October Icon - Oscar Wilde 1854-1900

Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde born 16 October 1854 (d. 1900)

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish playwright, novelist, poet, short story writer and Freemason. Known for his barbed and clever wit, he was one of the most successful playwrights of late Victorian London, and one of the greatest celebrities of his day. As the result of a famous trial, he suffered a dramatic downfall and was imprisoned after being convicted of 'gross indecency' for homosexual acts.

Though Wilde's sexual orientation has variously been considered bisexual, homosexual, and pederastic, Wilde himself felt he belonged to a culture of male love inspired by the Greek pederastic tradition. His most significant sexual relationships appear to have been (in chronological order) with (perhaps) Frank Miles, Constance Lloyd (Wilde's wife), Robert Baldwin Ross, and Lord Alfred Douglas. Wilde also had numerous sexual encounters with working-class male youths, who were often rent boys.

Biographers generally believe Wilde was introduced to homosexuality in 1885 (the year after his wedding) by the 17-year-old Robert Baldwin Ross. Neil McKenna's biography The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde (2003) theorises that Wilde was aware of his homosexuality much earlier, from the moment of his first kiss with another boy at the age of 16. According to McKenna, after arriving at Oxford in 1874, Wilde tentatively explored his sexuality, discovering that he could feel passionate romantic love for 'fair, slim' choirboys, but was more sexually drawn towards swarthy young rough trade.

By the late 1870s, Wilde was already preoccupied with the philosophy of same-sex love, and had befriended a group of Uranian poets and homosexual law reformers. Wilde also met Walt Whitman in America in 1881, writing to a friend that there was 'no doubt' about the great American poet's sexual orientation — 'I have the kiss of Walt Whitman still on my lips,' he boasted. He even lived with the society painter Frank Miles, who was a few years his senior and may have been his lover. However, writes McKenna, he was unhappy with the direction of his sexual and romantic desires, and, hoping that marriage would cure him, he married Constance Lloyd in 1884.

After meeting and falling in love with Lord Alfred Douglas, 'Bosie', in 1891, Wilde and his lover embraced an hedonistic life style, and for a few years they lived together more or less openly in a number of locations. Wilde and some within his upper-class social group also began to speak about homosexual law reform, and their commitment to 'The Cause' was formalised by the founding of a highly secretive organisation called the Order of Chaeronea, of which Wilde was a member.

Bosie's father, the Marquess of Queensberry, became increasingly enraged at his son's involvement with Wilde. He confronted the two publicly several times, and each time Wilde was able to mollify the Marquess. Eventually, the Marquess planned to interrupt the opening night of The Importance of Being Earnest with an insulting delivery of vegetables, but somebody tipped Wilde off and he was barred from entering the theatre.

On February 18, 1895, the Marquess left a calling card at one of Wilde's clubs, the Albemarle. On the back of the card he wrote 'For Oscar Wilde posing as a Somdomite' (a misspelling of 'Sodomite').

Although Wilde's friends advised him to ignore the insult, Lord Alfred later admitted that he egged Wilde on to charge Queensberry with criminal libel. Queensberry was arrested, and in April 1895, the Crown took over the prosecution of the libel case against him. The trial lasted three days. The prosecuting counsel, Edward Clarke, was unaware that Wilde had had liaisons and romantic relationships with other males. Clarke asked Wilde directly whether there was any substance to Queensberry's accusations and Wilde denied that there was. Edward Carson, the barrister who defended Queensberry, hired investigators who were able to locate a number of youths with whom Wilde had been involved, either socially or sexually, such as the 16-year-old Walter Grainger and other newsboys and valets. Most damaging of all, among them were a number of young men who had earned money through prostitution, including one of the main witnesses, Charles Parker.

Wilde put on a tremendous display of drama in the first day of the trial, parrying Carson's cross-examination on the morals of his published works with witticisms and sarcasm, often breaking the courtroom up with laughter. However, on the second day, Carson's cross-examination was much more damaging: Wilde later admitted to perjuring himself with some of his answers. On the third day, Clarke recommended that Wilde withdraw the prosecution, and the case was dismissed. The authorities were unwilling to let matters rest.

Based on the evidence acquired by Queensberry and Carson, Wilde was arrested on April 6, 1895, at the Cadogan Hotel, London, and charged with 'committing acts of gross indecency with other male persons' under Section 11 of the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act. Despite pleas by friends to flee the country, Wilde chose to stay and martyr himself for his cause.

Two trials followed. The first trial ended with the jury unable to reach a verdict. The next, and last, trial was presided over by Chief Justice Sir Alfred Wills. On May 25, 1895 Wilde was convicted of gross indecency and sentenced to two years' hard labour. He was imprisoned first in Pentonville and then in Wandsworth prison in London, and finally transferred in November to Reading Prison.

Prison was harsh on Wilde's health and after he was released on May 19, 1897 he spent his last three years penniless, in self-imposed exile from society and artistic circles. After his release, he wrote the famous poem The Ballad of Reading Gaol.

Wilde spent his last days in the Hôtel d'Alsace, now known as L'Hôtel, in Paris.

Oscar Wilde died of cerebral meningitis on November 30, 1900.

Wilde is an iconic figure in modern popular culture, both as a wit and as an archetype of gay identity. His trial, imprisonment and death have made him a gay martyr and come to symbolise the inhumane attitudes and treatment with which society has confronted gay people - although it could be argued that his foolish decision to sue the Marquess of Queensberry and his own resulting trial drove an entire generation of increasingly confident homosexual men underground and set the course of gay liberation back by untold decades - but that we shall never know.

Stephen Gately 1976 - 2009

Stephen Gately 1976 - 2009

September Icon - Freddie Mercury 1946-1991

Gok Wan

Gok Wan born 9 September 1974

Gok Wan (born Ko-Hen Wan, meaning 'Noisy Big City' in Cantonese, is a British fashion consultant, author and television presenter of British Chinese heritage.

Gok Wan was born in Leicester, England, to a Chinese father, who was born in Hong Kong, and an English mother. He grew up on one of the city's council estates and his parents ran a local restaurant there. Wan stood out from his peers from a young age and the fact that he was mixed-race, tall, overweight and gay led to bullying from other children. He was 21 stone (133 kg) in his teenage years and later confessed, 'I was really fat'. He was drawn to performing arts and began attending a course at the Charles Keene College of Further Education. After receiving a diploma from the college, Wan enrolled at the Central School of Speech and Drama and continued to study performing arts. However, the other students had backgrounds very different to his and he felt that his weight was beginning to dictate his life.

He felt restricted and unhappy and eventually dropped out of the course, returning to live with his family. Wan set about losing weight and at the age of 20 he began a crash diet, losing nearly half his weight in several months. Despite the sudden change, he had no problem with having been overweight, later reflecting: 'I don't regret having been fat at all. I know how to throw jokes at myself and I use humour before anything else, and those skills allow me to do the chatshows. So I'm thankful for that." He even lamented that, after losing weight, he had to try harder to attract attention, saying that his weight had, to an extent, defined him.

Fuelled by his personality and charm, he moved in to the world of fashion. Over the next 10 years, Wan worked with many celebrities including Bryan Ferry, All Saints, Damien Lewis, Erasure, Vanessa Mae, Wade Robson, Lauren Laverne, Wet Wet Wet, and Johnny Vaughan. He also offered his opinions to magazines, becoming a fashion consultant, and his work has been published internationally in several magazines, which include Tatler, Glamour, Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan and The Face. He has also worked with photographers such as Rankin, Mike Owen and Jason Joyce.

Wan has also worked as an 'on-screen' fashion consultant on many television shows including: MTV Shakedown (MTV Europe), GMTV (ITV), LK Today (ITV), Big Brother's Little Brother (Channel 4), Battle of the Sexes (BBC1), The Wright Stuff (Five), Make Me a Grown Up (Channel 4/T4), The Xtra Factor (ITV2) and T4 (Channel 4).

In 2006, Wan was approached by Channel 4 and asked to present his own fashion show, How to Look Good Naked. In addition, he wrote a book to accompany the series, entitled How to Look Good Naked: Shop for Your Shape and Look Amazing!, that was published in April 2007. A second series was commissioned and was broadcast on Channel 4 in mid-2007. Along with the second series, he appeared on The New Paul O'Grady Show, in which he persuaded Paul O'Grady to strip 'naked'. A third series was shown in early 2008. His new series, entitled Gok's Fashion Fix was broadcast on Channel 4 in mid-2008.

Gok presented a documentary which was first broadcast in January 2009, entitled Too Fat Too Young, examining overweight kids in the UK. He reflected on his experience of being obese to help these teenagers.

August Icon - Stephen Fry

Yves Saint Laurent

Yves St Laurent born 1 August 1936 (d. 2008)

Born in Algeria to French parents, Yves Saint Laurent had a difficult childhood. Although taunted at school, he found solace at home in his drawing and painting and occasional designs of dresses for his mother and two sisters.

He first came to the fashion world's attention when he was seventeen and studying in Paris. He won 1st prize in a dress design competition sponsored by the International Wool Secretariat.

When Christian Dior saw Saint Laurent's designs, he was so impressed that he offered the young man a job as an assistant and was soon referring to Saint Laurent as his 'dauphin'. When Dior died in 1957, Saint Laurent took over the house. His first collection for Dior in 1958 was greeted enthusiastically and his 1960 collection for Dior appropriated the Left Bank style, with black leather jackets, knitted turtlenecks, and crocodile jackets with mink collars. The fashion world watched with fascination as street fashion was redesigned at the hands of a couturier.

In the same year Saint Laurent was called up to fight in the Algerian war. When he was discharged several months later, he discovered that he had been replaced as head designer at Dior - so he created his own house.

Under his own name, Saint Laurent continued to produce elegant wearable clothes that drew on a huge range of influences and he successfully tapped into the vogue for androgynous dressing that spread throughout Europe and America in the mid-1960s. By feminising the basic shapes of mens fashion, he can be credited with transforming evening wear and the working woman's wardrobe - as Armani was to do again in the 1980s.

