Here you will discover the back stories of kings, titans of industry, stellar athletes, giants of the entertainment field, scientists, politicians, artists and heroes – all of them gay or bisexual men. If their lives can serve as role models to young men who have been bullied or taught to think less of themselves for their sexual orientation, all the better. The sexual orientation of those featured here did not stand in the way of their achievements.
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.
***************************************************************** 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!
I just cracked open Adventures in Old New York* (Bowery Boys 2016), a birthday gift presented to me last month. There’s an entire chapter on Central Park, which I have visited too many times to count, but I didn’t know the quarter mile path, bordered by huge American Elm trees that makes a straight shot north from the zoo to the Bethesda fountain and terrace, is called "The Mall"**, and that the southern part of it is known as Literary Walk. It’s here that our Bowery Boys make the gay connection. Literary honorees include Sir Walter Scott, Shakespeare and Robert Burns, but there’s also a statue of Fitz-Greene Halleck. Who? Never heard of him.
Turns out Fitz-Greene Halleck (1790-1867) was a Connecticut-born writer of romantic and satirical poetry who was so popular that 10,000 rabid poetry fans joined President Rutherford Hayes and his entire cabinet for the dedication of his Literary Walk statue in 1877, marking the tenth anniversary of the writer’s death. Imagine that today – 10,000 people attending the unveiling of a statue of a poet. Hard to believe, but at that time (pre-radio and TV) authors were the celebrities of American culture. Halleck enjoyed tremendous readership among the general public, even though his poems and essays were infused with homosexual themes. Considering late nineteenth-century mores, the celebrants likely played down the gay stuff.
Halleck was dubbed “the American Byron” during his lifetime. Edgar Allan Poe wrote, “No name in the American poetical world is more firmly established than that of Fitz-Greene Halleck.” Charles Dickens spoke fondly of Halleck, and Abraham Lincoln read his poems out loud to friends at the White House. Newspapers published his newly-minted poems all across America and Great Britain. These were extraordinary endorsements, considering that Halleck’s writings had “gay” written all over them. Not all criticism was positive. Mark Twain ridiculed Halleck and referred to him as "girl."
Fitz-Greene, also an essayist and noted Byron scholar, moved to NYC when he was twenty-one and found a job as personal secretary to John Jacob Astor. Halleck became one of the original trustees for the Astor Library, which later formed the nucleus of the New York Public Library (Fifth Ave. at 41st Street).
Halleck was love sick for a certain fellow poet Joseph Rodman Drake (1795-1820), who partnered with Halleck in writing The Croaker Papers, a satirical send up of New York society. Published anonymously and serialized in leading newspapers, these poems seemed to delight even their targets of derision, the upper crust of New York City. Both writers were members of the “Ugly Club”***, a club specifically for handsome young men. Drake played the flute and had a fine singing voice, and when joined by Halleck’s recitations, the two would entertain the membership of The Ugly Club. The two soon became inseparable.
Drake’s relationship with Halleck was fictionalized in what many call America’s first gay novel, Bayard Taylor’s “Joseph and His Friend” (1870, three years after Halleck’s death). The book is addressed to “those who believe in the truth and tenderness of man’s love for man.” Taylor had known both men and even delivered a speech at the dedication of a Halleck statue in Connecticut, in addition to the one in Central Park. See sidebar for separate post on Bayard Taylor.
But Drake (pictured above, on a vintage cigar box label), who had studied medicine, was unable to delay his early death from tuberculosis, and Halleck mourned the loss for the rest of his life. When Drake died, his coffin was followed by thirty carriages, a fitting tribute to his enormous fame at the time.
Drake had married a year before his death, and Halleck reluctantly served as best man.
“I officiated as groomsman, though much against my will...He is perhaps the handsomest man in New York – a face like and angel, a form like an Apollo...I felt myself during the ceremony as committing a crime in aiding and assisting such a sacrifice.” While Drake was on his honeymoon, Halleck could not eat, sleep or work, and fell into a serious depression. Such was the extent of Halleck’s life-long obsession with Drake that in his will the poet asked for Drake’s body to be exhumed and buried next to him.
Halleck’s biographer described the poet’s last major work, “Young America,” as both a jaded critique of marriage and a pederastic boy-worship reminiscent of classical homosexuality. Halleck rhapsodizes over his fourteen-year-old male subject in salacious detail.
All of this was news to me. So a recent warm spring day found me strolling Central Park’s Literary Walk, where I located Halleck’s granite statue. There he sits, with legs crossed, for all eternity. According to the Bowery Boys, his was Central Park’s first statue of an American.
*528 pages of fascinating details of NYC’s history told in a way that never fails to captivate. The Bowery Boys are the transplanted midwestern guys – Greg Young and Tom Myers – who produce award-winning podcasts about NYC, their adoptive home.
**The mall is on the east side of the park, running roughly from 66th-72nd streets.
***The Ugly Club was exclusive to the point of secrecy. Membership was by invitation, and open only to the handsomest and most foppish young men in NYC. They held seances and all male balls and recruited members from “what the ladies call rather pretty” and the men called “models of manly beauty.” Even so, there is no evidence that it was an exclusively homosexual body.
Halleck’s poetry is breezy, charming and witty. One can understand his popularity among readers of the day in this excerpt from “Fanny”. What many readers missed, however, was that his poem was the vengeful response to the fact that Drake withdrew from their writing partnership upon marriage. This poem rails against matrimony, suggesting that marriage should be for money (Fanny’s father was rich!), not love.
FANNY (1819): excerpted verses; the entire poem numbers more than 1,500 lines
VIII A decent kind of person; one whose head Was not of brains particularly full; It was not known that he had ever said Anything worth repeating—’twas a dull, Good, honest man—what Paulding’s muse would call A “cabbage head”—but he excelled them all
IX In that most noble of the sciences, The art of making money; and he found The zeal for quizzing him grew less and less, As he grew richer; till upon the ground Of Pearl-street, treading proudly in the might And majesty of wealth, a sudden light
X Flash’d like the midnight lightning on the eyes Of all who knew him; brilliant traits of mind, And genius, clear and countless as the dies Upon the peacock’s plumage; taste refined, Wisdom and wit, were his—perhaps much more. ’Twas strange they had not found it out before.
