CHARLES ROBERT ASHBEE was born on this date. Ashbee was a designer and entrepreneur who was a prime mover of the English Arts and Crafts movement that took its craft ethic from the works of John Ruskin and its co-operative structure from the socialism of William Morris. He was the son of businessman and erotic bibliophile Henry Spencer Ashbee. He received his education at Wellington College.

After reading history at King's College, Cambridge from 1883 to 1886, and studying under the architect George Frederick Bodley, Ashbee set up his Guild and School of Handicraft in 1888, while a resident at Toynbee Hall, a settlement in Whitechapel, London. The fledgling venture was first housed in temporary space but by 1890 had workshops at Essex House, Mile End Road, in the East End, with a retail outlet in the heart of the West End in fashionable Brook Street, Mayfair, more accessible to the Guild's patrons.

In 1902 the works moved to Chipping Campden, in the picturesque Cotswolds of Gloucestershire, where a sympathetic community provided local patrons, but where the market for craftsman-designed furniture and metalwork was saturated by 1905.

TAMARA DE LEMPICKA, Polish Art Deco painter, born (d: 1980); born Maria Górska in Warsaw, her distinctive and bold artistic style developed quickly (influenced by what Lhote sometimes referred to as "soft cubism" and by Denis' "synthetic cubism") and epitomized the cool yet sensual side of the Art Deco movement. For her, Picasso "embodied the novelty of destruction." She thought that many of the Impressionists drew badly and employed "dirty" colors. De Lempicka technique would be novel, clean, precise, and elegant.

During the Roaring 20s Paris, Tamara de Lempicka was part of the bohemian life: she knew Picasso, Cocteau and Andre Gide. Famous for her libido, she was bisexual, and her affairs with both men and women were carried out in ways that were scandalous at the time. She often used formal and narrative elements in her portraits and nude studies to produce overpowering effects of desire and seduction. In the 1920s she became closely associated with Lesbian and bisexual women in writing and artistic circles, such as Violet Trefusis, Vita Sackville-West and Colette. She also became involved with Suzy Solidor, a night club singer at Boite de Nuit, whom she later painted. Her husband eventually tired of their arrangement; he abandoned her in 1927, and they were divorced in 1928.

Today is the birthday of the sequined pianist and entertainer LIBERACE (d: 1987). A lovely man, he was, alas, as closeted as they come, despite his parade of “drivers,” “assistants” and “protégés.” Born in Wisconsin, Lee was a product of his generation. All I can offer -- as someone who worked with him at one time as his publicist -- is that when he found out we were born on the same day, he gave me a “diamond” the size of a small egg. I treasure it to this day. A bio-pic of Lee’s life, Behind the Candelabra was directed by Steven Soderbergh, with Michael Douglas playing Liberace and Matt Damon playing his lover/chauffeur, Scott Thorsen. Liberace died of AIDS in 1987.

On this date the writer who created Auntie Mame was born in Chicago. PATRICK DENNIS was almost as camp as his heroine and is the only author to have had three novels on the New York Times best-seller list at the same time (for 8 weeks in 1956).

Poet, essayist and theorist ADRIENNE RICH was born. In 1953 (d: 2012), Rich married Alfred Haskell Conrad, an economics professor at Harvard, whom she had met as an undergraduate. She had said of the match "I married in part because I knew no better way to disconnect from my first family [...] I wanted what I saw as a full woman's life, whatever was possible." They settled in Cambridge, Mass/ and had three sons - David in 1955 (now a graphic designer), Paul in 1957 (now an elementary school music teacher) and Jacob in 1959 (now a radio producer). In 1955 she published her second volume, The Diamond Cutters, a collection she says she wishes had not been published. In 1964, Rich joined the New Left and in 1966, she moved with her family to New York, becoming involved in anti-war, civil rights and feminist activism; her husband took a teaching position at City College of New York. In 1968, she signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War. Rich's activism and increasing politicization are reflected the poems in her next three collections. Increasingly militant, Rich hosted anti-Vietnam and Black Panther fundraising parties at their apartment; tensions began to split the marriage, Conrad fearing that his wife had lost her mind. The couple separated in mid-1970 and shortly afterward, in October, Conrad drove into the woods and shot himself.

In coming out as a lesbian in 1976, Rich's feminist position crystallized. In this year she published the controversial volume Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. She wrote, "The suppressed lesbian I had been carrying in me since adolescence began to stretch her limbs," lesbianism pressing as a political as much as a personal imperative. 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 work. A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far (1981) and some of her late poems in The Fact of a Doorframe (2001) represent the capstone of this philosophical and political position.

In her analytical work Adrienne Rich: the moment of change, Langdell suggests these works represent a central rite of passage for the poet, as she (Rich) crossed a threshold into a newly constellated life and a "new relationship with the universe". During this period, Rich also wrote a number of key socio-political essays, including “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” one of the first to address the theme of lesbian existence. In this essay, she asks "how and why women's choice of women as passionate comrades, life partners, co-workers, lovers, community, has been crushed, invalidated, forced into hiding." Some of the essays were republished in On Lies, Secrets and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966–1978 (1979). Rich shouted out her sexuality and took a role in leadership for sexual equality. Novelist and poet Jeanette Winterson describes Rich's impact: "Since the 1960s, her poetry and her politics have come together to create involved, engaged, challenging writing."

