July 9

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1550 – Jacopo Bonfadio is tried and beheaded for sodomy, most likely because he published gossipy accounts of wealthy Genoese families. He was an Italian humanist and historian. Several other humanists were tried for sodomy during this time as well, but Bonfadio is one of few to be executed.

1775 – Matthew Monk Lewis, British gothic novelist, born (d.1818); Have you ever read an 18th century Gothic romance? They are incomparably silly, overripe, and, except for their excruciatingly stilted language, great fun to read. Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto started the literary vogue, and it was quickly followed by Lewis's Ambrosio, or The Monk (1795), and, in America, by the novels of Charles Brockden Brown.

The Monk is the most lurid example of the genre, and Lewis was forced to delete many passages for a second edition that were considered "scandalous," so scandalous, in fact, that Lewis's literary stock skyrocketed and he found himself lionized by high society.

The Monk combines the supernatural, the horrible, and a little bit of raw sex in its plot about Ambrosio, the Father Superior of the Capuchins of Madrid. (It is essential to the Anglo-Saxon Gothic novel that affairs of the flesh always take place in Latin climes.) Ambrosio is seduced by Matilda de Villanegas, a woman driven to blind nymphomania by demons, and who enters the monastery, and Ambrosio's bed, disguised as a boy! After he discovers that the boy is actually a woman, Ambrosio's entire character changes, and he pursues other women with the aid of magic and by murdering. His sins are found out and he is tortured by the Inquisition, finally being sentenced to death. He makes a bargain with the Devil to escape, but the Devil destroys him. It seems apparent that had the wild nympho Matilda actually been a boy, none of Ambrosio's problems would have followed.

In real life, Lewis at twenty-eight was in love with fourteen year old William Kelly a male incarnation of Matilda who brought him nothing but misery. Kelly was the ne'er-do-well son of Mrs. Isabella Kelly, an author with whom he corresponded, and to whom he offered various kinds of financial aid, among them the cost of educating her son. Lewis was involved with William for fifteen years, and though there is no proof of sexual involvement, Lewis did include the younger man in his will and speak of him always in affectionate, if frustrated terms.

The question of Lewis's "homosexuality" has been debated by his biographers, such as Summers and Peck. That Lewis was of an unconventional sexual makeup is clear in his life as well as his works.

1908 - Minor White (d.1976) was one of the most important and influential 20th Century American photographers. He was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota on this date.

White earned a degree in botany with a minor in English from the University of Minnesota in 1933. His first creative efforts were in poetry, as he took five years thereafter to complete a sequence of 100 sonnets while working as a waiter and bartender at the University Club. In 1938, White moved to Portland, Oregon. There he began his career in photography, first joining the Oregon Camera Club, then taking on assignments from the Works Project Administration (WPA) and exhibiting at the Portland Art Museum.

After serving in military intelligence during WWII, White moved to New York City in 1945. He spent two years studying aesthetics and art history at Columbia University under Meyer Schapiro and developing his own distinctive style. He became involved with a circle of influential photographers including Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Weston and Ansel Adams; hearing Stieglitz's idea of "equivalents" from the master himself was crucial to the direction of White's mature post-war work.

Snow on Door

The "equivalents" of White were often photographs of barns, doorways, water, the sky, or simple paint peeling on a wall: things usually considered mundane, but often made special by the quality of the light in which they were photographed. One of his more popular photographs is titled Frost on Window, a close-up of frost crystals on glass. However, in regard to an equivalent, the specific objects themselves are of secondary importance either to the photographer or the viewer. Instead, such a photograph captures a sentiment or emotionally symbolic idea using formal and structural elements that carry a feeling or sense of "recognition": a mirroring of something inside the viewer.

At Ansel Adams' invitation, White moved back to the West Coast to join Adams, Dorothea Lange and Imogen Cunningham in the first American fine arts photography department which was forming at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco.

White co-founded the influential magazine Aperture in 1952 with fellow photographers Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, and Barbara Morgan; writer/curator Nancy Newhall; and Newhall's husband, historian Beaumont Newhall. White edited the magazine until 1975.

In 1953 he moved to Rochester, New York and for four years worked as a curator at George Eastman House, and also edited their magazine Image. He taught at the Rochester Institute of Technology from 1956 to 1964. Prominent students from this period include Paul Caponigro, Pete Turner and Jerry Uelsmann. White spent the last ten years of his life teaching at MIT where, among others, he taught Raymond Moore. In 1970 he was given a Guggenheim Fellowship.

