December 28

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1888 – On this date the German film director Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, better known as F. W. Murnau was born (d.1931), was one of the most influential German film directors of the silent era. A figure in the expressionist movement in German cinema during the 1920s, some of Murnau's films from the silent era have been lost, but most still survive. He was one of a number of directors who were part of the expressionist movement in German cinema during the 1920s and directed many movies that were influential. While some of Murnau's films from the silent era have been lost, most still survive. They are widely acknowledged among film scholars as masterpieces.

He's best known for the exquisite silent film Nosferatu, but his film Sunrise, produced in Hollywood, is one of the most beautiful films ever made. The rumors of his death are certainly the most bizarre in a town known for extraordinary ways of dying. In 1931, Murnau and his chauffeur were killed in an automobile accident. From the way the bodies had been found, the director was rumored to have been killed while he was fellating the driver. Its probably a myth. No one knows, but the historian and Murnau biographer Lotte Eisner writes matter-of-factly of Murnau's finding Hollywood a tolerant place for his sexuality and that he was "no longer subject to intolerant German law" concerning homosexuality.

Only 11 people showed up for the funeral. Among them were Greta Garbo and Fritz Lang who delivered the funeral speech. Garbo also commissioned a deathmask of Murnau which she kept on her desk during her years in Hollywood.

1909 – Irving Bieber (d.1991) was an American psychoanalyst, best known for his study Homosexuality: A Psychoanalytic Study of Male Homosexuals (1962), in which Bieber took the since discredited position that homosexuality is an illness.

Irving Bieber was born in New York City and graduated from New York University Medical College in 1930. Bieber went on to work at Yale Medical College, New York University, and starting in 1953 at the New York Medical College, where he taught a course in psychoanalysis. Bieber was, along with Lionel Ovesey and Charles Socarides, one of the most influential American psychoanalysts who attempted to convert gay men to heterosexuality. Bieber's 1962 book Homosexuality: A Psychoanalytic Study of Male Homosexuals was a counter reaction to the 1948 Kinsey Report on male sexual behavior. It remained the leading study on homosexuality until homosexuality was removed from the clinical list of mental disorders in 1973

In 1970, Bieber attended a meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in San Francisco that was protested by gay activists. According to Socarides, Bieber, who felt he had "been working all these years to help these people", "took this very hard." In 1973, the same year the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders, Bieber told an interviewer that "a homosexual is a person whose heterosexual function is crippled, like the legs of a polio victim." When Alan P. Bell, Martin S. Weinberg, and Sue Kiefer Hammersmith's study Sexual Preference was published in 1981, Bieber declared that its findings were "totally disparate" with his experience from psychiatric consultation.

Bieber arranged a partial translation into English of a paper by the Hungarian pediatrician S. Lindner, who had reported a systematic study of sucking. Sigmund Freud had used Lindner's observation that sensual sucking seems to absorb the attention completely and leads to either sleep or an orgasm-like response to develop his theory of infantile sexuality. Bieber pointed out what he saw as inaccuracies in Freud's use of this paper.

Homosexuality offered a view of homosexuality as an illness that has since been discredited. The book has been criticized for examining homosexuals already in analytic treatment as opposed to non-patient heterosexuals. It has been suggested that the study informed stereotypes later promulgated by the media. For example, in 1964 Life magazine featured an article on homosexuals and smothering mothers directly inspired by this study. Despite its discrediting, Homosexuality continued to be read and taught in psychopathology courses in universities in the 1980s.

Bieber died in Manhattan in 1991.

1916 – Willmer "Little Ax" Broadnax, (d.1994) also known as "Little Axe," "Wilbur," "Willie," and "Wilmer," was an African-American hard gospel quartet singer. A tiny man with glasses and a high, powerful tenor voice, he worked and recorded with many of the most famous and influential groups of his day.

In 1950, Broadnax joined the Spirit of Memphis Quartet. Along with Broadnax, the group featured two other leads -- Jethro "Jet" Bledsoe, a bluesy crooner, and Silas Steele, an overpowering baritone. This was one of the most impressive line-ups in quartet history. The Spirit of Memphis Quartet recorded for King Records, and Broadnax appeared on their releases at least until 1952. Shortly after that, however, he moved on, working with the Fairfield Four, and, in the beginning of the 60s, as one of the replacements for Archie Brownlee in the Five Blind Boys of Mississippi. Until 1965 he headed a quartet called "Little Axe and the Golden Echoes," which released some singles on Peacock Records. By then, quartet singing was fading as a commercial phenomenon, and Broadnax retired from touring, though he did continue to record occasionally with the Blind Boys into the 70s and 80s.

