Portrait
Gareth Thomas
Born
25 July 1974Sarn, United Kingdom
Rugby playerUnited Kingdom

Gareth Thomas

Wales’s first player with 100 caps came out in 2009 – one of the first top-level players in a team sport to do so while still playing.

Gareth Thomas grew up in Sarn near Bridgend in South Wales. Nicknamed “Alfie”, he played as a fullback, wing and centre for Bridgend, Cardiff, the Celtic Warriors, Toulouse – with whom he won the Heineken Cup in 2005 – and the Cardiff Blues. He made his debut for Wales in 1995 and became the first Welsh player to win 100 international caps. He scored 40 tries for Wales, for a time a national record, and captained his country. On the British & Irish Lions tour of New Zealand in 2005 he took over as captain.

For years he hid that he was gay. He married and lived in fear of being found out. In December 2009, still playing, he came out publicly – at the time one of very few active professional players in a major team sport to do so. In 2010 he was named the most influential gay person in Britain in a newspaper list and received Stonewall’s Hero of the Year award.

After switching to rugby league, he played for Wales in that code too, before retiring in 2011.

In 2019 Thomas announced that he was living with HIV, after a newspaper had threatened to reveal it. The same day he completed an Ironman triathlon to show what is possible with the virus. Since then he has campaigned against the stigma surrounding HIV.

More in July

01JulDied 194383rd anniversary of death

Willem Arondéus

He helped blow up the Amsterdam population register to protect Jews from the Nazis – and before his execution said: “Tell people that homosexuals are not cowards.”

01JulDied 196264th anniversary of death

Alan L. Hart

A physician, novelist and early figure in trans history, he helped expand the use of X-rays to detect tuberculosis.

01JulDied 198541st anniversary of death

Pauli Murray

A civil rights lawyer whose ideas shaped both Brown v. Board of Education and women’s rights law – and who struggled all their life with gender.

02JulBorn 195175th birthday

Sylvia Rivera

A Latina trans activist who fought at the front of the gay liberation movement – and was pushed out by the very movement she helped build.

03JulDied 199828th anniversary of death

Danielle Bunten Berry

The creator of M.U.L.E. was a pioneer of multiplayer computer games – “no one ever said on their deathbed, ‘I wish I had spent more time alone with my computer.’”

04JulBorn 194779th birthday

Jacques Morali

After a night at a gay disco in Greenwich Village he invented the Village People – and gave the world “Y.M.C.A.” and “Macho Man”.

05JulBorn 1889137th birthday

Jean Cocteau

A poet, filmmaker and artist who carried a language of dreams across several forms of art.

05JulBorn 1879147th birthday

Wanda Landowska

She brought the harpsichord back to life – and spent her last 26 years with her student and companion Denise Restout.

05JulBorn 197947th birthday

Amélie Mauresmo

At 19 she spoke openly about her girlfriend during the Australian Open – and endured taunts on her way to becoming world number one.

05JulBorn 198541st birthday

Megan Rapinoe

The World Cup winner with the purple hair came out in 2012 and became the loudest voice for equal pay in sport.

05JulDied 199828th anniversary of death

Maria Mercè Marçal

“Three times a rebel”: a woman, working class and Catalan – and one of the first Catalan poets to write openly about love between women.

06JulBorn 1907119th birthday

Frida Kahlo

A Mexican painter whose self-portraits made the body a place of pain, invention and self-definition.

06JulBorn 194383rd birthday

Leonard Matlovich

“They gave me a medal for killing two men and a discharge for loving one.” – the decorated sergeant who challenged the US military’s ban on gay soldiers.

06JulDied 1750276th anniversary of death

Jean Diot and Bruno Lenoir

Two ordinary Parisian workmen were caught together in a doorway in 1750 – and became the last people executed in France for homosexuality.

06JulDied 199234th anniversary of death

Marsha P. Johnson

A Stonewall participant and co-founder of STAR, she found shelter for young queer people and stood alongside people living with HIV and AIDS.

06JulDied 20224th anniversary of death

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.

07JulBorn 1899127th birthday

George Cukor

A Hollywood director whose close attention to performance produced enduring comedies, dramas and musicals.

07JulBorn 193591st birthday

Kitty Genovese

Her murder became a textbook case of the “bystander effect” – while the woman she loved had to grieve in silence for forty years.

07JulDied 199036th anniversary of death

Cazuza

His songs combined desire and political anger, and his public disclosure of AIDS challenged silence around the epidemic in Brazil.

08JulBorn 1906120th birthday

Philip Johnson

The architect of the Glass House shaped modern architecture for seventy years – a career with a dark chapter in the 1930s.

08JulDied 197947th anniversary of death

Robert Opel

He streaked naked across the Oscars stage in 1974 – and later ran one of the first galleries for gay erotic art, showing Tom of Finland and Mapplethorpe.

09JulBorn 193789th birthday

David Hockney

He made gay relationships an open subject of painting and kept finding new ways to depict people, places and looking itself.

09JulBorn 193690th birthday

June Jordan

A poet who wrote about race, gender and justice – and who defended bisexuality as a political stance long before it was common.

10JulBorn 1871155th birthday

Marcel Proust

The author of “In Search of Lost Time” loved men all his life – and wrote one of literature’s great studies of homosexuality.

10JulDied 1381888th anniversary of death

Hadrian

A Roman emperor whose public commemoration of Antinous gave a private loss an extraordinary afterlife.

11JulBorn 1895131st birthday

Dolly Wilde

Oscar Wilde’s niece inherited his wit – and was for fourteen years the partner of Natalie Clifford Barney in Paris.