XXV Dear to the exile is his native land, In memory’s twilight beauty seen afar: Dear to the broker is a note of hand, Collaterally secured—the polar star Is dear at midnight to the sailor’s eyes, And dear are Bristed’s volumes at “half price;”
XXVI But dearer far to me each fairy minute Spent in that fond forgetfulness of grief; There is an airy web of magic in it, As in Othello’s pocket-handkerchief, Veiling the wrinkles on the brow of sorrow, The gathering gloom to-day, the thunder cloud to-morrow.
Sources: The American Byron: Homosexuality and the Fall of Fitz-Greene Halleck (2000), by John Hallock.
That’s So Gay: Outing Early America – The Library Company of Philadelphia Wikipedia
British-born model, writer and former porn star Aiden Shaw (b. 1966) had a traditional upbringing in England. He came from respectability and has returned to it again, but there’s no ignoring that wild detour in the early 1990s when he established himself as a popular star of gay porn. What set him apart from his adult film peers was that he was a man of intellect.
Shaw made over 50 pornographic films, earning several industry awards along the way. He stood out from the pack of blonds and their smooth all-over-tanned bodies. Shaw didn’t shave his chest and obviously didn’t sunbathe in the nude – in fact, his sharply defined tan line became a trademark. He was further distinguished by his British accent, although his porn roles required limited use of his speaking voice. Shaw’s screen persona was that of a traditionally handsome natural man possessed of a spectacularly generous endowment (and a rose tattoo on his arm). In fact, his penis was as much discussed in the 1990s as international playboy Porfirio Rubirosa’s(*) was in the 1930s (we're all of us too young to remember – just Goggle him). Many of Shaw’s fans noticed a startling facial resemblance to Richard Gere (see photo below). *OK, I've received numerous E-mails about this, so here's a hint. To
this day in Paris, if a restaurant patron wants one of those tall wooden
peppermills, he says, "Waiter, may I please have a Rubirosa?" I kid you not.
He became one of the most popular global adult male stars before retiring from the porn industry in 1999 (he was diagnosed HIV positive in 1997). Although a car accident brought a hiatus to his porn career – for a time he was paralyzed and in a wheelchair – he made a return with four more adult videos in 2003/2004.
Nevertheless, it is difficult to reconcile his current appearance as a classically handsome, mature man with salt and pepper hair and a beard with his actual age – 52. He looks years older, in a good way. Talk about aging gracefully.
He comes across as a confident, worldly man, the perfect type for promoting luxury goods. He has modeled for GQ Magazine in Berlin, Le Figaro and El Pais, as well as in other print venues. That his present appearance renders him nearly unrecognizable from his days as a porn star is surely to his advantage, although the rose tattoo is an identity giveaway.
Shaw has worked in diverse fields, as an editor of an interior design magazine, a poet, an HIV activist, vocalist, producer, escort, composer and writer. Print modeling is merely his latest career turn. He undertook formal studies in film, television, photography and video, subsequently taking post- college jobs directing and art directing music videos. Shaw wrote and produced two albums of music, performing lead vocals with his band "Whatever". Individual tracks are available on iTunes.
The first chapter of his autobiography, My Undoing: Life in the Thick of Sex, Drugs, Pornography and Prostitution (2006), begins: “All I could see were pretty shapes and colours, my dick going in and out of his white cheeks.” From his days as an escort, his comment on how to have sex with men who repulse him: “Well, the thing is, very few men physically repulse me. Like a good whore, I can always find something about a man that I like.”
From an interview with Daniel Lee in NYC in 2003:
DL: What makes you laugh hardest?
AS: Getting treated special because I have a big dick.
DL: Would you prefer not to be treated special because you have big dick?
AS: No way!
Well, there you have it.
Shaw’s writing is described by Michael Musto of The Village Voice as prose that “can tug at your heartstrings and your crotch at the same time.” His first novel, Brutal, appeared in 1996, the same year he published a collection of poems titled If Language at the Same Time Shapes and Distorts Our Ideas and Emotions, How Do We Communicate Love? (it sold out), followed by two more novels, Boundaries (1997) and Wasted (2001).
Shaw completed a master’s degree in Creative Writing in 2007 at Goldsmiths University of London, followed by publication of a second autobiography, Sordid Truths (2009). In 2011, Shaw completed training to become a qualified English teacher.
Shaw was recently profiled in the Spring/Summer 2012 issue of Hercules Universal – One Last Colony, the Havana Affair – in which he models luxury men’s clothing (click on link).
At present Mr. Shaw divides his time between residences in London and Barcelona. In 2016 he reverted to his birth name: Aiden Brady. Here is a sampling of his recent modeling work. You're welcome.
Born February 1, 1902, Langston Hughes, a deeply closeted gay man, was an African-American poet, novelist, lecturer, columnist and playwright who became one of the foremost interpreters of racial relationships in the United States. Born in the south, he dropped out of Columbia University to experience the world of jazz and nightclubs and went on to become a major component of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. He was one of the innovators of the new literary art form called jazz poetry. He worked menial jobs, and was “discovered” as a poet while working as a busboy at the Wardman Park Hotel in Washington, DC. The story goes that Hughes dropped his poems beside the poet Vachel Lindsay's dinner plate, and Lindsey included several of them in his next poetry reading. Lindsay’s interest and support launched a major career for Hughes.
This event spawned a local chain of restaurants in the Washington, DC area called “Busboys and Poets” (your blogger has enjoyed many evenings there drinking, dining, playing cards, watching films and taking in live shows and poetry readings). Hughes, who went on to become one of the first black authors who could support himself by writing, became a friend of Ernest Hemingway, with whom he attended bullfights. He wrote lyrics for “Street Scene,” an opera by Kurt Weill and Elmer Rice, as well as screenplays for Hollywood films. His original works portrayed people whose lives were impacted by racism and sexual conflicts; he often wrote about southern violence. However, he felt he had to remain sexually closeted in order to maintain the financial support and respect of various black churches and other cultural institutions.
Hughes had more life experience to draw upon than most, and his world view was vast. Having been born in the segregated deep south of Joplin, Missouri, he later lived in Mexico, Paris and Italy. He worked as a seaman on jaunts to Africa and Europe, spent a year in the Soviet Union, and served as a Madrid correspondent for the Baltimore Afro-American.
His career successes helped break the chains of poverty into which he had felt trapped. For the last twenty years of his life he owned his own home in Harlem, a brownstone at 20 E. 127th Street.
In 1967, Hughes died at the age of 65 from complications after abdominal surgery, related to prostate cancer. He left an enduring legacy.
A poem written when Hughes was 18 years old:
“The Negro Speaks of Rivers”
I've known rivers:
I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
flow of human blood in human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I danced in the Nile when I was old
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln
went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy
bosom turn all golden in the sunset.
I've known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
– from "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," 1920
Sources: Wikipedia, Charles H. Hughes, The Oxford Companion to African American Literature (1997), Out Magazine
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)
Italian film director, poet, writer, actor and painter Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975) was a highly controversial figure who was at the center of postwar European intellectual life. He was involved in 33 trials relating to scandals, censure and assorted controversies. He was also a defiant homosexual, visionary artist, a Catholic who was tried for insulting the Church, and a non-aligned Leftist.
Pasolini was born in Bologna and became a member of the Communist party in 1949, but his political enemies outed him as homosexual, resulting in his being expelled from the party. This ruined his career as a teacher, resulting in a move to Rome, where he wrote poetry and novels of high quality, although laced with obscenity, which brought on subsequent prosecutions. He favored scandal and going against the tide, with a willingness to shock. Beginning in the 1960s he began writing plays while he was dabbling in film-making. It is for his films that he is remembered today. While openly gay from the very start of his career, Pasolini rarely dealt with homosexuality in his movies. One of several exceptions was “Salò” (1975), made the last year of his life. Subtitled “The 120 Days of Sodom,” the film depicted the Marquis de Sade’s compendium of sexual horrors. His personal life, however, was jump started when at age forty he met the great love of his life, fifteen-year-old Ninetto Davoli in 1962. Pasolini cast him in his 1966 film “Uccellacci e uccellini” (The Hawks and the Sparrows). Even though their sexual relations lasted only a few years, Ninetto continued to live with Pasolini and was his constant companion, also appearing in six more of Pasolini’s films.
But all of this brilliance, sordidness and controversy was extinguished when Pasolini was just 53 years old. In 1975, in an act of gruesome cruelty, Pasolini was murdered by being run over several times with his own car on the beach at Ostia (the port of Rome). Seventeen-year-old hustler Giuseppi Pelosi, who was later spotted driving Pasolini’s car, was arrested and confessed to the murder. Pasolini’s body was marked by broken bones, crushed testicles and gasoline burns. Twenty-nine years later Pelosi retracted his confession, claiming that three people who denounced Pasolini as a “dirty communist” had committed the murder. New evidence indicated that Pasolini had been murdered by an extortionist, that several spools of the film Salò had been stolen (the film had not yet been released at the time of the murder), and that an eyewitness had seen a group of men pull Pasolini from his car, but the judges responsible for the investigation found that the new evidence did not justify a continued inquiry – this was Italy, after all! The crime has never been fully resolved.
Because so many of Pasolini’s films depicted a sexual and moral reality that did not reflect what society sanctioned, controversy was aroused at every turn. In addition to written works, a list of his films (1961-1975) can be found on Pasolini’s Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pier_Paolo_Pasolini
From San Francisco film critic Michael Guillen: "Pasolini's cinema takes its inspiration from many sources: Renaissance painting, Romanticism, Freudian psychology, Italian neo-realism, ethnographic film-making, and music – his films share an affinity to musical structures and form. His aesthetic often rebuked traditional film grammar, opting instead for a spirit of experimentation. More often than not, he drew upon non-professional actors, casting peasants and urban youths who brought an authenticity and edginess to his narrative films. Behind the camera, Pasolini collaborated with top-notch film-makers, including cinematographers Tonino Delli Colli and Giuseppe Ruzzolini, costume designer Danilo Donati, and composer Ennio Morricone, often working with the crew on location, be it Syria, Yemen, or the impoverished outskirts of Rome. As a poet/film-maker, he spoke of his 'tendency always to see something sacred and mythic and epic in everything – even the most humdrum, simple and banal objects and events.' "
New York City graffiti prodigy Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988) had honed his signature painting style of obsessive scribbling, elusive symbols and diagrams alongside mask-and-skull imagery by the time he was 20. He sold his first painting in 1981. Although he received extraordinary exposure and acclaim as a painter, the Brooklyn-born artist was also an accomplished poet and musician. But his meteoric rise as a multi-genre artist was cut short when he died from a heroin overdose at age 27*.
In the early 1980s he fell under the spell of Andy Warhol, with whom he collaborated on a series of paintings. Some say he entered into an intimate relationship with Warhol, his idol and mentor, but Basquiat’s sexual relationship with fellow East Village artist David Bowes is better documented. However, no matter how fluid his sexual orientation has been described by art historians, most of his sexual relations were with women.
Although Basquiat’s Caribbean heritage provided ample subject matter (his father was Haitian and his mother of Puerto Rican descent), his art incorporated influences from African-American, Aztec and African cultures. Contemporary heroes such as musicians and athletes factored into his paintings, as well. Basquiat was often associated with Neo-Expressionism, and his works were shown at NYC’s most prestigious galleries and events. Tragically, a rapid descent into drug culture eventually stunted his creativity and artistic output.
