CATULLUS aka Gaius Valerius Catullus, Roman poet of the 1^st century BCE born (d: 54 BCE); His love poetry was never surpassed in ancient times, and influenced a great many poets, both ancient and modern.

Tibullus, Propertius, Horace and Ovid imitated his techniques, and, during the English Renaissance, English poets such as Ben Jonson and Robert Herrick attempted to capture the quality of Catullus (unsuccessfully) in English. Most of Catullus’s poems are short; in a few concise lines he is able to create an experience of love, friendship, or sometimes bitterness and anger either at his mistress (whom he called “Lesbia”) or at some person he despised.

Although most of his poems are about heterosexual love, a good number of them are devoted to the love of boys. These are particularly lusty, some of them very funny, and all of them explicitly sexual. (Since many editions of Catullus prudishly omit these poems, and since almost all translations are severely bowdlerized, only one edition in translation is recommended, that by Peter Whigham.) In one poem, the poet comes upon a young boy “stuffing his girl.” With a wink to Venus, he “stuffs” the boy as “poetic justice.” Since Catullus was a contemporary of Caesar, his pederastic poetry is characterized by the basic prejudice of the period: “taking” a boy is a manly act, but allowing another man to do unto you what you did unto him is sheer depravity.

JONATHAN FRID was a Canadian actor, born on this date (d: 2012) best known for his role as vampire Barnabas Collins on the gothic television soap opera Dark Shadows. The introduction in 1967 of Frid's reluctant, guilt-ridden vampire caused the floundering daytime drama to soar to 20 million daily viewers. His watershed portrayal has been cited as a key influence on contemporary genre film and television series such as Twilight, True Blood and The Vampire Diaries.

After receiving high praise in his second year at Yale for his portrayal of Tullus Aufidius in Shakespeare's Coriolanus, Frid was invited to join the American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Connecticut. For two consecutive summer seasons, under the direction of John Houseman, Frid performed with such distinguished actors as Alfred Drake, Earle Hyman, Fritz Weaver, Sada Thompson, and Katharine Hepburn.

After earning his MFA in 1957, Frid joined Hepburn and other members of the American Shakespeare Festival on a national tour of Much Ado About Nothing. When the tour concluded Frid moved to New York City, where he made his off-Broadway debut in The Golem directed by Robert Kalfin. In 1961 he began using the stage name Jonathan Frid, first seen in the program for The Moon in The Yellow River. He continued to appear in many off-Broadway productions and in regional theatres across the United States. Among them were Front Street Theater in Memphis; Pittsburgh Playhouse; and the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego. 

His most celebrated Shakespearean performance was the title role of Richard III at the 1965 Summer Festival of Professional Theatre at Pennsylvania State University.

Frid made his Broadway debut as an understudy, and appeared, in the 1964 play Roar Like a Dove, directed by Cyril Ritchard and starring Betsy Palmer.

How closeted was Jonathan Frid? While he never publicly came out, he did, during the many years he lived in New York City, patronize several gay bars. He allowed himself to be photographed with Louis Edmonds, his openly gay co-star, on a gay beach in New York. 

Frid died in May 2012 at the age of 87. He was a gentleman to the end, always conducting himself with the utmost dignity and class. To gay kids who watched him get out of that coffin and search for his long dead love, he remains a pivotal icon. Barnabas Collins, the lonely vampire who felt cursed by the undead state he was forced to live in, gave his young gay viewers, many of whom were forced by society to live equally lonely lives, a hero they could believe in.

GIANNI VERSACE, Italian fashion designer born (d. 1997); An Italian designer of both clothing and theater costumes, Versace was influenced by Andy Warhol, Ancient Roman and Greek art as well as modern abstract art; he is considered one of the most colorful and talented designers of the late 20^th century.

Gianni Versace met Antonio D’Amico, a model, in 1982. The couple embarked on a long-term relationship that lasted 11 years, until Versace's untimely death.

During that time Antonio worked as designer for the Versace sports line. Versace's will left his male partner D'Amico with a pension of 50 million lire (about $26,000) a month (for life), and the right to live in any of Versace's homes in Italy and the United States. D'Amico now runs his own fashion design company.

