December 28

Born

1888 -

FRIEDRICH WILHELM MURNAU, German film director, born (d. 1931); One of a number of directors who were part of the expressionist movement in German cinema during the 1920s, and he directed many movies that were influential. While some of Murnau's films from the silent era have been lost most still survive. They are widely acknowledged among film scholars as masterpieces.

The famous German director, best known for the exquisite silent film Nosferatu, his film Sunrise, produced in Hollywood, is one of the most beautiful films ever made. His death is certainly the most bizarre in a town known for extraordinary ways of dying. In 1931, Murnau and his chauffeur were killed in an automobile accident. From the way the bodies had been found, it was rather clear that the director was killed, and the accident was probably caused, while Murnau was blowing the driver.

Only 11 people showed up for the funeral. Among them were Greta Garbo and Fritz Lang who delivered the funeral speech. Garbo also commissioned a death mask of Murnau which she kept on her desk during her years in Hollywood.

He published a beautiful book of private photographs, many of comely young men, Die privaten fotografien. The book presents photographs from his private album, taken mostly by himself between 1924 and 1930 in Berlin, Hollywood, and Tahiti.

Edward Perry Warren pictured with John Marshall (right), his long-time partner

1928 -

EDWARD PERRY WARREN, who died on this date (b: 1/8/1860) was an American millionaire, art collector and the author of works proposing an idealized view of homosexual relationships. He is now best known as the former owner of the Warren Cup in the British Museum.

Born into a fabulously wealthy family in Boston, when he was young, Warren kept a diary detailing his crushes on other boys and making no secret of the gentlemen to whom he was attracted, much to the dismay of his family. Warren just wasn't cut out for life in puritanical Boston, so he traveled to England to study at Oxford, an all-male university where consensual male-on-male action between aristocratic young men was mostly ignored.

At Oxford, Warren felt comfortable courting comely classmates, and he furnished his room with the best art, furniture, silver, porcelain, and crystal. Several of his Oxford scholars focused on homoeroticism in ancient art and culture and spoke about the virtues of the Greeks, and Warren found his calling. He decided to stay in England, and he began buying, selling, and collecting ancient Etruscan, Greek, and Roman art.

Warren wrote a three-volume A Defense of Uranian Love using his pen name Arthur Lyon Raile and privately printed and published it one-book-a-year from 1928 –1930. Warren: "My verses and my prose advocate a morality, but it is not the current morality in certain matters." What an understatement; the books suggest a plan for a Utopian society where aristocracy, nobleness, and masculinity bring about a civilization like the ancient Spartans had that could flourish. "Uranian" was a euphemism for "gay" in the Victorian era.

While at Oxford, Warren met John Marshall, a middle-class young man who was studying to be an Anglican priest. They fell in love, and Marshall abandoned Theology for the Classics. After his father's death in 1888, Warren started to receive an annual income of a million U.S. dollars a year ($33 million in 2025 dollars). The boys left Oxford the next year and began restoring a Georgian mansion, The Lewes House, making it a showplace for a collection of ancient art.

Marshall learned how to determine the value, provenance, and authenticity of the pieces that caught Warren's interest, and he became a skilled negotiator on the prices paid for the purchases.

Warren was deliriously rich, and the couple began acquiring art to fill their many rooms. Their collection was better than those of the Americans J. P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, and Henry Frick. They became the most important collectors of classical antiquities in the world, eventually gaining almost complete control of the market. Almost everything that worth collecting came to them for first refusal.

Warren commissioned a version of Auguste Rodin's (1840 – 1917) Le Baiser, requesting that the sculptor make the male figure especially well-hung. Although earlier versions of the famous statue didn't feature a visible penis, Rodin happily agreed. This sculpture was turned down by museums in the USA for being too explicit, but it can be seen at The Tate London.

