BARBETTE (born Vander Clyde) born (d. 1973); Born in Round Rock, Texas, Clyde achieved international fame as Barbette, a female impersonator and trapeze and high-wire performer.

Enamored of the circus after his mother took him to his first performance in Austin, Clyde began practicing on the clothesline in his mother's yard and working in the fields for money to go to as many circuses as possible. After graduating from high school at age fourteen, he traveled to San Antonio to answer a Billboard advertisement placed by one of the Alfaretta Sisters, "World Famous Aerial Queens." He joined the act on the condition that he dress as a girl, since his partner believed that women's clothes made a wire act more dramatic. He later performed in Erford's Whirling Sensation, in which he and two others hung by their teeth from a revolving apparatus.

If you’ve seen the idiotic Victor/Victoria and wondered what all the fuss was about when Julie Andrews, looking very much like Julie Andrews, sings and dances in female attire and then, as the audience goes crazy, removes her wig and reveals herself to be a man, who still looks very much like Julie Andrews, it was Barbette whom she was supposed to be impersonating.

During this period Clyde began developing a solo act in which he appeared and performed as a woman and removed his wig to reveal his masculinity at the end of the performance. After adopting the name Barbette, he traveled throughout the United States performing the act, which became wildly popular. In the fall of 1923 the William Morris Agency sent him to England and then to Paris, where he opened at the Alhambra Music Hall. Barbette became the talk of Paris and was befriended by members of both American café society and French literary and social circles.

In particular, his artistry was championed by French poet and dramatist Jean Cocteau. Inspired by Barbette's act, which he described as "an extraordinary lesson in theatrical professionalism," Cocteau wrote a review in the July 1926 issue of the Nouvelle Revue Française, "Le Numéro Barbette," which is considered a classic essay on the nature of art. As described by Cocteau, Barbette's acrobatics became a vehicle for theatrical illusion.

From his entrance, when he appeared in an elaborate ball gown and an ostrich-feather hat, to an elaborate striptease down to tights and leotard in the middle of the act, Barbette enacted a feminine allure that was maintained despite the vigorous muscular activity required by his trapeze routine.

Only at the end of the performance, when he removed his wig, did he dispel the illusion, at which time he mugged and flexed in a masculine manner to emphasize the success of his earlier deception. To Cocteau, Barbette's craftsmanship, practiced on the fine edge of danger, elevated a rather dubious stunt to the level of art, analogous to the struggle of a poet.

Cocteau wrote about Barbette on several other occasions, and in 1930 he used the aerialist in his first film, Le Sang d'un Poete (Blood of a Poet), in which the bejeweled and Chanel-clad Barbette and other aristocrats applauded a card game that ends in suicide.

JEAN GENET, French writer born (d. 1986); A prominent and controversial French writer and later political activist early in his life he was a vagabond and petty criminal, Later in life, Genet wrote novels, plays, poems, and essays, including Querelle de Brest, The Thief’s Journal, Our Lady of the Flowers, The Balcony, The Blacks and The Maids. His explicit and often deliberately provocative portrayal of homosexuality and criminality was such that by the early 1950s his work was banned in the United States. Sartre wrote a long analysis of Genet's existential development (from vagrant to writer) entitled Saint Genet comédien et martyr (1952) which was anonymously published as the first volume of Genet's complete works. Genet was strongly affected by Sartre's analysis and did not write for the next five years.

Between 1955 and 1961 Genet wrote three more plays as well as an essay called "What Remains of a Rembrandt Torn Into Four Equal Pieces and Flushed Down the Toilet", on which hinged Jacques Derrida's analysis of Genet in his seminal work "Glas". During this time he became emotionally attached to Abdallah, a tightrope walker. However, following a number of accidents and Abdallah's suicide in 1964, Genet entered a period of depression, even attempting suicide himself.

From the late 1960s, starting with a homage to Daniel Cohn-Bendit after the events of May 1968, Genet became politically active. He participated in demonstrations drawing attention to the living conditions of immigrants in France. In `970 the Black Panthers invited him to the USA where he stayed for three months giving lectures, attending the trial of their leader, Huey Newton, and publishing articles in their journals. Later the same year he spent six months in Palestinian refugee camps, secretly meeting Yasser Arafat near Amman.

Profoundly moved by his experiences in Jordan and the USA, Genet wrote a final lengthy memoir about his experiences, A Prisoner of Love, which would be published posthumously. Genet also supported Angela Davis and George Jackson, as well as Michel Foucault and Daniel Defert’s Prison Information Group. He worked with Foucault and Sartre to protest police brutality against Algerians in Paris, a problem persisting since the Algerian War of Independence, when beaten bodies were to be found floating in the Seine.

In September 1982 Genet was in Beirut when the massacres took place in the Palestinian camps of Sabra and Shatila. In response, Genet published "Quatre heures à Chatila" (Four Hours in Shatila), an account of his visit to Shatila after the event. In one of his rare public appearances during the later period of his life, at the invitation of Austrian philosopher Hans Köchler he read from his work during the inauguration of an exhibition on the massacre of Sabra and Shatila organized by the International Progress Organization in Vienna, Austria, in December 1983.

Genet developed throat cancer and was found dead on April 15, 1986 in a hotel room in Paris. Genet may have fallen on the floor and fatally hit his head. He is buried in the Spanish Cemetery in Larache, Morocco. 

