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THIS DAY IN GAY HISTORY

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 …

September 2

1853 – Ferdinand Karsch-Haack (d.1936) was a German entomologist. His most significant contribution to the sexual emancipation movement in Germany consisted of demonstrating the occurrence of same-sex sexual activity throughout the animal kingdom, among the so-called primitive peoples, and in all non-Western cultures. His zoological and ethno-historical arguments were intended to enable a deeper understanding of human sexual diversity and to promote the acceptability of same-sex love in Western societies.

Although the sexual emancipation movement became increasingly divided between a group centered around Magnus Hirschfeld and the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee and another with more elitist aspirations known as "Die Eigenen," both groups recognized the intrinsic merits of Karsch-Haack's work and were eager to publish his essays in their journals. He is depicted, along with Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Magnus Hirschfeld, and Havelock Ellis, as one of the "great authorities" in the area of sexual science in the book Homosexuelle Probleme [Homosexual Problems] (1902) by Ludwig E. West.

Ferdinand Karsch-Haack was born on September 2, 1853 in Münster, a city in northwestern Germany, the son of a physician. He pursued advanced education in Berlin, where he presented his dissertation on the gallwasp in 1877. Eventually, he was named "Privatdozent" for Zoology and became Curator at the Zoological Museum of the Friedrich-Wilhelm University in Berlin.

Despite being an entomologist by profession, Karsch-Haack was best known for his ethnological and cultural treatises on same-sex love and for his critical studies of homosexual personalities in European history.

Karsch lived his later life as an open homosexual in Berlin. The rise of Hitler to power and Nazi repression of homosexuality led to the eclipse of his reputation. In 1933, the year Hitler seized power, Karsch-Haack published his last important essay, "Die Liebschaften des Prinzen Heinrich, Bruder Friedrichs des Grossen" [The love affairs of Prince Heinrich, Brother of Frederick the Great]. He died three years later, on December 20, 1936.

The most significant writings by Karsch-Haack may be read as a twofold reply to the typical objection that same-sex love is the regrettable product of "overcultivation" or excessive civilization. Karsch-Haack contended that homosexualty is not a product of civilized refinement, but a phenomenon frequently observable at different levels of animal evolution, and disputed the unwarranted assumption that homosexuality is absent from the animal kingdom. In time, Karsch-Haack amplified the scope of his argument to include the sexual complexities of the plant world. Not surprisingly, he underscored in his later work the idea that human homosexuality is grounded in a "natural disposition", which humans share with other complex life forms.

1946 – (William Everett) Billy Preston (d.2006) was an American musician whose work included R&B, rock, soul, funk and gospel. Preston became famous first as a session musician with artists including Little Richard, Sam Cooke, Ray Charles and the Beatles, and was later successful as a solo artist with hit pop singles including "Outa-Space", its sequel, "Space Race", "Will It Go Round in Circles" and "Nothing from Nothing", and a string of albums and guest appearances with Eric Clapton, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and others. In addition, Preston was co-author, with The Beach Boys' Dennis Wilson, of "You Are So Beautiful," recorded by Preston and later a #5 hit for Joe Cocker.

Alongside Tony Sheridan, Billy Preston was the only other musician to be credited on a Beatles recording: the artists on the number-one hit "Get Back" are given as "The Beatles with Billy Preston". Stephen Stills asked Preston if he could use Preston's phrase "if you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with" and created the hit song.William Everett Preston was born on September 2, 1946, in Houston, Texas. When he was three, the family moved to Los Angeles where Preston began playing piano while sitting on his mother Robbie's lap. Noted as a child prodigy, by the age of ten, Preston was playing organ onstage backing several gospel singers such as Mahalia Jackson, James Cleveland and Andrae Crouch. At twelve, he appeared in the W.C. Handy biopic starring Nat King Cole entitled, St. Louis Blues, playing W.C. Handy at a younger age. A year prior, Preston appeared on Cole's national TV show singing the Fats Domino hit, "Blueberry Hill". In 1962, Preston joined Little Richard's band as an organist and it was while performing in Hamburg that Preston met the Beatles. In 1963 he played the organ on Sam Cooke's Night Beat album and released his debut album, 16 Yr Old Soul, that same year for Cooke's SAR Records label. In 1965, he released the album The Most Exciting Organ Ever, and that same year played organ and performed on the rock and roll show, Shindig!. In 1967, he joined Ray Charles' band. Following his exposure with Charles, several musicians began asking Preston to come to sessions, most notably the Beatles, who asked him to contribute to two of their albums, Abbey Road and Let It Be.

