April 24

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1862 – (Arthur Christopher) A.C. Benson (d.1925) was an English essayist, poet, and author and the 28th Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge.

Benson was one of six children of Edward White Benson (Archbishop of Canterbury, 1882-96) and his lesbian wife Mary, sister of the philosopher Henry Sidgwick.

The Benson family was exceptionally literate and accomplished, but their history was somewhat tragic. A son and daughter died young; and another daughter, as well as Arthur himself, suffered badly from a mental condition that was probably manic-depressive psychosis, which they had inherited from their father. None of the children ever married. Arthur was homosexual, though his diaries suggest he had few or no sexual relationships.

Despite his illness, Arthur was a distinguished academic and a most prolific author. He was educated at Eton and King's College, Cambridge. From 1885 to 1903 he taught at Eton, returning to Cambridge to lecture in English literature for Magdalene College. From 1915 to 1925, he was Master of Magdalene. From 1906, he was a governor of Gresham's School.

All three of the Benson brothers were noted for writing ghost stories. The bulk of his published ghost stories in the two volumes The Hill of Trouble (1903) and The Isles of Sunset (1904) were written as moral allegories for his pupils. After Arthur's death, Fred Benson found a collection of unpublished ghost stories by Arthur. He put two of them into a book, Basil Netherby (1927); the title story ws renamed "House at Treheale" and the volume was completed by the long "The Uttermost Farthing". The fate of the rest of the stories is unknown.

 Twins Karl and Robert Oelbermann

1896 – Robert Oelbermann, German youth leader. (d.1941) In 1919 Robert and his twin brother Karl founded the Nerother Bund youth group in the Cologne region. Like other German youth groups, it aimed to bring youth closer to nature through camping and hiking. Homosexual relationships sometimes developed from the intense adolescent male camaraderie, and the Nerother Bund accepted these friendships, as did a number of German youth groups at the time.

Soon after the Nazis took power in 1933, they dissolved all independent youth groups and urged the members to join the Hitler Youth movement. Robert refused and secretly continued his connection with the Nerother Bund. In 1936 he was convicted under the Nazi-revised criminal code's Paragraph 175 which outlawed homosexuality. Robert was imprisoned with 13 other members of the Nerother Bund.

Robert was one of more than 50,000 men sentenced under Paragraph 175 during the Nazi regime. By 1941 he had been transferred to the Dachau concentration camp. Like many "175ers" in the camps, Robert was required to wear an identifying pink triangle. The "175ers" were commonly segregated in separate barracks, subjected to particularly harsh treatment, and often ostracized by other prisoner groups.

Forty-four-year-old Robert died at Dachau in 1941.

Otis Charles (L) & Filipe Sanchez-Paris

1926 – Edgar Otis Charles (d.2013) was the eighth bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Utah.

Charles was born in Norristown, Pennsylvania, and first served as a priest in Connecticut. From 1968 until 1982 he was a member of the Standing Liturgical Commission, which developed the 1979 edition of the Book of Common Prayer. In 1971, he was elected Bishop of Utah.

He was active in the peace movement, and opposed Nevada and Utah being launching sites for the MX missile. In the House of Bishops, Charles was chair of the Prayer Book Committee and a member of the Bishops' Committee on Racism. Charles became Dean of the Episcopal Divinity School in 1985. Charles also has significant academic achievements, including a Doctorate of Divinity, and a Doctorate of Sacred Theology.

Charles was married for 42 years and has five children.After his retirement in 1993, Charles publicly came out as gay, the first Christian bishop ever to take such a step. Soon after, he and his wife divorced. He relocated to San Francisco, where he helped to found the California branch of the Oasis Commission.

He married Dr. Felipe Sanchez-Paris on September 29, 2008. The two appear in the documentary film Love Free or Die, testifying about a resolution directing the Episcopal Church to create a provisional rite for the blessing of same-gender relationships at its General Convention in Anaheim, Ca., in 2009.

Sanchez-Paris died on July 30, 2013. Bishop E. Otis Charles died on December 26, 2013, in San Francisco, California.

1951 – John Edward Heys is an American independent filmmaker, actor and writer who lives and works in Berlin.

John Edward Heys was born and raised in New Jersey. Upon his father's death two days after Heys' 12th birthday, he was enrolled and educated at a private boarding school in northern New Jersey. Upon graduating from secondary school, Heys moved to Miami Shores, Florida, to the home of his maternal aunts.

After two semesters of college majoring in Liberal Arts, Heys moved to New York City in 1968 and became part of the East Village and West Village alternative life and LGBTQ culture.

