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Gay Wisdom – Today in Gay History

Born

1888 -

T.S. ELIOT, poet, dramatist and literary critic, born in St. Louis MO (d: 1965) He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. He wrote the poems "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", The Waste Land, "The Hollow Men", "Ash Wednesday", and Four Quartets; the plays Murder in the Cathedral and The Cocktail Party; and the essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent". Eliot was born an American, moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 (at the age of 25), and became a British subject in 1927 at the age of 39. When he was living in Paris before WWI, he met a French medical student named Jean Verdenal in the Luxembourg Gardens. Werdenal was waving a branch of lilac at the time. Verdenal died in the Dardanelles in 1915. Eliot dedicated Prufrock to him, adding a epigraph from Dante’s Purgatory: “Now can you understand the quantity of love that warms me to you, so that I forget out vanity, and treat the shadows like the real thing.”

This is all we know about his friendship with the young medical student, and all we are likely to know. Other considerations: Eliot had a horror of the female body, he feared it, and thought it “smelled.” He had an abhorrence of sex in general, though as a boy, he masturbated guiltily and wrote a magnificently sensuous poem about it…an excerpt here:

Then he knew that he had been a fish

With slippery white belly held tight in his own fingers

Writhing in his own clutch, his ancient beauty

Caught fast in the pink rips of his new beauty.

Eliot obsessed with the thought that every man wanted to kill a woman, and without irony, extended his fantasy to all men. His first marriage was miserable in that his wife laughed in his face at the very idea of sleeping with him. These are the general facts, and various interpretations are offered by various biographers. Thus far, interpretations have run in two obvious directions. Of course he was completely asexual. Of course he was a latent homosexual. Either seems unfair in some way; he was simply T.S. Eliot. Perhaps the first queer?

Died

1987 -

EMLYN WILLIAMS, Welsh actor died (b. 1905) In 1927, he joined a repertory company and began his stage career. By 1930, he had branched out into writing, and his first major success was with the thriller Night Must Fall (1935), which was made into a film in 1937 and again in 1964. His other great play was very different: The Corn is Green (1938), partly based on his own childhood, and also later filmed. In addition to stage plays, Williams wrote a number of film screenplays, working with Alfred Hitchcock and other directors.

He acted in and contributed dialogue to various films based on the novels of A.J. Cronin, including The Citadel (1938), The Stars Look Down (1940), Hatter’s Castle (1942), and Web of Evidence (1959). In 1941 Williams starred in the film You Will Remember, directed by Jack Raymond and written by Sewell Stokes and Lydia Hayward. The film is based on the life of the popular late Victorian songwriter Leslie Stuart, played here by Robert Morley, with Williams as Stuart's best friend.

He often appeared in his own plays, and was justly famous for his one-man-show, with which he toured the world, playing Charles Dickens in an evening of readings from Dickens' novels. On a personal note, this writer had the privilege of dining with Williams on a number of occasions in Los Angeles, through the friendship he maintained with one of my personal mentors, the late, beloved Alan Hodshire. It was at one such dinner with Mr. Williams that I learned the culinary delight of fresh cracked pepper on good vanilla ice cream. Try it.

His autobiography, in the volumes George (1961) and Emlyn (1973), was also highly successful. In it, he wrote frankly of his sexuality, though, as many Gay men of his generation did, he had married in 1935 and had a son; his wife died in 1970.