Alexander von Humboldt

Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) was one of the most influential scientists and thinkers of his day, considered second only to Napoleon in influence on Europeans. This Prussian-born geographer, naturalist, explorer and illustrator was a prolific writer, the author of a 23-volume work on his travels and of the seminal Cosmos, which laid the foundations for modern physical geography and meteorology. He also left a lasting impression on American visual arts, sciences, literature and politics by inspiring a network of like-minded individuals who would go on to embrace the spirit of exploration, decry slavery, advocate for the welfare of Native Americans and extol America's wilderness as a signature component of our nation's sense of self.

Humboldt is the namesake of a major Pacific current as well as  numerous cities, counties, and other landmarks. In fact, more places and species are named after Humboldt than any other person. To this day things continue to be named after him. When the grand, rebuilt City Palace (Stadtschloss) in Berlin partially opened a month ago, on December 17, 2020, it was known as the Humboldt Forum. Humboldt was born and died in Berlin, and the forum’s opening was originally intended to be on September 14, 2019, exactly 250 years since the day Humboldt was born in 1769. No matter how late it has come to the party, it will be the German equivalent of the British Museum, a world-class forum for the arts and sciences.

 

During his lifetime Humboldt’s same sex attraction was widely noted. While some biographers say that there is no “proof” that he was gay, there is plenty of incriminating evidence. When he died, his sister burned all of his love letters. Humboldt left his entire estate to his male “servant,” Johann Seifert, who was some thirty years younger. During the nineteenth century, a common way to “hide” a same sex relationship was to pass off one’s lover as a servant, especially if the two were of different social classes. Humboldt was of the monied class; Seifert was not. Humboldt was also somewhat effeminate and had masochistic tendencies. Seifert was domineering and bullying by nature. To your blogger, this seems a perfect fit.

When Humboldt was 25 years old he met a 21-year-old Lieutenant named Reinhard von Haeften. Humboldt was so besotten with von Haeften that he desired his presence at all times, so Humboldt invited him to live under his own roof. At Humboldt’s invitation and patronage, the two traveled extensively. Humboldt used the code letter “R” when referring to von Haeften in letters to colleagues and friends (wonder why?). This went on for two years, and after von Haeften married his pregnant fiancée, Humboldt lived with the newlyweds for six months. Must have been cozy. In fact, Humboldt was so brazen that, before the marriage, he contacted von Haeften’s fiancée to tell her that he had found the perfect house in Switzerland for the three of them to live in. As if.

Likewise with esteemed French botanist Aimé Bonpland, another favored male companion who lived and traveled with Humboldt for five years. In attentive detail they wrote descriptions of the "masculine beauty" of South American Indians. From 1799-1804 they explored the Amazon and Orinoco rivers, the Andes mountains and parts of Venezuela, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia and Mexico, collecting specimens of rocks and plants. They investigated volcanoes, ocean currents, the earth’s magnetism, climate and animal life. Humboldt funded this five-year exploration with his own inheritance.

Humboldt died from a stroke at age 89, but he was still publishing scientific works right up to the time of his death. When biographers started poking around, they discovered letters written to friends and travel companions that revealed that Humboldt had been amorously corresponding with men. Even skeptics admit that it seems hard not to confirm that Humboldt was gay. But further "proof" went up in flames, literally, when Humboldt's sister burned all his love letters. And why might that have been? Hmmm.....

Sources:

Encyclopedia of Homosexuality (Wayne Dynes)

Vincent Gabrielle (California-based gay scientist and blogger)

The Humboldt Society lecture, Philadelphia, 1996

The Life of Alexander von Humboldt (Maren Meinhardt)

Alexander von Humboldt: A Metabiography (Nicolaas Rupke)

Wikipedia

NOGLSTP (National Organization of Gay and Lesbian Scientists and Technical Professionals)
 
 

Pier Paolo Pasolini

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.' "

Stephen Hough

Openly gay poet and pianist

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...

Leonardo da Vinci

Because Leonardo da Vinci was born out of wedlock in 1452, he was denied both an education and a lucrative profession. Despite the stigma of being a bastard son of a notary and peasant girl, Leonardo went on to master anatomy, astronomy, architecture, botany, cartography, engineering, mathematics, music, poetry, science, optics, sculpture, sketching, geology and, last but not least, painting. The polymath of all polymaths, he also designed machines and drew plans for hundreds of inventions.

