March 15

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The Ides Of March, The term ides was used for the 15th day of the months of March, May, July and October, and the 13th day of the other eight months. In Roman times, the Ides of March was a festive day dedicated to the god Mars and a military parade was usually held. In modern times, the term Ides of March is best known as the date that Julius Caesar was assassinated, in 44 BC.

c.30 A.D. – In Catholic tradition, March 15th is the feast day of Longinus, the name given to the Roman centurion at the crucifixion who pierced Christ's side with his spear. Some writers also identify him with the centurion who asked Jesus to heal his "beloved boy", who was ill.

It may be that you do not recall any Gospel stories about a gay centurion and his male lover, but that is because cautious or prudish translators have softened the words of the text, and because the word "gay" is not really appropriate for the historical context.

You are more likely to know as the story as the familiar one of the Roman centurion and his "servant" - But this is a poor translation. Matthew uses the word "doulos", which means slave, not a mere servant. Luke uses quite a different word, "pais", which can mean servant boy - but more usually has the sense of a man's younger male lover - or "boyfriend".

If "pais" was intended here to indicate a lover, the conclusion is obvious. If the intended meaning was either "slave " or "servant" - the conclusion does not significantly change. As a soldier on foreign service, the centurion will not have been married: Roman soldiers on active service were not permitted to marry. For Romans, the crucial distinctions in sexuality were not about male or female, or about homosexuality or heterosexuality, but between higher or lower status. Roman men would have expected to make sexual use of their slaves, especially if as here they were unmarried. Far from home, this is likely to have been a sexual relationship, which could easily have developed also as an emotional one. And if the sense was not "slave", but the softer "servant", much the same follows. Roman citizens expected to take their sexual satisfaction from anyone of lower status under their control - including the "freedmen", or former slaves who had been released.

All those present and hearing the Centurion's request would have been familiar with Roman sexual practice. For the Jewish bystanders, as for Jesus himself, there will have been an assumption that a homoerotic sexual relationship was at least possible, even probable. But this did not in any way affect Jesus's willingness to go to the centurion's house - even though this in itself would have horrified traditional Jews.

Christ was not one bit disturbed by this approach from a man for help in having his (probable) male lover healed, but instead was immediately ready to go to the couple's home.

559 – Turkey : "Men-corruptors" [homosexuals] are blamed for the earthquake and plague in Constantinople by the Emperor of the Byzantine Empire.

1867 – Lionel Johnson, British literary critic, born, (d.1902); Lionel Johnson was an influential literary critic in his time and wrote, among other books, the first critical study of Thomas Hardy (1894). He lived a solitary life in London, struggling with alcoholism and his repressed homosexuality.

He was also the victim of one of the oldest ironies in the history of love. He introduced his young lover to a friend who promptly walked off with him. The young lover was Lord Alfred Douglas; the friend, Oscar Wilde. Johnson's poem, "The Destroyer of a Soul" ("I hate you with a necessary hate …") is, naturally enough, directed to Wilde. Johnson lived only long enough to see Oscar get his, and at thirty-five, died of a fractured skull after falling off a barstool.

1900 – Colin McPhee (d.1964) was a Canadian composer and musicologist. He is primarily known for being the first Western composer to make an ethnomusicological study of Bali, and for the quality of that work. He also composed music influenced by that of Bali and Java decades before such world music-based compositions became widespread.

McPhee was born in Montreal. He studied with the avant-garde composer Edgard Varèse before marrying Jane Belo, a disciple of Margaret Mead, in 1931. He was involved in the circle of experimental composers known as the "ultra-modernists" and was among those—along with the group's leader, Henry Cowell, John Becker, and Cowell protégé Lou Harrison—particularly interested in what would later become known as "world music."

McPhee is said to have first encountered Balinese music while listening to a record in New York City. He and his wife moved to Bali together for Belo's anthropological work. Once there McPhee became so interested in the music that he studied, built, and wrote extensively about the gamelans. Since the Balinese were relatively tolerant of homosexuality, McPhee also soon threw himself into the sexual exploration of Balinese men. His sexual involvements with Balinese men led eventually to a divorce from Belo in 1938.

McPhee wrote to one friend, "I was in love at the time with a Balinese, which she knew, and to have him continually around was too much for her vanity. So it ended as I had foreseen at the beginning .…"

In the early 1940s he lived in a large brownstone in Brooklyn, known as the February House, which he shared with Leonard Bernstein and Benjamin Britten, among others.

McPhee was responsible for introducing Britten to the Balinese music that influenced such works by the British composer as The Prince of the Pagodas, Curlew River, and Death in Venice.

