January 4, 1877 – Marsden Hartley the American painter, poet, and essayist. is born in Lewiston, Maine. Hartley was in Paris at the creation of the cubist movement. His friends reads like a phone book of the gay who’s Who on the time: William Sloan Kennedy, Thomas Bird Mosher, Oscar Wilde, Gertrude Stein, to name only a few. The love of his life was Karl von Freyburg a young German soldier who was sadly killed in battle in 1914. References to Freyburg were a recurring motif in Hartley’s work, most notably in Portrait of a German Officer (1914).
January 4, 1976 – In Saskatoon, the Saskatchewan Court of Queen’s Bench rules that term “sex” in the Saskatchewan Human Rights Act does not include sexual orientation and turns down a job discrimination case brought by Doug Wilson. Wilson decides to abandon pursuit of legal redress.
January 4, 1977 – The first issue of After Stonewall: A Critical Journal of Gay Liberation is published in Winnipeg. The magazine continued into the early 1980s.