Upon his death in 1994, it was discovered that Broadnax was female assigned at birth.

1927 – Simon Raven (d.2001) was an English novelist, essayist, dramatist and raconteur who, in a writing career of forty years, caused controversy, amusement and offence. His obituary in The Guardian noted that, "he combined elements of Flashman, Waugh's Captain Grimes and the Earl of Rochester", and that he reminded Noel Annan, his Cambridge tutor, of the young Guy Burgess.

He was educated, first at Cordwalles preparatory school near Camberley, then as a scholarship pupil at Charterhouse, whence he was expelled in 1945 for homosexual activities - this despite his cricketing and scholastic prowess.

After completing national service he entered King's College, Cambridge in 1948, to read Classics. Although he possessed a first-class intelligence this was not matched by his application, and his university career was punctuated by regular crises over money, mis-behaviour and an apparent inability to connect actions with their consequences. His first class intelligence garnered in the event only an upper Second, a degree which would not normally have gained him a studentship to read for a doctorate. That it did so may be attributed, essentially, to his charm. He was awarded a Studentship (graduate fellowship) to study the influence of the classics in Victorian schooling, but this soon gave way to pleasure-seeking and his thesis was never seriously addressed.

n 1951, he married Susan Kilner, a graduate from Newnham who was expecting his child; the marriage was from duty, as he made clear, and afterwards, he studiously avoided her. A son, Adam, was born in 1952. (The couple divorced in 1957.) Raven, his scholarship funds exhausted, withdrew from King's, and attempted to earn a living as a writer, gaining a small income as book reviewer for The Listener. He also wrote a novel, which proved unpublishable because of its libellous nature, and only emerged almost 30 years later as An Inch of Fortune. Seeking a firmer livelihood, Raven decided to rejoin the army.

During his National Service, Raven had served as an officer cadet in the Parachute Regiment, and was based in India during the final months of the Raj. He was subsequently commissioned into the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, before being seconded to the 77th Heavy Ack Ack (Anti Aircraft) Regiment at Rolleston Balloon Camp, where he saw out his service.In 1953, after his King's College experiences, he secured a regular commission with the King's Shropshire Light Infantry (KSLI), serving in Germany and Kenya, before receiving a home posting to Shrewsbury.

1930 – Artist George Dureau is best known for his male figure studies and narrative paintings in oil and charcoal and for his black-and-white photographs, which often feature street youths, dwarfs, and amputees. He is quintessentially a New Orleanian. He was born in the city and, except for brief hiatuses, has lived there his entire life.

Critic Kenneth Holditch observed some time ago, Dureau's art is "entwined with that mixture of contradictory elements that constitutes the carnal atmosphere of his native city. Perhaps this accounts to some extent for the paradoxes so distinctly a part of his best work: the joyful and painful, the beautiful and ugly, the spiritual and sensual, and most significant of all the real in sharp juxtaposition to that which is vividly imagined. Dureau looks at life in its grandeur and grossness and his keen eye and sure hand do not wink or tremble at either extreme."

One important part of Dureau's oeuvre is his canvases inspired by mythological figures and stories, such as Doing the Pollaiolo at the New Firenze (1997) or Three Maenads and a Centaur (1997). In these works, usually very large paintings, the figures are intricately posed, inhabiting fully the picture plane, rhythmically interacting with each other.

Many of these paintings, such as The Poseurs Illuminate the Eighth Deadly Sin (1997), are frankly homoerotic. All of them tell, or at least imply, interesting, often provocative, stories. Yet they are also slyly humorous, partly because the mythology is often potted and partly because they are presented whimsically. They might be sketches for a Mardi Gras bal masqué.

Because the mythological paintings often use the very same models Dureau uses in his portraits and photographs, the classical figures are anything but remote. Indeed, in these paintings, the heroic and the grotesque, the stereotypically beautiful and the deformed easily intermingle, with the real often interrogating or challenging the idealized. The mythological figures are never only symbols of the past. While they function to connect the present to the long ago, they are always also about the here and now.

