May 26th

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1779 – August Kopisch (d.1853) was a German poet and painter.

Kopisch was born on 26 May 1799 in Breslau, Prussia (now Wrocław, Poland). In 1815 he began studying painting at the Prague academy, but an injury to his hand damaged his prospects of success as an artist, and he turned to literature.

After residences in Dresden and Vienna Kopisch proceeded in 1822 to Italy. At Naples he began a homosexual relationship with the poet August von Platen-Hallermünde; and when out swimming he and the painter Ernst Fries re-discovered the "Blue Grotto" of Capri, which had been associated with male sexuality from the age of Tiberius in Roman times.

In 1828 he settled at Berlin and was granted a pension by Frederick William IV of Prussia, who in 1838 conferred upon him the title of professor. Kopisch produced some original poetry, light in language and in form. He specialised in re-telling legends and popular subjects, and among his Gedichte (Berlin, 1836) are some naïve and humorous little pieces such as Die Historie von Noah, Die Heinzelmännchen, Das grüne Tier and Der Schneiderjunge von Krippstedt, which became popular.

In 1847 he moved to Potsdam and wrote an account of royal residences there and in the neighborhood. He died on 6 February 1853 at Berlin.

1822 – Edmond de Goncourt (d.1896), born Edmond Louis Antoine Huot de Goncourt, was a French writer, literary critic, art critic, book publisher and the founder of the Académie Goncourt.

Writer, art historian of the eighteenth-century art and art critic of contemporary nineteenth-century Paris together with his brother, Jules. Edmond de Goncourt and his brother, Jules, were born into minor aristocracy. Their father and their mother both died when the men were young.

Their inherited wealth enabled the brothers to become artists without concern for their livelihood, relieving Edmond from a treasury clerk position so dismal that he entertained thoughts of suicide. The assembled a collection of eighteenth-century art, largely drawings and pastels, which were not popular at the time.

Though throughout their lives they were self-indulgent pleasure-seekers, the brothers made their initial reputation as journalists. In 1851 the two began publishing a journal chronicling their art scene. The brothers were arrested in 1852 for quoting mildly erotic Renaissance verses in one of their articles.

The brothers wrote about all French artists of the eighteenth century, not just the famous.

They, however, considered themselves novelists and wrote throughout their career. Their Germinie Lacerteux (1864), was based on the life of their servant, Rose, follows her thefts from the brothers to pay for after-hours orgies and trysts. It is considered among the early novels of French Realism devoted to working-class life. In 1867, their novel Manette Salomon appeared. The book, a narrative about the studio practice of contemporary artists, art students and their model, was both original and modern in its treatment of psychology and contemporary life.

The prix Goncourt was conceived by the brothers in the same year (1867) as the Académie Goncourt, a literary society of 10 members. The Goncourt's art criticism focused on the Barbizon school.

Whn Jules died of a syphilis-related heart ailment in 1870, Edmond a homosexual, was devastated.

In 1885, Edmond began his literary salon, known as the genier for the sumptuous attic in which it was held. Edmond's final works were on the Japanese artists Kitagawa Utamaro (1891) and Katsushika Hokusai (1896). He died in 1896.

The Académie Goncourt was established in 1903 through a bequest of Edmond. After Edmond's death, the brothers' importance waned until the second half of the 20th century when they were recognized as the leaders of much of modernism in French art writing and taste.

1864 – Congress creates the Montana Territory and makes no provision for criminal laws, so that sodomy is legal.

1907 – Marion Morrison, better known by his stage name John Wayne (d.1979), was an American film actor, director and producer. An Academy Award-winner, Wayne was among the top box office draws for three decades. An enduring American icon, he epitomized rugged masculinity and is famous for his demeanor, including his distinctive calm voice, walk, and height.

John Wayne personified for millions the nation's frontier heritage. Eighty-three of his movies were Westerns, and in them he played cowboys, cavalrymen, and unconquerable loners.