Untitled (1982): $10.5 million at auction
At a Sotheby’s art auction two months ago (May 18, 2017) Basquiat's “Untitled 1982" painting depicting a face in the shape of a skull, created with oil stick and spray paint, set a new record high for any U.S. artist at auction, selling for $110,500,000. Not a typo. The pre-sale estimate had been $60 million, aligned with the previous Basquiat record that had been set last year at $57.3 million, also for a skull painting. Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maesawa now owns both.
A 2009 documentary film, “Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child” was shown at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival and on PBS television in 2011.
*Basquiat is buried at Brooklyn’s historic Green-Wood Cemetery, alongside other gay and bisexual luminaries Leonard Bernstein, Dr. Richard Isay, Jean Moreau Gottschalk, Fred Ebb (of the Kander & Ebb song-writing team) and Paul Jabara. See their individual posts in the sidebar.
Bisexual American expatriate Paul Bowles (1910-1999) was a polymath who enjoyed successful careers as a composer, translator, novelist and poet. Until he was 35 years old he showed more interest in poetry and musical composition, although his legacy rests on his novels.
In 1937 Bowles met Jane Auer (1917-1973), a lesbian writer from a wealthy Long Island family. She walked with a permanent limp, the result of a riding accident when she was 14 years old. Both were only children who had grown up on Long Island, had lived abroad and spoke fluent French. Although American by birth, they spoke French together for the rest of their lives. Both Bowles and Auer preferred same sex partners, so their friends were baffled when the two married in 1938, having known each other for just a year. As a condition to marriage, they both agreed to be sexually “free,” while knowing that their union would upset their respective families. Paul’s anti-Semitic father, whom he hated, called Jane a “crippled kike.”
Marriage allowed each to express their homosexuality, instead of hiding it. Eighteen months into their marriage, they ceased sexual relations, although they remained devoted to each other for the rest of their lives. They were polar opposites in temperament and habits. Paul was restrained, but Jane was beyond wild. After both inherited some money, they pooled their resources to live a vagabond life free from the necessity of salaried jobs. In 1947 they settled in the city of Tangier, Morocco, living in separate apartments. They became permanent expatriates, remaining in Tangier to live out their lives.
At that time Tangier’s status as an international zone (separate from the rest of Morocco) had been restored, lasting until Morocco’s independence in 1956. The city’s population comprised 31,000 Europeans, 15,000 Jews and 40,000 Muslims. The cost of living in Tangier was extraordinarily cheap, and both Paul and Jane were able to receive guests from the cream of the crop of influential intellectual homosexuals. Paul became a habitual abuser of hashish, Jane of alcohol. Unfortunately, both also entered into dangerous relationships with Arab lovers. Jane, with Cherifa, who dominated and eventually destroyed her life; Paul, with a 16-year-old boy named Ahmed Yacoubi and his successor Mohammed Mrabet, 30 years younger than Paul.
Any search engine can yield a list of Paul’s musical and literary works, but his best and most successful novel was The Sheltering Sky (1949), in which Paul and Jane appear as Port and Kit Moresby, a couple who journey to northern Africa to rekindle their marriage but fall prey to the dangers surrounding them, experiencing horror and tragedy. A distinguished film version was released in 1991, with Bowles himself as narrator, also appearing in a cameo role (at age 79). Unfortunately Jane, whose literary efforts were in direct competition with her husband’s, has not enjoyed an enduring literary legacy.
While continuing to live in Tangier, Jane descended into illness and insanity. Having given away all her money and possessions, she caused Paul to have to cover checks she wrote without funds to support them. She died in a psychiatric clinic in Málaga, Spain, at age 56. Paul died in his modest home in Tangier in 1999, at the age of 88.
A strange relation:
SALLY BOWLES – LIFE IS A CABARET
After writer Christopher Isherwood met Bowles in Berlin, Isherwood borrowed his surname in creating the literary character Sally Bowles, included in a collection of semi-autobiographical stories called Goodbye to Berlin (1939). Isherwood based the character on a woman he had known while living in Berlin. British playwright John Van Druten adapted Isherwood’s story for a 1951 Broadway play, I Am a Camera, for which Julie Harris won a Tony Award for portraying Sally Bowles. Producer Harold Prince commissioned the team of Kander (music) and Ebb (lyrics) to write the score for Cabaret, a musical version of I Am a Camera, which opened on Broadway in 1966, running for three years. It is a little-known fact that Judi Dench debuted the role of Sally Bowles in London’s 1968 West End production of Cabaret (photo evidence below). Judi Dench had never done a musical in her life, but John Kander later said that she was the best Sally Bowles he had ever seen, before or since.
Liza Minelli won an Oscar for her portrayal of Sally in the 1972 film version. Cabaret remains an oft-revived landmark of American musical theatre. A 2014 year-long Broadway revival starred Alan Cumming as the cabaret emcee and Michelle Williams as Sally Bowles.
London-born poet, essayist and novelist Stephen Spender (1909-1995) delayed publication of his first novel, The Temple, for fifty-nine years – until 1988, when he was seventy-nine years old. The male protagonist has same-sex encounters in pre-War Germany. In Spender’s real life experience, which included living in Germany, he had a series of affairs with men, after which he married twice* and took about renouncing his gay past.
During the course of his life he morphed from homosexual (fell in love with Tony Hyndman in 1933, the two living as a same-sex couple 1935–36) to bisexual (married Inez Maria Pearn 1936-1939) to homophobic straight man (married to Jewish concert pianist Natasha Litvin from 1941 until his death).
Above: Spender photographed with his German pal Franz Büchner in 1929.
*Spender had two children; his daughter Lizzie married Australian drag icon Dame Edna (Barrie Humphries) in 1990, and his son Matthew wrote a memoir about his family.
