April 26

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1319 – John II of France (French: Jean II) called John the Good (French: Jean le Bon), was a monarch of the House of Valois who ruled as King of France from 1350 until his death (d.1364).

When John II came to power, France was facing several disasters: the Black Death, which caused the death of nearly half of its population; popular revolts known as Jacqueries; free companies (Grandes Compagnies) of routiers who plundered the country; and English aggression that resulted in disastrous military losses, including the Battle of Poitiers of 1356, in which John was captured.

While John was a prisoner in London, his son Charles became regent and faced several rebellions, which he overcame. To liberate his father, he concluded the Treaty of Brétigny (1360), by which France lost many territories and paid an enormous ransom.

In an exchange of hostages, which included his second son Louis, Duke of Anjou, John was released from captivity to raise funds for his ransom. Upon his return in France, he created the franc to stabilize the currency and tried to get rid of the free companies by sending them to a crusade, but Pope Innocent VI died shortly before their meeting in Avignon.

When John was informed that Louis had escaped from captivity, troubled by the dishonour of this action, and the arrears in his ransom, John did something that shocked and dismayed his people: he announced that he would voluntarily return to captivity in England. His council tried to dissuade him, but he persisted, citing reasons of "good faith and honour." He sailed for England that winter and left the impoverished citizens of France again without a king. He died in England in 1364.

During his life, he hathered 11 children with his wife Bonne of Bohemia, but due to his close relationship with Charles de la Cerda, rumours were spread of a romantic attachment between the two. La Cerda was given various honours and appointed to the high position of connetable when John became king; he accompanied the king on all his official journeys to the provinces. La Cerda's rise at court excited the jealousy of the French barons, several of whom stabbed him to death in 1354. La Cerda's fate paralleled that of Edward II of England's Piers Gaveston and John II of Castile's Alvaro de Luna; the position of a royal favourite was a dangerous one. John's grief on La Cerda's death was overt and public.

1865 – Charles Shannon (d.1937), English artist, was born at Sleaford in Lincolnshire. He attended the Lambeth school of art, and was subsequently considerably influenced by his friend and partner Charles Ricketts and by the example of the great Venetians.

Complete sets of his lithographs and etchings have been acquired by the British Museum and the Berlin and Dresden print rooms.

Shannon and Ricketts founded The Dial, a magazine, which had five issues from 1889 to 1897, and the Vale Press, named after their house, The Vale, in Chelsea, London. The pair came to the attention of Oscar Wilde with the publication of their magazine. He visited them at their home and they become great friends. Ricketts and Shannon were among the few to remain faithful to Wilde when he was disgraced.

Throughout their careers Shannon and Ricketts were collectors of art and over time built up a valuable collection. Charles Shannon was particularly interested in Japanese art and they bought a number of Hokusai drawings. In their joint will they left their collection to public bodies such as the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge and the British Museum.

In January 1929 Shannon was re-hanging some pictures on the staircase of his studio when he fell and hit his head on the marble floor. From then on he was a physical and mental invalid, and unable to recognise and communicate with Charles Ricketts. Charles Ricketts died of a heart attack two years later, and Charles Shannon lived for a further six years.

Shannon (L) & Ricketts

Shannon and Ricketts spent their entire adults lives together but were very discreet as a couple. It is generally accepted that Charles Ricketts was a homosexual but there are those who believe that Shannon was bisexual. One particular friendship with a woman caused an anxious Ricketts to record in his diary his fears that Shannon might marry.

1886 – The great American singer and "Mother of the Blues" Ma Rainey (nee Gertrude Pridgett) was born (d.1939). Rainey was one of the earliest known American professional blues singers and one of the first generation of such singers to record. She did much to develop and popularize the form and was an important influence on younger blues women, such as Bessie Smith, and their careers.

Rainey was born in Columbus, Georgia. She first appeared on stage in Columbus in "A Bunch of Blackberries" at 14. She then joined a traveling vaudeville troupe, the Rabbit Foot Minstrels. After hearing a sad song sung a cappella by a local girl in a small town in Missouri in 1902, she started performing in this style, and claimed that she was the one who named it "blues."

