9 Sunday

April

During the Civil War a Wisconsin woman in drag is arrested for having "married a woman in Green Bay, taken her money, and decamped," 1864.

10 Monday

Evelyn Waugh, who, as a young man, passed through the "extreme homosexual phase" so superbly described in Brideshead Revisited, dies at Combe Florey, Somerset, 1966,

11 Tuesday

Ferdinand Lassalle, the German socialist leader who was killed in a duel caused by his affair with someone else's wife, but who was nonetheless an early advocate of homosexual rights, born in Breslau, 1825.

12 Wednesday

French humanist Marc-Antoine Muret, once burned in effigy as a sodomist while his less fortunate partner, Luc Menge-Fremiot, was fed to the flames as fuel, born in Muret, near Limoges, 1526.

13 Thursday

San Francisco police chief Charles Gain says that there are twenty homosexuals on his force, and, promising his full support, urges them to "come out of the closet" and show that gays can be good police officers, 1976.

14 Friday

Zeno, the Greek founder of Stoicism, whose birth and death dates are unrecorded, but whose homosexuality was so well known that Stoicism at first became popularly associated with gayness, is here commemorated.

15 Saturday

Bessie Smith, the legendary blues singer whose black lesbian circle included the equally legendary Ma Rainey and the male impersonator Gladys Fergusson, born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, 1894.

Bessie Smith:

"Fix my feathers, baby. . . ."