Hidden: The Intimate Lives of Gay Men Past and Present
()
About this ebook
Readers will find joy and sorrow and pleasure and pain in these 400 biographies of men who were forced to live hidden lives. All were caught in the tension between the torment of secrecy and the calamity of revelation. How did they manage their difficult lives? How indeed did they survive?
One who did was James Brooke. He turned his inheritance into a 142 ton schooner, sailed for the East Indies, seized the northern part of Borneo and proclaimed himself Rajah of Sarawak. Among those who did not survive was Jan Quisthout Van der Linde, a soldier in New Amsterdam (not yet New York). He was stripped of his arms, his sword broken at his feet. He was then tied in a sack, thrown into the Hudson River and drowned until dead.
While illuminating individuals, the book also provides rich cultural and historical content, including the trial of those over-the-top transvestites Ernest Boulton Stella of the Strand and Frederick Fanny Park; and a delightful description of the 5th Marquess of Anglesey as he parades along the boulevards of Paris rouged, powdered and perfumed, cradling an equally perfumed poodle festooned with pink ribbons.
Written in clear, concise, and lively prose, Hidden offers a substantive and extensive look at men who lived their lives in conflict with their sexuality.
Clinton Elliot
Clinton Elliott was born in New York City, attended Westminster School in Simsbury, Conn., and studied music at Yale University. He served in the U.S. Navy on a submarine chaser in the Pacific at the close of World War II. He graduated from Yale in 1949 and continued his studies in music composition in France with Nadia Boulanger and at Columbia University where he received an M.A. Elliott wrote numerous scores for documentary films for CBS and ABC, including Mr. Dickens of London, Hall of Kings and Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us. He also wrote for the pioneering television series Twentieth Century and Omnibus. His many choral pieces have been published by MCA and other publishing houses. He lives in the Berkshire Hills in Massachusetts and the Florida Keys.
Related to Hidden
Related ebooks
Lust Unearthed: Vintage Gay Graphics From the DuBek Collection Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Lost Autobiography of Samuel Steward: Recollections of an Extraordinary Twentieth-Century Gay Life Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Secrets of a Gay Marine Porn Star Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Gay Art Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Boy Culture: 25th-Anniversary Edition Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Out of the Shadows: Reimagining Gay Men's Lives Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Gay Pioneers: How DRUMMER Magazine Shaped Gay Popular Culture 1965-1999: How D Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSparkle: The Queerest Book You'll Ever Love Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Full Frontal: To Make a Long Story Short Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5M4M: For an Hour or Forever--the Gay Man's Guide to Finding Love Online Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Naked: The Life And Pornography Of Michael Lucas Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Joe Dallesandro: Warhol Superstar, Underground Film Icon, Actor Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Gay Men's Guide to Glory Holes Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5Gay Cruising: A How-To Guide Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Bathhouse Blues: Your Guide to Gay Bathhouses Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Coming Together: The Cinematic Elaboration of Gay Male Life, 1945-1979 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Homo Odyssey: Adventures of a World Traveler Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMen on the Make: True Gay Sex Confessions Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Cruising: An Intimate History of a Radical Pastime Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Ask A Gay Guy Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Joy of Gay Sex: Fully revised and expanded third edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Hint of Homosexuality?: ‘Gay' and Homoerotic Imagery in American Print Advertising Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMy Brother and his Brother: A gay story about a brotherly love Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Arena of Masculinity: Sports, Homosexuality, and the Meaning of Sex Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Animals: Love Letters Between Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Gay History of Great Britain Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDaddy Lover God: a sacred intimate journey Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsNo Asians Please Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Gay Men and The New Way Forward Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
LGBTQIA+ Biographies For You
In the Dream House: A Memoir Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Gender Queer: A Memoir Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Party Monster: A Fabulous But True Tale of Murder in Clubland Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Tomboy Survival Guide Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Deviant's War: The Homosexual vs. the United States of America Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Roxane Gay & Everand Originals: Built for This: The Quiet Strength of Powerlifting Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Deaf Utopia: A Memoir—and a Love Letter to a Way of Life Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Oscar Wilde: The Unrepentant Years Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5All the Young Men: A Memoir of Love, AIDS, and Chosen Family in the American South Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Greedy: Notes from a Bisexual Who Wants Too Much Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Roxane Gay & Everand Originals: My Year of Psychedelics: Lessons on Better Living Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Gender Madness: One Man's Devastating Struggle with Woke Ideology and His Battle to Protect Children Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Letter to a Bigot: Dead But Not Forgotten Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Girls Can Kiss Now: Essays Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Punch Me Up To The Gods: A Memoir Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Not My Father's Son: A Memoir Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Hiding in Hip Hop: On the Down Low in the Entertainment Industry--from Music to Hollywood Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5A Burst of Light: and Other Essays Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Hollywood Park: A Memoir Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I Can't Date Jesus: Love, Sex, Family, Race, and Other Reasons I've Put My Faith in Beyoncé Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Cult City: Jim Jones, Harvey Milk, and 10 Days That Shook San Francisco Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5In the Shelter: Finding a Home in the World Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Spoiler Alert: The Hero Dies: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Other Four-Letter Words Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Transforming: The Bible and the Lives of Transgender Christians Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Becoming a Man: The Story of a Transition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5How We Fight for Our Lives: A Memoir Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Future Is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes and Mourning Songs Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Transforming: Updated and Expanded Edition with Study Guide: The Bible and the Lives of Transgender Christians Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Reviews for Hidden
0 ratings0 reviews
Book preview
Hidden - Clinton Elliot
AuthorHouse™
1663 Liberty Drive
Bloomington, IN 47403
www.authorhouse.com
Phone: 1-800-839-8640
© 2014 by Clinton Elliott. All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.
