May 9th

05-09-1943 – 05-10-2000 Kiyoshi Kuromiya – Born in Heart Mountain Relocation Center, Wyoming. He was a Japanese-American author and civil and social justice advocate. He was a committed civil right and anti-war activist and was also one of the founders of Gay Liberation Front – Philadelphia. Kuromiya served as an openly gay delegate to the Black Panther Convention (1969) that endorsed the gay liberation struggle. From 1978 to 1983, he traveled worldwide with Buckminster Fuller and collaborated on his last 6 books. Kuromiya was also an assistant of Martin Luther King Jr. and took care of King’s children immediately following his assassination. He was involved in all aspects of the AIDS movement. He is best known as the founder of the Critical Path Project, which brought the strategies and theories of his associate/mentor Buckminster Fuller to the struggle against AIDS. The CRITICAL PATH newsletter, one of the earliest and most comprehensive sources of HIV treatment information, was mailed to thousands of people living with HIV all over the world. Kuromiya was the leading plaintiff in the Supreme Court case, Kuromiya vs. The United States of America, calling for the legalization of marijuana for medical uses (1999). He died due to complications from AIDS.

05-09-1934   Alan Bennett – Born in Armley, Leeds, Yorkshire, England. He is an English actor, author, playwright, and screenwriter. His play, The History Boys, won three Laurence Olivier Awards in 2005, and in 2006, the play won six Tony Awards on Broadway, including best play. A film version of The History Boys was released in the UK in 2008. Bennett ’s life-partner is Rupert Thomas, the editor of The World of Interiors magazine. Bennett also had a long-term relationship with his former housekeeper, Anne Davies, until her death in 2009. In the autobiographical sketches which form a large part of the book, Bennett wrote openly for the first time about his bisexuality. Previously Bennett had referred to questions about his sexuality as like asking a man who has just crawled across the Sahara desert to choose between Perrier or Malvern mineral water.

05-09-1963   Justin Vivian Bond – Born in Hagerstown, Maryland. Bond is an American singer-songwriter, author, painter, performance artist, and actor. Bond is transgender and prefers the gender-inclusive honorific Mx. (in place of Ms./Mr.) and pronoun v (with vself instead of her/himself), a reference to Bond’s middle name. V has been described as “the best cabaret artist of his generation.” Bond has received the following awards: GLADD (2000), Obie (2001), Bessie (2004), Ethyl (2007), nominated for a Tony (2007), and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists (2012). Though assigned male at birth, Bond never identified as such. As a trans-person, Bond decided to clarify by explaining “for me to claim to be either a man or a woman, feels like a lie. My identity falls somewhere in the middle and is constantly shifting.” 

05-09-1978   Daniel Franzese – Born in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, New York. He is an American actor, comedian, and LGBT activist. After coming out as gay in 2014, Franzese became active in the fight for civil and human rights in the LGBTQ community. In 2015 he became an ambassador for the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation. He is also an ambassador for Lambda Legal, which is dedicated to decreasing the stigma associated with people with AIDS.  

05-09-1914 – 12-16-1948 Denham Fouts – Born in Jacksonville, Florida. He was an American male prostitute, socialite, and literary muse. He was the inspiration for characters by Truman Capote, Gore Vidal, Christopher Isherwood, and Gavin Lambert. Capote considered him the “Best-Kept Boy in the World.” Fouts was allegedly the lover of numerous notable figures, including Prince Paul of Greece (later King), and French actor Jean Marais. Another of his lovers was Evan Morgan, 2nd Viscount Tredegar. Fouts died in 1948, in Rome, at the age of 34 of a “hypoplastic aorta and hypertrophy of left ventricle (heart disease).”

05-09-1980 Kate Richardson-Walsh – Born in Withington, Manchester, United Kingdom. She is an English field hockey player and captain of her team. Kate has twice been the winner of the Hockey Writers Club UK Player of the Year. In 2003, she married teammate Helen Richardson and both adopted the surname Richardson-Walsh. In 2016, the British women’s field hockey teams won gold at the Olympics and because both women were on the team, it made them the first same-sex couple to win Olympic medals. Kate was also one of 49 out LGBT athletes at the 2016 Summer Olympic Games at Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.