1998U.S.: Chastity Bono, on the death of her father, Sonny Bono, says: ‘We were estranged and I hadn’t talked to him in about a year. I feel terrible about that.’ * St. Louis alderman vote 17-5 to approve the city’s domestic-partnership registry. * The South Carolina Gay and Lesbian Pride Movement urges people to withhold financial support from local public television network SCETV until the company reverses its decision not to air License to Kill, a film about men who murder gay men. * Quentin Crisp says: ‘A lifetime of listening to Disco music is a high price to pay for one’s sexual preference.’ * Australia: For the first time in the country’s history a gay man wins custody of his child. * El Salvador: William Hernandez, of the gay organization Between Friends, says that seven gay transvestite prostitutes have been shot dead in the last three months and the police couldn’t care less.
1993U.S.: In San Francisco more than 150 people, including many PWA’s, attend a seminar on ‘How To Kill Yourself’ led by Derek Humphry, founder of the Hemlock Society. * In Montpelier, Vt., the Supreme Court decides that Deborah Lashman can legally adopt the children of her lover Jane Van Buren, who was artificially inseminated, and is the biological mother of two boys. * Roddy Bottum, keyboard player with heavy metal band Faith No More ‘comes out’ in The Advocate. * Author Randy Shilts tells The Advocate: ‘What frustrates me is that most of the Pentagon’s employees are like piano players in a whorehouse who don’t know what’s going on upstairs.’ * In St. James, Minn., police arrest 64-year-old dairy farmer, Herbert Saunders, for allegedly telling people he could cure cancer, diabetes and AIDS, by injecting a cow with their blood and then giving them the cow’s milk to drink. * Craig Rodwell, long-time gay activist and founder of the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop in Greenwich Village, dies of stomach cancer at age 52.
1988U.S.: A book called You Can Do Something About AIDS, with 35 chapters written by celebrities like Elizabeth Taylor, Whoopi Goldberg and Greg Louganis, is given away free in bookstores. * At the Southern Baptist Convention in San Diego, delegates vote to pass a resolution blaming homosexuals for the AIDS epidemic, and condemning homosexuality as ‘an abomination,’ ‘a perversion,’ and the ‘manifestation of a depraved nature.’ * Greg Louganis tells GQ magazine: ‘My sexual preference is no issue. It’s nobody’s business. I would never say whether I slept with men or women. I’m just old-fashioned.’ * Rev. Charles Dancy, a Presbyterian minister in Tuscaloosa, Ala., shoots himself to death, just hours after discovering that he had tested positive for the HIV virus.
1983U.S.: The 3rd annual Castro Street Dog Show takes place in San Francisco. Among the contestants is Pedro, who is ‘150 years old in dog years,’ Isadora, who was in heat and showed much interest in Pedro, Armistead Maupin’s dog fell off the ramp twice, and one dog disappeared while chasing bubbles blown by his master. The winner of the Best Dog Award was Joey, who didn’t even have to walk—he was carried around the stage in a Cleopatra-like carrier. * The New York Times publishes its first front-page story on AIDS, two years after the epidemic was first reported. * Jerry Falwell tells his followers that AIDS is ‘the judgment of God.’