ARTHUR LAURENTS, American playwright, novelist, director and one of the giants of the American theater, born (d: 2011); His credits included the stage musicals West Side Story and Gypsy and the film The Way We Were. In 2000, Laurents published Original Story By Arthur Laurents: A Memoir of Broadway and Hollywood. In it, he discusses his lengthy career and his many Gay affairs and long-term relationships, including those with Farley Granger and Tom Hatcher, an aspiring, and quite beautiful, actor whom Gore Vidal suggested Laurents seek out at the men's clothing store in Beverly Hills Hatcher was managing at the time.

The couple remained together for 52 years until Hatcher's death on October 26, 2006. Laurents died in 2011.

JAMES PURDY (d: 2009) novelist, born; A gay man, from the start his work had often been at the edge of what was printable: Gollancz could not bring himself to print the word "motherfucker" in the 1957 UK edition of 63: Dream Palace; decades later, the German government tried to ban Narrow Rooms, but a court threw the case out. Although many readers were scandalized, a solid cadre of distinguished critics and scholars embraced his work from the start, including John Cowper Powys, Dame Edith Sitwell, Dorothy Parker, Jane Bowles, Lillian Hellman and Susan Sontag, who warmly defended him against puritanical critics. Tennessee Williams was also an early admirer of Purdy's work.

His early novel Malcolm was for decades a staple of the undergraduate American Literature curriculum of most American colleges and universities. Malcolm may have slipped from its place in the canon in recent years due to its irregular publishing history. This is consequent upon the contractual confusion that arose when Purdy agreed to permit Edward Albee to adapt it for the stage. In spite of this ongoing and unresolved problem, Malcolm is currently in print. Following several reissues of previously out-of-print novels, as well as a recent appreciation by Gore Vidal in The New York Times Book Review, Purdy's work is currently enjoying a renaissance. As Edward Albee wrote long ago, there is a Purdy renaissance every ten years, like clockwork. Albee has been proved right every decade since.

Since the 1990s, when great age began to make itself felt, he had worked closely with his companion John Uecker (who was previously the last amanuensis of Tennessee Williams), a partnership that resulted in such late works as the novel Gertrude of Stony Island Avenue (1997) and the collection of stories Moe's Villa (2003, 2005). He continued to dictate to a small team of devoted friends, and ascribed his continued intellectual vigor to the drinking of green tea and the avoidance of alcohol and tobacco. His advice to young writers was to 'banish shame'.

Purdy wrote anonymous letters from the age of nine. His first was written to his mother's landlady who, in young Purdy's view, was grasping. Countless thousands have been written since, many now owned by persons who have no idea of their provenance or value, although the style is inimitable. One of his very latest, written when he was 92, to a redactor who had displeased him by moving from New York to Montana, can be seen  here.  This features some of Purdy's drawings, which have attracted some attention. 

Purdy continued to dictate and to draw nearly every day until his death at 94. After several years of declining health, he fractured a hip and died in Englewood, New Jersey on 13 March 2009. Shortly after his death in March 2009 a book of plays, "James Purdy, Selected Plays" including Brice, Ruthanna Elder, Where Quentin Goes and The Paradise Circus, was published by Ivan R. Dee. It features an insightful foreword by John Uecker (who also edited the book) about the friendship between Tennessee Williams and James Purdy. It also focuses on Purdy's play writing being his first form of writing since childhood, when he wrote plays for his brother, an actor, to perform. The book is dedicated by Purdy "To those who stood behind me", to Tennessee Williams and John Uecker. John Waters contributed the following blurb on the cover: "James Purdy's Selected Plays will break your damaged little heart." Also on the cover, Gore Vidal called Purdy "An authentic American genius."

THOMAS FRANCK, international law adviser, jurist, and educator, was born (d: 2009); A legal adviser to many foreign governments and an ad hoc judge and advocate before the International Court of Justice and the author of many books on international law, Franck was the founder of the Center for International Studies at New York University. Brown University Professor of Law and international relations, David Kennedy called Franck “the leading American scholar of international law, an enthusiast for new ideas to make the world a more ordered and humane place. He was a powerful voice in just about every discussion of important international law in the last four decades.”

