Hidden: The Intimate Lives of Gay Men Past and Present

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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

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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