Gay For Today

Angus McBean

2011-06-08T00:01:00.000+01:00

Angus McBean born 8 June 1904 (d. 1990)

Angus McBean was a Welsh photographer, associated with surrealism.

McBean was born in Newbridge, Monmouthshire, the son of a coal mine surveyor. He bought his first camera and tripod as World War I was ending. Fascinated by the apparently magical properties of photography, he wanted to be able to take pictures of people and sold a gold watch left to him by his grandfather to raise the five pounds necessary for the equipment.

In 1925, after his father's early death, McBean moved with his mother and younger sister to Acton, London. He worked for Liberty's department store in the antiques department learning restoration, while his personal life was spent in photography, mask-making and watching plays in the West End theatre. In 1932 he left Liberty and grew his distinctive beard to symbolise the fact that he would never be a wage-slave again. He then worked as a maker of theatrical props, including a commission of medieval scenery for John Gielgud's 1933 production of Richard of Bordeaux.

McBean's masks became a talking point in social columns, and were much admired by the leading Bond Street photographer Hugh Cecil. Cecil offered McBean an assistant's post at his Mayfair studio, and having learnt the secrets of Cecil's softer style and after using the studio at night, McBean set up his own studio 18 months later in a basement in Belgrave Road, Victoria, London.

The artist McBean as he was still known as a mask maker, gained a commission in 1936 from Ivor Novello for masks for his play The Happy Hypocrite. Novello was so impressed with McBean's romantic photographs that he commissioned him to take a set of production photographs as well, including young actress Vivien Leigh. The results, taken on stage with McBean's idiosyncratic lighting, instantly replaced the set already made by the long-established but stolid Stage Photo Company. McBean had a new career and a photographic leading lady: he was to photograph Vivien Leigh on stage and in the studio for almost every performance she gave until her death thirty years later.

McBean resultantly became one of the most significant portrait photographers of the 20th century, and was known as a photographer of celebrities. In the Spring of 1942 his career was temporarily ruined when he was arrested in Bath for committing homosexual acts. He was sentenced to four years in prison and was released in the autumn of 1944. After the Second World War, McBean was able to successfully resume his career.

There were in effect two periods to McBean's career, his pre- and post-war phases. Pre-war he was a lot more confident in himself and experimented successfully with surrealism, indeed his work with the likes of Vivian Leigh are some of the most accessible surrealist photographic images known. Post-war he reverted to a more regular style of portraiture photography, nearly always working with the entertainment and theatre profession.

In 1945, not sure whether he would find work again, McBean set up a new studio in a bomb-damaged building in Covent Garden. He sold his Soho camera for £35, and bought a new half-plate Kodak View monorail camera to which he attached his trusted Zeiss lenses. McBean was commissioned first by the Stratford Memorial Theatre to photograph a production of Anthony and Cleopatra, and all his former clients quickly returned. Through the late 1940s and 50s he was the official photographer at Stratford, the Royal Opera House, Sadlers Wells, Glyndebourne, the Old Vic and at all the productions of H.M. Tennent, servicing the theatrical, musical and ballet star system.

Magazines such as the Daily Sketch and Tatler vied to commission McBean's new series of surreal portraits.

Two figures have prevented McBean from gaining the full fame he deserves - the first being Cecil Beaton, whose lavish lifestyle and work for Vogue and the British Royal Family made him a huge star. And secondly that of David Bailey who though coming much later (1960s) was also close to Cecil Beaton both personally and in terms of style. Bailey is an iconic figure in the world of fashion photography just as Beaton was before him - McBean sadly did not enjoy this level of fame either in his life or after death, even though he was arguably the better technically and perhaps artistically. Additionally McBean's focus on the world of theatre (particularly London's West End) did not give him the international recognition that he probably deserved.

McBean's later works included being the photographer for The Beatles' first album, surrealist work as well as classic photographs of individuals such as Agatha Christie, Audrey Hepburn, and Noel Coward. Both periods or his work (pre- and post-war) are now eagerly sought by collectors and his work sits in many major collections around the world.

Mark Ravenhill

2011-06-07T00:01:00.001+01:00

Mark Ravenhill born 7 June 1966

Mark Ravenhill is one of England's leading contemporary playwrights.
His most famous plays include Shopping and Fucking (first performed in 1996), Some Explicit Polaroids (1999) and Mother Clap's Molly House (2001). He made his acting debut in his monologue Product, at the Edinburgh Festival in 2005. He often writes for the The Guardian arts section.

Mark Ravenhill grew up in West Sussex, England and cultivated an interest in theatre early in life, putting on plays with his brother when they were children. He studied English and Drama at Bristol University from 1984-1987, and held down jobs as a freelance director, workshop leader and drama teacher.

In 1997, Ravenhill became the literary director of a new writing company, Paines Plough. In 2003, when Nicholas Hytner took over as artistic director of the National Theatre, Ravenhill was brought in as part of his advisory team. In the mid-nineties, Ravenhill was diagnosed as HIV+, his partner of the early 1990s having died with AIDS.

Although he was at the heart of new British playwriting in the 1990s and 2000s, Ravenhill is very respectful of historical theatre and has claimed that he would like to see directors focus more on the classics and stop producing new plays that don’t have as much substance or meaning. In the same article, Ravenhill posits that directors have forced themselves into the 'eternal present', rather than expanding their reach to the many different cultures and genres of the past that they have to choose from. Further evidence of his interest in traditional theatre forms lies in Ravenhill's love of pantomime; he presented a Radio 4 documentary about the form and wrote Dick Whittington for the Barbican Theatre in 2006.

Ravenhill's work has transformed and developed in the 2000s. While his work in the 1990s - Shopping and Fucking, Handbag, and Some Explicit Polaroids for example - may be characterised by directly attempting to represent contemporary British society, his work has become more formally experimental and abstract.

His one-man show, Product, which toured internationally after its premiere at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2005, is both a satire on our post-9/11 attitudes to terrorism, and also a minutely observed reflection on the limits of language and form to capture contemporary reality. His play, The Cut, opened in 2006 at the Donmar Warehouse starring Sir Ian McKellen and divided critics with its portrait of a world dominated by the administering of a surgical procedure: the country, the year and the procedure are all unspecified. A similarly ambiguous and politically indirect style characterises the seventeen short plays that make up Ravenhill for Breakfast.

Ravenhill's former style continues to get an airing in the short plays he has written for young people, Totally Over You and Citizenship, both written for the National Theatre's National Theatre Connections Programme.

In November 2007, he announced in the Guardian that for the moment, he would concentrate on writing about heterosexual characters.

In 2008 the Royal Court, The Gate Theatre, the National Theatre, Out of Joint, and Paines Plough collectively presented the seventeen short plays Ravenhill wrote for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2007 under the title Ravenhill for Breakfast retitled as Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat.

Ravenhill was appointed Associate Director of London's Little Opera House at The King's Head Theatre in September 2010. He played an active role in the venue's relaunch as London's third Opera House along with patron Sir Jonathan Miller, Robin Norton-Hale and Artistic Director Adam Spreadbury-Maher[

James Ivory

2011-06-07T00:01:00.000+01:00

James Ivory born 7 June 1928

James Francis Ivory is an award-winning American film director, best known for the results of his long collaboration with Merchant Ivory Productions, which included both Indian-born producer Ismail Merchant and screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Their films won six Academy Awards.

Ivory was born in Berkeley, California. He was educated at the University of Oregon, majoring in Architecture and Fine Arts and then at the University of Southern California Film School. He wrote, photographed, and produced Venice: Theme and Variations a half-hour documentary submitted as a thesis film for his degree in cinema at USC. The film was named by The New York Times in 1957 as one of the ten best non-theatrical films of the year.

In 1961, Ivory created the film production company, Merchant Ivory Productions, with Indian-born producer Ismail Merchant and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala who served as the screenwriter for many of their productions. Until Merchant's death in 2005, the company produced a number of award winning films. Merchant was also Ivory's long-term life partner. Their professional and romantic partnership lasted from the early 1960s until Merchant's death in 2005.

In 1985 A Room with a View, based on the E. M. Forster novel, was nominated for eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director, and won three, for Jhabvala’s adaptation of Forster’s novel as well as for Best Costume and Best Production Design. A Room With a View was also voted Best Film of the year by the Critic’s Circle Film Section of Great Britain, the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, the National Board of Review in the United States and in Italy, where the film won the Donatello Prize for Best Foreign Language Picture and Best Director.

In 1987, Maurice received a Silver Lion Award for Best Director at the Venice Film Festival as well as Best Film Score for Richard Robbins and Best Actor Awards for co-stars James Wilby and Hugh Grant.

This was followed in 1990 by Mr and Mrs Bridge, which was adapted by Ruth Jhabvala from the novels by Evan S. Connell. This film received an Oscar nomination for best Actress (Joanne Woodward), as well as Best Actress and Best Screenplay from the New York Film Critics Circle.

In 1992 Ivory directed another Forster-adapted film, Howards End. The film was nominated for nine Academy awards, including Best Picture and Best Director, and won three: Best Actress (Emma Thompson), Best Screenplay - Adaptation (Ruth Prawer Jhabvala), and Best Art Direction/Set Decoration. The film also won Best Picture at the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) Awards, as well as awards for Best Picture, Best Actress for Emma Thompson and Best Director for Ivory from the National Board of Review. The Directors Guild of America awarded the D.W. Griffith award, its highest honor, to Ivory for his work.

Howards End was immediately followed by The Remains of the Day, which in turn was nominated for eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director.

The final Merchant Ivory film was 2005's The White Countess.

Thomas Mann

2011-06-06T00:01:00.002+01:00

Thomas Mann born 6 June 1875 (d. 1955)

Paul Thomas Mann was a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate, known for his series of highly symbolic and ironic epic novels and mid-length stories, noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and the intellectual. His analysis and critique of the European and German soul used modernised German and Biblical stories, as well as the ideas of Goethe, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer.

Thomas Mann was born in Lübeck, Germany to German and Brazilian parents. His mother was Roman Catholic, but Mann was baptised into his father's Lutheran faith. Mann's father died in 1891, and his business was liquidated. The family subsequently moved to Munich. Mann attended the science division of a Lübeck gymnasium, then spent time at the University of Munich and Technical University of Munich where, in preparation for a journalism career, he studied history, economics, art history, and literature. He lived in Munich from 1891 until 1933, with the exception of a year in Palestrina, Italy, with his novelist elder brother Heinrich. Thomas worked with the South German Fire Insurance Company 1894–95. His career as a writer began when he wrote for Simplicissimus. Mann's first short story was published in 1898.

In 1905, he married Katia Pringsheim, daughter of a prominent, secular Jewish family of intellectuals. They had six children who became literary, artistic figures in their own right.

In 1929, Mann had a cottage built in the fishing village of Nidden (Nida, Lithuania) on the Curonian Spit, where there was a German art colony, and where he spent the summers of 1930-32 there, working on Joseph and his Brothers. In 1933, after Hitler assumed power, Mann emigrated to Küsnacht, near Zürich, Switzerland, in 1933, but received Czechoslovakian citizenship and a passport in 1936. He then emigrated to the United States in 1939, where he taught at Princeton University. In 1942, the Mann family moved to Pacific Palisades, California, where they lived until after the end of World War II; on June 23, 1944 Thomas Mann was naturalised as a citizen of the United States. In 1952, he returned to Europe, to live in Kilchberg, near Zürich, Switzerland.

He never again lived in Germany, though he regularly travelled there. His most important German visit was in 1949, at the 200th birthday of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, attending celebrations in Frankfurt am Main and Weimar, a statement that German culture extends beyond the new political borders.

In 1955, he died of atherosclerosis in a hospital in Zürich and was buried in Kilchberg. Many institutions are named in his honour, most famously the Thomas Mann Gymnasium of Budapest.

Mann's diaries, unsealed in 1975, tell of his struggles with his sexuality, which found reflection in his works, most prominently through the obsession of the elderly Aschenbach for the 14-year-old Polish boy Tadzio in the novella Death in Venice (Der Tod in Venedig, 1912), which was famously filmed in 1971 by Luchino Visconti starring Dirk Bogarde, and turned into an opera by Benjamin Britten, his last, in 1973.

Hugh Laing

2011-06-06T00:01:00.001+01:00

Hugh Laing born 6 June 1911 (d. 1988)

Hugh Laing was a British ballet dancer and actor, and lifelong partner of choreographer Antony Tudor.

Hugh Laing, whose original name was Hugh Skinner, was born in Barbados in the then British West Indies. He moved to London in 1931 to study art, but soon became interested in ballet. After taking ballet classes with Marie Rambert, Margaret Craske and Olga Preobrajenska, he joined Miss Rambert's experimental Ballet Club in 1933, and it was there that he met Antony Tudor.

He remained Tudor's artistic collaborator and 'friend' until the choreographer's death in 1987. For the Ballet Club, Tudor created roles for Laing in The Planets, The Descent of Hebe, Jardin aux Lilas and Dark Elegies.

In 1938, Laing became a member of Tudor's London Ballet, a short-lived troupe for which he danced in Tudor's Gala Performance and Judgment of Paris.

Hugh Laing accompanied Tudor to New York in 1939 to participate in the first season of Ballet Theater, as American Ballet Theater was originally known. Just as Tudor soon was recognised as a great choreographer, so Laing was hailed as one of the company's finest artists.

At Ballet Theater, Tudor choreographed several of the roles for which Laing was famous - the handsome, but corrupt, Young Man from the House Opposite in Pillar of Fire (1942), Romeo in Romeo and Juliet (1943), a sophisticated gentleman in Dim Lustre (also 1943) and a murderer in Undertow (1945). He was also admired for his portrayals of the gypsy lover in Leonide Massine's Aleko, a neurotic young man in Jerome Robbins' Facsimile, Albrecht in Giselle and the title role of Petrouchka.

[Left] Hugh Laing, Maude Lloyd, Antony Tudor, and Peggy van Praagh in Tudor's Jardin aux Lilas (1936)

He danced with the New York City Ballet from 1950 to 1952, appearing in a revival of Jardin aux Lilas and in such new works by Tudor as The Lady of the Camellias (1951) and La Gloire (1952). In addition, he won praise in the title role of Balanchine's Prodigal Son and Robbins's Age of Anxiety. He later made guest appearances with Ballet Theater, then embarked upon a new career as a commercial photographer in New York continuing to assist Tudor with restagings of his ballets. Laing appeared as Harry Beaton in the film of the musical Brigadoon (1954)

Laing's relationship with Tudor was briefly interrupted when he married the American ballerina Diana Adams in 1947; they were divorced in 1953.

Known for his good looks and the intensity of his stage presence, he was never considered a great technician, yet his powers of characterisation and his sense of theatrical timing were considered remarkable. His profile as a significant dancer of his era was almost certainly enhanced by Tudor's choreographing to his undoubted strengths and Laing is generally regarded as one of the finest dramatic dancers of 20th-century ballet.

He died of cancer, aged 77, in New York City in 1988.

Harvey Fierstein

2011-06-06T00:01:00.000+01:00

Harvey Fierstein born 6 June 1952

Harvey Fierstein is a Tony Award-winning and Emmy Award-nominated American actor, playwright, and screenwriter.

Born Harvey Forbes Fierstein in Brooklyn, New York, the gravelly-voiced actor perhaps is known best for the play and film Torch Song Trilogy, which he wrote and in which he starred. The 1982 Broadway production won him two Tony Awards, for Best Play and Best Actor in a Play, two Drama Desk Awards, for Outstanding New Play and Outstanding Actor in a Play, and the Theatre World Award, and the film earned him an Independent Spirit Award nomination as Best Male Lead.

Fierstein also wrote the book for La Cage aux Folles (1983), winning another Tony Award, this time for Best Book of a Musical, and a Drama Desk nomination for Outstanding Book. Legs Diamond, his 1988 collaboration with Peter Allen, was a critical and commercial failure, closing after 72 previews and 64 performances. His other playwriting credits include Safe Sex, Spookhouse, and Forget Him.

Fierstein made his acting debut in Andy Warhol's only play, Pork's. In addition to Torch Song Trilogy, Fierstein's Broadway acting credits include Edna Turnblad in Hairspray (2003) [left], for which he won another Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Musical (joining Tommy Tune as the only people to win the award in four different categories), and Tevye in the 2005 revival of Fiddler on the Roof.

Fierstein's film roles include Woody Allen's Bullets Over Broadway, Robin Williams' maskmaker brother in Mrs Doubtfire, a Parade of Hope spokesman in Death to Smoochy, Garbo Talks, Duplex, and the blockbuster hit Independence Day. He also narrated the documentary The Times of Harvey Milk and voiced the role of Yao in Walt Disney's Mulan (1998), a role he later reprised for the video game Kingdom Hearts II.

On television, Fierstein was featured as the voice of Karl, Homer's assistant, in the Simpson and Delilah episode of The Simpsons, and the voice of Elmer in the 1999 HBO special based on his children's book The Sissy Duckling, which won the Humanitas Prize for Children's Animation.

Additional credits include Miami Vice, Murder, She Wrote, the Showtime TV movie Common Ground (which he also wrote), and Cheers, which earned him an Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series.

Fierstein is an occasional columnist writing about gay issues. His careers as a stand-up comic and female impersonator are mostly behind him.

John Maynard Keynes

2011-06-05T00:01:00.000+01:00

John Maynard Keynes born 5 June 1883 (d. 1946)

John Maynard Keynes, 1st Baron Keynes CB was a British economist whose ideas, called Keynesian economics, had a major impact on modern economic and political theory as well as on many governments' fiscal policies. He advocated interventionist government policy, by which the government would use fiscal and monetary measures to mitigate the adverse effects of economic recessions, depressions and booms. He is one of the fathers of modern theoretical macroeconomics.

Born in Cambridge, John Maynard Keynes was the son of an economics lecturer at Cambridge University and a successful author and a social reformer.

Keynes' early romantic and sexual relationships were almost all with men. Homosexuality was not unusual in the Bloomsbury group in which Keynes was avidly involved. One of his great loves was the artist Duncan Grant, whom he met in 1908, and he was also involved with the writer Lytton Strachey. Keynes appeared to turn away from homosexual relationships around the time of the first World War. In 1918, he met Lydia Lopokova, a well-known Russian ballerina, and they married in 1925.

After studying Mathematics at Cambridge, where his interest in politics lead him to switch to economics, Keynes accepted a lectureship at Cambridge in economics, from which position he began to build his reputation. Soon he was appointed to the Royal Commission on Indian Currency and Finance, where he showed his considerable talent at applying economic theory to practical problems.

His expertise was in demand during the First World War. He worked for the Adviser to the Chancellor of the Exchequer and to the Treasury on Financial and Economic Questions. Among his responsibilities were the design of terms of credit between Britain and its continental allies during the war, and the acquisition of scarce currencies.

His successes in this field led eventually to the appointment that would have a huge effect on Keynes’ life and career: financial representative for the Treasury to the 1919 Paris Peace Conference.

Keynes' career lifted off as an adviser to the British finance department from 1915 – 1919 during World War I, and their representative at the Versailles peace conference in 1919. His observations appeared in the highly influential book The Economic Consequences of the Peace in 1919, followed by A Revision of the Treaty in 1922. Using statistics provided to him by the German delegation, he argued that the reparations which Germany was forced to pay to the victors in the war were too large, would lead to the ruin of the German economy and result in further conflict in Europe. These predictions were borne out when the German economy suffered in the hyperinflation of 1923. Only a fraction of reparations were ever paid.

By 1942, Keynes was a highly recognised economist and was raised to the House of Lords as Baron Keynes, of Tilton in the County of Sussex, where he sat on the Liberal benches. During World War II, Keynes argued in How to Pay for the War that the war effort should be largely financed by higher taxation, rather than deficit spending, in order to avoid inflation. As Allied victory began to look certain, Keynes was heavily involved, as leader of the British delegation and chairman of the World Bank commission, in the negotiations that established the Bretton Woods system. The Keynes-plan, concerning an international clearing-union argued for a radical system for the management of currencies, involving a world central bank, the International Clearing Union, responsible for a common world unit of currency, the Bancor.

Keynes was ultimately a successful investor, building up a substantial private fortune. He was nearly wiped out following the Stock Market Crash of 1929, but he soon recouped his fortune. He enjoyed collecting books: for example, he collected and protected many of Isaac Newton's papers. He was interested in literature in general and drama in particular and supported the Cambridge Arts Theatre financially, which allowed the institution to become, at least for a while, a major British stage outside of London.

Keynes' personal interest in Classical Opera and Dance focused on his support of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden and the Ballet Company at Sadlers Wells. During the War as a member of CEMA (Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts) Keynes helped secure government funds to maintain both companies while their venues were shut. Following the War Keynes was instrumental in establishing the Arts Council of Great Britain and was the founding Chairman in 1946. Unsurprisingly from the start the two organisations that received the largest grant from the new body were the Royal Opera House and Sadlers Wells.

He also had a less laudable interest in eugenics.

Keynes died of a heart attack at his holiday home in Tilton, East Sussex, his heart problems being aggravated by the strain of working on post-war international financial problems. He died soon after he arranged a guarantee of an Anglo-American loan to Great Britain, a process he described as 'absolute hell'.

Sam Harris

2011-06-04T00:01:00.000+01:00

Sam Harris born 4 June 1961

Sam Harris is an Oklahoma-born singer, actor, songwriter and theatre director. 'Discovered' in the first season of US TV talent show Star Search at the age of 22, he has gone on to forge a successful career touring, on record and especially as a Broadway musical performer.

Harris is a Tony nominated actor in musical theatre, starring in Broadway productions of Grease, The Life, Cabaret, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and The Jazz Singer, among others. He has also appeared in films and TV shows.

Although encouraged several years ago to lend his talent to AIDS benefits, Sam Harris began to speak about his sexuality in the late 1990s and the recent ultra-conservative trend in America has inspired him towards greater openness and activism.

Harris and Danny Jacobsen, who is a director and presentation coach for numerous Blue Chip companies and also film producer, have been together since 1994. They adopted a son, Cooper Atticus Harris-Jacobsen, in April 2008 and the couple married on November 1, 2008.

When Sam sings, I'm perfectly all right, except for the fact that I can't breathe! I find myself crying and laughing and applauding and knowing why I went into this business. [Liza Minnelli]

George Quaintance

2011-06-03T00:01:00.003+01:00

George Quaintance born 3 June 1902 (d. 1957)

George Quaintance was a man of many of talents - dancer; designer of stage sets, interiors and New York department store windows; he also designed women's make-up and hairstyles for Hollywood stars and New York socialites, and was a sought-after portrait artist. But George Quaintance's main contribution to gay life and culture and the key to his true significance is his long career as a male physique photographer and, more especially, his extraordinary paintings, which are now highly collectible and hold a unique place in the story of gay sensibility and imagery in the twentieth century. His art helped define the now-familiar iconography of male erotica.

Although now obscure, George Quaintance was one of the most influential figures in a unique American style of art and one of the most flamboyant and interesting gay characters for four decades of the twentieth century.

Though few people outside the gay world know it, Quaintance was a pioneer of male physique painting. This genre heralded a new American gay consciousness in the early 1950s.

John Waybright - GLBTQ Encyclopedia

A more detailed biography of this extraordinary man and his life and work is available at the GLBTQ Encyclopedia.

Quaintance, the first major biography of George Quaintance, by John Waybright and Ken Furtado, is due to published soon.

The Quaintance Collection

Allen Ginsberg

2011-06-03T00:01:00.002+01:00

Allen Ginsberg born 3 June 1926 (d. 1997)

Irwin Allen Ginsberg was an American Beat poet. Ginsberg is best known for Howl (1956), a long poem about the self-destruction of his friends of the Beat Generation and what he saw as the destructive forces of materialism and conformity in United States at the time.

Ginsberg was born into a Jewish family in Newark, New Jersey. His father Louis Ginsberg was a poet and a high school teacher. Ginsberg's mother, Naomi Levy Ginsberg (who was affected by epileptic seizures and mental illnesses such as paranoia) was an active member of the Communist Party USA and often took Ginsberg and his brother Eugene to party meetings. Ginsberg later said that his mother 'Made up bedtime stories that all went something like: "The good king rode forth from his castle, saw the suffering workers and healed them."'

