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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 … February 25

1937 – Severo Sarduy, born in Camagüey, Cuba (d.1993) was a Cuban poet, author, playwright, and critic of Cuban literature and art.

He went to Havana in the mid-1950s to study medicine. Though he did not finish his studies, he retained a lifelong interest in science. While living in the capital he pursued his vocation for poetry and painting and came into contact with older writers such as José Rodríguez Feo and José Lezama Lima.

With the advent of the revolution in 1959, Sarduy became one of a group of young writers given the task of renewing Cuban literature. Sent to Paris by the government in 1960 to study art at the École du Louvre, Sarduy decided not to return to Cuba when his scholarship ran out a year later. Disaffected with Castro's regime and fearful of its persecution of homosexuals and the censorship imposed on writers, Sarduy never went home.

In Paris, he was connected to the group of intellectuals who produced the magazine Tel Quel, particularly to philosopher François Wahl, with whom he was openly involved.

Sarduy worked as a reader for Editions du Seuil and as editor and producer of the Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française.

In 1972 his novel Cobra won him the Medici Prize. He was among the most brilliant essayists writing in Spanish and "a powerful baroque narrator, full of surprising resources.".

As a poet, he was considered one of the greatest of his time. He was also a more or less secret painter; a major retrospective of his work was held at the Reina Sofía Museum of Madrid after his death. He died due to complications from AIDS just after finishing his autobiographical work Los pájaros de la playa.

Sarduy's posthumous Pájaros de la playa (1993; "Beach Fowl") is about a sanatorium for sufferers of AIDS, the disease that killed the author.

1942 – John Saul is an American author of suspense and horror novels. Most of his books have appeared on the New York Times Best Seller List.

Born in Pasadena, Saul grew up in Whittier, California. He went on to several colleges, variously majoring in anthropology, liberal arts and theater, but never obtained a degree. After leaving college, Saul decided to become a writer, and spent fifteen years working in various jobs while trying to improve his craft.

Prior to the start of his bestselling thriller career Saul had around ten books published under pen names, the first of which he wrote in one weekend after unexpectedly losing his job. His first book sale earned him just $200. Today he has over 60 million books in print.

In 1976, Dell Publishing contacted him and asked if he'd be interested in writing a psychological thriller. The resulting novel, Suffer the Children, appeared on all the bestseller lists in the United States and reached the number one spot in Canada. Cry for the Strangers was made into a film of the same name in 1982.

In addition to his novels, Saul has had several one-act plays produced in both Los Angeles and Seattle.

Saul lives part-time in the Pacific Northwest, both in Seattle and in the San Juan Islands, and has a residence on the Big Island of Hawaii. Saul is openly gay. He lives with his partner of 32 years, who has collaborated on several of his novels. He is a frequent speaker at the Maui Writers' Conference.

1947 – Jorge Donn was an internationally-known ballet dancer. (d.1992) He was best known for his work with the Maurice Béjart's Ballet company, and his participation as lead dancer in Claude Lelouch's film Les Uns et les Autres.

Jorge Donn was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He began to dance when he was 4 or 5 years old, then studied at the Colon Theatre school. In 1963, he arrived in Brussels to work in the Maurice Béjart company and soon became its principal dancer, entering into a twenty-year professional and personal relationship with Béjart.

Many of Béjart's works were created expressly for him: Bhakti (1968), Nijinsky, Clown of God (1971), Golestan, or The garden of roses (1973), Ce que l'amour me dit (1974), Notre Faust (1975), Léda (1978), Adagietto (1981) and others.

In 1976, Jorge Donn became artistic director of the Béjart's Ballet of the Twentieth Century company. In 1988, he founded his own company, L'Europa Ballet, which existed for a short time.

Jorge Donn died of AIDS on 30th November 1992 in Lausanne. Many choreographers created ballets as a tribute to him: Maurice Béjart (Ballet for Life), Denys Ganio (Tango... a rose for Jorge Donn), Carolyn Carlson (Homage for Jorge Donn), Grazia Galante (Masticando Sueños)

1950 – The Irish director Neil Jordan was born today. An Academy award-winning Irish filmmaker and novelist. He received the Academy Award for The Crying Game. As a writer/director, Jordan has a highly idiosyncratic body of work, ranging from mainstream hits like Interview With the Vampire to commercial failures like We're No Angels to a variety of more personal, low-budget art-house pictures.

Although in a conventional heterosexual marriage, unconventional sexual relationships are a recurring theme in this gay-friendly director's work, and he often finds a sympathetic side to characters audiences would traditionally consider deviant or downright horrifying. His film The Miracle, for instance, followed two characters who struggled to resist a strong, incestuous attraction, while The Crying Game made complicated, likable characters out of an IRA terrorist and a Transgendered woman. Vampire, like the Anne Rice book it was based on, focused on the intense sexual relationship of two undead men who murder humans nightly (although the pair never have sex, they are clearly lovers of a sort), accompanied by an equally lusty vampire woman who is eternally trapped in the body of a little girl. While Lestat (Tom Cruise) is depicted in an attractive but villainous manner, his lover Louis (Brad Pitt) and the child vampire Claudia (Kirsten Dunst) are meant to capture the audience's sympathy despite their predatory nature.