In 1993, Yves Saint Laurent , which was by now also a major perfume house, was sold to a major company and has changed hands a number of times since, becoming part of the Gucci NV group in 1999 with Tom Ford as designer and creative director for couture and Yves Saint Laurent Perfumes, as well as designer for the YSL Rive Gauche label.

In 1958, Saint Laurent met Pierre Bergé, who was at the time the manager and lover of the Parisian painter Bernard Buffet. At a weekend party Buffet met his future wife, and Saint Laurent and Bergé commenced a romantic relationship that lasted until 1976. After their breakup Bergé continued to serve as Saint Laurent's business manager and remained living in their jointly owned home until 1986.

Although his sexuality was hardly a secret in the fashion world, Saint Laurent did not publicly acknowledge his homosexuality until 1991, in an interview in the French daily newspaper Le Figaro.

Almost any other leading designer will cite him as their idol. Marc Jacobs refers to him as god. Tom Ford and Jean-Paul Gaultier called him their mentor.

In 2002, dogged by years of poor health, drug abuse, depression, alcoholism, criticisms of YSL designs, and 'problems' with lead designer Tom Ford, Saint-Laurent and Gucci closed the illustrious couture house of YSL. While the house no longer exists, the brand still survives through its parent company Gucci.

The pret-a-porter line is still being produced under the direction of Stefano Pilati after Tom Ford retired in 2004, while the boxer briefs sold all over the world still carry the brand name.

After his retirement, Saint Laurent became increasingly reclusive and spent much of his time at his house in Marrakech, Morocco. He died 1 June 2008 in Paris, aged 71, after a long illness.

July Icon - Giorgio Armani

James Purdy

James Purdy born 17 July 1923 (d. 2009)

Novelist James Purdy was born in Ohio and moved to Chicago when he was still in his teens. He attended the University of Chicago and the University of Puebla in Mexico. From 1949 to 1953, he taught at Lawrence College in Wisconsin and then lived abroad for some years before returning to live and work in the US.

Purdy began to publish stories in magazines in the 1940s. In the 1950s, he tried without success to find an American publisher. His first book was published privately and then by a major publisher in England, where he had many supporters in the literary world, most notably Dame Edith Sitwell and Angus Wilson.

James Purdy's novels often describe obsessive love between men for whom homosexuality is unthinkable and whose fate is inevitably bleak; the themes of alienation and violence are common. His writing is characterised by bleak pessimism, tempered with some humour, and a simplicity which veers between the monumental and the gothic. His best known works include his first novel 63: Dream Palace (1956) Eustace Chisholm and the Works (1967) In a Shallow Grave (1975) and Narrow Rooms (1978). His work has been described as 'singular', 'controversial' and 'obscure'.

Following several reissues of previously out-of-print novels, as well as an appreciation by Gore Vidal in The New York Times Book Review, Purdy's work enjoyed a renaissance. As Edward Albee wrote long ago, there is a Purdy renaissance every ten years, like clockwork. Albee has been proved right every decade since.

Since the 1990s, when great age began to make itself felt, he had worked closely with his companion John Uecker (who was previously the last amanuensis of Tennessee Williams), a partnership that resulted in such late works as the novel Gertrude of Stony Island Avenue (1997) and the collection of stories Moe's Villa (2003, 2005). He continued to dictate to a small team of devoted friends, and ascribed his continued intellectual vigor to the drinking of green tea and the avoidance of alcohol and tobacco. His advice to young writers was to 'banish shame'.

Purdy continued to dictate and to draw nearly every day until his death at 94. After several years of declining health, he fractured a hip and died in Englewood, New Jersey on 13 March 2009.

Shortly after his death in 2009 a book of plays, James Purdy, Selected Plays was published. It features an insightful foreword by John Uecker (who also edited the book) about the friendship between Tennessee Williams and James Purdy. It also focuses on Purdy's play writing being his first form of writing since childhood, when he wrote plays for his brother, an actor, to perform. The book is dedicated by Purdy 'To those who stood behind me', to Tennessee Williams and John Uecker.

John Waters contributed the following blurb on the cover: 'James Purdy's Selected Plays will break your damaged little heart.' Also on the cover, Gore Vidal calls Purdy 'An authentic American genius'.

Although he has never achieved either the popular success or critical acclaim he perhaps deserved, he has influenced several young gay writers.

James Purdy Society

Giorgio Armani

Giorgio Armani born 11 July 1934

Born in Piacenza, Italy, Giorgio Armani is one the greatest fashion designers of the last 50 years and with his couture collections and various diffusion lines has been at the forefront of creating the modern designer as superstar as brand as household name - yet still retaining his class and mystique.

He originally trained in medicine, giving it up to pursue photography before doing his national service in 1957. He then worked as a window dresser in a department store, La Rinascente. From 1961-70 he worked as an in-house designer for Nino Cerruti, leaving to pursue freelance work. In 1974, with his partner Sergio Galeotti, he launched his first Giorgio Armani S.p.A. menswear line, adding womenswear in 1975. Galeotti died from AIDS in 1985, aged only 40.

He is known for elegant, luxurious, clean yet soft tailored lines, often in a palette of classic neutrals, slate greys and navy. His unstructured jackets and unisex women's clothing defined the 80s and gave women a functional and yet feminine business dress - reinventing the trouser suit.




He achieved the breakthrough to international fame through costuming the occasional Hollywood film - notably, Richard Gere in American Gigolo, and The Untouchables.

He remains a popular choice for stars seeking classic elegance on international red carpets, and his many clothing lines, fragrances, accessories and homewares can be found in department stores and on smarter shopping streets worldwide.

June Icon - Cole Porter 1891 - 1964

Alan Turing

Alan Turing born 23 June 1912 (d. 1954)

It would be difficult to overestimate the importance to the modern world of the mathematical, philosophical, and cryptographic work of Alan Mathison Turing. A gifted mathematician, Turing is remembered today as one of the founders of computer science.

The gay community remembers Turing not only for his work on computers and the cracking of the Enigma machine code during World War II, but also because of his needless, horrific death. He committed suicide at the age of 41, two years after his arrest, conviction, and forced chemical castration for his homosexuality.

After pioneering work in computer and software design and in artificial intelligence, and after being honoured for his war work with an OBE in 1946 and elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1951 at an unusually young age, in 1952 Turing's life took an abrupt turn for the worse.

In 1948, Turing had moved to Manchester after accepting a position as Deputy Director of the Royal Society Computing Laboratory at the University of Manchester, where he soon became involved with a young working class man, Murray Arnold, who would later break into his home.

After reporting the burglary, Turing was arrested and prosecuted for what was then known under British law as Gross Indecency, a section of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885, under which Oscar Wilde had also been charged in 1895. Even through this ordeal, he remained open and unapologetic about his sexuality. Turing was offered a stark choice: go to prison or submit to the administration of the hormone oestrogen. Intended to suppress his libido, it was a type of chemical castration.

This treatment left Turing impotent. He also developed breasts. He found his security clearances revoked and he was unable to continue his pioneering work. Two years after his arrest, and one year after this coerced and barbaric 'therapy', Alan Turing killed himself.

He left no note, and the circumstances of his death were inadequately investigated and perhaps left deliberately murky to spare his mother anguish. She believed his death to be accidental. Most commentators believe, however, that he committed suicide by eating an apple smeared with cyanide-laced jam.

Despite the fact that he may have been the most brilliant scientist of his generation, someone whose work in deciphering the German codes during World War II played a major role in achieving Allied victory, Turing was discarded and deemed a security risk because of his homosexuality.

The city of Manchester has done something to celebrate Turing's life and achievements and make amends for the cruel treatment he received - there is now a major road called Alan Turing Way, and a statue of Turing [right] in Sackville Park, near to Manchester's Gay Village.

There is also a statue [above] at the University of Surrey, close to Turing's childhood home in Guildford. In June 2007 a new statue of Turing was unveiled at Bletchley Park, where he carried out his wartime work.

Read more about the life of this incredible man.

The play and film Breaking The Code are about the life and work of Alan Turing.

On 10 September 2009, following an Internet campaign, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown made an official public apology on behalf of the British government for the way in which Turing was treated after the war.

E Lynn Harris

E Lynn Harris born 20 June 1955 (d. 2009)

Everette 'E' Lynn Harris was a prolific American author. Openly gay, he was best known for his depictions of African American men on the down-low or in the closet.

In his writings, Harris maintained a poignant motif, occasionally emotive, that incorporated vernacular and slang from popular culture.

Born in Flint, Michigan, Harris became the first black male cheerleader while attending the University of Arkansas.

A former computer executive, Harris turned to writing and published his own first book, Invisible Life, about his own struggles with his sexuality, before signing a deal.

Many of his novels, 10 of which made it on to the New York Times best-sellers list, dealt with the experiences of the gay African American man.

Gay advocate Herndon Davis called Harris a 'pioneering voice' within the black lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities.

'Harris painted with eloquent prose and revealing accuracy the lives of African American men and the many complicated struggles they faced reconciling their sexuality and spirituality while rising above societal taboos within the black community,' added Mr Davis.

Alongside fiction, Harris had also penned a personal memoir, What Becomes of the Brokenhearted?

Harris died suddenly on July 23, 2009 at the age of 54 while in Los Angeles for a business meeting. He was found unconscious at the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills, California, and was pronounced dead at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.

Carl Van Vechten

Carl Van Vechten born 17 June 1880 (d. 1964)

Carl Van Vechten was an American writer and photographer who was a patron of the Harlem Renaissance and the literary executor of Gertrude Stein.

Born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, he graduated from Washington High School in 1898, and later the University of Chicago in 1903. In 1906, he moved to New York City. He was hired as the assistant music critic at the New York Times. His interest in opera had him take a leave of absence from the paper in 1907, to travel to Europe to explore opera.

While in England he married his long time friend from Cedar Rapids, Anna Snyder. He returned to his job at the New York Times in 1909 and then became the first American critic of modern dance. At that time, Isadora Duncan, Anna Pavlova, and Loie Fuller were performing in New York City. The marriage to Anna Snyder ended in divorce in 1912 and he wed actress Fania Marinoff in 1914.

