April 13

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c.435 BC – The Greek philosopher Aristippus was born on or around this date (d.circa 360 BC). He was a pupil of Socrates, but adopted a very different philosophical outlook, teaching that the goal of life was to seek pleasure by adapting oneself to circumstances and by maintaining proper control over both adversity and prosperity. Aristippus held that the highest purpose and virtue was the pursuit of pleasure.

Aristippus was born at Cyrene. He came over to Greece to be present at the Olympic games, where he fell in with Ischomachus the agriculturist, and by his description was filled with so ardent a desire to see Socrates, that he went to Athens for the purpose, and remained with him almost up to the time of his execution, 399 BCE

One work attributed to "Aristippus" in ancient times was a scandalous work entitled On Ancient Luxury (or On the Luxury of the Ancient Greeks). This work, judging by preserved quotations was filled with spicy anecdotes about philosophers and their supposed taste for boy-lovers and courtesans. The author supports his claims for Plato's various erotic relationships through his quotation of epigrams attributed to the philosopher.

"The art of life lies in taking pleasures as they pass, and the keenest pleasures are not intellectual, nor are they always moral." - Aristippus

1841 – Michigan amends its sodomy law to specify that emission of semen is not necessary for completion of the crime.

1890 – On this date former Michigan governor and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Frank Murphy was born (d.1949).

Murphy was elected the Governor of Michigan in 1936 and served one two-year term. During his two years in office, an unemployment compensation system was instituted and mental health programs were improved. The United Automobile Workers engaged in an historic sit-down strike at the General Motors' Flint plant.

Murphy successfully mediated an agreement and end to the confrontation; G.M. recognized the U.A.W. as bargaining agent under the newly adopted National Labor Relations Act. This had an effect upon organized labor. In the next year the UAW saw its membership grow from 30,000 to 500,000 members. As later noted by the British Broadcasting System, this strike was "the strike heard round the world."

Murphy was first nominated by Franklin Delano Roosevelt to be Attorney General and then in 1940 Roosevelt promoted him to the Supreme Court where he served till his death in 1949.

He has been acclaimed as a legal scholar and a champion of the common man. Justice Felix Frankfurter disparagingly nicknamed Murphy "the Saint", criticizing his decisions as being rooted more in passion than reason.

Murphy's support of African-Americans, aliens, criminals, dissenters, Jehovah's Witnesses, Native Americans, women, workers, and other outsiders evoked a pun: "tempering justice with Murphy." As he wrote in Falbo v. United States (1944), "The law knows no finer hour than when it cuts through formal concepts and transitory emotions to protect unpopular citizens against discrimination and persecution."

The reason Murphy's being mentioned here is for his lifelong companion and roommate, Edward Kemp. For more than 40 years, Edward G. Kemp was Frank Murphy's devoted, trusted companion. Like Murphy, Kemp was a lifelong bachelor. From college until Murphy's death, the pair found creative ways to work and live together. They met while in college, attended law school together, started a law practice together and were basically inseparable for Murphy's entire life. They travelled overseas together, and lived together before and during Murphy's time on the Supreme Court. Kemp said he was only Murphy's personal assistant and political advisor.

The attribution of Murphy's sexuality must remain speculative. He never publicly identified himself as homosexual, which would, especially at a time when homosexual acts were illegal throughout the United States, have been extremely difficult for him as a Catholic and undoubtedly fatal to his legal and political career.

He exemplifies how, in a sexually naive age, discreet homosexuals were able to attain prominence even in high-profile positions, thanks to a widespread presumption of heterosexuality (especially for men who did not conform to the prevailing stereotype of homosexuals as weak and ineffectual) and to the reluctance of the press to delve deeply into the private lives of public figures.

As well as Murphy's close relationship with Kemp, Murphy's biographer, historian Sidney Fine, found in Murphy's personal papers a letter that "if the words mean what they say, refers to a homosexual encounter some years earlier between Murphy and the writer." But the letter's veracity cannot be confirmed, and review of all the evidence led Fine to conclude he "could not stick his neck out and say [Murphy] was gay".

Murphy was a beloved figure in Michigan and especially Detroit. Over 10,000 people attended his funeral in Detroit. The Frank Murphy Hall of Justice bears his name. Outside the Hall of Justice is Carl Milles' statue "The Hand of God". This rendition was cast in honor of Murphy and paid for by labor unions in thanks for his support for the working man. It features a nude figure emerging from the left hand of God. Although commissioned in 1949 and completed by 1953, the work, partly because of the male nudity involved, was kept in storage for a decade and a half. The work was chosen in tribute to Murphy by the legendary union leaders Walter P. Reuther and Ira W. Jayne.

 Molinier - Self-portrait (Click for larger)

1900 – Pierre Molinier was a painter, photographer and 'maker of objects' (d.1976). He was born in Agen (France) and lived his life in Bordeaux. He began his career by painting landscapes, but his work turned towards a fetishistic eroticism early on.

