22 Sunday

October

Anna Dickinson, who, as the love object of Susan B. Anthony, was invited to share the famous feminist's double

bed, "big enough and good enough to take you in," dies at ninety, 1932.

23 Monday

Gore Vidal, who wickedly points out that the work of Truman Capote has been analyzed by a Professor Nance and boasts that his output has been studied by a Professor Dick, born at West Point, New York, 1925.

24 Tuesday

Poet and dramatist August von Platen, whose diaries document the gay life at nineteenth-century German universities, born at Ansbach, 1796.

25 Wednesday

After serving seventeen months in the Continental Army disguised as a man (and being wounded in the Battle of Tarrytown), Deborah Sampson is honorably discharged by General Henry Knox at West Point, 1783.

26 Thursday

Gilles de Rais, the original model for Bluebeard, who, legend notwithstanding, murdered not wives but boys he had sodomized, executed at Nantes, 1440.

27 Friday

Michael Servetus, Spanish physician and theologian who was sentenced to the stake by Calvin and whose homosexuality has been documented by Edward I. Stevenson in The Intersexes, executed at Geneva, 1553.

28 Saturday

American patriot John Laurens, who played Pithias to Alexander Hamilton's Damon, born in Charleston, South Carolina, 1754.

Alexander Hamilton:

Love letters to another soldier.