April 2nd

04-02-1914 – 08-05-2000   Sir Alec Guinness – Born in Maida Vale, London, England. He was an English actor. Guinness is known for his six collaborations with David Lean, including the 1957 film The Bridge on the River Kwai for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor. He is also known for his portrayal of Obi-Wan Kenobi in the original Star Wars trilogy. In 1959, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for services to the arts. In the biography, Alec Guinness: The Unknown, by Garry O’Connor, in 1946 Guinness was arrested and fined for a homosexual act in a public restroom in Liverpool. Biographies written after his death claim Guinness was bisexual and that he had kept his sexuality private from the public. Only his closest friends and family members knew he had sexual relationships with men. Guinness died from liver cancer in 2000.

04-02-1805 – 08-04-1875 Hans Christian Andersen – Born in Odense, Denmark. He was a Danish storyteller and playwright. Although a prolific writer of plays, travelogues, novels, and poems, Andersen is best remembered for his fairy tales. His fairy tales have been translated into 125 languages. Some of his most famous fairy tales include: The Little Mermaid, The Snow Queen, The Ugly Duckling, The Nightingale, and The Emperor’s New Clothes. His stories have inspired plays, ballets, and both live-action and animated films. Andersen fell in love with unattainable women and he certainly experienced same-sex love as well: He wrote to Edvard Colin: “I languish for you as for a pretty Calabrian wrench…my sentiments for you are those of a woman. The femininity of my nature and our friendship must remain a mystery.” He also had infatuations for the Danish dancer Harald Scarf and Carl Alexander, the duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach. None of these crushes that he had with women or men resulted into any relationship.

04-02-1884 – 03-29-1965 Adrian-Nilsson Gösta – Born in Lund, Sweden. He was a Swedish artist and writer, usually referred to as GAN. GAN was a pioneer of the Swedish modernist art movement. His later works were more towards romanticism, inspired by landscape artist Marcus Larson. In addition to oil paintings, he also did some watercolors, wrote poems, short stories, and children’s books. GAN was gay and many of his works reflect this. He loved sailors, sportsmen, and masculine strength. Because homosexual eroticism was both illegal and taboo in Sweden, GAN was forced to live a double life. His diaries give us an insight into what it was like to be a gay man in Sweden. GAN is now considered one of the most significant Swedish artists of the twentieth century. He also is recognized as a bold pioneer in gay art, defying the predominant homophobia of his era.

04-02-1945   Linda Hunt – Born in Morristown, New Jersey. She is an American actress. Hunt’s breakthrough came playing the male character Billy Kwan in The Year of Living Dangerously (1982), for which she won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, becoming the first person to win an Oscar portraying a character of the opposite sex. She has also had a successful television career. Hunt has been in a relationship with psychotherapist Karen Kline since 1978. The two were married in 2008. As a teenager, Hunt was diagnosed as having hypopituitary dwarfism and stands 4 feet 9 inches tall.

04-02-1947 Camille Paglia – Born in Endicott, New York. She is an American academic and social critic. Paglia has been a professor at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, since 1984. She wrote a regular column for salon.com from 1995 to 2001 and again from 2007 to 2009. Paglia resumed writing a salon.com column in 2016. She considers her statement, “God is man’s greatest idea.” as probably the most important sentence that she has ever written. For over a decade she was lovers with artist Alison Maddex. The couple separated in 2007. She is an out lesbian and has been since she attended Yale in 1968.

04-02-1958 Deborah L. Ruggiero – Born in Providence, Rhode Island. She is an American radio personality and politician from Jamestown, Rhode Island. A Democrat, she serves in the Rhode Island House of Representatives representing the 74th district. Ruggiero is openly lesbian; her partner of 22 1/2 years, Joyce Ioanes, died of cancer in 2007. She is one of four openly LGBT members of the Rhode Island General Assembly.