March 19

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1821 – Richard Francis Burton, legendary British explorer, diplomat and author (d.1890); a swashbuckling English explorer, translator, writer, soldier, orientalist, ethnologist, linguist, poet, hypnotist, fencer and diplomat. If we left anything out it's hard to imagine what it might be . Burton was known for his far-flung and exotic travels and explorations within Asia and Africa as well as his extraordinary knowledge of languages and cultures. According to one count, he spoke 29 European, Asian, and African languages.

Burton's best-known achievements include traveling in disguise to Mecca, making an unexpurgated translation of The Book of One Thousand Nights and A Night (more commonly called The Arabian Nights in English because of Andrew Lang's abridgment) and the Kama Sutra and journeying with John Hanning Speke as the first white men guided by the redoubtable Sidi Mubarak Bombay to discover the Great Lakes of Africa in search of the source of the Nile.

Burton's writings are unusually open and frank about his interest in sex and sexuality. His travel writing is often full of details about the sexual lives of the inhabitants of areas he travelled through. Burton's interest in sexuality led him to make measurements of the lengths of the sexual organs of male inhabitants of various regions which he includes in his travel books. He also describes sexual techniques common in the regions he visited, often hinting that he had participated, hence breaking both sexual and racial taboos of his day. Burton, together with Forster Fitzgerald Arbuthnot, created the Kama Shastra Society to print and circulate books that would be illegal to publish in public. Many people at the time considered his Kama Shastra Society and the books it published scandalous.

Allegations of homosexuality followed Burton throughout most of his life, at a time when it was a criminal offense in the UK. Biographers disagree on whether or not Burton ever experienced Gay sex (he never directly acknowledges it in his writing). These allegations began in his army days when General Sir Charles James Napier requested that Burton go undercover to investigate a male brothel reputed to be frequented by British soldiers. It has been suggested that Burton's detailed report on the workings of the brothel may have led some to believe he had been a customer.

Burton was a heavy drinker at various times in his life and also admitted to taking both hemp and opium. Friends of the poet Algernon Swinburne blamed Burton for leading him astray, holding Burton responsible for Swinburne's alcoholism and interest in the works of the Marquis de Sade.

1850 – Octave Thanet, aka Alice French, American novelist, born (d.1934); One of the most popular novelists of the late 19th century, Octave Thanet is no longer read, and with good reason. Her stuff is irredeemably dreadful by any standard. (In one novel, for example, the heroine falls in love with a young woman and proceeds to tell her so, nonstop, for twenty-two pages, not counting heaves and maidenly emotion-laden sighs.) For 50 years, Thanet, a 200-pound, six-footer, lived together with petite Jane Crawford at their mansion "Thanford" (Thanet/Crawford).

1860 – Virginia's new sodomy law eliminates death for slaves, equalizing the penalty for all persons.

1894 – The American actress and comedienne 'Moms' Mabley was born (d.1975). Though she had four children and five grandchildren, Mabley never married and she lived most of her life as a Lesbian.

By the age of fifteen, Mabley had been raped twice and had two children who were given up for adoption. She was pressured by her stepfather to marry a much older man, but was encouraged by her grandmother to strike out on her own. Mabley ran away to Cleveland, Ohio, joining a traveling minstrel show, where she sang and entertained.

She took her stage name, Jackie Mabley, from an early boyfriend, commenting to Ebony in a 1970s interview that he'd taken so much from her, it was the least she could do to take his name. Later she became known as "Moms" because she was indeed a "Mom" to many other comedians on the circuit in the 1950s and '60s.

She came out as a lesbian at the age of twenty-seven, becoming one of the first triple-X rated comedians on the comedy circuit.

During the 1920s and '30s she appeared in androgynous clothing (as she did in the film version of The Emperor Jones with Paul Robeson) and recorded several of her early "lesbian stand-up" routines. Mabley was one of the top women doing stand-up in her heyday, eventually recording more than 20 albums of comedy routines. She appeared in movies, on television, and in clubs, and performed at the Michigan Women's Festival shortly before her death in 1975.

Moms Mabley broke taboos and challenged assumptions throughout her career with her character of an old woman, who was sexual, savvy, and irrepressible. The girl who survived childhood rape to carve out a successful career in the inhospitable world of show business grew up to be Moms, who described her television appearances by saying, "I looked at the world as my children."