Preston was an openly gay man but did not speak publicly about his sexuality.

He died on June 6, 2006 in Scottsdale, Arizona, of complications of malignant hypertension that resulted in kidney failure and other complications. He had voluntarily entered a drug rehabilitation clinic in Malibu, California, at the suggestion of guitarist Is'real Benton and suffered pericarditis there, leading to respiratory failure that left him in a coma from November 21, 2005.

1949 – Frank Ripploh was a German actor, film director, and author (d.2002). He is best remembered for his semi-autobiographical 1981 movie Taxi zum Klo.

The film, produced on a shoestring budget of 100,000 DM, explored the day-to-day life of a Berlin schoolteacher who also led a very active gay sex life. Extremely explicit, especially for its day, Taxi zum Klo was considered groundbreaking for the subject matter it portrayed, and achieved something of a cult status among gay audiences of the time.

Ripploh also participated in the creation of a small number of other art house films during the 1980s, and had a role in the 1982 movie Querelle.

He died of cancer in 2002.

1950 – Mel Odom is an American artist who has created book covers for numerous novels, including a number of paperback editions of the novels of Patrick White, the Australian winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, and several books by fantasy author Guy Gavriel Kay such as The Fionavar Tapestry trilogy, Tigana, A Song for Arbonne, and The Lions of Al-Rassan. Dreamer, a collection of his work, with an introduction by Edmund White, was published by Penguin Books in 1984. Odom is also the designer of the Gene Marshall collectible fashion doll.

Odom was born in Richmond, Virginia, USA, and grew up in Ahoskie, North Carolina, where his parents encouraged his interests in drawing and in dolls. He majored in fashion illustration at Virginia Commonwealth University and then attended Leeds Polytechnic Institute of Art and Design in England for graduate work before moving to New York City in 1975.

"Hard Stuff"

His Art Deco-like style established him as a commercial artist, at first via erotic illustrations for sexually oriented magazines such as Blueboy, Viva, and Playboy, the last of which named him their "Illustrator of the Year" in 1980. In the same year, he provided the cover art for Edmund White's novel Nocturnes for the King of Naples.

"Mouth to Mouth" for Blueboy Magazine

During the 1980s, his work covered many commercial media. He created album covers for CBS Records and book covers for numerous other novels, usually in the genres of fantasy, mystery, or horror. He provided illustrations for the science/science-fiction magazine OMNI and (in 1989) a front cover for Time magazine.

In 1990, Odom proposed to design the cosmetic facepaint for Mdvanii, a 25 cm limited-edition collector's fashion doll. The experience renewed his childhood interest in dolls and led him to create a doll of his own, the 15.5" Gene Marshall.

Gene Marshall's appearance, wardrobes, and history are modelled on the glamour of Hollywood's golden age from the 1920s through 1950s. The doll made its commercial debut at the 1995 Toy Fair and was an immediate success, creating a wider market for large, fully articulated collector's fashion dolls in contrast to the slightly smaller and less flexible Barbie doll. Since then, Odom has largely concentrated his professional pursuits on the Gene Marshall doll, regularly modifying her design to create new variations and creating similar companion dolls to share her world, such as Gene's "co-stars" Madra Lord, Violet Waters, and Trent Osborn.

