Band of Thebes

Born June 3: Wilfred Thesiger

A leading figure of the golden age of exploration, it's appropriate that Sir Wilfred Thesiger was awarded the Lawrence Medal and the Burton Medal, not least because they were all gay. Born in 1910 to a British diplomat in Abssynia, Thesiger was educated at Eton and Oxford where his only happy times were vacations (and beating Cambridge as captain of the boxing team). On his first college break he worked for his passage on a steamer to Constantinople. Returning, he found a personal invitation from Haile Selassie to attend his coronation as Emperor. On his second summer break, he worked a fishing trawler off Iceland. At 23 he went back to Africa, became assistant district commissioner in the Sudan, and learned to fast ride camels with the local men, adopting their clothes and diet. Said to call any invention more modern than the steam engine "an abomination," he hated the first world's intrusion on remote wilderness and peoples. In WWII, he fought with the Sudan defense force against Mussolini's Italians and with the Syrians against the Vichy French. A job with what became the United Nation's anti-locust program took him to the Arabia's famed Empty Quarter prompting his best work, Arabian Sands (now with an introduction by Rory Stewart), which the Guardian recently called "probably the finest book ever written about Arabia and a tribute to a world now lost forever." Thesiger's other masterpiece, The Marsh Arabs [and Kindle] (introduced by Jon Lee Anderson), covers the seven years he lived off and on with the people of southern Iraq. His travels in Asia with the Hindu Kush, the Karakorams and the Pamirs, are recounted in Among the Mountains. Chances are his autobiography Life Of My Choice avoids his homosexuality, but his gay side is somewhat integrated in Alexander Maitland's Wilfred Thesiger: The Life of the Great Explorer. Thesiger died at 93 in 2003, leaving 23,000 negatives of his photographs to the Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford. See fifty-nine of his images here and one below.

Born June 2: Wentworth Miller, Zachary Quinto

Light years beyond those soppy, uncomfortable People magazine "I'm a Gay!" cover stories, the next wave of actors are coming out in simpler, more natural ways. In October 2011, Zachary Quinto, then 34, came out midparagraph, midsentence, in a dependent clause, while discussing his role in Angels in America: "And at the same time, as a gay man, it made me feel like there's still so much work to be done." He is no longer dating Broadway actor, Looking star Jonathan Groff. Last summer, Prison Break's Wentworth Earl Miller III (top), then 41, came out in a letter declining an invitation to St. Petersburg's film fest because of Russia's deplorable homophobia. Wentworth was born in England to American parents, white mother, black father who was a Rhodes Scholar. In addition to his acting work, Wentworth writes screenplays, most recently Stoker, starring Nicole Kidman, Mia Wasikowska, and Matthew Goode. 

Born May 31: Walt Whitman

You could make a case that the Big Bang moment of the modern lgbt universe was Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, which he self-published in 1855 when he was 36. His open celebration of love between men was a major inspiration to Oscar Wilde and to Edward Carpenter and to scores of other towering queer leaders who have turned the tide of human history. Born in Long Island the second of nine children, he moved frequently with his poor and unlucky family and dropped out of school at 11. He jumped from job to job, teaching, journalism, government clerk. He was fired from his post at the Bureau of Indian Affairs after the new Secretary of the Interior read his book. Whitman became a nurse during the Civil War and in 1866 met his beloved Peter Doyle, a streetcar conductor. He lived until 1892. For the full story, read Gary Schmidgall's MLA Prize winning biography, Walt Whitman: A Gay Life. Ignore the generations of scholars who have tried to degay him, the contemporary critics who claim his homosexuality is "irrelevant," and his own late life prevarications about his having had a wife and children. Also, read the poems.

