title: John Donne

text: Donne was born in London in 1571 or 1572, into a recusant Roman Catholic family when practice of that religion was illegal in England. Donne was the third of six children. His father, also named John Donne, married to one Elizabeth Heywood, was of Welsh descent and a warden of the Ironmongers Company in the City of London. However, he avoided unwelcome government attention out of fear of persecution.


title: John Donne

text: His father died in 1576, when Donne was four years old, leaving his mother, Elizabeth, with the responsibility of raising the children alone. Heywood was also from a recusant Roman Catholic family, the daughter of John Heywood, the playwright, and sister of the Reverend Jasper Heywood, a Jesuit priest and translator. She was also a great-niece of Thomas More. A few months after her husband died, Donne's mother married Dr. John Syminges, a wealthy widower with three children of his own.


title: John Donne

text: Donne was educated privately; however, there is no evidence to support the popular claim that he was taught by Jesuits. In 1583, at the age of 11, he began studies at Hart Hall, now Hertford College, Oxford. After three years of studies there, Donne was admitted to the University of Cambridge, where he studied for another three years. Donne, however, could not obtain a degree from either institution because of his Catholicism, since he refused to take the Oath of Supremacy required to graduate. In 1591 he was accepted as a student at the Thavies Inn legal school, one of the Inns of Chancery in London. On 6 May 1592, he was admitted to Lincoln's Inn, one of the Inns of Court.


title: John Donne

text: In 1593, five years after the defeat of the Spanish Armada and during the intermittent Anglo-Spanish War (1585–1604), Queen Elizabeth issued the first English statute against sectarian dissent from the Church of England, titled "An Act for restraining Popish recusants". It defined "Popish recusants" as those "convicted for not repairing to some Church, Chapel, or usual place of Common Prayer to hear Divine Service there, but forbearing the same contrary to the tenor of the laws and statutes heretofore made and provided in that behalf". Donne's brother Henry was also a university student prior to his arrest in 1593 for harbouring a Catholic priest, William Harrington, and died in Newgate Prison of bubonic plague, leading Donne to begin questioning his Catholic faith.


title: John Donne

text: During and after his education, Donne spent much of his considerable inheritance on women, literature, pastimes and travel. Although no record details precisely where Donne travelled, he did cross Europe and later fought alongside the Earl of Essex and Sir Walter Raleigh against the Spanish at Cadiz (1596) and the Azores (1597), and witnessed the loss of the Spanish flagship, the "San Felipe". According to his earliest biographer,


title: John Donne

text: By the age of 25 he was well prepared for the diplomatic career he appeared to be seeking. He was appointed chief secretary to the Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, Sir Thomas Egerton, and was established at Egerton's London home, York House, Strand close to the Palace of Whitehall, then the most influential social centre in England.


title: John Donne

text: During the next four years, Donne fell in love with Egerton's niece Anne More, and they were secretly married just before Christmas in 1601, against the wishes of both Egerton and Anne's father George More, who was Lieutenant of the Tower. Upon discovery, this wedding ruined Donne's career, getting him dismissed and put in Fleet Prison, along with the Church of England priest Samuel Brooke, who married them, and his brother Christopher, who stood in, in the absence of George More, to give Anne away. Donne was released shortly thereafter when the marriage was proved to be valid, and he soon secured the release of the other two. Walton tells us that when Donne wrote to his wife to tell her about losing his post, he wrote after his name: "John Donne, Anne Donne, Un-done." It was not until 1609 that Donne was reconciled with his father-in-law and received his wife's dowry.


title: John Donne

text: After his release, Donne had to accept a retired country life in a small house in Pyrford, Surrey, owned by Anne's cousin, Sir Francis Wooley, where they lived until the end of 1604. In spring 1605 they moved to another small house in Mitcham, Surrey, where he scraped a meagre living as a lawyer, while Anne Donne bore a new baby almost every year. Though he also worked as an assistant pamphleteer to Thomas Morton writing anti-Catholic pamphlets, Donne was in a constant state of financial insecurity.


title: John Donne

text: Anne gave birth to twelve children in sixteen years of marriage (including two stillbirths—their eighth and then, in 1617, their last child); indeed, she spent most of her married life either pregnant or nursing. The ten surviving children were Constance, John, George, Francis, Lucy (named after Donne's patron Lucy, Countess of Bedford, her godmother), Bridget, Mary, Nicholas, Margaret and Elizabeth. Three (Francis, Nicholas and Mary) died before they were ten. In a state of despair that almost drove him to kill himself, Donne noted that the death of a child would mean one mouth fewer to feed, but he could not afford the burial expenses. During this time, Donne wrote but did not publish "Biathanatos", his defense of suicide. His wife died on 15 August 1617, five days after giving birth to their twelfth child, a still-born baby. Donne mourned her deeply, and wrote of his love and loss in his Holy Sonnet.


title: John Donne

text: In 1602, John Donne was elected as Member of Parliament (MP) for the constituency of Brackley, but the post was not a paid position. Queen Elizabeth I died in 1603, being succeeded by King James VI of Scotland as King James I of England. The fashion for coterie poetry of the period gave Donne a means to seek patronage, and many of his poems were written for wealthy friends or patrons, especially for MP Sir Robert Drury of Hawsted (1575–1615), whom he met in 1610 and who became his chief patron, furnishing him and his family an apartment in his large house in Drury Lane.


title: John Donne

text: In 1610 and 1611, Donne wrote two anti-Catholic polemics: "Pseudo-Martyr" and "Ignatius His Conclave" for Morton. He then wrote two Anniversaries, "" (1611) and "Of the Progress of the Soul" (1612) for Drury.


title: John Donne

text: Donne sat as an MP again, this time for Taunton, in the Addled Parliament of 1614 but though he attracted five appointments within its business he made no recorded speech. Although King James was pleased with Donne's work, he refused to reinstate him at court and instead urged him to take holy orders. At length, Donne acceded to the king's wishes, and in 1615 was ordained priest in the Church of England.


title: John Donne

text: In 1615, Donne was awarded an honorary doctorate in divinity from Cambridge University, and became a Royal Chaplain in the same year, and a reader of divinity at Lincoln's Inn in 1616, where he served in the chapel as minister until 1622. In 1618, he became chaplain to Viscount Doncaster, who was on an embassy to the . Donne did not return to England until 1620. In 1621, Donne was made Dean of St Paul's, a leading and well-paid position in the Church of England, which he held until his death in 1631.


title: John Donne

text: At the same time he was granted the living as rector of a number of parishes, including Blunham, in Bedfordshire. Blunham Parish Church has an imposing stained glass window commemorating Donne, designed by Derek Hunt. During Donne's period as dean his daughter Lucy died, aged eighteen. In late November and early December 1623 he suffered a nearly fatal illness, thought to be either typhus or a combination of a cold followed by a period of fever.


title: John Donne

text: During his convalescence he wrote a series of meditations and prayers on health, pain and sickness that were published as a book in 1624 under the title of "Devotions upon Emergent Occasions". One of these meditations, , contains the well-known phrases "No man is an "Iland"" (often modernised as "No man is an island") and "...for whom the "bell" tolls". In 1624, he became vicar of St Dunstan-in-the-West, and in 1625 a prolocutor to Charles I. He earned a reputation as an eloquent preacher and 160 of his sermons have survived, including Death's Duel, his famous delivered at the Palace of Whitehall before King Charles I in February 1631.


title: John Donne

text: Donne died on 31 March 1631 and was buried in old St Paul's Cathedral, where a memorial statue of him by Nicholas Stone was erected with a Latin epigraph probably composed by himself. The memorial was one of the few to survive the Great Fire of London in 1666 and is now in St Paul's Cathedral. The statue was said by Izaac Walton in his biography to have been modelled from the life by Donne in order to suggest his appearance at the resurrection; it was to start a vogue in such monuments during the course of the 17th century. In 2012, a bust of the poet by Nigel Boonham was unveiled outside in the cathedral churchyard.


title: John Donne

text: Donne's earliest poems showed a developed knowledge of English society coupled with sharp criticism of its problems. His satires dealt with common Elizabethan topics, such as corruption in the legal system, mediocre poets and pompous courtiers. His images of sickness, vomit, manure and plague reflected his strongly satiric view of a society populated by fools and knaves. His third satire, however, deals with the problem of true religion, a matter of great importance to Donne. He argued that it was better to examine carefully one's religious convictions than blindly to follow any established tradition, for none would be saved at the Final Judgment, by claiming "A Harry, or a Martin taught [them] this."


title: John Donne

text: Donne's early career was also notable for his erotic poetry, especially his elegies, in which he employed unconventional metaphors, such as a flea biting two lovers being compared to sex. Donne did not publish these poems, although they circulated widely in manuscript form. One such, a previously unknown manuscript that is believed to be one of the largest contemporary collections of Donne's work (among that of others), was found at Melford Hall in November 2018.


title: John Donne

text: Some have speculated that Donne's numerous illnesses, financial strain and the deaths of his friends all contributed to the development of a more sombre and pious tone in his later poems. The change can be clearly seen in "" (1611), a poem that Donne wrote in memory of Elizabeth Drury, daughter of his patron, Sir Robert Drury of Hawstead, Suffolk. This poem treats Elizabeth's demise with extreme gloominess, using it as a symbol for the fall of man and the destruction of the universe.


title: John Donne

text: The increasing gloominess of Donne's tone may also be observed in the religious works that he began writing during the same period. Having converted to the Anglican Church, Donne quickly became noted for his sermons and religious poems. Towards the end of his life Donne wrote works that challenged death, and the fear that it inspired in many, on the grounds of his belief that those who die are sent to Heaven to live eternally. One example of this challenge is his Holy Sonnet X, "Death Be Not Proud".


title: John Donne

text: Even as he lay dying during Lent in 1631, he rose from his sickbed and delivered the Death's Duel sermon, which was later described as his own funeral sermon. Death's Duel portrays life as a steady descent to suffering and death; death becomes merely another process of life, in which the 'winding sheet' of the womb is the same as that of the grave. Hope is seen in salvation and immortality through an embrace of God, Christ and the Resurrection.


title: John Donne

text: His work has received much criticism over the years, especially concerning his metaphysical form. Donne is generally considered the most prominent member of the metaphysical poets, a phrase coined in 1781 by Samuel Johnson, following a comment on Donne by John Dryden. Dryden had written of Donne in 1693: "He affects the metaphysics, not only in his satires, but in his amorous verses, where nature only should reign; and perplexes the minds of the fair sex with nice speculations of philosophy, when he should engage their hearts, and entertain them with the softnesses of love."


