William GORDON MERRICK, born on this date (d: 1988) was a Broadway actor, wartime OSS field officer, best-selling author of gay-themed novels, and one of the first authors to write about gay sexual themes for a mass audience. Merrick enrolled in Princeton University in 1936, studied French literature, and was active in campus theater. He quit in the middle of his junior year and moved to New York City, where he became an actor, landing the role of Richard Stanley in George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s The Man Who Came to Dinner. Merrick became Hart’s lover for a time, but tired of the theater, with its endless nights playing the same role.` He was reputed, at the time, to be “the handsomest young man on Broadway.”

In 1941, Merrick quit Broadway to become a reporter. Exempt from the draft because of hearing problems, Merrick moved to Washington, D.C., where he got a job with the Washington Star. He later worked for the Baltimore Sun, before returning to New York City to write for the New York Post. His years as a reporter helped him to develop a love of writing as well as a writing style.

Eager to participate in World War II, Merrick got a job with the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner to the Central Intelligence Agency. He was sent to Algeria as a counter-intelligence officer, rising to the civilian rank of captain. He was diverted to France and took up residence in Cannes. Because he spoke excellent French, the OSS gave him papers listing him as a French citizen. He was case officer for the double agent code-named “Forest”. Though thought to be apocryphal, it gives credit to his personality and reputation at the time that it was rumored to have joined the Allied landing in the South of France decked out in a white dinner jacket and black patent-leather showes, a martini glass in hand.

In August 1945, Merrick returned to the United States. He again sought work as a reporter, but did not find employment, so he went to Mexico and began writing novels that brought him riches and further notoriety as an author of racy novels abut men loving men.

Merrick’s first novel, The Strumpet Wind (1947), was successful in the United States. The somewhat autobiographical novel is about a gay American spy in France during World War II. Homosexual themes are minimized in the novel, which explores concepts of individual liberty and freedom. The spy’s director is a dazzlingly handsome, but sadistic, bisexual.

In 1970, 10 years after moving to Hydra, Merrick published his second successful novel and his best-known book, The Lord Won’t Mind.

With the money he earned from his success, Merrick returned to France to continue writing. He contributed book reviews and articles to The New Republic, Ikonos, and other periodicals. In all, he wrote 13 books, but only his later works were successful. Merrick’s works are rarely included in anthologies, and few discussions of American gay authors mention him.

Although Merrick’s novels are often criticized for an insistent emphasis on handsome virile men, some critics defend his writing style as authentic: “Beauty is a part of gay life, an important part – those men aren’t spending all those hours at the gym just for the cardiovascular benefits. This obsession has its roots in our core definition: we are gay because we find men beautiful. Beauty has its dangers, of course. That’s part of our complex response to it, and it is in fact this complexity that makes beauty a valid and vital subject for our literature.”

Some dismiss Merrick because of his obvious romanticism; others do so because he sprinkles explicit scenes of gay sexual intercourse throughout each novel. But underneath the handsome blonde studs with too much wealth falling in love on the Cote d’Azur, are fairly progressive and even radical conceptualizations of what it means to be gay, the liklihood of self-actualization, identity politics, and the role that power plays in relationships.”

In 1956, when Merrick was 40, he met Charles Gerard Hulse, who was working in Paris at the time – a 27-year-old American dancer and actor. Hulse became his lifetime companion. The following year, they began living together, but Hulse returned to the U.S. for four years to work as a dance instructor in Marin County, California.

In 1960, Hulse returned to Paris to be with Merrick; the two remained together until Merrick’s death. Gordon Merrick died of lung cancer at age 71 in Colombo, Sri Lanka in March 1988. He was survived by Hulse, his partner of 32 years, and his brother and nephew.