Published by AuthorHouse 11/13/2014
ISBN: 978-1-4817-6511-4 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-4817-6510-7 (hc)
ISBN: 978-1-4817-6509-1 (e)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2013912681
Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.
Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.
Discretion is not the better part of biography.
Michael Holroyd
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
in order of appearance
J. R. Ackerley, author and editor
Harold Acton, author and aesthete
Francesco Algarotti, author and philosopher
Horatio Alger, author
Allexander and Roberts, New England colonists
Joseph Alsop, journalist
Hans Christian Andersen, author
Henry Paget, 5th Marquess of Anglesey
Louis Aragon, political activist
Gavin Arthur, guru
Newton Arvin, professor
Frederick Ashton, choreographer
John Atherton, Bishop of Waterford
W. H. Auden, poet
Jules Barbey Amédée d’Aurevilly, author
Arthur Everett Austin, museum director
Babur, Mughal emperor
Edmund Trelawny Backhouse,
China hand
Anthony Bacon, diplomat
Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam, politician
R. S. Baden-Powell, Lord Baden-Powell, soldier and Boy Scout founder
Philip Bainbrigge, poet
Oliver Baldwin, Lord Baldwin of Bewdley, politician
Cristobal Balenciaga, couturier
Alvin Baltrop, photographer
William Bankes, art collector
Richard Barnfield, poet
Roland Barthes, thinker
Bruce Bawer, essayist and critic
Billy Bean, athlete
William Lygon, 7th Earl Beauchamp, politician
Antonio Beccadelli, Il Panormita
author
William Beckford, author
The Benson Brothers, authors
Berlin in the Twenties
Berry and Joanes, New England colonists
Isaac Bickerstaffe, playwright
James Bidgood, photographer
Noel Pemberton Billing, author and journalist
Kirk LeMoyne Billings, interior decorator
Bloomsbury: The Higher Sodomites
Anthony Blunt, art critic and spy
François le Métel de Boisrobert, courtier
Sandro Botticelli, artist
The Boulton and Park Sodomy Trial
The Boys from Boise
Marlon Brando, movie star
James Brooke, Rajah of Sarawak
Rupert Brooke, poet
Ellingham Brooks, man about Capri
Gay Brothers
Roger Brown, professor
William Brown, sodomite
John Browne, Lord Browne of Madingly, industrialist
Oscar Browning, teacher
Guy Burgess, Foreign Service officer and spy
Glenn Burke, athlete
Lord Byron, poet
Paul Cadmus, artist
Jean-Jacques Régis de Cambacérès, politician
The Cambridge Apostles
Truman Capote, author
Al Carmines, theater director
Edward Carpenter, author and activist
Giovanni Jacopo de Casanova, diarist
Roger Casement, patriot and philanthropist
Mervyn Touchet, Earl of Castlehaven
Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh, politician
C.P. Cavafy, poet
Benvenuto Cellini, sculptor
Bruce Chatwin, author
John Cheever, author
Rev. John Church, clergyman
Alfred Corning Clark, millionaire
The Cleveland Street Scandal
Montgomery Clift, movie star
Percy Jocelyn, Bishop of Clogher
Edward Samuel Wesley de Cobain, politician
Jean Cocteau, cultural polymath
Jason Collins, athlete
Anderson Cooper, TV anchor
Richard Cornish, sea captain
Baron Corvo, author
William Johnson Cory, teacher
Richard Cowan, student and diarist
Noël Coward, playwright
Larry Craig, politician
Gottfried von Cramm, athlete
Jan Creoli, citizen of New Amsterdam
Quentin Crisp, actor and personality
Aleister Crowley, occultist
Countee Cullen, poet
Ernest Augustus, Duke of Cumberland
Philip Cunanan, serial killer
Donal Og Cusack, athlete
Astolphe de Custine, author
Stephen Daldry, theater and film director
Salvador Dalí, artist
Ron Davies, politician
Brad Davis, actor
F. Holland Day, photographer
Jacob Israel De Haan, author
Jean Delville, artist
Sergei Diaghilev, impresario
David Diamond, composer
Albert Dodd, student and diarist
Donatello, sculptor
Lord Alfred Douglas, poet
Tom Driberg, politician
Samuel Drybutter, merchant
Jack Dunphy, actor & dancer
John Eleuthère Du Pont, heir