"Portland, 1940"
(Click for larger)

White was a closeted bisexual man and felt tormented through much of his life by his then socially-unacceptable feelings for young men. Much of this erotic turmoil expressed itself in his post-war subject matter and style, and in his spiritual search for peace and simplicity. Several of his photographs of male nudes are considered to be the masterworks of the genre, but were only posthumously published in 1989.

1915 – David Diamond, American composer of classical music (d.2005), was born in Rochester, NY and studied at the Cleveland Institute of Music and the Eastman School of Music under Bernard Rogers, also receiving lessons from Roger Sessions in New York City and Nadia Boulanger in Paris. He won a number of awards including three Guggenheim Fellowships, and is considered one of the preeminent American composers of his generation. Many of his works are tonal or modestly modal. His later style became more chromatic.

Diamond was openly gay long before it was socially acceptable, and believed his career was slowed by homophobia and antisemitism.The New York Times also suggested that Diamond's career troubles may have also been caused by his "difficult personality... he said in a 1990 interview, 'I was a highly emotional young man, very honest in my behavior, and I would say things in public that would cause a scene between me and, for instance, a conductor.' "

In 2005, Diamond died at his home in Brighton, Monroe County, New York from heart failure.

1933 – Oliver Sacks (d.2015) was a British neurologist, naturalist and author who spent his professional life in the United States. He believed that the brain is the "most incredible thing in the universe" and therefore important to study. He became widely known for writing best-selling case histories about his patients' disorders, with some of his books adapted for stage and film.

Sacks was the author of numerous best-selling books, mostly collections of case studies of people with neurological disorders. His writings have been featured in a wide range of media. His books include a wealth of narrative detail about his experiences with patients, and how they coped with their conditions, often illuminating how the normal brain deals with perception, memory and individuality.

Awakenings (1973), an autobiographical account of his efforts to help people with encephalitis lethargica regain proper neurological function, was adapted into the Academy Award-nominated film in 1990, starring Robin Williams and Robert De Niro. He and his book Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain were the subject of "Musical Minds", an episode of the PBS series Nova. In 2008, Sacks was awarded a CBE for services to literature during the Queen's Birthday Honours.

Sacks never married and lived alone for most of his life. He declined to share details from his personal life until late in his life. He addressed his homosexuality for the first time in his 2015 autobiography On the Move: A Life. During his early career he indulged in:

On learning of her son’s sexuality, his mother exclaimed: "You are an abomination. I wish you had never been born". When he turned 40 Sacks had a week-long liaison with a Harvard student. "After that sweet birthday fling," he recalled, "I was to have no sex for the next thirty-five years."

Celibate for about 35 years after his forties, in 2008 he began a friendship with writer and New York Times contributor Bill Hayes, that evolved into a committed long-term partnership in a shared home. He noted in a 2001 interview that severe shyness — which he described as "a disease" — had been a lifelong impediment to his personal interactions.

1936 – June Jordan (d.2002), in both her poetry and her essays, called for the rejection of stereotypical views of bisexuality, and she associated sexual independence with political commitment. Born in Harlem to Jamaican immigrants, June Jordan grew up in one of the largest black urban areas in the country, which, coupled with her three high school years at a predominantly white preparatory school, gave Jordan an early understanding of racial conflicts.

She attended Barnard College, where she met and married Michael Meyer, a white Columbia University student who shared her political beliefs. Divorced after eleven years, Jordan continued studying architectural design and working as a free-lance political journalist to support herself and her son.

Her broad-based inclusive politics were significantly influenced by her work in 1964 with visionary architect Buckminster Fuller, her mother's suicide in 1966, her meetings with Fannie Lou Hamer in 1969, and her travels to Nicaragua in the 1980s.

She began her teaching career in 1967 at the City College of New York and also taught at Connecticut College, Sarah Lawrence, and Yale; in 1989, she became a professor of African-American studies at University of California, Berkeley, and began writing a political column for The Progressive magazine.

Although primarily known for her poetry, Jordan wrote essays, plays, novels, and musicals. The title of her 1989 collection of new and previously published poems, Naming Our Destiny, succinctly describes her ethical vision, as well as a central theme in her work: the importance of individual and collective self-determination.

