HOWARD OVERING STURGIS, the novelist and eccentric was born on this date. A millionaire American expatriate, Sturgis passed his life in England knitting, embroidering and writing novels. He is best known for two: Tim: A Story of Eton and Belchamber. Affable and witty, Sturgis was a favorite with Henry James, Edith Wharton, and A. C. Benson, and the subject of a memorable sketch by E. M. Forster. Sturgis maintained a lifelong relationship with a much younger man, William Haynes-Smith, familiarly known as "the Babe", to whom his novel "Belchamber" is dedicated.

The scion of a wealthy New England family, his parents sent him to be educated at Eton College. He went on to study at Cambridge where he became a friend of the novelists henry James and Edith Wharton.

After the death of his mother in 1888 he moved, with his lover William Haynes-Smith, into a country house named Queen's Acre, near Windsor Great Park. Sturgis's first novel, Tim: A Story of School Life (1891), was published anonymously and was dedicated to the "love that surpasses the love of women." It describes the love of two youths at boarding-school.

He died on February 7, 1920. After his death appreciations of him were published by A.C. Benson, Edith Wharton, E.M. Forster and George Santayana, his cousin.

EDWARD MARTYN was born on this date. (d: 1923); Martyn was the first president of Sinn Fein, the Irish republican movement's political party, serving from 1904 to 1908. He was homosexual and the son of a wealthy Catholic family from Tillyra Castle in County Galway.

A pillar of the Celtic Renaissance, in 1899 Martyn co-founded, with the poet W.B. Yeats, what became Ireland's famous national theater, the Abbey. the Irish Literary Theatre (1899), which was part of the nationalist revival of interest in Ireland’s Gaelic literary history. He was the first President of Sinn Féin, which he co-founded with Arthur Griffith. He was a cousin and friend to George Moore, though their relationship was often antagonistic.

Violently opposed to British rule in Ireland, he was the center of a court case in 1905 as the result of an off-the-cuff remark in which he stated that "All Irishmen who join the English army ought to be flogged". He died in 1923, unmarried, and after donating his body to science, was buried at his own request in a pauper's grave. He was related to the Hungarian artist and sculptor, Ferenc Martyn (1899-1986).

Martyn was outed by his friend George Moore (1852-1933), a prolific novelist, critic, and polemicist, in his three-volume masterpiece "Hail and Farewell" (published between 1911 and 1914).

Moore, who was attracted to the handsome young Yeats, later fell in love with the celebrated French painter Edouard Manet, who painted three portraits of him. Moore was influenced by the homosexual Oxford critic Walter Pater, and Moore's 1879 work, Flowers of Passion, already contained references to Lesbianism. Moore's 1887 novel, A Mere Accident, also has a homosexual theme and its central character is again based on Martyn.

The poet JACK SPICER was born in Hollywood, California. Most often identified with “the San Francisco Renaissance,” he is associated with other poets of the era like Robin Blaser and Robert Duncan.and studied Old Norse, Anglo-Saxon, and German to prepare for a career in linguistics. This putative career was blighted by Spicer's refusal to sign the 'Loyalty Oath', a legal provision that required all California state employees (including graduate teaching assistants at Berkeley) to swear loyalty to the United States.

Although writing and living in the middle of the Beat movement, Spicer and Duncan stood oddly set apart from it, maintaining an approach to poetry and art that wedded aesthetics to intellect. Spicer's relations with his Gay contemporaries Allen Ginsberg and Frank O'Hara remained antagonistic: Ginsberg was too 'populist'; O'Hara a superficial versifier.

The lyric beauty, intellectual power, and formal invention of Spicer's poetry attracted a core of disciples who met in the North Beach bars and the San Francisco parks he favored. The open homosexuality of his core group, the 'Spicer Circle', resulted in the marginalization of some of the most moving love poetry produced in this century.

Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated in New Delhi, India by a Hindu religious extremist. Gandhi had ended British rule in India through nonviolent resistance. "Non-violence is not a garment to be put on and off at will. Its seat is in the heart, and it must be an inseparable part of our very being," he stated in 1926. His teachings were used during many of the Gay demonstrations of the 60s and 70s and were a major influence on Martin Luther King, through his Gay cohort and fellow organizer, Bayard Rustin, who studied with Gandhi and brought the idea of satyagraha (a synthesis of the Sanskrit words Satya (meaning "truth") and Agraha ("insistence", or "holding firmly to") back to the American civil rights movement

Today, the Gay Christian group Soulforce continues the uses Gandhi's non-violence practices in its demonstrations against Christian churches that discriminate against GLBT people. Advocates of nonviolence believe cooperation and consent are the roots of political power: all regimes, including bureaucratic institutions, financial institutions, and the armed segments of society (such as the military and police); depend on compliance from citizens.

On a national level, the strategy of nonviolence seeks to undermine the power of rulers by encouraging people to withdraw their consent and cooperation. The forms of nonviolence draw inspiration from both religious or ethical beliefs and political analysis. Religious or ethically based nonviolence is sometimes referred to as principled philosophical or ethical nonviolence, while nonviolence based on political analysis is often referred to as tactical, strategic, or pragmatic nonviolence.

Commonly, both of these dimensions may be present within the thinking of particular movements or individuals.

Coretta Scott King died in Rosarito Beach, Mexico on this. The great civil-rights activist and tireless supporter of gay rights succumbed to complications from a stroke and ovarian cancer. In arguing against a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage King said, "Gay and lesbian people have families, and their families should have legal protection, whether by marriage or civil union. A constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriages is a form of gay bashing and it would do nothing at all to protect traditional marriage."

In 2003, she invited the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force to take part in observances of the 40th anniversary of the March on Washington and Martin Luther King's "I Have A Dream" speech. It was the first time that an LGBT rights group had been invited to a major event of the African American community. King said her husband supported the quest for equality by LGBT people and reminded her critics that the 1963 March on Washington was organized by Bayard Rustin, an openly Gay civil rights activist.

The city of Yerba Buena, California is renamed SAN FRANCISCO a place that still holds a magical aura for Gay people everywhere. Also known as Baghdad by the Bay coined in the late 1940s by columnist and mainstay of San Francisco culture Herb Caen, likely reflecting the multiculturalism and exotic character of the city, while also identifying the city with a great historical cultural and intellectual center, as well as possibly implying a moral association with Babylon.

The Lesbian, Gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community in San Francisco is one of the largest and most prominent LGBT communities in the world, and is one of the most important in the history of LGBT Rights and activism. The city itself has, among its many nicknames, the nickname "Gay capital of the world", and has been described as "the original 'Gay-friendly city'". LGBT culture is also active within companies that are based in Silicon Valley, which is located within the San Francisco bay area.

San Francisco's LGBT culture has it roots in the city's own origin as a frontier-town, what SF State University professor Alamilla Boyd characterizes as “San Francisco’s history of sexual permissiveness and its function as a wide-open town - a town where anything goes". The discovery of gold saw a boom in population from 800 to 35,000 residents between 1848 and 1850. These immigrants were composed of miners and fortune seekers from a variety of nationalities and cultures, although over 95% were young men.

These transient and diverse populations thrust into a relatively anarchic environment were less likely to conform to social conventions. For example, with an unbalanced gender ratio, men often assumed roles conventionally assigned to women in social and domestic settings. Cross-gender dress and same-sex dancing where prevalent at city masquerade balls where some men would assume the traditional role of women going so far as to wear female attire.

On this date Belgium became the second country in the world to legally recognize same-sex marriage, with some restrictions. . According to the Belgian Official Journal, approximately 300 same-sex couples were married between June 2003 and April 2004 (245 in 2003 and 55 in 2004). This constituted 1.2 percent of the total number of marriages in Belgium during that period. Two thirds of the married couples were gay male couples; the remainder were lesbian couples. On July 22, 2005, the Belgian government announced that a total of 2,442 same-sex marriages had taken place in the country since the extension of marriage rights to same-sex couples two and a half years earlier.