Several books of Van Vechten's essays on various subjects such as music and literature were published between 1915 and 1920. Between 1922 and 1930 Knopf published seven novels by Van Vechten, starting with Peter Whiffle: His Life and Works and ending with Parties.

Van Vechten was interested in black writers and artists, and knew and promoted many of the major figures of the Harlem Renaissance, including Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and Wallace Thurman. Van Vechten's controversial novel Nigger Heaven was published in 1926. An essay of his entitled 'Negro Blues Singers' was published in Vanity Fair in 1926.

In the 1930s, Van Vechten began taking portrait photographs. Among the many individuals he photographed were Gertrude Stein, Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Henry Miller, Mahalia Jackson, W Somerset Maugham, F Scott Fitzgerald, Bessie Smith, Paul Cadmus, Marc Chagall, Horst P Horst, Georgia O'Keeffe, Gore Vidal, Sidney Lumet, James Stewart, Marlon Brando, Orson Welles, Norman Mailer, Evelyn Waugh, Ella Fitzgerald, Alfred Stieglitz, Truman Capote, Billie Holiday, Cesar Romero, Tallulah Bankhead and Sir Laurence Olivier.

Van Vechten initially met Gertrude Stein in Paris in 1913. They continued corresponding for the remainder of Stein's life, and at her death she appointed Van Vechten her literary executor; he helped to bring into print her unpublished writings.

After the 1930s, Van Vechten published little writing, though he continued to write letters to many correspondents.

Although Van Vechten was married to Fania Marinoff until the end of his life, he was either a homosexual or a bisexual. Some of his papers were kept under seal for 25 years after his death, and when they were examined after that time, they were found to include scrapbooks of photographs and clippings related to homosexuality.

He died at the age of 84 in New York City. Van Vechten was the subject of a 1968 biography by Bruce Kellner, Carl Van Vechten and the Irreverent Decades.


Billie Holiday and Marlo Brando photographed by Carl Van Vechten.

(Boy) George O'Dowd

(Boy) George O'Dowd born 14 June 1961

Former-New Romantic, singer, songwriter, autobiographer, actor, superstar DJ, wit, raconteur, new age renaissance man, sexual terrorist and probably his own worst enemy, Boy George is a treasured and very British institution.

Arguably a future holder of Quentin Crisp's crown as one of the 'Stately Homos of England' he has enjoyed and destroyed more careers and got himself in more scrapes than most people can dream of. George, we salute you.

Cole Porter

Cole Porter born 9 June 1891 (d. 1964)

Born into a wealthy family in Peru, Indiana, Cole Porter remains one of America's all-time greatest composers and songwriters. His work is characterised by witty and sophisticated lyrics with complex and clever use of rhythm and rhyme.

The 1930s were the golden period for Porter as he enjoyed a string of hit songs, Broadway shows and, eventually, Hollywood musicals. Porter had a gift for self-promotion and attracting and writing for the brightest talents of the age and many songs and shows were written specifically with stars such as Fred Astaire, Ethel Merman and Fanny Brice in mind.

Porter was plainly and openly homosexual, which was not a concern for his almost a decade older wife, Linda Lee Thomas. They both got what they wanted from each other. Linda was no longer interested in sex and was the glamorous wife of a world famous songwriter, who would never physically mistreat her as her first husband is reputed to have done; Cole had a beautiful woman on his arm when the situation warranted it. In those days, it was not uncommon for wealthy gay men to marry wealthy socialtes. Cole and Linda did separate in the early 1930s when Porter's sexuality became more and open during their time living in Hollywood.

He had affairs with Ballet Russes star Boris Kochno in 1925, and reportedly had a long relationship with his constant companion Howard Sturges, a Boston socialite, as well as architect Ed Tauch (for whom Porter wrote Easy To Love) , choreographer Nelson Barclift (who inspired Night and Day), director John Wilson and longtime friend Ray Kelly, whose children still receive half of Porter`s royalties. When in Hollywood, Porter was also a regular at George Cukor's Sunday pool parties - men-only affairs populated by young Hollywood hopefuls and their admirers.

In 1937, Porter was thrown from a horse and his legs badly crushed, effectively crippling him. He endured more than 40 operations on his legs and the constant pain left him with terrible depression for which he received brutal experimental electric shock therapy, although he continued to write. Eventually, ulceration led to his right leg being amputated, and he spent the rest of his long life with an artificial limb.

If you ever see the Hollywood biopic of Porter's life Night & Day (1946) starring Cary Grant and Alexis Smith as Cole and Linda, enjoy it for the music, but the story is so sanitised and romanticised as to be practically fiction.

Angus McBean

Angus McBean born 8 June 1904 (d. 1990)

Angus McBean was a Welsh photographer, associated with surrealism.

McBean was born in Newbridge, Monmouthshire, the son of a coal mine surveyor. He bought his first camera and tripod as World War I was ending. Fascinated by the apparently magical properties of photography, he wanted to be able to take pictures of people and sold a gold watch left to him by his grandfather to raise the five pounds necessary for the equipment.

In 1925, after his father's early death, McBean moved with his mother and younger sister to Acton, London. He worked for Liberty's department store in the antiques department learning restoration, while his personal life was spent in photography, mask-making and watching plays in the West End theatre. In 1932 he left Liberty and grew his distinctive beard to symbolise the fact that he would never be a wage-slave again. He then worked as a maker of theatrical props, including a commission of medieval scenery for John Gielgud's 1933 production of Richard of Bordeaux.

McBean's masks became a talking point in social columns, and were much admired by the leading Bond Street photographer Hugh Cecil. Cecil offered McBean an assistant's post at his Mayfair studio, and having learnt the secrets of Cecil's softer style and after using the studio at night, McBean set up his own studio 18 months later in a basement in Belgrave Road, Victoria, London.

The artist McBean as he was still known as a mask maker, gained a commission in 1936 from Ivor Novello for masks for his play The Happy Hypocrite. Novello was so impressed with McBean's romantic photographs that he commissioned him to take a set of production photographs as well, including young actress Vivien Leigh. The results, taken on stage with McBean's idiosyncratic lighting, instantly replaced the set already made by the long-established but stolid Stage Photo Company. McBean had a new career and a photographic leading lady: he was to photograph Vivien Leigh on stage and in the studio for almost every performance she gave until her death thirty years later.

McBean resultantly became one of the most significant portrait photographers of the 20th century, and was known as a photographer of celebrities. In the Spring of 1942 his career was temporarily ruined when he was arrested in Bath for committing homosexual acts. He was sentenced to four years in prison and was released in the autumn of 1944. After the Second World War, McBean was able to successfully resume his career.

There were in effect two periods to McBean's career, his pre- and post-war phases. Pre-war he was a lot more confident in himself and experimented successfully with surrealism, indeed his work with the likes of Vivian Leigh are some of the most accessible surrealist photographic images known. Post-war he reverted to a more regular style of portraiture photography, nearly always working with the entertainment and theatre profession.

In 1945, not sure whether he would find work again, McBean set up a new studio in a bomb-damaged building in Covent Garden. He sold his Soho camera for £35, and bought a new half-plate Kodak View monorail camera to which he attached his trusted Zeiss lenses. McBean was commissioned first by the Stratford Memorial Theatre to photograph a production of Anthony and Cleopatra, and all his former clients quickly returned. Through the late 1940s and 50s he was the official photographer at Stratford, the Royal Opera House, Sadlers Wells, Glyndebourne, the Old Vic and at all the productions of H.M. Tennent, servicing the theatrical, musical and ballet star system.

Magazines such as the Daily Sketch and Tatler vied to commission McBean's new series of surreal portraits.

Two figures have prevented McBean from gaining the full fame he deserves - the first being Cecil Beaton, whose lavish lifestyle and work for Vogue and the British Royal Family made him a huge star. And secondly that of David Bailey who though coming much later (1960s) was also close to Cecil Beaton both personally and in terms of style. Bailey is an iconic figure in the world of fashion photography just as Beaton was before him - McBean sadly did not enjoy this level of fame either in his life or after death, even though he was arguably the better technically and perhaps artistically. Additionally McBean's focus on the world of theatre (particularly London's West End) did not give him the international recognition that he probably deserved.

McBean's later works included being the photographer for The Beatles' first album, surrealist work as well as classic photographs of individuals such as Agatha Christie, Audrey Hepburn, and Noel Coward. Both periods or his work (pre- and post-war) are now eagerly sought by collectors and his work sits in many major collections around the world.

Harvey Fierstein

Harvey Fierstein born 6 June 1952

Harvey Fierstein is a Tony Award-winning and Emmy Award-nominated American actor, playwright, and screenwriter.

Born Harvey Forbes Fierstein in Brooklyn, New York, the gravelly-voiced actor perhaps is known best for the play and film Torch Song Trilogy, which he wrote and in which he starred. The 1982 Broadway production won him two Tony Awards, for Best Play and Best Actor in a Play, two Drama Desk Awards, for Outstanding New Play and Outstanding Actor in a Play, and the Theatre World Award, and the film earned him an Independent Spirit Award nomination as Best Male Lead.

Fierstein also wrote the book for La Cage aux Folles (1983), winning another Tony Award, this time for Best Book of a Musical, and a Drama Desk nomination for Outstanding Book. Legs Diamond, his 1988 collaboration with Peter Allen, was a critical and commercial failure, closing after 72 previews and 64 performances. His other playwriting credits include Safe Sex, Spookhouse, and Forget Him.

Fierstein made his acting debut in Andy Warhol's only play, Pork's. In addition to Torch Song Trilogy, Fierstein's Broadway acting credits include Edna Turnblad in Hairspray (2003) [left], for which he won another Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Musical (joining Tommy Tune as the only people to win the award in four different categories), and Tevye in the 2005 revival of Fiddler on the Roof.

Fierstein's film roles include Woody Allen's Bullets Over Broadway, Robin Williams' maskmaker brother in Mrs Doubtfire, a Parade of Hope spokesman in Death to Smoochy, Garbo Talks, Duplex, and the blockbuster hit Independence Day. He also narrated the documentary The Times of Harvey Milk and voiced the role of Yao in Walt Disney's Mulan (1998), a role he later reprised for the video game Kingdom Hearts II.