In August 1969, he founded America's first bi-monthly newspaper for the LGBTQ community, Gay Power, the official title totaling 24 issues and was editor until August 1970. One of its covers was created by Robert Mapplethorpe. The newspaper also contained illustrations by Touko Laaksonen, better known as Tom of Finland, as well as regular contributors as Arthur Bell, Taylor Mead, Charles Ludlam, Pudgy Roberts, Bill Vehr, Pat Maxwell, Clayton Cole and regular columns from all of the active LGBSTG groups, from the most conservative Mattachine Society to the most radical The Gay Liberation Front, and all the other groups in between.

Heys created several one-man performance pieces and he acted with Cookie Mueller, H.M. Koutoukas, Charles Ludlam, Ethyl Eichelberger and as part of the Angels of Light NYC Group which Hibiscus founded after moving to NYC.

Heys was a subject for the artists Peter Hujar, Francesco Clemente, Charles Ludlam, Richard Banks, Frank Moore and numerous other photographers. Heys was a close friend & muse of the photographer Peter Hujar and subject of many portraits. Hujar once remarked upon Heys' resemblance to Diana Vreeland, stating that, "I can take a picture of her and another of you and there is a resemblance".

In Berlin he was a friend of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, the Neue Deutsche Welle (new-wave) band Die Tödliche Doris and to the radical gay-activist Napoleon Seyfarth. Heys made two films of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, one of Napoleon Seyfarth, and was the subject of an 8 mm short film which Wolfgang Mueller made in 1984 in the legendary 1930's bordello, Pensione Florian.

Heys' films have been screened at many worldwide film festivals.

1952 – Jean-Paul Gaultier's clothes have both influenced fashions in the clubs and on the streets and have also appropriated ideas from those sources. Since his early shows Gaultier has drawn upon street styles and club culture for his haute couture creations.

A frequenter of gay clubs in London, he typically incorporates elements of gay style into his collections. His 1996 Pin Up Boys collection, for example, drew upon the sailor as a gay icon and presented figure-hugging pink and blue Tom of Finland style outfits.

Born in Arcueil, France, Gaultier was an only child. The future designer was greatly influenced by his grandmother, Marie Garrabe, a hypnotist and practitioner of alternative healing who encouraged him to pursue the unmanly pastimes of sketching and costume making.

Gaultier first realized the impact of his sketches when he was punished by his school teacher for drawing Folies Bergère showgirls. He was made to walk around school with the drawing pinned to his back. The punishment, however, only made the young Gaultier aware of his potential for showmanship.

Gaultier had no formal fashion training. Instead, he sent hundreds of his sketches to various couture houses. Pierre Cardin was impressed by the work and hired Gaultier as a design assistant in 1970, on the young man's eighteenth birthday. Gaultier worked for a number of other French design houses before launching his first collection under his own name in 1976.

However, it was not until 1981, when Gaultier began reflecting and adapting with his own inimitable touch key strands of London's youth subcultures, that his talent was established and his reputation as the enfant terrible of the fashion world was consolidated.

In addition to producing groundbreaking and outrageous clothes for his highly theatrical fashion shows, presented by unconventional models (transvestites, old and fat women, tattooed and pierced youngsters), he also launched cheaper diffusion ranges—Junior Gaultier (in 1988), Gaultier Jeans (in 1993), and JPG (in 1994).

In his designs, Gaultier toys with notions of masculinity and the appropriate forms of dress for men to wear. In 1985 he created his first skirt for men. While it did not create a major impact, it had some effect, as fashionable young gay men were seen in the clubs of London and Paris wearing skirts.

For his Autumn/Winter 1988 collection Gaultier again attempted to create a skirt for men; and in 1993, responding to the popularity of kilts amongst gay men on the streets of London and New York, his Vikings collection included his reinvention of the skirt for men in the form of the kilt.

Gaultier has utilized his distinctive appearance, especially his bleached blond hair and blue and white striped matelot T-shirt, as a fashion statement in its own right. When he launched his men's fragrance in 1995, it was in a male torso bottle that was striped to imitate his signature T-shirt.

At the end of the 1980s, Gaultier suffered several reverses, including most painfully the loss, from an AIDS-related illness, of his lover and business partner of fifteen years, Francis Menuge.

But in 1990 he returned to the forefront of fashion by creating the now infamous corset and other stage costumes for Madonna's Blond Ambition tour. "I love Madonna. That was one of the best times of my career," he told the London Observer newspaper in 1997.

The designer lives in Paris, where his business is headquartered, but also spends time in Italy, where his clothes are manufactured.

 John Epperson with Lypsinka

1955 – Born: John Epperson, who has had an extremely successful career performing as the glamorous and hilarious drag character Lypsinka. In addition, he has appeared, both in and out of character, in several plays and films.

