Charles Hawtrey

Charles Hawtrey born 30 November 1914 (d. 1988)

George Frederick Joffre Hartree, better known as Charles Hawtrey, was an English comedy actor. He took his stage name from a celebrated theatrical knight who died in 1923, Sir Charles Hawtrey. It has mistakenly been suggested, and encouraged by Hartree himself, that he was his son, but there is no foundation to this. His father was actually a London car mechanic.

Charles Hawtrey made an early start to a remarkable career that was to span a period of almost 60 years, and broke through in all the major entertainment media of the time. He began in the field of music as a renowned boy soprano, making several records before then moving onto the wireless where he performed in programmes for Children's Hour. Following study at the Italia Conti Academy of Theatre Arts in London, he embarked on a career in the theatre as both actor and director. Finally he moved from the cinema (where he regularly appeared in films supporting Will Hay in the 1930s and 40s) through the Carry On films for which he is of course best known and loved, to the television screen.

Relatively little is known about Charles Hawtrey's private life. He guarded his relationships very carefully - perhaps no surprise in an age where homosexuality was illegal and punishable by a prison sentence - but during his life he never hid (to put it mildly) his homosexuality, and was one of the first actors in British cinema to be identifiably 'gay' in the characters that he played.

His outrageous drunken promiscuity however, did not portray homosexuality in a positive light to an unsympathetic world, and nor did his general demeanour with those around him earn him many (if any) close friends. Nevertheless a few anecdotes told by his Carry On colleagues shed a little light on the character off the screen. Kenneth Williams records several encounters with Hawtrey in his 'Diaries' and 'Letters' (both published). He remembers a visit to Deal where Hawtrey's house was full of old brass bedsteads which the eccentric actor had hoarded, believing that one day he would make money from them. He would also wave with gusto at the sailors on the beach.

In her autobiography, Barbara Windsor writes openly about Hawtrey's alcohol problem. While filming Carry On Spying she thought he had fainted from fright at a dramatic scene on a conveyor belt. In fact he had passed out because he was drunk. When he came on set with a crate of R White's Lemonade, everyone knew that he had been on another heavy drinking binge.

Joan Sims could apparently communicate with him in a private language called 'Telegraphese'. He would smoke woodbines profusely and play cards between takes with Sid James and his gang. He was godfather to Richard O'Callaghan (son of Patricia Hayes) who appeared in Carry On Loving, and was also admired by Jim Dale as a type of mentor in comic timing. This was Hawtrey's absolute strength.

A lot of strain was put on him by his mother who suffered senile dementia in later years. One story has the old woman's handbag catching fire when her cigarette ash fell in. Hawtrey, without batting an eyelid, poured a cup of tea into it to put out the flames, snapped the purse shut and continued with his story. His mother would also collect toilet rolls and on another visit to the studios blocked the women's toilets with paper.

The falling-out between Hawtrey and the Carry On producer, Peter Rogers, came about partly through drink, but partly because he had hoped for higher billing. Pay for the films was bad and without either Sid James or Kenneth Williams starring in the 1971 Christmas special, Hawtrey believed it was his due to get top billing. However, the producers went with Hattie Jacques who they believed was better known on TV. Rogers tried to contact Hawtrey a day before filming began at the hotel where Hawtrey regularly dined, to ask him to reconsider; but Hawtrey declined. He never worked for Carry On again.

Hawtrey finally retired to Deal in Kent in the 1980s, where he continued to battle against alcoholism. He made the news in August 1984 when his house caught fire after he left a cigarette burning on the sofa. When rescued by firemen, a pathetic character, without the ill-fitting wig he generally wore, he tried to re-enter the house pleading that 'my fags are next to the bed, and my boyfriend's in it!' He had long suffered from arthritis, and by October 1988, following a fall in a public house, his doctors told him that the condition (compounded by smoking) had become so serious that his legs would have to be amputated. He refused, and died almost a month later, aged 73. On his deathbed, Hawtrey threw a vase at his nurse who dared to ask him for a final autograph - it was the last thing he did.

