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  • LGBTSR,  Ronni Sanlo,  This Day in LGBTQ History

    Ronni Sanlo’s This Day in LGBTQ History (September 17 – 23)

    Ronni Sanlo’s This Day in LGBTQ History makes the past ever-present with daily rundowns of historic events and people. 

    Ronni Sanlo
    THIS DAY in LGBTQ HISTORY
    SEPTEMBER 23

    Bisexuality Day and Bisexual Awareness Week

    1965, India

    Indian prince Manavendra Singh Gohil (born September 23, 1965), believed to be the only openly gay royal in the world, was born. His family disowned him when he first came out in the media in 2006. He has since been welcomed back. The Prince is the founder of an HIV/AIDS prevention charity. He runs another charity, The Lakshya Trust, which works with the LGBT community.

  • This Day in LGBTQ History

    Ronni Sanlo’s This Day in LGBTQ History (September 3 – 9)

    Ronni Sanlo’s This Day in LGBTQ History makes the past ever-present with daily rundowns of historic events and people. 

    Ronni Sanlo
    THIS DAY in LGBTQ HISTORY
    SEPTEMBER 9
    1898
    John Beverley Nichols (9 September 1898 – 15 September 1983) was an English author, playwright, journalist, composer, and public speaker. He wrote over 60 books and is best remembered for his books about his homes and gardens, the first of which was Down the Garden Path (1932). He was gay and is thought to have had a brief affair with a famous war poet, Siegfried Sassoon (8 September 1886 – 1 September 1967). Nichols’s long-time companion was actor and director Cyril Butcher (31 July 1909 – 23 February 1987).
    1992
    The Lesbian Avengers stage their first public action in the New York City borough of Queens when right-wingers attempt to suppress a multicultural “Children of the Rainbow” curriculum for elementary school children. The Lesbian Avengers was founded in New York City by Ana Maria Simo, Sarah Schulman, Maxine Wolfe, Anne-christine D’Adesky, Marie Honan, and Anne Maguire as “a direct action group focused on issues vital to lesbian survival and visibility.” Dozens of other chapters quickly emerged world-wide, a few expanding their mission to include questions of gender, race, and class. On their first action, the Lesbian Avengers targeted right-wing attempts to suppress.
    This Day in LGBTQ History, Vol. 1 January-March – https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08SB3C75V
    This Day in LGBTQ History, Vol. 2 – April-June.
    This Day in LGBTQ History, Vol. 3 – July-September
  • LGBTSR,  This Day in LGBTQ History

    Ronni Sanlo’s This Day in LGBTQ History (August 13 – 19)

    Ronni Sanlo’s This Day in LGBTQ History makes the past ever-present with daily rundowns of historic events and people. 

    Ronni Sanlo
    This Day in LGBTQ HistoryAUGUST 19
    1867, Germany

    In Munich, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (28 August 1825 – 14 July 1895) is jeered when he attempts to persuade jurists that same-sex love should be tolerated rather than persecuted. He is probably the first to come out publicly in defense of what he calls “Uranism” (homosexuality). Ulrichs coined various terms to describe different sexual orientations, including Urning for a man who desires men (English “Uranian”) and Dioning for one who desires women. These terms are in reference to a section of Plato’s Symposium in which two kinds of love are discussed, symbolized by an Aphrodite who is born from a male (Uranos) and an Aphrodite who is born from a female (Dione). Ulrichs also coined words for the female counterparts (Urningin and Dioningin) and for bisexuals and intersexual persons. Ulrichs is likely the first true gay activist and is seen today as the pioneer of the modern gay rights movement. Published in 1870, Ulrich’s Araxes: A Call to Free the Nature of the Urning from Penal Law is remarkable for its similarity to the discourse of the modern gay rights movement. In it “the Urning, too, is a person. He, too, therefore, has inalienable rights. His sexual orientation is a right established by nature. Legislators have no right to veto nature; no right to persecute nature in the course of its work; no right to torture living creatures who are subject to those drives nature gave them. The Urning is also a citizen. He, too, has civil rights; and according to these rights, the state has certain duties to fulfill as well. The state does not have the right to act on whimsy or for the sheer love of persecution. The state is not authorized, as in the past, to treat Urnings as outside the pale of the law.”
  • This Day in LGBTQ History

    Ronni Sanlo’s This Day in LGBTQ History (August 7 – 12)

    Ronni Sanlo’s This Day in LGBTQ History makes the past ever-present with daily rundowns of historic events and people. 

    Ronni Sanlo
    This Day in LGBTQ History

    AUGUST 12
    1859

    Lesbian Katharine Lee Bates, (August 12, 1859 – March 28, 1929), an American poet, is born. She is remembered as the author of the words to the anthem America the Beautiful. She had graduated from Wellesley then became a professor there. Bates was a prolific author of many volumes of poetry, travel books, and children’s books. She popularized Mrs. Claus in her poem Goody Santa Claus on a Sleigh Ride from the collection Sunshine and other Verses for Children (1889). Bates never married. She lived in Wellesley with Katharine Coman who was a history and political economy teacher and founder of the Wellesley College School Economics department. The pair lived together for twenty-five years until Coman’s death in 1915. Bates was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1970. In 2012, she was named by Equality Forum as one of their 31 Icons of the 2015 LGBT History Month.

  • LGBTSR,  This Day in LGBTQ History

    Ronni Sanlo’s This Day in LGBTQ History (August 1 – 6)

    Welcome to another new feature at LGBTSr: Ronni Sanlo’s This Day in LGBT History. I’ll be posting these every Friday going forward, with that day’s reprinted with permission and links to Ronni’s Facebook Page for the others. I’ve enjoyed her fascinating and vital history rundowns for some time, and I’m delighted to share them here. – Mark

    Ronni Sanlo
    This Day in LGBTQ History 

    AUGUST 6

    1637
    The Plymouth, Massachusetts court finds John Allexander and Thomas Roberts guilty of “often spending their seed one upon the other” though they are not charged with sodomy. Both were severely whipped, and Alexander was branded on the shoulder and banished from the colony. Although the colony had made sodomy punishable by death the previous year, it required penetration that was not proven in this case. The men were convicted of men of “Lewd Behavior and Unclean Carriage.” John Allexander [was] found to have been “formerly notoriously guilty that way,” alluring others. He was sentenced by the Court to be severely whipped, and burnt in the shoulder with a hot iron, and to be perpetually banished from New Plymouth. Thomas Roberts was severely whipped and returned to his master. Though Allexander and Roberts had long histories of sodomy in Plymouth, they were spared capital punishment. Allexander, a property-owning man, and Roberts, an indentured servant, not only violated sexual morals, but also transgressed class distinctions. Their punishment, banishment for Allexander and the denial of future land ownership for Roberts, was approximately the same as that of people who participated in illicit sexual acts between men and women.