March 8

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Radcliffe-Hall & Lady Troubridge

1887 – The British sculptor and translator Una Vincenzo, aka Lady Troubridge was born on this date (d. 1963). Born Margot Elena Gertrude Taylor, she is best known as the long-time partner (28 years) of Marguerite "John" Radclyffe-Hall, the author of The Well of Loneliness. She married Admiral Ernest Thomas Troubridge in 1908 and gained her title when Admiral Troubridge was knighted in 1919.

Troubridge was an educated woman who had many achievements in her own right. Most notably she was a successful translator and introduced the French writer Colette to English readers. Her talent as a sculptor prompted Nijinsky to sit for her several times.

Troubridge met Hall in 1915 as Troubridge was the cousin of singer Mabel Batten who was Hall's lover at the time. Mabel died in 1916, and Hall and Troubridge moved in together the following year. Troubridge wrote about the intensity of their relationship in her diary: "I could not, having come to know her, imagine life without her."

Both Troubridge and Hall identified as 'inverts', a term used by sexologists such as Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis usually to connote what we now think of as homosexuality. Hall and Troubridge raised and showed dachshunds and griffons. The dachshunds shown in the Romaine Brooks portrait of Troubridge (above) were a prize winning pair given to her by Hall.

1896 – Charlotte Whitton, OC, CBE (d.1975) was a Canadian feminist and mayor of Ottawa. She was the first female mayor of a major city in Canada, serving from 1951 to 1956 and again from 1960 to 1964.

Whitton attended Queen's University, where she was the star of the women's hockey team and was known as the fastest skater in the league. At Queen's, she also served as editor of the Queen's Journal newspaper in 1917; and was the newspaper's first female editor. From Queen's she became the founding director of the Canadian Council on Child Welfare from 1920 to 1941 (which became the Canadian Welfare Council, now the Canadian Council on Social Development) and helped bring about a wide array of new legislation to help children.

Whitton was elected to Ottawa's Board of Control in 1951. Upon the unexpected death of mayor Grenville Goodwin that August, Whitton was immediately appointed acting Mayor and on 30 September 1951 was confirmed by city council to remain Mayor until the end of the normal three-year term.

Whitton had many remarkable achievements but her story is framed by current controversy over some of her actions. She has been accused in print of espousing, "a 'scientific' racism that viewed groups such as Jews and Armenians as 'undesirable' immigrants."

Whitton never married, but lived for years with her partner, Margaret Grier. Her relationship with Grier was not widespread public knowledge until 1999, 24 years after Whitton's death, when the National Archives of Canada publicly released the last of her personal papers, including many intimate personal letters between Whitton and Grier. The release of these papers sparked much debate in the Canadian media about whether Whitton and Grier's relationship could be characterized as lesbian, or merely as an emotionally intimate friendship between two unmarried women.

1900 – Otto Peltzer (d.1970) was a German middle distance runner who set world records in the 1920s. Over the 800m Peltzer improved Ted Meredith's long-standing record by 0.3 seconds to 1:51.6 min in London in July 1926. Over the 1000m he set a world record of 2:25.8 in Paris in July 1927, and over 1500 m Peltzer broke Paavo Nurmi's world record (3:52.6) and set a new one at 3:51.0 in Berlin in September 1926. Peltzer was the only athlete to have held the 800m and the 1500m world records simultaneously, until Sebastian Coe matched the feat over fifty years later.

Born in Ellernbrook-Drage in Holstein, Peltzer overcame childhood ill-health to become a successful athlete, winning his first German championship at age twenty-two. He started university in Munich in 1918, joining the TSV 1860 club, where he was nicknamed "Otto der Seltsame" (Otto the Strange). He continued in Munich, receiving his doctorate in 1925. In 1926 he was one of a group of German athletes invited to the AAA Championships at Stamford Bridge stadium in London, where he won the 800m, beating Britain's Douglas Lowe, who had won the event at the 1924 Olympic Games which, along with the 1920 Games, Germany had been barred from entering. In 1926, a specially arranged 1500m race between Peltzer, Paavo Nurmi of Finland, Edvin Wide of Sweden and Herbert Bocher of Germany took place in Berlin which was won by Peltzer in a new world record time.

