Henry David Thoreau:

"These young buds of manhood in the streets are like buttercups in the meadows...."

30 Sunday

April/May

Florence Converse, late-nineteenth-century American novelist, whose lover was Wellesley College professor Vida Scudder, born in New Orleans, 1871.

1 Monday

Boris Todrin, whose powerful "Hate Song," a poem about the loss of a man's wife to another woman, is unfairly forgotten today, born in Brooklyn, 1915.

2 Tuesday

English writer and social reformer Edward Carpenter visits Walt Whitman at Camden, New Jersey, for the first time, setting in motion speculation that persists to the present day that they did more than discuss Leaves of Grass, 1877.

3 Wednesday

Poet May Sarton, whose sonnet sequence "A Divorce of Lovers" is a brilliant study of two lesbians and the death of their affair, born in Wendelgem, Belgium, 1912.

4 Thursday

Francis Cardinal Spellman, whom Gore Vidal described in print as "a lurid queen" who used to frequent homosexual "procurers," born in Whitman, Massachusetts, 1889.

5 Friday

In Hollywood, actor Albert Dekker commits sucide in drag and handcuffs and leaves behind a farewell note scrawled in lipstick, 1968.

6 Saturday

Transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau, who at twenty-two fell desperately in love with eleven-year-old Edmund Sewell, dies at Concord, Massachusetts, 1862.