21 Sunday

May

Scottish general James Graham, Marquess of Montrose, who apparently attempted in his own way to find the answer to the age-old question of what Scottish men wear under their kilts, executed in Edinburgh, 1650.

22 Monday

Victoria Day (Canada)

Alan Dale (né Alfred J. Cohen), whose novel A Marriage Below Zero (1889) is one of the earliest in America with an overt homosexual theme, dies at sixty-seven, 1928.

23 Tuesday

Margaret Fuller, the American transcendentalist whose memoirs were bowdlerized by Emerson and others to make her attachments to other women appear merely "spiritual," leaving her physical life largely speculative, born at Cambridgeport, Massachusetts, 1810.

24 Wednesday

Queen Victoria, who, according to legend, was incapable of believing that lesbianism existed, born, 1819.

25 Thursday

Poet-philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, who as a young man was hopelessly in love with the splendidly-named Martin Gay, born in Boston, 1803.

26 Friday

After Pope Paul VI denies as "ignoble and slanderous" the allegation that he once had an affair with a young French actor, an Italian homosexual organization sues him for defaming "homosexual behavior and therefore homosexuals themselves," 1976.

27 Saturday

Joseph Gallieni, French general and statesman whose homosexuality figures in the plot of Roger Peyrefitte's The Exile of Capri, dies at Versailles, 1916.

Margaret Fuller:

Did Emerson launder her "dirty linen"?