T.S. ELIOT, poet, dramatist and literary critic, born in St. Louis MO (d: 1965) He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. He wrote the poems "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock",  The Waste Land, "The Hollow Men", "Ash Wednesday", and Four Quartets; the plays Murder in the Cathedral and The Cocktail Party; and the essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent". Eliot was born an American, moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 (at the age of 25), and became a British subject in 1927 at the age of 39. When he was living in Paris before WWI, he met a French medical student named Jean Verdenal in the Luxembourg Gardens. Werdenal was waving a branch of lilac at the time. Verdenal died in the Dardanelles in 1915. Eliot dedicated Prufrock to him, adding a epigraph from Dante’s Purgatory: “Now can you understand the quantity of love that warms me to you, so that I forget out vanity, and treat the shadows like the real thing.”

This is all we know about his friendship with the young medical student, and all we are likely to know. Other considerations: Eliot had a horror of the female body, he feared it, and thought it “smelled.” He had an abhorrence of sex in general, though as a boy, he masturbated guiltily and wrote a magnificently sensuous poem about it…an excerpt here:

Then he knew that he had been a fish

With slippery white belly held tight in his own fingers

Writhing in his own clutch, his ancient beauty

Caught fast in the pink rips of his new beauty.

Eliot obsessed with the thought that every man wanted to kill a woman, and without irony, extended his fantasy to all men. His first marriage was miserable in that his wife laughed in his face at the very idea of sleeping with him. These are the general facts, and various interpretations are offered by various biographers. Thus far, interpretations have run in two obvious directions. Of course he was completely asexual. Of course he was a latent homosexual. Either seems unfair in some way; he was simply T.S. Eliot. Perhaps the first queer?

ANTHONY BLUNT, born on this date (d: 1983), styled Sir Anthony Blunt KCVO from 1956 to November 1979, was a leading British art historian who in 1964, after being offered immunity from prosecution, confessed to having been a spy for the Soviet Union.

Blunt was considered to be the "fourth man" of the Cambridge Five, a group of Cambridge-educated spies working for the Soviet Union from some time in the 1930s to at least the early 1950s. He was the fourth discovered, with John Cairncross yet to be revealed. The height of his espionage activity was during World War II, when he passed intelligence on Wehrmacht plans that the British government had decided to withhold from its ally. His confession, a closely guarded secret for years, was revealed publicly by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in November 1979. He was stripped of his knighthood immediately thereafter.

He was a third cousin of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother: his mother was the second cousin of Elizabeth's father Claude Bowes-Lyon, 14th Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne. He was fourth cousin once removed of Sir Oswald Ernald Mosley (1896–1980) 6th Baronet of Ancoat, leader of the British Union of Fascists, both being descended from John Parker Mosley (1722–1798).

Blunt's father, a vicar, was assigned to Paris with the British embassy chapel, and moved his family to the French capital for several years during Anthony's childhood. The young Anthony became fluent in French and experienced intensely the artistic culture available to him there, stimulating an interest which lasted a lifetime and formed the basis for his later career.

He was educated at Marlborough College, a boys' public school in Marlborough, Wiltshire. At Marlborough, Blunt joined the college's secret 'Society of Amici', in which he was a contemporary of Louis MacNeice (whose unfinished autobiography The Strings Are False contains numerous references to Blunt), John Betjeman and Graham Shepard. He was remembered by historian John Edward Bowle, a year ahead of Blunt at Marlborough, as "an intellectual prig, too preoccupied with the realm of ideas". Bowle thought Blunt had "too much ink in his veins and belonged to a world of rather prissy, cold-blooded, academic puritanism".

Blunt was professor of art history at the University of London, director of the Courtauld Institute of Art, and Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures. His 1967 monograph on the French Baroque painter Nicolas Poussin is still widely regarded as a watershed book in art history. His teaching text and reference work Art and Architecture in France 1500–1700, first published in 1953, reached its fifth edition in a slightly revised version by Richard Beresford in 1999, when it was still considered the best account of the subject.

