In 2019, I was visiting a dear friend living at the time in Tbilisi, Georgia. After a week or so getting to know the city—ancient, Soviet, and modern—and experiencing first hand Georgia’s legendary hospitality (including endless toasts with, of course, lots of wine—Georgia does have the oldest winemaking tradition in the world, after all)—my friend and I decided to try to venture out into the countryside and see some of the beautiful ancient castles and monasteries nestled into the verdant mountainsides. We had seen images online and thought we could just drive right to some of these places. We did not, however, have a car.
We took the majorly subterranean Soviet era metro to the outskirts of the city, where we then hired a cab. The driver spoke limited English and my friend spoke limited Georgian (though she was actively learning). I could say “yes,” and that “thank you,” and that was about it. After quite a while driving and stopping once—seemingly randomly—to pick up another man on the side of the road (this is normal, but I did not know that at the time!), we were dropped off in the middle of a tiny village. We had asked to go to Kakheti, 85 kilometers (about 52.82 mi) east of Tbilisi, thinking it was a region with tourist stops. The driver took us to the small town and just drove off without a word.
Hmm, what to do now? We looked around and saw no dramatic castles or monasteries, so we walked to what looked like a restaurant. Luckily, the young man there spoke English and filled us in on our mistake. The castles were quite far away and difficult to get to. He also let us know that it may be difficult to get back to Tbilisi. We laughed, knowing we had a delightful story in the making, and we were soon proven correct. What we thought was a small restaurant was actually a lovely winery (Kakheti is in Georgia’s wine region). The young man gave us a tour and a tasting, and even showed us some examples of the massive clay casks ancient Georgians used to make wine. We were then treated to a wonderful dinner and conversation with a great spread of traditional Georgian foods (I still dream about Khachapuri).
By the time we finished our dinner, the young man had managed to get a cab to come all the way from Tbilisi to pick us up (yes, all while entertaining and feeding us) and we communicated our sincere thanks and goodbyes. When I say that Georgians have legendary hospitality skills, I’m not kidding. We did not see any castles or monasteries, but we certainly had a real Georgian experience that day.
Many people before me have been inspired and intrigued by the Caucasus region. Just a few months ago, I had a student from Tbilisi in one of my classes visiting the American Heritage Center (AHC). She was researching Georgia. I thought for sure I would not be able to find much to help her. We are, after all, the American Heritage Center! But I did find one collection that had some information about Georgia from a journalist stationed in Moscow in the years leading up to WWII. Like my friend and I, Joseph Becker Phillips was drawn to the mountains outside the city when he visited Tbilisi in 1936 (he went north while I went east toward Azerbaijan).
The Collection
Joseph Becker Phillips (1900-1977) was working as a journalist for the New York Herald-Tribune. He had been stationed in Paris, London, Rome, and Moscow. Though part of the Russian Empire, Georgia’s independence was recognized until Stalin and his Red Army invaded in 1921, annexing Georgia into the Soviet Union in 1922. Phillips interest in Georgia, then, makes sense while he was stationed in Moscow.
His collection at the AHC is small, only filling two document boxes. But contained within are hundreds of articles he wrote for various magazines and newspapers. There are also detailed notes about a trip he undertook to the then difficult-to-reach Khevsureti region, northeast of Tbilisi on the border with Chechnya.
Although it did take me four days, four different itineraries, and four flights (thanks to a bomb cyclone that hit Denver just after I arrived and effectively shut the city down), my trip to Georgia was undoubtedly much easier than Phillips’ was in 1936. He and a fellow journalist started out in Moscow and took two planes. The first one had to make two emergency stops to “take on water” because the engine was overheating. Unlike my two-hour-or-so cab ride from Tbilisi, Phillips was advised it was better to travel by horse the (approximately) 100 kilometers (about 62.14 mi) from Passanauri (he called it Passanaur) to Khevsureti (he called it Khevsuretia or Hevsuretia, though Khevsuria is also correct). They needed a guide to show them the way through the mountains and a lieutenant from the NKVD (internal affairs of the USSR, who acted as police for prison and labor camps) also insisted on going along. His notes offer a detailed account of his travels, including descriptions of castles on picturesque mountains, sylvan passes, the villages, and an incident where their horses stepped into a yellow-jacket nest!
