December 19

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1626 – Queen Christina of Sweden (d.1689), Queen regnant of Swedes, Goths and Vandals, Grand Princess of Finland, and Duchess of Ingria, Estonia, Livonia and Karelia, from 1633 to 1654. She was the only surviving legitimate child of King Gustav II Adolph and his wife Maria Eleonora of Brandenburg. As the heiress presumptive, at the age of six she succeeded her father on the throne of Sweden upon his death at the Battle of Lützen. Being the daughter of a Protestant champion in the Thirty Years' War, she caused a scandal when she abdicated her throne and converted to Catholicism in 1654. She spent her later years in Rome, becoming a leader of the theatrical and musical life there. As a queen without a country, she protected many artists and projects. She is one of the few women buried in the Vatican grotto.

Christina was moody, intelligent, and interested in books and manuscripts, religion, alchemy and science. She wanted Stockholm to become the Athens of the North. Influenced by the Counter Reformation, she was increasingly attracted to the Baroque and Mediterranean culture that took her away from her Protestant country. Her unconventional lifestyle and masculine behaviour would feature in countless novels and plays, and in opera and film. In the twentieth century, Christina became a symbol of cross-dressing, transsexuality and lesbianism.

Christina was unusual in her own time for choosing masculine dress, and she also had some masculine physical features. Whether she choose her attire because of a self-perception as masculine, or purely for reasons of functional convenience, is difficult to know.

She was irrefutably gender-variant, cross-dressing by her early teens. Of Queen Christina, Father Marmerschied, priest to the Spanish Ambassador, remarked, "There is nothing feminine about her except her sex. Her voice, her walk, her style, her ways are all quite masculine."

Christina abdicated her throne on 5 June 1654, in favor of her cousin Charles Gustavus, amid some financial hanky panky and wandered Europe, dressed as a man, frequently under the pseudonym of Count Dohna.

Based on historical accounts of Christina's physicality, some scholars believe her to have been an intersexed individual. (Someone with a blend of female and male genitals, hormones, or chromosomes.)

According to Christina's autobiography, the midwives at her birth first believed her to be a boy because she was "completely hairy and had a coarse and strong voice." After changing their minds, deciding that she was female, her father Gustav II Adolph decided "to find out for himself the nature of the matter."

Such ambiguity did not end with birth, as Christina made cryptic statements about her "constitution" and body throughout life. Her unusual body was also noted by acquaintances, who noted that the queen had a masculine voice, appearance, and movements. Although not direct evidence of her bodily makeup, Christina had a disdain for marriage, sex, and childrearing that may have stemmed from the realities of such things for a person of unusual physicality.

In 1965 all of these observations led to an investigation of Christina's mortal remains, which had inconclusive results. As the physical anthropologist who undertook the investigation, Carl-Herman Hjortsjö, explained, "Our imperfect knowledge concerning the effect of intersexuality on the skeletal formation ... makes it impossible to decide which positive skeletal findings should be demanded upon which to base the diagnosis of intersexuality." Nevertheless, Hjortsjö speculated that Christina had reasonably typical female genitalia because it is recorded that she menstruated.

1816 – Georgia adopts a new criminal code, reinstating sodomy as a crime after a 32-year hiatus. The penalty is compulsory life imprisonment. The law is not enforced.

1904 – On this date the female impersonator extraordinaire Barbette was born (d.1973). Born Vander Clyde in Round Rock, Texas, Clyde achieved international fame as Barbette, a female impersonator and trapeze and high-wire performer. Enamored of the circus after his mother took him to his first performance in Austin, Clyde began practicing on the clothesline in his mother's yard and working in the fields for money to go to as many circuses as possible. After graduating from high school at age fourteen, he traveled to San Antonio to answer a Billboard advertisement placed by one of the Alfaretta Sisters, "World Famous Aerial Queens." He joined the act on the condition that he dress as a girl, since his partner believed that women's clothes made a wire act more dramatic. He later performed in Erford's Whirling Sensation, in which he and two others hung by their teeth from a revolving apparatus.