1953 – Garrett Glaser is a retired news reporter who was one of the first US television journalists to "come out" publicly as a homosexual.

His coming out occurred during the course of a speech he made before a large group of TV and radio executives at the 1992 convention of the Radio/TV News Directors Association being held in San Antonio, Texas. Although Glaser co-founded the Electronic Media Task Force of the National Lesbian/Gay Journalists Association (NLGJA) in 1990 and was later out, as well, to fellow journalists, he was not out to the public at large. That changed in 1994, when Glaser disclosed his sexual orientation during a live report on the "Channel 4 News" at KNBC-TV Los Angeles as he was reporting on the death of Elizabeth Glaser (no relation), an AIDS activist who founded the Pediatric AIDS Foundation.

Several weeks later, the Los Angeles Times published a story on the front page of its "Calendar" section about Glaser's status as one of the nation's few openly gay TV reporters.

1989 – Evan Todd is an American actor and producer.

Todd grew up in Kissimmee, Florida. He finished his senior year of high school at the North Carolina School of the Arts in Winston-Salem and later graduated from the Juilliard School. Todd also studied at Yale School of Drama and London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art.

In 2007, Todd made his big screen debut as a student in the 2007 film Sydney White. He subsequently appeared in several television films and series such as Grumpy Cat's Worst Christmas Ever (2014), Switched at Birth and Jane the Virgin. In 2014, he originated the role of Kurt Kelly in Heathers: The Musical, when the rock musical had a production Off-Broadway. The following year, Todd co-produced the 2015 Broadway revival of Spring Awakening. A critical success, the rock musical, based on the German play Spring Awakening (1891) by Frank Wedekind, was nominated for both a Tony Award and a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Revival of a Musical.

In 2016, Todd had a leading role in the comedy film 4th Man Out about a young mechanic who comes out to his straight buddies and to his family. The film received the Audience Choice Award for Best Dramatic Feature at Outfest, and was awarded the Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature at the InsideOut LGBT Film Festival. In March 2017, Todd joined the Broadway cast of Beautiful: The Carole King Musical as King’s songwriter first husband and writing partner Gerry Goffin.

Todd is openly gay. He is the co-founder of stART and artsINSIDEOUT, two summer arts empowerment programs benefiting students from his home town as well as children affected by HIV in South Africa.

2000 – On this date Henry Stuart Matis walked up to the steps of a Mormon church in Los Altos with a note reading "Do not resuscitate" pinned to his shirt, and shot himself.

He was a 32-year-old Gay man and devoted member of the The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and after a lifetime spent struggling to reconcile the two, explained in a suicide note that "for the first time in over 20 years, I am free from my pains."

"As I believed that I was a Christian, I believed that I could never be Gay," he wrote. "Perhaps my death ... might become the catalyst for much good ... Your actions might help to save many young people's lives."

In the early morning, on the 10th anniversary of Matis' death, a group of local Mormons and others held a memorial vigil for Matis in Los Altos. Starting at Cuesta Park with songs and brief speeches, about 20 people then walked up Grant Road, carrying roses and candles. They ended up on the sidewalk in front of the LDS stake center on Grant Road in Los Altos, where they set up a small memorial display with an image of Matis' tombstone and stories about him and other Gay Mormons who have committed suicide.

Matis' body was found at the center, which serves as the headquarters for South Bay Mormon congregations, at about 7:30 a.m. on Feb. 25, 2000. Robert Rees of the Santa Cruz stake, who served as a spiritual adviser to Matis, said the event was meant "to honor a good man who eft life much earlier than he should have, whose passing was tragic but whose message was one of hope to other people." According to a statement on its Web site, the Mormon church believes that acting on "same-gender attraction" is a sin and Gay church members must remain celibate.

George Cole, a San Francisco resident who is Gay and serves on the executive committee of Affirmation, a support and advocacy group for Gay and Lesbian current and former Mormons, said he didn't know Matis personally but has "lost too many very good friends to suicide. "I know what it is like to seriously consider taking your life," he said. Cole said he left the Mormon church in 2002.

"I chose happiness and fulfillment at the cost of not having the church in my own life," he said. Matis died just a couple of weeks before Proposition 22, the anti-Gay marriage measure in 2000 that preceded 2008's Proposition 8, went before voters, and his death was often portrayed as a political statement, though Matis did not mention the initiative in his suicide note.

2007 – On this date the 79th Academy Awards were hosted by Ellen DeGeneres in Hollywood.

#gay story #history #gay history #souvenir

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