2 Sunday

July

Roman emperor Valentinian III, characterized as a homosexual in Valentinian, a little-known Restoration drama by

the notoriously gay John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, born in Ravenna, 419 A.D.

3 Monday

American writer and newspaper editor William Henry Hurlbert (né Hurlbut), whose startling male beauty attracted several novelists, including Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Theodore Winthrop, and Charles Kingsley, to work out their gay fantasies in the safe world of fiction, born in Charleston, South Carolina, 1827.

4 Tuesday

Independence Day

A homosexual act at the Centennial Exposition at Philadelphia leads to $70,000 in blackmail payments and the declaration of Henry B. Palmer of New Brunswick, New Jersey, as "legally insane" for frittering away his fortune, 1876.

5 Wednesday

Cecil Rhodes, British colonial and Imperial statesman, whose homosexuality was well known to his Victorian colleagues but remains unmentioned to the fellows who bear the scholarships bequeathed annually in his name, born at Bishop Stortford, Hertfordshire, 1853.

6 Thursday

Flemish sculptor Jérôme Duquesnoy is accused of sodomizing two young acolytes in the Chapel of Ghent and is eventually lashed to a stake, strangled, and burned, 1654.

7 Friday

Edward II of England, who, in a grotesquely literal interpretation of the punishment fitting the crime, was executed in 1327 by a red-hot poker forced up his anus, is crowned king, 1307.

8 Saturday

Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama, of whose homosexuality gay historian Edward I. Stevenson was convinced, sets sail from Lisbon to open the sea route to India, 1497.

Cecil Rhodes:

He liked scholars.