CAPTAIN DAVID DERICKSON, born on this date (d: 7/21/1891) was a soldier of the 150th Pennsylvania Infantry. He was Lincoln's bodyguard and companion between September 1862 and April 1863. They shared a bed during the absences of Lincoln's wife, until Derickson was promoted in 1863. 

Derickson was twice married and fathered ten children. C.A. Tripp recounts that, whatever the level of intimacy of the relationship, it was the subject of gossip. Elizabeth Woodbury Fox, the wife of Lincoln's naval aide, wrote in her diary for November 16, 1862, "Tish says, 'Oh, there is a Bucktail soldier here devoted to the president, drives with him, and when Mrs. L. is not home, sleeps with him.' What stuff!" This sleeping arrangement was also mentioned by a fellow officer in Derickson's regiment, Thomas Chamberlin, in the book History of the One Hundred and Fiftieth Regiment Pennsylvania Volunteers, Second Regiment, Bucktail Brigade. Historian Martin P. Johnson states that the strong similarity in style and content of the Fox and Chamberlin accounts suggests that, rather than being two independent accounts of the same events as Tripp claims, both were based on the same report from a single source. David Donald and Johnson both dispute Tripp's interpretation of Fox's comment, saying that the exclamation of "What stuff!" was, in that day, an exclamation over the absurdity of the suggestion rather than the gossip value of it (as in the phrase "stuff and nonsense")

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE, French poet (d. 1867); born to a bourgeois family, the author of Les Fleurs du Mal for a while lived the modish life of a literary dandy on an inheritance from his father, reluctantly joining the Paris bohème when his fortune ran dry. His character, as we view him from the 20^th century, is perverse and fascinating. Critics see in him a conflict of many opposites: he was both a Catholic and a satanist, debauchee and mystic, cynical sensualist and yearner for purity. Unable to excel in virtue, he made himself a legend of vice. He was probably homosexual, or at least Marcel Proust thought so, as did Andre Gide, Roger Peyrefitte, and many others. The floppy cravat Baudelaire affected became all the rage of European dandies during the first decades of the 20^th century, Gays having adopted him as their very own at an early date.

The Australian dancer, actor, director and choreographer SIR ROBERT MURRAY HELPMANN CBE was born on this date (d. 1986). Born Robert Murray Helpman, he added the extra 'n' to avoid his name having a numerologically unlucky 13 letters, at the suggestion of the dance diva Anna Pavlova, who was a devotee of numerology.

He was born in Mount Gambier and also boarded at Prince Alfred College in Adelaide, South Australia. The Helpmann Academy in South Australia, a partnership of the major visual and performing arts education and training institutions in South Australia offering award courses for people seeking professional careers in the arts, was named in his honor.

In 1938, Helpmann met a young Oxford undergraduate while fulfilling an invitation to dance at the university. Immediately drawn to the handsome and intelligent Michael Benthall, the pair formed a relationship that was to last for 36 years until the English theater director Benthall's untimely death in 1974. The couple lived and often worked together quite openly for the time.

In 1965 Helpmann returned to Australia to become co-director of the Australian Ballet. Since he was Gay and flamboyant, his arrival in what was at that time a very conservative country caused some consternation. Australians were proud of his international fame, but not sure what to make of him personally. His most significant contribution to the development of theatre in Australia was his time with the Australian Ballet.  The avant-garde nature and sexual overtones of much of his work unsettled many Australians.  He did not endear himself with the comment: "I don't despair about the cultural scene in Australia because there isn't one here to despair about."

Helpmann's obituaries in the Australian media were suitably laudatory, but reserved. The country paid him the highest final recognition it could by honoring him with a state funeral in Sydney, the eulogy calling him "a genius, an outstanding communicator of unique inspiration and insight. He asserted his rights to pursue a path that improved the quality of life of the nation, and defeated the common herd of detractors."  An obituary in The Times in London, characterized his appearance as "strange, haunting and rather frightening", and portrayed him as "a homosexual of the proselytizing kind" whose impact upon a company was "dangerous as well as stimulating", creating fresh headlines in Australia.

We salute you sir.

TOM LEHRER was an American musician, singer-songwriter, satirist, and mathematician, born on this date (d: 7/26/25), who later taught mathematics and musical theater. He recorded pithy and humorous songs that became popular in the 1950s and 1960s. His songs often parodied popular musical forms, though they usually had original melodies. An exception is "The Elements", in which he set the names of the chemical elements to the tune of the "Major-General's Song" from Gilbert and Sullivan's Pirates of Penzance.