Odom continues to attend doll collectors' conventions to make personal appearances and buy dolls for his own collection, as well as to support charitable causes. Of his early friends in the art world, he estimates that two-thirds of them died of AIDS in the 1980s before the awareness and treatment of the disease became better known. At a 1997 doll convention entirely devoted to Gene Marshall, a charity auction of uniquely modified Gene dolls raised more than $30,000 for Gay Men's Health Crisis, an AIDS service organization.

1955 – Eric Allman is an American computer programmer who developed sendmail and its precursor delivermail in the late 1970s and early 1980s at UC Berkeley.

Born in El Cerrito, California, Allman knew from an early age that he wanted to work in computing, breaking into his high school's mainframe and later using the UC Berkeley computing center for his computing needs. In 1973, he entered UC Berkeley, just as the Unix operating system began to become popular in academic circles.

As the Unix source code was available at Berkeley, the local hackers quickly made many extensions to the AT&T code. One such extension was delivermail, which in 1981 turned into sendmail. As an MTA, it was designed to deliver e-mail over the still relatively small (as compared to today's Internet) ARPANET, which consisted of many smaller networks with vastly differing formats for e-mail headers.

Sendmail soon became an important part of the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) and continues to be the most widely used MTA on Unix based systems today, despite its somewhat complex configuration syntax and frequent abuse by Internet telemarketing firms. In 1998, Allman founded Sendmail, Inc., headquartered in Emeryville, California, to do proprietary work on improving sendmail.

Allman, who is openly gay, lives in Berkeley, California with his partner of more than 30 years, Marshall McKusick. McKusick is a lead developer of BSD; the two first met in graduate school. Allman says:

"There is some sort of perverse pleasure in knowing that it's basically impossible to send a piece of hate mail through the Internet without its being touched by a gay program. That's kind of funny."

1964 – Keanu Reeves is a Canadian actor. Reeves is perhaps best known for his roles in Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, Speed, Point Break and the science fiction-action trilogy The Matrix. He has a new hit trilogy in th John Wick movies. He has worked under major directors, such as Stephen Frears (in the 1988 period drama Dangerous Liaisons); Gus Van Sant (in the 1991 independent film My Own Private Idaho, also written by Van Sant); and Bernardo Bertolucci (in the 1993 film Little Buddha).

Reeves was born in Beirut, Lebanon. His mother was English and his father was a Hawaiian-born American of English, Irish, Portuguese, Hawaiian, and Chinese descent. Reeves's mother was working in Beirut when she met his father. Reeves' father worked as an unskilled. He abandoned his wife and family when Reeves was three years old, and Reeves does not currently have any relationship with him.

Reeves moved around the world frequently as a child and he lived with various stepfathers. He grew up primarily in Toronto. Within a span of five years, he attended four different high schools, including the Etobicoke School of the Arts, from which he was later expelled. Reeves stated he was expelled "...because I was greasy and running around a lot. I was just a little too rambunctious and shot my mouth off once too often. I was not generally the most well-oiled machine in the school. I was just getting in their way, I guess."

Reeves excelled more in hockey than in academics. He was a successful goalie at one of his high schools (De La Salle College "Oaklands"). While Reeves dreamed of becoming an Olympic hockey player for Canada, an injury ended his hopes for a hockey career.

Reeves' first studio movie appearance was in the Rob Lowe ice hockey film Youngblood, in which he played a Québécois goalie. Shortly after, Reeves received a sizable role in the 1986 drama film River's Edge, which depicted how a murder affected a group of teens. Following this film's critical success, he spent the late 1980s appearing in a number of movies aimed at teenage audiences, including Permanent Record, and the unexpectedly successful 1989 comedy, Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, which, along with its 1991 sequel, Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey, typecast Reeves as a spaced-out teen.In addition to his film roles, Reeves has also performed in theatre. His performance in the title role in a Manitoba Theatre Centre production of Hamlet was praised by Roger Lewis, the Sunday Times, who declared Reeves " ... one of the top three Hamlets I have seen, for a simple reason: he is Hamlet."