Once he made it to the Khevsur region, he took some relative rare photographs of the region and began to document his experience with the people. In 1937, he published an article about the “peaceful” Russian takeover of the Khevsur region and described how the Soviets were building roads, hospitals, and schools in this once truly remote region. Because of its difficult geography, Phillips described the annexation as “one of the most interesting and difficult experiments in penetration into an isolated community which the Soviet Government has made.” Even after the Soviet road was built, Phillips commented that it was easier to traverse the 12,000-foot pass by horse than by truck, just as his guides had suggested.
That doesn’t, however, mean the trip was easy. Lev Nussimbaum, a Jewish Ukrainian writing under the pseudonym Essad-Bey in 1931, described how difficult it was to access Khevsureti in his book, Twelve Secrets of the Caucuses
A gigantic wall of rock surrounds Khevsureti and separates it from the rest of the world. After surmounting this wall, a precipice confronts you. Far below in the valley are to be seen the free villages of the Khevsurs. From the cliff wall down into the void there hangs a long rope. Whoever has the courage can catch hold of the rope and let himself down to the Khevsurs.
Like much of what Essad-Bey wrote about Khevsureti, this is probably embellished and romanticized. Phillips, traveling there just a few years after this book’s publication, described a difficult journey but nothing so outlandish. Essad-Bey described this nearly impossible descent via a rope to reinforce the idea that the Khevsurs were unusually independent and uninfluenced by outside forces since medieval times. He even goes so far as to say that this rope was used by political refugees and criminals to escape the police, who dared not go into Khevsureti.
The Untruth of Crusader Khevsureti
Like Essad-Bey and other writers, particularly westerner writers, before and after him, Phillips promoted a long-held belief that the Khevsurs are descended from a lost group of medieval Crusaders. Essad-Bey said the Khevurs were a “strange and mysterious mountain race. Who they are and whence they originate nobody knows. They are surrounded by a secret which it is now impossible to unveil.” Of particular interest to those who perpetuated the Crusaders myth was the unique form of battle dress the Khevsurs held onto. Into the 1900s, they still wore chain mail and fitted breeches, which admittedly looked very medieval European.
To top it off, writers like Essad-Bey and, more broadly, Richard Halliburton in his popular 1937 book, Seven League Boots, claimed that Khevsurs sewed Maltese crosses onto their clothes and their weapons bore the letters A.M.D., which they say stood for the Crusaders’ motto: Ave Mater Dei. Though he didn’t go into such romantic detail, instead relying more on his own observations as a journalist, Phillips still talked of how the men wore chainmail and carried armor from the Middle Ages, while women dyed their hair “in the manner of the ancient Greeks.”
The Real Khevsurs
It is impossible to summarize the complex history and culture of Khevsueti in such a brief article. I will, instead, point to a recent article by Ryan Michael Sherman from Cornell, “Kicking the Crusaders out of the Caucuses,” to help reinforce his argument that Khevsur ethnicity, tradition, history, and origin stories are more interesting and valid than the attempts to Europeanize or Russianize them. Despite Essad-Bey’s claim that “who they are and whence they originate nobody knows,” it is likely they broke off from other nearby groups to begin farming practices in the mountains, as their origin stories claim. It is a demanding terrain that is difficult to trek, resulting in a somewhat isolated set of small communities that depended greatly on their horse, cattle, and one another. Likely because of minimal outside influence, they also kept very traditional forms of dress, music, language, and an interestingly unique religion.