One July morning in the summer of 1997, returning from his customary walk on Ocean Drive, Versace was gunned down outside his ocean-front mansion in Miami Beach, Florida. He was murdered by gay spree killer Andrew Cunanan, who committed suicide shortly after the murder. Versace was buried in Lake Como, Italy

DAVID CARTER was an author and historian on LGBTQ civil rights born on this date (d: 2020); He is credited with writing the definitive book about the 1969 Stonewall riots that he said triggered a worldwide “mass movement” for LGBTQ rights. Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution, was published in 2004, when a younger generation might not have fully appreciated how oppressive life was for gay men and women in the New York of the 1960s. Mr. Carter conjured the times bluntly.

Shortly after his Stonewall book was published, Carter began work on what he considered his next major project – a definitive biography of gay rights pioneer Frank Kameny, the co-founder of the Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C. in the early 1960s. For more than 10 years, Carter conducted extensive research on Kameny’s role as one of the first known pre-Stonewall activists who declared homosexuals to be a minority group deserving of full civil rights.

Carter was born and raised in the Southeast Georgia town of Jesup. He graduated from the town’s Wayne County High School before attending Emory University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in religion and French.

During his junior year in college he studied at the Sorbonne University in France. He later attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he earned a master’s degree in 1978 in South Asian Studies. He first became involved in the gay rights movement while a graduate student in Madison. Among other things, Carter organized a 1977 dance that raised more than $1,000 to support a Dade County, Fla., gay rights group that was fighting a campaign by anti-gay advocate Anita Bryant to overturn the Florida county’s gay rights law.

A short time later, Carter co-founded an organization in Madison that led a successful effort to prevent anti-gay advocates from overturning Madison’s gay rights law, making Madison one of the few places in the country in the late 1970s and early 1980s to stop an effort to repeal a pro-LGBTQ nondiscrimination law.

Carter later became involved in the successful lobbying effort that made Wisconsin the first state in the nation to pass a law banning discrimination based on sexual orientation.

He moved to New York City in 1985 shortly before starting work as an editor at Chelsea House Publishers, a publisher of young adult multicultural books. Chelsea accepted a proposal by Carter that it publish two separate book series for young adults, “Issues in Gay and Lesbian Life” and “Lives of Notable Gay Men and Lesbians.”

After leaving Chelsea House, Carter began work on the Stonewall book and a separate book consisting of a collection of interviews of famed gay poet Allen Ginsberg that was later published as “Spontaneous Mind: Selected Interviews 1958-1996.”

In 2014, Carter served as the historic adviser to the National Park Service in the successful effort to have the Stonewall site become a National Monument. 

He  died May 1 at his Greenwich Village apartment in New York City. He was 67.

DAN BUTLER, American actor, born; American actor known for his role as Bob "Bulldog" Briscoe on the long-running TV series Frasier as well as "D-pop" on the television show "Handsworth High." Butler was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

Openly Gay, he starred in Terrence McNally's 1989 play The Lisbon Traviata and wrote an off-Broadway play about his life, The Only Thing Worse You Could Have Told Me..., which derives its title from a comment Butler's father allegedly made when Dan came out to him.

Butler is married to producer Richard Waterhouse.

DR. ROBERT GARCIA, born on this date, is an educator and the 28th Mayor of Long Beach. He was re-elected to a second term by almost 80% of the vote in 2018.

Garcia immigrated to the United States at age 5 and was raised in Southern California. He is a college and university educator, holds an M.A. from the University of Southern California and an Ed.D. in Higher Education from Cal State Long Beach, where he also earned his B.A. in Communication.

Mayor Garcia has focused on making the City of Long Beach a leader in education, economic development, and climate protection. As Mayor, he has championed progressive education policy, launched an aggressive climate plan, supported workers by increasing the minimum wage and fought to expand and protect rights for women, immigrants, and the LGBTQ community.

He has proposed and passed ten ballot initiatives since 2014. They include measures to support safety and infrastructure, a cannabis tax, and reforms to strengthen the city auditor, set term limits, and create ethics and redistricting commissions. His signature initiative, Measure A, has launched the largest infrastructure repair program in a generation.

