May 2

1858 – Edith Somerville (d.1949) was an Irish novelist. She wrote in collaboration with her cousin "Martin Ross" (Violet Martin) under the pseudonym "Somerville and Ross". Together they published a series of fourteen stories and novels, the most popular of which were The Real Charlotte, and The Experiences of an Irish R. M., published in 1899.

Trained as an illustrator, Somerville met Martin in 1886. The encounter was pivotal: As Somerville recalled in Irish Memories (1917), the meeting "proved the hinge of my life, the place where my fate, and hers, turned over. . . ."

The two women became life and literary partners. Their families were initially shocked by the latter relationship: Writing seemed a vulgar occupation. Although both women took pseudonyms--Martin was "Martin Ross," Somerville was "Guilles Herring"--only Martin's endured.

The cousins' collaboration yielded a highly successful partnership that lasted nearly three decades and, arguably, even longer. Although Martin died in 1915, Somerville believed that communication with her continued via automatic writing; Somerville's later works were published under both their names.

Although Somerville never spoke of her relationship with Ross as lesbian, her memoirs indicate clearly that it was passionate and primary. To judge from the authors' thirteen published volumes, it was also nourishing.

Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart (standing)

1895 – Lyricist Lorenz Hart (d.1943) is, with his musical partner Richard Rodgers, one of the greatest American songwriters of all-time. His best-loved lyrics include Bewitched, Bothered & Bewildered, Blue Moon, My Funny Valentine and Where Or When.

Hart was born in Harlem to Jewish immigrant parents. He attended Columbia University, where a friend introduced him to Rodgers, and the two joined forces to write songs for a series of amateur and student productions. They continued working together until Hart's death in 1943, along the way producing scores for a series of hit shows.

Barely five feet tall, balding early, and possessing a disproportionately large head, Larry Hart was the first to disparage his own attractiveness. His jokes, however, masked a deeply-rooted inability to accept the possibility of romantic happiness or sexual gratification.

Hart struggled with his homosexuality in an era when such a lifestyle was socially unacceptable. When he allowed himself to act upon his desire for other men, he seems to have had difficulty performing sexually. (Biographer Frederick Nolan quotes one unidentified male partner's shock at discovering Hart cowering in the bedroom closet after sex, suggesting that the songwriter was unable actively to pursue homosexual pleasure without being overcome by guilt.)

Hart also suffered great emotional turmoil toward the end of his life. His personal problems were often the cause of friction between him and Richard Rodgers, and in fact led to a brief breakup in 1943, at which time Rodgers started working with Oscar Hammerstein II. He also struggled with alcoholism, which eventually contributed to his death.

Rodgers and Hart teamed up one last time for a revival of one of their earlier hit shows, but within days, Hart died of pneumonia from exposure.

1903 – The pediatrician Benjamin Spock was born (d.1998). His book, "Baby and Child Care," published in 1946, is one of the biggest best-sellers of all time. Its revolutionary message to mothers was that "you know more than you think you do."

Spock was an early advocate for the rights of Gay people. He was also the People's Party candidate in the 1972 United States presidential election on a platform which called for free medical care, the repeal of "victimless crime" laws, including the legalization of abortion, homosexuality, and marijuana, a guaranteed minimum income for families and the immediate withdrawal of all American troops from foreign countries. He died in 1998.

1920 – William Hutt (d.2007) was a Canadian actor of stage, television and film. Hutt's distinguished career spanned more than fifty years and won him many accolades and awards. While his base throughout his career remained at the Stratford Festival in Stratford, Ontario, he appeared on the stage in London, New York and across Canada.

About his early life, theatre director Richard Nielsen said, "As a young man, he was openly gay at a time when being openly gay was a very dangerous identity. He shunned violence, but he volunteered as a medic in the Second World War, and he later won the Military Medal for his services; and this I found most fascinating: he committed to a career in theatre when such a thing as the 'Canadian theatre' simply did not exist."

His distinguished acting career was centred around the Stratford Festival where he won great acclaim in many roles including those of King Lear (1988), James Tyrone in Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night (1994-1995) (a production which was subsequently filmed), and Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest (1975-1979). He played all the great Shakespearean roles—Hamlet, Lear, Falstaff, Prospero, Macbeth, and Titus Andronicus.

Hutt retired from the Stratford stage in 2005 with a reprise of Prospero in The Tempest, a role for which he was renowned. He appeared in the television series Slings and Arrows as an ailing stage icon who wants to play King Lear one last time. He had planned to return to Stratford in 2007 in a production of A Delicate Balance, but had to cancel due to poor health.

