December 3

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 Self-portrait

1830 – Baron Frederick Leighton, English sculptor and painter, born (d.1896); Leighton's painting, long in disfavor, but coming back in style as more and more people learn to appreciate the Victorian Renaissance Revival, was enormously popular in his lifetime. Since Leighton's sympathies were with the Italian Renaissance tradition, his paintings - with their often mythological subject, monumental compositions, and figures clad in classical drapery - are among the last examples of the grand traditional manner in European art.

 
Daedelus and Icarus The Sluggard     
(Click for larger)

Leighton's paintings and sculpture appealed to a large and influential segment of the Victorian public, which craved an art of "high seriousness."

Because he played by the established rules of the game, Leighton, whose homosexuality was widely known, pursued his career and his pleasure with discretion. He died at 65, the day after being made a baron, the first English painter to be so honored. Leighton was bearer of the shortest-lived peerage in history; after only one day his hereditary peerage ended with his death. As he was unmarried, after his death his Barony was extinguished after existing for only a day; this is a record in the Peerage.

1892 – The Michigan Supreme Court rules that emission is required to complete an act of sodomy.

  Sigmund and Anna Freud

1895 – Pioneering psychologist and daughter of Siggmund, Anna Freud was born on this date (d.1982).

A pioneer in the field of child psychoanalysis, Freud neither conformed to conventional heterosexual expectations nor identified herself explicitly as a Lesbian. Even though it is impossible to know whether Freud was homosexual, it is relatively easy to conclude that she was decidedly not heterosexual in any typical sense.

Anna Freud's primary relationships were with her father, with whom she lived and cared for until his death in 1939, and two close female friends, Lou Andreas- Salome and Dorothy Burlingham. Burlingham became Freud's life partner and companion, although the sexual nature of their intimacy remains unclear.

Burlingham moved to Vienna in 1925 to begin her work in psychoanalysis. She lived with the Freud family in their apartment at Berggasse 19, which at that time included Sigmund Freud, his wife Martha, her sister Minna Bernays, and Anna Freud. She and Anna Freud became close friends and began their life-long collaboration on developing children's therapies and psychoanalysis. They worked and lived together for the rest of their lives. Freud helped raise Burlingham's children from a previous marriage.

 Added 2024

1927 — Adrian Hall was an American theater director born on this date (d.2023); Hall's directing style was described as "bold" by the New York Times, and his work was considered part of the first and second generation of the regional theater movement of the 1960s and late 1980s. He was the founding Artistic Director of the Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, Rhode Island from 1963 to 1986, and the Artistic Director of Dallas Theater Center in Dallas, Texas from 1983 to 1989. He is considered to have created major and divisive change within both institutions.

In addition to his work producing plays at Trinity Repertory, Hall oversaw and participated in the Project Discovery program at Trinity Repertory, which introduced high school students to theater. Actress Viola Davis credits Hall's visit to her high school and the subsequent visits to the theater during Hall's tenure as what "changed her path." Two of Hall's productions at Trinity Repertory Company were featured on the PBS series, Great Performances.

Mr. Hall had a big personality and sometimes clashed with theater boards; his reluctance to set his full season in advance was one source of friction, since that made it hard to market subscriptions. A split with the Trinity board led him to leave Providence in 1989 and devote his full attention to the Dallas job, only to have that end when he clashed with the board there the same year, after which he became a freelance director.

“Every once in a while,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1989, “an Adrian Hall will meet an unmovable object such as the Dallas Theater Center board.”

1946 – American historian, activist, scholar and self-described "community based" researcher Allan Bérubé was born (d.2007). The award-winning author was best known for his research and writing about homosexual members of the American Armed Forces during World War II. He also wrote essays about the intersection of class and race in Gay culture, and about growing up in a poor, working class family, his French- Canadian roots, and about his experience of anti-AIDS activism.

Among Bérubé's published works was the 1990 book Coming Out Under Fire, which examined the stories of Gay men and women in the US military between 1941 and 1945.

The book sprang from a box of letters. One day in the 1970s, a friend of one of Bérubé's neighbors salvaged from a Dumpster a cache of correspondence exchanged by a dozen gay G.I.'s during the war. The men, who had met at an Army base in Missouri, were posted to different spots, but they continued to write — in particular about what it was like to be gay wherever they had fetched up.