She married fellow vaudeville singer William "Pa" Rainey in 1904, billing herself from that point as "Ma" Rainey. She later had an unknown number of children, one being Clyde Rainey, who served in the US Navy. The "Ma and Pa" pair toured with the Rabbit Foot Minstrels as "Rainey & Rainey, Assassinators of the Blues", singing a mix of blues and popular songs. In 1912, she took the young Bessie Smith into the Rabbit Foot Minstrels, trained her, and worked with her until Smith left in 1915.

Also known, though less discussed, is the fact that she was Bisexual. She was arrested in Chicago in 1925 for hosting an indecent party with a room full of semi- naked women. Rainey celebrated the Lesbian lifestyle in "Prove It On Me Blues", which presented a cross-dressing, man-hating persona that was quite distinct from her regular public image:

The great blues singer was part of a circle of black Lesbians and Bisexuals that included Bessie Smith, Jackie "Moms" Mabley, and Josephine Baker.

In most of her songs, Ma projected herself as a passionate and often mistreated lover of men. In private, her preference was for young men. The great Washington poet Sterling Brown tells of approaching her as a fan with the musicologist John Work. She immediately propositioned them as she was having trouble with her young musicians. Brown wrote a moving poem about Ma Rainey and her huge popularity with Southern audiences.

Ma Rainey was already a veteran performer with decades of touring in African- American shows in the U.S. Southern States when she made her first recordings in 1923. Rainey signed with Paramount Records and, between 1923 and 1928, she recorded 100 songs, including the classics "C.C. Rider" (aka "See See Rider") and "Jelly Bean Blues", the humorous "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom", and the deep blues "Bo Weavil Blues".

Rainey's career dried up in the 1930s--as did the career of just about every other classic female blues singers of the previous decade. But her earnings were enough that she was able to retire from performing in 1933. Rainey returned to her hometown, Columbus, Georgia, where she ran two theaters, "The Lyric" and "The Airdrome", until her death from a heart attack in 1939.

She was inducted into the Blues Foundation's Hall of Fame in 1983, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1990. In 1994, the U.S. Post Office issued a Ma Rainey 29-cent commemorative postage stamp. In 2004, her song "See See Rider Blues" (1925) was inducted in the Grammy Hall of Fame, and was included by the National Recording Preservation Board in the Library of Congress' National Recording Registry in 2004. The board selects songs in an annual basis that are "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

1889 – The Austrian-born philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was born on this date (d.1951). Wittgenstein worked primarily in the foundations of logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. Wittgenstein is known for having inspired two of the century's principal philosophical movements, logical positivism and ordinary language philosophy, and for being one of the foremost figures in the tradition of analytic philosophy, though in his lifetime he published just one book review, one article, a children's dictionary, and the 75-page Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921). Philosophical Investigations, which Wittgenstein worked on in his later years, was published shortly after he died. Both of these works are regarded as highly influential in analytic philosophy.

Wittgenstein served in World War I. In January 1917, he was sent as a member of a howitzer regiment to the Russian front, where he won several medals for bravery including the Silver Medal for Valour. In 1918 he was promoted to reserve officer (lieutenant) and sent to northern Italy as part of an artillery regiment. For his part in the Austrian offensive of June 1918, he was recommended for the Gold Medal for Valour, the highest honour in the Austrian army, but was instead awarded the Band of the Military Service Medal with Swords. Throughout the war, he kept notebooks in which he frequently wrote philosophical reflections alongside personal remarks, and in them he records his contempt for the baseness of soldiers in wartime. He discovered Leo Tolstoy's The Gospel in Brief at a bookshop in Galicia, and carried it everywhere, recommending it to anyone in distress, to the point where he became known to his fellow soldiers as "the man with the gospels".

Bertrand Russell said he returned from the war a changed man, one with both a more mystical and more ascetic bent. After the war he returned home to his family in Vienna and enrolled in a teacher training college. His sister Hermine said that Wittgenstein working as an elementary teacher was "like using a precision instrument to open crates, but the family decided not to interfere." He moved out of the family home and into lodgings in Untere Viaduktgasse in Vienna's third district, and it was during this period that, according to William Warren Bartley, a professor of philosophy at Stanford, Wittgenstein engaged in a series of casual homosexual encounters in an area of the city called the Prater, within walking distance of his lodgings. It is a controversial claim, one that Bartley first made in 1973 in his biography Wittgenstein, and which was denied at the time by Wittgenstein's executors and friends in England, who seemed to argue that, although Wittgenstein was not heterosexual, he had not actually engaged in gay sex.

