May 20

[{(o)}]|[{(o)}]|[{(o)}]|[{(o)}]| [{(o)}]|[{(o)}]

Late 13th Century – Robin Hood, who lived with his band of merrie men in their forest ghetto, may have been gay, claimed The Times of 11 July 1999 reported on research suggesting the probability.

New studies of the medieval texts that first recorded his deeds suggest that the robber with a heart of gold was actually a gay outlaw who had been exiled from "straight" society. Little John, not Maid Marian, was his true love.

The reassessment is based on studies of the 14th-century ballads of Robin Hood, the earliest known accounts of his deeds, which detail his relationships with his "merrie men", especially Little John and Will Scarlet. He is placed in May in this history because of his traditional association with May games and the Maypole, itself a phallic symbol.

Stephen Knight, professor of English literature at Cardiff University, said the ballads, the first and most authoritative accounts of Hood's deeds, had clear homoerotic overtones:

The ballads were written in Chaucerian English, made more complex by a strong dialect. One translation includes the verse:

The ballads also show that Maid Marian - usually depicted as Hood's true love - never existed. Knight believes she was added by 16th-century authors who wanted to make their works more respectable to heterosexual readers.

The ballads indicate that the real Hood almost certainly came from yeoman or peasant stock, that he roamed Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire in the late 13th or 14th century and that his popularity came not from giving away money but from his ability to flout authority.

One of the earliest works, "Robin Hood and the Monk", written anonymously in about 1450, describes the intimate friendship between the outlaw and Little John. It depicts them having a row over money that Knight describes as "almost domestic". It is resolved only when Little John rescues his leader from their enemies.

Similar themes are explored in "Robin Hood and Guy of Gisbourne" - again Hood and Little John fall out but are reunited.

Some historians believe that Hood was a genuine character, but that ballads have been embellished with the exploits of other outlaw gangs, among many of which homosexuality would also have been common.

Barry Dobson, professor of medieval history at the University of Cambridge, agrees with Knight that the relationship between Hood and John in the ballads is "ambiguous".

He said the 13th century had seen increasing oppression of gays: "In the 12th century homosexuality was accepted, but in the 13th the church became much less tolerant and such people were driven underground."

1609 – William Shakespeare's Sonnets were first published on this date in London, perhaps illicitly, by the publisher Thomas Thorpe. Among the greatest and well known and loved poems in the English language, most people do not realize that Shakespeare wrote these sonnets to "a fair youth." The 'Fair Youth' is an unnamed young man to whom sonnets 1-126 are addressed. Shakespeare clearly writes of the young man in romantic and loving language, a fact which serves to confirm a homosexual relationship between them.

The more prudish and near-sighted prefer to call it "platonic." But it is quite clear that he addresses a man and once read, "platonic" seems a ridiculous attempt at denying the obvious. Do you remember Shakespeare's famous Sonnet 18? ("Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?"). That poem, taught to us as a poem of heterosexual love, is in fact written between men, and is from Shakespeare to another man in a tone of clear romantic intimacy, while Sonnet 20 explicitly laments that the young man is not a woman.

Through the years there have been many attempts to identify "the Fair Youth." Shakespeare's one-time patron, Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton is the most commonly suggested candidate, although Shakespeare's later patron, William Herbert, 3rd Earl of Pembroke, has recently become a popular candidate. Both claims have much to do with the dedication of the sonnets to 'Mr. W.H.', "the only begetter of these ensuing sonnets": the initials could apply to either Earl.

However, while Shakespeare's language often seems to imply that the 'friend' is of higher social status than himself, this may not be the case. The apparent references to the poet's inferiority may simply be part of the rhetoric of romantic submission. An alternative theory, most famously espoused by Oscar Wilde's short story "The Portrait of Mr. W.H." notes a series of puns that may suggest the sonnets are written to a boy actor called William Hughes; however, Wilde's story acknowledges that there is no evidence for such a person's existence. Samuel Butler believed that the friend was a seaman, and recently Joseph Pequigney in "Such Is My Love" argued for the idea that "Mr. W.H." was an unknown commoner.

