8 Sunday

October

Irish writer Edith Anna Oenone Somerville, who, with her lover Violet Florence Martin (who called herself "Martin Ross''), wrote over two dozen works under the joint name Somerville & Ross, dies at ninety-one in Castlehaven, Ireland, 1949.

9 Monday

Columbus Day

Thanksgiving (Canada)

Walt Whitman records in his diary that Jerry Taylor, a Union soldier, "slept with me last night," 1863.

10 Tuesday

For lack of a more important event, the name of Bathyllus, a Greek youth so delicately beautiful that Polycrates, tyrant of Samos, defied all convention by erecting a statue in his honor in the temple of Hera, goddess of women, is here recorded.

11 Wednesday

Yom Kippur

Molière (né Jean Baptiste Poquelin), the great French dramatist, whose marriage was destroyed by his love for young actor Michel Baron, thirty-one years his junior, dies in Paris, 1672. Walt Whitman, apparently busy under the sign of Libra, picks up David Wilson on Middough Street in Brooklyn and records in his diary that Wilson "slept with me," 1862.

12 Thursday

Lucy Ann Lobdell, who, with her "wife," lived among her New York State neighbors as the "female hunter of Delaware and Sullivan Counties," is admitted to the Willard Asylum for the Insane, 1880.

13 Friday

GRILL

Italian sculptor Antonio Canova, whose homosexuality is documented by Magnus Hirschfeld, dies at sixty-four in Venice, 1822.

14 Saturday

Mlle. Polaire (née Emilie Marie Bouchard), who, as a star of the French stage before World War I, was billed as having "the smallest waist in the world," and who was part of the lesbian circle of Colette, dies at Champigny-surMarne, 1939. Poet Katherine Mansfield born in Wellington, New Zealand, 1888.

Truman Capote:

Prose as brittle, cold, and sharp as ice.