WIKIPEDIA: Brideshead Revisited is a 1981 British television serial produced by Granada Television for broadcast by the ITV network. The serial is an adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited (1945). Although John Mortimer was given a credit in the titles, Valerie Grove’s A Voyage Round John Mortimer revealed that Mortimer’s script was never used and that the series was actually written by the producer Derek Granger and others. The bulk of the serial was directed by Charles Sturridge, with a few sequences filmed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg.

Broadcast in eleven episodes, the serial premiered on ITV in the UK on 12 October 1981, on CBC Television in Canada on 19 October 1981, and as part of the Great Performances series on PBS in the United States on 18 January 1982.

In 2000, the serial placed tenth on a list of the 100 Greatest British Television Programmes compiled by the British Film Institute, based on a poll of industry professionals. In 2007, the serial was listed as one of Time magazine’s “100 Best TV Shows of All-Time.” In 2010 it was placed second in The Guardian newspaper’s list of the top 50 TV dramas of all time.

Episode 1: “Et in Arcadia Ego” (Original UK airdate 12 October 1981; 100 minutes) In the spring of 1944, disillusioned Army captain Charles Ryder is moving his company to a new Brigade Headquarters at a secret location he discovers is Brideshead, once home to the Marchmain family and the scene of both pleasant and anguished visits for the younger Charles.

Seeing the house for the first time in many years prompts a recollection of Charles’ first meeting with Lord Sebastian Flyte, the Marchmains’ younger son, at Oxford University in 1922, and the rest of the narrative flashes back to that time forward. At Oxford, two young men quickly bond and, although his cousin warns him to avoid Sebastian and his inner circle of friends, Charles is fascinated by them, particularly flamboyantly foppish Anthony Blanche. Short on funds, Charles finds himself fitfully spending the summer holidays in London with his indifferent and rigid father Edward until an urgent message from Sebastian sends him to Brideshead, where Charles is introduced to a world of wealth and privilege dominated by a powerful devotion to Catholicism.

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When most queers think of important dates in the gay calendar, Pride is probably the first one that jumps to mind. Halloween is perhaps not far behind. But very few of us remember, or have ever heard of, the first official gay and lesbian holiday in Canada: Pink Triangle Day.

Declared at the 1979 conference of the long-gone national organization Canadian Lesbian And Gay Rights Coalition (CLGRC), Pink Triangle Day commemorates the first major legal victory for Canada’s queer rights movement. On that day in 1979, three officers of Pink Triangle Press (the company that publishes Xtra) were acquitted of indecency charges stemming from the article “Men Loving Boys Loving Men,” published in the Dec 1977/Jan 1978 issue of The Body Politic.

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Edward Earle Marsh (December 20, 1929 – May 29, 2004) was an American actor, musician, adult film director and star. He is principally known by his stage name Zebedy Colt.

Born in California, Marsh began his career as a child actor in Hollywood. In the late ’60s he became an innovator of “queer cabaret” when he recorded the early gay album “I’ll Sing for You” with the London Philharmonic Orchestra. This was the first time he used the “Zebedy Colt” name. Controversial in its day, the album consisted of original gay-themed compositions (credited to his real name) and songs originally meant to be sung by women (Listen to George Gershwin’s “The Man I Love” below), but given a homosexual twist by being covered by a man.

In November 1969 Marsh wrote a letter to Time Magazine, using his “Zebedy Colt” pseudonym, in response to an article published in its October 31, 1969, edition entitled “Behavior: A Discussion: Are Homosexuals Sick?”, using his Stockton, New Jersey, address, in which he argued that gays were then “becoming more and more a part of the mainstream.”

Marsh entered the pornographic film world in middle age, primarily as a way of financially supporting himself. He chose to resurrect the “Zebedy Colt” name from his “I’ll Sing for You” album for his porn directing/acting work both to conceal his true identity and as a way of separating this from his Broadway work. On one occasion, however, Marsh’s double life was uncovered when the Broadway company he was with went to see The Story of Joanna and were surprised to see their co-star playing a bisexual butler, Marsh later recalled one of them telling him, “Darling, you can be my butler anytime”. A similar situation occurred when Marsh was appearing in an off-Broadway play with Sandy Dennis. Dennis thought she recognized Marsh from an adult film she had been to see with her mother, and was delighted to have this confirmed when she asked him “are you Zebedy Colt?”.

