Marc Acito

Marc Acito (b. January 11, 1966) is an American playwright, novelist, and humorist. His comic novel How I Paid for College won the 2005 Ken Kesey Award for Best Novel and was voted a 2005 "Teens Top Ten for favorite young adult book" of the American Library Association. In April 2008 Acito published a sequel, Attack of the Theater People. 

In addition to his humor column and essays, he has attained a major theatrical career as librettist and adapter for stage works.   

Acito lives in New York City with his husband, Floyd Sklaver. 

Federico García Lorca

Lorca was an avante-garde homosexual Spanish poet and playwright who had a serious and scandalous affair with Salvador Dalí. Lorca, born near Granada, was considered the greatest Spanish poet of the twentieth century. He trained as a classical pianist, but also studied law, literature and musical composition. From his friendship with homosexual Spanish composer Manuel de Falla, Spanish folklore became his muse. Lorca’s early anthologies of poems were stylized imitations of the ballads and poems that were told throughout the Spanish countryside. When Romancero Gitano (Gypsy Ballads, 1928) was published, it brought him fame across the Hispanic world.

From 1925 to 1928 he was passionately involved with Salvador Dalí. Their sexual relationship was portrayed in the film Little Ashes (2009). As Lorca’s reputation increased, however, he became estranged from Dalí. When a collapse of a love affair with sculptor Emilio Soriano Aladrén followed, Lorca moved to New York, where his homosexuality would perhaps be more accepted. At a time when in Spain hardly anyone traveled, Lorca prospered in New York, where he wrote his acclaimed work, "Poet in New York". He then went to Argentina, and even spent time in Cuba, where he was inspired to write "In a coach of black water I will go to Santiago". However, Lorca’s heavily homoerotic Sonnets of Dark Love (1935) were not published during his lifetime (see excerpt at end of post).

Lorca (below on left) shown with Salvador Dalí (on right) in 1926:

Lorca described himself as "Catholic, communist, anarchist, libertarian, traditionalist, monarchist." His works challenged the accepted role of women in society and explored taboo issues of homoeroticism and class distinctions (he was a passionate social activist). These outspoken liberal views led Franco to ban all of Lorca’s works. In fact, it was only after Franco's death in 1975 that Lorca's life and circumstances of his death could be openly discussed in Spain.

Lorca was envied for his talent, he had money and was successful. When the military took power, his execution was only a matter of time. A successful, liberal homosexual could not be tolerated in Franco's Spain, and he was shot by Franco’s anti-communist death squads during the Spanish Civil War.

Lorca had taken refuge in the home of poet Luis Rosales (now the Hotel Reina Cristina in Granada) from where he was abducted. They came for him on August 19, 1936, and loaded him into a truck with other political suspects. He was shot a few kilometers from Fuente Vaqueros, Spain (where he had been born), but his body has still not been found.

Footnote: Manuel de Falla, who had become disillusioned with the Franco regime, tried but failed to prevent the murder of his close friend Lorca. As a result, de Falla left Spain in 1939 for Argentina, never to return to his native country.

Lorca, who was assassinated at the tender age of 38, was a man whose crime was to be free at a time in Spain's history when to call for freedom was to knock on the executioner’s door.


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The Poet Speaks by Telephone with His Lover
– from Sonnets of Dark Love (1935)

My chest was dune and drought, your voice was water;
that wooden cabin ceased to be my coffin.
At the south pole of my feet the crocus sprang,
at the north pole of my brow the bramble bloomed.
A pine of light sang through each crack and corner,
sang with no seed sown in the earth nor dawn;
for the first time my cry flew like an arrow,
pinning a crown of hope upon the roof.
Sweet and distant voice coursing toward me,
sweet and distant fountain of my pleasure,
distant and sweet like a sunken river!
Distant as a half-hidden, wounded faun,
sweet as a sobbing draught from snowy fields,
distant yet sweetly lodged in my own marrow!

Lynn Riggs

Born on a farm outside Claremore, Oklahoma, gay poet and playwright Rollie Lynn Riggs (1899-1954) had once worked as a day laborer, a movie cowboy, a reporter, a Hollywood screenwriter, a proofreader at the Wall Street Journal and a school teacher in Chicago. His father was a cattleman turned bank president, and his mother was 1/8th Cherokee. Lynn grew up during Oklahoma’s territorial days.

 

His first poem was published in 1919 in the Los Angeles Times, where he was working as a proof reader. Before relocating to NYC in 1926, he had worked on a chicken ranch, in a glass factory, and had sung in a Chautauqua quintet. Now he was setting his sights on Broadway.

In 1928 he went to Europe on a Guggenheim Fellowship, arriving in Paris to work on a new play. Settling in at the famed Les Deux Magots café, Lynn Riggs wrote about life on the Oklahoma Indian territory, relating the loneliness, isolation and violent emotions of life on the frontier before Oklahoma became a state. Many of the characters were based on his own family and friends. As work progressed, he relocated to a $2-a-night rented room in Cagnes-sur-Mer on the French Riviera west of Nice. He titled his play Green Grow the Lilacs, after a nineteenth-century folk song, and it became the source material for the 1943 landmark Broadway musical Oklahoma!, the first ever collaboration between Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II. 

The first production of Green Grow the Lilacs was a 1931 presentation by the Theatre Guild in NYC, and the cast included Lee Strasberg and a troupe of real cowboys from a rodeo that had just closed at Madison Square Garden. While Rodgers and Hammerstein began crafting their musical version of Riggs’s play in 1942, Lynn was drafted into the U.S. Army, serving his country at Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio. He did not know that Hammerstein was frequently lifting melodious dialogue from his play verbatim for use as lyrics for the musical’s songs.

Some of Lynn’s postwar scripts achieved success in NYC, where he lived out his days with a series of male companions. Riggs was described as a slight man with fine brown hair and gentle manners. While living in Los Angeles he became a confidant of both Betty Davis and Joan Crawford, functioning as their frequent public escort. In an affectionate gesture Crawford presented him with a Scottish terrier he named The Baron.

Riggs died in NYC of stomach cancer in 1954 at age 54, but his body was returned to his hometown of Claremore, Oklahoma, for interment. A park in Claremore is named in his honor, and a museum in the same town displays photographs that chronicle his lifetime. Also on display are artifacts from the film version of Oklahoma!, including the “Surry with the Fringe on Top” and Laurey’s honeymoon dress. 918.342.1127.

Sources:

Something Wonderful by Todd Purdum (2018)

Thomas Erhard, Oklahoma Historical Society (2009)

A Handbook of Oklahoma Writers by Mary Hays Marable and Elaine Boylan (1939)

Tennessee Williams

Of Streetcars, Menageries, Cats & Iguanas
America's Greatest Playwright

Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American playwright whose works included classics such as A Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, all made into films. A native of Mississippi, his given name was Thomas Lanier Williams, later legally changed to “Tennessee,” because he spent summers there with his mother’s parents, who lived in Memphis. They had paid his college tuition.

Because his real interest while growing up was reading, rather than sports, his alcoholic father taunted him by calling him “Miss Nancy.”  Tennessee’s sister Rose was mentally ill, and her parents had a lobotomy performed on her, for which Tennessee never forgave them.