"Coming Out Under Fire" draws on interviews with dozens of men and women from all branches of the service. It argues that although gays were specifically barred from the armed forces from 1942 onward, homosexuality and military service, at least early on, were not as incompatible as they might seem.

At the start of World War II, the military, desperate to meet enlistment quotas, quietly admitted gay people with the tacit understanding that they would be discreet about their sexuality. For many gay men and lesbians, Bérubé wrote, military service was actually a godsend: It took them away from small-town life and gave them their first opportunity to meet other gay people.

On the whole, Bérubé found, gay service people who did their jobs ably were treated well by comrades and superiors. (Conditions worsened toward the end of the war, when the military stepped up its purges of homosexuals.) But those early war years, Bérubé concluded, were the wellspring of the gay-rights movement of the late 1960s and beyond.

Bérubé received a MacArthur Fellowship (often called the "genius grant") from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in 1996. He received a Rockefeller grant from the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies in 1994 to research a book on the Marine Cooks and Stewards Union, and he was working on this book at the time of his death. Allan Bérubé is survived by his partner, John Nelson.

The records of Bérubé's life and work are preserved by the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco, of which he was a founding member. Bérubé donated the research and administrative files of his World War II Project to the society in 1995.

1946 – Guy Hocquenghem (d.1988) was a French writer and queer theorist.

Guy Hocquenghem was born in the suburbs of Paris and was educated at the Lycée Lakanal in Sceaux and the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. At the age of fifteen he began an affair with his high school philosophy teacher, René Scherer. They remained lifelong friends. His participation in the May 1968 student rebellion in France formed his allegiance to the Communist Party, which later expelled him because of his homosexuality.

Hocquenghem taught philosophy at the University of Vincennes-Saint Denis, Paris and wrote numerous novels and works of theory. He was the staff writer for the French publication Libération. Hocquenghem was the first gay man to be a member of the Front Homosexuel d'Action Révolutionnaire (FHAR), originally formed by lesbian separatists who split from the Mouvement Homophile de France in 1971.

With filmmaker Lionel Soukaz, Hocquenghem wrote and produced a documentary film about gay history, Race d'Ep! (1979) the last word of the title being a play on the word pédé, a French slur for gay men.

Guy Hocquenghem's Homosexual Desire (1972, English translation 1978) may be the first work of Queer Theory.

Hocquenghem died of AIDS on 28 August 1988, age 41.

1953 – Alarmed by the rise in prosecutions for male-male sex (including several much-publicized recent cases involving prominent Britons), two MPs first raise the issue of sex law reform in the British House of Commons.

Self-Portrait

1953 – Patrick Angus (d.1992) was a 20th century American painter who among many other works created a number of oil or acrylic paintings of the interior of the Gaiety Theater and some of its dancers and customers in the 1980s.

Some of the those titles are: Grand Finale (1985), The Apollo Room I (1986), Remember the Promise You Made (1986), Slave to the Rhythm (1986), All The Love in the World (1987), Hanky Panky (1991)

Born in 1953 in North Hollywood, California and raised in Santa Barbara, Patrick was a shy boy who wanted to be an artist. With no guidance and only misinformation for reference, he floundered. Although a kind high school art teacher mentored him and even let him use his studio, Patrick was afraid to broach the subject of his sexual angst with a heterosexual man.

Angus (R) with Quentin Crisp

In 1974, a scholarship to the Santa Barbara Art Institute led him to discover the book 72 Drawings by David Hockney (1971). Here he found an artist who celebrated his sexual persona in his work and who glamorized the "good" gay life in Los Angeles, only 100 miles away. However, when Patrick moved to Hollywood in 1975, he discovered that the good gay life does not exist for poor people, "unless, of course," as he bitterly noted, "they are beautiful."

Patrick, believing that he was sexually unattractive, was hopelessly lonely for the affection of an objectified beautiful boy.

In 1980, in New York City to see the Picasso Retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, Patrick made a crucial observation of the sexual autobiography inherent in Picasso's work. Thereafter, Patrick began to paint large canvases based on his personal obsession with erotic loneliness.

Although a dedicated creator of portraits and still lifes, and an occasional designer of stage settings, Angus is principally known for works begun in 1981 depicting the young male erotic dancers at the Gaiety and other New York showplaces. Referring to an earlier French painter who made his reputation depicting the demi-monde, playwright Robert Patrick deemed Angus "The Toulouse-Lautrec of Times Square."