His ashes were scattered in the tranquillity of Mortlake Crematorium close to Chiswick in London.

Robert Odeman

Robert Odeman born 30 November 1904 (d. 1985)

Robert T Odeman, born Martin Hoyer in Hamburg, Germany was a German classical pianist, actor, writer, and composer. He was a Holocaust survivor.

Odeman [pictured right] met his first love, architecture student Martin Ulrich Eppendorf [pictured left], who went by the name Muli, at the age of 17. The two shared a close relationship for ten years until Muli's death.

After training to become a carpenter, Odeman studied classical piano, successfully performing throughout Europe for several years as a pianist. He played accompaniments for silent films in many cinemas in Hamburg. After suffering a hand injury, Odeman was forced to give up piano playing, and turned to theatre.

A year after Muli’s death, in 1933, Odeman became musical director of the New Theater in Hamburg. In 1935, Odeman opened a cabaret in Hamburg, which was shut down a year later by the Nazis, who claimed it was politically subversive.

Odeman's boyfriend, a bookseller, was pressured by the Gestapo to denounce him in 1937 and he was arrested under paragraph 175, which outlawed homosexual acts between men. Odeman was sentenced to 27 months in prison, which he spent first in Plötzensee and then in various Berlin prisons. After his release in 1940, Odeman was subject to a 'Berufsverbot' forbidding him from carrying on certain professions, and he was not permitted to appear in public. He also remained under police surveillance.

Odenbach purported to carry on a relationship with the singer Olga Rinnebach, but in 1942 he was again arrested under paragraph 175 and sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp where he was assigned an office job. During a forced march from the camp towards the Baltic Sea in April 1945, he escaped with other homosexual concentration camp prisoners.

After the war, Odeman focused on cultural activities, completing training as an actor and appearing in various theatres and productions. He also wrote many satirical poems, which were released in book form, and were later set to music and released on musical and spoken records, some with Odeman himself performing.

In 1959, Odeman met the 25-year-old Günter Nöring, with whom he lived until his death. Since the two were unable to marry, Odeman adopted his younger partner. After the adoption, Nöring used the name Günter Odeman-Nöring.

Odeman died in the Berlin-Grunewald district of Berlin in 1985, at the age of 81.

Billy Strayhorn

Billy Strayhorn born 29 November 1915 (d. 1967)

William Thomas 'Billy' Strayhorn was an American composer, pianist and arranger, best known for his successful collaboration with bandleader and composer Duke Ellington lasting two decades. The composition most closely associated with Strayhorn is Lush Life.

Billy Strayhorn was born in Dayton, Ohio. He began his musical career in Pittsburgh, where he studied for a time at the Pittsburgh Music Institute, wrote a high school musical and, while still in his teens, composed Lush Life, a work that had the world weariness of an older man. He met Duke Ellington backstage after an Ellington performance in Pittsburgh in 1938. Here he first told, and then showed, the band leader how he would have arranged one of Duke's own pieces. Ellington was impressed enough to invite other band members to hear Strayhorn. At the end of the visit he arranged for Strayhorn to meet him when the band returned to New York. Strayhorn worked for Ellington for the next quarter century until his early death from cancer.

Strayhorn's relationship with Ellington was always difficult to pin down: he was a gifted composer and arranger who seemed to flourish in Duke's shadow. Ellington may have taken advantage of him, but not in the mercenary way that others had taken advantage of Ellington; instead, he used Strayhorn to complete his thoughts, while giving Strayhorn the freedom to write on his own and enjoy at least some of the credit he deserved. Strayhorn, for his part, may have preferred to stay out of the limelight, since that also allowed him to be out of the closet in an era and a community that did not tolerate gay artists.