Epperson was born in Hazlehurst, Mississippi, not a particularly gay-friendly place to grow up. He said in a 2002 interview, "I was always like a changeling in my home . . . like an alien among them." He wondered "why I was so fascinated by show business, when no one else in my family was." By the age of four he was lip-synching to his father's records and soon gave dancing a try as well, mimicking Ann-Margret's moves in George Sidney's Bye Bye Birdie (1963).

School days were a trial for the boy seen as a "sissy," who was "teased, taunted, [and] physically threatened." He had to teach himself to be less effeminate in order to cope with the schoolmates' cruelty. After high school Epperson enrolled in college in Jackson, Mississippi. While there he went to a gay bar—a "sawdust-on-the-floor-dump" as he recalled it—for the first time and saw drag performers doing lip-synching acts. He called the experience "totally frightening because I saw myself up on stage." He stopped going to gay bars for a year.

In 1978 he moved to New York, where he became a rehearsal pianist for the American Ballet Theater. In addition, despite his earlier misgivings Epperson began doing drag performances at nightspots such as Club 57 and the Pyramid. When Epperson went on tour with the American Ballet he had the opportunity to see sophisticated drag acts in Europe. Modeling his performances on those, Epperson wrote and starred in two drag pieces — Dial "M" for Model (1987) and Ballet of the Dolls (1988), a send-up of Jacqueline Susann's Valley of the Dolls—before beginning to perform as Lypsinka.

In creating the Lypsinka character he "chose a one-word name to show a sense of humor, but also as an homage to European models with one name." Epperson has said that Lypsinka owes much of her look to stage actress Dolores Gray as part of the "prototype for Lypsinka." Among others who influenced his work he cites Ann-Margret, Charles Pierce, and Charles Ludlam.

Lypsinka first met her public in late 1988 when Epperson's act was a late-night addition to the bill of Charles Busch's Vampire Lesbians of Sodom at the Provincetown Playhouse in New York.

I Could Go on Lip-Synching is the story of Lypsinka's rise from modest beginnings in Louisiana to the status of diva. The show was a resounding success, running for slightly over a year in New York. It then went to California, where the production was financed in part by Madonna. Epperson quit his job with the American Ballet Theater in 1991 in order to devote himself full-time to performing as Lypsinka.

Epperson does not see himself as a particularly political person. On the possibility of gay marriage he commented in a 2002 interview, "I understand why people want the legal benefits of marriage. It just doesn't appeal to me to be married at all." A year later he called himself "too idiosyncratic for anybody to live with me," adding that "traditionally most gay guys aren't interested in going with drag performers, because they just can't go there." Epperson has stated on various occasions that although the status of outsider can be difficult, he prefers individualism to assimilation. In a 2003 interview he said,

1958 – Born: Brian Paddick, Baron Paddick of Brixton, British politician, and Liberal Democrat candidate for the London mayoral election, 2008, coming third behind Boris Johnson and Ken Livingstone. He was, until his retirement in May 2007, Deputy Assistant Commissioner in London's Metropolitan Police Service and the United Kingdom's most senior openly gay police officer.

Paddick was educated at Sutton Grammar School, Sutton then went on to study at Queen's College, Oxford (BA), the University of Warwick (MBA), and the University of Cambridge (Postgraduate Diploma in Criminology). When he was at Oxford, he was Captain of the University Swimming Team and Vice-Captain of his college's Rugby team.

Paddick was a sergeant on the front line during the 1981 Brixton riots, an experience which undoubtedly shaped his attitudes about confrontational police action and strengthened his belief in community policing. He was later in charge of CID at Notting Hill and responsible for policing the Notting Hill Carnival. He was promoted to commander in December 2000, and fulfilled his ambition of becoming head of policing in Brixton.

In November 2003 Paddick was promoted to Deputy Assistant Commissioner, and in April 2005 he took over management of Territorial Policing across all 32 London Boroughs, with responsibility for 20,000 police officers and support staff. He was accountable for reducing 'volume crime' in London (all offences up to and including rape in terms of seriousness) and increasing the number of offenders brought to justice. He was the national lead for the police service on disability and mental health issues for a year and a half. He was also in the media spotlight as the senior Metropolitan Police Service spokesman for the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales and after the 7 July 2005 London bombings.

Following a widely-publicised disagreement with Sir Ian Blair, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, over the wrongful shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes at Stockwell Tube station on 22 July 2005, Paddick was assigned the position of group director of information management, which he considered a 'non-job'. Claiming that the Home Office had intervened for political reasons to ensure that Blair would not have to resign over the incident as it had occurred in the aftermath of 21 July 2005 London bombings, Paddick says he came to accept that his police career was over and that he would never achieve his goal of becoming a chief constable.