Many of the non-mythological paintings, such as Nude Beach (1965) or Reception with a Waiter (1962), also imply provocative narratives. Even a portrait such as Black Tie to Petronius (1970), which depicts a handsome, long-haired, languid-eyed, sensuous-lipped young man in a tuxedo, becomes a narrative by virtue of its title, which alludes to a gay Mardi Gras krewe.

Dureau's charcoal drawings and black-and-white photographs are significant contributions to homoerotic art. While they often celebrate the obvious delights of the male body with a disarming frankness, they are also able to discover beauty and dignity in unexpected places. Dureau's subjects are a motley crew, including young street people, poor white and African-American hustlers and athletes, dwarfs, and amputees.

Dureau's photographs have often been compared with those of Robert Mapplethorpe. But the influence runs not from Mapplethorpe to Dureau but from Dureau to Mapplethorpe. The photographers were friends in the early 1970s. Mapplethorpe was greatly moved by Dureau's photographs, even to the point of restaging many of Dureau's earlier compositions.

1932 – The Argentine writer Manuel Puig was born on this date (d.1990); Gay themes and motifs are suggested in a number of Manuel Puig's eight novels, and in the best known of them, Kiss of the Spider Woman, Gay desire is central to the fiction.

After unsuccessfully studying architecture in the Universidad de Buenos Aires, he began working as a film archivist and editor in the city of Buenos Aires and later, in Italy after winning a scholarship from the Italian Institute of Buenos Aires. Puig's dream was to become a screenwriter to write TV shows and movies. His career as a screenwriter never took off, however. In the 1960s, he moved back to Buenos Aires, where he penned his first major novel, La traición de Rita Hayworth (The Betrayal of Rita Hayworth).

Because he had leftist political tendencies and also foresaw a rightist wave in Argentina, Puig moved to Mexico in 1973, where he wrote his later works including El beso de la mujer araña (Kiss of the Spider Woman ).

Much of Puig's work can be seen as pop art. Perhaps due to his work in film and television, Puig managed to create a writing style that incorporated elements of these mediums, such as montage and the use of multiple points of view. He also made much use of popular culture (for example, soap opera) in his works. In Latin American literary histories, he is presented as a writer who belongs to the Postboom and Post-modernist schools.

Puig lived in exile throughout most of his life. In 1989 Puig moved from Mexico City to Cuernavaca, Mexico, where he died in 1990.

In his quadruple memoir, Eminent Maricones, the Columbian-American author (and close friend of Puig's) Jaime Manrique relates the astounding story of the New York Times obituary writer who completely flubbed up Puig's obituary and made him not only heterosexual, but the father of sons. According to Manrique, the reporter, John T. McQuiston called Puig's Cuernavaca home to confirm the writer's death. The person who answered the call and confirmed the death was one of Puig's proteges — one of the many Gay men that Puig mentored throughout his life. Puig called these men, "his daughters" and he was the mother to these daughters. When the reporter asked what his relation to Puig was, the man answered that he was one of Puig's "hijas" (daughters). McQuiston must have thought the man said "hijo" instead of "hija" and so the obituary read that Puig's "son, Javier Labrada, said his father died of a heart attack after gall bladder surgery" and that Puig was survived by "two sons, Mr. Labrada and Agustin Garcia Gil, all of Cuernavaca." Which came as a complete shock to anyone who remotely knew the very proudly flamboyantly Queer writer. The foul up remained a mystery until Manrique cleared it up in his memoirs.

1936 – On this date, the American scholar and writer Byrne R.S. Fone, was born.

Byrne Fone is a pioneering Gay historian. His career has been dedicated to curating a greater understanding of the lives erased throughout history due to prejudice, ignorance, and self-censorship.

Fone is the editor of the outstanding and voluminous Columbia Anthology of Gay Literature, and the author of A Road to Stonewall: Male Homosexuality and Homophobia in English and American Literature, 1750-1969, Masculine Landscapes: Walt Whitman and the Historical Text and Hidden Heritage: History and the Gay Imagination published way back in 1978.

1942 – Best known by his stage name Peter Berlin, Armin Hagen Freiherr von Hoyningen-Huene (born in 1942) is a photographer, artist, filmmaker, clothing designer/sewer, model and gay sex symbol . In the early to mid-1970s, Berlin created some of the most recognizable gay male erotic imagery of his time. Serving as his own photographer, model, and fashion designer, Berlin redefined self-portraiture and became an international sensation.

