based on: The White Crane Institute's 'Gay Wisdom', Gay Birthdays, Gay For Today, Famous GLBT, glbt-Gay Encylopedia, Today in Gay History, Wikipedia, and more … December 30
1865 – Rudyard Kipling (d.1936) in "The Appeal" begged "Seek not to question other than / The books I leave behind." The two-line poem written shortly before his death is decribed by his editor M. M. Kaye as "a plea to posterity to respect his private life." Such an appeal proves especially ironic having been made by a man who deliberately lived by far the greatest part of his life in the public eye, as a result of his novels, stories, poetry, and politics.
Born in India and schooled in England, in his late teens Kipling entered the public stage as a newspaperman in India; the poems and prose vignettes of British colonial and native life in South Asia that he wrote for local publications proved wildly successful when collected and republished in book form in England. They established him as one of the most original voices of his generation. For the entire of his adult life Kipling fashioned himself as the conscience of the English-speaking world, refusing government honors in order to remain free to pontificate publicly on a host of social, political, and economic issues.
In the vein of the opening quote, the systematic destruction of his private papers (letters, diaries, and drafts of works), begun by Kipling while alive, was continued by his wife after his death, and completed by his daughter following Mrs. Kipling's own demise. Consequently, most of the evidence concerning Kipling's private life has been lost, while suspicion has been aroused of a secret that Kipling and his family hoped to suppress.
That secret, biographer Martin Seymour-Smith concluded in 1989, is that Kipling was in love with a charming, young, American literary agent, Wolcott Balestier, who died suddenly in 1891, and that a grief-stricken Kipling married the man's sister Caroline only six weeks later out of a sense of loyalty to his departed friend and/or guilt over his homosexual desire.
Kipling's nature was so deeply homosocial, echoed in the "brotherly love" that permeates his writings, that even after he married, he proved incapable of representing heterosexual love in anything other than a stilted, wooden way. In adulthood, he bonded closely with men like Henry James (who gave away the bride at the Kiplings' wedding), Edmund Gosse, and Cecil Rhodes who are now recognized to have been discreet or closeted homosexuals. Contemporaries questioned Kipling's orientation. For example, writer Enid Bagnold wondered—after she had become friendly with Kipling and his wife—if the older man was not a repressed homosexual.
As Martin Seymour-Smith interprets the facts of Kipling's life, Kipling feared expressing homosexual desire because he associated homosexual acts with "beastliness" and anarchy. His small size made him particularly vulnerable to other boys' advances in school, further coloring with anxiety any desire that he may have felt. Although in later life he publicly insisted that United Services College had been free of "uncleanness" while he was in residence there, he complained privately of the sexual activities that he had indeed regularly witnessed among his contemporaries, and in which he himself was accused of participating by one of his schoolmasters.
However, Leon Edel concluded Kiping's homosexuality was so buried that although "Between Balestier and Kipling it was a case of camaraderie and of love, almost at first sight. Platonic, quite clearly." that "Both would have been terrified at any other suggestion."
1901 – Beauford Delaney (d.1979) was an American modernist painter. He is remembered for his work with the Harlem Renaissance in the 1930s and 1940s, as well as his later works in abstract expressionism following his move to Paris in the 1950s.
Born in 1901, Delaney began working with Lloyd Branson, a Knoxville impressionist painter who saw talent in the young artist and took him under his wing when he was about 20 years old.
In 1923, Delaney left home for Boston, where he studied at several schools, including the Massachusetts Normal School and the South Boston School of Art. He made his way in 1929 to New York, where he floated between Greenwich Village and Harlem. With the city in the throes of the Great Depression, he supported himself with various small jobs while painting simple but earnest portraits, modernist interiors and urban street scenes often depicting the disenfranchised and downtrodden.
In 1953, at the age of 52, Delaney moved to Paris, where his friend, James Baldwin, had already fallen into a steady rhythm of expat life. Settling in the Left Bank neighborhood of Montparnasse, an artists’ enclave, Delaney, like Baldwin, relished a sense of freedom as a gay black man that he did not have in the United States.Delaney found little commercial success in Paris and survived mostly on the generosity of friends and dedicated patrons. Existing mental health problems only intensified and, by the 1960s, his decline was fueled by heavy drinking and the onset of schizophrenia. A year after his Harlem retrospective, he was dead. Baldwin and other friends paid for his burial in the Thiais cemetery near Paris.
1954 – ( Joseph F.) Joe Beam (d.1988), born in Philadelphia, was an African-American gay rights activist and author who worked to foster greater acceptance of gay life in the black community by relating the gay experience with the struggle for civil rights in the United States.