During this period Clyde began developing a solo act in which he appeared and performed as a woman and removed his wig to reveal his masculinity at the end of the performance. After adopting the name Barbette, he traveled throughout the United States performing the act, which became wildly popular. In the fall of 1923 the William Morris Agency sent him to England and then to Paris, where he opened at the Alhambra Music Hall. Barbette became the talk of Paris and was befriended by members of both American café society and French literary and social circles.

In particular, his artistry was championed by French poet and dramatist Jean Cocteau. Inspired by Barbette's act, which he described as "an extraordinary lesson in theatrical professionalism," Cocteau wrote a review in the July 1926 issue of the Nouvelle Revue Française, "Le Numéro Barbette," which is considered a classic essay on the nature of art. As described by Cocteau, Barbette's acrobatics became a vehicle for theatrical illusion. From his entrance, when he appeared in an elaborate ball gown and an ostrich-feather hat, to an elaborate striptease down to tights and leotard in the middle of the act, Barbette enacted a feminine allure that was maintained despite the vigorous muscular activity required by his trapeze routine. Only at the end of the performance, when he removed his wig, did he dispel the illusion, at which time he mugged and flexed in a masculine manner to emphasize the success of his earlier deception. To Cocteau, Barbette's craftsmanship, practiced on the fine edge of danger, elevated a rather dubious stunt to the level of art, analogous to the struggle of a poet.

Cocteau wrote about Barbette on several other occasions, and in 1930 he used the aerialist in his first film, Le Sang d'un Poete (Blood of a Poet), in which the bejeweled and Chanel-clad Barbette and other aristocrats applauded a card game that ends in suicide.

1910 – Jean Genet (d.1986) was a prominent and controversial French novelist, playwright, poet, essayist, and political activist. Early in his life he was a vagabond and petty criminal, but later took to writing. His major works include the novels Querelle of Brest, The Thief's Journal, and Our Lady of the Flowers, and the plays The Balcony, The Blacks, The Maids and The Screens. He is the author of the quote: "I'm homosexual... How and why are idle questions. It's a little like wanting to know why my eyes are green."

While he received excellent grades in school, his childhood involved a series of attempts at running away and incidents of petty theft . For this and other misdemeanors, including repeated acts of vagrancy, he was sent at the age of 15 to Mettray Penal Colony from 1926 to 1929. In The Miracle of the Rose (1946), he gives an account of this period of detention, which ended at the age of 18 when he joined the Foreign Legion. He was eventually given a dishonorable discharge on grounds of indecency (having been caught engaged in a homosexual act) and spent a period as a vagabond, petty thief and prostitute across Europe— experiences he recounts in The Thief's Journal (1949).

After returning to Paris, France in 1937, Genet was in and out of prison through a series of arrests for theft, use of false papers, vagabondage, lewd acts and other offenses. In prison, Genet wrote his first poem, "Le condamné à mort," which he had printed at his own cost, and the novel Our Lady of the Flowers (1944). In Paris, Genet sought out and introduced himself to Jean Cocteau, who was impressed by his writing. Cocteau used his contacts to get Genet's novel published, and in 1949, when Genet was threatened with a life sentence after ten convictions, Cocteau and other prominent figures, including Jean-Paul Sartre and Pablo Picasso, successfully petitioned the French President to have the sentence set aside. Genet would never return to prison.

By 1949 Genet had completed five novels, three plays and numerous poems. His explicit and often deliberately provocative portrayal of homosexuality and criminality was such that by the early 1950s his work was banned in the United States.

In the 60s and 70s he became highly politically active in France, the USA, and the Middle East. Genet developed throat cancer and was found dead on April 15, 1986 in a hotel room in Paris. Genet may have fallen on the floor and fatally hit his head.

1910 – Born in Havana, Cuba, José Lezama Lima (d.1976) is a major Latin-American literary figure. Although he received a law degree from the University of Havana in 1938, and indeed practiced law for some time, Lezama Lima's true passion was literature.

Apart from two brief trips—one to Mexico in 1949 and another to Jamaica in 1950—the "immobile traveler," as Lezama Lima identified himself, never left Havana, dedicating himself entirely to writing and exploring the cultures of the world through his readings. Lezama Lima's house was filled with over ten thousand books and was the site of countless literary meetings with young writers who would stop by to engage the maestro in dialogue.