This unpleasant family situation, however, inspired strong characters in his plays. His mother was the model for Amanda Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie, and his father was the inspiration for Big Daddy in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. After two years of college Tennessee left school because of his family’s financial setbacks and poor grades. He took a job as a shoe salesman for his father, but he hated the job and lapsed into severe depression, leading to a nervous breakdown.

At age twenty eight Williams moved to New Orleans, a city that inspired his subsequent writing, notably A Streetcar Named Desire. In 1945, The Glass Menagerie, a play he'd been working for some years, opened on Broadway to great acclaim; the New York Drama Critics’ Circle named it the best new play of the year. A Streetcar Named Desire opened two years later, and his life was forever changed. This play earned Williams his first Pulitzer Prize and another Drama Critics’ Award, establishing him as one of America’s great playwrights. These plays also introduced a signature character type, that of the faded Southern belle.

Shortly after A Streetcar Named Desire opened, Tennessee sailed for Europe to recover from the physical and emotional strain of writing and producing the play, leading to his belief that he would never write again. A long, unproductive period followed, during which the playwright took to excessive drinking, consuming huge quantities of pills and engaging in promiscuous gay sex. When he failed to show up for a gala in his honor at the London premiere of The Glass Menagerie, his mother later received a telegram from Tennessee stating that he had fallen unconscious after taking sedatives. This event served as a wake-up call, and he returned to the States a short time later.

Before Williams had left for Europe, a one-night stand in Provincetown, Massachusetts, served as an introduction to the man who would become the love of his life. Upon Tennessee’s return to NYC in 1948, while eating at a deli on Lexington Avenue he recognized Frank Merlo, a truck driver, from their tryst a year earlier. A few weeks later Merlo moved in with Williams, and the pair fell hopelessly in love. Frank cleaned the apartment, cooked all the meals, acted as chauffeur and managed correspondence. More importantly, Merlo gradually weaned Williams off dependence on alcohol, casual sex and pills. This newly stable home life allowed Tennessee Williams once again to  concentrate on writing. Frank, of Sicilian heritage, was the inspiration for the lead character in the playwright’s next creation, a play called The Rose Tattoo, which was honored at the Tony Awards as the best new play of 1951.

When Williams was writing Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, he was filled with anxiety and doubt, fearful that he could not match the excellence and acclaim of A Streetcar Named Desire. Merlo (seated in photo) encouraged and coddled Williams through this difficult process during 1954. The play opened to rave reviews, earning Williams his third Drama Critics’ Award and a second Pulitzer. Tennessee was so grateful for Frank’s support during the writing of that play that he gave him ten percent of the profits. While writing his next major success, The Night of the Iguana, this situation was repeated. Merlo smoothed over Tennessee’s next crisis of confidence leading up to the play’s opening in 1961. Time Magazine honored the play’s great success by placing Tennessee Williams on its cover, and the inside text dubbed Williams “America’s greatest playwright.”

The public knew nothing of Tennessee’s sexual orientation or his relationship with Frank Merlo. Although Williams never denied being gay, such things were not written about at the time. Unfortunately, cracks began to develop in their relationship. Merlo had insisted that Williams be sexually faithful to him, a near impossibility for the playwright. Also, Frank had no career outside providing domestic and professional support for Tennessee. When both men were in California during the filming of The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee forgot to introduce Frank to Jack Warner, head of Warner Brothers. Warner walked up to Merlo and asked, “And what do you do, young man?” Frank replied, “My job is to sleep with Mr. Williams.” Even worse, Williams had begun to return to alcohol and drugs on the sly. When Merlo found out about it, he felt betrayed.

Merlo had been a four-pack-a-day smoker, and by the early 1960s he had developed a hacking cough. In 1962 he was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer and died the following year, at age forty one. Devastated, Williams relapsed into a seven-year period of depression, promiscuous sex, alcohol abuse and drug use. None of his subsequent plays matched the quality of his earlier works, and many were received with poor reviews. The downward spiral became so pronounced that in 1969 Tennessee’s brother checked him into rehab; within the first two days of treatment Williams suffered two heart attacks and three seizures. 

A bright spot occurred in 1979 when he received recognition by the Kennedy Center Honors. The following year President Carter bestowed upon him the Medal of Freedom. But Williams was never able to cast aside his demons. While surrounded by bottles of wine and pills, Williams died in his suite at the Elysée Hotel in New York City on February 25, 1983, the result of choking to death on the cap from a bottle of eye drops. Some researches dispute that account of his death, suggesting that a combination drug/alcohol overdose was a more likely cause. In any event, that ninth floor mid-town Manhattan hotel suite had been his home for the last fifteen years of his life. Williams was seventy one years old at the time of his death, and an obituary in the Los Angeles Times stated, “His longtime companion of 15 years, Frank Merlo, died of cancer in 1963. After that, the playwright said, 'Everything sort of fell apart'.”

Note: Astonishingly, most Internet sources for information on Tennessee Williams make no mention of Frank Merlo.

Sources for this blog post:

Outlaw Marriages: The Hidden Histories of Fifteen Extraordinary Same-Sex Couples (2012) by Rodger Streitmatter

Biography.com

The Marquis de Sade

Let’s see. According to the Wikipedia page, he was born Count (not Marquis) Donatien-Alphonse-François de Sade in 1740 in Paris and died in a French mental asylum in 1814. He was a rich, bisexual pint-sized (5'2") libertine and writer (novels, plays, poems) who spent a third of his life incarcerated for indecency – and that’s a charitable assessment of his life. The engraving at left (de Sade at age 19) is the only surviving image of the Marquis.

The word “sadism” (deriving sexual pleasure from inflicting pain) is derived from his name, and he is thought to have acted out in real life most of the debauchery and perversions he wrote about. A rabid atheist, de Sade also held enlightened views on homosexuality, which he described as no more or less normal than heterosexuality. Indeed, one of de Sade’s favorite sexual acts was to be impaled by his male valet while engaging in intercourse with a female.

Where to start? Although he had a wife and three children, there was nothing respectable about him. He used these words to describe himself: “Imperious, angry, furious, extreme in all things, with a disturbance in the moral imagination unlike any the world has ever known –  there you have me in a nutshell: and one more thing, kill me or take me as I am, for I will not change.” His aristocratic family’s reputation was ruined by his depravity; his son removed “Donatien” from his name so as not to be associated with his infamous father. His other son burned his father's manuscripts upon his death in 1814. De Sade's writings, which detailed acts of rape, incest and pedophilia (for starters), were banned until 1957, and his family took extensive measures to erase the memory of their disgraced ancestor. When, as newly-weds during the 1940s, the parents of Hughes de Sade (b. 1948) explored the attic of their chateau, they discovered that a wall had been bricked up generations ago. Stored inside were papers, letters and writings by the Marquis. The couple had never heard of him and knew nothing about his reputation.

There has been a huge turnabout in recent times. The de Sade family now celebrates its link to the so-called “Marquis.” Hughes de Sade, who boldly named his now 39-year-old son “Donatien”, has created a luxury brand that capitalizes on the Marquis de Sade legacy. Offerings from the Maison de Sade include wine (one red variety is labeled “Justine”), scented candles and gourmet items, and the family is in negotiations with Victoria’s Secret to develop a line of lingerie that will pay homage to the Marquis.

