King of Macedonia and conqueror of the world, Alexander the Great overthrew the Persian Empire and extended his rule from Greece to Egypt and all the way to India. Alexander's achievement laid the foundation for the Hellenistic world, the Roman Empire, and even the spread of Christianity: all the New Testament writings were in Greek as a result of Alexander's influence.

Men in ancient Greece had wives, mistresses, and lovers of either gender. Alexander refused to marry, and beget an heir when he left Macedon to conquer the world, because he loved his boyhood friend, Hephaestion. Both Alexander and Hephaestion were tutored by Aristotle, with whom Hephaestion kept up a lifelong correspondence. Hephaestion started off as a regular cavalry soldier and rose through the ranks on merit and carried out the most important military and administrative assignments. Later, Alexander also fell in love with a courtier from the conquered Persian court, scandalous ~ not because the courtier was male, but because he was Persian ~ most Greeks thought that other people were barbarians.

Alexander was said to be extremely handsome. Many portraits of him were made in his life and these Roman copies may be pretty accurate. He was an incredibly athletic and loved strenuous exercise ~ he would jump off and back on a chariot moving at full speed. His lover, Hephaestion, was taller and even more handsome. The Persian Queen bowed to him instead of Alexander when she was presented to them. Alexander said to the mortified queen "Never mind, Hephaestion is also Alexander".

Staff Sgt. Eric Alva was the first American to be wounded in war in Iraq. On March 21, 2003 Alva stepped on a landmine, sustaining heavy injuries to his leg. It couldn't be saved and was amputated. Alva was medically discharged and awarded a Purple Heart. On February 28, 2007, Staff Sgt. Alva, Rep. Christopher Shays, R-4th District and Martin Meehan, D-Mass. and another 107 House members introduced legislation that would repeal the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy against gays in the military.

Alva told Congress, "I'm an American who fought for his country. Who'd have ever guessed the first American wounded was a gay Marine."

FACT: Eric Alva is a native of San Antonio, TX. He joined the marines at age 19, and was a member of the 3rd Battalion of the 7th Marines.

George Alan O'Dowd, better known as Boy George is a rock singer-songwriter. George grew up in a large, working-class Irish family, which originated in Thurles, in Co. Tipperary, Ireland.

O'Dowd was a part of the British new romantic movement which emerged in the late 1970s and was popularised in the early 1980s. Marilyn and himself were regulars at 'The Blitz' (regulars being labelled as Blitz Kids), a highly stylised nightclub in London run by Steve Strange of the musical group Visage, and a place which spawned many early 1980s pop stars such as Spandau Ballet. Essentially the new romantics based their image on the coolness of David Bowie and high fashion, and the music of David Bowie, Kraftwerk, Marc Bolan and post punk New Wave.

O'Dowd gained fame with his group Culture Club during the 1980s. His music is often classified as blue-eyed soul, since he was heavily influenced by Rhythm and Blues and Reggae. Early recordings with Culture Club showed that O'Dowd's vocals had an emotional quality which was reminiscent of American Soul music of the 1960s and 1970s. His later solo work has also touched on Glam-Rock influences and was particularly influenced by David Bowie and Iggy Pop.

FACT: Boy George is also known for his flamboyant and androgynous appearance back in the 80s and early 90s.

FACT: Boy George's androgynous style caught the attention of music executive Malcolm McLaren, of Sex Pistols fame, who arranged for O'Dowd to perform with the group Bow Wow Wow, featuring Annabella Lwin, at various shows. He was christened Lieutenant Lush and he nearly stole the spotlight from Lwin.

Benedetta Carlini was a Catholic mystic and lesbian nun, who lived in Counter-Reformation Italy during the sixteenth and seventeenth century. Judith Brown chronicled her life in Immodest Acts (1986), which discussed the events that led to her archival significance for historians of women's spirituality and lesbianism.

Benedetta Carlini was born to a middle-class Italian family, which was able to buy her a place in a reasonably comfortable convent, the Convent of the Mother of God, at Pescia. When she was thirty, Benedetta was made abbess of the convent, but then reported a disturbing series of visions in which men were trying to kill her. Fearful that Sister Benedetta was being harassed by demonic entities, the other sisters assigned Sister Bartolemea to her cell. Thereafter, Sister Benedetta's more disturbing visions ceased, but she still encountered alleged supernatural visitations.

