English drag performer and aesthete Herbert Pollitt, also known as Jerome Pollitt, was BOTD in 1871. Born in Kendal to a prominent middle-class family, he was educated at private schools before studying medicine at Cambridge University. He quickly became notorious for his love of Decadent art and literature, decorating his rooms with art by James McNeill Whistler and Aubrey Beardsley and collecting occult and pornographic literature. A keen amateur dramatist, he developed the drag persona Diane de Rougy in homage to the Folies-Bergère star Liane de Pougy. His scarf dances became so well-known that he posed as Diane for society photographer Frederick Hollyer, who included the portraits in an 1894 London exhibition. Pollitt developed close friendships with Whistler and Beardsley, becoming an important patron of their work and posing for portraits. In 1897, he met the occultist Aleister Crowley, with whom he had a brief but passionate affair. In his memoirs, Crowley described living with Pollitt “as his wife for some six months and he made a poet out of me.” They separated soon after, over an argument about Crowley’s spiritualist beliefs, but remained friends, maintaining shared interests in the occult, erotic literature and transvestism. Crowley later recalled the end of their relationship as “a lifelong regret”. Via Crowley, Pollitt also became friends with Oscar Wilde, with whom he shared a passionate correspondence and sexually explicit photos of himself. At the outbreak of World War One, Pollitt enlisted in the Royal Army Medical Corps, serving as a Lance-Corporal. Little is known of his life after the war, but he appears to have faded from public life, dying in 1942 aged 71. Pollitt’s Cambridge days were immortalised in his friend E. F. Benson‘s 1896 comic novel The Babe B.A. He also inspired Crowley’s 1910 homoerotic poetry collection The Scented Garden of Abdullah the Satirist of Shiraz, who dedicated the book to him.