Warren donated pieces to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, including collections of pottery depicting pornographic male images. The Boston Museum finally cataloged and exhibited a few of them in 1950, but the Met put theirs in storage, where they continue to sit uncatalogued, unphotographed, unexhibited, and unacknowledged. Warren's gifts to the Boston Museum make up 90% of its classical collection, regarded as one of the finest in the world.

A solid silver six inch tall drinking goblet dating to the first century was found near Jerusalem, and Warren purchased it from a dealer in Italy soon after its discovery. Now known as "The Warren Cup", it depicts a man and a boy having sex while a servant boy watches. The craftsmanship is exquisite. Warren tried to sell it to museums in Europe and North America, but no one would touch it because of its depiction of sex between two men. It's a major piece of classical work, but it stayed in Warren's personal collection. Even the next owners refused to show it. Finally, in 1999, the British Museum purchased it for a huge amount of money, and photographs of its pornographic details were splashed all over the tabloids. It continues to attract big crowds. Sex sells.

Handsome young men were part of the Warren-Marshall household, ostensibly to assist in cataloging the acquisitions. The couple also had homes in coastal Maine, Boston, and England, but Warren spent most of his time in Italy and Greece acquiring more art. Left on his own, Marshall married one of Warren's female cousins, who was anxious to end her unflattering label of "spinster". Together they advised and aided in the purchase of antiquities for the Met, while Warren pursued young men using his considerable fortune to sponsor the educations of the gentlemen who held promise but had no money. This arrangement started a stormy on-again off-again relationship with Marshall, but as they got older, the men became a couple again.

For three decades Warren, Marshall, and the wife lived together. The men had the main bedroom while the wife had her own rooms on another floor of the house. They enjoyed meals together and traveled as a trio. After the death of Marshall's wife in 1928, the fellows took up residence at an apartment in Rome, where one night, Marshall went to bed early, saying that he was not feeling well, and he was gone by the next morning. A devastated Warren never recovered and he returned to England. 10 months later Warren joined Marshall.

Because he was open with his gayness, Warren's family didn't attend his funeral, and none of the museums that he had donated so many priceless works of art sent a representative to the memorial service. Warren's ashes, and those of Marshall and his wife are all interred together in a cemetery in an Italian village, where the trio had been happiest.

In 1911, Warren had adopted a four-year-old boy, Travis Warren, who grew up at Lewes House. Warren left Lewes House to H. Asa Thomas, his "secretary". He left his other homes to Charles Murray West, another "secretary". Both Thomas and West sold their places. Travis Warren inherited $3,000 ($55,000 in 2025 dollars) a year managed by a trust until he turned 28 years old, when he was to receive $20,000 ($367,000 today), and the trust could invest up to $30,000 on his behalf. Despite this money, poor Travis was destitute by the end of his life.

1932 -

MANUEL PUIG, Argentine writer, born (d. 1990); Gay themes and motifs are suggested in several Manuel Puig's eight novels, and in the best known of them, Kiss of the Spider Woman, Gay desire is central to the fiction. Puig was born in General Villegas, an isolated town in Buenos Aires Province, Argentina. As a child, bored by the provincialism of his surroundings, the young Puig would go to the local movie house five nights a week to be entertained by the glamour of Hollywood movies.

The Columbia Anthology of Gay Literature

1936 -

BRYNE R.S. FONE, American scholar and writer, born; It would be impossible to compile a complete survey of Gay male literature; the very looseness of the definition of "Gay" (not to mention the wealth of possible material) would overwhelm the project. Despite that, Byrne R.S. Fone fashioned a useful, intelligent, and amazingly functional volume that traces Gay male themes from classical antiquity to the present day.

Drawing on a variety of traditions and cultures -- from ancient Greece to modern Egypt, from the Hebrew Bible to the Russian revolutionary Sergei Esenin -- Fone reviews and reprints not only significant texts, but also supplies readable, intelligent introductions that illuminate the subject in the Columbia Anthology of Gay Literature (ISBN: 0231096712).