Thomas Eakins, artist
Edward II, King of England
Georges Eekhoud, author
T. S. Eliot, poet
William Empson, critic
Lt. Frederick Gotthold Enslin, soldier
The Eulenburg Affair
Sir Arthur Evans, archaeologist
D. Carleton Gajdusek, Nobel scientist
David Garnett, author
Gay Brothers
Rev. John J. Geoghan, priest
André Gide, author
John Gielgud, actor
Anne-Louis Girodet, artist
Matthew J. Glavin, lawyer
Wilhelm von Gloeden, photographer
Montague Glover, photographer
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, poet
Nikolai Gogol, author
Nicolas Gombert, composer
Witold Gombrowicz, author
Rev. Peter J. Gomes, clergyman
Rev. Stephen Gorton, clergyman
Edmund Gosse, man of letters
Lord Ronald Gower, sculptor
Thomas Granger, New England colonist
Cary Grant, actor
Duncan Grant, artist
Robert Graves, poet and author
Thomas Gray, poet
Anton Francesco Grazzini, Il Lascia
, poet
Charles Tomlinson Griffes, composer
Michael Guest, Foreign Service officer
Alec Guinness, actor
Thom Gunn, poet
Fritz Haarsman, murderer
Rev. Ted Haggard, clergyman
Richard Halliburton, travel writer
David Hampton, con man
George Frederick Handel, composer
Roger Hanson, Denny
, professor
The Harlem Renaissance
E. Lynn Harris, author
Walter Harris, author
Marsden Hartley, artist
The Harvard Pogrom of 1920
Richard Heber, bibliophile
Henry III, King of France
Henry, Prince of Prussia
Lord Hervey, courtier
Jon Hinson, politician
Arthur Hobhouse, politician
Hugo von Hofmannsthal, author
Hollywood
A. E. Housman, classicist and poet
Laurence Housman, playwright
Rock Hudson, movie star
Langston Hughes, poet
Simon Hughes, politician
Count Dietrich von Hülse-Häseler, soldier
Alexander von Humboldt, scientist
Tab Hunter, movie star
Christopher Hurran, Foreign Service officer
August Wilhelm Iffland, playwright
The Irish Crown Jewels Scandal
James I, King of England
Henry James, author
Walter W. Jenkins, White House aide
Jerome, artist
Capt. Robert Jones, soldier
Isaac Julien, filmmaker
Jack Kerouac, author
Count Harry Kessler, diplomat and diarist
John Maynard Keynes, economist
Alfred C. Kinsey, sociologist
Lincoln Kirstein, cultural catalyst
Lord Kitchener, soldier
Ebenezer Knight, citizen of Massachusetts
John Knight, servant
Reşat Ekrem Koçu, encyclopedist
Dave Kopay, athlete
Friedrich Alfred Krupp, heir
T. E. Lawrence, adventurer
James Lees-Milne, diarist
LeGros and Schultze, soldiers
Leonardo da Vinci, artist and polymath
J. C. Leyendecker, illustrator
Abraham Lincoln, president
Alain Locke, activist
Federigo García Lorca, poet
John Campbell, Marquess of Lorne
Jean-Baptiste Lully, composer
Lulu, callboy
Hubert Lyautey, soldier
Major-General Sir Hector MacDonald, soldier
George Mallory, mountaineer
Thomas Mann, author
Robert Mapplethorpe, photographer
Leonard Matlovich, soldier
Matthiessen and Cheney, critic and artist
Robin Maugham, author
W. Somerset Maugham, author
Steve May, politician
Robert McAlmon, author and expatriate
James E. McGreevey, politician
Andrew McIntosh, athlete
Claude McKay, poet
Gordon McMaster, politician
The de’ Medici Family
Rev. Anthony Mercieca, priest
Metastasio, poet
George Michael, musician
Harvey Milk, activist
Christopher Millard, bibliophile
Daniel C. Miller, businessman
John Minton, artist
Sultan-Mahmud Mirza
Yukio Mishima, author
Count Kuno von Moltke, soldier
Paul Moore, Bishop of New York
Rev. Bob Moorehead, clergyman
Rev. Alfred G. Mortimer, clergyman
Tewdwr Moss, travel writer
The Nabokov Family
John F. Nash, mathematician
Cardinal Newman
The Newport YMCA Scandal
Rev. Richard Nichols, priest
John Gambril Nicholson, poet
Nicoleto and Giovanni, Venetian boatmen
Harold Nicolson, diplomat
The Night of the Long Knives
Vaslav Nijinsky, dancer
Charles Vicomte de Noailles, patron of the arts
Ramon Novarro, movie star
Bruce Nugent, author
Anthony J. O’Connell, Bishop of Palm Beach
Frank O’Hara, poet
Laurence Olivier, actor
Cathal O Searcaigh, poet
Wilfred Owen, poet