 

Born May 30: Colm Tóibín

This is his year: last month Colm Tóibín was named chairman of the PEN World Voices festival (replacing Salman Rushdie) and on October 7 comes his new novel Nora Webster, about an Irish woman widowed at 40 with four children, a certain contender for major awards. Twenty-four years ago, after being rejected by twenty publishers over two and half years, Tóibín’s debut novel The South was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award and won the Irish Times/Aer Lingus prize for first novel. Two years later his second novel, The Heather Blazing, won the Encore Prize. His third novel, the widely-prized The Story of the Night, set in Argentina, is included on Publishing Triangle’s list of the 100 best lesbian & gay novels. The Blackwater Lightship, his fourth, exploring the fractious family relations as a young man with aids comes back to die in County Wexford, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and was adapted for a tv movie starring Angela Lansbury and Dianne Wiest. The Master, his revelatory novel about Henry James, was an international bestseller. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, named one of the New York Times’ ten best books of the year, won the LA Times Novel of the Year award, and won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, worth 100,000 Euros. His Brooklyn was a highlight of 2009, when it was a bestseller and a Booker finalist. His story collection, The Empty Family, is flat-out magnificent and won the Lammy for gay fiction. His earlier story collection was Mothers and Sons and his newer essay collection is New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers and Their Families.

Three books Tóibín considers major influences on his work are The Sun Also Rises, Giovanni’s Room, and Go Tell It On the Mountain, and he told B&N his ten favorite novels, not in order, are: Company, Beckett; A Book of Common Prayer, Didion; Doctor Faustus, Mann; Daniel Deronda, Eliot; Age of Iron, Coetzee; Amongst Women, McGahern; The Portrait of a Lady, James; The Trial, Kafka; Things Fall Apart, Achebe; Island, McLeod; and The Enigma of Arrival, Naipaul.

Born May 29: Rupert Everett

Bitter about his stalled film career (thirty years since Another Country opposite a baby Colin Firth), sourly against gay marriage ("beyond tragic"), Rupert Everett at 55 has finally settled into the dual careers he was always meant to have, stage actor and author. Last year he was nominated for an Olivier Award for playing Oscar Wilde in a West End revival of The Judas Kiss, and he is writing a biopic covering Wilde's final years. Also last year he co-starred with Benedict Cumberbatch, Janet McTeer, and Rebecca Hall in a five-part minseries of Parade's End. He has published two novels, which I expected to be charming and frivilous and found to be charming and affecting: Hello Darling, Are You Working? and The Hairdressers of St.Tropez. His two memoirs, Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins and Vanished Years, are spiced with sharper flavors. He shifts between politely savaging the egomania of his more famous co-stars and dutifully recording the wisdom of his family: 'You were such a solitary child,' Granny says dreamily. 'Very quiet. You always played alone. You hated birthday parties. Now I read in Hello! that you're the life and soul of every party. What happened?'

Born May 28: Patrick White

When you count gay Nobel Prize winning novelists, do you get beyond André Gide and Thomas Mann? The Australian writer Patrick White, born in 1912, won the award in 1973. Although White never forgave his parents for shipping him off to a detestable boarding school in England, he inherited their conservatism and did not discuss his sexuality nor did he include openly gay characters in his work until 1979's The Twyborn Affair, which was short-listed for the Booker Prize. After winning the inaugural Miles Franklin Award for his enduring Voss, White declined that award a second time for Riders in the Chariot and refused all other prizes, asking the Booker judges to remove his name from their shortlist to give younger writers a chance. Obviously, he made an exception for the Nobel, but he sent his friend the painter Stanley Nolan to Stockholm to accept the prize on his behalf. He lived with a former Greek soldier his same age, Manoly Lascaris, who was his ballast and partner for forty-eight years. White finally came out when he was sixty-nine with the publication of his memoir, Flaws in the Glass. He died at seventy-eight in 1990, Lascaris survived him thirteen years. 

Born May 27: John Cheever

Closeted, self-hating, alcoholic, miserably married, and a frequent liar, John Cheever escaped by creating a more bucolic WASP suburbia in his beautiful fiction. Not coincidentally his most accomplished novel, Falconer [and Kindle], is the one that deals openly with love between men, (also not coincidentally) imprisoned. His masterpieces are his stories. He slept with everyone from Walker Evans when he was young to Allan Gurganus when he was old. (Read Cheever's memory of the Evans hookup here.) Blake Bailey was awarded a Guggenheim to write his biography, which went on to be a Pulitzer finalist and won the NBCC and the Francis Parkman Prize.