Molinier began to take photographs at the age of 18, and started his erotic production around 1950. With the aid of a wide range of specially made 'props' - dolls, various prosthetic limbs, stiletto heels, corsetry, dildos and an occasional confidante - Pierre Molinier used his own body as the basis for surreal and fantastic distortions of the human form, blurring sexuality and gender and ultimately producing a large body of photographic work. Most of his photographs, photomontages, are self-portraits of himself as a woman.

By combining costume, props, photography and photomontage he stepped beyond mere photographic representation of himself and his models to create a bizarre and distorted world of gender-confused fetishism and auto-eroticism.

He began a correspondence with André Breton and sent him photographs of his paintings. Later Breton integrated him into the Surrealist group. Breton organised an exhibition of Molinier's paintings in Paris, in January-February 1956.

In 1976, as his health began to decline, Pierre Molinier lay on his bed in front of a mirror, masturbated and committed suicide by shooting himself. The staging of his death initially led police to suspect he had been murdered but it seems that his death was Molinier's final creative act.

1936 – Win Ng (d.1991) was a Chinese American sculptor, industrial designer and illustrator. He is best known as the co-founder of the groundbreaking San Francisco based handmades department store Taylor & Ng.

Ng was born in Chinatown, San Francisco. He studied at the City College of San Francisco and San Francisco State University. After serving in the United States Army he studied at the San Francisco Art Institute receiving a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1959.

Ng was openly gay.

In 1965 Ng met artist Spaulding Taylor and shifted his focus toward utilitarian work. The two founded Environmental Ceramics (the precursor to Taylor & Ng) and moved into creating handmade artware and homewares. The company called Taylor & Ng was founded during the same period and, with the addition of Win Ng's brother, Norman Ng, as president, grew into a major producer and retailer of housewares.

Through their own San Francisco department store and wholesale business, Taylor & Ng not only created a signature style still in demand by collectors, but helped to popularize Asian culture and cuisine. The Taylor & Ng company is credited with bringing the Chinese wok to the U.S. and making it a common kitchen utensil.

Ng died on September 6, 1991 from AIDS related complications. He was 55.

1937 – On this date the award winning playwright Lanford Wilson was born (d.2011). Considered one of the founders of the Off-off Broadway theater movement, Wilson received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1980, was elected in 2001 to the Theater Hall of Fame, and in 2004 elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Wilson was raised in Missouri by his mother, but in 1956 he moved to California, where he worked and attended college. There, Wilson lived with his father, who did not accept Wilson's homosexuality, and so, in 1957, he moved to Chicago, where he worked as a graphic artist and studied playwriting.

Wilson began his active career as a playwright in the early 1960s at the Caffe Cino in Greenwich Village, writing one-act plays such as Ludlow Fair, Home Free!, and The Madness of Lady Bright. The Madness of Lady Bright premiered at the Caffe Cino in May of 1964 and was the venue's first significant hit. The play featured actor Neil Flanagan in the title role as Leslie Bright, a neurotic aging queen. The Madness of Lady Bright is considered a landmark play in the representation of male homosexuality. It was the longest running play ever to appear at the Caffe Cino, where it was performed over two hundred times. Wilson was subsequently invited to present his work off-Broadway, including his plays Balm in Gilead and The Rimers of Eldritch.

Wilson was a founding member of the Circle Repertory Company in 1969. Many of his plays were first presented there, directed by his long-standing collaborative partner, Marshall W. Mason. The Circle Rep's production of Wilson's The Hot l Baltimore won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award, the Outer Critics Circle Award, and the Obie Award, and was adapted into a television program by Norman Lear. In 1979 Wilson received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Talley's Folly.

Wilson's style and approach has evolved over the years, sometimes resulting in drastically different effects. Some of his plays are extremely radical and experimental in nature while others clearly have a more mainstream, if still creative, sensibility. His first full length play, Balm in Gilead, is perhaps his most radical, yet it also remains one of his most popular. The play had a memorable off-Broadway revival in the 1980s, directed by John Malkovich, a co-production of Circle Rep and the Steppenwolf Theatre Company.

In addition to writing plays, Wilson has written the texts for several twentieth century operas, including at least two collaborations with composer Lee Hoiby: Summer and Smoke (1971) and This is the Rill Speaking (1992) (based on his own play).

1945 – Joseph Doucé (d.1990) was born to a rural family in Sint-Truiden, Belgium. He was a psychologist and Baptist pastor in Paris. He was openly gay and was among the founders of the International Lesbian and Gay Association. He served as a volunteer soldier in the OTAN base at Limoges (France), where he had time to perfect his French. After one year of pastoral and humanistic studies at Stenonius College (also known as Europaseminär, a Roman Catholic seminary today extinct) in Maastricht, the Netherlands, he began his conversion to Protestantism around 1966.

