WILLIAM HENRY HURLBURT was born (1895); Is it the soil? Is it the climate? The American South has produced not only a disproportionate number of Miss Americas, but an equally disproportionate number of beautiful young men, many of whom, by way of Princeton University, wander up North, where they settle as innocents, both charming and tantalizing, until middle age hits them like Italian madonnas, if the bottle doesn’t get them first. William Hurlburt (né Hurlbut) was one such beauty who drove several rather stolid men wild. The minister Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who confessed that “I never loved but one male friend with a passion,” found the beautiful Hurlburt “like some fascinating girl” and modeled the hero of his novel Malbone (1869) on him.

Mrs. Higginson, who took a somewhat dim view of this “romantic friendship,” complained after her husband’s death that the letters he exchanged with Hurlburt were “more like those between man and woman, than between two men.” Apparently, at least two other novelists used the handsome Southerner as a lead character in their books, one of these characters a man who, at the end of the novel, turns out to be a woman!

Hurlburt, a writer himself, became the editor-in-chief of The New York World and famously penned The Diary of a Public Man, It claimed to offer verbatim accounts of secret conversations between a long-time Washington insider and Stephen A. Douglas, William H. Seward, and Abraham Lincoln himself—among others—in the desperate weeks just before the start of the Civil War. Whether he was merely an innocent bag of gold, or actually gay himself, is difficult to say. The record says only that several distinguished men couldn’t help falling in love with him.

M.F.K. FISHER, American writer. memoirist, food maven (d. 1992); Not Gay. In fact, decidedly heterosexual. But, in this writer’s opinion, one of the most important writers in the English language in the 20th century. A goddess among the pantheon of goddesses adored by gay men. So beautiful she was photographed by none other than Man Ray.

If you love eating, if you love food, five books by Fisher: Serve It Forth, Consider the Oyster, How To Cook A Wolf, The Gastronomical Me and An Alphabet for Gourmets collected under the title The Art of Eating are nothing less than blissful, required reading. We defy you to read it and not crave a fried egg sandwich with mayonnaise. In a career spanning more than 60 years, Mrs. Fisher wrote hundreds of stories for The New Yorker, as well as 15 books of essays and reminiscences. She produced the enduring English translation of Brillat-Savarin's book The Physiology of Taste, as well as a novel, a screenplay, a book for children and dozens of travelogues.

While other food writers limited their writing to the particulars of individual dishes or expositions of the details of cuisine, Mrs. Fisher used food as a cultural metaphor. When asked what it was she wrote about, Fisher responded, “The easiest answer is to say that, like most humans, I am hungry. But there is more than that. It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it." In 1963, W. H. Auden called her "America's greatest writer."

Tom Cruise was born…but…does anyone really care anymore?

According to The Old Farmer’s Almanac today marks the beginning of the DOG DAYS most commonly experienced in the months of July and August, which typically observe the warmest summer temperatures. In the Southern hemisphere, they typically occur in January and February, in the midst of the austral summer. The Almanac lists the traditional period of the Dog Days as the forty days beginning July 3rd and ending August 11th, coinciding with the ancient heliacal (at sunrise) rising of the Dog Star, Sirius. These are the days of the year with the least rainfall in the Northern Hemisphere.