Samuel Steward: Renegade Professor...

...tattoo artist, writer, masochist & Thornton Wilder's lover

Steward (1909-1993) is the subject of a lurid and fascinating biography penned by art scholar Justin Spring: Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade (published September, 2010). 478 pages. Print and kindle editions available.

The title is not the half of it. Steward was the polymath to end all polymaths. He was a poet who made a career in academia, teaching English at DePaul and Loyola Universities (Steward held a PhD in English), but used the name Phil Sparrow when he began a career as a tattoo artist (he used a pseudonym so as not to jeopardize his teaching position). Steward became addicted to the use of pseudonyms. As the author of gay S&M pulp fiction over a period of more than 30 years, he went by Phil Andros (among many others), providing eager readers with astonishingly literate porn. When the Hells Angels in Oakland, CA, used him as their official tattoo artist, they called him Doc Sparrow. Readers of his articles in underground newspapers and magazines knew him as Ward Stames (an anagram of Sam Steward). And most of these circles of friends were completely ignorant of each other. Suffice it to say that the Hells Angels were unaware that their resident tattoo artist had once been Thornton Wilder's lover.

To a close circle of prominent artistic friends like Paul Cadmus, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Christopher Isherwood, photographer George Platt Lynes and the like, he was known as Sammy. Thornton Wilder drafted the third act of Our Town during a brief affair with Steward in Zurich, Switzerland, upon their first meeting. Steward had a fling with avant-garde writer James Purdy when Purdy was still in his teens. In the early 1950s Steward made pornographic drawings, many of them based on his own Polaroid photographs, and some of his work was published in the trilingual Swiss homosexual journal Der Kreis (The Circle). Oh -- forgot to mention that he played a mean piano.

What a life this man led. As a teenager he seduced Rudolph Valentino (and kept some of the silent film actor’s pubic hair as a memento*), made love to a much older Lord Alfred Douglas (providing an amorous link to his hero Oscar Wilde), bedded Andre Gide’s Arab lover (with Gide’s full consent), and put the moves on Rock Hudson in a department store elevator. Steward kept a card file of every single sexual dalliance, complete with statistics and descriptions of acts performed. Steward was a protegé of Albert Kinsey, who flew in a partner to engage Steward in S&M sexual activity so that Kinsey could film it (assisted by Kinsey's wife!). In his spare time Steward reveled in abusing alcohol and drugs. By the age of 26, while he was a professor at Loyola, Steward was drinking more than a quart of alcohol a day, all the while never missing a class or appointment.

Spring’s book jumps to no conclusions and is assiduously non-judgmental. He simply relates what he discovered among the 80 boxes full of drawings, letters, photographs, sexual paraphernalia, manuscripts and other items made accessible to him by the executor of Steward’s estate. Included was that infamous green metal card catalog labeled “Stud File,” which contained meticulously documented index cards on every sexual partner that Steward had enjoyed over a 50 year period.

It is possible to purchase new and used erotic paperback copies of Steward's pulp porn from amazon.com (search "Phil Andros"), but the prices are staggering: $30-$60-$90 and up for a used paperback, in the hundreds of dollars for new, uncirculated  copies. The Advocate magazine called the Phil Andros erotic novels "the Rolls-Royce" of gay porn. When Justin Spring (author of this biography) passed along several of them to a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, she stated that it was the "happiest, most well-adjusted pornography" she had ever read. My personal reaction (I read one only for researching this post, I swear!) is that you might think that only if your taste runs toward rough sex (and mine does). Enjoy this biography, and try to get your hands on a Phil Andros paperback, many of them replete with covers illustrated by Tom of Finland (see photo at beginning of post).

In an interview by Owen Keehnen in the last year of Steward’s life, Keehan described Steward as "a charmingly smutty Auntie Mame, only instead of life's being a banquet, it was a gay orgy in a tattoo parlor." Steward told Keehan why he gave up teaching English: "I was teaching a freshman class, and I had a little trick of firing a lot of questions at the class to find out what their background was. One of the questions was 'Who is Homer?' It was a mixed class of forty, and not one of them had ever heard of Homer. Can you imagine? Then I asked how many knew how to change a sparkplug, and about thirty hands went up. So that day I decided that maybe it was time for me to think about leaving higher education. I wanted to get as far away as I could. That was tattooing. The mysterious and dark side of tattooing attracted me as well."

*This incident is worthy of its own post. Rudolph Valentino, the silent film heartthrob of countless women, had been called a "pink powder puff" in the Chicago Tribune, a reference to his effeminate mannerisms. Valentino headed to Chicago by train to challenge the reporter to a duel (the writer never showed up) and was then on his way back to California when he stopped for an overnight at a hotel in Columbus, Ohio (July 24, 1926). Valentino was registered incognito, under his real name. Steward, who was living at his aunt's boarding house in Columbus, was an avid collector of autographs, and he got tipped off by a friend who worked at the hotel. Steward, who had celebrated his 17th birthday the day before, knocked on Valentino's door and got his autograph. Their collective gaydar must have been working overtime, because Valentino asked Steward, "Is there anything else you want?" Steward replied, "Yes. You!" Valentino obliged, and Steward kept a scrap of Valentino's pubic hair in a monstrance(!) by his bed for the rest of his life. Steward had not yet converted to Catholicism (1936; he left the church 18 months later, when he came to realize that no one with honesty could be both a Catholic and a homosexual); he was raised Methodist, and his father had taught Sunday School in a Methodist Church for 20 years. Tragically, within a month Valentino died of a ruptured appendix at age thirty-one. Steward's first published book, Pan and the Fire-Bird (1930), a collection of poems and short stories, contained Steward's tribute to Valentino, a poem titled "Libation to a Dead God."

Fairy Tales: Hans Christian Andersen

Hans Christan Andersen (1805-1875), known as the father of the modern fairy tale, was forced to go to work at the age of eleven, when his father died insane. Hans was apprenticed to a weaver and tailor in Odense and later worked at a tobacco factory. He had a high pitched voice and effeminate mannerisms, and once his trousers were pulled down when other workers suspected that he was a girl. At the age of 14 Andersen left Odense for Copenhagen to seek a career as a singer, dancer or an actor – he had a beautiful soprano voice. Eventually he was able to find sponsors to pay for his education. Andersen was an eccentric, overly sensitive student and exceptionally tall, almost ungainly, with an enormous nose that marred his looks. His feet, arms and legs were disproportionately large for his frame. In his later fairy tales, a common theme was that the ugly physical appearance of the hero often concealed great inner beauty, not revealed until after a series of misfortunes. He knew what he was writing about.

Andersen managed to publish his first novel upon graduation in 1829 and went on to become Denmark’s leading man of letters, writing novels, dramas, poetry, travel books and autobiographies. In 1837, at the age of thirty-two, he began writing the fairy tales for which he was known throughout the world. Andersen traveled across Europe and Africa, and was once hosted by Charles Dickens in England, although Dickens was nearly driven mad by Andersen’s prissy, effeminate ways and hypochondriacal bent.