Lehrer's early performances dealt with non-topical subjects and black humor in songs such as "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park". In the 1960s, he produced songs about timely social and political issues, particularly for the U.S. version of the television show That Was the Week That Was. The popularity of these songs has far outlasted their topical subjects and references. Lehrer quoted a friend's explanation: "Always predict the worst and you'll be hailed as a prophet." In the early 1970s, Lehrer largely retired from public performance to devote his time to teaching mathematics and musical theater history at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Lehrer was encouraged by the success of his performances, so he paid $15 (equivalent to $152 in 2021) for some studio time in 1953 to record Songs by Tom Lehrer. The initial pressing was 400 copies. Radio stations would not air his songs because of his controversial subjects, so he sold the album on campus at Harvard for $3, equivalent to $30 in 2021, while "several stores near the Harvard campus sold it for $3.50, taking only a minimal markup as a kind of community service. Newsstands on campus sold it for the same price." 

After one summer, he started to receive mail orders from all parts of the country, as far away as San Francisco, after the San Francisco Chronicle wrote an article on the record. Interest in his recordings spread by word of mouth. People played their records for friends, who then also wanted a copy. Lehrer recalled, "Lacking exposure in the media, my songs spread slowly. Like herpes, rather than ebola."

The album included the macabre "I Hold Your Hand in Mine", the mildly risqué "Be Prepared", and "Lobachevsky" regarding plagiarizing mathematicians. It became a cult success by word of mouth, despite being self-published and without promotion. The limited distribution of the album led to a knock off album by Jack Enjal being released in 1958 without Lehrer’s approval, where some of the lyrics were mistranscribed.

Lehrer embarked on a series of concert tours and recorded a second album in 1959. He released the second album in two versions: the songs were the same, but More of Tom Lehrer was a studio recording and An Evening Wasted with Tom Lehrer was recorded live in concert. In 2013, Lehrer recalled the studio session for "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park", which referred to the practice of controlling pigeons in Boston with strychnine-treated corn.

In 2020, at the age of 92, Lehrer donated all of his lyrics and music written by him to the public domain. He followed this on November 1, 2022 with all recording and performing rights of any kind, making all of his music that he has originally composed or performed free for anyone to use and available directly from his site for free download. His statement releasing all his works into the public domain concludes with this note: "This website will be shut down at some date in the not too distant future, so if you want to download anything, don't wait too long."

Lehrer died at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on July 26, 2025, at the age of 97.

DAVID EASTON was an architect and interior designer who created English-style palaces for an American aristocracy, born on this date (d: 2020).

As a child, he spent summers with a grandmother in Chicago, and realized he wanted to be an architect after visiting the Trend House at the Marshall Field’s department store there and becoming transfixed by its model rooms. He studied architecture at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, and after graduation received a scholarship to study architecture at a school in Fontainebleau, France.

Easton returned to New York City in 1964, and went to work for Edward Wormley, the modernist furniture designer. But he was a classicist at heart. In 1967, Parish-Hadley hired him as a senior designer. He started his own firm in 1972, and by the next decade, his work, along with that of Mark Hampton and Mario Buatta, would become emblematic of the English-style opulence that defined the 1980s.

In 1981, Mr. Easton was already an established architect and decorator when Alistair Stair, a principal of Stair & Company, an antiques dealer, suggested to Patricia Kluge, who had just married John Kluge, the much older billionaire head of MetroMedia, that Mr. Easton was the man to design the estate the couple wanted to build in Charlottesville, Va.

Mr. Easton and Ms. Kluge met at the Carlyle hotel in Manhattan, and, as was his habit, he used a cocktail napkin to sketch his design for a 45-room brick manor that the Kluges would name Albemarle House.

There were formal English gardens, five lakes carved into the estate’s 6,000 acres, a carriage house and stables, a grotto, a helicopter landing pad, an 850-acre game preserve and a chapel, for which Mr. Easton designed the vestments of the clergy who would preside there, as well as the crypt below. (Mr. Easton researched just what was required to store embalmed bodies.) The house itself was more than 23,000 square feet, and Mr. Easton filled it with European and English antiques. Even for its time, at the height of the go-go Reagan years, Albemarle House was considered over the top. When the mortgage crisis hit in the late 2000s, she first listed Albemarle House for $100 million, and then lost it to the bank, which sold it to some loser named Donald Trump for $6.5 million, after much litigation from the Trump Organization to secure a deep discount. It is now a hotel and vineyard called the Albemarle Estate and Trump Winery.

The Kluges certainly weren’t the only high-wattage clients in Mr. Easton’s portfolio. He designed an apartment in the Pierre hotel in Manhattan for Phyllis and Sumner Redstone, the media mogul. For Paula Zahn, the former CNN anchor, he built a contemporary house in Aspen, Colo. And for Herbert Black, the Canadian businessman who exposed the Sotheby’s and Christie’s price-fixing scandal in 2000, he created a Georgian-style house in Montreal.