Wittgenstein certainly seems to have been rather uncomfortable with his homosexuality. Certainly, he was very secretive about his sexual interests and activities. His secretiveness is not altogether surprising, considering the fact that homosexuality was illegal in Austria and Britain during his lifetime. At Cambridge John Maynard Keynes also invited him to join the Cambridge Apostles, an elite secret society formed in 1820, which both Russell and G. E. Moore had joined as students, but Wittgenstein did not enjoy it and attended infrequently. Russell had been worried that Wittgenstein, with his literal-mindedness, would not appreciate the group's humour or the fact that many of the members were in love with each other.

Lytton Strachey wrote to Keynes on 17 May 1912 about an Apostles meeting where Wittgenstein was present, calling him Herr Sinckel-Winckel: "Oliver and Herr Sinckel-Winckel hard at it on universals and particulars. The latter oh! so bright— but quelle souffrance! Oh God! God! 'If A loves B'—'There may be a common quality'—'Not analysable that way at all, but the complexes have certain qualities.' How shall I manage to slink off to bed?"

Bartley writes that he obtained the information about the Prater cruisings from Wittgenstein's friends, and it was this activity, he argues, that Wittgenstein was referring to when he wrote to the architect Paul Engelmann in May 1920: "Things have gone utterly miserably for me lately. Of course only because of my own baseness and rottenness. I have continually thought about taking my own life, and now too this thought still haunts me. 'I have sunk to the bottom'. May you never be in that position!"

The literary executors threatened legal action to suppress publication of Bartley's book, according to an afterword he included in a 1985 edition. Bartley writes that a whispering campaign began against him, with one British literary critic writing, "The general line here is that you are to be drummed out of the trade and that no academic invitation of any kind will be extended to you from the United Kingdom henceforth ..."

Wittgenstein's estate and other biographers challenged him to produce the sources that he claims. What has become clear, at least, is that Wittgenstein had several long-term homoerotic attachments, including an infatuation with his friend David Pinsent - who was killed in a military flying accident in 1918 - and long-term relationships during his years in Cambridge with Francis Skinner and Ben Richards.

1893 – Born: Dimitri Bouchéne (also known as Beauchesne/Bushen) (d.1993). Bouchéne was the last surviving artist of Sergei Diaghilev and Alexander Benois's avant-garde group Mir Iskusstva ('The World of Art'). He appeared in three of the St Petersburg group's exhibitions before leaving Russia in the 1920s for France, where, as well as continuing painting and drawing, he worked in haute couture and theatre and ballet design. He died in Paris seven weeks before his 100th birthday.

Born in St. Tropez, he grew up in Tsarist Russia. He was a pupil at the Second Imperial (Alexander I) gymnasium and attended evening classes at the art school attached to the Society for Encouragement and Promotion of Arts. Its director was the artist Nikolai Roerich - who introduced his talented pupil to Diaghilev and Benois and Mir Iskusstva.

In 1912 Roerich gave Bouchéne a letter of introduction to a friend in Paris, Maurice Denis, a co-founder and principal theorist of the Nabis movement. There Bouchéne met Henri Matisse, who taught him to paint not what he saw but what he felt about his subject.

St. Tropez by Bouchéne

On Bouchéne's return to St Petersburg he joined the staff at the Hermitage as Keeper of Fans. He then ran the department of Russian porcelain, silver and jewels.

In 1925 he obtained permission for a three-month holiday in Paris, travelling via Tallinn with his lover, the art historian Sergei Ernst, whom he had first met at art school. They never returned to the Soviet Union.

1894/5? – Sergei Ernst (d.1980) was a Russian art historian and critic also associated with members of Mir Iskusstva ("World of Art") He was the first to write monographs on the leading artists of the Russian "Silver Age": Benua, Rerikh and Serebriakova (who painted both of the portraits used here.

He met his life-long lover and partner Dimitri Bouchène when they were both art students in St. Petersburg. In 1925 Bouchéne obtained permission for a three-month holiday in Paris, travelling together with Sergei Ernst. As previously mentioned, the couple never returned to Russia.