As a teenager, Ginsberg began to write letters to The New York Times about political issues such as World War II and workers' rights. While in high school, Ginsberg began reading Walt Whitman; he said he was inspired by his teacher's passion in reading.

In Ginsberg's freshman year at Columbia he met fellow undergraduate Lucien Carr, who introduced him to a number of future Beat writers including Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and John Clellon Holmes. They bonded because they saw in one another excitement about the potential of the youth of America, a potential which existed outside the strict conformist confines of post-WWII McCarthy-era America. Ginsberg and Carr talked excitedly about a 'New Vision' (a phrase adapted from Arthur Rimbaud) for literature and America. Carr also introduced Ginsberg to Neal Cassady, for whom Ginsberg had a long infatuation. Kerouac later described the meeting between Ginsberg and Cassady in the first chapter of his 1957 novel On the Road. Kerouac saw them then as the dark (Ginsberg) and light (Cassady) side of their 'New Vision'. Kerouac's perception had to do partly with Ginsberg's association with Communism (though Ginsberg himself was never a Communist); Kerouac called Ginsberg 'Carlo Marx' in On the Road. This was a source of strain in their relationship since Kerouac grew increasingly distrustful of Communism.

Also in New York, Ginsberg met Gregory Corso in a bar and introduced him to the rest of his inner circle.

In 1954 in San Francisco, Ginsberg met Peter Orlovsky, a young man of 21 with whom he fell in love and who remained his life-long lover, and with whom he eventually shared his interest in Tibetan Buddhism.

Also in San Francisco Ginsberg met members of the San Francisco Renaissance and other poets who would later be associated with the Beat Generation in a broader sense.

He met Michael McClure at a W. H. Auden reading where they struck up a conversation about William Blake. McClure was planning a poetry reading at the Six Gallery where Robert Duncan's play Faust Foutu had previously been performed. But McClure handed the duties off to Ginsberg. Ginsberg advertised the event as 'Six Poets at the Six Gallery'. One of the most important events in Beat mythos, known simply as 'The Six Gallery reading' took place on October 7, 1955. The event, in essence, brought together the East and West Coast factions of the Beat Generation. Of more personal significance to Ginsberg: that night was the first public reading of Howl, a poem that brought world-wide fame to Ginsberg and many of the poets associated with him.

Ginsberg's principal work, Howl, is well-known to many for its opening line: 'I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness.' Howl was considered scandalous at the time of its publication due to the rawness of its language, which is frequently explicit. Shortly after its 1956 publication by San Francisco's City Lights Bookstore, it was banned for obscenity. The ban became a cause célèbre among defenders of the First Amendment, and was later lifted after a judge declared the poem to possess redeeming social importance.

Though 'Beat' is most accurately applied to Ginsberg and his closest friends (Corso, Orlovsky, Kerouac, Burroughs, etc.), the term 'Beat Generation' has become associated with many of the other poets Ginsberg met and became friends with in the late 1950s and early 1960s. A key feature of this term seems to be a friendship with Ginsberg. (Friendship with Kerouac or Burroughs might also apply, but both writers later strove to disassociate themselves from the name 'Beat Generation') Part of the dissatisfaction with the term 'Beat Generation' came from the mistaken identification of Ginsberg as the leader. Ginsberg never claimed to be the leader. He did, however, claim many of the writers with whom he had become friends in this period shared many of the same intentions and themes.

Later in his life, Ginsberg formed a bridge between the beat movement of the 1950s and the hippies of the 1960s, befriending, among others, Timothy Leary, Ken Kesey, Rod McKuen, and Bob Dylan.

Ginsberg's willingness to talk about taboo subjects is what made him a controversial figure in the conservative 1950s and a significant figure in the 1960s. But Ginsberg continued to broach controversial subjects throughout the 1970s, '80s, and '90s.

One contribution that is often considered his most significant and most controversial was his openness about homosexuality, including his love of youths. Ginsberg was an early proponents of freedom for men who loved other men, having already in 1943 discovered within himself 'mountains of homosexuality'. He expressed this desire openly and graphically in his poetry. He also struck a note for gay marriage by listing Peter Orlovsky, his lifelong companion, as his spouse in his Who’s Who entry. Later homosexual writers saw his frank talk about homosexuality as an opening to speak more openly and honestly about something often before only hinted at or spoken of in metaphor.

Also, in writing about sexuality in graphic detail and in his frequent use of language seen as indecent he challenged — and ultimately changed — obscenity laws. He was a staunch supporter of others whose expression challenged obscenity laws (William S. Burroughs and Lenny Bruce, for example).

He continuously attempted to force the world into a dialogue about controversial subjects because he thought that no change could be made in a polite silence.

Allen Ginsberg died on April 5, 1997, surrounded by family and friends in his East Village loft in New York City. He succumbed to liver cancer via complications of hepatitis. He was 70 years old.

Maurice Evans

2011-06-03T00:01:00.001+01:00

Maurice Evans born 3 June 1901 (d. 1989)

Maurice Herbert Evans was an English actor who became a US citizen in 1941.

Maurice Evans was born in Dorchester, Dorset. He first appeared on the stage in 1926 and joined the Old Vic Company in 1934, playing Hamlet, Richard II and Iago. His first appearance on Broadway was in Romeo and Juliet opposite Katharine Cornell in 1936, but he made his biggest impact in Shakespeare's Richard II, a production whose unexpected success was the surprise of the 1937 theatre season and allowed Evans to play Hamlet (1938) (the first time that the play was performed uncut on the New York stage), Falstaff in Henry IV, Part I (1939), Macbeth (1941), and Malvolio in Twelfth Night (1942) opposite the Viola of Helen Hayes, all under the direction of Margaret Webster.

When World War 2 arrived, he was in charge of an Army Entertainment Section in the Central Pacific and played his famous 'G.I. version' of Hamlet that cut the text of the play to make Prince Hamlet more decisive and appealing to the troops, an interpretation so popular that he took it to Broadway in 1945. He then shifted his attention to the works of Shaw, notably as John Tanner in Man and Superman and as King Magnus in The Apple Cart. He was also a successful Broadway producer of productions in which he did not appear, notably Teahouse of the August Moon.

American television audiences of the 1960s will remember Evans as Samantha's father, Maurice (the character was originally named Victor when he was introduced), on the sitcom Bewitched. He also played "The Puzzler" on Batman. Many viewers were unaware of Evans' extraordinary Shakespearean pedigree. His real-life insistence that his first name was pronounced the same as the name 'Morris' was ironically at odds with his Bewitched character's contrasting stance that it be pronounced 'Maw-REESE'.

As of 2006, Evans had appeared in more American television productions of Shakespeare than any other actor. In bringing Shakespeare to television, he was a true pioneer. Evans also brought his Shakespeare productions to Broadway many times, playing Hamlet in 4 separate productions for a grand total of 283 performances, a Broadway record that is not likely to be broken.

Evans had great impact onscreen as well, memorably in two 1968 films: as the evolved orang-utan, Dr Zaius in Planet of the Apes and as Rosemary's friend Hutch in the thriller Rosemary's Baby.

In his later years, Evans returned to the English country of his birth and died of cancer in East Sussex, England, aged 87.

Patrick Cargill

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Patrick Cargill born 3 June 1918 (d. 1996)

Patrick Cargill was a British actor.

Patrick Cargill was one of the West End's most distinguished actors and a brilliant farceur. His sense of timing was excellent, an essential part of comedy acting. Although it was television that brought him fame.

He made his first West End appearance in 1953 in Ian Carmichael's revue, High Spirits at the London Hippodrome. He also co-wrote the stage play Ring For Catty, with Jack Beale. The second of the Carry On films, Carry On Nurse (1959) was based on this play. He appeared in Hancock's The Blood Donor as the long-suffering doctor in charge of the blood transfusion.

After a number of other West End roles he landed that of Bernard in Boeing Boeing at the Apollo Theatre in 1962. The farce, which was almost tailor made for him, attracted major producers to him and he went on to star in Say Who You Are at Her Majesty's Theatre in 1965 and to direct Not Now Darling by Ray Cooney and John Chapman at The Strand Theatre in 1968. In that year, Cargill had his big break when he was offered the chance of his own sitcom on ITV.

Father, Dear Father was written specifically for him and his unique off-beat farcical talent, and he was cast as Patrick Glover, a thriller writer, but an inept father of two teenage daughters. The show ran until 1973 and showcased many other stars, such as Leslie Phillips, Ian Carmichael, Tony Britton, Jeremy Child, Joyce Carey, Donald Sinden, Rodney Bewes, June Whitfield, Richard O'Sullivan, Bill Fraser, Dandy Nichols, Bill Pertwee, Peter Jones, Joan Sims, Richard Wattis, Jack Hulbert, Hugh Paddick, Roy Kinnear and Beryl Reid. The series was produced and directed by William G. Stewart, later to be the presenter of Channel 4 quiz show Fifteen to One.

In 1976 Cargill returned to the TV screens with The Many Wives of Patrick, playing a middle-aged playboy who is trying to divorce his sixth wife in order to remarry his first. This series again showcased many famous stars.

A resurgence in the popularity of farce in the 1980s saw him return to the theatre for the remainder of his career.

Patrick Cargill made a number of films, notably two Carry Ons and The Beatles' Help!

Patrick Cargill was born of middle-class parents living in Bexhill on Sea, East Sussex. He was a commissioned officer in the army during the war and spent most of his active service in India. From the mid 1960s he lived near Richmond, Surrey. He spent his time 'resting' at Spring Cottage, his country retreat situated in Sussex. For many years his 'companion' was Vernon Page, an eccentric landscape gardener, poet and lampoon songwriter, until he married in 1984 with Cargill's blessing.

Cargill was not a private man who quietly disliked his TV fame. He would shun the awards ceremonies and star galas in favour of a quiet evening at home playing Mah Jong. He never made any public acknowledgment of his private life as he felt that to admit to being gay would damage his professional image. Notwithstanding his reluctance to come out in this respect, Cargill was happy being gay in his private life and his wit when not in the spotlight reflected that. Once, whilst lunching with Ray Cooney, the theatrical impresario, Cargill wittily observed, when a particularly handsome waiter mistakenly removed his soup spoon, 'Ah look Ray, the dish has run away with the spoon.'

In the later years of his life, Cargill lived in Henley with his last companion, James Camille Markowski.

He died in Richmond, London, aged 77. He had been suffering from a brain tumour.

John Lehmann

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John Lehmann born 2 June 1907 (d. 1987)

John Frederick Lehmann (born Bourne End, Buckinghamshire) was an English poet and man of letters, and one of the foremost literary editors of the twentieth century, founding the periodicals New Writing and The London Magazine.

The son of journalist Rudolph Lehmann, and brother of actress Beatrix Lehmann and novelist Rosamond Lehmann, he was educated at Eton and read English at Trinity College, Cambridge, his time at both of which he considered 'lost years'.

In 1928 he had a slim volume of his poems privately printed , but the next volume of verse was published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press. The Woolfs offered him an 'apprenticeship' - as dogsbody and secretary - an experience he later caustically documented in Thrown To The Woolfs. In August 1932, he turned his back on the Hogarth Press and departed for Vienna. Part of the legendary Auden generation, he spent the early 1930s in a politically precarious but sexually liberated central Europe, engrossed in leftist politics, artistic pursuits and gay hedonism.

He returned to England to found the popular periodical in book format, New Writing (1936-1941) which proved of great influence on literature of the period, and an outlet for writers such as Christopher Isherwood and W H Auden.

After re-establishing relations with the Woolfs, he returned as managing director of Hogarth Press between 1938 and in 1946 he created his own firm John Lehmann Ltd with his sister Rosamond, publishing new works by authors such as Sartre and Stendhal, and discovering talents like Thom Gunn and Laurie Lee. The venture was not a commercial success however.

In 1954 he founded The London Magazine, remaining as editor until 1961, following which he was a frequent lecturer in the US in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and completed his three volume autobiography, Whispering Gallery (1955), I Am My Brother (1960), The Ample Proposition (1966).

In The Purely Pagan Sense (1976) is an autobiographical record of his homosexual love life in England and pre-war Germany, discreetly written in the form of a novel. He also wrote the biographies Edith Sitwell (1952), Virginia Woolf and Her World (1975), Thrown To The Woolfs (1978) and Rupert Brooke (1980).

In the long run, Lehmann is not so much remembered as a poet as for his influential editorship, his memoirs of inter-war literary life and his volumes of autobiography.

He died in London on 7 April 1987.

Christopher Bernau

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Christopher Bernau born 2 June 1940 (d. 1989)

Christopher Bernau (born Herbert Augustine Bernau) was an American actor.

Bernau trained in the drama department at the University of California before getting his big break, appearing in the New York Shakespeare Festival's production of Antony and Cleopatra in 1962. He continued in that role until 1964, when he toured nationally in the production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? These roles, in addition to performing at Canada's Stratford Festival, led to an appearance in a story arc on cult Gothic soap opera Dark Shadows in 1969 and 1970.

His most famous role, however, was that of villain Alan Spaulding on the soap opera Guiding Light, a role he played from 1977 to 1984 and again from 1986 until shortly before his death in 1989.

Bernau is considered to be one of the only truly 'out' soap opera actors, as it was fairly well known by both the actors he worked with, and the soap press at large, that he was gay.

Bernau was diagnosed with AIDS but continued to work on Guiding Light. He left the show when he became too ill to show up at work, and he died of a heart attack brought on by complications from AIDS. He is buried at Santa Barbara Cemetery, Santa Barbara, California.

Crawford Barton

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Crawford Barton born 2 June 1943 (d. 1993)

Crawford Barton was a notable gay photographer. His work is known for documenting the blooming of the openly gay culture in San Francisco, in the 1960s and 1970s.

Born and raised in a fundamentalist community in rural Georgia, Barton was a shy, introspective boy — a 'sissy'. His artistic interests and fear of sports alienated him from his father, a struggling farmer. He escaped family tensions by creating a world of his own imagination, which eventually led him to receive a small art scholarship at the University of Georgia.

It was here that Barton fell in love with a man for the first time. His feelings weren’t reciprocated, and after one semester, he dropped out and returned to the farm.

A couple years later, at age 21, he enrolled in art school in Atlanta. He made new friends and found outlets for his pent-up sexual energy in that city’s gay bars and clubs. It was during this time in Atlanta that Barton received a used 35mm camera as a gift, and learned basic darkroom techniques. He found his true calling in life — photography.

Barton moved to California in the late 1960s to pursue his art and life as an openly gay man. By the early 1970s he was established as a leading photographer of the 'golden age of gay awakening' in San Francisco. He was as much a participant as a chronicler of this extraordinary time and place.

Many of his images documenting long-haired freaks dancing in the street, love-ins in the park, 'dykes on bikes', cross-dressers in the Castro, and leather men prowling at night have become classics of the gay world. He photographed some of the first Gay Pride parades and protests; Harvey Milk campaigning in San Francisco; and celebrities including poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and actors Sal Mineo and Paul Winfield.

But it was his circle of friends and acquaintances that inspired his most intimate erotic photography, especially his lover, Larry Lara [left and below]. Crawford described Larry as the 'perfect specimen, as crazy and wonderful and spontaneous and free as Kerouac, so I’m never bored and never tired of looking at him'. Considered as a single body of work, his photographs of Lara dancing in the hallway of their flat on Dorland Street, a bearded hippie in the door of a cabin in Marin, a sensual nude in the hills of Land’s End, suggest the fullness, richness and complexity of the man he loved most.

In 1974, the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum featured Barton's prints in a show entitled 'New Photography, San Francisco and the Bay Area'. His bold, unapologetic work was praised by The New York Times reviewer. Other critics labelled it 'shocking' and 'vulgar'.

In addition to his fine art photography, Barton worked on assignment for The Advocate, and the Bay Area Reporter as well as The Examiner, Newsday, and the Los Angeles Times. A book of Barton's work, Beautiful Men, was published in 1976 and his photographs were used to illustrate a collection of short stories of Malcolm Boyd. Crawford Barton, Days of Hope was published posthumously in 1994 by Editions Aubrey Walter.

Days of Hope features more than 60 of Barton's black and white photographs which capture the look and optimistic spirit of '70s gay San Francisco: the freedom and joy of the sexual revolution (pre-AIDS), the intimate bonds of lesbian and gay couples, and like Beautiful Men, homoerotic portraits of the hottest men.

'I tried to serve as a chronicler, as a watcher of beautiful people - to feed back an image of a positive, likable lifestyle ― to offer pleasure as well as pride,' he explained.

By the early 1980s this period was over. San Francisco and the gay community were devastated by the onset of the AIDS epidemic. Barton’s lover of 22 years, Larry Lara, died of complications from AIDS before Barton himself succumbed at the age of 50 in 1993.

Tom Robinson

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Tom Robinson born 1 June 1950

Although he was never really a proper 'punk', the Tom Robinson Band emerged on the back of the punk movement and enjoyed some success. Notably his ground breaking 1978 anthem Sing If You`re Glad To Be Gay, which was a Top 20 hit in the UK. His other notable hits were 2-4-6-8 Motorway (1977) and War Baby (1983)

Tom enjoyed some solo success and then Britain's first openly gay pop star 'ruined' it all by getting married and having children - which attracted some amusement from the press and the ire of some sections of the gay community.

He now sings that he's glad to be bi and continues to be an advocate for the LGBT community.

He finally retired as a full-time musician in 2002 and works as a broadcaster for BBC 6 Music. He occasionally appears in concert for fan events and for causes he supports.

Walt Whitman

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Walt Whitman born 31 May 1819 (d. 1892)

Walter Whitman was an American poet, essayist, journalist, and humanist. Whitman is among the most influential poets in the American canon, often called the father of free verse. His work was very controversial in its time, particularly his poetry collection Leaves of Grass, which was described as obscene for its overt sexuality.

Born on Long Island, Whitman worked as a journalist, a teacher, a government clerk, and a volunteer nurse during the American Civil War in addition to publishing his poetry. Early in his career, he also produced a temperance novel, Franklin Evans (1842). Whitman's major work, Leaves of Grass, was first published in 1855 with his own money. The work was an attempt at reaching out to the common person with an American epic. He continued expanding and revising it until his death in 1892. After a stroke towards the end of his life, he moved to Camden, New Jersey where his health further declined. He died at age 72 and his funeral became a public event.

Whitman's sexuality is sometimes disputed, although often assumed to be bisexual based on his poetry. The concept of heterosexual and homosexual personalities was invented in 1868, and it was not widely promoted until Whitman was an old man. Whitman's poetry depicts love and sexuality in a more earthy, individualistic way common in American culture before the 'medicalisation' of sexuality in the late 1800s. Though Leaves of Grass was often labelled pornographic or obscene, only one critic remarked on its author's presumed sexual activity: in a November 1855 review, Rufus Wilmot Griswold suggested Whitman was guilty of 'that horrible sin not to be mentioned among Christians'. Whitman had intense friendships with many men throughout his life.

Some biographers have claimed that he may not have actually engaged in sexual relationships with men, while others cite letters, journal entries and other sources which they claim as proof of the sexual nature of some of his relationships.

Biographer David S. Reynolds described a man named Peter Doyle as being the most likely candidate for the love of Whitman's life. Doyle was a bus conductor whom he met around 1866. They were inseparable for several years. Interviewed in 1895, Doyle said: 'We were familiar at once — I put my hand on his knee — we understood. He did not get out at the end of the trip — in fact went all the way back with me.'

A more direct second-hand account comes from Oscar Wilde. Wilde met Whitman in America in 1882, and wrote to the homosexual rights activist George Cecil Ives that there was 'no doubt' about the great American poet's sexual orientation — 'I have the kiss of Walt Whitman still on my lips,' he boasted. The only explicit description of Whitman's sexual activities is second hand. In 1924 Edward Carpenter, then an old man, described an erotic encounter he had had in his youth with Whitman to Gavin Arthur, who recorded it in detail in his journal. Late in his life, when Whitman was asked outright if his series of Calamus poems were homosexual, he chose not to respond.

There is also some evidence that Whitman may have had sexual relationships with women. He had a romantic friendship with a New York actress named Ellen Grey in the spring of 1862, but it is not known whether or not it was also sexual. He still had a photo of her decades later when he moved to Camden and referred to her as 'an old sweetheart of mine'. In a letter dated August 21, 1890 he claimed, 'I have had six children - two are dead'. This claim has never been corroborated. Toward the end of his life, he often told stories of previous girlfriends and sweethearts and denied an allegation from the New York Herald that he had 'never had a love affair'.

In any case, Whitman is one of the first truly working-class poets and an iconic figure in gay literature.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder

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Rainer Werner Fassbinder born 31 May 1945 (d. 1982)

Rainer Werner Fassbinder was a German film director, screenwriter and actor. A premier representative of the New German Cinema.

Famous for his frenetic pace in film-making, in a professional career that lasted less than fifteen years Fassbinder completed 35 feature length films; two television series shot on film; three short films; four video productions; twenty four stage plays and four radio plays directed; and 36 acting roles in his own and other’s films. He also worked as an actor (film and theatre), author, cameraman, composer, designer, editor, producer and theatre manager.

Fassbinder was distinguished for the strong provocative current underlying his work and the air of scandal surrounded his artistic choices and private life. His intense discipline and phenomenal creative energy when working were in violent contrast with a wild, self-destructive libertinism that earned him a reputation as the enfant terrible of the New German Cinema, as well as its central figure. He had tortured relationships in his personal life with the people he drew around him in a surrogate family of actors and technicians. However, his pictures demonstrate his deep sensitivity to social misfits and his hatred of institutionalised violence. He ruthlessly attacked both German bourgeois society and the larger limitations of humanity. His films detail the desperate yearning for love and freedom and the many ways in which society, and the individual, thwarts it. A prodigiously inventive artist, Fassbinder distilled the best elements of his sources — Brechtian theatrics, Artaud, Hollywood melodramas - especially 'women's pictures', classical narrative, and a gay sensibility into a complex body of work.

His most notable films include The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant (1972), Fox and his Friends (1974), The Marriage of Maria Braun (1978) and his final film, his extraordinary vision of Jean Genet's Querelle (1982) [pictured left].

Fassbinder died at the age of 37 from an overdose of cocaine and sleeping pills. There is debate as to whether the overdose was accidental or not. His death is often considered to mark the end of New German Cinema.

Colm Tóibín

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Colm Tóibín born 30 May 1955

Acclaimed Irish novelist and journalist Colm Tóibín is the author of a number of non-fiction books and five novels. His writings are infused with keen political insights and shrewd analyses. While same-sex desire is not overtly addressed in his early work, his most recent novels are astutely observed, unsentimental explorations of gay men trying to fit into an unwelcoming, and often openly hostile, world.

Tóibín received his secondary education at St Peter's College, Wexford, where he was a boarder from 1970 to 1972. He then progressed to University College Dublin, graduating in 1975. Immediately after graduation, he left for Barcelona. His first novel, The South (1990), was partly inspired by his time in the Spanish city, as was, more directly, his non-fiction Homage to Barcelona (1990).

After returning to Ireland in 1978, he began studying for a Masters. He never handed in his thesis and left academia, at least partly, for a career in journalism. The early 1980s were an especially bright period in Irish journalism and the heyday of the monthly news magazine Magill. Tóibín became editor of that magazine in 1982, remaining in the position until 1985.

The Heather Blazing (1992), his second novel, was followed by the award-winning The Story of the Night (1996) and The Blackwater Lightship (1999). His fifth novel, The Master (2004), was a fictional account of portions in the life of author Henry James. In 2006 his first collection of short stories was published as Mothers and Sons. In January 2010, Tóibín was named the winner of the Costa Novel Award for his novel Brooklyn.

He is the author of other non-fiction books: Bad Blood: A Walk Along the Irish Border (1994), (reprinted from the 1987 original edition) and The Sign of the Cross: Travels in Catholic Europe (1994). He has written a play that was staged in Dublin in August 2004, Beauty in a Broken Place.