Mr. Easton married James Steinmeyer in 2014, after 39 years together. Mr. Steinmeyer said he had been engaged to a woman back home in Oklahoma when he and Mr. Easton met in 1975. “David said: “I’m not going to tell you what to do, but you can’t have your life two different ways. Either way, you’re going to make somebody very unhappy. If you want to screw up your life, that’s fine. But don’t screw up somebody else’s.”

In 1992, Mr. Easton was named to Interior Design magazine’s Hall of Fame.

Despite his very proper interiors, Mr. Easton had a mischievous streak. He drank red wine with all his meals, even breakfast, declaring, like W.C. Fields, that he didn’t like water because fish mated in it (although both he and Fields used a different verb). Former employees recall Mr. Easton asking for a ham sandwich on the Concorde, the supersonic jet that used to ferry the wealthy across the Atlantic at record speeds, instead of the lobster thermidor they were serving. At dinner parties he liked to say that he was a sex therapist, so that he didn’t have to talk about his work.

STEPHEN SILHA (aka Bubbling Banana/BB Ha!), born on this date, is a journalist, filmmaker, facilitator, community organizer.

In 1989, he met poet/filmmaker James Broughton at a Radical Faerie Gathering at Breitenbush Hot Springs in Oregon; they became friends and mentors, and in 2013 the documentary BIG JOY: The Adventures of James Broughton premiered at South by Southwest, and traveled to over 50 film festivals. It was co-directed by Eric Slade, who also made Hope Along the Wind, the biopic about Harry Hay. 

NIGEL SLATER OBE, born on this date,  is an English food writer, journalist and broadcaster. He has written a column for The Observer Magazine for over a decade and is the principal writer for the Observer Food Monthly supplement. Prior to this, Slater was a food writer for Marie Claire for five years.

Slater claims in his autobiography that he used food to compete with his stepmother for his father's attention. Their biggest battle was over lemon meringue pie – his father's favorite. She refused to divulge her recipe, so Slater resorted to subterfuge to turn out his own version. "I'd count the egg-shells in the bin, to see how many eggs she'd used and write them down. I'd come in at different times, when I knew she was making it. I'd just catch her when she was doing some meringue, building up that recipe slowly over a matter of months, if not years."

Slater gained an Ordinary National Diploma in catering at Worcester Technical College in 1976, and worked in restaurants and hotels across the UK before becoming a food writer for Marie Claire magazine in 1988. He became known for uncomplicated, comfort food recipes which he presented in early books such as The 30-Minute Cook (1994) and Real Cooking, as well as his memoir-like columns for The Observer which he began in 1993.

Slater's book, Eating for England: The Delights & Eccentricities of the British at Table (Fourth Estate), is devoted to British food and cookery. It was published in October 2007 and was described in The Sunday Times as "the sort of ragbag of choice culinary morsels that would pass the time nicely on a train journey". His book Tender is the story of his vegetable garden, how it came to be, and what grows in it. The book was published in two volumes; the first is on vegetables, which was released late in 2009 and the second is on fruit, which was released in 2010. Tender is described as a memoir, a study of fifty of our favourite vegetables, fruits and nuts and a collection of over five hundred recipes.

Slater became known to a wider audience with the publication of Toast: The Story of a Boy's Hunger , a moving and award-winning autobiography focused on his love of food, his childhood, his family relationships (his mother died of asthma when he was nine) and his homosexuality. Slater has called it "the most intimate memoir that any food person has ever written". Toast was published in Britain in October 2004 and became a best-seller after it was featured on the Richard & Judy Book Club.

Slater's autobiographical work was adapted into a 2010 film, Toast, starring Freddie Highmore as the 15-year-old Slater and Helena Bonham Carter as his stepmother. 

Slater lives in the Highbury area of north London, where he maintains a kitchen garden which is often featured in his column.

MARC JACOBS, American fashion designer, born; an American fashion designer. He is the head designer for Marc Jacobs, as well as the diffusion line Marc by Marc Jacobs. Jacobs is currently the creative director of the prestigious French design house Louis Vuitton. Jacobs, who is openly gay, had been in a relationship with retired escort Jason Preston since 2005. However, in February 2008, it was reported that Jacobs was engaging in an affair with escort and porn star Erik Rhodes aka James Naughton who died in 2012.

In April 2018, Jacobs proposed to his boyfriend, Charly Defrancesco, via a flashmob while in a Chipotle restaurant. The flashmob did a routine to the song "Kiss" by Prince. They were married in a lavish wedding held in New York City in April 2019.

Jacobs and Defrancesco purchased a home in Rye, New York in April 2019. The Westchester home was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and is known as the Max Hoffman House.