title: John Donne

text: In "Life of Cowley" (from Samuel Johnson's 1781 work of biography and criticism "Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets"), Johnson refers to the beginning of the 17th century in which there "appeared a race of writers that may be termed the metaphysical poets". Donne's immediate successors in poetry therefore tended to regard his works with ambivalence, with the Neoclassical poets regarding his conceits as abuse of the metaphor. However, he was revived by Romantic poets such as Coleridge and Browning, though his more recent revival in the early 20th century by poets such as T. S. Eliot and critics like F. R. Leavis tended to portray him, with approval, as an anti-Romantic.


title: John Donne

text: Donne is considered a master of the metaphysical conceit, an extended metaphor that combines two vastly different ideas into a single idea, often using imagery. An example of this is his equation of lovers with saints in "The Canonization". Unlike the conceits found in other Elizabethan poetry, most notably Petrarchan conceits, which formed clichéd comparisons between more closely related objects (such as a rose and love), metaphysical conceits go to a greater depth in comparing two completely unlike objects. One of the most famous of Donne's conceits is found in "" where he compares the apartness of two separated lovers to the working of the legs of a compass.


title: John Donne

text: Donne's works are also witty, employing paradoxes, puns and subtle yet remarkable analogies. His pieces are often ironic and cynical, especially regarding love and human motives. Common subjects of Donne's poems are love (especially in his early life), death (especially after his wife's death) and religion.


title: John Donne

text: John Donne's poetry represented a shift from classical forms to more personal poetry. Donne is noted for his poetic metre, which was structured with changing and jagged rhythms that closely resemble casual speech (it was for this that the more classical-minded Ben Jonson commented that "Donne, for not keeping of accent, deserved hanging").


title: John Donne

text: Some scholars believe that Donne's literary works reflect the changing trends of his life, with love poetry and satires from his youth and religious sermons during his later years. Other scholars, such as Helen Gardner, question the validity of this dating—most of his poems were published posthumously (1633). The exception to these is his "Anniversaries", which were published in 1612 and "Devotions upon Emergent Occasions" published in 1624. His sermons are also dated, sometimes specifically by date and year.


title: John Donne

text: Donne is remembered in the Calendar of Saints of the Church of England, the Episcopal Church liturgical calendar and the Calendar of Saints of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America for his life as both poet and priest. His commemoration is on 31 March.


title: John Donne

text: During his lifetime several likenesses were made of the poet. The earliest was the anonymous portrait of 1594 now in the National Portrait Gallery, London, which was restored in 2012. One of the earliest Elizabethan portraits of an author, the fashionably dressed poet is shown darkly brooding on his love. The portrait was described in Donne's will as "that picture of myne wych is taken in the shaddowes", and bequeathed by him to Robert Kerr, 1st Earl of Ancram. Other paintings include a 1616 head and shoulders after Isaac Oliver, also in the National Portrait Gallery, and a 1622 head and shoulders in the Victoria and Albert Museum. In 1911, the young Stanley Spencer devoted a visionary painting to "John Donne arriving in heaven" (1911) which is now in the Fitzwilliam Museum.


title: John Donne

text: Donne's reception until the 20th century was influenced by the publication of his writings in the 17th century. Because Donne avoided publication during his life, the majority of his works were brought to the press by others in the decades after his death. These publications present what Erin McCarthy calls a "teleological narrative of Donne's growth" from young rake "Jack Donne" to reverend divine "Dr. Donne". For example, while the first edition of "Poems, by J. D." (1633) mingled amorous and pious verse indiscriminately, all editions after 1635 separated poems into "Songs and Sonnets" and "Divine Poems". This organization "promulgated the tale of Jack Donne's transformation into Doctor Donne and made it the dominant way of understanding Donne's life and work."


title: John Donne

text: A similar effort to justify Donne's early writings appeared in the publication of his prose. This pattern can be seen in a 1652 volume that combines texts from throughout Donne's career, including flippant works like "Ignatius his Conclave" and more pious writings like "Essays in Divinity." In the preface, Donne's son "unifies the otherwise disparate texts around an impression of Donne's divinity" by comparing his father's varied writing to Jesus' miracles. Christ ""began his first" Miracle "here", "by turning" Water "into" Wine, "and made it his last to ascend from" Earth "to" Heaven."


title: John Donne

text: Donne first wrote ""things conducing to cheerfulness & entertainment of" Mankind," and later ""change[d] his conversation from" Men "to" Angels." Another figure who contributed to Donne's legacy as a rake-turned-preacher was Donne's first biographer Izaak Walton. Walton's biography separated Donne's life into two stages, comparing Donne's life to the transformation of St. Paul. Walton writes, "where [Donne] had been a Saul… in his irregular youth," he became "a Paul, and preach[ed] salvation to his brethren."


title: John Donne

text: The idea that Donne's writings reflect two distinct stages of his life remains common; however, many scholars have challenged this understanding. In 1948, Evelyn Simpson wrote, "a close study of his works... makes it clear that his was no case of dual personality. He was not a Jekyll-Hyde in Jacobean dress... There is an essential unity underlying the flagrant and manifold contradictions of his temperament."


title: John Donne

text: After Donne's death, a number of poetical tributes were paid to him, of which one of the principal (and most difficult to follow) was his friend Lord Herbert of Cherbury's "Elegy for Doctor Donne". Posthumous editions of Donne's poems were accompanied by several "Elegies upon the Author" over the course of the next two centuries. Six of these were written by fellow churchmen, others by such courtly writers as Thomas Carew, Sidney Godolphin and Endymion Porter. In 1963 came Joseph Brodsky's "The Great Elegy for John Donne".


title: John Donne

text: Beginning in the 20th century, several historical novels appeared taking as their subject various episodes in Donne's life. His courtship of Anne More is the subject of Elizabeth Gray Vining's "Take Heed of Loving Me: A novel about John Donne" (1963) and Maeve Haran's "The Lady and the Poet" (2010). Both characters also make interspersed appearances in Mary Novik's "Conceit" (2007), where the main focus is on their rebellious daughter Pegge. English treatments include Garry O'Connor's "Death's Duel: a novel of John Donne" (2015), which deals with the poet as a young man.


title: John Donne

text: He also plays a significant role in Christie Dickason's "The Noble Assassin" (2012), a novel based on the life of Donne's patron and (the author claims) his lover, Lucy Russell, Countess of Bedford. Finally there is Bryan Crockett's "Love's Alchemy: a John Donne Mystery" (2015), in which the poet, blackmailed into service in Robert Cecil's network of spies, attempts to avert political disaster and at the same time outwit Cecil.


title: John Donne

text: There were musical settings of Donne's lyrics even during his lifetime and in the century following his death. These included Alfonso Ferrabosco the younger's ("So, so, leave off this last lamenting kisse" in his 1609 Ayres); John Cooper's ("The Message"); Henry Lawes' ("Break of Day"); John Dowland's ("Break of Day" and "To ask for all thy love"); and settings of "A Hymn to God the Father" by John Hilton the younger and Pelham Humfrey (published 1688).


title: John Donne

text: After the 17th century, there were no more until the start of the 20th century with Havergal Brian ("A nocturnal on St Lucy's Day", first performed in 1905), Eleanor Everest Freer ("Break of Day, published in 1905) and Walford Davies ("The Cross", 1909) among the earliest. In 1916–18, the composer Hubert Parry set Donne's "Holy Sonnet 7" ("At the round earth's imagined corners") to music in his choral work, "Songs of Farewell". Regina Hansen Willman (1914-1965) set Donne's "First Holy Sonnet" for voice and string trio. In 1945, Benjamin Britten set nine of Donne's Holy Sonnets in his song cycle for voice and piano "The Holy Sonnets of John Donne". in 1968, Williametta Spencer used Donne's text for her choral work "At the Round Earth's Imagined Corners." Among them is also the choral setting of "Negative Love" that opens "Harmonium" (1981), as well as the aria setting of "Holy Sonnet XIV" at the end of the 1st act of "Doctor Atomic", both by John Adams.


title: John Donne

text: There have been settings in popular music as well. One is the version of the song "Go and Catch a Falling Star" on John Renbourn's debut album "John Renbourn" (1966), in which the last line is altered to "False, ere I count one, two, three". On their 1992 album "Duality", the English Neoclassical dark wave band In the Nursery used a recitation of the entirety of Donne's "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" for the track "Mecciano" and an augmented version of "A Fever" for the track "Corruption."


title: John Donne

text: Prose texts by Donne have also been set to music. In 1954, Priaulx Rainier set some in her "Cycle for Declamation" for solo voice. In 2009, the American Jennifer Higdon composed the choral piece "On the Death of the Righteous", based on Donne's sermons. Still more recent is the Russian minimalist Anton Batagov's " I Fear No More, selected songs and meditations of John Donne" (2015).


title: John Donne

text: Singer-songwriter Van Morrison refers to the poet in his song "Rave On, John Donne" from his 1983 album "Inarticulate Speech of the Heart".


title: Christopher Abbott

text: Christopher Jacob Abbott (born February 1, 1986) is an American actor. Abbott made his feature film debut in "Martha Marcy May Marlene" (2011). Abbott's other notable films include "Hello I Must Be Going" (2012) "The Sleepwalker" (2014) and On the Count of Three (2021). In 2015, Abbott starred as the titular character in the critically acclaimed film "James White". In 2017, he starred opposite Joel Edgerton in the psychological horror film "It Comes at Night". In 2018, he portrayed astronaut David Scott in the film "First Man", and a reporter in "Vox Lux". Abbott portrayed John Yossarian as the lead role in the 2019 miniseries "Catch-22" based on the Joseph Heller novel of the same name, for which he was nominated for the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Miniseries or Television Film. In 2020, he co-starred in the films "Black Bear", "Possessor" and "The World to Come".


title: Christopher Abbott

text: Abbott is mostly known for his role as Charlie Dattolo in the HBO comedy-drama series "Girls" and for his role as Mason Tannetti in "The Sinner". Abbott has also had an extensive career on stage, having performed in both Broadway and Off-Broadway productions.