These came to the attention of the Counter-Reformation Papacy, determined to subordinate potentially troublesome mystics if they showed any signs of independent or 'heretical' spirituality. Although they paid three to four visits to the nunnery, it wasn't until they interrogated Sister Bartolemea that they found that Benedetta and Bartolemea were lovers. According to Bartolemea, Sister Benedetta would make love to her, and both would experience the mystical epiphanies that Sister Benedetta described.

FACT: According to Brown, it may not have been Benedetta's lesbianism that led to her ultimate downfall and imprisonment, as much as her egotism. However, Bartolemea's admission was enough to insure that Benedetta was stripped of her primacy as abbess and then held under guard for the remaining 35 years of her life. She died in 1661, while her former lover, Sister Bartolomea, predeceased her by one year, dying in 1660.

Quentin Crisp (December 25, 1908 – November 21, 1999), was an English writer, artist's model, actor and raconteur known for his memorable and insightful witticisms. He became a gay icon in the 1970s after publication of his memoir, The Naked Civil Servant, brought to the attention of the general public his defiant exhibitionism and longstanding refusal to conceal his homosexuality.

FACT: The self-described "stately old homo of England" relates in his autobiography how, in his early twenties, he decided to devote his life to "making the existence of homosexuality abundantly clear to the world's aborigines."

FACT: Crisp attempted to join the army at the outbreak of the Second World War, but was rejected and declared exempt by the medical board on the grounds that he was 'suffering from sexual perversion'. He remained in London during the 1941 Blitz, stocked up on cosmetics, purchased five pounds of Henna and paraded through the blackout, picking up GIs, whose kindness and open-mindedness inspired his love of all things American.

FACT: During the 1980s and 1990s Crisp gained worldwide recognition when Sting dedicated his song "Englishman In New York" to him. Sting wrote the song not long after Crisp moved from London to an apartment in New York's Bowery. Crisp had remarked jokingly to the musician "...that he looked forward to receiving his naturalization papers so that he could commit a crime and not be deported." In late 1986, Sting visited Crisp in his apartment in New York and was told over dinner — and the next three days — what life had been like for a homosexual man in the homophobic Great Britain of the 1920s to the 1960s. Sting was shocked and fascinated at the same time and decided to write the song.

Alan Cumming is a Scottish film and stage actor best known for his roles of Boris Grishenko in GoldenEye, Kurt Wagner/Nightcrawler in X2: X-Men United and on the stage with his Tony Award-winning performance as the Emcee in the highly successful revival of Cabaret. He has directed, produced, and written films, TV series and plays, voiced several soundtracks, written a book, developed a stand-up show at the Edinburgh Fringe, and formed his own production company.

FACT: Cumming is openly bisexual, an GLBT rights activist, and has promoted gay rights on both sides of the Atlantic with organizations such as GLAAD and the HRC, as well as working for several AIDS charities, including AMFAR and Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS.

FACT: Cumming has recently become a patron of NORM-UK, a UK registered charity concerned with the foreskin and genital integrity.

Batwoman: Katherine "Kate" Kane is the former lover of Renee Montoya, retired police detective from the Gotham City Police Department, as well as heiress to one of the wealthiest families in Gotham City, owning that which the Wayne family does not. Unlike the Silver Age Kathy Kane, who was written as being romantically attracted to Batman, the new version of Kane is portrayed as a "lipstick lesbian", while still hiding this fact from nearly everyone she knows. In her civilian identity as a socialite, she is acquainted with Bruce Wayne.

Her homosexuality was announced at the same time as the character was revealed in the spring of 2006. Her homosexuality attracted substantial media coverage when the character was announced in the spring of 2006. Stories appeared on television news outlets such as CNN, general news magazines such as USA Today, and gay culture magazines such as Out.

FACT: As Batwoman, Kate lacks any superpowers, and instead relies on her martial artistry and Batman-inspired equipment when fighting crime. In the ten years since her breakup with Renee Montoya, she has learned to fight and is able to defeat three monsters, as well as spy on Renee and the Question with relative ease. Being the heiress of a family whose fortune is comparable to the Waynes, Kate possesses the finances to produce an arsenal of equipment, similar to Batman.

FACT: For a complete list of "outed" superheroes, details, and their storylines, please visit The Gay League's character index.

