April

23 Sunday

As documented in Jonathan Katz's Gay American History, William C. Bullitt informs Franklin Delano Roosevelt that Sumner Welles, the president's Undersecretary of State, is a homosexual and demands his dismissal, a demand F.D.R. refuses until Bullitt leaks the news to gossip columnists, 1941.

24 Monday

Victorian novelist Marie Corelli, who called her lover, Bertha Vyver, "Mamasita" and was called in turn "Little Girl," dies at Stratford-on-Avon, 1924.

25 Tuesday

Louise Labé, the sixteenth-century French poet called "La Belle Cordiere," whose passionate verses strongly suggest that she was a lesbian, dies at Parcieu, 1566.

26 Wednesday

Black singer Ma Rainey (Gertrude Malissa Nix Pridgett), who in her day was known as a woman-lovin' woman, born in Columbus, Georgia, 1886.

27 Thursday

Ferdinand Magellan, the great Portuguese-born Spanish explorer whose homosexuality is documented in Edward I. Stevenson's The Intersexes (1908), is killed by natives on the Pacific island of Mactan, 1521.

28 Friday

Prince Mikhail Kutuzov, Russian general responsible for Napoleon's retreat from Moscow, dies of a heart attack during sexual intercourse with one of his soldiers, 1813.

29 Saturday

Rod McKuen, who was delighted that his song "Bend Down and Touch Me" was used in place of "O Promise Me" by two San Francisco men at their church wedding, born in Oakland, California, 1933.

Rod McKuen:

"I have had sex with men; does that make me gay?"