Harry Hay, one of the 1950 founders of the Mattachine Foundation and now 81 years old, and his lover, John Burnside, were burned out of their rented house in Los Angeles last May. Hay and Burnside live solely on Social Security and have not been able to find affordable housing since the fire. Anyone wishing to help one of the earliest and most central figures in the gay movement can send checks or messages of support to Friends of Harry, c/o Vortex, Box 15154, San Francisco, CA 94115-0154. Randolph Trumbach spent four weeks in June at the University of Amsterdam teaching a course on ”the model of the queen” in gay history from the 18th century to the present. The students came from the Netherlands, the United States, Finland, Switzerland, Hungary, and Japan. His co-teacher was Gert Hekma. The course was one of four, each taught by a team composed of a North American and a Dutch scholar. While in the Netherlands, Trumbach also lectured at the University of Limburg in • Maastricht and was part of a conference on space and sexuality in contemporary prostitution and homosexuality, held at SISWO, the Dutch Universities’ Center for the Social Sciences. On December 1, 1993, CLAGS will cosponsor with CUNY TV 24-hours of programming for International AIDS Awareness Day. Included in the programming will be video tapes of CLAGS’s October 15th fundraising event and its November 12th annual Kessler Lecture (See accompanying articles). Arthur S. Leonard, Professor of Law at New York Law School, has brought to our attention the fact that TIAA/CREF, the pension fund servicing most faculty participants, owns 140,350 shares of Cracker Barrel Old Country Store, Inc. A few years ago this company’s president issued a formal order to discharge all gay men and lesbians in its employ. The gay community at the time launched a major campaign against Cracker Barrel, which resulted in the cancellation of that order. But those gays and lesbians who had been discharged were not rehired and to this date, the company has refused to adopt a policy barring discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. CLAGS urges all our newsletter readers to write to John Biggs, Chairman and CEO of TIAA/CREF at 730 Third Avenue, NYC 10017-3206, asking that the Fund sell its shares of Cracker Barrel. The Australian Centre for Gay & Lesbian Research has been established at the University of Sydney. Like CLAGS, it is a multidisciplinary center, encompassing research into all aspects of homosexuality. The initiative for the Centre came from Garry Wotherspoon and Robert Aldrich. The Centre was launched on June 25-26 at an Inaugural Conference entitled “Activism in the 1990s” at the University. Anyone seeking further information can contact Dr. John Hart, Interim Director, at the Australian Centre for Gay & Lesbian Research, Room 314, Building A27, University of Sydney, Australia NSW 2006.
