September 25th

09-25-1949 Pedro Almodóvar – Born in Calzada de Calatrava, Ciudad Real, Spain. He is a Spanish film director, screenwriter, producer, composer, and former actor. Almodovar achieved international recognition for his black comedy-drama film Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988), which was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. He later won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and Best Original Screenplay for the comedy-drama All About My Mother (1999). Noted for being one of the most internationally-successful Spanish filmmakers, Almodóvar and his films have gained worldwide interest and a cult following. He has won two Academy Awards, five BAFTA Awards, six European Film Awards, two Golden Globe Awards, six Goya Awards, and several honors at the Cannes Film Festival. Almodóvar also helped ChavelaVargas’ music regain recognition by including her music in his films. Almodóvar is openly gay.

09-25-1977   Clea DuVall – Born in Los Angeles, California. She is an American actress, writer, producer, and director. She’s known for her appearances in the films The Faculty (1998), three films in 1999, She’s All That, But I’m a Cheerleader, and Girl Interrupted, in 2003 she appeared in Identity and 21 Grams, The Grudge (2004), Zodiac (2007), Conviction (2010), and Argo (2012). She has also appeared in many television programs including The Handmaid’s Tale (2018-2019). In 2016, DuVall made her feature directorial debut with The Intervention, which she wrote and co-produced. She is an out lesbian and lives in Los Angeles.

09-25-1939   Sheila Ortiz-Taylor – Born in Los Angeles, California. Her father was an Anglo lawyer and musician, and her mother was a Chicana. She is a novelist, poet, and scholar. Her first novel, Faultline, published in 1982, is considered to be the first lesbian novel with a Chicana hero. Through this book and her other works, Ortiz-Taylor has helped illuminate the Mexican-American experience. In 1999, she and her life-partner Joy Lewis applied to move to the Westminster Oaks retirement community in Tallahassee, Florida. They were turned down because the community’s parent company, Presbyterian Retirement Communities, Inc., refused to recognize their relationship. In 2002, the couple, armed with a civil union certificate from the state of Vermont, tried again and turned down again. In June 2004, with help from the National Center for Lesbian Rights in Equality Florida, they reached a settlement and happily moved into the facility.

09-25-1949 Angela Bowie (born Mary Angela Barnett) – Born in Ayios Dhometios, Nicosia, Cyprus. An American citizen, her father was a US Army veteran working in Cyprus when she was born. She is an American model, actress, and journalist, best known as the ex-wife of David Bowie. The couple influenced the glam rock culture and fashion of the 1970s, especially their openness about bisexuality. She married David Bowie in 1970 and divorced him in 1980. They had one child together, Duncan Jones, film director. In her autobiography, Backstage Passes: Life On the Wild Side with David Bowie, published in 1993 and updated in 2000, it details her drug use and open bisexual lifestyle with her former husband and many other well-known musicians.

09-25-1952 Cherrie Moraga – Born in Whittier, California to a Mexican mother and an Anglo father. She is an American Chicana writer, feminist activist, poet, essayist, and playwright. Her works examine the ways in which gender, sexuality, and race intersect in the lives of women of color. Moraga was one of the few writers to write and introduce the view of Chicana lesbianism. After her college years, Moraga openly accepted her lesbianism. She said, “ My lesbianism is the avenue through which I have learned the most about silence and oppression, and it continues to be the most tactile reminder to me that we are not free human beings” describing lesbianism as poverty, just as being dark, women or simply poor. Her play, Watsonville: Some Place Not Here (1996), won the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts Fund for New American Plays Award.

09-25-1989   Jordan Gavaris – Born in Caledon, Ontario, Canada. He is a Canadian actor best known for his role as Felix Dawkins in the BBC America and Space television series Orphan Black (2013–2017). Gavaris has been dating actor and screenwriter Devon Graye since September 2013.

09-25-1991 Meleana “Mana” Shim – Born in Honolulu, Hawaii. She is an American soccer midfielder who plays for the Portland Thorns FC of the National Women’s Soccer League

Shim publicly came out as a lesbian on August 30, 2013, in an interview with Outsports.

09-25-1995 Ryan Beatty – Born in Clovis, California. He is an American singer. His debut EP, Because of You, debuted at #1 on the iTunes Pop Charts and #7 on the Top 100 in 2012. Beatty’s single Hey LA was featured in a nationwide AT&T campaign against texting while driving. On June 29, 2016, Beatty came out as a “raging homosexual.” He said, “It’s taken 20 years of suffocating in the closet for me to become comfortable enough to say it, but now I can breathe. I did it!”