While many had written that his marriage to Natasha ended his same-sex relations, six years into their second marriage Spender was photographed semi-naked while reveling with gay icons WH Auden and Christopher Isherwood on Fire Island, an über-gay venue if ever there were one. From left: Auden, Spender, Isherwood on Fire Island, 1947.
October 2015 saw the publication of Matthew Spender’s memoir titled, “A House in St John’s Wood: In Search of My Parents”, in which Matthew described a party of intellectuals in post-WW II Paris where Natasha, still newly married to Stephen, inquired as to the identity of an elegant young man talking to her husband.
"Don't you know?” the worldly Parisian replied. “That's Stephen's new lover.” Natasha promptly fainted, and a few days later she tried to throw herself off a train.
In 1955, Matthew overheard his father telling his mother he wanted to leave her and live with a new boyfriend in Japan.
In fact, Stephen Spender, who was known to cruise for young male flesh, took several male lovers, including Tony Hyndman, Lucian Freud, WH Auden and Bryan Obst. While cruising around the Piccadilly area in London, Spender met Tony Hyndman, a former Welsh guardsman and oft-time male prostitute; their relationship lasted six years. Bryan Obst, Spender’s last-known male lover, was an American ornithologist who died from AIDS-related illness in 1991.
So keen was he to erase his gay past, however, that Sir Stephen (knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 1983) rewrote selected lines from his eighteen books of poetry. For example, he replaced “I shall always have a boy” with “I shall always have an affair” in the following poem:
Original: Whatever happens, I shall never be alone. I shall always have a boy, a railway fare, or a revolution.
Altered version: Whatever happens, I shall never be alone. I shall always have an affair, a railway fare, or a revolution.
Spender was so sensitive to being portrayed as gay that he sued David Leavitt for his novel, While England Sleeps. Spender claimed that Leavitt’s book was based on his life and charged that the gay scenes were over-the-top pornographic. They settled out of court in 1994, the year before Spender’s death.
Spender secured his place among the Oxford poets with the publication of Twenty Poems (1930). He later co-edited Horizon (1939-1941) and Encounter (1953-1967) magazines. He left his post at Encounter magazine when he learned that is was being secretly financed by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). In 1965 he became the first non-American citizen to serve as Poet in Residence at the Library of Congress – his successor was James Dickey. Spender was Professor of English at University College, London, from 1970 through 1977.
At a 1984 ceremony commemorating the 40th Anniversary of D-day, President Ronald Reagan quoted from Spender's poem "The Truly Great":
Gentlemen, I look at you and think of the words of Stephen Spender's poem. You are men who in your "lives fought for life... and left the vivid air signed with your honor."
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.
Paderewski: Nocturne (encore at Carnegie Hall recital)
Openly gay classical pianist Stephen Hough was born in England in 1961, although he has held dual citizenship with Australia since 2005 (his father was born in Australia). Hough holds a particular interest in unusual works by pianist-composers of the late nineteenth century, of which this video clip is an example. He plays with wit, charm, sophistication, humor, lyricism and generous doses of style.
Hough also composes and arranges transcriptions for piano solo, and often features his own works in recitals. Of late he has branched out into chamber and choral music. As well, he is a noted writer and researcher, publishing essays and writing album liner notes. He is something of a renaissance man, fully indulging his interests in painting, photography and blogging.
Hough has recorded over fifty CDs, and in 2008 he won the sixth International Poetry Competition*. Hough has spoken, written and blogged about his homosexuality and its relationship to his music-making.
Instead of limiting what we know about him, as is the custom of most classical musicians, Hough is quite open about his weaknesses, about moments when he’s deeply questioned his career choice as a touring musician, about battling ego issues, fighting nerves, and overcoming moments when he says he fails to reach his own high standards. Hearing him talk so openly and honestly about his vulnerabilities opens many to his art. I am a pianist myself, and I regard Hough as one of the top pianists of our time.
*Excerpt from "Early Rose", a prize-winning poem by Stephen Hough
...To the garden, awake,
Tiptoe, quick, go
Slick-stairs down the
Steps to the pre-dew
Night morn before the
Dawn's birth is born.
Follow to the foliage where,
Hidden as the future's
Fall or rise, the rose –
Petals closed – will bud-burst
A billion atoms of beauty...
Bayard Taylor (1825-1878), was an American poet, novelist, travel writer, literary critic, diplomat, lecturer and translator. He was a frustrated poet who, even though he published twenty volumes of poetry, resented the mass appeal of his travel writings, because his desire was to be known as a poet. Even his travel writings have been relegated to the dustbin of literary history, and he is known today solely for his translation of both volumes of Goethe’s Faust.
He shared Walt Whitman’s penchant for homosexual relationships. Taylor confided to Whitman that he found in his own nature “a physical attraction and tender and noble love of man for man.” Taylor’s novel Joseph and His Friend (1870), which depicted men holding hands and kissing, is considered the first American gay novel. This novel is said to be based on the romantic relationship between poets Fitz-Greene Halleck and Joseph Rodman Drake. As well, Taylor’s poem To a Persian Boy and short story Twin-Love explored homosexual attraction.
In Keith Stern’s Queers in History, it is revealed that the love of Taylor’s life was George Henry Boker, although both men had married. Mitch Gould relates that American banker, diplomat and poet George Boker wrote to Taylor in 1856 that he had “never loved anything human as I love you. It is a joy and a pride to my heart to know that this feeling is returned.”
Taylor wrote popular columns in important newspapers and magazines, and he served as a diplomat to both Russia and Germany. He was so well known at the time of his death in Germany that the New York Times printed his obituary on its front page.
To a Persian Boy in the Bazaar at Smyrna
Excerpt:
The gorgeous blossoms of that magic tree
Beneath whose shade I sat a thousand nights
Breathed from their opening petals all delights
Embalmed in spice of Orient Poesy,
When first, young Persian, I beheld thine eyes,
And felt the wonder of thy beauty grow
Within my brain, as some fair planet’s glow
Deepens, and fills the summer evening skies.