His two films, Nights in Black Leather (1973) and That Boy (1974) (credited in the latter as Peter Burian), played to packed houses for years and, along with other pioneering erotic filmmakers such as Wakefield Poole and Jack Deveau, helped bring gay male erotic films artistic legitimacy.

He was the second of the three children (a sister Mirna and a brother Reinhold who died in 1970 in a car crash) of Eduard Baron von Hoyningen-Huene and his wife Marion, 20 years old at the time of his birth. He was born in Łódź, Poland, and grew up in Berlin, Germany. The extended family included the American fashion photographer George Hoyningen-Huene.

He received post-secondary education in Germany as a photo-technician. In his early 20s, he worked as a photographer for an interview program on German television, photographing some of Europe's biggest celebrities and film stars.

Berlin designed and sewed all of his clothing without a pattern. He also was a painter and illustrator. He began photographing himself in erotic poses and making skin-tight clothes to wear as he cruised the parks and train stations of Berlin, the streets of Rome, Paris, New York and San Francisco.

Berlin as seen by Tom of Finland
Click for larger

In the early 1970s, Berlin moved to San Francisco and became a fixture on the streets with his highly suggestive clothing and constant cruising. He collaborated with friend Richard Abel on a 16 mm hard-core porn film entitled Nights in Black Leather (1973) in which he played the lead role. Berlin's poster for the film helped make Nights in Black Leather an underground hit.

1953 – Martha Wash, known for her distinctive and powerful dramatic soprano voice, is a two time Grammy nominated American R&B, pop, soul, and house singer and songwriter with a career spanning over thirty years.

Wash began her music career as a backing singer for Sylvester. With fellow backing singer Izora Rhodes, she was half of Two Tons O' Fun, who would later be renamed The Weather Girls. As such, they were responsible for providing much of the firepower behind several of Sylvester's earliest releases — often their voices were mixed so that Sylvester was actually the background singer and Wash's and Rhodes's voices were up front. When they left to pursue a career on their own, they achieved success with a handful of disco-oriented tracks, culminating in the 1982 release "It's Raining Men", a worldwide hit.

Wash, considered an icon within the gay community, continues to record new music into the 21st century such as her first new single in more than 5 years, "You Lift Me Up" - a fusion of gospel and house, which is the first song produced on her own label, Purple Rose Records - 2005. Wash performed in the opening ceremony of the World's first OutGames in Montreal in July 2006. She performed at numerous Human Rights Campaign events in the U.S. The gay-themed podcast Gay Pimpin' with Jonny McGovern dedicated an episode to Wash and she obliged them with an extended telephone interview. In 2006 Wash appeared as a guest on GSN's I've Got a Secret, and performed "It's Raining Men" for the all-gay panel.

She was a performer at the annual Big Gay Day in Brisbane, Australia on March 9, 2008. She also performed at the Chicago Gay Pride Street Fest on June 28, 2008, at the Nightingale as part of the Birmingham, England, bank holiday festival on August 23, 2008, at Washington, DC Capital Pride on June 14, 2009, and at the Opening Ceremony of the NAGAAA Gay Softball World Series in Milwaukee, WI on August 31, 2009. In April 2011, the song and accompanying music video for the song "I've Got You" were released. On Oct. 1, 2012, she was on "The Late Show with David Letterman" celebrating the 30th anniversary of the release of "It's Raining Men," which she performed the classic with Paul Schaffer, six back-up singers, three female dancers and three male acrobats descending from the sky. Martha pefrormed at World Pride in Toronto, Canada, in the summer of 2014.

1963 – Malcolm Gets is an American actor. He is best known for his role as Richard in the American television sitcom Caroline in the City. Gets is also a dancer, singer, composer, classically trained pianist, vocal director, and choreographer. His first solo album came out in 2009 from PS Classics.

Gets was nominated for a Tony Award in 2003 (Best Performance by a Lead Actor in a Musical for Amour) and was awarded the Obie Award in 1995.

Gets was born in Waukegan, Illinois, the son of Lispbeth, an educator, and Terence Gets, a college textbook salesman. Both parents grew up in London, England. He moved with his family to New Jersey. He lived there until he was six, when his family moved to Gainesville, Florida.

Gets started studying performing arts early in life. He began studying piano at age nine. This skill helped him pay his way through college. He began singing lessons at 14. He also danced with a studio in Gainesville as a teenager.