Exactly two months ago – December 2, 1814 – marked the two hundredth anniversary of the death of the Marquis, and the Musée d’Orsay in Paris had an exhibition on de Sade’s influence on the visual arts titled “Sade – Attacking the Sun.” A big tourist draw at the Château de Vincennes, a short distance east of Paris, is the prison cell in which the Marquis was incarcerated. Also notable is an exhibit at the Paris Museum of Letters and Manuscripts titled “Sade: Marquis of the Shadows, Prince of the Enlightenment” that opened in late 2014.

While a prisoner at the Bastille, de Sade wrote The 120 Days of Sodom on a 6" tall, 39' long scroll, that was found hidden away in his cell when the Bastille was stormed during the Revolution of 1789. Somehow the scroll fell into the hands of a wealthy French family that sold it in 1904 to a German collector who published a limited edition of 180 copies. The scroll was returned to France in 1929, but in 1982 a descendant of the de Sade family lent it to a bookseller, who stole it and promptly sold it to a Swiss collector. In the spring of 2014, the French National Library brought the manuscript back to France for an astonishing settlement of $9.6 million dollars with the contentious French and Swiss owners. That makes The 120 Days of Sodom one of the most valuable literary works in existence, on a par with the Magna Carta and da Vinci’s Leicester Codex. All the more amazing is that the subject of this über-valuable scroll is the imprisonment, sexual torture and death of dozens of adolescent and teenaged men and women at the hands of four depraved male aristocrats.

Notes: Tony Perrottet wrote an extended article, “The Marquis de Sade – Crimes of Passion”, that appeared in the February 2015 issue of Smithsonian Magazine:
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/who-was-marquis-de-sade-180953980/?no-ist

A short English-language article about de Sade can be found at: http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/desade.htm

George Edward Kelly

If you are of a certain age, you know that Grace Kelly (1929-1982), who became the Princess of Monaco when not yet twenty-six years old, was a stage, television and film actress in her youth. She made her acting debut in The Torch-Bearers in 1949 at the Bucks County Playhouse in New Hope, PA. This popular satiric comedy was written in the early 1920s by her uncle, George Edward Kelly (1887-1974); the play takes pot shots at the egos and foibles of community theater. Apparently Princess Grace adored her uncle, and the two visited often – George accepting invitations to Monaco and Princess Grace visiting her uncle at his home in California. Many biographers relate that George was partly responsible for his niece’s becoming as actress.

Three years after writing The Torch Bearers, George Kelly won the Pulitzer Prize in 1926 for the play Craig’s Wife, subsequently made into three film versions. An earlier play, The Show Off (1924) had been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.

Gregory Kelly (husband of Ruth Gordon) portrayed Joe Fisher, and Louise Brooks was Clara, the girl next door, in the 1926 silent film version of George Kelly’s famous play, The Show Off, nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. 








What few people knew at the time was that George was a gay man. He maintained a 55-year relationship with his lover William E. Weagley (sometimes spelled Weagly), who was often referred to as Kelly’s valet. That Kelly was gay was a closely guarded secret and went unacknowledged by his family – to the point of their not inviting Weagley to Kelly’s funeral in Pennsylvania. Weagley quietly slipped in and took a seat in the back at St. Bridget’s in order to attend the service. Worse, the Philadelphia Kellys, who seldom missed an opportunity to pass moral judgment on others, forced Weagley to eat in the kitchen with the servants when George and William were visiting, thus reinforcing their acknowledgment that William was regarded as nothing more than George’s employee, a valet. While it’s true that William often cooked, typed, and performed secretarial services for George, William was much more than a traveling companion and valet. The couple were loyal, devoted partners who were deeply in love.

When George and William hosted dinner parties at their home in Laguna Beach, California, the two men sat at opposite ends of the table as equal co-hosts and partners. Subsequently, many of the Kelly clan of righteous Irish Catholics refused invitations from George.

Caricature of playwright George Kelly (at right):

George and William met in 1919, when George maintained a suite at NYC’s Concord Hotel. At the time, George was a vaudevillian actor and skit writer, as was his brother Walter. The story goes that William was working as a bellhop at the hotel, and the two became lovers within a short time after meeting. George educated William in the rules of etiquette so that the two could appear in high society as social equals.




Kelly’s play Reflected Glory (1936) was also about theater people, and it was the vehicle for Tallulah Bankhead’s first major NYC role, that of a woman’s difficult choice between marriage and a career.

In a profile published at the peak of Kelly’s fame, it was revealed that George had some quirky habits:

At first he insisted on directing his own plays, and he enacted every role.

He went out very little and often stayed at home for days, because he hated publicity and celebrity.

His writing desk had to be maintained in perfect order. An out of place piece of paper bothered him.

He often worked at writing plays at the typewriter in marathon 18-hour stretches.

He loved to travel, but he hated trains, preferring boats.

He collected watches by the drawer full.

George was an expert at horseback riding, bridge, tennis and golf.

He seldom attended the theater, going out to a play about once a year. He never saw his own plays from the house – he watched them while standing in the wings.

He had a remarkable memory and knew every line of all his plays by heart. Once he jumped into the lead role of his play Behold the Bridegroom (1927) with only five minutes’ notice.

François Le Metel de Boisrobert

French lawyer, playwright, poet, courtier of Cardinal Richelieu and audacious, irreligious cleric, Boisrobert (1592-1662) was a founding member of the French Academy (Académie française). While Richelieu is given credit for establishing the French Academy, it was in fact Boisrobert who suggested to Richelieu the plan of that august institution whose forty governing members are referred to as “the immortals”. Boisrobert was one of its earliest and most active members.

He was also never far from scandal, and his blatant homosexual proclivities resulted in his being banished from courts and high society time and again, but never for long. His wit, humor and gifts as a  raconteur made him a favorite of both Cardinal Richelieu and Pope Urban VIII.

Although not high born, he became quite wealthy and gained access to the court of King Louis XIII, easily insinuating himself into the circles of noble women, whom he flattered and entertained. His sexual dalliances with the handsome male pages and servants of those in high places earned him the moniker “the Mayor of Sodom.” A contemporary remarked that, “He could have given the Greeks lessons in how to make love.” As a token of his favor, Richelieu conferred the title of canon at Rouen on Boisrobert, but this title of respectability did nothing to change his lifestyle, which was marked by the practice of feminine pursuits of gossip, sartorial excesses, entertainment, literature and art. His innate charm enabled him to play the role of courtier with skill and audacity.

Sources:

Wikipedia

Encyclopedia of Homosexuality (Dynes, 1990)

Moss Hart

American playwright and theatre director/producer Moss Hart (1904-1961) considered George S. Kaufman his greatest collaborator. Among the hit comedies they wrote together were You Can’t Take It With You (1936 – Pulitzer Prize for Drama and Oscar for Best Picture) and The Man Who Came To Dinner (1939). Hart also wrote a best-selling autobiography called Act One (1959), about which George S. Kaufman said, “I’m very pleased for Moss that Act One is on the best seller list. I simply feel that it should be under fiction instead of non-fiction.” Kaufman knew what he was talking about.

