Elisa Rolle's Blog, page 227

February 25, 2017

Violet Oakley (June 10, 1874 – February 25, 1961)

Violet Oakley was the first American woman to receive a public mural commission. During the first quarter of the twentieth century, she was renowned as a pathbreaker in mural decoration, a field that had been exclusively practiced by men.
Born: June 10, 1874, New Jersey, United States
Died: February 25, 1961, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States
Education: Art Students League of New York
Drexel University
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
Lived: Plashbourne Estate, 51 Carlton Rd, Yonkers, NY 10708, USA (40.93906, -73.84728)
Cogslea, 627 St Georges Rd, Philadelphia, PA 19119, USA (40.05254, -75.20455)
Buried: Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn, Kings County (Brooklyn), New York, USA, Plot: Section 163, Lot 14788
Find A Grave Memorial# 10067778
Period: Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
Books: Samuel F.B. Morse: A Dramatic Outline of the Life of the Father of Telegraphy & the Founder of the National Academy of Design, more

Violet Oakley and her friends, the artists Elizabeth Shippen Green and Jessie Willcox Smith, all former students of Howard Pyle, were named the Red Rose girls by him. The three illustrators received the "Red Rose Girls" nickname while they lived together in the Red Rose Inn in Villanova, Pennsylvania from 1899 to 1901. They later lived, along with Henrietta Cozens, in a home in the Mt. Airy neighborhood of Philadelphia that they named Cogslea after their four surnames (Cozens, Oakley, Green and Smith).
Address: 627 St Georges Rd, Philadelphia, PA 19119, USA (40.05254, -75.20455)
Type: Private Property
National Register of Historic Places: 77001188, 1977
Place
In 1996, Violet Oakley was elected to the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame, the last of the “Red Rose Girls” to be inducted, but one of only ten women in the hall. Her home and studio at Yonkers, New York, where she resided intermittently between 1912 and 1915 is also listed on the National Register of Historic Places as the Plashbourne Estate. Oakley was a member of Philadelphia's The Plastic Club, an organization established to promote "Art for art's sake". Other members included Elenore Abbott, Jessie Willcox Smith, and Elizabeth Shippen Green. Many of the women who founded the organization had been students of Howard Pyle. It was founded to provide a means to encourage one another professionally and create opportunities to sell their works of art. On June 14, 2014, Miss Oakley was featured in the first gay-themed tour of Green-Wood Cemetery, where she is interred in the Oakley family plot, Section 63, Lot 14788.
Life
Who: Violet Oakley (June 10, 1874 – February 25, 1961)
Violet Oakley was the first American woman to receive a public mural commission. During the first quarter of the XX century, she was renowned as a pathbreaker in mural decoration, a field that had been exclusively practiced by men. Oakley excelled at murals and stained glass designs that addressed themes from history and literature in Renaissance-revival styles. Elizabeth Shippen Green (September 1, 1871 – 1954) was an American illustrator. She illustrated children's books and worked for many years for Harper's Magazine. In 1911, at the age of forty, Green married Huger Elliott, an architecture professor, after a five-year engagement, and moved away from Cogslea. Green continued to work through the 1920s and illustrated a nonsense verse alphabet with her husband. Green died May 29, 1954 and is buried at The University of the South (735 University Ave, Sewanee, TN 37383). Jessie Willcox Smith (September 6, 1863 – May 3, 1935) was one of the most prominent female illustrators in the United States during the Golden Age of American illustration. She was a prolific contributor to respected books and magazines during the late XIX and early XX centuries. She illustrated stories and articles for clients such as Century, Collier's, Leslie's Weekly, Harper's, McClure's, Scribners, and the Ladies' Home Journal. She had an ongoing relationship with Good Housekeeping, including the long-running Mother Goose series of illustrations and creating all the covers from 1915 to 1933. Among the more than 60 books that Smith illustrated were Louisa May Alcott's “Little Women” and “An Old-Fashioned Girl,” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's “Evangeline,” and Robert Louis Stevenson's “A Child's Garden of Verses.” Henrietta Cozens (1862-1940), served as the "wife" of the household. As the women's fame grew, the press lauded their accomplished Boston marriage. But when Green married at 39 after a seven-year engagement, Oakley's devastation created a scandal and severed the group's artistic partnership.

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Published on February 25, 2017 02:27

Tennessee Williams (March 26, 1911 - February 25, 1983)

Thomas Lanier "Tennessee" Williams III was an American playwright. Along with Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller he is considered among the three foremost playwrights in 20th-century American drama.
Born: March 26, 1911, Columbus, Mississippi, United States
Died: February 25, 1983, New York City, New York, United States
Education: University of Missouri
University of Iowa
The New School
Washington University in St. Louis
Actors Studio
Lived: The Atlantic House, 4-6 Masonic Place, Provincetown, MA
Hotel Chelsea
Algonquin Hotel, 59 W 44th St, New York, NY 10036
1431 Duncan St, Key West, FL 33040, USA (24.55577, -81.7866)
Hotel Elysée, 56- 60 E 54th St, New York, NY 10022, USA (40.7599, -73.9732)
Buried: Calvary Cemetery and Mausoleum, Saint Louis, St. Louis City, Missouri, USA, Plot: Section 15A, GPS (lat/lon): 38.70297, -90.23692
Find A Grave Memorial# 1111
Books: Memoirs, One arm, The theatre of Tennessee Williams, more
Movies: A Streetcar Named Desire, Baby Doll, The Fugitive Kind, more

Tennessee Williams was an American playwright, author of many stage classics. On a 1945 visit to Taos, New Mexico, Williams met Pancho Rodríguez y González. They lived and traveled together until late 1947 when Williams ended the affair. Rodríguez and Williams remained friends, however, and were in contact as late as the 1970s. Williams met Frank Merlo, a navy veteran, and former lover of the lyricist John Latouche, in Provincetown during the summer of 1947 where they spent a night together in the dunes. In the early autumn of 1948, Williams accidentally ran again into Merlo in New York City, and by October, they were living together. Merlo began the process of weaning the playwright off a toxic dependence on drugs and casual sex. They remained together until Merlo died of lung cancer in 1963.
Together from 1947 to 1963: 16 years.
Frank Phillip Merlo (1921 – September 21, 1963)
Thomas Lanier "Tennessee" Williams III (March 26, 1911 - February 25, 1983)

Queer Places, Vol. 1 edited by Elisa Rolle
ISBN-13: 978-1532901904
ISBN-10: 1532901909
Release Date: July 24, 2016
CreateSpace Store: https://www.createspace.com/6228297
Amazon (print): http://www.amazon.com/dp/1532901909/?...
Amazon (kindle): http://www.amazon.com/dp/B01IZ1BU9K/?...

The Hotel Chelsea – also called the Chelsea Hotel, or simply the Chelsea – is a historic New York City hotel and landmark, known primarily for the notability of its residents over the years.
Address: 222 W 23rd St, New York, NY 10011, USA (40.74431, -73.9969)
Type: Guest facility (open to public)
Phone:+1 616-918-8770
National Register of Historic Places: 77000958, 1977
Place
Built between 1883 and 1885, Design by Hubert, Pirsson & Company (Philip Gengembre Hubert (1830-1911) and James W. Pirrson (1833-1888))
Opened for initial occupation in 1884, the twelve-story red-brick building that is now the Hotel Chelsea was one of the city’s first private apartment cooperatives. It was designed in a style that has been described variously as Queen Anne Revival and Victorian Gothic. Among its distinctive features are the delicate, flower-ornamented iron balconies on its facade, which were constructed by J.B. and J.M. Cornell and its grand staircase, which extends upward twelve floors. Generally, this staircase is only accessible to registered guests, although the hotel does offer monthly tours to others. At the time of its construction, the building was the tallest in New York. Hubert and Pirsson had created a "Hubert Home Club" in 1880 for "The Rembrandt,” a six-story building on West 57th Street intended as housing for artists. This early cooperative building had rental units to help defray costs, and also provided servants as part of the building staff. The success of this model led to other "Hubert Home Clubs,” and the Chelsea was one of them. Initially successful, its surrounding neighborhood constituted the center of New York’s theater district. However within a few years the combination of economic stresses, the suspicions of New York’s middle class about apartment living, the opening up of Upper Manhattan and the plentiful supply of houses there, and the relocation of the city’s theater district, bankrupted the Chelsea. In 1905, the building reopened as a hotel, which was later managed by Knott Hotels and resident manager A.R. Walty. After the hotel went bankrupt, it was purchased in 1939 by Joseph Gross, Julius Krauss, and David Bard, and these partners managed the hotel together until the early 1970s. With the passing of Joseph Gross and Julius Krauss, the management fell to Stanley Bard, David Bard’s son. On 18 June, 2007, the hotel’s board of directors ousted Bard as the hotel’s manager. Dr. Marlene Krauss, the daughter of Julius Krauss, and David Elder, the grandson of Joseph Gross and the son of playwright and screenwriter Lonne Elder III, replaced Stanley Bard with the management company BD Hotels NY; that firm has since been terminated as well. In May, 2011, the hotel was sold to real estate developer Joseph Chetrit for US$80 million. As of August 1, 2011, the hotel stopped taking reservations for guests in order to begin renovations, but long-time residents remain in the building, some of them protected by state rent regulations. The renovations prompted complaints by the remaining tenants of health hazards caused by the construction. These were investigated by the city’s Building Department, which found no major violations. In Nov. 2011, the management ordered all of the hotel’s many artworks taken off the walls, supposedly for their protection and cataloging, a move which some tenants interpreted as a step towards forcing them out as well. In 2013, Ed Scheetz became the Chelsea Hotel’s new owner after buying back five properties from Joseph Chetrit, his partner in King & Grove Hotels, and David Bistricer. Hotel Chelsea is now managed by Chelsea Hotels, formerly King & Grove Hotels. Restoration and renovation is underway and Hotel Chelsea plans to reopen in 2016.
Notable queer resident at Hotel Chelsea:
• William S. Burroughs (1914-1997), novelist, short story writer, satirist, essayist, painter, and spoken word performer. A primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author who wrote in the paranoid fiction genre, he is considered to be "one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the XX century.”
• Arthur C. Clarke (1917-2008) wrote “2001: A Space Odyssey” while staying at the Chelsea.
• Quentin Crisp (1908-1999), writer and raconteur. His first stay in the Hotel Chelsea coincided with a fire, a robbery, and the death of Nancy Spungen.
• Musician, gay civil rights icon and Stonewall veteran Stormé DeLarverie (1920-2014) resided at the hotel for several decades.
• Poets Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) and Gregory Corso (1930-2001) chose it as a place for philosophical and artistic exchange.
• Brad Gooch (born 1952), writer. His 2015 memoir “Smash Cut” recounts life in 1970s and 1980s New York City, including the time Gooch spent as a fashion model, life with his then-boyfriend filmmaker Howard Brookner, living in the famous Chelsea Hotel and the first decade of the AIDS crisis.
• Herbert Huncke (1915-1996), writer and poet. In his last few years, he lived in room 828, where his rent came from financial support from Jerry Garcia of The Grateful Dead, whom Huncke never met. Herbert Huncke died in 1996 at age 81.
• Iggy Pop (born 1947), singer-songwriter, musician and actor. Pop’s career received a boost from his relationship with David Bowie when Bowie decided in 1972 to produce an album with Pop in England.
• Charles R. Jackson (1903-1968), author of “The Lost Weekend,” committed suicide in his room on September 21, 1968.
• Jasper Johns (born 1930), painter and printmaker. In 1954, after returning to New York, Johns met Robert Rauschenberg and they became long-term lovers. For a time they lived in the same building as Rachel Rosenthal. In the same period he was strongly influenced by the gay couple Merce Cunningham (a choreographer) and John Cage (a composer.)
• Jack Kerouac (1922-1969), who wrote “On the Road” there.
• Lance Loud (1951-2001), television personality, magazine columnist and new wave rock-n-roll performer. Loud is best known for his 1973 appearance in “An American Family,” a pioneer reality television series that featured his coming out, leading to his status as an icon in the gay community.
• Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-1989), photographer, known for his sensitive yet blunt treatment of controversial subject-mater in the large-scale, highly stylized black and white medium of photography. The homoeroticism of this work fuelled a national debate over the public funding of controversial artwork.
• Larry Rivers (1923-2002), artist, musician, filmmaker and occasional actor. Poet Jeni Olin was his companion. Rivers also sustained a relationship with poet Frank O’Hara in the late 1950s and delivered the eulogy at O’Hara’s funeral in 1966.
• Patti Smith (born 1946), singer-songwriter, poet and visual artist. On November 17, 2010, she won the National Book Award for her memoir “Just Kids.” The book fulfilled a promise she had made to her former long-time roommate and partner, Robert Mapplethorpe.
• Virgil Thomson (1896-1989), composer and critic. In 1925 in Paris, he cemented his relationship with painter Maurice Grosser (1903-1986), who was to become his life partner and frequent collaborator. He and Grosser lived at Hotel Chelsea, where he presided over a largely gay salon that attracted many of the leading figures in music and art and theather, including Leonard Bernstein, Tennessee Williams, and many others. Virgil Thomson died on September 30, 1989, in his suite at the Hotel Chelsea in Manhattan, aged 92.
• Gore Vidal (1925-2012), writer and a public intellectual known for his patrician manner, epigrammatic wit, and polished style of writing.
• Rufus Wainwright (born 1973), lived in the Chelsea Hotel in New York City for six months, during which he wrote most of his second album.
• Tennessee Williams (1911-1983), playwright and author of many stage classics. Along with Eugene O’Neill and Arthur Miller he is considered among the three foremost playwrights in XX century American drama.
• Hotel Chelsea is often associated with the Warhol superstars, as Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey directed “Chelsea Girls” (1966), a film about his Factory regulars and their lives at the hotel. Chelsea residents from the Warhol scene included Edie Sedgwick, Viva, Ultra Violet, Mary Woronov, Holly Woodlawn, Andrea Feldman, Nico, Paul America, René Ricard, and Brigid Berlin.