Born May 26: Alan Hollinghurst

Here are the five essential things to know about Alan Hollinghurst, 60 today and still the only openly gay man to win the Booker Prize: 1. his first novel The Swimming-Pool Library (winner of the Somerset Maugham Award), 2. his second novel The Folding Star (winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize), 3. his third novel The Spell, 4. his fourth novel The Line of Beauty (winner of the Man Booker Prize), and 5) his fifth novel The Stranger's Child (finalist for the Walter Scott Prize, longlisted for the Man Booker). Read them all. When he made his debut with The Swimming-Pool Library, Edmund White called it, "the best book on gay life yet written by an English author." Hollinghurst has only gotten better with time, though you should put The Spell last on your list. As one of the ten queer curators of London's Gay Icons show, his six selections included Ronald Firbank, Joe Dallesandro, Thom Gunn, and Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Born May 25: Ian McKellen

For anyone who still thinks being an out actor is a career-ender, study the numbers: Ian McKellen ranks #16 or #17 in all-time box office grosses, at $2.7 billion, far ahead of Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Adam Sandler, and homophobe Mel Gibson (#48), to name a few. Please note his two cash cows -- five X-Men movies so far, the sixth Tolkien movie this December -- came after he "shocked" viewers by purring down the red carpet, flaunting his four-decades-younger boyfriend Nick Cuthell, at the Oscars when he was nominated for the adaptation of Chris Bram's Gods and Monsters. Out since 1988, he co-founded Stonewall UK, the lgbt rights powerhouse, in response to the deplorable Section 28, and he's been an unabashed activist on queer issues ever since. He has won a Golden Globe, a Tony, a SAG award, two Critics' Choice awards, four Drama Desk awards, and six Olivier awards, and been nominated for two Oscars, four BAFTAs, and five Emmys. He was knighted in 1991. Playing off Sir Ian, Stephen Fry calls him Serena. He is also best chums with co-star Patrick Stewart. Their two-man show charmed everyone, which cannot be said of his BBC comedy with Derek Jacobi, Vicious. An avowed atheist, Ian got ordained online as a Unification Church minister and officiated Patrick's third wedding. Watch them together on Late Night. Or watch them fail at The Newlywed Game. Today he's 75.

Born May 23: Allen Barnett

The absolutely terrific writer Allen Barnett -- born in Joliet in 1955, studied at Loyola, moved to New York to act, died of aids at thirty-six in 1991 -- is in danger of being lost. His only book is out of print. His New York Times obituary said:

Mr. Barnett was the author of The Body and Its Dangers (1990), a collection of stories in which many of the characters are afflicted with aids. The book was a winner of a PEN/ Ernest Hemingway Citation. Mr. Barnett worked for the Gay Men's Health Crisis, helped to establish the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, and taught aids education to students of English as a second language at the 23d Street Y.M.C.A.

He is survived by his mother, Margaret Barnett of Joliet, Ill.; four sisters, Debby, Cindy, Donna and Rhonda, and two brothers, Dale and Ricky.

In addition to the PEN citation (a sort of runner-up to the actual award), The Body and Its Dangers won a Ferro-Grumley and a Lammy. Publishers Weekly said,

Barnett's willingness to venture into explosively emotional terrain with empathy, candor and balance is perhaps best revealed in his stunning "The Times As It Knows Us," where men sharing a summerhouse appear to have created family within the gay community--yet even this proves illusory.

Reviewing it for the Times Meg Wolitzer wrote,

The urgency of Mr. Barnett's characters, and their simple good will toward all that is human, carry considerable weight. He portrays their awareness of fragility with such candor and melancholy that they almost seem to be holding their own hearts in their hands.

Four years ago Christopher Bram wrote about Allen in the excellent queer lit rescue project The Lost Library: Gay Fiction Rediscovered [and Kindle] conceived and edited by Tom Cardamone. For serious readers, this book is a must for its 28 essays and its bibliography citing further works by more than 80 gay authors.