Biographers tend to label Hans Christian Anderson as bisexual, and a few even suggest that he may have remained celibate for his whole life. However, he engaged in many romantic relationships, especially with young men, with whom he exchanged torrid letters. Many of his fairy tales were autobiographical, especially those that describe impossible love and poor self image, such as The Ugly Duckling* and The Little Mermaid. Andersen’s The Shadow is a fairytale that parents seldom read to their children, because it's so disturbing. It suggests that each of us has a shadowy part that will, if we let it, destroy us.

*From "The Ugly Duckling":
“He now felt glad at having suffered sorrow and trouble, because it enabled him to enjoy so much better all the pleasure and happiness around him; for the great swans swam round the new-comer, and stroked his neck with their beaks, as a welcome.”

His statue in Central Park (NYC) features the author sitting and reading to a stray duck. The 1956 sculpture by Georg J. Lober was constructed with contributions from Danish and American schoolchildren. It was cast at the Modern Art Foundry in Astoria, Queens.

Upon his death in 1875, his private journals were discovered, in which he detailed his enthusiasm for masturbation. He placed a cross mark in his journal for every time he masturbated. I kid you not. In the book “Hans Christian Andersen: The Life of a Storyteller,” Jackie Wullschlager writes of the open love letters Andersen wrote to handsome young men. He also wrote similar letters to a few women, such as the soprano Jenny Lind, but the women were always unapproachable and out of his league. His letters to young men were obviously an outlet for his sexual desire and his sensuous, romantic nature. Andersen's novel, O.T., depicting an intimate male friendship, was influenced by his unrequited love for Edvard Collin, whose eventual marriage sent Andersen into a tail-spin. When Andersen died, he was initially buried next to Collin and his wife Henrietta, until descendants of Collin had the bodies of Edvard and Henrietta re-interred elsewhere, leaving Andersen’s grave standing alone (in death as in life!). A healthier, reciprocal romantic relationship was carried out with the Hereditary Grand Duke of Weimar, Carl-Alexander von Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, whom Andersen met in 1844.

Andersen titled his autobiography “The Fairy Tale of My Life.” There is indeed something miraculous about the transformation of a poverty-stricken, uneducated child into a world-renowned writer. In it we learn that Andersen suffered from dyslexia and agoraphobia – not to mention the fact that he was a strict vegetarian. He also feared being burned or buried alive.

When Andersen's funeral was held at the Cathedral of Our Lady in Copenhagen (August 11, 1875), a national day of mourning was declared. Throngs of people attended the funeral, including royalty and many celebrities. His fairy tales were translated into more languages than any other books except the Bible, and his stories continue to influence and inspire children and adults alike.

The Little Mermaid
Highly disturbing and morbid tale about a mermaid who makes a diabolical bargain with a sea witch and suffers her tongue to be cut out and her tail to be lost, all for the love of a prince. Inevitably, he completely fails to recognize the enormity of her sacrifice.

The Red Shoes
Vanity is the sin of the anti-heroine (vindictively named Karen after Andersen's loathed half-sister) in this nasty tale, which was made into an acclaimed film in 1948. Karen's sin of going to church in bright red shoes and failing to care for her grandmother is punished by her being forced to dance unceasingly – forever. Rest comes only when her feet are cut off with an axe. Nice!

The Ice Maiden
There is a touch of the earlier Snow Queen in this novella, a dark, tragic love story about Rudy and Babette who are stolen away by the icy Glacier Queen, a terrifying figure who represents death.

Poultry Meg's Family
One of several of Andersen's highly charged and erotic tales. The sexually voracious heroine, inspired by a Danish historical figure, swaps a comfortable life with her rich husband for a bit of "rough trade" and lovers who beat her.

Anne Lisbeth
Spooky story telling the fate suffered by a woman who rejects her ugly son and becomes a nursemaid to the count's son instead. Retribution comes in the form of rejection by those she has served, the drowning of her own son and guilt-ridden nightmares. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Edward Tanner, a.k.a. Patrick Dennis

Author of Auntie Mame

Edward Everett Tanner III was born in 1921 in Illinois into a prominent family of staunch Republicans. Edward, nicknamed "Pat", was a popular high school student who excelled in writing and theater. In 1942, at the age of 21 he joined the American Field Service, working as an ambulance driver in North Africa and the Middle East. After WW II he married Louise Stickney, with whom he had two children, even though he had struggled with homosexual leanings his entire adult life.

Under an assumed name at the age of 36 he wrote a best-selling novel, which remained on the NYT Bestseller list for more than two years, selling more than 2 million copies in the first edition. A year later he became the first writer to have three books on the NYT Bestseller list at the same time. His books were mostly biting social satires which almost single-handedly introduced "camp" into mainstream American culture. He also wrote several books under the female pseudonym, Virginia Rowans.

Tanner made millions from his 16 books and became the toast of New York society. His novels were made into wildly popular films, plays, television series and musicals, but by the 1970s his writing style had fallen out of fashion. A week after he was profiled in Life magazine, he attempted suicide and was committed to a mental hospital for eight months. After years of leading a double life as a gay man, he had fallen in love with another man and decided he had to abandon his family. He had always been a profligate spender, and by the time he left his wealthy wife, he was broke and had to go to work as a butler, a job he actually enjoyed. Giving full vent to his homosexual orientation, he became a fixture in the Greenwich Village gay scene in New York.

His employers at the time, Mr. and Mrs. Ray Croc (founder of McDonalds), had no idea that their butler, Edward Tanner, was in fact the writer Patrick Dennis, author of Auntie Mame, which in stage, movie and musical forms would provide Rosalind Russell and Angela Lansbury with major theatrical roles.

Mr. Dennis died from pancreatic cancer in 1976, at the age of 55, his days as a dilettante long behind him. In the year 2000 his ashes were interred with the body of his wife Louise in St. James’s Cemetery in Stony Brook, Long Island.

Note: I can especially recommend an obscure book by Mr. Dennis: Tony (1966). The narrator, whose name is never disclosed, meets Tony, a name-dropping scoundrel, when they become college roommates. Tony is a complete fraud and a pathological liar, yet the narrator chronicles their decades long love-hate friendship in hilarious style. Tony morphs into whatever form will get him ahead. An inveterate social climber, even Tony’s sexuality is “fluid” when a wealthy homosexual man falls in love with him (the man’s mother writes a very large check to have Tony fly the coop). Many aspects of  Tony’s character are autobiographical (the author had three real life identities as Edward Tanner, Patrick Dennis and Virginia Rowans, not to mention the bisexuality), and the reader can easily lose track of the number of times Tony reinvents himself . This is perfect “beach” reading, and used copies are readily available from Amazon and Alibris.