Among his better-known later films are The Quiet Man (1952), in which he is an Irish-American in love with a fiery spinster played by Maureen O'Hara; The Searchers (1956), in which he plays a Civil War veteran whose young niece (Natalie Wood) is abducted by a tribe of Comanches in an Indian raid; Rio Bravo (1959), playing a sheriff with Dean Martin; The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), portraying a troubled rancher competing with Eastern lawyer (James Stewart) for a woman's hand in marriage; True Grit (1969), as a humorous U.S. Marshal who sets out to avenge a man's death in the role that won Wayne his Academy Award; and The Shootist (1976), his final screen performance, in which he plays an aging gunfighter battling cancer.

Wayne was a prominent Republican in Hollywood, supporting anti-communist positions. In June 1999, the American Film Institute named Wayne 13th among the Greatest Male Screen Legends of All Time.

Wayne was married three times and divorced twice, but although he was the epitome of masculinity, stories about another side of him abound.

According to film historian Kevin Brownwing:

1918 – John Dall was an American actor born in New York City (d.1971) He is best remembered today for the part of the cool-minded intellectual killer in Alfred Hitchcock's Rope, but first came to fame as the young prodigy who comes alive under the tutelage of Bette Davis in The Corn is Green, for which he received an Academy Award nomination. He made a number of other films but worked primarily in theatre.

Rope was inspired by the notorious Leopold and Loeb murder case, Dall and co-star Farley Granger - also gay -were cast as two affluent young men who strangle an acquaintance merely as an intellectual challenge to commit the perfect murder.

Although the two men's sexuality is never made explicit in the film, the relationship between Granger's and Dall's characters has a strong homoerotic subtext, skilfully engineered by Hitchcock and his actors through staging, art direction, and nuance. 'It was just a thing assumed,' Granger said many years later of his character's homosexuality. 'Either you got it or you didn't.'

As the film's screenwriter, Arthur Laurents, who was Farley Granger's lover at the time, explained, 'There wasn't a word of dialogue that said [the two men] were lovers or homosexual, but there wasn't a scene between them where it wasn't clearly implied.'

After a long absence from the screen, Dall returned in 1960 to character roles in the costume dramas Spartacus (1960) and Atlantis, the Lost Continent (1961).

John Dall died in Los Angeles from a heart attack in 1971 aged 52.

1925 – Alec McCowen is an English actor, best known for classical roles including Shakespeare. He was born in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, and was and a graduate of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.

McCowen made his film debut in 1953 in a British film, The Cruel Sea, but achieved his greatest successes on stage. He made his London debut at the Arts Theatre in Ivanov in 1950, and had rising success as Toulouse-Lautrec in Moulin Rouge (1954), Barnaby Tucker in The Matchmaker (1954), and appearances at the Old Vic Theatre in 1959/60 in many Shakespearean plays, notably as Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet. His breakthrough came as Friar William Rolfe in Hadrian the Seventh, for which he won an Evening Standard Award for the London production and a Tony nomination after taking it to Broadway. His next big successes were in Molière's The Misanthrope opposite Diana Rigg (1973) and the role of psychiastrist Martin Dysart in the world premire of Peter Shaffer's Equus (1973), but his greatest achievement was his one-man performance of the complete text of Saint Mark's Gospel (1978), for which he received worldwide acclaim and another Tony nomination.

McCowen has appeared in the films Never Say Never Again (as Q), Cry Freedom, Frenzy , The Age of Innocence, and Travels With My Aunt, for which he received a Golden Globe nomination.

His partner, the actor Geoffrey Burridge died in 1987 from an AIDS-related illness.

In 1989 he was selected to appear on the celebrity surprise show This Is Your Life but was aghast at the programme's complete failure to mention Geoffrey Burridge, who had died less than two years previously and McCowen - bravely for the time - insisted that his late partner be acknowledged.