Ferzan Ozpetek, movie director
Dave Pallone, baseball umpire
Jacopo and Salvi Panuzzi, Florentine merchants
Pier Paolo Pasolini, poet and movie director
Walter Pater, professor and author
Anthony Perkins, movie star
Pierre and Gilles, artists
Pirates and Sodomy
William Plaine, New England colonist
August von Platen, poet
Angelo Poliziano, poet
Ralph Pomeroy, author
Fairfield Porter, artist
The Mayor of Portland
The Portland YMCA Scandal
Francis Poulenc, composer
Preston, Mitchell, and Keene, New England colonists
Priests
Marcel Proust, author
Manuel Puig, author
Raymond Radiguet, author
Marc-André Raffalovich, poet
Alexis von Redé, socialite
Gerard Reve, author
Ricketts and Shannon, artists
Donald Richie, Japanophile
Rev. Bruce Ritter, priest
Paul Rivera, student
Antonio Rocco, libertine priest and author
Robbie Rogers, athlete
Robert Ross, bibliophile
Raymond Roussel, author and personality
The Rucellai Family
Bayard Rustin, activist
Camille Saint-Saëns, composer
John Singer Sargent, artist
Frank Sargeson, author
Siegfried Sassoon, poet
Sathya Sai Baba, guru
Rev. Thomas Savage, priest and educator
August, Duke of Saxe-Gotha and Altenburg, author
Tobias Schneebaum, travel writer
Franz Schubert, composer
The Schubert Circle
Paul Scott, author
C. K. Scott-Moncrieff, translator
Nicholas Sension, New England colonist
Tommaso Sgricci, improvvisatore
Shakers
Rev. Charles Shipley, clergyman
Michelangelo Signorile, activist
Sodoma, artist
Andrew Solomon, author
Simeon Solomon, artist
Lord Arthur Somerset
Lord Henry Somerset
Stephen Spender, poet
Sport
Freya Stark and her friends
Adrian Stephens, psychiatrist
John W. Sterling, lawyer and philanthropist
Baron von Steuben, soldier
James Strachey, psychiatrist
Lytton Strachey, author
Billy Strayhorn, composer and arranger
Jeff Stryker, porn star
Andrew Sullivan, journalist and editor
Harry Stack Sullivan, psychiatrist
John Addington Symonds, author
Bayard Taylor, man of letters
Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, composer
Stephen Tennant, socialite
Wilfred Thesiger, Arab hand
Gareth Thomas, athlete
Wallace Thurman, author
William Tilden, athlete
Andrew Tobias, businessman
Prescott Townsend, activist
Esera Tuaolo, athlete
Henry Scott Tuke, artist
Alan Turing, computer scientist
Colin Turnbull, anthropologist
John Tylney, Earl of Castlemaine
Nicholas Udall, schoolmaster
Ufficiali di Notte
Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, editor and pamphleteer
Uranians
The Uranian Poets
Rudolph Valentino, movie star
Harmen Meyndertsz Van den Bogaert, citizen of New Amsterdam
Jan Van der Linde, citizen of New Amsterdam
Carl Van Vechten, photographer and man of letters
Vassili III, Grand Prince of Muscovy
Keith Vaughan, artist
The Vere Street Scandal
Paul-Marie Verlaine, poet
Antonio Vignali, author
The Violet Quill
Luchino Visconti, movie director
Voltaire, philosopher and author
Siegfried Wagner, composer
Rufus Wainwright, musician
Horace Walpole, man of letters
David Ignatius Walsh, politician
Andy Warhol, artist
Edward Perry Warren, art collector
Rembert Weakland, Archbishop of Milwaukee
Otto Weininger, author
Sumner Welles, diplomat
Guido Westerwelle, politician
James Whale, movie director
Walt Whitman, poet
Whitman’s Camerados
Rev. Michael Wigglesworth, clergyman
Oscar Wilde, playwright and wit
Thornton Wilder, novelist and playwright
William III, King of England
Tennessee Williams, playwright
Johann Joachim Winckelmann, art historian
Thomas Jefferson Withers, judge
Ludwig Wittgenstein, philosopher
David Wojnarowicz, artist
Grant Wood, artist
Franco Zeffirelli, opera and movie director
INTRODUCTION
You will find joy and sorrow and pleasure and pain in these biographies of men who were forced to live hidden lives. All were caught in the tension between the torment of secrecy and the calamity of revelation. How did they find joy and pleasure facing this existential dilemma? How indeed did they survive?