A 2002 biography, Uncle Mame: The Life of Patrick Dennis, written by Eric Myers, is available in a Kindle edition, and used copies of the print editions are likewise available from Amazon and Alibris.

Langston Hughes

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

Sir Stephen Spender

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."

John Cheever

Pulitzer Prize winning American novelist and short story author John Cheever (1912-1982) suffered from many demons, chiefly a debilitating alcoholism. Two years after his death his daughter Susan wrote a memoir, Home Before Dark, in which she mentioned her father’s guilt-inducing bisexuality, revealing that at the end of his life, when he had dried out, he found love with “Rip,” a former student whose real name is Max Zimmer. Rip moved in with Cheever and his wife Mary, driving the esteemed author to medical treatments and chopping wood for the fireplace. Max even served as a pall bearer at Cheever’s funeral and sat with the family during the service. While Rip was living in Cheever’s household, however, Cheever was so determined to give the appearance of a 100% heterosexual male that he took Rip out to the woods in order to have sex. Before Mary’s death she nevertheless said that she knew what was going on all along.

Susan’s brother Benjamin later edited a volume of Cheever’s letters, writing in his introduction how difficult it had been learning the extent of his father’s homosexual activity, even though Cheever had come out to Benjamin two weeks before his death. With the 2009 publication of Cheever: A Life by Blake Bailey, Susan Cheever said that she was astonished to learn how much gay activity there had been in her father’s life. Among his dalliances were relations with photographer Walker Evans, writer Calvin Kentfield, Tom Smallwood, Allan Gurganus and various male prostitutes – all of it leading to a toxic form of self hatred, for which Cheever was nearly unmatched.

After Cheever’s death from cancer, his widow Mary continued to live in their Westchester County, NY, home for more than thirty years. After Mary’s death last year at the age of 95, the five acre property once occupied by the “Chekhov of the suburbs” was put up for sale. The resulting media blitz in newspapers and magazines brought Cheever's name back from the dust bin, warts and all, including  knowledge of Cheever’s bisexuality and near death from alcoholism. If any good came from this, the publicity introduced his writing to a younger generation which had not read any of his novels or short stories.

Cheever wrote five novels and many dozens of short stories (many first published in the New Yorker), for which he won Pulitzer prizes, National Book Critics Circle awards, and the National Medal for Literature. As well, his work has been included in the Library of America.

Thomas Mann

Thomas Mann (1875-1955) was perhaps the greatest German novelist of the early twentieth century. In 1929 he won the Nobel Prize in Literature for his novels Death in Venice*, Buddenbrooks and The Magic Mountain (Buddenbrooks had sold more than a million copies in German before the Hitler era). Mann was referred to as the “heir to Goethe” during his lifetime.

Because his wife was Jewish, his family fled to the U.S. after Hitler took power in Germany; the Nazi Party revoked his German citizenship in 1936 in response to Mann’s public denunciations of Nazi politics. After teaching at Princeton in New Jersey, Mann moved west to California. Mann subsequently became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1944. From 1941-1953 he lived in Pacific Palisades above Santa Monica, California, a dozen miles west of downtown Los Angeles. A few years ago I tracked down two of his former homes at 740 Amalfi Drive and 1550 San Remo Drive, both in Pacific Palisades. I parked the car and peeped through the shrubbery, like a true stalker. The houses remain private residences, so be cautious if you want to mimic my questionable behavior.

While in California Mann recorded a series of anti-Nazi radio speeches, which were broadcast from Britain, so that they could reach German listeners. Ironically, the FBI kept a file on Mann from the late 1920s until his death in 1955, primarily to track any communist leanings. The last three years of his life were spent in a town close to Zürich, Switzerland.

Homoerotic, often unrequited, love was a significant feature in much of his writing. In Death in Venice (1912), for example, an older man’s hopeless affection for a young boy leads to tragedy. Mann’s personal experience contributed to that story: in the summer of 1911, Mann had been staying at the Grand Hôtel des Bains on the Lido of Venice with his wife and brother when he became enraptured by the angelic figure of Władysław Moes, an adolescent Polish boy.

Papers that were unsealed twenty years after his death revealed that Mann had been exclusively homosexual through his late twenties, and that Mann remained intensely attracted to men throughout his life. His diaries told of his struggle with his sexual orientation, as when he described his feelings for the young violinist/painter Paul Ehrenberg as “the central experience” of his heart. Shattered by the failure of this homosexual relationship, Mann fled into marriage, repressing for decades his homosexual yearnings. Nevertheless, at the age of 53 Mann fell in love with a 17-year-old boy, Klaus Heuser. At the age of 75 (!), Mann set his sights on a young waiter at a hotel in Zürich, immortalizing him in “Felix Krull.” After Mann’s diaries were unsealed, German reporters tracked down the waiter and found him working at the St. Regis Hotel in NYC. The aging hotel employee became a minor celebrity in Germany and appeared on television numerous times.

Embarrassingly, Mann’s diaries were embellished by sketches of shirtless gardeners, soldiers, and even his own son Klaus, who was a homosexual drug addict who ultimately committed suicide, as did another of his sons. Mann had three daughters and three sons, all of whom were bisexual or homosexual. Each became an artistic or literary figure, as well.

Thomas Mann achieved a cult status during his lifetime, a status that seemed to intensify after his death. Although there was always a net of latent homosexuality cast over Mann's life, his most ardent heterosexual fans chose to dismiss it as probable gossip or wishful thinking on the part of Mann's gay fans. The publication of his once-sealed diaries put an end to that line of thought.

*Death in Venice was made into both a 1971 film and an opera, the latter written by homosexual composer Benjamin Britten in the early 1970s. Britten's last opera, the work is unusual in that it is written for only three singers: a tenor (Von Aschenbach), a counter-tenor (the voice of Apollo) and a baritone who covers all the other roles; the young Tadzio (the object of Von Aschenbach's lustful obsession) and his family are portrayed by dancers. Excerpts from a production at Teatro La Fenice in Venice are contained in the following video:



The trailer for the 1971 film Death in Venice, directed by Luchino Visconti and starring the great homosexual actor Dirk Bogarde:



Thomas Mann (Quote from Death in Venice):
“Solitude produces originality, bold and astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportionate, the absurd and the forbidden.”

The entire novel Death in Venice can be downloaded in English translation for free at:
http://www.ebook3000.com/Death-in-Venice_59705.html
There is a link for a PDF format download as well (Rapidshare), using Adobe Reader software.

Donald Windham and Sandy Campbell

Donald Windham, second from left, with dancer Tanaquil Le Clercq, painter Buffie Johnson, Tennessee Williams and Gore Vidal.

