July 16

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1746 – Mary Hamilton disguises herself as a man in order to marry a woman. Mary Hamilton was the subject of a notorious 18th century case of fraud and female cross-dressing, in which Hamilton, under the name of Charles, duped a woman into supposed marriage. She was arrested, charged with fraud, publicly whipped, and imprisoned for six months.

While the surviving records of the case indicate that Hamilton was only prosecuted for deceiving one woman into marriage, newspaper reports at the time claimed that there had been 14 marriages in all.

Henry Fielding published a partially fictionalised account of the case under the title The Female Husband.

1876 – (Edward Joseph) E.J. Dent was a British musicologist, translator and academic. (d.1957)

Edward Dent was born in Hunsingore in Yorkshire. His father was John Dent, who was a barrister who had been a Conservative Member of Parliament. He was educated at Eton College where he studied music with C H Lloyd. He then went to King's College, Cambridge University. In 1899 he obtained his Mus.B.

He was elected a Fellow of King's College Cambridge in 1902. He began lecturing on the history of music in 1902, and he also taught counterpoint, harmony, and composition. He began a close friendship with Clive Carey in 1902 which continued until Edward Dent's death. Clive Carey was a 19-year-old organ scholar at Clare College. Edward Dent wrote him over four hundred letters during their affair.

Another friend was E M Forster who represented him as the character Philip Herriton in Where Angels Fear To Tread. Edward Dent also introduced Ronald Firbank to Rupert Brooke.

Edward Dent was part of a circle of gay men at Cambridge which included A T 'Theo' Bartholomew. In the summer of 1915 they met painter Gabriel Atkin who was in Cambridge for his officer training. In August that year they also met Siegfried Sassoon who arrived in Cambridge for the same reason. Gabriel Atkin had already left but Edward Dent engaged in some matchmaking and encouraged Siegfried Sassoon and Gabriel Atkin to meet, which they did in November, 1918. This was the start of an affair of several years.

In 1918 Edward Dent moved to London and he became the music critic of the Athenaeum in 1919. In 1926 he returned to Cambridge University as Professor of Music, and he was also elected again as a Fellow of King's College. He was President of the Royal Musical Association from 1928 to 1935. In 1928 he was one of the founders of the International Society for Contemporary Music, and he was its President from its inauguration. He was then made an Honorary Life President in 1938.

1907 – Barbara Stanwyck (d.1990) was an American actress. She was a film and television star, known during her 60-year career as a consummate and versatile professional with a strong screen presence, and a favorite of directors including Cecil B. DeMille, Fritz Lang and Frank Capra. After a short but notable career as a stage actress in the late 1920s, she made 85 films in 38 years in Hollywood, before turning to television. She was probably bi-sexual.

Stanwyck married her first husband, actor Frank Fay in 1928. Her stormy marriage to Fay finally ended after a drunken brawl, during which he tossed their adopted son, Dion, into the swimming pool. Some claim that this union was the basis for A Star is Born. The couple divorced in 1935. Stanwyck won custody of their adoptive son.

Despite rumours of her affairs with Marlene Dietrich, Tallulah Bankhead, and Joan Crawford, Stanwyck next wed Robert Taylor, who had gay rumours of his own to dispel. Following a whirlwind romance, the couple began living together. Their 1939 marriage was arranged with the help of Taylor's studio MGM, a common practice in Hollywood's golden age. Their marriage started off on a sour note when his possessive mother demanded he spend his wedding night with her rather than with Barbara.

In 1941, while making the Preston Sturges film The Lady Eve with Henry Fonda, Stanwyck and Fonda had a tempestuous affair, which was kept secret at the time. Years later, Fonda confided to his then fourth wife Afdera that "Barbara was ... gay [and had] no inhibitions. She'd do anything in bed to please a man."

Taylor reportedly also had affairs during the marriage. When Stanwyck learned of Taylor's fling with Lana Turner, she filed for divorce in 1950 when a starlet made Turner's romance with Taylor public. After the divorce, they acted together in Stanwyck's last feature film, The Night Walker (1964). Stanwyck never remarried, collecting alimony of 15 percent of Taylor's salary until Taylor's death in 1969.

Stanwyck also had an affair with actor Robert Wagner, whom she met on the set of Titanic (1953). Wagner, who was 22, and Stanwyck, who was 45 at the beginning of the affair, had a four-year romance, which is described in Wagner's 2008 memoir, Pieces of My Heart. Stanwyck ended the relationship.

1943 – Reinaldo Arenas (d.1990) was a Cuban poet, novelist, and playwright who despite his early sympathy for the 1959 revolution, grew critical of and then rebelled against the Cuban government.

Arenas was born into poverty in the countryside, in the northern part of the Province of Oriente, Cuba, and later moved to the city of Holguín. In 1963, he moved to Havana to attend university, where he studied philosophy and literature without completing a degree. The following year, he began working at the Biblioteca Nacional José Martí.

