MARIA CAROLINA, Queen of Naples and the Two Sicilies, was born in the Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna (d: 1814); Emma Hamilton, wife of Sir William Hamilton, ambassador to Naples, is well known as the mistress of Horatio Nelson, who risked career and reputation to be with her. Less known is her liaison with the Neopolitan Queen Maria Carolina, over whom she exercised considerable influence.

This affair, aided and abetted by Maria Caroline’s sister, Marie Antoinette (yes, THE Marie Antoinette) was well known to Sir William Hamilton, who found his wife’s Lesbianism an invaluable aid to his diplomatic mission in Naples. Ironically, no matter how “modern” and independent a spirit Lady Hamilton appears to us today, her every nonconforming move was made possible only by its profitability in flesh or influence to powerful men.

And no....we don't know what that is on her head.

EDWARD LEAR, British poet, born (d: 1888); Whether Lear was Gay or not is of little consequence. His nonsense poetry has never been equaled, nor have his whimsical illustrations. No one who reads his limericks, a form that he virtually perfected, can doubt that he was anything other than a comic genius on the order of Lewis Carroll, his contemporary.

Still, all the signs of probable queerness are present. What he called his “natural affinity for children” went well beyond garden-variety naturalness and beyond mere affinity. His entire life is characterized by close friendships with handsome young men many years his junior, by dozens of reasons – from poor eye sight to a big nose – found or invented for never marrying, and by references in his journal to intense suffering each time one of his pretty young men married.

If you weren’t brought up on Lear, you’ve missed one of the joys of childhood; if you still don’t know his as an adult, get out there and start reading “How pleasant to know Mr. Lear! / Who has written such volumes of stuff: / Some think him ill-tempered and queer, / But few think him pleasant enough.

That’s Lear to a T. Queer, pleasant and very funny. One more...

There was an old man with a beard/Who said "It is just as I feared!"/Two owls and a hen, four larks and a wren/Have all built their nests in my beard!

KATHARINE LEE BATES, American songwriter, born (d: 1929); Bates is remembered as the author of the words to the anthem "America the Beautiful”. She popularized Mrs. Santa Claus through her poem Goody Santa Claus on a Sleigh Ride (1889). Bates was born in Falmouth Massachusetts, the daughter of a Congregational pastor. She graduated from Wellesley College in 1880 and for many years was a professor of English literature at Wellesley. While teaching there, she was elected a member of the newly formed Pi Gamma Mu honor society for the social sciences because of her interest in history and politics, which she had also studied.

Bates lived at Wellesley with Katharine Coman, who was a history and political economy teacher and founder of the Wellesley College Economics department. The pair lived together for twenty-five years until Coman's death in 1915. It is debated whether their relationship was an intimate lesbian relationship as different sources maintain or platonic (sometimes called a "Boston Marriage") as the local historical society of her birthplace maintains. In the years following Coman's death, Bates wrote Yellow Clover: A Book of Remembrance, to Katharine Coman. Almost all the poems there contained refer to the relationship between Bates and Coman. She was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1970. Fundamentalists continue to conveniently ignore the fact that one of their favorite American “hymns” was written by a Lesbian.

EDITH HAMILTON, born. Classicist, Mythology. (d:, 1963) There is, arguably, no more important figure in the study of mythology than Edith Hamilton. A classicist and educator before she became a writer on mythology, her most famous books are The Greek Way (1930) and Mythology (1942). Mythology remains in print after six decades and is still used as an introductory text to mythology in high schools and colleges; a mark of its status is that study guides to the book exist.

Edith Hamilton was born in Dresden, Germany and grew up with her parents in Fort Wayne, Indiana. When she was seven, her father began to teach her Latin and added French, German. And Greek to her curriculum. Her education continued at Miss Porter's School in Farmington, Connecticut and Bryn Mawr College (M.A. 1894). In the following year, Edith and her sister Alice became the first female students accepted at the German universities of Leipzig and Munich.

Upon her return to the United States in 1896, Edith Hamilton became the headmistress of Bryn Mawr School for Girls in Baltimore, MD, to which she devoted all her energies until her retirement in 1922. Upon retiring, she moved to New York City with her life partner Doris Fielding Reid, and wrote and published various articles about Greek drama.

Reid (1895 - 1973) was vice president of the investment firm Loomis Sayles & Company. Hamilton dedicated her first book, The Greek Way, to her. Doris was a former student of Hamilton’s, and eventually became her biographer. The two women cohabited in Maine, on Park Avenue in New York City, and finally in Washington, D.C. Together, they raised Reid’s nephew, Dorian. Edith Hamilton's correspondence and papers are at Princeton University. After her death, in 1963, her long-time companion Doris Fielding Reid published the book Edith Hamilton: An Intimate Portrait. Doris died ten years later in Lenox Hill, New York.

