Portrait
Brian Epstein
Born
19 September 1934Liverpool, England
Died
27 August 1967London, England · aged 32
Music managerUnited Kingdom

Brian Epstein

He helped turn the Beatles into an international phenomenon while navigating the dangers of being gay in 1960s Britain.

Brian Epstein was born in Liverpool in 1934. He worked in his family’s retail business, running the record department at NEMS, before seeing the Beatles at the Cavern Club in November 1961.

As their manager, he helped reshape their stage presentation, pursued a recording contract and organised the business behind their rapid rise. His work brought the band to EMI and helped sustain a demanding schedule of recordings, tours and appearances. He also managed other Liverpool performers, including Cilla Black and Gerry and the Pacemakers.

Epstein’s position in popular music contrasted with the secrecy surrounding his personal life. He was gay when sexual relationships between men remained criminalised in England and Wales, exposing him to blackmail and violence. His professional success did not remove those pressures.

In July 1967 the law in England and Wales changed to permit some sexual activity between men under restricted conditions. Epstein died only weeks later, on 27 August 1967, aged 32, from an accidental overdose of sleeping pills. The Beatles’ subsequent history has often highlighted how much practical and personal stability his management had provided.

More in September

01SepBorn 1864162nd birthday

Roger Casement

He exposed colonial atrocities in the Congo and the Amazon – and when he was sentenced to death, his diaries were used to destroy the campaign to save him.

01SepBorn 194977th birthday

Leslie Feinberg

The author of “Stone Butch Blues” gave the word “transgender” its political meaning – and fought for workers, butches and trans people.

01SepBorn 193987th birthday

Lily Tomlin

The comedian behind Ernestine the telephone operator has shared her life and work with writer Jane Wagner since 1971.

01SepDied 196759th anniversary of death

Siegfried Sassoon

A decorated officer who protested publicly against the First World War – and whose great loves before his marriage were men.

02SepBorn 195670th birthday

Elizabeth Birch

A former Apple litigation chief, she built the Human Rights Campaign into the largest LGBT organisation in the US – and was the first LGBT leader to address a national party convention.

03SepDied 20179th anniversary of death

Eduard Stapel

The Stasi set hundreds of informers on him – he built up the gay movement in East Germany under the roof of the Protestant church.

03SepDied 1918108th anniversary of death

Margaret Todd

She studied medicine when women were barely allowed to, wrote novels under a man’s name, coined the word “isotope” – and lived with Sophia Jex-Blake.

04SepBorn 1905121st birthday

Mary Renault

Her novels about ancient Greece told of love between men with a dignity few dared – and she lived for fifty years with Julie Mullard.

05SepBorn 1912114th birthday

John Cage

The composer of “4′33″” – four and a half minutes of silence – shared his life and work for fifty years with the choreographer Merce Cunningham.

05SepBorn 1918108th birthday

Wolfgang Lauinger

Persecuted by the Gestapo, imprisoned again under Paragraph 175 in 1950 – and refused compensation until his death at 99.

05SepBorn 194680th birthday

Freddie Mercury

Queen’s singer brought theatrical force to rock while protecting much of his private life.

06SepBorn 1860166th birthday

Jane Addams

A social reformer whose work for immigrant communities grew into an international campaign for peace.

06SepBorn 1926100th birthday

Everett Klippert

Declared a “dangerous sexual offender” for consensual sex with men, he was the last Canadian imprisoned for it – his case led to decriminalisation.

06SepBorn 194779th birthday

Sylvester

“You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)”: the disco star with the falsetto voice never hid who he was – and left his royalties to fight AIDS.

06SepDied 20179th anniversary of death

Kate Millett

Her book “Sexual Politics” made her the face of second-wave feminism – until she said publicly that she loved women.

07SepDied 20215th anniversary of death

Carl Bean

His Motown disco hit “I Was Born This Way” became an anthem – then he founded a church for Black queer people and fought AIDS in Los Angeles.

