Welkom Bar: Vintage Same Sex Marriage

Visit the Welkom Bar/For the Young and Old

This spring I came across some vintage images of a same sex marriage in Jet Magazine. I wrote about the marriage of Harry Rietra and Jean Knockaert in a previous blog post.

Kathy van der Pas, the current owner of the building that Harry and Jean once owned, was kind enough to write me. She shared her knowledge about this history of her art gallery. She wrote:

Homo Bride and Groom Restored to Dignity

So here we have another vintage image of two men that just begged for a little research. It's showed up in variety of websites aggregating images that are labeled as vintage gay couples. Each depiction lacks any information (here, here, here, and here). Who is this "homo bride and groom" marching down the aisle toward matrimonial bliss?

I want to know.

A quick search revealed that the images came from an article that appeared in Jet Magazine on September 21 1967. Whomever took the original screen caps kept the pictures but removed most of the identifying information (along with a lot of the obvious homonegative text).

Here are the facts that I know:

• The two men are John Knockhart, a 24 year old from Belgium and Henyrk Rietra, a 26 year old who owned Rotterdam's "famous Welcome Bar." 
• In attendance was best man, Pieter Maas and a small group of friends and family.
• The Catholic priest Father Omtzigt officiated over the ceremony.
• Bishop Martien Antoon Jansen defended the priest saying he was tricked into the ceremony.

That's not bad for a quick Google image search. It was enough to give me a trail to follow this story.

At first I thought the trail was going to run dry. Simple Google searches gave up nothing about who these two men were. My first tantalizing lead was this image of a sugar packet. This is, apparently, all that is left of the "famous Welcome Bar" that Rietra owned. The sugar packet, however, has an address. I followed that address and found an African art gallery. I've emailed the gallery owners, Kathy van der Pas and Steven van de Raadt, to see if they might know anything about our young couple or the business that apparently once stood where their gallery is currently located. I'll keep you posted.

The sugar packet, however, wasn't the end of the line. A search for Rietra took me to a webpage that was in Italian. Thanks to Google, reading Italian (which I don't) is unnecessary. A click of a button and the web page is (poorly) translated into English.

In 1967 Henryk Rietra and Jean Knockhaert, two men of 26 and 24 years respectively, are joined in marriage in Broederkappellet Rotterdam by Catholic priest JZ Omtzigt.

So we have at least another reference to these two men and their marriage. John Knockhart has now become Jean Knockhaert. The correct spelling of Knockhaert's name gives me some new leads. 

Jean and Henryk (sometimes listed as Harry) had a photographer, Robert Lantos,  on hand the day of their wedding. Some of those photographs have been archived in The Netherlands National News Agency (ANP) Photo Archives at the Memory of The Netherlands Project. I've emailed the reference librarian at the Koninklijke Bibiliotheek, the National Library of the Netherlands, to see if they might have some additional resources.

Invisible: Philadelphia Gay Wedding c. 1957

Here is a set of images I found on the One Archives. The images were all of a same sex wedding held in Philadelphia sometime around 1957. The photoshop found the images inappropriate and never returned them to the young couple. It's heartbreaking to think about how much of these two handsome young men's lives were rendered invisible. At the same time they found a way to have a long strong enough to be witnessed in a ceremony of a community of people who loved them.

Take a moment to think of their existence. Take a moment to notice them and let them be real.

For more images of vintage men and their relationships (some gay, some straight) visit: Two Men and Their Dog; Adam and Steve in the Garden of Eden: On Intimacy Between Men; A Man and His Dog; The Beasts of West Point; Vintage Men: Innocence Lost | The Photography of William Gedney; It's Only a Paper Moon;Vintage Gay America: Crawford Barton; These Men Are Not Gay | This Is Not A Farmer | Disfarmer; Desire and Difference: Hidden in Plain Sight, Come Make Eyes With Me Under the Anheuser Bush, Hugh Mangum: Itinerant Photographer, Two men, Two Poses; Photos are Not Always What They Seem,Vintage Sailors: An Awkward Realization, Three Men on a Horse, Welkom Bar: Vintage Same Sex Marriage, Pretty in Pink: Two Vintage Chinese Men, Memorial Day Surprise: Vintage Sailor Love, Memorial Day: Vintage Dancing Sailors, The Curious Case of Two Men Embracing, They'll Never Know How Close We Were, Vintage Love: Roger Miller Pegram,Manly Affections: Robert Gant, Homo Bride and Groom Restored to Dignity, The Men in the Trees, The Girl in the Outhouse, Tommy and Buzz: All My Love,Men in Photo Booths, and Invisible: Philadelphia Gay Wedding c. 1957. You can also follow me on Tumblr.

