September 27

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1601 – King Louis XIII of France born (d.1643) also Louis II of Navarre, called the Just (French: le Juste), ruled as King of France and Navarre from 1610 to 1643. There is no evidence as to whether or not Louis had lovers, but persistent rumors insinuated that the King may have been homosexual or bisexual. Tallemant des Reaux, in his Historiettes, gives quite explicit (but second hand) descriptions of what happened in the king's bed.

On November 9 1615, aged only 14, Louis XIII was married to a Hapsburg Princess, Anne of Austria (1601-66), daughter of King Philip III of Spain (1578-1621). This marriage followed a tradition of cementing military and political alliances between the Catholic powers of France and Spain with royal marriages. Their sexual relationship did not begin (other than the consummation of the wedding) until 1619 (when he was 18). The marriage, like many Bourbon-Habsburg relationships, was only briefly happy, and the King's duties often kept them apart. After 23 years of marriage and four miscarriages, Anne finally gave birth to a son in 1638.

1898 – Vincent Youmans (d.1946) was an American popular composer and Broadway producer. He is best remember for the musical No, No, Nanette and songs Tea for Two and I Want To Be Happy .

He came from privilege: Born in Manhattan, he was raised on Central Park West. Youmans served in WW1, & while in the Navy, he fell in love with men & musical theater. After the war, he went to work as a song-plugger for the prestigious TB Harms Company. Before phonographs, people purchased sheet music & sat around the piano at home & sing the hits of the day. It took talented pianists who could put a song over with panache to sell the sheet music songs to music stores. By performing the work of the great Tin Pan Alley songwriters of the day, Youmans grew familiar with the hit songs, & quickly decided he could create his own.

As a composer, he turned to other lyricists, & collaborated with the greatest: Oscar Hammerstein II, Irving Caesar, Leo Robin, Billy Rose, Mack Gordon, Buddy De Sylva & Gus Kahn. With Ira Gershwin, he wrote songs for Two Little Girls In Blue, which became a big Broadway smash in 1921.

A friend of George Gershwin, Vincent Youmans had much in common with his famous friend: they both collaborated with George's brother Ira, they both wrote pop songs & serious music, they were both closeted gay men, and they both, tragically, died young.

The greatest triumph of his life was No, No Nanette. With lyrics by Irving Caesar, it became one of the most successful musicals of all time, with simultaneous productions on Broadway & London during much of the 1920s.

Youmans wrote songs for movies, most famously for Flying Down To Rio, with Fred Astaire. But his heart was on Broadway, but unfortunate failures followed, shows which bombed and closed quickly, although the songs he wrote for them were always memorable.

Disheartened, he retired in 1934, after a career of only 13 years but continued to work in secret.

Youmans returned to Broadway in 1943 with a colossal and ambitious extravaganza called The Vincent Youmans' Ballet Revue, which merged classical and Latin music. A failure of unprecedented proportions, it lost more than $4 million dollars, and this fiasco might have been the reason for the secret songs in his hidden trunk , but its failure, along with a drinking problem & a life in the closet helped to bring on his final emotional & physical decline. He died alone & largely forgotten in 1946 of TB.

For decades after his death, a legend circulated that Youmans had left behind a trunk of unpublished songs, all notated in a secret code that only he could decipher. Music historians worked for years to determine if this was true. The trunk was discovered, and the trunk contained unheard melodies and scores, written in a mysteriously mirrored and intricate Da Vinci-like code.

1907 –  John Leonell, 23, and Tom McLaughlin, 28, commit suicide in an Ohio hotel room, locked in each other’s arms.

1937 – Robert Patrick, American playwright, born; Gay playwright, poet, lyricist, and short story writer and novelist. He was born Robert Patrick O'Connor in Kilgore, Texas.

During the 1960s, Mr. Patrick was a pioneer in the Off-Off-Broadway movement and Gay theater, with over 300 productions of his plays being held during this decade in Manhattan alone. He won the "Show Business" Award in 1969 for Joyce Dynel, Salvation Army, and Fog. That same year his play, Camera Obscura was produced on PBS, starring the lovely Marge Champion. A 1974 production of Haunted Host marked the first time Harvey Fierstein appeared onstage as a male. Years later, Fierstein included a recording of Patrick's monologue, Pouf Positive on his CD, "This Is Not Going to Be Pretty. Positive was also filmed by Dov Hechtman in 1989.