 Poster for the Markova movie

1924 – Walter Dempster, Jr. (d.2005), better known by his alias Walterina Markova, was a Filipino gay man who served as a "comfort gay" (sex slave) for Japanese soldiers during the Japanese occupation of the Philippines in World War II.

After Markova left home, he joined a group of six cross-dressing performers (drag queens). It was as part of this group that he was arrested by Japanese soldiers, and taken to a camp which is now the Rizal Memorial Sports Complex. For several years he and his companions, and other "comfort gays", were put to forced labor and used sexually by Japanese soldiers, as the "comfort women" were used.

His story was made into a movie called Markova: Comfort Gay in 2000, directed by Gil Portes. It was included in the 2002 Seattle Lesbian and Gay Film Festival and the San Francisco International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival. He was quoted as saying: "As humans, we won’t live long. Revealing my own story is my way of inspiring other gays who continue to be oppressed today. By my act, I may have probably given freedom to many other gay people."

He spent the last years of his life at the Home for the Golden Gays in Pasay City. He died at the age of 81 when he was accidentally hit by a racing cyclist.

1928 – John Forbes Nash Jr. (d.2015) was an American mathematician who made fundamental contributions to game theory, differential geometry, and the study of partial differential equations. Nash's work has provided insight into the factors that govern chance and decision-making inside complex systems found in everyday life.

His theories are widely used in economics. Serving as a Senior Research Mathematician at Princeton University during the latter part of his life, he shared the 1994 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with game theorists Reinhard Selten and John Harsanyi. In 2015, he also shared the Abel Prize with Louis Nirenberg for his work on nonlinear partial differential equations. John Nash is the only person to be awarded both the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences and the Abel Prize.

In 1959, Nash began showing clear signs of mental illness, and spent several years at psychiatric hospitals being treated for paranoid schizophrenia. After 1970, his condition slowly improved, allowing him to return to academic work by the mid-1980s. His struggles with his illness and his recovery became the basis for Sylvia Nasar's biography, A Beautiful Mind, as well as a film of the same name starring Russell Crowe as Nash.

Nash had recurring liaisons with other men. As an undergraduate, he once climbed into a friend's bed while the friend was sleeping and "made a pass at him," Nasar writes. Nash also made a sexual overture toward John Milnor, a fellow mathematician with whom Nash lived one summer while working for the RAND Corporation think tank in Santa Monica, Calif. According to Nasar, "What Nash felt toward Milnor may have been something very close to love."

Nash's first loves were one-sided infatuations with other men. He once kissed another friend, Donald Newman, on the mouth. According to Newman, "He tried fiddling around with me. I was driving my car when he came on to me." Nash also had "special friendships," in his own words, with two men. One of these was Nash's "first experience of mutual attraction," Nasar writes. Of the other, she writes that they were "friends—and then more than friends."

In 1954, Nash was arrested for indecent exposure in a bathroom in Santa Monica, which cost him his position at RAND. (He told his bosses that he was "merely observing behavioral characteristics.")

John Nash married Alicia Larde in February 1957. Their son, John Charles Martin Nash, born May 20, 1959, remained nameless for a year.On the day after Christmas in 1962, Alicia filed for divorce. Her papers stated that Nash blamed her for twice committing him to a mental institution. He had moved into another room and refused to have sex with her for more than two years. By 1965, she hoped to marry another math professor, John Coleman Moore.

Nash moved in with Alicia again in 1970. Her patience and concern played a critical role in his recovery from schizophrenia. But she referred to him as her "boarder," Nasar writes, and "they lived essentially like two distantly related individuals under one roof" until he won the Nobel Prize, when they renewed their relationship.

On May 23, 2015, Nash and his wife Alicia were killed in a car crash while riding in a taxi on the New Jersey Turnpike.