Rupert James Hector Everett (born May 29, 1959) is an English actor and a former singer. Everett was born in Norfolk, England to Major Anthony Michael Everett and Sara MacLean, who was Scottish, and descended from the baronets Vyvyan of Trelowarren and the German Schmiedern barons. From the age of 7, he was educated at Farleigh House preparatory school and later was educated by Benedictine monks at Ampleforth College, but dropped out of school at 15 and ran away to London to become an actor. In order to support himself, he worked as a male prostitute, as he later admitted to US magazine in 1997. After being dismissed from the Central School of Speech and Drama for insubordination, he travelled to Scotland and got a job in the avant-garde Citizens' Theatre of Glasgow.

FACT: In 1989 he moved to Paris, writing a novel Hello, Darling, Are You Working? and coming out as gay, a move which some at the time perceived as damaging to his career. Returning to the public eye in The Comfort of Strangers (1990), several films of variable success followed. In 1995 he released a second novel, The Hairdresser of St. Tropez.

FACT: In 2006 Everett published his memoir, Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins. In it he revealed he had had a 6-year affair with British television presenter, Paula Yates. “I am mystified by my heterosexual affairs — but then I am mystified by most of my relationships," he said, with the article describing him as bisexual as opposed to homosexual.

FACT: Everett has appeared in the smash hit Shrek 2 (2004) as Prince Charming. He will reprise this role in upcoming film Shrek the Third, to be released May 18, 2007.

Harvey Fierstein (born June 6, 1954) is a Tony Award-winning and Emmy Award-nominated American actor, playwright, and screenwriter. Born Harvey Forbes Fierstein in Brooklyn, New York, the gravelly-voiced actor perhaps is known best for the play and film Torch Song Trilogy, which he wrote and starred in. The 1982 Broadway production won him two Tony Awards, for Best Play and Best Actor in a Play, two Drama Desk Awards, for Outstanding New Play and Outstanding Actor in a Play, and the Theatre World Award, and the film earned him an Independent Spirit Award nomination as Best Male Lead.

Fierstein also wrote the book for La Cage aux Folles (1983), winning another Tony Award, this time for Best Book of a Musical, and a Drama Desk nomination for Outstanding Book. Legs Diamond, his 1988 collaboration with Peter Allen, was a critical and commercial failure, closing after 72 previews and 64 performances. His other playwriting credits include Safe Sex, Spookhouse, and Forget Him.

FACT: Fierstein is an occasional columnist writing about gay issues. His careers as a stand-up comic and female impersonator are mostly behind him. Fierstein resides in Ridgefield, Connecticut.

Val Joe "Rudy" Galindo is an American figure skater. He skated pairs with Kristi Yamaguchi, winning the 1988 World Junior Championship and the U.S. Senior Championships in 1989 and 1990. He also won the 1987 World Junior Championship in singles before temporarily giving up on singles competition in order to concentrate on pairs. After his partnership with Yamaguchi broke up in 1990, Galindo returned to singles competition. In 1996, Galindo won the men's title at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships at the San Jose Arena, becoming the oldest male to win this title in almost 50 years. He followed this win with a bronze medal at the 1996 World Championships.

FACT: Galindo retired from eligible competition in the summer of 1996. After being diagnosed as HIV positive and recovering from hip surgery, Rudy continues to tour with the Tom Collins' Champions on Ice show.

FACT: He published his autobiography, Icebreaker in 1997.

Philip "Phil" Jimenez is an American comic book writer, artist and penciller. Born and raised in Los Angeles, California, and later Orange County, California, he moved to New York City to attend college at the School of Visual Arts. He began working at DC Comics when he was 21; his first published work was 4 pages in the DC miniseries War of the Gods (1991).

Born and raised in southern California, and trained at NYC's School of Visual Arts, Phil Jimenez has worked in comics since 1991. He first gained recognition for his work on Tempest. His later works including pencilling stints on the Invisibles, JLA-Titans, and Planetary/Authority. Phil finished a two year run on DC Comics' Wonder Woman, worked with Grant Morrison on New X-Men, and co-authored The DC Comics Encyclopedia. His creator-owned project, Otherworld, is currently being published through DC/Vertigo, and he is also the penciller on DC's Infinite Crisis.