There are numerous versions of how Blunt was recruited to the NKVD. As a Cambridge don, Blunt visited the Soviet Union in 1933, and was possibly recruited in 1934. In a press conference, Blunt claimed that Guy Burgess recruited him as a spy. The historian Geoff Andrews writes that he was "recruited between 1935 and 1936", while his biographer Miranda Carter says that it was in January 1937 that Burgess introduced Blunt to his Soviet recruiter, Arnold Deutsch. Shortly after meeting Deutsch, writes Carter, Blunt became a Soviet "talent spotter" and was given the NKVD code name 'Tony'. Blunt may have identified Burgess, Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, John Cairncross and Michael Straight – all undergraduates at Trinity College (except Maclean at the neighbouring Trinity Hall), a few years younger than he – as potential spies for the Soviets.

Blunt said in his public confession that it was Burgess who converted him to the Soviet cause, after both had left Cambridge. Both were members of the Cambridge Apostles, and Burgess could have recruited Blunt or vice versa either at Cambridge University or later when both worked for British intelligence.

Like Guy Burgess, Blunt was known to be homosexual, which was a criminal offence at the time in Britain. Both were members of the Cambridge Apostles (also known as the Conversazione Society), a clandestine Cambridge discussion group of 12 undergraduates, mostly from Trinity and King's Colleges who considered themselves to be the brightest minds. Through the Apostles, he met the future poet Julian Bell (son of Vanessa Bell) and took him as a lover. Many others were homosexual and also Marxist at that time. Amongst other members were Victor Rothschild and the American Michael Whitney Straight, the latter also later suspected of being part of the Cambridge spy ring. Rothschild later worked for MI5 and also gave Blunt £100 to purchase the painting Eliezar and Rebecca by Nicolas Poussin.

Some people knew of Blunt's role as a Soviet spy long before his public exposure. According to MI5 papers released in 2002, Moura Budberg reported in 1950 that Blunt was a member of the Communist Party, but this was ignored. According to Blunt himself, he never joined because Burgess persuaded him that he would be more valuable to the anti-fascist crusade by working with Burgess. He was certainly on friendly terms with Sir Dick White, the head of MI5 and later MI6, in the 1960s, and they used to spend Christmas together with Victor Rothschild in Rothschild's Cambridge house.

His KGB handlers became suspicious at the sheer amount of material he was passing over and suspected him of being a triple agent. Later, he was described by a KGB officer as an "ideological shit".

With the defection of Burgess and Maclean to Moscow in May 1951, Blunt came under suspicion. He and Burgess had been friends since Cambridge. Maclean was in imminent danger due to decryptions from Venona as the messages were decrypted. Burgess returned on the Queen Mary to Southampton after being suspended from the British Embassy in Washington for his conduct. He was to warn Maclean, who now worked in the Foreign Office but was under surveillance and isolated from secret material. Blunt collected Burgess at Southampton Docks and took him to stay at his flat in London, although he later denied that he had warned the defecting pair. Blunt was interrogated by MI5 in 1952, but gave away little, if anything. Arthur Martin and Jim Skardon had interviewed Blunt eleven times since 1951, but Blunt had admitted nothing.

Blunt was greatly distressed by Burgess's flight and, in May 1951, confided in his friend Goronwy Rees, a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, who had briefly supplied the NKVD with political information in 1938–39. Rees suggested that Burgess had gone to the Soviet Union because of his violent anti-Americanism and belief that America would involve Britain in a Third World War, and that he was a Soviet agent. Blunt suggested that this was not sufficient reason to denounce Burgess to MI5. He pointed out that "Burgess was one of our oldest friends and to denounce him would not be the act of a friend." Blunt quoted E. M. Forster's belief that country was less important than friendship. He argued that "Burgess had told me he was a spy in 1936 and I had not told anyone."

In 1963, MI5 learned of Blunt's espionage from an American, Michael Straight, whom he had recruited. Blunt confessed to MI5 in April 1964, and Queen Elizabeth II was informed shortly thereafter. He also named Jenifer Hart, Phoebe Pool, John Cairncross, Peter Ashby, Brian Symon and Leonard Henry (Leo) Long as spies. Long had also been a member of the Communist Party and an undergraduate at Trinity College, Cambridge. During the war he served in MI14 military intelligence in the War Office, with responsibility for assessing German offensive plans. 