Until the publication of his novel Paradiso (1966), which brought him instant international fame and notoriety, Lezama Lima was primarily known as a poet. In 1937, at the age of twenty-seven, his first poetic composition, Muerte de Narciso (Death of Narcissus), was published.

The publication of Paradiso in 1966 marked an important turning point in Lezama Lima's career. Internationally, the novel was immediately recognized as a masterpiece. However, the novel's total lack of political commitment to the Cuban Revolution, as well as its explicit descriptions of male homosexual relations, was met with resistance in Cuba and placed Lezama Lima in a precarious situation.

As early as 1965, the new Cuban socialist regime had been conducting systematic purges of homosexuals whose conduct was considered to be at variance with revolutionary morals.

The mere fact that the author dared to express detailed sexual relations between men, at a time when such expressions were generally looked down on in Latin-American literature and severely censored by the Cuban revolutionary establishment, represents an important turning point in Latin-American letters that paved the way for a greater representation of homosexual desire.

1946 – Miguel Piñero (d.1988) was a Puerto Rican playwright, actor, and co-founder of the Nuyorican Poets Café. He was a leading member of the Nuyorican literary movement.

His first of what would be many criminal convictions was at the age of eleven for theft. He was sent to the Juvenile Detention Center in the Bronx and also to Otisville State Training School for Boys. He joined a street gang called "The Dragons" when he was 13, and when he was 14 he was hustling in the streets.

He would move to Brooklyn, where he and three other friends would commit robberies (according to Piñero, they did over 100), until they were caught at a jewelry store. He would be sent to Rikers Island in 1964. After this, he joined the Job Corps and was sent to Camp Kilmer for training. It turned out the opportunity was, as Piñero put it, "Dope City, Skag Town." He returned to New York City and became affiliated with the Young Lords, similar to the Black Panthers.

While serving time in prison, he wrote the play Short Eyes as part of the inmates playwriting workshop. When he left Sing Sing on parole in 1973, he was able to put Short Eyes with The Family, , an acting troupe made up of ex-cons. The title comes from the slang for pornography "short heist", but since the Puerto Ricans could not pronounce the 'h' so it became short eyes. The play is a drama based on his experiences in prison and portrays life, love and death among prison inmates. In 1974, the play was presented at Riverside Church in Manhattan. Theater impresario Joseph Papp saw the play and was so impressed that he moved the production to Broadway.

In 1977, Piñero's play Short Eyes was turned into a film directed by Robert M. Young. In the film Piñero played the part of "Go-Go", a prisoner. While on set, he and Tito Goya were arrested for armed robbery and were arraigned in the same building where they were filming. The charges were dropped, but some people thought Piñero had a "need" to go back to prison.

He would land some supporting roles in movies:The Jericho Mile (1978), Times Square (1980), Fort Apache, The Bronx (1981), Breathless (1983), Deal of the Century (1983), and Alphabet City (1984).

Piñero was considered a talented writer who described the evils of society, even though he continued to be a drug addict. Piñero wrote the Baretta TV episode The Gadjo in 1978 and acted in the episode Por Nada in 1977. He played the part of drug lord Esteban Calderone in several episodes of TV series Miami Vice in 1984, as well as writing the episode "Smuggler's Blues" in the same year. He also wrote the screenplay for Short Eyes (the movie).

Piñero played an important role in acquainting his partner and at times lover, the Chinese-American gay artist Martin Wong, with the Lower East Side, becoming a benefactor at a time when Wong found it difficult to meet his rent. Several of Wong's paintings are illustrations of poems given to him by Piñero. "The Annunciation According to Mikey Piñero (Cupcake and Paco)" (1984) pictures a scene from Short Eyes.

Miguel Piñero died on June 16, 1988 in New York City from cirrhosis. Piñero's ashes were scattered across the Lower East Side of Manhattan, as he asked in his 1985 "Lower East Side Poem."

