HENRY SCOTT TUKE, English painter, born (d; 1929); Although a great deal of attention has been paid to the paintings and photographs of naked girl children that were innocently, yet disturbingly, common in the Victorian era (Lewis Carroll’s photographs, for example), almost no attention has been paid to the even more prevalent representations in art of prepubescent boys during the same repressive period. In the America of Horatio Alger, the parlors of the fashionable were decorated with the salon paintings of J.D. Brown, whose sentimental studies of newsboys, grocer boys and street urchins not only prefigure wide-eyed Keanes and the teary-eyed horrors of Woolworth’s, but rather perversely transfer the physical horseplay of robust teenagers to the bodies of eight and nine year olds.

The result was hundreds of male Lolitas in the middle-class parlors of America. In England, the grand master of romantic boy painting was Henry Scott Tuke, whom we know to have been Gay. Tuke was an athlete who took great pride in his splendid body. He was obsessed with painting nude boys and experimented, and succeeded, in developing a special technique for capturing on canvas the effect of sunlight on naked skin. Interestingly, his name is not mentioned in several multi-volume sets of reference books calling themselves “encyclopedias of art,” despite the fact that Tuke was enormously popular in his time.

For lovely Tuke images: http://www.topofart.com/artists/Henry_Scott_Tuke

DJUNA BARNES, American author born (d. 1982); an American writer who played an important part in the development of 20th century English language modernist writing and was one of the key figures in 1920s and 30s bohemian Paris after filling a similar role in the Greenwich Village of the teens. Her novel Nightwood became a cult work of modern fiction, helped by an introduction by T.S. Eliot. It stands out today for its portrayal of Lesbian themes and its distinctive writing style. Since Barnes's death, interest in her work has grown and many of her books are back in print. In the 1920s, Paris was the center of modernism in art and literature; as Gertrude Stein remarked, "Paris was where the twentieth century was." Barnes first traveled to Paris in 1921 on an assignment for McCall’s Magazine. She interviewed her fellow expatriate writers and artists for U.S. periodicals and soon became a well-known figure on the local scene; her black cloak and her acerbic wit are remembered in many memoirs of the time.

Even before her first novel was published, her literary reputation was already high, largely on the strength of her story "A Night Among the Horses", which was published in The Little Review and reprinted in her 1923 collection A Book. She was part of the inner circle of the influential salon hostess Natalie Barney, who would become a lifelong friend and patron, as well as the central figure in Barnes's satiric chronicle of Paris Lesbian life, Ladies Almanack. They probably also had a brief affair, but the most important relationship of Barnes's Paris years was with the artist Thelma Wood. Wood was a Kansas native who had come to Paris to become a sculptor, but at Barnes's suggestion took up silverpoint instead, producing drawings of animals and plants that one critic compared to Rousseau.

By the winter of 1922 they had set up housekeeping together in a flat on the Boulevard Saint-Germain. Her Ladies Almanack (1928) is a roman a clef about a predominantly Lesbian social circle centering on Natalie Clifford Barney's salon in Paris. It is written in an archaic, Rabelaisian style, with Barnes's own illustrations in the style of Elizabethan woodcuts. Barney appears as 'Dame Evangeline Musset, '"who was in her Heart one Grand Red Cross for the Pursuance, the Relief and the Distraction, of such Girls as in their Hinder Parts, and their Fore Parts, and in whatsoever Parts did suffer them most, lament Cruelly". "[A] Pioneer and a Menace" in her youth, Dame Musset has reached "a witty and learned Fifty," she rescues women in distress, dispenses wisdom, and upon her death is elevated to sainthood." In other words, Miss Musset's Home for Wayward Girls and Women.

Also appearing pseudonymously are Elisabeth de Gramont, Romaine Brooks, Dolly Wilde (Oscar’s niece) Radclyffe Hall and her partner Una Troubridge, Janet Flanner and Solita Solano and Mina Loy. The obscure language, inside jokes, and ambiguity of Ladies Almanack have kept critics arguing about whether it is an affectionate satire or a bitter attack, but Barney herself loved the book and reread it throughout her life.

Italian poet SANDRO PENNA, (d: 1977) was born on this date. For Sandro Penna boyhood was the embodiment of desire and the inspiration for all of his poetry. Penna was born in Perugia, but after the age of sixteen, spent most of his life in Rome. By some standards, his life was uneventful, unambitious, lonely, scruffy, and sordid. One does not have to endorse this view. Penna made firm choices about the two things in life that interested him most: poetry and boys.

For several years, he had a competition with Pier Paolo Pasolini to see who could make love with the greater number of boys along the overgrown banks of the Tiber and in the scattered urinals of Rome's ugly urban landscape. It was Pasolini who most consistently championed Penna's poetry. One poem sums up Penna's attitude to criticism of his thematic narrowness. Responding to the complaint that there are always young men in his poems, the poet replies: "Ma io non so parlare d'altre cose. / Le altre cose son tutte noiose" ("But I don't know how to write about anything else. Everything else is just boring"). If his sexual interest is a limitation, it is one he accepts with cheerful equanimity.

BILL BLASS, American fashion designer died on this date (b. 1922); An American fashion designer, born in Fort Wayne, Indiana. He was known for his tailoring and his innovative combinations of textures and patterns. One of the most influential of American designers, Blass was the recipient of many fashion awards, including seven Coty Awards and the Fashion Institute of Technology’s Lifetime Achievement Award (1999). Blass began his New York fashion career in 1946.

He was a protégé of Baron de Gunzburg (who was also mentor to Vaslav Nijinsky, prior to Diaghilev, and later to Calvin Klein). In 1970, after two decades of success in menswear and womenswear, he bought Maurice Rentner Ltd., which he had joined in 1959, and renamed it Bill Blass Limited. Over the next thirty years he expanded his line to include swimwear, furs, luggage, perfume and chocolate. By 1998, his company had grown to a $700-million-a-year business.

Though not believing in sexual categorization, Blass came to be quite open about his attraction to both women and men, alluding to the existence of secret same-sex couplings in Fort Wayne and New York. Blass also had a charming personality and had a wide range of associations, boasting friendships with everyone from fellow fashion icon Oscar de la Renta to war criminal Henry Kissinger, though maintaining that he generally preferred to keep a certain emotional distance from others.

A regular smoker, Blass was diagnosed with throat cancer in the spring of 2000. The designer received waves of support from friends during his subsequent radiation treatments. He succumbed to the disease on June 12, 2002, passing away at his home in New Preston, Connecticut, at the age of 79. His autobiography, Bare Blass, was released a month later by HarperCollins.

Gay men and Lesbians picket a conference of the Society for the Promotion of Community Standards at the Loaves and Fishes, New Zealand's Wellington Cathedral.