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.

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.