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THIS DAY IN GAY HISTORY

based on: The White Crane Institute's 'Gay Wisdom', Gay Birthdays, Gay For Today, Famous GLBT, glbt-Gay Encylopedia, Today in Gay History, Wikipedia, and more … April 7

529 Constantinople : Emperor Justinian I re-wrote Roman Law, making it distinctly Christian and stating that all same-sex acts are contrary to nature and punishable by death.

1786 – On this date William Rufus King, the U.S. Representative from North Carolina, Senator from Alabama, and the thirteenth Vice President of the United States was born (d.1853). Historians have argued about the extremely close relationship that King had with President James Buchanan.

King was close friends with James Buchanan, and the two shared a house in Washington, D.C. for fifteen years prior to Buchanan's presidency. Buchanan and King's close relationship prompted Andrew Jackson to refer to King as "Miss Nancy" and "Aunt Fancy", while Aaron V. Brown spoke of the two as "Buchanan and his wife". Further, some of the contemporary press also speculated about Buchanan and King's relationship.

Buchanan and King's nieces destroyed their uncles' correspondence, leaving some questions as to what relationship the two men had, but surviving letters illustrate the affection of a special friendship, and Buchanan wrote of his communion with his housemate. Buchanan wrote in 1844, after King left for France,

"I am now solitary and alone, having no companion in the house with me. I have gone a wooing to several gentlemen, but have not succeeded with any one of them. I feel that it is not good for man to be alone; and should not be astonished to find myself married to some old maid who can nurse me when I am sick, provide good dinners for me when I am well, and not expect from me any very ardent or romantic affection."

While the circumstances surrounding Buchanan and King have led authors such as Paul Boller to speculate that Buchanan was "America's first homosexual president", there is no direct evidence that he and King had a sexual relationship

Wood Self-portrait

1901 – John Christopher Wood (d.1930), often called Kit Wood, was an English painter born in Knowsley, near Liverpool.

Christopher Wood was born son of Doctor Lucius Wood. He briefly flirted with medicine and architecture at Liverpool University before pursuing an artistic career.At Liverpool University, Wood met Augustus John, who encouraged him to be a painter. The French collector Alphonse Kahn invited him to Paris in 1920. From 1921 he trained as a painter at the Academie Julian in Paris, where he met Picasso, Jean Cocteau, Georges Auric and Diaghilev. He travelled around Europe and north Africa between 1922 and 1924. He also collaborated with and became the lover of painter Francis Rose.

In 1926 Wood created designs for Romeo and Juliet for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, although they were never used. The same year he became a member of both the London Group and the Seven and Five Society plus meeting and befriending Ben Nicholson and Winifred Nicholson.

Wood was bisexual. In the early summer of 1921, Wood met Antonio de Gandarillas, a Chilean diplomat. Gandarillas, a married homosexual fourteen years older than Wood, lived a glamorous life partly financed by gambling. Their relationship lasted through Wood's life, surviving his affair with Jeanne Bourgoint. In 1927 his plans to elope and marry heiress Meraud Guinness were frustrated by her parents whereupon he required emotional support from Winifred Nicholson. Wood also had a liaison with a Russian émigrée, Frosca Munster, whom he met in 1928.

By 1930, addicted to opium and painting frenetically in preparation for his Wertheim exhibition in London, he suffered paranoia and began carrying a revolver. On August 21 he travelled to meet his mother and sister for lunch at 'The County Hotel' in Salisbury and to show them a selection of his latest paintings. After saying goodbye he jumped under a train at Salisbury railway station, although in deference to his mother's wishes it was reported as an accident.

1907 – Violette Leduc, French author, born (d.1972); Leduc was born in Arras, Pas de Calais, France, the illegitimate daughter of a servant girl, Berthe. In Valenciennes, the young Violette spent most of her childhood suffering from poor self-esteem, exacerbated by her mother's hostility and overprotectiveness. She developed tender friendships with her grandmother Fideline and her maternal aunt Laure. Her formal education, begun in 1913, was interrupted by World War I. After the war, she went to a boarding school, the Collège de Douai, where she experienced Lesbian affairs with a classmate and a music instructor who was fired over the incident.

In 1926, Leduc moved to Paris and enrolled in the Lycée Racine. That same year, she failed her baccalaureate exam and began working as a telephone operator and secretary at Plon publishers.