Luckily for us, a few outsiders who ventured in Khevsureti, like Phillips, took photographs while they were there. However, the Khevsurs, like much of Georgia, has kept an admirable amount of their traditional culture alive and well despite time, outside influence, and Soviet attempts to quash or destroy it. You can see many photos of modern Khevsurs in traditional dress, listen to a traditional Khevsurian folk song, or if you’re feeling ambitious enough to try to hunt down the ingredients in the US (I’ve tried, it’s not easy), try a Georgian recipe.
Georgia is a magic place of vast and intricate history and the most beautifully welcoming people, and I encourage everyone reading this to find out more. It’s amazing to me that I found such an unexpected pearl of Georgian history tucked away in a small collection at the AHC, but that just goes to show that you never know what you’ll find at the archives until you start digging in. Who knows where your next archival adventure will take you?
Post contributed by AHC Public History Educator Brie Blasi.
#alwaysarchiving
Sources consulted:
Essad-Bey. Twelve Secrets of the Caucuses (New York: Viking Press, 1931).
Halliburton, Richard. Seven League Boots (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1937).
Phillips, Joseph B. “Russia Takes Peaceful Way to Win Tribesmen of Caucasus who Bear Weapons used in the Crusades.” May 4, 1937. St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Reiss, Tom. The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life (New York: Random House, 2006).
Sherman, Ryan Michael. “Kicking the Crusaders out of the Caucuses: Deconstructing the 200-Year-Old Meme that the Khevsurs Descended from a Lost Band of Medieval Knights,” Nationalities Papers 49, no. 1 (2021), 54-71.
Soldak, Katya. “Two Steps Forward, One Step Back: Georgia’s Path from Soviet Republic to Free Market Democracy.” Forbes. November 23, 2021. Accessed on May 16, 2023.
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The Donald Vining Diaries – A Fifty Year Chronicle of a Gay Man’s Life
June is Pride Month, an opportune time to highlight the unique diaries of Donald Vining.
Vining was a diarist from the very beginning. At the age of eight, he began documenting his day-to-day activities. He wrote one line, largely practical entries about playing with friends, shoveling snow, taking violin lessons, and getting a dog – and with the dog, the attendant chores. Vining’s diary entry on Wednesday, January 6, 1926, reads “Went to school and cleaned up six dog messes.”
Box 1, Donald Vining papers, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming.
While Vining’s adolescent attempts at keeping a diary sometimes fizzled out as the months progressed, a Christmas gift of a diary in 1931 “led to another attempt at faithful diarizing”. By that time, his diary entries had grown longer and sometimes included references to world events, like the 1932 kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby, which, to Vining’s chagrin, interrupted his favorite regularly scheduled Sherlock Holmes radio program.
By 1933, Vining was dreaming big, musing “As actor, author, playwright, investor, I’ll make huge sums. Of course, love means a great deal to me but I’m afraid money will always come first if it is a choice between the two.” He so identified with being a diarist, that it sometimes gave him nightmares. He wrote, “had a very disturbing dream last night when I dreamed that I wrote my diary on the rug and on my shirt cuffs – then somebody cleaned the rug and washed my shirts and the printing disappeared. I was on the point of weeping at the thought of blank pages in my diary.”
On December 31, 1934, Vining wrote, “Sixteen and seventeen is a good early age at which to finish one’s first diary. I believe it is such a habit now and I shall never get out of it.” It was a prescient observation. By January 1, 1936, Vining had dropped out of college, where he had been studying drama. “Finances were complicated” he wrote, but he was still determined to keep up with his diary writing. His first resolution for the new year – “to keep a more literate diary.”
In May of 1936, Vining, still a teenager and inspired by a sermon on the topic of love, wrote, “I at once decided never to feel furtive in my love affairs hereafter. Perhaps my lust for those of my own sex is something to be ashamed of, perhaps not. But at any rate my love for them is not. It’s only to be regretted that everyone can’t love everyone else and no love should be considered as other than the finest thing in the world.” It was the beginning of Vining’s many observations on attraction, love, and sex that would pepper his diaries in the years to come.
