August

6 Sunday

""

English poet Alfred Lord Tennyson, who penned the lines 'Tis better to have loved and lost/ Than never to have loved at all" to another man, his "beloved Arthur" Hallam, despite their appropriation by sentimental heterosexuals, born at Somersby, Lincolnshire, 1809.

7 Monday

Henry James's sister Alice, whose lover was Katharine Loring, born in New York City, 1848. Charles Warren Stoddard, who began his career writing poems in Bret Harte's Golden Era under the pen name "Pip Pepperpod" and later wrote the almost indescribably lush gay romance South-Sea Idylls (1873), born in Rochester, New York, 1843.

8 Tuesday

The American poet Sara Teasdale, who near the end of her life seems to have found "a quiet at the heart of love" through friendship with Margaret Conklin, an admiring college student, born in St. Louis, 1884.

9 Wednesday

Twenty-two-year-old Seagram's whisky heir Samuel Bronfman is kidnapped, setting in motion a long trial in which accusations of homosexuality are a key element, 1975.

10 Thursday

Gay novelist John Horne Burns, whose aggressively straightforward works are all but forgotten today—and unfairly so-dies at thirty-six, 1953.

11 Friday

Sara Teasdale:

"A quiet at the heart of love."

John Henry Cardinal Newman, whose great love for Ambrose St. John ended with a tearful night in bed with Brother Ambrose's corpse, dies in Birmingham, 1890.

12 Saturday

Eminent classicist Edith Hamilton, whose intimate friendship with Doris Fielding Reid began in 1903 and ended with Miss Hamilton's death sixty years later, born in Dresden, Germany, 1867.