Later in the decade, McPhee fell into an alcohol-fueled depression, but began to write music again during the 1950s. He became professor of ethnomusicology at UCLA in 1958 and was also a respected jazz critic. He died in Los Angeles in 1964.

1926 – On this date the pioneering Gay Rights activist Ruth Simpson was born (d.2008). Simpson was the founder of the United States' first Lesbian community center, an author, and former president of Daughters of Bilitis, New York. As president of the New York chapter of Daughters of Bilitis (DOB), Simpson organized Gay rights demonstrations and educational programs for DOB members during the period 1969-71. Several times when NYC police, without warrants, illegally entered DOB's Lesbian center in lower Manhattan, Simpson stood between the police and the DOB women. On three occasions she was cited for court appearances by the police. She was also arrested at a Women Against Richard Nixon (WARN) rally, along with Ellen Povill, Ti-Grace Atkinson and Flo Kennedy, and spent most of a day in jail until the women's attorney gained their release.

In Ruth Simpson's 1976 pioneering work From the Closet to the Courts she documented her history in the early days of the Gay movement and the actions taken to achieve justice, civil rights and equal treatment under the law for the large, diverse LGBT population.

Ruth produced a weekly, hour-long television program, "Minority Report", in Woodstock, New York. She served as the Board President of the Woodstock Public Library from 1982-2001 and continued as an Officer until her death. Ruth has had her poetry published in literary magazines, and she has given a number of talks on college campuses in the Hudson Valley area.

1929 – Today's the birthday of the American pianist and poet Cecil Taylor. Classically trained, Taylor is generally acknowledged as one of the inventors of free jazz. His music is characterized by an extremely energetic, physical approach. His piano technique has been likened to percussion, for example described as "eighty-eight tuned drums" (referring to the number of keys on a piano).

The myth of the macho jazz musician continues to exercise a hold on the world of jazz. Still, there have been several post-bebop musicians who have been rumored to be gay, and some who have actually come out publicly as homosexual. Cecil Taylor is one such.

His very muscular style of playing the piano belied the image in the jazz world of the effeminate fairy. However, John Gill records that Taylor gave an interview in 1985 to a San Francisco newspaper that stressed the importance to his music of his race and his homosexuality.

Taylor began playing piano at age six and studied at the New York College of Music and New England Conservatory. After first steps in R&B and swing-styled small groups in the early 1950s, he formed his own band with soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy in 1956.

Taylor's first recording, Jazz Advance, featured Lacy and was released in 1956. Taylor's Quartet featuring Lacy also appeared at the 1957 Newport Jazz Festival. He collaborated with saxophonist John Coltrane in 1958 (Stereo Drive, currently available as Coltrane Time).

Taylor began to perform solo concerts in the early 1970s. Many of these were released on album and include Indent (1973), Silent Tongues (1974), Garden (1982), For Olim (1987), Erzulie Maketh Scent (1989) and The Tree of Life (1998). He began to garner critical, if not popular, acclaim, playing for Jimmy Carter on the White House Lawn, lecturing as an in-residence artist at universities, and eventually being awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1973 and then a MacArthur Fellowship in 1991.

Taylor is also an accomplished poet, citing Robert Duncan, Charles Olson and Amiri Baraka as major influences. He often integrates his poems into his musical performances, and they frequently appear in the liner notes of his albums. Taylor was featured in the 1981 documentary film Imagine the Sound, in which he discussed and performed his music, poetry and dance.

In 1982, jazz critic Stanley Crouch outed Taylor as being gay, prompting an angry response. However, Taylor never denied it. In 1991, Taylor told a New York Times reporter "someone once asked me if I was gay. I said, 'Do you think a three-letter word defines the complexity of my humanity?' I avoid the trap of easy definition."

Greenfield (R) with Neil Sedaka

1936 – Howard Greenfield (d.1986) was an American lyricist and songwriter, who for several years in the 1960s worked out of the famous Brill Building. He is best known for his successful songwriting collaborations, including one with Neil Sedaka from the late 1950s to the mid-1970s, and a near-simultaneous (and equally successful) songwriting partnership with Jack Keller throughout most of the 1960s.

Greenfield co-wrote four songs that reached #1 on the US Billboard charts: "Breaking Up Is Hard to Do", as recorded by Sedaka; "Everybody's Somebody's Fool" and "Breakin' in a Brand New Broken Heart", both as recorded by Connie Francis, and "Love Will Keep Us Together", as recorded by Captain & Tennille.

