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July 2006 Scavenger Hunt
"grave"
Leonard Matlovich's headstone in Congressional Cemetery.
Matlovich was a highly decorated soldier and was the first to go before the Supreme Court challenging the military's exclusion of gays and lesbians. He was featured prominently in Time magazine in the 1980's during this case. He died of AIDS in the late 1980's.
On September 8, 1975, Latter-day Saint Air Force Sgt. Leonard P. Matlovich Jr. appeared on the cover of Time magazine, declaring "I am a Homosexual" to the nation and hurling him into the national spotlight as "poster boy" for Gay rights. In a watershed moment for the Gay rights movement, the Gay Mormon was the first openly Gay person ever to appear on the cover of Time or any other major US news magazine. Matlovich was featured in the magazine because he was suing the US Armed Force for discharging him for being Gay, despite the fact that he had an impeccable record, having served three tours of duty in Vietnam, where he received the Bronze Star, a Purple Heart, and an Air Force Meritorious Service Medal. Matlovich, initially raised Catholic, had apparently converted to the LDS Church during his tour of duty in Vietnam. He was ordained a Mormon Priest in 1970 and then an Elder on January 19, 1971 while in Vietnam, by W. Brent Hardy.
Although the Time article did not mention that Matlovich was LDS, when the publicity on his case against the Air Force broke, the Mormon Church conducted a series of trials against him. On August 1, 1975, the Norfolk Virginia Stake High Council met with Matlovich to investigate "alleged wrongdoing on [his] part involving infraction of the standards and rules of the Church". During this meeting, Matlovich "made a strong and convincing plea for time to think and consider the course of action [he was] pursuing, and to decide whether or not to abandon it and to seek professional help", which the Stake Presidency had "offered to help arrange". Matlovich was disfellowshipped at that time, meaning he could attend church meetings but was not "entitled to speak, offer public prayer, partake of the sacrament, or otherwise participate in these meetings". Of course his first charge was to "continue to pay [his] tithes and offerings" to the Church. Matlovich stopped attending church services and declined further "invitations" to meet with the Stake Presidency.
Then after his appearance on the cover of Time a month later, the Norfolk Stake leaders decided a more severe punishment was warranted. Stake President W. Boyd Lee and his two counselors, Kirk T. Waldron and Mark J. Rowe wrote him on September 12, 1975, requesting another appearance before the Stake High Council on September 27, because of his "expressed decision to make no effort to change or correct" his homosexual activism. Matlovich was unable to make that meeting because of "the demands on [his] time by the United States Air Force". However, the High Council ignored his plea to reschedule. They met without him on October 7, 1975 and "took action to excommunicate [him] from the Church". They cited his "intention to continue activism in a practice which is abhorrent to and in direct violation of the laws of our Heavenly Father. We cannot accept that you cannot change or be helped. It is our prayer that you may come to realize that you can indeed be changed and that you will seek such help as is necessary to accomplish it." They informed him that excommunication meant "complete severance from the Church and denial of all Church priveliges [sic] and rights". He was welcome to attend public meetings as a guest but he was "not to pay tithes or other contributions, but [was] encouraged to keep them on deposit until such time as [he] might be readmitted to the Church." (Apparently getting money from even ex-members is a priority for the Church!) They concluded in their letter to him that they urged him "to study the scriptures and pray, that [he might] come to know the truth, and to ignore the rising popular clamor for liberal practices in conflict with God's laws and eternal purposes".
After his court victory against the Air Force (which ultimately ended in Matlovich resigning with a large settlement in hand) he moved to San Francisco, and then appeared on the Phil Donahue television show in 1978. On October 12, 1978, "Mat" Matlovich received yet another summons from the Church, this time from the San Francisco Stake President, Jonas J. Heaton of Daly City, to investigate "conduct in violation of the law and order of the Church". Matlovich was unable to make that trial date and Heaton wrote an identical letter on November 20, 1978, requesting a trial on January 17, 1979. In January 1979, both the California Sentinel and the Bay Area Reporter published stories of how the LDS church was shortly going to excommunicate Matlovich yet again. Metropolitan Community Church Elder James Sandmire, an excommunicated Mormon "high official" said in the media interviews that he had "had seen or heard of hundreds of these cases where gays have either been 'disfellowshipped' or 'excommunicated'" once, but not twice.
