JULIUS CAESAR, Roman military and political leader (d. 44 BCE) (born either July 12 or July 13); Although it is by no means the only reason why they carried Caesar out on a slab on the Ides of March, the Roman Emperor’s reputation as a manly man had once been irrevocably besmirched.

The Roman code that permitted men to bugger at their will, allowed only adolescent boys to be on the long end of the stick. In a society where it was considered infinitely better to give than to receive, any male who voluntarily adopted a passive sexual role was forever after considered an inferior being. This Caesar had done in his love affair with Nicomedes, king of Bithynia. Cicero reports that Caesar, acting as the royal cup bearer for Nicomedes, was led, clad in purple shift, to the royal bedchamber and its golden couch. Nicomedes, he says, was definitely on top.

Throughout the remainder of his life, emperor or not, Caesar was taunted by his enemies: Suetonius reports that Caesar was called “the queen’s rival”; his partner in the consulship described him in an edict as “the queen of Bithynia”; his soldiers chanted “Caesar conquered Gaul; Nicomedes, Caesar”; Curio the Elder called him “every man’s wife and every woman’s husband.” “In contrast,” as John Boswell wrote, “the charge that Augustus had, as a boy, submitted to Caesar in the same way seems never to have done him much harm.”

Poor Julius Caesar, in so many ways a man in advance of his time. Not long after his murder, the public attitude changed as more and more emperors began to turn the other cheek just for the hell of it. They set the fashion for the glory that was Rome. Or, as an anonymous poet put it, “Rome, which delighted in making love from behind,/spelled AMOR—love—by inverting its own name.” And speaking of spelling please note for all future menu references: it is C-A-E-S-A-R…not Ceasar.

HENRY DAVID THOREAU, American writer, philosopher born (d: 1862); In the fall of 1856, when he was thirty-nine years old, the author of Walden found “a rare and remarkable fungus, such as I have heard of but never seen before. The whole length [is] six and three quarter inches. It may be divided into three parts, picus, stem and base, -- or scrotum, for it is a perfect phallus. One of those fungi named impudicus, I think. In all respects, [it is] a most disgusting object, yet very suggestive. It was as offensive to the eye as to the scent, the cap rapidly melting and defiling what it touched with a fetid, olivaceous, semi-liquid matter. In an hour or two the plant scented the whole house wherever placed, so that it could not be endured. I was afraid to sleep in my chamber where it had lain until the room had been well ventilated. It smelled like a dead rat in the ceiling, in all the ceilings of the house. Pray, what was Nature thinking of when she made this? She almost puts herself on a level with those who draw in privies.”

Thoreau's sexuality has long been a subject of speculation; even his contemporaries commented on his apparent lack of interest in conventional romance. The most exhaustive examination of the evidence on both sides of this question is Walter Harding's article, "Thoreau's Sexuality," published in the Journal of Homosexuality (1991). Basing his conclusions mostly on evidence from Thoreau's Journal, Harding suggests that Thoreau's affectional orientation was probably homosexual, though there is no evidence that he was physically intimate with either men or women.

Although Thoreau proposed marriage to one woman (and was proposed to by another), Harding concludes that the preponderance of the evidence indicates that he had a fundamental attraction to other men, an attraction sublimated through his writing and his passion for nature.

It's fascinating that his journals never mention women and some of whose essays express his thoughts on the relations of men. His essay "Chastity and Sensuality," and the long discourse on "Friendship" in A Week are prolific expressions of the beauty, and the agony, of love between men. Some of these discussions are said to refer to his brother or to Ralph Waldo Emerson. Others clearly refer to two men whom Thoreau found particularly attractive: Tom Fowler, whom Thoreau chose as a guide on a trip to the Maine woods; and Alek Therien, the Canadian wood-chopper who visited Thoreau at Walden Pond (more on that in a bit).

In 1991, a quarter of a century after publishing his biography of Thoreau, his biographer Walter Harding, added an important postscript to his analysis of his subject: an essay in the Journal of Homosexuality arguing that Thoreau had “a specific sexual interest in members of his own sex.” This aspect of Thoreau’s sensibility has remained strangely quarantined from mainstream Thoreau scholarship, despite Harding and scholars such as Henry Abelove, Jonathan Ned Katz, and Michael Warner.