Vining spent his early twenties attending Westchester University in Pennsylvania, working odd jobs and writing and putting on plays for an amateur theatrical society. Much to his delight, he was eventually accepted for graduate studies at Yale’s drama school, where he was “thrown into ecstasy by the beauty of some of the buildings and the aristocratic appearance of it all.” He harbored fantasies of having his own repertory theatre and was eager to learn “a stage hand’s duties as well as an actor’s, director’s and author’s.” Those weren’t the only fantasies on his mind. On September 26, 1939, he wrote “Am I smitten now! As I came out from Drama 6 I saw him…His hair was wavy with just the slightest tint of red in its blondness. He has very prominent cheekbones and a long angular face. He looks intelligent and as tho he meant business. All this raving after only a glance or two…At last I have someone to pretend I’m in love with.” Dedicated to his diary as always, Vining wrapped up the year by writing, “No days of the year can be counted on to give me such joy as a diarist as do the first and last. I relish the summary.”
By 1941, Vining had graduated from Yale and submitted manuscripts to MGM and 20th Century Fox in Hollywood, but they were turned down. He wrote, “I rebound very quickly to professional setbacks and disappointments, which is either a very great asset or a quality that will lead me and my family smack onto the shoals. How long does one go on achieving nothing much. It always comes out all right in the biographies of successful authors, but what about the many you never hear about? When should one fight on, and when wise up to one’s own inadequacies and give up the attempt.”
Soon World War II was raging, and men of Vining’s age were being drafted. After some reflection, Vining submitted the necessary paperwork to be classified as a conscientious objector but still was required to go through the Army’s induction process. It was there that he was declared unfit for service by a psychiatrist who wrote “homosexualism-overt” on his papers. Vining was relieved to be rejected by the Army and resolved to move to New York City, saying “I know that I must take my talent, education and experience to market before it gets rusty.” In New York, he found some success writing plays and synopses of scripts and reviewing books. He felt compelled to write, saying “I have to have my freedom to write just as much, almost, as I have to have water, food, and sleep.” Vining wrote, “Being in New York is wonderful, high cost of living and amorous misadventures not-withstanding. Much of what I came for has not developed or has lost its appeal, but music and theatre are swell.”
By 1945, Vining was working as a clerk at the Sloan House YMCA. During the war it housed more than a thousand men, many of them enlisted, and was the biggest YMCA in the nation. Vining wrote about practicing his swimming in the Y’s basement swimming pool and keeping an eye out for attractive gay men there and in New York City’s Central Park West, a popular “cruising” spot.
While Vining still harbored an interest in playwriting, by 1949 he had taken a job in the Development Office at the Teacher’s College of Columbia University. Much of his diary in the 1940s, 50s and 60s documented the minutiae of everyday life – searching for an apartment, caring for his cats, and airing work grievances. His diary revealed that he enjoyed knitting and needlepoint and played mahjong and bridge. He maintained a busy social life and capitalized on the benefits of living in New York City. Visits to museums were frequent and he was a regular movie goer. He enjoyed opera, symphony, ballet and theater performances, often recording his impressions in his diary.
Vining eventually settled into a long-term relationship with Richmond Purinton. As the year was drawing to a close in 1956, Vining, then 39, wrote, “As I look around me, I seem to have all I ever wanted even if perhaps not so much of any one thing as I used to envision. I have a companion I love who fills my days and years with a nice balance or surprise, whimsy, thoughtfulness, and dependability. I have books, a bank account that permits travel, a job I don’t resist rising to in the morning, small but pleasant rewards from writing and painting, and I have New York.”
Vining long admired Samuel Pepys, who was known for his mid-17th century diary. Pepys’ diary is remembered today for its insight into upper-class life in London. It seems that Vining saw himself as a sort of gay New York City Pepys. By 1959 he had agreed to give his diary to Yale. He wrote “So now I don’t have to worry about offering it elsewhere and have only to pack it and send it off…Then I can stop worrying about fire, etc.” Vining spent his evenings transcribing his diary, writing “I must say that as I do the transcription I become convinced that with the chaff threshed away mine is a very good diary on the whole, ranging from poor in the Tech years to superb in the years where actual quotes characterize people very well. I am committed now to the dream that it will be published eventually but this is a little difficult to guarantee for its great value lies in its utter frankness.”
The American Heritage Center’s copy of Vining’s diary is largely typewritten transcripts, but when Vining was traveling, he resorted to writing in longhand.
He was widely traveled, often spending up to a month at a time abroad, frequently in Europe. While away from home he was exceptionally observant, making note of cultural differences, architecture, museum artefacts and more.
While Vining and Purinton were a couple for decades, their relationship was not strictly exclusive, and Vining wrote of his trips to the gay bath houses of New York City. His March 1982 diary notes, “we went home and had supper. Afterward I set out for Everard. During my first five minutes in the steam room and elsewhere I saw 6 handsome bodies that showed Everard is still the place. Beauty thinned out after that but still I had one of my better nights.”
Eventually, after failing to find a publisher for his diary, Vining founded Pepys Press and published a five-volume series simply titled A Gay Diary. The dedication page read, “To THE UNABASHED Those thousands of gay men and lesbians who didn’t wait for the Stonewall Rebellion and Gay Liberation to live full and loving gay lives without undue regard for what family, church, psychiatrists or state thought about it. My true kin.”
Vining had been a diarist for more than 50 years and had produced thousands of pages of single-spaced typewritten diary entries. He said he made “no attempt to touch up the self-portrait by removing warts nor to make improvements in the quality of the writing, often poor due to haste, fatigue, and, I’m afraid, blind spots in my mastery of capitalization, punctuation, and grammar … On the one hand I should have loved to amplify, explain, retract, or rephrase a thousand passages but on the other hand I felt it unfair to cosmeticize, patronize or apologize for my younger self.” Reviewers at the time praised his published work as “unquestionably the richest historical document of gay male life in the United States”.
Vining’s diaries capture his evolution from precociously observant boy to gay senior citizen. His last published diary entry, written on December 31st, 1982, begins “As an interim piece of writing I decided to work on the little 500 word essay for SAGE’s contest on MY LIFE AS A LESBIAN OR GAY: THEN AND NOW. I fussed and fussed with it long after working hours and way out of proportion to the rewards offered.” He concluded “Since this entry rounds out fifty years of diary, it makes a very natural place to stop. For now, at least.” Vining passed away in New York City on January 24th, 1998, at the age of 80 and is buried alongside Richmond Purinton in Maine.
The Donald Vining papers at the American Heritage Center consist of five boxes of diary transcripts and a published copy of A Gay Diary 1975-1982. There are edited and original diaries from the the years 1926 through 1982. The New York Public Library also houses Vining’s correspondence, diaries, novels, play scripts, stories, articles, scrapbook, two videotaped interviews, two of his original childhood diaries (1926-1927), and typescripts of his diaries, 1926-1970, illustrated with photographs, that Vining called his “Diary Digests.”
To see how Vining’s personal experiences reflected broader societal attitudes, explore our Virmuze exhibit “A Different Kind of Spotlight: How the media has portrayed queerness throughout the decades.” While Vining documented his private gay life with remarkable candor from the 1930s through the 1980s, this exhibit reveals how mainstream media was simultaneously covering LGBTQ+ issues—often with far less understanding or compassion. The contrast between Vining’s authentic self-portrayal and the media’s evolving representation offers fascinating insight into the gap between lived experience and public discourse during those transformative decades.
Post contributed by AHC Writer Kathryn Billington.
#alwaysarchiving