Jonas Heaton also told the reporters that there "is a move to drop the upfront Gay activist because of 'conduct in violation of the law and order of the church'--namely his homosexuality." Leonard in turn vowed, "that the attempt to remove him from Mormon rolls will be a media event." Matlovich also admitted he "[was] confused on how he [could] be removed twice from the same church. When Heaton was asked about the double excommunication, the official said, 'This is a private matter within the church--I know a great deal about Mr. Matlovich that I am not going to discuss.'" Matlovich was then excommunicated a second time from the Mormon Church in January 1979. As early as 1978, due to the unethical treatment he received by the Mormon Church, his faith and spirituality were crushed and he considered himself somewhere "between an agnostic and an atheist."
The publicity surrounding him was enormous, and he received thousands of letters from all over the nation and even Europe, praising his courage and bravery for coming out. Of the many letters I read in his archived collection, only two were negative; the rest were heart-wrenching expressions of gratitude and support. For example, Joseph Allen, a native of Vienna, Austria, wrote him to say, "I saw your picture on the front cover of Time and cried. It is, indeed, a new awakening for us....I feel it happening because of people such as you who are unafraid."
Matlovich also befriended and corresponded with several other Gay Mormons. For example, C.R. "Joe" Smith, corresponded regularly with "Mat" in 1978 and 1979, encouraging him in his activism, and frequently mentioning their bond as ex-Mormon Gays. Smith had been raised in Utah but was excommunicated. He then had moved to Yucca Valley, California where he and his partner lived for many years together, running an animal shelter in the high desert.
Eventually the media circus around Matlovich exhausted him and he grew weary of being at the brunt of the Gay rights movement. However, he did continue to speak out against homophobic crusader Anita Bryant, and in June 1977 was a featured speaker at a large Gay rights convention held in Salt Lake City, during which Affirmation: Gay Mormons United was founded.
In 1980, a federal judge ordered the Air Force to reinstate Matlovich with back pay. The Air Force, disgruntled that their policy was found to be discriminatory and illegal, pressed Matlovich to drop his case and settle out of court, or they would appeal to the US Supreme Court. Finally Matlovich gave in and accepted $160,000 tax free, and explained to angered Gay rights advocates that "he believed it to be less likely to win a government appeal in front of an increasingly conservative U.S. Supreme Court."
Leonard Matlovich announced that he had HIV on "Good Morning America" television show in July of 1987 and died from AIDS in West Hollywood at the home of a friend on June 22, 1988. His famous epitaph at the Congressional Cemetery in Washington DC reads, "When I was in the military they gave me a medal for killing two men and a discharge for loving one".
Source: Wikipedia
Amsterdam. Royal Concertgebouw. Architect : Adolf Leonard van Gendt, Finial on roof with figure blowing horn.
I made this photo of Leonard Cohen during his concert in Portland, OR in November 2012, four years before he passed away.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGorjBVag0I
A POSTHUMOUS LETTER TO LEONARD COHEN
By Irene Lilienheim Angelico -
April 28, 2017
Dear Leonard Cohen,
“Dance Me to the End of Love,” you once explained, “is a love song inspired by the Holocaust.” The Nazis often forced string quartets to perform as they sent prisoners to their death. “Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin,” you said, is about “the beauty there… at the end of existence.”
I began this letter before you died. It is about your ancestral home, Vilnius, or Vilna, as the Jews called it, where your family was close to coming to the end of its existence. My husband Abbey and I were invited by the human rights festival, Inconvenient Films, to show our documentary Dark Lullabies, about the effects of the Holocaust on the next generation of Germans and Jews. You had been so warm in your response to the film, I wanted to return your generosity by telling you about the extraordinary event that happened in Vilnius.
