Standing with Berlin
Gay Boyband
Disco Diva’s Cabaret
https://www.facebook.com/events/2963811113959753?active_tab=about
New Hours at Utopia Road Bar & Courtyard
7 Years ago
The Ybor City Museum Society
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New Courthouse coming?
From URBAN Tampa Bay https://www.facebook.com/urbnTB
Hillsborough County has a concept plan to revamp the courthouse district in Downtown Tampa. The new district would include:
– a new 8 story building, that could later have an additional 6 floors built on top, to house the state attorney’s and public defender’s offices
– a new 7 story circuit courthouse
– multiple new parking garages
– new open space plazas and green space
700 East Twiggs, which is depicted in the attached render as a 14 story office building, would possibly be sold to a private developer to help pay for the project:
“On Wednesday, county leaders and court officials gathered once again to ponder a life after the Courthouse Annex. The aged and outdated building, which serves as the venue for most criminal court matters in Hillsborough County, has long needed to be replaced.”
From Bil Browing https://www.facebook.com/BilBrowning
Allied prisoners at Stalag Luft III in Nazi-occupied Poland spent much of 1943 performing a show called “Girls, Girls, Girls.” Men in bikinis and wigs performed for hundreds of fellow prisoners who climbed onto rooftops to watch. The German guards saw exactly what they wanted to see: cooperative, culturally engaged captives who’d found a healthy outlet for their boredom.
Below the theater, prisoners were digging three escape tunnels.
Stalag Luft III sat near Sagan, about 100 miles southeast of Berlin. The Germans had picked the site deliberately because its sandy soil made tunneling a nightmare. RAF Squadron Leader Roger Bushell decided that was someone else’s problem.
In 1943, he organized the most ambitious escape operation in the history of Allied captivity: three tunnels, named Tom, Dick, and Harry, dug simultaneously so that if guards found one, work on the others could continue without interruption.
The theater was the operation’s backbone. Prisoners used it to cover the dispersal of excavated sand, the single biggest logistical problem in any tunnel operation. Too much displaced earth and the Germans would notice.
RAF officer Jimmy James ran tunnel dispersal out of the theater building, moving men and material under the cover of rehearsals, set construction, and costume fittings. Drag performers in wigs and elaborate costumes scrounged from whatever the prisoners could trade or smuggle gave everyone in that building a reason to be there that had nothing to do with escape.
The Germans permitted all of it. They’d also permitted the camp library, the radio station the prisoners called KRGY, and a covered theater in each compound. A population busy with amateur dramatics was a population not busy digging, or so the thinking went.
On the night of March 24, 1944, 76 men crawled through tunnel Harry. The tunnel came up short of the tree line, emerging in open ground near a guard tower, and the operation slowed from the planned one man per minute to ten per hour. All 76 got out.
Within days, 73 were recaptured. Hitler personally ordered 50 of them shot, a war crime for which Gestapo officers were later convicted at Nuremberg.
Three men made it home.
Drag theater as cover for resistance wasn’t unique to Stalag Luft III. Allied prisoners performed at Colditz Castle and camps across occupied Europe. But Stalag Luft III is where men in bikinis performed “Girls, Girls, Girls” directly above the tunnel that nearly got 76 men out of Nazi Germany.
Now Republicans consider drag perversion destroying America. During World War II, it was saving soldiers’ lives
Bradley’s on 7th
Utopia Road Bar & Courtyard
The Disco Pony Nightclub