Her albums include: The Funniest Woman In The World, Moms Mabley At The UN (1961), Young men si, Old men no, Live at the Apollo, The Funny Sides Of Moms Mabley; The Musicals: Miss Bandana (1927), Fast and Furious (1931); and the films: Emperor Jones (1933), Big Timers(1945), Boardinghouse Blues (1948), Killing Diller (1948), and Amazing Grace (1974).

1895 – North Dakota becomes the eighth state to amend its sodomy law explicitly to cover oral sex.

1907 – Hans Mayer (d.2001) was a German-Jewish literary scholar. Mayer was also a jurist and social researcher and was internationally recognized as a critic, author and musicologist. Hans Mayer was born in the upper-class Jewish family. He was influenced in his youth by the writings of Georg Lukács and Karl Marx. He can be described as a socialist and a Marxist.

Shortly after Hitler came to power, he left Germany for Strasbourg, Paris (where he worked for the Rockefeller Foundation in 1938) and Switzerland, where he spent the war. Besides exile journalism, he spent periods in internment and work camps as a potential leftwing troublemaker. In 1946-47, he worked under the Americans, as political editor at Frankfurt Radio, although, after political differences, he left to teach at a trades union college.

In 1948, he went to Leipzig University, in the Soviet zone, where he stayed for 15 years. Initially, he was professor of nationalities, and, in 1950, became professor of cultural sociology and literary history. However, he failed to return from a lecture tour in the west in 1963, and went to the West German university town of Tübingen, where his friend, the philosopher Ernst Bloch, had settled. Mayer was not offered a university post, but taught at the Hanover Polytechnic. Subsequently, he became a freelance critic, writer, lecturer and broadcaster.

Besides studies of Brecht (1961), Wagner (1959 and 1966), Goethe (1977), Thomas Mann (1980) and Schiller (1987), and numerous collections of essays, his most famous work was Aussenseiter (Outsiders, 1975), one of the few of his books to have appeared in English translation, though not a happy one. This study, which includes essays on Victorian moralism, George Sand, homosexuality and literature, Klaus Mann, Maurice Sachs and Jean Genet, as well as studies of Jews in literature, is considered to be autobiographically inspired.

As a Jew, an open homosexual, a double (if not triple) exile and a German, Mayer was nothing if not an outsider. It was this that most strongly determined his life.

1925 – The Virginia Supreme Court reverses the sodomy conviction of a man who had been found drunk in bed with his head on another man's stomach and with the other man's penis in his hand.

1930 – Charles Rowan Beye, born in Iowa, is a classical Greek scholar and author, noted for many texts on ancient Greece, including Odysseus: A Life. More recently he is known for his autobiography My Husband and My Wives: A Gay Man's Odyssey

Beye's budding homosexuality emerged when he was in junior high, enjoying a limited menu of sexual adventures with mostly straight boys. The local Episcopal priest informed Beye's mother that her son's name was scrawled, along with a sexual slur, on a men's room wall. Mother promptly dispatched her wayward son to a psychiatrist who — counter to almost every other psychiatrist in every work of gay literature ever written — turned out to be a compassionate man. The shrink simply counseled the 15-year-old Beye to be more discreet.

My Husband and My Wives: A Gay's Man's Odyssey is the memoir Beye looking back over eight tumultuous decades at the complications of discovering at puberty that he is attracted to other men.

By age 21, he had never slept with a woman. Nevertheless he married his first wife, Mary, living happily, until Mary suddenly dies of a freak heart condition a few years later. Beye remarried and fathered four children — all along maintaining his core identity as a gay man and enjoying an abundant sex life with both gay and straight men, described in great fleshy detail in the autobiography.

The ordeal of remaining true to what his libido tells him is right, in the midst of a disapproving and sometimes hostile society, is one side of his story. Another was the impulsive decision he made as a young adult to marry a woman who fascinated him. This led him into entirely unanticipated territory. He found himself suddenly a husband, a widower, a groom for a second time, and, finally, the father of four children and grandfather of six, though throughout it all, he never abandoned his erotic involvement with men.

Perhaps most extraordinary is the story's happy conclusion: Charles Rowan Beye's wedding in 2008 to the man who had been his companion for the previous twenty years.

