AMY LOWELL, American poet, born (d: 1925); Lowell was born into Boston's prominent Lowell family. Her brother, Percival Lowell, was a famous astronomer who predicted the existence of the dwarf planet Pluto; another, Abbott Lawrence Lowell, served as President of  Harvard University. She herself never attended college because it was not deemed proper for a woman by her family, but she compensated for this with her avid reading, which led to near-obsessive book-collecting. She lived as a socialite and traveled widely, turning to poetry in 1902 after being inspired by a performance of Eleanor Duse in Europe.

Her first published work appeared in 1910 in The Atlantic Monthly. The first published collection of her poetry, A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass, appeared two years later. Lowell was Lesbian, and in 1912 she and actress Ada Dwyer Russell, whom she called “Peter” were lovers. Russell was Lowell's patron. Russell was the subject of her more erotic work.

The two women traveled to England together, where Lowell met Ezra Pound, who at once became a major influence and a major critic of her work. Lowell has been linked romantically to writer Mercedes de Acosta, but the only evidence that they knew each other at all is the brief correspondence between them about a memorial for Duse that never took place.

Acosta is said to have said that Lowell could spit a cigar tip into a spittoon fifteen feet away. Forgotten for years, there has been a resurgence of interest in her work, in part because of its focus on lesbian themes and her collection of love poems addressed to Ada Dwyer Russell, but also because of its extraordinary, almost frightening, ability to breathe life into inanimate objects, such as in The Green Bowl, The Red Lacquer Music Stand, and Patterns.

SHEILA KUEHL, American actress, born; an American politician, and a former child actress she is best known, as an actress, for her portrayal of the "irrepressible" Zelda Gilroy in the long-running 1950s TV show The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. She is currently a Democratic member of the California State Senate, representing the highly urbanized 23^rd district in Los Angeles County and parts of southern Ventura County. A former member of the California State Assembly, she was elected to the senate in 2000. Term limits prevented her seeking a third senate term in 2008.

Kuehl was first elected to the California State Assembly in 1994, becoming the first out LGBT person elected to the California legislature. She served as Speaker pro tempore during the 1997-98 legislative session, becoming the first woman in California history to hold the position. After three terms in the Assembly, she was elected to the California State Senate in 2000, beating Assemblyman Wally Knox in the Democratic primary. Re-elected in 2004 with 65.7% of the vote, she has repeatedly been voted the "smartest" member of the California Legislature by the California Journal.

In 2006, she sponsored a bill that would prohibit the adoption by any school district in California of any instructional material that discriminates against persons based on their gender or sexual orientation. Throughout her career as a legislator, Kuehl has taken a leadership role on healthcare policy. Her foremost objective has been securing passage of legislation to establish a single-payer healthcare system in California. SB 840 passed both houses of the legislature in 2006, but was vetoed by Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger; it was reintroduced in 2007 and again passed the state Senate, with a vote pending in the Assembly.

Term-limited from running for the Senate again, Kuehl ran for and became the first openly LGBT member of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, and took office in December 2014. The 3^rd District covers western Los Angeles County, including the Westside, San Fernando, Malibu and the Santa Monica Mountains.

Since joining the LA County Board of Supervisors, she has championed efforts to reduce homelessness, raise the minimum wage, establish LA County’s first affordable housing trust, and develop measures that will bring long-term environmental sustainability to the region.

In the past Kuehl had a ten-year romantic relationship with Torie Osborn and while admitting publicly that she was hurt at first over the break-up, she was over time able to gain perspective and became best friends with Osborn. Osborn went on to support Kuehl's run for Supervisor and (having previously served as a deputy mayor in L.A.) joined her staff as principal deputy for strategy and policy.

SUSAN LOVE, was an American surgeon, a prominent advocate of preventive breast cancer research, and author. She was regarded as one of the most respected women's health specialists in the United States. Love is best known for pioneering work fueled by her criticism of the medical establishment's paternalistic treatment of women. She was an early advocate of cancer surgery that conserves as much breast tissue as possible. She also was among the first to sound the alarm on the risks of routine hormone replacement therapy (HRT) for menopausal women.

Love completed her surgical training at Boston's Beth Israel Hospital, and in 1988 was recruited to found the Faulkner Breast Center at Faulkner Hospital, with comprehensive care that allowed patients to see teams composed of radiation therapists, oncologists and surgeons. After leaving the Faulkner Hospital in Boston, Love was recruited to set up what later became the Revlon Breast Center at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1992. A founder of the breast cancer advocacy movement in the early 1990's, she helped organize the National Breast Cancer Coalition (NBCC). She later served on the boards of the NBCC and the Young Survival Coalition. In 1996, she retired from the active practice of surgery to dedicate her time to finding the cause for breast cancer. According to The New York Times, Love sought "not so much to cure the disease as to vanquish it altogether by isolating its causes and pre-empting them at a cellular level".