His films as a director include the infamous The Farmer’s Daughter (which starred a young Spalding Gray), the sadistic The Devil Inside Her (which was shot at Marsh’s home in Lambertville, New Jersey), Unwilling Lovers and Terri’s Revenge. As an actor in adult films, he starred in such pictures as Barbara Broadcast, Gerard Damiano’s The Story of Joanna, Manhold–a 3D film–and the Death Wish porn rip-off Sex Wish. His Broadway acting work included appearing as Anthony Newley’s understudy in The Roar of the Greasepaint – The Smell of the Crowd as well as performances in “The Royal Family”, “Dark at the Top of the Stairs” and an award-winning 1976 production of Tom Stoppard’s Travesties. He was also known in New Jersey and Pennsylvania for directing and performing in Regional and Community Theatre Productions.

There is one uncredited film entry that was told anecdotally in his Las Vegas home one year before his death. He was one of the children in the forest scene sitting on the ground in The Adventures of Robin Hood with Errol Flynn.

Marsh retired from adult films in the early ’80s, due to concerns over the criminal element (citing the murder of Dutch businessman Navred Reef who directed him in the film “Sharon”) in the industry as well as the drop in quality due to the change from film to video. He spent his final years in Las Vegas, entertaining friends and neighbors with scrapbooks that documented his long career.

Zebedy Colt articles HERE @ QUEERMUSIC HERITAGE
Listen to tracks from the album HERE @ QUEERMUSIC HERITAGE

Colt’s PORN movies

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POLARIMAGAZINE
by Christopher Bryant
How an adolescent gay love story changed the shape of the digital future:

The idea that led to the invention of the computer, an idea that Alan Turing put forward in his 1936 paper ‘Computable Numbers’, did not start with a mathematical puzzle. It started with a love story, and a gay love story at that.

Alan Turing became friends with Christopher Morcom in1928. Morcom was, in many ways, Turing’s first real peer. He was, like Turing, a mathematician and a scientist. “When they were together,” David Leavitt writes, “the boys were more likely to talk about relativity and the value of π – which Turing, in his spare time, had calculated to thirty-six decimal points – than about poetry. Despite their seemingly dry subject matter, these conversations hummed, at least for Turing, with poetic intensity.” It was an unrequited love, by all accounts, but it was no less significant for that.

Christopher Morcom changed Alan Turing. The distracted and somewhat lonely boy was no longer alone; now he had someone to look up to, and someone he wanted to impress. As a scientist, Morcom was careful. Turing, who was raw enthusiasm, unbound, was careless. Morcom taught him to be methodical, which is something his schooling had failed to do. There was a focus and a drive that had not been there before, and his schoolmasters, who had previously been dismayed at his work, were astonished by the change. As Turing later wrote, Morcom “had a great power in practical work of finding out just what was the best way of doing anything.”

In the early hours of February 7, 1930, Turing had a premonition of Morcom’s death. The abbey clock struck a quarter to three, and he looked out of the window and saw the setting moon, which he suddenly knew was a “goodbye to Morcom”. That same night Christopher Morcom was taken ill with tuberculosis, and on February 13 he died.

Turing was devastated. Yet on 16 Feb he wrote to his mother, “I feel sure that I shall meet Morcom again somewhere and that there will be some work for us to do together.” Turing’s writing about Morcom in the years following his death betrays all the hallmarks of adolescent love. “It never seems to have occurred to me to make other friends besides Morcom, he made everyone else seem so ordinary,” he wrote in a letter to Morcom’s mother. The loss fixed Morcom, and the very idea of love, in a romantic ideal; as Leavitt notes, there was no chance for this love to sour, and for reality to set in. “Perhaps as a result, he spent much of the rest of his short life seeking to replicate this great and unfulfilled love.” What is certain is that the death of his friend had a decisive effect on Turing’s creative mind, and he developed a mystical attitude toward Morcom, as well as toward death and the idea of the spirit.