In a career spanning four decades, Elton John has sold more than 250 million records and has more than 50 Top 40 hits, making him one of the most successful musicians of all time. John was one of the dominant commercial forces in the rock world during the 1970s, with a string of seven consecutive #1 records on the U.S. album charts, 23 Top 40 singles, 16 Top 10 ones, and six #1 hits. His success had a profound impact on popular music, and contributed to the continued popularity of the piano in rock and roll. Key musical elements in John's success included his melodic gifts matched with the contributions of his lyricist partner Bernie Taupin, his rich tenor and gospel-chorded piano, aggressive string arrangements, and his flamboyant fashion sense and on-stage showmanship. In 2004, Rolling Stone Magazine ranked Elton John #49 on their list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time.

He continues to be a major public figure, and has been heavily involved in the fight against AIDS since the late 1980s. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994 and was knighted in 1998, and has remained an enduringly successful artist. Elton is also a champion of gay rights.

FACT: Within the music industry, Elton is sometimes known as "Sharon", a nickname originally given to him by good friend Rod Stewart. In return, Elton calls Rod "Phyllis".

Lane was born Joseph Lane in Jersey City, New Jersey, the son of Irish American Catholic parents. He was named after a paternal uncle, a Jesuit priest. His father, Daniel, was a truck driver and an aspiring tenor who died from alcoholism when Lane was 11; his mother, Nora, was a manic-depressive housewife and secretary who died in 2000. He has two brothers, Robert and Daniel. Lane attended Roman Catholic schools in Jersey City, including Jesuit-run St. Peter's Preparatory High School where he was elected Best Actor in 1974.

Deciding between college and an acting career, Lane opted for the latter, saying that college was for people who didn't know what they wanted to do, while he did. Because there already was a Joseph Lane registered with Actors Equity, he changed his name to Nathan after the character Nathan Detroit from the musical Guys and Dolls. He moved to New York City where, after a long struggle, his career began to take off, first with off-Broadway productions at Second Stage Theatre and the Manhattan Theatre Club, and then his 1982 Broadway debut in a revival of Noel Coward's Present Laughter.

FACT: Nathan Lane's career has won him over three television awards, six film awards, and fifteeen theater awards.

Kathryn Dawn Lang, OC (born November 2, 1961), best known by the stage name k.d. lang (without capital letters), is a Grammy Award-winning Canadian singer and songwriter.

Lang was born November 2, 1961 Edmonton, Alberta to Audrey and Fred Lang. When lang was two years of age, the family moved to a small farming community, Consort, Alberta, and there she grew up with her two sisters and one brother, on the Canadian prairies.

Singing at country and western venues in Canada, she made several recordings that received good reviews and earned a 1985 Canadian Juno Award for Most Promising Female Vocalist. She accepted the award wearing a wedding dress and made numerous tongue-in-cheek promises about what she would and would not do in the future, thus fulfilling the title of "Most Promising". lang has won eight Juno Awards.

In 1986, she signed a contract with an American record producer in Nashville, Tennessee, and received critical acclaim for her 1987 album, Angel With A Lariat which was produced by Dave Edmunds.

FACT: In addition to her musical talents, k.d. lang, who came out as a lesbian in a 1992 article of the GLBT-related news magazine The Advocate, has actively championed gay rights causes. She has performed and supported many causes over the years, including HIV/AIDS care and research.

Anna-Lou "Annie" Leibovitz is a noted American portrait photographer whose style is marked by a close collaboration between the photographer and the subject.

In high school, she became interested in various artistic endeavors, wrote and played music, and eventually attended the San Francisco Art Institute. She became interested in photography after taking pictures on a trip to visit her family, based in the Philippines. For several years, she continued to develop her photography skills, while working various jobs, including a stint on a kibbutz in Israel for several months in 1969.

When Leibovitz returned to America in 1970, she became involved with Rolling Stone Magazine, which had just launched a short time before. In 1973, publisher Jann Wenner named Leibovitz chief photographer of the magazine, and she remained with the magazine until 1983. Her intimate portraits of celebrities helped define the look of the magazine.

FACT: Leibovitz's famous portrait of John Lennon and Yoko Ono was taken the morning of the day on which he was shot and killed.