Love fought to expand the rights of same-sex couples as parents. In 1993, Dr. Love and her wife, Dr. Helen Cooksey, made history by getting approval for the first joint adoption by a gay couple from the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, a state that did not recognize same-sex marriage at the time. The couple married in San Francisco in 2004.

In 2012, Love announced that she was diagnosed with leukemia and would take a leave of absence to pursue  chemotherapy treatment. After a successful treatment, Love returned to work the following year, but died from a recurrence of the disease on July 2, 2023, at the age of 75, at her home in Los Angeles.

JIM J. BULLOCK, American actor, born; An out Gay personality, Bullock became a notable entertainment figure in the 1980s when he co-starred on Too Close for Comfort, and was a regular "square" on John Davidson's updated version of Hollywood Squares (1986-89). After the sitcom went off the air, Bullock remained active with theater, TV, and film work.

He briefly hosted a syndicated talk show with ex-televangelist, Tammy Faye Baker Messner. The Jim J. and Tammy Faye Show debuted in 1996, but Messner exited the program a few months later following a cancer diagnosis. Bullock continued with new co-host Ann Abernathy, and the show became The Jim J. and Ann Show until it was cancelled soon after. Bullock was the voice of Queer Duck in the animated series of cartoons of the same name which have appeared on both the Internet and the TV channel Showtime.

GABRIEL ROTELLO (nee Douglas Gabriel Rotello) is an American musician, writer and filmmaker born on this date. He created New York's Downtown Divas revues in the 1980s, was the co-founder and editor-in-chief of OutWeek magazine, became the first openly gay columnist at a major American newspaper, New York Newsday, and authored the book Sexual Ecology. He now makes documentaries for HBO, The History Channel and other networks.

Gabriel Rotello was born and raised in Danbury, Connecticut, and attended Knox College and Carlton College. He was in the first group of American exchange students to live and study in Kathmandu, Nepal. After graduating Rotello became a New York City keyboard player, arranger and music director. In 1979 he co-founded the underground band Brenda and the Realtones, whose story was recounted in the off-Broadway show Endangered Species in 1997.

In the 1980s, as music director of The Realtones he backed artists such as Ronnie Spector, Darlene Love, Solomon Burke, Rufus Thomas and many others. In the mid-1980s he produced a series of music revues at The Limelight, The Palladium and The Saint under the general name Downtown Dukes and Divas. Among his collaborators were the Uptown Horns, David Johansen, Cherry Vanilla, Johnny Thunders, the Lady Bunny, Holly Woodlawn, Joey Arias, David Peaston, Taylor Mead, Sylvain Sylvain, Jackie Curtis, Dean Johnson, Michael Musto, Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato of the Fabulous Pop Tarts and many others. Rotello's life and productions during this period were frequently filmed by videographer Nelson Sullivan, and are now part of Sullivan's archive of downtown life in the 1980s.

In 1988 Rotello joined the AIDS activist group ACT UP and served on its fundraising committee. In 1989 he co-founded OutWeek magazine with businessman Kendall Morrison and became its editor-in-chief. The New York Times called OutWeek "the most progressive of the gay publications", and Time magazine wrote that "its greatest success was in shaking up its competitors by challenging their brand of gay activism with a more militant stance."

Rotello and OutWeek became controversial for the practice of "outing," which originated at OutWeek, and for promoting the word queer as a catch-all phrase for sexual minorities. As an investigative reporter Rotello helped break numerous stories such as the Covenant House scandal and the Woody Myers affair, which The New York Times called "the most bitter dispute of the Dinkins administration". Many of the young staffers Rotello hired at OutWeek went on to become well-known figures in gay and lesbian writing, publishing and other fields, including Michelangelo Signorile, Sarah Pettit, Dale Peck, Jim Provenzano, K. M. Soehnlein and James St. James.

In 1998 Rotello moved to Los Angeles and began making documentaries exploring American life and popular culture with World of Wonder founders Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato. Their first collaboration, the documentary Party Monster, centered on New York's downtown nightclub scene, a world which Rotello, Bailey and Barbato knew from their earlier days as musicians. Their next feature, The Eyes of Tammy Faye, is on Current TV's list of 50 Documentaries to See Before You Die.

Rotello currently makes science and history documentaries with Flight 33 Productions for the History Channel, Discovery Channel and National Geographic Channel, including series such as The Universe, Life After People, Big History and America's Secret Slang.