title: Christopher Abbott

text: Abbott was born in Greenwich, Connecticut, the son of Anna (née Servidio) and Orville Abbott. He has an older sister, Christina. Abbott has described himself as being a "Euro-mutt", with distant Portuguese and Eastern European ancestry. He spent his early years in Chickahominy, a working-class, heavily Italian-American neighborhood in Greenwich, and grew up in Stamford. Abbott worked at a local video store and at his friend's wine store. Abbott attended Norwalk Community College shortly before he began studying acting at HB Studio. Abbott moved to New York City in 2006 to be closer to school.


title: Christopher Abbott

text: After moving to New York, Abbott began going to big open calls for plays while in school. This is how Abbott got his two first acting jobs, Off-Broadway. The first play, "Good Boys and True", opened in the spring of 2008 and was written by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and directed by Scott Ellis. It followed a scandal at a prep school. Abbott played the lead character's (Brian J. Smith) gay best friend, Justin. The second play, "Mouth to Mouth", opened in the fall of 2008. The mordant and mournful play about the limits of friendship and family was written by Kevin Elyot and directed by Mark Brokaw. Abbott played the sympathetic 15-year-old son of Laura (Lisa Emery). Abbott received positive reviews for both productions. Abbott followed this with guest-starring roles in the comedy series "Nurse Jackie" and the police procedural series "" . In 2010, Abbott co-starred opposite Cristin Milioti and Laila Robins in the play "That Face" at the Manhattan Theatre Club.


title: Christopher Abbott

text: Abbott made his feature film debut in the 2011 drama thriller "Martha Marcy May Marlene" opposite Elizabeth Olsen. Written and directed by Sean Durkin, the filmed premiered at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival in January, and had a limited release in the United States on October 21, 2011. It was met with positive reviews. The same year, Abbott made his Broadway debut in the revival of the play "The House of Blue Leaves" opposite Ben Stiller and Edie Falco. Directed by David Cromer, the play opened in April 2011. Abbott played the part of the sullen, recently drafted son, Ronnie Shaughnessy, for which Abbott received positive reviews.


title: Christopher Abbott

text: In 2012, Abbott co-starred opposite Melanie Lynskey in the comedy-drama film "Hello I Must Be Going". The film premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, and was released theatrically in the United States on September 7, 2012. Critic Roger Ebert praised the film and Abbott's performance. Abbott gained public recognition for his role as the sweet, docile boyfriend of Marnie (Allison Williams), Charlie Dattolo in the HBO comedy-drama series "Girls". Created by Lena Dunham, the series premiered on April 15, 2012. Abbott decided to quit the series after season two's finale which left the fans of the series in shock. Abbott stated that the reason why he left was because he couldn't relate to the character. Before leaving "Girls", Abbott starred in a series of short films opposite model-actress Sheila Márquez for Free People and guest-starred in an episode of the comedy-drama series "Enlightened" opposite Luke Wilson.


title: Christopher Abbott

text: After leaving the series, Abbott returned to the theatre in the fall of 2013 in the play "Where We're Born" by Lucy Thurber at the Rattlestick Playwrights Theater. The Jackson Gay-directed play featured Abbott opposite a cast that included Betty Gilpin. Abbott received positive reviews for his role as Tony. In 2014, Abbott co-starred in the drama film "The Sleepwalker", co-written by his good friend Brady Corbet. It premiered in-competition in the "US Dramatic Category" at 2014 Sundance Film Festival on January 20, 2014. It was met with mixed to positive reviews. Abbott also co-starred opposite Sam Rockwell and Nina Arianda in the 2014 production of Sam Shepard's play "Fool for Love" at the Williamstown Theatre Festival. Abbott received positive reviews for his performance in the Daniel Aukin-directed play. In his second film of 2014, Abbott played the supporting role of Louis Servidio in J. C. Chandor's crime drama film "A Most Violent Year". Starring Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain, the film had its world premiere at the AFI Fest on November 6, 2014 at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood and received a limited release on December 31, 2014.


title: Christopher Abbott

text: In the Fall of 2015, Abbott played Elias Schreiber-Hoffman in the Annie Baker play "John" opposite Georgia Engel and Lois Smith. Directed by Sam Gold, the play took place at the Signature Theatre. Abbott's performance received positive reviews and the play was chosen as one of the best plays of 2015 by "The New York Times". Abbott starred as the title character in the drama "James White" opposite Cynthia Nixon, directed by Josh Mond. The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on January 23, 2015 and received a theatrical limited release on November 13, 2015. It was met with positive reviews and Abbott received a nomination for the Independent Spirit Award for Best Male Lead.


title: Christopher Abbott

text: In 2016, Abbott co-starred in the comedy war film "Whiskey Tango Foxtrot", opposite Tina Fey and Martin Freeman, released on March 4, 2016. Abbott also returned for an episode of "Girls", in the series' fifth season. The episode was critically acclaimed and lauded as one of the series' best episodes ever. In the summer of 2016, Abbott co-starred opposite Marisa Tomei in the Trip-Cullman production of Tennessee Williams' play "The Rose Tattoo" at the Williamstown Theatre Festival, for which Abbott received positive reviews. Abbott co-starred opposite Olivia Cooke in the American independent drama film "Katie Says Goodbye", which premiered at the 2016 Toronto International Film Festival.


title: Christopher Abbott

text: Abbott starred alongside Joel Edgerton and Riley Keough in Trey Edward Shults's horror film "It Comes at Night", which was released on June 9, 2017. He co-starred in Jamie M. Dagg's 2017 thriller "Sweet Virginia", opposite Jon Bernthal, Imogen Poots and Rosemarie DeWitt. He also co-starred opposite Jessica Biel and Bill Pullman in the television series "The Sinner", which debuted in 2017. Abbott also starred opposite Mia Wasikowska in Nicolas Pesce's film "Piercing" (2018), based on the novel of the same name.


title: Christopher Abbott

text: Abbott will next star in John Michael McDonagh's "The Forgiven", Zachary Wigon's second feature film "Sanctuary", and Yorgos Lanthimos' "Poor Things". He is also set to make his television return as Stan in the Apple TV+ anthology series "The Crowded Room", alongside Tom Holland and Amanda Seyfried. Filming of the series had begun by March 31, 2022 in New York City. The same month, he joined Aaron Taylor-Johnson in "Kraven the Hunter" as the film's main villain, which was reported to be the Foreigner. Principal photography began on March 20, 2022.


title: Christopher Abbott

text: In February 2022, it was announced that Abbott would reteam John Michael McDonagh in "Fear Is The Rider", co-starring Abbey Lee. In May 2022, he signed to star in Justin Anderson’s directorial debut "Swimming Home", an adaptation of the Booker Prize-nominated novel of the same name by Deborah Levy. He is also set to voice Reed, an art dealer, in the upcoming adult animated music television series based on the upcoming album of the same name by American musician and actor Kid Cudi. The series will premiere on Netflix.


title: Christopher Abbott

text: Abbott lives in New York. Abbott considers John Cassavetes to be the model for the type of creative life he would like to emulate.


title: Third gender

text: Third gender is a concept in which individuals are categorized, either by themselves or by society, as neither man nor woman. It is also a social category present in societies that recognize three or more genders. The term "third" is usually understood to mean "other", though some anthropologists and sociologists have described fourth and fifth genders.


title: Third gender

text: The state of personally identifying as, or being identified by society as, a man, a woman, or other, is usually also defined by the individual's gender identity and gender role in the particular culture in which they live.


title: Third gender

text: Most cultures use a gender binary, having two genders (boys/men and girls/women). In cultures with a third or fourth gender, these genders may represent very different things. To Native Hawaiians and Tahitians, "Māhū" is an intermediate state between man and woman, or a "person of indeterminate gender". Some traditional Diné Native Americans of the Southwestern US acknowledge a spectrum of four genders: feminine woman, masculine woman, feminine man, and masculine man. The term "third gender" has also been used to describe the "hijras" of India who have gained legal identity, fa'afafine of Polynesia, and Balkan sworn virgins. A culture recognizing a third gender does not in itself mean that they were valued by that culture, and often is the result of explicit devaluation of women in that culture.


title: Third gender

text: While found in a number of non-Western cultures, concepts of "third", "fourth", and "some" gender roles are still somewhat new to mainstream Western culture and conceptual thought. The concept is most likely to be embraced in the modern LGBT or queer subcultures. While mainstream Western scholars—notably anthropologists who have tried to write about the South Asian "hijras" or the Native American "gender variant" and "two-spirit" people—have often sought to understand the term "third gender" solely in the language of the modern LGBT community, other scholars—especially Indigenous scholars—stress that mainstream scholars' lack of cultural understanding and context has led to widespread misrepresentation of the people these scholars place in the third gender category, as well as misrepresentations of the cultures in question, including whether or not this concept actually applies to these cultures at all.


title: Third gender

text: Since at least the 1970s, anthropologists have described gender categories in some cultures which they could not adequately explain using a two-gender framework. At the same time, feminists began to draw a distinction between (biological) sex and (social/psychological) gender.


title: Third gender

text: Anthropologist Michael G. Peletz believes our notions of different types of genders (including the attitudes toward the third gender) deeply affect our lives and reflect our values in society. In Peletz' book, "Gender, Sexuality, and Body Politics in Modern Asia", he describes:


title: Third gender

text: Gender may be recognized and organized differently in different cultures. In some non-Western cultures, gender may not be seen as binary, or people may be seen as being able to cross freely between male and female, or to exist in a state that is in-between, or neither. In some cultures being third gender may be associated with the gift of being able to mediate between the world of the spirits and world of humans. For cultures with these spiritual beliefs, it is generally seen as a positive thing, though some third gender people have also been accused of witchcraft and persecuted. In most western cultures, people who do not conform to heteronormative ideals are often seen as sick, disordered, or insufficiently formed.


title: Third gender

text: The Indigenous "māhū" of Hawaii are seen as embodying an intermediate state between man and woman, or as people "of indeterminate gender", while some traditional Dineh of the Southwestern US recognize a spectrum of four genders: feminine woman, masculine woman, feminine man, masculine man. The term "third gender" has also been used to describe the "hijras" of South Asia who have gained legal identity, the "fa'afafine" of Polynesia, and the Albanian sworn virgins.


title: Third gender

text: In some Indigenous communities in Africa, a woman can be recognized as a "female husband" who enjoys all of the privileges of men and is recognized as such, but whose femaleness, while not openly acknowledged, is not forgotten either.


title: Third gender

text: The "hijras" of India are one of the most recognized groups of third gender people. Some western commentators (Hines and Sanger) have theorized that this could be a result of the Hindu belief in reincarnation, in which gender, sex, and even species can change from lifetime to lifetime, perhaps allowing for a more fluid interpretation. There are other cultures in which the third gender is seen as an intermediate state of being rather than as a movement from one conventional sex to the other.