Queer Places, Vol. 1 edited by Elisa Rolle
ISBN-13: 978-1532901904
ISBN-10: 1532901909
Release Date: July 24, 2016
CreateSpace Store: https://www.createspace.com/6228297
Amazon (print): http://www.amazon.com/dp/1532901909/?...
Amazon (kindle): http://www.amazon.com/dp/B01IZ1BU9K/?...

The Hotel Elysée is a New York City hotel situated on 60 East 54th Street between Madison and Park avenues. The hotel was founded in 1926 as a European-style hotel for the carriage trade by Swiss-born Max Haering,
Address: 56- 60 E 54th St, New York, NY 10022, USA (40.7599, -73.9732)
Type: Guest facility (open to public)
Phone: +1 212-753-1066
Place
New York’s leading hatcheck concessionaire, Mayer Quain, purchased the hotel out of bankruptcy in 1937. After the War, his children eclectically designed every room so that no two rooms were alike. In lieu of traditional numbers, the rooms were named to reflect their personality, such as the "Sayonara" suite assigned to Marlon Brando after his starring role in “Teahouse of the August Moon.” Tennessee Williams lived in the hotel for fifteen years and died in the "Sunset" suite. Columnist Jimmy Breslin, who regards the Elysée as "a great hotel, a genuine New York landmark," succeeded Ruark as the hotel’s unofficial chronicler. Upon Tennessee Williams’s death at the Elysée in Feb. 1983, Breslin recalled the story of a transient guest who called the front desk at 5:00 am complaining that someone in the next suite was keeping her awake by typing all night. "They knew right away who the culprit was, but they couldn’t very well ask Mr. Williams to stop playwriting, so we simply moved the guest to another room." In Nov. 1948, Tallulah Bankhead celebrated President Harry S. Truman’s stunning victory over Thomas E. Dewey by throwing a noisy party at the hotel that ran non-stop for five days and nights. The Elysée is known for the Monkey Bar, a piano bar just off the lobby. Opened in the 1940s, it became known to the cognoscenti as "the place to go where jokes die," especially off-color jokes and double-entendre songs spun by such performers as Johnny Payne (1934-1964), Marion Page (1950-1965) and Mel Martin (1945-1983.) Johnny Andrews played the piano at cocktail hour for over 50 years (1936-1990.) Starting out as just another dimly lit hotel piano bar with mirrored paneling, the tiny room was expanded in the early 1950s when the mirrors were replaced by wraparound hand-painted mural by caricaturist Charlie Vella. Eight more monkeys were added to the bar mural in 1984 by artist Diana Voyentzie "to remind customers of their behaviour." In 1995, when the bar was redesigned by the architect David Rockwell, all of the monkeys were unified by Voyentzie with more monkeys and palm trees and foliage. The monkeys in the mural depict decidedly human features riding elephants, crouching under a Christmas tree, mixing up banana daiquiris for tough-looking monkey-like customers, etc. In successive years, other artists have added to the tableau.
Life
Who: Thomas Lanier "Tennessee" Williams III (March 26, 1911 – February 25, 1983)
From 1948 to the early 50s, Tennessee Williams lived in New York City at 235 E 58th St; in 1965 he was at 15 W 72nd St; in 1978 at Manhattan Plaza (400 W 43rd St); last NY address was Hotel Elysee (56-60 E 54th St), where he died. In New York Tennessee Williams joined a gay social circle which included fellow writer and close friend Donald Windham (1920–2010) and his then partner Fred Melton. In the summer of 1940 Williams initiated an affair with Kip Kiernan (1918–1944), a young Canadian dancer he met in Provincetown, Massachusetts. When Kiernan left him to marry a woman he was distraught, and Kiernan’s death four years later at 26 delivered another heavy blow. On a 1945 visit to Taos, New Mexico, Williams met Pancho Rodríguez y González, a hotel clerk of Mexican heritage. Rodríguez was, by all accounts, a loving and loyal companion. However, he was also prone to jealous rages and excessive drinking, and so the relationship was a tempestuous one. Nevertheless, in Feb. 1946 Rodríguez left New Mexico to join Williams in his New Orleans apartment. They lived and traveled together until late 1947 when Williams ended the affair. Rodríguez and Williams remained friends, however, and were in contact as late as the 1970s. Williams spent the spring and summer of 1948 in Rome in the company of a teenaged Italian boy, called "Rafaello" in Williams’ “Memoirs,” to whom he provided financial assistance for several years afterwards, a situation which planted the seed of Williams’ first novel, “The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone.” When he returned to New York that spring, he met and fell in love with Frank Merlo (1922–1963), an occasional actor of Sicilian heritage who had served in the U.S. Navy in WWII. This one enduring romantic relationship of Williams’ life lasted 14 years until infidelities and drug abuse on both sides ended it. Merlo, who became Williams’ personal secretary, taking on most of the details of their domestic life, provided a period of happiness and stability as well as a balance to the playwright’s frequent bouts with depression and the fear that, like his sister Rose, he would fall into insanity. Their years together, in an apartment in Manhattan and a modest house in Key West, Florida, were Williams’ happiest and most productive. Shortly after their breakup, Merlo was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer and Williams returned to take care of him until his death on September 20, 1963. As he had feared, in the years following Merlo’s death Williams was plunged into a period of nearly catatonic depression and increasing drug use resulting in several hospitalizations and commitments to mental health facilities. On February 25, 1983, Williams was found dead in his suite at the Elysée Hotel in New York at age 71. Williams had long told his friends he wanted to be buried at sea at approximately the same place as Hart Crane, a poet he considered to be one of his most significant influences. Contrary to his expressed wishes, but at his brother Dakin Williams’ insistence, Williams was interred in Calvary Cemetery in St. Louis, Missouri.

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Published on February 25, 2017 02:15

James Coco (March 21, 1930 - February 25, 1987)

James Coco was an American character actor. He was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for Only When I Laugh.
Born: March 21, 1930, New York City, New York, United States
Died: February 25, 1987, New York City, New York, United States
Lived: 45 Christopher St, New York, NY 10014
Buried: Saint Gertrudes Roman Catholic Cemetery, Colonia, Middlesex County, New Jersey, USA, Plot: Section 29, Lot 660, GPS (lat/lon): 40.5961, -74.3068
Find A Grave Memorial# 6780261
Books: The James Coco Diet
TV shows: St. Elsewhere, Calucci's Department, The Dumplings
Parents: Feliche Coco, Ida Detestes Coco

45 Christopher Street is a residential building facing south onto Christopher Park in the Greenwich Village Historic District on the west side of Lower Manhattan in New York City. Opened on July 17, 1931, the construction of the Art Deco building started in 1929. James Coco (1930-1987), actor, lived at 45 Christopher Street with his long time lover Jack. Coco's first modern collaboration with playwright Terrence McNally was a 1968 off Broadway double-bill of the one-act plays “Sweet Eros” and “Witness.” Coco died in 1987 and is buried at St Gertrude Cemetery (53 Inman Ave, Colonia, NJ 07067).

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Published on February 25, 2017 01:52

Dr Eugene David Glynn (February 25, 1926 - May 15, 2007)

Born: February 25, 1926, Passaic, New Jersey, United States
Died: May 15, 2007, Brooklyn, New York City, New York, United States
Find A Grave Memorial# 161891002
Books: Desperate necessity
People also search for: Maurice Sendak, Jonathan Weinberg, Sadie Schindler, Philip Sendak

Maurice Sendak was an American illustrator and writer of children's books. He was best known for his book Where the Wild Things Are, first published in 1963. Sendak mentioned in a September 2008 article in The New York Times that he was gay and had lived with his partner, psychoanalyst Dr. Eugene Glynn, for 50 years before Glynn's death in May 2007. Revealing that he never told his parents, he said, "All I wanted was to be straight so my parents could be happy. They never, never, never knew." Other writers before (e.g., Tony Kushner in 2003) had mentioned Sendak’s relationship with Glynn and Glynn's 2007 death notice had identified Sendak as his "partner of fifty years". Sendak donated $1 million to the Jewish Board of Family and Children's Services in memory of Glynn.
Together from 1957 to 2007: 50 years.
Eugene Glynn (1926 - May 15, 2007)
Maurice Sendak (June 10, 1928 – May 8, 2012)

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Published on February 25, 2017 01:49

Carleton A. Hildreth (February 25, 1908 - March 12, 1977)

Lived: 89 East Bay Street, Charleston
141-145 Church Street, Charleston
Buried: Bonaventure Cemetery, Savannah, Chatham County, Georgia, USA
Buried alongside: Harry Hervey
Find A Grave Memorial# 122346904

Today 89 East Bay Street is one the series of homes in the colorfully named Rainbow Row, which has no particular reference to the rainbow flag or other gay icons, although the area does have a gay history. Perhaps the most colorful presence here was Harry Hervey (1900-1951). Born in Texas and mostly associated with Savannah, GA, Hervey was a world traveler, novelist and film writer, famous mostly for his story for the classic film “Shanghai Express.” Hervey lived in Charleston in the mid-1920s openly with his lover Carleton Hildreth and wrote at least two of his books here, and used Charleston as decadent jazz age setting for his novel, “Red Ending.” Although he used coded language in some of his book to cloak a homoerotic meaning and subtext, he was often more explicit than many other closeted writers of his day. When it became known in Charleston that he was gay, he suffered for it, though he never seemed to care. Hervey bought this house and hoped to live in it, but lost it in the Depression and died broke.

by Elisa Rolle

Queer Places, Vol. 1 edited by Elisa Rolle
ISBN-13: 978-1532901904
ISBN-10: 1532901909
Release Date: July 24, 2016
CreateSpace Store: https://www.createspace.com/6228297
Amazon (print): http://www.amazon.com/dp/1532901909/?...
Amazon (kindle): http://www.amazon.com/dp/B01IZ1BU9K/?...

