English fictional detective, born; What!? SHERLOCK HOLMES? Why include the famous, hawk-nosed detective, a figment of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s fertile imagination, when today is also the birthday of the very real KING RICHARD II (b: 1367), whom even the staid Encyclopedia Britannica called “tall, handsome, and effeminate”?

Why? Because Sherlock, whom his creator almost named “Sherinford,” is simply more interesting. And, besides, almost anyone who has read Shakespeare knows about Richard, whereas almost no one realizes that Sherlock Holmes was Gay. He was, of course, the first consulting detective, a vocation he followed for 23 years. In January 1881, he was looking for someone to share his new digs at 221B Baker Street, and there being no personal ads in the Village Voice or The Advocate (remember those?) in those days, a friend introduced him to Dr. John H. Watson.

Before agreeing to share the flat, the two men, immediately attracted to one another, listed their respective character deficiencies. Holmes admitted to smoking a smelly pipe, although he didn’t mention that he was a frequent user of cocaine. Watson owned up to a peculiar habit of leaving his bed at odd hours of the night. “I have another set of vices,” he admitted, but, then, so did Sherlock.

The two became friends and roommates for the rest of their lives. For the sordid details of the famous marriage of true minds that followed, read Rex Stout’s astonishing “Watson Was Woman,” in which the famous creator of Nero Wolfe (himself hardly a paragon of butch studliness) reveals that Watson and Holmes were the most extraordinary Gay team in sleuthing history.

Today is the birthday of JUAN GOYTISOLO, the Spanish poet and novelist. Goytisolo was born in Barcelona in 1931, in an aristocratic family; two of his brothers José Agustín and Luis are also well known writers. His father was imprisoned by the Republican government during the Spanish Civil War while his mother was killed in the first Francoist air raid in 1938.

After law studies, he published his first novel, The Young Assassins, in 1954. His deep opposition to Generalissimo Francisco Franco led him into exile in Paris in 1956, where he worked as a reader for Gallimard. In the early 1960s, he was a friend of Guy Debord and Jean Genet was his mentor.  He says of the playwright who could fit all his belongings in a suitcase: "He was alien to all kinds of vanity. Because of him, I discovered I was interested in literature, not in literary life. I try to take my work seriously but not myself." He quotes Genet: "If you know your point of arrival, it's not a literary adventure, it's a bus journey."   Breaking with the realism of his earlier novels, he published Marks of Identity (1966), Count Julian (1970), and Juan the Landless (1975). Like all his works, they were banned in Spain until Franco's death.

Juan Goytisolo was married to the publisher, novelist and screenwriter Monique Lange, a cousin of novelist Marcel Proust, Emmanuel Berl, and the philosopher Henri Bergson. Monique Lange died in 1996. After her death, he is noted as saying their once shared Paris apartment had become like a tomb. In 1997 he moved to Marrakesh, in part due to the Arab culture's acceptance of his homosexuality.  In Edmund White's view Goytisolo "is an apostle of the revolutionary, anarchic power of sexuality, of the desiring body, to break through the sterile confines of class."

JOSEPH SONNABEND was an Afrikaans physician, scientist and HIV/AIDS researcher, born on this date (d: 2021) notable for pioneering community-based research, the propagation of safe sex to prevent infection, and an early multifactorial model of AIDS.

As one of the first physicians to notice among his gay male patients the immune deficiency that would later be named AIDS, during the 1980s and 1990s he treated many hundreds of HIV-positive people. During the height of the AIDS crisis, Sonnabend helped create several AIDS organizations, including the AIDS Medical Foundation (now amfAR), the nonprofit Community Research Initiative (now ACRIA), which pioneered community-based research, and the PWA Health Group, the first and largest formally recognized buyers' club.

Sonnabend became controversial for maintaining his view that HIV was not the sole cause of AIDS over a decade after the virus's discovery but he is widely respected as a pioneering and compassionate clinician and researcher.