Another Thoreau biographer, Robert Richardson, has consistently downplayed it and is so allergic to all things Freudian that he took the precaution of omitting Thoreau’s childhood and adolescence from his biography. Telling.

Of course, Thoreau could not have thought of himself as a homosexual as we understand the term, but as a careful reader of Darwin and a close observer of nature, Thoreau wondered what it meant that he dispersed no seed of his own. (He half-asserted, half-speculated in his journal that “The end of marriage is not the propagation of the species— If you & I succeed there will have been men enough—any more than the object of the blossom is to mature the seed.”) He also knew that in his relationships with men, his emotions were often more turbulent and demanding than his partners: “Methinks that I carry into friendship the tenderness & nicety of a lover,” he admitted in his diary.

Most touchingly in 1854 Thoreau wrote in Walden of a visit paid him by a wandering French-Canadian wood-chopper Alex Therien. So taken was Thoreau with this rugged laborer--"a true Homeric or Paphlagonian man," as he put it in his journal--and so eager was he "to fasten [him]self like a blood-sucker... to any full-blooded man that [came his] way," that he indulged in a moment of "Homerotic" fantasy: he asked the woodsman to read to him from the Iliad, and in particular "Achilles' reproof to Patroclus for his sad countenance."

Throughout his life Thoreau was falling in and out of love with his male acquaintances. He meditated on the higher meaning of male friendship in his notebooks. He never married.

MAX JACOB, French poet, born (d. 1944); Born in Quimper, Britttany, France, he enrolled in the Paris Colonial School, which he left in 1897 for an artistic career. On the Boulevard Voltaire, he shared a room with Pablo Picasso, who introduced him to Guillaume Apollinaire, who in turn introduced him to Georges Braque. He would become close friends with Jean Cocteau, Christopher Wood and Amedeo Modigliani, who painted his portrait in 1916.

He also befriended and encouraged the artist Romanin, otherwise known as French politician and future Resistance leader Jean Moulin. Jacob, who had Jewish origins, claimed to have had a vision of Christ in 1909, and converted to Catholicism. But, despite his hopes, his new religion could not rid him of his homosexual longings, about which he once said, "If heaven witnesses my regrets, heaven will pardon me for the pleasures which it knows are involuntary." Notorious for his heavy drinking, Jacob said he joined the artistic community in Montparnasse to "sin disgracefully."

In 1915, he arrived drunk at the funeral of Picasso's lover, Eva Göuel, and attempted to seduce the driver of the hearse. Max Jacob is regarded as an important link between the symbolists and the surrealists, as can be seen in his prose poems Le cornet à dés (Dice Box, 1917) and in his paintings, exhibitions of which were held in New York City in 1930 and 1938.

On February 24, 1944 Max Jacob, too, was arrested by the Gestapo and put into Orleans prison. He was then transferred to a holding camp in Drancy for transport to a concentration camp in Germany. However, said to be suffering from bronchial pneumonia, Max Jacob died in the Drancy deportation camp on March 5th.

PHIL JIMENEZ, was born today, and is an American comic book writer, artist and penciller. Born and raised in Los Angeles, California, and later Orange County, California, he moved to New York City to attend college at the School of Visual Arts where he now teaches a life-drawing course, Drawing for Cartoonists, as part of the undergraduate cartooning program.

He began working at DC Comics when he was 21; his first published work was four pages in the DC miniseries War of the Gods (1991) and still lives in New York City.He is probably best known for his work as writer/artist on Wonder Woman (2000- 2003), main penciller of the miniseries crossover event Infinite Crisis (2005- 2006) or his collaborations with writer Grant Morrison on The Invisibles and New X-Men.

Delegate JIM FOSTER becomes the first openly gay person to address a major American party convention at the 1972 Democratic National Convention.

CANADIAN GAY RIGHTS: The Superior Court of Ontario orders Ontario to recognize marriage equality.