08SepBorn 1886140th birthday

Siegfried Sassoon

A decorated officer who protested publicly against the First World War – and whose great loves before his marriage were men.

08SepDied 20179th anniversary of death

Pierre Bergé

Yves Saint Laurent’s partner in love and business built a fashion empire – and became a major voice in the fight against AIDS.

09SepBorn 194977th birthday

John Curry

He wanted to dance, so he turned figure skating into ballet on ice – and became Olympic champion and one of the first openly gay top athletes.

10SepBorn 196066th birthday

Alison Bechdel

Her comics brought lesbian everyday life to a wide readership, while “Fun Home” transformed family memoir into graphic art.

10SepBorn 1886140th birthday

H. D.

A modernist poet whose spare early images developed into expansive explorations of myth, war and desire.

10SepBorn 193591st birthday

Mary Oliver

One of America’s best-loved poets wrote about geese, ponds and attention – and shared her life for over forty years with photographer Molly Malone Cook.

11SepDied 200125th anniversary of death

Mychal Judge

The chaplain of the New York Fire Department was the first recorded victim of 11 September 2001 – a gay priest who cared for people with AIDS.

12SepBorn 195373rd birthday

Nan Goldin

Her photographs of friends, lovers and drag queens became a diary of queer life – and her protests brought down the Sackler name in museums.

12SepDied 20179th anniversary of death

Edith Windsor

A federal tax bill after her wife’s death led to a Supreme Court victory that changed the treatment of same-sex marriages.

13SepDied 193195th anniversary of death

Lili Elbe

A Danish painter who became one of the first women to undergo gender-affirming surgery – her story inspired “The Danish Girl”.

14SepBorn 193492nd birthday

Kate Millett

Her book “Sexual Politics” made her the face of second-wave feminism – until she said publicly that she loved women.

14SepBorn 195472nd birthday

David Wojnarowicz

His writing and images confronted the neglect, censorship and political indifference surrounding the AIDS crisis.

14SepDied 1926100th anniversary of death

Karl Friedrich Jordan

In 1900 a Berlin teacher published the story of his own life as a homosexual – asking readers to examine it without prejudice.

15SepBorn 193294th birthday

Ann Bannon

Her paperback novels offered isolated lesbian readers stories in which women could find one another and build a life.

15SepBorn 1889137th birthday

Claude McKay

His poetry of resistance and fiction about Black life made him a central voice of the Harlem Renaissance.

16SepDied 201610th anniversary of death

Edward Albee

His plays exposed the strain beneath respectable family life, while he resisted the idea that sexuality should define a writer’s range.

17SepBorn 1904122nd birthday

Frederick Ashton

The founder of English ballet created “La fille mal gardée” and “Cinderella” – after seeing Anna Pavlova dance as a boy in Peru.

17SepBorn 1730296th birthday

Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben

A Prussian officer who helped train the Continental Army and left an enduring place in American military history.

17SepDied 194878th anniversary of death

Ruth Benedict

The anthropologist who wrote “Patterns of Culture” argued that what counts as normal depends on culture – and loved Margaret Mead.

18SepBorn 1905121st birthday

Greta Garbo

A Swedish film star whose guarded private life became almost as famous as her performances.

18SepDied 193591st anniversary of death

Alice Dunbar-Nelson

A writer, teacher and suffragist, she left diaries and letters that also preserve her relationships with women.

18SepDied 193987th anniversary of death

Gwen John

A Welsh painter whose quiet portraits emerged from an independent life of work, faith and intense attachment.

20SepBorn 196858th birthday

Norah Vincent

For her book “Self-Made Man”, the lesbian journalist lived for eighteen months disguised as a man – and came back with more sympathy for men than she expected.

21SepBorn 1902124th birthday

Luis Cernuda

A poet of the Generation of ’27 who wrote openly about love between men in the 1930s – and spent the rest of his life in exile.