Historic Savannah hotels began with the original DeSoto Hotel. Still rich in history and culture, the newly-renovated Hilton Savannah DeSoto Hotel is situated downtown in the heart of Savannah's Historic District.
Address: 15 E Liberty, Savannah, GA 31401, USA (32.07415, -81.09289)
Type: Guest Facility (open to public)
Phone: +1 912-232-9000
Place
Built in 1890
Built on the site of Oglethorpe's Barracks, the original DeSoto hotel was Savannah's haven of hospitality and gathering place for celebrities, dignitaries, and presidents. Setting the bar for Savannah's tradition of gracious service, Hilton Savannah DeSoto continues as one of the Savannah Historic District's landmark hotels, providing an unmatched atmosphere for leisure and business travelers. Original crystal chandeliers shine brilliantly over the grand lobby of this iconic Savannah hotel.
Life
Who: Harry Clay Hervey (November 5, 1900 – August 13, 1951) and Carleton Hildreth (February 25, 1908 - March 12, 1977)
Harry Hervey was born in Beaumont, Texas, but was educated in Savannah, Georgia and Tennessee. He started writing at about age eight and sold his first work to H. L. Mencken at the age of sixteen. He spent much of his life at Savannah’s old Desoto Hotel, as his mother was in charge of housekeeping from 1923 to 1957. Hervey has traveled widely in Asia, Africa and the South Pacific. He authored twelve noels and numerous short stories ad screenplays. Harry Hervey was a life-long bachelor and died at the age of fifty in New York. Carleton Hildreth lived in Savannah, Georgia. He was an actor, writer, researcher, and copy editor, eventually working as proofreader for the Savannah Morning News. It was sometime during the 1920s that Hildreth met Harry Hervey. At the time, Hervey was living in Savannah with his mother, Jane Davis Hervey. For approximately thirty years, until Hervey's death in 1951, Hildreth and Hervey lived together as companions and collaborators working on a number of artistic projects. Hildreth helped type and research many of Hervey's novels and travel books, co-wrote plays and screenplays with him, and acted in at least one of their productions on Broadway. Hildreth accompanied Hervey to Southeast Asia and the Orient in the mid 1920s, and later spent time with him in Hollywood, California, where Hervey was employed as a successful screenwriter. After Hervey's death, Hildreth remained in Savannah working as a proofreader. Harry Hervey and Carleton Hildreth are buried next to Hervey’s mother, Jane Louise Davis, in Bonaventure Cemetery (330 Bonaventure Rd, Savannah, GA 31404). “Even in his wildest moments, Hervey caught something true that those of us more than twice his age can only bow before." Pico Iyer.

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Published on February 25, 2017 01:45

Arthur Lett-Haines (November 2, 1894 – February 25, 1978)

Arthur Lett-Haines, known as Lett Haines, was a British painter and sculptor who experimented in many different media, though he generally characterised himself as "an English surrealist".
Born: November 2, 1894, Paddington, London, United Kingdom
Died: February 25, 1978
Lived: Corfe, Taunton, Somerset TA3
Benton End House, Benton Street, Hadleigh, Suffolk IP7 5JR, UK (52.03691, 0.95912)
The Pound, Hadleigh Road, Higham, Suffolk CO7 6LE, UK(51.99071, 0.95763)
32 Great Ormond St, London WC1N, UK (51.52201, -0.11983)
9 Walterton Rd, London W9 3PE, UK (51.5253, -0.20009)
Buried: Friars Road Cemetery, Hadleigh, Babergh District, Suffolk, England
Buried alongside: Cedric Morris
Find A Grave Memorial# 161188757

Arthur Lett-Haines was a British painter and sculptor who experimented in many different media, though he characterized himself as "an English surrealist". He was part of a London artistic circle, which included D.H. Lawrence, the Sitwells (Dame Edith Sitwell and Sir Osbert Sitwell) and Wyndham Lewis. Sir Cedric Morris was a British artist, art teacher and plantsman. As an artist, he is best known for his portraits, flower paintings and landscapes. In 1916, Lett-Haines married Gertrude Aimee Lincoln at Hailsham, but he met the painter Cedric Morris in 1918. Morris and Lett Haines fell in love and began a lifetime relationship, and shortly afterwards Morris moved in with Haines and his wife, Aimee. The trio planned to go to America, but in the event, Aimee Lett-Haines left on her own, and the two men moved to Cornwall. This relationship lasted some 60 years, despite its open nature that included attachments on both sides such as Haines' affair with the artist and author Kathleen Hale. In 1937, Morris and Haines founded the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing at Dedham. The school closed when Haines died in 1978, though Morris continued to live at Benton End until his death in 1984.
Together from 1918 to 1978: 60 years.
Arthur Lett-Haines (1894 – February 25, 1978)
Sir Cedric Lockwood Morris, 9th Baronet (December 11, 1889 – February 8, 1982)

Queer Places, Vol. 2 edited by Elisa Rolle
ISBN-13: 978-1532906312
ISBN-10: 1532906315
Release Date: July 24, 2016
CreateSpace Store: https://www.createspace.com/6228833
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At the time of the Armistice with Germany in Nov. 1918 Cedric Morris was in London, where he met the painter Arthur Lett-Haines.
Address: 32 Great Ormond St, London WC1N, UK (51.52201, -0.11983)
Type: Private Property
Place
Cedric Morris settled in London in 1927, with a big studio at 32, Great Ormond Street, which soon became a gathering place for most of his contemporaries. Upon his arrival Roger Fry, whom he had known in Paris, elected him to the London Group and took two of his canvasses for the International Exhibition at Buenos Aires. Later, Ben Nicholson elected him to the 7 & 5 Society. He continued to exhibit with these groups for several years. In May 1927, he had his first One Man Show at Messrs. Arthur Tooth and Sons, which was a phenomenal success and thereafter has held exhibitions with West End dealers at intervals of two or three years. He has also had exhibitions at the Hague and in New York, and has been an international exhibitor at Brussells, Buenos Aires, Venice, Chicago, Pittsburg, and San Francisco. There are samples of his work in most of the important public galleries. The success of his first exhibition at Messrs. Tooth enabled him to fulfill a long defined project of painting in Wales and much of his work is of Welsh landscapes. He initiated the Welsh Contemporary Art Exhibitions in 1935, from which sprang the Welsh Contemporary Art Society.
Life
Who: Sir Cedric Lockwood Morris, 9th Baronet (December 11, 1889 – February 8, 1982) and Arthur Lett-Haines (1894 – February 25, 1978)
Sir Cedric Morris was a British artist, art teacher and plantsman. He was born in Swansea in South Wales, but worked mainly in East Anglia. As an artist he is best known for his portraits, flower paintings and landscapes. Morris went to Zennor in Cornwall, where he studied plants and painted water colours. At the time of the Armistice with Germany in Nov. 1918 he was in London, when he met the painter Arthur Lett-Haines. Morris and Lett-Haines fell in love and began a life-time relationship, and shortly afterwards Morris moved in with Lett-Haines and his second wife, Aimee. The trio planned to go to America, but in the event Aimee Lett-Haines left on her own, and the two men moved to Cornwall. They converted a row of cottages at Newlyn into a larger house and stayed there until the end of 1920, when they moved to Paris. This relationship lasted some 60 years, despite its open nature that included attachments on both sides such as Haines’ affair with the artist and author Kathleen Hale. Paris was their base for the next five years, when they travelled extensively in Europe. Morris also studied at the Academies Moderne and La Grande Chaumiere. Morris had successful exhibitions in London in 1924 and 1926, and later in that year they settled back in Britain. After staying with his sister Nancy Morris in Corfe, Morris and Haines found a studio in London at Great Ormond Street to which they moved in 1927. Morris became a member of the London Artists Association and the Seven and Five Society, for which he was proposed by Winifred Nicholson and seconded by Ben Nicholson. He became especially friendly with the painter Christopher Wood, and renewed friendship with Frances Hodgkins. At the end of the 1920s Morris became involved with much commercial work designing textiles for Cresta Silks with Paul Nash and posters for Shell and B. P.

Queer Places, Vol. 2 edited by Elisa Rolle
ISBN-13: 978-1532906312
ISBN-10: 1532906315
Release Date: July 24, 2016
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Cedric Morris chose the country life to pursue his passion for horticulture. Early in 1929 Morris and his companion, Arthur Lett-Haines, took the lease of Pound Farm, Higham, Suffolk, and in February 1930 they gave up the London studio.
Address: Hadleigh Road, Higham, Suffolk CO7 6LE, UK(51.99071, 0.95763)
Type: Private Property
English Heritage Building ID: 277246 (Grade II, 1955)
Place
The Pound is a XVI-XVII century house with XIX century wing to left and XX century alterations. Timber-framed, rendered with red brick stack, XIX century wing red brick with some dark brick headers. Plain tile roof. Single-storey and attic range with gabled jettied cross wing at left. 2-storey brick addition. Half-glazed door to cross wing, jettied 1st floor. 3-light XX century casement, bargeboards to gable. 24-pane fixed window with single opening light to hall, end of beam protrudes at floor level. XX century casements and further door to right. 2 gabled dormers with XX century windows. Small XX century ridge stack to right and sawtooth stack between cross wing and hall. Brick range 3-light windows under segmental arches, 2 replaced 16-pane sashes in flush architraves above. Pair of large gabled wall dormers to rear hall range. XX century extension under pent roof. Interior: hall, somewhat rebuilt inglenook. Chamfered beam and exposed joists.
Life
Who: Sir Cedric Lockwood Morris, 9th Baronet (December 11, 1889 – February 8, 1982) and Arthur Lett-Haines (1894 – February 25, 1978)
In 1932 the owner of Pound Farm, Vivien Gribble, who was for a while his student, died and left it to Cedric Morris. Morris had resigned from the Seven and Five Society in 1930 and he resigned from the London Artist’s Association in 1933. There were many visitors at Pound Farm, including Frances Hodgkins, Barbara Hepworth and John Skeaping. Joan Warburton who was a student described Pound Farm as a paradise, mainly because of the spectacular gardens which Morris developed. She was also impressed by their spectacular parties. Morris often went painting in his native South Wales, and in 1935 at the time of the Depression was moved by the plight of the people of South Wales Valleys. He initiated a major touring exhibition of Welsh art in 1935, and was a regular teacher at Mary Horsfall’s Art’s centre at Merthyr Tydfil. In 1935 he painted two large flower murals on board the liner Queen Mary. In late 1937 Morris and Haines joined the Hadleigh Labour Party after attending a meeting addressed by Professor Catlin.

