Jan. 26-Feb. 1
1998
U.S.: Revolutionary Angela Davis comes out as a lesbian in Out magazine. * Us magazine features interviews with Anne Heche and Nathan Lane. * The HBO movie Gia, about a lesbian supermodel who dies of AIDS, debuts on TV. Gia is played by Angelina Jolie. * The Supreme Court refuses to hear the appeal of Georgia lawyer Robin Shahar, who sued Georgia Attorney General Michael Bowers for discrimination after he rescinded a staff attorney job that Shahar had already accepted, after finding out about Shahar’s commitment ceremony with her partner. * Mick Jagger, who plays a drag queen in the new movie Bent, says : ‘I loved dressing up, finding the right costumes. I started of with short dresses, which I knew I wouldn’t get to wear. But I looked a lot better in short dresses, to be purrfectly honest.’ * Canada: Member of Parliament Tom Wappel introduces a Defense of Marriage Act to ban gay marriage. * Singapore: The Controller of Undesirable Publications bans calendars showing partially clothed men. * Britain: After a death in London, Abbott Laboratories come under to pressure to add a warning to Retonavir about dangers of mixing the drug with MDMA, the ingredient found in Ecstasy.
1993
U.S.: Top Pentagon officials review the practical aspects of dealing with homosexuals in the armed forces, including whether to bar them from combat, or give them separate barracks and showers. * Three marines from Camp Lejeune, near Wilmington, N.C., drag Crae Pidgen out of a gay bar and beat him. In their defense, the three lance corporals say they were angry about President Clinton’s efforts to lift the ban on gays in the military. * In North Carolina, the Chapel Hill Herald begins a column that comments on gay issues, AIDS, and health issues from a gay perspective. * Britain: A parliamentary committee votes to continue allowing local authorities to evict gays from public housing when their partners die.
1988
U.S.: The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation meets with PBS station WNET in New York, in an effort to improve public television’s ‘patchy’ coverage of gays. * A poster of a hairy, muscular, naked man with a condom over his fully erect penis causes trouble between the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, and the San Francisco Public Health Department. The poster’ caption reads ‘Dress for The Occasion’ and is distributed in the city’s gay neighborhoods. Public Health Director, David Werdeger, says the poster ‘would be counterproductive, because it may find its way into the wrong hands.’ He goes on to say that the political climate in San Francisco requires that safer-sex materials should not be open to easy attack. * Chile: The Colectiva Ayuquelan, a lesbian group in Santiago, ‘comes out’ publicly with an interview published in APSI, a center-left newspaper. This is the first time a gay group has shown itself in the Chilean press.
1983
U.S.: The Minneapolis City Council approves a $10,000 payment to Blaine Wesley, a gay man who was injured by officer James Hovda during a routine traffic stop. Hovda allegedly walked up to the car, reached in, grabbed Wesley, then hit him in the mouth with a flashlight. * America is gripped by AIDS panic: people are evicted from their homes, undertakers refuse to embalm the dead, women change their hairdressers, and one woman writes to a newspaper asking, ‘How should I fumigate an apartment I bought from a homosexual?’ and a man writes, ‘Is it OK to share a pizza with a friend?’