He has continued to work as a journalist, both in Ireland and abroad. He has also achieved a reputation as a literary critic: he has edited a book on Paul Durcan, The Kilfenora Teaboy (1997); The Penguin Book of Irish Fiction (1999); and has written The Modern Library: The 200 Best Novels in English since 1950 (1999), with Carmen Callil; a collection of essays, Love in A Dark Time: Gay lives from Wilde to Almodóvar (2002); and a study on Lady Gregory, Lady Gregory's Toothbrush (2002).

Tóibín's work explores several main lines: The depiction of Irish society, living abroad, the process of creativity and the preservation of a personal identity, focusing especially on homosexual identities — Tóibín is openly gay — but also on identity in front of loss.

Countee Cullen

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Countee Cullen born 30 May 1903 (d. 1946)

Countee Cullen was an American Romantic poet. Cullen was one of the leading African American poets of his time, associated with the generation of black poets of the Harlem Renaissance.

Cullen was born with the name Countee LeRoy Porter and was abandoned by his parents at birth. He was raised by his grandmother, Mrs Porter, but because he was very secretive about his life, it is unclear where he was actually born. Scholars state he was either born in Louisville, Kentucky, or Baltimore. Later in his life, Cullen said he was born in New York City. It is known that he attended Townsend Harris High School for one year and then transferred to DeWitt Clinton High School in New York and received special honours in Latin studies in 1922.

In 1918 his grandmother died. Cullen was subsequently adopted by Reverend Frederick Ashbury Cullen, minister at Salem Methodist Episcopal Church in Harlem, and thus Cullen was raised a Methodist. Throughout his unstable childhood his birth mother never attempted to contact Cullen, and would not attempt to do so until sometime in the 1920s, after he'd become famous.

Cullen won many poetry contests from a very young age and often had his winning work reprinted. He attended DeWitt Clinton High School, mainly consisting of all white, male students. He became Vice President of his class during his senior year, was also involved in the school magazine as an editor, and was affiliated with the Arista Honor Society.

After completing his secondary education, Cullen attended New York University. While an undergraduate, he published works in various literary magazines, including Harper's, Century Magazine, and Poetry. Also, his writing exceptional faculties were acknowledged with prizes from The Crisis, edited by W. E. B. Du Bois, and Opportunity of the National Urban League. He graduated in 1925. Soon afterwards, he produced his first volume entitled Color and pursued graduate studies at Harvard University.

In April 1928, Cullen married Nina Yolande Du Bois, daughter of the famous W. E. B. Du Bois. Two months after the wedding, Cullen left for Europe with his father and Harold Jackman; his wife followed after a month. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1928.

Nina Yolande Du Bois divorced Cullen two years later, saying that he told her that he was sexually attracted to men.

In 1940, he married Ida Mae Roberson and they enjoyed a seemingly happy marriage.

On January 9, 1946, Cullen unexpectedly died of uremic poisoning and complications from high blood pressure. After his death, for a few years, Cullen was honoured as the most celebrated African American writer. A collection of some of his best work was also arranged in On These I Stand.

The West 136th Street branch of the New York Public Library in Harlem is named after Countee Cullen

T H White

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T H White born 29 May 1906 (d. 1964)

Terence Hanbury White was an English writer born in Bombay (Mumbai), India. After graduating from Cambridge with a first-class degree in English, he taught for a few years at Stowe School before becoming a full-time writer.

He is most famous for writing The Once and Future King, a sequence of novels based on Sir Thomas Malory's 15th-Century romance Le Morte D'Arthur reinterpreting the legend of King Arthur. The Broadway musical Camelot and the Disney film The Sword in the Stone are both based on The Once and Future King. We probably owe much of our 'historical' knowledge of King Arthur to White's work.

He was also a closeted homosexual, turning first to psychotherapy and, when it failed, alcohol as a way out of what he perceived as a problem.

A rather private and solitary man, he eventually retired to the island of Alderney, one of the Channel Islands, but died from heart failure on a ship in Piraeus, Greece, while returning from a lecture tour in America.

White's work was an influence on science-fiction writer Michael Moorcock, and J K Rowling has acknowledged the influence of White's work on the Harry Potter novels.

Rupert Everett

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Rupert Everett born 29 May 1959

Rupert James Hector Everett is an English actor. He is perhaps the first Hollywood movie star to have a long, mainstream, and successful acting career while being openly gay, and blasé about it.

Rupert Everett was born in Norfolk, England. From the age of 7 he was educated at Farleigh House preparatory school and later was educated by Benedictine monks at Ampleforth College, but dropped out of school at 15 and ran away to London to become an actor. In order to support himself, he worked as a male prostitute, or rent boy, as he later admitted to US magazine in 1997. After being dismissed from the Central School of Speech and Drama for insubordination, he travelled to Scotland and got a job in the avant-garde Citizens' Theatre of Glasgow.

His break came with the 1982 West End production of Another Country, playing a gay schoolboy opposite Kenneth Branagh, followed by a film version in 1984 with Colin Firth. He began to develop a promising film career, until he co-starred with Bob Dylan in the huge flop Hearts of Fire (1987).

In 1989 he moved to Paris, writing a novel Hello, Darling, Are You Working? and coming out as gay, a move which some at the time perceived as damaging to his career. Returning to the public eye in The Comfort of Strangers (1990), several films of variable success followed. In 1995 he released a second novel, The Hairdresser of St. Tropez.

Everett's career was revitalised by My Best Friend's Wedding (1997), playing Julia Roberts's gay friend. In 1999, he played Madonna's gay best friend in The Next Best Thing (he also sang backup on her cover of American Pie, which is on the film's soundtrack). He has since appeared in a number of high-profile film roles, often playing heterosexual leads. He is also a Vanity Fair contributing editor.

In 2006 Everett published his memoir, Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins. In it he revealed he had had a 6-year affair with British television presenter Paula Yates. 'I am mystified by my heterosexual affairs — but then I am mystified by most of my relationships,' he said, with the article describing him as bisexual as opposed to homosexual.

But in a radio show with Jonathan Ross, Everett described his heterosexual affairs as resulting from adventurousness: 'I was basically adventurous, I think I wanted to try everything.'

In recent years Everett has expressed the view that his career has been negatively affected by his having come out and gone so far as to advise younger actors against doing so. Whilst his career has seen him achieve varying levels of critical and commercial success through the years, this may be as much due to his limitations as an actor - posh, brittle, slightly camp - as to the industry's view of him as a gay actor.

Helmut Berger

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Helmut Berger born 29 May 1944

Helmut Berger is an Austrian actor.

Berger (whose real name is Helmut Steinberger) was born in Bad Ischl, Austria, into a family of hoteliers and although he had no interest in gastronomy or the hospitality industry, he initially trained and worked in this area. At the age of 18, he moved to London, where he did odd-jobs whilst simultaneously taking acting classes. After studying languages in Perugia, Berger moved to Rome.

In 1964, he first met Luchino Visconti, whose life partner he later became. Visconti gave him his first acting role in the movie Le Streghe (1967) (in the episode La Strega Bruciata Viva), but he attained international fame playing Martin von Essenbeck in Visconti's The Damned (1969). In this film, in what is perhaps his best known scene, he mimics the role of Lola, as played by Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel . However, the role of Ludwig II of Bavaria in Visconti's Ludwig can be considered the pinnacle of his acting career: here he portrays the monarch from his blooming youth, to his dissolute final years – and in the process reveals a nervous and paranoid lord of decay drawn from his own weaknesses and psychological depths.

Visconti also introduced him to new people. Musicians and models first (in London), and then Berger was introduced to international artists - conductor Leonard Bernstein, opera singer Maria Callas, ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev - with whom Berger had an affair; Nureyev was sexually hyper-active, but Berger disliked the Russian's passion for garlic and vodka. Nureyev wanted to live with Berger but he could not give him the security of Visconti. For a short time, Nureyev was his lover, but Visconti was his husband and his father-figure.

Visconti's death in 1976 plunged Berger into a deep personal and financial crisis. Visconti's will, in which Berger was apparently named as heir, could not be found. A former friend and companion of Visconti, the director Franco Zeffirelli, has subsequently castigated Berger publicly, accusing him of exploiting his mentor. In addition to a suicide attempt on the first anniversary of Visconti's death, Berger has also had alcohol and drug-related problems.

He has made appearances in various B-movies and smaller prestige pictures such as Ash Wednesday (1973) with Elizabeth Taylor. Berger has also worked in television, most notably in the role of Peter De Vilbis on Dynasty. Since Visconti's death no director has been able to fulfill Berger's potential again.

Berger, with his dissipated lifestyle and openly acknowledged bisexuality, has been a welcome guest on talk shows telling for example of erotic adventures with Marisa Berenson, whom he supposedly wished to marry, and Mick Jagger.

In 2004, to the great interest of the Austrian media, Berger moved from Rome to Salzburg to live with his mother; he denied rumours of financial difficulties, explaining he was merely looking for a new apartment in Rome. He also declared he had come off all drugs.

In 2007, he received the honour of a Special Teddy at the Berlin Film Festival for his overall professional achievements.

Patrick White

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Patrick White born 28 May 1912 (d. 1990)

Patrick Victor Martindale White was an Australian author widely regarded as one of the major English-language novelists of the 20th century. From 1935 until his death, he published 12 novels, two short story collections and eight plays. His fiction freely employs shifting narrative vantage points and a stream of consciousness technique. In 1973, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

White was born in London to Australian parents, who settled in Sydney when he was six months old. As a child, he, with his sister, nanny, and maid, lived in one flat, while his parents lived in an adjoining flat. White remained distant from his parents throughout his life. At the age of four, White developed asthma and his health was fragile throughout his childhood, which, while it precluded his participation in many childhood activities, stimulated his imagination. He would perform private rites in the garden, and would dance for his mother’s friends. He loved the theatre, which he first visited at an early age.

At the age of ten, White was sent to Tudor House School, a boarding school in the New South Wales highlands, in an attempt to abate his asthma. It took him some time to adjust to the presence of other children. At boarding school he started to write plays. Even at this early age, White wrote about noticeably adult themes. In 1924, the boarding school ran into financial trouble, and the headmaster suggested that White be sent to boarding school in England, a suggestion which his parents accepted.

White struggled to adjust to his new surroundings at this new school, Cheltenham College. He was later to describe it as 'a four-year prison sentence'. White withdrew inside himself and had a limited circle of acquaintance. Occasionally he would holiday with his parents at European locations, but their relationship still remained distant. While in London, White did make one close friend, Ronald Waterall, an older boy who shared similar interests. White’s biographer, David Marr, wrote that the two men would walk arm in arm to London shows, stand around stage doors to catch a glimpse of their favourite stars, and give practical demonstrations of chorus girls’ high kicks, with appropriate vocal accompaniment. When Waterall left school, White again withdrew into himself. He asked his parents if he could leave school to become an actor. They compromised, allowing him to finish school early, on the condition that he first come home to Australia, to try life on the land.

White spent two years working as a stockman at a station on the edge of the Snowy Mountains in New South Wales, Australia. His parents felt that he should work on the land rather than become a writer and hoped that his work as a jackaroo would cause his artistic ambitions to fade. Although White grew to respect the land, and his health started to improve, it was clear that he was not cut out for this life.

From 1932 to 1935, White lived in England, studying French and German literature at King's College, Cambridge. He struggled in his first term, in part because he developed an attraction to a young man who had come to King's to become an Anglican priest. White dared not speak of his feelings for fear of losing the friendship and, like many homosexual men of that period, feared that his sexuality would doom him to a lonely life. Then one night, the student priest, after an awkward liaison with two women, admitted to White that women meant nothing to him sexually. This became White’s first love affair.

While at Cambridge University, a collection of White's poetry was published under the title The Ploughman and Other Poems, and he wrote a play that was performed by an amateur group. He received his Bachelor of Arts in 1935, and briefly settled in London, where he lived in an area that was frequented by artists. Here, the young author thrived for a time, writing several unpublished works, and reworking a novel, Happy Valley, that he had written while jackarooing. In 1937, White’s father died, leaving him ten thousand pounds. This enabled him to write full-time in relative comfort. Two more plays followed, before he succeeded in finding a publisher for Happy Valley. The novel was received well in London, but poorly in Australia. He wrote another novel but abandoned it after receiving negative comments, which he later spoke of regretting.

Towards the end of the 1930s, White spent some time in the United States, including Cape Cod, Massachusetts and New York City, where he wrote The Living and the Dead. By the time World War 2 broke out, he had returned to London and joined the Royal Air Force. He was accepted as an intelligence officer, and was posted to the Middle East. He served in Egypt, Palestine, and Greece before the war was over. While in the Middle East, he had an affair with a Greek Army officer, Manoly Lascaris, who was to become his life partner.

After the war, White once again returned to Australia, buying an old house in the semi-rural outskirts of Sydney. Here he settled down with Lascaris, the officer he had met during the war. They lived there for 18 years, selling flowers, vegetables, milk, and cream. During these years, he started to make a reputation for himself as a writer, publishing The Aunt's Story and The Tree of Man, which was published in the United States in 1955 and shortly after in England. The Tree of Man was released to rave reviews in the US, but, in what was to become a typical pattern, was panned in Australia. White had doubts about whether to continue writing, after his books were largely dismissed in Australia (three of them having been called ‘un-Australian’ by critics), but, in the end, decided to persevere. His first breakthrough in Australia came when his next novel, Voss, won the inaugural Miles Franklin Literary Award.

In 1961, White published Riders in the Chariot. This was to become both a bestseller as well as a prize-winner, garnering him a second Miles Franklin Award. Soon, he had clearly established his reputation as one of the world's great authors, but remained an essentially private person, resisting opportunities for interviews and public appearances, although his circle of friends had widened significantly.

In 1968, White wrote The Vivisector, a character portrait of an artist. Many people drew links to his friend, the painter Sidney Nolan, but White always vehemently denied any connection. Around this time, he decided that he would not accept any more prizes for his work, and declined both the $10,000 Britannia Award and another Miles Franklin Award. White was approached by Harry M. Miller to work on a screenplay for Voss, but nothing came of it. He became an active opponent of literary censorship and joined a number of other public figures in signing a statement of defiance against Australia’s decision to participate in the Vietnam War.

In 1973, White became the first Australian to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature, 'for an epic and psychological narrative art, which has introduced a new continent into literature'. White enlisted Sidney Nolan to travel to Stockholm to accept the prize on his behalf. The award had an immediate impact on his career, as his publisher doubled the print run for The Eye of the Storm and gave him a larger advance for his next novel. White used the money from the prize to establish a trust to fund the Patrick White Award, given annually to established creative writers who have received little public recognition. White was also made Australian of the Year, but, in typically rebellious fashion, his acceptance speech encouraged Australians to spend the day reflecting on the state of the country.

White supported Gough Whitlam's Labour government and, following the 1975 constitutional crisis, became particularly anti-royalist, making a rare appearance on national television to broadcast his views on the matter.

During the 1970s, White’s health began to deteriorate — his teeth were crumbling, his eyesight was failing, and he had chronic lung problems. In 1979, his novel The Twyborn Affair was short-listed for the Booker Prize, but White requested that it be removed in order to give younger writers a chance to win. Soon after, White announced that he had written his last novel, and that in the future, he would write only for radio or for the stage.

In 1981, White published his autobiography, Flaws in the Glass: A Self-Portrait, which explored several issues about which he had publicly said little beforehand, such as his homosexuality, and his refusal to accept the Nobel Prize personally. On Palm Sunday, 1982, White addressed a crowd of 30,000 people, calling for a ban on uranium mining and for the destruction of nuclear weapons.

In 1986 White released one last novel, Memoirs of Many in One, though it was curiously published under the pen name "Alex Xenophon Demirjan Gray" and edited by Patrick White. In the same year, his novel Voss was turned into an opera. White refused to see it when it was first performed at the Adelaide Festival, because Queen Elizabeth II had been invited, and chose instead to see it later in Sydney. In 1987, White wrote Three Uneasy Pieces, with his musings on ageing and society's efforts to achieve aesthetic perfection. When David Marr finished his biography of White in July 1990, his subject spent nine days going over the details with him.

Henry Kendall

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Henry Kendall born 28 May 1897 (d. 1962)

Henry Kendall was an English stage and film actor, theatre director and an immaculately stylish revue artiste.

Kendall was educated at the City of London School, and made his first appearance on the stage in September 1914 at the Lyceum Theatre. He had a distinguished war career, serving as a Captain in the Royal Air Force from 1916 to 1919, and on demobilisation was awarded the Air Force Cross.

He played the leading role of Reggie Ogden in the film The Shadow in 1933, and also starred in Alfred Hitchcock's 'bravest failure', Rich and Strange, US title East of Shanghai (1931).

Kendall dismissed his own cinematic work, although he appeared in a number of films in the 1930s and after. His appearances on the London stage were many however throughout the 1930s, 40s and 50s.

As a gifted West End revue artiste he appeared in Charlot's Revue at the Prince of Wales Theatre in 1924 and Charlot's Masquerade at the Cambridge Theatre in 1930. He also enjoyed great success co-starring with Hermione Gingold in the three long-running Sweet and Low revues; this was followed in June 1948 by the A la Carte revue at the Savoy Theatre.

But a greater contribution in this field was his appearance with Hermione Baddeley and Hermione Gingold ('The Two Hermiones'), Walter Crisham and Wilfred Hyde-White, in Leslie Julian Jones's revue Rise Above It, first at the Q Theatre in January 1941, when Hedley Briggs was nominally directing; then in two West End editions of the show which ran for a total of 380 performances at the Comedy Theatre opening in June 1941 and again in December 1941, when he was both starring and directing show.

As he reports in his autobiography: 'Of all forms of theatrical entertainment, revue is the most bitchy. The material is bitchy, the artists are bitchy and, strangely enough, the average revue audience is bitchy.'

In addition to a busy career as an actor and entertainer, he was frequently engaged as a director, notably staging the first productions of See How They Run (Peterborough Rep, tour and Q Theatre 1944; Comedy Theatre 1945), and The Shop at Sly Corner (St Martin's Theatre 1945).

He also directed numerous plays at the Embassy Theatre and Q Theatre.

Mark Feehily

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Mark Feehily born 28 May 1980

Mark Feehily is one of the two lead singers - along with Shane Filan - of Irish boyband Westlife who have enjoyed a record-breaking succession of number 1 singles and hit albums.

In August 2005, Mark announced in an interview with The Sun that he was gay:
'I want people to know the truth. I am gay and I'm very proud of who I am.
'I'm not asking for sympathy, or to be a role model for someone else.
'I simply felt it was the right time to tell the truth.'

Westlife have sucessfully avoided several boyband curses - they lost a popular member, made a disastrous Rat Pack album and have survived the self-outing of a gay member.

Mark is in a relationship with Kevin McDaid, a former member of defunct boyband V.

Westlife continue to be successful and show no signs of splitting.

John Cheever

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John Cheever born 27 May 1912 (d. 1982)

John Cheever was an American novelist and short story writer, sometimes known as the 'Checkhov of the suburbs'. His The Stories of John Cheever won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1979.

He was a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and was considered one of the purest examples of 'the New Yorker writer'.
Cheever's main theme was the spiritual and emotional emptiness of life. He especially described the manners and morals of middle-class, suburban America, with an ironic humour which softened his basically dark vision.

Cheever died from cancer in 1982, and his posthumously published letters and journals revealed his bisexuality - although he enjoyed a long marriage and fathered 3 children, he had numerous affairs with both men and women.

His attitude towards his own bisexuality is reflected in his novels and short stories, moving from ambivalence and stereotypical portrayal in his earlier works to later acceptance and redemption.

Alec McCowen

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Alec McCowen born 26 May 1925

Alec McCowen is an English actor, best known for classical roles including Shakespeare.

He was born in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, the son of Mary and Duncan McCowen. He was educated at the Skinners' School in Tunbridge Wells 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. He notably appeared in the film based on the life of Cynthia Payne Personal Services (1987) with Julie Walters. He starred in the lead role of the 1980s TV series Mr Palfrey of Westminster.

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.

Alan Hollinghurst

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Alan Hollinghurst born 26 May 1954

Alan Hollinghurst is a British novelist, and winner of the 2004 Booker Prize for The Line of Beauty.

He was born in Stroud, Gloucestershire, the only child of a bank manager.

He studied English at Magdalen College, Oxford. While at Oxford he shared a house with Andrew Motion, and was awarded the Newdigate Prize for poetry.

In the late 1970s he became a lecturer at Magdalen, and then at Somerville College and Corpus Christi College. In 1981 he moved on to lecture at the University of London.

In 1981 he joined the Times Literary Supplement and from 1982 to 1995 he was deputy editor.

His acclaimed first novel, The Swimming-Pool Library (1988), gives a vivid account of London gay life in the early 1980s through the story of a young aristocrat, William Beckwith, and his involvement with the elderly Lord Nantwich, whose life he saves. It was followed by The Folding Star in 1994, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction).

The Spell (1998), a gay comedy of manners which interweaves the complex relationships between 40-something architect Robin Woodfield, his alcoholic lover Justin, and Justin's ex, timid civil servant Alex, who falls in love with Robin's son Danny. The action moves between the English countryside and London where Danny introduces Alex to ecstasy and the club scene.

Alan Hollinghurst's translation of Racine's play Bajazet was first performed in 1990. His most recent novel, The Line of Beauty (2004), traces a decade of change and tragedy and won the 2004 Man Booker Prize for Fiction. It was adapted for BBC Television by Andrew Davies in 2006.

A new novel The Stranger's Child will be published in 2011.

John Dall

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John Dall born 26 May 1918 (d. 1971)

John Dall was an American actor born in New York City.

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.

Reg Bundy

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Reg Bundy aka HIH Regina Fong born 26 May 1945 (d. 2003)

Reginald Sutherland 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 Grab it all (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 and also the Royal Vauxhall Tavern. 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.'

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.

Bundy appeared in the Edinburgh and London productions of playwright Neil Bartlett's A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep and Night After Night, and also appeared in the BBC Radio Four adaptation of Night After Night.

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.

Robert 'Robbie' Ross

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Robert 'Robbie' Ross born 25 May 1869 (d. 1918)

Robert Baldwin Ross was a journalist and art critic. He is best known, however, as the executor of Oscar Wilde's estate. He was also responsible for bringing together several great literary figures and acting as their mentor.

Ross was born in Tours, France but came to Britain at an early age. His father originally came from Northern Ireland and his mother from Canada. His father had been the attorney-general of Upper Canada and his grandfather was the Canadian Prime Minister Robert Baldwin.

While working as a journalist and critic, he is alleged to have been Oscar Wilde's first male lover, and remained loyal to Wilde through thick and thin, eventually becoming his literary executor. This was not an easy task. It meant tracking down and purchasing the rights to all of Wilde's texts, which had been sold off along with all of Wilde's possessions when he was declared bankrupt. It also meant fighting the rampant trade, following Wilde's arrest, in black market copies of his books and, in particular, books, usually erotic, that Wilde did not write but which were published illegally under his name. The rights to all of Oscar's works along with the money earned from their printing/performance while he was executor was given by Ross to Wilde's sons.

Ross was also responsible for commissioning Jacob Epstein to produce the tomb for Wilde. He even requested that Epstein design a small compartment into the tomb for Ross’s own ashes.

In 1908, some years after Wilde's death, Ross produced the definitive edition of his works. Following Wilde's disgrace and imprisonment, Ross went abroad for safety's sake, but returned to offer support, both financial and emotional, to Wilde during his last years. Ross himself did not escape scandal. A few years before Wilde's imprisonment, Ross was involved in a scandal over his sexual relationship with a boy of fourteen, the son of friends, and his best-friend, aged fifteen. Both boys confessed to their parents that Ross had made love to them, and the fourteen year old boy also admitted that Lord Alfred Douglas had also made love to him while he was a guest at Ross's house. After a good deal of panic and frantic meeting held with solicitors, Douglas and Ross convinced the parents not to go to the police.

