Jesse Tyler Ferguson

The Emmy-nominated star’s role on TV’s popular Modern Family (2009-2020) gave him the opportunity to reshape public perception of same-sex relationships and their families. Ferguson played Mitchell Pritchett, an uptight gay lawyer raising an adopted Asian-American baby with his excitable, over-the-top screen partner, Cameron.


At left: Ferguson with husband Justin Mikita.

In an Advocate magazine interview, he said, “I feel like there are a lot of people who still aren’t comfortable with gay characters on television, but what I admire about our show is that it has a plethora of characters for people to attach to, and slowly those people are becoming attached to Mitchell and Cam...It’s kind of like a Trojan horse. We sneak into a lot of people’s living rooms when they aren’t expecting it and maybe change some minds through the back door.

Mitchell is basically me, so when people tell me I’m stereotypical and cliché in that role, then Jesse Tyler Ferguson is stereotypical and cliché, because I’m basically doing no acting at all.”

Nonetheless, his performance as Mitchell earned him five consecutive Emmy Award nominations for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series. 

 
Jesse and his fiancé Justin Mikita, a lawyer, were married in New York in July, 2013. They met in a gym, where Justin recognized Jesse and came over to say he enjoyed Jesse’s portrayal of Mitchell on the hit television show. They started dating several months later and became engaged in late 2012. Their son, Beckett Mercer Ferguson-Mikita, was born a few months ago, on July 7, 2020.

At about the same time the couple became engaged they launched Tie the Knot, which sells custom bow ties and donates all proceeds to various organizations fighting for marriage equality and LGBT civil rights in general.

Says Ferguson, “Justin came up with the idea. I’ve definitely become more of an advocate, philanthropist, and do-gooder because of him. He has really ignited the civil rights passion within me.”

The couple says they would have loved to have gotten married in California, which is where they reside, but, “unfortunately it was not legal there. We spent a lot of money on the wedding, and that’s money California did not get. But congratulations to New York!”

Currently Jesse hosts Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, the revival of a television reality show on the HGTV channel (premiered February 16, 2020). In each episode a family facing hardship receives a makeover of their home.

 

Ludwig Wittgenstein

The brilliant philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) wore several awkward labels. He was of half Jewish and half Catholic ancestry. He was also a homosexual who was not comfortable with his sexual orientation. 

One of eight children sired by an enormously rich Austrian steel industrialist, Ludwig sought simplicity and solitude, rejecting the privileged and highly cultured lifestyle of his father and sister. For example, his sister Margaret had helped arrange Freud’s escape to England in 1938, and Ludwig's father took a violin with him on business trips. Highly cultured, indeed.

House guests at the Viennese home of the Wittgensteins included Johannes Brahms, Richard Strauss, Clara Schumann, Gustav Mahler and Bruno Walter, and private musical performances in the Wittgenstein's city palace in Vienna (staircase shown in photo) were coveted invitations. Ludwig was himself an accomplished musician and had perfect pitch. There were seven grand pianos in their house, just one of thirteen mansions they owned in downtown Vienna. The palace interior's Red Salon (below) affords a glimpse into the level of opulence Wittgenstein experienced while growing up. Unfortunately, the city palace was demolished by developers in the early 1950s. There was also a summer palace, of course, called the Hochreith, located in the countryside outside Vienna. At the time, the Wittgensteins were second in wealth only to the Rothschilds.

Ludwig’s brother Paul became a famous concert pianist, but three other brothers committed suicide. His brother Rudolph (Rudi), took his own life in a very public way. He mixed a packet of potassium cyanide into a glass of milk and drank it while having dinner in a Berlin restaurant. Two minutes later he was dead. Rudi killed himself because he was petrified that he would be identified in a case report by famous sexologist, Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld (himself a homosexual), describing in detail the problems of a homosexual student in Berlin. Rudi, a homosexual student in Berlin, was not at all comfortable with his sexuality. Their brother Johannes, also homosexual, took his own life, as well. Their father, Karl Wittgenstein, was humiliated by these acts and thereafter forbade family members to mention the name of either Johannes or Rudolph. A third brother, a military officer, shot himself when his troops deserted him. Paul, who lost an arm during the war, later settled in New York to teach music. Paul commissioned a piano concerto for the left hand only from composer Maurice Ravel. The photo above shows Ludwig (on the left) with his brother Paul, the pianist (wearing glasses), before the tragic loss of Paul's right arm.