Liberace, known as “Lee” to his friends, was born in West Allis, Wisconsin to Frances Zuchowski, a Polish American, and Salvatore Liberace, an immigrant from Formia, Italy. He grew up in a musical family. He was classically trained as a pianist and gained wide experience playing popular music. Lee followed the advice of famous Polish pianist and family friend, Paderewski and billed himself under his last name only. As his classical career developed he found that his whimsical encores, in which he played pop songs and marches, went over better with audiences than his renditions of classical pieces, so he changed his act to "pop with a bit of classics". At other times, he referred to his act as "classical music with the boring parts left out." During the mid and late 1940s, he performed in dinner clubs and night clubs in major cities around the United States.

FACT: He had a twin who died at birth.

FACT: In 1982, Liberace's live-in boyfriend of some five years, Scott Thorson, sued the pianist for $113 million in palimony after an acrimonious split-up. Liberace continued to publicly deny that he was homosexual. In 1984, most of Thorson's claim was dismissed although he received a $95,000 settlement. Later in the decade, Thorson emerged as a pivotal witness in the prosecution of reputed gangster Eddie Nash in the 1981 quadruple murders of the Wonderland Gang.

FACT: Liberace's final stage performance was at Radio City Music Hall in New York City on November 2, 1986. He died of complications related to AIDS at the age of 67 on February 4, 1987 at his winter house in Palm Springs, California.

FACT: Liberace was also known as Walter Busterkeys, Walter Liberace, Lee Liberace, Liberace Chefroach, and The Glitter Man.

Greg Louganis began competing in diving at age 10. By the time he was 16, he had won his first Olympic medal, a silver medal on the platform in 1976. At 24, he became the first man in 56 years to win two gold medals in diving by winning both the platform and springboard events. In 1988, competing against divers half his age, he became the first to win double gold medals for diving in two consecutive Olympics. He is a six time World Champion and has held 47 National Championship titles. At the Pan Am Games he earned six gold medals and in 1985 he was awarded the Sullivan Award as the nation’s most outstanding amateur athlete.

Harvey Bernard Milk, an American politician and gay rights activist, was the first openly gay city supervisor of San Francisco, California. He and Mayor George Moscone were assassinated in 1978. His assassin, Dan White, was sentenced to seven years in prison. Outrage over the verdict led to widespread rioting in San Francisco by enraged homosexuals and others. White was convicted of voluntary manslaughter on the grounds of diminished capacity and sentenced to seven years and eight months, a sentence widely denounced as lenient and motivated by homophobia. During jury selection, defense attornies had excluded candidates they deemed "pro-gay".

FACT: Harvey Milk is widely regarded as a martyr for the gay community and the gay rights movement. Many gay and lesbian community institutions are named for Milk, including the Harvey Milk Institute and the Harvey Milk Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Democratic Club in San Francisco, as well as a number of alternative schools in the United States, including Harvey Milk High School in New York City.

The actor known as Divine was born Harris Glenn Milstead on October 19, 1945 in Towson, Maryland, a suburb of Baltimore to father Harris Bernard and mother Diana Frances. At the age of 12, the Milsteads moved to Lutherville, another nearby district, just six houses from a boy the same age named John Waters. Years later, John and Glenn would thrive off each other's talents to acheive notoriety and eventually fame.

Around 1966, Glenn was cast in his first Waters film, being remodeled by John and his makeup artist, Van Smith, into the horror show that would forever be known as Divine. Through Waters' films, Divine became synonymous with vile, repulsive acts with an attitude to match. But throughout his career, he longed for a way out of that mask, wig and dress, and in fact, did play a few roles out of drag.

At age 42, he was just about to branch into television when he met his demise in Southern California. He'd broken his habit of pot smoking, been widely praised by fans and the press for his role as Edna Turnblad in John Waters' Hairspray, and was finally going to play a role out of drag on network television. The Fox program, Married With Children, had booked Divine to play Bundy relative, Uncle Otto - a character Fox hoped would become a regular. He did not show up on the set. His personal manager, Bernard Jay, discovered him dead in his hotel suite - Mr. Jay swears Divine died of happiness, a state he finally acheived the morning of March 7, 1988.

FACT: Divine was the inspiration for the design of Ursula the Sea-Witch in the Disney classic, The Little Mermaid.