As a young man, Ross moved to England to go to university. He was accepted at Cambridge but was the victim of bullying, probably due to his sexuality (of which he made no secret) and his, perhaps, outspoken journalism in the university paper. Ross caught pneumonia after a cruel dunking in a fountain by a number of students with, according to Ross, the full support of a don. After recovering he fought for an apology from his fellow students, which he received, but more fiercely, for the dismissal of the don who, he argued, had known about and supported the bullying. The university refused to punish the man and Ross dropped out of university.

Following this Ross tried his hand at a number of careers, as writer, art critic, and literary executor. He was able to rely on an allowance and inheritance from his wealthy family to support himself. His literary output is small, with only one book worth a mention; Masques and Phases is a collection of previously published works by Ross, short stories and reviews. Ross's main contribution to literature lies in his work as Wilde's executor, and as Wilde's friend in reading Wilde's texts, making suggestions, and, if Ross is to be believed, frequently suggesting changes and improvements. As an art critic, Ross was highly critical of the post-impressionist painters. He worked unpaid for many years for a small art gallery run by friends, for whom he travelled purchasing works. At one time he hoped to be selected for a royal position but was rejected probably due to his connection to Wilde.

Ross is also of interest in his decision to 'come out' to his family, whom he gathered to hear the announcement not long after he left university.

As a result of his faithfulness to Wilde even in death, Ross was vindictively pursued by Lord Alfred Douglas, who repeatedly attempted to drag him into court, and attempted to have him arrested as a homosexual.

During the First World War, he drew around him a coterie of young artists, mostly homosexuals, including Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. He was also a close friend of Wilde's son Vyvyan Holland, and a friend of his other son Cyril until his death in the First World War. In early 1918, during the German Spring Offensive, Noel Pemberton Billing, a right-wing M.P., published an article entitled The Cult of the Clitoris, in which he accused members of Ross's circle of being at the centre of 47,000 homosexual traitors who were betraying the nation to the Germans. The incident brought much embarrassing attention to Ross and his associates.

Later in the same year, Ross was preparing to travel to Melbourne, Australia to open an exhibition at the National Gallery when he died suddenly, an event which caused great grief to his many friends. In 1950, on the 50th anniversary of Wilde's death, Ross's ashes were added to Wilde's tomb in the Le Père Lachaise Cemetery.

Donald Maclean

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Donald Maclean born 25 May 1913 (d. 1983)

Donald Duart Maclean was a career British diplomat turned Soviet intelligence agent. Maclean was one of the Cambridge Five, members of MI5, MI6 or the diplomatic service who acted as spies for the Soviet Union during WWII and in the early-Cold War era. His actions are widely thought to have contributed to the 1948 Soviet blockade of Berlin and the onset of the Korean War. As a reward for his espionage activities, Maclean was brevetted a colonel in the Soviet KGB.

Educated at Gresham's School and Trinity Hall, Cambridge, he was the son of the Liberal politician Sir Donald Maclean, who was Leader of the parliamentary Opposition in the years following WWI.

From Gresham's, Maclean won a place at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, arriving in 1931 to study modern languages. While there, he joined the Communist Party. In his second year at Cambridge, his father died, and in his last year he was recruited into Soviet intelligence by Anthony Blunt, ultimately becoming one of the Cambridge Five.

All of the Cambridge Five came from privileged backgrounds, and two of the others, Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt, were known to be homosexuals. It is sometimes stated that Maclean was, too, and Guy Burgess claimed to have seduced him, but it seems more likely that he was bisexual.

In 1934, Maclean passed the Civil Service examination and started work at the Foreign Office in London. While there, he was under the operational control of the Russian secret service.

Maclean was later posted to the British Embassy in Paris, where he was when the Second World War broke out. In 1940 he married the American-born Melinda Marling in Paris shortly before the Germans captured the city. They escaped to the coast and got back to England on board a Royal Navy warship.

Maclean continued to report to Moscow from London and signalled in 1941 that a uranium bomb might be constructed within two years through the efforts of Imperial Chemical Industries with the support of the British government. Maclean sent Moscow a sixty-page report with the official minutes of the British Cabinet Committee on the Uranium Bomb Project.

He was transferred to Washington, where he served from 1944 to 1948, as Secretary at the British Embassy and, later, Secretary of the Combined Policy Committee on Atomic Development. For the Soviets, this was his most fruitful period, and he was Stalin's main source of information about communications and policy development between Churchill and Roosevelt, and then between Churchill or Clement Attlee and Harry S. Truman.

Although Maclean did not transmit technical data on the atom bomb, he reported on its development and progress, particularly the amount of uranium available to the United States. As the British representative on the American-British-Canadian council on the sharing of atomic secrets, he was able to provide the Soviet Union with minutes of Cabinet meetings. This knowledge alone gave the Soviet scientists the ability to predict the number of bombs that could be built by the Americans. Coupled with the efforts of Alan Nunn May and Klaus Fuchs, who provided scientific information, Maclean's reports to his KGB controller helped the Soviets not only to build their own atomic bomb, but also to estimate their nuclear arsenal's relative strength against that of the United States.

Armed with this information, Stalin was able to conclude that the United States did not possess a sufficiently large stock of atomic weapons or bomb production capacity to attack the Soviet Union or its allies in either Europe or the Pacific in the near future. This knowledge played a central role in Stalin's decision to institute a blockade of Berlin in 1948, as well as his decision to extensively arm and train Kim Il Sung's North Korean army for an offensive war (a conflict that would later claim the lives of over 30,000 U.S. and Allied troops).

In 1941 Maclean was tentatively identified by Walter Krivitsky, a Soviet defector, who is rumoured to have been assassinated by Soviet agents in the Bellevue Hotel in Washington D.C.. It was said that Krivitsky had claimed there was a mole in British intelligence who was "a Scotsman of good family, educated at Eton and Oxford (sic), and an idealist who worked for the Russians without payment."

Maclean's continual monitoring of secret messages between Truman and Churchill allowed Stalin to know how the Americans and the British proposed to occupy Germany and carve up the borders of Eastern European countries.

Maclean reported to Moscow that the goal of the Americans was to ensure American economic domination in Europe - the so-called Marshall Plan. The new international economic organisation to restore European productivity would be under the control of American financial capital. At that time the Soviet Union had no export earnings, war reparations were the sole source of foreign capital to rebuild the war-torn Soviet economy. Yalta and Potsdam agreements allowed German reparations in the form of equipment, manufacturing machinery, cars, trucks, and building supplies to be sent to Russia for five years. The flow of goods was unregulated by international control, and could be used for whatever purposes the Soviets chose. Six months after the Marshall Plan was rejected by the Soviet Union, multiparty rule in Eastern Europe ended.

In 1948, Maclean was transferred to the British Embassy in Cairo. Undoubtedly, Maclean's information was significant in assisting Stalin in his strategy for the Cold War.

The story of the Burgess and Maclean defection, and the subsequent implication of Philby, is a fascinating one of code-breaking, detection, and discovery. In 1949, Robert Lamphere, FBI agent in charge of Russian espionage, along with cryptanalysts, discovered that between 1944 and 1946 a member of the British Embassy was sending messages to the KGB. The code name of this official was 'Homer'. By a process of elimination, a short list of three or four men were identified as possible Homers. One was Maclean.

Shortly after Lamphere's investigation began, Kim Philby was assigned to Washington, serving as Britain's CIA-FBI-NSA liaison. As such, he was privy to the decoding of the Russian material, and recognised that Maclean was very probably Homer. He confirmed this through his British KGB control. He was also aware that Lamphere and his colleagues had found that the encoded messages to the KGB had been sent from New York. Maclean had visited New York on a regular basis, ostensibly to visit his wife and children, who were living there with his in-laws.

The pressure on Philby now began to grow. If Maclean was unmasked as a Soviet agent, then, were he to confess, the trail might lead to the other Cambridge spies. Philby, now in a very important position in his ability to provide information to the Soviets, might be implicated, if for no other reason than his association with Maclean at Cambridge. Concerned that Maclean would be positively identified, interrogated, and confess to MI5, Philby and Burgess concocted a scheme in which Guy Burgess would return to London (where Maclean was now the Foreign Service officer in charge of American affairs). Burgess would then warn Maclean of the impending unmasking.

Before Burgess left, Philby was explicit in his instructions to Burgess. He was not to defect with Maclean.

The Philby-Burgess plan was for Burgess to visit Maclean in his Foreign Office quarters, give him a note identifying a place where the two could meet - it was assumed that Maclean, now under suspicion and denied sensitive documents, had a bugged office - and Burgess would explain the situation. They met clandestinely to discuss Maclean's imminent exposure and necessary defection to Russia. Yuri Modin, the controller at the time, made arrangements for Maclean's defection. Maclean was in an extremely nervous state, and reluctant to leave alone. Modin was willing to serve as his guide, but KGB Central demanded that Burgess escort Maclean behind the Iron Curtain.

In the meantime, MI5 had insisted that Maclean be questioned. They had decided that he would be confronted with the FBI and MI5 evidence on Monday, 28 May 1951.

On Maclean's 38th birthday, the Friday before the Monday when he was to be interrogated, Burgess and Maclean fled to the coast, boarded a ship to France, and disappeared. Had Blunt learned of the impending questioning of Maclean, and warned Burgess that the time had come? Blunt never admitted to that, and it is possible that Burgess and Maclean had selected Friday to flee whatever the current circumstances. Both Modin and Philby assumed that Burgess would deliver Maclean to a handler, and that he would return. For some reason, the Russians insisted that Burgess accompany Maclean the entire way. Perhaps Burgess was no longer useful to the KGB as a spy, but too valuable to fall into the hands of MI5.

Maclean, unlike the self-indulgent Burgess, assimilated into the Soviet Union and became a respected citizen, learning Russian and serving as a specialist on the economic policy of the West and British foreign affairs. He worked for the Soviet Foreign Ministry and the Institute of World Economic and International Relations. Maclean was awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labour and the Order of Combat.

While living in Moscow, he spoke up for Soviet dissidents, and gave money to the families of some of those imprisoned. His American-born wife, Melinda, joined him in Russia with their children, but they were soon divorced and she had a brief affair Kim Philby in 1966. Later she and the children returned to the United States.

Maclean died of a heart attack in 1983, at the age of sixty-nine. He was cremated and some of his ashes were scattered on his parents' grave in the churchyard of Holy Trinity Church, Penn, Buckinghamshire, England.

Julian Clary

2011-05-25T00:01:00.000+01:00

Julian Clary born 25 May 1959

Julian Clary (born as Paul Ross McNamara) is an English comedian who is known for his camp style, with a heavy reliance on innuendo and double entendre.

Clary was born in Teddington, Middlesex and went to St Benedict's School, a Catholic school in Ealing, London. He studied English and Drama at Goldsmith's College, part of the University of London.

Clary's comedy career started on the alternative comedy scene in the early 1980s as The Joan Collins Fanclub. He wore heavy draggish make-up and dressed in outrageous fashions, usually involving leather and hinting at bondage. His pet dog 'Fanny the Wonder Dog' featured in performances.

After a number of appearances on Friday Night Live, he presented the gameshow Sticky Moments with Julian Clary. This was a light-hearted gameshow, with Clary often awarding points because he liked the contestants rather than for any particular skill or aptitude. He later featured in the sitcom Terry and Julian with June Whitfield, and in the studio-based All Rise for Julian Clary in which he played a judge in a mock courtroom setting.

Clary appeared in the film Carry on Columbus (1992), an unsuccessful attempt to revive the Carry On series of films. It was widely panned by critics.

Clary was cast into the show business wilderness after making a sexually explicit joke about politician Norman Lamont ("I've just been fisting Norman Lamont") during a live broadcast of the 1993 British Comedy Awards ceremony, before the 9 o'clock watershed. The audience reaction was sufficiently raucous that his intended punchline ("Talk about a red box!") was almost entirely drowned out. His career was adversely affected by this event as he was no longer trusted on live television, but he has been largely rehabilitated in recent years.

In 1999, he became a team captain on the quiz show It's Only TV... But I Like It along with Phil Jupitus and Jonathan Ross.

In 2004, Clary took part in the BBC series Strictly Come Dancing, finishing third with his partner Erin Boag.

In 2005, Clary hosted Come and Have A Go for the National Lottery.

On 1 February 2006, he appeared on the BBC 2 programme Who Do You Think You Are? a genealogy series which traced his ancestors to a World War I flight engineer and a German immigrant. In May 2006 Clary hosted the topical quiz show Have I Got News For You.

In November 2006, Clary joined the panel of QI, a panel game/comedy show hosted by Stephen Fry, and also appeared on an episode of The New Paul O'Grady Show.

In 2007, he made a cameo appearance in the Australian soap opera, Neighbours, in scenes filmed in London. In March and April 2007 Clary presented a brand new show for the BBC called Underdogs, which paired up celebrities with rescued mongrels and set them training and obedience challenges.

Since 2005, Clary has written a fortnightly column for New Statesman magazine - 'A look at the week through the eyes of a camp comic and renowned homosexual.'

Clary published an autobiography in 2005 A Young Man's Passage, which covers his life and career up until the Norman Lamont incident.

His first novel Murder Most Fab was published in 2007 and he has also narrated a selection of childrens books. His second novel Devil In Disguise was published in 2009

From October 2007 to April 2008, Clary played the much coveted role of 'Emcee', in Rufus Norris’s Olivier Award winning production of Cabaret, now in its second year in the West End of London.

In January 2008, Clary was drafted in as a relief presenter for This Morning, co-presenting alongside Fern Britton and Ruth Langsford during Phillip Schofield's absence. Both he and Michael Ball appeared throughout 2008 year when Schofield was on holiday.

His career continues to be a varied mix of presenting, guest appearances, acting, stand-up and writing.

Greg Berlanti

2011-05-24T00:01:00.000+01:00

Greg Berlanti born 24 May 1972

Greg Berlanti is an American television writer and producer.

Born in New York, Berlanti studied writing at Northwestern University. He was a writer and producer on Dawson's Creek and its short-lived spin-off Young Americans. He became known as the creator, show runner and executive producer of Everwood. He also co-created the short-lived series Jack & Bobby.

Berlanti also wrote and directed the film Broken Hearts Club, about young gay friends in West Hollywood which he based on his own circle of friends at the time.

In August 2006, Berlanti announced a new deal with Touchstone Television and ABC to create new pilots. At the same time, news surfaced that Berlanti was acting as a consultant for the new ABC series Brothers & Sisters. The previous executive producer, Marti Noxon, had left the show after conflict with creator Jon Robin Baitz. Berlanti now serves as an executive producer for the series.

Berlanti was also executive producer of Dirty Sexy Money which debuted on ABC in late 2007.

Berlanti has been involved as a writer and was at one time mentioned as director for the upcoming 2011 film, Green Lantern.

Gabriel Atkin

2011-05-23T00:01:00.000+01:00

Gabriel Atkin born 1897* (d. 1937)

Gabriel Atkin was a British artist.

Born William Park Atkin, Gabriel Atkin was born in South Shields, Durham, the son of a builder. Before the First World War he showed promise as a water-colourist and he studied briefly at Armstrong College in Newcastle with tutor Richard George Hatton.

With the start of the war he enlisted and was based mostly on the south coast. In the summer of 1915 he was sent to Cambridge for officer training. While there he got to know the circle of gay men including the academics Edward Dent and A. T. 'Theo' Bartholomew. Although Atkin could be charming he was also prone to drunkenness and riotous behaviour, which caused those around him embarrassment and anguish. They engaged in some matchmaking and encouraged Siegfried Sassoon to meet Atkin. The meeting took place when Siegfried Sassoon travelled to Margate, where Gabriel Atkin was staying, on 20 November 1918. The meeting went well and they immediately fell for each other. They spent that Christmas together at Siegfried Sassoon's family home at Weirleigh and at Robert Ross's rooms in Half Moon Street in London. Gabriel Atkin almost certainly provided Siegfried Sassoon with his first sexual encounter.

After this Siegfried Sassoon became a minor literary celebrity and got to know a number of well-known people. This meant that Gabriel Atkin also got to know them. Sacheverell Sitwell introduced Siegfried Sassoon to Ronald Firbank. Although Siegfried Sassoon did not find Ronald Firbank's work appealing they met a couple more times mainly because Atkin was a devotee. They had also got to know some of the Bloomsbury Set including Lytton Strachey, Mark Gertler, Duncan Grant, and John Maynard Keynes.

Gabriel Atkin had a show at the London Salon in 1919. He also sent work to the Artists of the Northern Counties exhibits.

In 1920 Atkin was living in a studio flat in Tite Street in Chelsea, London, and Siegfried Sassoon gave him an allowance of £300 so that he could continue painting. They began to see much less of each other, although Siegfried Sassoon continued to send money for some years.

Gabriel Atkin travelled to France and for a while was a male prostitute in Lyon and then the south of France.

In 1928 he met the minor writer Mary Butts, and they married in London in 1930. For the first two years of their marriage they lived in London and Newcastle. They then settled in Sennen in Cornwall and bought a cottage that they called Tebel Vos. They both relied on drink and drugs. The marriage was troubled and Gabriel Atkin left in 1934. By 1937 they were both dead.

*actual birthday unknown

Paul Winfield

2011-05-22T00:01:00.004+01:00

Paul Winfield born 22 May 1939 (d. 2004)

Paul Edward Winfield was an Academy Award-nominated American television and film actor. Winfield was openly gay in his private life, but remained discreet about it in the public eye.

Winfield was born in Los Angeles, California. He first became well-known to audiences when he appeared for several years opposite Diahann Carroll on the US television series Julia. He also starred as Martin Luther King, Jr. in the 1978 miniseries King. In 1973, he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor for the 1972 film Sounder, becoming the third African American to ever earn a nomination for a leading role, after Dorothy Dandridge and Sidney Poitier. Though it should be noted that Sounder co-star Cicely Tyson was also nominated that year for a leading role, for Best Actress. He appeared in the 2003 Disney-produced television remake of Sounder. Winfield played the part of 'Jim the Slave' in Huckleberry Finn (1974) which was a musical.

Winfield also starred in more recent miniseries, including Roots: The Next Generations, Queen: The Story of an American Family and Scarlett.

Winfield gained many fans for several of his brief but memorable roles in science fiction TV programs and movies. He was Captain Clark Terrell in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and a friendly but crusty cop partnered with Lance Henriksen in The Terminator. On the small screen, he appeared as General Richard Franklin, father of regular character Dr Stephen Franklin, on Babylon 5 and as an alien captain in a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode. He also provided voices on the cartoons Spider-Man, The Magic School Bus, Batman Beyond, and The Simpsons, on the latter voicing the Don King parody Lucius Sweet. He was 'The Mirror' on the TV show The Charmings (1987-1988). He also played the long-lost father of Harriette Winslow and her sister Rachel Crawford on Family Matters. At the time of his death, he was a narrator for the A&E show City Confidential.

He was nominated for an Emmy Award for his performance in the King and Roots: The Next Generations. He won an Emmy Award, in 1995, for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama Series, for his appearance in an episode of the CBS drama Picket Fences.

Throughout his career, Winfield frequently managed to perform in the theatre. His only Broadway production, Checkmates, in 1988, co-starring Ruby Dee, was also the Broadway debut of Denzel Washington. He also appeared in productions Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.

Winfield died of a heart attack in 2004; he was 64. His long-time partner of 30 years, architect Charles Gillan Jr., preceded him in death in 2002.

Morrissey

2011-05-22T00:01:00.003+01:00

Morrissey born 22 May 1959

"I don't recognise such terms as heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, and I think it's important that there's someone in pop music who's like that. These words do great damage, they confuse people and they make people feel unhappy, so I want to do away with them."

"Artists aren't really people. And I'm actually 40 per cent papier mache."

"I lost myself to music at a very early age, and I remained there."

Tom Driberg

2011-05-22T00:01:00.001+01:00

Tom Driberg born 22 May 1905 (d. 1976)

Thomas Edward Neil Driberg, Baron Bradwell was a British journalist and politician who was an influential member on the left of the Labour Party from the 1950s to the 1970s. He was revealed as a spy for the Soviet Union by Vasili Mitrokhin.

Tom Driberg was born at Crowborough, Sussex. Having studied Classics at Christ Church, Oxford (1924-1927) without taking a degree, Driberg worked on the Daily Express from 1928 and created the William Hickey diary and gossip column. He was also connected to the intelligence services of both the United Kingdom and Soviet Union, as demonstrated in the Mitrokhin archives.

In the autumn of 1935 he gave two unemployed miners a place with him in his bed, but when his hands began to wander the men went to report him at the local police station. On 12 November 1935 Tom Driberg ended up in court at the Old Bailey on a charge of indecent assault, but he was found not guilty. His boss at the Express, Lord Beaverbrook (Max Aitken), ensured that there was no press coverage, although Tom Driberg had to go to see the editor of The News of the World. Despite rumours on Fleet Street the story never made the papers.

He was first elected as a Member of Parliament for Maldon in a by-election in June 1942 as an independent candidate. He took the Labour whip in January 1945 and continued to sit for the seat until his retirement at the 1955 general election. He was MP for Barking from 1959 to February 1974. In 1957 he became chairman of the Labour Party.

He left the Express in June 1943 after being sacked by the editor who thought that his parliamentary activities conflicted with his journalism. He was then given a job by the editor of a left-wing Sunday newspaper belonging to the Co-operative movement. He wrote a column under his own name which was more political. The paper became the Sunday Citizen in 1962, but in 1966 Tom Driberg was sacked because the paper could no longer afford his salary. The paper closed in 1967. He subsequently worked freelance and contributed to the 'London Diary' of the New Statesman, and wrote book reviews.

He had a lucky escape when caught with a Norwegian sailor in an air raid shelter in Edinburgh. Fortunately the policeman was an avid reader of the William Hickey column and let him off. In fact the policeman and Tom Driberg became friends and exchanged letters. Tom Driberg related the story to his friends Harold Nicolson and Bob Boothby. It seems that Compton Mackenzie also heard about the story and used it as inspiration for his novel Thin Ice about the life of a homosexual politician.

He was created a Life peer, as Baron Bradwell, of Bradwell-juxta-Mare in the County of Essex, shortly before his death. His autobiography, Ruling Passions, was published posthumously and disclosed the conflict between the three passions that drove his life: his homosexuality (he pursued casual and risky encounters compulsively, going cottaging and using rent boys), his left-wing political beliefs, and his allegiance to the High Church tendency of the Church of England. His will insisted that at his memorial service, the reader excoriate him for his sins rather than praise him for his virtues.

Mark Bingham

2011-05-22T00:01:00.000+01:00

Mark Bingham born 22 May 1970 (d. 11 September 2001)

Mark Kendall Bingham was an American public relations executive who founded his own company, the Bingham Group. He died at age 31 in the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack on board United Airlines Flight 93.

Bingham is believed to have been among the passengers who attempted to storm the cockpit to try to prevent the hijackers from using the plane to kill hundreds or thousands of additional victims. He made a brief mobile phone call to his mother, Alice Hoagland, shortly before the plane went down. Hoagland, a former flight attendant with United Airlines, later left a voice mail message on his mobile, instructing Bingham to reclaim the aircraft after it became apparent that Flight 93 was to be used in a suicide mission.

Bingham was survived by his former boyfriend of six years, Paul Holm, who says this was not the first time Bingham risked his life to protect the lives of others. In fact, he had twice successfully protected Holm from attempted muggings, one of which was at gunpoint. Holm describes Bingham as a brave, competitive man, saying, 'He hated to lose — at anything.' He was even known to proudly display a scar he received after being gored at the running of the bulls in Pamplona.

Bingham attended Los Gatos High School. He was a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, where he was also president of his fraternity, Chi Psi. In college, he played for the UC Berkeley rugby team and helped them win a string of national championships.

A large athlete at 6 ft 4 in (1.93 m) and 225 pounds (102 kg), he also played for the San Francisco Fog, a rugby union team.

The Mark Kendall Bingham Memorial Tournament (Bingham Cup), an annual international rugby union competition predominantly for gay and bisexual men, was established in 2002 in his memory.

He is portrayed in the 2006 movie United 93 by gay actor Cheyenne Jackson.