Queer Places, Vol. 2 edited by Elisa Rolle
ISBN-13: 978-1532906312
ISBN-10: 1532906315
Release Date: July 24, 2016
CreateSpace Store: https://www.createspace.com/6228833
Amazon (print): http://www.amazon.com/dp/1532906315/?...
Amazon Kindle: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B01IZ1KZBO/?...

Benton End House was originally a large medieval farmhouse. From 1940 it was the home of Sir Cedric Morris, artist and plantsman, who formed the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing there. Students included Lucian Freud and Maggi Hambling.
Address: Benton Street, Hadleigh, Suffolk IP7 5JR, UK (52.03691, 0.95912)
Type: Private Property
English Heritage Building ID: 277783 (Grade II, 1950)
Place
Built from the XVI century, Design by Sir Peter Cheyney
XVI century and later, 2 storeys and attics, timber framed and plastered, roofs tiled. Front wings extend North and South, and wing at back extends East. The front has been largely altered and includes XVIII century features. There are 3 gabled attic dormers. 3 window range, flush frame, sash. Upper storey projects. Large, shouldered, chimney at either end. The central doorcase has flat hood on scroll brackets. At North end of front is an octagonal brick pier with pointed cap. The East wing has a brick gable with octagonal flank piers, coping and chimney stack with 2 octagonal shafts (moulded bases.) The timber framing is exposed and there is some brick nogging.
Life
Who: Sir Cedric Lockwood Morris, 9th Baronet (December 11, 1889 – February 8, 1982) and Arthur Lett-Haines (1894 – February 25, 1978)
Cedric Morris and Lett-Haines opened the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing at Dedham in April 1937. Within a year they had 60 students. Lucian Freud was one of his most noted students. In 1939 the building at Dedham was destroyed by fire with several of Morris’s paintings also destroyed. By the end of the year the school was re-established at Benton End. Benton End was a rambling “Suffolk Pink” farmhouse on the outskirts of Hadleigh, set in 3 or 4 acres (1.6 ha) of orchard. Morris was intolerant of cruelty to animals and at Benton End had a running feud with a local gamekeeper who shot cats and dogs - until the latter tripped over his shotgun and killed himself. In addition to running the school, Morris indulged his passion for plants. He grew about 1,000 new Iris seedlings each year and opened Benton End to display his collection. He produced at least 90 named varieties, 45 of which were registered with the American Iris Society. Some were sold commercially and exhibited at the Chelsea Flower Show. Many of his named varieties carried the prefix "Benton,” including “Benton Menace” named after his cats, and “Benton Rubeo,” named for his pet macaw. He also used to walk the fields and hedgerows searching for softer colour variants of poppies. Morris’s work as a horticulturalist resulted in a number of plants being names after him. Morris bred birds as a hobby and his knowledge and understanding of them may have contributed to his ability to paint them. In his “Peregrin Falcons” (1942), the birds are presented in a slightly formalised and simplified manner. His intention, he explained, was to "provoke a lively sympathy with the mood of the birds which ornithological exactitude may tend to destroy." In 1947 the Morris baronetcy came to his father from a distant cousin three months before his death and Cedric Morris succeeded his father in the same year to become the 9th Baronet Morris. He became a lecturer at the Royal College of Art in 1950. From about 1975 Morris virtually gave up painting because of failing eyesight. The school closed when Haines died in 1978, though Morris continued to live at Benton End until his death. Cedric Morris died on February 8, 1982. His former pupil, Maggi Hambling visited him on the day before his death and afterwards drew a portrait of him. His grave in Hadleigh cemetery is marked by a Welsh slate headstone cut by Donald Simpson.

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Published on February 25, 2017 01:37

February 24, 2017

William A. Emboden (born February 24, 1935)

Born: 1935
Books: Narcotic plants, Bizarre plants, Leonardo da Vinci on plants and gardens, The Visual Art of Jean Cocteau
People also search for: Isabelle Reinharez, Marshall Lee, Jean Cocteau
Anniversary: April 20

Tony Clark came to Fine Art through a background in ballet in Europe and America where he was a soloist with the Paris Opera Ballet and Maurice Bejart’s Ballet Mudra. He also worked with Loring, Hightower and Cunningham. The French government awarded him a knighthood as Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, in recognition of his curation and organizing exhibitions, and in keeping the French arts alive. As a tireless supporter of the arts, he produced sixty-four events in one year alone. William A. Emboden Ph.D., F.L.S is the author of Leonardo da Vinci on Plants and Gardens and The Visual Art of Jean Cocteau followed it. Emboden is an artist/poet in his own right. He is also a botanist and has written several books in that field. Upon his return to the USA, Clark and Emboden founded Arts of the Theatre Gallery, Los Angeles.
Together since 1971: 44 years.
Baron Anton van Kaak II, Viscount di Vreeland (born September 4)
William A. Emboden (born February 24)
Anniversary: April 20
Feb. 1971, I entered Dr. Emboden's Ethnobotany class. There was an immediate attraction and he had to allow 17 other students enroll just to have me in the class. I was an Industrial Psychology major and William was already an internationally renowned Ethobotanist. I approached and had an affair with the professor. My true calling, from age 3, was that of a dancer. I was accepted in Bejart's Ballet Murdra and the first Grand Sujet at the Paris Opera Ballet. So I had to leave William, but return to him in 1973, where we resumed our romantic partnership. 1974 we moved into a historic Hollywoodland home where we remain until this day. In 1979, we co-founded Arts of the Theatre Gallery, which was a wonderful salon/gallery in the vintage Larchmont Village. This led us to meet very interesting people in the art world and luminaries of the theatre and film world. Ultimately, this lead to the creation of a total retrospective and world tours of the finest collection of the Art of Jean Cocteau. Today it is now Jean Cocteau Museum of Menton, France. We continue our private and professional lives together. There has been a mentorship, but roles continue to change over time. The most important thing is that we have shared values. We have shared and individual tastes were both shaped by our Scandinavian heritage. We share some friends and are independent with others. We have the richest of memories working and playing globally. Our fondest memories are sharing the visual and performing arts. The most meaningful time is just being home together. We are linked by mutual respect, love and a great deal of laughter. It is a life and love shared that is a bond that has only grown stronger and eternal. -Tony Clark

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Published on February 24, 2017 00:17

Robert Byron (February 26, 1905 - February 24, 1941)

Robert Byron was a British travel writer, best known for his travelogue The Road to Oxiana. He was also a noted writer, art critic and historian.
Born: February 26, 1905, Wembley, United Kingdom
Died: February 24, 1941, Cape Wrath, United Kingdom
Education: Merton College, Oxford
Eton College
Find A Grave Memorial# 52713294
Date killed: February 24, 1941