Gets skipped two years of K-12 education and graduated from Buchholz High School in Gainesville, Florida, aged 16. He then attended the University of Florida, where he won Best Newcomer's Award in acting and at age 24 earned a BFA in Theatre (1988). Following that, he completed an MFA at the Yale Drama School.

Gets came out as gay in the late 1990s and lives with his partner.

1969 – In Berkeley California, Don Jackson announced plans for a "gay colony" in California's Alpine County. Though the proposal received media attention, few gay men and lesbians were willing to move there.

1978 – Uriah Bell is a poet, writer, publisher and founder of Rising Voices Press, and most recently, the editor in chief of TRUTH Magazine, a bi-monthly national publication for LGBTQ persons of color.

Bell began formally publishing his writing in 2008 with his freshman collection of poetry Mood Swings - where he decided to expose his personal self in an intimate collection. Although Bell intended Mood Swings to be his only publication, he was encouraged to continue sharing his story, and the stories of others through Mood Swings overwhelming response. In 2009, Bell founded Rising Voices Press, an independent publishing company focused on promoting and publishing the written voices of the Black LGBT community.

An activist in the struggle around HIV/AIDS, Bell is a 2011 fellow in the Black AIDS Institute's AAHU Community Mobilization College, a dedicated group of fellows from across the country working tirelessly to develop mobilization campaigns to rally the Black community around ending and educating themselves on the disparities of HIV/AIDS and working to end the epidemic. Bell has participated on national and international panels and has led discussions on HIV/AIDS in the Black community, living with HIV/AIDS and overcoming new diagnosis, homophobia in the Black community, LGBT youth suicide, the Black church, and segregation in the LGBT community.

Dan Amboyer (R) with husband Eric Berger

1985 – Dan Amboyer is an American actor, best known for his starring roles on the hit TV series Younger, the limited NBC spin-off series The Blacklist: Redemption, and for starring as Prince William of Wales in the film William & Catherine: A Royal Romance.

Amboyer was born in Detroit, to Claudia and Dr. Donald Amboyer. He attended The Roeper School and arts high school Interlochen Arts Academy. Amboyer subsequently continued his studies at the Carnegie Mellon School of Drama, where he was offered early admittance following his junior year of high school. After graduation, he relocated to New York City.

Amboyer has appeared in numerous television shows and films, and worked extensively in theatre. Amboyer is a founding member of the theatre company Exit, Pursued by a Bear. In 2019, he made his directorial debut helming the world premiere of Whirlwind Off-Broadway.

On October 7, 2017, Amboyer publicly came out as gay and announced that he had married his long-term partner, Eric P. Berger. Amboyer's coming out sparked national attention with televised coverage on Access Hollywood, E! News and Entertainment Tonight. On November 4, 2019, Amboyer announced via Instagram that he and Berger were expecting a son. Their son, Theodore Carl Amboyer-Berger, was born on December 13, 2019.

1986 – Terry Dolan, an anti-gay family values advocate, was discovered to have been gay after his death from AIDS at age 36.

1987 – Thomas Dekker is an American film, television actor, musician and voice actor. He is also a singer and has written and produced two albums.

He is best known for his roles as John Connor in Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Adam Conant on The Secret Circle, and Zach on Heroes. Dekker did the voice of Littlefoot in The Land Before Time V-IX (singing voice in The Land Before Time V) and as Fievel Mousekewitz in An American Tail: The Treasure of Manhattan Island and An American Tail: The Mystery of the Night Monster. He is known for playing Jesse Braun in the 2010 remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Smith in Gregg Araki's film Kaboom. Dekker starred as Gregory Valentine in the TV show Backstrom.

Dekker was born in Las Vegas, Nevada. His mother, Hilary (née Williams), is a concert pianist, acting coach, actor, and singer, and his late father, David John Ellis Dekker, was an artist, set designer, opera singer, and actor. His mother is Welsh and his father was American, with English and Dutch ancestry. His maternal grandfather was Alun Williams, a radio broadcaster for the British Broadcasting Corporation. As a child, he and his parents moved all over the world, including his mother's native United Kingdom and Canada.