In an essay titled ‘Nature of Spirit’, written in 1932 and sent to Christopher Morcom’s mother, Alan Turing started to explore the mystical ideas that had been working their way around his head in the years following Morcom’s death. “It used to be supposed in Science,” he began, “that if everything was known about the universe at any particular moment then we can predict what it will be all through the future.” The theory of relativity, and the unpredictability of atoms and electrons, had changed that. Yet what power does the will, the spirit, have over that unpredictability, he then asked, and what is the role of the body in this? “Personally I think that spirit is really eternally connected with matter but certainly not always by the same kind of body,” he concluded. “The body provides something for the spirit to look after and use.” The spirit, and the vessel that held the spirit, were to Turing’s mind separate and separable. This thinking had a profound impact on how he conceived the idea of the “universal machine”.

In ‘Computable Numbers’, the idea of a universal machine that Turing put forward separated the machine itself, i.e. the body, from the software that allowed the machine to function, i.e. the mind. It was from this revolutionary idea that the modern digital computer was born. His thinking about the nature of spirit in the wake of Morcom’s death, moreover, linked back to what he had been taught by the influential book Natural Wonders Every Child Should Know, by Edwin Tenney Brewster, which had been given to him when he was 10.

“For, of course, the body is a machine. It is a vastly complex machine, many, many times more complicated than any machine ever made with hands; but still after all a machine. It has been likened to a steam engine. But that was before we knew as much about the way it works as we do now. It really is a gas engine, like the engine of automobile, a motor boat, or a flying machine.”

After the loss for Morcom, Turing started to puzzle out the nature of mind and spirit, and its relationship with the physical machine, the body. It was this creative leap that drove his career. Questions of free will and determinism, and the extent to which the mind controls the body, are at the core of ‘Computable Numbers’.

The most complex and difficult ideas of Alan Turing, from the universal machine to artificial intelligence, which he explored when he asked “can machines think?” in his 1950 paper ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’, link back to this love story and its consequences. Alan Turing believed that the spirit could live on, and he proved that yes, it could. In the end, Morcom’s spirit lived on not in his body but in a wholly different form, in the work of Alan Turing.

music music music

THE STRANGE LIFE & DEATH OF DR. TURING PART 1 & PART 2

did he or didn’t he?

Seriously… did he or didn’t he?

Primer tema del álbum de Hidrogenesse “Un dígito binario dudoso. Recital para Alan Turing” [Austrohúngaro AH025] via eduardo c

WW2 Enigma Codebreaker Alan Turing Chemically… by PoliticalVideos

Brian Christian de Claiborne Howard was an English poet, whose work belied a spectacularly precocious start in life; in the end he became more of a journalist, writing for the New Statesman.

Born: March 13, 1905
Died: January 15, 1958

It has been suggested that Howard was Waugh’s model for Anthony Blanche in Brideshead Revisited. But Waugh wrote, to Lord Baldwin: “There is an aesthetic bugger who sometimes turns up in my novels under various names — that was 2/3 Brian [Howard] and 1/3 Harold Acton. People think it was all Harold, who is a much sweeter and saner man [than Howard].”

At this time he had already been published as a poet, in A. R. Orage’s The New Age, and the final Sitwell Wheels anthology. He used the pseudonyms Jasper Proude and Charles Orange. His verse also was in Oxford Poetry 1924. Howard is credited with coining the phrase “Anybody seen in a bus over the age of 30 has been a failure in life”, wrongly attributed to Margaret Thatcher. According to Daily Telegraph correspondent and historian, Hugo Vickers, (writing in November 2006) the author was Brian Howard. The phrase came into wider use when used by Loelia, Duchess of Westminster, in her memoir, Grace and Favour (1961).

Subsequently he led a very active social life, tried to come to terms with his homosexuality, and published only one substantial poetry collection God Save the King (1930, Hours Press). He was active as a poet during the Spanish Civil War, but did not ultimately invest in his work with seriousness. He drank heavily and used drugs. During World War II he was part of the little ships armada to Dunkirk and later worked for MI5 and had a low-level post in the Royal Air Force. He suffered from bad health in the 1950s, and committed suicide after the accidental death of a lover. This American man died suddenly but naturally in Howard’s bath. Howard poisoned himself some days later.