1938 – Daniel Curzon, born Daniel Brown, is a novelist, playwright, educator, and writer of etiquette manuals for gay men.

He is the author of Something You Do in the Dark, first published in 1971 and which may be considered as one of the first gay protest novels. It is the story of a gay man's attempt to avenge his entrapment by a Detroit vice squad police officer by murdering him.

Curzon has written other novels, including The Misadventures of Tim McPick (original title: Queer Comedy), From Violent Men, Among the Carnivores, The World Can Break Your Heart, Curzon in Love, The Bubble Reputation, or Shakespeare Lives!, and What a Tangled Web. His non-fiction books include The Big Book of In-Your-Face Gay Etiquette and Dropping Names: The Delicious Memoirs of Daniel Curzon. This last was described by Ian Young in Torso as "ferociously honest and very funny" and by Philip Clark in Lambda Book Report as "a blunt, hilarious, page-turning ride that is...impossible to put down."

Curzon edited and published the early homophile magazine "Gay Literature: A New Journal" in 1975 and 1976. The magazine included poetry, fiction, literary reviews, essays, photography, and short plays. Curzon's own written work sometimes was included. Curzon contributed articles for other magazines such as "Gay Times" in 1976 and "Alternate" in 1978.

He is also a prolific writer of one-act plays. Seven volumes of his Collected Plays have been published as POD books through BookSurge. His plays have also been performed at such theaters as Theater Rhinoceros, New Conservatory Theater, New City Theater, Above Board Theater, as well as at the Fringe Festival in San Francisco and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

Curzon, who is openly gay, is currently a retired professor of English.

1945 – Randy Kraft is a serial killer who was homosexual and targeted men - most of whom were also gay. He is known to have the raped, tortured, mutilationed and murdered them.

He was born in Long Beach, California. When he was three his family moved to Westminster where he graduated from Westminster High School in 1963, 10th in his class. He was awarded a scholarship to Claremont Men's College. Kraft later stated he had known from his high school days that he was homosexual, although he initially kept his sexuality a secret. In 1964 he had his first known gay relationship, with a "black guy named Mike." In 1965 he was arrested after offering to have sex with a guy at Huntington Beach Pier. The man was a vice officer. He was released, being a first offense.

In 1968 he joined the air force and began painting test planes. He also campaigned for Kennedy. The following year he told his family that he was gay. They disapproved and he became distant, and the air force discharged him for "medial reasons" when they also learned of his homosexuality. Kraft upgraded from valium, which he started taking in college, to speed - in order to lose weight.

It seems like it was these changes in his life - the world not accepting who he was, and his progression into heavier drugs - as well as some other underlying mental disorder - that moved him to kill the first time in 1970.

Kraft managed to have further relationships with men - Jeff Graves in 1971 and Jeff Seelig from 1972 to 1980. But despite this he continued to kill. The total number is unknown but is suspected to have been between 14 and 61 young men between the ages of 17 and 25, spread over the year 1970 to 1983.

Kraft was finally arrested on May 14, 1983 and convicted and sentenced to death row on November 29, 1989. The sentence was upheld by the California Supreme Court on April 11, 2000. He is still alive and currently completing his life sentence at San Quentin State Prison in California.

1953 – Ricky Wilson, American musician, member of The B-52s, was born (d.1985). He was the original guitarist in the The B-52s, which he helped to form in 1976. Born in Athens, Georgia, he was the brother of fellow B-52s member Cindy Wilson. Like both other male members of the band, Wilson was out gay.

At an early age, Wilson developed an interest in music, and learned how to play folk guitar from the PBS series Learning Folk Guitar. Upon entering Clarke Central High School, Wilson had upgraded to a Silvertone guitar and, to tape his music, purchased a two-track tape recorder with money earned from a summer job at the local landfill.

In mid-1969, Wilson met former Comer resident Keith Strickland at the local head shop The Looking Glass. The two shared common interests in music and Eastern mysticist culture, and quickly became friends.

Wilson quietly came out as gay to Strickland whilst the two were in their teens, becoming the first member of the band to do so.

In late 1976, Strickland and Wilson were in search of employment. The two joined the B-52's when they, Wilson's sister Cindy, and Kate Pierson and Fred Schneider of local protest band The Sun-Donuts, formed the group in an impromptu musical practice session after sharing a tropical Flaming Volcano drink at a Chinese restaurant. They played their first concert in 1977 at a Valentine's Day party for friends. The band's quirky take on the new wave sound of their era was a combination of dance and surf music set apart by the unusual guitar tunings used by Wilson.

