British novelist and playwright W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM was born in Paris. The famous playwright was twenty-one when Oscar Wilde was put on trial. It was enough to make him "publicly straight." He later said that his biggest mistake was "I tried to persuade myself that I was three-quarters normal and that only quarter of me was queer — whereas it was the other way around." Despite his wealth, his fame, and his secretary-companion Gerald Haxton, Maugham died a bitter man.

Lesbian writer VIRGINIA WOOLF was born in London. The most celebrated of the Bloomsbury set, her writing is cerebral, and subtle. Woolf's greatest love was probably Vita-Sackville West. Although married to Leonard Woolf, the ethos of Bloomsbury discouraged sexual exclusivity, and in 1922, Woolf met the poet and novelist Vita Sackville-West. After a tentative start, they began a relationship that lasted through most of the 1920s. In 1928, Woolf presented Sackville-West with "Orlando," a fantastical biography in which the eponymous hero's life spans three centuries and both genders. It has been called by Nigel Nicolson, Vita Sackville-West's son, "the longest and most charming love letter in literature." After their affair ended, the two women remained friends until Woolf's death in 1941.

Legendary French jazz violinist STEPHANE GRAPPELLI was born (d. 1997). Grappelli is best known as the cofounder of the Quintette du Hot Club de France with guitarist Django Reinhardt. It was one of the first (and arguably the most famous) of all-string jazz bands.

Born Stephane Grappelly (he didn't change his name to "Grappelli" until the 1960s), his collaboration with Reinhardt produced a musical pairing that was sort of the jazz equivalent of Lennon-McCartney or Jagger-Richards. A foil worthy of literature, Grappelli was openly Gay, fastidiously a tidy pianist and violinist.

Grappelli was born in Paris, France to Italian parents: his father, Marquess Ernesto Grappelli was born in Alatri (Lazio). His mother died when he was four and his father left to fight in World War I. As a result he was sent to an orphanage. Grappelli started his musical career busking on the streets of Paris and Montmartre with a violin.

He began playing the violin at age 12, and attended the Conservatoire de Paris studying music theory, between 1924 and 1928. He continued to busk on the side until he gained fame in Paris as a violin virtuoso. He also worked as a silent film pianist while at the conservatory and played the saxophone and accordion. He called his piano "My Other Love" and released an album of solo piano of the same name. His early fame came playing with the Quintette du Hot Club de France with Django Reinhardt, which disbanded in 1939 due to World War II. In 1940, a little-known jazz pianist by the name of George Shearing made his debut as a sideman in Grappelli's band.

After the war he appeared on hundreds of recordings including sessions with Duke Ellington, jazz pianists Oscar Peterson, Michel Petrucciani and Claude Bolling, jazz violinist Jean-Luc Ponty, jazz violinist Stuff Smith, Indian classical violinist L. Subramaniam, vibraphonist Gary Burton, pop singer Paul Simon, mandolin player David Grisman, classical violinist Yehudi Menuhin, orchestral conductor André Previn, guitar player Bucky Pizzarelli, guitar player Joe Pass, cello player Yo Yo Ma, harmonica and jazz guitar player Toots Thielmans, jazz guitarist Henri Crolla and fiddler Mark O'Connor. He also collaborated extensively with the British guitarist and graphic designer Diz Disley, recording 13 record albums with him and his trio, and with now renowned British guitarist Martin Taylor. In the 1980s he gave several concerts with the young British cellist Julian Lloyd Webber.

Grappelli made a cameo appearance in the 1978 film King of the Gypsies, along with noted mandolinist David Grisman. Three years later they performed together in concert, which was recorded live and released to critical acclaim.  Grappelli's music is played very quietly, almost inaudibly, on Pink Floyd's album Wish You Were Here. In 1997, Grappelli received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. He is an inductee of the Down Beat Jazz Hall of Fame. Grappelli is interred in Paris' famous Père Lachaise Cemetery.

Angela Davis was born on this date in Birmingham, Alabama. The American socialist organizer and professor was associated with the Black Panther Party and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Davis was also a notable activist during the Civil Rights Movement, and a prominent member and political candidate of the Communist Party USA. In recent years, she no longer identifies as a Communist, but rather a democratic socialist, and is currently a member of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism.

She first achieved nationwide notoriety when a weapon registered in her name was linked to the murder of Judge Harold Haley during an effort to free a black convict who was being tried for the attempted retaliatory murder of a white prison guard who killed three unarmed black inmates. Davis fled underground and was the subject of an intense manhunt. Davis was eventually captured, arrested, tried, and then acquitted in one of the most famous trials in recent U.S. history.

Davis is currently a graduate studies Professor of History of Consciousness at the University of California and Presidential Chair at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She works for racial and gender equality and for Gay rights and prison abolition. She is a popular public speaker, nationally and internationally, as well as a founder of the grassroots prison-industrial complex-abolition organization Critical Resistance.