Gay partners Donald Windham (1920-2010) and Sandy Montgomery Campbell lend their names to a new literary award administered by Yale University to endow up to nine unrestricted $150,000* annual awards to emerging and established English language writers for outstanding achievement in fiction, nonfiction, and drama (it is possible that poetry may be included at a later time). The awards are administered by the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale, and winners are solely determined by experts in each field. Mr. Windham, who never went to college himself**, specifically requested that writers with no academic affiliation be considered. The awards are not operated by an application process. Instead, a steering committee solicits nominations, and a panel of judges selects the winners. The first nine recipients of these new awards were announced by live stream on March 4, 2013, and a ceremony conferring the awards will take place at Yale on September 10, 2013.

*To compare the richness of the Windham-Campbell awards, it should be noted that the Pulitzer Prizes for Literature and the National Book Awards are each worth only $10,000. Windham wished to ensure that the prizes would be substantial enough to enable each recipient to spend a full year writing, unencumbered by financial concerns.

**Immediately after high school, Windham worked at Atlanta’s Coca-Cola plant, rolling barrels through the factory. High school was the extent of his formal education.

The endowment for the prizes comes from the estate of openly gay writer Donald Windham, who died in 2010. A co-executor of Windham’s estate said that Mr. Windham’s will was quite specific about his intention to establish a fund for literary prizes, although he left the details of how such prizes should be awarded to be worked out by his estate’s executors and advisers at Yale.

Donald Windham was a minor, but well-regarded, author who relocated to New York City from Atlanta as a virtually penniless teenager. He quickly befriended Tennessee Williams, with whom he collaborated on a play, a stage adaptation of D. H. Lawrence's You Touched Me. Windham's social circle soon included the likes of Truman Capote, George Platt Lynes, George Balanchine, Paul Cadmus and Lincoln Kirstein. Windham wrote short stories and novels, including “Two People” (1965, available in a Kindle edition) about a married New York stockbroker who falls in love with a teenage Italian boy. He is perhaps best known, however, for his memoir, “Lost Friendships,” about his relations with Williams and Capote. Struck by the inaccuracy of Williams's own Memoirs, Windham published Williams's letters to him. Subsequently, Williams falsely claimed that Windham had not been granted permission to do so and trashed the volume, resulting in a very acrimonious and often public dissolution of their friendship.

Windham and Sandy Campbell (shown in photo as young men in Italy), were a well-known couple in New York’s gay literary circles. It was at a chance meeting at Paul Cadmus’ studio that Donald met Princeton undergraduate Sandy Campbell, who was modeling for one of Cadmus’ paintings. Windham and Campbell began a 45 year relationship that led to a collaboration as avid book collectors, voracious readers, and friends with many of the most important literary figures of their time. The couple lived together from 1943 until Campbell's death.

Windham wrote memoirs, novels, plays, short stories, and a children’s book. Campbell was a stage actor who also penned unsigned book reviews for The New Yorker and contributed articles to Harper’s Magazine and other publications. Campbell died in 1988, predeceasing Windham by 22 years. However, the partners lived so unostentatiously that it surprised many that Windham could leave a bequest large enough to generate more than a million dollars in prize money every year. His estate was amassed from a large inheritance from Campbell, successful investing and a very modest lifestyle.

In 1989, Windham gave Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library a collection of his  papers, with the stipulation that the library would receive the balance of Windham’s literary estate. Yale describes The Donald Windham-Sandy Campbell Collection at the Beinecke as “a rich and diverse trove of correspondence between partners Windham and Campbell and such writers as Tennessee Williams, E. M. Forster, Truman Capote and Christopher Isherwood; other correspondence involves such notable writers as Carson McCullers, Marianne Moore, Graham Greene, Isak Dinesen and Paul Bowles.”

1955 portrait of Windham (standing) with life-partner Sandy Campbell by celebrity gay photographer and writer Carl Van Vechten.

Truman Capote

Truman Capote (1924-1984) was a notorious, back-stabbing liar who had a keen facility for making enemies. He tossed off outrageous, barbed comments like hand grenades, and his life –  a non-stop orgy of drinking, parties and gossip – was a sordid mess, almost from day one. While attending prep school he worked as a copyboy for New Yorker magazine, but was summarily fired after angering Robert Frost.

Capote was openly homosexual, with physical and vocal affectations that alienated many people. He was five-feet three-inches tall with a lisping, high pitched voice. Capote’s rehab treatments (for drugs, depression and heavy drinking) and various breakdowns frequently became public.

He hobnobbed with authors, critics, business tycoons, philanthropists, Hollywood and theatrical celebrities, royalty and members of high society, both in the U.S. and abroad. He was also an extraordinarily talented writer.

His novel Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948, on the New York Times best seller list for nine weeks) was a thinly veiled autobiography of his Alabama childhood. It introduced the character Joel, a young man who, through a meeting with a transvestite, discovers and learns to accept his own homosexuality; he wrote about what was going on sexually in own his life. The Harold Halma photograph on the dust jacket created a sensation, inspiring Andy Warhol to craft his first NYC one-man show as Fifteen Drawings Based on the Writings of Truman Capote (1952). The Halma photo (not shown here) was widely reproduced and often satirized.

The novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958) introduced the character of Holly Golightly, becoming  one of Capote's best known creations, and the prose style prompted Norman Mailer to call Capote "the most perfect writer of my generation." Most critics agree that in the 1961 film version, Holly Golightly was Audrey Hepburn’s defining role (shown at right), although Capote was highly critical of the film’s many digressions from the original source. But it was a 1959 Kansas quadruple murder that inspired Capote’s 1966 non-fiction novel and movie that made him rich and famous: In Cold Blood. The highly praised biopic film Capote (2005), in which Capote was played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, spanned the years Capote spent researching and writing the wildly successful book.

While he had two serious relationships with men – Smith College professor Newton Arvin (1946-1949) and ballet dancer/novelist/playwright Jack Dunphy (1949 until Capote’s death) – they were not exclusive; Arvin lost his teaching job after his homosexuality was exposed, but Dunphy became the chief beneficiary of Capote’s will. Capote confessed to a sexual liaison with actor Errol Flynn and other high-profile bisexuals, but he famously claimed to know many high-profile people he had in fact never met, such as Greta Garbo. Capote and Gore Vidal were arch rivals. Vidal once observed, "Truman Capote has tried, with some success, to get into a world that I have tried, with some success, to get out of." Lee Radziwill, the sister of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, supplanted the older Babe Paley as Capote’s primary female companion in public appearances.

In 1966 Capote hosted a gala honoring Katherine Graham, Washington socialite and publisher of The Washington Post. Held in the grand ballroom of the Plaza Hotel, the Black and White Ball was a legendary social event. Capote dangled the prized invitations for months, snubbing early supporters as he determined who was “in” and who was “out”. In this photo Capote, host of the Black and White Ball at the Plaza Hotel, escorts the guest of honor, Katharine Graham (1966).

