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Indeed, it was actually Bosie, and not Wilde, who had coined the term ‘the love that dare not speak its name’ in one of his poems.
Bosie’s later life of far-right political involvement is just as unpleasant and illuminating as his years with Oscar.
The Sacred Band of Thebes was a military unit made up of 150 pairs of male lovers and was regarded as the most elite unit in the Theban army, its soldiers being of unusual bravery and moral character.
Fittingly, for a man who devoted his life to building and to stability, he was buried in a colossal mausoleum that he had commissioned for himself. It was the tallest building in Rome upon its completion. Having been converted into a fortress in the mediaeval period, it still stands today, and is known as the Castel Sant’Angelo – the Castle of the Holy Angel.
There is power in being the king who sits upon the throne, but sometimes there is more power in being the throne on whom the king sits.
Rustin, however, was also homosexual, and an earlier march planned for the 1960 Democratic National Convention had been dropped when Democratic politician Adam Clayton Powell Jr told King he would release a fake rumour that King and Rustin were lovers were the march to go ahead and embarrass the Democratic Party. Just weeks before the actual March on Washington, South Carolina Democratic senator Strom Thurmond, a racist bigot and segregationist, produced a photograph of King in a bathtub while talking to Rustin, with the implication, again, that they were lovers. The photo had been given to
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Many people involved in the fight against AIDS at the time were furious that, despite being a person with AIDS, his refusal to acknowledge it meant he could not lend his considerable influence to help increase funding into research to tackle the disease. Their anger only increased when it became known that Cohn, publicly refusing to be identified with the disease, had privately used his influence to jump the queue for access to the experimental treatment for the disease, AZT.
At 5 a.m. on 2 August 1986, he died. His only companion by the bedside was his boyfriend, Peter Fraser, loyal to a relationship that Cohn had publicly denied right to the end.