On television, Fierstein was featured as the voice of Karl, Homer's assistant, in the Simpson and Delilah episode of The Simpsons, and the voice of Elmer in the 1999 HBO special based on his children's book The Sissy Duckling, which won the Humanitas Prize for Children's Animation.

Additional credits include Miami Vice, Murder, She Wrote, the Showtime TV movie Common Ground (which he also wrote), and Cheers, which earned him an Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series.

Fierstein is an occasional columnist writing about gay issues. His careers as a stand-up comic and female impersonator are mostly behind him.

May Icon - Harvey Milk 1930 - 1978

Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman born 31 May 1819 (d. 1892)

Walter Whitman was an American poet, essayist, journalist, and humanist. Whitman is among the most influential poets in the American canon, often called the father of free verse. His work was very controversial in its time, particularly his poetry collection Leaves of Grass, which was described as obscene for its overt sexuality.

Born on Long Island, Whitman worked as a journalist, a teacher, a government clerk, and a volunteer nurse during the American Civil War in addition to publishing his poetry. Early in his career, he also produced a temperance novel, Franklin Evans (1842). Whitman's major work, Leaves of Grass, was first published in 1855 with his own money. The work was an attempt at reaching out to the common person with an American epic. He continued expanding and revising it until his death in 1892. After a stroke towards the end of his life, he moved to Camden, New Jersey where his health further declined. He died at age 72 and his funeral became a public event.

Whitman's sexuality is sometimes disputed, although often assumed to be bisexual based on his poetry. The concept of heterosexual and homosexual personalities was invented in 1868, and it was not widely promoted until Whitman was an old man. Whitman's poetry depicts love and sexuality in a more earthy, individualistic way common in American culture before the 'medicalisation' of sexuality in the late 1800s. Though Leaves of Grass was often labelled pornographic or obscene, only one critic remarked on its author's presumed sexual activity: in a November 1855 review, Rufus Wilmot Griswold suggested Whitman was guilty of 'that horrible sin not to be mentioned among Christians'. Whitman had intense friendships with many men throughout his life.

Some biographers have claimed that he may not have actually engaged in sexual relationships with men, while others cite letters, journal entries and other sources which they claim as proof of the sexual nature of some of his relationships.

Biographer David S. Reynolds described a man named Peter Doyle as being the most likely candidate for the love of Whitman's life. Doyle was a bus conductor whom he met around 1866. They were inseparable for several years. Interviewed in 1895, Doyle said: 'We were familiar at once — I put my hand on his knee — we understood. He did not get out at the end of the trip — in fact went all the way back with me.'

A more direct second-hand account comes from Oscar Wilde. Wilde met Whitman in America in 1882, and wrote to the homosexual rights activist George Cecil Ives that there was 'no doubt' about the great American poet's sexual orientation — 'I have the kiss of Walt Whitman still on my lips,' he boasted. The only explicit description of Whitman's sexual activities is second hand. In 1924 Edward Carpenter, then an old man, described an erotic encounter he had had in his youth with Whitman to Gavin Arthur, who recorded it in detail in his journal. Late in his life, when Whitman was asked outright if his series of Calamus poems were homosexual, he chose not to respond.

There is also some evidence that Whitman may have had sexual relationships with women. He had a romantic friendship with a New York actress named Ellen Grey in the spring of 1862, but it is not known whether or not it was also sexual. He still had a photo of her decades later when he moved to Camden and referred to her as 'an old sweetheart of mine'. In a letter dated August 21, 1890 he claimed, 'I have had six children - two are dead'. This claim has never been corroborated. Toward the end of his life, he often told stories of previous girlfriends and sweethearts and denied an allegation from the New York Herald that he had 'never had a love affair'.

In any case, Whitman is one of the first truly working-class poets and an iconic figure in gay literature.

Sir Ian McKellen

Sir Ian McKellen born 25 May 1939

Sir Ian McKellen is probably the current holder of the unofficial title of the UK's best-loved actor.

Gifted and charismatic, he is able to tackle a wide range of roles from Shakespearean gravitas to modern theatre to the high-camp of panto. He has especially been immortalised in film history for his appearances as Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings Trilogy and Magneto in the X Men franchise.

Since taking the decision to come out as a gay man, he has been a tireless and passionate supporter of gay causes and campaigns and an unofficial spokesman for the gay community. He is a co-founder of Stonewall.

McKellen made his stage début in Coventry in 1961 and his West End début in 1964. His first film role — in the unfinished The Bells of Hell Go Ting-A-Ling-A-Ling (1966) — produced a £4000 fee that helped fund his repertory work for a time, but the experience contributed to a focus on the stage, which remained the medium he was best known for well into the fourth decade of his career.

The role that made McKellen famous was his 1969 appearance in the title role in a touring production of Marlowe's Edward II. The production was controversial for its explicit torture scenes and implicit homosexuality. He later reprised the role for the BBC. In 1972, he founded the Actors' Company with his friend Edward Petherbridge, and this was the beginning of his reputation as a spokesman for actors and the British theatre in general. Between 1974 and 1978, he played leading roles in Royal Shakespeare Company productions such as Romeo and Juliet; Macbeth (opposite Judi Dench); and Trevor Nunn's 1977 production of The Alchemist by Ben Jonson.

McKellen starred on Broadway in Bent, a play about gay men in Nazi death camps, starting in 1979. Despite his role in the play, which brought to public view for the first time in a widespread way the persecution of gays in Nazi Germany, McKellen was not yet out publicly. Since starring in the original production of Bent, he has been involved in two other productions of the play. In 1990 he starred in the revival at the National Theatre in London directed by ex-partner Sean Mathias, and also made a supporting appearance in the film version, also directed by Mathias, which was released in 1997.

McKellen won more and more parts, and eventually in 1980 he won the role of Salieri in the Broadway production of Amadeus. He was awarded the Tony Award for his performance, an honour he was also nominated for in 1984 for his one-man Shakespeare recital Acting Shakespeare. His appearance as Walter, a mentally-handicapped adult, in a 1982 television play shown on the first night of Channel 4's broadcasting, won him a new following; but he was still a relative unknown to much of the US public.

In 1994 McKellen put together a one-man show, A Knight Out. The show was very successful, and he still performs it today, considering it a perpetual 'work in progress'.

He is a benefactor of the Rose Theatre in London and in January 2006 unveiled a blue plaque on the outside of the building.

McKellen had taken film roles throughout his career - beginning in 1969 with A Touch of Love, excluding the unreleased The Bells of Hell Go Ting-A-Ling-A-Ling (1966) – but it was not until the 1990s that he became more widely recognised in this medium, through several roles in blockbuster Hollywood movies.

In 1993, McKellen had a supporting role in the sleeper hit Six Degrees of Separation. In the same year, he appeared in minor roles in the television miniseries Tales of the City (based on the novel by his friend Armistead Maupin) and the Schwarzenegger movie Last Action Hero. Also in 1993, McKellen played a large role in the TV movie And the Band Played On, about the discovery of the AIDS virus.

In 1995, he played the title role in Richard III, a film he also co-wrote (adapting the play for the screen based on a stage production of Shakespeare's play directed by Richard Eyre for the Royal National Theatre) and co-produced. His performance in the title role was critically acclaimed, and he was nominated for Golden Globe and BAFTA awards, and won the European Film Award for best actor.

His breakthrough role for mainstream American audiences came with the modestly acclaimed Apt Pupil, based on a story by Stephen King. McKellen portrayed an old Nazi officer, living under a false name in the US, who was befriended by a curious teenager (Brad Renfro) who threatened to expose him unless he told his story in detail. His casting was based partly on his performance in Cold Comfort Farm, seen by Apt Pupil-director Bryan Singer despite the BBFC's refusal to release it in cinemas. He was subsequently nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor for his role in the 1998 film Gods and Monsters, where he played James Whale, gay director of Frankenstein.

McKellen has unexpectedly become a major global star by playing leading roles in blockbuster films. He reteamed with Apt Pupil director Bryan Singer to play the comic book character Magneto in X-Men and its sequels X2 and X-Men: The Last Stand. It was while filming X-Men that he was cast as Gandalf in Peter Jackson's three-film adaptation of The Lord of the Rings. McKellen received honours from the Screen Actors Guild for Best Supporting Actor in a Motion Picture for his work in The Fellowship of the Ring and was also nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for the same role.

On March 16, 2002, he was the host on Saturday Night Live. In 2003, McKellen made a guest appearance as himself on the American cartoon show The Simpsons, in a special British-themed episode entitled 'The Regina Monologues', along with Tony Blair and J. K. Rowling. In April and May 2005, he played the role of Mel Hutchwright in Granada Television's long running soap opera, Coronation Street, fulfilling a lifelong ambition. He is also known for his voicework.

McKellen has also appeared in limited release films, like Emile (which was shot in a few days during the X2 shoot), Neverwas and Asylum. He has appeared as Sir Leigh Teabing in The Da Vinci Code. McKellen also appeared in the 2006 series of Ricky Gervais' comedy series Extras, where he played himself directing Gervais' character Andy Millman in a play about gay lovers.

In May 2007 Sir Ian was placed at number five - down from 2006's number one spot - on The Independent on Sunday's annual Pink List, which attempts to identify the most influential gay men and lesbians in the UK.

In 2008 it was confirmed that McKellen would reprise his role as Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings prequels based on The Hobbit.

Harvey Milk

Harvey Milk born 22 May 1930 (d. 1978)

Harvey Bernard Milk an American politician and gay rights activist, was the first openly gay city supervisor of San Francisco, California. He and Mayor George Moscone were assassinated in 1978. His assassin, Dan White, was sentenced to seven years in prison. Outrage over the verdict led to the White Night Riots in San Francisco by enraged citizens. Milk is seen by some to be a martyr to the LGBT community.

MIlk's grandfather, Morris Milk was the owner and namesake of Milk's Department Store in Woodmere, New York; 'Glimpy' was Harvey Milk's nickname because as a child and adolescent, he was considered odd-looking because of his large ears, nose, and feet. He was born in Woodmere. He graduated from Bay Shore High School, Bay Shore, NY in 1947, graduated from University at Albany in 1951 and joined the United States Navy, serving on active duty in the Korean war; he was honorably discharged.