The much-delayed publication of Answered Prayers (1986, posthumously) brought about his fall from grace with high society. Various chapters published in Esquire magazine (1975-76) betrayed the confidences of high profile friends such as Tennessee Williams and William S. and Babe Paley. Although Capote subsequently underwent a facelift, lost weight and experimented with hair transplants, he became a recluse after the revocation of his driver's license and a hallucinatory seizure in 1980. He died of liver cancer in 1984 at the Los Angeles home of Joanna Carson, ex-wife of TV host Johnny Carson, on whose show Capote had been a frequent guest. After Capote’s death, rival Gore Vidal described Capote's demise as "a good career move".

Photo of Truman Capote by Henri Cartier-Bresson:

A Christmas Memory, narrated by Truman Capote. This 1966 Emmy-award winning television version of his 1956 short story (published in Mademoiselle magazine) reveals Capote’s distinctive, quirky voice, starting at the 0:47 timing mark. Have a listen.

Edward Field

Gay poet Edward Field was born in 1924 in Brooklyn and attended New York University before enlisting in the Air Force in 1943. During the war, as a navigator in heavy bombers, he flew 25 missions over Germany. Field began writing poetry during his military service but did not gain recognition until his collection of poems, Stand Up, Friend, With Me, was awarded the Lamont Poetry Selection prize in 1962. The collection was published the following year.

Field uses words in a straightforward way, and he does not expect his audience to have arcane knowledge. He says he was asked to translate a book of Eskimo poems for children, because he was the only writer the publisher could find whose poetry could be understood by ten-year-olds.

There is also a confessional nature to his poetry. While earlier poems contained subtle references to homosexuality, A Full Heart (1977), is a collection of genial poems in which Field came out as a gay poet. His gay manifesto is "The Two Orders of Love." In this poem, he sees homosexuality as a natural and necessary condition:

Nature needs both to do its work
and humankind, confusing two separate orders of love
makes rules allowing only one kind
and defies the universe.

Terrence Johnson sums up Field’s place in the genre of contemporary literature: “Field's poetry is a pleasurable and valuable account of coming to terms with homosexuality in the literary world of New York in the second half of the twentieth century.”

His honors include an Academy Award for the documentary film “To Be Alive” (1965) for which he wrote the voice-over narration, the Shelley Award, a Lambda Award, and the Bill Whitehead Lifetime Achievement Award.

Field, who maintains a web site at www.edwardfield.com, has given readings at hundreds of colleges and other institutions, including the Library of Congress. You can hear him reading poetry at:

www.YouTube.com/fieldinski

John Medeiros, gay apologist

An Open Apology to Amy Koch
on behalf of all gay and lesbian Minnesotans

Dear Ms. Koch,

On behalf of all gays and lesbians living in Minnesota, I would like to wholeheartedly apologize for our community's successful efforts to threaten your traditional marriage. We are ashamed of ourselves for causing you to have what the media refers to as an "illicit affair" with your staffer, and we also extend our deepest apologies to him and to his wife. These recent events have made it quite clear that our gay and lesbian tactics have gone too far, affecting even the most respectful of our society.

We apologize that our selfish requests to marry those we love has cheapened and degraded traditional marriage so much that we caused you to stray from your own holy union for something more cheap and tawdry. And we are doubly remorseful in knowing that many will see this as a form of sexual harassment of a subordinate.

It is now clear to us that if we were not so self-focused and myopic, we would have been able to see that the time you wasted diligently writing legislation that would forever seal the definition of marriage as being between one man and one woman, could have been more usefully spent reshaping the legal definition of "adultery."

Forgive us. As you know, we are not church-going people, so we are unable to fully appreciate that "gay marriage" is incompatible with Christian values, despite the fact that those values carry a biblical tradition of adultery such as yours. We applaud you for keeping that tradition going.

And finally, shame on us for thinking that marriage is a private affair, and that our marriage would have little impact on anyone's family. We now see that marriage is more than that. It is an agreement with society. We should listen to the Minnesota Family Council when it tells us that marriage is about being public, which explains why marriages are public ceremonies. Never did we realize that it is exactly because of this societal agreement that the entire world is looking at you in shame and disappointment instead of minding its own business.

From the bottom of our hearts, we ask that you please accept our apology.

Thank you.
John Medeiros
Minneapolis MN

John Medeiros, a gay writer working in Minneapolis, Minnesota, is curator of Queer Voices: a GLBT reading series for queer writers. Note: John sent me an E-mail stating that his photograph and bio I had placed on this blog were copyrighted, so I subsequently removed them.

Alan Shayne & Norman Sunshine

Gay marriage is at the forefront of today's political battles, and a book was published Tuesday that puts a human face on this contentious debate:

Double Life: A Love Story
By Alan Shayne and Norman Sunshine

It’s a dual memoir by a gay male couple who have been in a relationship for more than 50 years. With high profiles in the entertainment, advertising and art communities, the authors share inside stories from film, television and media, featuring Marlon Brando, Rock Hudson, Laurence Olivier, Truman Capote and Robert Redford. A standout is their neighbor Rock Hudson’s generosity in lending the couple his house after a fire had made their own home uninhabitable for many months. A nosy Katherine Hepburn invited herself over to see what changes Rock Hudson had made to the house, since she knew the previous owner. The book is brimming with tantalizing anecdotes such as this.

“We both grew up at a time when homosexuality was not even spoken about,” the couple writes. “There were certainly no books that could help a young person understand that two people of the same sex could build a happy, productive and loving life together. We wanted to show people who were not gay that our life was not unlike theirs. We are all pretty much the same, so we deserve equal protection under the Constitution.”

Alan Shayne retired as President of Warner Brothers Television in 1986, following a career that included Broadway, playing opposite Lena Horne in his early years. As a leading casting director, he worked on such films as Catch 22, All the President’s Men and many others. At Warner Brothers, he shepherded long-running television series such as as Alice, Night Court and The Dukes of Hazard.

Norman Sunshine was a successful magazine illustrator in New York who went on to be a painter and sculptor whose works are in museums as well as in important private collections. In the early years of his career, he was vice president, creative director of an advertising agency, and coined the phrase, “What Becomes a Legend Most?” (for Blackglama Mink) as well as “Danskins are not just for Dancing.”

Upon the two men meeting in New York in 1958, “We didn’t want to live together,” says Shayne. “We didn’t have any examples of what a good love relationship between two men could be. And there was always the problem of hiding so no one would know we were gay. There was no question that if I were known to be gay, living with another man, it would make it more difficult for me to get work as an actor.”

As an artist, Sunshine was able to maintain a moderately out lifestyle. But when the first exhibition of his paintings in New York brought on a profile in The New York Times in 1968, he was photographed in the apartment that he revealed sharing with Shayne. At both his advertising agency and Shayne’s television production company, the article was met with icy, absolute silence.