title: Third gender

text: In a study of people in the United States who thought themselves to be members of a third gender, Ingrid M. Sell found that they typically felt different from the age of 5. Because of both peer and parental pressure, those growing up with the most ambiguous appearances had the most troubled childhoods and difficulties later in life. Sell also discovered similarities between the third genders of the East and those of the West. Nearly half of those interviewed were healers or in the medical profession. Many of them, again like their Eastern counterparts, were artistic, and several were able to make a living from their artistic abilities. The capacity to mediate between men and women was a common skill, and third genders were oftentimes thought to possess an unusually wide perspective and the ability to understand both sides. A notable result of Sell's study is that 93% of the third genders interviewed, again like their Eastern counterparts, reported “paranormal”-type abilities.


title: Third gender

text: In recent years, some Western societies have begun to recognize non-binary or genderqueer identities. Some years after Alex MacFarlane, Australian Norrie May-Welby was recognized as having unspecified status. In 2016, an Oregon circuit court ruled that a resident, Elisa Rae Shupe, could legally change gender to non-binary.


title: Third gender

text: The Open Society Foundations published a report, "License to Be Yourself" in May 2014, documenting "some of the world's most progressive and rights-based laws and policies that enable trans people to change their gender identity on official documents". The report comments on the recognition of third classifications, stating:


title: Third gender

text: The report concludes that two or three options are insufficient: "A more inclusive approach would be to increase options for people to self-define their sex and gender identity."


title: Third gender

text: Before the sexual revolution of the 1960s, there was no common non-derogatory vocabulary for non-heterosexuality; terms such as "third gender" trace back to the 1860s.


title: Third gender

text: One such term, Uranian, was used in the 19th century for a person of a third sex—originally, someone with "a female psyche in a male body" who is sexually attracted to men. Its definition was later extended to cover homosexual gender variant females and a number of other sexual types. It is believed to be an English adaptation of the German word "Urning", which was first published by activist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (1825–95) in a series of five booklets (1864–65) that were collected under the title "Forschungen über das Räthsel der mannmännlichen Liebe" ("Research into the Riddle of Man-Male Love"). Ulrich developed his terminology before the first public use of the term "homosexual", which appeared in 1869 in a pamphlet published anonymously by Karl-Maria Kertbeny (1824–82). The word Uranian ("Urning") was derived by Ulrichs from the Greek goddess Aphrodite Urania, who was created out of the god Uranus' testicles; it stood for homosexuality, while Aphrodite Dionea ("Dioning") represented heterosexuality. German lesbian activist Anna Rüling used the term in a 1904 speech, "What Interest Does the Women's Movement Have in Solving the Homosexual Problem?"


title: Third gender

text: According to some scholars, the West is trying to reinterpret and redefine ancient third-gender identities to fit the Western concept of sexual orientation. In "Redefining Fa'afafine: Western Discourses and the Construction of Transgenderism in Samoa", Johanna Schmidt argues that the Western attempts to reinterpret fa'afafine, the third gender in Samoan culture, make it have more to do with sexual orientation than gender. She also argues that this is actually changing the nature of fa'afafine itself, and making it more "homosexual".


title: Third gender

text: A Samoan fa'afafine said, "But I would like to pursue a master's degree with a paper on homosexuality from a Samoan perspective that would be written for educational purposes because I believe some of the stuff that has been written about us is quite wrong."


title: Third gender

text: In "How to become a Berdache: Toward a unified analysis of gender diversity", Will Roscoe, using an anthropological term Indigenous people have always found offensive, writes that "this pattern can be traced from the earliest accounts of the Spaniards to present-day ethnographies. What has been written about berdaches reflects more the influence of existing Western discourses on gender, sexuality and the Other than what observers actually witnessed."


title: Third gender

text: Western scholars often do not make a distinction between people of the third gender and males; they are often lumped together. The scholars usually use gender roles as a way to explain sexual relations between the third gender and males. For example, when analyzing the non-normative sex gender categories in Theravada Buddhism, Peter A. Jackson says it appears that within early Buddhist communities, men who engaged in receptive anal sex were seen as feminized and were thought to be hermaphrodites. In contrast, men who engaged in oral sex were not seen as crossing sex/gender boundaries, but rather as engaging in abnormal sexual practices without threatening their masculine gendered existence.


title: Third gender

text: Some writers suggest that a third gender emerged around 1700 in England: the male sodomite. According to these writers, this was marked by the emergence of a subculture of effeminate males and their meeting places (molly houses), as well as a marked increase in hostility towards effeminate or homosexual males. People described themselves as members of a third sex in Europe from at least the 1860s with the writings of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and continuing in the late nineteenth century with Magnus Hirschfeld, John Addington Symonds, Edward Carpenter, Aimée Duc and others. These writers described themselves and those like them as being of an "inverted" or "intermediate" sex and experiencing homosexual desire, and their writing argued for social acceptance of such sexual intermediates. Many cited precedents from classical Greek and Sanskrit literature (see below).


title: Third gender

text: Throughout much of the twentieth century, the term "third sex" was a common descriptor for homosexuals and gender nonconformists, but after the gay liberation movements of the 1970s and a growing separation of the concepts of sexual orientation and gender identity, the term fell out of favor among LGBT communities and the wider public. With the renewed exploration of gender that feminism, the modern transgender movement, and queer theory has fostered, some in the contemporary West have begun to describe themselves as a third sex again. Other modern identities that cover similar ground include pangender, bigender, genderqueer, androgyne, intergender, "other gender" and "differently gendered".


title: Third gender

text: In Wilhelmine Germany, the terms "drittes Geschlecht" ("third sex") and "Mannweib" ("man-woman") were also used to describe feminists – both by their opponents and sometimes by feminists themselves. In the 1899 novel "Das dritte Geschlecht" ("The Third Sex") by Ernst von Wolzogen, feminists are portrayed as "neuters" with external female characteristics accompanied by a crippled male psyche.


title: Third gender

text: "Two-Spirit" is a modern umbrella term created at an Indigenous lesbian and gay conference in 1990 with the primary intent of replacing the offensive term, ""berdache"", which had been, and in some quarters still is, the term used for gay and gender-variant Indigenous people by non-Native anthropologists. ""Berdache"" has also been used to describe slave boys, sold into sexual servitude. Kyle De Vries writes, "Berdache is a derogatory term created by Europeans and perpetuated by anthropologists and others to define Native American/First Nations people who varied from Western norms that perceive gender, sex, and sexuality as binaries and inseparable." Mary Annette Pember adds, "Unfortunately, depending on an oral tradition to impart our ways to future generations opened the floodgates for early non-Native explorers, missionaries, and anthropologists to write books describing Native peoples and therefore bolstering their own role as experts. These writings were and still are entrenched in the perspective of the authors who were and are mostly white men." This has resulted in widely diverse traditions of gender-variant and third-gender traditions among the over 500 living Native American communities being homogenized and misrepresented under English-language names, and widely misinterpreted by both non-Native and disconnected descendants alike. "["Two-Spirit"] implies that the individual is both male and female and that these aspects are intertwined within them. The term moves away from traditional Native American/First Nations cultural identities and meanings of sexuality and gender variance. It does not take into account the terms and meanings from individual nations and tribes. ... Although "two-spirit" implies to some a spiritual nature, that one holds the spirit of two, both male and female, traditional Native Americans/First Nations peoples view this as a Western concept."


title: Third gender

text: While some have found the new term two-spirit a useful tool for intertribal organizing, it is not based in the traditional terms, and has not met with acceptance by more traditional communities; the tribes who have traditional ceremonial roles for gender-variant people use names in their own languages, and have generally rejected this "binary" neologism as "Western".


title: Third gender

text: In Mesopotamian mythology, among the earliest written records of humanity, there are references to types of people who are not men and not women. In a Sumerian creation myth found on a stone tablet from the second millennium BC, the goddess Ninmah fashions a being "with no male organ and no female organ", for whom Enki finds a position in society: "to stand before the king". In the Akkadian myth of Atra-Hasis (ca. 1700 BC), Enki instructs Nintu, the goddess of birth, to establish a "third category among the people" in addition to men and women, that includes demons who steal infants, women who are unable to give birth, and priestesses who are prohibited from bearing children. In Babylonia, Sumer and Assyria, certain types of individuals who performed religious duties in the service of Inanna/Ishtar have been described as a third gender. They worked as sacred prostitutes or Hierodules, performed ecstatic dance, music and plays, wore masks and had gender characteristics of both women and men. In Sumer, they were given the cuneiform names of "ur.sal" ("dog/man-woman") and "kur.gar.ra" (also described as a man-woman). Modern scholars, struggling to describe them using contemporary sex/gender categories, have variously described them as "living as women", or used descriptors such as hermaphrodites, eunuchs, homosexuals, transvestites, effeminate males and a range of other terms and phrases.


title: Third gender

text: Inscribed pottery shards from the Middle Kingdom of Egypt (2000–1800 BCE), found near ancient Thebes (now Luxor, Egypt), list three human genders: "tai" (male), "sḫt" ("sekhet") and "hmt" (female). "Sḫt" is often translated as "eunuch", although there is little evidence that such individuals were castrated.


title: Third gender

text: References to a third sex can be found throughout the texts of India's religious traditions like Jainism and Buddhism – and it can be inferred that Vedic culture recognised three genders. The Vedas (c. 1500 BC–500 BC) describe individuals as belonging to one of three categories, according to one's nature or prakrti. These are also spelled out in the Kama Sutra (c. 4th century AD) and elsewhere as "pums-prakrti" (male-nature), "stri-prakrti" (female-nature), and "tritiya-prakrti" (third-nature). Texts suggest that third sex individuals were well known in premodern India and included male-bodied or female-bodied people as well as intersex people, and that they can often be recognised from childhood.


title: Third gender

text: A third sex is discussed in ancient Hindu law, medicine, linguistics and astrology. The foundational work of Hindu law, the Manu Smriti (c. 200 BC–200 AD) explains the biological origins of the three sexes:


title: Third gender

text: A male child is produced by a greater quantity of male seed, a female child by the prevalence of the female; if both are equal, a third-sex child or boy and girl twins are produced; if either are weak or deficient in quantity, a failure of conception results.