He also co-wrote numerous other top 10 hits for Sedaka (including "Oh! Carol", "Stairway to Heaven", "Calendar Girl", "Little Devil", "Happy Birthday Sweet Sixteen", and "Next Door to an Angel"); Francis (including the "Theme to Where The Boys Are" and "My Heart Has a Mind of Its Own"); the Everly Brothers ("Crying in the Rain"); Jimmy Clanton ("Venus in Blue Jeans") and the Shirelles ("Foolish Little Girl"). Greenfield also co-wrote the theme songs to numerous 1960s TV series, including Gidget, Bewitched, The Flying Nun and Hazel.

Born in Brooklyn, New York City, by his late teens Greenfield formed a songwriting partnership with Neil Sedaka, a friend whom he had first met as a teenager when they both lived in the same apartment building, in the Brighton Beach section of Brooklyn. Greenfield was educated at Abraham Lincoln High School.

Greenfield was openly gay, although during the era in which he lived it was unusual to be open about this. His companion from the early 1960s to his death was cabaret singer Tory Damon; the two lived together in an apartment on East 63rd Street in Manhattan before moving to California in 1966.

Greenfield died in Los Angeles in 1986 from complications from AIDS, eleven days before his 50th birthday. He was interred at Forest Lawn Memorial Park. Damon died from AIDS complications a few days later and is buried next to Greenfield.

In 1991, Greenfield was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame.

1948 – Kate Bornstein is one of the best-known contemporary transgender activists in America. Born male in Neptune, New Jersey, on March 15, 1948, Kate grew up as Albert.

In 1985 Bornstein began living part-time as a woman and one year later underwent a sex change operation and began living full time as a woman. However, 'ze' soon came to the conclusion that 'ze' was neither male nor female. Like a number of other Western feminist and transgender activists, such as Leslie Feinberg, Bornstein rejects conventional gendered pronouns such a 'ze' (pronounced with a sound like 'she' with a z - 'zhe', rhyming with 'he' or 'she') .

Bornstein's first theatrical work as a gender activist drew on history—hir own as well as that of Herculine Barbin, a nineteenth-century French hermaphrodite. Hidden: A Gender, first performed at the 1989 First International Lesbian and Gay Theatre Conference and Festival in Seattle, employs a talk show format to challenge "gender terrorism," the everyday practice enforcing conformity to the two-sex gender system. Included in the program as the result of a last minute cancellation, it proved enormously successful and was subsequently staged on university campuses and in local queer and other theater venues.

In 1994, Bornstein published Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us. Part-autobiography, part "mind-altering manifesto," and part fashion guide, it pushed through some of the boundaries that constrained gender politics, and secured hir place in the emerging queer theory canon.

Bornstein also sought to bridge the increasingly bitter divide between transsexuals and the gay and lesbian communities, who at the time were embroiled in controversial practices of political and social exclusion. Hir claim that gender oppression united the two groups regardless of sexual practices immediately resonated with queer theorists and activists who rejected identity politics.

Bornstein continues to challenge audiences to buck the gender system with new theater pieces, workshops, and more recently, fiction. Since Hidden, Bornstein and hir partner Barbara Carrellas co-wrote and performed in Too Tall Blondes in: LOVE (premiered in Boston in 2001), and more recently ze wrote and performed in Strangers in Paradox.

More recently ze has published Hello Cruel World: 101 Alternatives to Suicide for Teens, Freaks and Other Outlaws, [2006]

Listen to Kate speak about "It Gets Better":
Note: The first few seconds of video are poor quality.

1963 – A California appellate court upholds the oral copulation conviction of a man who stopped in a restroom for "relief sexually" while "waiting to pick up his wife." He said he'd done this several times before.

1982 – Kwame Harris is a Jamaican-born former American football offensive tackle who played six seasons in the National Football League (NFL). He was selected by the San Francisco 49ers with the 26th overall pick in the first round of the 2003 NFL Draft. He played college football for the Stanford Cardinal, when he won the Morris Trophy as the top offensive lineman in the Pac-10 Conference in 2002.

Harris played high school football in Delaware, and was among the top prep offensive lineman in the country. He played three years at Stanford, twice earning all-conference honors and earning named honorable mention All-American in his final season. Harris was among the top-rated offensive linemen available in the 2003 draft, and he played five seasons with the 49ers and one with Oakland Raiders. He was a starter for most of his career, but often struggled with blocking and committing penalties.