1938 – Pauline Parker, New Zealand murderess, born; A woman from Christchurch, New Zealand who, together with her friend Juliet Hume, murdered her mother, Honora Parker, on June 22nd, 1954. It is believed that the two girls killed Honora because Juliet and her father were leaving shortly for South Africa and, though Pauline wanted to accompany them, her mother forbade it. According to their own accounts, Pauline and Juliet were devoted friends who collaborated on a series of adventure novels which they hoped would be bought by a Hollywood studio and made into epic films. The girls' friendship was documented in detail by Pauline in a series of diaries during her teenage years.

During their friendship, the girls invented their own personal religion, with its own ideas on morality. They rejected Christianity and worshipped their own saints, envisioning a parallel dimension called "The Fourth World," essentially their version of Heaven. The Fourth World was a place that they felt they were already able to enter occasionally, during moments of spiritual enlightenment. By Pauline's account, they had achieved this spiritual enlightenment due to their friendship. Eventually, the girls formulated a plan to flee to Hollywood.

Shortly prior to the murder, Juliet had discovered her mother was having an affair and her parents were separating. This devastated Juliet as well as Pauline, who, due to having spent so much time with the Hulmes, thought of Juliet's parents as her own. Both girls were unaware of the fact that both sets of parents were collaborating at the time in an effort to separate the girls, viewing their close friendship as potentially unhealthy or homosexual (which, in 1950's, was thought of both as a crime and a mental illness).

The girls began to plan the murder of Parker's mother in June 1954. This amateurish plan was documented in Parker's diary entries. On 22 June, the girls led her to a remote area of a park near Christchurch and beat her to death with a half brick concealed in a stocking. They immediately ran to a nearby tea shop, visibly upset and covered in blood, claiming that Pauline's mother had slipped and fallen. When the body was discovered by police, their story did not hold up in explaining the 45 wounds on the woman's head. The torn, blood-soaked stocking with the brick in it was found nearby.

Parker and Hulme were tried by jury in Christchurch, and were found guilty. A plea of insanity was rejected by the court. As the girls were too young to be considered for the death penalty under New Zealand law at the time, they were convicted and sentenced to be detained at Her Majesty's pleasure. In practice, this sentence meant they were to be detained at the discretion of the Minister of Justice. They were released separately some five years later.

The girls' story was made into a film, Heavenly Creatures, by Lord of the Rings producer-director Peter Jackson, in 1994. Pauline was played by Melanie Lynskey and Juliet by Kate Winslet.

As of 1997, Pauline was living in the small village of Hoo near Strood, Kent, and running a children's riding school. Juliet is now known as acclaimed fiction author Anne Perry.

1944 – Archbishop Rev. Carl Bean is the Founding Prelate of the Unity Fellowship Church Movement, the world’s first African-American liberal affirming denomination welcoming the LGBTQ+ Community and Allies. The first church was founded in Los Angeles in 1982.

Before starting his historic church, Bishop Carl was known as a renowned lead singer, songwriter, performing artist, and producer working with some of the music industry’s greatest projects and legends. In the 1960s, he was lead singer with the legendary Alex Bradford Singers, the Gospel Chimes, and the Gospel Wonders.

In the theatre circuit, he’s was featured in productions such as Black Nativity and Your Arms Too Short To Box With God. However, it wasn’t until his record deal with the historic Motown Records that made him an icon in the LGBTQ movement by recording the historical classic, “I Was Born This Way.” The song became one of the first club hits of the gay liberation movement, popularized by disco DJs around the country throughout the 80s. The song also became the title of his first book, released in February 2013.

Bean founded the Minority AIDS Project (MAP) in 1985 to address individuals’ needs within the African American and Latino communities living with HIV/AIDS in Los Angeles.

On May 26, 2019, the Los Angeles City Council designated the intersection of Jefferson Blvd. and Sycamore Ave. as Archbishop Carl Bean Square. to honor his numerous contributions to the L.A. LGBTQ Community.

1945 – Born: Reg Bundy aka HIH Regina Fong (d.2003). Reginald Bundy was a British dancer, actor and television presenter best-known for his drag as HIH (Her Imperial Highness) Regina Fong.