Mayor Garcia currently serves as a Board Member on the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (Metro) representing much of South East Los Angeles County.

He is married to Matthew Mendez Garcia, a professor of political science at California State University, Long Beach

NELLY FURTADO, the Canadian bisexual singer, was born in Victoria, British Columbia as Nelly Kim Furtado. Her hits include: I'm like a bird (2001), Hey, Man! (2002), Powerless (2003), Try (2004), Explode (2004), Maneater (2006)

CASON CRANE is an American entrepreneur and endurance athlete born on this date. In 2013, he became the first out gay mountaineer to scale the Seven Summits. In 2023, he competed on season 1 of the USA Network competition show Race to Survive: Alaska with his sister Bella Crane, finishing in 3rd place.

Crane is the oldest of five children born to David W. Crane, the president of NRG Energy, and Isabella de la Houssaye, who was an international lawyer, and a prolific endurance athlete and mountaineer  in Mercer County, New Jersey. He lived in Hong Kong between the ages of one and six before returning to Lawrenceville, New Jersey. His younger brother Oliver Crane is an American adventurer and rower.

Crane attended Princeton Day School through his eighth grade year, along with the rest of his siblings. In 2011, he graduated from Choate Rosemary Hall, a private boarding school in Connecticut, where he competed in a number of sports. He came out as gay at the age of 14; both his parents and his school were supportive, although he experienced bullying by classmates on occasion.

Crane summited his first mountain, Mount Kilimanjaro, as a 15-year-old freshman in high school with his mother. They had just finished the Kilimanjaro Marathon the day before. He described it as a "gateway mountain" which piqued his interest in mountaineering. As a junior, following the suicides of Tyler Clementi and one of Crane's friends, he was inspired to raise awareness about suicide among LGBT youth through mountain climbing. This led him to start the Rainbow Summits Project, with the goal of climbing the Seven Summits—the highest mountains of each continent—in order to raise funds and awareness for the Trevor Project.

By the beginning of 2013, a year after starting the Rainbow Summits Project, Crane had successfully climbed five of the Seven Summits: Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, Mount Elbrus in Russia, Cerro Aconcagua in Argentina, Carstensz Pyramid in Indonesia and Vinson Massif in Antarctica. In May 2013, he reached the summit of Mount Everest in Nepal, guided by New Zealand climber Lydia Bradey, the first woman to summit Everest without using supplemental oxygen. Crane's successful ascent of Denali in July 2013 at the age of 20 marked his completion of the Seven Summits, making him the first out gay man to have done so. By the completion of the project, Crane had raised US$135,000 for the Trevor Project.

On this date the American novelist, writer, playwright, poet, essayist and civil rights activist JAMES BALDWIN died in the South of France (b. 1924).  Most of Baldwin's work dealt with racial and sexual issues in the mid-20th century in the United States. His novels are notable for the personal way in which they explore questions of identity as well as the way in which they mine complex social and psychological pressures related to being black and homosexual well before the social, cultural or political equality of these groups was improved.

On this date the great American composer AARON COPLAND died (b. 1900). A composer of concert and film music, as well as an accomplished pianist, Copland was instrumental in forging a distinctly American style of composition.  He was widely known as “the dean of American composers.” Copland's music achieved a balance between modern music and American folk styles. The open, slowly changing harmonies of many of his works are said to evoke the vast American landscape. He also incorporated percussive orchestration, changing meter, polyrhythms, polychords and tone rows in a broad range of works for concert hall, theater, ballet, and films. Aside from composing, Copland was a teacher, lecturer, critic, writer, and conductor (generally, but not always) of his own works.

On this date DAVID CATANIA became the first openly gay or Lesbian person to be elected to the city council of Washington, D.C.  Catania was elected as a Republican but left the party during the George W. Bush administration in protest of the right-ward, anti-Gay takeover the GOP.  He's now an independent.  Catania would go on to author, sponsor and shepherd through the key legislation that legalized same-sex marriage in the nation's capital in 2010.