November 27

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c. 111 A.D – Antinous born (d.130 A.D.); If there was an All Time Beautiful Men contest, this man would have been a contender if he didn't just walk away with the cup. And like most beauties, be married well.

Antinous was a famous beauty of the ancient world who became the beloved of the emperor Hadrian. He may have been a male prostitute when Hadrian met him, but his origins are obscure. All that is known is that Hadrian was immediately and utterly smitten with the beautiful 15-year-old. From that time on, Antinous was with the emperor constantly until a journey to Egypt where he was drowned in the Nile. Some say that Antinous, knowing that a prophecy had declared the death of Hadrian unless a living sacrifice were to be offered in his place, died so that his lover might live. Others believe that Antinous, growing into young manhood, was ashamed of playing mistress to the emperor.

The most poignant story is that the boy killed himself because he couldn't bear the idea of growing old. What we know for certain is that Hadrian's grief at the death of Antinous was uncontained and nothing short of monumental. He deified him and founded the city of Antinopolis in Egypt in his honor (and many other Antinopolises elsewhere in the Roman world) and renamed the boy's birthplace Antinopolis as well. A cult was inaugurated in his honor. Coins were minted with his likeness and numerous busts and shatteringly beautiful statues were erected to commemorate the beauty of this youth and the love the emperor felt for him.

After deification, Antinous was associated with and depicted as the Egyptian god Osiris, associated with the rebirth of the Nile. Antinous was also often depicted as the Roman Bacchus, a god related to fertility. Antinous is one of the best-preserved faces from the ancient world. Many busts, gems and coins represent Antinous as the ideal type of youthful beauty.

1700 – A new law concerning sodomy was passed by the Pennsylvania assembly. If committed by a white man, sodomy was punishable by life in prison and, at the discretion of the judge, a whipping every three months for the first year. If married, the man was castrated and his wife was granted a divorce. If committed by a black man, the punishment for sodomy was death.

1883 – The English Uranian poet Edmund John was born on this date (d.1917). Poet John came of age in the decade after the trial of Oscar Wilde and illustrates the fact that far from disappearing off the face of the globe, homosexuality simply retreated a bit further underground. A letter to one of John's young friends provides us with a very good idea of the "tone" of Gay life in Edwardian England:
"I have received your adorable illustrated letter this morning and loved it so much I immediately made an altar before it, lit by amber candles in copper candlsticks, burnt incense before it and kissed its extreme beautifulness."

Much of his work was condemned by critics for being overly decadent and unfashionable. He fought in the First World War, but was invalided out in 1916 and died at Taormina, in Sicily, a year later. His books include The Flute of Sardonyx: Poems (1913), The Wind in the Temple: Poems (1915), and Symphonie Symbolique (1919).

Following what was almost a fashion in the first two decades of the century, the objects of the emotion in many of the poems are young boys but, unlike most of the 'Uranian' poets, John's sincerity gives the poems a white-hot purity.

1922 – Born: James Lord (d.2009), expatriate British writer in France, Giacometti scholar and art historian.

Lord was born to Albert Lord, a New York stock broker and Louise Bennett . He attended Wesleyan University, but a self-admitted poor student, he enlisted in the United States army after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. His facility with French qualified him for Military Intelligence Service after the invasion of Normandy; he was stationed in France.

While there, Lord searched out Pablo Picasso in 1944 locating him in his studio on the Rue des Grands-Augustins. Following the war, Lord left Wesleyan without graduating, returning to Paris in 1947, perhaps because his homosexuality might be better accepted there.

Despite his sexual proclivities, he entered into an affair with Picasso's mistress, Dora Maar after she and the artist were split.

He kept meticulous journals of the conversations that he had with nearly all the litterati of post-war Paris. His intention was to become a writer, but excessive socializing kept him from production.

Lord met the Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti in 1952 at the Café aux Deux Magots, and frequently visited his studio in Montparnasse. The two remained friends throughout the artist's life.

After two unsuccessful novels, Lord was asked to write a book on Giacometti by the Museum of Modern Art to accompany the 1965 retrospective exhibition on the artist.

A Giacometti Portrait was hailed a success and is today valued as a source for information and insight on the artist. In 1970 Lord began a full-length treatment of the scultpor, completed only in 1985 and published as Giacometti: A Biography. The book's frank description of Giacometti's sadistic tendencies and mental problems drew the ire of many of the sculptor's friends, who signed a public protest letter against the book.

Lord set out to write a series of memoirs based upon personalisties. Picasso and Dora: A Personal Memoir appeared in 1993 followed by Six Exceptional Women the following year and Some Remarkable Men in 1996. A Gift for Admiration was published in 1998.

He adopted his life-companion, Gilles Foy-Lord, officially as his son. While working on a book of his experiences as a gay man in the army, My Queer War, he suffered a heart attack at his home in Paris and died at age 86.

