January

15 Sunday

Martin Luther King's Birthday

Novelist Mazo de la Roche, who lived together with her cousin Caroline Clement for three-quarters of a century

and together raised two adopted children, born in Canada, 1879.

16 Monday

Thomas Sweetin, a candidate for the Jesuit priesthood, is told by his superior, the Reverend Albert Bartlett, that he will not be ordained because he is a homosexual, 1977.

17 Tuesday

Murray H. Hall, a minor New York City politician and the husband of two wives, dies suddenly at sixty and is discovered to be a cross-dressing woman named Mary Anderson, 1901.

18 Wednesday

A Wisconsin newspaper reports that Anna Morris (alias "Frank Blunt'), who had worn masculine attire nearly all her life and had recently married Gertrude Field, has been sentenced to a year in prison for stealing $175 in Fond du Lac, 1894.

19 Thursday

Drama critic Alexander Woollcott, whose biographer explains away his homosexuality by calling it a case of "too much estrogen," born in Phalanx, New Jersey, 1887.

20 Friday

Elisabeth Bettina von Arnim, German writer whose passionate love letters to poet Karoline von Günderode were translated in 1842 by Margaret Fuller, dies in Berlin, 1859.

21 Saturday

Mary Jo Risher, who lost custody of her nine-year-old-son in 1975 after acknowledging that she is a lesbian, is ordered to pay her former husband $22 weekly for child support, 1976.

Elisabeth Bettina von Arnim:

Her love letters to Karoline von Günderode virtually define Romanticism.