Shortly before the 1928 Olympic Games in Amsterdam, to which German athletes were again allowed to enter with Peltzer elected as team leader, Peltzer was injured in an accident while playing handball. Although he recovered enough to take part in the 800m heats, he failed to qualify for the final. In 1932 he was team captain, but poor arrangements left the German team trying to run with spiked shoes on the hard Olympic track. Peltzer made the final, but did not finish.

Peltzer was often persecuted for his homosexuality.In 1933 he joined the Nazi Party and the SS. However, in June 1935 he was sentenced to 18 months imprisonment for 'homosexual offences with youths'. He was released early on condition that he would end his involvement in sport, but was rearrested in 1937. After spending time in Denmark, Finland (where he slept rough and contracted bronchitis) and Sweden, he returned to Germany in 1941 having been assured that the charges against him would be dropped. However, he was arrested and sent to KZ Mauthausen, where he remained until the camp was liberated on 5 May 1945.

With homosexuality remaining a criminal offence in 1950s Germany, and Peltzer in conflict with the German Athletic Association (DLV), Peltzer's opportunities to coach athletics were limited in Germany. He obtained a commission from a German newspaper to report on the Melbourne Olympics, and after the Games tried unsuccessfully to get work with various national athletics organisations. He eventually came to India, coaching in the national athletics stadium in New Delhi, and founded the Olympic Youth Delhi club, later renamed the Otto Peltzer Memorial Athletic Club in his honour.

Following a heart attack in 1967, Peltzer was persuaded to return to Germany, and was treated in hospital in Holstein. After attending an athletics meeting in Eutin, Schleswig-Holstein, Peltzer collapsed and was found dead on a path towards the car park.

1929 – American poet, publisher, essayist and photographer Jonathan Williams was born (d. 2008). Williams was the author of more than a hundred books and booklets of gay poetry that merges flesh and spirit with a sense of history.

Williams was born in Asheville, North Carolina, and educated at St. Alban's School in Washington and at Princeton University. His real education, however, began at Black Mountain College (1951-1956), where he met Charles Olson and, in company with another gay poet, Robert Duncan, took on Ezra Pound's lesson of compact speech and William Carlos Williams' maxim "no ideas but in things."

Jonathan Williams has been described as a cross "between Richard Pryor and the Roman poet Martial." Indeed, his poetic reception has suffered from his refusal to keep the flesh and the spirit separate.

Either he is criticized by the traditional straight world for lowering poetic tone or ignored by the gay world, both for seeing the raunchiness of our world in classical terms and for having a sense of history. For him Zeus is a randy old-goat tourist snatching up the local Ganymede trade, and Catullus is familiar with jock straps.

"I haven't seen the territory yet that can't be sexualized or examined for its poetic cuisine, or its birds, or for its dialects," Williams wrote. In one of his collections, Quantulumcumque (1991) (the word means "as much as can be said in a small space"), is an epigram of a modern hustler that reappropriates classical epigram form:

But he was also concerned with feeling--with getting beyond what he called the verbal and imaginative penury of "hardcornponeography." What he imagined best was the hard-on longing for it of country boys wild for passion.

He also wrote a fine sequence based on the fears and failings of the men interviewed by Havelock Ellis and a beautiful love poem ("Lexington Nocturne"), in which he lets his hand hang for a moment in the hair of his as-yet-unseduced bedmate and concludes "let that be all / for then."

Williams was a pathologist of the ordinary, listening to the quirks and privacies of speech as they reveal character. Many of his poems sound like (and were) overheards:

Along with his lover, the accomplished poet, Tom Meyer, Williams kept busy running Jargon Press, which has been responsible for publishing a number of gay poets—James Broughton, Robert Duncan, Harold Norse, and Paul Metcalf among them.

Some of his essays and reviews have been collected in The Magpie's Bagpipe (1982), but much of his liveliest work still remains uncollected in the annual collections of squibs and ripostes that he sent out to friends.

If he had failings, they were the result of his being too large, of embracing multitudes, as Whitman would put it. His bibliography extends to more than a hundred books and booklets as well as many other publications. It would be hard to think of any one person who did more for poetry, gay and straight, in America.

Williams died on March 16, 2008 in Highlands, North Carolina. He was survived by Meyer, his companion for more than 40 years.

1930 – John V. Briggs is a retired Californian republican politician who served in the California State Assembly and the California State Senate. He is perhaps best known for sponsoring Proposition 6 in 1978, also known as the Briggs Initiative, a failed measure which attempted to remove all gay or lesbian school employees or their supporters from their jobs.