Some did, and some did not. Among those who did was James Brooke. You will sail with him on his 142-ton schooner to the East Indies where he will declare himself Rajah of Sarawak. You will don Bedouin robes, mount a camel, and follow Lawrence of Arabia as he joins the great Arab Revolt against the Turks. You will climb Mt. Everest with George Mallory, though it may never be known if you reached the top.
You will train the troops of the Continental Army with Baron von Steuben, and while at Valley Forge join George Washington reviewing the fifers and drummers drumming Lt. Frederick Enslin out of that same army. Inspired by Roger Casement you will land with him in Ireland on a German submarine in the middle of World War I to free the Irish from British rule.
You will snag that fly ball in center field with Billy Bean, hurl the sliotar with Donal Cusack, fight the bulls with Sidney Franklin in Madrid’s Plaza Monumental and play defensive tackle with Esera Tuaolo and the Green Bay Packers.
You will stand with Harvey Milk in the Castro as he rallies the faithful to the cause, and ride with the arch-communist Louis Aragon in a pink convertible in Paris’s first Gay Pride March.
You would be wise not to join Prince Eddy,
Queen Victoria’s grandson, at the male brothel at No. 19 Cleveland Street in London, at least not in July 1889, the month it was raided. Nor would it be prudent to be present in an upstairs room in a certain alehouse near the Haymarket on July 19, 1822, the day the Bishop of Clougher was caught with his breeches around his ankles with a young guardsman.
Some survived, but there were those who did not. There will be horrors to witness as you stand on the Piazzetta and watch a fire being lit and Nicoleto and Giovanni, two Venetian boatmen, being burned to death. You will see Harmen van der Bogaert fall through the ice and drown in the Hudson River while pursued by a posse from New Amsterdam. You will accompany Bishop Atherton in a tumbrel as he prays to the angels to save his soul on the way to Gallows Green at Dublin Castle. You will stand next to Crown Prince Frederick (not yet the Great) as, on orders of his father, he watches his friend Hans von Katte being beheaded. Alas, the reader will find within this book many, many more tragic incidents like these.
But it’s not all bad news. You will be part of the court house crowd at the trial of those over-the-top transvestites Ernest Boulton Stella of the Strand
and Frederick Fanny
Park and join the applause when they are acquitted. You will be invited to breakfast with August, Duke of Saxe-Gotha and Altenburg. The Duke will be attired in full woman’s regalia with a morning bonnet, mantilla and lace sleeves. You will look over Harold Nicolson’s shoulder as the punctilious diplomat writes a thank-you note to the call-boy Lulu for une soirée delicieuse. You will marvel at the audacity of the 5th Marquess of Anglesey parading along the boulevards of Paris rouged, powdered and perfumed, cradling an equally perfumed poodle festooned with pink ribbons.
These are some of the more colorful characters peopling this book. Who are the others? They are not all necessarily homosexuals. Gore Vidal, taking a hint from Foucault, has declared that the word homosexual
should be eliminated as a noun and should be used only as an adjective. I sympathize with this proscription, although I reserve the right to violate it. Still, my intention is to emphasize homosexual behavior and not to characterize those who practice such behavior as being gay
or straight.
With an emphasis such as this there is the danger of reductionism. There are those,
Bruce Bawer wrote referring to some of Walt Whitman’s biographers, who have cautioned about the danger of reducing writers to their race, gender or sexual orientation. Yet when it comes to sexual orientation there’s another danger which is still far more commonly fallen into: the danger of minimizing its importance.
As the very topic of this book is the sex lives of its subjects, there is little danger of falling into the second pitfall.
W. H. Auden maintained that all sex-acts are rites of symbolic magic that must be known before an understanding of a man’s true nature can be achieved. This may also be true, but I make no claim that in any of these sketches the subjects’ homosexuality illuminates or gives coherence to their lives. Indeed, I think it often does, but to substantiate such a claim would require a different book. Am I a reductionist? Very well (if I may echo Whitman) then I am a reductionist.
