ALICE B. TOKLAS, American companion of Gertrude Stein (d. 1967); There are any number of stories that can be told about this homely woman, ranging from nasty cracks about her spidery mustache to vicious bon mots about the disfiguring hump on her forehead. But there is really only one Alice B., that one very beautiful indeed, who need concern us here.

Throughout most of her life, this selfless woman’s major occupation was the care and maintenance of Gertrude Stein. She was cook, secretary, manager, nurse and lover, and in return received s love as faithful and intense as any recorded in history of friendship. She was also a highly intelligent woman, whose correspondence reveals her to be a writer and commentator no less brilliant than her more famous partner. She called Gertude “Lovey.” Lovely called her “Pussy.” And they lie together, head to head, in Père Lachaise.

ALFRED EDWARD HOUSMAN, English poet died (b. 1859); A. E. Housman's poetry is inextricably rooted in homosexual experience and consciousness and is also a significant reflector of gay history. In 1942 A.E. Houseman’s brother, Laurence Housman, deposited an essay entitled "A. E. Housman's 'De Amicitia'" in the British Library, with the proviso that it was not to be published for 25 years. The essay discussed A. E. Housman's homosexuality and his love for Moses Jackson. Given the conservative nature of the times it is not surprising that there was no unambiguous autobiographical statement about Housman's sexuality during his life.

It is certainly present in A Shropshire Lad, for instance #30 Others, I am not the first / have willed more mischief than they durst', in which 'Fear contended with desire', and in #44, in which he commends the suicide, where 'Yours was not an ill for mending'... for 'Men may come to worse than dust', their 'Souls undone, undoing others': he has died 'Undishonoured, clear of danger, / Clean of guilt..'.

More Poems was more explicit, as in no. 31 about Jackson 'Because I liked you better / Than suits a man to say', in which his feelings of love break his friendship, and must be carried silently to the grave. His poem 'Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrists?', written after the trial of Oscar Wilde, addressed more general societal injustice towards homosexuality. In the poem the prisoner is suffering 'for the colour of his hair', a natural, given attribute which - in a clearly coded reference to homosexuality - is reviled as 'nameless and abominable' (recalling the legal phrase 'peccatum horribile, inter christianos non nominandum', 'the horrible sin, not to be named amongst Christians').