Reginald Bundy was originally trained as a dancer. He worked on numerous West End shows as a dresser and eventually in the 1970s became a dancer in a variety of stage musicals. He also appeared in a dancing role in Bryan Forbes' film The Slipper and the Rose (1976).

In the early 1980s he teamed up with Rosie Lee (Roy Powell) & Gracie Grabitall (Graham) to form the now legendary drag trio The Disappointer Sisters, who performed across the London pubs and clubs.

Bundy first developed Regina Fong in 1985, and quickly achieved a regular spot at the Black Cap gay pub in Camden Town, London. The Fong character was a Russian princess who had escaped to Britain following the Russian Revolution, a conceit which formed the basis of Bundy's show The Last of the Romanoffs, which premiered at the Edinburgh Festival and later ran at the Bloomsbury Theatre in London - 'Her Imperial Highness was born to the Imperial Russian family of Saint Petersburg in 1905, but was almost immediately hidden away on the orders of the Czar due to her startling mane of red hair.'

HIH Regina Fong

Regina's stage act entailed audience participation, and used a variety of songs, jingles, and sound effects, and was one of the regular hosts of London's Lesbian and Gay Pride Festival.

His act, alongside that of other true originals, and close friends, like Lily Savage and Adrella, was instrumental in the rehabilitation of drag as a significant part of gay culture, where once it had been banished to the non-PC margins by critics who deemed it as irretrievably misogynist.

In 1993, Reg Bundy appeared at the Criterion Theatre in London alongside Kim Criswell, James Dreyfus, Sean Mathias, and Simon Fanshawe, in Elegies for Angels, Punks and Raging Queens, a verse and musical celebration of lives lost to AIDS. Throughout his career, he devoted endless evenings to hosting charity events to raise money for emerging AIDS charities.

And perhaps one of the greatest measures of his ability came when, alongside the likes of Ian McKellen, Stephen Fry and other luminaries, he showed he was easily able to hold the attention of the audience in the vast auditorium of the Albert Hall at the annual Equality Show to raise funds for the lesbian and gay campaigning organisation Stonewall.

Reg Bundy - and HIH Regina Fong, the last of the Romanoffs - died of cancer on 15 April 2003, aged 56.

1951 – Sally Ride (d.2012) was an American physicist and a former NASA astronaut. Ride joined NASA in 1978, and in 1983 became the first American woman to enter space. As of 2012, Ride also remains the youngest American astronaut to be launched into space at thirty-two years old. In 1987, she left NASA to work at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Arms Control.

Ride was one of 8,000 people to answer an advertisement in a newspaper seeking applicants for the space program. As a result, she joined NASA in 1978. Prior to her first space flight, she was subject to media attention, even being asked during a press conference "Do you weep when things go wrong on the job?"

On June 18, 1983, she became the first American woman in space as a crew member on Space Shuttle Challenger for STS-7. (She was preceded by two Soviet women, Valentina Tereshkova in 1963 and Svetlana Savitskaya in 1982.)

Ride was extremely private about her personal life. She married fellow NASA astronaut Steve Hawley in 1982 and they divorced in 1987.

Ride died at 61 on July 23, 2012, after a 17-month battle with pancreatic cancer.

After death, her obituary revealed that Ride's partner was Tam E. O'Shaughnessy, a female professor emerita of school psychology at San Diego State University and a childhood friend who met Ride when both were aspiring tennis players. O'Shaughnessy became a science teacher and writer and, later, the chief operating officer and executive vice president of Ride's company, Sally Ride Science. She co-authored several books with Ride. Their 27-year relationship was revealed by the company and confirmed by Ride's sister who also stated that Ride chose to keep her personal life private, including her sickness and treatments.

 
Don Maclean & Guy Burgess

1951 – Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess, British spies; No ... both spies were not born on the same day. But it is the day that the two British Foreign Office Officials defected to Russia, setting in motion an English witch hunt as vicious as America's contemporary McCarthy investigations. Unfortunately for their gay brothers, and especially for their old Oxford classmates, Maclean and Burgess were homosexuals. Their actions brought new meaning to the dreaded term "security risk" and cost numerous innocent gay men and women their livelihoods and, in some cases, (as in the mathematician Alan Turing) their lives.