Satchel RONAN FARROW is an American journalist born on this date. The son of actress Mia Farrow and, putatively, filmmaker Woody Allen, he is known for writing the 2017 articles in The New Yorker that helped uncover allegations of sexual abuse against film producer, Harvey Weinstein. For this reporting, The New Yorker won the 2018 Pulitzer for Public Service, sharing the award with The New York Times. Farrow's subsequent investigations exposed similar allegations against politician Eric Schneidermann, media executive Les Moonves, and Justice Brett Kavanaugh. He is also known for making regular appearances on the NBC morning program Today.

As a child, Farrow skipped grades in school and took courses with the Center for Talented Youth. He attended  Bard College at Simon's Rock, later transferring to Bard College for a B.A. in philosophy, where he became the youngest graduate of that institution at age 15. In 2009, he received a J.D. from Yale Law School, and he later passed the New York State Bar examination.

In 2011, Farrow was appointed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as her Special Adviser for Global Youth Issues and Director of the State Department's Office of Global Youth Issues. The office's creation was the outcome of a multi-year task-force appointed by Clinton to review the United States' economic and social policies on youth, for which Farrow co-chaired the working group with senior United States Agency for International Development staff member David Barth beginning in 2010. Farrow's appointment and the creation of the office were announced by Clinton as part of a refocusing on youth following the Arab Spring revolutions. Farrow was responsible for U.S. youth policy and programming with an aim toward "empower[ing] young people as economic and civic actors." Farrow concluded his term as Special Adviser in 2012, with his policies and programs continuing under his successor.

He has written essays, op=eds, and other pieces for The Guardian, Foreign Policy magazine, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times and other periodicals. In October 2013, Penguin Press acquired Farrow's book, Pandora's Box: How American Military Aid Creates America's Enemies, scheduling it for 2015 publication. From February 2014 through February 2015, Farrow hosted Ronan Farrow Daily, a television news program that aired on MSNBC.

Farrow hosted the investigative segment "Undercover with Ronan Farrow" on NBC's Today. Launched in June 2015, the series was billed as providing Farrow's look at the stories "you don't see in the headlines every day", often featuring crowd-sourced story selection and covering topics from the labor rights of nail salon workers to mental healthcare issues to sexual assault on campus.

On May 11, 2016, The Hollywood Reporter published a guest column by Farrow in which he drew comparisons between the long-term absence of journalistic inquiry into the rape allegations leveled against Bill Cosby and the sexual abuse allegations leveled against Woody Allen by Farrow's sister, Dylan Farrow (who was 7 years old at the time of the alleged abuse). Farrow detailed first-hand accounts of journalists, biographers, and major publications purposefully omitting from their work decades of rape allegations targeting Cosby. Similarly, Farrow recounts the efforts of Allen's publicist, Leslee Dart, to mount a media campaign focused on countering Dylan Farrow's allegations, while at the same time vindicating Allen.

As of August 2019, Farrow resided in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He publicly identified as part of the LGBT community in 2018. Farrow began dating podcast host and former presidential speech writer Jon Lovett in 2011. The two became engaged in 2019 after Farrow wrote a proposal to Lovett in the Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators book's draft. The couple bought a $1.87 million home in Los Angeles in August 2019.

Farrow is estranged from his father, Woody Allen. After Allen married Soon-Yi Previn, the adopted daughter of Mia Farrow and Andre Previn, Farrow commented, "He's my father married to my sister. That makes me his son and his brother-in-law. That is such a moral transgression."

In a 2013 interview with Vanity Fair, Mia Farrow stated that Ronan could "possibly" be the biological child of singer Frank Sinatra, with whom she said she "never really split up. Sinatra's daughter Nancy dismissed the idea that her father is the biological father of Ronan Farrow, calling it "nonsense", and said her father had a vasectomy years before Ronan's birth.

JAKE GYLLENHAAL, American actor, born; In Brokeback Mountain, Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger play two sheep herders who, after overcoming initial awkwardness, have an intimate relationship during the 1960s and 1970s. Brokeback Mountain became known by the shorthand phrase "the Gay cowboy movie" and the name “Brokeback” became an adjective, describing anything that it was attached to as Gay. It went on to win the Golden Lion prize at the Venice Film Festival and four Golden Globe Awards, four British Academy of Film and Television Arts Awards, and three Academy Awards.

Gyllenhaal was nominated for an Academy Award in the category of Best Supporting Actor for his performance, but lost to George Clooney for Syriana. Gyllenhaal won the Best Supporting Actor BAFTA for the role and received a Best Supporting Actor nomination and Best Film Ensemble nomination from the Screen Actor’s Guild. The actor won an MTV Movie Award for "Best Kiss" in 2005 for his movie "Brokeback Mountain" Shortly after the 2006 Academy Awards, Gyllenhaal was invited to join the Academy in recognition of his acting career. Most recently, Gyllenhaal was awarded the 2006 Young Artist Award for Artistic Excellence by The Americans for the Arts National Arts Awards for his role.

Asked about his kissing scenes with Heath Ledger in Brokeback Mountain, Gyllenhaal said, "As an actor, I think we need to embrace the times we feel most uncomfortable." When asked about the more intimate scenes with Ledger, Gyllenhaal likened them to "doing a sex scene with a woman I'm not particularly attracted to." Following the release of Brokeback Mountain, rumors circulated regarding the actor's sexual orientation. His appearance on Saturday Night Live, singing “And I am Telling You” from Dream Girls demonstrated how little the rumors have bothered him. Ahhh...if only.

Un Chant d'Amour - A short film by Genet

https://youtu.be/ch8cTL2tN4c