September 28

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1292 – Ghent (present-day Belgium): John, a knife maker, is sentenced to be burned at the stake for having sex with another man. This is the first documented execution for sodomy in Western Europe.

1573 – Caravaggio was an Italian baroque painter (d.1610), who was the most revolutionary artist of his time and the best exemplar of naturalistic painting in the early 17th century.

Originally named Michelangelo Merisi, Caravaggio was born in the Lombardy hill town of Caravaggio, from which his professional name is derived. Orphaned at age 11, he was apprenticed to the painter Simone Peterzano of Milan for four years.

At some time between 1588 and 1592, Caravaggio went to Rome and worked as an assistant to Giuseppe Cesari, also known as the Cavaliere d'Arpino, for whom he executed fruit and flower pieces (now lost).

Caravaggio's personal life was turbulent. He was often arrested and imprisoned. He fled Rome for Naples in 1606 when charged with murder. Later that year he traveled to Malta, was made a knight, or cavaliere, of the Maltese order. In October of 1608, Caravaggio was again arrested and, escaping from a Maltese jail, went to Syracuse in Sicily.

Caravaggio was a rather outrageous and controversial man. Many of his paintings demonstrate a rebellious and often ribald sense of humor. It has been suggested by some sources that Caravaggio was a homosexual and a pederast.

(Click for larger)

The painting Boy Being Bitten by a Lizard (c1600) is thought to be an allegorical portrait of lust. The young boy is probably the type of young man that Caravaggio held as the object of his desire. Young male prostitutes were fairly common in cities during this time (as they are now). The lizard hanging from the boy's finger may represent the cost of the lust and the cherries may be a reference to the concepts concerning "forbidden fruit" or possibly even virginity.

Caravaggio died on the beach at Port'Ercole in Tuscany on July 18, 1610, of a fever contracted after a mistaken arrest.

1654 – Belgian sculptor Jérome Duquesnoy is burned at the stake for committing sodomy.

1681 – Johann Mattheson (d.1764) was a German composer, singer, writer, lexicographer, diplomat and music theorist.

Mattheson was born and died in Hamburg. He was a close friend of George Frideric Handel, although he nearly killed him in a sudden quarrel, during a performance of Mattheson's opera Cleopatra in 1704. Handel was saved only by a large button which turned aside Mattheson's sword. The two were afterwards reconciled and remained in correspondence for life: shortly after his friend's death, Mattheson translated John Mainwaring's Handel biography into German and had it published in Hamburg at his own expense ("auf Kosten des Übersetzers") in 1761.

He and Handel may have been lovers. Mattheson and Handel went to Lübeck, together in the hope that one might succeed the celebrated, but aged, D. Buxtehude as town organist; unfortunately the appointment also entailed marriage with Buxtehude's daughter and as neither wished to undertake this responsibility they both returned to Hamburg together.

The son of a well-to-do tax collector, Mattheson received a broad liberal education and, aside from general musical training, took lessons in keyboard instruments, violin, composition and singing. By age nine he was singing and playing organ in church and was a member of the chorus of the Hamburg opera. He made his solo debut with the Hamburg opera in 1696 in female roles and, after his voice changed, sang tenor at the opera, conducted rehearsals and composed operas himself. He was cantor at St. Mary's Cathedral from 1718 until increasing deafness led to his retirement from that post in 1728.

Mattheson's chief occupation from 1706 was as a professional diplomat. He had studied English in school and spoke it fluently. He became tutor to the son of the English ambassador Sir John Wich and then secretary to the ambassador. He went on diplomatic missions abroad representing the ambassador.

1839 – Frances Willard (d.1898) was an American educator, temperance reformer, and women's suffragist. Her influence was instrumental in the passage of the Eighteenth (Prohibition) and Nineteenth (Women Suffrage) Amendments to the United States Constitution. Willard became the national president of the World's Woman's Christian Temperance Union, or WWCTU, in 1879, and remained president for 19 years. She developed the slogan "Do everything" for the women of the WCTU to incite lobbying, petitioning, preaching, publication, and education. Her vision progressed to include federal aid to education, free school lunches, unions for workers, the eight-hour work day, work relief for the poor, municipal sanitation and boards of health, national transportation, strong anti-rape laws, and protections against child abuse.

