October 30

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Peisistratus rides into Athens with Athene

605 BC – On this date the Athenian benevolent tyrant Peisistratus was born (d.527 BC). Peisistratos was the son of a philosopher and teacher called Hippocrates, and was named for the Peisistratos in the Odyssey. He lowered taxes and increased Athens' economy.

According to Plutarch he was the eromenos (Greek for "young lover") of the Athenian lawgiver Solon. He assisted Solon in his endeavors, and fought bravely in the battle of Salamis.

When Solon left Athens, Peisistratos became leader of the party of the Highlands (poor, rural people) in 565 BC. Peisistratos used a clever scheme, calling for bodyguards after he pretended to be attacked. Those bodyguards were composed of the people of the Highlands who had entered Athens. In 561 BC he seized the Acropolis with this group of bodyguards, becoming ruler. His rule did not last - he was driven out by Lycurgis, Megacles and others from the party of the Coast within the year. He returned 10 years later (in legend, with Athene at his side), regained power and reigned for 23 years until his death in 527 BC.

During his reign, many temples were built and he encouraged poets and artists by welcoming them into his court. According to a story first mentioned by the Latin author Cicero, Peisistratus ordered the writing down of the Iliad and Odyssey of Homer, which had previously been transmitted orally.

1853 – The French painter, sculptor, and designer of the Belle Époque Louise Abbéma was born (d.1927). She died in Paris. She began painting in her early teens, and first received recognition for her work at age 23 when she painted a portrait of Sarah Bernhardt, her life-long friend and, many believe, her lover.

She went on to paint portraits of other contemporary notables, and also painted panels and murals which adorned the Paris Town Hall, the Paris Opera House, numerous theatres including the "Theatre Sarah Bernhardt", and the "Palace of the Colonial Governor" at Dakar, Senegal. She was a regular exhibitor at the Paris Salon, where she received an honorable mention for her panels in 1881. Abbéma was also among the female artists whose works were exhibited in the Women's Building at the 1893 World Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

Abbéma specialized in oil portraits and watercolors, and many of her works showed the influence from Chinese and Japanese painters. She frequently depicted flowers in her works. Among her best known works are The Seasons, April Morning, Place de la Concorde, Among the Flowers, Winter, and portraits of actress Jeanne Samary, Emperor Dom Pedro II of Brazil, Ferdinand de Lesseps, and Charles Garnier.

Abbéma was also an accomplished printmaker, sculptor, and designer, as well as a writer who made regular contributions to the journals Gazette des Beaux-Arts and L'Art.

Among the many honors conferred upon Abbéma was nomination as "Official Painter of the Third Republic." She was also awarded a bronze medal at the 1900 Exposition Universelle and in 1906 made a Chevalier of the Order of the Legion d'Honneur. Abbéma died in Paris in 1927. At the end of the 20th century, as contributions by women to the arts in past centuries received more critical and historical attention, her works have enjoyed a renewed popularity.

1871 – Jules Siber, born in Dettelbach, Lower Franconia, Germany, was a German jurist, writer, composer and violinist; he celebrated worldwide success as a "German Paganini"and "oddball on the violin".

Siber was the son of the physician Oskar Michael Siber. In Würzburg, studied law and music at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München earned a Dr. jur. PhD. As a musician he was a student of the violinist Felix Berber and the composer Max Reger.

At the turn of the century he appeared publicly as a violinist for the first time under the stage name Jules Siber. and quickly made a world career. He went on Oriental tours, played in Bucharest in 1908 in front of Prime Minister Dimitrie Sturdza and Minister Petre S. Aurelian and was even performed in front of the Romanian King Charles I in 1909. Argentine President José Figueroa Alcorta also invited him to a matinee. He played in front of the royal houses of the world and sent whole crowds into ecstasy. But Siber did not only make a name for himself as a violin virtuoso. He also became known as a composer of popular pieces such as the Witch Dance.

As early as 1915 he was a member of the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, which had been campaigning for the deletion of Paragraph 175 and for the "third gender" since 1897. His homosexuality was also referred to in his book Seelenwanderung (1914). Throughout his life, Siber showed himself to be "free-thinking" and "sometimes expressed himself in an original and drastic way".

1882 – Johannes Holzmann (d.1914) was a German anarchist writer and activist who generally went by the pseudonym Senna Hoy.

Holzmann, born in Tuchel, Prussia (now Tuchola, Poland), hailed from a bourgeois Jewish family. Moving to Berlin, he became a teacher of religion at first. Like many intellectuals around the turn of the century, he felt oppressed by the restrictive morals then reigning German society. He quit teaching in 1902 and founded the League for Human Rights (Bund für Menschenrecht, in German) in 1903.

In 1904, he published a booklet entitled "Das dritte Geschlecht" ("The Third Gender"). In it, he attacked homophobia, laying most of the blame on religion. Above all, the text was intended to be educational and covered evolution, biology and issues then facing homosexuals.

From 1904 to 1905, Holzmann edited the journal Der Kampf: Zeitschrift für gesunden Menschenverstand (The Struggle: Journal for Common Sense). Though it was not published by any particular organization, the journal was anarchist in outlook. In addition to fictional stories, Der Kampf published articles on various topics, including many about homosexuality. Among its writers were Else Lasker-Schüler, Peter Hille, and Erich Mühsam and, at its best, it had a circulation of up to 10,000.

During this time, Holzmann wrote an article entitled "Die Homosexualität als Kulturbewegung" ("Homosexuality as a Cultural Movement"). He argued that the right to privacy entailed that "no one has the right to intrude in the private matters of another, to meddle in another's personal views and orientations, and that ultimately it is no one's business what two freely consenting adults do in their homes." He attacked Paragraph 175 of the German criminal code which criminalized homosexual acts.

To him, the struggle against the prohibition of homosexual acts was part of a larger struggle for emancipation. He disagreed with the mainstream socialist movement, namely the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), that viewed the repeal of Paragraph 175 as a minor issue. He also opposed the SPD's tactic of forcefully outing gays, such as the steel magnate Friedrich Alfred Krupp, in order to bring about the repeal of Paragraph 175. He called this tactic an "indecent weapon", saying that anyone who practices it "is willing to remove ground under his own feet by practicing the very injustice that he opposes". He also disagreed with many other German gay rights activists such as Adolf Brand who did not see their struggle as part of a wider movement.

He views caused him to be monitored by the police. Annoyed by this, he wrote a letter to the chief of the Berlin police, threatening to punch the next person he caught spying on him in the face. For this, he was sentenced to four months in prison, but he decided to flee rather than serve the sentence.

Once in Zurich, he worked for a newspaper called Der Weckruf (The Wake-up Call). He was arrested once more and deported. He sneaked back into Switzerland. He tried to stay in hiding by faking his own death. He wrote an obituary for himself claiming that he had been killed in the course of a prisoners' escape. After this was exposed, he was disgraced, even within the anarchist scene. Therefore, he decided to leave Zurich. After spending a couple of months in Paris, he decided to move to Russia.

He opted for Russia, having reported on the 1905 Russian Revolution in Der Kampf, because he thought Europe's future depended on the outcome of revolutionary developments in that country. He joined an anarchist federation in Poland, then part of the Russian Empire. He assisted that organization for several weeks, robbing rich merchants to fund the group's activities. In June 1907, he was caught and sentenced to fifteen years of hard labor. Having struggled for his release for years, his supporters finally managed to convince the Russian authorities to let him go. However, the German authorities refused to let him back into the country, so he was forced to remain incarcerated in Russia. Meanwhile, Holzmann's health deteriorated. He suffered from malnutrition and typhus and died on April 28, 1914.

1930 – The Oscar-winning Spanish-born Cuban cinematographer Néstor Almendros, was born on this date (d.1992). Born in Barcelona, Spain, Almendros moved to Cuba at age 18 to join his exiled anti-Franco father. In Havana, he founded a cinema club and wrote film reviews. Then he went on to study in Rome at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia. He directed six shorts in Cuba and two in New York. After the 1959 Cuban Revolution, he returned and made several documentaries for the Castro regime. But after two of his shorts (Gente En La Playa and La Tumba Francesa) were banned, he moved to Paris. There he became the favorite of Éric Rohmer and François Truffaut. In 1978, he started his Hollywood career, and won the Academy Award for Best Cinematography for the film Days of Heaven. Four years later he was nominated again by the Academy for his work on Sophie's Choice.

In his later years, Almendros co-directed two documentaries about the human rights situation in Cuba: Mauvaise Conduite (about the persecution of Gay people) and Nobody Listened (about the arrest, imprisonment, and torture of former comrades of Fidel Castro). He shot several prestigious advertisements for Giorgio Armani and Calvin Klein.

In 1992, Néstor Almendros died of AIDS in New York at age 61. Human Rights Watch International has named an award after him, given every year at the HRWI film festival.