Briggs sponsored the 1978 initiative known as Proposition 6 or the Briggs Initiative that would have prevented gays or those who supported gay rights from working in public schools. Of gay teachers, he said, "Most of them are in the closet, and frankly, that's where I think they should remain."

Former California governor Ronald Reagan spoke out publicly against the Briggs Initiative, stating that "there are enough laws that protect children". In a November 1, 1978, editorial in the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, Reagan wrote, "Whatever else it is, homosexuality is not a contagious disease like measles. Prevailing scientific opinion is that an individual's sexuality is determined at a very early age and that a child's teachers do not really influence this." California Governor Jerry Brown denounced Proposition 6, as did U.S. President Jimmy Carter. The Log Cabin Republicans, a national organization of gay Republicans, subsequently credited Proposition 6 as being the catalyst leading to its formation.

Opposition by leading politicians combined with grassroots lobbying led to the defeat of Proposition 6 by 58.4% to 41.6%.

1954 – Patrick Califia (also 'Califia-Rice', formerly known as Pat Califia), born 1954 near Corpus Christi, Texas, is a writer of nonfiction essays about sexuality and of erotic fiction and poetry. Califia is a bisexual trans man.

Born in Corpus Christi, Texas, Pat Califia lived in various places from South Carolina to Utah as the family followed her father, a miner and road-construction worker, from one job to another.

She did not have the happiest of childhoods. Her father was an angry and violent man, and her mother a pious woman whose focus was on achieving happiness in the afterlife rather than in the world. Both were devout Mormons.

Califia felt a sense of difference even as a child, insisting that she was not a girl when her parents told her that she could not become a train engineer because of her gender.

A good student, she was able to lto enroll at the University of Utah in 1971. There she met other lesbians and recognized her own sexual orientation. She fell in love with another student who did not, however, return her affection.

Her parents tried to put her into a mental institution which drove her to a nervous breakdown. She dropped out of college, evaded her parents, and became involved in political causes including the women's liberation and anti-war movements.

In 1994, Little Sister's Book and Art Emporium, a gay and lesbian store in Vancouver, British Columbia, challenged a 1992 decision by the Canadian Supreme Court holding that pornography was not covered under the right to free speech. The writings of American feminists opposed to pornography, including Catherine MacKinnon, had weighed heavily in the decision.

The Little Sister's case against the Canadian Customs service included a question of discrimination against gay men and lesbians since 40 percent of the material being seized was destined for that market. Califia, whose collection of short stories, Melting Point (1993), was among the confiscated works, testified at the trial.

In its decision, the court upheld the constitutionality of the law but ruled that it had been applied in an arbitrary manner that discriminated against Little Sister's as a gay and lesbian bookstore. Thereafter, Clifia's pornographic works which had often been seized by Canadian customs were found acceptable.

1999 when Califia decided to initiate the process of becoming a female-to-male (FTM) transgendered person by having injections of testosterone. Her doctor had suggested hormone replacement therapy for menopause. Califia rejected the idea of taking the female hormone estrogen, however, saying, "I could not put this chemical into my body on purpose."

She had considered gender reassignment while she was in her twenties but had been leery at the time. Califia stated, "the strategy that I employed to deal with my gender dysphoria was to be a different kind of woman." Regarding the stark categories of "man" and "woman" Califia concluded, "neither one is really a very good fit for me." Nevertheless, gender reassignment seemed the preferable option, and Califia proceeded with it, adopting the first name of Patrick for his new life as a man. He now identifies as bisexual.

Califia's partner at the time, Matt Rice, also in the process of becoming an FTM, had to suspend testosterone therapy and wished to become pregnant. Rice successfully conceived through artificial insemination. Although the parents are no longer together, Calfia remains devoted to his young son, who is autistic.

Prior to gender reassignment Califia had been anxious about its effect on her career since she had built her reputation as a lesbian writer and activist. According to Heather Findlay, editor of the lesbian Girlfriends Magazine, readers "begged us to maintain Pat as the [sex advice] columnist." (The magazine did, however, change the title of the column from "Girl Talk" to "Kiss and Tell.")

Although Califia's sexual philosophy is sinful in the eyes of the Mormon church, he stated in a 2000 interview that there is an element of Mormon thought in his approach to life. "One of the primary tenets of Mormonism is that if the truth has been revealed to you and you don't speak out, you are culpable for any wrongs that are committed in those realms of life," he said. Califia has never been one to remain silent.

