29 Sunday

January/February

This day is given to Abigail Hill, waiting woman to Queen Anne, whose dates are long lost and who inspired the following contemporary verse: "Whenas Queen Anne of great renown/Great Britain's scepter swayed/Besides the Church, she dearly loved/ A dirty Chamber-maid.”

30 Monday

American journalist Dorothy Thompson, who numbered among her lovers Christa Winsloe, author of Mädchen in Uniform, and Gertrude Franchot Tone, mother of the famous screen actor, dies at sixty-six, 1961.

31 Tuesday

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The Drag, Mae West's gay play, opens at the Park Theatre in Bridgeport, Connecticut, nine days before her play Sex is raided on Broadway, 1927.

1 Wednesday

The New York Times reports that fiery radio evangelist Billy James Hargis lost control of the American Christian College after he was accused of having had sexual relations with male students while accompanying the college choir, "The All-American Kids," on nationwide tours, 1976.

2 Thursday

Havelock Ellis, who, with a straight face, reported in his famous book Sexual Inversion that American male prostitutes "invariably wear red neckties," born at Croyden, Surrey, England, 1859.

3 Friday

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Natalie Clifford Barney, listed in a 1927 French biographical dictionary as 'the wild girl from Cincinnati,' known all over Paris for her wealth, social connections, poetry, aphoristic writings, and scandalously unorthodox life," dies at ninety-four in Paris, 1972.

4 Saturday

Mary Anne Talbot, whose exploits as a sailor in the eighteenth century earned her the nickname of "the British Amazon" and included the courtship of a fair Rhode Island maiden, dies at thirty in London, 1808.

Mary Anne Talbot:

Sailors have more fun.