LGBT History Month Begins

And there's a website that will be posting biographies about a different LGBT figure every day. They begin today with Roberta Achtenberg.

B.A.R. Posts All Obits Since 1980

In a joint project with the San Francisco Gay & Lesbian Historical Society, the Bay Area Reporter has created an online database of every obituary published since 1980.

For years, especially in the late 1980s and early 1990s, people who had died from complications related to AIDS dominated the B.A.R. 's obituary pages. Tom Burtch, a volunteer at San Francisco's GLBT Historical Society, has spent about three years scanning the obituaries from the paper's archives, which are stored at the society's Mission Street facility. The site will enable users to share memories and could eventually let them upload photos – "sort of like a Facebook page for each person," said Burtch. Burtch, who's been a member of the San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus for 24 years, had originally set out to find obituaries of former chorus members and put them online in time for the chorus's 30th anniversary last November. But after he started, he said, "I realized that was a little bit selfish of me. I felt that the greater community also needed an opportunity to mourn ... an ability to remember people and keep their memories alive."

By the early 90's, the B.A.R. was publishing pages of AIDS-related obituaries every week. In 1998, two years after the advent of protease inhibitors, the paper made international news when it published the words "No Obits" on its front page. It was the first time since the epidemic began that the paper had not received notice of an AIDS-related death.

First Gay Rights Writing Discovered

An English scholar has unearthed a scroll of parchment containing what he says is the earliest English-language writing on the topic of gay rights. Ancient And Modern Pederasty Investigated And Exemplified, a book written by Thomas Cannon in 1749 is a "defense" of homosexuality containing citations from ancient Greek and Roman literature.

The book was suppressed upon publication, with all copies destroyed and the printer forced to flee the country to avoid prosecution. Dr. Hal Gladfelder of the University of Manchester said of the author, "It's a fair assumption that Cannon was writing for a gay subculture at the time - which has largely remained hidden. Though he lived in anonymity - possibly because of the notoriety of his pamphlet - I certainly regard him as a martyr."
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