TSAR ALEXANDER I OF RUSSIA was born on this date (d. 1825); Alexander’s Russia is the backdrop for Tolstoy’s War and Peace, so complicated is this period of European history. Basically, Alexander may be seen as the emperor of Russia who formed the coalition that defeated Napoleon and founded the Holy Alliance.

The church bells you hear at the end of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture are ringing out at the news of Alexander’s defeat of France, which made him one of the most powerful leaders in Europe.

Is it any wonder Napoleon called Alexander “the slyest and handsomest of all the Greeks,” a begrudgingly admiring assessment of the czar’s sexuality, a contention amply supported in the documents of the period. Alexander was always shrouded in mystery. When he died, rumors persisted that he had actually fled Russia to Siberia where he became a hermit. In 1926 his tomb was opened by the Soviet government. It was empty and the mystery remains unresolved.

DANNY NICOLETTA, is an American photographer and activist, born on this date: In 1975, when he was nineteen, he was hired by Harvey Milk and Scott Smith to work at Castro Camera, their camera store on Castro Street. The three became friends and Nicoletta worked with Milk on his political campaigns for office.

During this period of time, Nicoletta took many now well-known photographs of Milk. Once Milk was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, Milk became California's first openly Gay elected official and served for almost eleven months before he and Mayor George Moscone were assassinated by Dan White in City Hall on November 27, 1978.

After the death of Harvey Milk, Nicoletta worked to keep his memory alive. He was the installation coordinator of the Harvey Milk photographic tribute plaques installed at Harvey Milk Plaza and at the Castro Street Station, which featured his photographs as well as those of Marc Cohen, Don Eckert, Jerry Pritikin, Efren Ramirez, Rink, and Leland Toy. He was co-chair of the Harvey Milk City Hall Memorial Committee, and his photograph served as the basis for the bust of Milk that now resides in the rotunda of San Francisco's City Hall. His portrait of Milk was also used on the United States Postal Service's tribute stamp.

Daniel Nicoletta's photographs of Milk are featured prominently in the 1985 Academy Award-winning documentary The Times of Harvey Milk, directed by Rob Epstein. In the feature film Milk, a biographical film based on the life of Harvey Milk directed by Gus Van Sant, Daniel Nicoletta is played by Lucas Grabeel. Nicoletta himself plays Carl Carlson and served as the stills photographer on the film.

Daniel Nicoletta was one of the founders of Frameline Film Festival. In 1977, while still working at Harvey Milk's photography shop, Nicoletta, along with David Waggoner, Marc Huestis, and others, began film screenings of their Super 8 films, called the Gay Film Festival of Super 8 Films, which evolved into the yearly festival.

As a photographer, Nicoletta has contributed to a number of films, as well as books and periodicals. His work is archived at the James C. Hormel Gay and Lesbian Center at the San Francisco Public Library, at the Wallach Collection of Fine Prints and the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library and at Schwules Museum in Berlin, Germany.

His work has documented queer culture throughout the late 1970s into the 2000s and besides his historic photographs of Harvey Milk also include subjects such as the White Night Riots, the Castro Street Fair and the San Francisco Pride Parade, The Cockettes and the Angels of Light. Nicoletta’s first book, “LGBT San Francisco: The Daniel Nicoletta Photographs,” was released by Reel Art Press this summer (2017).

SEAN MICHAEL GUNN born on this date, is a Zimbabwean swimmer. He competed in the men's 100 metre freestyle event at the 2016 Summer Olympics, setting what was then a new a national record. While that record has since been eclipsed, his 200-meter freestyle national record from earlier in 2016 still holds today.

The international stage wasn’t unfamiliar to Gunn. He had competed in the FINA World Swimming Championships as a teenager. By 2016, Gunn was a swimmer at the University of Kentucky. There he was part of relay teams that broke school records.

It was also at Kentucky where Gunn came to realize and accept that he was gay. “Initially I was not out at all,” Gunn said of his time at Kentucky. “I dated girls for the first few years. I had some really great relationships with girls over the years and really loved them. 

“Obviously over time that changed and I started dating guys later on. But my team, and everyone who did know, was very supportive and happy for me.”

Now, having retired from competitive swimming, Gunn is more of a runner and lives with his boyfriend in South Africa.

Laurence "LARS" EIGHNER Hexamer (born Laurence Vail Eighner, was an American author and memoirist who died on this date (b: 1948). He was the author of Travels with Lizbeth, a memoir of homelessness in the American Southwest during the late 1980s, "a book widely regarded as one of the finest memoirs of recent decades." This writer heartily endorses that assessment.

Included as a chapter in that book was the essay "On Dumpster Diving," which is widely anthologized both at full length and in abridged form under the title "My Daily Dives in the Dumpster."

Eighner also wrote Pawn to Queen Four, a novel; Lavender Blue: How to Write and Sell Gay Men's Erotica, also published as Elements of Arousal (an early edition includes an introduction by noted erotica author John Preston); Gay Cosmos, a work of gay theory; and numerous short works of gay men's erotica, collected under various titles.

Eighner began writing for publication in the early 1980s. By that time he was generally known as Lars, the result of having worked in a small office with two Larrys. Because in early writing attempts he had been confused with Black Mountain poet Larry Eigner, Eighner used "Lars" for writing. His first book was a collection of short stories, Bayou Boy and Other Stories (Gay Sunshine Press, 1985). In the late 1980s, he and his dog Lizbeth became homeless, and his experiences as a homeless person in Austin, Texas; Los Angeles, and places in between are the subject of Travels with Lizbeth. You will fall in love with both of them. It is a classic down-and-out story, in a league with Orwell's Down and Out in Paris, and touching in a way that compares to The Diary of Anne Frank.

Eighner became homeless in 1988 after leaving a job he had held for ten years as an attendant at a state hospital in Austin, Texas.

Eighner was elected to the Texas Institute of Letters in 1994. In July  2015, Eighner was married to the man called Clint in his memoir, with whom he had lived for nearly 28 years. In 2017, he assumed his husband's surname and his legal name became Laurence Eighner Hexamer. He died aged 73 on December 23, 2021 in Austin.