29 Sunday

October/November

The French writger Etienne de la Boétie (1530-1563), who was the lover of Montaigne, and whose exact dates of birth and death are unrecorded by history, is here commemorated.

30 Monday

Horace Annesley Vachell, English author of the early twentieth-century gay novel The Hill: A Romance of Friendship, born in Essex, 1861.

31 Tuesday

Halloween

A few years after the California Gold Rush, The New York Daily Tribune reports the exploits of Brooklynite Lydia Ann Puyfer, who ran off to the West Coast wearing her male cousin's clothes, 1854.

1 Wednesday

An anti-homosexual witch-hunt begins in Idaho and is later chronicled by John Gerassi in The Boys of Boise, a brilliant study of the homosexual as political victim, 1955.

2 Thursday

Marie Antoinette, whose lesbianism is treated in Stefan Zweig's fascinating biography of the Austrian-born French queen, born in Vienna, 1755.

3 Friday

Marie Antoinette:

She loved the faithless and left behind the faithful.

A poll of American doctors taken by Modern Medicine magazine shows that, although a majority reject legalizing

the sale of marijuana, most hold that homosexual acts between consenting adults should be permitted, 1969.

4 Saturday

J. R. Ackerley, who summed up the classic British homosexual's attitude toward gay sex by writing of his brief affairs with "several hundred young men, mostly of the lower orders and often clad in uniforms of one sort or another," born at Herne Hill, 1896.