In 1932 she met Maurice Sachs and Simone de Beauvoir, who encouraged her to write. Her first novel L'Asphyxie (In the Prison of Her Skin) was published by Albert Camus for Éditions Gallimard and earned her praise from Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Cocteau and Jean Genet.

In 1955, Leduc was forced to remove part of her novel Ravages because of sexually explicit passages describing lesbianism. The censored part was eventually published as a separate novella, Thérèse and Isabelle in 1966. Another novel, Le Taxi caused controversy because of its depiction of incest between a brother and sister.

Leduc's best-known book, the memoir La Bâtarde, was published in 1964. It quickly became a bestseller. She went on to write eight more books, including La Folie en tête (Mad in Pursuit), the second part of her literary autobiography.

In 1968 Radley Metzger made a film of Leduc's novel Thérèse and Isabelle. The film was a commercial feature about adolescent lesbian love, starring Essy Persson and Anna Gael.

Leduc developed breast cancer and died aged 65 after two operations.

Young Harry Hay - Activist

1912 – Harry Hay, the founder of the Mattachine Society and the Radical Faeries, was born on this date (d.2002).

Although Harry Hay claimed 'never to have even heard' of the earlier Gay liberation struggle in Germany - by the people around Adolf Brand, Magnus Hirschfeld and Leontine Sagan - he is known to have talked about it with European emigres in America including Mattachine co-founder Rudi Gernreich. (However, Gernreich arrived in America at age 14, and Hay had already written his Gay manifesto when they met).

Hay, along with Roger Barlow and LeRoy Robbins directed a short film Even As You and I (1937) featuring Hay, Barlow, and filmmaker Hy Hirsh. A married man (beard/wife Anita Platky) and a member of the Communist Party USA, Hay composed the first manifesto of the American Gay rights movement in 1948, writing:

"We, the Androgynes of the world, have formed this responsible corporate body to demonstrate by our efforts that our physiological and psychological handicaps need be no deterrent in integrating ten percent of the world's population towards the constructive social progress of mankind."

Hay soon dispensed with the apologetic language and ideas. Though it may seem very dated today, the group was very radical compared to the rest of society at the time. It and Hay were among the first to advance the argument that Gay people represented a "cultural minority" as well as being just individuals, and even called for public marches of homosexuals, predicting later Gay pride parades.

Hay's concept of the "cultural minority" came directly from his Marxist studies, and the rhetoric he and his colleague Charles Rowland employed often reflected the militancy of Communist tradition. As the Mattachine Society grew with chapters around the country, the organization saw the Communist ties of its founders, including Hay, as a threat during that McCarthy-ite witch-hunt era, and expelled them from leadership. The organization took a more cautious tack so that by the time of the Stonewall riots the Mattachine Society came to be seen by many as stodgy and assimilationist.

The Communist Party did not allow Gays to be members, claiming that homosexuality was a 'deviation'; perhaps more important was the fear that a member's (usually secret) homosexuality would leave them open to blackmail and was a security risk in an era of red-baiting. Concerned to save the party difficulties, as he put more energy into the Mattachine Society, Hay himself had approached the CP's leaders and recommended his own expulsion. However, after much soul-searching, the CP, clearly reeling at the loss of a respected member and theoretician of 18 years standing, refused to expel Hay, instead dropping him as a 'security risk' but ostentatiously announcing him to be a 'Lifelong Friend of the People'.

Hay in later years

Hay later became an outspoken critic of Gay assimilationism and went on to help found both Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition and the Gay men's group the Radical Faeries, as well as being active in the Native American movements.

Hay once explained,

"We pulled an ugly green frog skin of heterosexual conformity over us, and that's how we got through school with a full set of teeth. We know how to live through their eyes. We can always play their games, but are we denying ourselves by doing this? If you're going to carry the skin of conformity over you, you are going to suppress the beautiful prince or princess within you."

Harry Hay and the Radical Faeries

In 1963, at age 51, he met an inventor named John Burnside, who became his life partner. They lived first in Los Angeles, and later in a Pueblo Indian reserve in New Mexico. After returning to Los Angeles to help organize the first Radical Faerie gathering, the couple moved to San Francisco, where Hay died of lung cancer at age 90. Hay was the subject of the 2002 documentary by Eric Slade, "Hope along the Wind: The Life of Harry Hay" (2002).