1928 – Charles A. Reich is an American legal and social scholar as well as writer who was a Professor at Yale Law School when he wrote the 1970 paean to the 1960s counterculture and youth movement, The Greening of America. Excerpts of the book first appeared in The New Yorker, and its seismic reception there helped the book to leading The New York Times Best Seller list.

Reich was born in New York City. He attended City and Country School and Lincoln School in the city prior to undergraduate studies at Oberlin College. As a law student, he was editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal for 1951–1952 and he clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo L. Black during the 1953-1954 term. Prior to his academic career he worked for six years as a lawyer at the leading firms Cravath, Swaine & Moore in New York and Arnold & Porter in Washington, D.C..

Reich was a professor at Yale Law School from 1960-1974. Both Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton were students of Professor Reich when he was writing The Greening of America and he is mentioned in their biographies. Reich left Yale in 1974 to move to San Francisco, although he continued as a visiting professor from 1974-1976. He returned to teach at Yale from 1991–1994 and in February 2011. The Yale Law School Association selected Reich for its Award of Merit in 2008.

Reich is gay, and came to terms with this in San Francisco during the 1970s era of rapidly advancing gay rights and liberation. He eventually became actively out during this early period of the modern LGBT rights movement and in his autobiography he details his activism and the process of coming to terms with his then long-repressed homosexuality. Decades later Reich was less active in LGBT affairs and explicitly stated that his need to live alone "trumped" sexual orientation as meaningful in his life.

1930 – Betty DeGeneres is an American LGBT rights activist. She is the mother of Ellen Degeneres and Vance DeGeneres and the first straight spokeswoman for the Human Rights Campaign's National Coming Out Project and an active member of Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG). She gained notability following her daughter Ellen's highly publicized coming out in 1997.

DeGeneres is the author of two books: Love, Ellen: A Mother Daughter Journey and Just a Mom. In Love, Ellen: A Mother Daughter Journey, Betty describes her reaction to her daughter coming out as a lesbian, and her path from passive acceptance to becoming a passionate advocate for LGBT rights. She also describes the media scrutiny she received after Ellen came out. Her second book, Just a Mom, continues these themes. She also wrote a column for the (now defunct) website PlanetOut called "Ask Betty."

DeGeneres appeared as an extra in the episode "The Puppy Episode" of the television sitcom Ellen, in which her daughter Ellen's character comes out. DeGeneres appears in many episodes of The Ellen DeGeneres Show, sitting in the audience.

DeGeneres is a breast cancer survivor and discusses this during public appearances.

1934 – Charles Moskos (d.2008) was a sociologist of the United States military and a professor at Northwestern University. Described as the nation's "most influential military sociologist" by the Wall Street Journal, Moskos was the author of the "don't ask, don't tell" (DADT) policy, which prohibited homosexual service members from acknowledging their sexual orientation from 1993 to 2011.

In 1993, to help break an impasse between the Clinton administration and military leadership over the status of gays in the military, Moskos devised a compromise policy and coined the phrase "don't ask, don't tell". Originally suggested as "Don't Ask, Don't Tell, Don't Seek, Don't Flaunt" to Senate Armed Forces Committee Chairman Senator Sam Nunn, it was eventually shortened to "don't ask, don't tell".

Secretary of Defense Les Aspin approved the policy, and it was recommended to the President. In the following months, Moskos worked with the White House, the Armed Forces, and the Senate Armed Forces Committee to draft the policy, which eventually was adopted.

In 2000, Moskos told academic journal Lingua Franca that he felt the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy would be gone within five to ten years. He criticized the unit cohesion argument, the most frequent rationale for the continued exclusion of gay and lesbian service members from the U.S. military. Instead he argued that since it was established that "modesty rights" require that women have separate bathrooms and showers, heterosexuals also had modesty rights: "I should not be forced to shower with a woman. I should not be forced to shower with a gay."

Moskos's comments were met with outrage by gay activists and Northwestern University students who argued that his fear of being eyed in the shower was not sufficient justification for denying equal rights to gay men and lesbians.

1946 – Singer, actress, living mannequin for Bob Mackie costumes Cher, was born on this date as Cherilyn Sarkisian. She has the rare distinction of having won an Academy Award, a Grammy Award, an Emmy Award and three Golden Globe Awards.

Cher has been imitated by drag queens across the world for decades. Her transition to dance music and social activism in recent years has further contributed to her iconic popularity within the Gay community. The NBC sitcom Will & Grace acknowledged her status by making her the idol of Gay character Jack McFarland. Cher guest-starred as herself twice on the sitcom. In 2000 Cher made a cameo on the show, in which Jack believed her to be a drag queen, and said he could "do" a better Cher himself. Cher has become one of the Gay community's most vocal advocates. At several of her live concert appearances, Cher acknowledged the audience by declaring, "Good evening, ladies and gentlemen... and flamboyant gentlemen!"

In 2003 Cher staged a huge farewell tour that saw the smoldering diva play to more than 1.5 million fans in North America alone. She is now, perhaps, as famous for being the struggling-to-understand mother of FTM-transgendered son , Chaz Bono.

1954 – A California appellate court upholds the conviction of a man for oral copulation that is based solely on police testimony.

1959 – Jeffrey Kofman is a former reporter for ABC and CBS and current university lecturer. He is openly gay.

Before joining CBS, Kofman was a correspondent at CBC Television in Toronto. During his 11 years at the CBC, he was host of a current affairs program, anchor of the CBC's Toronto newscast, a network radio host, and sub-anchor for the CBC's flagship nightly network newscast, The National.

Born in Toronto, he is a graduate of Upper Canada College and then Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, where he studied political science.

Kofman came to ABC News from CBS News, where he was a correspondent in the network's New York Bureau from 1997 to 2001.

As London-based correspondent for ABC News he reported on stories in Europe. Prior to his assignment overseas, Kofman spent 10 years based in Miami for ABC News as correspondent for Florida, the Caribbean and Latin America. He moved to ABC's London bureau in January 2010 where he covered the Arab revolutions in North Africa from Tunisia, Libya and Egypt. He has reported from South Africa, Kenya, Norway, Sweden and Italy and the Indian Ocean. In 2011 he won an Emmy for his coverage of the Libyan Revolution and the downfall of Col. Muammar Gadhafi. Kofman covered the revolution in Libya from its beginning to its end. He reported from Tripoli as Gadhafi struggled to sustain his dictatorship.

Kofman did six tours in the Middle East after September 11, 2001: four in Iraq, one in the Arabian Sea during the war in Afghanistan, and one in Pakistan. While in Iraq, Kofman was embedded with U.S. Marines in the southern part of the country. He traveled to some of the most troubled regions, including Fallujah and Samarra. In July 2003, he reported on the declining morale of U.S. troops in the region as their tours of duty kept getting extended. The story was picked up by outlets around the world when one soldier called on Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to resign. Kofman was reportedly the target of a smear campaign as a reaction to his report.

1965 – Ted Allen was born on this date. He was the "food and wine connoisseur" on the American Emmy-winning television program "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy." He is a frequent guest on TV cooking shows like "Top Chef" "The Iron Chef" and author of magazine articles and books.

Allen was born in Columbus, Ohio, but grew up in Carmel, Indiana. His Southern-born mother instilled in him a love of food and cooking from a young age.

After completing his studies he moved to Chicago, where he started working as a journalist for a local newspaper group. He got his start in restaurant criticism as one quarter of a bi-weekly group-review team called 'The Famished Four', along with his partner, Barry Rice, then the chain's entertainment editor, who initiated the concept.

Allen then became a freelancer for Chicago magazine, eventually becoming a senior editor, and often writing about food, wine and luminaries of the culinary world. He joined Esquire in 1997 as a contributing editor. He contributed to an Esquire food series, profiled many celebrities and co-authored the magazine's popular 'Things a Man Should Know' series. He has written for a variety of other magazines and continues as a contributing editor for Esquire.