Hart’s wife Kitty Carlisle (1910-2007) was committed to protecting her husband’s secrets. A socialite, opera singer, stage and film actress and cabaret performer, she was married to Hart for the last fifteen years of his life, and their union produced two children. Although Hart died in 1961 of a heart attack at age 57, she lived for another 46 years, never remarrying. In Steven Bach’s biography of Hart, Dazzler: The Life and Times of Moss Hart (2001), the author revealed that throughout his marriage Hart was a closeted bisexual. Miss Carlisle made no public comment about the contents of the book, but until her death she continued Hart’s own attempt to heterosexualize his life story, despite his physical relationships with literary agent Lester Sweyd. MGM screenwriter Charles Lederer and many of the homosexuals mentioned in Hart’s autobiography. In a 1939 letter written by Hart to Dore Schary (later president of MGM Studios), he wrote the damning words, “We shall once again lay in each other’s arms and taste the sweetness of sin – I love you very much.”

After his death Carlisle sealed Hart’s diaries and prevented access to materials that contained evidence of his sexuality. Nevertheless, Hart’s name cropped up on lists of bisexuals by Yamaguchi Fletcher, Adrien Saks and others.

Suffering from writer’s block, manic depression and numerous nervous breakdowns, Hart developed an addiction to psychoanalysis. His therapist, Lawrence Kubie, strongly disapproved of Hart’s gay alliances and pushed him into eventually adopting an entirely heterosexual lifestyle. Kubie was known for “conversion therapy” that resulted in redirecting gay or bisexual patients to heterosexual lives. Kubie saw Hart twice a day and conducted shock therapy once a week. As a result, at age 42, Hart married Kitty Carlisle, an act that greatly surprised most of his friends and associates. After getting married, Hart ended his friendships with many "out" gay men, but Arthur Laurents reported his embarrassment at the wedding reception at Hart’s house in Bucks County, PA, when Hart suggested that the men take all their clothes off when there were no women around. Following a performance by Kitty Carlisle at Bucks County Playhouse in 1948, Hart proudly presented his infant son to the audience, declaring, "Now they won't be able to say I'm gay anymore."

Although a tortured man psychologically, Hart enjoyed tremendous professional success. He directed huge Broadway hits such as My Fair Lady (1956 – Tony Award for Best Director) and Camelot (1960). During the latter production, actor Robert Goulet maintained that Hart behaved in a “notably flirtatious manner” toward him; others involved in Camelot confirmed this. Hart’s screenplays included major successes such as A Star Is Born (1954) and Gentlemen’s Agreement (1947).

Personal note from your blogger: One of the first professional stage productions I ever saw was a revival of Hart's Light Up the Sky.

Somerset Maugham

W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) was an English writer of novels, short stories and plays. His best-known novel is "Of Human Bondage" (1915), an early semi-autobiographical work which has never gone out of print since its initial publication. The female character in "Of Human Bondage" was actually based on a feckless young man who had humiliated the author all over Paris and London, breaking what there was of Maugham's heart.

When an early literary effort sold out within a few weeks of publication in 1897, Maugham gave up medical studies at age twenty three to become a full-time writer. He became so successful that by the 1930s he was the highest paid writer in the English-speaking world, and his literary career lasted sixty-five years until his death at age 91.

Born at the British Embassy in Paris, his first language was French, and he was later teased for his bad English by his classmates at Canterbury. They also taunted him for his short stature, and Somerset ultimately developed a troubling stammer that stayed with him his entire life. He so hated his English school that he relocated to Germany, where he studied at Heidelberg University. While in Germany he had a sexual affair with John Ellington Brooks, an Englishman ten years his senior. Soon thereafter he returned to London to study medicine.

After switching to writing, he met with stupendous success. In 1907 “Willie,” as he was known to his friends, had four plays running simultaneously in London, and by the age of forty he was famous, having already published ten plays and ten novels. He was so prolific and successful throughout his career that he became extremely wealthy from his craft. Charming, suave and dignified, Willie always dressed in fine, tailored clothing of the highest quality, as he could well afford, and he was ferried about via chauffeur-driven limousine.

During the First World War, he served with the Red Cross in an ambulance corps, before being recruited into the British Secret Intelligence Service. While driving an ambulance in Flanders he met Gerald Haxton (1892-1944), eighteen years his junior. Haxton was a San Francisco native who became Maugham's companion and lover for thirty years. During and after the war, Somerset and Gerald traveled to India and Southeast Asia, and all of those experiences were reflected in his later writings. Willie lived for a time on the island of Capri, where many celebrated homosexuals pursued their careers and one another.

However, Maugham (photo at right) carefully avoided homosexual themes and gay characters in his works. As American novelist Glenway Wescott, pointed out, Willie's generation lived in mortal terror of the Oscar Wilde trial, which had taken place when Maugham was 21 years old. Before his relationship with Gerald, Maugham had fallen deeply in love with a man named Harry Philips, a failed Oxford divinity student. They were so paranoid of their relationship being exposed that they feared returning to England, living instead as a couple in Paris. Gerald Haxton had himself been deported from England in 1919 for being caught committing a homosexual act. Thus, in order to be together, Maugham had to travel outside England for Haxton's companionship. And travel they did.

It was not until Maugham became famous that he courted women. Although he had been brought up with the understanding that his homosexuality was a “defect,” his real reason for involvement with women was because a reputation as a gay man would have ruined his chances of continued success. He had a child, Liza, with his "mistress," Syrie Wellcome, whose husband sued for divorce over the illicit affair. Somerset did the noble thing and asked Syrie to marry him. But he had already met Gerald by this time, and when Somerset wavered on getting married, Syrie tried to kill herself. The couple married in New Jersey, shortly after her divorce in 1917, and she became a celebrated interior designer with a clientele culled from high society. Tragically, the pair had nothing in common in taste, temperament or sexual orientation. Although she loved being "Mrs. Somerset Maugham," she eventually agreed to a divorce in 1929, finding her husband's relationship with Gerald Haxton too difficult to cope with. The terms were expensive for Somerset – Syrie received the house in London with all its contents, a Rolls Royce and 2,400 pounds a year for her and 600 pounds a year for Liza. Syrie never remarried and died in 1955 at age 76.

On his many travels Somerset was always accompanied by Haxton (photo at left), whom Maugham regarded as indispensable to his success as a writer. Somerset was painfully shy and had to cope with his stammer, so the extrovert Haxton went out to gather material which the author converted to fiction. Haxton possessed what Maugham lacked. Haxton’s outwardness, amiability and popularity compensated for Maugham’s shyness, reserve and stiffness. Acquaintances were often astonished at how spoiled and controlling Haxton appeared, demanding that Maugham fetch drinks for him, cover his gambling debts and the like.

Haxton had a love affair with alcohol, and one drunken evening in 1930 he dove head-first into a half-empty swimming pool at a neighbor's house and cut his head open, dislocated his spine and broke a vertebrae, from which he recovered enough to walk about independently, although his posture was forever affected, and he could no longer turn his head. For all the trouble he was, Somerset's friends came to realize that Haxton was nevertheless exactly what Maugham desired. He virtually lit up inside whenever Haxton entered the room.

In 1926, three years prior to his divorce from Syrie, Somerset bought the 19th century Villa Mauresque, a 9 acre property on the French Riviera at Cap Ferrat, between Nice and Monaco. While Maugham described the French Riviera as "a sunny place for shady people," Cap Ferrat was his home for most of the rest of his life (his tax status stipulated that he could spend no more than 90 days a year in England). In 2005 the property was converted into a boutique hotel of eleven rooms and suites (below).