1912 – Academy Award nominated songwriter Jack Lawrence was born on this date (d.2009). He wrote about his being Gay in his 2004 autobiography, They All Sang My Songs. He was a gay man during a time when it was astronomically difficult to be one.

In addition to fun stories about divas ranging from Tallulah Bankhead to Cher, his book They All Sang My Songs covered his discreet queer life (he was closeted until sometime in his thirties), during which he attended gay "rent parties" in Harlem, and cruised Central Park for sex.

In 1945, met the love of his life, Walter Myden, who remained with Lawrence until he died 30 years later. Then Lawrence and Richard Debnam—who actually became Richard Lawrence when Jack adopted him in 1979—shared their love, with Richard more like the son he never had, Jack explained. "I think I would've been a good parent," the songwriter said, adding that not having children may have been his one regret. His songs, though, will live on longer than any child would have.

You probably know his songs through recordings like the Ink Spots' "If I Didn't Care", Rosemary Clooney's "Tenderly" and Frank Sinatra's "All Or Nothing At All" which was Sinatra's first solo hit.

Hearing his music now one can hear the sentiment of one who had to shield his life, or fight for its full acceptance, especially in "All Or Nothing At All" which has been recorded by Sinatra, Jimmy Scott, John Coltrane, Chet Baker and Diana Krall, to name just a few of its interpreters. Reading those lyrics it's easy to take it as an anthem of living and loving openly.

Lawrence died on March 16, 2009 at age 96 after a fall in his home in Redding, Connecticut. He was survived by Richard Debnam-Lawrence.

1915 – Gay diva and Jazz legend Billie Holiday was born today (d.1959). Nicknamed "Lady Day" by her friend and musical partner Lester Young, Holiday had a seminal influence on jazz and pop singing. Her vocal style, strongly inspired by jazz instrumentalists, pioneered a new way of manipulating phrasing and tempo.

Critic John Bush wrote that Holiday "changed the art of American pop vocals forever." She co-wrote only a few songs, but several of them have become jazz standards, notably "God Bless the Child," "Don't Explain," "Fine and Mellow," and "Lady Sings the Blues." She also became famous for singing "Easy Living," "Good Morning Heartache," and "Strange Fruit", a protest song which became one of her standards and was made famous with her 1939 recording.

Billie lived it up with a vengeance, and had a huge appetite for drink, drugs, men and women. She had an affair with actor and director Orson Welles, and also had a number of lesbian affairs - including one with Tallulah Bankhead. According to one of the later and better biographies she would call herself 'William' when she was sexually interested in a particular women.

STRANGE FRUIT Southern trees bear a strange fruit, Blood on the leaves and blood at the root, Black body swinging in the Southern breeze, Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees. Pastoral scene of the gallant South, The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth, Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh, And the sudden smell of burning flesh! Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck, For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck, For the sun to rot, for a tree to drop, Here is a strange and bitter crop.

As Billie Holiday later told the story, a single gesture by a patron at New York's Café Society, in Greenwich Village, changed the history of American music in early 1939, the night when she first sang "Strange Fruit." Café Society was New York's only truly integrated nightclub outside Harlem, a place catering to progressive types with open minds. But Holiday was to recall that even there she was afraid to sing this new song, and regretted it, at least momentarily, when she first did. "There wasn't even a patter of applause when I finished," she later said. "Then a lone person began to clap nervously. Then suddenly everyone was clapping."

The applause grew louder and less tentative as "Strange Fruit" became a nightly ritual for Holiday, then one of her signature songs, at least where it could be safely performed. And audiences have continued to applaud this disturbing ballad, unique in Holiday's oeuvre and in the American popular- song repertoire, as it has left its mark on generations of writers, musicians, and listeners, both black and white. The late jazz writer Leonard Feather once called "Strange Fruit" "the first significant protest in words and music, the first unmuted cry against racism." Jazz musicians still speak of it with a mixture of awe and fear - "When Holiday recorded it, it was more than revolutionary," said the drummer Max Roach – and perform it almost gingerly. "It's like rubbing people's noses in their own shit," said Mal Waldron, the pianist who accompanied Holiday in her final years. A few years back a British music publication, Q Magazine, named "Strange Fruit" one of 10 songs that actually changed the world.

