GEORGE WASHINGTON, First President of the United States was born on this date (d. 1799); George, as everyone knows, had no children of his own And he surrounded himself with a circle of young male revolutionaries…handsome young things…that he called his “family.”

Among his favorites were John Laurens, who once fought a duel to defend George’s honor (sullied by some cad now lost to history); and Alexander Hamilton, who was known to be, as we have noted in these postings, as something of a cock-tease.

Washington was often accused, it seems, by his enemies of being a bit soft (or perhaps hard?) on the boys and was suspected of being overly fond of young Hamilton in particular. These are always dismissed as “18^th century “classicism.” Whatever.

ROBERT BADEN-POWELL 1^st Baron Baden-Powell, English founder of the Boy Scouts (d. 1941); Robert Baden-Powell's sexuality has been brought into question by his principal modern biographers, including Michael Rosenthal in The Character Factory: Baden-Powell's Boy Scouts and the Imperatives of Empire (1984), who have found a great deal of evidence indicating he was attracted to youthful men and to boys. Nonetheless, Baden-Powell is believed to always have remained chaste with his scouts, and he did not tolerate Scoutmasters who indulged in sexual 'escapades' with their charges.

Much of the evidence for Baden-Powell's sexuality can be found in Tim Jeal's monumental and definitive biography, Baden-Powell (1989), in which Jael states frankly: "The evidence available points inexorably to the conclusion that Baden-Powell was a repressed homosexual, (... but) he managed to follow Plato's prescription glorifying the love of man for man, or man for boy, while remaining physically chaste."

Jeal gives several detailed instances of Baden-Powell's pleasure in seeing naked boys, his emotional enjoyment gained from living alongside them, and his delight in contemplating the clandestine "artistic" nude photography of boys which was at that time circulating among English pederastic public school circles.

EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY, American writer was born (d. 1950); It’s time for a new biography of this American poet, whose name sounds like the first line of a dirty limerick and whose life was mostly a bisexual romp, even though early biographies make it difficult to know for sure. For the moment the poems themselves will have to serve as biography, making it difficult to believe that the poet who dreamed of a lover with a “pink camellia-bud…beside a silver comb” was dreaming of anything other than another woman.

JANE BOWLES, American writer and playwright (d. 1973); Born into a Jewish family in New York, Jane Bowles spent her childhood in Woodmere, NY, on Long Island. She developed tuberculosis of the knee as a teenager and her mother took her to Switzerland for treatment, where she attended boarding school. As a teenager she returned to New York, where she gravitated to the intellectual bohemia of Greenwich Village and began to experiment in bisexuality. She married writer and composer Paul Bowles in 1938.

In 1943 her novel Two Serious Ladies was published. The Bowleses lived in New York until 1947, when Paul moved to Tangier, Morocco; Jane followed and they both whiled their time indulging their bisexual tastes and receiving the international literati crowd. Jane Bowles wrote the play In The Summer House, which was performed on Broadway in 1953 to mixed reviews. Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote and John Ashbery considered her to be one of the finest and most underrated writers of American fiction.

BILLY NAME, American photographer and Andy Warhol archivist, born; an American photographer, artist, filmmaker, lighting designer, and the main archivist of the Warhol era from 1964-70.

His brief romance and subsequent close friendship with Andy Warhol fostered substantial collaboration on Warhol's most influential work, including his films, paintings and sculpture. Linich became Billy Name among the coterie known as the Warhol Superstars, and he is considered one of the most significant. He was responsible for "silverizing" Warhol's New York studio the Factory, where he lived until 1970. His images of Edie Sedgwick, Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, Nico, Ultra Violet, Bob Dylan, Mary oronov and of Warhol himself, amongst others, are portraits of the birth of the Pop Art era.

KARLA JAY is a distinguished professor emerita at Pace University and she was born on this date. Jay taught English and directed the women's and gender studies program between 1974 and 2009. A pioneer in the field of Lesbian and Gay Studies, she is widely published.

While she shared many of the goals of the radical left-wing of the late 1960s, Jay was at odds with the male-supremacist behavior of many of the movement’s leaders. In 1969, she became a member of Redstockings. Jay, who had been aware of her lesbianism since high school, came out to her consciousness-raising group in Redstockings. At around the same time she began using the name Karla Jay to reflect her feminist principles.

When activists founded the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) in the wake of the Stonewall Riots of June 1969, Jay, openly Lesbian, became an early member and an active participant. She balanced attendance at GLF meetings with graduate school at New York University, where she majored in comparative literature. She was one of the few women actively involved in the early Gay Rights movement on both coasts. Jay was a member of Lavender Menace, a group that formed to protest the exclusion of Lesbians from mainstream Women's Liberation.  

