William S. Burroughs

b. February 5, 1914 

d. August 2, 1997

Novelist, born as William Seward Burroughs in St. Louis, Missouri. Heir to the Burroughs Adding Machine Company fortune. As a teenager, Burroughs was sent off to military school at Los Alamos, New Mexico, where he had his first same-sex encounters. He was educated at Harvard and Vienna universities.

Burroughs fell in love and became obsessed with Ginsberg, and they have remained lifelong friends. Following trouble with the law regarding his drug habits, Burroughs settled in Mexico City with his wife Joan. One night in 1951, after a few drinks, they were entertaining some friends with their "William Tell" routine. She put a whiskey glass on her head and he aimed a pistol at the glass. Although he was an expert marksman, the shot was low and Joan was killed instantly. Burroughs had to leave Mexico.

His sexual explicitness (he was an avowed and outspoken bisexual) and the frankness with which he dealt with his own experiences as a drug addict won him a following among writers of the Beat movement. With Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, he was one of the founding members of the Beat generation. He was known to be a lover of young boys and in his later years, he lived with his long-time companion James Grauerholtz.

 Books:


Junkie: Confessions of an Unreedemed Drug Addict (1953)
Letters to Allen Ginsburg 1953-1957
The Naked Lunch (1959)
Nova Express (1960)
The Soft Machine (1961)
The Ticket that Exploded (1962)
Dead Fingers Talk (1963)
The Wild Boys (1971)
The Place of Dead Roads (1983)
Queer (1986)
The Western Lands (1987)

Guido Gezelle (1830-1899): Flemish priest, teacher, and poet

b. 1st May 1830
d. 27th November 1899

Belgian priest and poet, born in Brugge as Guido Pieter Theodorus Josephus Gezelle. He is considered by the Belgians as one of their greatest poets.

About Gazelle's sexuality, not much is certain. Typically for a priest, there is no clear evidence that he ever gave physical expression to his sexual yearnings, whatever they may have been, About the nature of those feelings, and what we today would call his "orientation", there are some strong clues:

Forget Maurice Maeterlinck, Herman de Coninck, Hugo Claus. The Belgian poet you want to read is Guido Gezelle (1830-1899). Writing in the popular idiom of the West Flemish region, this poet-priest caused a revolution in the rhythm, sound, and soul of Belgian poetry, and can be counted among the world’s greatest poets.

In Gezelle’s work, God and Nature are the key words. Admiring the beauty of God’s creation, the poet is reminded of the grandeur of the Creator Himself. To express these feelings into writing, Gezelle refuses to imprison them into the straight-jacket of age-old conventional forms, but allows them to play freely in a refreshing, new use of rhyme patterns, original images, free verse, and prose poetry.

- Unibooks

(He) also voiced strong feelings for some of his pupils. Gezelle expressed the "spiritual twofoldness" between master and student in some of his best poems.

Gezelle's homoerotic feelings may have been platonic. Certainly, some of his admirers resist any suggestion that his feelings for his pupils were sexual.Nevertheless, his relationship with Eugène van Oye, whom he admired for his "angelic innocence" and whom he tried to comfort in his loneliness in the seminary, was deep indeed. It struck him as a tragedy when van Oye left the seminary in Roeselare in 1859. In his lamentation "To an Absent Friend," published in 1862, he called his loss greater than that of a mother missing her child.

John Gray (1866 – 1934), UK

b. 2 March 1866
d. 14 June 1934

English poet, who may have been the inspiration behind Oscar Wilde's fictional Dorian Gray. His life partner was Marc André Raffalovich, also a poet and a notable early defender of homosexuality - which he called "unisexuality", but insisted remained at its best when chaste. Gray and Raffalovich both converted to Catholicism, and Gray was ordained a Catholic priest in 1901. After Gray was moved to a parish in Edinburgh, Raffalovich followed him. The pair continued in a close, but chaste relationship until they died four months apart in 1934

Like many of the artists of that period, Gray was a convert to Roman Catholicism. He was baptised on 14th February 1890, but soon lapsed. Wilde's trial appears to have prompted some intense soul-searching in Gray and he re-embraced Catholicism in 1895.In 1896 he gave this reversion poetic form in his volume Spiritual Poems: chiefly done out of several languages. He left his position at the Foreign Office and on 28 November 1898, at the age of 32, he entered the Scots College, Rome, to study for the priesthood. He was ordained by Cardinal Pietro Respighi at St John Lateran on 21 December 1901.He served as a priest in Edinburgh, first at Saint Patrick's and then as rector at Saint Peter's.