The University of Oxford is a collegiate research university located in Oxford.
Address: Oxford, Oxfordshire OX1, UK (51.75663, -1.2547)
Type: Student Facility (open to public)
Phone: +44 1865 270000
Place
While having no known date of foundation, there is evidence of teaching as far back as 1096, making it the oldest university in the English-speaking world and the world's second-oldest surviving university. It grew rapidly from 1167 when Henry II banned English students from attending the University of Paris. After disputes between students and Oxford townsfolk in 1209, some academics fled northeast to Cambridge where they established what became the University of Cambridge. The two "ancient universities" are frequently jointly referred to as "Oxbridge". The university is made up of a variety of institutions, including 38 constituent colleges and a full range of academic departments which are organised into four divisions.
Notable Queer Alumni and Faculties at University of Oxford:
• Harold Acton (1904-1994) went up to Oxford in October 1923 to read Modern Greats at Christ Church, and while there he co-founded the avant garde magazine The Oxford Broom, and published his first book of poems, “Aquarium” (1923). In this phase of life and following it, Acton moved in the circles of, was influenced by, and he himself influenced many intellectual and literary figures of pre-war Britain; Acton is noted by Evelyn Waugh for having inspired, in part, the character of Anthony Blanche “Brideshead Revisited” (1945).
• Richard Addinsell (1904-1977) was educated at home before attending Hertford College, to study Law but went down after just 18 months. He then became interested in music.
• W.H. Auden (1907-1973) went up to Christ Church in 1925, with a scholarship in biology; he switched to English by his second year. Friends he met at Oxford include Cecil Day-Lewis, Louis MacNeice, and Stephen Spender; these four were commonly though misleadingly identified in the 1930s as the "Auden Group" for their shared (but not identical) left-wing views. Auden left Oxford in 1928 with a third-class degree. In 1956–61 he was Professor of Poetry at Oxford; his lectures were popular with students and faculty and served as the basis of his 1962 prose collection “The Dyer's Hand.” In 1972, Auden moved his winter home from New York to Oxford, where his old college, Christ Church, offered him a cottage, while he continued to summer in Austria.
• Sir Edmund Trelawny Backhouse, 2nd Baronet (1873–1944) attended Winchester College and Merton College. While at Oxford he suffered a nervous breakdown in 1894, and although he returned to the university in 1895, he never completed his degree, instead fleeing the country due to the massive debts he had accumulated.
• Katharine Lee Bates (1859-1929) studied at Oxford University during 1890–91.
• Francis Beaumont (1584–1616) was educated at Broadgates Hall (now Pembroke College) at age thirteen. Following the death of his father in 1598, he left university without a degree and followed in his father's footsteps by entering the Inner Temple in London in 1600.
• George Benson (1613–1692) matriculated at Queen's College, on November 21, 1628, aged 15; BA, on May 10, 1631; MA from St Edmund's Hall, on February 11, 1633 or 1634; DD from Queen's College, on August 2, 1660. Prebendary of Chichester. Rector of Chetton (Sallop), 1638. Canon and archdeacon of Hereford, 1660; canon of Worcester, 1671; Dean of Hereford, from September 10, 1672 to August 24, 1692. He married Katherine Fell, daughter of Samuel Fell, at Christ Church, Oxford. He died aged 78 years and is buried beside his friend Bishop Croft underneath the throne in the Choir of Hereford Cathedral.
• Lennox Berkeley (1903-1989) was born in Oxford, and educated at the Dragon School, Gresham's School and Merton College.
• Maurice Bowra (1898-1971) was an English classical scholar and academic, known for his wit. He was Warden of Wadham College, from 1938 to 1970, and served as Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford from 1951 to 1954. In his long career as an Oxford don Bowra had contact with a considerable portion of the English literary world, either as students or as colleagues. The character of Mr Samgrass in Evelyn Waugh's “Brideshead Revisited” is said to have been modelled on Bowra. Cyril Connolly, Henry Green, Anthony Powell and Kenneth Clark knew Bowra quite well when they were undergraduates. Clark called Bowra "the strongest influence in my life". Waugh marked his friend's election as Warden of Wadham by presenting him with a monkey-puzzle tree for his garden. As an undergraduate in Oxford in the 1920s Bowra was fashionably homosexual and was known to cruise for sex. He used the term "the Homintern" and privately referred to his leading position in it, also calling it "the Immoral Front" or "the 69th International". Bowra retired in 1970, but continued to live in rooms in the college that had been granted to him in exchange for a house he owned. He became an honorary fellow of Wadham and was awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Civil Law. He died of a sudden heart attack in 1971 and was buried in Holywell Cemetery (St Cross Church, St.Cross Rd, City Centre, Oxford OX1 3TP).
• Edwin Emmanuel Bradford (1860–1944) was an English clergyman and Uranian poet and novelist. He attended Exeter College, received his B.A. in 1884, and was awarded a D.D. He was vicar of Nordelph, Downham Market, Norfolk, from 1909 to 1944.
• Sir John Bramston (1832–1921), was a politician in Queensland (now part of Australia) and a British colonial government administrator in Queensland and Hong Kong. Bramston was the second son of Thomas William Bramston (later MP for South Essex), of Skreens, Essex and his wife Eliza, daughter of Admiral Sir Eliab Harvey. He was educated at Winchester College and at Balliol College, where he graduated B.A. in 1854, becoming Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford in the following year, and D.C.L. in 1863. He entered the Middle Temple in November 1854 and was called to the bar in June 1857.
• Beau Brummell (1778-1840) attended Oxford University, where, by his own example, he made cotton stockings and dingy cravats a thing of the past. While an undergraduate at Oriel College in 1793, he competed for the Chancellor's Prize for Latin Verse, coming second to Edward Copleston, who was later to become provost of his college. He left the university after only a year at the age of sixteen.
• Peter Burra (1909-1937) attended Christ Church College and edited Farrago, founded by Simon Nowell-Smith as a rival to Oxford Poetry. Farrago ran for six issues, from February 1930 to June 1931, and quickly established a reputation a long way from Oxford; The Times was soon calling it “that very excellent undergraduate literary review,” while the London Mercury hailed it as “the best undergraduate journal published since the War.” Burra was occasionally successful in attracting contributions from figures such as Evelyn Waugh, Robert Bridges, the artist Edward Burra (Peter’s cousin) and Max Beerbohm, but the magazine was identified closely with the group of poets, artists and musicians around the Oxford University Orchestral Society.
• Richard Francis Burton (1821-1890) matriculated at Trinity College, on 19 November 1840. Before getting a room at the college, he lived for a short time in the house of Dr. William Alexander Greenhill, then physician to the Radcliffe Infirmary. Here, he met John Henry Newman, whose churchwarden was Dr. Greenhill. Despite his intelligence and ability, Burton was antagonised by his teachers and peers. During his first term, he is said to have challenged another student to a duel after the latter mocked Burton's moustache. Burton continued to gratify his love of languages by studying Arabic; he also spent his time learning falconry and fencing. In April 1842, he attended a steeplechase in deliberate violation of college rules and subsequently dared to tell the college authorities that students should be allowed to attend such events. Hoping to be merely "rusticated" – that is, suspended with the possibility of reinstatement, the punishment received by some less provocative students who had also visited the steeplechase – he was instead permanently expelled from Trinity College.
• Robert Byron (1905–1941) was educated at Eton and Merton College, from which he was expelled for his hedonistic and rebellious manner. He was best known at Oxford for his impersonation of Queen Victoria. He died in 1941, during WWII, when the ship on which he was travelling was torpedoed by a U-Boat off Cape Wrath, Scotland, en route to Egypt. His body was never found. Nancy Mitford hoped at one stage that Byron would propose marriage to her, and was later astonished as well as shocked to discover his homosexual tastes, complaining: "This wretched pederasty falsifies all feelings and yet one is supposed to revere it." Byron's great, though unreciprocated, passion was for Desmond Parsons, younger brother of the 6th Earl of Rosse, who was regarded as one of the most magnetic men of his generation. They lived together in Peking, in 1934, where Desmond developed Hodgkin's Disease, of which he died in Zurich, in 1937, when only 26 years old. Byron was left utterly devastated. It has been said that Parsons was also the only man Harold Acton has ever loved.
• Robert Carr, 1st Earl of Somerset, (1587–1645), was a politician, and favourite of King James VI and I. His alma mater was Queen's College.
• Lord David Cecil (1902–1986), was a British biographer, historian and academic. He held the style of "Lord" by courtesy, as a younger son of a marquess. David Cecil was the youngest of the four children of James Gascoyne-Cecil, 4th Marquess of Salisbury, and the former Lady Cicely Gore (second daughter of Arthur Gore, 5th Earl of Arran). After Eton he went on to Christ Church, as an undergraduate. Cecil read Modern History at Oxford and in 1924 obtained first-class honours. From 1924 to 1930 he was a Fellow of Wadham College. With his first publication, “The Stricken Deer” (1929), a sympathetic study of the poet Cowper, he made an immediate impact as a literary historian. Studies followed on Walter Scott, early Victorian novelists and Jane Austen. In 1939 he became a Fellow of New College, where he remained a Fellow until 1969, when he became an Honorary Fellow. In 1947 he became Professor of Rhetoric at Gresham College, London, for a year; but in 1948 he returned to the University of Oxford and remained a Professor of English Literature there until 1970. Joyce Grenfell mentions that Lord David Cecil was bisexual.
• Cyril Connolly (1903-1974) achieved academic success in 1922 winning the Rosebery History Prize, and followed this up with the Brackenbury History scholarship to Balliol College. After his cloistered existence as a King's Scholar at Eton, Connolly felt uncomfortable with the hearty beer-drinking rugby and rowing types at Oxford. His own circle included his Eton friends Mynors and Dannruthers, who were at Balliol with him, and Kenneth Clark, whom he met through Bobbie Longden at Kings. He wrote: "The only exercise we took was running up bills." His intellectual mentors were the Dean of Balliol, "Sligger" Urquhart, who organised reading parties on the continent, and the Dean of Wadham, Maurice Bowra.
• Antony Copley (1937–2016) was a British historian. He was an honorary professor at the University of Kent at Canterbury, and specialised in XIX century French history and modern Indian history. At the time of his death he was looking forward to a general pardon for gay men who like himself, had been convicted of homosexual acts. He was born on 1 July 1937 in Hertfordshire, the son of Alan, a solicitor, and Iris Copley, and educated at Gresham's School and Worcester College.
• Paul Dehn (1912-1976) was educated at Shrewsbury School, and attended Brasenose College. While at Oxford, he contributed film reviews to weekly undergraduate papers.
• Alfred Douglas (1870-1945) was educated at Wixenford School, Winchester College (1884–88) and Magdalen College (1889–93), which he left without obtaining a degree. At Oxford, he edited an undergraduate journal, The Spirit Lamp (1892–3), an activity that intensified the constant conflict between him and his father.
• Edward Douglas-Scott-Montagu (1926-2015) attended St Peter's Court, a prep school at Broadstairs in Kent, then Ridley College in Canada, Eton College and finally New College. He read Modern History at Oxford, but during his second year an altercation between the Bullingdon Club, of which he was a member, and the Oxford University Dramatic Society led to his room being wrecked, and he felt obliged to leave.
• Tom Driberg (1905-1976) won a classics scholarship to Christ Church. Oxford in 1924 featured an avant-garde aesthetic movement in which personalities such as Harold Acton, Brian Howard, Cyril Connolly and, a little later, W. H. Auden were leading lights. Driberg was soon immersed in a world of art, politics, poetry and parties: "There was just no time for any academic work", he wrote later. A poem of Driberg's in the style of Edith Sitwell was published in Oxford Poetry 1926; when Sitwell came to Oxford to deliver a lecture, Driberg invited her to have tea with him, and she accepted. After her lecture he found an opportunity to recite one of his own poems, and was rewarded when Sitwell declared him "the hope of English poetry." The consequence of his various extracurricular involvements was neglect of his academic work; failure in his final examinations was inevitable, and in the summer of 1927 he left Oxford without a degree.
• Robert Flemyng (1912–1995) was an English film and stage actor. Flemyng was married to Carmen Sugars, who died in 1994, and they had one daughter. According to “Alec Guinness: The Authorised Biography,” a biography of Alec Guinness by Piers Paul Read, he "[fell] in love with a younger man in [his] middle age." He could not act upon his repressed feelings because male homosexuality was illegal in the United Kingdom (until 1967) and because he was married. Therefore, "he had a nervous breakdown and then a stroke and had a really terrible time."
• Peter Glenville (1913-1996) was the son of Sean Glenville and Dorothy Ward, a highly successful double act in the pantomime. Dorothy Ward, with famously beautiful legs, played the principal “boy” and Sean Glenville the “dame”. It was hardly surprising, Glenville used to say, that he was queer. Since Dorothy Ward was Roman Catholic, she provided the funds to send Peter to Stonyhurst, the public school run by the Jesuits in Lancashire. From there Glenville went to Christ Church, where he joined OUDS. The OUDS at that time was a distinctly homosexual society with some very good-looking young men, among them Peter Glenville, Robert Flemyng and Terence Rattigan, all of whom were keen to cluster around the visiting star. The “visiting star” was John Gielgud who, in 1932, came to direct “Romeo and Juliet”. In 1934, Glenville was elected president of OUDS, and after graduation made his first professional stage appearance at the Manchester Repertory Company in Louis Jourdan’s role as the tutor, Dr. Agi, in Ferenc Molnar’s “The Swan”.
• Alastair Graham (1904-1982), one of the three Oxford lovers of Evelyn Waugh (in order Richard Pares, Alistair Graham and Hugh Lygon.) Paula Byrne said that while he was "candid" about the relationships with Pares and the well-heeled Graham in his autobiography, Waugh refrained from explicitly describing them as homosexual.
• Robert Graves (1895-1985) won a classical exhibition to St John's College, but did not take his place there until after the war. His most notable Oxford companion was T. E. Lawrence, then a Fellow of All Souls', with whom he discussed contemporary poetry and shared in the planning of elaborate pranks. In 1961 he became Professor of Poetry at Oxford, a post he held until 1966.
• Henry William Greville (1801–1872) was educated at Westminster School and Christ Church, where he graduated B.A. on 4 June 1823.
• Bryan Guinness, 2nd Baron Moyne (1905-1992) attended Christ Church and was called to the bar in 1931.
• Leslie Poles Hartley (1895–1972), known as L. P. Hartley, was a British novelist and short story writer. Hartley was born in Whittlesey, Cambridgeshire, the son of Bessie and Harry Hartley. While he was young, the family moved to a small country estate near Peterborough. Hartley was educated in Cliftonville, Thanet, then briefly at Clifton College, where he first met Clifford Henry Benn Kitchin, then at Harrow. In 1915, during WWI, he went up to Balliol College, to read modern history, and there he befriended Aldous Huxley. In 1916, with the arrival of conscription, Hartley joined the army, and in February 1917 he was commissioned as an officer in the Norfolk Regiment, but for health reasons he was never posted overseas for active duties. Invalided out of the army after the war, he returned to Oxford in 1919, where he gathered a number of literary friends, including Lord David Cecil, the platonic ‘love of his life’ according to Francis King. He was introduced by Huxley to Lady Ottoline Morrell. Kitchin, who was also then at Oxford, introduced him to the family of H. H. Asquith, and Cynthia Asquith became a lifelong friend. Despite being named after Leslie Stephen, Hartley always belonged to the Asquith set and was rebuffed by the Bloomsbury group. Hartley was homosexual but not open about his sexuality until toward the end of his life. Hartley regarded his 1971 novel “The Harness Room” as his "homosexual novel" and feared the public reaction to it.
• Gavin Henderson, 2nd Baron Faringdon (1902-1977), was sent to Eton College, then attended McGill University in Montreal, before graduating from Christ Church, in 1924.
• Robert Herbert (1831-1905) was the first Premier of Queensland, Australia. He was educated at Eton and Balliol College. He won a Balliol scholarship in 1849 and subsequently the Hertford and Ireland scholarships. He took a first class in classical moderations, won the Latin verse prize in 1852, and obtained second-class final honours in the classical school. He was elected Fellow of All Souls in 1854 and was Eldon law scholar. In 1855 he was private secretary to William Ewart Gladstone and was called to the bar of the Inner Temple in 1858. Robert Herbert met his companion, John Bramston, in the early 1850s at Balliol College. The pair shared rooms at Oxford, and also in London. When Herbert was Premier of Queensland, and Bramston his Attorney-General, the two created a farm on what is now the site of the Royal Brisbane and Women's Hospital. They named the farmhouse in which they both lived "Herston", a combination of their names. It also became the name of the modern-day Brisbane suburb of Herston, in the same location.
• Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) studied classics at Balliol College (1863–67). Hopkins was an unusually sensitive and shy student and poet, as witnessed by his class-notes and early poetic pieces. At Oxford he forged a lifelong friendship with Robert Bridges (eventual Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom) which would be of importance in his development as a poet and in his posthumous acclaim. Hopkins was deeply impressed with the work of Christina Rossetti and she became one of his greatest contemporary influences, meeting him in 1864. During this time he studied with the prestigious writer and critic Walter Pater, who tutored him in 1866 and who remained a friend until Hopkins left Oxford in September 1879. In July 1866, he decided to become a Roman Catholic, and he traveled to Birmingham in September to consult the leader of the Oxford converts, John Henry Newman. Newman received him into the Roman Catholic Church on 21 October 1866.
• A. E. Housman (1859-1936) won an open scholarship to St John's College, where he studied classics. Although introverted by nature, Housman formed strong friendships with two roommates, Moses Jackson and A. W. Pollard. Jackson became the great love of Housman's life, but he was heterosexual and did not reciprocate Housman's feelings.
• Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) graduated from Balliol College, with a first in English literature. In 1916 he edited Oxford Poetry and in June of that year graduated BA with First Class honours.
