December 18

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1788 – Ferdinand Philipp Grimm, born in Hanau, Germany, (d.1845) was a German collector of sagas. He is known as the "unknown brother" of the Brothers Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm. The portrait above, of Ferdinand at 19 years old, was drawn by his artist brother Ludwig Grimm.

From 1815 he worked as a proofreader at the Berlin publishing house Reimer and was financially supported by his brothers Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm. Dismissed from the publishers in 1834, he lived with his brothers in Göttingen until 1836 , then as a writer in Wolfenbüttel.

He helped his famous brothers collect legends, but also published three collections of his own under the pseudonyms Lothar , Philipp von Steinau and Friedrich Grimm.

Heiner Boehncke writes that Ferdinand was wrongly overshadowed by his brothers, as his fairy tales are of very good literary quality. He writes that Ferdinand was very lonely and that this showed in his work.

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm wrote in a several letters that their brother was extremely strange and the Germanist Heiner Boehncke came to the conclusion that Ferdinand had come out as homosexual during the Grimms' public Christmas party in 1810.

When he was dying, Jacob visited him, but Wilhelm had broken off contact completely.

1870 – On this date the British writer Saki was born (d.1916). Born Hector Hugh Munro, his witty and sometimes macabre stories satirized Edwardian society and culture. He is considered a master of the short story and is often compared to O. Henry and Dorothy Parker. His tales feature delicately drawn characters and finely judged narratives. "The Open Window" may be his most famous.

His short stories are extraordinarily compact and cameolike, wicked and witty, with cruelty and a powerful vein of supernatural fantasy. They deal, in general, with the same group of upper-class Britishers, whose frivolous lives are sometimes complicated by animals - the talking cat who reveals their treacheries in love, the pet ferret who is evil incarnate.

A J Langguth, in his biography of Munro, produces strong evidence to support the hypothesis that Munro was homosexual, but, at that time in the U.K., sexual activity between men was a crime. The Cleveland Street scandal (1889), followed by the downfall of Oscar Wilde (1895), meant that "that side of [Munro's] life had to be secret". Munro never married, and was a devotee of London's Jermyn Street baths, it is reported, and now that it has been revealed that H. H. Munro was Gay, his stories are being re-read as allegories of the torment of remaining bottled up in hypocritical English society. The stories are even more entertaining with this new knowledge.

Munro was guarded except in one or two of his stories and most of his readers would probably have been shocked had they known that his pen name refers to a cupbearer or beautiful boy and carries esoteric homoerotic connotations. The nom de plume, "Saki" was borrowed from the cupbearer in The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.

1938 – Aubrey Levin was a professor of clinical psychiatry at the University of Calgary until March 2010, when his license was suspended by the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Alberta, and is a convicted sex offender.

Levin was first licensed as a psychiatrist in South Africa in 1969. He was a Colonel in the South African Defence Force (SADF), as well as the chief psychiatrist at the Voortrekkerhoogte military hospital during the 1970s, during which time he was the attending psychiatrist at Greefswald, an isolated detention barracks where harsh conditions were supposed to 'cure' conscripts of supposed 'vices' and conscientious objections.

He rose to notoriety for his work on an aversion therapy medical program which attempted to cure gays and lesbians of homosexuality. Between 1971 and 1989, many victims were submitted to chemical castrations and electric shock treatment, meant to cure them of their homosexual “condition.” As many as 900 homosexuals, mostly 16-24 years old who had been drafted and had not voluntarily joined the military, were subjected to forced “sexual reassignment” surgeries. Men were surgically turned into women against their will, then cast out into the world, the gender reassignment often incomplete, and without the means to pay for expensive hormones to maintain their new sexual identities. After the end of apartheid, South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission heard testimony regarding the controversial nature of the aversion project Levin ran while in the SADF.

Levin later left South Africa and was licensed by the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Saskatchewan, Canada, in 1995, and then by Alberta's college in 1998. In March 2010 the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Alberta suspended Levin's license over accusations of abuse after a male patient secretly filmed the psychiatrist allegedly making sexual advances.

A pre-trial hearing determined that, although in the early stages of dementia, Levin was still fit to stand trial. July 2010, police announced that 20 other men had come forward, claiming they were assaulted by Levin during counseling sessions. On October 11, 2012 Levin went to trial at the Court of Queen’s Bench in Calgary. The Crown decided to go ahead with nine of the original 21 cases.

During the trial, a jury was shown the graphic secretly-recorded video of Levin touching a patient, which had been secretly recorded on the patient's camera wristwatch. On January 28, 2013, a jury found Dr. Levin guilty of three charges of sexual assault against male patients, not guilty of two other charges of sexual assault, while a mistrial was declared in reference to a further four counts.

February 7, 2013 police arrested Dr. Levin’s wife Erica Levin, 69, and charged her with obstruction of justice alleging she attempted to bribe a juror in the Levin trial. The juror said she was approached on a train platform in January and offered $1000 or $10,000 in a white envelope, to bring in a not-guilty verdict. The juror informed police and was subsequently dismissed.

Despite a 5 year prison sentence Levin was released on $15,000 bail on February 13, 2013. The judge says that, since his license to practice medicine has been suspended, he is "not a danger to the public.".

On 23 April 2014 the Alberta Court of Appeal, in a unanimous decision, upheld the 2013 conviction. Dr. Levin was ordered to report, within 48 hours, to begin his five year sentence.

1939 – Born in Leavenworth, Texas, gay rights activist Tim Campbell (d.2015) was perhaps best known as the publisher of the GLC Voice newspaper in Minneapolis, which came out from 1979 through 1992. During that period he was the go to person in Minneapolis for the media whenever they needed a quick quote on some gay related event. Campbell was also known for a number of street theater type gay rights protests scattered over the years.

Campbell was pushed into an openly gay lifestyle by the US Army in 1962 when he was called to register for the draft. He checked the box for people who had “homosexual tendencies” even though he had never yet acted on them. For years thereafter, Campbell had to list "1Y" as his draft status on every application for employment he filled out. This had a chilling effect on his pursuit of respectable employment, so he worked in department stores and waited tables.

Bruce Brockway partnered with him to start the Positively Gay newspaper, which became the GLC Voice newspaper.

Campbell himself often said his most important contribution to the national drive for gay rights was the energy he put, during 1974 and 1975, into convincing the Advocate (a national gay publication), the Minneapolis and St. Paul newspapers, including the university's Minnesota Daily, the Washington Post, Dear Abby (Van Buren), and the New York Times to direct their style sheets to use "gay" or "gay and lesbian" or "lesbian and gay" instead of "homosexual". Ever since the mid 1960s, gays themselves throughout the gay bar system and other fledgling organizations had started using "gay" for themselves.

Campbell was also very involved in helping gays, lesbians and others to recover from alcoholism and drug addiction. He sobered up August 25, 1973, in Minneapolis. He was the founding Chair of the Lambda Sobriety Center in Minneapolis in 1981.

Tim Campbell died December 26, 2015, in Houston, Texas, at the age of 76, from esophageal cancer.

1945 – Robert Eads (d.1999) was an American trans man, whose life and death was the subject of the award-winning documentary Southern Comfort.

Eads began transitioning in his forties, after a marriage to a man and after having borne two children. Eads later described being pregnant as "the best and the worst (time) in my life," as he was thrilled by the feeling of having another life grow inside him, but was also disgusted by the fact that his pregnancy made him as a trans man feel even more "trapped" inside his female body. He divorced his husband after the birth of their second son, and presented for some time as a lesbian, though he would later point out that he always viewed his attraction to women as the product of being a heterosexual man rather than a homosexual woman.

In 1996, after a severe bout of abdominal pain and vaginal bleeding, Eads sought emergency medical treatment, and received a diagnosis of ovarian cancer. However, more than two dozen doctors subsequently refused to treat Eads on the grounds that taking him on as a patient might harm their practice.

It was not until 1997 that Eads was finally accepted for treatment by the Medical College of Georgia hospital, where he underwent surgical, medical, and radiation therapy over the next year. At the time Southern Comfort was filmed in 1998, his cancer had metastasized to the uterus, cervix, and other abdominal organs, and his prognosis was poor. Despite aggressive treatment, Eads died in a nursing home in 1999 at the age of 53.

1950 – Ankha Shamin (nee Donn E. Holley d.2012) was a committed activist for gay rights beginning in the 1970s with the Mattachine Society of New York.

He was born in Rochester, New York. He graduated from Buffalo State University, New York. Most recently he worked as a records manager/senior analyst at Allianz Life and was previously employed as a reference and corporate librarian for Minnesota Technology and Braun Intertec.

Early years in Minneapolis found him singing with the Twin Cities Gay Men’s Chorus and helping to develop and facilitate “Voices and Visions.” He trained with the School of Body Electric organizing and facilitating numerous BE workshops here in the Twin Cities. He avidly participated in the Mankind Project Rainbow Circles and Midwest Radical Faeries.

His life partner and soulmate, Mark S. Mueller, died some time before him.

1953 – Dr Harry Benjamin conducted a symposium on transsexuals for the New York Academy of Medicine.

1961 – Brian Orser, born in Belleville, Ontario, is a Canadian retired competitive and professional figure skater. He is the 1984 and 1988 Olympic silver medalist, 1987 World champion and the 1981-1988 Canadian national champion. In 1985 he was made a Member of the Order of Canada and was promoted to Officer in 1988.