Australian-born, British gay rights campaigner, social worker, journalist and author PETER TATCHELL was born.  Born in Footscray, Melbourne, Australia. In March 2001 Tatchell tried to make a citizen’s arrest of the Zimbabwaen President Robert Mugabe in the Hilton Hotel in Brussels, Belgium on charge of torturing Ray Chote and Mark Chavundula. Tatchell was beaten up and knocked unconscious by Mugabe's bodyguards. He led protests in Moscow against anti-gay policies of the Russian government and suffered beatings at the hands of security police.

In April 2007 he became the Green Party prospective parliamentary candidate in the constituency of Oxford East. In February of 2010, the UK's Guardian newspaper reported that Tatchell had to withdraw as a Green Party candidate for Parliament, due to the cumulative effects of the repeated beatings he has suffered. He told the Guardian: "I have problems with my memory, concentration, balance and co-ordination...I'm slower, I make mistakes more easily and I don't quite have the drive that I once had. I'm now prone to a bit of depression, but it's manageable. Tatchell's website is at www.petertatchell.net 

Today is ELLEN DEGENERES' birthday. The Emmy Award-winning American stand-up comedienne, television hostess and actress was born in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Degeneres started her career as an emcee at a local comedy club in New Orleans. She played the (leading) part of Ellen in the series Ellen. When she came out in 1997 as a Lesbian both in the series as well in real life the popularity of the series diminished. Chrysler bravely withdrew its commercials. But the 'Puppy episode', as it was titled, in which Ellen had her coming-out, received an Emmy-award.

She hosts the award-winning syndicated talk show The Ellen DeGeneres Show and has hosted both the Academy Awards and the Primetime Emmys. She served as one of the judges on the TV reality competition American Idol in the 2014 season.  She starred in two television sitcoms, Ellen from 1994 to 1998 and The Ellen Show from 2001 to 2002.  In 1997, during the fourth season of Ellen, she came out publicly as a Lesbian in an appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show. Shortly afterwards, her character Ellen Morgan also came out to a therapist played by Winfrey and the series went on to explore various LGBT issues as well as the coming out process.

DeGeneres received wide exposure on November 4, 2001, when she hosted the Emmy Awards-TV show. Presented after two cancellations due to network concerns that a posh ceremony following the September 11, 2001 attacks would appear insensitive, the show required a more somber tone that would also allow viewers to temporarily forget the tragedy. DeGeneres received several standing ovations for her performance that evening which included the line:

"We're told to go on living our lives as usual, because to do otherwise is to let the terrorists win, and really, what would upset the Taliban more than a homosexual woman wearing a suit in front of a room full of Jews?"

Her daily talk show is one of the most popular daytime television shows. Now in its 15^th year the show has won 59 Daytime Emmy Awards as of 2017, including four for Outstanding Talk Show and six for Outstanding Talk Show Entertainment, surpassing the record held by The Oprah Winfrey Show, which won nine. The show also won 20 People’s Choice Awards. In 2003 DeGeneres lent her voice to the role of Dory, a friendly fish with short-term memory loss, in the 2003 animated Disney/Pixar film Finding Nemo.  She reprised the role of Dory in the 2016 sequel Finding Dory.

The talk show's YouTube channel is currently charted as being in the top 20 most subscribed YouTube channels. On January 20, 2016, it was announced that the show had been renewed for three additional seasons through 2020. In 2015, she was named the 50th most powerful woman in the world by Forbes^[ and number two on the World Pride Power list. By July 30, DeGeneres has more than 71 million followers on Twitter and 47 million on Instagram, making her the sixth most followed user on Twitter and the 28^th most followed on Instagram. Her salary for her show is $75 million annually and her net worth is estimated to be $400 million.

DeGeneres was in a relationship with the actress Anne Heche and then the actress/director/photographer Alexandra Hedison before meeting her wife the actress PORTIA DE ROSSI in 2004. After the overturn of the same-sex marriage ban in California, DeGeneres announced on a May 2008 show that she and de Rossi were engaged, and gave de Rossi a three-carat pink diamond ring. They were married on August 16, 2008 at their home, with nineteen guests including their respective mothers. The passage of Proposition 8 cast doubt on the legal status of their marriage but a subsequent Supreme Court judgment validated it because it occurred before November 4, 2008. They live in Beverly Hills with three dogs and four cats.

AARON FRICKE was born in Providence, Rhode Island. At the age of seventeen Frick decided to take a male date to the high school prom. "The simple thing would have been to go to the senior prom with a girl. But that would have been a lie — a lie to myself, to the girl, and to all the other students."

He recounts the battle over that date in Reflections of a Rock Lobster: A Story About Growing Up Gay. Fricke successfully sued his high school for not allowing him to bring his boyfriend to the senior prom at Cumberland High School in Cumberland, Rhode Island. He later collaborated with his father, Walter, on a book about their relationship and of the elder Fricke's coming to terms with his son's homosexuality. 