Giovanni's Room in the Center City District in Philadelphia was one of the main bookstores and contact points for lesbians and gays in the 1970s and 1980s. Beam, himself gay, became well acquainted with local and national gay figures and institutions while employed there in the early 1980s.His articles and short stories began appearing around the same time in numerous gay newspapers and magazines, including Au Courant, Blackheart, Changing Men, Gay Community News, Philadelphia Gay News, The Advocate, New York Native, Body Politic and the Windy City Times. He joined the Executive Committee of the National Coalition of Black Lesbians and Gays in 1985, and became the editor of their new journal Black/Out.
Beam began preparing and collecting materials for an anthology of writings by and about black gay men in 1982. His goal was to counteract the absence of positive images of gay men of color in the media and their exclusion from the cultural world of white gay rights activists. He saw his work as part of a broad effort to correct and redefine the reality of race, sex, class and gender in the United States. Through his writings, he sought to alleviate the alienation of black homosexuals and help create a community of their own.
In the Life was published in 1986; it was the first anthology of writing by gay black men. It was ignored by most African-American critics and institutions, but was greeted as a literary and cultural milestone in the gay community.
Beam was working on a sequel to In the Life at the time of his death of HIV related disease in 1989. This work was completed by Dorothy Beam and the gay poet Essex Hemphill, and published under the title Brother to Brother in 1991. Both books were featured in a television documentary, Tongues United in 1991. "As a writer, Joe was more profound than prolific," wrote his friend Craig Harris after his death. "His articles and essays were poetic, containing turned phrases and puns, metaphors in meters that made his writing musical with penetrating meaning. He took great pride in his skill and devoted time to multiple rewrites, crafting his work to create the style which other writers of the Black genre dubbed `Beamesque'."
1963 – Chandler Burr is an American journalist, author, and museum curator. Since December 2010 he has been curator of olfactory art at the Museum of Art and Design in New York City.
Burr began his journalism career in 1987 as a stringer in The Christian Science Monitor's Southeast Asia bureau, and later became a Contributing Editor to U.S. News and World Report. Burr has also written for The Atlantic on epidemiology and public health. He lives in New York City.
In 1993, Burr , who is homosexual himself, wrote a cover story, "Homosexuality and Biology", for The Atlantic. It became the basis for his first book A Separate Creation: The Search for the Biological Origins of Sexual Orientation (1996), which investigated sexual orientation research. A Separate Creation was published by Hyperion, a subsidiary of the Walt Disney Company, and its argument that sexual orientation is inborn prompted a call by Southern Baptists to boycott Disney films and theme parks.
In 1996 The Weekly Standard published Burr's article "Why Conservatives Should Embrace the Gay Gene". It argued that scientific research that in Burr's view demonstrated that sexual orientation is biologically determined supports a conservative view of human nature.Burr's The Emperor of Scent, published in 2003, tells how the French-Italian scientist Luca Turin originated the theory about the functioning of the sense of smell. As a result, The New Yorker proposed that Burr describe the creation of a perfume. Burr's March 2005 New Yorker article recounted Jean-Claude Ellena's year-long creation, in Paris and Grasse, of Hermes Un Jardin sur le Nil.
From August 2006 until the end of 2010, Burr was perfume critic of The New York Times.
In December 2010, Burr left The New York Times to create, and become Curator of, the Department of Olfactory Art at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City.
The Bogota newspaper El Tiempo in its edition of 2 December 2011 carried an article on how Burr reportedly had failed to disclose his sexual orientation in petitioning to adopt two Colombian orphans. As a result the ICBF (Instituto Colombiano de Bienestar Familiar ) halted the adoption proceedings, claiming a lack of candor on Burr's part; Burr responded that the children knew about his sexuality and "they didn't care". On 13 December 2011, however, it was reported that the adoptions were made official and that Burr and his sons were reunited.
1980 – Jason Dottley, born in Memphis, Tennessee, is an American television and stage actor, recording artist, director and producer. Dottley was married to American film director, producer, television writer and playwright, Del Shores October 26, 2003. The couple divorced in 2013. After his divorce from Del Shores, Dottley dated famed Israeli journalist and anchor for Logo TV, CBS News and most currently The Wrap Itay Hod about whom he wrote his record "It's Our Night". For the most part of 2012 through 2014, he focused on taking care of his ailing grandmother at her home in Florida until she died July 6, 2014.
In 2003, he made his professional acting debut in a production of Terrance McNally's "Lisbon Traviata" at the Actor’s Lab in Hollywood, CA. His performance was reviewed "Letter-perfect" by the LA Times.
The world was introduced to Dottley in 2008, in his most notable-to-date starring role as Ty Williamson in "Sordid Lives: The Series", from IMG Global and Viacom via cable's LOGO Logo TV in the United States and is now available to view on HULU. Sordid Lives aired internationally in 17 countries around the world starring icons Rue McClanahan, Caroline Rhea, Olivia Newton-John, Leslie Jordan and Margaret Cho. Dottley also appeared in a national tour of the stage production of Sordid Lives.