title: Third gender

text: Indian linguist Patañjali's work on Sanskrit grammar, the Mahābhāṣya (c. 200 BC), states that Sanskrit's three grammatical genders are derived from three natural genders. The earliest Tamil grammar, the Tolkappiyam (3rd century BC) refers to hermaphrodites as a third "neuter" gender (in addition to a feminine category of unmasculine males). In Vedic astrology, the nine planets are each assigned to one of the three genders; the third gender, "tritiya-prakrti", is associated with Mercury, Saturn and (in particular) Ketu. In the Puranas, there are references to three kinds of devas of music and dance: apsaras (female), gandharvas (male) and kinnars (neuter).


title: Third gender

text: The two great Sanskrit epic poems, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, indicates the existence of a third gender in ancient Indic society. Some versions of Ramayana tell that in one part of the story, the hero Rama heads into exile in the forest. Halfway there, he discovers that most of the people of his hometown Ayodhya were following him. He told them, "Men and women, turn back", and with that, those who were "neither men nor women" did not know what to do, so they stayed there. When Rama returned from exile years later, he discovered them still there and blessed them, saying that there will be a day when they, too, will have a share in ruling the world.


title: Third gender

text: In the Buddhist Vinaya, codified in its present form around the 2nd century BC and said to be handed down by oral tradition from Buddha himself, there are four main sex/gender categories: males, females, "ubhatobyañjanaka" (people of a dual sexual nature) and "paṇḍaka" (people of non-normative sexual natures, perhaps originally denoting a deficiency in male sexual capacity). As the Vinaya tradition developed, the term "paṇḍaka" came to refer to a broad third sex category which encompassed intersex, male and female-bodied people with physical or behavioural attributes that were considered inconsistent with the natural characteristics of man and woman.


title: Third gender

text: In Plato's "Symposium", written around the 4th century BC, Aristophanes relates a creation myth involving three original sexes: female, male and androgynous. They are split in half by Zeus, producing four different contemporary sex/gender types which seek to be reunited with their lost other half; in this account, the modern heterosexual man and woman descend from the original androgynous sex. The myth of Hermaphroditus involves heterosexual lovers merging into their primordial androgynous sex.


title: Third gender

text: Other creation myths around the world share a belief in three original sexes, such as those from northern Thailand.


title: Third gender

text: Many have interpreted the "eunuchs" of the Ancient Eastern Mediterranean world as a third gender that inhabited a liminal space between women and men, understood in their societies as somehow neither or both. In the Historia Augusta, the eunuch body is described as a "tertium genus hominum" (a third human gender). In 77 BC, a eunuch named Genucius was prevented from claiming goods left to him in a will, on the grounds that he had voluntarily mutilated himself ("amputatis sui ipsius") and was neither a woman or a man ("neque virorum neque mulierum numero") according to Valerius Maximus. Several scholars have argued that the eunuchs in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament were understood in their time to belong to a third gender, rather than the more recent interpretations of a kind of emasculated man, or a metaphor for chastity. The early Christian theologian, Tertullian, wrote that Jesus himself was a eunuch (c. 200 AD). Tertullian also noted the existence of a third sex ("tertium sexus") among heathens: "a third race in sex... made of male and female in one." He may have been referring to the Galli, "eunuch" devotees of the Phrygian goddess Cybele, who were described as belonging to a third sex by several Roman writers.


title: Third gender

text: Mukhannathun ( "effeminate ones", "ones who resemble women", singular "mukhannath") was a term used in Classical Arabic to refer to effeminate men or people of ambiguous sex characteristics who appeared feminine or functioned socially in roles typically carried out by women. According to the Iranian scholar Mehrdad Alipour, "in the premodern period, Muslim societies were aware of five manifestations of gender ambiguity: This can be seen through figures such as the "khasi" (eunuch), the "hijra", the "mukhannath", the "mamsuh" and the "khuntha" (hermaphrodite/intersex)." Western scholars Aisya Aymanee M. Zaharin and Maria Pallotta-Chiarolli give the following explanation of the meaning of the term "mukhannath" and its derivate Arabic forms in the hadith literature: "Mukhannathun", especially those in the city of Medina, are mentioned throughout the hadith and in the works of many early Arabic and Islamic writers. During the Rashidun era and first half of the Umayyad era, they were strongly associated with music and entertainment. During the Abbasid caliphate, the word itself was used as a descriptor for men employed as dancers, musicians, or comedians.


title: Third gender

text: Mukhannathun existed in pre-Islamic Arabia, during the time of the Islamic prophet Muhammad, and early Islamic eras. A number of hadith indicate that "mukhannathun" were used as male servants for wealthy women in the early days of Islam, due to the belief that they were not sexually interested in the female body. These sources do not state that the "mukhannathun" were homosexual, only that they "lack desire".


title: Third gender

text: In later eras, the term "mukhannath" was associated with the receptive partner in gay sexual practices, an association that has persisted into the modern day. "Khanith" is a vernacular Arabic term used in some parts of the Arabian Peninsula to denote the gender role ascribed to males and occasionally Intersex people who function sexually, and in some ways socially, as women. The term is closely related to the word "mukhannath".


title: Third gender

text: Early Islamic literature rarely comments upon the habits of the "mukhannathun". It seems there may have been some variance in how "effeminate" they were, though there are indications that some adopted aspects of feminine dress or at least ornamentation. Some thirteenth and fourteenth-century scholars like al-Nawawi and al-Kirmani classified "mukhannathun" into two groups: those whose feminine traits seem unchangeable, despite the person’s best efforts to stop them, and those whose traits are changeable but refuse to stop. Islamic scholars like Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani stated that all "mukhannathun" must make an effort to cease their feminine behavior, but if this proved impossible, they were not worthy of punishment. Those who made no effort to become less "effeminate", or seemed to "take pleasure in (his effeminacy)", were worthy of blame. By this era, "mukhannath" had developed its association with homosexuality, and Badr al-Din al-Ayni saw homosexuality as "a more heinous extension of "takhannuth"", or effeminate behavior.


title: Third gender

text: One particularly prominent "mukhannath" with the "laqab" Tuways ("little peacock") was born in Medina on the day Muhammad died. There are few sources that describe why Tuways was labeled a "mukhannath", or what behavior of his was considered effeminate. No sources describe his sexuality as immoral or imply that he was attracted to men, and he is reported to have married a woman and fathered several children in his later life. While he is described as non-religious or even frivolous towards religion in many sources, others contradict this and portray him as a believing Muslim instead. His main association with the label seems to come from his profession, as music was mainly performed by women in Arab societies.


title: Third gender

text: The ancient Maya civilization may have recognised a third gender, according to historian Matthew Looper. Looper notes the androgynous Maize Deity and masculine Moon goddess of Maya mythology, and iconography and inscriptions where rulers embody or impersonate these deities. He suggests that a Mayan third gender might also have included individuals with special roles such as healers or diviners.


title: Third gender

text: Anthropologist and archaeologist Miranda Stockett notes that several writers have felt the need to move beyond a two-gender framework when discussing prehispanic cultures across mesoamerica, and concludes that the Olmec, Aztec and Maya peoples understood "more than two kinds of bodies and more than two kinds of gender." Anthropologist Rosemary Joyce agrees, writing that "gender was a fluid potential, not a fixed category before the Spaniards came to Mesoamerica. Childhood training and ritual shaped, but did not set, adult gender, which could encompass third genders and alternative sexualities as well as "male" and "female." At the height of the Classic period, Maya rulers presented themselves as embodying the entire range of gender possibilities, from the male through the female, by wearing blended costumes and playing male and female roles in state ceremonies." Joyce notes that many figures of Mesoamerican art are depicted with male genitalia and female breasts, while she suggests that other figures in which chests and waists are exposed but no sexual characteristics (primary or secondary) are marked may represent a third sex, ambiguous gender, or androgyny.


title: Third gender

text: Andean Studies scholar Michael Horswell writes that third-gendered ritual attendants to "chuqui chinchay", a jaguar deity in Incan mythology, were "vital actors in Andean ceremonies" prior to Spanish colonisation. Horswell elaborates: "These "quariwarmi" (men-women) shamans mediated between the symmetrically dualistic spheres of Andean cosmology and daily life by performing rituals that at times required same-sex erotic practices. Their transvested attire served as a visible sign of a third space that negotiated between the masculine and the feminine, the present and the past, the living and the dead. Their shamanic presence invoked the androgynous creative force often represented in Andean mythology." Richard Trexler gives an early Spanish account of religious 'third gender' figures from the Inca empire in his 1995 book "Sex and Conquest":


title: Third gender

text: With over 500 surviving Indigenous North American cultures, attitudes about sex and gender are diverse. Historically, some communities have had social or spiritual roles for people who in some way may manifest a third-gender, or another gender-variant way of being, at least some of the time, by their particular culture's standards. Some of these ways continue today, while others have died out due to colonialism. Some communities and individuals have adopted the pan-Indian neologism Two-spirit as a way of honoring contemporary figures and organizing intertribally.


title: Third gender

text: Inuit religion states that the one of the first angakkuq was a third gender being known as Itijjuaq who discovered the first amulet.


title: Third gender

text: Historically, Inuit in areas of the Canadian Arctic, such as Igloolik and Nunavik, had a third gender concept called "sipiniq" (). A "sipiniq" infant was believed to have changed their physical sex from male to female at the moment of birth. "Sipiniq" children were regarded as socially male, and would be named after a male relative, perform a male's tasks, and would wear traditional clothing tailored for men's tasks. This generally lasted until puberty, but in some cases continued into adulthood and even after the "sipiniq" person married a man. The Netsilik Inuit used the word "kipijuituq" for a similar concept.


title: Third gender

text: In David Lindsay's 1920 novel "A Voyage to Arcturus" there is a type of being called "phaen", a third gender which is attracted neither to men nor women but to "Faceny" (their name for Shaping or Crystalman, the Demiurge). The appropriate pronouns are "ae" and "aer".


title: Third gender

text: "Mikaël", a 1924 film directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer, was also released as "Chained: The Story of the Third Sex" in the USA.


title: Third gender

text: Literary critic Michael Maiwald identifies a "third-sex ideal" in one of the first African-American bestsellers, Claude McKay's "Home to Harlem" (1928).


title: Third gender

text: Kurt Vonnegut's 1969 novel "Slaughterhouse-Five" identifies seven human sexes (not genders) in the fourth dimension required for reproduction including gay men, women over 65, and infants who died before their first birthday. The Tralfamadorian race has five sexes.