At a Parisian flea market, Ernst bought a Delacroix at a ridiculously low price. Reselling the painting allowed the couple to buy a home. They never returned to the Soviet Union. Bouchéne worked for the Paris Opéra and La Scala as stage designer. Ernst worked as an art critic and historian.

During the Nazi occupation of France, Bouchéne and Ernst took part in the French Resistance.

The lovers lived together all their lives and are buried in one grave in Montparnasse. The inscription reads "What a joy / You have arrived" - referring to the thirteen years between Sergei's death in 1980 and Bouchéne's in 1993 - seven weeks short of his 100th brthday.

1905 – (Lillian) Lily Parr, the great English football player and the only woman to be made an inaugural inductee into the English Football Hall of Fame, was born (d.1978). During the First World War in England there was a growing interest in ladies football and Dick, Kerr & Co. was the name of the Preston Munitions Factory where most of the women on the team worked. The Dick, Kerr's Ladies team regularly drew large crowds which included a famous event in December 1920 at Goodison Park that drew more than 53,000 spectators. When the company was sold to English Electric, the new owners got rid of the women's team.

In its time, Dick Kerr Ladies had raised a lot of money for Whittingham Hospital and Lunatic Asylum. In gratitude, they offered jobs and accommodation to women on the team who had been fired from English Electric.

In her first few days at the hospital Parr met a co-worker called Mary. The two fell in love and became partners. Parr and Mary refused to hide their relationship like so many lesbians of the time did and they were openly partners among friends and teammates. So forthright were they that few people dared to question or criticize their relationship. The couple even bought a house together (Parr was the only woman on the team to own her own house, mostly due to Mary's brilliant financial and organizational skills.)

When the 1930s arrived, football began to fade into the background for many of the Dick Kerr team. Parr concentrated more and more on her nursing career, eventually reaching the post of Ward Sister, while many of the other players married and gave up football altogether. The war years proved a difficult time for the game as petrol rationing made it hard to travel to matches. Nevertheless, Parr was made captain of the team in 1946 in recognition of 26 years service in the team. In all her years, she had scored 967 goals and only missed 5 games through illness or injury. She played her last game at the age of 45 when she took to the field in a game against Scotland. Parr left on a high - her team won 11-1. Preston Ladies continued without her well into the 60s, but eventually folded in 1965.

Two year later in 1967, Parr's years of smoking caught up with her and she developed breast cancer. She stubbornly refused to give up her beloved Woodbines and despite a double mastectomy she died at home in May 1978. In 2002, she became the first and only women to enter the Football Hall of Fame. 2007 saw a major exhibition on her life and football as part of LGBT History Month as well as the first ever Lily Parr Exhibition Trophy match, played in Camden.

1935 – American composer Conrad Susa is best remembered for his operas and choral music, some of which is informed by his experience as a gay man. (d.2013)

Conrad Stephen Susa was born in the town of Springdale, Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh. His family was Slovak, and there was a great deal of amateur music making at home, especially choral music. He studied music at Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) and at Juilliard.

From the beginning of his career, Susa was involved with dramatic music, such as composer-in-residence for the Old Globe Theater in San Diego. In 1972 he moved from New York to San Francisco; he joined the composition department at the San Francisco Conservatory in 1988, where he became Chair in 2000.

In addition to many film and television scores and instrumental works, Susa has written a number of vocal works, both stage and choral.

Susa was the first composer ever commissioned by a gay men's chorus. The New York Gay Men's Chorus (together with Susa's publisher G. Schirmer) commissioned Chanticleer's Carol (1982), an antiphonal work whose cries of "Awake!" are accompanied by brass, including an offstage trumpet.

He had numerous commissions by the Gay and Lesbian Association of Choruses (GALA) and its members, including the San Francisco, Boston, Minneapolis, and San Diego choruses.

Susa's first opera, Transformations (1973), was among the most famous commissions by the theatrically innovative Minnesota Opera, and has become one of the most widely performed American operas. Its staging of Anne Sexton's radical reinterpretations of fairy tales expands the gender roles of the originals, including cross-gender casting (approved by Sexton) and a lesbian seduction. The composer's libretto works in a story of Sexton's creative and personal growth as a subplot, and the musical numbers parody a range of popular music styles.

Two of Susa's operas, Black River (1975) and The Love of Don Perlimplin (1984), were written to libretti by the composer's then partner Richard Street; the latter is based on a text by Federico García Lorca.