The Human Face of Same Sex Marriage

I recently became involved in a discussion on Facebook about same sex marriage. I generally avoid these sorts of situations. Discussions such as the one I got myself involved in generally become banal and rather frustrating. They usually don't end up very well. Sure, the back and forth is interesting, for a while. In the end the narrative is always the same: one side blames the other for being (circle one: ignorant, uneducated, defensive, stupid) while the other side generally resorts to accusing the other as (circle one: ignorant, uneducated, defensive, stupid). Facts are provided. Facts are disputed. Both parties, in the end, become something akin to a dog, tied to a stake, running around in circles tearing up all the grass.

The end of the conversation went something like this:

A Tree's a Tree--Until It's Not

Presidential candidate Rick Santorum was recently asked why he thought marriages between people of the same sex would affect marriages between people of other sexes. Here is what he said:

Because it changes the definition of an intrinsic element of society in a way that minimizes what that bond means to society. Marriage is what marriage is. Marriage was around before government said what it was.

It’s like going out and saying, ‘That tree is a car.’ Well, the tree’s not a car. A tree’s a tree. Marriage is marriage. You can say that tree is something other than it is. It can redefine it. But it doesn’t change the essential nature of what marriage is. Marriage is a union between a man and a woman for the purposes of the benefit of both the man and the woman, a natural unitive according to nature, unitive, that is for the purposes of having and rearing children and for the benefit of both the man and the woman involved in that relationship.

What is Rick actually saying here when he says a tree is a tree and a marriage is a marriage? He is suggesting that there is a single definition of marriage that has been consistently used in the history of humanity. Any student of history (or psychology, or science, or a student of any other subject, really) would easily reject this statement. There are no absolute meanings, and there are no static social institutions that have kept the same purpose for all of recorded (and unrecorded) civilization.

Santorum makes a stupid argument. He makes an argument that is intellectually and morally bankrupt.

Interested in the history of marriage? You might want to check out this link, or this one, or even this one.  You might also be interested in E.J. Graff's book "What is Marriage for: The Strange Social History of Our Most Intimate Institution."

A few highlights:

While in many (but not all) parts of the modern world marriage is a personal decision between two people, for much of recorded history marriage has been an arranged affair. We married not for love, not for companionship, but for family bonds. We married because our families arranged for us to do so, and we did so to build businesses, alliances, and economic security. There was little--if any--room for love or affection.

Did you know that during the Protestant revolution Martin Luther totally rejected the religious underpinnings of marriage? He declared that marriage is "a worldly thing... that belongs to the realm of government. The Puritans, who found there way here to the coast of New England, felt similarly. They asserted (and passed an Act of parliament) that "marriage [is] to be no sacrament." That was the beginning of our modern day secular marriages.

Check out the links above to learn more.

My point here is that a tree isn't always a tree. They evolve, change, and adapt to the environment in which they are living. What Santorum is really saying is that he values one particular understanding of marriage. It is an understand that is adapted to his values, his morals, and his way of seeing the world. The meaning of the word, and the institution, reflects the values of the meaning maker and the zeitgeist of the times.

It's just silly to engage in meaningless banter about a tree always being a tree, and a marriage always being a marriage, when the recorded history of humanity shows that what we consider a marriage has changed over time.

So here is my question: what are your morals and values? Why do you value one sort of marriage over another? Why is that important to you? How does it reflect the world you want to be in? How does it reflect the world that you want to create?