Here
is a great Autumn recipe that is simple and low cost! Some sweet and
some heat with a citrus note, what tasty way to dress the common
chicken thigh?
We
dedicate this dish to a young man history has forgotten, Cyril
Wilcox, a confused Harvard student who believed suicide was the only
way to deal with the homophobia around him. Please read about him and
the Harvard Secret Court of a hundred years ago.
Ingredients
4-6
chicken bone-in thighs
1
stick butter
1
tsp garlic powder
1
lemon (juice & zest)
½
cup reduced-sodium soy sauce
½
cup honey
1
Tbs horseradish
salt
and pepper to taste
½
cup dried cranberries
Zest
and juice lemon into a small bowl – that way it is easier to remove
any seeds that fall in.
In
a microwave safe bowl, melt the butter carefully. When melted, stir
in the garlic, the lemon juice and zest, the honey, and horseradish.
Place
in zipper plastic bags with chicken and let sit in refrigerator at
least 4
hours.
Pre-heat
oven to 375
degrees.
Line a rimed baking sheet with foil and spray a rack lightly.
Remove
chicken from marinade and shake off excess. Place chicken pieces
skin side up on pan. Sprinkle with dried cranberries.
Roast
for 35
– 45 minutes or
until thermometer reads 165
degrees
in thickest part of thighs.
Note: chicken can be marinaded 1 day ahead.
Serve with a colorful side of mixed vegetables.
For our music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meDXI63FtA8&t=96s
What a meal!
Happily serving my Master Indy:
socialslave
To
satisfy and restore.
To
nourish, support and maintain.
To
gratify, spoil, comfort and please,
to
nurture, assist, and sustain
…..I
cook!
Please
buy slave's cookbook:
The
Little Black Book of Indiscreet Recipes
by
Dan White
http://www.amazon.com
=============================
A Prayer for Cyril
About 100 years ago:
It was a time of speakeasies
and organized crime. American society was changing rapidly. The
great war had ended in 1918. Communism, Ku Klux Klan, women voting,
evolutionary science, and a great epidemic of Influenza (which killed
more than the war had).
Rapid progress had been made in transportation. You can't keep them down on the farm any more!
This was the world of Cyril B. Wilcox and it was collapsing around him.
Wilcox had been a student of Harvard University. He had consulted Professor of Hygiene Robert I. Lee, about a bad attack of hives.
“It
is apt particularly to occur in nervous people, and in people who are
under a nervous strain,” Lee wrote on April 13. 1920. “Wilcox
tells me his mother wants to take him home for a rest. I certainly
agree that he should go home and get himself straightened out
nervously.”
Today
we can only guess at what was going on with him. Away at a
university, he had met, for the first time, other men who also liked
men. This is a powerful, life changing event in a young gay man's
life. He started to spend time socializing with these other outcasts.
Dances, parties and other in-dorm get togethers took place, often
forsaking studies. His grades slipped. His family had no idea what
was going on. Reading about the incident now we can conjecture the
young man may have fallen in love with a man he was seeing. He had no
one to talk to.
In
May Cyril confided in his older brother George. He told about his
relationship with Harry Dreyfus, an older man who lived in Boston.
We can only assume it did not go well. The next morning Mary Wilcox
smelled gas from her son's room. When she opened the door.: Cyril B.
Wilcox was dead.
The
medical examiner wrote in his report that Wilcox’s death was “most
probably accidental, change of pressure in gas pipe extinguishing
light, allowing raw gas to fill bed room”. His family and friends,
as well as Harvard administrators, knew that his death was
self-inflicted.
Cyril’s
suicide would have been written down as the tragic result of too much
academic pressure at Harvard were it not for that conversation with
his older brother. Shortly after, George opened two letters
addressed to Cyril. One was a nine-page handwritten letter from
classmate Ernest Roberts, that left no doubt that Cyril was part of a
group involved in homosexual activities. In parts of the
letter he refers to “faggoty parties” in his room and the names
of non-Harvard-affiliated Boston men who were involved in the gay
scene.
A
second letter from Harold W. Saxton, was filled with code and jargon.
Saxton referred to Cyril as “Salomé’s Child” and someone else
as “Dot.” He refers to raids against clubs, “tricks” and a
“souse” party, apparently in reference to a party with alcohol
that would have been in illegal in 1920, the first year of
Prohibition.
George
became enraged and decided to act. He tracked down his brother’s
former lover, Harry Dreyfus, in Boston. Dreyfus was beaten by Wilcox,
and gave up three names of other men involved: Roberts, Harvard
Dental School student, Eugene R. Cummings and Pat Courtney, a
non-Harvard man living in Boston.
George
went to Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell, who then asked Lee,
Regent Matthew Luce, Assistant Dean of the College Edward R. Gay and
Assistant Dean Kenneth B. Murdock to gather evidence on the case to
be submitted to the President. They called this five-person body “The
Court.”
But,
at least at first, it was far from clear how this secret Court should
proceed. Cyril was already dead, Saxton graduated the year before and
the other two men were not connected with the University at
all.
This
did not stop them for proceeding with a great witch hunt. Using
intimidation, grilling, spying, and down right lies, many lives were
ruined.
According
to newly released documents the court received an unsigned
letter from someone who identified himself only as a member of the
Class of 1921. The anonymous student claimed to know all the details
of Cyril Wilcox’s suicide and told of how Cyril first got involved
with the underground gay group. “While in his Freshman year he met
in college some boys, mostly members of his own class, who committed
upon him and induced him to commit on them ‘Unnatural Acts’
which habit so grew on him that realizing he did not have strength of
character enough to brake [sic] away from it concluded suicide the
only course open to him,” the anonymous letter read. “The leader
of these students guilty of this deplorable practice and the one
directly responsible for Cyril Wilcox’s suicide is Ernest Roberts.
“the
most disgusting and disgraceful and revolting acts of degeneracy and
depravity took place openly in plain veiw [sic] of all present.”
“Isn’t it about time an end was put to this sort of thing in
college?”
Over
the next two weeks, The Court handed down a verdict of
“guilty” for a total of 14 men: seven college students;
Cummings, the Dental School student; Clark, the Assistant in
Philosophy; Saxton, the alumnus; and four men not connected with
Harvard.
The were not just asked to
leave campus, they were told to get out of Cambridge imediately.A letter was sent to the Alumni Placement Service: “Before making any statement that would indicate confidence in the following men, please consult some one in the Dean’s office. If they do not know what is meant, tell them to look in the disciplinary file in an envelope marked ‘Roberts, E.W. and others.’”
In June of 1920, Eugene R. Cummings a 23-year-old dental-school student committed suicide at Harvard’s Stillman Infirmary. The medical examiner ruled that the cause of death was “poisoning by corrosive sublimate taken with suicidal intent probably while mentally deranged.”
Then an article came out in the Boston American
“According to friends of the two, Cummings, who was said to have been mentally unbalanced, told a story of an alleged inquisition which he claimed was held in the college office following Wilcox’ [sic] death,” read the article. “He said that he was taken into the office, which was shrouded in gloom, with but one light dimly burning, and there questioned exhaustively. This story, which was denied by the college authorities, was said to have sprung from his disordered mind.”
On
Sept. 8, 1930, Keith Smerage became the third member of the circle to
commit suicide. The New York Times reported that he was found dead of
gas asphyxiation in an apartment he shared with Philip Towne, a
government clerk. The police listed the case as a suicide.
Reading these give a new outlook on homophobia and its effects.
This led to the book and play: 'Unnatural Acts'.
The Harvard Secret Court was despicable yet hopefully today we can learn from the tragic life of that young university student Cyril B. Wilcox.
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