Two later operas, The Wise Woman (1994) and The Dangerous Liaisons (1994, revised 1996-1997, after the Laclos novel), use libretti by gay songwriter Philip Littell; the former was commissioned by the American Guild of Organists, the latter by the San Francisco Opera.

Dirge from Cymbeline (1991) for men's chorus with offstage trumpet was written in memory of Susa's lover Nikos, who died of AIDS. Susa himself died in 2013.

1951 – Billy Newton-Davis, born in Cleveland, Ohio, United States, is a Canadian R&B, jazz and gospel singer and songwriter.

Newton-Davis grew up in Shaker Heights, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland. He was one of two lead singers in a local soul band called The Illusions. After working as a singer and dancer on Broadway, he moved to Toronto, Ontario in 1980. His debut album, Love Is a Contact Sport, won the Juno Award for best R&B/soul recording in 1986 and included the hits "Deeper", "Right Beside You" and "Find My Way Back".

His 1989 follow up, Spellbound, included his biggest Canadian chart hit, "I Can't Take It", as well as the Celine Dion duet "Can't Live With You, Can't Live Without You" and again won the Juno for best R&B/soul recording.

Newton-Davis subsequently joined The Nylons in 1991. Since leaving The Nylons, he has primarily concentrated on songwriting and live jazz and gospel performances. He also performed vocals on a number of deadmau5 tracks, including "All U Ever Want", and "R My Dreams" from At Play Vol. 2. In 2008, Newton-Davis won the Juno Award for All You Ever Want as Best Dance Album.

Openly gay, his On A Boy's Life (2008) is a "celebration of all the naughty things men can get up to when left to their own devices." Diagnosed HIV-positive in 1986 at the height of his career, he first went public with his status in a documentary by Sylvia Sweeney that aired on Vision TV in 2000.

1960 – Jonathan Rauch, born in Phoenix, Arizona, is an American author, journalist and activist. After graduating from Yale University, Rauch worked at the Winston-Salem Journal in North Carolina, for the National Journal magazine, and later for The Economist magazine and as a freelance writer.

Currently, a contributing editor of National Journal and The Atlantic, he is the author of several books and many articles on public policy, culture, and economics. He is also a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution in Governance Studies and a vice president of the Independent Gay Forum. Rauch is also the author of five books, including Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America (2004)

A critic of U.S. government public policy in general, and specifically in its relation to homosexuals, Rauch has pursued gay-related topics as an openly gay author since 1991 when he spoke out against hate crime laws in The New Republic. He is an avid proponent of same-sex marriage, which he believes will improve the quality of life of both LGBT people and married heterosexuals. He co-authored an op-ed article in the New York Times that proposed the compromise of nationally recognised civil unions for gay couples, which he did with the goal of "reconciliation" with religious opponents of same-sex marriage.

1977 – Fredrik Eklund, aka Tag Erikkson, born in Stockholm, Sweden, is a New York City real estate broker, a former Information technology (IT) entrepreneur in his native Sweden, a gay porn actor (under the pseudonym Tag Eriksson, also written Tag Ericsson) and a novelist.

After being done with high school, Eklund studied at the Stockholm School of Economics, but never graduated. He has also worked for the financial newspaper Finanstidningen. At the age of 23, Eklund was the CEO of a company with 45 employees.

Eklund as Eriksson
(Click for Full Monty)

Before leaving Sweden for New York City, Eklund entered a career in gay pornographic film under the pseudonym Tag Eriksson (or Tag Ericsson). He starred in the porn comedy movie The Hole (2003) (a parody of The Ring), and for this role won a GayVN award for "Best Solo Scene." He appeared in six additional pornographic movies with Jet Set Productions. He claims his background in acting has not affected his career negatively.

In New York City Eklund became Managing Director at the New York City real estate firm CORE Group Marketing and in 2010 Managing Director at Prudential Douglas Elliman, the largest real estate brokerage on the East Coast. He is currently one of three New York City brokers starring in Bravo's Million Dollar Listing New York.