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Lord's style is that of a raconteur and witness to the event itself. All of his writing weaves autobiography, reportage, and gossip. HIs portraits of his experiences with Gertrude Stein, Jean Cocteau, Balthus, Peggy Guggenheim and the art historian Douglas Cooper provide rich documentary evidence on these personalities.

1927 – Roger Lockyer (d.2017) was an English historian, academic, and writer. He was the author of several studies of Britain and Europe in the early modern period, and of a magisterial biography of George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham; his Tudor and Stuart Britain, first published in 1964, went into three editions and remains a standard textbook on the period.

Roger Walter Lockyer was born in London on November 27 1927, and in an interview to mark the 50th anniversary of the Sexual Offences Act 1967, said that he could not remember "not knowing" he was gay. He had never had to "come out" as people "took it for granted I was gay".

He was educated at King's College School, Wimbledon, winning a scholarship to read History at Pembroke College, Cambridge. He went up in 1948 after National Service in the Navy, where "it was a question of whether you weren't gay".

After graduating from Cambridge, Lockyer spent a year in Paris teaching at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, followed by two more years as head of History at Haileybury and Imperial Service College, then as an editor of the Blue Guides, before being appointed head of History at Lancing College in 1954.

In 1961 he was appointed a lecturer at Royal Holloway College, University of London, where he would spend the rest of his career, retiring as a Reader in History in 1984.

In his notably sympathetic biography, Buckingham: The Life and Political Career of George Villiers, First Duke of Buckingham, 1592-1628 (1981), Lockyer was the first to claim that the Duke's relationship with King James I was sexual, based on a letter to the King in which Buckingham admits asking himself "whether you loved me now … better than at the time which I shall never forget at Farnham [Farnham Castle, where the pair had stayed in August 1615] where the bed's head could not be found between the master and his dog". The precise nature of their relationship, however, remains a matter of historical debate.

Before the Sexual Offences Act 1967 partially decriminalised homosexual relationships, men convicted of being in a same-sex relationship risked jail, loss of livelihoods – or worse. As a result Lockyer had to keep his private life completely separate from his professional life.

Yet there was a thriving, semi-secret world of gay clubs and pubs, and in his evenings off Lockyer became a regular frequenter of such establishments as the Coleherne in Earl's Court, the Salisbury on St Martin's Lane and the Rockingham, behind Leicester Square, otherwise known as "the gentlemen buggers' club".

A frequent companion on these jaunts was Jeremy Wolfenden, the gay son of Lord Wolfenden, author of the 1957 report which recommended decriminalising homosexuality.

On one outing to the Rockingham, where patrons had to give their name at the door, Lockyer asked his companion whether he was not worried about admitting his identity: "He said: 'Oh don't worry my dear I always give your name.' So I'm recorded as having a much busier social life when it was in fact Jeremy capering about town while his father made these important recommendations to the government about 'queers'."

Lockyer made history himself in 2005, when he and his partner of 39 years, Percy Steven, became one of the first couples to enter into the new civil partnership. Then in 2014, when same-sex marriage became legal, they returned to Westminster Register Office to be one of the first couples to benefit from the new law.

1963 – John Aravosis is an American Democratic political consultant, writer, gay activist and blogger. Aravosis, an attorney who lives in Washington, D.C., is the founder of AMERICAblog and a co-founder of StopDrLaura.com.

Aravosis is a lawyer and worked on Capitol Hill as a foreign policy adviser for Ted Stevens, a Republican senator in the late 1980s and early 1990s before becoming a Democrat. He subsequently worked at the World Bank, the Children's Defense Fund, and then started his own political Internet consulting business in 1997 and AMERICAblog, a liberal news blog dealing in politics (because, according to its masthead, "a great nation deserves the truth"), in 2004. He has also written as a stringer for The Economist and Radar. He has a joint law degree and master's degree in foreign service from Georgetown, where he studied under former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.

In 1998, Aravosis defended U.S. sailor Timothy R. McVeigh (not to be confused with the terrorist Timothy McVeigh), who was being kicked out of the military because he had engaged in homosexual activity. Nine days before McVeigh was to be discharged, Aravosis came to his defense and launched an online campaign that got McVeigh and his case on ABC News' World News Tonight, Time, Newsweek and beyond. The publicity Aravosis generated for McVeigh in this pro bono campaign got a lawyer interested in helping the sailor, and he won his case against the military and was able to get an honorable discharge and a reportedly large settlement from AOL where his profile had said he was gay.

In 2000, Aravosis and a small group of friends launched StopDrLaura.com, the first-ever successful boycott of a TV show. StopDrLaura, a one-year long pro bono campaign, got 170 of Dr. Laura Schlessinger's television advertisers to pull their endorsements after Dr. Laura called gays and lesbians "biological errors", compared gay men to pedophiles, and routinely denigrated women and abortion.