In 1974, her collection Diving Into the Wreck won the National Book Award for Poetry, which she shared with Allen Ginsberg. Rich was joined by feminist poets Alice Walker and Audre Lorde to accept it on behalf of all women. In 1976, began a relationship with Jamaican-born novelist and editor Michelle Cliff. Adrienne Rich taught at City College as well as Rutgers University until 1979. She moved to Western Massachusetts with Cliff in the early 1980s. Ultimately, they moved to Northern California, where Rich continued her career as a professor, lecturer, poet, and essayist. Cliff and Rich took over editorship of the lesbian journal Sinister Wisdom in 1981. Rich taught and lectured at Scripps College, San Jose State University and Stanford University during the 1980s and 1990s.

Both An Atlas of the Difficult World (1991) and Dark Fields of the Republic (1995) explore the relationship between private and public histories. During the 1990s Rich became an active member of numerous advisory boards such as the Boston Woman’s Fund, National Writers Union, Sisterhood in Support of Sisters in South Africa, and New Jewish Agenda. On the role of the poet, she has written, "We may feel bitterly how little our poems can do in the face of seemingly out-of-control technological power and seemingly limitless corporate greed, yet it has always been true that poetry can break isolation, show us to ourselves when we are outlawed or made invisible, remind us of beauty where no beauty seems possible, remind us of kinship where all is represented as separation."

In 1997, Adrienne Rich refused the National Medal of Arts, stating that "I could not accept such an award from President Clinton or this White House because the very meaning of art, as I understand it, is incompatible with the cynical politics of this administration [...] "[Art] means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of the power which holds it hostage." Rich died on March 27, 2012, at the age of 82 in her Santa Cruz, California home. Her son, Pablo Conrad, reported that her death resulted from long-term rheumatoid arthritis. Her last collection was published the year before her death. Rich was survived by her sons and Michelle Cliff.

Linguist JOHN HOLM was born (d: 2016); Holm produced a landmark study, a two-volume “Pidgins and Creoles” which traced the socio-historical evolution of the two language forms. While hitchhiking through Mexico and Central America in his teenage years, Holm heard black Nicaraguans on the Caribbean coast, speaking a non-Spanish language that seemed familiar to him. They called it “Pirate English”, a reference to its probable origin on pirate and British Navy ships.

Holm was born in Jackson, Michigan and studied German, Spanish and Russian in high school. He attended the University of Michigan, obtaining a B.S. degree in English. He went on to attend the Sorbonne to study French and to teach English at the University of the Andes in Bogota, Colombia. He obtained a Master’s in teaching English as a foreign language from Columbia’s Teachers College and a doctorate in linguistics from University College, London, writing his dissertation, a history, descriptive grammar and dictionary of the “pirate English” he had heard as a young man along the Miskito Coast.

He insisted that pidgins and creoles be regarded as languages in their own right, not debased versions of the source languages. He died in January 2016 and is survived by his husband Michael Pye.

Journalist, editor, gardener, cook, publisher of White Crane and White Crane Books, and assembler and editor of Daily GayWisdom, BO YOUNG was born.

JÓNÍNA LEÓSDÓTTIR, born; author, playwright and spouse of the Icelandic Prime Minister; She has worked as a journalist and editor since 1985. She has also written two novels and two biographies and translated several books from English into Icelandic. Twelve of Jónína’s plays have been produced on stage, television and radio and she has received two awards for play writing. Her plays include Table for Two, To Be Or Not To Be, The Secret, and The Palm-Reader.

The first Academy Awards are handed out. That year the best picture winner was "Wings."

Six degrees of separation: Wings starred Charles “Buddy” Rogers who later married America’s Sweetheart, actress Mary Pickford, with whom White Crane advisor and author, Malcolm Boyd produced film until he entered the Episcopal priesthood.

On this date a Gay couple in Malawi were sentenced to fourteen years of hard labor in prison. STEVEN MONJENZA, 26, and TIWONGE CHIMBALANGA, 20, conducted a traditional engagement ceremony in late December in Chirimba, near Blantyre. After news reports surfaced of the same-sex engagement, they were rounded up by Malawi's police and charged under colonial-era sodomy laws.

The arrest received some popular support in the conservative southern African nation, but sparked outrage among Malawian and international Gay Rights campaigners. The presiding judge refused bail for the men, who are being held in Chichiru Prison in Blantyre. "It is quite outrageous," said Peter Tatchell, the Gay rights activist from Britain who is supporting the pair. "In Malawi, people facing much more serious felony charges for serious crimes usually get bail." Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have called for the release of the young men. The Malawi Law Society said the case has been driven by prejudice and not jurisprudence.

Chimbalanga sent British human rights campaigner, Peter Tatchell this defiant message from jail: "If people or the world cannot give me the chance and freedom to continue living with him as my lover, then I am better off to die here in prison. Freedom without him is useless and meaningless."

Subsequent to the sentencing, Malawian president, Bingu wa Mutharika, released the pair, citing humanitarian grounds, after international pressure and the eventual visit of UN secretary general, Ban Ki-Moon to the southern African country.

Peter Tatchel told media in Malawi that they were liasing with Steve and Tiwongwe about whether they want to seek asylum abroad. "If they want then we can help them stay in Britain,'' said Tatchel.

Today is the first day of the Islamic holy day, Ramadan. It is the ninth month of the Islamic calendar, and is observed by Muslims worldwide as a month of fasting (Sawm) to commemorate the first revelation of the Quran to Muhammed according to Islamic belief. This annual observance is regarded as one of the Five Pillars of Islam. The month lasts 29–30 days based on the visual sightings of the crescent moon, according to numerous biographical accounts compiled in the hadiths.