Most of the material, apart from a short section on Latin American and Cuban writing, is steeped in a Western European tradition; the book nevertheless conjures a good case for a Gay sensibility--or rather a series of sensibilities--that amazes, alarms, and endures. Fone is also the author of A Road to Stonewall: Male Homosexuality and Homophobia in English and American Literature, 1750-1969 and Masculine Landscapes: Walt Whitman and the Historical Text

1937 -

MAURICE RAVEL, French composer, died (b. 1875); French composer and pianist of the impressionistic period, known especially for the subtlety, richness and poignancy of his music. His piano music, chamber music, vocal music and orchestral music have become staples of the concert repertoire.

One of France's most distinguished composers, Ravel was a prolific and versatile artist who worked in several musical genres, creating stage music (two operas and several ballets), orchestral music, vocal music, chamber music, and piano music. His unique musical language, employing harmonies that are at once ravishing and subtle, made him one of the most influential composers of the 20th century.

Ravel's sexuality has been the subject of intense speculation. Although it is not certain that he was Gay, he was rumored to be so. Fiercely protective of his privacy, his most significant emotional relationship seems to have been with his mother. At the same time, however, he embraced a public identity as a cultured dandy, a dapper man-about-town of refined taste and sensibility. A life-long bachelor, Ravel had several significant relationships with men, including one with pianist Ricardo Viñes, a fellow dandy and bachelor, but it is not certain whether these friendships were sexual.

1985 -

DAN AMBOYER is an American actor born on this date, best known for his starring roles on the hit series Younger, the limited NBC spin-off series The Blacklist: Redemption, and for starring as Prince William of Wales in the film William & Catherine: A Royal Romance, which also starred Victor Garber, Jean Smart and Jane Alexander.

Amboyer was born in Detroit. He attended Carnegie Mellon School of Drama, where he was offered early admittance following his junior year of high school. After graduation, he relocated to New York City.

Amboyer has appeared in numerous television shows and films, and worked extensively in theatre. Amboyer is a founding member of the theatre company Exit, Pursued by a Bear. In 2019, he made his directorial debut helming the world premiere of Whirlwind Off-Broadway, which The New Yorker called a "delightful 80 minutes."

In October 7, 2017, Amboyer publicly came out as gay and announced that he had married his long-term partner, Eric P. Berger. In November 2019, Amboyer announced via Instagram that he and Berger were expecting a son. Their son, Theodore Carl Amboyer-Berger, was born in December 2019.

Died

Susan Sontag portrait by Annie Leibovitz

2004 -

SUSAN SONTAG, American writer died on this date (b. 1933); American essayist, novelist, filmmaker, and activist. Sontag had committed relationships with photographer Annie Leibowitz, choreographer Lucinda Childs, writer Maria Irene Fornes, and other women. In the early 1970s, she was romantically involved with Nicole Stephane (1923-2007), a Rothschild banking heiress turned movie actress.

Many of Sontag's obituaries failed to mention her significant same-sex relationships, most notably with photographer Leibowitz. In response to this criticism, The New York Times' Public Editor, Daniel Okrent, defended the newspaper's obituary, stating that at the time of Sontag's death, a reporter could make no independent verification of her romantic relationship with Leibovitz (despite attempts to do so). After Sontag's death, Newsweek published an article about Leibovitz that made clear reference to her decade-plus relationship with Sontag, stating: "The two first met in the late '80s, when Leibovitz photographed her for a book jacket. They never lived together, though they each had an apartment within view of the other's."

Sontag was quoted, "I grew up in a time when the modus operandi was the open secret'. I'm used to that, and quite OK with it. Intellectually, I know why I haven't spoken more about my sexuality, but I do wonder if I haven't repressed something there to my detriment. … Maybe I could have given comfort to some people if I had dealt with the subject of my private sexuality more, but it's never been my prime mission to give comfort, unless somebody's in drastic need. I'd rather give pleasure, or shake things up."

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Today in Gay History

December 28

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