March 6

Events

• Current events

• 1475 - An artist and lover - The legendary artist, Michelangelo was born on this date. He remains to this day one of the most famous Renaissance sculptors, painters, architects, and poets who exerted an unparalleled influence on the development of Western art. His life was marked by his accomplishments and is also remembered for the many boys he loved. Once, in a letter, he humorously recalls how a father described his son to him in the hopes of the boy becoming the artist's apprentice: "Once you saw him, you'd chase him into bed the minute you got home!" In the early 1530s Michelangelo was also sustaining a relationship with his much younger model Febo di Poggio. He called Febo "that little blackmailer," because Febo adopted Michelangelo as "my honorary father" and steadily demanded money, clothes, and love-gifts from him. Another of Michelangelo's lovers was Andrea Quaratesi, a boy with whose family he lived for several years. By 1542, at the age of sixty-six, he was sleeping with a thirteen-year-old boy named Francesco Cecchino de Zanobi Bracci. But in 1544 Cecchino died. In a letter to the boy's uncle, Michelangelo speaks of the youth as "the flame who consumes me" and alluded to a sexual relationship with: "My love has ratified the agreement which I made of myself to him." Michelangelo also wrote these lines to celebrate their love: "The earthy flesh, and here my bones deprived / Of their charming face and beautiful eyes, / Do yet attest for him how gracious I was in bed / When he embraced, and in what the soul doth live."

• 1997 - Loving the alien - The film Love and Death on Long Island was released on this date. It starred John Hurt as an aging British academic who mistakenly rents a teen movie called hotpants College and falls in love with the young male star of the film (played by Jason Priestly). This awakens new feelings in him that bring him to buying teenie-boper magazines, making scrapbooks of his favorites, and eventually travelling to meet his object of obsession. While not strictly speaking a pedo film, as Priestly's character is clearly in his 20s, it does address the themes of intergenerational attraction and the unpredictability of just who one will fall in love with.

• 1998 - Thought provoking theater - Jane Martin wrote a play called Mr. Bundy which premiered on this date at the Actor's Theatre of Louisville as part of the Humana Festival of New American Plays. It was described as "both disturbing and exhilarating, pulled right out of today's headlines." Mr. Bundy is a former teacher and an elderly neighbor of the Ferreby family. Through some self-righteous rednecks, they learn Mr. Bundy was once convicted of child molestation. Through innuendo and badgering, the family is led to extreme acts, including a violent physical attack on the old man. The play is troublingly convincing. Each character has at least a part of a legitimate perspective (even the little girl, who assesses it by saying "This is yucky!"), but the end result is one of hatred and intolerance. But the show forces the audience to think about their own reactions to such a situation as issues of forgiveness are lost in the face of personal fear.

• 1998 - Jesus is a pedo. Don't fuck with the Jesus! - On this date the film The Big Lebowski was released. A minor character, played by John Turturo, is a pedo who has been in jail for molesting an 8 year old girl. In one scene we see the results of his charater's tour of the neighborhood to notify his neighbors that a sex offender lives in their midst. Not exactly a pedo-positive character, but in the bizarre world that Joel and Ethan Coen create, his presence seems strangely quite normal.

• 2002 - Proof that more tolerance education - not less - is needed - Parents in California were so outraged by skits performed at an elementary school for their children that they sued the school district on this date. The basis for the suit was showing "pro-gay skits for elementary-age children without notifying parents." The skits, called "Cootie Shots: Theatrical Inoculations Against Bigotry," were performed by a San Francisco-based group called Fringe Benefits. The group designs performance skits on a wide variety of topics, including tolerance of homosexuality and cross-dressing. Parents were worried that pro-gay messages might influence their children's sexuality or make them more vulnerable to pedos. District officials said two schools invited Fringe Benefits to perform skits after receiving recommendations on the group from the Bay Area Discovery Museum for children. One of the skits chosen, they said, centered on a girl who was being teased because her brother was gay. It was shown to 3rd, 4th, and 5th graders. It looks like maybe the parents are the ones who need to see the skits and learn a lesson or two about bullying and homophobia.