March 6

Events

• Current events

• 1475 - An artist and lover - The legendary artist, Michelangelo was born on this date. He remains to this day one of the most famous Renaissance sculptors, painters, architects, and poets who exerted an unparalleled influence on the development of Western art. His life was marked by his accomplishments and is also remembered for the many boys he loved. Once, in a letter, he humorously recalls how a father described his son to him in the hopes of the boy becoming the artist's apprentice: "Once you saw him, you'd chase him into bed the minute you got home!" In the early 1530s Michelangelo was also sustaining a relationship with his much younger model Febo di Poggio. He called Febo "that little blackmailer," because Febo adopted Michelangelo as "my honorary father" and steadily demanded money, clothes, and love-gifts from him. Another of Michelangelo's lovers was Andrea Quaratesi, a boy with whose family he lived for several years. By 1542, at the age of sixty-six, he was sleeping with a thirteen-year-old boy named Francesco Cecchino de Zanobi Bracci. But in 1544 Cecchino died. In a letter to the boy's uncle, Michelangelo speaks of the youth as "the flame who consumes me" and alluded to a sexual relationship with: "My love has ratified the agreement which I made of myself to him." Michelangelo also wrote these lines to celebrate their love: "The earthy flesh, and here my bones deprived / Of their charming face and beautiful eyes, / Do yet attest for him how gracious I was in bed / When he embraced, and in what the soul doth live."

• 2002 - Proof that more tolerance education - not less - is needed - Parents in California were so outraged by skits performed at an elementary school for their children that they sued the school district on this date. The basis for the suit was showing "pro-gay skits for elementary-age children without notifying parents." The skits, called "Cootie Shots: Theatrical Inoculations Against Bigotry," were performed by a San Francisco-based group called Fringe Benefits. The group designs performance skits on a wide variety of topics, including tolerance of homosexuality and cross-dressing. Parents were worried that pro-gay messages might influence their children's sexuality or make them more vulnerable to pedos. District officials said two schools invited Fringe Benefits to perform skits after receiving recommendations on the group from the Bay Area Discovery Museum for children. One of the skits chosen, they said, centered on a girl who was being teased because her brother was gay. It was shown to 3rd, 4th, and 5th graders. It looks like maybe the parents are the ones who need to see the skits and learn a lesson or two about bullying and homophobia.