1954 – On this date the American archeologist, teacher and Gay & Lesbian activist Paul Rehak was born in Ann Arbor Michigan (d. 2004). He studied at the University of Michigan and Bryn Mawr College. Rehak's research interests extended from prehistoric and Classical Greece to Imperial Rome.

He taught at the College of Wooster, American University of Paris, Chicago's Loyola University and Duke University. At Duke he was also popular as an out activist for Gay and Lesbian rights. In March 2004, just months before his death, the University of Kansas promoted him to associate professor.

Rehak died in June 2004 of complications from a heart attack aggravated by a long struggle living with AIDS. Two years after his death his book Imperium and Cosmos: Augustus and the Northern Campus Martius was published by the University of Wisconsin Press. The book was edited by John G. Younger from a work in progress at the time of Rehak's death.

1963 – Jim Nelson was editor-in-chief of the magazine GQ.

Nelson began his journalism career in television, first working as a producer and writer at CNN and later moving to Hollywood where he worked briefly as a writer's assistant on television sitcoms.

He made the shift to magazines at age thirty, starting with an internship at Harper's Magazine, From 1994 to 1997 Nelson was an editor at Harper’s Magazine under Lewis Lapham, where he was responsible for the magazine’s Readings section. His writing has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Gourmet, and Food & Wine.

Nelson had been editor-in-chief of GQ since March 2003. He retired from that post at the end of 2018. Nelson joined the magazine as a senior editor in 1997, editing the work of such writers as Andrew Corsello, Elizabeth Gilbert, Charles Bowden, and Michael Paterniti. After working under Art Cooper as an executive editor, Nelson was appointed by Condé Nast to replace him as editor-in-chief in 2003.

Under his direction, the magazine has been nominated for sixty-two National Magazine Awards and has won for feature writing, reporting, design, photography, and general excellence, the highest honor in the industry. His own writing for GQ was cited in The Best American Sports Writing 2001.

Also during Nelson’s time at GQ, the magazine has been nominated for forty-one James Beard Awards and has won for restaurant reviews and critiques, distinguished food writing, writing on wine spirits or beer, and humor. In 2016 The Daily Front Row’s fourth annual Fashion and Media Awards honored Jim Nelson with the Magazine of the Year award for GQ.

Most recently Nelson launched ‘The Closer with Keith Olbermann,’ a twice-weekly web series offering political commentary on the 2016 election and other timely news topics. After garnering more than 75 million views[14] for ‘The Closer,’ Olbermann returned with a post-election series on GQ.com called ‘The Resistance’ where he continues the conversation about the President elect.

He resides in Brooklyn with his partner, John Mario Sevilla, a dancer and choreographer.

1963 – Bruce Hayes is an American former competition swimmer best known for anchoring the U.S. men's 4x200-meter freestyle relay team that won the gold medal at the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.

A native of Sarasota, Florida, Hayes' success as a Texas age group and high school swimmer earned him a full scholarship to University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He was the highest scoring freshman at the 1982 NCAA Men's Swimming and Diving Championships, helping the UCLA Bruins win the national team championship.

Hayes represented the United States in several international swimming meets. His first national and international titles came in 1983. He won seven medals at the 1983 World University Games in Edmonton - the most by any American swimmer - and his win in the 200-meter freestyle was the only U.S. gold. A few weeks later, he won the 200-meter freestyle at the 1983 summer United States Swimming Championships.

At the 1983 Pan American Games in Caracas, Venezuela, Hayes won three gold medals in the 200-meter and 400-meter freestyle races and in the 4x200-meter freestyle relay. He also collected three gold medals at the 1983 Descente International Invitational Swim Meet in Tokyo in the same three events.

Hayes won the 400-meter freestyle race at the 1984 winter United States Swimming Championships for his second national title. He finished third in the 200-meter freestyle at the 1984 United States Olympic Swimming Trials, qualifying him for a place on the 4x200-meter freestyle relay team in Los Angeles.

Hayes captured one more national title before retiring when he won the 200-meter freestyle at the 1984 summer United States Swimming Championships, held after the Olympics. He subsequently earned a Masters degree in journalism at Northwestern University in Chicago and then moved to New York City to begin a professional career in public relations. He joined Team New York Aquatics in 1990 and began competing again, this time in Masters swimming events.