She was involved in the planning and execution of the "Lavender Menace Zap" at the Second Congress to Unite Women in New York City in May 1970. This zap is considered a turning-point in the history of second-wave feminism.

Working with Allen Young Jay edited Out of the Closets (1972), a pioneering anthology that gave voice to the Radicalesbians, Martha Shelley, and writers such as Rita Mae Brown. It was during the 1970s that Jay first heard about the writers Natalie Clifford Barney and Renee Vivien, Lesbian members of the American expatriate community in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s. Their lives and works became the subject of Jay's doctoral dissertation, published by Indiana University Press as The Amazon and the Page (1988).

Jay contributed the essay "Confessions of a Worrywart: Ruminations on a Lesbian Feminist Overview" to the anthology Sisterhood is Forever: The Women's Anthology for a New Millennium (2003), edited by Robin Morgan.

At the presentation of Pace University's 10th Annual Dyson Distinguished Achievement Awards on April 6, 2006, Jay was honored with the Distinguished Faculty Award. She received th Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement from Publishing Triangle in 2006.

Jay is featured in the feminist history film She's Beautiful When She's Angry.

Her papers are held in the Archives & Manuscripts Division of the New York Public Library.

ANDY WARHOL, American artist, director, and writer, died (b. 1928); One of the most famous American artist of the 20th century, Warhol was a central figure in the movement known as Pop Art. After a successful career as a commercial illustrator, Warhol became famous worldwide for his work as a painter, an avant-garde film-maker, a record producer, an author, and a public figure known for his presence in wildly diverse social circles that included bohemian street people, distinguished intellectuals, Hollywood celebrities and wealthy aristocrats. A controversial figure during his lifetime (his work was often derided by critics as a hoax or "put-on"), Warhol has been the subject of numerous retrospective exhibitions, books and documentary films since his death in 1987. He is generally acknowledged as one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century.^[

Many people think of Warhol as asexual and merely a voyeur, but these notions have been debunked by biographers (such as Victor Bockris), explored by other members of the Factory scene such as Bob Colacello (in his book Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Close Up), and by scholars like art historian Richard Meyer (in his book Outlaw Representation). The question of how his sexuality influenced Warhol's work and shaped his relationship to the art world is a major subject of scholarship on the artist, and is an issue that Warhol himself addressed in interviews, in conversation with his contemporaries, and in his publications (e.g. Popism: The Warhol Sixties).

Throughout his career, Warhol produced erotic photography and drawings of male nudes. Many of his most famous works (portraits of Liza Minelli, Judy Garland, Elizabeth Taylor, and films like Blow Job, My Hustler, and Lonesome Cowboys) draw from gay underground culture and/or openly explore the complexity of sexuality and desire. Many of his films premiered in gay porn theaters. That said, some stories about Warhol's development as an artist revolved around the obstacle his sexuality initially presented as he tried to launch his career. The first works that he submitted to a gallery in the pursuit of a career as an artist were homoerotic drawings of male nudes and they were rejected for being too openly gay. In Popism, furthermore, the artist recalls a conversation with the film maker Emile de Antonio about the difficulty Warhol had being accepted socially by the then more famous (but closeted) gay artists Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. De Antonio explained that Warhol was "too swish and that upsets them." In response to this, Warhol writes, "There was nothing I could say to that. It was all too true. So I decided I just wasn't going to care, because those were all the things that I didn't want to change anyway, that I didn't think I 'should' want to change ... Other people could change their attitudes but not me".

Warhol died in New York City at 6:32 a.m. on February 22, 1987. According to news reports, he had been making good recovery from a routine gallbladder surgery at New York Hospital before dying in his sleep from a sudden heart attack. The hospital staff had failed to adequately monitor his condition and overloaded him with fluids after his operation, causing him to suffer from a fatal case of water intoxication, which prompted Warhol's lawyers to sue the hospital for negligence.

WILLIAM BRONK (b: 1918) was an American poet who died on this date. His book, Life Supports (1981), won the National Book Award for Poetry. He was a veteran of World War II and a businessman. After teaching at Union College for a brief period, he took over the family business of Bronk Coal and Lumber after his father's early death. He ran it for 30 years in Hudson Falls, New York.

He first taught English at Union College Schenectady, New York. He left Union in June 1946 and returned to Hudson Falls. During the latter half of 1946, he completed work on The Brother in Elysium. In January 1947 Bronk took over management of the Bronk Coal and Lumber Company, which he had inherited in 1941 when his father died unexpectedly. Although he intended this work to be temporary, he ran the business for 30 years, retiring in 1978.

Bronk said that the poems emerged in his mind as he went through the business of the day. When one was ready, he put it on paper, working in longhand rather than at a typewriter. As his manuscripts attest, he seldom rewrote or modified, a poem once he wrote it on paper.