1930 – Timothy Findley (d.2002) was a Canadian novelist and playwright. He was also informally known by the nickname Tiff or Tiffy, an acronym of his initials.

Findley was born in Toronto, Ontario,. He was raised in the upper class Rosedale district of the city, attending boarding school at St. Andrew's College (although leaving during grade 10 for health reasons). He pursued a career in the arts, studying dance and acting, and had significant success as an actor before turning to writing. He was part of the original Stratford Festival company in the 1950s, acting alongside Alec Guinness, and appeared in the first production of Thornton Wilder's The Matchmaker at the Edinburgh Festival. He also played Peter Pupkin in Sunshine Sketches, the CBC Television adaptation of Stephen Leacock's Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town.

Though Findley had declared his homosexuality as a teenager, he married actress/photographer Janet Reid in 1959, but the union lasted only three months and was dissolved by divorce or annulment two years later. Eventually he became the domestic partner of writer William Whitehead, whom he met in 1962, either while working as an arts reporter for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation or while appearing in a theatre production (sources differ). Findley and Whitehead also collaborated on several documentary projects in the 1970s including the television documentaries Dieppe 1942 and The National Dream: Building the Impossible Railway.

Through Wilder, Findley became a close friend of actress Ruth Gordon, whose work as a screenwriter and playwright inspired Findley to consider writing as well. After Findley published his first short story in the Tamarack Review, Gordon encouraged him to pursue writing more actively, and he eventually left acting in the 1960s.

Findley's first two novels, The Last of the Crazy People (1967) and The Butterfly Plague (1969), were originally published in Britain and the United States after having been rejected by Canadian publishers. Findley's third novel, The Wars, was published to great acclaim in 1977 and went on to win the Governor General's Award for fiction. It was adapted for film in 1981.

He publicly mentioned his homosexuality, passingly and perhaps for the first time, on a broadcast of the programme The Shulman File in the 1970s, taking flabbergasted host Morton Shulman completely by surprise. Shulman was a man who did not rattle easily.

Timothy Findley received a Governor General's Award, the Canadian Authors Association Award, an ACTRA Award, the Order of Ontario, the Ontario Trillium Award, and in 1985 he was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada. He was a founding member and chair of the Writers' Union of Canada, and a president of the Canadian chapter of PEN International.

Findley and Whitehead resided at Stone Orchard, a farm near Cannington, Ontario, and in the south of France. In the final years of Findley's life, declining health led him to move his Canadian residence to Stratford, Ontario, and Stone Orchard was purchased by Canadian dancer Rex Harrington (see below).

1931 – Hubert Kennedy is an American author and mathematician.

Kennedy was born in Florida and studied mathematics at several universities. From 1961 he was professor of mathematics, with research interest in the history of mathematics, at Providence College (Rhode Island), He spent three sabbatical years doing research in Italy and Germany.

Kennedy came out as gay on the cover of the magazine The Cowl, and, along with Eric Gordon, was part of the first Gay Pride parade in Providence, Rhode Island, which was held on June 26, 1976.

In 1986 Kennedy moved to San Francisco, where he continued his historical research on the beginnings of the gay movement in Germany. Since 2003 he has been in a home for assisted living in Concord, California.

1942 – The Nebraska Supreme Court rules that fellatio is outlawed by the state's law prohibiting "carnal copulation in any opening of the body, except sexual parts."

1944 – The Arizona Supreme Court upholds the sodomy conviction of a man over his claims of privacy rights, the first to be raised in the United States.

1951 – P. Craig Russell is an American comics artist, writer, and illustrator. His work has won multiple Harvey and Eisner Awards. Russell was the first mainstream comic book creator to come out as openly gay.

Philip Craig Russell was born in Wellsville, Ohio. He entered the comics industry in 1972 as an assistant to Dan Adkins. Russell first became well known with his 11-issue Amazing Adventures run and subsequent graphic novel featuring Killraven, hero of a future version of H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds, collaborating with writer Don McGregor. Comics historian Peter Sanderson wrote that, "McGregor's finest artistic collaborator on the series was P. Craig Russell, whose sensitive, elaborate artwork, evocative of Art Nouveau illustration, gave the landscape of Killraven's America a nostalgic, pastoral feel, and the Martian architecture the look of futuristic castles." At DC Comics, Russell inked Batman stories in Batman Family and Detective Comics over the pencils of Michael Golden and Jim Starlin respectively.

Withdrawing for a while from mainstream comics, Russell produced several experimental strips, many of which were later published in his Night Music series and Epic Illustrated.