Friendship is a particularly tricky concept. Friendship, homosociability, homoeroticism, homosexuality: where does one
begin, another end? Or, to put it a different way, when does friendship lead to love, and love to sex? The anonymous author of Don Leon, the polemic poem opposing the persecution of sodomites, formerly thought to have been by Lord Byron, was certainly thinking of sexual love when he wrote
Oh! ’tis hard to trace
The line where love usurps tame friendship’s place.
In omitting examples of tame friendship
I have, reluctantly, let go of such famous friends as Alexander Hamilton and Henry Laurens, Alfred Tennyson and Charles Hallam, J. Edgar Hoover and Clyde Tolson and a host of other pairs. Nevertheless, while I do not search for smoke, when I find it, I certainly consider the possibility of fire. I find pale puffs emerging from such friendships as Abraham Lincoln and Joshua Speed, R. S. Baden-Powell and Kenneth McLaren, Marlon Brando and Wally Cox. Readers can judge for themselves if fire has caused the smoke.
I want to emphasize that no one will be outed in these pages. By outing
I mean revealing as homosexual persons not otherwise known to have been so. In all cases the homosexual events in their lives are matters of public record. This book is not Outweek in book form.
The so-called Buggery Act was enacted in 1533 during the reign of Henry VIII. For the first time in England sodomy, which had been condemned only as a sin, became also a crime. Similar criminalizing laws took place in the Holy Roman Empire under Charles V and in France during the reign of Francis I. These laws moved the revelation of sodomy from the private confessional booth to the public court room. Of course sodomy is still a sin today, and the confessional booth remains the scene of its ecclesiastical expiation. The Church clearly wishes it would remain that way. But what had been private became public, and this book became possible.
My account of sodomy begins then with the early modern period and continues to the present. I have also imposed cultural and geographical limits, and do not attempt to move beyond Europe and the Western world. Absent, therefore, are the cultures of India, China, and Japan. Nor do I consider a culture closer at hand, the Moslem world, and I have also excluded the Lesbian scene. Both groups have their own historians.
Most of the events that take place in this book took place safely in the past. But what about the future? Laws have changed, and so have the times. Have all the horrors imposed by a repressive society ended? Is all the heartbreak over forbidden love a thing of the past? Are there to be no hidden lives ahead? Will this book have become a quaint antique? Perhaps it already has.
But reading the daily newspapers suggests otherwise. Nothing dies harder than prejudice, and I have the feeling that prejudice against gays, which we have recently seen eroded, may be here to stay for a while.
Why do we need another contribution to Gay Studies? What was merely a cottage industry only a few years ago has burgeoned into mass production. Gay Studies departments have been established in all the major universities in this country. Professors teaching these courses have written specialized books on their subject and I have gratefully taken advantage of their labors. In the economic heyday of the late 1990s even mainstream publishing houses had departments devoted to producing books on gay topics. Why in the world add to this mountain of material?
First of all, unlike the products of the Gay Studies programs, my miniature biographies are not scholarly histories aimed at a scholarly audience. Secondly, I hope to cast my net more widely and attract the general reader. I hope I don’t do so at the expense of these men whose lives were often a courageous struggle against bigotry. Nevertheless, when in doubt as to what to exclude or include, my guiding rule has been to let the chips fall where they may. After all it was that model biographer Michael Holroyd who declared that discretion is not the better part of biography.
A
J. R. Ackerley
1896-1967
Joe Ackerley was an English memoirist, novelist, biographer, and for many years (1935-1959) the influential arts editor of the BBC magazine, The Listener. Among the careers he promoted were those of the poets W. H. Auden and Philip Larkin and the novelist Francis King.
He was twice wounded and taken prisoner in World War I. After his discharge and with a recommendation from E. M. Forster he went to India for five months as companion to an eccentric maharajah whose philosophical quest was to find the ultimate meaning of meaning
and whose pleasure was loving his collection of lovely boys. The visit was immortalized in the novelized memoir, Hindoo Holiday (1932).
In his posthumously published memoir, My Father, Myself (1968), he tells how in doing research on his father’s life he was shocked to discover that his father like himself had lived a secret homosexual life. One of his father’s lovers was an older wealthy patron, Count de Gallatin, who gave him his start in business. His father, however, married twice and had several female lovers, a notable difference.
Ackerley is forthcoming about his sexual life. He describes how in searching for The Ideal Friend
he picked up and paid for the services of young guardsmen, sailors, and laborers among hundreds of lovers. He never found his ideal and turned instead to his dog Queenie whose name was changed by the editor of his published memoir My Dog Tulip (1956).
Harold Acton
1904-1994
The trajectory of Harold Acton’s life from Bright Young Thing at Oxford to Grand Panjandrum of the Villa La Pietra must be unique in the annals of English letters.
