PLATO born (d: 347 BCE); This is hardly the place to summarize the teachings of one of antiquity’s greatest thinkers. Suffice it to say that Plato, through his famous Symposium, has given his name to “the love that dare not speaks its name” nor show its little faerie wings in public, even though Platonic love has come to mean lately a kind of sexless friendship.

That Platonic love before Freud was clearly Gay love is evident in Patience, Gilbert and Sullivan’s devastating satire on the aesthetic movement, in which the effeminate poet Bunthorne sings about “an attachment a la Plato for a bashful young potato and not too French, French bean!”

Plato was born with the name Aristocles. He was surnamed Plato because of his exceptionally well-developed broad shoulders.

MARGARET JONES is hanged in Boston for witchcraft in the first such execution for the Massachusetts colony.

In a blatant act of pandering and a flaunting of the separation of church and state, U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower signs a bill into law that places the words "under God" to the United States Pledge of Allegiance.

In Montreal Gay Rights group FLH opens new Gay center with a dance. Police raid it and charge forty people for being found in an establishment selling liquor without permit. The charges were later dropped, but attendance falls at center. Organization folds within a few months.

Then Congresswoman and now SENATOR TAMMY BALDWIN (D-WI) and now-retired Congressman Barney Frank (D-MA) wrote a public letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice urging the State Department to investigate reports of violent persecution of homosexual Iraqis by Islamic groups and militias. According to Iraqi LGBT, a London-based human rights group working to support the human rights of Gay Iraqis, twenty-six of its members have been killed since 2003, including the murder of two minors -- 11-year-old Ameer and 14-year-old Ahmed who were forced into child prostitution -- in 2006. In addition, a mass kidnapping of five gay men from the Shaab area of Iraq took place during the first week of December 2006. All are now presumed dead.