HARRIET HOSMER, American sculptor, born (d: 1908); Hosmer’s widowed father raised her as a boy, encouraging her to become a physician, but absolutely supported her decision to become a sculptor, too.

At about the age of 20, she fell under the spell of Charlotte Cushing, who convinced her to study sculpting in Italy, where Cushing presided over a colony of Lesbians who called themselves the “Jolly Bachelors.” Hosmer, with her masculine demeanor and habit of dressing, fit right in. While in Rome, she was associated with Nathaniel Hawthorne, Thorvaldsen, Flaxman, Thackeray, George Eliot and George Sand; and she was frequently the guest of the Brownings at Casa Guidi, in Florence. Later she also lived in Chicago and Terre Haute, Indiana.

Novelist Henry James snidely referred to the Jolly Bachelors as "The White Marmorean Flock," borrowing a term from Hawthorne in The Marble Faun. These artists included Anne Whitney, Emma Stebbins, Edmonia Lewis and others.

Hosmer and Cushing would shock the Roman gentry by riding astride horses as men rode. Hosmer went on to become one of the most successful sculptors of her day. Her most famous work, “Puck” was perhaps one of the most frequently reproduced words of the late 19^th century. Her body of work [in some cases literally many beautiful bodies] is exquisite.

CAMILLE SAINT-SAËNS, French composer, born. French composer, organist, conductor, and pianist, known especially for his orchestral works The Carnival of the Animals, Danse Macabre, Samson et Dalila, and Symphony No. 3 (Organ Symphony). Saint-Saëns began his musical career as a child prodigy and pursued a life in music until he died at age 86. He was a pianist and organist who composed works, as he put it, “as an apple-tree produces apples.” He brought forth prodigious quantities of musical apples, and if some, to modern ears, are a little green or even rotten, they are more than made up for by the large number of perfect polished fruit. It cost a great deal of money to be a full-time composer, and Saint-Saëns was no struggling artist in a rooftop garret. He was supported by a large behest from an older friend, Henri Libon, and the nature of their friendship has always been open to interpretation.

There’s no interpretation necessary, however, to understand Saint- Saëns own sexuality. Though he is reported to have had a marked preference for Algerian boys, he was a devotee of Parisian pissoirs even in old age. In an amusing memoir, the composer Henri Busser records coaxing his ancient colleague, now reduced to merely peeking, from the local pissoirs. In 1875, Saint-Saëns married Marie-Laure Truffot and they had two children, André and Jean-François, who died within six weeks of each other in 1878. Saint-Saëns left his wife three years later. The two never divorced, but lived the rest of their lives apart from one another. On being accused of homosexuality at a social occasion, he is reported to have countered 'Non. Je ne suis pas homosexuel, je suis pédéraste!' “No, no, my dear, I am not a homosexual. I am a pederast.” Not everyone, after all, acknowledges that the two are not synonymous.

SIMEON SOLOMON, Today was the birthday of this British artist (d. 1905) Solomon lived as an openly Gay man in a time when it was not socially acceptable to do so. He and Algernon Swinburne were frequently seen chasing each other naked through Dante Gabriel Rosetti’s house.

In 1873 his career was cut short when he was arrested in a public toilet in London and charged with indecent exposure and attempting to commit sodomy. He was sentenced to serve eighteen months' hard labor in prison, but this was later reduced to police supervision. He fled to the French Third Republic. He was however arrested again in 1874, after which he was sentenced to spend three months in prison. Upon his arrest, though, Swinburne turned into a fair weather friend and would no longer deign to be seen with Solomon, much less romp naked through Dante’s house. For a time, Solomon was lovers with Eton master and Cambridge tutor, Oscar Browning who himself was forced to leave both schools because of his own little homosexual scandals. Solomon’s own art has never been collected and published, probably because most of it is erotic and explicitly Gay, much as the artist’s name seems to have been expunged from all but the most complete art reference books. Their loss as his work has been said in many ways to virtually define Victorian art.

IRVING ROSENTHAL was born in San Francisco on this date (d: 2022); He attended Pomona College and then the University of Chicago, where he did graduate work in human development.

In the late 1950s, Rosenthal became editor of The Chicago Review and succeeded in publishing poetry by Jack Kerouac, prose by Edward Dahlberg, and the first parts of William Burroughs's Naked Lunch before the University of Chicago censored his editorial practice. After resigning from The Chicago Review, he moved to New York and started Big Table magazine with the help of a colleague. Its first issue included the entire contents of the suppressed 1959 winter edition of The Chicago Review. Although Big Table survived only briefly, its few issues strengthened Rosenthal's connection to both the Dahlberg circle and the Beats.

Living in New York, Rosenthal developed particularly close relationships with Allen Ginsberg, Hubert Huncke, and other figures in the Beat movement. He subsequently visited Burroughs and Paul Bowles in Tangier and lived there from 1962 to1964. During this period he also began work on a novel, Sheeper, which was later published by Grove Press in 1967. Returning to New York, Rosenthal was drawn into the orbit of the experimental film maker, Jack Smith, and appeared in Flaming Creatures and No President .

