1973: Twenty year old French actress and star of the The Last Tango in Paris, Maria Schneider, admits to the New York Times that she is bisexual, stating “I’ve had quite a few lovers for my age. More men than women . . . women I love more for beauty than for sex. Men I love for grace and intelligence.”
In early 1976, Schneider abandoned the film set of Caligula and checked herself into a mental hospital in Rome for several days to be with her lover, photographer Joan Townsend.] This, coupled with her refusal to perform nude, led to Schneider’s dismissal and she was replaced by Teresa Ann Savoy.
Maria Schneider died from cancer on February 3, 2011 at age 58.
1981: Jon Hinson (R-Mississippi) an extremely conservative congressman is arrested for performing an act of “oral sodomy” with a twenty-eight-year-old man in the rest room of a House of Representatives office building. He was taken into custody along with a male employee of the Library of Congress.
He pleads no contest and is given a thirty-day suspended sentence. He resigns two months later.
It also becomes known that Hinson also survived a 1977 fire that killed nine people at the Cinema Follies, a Washington theater that catered to a gay clientele. while he was an aide for then Republican Thad Cochran. He was rescued from under a pile of bodies — one of only four men who survived.
After his resignation he publicly acknowledged his homosexuality and became active in gay political issues. Hinson fought against the ban on homosexuals in the military and was a founder of the Fairfax Lesbian and Gay Citizens Association in Fairfax County, VA before his death from respiratory failure resulting from AIDS in July 1995
1987: Liberace dies at the age of 62 in Palm Springs from AIDS. Just two weeks earlier his publicists had denied a Las Vegas Sun story which claimed he had the disease. He is buried in Los Angeles’ Forest Lawn Cemetery.
What can I say about the old queen that has not already been said in Behind The Candelabra.
2004: The Massachusetts high court rules that only full, equal marriage rights for gay couples, not civil unions, would be constitutional. “The history of our nation has demonstrated that separate is seldom, if ever, equal,” an advisory opinion from the four justices who ruled in favor of gay marriage stated. A bill creating only civil unions, not full marriage rights, would be “unconstitutional, inferior, and discriminatory status for same-sex couples.”