1957 – Cyril Collard (d.1993) was a French author, filmmaker, composer, musician and actor. He is known for his unapologetic portrayals of bisexuality and HIV in art, particularly his autobiographical novel and film Les Nuits Fauves (Savage Nights). Openly bisexual, Collard was also one of the first French artists to speak openly about his HIV-positive status.

The semi-autobiographical Savage Nights (Les Nuits Fauves), finished in 1992, was Collard's first and only feature film. The autobiographical story examines the life of a thirtyish aspiring director, Jean, engaged in simultaneous affairs with an 18-year-old French girl and a young, "straight" Spanish rugby player, Samy, who develops a taste for S&M and moves in with him, while Jean still (compulsively?) enjoys frequent, rough anonymous hookups, all of which is further complicated by his being HIV+. It won four Césars (best editing, best film, best first work, and most promising actress) in 1993. Unfortunately, Collard did not live to accept his award; he had died three days earlier.

Early in his career, Collard assisted fellow director Maurice Pialat and directed six music videos, as well as several television programs. Among the music videos he directed were those of French-Algerian band Carte de Séjour, whose lead singer Rachid Taha is one of the most famous rock-ethnic musicians in France today.

Collard's own experiences with AIDS undoubtedly influenced his work. He died of AIDS-related illness aged 35.

1958 – Christopher Hamill, better known by his stage name Limahl (an anagram of Hamill), is an English pop singer. He rose to fame as the lead singer of the 1980s pop group Kajagoogoo, before embarking on a briefly successful solo career, which reached its peak with the 1984 hit "The NeverEnding Story", taken from the film of the same name.

With aspirations to be an actor, Hamill toured with the company in a production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. In 1980, he was given a small role in an episode of the ITV police series The Gentle Touch playing a schoolboy. In 1981, Hamill appeared as an extra in the promotional video for Adam and the Ants' number one UK single "Stand and Deliver".

The four members of Art Nouveau, the band who were yet to become Kajagoogoo, had placed an advert in the music magazine Melody Maker, asking for a 'front man who could sing and look good'. Hamill attended the audition and subsequently joined the band which was then, after some deliberation, renamed Kajagoogoo. Soon after he had joined, Limahl met Nick Rhodes, keyboardist of the group Duran Duran, while Limahl was working as a waiter at the Embassy Club in London. Rhodes agreed to co-produce the band's first single, "Too Shy".

Limahl later said: "I met Nick Rhodes and it changed my life." Kajagoogoo signed a deal with EMI (who had turned down the group before Rhodes got involved) and the single "Too Shy" was released. It went to Number 1 in the UK Singles Chart and made the Top 5 on the Billboard Hot 100.

In mid-1983, soon after the end of the White Feathers concert tour, the band fired him by telephone. Limahl accused the other bandmembers of being jealous of his prominence as lead singer, and was quoted in the press as saying that "I've been betrayed!", and that "I was sacked for making them a success".

After leaving the band, Limahl launched a solo career, achieving hits with "Only for Love"(UK No. 16) in 1983, and with "The NeverEnding Story" (UK No. 4) in 1984.

Unable to replicate the success of his earlier career, Limahl hit hard times and was later photographed coming out of an unemployment office in the UK. The pictures were published in a British Sunday newspaper, highlighting how "the once mighty can fall".

Though now openly gay, Limahl once shared a flat with disc jockey Paul Gambaccini (who is also author of the first official Kajagoogoo biography, songbook and photobook), leading to rumours in the tabloid press that the two were lovers.

1960 – Michelangelo Signorile is a prolific, and often provocative, writer and activist whose books and articles, radio show, newspaper columns, and website champion the cause of glbtq rights. He is best known for his practice of "outing" closeted conservatives and for advocating the redefinition of marriage to include same-sex couples. He has been called the heir to the "in your face" brand of activism pioneered by 1980s AIDS activist and writer Larry Kramer.

Signorile was born into a blue collar Italian family in New York. He grew up in Brooklyn and on Staten Island. In the early 1980s he proceeded to "come out." He spent much of the 1980s working as an entertainment publicist and enjoying the perks that come with such a job. However, by the late 1980s he became involved in gay politics and AIDS activism. He ran the media committee of the direct action group ACT UP in New York, helping to publicize protests and bringing attention to the various issues surrounding AIDS.