Hutt, who had leukemia, died peacefully in his sleep on June 27, 2007 in Stratford, Ontario.

His cartoons appeared in such publications as Dope Comix, Bizarre Sex, Heavy Metal, Blab!, Crazy, Fangoria, and The Village Voice, among others. One of his best-known early works was the strip Barefootz, whose namesake character reflected late 1960s and early 1970s counterculture.

Cruse was born and raised in Springville, Alabama, the son of a preacher and a homemaker. His earliest published cartoons were in The Baptist Student when he was in high school. His work later appeared in Fooey and Sick. He attended high school at Indian Springs School in (what is now) Indian Springs, Alabama, and college at Birmingham-Southern College, where he studied drama. Cruse worked for about a decade in television.

After coming out as a gay man, he founded and contributed regularly to Gay Comix, an annual publication of gay and lesbian cartoonists that had its first issue in 1980. A collection of Cruse's short comic strips and stories from the 1970s and 1980s was published by St. Martin's Press in 1987 under the title Dancin' Nekkid with the Angels.

Cruse reached a much wider audience when the national gay and lesbian newsmagazine The Advocate began publishing his serial strip Wendel in 1983 on an irregular basis; it eventually became a weekly feature. A funny, often moving strip, Wendel explored a variety of gay and lesbian issues until its end in 1989, when the editors of The Advocate changed formats and eliminated comic strips from the magazine.

With the end of Wendel, Cruse was encouraged by friends in the comics business to approach Paradox Press, an imprint of DC Comics (home of Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman) about creating a large work for them. This resulted in his largest project to date, a 210-page graphic novel that took him four years to write and draw: Stuck Rubber Baby (1995).

Stuck Rubber Baby

The painstakingly conceived and executed Stuck Rubber Baby has been hailed, like its predecessor Art Spiegelman's Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus (1986), as a breakthrough work in establishing the graphic novel as a serious literary and artistic form rather than simply a comic strip.

In the aftermath of the attack on New York City on September 11, 2001, Cruse returned to a project he had thought about for years, an "illustrated fable" based on a story by Alabama composer Jeanne E. Shaffer. The Swimmer with a Rope in His Teeth was published in 2004.

Cruse and his partner Eddie Sedarbaum moved from New York City in 2003 to North Adams, Massachusetts, where they were married in 2004, after celebrating 25 years together as a couple. Cruse continued cartooning, developing web sites, and working in computer graphics until his death in 2019.

1946 – 1960s teen pop singer Lesley Gore was born today. Known for her hit song "It's My Party and I'll Cry If I Want To" Gore came out as a Lesbian in 2003. Since coming out publicly, she has hosted episodes of In the Life and reached out to members of the glbtq community.

In 1963 Gore's coach had her make some demonstration recordings.. Impressed, music producer Quincy Jones called the young singer in and soon had her record a pop song called "It's My Party." Green cautioned Gore that she should not be disappointed if the record did not get released, but exactly a week later Gore was surprised to hear it on the radio while she was driving to school.

"It's My Party" shot to number one on the pop charts. Chronicling the emotional turmoil of a teenager who learns that her boyfriend has left her for another girl, the song declares "It's my party, and I'll cry if I want to. You would cry, too, if it happened to you."

Gore collaborated on a song sung by a closeted teen character in Allison Anders' Grace of My Heart (1996). The young singer was supposedly loosely based on Gore herself, but Gore has said that she was in her twenties before she realized her sexual orientation. (Although she was not in the film, Gore's recording of "It's My Party" was, no doubt, the source of the title of Randall Kleiser's moving AIDS film, It's My Party (1996), another indication of the song's continuing presence in the popular imagination.)

Gore's family and the people working with her were long aware of her lesbianism, but her first public acknowledgment of it came when she hosted an episode of the glbtq magazine show In the Life in 2003. She has since done another episode and has been touched by the response from glbtq people—particularly those not from urban areas—who have approached her when she is on tour.

"I saw what a difference a show like 'In the Life' can make to their lives in some of these small towns," she stated, adding that "a lot of young gay people in the Midwest . . . really had nothing to relate to. At least I felt this program is presenting them with some options."

Gore has not publicly named her partner but has acknowledged that she has been in a committed relationship with another woman since the early 1980s.

1948 – Cal Anderson (d.1995) was an American politician. A Democrat, he served in both chambers of the Washington State Legislature, representing the 43rd Legislative District in Pos. 1 in the State House of Representatives, as well as in the State Senate. Anderson was Washington's first openly gay legislator.