Professor Franck’s advocacy was rooted in his own childhood. Fleeing from Nazi Germany just before Kristallnacht, Frank was born in Berlin, the only child of Hugo and Ilse Franck. An early advocate of de-colonialization in the 1950s,

Professor Franck wrote constitutions for several African countries as they emerged from British rule, Tanganyika and Zanzibar, which became Tanzania, and Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe; and Sierra Leone.

He later served as legal adviser to the governments of Kenya, Mauritius, the Solomon Islands, El Salvador and Chad. From 1995 to 2007 he was counsel to Bosnia before the International Court of Justice in the case against Serbia in the case of the slaughter of 8,000 Bosnians at Srebrenica.

Dr. Franck’s marriage to Martin Daly was one of the 18,000 marriages the Supreme Court of California allowed to stand in the wake of Proposition 8. Franck died on May 29, 2009 and is survived by his partner of many years.

Today is the birthday of the American comedienne, actress and singer JANE LYNCH. She is known for her roles in comedies such as Best in Show, A Mighty Wind, and The 40-Year-Old Virgin, and for her recurring role as lawyer Joyce Wischina in The L Word. She starred opposite Meryl Streep in Julie and Julia, playing Child's sister Dorothy McWilliams and on the Fox series Glee. Lynch won glowing reviews for her role as the aggressive cheer-leading coach Sue Sylvester. Mary McNamara of the L.A. Times wrote, "Lynch alone makes Glee worth watching."

Lynch received a 2009 Golden Globe nomination for Best Supporting Actress in a Series, Miniseries, or Television Film for her role on Glee. The series itself also received nominations in three other categories.

She won the 2010 Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress - Comedy Series for her work in Glee. Lynch hosted Saturday Night Live for the first time in October 2011. Lynch is out and married her wife, Dr. Lara Embry, on May 31, 2010 at the Blue Heron Restaurant in Sunderland, Massachusetts. Embry herself received much publicity surrounding a custody battle over two children with her former partner.

KARL-HEINRICH ULRICHS, the great German campaigner for Gay Rights, died (b: 1825); a visionary pioneer of modern Lesbian, Gay Bisexual and Transgender movement. Ulrichs was born in Aurich, then part of the Kingdom of Hanover, in northwestern Germany. His first same-sex experience was in 1839 at the age of fourteen, in the course of a brief affair with his riding instructor. He graduated in law and theology from Göttingen University in 1846.

From 1846 to 1848, he studied history at Berlin University, writing a dissertation (in Latin) on the Peace of Westphalia. From 1849 to 1857 Ulrichs worked as an official legal adviser for the district court of Hildensheim in the Kingdom of Hanover. He was dismissed in 1859 when his sexuality became apparent. In 1862, Ulrichs took the momentous step of telling his family and friends that he was, using his own term, an Urning, and began writing under the pseudonym of "Numa Numantius". His first five essays, collected as Forschungen über das Rätsel der mannmännlichen Liebe ("Researches on the Riddle of Male-Male Love"), explained such love as natural and biological, summed up with the Latin phrase anima muliebris virili corpore inclusa (a female psyche confined in a male body).

In these essays, Ulrichs coined various terms to describe different sexual orientation/gender identities, including "Urning" for a male who desires men (English "Uranian"), and "Dioning" for a male who is attracted to women. These terms are in reference to a section of Plato’s Symposium in which two kinds of love are discussed, symbolized by an Aphrodite who is born from a male (Uranos), and an Aphrodite who is born from a female (Dione). Ulrichs also coined words for the female counterparts, bisexuals and intersexuals. He soon began publishing under his real name (possibly the first public "coming out") and wrote a statement of legal and moral support for a man arrested for homosexual offences.

On August 29, 1867, Ulrichs became the first self-proclaimed Urning to speak out publicly in defense of same-sex sexuality when he pleaded at the Congress of German Jurists in Munich for a resolution urging the repeal of anti-same-sexual intimacy laws. He was shouted down.

