GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS, British poet, scholar and aesthete, born (d:1889); an English poet, Roman Catholic convert and Jesuit priest, whose 20th century fame established him posthumously among the leading Victorian poets. His experimental explorations in prosody (especially ‘sprung rhythm’) and his use of imagery established him as a daring innovator in a period of largely traditional verse.


In 1868 he entered a Jesuit Novitiate and burned all his early poems, resolved to write no more till he should by ecclesiastical authority, be enjoined to do so. After seven years, the silence was lifted by a superior’s suggestion that some member of the community should elegize the five Franciscan nuns who perished in the wreck of the Deutschland. Manley-Hopkins, the Jesuit poet, is a master of word painting, who in freshness of diction and elliptical approach is generally considered the first modern poet. He seems much closer to the 20th century than he does to the Victorians, and, in fact, his poems were only first collected and published in 1918.


The constant conflict between Hopkins’ desire to be an artist and his aestheticism is central to his poetry, but it produced the “nervous prostration” from which he suffered and which led to his failure as a parish priest, teacher, and classical lecturer – his real “occupations.” It is now acknowledged that what Hopkins called his “nervous prostration” was in reality his repressed homosexuality. The poet-priest was completely homosexual in inclination and perfectly celibate in life, a state which resulted in great misery for him and great poetry for us.

James Paul "JIMMY" DONAHUE Jr. was an heir to the Woolworth estate and a noted New York City socialite. He was the second son of James Paul Donahue, the scion of an Irish American family which had made a fortune in the fat rendering business (Retail Butchers’ Fat Rendering Company), by his wife Jessie Woolworth Donahue, one of the three daughters of Frank Winfield Woolworth, founder of the Woolworth retail chain. His older brother was Woolworth Donahue who brought a cheetah to Cannes following a safari .

Donahue was a nephew of Edna Woolworth, a wealthy socialite and a nephew by marriage of Franklyn Laws Hutton, a co-founder of the brokerage firm E. F. Hutton & Co. He was also the first cousin and confidante of the American socialite Barbara Hutton.

Donahue was a high school dropout. He initially attended the Hun School at Princeton, NJ, and after his parents were advised to remove him from there, he was shifted to Choate Rosemary Hall in Connecticut. However, he was expelled from that school at age 17. Following his expulsion from Choate he took tap dance lessons with the tap dance master Bill "Bojangles" Robinson.

Having been born into a wealthy family, Donahue never felt the need to earn a living, and indeed he lived lavishly, travelling the world with a valet in tow and staying at the most expensive hotels. He was known within his circle by the nickname "Jeem". A playboy by nature, he was a gay man although he claimed he had had a four-year affair with Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor, the wife of the Duke of Windsor and former King Edward VIII. This claim is endorsed by Lady Pamela Hicks, daughter of Earl Mountbatten of Burma and a cousin of the Duke of Windsor.

But it is far more likely that Jimmy played footsie with the Duke than the Duchess and all the "endorsement" and giggles from Simpson was because they knew the real -- and far more convenient -- story.

Donahue had several mansions built, including one on Palm beach, Florida where the Duke and Duchess stayed . Jimmy reportedly kicked the Duchess in the shin during the Windsors visit from the Bahamas where the duke was governor during the war. Presumably the Windsors used the Florida detectives during the Harry Oakes murder case in 1943 that were their body guards on this earlier trip to Florida in 1941.

He is buried in the Woolworth Family Mausoleum at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, New York, having died in 1966 at the age of 51.

LAWRENCE D. MASS, born on this date, is an American physician and writer. A co-founder of Gay Men's Health Crisis, he wrote the first press reports in the United States on the illness that later became known as AIDS. He is the author of numerous publications on HIV, hepatitis C, STDs, gay health, psychiatry and sex research, and on music, opera, and culture. He is also the author/editor of four books/collections. In 2009 he was in the first group of physicians to be designated as diplomates of the American Board of Addiction Medicine. Since 1979, he has lived and worked as a physician in New York City, where he resided with his life partner, writer and activist Arnie Kantrowitz.Having written for the New York Native since the 1970s, he currently writes a column for The Huffington Post. An archival collection of his papers are at the New York Public Library.

Mass received his B.A. from the University of California at Berkeley in 1969, and his M.D. from the University of Illinois's Abraham Lincoln School of Medicine in 1973.