Cal grew up in Tukwila, Washington, graduated from Foster High School, served in Vietnam and became the first openly gay member of the Washington State legislature. There, Anderson worked for civil rights for gay, lesbian and bisexual people as well as such issues as campaign finance reform and easier voter registration.

He died of complications from AIDS on August 4, 1995. On April 10, 2003, Seattle’s Broadway Park was renamed Cal Anderson Park in his honor.

1955 – On this date Tennessee Williams won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof." It was Williams' second Pulitzer after his first for "A Streetcar Named Desire."

Ed Murray and Michael Shiosaki

1955 – Ed Murray was elected Mayor of Seattle in January 2014. He served in the Washington State Senate from 2007-2013, and before that for 11 years in the Washington State House of Representatives.

A Democrat, Murray was appointed to fill one of the vacant 43rd District seats in the House in October 1995 and was re-elected biennially until he opted not to run for re-election to the House in 2006. The 43rd district, located entirely in Seattle, includes the University District, Montlake, Eastlake, and Capitol Hill neighborhoods. The district is very progressive and reliably Democratic.

In 2006, he announced his intention to challenge Sen. Pat Thibaudeau for the 43rd District seat in the State Senate. Murray was elected to the Senate with little opposition.

He has also been very active in advancing LGBT rights. He led the push for an anti-discrimination law protecting gays and lesbians, a measure that finally passed in 2006 after three decades of debate.He was also the main sponsor of legislation creating domestic partnerships, approved in 2007.

Murray was elected Mayor of Seattle in the 2013 elections.

Murray is gay; his spouse is Michael Shiosaki. His election to the Senate, like many of his previous campaigns, won the backing of the Gay & Lesbian Victory Fund.

1961 – Stephen Daldry is an English theatre and film director and producer, as well as a three-time Academy Award nominated and Tony Award winning director. He is also notable for having all the feature films that he has directed go on to be nominated for Best Director or Best Picture at the Academy Awards — Billy Elliot (2000), The Hours (2002), The Reader (2008) and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2011).

Daldry made his feature film directorial debut in 2000 with Billy Elliot. His next film was The Hours, and it won Best Actress at the Academy Awards for Nicole Kidman. Recently, he directed a stage musical adaptation of Billy Elliot, and in 2009 his work on Billy Elliot the Musical earned him a Tony Award for Best Director of a Musical.

Daldry describes himself as a gay man because people prefer it ("they don't like confusion"), although has been married since 2001 to American performance artist and magazine editor Lucy Sexton, with whom he has a daughter.

Stephen Daldry shocked everyone around him when he married his wife Lucy. As an openly-gay man, the movie and theatre director never tried to hide his sexuality, but his wedding to long-term female friend in October of that year was a surprise to many.

Speaking to Vanity Fair, Daldry has opened up and revealed the not-so-romantic reason he wanted to tie the knot.

He elaborated: 'I'm a gay man who married a best friend so we could have a child together and get decent health insurance. It wasn't a romantic wedding. The source of the marriage itself wasn't romantic. It was practical.'

It is thought that spending time with Billy Elliot's teen star Jamie Bell had made him realise he wanted to become a father. 

He was previously in a relationship with set designer Ian MacNeil for 13 years. They met at an outdoor production of Alice in Wonderland in Lancaster in 1988, and after settling in a bedsit in Camberwell, began collaborating on theatrical productions.

1962 – (Boyd Tyrone) Ty Herndon is an American country music singer. After signing to Epic Records in 1995, Herndon made his debut with his number one single, "What Mattered Most", followed by the release of his first album, also entitled What Mattered Most (1995). The album was followed by the release of his second album, Living in a Moment (1996), which produced his second number one country hit, with the album's title track.

Herndon released three more albums for Epic: Big Hopes (1998), Steam (1999), and This Is Ty Herndon: Greatest Hits (2000). He recorded a Christmas album in 2002 for the Riviera label, followed by his fifth studio album, Right About Now (2007) and a second Christmas compilation for the Titan Pyramid label; his sixth studio release, Journey On, followed in 2010.