He became the first Olympic gold medalist to compete at the Gay Games when he swam at Gay Games III in Vancouver in August 1990.

In 1992, Hayes became the first American Olympic gold medalist to declare his homosexuality publicly when he was profiled by Dick Schaap for ABC's World News Tonight regarding the challenges of being gay in the sports community. He became a spokesperson for the Gay Games IV in New York City in 1994.

At Gay Games IV, his swimming success continued - he set five 25-meter short course Masters world records in the 30-34 age group, including becoming the first Masters swimmer to break 4:00 in the 400-meter freestyle. He was included in Out magazine's 1994 list of the 100 most influential gays and lesbians in America.

Hayes worked for the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games as the Assistant Competition Manager for Swimming at the 1996 Summer Olympics. During his time in Atlanta, he co-founded the Atlanta Rainbow Trout Masters swimming team.

He resumed his public relations career at Edelman in New York following the Atlanta Olympics and later worked for two years in Edelman's Madrid office. In 2002, Hayes became a charter member of the Gay Games Ambassadors. He attended the Gay Games' 25th anniversary celebration in San Francisco in 2007 and presented the Federation of Gay Games' inaugural Media Award.

Hayes swam again at the 2010 Gay Games VIII in Cologne, Germany, winning a bronze in the 1,500-meter freestyle (age 45-49) behind Aaron Murphy (Great Britain) and Jonathan Haines (Australia).

1964 – Mark Oaten is a British former politician who was a senior member of the Liberal Democrat Party until his resignation in disgrace. He served as the Member of Parliament (MP) for Winchester from 1997 to 2010.

Born in Watford, Hertfordshire, Oaten became a councillor in local government, joining the centre-left Social Democratic Party, which merged with the Liberal Party to form the Liberal Democrats in 1988. He became the party's Home Affairs spokesperson in 2003. He stood for the position of Leader of the Liberal Democrats in 2006, but withdrew from the contest when he was hit by a series of scandals which also led to his resignation as Home Affairs spokesperson. He did not run for re-election to the House of Commons at the 2010 general election.

On 21 January 2006, Oaten resigned from the Liberal Democrat front bench when it was revealed by the News of the World that he had hired a 23-year-old male prostitute between the summer of 2004 and February 2005. The newspaper also alleged that Oaten had engaged in 'three-in-a-bed' sex sessions with two male prostitutes. Further allegations surfaced in the media over the following days, including an accusation that he had asked one of the prostitutes to engage in an act of coprophilia (shit-eating).

Following his retirement from active politics, Oaten published two books, before becoming executive of the International Fur Trade Federation in 2011, resulting in condemnation from animal welfare groups.After his retirement from frontline politics, Oaten released a memoir entitled Screwing Up: How One MP Survived Politics, Scandal and Turning 40.

In February 2010 Channel 4 broadcast a four-part series called Tower Block of Commons in which four MPs lived with on different council estates in England. On arrival on the council estate, he attempted to blend in by exchanging his business suit for a tracksuit, but on the first day he found himself being goaded by youths about having hired a rent boy.

1965 – Robert Sabuda is a leading children's pop-up book artist and paper engineer. His recent books, such as those describing the stories of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and Alice in Wonderland, have been well received and critically acclaimed.

Sabuda was born in Wyandotte, Michigan and raised in Pinckney, Michigan. He was skilled as an artist from a very young age, and attended the Pratt Institute in New York City. His specific interest in 3-D paper engineering (i.e., pop-up books) was sparked by a book he received that was illustrated by Vojtěch Kubašta. His interest in children's book illustration began with an internship at Dial Books for Young Readers while attending the Pratt Institute. Initially working as a package designer, he illustrated his first children's book series, of "Bulky Board Books", in 1987. Wide recognition only came his way after he started designing pop-up books for children in 1994.

Robert Sabuda kicked off the pop-up renaissance in 1996 with Christmas Alphabet, a series of elegantly constructed pop-up images that scaled the New York Times bestseller list, despite its then-staggering price tag of $19.99.

Matthew Reinhart began working alongside him and creating his own work when the two became a couple, in 1997. Now, working from their Tribeca studio with four assistants, Robert and Matthew start from scratch with each new book, crafting elaborate, intricately colored structures that leap from the pages, then sending the books off to be hand-assembled overseas.

1968 – David Berger, born in Würzburg, Germany, is a German theologian, author and gay activist.