The year 1974 saw international success for the play Kennedy's Children, earning actress Shirley Knight a Tony award, and also the first season of Gay theatre in the U.K., to which Patrick contributed three plays. Patrick toured high schools and high school theater conventions nationwide for ten years on behalf of the International Thespians Society. My Cup Runneth Over (1976) was commissioned by Marlo Thomas, for herself and Lily Tomlin, but their projected special never happened. The play went on to become Mister Patrick's most produced. T-Shirts, first produced in 1979 and starring Jack Wrangler, was later chosen as the opening piece for William M. Hoffman's Gay Plays: A First Anthology. Blue is For Boys was the first play about Gay teenagers, and weekends in honor of the play were declared by Manhattan borough presidents in 1983 and 1986. The Trial of Socrates was the first Gay play presented by the City of New York. Hello Bob is an account of Mr. Patrick's experiences with the production of Kennedy's Children. It was the last play he directed before leaving New York.

Other works by Robert Patrick include Untold Decades (1988), a history of Gay male life in the U.S. told in a humorous vein, and Temple Slave, a "totally romanticized" novel about the early days of Off-Off Broadway and Gay theatre. He has also ghostwritten several screen- and television plays, contributed poems and reviews to Playbill, FirstHand, and Adult Video News, and had short stories included in numerous anthologies. He has also appeared in the documentary Resident Alien with Quentin Crisp and also in the videos O is for Orgy: The Sequel, and O Boys: Parties, Porn, and Politics, both produced by the O Boys Network.

 Added 2024

1942 — Lloyd Ziff, born on this date, (d.2024) was an American photographer and art director. He was the art director for Vanity Fair, House & Garden, and Rolling Stone.  He was not yet a celebrated art director in 1968 when he photographed an art school classmate, Robert Mapplethorpe, and his girlfriend, Patti Smith, in their tiny Brooklyn apartment. “I found them very beautiful,” Mr. Ziff said years later.

Ziff was born in Detroit, the only child of Frances (Maimes) Ziff and Max Ziff, an upholsterer. Lloyd’s father died when Lloyd was 5, and he and his mother moved to Los Angeles. Lloyd graduated from Beverly Hills High School, and in 1967 earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Pratt Institute in the New York City borough of Brooklyn.

Ziff spent the 1970s in California, between San Francisco, where he worked for Rolling Stone, and Los Angeles, where he had grown up and where he worked at Playgirl magazine and helped launch New West, New York magazine’s West Coast sister publication, in 1976. New West’s first cover sported a caricature of Gov. Jerry Brown by Robert Grossman, but Mr. Ziff’s real love was photography, and he brought a photographer’s eye to his art direction.

His first job was in the design department of McCall’s magazine. He stayed there for about a year before moving to CBS Records, where he designed album covers; he was nominated for a Grammy for the 1972 reissue “Bessie Smith: The Empress.”

In 1999, Mr. Ziff had a heart attack and quit art direction to focus on his photography. His work is in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the International Center of Photography in Manhattan, among other institutions.

He used a 35-millimeter Leica and, like Henri Cartier-Bresson, had a knack for capturing the “decisive moment.” His Los Angeles and New York City streetscapes are love stories to each city’s architecture and street life. His work grew more intimate as he grew older and turned his camera on his family and friends.

Mr. Ziff died at 81 on Aug. 1 at his home in Orient Point, N.Y., on Long Island’s North Fork. In addition to his husband, Stephen Kelemen, an artist whom he met in 1979 and married in 2008, Mr. Ziff is survived by his two stepchildren and four grandchildren.

1944 – Patrick Haggerty, lead singer of Lavender Country, was born and raised on a dairy farm near Port Angeles, Washington (d.2020). After college he joined the Peace Corps, but was discharged in 1966 for being gay. He later became an artist and an activist with the local chapter of the Gay Liberation Front after moving to Seattle to pursue graduate studies at the University of Washington.

His band, Lavender Country, was an American country music band formed in 1972, whose self-titled 1973 album is the first known gay-themed album in country music history.

Based in Seattle, Washington, the band consisted of lead singer and guitarist Patrick Haggerty, keyboardist Michael Carr, singer and fiddler Eve Morris and guitarist Robert Hammerstrom (the only heterosexual member).

The 1973 album was funded and released by Gay Community Social Services of Seattle, with funding and production assistance from activist Faygele Ben-Miriam. The band performed at the first Seattle Pride event in 1974, and performed at numerous pride and other LGBT events throughout Washington, Oregon and California until their dissolution in 1976.