Raymond Burr

2011-05-21T00:01:00.001+01:00

Raymond Burr born 21 May 1917 (d. 1993)

American actor Raymond Burr will probably be forever associated with two successful TV roles - Perry Mason (1957-66 & 1985-93) and Ironside (1967-1975). Although he notably appeared in A Place In the Sun (1951) and as the murderer in Hitchcock`s Rear Window (1954).

An intensely private man, it would appear that Burr created a smokescreen to conceal his homosexuality by inventing two wives and a son. One of his fictional wives died in a plane crash, one from cancer, his son from leukemia aged 10. He was actually briefly married, but that marriage was annulled.

His real 'marriage' was with an actor he met while filming Perry Mason. Raymond Burr and Robert Benevides bought a Fijian island in 1963, ranched cattle, farmed orchids and invested in improving the lives of the islanders. In 1983, they sold the island, and moved with their successful orchid business to California. In the 1980s they donated greenhouses, much of their orchid collections and over $1m worth of art and antiques to a California University. They started a successful vineyard which continues today.

In 1985, Burr reprised his role as Perry Mason in a series of successful TV movies, with Benevides as producer. By the early 1990s, Burr`s health was failing, and in 1993 he retired to their farm where he died from cancer.

Fred Barnes

2011-05-21T00:01:00.000+01:00

Fred Barnes born 21 May 1885 (d. 1938)

Fred Barnes was an English music hall artist.

He experienced extremes of success and failure, and as a young gay man escaped to London from his father and his father's lifestyle.

Barnes was born in a bedroom above his father's butcher's shop at number 219 Great Lister Street, Saltley, Birmingham, England.

Aged ten, after seeing Vesta Tilley, first visiting her sister who lived close to the shop, and later playing the lead in Dick Whittington at the Prince of Wales Theatre, Fred became interested in the stage. His first notable performance was playing the Duke of Solihull in Cinderella at the Alexandra Theatre, in 1906. It was while starring in the pantomime that Fred acquired his first agent and attracted the attention of another Birmingham-born music hall artist, George Lashwood, who, in Fred's own words, 'took me in hand... [placed] at my disposal, free and unasked, the lessons of his long and brilliant career'. It was following Cinderella's fourteen week run that Fred first performed in London, persuaded by fellow cast members, the Eight Lancashire Lads, to travel with them. Upon his arrival, Fred found himself playing the hated first slot on the bills. However, this was to change when he decided to try out a new song that he'd written, The Black Sheep of the Family, at the Hackney Empire in 1907. It was a huge success and was to remain Fred's most popular song.

As Fred says in his account of his life ('How success ruined me'), his name was 'made in a single night'. With this impressive start to his career he spent the next few years establishing himself. By 1911 he was top of the bill on all of the major circuits and principle boy in a number of pantomimes.

In 1913 his father committed suicide. Two weeks later, Barnes performed at the Birmingham Hippodrome, 'a place full of memories of my father. To this day I don't know how I got through that week'. The Birmingham Gazette of August 30 commented, 'Fred Barnes has this week proved the hollowness of the old saying that an artiste is never appreciated in his own town. He has gone a long way towards packing the house at every performance at the Hippodrome'. Following his father's death Fred's career continued to improve.

In an Era interview from 1914 he stated that he had no vacant dates for the next three years and held contacts for the next ten. It was when his personal problems, namely spending and drinking too much, began. He attributed these to dealing with both the death of his father and his new found success and popularity. The large sums of money he was earning and which he inherited led him to begin spending extravagantly - a habit he found hard to break when he was no longer earning any money. But it was drinking which was to ruin Fred's career. He missed performances, went on stage incapable of singing or dancing and generally put less and less care into his performances. This led to his being moved down the bills until he was finally back at first turn. Managers grew wary of him and soon his outstanding contracts were paid off and he was without work altogether.

During the twenties Fred was arrested (and later sentenced to one month in jail) for driving while drunk, in a dangerous manner and without a licence. Following the arrest, Fred, deemed a 'menace to His Majesty's fighting forces' (almost certainly because of the topless sailor who had been travelling with him at the time of the accident), was banned from attending the Royal Tournament, an annual military tattoo; he returned each year and each year successfully evaded discovery.

He was also open about his sexuality, and was one of the well-known 'twanks' of his period, unsurprisingly since he was known to pick up sailors and guardsmen in his Rolls-Royce.

It is for these reasons rather than his musical achievements (he only made ten recordings during his career), that only two biographies exist.

By the mid 30s Fred was suffering from tuberculosis. His failing health led him and his lover and manager John Senior to move to Southend-on-Sea. By this time any work consisted of playing the piano in pubs while John collected tips. Luckily for Fred and John a past manager, Charles Ashmead Watson, paid their rent, lighting and clothing costs, as well as giving them a weekly allowance of 30 shillings. Fred had made a number of attempts to return to the stage, most of which were unsuccessful; a final job in the summer of 1938, playing his songs in the lounge of a local hotel restored some of his confidence in his own ability. But by that winter he could no longer live with the pain he constantly suffered. Two and a half years after he was told he had only three months to live, Fred Barnes committed suicide.

When the Jury at the inquest into Fred's death commented that Watson had been 'wonderful' to Fred, he replied 'He was a great man'. He was not the only person who thought so. Naomi Jacob said 'he had one of the kindest hearts in the world. Moreover he was a fine artist and no mean dancer'. An Era interviewer in 1911 commented on his 'singularly pleasing popularity'. Fred's funeral on the second of July 1938, was attended by hundreds, the St Saviour's Churchyard and nearby streets crowded with mourners.

He was free with facts in interviews and in his own account of his life; his numerous publicity stunts which included announcements of his 'near-death' in a fire and a fake marriage. His appearance, he was known to walk around London at the height of his success with a marmoset perched on his shoulder (later, playing the pubs in Southend-on-Sea, he made do with a chicken).

Footlight Notes - profile of Fred Barnes with photographs

Barnes' life is featured in Three Queer Lives by Paul Bailey.

Ted Allen

2011-05-20T00:01:00.000+01:00

Ted Allen born 20 May 1965

Ted Allen was the food and wine connoisseur on the American Bravo network's discontinued, Emmy-winning television program Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.

Allen was born in Columbus, Ohio, but grew up in Carmel, Indiana. His Southern-born mother instilled in him a love of food and cooking from a young age.

After completing his studies he moved to Chicago, where he started working as a journalist for a local newspaper group. He got his start in restaurant criticism as one quarter of a bi-weekly group-review team called 'The Famished Four', along with his partner, Barry Rice, then the chain's entertainment editor, who initiated the concept.

Allen then became a freelancer for Chicago magazine, eventually becoming a senior editor, and often writing about food, wine and luminaries of the culinary world. He joined Esquire in 1997 as a contributing editor. He contributed to an Esquire food series, profiled many celebrities and co-authored the magazine's popular 'Things a Man Should Know' series. He has written for a variety of other magazines and continues as a contributing editor for Esquire.

Allen gained great visibility in 2003, when he became a cast member of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. Allen portrayed the 'Food and Wine connoisseur.' He continues to make TV appearances as a gourmet. Allen has appeared as a regular judge on seasons 3 and 4 of Bravo's reality television program Top Chef, following several guest judge appearances during the previous two seasons.

He lives in New York City with long-time partner Barry Rice.

Peter Wildeblood

2011-05-19T00:01:00.000+01:00

Peter Wildeblood born 19 May 1923 (d. 1999)

Peter Wildeblood was a British-Canadian journalist, novelist, playwright, and gay rights campaigner.

Peter Wildeblood's father was an engineer in the Indian Public Works Department. His mother was the daughter of a sheep-rancher in the Argentine. The family moved to London in 1926 when Peter was three. He was brought up in a small Elizabethan cottage on the edge of Ashdown Forest, Sussex where he developed a strong interest in nature.

He was sent to boarding school at the age of seven. At thirteen, he won a scholarship to Radley College, a public school near Oxford. He was subjected to bullying and his time at school was very unhappy. Peter left school at the age of eighteen and went to Trinity College, Oxford on scholarship. He spent ten days in his college, but became both disenchanted and ill.

Upon his departure from Trinity College, and despite health concerns, Peter volunteered for aircrew duties in the RAF. Completion of basic training found Wildeblood posted to Southern Rhodesia (later to become Zimbabwe) for flight training. However, he exhibited poor flying skills and moved into meteorology. During the war, he had a number of intimate experiences with women. These relationships were brief and unsatisfactory to him. He was beginning to think of himself as a homosexual.

In November 1945, Peter returned to Trinity College. During this time, he often spent weekends in London and acquired many gay friends. He completed his degree at the age of 24 and was awarded second class honours.

Wildeblood found it difficult to get employment. He eventually took a job as a waiter in a London hotel at £5 a week. Peter soon began freelance writing. He sold an article to Vogue, one to Printer's Pie, and two to Punch. He wrote a play about the groundnuts scheme in Northern Rhodesia entitled Primrose and the Peanuts, that was put on one evening at the Playhouse Theatre. It also ran for two weeks at the Bedford Theatre in Camden Town. Despite positive reviews, it was not moved to the West End. Additionally, Peter also adapted, with Kenneth Tynan, Cold Comfort Farm, for the Haymarket Theatre.

He started a job as a reporter for the Daily Mail, in its district office in Leeds, for £6 a week. After a time, an article of his was printed on the front page. He persuaded the editor to employ him in the London office, located on Fleet Street. For the next five years, Peter had a number of jobs at the newspaper. He served as beat reporter, gossip columnist, Festival of Britain correspondent, assistant drama critic, Buckingham Palace reporter, and Coronation columnist. He covered the Craig and Bentley shooting at Croydon, and the East Coast floods, and he interviewed Tallulah Bankhead. In August 1953, he became the acting diplomatic correspondent for the Daily Mail.

He met Edward Montagu (also known as Lord Montagu of Beaulieu), who was three years younger, through a publicity agent where he had a job of getting paragraphs about various products and places into the press.

Peter Wildeblood met the 23-year-old Eddie McNally in Piccadilly Circus. He was a corporal in the RAF who worked in a hospital in Ely, Cambridgeshire. Although Eddie McNally was not Peter Wildeblood's type they developed a relationship over time. In the summer of 1952 they arranged to go on holiday together at Edward Montagu's beach hut in Dorset. John Reynolds, who was also an airman and a friend of Eddie McNally also joined them. This became the subject of the Montagu/Pitt-Rivers/Wildeblood Case which went to trial in 1954.

On Saturday, 9 January 1954 Peter Wildeblood was arrested at his home in Islington, and his house was searched. He was charged with conspiring with Edward Montagu and Michael Pitt-Rivers to incite Eddie McNally and John Reynolds to commit indecent acts. The police tipped off the press and the story was headlined in all the Sunday newspapers the next day. Eddie McNally and John Reynolds became witnesses for the prosecution. Kenneth Tynan stood bail for Peter Wildeblood.

In the trial which took place in March 1954, Peter Wildeblood became one of the first men in Britain to declare publicly that he was a homosexual. On 24 March he was found guilty of conspiring to incite acts of gross indecency and he was sentenced to 18 months in prison. He was first sent to Winchester prison, but after five weeks he was transferred to Wormwood Scrubs in London. He had been admitted to hospital prior to going to prison and he was considered a suicide risk. He found prison terrible, with its squalor, and the lack of any attempt to prepare prisoners for outside life. While in prison he was visited by Frank Pakenham (later known as Lord Longford). After completing 12 months of his sentence he was released in March 1955. When he left prison, Frank Pakenham (Lord Longford) met him in his car with his daughter Antonia.

After his release from prison he gave evidence to the Wolfenden Committee and to the House of Lords, and became a campaigner for homosexual law reform.

He described his background and the history of the events upto 1955 in a book titled Against the Law. His three main points were that homosexuality between consenting adults in private ought not to be against the law, that prison only encourages homosexuality, and that in the squalor of Wormwood Scrubs there was no attempt at rehabilitation. While writing this he bought a small drinking club in Berwick Street, Soho, which attracted a mixture of types on the fringes of society. This provided material for his fictional autobiography about the club A Way Of Life.

His novel West End People was produced as the musical The Crooked Mile and became hugely successful in the West End after it opened at the Cambridge Theatre, London on 19 September 1959. The score was by Peter Greenwell and starred Elisabeth Welch and also launched the career of Millicent Martin. (Peter Greenwell later became Noël Coward's accompanist.) Peter Wildeblood's second collaboration with Peter Greenwell was on The House of Cards (1963), which was not so well received but was much appreciated by Andrew Lloyd Webber; his wife Sarah Brightman recorded one of its numbers, If I Ever Fall in Love.
A third collaboration between Peter Wildeblood and Peter Greenwell was on the musical The People's Jack, based on the life of John Wilkes. This was televised in 1969.

Not expecting to be able to go back into journalism, Peter Wildeblood continued to write novels, plays and television scripts. In 1969 he joined the staff of Granada Television and worked as a television producer. In the early 1970s he accepted an offer from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and went to live in Toronto and became a Canadian citizen. For 16 years he wrote and produced a number of successful series.

When he retired he went to live in a wooden Edwardian cottage in Victoria, British Columbia which had a view over the Juan de Fuca Straights to the Olympic Mountains above Seattle. Here he resumed his childhood interest in nature.

In June 1994 he had a stroke which left him speechless and quadraplegic. He learnt to communicate via a computer using movements of his chin. He died at the age of 76. Shortly after his death, Against the Law was republished with an introduction by journalist Matthew Parris in 2000.

The story of Peter Wildeblood and Lord Montagu's trial and their role in the history of decriminalisation in England is told in a 2007 Channel 4 drama-documentary, A Very British Sex Scandal.

Robin Blaser

2011-05-18T00:01:00.002+01:00

Robin Blaser born 18 May 1925 (d. 2009)

Robin Francis Blaser was a noted author and poet in both the United States and Canada.

Born in Denver, Colorado, Blaser grew up in Idaho, and came to Berkeley, California in 1944. There he met Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan, becoming a key figure in the so-called San Francisco Renaissance of the 1950s and early 1960s. He moved to Canada in 1966, joining the faculty of Simon Fraser University; in his later years he held the position of Professor Emeritus and lived in British Columbia with his partner of 30+ years, David Farwell.

In June of 1995, for Blaser's 70th birthday, a conference was held in Vancouver, Canada to pay tribute to his contribution to Canadian poetry. The conference was attended by poets from Canada, the US and around the world.

Robin Blaser was also well known as the editor of The Collected Books of Jack Spicer, which includes Blaser's essay 'The Practice of Outside'. The 1993 publication The Holy Forest represents his collected poems to that date. In 2006, Blaser received a special Lifetime Recognition Award given by the trustees of the Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry, which also awards the annual Griffin Poetry Prize.

Blaser died of a brain tumour on May 7, 2009, in Vancouver, at age 83.

Pierre Balmain

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Pierre Balmain born 18 May 1914 (d. 1982)

Pierre Alexandre Claudius Balmain was a French fashion designer. Known for sophistication and elegance, he said that 'dressmaking is the architecture of movement'.

Balmain's father, who died when the future designer was 7 years old, was the owner of a wholesale drapery business. His mother and her sisters operated a fashion boutique. After first studying architecture, he went to work for the fashion designer Edward Molyneux, for whom he worked from 1934 until 1939. He joined Lucien Lelong after World War II and opened his own fashion house in 1945. He collaborated closely with Christian Dior while working for Lelong.

He was a leading practitioner of the 'New French Style' (or 'New Look') of Paris couture following World War II and the 'Jolie Madame' style of the mid-1950s, but was not hemmed into the heavily draped and embroidered styles of his early designs, as he changed to structural, uncluttered designs in the 1960s. Balmain claimed that he, not Dior, deserved credit for the small-waisted, bell-shaped skirts that were a key component of the 'New Look'.

Balmain also created perfumes, including Vent Vert (1947), his first successful scent and one of the best-selling perfumes of the late 1940s and early 1950s, Jolie Madame (1953), Ivoire (1979), and Eau d'Amazonie (2006). His first perfume bore his company's address, Elysées 64-83.

Balmain was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Costume Design and won the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Costume Design for Happy New Year (1980). Additional Broadway theatre credits include costumes for Katharine Hepburn in The Millionairess (1952) and Josephine Baker for her eponymous 1964 revue. He also was a costume designer for 16 films, including the Brigitte Bardot vehicle And God Created Woman, and designed on-screen wardrobes for the actresses Vivien Leigh and Mae West.

Balmain's 1964 autobiography was titled My Years and Seasons.

His companion was the Danish designer Erik Mortenson, who worked as a designer at Balmain from 1948 until 1991.

The house of Pierre Balmain has continued, first under the leadership of Erik Mortensen (of whom Pierre Balmain said 'He is more Balmain than me') and then to Herve Pierre, Oscar de la Renta, Laurent Mercier, and now Christopher Decarnin.

Don Bachardy

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Don Bachardy born 18 May 1934

Don Jess Bachardy is a noted portrait artist.

Born in Los Angeles, California, Bachardy was the life partner of writer Christopher Isherwood, whom he met on Valentine's Day 1953 when he was eighteen and Isherwood was forty-nine, until Isherwood's death in 1986. A number of paperback editions of Isherwood's novels feature Bachardy's pencil portraits of the author.

Bachardy's life and works are documented in Terry Sanders' film The Eyes of Don Bachardy. He collaborated with Isherwood on Frankenstein: The True Story (1973). His book Stars in My Eyes (2000), about celebrated people whom he had painted, became a best-seller in Los Angeles.

Bachardy's career undoubtedly benefited from his long relationship with Christopher Isherwood, however he is a talented and successful artist in his own right and his work has been exhibited and collected in various museums and galleries. However, he has never been so naive as not to acknowledge that the connections of his more famous partner gave him access to a wider public and to the many celebrities and friends who became the subjects of his sketches and portraits.

Bachardy's drawings and paintings are included in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian, the National Portrait Gallery in London, Princeton University, the Fogg Art Museum of Harvard University, and the University of California at Los Angeles, among many others.

One of his most notable works is the official gubernatorial portrait of Governor Jerry Brown hanging in the California State Capitol.

He currently resides in Santa Monica, California.

Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, 1968, David Hockney

Don Bachardy was a creative consultant on Tom Ford's 2009 film of Christopher Isherwood's 1964 novel A Single Man, a novel which may have reflected certain aspects of Isherwood and Bachardy's relationship, although with a less tragic outcome.

Erik Satie

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Erik Satie born 17 May 1866 (d. 1925)

French composer and pianist Erik Satie, was a pioneer of classical music whose ideas were to have a tremendous influence on 20th century modernism.

A contemporary of Ravel and Debussy, he would later go on to work with Jean Cocteau to create the ballet Parade (1917) for the Ballet Russes, with set designs by Pablo Picasso and choreography by Leonide Massine. He knew, worked with or influenced most of the artists and writers and musicians who frequented Paris when it was the undoubted cultural hub of the world. Although sometimes credited with being the precursor of practically every avant-garde movement of the 20th century, he was genuinely influential in the fields of minimalism and ambient music, the use of prepared piano and music-to-film synchronisation.

Despite all this, he was an incredibly private and eccentric man - known to enter a room and sit without removing his hat, coat or gloves, and always with a brand-new umbrella. He is thought to have been homosexual because of the company he kept, but he appears to have mostly lived an asexual life.

After his funeral 1925, his friends entered the tiny room he had occupied for 27 years but had never allowed anyone else to enter. Apart from dust and cobwebs, they found huge quantities of umbrellas - many never used - as well as large numbers of unknown compositions hidden all over the room.

Robin Maugham

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Robin Maugham born 17 May 1916 (d. 1981)

Robin Maugham was an author of short stories, novels, non-fiction, plays, and screenplays; an officer in World War II; a barrister-at-law; and 2nd Viscount Maugham of Hartfield. His success was not without struggle. In the preface to his first autobiography Escape from the Shadows Maugham describes the three shadows of his life: his uncle William Somerset Maugham, his father Viscount Frederic Herbert Maugham, and the guilt he experienced due to the 'strict upper-middle class moral convictions' that declared his homosexual desires to be perverse.

Robin Maugham was born Robert Cecil Romer Maugham. Maugham described his childhood as lonely, with the exception of an imaginary friend, Tommy. Throughout his autobiographical works, Maugham speaks frankly about the troubles he experienced because of his attraction to men.

He spent most of his youth in boarding schools, beginning with Highfield School, Eton, and Trinity Hall, Cambridge. Both sides of his family practiced law, and Maugham was urged to follow the family tradition. His interest in law was less than enthusiastic; he found writing, painting, and music more pleasurable. He left Cambridge in 1937, signed up for the Inns of Court Regiment and became a judge's marshal. In April 1939, Maugham became the private secretary to the Director of the National Service Campaign. As part of this assignment, Maugham worked with Winston Churchill, creating a relationship that lasted until just before Churchill's death. When war was declared in September 1939, Maugham entered as a trooper in the Inns of Court Regiment.

Maugham served in World War 2 from 1939 to 1945, first with the 8th Army in North Africa and later with the Middle East Intelligence Centre. During a 1942 battle he was hit in the head with a shell fragment. This caused him to have blackouts, but the severity was never enough to have the shrapnel removed. However, due to this injury he was released from duty in 1945 and was unable to resume his law practice.

Maugham's short story, The 1946 Ms, had been published by the War Facts Press in 1943 and was his first published work. Convoy, a journal bridging the gap between military and civilian life during World War II, was created by and edited by Maugham for seven issues beginning in 1944. When his father died in 1958, Maugham became the 2nd Viscount Maugham of Hartfield. In 1960 he gained a seat in the House of Lords.

After his first published work in 1943, Maugham wrote novels, short stories, plays, travel books, dramatic works, a biography of his family, two autobiographies, and film scripts. His writing has been compared to that of his uncle in their use of 'exotic locales', though Robin is much more frank in his writing regarding sexuality and sexual guilt, particularly in his first autobiography. Writer, editor, and journalist Peter Burton met Maugham in 1968 and helped with the revision and rewriting of several novels, as well as several articles and reviews. Burton worked as a writer and editor for Gay News from 1972 to 1982. During this time, he also worked with Maugham on many projects and compiled Maugham's bibliography. Burton discusses the many aspects of their relationship in Parallel Lives.

Maugham was also assisted in his writing by his partner William Lawrence, who worked as his personal assistant for the last 11 years of his life, and is the copyright holder of Robin Maugham's estate.

Maugham's best known work is probably The Servant, which was notably adapted for the screen by Harold Pinter and directed by Joseph Losey in 1963. The film starred James Fox, Dirk Bogarde, Sarah Miles and Wendy Craig.

By 1981, Maugham's health had deteriorated. Diabetes and his abuse of alcohol, in addition to other physical problems, ended his life two months shy of his 65th birthday, on March 13, 1981.

Thom Filicia

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Thom Filicia born 17 May 1969

Thom Filicia was the interior design expert on the American television program Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. He is also a co-author of a book based on the show.

Raised in Syracuse, New York, Filicia attended Syracuse University's Art and Design school in the college of Visual and Performing Arts, gaining a BA in interior design.

His design firm, Thom Filicia Inc., has completed both residential and commercial work in metropolitan New York, the Hamptons, Connecticut, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Washington D.C., Florida, California, Utah and Bermuda. His firm was chosen as the exclusive design firm for the US Pavilion at the 2005 World's Fair. He describes his decorating style as modern classicism.

Filicia gained great exposure when he became the interior design expert on the TV reality show Queer Eye in 2003. He and his designs have been the subject of many magazine articles and he has frequently appeared as a guest expert on many American TV shows.

He also is co-author of the New York Times best-selling book, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy: The Fab Five's Guide to Looking Better, Cooking Better, Dressing Better, Behaving Better, and Living Better.

In 2006 he was chosen as one of House Beautiful's Top 100 American Designers and House & Garden's Top 50 'Tastemakers'.

Filicia is currently working on a home makeover show for the Style Network, titled Dress My Nest.

He is also working on his own furniture and home collections, and has published a how-to book on interiors, titled Thom Filicia Style.