Although she appeared in more than 70 films and on dozens of television shows during a career that spanned more than 30 years, Moorehead is probably most-widely known to modern audiences for her role as the witch Endora in the television series Bewitched. While rarely playing leads in films, Moorehead's skill at character development and range earned her one Emmy, and two Golden Globe awards in addition to four Oscar and six Emmy nominations. Moorehead's transition to television won acclaim and accolades for her work in drama and in comedy. She could play many different character types, but often portrayed haughty, arrogant characters.

FACT: In the years since her death, rumors about Moorehead's being a lesbian have been widespread (most notoriously in the book, Hollywood Lesbians); however, Moorehead biographer Charles Transberg (I Love the Illusion: The Life and Career of Agnes Moorehead, 2005) interviewed several of the actress' closest friends, including some who were openly gay, who all stated the rumor is untrue. Debbie Reynolds explicitly denied to film historian, Robert Osborne, that her "best friend" Moorehead was gay.

Martina Navratilova (born October 18, 1956, in Prague, Czechoslovakia) is a former World No. 1 woman tennis player. Tennis magazine has selected her as the greatest female tennis player for the years 1965 through 2005. She has won 18 Grand Slam singles titles, 31 Grand Slam women's doubles titles (an all-time record), and 10 Grand Slam mixed doubles titles. She reached the Wimbledon singles final 12 times, including 9 consecutive years from 1982 through 1990, and won the women's singles title at Wimbledon a record 9 times. She is one of just three women to have accomplished a career Grand Slam in singles, women's doubles, and mixed doubles. She holds the open era record for most singles and doubles tournament wins (167 and 177 titles respectively). She also recorded the longest winning streak in tennis history (74 matches in a row), and three of the top six longest winning streaks in women's tennis history.

FACT: When not playing tennis, Navratilova is involved with various charities that benefit animal rights, underprivileged children, and gay rights. She filed a lawsuit against Amendment 2, a 1992 ballot proposition in Colorado designed to deny legal benefits to gays and lesbians. In the same year, she spoke before the National March on Washington for Gay and Lesbian Rights.

Roseann Teresa O'Donnell, born March 21, 1962 in Bayside, Queens, New York, is a controversial Emmy-award winning American talk show host, television personality, comedian, film, television, and stage actress.

FACT: Four days before her 11th birthday, on March 17, 1973, her mother died of breast cancer.

Kanako Otsuji is one of Japan's leading GLBT rights activists and a former member of the Osaka Prefectural Assembly (April 2003–April 2007). One of only seven women in the 110-member Osaka Assembly, Otsuji represented the Sakai-ku, Sakai City constituency. In August 2005, Otsuji published an autobiography Coming Out: A Journey to Find My True Self, and in doing so came out as Japan's first lesbian politician, the day before the 2005 Tokyo Pride parade.

In 2005, Otsuji was instrumental in bringing about a legislative change that allows same-sex couples to rent housing from the Osaka Prefectural Housing Corporation. This was a privilege previously limited to married couples. Since same-sex marriages are not recognised under Japanese law, gay couples in Osaka had previously found it impossible to rent public housing.

FACT: In March-April 2006, Otsuji attended International Lesbian and Gay Association's world conference in Geneva.

Joe Phillips (born February 13th 1969) is an American comic book artist well-known for both mainstream comic book work, as well as work for gay-themed magazines. Joe started drawing at a very young age when his mother bought him a pad of paper and some pens, which he says "started my lifelong obsession with art". Art became his way of communicating, and he pursued his passion into his teens when he joined a creative arts school.

Joe has worked on the likes of Southern Knights, Speed Racer, Interview With The Vampire, Mister Miracle, Timber Wolf, and Justice League Of America. He was also one of the original members of Atlanta's Gaijin Studios, his tenure lasting from 1991 until early 1993. Gaijin Studios has long been considered an influential breeding ground for some of comics' most prominent talents, thanks in part to Joe's contributions.

FACT: Joe launched a line of paper-doll-style magnets for the gay market called JoeBoy Dress-Me Magnets.

FACT: Joe started Joe Boy Comics, a collection of humorous gay comic strips, which were very successful. Afterwards, Joe produced more risque humor work for adult websites like Absolutely Male and Kara's Adult Playground. Joe's creation, House of Morecock was so successful as a website that it's short cartoons were released on DVD.

FACT: Joe explains his outlook as so: "I draw from the idea that we would all like to be in a beautiful place, with our friends and loved ones. When I was younger, I always wanted to see more positive images of gay life. When I didn't find enough of them, I began creating the images myself."