Her tireless efforts for women's suffrage and prohibition included a fifty-day speaking tour in 1874, an average of 30,000 miles of travel a year, and an average of four hundred lectures a year for a ten year period, mostly with her longtime companion Anna Gordon.

To most modern historians, Willard is overtly identified as a lesbian, while contemporary and slightly later accounts merely described her relationships, and her pattern of long-term domestic cohabitation with women, and allowed readers to draw their own conclusions. Willard herself only ever formed long-term passionate relationships with women, and she stated as much in her autobiography.

1916 – Peter Finch, born in London, England, (d.1977), was an English actor who was noted for his ability to portray complex characters with subtlety and warmth.

While Finch was a toddler, his parents divorced owing to his mother’s extramarital affair, and it was not until decades later that Peter discovered that George Ingle Finch, a chemist and noted mountaineer, was not his biological father.

Peter grew up in France and Australia, where he launched an acting career in the 1930s. He appeared in several Australian films and became a popular radio actor, but it was his stage work that impressed Laurence Olivier, who signed Finch to a personal contract.

Finch moved to London in 1949 and became a leading actor in such British and American films as A Town like Alice (1956), Kidnapped (1960), The Pumpkin Eater (1964), and Far from the Madding Crowd (1967).

1927 – Heterosexual (James) Ace Lyons, Jr. is a retired admiral in the United States Navy whose 36-year career was capped by serving as Commander, U.S. Pacific Fleet from 16 September 1985 to 30 September 1987.

On 19 February 2010, Andrew Sullivan quoted Lyons at the CPAC conference in Washington as saying:

1930 – Daniel L. Ryan is an American prelate of the Roman Catholic Church. He served as Bishop of Springfield in Illinois from 1984 to 1999.

During the last two years of his administration, Ryan was plagued by sexual abuse allegations. In 1997 and 1998, a group called Roman Catholic Faithful had picketed a national bishops conference in Washington, D.C. and carried signs alleging Ryan was protecting abusive priests. He himself was accused of engaging in homosexual affairs with young men, prostitutes, and other priests.

After fifteen years as Bishop of Springfield, Ryan resigned on October 19, 1999. In 2002 there were new allegations that Ryan had solicited sex from a teenaged boy in 1984, but the Sangamon County state's attorney could not prosecute because the statute of limitations had expired. Having continued to administer Confirmation and celebrate Mass, he voluntarily agreed to suspend his public ministry. In 2006 an investigative report declared that Ryan "engaged in improper sexual conduct and used his office to conceal his activities" and fostered "a culture of secrecy...that discouraged faithful priests from coming forward with information about misconduct" by other clergy in the diocese. He currently resides at the diocese's retirement center for priests.

1940 – Joe Tom Easley (d.2022) was a prominent gay rights activist and lawyer involved in the repeal of the "don't ask, don't tell" policy that discriminated against gays in the military and whose wedding in 2003 was among the first same-sex marriages featured in the New York Times.

Joe Tom Easley was born in Robstown, Texas. He grew up in Truby and Eagle Pass, Texas, in the 1940s and '50s, when being openly gay was far from commonplace.

He joined the Navy in 1966, during the Vietnam War, and served at an intelligence base on Adak Island in Alaska. After a year, he was told that a friend who had propositioned him for sex before he joined the service had told the government that Joe Tom was gay.

Easley's commander told him that he had to kick him out because gay men and women were barred from serving, but that "because of his exemplary service," he would ensure that Easley received an honorable discharge and veteran benefits.

Although he was almost 38 when he came out as gay in 1978, he sought to make up for lost time with his gay activism by using his skills as a speaker, teacher and leader.

In the early 1980s, while in Washington, Easley served on the District's civilian police review board and was president of the Gertrude Stein Democratic Club, the area's largest and most influential gay organization.

After moving to New York, he served as co-chairman of the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund from 1983 to 1987 and then served until 1995 as president of the Human Rights Campaign Foundation, an arm of the country’s largest LGBTQ rights group.