Howard Ashman

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Howard Ashman born 17 May 1950 (d. 1991)

Howard Ashman was an American playwright and lyricist.

Howard Ashman first studied at Boston University and Goddard College and then went on to achieve his master's degree from Indiana University in 1974. He collaborated with Alan Menken on several films, notably animated features for Disney, Ashman writing the lyrics and Menken composing the scores.

Ashman, born Howard Elliott Ashman in Baltimore, Maryland was the artistic director of the WPA Theater in New York. He first worked with Alan Menken on a 1979 musical adapted from Kurt Vonnegut's God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. They also collaborated on Little Shop of Horrors with Ashman as director, lyricist, and librettist.

Ashman was director, lyricist and bookwriter for the 1986 Broadway musical, Smile (music by Marvin Hamlisch). Along with Menken, Ashman was the co-recipient of two Grammy Awards, two Golden Globes and two Oscars. His second Academy Award in 1992 was awarded posthumously for Best Song and was accepted by his partner, Bill Lauch.

He succumbed to complications from AIDS at the age of 40 in New York, during the making of both Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin. The song Proud of Your Boy from Aladdin was cut from the movie after the mother was taken out of the story. Ashman and Menken had finished the songs for Beauty and the Beast, but Tim Rice was brought in to finish the Aladdin songs with Menken.

He was posthumously named a Disney Legend in 2001. Beauty and the Beast was dedicated to him, 'To our Friend Howard, who gave a mermaid her voice and a beast his soul, we will be forever grateful. Howard Ashman 1950-1991'

Charles Robert Ashbee

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Charles Robert Ashbee born 17 May 1863 (d. 1942)

Charles Robert Ashbee was a designer and entrepreneur who was a prime mover of the English Arts and Crafts movement that took its craft ethic from the works of John Ruskin and its co-operative structure from the socialism of William Morris.

He was the son of businessman and erotic bibliophile Henry Spencer Ashbee. He received his education at Wellington College. After reading History at King's College (1883–86) and studying under the architect George Frederick Bodley, Ashbee set up his Guild and School of Handicraft in 1888, at first housed in temporary space in London and by 1890 with workshops at Essex House, Mile End Road, in the East End with a retail outlet that was more accessible to the Guild's patrons in Brook Street, Mayfair. In 1902 the works moved to Chipping Campden in the picturesque Cotswolds of Gloucestershire, where a sympathetic community provided local patrons, but where the market for craftsman-designed furniture and metalwork was saturated by 1905. The Guild was liquidated in 1907.
[pictured: Writing cabinet c. 1902]

The Guild of Handicraft specialised in metalworking, producing jewellery and enamels as well as hand-wrought copper and wrought ironwork, and furniture. The School attached to the Guild taught crafts. Ashbee himself was willing to do complete house design, including interior furniture and decoration, as well as items such as fireplaces. The Guild operated as a co-operative.
[pictured: Belt or cloak clasp 1902]

Later the Guild turned to book production after Morris's Kelmscott Press closed in 1897; Ashbee took on many of the Kelmscott printers and craftsmen and set up the Essex House Press. Between 1898 and 1910 the Essex House Press produced more than 70 titles.

The London County Council's introduction of the Polytechnic Institutes, which took on craftworkers at a minimal charge, was inspired by Ashbee's Guild and School, which it out-competed and drove out of business.

A widely-illustrated suite of furniture was made by the Guild for the Grand Duke of Hess at Darmstadt to designs of M. H. Baillie Scott.

He is thought to have been a member of the Order of Chaeronea founded in 1897 by George Ives.

Liberace

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Liberace born 16 May 1919 (d. 1987)

Wladziu Valentino Liberace, or Lee to his friends, was a classically trained musician who found a rich vein of record, concert and television success when he left the 'boring parts out'. His blend of campy, extravagant theatricals, flamboyant dress, witty self-deprecation and feather-light classical music made him adored by generations of women who were either oblivious to his blatant flaming, or just didn't care.

He suffered from ill-health in later life including heart and liver trouble, and emphysema from smoking, but it was an AIDS-related illness which finally sent him to his candelabra'ed rhinestone coffin in the sky at the age of 67.

Liberace always denied that he was homosexual, and the pretty young men were just his chauffeurs and personal assistants.
The Liberace Foundation

Jasper Johns

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Jasper Johns born 15 May 1930

Jasper Johns is a contemporary American artist best known for painting and printmaking and associated with the Pop Art and Neo-Dada movements.

Born in Augusta, Georgia, Jasper Johns grew up in Allendale, South Carolina. Johns studied at the University of South Carolina from 1947 to 1948. He then moved to New York City and studied briefly at Parsons School of Design in 1949. While in New York, Johns met Robert Rauschenberg, with whom he had a artistic and sexual relationship, as well as Merce Cunningham and John Cage. Working together they explored the contemporary art scene, and began developing their ideas on art. United by friendship and shared homosexuality they were to have a profound effect on the creative arts in 1950s New York - helping to define post-modernism.

In 1952 and 1953 he was stationed in Sendai, Japan during the Korean War.

In 1958, gallery owner Leo Castelli discovered Johns while visiting Robert Rauschenberg's studio.

Johns is best known for his painting Flag (1954-55), which he painted after having a dream of the American flag. His work is often described as a 'Neo-Dadaist', as opposed to pop art, even though his subject matter often includes images and objects from popular culture. Still, many compilations on pop art include Jasper Johns as a pop artist because of his artistic use of classical iconography.

Early works were composed using simple schema such as flags, maps, targets, letters and numbers. Johns' treatment of the surface is often lush and painterly; he is famous for incorporating such media as Encaustic (wax-based paint), and plaster relief in his paintings. Johns played with and presented opposites, contradictions, paradoxes, and ironies, much like Marcel Duchamp (who was associated with the Dada movement). Johns also produces intaglio prints, sculptures and lithographs with similar motifs.

Johns' breakthrough move, which was to inform much later work by others, was to appropriate popular iconography for painting, thus allowing a set of familiar associations to answer the need for subject. Though the Abstract Expressionists disdained subject matter, in the end it could be said that they simply changed subjects. Johns neutralised the subject, so that something like pure paint - painted surface - could declare itself. For twenty years after Johns painted Flag, the surface - in Andy Warhol's silkscreens or Robert Irwin's illuminated ambiances - could suffice.

In contrast to the concept of macho 'artist hero' as ascribed to Abstract Expressionist figures such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, whose paintings are fully indexical (that is, standing effectively as an all-over canvas signature), Neo-Dadaists like Johns and Robert Rauschenberg seem preoccupied with a lessening of the reliance of their art on indexical qualities, seeking instead to create meaning solely through the use of conventional symbols, painted indexically in what some have interpreted as a rebuttal of the hallowed individuality of the Abstract Expressionists. There is also the issue of symbols existing outside of any referential context; Johns' flag, for instance, is primarily a visual object, divorced from its symbolic connotations and reduced to something in-itself.

Since the 1980s, Johns produces paintings at four to five a year, sometimes not at all during a year. His large scale paintings are much favoured by collectors and due to their rarity, it is known that Johns' works are extremely difficult to acquire.

Above, Jasper Johns, 1997 by Chuck Close

Javier de Frutos

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Javier de Frutos born 15 May 1963

Javier de Frutos is a multi award-winning director and choreographer who has directed a dynamic range of theatre productions as well as movement for TV and film. In 2007 he received an Olivier Award for his choreography in Cabaret.

Javier De Frutos was born in Venezuela in 1963 where he began his dance training in 1980, continuing at the London School of Contemporary Dance and at the Merce Cunningham School, New York.

From 1988 to 1992 he was a member of Laura Dean Dancers and Musicians in New York. In 1992, he was appointed Choreographer in Residence at Movement Research in New York City. On his return to the UK in 1994 he established the Javier De Frutos Dance Company which toured to great acclaim around the world.

In 1999 his achievements were recognised in a South Bank Show. The programme was nominated for the Royal Television Society Award.

In 2000 the digital channel Artsworld made a documentary about the making of The Celebrated Soubrette for Rambert Dance Company as well as a companion broadcast of its performance at Sadler’s Wells Theatre, London. His ballet Milagros features in the documentary celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Royal New Zealand Ballet. The same year Javier was among the first to be made a Fellow of The Arts Council of England, conducting two years exhaustive research on the work of playwright Tennessee Williams.

In 2006 he represented Britain at the Venice Biennale with a trilogy of his work and developed and staged a new musical called Cattle Call in collaboration with Richard Thomas (creator of Jerry Springer the Opera) and the 2008 Tony Award winning designer Katrina Lyndsay.

Javier’s film and TV credits include The Long Road to Mazatlan in collaboration with Isaac Julien which was nominated for the Turner prize in 2001. Javier is also credited with the movement direction for Mika’s music video We Are Golden and more recently the pilot for the new HBO drama Game of Thrones directed by Thomas McCarthy.

Javier’s work is in the repertoire of many ballet and contemporary dance companies, including Rotterdam Dance Group, Ballet Shindowski, Nuremberg Ballet, Rambert Dance Company, The Royal New Zealand Ballet, Candoco, The Royal Ballet and Gothenburg Ballet.

His range extends beyond ballet and contemporary dance. A passionate focus of Javier’s work is musicals. He choreographed Carousel for the Chichester Festival Theatre, the National Theatre’s production of Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman (for which he was also movement director) and the acclaimed West End and touring productions of Kander and Ebb’s Cabaret for which he won the prestigious Olivier Award for Best Theatre Choreographer in February 2007. This follows Olivier Awards nominations in 2004 for best achievement in Dance (Elsa Canasta) and in 2005 for best new dance production (Milagros).

Other awards include the 1995 Paul Hamlyn Award, 1996 Bagnolet Prix d’ Auteur (E Muio Disperato…), 1997 South Bank Show Award (Grass and All Visitors Are Welcome, Some by Coming Some by Going), 2004 Time Out Live Award (Sour Milk) and the 2005 Critics Circle National Dance Award for Best Choreography (Elsa Canasta and Milagros) plus a nomination for the same award again in 2008. Javier has also received nominations for the Theatregoers’ Choice Award (Cabaret), Manchester Evening News Theatre Awards and the International Theatre Institute Award.

Javier is currently choreographer/movement director for the production of Macbeth at Shakespeare’s Globe. He is also working on a project with the Open Air Theatre, developing a musical about cigars set in Cuba and directing and choreographing the Pet Shop Boys ballet which is scheduled to open in London in early spring 2011.

Magnus Hirschfeld

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Magnus Hirschfeld born 14 May 1868 (d. 1935)

Magnus Hirschfeld was a prominent German-Jewish physician, sexologist, and gay rights pioneer.

Hirschfeld developed the theory of a third, 'intermediate sex' between men and women. He was interested in the study of a wide variety of sexual and erotic urges, at a time when the early notions of sexual identity was still being formed. His scientific work extended that of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and influenced Havelock Ellis and Edward Carpenter.

As a young man he had lived in Paris and worked as a journalist. His subsequent career successfully found a balance between medicine and writing. After several years as a general practitioner in Magdeburg, in 1896 he issued the anonymous pamphlet Sappho and Socrates, on homosexual love.

In 1897, Hirschfeld founded the Scientific Humanitarian Committee with Adolf Brand, Benedict Friedlaender and other leaders of Der Eigene, a homosexual campaign and publication. The group aimed to undertake research to defend the rights of homosexuals and to repeal Paragraph 175, the section of the German penal code that since 1871 had criminalised homosexuality. They argued that the law encouraged blackmail, and the motto of the Committee, 'Justice through science', reflected Hirschfeld's belief that a better scientific understanding of homosexuality would eliminate hostility toward homosexuals. He was a tireless campaigner and became a well-known public figure.

Within the group, some of the women, as well as Friedlaender, scorned Hirschfeld's analogy that homosexuals are like cripples. They argued that society might tolerate or pity cripples, but never treat them as equals. They also disagreed with Hirschfeld's (and Ulrichs's) view that male homosexuals were by nature womanish — Brand, Friedlaender and others would later leave the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee and form their another group, Gemeinschaft der Eigenen, which argued that male-male love is a simple aspect of virile manliness rather than a special condition.

However, the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, under Hirschfeld's leadership, managed to gather over 5,000 signatures from prominent Germans for a petition to overturn Paragraph 175. Signatories included Albert Einstein, Hermann Hesse, Thomas Mann, Rainer Maria Rilke and Leo Tolstoy, but no one admitted publicly to being homosexual themselves.

The bill was brought before the Reichstag in 1898, but was only supported by a minority from the Social Democratic Party of Germany, prompting a frustrated Hirschfeld to consider the controversial strategy of 'outing' — that is, forcing some of the prominent law-makers who had remained silent out of the closet. The bill continued to come before parliament, and eventually began to make progress in the 1920s before the takeover of the Nazi party obliterated any hopes for reform.

In 1921 Hirschfeld organised the First Congress for Sexual Reform, which led to the formation of the World League for Sexual Reform. Congresses were held in Copenhagen (1928), London (1929), Vienna (1930), and Brno (1932).

Hirschfeld was both quoted and caricatured in the press as a vociferous expert on sexual manners, receiving the epithet 'the Einstein of Sex'. He saw himself as a campaigner and a scientist, investigating and cataloging many varieties of sexuality, not just homosexuality. He coined the word 'transvestism', for example.

Hirschfeld co-wrote and acted in the 1919 film Anders als die Andern (Different From the Others), where actor Conrad Veidt played possibly the first homosexual character ever written for cinema. The film had a specific gay-rights law reform agenda — Veidt's character is blackmailed by a lover, eventually coming out rather than continuing to make the blackmail payments, but his career is destroyed and he is driven to suicide.

In 1919, under the more liberal atmosphere of the newly founded Weimar Republic, Hirschfeld was given a former royal palace for his new Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexual Research) in Berlin. His Institute housed his immense library on sex and provided educational services and medical consultations. People from around Europe visited the Institute to gain a clearer understanding of their sexuality. Christopher Isherwood writes about his and Auden's visit to the Institute in his book Christopher and His Kind. They were visiting Francis Turville-Petre, a friend of Isherwood's who was staying there. The Institute also housed the Museum of Sex, an educational resource for the public which is reported to have been visited by school classes.

Hirschfeld's work continues to be controversial. Critics have claimed that some of his financial support came from closeted but prominent German homosexuals whom he blackmailed. Though he was immensely popular in some circles, in others he was reviled. Gatherings at which he spoke came under attack from anti-gay groups: in one such instance in 1921, his skull was fractured and he was left lying in the street.

Others complain that his belief that homosexuality was, at root, hormonal opened the door for others who were seeking a 'cure' for homosexuality.

When the Nazis took power, one of their first actions, on May 6, 1933, was to destroy the Institut and burn the library. The press-library pictures & archival newsreel film of Nazi book-burnings seen today are often pictures of Hirschfeld's library ablaze. Fortuitously, at that time Hirschfeld was away from Germany on a world speaking tour.

He never returned to Germany, dying in exile in Nice of a heart attack on his 67th birthday in 1935. He is buried there.

Julian Eltinge

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Julian Eltinge born 14 May 1881 (d. 1941)

In the 1910s and 1920s, Julian Eltinge was one of the biggest stars of the day, the toast of Broadway and vaudeville, and an enormously popular and wealthy star of silent film. With music composed by Jerome Kern and other leading composers of the day, and lyrics often written by Eltinge himself, his theatrical farces were phenomenal critical and financial successes.

Regarded by many as the greatest female impersonator in history, today Eltinge is all but forgotten and his life and work virtually unknown to the public.

When not performing, he invested a great deal of effort into creating a masculine persona - boxing, horse-riding, (staged) bar fights, ladies' man - to deflect rumours of his homosexuality. There is no record of lovers of either sex although there were plenty of stories. He never married, as they say.

Despite great international success Eltinge's career began to fade in the 1930s. Times and tastes were changing, and alcoholism, and other personal and financial problems seemed to spin him into a decline. By the 1930s, the female impersonations that he had built his career had begun to lose popularity. Eltinge resorted to performing in sleazy nightclubs. Crackdowns on cross-dressing in public, meant to curb homosexual activity, prevented Eltinge from performing in costume. At one appearance in a Los Angeles club, Eltinge stood next to displays of his gowns while taking on his characters.

The performances in nightclubs continued and while performing in New York in 1941, Eltinge died in his hotel room of what is reported to have been a cerebral hemorrhage, though the circumstances are considered mysterious to some scholars.

Alan Ball

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Alan Ball born 13 May 1957

Alan Ball - born in Atlanta, Georgia - is an Academy Award-winning screenwriter, director, producer and occasional actor, who is best known for writing the screenplay for the Oscar-winning film American Beauty (1999), and for creating the HBO original drama series Six Feet Under. His most recent creation is the acclaimed TV vampire drama True Blood.

Alan Ball was an undergraduate student of the Florida State University School of Theatre. He did not receive a diploma; however he informed reporters, after winning an Emmy for directing at the 54th Emmy Awards, that he did start writing and producing his own work at FSU and has been doing so since.

Ball started out by writing for the TV show Cybill, starring Cybill Shepherd, and he stated that he based the horrific suburban wife character played by Annette Bening in American Beauty on Shepherd, who has a (possibly unfair) reputation for being extremely difficult to work with, from both male and female co-workers. Ball has also written scripts for several stage plays.

He is openly gay and his work frequently includes gay themes and characters.

In 2011 Ball was sued by his California neighbour Quentin Tarantino over the 'obnoxious pterodactyl-like screams' of his collection of Macaw parrots.

Modest Ilyich Tchaikovsky

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Modest Ilyich Tchaikovsky born 13 May 1850 (d. 1916)

Modest Ilyich Tchaikovsky was a Russian dramatist, opera librettist and translator.

Modest Ilyich was the younger brother of the composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. He graduated from the School of Jurisprudence with a degree in law. Like many graduates of this school (including his brother) he was homosexual and lived relatively openly with the poet Aleksey Apukhtin and then with another boyfriend, Kolya Konradi.

Tchaikovsky chose to dedicate his entire life to literature and music. He wrote plays, translated sonnets by Shakespeare into Russian and wrote librettos for operas of his brother, as well as other composers such as Eduard Nápravník, Arseny Koreshchenko, Anton Arensky and Sergei Rachmaninov. Being the nearest friend of his brother, he became his first biographer, and also the founder of Tchaikovsky's museum in Klin.

Armistead Maupin

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Armistead Maupin born 13 May in 1944

Armistead Maupin is an American writer best known for his Tales of the City series of novels based in San Francisco.

Maupin, a descendent of American Revolutionary War general Gabriel Maupin, was born to a conservative, Christian family in Washington, D.C., but moved early on to North Carolina where he was raised. He says he has had storytelling instincts since he was eight years old.

He attended the University of North Carolina where he got into journalism through writing for The Daily Tar Heel. After earning his undergraduate degree, Maupin enrolled in law school, but later dropped out. He worked at a television station in Raleigh managed by conservative television personality and later US Senator Jesse Helms, who nominated him for a patriotic award, which he won. Maupin is a veteran of the United States Navy; he served several tours of duty including one in the Vietnam War.

Maupin's work on a Charleston newspaper was followed with an offer of a post at the San Francisco bureau of the Associated Press in 1971. The move to San Francisco was to change his life.

He says he knew he was gay since childhood, but didn't have sex until he was 26 and only decided to come out publicly in 1974. The same year, he began what would become the Tales of the City series as a serial in a local newspaper, The Pacific Sun, moving to the San Francisco Chronicle after the former newspaper folded.

Tales of the City is a series of novels, the first portions of which were initially published as a newspaper serial and later reworked into the series of books. The first of Maupin's novels, entitled Tales of the City, was published in 1978. Five more followed in the 80s, ending with the last book, Sure of You, in 1989. A seventh novel published in 2007, Michael Tolliver Lives, continues the story of some of the characters. In Babycakes, published in 1983, he was one of the first writers to address the subject of AIDS. Of the autobiographical nature of the characters, he says, 'I’ve always been all of the characters in one way or another.' Maupin's novels are essentially comic in nature, but he has never been afraid to add controversy, thrills, chills and strong doses of reality to the mix.

The first three books in the series have also been converted into three television miniseries starring Olympia Dukakis and Laura Linney, the first airing on the American television network PBS (Channel 4 in the UK) and the latter two on the American cable television channel Showtime. Plans to film the rest of the Tales have been scuppered by costs, despite the willingness of many of the cast to reprise their roles and the now much less controversial climate.

Maupin has written two novels, Maybe The Moon and The Night Listener, which are not part of the Tales series. The Night Listener, a psychological thriller, still with Maupin's trademark autobiographical touches, was made into film in 2006, starring Robin Williams and Toni Collette.

His former partner of twelve years, Terry Anderson, was once a gay rights activist (Maupin himself has done much work in this area), and co-authored the screenplay for The Night Listener. He lived with Anderson in San Francisco and New Zealand. Ian McKellen is a close friend and Christopher Isherwood was a mentor, friend, and influence as a writer.

Maupin is now married to Christopher Turner, a website producer and photographer who he came across on an internet dating website and then 'chased him down Castro Street, saying, "Didn’t I see you on Daddyhunt.com?"' Armistead and Christopher were married in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, on February 18, 2007, though he says that they had called each other 'husband' for two years prior. He enjoys doing public readings of his own works and has recorded them all as audiobooks.

In May 2006 Tales of the City was named Britain favourite gay novel in a poll to find the Big Gay Read - part of the Queer Up North arts festival.

In 2010 Maupin produced another Tales volume, Mary Ann in the Autumn: 'Whatever I have to offer seems to come through those characters ... And I see no reason to abandon them.' Good news, indeed. Armistead Maupin - we love and salute you.

Bruce Chatwin

2011-05-13T00:01:00.000+01:00

Bruce Chatwin born 13 May 1940 (d. 1989)

Bruce Charles Chatwin was a British novelist and travel writer.

After leaving Marlborough College in 1958, Chatwin reluctantly moved to London to work as a porter in the Works of Art department at the auction house Sotheby's. Thanks to his sharp visual acuity, he quickly became Sotheby's expert on Impressionist art. He later became a director of the company.

In late 1964 he began to suffer from problems with his sight, which he attributed to the close analysis of artwork entailed by his job. A leading eye specialist recommended that Chatwin take a six month break from his work at Sotheby's. Having been involved in the design of an eye hospital in Addis Ababa, he suggested Chatwin visit east Africa. In February 1965, Chatwin left for the Sudan. On his return, Chatwin quickly became disenchanted with the art world, and turned his interest instead to archaeology. He resigned from his job at Sotheby's in the early summer of 1966.

Chatwin studied archaelogy at the University of Edinburgh for two years but left without taking a degree, finding the work tiresome.

In 1972, Chatwin was hired by the Sunday Times Magazine as an adviser on art and architecture. His association with the magazine cultivated his narrative skills and he travelled on many international assignments, writing on such subjects as Algerian migrant workers and the Great Wall of China, and interviewing diverse people.

In 1972, Chatwin interviewed the 93-year-old architect and designer Eileen Gray in her Paris salon, where he noticed a map of the area of South America called Patagonia which she had painted. 'I've always wanted to go there,' Bruce told her. 'So have I,' she replied, 'go there for me.' Two years later, in November 1974, Chatwin flew out to Lima in Peru, and reached Patagonia a month later. When he arrived there he severed himself from the newspaper with a telegram: 'Have gone to Patagonia.' He spent six months there, a trip which resulted in the book In Patagonia (1977), which established his reputation as a travel writer. Later, however, residents in the region came forward to contradict the events depicted in Chatwin's book. It was the first, but not the last time in his career, that conversations and characters that Chatwin reported as true, were alleged to be just fiction.

Later works included a fictionalised study of the slave trade, The Viceroy of Ouidah, which he researched with extended stays in the West African state of Benin. For The Songlines, Chatwin went to Australia to develop the thesis that the songs of the Aborigines are a cross between a creation myth, an atlas and an Aboriginal man's personal story. On the Black Hill was set closer to home, in the hill farms of the Welsh Borders, and focuses on the relationship between twin brothers, Lewis and Benjamin, who grow up isolated from the course of twentieth century history. Utz, his last book, was a fictional take on the obsession which leads people to collect. Set in Prague, the novel details the life and death of Kaspar Utz, a man obsessed with the collection of Meissen porcelain. Chatwin was working on a number of new ideas for future novels at the time of his death in 1989.