In 1984, Russell began Night Music, an ongoing anthology series for Eclipse Comics featuring some of his most heralded literary and operatic adaptations. Russell has previously used the same title for a black and white collection of the earliest of these works, published by Eclipse Comics. Included in this series was "The King's Ankus," adapted from Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book. Russell had previously inked several Jungle Book adaptations drawn by Gil Kane, published in Marvel Fanfare #8-11 (May-Nov. 1983). The series included "Pelleas & Melisande," adapted from Maurice Maeterlinck's play of the same name which had been turned into an opera by Claude Debussy, and "Salome" adapted from Oscar Wilde's play of the same name which was the basis for Richard Strauss's opera. Opera would continue to resurface in Russell's work, including a four-part adaptation of The Magic Flute, taken from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's opera.

Hysén speaks at Stockholm Pride

1959 – Glenn Hysén, born in Gothenburg, Sweden, is a football manager and former player who played for leading Dutch, Italian and English clubs and won 68 caps for Sweden. He is also a reality television star, coach, and football commentator.

Hysén is the father of Tobias Hysén of IFK Göteborg, Alexander Hysén of GIF Sundsvall, and Anton Hysén of Utsiktens BK.

At Frankfurt Airport in 2001, Hysén attacked a man who had groped him while in the public restroom. In 2007, Hysén spoke at Stockholm Pride, the largest gay pride festival in the Nordic region. Many people from the gay community were surprised due to the earlier incident. At the Stockholm Pride, he delivered a speech denouncing sports homophobia and laid to rest his 2001 airport incident.

He stated that,

In the same speech he asked "How easy would it be for a sixteen-year-old boy who plays football to come out as gay to his team mates?" In March 2011, his youngest son, Anton Hysén, a professional footballer himself, came out of the closet to the media.

1953 – Arthur Dong, born in San Francisco, California, is an American documentary filmmaker. His work combines the art of the visual medium with an investigation of social issues, examining topics such as Asian American history and identity, and gay oppression. He received a BA (in film) from San Francisco State University in 1982 and completed the Director's Fellowship program at American Film Institute Center for Advanced Film Studies in 1985.

He is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences where he served on the Board of Governors from 2002-2006 (Documentary Branch). Currently he serves on National Film Preservation Board. He is also a member of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, and has served on the Film Independent (formerly IFP/West) Board of Directors from 2000-2003.

Dong was an associate producer for KGO-TV in San Francisco from 1981–1982 and a producer at KCET in Los Angeles from 1991–1992 (producing for Life & Times). In 1982, he founded DeepFocus Productions, where he serves as producer, director and writer. He has received a nomination for an Academy Award for Documentary Short Subject in 1984 for Sewing Woman, a Peabody Award in 1995 for Coming Out Under Fire, three Sundance Film Festival Awards, and five Emmy nominations.

His 2007 documentary Hollywood Chinese was broadcast on the PBS series American Masters, on May 27, 2009.

Rex Harrington with partner Robert Hope

1962 – Rex Harrington, born in Peterborough, Ontario, is a Canadian ballet dancer. In 2000, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada. In 2005, he was inducted into Canada's Walk of Fame. In 2006, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by York University and was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He is currently Artist-in-Residence at the National Ballet of Canada, and is a Board member of the Dancer Transition Resource Centre.

Harrington studied at Canada's National Ballet School. He joined the National Ballet of Canada in 1983 and became a principal dancer in 1988. He has also performed with such companies as La Scala Theatre Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, Royal Winnipeg Ballet, and Stuttgart Ballet.

Harrington's classical roles include Romeo in Romeo and Juliet (ballet), Basilio in Don Quixote (ballet), Kastchei in The Firebird, Eugene Onegin in Onegin (ballet), and Apollo in Balanchine's Apollo (ballet). James Kudelka created several roles on Harrington, including Rothbart in Swan Lake(1999), Peter/The Nutcracker in The Nutcracker (1995), and the central role in The Four Seasons(1997). Choreographer Glen Tetley also created the roles of Lewis Carroll in Alice(1992) and The Young Gentleman in La Ronde(1988) on Harrington. Harrington retired from the stage in 2004, although he came out of retirement to dance the role of Prince Gremin in the National Ballet of Canada's 2010 production of Onegin (ballet).