When he was 15, Leonardo moved from the village of Vinci to the city of Florence, known both as a great center of art and as a flourishing community of homosexual men (in those days the German word “Florenzer” [Florentine] was the term for a homosexual). When he was 24, Leonardo and three other youths were arrested in Florence on a sodomy charge. An anonymous tip alerted the magistrate of the city that a 17-year-old male was a gay prostitute, and Leonardo was listed as one of four patrons. No witnesses appeared against them, and eventually the charges were dropped. However, two months later Leonardo was again accused and this time jailed for two months, until an uncle arranged for his release. Leonardo never married, had any children or showed any interest in women, and he wrote in his notebooks that male-female intercourse disgusted him. Leonardo dealt with this controversy by leaving Florence to settle in Milan.

Thereafter Leonardo took pains to keep his homosexual life private, but he nevertheless always surrounded himself with attractive men. Although he started writing his journals in code, his art reflected his love of male beauty, and the models he used were sexually desirable young men. His relationship with the beautiful curly-haired Gian Giacomo Caprotti da Oreno (note Leonardo's painting of Caprotti at beginning of post), a former pupil, lasted twenty five years. For the last ten years of his life, Leonardo’s companion was a much younger nobleman, who would later serve as the executor of Leonardo’s estate.

When Leonardo died in 1519, Caprotti (better known as Salaì, meaning “little Devil”) inherited half a vineyard and several works of art, among them the Mona Lisa painting, now regarded as the world’s most famous portrait. Although Leonardo described Salaì as "a liar, a thief, stubborn and a glutton," Leonardo kept him in his household for more than 20 years, eventually training him as an artist. If Salaì had merely been a servant or pupil, he would have been dismissed.  Although Salaì stole from him on numerous occasions, Leonardo spent lavishly on clothing for his “kept” boy, even purchasing the 24 pairs of shoes the lad desired. What we do for love.

Many art historians believe that Salaì was the model for Leonardo’s homoerotic painting of John the Baptist. Salaì, a painter of modest talent, even created a nude version of the Mona Lisa, known as the Monna Vanna (shown at right). A page of drawings by Leonardo includes a sketch depicting Salaì from behind, pursued by a horde of penises on legs. I’m not making this up. We might have more of these had a pious priest not destroyed the bulk of Leonardo’s erotic gay sketches.

Leonardo eventually sent Salaì on his way, replacing him with a very young nobleman, Franceso Melzi, who described Leonardo’s affections as “a passionate and most fiery love.” Public knowledge of Leonardo’s homosexuality extended beyond his lifetime. In 1563, a book by Gian Paolo Lamazzo included a fictional dialogue between an interviewer and Leonardo. When being queried about the nature of Leonardo’s relationship with Salaì, Leonardo was asked, “Did you play the game from behind which the Florentines love so much?” Leonardo replied, “And how! Keep in mind that he was a beautiful young man, especially when about the age of fifteen.”

Undisputedly, Leonardo possessed the greatest mind of the Italian Renaissance. He wanted to know the workings of what he saw in nature. His inventions and scientific studies were centuries ahead of their time. He was the standard of ingenuity, and his intellectual inquisitiveness was the epitome of the Renaissance spirit. Six centuries later, the world is still in awe.

The following is from Serge Bramly's 1991 great biography of Leonardo:

No other personality was so intimidating, no other career so difficult to encompass, so biographers often resort to the assumption that Leonardo embodied some superhuman quality: "il divino". Vasari (a contemporary biographer of Leonardo) wrotes "there is something supernatural in the accumulation in one individual of so much beauty, grace, and might. With his right hand he could twist an iron horseshoe as if it were made of lead. In his liberality, he welcomed and gave food to any friend, rich or poor." His kindness, his sweet nature, his eloquence (his speech could bend in any direction the most obdurate of wills) his regal magnanimity, his sense of humor, his love of wild creatures, his terrible strength in argument, sustained by intelligence and memory, the subtlety of his mind which never ceased to devise inventions, his aptitude for mathematics, science, music, poetry. What's more, Leonardo was himself a man of physical beauty beyond compare.

Leonardo trivia:
He slept a paltry two hours a day.
A left-handed dyslexic, he tried to paint with both hands.
He was a stern self critic, destroying most of his work.

Gore Vidal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A youthful Gore Vidal, in photo at right.

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

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

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