From under thy dark lashes shone on me
The rich, voluptuous soul of Eastern land,
Impassioned, tender, calm, serenely sad, –
Such as immortal Hafiz felt when he
Sang by the fountain-streams of Rocnabad,
Or in the bowers of blissful Samarcand.
The engraving at the top of this post is by John Chester Buttre after a photograph. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
Curiously, openly gay American poet Edgar Bowers (1924-2000) is little known today, even though he was the recipient of several important prizes and fellowships, including the prestigious Bollingen prize and two Guggenheim fellowships. Poet and critic Yvor Winters thought the poems in Bowers’s early books were among the best American poems of the 20th century, and distinguished colleagues included his works in British anthologies. Among his advocates were Richard Wilbur, Robert Lowell, Harold Bloom and Tony Tanner.
The title of a 1990 collection of poems was For Louis Pasteur, and every year Bowers celebrated the birthdays of three of his heroes: Louis Pasteur, Paul Valéry and Mozart. According to Clive Wilmer (The Guardian), those three all “suggest admiration for the life of the mind lived at its highest pitch – a concern for science and its social uses, and a love of art that is elegant, cerebral and orderly.” Although a rationalist, Bowers's poems are marked by aesthetic refinement and an intense feeling for the mystery of things. He rarely engaged with homosexuality as a literary theme.
Born in Rome, Georgia, Bowers had to leave the University of North Carolina in 1943, when he was called up for military service during World War II, serving in the Counter Intelligence Corps as a translator. At the age of 21 he traversed the ruins of Europe and for a while was stationed at Hitler's retreat at Berchtesgaden, where he participated in the de-Nazification campaign. The impact of those experiences on a sensitive and ethical consciousness influenced his poetry.
After the war, Bowers returned to his studies, earning a doctorate at Stanford University. His subsequent academic career included teaching positions at Duke University, Harpur College and the University of California at Santa Barbara. According to Wilmer he “fought against political compromises (over Vietnam, for instance) and the exploitation of young, untenured teachers. He sometimes suffered from sneering suggestions about his homosexuality, and, despite being the most radical and egalitarian of men, stood accused of elitism.” Throughout his career Bowers suffered from bouts of depression and alcoholism. Until 1965 he wrote in immaculately constructed rhymed stanzas, but changed to blank verse for the following decades.
After the death of his aged mother, Bowers left his beach front house in Montecito, CA, and moved to San Francisco, where he enjoyed the love and support of an openly gay community. Bowers remained in San Francisco until his death at age 75, fourteen years ago this month.
This poem is typical of Bowers, a writer who lived brightly but wrote darkly:
Living Together (from Collected Poems, 1997)
Of you I have no memory, keep no promise.
But, as I read, drink, wait, and watch the surf,
Faithful, almost forgotton, your demand
Becomes all others, and this loneliness
The need that is your presence. In the dark,
Beneath the lamp, attentive, like a sound
I listen for, you draw near -- closer, surer
Than speech, or sight, or love, or love returned.
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.
The American painter, poet, and essayist known as Marsden Hartley (1877-1943) was born Edmund Hartley in Lewiston, Maine. After studying at the Cleveland School of Art, he won a scholarship to further his education in New York City, where he became one of the first American artists to paint in the modernist style of Picasso, Paul Klee and Kandinsky. He launched his public career as an artist under the name Marsden Hartley (Marsden was his step-mother's maiden name). Through modern art promoter Alfred Stieglitz (noted photographer and husband of Georgia O’Keeffe), Hartley was given his first one-person show at Stieglitz’s noted 291 gallery, and Hartley gained immediate entrée into New York's avant-garde world.
Hartley went to Paris in 1912 and was welcomed into the influential artistic sphere of Gertrude Stein. While in Paris he was introduced to the abstract art of Franz Marc and Vassily Kandinsky. A year later Hartley settled in Berlin, where he fell in love with a German lieutenant, Karl von Freyburg. Tragically, his lover was killed in battle on October 7, 1914. Grief stricken, Hartley created some of his finest paintings to memorialize their relationship.
Portrait of a German Officer (1915):
He returned to New York in 1915, and by the fall of 1916 Hartley was sharing a house in Provincetown, Massachusetts, with Charles Demuth, another modernist artist. Demuth was one of the earliest American artists to reveal a gay identity through explicit yet positive depictions of homosexual desire. Demuth was also well acquainted with the gay scene of New York, where Hartley became friends with lesbian writer Djuna Barnes.
Hartley returned to Europe in 1921 and pursued his literary bent. He soon published Twenty-Five Poems, a book issued by Robert McAlmon's Contact Publishing Company in Paris. The Great Depression forced Hartley to return to the United States, but a Guggenheim fellowship allowed him to spend 1932 in Mexico, where he became a close friend of Hart Crane, who was also in Mexico on a Guggenheim fellowship. On his return voyage to the U.S., Crane was severely beaten after making sexual advances to a male crew member. Crane subsequently jumped overboard off the coast of Florida, and when Hartley learned of his suicide, he painted Eight Bells Folly (1933, below), a surrealist tribute to Crane.
During the middle years of the Depression Hartley supported himself in New York by participating in the Public Works of Art Project. He struck up a friendship with the Francis Mason family in Nova Scotia, and he was to live with them in a Canadian fishing community for several intervals during the rest of his life. Hartley returned to Maine in 1937, after declaring that he wanted to become "the painter of Maine" and depict American life at a local level. This aligned Hartley with the Regionalism movement, a group of artists who attempted to represent a distinctly American art.
Madawaska, Acadian Light-Heavy, Third Arrangement, 1940
He continued to paint in Maine, primarily scenes around Lovell and the Corea coast, until his death in Ellsworth in 1943.