In 2015, Dottley began his 40+ city tour with his first full length one-man show "Life on the gAy-List". Jason doesn't hold back about life when you are gay, divorced and over 30. Dubbed the "poster boy for marriage" turned the "public face for gay divorce", Dottley details celebrity adventures, heartbreak, and every funny and regrettable decision in between. He co-wrote and co-produced the one man show with playwright and producer, Eric Rittenhouse. His success and recent activity landed him recognition as a comedy "Pick of the Week" in the Boston Globe on July 1, 2015.
1991 – Derek Tyler Carter is an American musician, singer, songwriter and record producer from Habersham County, Georgia. He was the lead vocalist and founding member of American metalcore band Issues. Carter began his musical career performing drums in local bands in Atlanta, Georgia. Following his underground success, he joined metalcore outfit Woe, Is Me, releasing their debut studio album, Number[s], in 2010, which he left the following year.
After departing from Woe, Is Me, he began amalgamating Issues with former members of Woe, Is Me, including vocalist Michael Bohn. With Issues, they released their debut extended play (EP), Black Diamonds (2012).
The following year, the band released the stand-alone single, "Hooligans". In 2014, the group released their debut full-length studio album, Issues, to critical and commercial acclaim, charting at number-nine on the U.S. Billboard 200. The group released their second EP, Diamond Dreams, on November 18, 2014. The band released their second full-length studio album, Headspace (2016), to positive acclaim, charting at number 20 on the US Billboard 200. Bohn departed from Issues in January 2018, making Carter the sole vocalist in the group's line-up.The following year, the group released their third studio album, Beautiful Oblivion. In September 2020, he was removed from Issues due to allegations of sexual misconduct. In 2020, he co-founded the duo Emerald Royce with Attila's Chris Linck.
Carter also pursues a solo music career, having released two EPs, Leave Your Love (2015) and Moonshine Acoustic (2020), and one studio album, Moonshine (2019). Carter has also worked with longtime collaborator Tyler Acord.
In 2020, Carter was accused of grooming and sexual misconduct of a then-fourteen year old minor. The claim was made by a Twitter user who alleged that Carter had sexually assaulted him while inebriated under the influence of alcohol. Later on further allegations were purported by several other Twitter users citing their cases of misconduct that are alleged to have occurred over several years. Carter was subsequently removed from the band Issues, which followed with a statement that they had parted ways with Carter following the allegations. Carter later denied the allegations made against him.
Tyler Carter came out as bisexual in 2015. He is an outspoken supporter of the LGBTQ community.
Peter Mark Brant and brother Harry
1993 – Peter Mark Brant Jr. is an American socialite and model.
Peter Mark Brant Jr. was born and raised in Greenwich, Connecticut. Brant is the son of businessman and art collector Peter M. Brant and model Stephanie Seymour.
In 2011, Brant publicly came out as gay.
In 2014, Brant was quoted in a Harper's Bazaar profile of him, his brother Harry and mother, Stephanie, about enjoying his clan's notoriety, "We had to do a report about our parents: where they were born, what they did, and all that. Everyone else had to do theirs as homework, but I finished mine before class ended using Wikipedia."
In 2015, Peter along with his younger brother Harry, in collaboration with Mac Cosmetics, launched a unisex cosmetics line aimed at the Gender fluid youth movement.
In 2021, Harry died after an accidental drug overdose. The 24-year-old socialite and fashion circuit fixture had struggled with addiction and was due to enter a rehab facility imminently. Peter posted a tribute to him on Twitter.
1994 – Isaac Cole Powell is an American actor and singer. He played the role of Daniel in the Broadway revival of the musical Once on This Island and was cast as Tony in the 2020 Broadway revival of West Side Story.
Powell was raised in Greensboro, North Carolina, the youngest of three children born to Terry and Will Powell, a three-time world CrossFit champion. His father is Mixed Native American and African-American; his mother is Caucasian. His sister, Jessica Powell, stars on TLC's My Big Fat Fabulous Life and is a Certified Personal Trainer at their father's fitness studio. Powell began to act in middle school with the Community Theatre of Greensboro. He attended Philip J. Weaver Academy, a performing arts high school, before transferring to a boarding program at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts (UNCSA) during his senior year of high school. He graduated from UNCSA with an acting degree in May 2017.
In November 2020, Powell was cast in Universal Pictures and director Stephen Chbosky's film adaptation of Dear Evan Hansen as new character Rhys, a high school jock.
Powell is gay and came out at the age of sixteen. In 2016, Powell met Broadway actor, Wesley Taylor, when Taylor was visiting University of North Carolina School of the Arts where Powell was a junior in the school's theatre program. The two then began a relationship in 2017 and were engaged in May 2019. They ended their relationship in 2021.