Signorile and Gabriel Rotello, a New York party promoter, formed the New York-based magazine OutWeek in 1989. Signorile and Rotello felt that both mainstream media and gay media failed to cover the AIDS crisis accurately. Plus, they wanted to "shake things up.

In OutWeek Signorile often wrote about how invisibility and the closet hurt the gay movement and adversely affect efforts to contain the AIDS epidemic. Soon, he began taking aim at the media, which allowed gay public figures to remain closeted. To illustrate the point, in 1990 Signorile and OutWeek outed the recently deceased billionaire Malcolm Forbes, whose homosexuality was an open secret in New York media circles but had not previously been mentioned in print.

Signorile contended that the homosexuality of public figures (and only public figures) should be mentioned when relevant to a larger story (and only when relevant). Signorile's position at the time was seen as radical.

Signorile's book, Queer in America: Sex, the Media, and the Closets of Power (1993), examines the three closets that keep gays invisible: the media in New York, politics in Washington, and entertainment in Hollywood. His book explores the devastating effects of homosexuals' remaining in the closet, and provides one of the first intellectual justifications for the practice of outing.

1n 1996, Signorile published Outing Yourself: How to Come Out to Your Family, Friends, and Coworkers. In this work, he offers step-by-step tips on coming out. He describes a fourteen-step process of how glbtq individuals can come out to their families and friends. He presents a coming-out journey, and declares, "The stress of coming out will never be as hard on you as the stress of staying in was."

Signorile's columns and reporting in the late 1990s again sparked controversy. He cautioned that many younger gay men in the United States were not practicing safe sex and deplored the popularity of bare back sex. He warned of "circuit boy" culture and the popularity of designer drugs, such as Ecstasy, ketamine (also known as special K), crystal methamphetamine, and gamma hydroxybuterate or GHB.

Signorile deserves credit for helping change journalistic practices in the United States, especially in regard to mentioning the homosexuality of public figures. In doing so, he has also helped make it easier for ordinary individuals to be open about their sexuality in the workplace and in daily life.

On July 19, 2013 he married film historian David Gerstner in New York City: "Blown away by all the best wishes here to David and me on our wedding. Thanks to all, far and wide, for making the day even more special," he announced on Twitter.

 Matthew Waterhouse (R) with Doctor Who

1961 – On this date the British actor Matthew Waterhouse was born. He is best known for his role as Adric in the BBC science fiction television series Doctor Who. Adric was a companion of Tom Baker and Peter Davison's Doctors from 1980 to 1982. Waterhouse was the youngest male actor to play a companion.

Waterhouse is openly Gay and is believed to be the first actor on Doctor Who to have been open about his sexuality while on the series.

After leaving the series, he began a stage career. In 2006, Waterhouse self-published his debut novel, Fates, Flowers: A Comedy of New York.

1964 – Dean and Dan Caten (né Catenacci) are Canadian fashion designers, radio personalities, and businessmen. They are identical twin brothers and the founders and owners of Dsquared², an international fashion house. The youngest of nine siblings, identical twins Dean (the naughty one) and Dan (the sensible one) do everything together: they work together, they play together, they even sleep in the same bed.

When they were teenagers, the Catens’ parents could no longer afford to take care of them and the Canadian government had to step in. The twins were shuffled between various foster families, and eventually placed with an abusive couple in Arizona. Again, the exact nature of that abuse was something the twins were unwilling to discuss.

It was during this time that the two were forced apart, after the couple decided that Dean was too difficult to deal with and sent him away. The trauma of that separation, perhaps more than anything else the pair suffered in their young lives, would seem to be at the core of their extraordinary closeness, and their co-sleeping. “There was a moment in my life when I thought I was never going to see my brother again,” said Dean. “That will never happen again in our life. So if we’re afraid of the dark and need to sleep next to each other then we’re okay because there’s no stronger power that can get us. It’s not sexual, it’s brotherly.”