Following his service in the Navy, Milk lived for a time in Dallas, Texas. Eventually he relocated to New York City and took a job on Wall Street. He also became involved with theatre, serving as Assistant Director alongside Tom O'Horgan for a number of plays including Lenny and the musical Jesus Christ Superstar.

In 1972, Milk moved to San Francisco. He settled with his partner Scott Smith and opened a camera store, Castro Camera, in the Castro gay village. He emerged as a community leader, founding the Castro Valley Association of local merchants, and represented the neighbourhood businesses in dealing with the city government.

Milk ran for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors unsuccessfully twice, in 1973 and 1975. He emerged as a figurehead for San Francisco's large gay community, and was known as the 'Mayor of Castro Street', a title which he himself coined. With each campaign, he garnered a larger number of supporters.

After San Francisco switched from at-large to district elections, Milk was elected to the Board of Supervisors on his third attempt in 1977, the first openly gay elected official of any large city in the United States, and only the third openly gay elected official in all of the US, the first man. Milk represented District 5, which included the Castro.

In his eleven months as a Supervisor, he sponsored a gay rights bill for the City as well as – famously – a pooper-scooper ordinance. He was also instrumental in defeating Proposition 6, The Briggs Initiative, backed by State Senator Briggs, which would have allowed openly gay men and lesbians who were teachers to be fired based on their sexuality. In November 1978, Proposition 6 was soundly voted down by Californians.

Milk was also successful in reaching out and making alliances among the city's ethnic populations and among labour union leaders but not among the rank and file members.

On September 22, 1975 former marine Oliver Sipple saved the life of President Gerald Ford for which he was highly praised by law enforcement in the media as well as in a personal letter from the President. Milk outed Sipple, despite Sipple's insistence to reporters that his sexuality was to be kept confidential, proclaiming Sipple a 'gay hero', and stating (this) 'will help break the stereotype of homosexuals'. This action had a disastrous effect on the life of Sipple himself.

Late in 1978, Supervisor Dan White, an acrimonious political opponent of Milk's, resigned from the Board of Supervisors. His resignation meant that Moscone would choose White's successor, and thus could tip the Board's balance of power in Moscone's favour. Recognising this, those who supported a more conservative agenda, including board ally Dianne Feinstein, talked White into changing his mind. White requested that Moscone re-appoint him to his former seat. Moscone originally indicated a willingness to do so, but more liberal city leaders, including Milk, lobbied him against the idea, and Moscone ultimately decided not to re-appoint White.

On November 27, 1978, White went to San Francisco City Hall to meet with Moscone and make a final plea for re-appointment. When Moscone refused to yield, White shot Moscone to death, then went to Milk's office and also shot Milk to death. White later turned himself in at the police station where he was formerly an officer. Even though he had carried a gun, 10 extra rounds, and crawled through a window to avoid metal detectors, White denied premeditation. Thousands attended a spontaneous candlelight memorial vigil the night of Milk's funeral. Milk had foreseen his risk of assassination and had recorded several audio tapes to be played in that event. One of the tapes included his now-famous quote, 'If a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door.'

Dan White's trial, which began four months after the killings, was one of the most closely watched trials in California at that time. The prosecution claimed that White's motive was revenge. But White's attorney, Douglas Schmidt, claimed that White was a victim of pressure and had been depressed, a state exacerbated by his consuming a large quantity of junk food before the murders; this became known as the 'Twinkie defence'. Schmidt also told the jury and the press that White carried all that ammunition on him not so much out of hatred but out of impulse from his experience as an ex-police officer.

Finally, the jury heard what the prosecution hoped it would be its most damaging piece of evidence — Dan White's tape-recorded confession which was taped the day after the murders. What was notable about this confession was that the police didn't seem to ask White any questions about the crime and just let him talk. Instead, White tearfully talked of how Moscone and Milk refused to give him his supervisor's job back.

White was convicted of voluntary manslaughter on the grounds of diminished capacity and sentenced to seven years and eight months, a sentence widely denounced as lenient and motivated by homophobia. During jury selection, defence attorneys had excluded candidates they deemed 'pro-gay'.

After the sentence, the gay community erupted into what became known as the White Night Riots. As soon as the sentence was announced, word ran through the gay community and groups of people began walking quickly to the Civic Center and by 8pm, there was a sizeable mob formed. According to the documentary, The Times of Harvey Milk, the enraged crowd started by screaming at police officers calling for revenge and death. Then, riots began to break out with the mob setting ablaze a number of police vehicles, disrupting traffic, smashing windows of cars and stores, buses had their overhead wires ripped down, and physical violence resulted against the outnumbered police officers.

Many rioters were arrested but the Chief of Police, Charles Gain, was blamed for being too weak in his response and holding back his officers when he should have been more proactive and defended lives and property. He defended himself by pointing out that no one was dead and only a few had minor injuries. More than 160 people were hospitalised because of the rioting.

Dan White served a little more than five years for the double murder of Moscone and Milk. On October 22, 1985, a year and a half after his release from prison, White was found dead in a running car in his ex-wife's garage. He was 39 years old. His defense attorney told reporters that he had been despondent over the loss of his family, and the situation he had caused, adding 'This was a sick man.'

Harvey Milk is widely regarded as a martyr for the gay community and the gay rights movement. Many gay and lesbian community institutions are named for Milk, including the Harvey Milk Institute and the Harvey Milk Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgendered Democratic Club in San Francisco, as well as a number of alternative schools in the United States, including Harvey Milk High School in New York City. Oakes College at the University of California, Santa Cruz has an on-campus apartment building named Harvey Milk.

Harvey Milk has been the subject of several documentaries, films, tribute songs and plays. A major feature film based on the life and death of Harvey Milk was in the offing for several years and finally appeared in late-2008, directed by Gus Van Sant and starring Sean Penn as Milk, who was Oscar-nominated for the role.

Pioneering gay journalist Randy Shilts wrote a major investigative biography entitled The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk.

Armistead Maupin

Armistead Maupin born 13 May in 1944

Armistead Maupin is an American writer best known for his Tales of the City series of novels based in San Francisco.

Maupin, a descendent of American Revolutionary War general Gabriel Maupin, was born to a conservative, Christian family in Washington, D.C., but moved early on to North Carolina where he was raised. He says he has had storytelling instincts since he was eight years old.

He attended the University of North Carolina where he got into journalism through writing for The Daily Tar Heel. After earning his undergraduate degree, Maupin enrolled in law school, but later dropped out. He worked at a television station in Raleigh managed by conservative television personality and later US Senator Jesse Helms, who nominated him for a patriotic award, which he won. Maupin is a veteran of the United States Navy; he served several tours of duty including one in the Vietnam War.

Maupin's work on a Charleston newspaper was followed with an offer of a post at the San Francisco bureau of the Associated Press in 1971. The move to San Francisco was to change his life.

He says he knew he was gay since childhood, but didn't have sex until he was 26 and only decided to come out publicly in 1974. The same year, he began what would become the Tales of the City series as a serial in a local newspaper, The Pacific Sun, moving to the San Francisco Chronicle after the former newspaper folded.

Tales of the City is a series of novels, the first portions of which were initially published as a newspaper serial and later reworked into the series of books. The first of Maupin's novels, entitled Tales of the City, was published in 1978. Five more followed in the 80s, ending with the last book, Sure of You, in 1989. A seventh novel published in 2007, Michael Tolliver Lives, continues the story of some of the characters. In Babycakes, published in 1983, he was one of the first writers to address the subject of AIDS. Of the autobiographical nature of the characters, he says, 'I’ve always been all of the characters in one way or another.' Maupin's novels are essentially comic in nature, but he has never been afraid to add controversy, thrills, chills and strong doses of reality to the mix.

The first three books in the series have also been converted into three television miniseries starring Olympia Dukakis and Laura Linney, the first airing on the American television network PBS (Channel 4 in the UK) and the latter two on the American cable television channel Showtime. Plans to film the rest of the Tales have been scuppered by costs, despite the willingness of many of the cast to reprise their roles and the now much less controversial climate.

Maupin has written two novels, Maybe The Moon and The Night Listener, which are not part of the Tales series. The Night Listener, a psychological thriller, still with Maupin's trademark autobiographical touches, was made into film in 2006, starring Robin Williams and Toni Collette.

His former partner of twelve years, Terry Anderson, was once a gay rights activist (Maupin himself has done much work in this area), and co-authored the screenplay for The Night Listener. He lived with Anderson in San Francisco and New Zealand. Ian McKellen is a close friend and Christopher Isherwood was a mentor, friend, and influence as a writer.

Maupin is now married to Christopher Turner, a website producer and photographer who he came across on an internet dating website and then 'chased him down Castro Street, saying, "Didn’t I see you on Daddyhunt.com?"' Armistead and Christopher were married in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, on February 18, 2007, though he says that they had called each other 'husband' for two years prior. He enjoys doing public readings of his own works and has recorded them all as audiobooks.

In May 2006 Tales of the City was named Britain favourite gay novel in a poll to find the Big Gay Read - part of the Queer Up North arts festival.

His next project is another Tales volume: 'Whatever I have to offer seems to come through those characters ... And I see no reason to abandon them.' Good news, indeed. Armistead Maupin - we love and salute you.

Alan Bennett

Alan Bennett born 9 May 1934

Alan Bennett is an English author and actor noted for his work, his boyish appearance and his sonorous Yorkshire accent.

Alan Bennett was born in Armley in Leeds, Yorkshire. The son of a butcher, Bennett attended Leeds Modern School (a former state grammar school), learned Russian at the Joint Services School for Linguists during his National Service, and gained a place at Cambridge University. However, having spent time in Cambridge during national service, and partly wishing to follow the object of his unrequited love, he decided to apply for a scholarship at Oxford University. He was accepted by Exeter College, Oxford University and went on to take a first-class degree in history. While at Oxford he performed comedy with a number of future successful actors in the Oxford Revue. He was to remain at Oxford for several years researching and teaching Medieval History before deciding he was not cut out to be an academic.

He claims that as an adolescent he assumed he would grow up to be a Church of England clergyman, for no better reason than that he looked like one.