Born May 22: Paul Winfield

After three consecutive years of winning best actor at Speech and Drama Teachers Association Drama Festival during high school in Los Angeles, Paul Winfield received an offer of a scholarship to Yale. It was 1959 and he turned it down. Nine years later he played Diahann Carroll's boyfriend on the groundbreaking tv series Julia. In 1972, he earned a best actor Oscar nomination for his starring role in Sounder, and lived with his co-star Cicely Tyson for a year and a half. After that, he split for San Francisco where he met Charles Gillan Jr., an architect and set designer on "Married … With Children," "Who's the Boss?" "Mad About You" and "The Nanny." They stayed together for 30 years. Returning to LA, he again played opposite Cicely Tyson in A Hero Ain't Nothin But A Sandwich and yet again when he starred as Martin Luther King Jr. in the miniseries King, for which he and she were both nominated for Emmys. In the 80s and 90s he appeared in twenty-five films including Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, The Terminator, Presumed Innocent, Dennis the Menace, and Mars Attacks! Although open in his social life, he was closeted in public, yet played gay characters in Mike's Murder and Relax... It's Just Sex. Winfield appeared in recurring story arcs on L.A. Law, Touched by an Angel, and Picket Fences, for which he won an Emmy in 1995. Suffering from diabetes, he died of a heart attack at 64 in 2004, two years after his partner. (AP photo via)

Born May 21: Tom Daley, Raymond Burr

Here's how the new generation does it: At the 2012 London Olympics, 18 year-old Tom Daley won a bronze medal in the 10-metre diving event and earned a lot of admirers, many of them gay, who wishfully or not claimed him as their own. He went out a few times with a female American diver whom the media dubbed his "girlfriend" to no objections. In September 2013, at 19, he said, "I think it’s funny when people say I’m gay... I laugh it off... I’m not. But even if I was, I wouldn’t be ashamed. It wouldn’t bother me in the slightest what people thought. But I’m cool with my gay following. It’s great to have gay fans even though my friends gently take the mick." Cue straight sports commentators angrily denouncing gaydar. Three months later, in December, Tom came out as bisexual, surprising his grandparents who said he "always had girlfriends." Four months later, this April, he came out as definitely gay, not bi, surprising no one. Today he celebrates his big 20th birthday with his live-in boyfriend of six-plus months, Oscar winner Dustin Lance Black, who next month celebrates his big 40th birthday. (Daley's father would be 42 now if he hadn't died in 2011.) The new rumors are that Tom and Dustin plan to marry. I can get behind hot gay power couples but I'm still strict: Oscars and Olympic medals are no excuse for matching outfits at their first joint charity event. (top photo via)

It wouldn't take Perry Mason to figure out Raymond Burr was "acting" when he invented heterosexual details about his life in order to hide his gay relationships. His alleged first wife, "Annette Sutherland," was supposedly a British actress who died in the plane crash that killed Leslie Howard, but, as you've already guessed, British Equity has no record of an actress with that name and the doomed plane had only three women on it, all of them otherwise accounted for. Later Burr claimed to have had a son who died at ten of an incurable disease, possibly leukemia, and he even said he took a year off to travel the country with him as his dying wish. Yet his publicist at the time said Burr was working steadily that entire year, 1953, and that Burr "never mentioned any wife or son." However, one short-lived marriage can be documented.

Happily, Burr did have a very long relationship with fellow actor Robert Benevides. They met on the set of Perry Mason, together bought an island in Fiji where their passion for orchids eventually became a business back in California, sold their Fiji land in 1983, and spent their time on their farm in Sonoma, where they later started a vineyard. Among his many movie roles, his menacing turn as the killer in Rear Window came three years before his beloved television series Perry Mason which ran for 271 episodes from 1957 to 1966, and remained so popular it was later revived in 26 tv movies. Burr's next series, Ironside, ran for 195 episodes from 1967 to 1975 and it too spawned a tv movie comeback in 1993, the year Burr died of cancer. One of his nieces fought with Benevides over Burr's vast estate, questioning his right to it. They were together thirty-one years. Read Michael Starr's Hiding in Plain Sight: The Secret Life of Raymond Burr.

Born May 18: Don Bachardy

Eighty today, Don Bachardy has one more thing to celebrate: He helped bring out last week's collection of love letters The Animals: Love Letters Between Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy [and Kindle]. Overshadowed and overlooked, he is a lovely artist of these nuanced, revealing sketches of their famous friends, and a daring painter, whose official gubernatorial portrait of Jerry Brown hangs in the California State Capitol. In the documentary Chris & Don. A Love Story he thoughtfully discusses his life in art and the complex power imbalances of a 30+ year relationship that began when he was southern California teenager and his new English bf in his late forties was already an international literary star.