Aravosis outed Jeff Gannon as "a conservative operative and as an alleged male prostitute" while Gannon (real name James Guckert) was working as a White House reporter for the Talon News.

In response to complaints from the religious groups, Microsoft pulled its support for a Washington state gay rights bill and then said it was rethinking its support for civil rights nationwide. Aravosis launched a campaign to highlight Microsoft's change of heart.

Aravosis took on the Ford Motor Company when, in response to a boycott from a conservative organization, Ford was pulling its support for gay advertising and gay organizations. Ford maintained that it was re-structuring its advertising for business reasons unrelated to any social agenda, and, indeed, Ford continued to buy advertising space in gay media for its Volvo division. Aravosis launched a campaign on his blog to get Ford to recommit itself to the gay market. Even though Volvo eventually pulled its advertisements, Ford never left the gay market.

1964 – David Rakoff (d.2012) was a Canadian-born writer based in New York City who was noted for his humorous, sometimes autobiographical non-fiction essays. Rakoff was an essayist, journalist, and actor, and a regular contributor to WBEZ's This American Life.

Rakoff described himself as a "New York writer" who also happened to be a "Canadian writer", a "mega Jewish writer", a "gay writer" and an "East Asian Studies major who has forgotten most of his Japanese" writer.

He said that he only pursued acting half-heartedly … partly because of the stereotyping that unimaginative casting agents engage in. Rakoff has characterised most of the roles that he auditioned for as "Fudgy McPacker" or "Jewy McHebrew" (to which he later added "Classy McSophisticate"). Fudgy McPacker is a stereotypically gay character, who is either supercilious or the loveable queen, and Jewy McHebrew is the prototypical Jewish part, involving a careworn, inquiring, furrowed browed, bookish type. Rakoff said that he has continued with his theatre work, since such acting stereotypes are not so prevalent in stage work, because audiences are more sophisticated. He has also noted that, as a writer, being gay and being Jewish does not limit his readership or the subjects he can write about in the way it limits his acting roles.

Rakoff can be seen in the Academy Award winning short film The New Tenants (2009). In the film he plays Frank, half of a gay couple who move into an apartment that was vacated unexpectedly. The film begins with Rakoff delivering a bitter, humorous but pessimistic monologue on life and death. Rakoff also adapted the screenplay for the film.

Rakoff died of cancer in Manhattan on August 9, 2012.

1964 – Adam Shankman is an American film director, producer, dancer, actor, and choreographer. He has been a judge on the television program So You Think You Can Dance since Season 3. He began his professional career in musical theater, and was a dancer in music videos for Paula Abdul and Janet Jackson. Shankman has choreographed numerous films as well as one of the Spice Girls' tours. He has directed several feature-length films, including A Walk to Remember, Bringing Down the House, and the 2007 remake of Hairspray. Shankman is openly gay.

Shankman was born in Los Angeles, California to an upper middle class family. He has said that he had a "traditional Jewish upbringing" in Brentwood. He attended The Juilliard School, but dropped out to dance in musical theater.

Prior to directing Hairspray, Shankman was known in Hollywood primarily as a script doctor. His trademarks in his films often features a singing/dancing sequence and a character getting sent to do community service. "I've done so many things I'm not super-proud of," he admitted in an interview with the Los Angeles Times. In August 2008, Box office Mojo reported that Hairspray had become the fourth-largest grossing American movie musical within the previous 30 years. He has also directed the 2012 film adaptation of the Broadway musical Rock of Ages for New Line Cinema. Shankman has also directed and choreographed multiple episodes of Fox's Glee.

1967 – On this date Craig Rodwell opened Oscar Wilde Bookshop, the world's first Gay and Lesbian bookstore, in Greenwich Village, New York City. The small bookstore remained open over 40 years until it closed in 2009.

1978 – The Moscone-Milk assassinations were the killings of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk, who were shot and killed in San Francisco City Hall by former Supervisor Dan White on November 27, 1978. White was angry that Moscone had refused to re-appoint him to his seat on the Board of Supervisors, which White had just resigned, and that Milk had lobbied heavily against his re-appointment. Because Milk was openly gay, some consider his murder a hate crime. These events helped bring national notice to then-Board President Dianne Feinstein, who became mayor of San Francisco and eventually U.S. Senator for California.

White was subsequently convicted of voluntary manslaughter, rather than of first degree murder. The verdict sparked the "White Night riots" in San Francisco, and led to the state of California abolishing the diminished capacity criminal defense. It also led to the urban legend of the "Twinkie defense", as many media reports had incorrectly described the defense as having attributed White's diminished capacity to the effects of sugar-laden junk food. White committed suicide in 1985, a little more than a year after his release from prison.

1978 – Formation of first Parents of Gays group in Canada.

1998 – Former Zimbabwean President Canaan Banana was convicted of eleven counts of sodomy and indecent assault.