 Added 2023

1980 – Channing Tatum is an American actor. Tatum made his film debut in the drama Coach Carter (2005), and had his breakthrough role in the 2006 dance film Step Up. He gained wider attention for his leading roles in the sports comedy She's the Man (2006), the comedy-drama Magic Mike (2012) and its sequels Magic Mike XXL (2015) and Magic Mike's Last Dance (2023), the latter two of which he also produced.

His other films include White House Down (2013), Foxcatcher (2014), and The Lost City (2022). Tatum has also starred in, produced and co-directed the road film Dog (2022). Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2022.

Tatum has discussed having dealt with attention deficit disorder (ADD) and dyslexia while growing up, which affected his ability to do well in school. Growing up, Tatum played football, soccer, track, and baseball; he has said that "girls were always [his] biggest distraction in school."

He attended Glenville State College in Glenville, West Virginia on a football scholarship, but dropped out. He returned home and started working odd jobs.

Us Weekly reported that around this time Tatum left his job as a roofer and began working as a stripper at a local nightclub, under the name "Chan Crawford". In 2010, he told an Australian newspaper that he wanted to make a movie about his experiences as a stripper. That idea led to the movie Magic Mike. Tatum moved to Miami, where he was discovered by a model talent scout.

Tatum met actress Jenna Dewan on the set of their movie Step Up, and they married on July 11, 2009, in Malibu, California. They have one daughter, born in 2013. On April 2, 2018, the couple announced they were separating. Six months later, Dewan filed for divorce from Tatum. The divorce was finalized in November 2019.

Although he was married, and has been reported as dating several different actresses, rumors conting that Channing is gay, fuelled by many of his own comments about other men:

In a 2012 interview published in the UK's Sun, Tatum revealed that he'd developed a "Man Crush" on George Clooney and went on to say, "I'd have sex with him".

Channing appeared in an ET Interview in 2014 whereby he revealed a straight-up man crush on actor Jude Law.

Of a fellow actor (and out gay man) Matt Bomer: "No matter if you're a man, woman, cat, hamster, you will get lost in Matt Bomer's eyes."

"I'd f... Danny Devito, as I was saying earlier it could be fun. I'd marry Ray Romano, because I think he has a pretty solid perspective on marriage. I don't know who would be the male or female, you figure it out."

Channing Tatum is supportive of the LGBTQ community. In 2015, he appeared in the LA Pride Parade and many of his movies hold a queer-friendly vibe.

Some have suggested that Channing purposely engages in gay baiting, a popular term used to describe the dynamic where an actor hints at (possibly) being queer but never comes right out and says it. The reason for doing so is to whip up buzz and speculation about the person or the movie they will appear in.

1980 – A large night demonstration takes over Montreal's Stanley and Ste-Catherine intersection to protest the police raid on Sauna David.

1984 – Brett Novek is an American male fashion model and actor. He is a campaign level model for Papi Underwear and appears on their product packaging and sales and promotional material. In 2007, he was a contestant in season one of VH1's reality competition television program America's Most Smartest Model, in which he placed fourth.

Novek was born in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. While working out at a gym, Novek met professional model Gregg Avedon, who submitted Novek's information to a modeling agency.

In May 2007, Novek participated as one of sixteen professional model contestants in the taping of Season One of America's Most Smartest Model. The game show consisted of a series of challenges that led to each model being eliminated from the contest until only the winner remained. Novek ended the game in fourth place. When the show aired later in the year, Novek appeared in episodes 1 thru 9. At the end of the ninth episode, Novek was eliminated. According to the judges, it was because of a disappointing performance in an automobile presentation challenge and because it appeared that he had lost his motivation after his friend and fellow contestant, Jeff Pickel, was eliminated the episode before.

Novek, who is gay, lived with fellow America's Most Smartest Model contestant Jeff Pickel in Los Angeles, California. He currently lives with fellow model/actor Erik Fellows.

2000 – Vermont becomes the first state in the U.S. to legalize civil unions and registered partnerships between same-sex couples.

2010 – On this date the California Assembly by unanimous vote repealed an archaic law requiring research into a "cure" for homosexuality. The decades-old state law, written in 1950, characterized homosexuality as a "sexual deviation" that must be cured and classified Gay people as "sexual deviants." It required the state to conduct research to find the causes of sex crimes against children and singled out homosexuals as a group that should be researched. The state had long stopped conducting such research, but the law remained on the books. How many other similar archaic laws must still be lurking around in state books?