August 31

12 A.D. – Caligula was the popular nickname of Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, Roman emperor from 37 AD to 41 AD. Caligula was a member of the Julio-Claudian dynasty. Caligula's father Germanicus, the nephew and adopted son of Emperor Tiberius, was a very successful general and one of Rome's most beloved public figures. The young Gaius earned the nickname Caligula (meaning "little soldier's boot", the diminutive form of caliga, hob-nailed military boot) from his father's soldiers while accompanying him during his campaigns in Germania.

When Germanicus died at Antioch in 19 AD, his wife Agrippina the Elder returned to Rome with her six children where she became entangled in an increasingly bitter feud with Tiberius. This conflict eventually led to the destruction of her family, with Caligula as the sole male survivor. Unscathed by the deadly intrigues, Caligula accepted the invitation to join the emperor on the island of Capri in 31 AD, where Tiberius himself had withdrawn five years earlier. With the death of Tiberius in 37 AD, Caligula succeeded his great uncle and adoptive grandfather.

There are few surviving sources on Caligula's reign, although he is described as a noble and moderate ruler during the first six months of his rule. After this, the sources focus upon his cruelty, sadism, extravagance, and intense sexual perversity, presenting him as an insane tyrant. While the reliability of these sources has increasingly been called into question, it is known that during his brief reign, Caligula worked to increase the unconstrained personal power of the emperor. He directed much of his attention to ambitious construction projects and notoriously luxurious dwellings for himself. However, he initiated the construction of two new aqueducts in Rome: the Aqua Claudia and the Anio Novus. During his reign, the Empire annexed the Kingdom of Mauretania and made it into a province.

Philo of Alexandria and Seneca the Younger describe Caligula as an insane emperor who was self-absorbed, angry, killed on a whim, and indulged in too much spending and sex. He is accused of sleeping with other men's wives and bragging about it, killing for mere amusement, and wanting a statue of himself erected in the Temple of Jerusalem for his worship. Once, at some games at which he was presiding, he ordered his guards to throw an entire section of the crowd into the arena during intermission to be eaten by animals because there were no criminals to be prosecuted and he was bored.

While repeating the earlier stories, the later sources of Suetonius and Cassius Dio provide additional tales of insanity. They accuse Caligula of incest with his sisters, Agrippina the Younger, Drusilla, and Livilla, and say he prostituted them to other men. They state he sent troops on illogical military exercises, turned the palace into a brothel, and, most famously, planned or promised to make his horse, Incitatus, a consul, and actually appointed him a priest.

He assassinated at the Palatine Games by his own officers after a reign of only four years. He was noted for his madness and cruelty including arbitrary murder. His taste in men was far-reaching. In fact, his taste for anything sexual, male, female, relative, or animal seems far-reaching. One of his playmates was a priest who he enjoyed screwing in public at religious events. He forced his officers into regular sex bouts. He is reported to have made them kiss his penis in public.

In early 41 AD, Caligula became the first Roman emperor to be assassinated, the result of a conspiracy involving officers of the Praetorian Guard, as well as members of the Roman Senate and of the imperial court. The conspirators' attempt to use the opportunity to restore the Roman Republic was thwarted: on the same day the Praetorian Guard declared Caligula's uncle Claudius emperor in his place.

1922 – André Baudry (d.2018), as leader of the French homophile movement from the early 1950s into the 1980s, was the principal spokesman for homosexuals in France before the rise of gay liberation in the 1970s. Born in Rethonde, France, on August 22, 1922, Baudry grew up in Senlis, where his father was a notary. After the death of his mother, Baudry, then eight years old, was sent to a Jesuit-run boarding school in Laval. He came down with tuberculosis soon after graduation and spent the first years of World War II in hospital and then in a sanatorium in eastern France. Baudry entered the Roman Catholic seminary at Versailles in 1943, but abandoned his plans for the priesthood in late 1945 or early 1946 because of what he considered an irreconcilable conflict between his religious vocation and his homosexuality. He went on to teach philosophy in a Catholic private school in Paris until the mid-1950s.

In 1946, Baudry began frequenting a circle of conservative Catholic homosexual writers that included Roger Peyrefitte, André du Dognon, and Jacques de Ricaumont. Ricaumont introduced Baudry to the Swiss homophile review Der Kreis (The Circle). He became its French correspondent in 1951 under the pseudonym André Romane. The homophile movement, which was international in scope, disliked the term "homosexual" because it seemed to stress sex over love, whereas "homophile," as Baudry observed, more broadly "designates those persons who can find their erotic fulfilment (... physical, psychological, emotional and intellectual) only with another person of the same sex."