• H. Montgomery Hyde (1907-1989) was a barrister, politician (Ulster Unionist MP for Belfast North), prolific author and biographer. He was deselected in 1959, losing his seat in the House of Commons, as a result of campaigning for homosexual law reform. He attended Queen's University Belfast where he gained a first-class history degree, and then Magdalen College, and a second-class law degree. He was an extension lecturer in History at the University of Oxford in 1934, and Professor of History and Political Science at the University of Lahore from 1959 to 1962.
• Evelyn Irons (1900-2000) graduated from Somerville College.
• Robert King, 4th Earl of Kingston (1796-1867) was the second but eldest surviving son of George King, 3rd Earl of Kingston, and Lady Helena, daughter of Stephen Morre, 1st Earl of Mount Cashell. He was educated at Exeter College.
• C. H. B. Kitchin (1895-1967) was a British novelist of the early XX century. He was one of Francis King's two mentors, the other being J. R. Ackerley. Kitchin attended Exeter College and became a barrister. Kitchin led a varied and colourful life. He was born into wealth and increased his wealth through investment in the stock market. He used his wealth to take part in many different fields, including the breeding and racing of greyhounds, in which he was briefly an important figure. He was homosexual, and was living with his lover Clive Preen until Preen's death in 1944. 1886: Clive Bertram Preen (1886-1944) was born at George St, Kidderminster. He was the son of Harvey Edwin Preen, a chartered accountant, and his wife Ann (formerly Harper). In 1891 he was visiting Hastings with his parents and in 1901 he was at school in Marlborough. In 1911 he was living in Belsize Park, Hampstead with his parents and working as a chartered accountant. In April 1914 he and his father Harvey sailed to New York and he went by himself in both July 1914 and January 1836. He never married and since 1930 was living with Kitchin. He died in 1944.
• (Edward) Eardley Knollys (1902-1991) was an English artist of the Bloomsbury School of artists, art critic, art dealer and collector, active from the 1920s to 1950s. He was educated at Winchester and Christ Church.
• T. E. Lawrence (1888-1935) studied History at Jesus College from 1907 to 1910. In 1910 Lawrence was offered the opportunity to become a practising archaeologist in the Middle East, at Carchemish, in the expedition that D. G. Hogarth was setting up on behalf of the British Museum. Hogarth arranged a "Senior Demyship", a form of scholarship, for Lawrence at Magdalen College in order to fund Lawrence's work at £100/year. In 1919, he was elected to a seven-year research fellowship at All Souls College, providing him with support while he worked on “Seven Pillars of Wisdom.”
• James Lees-Milne (1908-1997) attended Lockers Park School in Hertfordshire, Eton, and Oxford University from which he graduated with a Third Class in History in 1931.
• Alan Lennox-Boyd, 1st Viscount Boyd of Merton (1904-1983) was educated at Sherborne School, Dorset, and graduated from Christ Church, with a Master of Arts.
• Matthew Lewis (1775-1818), like his father, entered Christ Church, on 27 April 1790 at the age of fifteen. He graduated with a bachelor's degree in 1794 and earned a master's degree from the same college in 1797.
• Alain LeRoy Locke (1885-1954) was denied admission to several colleges, and several Rhodes Scholars from the American South refused to live in the same college or attend events with Locke. He was finally admitted to Hertford College, where he studied literature, philosophy, Greek, and Latin, from 1907–1910. In 1910, he attended the University of Berlin, where he studied philosophy. Locke wrote from Oxford in 1910 that the "primary aim and obligation" of a Rhodes Scholar "is to acquire at Oxford and abroad generally a liberal education, and to continue subsequently the Rhodes mission [of international understanding] throughout life and in his own country. If once more it should prove impossible for nations to understand one another as nations, then, as Goethe said, they must learn to tolerate each other as individuals".
• Hugh Patrick Lygon (1904-1936) was educated at Eton and Pembroke College. He was a friend of Evelyn Waugh's at Oxford (A. L. Rowse believed the two to be lovers), where both were members of the Hypocrites' Club, along with their contemporary Murray Andrew McLean.
• William Lygon (1872-1938) was educated at Eton and Christ Church, where he showed an interest in evangelism, joining the Christian Social Union.
• Compton Mackenzie (1883-1972) was educated at St Paul's School, London, and Magdalen College, where he graduated with a degree in modern history.
• Christabel Marshall (1871-1960) took a BA in Modern History at Somerville College.
• F. O. Matthiessen (1902-1950) studied at Oxford University, as a Rhodes Scholar earning a B.Litt. in 1925.
• Evan Morgan, 2nd Viscount Tredegar (1893-1949), was educated at Eton College and Christ Church.
• Raymond Mortimer (1895–1980) was educated at Malvern College, and Balliol College, which he entered in 1913 to read history. His studies were interrupted by service in a hospital in France from 1915; and then work in the Foreign Office. He did not complete his degree.
• John Henry Newman (1801-1890), originally an evangelical Oxford University academic and priest in the Church of England, then became drawn to the high-church tradition of Anglicanism. He became known as a leader of, and an able polemicist for, the Oxford Movement, an influential and controversial grouping of Anglicans who wished to return to the Church of England many Catholic beliefs and liturgical rituals from before the English Reformation. However, in 1845 Newman, joined by some but not all of his followers, left the Church of England and his teaching post at Oxford University and was received into the Catholic Church. He was quickly ordained as a priest and continued as an influential religious leader, based in Birmingham. In 1879, he was created a cardinal by Pope Leo XIII in recognition of his services to the cause of the Catholic Church in England. He was instrumental in the founding of the Catholic University of Ireland, which evolved into University College Dublin, today the largest university in Ireland.
• Beverley Nichols (1898–1983) went to school at Marlborough College then Balliol College, and was President of the Oxford Union and editor of Isis.
• Harold Nicolson (1886–1968) was educated at Wellington College and Balliol College.
• Ivor Novello (1893-1951) won a scholarship to Magdalen College School, where he was a solo treble in the college choir.
• Richard Pares (1902–1958) won scholarships at Winchester College and at Balliol College, where he took a first-class degree in literae humaniores in 1924. On obtaining his Oxford degree, he was elected to a fellowship of All Souls College, which he retained until 1945.
• Hon. Desmond Edward Parsons (1910-1937) was the son of William Edward Parsons, 5th Earl of Rosse and Frances Lois Lister-Kaye. He died on 4 July 1937 at age 26. He was the unrequited love of both Robert Byron and Harold Acton.
• Ralph Partridge (1894-1960) rowed with Noel Carrington while at the University of Oxford. In 1918 Noel introduced him to his sister, Dora Carrington, who was on holiday in Scotland. After surviving the WWI, Partridge returned to Oxford, and became a regular visitor to Tidmarsh. He soon fell in love with Carrington - whilst Strachey fell in love with him, rechristening him “Ralph,” as he would thereafter be known.
• Walter Pater (1839-1894) went to Queen's College in 1858. After graduating, Pater remained in Oxford and taught Classics and Philosophy to private students. His years of study and reading now paid dividends: he was offered a classical fellowship in 1864 at Brasenose on the strength of his ability to teach modern German philosophy, and he settled down to a university career. Pater was at the centre of a small but gifted circle in Oxford – he had tutored Gerard Manley Hopkins in 1866 and the two remained friends till September 1879 when Hopkins left Oxford – and he gained respect in the London literary world and beyond, numbering some of the Pre-Raphaelites among his friends. He is buried at Holywell Cemetery (St Cross Church, St.Cross Rd, City Centre, Oxford OX1 3TP).
• Peter Pears (1910–1986) went to Keble College in 1928, to study music. He was not at this stage sure whether his musical future was as a singer or as player; during his brief time at the university he was appointed temporary assistant organist at Hertford College, which was useful practical experience. Headington comments that a musical conservatoire such as the Royal College of Music would have suited Pears better than the Oxford course, but at the time it was seen as a natural progression for an English public school boy to continue his education at Oxford or Cambridge. In the event Pears did not take to Oxford's academic regime, which required him to study a range of subjects before specialising in music. He failed the first-year examinations (Moderations) and though he was entitled to resit them he decided against doing so, and went down from Oxford.
• John Pope-Hennessy (1913-1994) was educated at Downside School, a Roman Catholic boarding independent school for boys, in the village of Stratton-on-the-Fosse in Somerset, followed by Balliol College, where he read modern history. At Oxford, he was introduced by Logan Pearsall Smith (a family friend from the United States) to Kenneth Clark, who became a mentor to the young Pope-Hennessy.
• Terence Rattigan (1911-1977) was educated at Sandroyd School from 1920 to 1925, at the time based in Cobham, Surrey (and now the home of Reed's School), and Harrow School. Rattigan played cricket for the Harrow First XI and scored 29 in the Eton–Harrow match in 1929. He was a member of the Officer Training Corps and organised a mutiny, informing the Daily Express. Even more annoying to his headmaster, Cyril Norwood, was the telegram from the Eton OTC, "offering to march to his assistance". He then went to Trinity College. A troubled homosexual, who saw himself as an outsider, his plays "confronted issues of sexual frustration, failed relationships and adultery", and a world of repression and reticence. Rattigan had numerous lovers but no long-term partners, a possible exception being his "congenial companion ... and occasional friend" Michael Franklin.
• Mary Renault (1905-1983) was educated at St Hugh's College, then an all-women's college, receiving an undergraduate degree in English in 1928. In 1933 she began training as a nurse at the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford. During her training she met Julie Mullard, a fellow nurse with whom she established a lifelong romantic relationship.
• Cecil Rhodes (1853-1902) was admitted to Oriel College, but stayed for only one term in 1873. He returned to South Africa and did not return for his second term at Oxford until 1876. He was greatly influenced by John Ruskin's inaugural lecture at Oxford, which reinforced his own attachment to the cause of British imperialism. Among his Oxford associates were James Rochfort Maguire, later a fellow of All Souls College and a director of the British South Africa Company, and Charles Metcalfe. Due to his university career, Rhodes admired the Oxford "system". Eventually he was inspired to develop his scholarship scheme: "Wherever you turn your eye—except in science—an Oxford man is at the top of the tree".
• Adrienne Rich (1929-2012), following her graduation at Radcliffe College, received a Guggenheim Fellowship to study at Oxford for a year. Following a visit to Florence, she chose not to return to Oxford, and spent her remaining time in Europe writing and exploring Italy.
• Philip Sassoon (1888-1939) was educated at Farnborough Prep school, Eton before going up to Oxford. Old Etonian Arthur Balfour recommended the Debating Society to him. His father was also friendly with Frances Horner, wife of Sir John Horner, a longtime friend of Gladstone who lived at Mells Manor in Somerset. His house master was a member of the secret society of liberals the Young Apostles. And a near contemporary was Osbert Sitwell, the Yorkshireman and author (Sitwell’s long-time companion was David Horner, from the Horner’s family at Mells Manor). A French scholar, he learnt the language doing classes at Windsor Castle. Sassoon was taught aesthetics by Henry Luxmoore giving an insight into philosophy and social realism. However he chose to read Modern History at Christ Church. He was one of only 25 Jewish undergraduates, but was invited to join the Bullingdon Club. He joined the East Kent Yeomanry while still at Oxford and commissioned a second lieutenant.
• John Schlesinger (1926-2003), after St Edmund's School, Hindhead, Uppingham School and Balliol College, where he was involved in the Oxford University Dramatic Society, he worked as an actor.
• Vida Dutton Scudder (1861-1954) and Clara French (1863-1888) were the first American women admitted to the graduate program at Oxford in 1885, where Scudder was influenced by York Powell and John Ruskin.
• Desmond Shawe-Taylor (1907-1995) was sent to be educated in England, at Shrewsbury School and Oriel College, where he graduated in 1930 with a first class degree in English
• Philip Sidney (1554-1586) was educated at Shrewsbury School and Christ Church.
• Sacheverell Sitwell (1897-1988) was educated at Eton College and Balliol College.
• Susan Sontag (1933-2004) was awarded an American Association of University Women's fellowship for the 1957–1958 academic year to St Anne's College, where she traveled without her husband, Philip Rieff, and son. There, she had classes with Iris Murdoch, Stuart Hampshire, A. J. Ayer and H. L. A. Hart while also attending the B. Phil seminars of J. L. Austin and the lectures of Isaiah Berlin. Oxford did not appeal to her, however, and she transferred after Michaelmas term of 1957 to the University of Paris.
• Stephen Spender (1909-1995) came up to University College in 1927. His autobiography "World within World" (1951) suggests that he did not have a very happy time at Oxford, and he never took a degree, but in 1973 he was elected an Honorary Fellow of the College, and stayed in contact with it until his death.
• Major Honorable James “Hamish” Alexander Wedderburn St. Clair-Erskine (1909-1973), second son of James Francis Harry St. Clair-Erskine, 5th Earl of Rosslyn and Vera Mary Bayley. He was educated at Eton College, and New College. He gained the rank of Major in the service of the Coldstream Guards. He fought in the WWII between 1939 and 1942, where he was wounded, mentioned in despatches twice and became a POW. He was decorated with the award of the Military Cross (M.C.) in 1943. Nancy Mitford fell in love with him. He was the least suitable partner of all, "the most shimmering and narcissistic of all the beautiful butterflies". The pair met in 1928 and became unofficially engaged, despite his homosexuality (of which Nancy may not have been aware). Against a backdrop of negativity from family and friends—Waugh advised her to "dress better and catch a better man"— the affair endured sporadically for about 5 years. He eventually converted to homosexuality and called the wedding off. He died unmarried in December 1973
• Ambrose St. John (1815-1875) was educated at Westminster School, and Christ Church, where he graduated M.A., forming a lifelong friendship with Cardinal Newman.
• Eric Stenbock (1860-1895) attended Balliol College but never completed his studies. While at Oxford, Eric was deeply influenced by the homosexual Pre-Raphaelite artist and illustrator Simeon Solomon. He is also said to have had a relationship with the composer and conductor Norman O'Neill and with other "young men". In Oxford, Stenbock also converted to Roman Catholicism taking for himself the name Stanislaus. Some years later Eric also admitted to having tried a different religion every week in Oxford. At the end of his life, he seemed to have developed a syncretist religion containing elements of Catholicism, Buddhism and idolatry.
• Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909) attended Balliol College (1856–60) with a brief hiatus when he was rusticated from the university in 1859 for having publicly supported the attempted assassination of Napoleon III by Felice Orsini. He returned in May 1860, though he never received a degree.
• John Addington Symonds (1840-1893) studied classics under Benjamin Jowett at Balliol College, and later worked with Jowett on an English translation of Plato's Symposium. Jowett was critical of Symonds' opinions on sexuality, but when Symonds was falsely accused of corrupting choirboys, Jowett supported him, despite his own equivocal views of the relation of Hellenism to contemporary legal and social issues that affected homosexuals.
• Wilfred Thesiger (1910-2003) was educated at Eton College followed by Magdalen College, where he took a Third in History. Between 1930 and 1933, Thesiger represented Oxford at boxing and later (in 1933) became captain of the Oxford boxing team. He was awarded a boxing Blue for each of the four years that he was at Oxford. Whilst at Oxford, Thesiger was also elected Treasurer of the Oxford University Exploration Club (1931–32).
• Colin Turnbull (1924-1994) was educated at Westminster School and Magdalen College, where he studied politics and philosophy. Joseph Allen Towles moved to New York City in 1957 to pursue a career as an actor and writer. He met Turnbull in 1959 and they exchanged marriage vows the following year. From 1965 to 1967, Turnbull and Towles conducted fieldwork among the Ik of Northern Uganda in Africa. Towles' health declined slowly from 1983. He died from complications of AIDS in 1988. Colin Turnbull asked his name to be added to Joe's gravestone since, basically, his soul died when his partner died too. He died in Virginia in 1994, aged 69.
• Edward Perry Warren (1860-1928) received his B.A. from Harvard College in 1883 and later studied at New College, earning his M.S. in Classics. His academic interest was classical archeology. At Oxford he met archeologist John Marshall (1862–1928), a younger man he called "Puppy," with whom he formed a close and long-lasting relationship, though Marshall married in 1907, much to Warren's dismay.
• Peter Watson (1908-1956), wealthy English art collector and benefactor, was the son of William George Watson, later Sir George Watson. He was educated at Lockers Park School, Eton College and St John's College.
• Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966) was educated at Lancing College and then at Hertford College. During his first two terms, he generally followed convention; he smoked a pipe, bought a bicycle, and gave his maiden speech at the Oxford Union, opposing the motion that "This House would welcome Prohibition". The arrival in Oxford in October 1922 of the sophisticated Etonians Harold Acton and Brian Howard changed Waugh's Oxford life. Acton and Howard rapidly became the centre of an avant-garde circle known as the Hypocrites, whose artistic, social and homosexual values Waugh adopted enthusiastically; he later wrote: "It was the stamping ground of half my Oxford life". He began drinking heavily, and embarked on the first of several homosexual relationships, the most lasting of which were with Richard Pares and Alastair Graham.
• Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) proved himself to be an outstanding classicist, first at Dublin, then at Magdalen College. He became known for his involvement in the rising philosophy of aestheticism, led by two of his tutors, Walter Pater and John Ruskin.
• Peter Wildeblood (1923–1999) won a scholarship to Radley College and then went up to Trinity College, in 1941, but dropped out after ten days because of ill health.
• Emlyn Willians (1905-1987), aged 11, won a scholarship to Holywell Grammar School. At the end of his time at the grammar school he won a scholarship to Christ Church, where he read French and Italian and joined the Oxford University Dramatic Society (OUDS). His first full-length play, Full Moon, was premiered at the original Oxford Playhouse in 1927, the year he joined a repertory company and began his stage career.
• Angus Wilson (1913-1991) was educated at Westminster School and Merton College, and in 1937 became a librarian in the British Museum's Department of Printed Books, working on the new General Catalogue.
• Carl Winter (1906-1966) was educated at Xavier College and Newman College, University of Melbourne. He came to England in 1928 and attended Exeter College.