Throughout her work, she explored multiple personal, national, and international issues, including her relationships with female and male lovers, homophobia, Black English, racial violence in Atlanta, South African apartheid, and the Palestinian crisis. Given the opposition bisexuals have received from both heterosexual and lesbian and gay communities, Jordan's willingness to identify herself openly as bisexual established an extremely important precedent.

Her most radical statement can be found in "A New Politics of Sexuality" (in Technical Difficulties, 1993), where she calls for a "new, bisexual politics of sexuality." In addition to rejecting the stereotypical views of bisexuals, she associates sexual independence with political commitment and maintains that homophobia and heterosexism do not represent "special interest" concerns or secondary forms of oppression less important than racism or sexism. Indeed, she suggests that sexual oppression is perhaps the most deeply seated form of human conflict.

Jordan enacted her bisexual politics in "A Short Note to My Very Critical Friends and Well-Beloved Comrades," "Meta-Rhetoric," "Poem for Buddy," and other poems in Naming Our Destiny, where she rejected restrictive labels and exclusionary political positions based on sexuality, color, class, or nationality. On June 14, 2002, June Jordan died of breast cancer.

1937 – The English artist David Hockney was born on this date. Based in Los Angeles, California, Hockney was an important contributor to the British Pop art movement of the 1960s, and considered one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century. He settled in California during the 80's. Early in his development, Hockney exhibited a distinct crush on rockstar Cliff Richard. Richard was referenced directly and indirectly in Hockney's work. Often Hockney referred to him as 'Doll Boy' after Richard's 1958 hit single Living Doll and many early works have the letters "CR" or "DB" or the numerical representation "42" where 4 represents the D and 2 stands for the B.

 

Sometimes, as in We Two Boys Together Clinging (1961), named after a poem by Walt Whitman, these works make reference to his love for men. His widely seen portraits of friends and lovers have handsomely played their part in breaking down entrenched resistance to the erotic gaze directed at the male body, and his brilliantly colored paintings of sun-drenched swimming pools have captured the essence of Southern California sensuality.

His work has always been critically acclaimed and he has faced no hardship in his career. Ironically, this passionate music lover is now going deaf. At the height of his craft, Hockney is in a private race against time.

In summer 1966, while teaching at UCLA he met Peter Schlesinger, an art student who posed for paintings and drawings. He’s there in so many of David Hockney’s iconic artworks: the blurred figure snaking through the swimming pool, the nude with the intense stare in the tropical garden, the delightfully well-dressed young man in the painting. They fell in love, and moved back to London where they spent many years in the company of some of the most dazzling stars of the swinging capital. Peter collected hundreds of photgraphs of their time together before they eventually parted. Today, he resides in New York, and works as an artist creating sculptures, stonewares and ceramics, and occasionally exhibiting his now iconic photographs.

On the morning of 18 March 2013, Hockney's 23-year-old assistant, Dominic Elliott, died as a result of drugs, drinking acid and alcohol at Hockney's Bridlington studio. Elliott was a first- and second-team player for Bridlington rugby club. It was reported that Hockney's ex-partner John Fitzherbert drove Elliott to Scarborough General Hospital where he later died.

Hockney was offered a knighthood in 1990, but he declined the offer.

1957 – Marc Almond is a British singer-songwriter and musician. He started his music career as a member of Soft Cell and Marc and the Mambas, but he has been a solo artist since 1984. His solo work is by turns romantic and dark, campy and seedy. It often deals with subject matter like transvestites, hustlers, drug addicts and toreadors.

Marc is homosexual, but he doesn't want to be described as a homosexual artist, as he feels that that would imply that his work is only of interest to other homosexuals, saying that such a label "enables people to marginalise your work and reduce its importance, implying that it won't be of any interest to anyone who isn't gay".

Some of his biggest hits are a cover of the song "Tainted Love" (with Soft Cell) and "Something's Gotten Hold of my Heart". He has duetted with former Sneaker Pimps vocalist Kelli Ali, Nina Hagen, Nico, Gene Pitney, Siouxsie Sioux, Foetus (J. G. Thirlwell) and Jimmy Somerville.

On 17 October 2004, Almond was critically injured in a near-fatal motorcycle accident in which he was a pillion passenger, near Cannon Street tube station in London; initially the prognosis was considered poor, and he spent a month in a coma afterwards and later became a patron of the brain trauma charity Headway.

He was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2018 New Year Honours for services to arts and culture.