Harrington has appeared in Norman Jewison's "The January Man", as well as the film adaptation of "The Four Seasons", for which Rex won a Gemini Award in 2000. Harrington's television credits include CBC specials "Karen Kain: Dancing in the Moment", and "Wild Hearts in Strange Times" featuring dance artist Margie Gillis. In 2002, Harrington made his musical theatre debut in "Robin Hood" at Toronto's Winter Garden Theatre. Harrington has also been a recurring guest judge on So You Think You Can Dance Canada since Season 1.

In 2010, Harrington and his partner Robert Hope announced they intended to marry. Apparently they never got around to it, because in 2014 they appeared as themselves, "an engaged couple," on the The Amazing Race Canada.

Solomon (R) with John Habich

1963 – Andrew Solomon is a writer on politics, culture and psychology who lives in New York and London. He has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, Artforum, Travel and Leisure, and other publications on a range of subjects, including depression, Soviet artists, the cultural rebirth of Afghanistan, Libyan politics, and deaf politics. His book The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression won the 2001 National Book Award, was a finalist for the 2002 Pulitzer Prize, and was included in The Times of London's list of one hundred best books of the decade.

Born and raised in New York City, as an adult Solomon became a dual citizen of the United States and the United Kingdom. He and journalist John Habich were joined in an official civil partnership ceremony on June 30, 2007, at Althorp, the Spencer family estate and childhood home of Diana, Princess of Wales. The couple married again on July 19, 2009, the eighth anniversary of their meeting, in Connecticut, so that their marriage would be legally recognized in the state of New York.

In 2003, Solomon and longtime friend Blaine Smith decided to have a child together; their daughter, Carolyn Blaine Smith Solomon, was born in November 2008. Mother and child live in Texas. A son, George Charles Habich Solomon, was born in April 2009, and lives in New York with Solomon and Habich, his adoptive father. Mr. Habich is also biological father of two children, Oliver and Lucy, born to lesbian friends who live in Minneapolis. The development of this composite family was the subject of a feature article by Solomon published in Newsweek in January 2011.

Solomon is an activist and philanthropist in LGBT rights, mental health, education and the arts. He is founder of the Solomon Research Fellowships in LGBT Studies at Yale University and a member of the boards of directors of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and Trans Youth Family Allies. His articles on gay marriage have appeared in Newsweek, The Advocate, and Anderson Cooper 360.

1968 – The North Carolina Supreme Court overturns a sodomy conviction because the indictment didn't name the "victim."

In his maiden statement to Parliament, , Robertson alluded to his sexuality as a part, but not the whole, of his identity:

Robertson lives in Northland, Wellington, with his partner Alf, whom he met through playing rugby together for the Wellington-based Crazy Knights, New Zealand's first gay rugby team. After 10 years in a relationship, they held a civil union ceremony in January 2009.

1976 – The first gay civil rights group in Quebec, Association pour les droits de la communauté gaie du Québec(ADGQ), is formed.

1987 – A panel discussion on Gays and the constitution was held during the inauguration of the new Lesbian And Gay Studies Center at Yale University.

1991 – Danell Leyva is a Cuban-American former gymnast who competed for the United States. He is the 2012 Olympic individual all-around bronze medalist and 2016 Olympic parallel bars and horizontal bar silver medalist. He is also the 2011 US national all-around gold medalist and the 2011 world champion on the parallel bars.

In gymnastics, Leyva was a specialist on parallel bars and horizontal bar, having his own signature move (jam-dislocate-hop to undergrips) on the latter.

In 2013, Leyva signed a multi-year sponsorship agreement with Adidas Gymnastics. Fellow US Olympic Team members Jake Dalton, McKayla Maroney and Jordyn Wieber were also sponsored by Adidas.

After ending his career in gymnastics, Leyva began to pursue an acting and media career. Soon after the 2016 Olympics, he moved from Miami to Los Angeles to pursue this career and enrolled in acting classes. By mid-2017, Leyva had already filmed two television advertisements, appeared on a Nickelodeon show, and worked as a choreography consultant on Brooklyn Nine-Nine. He had also purchased a production company, which he named "Parallel Entertainment".

Leyva competed on American Ninja Warrior in 2019.

On October 11, 2020, for National Coming Out Day, Leyva revealed via Twitter that he identifies as bisexual and pansexual.

1992 – New Ways Ministry, a Mt. Rainier, Maryland group led by three Roman Catholic bishops, announced it would release a statement of disagreement with the Vatican's call for Gays and Lesbians to be barred from becoming adoptive or foster parents, teachers, coaches, or military personnel. 1,500 lay persons signed the statement.