This villa was the scene of one of the great literary and social salons of the 1920s and -30s, but it was also host to all-male nude bathing parties, drugs, an over-abundance of alcohol and nightly seductions of the local lads. Visitors were invariably astonished at the level of debauchery.  Photo below: poolside at Villa Mauresque. Maugham (lying under the lad seated atop the wall) enjoys nude sunbathing with his younger male guests:

In late middle age Maugham spent most of WW II in the United States, first in Los Angeles, where he worked on many scripts, becoming one of the first authors to make significant money from film adaptations. To date 35 film adaptations have been made of his works. For a time he also lived in South Carolina, where his publisher had an estate, to wait out the European war. Nelson Doubleday custom built a cottage for Maugham's exclusive use, staffed with a cook, maid and gardener. Located two miles from the main manor house, this private cottage provided a hideaway perfect for writing, away from the interruptions and obligations of city life.

After his companion Gerald Haxton was able to join him in the United States, Gerald suffered an attack of pneumonia. When he died of pulmonary edema in 1944 at age 52 in New York City, Maugham returned to England. Willie never really recovered from Gerald's death, and it was a grief-stricken Maugham who returned to his villa in France, where he lived out his days.

Soon after Haxton's demise, Maugham ratcheted up his relationship with the much younger Alan Searle (at left in photo), whom he had known since 1928. A young "rough trade" man from a London slum area, Alan had already been kept by older men. One of Maugham's friends described the difference between Haxton and Searle: "Gerald was vintage, Alan was vin ordinaire." Both men had ostensibly been hired to be Maugham's secretaries, a euphemism that reflected the mores of the times. "Searle was more pussycat," recounted a friend, "whereas Haxton had been bristlingly abrasive, like a bulldog about to break his leash." Maugham himself once told David Horner, "Alan is never what you would call the life and soul of a party." However, Alan supplied the plot outlines for many of Maugham's later novels and eventually performed secretarial duties with efficiency. Maugham treated the graceless Alan, whose main pastime was reading pornographic magazines, as a servant, not the companion that Gerald had been, and Willie taunted him ruthlessly.

In 1962 Maugham sold a collection of several dozen valuable paintings, a few of which had been  purchased  in Liza's name, knowing that they would become a valuable inheritance. However, Alan detested Liza and her husband, fearing that they would stand in the way of an inheritance that would allow him to be able to live independently after Maugham's death. Tragically, Alan drove a wedge between Liza and her father, ruining what had become a treasured relationship. Alan convinced Maugham that Liza was amiable toward her father only because of the money and property she was to inherit, and Alan prevented Liza from speaking to or visiting her father during his final years. She then sued her father for selling her rightfully owned paintings and won a judgment of £230,000, an enormous sum at the time.

At Alan's urging Maugham publicly disowned her and claimed she was not his biological daughter, since Syrie had been married to her former husband at the time of Liza's birth. In retaliation for her lawsuit, Somerset sued Liza in 1962 for the return of all gifts bestowed upon her in previous years, legally adopted Alan and made changes to his will to elevate Alan to principal heir. Liza contested the changes to Maugham's will, won the case and had Alan's adoption nullified by the French government. To make matters worse, Alan encouraged Maugham to publish a further volume of autobiography, which was serialized in an English newspaper. In its columns Maugham cruelly vilified his former wife, and in doing so broke the Englishman's code of civility. Old friends vanished, and Maugham was ostracized whenever he appeared in public. Maugham was a broken man, devastated to have his reputation ruined, and he lived his last years tortured by guilt and overcome with remorse.

Nevertheless, Maugham lived to the ripe old age of 91. His long life, which had begun just a decade after the American Civil War, had witnessed the inventions of the telephone, automobile, radio, films and television. He was already 51 years old when Al Jolson thrilled audiences with his talking film, The Jazz Singer (1927). His life span of nearly a century took him from the days of horseback to jet airplane travel.

In December of 1965 he suffered a fall and was hospitalized in Nice after coming down with pneumonia shortly thereafter. Lying in a semi-comatose state for a week, he died quietly during the very early hours of December 16, five weeks shy of his ninety-second birthday. Under cover of darkness his body was returned to Villa Mauresque, where Alan announced to the world that Maugham had died in his bed at home, thus avoiding an autopsy that would otherwise have been required by French law.

When Maugham's will was read, it was revealed that Liza was to inherit Villa Mauresque, but not the contents. Within weeks of Maugham's death, his nephew Robin published a series of memoirs about his uncle, outing Somerset as a gay man and airing other unsavory family matters. Maugham's reputation thus took additional hits.

In spite of Liza's doings, Alan Searle still ended up inheriting £50,000 in cash, the contents of Villa Mauresque, Maugham's manuscripts and most importantly, a lifetime revenue from royalties. Alan lived out his final years as a wealthy, lonely man, traveling from luxury hotel suite to luxury hotel suite with his own manservant. He spent Maugham's inheritance on boys, clothes and rich meals to the point that he grew enormously fat. He suffered from arthritis and Parkinson's disease and was eventually confined to a wheelchair. Before his death he confessed to one of Somerset's friends that he regretted having caused such trouble between Liza and her father.

"The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham" is a juicy, gay-drenched highly readable biography by Selina Hastings (Kindle and other e-reader formats). Her biography of Evelyn Waugh won the Marsh Biography Award.

1941 portrait of Somerset Maugham by George Platt Lynes:

Primary sources:
Wikipedia
Geoff Puterbaugh: p.783/4 Encyclopedia of Homosexuality (ed. Wayne Dynes)
Selina Hastings: The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham: A Biography

Molière

Jean-Baptiste Poquelin (1622-1673), considered the greatest French playwright of all time and one of the greatest masters of comedy in Western literature, was better known by his stage name, Molière (mohl-YAIR). He was also the leading French comic actor, stage director and dramatic theoretician of the 17th century. He abandoned a successful career as a lawyer to form an acting troupe that eventually played before King Louis XIV, whose brother became Molière’s patron. Thirteen years of work as an actor led to a career as an influential playwright, and the king granted a royal pension to his troupe, along with the title “Troupe du Roi” (the king’s troupe). Molière thus became the official author of entertainments for the royal court of France.

In 1662, at age forty, he married Armande Béjart, a 19-year-old actress whom historians say was either the sister of his mistress Madeleine, or (as some of the playwright's rivals claimed) her daughter by Molière. They had one child, Esprit-Madeleine, born in 1665. The tempestuous marriage led to more than one separation and reconciliation between the playwright and his wife, who was 21 years his junior. To her utter humiliation, while in his late 40s Molière fell in love with a 15-year-old actor named Michel Baron (1653-1729). When Molière’s wife learned of it, she demanded that the playwright make a choice between her and the boy. When she heard Molière’s decision, she started packing her bags. Molière and his young male lover were together until the playwright’s death.

In the late 1660s, Molière developed a lung ailment from which he never recovered, although he continued to write, act, direct, and manage his troupe as energetically as before. He finally collapsed on February 17, 1673, after the fourth performance of his new play, The Imaginary Invalid (oh, the irony!) and died at home that evening. Four days later, on the night of February 21, he was secretly interred in Saint Joseph's Cemetery, but church leaders refused to officiate or grant his body a formal burial, since at the time actors were not allowed to be buried on sacred ground. Later, his body was re-interred, and today Molière’s tomb is in the huge, prestigious Père-Lachaise cemetery in eastern Paris, near the tombs of Marcel Proust and Oscar Wilde. 