title: Third gender

text: In "bro'Town" (2004–2009), Brother Ken is the principal of the school and is "fa'afafine", a Samoan concept for a third gender, a person who is born biologically male but is raised and sees themself as female. Because the concept does not readily translate, when the series was broadcast on Adult Swim Latin America, a decision was made not to translate Samoan words and just present them as part of the "cultural journey".


title: Third gender

text: In "Knights of Sidonia" (2014–2015), Izana Shinatose belongs to a new, nonbinary third gender that originated during the hundreds of years of human emigration into space, as first shown in the episode "Commencement." Izana later turns into a girl after falling in love with Nagate Tanasake.


title: Third gender

text: In Hinduism, Shiva is still worshipped as an Ardhnarishwara, i.e. half-male and half-female form. Shiva's symbol, which is today known as Shivalinga, actually comprises a combination of a 'Yoni' (vagina) and a 'Lingam' (phallus).


title: Third gender

text: At the turn of the common era, male cults devoted to a goddess that flourished throughout the broad region extending from the Mediterranean to South Asia. While galli were missionizing the Roman Empire, kalū, kurgarrū, and assinnu continued to carry out ancient rites in the temples of Mesopotamia, and the third-gender predecessors of the hijra were clearly evident. It should also be mentioned of the eunuch priests of Artemis at Ephesus; the western Semitic qedeshim, the male "temple prostitutes" known from the Hebrew Bible and Ugaritic texts of the late second millennium; and the keleb, priests of Astarte at Kition and elsewhere. Beyond India, modern ethnographic literature documents gender-variant shaman-priests throughout Southeast Asia, Borneo, and Sulawesi. All these roles share the traits of devotion to a goddess, gender transgression and receptive anal sex, ecstatic ritual techniques (for healing, in the case of kalū and Mesopotamian priests, and fertility in the case of hijra), and actual (or symbolic) castration. Most, at some point in their history, were based in temples and, therefore, part of the religious-economic administration of their respective city-states.


title: Third gender

text: Scholars have made several criticisms of the third gender concept. These critiques regard primarily Western scholars' use of the concept to understand gender in other cultures in an ethnocentric way. Third gender has also been criticized as a reductionist "junk drawer" used for all identities beyond the Western gender binary, ignoring the nuance of various identities, histories, and practices in other cultures to situate them in a Western understanding. As Towle and Morgan write, "The term third gender does not disrupt gender binarism; it simply adds another category (albeit a segregated, ghettoized category) to the existing two." Towle and Morgan additionally note that Western scholars may incorrectly treat non-Western third gender examples as though they existed prior to and serve as the foundation for modern Western understandings of gender variability. This implication makes it difficult for Western scholars to understand how non-Western cultures view and value sex and gender in their own societies in both the present day and historically.


title: Incendies

text: Incendies (; "Fires") is a 2010 Canadian drama film directed by Denis Villeneuve, who co-wrote the screenplay with Valérie Beaugrand-Champagne. Adapted from Wajdi Mouawad's play of the same name, "Incendies" stars Lubna Azabal, Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin, Maxim Gaudette, and Rémy Girard.


title: Incendies

text: The story concerns Canadian twins who travel to their mother's native country in the Middle East to uncover her hidden past amidst a bloody civil war. While the country is unnamed, the events in the film are heavily influenced by the Lebanese Civil War and particularly the story of prisoner Souha Bechara. The film was shot mainly in Montreal, with a few days spent in Jordan.


title: Incendies

text: It premiered at the Venice and Toronto Film Festivals in September 2010 and was released in Quebec on 17 September 2010. It met with critical acclaim in Canada and abroad and won numerous awards.


title: Incendies

text: In 2011, it was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. "Incendies" also won eight Genie Awards, including Best Motion Picture.


title: Incendies

text: Following the death of their mother Nawal, an Arab immigrant in Canada, Jeanne and her twin brother Simon meet with French Canadian notary Jean Lebel, their mother's employer and family friend. Nawal's will makes reference to not keeping a promise, denying her a proper gravestone and casket, unless Jeanne and Simon track down their mysterious brother, whose existence they were previously unaware of, and their father, who they believed was dead. Nawal has left two letters; one is to be delivered to Jeanne and Simon's father, and the other is to be delivered to their brother. Jeanne accepts; Simon, on the other hand, seemingly having had a more difficult relationship with Nawal and her apparently unusual personality, is reluctant to join Jeanne on this pursuit.


title: Incendies

text: A series of flashbacks reveal Nawal came from a Christian Arab family in an unnamed Middle Eastern country, and that she fell in love with a refugee named Wahab, resulting in her pregnancy. Her family murders her lover and nearly shoots her as an honour killing, but her grandmother spares her, making her promise to leave the village after the birth of her baby and start a new life in the fictional city of Daresh. The grandmother tattoos the back of the baby's heel and sends him to an orphanage.


title: Incendies

text: While Nawal is at university in Daresh, a civil war and war crimes break out with Nawal opposing the war on human rights grounds. Her son's orphanage in Kfar Khout is destroyed by a Muslim militant, Chamseddine, who converts him into an Islamic child soldier. After barely escaping the massacre of a bus full of Muslim refugees by Christian Nationalists, Nawal narrowly manages to join the Muslim fighters, and eventually shoots a nationalist leader. She is imprisoned in Kfar Ryat and raped by torturer Abou Tarek, consequently giving birth to the twins.


title: Incendies

text: After travelling to her mother's native country, Jeanne gradually uncovers this past, and persuades Simon to join her. With help from Lebel, they learn their brother's name is Nihad of May and track down Chamseddine. Simon meets with him personally, and he reveals the war-mad Nihad was captured by the nationalists, turned by them, trained as a torturer, and then sent to Kfar Ryat, where he took the name Abou Tarek, making him both the twins' half-brother and father; as such, both letters are addressed to the same person. Like Nawal, Nihad's superiors gave him a new life in Canada after the war. By chance, Nawal encountered him at a Canadian swimming pool, and saw both the tattoo and his face. The shock of learning the truth caused Nawal to suffer a stroke which led to her decline and untimely death at age sixty.


title: Incendies

text: The twins find Nihad in Canada and deliver Nawal's letters to him. He opens both of them; the first letter addresses him as the twins' father, the rapist, and is filled with contempt. The second letter addresses him as the twins' brother, and is instead written with caring words, saying that he, as Nawal's son, is deserving of love.


title: Incendies

text: Parts of the story were based on the life of Souha Bechara. The story is based on events that happened during the Lebanese Civil War of 1975 to 1990, but the filmmakers attempted to make the location of the plot ambiguous.


title: Incendies

text: Director Denis Villeneuve first saw Wajdi Mouawad's play "Incendies" at Théâtre de Quat'Sous in Montreal in 2004, commenting "I had this strong intuition that I was in front of a masterpiece". Villeneuve acknowledged unfamiliarity with Arab culture, but was drawn to "Incendies" as "a modern story with a sort of Greek tragedy element". In adapting the screenplay, Villeneuve, while keeping the story structure and characters, replaced "all" the dialogue, even envisioning a silent film, abandoning the idea due to expense. He showed Mouawad some completed scenes to convince the initially reluctant playwright to grant permission for the film. Villeneuve spent five years working on the screenplay, in between directing two films. Mouawad later praised the film as "brilliantly elegant" and gave Villeneuve full credit. The project had a budget of $6.5 million, and received funding from Telefilm Canada.


title: Incendies

text: For the part of Nawal, Villeneuve said he conducted an extensive search for actresses across Canada. He considered casting the main character to be the most challenging, and at one point contemplated using two or three actresses to play the character, since the story spans four decades. He finally met Lubna Azabal, a Belgian actress of Moroccan—Spanish descent in Paris, intrigued by her "expressive and eloquent" face in "Paradise Now" (2005). Although she was 30, Villeneuve thought she appeared 18 and could play the part throughout the entire film, using makeup.


title: Incendies

text: Villeneuve selected Canadian actress Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin to play Jeanne, saying the role required listening skills and Désormeaux-Poulin is "a very generous actress". Before "Incendies", Désormeaux-Poulin was mainly known for "light fare". Montreal actor Allen Altman, who played a notary, worked with a dialect coach for hours to develop a blend of the French and Arab accents before auditioning. While shooting in Jordan, to research his role, actor Maxim Gaudette toured a Palestinian refugee camp near Amman.


title: Incendies

text: The film was shot in Montreal and Jordan. The film took 40 days to shoot, of which 15 were spent in Jordan, with Villeneuve aiming to film no scene without being sure it would not be cut.


title: Incendies

text: For the scenes filmed in Jordan, Villeneuve used a Lebanese and Iraqi crew, though he feared the war scenes would be too reminiscent of bad experiences for them. However, he said the Arab crew members felt "It’s important that those sorts of stories are on the screen". Some of the filming in Jordan took place in the capital of Amman. To recreate Beirut, art director André-Line Beauparlant built up rock and debris on a street in Amman.


title: Incendies

text: Two tracks by British band Radiohead from their album "Amnesiac", "You and Whose Army?" and "Like Spinning Plates", were used in the film. The music was considered so notable and integral to the film that the music was mentioned in many reviews. Film critic David Ehrlich wrote that ""Incendies" exploits Radiohead tracks for the multiplicity of their meaning, empowering the image by dislocating viewers from it". Villeneuve said that he had written "You and Whose Army?" into the script from the beginning, as it was intended to make it "clear that [the film] will be a westerner’s point of view about this world". One music reviewer gave it first place in their "Top Ten Music Moments in Film".


title: Incendies

text: "Incendies" was officially selected to play in the 2010 Venice Film Festival, 2010 Telluride Film Festival, 2010 Toronto International Film Festival, 2011 Sundance Film Festival and 2011 New Directors/New Films Festival. The film opened in Toronto and Vancouver in January 2011.


title: Incendies

text: In the United States, the film was distributed by Sony Pictures Classics. When the film was screened in Beirut in March 2011, Villeneuve claimed "a lot of people said to me that we should show this film to their children, to show them what they had been through".


title: Incendies

text: In Canada, the film passed the $1 million mark at the box office by October 2010. By the end of April 2011, the film grossed $4.7 million. In Quebec theatres alone, "Incendies" made $3 million. It was considered a success in the country.


title: Incendies

text: According to "Box Office Mojo", the film completed its theatrical run on September 29, 2011 after making $2,071,334 in the U.S. According to "The Numbers", the film grossed $6,857,096 in North America and $9,181,247 in other territories for a worldwide total of $16,038,343.