"Hanky Panky"
(Click for larger)

Angus appears as himself in the 1990 documentary movie Resident Alien, about Quentin Crisp in New York. Angus is portrayed by actor Jonathan Tucker in the 2009 dramatic movie An Englishman in New York, a biographical picture about the later years of Quentin Crisp. Crisp befriends Angus in both films, and encourages him to show his work.

Angus said he didn't have the happiest day of his life until he was on his deathbed, succumbing to aids at thirty-eight in 1992. It was then that he saw the proofs of Strip Show, a book of forty-seven color reproductions of his paintings, and could finally believe that his art would not be completely forgotten. He had worked in obscurity, defeated by early humiliations from galleries that caustically rejected his depictions of sexual loneliness and the "bad" gay culture of hustlers, tricks, and low clubs. Worn down by his failures, Angus gave up hope of exhibiting his paintings, until Robert Patrick wrote an essay about him in Christopher Street.

Musto is gay and has been published regularly in several LGBT publications, including Out and The Advocate.

He writes the weekly, entertainment-related Musto Unfiltered column for NewNowNext.com and pieces for Papermag.com, and has had bylines in The New York Times, and The Daily Beast.

Among Musto's first journalistic jobs were assignments covering culture for Circus magazine, Soho Weekly News, and After Dark magazine, as well as becoming the music critic for Us magazine in the 1980s. In 1982, he began writing for Details, then a downtown style-and-nightlife magazine, and in 1984, Musto began his Village Voice column, after having already written features for the publication.

Musto's breathlessly dishy and opinionated first-person column celebrated nightlife and LGBT personalities, described outlandish New York club fetes, and gave vital early coverage to up-and-coming performers like John Sex, RuPaul, Kiki and Herb, Bridget Everett, Jackie Hoffman, Bianca Del Rio and Peppermint.

A 1989 appearance in Slaves of New York — based on Tama Janowitz's book centered on the New York nightlife scene—was called the film's only moment of credibility by critic J. Hoberman of The Village Voice. Other cameos through the years were made in Garbo Talks (1984), Day of the Dead (1985), Jeffrey (1995), Death of a Dynasty (2003), The Big Gay Musical (2009), and Violet Tendencies (2010).

Shores has two daughters Caroline and Rebecca from a previous marriage. Shores was also married to actor Jason Dottley. After two years together, the couple became domestic partners in October 2003 and celebrated their union with a ceremony that they considered their wedding although they could not marry in California at the time. They married legally in 2008; almost immediately, however, they saw with horror that polls showed that California Proposition 8 might pass in the rapidly approaching election. The marriage ended in divorce in 2011.

Del Shores with sometime-husband Jason Dottley

1967 – Martin Sorrondeguy is the singer of hardcore bands Los Crudos and Limp Wrist, the founder of the DIY record label, Lengua Armada Discos, documentary film director and a prominent figure in both the straight edge scene and the queercore scene. He currently does vocals in the band Needles.

Martin Sorrondeguy was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, grew up in Chicago, Illinois, United States. He sang about many issues facing Spanish speaking minorities in the U.S. as the vocalist for Los Crudos. The band recorded in both Spanish and English, releasing many recordings, and toured in South America and Mexico, as well as the U.S. and Canada. At the same time, Sorrondeguy started his independent record label, Lengua Armada Discos. While in Los Crudos, Sorrondeguy began making his documentary film Beyond The Screams: A U.S. Latino Hardcore Punk Documentary. The film was released in 2004.

It was during the time he was vocalist for Los Crudos that Sorrondeguy made his sexuality public and began to speak out about it. In 1997, he appeared in Scott Treleaven's documentary film Queercore: A Punk-U-Mentary and spoke about being gay in the hardcore punk scene.

In the 2000s, Sorrondeguy put together a new band called Limp Wrist, a straight edge queercore band. In 2001, he was featured in the Punk Planet publication We Owe You Nothing. In 2002, he appeared in the "Queer Punk" issue of the long running San Francisco-based punk zine Maximum Rock n Roll.

Since the early 2000s, Sorrondeguy has been very active in solo and group photo exhibitions of his photography, which has also been regularly documented in his semi-regular 'zine, Susto. Sorrondeguy has been an occasional guest lecturer on his experiences in Canada, Brazil, Australia and the U.S. Los Crudos continues to tour, embarking on U.S. and Scandinavian dates in 2016.