Died May 17: Sandro Botticelli

With an unknown birthdate circa 1445 Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi was appreprenticed to Fra Filippo Lippi in the early 1460s and within several years had his own workshop, from which he launched a stellar career that made him the quintessential Quattrocento artist of Florence -- very much including the charge of sodomy. Called Il Botticello (little barrel) he had a horror of marriage, never wed, dated young men, and -- with his priorities perfectly clear in his painting, as above -- was a favorite of Popes. Even more importantly, he was a favorite of Medicis, who commissioned many pieces including two of the most iconic works in Western art, The Birth of Venus and Primavera. After his death on May 17, 1510, he was forgotten and his work was ignored for 350 years. Of course, it took a gay man to rescue him from oblivion, Walter Pater in the 1870s. Get the oversized monograph with 200 color plates Botticelli: Likeness, Myth, Devotion or Ronald Lightbown's biography Botticelli: Life and Work. At left, a probable self-portrait and after the jump, more images.

Born May 13: Maupin, Chatwin, Smith

Seventy today, Armistead Maupin's legacy is doubly assured: Begun forty years ago, his important, enduring, and always readable Tales of the City series concluded with its ninth installment, The Days of Anna Madrigal, this January, the same month his Mary Ann, actress Laura Linney, and her husband welcomed their first child, Bennett Armistead Schauer. Those film adaptations in the early 90s were widely praised and greatly loved, and, inevitably, attacked by conservatives, especially because the first film was shown on PBS. Several state legislatures in the South officially condemned the series. No surprise, the frightened suits at PBS ignored the record breaking ratings and awards, and cancelled the sequel. Enter Showtime, which produced the next two adaptations and earned six additional Emmy nominations. Maupin's bravery in print was matched in action, fighting aids and for gay rights. Author of two novels outside the Tales series (Maybe the Moon and The Night Listener), he has written the screenplays for four adaptations of his work and wrote the excellent narration to The Celluloid Closet. After a twelve-year relationship with Terry Anderson, Maupin met and married photographer Christopher Turner. They left their beloved San Francisco and have established themselves in Santa Fe. 

A contemporary heir to Patrick Leigh Fermor's genius in travel writing, Bruce Chatwin's literary talent was matched by his personal panache. So brilliant, so handsome, so acclaimed, so willing to buck British convention, yet so tormented by his own prejudices. Unable to accept that he was gay, he married a woman, Elizabeth Chanler, in 1965, when he was twenty-five, and exclusively pursued men throughout their fifteen years of marriage. (She didn't mind, although she did ask for a separation in 1980.)

Chatwin's reflex for making up cover stories appears to have extended into his nonfiction. The local people of his marvelous travel books like In Patagoniaand The Songlines disputed the accuracy of some of his writing, claiming he embellished or created characters and conversations described as fact. Many episodes in those essays only make sense if you realize he is sleeping with the men he meets. Although there's nothing outright gay in his much loved first novel On the Black Hill, it concerns two long-time bachelor brothers who sleep in the same bed for decades. Even when he was dying at forty-eight in 1989, he remained so closeted he said he had a rare, fatal blood disease contracted in China from a bat bite, rather than say he had aids. One of his lovers was Jasper Conran; Chatwin died in the South of France in a house owned by Jasper's mother, Shirley Conran, and his ashes were scattered near Leigh Fermor's home in the Peleponnese.

Rupert Smith's output is so big and versatile he needs three names to cover it. His own literary fiction includes most recently the award-winning Man's World which follows two storylines of gay Londoners decades apart, both revolving around a trio of similar types made memorable by individual quirks: a quieter man whose best friend is screamingly camp and whose off-again-on-again lover is a hot bloke with serious self-acceptance issues. As in The Swimming-Pool Library, the historical characters (and the old men they become) are more interesting than the funnier but shallower contemporary club denizens. Rupert James is his name for swift, swirly Shirley Conran-ish fiction like Silk and Step Sisters. And James Lear delivers gay erotica in clever settings with actual wit: a country house whodunit (The Back Passage), a murder on a long journey aboard the legendary train The Flying Scotsman (The Secret Tunnel), a Civil War romance between a spoiled white heir and a runaway slave (Hot Valley), a Robert Louis Stevenson-style romp through Scotland in the 1750s (The Low Road), and a new work in the vein of Lee Child (The Hardest Thing). Generously, Rupert has posted on his site a list of his 101 favorite novels with a wonderfully opinionated paragraph about each. Later this year comes his new novel Interlude.

