28 Sunday

May/June

Violette Leduc, French lesbian author whose great unrequited love for Maurice Sachs caused the homosexual writer

to suggest that she write instead of nagging him, dies in Paris, 1972.

29 Monday

Memorial Day

Anne Marie Louise d'Orleans, Duchesse de Montpensier, who set her sights on the courtesan Ninon de Lenclos who cared exclusively for men, born at the Louvre, 1627. French anarchist Louise Michel, whose lesbianism was courageously defended by Emma Goldman, born at Vroncourt, Upper Marne, 1830.

30 Tuesday

Christopher Marlowe, English dramatist and poet to whom is attributed the epigram, "He that does not love boys and tobacco is a fool," dies at twenty-nine in Deptford, 1593.

31 Wednesday

Gay actor-director Rainer Werner Fassbinder, whose film about lesbians, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, excludes all men save the nudes in the huge Correggio mural beside the main character's brass double bed, born in Bad Wörishofen, Bavaria, 1945.

1 Thursday

The tenth U.S. census (1880) reports a total of 63 prisoners languishing in American jails for "crimes against nature." Ten years later, the number reaches 224.

2 Friday

Eleanor Butler, who with Sarah Ponsonby, sixteen years her junior, eloped from eighteenth-century Ireland to Llangollen, Wales, where they set up an independent household and lived in conjugal bliss for fifty years, dies at ninety, 1829.

3 Saturday

La Couronne d'or:

Remembering the '60s.

Allen Ginsberg, whom Esquire magazine "proved" was "descended" from a long line of copulating male partners, beginning with poets Walt Whitman and Edward Carpenter, born in Newark, New Jersey, 1926.