Today Molière’s plays continue to be presented at the Comédie-Française in Paris, chiefly in the Salle Richelieu. Inside the Café de la Comédie Française, the wall mirrors have wonderful depictions of scenes from Moliere’s comedies.

Notable lines attributed to Molière:

Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love, then for a few close friends, and then for money.

I prefer a pleasant vice to an annoying virtue.

One ought to look a good deal at oneself before condemning others.

As the purpose of comedy is to correct the vices of men, I see no reason why anyone should be exempt.

We die only once, and for such a long time.

Of all the noises known to man, opera is the most expensive.

All the ills of mankind, all the tragic misfortunes that fill the history books, all the political blunders, all the failures of the great leaders – have arisen merely from a lack of skill at dancing.

Ben Piazza

The film The Hanging Tree (1959) is a Western character study of a doctor (Joseph Frail) who saves a local criminal (Rune) from a mob that is trying to hang him. The doctor, played by Gary Cooper, then tries to control the life of the young man, promising to keep his criminal past secret in exchange for his labor. Bisexual actor Ben Piazza (1933-1991) played Rune in his Hollywood debut, and although Piazza was being groomed for movie stardom, he never attained true leading man status. Instead, he ended up with a steady, if unsensational, career of supporting roles and TV guest shots. Although Piazza was married to actress Dolores Dorn from 1967 to 1979 (no children), he became the longtime companion of Wayne Tripp, who was mentioned as his partner in Piazza’s 1991 Los Angeles Times obituary. Piazza and Tripp lived together for eighteen years.

Compared to the young Marlon Brando, Piazza began acting in 1952 during his college days at Princeton University. He was accepted as a member of New York’s famed Actors Studio and made his professional debut off-Broadway in 1956. Ben made his Broadway debut in 1958 in Winesburg, Ohio, a play penned by Sherwood Anderson.

Piazza had some notable success on Broadway, where he replaced fellow gay actor George Grizzard in the role of Nick in the original production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962). Ben appeared in two other Edward Albee plays, The Death of Bessie Smith and The Zoo Story.

On television, he had recurring roles in two prime-time soaps, Dallas and Dynasty; as well, he played a supportive doctor in the coming-out TV movie Consenting Adult.

His big-screen credits included The Bad News Bears (1976), The Blues Brothers (1980), and Mask (1985), and his final feature film was the blacklist drama Guilty by Suspicion (1991), portraying Hollywood mogul Darryl F. Zanuck.

Piazza also wrote plays and a novel, The Exact and Very Strange Truth (1964), a coming-of-age story about an Italian-American boy in Little Rock, Arkansas, which was Piazza’s hometown. However, Ben wrote in the book’s introduction that any resemblance between the characters and real people was “irrelevant,” although the parallels to his own life were unmistakable. Piazza dedicated the book to openly gay playwright Edward Albee, who was a close friend.

Ben Piazza died of AIDS-related cancer at the age of 57 in Sherman Oaks, California, and is buried at Forest Lawn Cemetery.





In this film clip Piazza plays Mr. Simms, the high school principal in Mask, starring Cher and Eric Stoltz:

Joe Orton

Joe Orton (1933-1967), was an English playwright and author. His prolific three-year public career was cut short by a tragic murder-suicide by his lover, when Orton was only thirty-four years old. During this brief period he shocked, outraged, and amused audiences with his scandalous black comedies.

Born in Leicester (East Midlands) to working class parents, Joe began acting in local productions at the age of sixteen. He determined to improve his appearance and physique by engaging in bodybuilding and elocution lessons, while trying to redress his lack of education and culture. Joe applied for a scholarship at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (London) in November of 1950 and was accepted as a seventeen year old.

Joe met fellow student Kenneth Halliwell (1926-1967) in 1951 at the Royal Academy, and the two became roommates and lovers. Halliwell was seven years older than Orton and of independent means through a substantial inheritance. After graduation, they collaborated on a number of novels, put none found a publisher*. From that point they worked at writing independently. They settled in the Islington neighborhood of London, living off Kenneth’s inheritance, unemployment benefts and brief stints as workers for Cadbury’s chocolatier.

*Two of them – Lord Cucumber and The Boy Hairdresser – were eventually published in 1999.

The couple amused themselves by stealing books from the local library and modifying the covers before returning them. A volume of poems by John Betjeman, for example, was returned to the library with a new dust jacket featuring a photograph of a nearly naked, heavily tattooed, middle-aged man. In 1962 they were eventually discovered and prosecuted for stealing and damaging library books (example at left), charged with five counts of theft and malicious damage. They admitted to defacing more than 70 books and were jailed for six months and fined £262. Orton and Halliwell stated that the sentence was unduly harsh "because we were queers"*.  However, prison would be a crucial formative experience for Orton, and the isolation from Halliwell would allow him to break free of his lover creatively. Orton developed a cynicism of the corruptness, priggishness and double standards of a purportedly liberal country.

As Orton put it, “It affected my attitude towards society. Before I had been vaguely conscious of something rotten somewhere, prison crystallized this. The old whore society really lifted up her skirts and the stench was pretty foul... Being in the nick (jail) brought detachment to my writing. I wasn't involved anymore. And suddenly, it worked.” He had found his literary voice.

*The book covers that Orton and Halliwell vandalized have since become a valued part of the Islington Local History Centre collection. Some are exhibited in the Islington Museum.

Orton began writing plays, and it was as a playwright that he met with success. In 1963 the BBC paid £65 for a radio play that was broadcast the following year. This play, The Ruffian on the Stair, was substantially rewritten for the stage in 1966. Orton reveled in his achievement, and new works poured forth. He had completed Entertaining Mr. Sloane by the time Ruffian was broadcast. He sent a copy to a theatre agent in 1963, and it was produced on the stage in 1964 under the direction of Michael Codron. Reviews ranged from praise to outrage.

Portrait of Orton by Lewis Morley: 1965

Entertaining Mr. Sloane lost money in its initial three-week run, but critical praise from playwright Terence Rattigan ensured its survival. The play was transferred to Wyndham's Theatre in the West End and later to the Queen's Theatre. Significantly, Entertaining Mr. Sloane tied for first place in the Variety Critics' Poll for "Best New Play" and Orton himself won second place as "Most Promising Playwright." Within a year, Entertaining Mr. Sloane was being performed in New York, Spain, Israel and Australia. As well it was soon made into a film and a television play.

Orton's next performed work was Loot, a wild parody of detective fiction, peppered with the blackest farce and jabs at establishment ideas on death, the police, religion and justice. However, the performances in regional theatres met with scathing reviews, and it was obvious the play needed extensive reworking. Instead, Joe and Kenneth took a head-clearing 80-day holiday in Tangier, Morocco, after which Joe finally did the work necessary to improve the play. A completely revamped Loot opened in London’s West End in late September, 1966, to rave reviews. Loot went on to win several awards and firmly established Orton's fame. In January 1967, Loot was awarded the London Evening Standard award for Best Play of 1966. Much to Halliwell’s disappointment, Orton took his agent Peggy Ramsay to the awards ceremony. Orton went dressed in Halliwell’s striped suit, and Orton and Ramsay were announced as ‘Mr. & Mrs. Orton’. Ramsay had said to Orton, “I’ll be your wife for the afternoon”. The incident left Halliwell vexed and aggrieved.