title: Incendies

text: "Incendies" received highly positive reviews from critics. Review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes reports 93% positive reviews based on 121 reviews, with an average rating of 7.92/10. The site's critics consensus reads, "It's messy, overlong, and a touch melodramatic, but those flaws pale before "Incendies" impressive acting and devastating emotional impact." On Metacritic the film has a weighted average score of 80 out 100 based on 42 reviews, indicating "generally favorable reviews".


title: Incendies

text: The film enjoyed a positive reception in its country and province. Kevin N. Laforest of the "Montreal Film Journal" gave it 3.5 stars out of four and wrote, "Villeneuve has done his best work yet here". The "Montreal Gazette"'s Brendan Kelly gave the film five stars and called it a "masterwork". Marc Cassivi of "La Presse" claimed the film transcended the play. Peter Howell, writing for "The Toronto Star", gave the film four stars, called it "a commanding film of multiple revelations", and the best of 2010, and praised Lubna Azabal as "first amongst equals". However, Martin Morrow of CBC News was unimpressed, saying, "Villeneuve’s screen adaptation strips away all this finely textured flesh and leaves only the bare bones". University of Berlin film scholar Claudia Kotte wrote that the film, along with "Monsieur Lazhar" (2011) and "War Witch" (2012), represent a break in the Cinema of Quebec from focus on local history to global concerns, with "Incendies" adding Oedipal themes. Authors Gada Mahrouse, Chantal Maillé and Daniel Salée wrote McCraw and Déry's films, "Incendies", "Monsieur Lazhar" and "Inch'Allah", depict Quebec as part of the global village and as accepting minorities, particularly Middle Easterners or "Muslim Others".


title: Incendies

text: Roger Ebert gave the film three and a half stars, saying "it wants to be much more than a thriller and succeeds in demonstrating how senseless and futile it is to hate others because of their religion", and Azabal "is never less than compelling". He later selected the film as his favourite to win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, though it lost to "In a Better World" from Denmark. Leonard Maltin also gave the film three and a half stars, referring to it as "tough, spellbinding". Ty Burr, writing for "The Boston Globe", gave the film three and a half stars, praising a bus scene as harrowing but saying the climax is "a plot twist that feels like one coincidence too far", that "leaves the audience doing math on their fingers rather than reeling in shock". "Incendies" was named by Stephen Holden of "The New York Times" as one of the 10 best films of 2011. Betsy Sharkey of the "Los Angeles Times" called it Villeneuve’s "best-realized work yet". A number of reviews complimented use of the song "You and Whose Army?" by Radiohead. Criticisms have included charges of melodrama and orientalism.


title: Incendies

text: On 22 September 2010, "Incendies" was chosen to represent Canada at the 83rd Academy Awards in the category of Best Foreign Language Film. It made the shortlist on 19 January 2011, one of nine films and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film on 25 January 2011.


title: Incendies

text: It won eight awards at the 31st Genie Awards, including Best Motion Picture, Best Actress for Azabal and Best Director for Villeneuve. Along with "Incendies", Villeneuve won the Rogers Best Canadian Film Award in 2009 for the film "Polytechnique", the first Canadian filmmaker to win it twice in a row. " Incendies" also won the Prix Jutra for Best Film, Director, Screenplay, Actress (Azabal), Editing, Cinematography, Art Direction, Costumes and Sound.


title: Incendies

text: It is also the only film to date to have won both the Toronto International Film Festival Award for Best Canadian Film and the Vancouver International Film Festival Award for Best Canadian Film.


title: Leave It to Beaver

text: Leave It to Beaver is an iconic American television situation comedy about an idealized American family of the 1950s and early 1960s. It stars Barbara Billingsley, Hugh Beaumont, Tony Dow and Jerry Mathers ("as The Beaver", as the opening credits put it).


title: Leave It to Beaver

text: CBS first broadcasted the show on October 4, 1957, but dropped it after one season. ABC picked it up and ran it for another five years, from October 2, 1958, to June 20, 1963. It proved to be a scheduling challenge for both networks, airing on four different evenings (Wednesday through Saturday). It was produced by Gomalco Productions (1957-1961) and by Kayro Productions (1961-1963), and distributed by Revue Studios.


title: Leave It to Beaver

text: "Leave It to Beaver" never broke into the Nielsen Ratings top 30 in its six-season run. However, it proved to be much more popular in reruns. It also led to an unsuccessful 1997 film of the same name.


title: Leave It to Beaver

text: The show is built around young Theodore "Beaver" Cleaver (Jerry Mathers) and the trouble he gets himself into while navigating his way through an often-incomprehensible, sometimes-illogical world. Supposedly, when he was a baby, his older brother Wallace "Wally" (Tony Dow) mispronounced "Theodore" as "Tweedor". Their firm-but-loving parents, Ward (Hugh Beaumont) and June Cleaver (Barbara Billingsley), felt "Beaver" sounded better. Conversely, Mathers has said that the real reason for the name "Beaver" is that one of the show's writers, Joe Connelly, had a shipmate named "The Beaver" in World War II; from that came the family's name, "Cleaver."


title: Leave It to Beaver

text: Beaver's friends include the perpetually apple-munching Larry Mondello (Rusty Stevens) in the early seasons, and, later, Gilbert Bates (Stephen Talbot), as well as the old fireman, Gus (Burt Mustin). His sweet-natured-but-no-nonsense elementary school teachers are Miss Canfield (to whom Beaver declares his love in the episode entitled "Beaver's Crush") (Diane Brewster), Miss Landers (Sue Randall) and Mrs. Rayburn (Doris Packer), also the school's principal. In the early seasons, Beaver's nemesis in class is Judy Hensler (Jeri Weil).


title: Leave It to Beaver

text: Beaver's brother Wally is popular with both peers and adults, getting into trouble much less frequently. He letters in three sports. He has little difficulty attracting girlfriends, among them Mary Ellen Rogers (Pamela Baird) and Julie Foster (Cheryl Holdridge). His pals include the awkward Clarence "Lumpy" Rutherford (Frank Bank) and smart aleck Eddie Haskell (Ken Osmond), the archetype of the two-faced wise guy, a braggart among his peers and an obsequious yes man to the adults he mocks behind their backs. Eddie often picks on the Beaver.


title: Leave It to Beaver

text: The family lives in the fictional town of Mayfield. Beaver attends Grant Ave. Grammar School, and Wally, Mayfield High School (after graduating from Grant Ave. in season one).


title: Leave It to Beaver

text: "Leave It to Beaver" often aimed toward a moral lesson and is referenced even now as an emblem of simpler American times. Ward stated that his father "had a fine sense of values", and if Ward himself sometimes seemed possessed of the gentility of a man of the cloth, it may have come from Beaumont's own background: he had become an ordained minister before he took up an acting career. June Cleaver, likewise, became a model of the archetypal suburban 1950s mother who wanted nothing more than to stay at home and take care of the family.


title: Leave It to Beaver

text: The show strongly promoted the importance of family. The recurring themes expounded parental expectations for children, while the moral messages stressed the importance of teaching children proper behavior. Proper parenting techniques and methods for resolving problems and achieving consensus were demonstrated.


title: Leave It to Beaver

text: The series was inventive in the sense that it portrayed the world through the eyes of a young boy and sometimes dealt with somewhat controversial subjects, such as alcoholism and divorce.


title: Leave It to Beaver

text: The pilot, titled "It's a Small World", aired on April 23, 1957. It featured Max Showalter (credited as Casey Adams) as Ward Cleaver, and Paul Sullivan as Wally Cleaver. TBS re-aired the pilot on October 4, 1987, to commemorate the show's 30th anniversary. TV Land re-aired it on October 6, 2007, as part of their twenty-four-hour marathon to commemorate the show's 50th anniversary. It is also available as a bonus episode on the season-one DVD. 234 episodes followed.


title: Leave It to Beaver

text: A voice-over by Hugh Beaumont precedes each episode in the first season, providing a background to that episode's theme, though these are omitted in airings on TV Land.


title: Leave It to Beaver

text: Season one: The characters are not shown. A drawing of a street, viewed from above, displays the credits in wet concrete.


title: Leave It to Beaver

text: Season two: Ward and June, standing at the bottom of the stairs, see the boys off to school as they come down the stairs and exit the front door.


title: Leave It to Beaver

text: Season four: Ward and June open the front door and stand on the stoop. As Wally, followed by Beaver, leave for school, June hands them their lunches and Ward gives them their jackets.


title: Leave It to Beaver

text: Season six: June, carrying a picnic basket, walks out the front door towards the car. Ward, carrying another item for the picnic, is next, followed in quick succession by Wally. Beaver, lagging behind, runs out, slamming the door behind him. Ward, with June in the passenger seat and the boys in back, then reverses toward the camera.


title: Leave It to Beaver

text: The show's playfully-bouncy theme tune, which became as much of a show trademark as Beaver's baseball cap or Eddie Haskell's false obsequiousness, was "The Toy Parade," composed by David Kahn, Melvyn Leonard, and Mort Greene. For the final season, however, the song was given a jazz-like arrangement by veteran composer/arranger Pete Rugolo.


title: Leave It to Beaver

text: Reruns of the show became part of CBS affiliates' lineups in the mornings for several years to come. TBS showed it for many years in the late 1980s, and it currently airs on TV Land—where it has been shown since July 1998. Today, NBC Universal Television owns the syndication rights and all properties related to the series.


title: Leave It to Beaver

text: A made-for-television reunion movie, "Still the Beaver", appeared in 1983. The main original cast appeared, except for Beaumont, who had died the previous year. Ward Cleaver was still a presence, however: the film's story used numerous flashbacks to the original show, as it followed young-adult Beaver's struggle to reconcile divorce and newly minted single fatherhood, straining to cope by what his father might or might not have done, while facing the possibility of his widowed mother selling their childhood home. June Cleaver is later elected to the Mayfield City Council.


title: Leave It to Beaver

text: Its reception led to a new first-run, made-for-cable series, "The New Leave It to Beaver" (1985–1989), with Beaver and Lumpy Rutherford running Ward's old firm (where Lumpy's pompous, demanding father — played by Richard Deacon in the original series — had been the senior partner), Wally as a practicing attorney and expectant father, June having sold the old house to Beaver himself but living with him as a doting grandmother to Beaver's two small sons. Eddie Haskell runs his own contracting business and has a son, Freddie, who is every inch his father's son — right down to the dual-personality.


