DIRK BOGARDE, English actor (d. 1999); Sir Derek Jules Gaspard Ulric Niven van den Bogaerde, better known by his stage name Dirk Bogarde, was an actor and author.

Bogarde's most serious friendship with a woman was with the bisexual French actress Capucine. For many years he shared his homes, first in Amersham, England, then in France with his manager Anthony Forwood (a former husband of the actress Glynis Johns and the father of her only child, actor Gareth Forwood), but repeatedly denied that their relationship was anything other than friendship.

These denials were understandable, mainly given that homosexual acts were illegal during most of his career, and also given his following among female admirers which he was loath to jeopardize. His brother Gareth Van den Bogaerde confirmed in a 2004 interview that Bogarde was Gay at a time when such acts were illegal, and also that his long-term relationship with Tony Forwood was more than simply that of a manager and friend.

Bogarde starred in the landmark 1961 Victim, playing a prominent homosexual barrister in London who fights the blackmailers of a young man with whom he had an emotional relationship. The young man commits suicide after being arrested for embezzlement, rather than ruining the attorney's reputation. In the process of exposing the ring of extortionists, Bogarde's character puts at risk his successful legal career and marriage to see that justice is served.

Victim was the first mainstream British film to treat the subject of homosexuality seriously and the film helped lead to the changing of the law. Before agreeing to play this role, which argued for the decriminalization of homosexual acts, Bogarde had specialized in playing leading men in light comedies. “It was a tremendous departure, playing ‘my first queer,’” he wrote. “The fanatics who had been sending me 4,000 letters a week stopped overnight...not because I was playing a homosexual, but because I was playing a middle-age man.”

BUD CORT, American actor, born; As a teenager Cort was a local portrait painting prodigy and began taking acting lessons. He was discovered in a revue by director Robert Altman, who subsequently cast him in two of his movies, M.A.S.H. and Brewster McCloud (in the title role).

But Cort’s most iconic role, was as the suicide-obsessed Harold, in Harold and Maude with the legendary Ruth Gordon. Though the film was not particularly successful at the time of its release, it gained international cult status and now is acclaimed as an American film classic.

On Broadway, Cort appeared in the short-lived 1972 play Wise Child by Simon Gray. Cort was invited to live with the famous comedian Groucho Marx in his Bel Air mansion, and was present at Marx's death in 1977.

In 1979, Bud’s life nearly ended in a near-fatal car accident on the Hollywood Freeway. From behind, he collided with an abandoned car blocking a lane into which he was turning. Years of plastic surgery, enormous hospital bills, a losing court case, and the disruption of his career ensued.

Since, Cort has appeared in various film, stage and TV roles: Endgame, He Who Gets Slapped, Sledge Hammer!, The Chocolate War, The Big Empty, Theodore Rex, Dogma, But I’m a Cheerleader, Pollack, Arrested Development, The Secret Diary of Sigmund Freud and The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou.

On a November 2007 original episode of Ugly Betty, he made a guest appearance as the priest officiating at Wilhemina Slater’s ill-fated wedding.

CHRIS BARTLETT is a Gay activist, feminist, educator, and researcher who lives in Philadelphia, PA, and currently is the Executive Director of The William Way Community Center. Chris was born on this date.

In 2003, Bartlett joined forces with the late Gay activist Eric Rofes to create the Gay Men’s Health Leadership Academy, a national center for excellence for leadership development of Gay and bisexual men and their allies based at the White Crane Institute. The Academy hosts biannual retreats on the East Coast in Greenwich, New York and the West Coast in Guerneville, California, and also works with organizations and governments to strengthen their cadres of Gay leadership. After Rofes death, the program was co-facilitated by Kevin Trimell Jones of Philadelphia, PA; Fred Lopez of San Francisco, CA; Scott Pegues of Denver, CO; and Kaijson Noilmar of Seattle, WA.

In 2005, Chris directed the LGBT Community Assessment, an assessment of the broad health related needs of LGBT populations in the Philadelphia region. The City of Philadelphia and Philadelphia Foundation subsequently funded an LGBT Youth Assessment, which he also directed.

In 2008, Bartlett received a grant from the Arcus Foundation to create the LGBT Leadership Initiative, a convening of thinkers in the United States about the strategic leadership needs of LGBT communities in the United States. His leadership interests include intergenerational communication and connection, as well as mentorship of younger leaders. In the November, 2008 Instinct Magazine he was named one of the "Leading Men of 2008."

He has created an on-line Wiki to document the deaths of gay men from HIV/AIDS between 1981 and the present. The site acts as an on-line AIDS quilt, on which community members and families can document the lives of their friends and loved ones.

