LEONARDO DA VINCI, Italian Renaissance polymath was born (d. 1519); How much of what is known about the sexuality of this greatest of history’s geniuses is fact and how much is speculation? Here's what we know:

(1) When he was 23 and working in Verocchio’s workshop, Leonardo was accused of having committed homosexual acts with one Jacopo Saltarelli, aged seventeen, and described as “a boy of ill-repute.”

(2) He complained in his notebooks of his attachment to his student Andrea Salaino, whom he nicknamed “Salai” “(“little devil”). Calling Salai a liar and a thief, he was nonetheless obsessed with the handsome young man to have left him a good portion of his estate.

(3) Francesco Melzi, Salai’s replacement as Leonardo’s assistant, was left the larger part of the master’s estate.

These are the known facts. That Leonardo chose his students for their looks is contemporary gossip. That all his female subjects were painted from young male models is speculation. That the Mona Lisa is actually a man is a pretty giggly idea.

Thirty years ago, the then-daring Sexology magazine attempted to prove this assertion by dressing up the famous painting with a boy’s haircut and clothing. Without knowing it, Sexology actually came up with definite proof that the Mona Lisa is really Julie Andrews.

HENRY JAMES, American author was born (d. 1916); In a brilliant series of articles, endorsed by James’s biographer Leon Edel, Richard Hall has shown that James was in love with his brother, the Harvard philosopher William James.

This finally puts to rest the speculations that have ranged (honest to god) from a severe, lifelong case of constipation to his having been hit in the nuts with a pump handle to explain why the famous writer seems to never have had a sex life.

For many years Henry James has been the darling of graduate students and other masochists, almost everyone else being bored to tears by his crabbed prose. Here is Somerset Maugham on the subject: “I don’t think Henry James knew how ordinary people behave. His characters have neither bowels nor sexual organs. [In James’s books] people do not go away, they depart, they do not go home, but repair to their domiciles, and they do not go to bed, they retire.” Late in life, James seems to have fallen for a sculptor, thirty years his junior, but it is doubtful that anything remotely physical transpired. James was seventy-two when he finally rusted.

BESSIE SMITH, American blues singer, born (d. 1937); When, in “Foolish Man Blues,” Bessie Smith sang “There’s two things got me puzzled, there’s two things I don’t understand;/ That’s a mannish-actin’ woman, and a skippin’ twistin’ woman-actin’ man,” she wasn’t the least bit puzzled. She was a good friend of the male-impersonator Gladys Fergusson and had been introduced to the world of women-lovin’ women by the blues singer Ma Rainey. Among her many Gay male friends was composer Percy Grainger.

Bessie herself slept with as many female members of her performing troupe as she could. So never believe that the songs an entertainer sings are necessarily true to their own lives. They’re just part of the act, that old show-biz scam.

KIRK LEMOYNE "LEM" BILLINGS (d: 1981) was a prep school roommate and then lifelong close friend of President John F. Kennedy. Billings took leave from his business career to work on Kennedy's 1960 presidential campaign. He had his own room in the White House and declined Kennedy's offers of official positions.

Billings was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on April 15, 1916, the third child of Frederic Tremaine Billings and Romaine LeMoyne. His father was a prominent physician and a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy. His mother was a Mayflower descendant and had ancestors who were prominent abolitionists linked to the underground railroad and negro education. The Billings family was Episcopalian and Republican.

Billings, a 16-year-old third-year student, and Kennedy, a 15-year old second-year student, met at Choate, an elite preparatory school, in the fall of 1933. Billings as a teenager was 6' 2", weighed 175 pounds, and was the strongest member of the Choate crew team. They became fast friends, drawn to each other by their mutual distaste for their school. From Billings' first visit with the Kennedy family for Christmas in Palm Beach in 1933, he joined them for holidays, participated in family events, and was treated like a member of the family. The Depression had hurt the Billings family financially, and Lem Billings was at Choate on scholarship. Billings repeated his senior year so that he and Kennedy could graduate from Choate together in 1935. They spent a semester together at Princeton University until Kennedy withdrew for medical reasons. While attending college, they frequently spent weekends together in New York City.

Friends from the 1970s confirmed that Billings was homosexual, but not open to discussing it. In 2006, looking back to the Kennedy Administration, Ben Bradlee said: "I suppose it's known that Lem was gay...It impressed me that Jack had gay friends." At the same time, he admitted that no one ever expressed the idea aloud during Kennedy's White House years. Red Fay, a friend of the President from his World War II service, said of Billings: "I didn't see anything overtly gay about him; I think he was neutral." One historian wrote that after the 1963 assassination Billings was "Probably the saddest of the Kennedy 'widows.'" Though newspapers often mentioned Billings attendance at major social events, they identified him either as the escort of a member of the Kennedy family or included him in a list of Kennedy friends. Otherwise he attended without a female partner.

Charles Bartlett, a journalist who introduced Kennedy to Jacqueline Bouvier and friend of both Billings and Kennedy, described their relationship: "Lem was a stable presence for Jack. Lem's raison d'être was Jack Kennedy. I don't think it's true that he did not have views of his own, as some have said. He had a very independent mind. He had interests of his own that Jack didn't necessarily share. He certainly didn't have the same interest in politics and women that Jack had." Though Gore Vidal thought Billings was "absolutely nobody," he also believed "it was a good idea that Jack had somebody he could trust like that around him." He believed Billings loved Kennedy.

"Jack made a big difference in my life," Billings said. "Because of him, I was never lonely. He may have been the reason I never got married."

Art critic and historian ROBERT PINCUS-WITTEN was born in Manhattan (d: 2018); Pincus-Witten wrote for Artforum Magazine for nearly 50 years and is credited with coining the term "Post-Minimalism" to describe a range of ideas and practices that began emerging in the late 1960s in response to the cool, dispassionate Minimalism, prevalent at the time.

Born Robert Alfred Pincus, he adapted his mother's last name and going by Pincus-Witten in an effort, according to his surviving husband, Leon Hecht, to be distinctive in his field. 

Mr. Pincus-Witten was the author of several books including "Postminimalism" (1977), "Eye to Eye": Twenty Years of Art Criticism (1984) and "Postminimalism Into Maximalism: American Art 1966-1986. He worked at the Gagosian Gallery from 1990 to 1996.

He died in February of 2018. Mr. Hecht, who Pincu-Witten married in 2013, had been childhood friends with his husband. Of his lifelong profession as an art critic, Pincus-Witten offered this: "I see the critical task 8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|

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