Hartley's work belongs to an American current of expressionism in which he was a pivotal figure. During his lifetime, however, his shifts of style and the relative immaturity of the American art world prevented his receiving full recognition. This neglect augmented a loneliness that his shyness about his homosexuality induced. However, a full-scale 1980 retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York cemented his reputation.
The portrait below captures artist Marsden Hartley mourning the death of another man whom Hartley admired. A shadowy man haunting the background of this 1942 photographic portrait taken by photographer George Platt Lynes alludes to the loves of Hartley’s life that were lost and unspoken.
Englishman George Ives (1867-1950) was the most famous gay activist you’ve never heard of. He formed a secret society for homosexuals called the Order of Chaeronea, named after the battle site where the Sacred Band of Thebes (an army of male lovers) met their annihilation in 338 BC. Members dated letters and other materials from the year of that battle, so that 1950 would be written as C.2288.
Ives believed that since homosexuals were not accepted openly in society, they needed to have a means of underground communication. The Order’s rituals were based on the writings of Walt Whitman, and the society took on issues beyond the realm of homosexuality, making efforts to reform laws affecting STDs, birth control, abortion and other repressive sex related statutes. This was in 1897! The Order, which promoted what Ives referred to as "The Cause," soon attracted members worldwide.
The Order of Chaeronea’s manifesto:
"We believe in the glory of passion.
We believe in the inspiration of emotion.
We believe in the holiness of love."
According to Ives, the Order was to be "A Religion, A Theory of Life and Ideal of Duty", although its purpose was primarily political. Ives stressed that The Order was not to be a means for men to meet other men for sex. It is estimated that, under Ives, the society numbered about 300 participants, the same as the number of soldiers of the Sacred Band of Thebes, but the Order’s secrecy meant that no membership lists were in circulation. The Order of Chaeronea was resurrected in the United States in the late 1990s and today has chapters in South Africa, France and the United Kingdom, as well.
When he was in his mid-twenties, Ives met Oscar Wilde, who was attracted by his youthful good looks. Through Wilde, Ives met Lord Alfred (Bosie) Douglas, with whom he had a brief affair. Although Ives recruited both men to join his "Cause," neither chose to join him. Their acquaintance, however, did provide Ives with an important entry into the Victorian literary scene. Ives figured prominently in the published diaries of Oscar Wilde.
In 1914 Ives became a co-founder of the British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology, which in 1931 became the British Sexological Society. Ives was the archivist for this society, whose papers are now housed at the Harry Ransom Center of the University of Texas at Austin.
Ives was also a noted authority on prisons who wrote several books and lectured about English penal methods. A true polymath, Ives thus had multiple careers as a poet, penal reformer, writer and gay rights activist.
Sources: "Queers in History" by Keith Stern and "The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde" by Neil McKenna.
Zeki Müren (1931-1996) was the most famous twentieth-century singer in all Turkish-speaking countries. He was never surpassed in performing a very difficult form of Turkish classical music that originated in the Sultan's Court of the Ottoman Empire.
In his early years he became a popular movie star, branching out into Arabesk (a Turkish musical genre), popular music and even composition – he penned more than 300 songs, many of them written for use in his films. A true polymath, Zeki also achieved success in poetry and design.
His recordings and televised performances made him a cult figure of almost mythical status, held as dear to the hearts of the Turkish people as Frank Sinatra in the U.S. and Europe. And, just like Sinatra, Müren’s recordings, issued over a 40-year span (1951-1991), are still heard today in all Turkish-speaking countries. Five wildly popular compilation albums have been released since his death, which resulted from a string of health complications and massive weight gain.
Although Zeki was a homosexual who always lived his life according to his own terms, it is astonishing that as Müren became more flamboyant, sporting heavy woman’s make-up, a bouffant hairdo. female dress and outsized jewelry, his popularity grew, along with record sales. His stage persona was as over-the-top as Liberace – in drag. He designed most of his outrageous costumes. It is difficult for us Westerners to comprehend that there was no public backlash, in light of Muslim countries’ unwavering intolerance of homosexuality. The last five years of his life, during which he was afflicted with health issues, were spent in relative seclusion with his male partner. Even so, he made not infrequent "guest star" appearances.
Yet after his death backstage immediately following a live television performance in Izmir, it was revealed that Müren had left all his money to an Army Fund for disadvantaged soldiers and a foundation for education. His death caused the greatest public grief in years, and many thousands of Turks attended his funeral. Zeki Müren is revered to this day, having his own museum in Bodrum; his extravagant grave in his native city of Bursa had to be fortified by a heavy iron grill to prevent well-wishers from taking all the soil as souvenirs.
After early success in Bursa’s summer theatre, Zeki moved to Istanbul to pursue a singing career while still in his early teens. After studying at the Fine Arts Academy in Istanbul, he recorded his first single in 1951, at a time when he was already a regular singer on Istanbul radio. His first musical film co-starred Cahide Sonku (in polka dots at left), the greatest female Turkish movie star at the time. It was the first of Müren’s 18 consecutive films (1953-1971), all of which met with success.
To say that Muren's stage performances were novel and over-the-top extravagant is understatement. Müren was one of the first artists to use a catwalk stage in order to mingle with his audiences. Zeki was particularly popular with conservative housewives, who flocked to his sold out afternoon shows fashioned particularly for the entertainment of women. In fact, it was this dialogue with his fans, his manner of interacting and his flawless diction and pronunciation of the Turkish language that best explains his wide appeal. Through his recordings, "good Turkish" was brought to the masses, providing them with a free linguistic education alongside their musical entertainment.
Gay rights at the forefront Of Obama's inauguration speech
Obama’s
inaugural address a few minutes ago made history, in that he linked the
struggle for gay rights (Stonewall) with the women’s movement (Seneca
Falls) and civil rights for black Americans (Selma).* It is assumed that
this speech was heard by millions, and when gay marriage and gay
equality were mentioned, those words received some of the loudest cheers
from the huge crowd (the mall was at capacity, and authorities had
to turn away many who were among the last to arrive).