In August 1960, Bennett, along with Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller, and Peter Cook, achieved instant fame by appearing at the Edinburgh Festival in the satirical revue Beyond the Fringe. After the Festival, the show continued in London and New York. He also appeared in My Father Knew Lloyd George. Bennett's first stage play, Forty Years On, was produced in 1968. Many television, stage and radio plays followed, along with screenplays, short stories, novellas, a large body of non-fictional prose and broadcasting, and many appearances as an actor.

Bennett's lugubrious yet expressive voice (which still bears a strong and distinctive Leeds accent) and the sharp humour and evident humanity of his writing have made his readings of his own work (especially his autobiographical writing) very popular. His readings of the Winnie the Pooh stories are also widely enjoyed.

Many of Bennett's characters are unfortunate and downtrodden, or meek and overlooked. Life has brought them to an impasse, or else passed them by altogether. In many cases they have met with disappointment in the realm of sex and intimate relationships, largely through tentativeness and a failure to connect with others.

Bennett is both unsparing and compassionate in laying bare his characters' frailties. This can be seen in his television plays for LWT in the late 1970s and the BBC in the early 1980s, and in the 1987 Talking Heads series of monologues for television which were later performed at the Comedy Theatre in London in 1992. This was a sextet of poignantly comic pieces, each of which depicted several stages in the character's decline from an initial state of denial or ignorance of their predicament, through a slow realisation of the hopelessness of their situation, and progressing to a bleak or ambiguous conclusion. A second set of six Talking Heads pieces followed a decade later.

In his 2005 prose collection Untold Stories Bennett has written candidly and movingly of the mental illness that afflicted his mother and other family members. Much of his work draws on his Leeds background and while he is celebrated for his acute observations of a particular type of northern speech ("It'll take more than Dairy Box to banish memories of Pearl Harbour"), the range and daring of his work is often undervalued – his television play The Old Crowd, for example, includes shots of the director and technical crew, while his stage play The Lady in the Van includes two characters named Alan Bennett. The Lady in the Van was based on his experiences with a tramp called Miss Shepherd who lived on Bennett's driveway in a dilapidated van for fifteen years.

In 1994 Bennett adapted his popular and much-praised 1991 play The Madness of George III for the cinema as The Madness of King George. The film received four Academy Award nominations, including nominations for Bennett's writing and the performances of Nigel Hawthorne and Helen Mirren. It won the award for best art direction.

Bennett's critically-acclaimed The History Boys won three Olivier Awards in February 2005, for Best New Play, Best Actor (Richard Griffiths), and Best Direction (Nicholas Hytner), having previously won Critics' Circle Theatre Awards and Evening Standard Awards for Best Actor and Best Play. Bennett himself received an Olivier Award for Outstanding Contribution to British Theatre.

The History Boys also went on to win six Tony Awards on Broadway, including best play, best performance by a leading actor in a play (Richard Griffiths), best performance by a featured actress in a play (Frances de la Tour), and best direction of a play (Nicholas Hytner).

A film version of The History Boys, with most of the original West End and Broadway cast was released in the UK in 2006.

Bennett refused an honorary doctorate from Oxford University in 1998, in protest of its accepting funding for a named chair in honour of press baron Rupert Murdoch. He also declined a CBE in 1988 and a knighthood in 1996. Despite refusing an honorary doctorate from his old university, Bennett was made an Honorary Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford in 1987. He was also awarded a D.Lit by the University of Leeds in 1990.

In September 2005, Bennett revealed that, in 1997, he had undergone treatment for cancer, and described the illness as a 'bore'. His chances of survival were given as being 'much less' than 50%. He began Untold Stories (published 2005) thinking it would be published posthumously. In the event his cancer went into remission. In the autobiographical sketches which form a large part of the book Bennett writes openly for the first time about his homosexuality (Bennett has had relationships with women as well, although this is only touched upon in Untold Stories). Previously Bennett had referred to questions about his sexuality as being like asking a man dying of thirst to choose between Perrier or Malvern mineral water.

Bennett has lived in London's Camden Town for thirty years, and shares his house with his partner of fifteen years, Rupert Thomas.

Tom of Finland

Tom of Finland born 8 May 1920 (d. 1991)

Tom of Finland (born Touko Laaksonen in Kaarina, Finland) was a fetish artist notable for his stylised homoerotic art and his influence on late twentieth century gay culture.

Over the course of four decades he produced some 3,500 illustrations, mostly featuring men with exaggerated primary and secondary sex traits: heavily muscled torsos, limbs, buttocks and improbably large penises. Tight or partially removed clothing showed off these traits, with penises often visible as distinct bulges in tight trousers or prominently displayed for the viewer. His drawings frequently feature two or more men either immediately preceding or during explicit sexual activity.

Touko Laaksonen made his first erotic drawings in his youth, but none of them are known to exist; Laaksonen said that he had at first kept his drawings hidden, but then destroyed them 'at least by the time I went to serve the army'. His drawings were based on images of masculine Finnish labourers he had seen from an early age. Finland, however, soon became embroiled in the Winter War with the USSR, and then formally involved in World War 2, and Laaksonen was conscripted into the Finnish Army. He served as an anti-aircraft officer, holding the rank of a second lieutenant. He later attributed his fetishistic interest in uniformed men to encounters with men in army uniform at this time. After the war, Laaksonen returned to civilian life and worked in the advertising industry as a commercial graphic artist, continuing to create erotic drawings for his own pleasure on the side.

In 1956, Laaksonen submitted some of his homoerotic drawings to the influential American magazine Physique Pictorial for publication under the pseudonym Tom. The editor of the magazine changed the name to Tom of Finland.

Laaksonen's work soon came to the attention of the gay community at large, and by 1973, he was both publishing erotic comic books and infiltrating the mainstream art world. He was best known for works that focused on homomasculine archetypes such as lumberjacks, motorcycle policemen, sailors, businessmen, bikers, and leathermen. His most prominent comic series are the Kake comics, which included these archetypal characters in abundance.

Exhibitions of Laaksonen's work began in the 1970s and in 1973 he gave up his full-time job at the Helsinki office of international advertising firm McCann-Erickson.

In 1979, Laaksonen founded the Tom of Finland Company to collect and distribute his work. This company exists to the present day, and has expanded into a non-profit foundation dedicated to collecting, preserving, and exhibiting homoerotic artwork.

Before his death, Laaksonen was the subject of the Finnish documentary Daddy and the Muscle Academy - The Art, Life, and Times of Tom of Finland which includes interviews with the artist. The European art publisher Taschen has published various collections of his work including three 'Retrospective' Anthologies and the complete Kake comics

Many of his drawings are based on photographs, but none are exact reproductions of them. The photographic inspiration is used, on the one hand, to create lifelike, almost moving images, with convincing and active postures and gestures whilst, on the other hand, Laaksonen exaggerates physical features and presents his ideal of masculine beauty and sexual allure, combining realism with fantasy.

Arguably Laaksonen's work revived and commercialised an underground leather counter-culture which emerged after World War 2 and reached its height in the late 1970s and early 1980s before the emergence of AIDS in the gay community.



The apparel, styling, and demeanour adopted by large numbers of gay men during that period appear to be derived directly from his work. Although the prevalence of this 'look' has declined since the mid-1980s - except in the leather and S&M scene - Laaksonen's work continues to be used extensively in gay publications, bars, clubs, and online communities who associate with its erotic subject matter. The combination of cap, leather jacket, and moustache became known in the pop culture of Western world as a visual stereotype of gay men.



Tom of Finland Foundation

Keith Haring

Keith Haring born 5 May 1958 (d. 1990)

Keith Haring was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, and studied graphic art in Pittsburg. After coming out, he moved to New York where he became influenced by graffiti art.

With his distinctive style, he quickly moved from the streets to international art galleries. His work is part of the iconography of the 1980s.

He was a tireless AIDS campaigner and, tragically, succumbed to the disease himself in 1990 at the age of 31.

Shortly before he died, he established the Keith Haring Foundation to maintain and enhance his legacy of supporting children's and AIDS organisations.

Mark Leduc

Mark Leduc born 4 May 1964 (d. 2009)

Mark Leduc was a former boxer from Toronto, Canada, who won a silver medal at the 1992 Barcelona Summer Olympics.

Mark Leduc was not a hero, at least not until 1992, when he won a silver medal for Canada at the Olympics in Barcelona. Before that singular accomplishment, he was only a tough kid. To his close friends, he was a hard man who happened to be gay. By the time he was 12 years old, Leduc was certain of only two things: his sexuality and his deep love of boxing. A friend invited him along to a gym in Toronto's east end, and it didn't take long before he was hooked. His parents separated when he was 15 and Leduc went to to live on the streets.

Leduc got into trouble for robbing a jewellery store at gunpoint. He had been told by an accomplice that it was an insurance scam: the owner wanted the place turned over and hired them to make it look real. Leduc grabbed the gold and gems, passed them over, pocketed a cash fee, and was picked up by the police a few weeks later. He was sentenced to over six years in prison.

After about 18 months inside, a guard took a shine to Leduc, and tried to secure him day passes so he could train in a real gym. The first application was rejected by the warden, but Leduc was ultimately awarded 72 hours a month in the outside world. He used his 'free' time sparingly: an hour to train here, a couple of hours to train there, a few more hours for a fight. He began to acquire a smart amateur record.

The 1984 Olympics came and went while Leduc languished in prison. He was released in time for the 1988 Summer Games trials, but failed to earn a spot on the team that was to go to South Korea. Leduc decided to stick with the sport for another four years. After winning both the national championship, and the gold medal at a preliminary international meet, Leduc was on his way to Barcelona, where he won silver.

Leduc turned pro in 1992 and had limited success. He retired in 1993.

Leduc came out as a gay man in 1994 in the TV documentary For the Love of the Game and attended Toronto’s Pride parade in 1999 as grand marshal (with Savoy Howe).

Leduc worked for and volunteered with the Toronto People with AIDS Foundation. His final occupation was that of set-builder and construction worker in the film industry.

Leduc died on July 22, 2009 in Toronto. He had collapsed in the sauna of a local hotel, and doctors suggested that his death may have resulted from heat stroke.