His Centre du Christ Libérateur was a ministry to sexual minorities. The center had support groups for homosexuals, transsexuals, sadomasochism and pedophiles.

Doucé was killed and the murder has never been solved. According to Doucé's lover, he was taken away by two men, who showed police badges on July the 19th 1990. The body was found in a forest in October 1990.

The killers are thought to be a unit of the French police, Renseignements Généraux, who investigated Doucé because of his support for pedophiles.

1949 – Christopher Hitchens, English American author and journalist, was born (d.2011); His books, and a prolific journalistic career that has spanned more than four decades, made him a prominent public intellectual and a staple of talk shows, lectures and punditry. He was a columnist and literary critic at The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, Slate, World Affairs, The Nation and Free Inquiry and a variety of other media outlets.

Hitchens was known for his admiration of George Orwell, Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson and for his excoriating critiques of Mother Teresa, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Henry Kissinger and Britain's royal family, among others. His confrontational style of debate made him both a lauded and controversial figure. As a political observer, polemicist and self-defined radical, he rose to prominence as a fixture of the left-wing publications in his native Britain and in the United States. His departure from the established political left began in 1989 after what he called the "tepid reaction" of the Western left following Ayatollah Khomeini's issue of a fatwa calling for the murder of Salman Rushdie. The September 11 attacks strengthened his internationalist embrace of an interventionist foreign policy, and his vociferous criticism of what he called "fascism with an Islamic face." His numerous editorials in support of the Iraq War caused some to label him a neoconservative, although Hitchens insisted he was not "a conservative of any kind."

Identified as a champion of the "New Atheism" movement, Hitchens described himself as an antitheist and a believer in the philosophical values of the Enlightenment. Hitchens said that a person "could be an atheist and wish that belief in god were correct", but that "an antitheist, a term I'm trying to get into circulation, is someone who is relieved that there's no evidence for such an assertion." According to Hitchens, the concept of a god or a supreme being is a totalitarian belief that destroys individual freedom, and that free expression and scientific discovery should replace religion as a means of teaching ethics and defining human civilization. He wrote at length on atheism and the nature of religion in his 2007 book God Is Not Great.

Though Hitchens retained his British citizenship, he became a United States citizen on the steps of the Jefferson Memorial on 13 April 2007, his 58th birthday

Hitchens has written of his homosexual experiences when in boarding school in his memoir, Hitch-22. These experiences continued in his college years, when he allegedly had relationships with two men who eventually became a part of the Thatcher government. Hitch-22 was published in June 2010. Touring for the book was cut short later in the same month so he could begin treatment for newly diagnosed esophageal cancer. On December 15, 2011, Hitchens died from pneumonia, a complication of his cancer, in Houston, Texas

1950 – The American actor Terry Lester was born on this date (d.2003). Lester was born in Indianapolis, Indiana and began an acting career while at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana.

After years of musical theater, concert performances, numerous prime-time TV guest roles, and a season starring in the 1976 children's series Ark II, Lester had his big break when he joined CBS daytime soap The Young and the Restless (Y&R) in 1980. He created the role of Jack Abbott, a scoundrel who never met a woman (including his own father's wife) he didn't want to take to bed. Lester was so popular that Y&R creator William J. Bell wrote an entire family for him. Y&R was going through a transition period at this time and many fans believe that Lester's star quality helped the show build more viewers and eventually rise to #1 in the daytime soap ratings.

Lester kept his personal life under wraps, but a 2002 In Magazine LA article on former soap star Thom Bierdz claimed that Lester, along with Michael Corbett and Bierdz, made up a trio of gay actors who worked on The Young and the Restless in the 1980s.

1955 – Carl-Friedrich Arp Ole Freiherr von Beust, generally called Ole von Beust, born in Hamburg, Germany, was First Mayor of the city-state (Freie und Hansestadt) of Hamburg from 31 October 2001 to 25 August 2010, serving as President of the Bundesrat from 1 November 2007 on for one year.

He is the son of Achim Helge Freiherr von Beust and Hanna, née Wolff, who was considered half Jewish in Nazi Germany. Through his father he is a descendant of Saxon and Austrian statesman Count Friedrich Ferdinand von Beust.

On 31 October 2001, Ole von Beust became First Mayor of Hamburg.

On 19 August 2003, Beust dismissed his vice-mayor Ronald Schill, causing a scandal. Beust had earlier dismissed Walter Wellinghausen, senator of the interior and Schill's most important official, without consulting Schill beforehand. This was due to public allegations of misconduct on Wellinghausen's part. In a private conversation, Schill then demanded that Beust take back the dismissal, allegedly using personal threats. Beust then decided to dismiss Schill as well.

