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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 … April 13

c.435 BC – The Greek philosopher Aristippus was born on or around this date (d.circa 360 BC). He was a pupil of Socrates, but adopted a very different philosophical outlook, teaching that the goal of life was to seek pleasure by adapting oneself to circumstances and by maintaining proper control over both adversity and prosperity. Aristippus held that the highest purpose and virtue was the pursuit of pleasure.

Aristippus was born at Cyrene. He came over to Greece to be present at the Olympic games, where he fell in with Ischomachus the agriculturist, and by his description was filled with so ardent a desire to see Socrates, that he went to Athens for the purpose, and remained with him almost up to the time of his execution, 399 BCE

One work attributed to "Aristippus" in ancient times was a scandalous work entitled On Ancient Luxury (or On the Luxury of the Ancient Greeks). This work, judging by preserved quotations was filled with spicy anecdotes about philosophers and their supposed taste for boy-lovers and courtesans. The author supports his claims for Plato's various erotic relationships through his quotation of epigrams attributed to the philosopher.

"The art of life lies in taking pleasures as they pass, and the keenest pleasures are not intellectual, nor are they always moral." - Aristippus

1841 – Michigan amends its sodomy law to specify that emission of semen is not necessary for completion of the crime.

Molinier - Self-portrait

1900 – Pierre Molinier was a painter, photographer and 'maker of objects' (d.1976). He was born in Agen (France) and lived his life in Bordeaux. He began his career by painting landscapes, but his work turned towards a fetishistic eroticism early on.

Molinier began to take photographs at the age of 18, and started his erotic production around 1950. With the aid of a wide range of specially made 'props' - dolls, various prosthetic limbs, stiletto heels, corsetry, dildos and an occasional confidante - Pierre Molinier used his own body as the basis for surreal and fantastic distortions of the human form, blurring sexuality and gender and ultimately producing a large body of photographic work. Most of his photographs, photomontages, are self-portraits of himself as a woman.

By combining costume, props, photography and photomontage he stepped beyond mere photographic representation of himself and his models to create a bizarre and distorted world of gender-confused fetishism and auto-eroticism.

He began a correspondence with André Breton and sent him photographs of his paintings. Later Breton integrated him into the Surrealist group. Breton organised an exhibition of Molinier's paintings in Paris, in January-February 1956.

In 1976, as his health began to decline, Pierre Molinier lay on his bed in front of a mirror, masturbated and committed suicide by shooting himself. The staging of his death initially led police to suspect he had been murdered but it seems that his death was Molinier's final creative act.

1936 – Win Ng (d.1991) was a Chinese American sculptor, industrial designer and illustrator. He is best known as the co-founder of the groundbreaking San Francisco based handmades department store Taylor & Ng.

Ng was born in Chinatown, San Francisco. He studied at the City College of San Francisco and San Francisco State University. After serving in the United States Army he studied at the San Francisco Art Institute receiving a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1959.

Ng was openly gay.

In 1965 Ng met artist Spaulding Taylor and shifted his focus toward utilitarian work. The two founded Environmental Ceramics (the precursor to Taylor & Ng) and moved into creating handmade artware and homewares. The company called Taylor & Ng was founded during the same period and, with the addition of Win Ng's brother, Norman Ng, as president, grew into a major producer and retailer of housewares.

Through their own San Francisco department store and wholesale business, Taylor & Ng not only created a signature style still in demand by collectors, but helped to popularize Asian culture and cuisine. The Taylor & Ng company is credited with bringing the Chinese wok to the U.S. and making it a common kitchen utensil.

Ng died on September 6, 1991 from AIDS related complications. He was 55.

1937 – On this date the award winning playwright Lanford Wilson was born (d.2011). Considered one of the founders of the Off-off Broadway theater movement, Wilson received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1980, was elected in 2001 to the Theater Hall of Fame, and in 2004 elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Wilson was raised in Missouri by his mother, but in 1956 he moved to California, where he worked and attended college. There, Wilson lived with his father, who did not accept Wilson's homosexuality, and so, in 1957, he moved to Chicago, where he worked as a graphic artist and studied playwriting.

Wilson began his active career as a playwright in the early 1960s at the Caffe Cino in Greenwich Village, writing one-act plays such as Ludlow Fair, Home Free!, and The Madness of Lady Bright. The Madness of Lady Bright premiered at the Caffe Cino in May of 1964 and was the venue's first significant hit. The play featured actor Neil Flanagan in the title role as Leslie Bright, a neurotic aging queen. The Madness of Lady Bright is considered a landmark play in the representation of male homosexuality. It was the longest running play ever to appear at the Caffe Cino, where it was performed over two hundred times. Wilson was subsequently invited to present his work off-Broadway, including his plays Balm in Gilead and The Rimers of Eldritch.