Evelyn Waugh wrote: “I used to know Brian Howard well — a dazzling young man to my innocent eyes. In later life he became very dangerous — constantly attacking people with his fists in public places — so I kept clear of him. He was consumptive but the immediate cause of his death was a broken heart.

Stephen James Napier Tennant (21 April 1906 – 28 February 1987) was a British aristocrat known for his decadent lifestyle. It is said, albeit apocryphally, that he spent most of his life in bed.

He was born in England, the youngest son of a Scots peer, Edward Priaulx Tennant, 1st Baron Glenconner, and the former Pamela Wyndham, one of the Wyndham sisters and of The Souls clique. His mother was also a cousin of Lord Alfred Douglas (1870–1945), Oscar Wilde’s lover and a sonneteer. On his father’s death, Tennant’s mother married Lord Grey, a fellow bird-lover. Tennant’s eldest brother was Edward – “Bim” – who was killed in the First World War.

During the 20s and 30s, Tennant was an important member – the “Brightest”, it is said – of the “Bright Young People.” His friends included Rex Whistler, Cecil Beaton, the Sitwells, Lady Diana Manners and the Mitford girls – part of the set that made the Nordstrom Sisters popular at The Ritz in 1939. He is widely considered to be the model for Cedric Hampton in Nancy Mitford’s novel Love in a Cold Climate; one of the inspirations for Lord Sebastian Flyte in Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, and a model for Hon. Miles Malpractice in some of his other novels.

During the 1920s and 1930s, Tennant had a sexual affair with the poet Siegfried Sassoon. Prior to this he had proposed to a friend, Elizabeth Lowndes, but had been rejected. (Hoare relates how Tennant discussed plans with Lowndes about bringing his Nanny with them on their honeymoon.) His relationship with Sassoon, however, was to be his most important: it lasted some four years before Tennant off-handedly put an abrupt end to it. Sassoon was reportedly depressed afterwards for three months, until Sassoon married in 1933 and became a father in 1936. When Tennant died in 1987, he had far outlived most of his contemporaries.

Released in 1970, ‘Boys In The Band”, the film, based on the play by Mart Crowley, was a watershed in American culture. This short feature examines its origin and odyssey.

Dion McGregor was a homeless gay bohemian from NY. He wanted to be a songwriter for Broadway musicals, and while waiting for his big break in show business, he couch-surfed with his friends, lovers, and acquaintances. One of his hosts was fascinated with Dion’s habit of talking in his sleep and attempted to document it. This LP compiles several recordings of Dion McGregor narrating his dreams. This isn’t just mumblemumble, though – these are clearly articulated stories with dialog and all. A few of them border on nightmares and often end with the speaker waking up with a muffled scream. You can hear New York street noises in the background, as he slept by an open window.

This record came out in 1964, and was accompanied by a book of transcriptions with illustrations by Edward Gorey (who also did the cover art for the record). Two more recordings came out recently, containing the stories which were deemed inappropriate for publication in 1960s.

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Dion McGregor (1922–1994) was a New York City-born songwriter, whose main claim to fame is that he was a voluble dreamer, or somniloquist.

As a songwriter, McGregor’s biggest success came when his song “Where Is The Wonder” (cowritten with roommate Michael Barr) was recorded by Barbra Streisand on her hit album My Name Is Barbra (1965). He was unable to find much success afterwards, however, and by the 1980s had given up on songwriting. Critic Joslyn Layne writes that “Despite his lack of success as a song lyricist, McGregor’s narration of his vivid dreamlife provided a more unique artistic contribution than any usually recorded.”

Mike Kuchar | 1966

More of that special Kuchar magic…

Why is that guy caught in a spiderweb? Shy Pop artist Wendel Samson (played by real Pop artist Red Grooms) can’t work up the nerve to break up with his boyfriend, so he has anonymous trysts with other men. Meanwhile, when his female friend Margaret pressures him into an intimate relationship, it sends Wendel spiraling into a nightmare world where he’s violently punished for his sexuality.