Lincoln Kirstein

Lincoln Kirstein born 4 May 1907 (d. 1996)

Lincoln Edward Kirstein was an American writer, impresario, art connoisseur, and cultural figure in New York City, famous less for his own artistic achievement than for his social influence.

Born in Rochester, New York, to a very wealthy Bostonian family, he was educated at Harvard, from which he graduated in 1930.

His interest in ballet and George Balanchine started when he had seen Apollo with the Ballet Russes. He became determined to get Balanchine to America. Together with Edward M. M. Warburg (a classmate from Harvard), they started the School of American Ballet in Hartford, Connecticut, in October 1933. The studio moved to the fourth floor of a building at Madison Avenue and 59th Street in New York City in 1934. Warburg's father invited the group of students from the evening class to perform at a private party. The ballet they did was Serenade, the first major ballet choreographed by Balanchine in America. Just months later Kirstein and Warburg founded, together with Balanchine and Dimitriev, The American Ballet.

During World War 2 Kirstein joined the Army and served in Europe. He worked with the division of Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives, helping to recover stolen artwork from the Nazis. He was honorably discharged in 1946.

The American Ballet would become the resident company of the Metropolitan Opera, but this proved unsatisfactory because the Opera would not allow Balanchine and Kirstein artistic freedom. In 1946, Balanchine and Kirstein founded the Ballet Society, renamed the New York City Ballet in 1948. Together they made this one of the most innovative dance companies in the world.

His eclectic interests, ambition and keen interest in high culture, funded by independent means drew a large circle of friends which would stimulate creativity in many of the arts. These included: Glenway Wescott, Monroe Wheeler, George Platt Lynes, Pavel Tchelitchev, Katherine Anne Porter, Gertrude Stein, Cecil Beaton, Jean Cocteau, Jared French, George Tooker and far too many more to name.

[Lincoln Kirstein pictured right with Igor Stravinsky]

He was married in 1940 to Fidelma Cadmus, some say because he was in love with her brother Paul Cadmus. While his wife and he enjoyed an amicable relationship, he continued to pursue affairs with other men. The New York art world, considered his pursuit of men an 'open secret', although he did not publicly acknowledge his sexual orientation until 1982.

He was the primary patron of Cadmus and purchased many of his paintings and subsidised his living expenses. Cadmus had difficulty selling his work through galleries because of the erotically charged depictions of working and middle class men, which provoked great controversy.

Kirstein commissioned and helped to fund the physical home of the New York City Ballet: the New York State Theater building at Lincoln Center, designed in 1964 by gay architect Philip Johnson. Despite its conservative modernist exterior, the glittery red and gold interior recalls the imaginative and lavish backdrops of the Ballets Russes. He would serve as the general director of the ballet company from 1948 to 1989.

Kirstein and Balachine's collaboration lasted until Balanchine's death in 1983 [Kirstein and Balanchine pictured left].

President Ronald Reagan on March 26, 1984, presented him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Kirstein was a great collector, and early in the history of the Dance Collection gave The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts a wealth of rare dance materials. Before his death in 1996, he donated all his papers, artworks, and other materials related to the history of dance and his life in the arts. These treasures in the Kirstein collection will be available to inform future generations pursuing the knowledge of dance.

He exerted his greatest influence in the 1940s.

April Icon - Sir John Gielgud 1904 - 2000

Merce Cunningham

Merce Cunningham born 16 April in 1919 (d. 2009)

Merce Cunningham was a ground-breaking 20th century American dancer and choreographer.

Merce Cunningham born in Centralia, Washington, received his first formal dance and theatre training at the Cornish School - Cornish College of the Arts - in Seattle, where he met his life-partner John Cage, who was a piano accompanist for dance classes.

From 1939 to 1945, he was a soloist in the company of Martha Graham. He presented his first New York solo concert with John Cage in April 1944. Merce Cunningham Dance Company was formed in 1953. Since then Cunningham choreographed around 200 works for his company. His work has been presented in many of the world's leading dance theatres including the New York City Ballet, the Ballet of the Paris Opéra, American Ballet Theatre, Boston Ballet, Zurich Ballet, London's Rambert Dance Company, and many others.

Along with their close friends, painters Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, Cunningham and Cage and other like-minded young gay artists defined an alternative creative art scene in 1950s New York that was an essential part of the development of what was to be known as post-modernism.

Cunningham's contribution to modern dance has several key elements. Cunningham applied the same use of chance to his choreography that Cage utilises in his music, so choices about sequences of movement would be determined randomly, making new relationships between movement, music and other applied arts and creating exciting new forms of narrative.

Cunningham also applied conventions of classical ballet to everyday activities, finding the structured yet fluid dance in running and walking for example. He also re-envisioned the use of dance space on stage, bringing the full dance area into play, wherever the dancer faces being 'front'. Rather than express sexuality through mixed or same-sex couples, combinations of dancers occur with the same use of 'chance', making gender and thus sexuality fluid and almost irrelevant.

Cunningham always embraced new technology in his work, with Cage, pioneering multimedia in dance and creating some of the first dance work to integrate music, movement, visual art and verse in equal balance. Since the 1990s Cunningham worked with a complex computer program called Life Forms, which provided a new way of creating choreography, and integrated the creation of images for projection during performance. He continued to experiment with music, choreographing to the music of Radiohead and Sigur Ros.

The inspirational personal and professional relationship between Merce Cunningham and John Cage lasted for 54 years, until Cage's death in 1992.

Merce Cunningham was one of the most significant and influential American choreographers of the 20th century, helping define modern dance and redefine elements of classical dance.

Although spent his last few years using a wheelchair, he continued his work until he died peacfully at home on 26 July 2009, aged 90.

George Platt Lynes

George Platt Lynes born 15 April 1907 (d. 1955)

George Platt Lynes was an American fashion and commercial photographer.

Born in East Orange, New Jersey his childhood was spent in New Jersey but he attended the Berkshire School in Massachusetts. He was sent to Paris in 1925 with the idea of better preparing him for college. His life was forever changed by the circle of friends that he would meet there. Gertrude Stein, Glenway Wescott and Monroe Wheeler - who became his lovers - and those that he met through them opened an entirely new world to the young artist.

He returned to the United States with the idea of a literary career and he even opened a bookstore in Englewood, New Jersey in 1927. He first became interested in photography not with the idea of a career, but to take photographs of his friends and displayed them in his bookstore.

Returning to France the next year in the company of Wescott and Wheeler, he travelled around Europe for the next several years, always with his camera at hand. He developed close friendships within a larger circle of artists including Jean Cocteau and Julien Levy the art dealer and critic. Levy would exhibit his photographs in his gallery in New York City in 1932 and Lynes would open his studio there that same year. He was soon receiving commissions from Harper's Bazaar, Town & Country and Vogue.

In 1935 he was asked to document the principal dancers and productions of Lincoln Kirstein's and George Balanchine's newly founded American Ballet company (now the New York City Ballet). This became a lifetime project.

While he continued to shoot fashion photographs, getting accounts with such major clients as Bergdorf Goodman and Saks Fifth Avenue during the 1930s and 1940s he was losing interest and had started a series of photographs which interpreted characters and stories from Greek mythology [Orpheus and Eros, 1936, left].

By the mid-1940s he grew disillusioned with New York; his relationship with Wescott and Wheeler had cooled and he left for Hollywood in 1946 where he took the post of Chief Photographer for the Vogue studios. He photographed Katharine Hepburn, Rosalind Russell, Gloria Swanson and Orson Welles, from the film industry as well as others in the arts among them Aldous Huxley, Igor Stravinsky and Thomas Mann. While a success artistically it was a financial failure.

His friends helped him to move back to New York City in 1948. Other photographers, such as Richard Avedon, Edgar de Evia and Irving Penn, had taken his place in the fashion world. This combined with his disinterest in commercial work, meant he was never able to regain the successes he once had.

Focus on homoerotic imagery started to take over his photographic life. He had begun in the 1930s taking nudes of his circle of friends and performers, including a young Yul Brynner, but these had been known only to intimates for years. He began working with Dr Alfred Kinsey and his Institute in Bloomington, Indiana. The Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction, as it is known today holds the largest collection of his male nudes. Twice he declared bankruptcy.

By May of 1955 he had been diagnosed terminally ill with lung cancer. He closed his studio. He destroyed much of his print and negative archives particularly his male nudes. After a final trip to Europe, Lynes returned to New York City where he died in December 1955. He was just 48.

Sir John Gielgud

Sir John Gielgud born 14 April 1904 (d. 2000)

Undoubtedly one of the greatest British actors of the 20th century, John Gielgud was born in London into a family with a theatrical tradition, and was acting by his teens. He joined the Old Vic theatre company in 1921, made his silent film debut in 1923 and soon after, became Noel Coward`s understudy and successor in a number of plays.

His career flourished and he began to work his way through the major Shakespearean roles at the Old Vic, starting with Romeo, and before he was thirty, Richard II, The Tempest, Macbeth, Hamlet and King Lear.

Gielgud also successfully moved into directing, launching his own distinguished company in 1937. He continued to work his way through the Shakespearean and more modern classics - School For Scandal, Three Sisters, The Importance of Being Earnest.

He was knighted in 1953, alledgedly through the intervention of his two already-knighted colleagues, Sir Laurence Oliver and Sir Ralph Richardson. The honour may have been 'overlooked' due to his widely acknowledged - if discreet - homosexuality. Ironically, a few months later, he was arrested for 'importuning' outside a public lavatory in Chelsea during one the Police's then regular purges. The press launched into a vitriloic campaign against him, but his public were more forgiving, and the publicity and the moral debate may have contributed to the slow move towards decriminalisation. Nonetheless, he found the experience deeply humiliating and became extremely reticent about his private life thereafter.

With the new writers and actors of the late 1950s and 1960s came a new, more naturalistic style of acting, and Gielgud, now slightly unfashionable in style, moved increasingly towards the film career that would make him a much loved and respected international star in later life. The pinnacle of his movie career was his best supporting actor Academy Award for his memorable appearance as the butler in Arthur (1982).

