Born October 5: John Addington Symonds

The granddaddy of us all. Shocked, bothered, and excited by a 17-year-old classmate's affair with their 41 year-old headmaster in 1858, John Addington Symonds slowly began to accept his own attraction to men. He married a woman at 24, and at 28 fell in love with young Norman Moor, about to go to Oxford. Their affair lasted four years and included a tour of Italy and Switzerland, inspiring his greatest output of poetry. In 1873 Symonds wrote his landmark gay book A Problem in Greek Ethics - Being an inquiry into the phenomenon of sexual inversion and finally published it in 1883... in an edition of ten copies. Nevertheless, as the first defense of gay love in English, it had an enormous impact on its daisy chain of many readers and inspired Havelock Ellis. From 1877 onward he lived mainly in Davos, Switzerland. He wrote seven volumes of Renaissance in Italy as well as separate studies of Dante, Michelangelo, Cellini, and his friend Walt Whitman to whom he inscribed this photo. In the final four years of his life, 1889-1893, he wrote the first openly gay memoir in English. We would have a lot more if Edmund Gosse hadn't burned Symond's papers. The youngest of his four children, all daughters, Katharine, was the first director of the Girl Scouts. The third daughter, Madge, is said to have been Virginia Woolf's first girl crush.