In 2000, the Journal of Country Music published an article on gay country musicians, focusing in large part on Haggerty and Lavender Country. As a result of the renewed attention, the album was rereleased on CD in December 1999, and in 2000 the band released a five-song EP, Lavender Country Revisited, which featured three rerecordings of songs from the original album and two new songs. The band reunited briefly in 2000, performing the album in its entirety at Seattle's Broadway Performance Hall in January 2000, and at that year's Seattle Pride. In addition, the album was archived at the Country Music Hall of Fame by former Journal of Country Music editor Chris Dickinson.

Their song "Cryin' These Cocksucking Tears" was included in the 2012 compilation album Strong Love: Songs of Gay Liberation 1972-1981.

1951 – An Illinois appellate court upholds a psychopathic offender designation on a man with a history of consensual sodomy.

1956 – The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit votes 3-0 to reverse the assault conviction of a man for touching the undercover police who encouraged him.

1963 – Mark Elderkin is an American entrepreneur who cofounded Gay.com in 1994 with his partner Jeff O. Bennett. Elderkin served as President of PlanetOut Inc. when the company went public in 2004. He retired from the company in 2006. He founded Gay Ad Network in 2007.

Elderkin lives in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida with his partner Jeff and daughter Chloe.

David Secter

1965 – Winter Kept Us Warm, a gay-themed independent film by David Secter, gets its Its debut as the opening film of the Commonwealth Film Festival (Cardiff, 27 September 1965). It also becomes the first English Canadian film to be given a screening at the Cannes Film Festival. The title comes from the fifth line of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land.

The film starred John Labow as Doug and Henry Tarvainen as Peter, two students at the University of Toronto who develop a complex quasi-romantic relationship, and Joy Tepperman and Janet Amos as their girlfriends Bev and Sandra. The film's gay subtext was carefully coded by Secter, who wrote the film based on his own experience falling in love with a male fellow student but feared that a more explicitly gay film would not attract an audience.

Below is a 5 minute clip from Winter Kept Us Warm.

Although not widely remembered among the general public, Winter Kept Us Warm is considered a major milestone in the Canadian film industry as one of the first Canadian films ever to attract international attention. Secter made a second film, The Offering, in 1966, one of the first Canadian films to depict an interracial romance. Secter subsequently moved to the United States. He directed the low budget sex comedy Getting Together, but subsequently left the film industry.

In the 1990s, Secter's nephew Joel rented Getting Together, not knowing that his uncle had directed films. Seeing David's name in the credits, Joel contacted his uncle to talk about his film career. Those discussions ultimately led to Joel Secter's own debut as a filmmaker, the 2005 documentary The Best of Secter & the Rest of Secter. Notable figures who discussed Secter and Winter Kept Us Warm in the documentary included David Cronenberg, Michael Ondaatje, Philip Glass, Ed Mirvish and Lloyd Kaufman. In the film, David revealed that he is HIV-positive.

Also in 2005, David Secter directed and released a documentary film on the Gay Games, Take the Flame! Gay Games: Grace, Grit, and Glory.

1974 – Carrie Brownstein is an American musician, writer, and actress, who first widely became known as a guitarist and vocalist in Sleater-Kinney. Since 2010, Brownstein has sung and played guitar for the band Wild Flag; they released their self-titled debut album in September 2011. Brownstein stars with co-developer Fred Armisen in Portlandia, a sketch comedy show which began airing in January 2011 on IFC.

Brownstein was outed as bisexual to her family and the world by Spin when she was 21 years old. The article discussed the fact that she had dated bandmate Corin Tucker in the beginning of Sleater-Kinney (the song "One More Hour" is about their breakup). After the article was out, she said, "I hadn't seen it [the Spin article], and I got a phone call. My dad called me and was like, 'The Spin article's out. Um, do you want to let me know what's going on?' The ground was pulled out from underneath me... My dad did not know that Corin and I had ever dated, or that I even dated girls."

In 2006, The New York Times described Brownstein as "openly gay." In a November 3, 2010 cover-story for Portland, Oregon's Willamette Week, Brownstein laid to rest questions about her sexual identity: "It's weird, because no one's actually ever asked me. People just always assume, like, you're this or that. It's like, 'OK. I'm bisexual."