His unprepared statement to the press quickly earned Schill an homophobic reputation. A popular radio-station broadcast a song calling him "Mega-Proll" (mega redneck) and gay and lesbian associations protested vocally. Schill however later affirmed Beust's version of the story, except for the accusations of blackmail, saying that he warned Beust to stay clear of nepotism, and that this had nothing to do with Beust's sexual orientation. He stated "I have nothing against homosexuals".

In a later interview, Beust's father confirmed that his son is indeed homosexual. Beust himself considers his sexual orientation a private matter; when asked directly he usually ironically refers the interviewer to his father.

On July 18, 2010 Ole von Beust declared his resignation effective August 25.

1958 – On this date Harvey Lavan "Van" Cliburn, Jr. achieved worldwide recognition by becoming the first American to win the International Tchaikovsky Piano Competition in Moscow. He was all of 23.

In 1998, Cliburn was named in a palimony lawsuit by his alleged domestic partner of seventeen years, mortician Thomas Zaremba.

1963 – John Paulk is a former advocate and promoter of the ex-gay movement and conversion therapy and author. He was the founder and former leader of the ministry Love Won Out, which was launched by the organization Focus on the Family. From 1998 to 2003, he was chairman of the board of Exodus International North America.

His 1998 autobiography Not Afraid to Change addressed his sexuality and attempts to change his same-sex desires. Later that year, after an incident in which Paulk was revealed to have attended a gay bar, both organizations disciplined him, but he remained with Focus on the Family until 2003. He resigned as Exodus board chairman but continued his elected position until his term was completed. In 2005, Paulk opened a catering business in Portland, Oregon.

On September 19, 2000 while on a speaking tour, Paulk was seen sitting inside at the Washington, D.C. gay bar Mr. P's. A patron recognized him and contacted Wayne Besen of the Human Rights Campaign, Truth Wins Out, and other gay political action organizations. When Besen arrived at the bar 40 minutes later and confronted Paulk, Paulk denied that he was John Paulk, instead insisting he was "John Clint". Upon exiting the bar, Paulk's picture was taken as evidence that he had been in the bar. When confronted by Besen about the incident and the photographs, Paulk admitted being in the bar, but stated that he didn't know that it was a gay bar, and he had simply stopped in for a moment to use the restroom. However, eyewitnesses reported that Paulk stayed for more than an hour, flirted with other men, and—when questioned about his sexuality—said that he was gay.

In the April 2013 issue of PQ Monthly, he was quoted as stating that he no longer supported the ex-gay movement or efforts to attempt to change individuals' sexual orientation, and that he was in the process of ending his marriage to his wife, Anne. The couple divorced in June 2013. Paulk disavowed his belief in gay reparative therapy, announcing that — while he remains a devout Christian — he also identifies as a gay (not "formerly gay") man and believes that reparative therapy is both futile and harmful.

1966 – Martin Pousson is an American novelist, poet, and professor.

He was born and raised in Louisiana, in the Cajun French bayou land of Acadiana. Some of his favorite writers include Carson McCullers, Truman Capote and James Baldwin, as well as Denis Johnson and Junot Diaz.

His first novel, No Place, Louisiana (2002) told the story of a Cajun family and an American dream gone wrong. The novel won acclaim from Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Cunningham and the Los Angeles Times, and it was a finalist for the John Gardner Book Award in Fiction.

His first collection of poetry, Sugar (2005) centered on the lives of outsiders, especially Cajuns, Southerners and gay men. Some of the poems also dealt with racism and the AIDS epidemic. He says that this collection would not have ever been published if it were not for a friend's saved copy of the manuscript. In 2005, he was named one of the Leading Men of the Year by Instinct magazine, alongside Jake Shears, Robert Gant, and Keith Boykin.

He is currently Associate Professor of English at California State University, Northridge, in Los Angeles. He teaches in the Creative Writing Program and the Queer Studies Program, and some of his most popular courses include Narrative Writing, Advanced Narrative Writing, Theories of Fiction, and Gay Male Writers.

He was named a recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts in Creative Writing for 2014. The NEA grant was awarded for a collection of short stories in development titled "Black Sheep Boy." The stories are about a homosexual boy coming of age sexually in the bayous of Louisiana. The stories also are about mental illness and werewolf myths.

1990 – Queer Nation – The direct-action group's inaugural action took place at Flutie's Bar, a straight hangout at the South Street Sea Port on April 13, 1990. The goal: to make clear to patrons that queers will not be restricted to Gay bars for socializing and for public displays of affection. More visibility actions like this one became known as "Queer Nights Out."

1997– Comedian and talk show host Ellen DeGeneres appears on TIME Magazine’s cover with the words, "Yep, I’m Gay." These words were spoken during thecoming-out episode of her sitcom Ellen, titled "The Puppy Episode" which was one of the highest-rated episodes of the show.