Determined to excite rage among the Philistines
at college, he seized a megaphone and leaning out the window of his room at Oxford proceeded to regale his fellow undergraduates with a recital of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. His friend, classmate, and possibly lover, Evelyn Waugh, based his outré homosexual character Anthony Blanche in Brideshead Revisited partly on Acton, mostly on Brian Howard, also a friend, classmate and possibly lover of Acton’s. The historian D. J. Taylor noted in passing that Waugh went through a violent homosexual phase
at Oxford, and that no other homosexual Bright Young Person was more notorious
than Howard.
After his father’s death in 1953 Acton moved into La Pietra with his mother, the former Hortense Mitchell. She was the heiress of a Chicago banking fortune and in 1907 had bought the palatial villa, one of the very grandest in the hills overlooking Florence. A whiff of aristocracy hung in the air around the Actons. First there was Lord Acton, the great historian. Then there was Admiral Sir Ferdinando Acton, sometime prime minister of the Two Sicilies and grandfather of Lord Acton. Harold Acton’s father, Arthur, asserted he was born in Naples, that he was also a descendant of the admiral, and that therefore he was a cousin of Lord Acton. Few historians accept this filiation, and the Actons’ aristocratic whiff remains just that.
In this congenial setting Acton now produced the books for which he is remembered: his two-volume History of the Bourbons of Naples and his Memoirs of an Aesthete and its sequel. He also entertained on a vast scale. Royalty, the rich and famous, delightful young men on the Grand Tour, all passed through the gates of La Pietra, among them Prince Charles, that constant guest Princess Margaret, and the Sitwells, along with a generous selection of other literati. Once, when Anthony Powell and his wife were dining at La Pietra, Alexander Zielcke, Acton’s live-in lover, left the room. You know, he’s not nearly as young as he looks,
their host confided to his bemused guests.
Francesco Algarotti
1712-1764
Everyone who met Algarotti, whether male or female, fell in love with him. He was a paragon of beauty and intelligence and delightfully bisexual. Born in Venice of a Paduan mercantile family, he was educated in Rome, Bologna, and Florence.
He was writing a book on Newtonian philosophy when at twenty in Paris he met Voltaire who dubbed him alternately The Venetian Socrates
and The Swan of Padua.
And when in 1736 the twenty-four-year-old swan swam into London, Lord Hervey and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu both fell in love with him. When he left, Hervey declared, I shall never forget you,
and Lady Mary, intending to pursue him to Venice, wrote, I am a thousand times more to be pitied than the sad Dido; and I have a thousand more reasons to kill myself.
Rictor Norton has described the affair as one of the silliest love-triangles of the eighteenth century.
On his travels he met up with a young man in Milan, apparently related to the seigneurs of Firmacon, with whom he made a leisurely tour of Provence. He returned briefly to London staying first in the Middle Temple with Andrew Mitchell, a young lawyer, and, moving up in the world, with Lord Burlington at Chiswick.
Soon he was off again on Lord Baltimore’s yacht to St. Petersburg. On his way back to London he made a stop-over in Berlin and caught the eye of Crown Prince Frederick of Prussia, a sighting that was to prove crucial to his fortunes.
No sooner had he returned to London than he was summoned back to Berlin by Frederick (now king and later The Great,
his odious
father having died.) My dear Algarotti,
he wrote, my destiny has changed. I await you impatiently; don’t let me languish.
Frederick had not sent him travel money and he was forced to borrow it from Lady Mary.
In Berlin he replaced Baron Keyserling as the king’s favorite bedmate and at the same time had an affair with the Marquis de Lugeac, a young French attaché at Frederick’s court. Voltaire observed them. When I see the tender Algarotti crush with passionate embrace the handsome Lugeac I see Socrates firmly fastened on the rump of Alcibiades.
Perhaps the epigram is wittier in French.
Frederick made him a count and after his death in Italy erected a monument to him in the Campo Santo in Pisa. Success had pursued Algarotti from the very beginning. He had been elected a member of the Royal Society on his arrival in London, and his complete works of criticism and philosophy in eight volumes appeared in his lifetime.
Horatio Alger
1832-1899
Alger’s dime novels for boys, inspirational from-rags-to-riches fables including Ragged Dick, Mark the Match Boy, Phil the Fiddler, and Driven from Home. They sold over 200 million copies.
He was born in Chelsea, Massachusetts, graduated from Harvard Divinity School in 1860, and traveled abroad for a year. He realized early on his sexual preference for males, especially adolescent boys.
But it was not until he was appointed minister of the First Unitarian Church of Brewster in 1866 that trouble occurred. Rumors began to circulate concerning his conduct with boys of the parish. Two thirteen year old boys told their parents that Alger had molested them. He was accused of the abominable & revolting crime of gross familiarity with boys
and allowed to resign providing he never returned.
