Benjamin, Harry (12 January 1885–24 August 1986), physician, endocrinologist, and sex researcher, was born in Berlin, Germany, the son of Julius Benjamin, a banker, and Bertha Hoffman. He became interested in human sexuality at the age of twenty, when he read August Forel’s ...
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Benjamin, Harry (1885-1986), physician, endocrinologist, and sex researcher
Keay Davidson
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Benjamin, Harry (1885-1986)
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Harry Benjamin. Courtesy of the National Library of Medicine (B02717).
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Funk, Isaac Kauffman (1839-1912), publisher and reformer
Lloyd J. Graybar
Funk, Isaac Kauffman (10 September 1839–04 April 1912), publisher and reformer, was born near Clifton, Ohio, the son of John Funk and Martha Kauffman, farmers. Funk graduated from Wittenberg College in 1860 and from its theological seminary the following year. He subsequently held pastorates at Lutheran churches near Moreshill, Indiana, and in Carey, Ohio, before moving to St. Matthews’ English Lutheran Church in Brooklyn, New York, where he remained the longest. In 1863 he married Eliza Thompson; they had two children. The year after his wife’s death in 1868 he married her sister, Helen G. Thompson. The couple had one son....
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Hay, Harry (07 April 1912–24 October 2002)
Craig M. Loftin
Hay, Harry (07 April 1912–24 October 2002), gay rights pioneer, was born Henry Hay, Jr., in Worthing, Sussex, England, to wealthy American parents, Henry Hay, Sr., and Margaret Neall. His father worked as a manager for mining companies, forcing the family to relocate frequently. The Hays moved to Chuquicamata, Chile, in 1914, then settled in Los Angeles, California, in 1919. Harry (as he was known) attended Los Angeles public schools and spent summers working on relatives’ ranches in California and Nevada. At age fourteen, Harry experienced his first sexual encounter with another man and realized he was gay (he had seen the word “homosexual” in a book several years earlier). Harry Hay attended Stanford University from 1930 to 1932, where he participated in the campus’s clandestine gay social scene and even told many classmates he was gay—an audacious declaration at a time when gay people usually did not publicly reveal their sexual identities....
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Langston, Charles Henry (1817-1892), abolitionist, temperance advocate, and educator
Thaddeus Russell
Langston, Charles Henry (1817–14 December 1892), abolitionist, temperance advocate, and educator, was born in Louisa County, Virginia, the son of Captain Ralph Quarles, a white plantation owner, and Lucy Langston, Quarles’s slave whom he manumitted and with whom he maintained an open relationship. Langston and his brothers were educated by Quarles in their youth. After the death of their parents in 1834 the Langston children were taken by William Gooch, a friend of Quarles and Lucy Langston, to Chillicothe, Ohio, where they were reunited with their half brother and two half sisters, the children of Lucy Langston who were born before her involvement with Quarles. Langston and his brothers took with them to Ohio considerable money bequeathed to them by Quarles. In 1835 Langston and his brother Gideon became the first African Americans enrolled in the preparatory department of Oberlin Collegiate Institute, then a hotbed of abolitionism. After leaving the preparatory department in 1836, Langston worked as a teacher at black schools in Chillicothe and Columbus, Ohio. He reenrolled in the Oberlin preparatory department in 1841 and studied there until the spring of 1843....
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Lewis, Dioclesian (1823-1886), temperance reformer and pioneer in physical education
Jack S. Blocker
Lewis, Dioclesian (03 March 1823–21 May 1886), temperance reformer and pioneer in physical education, was born near Auburn, New York, the son of John C. Lewis and Delecta Barbour, farmers. A product of the “Burned-Over District,” America’s most fertile ground for revivalism and reform during the Second Great Awakening (1800–1830), Dio Lewis absorbed revivalism’s lesson of individual improvement through self-discipline and applied it to social problems created or exacerbated by urbanization and industrialization. His first exposure to the new world of industry came as a boy, when he was hired by a cotton mill near his home. After spending several years in his late teens as a teacher, Lewis turned to the study of medicine, at first with a local doctor, then for a short time at Harvard. While practicing in Port Byron, New York, he was converted by his partner to homeopathy, and as a result of his efforts in publicizing homeopathic principles Lewis was awarded an honorary M.D. in 1851 by the Homeopathic Hospital College of Cleveland, Ohio....
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Russo, Vito Anthony (11 July 1946–7 Nov. 1990), film historian and gay/AIDS activist
Michael Schiavi
Russo, Vito Anthony (11 July 1946–7 Nov. 1990), film historian and gay/AIDS activist, was born in New York City, the older son of Manhattan natives Angelo (“Charles”) Russo and Angelina (“Annie”) Salerno Russo. Charles’s parents hailed from Caserta, Italy, while Annie’s parents also came to America from Italy, from Messina, Sicily. Charles worked primarily in Manhattan in construction. The Russos were Roman Catholic, although teenager Vito grew very skeptical of Catholicism as he embraced his homosexuality....
