English nurse, writer, and statistician FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE was born on this date (d. 1910). She came to prominence during the Crimean War for her pioneering work in nursing, and was dubbed "The Lady with the Lamp" after her habit of making rounds at night to tend injured soldiers.

Nightingale laid the foundation stone of professional nursing with the principles summarized in the book Notes on Nursing. The Nightingale Pledge taken by new nurses was named in her honor, and the annual International Nurses Day is celebrated around the world on her birthday.

Historians like writing her up as a saintly prude but she was alleged to have once said, "I have lived and slept in the same bed with English countesses and Prussian farm women...No woman has excited passions among woman more than I have."

On this date the acting genius of stage and screen KATHERINE HEPBURN was born. She's also a Gay diva for those into great acting chops and killer dialogue. A screen legend, Hepburn holds the record for the most Best Actress Oscar wins with four, from twelve nominations. Hepburn won an Emmy Award in 1976 for her lead role in Love Among the Ruins, and was nominated for four other Emmys and two Tony Awards during the course of her more than 70-year acting career.

In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked Hepburn as the greatest female star in the history of American cinema. Do yourself a favor and watch, or re-watch, "Woman of the Year," "Adam's Rib," "African Queen," "Pat & Mike," "Philadelphia Story," and/or "The Lion in Winter." Celebrate a brilliant actor and the remarkably independent woman behind the roles.

There are reliable reports of her – at the very least -- bisexuality, which is not hard to believe. Gore Vidal himself has vouched for his buddy Scotty Bowers, who claims that he set Katharine Hepburn up “with over 150 different women” in his book Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of Stars. Vidal flew to L.A. expressly for the book’s launch party. He wanted to assure attendees that Bowers is totally telling the truth. In a speech, he told party-goers he’s never caught Bowers in a lie in the 60-plus years he’s known him, joking that L.A. is a town “where you can meet 1,000 liars a day.” We’d say that never catching someone in a lie is a little different than saying someone has never told a lie, but hey—good enough for us.

So that settles it: Katharine Hepburn was a very sexually active Lesbian. Case closed! OK...bisexual, maybe.

On this date GERRY STUDDS the first United States congressman to come out while in office, was born. (d: 2006), After retiring from Congress in 1997, Studds worked as executive director of the New Bedford Oceanarium. Studds and husband Dean T. Hara (his partner since 1991) were married in Boston in May 2004, one week after same-sex marriages became legal in Massachusetts. Studds died on October 14, 2006 in Boston, at age sixty-nine, several days after suffering a pulmonary embolism.

Due to the federal ban on same-sex marriage, then, Hara was not eligible to receive the pension provided to surviving spouses of former members of Congress upon Studds' death. If you ever travel to Provincetown, Massachusetts and take a whale watch tour out into the open sea, you will experience the beautiful wonder of the denizens of the Stellwagen Bank. It is now known as the Gerry E. Studds Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary, which sits at the mouth of Massachusetts Bay. An appropriate memorial for a man who's openness brought out the beauty from the depths.

Today is the birthday of Lambda Award winning writer and editor and the co-founder of the Lesbian Herstory Archives, JOAN NESTLE. In 1972 Nestle co-founded the Gay Academic Union (GAU) which soon began gathering and preserving documents and artifacts related to Gay and Lesbian history.

Her project became the Lesbian Herstory Archives. Nestle retired from Queens College in 1995 due to an illness that was eventual cancer diagnosis. She now lives in Australia with her partner, law professor Diane Otto, and teaches at the University of Melbourne. Her life was the subject of a 2002 documentary by Joyce Warshow entitled Hand on the Pulse.

Today is the birthday of American actor, teacher, director and dramaturge TED SOD. Born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, Sod has numerous theater, film and television appearances and productions to his credit. He is the chief dramaturge for the Tony Award-winning Roundabout Theater in New York City. His writing credits include the plays Not Sunset Boulevard, Salon, Satan and Simon Desoto, The Lost Art of Conversation and The Cousins Grimm.

He's directed How To be A Good Italian Daughter In Spite of Myself, Talley’s Folly, Wit, The House Of Blue Leaves, and Who Popped Papi Chulo? and Scarlet Sees The Light. Sod's television credits include Nurse Jackie, Ugly Betty, and Law and Order. He recently appeared at the Perth Arts Festival in Blank and Jensen's Aftermath and in Mona Mansour's Urge For Going at the The Public Theatre.

On this date the great American poet AMY LOWELL died. Lowell (b: 1874) never attended college because it was not deemed proper for a woman by her family, but she compensated for this with her avid reading, which led to near-obsessive book-collecting. She lived as a socialite and traveled widely, turning to poetry in 1902.

Her first published work appeared in 1910 in the Atlantic Monthly. The first published collection of her poetry, A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass, appeared two years later. Lowell was rather open about her Lesbianism. She and actress Ada Dwyer Russell were lovers. Russell was Lowell's patron and the subject of Lowell's more erotic work. The two women traveled together. Lowell has also been linked romantically to writer Mercedes de Acosta. Lowell was an imposing figure who kept her hair in a bun and wore a pince-nez.

She, like Obama Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan (just sayin’) smoked cigars constantly, claiming that they lasted longer than cigarettes. Her writing also included critical works on French literature and a biography of John Keats. Lowell's fetish for Keats is well-recorded. Lowell was also an early adherent to the "free verse" method of poetry. Lowell died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1925 at the age of fifty-one. The following year, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for What's O'Clock.

Forgotten for years, there has been a resurgence of interest in her work, in part because of its focus on Lesbian themes and her collection of love poems addressed to Ada Dwyer Russell, but also because of its extraordinary, almost frightening, ability to breathe life into inanimate objects, such as in "The Green Bowl," "The Red Lacquer Music Stand," and "Patterns."

In the United Kingdom the HOMOSEXUAL LAW REFORM SOCIETY was formed on this date. On this same day in 1960 the society would hold its first public meeting.

Edward Price, Assistant Dean of Students at the University of Texas rejected a request by the GAY LIBERATION FRONT to be recognized as a University of Texas Austin campus student organization on the grounds that they did not have a faculty advisor. This was, and continues to be the tactic of homophobic institutions in denying the creation of support and activist groups for Gay students and allies on high school and college campuses.

California decriminalized same sex acts between consenting adults.

Canadian police once again raid THE BODY POLITIC, the country's leading Gay and Lesbian newspaper, on charges of publishing an allegedly obscene article. Police charged all nine members of the TBP editorial collective with publishing obscene material, related to "Lust with a very proper stranger" article in its April 1982 issue.