Harris was born in Jamaica and came to the United States when he was three years old. His family first settled in the Bronx, New York before moving to Delaware, where Harris' father operated multiple successful restaurants. Harris started playing the piano at age five and the violin in seventh grade. He grew up in Newark, Delaware, and attended Newark High School. Harris played violin in his high school orchestra along with playing high school football. He was a unanimous All-American selection and generally considered one of the top prep offensive linemen in the nation.

As a child, Harris knew he was attracted to men. In high school, when confronted by his mom about his sexuality, he came out as gay to his family. Not all of them were initially supportive, contributing to Harris's decision to attend Stanford University on the opposite coast.

Harris was a music major at Stanford. He played three years of football for the Cardinals, and he was a two-year starter at right tackle. Harris played seven games at left tackle in his freshman year, when he was the team's top reserve offensive lineman. He became one of the top lineman in the Pac-10 Conference, earning Second-Team All-Pac-10 honors in his sophomore year after starting 12 games at right tackle. In his final season in 2002, Harris started 11 games, and he was named First-Team All-Pac-10 and won the Morris Trophy as the top offensive lineman in the conference. He was also an honorable mention All-American and an honorable mention Academic All-Pac-10. Harris gave up his final year of eligibility at Stanford to enter the NFL.

He retired from football after being cut in 2010 by the Florida Tuskers in the United Football League, and he was replaced by former Pittsburgh Steelers offensive guard Darnell Stapleton. He played six seasons in his NFL career, starting 55 times in 86 games. Profootballtalk.com called Harris "a major disappointment in the pros." Harris partly attributed his decline to the pressure of hiding his sexuality.

Harris returned to college after retiring from football in order to complete his undergraduate degree.

On November 4, 2013, Harris was convicted on misdemeanor counts of domestic violence, assault and battery against his ex-boyfriend, Dimitri Geier, stemming from an incident on August 21, 2012. He was acquitted of felony counts of domestic violence causing great bodily injury and assault with force likely to produce great bodily injury. Geier also sued Harris for assault, battery, false imprisonment, negligence and both intentional and negligent infliction of emotional distress, but later dropped the lawsuit. According to the suit, Harris became upset and the two men argued after Geier poured soy sauce on a plate of rice at a restaurant in Menlo Park, California. The situation escalated as the two exchanged blows.The judge sentenced Harris to five days in jail and three years of probation, and ordered him to take domestic violence counseling and pay a fine.

After the incident became public, his lawyer stated that Harris identifies as gay, remarking that "he is a very private person. He doesn't like to talk about his personal life." On March 29, 2013, Harris officially outed himself as a homosexual during an interview with CNN. At the time, no NFL player had come out as gay while they were playing, and only a few had after retiring.

1985 – Fred C. Martinez was born on this date. Martinez was a 16-year-old Navajo boy who thought of himself as female. Another term for Martinez among indigenous peoples is nadleehi or "two-spirit." His friends adored him. Had he been born a woman, one of his teacher's said, he'd have been the most popular girl in town. They also feared what a violent world might have in store for someone like Fred C. Martinez Jr. Martinez died on June 16, 2001 at the hands of a man who beat him to death because he was different. He was beaten to death by one Shaun Murphy who bragged about the killing. Murphy was later sentenced to 40 years in prison for murdering Martinez.

Martinez's mother spoke about his son a few days after his murder: No one could say it better:

1985 – A new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association concludes that AIDS is NOT spread by casual contact.

1991 – Hig Roberts is an American alpine skier. He had 31 starts in the World Cup between 2015 and 2019 and won 2 giant slalom national titles competing on the United States Ski Team.

Roberts was born and raised in Steamboat Springs, Colorado where he started skiing at 2 years old. He competed in a large tournament for the first time at the age of 9 and broke his femur, resulting in a risky surgery. He began questioning his sexuality when he was 12 but did not come out. Roberts placed 7th in the giant slalom at the 2013 Winter Universiade. Roberts graduated from Middlebury College in 2014.

Roberts was one a few former college skiers to join the United States Ski Team B. In 2017, Roberts beat Tim Jitloff in the giant slalom at Sugarloaf, Maine to earn his first national title. He won again in 2018. He was the first alternate U.S. team at the 2018 Winter Olympics. After retiring from sports in 2019, Roberts worked in finance in Norway and continues to ski recreationally.

In December 2020, Roberts came out as gay."I just woke up one morning and I said, 'Enough is enough.'" He is the first current or former Alpine skier to come out. "Not being able to be openly gay as a professional athlete was truly hindering my performance."

2006 – The Czech Republic House and Senate pass a bill allowing same-sex partner registration but President Vaclav Klaus vetoes it. The veto is overturned on this day and the law goes into effect on July 1, 2006.