1968 – Brendan Fraser is an American and Canadian actor. He is best known for playing Rick O'Connell in The Mummy trilogy (1999, 2001, 2008), as well as for leading roles in comedy and fantasy films including Encino Man (1992), George of the Jungle (1997), Bedazzled (2000), Looney Tunes: Back in Action (2003) and Journey to the Center of the Earth (2008). Fraser branched into dramatic cinema with roles in School Ties (1992), Gods and Monsters (1998), The Quiet American (2002) and Crash (2004).

During a hiatus from film acting, Fraser found a new audience in television, with supporting roles in the History miniseries Texas Rising (2015), the Showtime drama series The Affair (2016-2017), the FX anthology series Trust (2018) and the DC Universe action series Doom Patrol (2019-).

Fraser, the youngest of four boys, was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, the son of Canadians Carol Mary (née Genereux) and Peter Fraser. His mother was a sales counselor, and his father was a former journalist who worked as a Canadian foreign service officer for the Government Office of Tourism. His maternal uncle, George Genereux, was the only Canadian to win a gold medal in the 1952 Summer Olympics, at the Olympic Trap. He holds dual American and Canadian citizenship.

He had his first major box office success with the 1997 comedy film George of the Jungle which was based on the animated series of the same title created by Jay Ward. His biggest commercial success came with the adventure fantasy film The Mummy (1999) and its sequel The Mummy Returns (2001).

Fraser alleged in 2018 that he was sexually assaulted by Philip Berk, the president of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, at a luncheon in the summer of 2003. The incident, his subsequent divorce, and the death of his mother, launched Fraser into a depression that, combined with his health issues and a backlash within the industry over speaking out against Berk, he believes caused his career to decline.

1968 – Rev Troy Perry, founder of the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches, officiated at his first same-sex holy union.

1973 – An Illinois appellate court upholds a public indecency conviction of a man for sex with another man in bushes where they could not be seen by others.

1973 – As a result of the case Society for Individual Rights v. Hampton, proceedings were held to determine under what circumstances sexual orientation may be considered in determining whether a person is suitable for employment in the U.S. Government.

1979 – (Robert E.) Robby Mook is an American political campaign strategist and campaign manager. He was the campaign manager for Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign, which lost to Donald Trump.

Mook worked on state campaigns, leading up to Howard Dean's 2004 presidential campaign. Mook then joined the Democratic National Committee, and worked for Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign as a state director in three states.

Mook was born in Sharon, Vermont, the son of Kathryn and Delo Mook, and was raised in nearby Norwich, across the river from Hanover, New Hampshire. His father was a physics professor at Dartmouth College in Hanover, and his mother was a hospital administrator at Dartmouth–Hitchcock Medical Center, in nearby Lebanon, New Hampshire. Both are now retired.

Mook attended Hanover High School, where Matt Dunne, a member of the Vermont House of Representatives, served as the theater director. Dunne met Mook when he auditioned for a school play, and Mook volunteered for Dunne's re-election campaign. Mook graduated from Columbia University in 2002 with a Bachelor of Arts in Classics. Mook also served in the United States Senate Page program.

Upon the April 2015 announcement of Clinton's 2016 campaign for president, Mook was introduced as Clinton's campaign manager. In 2015, Mook was paid by the campaign at an annual rate of $121,000, which is somewhat lower than other presidential campaign managers and similar to that of other top Clinton staffers (such as communication director Jennifer Palmieri, finance director Dennis Cheng, and national political director Amanda Renteria). According to the Washington Post, as Clinton's campaign manager Mook won praise "both inside the campaign and among Clinton’s vast circle of second-guessers, for the airtight and drama-free campaign he has built." A group of about 150 young political operatives close to Mook have become known as the "Mook Mafia."

Mook was the first openly gay manager of a major presidential campaign.

1990 – OutRage, a London direct-action group, staged a march from Coleherne pub to Earl's Court Police Station to protest police harassment of gays in Earl's Court.

1991 – OutRage held a zap of the Church of England in response to a press release condemning homosexuality. If you are unfamiliar with the term, a zap was a raucous public demonstration, popularized by the early gay liberation group Gay Activists Alliance, designed to embarrass a public figure or celebrity while calling the attention of both gays and straights to issues of LGBT rights.

1996 – Hawaii’s Judge Chang rules that the state does not have a legal right to deprive same-sex couples of the right to marry, making Hawaii the first state to recognize that gay and lesbian couples are entitled to the same privileges as heterosexual married couples.