Shayne and Sunshine flank their good friend and neighbor, Joan Rivers, who hosted their book release party at New York’s 21 Club.

Even in the 1970s, when Sunshine won an Emmy for the graphics and title design he had created for one of Shayne’s television productions, “Alan and I agreed it was not a good idea for us to be seen together at an industry event,” he remembers. “Alan, after all, was one of the very few homosexuals who had such a powerful, high profile job, and who lived openly with a man. Homophobia had its adherents and some ruthless climber up the executive ladder would certainly love an opportunity to use it…‘Better to be seen with a woman,’ we were advised by a very trusted friend. ‘Makes everyone more comfortable.’”

In 2008 the State of Massachusetts allowed the opportunity for the couple to be married on a beach in Nantucket. “We were like a long, empty, closed-up house where the windows have just been opened,” writes Shayne. “The fresh air thrilled through us, and after years of only being who we were in the privacy of our homes or with a few friends, we were out in the world, under the sky, no longer pretending. We were at last free.”

The couple also collaborated on several literary projects, including the popular Christmas classic, The Minstrel Tree (published 10 years ago), an old-fashioned family Christmas story. Equally popular with children and adults, it appeared in condensed form in Good Housekeeping magazine in December, 2001. That book, along with this just-published memoir, would make a fine pair of holiday gifts.

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Man Crush

Emerson had erotic thoughts about another man, Martin Gay. During his early years at Harvard, Emerson found himself attracted to the young freshman, about whom he wrote sexually charged poetry.

In his junior year at Harvard, Emerson began his journal, and in the August 8th entry, he wrote about his handsome schoolmate Martin Gay:

"A strange face in the Freshman class whom I should like to know very much. He has a great deal of character in his features....His name is Gay. I shall endeavor to become acquainted with him & wish if possible that I might be able to recall at a future period the singular sensations which his presence produced..."

With an unembarrassed frankness he wrote in his journal about the disturbing power of the glances he and Martin Gay exchanged. He would remain susceptible to such crushes, expressed at first through glances, all his life. Later he wrote about the quickness with which a glance could arouse a depth of interest. He had a sort of theory of "the glance." And while he heavily crossed out the Martin Gay journal notes at some later time, his initial recording of them indicates his essential emotional openness.

In a journal entry dated May 1, 1821, Emerson writes:

"I am more puzzled than ever with Gay's conduct. He came out to meet me yesterday, but just before we met, I turned another corner and most strangely avoided him. This morning I went out to meet him in a different direction and stopped to speak to a lounger so as to be directly in Gay's way, but he turned into the first gate and went towards Stoughton. All this child's play persists without any apparent design, and as soberly as if both of us were intent on some tremendous affair."

Emerson's journal was subsequently filled with many poems, comments and references to Martin Gay, who went on to become a prominent Boston physician.

As for Emerson (1803-1882), his first wife died at age twenty. Emerson did not seem to inspire passion in women, and he treated his second wife according to strictures of those times – wives were for bearing children and running households. Emerson proposed marriage to his second wife by writing her a letter. After the nuptials she treated him coolly and always called him Mr. Emerson. While Emerson admitted he could not write the sort of romantic love letters that women wanted, he had no difficulty writing sexually suggestive poetry about Martin Gay, and he wrote about Nathaniel Hawthorne in passionate terms, as well.

And there you have it.

New Novel from Alan Hollinghurst

The Stranger's Child
by Alan Hollinghurst

UPDATE: This book is now available stateside.

At long last, a new book from Alan Hollinghurst (b. 1954), a gay British novelist, poet, professor and editor who lives in London. His first four books, written over a span of almost 20 years, form a quartet that explores gay life in England, past and present. The Swimming-Pool Library (1988), his sex-drenched first book, mapped the gay world before and after the 1967 Sexual Offences Act, which decriminalized homosexuality in Britain. The Folding Star (1994) was a disturbing study of pederastic desire, in which a 33-year-old male tutor had a romanticized sexual obsession with one of his male high school students. The Spell (1998) was a sex-and-drugs-fueled comedy of manners. The Line Of Beauty, which won the Booker Prize in 2004, was a dark comedy exposing the hypocrisy of Thatcher-era England in the 1980s, tackling the thorny issue of AIDS. The Line of Beauty was made into a highly regarded 3-part TV mini-series in 2006.

Those four books, obviously influenced by Henry James, Evelyn Waugh, E.M. Forster and F. Scott Fitzgerald, are a set of theme and variations: hidden histories, young men's rites of passage, the compulsion of desire, the fragility and perplexity of gay love and romance.

The Stranger's Child (2011) – the title comes from Tennyson's In Memoriam – is Hollinghurst's fifth novel, and his first since The Line Of Beauty. The Stranger’s Child is a book about memory and its failings presented over an almost century-long sweep of changing social, sexual and cultural attitudes. Just-published reviews have been glowing:

“Bloody-hell, this is good! . . . Punctuated by abrupt and jagged turns of fate, skillfully redolent of life lived forwards, this story is fabulously involving and rich. It’s also very funny, in a dry and forgiving way. The silky precision of its prose . . . is matched by the mimetic completeness of its fictional world. This is an exercise in realism of a dazzlingly high order: it really does seem to be observed rather than imagined. The touches of extraneous detail are unobtrusive, concrete and exact. It is an extraordinary achievement.” — Sam Leith, The Spectator (UK)

Synopsis: The Stranger's Child is a century-spanning saga about a love triangle that continues across generations. In 1913, George Sawle brings charming, handsome Cecil Valance to his family’s modest home outside London for a summer weekend. George is enthralled by his Cambridge schoolmate, and soon his sixteen-year-old sister, Daphne, is equally besotted by Cecil, as she thrives on the stories he tells about the country estate he is heir to. But the poem that Cecil writes in Daphne’s autograph album will change their lives forever; after Cecil is killed in WW I and his reputation burnished, the poem will be recited by every schoolchild in England. This poem, supposedly written to a girl, is actually addressed to a boy and contains a hidden text within it, a forbidden love. Over time, a tragic love story is spun, even as secrets lie buried, until decades later an ambitious biographer threatens to unearth them.

In the nearly hundred years of time spanned by this novel, even the word for homosexual is referenced with historical accuracy. In the section that takes place in 1913, the word “sodomite” is used, true to the period. Next, the word “bugger” (very much a Bloomsbury word) comes into play in the section set in the 1920s – and so on through the term “queer,” and finally “gay.”

The Stranger’s Child was published in June in Britain and will be available is now available in the U.S. in October.


Here’s the first 10 minutes of the BBC mini-series. There’s already a temptation scene (a generous dash of shirtless male flesh) at the 5:15 mark, followed by several awkward moments dishing with the sister, who takes it upon herself to set up her gay male house guest with a date, in this case a black man. Fairly typical of British writers, who seem obsessed with relationships that portray intrigues of race and class distinctions. What you can’t discern from the mini-series is the craft with which Hollinghurst writes. Read one of his books.