1957 - Kelly McGillis is an American actress. She found fame for her roles in several films throughout the 1980s including her roles as Rachel Lapp in Witness (1985), Charlie in Top Gun (1986) and Kathryn Murphy in The Accused (1988).

Her breakout role was that of an Amish mother in the 1985 film Witness with Harrison Ford, for which she received Golden Globe and BAFTA award nominations. Her next high profile role was that of flight instructor Charlie in the 1986 fighter-pilot film Top Gun with Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer. After 1988's The Accused, she appeared in Cat Chaser with Peter Weller, a film she despised and which discouraged her from pursuing an acting career. McGillis appeared in dozens of television and film roles throughout the 1990s before taking a break from acting for a few years.

In 2004, she appeared in the stage play The Graduate as Mrs. Robinson, touring the United States. She began working in television again in 2006, then in 2007, she joined the cast of Showtime's The L Word for its fifth season. McGillis starred in a Pasadena Playhouse stage production of Little Foxes by Lillian Hellman in May 2009, co-starring with Julia Duffy.

McGillis married Boyd Black in 1979, divorcing in 1981.

She and her girlfriend were assaulted, verbally abused, and raped in February 1982 at knifepoint by two men who broke into her New York apartment. One of the rapists was 15-year-old Leroy Johnson, who was on the run from juvenile detention. This experience encouraged the actress to pursue her film role as the lawyer who supports Jodie Foster's character in The Accused.

She married Fred Tillman in 1989, and they had two daughters. The couple divorced in 2002. She also has two grandchildren.

She came out as a lesbian in April 2009 during an interview with SheWired.com, an LGBT-oriented web site. McGillis said that coming to terms with her sexual orientation has been an ongoing process since age 12, and she was long convinced that God was punishing her for being homosexual. In 2010, Kelly McGillis entered into a civil union with Melanie Leis, a Philadelphia based sales executive; she and McGillis met in 2000 when Leis was a bartender at the restaurant she owned with her then-husband.

McGillis worked full-time with drug addicts and alcoholics at Seabrook House Drug Alcohol Rehab Center, a rehabilitation center in Bridgeton, New Jersey when she and Leis shared a home in Collingswood.

 Paul Lisicky and Mark Doty

1959 – Paul Lisicky is an American novelist and memoirist born on this date. While a student at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he won a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. He also received awards from the James Michener/Copernicus Society, the Henfield Foundation, the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, where he was twice a winter Fellow. He is the author of the novel Lawnboy and the memoir Famous Builder.

He has taught creative writing at The University of Houston, Antioch University, and Sarah Lawrence College, in addition to several summer writing programs including the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Nebraska Summer Writers Conference, The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Indiana Summer Writers Conference. He currently lives in New York City. His partner from 1995 to 2011 was poet Mark Doty. They were married in 2008 and divorced in 2013.

1965 – Anthony D. Romero is the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union. He assumed the position in 2001 as the first Latino and openly gay man to do so.

Romero was born in New York City to Puerto Rican parents. Romero spent the initial years of his childhood growing up in a public housing project in the Bronx. He was the oldest of his siblings. His father worked as a houseman at a large Manhattan hotel and was repeatedly turned down for a more financially lucrative job as a banquet waiter, being told that it was because he did not speak English well enough. Demetrio Romero later decided to seek assistance from the attorney of the labor union he belonged to, hoping to file a grievance against his employer. He won the case, which allowed for him to seek out better paying work and later allowed for the family to improve their standard of living. The family subsequently moved to suburban New Jersey, where Anthony graduated high school.

Romero was the first member of his family to graduate from high school. He received his B.A. degree from Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs in 1987 and his J.D. degree from Stanford University Law School. He is a member of the New York bar. He was a Dinkelspiel Scholar at Stanford University, a Cane Scholar at Princeton, and a National Hispanic Scholar at both institutions.

Romero started his career at the Rockefeller Foundation, notably leading a foundation review that helped determine future directions in civil rights advocacy. In 1992, Romero began working for the Ford Foundation, initially serving as a program officer in the Civil Rights and Social Justice Program. After less than four years in that position, he was promoted to the position of director, making him one of the youngest directors in the foundation's history. Prior to his departure, he served as the Director of Human Rights and International Cooperation, transforming the program into the foundation's largest. As director, he managed and facilitated roughly $90 million in grants to civil rights, human rights, and peace projects. Notably, he also launched progressive initiatives in affirmative action, voting rights and redistricting, immigrants' rights, women's rights, reproductive freedom, and LGBT rights.