1954 – Alan Hollinghurst, British novelist and poet, born; Winner of the 2004 Booker Prize for The Line of Beauty. His poetry collections include Isherwood is at Santa Monica and Confidential Chats with Boys. He was the was The Times Literary Supplement's deputy editor from 1982 to 1995. In 1989, he won the Somerset Maugham Award for The Swimming Pool Library. In 1994, he won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction with The Folding Star.

"From the start I've tried to write books which began from a presumption of the gayness of the narrative position," says Hollinghurst. "To write about gay life from a gay perspective unapologetically and as naturally as most novels are written from a heterosexual position. When I started writing, that seemed a rather urgent and interesting thing to do. It hadn't really been done."

Now, he feels, he can move on from that overwhelming decade which "seems to have determined so many things about the way we live now". The Line of Beauty brings to an end this sequence of books in which he has consciously explored gay identity and its fight for recognition. "I do have a sense of having completed a quartet of books which, while not a tetralogy in any narrative sense, do cohere in a way." Unusually, he has no idea for a new novel and may develop some short stories instead. No poems, though.

The context in which he is writing has changed, too. "When I began, there was an urgency about it which isn't there now. Things have changed so much over those 20 years; attitudes towards homosexuality are so different now." Hollinghurst is the beneficiary of that change, but also one of those who helped to achieve it. The gay writers he discussed in his thesis are the last (one hopes, anyway) who will have to suppress their sexuality or encrypt it in their narratives. Hollinghurst went to the same college as Oscar Wilde. But he inhabits another world.

1962 – Andreas Salmen, born in Göttingen, Germany,(d.1992) was a German LGBT activist.

While still at school, Salmen was politically active. He researched the neo-Nazi scene in West Berlin “undercover” and published his research results a short time later. In 1977 he became a member of the Young Democrats , the left-wing youth organization of the FDP under Jürgen Kunze.

Among other things, Salmen fought against the NATO double resolution. Until shortly before the evacuation in 1984, he was one of the occupiers of the Tuntenhaus at Bülowstrasse 55 in Berlin, studied political science at the Free University of Berlin from 1984, initiated the first gay family reunification between West and East Berlin in 1984 and was co-founder of the Victory Column, the Berlin monthly newspaper (at that time) for gays. In addition to political and AIDS coverage, he wrote a lot, mostly about British pop music.

In 1984, Salmen took a violent position in the magazine Victory Column against the demand contained in the election manifesto of the then Berlin AL that sections 174 and 176 should be retained and not abolished as part of a reform of the criminal law. In contrast, he defended the "pedosexuals". The abolition would have decriminalized the sexual abuse of children.

Together with Rosa von Praunheim, he was one of the initiators and co-founders of the first German Act Up group in the summer of 1989 . Salmen got involved in AIDS projects in Germany, such as the establishment of a stop AIDS project in Berlin. He wrote various books and articles on the topic of AIDS and, according to his own statements, tried to raise awareness among gays of the existential threat posed by AIDS through the activities of the bookstore founders Hedenström and Weber.

Andreas Salmen died on February 13, 1992 of complications from AIDS. His estate is kept in the archive of the Hamburg Institute for Social Research.

1969 – John Baird, served as Canada's Minister of Foreign Affairs (2011-2015) in the cabinet of Prime Minister Stephen Harper and had been member of the federal cabinet, in various positions, since 2006. He previously was a provincial cabinet minister in Ontario during the governments of Premiers Mike Harris and Ernie Eves. Baird resigned from cabinet on February 3, 2015. He subsequently announced his intention to resign as a Member of Parliament effective March 16, 2015.

Baird was born in Nepean, Ontario. He became involved in politics when he backed a candidate for the local federal PC nomination in 1984. The next year, at age sixteen, Baird was the youngest delegate to attend the party's January 1985 provincial leadership convention, as a supporter of Ontario Attorney-General Roy McMurtry.

