Donald Vining

Donald Vining born 20 June 1917 (d.1998)

Donald Vining was an American writer, publisher and diarist whose published diaries comprise a unique slice of gay American life in the 20th century.

Donald Vining was born in Benton, Pennsylvania. He attended West Chester University in Pennsylvania prior to attending the Yale School of Drama, where he was a playwrighting major. A number of his plays have been produced for the stage and for the WICC Radio Listeners' Theatre, broadcast on the Yankee Network. His plays were subsequently published in such volumes as Yale Radio Plays and Plays For Players.

In the 1950s he served as Drama Editor of What's Cookin' magazine and wrote numerous freelance articles and stories for other varied publications and periodicals. After a 30 year career at Teacher's College, Columbia University, he took early retirement to start his own publishing company, The Pepys Press. This publishing firm produced five volumes of his acclaimed A Gay Diary as well as a book of diaries from the Second World War, American Diaries of World War II, and other works.

Vining published essays on gay relationships — his own with his partner Richmond Purinton lasted more than 43 years — which appeared in varied American periodicals. He also wrote numerous scripts, plays, poems and stories throughout his lifetime. His first story published in book form was in Cross-Section 1945 with his Show Me The Way To Go Home. Vining's short story The Old Dog was later published in Story Magazine, soon after immortalised in the book Story: The Fiction of The Forties, and today continues to be used in schools across the USA.

He was selected for inclusion in the Who's Who in the East 25th Edition, published in 1994. He died in New York City on January 24, 1998 at the age of 80.

A Gay Diary is, unquestionably, the richest historical document of gay male life in the United States that I have ever encountered... It chronicles a whole life in which homosexuality is but one part and an ever-changing part at that. And, it illuminates a critical period in gay male American history.

Body Politic

Donald Vining Website