Chatwin is admired for his spare, lapidary style and his innate story-telling abilities. However, he has also been strongly criticised for his fictionalised anecdotes of real people, places, and events. Frequently, the people he wrote about recognised themselves and did not always appreciate his distortions of their culture and behaviour. Chatwin, however, was philosophical about what he saw as an unavoidable dilemma, arguing that his portrayals were not intended to be faithful representations.

Much to the surprise of many of his friends, Chatwin had married Elizabeth Chanler in 1965, whom had met at Sotheby's where she worked as a secretary. Chatwin was bisexual throughout his entire married life, a circumstance his wife knew and accepted. They had no children, and after fifteen years of marriage, she asked for a separation and sold their farmhouse in Gloucestershire. However, towards the end of his life they reconciled.

Chatwin was known as a socialite in addition to being a famous travel author. His circle of friends extended far and wide and he was renowned for accepting hospitality and patronage from a powerful set of friends and allies. Penelope Betjeman - wife of the poet laureate John Betjeman - showed him the border country of Wales, and thereby helped to contribute to the gestation of the book that would become On the Black Hill. Tom Maschler, the publisher, was also a patron to Chatwin during this time, lending him his house in the area as a writing retreat. Later, he visited Patrick Leigh Fermor, in his house near Kardamyli, in the Peloponnese.

Numbered among his lovers was Jasper Conran.

In the late 1980s, Chatwin developed AIDS. He was one of the first high-profile sufferers of the disease in Britain and although he hid the illness - passing off his symptoms as fungal infections or the effects of the bite of a Chinese bat - a typically exotic cover story - it was a poorly kept secret. He did not respond well to AZT, and with his condition deteriorating rapidly, Chatwin and his wife went to live in the South of France at the house that belonged to the mother of his one-time lover, Jasper Conran. There, during his final months, Chatwin was nursed by both his wife and Shirley Conran. He died in Nice in 1989 at age 48.

His ashes were scattered by a Byzantine chapel above Kardamyli in the Peloponnese near to the home of one of his many mentors, Patrick Leigh-Fermor.

John William Sterling

2011-05-12T00:01:00.001+01:00

John William Sterling born 12 May 1844 (d. 1918)

John William Sterling was a philanthropist, corporate attorney, and major benefactor to Yale University.

John William Sterling was born in Stratford, Connecticut. He graduated from Yale University with a BA in 1864 and was admitted to the bar three years later. He obtained an MA degree in 1874 and an LL.D. from Columbia Law School in 1893. He became a corporate lawyer in New York, and helped found the law firm of Shearman & Sterling in 1873.

Around 1870, Sterling met James Orville Bloss (1847-1918), his 'intimate friend' for the next fifty years. Historian Jonathan Ned Katz suggests that theirs was also a sexual relationship.

As a lawyer, Sterling represented Jay Gould, James Fisk, the National City Bank of New York, and Standard Oil. Sterling's partner Thomas G Shearman defended Reverend Henry Ward Beecher in his adultery trial.

On his death in 1918 at Estevan Lodge in Quebec Canada, Sterling left $18 million to Yale, at the time the largest non-founding contribution made by an individual to a private university - equivalent to about $180 million in 2003. A portion of this was used to fund the Sterling Professorships, and other portions were used to build the Sterling Memorial Library, Sterling Law Buildings, Sterling Divinity Quadrangle, Sterling Chemistry Laboratory, the School of Medicine, Trumbull College, and the Hall of Graduate Studies.

Sterling’s will provided that his unmarried sister and unmarried friend Bloss could one day share his mausoleum. Sterling’s married sister was left, after death, to find her own resting place. Sterling thereby constructed his monument as a shrine to singleness, even to marriage resistors.

The idea of Sterling as unromantic and businesslike is belied by a few lines of a poem by Charles Algernon Swinburne that Sterling clipped from the New York Times in 1883 and pasted on the very last page of his commonplace book:

Once more I give my body and soul to thee,
Who hast my soul for ever: cliff and sand
Recede, and heart to heart once more are we.

Sterling is entombed at Woodlawn Cemetery.

Picture: John William Sterling [left] with roommate at Yale in 1863.

Edward Lear

2011-05-12T00:01:00.000+01:00

Edward Lear born 12 May 1812 (d. 1888)

Although a talented illustrator and painter, Edward Lear is best known for his nonsense verse. His poetry demonstrates a defining love of eccentricity, verbal invention and poetic delight in the sound of words. His best known poem is The Owl & The Pussycat.

He enjoyed poor health most of his life, suffering from epilepsy, asthma, bronchitis, and in later life, partial blindness. Although there a few clues in some of his work, the clearest indications of his attraction to other men are in his letters and diaries of the 1850s-70s. However, his lack of any relationships beyond mere longing and the nature of his verse and ironically sad life have encouraged some critics to see him as a shy heterosexual or completely unsexual.

Billy Bean

2011-05-11T00:01:00.000+01:00

Billy Bean born 11 May 1964

William Daro 'Billy' Bean (born in Santa Ana, California) is a former Major League Baseball player who made news in 1999 when he made his homosexuality public.

Bean was a high-scoring outfielder in a career that lasted from 1987 through 1995: Detroit Tigers 1987-89, Los Angeles Dodgers 1989, San Diego Padres 1993-95. Bean joined the Detroit Tigers in 1987 tying an MLB record with four hits in his first major league game.

After acknowledging that he is gay, Bean went on to write a book, Going the Other Way: Lessons from a life in and out of Major League Baseball.

Bean is only the second former major league player to reveal his homosexuality; the late Los Angeles Dodger and Oakland Athletic Glenn Burke is the only other player to have acknowledged his homosexuality.

He appears occasionally on US television in various guises - acting and as a celebrity - and is a board member of the Gay and Lesbian Athletics Foundation.

Léon Bakst

2011-05-10T00:01:00.000+01:00

Léon Bakst born 10 May 1866 (d. 1924)

Léon Nikolayevich Bakst was a Russian painter and scene- and costume-designer who revolutionised the arts he worked in.

Léon Bakst was born as Lev (Leib) Rosenberg in Grodno (currently Belarus) in a middle-class Jewish family. After graduating from gymnasium (school), he studied at St Petersburg Academy of Arts as a non-credit student, working part-time as a book illustrator.

On his first exhibition (1889) he took the name of Bakst based on his maternal grandmother's family name, Baxter - Rosenburg was considered too Jewish and not good for business. At the beginning of the 1890s he exhibited his works with the Society of Watercolourists. During 1893-1897 he lived in Paris, where he studied at the Académie Julian while still visiting St Petersburg often. After the mid-1890s he became a member of the circle of writers and artists formed by Sergei Diaghilev and Alexandre Benois, which later became the Mir Iskusstva art movement.

In 1899, he co-founded with Sergei Diaghilev the influential periodical World of Art. His graphics for the World of Art magazine brought him fame.

He continued easel painting as well producing portraits of Filipp Malyavin (1899), Vasily Rozanov (1901), Andrei Bely (1905) [pictured left], Zinaida Gippius (1906). He also worked as an art teacher for children of Grand Duke Vladimir Alexandrovich. In 1902 he took a commission from Tsar Nicholas II to paint Meeting of Russian sailors in Paris.

In 1898 he showed his works in the Diaghilev-organised First exhibition of Russian and Finnish Artists; in World of Art exhibitions, as well as the Secession in Munich, exhibitions of the Union of Russian Artists, etc.

After the end of the decade of the 1900s, Bakst worked mostly as a stage-designer. Bakst designed settings for Greek tragedies, and in 1908 made a name as a stage and costume designer for Diaghilev with the Ballets Russes (Cleopatra 1909, Shakherezada 1910, Carnaval 1910, Narcissus 1911, Daphnis et Chloé 1912). For this work, Bakst was to make a massive contribution in changing the visual vocabulary of theatre and dance.

During his visits to St Petersburg he taught in Zvantseva's school. One of his students was Marc Chagall (1908-1910).

In 1914 Bakst was elected a member of the Imperial Academy of Arts.

In 1918 he severed his ties with Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes. He died in 1924 in Paris from lung problems.

Top right: Self-portrait by Leon Bakst. Bottom left: Portrait of Leon Bakst by Amadeo Modigliani

Design by Léon Bakst for Phedre and Theseus in 1923

Alan Bennett

2011-05-09T00:01:00.000+01:00

Alan Bennett born 9 May 1934

Alan Bennett is an English author and actor noted for his work, his boyish appearance and his sonorous Yorkshire accent.

Alan Bennett was born in Armley in Leeds, Yorkshire. The son of a butcher, Bennett attended Leeds Modern School (a former state grammar school), learned Russian at the Joint Services School for Linguists during his National Service, and gained a place at Cambridge University. However, having spent time in Cambridge during national service, and partly wishing to follow the object of his unrequited love, he decided to apply for a scholarship at Oxford University. He was accepted by Exeter College, Oxford University and went on to take a first-class degree in history. While at Oxford he performed comedy with a number of future successful actors in the Oxford Revue. He was to remain at Oxford for several years researching and teaching Medieval History before deciding he was not cut out to be an academic.

He claims that as an adolescent he assumed he would grow up to be a Church of England clergyman, for no better reason than that he looked like one.

In August 1960, Bennett, along with Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller, and Peter Cook, achieved instant fame by appearing at the Edinburgh Festival in the satirical revue Beyond the Fringe. After the Festival, the show continued in London and New York. He also appeared in My Father Knew Lloyd George. Bennett's first stage play, Forty Years On, was produced in 1968. Many television, stage and radio plays followed, along with screenplays, short stories, novellas, a large body of non-fictional prose and broadcasting, and many appearances as an actor.

Bennett's lugubrious yet expressive voice (which still bears a strong and distinctive Leeds accent) and the sharp humour and evident humanity of his writing have made his readings of his own work (especially his autobiographical writing) very popular. His readings of the Winnie the Pooh stories are also widely enjoyed.

Many of Bennett's characters are unfortunate and downtrodden, or meek and overlooked. Life has brought them to an impasse, or else passed them by altogether. In many cases they have met with disappointment in the realm of sex and intimate relationships, largely through tentativeness and a failure to connect with others.

Bennett is both unsparing and compassionate in laying bare his characters' frailties. This can be seen in his television plays for LWT in the late 1970s and the BBC in the early 1980s, and in the 1987 Talking Heads series of monologues for television which were later performed at the Comedy Theatre in London in 1992. This was a sextet of poignantly comic pieces, each of which depicted several stages in the character's decline from an initial state of denial or ignorance of their predicament, through a slow realisation of the hopelessness of their situation, and progressing to a bleak or ambiguous conclusion. A second set of six Talking Heads pieces followed a decade later.

In his 2005 prose collection Untold Stories Bennett has written candidly and movingly of the mental illness that afflicted his mother and other family members. Much of his work draws on his Leeds background and while he is celebrated for his acute observations of a particular type of northern speech ("It'll take more than Dairy Box to banish memories of Pearl Harbour"), the range and daring of his work is often undervalued – his television play The Old Crowd, for example, includes shots of the director and technical crew, while his stage play The Lady in the Van includes two characters named Alan Bennett. The Lady in the Van was based on his experiences with a tramp called Miss Shepherd who lived on Bennett's driveway in a dilapidated van for fifteen years.

In 1994 Bennett adapted his popular and much-praised 1991 play The Madness of George III for the cinema as The Madness of King George. The film received four Academy Award nominations, including nominations for Bennett's writing and the performances of Nigel Hawthorne and Helen Mirren. It won the award for best art direction.

Bennett's critically-acclaimed The History Boys won three Olivier Awards in February 2005, for Best New Play, Best Actor (Richard Griffiths), and Best Direction (Nicholas Hytner), having previously won Critics' Circle Theatre Awards and Evening Standard Awards for Best Actor and Best Play. Bennett himself received an Olivier Award for Outstanding Contribution to British Theatre.

The History Boys also went on to win six Tony Awards on Broadway, including best play, best performance by a leading actor in a play (Richard Griffiths), best performance by a featured actress in a play (Frances de la Tour), and best direction of a play (Nicholas Hytner).

A film version of The History Boys, with most of the original West End and Broadway cast was released in the UK in 2006.

Bennett refused an honorary doctorate from Oxford University in 1998, in protest of its accepting funding for a named chair in honour of press baron Rupert Murdoch. He also declined a CBE in 1988 and a knighthood in 1996. Despite refusing an honorary doctorate from his old university, Bennett was made an Honorary Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford in 1987. He was also awarded a D.Lit by the University of Leeds in 1990.

In September 2005, Bennett revealed that, in 1997, he had undergone treatment for cancer, and described the illness as a 'bore'. His chances of survival were given as being 'much less' than 50%. He began Untold Stories (published 2005) thinking it would be published posthumously. In the event his cancer went into remission. In the autobiographical sketches which form a large part of the book Bennett writes openly for the first time about his homosexuality (Bennett has had relationships with women as well, although this is only touched upon in Untold Stories). Previously Bennett had referred to questions about his sexuality as being like asking a man dying of thirst to choose between Perrier or Malvern mineral water.

Bennett has lived in London's Camden Town for thirty years, and shares his house with his partner of fifteen years, Rupert Thomas.

Ian Watkins aka H

2011-05-08T00:01:00.002+01:00

Ian Watkins born 8 May 1976

Ian Watkins (born in Llwynypia, Rhondda, Wales), better known as H from Steps, is a Welsh Pop singer, one of the five members of the now defunct pop group Steps. He has said that 'H' stands for 'hyperactive', describing his character - it later emerged that it may have meant something else entirely. Before joining Steps, he worked as a redcoat for Butlins holiday parks.

As a result of his hyperactive, camp persona and seemingly limited contribution to the success of Steps, he was voted number 8 in a 2003 poll of the 100 Worst Britons.

After Steps split in 2001, he formed a duo with fellow ex-Steps member Claire Richards and became H & Claire. They released a few singles and then went their separate ways. He then decided to take a musical theatre course at the Royal Academy of Music. He was filmed through the course and it was broadcast as a reality TV series, H-side Story, which followed him as he tried to make a new career in acting. At the end of the course H passed his exam and graduated from the academy. After graduating from the academy H travelled to New York to continue refining his acting skills. Following his extra tuition in New York, H has successfully obtained a job on the West End, and toured the country starring in the production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat in Autumn 2006.

In June 2006, Watkins appeared in a special week of episodes of the BBC Radio Drama Silver Street on the BBC Asian Network. He played the character of former solider Dave in episodes set in the Welsh countryside.

On 3 January 2007, Ian Watkins came out as gay in an interview with The Sun newspaper. He also revealed that he had been involved in a ten-year relationship with Steps' manager, Tim Byrne, though this had ended several months earlier. Prior to this, Ian had hidden the fact he was gay from fans, although rumours were widespread. His interview was published the same day he entered the Celebrity Big Brother house...

Watkins has continued to find regular pantomime work.

There is talk of a one-off Steps reunion.

Tom of Finland

2011-05-08T00:01:00.001+01:00

Tom of Finland born 8 May 1920 (d. 1991)

Tom of Finland (born Touko Laaksonen in Kaarina, Finland) was a fetish artist notable for his stylised homoerotic art and his influence on late twentieth century gay culture.

Over the course of four decades he produced some 3,500 illustrations, mostly featuring men with exaggerated primary and secondary sex traits: heavily muscled torsos, limbs, buttocks and improbably large penises. Tight or partially removed clothing showed off these traits, with penises often visible as distinct bulges in tight trousers or prominently displayed for the viewer. His drawings frequently feature two or more men either immediately preceding or during explicit sexual activity.

Touko Laaksonen made his first erotic drawings in his youth, but none of them are known to exist; Laaksonen said that he had at first kept his drawings hidden, but then destroyed them 'at least by the time I went to serve the army'. His drawings were based on images of masculine Finnish labourers he had seen from an early age. Finland, however, soon became embroiled in the Winter War with the USSR, and then formally involved in World War 2, and Laaksonen was conscripted into the Finnish Army. He served as an anti-aircraft officer, holding the rank of a second lieutenant. He later attributed his fetishistic interest in uniformed men to encounters with men in army uniform at this time. After the war, Laaksonen returned to civilian life and worked in the advertising industry as a commercial graphic artist, continuing to create erotic drawings for his own pleasure on the side.

In 1956, Laaksonen submitted some of his homoerotic drawings to the influential American magazine Physique Pictorial for publication under the pseudonym Tom. The editor of the magazine changed the name to Tom of Finland.

Laaksonen's work soon came to the attention of the gay community at large, and by 1973, he was both publishing erotic comic books and infiltrating the mainstream art world. He was best known for works that focused on homomasculine archetypes such as lumberjacks, motorcycle policemen, sailors, businessmen, bikers, and leathermen. His most prominent comic series are the Kake comics, which included these archetypal characters in abundance.

Exhibitions of Laaksonen's work began in the 1970s and in 1973 he gave up his full-time job at the Helsinki office of international advertising firm McCann-Erickson.

In 1979, Laaksonen founded the Tom of Finland Company to collect and distribute his work. This company exists to the present day, and has expanded into a non-profit foundation dedicated to collecting, preserving, and exhibiting homoerotic artwork.

Before his death, Laaksonen was the subject of the Finnish documentary Daddy and the Muscle Academy - The Art, Life, and Times of Tom of Finland which includes interviews with the artist. The European art publisher Taschen has published various collections of his work including three 'Retrospective' Anthologies and the complete Kake comics

Many of his drawings are based on photographs, but none are exact reproductions of them. The photographic inspiration is used, on the one hand, to create lifelike, almost moving images, with convincing and active postures and gestures whilst, on the other hand, Laaksonen exaggerates physical features and presents his ideal of masculine beauty and sexual allure, combining realism with fantasy.

Arguably Laaksonen's work revived and commercialised an underground leather counter-culture which emerged after World War 2 and reached its height in the late 1970s and early 1980s before the emergence of AIDS in the gay community.

The apparel, styling, and demeanour adopted by large numbers of gay men during that period appear to be derived directly from his work. Although the prevalence of this 'look' has declined since the mid-1980s - except in the leather and S&M scene - Laaksonen's work continues to be used extensively in gay publications, bars, clubs, and online communities who associate with its erotic subject matter. The combination of cap, leather jacket, and moustache became known in the pop culture of Western world as a visual stereotype of gay men.

Tom of Finland Foundation

Darren Hayes

2011-05-08T00:01:00.000+01:00

Darren Hayes born 8 May 1972

Darren Hayes is an Australian singer-songwriter.

Hayes was born in Brisbane, Australia, the youngest of three children. He started performing for his mother at home from an early age. At Mabel Park High School, Hayes appeared in school musicals and school concerts before graduating in 1989.

Hayes declined an opportunity to attend a performance academy in favour of studying at the University of Queensland. He ended up deferring a degree to pursue a musical career. Hayes also met make-up artist Colby Taylor while studying at university, and the pair eventually married. They split up around 1998 and divorced in 1999.

Hayes debuted in 1996 as the frontman and singer of the pop duo Savage Garden, whose 1997 album Savage Garden propelled them to stardom. It spawned the international hit singles I Want You, To the Moon and Back, and Truly Madly Deeply. The duo followed the success of their debut album with album Affirmation (1999), which also produced several hits such as I Knew I Loved You and The Animal Song. Savage Garden sold more than 23 million albums worldwide before parting ways in 2001.

Hayes released his first solo album Spin in 2002. The album was supposed to continue the success of Savage Garden and make Hayes an even bigger star, but it failed to meet the expectations of Hayes' record company at the time, although it did sell a couple of million copies worldwide. Hayes' second solo album The Tension and the Spark marked a big change of direction for the singer-songwriter, showing him experimenting with electronica and dark, depressing lyrics. This ultimately became the reason why Hayes' record company let him go in 2006. Hayes then started his own independent record label Powdered Sugar, from which he would release his third solo album This Delicate Thing We've Made (2007). Including his work with Savage Garden, Hayes has sold more than 25 million albums worldwide

Hayes has been based in London for the past few years.

Darren Hayes entered into a civil partnership with his boyfriend of three years, Richard Cullen, on June 19, 2006 in London. In keeping with his usual practice of not talking about his sexual orientation, he did not announce the civil partnership until July 17, when the information appeared on his official website. While visiting Australia in August 2007, Darren was enraged when Richard was not recognised as his partner and was forced to enter the country under a tourist visa.

He has since become an unofficial spokesman on the subject of gay marriage, still resisted by the leading Australian political parties. He also makes regular appearances on Pride stages around the world.

Darren Hayes

Peter Ilych Tchaikovsky

2011-05-07T00:01:00.001+01:00

Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky born 7 May 1840 (d. 1893)

Peter Ilych Tchaikovsky was a Russian composer of the Romantic era.
Peter (or Pyotr) Ilyich Tchaikovsky is a composer whose music has made an indelible impression on the world, yet many things seemed to be stacked against him. His mother died from Cholera when Tchaikovsky was only 14 years old and this great loss affected the boy deeply. As a boy and also in later life, he suffered from various neuroses and experienced periods of deep depression. Although he learned the piano as a boy, Tchaikovsky was initially to study law and his first profession was as a clerk performing administrative functions. It was only at the age of 23 that he made a career change and decided to study composition at the new St Petersburg Conservatory.

His success there led to a post at the (also new) Moscow Conservatory with Nicholas Rubenstein (the brother of Anton Rubenstein who had established the St Petersburg Conservatory). Although Tchaikovsky's music is now universally admired across the world, he wasn't always to receive a warm reception in his native Russia and a poor critical reception to his works understandably contributed to his periods of depression. For example, his first Piano Concerto which is now instantly recognisable and a firm favourite with concert goers was initially dedicated to Nicholas Rubenstein. He didn't like the work and Tchaikovsky felt devastated. The dedication was changed but years later Rubenstein changed his mind and was to play the work regularly.

The image that history has left us of Tchaikovsky is of a solitary figure who often worked in isolation. When in later life he accepted invitations to conduct, he felt homesick and longed to return home. For a while Tchaikovsky struck up a curious relationship with a woman called Nadezhda van Meck who became his benefactor, and her regular funding and letters of encouragement allowed him to compose without the constant worry of earning a living and he resigned from the Moscow Conservatory to concentrate on composition. The relationship was curious because the two never met.

Undoubtedly a major contributor to the composer's bouts of depression was his homosexuality. This is not surprising since at that time in Russia, the state considered certain acts to be crimes carrying the death penalty. At one stage Tchaikovsky married a female admirer, perhaps to conceal his true nature, but the marriage was a disaster. It broke up within a short period of time, and Tchaikovsky suffered a breakdown and attempted suicide. It is not surprising that some of Tchaikovsky's music is full of sadness and despair. What is surprising perhaps is that much of his music is bright and happy.

Tchaikovsky was never a total recluse. He met many other composers and musicians of the day. In his native Russia he certainly knew several members of the Russian Nationalist School and for a while was inspired by their musical thinking. These composers - Rimsky-Korsakov, Balakirev, Borodin, Mussorgsky - sought to compose and promote music which emphasised its Russian origins using folk music and other traditions, and largely shunning the music being composed in other parts of the world. Tchaikovsky's music might seem very Russian to modern ears, but his fellow countrymen detected traces of European influence. It is true that his music has a broader appeal, characterised by beautiful melodies, inventive orchestration, and a 'heart on sleeve' emotional warmth and engagement. Indeed his music was more popular abroad than in his native country, and perhaps this was the cause of some initial resentment back home.

In time Tchaikovsky's music became more accepted in Russia. When his former benefactor stopped his allowance after 13 years, he was soon the beneficiary of funding from the Russian government. He even overcame his previous reluctance both to travel and to conduct. He travelled abroad to conduct his own music in European cities and in the US to great success. However his life was to end in tragedy. The official story is that he contacted Cholera (the same disease which had struck his mother years before) by carelessly drinking a glass of unboiled water, though a later story suggested that he committed suicide. Shortly before he died, Tchaikovsky had completed his 6th Symphony. The premier was not a great critical success, but the piece's mood of deepest despair seems prophetic.