Starting his acting career at age six, Dekker was first seen in the soap The Young and the Restless. He then appeared in Star Trek Generations, two episodes of Star Trek Voyager and Village of the Damned. Dekker has also appeared as Bobby on "Seinfeld" (Season 7 Episode 4). Later, in 1997, he became a regular on the Disney Channel show Honey, I Shrunk the Kids: The TV Show which is based on the movie of the same name where he played Nick Szalinski for three years.

Dekker was brought up with a musical background, and started writing music at age ten while living in Canada. At the age of fifteen he landed a record deal; however after feeling that he wasn't as involved in the music as he would have liked, he left to concentrate on making his own music. At the age of sixteen, Dekker started writing and producing his own classical music influenced by electronica which he describes as "electrofolk". His debut album Psyanotic was released in 2008

On April 20, 2011 in an interview with Out magazine Dekker spoke about his sexuality, which has been the subject of speculation.

On July 13, 2017 Dekker came out as gay and revealed that he married his husband in April. He is married to Canadian actor Jesse Haddock.

1990 – David Archuleta is an American singer-songwriter and actor. At ten years old, he won the children's division of the Utah Talent Competition leading to other television singing appearances. When he was twelve years old, Archuleta became the Junior Vocal Champion on the second season of Star Search known as "Star Search 2". In 2008, he finished second on the seventh season of American Idol.

Archuleta was born in Miami, to Guadalupe Mayorga, a salsa singer and dancer, and Jeff Archuleta, a jazz musician. His mother is from Honduras and his father is of Spanish, Danish, Irish, and German descent. Archuleta has stated that his surname is of Basque origin. He speaks fluent Spanish. Archuleta has four siblings.

Archuleta's family moved to the Salt Lake City suburb of Sandy, Utah, when he was six years old. He attended Murray High School before appearing on American Idol.

Archuleta began singing at the age of six, inspired by a Les Misérables video. "That musical is what started all of this," he said. He started performing publicly at the age of 10 when he participated in the Utah Talent Competition, singing "I Will Always Love You" by Dolly Parton; he won the Child Division.

When Archuleta, a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, was 21, he volunteered for two years as a full-time missionary in Rancuagua, Chile. Archuleta is a graduate of Barbizon Modeling and Acting School in Salt Lake City.

In August 2008, Archuleta released "Crush", the first single from his self-titled debut album. The album, released three months later, debuted at number two on the Billboard 200 chart; it has sold over 750,000 copies in the United States and over 900,000 worldwide.

In October 2010, he released a third album, The Other Side of Down, featuring lead single "Something 'Bout Love". On March 28, 2012, Archuleta left on a two-year hiatus to be a missionary of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Chile, but stated that he would continue his music career afterwards. As of February 2012, Archuleta had sold 1,108,000 albums and 3,327,000 tracks in the United States.

In March 2012, Archuleta released his fourth album, "Forevermore", exclusively in the Philippines. This was his first Original Filipino Music (OPM) album, composed of several covers of Filipino songs. The album was certified gold in the Philippines (10,000 units) as of June 2012.

1990 – The Greensboro North Carolina council repealed a municipal ordinance forbidding discrimination based on sexual orientation. The council had passed the ordinance only three months earlier.

1998 – Pope John Paul II spoke out against the acceptance of non-traditional families, saying it disfigures the traditional family structure.

2009 – First same-sex couple (Alejandro "Alex" Freyre & Jose Maria Di Bello) to legally marry in Argentina and Latin America.

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"Hordes and hordes of gay people, both younger and older, have been deprived of a chance to have a historic memory because academe, until the past few decades, hasn't recognized that there is a gay history. Nor have most people recognized that the monuments of gay history are to be found in gay literary history. Nations and peoples have their great monuments, but gay people have no space that is specifically ours. Gay books are our monuments — the most inclusive of all monuments." Byrne Fone

"Homophobia is never really very silent ... It's the shadow text for gay literature." Byrne Fone

"An entire culture has been built and rebuilt and rebuilt over the centuries." Fone on the effects of suppression of homosexuality throughout the ages.

The first openly gay book he remembers reading was Gore Vidal's The City and the Pillar, but that was much later. "'The Hardy Boys' - that's your answer," he says, sipping iced tea in a Soho coffee house on a blazing summer afternoon. "That was the first gay book I ever read. I made it a gay book." Byrne Fone

"So long as it is legitimated by society, religion, and politics, homophobia will spawn hatred, contempt, and violence, and it will remain our last acceptable prejudice."
- Byrne Fone in his book "Homophobia: A History"