*We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths – that all of us are created equal – is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall; just as it guided all those men and women, sung and unsung, who left footprints along this great Mall, to hear a preacher say that we cannot walk alone; to hear a King proclaim that our individual freedom is inextricably bound to the freedom of every soul on Earth.
Equality
for gay Americans was mentioned several times*, and the icing on
the cake was a poem – “One, Today” – written and recited (just after
the public swearing in) by openly gay Latino poet Richard Blanco. I had
to pinch myself, because a little more than four years ago I would have
thought this unimaginable. Blanco followed in the footsteps of our first
inaugural poet, Robert Frost, who was chosen by President John F.
Kennedy in 1961, and Maya Angelou, who was chosen by President Bill
Clinton in 1993.
*Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law – for if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well.
I have already made a post about
Richard Blanco, but I have since learned a little more about him. The
roots of his writing began in 1968, when his parents fled Communist Cuba
and went into exile in Spain. At the time, Blanco’s mother, a teacher,
was pregnant with Richard, her second son. After five months in Madrid,
where she gave birth to Richard, they immigrated to New York. As a boy,
she said, Richard always had an interest in exploring his Cuban roots.
"I
always had questions about Cuba, about the family we left there," he
said. On his website he refers to himself as being “made in Cuba,
assembled in Spain, and imported to the U.S.”
That
sense of not belonging and trying to belong seeps through his books of
poetry, which often feature his family and their efforts to hold on to
their traditions. Richard got to visit the homeland his parents yearned
for when he was growing up. His relatives, who feared he would not speak
Spanish and would feel uncomfortable, were surprised when he picked
yucca in the fields, jumped into the canals and danced a lot – just like
everyone else. That trip as a young man would shape the poet’s future
work, in which he writes about his roots.
“I would say
that poetry is the place we go to when we don't have any more words –
that place that is so emotionally centered,” says Richard. “It is the
place we go to when we have something that we can't quite put a finger
on, that we can't explain away, that we can't easily understand with the
mind. It's the reason I come to poetry as well. As I love to say in my
writing classes: If you sit down totally convinced of what the poem is
going to be, don't even sit down, because writing a poem is a discovery
process.
I immediately found a reason for writing
beyond the love of the words. I had something that I wanted to discover.
All of a sudden I was twenty-something thinking: Wait a minute, I'm not
as Cuban as I thought and I'm not as American either. That kind of
trumped a lot of sexual identity questions.
My third
book is sort of the book in which I came out of the literary closet. Its
theme and topic was the intersection of these identities, or how they
collided. What does it mean to be a gay Cuban man? Asking that really
opened the door. It piqued my interest in that sense. And now I've been
with my partner for twelve years, and I'm 44. It's almost like my mind
couldn't handle negotiating both things at the same time, until this
third book.
My work has to do with searching –
searching within myself, but searching for what the universal experience
is that poetry taps into as well.”
Or click on this link for video of Blanco delivering his poem during Obama’s inauguration:
One sun rose on us today, kindled over our shores,
peeking over the Smokies, greeting the faces of the Great Lakes,
spreading a simple truth across the Great Plains,
then charging across the Rockies.
One light, waking up rooftops, under each one,
a story told by our silent gestures moving behind windows.
My face, your face, millions of faces in morning’s mirrors,
each one yawning to life, crescendoing into our day:
pencil-yellow school buses, the rhythm of traffic lights,
fruit stands: apples, limes, and oranges arrayed like rainbows
begging our praise. Silver trucks heavy with oil or paper –
bricks or milk, teeming over highways alongside us,
on our way to clean tables, read ledgers, or save lives –
to teach geometry, or ring up groceries as my mother did
for twenty years, so I could write this poem.
All of us as vital as the one light we move through,
the same light on blackboards with lessons for the day:
equations to solve, history to question, or atoms imagined,
the “I have a dream” we keep dreaming,
or the impossible vocabulary of sorrow that won’t explain
the empty desks of twenty children marked absent today, and forever.
Many prayers, but one light breathing color into stained glass windows,
life into the faces of bronze statues,
warmth onto the steps of our museums and park benches
as mothers watch children slide into the day.
One ground. Our ground, rooting us to every stalk
of corn, every head of wheat sown by sweat and hands,
hands gleaning coal or planting windmills
in deserts and hilltops that keep us warm,
hands digging trenches, routing pipes and cables,
hands as worn as my father’s cutting sugarcane
so my brother and I could have books and shoes.
The dust of farms and deserts, cities and plains
mingled by one wind – our breath. Breathe.
Hear it through the day’s gorgeous din of honking cabs,
buses launching down avenues, the symphony of footsteps,
guitars, and screeching subways,
the unexpected song bird on your clothes line.
Hear: squeaky playground swings, trains whistling,
or whispers across cafe tables, Hear: the doors we open
for each other all day, saying: hello, shalom,
buon giorno, howdy, namaste, or buenos días
in the language my mother taught me – in every language
spoken into one wind carrying our lives without prejudice,
as these words break from my lips.
One sky: since the Appalachians and Sierras claimed
their majesty, and the Mississippi and Colorado worked
their way to the sea. Thank the work of our hands:
weaving steel into bridges, finishing one more report
for the boss on time, stitching another wound
or uniform, the first brush stroke on a portrait,
or the last floor on the Freedom Tower
jutting into a sky that yields to our resilience.
One sky, toward which we sometimes lift our eyes
tired from work: some days guessing at the weather
of our lives, some days giving thanks for a love
that loves you back, sometimes praising a mother
who knew how to give, or forgiving a father
who couldn’t give what you wanted.
We head home: through the gloss of rain or weight
of snow, or the plum blush of dusk, but always – home,
always under one sky, our sky. And always one moon
like a silent drum tapping on every rooftop
and every window, of one country – all of us –
facing the stars.
Hope – a new constellation waiting for us to map it,
waiting for us to name it – together.
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