes in one of the annual festivals in Athens called Adonia, which was named after him. This was a female-only festival. Women would go up onto their rooves, singing and dancing, mourning the death of Adonis. On the roof they planted lettuce and fennel seeds into pottery sherds (both plants were considered to be aphrodisiacs – there’s Aphrodite’s name again), which they called Gardens of Adonis. The women then went down into the streets and formed a procession which went to the sea shore (or a stream, it varied depending on how far away they lived from the sea), and buried, or planted, the “gardens” along with little effigies of Adonis.

Aphrodite’s floral connection also involves a garden. This time it comes in the form of one of her patronages. Aphrodite was the patron god of vegetation and fertility, and thus she was known as Aphrodite of the Gardens. There was a shrine and sanctuary to her under this name near the Acropolis in Athens. There were two statues of her, one of which was a herm.

Herm is the term given to a tall square or rectangular column with a carved head (and sometimes a torso) at the top, with a carved penis at the proportional height sticking out of the square column. The Aphrodite herm had her head at the top and a penis further down. There’s a herm statue of Aphrodite in the national museum in Stockholm, Sweden, which depicts her as fully female from the waist upwards. She is holding her dress up to reveal a square column underneath with a penis.

It is from herm statues like this that Aphrodite evolved into a separate deity – 21) Aphroditus.

Historically, Aphroditus was probably based on an earlier deity in Cyprus. Once the cult of Aphroditus made it to Greece it was assimilated into that of Aphrodite Urania, the goddess of spiritual love. What makes things more complicated is that some modern websites confuse Aphroditus with the more familiar 22) Hermaphroditus,

The more I read about both Aphroditus and Hermaphroditus the more I realise that they are not the same. I think that the confusion comes from “herm” in Hermaphrodite, and the fact that the name Aphroditus was first used in reference to herm statues of Aphrodite. Hermaphroditus seems to be a later addition to the pantheon of Greek deities. I wrote about both Aphroditus and Hermaphroditus several years ago (see here), so I won’t go into it in detail here. Suffice it to say that in the later Roman period the image of Hermaphroditus as intersex developed from Greek myths about him being the son of Aphrodite and Hermes, a god not really “invented” until a century or two after the first herm statues of Aphrodite were made. If you’re not already confused, Hermes got his name from originally being a herm statue.

But let’s get back to Aphrodite. As well as two statues of her near the Acropolis as Aphrodite of the Gardens (one of which had male genitalia, remember), the goddess had another temple and shrine in Athens dedicated to her as Aphrodite Urania, the goddess of spiritual love.

The temple was in the agora, the inner-city public square and meeting place. In the sanctuary was a statue of her made by a famous sculptor called Phidias (no. 8 in the 2020 “80 Gays” series). I’ll return to Phidias in a later entry in this current series.

Whenever ancient Athens is mentioned Adonis and Aphrodite are not the first names that spring to mind, Athena is, of course. Another thing that springs to mind is the founding of Greek democracy. So it is not surprising that on the other side of the agora there were once statues of the couple who are regarded as being the people who inspired the creation of Athenian democracy. They were 23) Harmodius and 24) Aristogeiton.

Next time: We carry a torch against tyranny, untangle a gay “incestuous” dynasty, and remove a few statues.