Anthony Romero became executive director in September 2001, just before the September 11, 2001 attacks. He is the first openly gay man and the first Hispanic director of the civil liberties institution.

After the September 11th attacks, Romero launched a national campaign called "Keep America Safe and Free" to protect American civil liberties and basic freedoms during a time of crisis in the United States. The campaign successfully targeted the Patriot Act, achieving a number of court victories, and uncovered hundreds of thousands of documents detailing the illegal torture and abuse of detainees in U.S. custody in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo. As a result of their successful court challenge to elements of the Patriot Act, the ACLU also forced the FBI to open files it had on antiwar groups, including the ACLU itself. Further, under Romero's leadership, the ACLU became the first organization to successfully file a legal challenge to the Bush administration's illegal National Security Agency (NSA) spying program. Shortly thereafter, Romero helped to establish the John Adams Project, in collaboration with the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, to assist the under-resourced military defense lawyers in the Guantanamo military commissions. Referring to the August 17, 2006, federal court declaration that the Terrorist Surveillance Program was unconstitutional, Romero called the court's opinion "another nail in the coffin in the Bush administration's legal strategy in the War on Terror". Discussing the Bush administration, Romero said that the "eight years of President Bush will go down in history as one of the darkest moments in America's commitment to human rights".

1969 – The Mattachine Society of New York invites activists to gather in Greenwich Village for the first "gay power" meeting. Called the "Homosexual Liberation Meeting," it was held at the Freedom House in Midtown Manhattan with over 100 attendees.

According to his website,

His ministry believes in the divine inspiration of the Bible, the sacredness of Tradition, and affirms

In 2006 Cannon was recognized as one of Out Magazine's Top 100 most influential gay people of the year. Each year Out Magazine, a national gay and lesbian general interest publication, honors one hundred individuals through a feature magazine issue and a special party/reception.

1985 – DeRay Mckesson is an American civil rights activist, podcaster, and former school administrator. An early supporter of the Black Lives Matter movement, he has been active in the protests in Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore, Maryland and on social media outlets such as Twitter and Instagram.

Mckesson has also written for HuffPost and The Guardian.

Along with Johnetta Elzie, Brittany Packnett, and Samuel Sinyangwe, Mckesson launched Campaign Zero, a policy platform to end police violence. He is currently part of Crooked Media and hosts Pod Save the People.

In late 2015, he was a guest lecturer at Yale Divinity School. In November of the same year, Mckesson spoke at the GLAAD Gala, where he discussed his life as a gay man and asked LGBT people to "come out of the quiet."

On February 3, 2016, Mckesson announced his candidacy in the 2016 Baltimore mayoral election. He finished with 3,445 votes (2.6%) placing sixth in the Democratic Party primary on April 26.

Mckesson is the author of On the Other Side of Freedom: The Case for Hope, a memoir about his life and time as a Black Lives Matter organizer.

1986 – The New Zealand Parliament passes the Homosexual Law Reform Act, decriminalizing sex between men and establishing the same legal provisions for all sexual relations.

1988 – Sebastián Vega is an Argentian basketball player. He is a power forward who most recently played for Gimnasia Indalo in Argentina - Liga A .

Sebastián was born in Gualeguaychú (Entre Ríos). He began his professional career at Central Entrerriano. In 2008 he arrived in Peñarol de Mar del Plata, a team with which he won the National League and the League of the Americas. Then he went through Boca, Quimsa and Libertad de Sunchales, before joining the  Gymnastics team of Comodoro Rivadavia in 2018. He was also part of the youth selected between 2005 and 2007 and made his major debut in the 2010 South American, in which Argentina won the silver medal.

 Added 2024

1992 – Jeremy Pope is an American actor and singer born on this date. Pope is the sixth person in Tony Award history tonominated in two categories for separate performances during the same year, when he received nominations for Best Actor in a Leading Role in a Play for his role as "Pharus Jonathan Young" in Choir Boy and Best Actor in a Featured Role in a Musical for his role as Eddie Kendricks in Ain't Too Proud in 2019, the latter of which also earned him a nomination for a 2020 Grammy Award for Best Musical Theater Album.

In 2020, Pope starred in the Netflix miniseries Hollywood, which earned him a nomination for a 2020 Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Actor in a Leading Role in a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie. His most recent work is as the young gay man who joins the Marines in the film The Inspection based on a book by Elegance Bratton.