DUTCH POET and novelist Jacob Israël de Haan was born in Smilde, the Netherlands, on December 31, 1881, and murdered in Jerusalem on June 30, 1924. As a writer, he is perhaps best known for his first novel Pijpelijntjes, which appeared in 1904 and caused a considerable uproar on account of its explicit description of a homosexual relationship, the first such description in Dutch literature.

WIDESPREAD INDIGNATION at the suggestion that Abraham Lincoln might have enjoyed sharing his bed with other men, that he delayed marriage to make it last as long as he could, and that he occasionally returned to the practice even in the White House when Mrs. Lincoln was away, suggests the fragility of tolerance for homosexuality.

THE POLITICAL DUST STORM kicked up by the Oscar-winning film Brokeback Mountain, however predictable, found right-wingers railing that yet another symbol of American “family values,” the cowboy, was being desecrated. A typical Christian blogger screamed: “Now they’re out to destroy the American legend of the cowboy. God help us, and John Wayne forgive us!”

“WHEN THE FIRST Christian pervert, St. Paul, made nature a crime against Christianity, civilization was finished,” writes poet Harold Norse in “Nocturnal Emissions” (1973). “Had he been handsome instead of hideous, the whole course of history might have been happier.” Norse’s opinion is shared by novelist Gore Vidal who, in Live from Golgotha (1992), presents Paul as a sexually maladroit troll obsessed with the handsome, teenaged Timothy.