RADCLYFFE HALL, British author born (d. 1943) British poet and author of eight novels, including the seminal Lesbian novel, The Well of Loneliness. Published in 1928, The Well of Loneliness deals with the life of Stephen Gordon, a masculine Lesbian (possibly loosely based on Standard Oil heiress Joe Carstairs) who, like Hall herself, identifies as an invert. It is badly written, dated, and God knows it has perpetuated the myth that a Lesbian is a man in a woman’s body, but it still the book about Lesbians that everyone knows, largely because it was the first undisguised Lesbian novel.

Although Gordon's attitude toward her own sexuality is anguished, the novel presents Lesbianism as natural and makes a plea for greater tolerance. While The Well of Loneliness is not sexually explicit, it was nevertheless the subject of an obscenity trial in the UK, which resulted in all copies of the novel being ordered destroyed.

The United States allowed its publication only after a long court battle. It is currently published in the UK by Virago and by Anchor Press in the United States. Hall was listed at number sixteen in the Top 500 Lesbian and Gay Heroes in The Pink Paper, September 26, 1997 edition, issue 500. The Well of Loneliness was number seven on a list of the top 100 Lesbian and Gay novels compiled by The Publishing Triangle in 1999.

What very few people know is why The Well of Loneliness, as well as all of Radclyffe Hall’s other books are dedicated “To the three of us.” Radclyffe’s first lover was Veronica Batten, a woman more than twenty years her senior. Known to her friends as “John,” Radclyffe Hall, throughout her life, in fact, was remarkably promiscuous (Editor’s Note: the definition of “promiscuous”: anyone who has more sex than you.)

Enormously wealthy, she had the means to pursue whatever she wanted, whether fast cars or beautiful women. Although Veronica Batten knew of her lover’s adventures, she was undisturbed as long as none of these affairs developed into meaningful friendships. Her worst fears were realized when Hall met Lady Una Troubridge. Their friendship, it seemed, was going beyond mere sexual pleasure, and Veronica Batten determined that Una Troubridge would have to go. She quarreled with her lover and then dropped dead from a heart attack.

To assuage her guilt, Radclyffe Hall took up spiritualism in a vain attempt to contact Veronica and beg forgiveness. Failing this, she forever dedicated all her books “To the three of us.”

JOHN CAGE, American composer died (b. 1912) An American composer, Cage was a long-term collaborator and romantic partner of choreographer Merce Cunningham. He is perhaps best known for his 1952 composition 4’33”, whose three movements are performed without a single note being played. He was a pioneer of chance music, non-standard use of musical instruments and electronic music. Though he remains a controversial figure, he is generally regarded as one of the most important composers of his era.

One of Cage's works, Organ2/ASLP ("as slow as possible"), is currently being performed near the German township of Halberstadt, in an imaginative interpretation of Cage's directions for the piece. The performance is being done on a specially-constructed autonomous organ built into the old church of St. Burchardi. It is scheduled to take a total of 639 years after having been started at midnight on September 5, 2001. The first year and half of the performance was total silence, with the first chord ‒ G-sharp, B and G-sharp ‒ not sounding until February 2, 2003. Then in July 2004, two additional Es, an octave apart, were sounded and were scheduled to be sounded on May 5, 2007. But at 5:00 p.m. (16:00 GMT) on Thursday, January 5, the first chord progressed to a second -- comprising A, C and F-sharp -- and is to be held down over the next few years by weights on an organ being built especially for the project.

In addition to his composing, Cage was also a philosopher, writer, print maker and avid amateur mycologist and mushroom collector.

Cage self-identified as an anarchist in a 1985 interview: "I'm an anarchist. I don't know whether the adjective is pure and simple, or philosophical, or what, but I don't like government! And I don't like institutions! And I don't have any confidence in even good institutions."

New Jersey Governor JAMES S. MCGREEVEY comes out publicly as a Gay man.

Today is the peak of the PERSEID METEOR SHOWER. a prolific meteor shower. associated with the comet Swift-Tuttle. The Perseids are called so because the point they appear to be coming from, called the radiant, is in the constellation of Perseus. However, they can be spotted all around the sky. Because of the positioning of Swift-Tuttle's orbit, Perseids are mostly visible on the northern hemisphere.

The shower is visible from mid-July each year, but the bulk of its activity falls between August 8 and 14 with a peak on August 12. During the peak, rates of a hundred or more meteors per hour can be registered.

Meteor showers can be seen when Earth moves through a meteor stream. The stream in this case is called the Perseid cloud and it stretches along the orbit of the Comet Swift-Tuttle. The cloud is composed of particles ejected by the comet as it passed by the Sun. Most of the dust in the cloud today is approximately a thousand years old.

However, there is also a relatively young filament of dust in the stream that boiled off the comet in 1862. The approximate rate of meteors originating from this filament is much higher than normal. The famous Perseid meteor shower has been observed for about 2000 years, with the first known information on these meteors coming from the far east. In early Europe, the Perseids came to be known as the "tears of St. Lawrence." To experience the Perseid shower in its full, one should observe in the dark of a clear moonless night, from a point far outside any large cities, where stars are not dimmed by light pollution.