March

12 Sunday

Lady Hester Stanhope, who, looking "like a seraglio page," lived among the desert bedouins with her lover Elizabeth Williams and became known as "the last of the eighteenth-century eccentrics," born at Kent, England, 1776.

13 Monday

English novelist Hugh Walpole, whose love for his burly chauffeur, Harold Cheevers, lasted for fifteen years until his death in 1941, born in New Zealand, 1884.

14 Tuesday

During World War II, Navy M.P.'s raid a homosexual brothel near the Brooklyn Navy Yard and discover that one

of the regular customers is the chairman of the Senate Naval Affairs Committee, 1942.

15 Wednesday

Lionel Johnson, British poet and critic who introduced "Bosie" Douglas to Oscar Wilde and who died of a fractured skull at thirty-five after falling off a barstool, born at Broadstairs, Kent, 1867.

16 Thursday

Novelist I. A. R. Wylie, whose My Life with George (1940) movingly chronicles her long love affair with Dr. S. Josephine Baker, born in Melbourne, Australia, 1885.

17 Friday

St. Patrick's Day

Rudolf Nureyev, who (as running back Dave Kopay records in his autobiography) is a constant visitor to the gay dancing bars of Washington, D.C., born in Ufa, East Siberia, 1938.

18 Saturday

While bathing aboard the U.S. battleship Vermont, sailor "John Wilkinson" is discovered to be a woman whose real name is now lost to history, 1907.

Rudolf Nureyev:

What becomes a legend most?