title: Leave It to Beaver

text: 1997's movie adaptation of the series starred Christopher McDonald as Ward, Janine Turner as June, Erik von Detten as Wally, and Cameron Finley as Beaver. It was panned by many critics, except for Roger Ebert, who gave it a three-star rating. It performed poorly at the box office, earning only $11,713,605. Barbara Billingsley, Ken Osmond and Frank Bank made cameo appearances in the film.


title: Leave It to Beaver

text: The Cleavers moved from 485 Mapleton Drive to 211 Pine Street, both in Mayfield, for the start of season three. In 1969, the house was reused for another Universal-produced television hit, "Marcus Welby, M.D." This house can still be seen at Universal Studios, though the original façade was replaced in 1988 for the following year's "The 'Burbs" and sits in storage elsewhere on the Universal lot. The façade was replaced again for the 1996 "Leave It to Beaver" movie.


title: Leave It to Beaver

text: Universal Studios released the first two seasons of "Leave It to Beaver" on DVD in Region 1 in 2005/2006.


title: Leave It to Beaver

text: On January 26, 2010, it was announced that Shout! Factory had acquired the rights to the series (under license from Universal). They subsequently released the remaining seasons on DVD as well as a complete series box set.


title: Leave It to Beaver

text: On January 31, 2012, Shout! Factory released a 20 episode best-of set titled "Leave It to Beaver: 20 Timeless Episodes.


title: Leave It to Beaver

text: In the mid 1970s, Mathers appeared on "The Tomorrow Show" hosted by Tom Snyder. Snyder pointed out that Mathers had not worked for a long time and that there was rumor going around that he had been killed "in the war in Southeast Asia". Mathers replied that he had heard that rumor and that he had no idea how it got started. The earliest appearance of the story in print was in a student newspaper at the University of Kansas in 1972. The author later admitted that she had only heard the story from someone who had heard it a party in Omaha, Nebraska earlier that year. The paper printed a retraction, but by then the story had spread throughout the U.S. The story was later attributed to a member of a defunct Omaha comedy improv group whose hobby was concocting outrageous stories and then convincing people they were true. "Beaver died in Vietnam" was a classic urban legend, memorable for its juxtaposition of idyllic 1950s imagery with the chaos and violence of the late 1960s.


title: Leave It to Beaver

text: Another urban legend was that actor Ken Osmond (Eddie Haskell) became porn star John Holmes. Holmes took Osmond's name and did several movies satirically under the name "Eddie Haskell". It started because there was some facial resemblance between the two men, which porn distributors exploited by using the name Eddie Haskell in advertising Holmes's films. "It was a pain in my butt for eleven years," says Osmond, who brought a $25 million defamation suit against porn houses, producers and distributors. The suit went all the way to the California Supreme Court. The court ruled for Holmes, saying the name was protected as a satire. This case set a precedent in the matter, and is still referred to in other cases in California today.


title: 2001 United Kingdom general election

text: The 2001 United Kingdom general election was held on Thursday 7 June 2001, four years after the previous election on 1 May 1997, to elect 659 members to the House of Commons. The governing Labour Party was re-elected to serve a second term in government with another landslide victory with a 167 majority, returning 413 members of Parliament versus 419 from the 1997 general election, a net loss of six seats, though with a significantly lower turnout than before—59.4%, compared to 71.6% at the previous election. The number of votes Labour received fell by nearly three million. Tony Blair went on to become the only Labour Prime Minister to serve two consecutive full terms in office. As Labour retained almost all of their seats won in the 1997 landslide victory, the media dubbed the 2001 election "the quiet landslide".


title: 2001 United Kingdom general election

text: There was little change outside Northern Ireland, with 620 out of the 641 seats in Great Britain electing candidates from the same party as they did in 1997. Factors contributing to the Labour victory included a strong economy, falling unemployment, and public perception that the Labour government had delivered on many key election pledges that it had made in 1997.


title: 2001 United Kingdom general election

text: The opposition Conservative Party, under William Hague's leadership, was still deeply divided on the issue of Europe and the party's policy platform had drifted considerably to the right. The party put the issue of European monetary union (and in particular, the prospect of the UK joining the Eurozone) at the centre of its campaign, but it failed to resonate with the electorate. A series of publicity stunts that backfired also harmed Hague, and he immediately announced his resignation as party leader when the election result was clear, formally stepping down three months later, therefore becoming the first leader of the Conservative and Unionist Party in the House of Commons since Austen Chamberlain nearly eighty years prior not to serve as prime minister.


title: 2001 United Kingdom general election

text: The election was largely a repeat of the 1997 general election, with Labour losing only six seats overall and the Conservatives making a net gain of one seat (gaining nine seats but losing eight). The Conservatives gained a seat in Scotland, which ended the party's status as an "England-only" party in the prior parliament, but failed again to win any seats in Wales. Although they did not gain many seats, three of the few new MPs elected were future Conservative Prime Ministers David Cameron and Boris Johnson and future Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne; Osborne would serve in the same Cabinet as Cameron from 2010 to 2016. The Liberal Democrats made a net gain of six seats.


title: 2001 United Kingdom general election

text: The 2001 general election is the last to date in which any government has held an overall majority of more than 100 seats in the House of Commons, and the second of only two since the Second World War (the other being 1997) in which a single party won over 400 MPs. Notable departing MPs included former Prime Ministers Edward Heath (also Father of the House) and John Major, former Deputy Prime Minister Michael Heseltine, former Liberal Democrat leader Paddy Ashdown, former Cabinet ministers Tony Benn, Tom King, John Morris, Mo Mowlam, John MacGregor and Peter Brooke, Teresa Gorman, and then Mayor of London Ken Livingstone.


title: 2001 United Kingdom general election

text: Change was seen in Northern Ireland, with the moderate unionist Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) losing four seats to the more hardline Democratic Unionist Party (DUP). A similar transition appeared in the nationalist community, with the moderate Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) losing votes to the more staunchly republican and abstentionist Sinn Féin.


title: 2001 United Kingdom general election

text: Exceptionally low voter turnout, which fell below 60% for the first (and so far, only) time since 1918, also marked this election. The election was broadcast live on BBC One and presented by David Dimbleby, Jeremy Paxman, Andrew Marr, Peter Snow, and Tony King.


title: 2001 United Kingdom general election

text: The 2001 general election was notable for being the first in which pictures of the party logos appeared on the ballot paper. Prior to this, the ballot paper had only displayed the candidate's name, address, and party name.


title: 2001 United Kingdom general election

text: The election had been expected on 3 May, to coincide with local elections, but on 2 April 2001, both were postponed to 7 June because of rural movement restrictions imposed in response to the foot-and-mouth outbreak that had started in February.


title: 2001 United Kingdom general election

text: The elections were marked by voter apathy, with turnout falling to 59.4%, the lowest (and first under 70%) since the Coupon Election of 1918. Throughout the election the Labour Party had maintained a significant lead in the opinion polls and the result was deemed to be so certain that some bookmakers paid out for a Labour majority before election day. However, the opinion polls the previous autumn had shown the first Tory lead (though only by a narrow margin) in the opinion polls for eight years as they benefited from the public anger towards the government over the fuel protests which had led to a severe shortage of motor fuel.


title: 2001 United Kingdom general election

text: By the end of 2000, however, the dispute had been resolved and Labour were firmly back in the lead of the opinion polls. In total, a mere 29 parliamentary seats changed hands at the 2001 Election.


title: 2001 United Kingdom general election

text: 2001 also saw the rare election of an independent. Richard Taylor of Independent Kidderminster Hospital and Health Concern (usually now known simply as "Health Concern") unseated a government MP, David Lock, in Wyre Forest. There was also a high vote for British National Party leader Nick Griffin in Oldham West and Royton, in the wake of recent race riots in the town of Oldham.


title: 2001 United Kingdom general election

text: In Northern Ireland, the election was far more dramatic and marked a move by unionists away from support for the Good Friday Agreement, with the moderate unionist Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) losing to the more hardline Democratic Unionist Party (DUP). This polarisation was also seen in the nationalist community, with the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) vote losing out to more left-wing and republican Sinn Féin. It also saw a tightening of the parties as the small UK Unionist Party lost its only seat.


title: 2001 United Kingdom general election

text: For Labour, the last four years had run relatively smoothly. The party had successfully defended all their by election seats, and many suspected a Labour win was inevitable from the start.


title: 2001 United Kingdom general election

text: Many in the party, however, were afraid of voter apathy, which was epitomised in a poster of "Hague with Lady Thatcher's hair", captioned "Get out and vote. Or they get in." Despite recessions in mainland Europe and the United States, due to the bursting of global tech bubbles, Britain was notably unaffected and Labour however could rely on a strong economy as unemployment continued to decline toward election day, putting to rest any fears of a Labour government putting the economic situation at risk.


title: 2001 United Kingdom general election

text: For William Hague, however, the Conservative Party had still not fully recovered from the loss in 1997. The party was still divided over Europe, and talk of a referendum on joining the Eurozone was rife, and as a result "Save The Pound" was one of the key slogans deployed in the Conservatives' campaign. As Labour remained at the political centre, the Tories moved to the right. A policy gaffe by Oliver Letwin over public spending cuts left the party with an own goal that Labour soon exploited.


title: 2001 United Kingdom general election

text: Margaret Thatcher also added to Hague's troubles when speaking out strongly against the Euro to applause. Hague himself, although a witty performer at Prime Minister's Questions, was dogged in the press and reminded of his speech, given at the age of 16, at the 1977 Conservative Conference. "The Sun" newspaper only added to the Conservatives' woes by backing Labour for a second consecutive election, calling Hague a "dead parrot" during the Conservative Party's conference in October 1998.


title: 2001 United Kingdom general election

text: The Tories campaigned on a strongly right-wing platform, emphasising the issues of Europe, immigration and tax, the fabled "Tebbit Trinity". They also released a poster showing a heavily pregnant Tony Blair, stating "Four years of Labour and he still hasn’t delivered". However, Labour countered by asking where the proposed tax cuts were going to come from, and decried the Tory policy as "cut here, cut there, cut everywhere", in reference to the widespread belief that the Conservatives would make major cuts to public services in order to fund tax cuts. Labour also capitalised on the strong economic conditions of the time, and another major line of attack (primarily directed towards Michael Portillo, now Shadow Chancellor after returning to Parliament via a by-election) was to warn of a return to "Tory Boom and Bust" under a Conservative administration.