Among guitar aficionados, Wilson's most salient feature must surely be his highly original approach to playing the instrument. Because at first The B-52s did not have a bass, he invented his own tunings, grouping the strings into a bass course (usually tuned to 5ths for strumming) and a treble course (often tuned in unison), removing the middle two strings entirely, though sometimes he played with 5 strings as well. A blue Mosrite so modified is visible on the back cover of the B-52s self-titled album.

His style is said to have been heavily influenced by American surf group The Ventures, possibly Pink Floyd's "Lucifer Sam" and other Batman-style 1960s music.

In 1983, during recording sessions for the band's third studio album Whammy!, Wilson discovered he had contracted AIDS. He confided his illness to Keith Strickland, as stated in several interviews including one with The Age. In 1985, during recording for their album Bouncing off the Satellites, Wilson's illness became more severe; both Strickland and Pierson have stated that despite this, he kept his illness secret from the other members of the band. In an interview, Pierson stated that Wilson did so because he "did not want anyone to worry about him or fuss about him."

Wilson died on October 12, 1985, aged 32, from health complications related to AIDS. In an interview, fellow band member Kate Pierson stated that Wilson had kept his illness secret from his fellow band members because he 'did not want anyone to worry about him or fuss about him'.

1963 – Gary Ferguson, a specialist of French Renaissance literature and culture, is the Douglas Huntly Gordon Distinguished Professor of French at the University of Virginia. From 1989, he taught at the University of Delaware, where he held the Elias Ahuja Professorship of French from 2012-2015. He graduated from St Chad's College, Durham University, receiving a BA with first-class honours in 1985 and a Ph.D. in 1989.

He is the author of Mirroring Belief: Marguerite de Navarre's Devotional Poetry, Queer (Re)Readings in the French Renaissance: Homosexuality, Gender, Culture, and Same-Sex Marriage in Renaissance Rome: Sexuality, Identity, and Community in Early Modern Europe, as well as of numerous articles dealing in particular with questions of gender and sexuality, women's writing, devotional literature and the cultural history of religion.

1978 – Garth Greenwell, author, grew up in Louisville, graduated from high school in Michigan, did his undergraduate work at SUNY Purchase, got his masters from Harvard, and somewhere along the way was classically trained as an opera singer, which he credits with giving him "a sense of the physicality of language."

In 2009 he moved to Bulgaria where he teaches at the America College of Sofia and where he found gay cruising spots that reminded him of Kentucky in the 90s. Those places and the local men "were nearly identical in their expectations and mores" including "a secrecy and shame about them."

His life there is the basis of his novella Mitko. Describing a nameless American in a nameless foreign city and his creepingly complex relationship with a hustler named Mitko, it was a finalist for Publishing Triangle's debut fiction prize and for a Lammy. A perennial favorite, the book garnered multiple mentions on the queer lit polls in 2011 and 2012.

In its article, "Of LGBT, Life and Literature," the Sofia Echo credits Greenwell's publications with bringing much needed attention to the LGBT experience in Bulgaria and to other English-speaking audiences through various broadcasts, interviews, blog posts, and reviews.

1981 – A Provincial election in Ontario sees the return of the Conservatives to power. The NDP suffers losses, attributed in some parts of province to backtracking on the gay issue. Conservative Susan Fish wins in Toronto riding of St George, defeating gay protest candidate George Hislop. Conservatives had been Ontario's governing party continuously since 1943.

1981 – A Massachusetts appellate court dismisses a newspaper's suit to allow reporters to witness restroom arrests.

1991 – (Gary Michael) Garrett Clayton is an American actor and singer. He is known for portraying Tanner in the 2013 Disney Channel movie Teen Beach Movie and its 2015 sequel Teen Beach 2, and other film, television, and stage roles.

Clayton was born in Dearborn, Michigan. He began acting at Crestwood High School in Dearborn Heights, Michigan, performing in many of the drama club's productions. He later attended Oakland University, where he studied musical theater.

In 2010, he made appearances on Days of Our Lives and Shake It Up. In December 2012, he appeared in the Lifetime movie Holiday Spin, co-starring Ralph Macchio, as Blake, a rebellious teen forced to live with his father after his mother is killed in a car accident.