Bartlett is also a long-time leader in the Gay Men’s Health Movement, both nationally and internationally. He has participated in each of the Gay Men’s Health Summits and LGBTI Health Summits as an organizer and presenter, as well as presenting at the Warning Gay Men’s Health Summit in Paris, France in 2005.

His work has shown a continuing interest in participatory democracy, starting with his early participation in ACT-UP Philadelphia. His current work focuses on the role of social media, including Twitter, Facebook, Ning, and other tools in developing on-line communities that can participate in effective social change.

Out of his engagement in social media work, he hosted the TEDx conferences in Philadelphia on November 18, 2010 and November 8, 2011. He is a member of the Philadelphia circle of Radical Faeries. During his tenure at the William Way Community Center, he has focused on community building through arts and culture, technological innovation, and intergenerational approaches. He has been a leader in the effort to build housing that is friendly for LGBT seniors. In 2013 under Bartlett's leadership the community center has received grants to fund the nation's first LGBT Jazz Festival (2014) and a city-wide exploration of LGBT history in Philadelphia (2015)

His writings include “Levity and Gravity", in Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore's Why are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots: Flaming Challenges to Masculinity, Objectification and the Desire to Conform; and “Choosing Faerie" in White Crane Books’ The Fire in Moonlight: Stories from the Radical Faeries 1975-2010 edited by Mark Thompson and myself.

Actor, singer, JAY BRANNAN born; Brannan was cast in 2003 for the movie Shortbus which featured him in a sex scene, and worked as a proofreader and in other jobs to support himself. He contributed the song "Soda Shop" to the film's soundtrack, which he stated was his "first professionally recorded track". Brannan began to record sparse music videos for YouTube, playing songs with guitar, and built an international fan base without corporate sponsorship, using MySpace and Blogspot. In 2007, he appeared in the movie Holding Trevor as the promiscuous best friend of the protagonist, and released a limited-edition EP with four songs named disasterpiece or Unmastered and added two additional songs for a 2008 rerelease.

In July 2008, Brannan released the album goddamned through his own label, Great Depression Records, and toured ten dates, when he had previously toured with about four dates in a row. The same year, Brannan left his proofreading job and sustained himself with earnings from concerts and merchandise. His second album, In Living Color, was released 2009 and reached number ten on the Billboard Top HeatSeekerschart for the week of July 25, 2009. He was voted “#1 Most Eligible Bachelor” by OUT Magazine in February 2011.

ADRIENNE RICH, a pioneering feminist poet and essayist who challenged what she considered to be the myths of the American dream, died on this date. She was 82.

The recipient of such literary awards as the Yale Young Poets prize, the National Book Award, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize and the Dorothea Tanning Award given by the Academy of American Poets, Rich died Tuesday at her home in Santa Cruz of complications from long-term rheumatoid arthritis, said a son, Pablo Conrad.

She came of age during the social upheavals of the 1960s and '70s and was best known as an advocate of women's rights, which she wrote about in both her poetry and prose. But she also wrote passionate antiwar poetry and took up the causes of the marginalized and underprivileged. She has been called "one of the most widely read and influential poets of the second half of the 20th century."

From her first book of poems in the early 1950s, Rich, a Baltimore native who attended Radcliffe College, showed her feminist bearings.Twenty years later, her image was set when universities began introducing courses in women's studies and Rich was among the most likely writers to be included.

In 1976, Rich began her lifelong partnership with Jamaican-born novelist and editor Michelle Cliff. In her controversial work Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, published the same year, Rich acknowledged that, for her, Lesbianism was both a political as well as a personal issue, writing, "The suppressed Lesbian I had been carrying in me since adolescence began to stretch her limbs." The pamphlet Twenty-One Love Poems (1977), which was incorporated into the following year's Dream of a Common Language (1978), marked the first direct treatment of lesbian desire and sexuality in her writing, themes which run throughout her work afterwards, especially in A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far (1981) and some of her late poems in The Fact of a Doorframe.  

Selected for the National Medal for the Arts in 1997, the highest award given to artists, Rich refused it. “The radical disparities of wealth and power in America are widening at a devastating rate,” she wrote in a letter addressed to then-President Clinton. “A president cannot meaningfully honor certain token artists while the people at large are so dishonored.”

One of my personal favorite quotes from Ms. Rich: “We might possess every technological resource... but if our language is inadequate, our vision remains formless, our thinking and feeling are still running in the old cycles, our process may be "revolutionary" but not transformative.”

The Twenty-third Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is ratified, allowing residents of Washington D.C. to vote in Presidential elections. They are still not represented in Congress though they pay Federal income tax.