As he entered old age, he began to find it difficult to memorise lengthy dialogue and retired from the stage in 1988, but he continued to appear in films, notably Shine (1996) and his final appearance, in Elizabeth (1998).

In 1999, he was devastated by the death of his partner of nearly forty years, Martin Hensler. A few months later, in May 2000, Sir John Gielgud passed away quietly at home. He was 96 years old.

Michael Bennett

Michael Bennett born 8 April in 1943 (d. 1987)

Michael Bennett was a Tony Award-winning American musical theatre director, writer, choreographer, and dancer.

Born Michael Bennett DiFiglia to a Roman Catholic father and a Jewish mother in Buffalo, New York, he studied dance and choreography in his teens and staged a number of shows in his local high school before dropping out to accept the role of Baby John in the US and European tours of West Side Story.

Bennett's career as a Broadway dancer began in the 1961 Betty Comden-Adolph Green-Jule Styne musical Subways Are For Sleeping, after which he appeared in Meredith Willson's Here's Love and the short-lived Bajour. In the mid-1960s he was a featured dancer on the NBC pop music series Hullabaloo, where he met fellow dancer Donna McKechnie.

Bennett made his choreographic debut with A Joyful Noise (1966), which lasted only twelve performances, and in 1967 followed it with another failure, Henry, Sweet Henry (based on a Peter Sellers film). Success finally arrived in 1968 in the form of Promises, Promises, an adaptation of the film The Apartment, with a hip contemporary score by Burt Bacharach and Hal David. For the next few years, he earned praise for his work on Twigs with Sada Thompson, Coco with Katharine Hepburn, two Stephen Sondheim productions - Company and Follies (which he co-directed with Hal Prince) - and the Cy Coleman-Dorothy Fields' hit Seesaw, for which he was also the director and librettist.

The process of taking over the troubled Seesaw on the road, just six months before it was scheduled to open, convinced Bennett the usual way of developing musicals - rehearsals, out-of-town tryouts, previews, and opening - was no longer efficient and devised a better plan. He decided to do a show about the lives of 'gypsies' - chorus boys and girls - but rather than commission a script or write one of his own he let the story-line evolve through a series of group therapy-style workshops in which fellow dancers shared their feelings and frustrations about their careers. Hundreds of hours of audio tapes eventually led to the creation of his biggest and most personally-felt triumph, A Chorus Line, which opened in July 1975 at Joseph Papp's Public Theater in lower Manhattan. The reviews were ecstatic and the demand for tickets so huge it transferred uptown to the Shubert Theater, where it remained a sell-out hit for fifteen years. It won nine Tony Awards, the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award, and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

As its creator, choreographer, and director, Bennett devoted the next several years of his life to the show, auditioning, rehearsing, and directing productions throughout the world. Realising it was very much a theatrical piece intended to be played on a proscenium stage, he declined an offer to direct the screen version, although he agreed to join the project as a creative consultant, a position he left early on due to differences with the studio (Bennett believed the movie should be about the audition process for the filming of the stage play, rather than a movie version of the play itself). Director Richard Attenborough declined to use Bennett's original choreography, instead opting to hire Jeffrey Hornaday, and the end result was a disappointing critical and commercial failure.

Although A Chorus Line was very much an ensemble piece, the original cast's standout star was Bennett's old friend McKechnie. The two married in 1976, but separated three months later and eventually divorced, but remained close friends. The bisexual Bennett's relationships with men, including an early one with fellow dancer Larry Fuller, were more discreet, less-publicised, and tended to be lengthy.

A Chorus Line was a tough act to follow. Bennett's next musical was the unsuccessful Ballroom, but he found himself at the top again in 1981 with Dreamgirls, with a book and lyrics by Tom Eyen and music by Henry Krieger.

In the early 1980s, Bennett worked on various projects, but none of them reached the stage. His addictions to alcohol and drugs, notably cocaine and quaaludes, severely affected his ability to work and impacted on many of his professional and personal relationships. In 1985, he abandoned the nearly-completed musical Scandal, which he had been developing for nearly five years through a series of workshop productions, and signed to direct the West End production of Chess, but he had to withdraw in January 1986 due to his increasingly failing health, leaving Trevor Nunn to complete the production using Bennett's already commissioned sets. He moved to Tucson, Arizona, where he remained until his death from AIDS-related lymphoma at the age of forty-four. He left a sizable portion of his estate to funding research to fight the epidemic.

Fred Ebb

Fred Ebb born 8 April 1935* (d. 2004)

Fred Ebb was a musical theatre lyricist who had many successful collaborations with composer John Kander.

Born in Manhattan to a Jewish family, Ebb worked during the early 1950s bronzing baby shoes and as a trucker's assistant, and he also was employed in a department store credit office and at a hosiery company. In 1955, he graduated from New York University with a bachelor’s degree in English Literature, and two years later, he earned his Master’s from Columbia University. His first professional writing experience was with Phil Springer, together they wrote a number of successful songs.

On his first theatrical writing job he did songs with Norman Martin for the revue Put It in Writing. He also worked with composer Paul Klein in the late 1950s, contributing songs to the Broadway revue From A to Z. With Klein, Ebb wrote his first book musical, Morning Sun. Originally, Bob Fosse was attached as director. Fosse eventually withdrew from the project, and the show was unsuccessful.

Music publisher Tommy Valando introduced Ebb to Kander in 1962. After a few songs such as My Coloring Book, Kander and Ebb wrote a stage musical, Golden Gate, that was never produced. However, the quality of the score convinced producer Harold Prince to hire them for their first professional production, the George Abbott-directed musical Flora the Red Menace. Although it won star Liza Minnelli a Tony Award, the show closed quickly.

Their second collaboration, Cabaret, was considerably more successful, running for nearly three years. Directed by Prince and based on the John Van Druten play I Am a Camera (which, in turn, was based on the writing of Christopher Isherwood), the musical starred Jill Haworth as Sally Bowles, Lotte Lenya as Fraulein Schneider and Joel Grey as the emcee. It won eight of the 11 Tony Awards for which it was nominated, including Best Musical and Best Score. Adapted into a film by Bob Fosse, it won numerous Academy Awards, though not Best Picture. It was revived twice on Broadway, first in 1987 with Grey reprising his role and again in 1998 in a long-running revival, originally starring Alan Cumming as the emcee and Natasha Richardson as Sally Bowles, a production transfered from the West End, where it has since been revived again in 2006.

Their next few works were less successful: The Happy Time ran for less than a year. Zorba, directed by Prince, also ran less than a year, though it was more successful in its 1983 revival; and 70, Girls, 70, which was originally intended as an off-Broadway production, closed after 35 performances.

In 1972, he wrote the television special, Liza with a Z. In 1974, Kander, Ebb and Fosse, contributed to Liza (concert), a concert for Minnelli on Broadway. In 1975, the team wrote the score to Funny Lady, the sequel to Funny Girl.

Chicago (1975) had mixed reviews but ran for more than two years. Starring Chita Rivera, Jerry Orbach and Gwen Verdon in her last Broadway role, it suffered from a cynical attitude, which contrasted with the record-breaking popularity of A Chorus Line. Though rumours of a film production directed again by Fosse were heard, the show did not seriously resurface until 1996, when it was revived as part of the Encores! series. A huge hit, the minimalist production transferred to Broadway and is still running. Chicago has also been running in the West End for ten years. A film version was eventually produced (in 2002) and won Best Picture at the Academy Awards.

Ebb himself wrote the book for Shirley MacLaine’s Broadway solo revue in 1976. The following year, Kander and Ebb worked with Minnelli and Martin Scorsese twice: first, in the film New York, New York, which had them write what is perhaps their best-known song, the title track; and, again in The Act, a musical about a fictional nightclub act. It ran for under ten months. After contributing a song to Phyllis Newman’s one woman musical, the team wrote Woman of the Year, which starred Lauren Bacall and won the team their second Tony Award for Best Score.

The Rink (1984) teamed Kander and Ebb again with Minnelli and Rivera. Following the closure of the show after six months, Kander and Ebb would not produce new material, save for a song in Hay Fever in 1985, for nine years. In 1991, the revue And The World Goes 'Round opened off-Broadway, which brought Karen Ziemba, Susan Stroman and Scott Ellis to the attention of the theatre community. The team’s musical adaptation of Kiss of the Spider Woman opened in 1993, starring Chita Rivera. Reunited with director Harold Prince, the show ran for more than two years and won them their third and last Tony Award for best score.

The team’s last original work on Broadway opened in 1997. Steel Pier brought together Ziemba, Ellis and Stroman and though the show was nominated for 11 Tonys, it won none and closed after two months. It is perhaps most notable for its introduction of Kristin Chenoweth to the Broadway stage. In 1997, Ebb reworked lyrics to Richard Rodgers' melody for the television production of Cinderella. Two decades earlier, Ebb refused the opportunity to write the musical Rex with Rodgers.

Ebb died of a heart attack at his home in New York City on September 11, 2004.

At the time of his death, Ebb was working on a new musical with Kander, Curtains: A Backstage Murder Mystery Musical Comedy. The project had already lost its librettist, Peter Stone, who died in 2001. The show's orchestrator, Michael Gibson, also died while the project was underway. Coincidentally, the show is about a series of deaths during the production of a Broadway musical. Kander continued working on the project with a new librettist Rupert Holmes, writing new lyrics when necessary. The musical had its world premire in Los Angeles on July 2006, opening to positive reviews. The show transferred to Broadway in February 2007.

At its 2007 ceremony, the Drama Desk honored Kander & (the late) Ebb with a special award for '42 years of excellence in advancing the art of the musical theatre.'

Despite the 'polymorphous perverse' nature of their shows, both Kander and Ebb have long been reticent about discussing their homosexuality, preferring to let the songs speak for themselves but in 2003, Kander (who has lived for 26 years with one man, a choreographer and teacher) implicitly addressed rumours concerning the nature of his non-professional relations with Ebb by describing the latter to interviewer Jeffrey Tallmer as 'his 40-year partner in creativity but never in domesticity, much less romance.'

*Fred Ebb's actual birth year is a source of mystery and confusion but is somewhere between 1928 and 1936.