In 1967 Rosenthal moved back to San Francisco with George Harris (soon to become Hibiscus and founder of the Cockettes) to start the Kaliflower commune, which continues to exist and where he lived until his death.

The Kaliflower spirit was one of communalism and cooperation. Many members saw their commune as their family. In one issue of Kaliflower, commune members wrote, "Nuclear family members don't usually buy and sell to each other, are in fact communistic, and we wanted nuclear family intimacy among the communes". It was common for members of Kaliflower to limit ties to relationships with non-communalist friends. Members gave their savings to the group and were encouraged to quit outside jobs and work inside the community instead. Some commune tasks included gardening, cleaning, cooking, running the Free Print Shop, maintaining a free store, or delivering the newsletter or food to other communes.

The community supported a culture of polyamory, resisting attachments to a single sexual partner. Many members slept in a group bedroom and regularly shared sexual partners, participating in what they considered to be a group marriage.

Major decisions were made by consensus within the daily meeting of committed community members. The commune also held voluntary criticism sessions to vent concerns with other commune members. During such a session, the member who asked for criticism would invite other members to participate, and then listen in silence while concerns & criticisms were aired. Customarily the member did not respond for three days. This system of self-governance was borrowed from the 19th-century American Utopian community at Oneida, NY.

Rosenthal brought his printing press to the basement of Kaliflower, and the space became known as the Free Print Shop, a free, underground publishing venue for Bay Area communes. The flyer for the opening of the Free Print Shop announced, "The Sutter Street Commune invites you to submit manuscripts, drawings, manifestos to our Free Print Shop. Free distribution guaranteed for whatever we print." From then on, the Free Print Shop produced hundreds of publication including books, pamphlets, and flyers (for free services, ecology groups, political protests, announcements for free events), Food Conspiracy order sheets, and Free Medical Clinic prescription forms.

Rosenthal’s papers reside at Stanford University’s Green Library and the University of Delaware.

JEFFREY ESCOFFIER, born on this date, (d: 2022); Escoffier was an American author, activist, and media strategist. He was a research associate at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. He has taught at the University of California (Berkeley and Davis), Barnard College, The New School, and Rutgers University, Newark. He lived and worked in Brooklyn, New York. 

Escoffier earned his undergraduate degree at St. John's College, Annapolis, before doing his graduate work at Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania. He was the director of health media and marketing for the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene from 1999 to 2015. Escoffier was an active participant in the LGBT community in Philadelphia, San Francisco, and New York City. 

In 1970 he moved to Philadelphia where he pursued his doctoral studies in economic history at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1972 he co-founded and served on the editorial board of The Gay Alternative, a gay and lesbian cultural magazine. In 1977 he moved to San Francisco, where he co-founded the San Francisco Lesbian and Gay History Project. In 1978 he joined the editorial board of Socialist Review, a democratic socialistic journal, and served as its executive editor from 1980 to 1988.

In 1988 Escoffier co-founded OUT/LOOK: A National Lesbian and Gay Quarterly, one of the first joint lesbian and gay cultural ventures. Starting in 1990, OUT/LOOK sponsored, under Escoffier's leadership, a series of conferences called OutWrite that brought together over 1,200 LGBT writers from across the U.S. These conferences brought together several notable writers such as Judy Grahn, Allen Ginsberg, Cherrie Moraga, Gore Vidal, Edward Albee, and Essex Hemphill. In the wake of the OutWrite conferences, he worked as a literary agent for lesbian and gay authors across the Bay Area.

Escoffier served on the board of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS) at the City University of New York from 1992 to 1995 and then from 2010 to 2013. He was the director of the CLAGS Project on Families, Values, and Public School Curriculum.

In 1995 he joined the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene as the deputy director of the Office of Gay and Lesbian Health. In 2000 he became the director of Health Media and Marketing and held that position until his retirement in August 2015. There he supervised the department's media and public education campaigns on several topics, including smoking cessation, HIV prevention and testing, anti-obesity, ebola, influenza, and immunization.

Escoffier wrote voluminously. Many of his essays, as he put it in the introduction to “American Homo: Community and Perversity,” his 1998 book, “explore the social significance of homosexual emancipation since the end of World War II and the political reaction that it has precipitated in American public life.”

That included excavating the pre-Stonewall history of gay life, along with economic and other aspects of it. It also included examining gay pornography, how it had changed over the decades and how it had both reflected and helped to shape gay identity. His most recent essay collection, published last year, was “Sex, Society, and the Making of Pornography: The Pornographic Object of Knowledge.” Escoffier was also co-editor of a book about dance and wrote a biography of John Maynard Keynes. 

Escoffier died in Brooklyn in May 2022, aged 79, from complications of a fall.

