diff --git a/ChangeLog b/ChangeLog
index afc04bd5..5d2dd4c4 100644
--- a/ChangeLog
+++ b/ChangeLog
@@ -20,6 +20,7 @@ Changes in 2.0.3-alpha:
  o If the kernel tells us that there are a negative number of bytes to read from a socket, do not believe it.  Fixes bug 2841177; found by Alexander Pronchenkov.
  o Do not detect whether we have monotonic clock support every time a new event base is created: instead do it only once.  Patch taken from Chromium.
  o Do not allocate the maximum event queue for the epoll backend at startup.  Instead, start out accepting 32 events at a time, and double the queue's size when it seems that the OS is generating events faster than we're requesting them.  Saves up to 374K per epoll-based event_base.  Resolves bug 2839240.
+ o Treat an event with a negative fd as valid but untriggerable by Libevent.  This is useful for applications that want to manually activate events.
 
 
 Changes in 2.0.2-alpha:
diff --git a/evmap.c b/evmap.c
index 47bea3ce..eb714b4b 100644
--- a/evmap.c
+++ b/evmap.c
@@ -267,6 +267,9 @@ evmap_io_add(struct event_base *base, int fd, struct event *ev)
 	/*XXX(nickm) Should we assert that ev is not already inserted, or should
 	 * we make this function idempotent? */
 
+	if (fd < 0)
+		return 0;
+
 #ifndef EVMAP_USE_HT
 	if (fd >= io->nentries) {
 		if (evmap_make_space(io, fd, sizeof(struct evmap_io *)) == -1)
@@ -319,6 +322,9 @@ evmap_io_del(struct event_base *base, int fd, struct event *ev)
 	int nread, nwrite;
 	short res = 0, old = 0;
 
+	if (fd < 0)
+		return 0;
+
 	assert(fd == ev->ev_fd); /*XXX(nickm) always true? */
 	/*XXX(nickm) Should we assert that ev is not already inserted, or should
 	 * we make this function idempotent? */