Completing his residency in anesthesiology at Boston's Massachusetts General Hospital (in association with Harvard Medical School), Mass encountered homophobia during his interviews in Chicago for a residency in psychiatry when he disclosed that he was gay. This treatment became the catalyst for his activism that he pursued via journalism, making him the first openly gay physician to write on a regular basis for the gay press.

In 1982, Mass joined Larry Kramer, Edmund White, Paul Rapoport, Paul Popham and Nathan Fain in co-founding Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC), the world's first and still largest AIDS information and service organization. For 10 years, through four revisions, Mass authored GMHC's guide, Medical Answers About AIDS, which usually concluded with an appeal for civil liberties for sexual minority persons and the sanctioning of same sex relationships as "essential considerations in the preventive medicine of AIDS and other STDs."

By the mid-1990s, thanks largely to the efforts of Kramer and ACT UP, HIV infection had become largely manageable with medical care, and gay activist concerns began to shift. Mass has continued to write about more recent health problems afflicting gay men, including the escalation of HIV among minority teens and the elderly, the crystal meth epidemic, hepatitis C and anal cancer.

Beginning in the late 1990s, Mass extended his public health interests to the bear subculture of the gay community. He has addressed in a regular column a range of health topics of interest to this subculture, initially consisting of middle-aged overweight men, first for American Bear Magazine and later for A Bear's Life magazine.

The papers of Mass and Kantrowitz are designated for deposit with the New York Public Library.

WILLIAM DORSEY SWANN (c. 1858) was an American gay liberationist activist. He was born into slavery, so we can only guess at the date of his birth. He was the first person in the United States to lead a queer resistance group and the first known person to self-identify as a "queen of drag."

Swann was a slave in Hancock Maryland and was freed by Union soldiers after the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect.

During the 1880s and 1890s, Swann organized a series of balls in Washington D.C. He called himself the "queen of drag". Most of the attendees of Swann's gatherings were men who were former slaves, and were gathering to dance in their satin and silk dresses. Because these events were secretive, invitations were often quietly made at places like the YMCA.

Swann was arrested in police raids numerous times, including in the first documented case of arrests for female impersonation in the United States, on April 12, 1888. In 1896, he was falsely convicted and sentenced to 10 months in jail for "keeping a disorderly house", i.e., running a brothel. After his sentencing, he requested a pardon from President Grover Cleveland who blanched and took to his chambers, requesting his salts. Which is to say the request was denied, but Swann was the first American on record who pursued legal and political action to defend the LGBTQ community's right to gather.

Swann was known to have been close with Pierce Lafayette and Felix Hall, two men who had also both been slaves and who formed the first known male same-sex relationship between enslaved Americans.

When Swann stopped organizing and participating in drag events, his brother continued to make costumes for the drag community. Two of his brothers had also been active participants in Swann's drag balls. Swann is the subject of the upcoming non-fiction book The House of Swann by Channing Joseph, set for publication by Picador in 2021.

THE CERCLE HERMAPHRODITOS was the first known informal transgender advocacy organization in the United States, founded in 1895 in New York City "to unite for defense against the world’s bitter persecution". The group first met at Paresis Hall, also called Columbia Hall or simply "the Hall," which was a center of homosexual nightlife in New York City. There, male sex workers would solicit men under an effeminate persona.

In a time when cross dressing was socially unacceptable and a punishable crime, places like Paresis Hall provided a place where self-described "instinctive female-impersonators," androgynes,  queens, fairies, or Uranians could gather and feel more free to express themselves and socialize with similar people. These were Victorian era and Edwardian era words – with their own nuances of meaning – for people who were born male, felt they were at least partly women in mind or spirit, and preferred having sex with men; people who today might call themselves transgender women, non-binary people, or feminine gay men, in the language of today's LGBT communities.

The nature of Paresis Hall during this period is known to historians today from a variety of sources. However, the Cercle Hermaphroditos is more apocryphal, known chiefly from the autobiography of an "instinctive female-impersonator," Jennie June, who provides the main surviving description of it. June says all the group's members knew one another only by pseudonyms, for reasons of safety. Additionally, June also stated that the majority of the group were Ultra-Androgyne, & would always clothe themselves as female in their daily lives if the law permitted it. The group was led by pseudonymous Roland Reeves. Little evidence of the Cercle's existence is known to survive today, outside of June's autobiography. If it issued any pamphlets, none are yet known to historians. For this reason, some historians have raised questions about whether the Cercle existed at all.

The Cercle is noted by transgender historian Susan Stryker as "the first known informal organization in the United States to concern itself with what we might now call transgender social justice issues".^[11]