Two years later, in 1869, the Austrian writer Karl-Maria Kertbeny cobbled together the word "homosexual" (oddly combining a Latin prefix with a Greek suffix), and from the 1870s the subject of sexual orientation (as we would now say) began to be discussed widely. In the 1860s, Ulrichs moved around Germany, always writing and publishing, and always in trouble with the law — though always for his words rather than for sexual offenses. In 1864, his books were confiscated and banned by police in Saxony. Later the same thing happened in Berlin, and his works were banned throughout Prussia. Some of these papers have recently been found in the Prussian state archives and were published in 2004. Already several of Ulrichs's more important works are back in print, both in German and in translation.

Ulrichs was a patriotic Hanoverian, and when Prussia annexed Hanover in 1866 he was briefly imprisoned for opposing Prussian rule. The next year he left Hanover for good and moved to Munich, where he addressed the Association of German Jurists on the need to reform German laws against homosexuality. Later he lived in Würzburg and Stuttgart. In 1879, Ulrichs published the twelfth and final book of his Research on the Riddle of Man-Manly Love. In poor health, and feeling he had done all he could in Germany, he went into self-imposed exile in Italy. For several years he travelled around the country before settling in L’Aquila, where his health improved. He continued to write prolifically and publish his works (in German and Latin) at his own expense. In 1895, he received an honorary diploma from the University of Naples.

Shortly after he died in L'Aquila. His grave stone is marked (in Latin), "Exile and Pauper." "Pauper" may have been bit of romantic license. Ulrichs lived in L'Aquila as the guest of a local landowner, Marquis Niccolò Persichetti, who gave the eulogy at his funeral. At the end of his eulogy, he said: “But with your loss, oh Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, the fame of your works and your virtue will not likewise disappear... but rather, as long as intelligence, virtue, learning, insight, poetry and science are cultivated on this earth and survive the weakness of our bodies, as long as the noble prominence of genius and knowledge are rewarded, we and those who come after us will shed tears and scatter flowers on your venerated grave.”

Late in life Ulrichs wrote: "Until my dying day I will look back with pride that I found the courage to come face to face in battle against the specter which for time immemorial has been injecting poison into me and into men of my nature. Many have been driven to suicide because all their happiness in life was tainted. Indeed, I am proud that I found the courage to deal the initial blow to the hydra of public contempt."

Forgotten for many years, Ulrichs is now a cult figure in Europe. There are streets named for him in Munich, Bremen and Hanover. His birthday (August 28th) is marked each year by a lively street party and poetry reading at Karl-Heinrich-Ulrichs-Platz in Munich. The city of L’Aquila has restored his grave and hosts the annual pilgrimage to the cemetery. Later Gay rights advocates were aware of their debt to Ulrichs. Magnus Hirshfeld thoroughly referenced Ulrichs in his The Homosexuality of Men and Women (1914).

The International Lesbian and Gay Law Association presents an annual Karl Heinricch Ulrichs Award in Ulrichs' memory. 1895, people…think about it. We all talk about the “modern LGBT movement” and we automatically think “Stonewall”…no. The most important thing stolen from a people is their history. If they steal your history they can tell you anything. Rethink. Revisit. Remember.

SENATE BILL 48 is signed by Governor Jerry Brown in California. The bill requires California's public school textbooks to include the historical contributions of LGBT Americans under a law signed by Gov. Jerry Brown on this date. The legislation was authored by out gay Democratic State Sen. Mark Leno, who said it would ensure that LGBT Americans are no longer excluded from history lessons. "Denying LGBT people their rightful place in history gives our young people an inaccurate and incomplete view of the world around them," Leno said.

Senate Bill 48 requires public instruction in social sciences to include the role and contributions of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Americans, as well as people with disabilities and members of other cultural groups. It prohibits teaching from textbooks or other instructional materials that reflect adversely on people because of their sexual orientation.

"History should be honest," said Governor Brown in a written statement. "This bill revises existing laws that prohibit discrimination in education and ensures that the important contributions of Americans from all backgrounds and walks of life are included in our history books.”

BASTILLE DAY is the French national holiday. In France, it is called "Fête Nationale" ("National Holiday"), in official parlance, or more commonly "quatorze juillet" ("14 July"). It commemorates the 1790 Fête de la Federation, held on the first anniversary of the storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789; the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille was seen as a symbol of the uprising of the modern French nation, and of the reconciliation of all the French inside the constitutional monarchy which preceded the First Republic, during the French Revolution.

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