From 1991 to 1998 Berger studied philosophy, Roman Catholic theology and German language and literature in Würzburg, Cologne and Dortmund. Berger is a German neo-Thomist and a former professor of the Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas in Rome, though the Catholic Church has since revoked his ability to teach religion. Before that time, he worked as a religious education teacher at a high school in Erftstadt, Germany. Until February 2015 he was the editor-in-chief of the gay periodical MÄNNER (Berlin).

In 2010, Berger wrote in his book Der heilige Schein: Als schwuler Theologe in der katholischen Kirche (“The holy sham: A gay theologian in the Catholic church”), that 20 to 40 percent of the Catholic clergy are homosexual.

1970 – In the early morning hours, New York City police raid a gay bar called the Snake Pit for not having a license for dancing and selling alcohol, arresting 167 patrons. At the police station, one of the arrestees, an Argentine national named Diego Vinales so feared the possibility of deportation that he leapt from a second-story window of the police station, impaling himself on the spikes of an iron fence. He survived, though firemen were forced to cut out a section of the fence with Vinales still skewered on it, in order to move him to the hospital.

One journalist remarked, “It is no crime to be 'in' a place that is serving liquor illegally, the only crime is to run such a place. There were no grounds for hauling the customers away.”

Though charges against other patrons were dropped, Vinales was rebooked for "resisting arrest" and officers were stationed outside his hospital room to prevent another escape. The community organized a protest march.

1984 – Dave Moffatt is a Canadian actor and singer, member of the sibling boy-band The Moffatts.

Dave Moffatt was born in Vancouver, British Columbia , one of triplets. Dave is a fraternal triplet, while his brothers Bob and Clint, who were born on the same date, are identical twins.

Dave was a member of the Canadian Pop/Rock band The Moffatts. He played keyboard and sang lead and background vocals. At a very young age, the Moffatt boys became international stars, with great numbers of pre-teen, teen and adult fans. Teen magazines published pin-up posters and many other photographs of the young band.

In 2001, Dave came out as gay to his family. In 2003, Dave posed for a photo shoot with Montreal-based photographer Mikel Marton. Most of the edgy, artistic photos were black and white and semi-nude.

In 2004, Dave came out publicly in an article in the Winnipeg Free Press and for a brief time hosted karaoke at a gay club in downtown Winnipeg called Desire. Dave appeared on the Canadian TV program Entertainment Tonight Canada, where it was stated that the band broke up because his father was not able to accept his sexuality. It was also stated that "The Moffatts" was his father's dream, and that he had pushed himself and his brothers into it.

In 2005, Dave made his professional theatre debut in the Rainbow Stage's production of Miss Saigon. He was also a contestant on Canadian Idol where he placed in the top 32 but failed to make it to the top 10.

In 2006, Dave worked in Calgary's gay bar Twisted Element as a karaoke host. In 2007, he was working with pop-punk band Lights Out Love, but has since decided to work on a solo project. He is based in Toronto, where he lives with his partner.

1987 – Devon Graye Fleming, known professionally as Devon Graye, is an American actor and filmmaker. He is best known for portraying teenage Dexter in the TV series Dexter, as well as the second Trickster in The Flash. In 2019, he wrote the thriller film I See You.

Graye was born in Mountain View, California. He studied acting at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco. Although Graye is American, he lived in the United Kingdom for all four years of high school.

Graye wrote a thriller screenplay titled Allison Adams, which was featured on the 2016 Black List for most popular unproduced screenplays.

He has been dating Canadian actor Jordan Gavaris since September 2013.

 Added 2024

In April 2021, it was announced that Connor would star opposite Joe Locke in the Netflix series Heartstopper, an adaptation of the webcomic and graphic novel of the same name by Alice Oseman. He originally auditioned for the role of Charlie, but ended up cast as the other lead, Nick Nelson. He is set to star in an upcoming film adaptation of the novel A Cuban Girl's Guide to Tea and Tomorrow by Laura Taylor Namey.

In September 2022, Connor was seen holding hands with actor Maia Reficco. This led to backlash on Twitter as users — who never miss an opportunity to slag someone —-- accused him of queerbaiting —-- the practice of pretending to be a part of the LGBTQ+ community for attention or engagement. He clapped back at these accusations, tweeting, "apparently some people on here know my sexuality better than I do..." In October 2022, Connor came out as bisexual.