That book, Sudden Strangers: The Story of a Gay Son and His Father, was published in 1989. It can be ordered here: http://www.amazon.com/Sudden-Strangers-Father-Stonewall-Editions/dp/0312078552/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1294856924&sr=1-1

The suit brought by Aaron Fricke against his school is considered a major milestone in the history of gay rights. Each year cases of young same-sex couples being discriminated against by their schools happen around the world, and when these cases are brought to court, the suit first brought by Aaron Fricke and Paul Guilbert is invariably cited by the plaintiff's counsel.

American composer ROBERT SHAW died in New Haven, Connecticut. Born in Red Bluff, California he is most famous for his work with his namesake Robert Shaw Chorale, with the Cleveland Orchestra and Chorus, and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Chorus. Shaw received 14 Grammy awards, the first Guggenheim Fellowship ever awarded to a conductor, the George Peabody Medal for outstanding contributions to music in America, the American National Medal of Arts, France's Officier des Arts et des Lettres, England's Gramophone Award, and was a 1991 recipient of the Kennedy Center Honors.

Shaw was a champion of modern music from the beginning of his career. He commissioned a requiem for Franklin D. Roosevelt from the newly naturalized German-born composer Paul Hindemith, who responded with When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d, a setting of Walt Whitman's poem commemorating the death of Lincoln. Shaw led the premiere of the work in 1946 with the Collegiate Chorale and continued to champion the work well into the last decade of his life.

in 1996 he conducted a 50th anniversary performance at Yale University, where Hindemith was a professor when he wrote the work. In 1998 Yale also awarded Shaw an honorary doctorate. He was also a recipient of Yale's Sandford Medal. Shaw also received the University of Pennsylvania’s Glee Club Award of Merit in honor of his vast influence on male choral music

Award-winning architect PHILIP JOHNSON died. Born Philip Cortelyou Johnson in 1906, with his trademark thick, round-framed glasses, Johnson was the most recognizable figure in American architecture for decades. In addition to his many large projects, Johnson produced dozens of such small works over his long career, on paper and built. In 1930, he founded the Department of Architecture and Design at MoMA and later (1978), as a trustee, he was awarded an American Institute of Architects Gold Medal and the first Pritzker Architecture Prize, in 1979. He was a student at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

With Henry-Russell Hitchcock he wrote The International Style: Architecture Since 1922 (1932), which provided a description of (and also a label for) post-World War I modern architecture. In 1940 Johnson returned to Harvard (B.Arch., 1943), where he studied architecture with Marcel Breuer.

His real mentor, however, was Ludwig Mies can der Rohe, with whom he worked on the widely-praised Seagram Building in New York City (1958). After WWII Johnson returned to MoMA as director of the architecture department from 1946 to 1954. His influential monograph Mies van der Rohe was published in 1947

Johnson’s reputation was further enlarged by the design of his own residence, known as the Glass House, at New Canaan, Connecticut (1949). The house, which is notable for its severely simple rectilinear structure and its use of large glass panels as walls, owed much to the precise, minimalist aesthetic of Mies van der Rohe but also alluded to the work of 18th- and 19th-century architects. (In addition to the Glass House, Johnson’s New Canaan estate featured a number of other structures, including an art gallery and a sculpture pavilion. He later donated the estate to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and in 2007 it was opened to the public.)

When Johnson died in January 2005, he was survived by his long-time life partner David Whitney, who died only a few months later on June 12, 2005.

South Africa adopted its post-Apartheid constitution. The breathtaking freedoms declared in this document made South Africa the first nation to bar discrimination based on sexual orientation.

Nearly 2,200 government employees involved in foreign policy issues signed a letter delivered to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton  calling on the government to give EQUAL BENEFITS TO SAME-SEX PARTNERS.

The Bush administration had eased some rules, opening up some training to same-sex partners, but had resisted efforts to treat homosexual partners the same as married couples.

But Clinton, during her confirmation hearings, indicated a greater willingness to explore the issue. "I think that we should take a hard look at the existing policy," Clinton, in response to a question from Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.) said "My understanding is other nations have moved to extend that partnership benefit."

The issue achieved prominence in 2007 when a respected ambassador, Michael Guest, resigned after 26 years in the Foreign Service to protest the rules and regulations that he argued gave same-sex partners fewer benefits than family pets. Guest said he was forced to choose "between obligations to my partner, who is my family, and service to my country," which he called "a shame for this institution and our country.

With the overturning of the Defense of Marriage Act by the Supreme Court in 2013, these benefits are now available to married Gay and Lesbian partners. There remains a looming threat, though, that they can be rescinded. The Radical Rightwing Religionists are hard at work to see that this happens. And every day, with this administration, have a judiciary and the Supreme Court they need to accomplish it.