CYNTHIA NIXON, American actress, born today; A Tony and Emmy Award-winning actress best known for her portrayal of lawyer Miranda Hobbes in the popular HBO dramedy Sex and The City (1998–2004). Nixon, who has identified publicly as bisexual,  has two children, daughter Samantha and son Charles Ezekiel with Danny Mozes, an English professor, with whom she had a relationship from 1988 to 2003.

In 2004, it was reported that Nixon had been in a nearly year-long relationship with the education activist Christine Marinoni. In 2005, the New York Post and other sources reported that Nixon had moved to Brooklyn to live with Marinoni. However, Nixon told the The New York Times in January 2006 that she had not moved and that keeping her kids in their Manhattan public schools took priority. Discussing her relationship in an interview in New York Magazine in 2006, Nixon stated that she never felt any struggle with her sexuality: "I never felt like there was an unconscious part of me around that woke up or that came out of the closet; there wasn't a struggle, there wasn't an attempt to suppress. I met this woman, I fell in love with her, and I'm a public figure."

Nixon's bears a strong resemblance to 19th century poet Emily Dickinson, and plays her in the biopic A Quiet Passion. 

In March 2018 Nixon announced her candidacy for governor of the State of New York. She has been active in politics and education or over 15 years. The contest was one of the marquee Democratic primaries in the nation at the time, as Ms. Nixon was widely expected to challenge Mr. Cuomo from the political left.

Her campaign immediately cast Mr. Cuomo as a “centrist and Albany insider,” and some of her initial rhetoric on inequality echoed Senator Bernie Sanders. “We are now the most unequal state in the entire country, with both incredible wealth and extreme poverty,” she said in a video announcing her candidacy. If she had been elected, Ms. Nixon would  have become the first female governor, and the first openly Gay governor, in New York history.

Alas, it was not to be.

Nixon is now appearing in Julian Fellowes' The Gilded Age on HBO.

Dorothy Ierne Wilde, known as DOLLY WILDE, died on this date (b: 1894); Wilde was an English socialite, made famous by association with her internationally famous uncle and her reputation as a witty conversationalist. Her charm and humor made her a popular guest at salons in Paris between the wars, standing out even in a social circle known for its flamboyant talkers. 

Before there was Paris Hilton, the uber-celebrity socialite of the early 20th century was Dolly Wilde, a witty, bon vivant who constantly lived on the legacy of her famous uncle, the poet Oscar Wilde. But unlike Hilton, Wilde was not rich and used her natural talent as an eloquent storyteller to live with friends as the perpetual– and notorious– guest. Sadly, she never used her talent to make a mark in literary history.

Her father was Oscar’s brother, Willie, an alcoholic journalist who died early. Her mother then married the translator Alexander Teixeira de Mattos, who became her stepfather.

Growing up, Dolly idolized her uncle despite her family turning their back on him. She went to France in 1914 to become an ambulance driver during World War I.

It was around that time that she met and developed a relationship with a fellow ambulance driver, the Standard Oil heiress Marion “Joe” Carstairs, who would become famous in her own right as the "World's Fastest Woman." {An excellent book on Carstairs, "The Queen of Whale Cay" by Kate Summerscale. A very fun read.)

Having only a small fund from her stepfather, Dolly moved on to the Paris salons and parties, living glamorously in hotels and houses of her rich friends. Noted writer Djuna Barnes once turned Dolly into a character in her work, Ladies Almanack, as "Doll Furious."

But the jealous Dolly didn’t like Djuna, saying: “Why should you be the one with genius? If anyone has it, it should be me.” Dolly had many affairs, one of which was with the silent screen actress Alla Nazimova. But the love of her life was the writer, Natalie Clifford Barney.  Meanwhile, Lady Una Troubridge once described her as “the better man” as compared to her uncle. 

Dolly was a heavy drinker and got into heroin. She tried to rehabilitate herself but failed, becoming addicted to the sleeping draught paraldehyde instead. She was later diagnosed with breast cancer in 1939, but she refused surgery and preferred alternative treatment.

At the start of World War II and the Germans advancing on Paris, she moved back to London in 1940. In April 1941, she died of a possible drug overdose. With Dolly’s death, Barney said that “just as no one’s presence could be as present as hers, so no one’s absence could be so absent.”

Canadian cartoonist Lynn Johnston introduces a Gay character into her nationally syndicated strip, "For Better or For Worse." Nineteen papers cancelled the strip and forty asked for substitutions. One result of the story line was that Johnston was made a jury-selected "nominated finalist" for the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning in 1994. The Pulitzer board said the strip "sensitively depicted a youth's disclosure of his homosexuality and its effect on his family and friends."