12 Sunday

Lincoln's Birthday

February

Because of growing concern about “immorality” on the Broadway stage, the producers of Mae West's play The Drag cancel plans to bring it to New York, 1927.

13 Monday

Vernon Lee (née Violet Paget), the once-eminent English Victorian novelist whose painfully broken romances with two women will undoubtedly be better understood after her private papers are unsealed in 1980, dies in Florence, 1935.

14 Tuesday

Valentine's Day

Right-wing singer Anita Bryant forms "Save Our Children, Inc." to fight Miami's homosexual rights ordinance and prompts at least one gay wit to comment: "Who'd want to squeeze her oranges?"-and others to think her more dangerous than comic, 1977.

15 Wednesday

American actress Charlotte Cushman, whose first love was Rosalie Kemble Sully, daughter of the great American artist, and whose last love was the sculptor Emma Stebbins-not to mention numerous alliances in between-dies in Boston, 1876.

16 Thursday

Feminist Susan B. Anthony, who wrote love letters to Anna Dickinson headed "My Dear Chicky Dicky Darling," born at Adams, Massachusetts, 1820.

17 Friday

English poet Horatio Forbes Brown, whose life was considered so "scandalous" that at his death almost all his manuscripts were burned, born in Nice, 1854.

18 Saturday

Giordano Bruno, Italian philosopher and precursor of the Enlightenment, whose homosexuality is documented by Magnus Hirschfeld, burned at the stake in Rome, 1600.

Charlotte Cushman:

The muses of comedy and tragedy weren't her only lady friends.