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Published on February 24, 2017 00:15

John Parke Boyle (July 30, 1893 – February 24, 1969)

Lived: Shirburn Castle, Castle Rd, Shirburn, Watlington, Oxfordshire OX49 5DJ, UK (51.65756, -0.99379)
Buried: St Mary the Virgin, Church Lane, North Stoke, Oxfordshire, OX10 6BQ
Find A Grave Memorial# 161197515

Oliver Baldwin was a British politician, son of three-time Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin. The Daily Mail on August 5, 1931, was dominated by a story claiming that Oliver Baldwin was living with a man named John Boyle. “We do not know if Mr. Oliver Baldwin and Mr. John Boyle are indulging in unnatural vice, but if they are committing criminal acts the police should be informed and a criminal prosecution brought.” That afternoon Stanley Baldwin gave a press conference with his wife Lucy and Oliver. He said that Oliver had the love and support of himself and his wife. They knew that he and John Boyle were close friends and were living together. What they did in their personal lives was no one's business and certainly not a matter for the law. In 1948, Oliver was appointed Governor of the Leeward Islands and took John Boyle with him.
Together from 1923 & 1958: 35 years.
John Parke Boyle (1893 - 1969)
Oliver Ridsdale Baldwin, 2nd Earl Baldwin of Bewdley, Viscount Corvedale (March 1, 1899 – August 10, 1958)

Days of Love edited by Elisa Rolle
ISBN-13: 978-1500563325
ISBN-10: 1500563323
Release Date: September 21, 2014
CreateSpace Store: https://www.createspace.com/4910282
Amazon (print): http://www.amazon.com/dp/1500563323/?...
Amazon (kindle): http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00MZG0VHY/?...