After serving in the Austrian Army during WW I, Ludwig Wittgenstein gave away his considerable fortune, always refused to wear a tie, furnished his rooms with simple deck chairs, played the clarinet, and wolfed down plates of cream doughnuts while watching his favorite John Wayne films. True.

Wittgenstein gave up philosophy and taught in elementary schools in Lower Austria from 1920 to 1926. For a time he even took up a job as a gardener's assistant at a monastery. From 1926 to 1928 he became involved in the design of a modernist mansion for his sister, a testament to the aesthetic austerity that he championed (no baseboards, bare light bulbs for illumination). The house still stands in Vienna and serves as the Bulgarian Cultural Institute. I forgot to mention that Ludwig also took up sculpture – the man was a true polymath.

Extraordinarily handsome as a youth, he counted Adolph Hitler among his classmates. They were the same age, but Wittgenstein was two grades apart from Hitler (Ludwig had been advanced a grade and Hitler held back one); there has been much speculation as to whether or not they were friends. At the age of nineteen Ludwig took up aeronautical studies in Manchester, England, where he designed a jet engine; the complex mathematics needed for such an endeavor led him to explore the foundations of mathematics. While at Cambridge he studied with an influential teacher, Bertrand Russell, and it is difficult to discern which had the greater impact on the other. Wittgenstein’s work was primarily in the philosophy of mathematics, the foundations of logic, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. His two great published philosophical works are densely crafted and thus difficult to read and comprehend. Nevertheless, Wittgenstein is generally regarded as one of the twentieth century's most important philosophers.

In November 1912, on the recommendation of fellow student John Maynard Keynes (with whom Wittgenstein shared a male lover), Ludwig was elected to the elite Cambridge society known as the Apostles, which at that time maintained an aura of homoeroticism. An atmosphere that teetered on the brink of male/boy worship made Wittgenstein so uncomfortable that he stopped attending meetings. Ludwig was unsettled by his homosexuality and quite secretive about his sexual interests and activities. He wrote his diary in code, identifying the males with whom he had relations by a letter (for example, Ben Richards was code named “Y”). This was perhaps to be expected, given the fact that homosexuality was illegal in Austria and Britain at the time. Historian Julie Anne Taddeo wrote, "The Cambridge Apostles transformed the definition of sodomy from an illegal and sinful act to an alternative creed of manliness and transcendental love and hoped to spread the gospel of the Higher Sodomy among their enlightened contemporaries."

During his student days in Vienna, Wittgenstein was known to cruise the Prater, a large public park where he hooked up with rough trade youths. He also frequented a café that was a chess club during the day, but a raucous gay bar by night. However, Wittgenstein went on to have several serious affairs with Englishmen of his own class – mathematics student David Pinsent, philosopher Frank Ramsey, the much-younger medical student Ben Richards, and mathematician Francis Skinner (at left in photo, shown walking with Wittgenstein). In 1929 Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge, where he became a professor in 1939. He resigned that post in 1947 to move to Ireland, where he hoped he’d find the solitude to complete his second great work, Philosophical Investigations. This plan didn’t come to fruition, unfortunately. It was published in its incomplete form in 1953, two years after his death from prostate cancer.

Ludwig died in Cambridge, housed in his doctor's home, since he did not wish to die in a hospital. He celebrated his 62nd birthday by taking a walk. Three days later, he was dead. His last words were, "Tell them I've had a wonderful life."

Frank Bruni

In June, 2011, New York native Frank Bruni, age 46, became the first gay op-ed columnist in the 160-year history of The New York Times. He takes on a wide variety of subjects in his writing.

Andrew M. Rosenthal, editor of the Opinion Pages said, “Frank’s column, a new anchor feature of the section, is a sharp, opinionated look at a big event of the last week, from a different or unexpected angle, or a small event that was really important but everyone seems to have missed, or something entirely different.”

Mr. Bruni has covered presidential campaigns for the paper and served as chief restaurant critic for five years. Frank joined The New York Times as a metropolitan reporter in August, 1995. For three and a half years he worked at the metropolitan desk and also wrote for the Sunday magazine, profiling a diverse group of characters. Mr. Bruni also wrote articles for the Sunday Arts and Leisure section and other feature sections of The Times.