Sonnabend was one of the first physicians to notice among his gay male patients the immune deficiency that would later be named AIDS. His background in microbiology, virology, infectious diseases and prior experience of working with immunocompromised transplant patients helped him to conduct some of the earliest research into AIDS, independently of government agencies that were slow to react and often at his own expense, and in 1983 he was founding editor one of the first AIDS journals, AIDS Research (renamed AIDS Research and Human Retroviruses in 1986, after Sonnabend was fired from the journal).

While he fathered three daughters with three different women, Sonnabend nevertheless openly identified as a gay man.

On this date the American lyric poet JOHN WIENERS was born (d. 2002). From 1954, when he graduated from Boston College with an A.B. in English, to 1970, when he published Nerves, Boston-born poet John Wieners was thoroughly immersed in the art, culture, and turmoil of the time. He spent 1955-1956 at Charles Olson's experimental Black Mountain College in North Carolina, studying writing with Robert Creeley and Robert Duncan. Wieners journeyed to San Francisco where he published his breakthrough Hotel Wentley Poems in 1958, at age twenty-four.

Wieners returned to Boston in 1959 to be institutionalized, in part because of drug abuse. In 1961 he moved to New York City with the help of a grant from Allen Ginsberg's Poetry Foundation. He worked as an assistant bookkeeper at the Eighth Street Bookshop from 1962-1963. Wieners went back to Boston in 1963 and worked as a subscriptions editor for Jordan Marsh department stores until 1965. In 1964 Robert Wilson, of The Phoenix Bookshop, published Wieners's second book, Ace Of Pentacles.

In 1965 Wieners moved west, spending time in Los Angeles and at the Berkeley Poetry Conference where he met up with his old friend, Charles Olson. Olson, then an endowed Chair of Poetics at S.U.N.Y. Buffalo, invited Wieners to enroll in the graduate program there, which is where he stayed until 1967. Pressed Wafer (1967) was published chronicling those years.

In 1967 Wieners's lover left him and went to Europe with a mentor of his, but not before aborting his child first. In late 1967 Wieners, back in Boston, resorted to further drink and drugs. In the spring of 1969 Wieners was again institutionalized, resulting in The Asylum Poems (For my Father), published later that year.

Wieners published Nerves in 1970, which contained his work from 1966 to 1970, including all of the Asylum Poems. In the early 1970s, despite brief periods of institutionalization, Wieners taught a course entitled "Verse in the U.S. Since 1955" at the Beacon Hill Free School in Boston. He was also involved in the antiwar movement, crusaded against racism, and campaigned for the rights of women and homosexuals.

In 1975 Wieners published Behind the State Capital, or Cincinnati Pike, a book of letters, memoirs, and brief lyric poems. He has published little new work since 1975 and has remained largely out of the public eye. In 1986 he produced a retrospective collection, Selected Poems, 1958-1984 with a forward written by Allen Ginsberg. In 1996 he appeared with Ed Sanders at Stone Soup in Boston for what would have been Jack Kerouac's 76th birthday celebration. Also in 1996, The Sun and Moon Press released an edited and previously unpublished diary and journal by Wieners documenting his life in San Francisco around the time of The Hotel Wentley Poems. The book, The Journal of John Wieners is to be called 707 Scott Street for Billie Holiday, 1959, contains prose, poetry, and assorted musings from Wieners at age twenty-four at the dawn of the Sixties.

Wieners died on March 1, 2002 at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, having collapsed a few days previously after an evening attending a party with his friend and publisher Charley Shively. Kidnap Notes Next, a collection of poems and journal entries edited by Jim Dunn, was published posthumously in 2002. A Book of Prophecies was published in 2007 from Bootstrap Press. The manuscript was discovered in the Kent State University archive's collection by poet Michael Carr. It was a journal written by Wieners in 1971, and opens with a poem titled 2007.

BILL HAYES (William Brooke Hayes) is an American non-fiction writer and photographer. He has written four books – Sleep Demons, Five Quarts, The Anatomist, and Insomnia City – and has produced one book of photography, How New York Breaks Your Heart. His freelance writing has appeared in a number of periodicals, most notably The New York Times. His most recent book is Sweat: A History of Exercise.

