January

8 Sunday

A New York Times book reviewer takes Cole Lesley, Noël Coward's valet and biographer, to task for refusing to name which "noble earl, Coldstream Guards officer, actor, or . . . er, . . . valet was numbered among Coward's lovers," 1977.

9 Monday

Octave Thanet (née Alice French), a six-foot tall, 200-pound American novelist, who lived for almost fifty years with petite Jane Crawford at their Arkansas plantation "Thanford" (after Thanet and Crawford), dies, 1934.

10 Tuesday

John I, gay Byzantine emperor, whose sartorial tastes earned him the nickname "Tzimisces" (Armenian for "red boots''), dies in Constantinople, 976. □ In New York, Ellen Marie Barrett, an avowed lesbian, is ordained as an Episcopal priest, 1976.

11 Wednesday

Alexander Hamilton, whose love letters to patriot John Laurens suggest more than mere eighteenth-century literary conventions of friendship, born in Nevis, B. W. I., 1757. □ Gay writer Bayard Taylor, who eventually became United States Ambassador to Berlin, born at Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, 1825.

12 Thursday

An indictment against Ella Thompson for "sodomy" with another woman is discharged after the Georgia Supreme Court rules that sodomy "cannot be accomplished between two women," 1939. Playwright Lorraine Hansberry dies, 1965.

13 Friday

Noël Coward:

Whom Coward kissed his valet never told.

Liberal Thomas Jefferson, revising Virginia law, suggests that sodomy "be punished by castration" rather than by death, 1777.

14 Saturday

Columnist Drew Pearson notes in his diary that all Washington is alive with rumors that "queer-baiting" Senator Joseph McCarthy is himself a homosexual, 1952.