 

 

Frank Bruni is the author of the NYT bestseller about George W. Bush called "Ambling into History" (2002) and co-author of "A Gospel of Shame: Children, Sexual Abuse and the Catholic Church" (1993). He has worked for the New York Post and the Detroit Free Press and has been a movie critic.

Prince Egon von Fürstenberg

Eduard Egon Peter Paul Giovanni Prinz zu Fürstenberg (Prince Egon von Fürstenberg, 1946-2004), was a bisexual fashion designer, socialite and interior designer. A member of a German aristocratic family, he was a businessman who managed to keep his name in the press, tabloids especially. Although his given name ended in “zu” Fürstenberg, not “von” Fürstenberg, he chose the latter, because it was better recognized and understood by the public.* In any event, his proper form of address was “His Serene Highness.”

In 1969 he married fashion designer Diane Halfin, a Jewish Belgian-American whose mother was a Holocaust survivor. The marriage was opposed by Egon’s father, mostly for anti-Semitic reasons. Diane’s marriage to Prince Egon brought her a noble title and helped her fashion design business rise to international prominence. 
 

Prince Egon and Diane von Fürstenberg

 
However, the couple became estranged and lived apart after 1972, just one year after their second child was born. In 1983 Prince Egon remarried, this time to an American, Lynn Marshall. That union was childless. But during and between those marriages Prince Egon had many male partners. He was frank about his bisexuality and the openness of his first marriage. He even professed his bisexuality and drug abuse to New York magazine and the Italian daily La Repubblica. Many of his friends remember that among his favorite hangouts were the NYC gay bars Flamingo (for drugs – they had no liquor license at that time) and The Barefoot Boy – not to mention his legendary gay partying on Fire Island.

Fürstenberg certainly didn’t need to work, but he was fascinated by the fashion world. He later published two books on fashion and interior design: The Power Look (1978) and The Power Look at Home: Decorating for Men (1980). After a lowly start as a buyer for Macy’s department store and a designer of plus-size women’s clothing, he launched a successful men’s clothing line. Eventually he opened an interior design firm in New York City, but his career was forever in the shadow of his first wife. It was Diane, not he, who made the name “von Fürstenberg” a famous brand. 

Nevertheless, Diane and Egon remained life-long friends, and she gave him a professional push or two, helping to assure his success. His signature logo reflected noble blood and love for high society – a crown with a star (upper right in photo below). 

In 2004 he died in Rome at the age of 57, survived by his two children and both wives. There was a delay in revealing a cause of death, leading many to confirm what was known by his intimate friends, that his death was from AIDS. Later it was reported “officially” by his second wife that he had died from liver cancer. 

Egon with Errol Wetson and his wife Margaux Hemingway,
and model Pat Amari (right).
Photographed by celebrity photographer Gary Bernstein.

Egon was born with the proverbial silver spoon in his mouth. He was the son of Prince Tassilo zu Furstenberg and Clara Agnelli, the sister of Fiat mogul Gianni Agnelli. Egon was also a cousin of Princess Caroline of Monaco (b. 1957) and the King of Sweden, Carl XVI Gustaf (b. 1946). Although he was born in Switzerland, Egon grew up in a Venetian palazzo with a staff of 21 servants, one of the perks of having a mother with the last name Agnelli. 

In 1965, while studying economics at the University of Geneva, he met fellow student Diane Halfin, from a wealthy German family. After their marriage, they settled in New York City, where Diane started her dress business, and Egon abandoned a career in banking to attend classes in fashion design. The von Fürstenbergs were lionized for their trendy life-style and frank discussion of sexual escapades outside of marriage. They maintained a frantic social life and were among the revelers who participated in drug infused nights at Studio 54.

The Fürstenberg family first rose to prominence as a thirteenth-century noble house in southwestern Germany (Swabia), as part of the Holy Roman Empire. Their noble status was elevated to a princely house during the seventeenth century. Today there are two Fürstenberg  ancestral residences: a magnificent Baroque palace in Donaueschingen (first image below) and a Renaissance palace in Heiligenberg (second image). 

*Note: A German noble with “zu” before the surname meant that the family still owned the hereditary feudal land holdings and residence, while many un-landed commoners who were subsequently ennobled simply placed a “von” before the surname. Thus, “zu” carried far greater prestige. I know, I’m always telling you more than you want to know.
Sources:
Wikipedia, People Magazine profile (Dec. 21, 1981), NYT obituary, Village Voice