Shirburn Castle is at the village of Shirburn, 6 miles (9.7 km) south of Thame, Oxfordshire. Shirburn Castle was the seat of the Earls of Macclesfield.
Address: Castle Rd, Shirburn, Watlington, Oxfordshire OX49 5DJ, UK (51.65756, -0.99379)
Type: Private Property
Place
George Parker, 2nd Earl of Macclesfield (c.1695–1764), celebrated as an astronomer, spent much time conducting astronomical observations at Shirburn Castle, which his father had bought in 1716. Here he built an observatory and a chemical laboratory. The observatory was "equipped with the finest existing instruments" and the 2nd Earl of Macclesfield used it from 1740. In 1761 the astronomer Thomas Hornsby observed the transit of Venus from the castle grounds. The Macclesfield Psalter, a lavishly illuminated manuscript from the English region of East Anglia, written in Latin and produced around 1330, was discovered in Shirburn Castle in 2004 when the contents of the Library were catalogued for auction. The present owner of the castle is the Beechwood Estates Company, the Macclesfield family estate management company. Following a long-running and acrimonious court battle, Richard Timothy George Mansfield Parker, the 9th Earl of Macclesfield, was evicted from the family seat at the end of 2004. The castle was used for external shots of Midsomer Priory for the popular television series “Midsomer Murders.”
Life
Who: Oliver Ridsdale Baldwin, 2nd Earl Baldwin of Bewdley (March 1, 1899 – August 10, 1958) and John Parke Boyle (July 30, 1893 – February 24, 1969)
On his return from Armenia Oliver Baldwin made two major decisions. First, any talk of engagement to Dorothea Arbuthnot was a fraud; he was homosexual and needed to live the rest of his life with a male partner, whom he found in the person of John Parke Boyle, the son of an army officer, descended from the earls of Cork. Together they set up home in Oxfordshire, first at Shirburn and then at North Stoke, keeping geese and hens and taking in lodgers, with Oliver trying to make money by writing. He refused to accept money from his father, except for small cheques at Christmas or for his birthday. Second, Oliver decided his politics lay decisively on the left. The substance of an interview he gave to the Westminster Gazette was taken up by Fred Gorle of the Social Democratic Federation. Baldwin was invited to become a member, which he immediately did. H. M. Hyndman, the guiding spirit of the SDF, remained his political inspiration for the rest of his life. Some members of his family thought that the adoption of socialism was deeply treacherous, but Stanley Baldwin was always warm, generous and understanding of the idealism of his elder son. His mother, coming from a background where the questioning of received ideas was not just possible but expected, was also supportive, and on a personal level too – she wrote to John Boyle to say, “Thank you for loving my Oliver.” Oliver Baldwin threw a party in honour of his father, on Dec. 15, 1938. In Oliver’s words “it was a wonderful evening and made the old man very happy.” The following day Stanley wrote to his son, “I enjoyed every minute of your happy party last night. In the excitement of leaving I don’t believe I said Good Night to Johnny, whose work as caterer was beyond praise. Bless you. Your loving old Father.” Oliver’s parents treated John Boyle as an ideal son-in-law and would begin letters to him with “My dear Johnny.” John Parke Boyle was the son of Major Charles John Boyle and Lillian Kennedy Pochin. He was educated at Bradfield School and was invested as a Fellow, Zoological Society (F.Z.S.) His sister Lilian Joanna Vere Boyle married George Loveden William Henry Parker (1888-1975), 7th Earl of Macclesfield, son of George Augustus Parker, Viscount Parker and Carine Agnes Loveden, on June 9, 1909. For a time, Oliver and John lived at Shirburn at John’s brother-in-law’s castle, before moving to North Stoke. John Parke Boyle is buried at St Mary the Virgin (Church Lane, North Stoke, Oxfordshire, OX10 6BQ).

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Published on February 24, 2017 00:09

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (February 24, 1463 - November 17, 1494)

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola was an Italian Renaissance nobleman and philosopher. He is famed for the events of 1486, when at the age of 23, he proposed to defend 900 theses on religion, philosophy, ...
Born: February 24, 1463, Mirandola
Died: November 17, 1494, Florence
Education: University of Padua,
University of Bologna
Buried: San Marco, Florence
Buried alongside: Girolamo Benivieni
Find A Grave Memorial# 175697336
Books: Oration on the Dignity of Man, Heptaplus, more
Parents: Gianfrancesco I Pico, Giulia Boiardo

Church: San Marco is the name of a religious complex in Florence, Italy. It comprises a church and a convent. The convent, which is now a museum, has three claims to fame. During the XV century it was home to two famous Dominicans, the painter Fra Angelico and the preacher Girolamo Savonarola. Also housed at the convent is a famous collection of manuscripts in a library built by Michelozzo.
Address: Via Camillo Cavour, 50, 50121 Firenze, Italy (43.77764, 11.2581)
Place
The present convent occupies the site where a Vallombrosan monastery existed in the XII century, which later passed to the Sylvestrine monks. Both of these groups were branches of the Order of St. Benedict. In the time of the Sylvestrines at least, the church was used both for monastic liturgical functions and as a parish church. From this initial period there have recently been rediscovered some traces of frescoes below floor level. In 1418 the Sylvestrines, accused of laxity in their observance of the Rule, were pressured to leave, but it took a direct intervention of Pope Eugene IV and the Council of Basel before finally in 1437 the buildings were vacated at San Marco and passed to observant Dominicans coming from the Convent of San Domenico, Fiesole. A decisive element was the intervention of Cosimo de' Medici the Elder, who since 1420 had already shown his support for the reformed Franciscan convent of Bosco ai Frati and from his return from exile in 1434 had made clear his desire to see an observant community of Domenicans established in Florence. When the Sylvestrines left, housed from that time onwards in the smaller monastery of San Giorgio alla Costa left, Dominican friars took over the San Marco buildings, which were in a poor condition and for two years or so were obliged to live in damp cells or wooden huts. They appealed to Cosimo de' Medici the Elder, who lived nearby in the family palace, now known as the Palazzo Medici-Riccardi, to fund the renovation of the entire complex. So it was that in 1437 Cosimo commissioned Michelozzo, the Medici’s favourite architect to rebuild the San Marco convent on Renaissance lines. By 1438 the work was well underway and the final dedication took place on Epiphany night 1443 in the presence of Pope Eugene IV and the Archbishop of Capua, cardinal Niccolò d'Acciapaccio. San Marco became one of the main elements in the new configuration of the area to the North of the centre of Florence (the so-called “Medici quartiere”, along with the Medici family palazzo and the basilica of San Lorenzo. These years marked in fact the height of the Medici family’s artistic patronage, above all in connection with the transfer to Florence of the Ecumenical Council from Ferrara to Florence in 1439. Cosimo invested in the new convent a notable amount of finance, amounting to some 40,000 florins according to Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, Michelozzo working on San Marco from 1439 to 1444. An outstanding feature of the convent is the library on the first floor, spacious with two rows of columns which form three naves covered in barrel vaulting. The large number of windows fill the room with natural light for study and for the copying of manuscripts. Under Lorenzo il Magnifico the library became one of the favourite meeting points for Florentine humanists such as Agnolo Poliziano and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola who could conveniently consult the precious book collections assembled by the Medici, with their rare Greek and Latin texts. Both are among the significant figures buried in San Marco.
Life
Who: Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (February 24, 1463 – November 17, 1494) and Girolamo Benivieni (February 6, 1453 – August 1542)
Giovanni Pico della Mirandola was an Italian Renaissance nobleman and philosopher. He is famed for the events of 1486, when at the age of 23, he proposed to defend 900 theses on religion, philosophy, natural philosophy, and magic against all comers, for which he wrote the Oration on the Dignity of Man, which has been called the "Manifesto of the Renaissance", and a key text of Renaissance humanism and of what has been called the "Hermetic Reformation". Giovanni was born at Mirandola, near Modena, the youngest son of Gianfrancesco I Pico, Lord of Mirandola and Count of Concordia (1415–1467), by his wife Giulia, daughter of Feltrino Boiardo, Count di Scandiano. The family had long dwelt in the Castle of Mirandola (Duchy of Modena), which had become independent in the XIV century and had received in 1414 from the Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund the fief of Concordia. Mirandola was a small autonomous county (later, a duchy) in Emilia, near Ferrara. The Pico della Mirandola were closely related to the Sforza, Gonzaga and Este dynasties, and Giovanni's siblings wed the descendants of the hereditary rulers of Corsica, Ferrara, Bologna, and Forlì. A precocious child with an exceptional memory, Giovanni was schooled in Latin and possibly Greek at a very early age. Intended for the Church by his mother, he was named a papal protonotary (probably honorary) at the age of ten and in 1477 he went to Bologna to study canon law. At the sudden death of his mother three years later, Pico renounced canon law and began to study philosophy at the University of Ferrara. During a brief trip to Florence, he met Angelo Poliziano, the courtly poet Girolamo Benivieni, and probably the young Dominican monk Girolamo Savonarola. For the rest of his life he remained very close friends with all three, including the ascetic and anti-humanist Savonarola. From 1480 to 1482, he continued his studies at the University of Padua, a major center of Aristotelianism in Italy. In 1494, Pico and his friend Angelo Poliziano died, under mysterious circumstances. Past historians hinted at death by poisoning, but more recent scholars suspect that Poliziano and Pico numbered among the first victims of the large-scale epidemic of syphilis – marked by acute symptoms and very rapid physical deterioration – which broke out in Europe in 1493 and 1494. He was interred at San Marco and Savonarola delivered the funeral oration. Ficino wrote: “Our dear Pico left us on the same day that Charles VIII was entering Florence, and the tears of men of letters compensated for the joy of the people. Without the light brought by the king of France, Florence might perhaps have never seen a more somber day than that which extinguished Mirandola's light.” In 2007, the bodies of Poliziano and Pico della Mirandola were exhumed. Scientists under the supervision of Giorgio Gruppioni, a professor of anthropology from Bologna, used current testing techniques to study the men's lives and establish the causes of their deaths. These forensic tests showed that both Poliziano and Pico likely died of arsenic poisoning, and arsenic was used to cure syphilis. Girolamo Benivieni was a Florentine poet and a musician. His father was a notary in Florence. He suffered from poor health most of his life, which prevented him from taking a more stable job. He was a leading member of the Medicean Academy, a society devoted to literary study. He was a friend of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, whom he met for the first time in 1479; it was Mirandola who encouraged him to study Neoplatonism. In the late 1480s, he and Mirandola became students of Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola (1452–1498). In 1496, he translated the teachings of Savonarola from Italian to Latin. After he began following Savonarola, he rejected his earlier poetry and attempted to write more spiritually. He participated in Savonarola's Bonfire of the Vanities, and documented the destruction of art worth "several thousand ducats". Pico experienced an heavenly love with Benivieni, ten years his junior, who ardently reciprocated his affections. Theirs was, they declared, a fervent but chaste love kept under watch by rigorous morality and Christian mysticism. However, during a sermon after Pico's death, Savonarola made a revelation which caused a sensation: Pico's soul had not immediately gone to paradise, but was consigned for a time to the flames of purgatory because of certain sins, which he did not wish to name. Popular opinion assumed that Pico had kept a female lover or a secret concubine. Five centuries later, it is impossible to know the truth, but the probability that Pico had a male lover, perhaps Benivieni himself, is now less unbelievable, as documents emerge showing the significance of homosexuality in the circle of Pico's friends (such as Ficino and Poliziano). It will never be known whether or not Pico remained celibate, or if his love for Benivieni was consummated. What is known is a delicate testimonial to this love: the tomb in which they decided to be buried together, and which can still be seen in the church of San Marco in Florence.

Queer Places, Vol. 3 edited by Elisa Rolle
ISBN-13: 978-1532906695
ISBN-10: 1532906692
Release Date: July 24, 2016
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