Strayhorn composed the band's theme, Take the A Train, and a number of other pieces that became part of the band’s repertoire such as Satin Doll. In some cases they were listed as Strayhorn compositions, while others were listed as collaborations with Ellington or were credited to Ellington alone. On the other hand, Ellington gave Strayhorn full credit as his collaborator on later, larger works where Strayhorn and Ellington worked closely together.

Strayhorn's arrangements had a tremendous impact on the Ellington band. Ellington always wrote for the personnel he had at the time, showcasing both the personalities and sound of soloists such as Johnny Hodges, Harry Carney, Ben Webster, Lawrence Brown and Jimmy Blanton, and drawing on the contrasts between players or sections to create a new sound for his band. Strayhorn brought a more linear, classically schooled ear to Ellington’s works, setting down in permanent form the sound and structures that Ellington sought.

Strayhorn’s own work, particularly his pieces written for Johnny Hodges on alto saxophone, often had a bitter-sweet, languorous flavour. He wrote his last pieces while dying from cancer; he delivered his last piece, Blue Cloud, to Ellington while in the hospital. Ellington included that piece, renamed Blood Count, on the album, ...And His Mother Called Him Bill, that he recorded several months after Strayhorn's death as a tribute to his friend and collaborator.

As an out gay black man in the first half of the twentieth century, Strayhorn was unusual indeed - especially considering that no other jazzmen were openly gay. But unconcerned about appearances, Strayhorn refused to don a façade of heterosexuality.

Most of his time was spent out of the spotlight, so his sexuality simply was not an issue in his career or in his relationship with Ellington. It may, however, explain why he seemed to avoid the spotlight and let Ellington receive credit for their collaborative work.

Upon learning that the collaborators' published works were all copyrighted by Ellington, who received the royalties, Strayhorn became understandably dismayed - though it was really the lack of independence in his own career, rather than the money, that bothered him.

While Strayhorn refused to pity himself or complain to friends and family, it was clear that he was often unhappy with his failure to receive credit for work that had helped make Ellington rich and famous.

His drinking, friends noticed, escalated considerably as the years passed. Consequently his health began to deteriorate, which affected his work and activities. Although Strayhorn, a civil rights advocate, attended the 1963 March on Washington with Martin Luther King, Jr., an acquaintance of his, he did not feel well enough actually to march.

The reason for his physical decline soon became clear. In early 1964, he was diagnosed with oesophageal cancer - a type of cancer usually stemming from use of alcohol and tobacco, both of which Strayhorn indulged in heavily.

The following year, Strayhorn played the only concert showcasing him without Ellington's presence, name, or influence. The concert at the New School in New York City completely sold out. It was, alas, one of Strayhorn's final accomplishments.

After a tracheotomy and the subsequent removal of his oesophagus, Strayhorn finally succumbed to the disease. He died prematurely on May 31, 1967, at the age of 53, leaving behind a legacy deserving of far more recognition than it garnered for decades to come.

Happily, he is now recognised as a major figure in American music, one who immensely enriched jazz music by investing it with complexly orchestrated form.

John Galliano

John Galliano born 28 November 1960

John Galliano was born in Gibraltar to Spanish parents. As a child, he moved to London. In 1984, he graduated in Fashion design from the St. Martin's School of Arts, with a collection inspired by the French Revolution called Les Incroyables and was bought in its entirety and sold in the London fashion boutique Browns. Following that, he started his own label under his own name and began his career as a fashion designer. He was awarded British Designer of the Year in 1987, 1994 and 1995. In 1997, he shared the award with Alexander McQueen, his successor at Givenchy.

In the 1990s, Galliano relocated to Paris in search of financial backing and a strong client base. In 1995, he was appointed as the designer of Givenchy by Bernard Arnault owner of luxury goods congolmerate LVMH becoming the first British designer to head a French couture house. Less than two years later, on 14 October 1996, LVMH moved Galliano to Christian Dior.