FACT: Joe owns and operates, along with his brother Lex, a film studio: Adult Visual Animation which has released both of their adult DVD films.

Sylvia Rae Rivera (2 July 1951–19 February 2002) was a transgender activist. She was a founding member of both the Gay Liberation Front and the Gay Activists Alliance and helped found STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries), a group dedicated to helping homeless young street queens, with her friend Marsha P. Johnson.

Sylvia Rivera, 50, passed away in the intensive care unit of St. Vincent's Hospital, New York on February 19, 2002 at about 5AM.
Riviera had been ill with liver cancer. She was accompanied by her lover, Julia Murray, and Reverend Pat Bumgardner of the MCC-NY. Riviera who had been a civil rights activist all her life was born Ray Rivera according to Martin Duberman, author of the book, Stonewall. She met with the leadership of the Empire State Pride Agenda in her hospital room just hours before her death, presenting the issues of concern to the community.

The Rt. Rev. V. Gene Robinson (born May 29, 1947) is the ninth bishop of the Diocese of New Hampshire in the Episcopal Church in the United States of America. Robinson was elected bishop in 2003 and entered office on March 7, 2004. Prior to becoming bishop, he served as assistant to the retiring New Hampshire bishop. Robinson is best known for being the first openly gay, noncelibate priest to be ordained to the historic episcopate.

FACT: When he was born, there were concerns that he would not survive the delivery, so the physician asked Robinson's father for a name for the baby's birth and death certificates. Charles and Imogene Robinson had counted on a girl, thus explaining Robinson's feminine given name of Vicky Imogene.

RuPaul, born RuPaul Andre Charles on November 17, 1960, and named after Paul Bergeron, is an American drag performer, dance music singer, actor, and songwriter, who gained worldwide fame in the 1990s; appearing in a wide variety of television programs, films, and musical albums. Though a catty attitude is often associated with drag queens, RuPaul intentionally displayed a "love one another" attitude to be set apart from them. Although primarily known for an extravagant drag queen persona, RuPaul has performed as a man in a number of roles, usually billed as RuPaul Charles.

FACT: When guests enter the main room of Madame Tussaud's New York, they are greeted with the wax likeness RuPaul holding court as the center attraction high above the room as a life size center piece of a fountain.

FACT: RuPaul is noted amongst famous drag queens for his indifference towards the gender-specific pronouns used to address him - both "he" and "she" have been deemed acceptable.

FACT: RuPaul has been famously quoted as saying, "We all came into this world naked, the rest of it is all drag," although this quote has been traced back to the gay liberation movement of the 1970s.

FACT: When asked why he wore women's clothes, Rupaul has often responded "These are not women's clothes, they are my clothes."

Sappho was an Ancient Greek lyric poet, born on the island of Lesbos. In history and poetry texts, she is sometimes associated with the city of Mytilene on Lesbos; she was also said to have been born in Eresos, another city on Lesbos. Her birth was sometime between 630 BC and 612 BC, and it is said that she died around 570 BC. The bulk of her poetry, which was well-known and greatly admired throughout antiquity, has been lost, but her immense reputation has endured.

Because some of her love poems were addressed to women, she has long been considered to have had homosexual inclinations. The word lesbian itself is derived from the name of the island of Lesbos from which she came. Her name is also the origin of its less common synonym sapphic. The narrators of many of her poems do in fact speak of infatuations and love (sometimes requited, sometimes not) for various women, but descriptions of physical acts between women are few and subject to debate.

Matthew Wayne Shepard was an American student at the University of Wyoming who was fatally attacked near Laramie, on the night of October 6 – October 7, 1998 in what was widely reported by international news media as a savage beating because of his homosexuality. Shepard died from severe head injuries at Poudre Valley Hospital in Fort Collins, Colorado, on October 12. His murder brought national attention to the issue of hate crime legislation at the state and federal levels.

Andy Warhol was an American artist associated with the definition of Pop Art. He was a painter, an avant-garde filmmaker, a commercial illustrator, music industry producer, writer and celebrity. He alos founded the magazine, Interview.