Born May 10: Blyth Tait

Born in Whangarei, son of a horse breeder, Blyth Tait won his first two of four world equestrian games gold medals at twenty-nine and his first two of four Olympic medals two years later at Barcelona in 1992. That year he topped the world standings at #1, a position he held for almost all of the 90s. At the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, Tait won a gold in individual eventing and a bronze with his team. Returning to the Olympics in Sydney in 2000, he was given the honor of bearing New Zealand's flag in the opening ceremony's parade of global athletic hotness, which for the first time included his partner Paul O'Brien, also on the equestrian team. Horribly, days before his competition Tait's horse died suddenly in quarantine, his back-up horse was rendered lame, and he failed to medal. At the Athens Olympics in 2004, he ranked fifth. After several years in retirement, he tried to win a spot on the New Zealand for the 2012 London Olympics. At least as of 2011, he and O'Brien were still a couple. In the history of New Zealand Olympians, he ranks fourth in total medals earned. Today he's 53.

Born May 9: Alan Bennett

Britain has been celebrating Alan Bennett's 80th birthday all week, and one notable interview came Tuesday on BBC Four when he explained his choice to stay closeted so long: "My objection about people knowing more about one's private life was that I didn't want to be put in a pigeonhole. I didn't want to be labelled as gay and that was it. I just wanted to be my own man, as it were." Read other interviews, praise, and commentary at the Guardian, the Daily Mail, the Telegraph, and the Independent.

 Much of his career as a playwright, screenwriter, author and actor been devoted to wry or gently comic emotional cripples, inhabiting worlds where happiness is as suspect (very) as it is unlikely (highly) and where unrequited love is a redundancy. His best known works are the adaptation of Prick Up Your Ears (gay playwright Joe Orton murdered by his lover), An Englishman Abroad (gay traitor Guy Burgess), The Madness of George III (crazy king), A Question of Attribution (another gay traitor, Anthony Blunt), and of course The History Boys. In 2011 reader Gary reminded me about Bennett's highly successful series of humorous and touching monologues, Talking Heads, which can be seen online. (Lovingly spoofed by Stephen Fry in drag.) The son of a Northern butcher, Bennett was accepted at Cambridge but, following a boy who didn’t like him, switched to Oxford where he took a first in history and, in 1960, joined Dudley Moore, Peter Cook, and Jonathan Miller to appear in the instantly famous comedy revue Beyond the Fringe. He also performed in The Secret Policeman’s Ball and The Secret Policeman’s Other Ball. Although he has been with his current partner, Rupert Thomas, for nearly 20 years, only recently has he felt comfortable discussing his gay life. And he's begun to create unqualified delights, such as the one even Michiko called “a completely charming entertainment: a small gem,” his novella The Clothes They Stood Up In, about a middle-aged married couple who return from the theatre to discover their flat has been robbed of absolutely everything, down to their last thumbtack and thimble. His hugely praised novella The Uncommon Reader, about the Queen's newfound love of literature thanks to a gay teenager, is a slender perfection. Since then he's published a memoir about his parents, A Life Like Other People's, and a pair of gay-inclusive tales in a short book wittily titled Smut [Kindle]. The same week that the British Library paid half a million pounds for Ted Hughes' papers, Bennett announced he is donating all his papers -- including decades of diaries and unpublished manuscripts -- to Oxford's Bodleian Library, in gratitude for his state scholarship.

Born May 8: Tom of Finland

In an era when merely entering a gay bar could mean jail time and the instant end of a career, Tom of Finland was boldly visualizing a world of healthy, happy, all-male sexual camaraderie that was hot and had a sense of humor. Then again, his fantasies of hyperidealized, turboerotic, uberbuilt masculinity guaranteed that reality would never measure up. For generations of gay men since the mid-1950s, his art has created an endless coupling of inspiration and insecurity. Born in Kaarina, Finland in 1920, Touko Laaksonen moved to Helsinki when he was nineteen and soon was drafted to fight in World War II. Afterward, he worked in an advertising agency while American physique magazines began to publish his drawings of rugged lumberjacks, cops, jocks, sailors, soldiers, prisoners, lifeguards, musclemen, and his enduring character Kake. In 1973, at the time of his first gallery show, in Hamburg, he was able to quit his job to draw fulltime. His second gallery exhibit, in Los Angeles, was not until 1978, followed by shows in San Franciso and New York, where he became friends with another artist whose work explored gay S&M, Robert Mapplethorpe. In 1981, Veli, his partner of twenty-eight years, died; Laaksonen survived him by ten years. The Finnish Culture Institute hosted an exhibit of his work in Paris in 1999, and in 2004 MoMA added several of his drawings to their permanent collection. Taschen's gigantic, oversized Tom of Finland XXL runs almost 700 pages, contains nearly 1,000 images, and includes essays by John Waters, Camille Paglia, Armistead Maupin, and Todd Oldham. Taschen also offers The Complete Kake. Later this year, Finland issues three stamps of his work.