He met Peter Freiberg, a journalist, in 1983. They established a civil union in Vermont in 2000 and married in Toronto city hall in August 2003, soon after same-sex marriages were legalized in Ontario. That same month, the Times published their wedding announcement.

He died of complications from a lung disease in Miami beach in 2022

1943 – José Gómez (d.2014) was an American labor and civil rights activist and educator. He was most widely known for his work as executive assistant to president of the United Farm Workers Cesar Chavez, for founding the Committee on Gay Legal Issues (COGLI) at Harvard Law School, and for his law review article "The Public Expression of Lesbian/Gay Personhood as Protected Speech."

José Gómez was born in Colorado and grew up in Wyoming. He was the son of Juan Gonzalez Gómez and Mercedes Aragon Gómez, and was one of ten children. His early childhood was spent in Reliance, Wyoming. Juan G. Gómez worked in coal mines until 1954, when mine closures led him to seek agricultural work in Wyoming's Big Horn Basin. The family settled in Worland, Wyoming where they and their children labored in sugar beet fields. At the time, Worland segregated its primary school children and operated a school called the Mexican School. In 1954, José and his sister Rosa Gómez were the first Latino students to attend the Emmett School rather than the Mexican School. Observing the difference between the education he received versus that offered in the Mexican School impressed upon Gómez the capacity of education to offer an escape from poverty, and he resolved to become an educator.

Gómez enrolled at the University of Wyoming and earned a B.A. in 1965 with emphases in Spanish, Journalism, and Education. He began graduate studies in Spanish and Latin American Literature at the University of Wyoming and in 1966–1967 was awarded a Fulbright Program grant to study Latin American literature in Nicaragua. The year in Nicaragua deepened his critique of U.S. foreign policy in Latin America. He returned to Laramie for the 1967–1968 academic year, but in the context of the Civil Rights Movement and opposition to United States Involvement in the Vietnam War he suspended graduate studies and moved toward activism.

From May 1968-April 1969 Gómez served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the northeast state of Sergipe, Brazil. He trained elementary school teachers and organized literacy classes. His opposition to U.S. foreign policy coupled with his discomfort with the policies of the Brazilian military government led him to resign from the Peace Corps after one year. He traveled to San José, Costa Rica where he took a teaching position at Lincoln School, an international secondary school.

On July 4, 1969 TIME Magazine published a cover story on Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee. Inspired by this story, Gómez resolved to join the movement, and he resigned his teaching post effective December 1969. Gómez made his way to the headquarters of the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee (later the United Farm Workers or UFW) and was charged to organize consumer boycotts of produce in New Jersey (1970), Washington DC (1971) and New York City (1972). During these years he was also active in the anti-war movement, and in 1971 he traveled to Cuba as part of the 4th contingent of the Venceremos Brigade. From January 1973-February 1975 Gómez served as executive assistant to president of the UFW Cesar Chavez.

Gómez left the UFW to work in the office of Governor Jerry Brown, serving as liaison to the Spanish-speaking community of Southern California from March 1975-August 1977. He left the Governor's office to enter Harvard Law School.

Between his first and second year at Harvard Gómez clerked at the San Francisco-based National Gay Rights Advocates. Collaborating with a team of law students to prepare for strategic LGBT civil rights litigation set the course for the next decade of his career. Upon his return to Harvard Law School in September 1978 he founded a student organization known initially as the Committee on Gay Legal Issues (COGLI, later renamed Lambda). Together with Barbara Kritchevsky and other activists, the group successfully pressured Harvard Law School to amend its non-discrimination policy to include gays and lesbians. The group also succeeded in convincing Harvard Law School to ban the U.S. military from access to its career center, on the grounds that the military's exclusion of LGBT service members violated Law School policy. This action by Harvard Law School and other institutions of higher education was followed by action in the U.S. Congress which, via the Solomon Amendment of 1996, required educational institutions that receive federal funds to allow military recruitment on their campuses.

Gómez was also active in the wider Boston community, volunteering as a founding board member of Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders (GLAD) from 1979 to 1981. He entered the national stage as a board member of the National Gay Task Force, later renamed National LGBTQ Task Force, from 1979 to 1984, serving as co-chair from 1982 to 1984.

