Sunday, 3 March 2013

March 3rd in Queer History


Events this day in Queer History

2009 – Ban on gays in the military ends in the Philippines

Born this day

Francois Raucourt (1815 - 1756),  French
Eighteenth-century French actress Françoise Raucourt became a favorite of Queen Marie-Antoinette. Widely admired for her talent and beauty, Raucourt never made a secret of her lesbianism. During the final years of the doomed monarchy, she lived openly with a series of lovers. After suffering through the French Revolution, she eventually became director of Napoleon's imperial theaters in Italy.

Edmund Lowe (1890 – 1971) US
Actor

Adrian (1903 –  1959), US
Costume Designer for over 250 films, whose most famous costumes were for The Wizard of Oz and other Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer films of the 1930s and 1940s.
Though he was openly gay, he married Janet Gaynor in 1939, possibly in response to the anti-gay attitudes of the movie studio heads and the sex-negative atmosphere created by the Production Code.

James Merrill (1926 - 1995) US
Poet, whose significance as a gay writer lies in his deliberate use of a personal relationship to fuel his poetry. He contends, in Mirabell, that gay love actuates the creation of poetry and music."The Black Swan", a collection of poems that Merrill's Amherst professor (and lover) Kimon Friar published privately in Athens, Greece in 1946, was printed in just one hundred copies when Merrill was 20 years old. This is Merrill's scarcest title and considered one of the 20th century's most collectible literary rarities. Later,Merrill's partner of more than four decades was David Jackson, also a writer.
His awards include the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1977) for "Divine Comedies".


Perry Ellis (1940 – 1986), US
Fashion Designer who founded a sportswear house in the mid-1970s.

Roy London (1943 – 1993), US
Actor, acting coach and teacher. London's partner in life and work for his last ten years was Tim Healey, with whom he had a commitment ceremony in 1988.

Andris Grinbergs (1946 – ), Latvian
Bisexual performance artist and filmmaker

Benjamin Cruz  (1951 – ),  Guam
Judge and politician. His nomination as a Judge in 1984 was marked with protests from evangelical and Baptist church groups because he is gay. Cruz was later confirmed and led the Family Court for nearly 10 years. He revealed a longstanding homosexual relationship in a magazine article published in 1995. Cruz eventually became Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Guam.

Christer Lindarw  (1953 – ), Swedish
clothes designer, drag queen entertainer, and the leader of dragshow group After Dark.

Yasmine   (1972 – 2009), Belgian
Hilde Rens, better known by her stage name Yasmine, was a Belgian singer, presenter and television personality. She came out as a lesbian in 1996, becoming an established LGBT icon for Flemish and Dutch youth.

Died this day

Danny Kaye (1913 - 1987) US
A celebrated American actor, singer, dancer, and comedian. His best known performances featured physical comedy, idiosyncratic pantomimes, and rapid-fire nonsense songs.
There are persistent rumors that Kaye was either homosexual or bisexual, and some sources claim that Kaye and Laurence Olivier had a ten-year relationship in the 1950s while Olivier was still married to Vivien Leigh.These rumours have been widely denied.

Richard Plant  (1910 - 1998) German / US
A German-American writer. He is said to have written, in addition to the works published under his own name, several detective novels or Kriminalromane, on which he collaborated with Dieter Cunz and Oskar Seidlin, and which were published under the collective pen-name of Stefan Brockhoff.
Plant is the author of The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War Against Homosexuals.

Louis Edmonds  (1923 - 2001) US
Actor, best known for his roles in Dark Shadows and All My Children. Though he'd never hidden his sexuality to those he met, he came out publicly in the biography Big Lou by Craig Hamrick, published while Edmonds was in his 70's.

Gerald Edwards  (??? - 2009) UK
Hate Crime Victim 

Sodomy in history, March 3rd


1785 — Massachusetts revises its sodomy law and rewords it so that it applies only to two males.
1849 — The Minnesota Territory is created and receives all the laws of Wisconsin, setting the sodomy penalty at 1-5 years.
1886 — New York amends its sodomy law to include oral sex.
1901 — The District of Columbia receives a new criminal code from Congress. Sodomy is not mentioned, but common-law crimes specifically are recognized, with a penalty of up to 5 years in prison and/or a $1,000 fine.
1973 — Two California police officers have a shootout in a restroom after one attempts to arrest the other for "an act of oral copulation.
1975 — Arkansas passes a new criminal code that repeals the state’s sodomy law, making it the first state in the South to do so. The repeal doesn’t last; the law is reinstated two years later.


Sources:

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