PAUL GOODMAN, American sociologist, poet, writer, and public intellectual born (d: 1972); He described his politics as anarchist, his loves as bisexual, and his profession as that of "man of letters." Goodman is now mainly remembered as the author of Growing up Absurd and for having been, during the 1960s, an activist on the pacifist Left and an inspiration to the counterculture of that era. He is less remembered as a co-founder of Gestalt Therapy in the 1940s and 50s. 

The freedom with which he revealed, in print and in public, his homosexual life and loves (notably in a late essay, "The Politics of Being Queer" (1969)), proved to be one of the many important cultural springboards for the emerging Gay Liberation Movement of the early 1970s. In an interview with Studs Terkel, Goodman said "I might seem to have a number of divergent interests — community planning, psychotherapy, education, politics — but they are all one concern: how to make it possible to grow up as a human being into a culture without losing nature. I simply refuse to acknowledge that a sensible and honorable community does not exist."

Whether you agree or disagree with the late, great Paul Goodman's cheerfully, rigorously radical ideas, it's clear that very, very few public figures -- really, of any ideological stripe -- since his 1960s-1970s prominence as author/speaker/television guest have attained nearly the richness of thought or the lively way of expressing it that Goodman had.

JEAN-NICKOLAUS TRETTER, was born on this date; Tretter is a gay activist and archivist who founded the Jean-Nickolaus Tretter Collection in Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender (GLBT) Studies housed at the University of Minnesota. 

Tretter was the 16-year host and producer of Night Rivers, a program on KFAI described as "the only regularly broadcast gay and lesbian classical music show in America." He grew up in Little Falls, Minnesota. By 1972, Tretter came out as a gay man and left the Navy, where he had served during Vietnam as a linguist. Tretter returned to the Twin Cities and co-organized the first Twin Cities commemoration of the Stonewall Riots in June 1972.

Around that same time, Tretter began to collect gay and lesbian materials. He went on to study social and cultural anthropology at the University of Minnesota in 1973, but dropped out in 1976 and began working as a counselor at a residence for youths with multiple disabilities. Meanwhile, he continued to collect GLBT materials, advocate for GLBT causes and conduct research on GLBT history. In 2000, the Tretter Collection was donated to the University of Minnesota.  The Jean-Nickolaus Tretter Collection in Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Studies houses over 30,000 items in a wide variety of media.