11JulDied 197353rd anniversary of death

Nobuko Yoshiya

One of Japan’s most popular novelists wrote stories of love between girls – and lived for fifty years with the woman she loved.

12JulBorn 1876150th birthday

Max Jacob

Picasso’s first friend in Paris, a pioneer of the prose poem – he died in the Drancy camp, days before deportation to Auschwitz.

13JulBorn 193591st birthday

Monique Wittig

“Lesbians are not women”: the French writer turned lesbian existence into a radical challenge to the idea of gender itself.

13JulDied 195472nd anniversary of death

Frida Kahlo

A Mexican painter whose self-portraits made the body a place of pain, invention and self-definition.

13JulDied 194581st anniversary of death

Alla Nazimova

A Broadway star who became a Hollywood producer, she took artistic risks and helped shape its queer social circles.

14JulBorn 1917109th birthday

Arthur Laurents

The writer of “West Side Story” and “Gypsy” also helped bring a gay couple’s story to Broadway as a director.

14JulDied 1895131st anniversary of death

Karl Heinrich Ulrichs

In 1867 he stood before a congress of jurists and demanded an end to laws against love between men – often called the first public coming out.

15JulBorn 1919107th birthday

Iris Murdoch

A novelist and philosopher who examined the difficulty of seeing other people clearly.

15JulDied 199729th anniversary of death

Gianni Versace

A fashion designer whose vivid clothes brought classical imagery, celebrity and sexuality onto the same stage.

16JulBorn 194383rd birthday

Reinaldo Arenas

Persecuted in Cuba as a gay man and dissident, he escaped in 1980 and wrote his memoir “Before Night Falls” while dying of AIDS.

16JulBorn 197056th birthday

Apichatpong Weerasethakul

His films bring queer desire, memory and spirits into a cinema that moves between everyday life and dreams.

16JulDied 199531st anniversary of death

Stephen Spender

A poet of the “Auden generation” who loved men and women and wrote frankly about it in his autobiography.

17JulBorn 1898128th birthday

Berenice Abbott

She photographed the Paris avant-garde, helped preserve Atget’s archive and documented a changing New York.

17JulDied 195967th anniversary of death

Billie Holiday

Her phrasing transformed popular songs, while “Strange Fruit” made the violence of lynching impossible to ignore.

18JulBorn 195175th birthday

Elio Di Rupo

A Belgian socialist who became the first openly gay man to lead a national government in modern times.

18JulDied 1610416th anniversary of death

Caravaggio

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

19JulBorn 1875151st birthday

Alice Dunbar-Nelson

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

19JulBorn 197254th birthday

Zanele Muholi

Muholi’s portraits of Black lesbian, gay, trans and intersex South Africans are an archive of lives often met with violence.

20JulDied 199036th anniversary of death

Sergei Parajanov

A visionary filmmaker whose dreamlike films defied Soviet realism – he was sent to a labour camp, among other things for homosexuality.

21JulBorn 196660th birthday

Sarah Waters

With “Tipping the Velvet” and “Fingersmith”, she wrote lesbian women into Victorian England – and into the bestseller lists.

22JulBorn 1889137th birthday

James Whale

A film director whose horror classics found wit, vulnerability and sympathy in the figure of the outsider.

22JulDied 199036th anniversary of death

Manuel Puig

His novel “Kiss of the Spider Woman” put a gay man and a revolutionary in one prison cell – and became a worldwide success.

22JulDied 199234th anniversary of death

David Wojnarowicz

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

23JulDied 196660th anniversary of death

Montgomery Clift

One of Hollywood’s first great method actors lived his love for men in secret – a strain that shaped his tragic life.

23JulDied 201313th anniversary of death

Emile Griffith

A boxing champion whose life exposed the violence of homophobia inside and outside the ring.

23JulDied 201214th anniversary of death

Sally Ride

The first American woman in space kept her 27-year relationship with a woman private – it was revealed only in her obituary.

24JulBorn 195274th birthday

Gus Van Sant

From “Mala Noche” and “My Own Private Idaho” to “Milk”: one of the leading figures of New Queer Cinema.

26JulDied 200917th anniversary of death

Merce Cunningham

He freed dance from music and story – and shared his life and work for fifty years with the composer John Cage.

27JulBorn 197947th birthday

Marielle Franco

A Black bisexual woman from the favela who fought police violence in Rio – and was assassinated in 2018.

27JulDied 194680th anniversary of death

Gertrude Stein

A modernist writer and art collector whose Paris home became a meeting place for artists and writers.

28JulBorn 1917109th birthday

Gloria Fuertes

Generations of Spanish children grew up with her poems – and under Franco she never concealed that she loved women.

29JulDied 201115th anniversary of death

Nella Martinetti

“Bella Nella” from Ticino won the first Grand Prix der Volksmusik – and co-wrote the song with which Céline Dion won Eurovision for Switzerland.

30JulBorn 194482nd birthday

Anne Fausto-Sterling

With “The Five Sexes” and “Sexing the Body”, the biologist challenged the idea that sex divides neatly into two.

31JulBorn 193294th birthday

Barbara Gittings

She helped bring gay rights into public protest, psychiatry and the nation’s libraries.

31JulBorn 194482nd birthday

David Norris

A Joyce scholar took his own country to court – and in 1988 brought down the law under which Oscar Wilde had once been convicted.

31JulDied 201214th anniversary of death

Gore Vidal

A novelist and essayist whose arguments about sex and power unsettled American public life.