NONA HENDRYX, American singer (LaBelle) vocalist, record producer, songwriter, musician, author, and actress, born. Hendryx is known for her work as a solo artist as well as for being one-third of the trio Labelle, who had a hit with "Lady Marmalade." Her music has ranged from soul, funk, dance and rhythm and blues to hard rock, art rock and new age. Labelle had emerged from the traditional "girl group" Patti LaBelle and the Bluebells, a quartet that became a trio with Cindy Birdsong’s departure for The Supremes.

It was manager Vicki Wickham who re-imagined the group as Labelle; as glam rock/space age divas, Labelle created a sound and look previously unheard of for a black, all-female crew, what with the "girl group" pigeon-holing of the time. Hendryx embraced the new concept whole-heartedly (much more so than Patti LaBelle, in particular, who stated her own adoration for "big ballads"; bandmate Sarah Dash remained fairly neutral throughout their time together).

Hendryx and Wickham paired off on a creative level. Other artists with whom Hendryx has recorded with over the years include: David Johansen, Yoko Ono, Cameo Talking Heads (3 albums, 80’s band, Our Daughter’s Wedding, Garland Jeffreys, Dan Hartman, Afrika Bambaata (performing a duet of "Giving Him Something He Can Feel" with Boy George), Canadian band Rough Trade, Curtis Hairston, and Graham Parker on the hit single, "Soul Christmas." In 2001 she discussed her bisexuality in an interview with the Advocate magazine and has appeared as herself on three episodes of the Lesbian hit show, The L Word.”

TARLACH MacNIALLAIS  born Terence Nellis in Belfast, Northern Ireland, on this date (d: 2020), the tenth of 11 children of John James Nellis, a bus conductor, and Una Nellis, a homemaker. He later adopted the Irish language version of his name.

As a university student, he protested against British imperialism and emerged as a gay rights advocate. He responded to the “Save Ulster From Sodomy” campaign — an ultimately unsuccessful effort to keep homosexual acts illegal in Northern Ireland — by helping to mount a counter campaign with the slogan “Save Sodomy From Ulster.”

He moved to New York in the mid-1980s and became involved in the protracted struggle by L.G.B.T. groups to be fully included in the St. Patrick’s Day Parade up Fifth Avenue. Many years later, he became a member of the New York City St. Patrick’s Day Parade formation committee, and marched in the parade with the Lavender and Green Alliance in 2016.

Brendan Fay, a friend and fellow activist, emphasized that Mr. MacNiallais’s well-publicized activism for inclusive parades should not overshadow an equal passion. “Most of his life in this city was advocating for people with disabilities,” Mr. Fay said.

He was known for his decades of advocacy for L.G.B.T. and disability rights. “A battering ram on issues of importance,” according to Harriet Golden, a vice president at A.H.R.C. New York City, an organization that serves people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, where Mr. MacNiallais worked for nearly 35 years.

MacNiallais died on April 1, 2020 due to complications of the coronavirus, according to friends and family.

MICHAEL ARDEN, born on this date, is an American actor, singer, musician, and Tony Award-winning theatre director. Growing up in Midland, Texas, he was active in the Pickwick Players, Midland Community Theatre's youth performing company. He was a student at Trinity School, a college preparatory school in Midland. A Presidential Scholar in the arts, he received a scholarship to Interlochen Arts Academy as a theatre student, where he graduated in 2001. He was accepted on a full scholarship to the Juilliard School, where he was in the Drama Division's Group 34 (2001–2005). He left Juilliard in 2003 to join the Broadway revival company of the musical Big River.

Arden made his Broadway debut as Tom Sawyer in the 2003 Roundabout and Deaf West revival of Big River. He also starred opposite John Hill in the 2004 off-Broadway show Bare, a Pop Opera. In Summer 2005, he played Nick, a sexually promiscuous gay man in love with a shark, in Adam Bock's surreal play Swimming in the Shallows at New York's Second Stage Theatre. He played the title character in Pippin for the World AIDS Day Broadway benefit concert in November 2004. He starred in the new Twyla Tharp musical The Times They Are A-Changin' based on the music of Bob Dylan.

Arden directed Annie at the Hollywood Bowl in July 2018 for the venue's annual summer musical production, with a cast including Ana Gasteyer as Miss Hannigan, Lea Salonga as Grace Farrell, and Megan Hilty as Lily St Regis. Following this Arden was slated to direct Jefferson Mays in his one-man adaptation of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol at Los Angeles' Geffen Playhouse beginning October 2018. Arden directed the American premiere of the musical Maybe Happy Ending at the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta, GA in January 2020. He has worked extensively in television and film

In November 2022 Arden directed a production of Jason Robert Brown's Parade for New York City Center's 2022 Gala. The production transferred to Broadway in March 2023 with the cast led by Ben Platt and Micaela Diamond as Leo and Lucille Frank. This production won Arden the 2023 Tony Award for Best Direction of a Musical. Parade also won for Best Revival of A Musical.

In his acceptance speech for that award he said: