December 20

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1785 – The last known execution for sodomy in the United States occurs in Pennsylvania. Joseph Ross is the victim.

1865 – Although interior decorating is now widely stereotyped as a career for gay men, Elsie de Wolfe (d.1950), an American lesbian , was, in fact, to a great extent responsible for the creation of this profession. Not only did Elsie de Wolfe spearhead a cultural movement of home aesthetics, she was also one of the central figures of an elite New York "Amazon enclave" that included some of the most glamorous figures of the Broadway stage during the early years of the twentieth century.

Nor were these her only accomplishments: she also has the distinction of being the inventor of both the Pink Lady cocktail (consisting of gin, grenadine, egg whites, and cream) and the infamous blue hair rinse favored by many graying ladies.

She was born the daughter of a wealthy New York family. Her parents sent her to a finishing school in Edinburgh, and after her education she was a debutante at the court of Queen Victoria. Until the age of twenty-five, she led the life of indolence usual for young, unmarried women of her background and occasionally participated in amateur dramatics.

1n 1890, de Wolfe's father died and left the family with considerable debts from his compulsive gambling. Rather than marry for money, she began her career as a stage actress, although at the time it was at best a dubious profession for a woman of genteel upbringing. In the theatrical world, de Wolfe was known for her striking mode of dressing, and she drew audiences for her clothes as much as for her acting.

During this period, de Wolfe became the lover and partner of Elisabeth ("Bessie") Marbury, a prominent Broadway agent and producer. Theirs was an almost prototypical "butch-femme" relationship, and they became the objects of constant gossip in high society, as they were alleged to have hosted "Sapphic orgies" at the Sutton Place home of their friend Anne Morgan, the daughter of financier J. P. Morgan. Beyond any doubt, they mentored many young lesbians in the New York theatrical world, including Katherine Cornell, Eva Le Gallienne, and Mercedes de Acosta.

At the age of forty, de Wolfe had passed her prime as an actress. She had already achieved some acclaim as a set designer and for decorating the house in which she lived with Marbury. Thus, at her partner's urging, she retired from acting to devote herself to creating a new career, that of decorating interiors for wealthy clients whom she knew through her social circle.

Although de Wolfe's influence was initially felt in the homes of the New York elite who formed her first clientele, her dictates on home aesthetics soon reached mainstream middle-class Americans by means of her newspaper and magazine columns. These writings were collected and published as The House in Good Taste (1913).

1897 – The California Supreme Court upholds the sodomy conviction of two prisoners for a consensual act in their cell, the first such reported case in the United States.

1904 – The American actor and director Albert Dekker, who died in unusual circumstance in 1968, was born in Brooklyn, New York, as Albert Ecke. His films include the classics The Man in the Iron Mask (1939), Beau Geste (1939), The Killers (1946), The Sound and the Fury (1959), Suddenly, Last Summer (1959), and The Wild Bunch(1969). He replaced Lee J. Cobb as Willy Loman in the original production of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, and during a five-year stint back on Broadway in the early 1960s, he played the Duke of Norfolk in Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons.

Dekker appeared in some seventy films from the 1930s to 1960s, but his four most famous screen roles were as a mad scientist in the 1940 horror film Dr. Cyclops; as a vicious hitman in the The Killers; as a dangerous dealer in atomic fuel in the 1955 film noir Kiss Me Deadly; and as an unscrupulous railroad detective in Sam Peckinpah's western The Wild Bunch, which would be his last screen appearance.

Dekker's off-screen preoccupation with politics led to his winning a seat in the California State Assembly in 1944. Dekker served as a Democratic member for the Assembly until 1946. During the McCarthy era he was an outspoken critic of U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy's tactics; to avoid being blacklisted he spent most of the period working on Broadway rather than Hollywood.

For his contribution to the motion picture industry, Dekker has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6620 Hollywood Boulevard.

On May 5, 1968, Dekker was found dead in his Hollywood home after failing to answer numerous phone calls for two days. Although money and camera equipment were missing, there were no signs of forced entry. He was found naked, kneeling in his bathtub with a noose wrapped around his neck that was looped around the shower's curtain rod. He was also handcuffed, blindfolded, gagged and had "make me suck" and "slave" and "cocksucker" scrawled on his body in red lipstick.

The police toyed with a theory that Dekker was a closet homosexual who practiced his eccentricities very discreetly with anonymous male prostitutes, and that this time, something had gone wrong and the frightened partner had quietly let himself out. The coroner's ruling was accidental death by autoerotic asphyxiation.

1944 – Craig Schoonmaker (d.2018) was an early advocate of outing other gay people, and was the co-founder of the Expansionist Party of the United States. Also an advocate for spelling reform, and agay rights activist, Schoonmaker claimed to have originated the term "gay pride."

Born in Newark, New Jersey, not much is known about Schoonmaker's early life. He attended Middletown Township High School in Monmouth County, New Jersey, graduating in 1962. Following high school, Schoonmaker remained in Newark for a few years, working several jobs, before finally moving to Manhattan in June 1965. Shortly thereafter, he began to go by his middle name Craig in everyday life.

Not long after arriving in New York, he entered into a long-distance relationship with a man living in Vancouver, Canada. Despite this, Craig Schoonmaker largely stayed clear of the gay activist scene which had begun to take hold in New York City.

While having a conversation with a fellow gay friend on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village, they were approached by an officer of the NYPD, who instructed them to, "Break it up and move on." After refusing, Schoonmaker was arrested and spent the night in jail. At his arraignment the next morning, he pleaded not guilty on the basis of constitutional infringement of his First Amendment right to free assembly. The charges were eventually dropped. It was the beginning of his activism.

Unfortunately, his nature was such that he was constantly at odds with others in the active gay and lesbian movements. Craig Schoonmaker spent his entire adult life advocating an exclusionary vision of LGBTQ politics in which white, cisgender gay men wielded all power and influence. As a necessary component of this vision, women, bisexuals, transgender people, and anyone else who did not fit into his rigid sexual and gender binary were not simply irrelevant in Schoonmaker's eyes, but were his mortal enemies. The very concepts of solidarity and cooperation were alien to him.

Schoonmaker filed to run for President of the United States in the 2000 election cycle. Because the Expansionist Party was not officially recognized as a political party anywhere within the U.S., Schoonmaker filed as an Independent.

1952 – Schuyler Lee "Sky" Gilbert, Jr. is a Canadian writer, actor, academic and drag performer. Born in Norwich, Connecticut, he studied theatre in Toronto, Ontario at York University and the University of Toronto, before becoming co-founder and artistic director of Buddies in Bad Times, a Toronto theatre company dedicated to LGBT drama. Gilbert's drag name is Jane. Sky also teaches a course on Playwrighting at the University of Guelph.

Although primarily a playwright, Gilbert has also published novels, poetry and an autobiography. He has also been a regular columnist for Toronto's eye weekly. Many of Gilbert's works are produced at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre.

Gilbert holds the University Chair in Creative Writing and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph. He received his Ph.D. at the University of Toronto.

The Hammertheatre Company, founded in January 2007, is a company devoted to theatre research in Hamilton, Ontario and also devoted to the plays of artistic director Sky Gilbert whose plays will deal with issues of gender and sexuality. The theatre is at the old Ancient Order of Foresters building in the James Street North neighbourhood where Hamilton's Art scene continues to blossom. Gilbert has been living in Hamilton since 2004 with his partner, artist Ian Jarvis.

1955 – Frank Kameny is fired from his job as an astronomer in the United States Army’s Map Service in Washington, D.C. because of his homosexuality. A few days later he is blacklisted from seeking federal employment. These events spur Kameny into being a gay rights activist.

1962 – Doug Wright is an American playwright, librettist, and screenwriter. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2004 for his play, I Am My Own Wife.

A Texas native, Wright was born in Dallas. He was the target of schoolyard teasing and playground attacks throughout elementary school. Overweight and awkward as a child, and not athletically inclined, he was routinely taunted by classmates as a "sissy," a "queer," and worse.

Despite the torments he was forced to endure in elementary and middle schools, once he entered Highland Park High School, outside of Dallas, Wright found acceptance in the theater department.

He entered Yale University in the fall of 1981. He achieved early success while still an undergraduate, when one of his first works, The Stonewater Rapture (1983), a two-character play about teenage sexuality and religious repression in a rural Texas town, was performed to acclaim at Scotland's Edinburgh Festival Fringe in August 1984.

The works of Doug Wright often focus on the unconventional lives of society's outsiders. Among these are the iconoclastic artist Marcel Duchamp in Interrogating the Nude; the Marquis de Sade in Quills; Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, an East Berlin transvestite who survived persecution by both the Nazi and Communist regimes, in the Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning I Am My Own Wife; and "Big Edie" and "Little Edie" Bouvier Beale, two eccentric American aristocrats who ended up living in squalor, sharing a once-elegant mansion, in the musical Grey Gardens, based on the cult classic documentary film of the same name.

Wright also helped adapt the animated Disney film The Little Mermaid into a Broadway musical.

He currently lives in New York City with his husband/partner, the singer-songwriter David Clement.

1973 – The New York City Council rejected a gay rights ordinance.

1978 – The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals rules that touching a clothed crotch constitutes "public lewdness."

1980 – According to recently released stats, at least one person is physically assaulted in New York City each day because they are gay or lesbian.

1990 – OutRage established the Coalition for Lesbian and Gay Rights to address legal attacks against the GLBT community. OutRage! was a British LGBT rights group lasting for 21 years, 1990 until 2011. It described itself as “a broad based group of queers committed to radical, non-violent direct action and civil disobedience” to advocate that lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people have the same rights as heterosexual people.

1999 – The Vermont Supreme Court ordered the legislature to pass a law requiring equal protection for same-sex committed couples.