Between 1983 and 1988, Paddick was married. According to Paddick, it was 'a fairly conventional marriage' and his former wife said it was 'a wonderful marriage'. She did not know he was gay. He struggled with his sexuality until towards the end of his marriage in 1988. Since then he has been a vocal and visible advocate for gay rights and diversity.

He had a knack during his police career of attracting controversy over his policies, outspokenness and his sexuality but this seems to have done him no harm and has given him much credibility and popularity in his post-police political career, as he seems to a confident and charming man of integrity. Being somewhat handsome has probably not hurt either.

Paddick was a contestant on the eighth series of the ITV1 reality television show I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here! in 2008. On 1 December 2008, he became the sixth celebrity to be voted off the show. Interviewed by the show's hosts Ant & Dec after leaving the jungle, he explained his reasons for participating:

In 2008, Paddick was ranked number 101 in the annual Pink List of influential gay and lesbian people in Britain published by The Independent on Sunday, down from number 83 in 2007.

Paddick presently lives in Vauxhall, London, with his husband Petter Belsvik, a civil engineer from Oslo, Norway; they met in a bar while on holiday in Ibiza. They married in Oslo 9 January 2009.

It was announced that he would be elevated to the House of Lords in August 2013. He was created a life peer on 12 September 2013 taking the title Baron Paddick, of Brixton in the London Borough of Lambeth.

1976 – Michael Schaefer, also known as Eric Raven, born in Bielefeld, Germany, is a German author of gay fiction.

Michael Schaefer was born in Bielefeld in East Westphalia-Lippe and lived with his grandparents in the neighboring town of Steinhagen until he was eleven . In 1986 he came to live with to his remarried mother in Neuss- Derikum . In the primary school there, he took part in an essay competition in the 1986/87 school year as a final assignment. His first short story was well received and published in the parish gazette of St. Dyonisus Congregation in August 1987.

Schaefer then wrote other short stories, almost all of which remained unpublished. As with his first successful article, his stories mostly dealt with " fantastic " topics. In 1991 he wrote his first complete novel Die Modellagentur (The Modelling Agency) , in which he initially unconsciously switched to the genre of homosexual fiction. The novel remained unpublished. Schaefer himself only came out in 1994 when he was eighteen.

In 2005 he wrote his debut novel Liebe auf Raten (Love in Installments) for the gay market , which was published in 2006 by Himmelstürmer Verlag , Hamburg, which specializes in gay literature . The novel tells the "romantic-erotic" love story between a conservatively brought up young man who had his first homosexual experience with his best friend on a school trip, and an adult homosexual whose activities as a callboy and porn actor stand in the way of the relationship.

In addition, Schaefer wrote fantasy stories and novels such as Warriors of the Angels , which he wrote under the pseudonym Eric Raven to differentiate them from his (homosexual) romance novels and designed for publication as an e-book.

In 2008, Schaefer's second romance novel Touch me, Coach! deals with the coming out of a teenage swimmer who is just discovering his own sexuality.

Michael Schaefer lives and works in the Westphalian town of Rheine.

1980 – San Francisco resident Ken Horne, the first AIDS case in the United States to be recognized at the time, is reported to the Center for Disease Control with Kaposi’s sarcoma (KS). By the end of 1981, 270 cases had been reported among gay men. Of these, 121 had died.

1989 – Thomas Sanders is an American internet personality made famous by Vine and YouTube. He is best known for his Vine career until the app was shut down by Twitter at the beginning of 2017.

After the shutdown of Vine, he shifted his online presence mainly to YouTube, though he had started to create content on YouTube before that as well. His online personality consists of comedy, impressions, singing, and social justice.

He also has a career outside of the Internet performing in local theater productions with the hope of someday making it to Broadway. He managed to amass over 7.4 billion loops and 8.3 million followers on Vine, making his career one of the most successful in the app's short history.

Thomas Sanders was born and raised in Gainesville, Florida and still lives there today.

Although he does not reveal much about his family or personal life, he makes clear his pride of his predominantly Irish Catholic heritage, and he has revealed that he has three brothers: Patrick, Christian, and Shea.

On June 12th 2017, Sanders came out as gay in his video titled Having Pride.

1993 – MCC Reverend Troy Perry joins 1,500 lesbian and gay couples in a mass marriage at the IRS building in Washington, D.C

1994 – Yaroslav Mogutin, Russia’s most visible openly gay journalist, makes headlines when he attempts to register his marriage to American artist Robert Filippini. The head of Moscow’s Wedding Palace No. 4 refuses his application.

2009 – In the British Columbia provincial election campaign, Liberal candidate Marc Dalton faces controversy when an e-mail he sent to a colleague in 1996 is released to the media, in which he stated:

The implication is, of course, that homosexuality is on a par with the latter group of "behaviours and acts".