Dean and Dan Catenacci were born in 1964 in Toronto, Ontario and grew up in Willowdale. They have seven older siblings. Their father is from Casalvieri, a small town in Ciociaria, Lazio, Italy. In 1983, they moved to New York to study fashion at Parsons School of Design, but stayed for only one semester before returning to Toronto.

Finding a financial backer in 1986, they launched their first signature womenswear collection, DEanDAN. By 1988 they had signed on to label Ports International as creative directors. At the same time, the Catens designed for their lower-end, leisure brand, Tabi International. In 1991, the brothers moved to Milan, Italy where they worked as designers for the house of Gianni Versace, and denim brand Diesel, the latter of which funded and launched their namesake brand. They debuted their men's collection in 1994, and in 2003, they launched a women's collection and a men's underwear collection.

The Dsquared² brand was launched in 1995.

In 2000–01, Madonna commissioned the brothers to design over 150 pieces for her Drowned World Tour 2001 and "Don't Tell Me" music video.

A runway show in 2005 ended with Christina Aguilera stripping male models of their clothes. In September 2007, the Dsquared² fashion show in Milan featured Rihanna entering the stage in an American muscle car, followed by a runway walk. In January 2010, the Dsquared² Autumn/Winter 2010 menswear show in Milan featured Bill Kaulitz descending from the ceiling in a caged elevator à la Rocky Horror Picture Show. Bill Kaulitz opened and closed the Dsquared² Autumn/Winter 2010 menswear show in Milan.

In June 2007, the first Dsquared² flagship was opened in Milan's fashion district. Stores also opened in St. Moritz, Athens, Mykonos, Capri, Istanbul, Kiev, Cannes, Singapore, Paris, Nicosia and Hong Kong. In March 2015, Dsquared² opened their first flagship store in London. This is the first stage of their major store redesign programme that will continue into the US at the end of 2015. More recent Dsquared² stores openings have included Miami, Doha, Los Angeles, New York, Baku, Rome, Istanbul and Madrid.

1980 – In Ottawa, Justice Minister Jean Chrétien announces proposals to revise the Criminal Code to reduce age of consent to 18 years and make other changes in legislation related to sexual offences. 

1985 – Shane Bitney Crone is an American filmmaker, writer, speaker, and advocate for LGBT rights.

Crone made headlines in May 2012 when he released a video on YouTube titled "It Could Happen to You," in which he spoke of the devastation he faced after the death of his longtime life partner, Tom Bridegroom, a year earlier. Bridegroom was an actor and songwriter who hosted the TV series The X Effect. While Crone's own family was loving and accepting of his sexual orientation, Bridegroom's family was not, and had gone so far as to threaten Tom with physical violence and to blame Crone for "making" Tom gay. After Bridegroom was accidentally killed in a fall from a rooftop in May 2011, Crone was threatened with physical violence if he dared to attend Bridegroom's funeral and was not mentioned in Bridegroom's obituary or memorial service. Crone had also been denied hospital visitations and other rights accorded married couples because he was not recognized as Bridegroom's partner or family.

Crone's emotional plea for rights for same-sex couples became one of the most widely viewed clips on YouTube shortly after its release. Crone was stunned and gratified by the reception to his video, and told RadarOnline.com he made the video as a form of therapy to help him deal with his loss and to further positive change for same-sex couples in the United States.

Bridegroom, a documentary based on the story of Crone's and Bridegroom's relationship and the difficulties Crone faced after his partner's death, premiered on April 23, 2013, at the Tribeca Film Festival. Bridegroom was endorsed by President Bill Clinton, who introduced the documentary at the Tribeca Film Festival. In his remarks, President Clinton stated, "This is really, on one level, a wonderful, sad, heartbreaking yet exhilarating and life-affirming story ... and on another level, it's a story about our nation's struggle to make one more step in forming a more perfect union, for which marriage is both the symbol and substance." Bridegroom won the Tribeca Film Festival Audience's non-fiction award. It is currently available on Netflix in the US and Canada.

On February 15, 2016, Crone announced that he is in a relationship with American Idol finalist Rayvon Owen. He is also featured as the romantic lead in Owen's music video "Can't Fight It". They announced on 3 March 2018 that they would be getting married, after Crone proposed to Owen on stage at a Demi Lovato concert.