His writings and openly gay lifestyle were, by 1967, bringing him into conflict with the Communist government. He left the Biblioteca Nacional and became an editor for the Cuban Book Institute until 1968. From 1968 to 1974 he was a journalist and editor for the literary magazine La Gaceta de Cuba. In 1973, he was sent to prison after being charged and convicted of 'ideological deviation' and for publishing abroad without official consent. He escaped from prison and tried to leave Cuba by launching himself from the shore on a tyre inner tube. The attempt failed and he was re-arrested near Lenin Park and imprisoned at the notorious El Morro Castle alongside murderers and rapists. He survived by helping the inmates to write letters to wives and lovers. He was able to collect enough paper this way to continue his writing. However, his attempts to smuggle his work out of prison were discovered and he was severely punished. Threatened with death he was forced to renounce his work and was released in 1976. In 1980, as part of the Mariel Boatlift, he fled to the United States.

Despite his short life and the hardships imposed during his imprisonment, Arenas produced a significant body of work. His Pentagonia is a set of five novels that comprise a 'secret history' of post revolutionary Cuba. It includes the poetical Farewell to the Sea, Palace of the White Skunks and the Rabelaisian Color of Summer. In these novels Arenas' style ranges from a stark realist narrative to absurd satiric humor. He traces his own life story in what to him is the absurd world of Castro's Cuba. In each of the novels Arenas himself is a major character, going by a number of pseudonyms. His autobiography, Before Night Falls was on the New York Times list of the ten best books of the year in 1993. In 2000 this work was made into a film, directed by Julian Schnabel, in which Arenas was played by Javier Bardem.

In 1987, Arenas was diagnosed with AIDS. After battling the illness, Arenas took an overdose of drugs and alcohol in 1990 in New York; he killed himself in his Hell's Kitchen apartment, where he lived in poverty, ravaged by AIDS, without health insurance.

1951 – During the height of the McCarthy era, homophobic doctor and Nebraska Senator A.L. Miller reported on this date that "the cycle of homosexual desires follows cycle closely patterned to the menstrual period of women."

Tony Kushner (R) with Mark Harris

1956 – Tony Kushner is an award-winning American playwright most famous for his play Angels in America, which is one of the most powerful pieces of American theatre inspired by the AIDS epidemic, for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.

He is also co-author of, along with Eric Roth, the screenplay of the 2005 film Munich, which was directed by Steven Spielberg and earned Kushner (along with Roth) an Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay.

He was born to a Jewish family in Manhattan, but his parents, both classically trained musicians, moved to Lake Charles, Louisiana shortly after his birth. Kushner moved to New York in 1974 to begin his undergraduate college education at Columbia University, where he completed a BA in English literature in 1978. He studied directing at New York University's Graduate School, from which he was graduated in 1984.

Due to the phenomenal theatrical and critical success of Angels In America, Kushner has become a celebrity spokeman for gay politics and AIDS activism. In April 2003 he and his long-time partner, Entertainment Weekly editor Mark Harris, had a wedding ceremony in New York. Theirs was the first same-sex marriage ever covered by The New York Times's 'Vows' column. In summer 2008 they were legally married at the city hall in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

His new play The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism With A Key to the Scriptures was inspired by two 19th century thinkers and their works – George Bernard Shaw's The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism and Mary Baker Eddy's Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. The play looks at the life of a 20th century thinker, a retired longshoreman, Gus Marcantonio, who's feeling confused and defeated by the 21st century.

1969 – The Mattachine Society of New York hosts an organizing meeting which over 200 attend. During the course of the meeting, approximately 40 participants walk out in dissatisfaction over chapter president Dick Leitsch’s handling of the post-Stonewall political energy. Richard "Dick" Valentine Leitsch is an American LGBT rights activist. He was president of the Mattachine Society, a gay rights group, in the 1960s. He conceptualized and lead the "Sip-In" at Julius' Bar, which was one of the earliest acts of gay civil disobedience in the United States in which LGBT activists attempted to legally gain the right to drink in bars in New York. He is also known for being the first gay reporter to publish an account of the Stonewall Riots and the first person to ever interview Bette Midler in print media.

1973 – Chad Griffin is an American political strategist best known for his work advocating for LGBT rights in the United States.

Griffin got his start in politics volunteering for the Bill Clinton presidential campaign, which led to a position in the White House Press Office at the age of 19. Following his stint in the White House and his graduation from Georgetown University, he led a number of political campaigns advocating for or against various California ballot initiatives, as well as a number of fundraising efforts for political candidates, such as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

Following the 2008 passage of California's highly publicized Proposition 8, which barred the recognition of same-sex marriage, Griffin founded the American Foundation for Equal Rights (AFER) to overturn the law. AFER's challenge, Perry v. Brown was ultimately successful following a decision by the United States Supreme Court in June 2013. In 2012, Griffin was appointed president of the Human Rights Campaign, the largest LGBT rights organization in the United States.

Griffin, who is himself gay, is best known for his work advocating LGBT rights, often citing the elevated rate of suicide among gay teens as motivation. In 2008, Griffin was selected as one of The Advocate's People of the Year, and in 2013, Griffin was placed 16th on Out magazine's "Power 50" list of the 50-most powerful LGBT individuals in the United States, moving up from 20th, 28th and 29th positions in 2012, 2011 and 2010, respectively.

He began dating longtime friend Charlie Joughin in early 2015.

1982 – The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service policy of barring homosexuals from entering the country is ruled unconstitutional by a federal judge.

1984 – U.S. News and World Report announces that gays and lesbians make up the seventh-largest voting bloc in the US.

1986 – Jeff Levi, executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, announces plans for a Privacy Project to fight sodomy laws.