Tchaikovsky has left us a wealth of great music including Symphonies and Concertos, some Operas and many shorter works. He is particularly remembered for his story-telling music, including Romeo and Juliet and the evocative free-flowing ballet music for Swan Lake, The Nutcracker and Sleeping Beauty.

The importance of Tchaikovsky's homosexuality and its consequences on the personal expression in his compositions cannot be underestimated. Tchaikovsky's gayness in itself has been known to the West for at least 75 years, gathered from the composer's own writings as well as those of his brother Modest, who was also gay. More debatable is how well he accepted his sexuality or was comfortable with it.

Tchaikovsky

Nicholas Hytner

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Sir Nicholas Hytner born 7 May 1956

Sir Nicholas Hytner is an award-winning English producer and director.

Hytner was born in Manchester to a Jewish family, attended Manchester Grammar School and read English at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. He worked as an Associate Director at Manchester's Royal Exchange Theatre between 1985 and 1989, and at the National Theatre in London between 1989 and 1997. His directional work includes The Country Wife, Edward II, Don Carlos, Ghetto, Miss Saigon, Orpheus Descending, a 2-part adaptation of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, Alan Bennett's The History Boys, Carousel, Southwark Fair and The Alchemist.

He has also directed movies, such as The Crucible, The Madness of King George, The Object of My Affection and Centre Stage.

His direction of the world-wide hit Miss Saigon and the launching of his period as director of the National Theatre with the controversial Jerry Springer: the Opera both benefitted from his pathbreaking direction of operas, including most notably Xerxes in 1985, which won the Laurence Olivier Opera Award that year, became a huge hit (uniquely for a Handel opera in modern times) and is still in the English National Opera repertory. He has subsequently directed opera for Covent Garden, Glyndebourne, Paris Opera, Théâtre du Châtelet, Geneva Opera and Bavarian State Opera.

He was appointed director of the National Theatre in London in 2003. He has made some drastic changes at the National, choosing much more political and controversial pieces than his predecessors, but he was famously quoted upon being appointed the job that he himself was 'a member of all sorts of interesting minorities'. He also introduced a very successful plan called the Travelex £10 Season, which, as the name suggests, offers up a number of tickets at a very reduced price.

Hytner's film version of the very successful stage play The History Boys appeared in 2006.

Hytner was knighted in the 2010 New Years Honours List for services to drama.

Rudolph Valentino

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Rudolph Valentino born 6 May 1895 (d. 1926)

Born Rodolfo Alfonso Raffaello Piero Filiberto Guglielmi di Valentina d'Antoguolla in Italy, he arrived in the US in 1913 and eventually became a taxi dancer and instructor, and eventually, an exhibition dancer. He made his way across the country to California, where he played a number of small parts in silent movies. He was impressive enough to be cast as the lead in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921); the film was a success and made him a star. Later the same year, The Sheik made him a legend.

In 1926, he collapsed with a perforated ulcer; after an apparently successful operation peritonitis set in and 8 days later, the greatest romantic hero of the silent era was dead. He was just 31 and had been a star for a mere five years.

100,000 distraught women swarmed his funeral, and many rumours abound, but male audiences were offended by Valentino's extravagant dress, colourful spats, make-up, and willingness to display his body on screen. Valentino disrupted his era's rigid codes of sex and gender.

Although his legendary star status is assured, his legacy of work died with the silent film era and while he retains an extraordinary beauty, glamour and allure on screen, his body of work is insufficiently substantial to stand among cinematic greats - like his style of acting, Valentino's work is frozen in time and almost incomprehensible to modern viewers with the heavy make-up and exaggerated mime and melodrama of silent acting

Accused at the time of downgrading masculinity with his perceived effeminacy, time has not been kind and Valentino seems as camp now as then.

Valentino's sexuality remains ambiguous, but rumours of his homosexuality were rife among Hollywood gay circles, despite (or because of) his marriages to and divorces from Jean Acker and Natacha Rambova, both lesbian.

Man Parrish

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Man Parrish born 6 May 1958

Man Parrish is considered to be a pioneering electronic music producer and performer. He became an underground music scene icon in the 1980s and 1990s and is considered to be one of the most important and influential figures in American electronic dance music, according to The New York Times.

Although he produced only a handful of tracks of renown and disappeared into obscurity almost as quickly as he had emerged from it, Man Parrish is nonetheless one of the most important and influential figures in American electronic dance music. Helping to lay the foundation of electro, hip-hop, freestyle, and techno, as well as the dozens of sub-genres to splinter off from those, Parrish introduced the aesthetic of European electronic pop to the American club scene by combining the plugged-in disco-funk of Giorgio Moroder and the man-machine music of Kraftwerk with the beefed-up rhythms and cut'n'mix approach of nascent hip-hop. As a result, tracks like Hip-Hop Be Bop (Don't Stop) and Boogie Down Bronx were period-defining works that provided the basic genetic material for everyone from Run-DMC and the Beastie Boys to Autechre and Andrea Parker - and they remain undisputed classics of early hip-hop and electro to this day.

A native New Yorker, Parrish was a member of the extended family of glam-chasers and freakazoids that converged nightly with Andy Warhol's at the legendary nightclub Studio 54 club. His nickname, Man, first appeared in Warhol's Interview magazine, and his early live shows at Bronx hip-hop clubs were spectacles of lights, glitter, and pyrotechnics that drew as much from the Warhol mystique as from the Cold Crush Brothers.

Influenced by the electronic experiments of his good friend and co-writer Klaus Nomi and Brian Eno as well as by Kraftwerk, Parrish together with 'Cool' Raul Rodriguez recorded their best-known work in a tiny studio sometimes shared with Afrika Baambaata, whose own sessions with Arthur Baker and John Robie produced a number of classics equal to Parrish's own.

What distinguished Hip-Hop Be Bop was its lack of vocals and the extremely wide spectrum of popularity it gained in the club scene, from ghetto breakdance halls to uptown clubs like Danceteria and the Funhouse. After he discovered a pirated copy of his music being played by a local DJ at the infamous Anvil club, Parrish found his way to the offices of the Importe label and signed his first deal. He released his self-titled LP shortly after, and the album went on to sell over 2 million copies worldwide. He was signed to Electra Records and managed by David Bowie's notorious manager Tony De Fries and the infamous Main Man Ltd management team. Tony De Fries had managed the careers of David Bowie, New York Dolls, Mott the Hoople, Mick Ronson and Dana Gillespie to name a few.

Following a period of burn-out that followed, Parrish recorded and remixed tracks for Michael Jackson, Boy George, Gloria Gaynor, and Hi-NRG group Man2Man, among others, and served as manager for the Village People and Crystal Waters and others. While Parrish's subsequent material has achieved nowhere near the success or creative pitch of his earlier work, he continues to record from his Brooklyn studio and is a frequent DJ at New York's eclectic night spots and SM clubs. He is main DJ and co founder for a circuit party called Hustlerball which has parties in many cities worldwide. He also has several adult websites and online businesses which keep him busy as a webmaster, and 'jack of all trades'.

Keith Haring

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Keith Haring born 5 May 1958 (d. 1990)

Keith Haring was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, and studied graphic art in Pittsburg. After coming out, he moved to New York where he became influenced by graffiti art and studied at the School of Visual Arts.

With his distinctive style - strong graphic outlines, simple but effective stick figures and bold primary colours - he quickly moved from the streets to international art galleries. His work is part of the iconography of the 1980s.

He was a tireless AIDS campaigner and, tragically, succumbed to the disease himself in 1990 at the age of 31.

Shortly before he died, he established the Keith Haring Foundation to maintain and enhance his legacy of supporting children's and AIDS organisations.

Kyan Douglas

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Kyan Douglas born 5 May 1970

Kyan Douglas, born as Hugh Edward Douglas, was the grooming expert on the American television programme Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.

Douglas was born in Miami, Florida but was raised in Tampa and Tallahassee. After high school he moved first to Dallas, where he studied philosophy at Brookhaven College and first became interested in religion and the healing arts. He then moved to Austin, where he had initially planned to pursue his interest in acting by studying drama at the University of Texas at Austin.

In his mid-twenties he moved to New Orleans, where he earned a degree in TV production and theatre studies. In 1996 three of Douglas' close friends were murdered in a restaurant robbery where both they and Douglas worked. The tragedy motivated him to leave New Orleans to start a new life.

Douglas moved to New York City in 1999 and started work in sales for Aveda, then helped them set up the Aveda Institute, a school for hairstyling and grooming. He then enrolled in its Cosmetology program, and after graduating at the top of his class, he joined the New York-based hair salon Arrojo Studio as a colourist. He also began working on the makeover TV shows What Not to Wear and While You Were Out. In 2002, a client at Arrojo told him about a makeover show that was being cast. Kyan sent a photo of himself and a short bio he'd written to the producers. They called him for an audition and quickly hired him as the show's 'Grooming Guru'.

As part of Queer Eye's Fab Five Douglas has co-authored a book and appeared on a soundtrack CD and accompanying DVD based on the show, as well as appeared on many magazine covers and TV talk shows. In 2004 he published Beautified, his own book on grooming for women, and became a spokesman and product advisor for L'Oreal.

Queer Eye won an Emmy in 2004 for Outstanding Reality Program, and received a nomination again in the same category in 2005. In 2006, Douglas was awarded the HRC's Humanitarian Award for his work with a number of charities, including HRC, DIFFA, and amFAR.

In 2009, he took over as host of the US version of Ten Years Younger.

James Beard

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James Beard born 5 May 1903 (d. 1985)

James Beard was an American chef and food writer. Although little known outside the US, James Beard is recognised by many as the father of American gastronomy.

James Beard was born in Portland, Oregon.

He trained initially as a singer and actor, and moved to New York City in 1937. Not having much luck in the theatre, he and his friend, Bill Rhodes, capitalised on the cocktail party craze by opening a catering company, Hors D'Oeuvre, Inc. which led the publication of Beard's first cookbook, Hors D'Oeuvre and Canapés, a compilation of his catering recipes. Rationing difficulties in World War 2 brought his catering business to a halt. In 1946 he appeared on an early televised cooking show, I Love to Eat on NBC, and thus began his rise as an eminent American food authority.

Over the next forty years, James Beard operated a cooking school out of his apartment in New York, wrote dozens of books on cooking and food, and hundreds of articles on food for many different magazines.

According to the James Beard Foundation website: 'In 1955, he established The James Beard Cooking School. He continued to teach cooking to men and women for the next 30 years, both at his own schools (in New York City and Seaside, Oregon), and around the country at women's clubs, other cooking schools, and civic groups. He was a tireless traveller, bringing his message of good food, honestly prepared with fresh, wholesome, American ingredients, to a country just becoming aware of its own culinary heritage.'

James Beard brought French cooking to the American middle and upper classes in the 1950s. Beard starred on TV as a cooking personality. He generated further income and financed his cooking schools by signing endorsement deals with various brands.

In 1981, along with friend Gael Greene, Beard founded Citymeals-on-Wheels, which continues to help feed the home-bound elderly in New York City.

Beard died 21 January 1985 in New York City of heart failure at the age of 81.

After Beard's death in 1985, his friends and former students organised the purchase of his New York residence to establish and permanently house the James Beard Foundation. The James Beard Foundation was set up in Beard's honour to provide scholarships to aspiring food professionals and to champion the American culinary tradition — which Beard helped create.

Beard's renovated brownstone is located at 167 West 12th Street, in the heart of Greenwich Village. It is North America's only historical culinary centre, a place where Foundation members, the press, and the general public are encouraged to savour the creations of both established and emerging chefs from across the country and around the globe.

The annual James Beard Foundation Awards are given at the industry's biggest party, part of a fortnight of activities that celebrate fine cuisine and Beard's birthday. The Awards ceremony honours the finest chefs, restaurants, journalists, cookbook authors, restaurant designers, and electronic media professionals in the country.

Mark Leduc

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Mark Leduc born 4 May 1964 (d. 2009)

Mark Leduc was a former boxer from Toronto, Canada, who won a silver medal at the 1992 Barcelona Summer Olympics.

Mark Leduc was not a hero, at least not until 1992, when he won a silver medal for Canada at the Olympics in Barcelona. Before that singular accomplishment, he was only a tough kid. To his close friends, he was a hard man who happened to be gay. By the time he was 12 years old, Leduc was certain of only two things: his sexuality and his deep love of boxing. A friend invited him along to a gym in Toronto's east end, and it didn't take long before he was hooked. His parents separated when he was 15 and Leduc went to to live on the streets.

Leduc got into trouble for robbing a jewellery store at gunpoint. He had been told by an accomplice that it was an insurance scam: the owner wanted the place turned over and hired them to make it look real. Leduc grabbed the gold and gems, passed them over, pocketed a cash fee, and was picked up by the police a few weeks later. He was sentenced to over six years in prison.

After about 18 months inside, a guard took a shine to Leduc, and tried to secure him day passes so he could train in a real gym. The first application was rejected by the warden, but Leduc was ultimately awarded 72 hours a month in the outside world. He used his 'free' time sparingly: an hour to train here, a couple of hours to train there, a few more hours for a fight. He began to acquire a smart amateur record.

The 1984 Olympics came and went while Leduc languished in prison. He was released in time for the 1988 Summer Games trials, but failed to earn a spot on the team that was to go to South Korea. Leduc decided to stick with the sport for another four years. After winning both the national championship, and the gold medal at a preliminary international meet, Leduc was on his way to Barcelona, where he won silver.

Leduc turned pro in 1992 and had limited success. He retired in 1993.

Leduc came out as a gay man in 1994 in the TV documentary For the Love of the Game and attended Toronto’s Pride parade in 1999 as grand marshal (with Savoy Howe).

Leduc worked for and volunteered with the Toronto People with AIDS Foundation. His final occupation was that of set-builder and construction worker in the film industry.

Leduc died on July 22, 2009 in Toronto. He had collapsed in the sauna of a local hotel, and doctors suggested that his death may have resulted from heat stroke.

Lincoln Kirstein

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Lincoln Kirstein born 4 May 1907 (d. 1996)

Lincoln Edward Kirstein was an American writer, impresario, art connoisseur, and cultural figure in New York City, famous less for his own artistic achievement than for his social influence.

Born in Rochester, New York, to a very wealthy Bostonian family, he was educated at Harvard, from which he graduated in 1930.

His interest in ballet and George Balanchine started when he had seen Apollo with the Ballet Russes. He became determined to get Balanchine to America. Together with Edward M. M. Warburg (a classmate from Harvard), they started the School of American Ballet in Hartford, Connecticut, in October 1933. The studio moved to the fourth floor of a building at Madison Avenue and 59th Street in New York City in 1934. Warburg's father invited the group of students from the evening class to perform at a private party. The ballet they did was Serenade, the first major ballet choreographed by Balanchine in America. Just months later Kirstein and Warburg founded, together with Balanchine and Dimitriev, The American Ballet.

During World War 2 Kirstein joined the Army and served in Europe. He worked with the division of Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives, helping to recover stolen artwork from the Nazis. He was honorably discharged in 1946.

The American Ballet would become the resident company of the Metropolitan Opera, but this proved unsatisfactory because the Opera would not allow Balanchine and Kirstein artistic freedom. In 1946, Balanchine and Kirstein founded the Ballet Society, renamed the New York City Ballet in 1948. Together they made this one of the most innovative dance companies in the world.

His eclectic interests, ambition and keen interest in high culture, funded by independent means drew a large circle of friends which would stimulate creativity in many of the arts. These included: Glenway Wescott, Monroe Wheeler, George Platt Lynes, Pavel Tchelitchev, Katherine Anne Porter, Gertrude Stein, Cecil Beaton, Jean Cocteau, Jared French, George Tooker and far too many more to name.

[Lincoln Kirstein pictured right with Igor Stravinsky]

He was married in 1940 to Fidelma Cadmus, some say because he was in love with her brother Paul Cadmus. While his wife and he enjoyed an amicable relationship, he continued to pursue affairs with other men. The New York art world, considered his pursuit of men an 'open secret', although he did not publicly acknowledge his sexual orientation until 1982.

He was the primary patron of Cadmus and purchased many of his paintings and subsidised his living expenses. Cadmus had difficulty selling his work through galleries because of the erotically charged depictions of working and middle class men, which provoked great controversy.

Kirstein commissioned and helped to fund the physical home of the New York City Ballet: the New York State Theater building at Lincoln Center, designed in 1964 by gay architect Philip Johnson. Despite its conservative modernist exterior, the glittery red and gold interior recalls the imaginative and lavish backdrops of the Ballets Russes. He would serve as the general director of the ballet company from 1948 to 1989.

Kirstein and Balachine's collaboration lasted until Balanchine's death in 1983 [Kirstein and Balanchine pictured left].

President Ronald Reagan on March 26, 1984, presented him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Kirstein was a great collector, and early in the history of the Dance Collection gave The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts a wealth of rare dance materials. Before his death in 1996, he donated all his papers, artworks, and other materials related to the history of dance and his life in the arts. These treasures in the Kirstein collection will be available to inform future generations pursuing the knowledge of dance.

He exerted his greatest influence in the 1940s. He also appears to have been excessively handsome. [Photo: George Platt Lynes]

Antony Hamilton

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Antony Hamilton born 4 May 1952 (d. 1995)

Born in Liverpool, England, but adopted and raised in Australia, Antony Hamilton studied ballet and toured with the Australian Ballet Company before moving into modelling.

His handsome looks and dance training made the move into acting inevitable and after several TV specials, Hamilton was offered the role of male model/undercover agent in hit TV show Undercover, as a replacement for Jon Erik Hexum, who had been killed in a tragic on-set accident.

He was briefly considered as a successor to Roger Moore as James Bond. He continued to work in film and TV, notably the revived TV series of Mission Impossible and The Howling IV, until his death in March, 1995 from an AIDS-related illness.

Lance Bass

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Lance Bass born 4 May 1979

James Lance Bass is an American pop singer, actor, film and television producer, and author.

Bass grew up in Mississippi and rose to fame as the bass singer for the American pop boy band N Sync. N Sync's success led Bass to experiment with film and television, primarily as an actor and a producer. Bass' acting career is most noted for his starring role in the 2001 film On The Line, which his company, Bacon & Eggs, also produced. Bass later formed a second production company, Lance Bass Productions, as well as a now-defunct music management company, Free Lance Entertainment.

After completion of 'N Sync's Pop Odyssey Tour, Bass moved to Star City, Russia in much publicised pursuit of a seat on a Soyuz space capsule. Bass was certified by both NASA and the Russian Space Program after several months of cosmonaut training, and planned to join the TMA-1 mission to the International Space Station in October of that year. However, after his financial sponsors backed out, Bass was denied a seat on the mission.

In July 2006, Bass revealed that he was gay in a cover story for People magazine. He was awarded the Human Rights Campaign Visibility Award in October 2006, and released an autobiography, Out of Sync, in October 2007, which debuted on The New York Times Best Seller list.

Bass was a contestant on Season 7 of Dancing with the Stars, and was paired with swing dance champ Lacey Schwimmer. He ended up with the third position in the show.

Lindsay Kemp

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Lindsay Kemp born 3 May 1938

Lindsay Kemp is a British dancer, actor, teacher, mime artist and choreographer.

Born in South Shields, Kemp was raised in Yorkshire and attended Bradford Art College before studying dance with Hilde Holger and mime with Marcel Marceau.

Kemp formed his own dance company in the early sixties and first attracted attention with an appearance at the Edinburgh Festival in 1968. Despite thirty years of worldwide touring with his company and the occasional film and television appearances, Kemp is ironically best known by devotees of Kate Bush and David Bowie, both former students and, briefly, members of Kemp's company (Bowie as a performer, Bush as a wardrobe assistant). Indeed, it is rumoured - a rumour begun by Kemp himself - that he had a brief but volatile affair with Bowie in the late sixties, culminating in a failed suicide attempt more notable for its melodrama than sincerity of purpose.

Kemp’s style of performance, a unique and seductive blend of Butoh, Mime, Burlesque, Drag and Music Hall, has at different times been described as fascinating, colourful and self-indulgent, but rarely fails to attract critical acclaim and a loyal fanbase.

He staged and performed in David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust concerts at London's Rainbow Theatre in August 1972, and, with Jack Birkett (more on him below), appears in the promotional video for Bowie's single John, I'm Only Dancing.

Kemp’s film roles include a dancer and cabaret performer in Derek Jarman’s Sebastiane (1976) and Jubilee (1977) respectively, a pantomime dame in Todd Haynes’ Velvet Goldmine (1998) and the wonderfully camp pub landlord Alder MacGregor in Anthony Shaffer's The Wicker Man (1973).

During the early 70s, Kemp was a popular and inspirational teacher of dance/mime with a regular two and a half hour session at the Dance Centre in Floral Street, Covent Garden. This was in the days before the Dance Centre became an up-market private club, and anyone could and did drop in. Classes were sometimes taken by Lindsay's unsighted friend Jack Birkett (aka 'The Incredible Orlando') whose flamboyance and mastery was such that uninitiated newcomers could go through a whole session without realising that they were being taught (and corrected) by a blind teacher. It was said that Lindsay had 'saved' Birkett from despair by re-training him after he lost his sight.

Lindsay Kemp now lives near Rome, Italy.

Lorenz Hart

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Lorenz Hart born 2 May 1895 (d. 1943)

Lyricist Lorenz Hart is, with his musical partner Richard Rodgers, one of the greatest American songwriters of all-time.

His best-loved lyrics include Bewitched, Bothered & Bewildered, Blue Moon, My Funny Valentine and Where Or When.

Hart was born in Harlem to Jewish immigrant parents. He attended Columbia University, where a friend introduced him to Rodgers [pictured left with Hart], and the two joined forces to write songs for a series of amateur and student productions. They continued working together until Hart's death in 1943, along the way producing scores for a series of hit shows and making a substantial contribution to the Great American Songbook.

The partnership was instinctive and comradely, and ideas were worked out at great speed, Rodgers providing the melodies to fuel Hart's invention. Hart was a sophisticated perfectionist as a wordsmith, but endearingly disorganised as a person; Rodgers, the more methodical and business-like one, would take charge and handle all negotiations.

Hart struggled with his homosexuality in an era when such a lifestyle was socially unacceptable and with alcoholism, which eventually contributed to his death. Hart also suffered great emotional turmoil toward the end of his life. His personal problems were often the cause of friction between him and Richard Rodgers, and in fact led to a brief breakup in 1943, at which time Rodgers started working with Oscar Hammerstein II.

Rodgers and Hart teamed up one last time for a revival of one of their earlier hit shows, but within days, Hart died of pneumonia from exposure.

Julian Mitchell

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Julian Mitchell born 1 May 1935

Julian Mitchell is an English screenwriter and occasional novelist.

Mitchell is best known as a playwright and screenwriter for TV, producing many original plays and series episodes, including at least ten for Inspector Morse. He has written nine produced plays, including Another Country, which won the SWET (now Oliviers) award for best play of the year (1981). He has also written the screenplay for five movies, starting by co-writing Arabesque (1966), and including the 1984 film adaptation of Another Country, Wilde and Vincent & Theo.

After leaving school, Mitchell performed national service in submarines 1953-55. He then went to St Antony's College, Oxford, where he received a BA with first class honours. This was followed by a period as a Harkness Fellow in the USA (1959-61). Since 1962 has been a freelance writer.

In the late 1960s, Mitchell co-wrote the teleplay Arthur (Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire) with Ray Davies of The Kinks. It was never produced, though it gave rise to the band's concept album. Originally intended to be a full 'rock opera', the project got to final planning stages before collapsing through lack of proper financing.

In 2007 he wrote for BBC4 the drama Consenting Adults about Sir John Wolfenden and his celebrated 1957 report.

Julian Mitchell has lived with philosopher Richard Rowson since the late 1960s.

Julian Mitchell in The Guardian on 50 years of gay liberation in Britain.