Baudry began holding meetings of Der Kreis's Paris subscribers in his apartment. In January 1954, he launched his own monthly periodical, named Arcadie after the mythical Ancient Greek paradise peopled by happy shepherds. Arcadie contained short works of fiction, as well as scientific, literary, and historical articles that focused on (and defended) homosexuality. Despite the review's austere tone and drab appearance (with no illustrations), the government banned its sale at newsstands; and in 1956 the courts fined Baudry forty thousand francs for offending morals.

Baudry's 'Arcadie' Magazine

Arcadie nonetheless survived and eventually reached ten thousand subscribers throughout France and perhaps three or four times as many readers. Baudry also sent free copies to politicians, magistrates, doctors, and clergymen, in hopes of changing their negative attitude toward homosexuality.

In 1957 Baudry founded a homophile association, Clespala (Club Littéraire et Scientifique des Pays Latins, or Literary and Scientific Club of the Latin Countries), often also called "Arcadie" for short, headquartered in Paris, first on the rue Béranger, then on the rue du Château-d'Eau from 1969. The club held weekend dances for members (overwhelmingly male) and sponsored occasional banquets, cultural activities, and conferences. Once a month, Baudry addressed those members present in the clubhouse with his "Word of the Month," a speech that some sarcastically called a "sermon" because of Baudry's preachiness.

Baudry once said: "I was a happy, well-adjusted homophile; in any case I had never been ... a complicated, tortured, traumatized, and anxious homosexual worried by the anathema of the Church, by the family or by my surroundings." He wanted other homosexuals to accept themselves in the same way and live happy, full, and productive lives.

Baudry eschewed political agitation and demonstrations for equal rights, because, as one Arcadian put it, "we [homosexuals] are a minority and always will be a minority. The only policy possible for us is to educate intelligent people ... They are the ones who, little by little, shape public opinion." By the late 1970s, this position seemed hopelessly outdated to the younger generation. France changed dramatically after the "May events" of 1968 and, as one of Baudry's critics commented, "Try talking about 'dignity' and 'morals' to the children of the barricades and of the permissive society!" French gay liberationists of the 1970s were left-wing radicals, who tried to advance their cause through anti-establishment rhetoric, provocative behavior, and clamorous street demonstrations, all anathema to Baudry. Gay liberationists returned his contempt, and (paraphrasing Karl Marx) declared that "Arcadie is the opium of the homosexuals."

In the 1970s, as homosexuality came into the open in France, Baudry (who was an eloquent speaker) appeared frequently on radio and television and gave numerous interviews to the press, but he declined to work with other gay groups.

In 1982, Baudry abruptly ceased publication of Arcadie, closed down Clespala, and retired with his life partner, Giuseppe Adamo (who had worked as barman in the club), to the latter's native village near Naples, Italy. He died there in 2018..

1935 – Jim Morris (d.2016), born in Brooklyn, New York, was an American bodybuilder known for winning competitions over a thirty-year career. Among the titles Morris won are: Mr. USA (1972), AAU Mr. America (1973), Mr. International (1974), and Mr. Olympia Masters Over 60 (1996). At age 50, he became a vegetarian and over 15 years transitioned to vegan, a diet to which he credited much of his excellent health.

Morris started designing fitness programs in 1954 at the Central Queens YMCA in New York. He had just gained 35 lbs of pure muscle in 3 months and people wanted to know how he did it. He was very successful and started an Olympic weightlifting team that won state competitions.

He joined the U.S. Air Force in 1961 where he ran the 5Bx fitness program and held workout classes for 4 years.

He then joined the New York Fire Brigade as fireman, which allowed him to start training for bodybuilding competition. Jim won every major competition at the East Coast including Mr. Jr USA, his first national title.

In 1973 Jim Morris met Elton John at a party in Hollywood, and this encounter led Jim to become Elton John's personal bodyguard for the next 15 years.

From 1978 to 1985 Jim Morris ran his own gym in West Hollywood and attracted many competing bodybuilders including Larry Jackson, James Joseph, and Bob Paris to train at his gym.

Morris, who was openly gay, still trained regularly into his final years.

In March 2011 a short documentary-film starring Jim Morris titled "Jim Morris: Lifelong Fitness" was released on YouTube. The film focuses on his life long body building career, vegan lifestyle and Morris' yearning to break stereotypes attached to the elderly. Morris died on January 28, 2016 at the age of 80.

 The young Kushar twins.

When Mike and George Kuchar first got their hands on an 8mm movie camera in 1954 as 12 year old boys, no one really thought the format was suitable for anything but vacation footage, yet since then no one in America has contributed more to the craft and philosophy of personal film-making than the twin brothers from the Bronx. In a culture of hype and careerism, where "size counts", its not surprising, then, that gangly, self-effacing Mike Kuchar, the lesser well known of the two, is not in any sense famous.

They have been making innovative, if engagingly threadbare, epics since that day in 1954, when The Wet Destruction of the Atlantic Empire saw the light of day. In that case, the boys' appropriation of all available materials included their mother's nightgown. According to George, "At the age of twelve I made a transvestite movie on the roof and was brutally beaten by my mother for having disgraced her, and also for soiling her nightgown." Mrs. Kuchar's reaction was the Kuchars' first bad review, but it is a testimony to how endearing they and their work are that by the mid-1960s she was making regular cameo appearances in her sons' work. Devotees of comic books, pornography, and commercial Hollywood cinema, George and Mike tried to replicate on film what they saw in their working-class lives—or filter it through their own gay sensibilities—using their 8mm camera and whatever locations, props, friends, and families were available.

Wet Destruction was followed by many other works in the comic chaos mode, torrid two-dollar melodramas based on Kuchar favorites such as Douglas Sirk's Written on the Wind (1956). Some of the titles are as notorious as the films themselves: Corruption of the Damned (1967), Pussy on a Hot Tin Roof (1961), Hold Me While I'm Naked (1966). Many featured shoestring special effects that included floods, earthquakes, and tornadoes, rendered with stock footage, backyard assemblages, and matte paintings by the talented duo.

The Kuchars were innovative exhibitors as well, setting up informal cinema clubs to show their work, which scandalized some of the attendees with its sexual frankness, anarchistic air, laughable plots, and grade-Z special effects. Eventually members of the haute underground —Andy Warhol, Ken Jacobs, Jack Smith — took notice, and the Kuchars' films became both infamous in creating their legend and influential in showing others that neither large budgets nor good taste were necessary conditions of film art

Mike and George ended their collaborative approach to movie making in 1965 when Mike phased himself out of their first 16mm work-in-progress, Corruption of the Damned, to concentrate on a futuristic science-fiction fantasy which would turn out to be the 45-minute Sins of the Fleshapoids, and which featured George in probably his finest acting appearance as Gianbeano, the evil prince.

Although their films would always display some stylistic similarity, reflective of their common love of fifties' Hollywood melodrama and their low-budget orientation, Mike dealt more with classical or Romanesque imagery that tended to have erotic under-currents, while George would go on to pioneer a form of personal film-making that relied heavily on first-person narration and his own presence in the frame - a style which he has honed in his prolific "video-diary" output of the last decade. Mike has always taken a more off-screen role in his own films, which are just as personal but in a different way, and tend on average to be longer than George's.

George went on refining the steamy camp melodrama, using a stock company of friends, and, later, working in a diary format that allowed him to record with droll humor the nuances of his daily life and his self-proclaimed "favorite topic," Midwestern tornadoes. In the early 1970s he became a cartoonist in the underground comics scene but continued to make films. In 1975, George collaborated with the late gay filmmaker Curt McDowell for one of the underground's best-known titles, Thundercrack!, a lewd sendup of the "old dark house" genre from 1930s Hollywood, which George co-wrote and acted in.

George Kuchar's latest major work, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, carries his obsession with earthly, fleshly things into the literal stratosphere. Secrets of the Shadow World is a 140-minute digital video epic ostensibly tracking George's attempts to make a "big UFO movie," but it is really an excuse to display the filmmaker's scintillating sensibility and eccentric gallery of friends. In a bizarre tableau that reaches the giddy heights of camp, he shows the Roswell, New Mexico alien as a sex fiend, stretched out on top of his friend Linda Martinez, who thrills to the touch of its plastic paw and moody, ovoid bedroom eyes.

Mike's work would span a range of subjects and techniques and he never established a consistent trademark style like George. Even his two major works of the sixties, Sins of the Fleshapoids and The Secret of Wendel Samson (1966), made only a year apart, are very different films. His output over the years was more sporadic and less prolific than his brother's, all of which helps to explain why George has a higher profile than Mike today. George's employment as a film teacher at the San Francisco Art Institute for almost thirty years now has also contributed to his somewhat broader recognition.

On the other hand, Mike has stayed active over the years, working on his own films and occasionally as a cinematographer on other independent productions, usually in Europe. A gifted painter and illustrator since his teens, he's derived some income from story board work and contributed to a number of gay erotic comic books.

In the past 10 years, Mike Kuchar has focused on more intimate one person expressionistic films. At the Vienna Film Festival in 2009, he unveiled two shorts, Swan Song and Dumped. Swan Song features the pain of a young man tormented by his sensuality who is painted as an animal writhing in pain, and Dumped stars veteran stage actress Deirdre McGill in a portrait of a woman engaged in a deadly love triangle.

Mike recently returned from Portugal to San Francisco's Mission District, where he shares a cheap walk-up flat with brother George.

in 1997, the Kuchar brothers collaborated on a book, Reflections from a Cinematic Cesspool (1997). It is a humorous memoir discussing four decades of filmmaking and includes an introduction by filmmaker John Waters

1943 – Jacques Nolot is a French actor, screenwriter and film director.

Jacques Nolot was born in Marciac, Gers, a small village in Southwest France. A fragile child, Nolot was doted upon by his mother, a woman who had three children with three different men. At age 16, he was working at the village's grocery store, when a tourist stopping there offered him to take him to Paris. In the French capital, he worked selling vegetables while taking acting classes. At age seventeen, he decided to move to Cannes in order to become a star. Young and penniless, he became the lover of a rich woman and later began hustling for men. His life was the street.

At age nineteen, he met Roland Barthes, who was more than twenty years his senior. They became lovers. Barthes introduced him to Parisian intellectuals among them André Téchiné. In the 1980s and 1990s Nolot took small roles in some of Téchiné's films beginning with Hotel America (1981). He performed in many other films including Long Live Life (1984), Scene of the Crime (1986), Les Innocents (1987) or Nénette and Boni (1996). As an actor, he is best remembered for his role as Charlotte Rampling's lover in François Ozon's Under the Sand (2000).

In 1986, Nolot wrote, directed, and acted in the short film Manège that would be the genesis for his later feature film Porn Theater (2002). He wrote and starred in a second short: Le café des Jules (1989), directed by Paul Vecchiali.

In 2000 while working in Benoît Graffin's Café de la plage (2001), the actor had a heart attack and fell into coma. He finished the film after his complete recovery. Nolot's second film Porn Theater (chatte à deux têtes) was screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival. La chatte à deux têtes (2002), shot entirely in a Paris movie theater, was critically well received. In his third film Before I Forget (Avant que j'oublie) Nolot portrays an aging HIV positive, a hustler in his youth who now in a reversal of roles has to pay for sex.

1946 – Michael Andre is a Canadian, disc jockey, poet, critic and editor living in New York City.

Andre was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, to a civil engineer doing wartime work on a military hospital. His mother's father was a newspaperman, Eyton Warburton; he died when Andre was an infant. Andre was raised in Kingston, Ontario. He studied at McGill University, the University of Chicago, and Columbia University.

Andre hosted radio shows in Chicago and New York. He interviewed, published, and occasionally socialized with W. H. Auden and Eugene McCarthy, Beats like Gregory Corso, William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, and homosexual esthetes like John Cage and Andy Warhol. He is divorced from Erika Rothenberg, an artist, and Jane Adler, a flautist and sign-language interpreter; he has a son, Benjamin Eyton Andre.

Andre has recited his poetry in London, Frankfurt and Paris, at various venues in New York including the Public Theater, St. Mark's Poetry Project, and the Bowery Poetry Club as well as at numerous universities and galleries throughout Canada and the United States.

1954 – Eric Rofes (d.2006) was a gay activist, educator, and author who wrote or edited 12 books.

Rofes was a prominent activist for homosexuals who became controversial for his permissive stand on gay sex during the age of AIDS. A teacher by vocation, he graduated cum laude from Harvard University in 1976, but was fired from his first job as a sixth-grade teacher because he was gay.

In 1978 he became an administrator and teacher at the Fayerweather Street School in Cambridge. During the 1970s, Rofes was already an activist, becoming a cofounder of the Boston Lesbian and Gay Political Alliance and the Gay Community News.

In the early 1980s, he was also a board member for the Massachusetts Department of Social Services, and a member of the board of directors for Project Assist and chair of Project Aware for the Massachusetts Committee for Children and Youth. Working with the students at Fayerweather, Rofes published The Kids' Book of Divorce: By, For, and About Kids (1981), and the next year released what many consider the first book about gay suicide: "I Thought People Like That Killed Themselves": Lesbians, Gay Men, and Suicide.

He left Massachusetts for California in 1985, when he was hired to be executive director of the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center; four years later, he was in San Francisco as head of the AIDS service group, the Shanti Project.

Openly gay, Rofes considered homosexuality a positive experience and thought that the tendency of some gay men to be promiscuous was not necessarily a negative thing. Angered by the effects of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s on the gay community, he later averred that the crisis had passed, a view that drew strong criticism from those who felt Rofes was discouraging safe sex practices. He wrote about his views in such books as Reviving the Tribe: Regenerating Gay Men's Sexuality and Culture in the Ongoing Epidemic (1996) and Dry Bones Breathe: Gay Men Creating Post-AIDS Identities and Cultures (1998).

He was living in Provincetown, Massachusetts, working on his 13th book when he died of a heart attack.

1959 – David McConnell, American author of the fictionalized memoir, The Firebrat, which came out in 2003, and was nominated for a Violet Quill Award, was born in Cleveland, Ohio. His short fiction and journalism have appeared widely in magazines and anthologies.

With Nora Wright he rented a sprawling farmhouse in Stephentown, New York. There, they kept cats and friends and experimented with nudism and marksmanship and published a literary magazine (along with the poet Tory Dent and James Cheney). Peripatetic for a while, McConnell lived in a white high rise overlooking Lake Erie, then sublet the painter Joe Brainard's Green Street loft in New York City, then moved to Hudson, New York, for a single gloomy year, then relocated to Paris, France, for five.

After returning to New York, he got a pilot's license and, for a short time, taught elementary Math to prisoners on Riker's Island. After learning his old Greek and Latin teacher had died, he regretted never returning a borrowed copy of Catullus, and, in an unusual dramatic gesture for such a reserved person, he threw the book into the Hudson River and settled down to writing.

After The Silver Hearted, a novel of delirious imagination (and a finalist for the Ferro-Grumley and the Lambda awards), he re-imagined “True Crime” non-fiction in American Honor Killings which won the 2014 American Library Association Stonewall Book Award-Israel Fishman Award for Non-Fiction. He's now at work on a memoir about his relationship with a man on death row.

He now lives with sometime Mississippi businessman Darrell Crawford in a West Chelsea townhouse once built on spec by slave owner Clement Clark Moore

1969 – Andrew Cunanan (d.1997) was an American spree killer who murdered at least five people, including fashion designer Gianni Versace, during a three-month period in 1997, ending with his own suicide, at age 27.

At school, Cunanan was remembered as being bright and very talkative, testing with an I.Q. of 147. As a teenager, he developed a reputation as a prolific liar given to telling fantastic tales about his family and personal life. He was also adept at changing his appearance according to what he felt was most attractive at a given moment.

After dropping out of college, he settled in the Castro District of San Francisco. While there, he frequented high-class gay bars and prostituted himself to wealthy older men.

When Cunanan was 19, his mother learned of Cunanan's homosexuality. During an ensuing argument, he threw her against a wall, dislocating her shoulder.

Before the murders, Cunanan was involved in petty theft and drug dealing.

Friends in San Diego, where he lived prior to the spree, felt he had some sort of break down after being rejected by his lover and his best friend. His friends attended an extravagant going away party for him when he said he was moving to San Francisco. He didn't go to San Francisco, though. He bought a one-way ticket to Minneapolis, where he stayed with a former lover, David Madson, 33. He arranged a fling with an old friend, Jeffrey Trail.

His friend Jeffrey Trail was his first murder in a three-month killing spree beginning April 27, 1997, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Trail's body, with his head bashed in, was found wrapped in a rug in Madson's loft on April 29th. The second victim, architect David Madson, was killed May 2, 1997. His body, with a single shot to the head, was found four days later about 60 miles north of Minneapolis. Cunanan then drove to Chicago to kill Lee Miglin, 72, a real-estate developer, with a saw blade and pruning shears on May 4. The fourth victim, William Reese, 45, a cemetery caretaker, was killed for his car on May 9, 1997. Reese was killed by a single shot to the head with a .40-caliber Taurus. Cunanan then hid in Miami Beach, Florida, for months before the fifth murder. July 15, 1997, Andrew Cunanan, the 27-year-old multi-murderer, shot and killed Gianni Versace on his front steps in Miami Beach, Florida, U.S as he was returning home after a morning walk.