1974 – The National Gay Task Force and other gay and lesbian activists persuade major consumer advertisers to withdraw commercials from a Marcus Welby, MD, episode about a high school boy who is raped by a male teacher. Their achievement is hailed as the first successful protest against alleged defamation of gay men on American Television.

1975 – Tim Campbell, born in Sydney, is an Australian television and stage actor, best known for playing the character of Dan Baker in the soap opera Home and Away.

In late 2007, rumours of Campbell dating Australian Idol singer Anthony Callea surfaced in the media. During an interview, Campbell confirmed that he is gay, but denied romantic involvement with Callea. However, on 11 February 2008, during an appearance on Vega 91.5fm's breakfast program, Campbell acknowledged that he and Callea had now progressed to being "an item" stating that they were 'very happy' together. The couple later thanked their fans for the support they were shown after their relationship was made public.

Campbell and Callea

In 2014, Tim Campbell and Anthony Callea and secretly tied the knot surrounded by family and friends. Campbell and Callea travelled over to New Zealand where same sex marriage was already recognized at that time and said their vows in front of their parents and a couple of their closest mates.

1977 – Marc Kushner is an American architect, entrepreneur and author. He is a partner at the New York City based architecture firm Hollwich Kushner (HWKN) and co-founding CEO of Architizer.

After working for multiple architecture firms including Steven Holl, Jürgen Mayer H. and Lewis Tsurumaki Lewis, Kushner formed the architecture firm Hollwich Kushner (HWKN) in 2007 with Matthias Hollwich whom he had met in Jürgen Mayer’s Berlin kitchen five years prior. In 2012 Marc Kushner and Matthias Hollwich won MoMA PS1's Young Architects Program with their project Wendy.

During the financial crisis of 2007–2008, Marc Kushner and his business partner Matthias Hollwich created a digital platform to help architects promote their firms’ work. Architizer rapidly grew to become the largest platform for architecture online.

Kushner married Christopher Barley, also an architect, in a Jewish ceremony on March 31, 2012.

Kushner's brother Jonathan Kushner is a real estate developer and president of their family's real estate organization, Kushner Real Estate Group. Marc is a first cousin of presidential advisor Jared Kushner (son-in-law of Donald Trump), and Joshua Kushner, managing partner of Thrive Capital, a New York-based private equity firm.

1979 – The Texas Court of Civil Appeals upholds the disbarment of an attorney for consensual fellatio with another man.

Jason Wu (R) with Gustavo Rangel

1982 – Jason Wu is a Taiwanese-Canadian fashion designer who became an overnight sensation when the first lady, Michelle Obama, wore one of his gowns to the inaugural ball in 2009. Mrs. Obama chose a Wu design again for the inaugural ball in 2013.

Wu was born in Taipei, Taiwan. His parents, who own an import-export business, recognized Jason’s creative talent at age 5. His mother would drive him to bridal stores so he could sketch the dresses. He learned to sew by producing doll clothes.

When Wu was 9, the family moved to Vancouver, British Columbia. He attended Loomis Chaffee, a prestigious Connecticut prep school. At 16, he was designing doll clothes for Integrity Toys. A year later, Wu was named the company’s creative director. Wu attended the Parsons School of Design in New York. In 2004, he dropped out six months before graduation to intern for designer Narciso Rodriquez.

In 2006, at age 24, Wu launched his own label and presented his first ready-to-wear collection. His clients include Ivana Trump, actresses January Jones and Kerry Washington, and RuPaul, for whom he designed six RuPaul dolls. In 2008, Wu was recognized with the Fashion Group’s International Rising Star Award.

Wu’s inaugural ball gowns for Mrs. Obama are on display at the Smithsonian Institution. 

Jason Wu lives in New York City with his business partner and boyfriend, Gustavo Rangel. Wu has grown his label into an internationally acclaimed fashion brand.

1988 – The Oklahoma Court of Appeals hints that all consensual sodomy is constitutionally protected, not just that between people of the opposite sex. Just 15 days later, the same court decides that sexual privacy is for heterosexuals only.

1994 – Real Menard , a Montreal representative of the Bloc Quebecois, becomes the second MP to come out when he tells reporters that he is "speaking for the community" to which he belongs when he protests the televised statements of another member of Parliament, Roseanne Skoke of Nova Scotia, among which is the claim that "this [gay and lesbian] love, this compassion, based on an inhuman act, defiles humanity, destroys family … and is annihilating mankind."