Allen gained great visibility in 2003, when he became a cast member of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. Allen portrayed the 'Food and Wine connoisseur.' He continues to make TV appearances as a gourmet. Allen has appeared as a regular judge on seasons 3 and 4 of Bravo's reality television program Top Chef, following several guest judge appearances during the previous two seasons.

He lives in New York City with long-time partner Barry Rice. On June 26, 2013, he announced that he was engaged to Rice. On July 30, 2013, the two were married in New York City.

1970 – Saúl Armendáriz is an American-born Mexican luchador, or professional wrestler, who works as an exótico for several independent promotions all over the world under the ring name Cassandro. He is a former NWA World Welterweight and UWA World Lightweight Champion. In 2009, Armendáriz signed a contract with American promotion Total Nonstop Action Wrestling (TNA), but was released before making his official debut.

Armendáriz was born and raised in El Paso, Texas, United States, but also spent a lot of time just across the Mexican border in Juárez, Chihuahua, his family's native town. At the age of fifteen, Armendáriz quit school and began training lucha libre in Juárez. He officially began his professional wrestling career in 1988, working under a mask as Mister Romano. The character, made up by well known luchador Rey Misterio, was a gladiator themed rudo (villain). Less than a year later, Armendáriz was encouraged to abandon the character and take on a new exótico character by Baby Sharon. Exóticos are male wrestlers dressed in drag portraying gay caricatures. While most exóticos were straight, both Sharon and Armendáriz were gay. Armendáriz wrestled his first match as an exótico in Júarez, working unmasked and under the new ring name Rosa Salvaje ("Wild Rose").

In late 1989, Armendáriz joined the Mexican Universal Wrestling Association (UWA) promotion, where he formed a new partnership with fellow exótico Pimpinela Escarlata, whom he had first met when the two were trained together in Juárez. Eventually, Armendáriz decided to change his ring name and, in order to do so, first lost the right to use his old one by losing to Johnny Vannessa in a Lucha de Apuestas (bet match). He then adopted the new ring name Cassandro, which he took from a Tijuana brothel keeper named Cassandra, whom he adored.

Through his regular tours of the United Kingdom and his fluency in English, Cassandro has gained some mainstream attention in the country, including being interviewed on The Sun and BBC Breakfast. In February 2017, Cassandro appeared in a skit on Conan, training Conan O'Brien and Andy Richter to become luchadores.

 (Click for Full Monty)

1977 - Tiger Tyson is an American gay pornography actor, model and director, noted for his appearances in ethnic-themed adult films, where he performs regularly as a top. He has also worked as a male escort and gogo dancer, and appears frequently in gay-themed publications. Tyson, who is of African American and Puerto Rican descent, is renowned for his large endowment and aggressive sexual style on camera.

Tyson went into pornography at age 19 after serving fourteen months in prison for grand theft auto. Recruited by a friend and fellow dancer at a gay club, Tyson was introduced in the 1997 film Sweatin' Black with director Enrique Cruz. Shortly thereafter Tyson starred in his breakthrough film, Tiger's Brooklyn Tails. After serving a stint as an actor for Latino Fan Club, Tyson left the porn industry in 1999, but quickly returned in 2000 to form his own production company, Tiger Tyson Productions. He announced his retirement in 2004, but again changed his mind after the success of Take 'Em Down. Tyson was a co-founder of Pitbull Productions in 2003, and has been its headlining star ever since. To date, Tyson has appeared in over two dozen pornographic films, and directed several others. He was inducted into the GayVN Hall of Fame in February 2008.

He has insisted he would never bottom on film.

1977 – Nevada passes a new criminal code that changes the sodomy law to be applicable only to people of the same sex. It is retained as a felony with a 1-6 year penalty.

1978 – The first bi-lingual gay youth conference begins in Toronto with delegates from English Canada and Quebec. It is a 3 day event.

