American composer JOHN STRAUSS was born (d: 2011); An Emmy-award winning composer and music editor who wrote the theme music for Car 54 Where Are You? and The Phil Silvers Show. Strauss won an Emmy for sound editing for a TV movie about Howard Hughes and a Grammy for producing the Amadeus movie soundtrack album. But he is best known for the Car 54 theme, which is reportedly based on the second movement of Mozart’s G major Piano Trio (K. 564). Who knew?

Speaking of who knew...the New York Times obit for him when Strauss passed at the age of 90 had this paragraph: “Mr. Strauss’s marriage to actress Charlotte Rae ended in divorce. His partner afterward, Lionel Friedman, died in 2003” . Unless anyone can show me where “Lionel” is a woman’s name, it seemed to...um...stand out for me.

JOHN PAUL HUDSON, Gay activist, born (d: 1992); With all the humility his detractors claim he lacks, John Paul Hudson calls himself “a militant Gay journalist of the earliest days of Gay Liberation movement.” But that description is no more complete than would be calling a laboratory skeleton a living human being.

Hudson was a pioneer of the Gay press, a contributor to a half dozen of the earliest Gay periodicals beginning with Gay in 1969 and The Advocate in 1970, and including David, Gaysweek, NewsWest, Flash and Vector. He organized the first Gay Pride March in the wake of the Stonewall riots. In the years following Stonewall, he was a tireless organizer, his growing radicalism more and more reflected in his writing as he himself became increasingly disillusioned with the “organized Gay community” he’d helped to bring about.

Like many radicals he is pure of heart and intolerant of hypocrisy. Unlike most radicals, he is not self-righteous. Like all radicals he is unwilling to allow history the necessary time to catch up with itself, insisting that all social changes must be effected NOW. No wonder he became disillusioned.

More than three decades ago, Hudson (as “John Francis Hunter”) gave us those eccentric and literate guides, The Gay Insider (1971) and The Gay Insider USA (1972). Without them there could have been no States of Desire, no Gayellow Pages. John Paul Hudson was, in short, an innovator, with a spirit as impatient as his flesh was attractive.

Today, incidentally, is not his birthday, as some would report. That is March 21. But, according to Hudson, it is the anniversary of his awakening as a born-again radical (1970) and is thus commemorated here. He died in 2002 in Honesdale, PA.

FRANCIS BACON, Anglo-Irish painter (b. 1909); An Irish-born figurative painter, Bacon was a collateral descendant of the Elizabethan philosopher Francis Bacon. His artwork is known for its bold, austere, and often grotesque or nightmarish imagery. In 1964, Bacon began a relationship with 39-year-old Eastender George Dyer, whom he met, he claimed, while the latter was burgling his apartment. A petty criminal with a history of borstal and prison, Dyer was a somewhat tortured individual, insecure, alcoholic, appearance obsessed and never really fitting in within the bohemian set surrounding Francis. The relationship was, to say the least, stormy and in 1971, on the eve of Bacon's major retrospective at the Paris Grand Palais, Dyer committed suicide in the hotel room they were sharing, overdosing on barbiturates. The event was recorded in Bacon's 1973 masterpiece Triptych May-June 1973. In 1974, Bacon met John Edwards, a young, illiterate, handsome Eastender with whom he formed one of his most enduring friendships.

Bacon died of a heart attack on April 28, 1992, in Madrid, Spain. He bequeathed his entire estate (then valued at £11 million) to John Edwards. Edwards, in turn, donated the contents of Francis Bacon's chaotic studio at 7 Reece Mews, South Kensington, to the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin. Bacon's studio contents were moved and the studio carefully reconstructed in the gallery. Additionally draft materials, perhaps intended for destruction, were according to Canadian Barry Joule bequeathed to Joule who later forwarded most of the materials to create the Barry Joule Archive in Dublin with other parts of the collection given later to the Tate museum.

Bacon's Soho life was portrayed by John Maybury, with Derek Jacobi as Bacon and Daniel Craig (with some rather lovely frontal nudity of Craig) as George Dyer (and with Tilda Swinton as Muriel Belcher), in the film Love Is the Devil (1998), based on Daniel Farson's 1993 biography The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon. Available: http://www.tlavideo.com/product/1-0-111245_love-is-the-devil.html?sn=3809 A tough movie to watch in some ways, but five stars from this reviewer.