In 1981 Gómez earned his J.D. from Harvard Law School and returned to San Francisco. In 1983 he was the first openly gay candidate elected to the national board of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and he published an influential law review article "The Public Expression of Lesbian/Gay Personhood as Protected Speech." Also in 1983 he published the chapter "First Amendment" in Sexual Orientation and the Law, revised and co-written with Mary Dunlap for the 2006 edition.

From 1981 to 1983 Gómez worked as executive director of the Human Rights Foundation, a group established by San Francisco donors in the wake of the defeat of California Proposition 6, popularly known as the Briggs Initiative. That initiative aspired to ban from employment in California public schools any LGBT person and any person who supported LGBT rights. The Human Rights Foundation sought to create a supportive environment in public schools for LGBT students. Gómez organized a speaker's bureau and co-wrote and edited a resource book, Demystifying Homosexuality: A Teaching Guide about Lesbians and Gay Men.

In 1983 Gómez was named executive director of the legal services agency La Raza Centro Legal in San Francisco. He held that post until 1988, when he took a position as academic dean at The Evergreen State College.

Gómez served as dean from 1988 to 1996, after which time he joined the faculty. He taught law at The Evergreen State College from 1997 to his death.

1953 – Keith McDermott is an American actor, theater director, and writer.

Born in Houston, Texas, McDermott graduated Ohio University Theatre School. In the 1970s, he lived with author Edmund White in New York City, and appeared as Alan Strang in Equus on Broadway opposite Richard Burton.

He directs theater productions, and is particularly known for his direction of Off-Off-Broadway comedies penned by avant garde playwright Jim Neu.

McDermott appeared in the Hollywood movie Without a Trace, as well as in numerous independent films, including as half the title role in Ignatz & Lotte.

Keith McDermott's current partner is artist Eric Amouyal.

1954 – American filmmaker David Weissman is a screenwriter and director. His film credits include The Family Man, Evolution, and When in Rome. Weissman co-directed the 2002 documentary The Cockettes.

David Weissman moved to San Francisco in 1976. A longhaired refugee from Venice Beach, CA, David was elated to find himself in such a beautiful city overflowing with activists, artists, performers, poets, hippies, drag queens and Deadheads. There were rebels and dreamers of every variety, thousands of whom were gays and lesbians, creating what was often referred to as the “Gay Mecca.”

David remembers the thrill of being at Harvey Milk’s camera store on the night of Harvey’s election, and at the victory party the following year for the No on 6 Campaign — the first major electoral victory for the emerging gay movement. Devastated by Harvey’s assassination just months later, David became more active in SF politics — working on political campaigns and as a Legislative Assistant to San Francisco Supervisor Harry Britt.

In 1981, David began taking filmmaking courses at City College of San Francisco. For years David made short films, which screened widely in festivals around the world. He also worked on other people’s films (including Crumb, and In The Shadow of the Stars) and taught filmmaking classes. As people began to die of AIDS in the early and mid-80s, this began to affect the content of David’s films, particularly in the short film Song From an Angel which featured San Francisco performer Rodney Price doing a song and tap-dance about his own death, two weeks before he died of AIDS.

In 1998, David teamed up with his friend Bill Weber to co-direct the feature length documentary, The Cockettes. After a 2002 Sundance premiere, theatrical and broadcast release, The Cockettes received the LA Film Critics’Award for Best Documentary of The Year.

The Cockettes were a psychedelic drag queen troupe founded by Hibiscus in the late 1960s in San Francisco's North Beach neighborhood. The troupe performed outrageous parodies of show tunes (or original tunes in the same vein) and gained an underground cult following that led to mainstream exposure. The film debuted at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival. It went on to a limited theatrical release and to play the film festival circuit. At the premiere at San Francisco's Castro Theatre many of the surviving Cockettes attended in genderfuck drag. The Cockettes received the LA Film Critics Award as Best Non-Fiction Film of 2002 and the Glitter Award for Best Documentary of 2003.