1987 – Ronan Farrow is an American journalist, lawyer, and former government advisor. He is the son of actress Mia Farrow and filmmaker Woody Allen.

In late 2017, Farrow's articles in The New Yorker helped uncover the Harvey Weinstein sexual abuse allegations. For this reporting, The New Yorker won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, sharing the award with The New York Times. Farrow's subsequent investigations exposed similar allegations against Eric Schneiderman and Les Moonves, which led to the resignations of both in 2018.

Farrow was born in New York City to actress Mia Farrow and filmmaker Woody Allen. His father's family is Jewish, whereas his mother's family is Catholic. His given name (Satchel Ronan O'Sullivan Farrow) honors National Baseball Hall of Fame pitcher Satchel Paige and actress Maureen O'Sullivan, his maternal grandmother. Now known as Ronan, he was given the surname "Farrow" to avoid a family with one child named Allen amid Farrows and Previns. In 2013, Mia Farrow raised speculation that singer-actor Frank Sinatra could have been Ronan's biological father.

As a child, Farrow skipped grades in school and took courses with the Center for Talented Youth. He attended Bard College at Simon's Rock, later transferring to Bard College for a B.A. in philosophy, and becoming the youngest graduate of that institution at age 15. In 2009, he received a J.D. from Yale Law School, and was later admitted to the New York Bar.

From 2001 to 2009, he was a UNICEF Spokesperson for Youth, advocating for children and women caught up in the ongoing crisis in Sudan's Darfur region and assisting in fundraising and addressing United Nations affiliated groups in the United States.

In 2009, Farrow joined the Obama administration as Special Adviser for Humanitarian and NGO Affairs in the Office of the Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan.

After leaving government, Farrow began a Rhodes Scholarship at Magdalen College, Oxford.

Farrow hosted the investigative segment "Undercover with Ronan Farrow" on NBC's Today. Launched in June 2015, the series was billed as providing Farrow's look at the stories "you don't see in the headlines every day", often featuring crowd-sourced story selection and covering topics from the labor rights of nail salon workers to mental healthcare issues to sexual assault on campus.

On October 10, 2017, The New Yorker published an investigative article by Farrow detailing allegations of sexual misconduct against film producer Harvey Weinstein five days after The New York Times published the findings of its own investigation into Weinstein. In 2016, NBC had decided against airing Farrow's initial findings. The New Yorker won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for Farrow's reporting, sharing the award with Jodi Kantor and Meghan Twohey at The New York Times. Farrow was included in the Time "100 Most Influential People in the World" list in 2018.

Farrow has identified as part of the LGBT community. He was recognized by the Point Foundation in 2018. His partner is podcast host and former presidential speech writer Jon Lovett. The couple has been together since 2011.

1991 – The New York Court of Appeals rules that sex in a parked car on a public street does not necessarily violate the state's public indecency law

1993 – Nik Dodani, born in Dallas, Texas, is an American actor and comedian. Dodani is of Indian origin. He is best known for his role as Zahid in Atypical, a Netflix original comedy series created by Robia Rashid. Dodani previously starred as Pat Patel in the revival of popular CBS sitcom Murphy Brown, which premiered on September 27, 2018.

In addition to Netflix's Atypical and CBS's Murphy Brown, Dodani is known for his appearances in TBS's Angie Tribeca, Comedy Central's Idiotsitter, Freeform's Kevin from Work, and NBC's The Player. He appeared in the Ben Stiller-produced Netflix film Alex Strangelove, Joshua Leonard's independent film, Dark Was the Night, opposite Marisa Tomei and Charlie Plummer, and the Sony Pictures thriller Escape Room.

Dodani also performs stand-up and made his late-night comedy debut on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on September 28, 2018.

During the 2016 presidential election, Dodani was a producer for MoveOn.org, where he organized a political comedy tour called Laughter Trumps Hate. He previously worked as a communications consultant at RALLY, an issue advocacy firm based in Hollywood, and as a graphic designer and student organizer on Elizabeth Warren's 2012 Senate campaign. He studied politics at Occidental College.