He was later president of the youth wing of the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario, and aligned himself with Dennis Timbrell during the latter's abortive campaign for the PC leadership in 1989-90. He backed Mike Harris when Timbrell withdrew from the contest. Baird has also indicated that he was charged with trespassing during the 1988 federal election, after he tried to question Ontario Premier David Peterson about free trade with the United States during a Liberal Party campaign stop in a Kingston shopping mall. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Studies from Queen's University in 1992.

Baird worked on the political staff of Perrin Beatty when Beatty was federal Minister of National Defence in the early 1990s, and followed Beatty through subsequent cabinet shifts, culminating in his becoming Secretary of State for External Affairs in the short-lived 1993 government of Kim Campbell. After the defeat of the federal Progressive Conservatives in the 1993 federal election, Baird worked as a lobbyist in Ottawa.

Baird is openly gay but has been described as being in a "glass closet" because he has not discussed it publicly.

1985 – Sarah Outen is a British athlete and adventurer. She is also a motivational speaker in the UK and internationally. Outen was the first woman and the youngest person to row solo across the Indian Ocean and also the Pacific Ocean from Japan to Alaska.

Outen attended Stamford High School before reading Biology at St Hugh's College, Oxford where she started rowing in 2004.

After an eleven day failed attempt which she dubbed her 'Warm Up Lap', Outen set out again from Fremantle, Western Australia, on 1 April 2009 in her 19ft boat called Serendipity. She rowed for 124 days, 14 hours and 9 minutes before arriving at Bois des Amourettes, on the island of Mauritius, on 3 August 2009. She was the first woman to attempt the crossing single-handedly, and only the fourth person to ever complete a solo crossing. She was also the youngest person and the first woman to row alone across the Indian Ocean.

Her journey raised more than £30,000 for two charities, Arthritis Care and Arthritis Research Campaign. She dedicated the crossing to the memory of her father who died in 2006. She was elected Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society shortly afterwards and awarded three Guinness World Records for her crossing.

On 1 April 2011, Outen set off on her current expedition called "London2London: Via the World". This solo loop of the planet has included the first attempt by a woman to row across the north Pacific Ocean. She will row, cycle and kayak her way eastward from London around the world, ending back to London, sharing stories about the adventure and experience. The 20,000 miles (32,000 km) journey was scheduled to take 2.5 years to complete. During her expedition, to date, she has cycled across Europe and Asia, rowed across the North Pacific, and is currently cycling across parts of America and Canada to Cape Cod, where she plans to depart in her attempt to row across the North Atlantic to the UK.

On 23 September 2013, after 150 days and 3,750 miles at sea, Outen became the first woman to row solo from Japan to Alaska as well as the first woman to complete a mid-Pacific row from West to East. She arrived at Adak Island in the Aleutian Islands, rowing to within half a mile of a rocky coastline before being towed through the channel between Adak and Kagalaska Island. She was originally bound for Canada, but punishing currents and inclement weather forced her to change destinations for Alaska.

In September 2014 she crossed the border into Canada and arrived in New York on 12 March 2015.

During her crossing of the North Pacific Ocean Outen proposed to her long term girlfriend Lucy. Lucy joined Outen for part of the cycle across North America.

1985 – Dustin "Deuce" Kidby is a Canadian curler from Regina, Saskatchewan. He currently throws lead rocks for Team Matt Dunstone.

Kidby represented Saskatchewan at two Canadian Junior Curling Championships. The first was the 2002 Canadian Juniors, playing lead for Team Kyle George. They finished the event with a 7-5 record. George won the Canadian Juniors in 2005 (without Kidby), but invited him to be the alternate for Team Canada at the 2005 World Junior Curling Championships. The team won the gold medal at the event, and Kidby would play in two matches. Kidby returned to the Canadian Juniors in 2006, playing lead for Team Mitch Heidt. This team also finished with a 7-5 record. In university, Kidby played second for the University of Regina, on a team skipped by Byron Moffatt. The team won the bronze medal at the 2008 CIS/CCA Curling Championships.