His most important supporter, and life partner, was Marc-André Raffalovich, a wealthy poet and early defender of homosexuality. Raffalovich himself became a Catholic in 1896 and joined the tertiary order of Dominicans. When Gray went to Edinburgh he settled nearby. He helped finance St Peter's Church in Morningside where Gray would serve as priest for the rest of his life. The two maintained a chaste relationship until Raffalovich's sudden death in 1934. A devastated Gray died exactly four months later at St. Raphael's nursing home in Edinburgh after a short illness.

Some queer historians note that in the period, the Catholic Church may have functioned as a cover, a convenient closet, for private sexual activities hiding behind a public facade of celibacy. Tirza True Latimer, for instance, writing on "The Closet" at glbtq.com, names Gray and Raffalovich as a notable example:

The decadent poet John Gray (allegedly the prototype for Wilde's Dorian Gray) and his lover André Raffalovich converted to Catholicism, for example. Gray went so far as to take the vows of priesthood. Raffalovich converted Wilde's illustrator Aubrey Beardsley to Catholicism. Even Wilde ultimately converted to Catholicism.

Max Nordau, whose treatise Degeneration made best seller lists in England in the wake of Wilde's prosecution, unmasked what he called "neo-Catholicism" as the "most distinctive stigmata of the degenerate," identifying the Catholic church as a kind of closet.

Paul Monette, novelist and poet

b. October 16, 1945
d. February 10, 1995

Born in Lawrence, Massuchusetts, Monette grew up in an upper-middle-class environment; educated at the Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts, and at Yale University, where he gained a BA in 1967. He subsequently taught at the Milton Academy and at Pine Manor College before settling into the life of a writer.

After moving to Los Angeles in the 1970s, Monette wrote a number of gay-themed novels, including "Taking Care of Mrs. Carrol" and "The Gold Diggers." In 1985, his world was shattered by the death of his lover of ten years, Roger Horwitz, from AIDS-related illness. Monette produced a book of poetry, "Love Alone: 18 Elegies for Rog", and "Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir," which became a best-seller in 1988.

Initially closeted, and after futile attempts at heterosexuality, and falling in love with a man, he finally came out. When his longtime lover Roger Horwitz was diagnosed with AIDS and suffered from a variety of AIDS-related diseases, and finally died, he became an advocate of gay and lesbian rights, and an active supporter of ACT UP (Aids Coalition to Unleash Power).

Also Monette was diagnosed with AIDS in 1991, and died four yìears later of AIDS-related complications. Nonetheless, Monette's final years were filled with love (he formed long-term relationships with casting director Stepphen Kolzak, who died in 1990 also to AIDS related illness, and then with Winston Wilde), and were amazingly productive.

Paul Monette won the 1992 National Book Award for nonfiction with his autobiographical "Becoming A Man: Half A Life Story." Written after he found out he had AIDS, it is a powerful depiction of the subjects Monette knew best: the nature of the disease, the problems of being in the closet, and the potential in gay relationships.

Source:


Gabriele Griffin, Who's Who in Lesbian and Gay and Writing, Routledge, London, 2002
Aldrich R. & Wotherspoon G., Who's Who in Contemporary Gay and Lesbian History, from WWII to Present Day, Routledge, London, 2001 - et alii

Books:

• Taking Care of Mrs.Carroll (1978)
• The Gold Diggers (1979)
• The Long Shot (1981)
• Love Alone: 18 Elegies for Rog (1987)
• Borrowed Time: An Aids Memoir (1988)
• Afterlife (1990)
• Halfway Home (1991)
• Becoming a Man - Half a Lifestory (1992)
• Last Watch of the Night (1994)
• Documentary about Monette:
• Paul Monette: The Brink of Summer's End (1997)