Boyd Tyrone Herndon was born in a Meridian, Mississippi hospital, but raised just across the state line in his parents' hometown of Butler, Alabama.He became involved in music as a teenager, playing the piano and singing Gospel music. Shortly after graduating from Austin High School (Alabama) in Decatur, Alabama, Herndon moved to Nashville to pursue a career in music. This did not prove to be easy, however, and after 10 years, he moved to Texas. Herndon was originally the lead vocalist of the Tennessee River Boys, a group that performed at the Opryland USA theme park in the early 1980s, which later evolved into the band Diamond Rio. He left the band in 1985 to compete on Star Search. In 1993, Herndon won Texas Entertainer of the Year. Later that year, Herndon was signed to Epic Records.

In June 1995, Herndon was arrested in Fort Worth, Texas, at Gateway Park by an undercover male police officer who alleged that Herndon asked the officer to accompany him to a wooded area of the park where Herndon sat on a log and exposed himself. When taken into custody, he was also discovered to be in possession of methamphetamine. A plea bargain saw the singer sentenced to community service and drug rehabilitation, and the charge of indecent exposure was dropped.

Herndon (R) with Matt Collum

Following the incident in Fort Worth, his sexuality became a topic of interest within the country music industry. Although his rep denied it following his arrest, the speculation came to an end on November 20, 2014, in an interview with People magazine, Herndon came out as a gay man, and stated that he had been in a relationship for a few years with Matt Collum. When asked if his two ex-wives knew of his sexuality, Herndon confirmed that they "absolutely" knew.

1972 – J. Edgar Hoover dies, and leaves the bulk of his estate to Clyde Tolson, his "companion" of over 40 years.

Shaun T. Fitness and Scott Blokker

1978 – Shaun T. Fitness is an American fitness trainer. He is best known for his home fitness programs for adults and children which include T25, Insanity and Hip-Hop Abs.

Born as Shaun Thompson in Camden, New Jersey, he grew up in Philadelphia and was raised by his grandparents in Deptford Township, New Jersey, where he enjoyed football, baseball and running track as a student at Deptford Township High School. He received a bachelor's degree in sports science from Rowan University where he also minored in theatre and dance. He is a member of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity. He lives in Phoenix, Arizona.

Thompson has been openly gay since coming out via Twitter in October 2012 and is married to Scott Blokker. They are raising twin sons Sander and Silas, born in November 2017.

1984 – Minnesota raises the maximum fine for sodomy to $3,000, but does not change the maximum jail term of one year.

Click for Full Monty

1986 – Ralph Woods, born in Quebec, Canada, is a Canadian pornographic actor and director.

At 18, Woods moved to Montreal to study and work as a dancer, but ended up as a cleaner, and then started working in the world of pornographic cinema. He began his career in 2005 with the production company Falcon Entertainment, then with Bel Ami (non-exclusive), a Bratislava-based production studio specializing in Gay pornography. Woods is one of the few non-European models to declare himself openly Gay.

In 2005, actor Pierre Fitch publicly announced that he had married Ralph Woods. The two were in the process of collaborating on the production of several videos for Pierre Fitch's website, and had participated in several productions together, acting both as a couple, and also separately.

Fitch then stated that his liaison with Woods was not official, finally on September 7, 2007, Pierre Fitch publicly announced his separation with Ralph Woods on his blog. In the fall of 2008, in an interview with Fab Magazine, Fitch revealed that his marriage to Woods was just a marketing gimmick.

1989 – Samuel Tsui is an American singer/songwriter, video producer and actor. He rose to fame as an Internet celebrity and is known for covering songs by popular artists like Adele, Britney Spears, Lady Gaga, Taylor Swift, Justin Timberlake, Bruno Mars and lot more, as well as some original songs, medleys, and mashups, along with his frequent collaborations with fellow YouTuber Kurt Schneider. As of August 25, 2018, Tsui had reached 3 million subscribers.

His father is of Cantonese descent and his mother is of European descent and hails from Iowa. He can speak some Cantonese. Tsui grew up in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania, a street away from Kurt Schneider, his producer and accompanist, with whom he attended Wissahickon High School. He was active in high school musicals, including Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Urinetown, Titanic, and Miss Saigon. Tsui attended Yale University, where he was a member of Davenport College and The Duke's Men of Yale, an all-male acappella group. He also majored in classical Greek at Yale University.

On April 15, 2016, Tsui posted a "coming in and out" video on his YouTube channel in which he announced that he is in a long-term relationship with fellow musician and collaborator Casey Breves. They met while they were both at Yale (Tsui a freshman and Breves a junior) and were both part of an a cappella group on campus. Tsui and Breves wed on April 16, 2016.

1994 – On this date the first-ever Deaf Lesbian & Gay Awareness Week took place in San Francisco, California.