3 Sunday

December

Magnus VI Ericsson, king of Norway and Sweden who was known as "The Effeminate," and whose elevation of his handsome favorites eventually caused him the loss of his throne, dies at fifty-seven, 1374.

4 Monday

Walt Whitman records in his diary that he "slept with" Horace Ostrander, a dry goods salesman-then the social equivalent of a "ribbon clerk" in the gay pecking order, 1862.

5 Tuesday

Robert Harley, 1st Earl of Oxford, whom Magnus Hirschfeld theorized was a repressed homosexual, born in London, 1661.

6 Wednesday

George Platt Lynes, many of whose photographs (now in private hands) document gay life in the '30s and '40s and merit publication, dies, 1955.

7 Thursday

Japanese poet Akiko Yosano, whose Tangled Hair reveals her love for another woman, Tomiko Yamakawa, born in Sakai City, 1878.

8 Friday

Anglo-Irish writer Sarah Ponsonby, who with Eleanor Butler (and with their servant Mary Caryll, known as "Molly the Bruiser'') lived together as "the ladies of Llangollen," dies at seventy-six, 1831.

9 Saturday

English poet John Milton, known to his Cambridge classmates as "the lady of Christ's," and portrayed as a repressed homosexual in Robert Graves's Wife to Mr. Milton, born in London, 1608.

Aleister Crowley:

"The wickedest man in the world."