1982 – (Travis John) TJ Klune is an American author of fantasy and romantic fiction featuring gay and LGBTQ+ characters. His fantasy novel, The House in the Cerulean Sea, is a New York Times best seller and winner of the 2021 Alex and Mythopoeic Awards. Klune has spoken about how his asexuality influences his writing. His novel Into This River I Drown won the Lambda Literary Award for Best Gay Romance in 2014.

Klune's love of writing began as a child in the 1980s, where he would write fan fiction about his favorite action-adventure video game Metroid. Later in his childhood, he began writing original stories. His teachers would always encourage his work, saying they look forward to seeing his writing in bookstores one day.

Klune's first book, Bear, Otter and the Kid, was published in 2011. Due to the prevalence of pen names in M/M romantic fiction, he wrote under the pseudonym TJ Klune. His motivation for this first book came from a realization of the poor, often offensive stereotypes of queer characters within stories. He wanted to be able to write a novel that had an accurate representation of queer relationships, that were not stereotypical, instead were seen as relatable and positive. Amazon noted Bear, Otter and the Kid as one of the top LGBTQ+ books of 2011.

In 2013, he wrote a magical realist novel, Into This River I Drown, while processing the death of his father. A supernatural tale about grief and love in a small town, it won the 2014 Lambda Literary Award for Best Gay Romance. Other novels written by Klune include the queer werewolf series Green Creek, the queer superhero series The Extraordinaries, the contemporary romance How to be a Normal Person and the comedic fantasy series Tales from Verania.

In 2013, Klune proposed to author Eric Arvin at the GayRomLit Conference in Atlanta, Georgia. The two had met for the first time in person one year earlier at the 2012 GayRomLit Conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Arvin endured many years of health struggles and passed away on December 12, 2016.

1996 – On this date the Supreme Court of the United States ruled 6-3 that Colorado's Amendment 2 was unconstitutional. In the case of "Romer V. Evans" the court ruled that "Amendment 2," that would have prevented any city, town or county in the state of Colorado from taking any legislative, executive, or judicial action to protect the rights of gays and Lesbians, was unconstitutional. It was a significant step forward for gay rights.

A few interesting points in the story: The legal case was named for Richard Evans, a gay man who was challenging the law, and Roy Romer, who was governor of the state of Colorado at the time of its passage by statewide ballot initiative. By legal custom, the governor's name is attached to a case like this, which was ironic because Governor Romer had not only opposed passage of the anti-gay initiative, he had publicly spoken out for gay rights and was one of the first governors in the country to address a state-wide Pride rally.

The passage of Amendment 2 caused a boycott of Colorado tourism and products by many gay rights groups in the rest of the country. This was also ironic as the very existence of the law was proof that many municipalities in Colorado had actually passed protections for gay people. The most populous areas of Colorado (Denver, Boulder and Aspen) had passed protections. The boycott of the skiing industry had the effect of punishing the very cities that had protected Gays in the housing and employment areas.

An added irony was the boycott by gay groups and newspapers in cities and regions of the country which themselves had far less or no protections for gay people (Dallas, Charlotte and Nashville for example). These communities located in much more gay hostile areas of the country were boycotting municipalities that did actually have protections on the book.

Amendment 2 had been passed by the more rural and conservative parts of the state but the boycott had the effect of punishing the more liberal and gay affirming areas that had made Amendment 2 necessary (in the minds of anti-gay activists). Given the complexity of the case, the entire process brought the effectiveness of boycotts under greater scrutiny in the Gay press. In any case there was much rejoicing of the Supreme Court's decision. It would factor in heavily in the eventual overturning of Sodomy laws across the land in the Lawrence v. Texas case.

2008 – On this date Portland, Oregon, voters elect openly gay Commissioner Sam Adams as their new mayor, making Portland the largest American city ever to be helmed by an out Gay person..... until 2009 , when Houston, (which ranks at #4) elected its new mayor.

[{(o)}]|[{(o)}]|[{(o)}]|[{(o)}]| [{(o)}]|[{(o)}]

Gay Wisdom

Sonnets by William Shakespeare