I was reluctant to accept the invitation to the festival. As you know, Vilnius was part of Poland before World War II. It was called “Jerusalem of the North” because of its vibrant cultural and intellectual Jewish life. But then the Germans and their collaborators created the Vilna Ghetto.
It was there that my parents were imprisoned after fleeing Warsaw. It was there my mother audaciously removed her yellow star, risking death, to leave the ghetto and bring back a doctor to set my father’s broken leg. It was there my father’s twin sister Eda, her husband and their sweet little seven-year-old Misia were selected for death. My father never forgave himself for not being able to save them.
I read all about it in my father’s memoir, The Aftermath: a Survivor’s Odyssey through War-torn Europe. Why would I want to go to that monstrous place?
Yet, the trip to Vilnius was also a pilgrimage to my parents’ past. Abbey and I had been invited to the heart of darkness in Germany, and had travelled there several times. Each time we felt we had contributed to opening the hearts and minds of the next generations of Germans to the legacy they, like we, had inherited.
But Lithuania is different from Germany. Today it has a population of just over three million, mostly Roman Catholics and a tiny remnant of the Jewish community. Every year on Lithuania’s Independence Day, the neo-Nazis march in Vilnius from the Cathedral up the city’s central boulevard.
Like the other former Soviet bloc countries, Lithuanians placed all the blame for the Holocaust on the West and on the Soviet Union. Although Lithuanians collaborated in killing over ninety per cent of their own Jewish population, they never acknowledged any responsibility. For 75 years and three generations they said nothing, learned nothing and changed not at all.
Then, last August, the Jewish community organized a march to commemorate the massacre in Moletai, just outside of Vilnius. There, in the summer of 1941, the Lithuanian police rounded up all the Jews of the village, locked them in a synagogue without food or water, then forced them to march to their deaths. They shot over 3,400 Jews into a pit – an atrocity followed by 75 years of silence.
The Jewish community organized the march to mark the anniversary. They expected 200, maybe 300, people to come, including the victims’ relatives from other countries. But then something unprecedented occurred. It began with an article the beloved Lithuanian writer and film director Marius Ivaškevičius wrote about the event.
“I’m not Jewish, I’m Lithuanian ….I don’t know, perhaps I am naïve, but for some reason I believe our generation can end this nightmare…. That time in Molėtai. Four o’clock. August 29. We will go visit those who have been waiting for us three-quarters of a century. I believe that as they were doing, they nonetheless knew the day would come when Lithuania would turn back to them. And then they would return to her. Because Lithuania was their home. Their only home, they had no other.”
Three thousand Lithuanians came out to march with the Jewish community. They came to recognize those murdered as their own – their own loss, and their own pain.
There were many young Lithuanians, priests, monks, and high-ranking officials including the president, ambassadors, ministers, the army chief and the 83-year old first president of post-Soviet Lithuania. There were people from Poland, Russia, Latvia and Belarus who came to march with the loved ones of the massacred Jews.
Some non-Jews wore yellow Stars of David. Afterwards, everyone waited patiently to light a candle and place a stone on the memorial.
It took three generations for Lithuanians to begin to come to terms with their country’s role in the Holocaust. There were two emotional screenings of Dark Lullabies in Vilnius and the festival organizers ended up adding a third. The audiences that attended were almost all young people, who evidently felt they could not move forward without facing their past.
After one screening, a beautiful girl in her mid-twenties stood up and said, “We always thought this happened to the Jews. Now we realize that this happened to our own citizens, to us.”
So their process of questioning and healing begins.
The list of people who trace their ancestry to this small town, those who the Nazis and Lithuanians wanted to annihilate, includes many ordinary folk and many of the greatest Jewish minds of our time.
It includes Nobel Prize Laureate Bob Dylan. When Dylan’s award was announced, you said it was like pinning a medal on Mount Everest.
It includes Canada’s own great international human rights lawyer and former Canadian Minister of Justice and Attorney General, Irwin Cotler.