Born May 7: Tchaikovsky

Swan Lake, The Nutcracker, Sleeping Beauty, Eugene Onegin, The Queen of Spades, the love theme from Romeo and Juliet, the 1812 Overture, Symphonies 4, 5, and 6 — what would the world listen to without Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky? Unfortunately, his private life was less sublime than his music. At 37, although he knew he loved men, he agreed to marry a female fan, Antonina Miliukova. Within two weeks of their wedding he tried to kill himself, hoping to catch pneumonia by soaking himself in the Moscow River. At the urging of his doctor, he fled to St. Petersburg and never saw his wife again, although he continued to support her. (The cost of the closet can be seen all around him: Miliukova had several children by other men, gave each infant to an orphanage and spent her final twenty-one years in a home for the certifiably insane. Tchaikovsky's brother Modest was also gay, and he too made an unhappy marriage.) Tchaikovsky enjoyed great renown during his lifetime and, among his countless honors, two days before he turned 51, he was the conductor at the opening night of Carnegie Hall. When he died at 53, sixty thousand people applied for tickets to his funeral, which for only the third time in Russian history was paid for by the Tsar.

Born May 5: James Beard, Del Martin

James Beard knew he was gay when he was seven in Portland and, acting on those impulses as soon as he got to college, was expelled from Reed in his freshman year for "homosexual activity."  He traveled with a theater troupe, spent several years in Europe, came home, and moved to New York still hoping to be an actor. He took a temporary job as a caterer and three years later published his first cookbook, Hors d'Oeuvre and Canapés, in 1940. After three more books he got his own cooking show on television and, in 1955, he established The James Beard Cooking School, which lasted 30 years until his death in 1985. His huge appetites extended to money and fame, leading him to many, many endorsement deals that contradicted everything he preached in the kitchen. Despite a famous temper, he could be a nurturing mentor and loyal friend, and with Gael Greene he founded Citymeals-on-Wheels. He is openly gay in his memoir Delights And Prejudices and his collection of letters Love and Kisses and a Halo of Truffles. Two biographies are Epicurean Delight: The Life and Times of James Beard by longtime friend Evan Jones, husband of legendary editor Judith Jones, and The Solace of Food by Robert Clark.

Del Martin died in August 2008 at 87, widowing a wife with whom she spent 55 years championing the rights of the denigrated and disenfranchised. In 1955, when homosexuality was illegal, she, her life partner Phyllis Lyon, and six other lesbians founded the Daughters of Bilitis in her native San Francisco. By 1960 DOB chapters were active in nine cities nationwide and their magazine, The Ladder, was thriving despite most readers' need for secrecy. Even in friendly waters, they had to fight the tides against lesbians, both among straight women in NOW and gay men in the queer equality movement. Martin addressed the latter situation in her landmark article, "Goodbye, My Alienated Brothers," which appeared in the Advocate in 1970. Two years later, she and Lyon were instrumental in forming the Alice B. Toklas Democratic Club, and they published their seminal book Lesbian/Woman. In 1979 they were honored by a group of medical professionals who wanted to start a clinic for lesbians who lacked health care, and they chose the name Lyon-Martin Health Services. In 1995 they were named separately as delegates to the White House Conference on Aging. Ever the trailblazers, Martin [above right, left left] and Lyon were the very first gay couple to be married in San Francisco in February 2004. If there is anything good about her death, it's that she did not have to see Prop 8 pass three months later. Click here to watch them describes the early hurdles they faced in forming and growing DOB during a time when they could not advertise their existence.