Weissman's most recent project is an HIV-AIDS documentary entitled, We Were Here: Voices from the AIDS Years in San Francisco with co-director Bill Weber. We Were Here documents the coming of what was then called the "Gay Plague" in San Francisco in the early 1980s; yet instead of dwelling on death, Weissman and Weber opt to focus on five people (Guy Clark, a dancer and florist; Paul Boneberg, a political activist; Eileen Glutzer, a nurse and researcher of several AIDS drugs; Daniel Goldstein, an HIV-positive artist who lost two lovers to AIDS; Ed Wolf, a counselor to AIDS-infected men) who survived and are willing to document their personal oral histories of those devastating years. They each arrived in San Francisco during the 1970s when Harvey Milk was energizing the gay community; but when Milk was assassinated in 1978, everything began to change. Then came AIDS... The film is a deep and reflective look at the arrival and impact of AIDS in San Francisco and how these individuals and others rose to the occasion during the first years of this unimaginable crisis.

David Weissman currently lives in San Francisco.

1966 – The Florida Supreme Court upholds a conviction for attempted consensual sodomy. The Court said that the public can find out what is illegal under the law by visiting a law library.

1969 – John A. Pérez is a union organizer and politician from Los Angeles, California, who has been the Speaker of the California State Assembly since March 1, 2010. A Democrat, he represents the 46th district in the California State Assembly.

Pérez is openly gay - he is the first openly LGBT Speaker of the California State Assembly and, after Minnesota's Allan Spear, only the second LGBT person to be elected to lead a state legislative chamber.

1970 – David Campos is an attorney and member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors representing San Francisco's District 9 (Bernal Heights, Portola, and the Inner Mission) since 2008. His reelection in 2012 made him one of only two LGBT San Francisco Supervisors. As of 2014, Campos is seeking to represent the 17th District (eastern half of San Francisco) in the California State Assembly. If elected, Campos will be the first Latino (Guatemalan-American) to represent San Francisco as a state legislator and would continue an 18-year tradition of LGBT officials representing the 17th Assembly District.

David Campos was born in Puerto Barrios, Guatemala. At age 14, with his parents and two sisters, he fled the Guatemalan Civil War and emigrated to the United States. Campos graduated at the top of his class at Jefferson High School in South Central Los Angeles, overcoming barriers such as learning English, attending an under-served high school, and the stigma and risk associated with being undocumented. His academic accomplishments earned him scholarships and admissions to Stanford University, from which he graduated in 1993 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science. While attending Harvard Law School from 1993 to 1996, Campos became a permanent resident of the United States and met his partner, Phil Hwang. They married in 2014.

After three years of private law practice, Campos entered public service as Deputy City Attorney for the City and County of San Francisco in 1999. During his tenure he was chief attorney for San Francisco Unified School District overseeing its school desegregation program. Campos was also appointed as a San Francisco Police Commissioner from 2005-2008.

1n 2008, David Campos was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, representing District 9 (Bernal Heights, Portola, and the Inner Mission), succeeding current State Assembly member Tom Ammiano.

1972 – Casper Andreas, born in Sweden, is an actor, film director, screenwriter, and film producer based in New York City. He is openly gay.

Andreas made his feature film debut as a director with the romantic comedy Slutty Summer (2004). Since then, he has directed numerous, award-winning films, including A Four Letter Word (2007), Between Love and Goodbye (2008), The Big Gay Musical (2009), and Violet Tendencies (2010). His most recent film Going Down in LA-LA Land appeared at several film festivals in 2011. Variety suggested that Andreas "shows signs of maturing talent" with this film and called his performance "dangerously sexy."

Based on the literary work of Andy Zeffer, Andreas' 2011 film Going Down in LA-LA Land follows a struggling actor, Adam, as he moves to Hollywood and tries to break into the film business. With his friend Nick's urging, Adam takes a role in front of the camera and becomes an instant success – in the gay pornography industry. "It's the gay Pretty Woman," states Andreas, "It wasn't meant to glamorize the porn industry in any way, but I needed to show how (Adam) gets seduced by it. Adam loses control."

Andreas has worked with talents such as Mindy Cohn, Alec Mapa, Bruce Vilanch, and Marcus Patrick. He is the head of Embrem Entertainment.