The problem was, less than a year later Orton (shirtless in photo) was dead.  Halliwell (at right) had been unable to deal with his own failure when measured against Orton’s new-found fame. Halliwell became increasingly depressed, argumentative and plagued by mystery ailments. He had felt threatened and isolated by Orton's success and had come to rely on anti-depressants and barbiturates. On August 9, 1967, Kenneth Halliwell bludgeoned 34-year-old Orton to death at his home in Islington with nine hammer blows to the head. He then committed suicide by an overdose of Nembutal. Investigators determined that Orton died first, because Halliwell's body was still warm when the police arrived. The two bodies were discovered the following morning when a chauffeur arrived to take Orton to a meeting with director Richard Lester to discuss filming options on one of his plays.

Four days before the murder, Orton went to a pub to meet his friend Peter Nolan, who later gave evidence at the inquest that Orton had told him that he had another boyfriend and wanted to end his relationship with Halliwell, but did not know how to go about it. As for Halliwell, the last person to speak with him was his doctor, who arranged for a psychiatrist to see him the following morning. He spoke to Halliwell three times on the telephone, the last call at 10 o'clock. Halliwell took down the psychiatrist's address and said, "Don't worry, I'm feeling better now. I'll go and see the doctor tomorrow morning."

Halliwell left a suicide note, informing police that all would be explained if they read Orton's diaries, "especially the latter part". The diaries have since been published. Nevertheless, Orton’s star continued to shine in posthumous first performances of Funeral Games (1968) and What the Butler Saw (1969).

What the Butler Saw (BBC production)




John Lahr (son of Bert Lahr, of The Wizard of Oz fame) wrote a biography of Orton titled Prick Up Your Ears. The 1987 film adaptation is based on Orton's diaries and Lahr's research. It starred Gary Oldman as Orton, Alfred Molina as Halliwell and Vanessa Redgrave as Peggy Ramsay, Orton’s theatrical agent. Alan Bennett wrote the screenplay.

All agree that the light of a supremely talented playwright had been prematurely and tragically extinguished.

Trivia: The adjective “Ortonesque” is sometimes used to refer to works characterized by a dark yet farcical cynicism.

Perry Brass

Originally from Savannah, GA, Perry Brass (b. 1947) is a poet, novelist, publisher, playwright, and activist who has published sixteen books, winning numerous awards in the categories of poetry, drama and fiction. He grew up as an impoverished gay Jew, which proved challenging in the suffocating homophobia of the South. At age 15, during the summer before his senior year in high school, he attempted suicide after overhearing other boys talking about his being gay. Rising from those depths, he worked up the nerve to have sex with another man at age 16, and by age 17 he was out of the South, hitchhiking all the way from Savannah to San Francisco in 1964, where he lived a “wild, crazy gay life, like Mark Twain with drag queens.” Two years later he moved to New York City, settling in Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood. Photo by Jack Slomowitz.

Brass has been involved in the gay rights movement since he was in his early twenties. In 1969 he co-edited Come Out!, the world's first gay liberation newspaper, originally based in NYC’s East Village. Some of Perry’s first poems appeared in Come Out!, along with early efforts by Rita Mae Brown, Dennis Altman, Allen Young, and Tony Diaman. Brass was attending New York University in Greenwich Village, and with two friends in 1972 he started the Gay Men's Health Project Clinic, the first clinic for gay men on the East Coast, still operating as New York’s Callen-Lourde Community Health Center.

Perry Brass in 1971


In 1984, his play Night Chills, one of the first to deal with the AIDS crisis, won a Jane Chambers International Gay Playwriting Award. As a poet, his collaborations with composers include the much-performed All the Way Through Evening, a cycle of 5 nocturnes in reaction to the AIDS epidemic, set by the late Chris DeBlasio, who himself succumbed to AIDS. All the Way Through Evening became the title for a recent documentary by Australian filmmaker Rohan Spong about young composers who've died of AIDS. Other poetry by Brass set to music includes The Angel Voices of Men set by Ricky Ian Gordon, Three Brass Songs by noted composer-pianist Fred Hersch,  The Restless Yearning Towards My Self by opera composer Paula Kimper, and 12 Musical Figures, by Gerald Busby. The latter was used in the score for Robert Altman s film 3 Women (1977) and Paul Taylor's ballet Runes (1975).

Walt Whitman in 1989 from All the Way through Evening
Words by Perry Brass, music by Chris DeBlasio; Performed by Gilles Denizot (tenor) and  Mimi Stern-Wolfe (piano).



With his partner Hugh Young, Brass started Belhue Press in 1991. Perry Brass's work often deals with that intersection of sexuality, spirituality and personal politics that came directly and openly out of his involvement with the radical gay politics of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Among many other activities, he is currently a coordinator of the Rainbow Book Fair, the first and largest U.S. LGBT book fair. As well, he is a regular contributor to the Queer New York blog. Hugh and Perry make their home in the Bronx in a co-op apartment along the shores of the Hudson.

Perry Brass has published a trilogy of gay science fiction, Mirage and its sequels Circles and Albert (The Book of Man). Angel Lust is an erotic novel of time travel. Books of poems include Sex-charge and The Lover of My Soul. Many of his other works defy being categorized, combining disparate elements of spirituality, eroticism, social commentary; these works include non-fiction and historical novels. A hugely popular book was 2010's The Manly Art of Seduction: How to Meet, Talk to, and Become Intimate with Anyone. His work has been included in 25 anthologies, including the groundbreaking Male Muse edited by Ian Young and The Columbia Anthology of Gay Literature, edited by Byrne Fone.

I can highly recommend King of Angels (2012, available in e-reader formats), an emotional coming-of-age story about personal acceptance set in the early 1960s. It explores the sexual underground of boys at Holy Nativity Military Academy, a Catholic school in which the protagonist is the sole Jewish student. It’s one of the few novels I’ve read in which I went from the last page right back to the beginning. Don’t be put off by the cover of the print edition, as I was initially. From a recent review: “I laughed and I cried, but most of all I thought, and I remembered how it was growing up in one of the most turbulent periods of American history when communities tried to come together. Accepting ourselves is part of it all, and Perry Brass helps us with that in his brilliant new book.” – Amos Lassen

www.perrybrass.com

Gore Vidal

“Never pass up the opportunity to have sex or appear on television.” – Gore Vidal

UPDATE: Gore Vidal died on July 31, 2012, at the age of 86, at his Hollywood Hills home of complications from pneumonia.

One of America’s great overachievers, Gore Vidal (b. 1925) is hard to categorize. He’s a novelist, social critic, playwright, essayist, mystery writer (as Edgar Box), pulp romance writer (as Katherine Everard), adventure writer (as Cameron Kay), screenwriter, ex-pat jet setter, literary critic, congressional candidate, political activist, and actor – for starters. He is cantankerous, opinionated, gruff and completely inflexible.

Now in his late eighties, he still makes the news. A couple of months ago his affirmation of the salacious details revealed in Scotty Bowers’ recent Hollywood memoir (Full Service) had Vidal’s name cropping up all over the Internet.