Hayes' first book, Sleep Demons, was published in 2001. An exploration of insomnia and other sleep disorders, Sleep Demons is part memoir, part trivia collection, and part record of scientific discovery. His second book, Five Quarts: A Personal and Natural History of Blood was published in 2005. In it, Hayes details the history of the scientific exploration of blood, and its many cultural associations. He also recounts his own relationship with an HIV-positive partner, and the science and emotion involved in treating HIV. The Anatomist, published in 2008, is a history of Gray's Anatomy, released 150 years after its first publication.

Hayes was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for non-fiction in 2013.

His fourth book, 2017's Insomniac City: New York, Oliver, and Me, is a memoir of his life in New York City, and his six-year relationship with neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks.

Hayes is also an accomplished photographer. His latest book 

Today is the birthday of the Hungarian politician GáBOR SZETEY.  Szetey is the former Secretary of State for Human Resources, a role he held since July 2006. He is a member of the Hungarian Socialist Party.

Szetey publicly declared that he was Gay at the opening night of Budapest's Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, on July 6, 2007. He is the first LGBT member of government in Hungary, and the second politician to come out, after Klára Ungár. Szetey's coming out came at the end of a speech on equality and tolerance:

“When we can be proud of being Hungarian, Romanian, Jewish, Catholic, Gay or Straight... If we can be proud of our differences, we will be proud of our similarities. I believe in God. And I believe that all men and women have the right to love and be loved. Everywhere. Love has no party preference. Neither does happiness or choosing a partner. So: I am Gábor Szetey. I am European, and Hungarian. I believe in God, love, freedom, and equality. I am the Human Resources Secretary of State of the Government of the Republic of Hungary. Economist and HR director. Partner, friend, sometimes rival. And I am Gay.”

In the audience was Klára Dobrev, the wife of Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány, as well as four other members of the Hungarian cabinet. The Prime Minister supported Szetey on his blog and called for public debate about same-sex relationships in Hungary. Hungary currently recognizes same-sex registered partnerships. After the coming out of Mr. Szetey, the Parliament adopted the Registered Civil Union Act, which came into force 1 January 2009.

In a subsequent interview, Szetey declared:

“There is a small but vocal group of right-wing extremists which is intent on offending everyone... According to a survey, 51 percent of the respondents thought my speech was courageous and that it would improve the situation for homosexuals. It's strange that the conservatives, who attach such great importance to neighboring states giving their Hungarian minorities equal rights, couldn't care less about equal rights in their own country."

Today's the birthday of child actor DANNY PINTAURO. Pintauro played Jonathan Bower, son of Angela Bower in the series 'Who's the Boss' from 1984 till 1992. He was born as Daniel John Pintauro in Milltown, New Yersey, USA. Pintauro studied English and drama at Stanford University

The iconic ballet dancer RUDOLF NUREYEV died on this date (b. 1938) Nureyev's artistic skills explored expressive areas of the dance, providing a new role to the ballet male dancer who once served only as support to the women.

He defected from the Soviet Union despite KGB efforts. According to KGB archives studied by his biographer Peter Watson, Nikita Khrushchev personally signed an order to kill Nureyev.  Meow. Nyet means Nyet Nikita.

I briefly met Nureyev...naked at my kitchen table one morning. I was living in San Francisco with my boyfriend. We had a three bedroom apartment (for $190 a month!) and we had a roommate, Michael. It was Sunday morning and I was being a good boyfriend and getting up for coffee that I was going to bring back to bed. I walked into the kitchen (naked) and didn't really notice, but Michael was sitting at the table with someone. As I turned to leave Michael (naked) spoke up, "Bo...this is Rudy. Rudy, this is my housemate, Bo." I said good morning and was greeted in return with a thick Russian "good morning". Michaek had brought Rudolph Nureyev home. Need I add that Rudy was....naked?

I quickly left the room to hurry back to tell Peter he really should go in and get his own cup of coffee. He did. And returned with mouth agape. We heard their bedroom door close and shortly thereafter the front door.