He is one of the most accomplished skaters in Canada's history, with eight national titles, two Olympic medals, and a world title to his credit. He is the skating director at the Toronto Cricket, Skating and Curling Club.

Orser on Ice
(Click for larger)

Orser was known as "Mr. Triple Axel" during his skating career. He became the second man to land the jump when he performed it in winning his Canadian junior title in 1979, at a time when few senior skaters were even attempting it. Over the next few years, Orser performed the jump more frequently and more consistently than any other skater of the time. Orser became the first man to land the triple axel at the Olympics when he landed it in his free skate at the 1984 Winter Olympics. He won the silver medal behind Scott Hamilton, and then won the silver at 1984 Worlds, again behind Hamilton. Only Orser's low placements in the compulsory figures prevented him from winning both titles.

Going into the 1988 Olympics, Orser and Brian Boitano were thrust into the Battle of the Brians, each being the other's main rival. Orser was undefeated in the 1986-1987 season and had not lost a competition since losing to Boitano at the 1986 Worlds. At the Olympics, Orser served as the flag-bearer for Canada during the opening ceremonies. He placed 3rd in compulsory figures segment of the competition, 1st in the short program, and second in the free skating, winning the silver medal overall. Brian Boitano won the gold medal,defeating Orser by .10 of a point.

In November 1991, Orser lost a close friend, Canadian ice dancer Rob McCall, to AIDS-related brain cancer. The following year, he and other Canadian skating stars, including Tracy Wilson, with whom McCall had won a bronze medal at the Calgary Olympics, put on a benefit exposition entitled "Skate the Dream" that McCall has been planning in order to raise money for AIDS research even as he had been dying of the disease.

In November 1998, Orser lost a legal battle to prevent public disclosure when ex-boyfriend Craig Leask, with whom he had lived for some five years beginning in 1992, sued him for palimony, even though he acknowledged that Orser had "denied his request to sign the equivalent of a prenuptial agreement" and that Orser claimed that Leask had "specifically promised not to seek support from him in the event of a break-up." Orser initially feared the revelation of his homosexuality would ruin his career, but he has since embraced support from other skaters and the public.

1974 – The first International Gay Rights Conference began. It would lead to the formation of the International Lesbian and Gay Association in 1978.

1978 – A Toronto police sergeant calls three school boards in the area and informs them six teachers in their employ were arrested in Barracks steam bath raid. The officer is given only internal department reprimand.

1979 – ABC News Close-Up featured a documentary on homosexuals. Fifteen affiliates refused to air it and the network was not able to find a single commercial sponsor. It covered topics such as promiscuity and implied that gays could not form stable relationships.

1980 – The New York State Court of Appeals abolished New York's sodomy laws.

1982 – The Quebec parliament overwhelmingly approves a measure, and becomes the first North American legislative body, to authorize Domestic Partnership benefits for same-sex couples. It gives domestic partners of gays and lesbians legal protection and access to economic benefits previously restricted to straights, authorizing "Domestic Partnership" benefits for gay and lesbian couples.

1984 – "The Times of Harvey Milk" was awarded the New York Film Critics Award for Best Documentary.

1990 – Dr Stanley Biber of Trinidad, Colorado, was elected to city council. Dr. Biber performs approximately 60% of the world's sex change operations.

1990 – Anthony Bowens is an American professional wrestler signed to All Elite Wrestling.

Bowens was born in Nutley, New Jersey. He attended Nutley High School and Montclair State University. He played baseball for eleven years, including at Montclair State and Seton Hall University. He was discovered by professional wrestler Santino Marella, who asked him whether he had ever thought about professional wrestling. He went on to train under Pat Buck.

Bowens started training in 2012 and made his professional wrestling debut in 2013. In November 2016, he suffered a concussion during a match on WWE NXT. In November 2020, All Elite Wrestling President Tony Khan announced that Bowens, alongside Max Caster, had been signed to a five-year contract with the promotion. The announcement also stated that Bowens and Caster would compete as a tag team named The Acclaimed.

Bowens came out as bisexual in January 2017 (he now identifies as gay), showing courage and bravery in that decision, and acting as another role model in the world of pro wrestling.

“It means something when a person can see someone that looks like them, gets them, and understands what they’re going through,” said the 28-year-old Bowens.

“I’m representing the LGBT community and athletes that are LGBT, but even more than that, too. I’m representing the small-town kid who was told he’d never make it, and I’m here for the shy kid that is ready to burst out of his shell and be that beautiful butterfly."

1997 – Navy Secretary John Dalton denied that the US Navy violates the "Don't ask, don't tell" policy by participating in witch hunts.