On July 23, 1997, eight days after murdering Versace, Cunanan shot himself in the mouth in the upstairs bedroom of a Miami houseboat. He used the same gun he had used to commit the other murders, a Taurus PT100 semi-automatic pistol in .40 S&W caliber, which had been stolen from the first victim, Jeff Trail.

His motivations remain a mystery. Various theories include jealousy for Versace's role as a "gay icon", as well as necessity and opportunity in some of the other murders.

1977 – Barry Winchell (d.1999) was an infantry soldier in the United States Army, whose murder by a fellow soldier, Calvin Glover, became a point of reference in the ongoing debate about the policy known as "Don't ask, don't tell", which banned from the U.S. military gays and lesbians who were open about their sexual orientation.

A native of Missouri, Winchell enlisted in the Army in 1997 and was transferred in 1998 to Fort Campbell, Kentucky. While stationed there, he received a Dear John letter from his high school sweetheart. Winchell later accompanied his roommate, Spc. Justin Fisher, and other soldiers for an excursion to Nashville's downtown bars. In 1999, Fisher and others took Winchell to a Nashville club, The Connection, which featured transgender performers, where Winchell met a male-to-female transgender showgirl named Calpernia Addams. The two began to date. Fisher began to spread rumors of the relationship at Ft. Campbell. Winchell then became a target of harassment which his superiors did little to stop.

The harassment was continuous until the Fourth of July weekend, when Winchell and fellow soldier, Calvin Glover, fought after Winchell accused a boasting Glover of being a fraud. Both were drinking beer throughout the day. Glover was soundly defeated by Winchell, and Fisher harassed Glover about being beaten by "a fucking faggot like Winchell." Subsequently, in the early hours of July 5, 1999, Glover took a baseball bat from Fisher's locker and struck Winchell in the head with it as he slept on a cot outside near the entry to the room Winchell shared with Fisher. Winchell died of massive head injuries on July 6.

Glover was later convicted of Winchell's murder. Fisher was convicted of lesser crimes regarding impeding the subsequent criminal investigation, and both were incarcerated at the United States Disciplinary Barracks. The murder charges against Fisher were dropped and Fisher was sentenced in a plea bargain to 12.5 years, denied clemency in 2003, released to a halfway house in August 2006, and released from custody in October 2006. Glover is serving a life sentence.

Winchell's murder led Secretary of Defense William Cohen to order a review of the "Don't ask, don't tell" (DADT), which some asserted was a significant factor in Winchell's harassment and murder. Despite campaigning by Winchell's parents and LGBT activist groups, the Commanding General of Fort Campbell at the time of the murder, Major General Robert T. Clark, refused to take responsibility for the purported anti-gay climate at Fort Campbell under his command.

The 2003 film Soldier's Girl is based on Winchell's murder and the events leading up to it. Troy Garity portrayed Winchell. The film received a Peabody Award and numerous Emmy and Golden Globe nominations and sparked renewed debate of the effects of DADT.

1979 – Del Marquis (born Derek Gruen in New York) is the lead guitarist for the group Scissor Sisters – and one of three gay band members. He is also the creator and producer of the US group, Slow Knights.

He was introduced to the band at the insistence his best friend, David Russell, who was dating lead singer Jake Shears at the time. He originally hated the band when he first saw them perform in a gay bar named 'The Cock'. His current membership of the band is due to his reappraisal of their music when he next came across them some months later, and subsequent reply to an advertisement the band had placed in a newspaper for a guitarist. According to his own account on the band DVD, he has stalked several renowned guitarists, sometimes sleeping outside the hotels they were sleeping in. One of these was Robert Smith of The Cure.

Unlike the outrageously flamboyant stage image of Jake Shears and Ana Matronic, his fellow band members, Del possesses a slightly more subdued image on stage, although still has a recognisable style of his own. He has a keen interest in graphic design and film, is known as an advocate for civil rights and 'liberation concepts', and possesses an unofficial fan group who call themselves the Deltoids, with whom he has a relatively good relationship.

1984 – A Louisiana appellate court upholds the conviction of a man for solicitation of an undercover police officer who was wired for sound and had the solicitation recorded.

2001 – The Canadian Human Rights tribunal rules in favor of prisons respecting sex reassignment.