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

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.

Radclyffe Hall (August 12, 1880 – October 7, 1943) is born in Bournemouth, England. She was an English poet and author and is best known for the novel The Well of Loneliness, a groundbreaking work in lesbian literature. In 1915 Hall fell in love with Una Troubridge (1887–1963), a sculptor who was the wife of Vice-Admiral Ernest Troubridge, and the mother of a young daughter. In 1917 Radclyffe Hall and Una Troubridge began living together. The relationship lasted until Hall’s death though Hall was involved in affairs with other women throughout the years. In 1934 Hall fell in love with Russian émigrée and poet Evguenia Souline and embarked upon a long-term affair with her which Troubridge painfully tolerated.

Blues singer Gladys Bentley is born (August 12, 1907 – January 18, 1960) to a Trinidadian mother and an African American father. She was an American blues singer, pianist and entertainer during the Harlem Renaissance. Her career skyrocketed when she appeared at Harry Hansberry’s Clam House in New York in the 1920s, as a black lesbian cross-dressing performer. She headlined in the early 1930s at Harlem’s Ubangi Club where she was backed up by a chorus line of drag queens. She dressed in men’s clothes (including a signature tuxedo and top hat), played piano, and sang her own raunchy lyrics to popular tunes of the day in a deep, growling voice while flirting with women in the audience. She relocated to southern California where she was billed as “America’s Greatest Sepia Piano Player” and the “Brown Bomber of Sophisticated Songs.” She was frequently harassed for wearing men’s clothing. She tried to continue her musical career but did not achieve as much success as she had had in the past. Bentley was openly lesbian early in her career (a “bulldagger” in the parlance of the day) and even once told a gossip columnist she had married a white woman (whose identity remains unknown) in New York. However, during the McCarthy Era she started wearing dresses and married Mr. J. T. Gipson who died in 1952,the same year in which she married Charles Roberts, a cook in Los Angeles; they were married in Santa Barbara, California, and went on a honeymoon in Mexico. (Roberts denied ever marrying her.) Bentley died of pneumonia in Los Angeles in 1960, aged 52.

The North American Conference of Homophile Organizations, nicknamed NACHO, made up of delegates from 26 groups, convenes in Chicago to discuss goals and strategy. Although delegates fail to form a unified national organization, they pass a five-point “Homosexual Bill of Rights” and resolve to make “Gay Is Good” the slogan of the movement.

Harvey Milk (May 22, 1930 – November 27, 1978) is posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, by President Barack Obama. Harvey Milk was an American politician and the first openly gay elected official in the history of California where he was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Despite being the most pro-LGBT politician in the United States at the time, politics and activism were not his early interests; he was neither open about his sexuality nor civically active until he was 40, after his experiences in the counterculture movement of the 1960s. He and San Francisco Mayor Mascone were assassinated on Nov. 27, 1978. In July 2016, U.S. Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus named the second ship of the Military Sealift Command‘s John Lewis-class oilers, the USNS Harvey Milk.