HORATIO FORBES BROWN, English writer and historian, born (d: 1926); Alas, poor Brown. When the English writer died in 1926, his executors burned almost all his unpublished works, attempting to hide what his acquaintances already knew. Like the tastes of so many of his upper-class colleagues, and his close friend John Addington Symonds, Brown’s ran to sailors, footmen, tram conductors, and other strapping members of the lower orders. One of his surviving poems, a psychological gem, depicts a boring society musicale in which Brown can’t keep his eyes off a broad-shouldered servant when he should be concentrating on the performing artiste. Each stanza ends with the line, “But I liked their footman John the best.” And he did, too.

KATHARINE CORNELL, American actress born (d. 1974); A stage actress, writer, and theater owner and producer noted for her major Broadway roles in serious dramas, often directed by her husband, Guthrie McClintic.

For forty years, actress Katharine Cornell and her husband, director Guthrie McClintic, sustained one of the most celebrated and successful partnerships in the American theater. McClintic first directed Cornell in 1925 when she starred as Iris March in Michael Arlen's The Green Hat. They went on to collaborate on a total of twenty-eight productions, most of which they presented under their own management. They achieved their greatest success in 1931 when, under McClintic's direction, Cornell portrayed Elizabeth Barrett in Rudolph Besier's The Barretts of Wimpole Street.

Even in theatrical circles, little was known about Cornell's and McClintic's sexual lives beyond the general knowledge that both were Gay. However, it seems clear that their relationship was a nonsexual one, at least after the first few years, and that both partners consistently pursued same-sex attachments. Nevertheless, McClintic and Cornell remained a devoted couple from their marriage in 1921 until McClintic's death.

SUSAN B. ANTHONY, American feminist and suffragist, born (d: 1906) If the federal government had deliberately set out to sabotage the first American coin to commemorate a woman, and perhaps it did, it could not have done better than to choose Susan B. Anthony as the honorand.

Not merely the funny shape of the Anthony dollar killed it; the choice of Susan B. helped. It’s not that the pioneering American feminist isn’t a great figure worthy of respect and honor; she is. It’s the confusion in the public mind as to who she was, most people thinking that she carried a hatchet and demolished saloons, the old bat. Carrie Nation she wasn’t, but it’s the clothes of her period that confuse and put off people. Every woman of a certain age looked like Whistler’s mother then, or like doilies on an easy chair in mourning.

What Susan B. needed was a modern image, the way the White Rock Girl and Betty Crocker have been periodically updated. Perhaps it would have helped to publicize her love letters to Anna Dickinson – the ones that began, “My Dear Chicky Dicky Darling.”

JOHN SCHLESINGER, English film director was born (d. 2003); The great English film director was an unheralded pioneer. His Midnight Cowboy (1969) was kicked to pieces by the critics for being too Gay, and by militant Gays for not being Gay enough. Even Vito Russo, in The Celluloid Closet, pummels the film for daring to present “homosexuals as losers and freaks.” Didn’t anyone bother to read James Leo Herlihy’s book in which everyone, by virtue of living in the 20^th century, is a loser and a freak? If Schlesinger got it between the eyes for Midnight Cowboy, his even better film, Sunday, Bloody Sunday (1971) was (in America, at least) a box-office bomb.

Who was going to pay good money to see, ick, anything as disgusting as two men kissing? A decade later Americans were queuing up around the block to see Michael Caine and Christopher Reeve lock lips in Death Trap and actually applauding the big moment. Poor John Schelsinger. It never pays to be the first kid on the block.

Schlesinger underwent a quadruple heart bypass in 1998, before suffering a stroke in December 2000. He was taken off life support at Desert Regional Medical Center in Palm Springs on July 24, 2003 by his life partner of over thirty years, photographer Michael Childers. Schlesinger died early the following day at the age of 77.