The grandson of a U.S. Senator, Vidal entered the army during World War II while in his teens. Although he rose to the rank of sergeant, he has had no subsequent formal higher education. Because Vidal felt uncomfortable living in the U.S. with its homophobic attitudes and extreme conservatism, he lived mostly in Italy from the mid 1960s, from where he wrote many stinging rebukes about American hypocrisies. Vidal shared his life with his companion Howard Austen, who died of brain cancer in 2003. For 30 years they lived in a villa perched on a cliff in Ravello, Italy, high above the Amalfi coast (see photos below). Austen and Vidal met in 1950 at New York City's Everard Baths. The pseudonym Vidal used as a romance writer, Katherine Everard, sprang from that encounter.

Guests of Vidal and Howard Austen at Villa La Rondinaia (Swallow’s Nest, above) in Ravello included Italo Calvino, Hillary Clinton, Gianni Agnelli, Mick and Bianca Jagger, Rudolf Nureyev, Lauren Bacall, Paul Newman, Leonard Bernstein, Peter O'Toole, Andy Warhol, Tennessee Williams and Princess Margaret, to name just a few. In 1983, the town council of Ravello gave Vidal honorary citizenship. It was Howard Austen who oversaw the decoration and furnishing of the house and cared for the grounds. Austen, a fine cook, felt at ease entertaining some of the world’s most famous people. The 6-acre property is spread over 20 terraced levels, and Vidal’s bad knees led to his selling his Amalfi Coast home of thirty years, when he could no longer walk to the piazza. This stark white villa, shown atop the sheer stone cliff in the photo below, was recently sold to a hotelier for $17 million.

Austen was Vidal’s companion for half a century. He ran their households in Italy and California, handled the finances, travel arrangements and all the day-to-day details that freed up Vidal’s schedule so that he had time to devote to writing, reading, politics and other ambitious projects. In short, Howard made Gore Vidal’s career and lifestyle possible.

The City and the Pillar (1948), written when Vidal was just twenty-three years old, is the story of professional tennis player Jim Willard, a man who never outgrew his boyhood crush on his best friend Bob Ford. That men who enjoyed sex with other men could go undetected in straight circles was an idea that shocked and outraged many of the novel’s readers and critics. The New York Times was so put off by the forthright writing about homosexuals that it refused to review Vidal’s next five books. Although Vidal vehemently (and frequently) declared that there is no such thing as a homosexual identity because everyone is bisexual to some degree, The City and the Pillar was the first mainstream coming-out novel. Twenty years after its initial publication, Vidal published The City and the Pillar with a different ending. Most of Vidal's subsequent literary works had prominent gay characters and gay themes, opening up the path for other writers to expanded gay visibility in mainstream fiction.

In Myra Breckinridge (1968), Vidal created further controversy by writing the first book in which the main character undergoes a clinical sex-change, resulting in a sharp satire of contemporary mores. It was made into a dreadful mess of a film (1970) that starred Raquel Welch in the title role. It was released with an “X” rating, not surprising for its time. It contained a lesbian scene and archival footage of Hollywood classic film stars, many of whom sued to have themselves removed from the film. Because Shirley Temple was a U.S. ambassador upon the film’s release, the White House demanded that footage from her movie Heidi be excised. It seemed everyone wanted to distance himself from this film, including Gore Vidal, who disowned it, calling the movie “an awful joke.” While the film version was an uncontested disaster, many critics consider Myra Breckinridge to be Vidal’s best novel.

A youthful Gore Vidal, in photo at right.

Two Sisters (1970) was a successful effort both in experimental point of view and in realistic representation of homosexual identity. Vidal wrote himself into the book as one of the two main narrators. Many of Vidal’s later writings contained autobiographical elements.

He is a distant cousin of Al Gore, Jr., Vice President of the U.S. (1992-2000), a fact known by few people. Gore Vidal grew up in Washington, DC., so he has had an inside track on politics for his entire life. His father was a member of Roosevelt’s cabinet and his grandfather a senator from Oklahoma. Gore Vidal shared a stepfather with Jackie Kennedy. In his book Point to Point Navigation (2006), he criticizes George W. Bush’s America as it sank deeper into war, debt and autocratic rule. The title refers to the dangerous feat of steering a ship without benefit of a compass, a nod to Vidal’s WW II military service.

Vidal’s career has been marked by many acrimonious elements. His feuds with Norman Mailer and Truman Capote made the tabloid gossip columns. Nonetheless, his 75+ year career has yielded  25 novels, five plays, several screenplays for television and film, over 200 essays, and two memoirs – across all genres. An ultimately unsuccessful campaign for U.S. Congress in 1960 (“You’ll Get More with Gore”), earned support from none other than Eleanor Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman. He also lost a 1982 bid for a seat in the U.S. Senate, and the same result came from a run for the office of the Governorship of California. He achieved celebrity status and counted among his friends many of the world’s richest and most powerful people. He also acted in two films (Bob Roberts in 1992, Gattaca in 1997) and appeared in many television interviews and documentaries. It is easy to forget, among all this career clutter, that Vidal was one of the first mainstream men of influence to embrace homosexuality and celebrate bisexuality. And for that, we are all of us in debt to this man.

Alan Bennett

"The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you. And now, here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone who is even long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out, and taken yours."
The History Boys – Alan Bennett

Alan Bennett (born 1934) is a bisexual British playwright, professor, screenwriter, actor and author. He first gained acclaim with the brilliant satirical revue Beyond the Fringe (1960), which he co-wrote and performed with Dudley Moore, Peter Cook, and Jonathan Miller. His first stage play was produced in 1968, and he later wrote works for television, which were marked by his characteristic mixture of wry comedy and sadness. His screenplays include Prick Up Your Ears (1987) and The Madness of King George (1994), which had been a successful stage play in 1991.

Likewise, his play The History Boys (2004) was made into a film in 2006. The History Boys garnered both the Critics' Circle Theatre Award and the Laurence Olivier Award for best new play. Set in Yorkshire in the 1980s, the play featured a clash of values between two teachers coaching a class of state-school boys through their university entrance examinations. It succeeded both as a serious-minded critique of Britain's education system – then and now – and as a comic entertainment. A 2006 film version, which used the original London cast, appeared the same year of its debut on Broadway, the latter winning six Tony awards (see quote at beginning of post). This is an extraordinarily entertaining and enlightening film, which is available from Netflix. Note: about an hour of the play's running time was cut for the film version.

In 1987 Talking Heads, a series of monologues for television, made him a household name and earned him the first of six Lawrence Olivier Awards. He went on to write television, stage and radio plays, as well as screenplays, short stories, novellas and non-fictional prose. He also made many appearances as an actor.

At the National Theatre in late 2009 Bennett's newest play, The Habit of Art, premiered. It is about the relationship between gay poet W. H. Auden and gay composer Benjamin Britten. In 1997 Bennett was diagnosed with cancer and began writing biographical sketches, Untold Stories, which were eventually published in 2005. He wrote of his homosexuality and touched on a few relationships with women. While he had a long-term relationship with his former housekeeper, Anne Davies, he makes his home in London today with Rupert Thomas, the editor of World of Interiors magazine.

Bennett declined a knighthood in 1996. He stated that he would never wish to be knighted, because “it would be a bit like having to wear a suit for the rest of ones life.”