10 Sunday

September

Mary Oliver, whose No Voyages and Other Poems should be more widely (and carefully) read, born in Cleveland, Ohio, 1935.

11 Monday

Catherine Wretford Tozer (fl. 1870), whose vital dates are lost in history, who lived her life as "Charley Wilson," a house painter happily married to another woman for many years, and had her curious history fictionalized by Victorian novelist Charles Reade, is here commemorated.

12 Tuesday

Novelist Grace Greenwood (née Sara Jane Clarke), who was part of the lesbian circle of Charlotte Cushman known as the "Jolly Female Bachelors," born at Norridgewock, Maine, 1840.

13 Wednesday

"The Star-Spangled Banner" is written (1813) and later set to the almost-unsingable popular tune "Anacreon in Heaven"; totally forgotten is the fact that Anacreon was a homosexual Greek poet noted for his love affairs with the youths Smerdis, Leukaspis, Simalus, Euryalus, and Bathyllus-to name but a few.

14 Thursday

Friedrich Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt, German scientist, explorer, and natural philosopher whose widely suspected homosexuality was confirmed when he made his valet Seifert his sole heir, born in Berlin, 1769.

15 Friday

Sarah Emma Evelyn Edmondson, who lived her life as "Franklin Thompson" and served with distinction in the Civil War as a male nurse, spy, foot soldier, and general's aide-taking time out for a love affair with an army chaplain's wife-dies in La Porte, Texas, 1898.

16 Saturday

Author John Knowles, whose novel A Separate Peace achieved instant popularity as a sort of gay Catcher in the Rye, whatever its original intention, born in Fairmont, West Virginia, 1926.

Alexander von Humboldt:

"His servant held him in more than matrimonial bondage."