1919 – Theophilus Brown (d.2012) was an American artist. He became prominent as a member of the Bay Area Figurative Movement.

A descendant of early-American intellectuals, Brown was born in Moline, Illinois. His great-grandfather was friends with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Brown's father was an inventor and chief designer, at the John Deere Company in Moline, Illinois.

While attending Yale University in the late-1930s, Brown met composer Paul Hindemith and poet May Sarton, with whom he would share lifetime friendships.

After graduating in 1941, Brown was drafted in World War II. Following his discharge, he began to study painting, moving between New York City and Paris, meeting an impressive range of artists that included Pablo Picasso, Braque, Giacometti, Balthus, and de Kooning, among others. Brown, who studied piano at Yale, was also close to a number of composers, including John Cage, Francis Poulenc, Samuel Barber, and Igor Stravinsky.

In 1952 Brown enrolled in the graduate studio program at the University of California, Berkeley, joining a group of artists—including Richard Diebenkorn David Park, Elmer Bischoff, James Weeks, and Nathan Oliveira —that would later be known as the Bay Area Figurative Movement. While attending Berkeley, Brown also met and fell in love with his long-time partner and fellow-painter, Paul Wonner.

In the early 1960s, Brown and Wonner moved to Santa Monica, where they developed a close friendship with fellow gay couple, novelist Christopher Isherwood, and portrait artist Don Bachardy. Over the years, Brown and Wonner also fostered friendships with playwright William Inge, composer and conductor Andre Previn, actress Eva Marie Saint and her husband, director Jeffery Hayden, and New Zealand novelist Janet Frame.

Figurative 1964

In his later years, Brown still managed to paint daily. Theophilus Brown resided in San Francisco, California at the time of his death. Four months before his death, Brown gave an interview in which he fact-checked his Wikipedia entry. He found the entry accurate, on the whole, but termed his classification as an abstract expressionist "horseshit." He died in San Francisco, aged 92.

1966 – The first Gay Community Center in the United States opens. It is located in San Francisco, led by The Society for Individual Rights.

1991 – Travis Flores is an American activist, philanthropist, motivational speaker, actor and children's book author. He has been featured in works such as Chicken Soup for the Soul, Readers Digest: Selections, Charlie's Cancer Rescue and The Lemonade Stand. Flores has cystic fibrosis and has spoken very openly about it, having served as a spokesperson for various cystic fibrosis related fundraisers. He is best known for his charitable work with both the Make-A-Wish Foundation and the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, and has donated a majority of his book's proceeds to the two organizations. To date, he has helped to raise over half a million dollars for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. Flores also established his own organization in 2005, which provides laptops to chronically ill youth in hospitals.

When Flores was twelve years old, he began work with illustrator Michelle Ciappa to prepare his children's book, "The Spider Who Never Gave Up", for publishing. In 2004, after the book was published when Flores was thirteen, he began a motivational speaking and book tour. In the same year, June 18 was proclaimed by Mayor Michael Mullen as "Travis Flores Day" in Marietta, Ohio; a city near his hometown of Newport, Ohio. A year later, Flores partnered with Disney to print an edition of his book for a Make-A-Wish Foundation event, in which two million dollars was donated to the charity. The media attention and success of the event enabled Flores to extend his tour another two years.

Flores started college when he was sixteen years old and received his bachelor's degree in Acting from Marymount Manhattan College by the age of twenty. In 2010, during his work as an undergraduate student, he had the opportunity to work with Susan Batson on the Broadway workshops of the Tennessee Williams play, In Masks Outrageous and Austere. In 2012, the play opened at Culture Project theater in New York City, but Flores was no longer affiliated with the project. While working in New York City, he attended New York University and graduated in Spring of 2013 with a master's degree in Fundraising.

On March 3, 2015, Flores successfully received a double-lung transplant at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center. Following the operation, he continued his work in entertainment, and later underwent a second double-lung transplant October 3, 2017 at the same medical facility.

In May 2019, Flores came out as gay on the CW series MyLastDays, making him the first person to ever come out on the network. Flores currently resides in Los Angeles, California with his male partner. He continues to pursue his philanthropic outreaches, acting, and writing.

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