In 1979, Blunt said that the reason for his betrayal of Britain could be explained by the E.M. Forster adage "if asked to choose between betraying his friend and betraying his country, he hoped he would have the guts to betray his country". In 2002 the novelist Julian Barnes asserted that "Blunt exploited, deceived, and lied to far more friends than he was loyal to ... if you betray your country, you by definition betray all your friends in that country..."

Queen Elizabeth II stripped Blunt of his knighthood, and in short order he was removed as an Honorary Fellow of Trinity College. Blunt resigned as a Fellow of the British Academy after a failed effort to expel him; three fellows resigned in protest against the failure to remove him. He broke down in tears in his BBC Television confession at the age of 72.

Blunt died of a heart attack at his London home, 9 The Grove, Highgate, in 1983, aged 75. Jon Nordheimer, the author of Blunt's obituary in The New York Times, wrote: "Details of the nature of the espionage carried out by Mr. Blunt for the Russians have never been revealed, although it is believed that they did not directly cause loss of life or compromise military operations."

LILLI VINCENZ, born on this date, (d: 2023) was a German-born American lesbian activist and the first lesbian member of the gay political activist effort, the Mattachine Society of Washington.

Vincenz served as the editor of the organization's newsletter and in 1969 along with Nancy Tucker created the independent newspaper, the Gay Blade, which later became the Washington Blade.

Vincenz invited women to meet every week at her home during the 1970s to create a safe venue for gay women to discuss gay activism and other lesbian-related issues, and her home became known as the Gay Women's Open House (GWOH). These meetings became the Gay Women's Alternative. She described her decision in an interview: "I decided to have women come into our home every week for seven years, and it just became an establishment. And it was wonderful to have them come, and we had musicians come...lots of women who didn't know where to go, and they didn't want to go to bars, they just wanted to be in a plac that was safe, so we provided that.

Vincenz was the only self-identified lesbian to participate in the second White House picket with Frank Kameny in 1965. A January 1966 photograph of Vincenz, taken by Kay Lahusen, appeared on the cover of the lesbian magazine The Ladder, making her the first woman with her face showing to do so.

Vincenz made an appearance on PBS' David Susskind Show in 1971, along with six other lesbians, including Barbara Gittings and Barbara Love. They were among the first open lesbians to appear on television in the US, and debated long-held stereotypes about gays with Susskind.

In 2013, her papers, films, and other memorabilia were donated to the Library of Congress. Vincenz died on June 27, 2023, at the age of 85.

EMLYN WILLIAMS, Welsh actor died (b. 1905) In 1927, he joined a repertory company and began his stage career. By 1930, he had branched out into writing, and his first major success was with the thriller Night Must Fall (1935), which was made into a film in 1937 and again in 1964. His other great play was very different: The Corn is Green (1938), partly based on his own childhood, and also later filmed. In addition to stage plays, Williams wrote a number of film screenplays, working with Alfred Hitchcock and other directors.

He acted in and contributed dialogue to various films based on the novels of A.J. Cronin, including The Citadel (1938), The Stars Look Down (1940), Hatter’s Castle (1942), and Web of Evidence (1959). In 1941 Williams starred in the film You Will Remember, directed by Jack Raymond and written by Sewell Stokes and Lydia Hayward. The film is based on the life of the popular late Victorian songwriter Leslie Stuart, played here by Robert Morley, with Williams as Stuart's best friend.

He often appeared in his own plays, and was justly famous for his one-man-show, with which he toured the world, playing Charles Dickens in an evening of readings from Dickens' novels. On a personal note, this writer had the privilege of dining with Williams on a number of occasions in Los Angeles, through the friendship he maintained with one of my personal mentors, the late, beloved Alan Hodshire. It was at one such dinner with Mr. Williams that I learned the culinary delight of fresh cracked pepper on good vanilla ice cream. Try it.

His autobiography, in the volumes George (1961) and Emlyn (1973), was also highly successful. In it, he wrote frankly of his sexuality, though, as many Gay men of his generation did, he had married in 1935 and had a son; his wife died in 1970.