It was during the 1960s that Warhol began to make paintings of famous American products such as Campbell's Soup Cans from the Campbell Soup Company and Coca-Cola, as well as paintings of celebrities like Marilyn Monroe, Troy Donahue, and Elizabeth Taylor. He founded The Factory, his studio, during these years, and gathered around himself a wide range of artists, writers, musicians and underground celebrities. He switched to silkscreen prints, which he produced serially, seeking not only to make art of mass-produced items but to mass produce the art itself. In declaring that he wanted to be "a machine", and in minimizing the role of his own creative insight in the production of his work, Warhol sparked a revolution in art - his work quickly became very controversial, and popular.

Warhol's work from this period revolves around American Pop (Popular) Culture. He painted dollar bills, celebrities, brand name products, and images from newspaper clippings - many of the latter were iconic images from headline stories of the decade (e.g. photographs of mushroom clouds, and police dogs attacking civil rights protesters). His subjects were instantly recognizable, and often had a mass appeal - this aspect interested him most, and it unifies his paintings from this period.

John Waters (born April 22, 1946) is an American filmmaker, writer, personality, visual artist and art collector, who rose to fame in the early 1970s for his transgressive cult films.

Waters was a student at New York University (NYU) in New York City, but was expelled in January 1966 for smoking marijuana on the school grounds. Waters returned to his hometown of Baltimore, Maryland, where he began work on his next film, Eat Your Makeup, which was filmed that year. Waters' films would become Divine's primary star vehicle. Waters' early films were all shot in the Baltimore area with his company of local actors, the Dreamlanders. In addition to Divine, the group included Mink Stole, Cookie Mueller, Edith Massey, David Lochary, Mary Vivian Pearce, and others. These early films were among the first picked up for distribution by New Line Cinema.

Waters' early campy movies present filthily lovable characters in outrageous situations with hyperbolic dialogue. His early films, Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble, and Desperate Living, which he labeled the Trash Trilogy, pushed hard at the boundaries of conventional propriety and movie censorship.

FACT: Waters is an avid fan of Court TV and for a time was known for going to high profile court cases as an observer. Waters has been quoted as saying that he saw many of the same people who were court observers all around the country at different trials. Waters eventually stopped going to trials when more fans started recognizing him and went to trials to meet him. He didn't feel it was appropriate to the seriousness of the court system.

Walter Whitman was an American poet, essayist, journalist, and humanist. Proclaimed the "greatest of all American poets" by many foreign observers a mere four years after his death, he is viewed as the first urban poet. His works have even been translated into more than 25 languages.

Whitman is among the most influential and controversial poets in the American canon. His work has been described as a "rude shock" and "the most audacious and debatable contribution yet made to American literature." He largely abandoned the metrical structures of European poetry for an expansionist freestyle verse—"irregular" but "beautifully rhythmic"— which represented his philosophical view that America was destined to reinvent the world as emancipator and liberator of the human spirit.

FACT: Whitman wrote in Leaves of Grass (By Blue Ontario's Shore), "Rhymes and rhymers pass away ~ America justifies itself, give it time..."

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish playwright, novelist, poet, and short story writer. Known for his barbed wit, he was one of the most successful playwrights of late Victorian London, and one of the greatest celebrities of his day. As the result of a famous trial, he suffered a dramatic downfall and was imprisoned for two years of hard labour after being convicted of the offence of "gross indecency".

FACT: Though Wilde's sexual orientation has variously been considered bisexual, homosexual, and pederastic, Wilde himself felt he belonged to a culture of male love inspired by the Greek pederastic tradition.

FACT: After graduating from Magdalen, Wilde returned to Dublin, where he met and fell in love with Florence Balcombe. She in turn became engaged to Bram Stoker.

Bruce Vilanch is an American comedy writer who caught the public eye when he became a wisecracking regular on the revamped Hollywood Squares with Whoopi Goldberg. Vilanch was born into a Jewish family and claims to be a practicing Jew. Vilanch attended Ohio State University as a theater and journalism student and graduated with a BFA in theatre in 1970. His first television appearance was in 1988 on Hollywood Today, where he was interviewed by Chris Aable. The show aired in 43 cities on Century Cable and the Manhattan Neighborhood Cable Network.

FACT: Vilanch is an obese man with long blonde hair, a big, bushy beard, and glasses. He is openly gay, straight edge, and "a notorious meat eater" He has a penchant for wearing wacky T-shirts.