Some days on the queer calendar are subtle. October 26 is not one of them. It’s the 30th anniversary of the first public intersex protest in North American history, the birthday of the Warhol superstar Lou Reed put on wax, the birthday of the Swedish poet who wrote 1984 before Orwell did, and the birth of the man who composed “Love Shack.” Pick a lane? Absolutely not. We take the whole highway.
1996: Thirty years of Hermaphrodites With Attitude
On October 26, 1996, a handful of activists from the Intersex Society of North America — Morgan Holmes and Max Beck among them, backed by allies from Transsexual Menace — marched outside the American Academy of Pediatrics conference in Boston. Their sign read HERMAPHRODITES WITH ATTITUDE, which remains one of the greatest protest slogans ever committed to poster board, and their demand was almost unbearably reasonable: stop performing “normalizing” surgeries on intersex infants who cannot consent to them.
It was the first public demonstration by intersex people in North America. It’s been marked annually as Intersex Awareness Day since 2004, and the movement it kicked off has real wins on the board — Malta became the first country to ban nonconsensual intersex surgeries in 2015, and others have followed. Thirty years on, the protest’s most radical idea — that maybe doctors could wait until patients can form opinions about their own bodies — is still treated as a “debate.” The attitude, fortunately, breeds true.
1946: Holly Woodlawn, dumpster-diver of destiny
Born October 26, 1946, in Juana Díaz, Puerto Rico, Holly Woodlawn ran away from home at fifteen, hitchhiked to New York, invented her name out of Breakfast at Tiffany’s and a passing road sign, and became a Warhol superstar by way of Paul Morrissey’s Trash (1970) — the film in which she retrieves a handbag from a garbage can like it’s couture. Lou Reed froze her into the opening verse of “Walk on the Wild Side”: “Holly came from Miami, FLA.” Puerto Rico, actually, but try rhyming Juana Díaz. “Plucked her eyebrows on the way, shaved her legs, and then he was a she.” He, Lou? We forgive you. It was 1972.
Her Trash performance was so good it inspired a write-in Oscar campaign — Gore Vidal was a fan — which the Academy ignored, on the grounds that the Academy in 1970 was the Academy. She died in 2015 and is buried in Hollywood Forever Cemetery, which is the most Holly Woodlawn sentence ever written.
1900: Karin Boye, Sweden’s poet of dystopia and desire
Long before dystopia got its own shelf in the bookstore, Karin Boye wrote Kallocain (1940), the story of a totalitarian state that uses a truth serum to liquidate its citizens’ inner lives — nine years before Orwell got around to 1984, and arguably bleaker, because Boye’s real subject is what happens when the last private thing you own is the inside of your own head. In 1931 she co-founded the literary magazine Spektrum and co-translated T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land into Swedish, a résumé line that guarantees you a statue.
She also wrote Kris (1934), a novel about a young woman falling in love with another woman — on purpose, out loud, in 1934 — and spent her last years with her partner Margot Hanel, a German Jewish refugee she met in Berlin. Boye died in 1941, at forty, and Hanel followed weeks later; grief keeps its own ledger. Boye’s poem “Yes, of course it hurts” — about how growth only happens by splitting open — is still one of the most-loved poems in Sweden. She understood Octobers like this one perfectly.
1953: Keith Strickland, architect of the Love Shack
Born October 26, 1953, in Athens, Georgia: Keith Strickland, founding member of the B-52’s, the greatest party band ever assembled by any civilization. He started behind the drum kit; when guitarist Ricky Wilson died in 1985, Strickland moved to guitar and wrote the music that became Cosmic Thing — the album with “Love Shack” and “Roam,” the soundtrack to every queer wedding, brunch and breakdown since 1989.
He came out publicly in 1992 with zero anguish: “Does it really matter if people come out in rock ’n’ roll?… When Melissa Etheridge came out, her next album went through the roof!” He retired from touring in 2012 but remains a member of the band, and “Love Shack” still works, so.
Meanwhile, in 1885…
Offered without further comment: on this day in 1885, per the gay history chronicles, Pennsylvania saw its first reported court case under the state’s 1879 fellatio statute — and the conviction was overturned so a new trial could determine whether the “victim” had actually been an accomplice. Six years of sodomy law and the courts were only then arriving at the obvious question.
Happy Intersex Awareness Day, happy birthday Holly, Karin and Keith — see you next week, when the calendar does it all over again.