21SepBorn 195472nd birthday

Julia Grant

In 1979 nearly nine million Britons watched her transition on the BBC – the first time such a story had been told so openly on British television.

21SepBorn 1640386th birthday

Philippe d’Orléans

The Sun King’s brother wore dresses and make-up and lived openly with his male lover at Versailles – protected by his rank.

22SepBorn 1857169th birthday

Anita Augspurg

Germany’s first woman with a law doctorate fought for women’s suffrage, peace and resistance to the rising far right.

22SepDied 1840186th anniversary of death

Anne Lister

Her coded diaries preserve an unusually detailed account of love between women in nineteenth-century England.

23SepBorn 196561st birthday

Manvendra Singh Gohil

The first openly gay prince in the world was disowned by his family – and turned his palace into a shelter for LGBTQ people.

23SepBorn 1861165th birthday

Karl Friedrich Jordan

In 1900 a Berlin teacher published the story of his own life as a homosexual – asking readers to examine it without prejudice.

24SepDied 1482544th anniversary of death

Richard Puller von Hohenburg

Twice he escaped charges of sodomy – in 1482 an Alsatian knight and his servant were burned alive in Zurich, in a trial where love and power politics were entangled.

24SepDied 200422nd anniversary of death

Françoise Sagan

A novelist whose lucid, spare prose made pleasure and emotional uncertainty feel newly direct.

25SepBorn 194977th birthday

Pedro Almodóvar

The great director of post-Franco Spain fills his films with passionate women, gay desire and trans heroines.

25SepBorn 195274th birthday

bell hooks

Her writing connected race, gender and class with questions of education, belonging and love.

25SepDied 1857169th anniversary of death

Marquis de Custine

After a beating in 1824, Paris society shut him out without any law – yet he lived openly with his partner and wrote a classic about Russia.

25SepDied 198739th anniversary of death

Victoria Kent

Spain’s pioneering woman lawyer reformed the prisons of the Republic – and spent forty years in exile with her American partner.

25SepDied 197254th anniversary of death

Alejandra Pizarnik

Her brief, intense poems made silence, desire and the limits of language central to Argentine poetry.

26SepBorn 194284th birthday

Gloria Anzaldúa

A Chicana writer whose work made the border a way of thinking about language, identity and power.

26SepBorn 194779th birthday

Enzo Francone

During the 1980 Moscow Olympics he chained himself up on Red Square to protest against the Soviet ban on homosexuality.

26SepDied 193789th anniversary of death

Bessie Smith

The “Empress of the Blues” made Black women’s lives and desires central to some of the era’s most influential recordings.

27SepDied 196165th anniversary of death

H. D.

A modernist poet whose spare early images developed into expansive explorations of myth, war and desire.

27SepDied 195670th anniversary of death

Babe Didrikson Zaharias

Perhaps the greatest all-round athlete of the 20th century, she won Olympic gold and ten golf majors – and spent her last years with her companion Betty Dodd.

28SepBorn 197551st birthday

Ana Brnabić

In 2017 she became Serbia’s first woman and first openly gay prime minister.

29SepBorn 1571455th birthday

Caravaggio

His dramatic light and bodily realism transformed painting; the sensuality of his male figures also invites queer readings.

29SepDied 197353rd anniversary of death

W. H. Auden

One of the greatest poets of the 20th century wrote “Funeral Blues” – and shared his life for over thirty years with Chester Kallman.

29SepDied 200422nd anniversary of death

FannyAnn Eddy

A Sierra Leonean activist who insisted that LGBTQ people be seen and protected.

30SepBorn 1924102nd birthday

Truman Capote

The author of “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” and “In Cold Blood” was openly gay at a time when few dared – and became a star of high society.

30SepBorn 198442nd birthday

Danica Roem

She brought a local reporter’s attention to roads and schools into a groundbreaking career as an openly trans legislator.