He went to New York City where he found his calling: a world of impoverished newsboys, bootblacks, and drifters who needed rescuing. He often stayed at the Newsboys’ Lodging Houses. These precursors of YMCAs were established by the Childrens’ Aid Society and were the perfect setting for Alger’s rescue operations. Here, surrounded by the boys he loved, he devoted the rest of his life to making amends for his early disgrace, and found the material for his phenomenally successful novels, and there were over a hundred of them.
His poem, Friar Anselmo’s Sin, seems to be autobiographical.
Friar Anselmo (God’s grace may he win!)
Committed one sad day a deadly sin . . .
Thy guilty stains shall be washed white again,
By noble service done thy fellow-men.
Allexander and Roberts
Plymouth Colony, 6 August 1637. John Allexander [and] Thomas Roberts were both examined and found guilty of lude behaviour and uncleane carriage one w[ith] another, by often spendinge their seeds one upon another, which was proved both by witnesse & their own confession; the said Allexander found to have beene formerly notoriously guilty that way, and seeking to allure others thereunto.
Both men confessed to the crime and the said John Allexander was therefore censured by the Court to be severely whipped, and burnt in the shoulder [with] a hot iron, and to be perpetually banished [from] the government of New Plymouth, and if he be at any tyme found w[ith]in the same, to bee whipped out againe…
Roberts, an indentured servant, was censured to be severely whipt, and to returne to his m[aster] Mr. Atwood, and to serve out his tyme w[ith] him, but to be disabled hereby to enjoy any lands w[ith]in this government, except hee manefest better desert.
Joseph Alsop
1910-1989
Joe Alsop parlayed a privileged background (Groton ’28, Harvard ’32) and important political connections (first the Roosevelts, later the Kennedys) into a spectacular career as newspaper reporter, syndicated columnist (with his brother Stewart) and finally as a significant Washington host. It is safe to say,
Henry Kissinger remarked, that at the Alsops’ table, more questions of policy were discussed… than at any summit conference.
Many of his friends suspected Alsop was homosexual, but he kept this side of his personality a secret his whole life. While on reporting trips in this country and abroad he frequently sought out and found like-minded male companions. Sometime in the fifties he was picked up by the police in San Francisco’s Castro District. In 1954 he had a sexual encounter with a State Department official in Germany. The Eisenhower administration was fully aware of these sexual activities and the FBI had a dossier with all the details.
In 1957 when in Moscow to interview the Russian leader Nikita Krushchev he invited a young man up to his hotel room. The room had been rigged by the KGB, photographs were taken, and Alsop was blackmailed. He prudently went straight to the American ambassador, his Porcellian Club friend Chip Bohlen, who advised him to notify the CIA. This he did, the blackmail attempt failed, and the matter was hushed up.
In 1961 at the age of fifty he married Susan Mary Jay, the forty-year-old widow of his old college friend William Patten. She was the ideal prospective wife: still in her prime, well-connected, and perfectly equipped to maintain an important salon. On her part she needed a man in her life and a father for her two young children.
He had told her he was homosexual before their marriage. She assumed she could cure him, but naturally was unable to do so. He began drinking heavily and took to abusing her verbally in front of important guests at their famous dinner parties. They divorced in 1972.
It was clear that two Washington hostesses in one household was one Washington hostess too many.
Hans Christian Andersen
1805-1875
Throughout his whole life Andersen was in love: in love with his friend Eduard Collin who was twenty-two: No one has brought more tears to my eyes, neither has anyone been loved so much by me as you.
In love with another young friend, Ludvig Müller: I miss you so dreadfully… . I am as fond of you as if you were my brother… . I am a strange being, my feelings run off with me too quickly, and I only make myself unhappy. Oh, do come, come my dear Ludvig… .
He was also in love with their sisters, perhaps to bring him closer to their brothers.
He did not draw a line between friendship and sexuality; and as these love affairs may never have been consummated, his life was one of constant frustration. My soul is so full of love… my pain is crushing me when I suffer.
As a boy he did not play with other boys, but delighted in making clothes for his dolls. As a youth he was effeminate and innocent, an innocence that stayed with him into his twenties and never left him. As a man he lived a life of secrecy, repression, and half-truths.
His friend Søren Kierkegaard observed early on—when he was twenty-four and Andersen thirty-two—that Andersen’s work should be compared with those flowers which have male and female placed on the same stem.
Only in fairy tales could he express himself completely. It was a medium whose formal distance from reality allowed him to write as he felt: as the social outsider, as the forbidden lover.
Later in life when he became famous