Kidby joined the Brad Heidt rink in 2008, playing two season as the team's lead. In their first season, the team played in the 2009 Players' Championship, Kidby's first Grand Slam event, where they won just one game. The next season, Kidby picked up his first World Curling Tour event win as a member of the team, at the Point Optical Curling Classic.

For the 2011-12 curling season, Kidby played lead for the Braeden Moskowy rink, with whom he would win another event, the November 2011 DeKalb Superspiel.

Kidby joined the Josh Heidt team in 2012, playing four seasons as the team's lead. During this period, the team won two events, the 2014 Red Deer Curling Classic and the 2015 Weatherford Curling Classic. Kidby played in the March 2014 National Grand Slam event playing lead for Team Brock Virtue, finishing the event winless.

In 2016, Kidby joined Team Adam Casey for two seasons, again playing lead. The team won the 2017 SaskTel Tankard, the provincial men's championship for Saskatchewan. They would go on to represent Saskatchewan at the 2017 Tim Hortons Brier, where they went 5-6. The next season, the team played in the 2017 Olympic Pre-Tials, going 2-4.

In 2018, Kidby joined the Matt Dunstone rink, playing lead. In this first season, the team won three World Curling Tour events, the Prestige Hotels & Resorts Curling Classic, the DeKalb Superspiel and the Qinghai Curling Elite, as well as the third leg of the 2018-19 Curling World Cup. The team also played in a number of Grand Slam events, making it to the quarterfinals of the 2018 Masters, and qualifying for the 2018 Tour Challenge and the 2019 Canadian Open. They also played in the 2018 Canada Cup, finishing 1-5.

Kidby is openly gay. His brother is D. J. Kidby and he is the cousin of Ben Hebert.

1987 – Touraj Keshtkar, better known under his stage name Tooji, is a Norwegian-Iranian singer, painter, model and television host. Tooji represented Norway in the Eurovision Song Contest 2012 in Baku, Azerbaijan and finished 26th in the final.

Tooji was born in Shiraz, Iran, and moved to Norway when he was one year old. At the age of 16 he started modeling. After the modelling work, he started working on MTV Norway where he presented "Super Saturday" and "Tooji's Top 10". He was also educated as a social worker and has worked in asylum reception centres. Now he works as a child protection consultant in the department of after-care.

Tooji holds a bachelor's degree in child welfare. He has worked in asylum reception centers helping children and teenage refugees and victims of human trafficking. This work motivated him to use his songs and profile to speak out for those who suffer in silence. Tooji is a supporter of LGBT and women's rights, as well as a supporter of Green Wave, Iran's democratic reform movement. Tooji wore a Free Iran green bracelet during his performance in the Eurovision Song Contest 2012 held in Baku, Azerbaijan.

In June 2015, Tooji came out as gay to the Norwegian website Gaysir, stating that he hoped he could make it easier for young gay people by being open about his own sexuality. He was praised for his decision by the Norwegian National Association for Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals and Transgender People.

1988 – Start of the first U.S. national HIV education campaign. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop oversees the mailing of a booklet titled "Understanding AIDS" to all American households.

2009 – The California Supreme Court upholds Prop 8 but legally recognizes 18,000 same-sex marriages that took place before its enactment.

2019 – The government of Kenya reaffirms imprisonment of 5 to 14 years of LGBT people. Nearly every country in Africa is vehemently anti-gay, some with calls for penalty of death. The exception is South Africa which has full inclusion of LGBT people.

2019 – CanadianGay Group email service re-opens after just one day's full closure. A flood of emails (Over 250) to Ted, the Owner/Moderator encouraged him to re-open on a paid ListServ SimpleLists. CanadianGay was closed for just one full day, and most regular contributors had joined the new list within hours. A subsequent appeal to members to contribute towards the upkeep of the paid service brought in nearly $1200 Canadian. Within a month, over 500 members has transitioned to the new list. A poll indicated that some of these members had been with the group since 2004!