1 Sunday
October
The death of "Mr. Charles Winslow Hall" on board the ocean liner Citta di Torino in the company of his "wife" of
ten years, Giuseppina Boriani, reveals "him" to be Miss Caroline Hall, a Boston heiress, 1901.
2 Monday
Rosh Hashanah 5739
Fourteenth-century Turkish sultan Bayazid I, whose birth and death dates are unknown, and whose tastes were so specific that he preferred only to sodomize Christian boys imported from the Balkans, is here commemorated.
3 Tuesday
Cesare Borgia orders the rape and murder of eighteen-year-old Astorre Manfredi, the handsome lord of Faenza, 1500.
4 Wednesday
Alberta Lucille Hart, so masculine in demeanor that she was once mistaken for a man in a YWCA gymnasium and hastily ejected before the gaff was discovered, born in Albany, Oregon, 1892.
5 Thursday
Cesare Borgia:
Not all gays are good guys.
The Greek lyric poet Ibycus, whose dates are irretrievably lost in history and who was labeled "the most frenzied of boy-lovers" by the Byzantine historian Suidas, is here commemorated.
6 Friday
English author Gerald Heard, who, with his lover Chris Wood, shared a London flat described by Christopher Isherwood in 1932 as "the last thing in tasteful modernity-they have a cat which tones in perfectly with the furnishings," born in that city, 1889.
7 Saturday
John Addington Symonds, writing the first of many letters to Walt Whitman, gingerly asks whether or not the "Calamus" poems are homosexual and is forced to wait nineteen years for an emphatic "no," a lie less hypocritical than a reflection of the poet's fear of the pervasive homophobia of the day, 1871.