James Merrill

Gay Poet and Philanthropist (1926-1995)

Born on March 3, 1926, James Merrill lived a life of privilege as the son of the co-founder of the Merrill Lynch investment firm. Merrill learned German and French from his Prussian nanny, and his parent’s fabulous 50-room mansion in the Hamptons boasted interiors that resembled a European palace. He had the money to go where he wanted, study where he wanted, and meet the best people. He lived modestly, even though he had great income from trust funds. He became a philanthropist and created several private foundations.

One of the most admired of American poets, Mr. Merrill was known for the elegance of his writing, his moral sensibility and his ability to transform moments of autobiography into deeply meaningful poetry. He once described his poetry as "chronicles of love and loss." Many consider him the heir to W. H. Auden.

Merrill attended Lawrenceville School and later Amherst College (graduating summa cum laude), where his professor Kimon Friar became his lover. Friar published Merrill’s “The Black Swan” in 1946 in Athens, Greece, which was to become important to Merrill and his partner of more than four decades, David Jackson (on left in photo), also a writer. For 20 years Jackson and Merrill divided their time between Stonington, Connecticut and Greece. From 1979 they spent part of each year at Jackson's home in Key West, Florida.

Though Merrill was wealthy his entire life, he understood the plight of many artists and founded the Ingram Merrill Foundation in 1956, a permanent endowment created for writers and painters.

He won every major literary award, including the Pulitzer Prize. As Merrill matured, the polished and taut brilliance of his early work gave way to a more informal, relaxed style. Already established in the 1970s among the finest poets of his generation, Merrill made a surprising detour when he began incorporating occult messages into his work. The result, a 560-page apocalyptic epic published in 1982 as “The Changing Light at Sandover”, documents two decades of messages dictated from otherworldly spirits during Ouija board séances hosted by Merrill and his partner David Jackson.

Merrill served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1979 until his death, and he contributed generously to literary causes, the arts, and public television. While vacationing in Arizona, Merrill died at the age of 68 on February 6, 1995, from a heart attack.

James Merrill's poem "Clearing the Title" is about this house at 702 Elizabeth Street in Key West, Florida, where he resided seasonally with partner David Jackson.

This modest Key West structure was a far cry from the house Merrill grew up in. The Orchard, still standing on Hill Street in South Hampton, was a 250-foot long house with a 70-foot-long music room with 18-foot ceilings and an Aeolian pipe organ with gilded pipes (visible at left in the photo is the bench and organ console, covered with a velvet cloth and bowl; click image to enlarge).

Christopher Rice

Author of best-selling mysteries & thrillers

Christopher Rice, born in 1978, is a 33-year-old gay American writer who has penned five best-selling novels over a ten-year period:

A Density of Souls
The Snow Garden
Light Before Day
Blind Fall
The Moonlit Earth (published a year ago)

They belong to the mystery/thriller genre, and each has gay characters who play prominent roles. His first novel (A Density of Souls) was published when he was just twenty-two years old. After Blind Fall, his novel about a gay marine, was published, Rice received death threats in reaction to his YouTube video about the book, in which he criticized the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy.


Here’s the video that caused all that fuss:





For years Rice wrote a column in The Advocate, and most of them are archived on his literary web site:
www.christopherricebooks.com

He is the son of Anne Rice, author of all those “Vampire” novels and a notable S&M “Beauty” fairy tale trilogy (published in the 1980s under the pseudonym “A.N. Roquelaure”). After the death of her husband, Anne Rice moved to California to be closer to her son, who makes his home in West Hollywood, Los Angeles.

Pierre Seel

Memoir of Nazi Terrors Against Homosexuals

French-born Pierre Seel came out of the closet at the age of 58 to bear witness to the Nazi deportation of homosexuals during WWII. After years of anguished silence, his powerful memoir recalls the details of his arrest and torture by the Gestapo and his horrific experiences at a concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Alsace, where homosexuals were the most despised of prisoners.

After the trauma he had endured at the hands of the Nazis as a homosexual, he tried for years to deny his true nature, even to the point of getting married and having children. That marriage was a failure. But in 1981, outraged by a prominent bishop's characterization of homosexuals as "sick," he became inspired with a sense of obligation to obtain recognition for what had happened to some 350,000 homosexuals during the war, and his public statements became a cause célèbre in France.

In 'I, Pierre Seel, Deported Homosexual: A Memoir of Nazi Terror' (1995), Seel narrated his story to Jean Le Bitoux, a French writer, journalist and gay activist. In it, he publicly airs the long-overlooked tragedy of the Nazi persecution of homosexuals. Seel’s account of his suffering and his plea for justice are heartrending in their dignified restraint, even though Seel had himself been tortured and raped with a wooden pole by the Nazis.

Below is an excerpt from his book, which has been translated into German, Spanish and English. I warn you that it is difficult to read.







"Days, weeks, months wore by. I spent six months, from May to November 1941, in that place, where horror and savagery were the law. But I've put off describing the worst ordeal I suffered. It happened during my earliest weeks in the camp and contributed more than anything else to making me a silent, obedient shadow among the others. One day the loudspeakers ordered us to report immediately to the roll-call site. Shouts and yells urged us to get there without delay. Surrounded by SS men, we had to form a square and stand at attention, as we did for morning roll call. The commandant appeared with his entire general staff. I assumed he was going to bludgeon us once again with his blind faith in the Reich, together with a list of orders, insults, and threats – emulating the infamous outpourings of his master, Adolf Hitler. But the actual ordeal was far worse: an execution.

Two SS men brought a young man to the center of our square. Horrified, I recognized Joe, my loving friend, who was only eighteen years old. I hadn't previously spotted him in the camp. Had he arrived before or after me? We hadn't seen each other during the days before I was summoned by the Gestapo. Now I froze in terror. I had prayed that he would escape their lists, their roundups, their humiliations. And here he was, before my powerless eyes, which filled with tears. Unlike me, he had not carried dangerous letters, torn down posters, or signed any statements. And yet he had been caught and he was about to die. What had happened? What had the monsters accused him of? Because of my anguish I have completely forgotten the wording of the death sentence.

Then the loudspeakers broadcast some noisy classical music while the SS stripped him naked and shoved a tin pail over his head. Next they unleashed their ferocious German shepherds upon him: the dogs first bit into his groin and thighs, then devoured him right in front of us. His shrieks of pain were distorted and amplified by the pail in which his head was trapped. My rigid body reeled, my eyes gaped at so much horror, tears poured down my cheeks, I fervently prayed that he would black out quickly.