It includes comedian Sacha Baron Cohen; former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin; New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg; painter Marc Chagall; composer Aaron Copland; the Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein; film actor Harrison Ford; composer Philip Glass; anarchist Emma Goldman; Nobel Prize Laureate Nadine Gordimer; Oscar-winning director Michel Hazanavicius; actress Scarlett Johansson, actor Walter Matthau; Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu; singer-songwriter Pink, Israeli writer Amos Oz; American writer J. D. Salinger and comedian John Stewart.
And it includes you, the great Canadian poet-novelist-singer-songwriter-gentleman.
How many other great and future leaders, thinkers, artists, parents, teachers and children did they kill?
Your passing was wrenching for Montrealers and for people around the world, who have been so profoundly touched by your music and words. You knew yourself and you knew us like no one else ever has.
We held a vigil in front of your home. We sang your songs, which we all knew and we washed the Parc du Portugual with our tears.
In his commentary, Ivaškevičius wrote about your song and about the stunning loss of talent and intellect that was and almost was destroyed.
“Leonard Cohen is also from here. You must surely have heard his love ballad, “Dance Me to the End of Love,” and perhaps you have even danced to this song. If not, give it a listen. It turns out it’s about our Jews … in detention waiting to be brought out and shot:
Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin
Dance me through the panic ’til I’m gathered safely in
Lift me like an olive branch and be my homeward dove
Dance me to the end of love.”
With love,
Irene Lilienheim Angelico
Today the world morns the passing of Leonard Nimoy of Star Trek fame. Here from an event celebrating the arrival of the space shuttle Enterprise to New York City in 2012. The Enterprise, the first space shuttle, was originally to be named the Constitution. A write in campaign by Star Trek fans convinced the government to go with the Enterprise.
Event Photography
Space Shuttle Enterprise Arrival
JFK Airport
New York , NY
©2012 Bill Wilson Photography
Etta Leona Leonard was born in Cranberry, Ohio on 18 September 1883, the daughter of Benjamin Levi Leonard (1858-1945) and Cora Matilda Wagner (1860-1904). Leona grew up on a farm in Ohio and in 1900 was living with her parents and seven siblings in Venice, Seneca County, Ohio. Circa 1910, she married Daniel Holzworth (born circa 1871 in Missouri); the couple does not appear to have had children. In 1910, Leona and Daniel were living in Kansas City, Jackson County, Missouri, where Daniel worked as bricklayer. He would follow this occupation through the 1940 census, and the couple would remain in Kansas City. In 1930, Leona was managing seven lodgers that were staying with the couple. Etta Leona Leonard Holzworth passed away in January 1967.
big bang theory stickers ! cafeconleche.com.mx/louisroskosch.html
get them here, super limited edition until nov27th!
Leonard is a homeless man in Miami. I drove passed him and decided to stop. He is probably the friendliest guy I met there. I only had a 5 on me so I just gave it to him..you might have thought I handed him a hundred...best wishes Leonard
Commentary.
Between the North and South Downs
was a heavily wooded area, named by the Saxons, “Walden.”
It had been like this from well before the invasion of the Romans.
It is now known as the Weald, in Surrey, Sussex and Kent.
Over twenty centuries at least 70% of this forest
has been cleared for agriculture and settlements.
But with nearly 30% remaining, it is still
one of the most wooded areas of England.
The High Weald, like a central spine, east to west,
is made up of alternating clay vales and Lower Greensand sandstone ridges.
In this Spring-time image, we can see the typical landscape.
Heathland of heather and fern.
Mostly deciduous woodland in the clay vales.
A domination of coniferous forest on the drier,
less fertile, and leached sandy soils of the higher ridges.
Silver Birch, one of only two truly native trees,
seems to be anywhere and everywhere.
The High Weald provides hundreds of miles of
splendid walking, horse-riding and cycling country.
Now, in spring, the Gorse and Broom
are beginning to flower, giving a golden frame,
to the increasingly green mantle.
I regularly walk and cycle this environment.
A great place to be for mind, body and soul.