He was cast in 2013 in the role of Tanner in Disney's musical Teen Beach Movie, playing a cool but vacuous surfer who is "a mix between Frankie Avalon and Link from Hairspray". The film was directed by Jeffrey Hornaday and was filmed in Puerto Rico and was first broadcast in July 2013.

In 2018, while speaking about why he chose to appear in the film Reach, Clayton revealed he has been in a long-term relationship with another man, Blake Knight. In January 2019, Clayton announced that he and Knight had become engaged a year prior.

1987 – The FDA approves AZT for the treatment of HIV /AIDS.It is the first drug for the treatment of HIVAIDS approved by the US Food and Drug Administration.

2004 – In Quebec, the Court of Appeal upholds a superior court ruling that same-sex marriages are legal under Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The Canadian provinces of Ontario and British Columbia had already permitted same-sex marriage.

 Added 2023

1988 – Freddie Smith is an American television actor. He is best known for his character Sonny Kiriakis, the first openly gay contract role on the daytime soap opera Days of Our Lives. He also briefly portrayed Marco Salazar in the new franchise of 90210 aired on The CW.

Freddie Smith was born in Ashtabula, Ohio. He grew up as an only child but is very close with two of his cousins. Smith "lived and breathed basketball" until his senior year in high school when a friend suggested he take a theater art class. After high school, Smith moved to Los Angeles, beginning his acting career in 2008 appearing a cameo role in the paranormal series Medium playing a senior boy.

On January 9, 2011 it was reported that he had joined the cast of The CW series 90210, in a recurring role as Marco, a gay soccer player who would become involved with Teddy Montgomery (Trevor Donovan). He appeared in 5 episodes of the third season including the season finale. On July 17, 2011 The CW announced that Marco would not return in season 4 as Teddy's boyfriend, having broken up with him over the summer.

Besides 90210, he took up the role of Jackson "Sonny" Kiriakis in Days of Our Lives, the first openly gay contracted character in the hit daytime soap opera (Ryan Scott had previously played the non-contract, openly gay role of Harold Wentworth between 2000 and 2003). Smith's character would become romantically involved with Will Horton, played by Chandler Massey, garnering immense popularity with fans and becoming the show's first same-sex supercouple (commonly referred to by the portmanteau "WilSon").

2010 – Billy Merasty receives Manitoda's Order of the Buffalo Hunt. Merasty (born 1960), is an Aboriginal Canadian actor and writer of Cree descent.

He moved to Toronto at the age of 18 in search of René Highway, who was then working for the Toronto Dance Theatre. At the age of 23, he launched his acting career after graduating from the Native Theatre School for aspiring First Nations artists. He then worked for the Native Earth Performing Arts for a long period.

Merasty has worked extensively on the stage and films as an actor and has written one play, Fireweed, produced in 1992. His second play, Godly's Divinia, is in development.

In 2010, Merasty received the Order of Manitoba (Order of the Buffalo Hunt) in recognition for his many years as an Aboriginal role model from Manitoba. At the time he was the lead actor in Where the Blood Mixes, winner of the 2009 Governor General's Award for drama.  The play tackles Canada's painful history of residential schools and "the '60s scoop", referring to the adoption of First Nation and Métis children in Canada between the years of 1960 and the mid-1980's, through the experiences of one family and their community.

His stage credits include appearances in Tomson Highway's The Sage, The Dancer and the Fool, Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing and The Rez Sisters, Daniel David Moses' The Indian Medicine Show, Lanford Wilson's Rain Dance, Marie Clements' Copper Thunderbird, Kevin Loring's Where the Blood Mixes, Steven Cole Hughes' Ghost Dance and David S. Craig's The Neverending Story.

In 2012, he performed the role of Gloucester in an all-aboriginal production of William Shakespeare's King Lear at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa, alongside a cast that also included August Schellenberg as Lear, Tantoo Cardinal as Regan, Jani Lauzon in a dual role as Cordelia and the Fool, and Craig Lauzon as Kent.

Reflecting on his life, Merasty said, "I've always been open. Although a lot of people have told me not to be so gay if I want to be an actor, that it will limit me. I know that it has, but I'm not limiting myself, it's other people who limit me"