11 Sunday

Shavuoth

June

George Baxt, author of A Queer Kind of Death, the first mystery novel to feature a gay detective, born in Brooklyn, New York, 1923.

12 Monday

Harriet Martineau, the English feminist who appears to have been the great love of Margaret Fuller, although their correspondence, veiled in nineteenth-century euphemism, makes it impossible to know whether their passion was ever consummated, born in Norwich, 1802.

13 Tuesday

Edward Barnfield, author of The Affectionate Shepherd, probably the most blatantly homosexual poem of the English Renaissance ("If it be sin to love a lovely lad,/Oh, then sin l."), baptized in Norbury, Staffordshire, 1574.

14 Wednesday

Edward Fitzgerald, English poet and translator of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, who had a thing for a strapping young fisherman named Joseph Fletcher to whom he addressed letters headed "My Dear Poshy," dies at Merton, Norfolk, 1883.

15 Thursday

Adah Isaacs Menken, who, despite her reputation for heterosexual promiscuity, was the author of Infelicia, a collection of Sapphic poems, and was for a time the lover of novelist George Sand, born in New Orleans, Louisiana, 1835.

16 Friday

Giulio Alberoni, Italian cardinal and statesman, whose homosexuality was the subject of several witty and gossipy letters of the German wife of gay Philip, Duc d'Orleans, dies at Piacenza, 1752.

17 Saturday

Adah Isaacs Menken:

Did she call the Baronne Dudevant "George'?

The Southern Baptist Convention goes on record against ordination or hiring of overt homosexuals, 1976.