Since then I sometimes wake up howling in the middle of the night. For fifty years now that scene has kept ceaselessly passing and repassing through my mind. I will never forget that barbaric murder of my love – before my eyes, before our eyes, for there were hundreds of witnesses. He was sentenced to be eaten alive because he was homosexual. Why are they still silent today? Have they all died? It's true that we were among the youngest in the camp and that a lot of time has gone by. But I suspect that some people prefer to remain silent forever, afraid to stir up the hideous memories, like this one, among so many others.”

Pierre Seel died of natural causes in November 2005, but his chilling tale lives on in infamy. In 2008 the municipality of Toulouse posthumously renamed a street in his honor. The sign reads: Rue Pierre Seel – Déporté français pour homosexualité – 1923-2005.

His memoir continues to inspire people whenever it is read. Available in print and Kindle editions.

Denton Welch

Painter and Writer

Ever feel as if you didn’t quite fit in as a child? Well, whatever your experience, your adolescence was likely not as colorful or “different” as that of Orvil Pym, a 15-year-old creative child who had lost his mother to a mysterious disease. The damaged lad wandered around the grounds of a hotel where he had been taken by his father to vacation with his older brothers. When he discovered an old book on physical culture and began working out to improve his body, he worried that he wasn’t sweating enough, so he locked himself into the bottom drawer of a dressing chest, fantasizing that he was in a sweat-box dungeon. Orvil instinctively welcomed the guilt of these thrilling, vaguely sexual yearnings, unable to understand his incipient homosexual fetishes. He knew he was not like other boys, but the allure of deviancy far outweighed any desire to fit in with his peers.

Orvil yearned to be butch. Endlessly experimenting with fashion and different looks, he painted the toes and heels of his white gym shoes black (in the manner of saddle shoes), hoping to appear daring and vulgar. While he left his hair “rough” and appeared in his new, supposedly masculine outfit, his brother humored him by saying, “My God, you look tough.” Orvil didn't understand that his brother was mocking him. But young Orvil couldn’t mask his feminine side. He had always been intrigued by perfume bottles and broken bits of china he found at thrift shops, and he would press his purchases into his side, giving in to the peculiar pleasure of a forbidden obsession.

It wasn’t easy being a creative child. Orvil, happiest when he was alone, felt the urge to create his own drama. When he sneaked into an empty ballroom at the hotel, the little master of masochism discovered a double bass enclosed in a case with a broken strap when he entered the musician's gallery. Suddenly inspired, Orvil ran to the cloakroom and locked himself in, stripped off his clothes, and started whipping himself with the strap. His brother caught him in full fantasy. “Christ! What are you doing?” he howled in utter amazement. "You’d be locked up if anyone else found you doing this sort of thing.”

(Exactly!)

Orvil loved to spy on the gruff and rugged schoolmaster and two older male students, who were camping in the nearby woods. When the schoolmaster caught Orvil spying on them, he was invited inside for tea. Orvil was ordered to take off his wet clothes. The erotic tension between Orvil and the schoolteacher was so thick you could cut it with a knife. Orvil decided he wanted to be this man’s slave, and after washing up the dishes for the schoolmaster, he asked if there would be “anything else.” The older man said Orvil could polish his shoes. This triggered another erotic fantasy as he thrust his hands inside the damp leather, which to him seemed like “caves of lust.”

(Let me know if I’m going too fast for you – please take time to savor every detail)

Photo of Welch from the late 1930s:

The Orvil described above was the main character in a book called “In Youth Is Pleasure” (1945), an autobiographical novel by Englishman Denton Welch (see his self portrait at the start of this post), who was born in Shanghai in 1915. He spent his earliest years there with his English father and American mother, who died in 1926. Welch, then 11 yeas old, was devastated. He suffered the double blow of losing a mother and being sent to be educated in England, which was such an unhappy experience that at the age of 16 he ran away from school.

Welch had better luck at Goldsmiths' School of Art. Intending a future as a painter, his life changed forever at age 20, when he was knocked off his bicycle by a woman driving a car and subsequently run over. The injuries to his spine and kidneys were severe, and he never fully recovered. He was in constant pain. His altered circumstances caused him to take up writing, and he is today best-known for his three semi-autobiographical novels, Maiden Voyage (1943), In Youth Is Pleasure (1945), and the posthumous A Voice Through a Cloud (1950). All three are suffused with nascent homosexuality. William Burroughs claimed that In Youth Is Pleasure was a major influence on his own work, and none other than E. M. Forster praised Welch's writing.

Welch met his companion and lover, Eric Oliver, in November 1943 while he was convalescing. Oliver was a farm-worker living nearby and was a regular visitor. He acted as nurse for Welch, then his secretary, and finally as his literary executor when Welch died at the age of 33 on December 30, 1948. Unfortunately, Oliver was given  to drinking binges lasting several days, during which time he would simply disappear to parts unknown.

All his life Welch was open about his homosexuality, which was unusual, and even brave, at the time he lived. Welch's writings make clear what gay literature, and modern literature generally, lost when the accident that made him a fine writer finally claimed his life (spinal tuberculosis).

Maiden Voyage (1943), his first major work, was published under the patronage of Edith Sitwell. It is an account of Welch's sixteenth year, when he ran away from his English public school and was then sent to Shanghai to live with his father. The book created a sensation on publication in 1943; its frank and unflattering description of English public schoolboy life forced the book’s publisher to seek advice from libel lawyers. The narrator’s homosexual awakening is explored through masochism and voyeurism. Winston Churchill's private secretary gossiped in a letter that, "the book was reeking with homosexuality. I think I must get it."

William Burroughs said he directed students to the writing of Denton Welch when they complained that they had nothing to write about. Welch possessed uncanny powers of observation. His descriptions of ordinary things were exceptional, often over-the-top. He thus described a tray of pastries offered with afternoon tea (from In Youth Is Pleasure): "the phallic chocolate and coffee eclairs oozing fat worms of cream, the squares of sponge cake dressed with wicked green beauty spots of pistachio nuts." When young Orvil asked a fellow hotel guest if he could borrow his bicycle, the bicycle owner replied, " 'Oh yes, you can borrow it for as long as you like. I loathe riding it. The saddle seat seems designed especially to deprive one of one's manhood; but perhaps you won't mind that.' Orvil was too happy to be pricked into any retort by the intended insult. Orvil wished passionately that he had no body, so that these remarks could never be applied to him. He felt ashamed of being in a position to be deprived of his manhood."

You get the idea. New and used copies of Denton’s works are available from Amazon.com.

Welch's books were often embellished with his own dust wrappers, end paper designs and illustrations, generally of great (often Gothic) originality, thus combining his talents of art and writing.

Trivia: Lesbian author Sarah Waters wrote a wartime novel, The Night Watch (2006), which includes a prickly and sensitive character named Duncan, based on Denton Welch.

Photo below: Welch particularly enjoyed the time he invested in restoring an antique Doll House (circa 1783), now on permanent display in the Homes Gallery of the Museum of Childhood, Victoria and Albert Museum, London.