13 Sunday

August

Lucy Stone, prominent American abolitionist and feminist who was the love object of Antoinette Brown, who called

her "dearest little cowboy," born in West Brookfield, Massachusetts, 1818.

14 Monday

Queen Maria Caroline of Naples, who numbered among her lovers Emma Lyon Hamilton and her "easy ally" Hester Stanhope, born in Vienna, 1752.

15 Tuesday

This day is given to the great Arabian poet Abu Nuwas, whose dates are lost in history and whose almost 5,000 poems, many of them blatantly gay, await a modern English translation, as does the hilarious Arabian Nights story 'Abu Nuwas and the Three Boys."

16 Wednesday

Wanda Landowska, the internationally-famous harpsichordist whose lesbianism is discussed in W. G. Rogers' Ladies Bountiful, a fascinating study of twentieth-century patrons of the arts, dies at eighty, 1959.

17 Thursday

This day is given to Ebba Sparre, the lover of Queen Christina, whose dates of birth and death seem to have been ignored by historians even though she influenced the destiny of Sweden by precipitating the Queen's abdication.

18 Friday

Pope Alexander VI, a corrupt, worldly, and ambitious bisexual, whose neglect of the spiritual inheritance of the Church contributed to the development of the Protestant Reformation, dies in Rome, 1503.

19 Saturday

English writer Horatio Forbes Brown, who once wrote a devastating poem about a boring society musicale, ending each descriptive stanza with the line, "But I liked their footman Robert best," dies at seventy-two, 1926.

Wanda Landowska:

"Et, vous êtes un pédéraste naturellement?"