Reeves is included here primarlity for his role in My Own Private Idaho, playing a street hustler opposite River Phoenix, his real-life friend. Van Sant based the story in part on the Henry IV cycle, and in part on John Rechy's 1963 novel about street hustlers, City of Night.

But he is also included because of the persistent rumors that he is gay, which he neither denies nor affirms. These stories include one which said he is married to David Geffen, based on the fact that Geffen owns a painting with a naked Adam looking very much like Keanu. Another report, now proved to be false, claimed Reeves and actor Alan Cumming (NightCrawler of X-Men 2), married one another before a small party of invited friends in Massachusetts. The report stated "Reeves ... had always been rumored to be gay, but always maintained his heterosexuality. Cumming ... had always been openly bi-sexual, but had never married before."

1966 – Charles Curtis Tuc Watkins is an American actor, known for his roles as David Vickers on One Life to Live and Bob Hunter on Desperate Housewives.

Charles Curtis Watkins III was born in Kansas City, Kansas, to Charles Curtis Watkins II, a salesman, and a photographer mother. He attended Indiana University where he majored in communications with a triple minor in theatre, psychology and French.

Watkins started his career with guest appearances on various television series including Sisters, Baywatch, and Melrose Place. He portrayed con-man David Vickers on the ABC soap opera One Life to Live from 1994 to 1996, next joining the soap opera General Hospital in the recurring role of Dr. Pierce Dorman from 1996 to 1997. Watkins went on to star as Malcolm Laffley on the Showtime series Beggars and Choosers for its two-season run from 1999 to 2001.

In 1999, he made his film debut in I Think I Do, a small budget independent screwball romantic comedy, playing Sterling Scott, the soap opera hunk boyfriend of Bob, played by Alexis Arquette. He followed this with his first appearance in a big studio production, The Mummy as the near-sighted glasses-wearing tomb raider Burns, later guest-starring on television series such as NYPD Blue, Six Feet Under, and CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.

After brief appearances in 2001 and 2002, Watkins rejoined the cast of One Life to Live full-time from 2003 through 2006, with several short term returns to the show in 2007, 2008, and 2009, returning again on a regular basis beginning in June 2010.

On October 21, 2007, Watkins made his first appearance on ABC's primetime series Desperate Housewives as Bob Hunter, a new resident of Wisteria Lane who is a gay lawyer with a husband. He was a recurring character in seasons 4-6 and a series regular in season seven.

Watkins came out as gay on April 26, 2013, in an interview on Marie with Marie Osmond. In that same interview, Watkins announced he had become a single dad in December 2012 by welcoming twins Catchen and Curtis via surrogacy

Tuc Watkins, proud daddy

Since 2019, he has been in a relationship with actor Andrew Rannells. The two met the year before while playing a couple on the Broadway production of The Boys in the Band. They reprised their roles for Netflix's film version of the show and also worked together on Black Monday in 2020.

1996 – The Toronto District School Board launches the Triangle Program, Canada's first alternative high school program for at-risk LGBT youth. The Triangle Program is designed for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender students who are at risk of dropping out or committing suicide because of homophobic and transphobic harassment in regular schools. It is also open to anyone who has been affected by homophobia or transphobia.

Operated by the Toronto District School Board at the campus of Oasis Alternative Secondary School, Triangle is the only program of its type in Canada. It was created as an organization in 1995, and launched its first classes in 1996.

In conjunction with the LGBT youth organization Supporting Our Youth, Triangle also holds its own annual prom during Toronto's Gay Pride Week.

The school day is divided into two halves. For the first half of the day students work on self-directed studies or smaller teacher-led classes. The afternoon is spent in a classroom setting, working on curriculum with a gay, lesbian and transgender focus. Units on LGBTQ history, healthy sexuality and equity and oppression allow gay, lesbian and transgender youth the opportunity to experience education geared to them.

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