Wilson was a founding member of the Circle Repertory Company in 1969. Many of his plays were first presented there, directed by his long-standing collaborative partner, Marshall W. Mason. The Circle Rep's production of Wilson's The Hot l Baltimore won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award, the Outer Critics Circle Award, and the Obie Award, and was adapted into a television program by Norman Lear. In 1979 Wilson received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Talley's Folly.

Wilson's style and approach has evolved over the years, sometimes resulting in drastically different effects. Some of his plays are extremely radical and experimental in nature while others clearly have a more mainstream, if still creative, sensibility. His first full length play, Balm in Gilead, is perhaps his most radical, yet it also remains one of his most popular. The play had a memorable off-Broadway revival in the 1980s, directed by John Malkovich, a co-production of Circle Rep and the Steppenwolf Theatre Company.

In addition to writing plays, Wilson has written the texts for several twentieth century operas, including at least two collaborations with composer Lee Hoiby: Summer and Smoke (1971) and This is the Rill Speaking (1992) (based on his own play).

1945 – Joseph Doucé (d.1990) was born to a rural family in Sint-Truiden, Belgium. He was a psychologist and Baptist pastor in Paris. He was openly gay and was among the founders of the International Lesbian and Gay Association. He served as a volunteer soldier in the OTAN base at Limoges (France), where he had time to perfect his French. After one year of pastoral and humanistic studies at Stenonius College (also known as Europaseminär, a Roman Catholic seminary today extinct) in Maastricht, the Netherlands, he began his conversion to Protestantism around 1966.

His Centre du Christ Libérateur was a ministry to sexual minorities. The center had support groups for homosexuals, transsexuals, sadomasochism and pedophiles.

Doucé was killed and the murder has never been solved. According to Doucé's lover, he was taken away by two men, who showed police badges on July the 19th 1990. The body was found in a forest in October 1990.

The killers are thought to be a unit of the French police, Renseignements Généraux, who investigated Doucé because of his support for pedophiles.

1950 – The American actor Terry Lester was born on this date (d.2003). Lester was born in Indianapolis, Indiana and began an acting career while at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana.

After years of musical theater, concert performances, numerous prime-time TV guest roles, and a season starring in the 1976 children's series Ark II, Lester had his big break when he joined CBS daytime soap The Young and the Restless (Y&R) in 1980. He created the role of Jack Abbott, a scoundrel who never met a woman (including his own father's wife) he didn't want to take to bed. Lester was so popular that Y&R creator William J. Bell wrote an entire family for him. Y&R was going through a transition period at this time and many fans believe that Lester's star quality helped the show build more viewers and eventually rise to #1 in the daytime soap ratings.

Lester kept his personal life under wraps, but a 2002 In Magazine LA article on former soap star Thom Bierdz claimed that Lester, along with Michael Corbett and Bierdz, made up a trio of gay actors who worked on The Young and the Restless in the 1980s.

1958 – On this date Harvey Lavan "Van" Cliburn, Jr. achieved worldwide recognition by becoming the first American to win the International Tchaikovsky Piano Competition in Moscow. He was all of 23.

In 1998, Cliburn was named in a palimony lawsuit by his alleged domestic partner of seventeen years, mortician Thomas Zaremba.

1966 – Martin Pousson is an American novelist, poet, and professor.

He was born and raised in Louisiana, in the Cajun French bayou land of Acadiana. Some of his favorite writers include Carson McCullers, Truman Capote and James Baldwin, as well as Denis Johnson and Junot Diaz.

His first novel, No Place, Louisiana (2002) told the story of a Cajun family and an American dream gone wrong. The novel won acclaim from Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Cunningham and the Los Angeles Times, and it was a finalist for the John Gardner Book Award in Fiction.

His first collection of poetry, Sugar (2005) centered on the lives of outsiders, especially Cajuns, Southerners and gay men. Some of the poems also dealt with racism and the AIDS epidemic. He says that this collection would not have ever been published if it were not for a friend's saved copy of the manuscript. In 2005, he was named one of the Leading Men of the Year by Instinct magazine, alongside Jake Shears, Robert Gant, and Keith Boykin.

He is currently Associate Professor of English at California State University, Northridge, in Los Angeles. He teaches in the Creative Writing Program and the Queer Studies Program, and some of his most popular courses include Narrative Writing, Advanced Narrative Writing, Theories of Fiction, and Gay Male Writers.

He was named a recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts in Creative Writing for 2014. The NEA grant was awarded for a collection of short stories in development titled "Black Sheep Boy." The stories are about a homosexual boy coming of age sexually in the bayous of Louisiana. The stories also are about mental illness and werewolf myths.

1990 – Queer Nation – The direct-action group's inaugural action took place at Flutie's Bar, a straight hangout at the South Street Sea Port on April 13, 1990. The goal: to make clear to patrons that queers will not be restricted to Gay bars for socializing and for public displays of affection. More visibility actions like this one became known as "Queer Nights Out."

2014 – The Finnish Post announces that Tom of Finland (Touko Valio Laaksone) will appear on postage stamps.

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