September

17 Sunday

Baron Friedrich von Steuben, one of the heroes of the American War of Independence, who emigrated to the young colonies to escape his reputation as a lover of young men and wound up adopting two American patriots as his sons and heirs-born in Magdeburg, Prussia, 1730.

18 Monday

Greta Garbo, who, as Tennessee Williams once confided to Donald Windham, wanted to make another movie-so long as the part was neither male nor female-and "regretted that she was not able to play Dorian Gray," born in Stockholm, Sweden, 1905.

19 Tuesday

The emperor Nerva, who as a senator enjoyed (for cold cash) the stud service of a young hustler named Titus Flavius Domitianus, who eventually became Domitian, his predecessor as Roman emperor, enthroned at Rome, 96

A.D.

20 Wednesday

Angelica Georgini, the opera singer who became a lover of Queen Christina after her abdication, and whose dates of birth and death are lost in history, is here commemorated.

21 Thursday

Yolande-Martine Gabrielle de Polastron, Duchesse de Polignac, who was the lover of Marie Antoinette, but managed to escape the wrath of the mob by escaping to the Ukraine, dies in St. Petersburg, Russia, 1817. The Daughters of Bilitis, the first lesbian organization in America, founded in San Francisco, 1955.

22 Friday

August Wilhelm Iffland, eighteenth-century German actor and playwright, who like so many theatrical people before and since was completely dedicated to his craft and a compleat homosexual, dies at seventy-five in Berlin, 1814.

23 Saturday

The Emperor Domitian:

The top man became Top Man.

English feminist and novelist Geraldine Jewsbury, who was in love with actress Charlotte Cushman and made her

the heroine of her then-shocking novel The Half Sisters, dies at eighty-eight, 1880.