He has been quoted as identifying his love of theatre and feminity as central to his creations - 'my role is to seduce,' he has said. His couture collections are meticulously researched and often inspired by historical costumes and cultures. He is a popular choice for actresses looking to make a red carpet splash in something more unusal and Charlize Theron, Cate Blanchett and Nicole Kidman have all worn dresses created by him to the Oscars in the past.

Between his own label and Dior, Galliano produced several couture and ready-to-wear collections a year and a new mid-season range under his own name.

His incredible personal discipline and highly distinctive personal style also marks him out as a maverick genius.

In February 2011 Dior sacked Galliano following an alleged anti-Semitic racist outburst in a Parisian cafe just before Paris Fashion Week. Galliano strongly denied the allegations. Galliano subsequently reportedly left France for rehab in the States.

Ernst Röhm

Ernst Röhm born 28 November 1887 (d. 1934)

Ernst Julius Röhm was a German military officer, and the commander and co-founder of the Nazi Sturmabteilung, or storm troopers — the SA, also known as 'Brownshirts'.

Ernst Röhm was one of the most prominent of a number of early Nazi party members who was a homosexual, and his homosexuality was ultimately the pretext used for his removal during the purge of the SA. The real reason was the threat he eventually posed to Hitler's authority. Having been outed in 1925, Röhm made little attempt to hide his sexuality. Despite Hitler's pretense of shock upon discovering his deputy's sexual orientation, he had in fact long known - probably since 1919 - that Röhm was homosexual.

During Röhm's tenure at the head of the SA, it has been suggested that a number of homosexual men (notably Karl Ernst, a former bouncer at a gay nightclub, and Edmund Heines) were appointed to and promoted within the SA as a result of high-level liaisons with powerful SA figures. Röhm's Brownshirt militia - mostly undisciplined soldiers and roughnecks from the city-slums - contained many gay men, and there was debauchery in the ranks. This was despite the openly anti-gay policies of the Nazis, exemplified by their strengthening of Paragraph 175 (criminalising homosexual acts) of the German Criminal Code of 1871.

Röhm was executed without trial during the purge of the SA — the so-called 'Night of the Long Knives' in June 1934.

In the wake of Röhm's execution, Hitler ordered the registration of homosexuals and the Gestapo was charged with the responsibility of creating dossiers on homosexuals and other 'asocials' in the Third Reich. The beginning of the Nazi terror against homosexuals was marked by the murder of Ernst Röhm.

Ernst Röhm
The Gay Holocaust - Nazi Persecution: The Röhm Affair

On a personal note, I gave considerable thought as to whether I wanted to feature a leading Nazi in Gay For Today - this site has always been intended to mark and celebrate the contributions of gay men to (usually) the worlds of the arts, media, sport, politics and entertainment and so on - but a Nazi? And Hitler's deputy to boot. However, the story of Ernst Röhm's openness about his sexuality, his leading role in the early days of the Nazis - he very much believed in the 'socialist' part of National Socialism - and the way Hitler tolerated this powerful homosexual as long as he was useful to him and then ruthlessly snuffed him out and purged the SA and then Germany of homosexuals is interesting and significant.

In the end, yes, Ernst Röhm was a gay man and a Nazi but he ultimately became a victim of the Nazis and his death, as it says above, marked the real beginning of the still tragically under-told story of the Nazi terror against homosexuals - an intensely dark period in the long, dark history of gay persecution and oppression.

Edmund John

Edmund John born 27 November 1883 (d. 1917)

Edmund John was a British poet of the Uranian school whose verses were modelled on the Symbolist poetry of Swinburne and other earlier poets. Much of his work was condemned by critics for being overly decadent and unfashionable.

He fought in the First World War, but was invalided out in 1916. He died at Taormina, in Sicily, a year later.

John Amaechi

John Amaechi born 26 November 1970

John Ekwugha Amaechi is a retired English NBA basketball player who currently works as a broadcaster in the United Kingdom. In February 2007, Amaechi publicly announced that he is gay and became the first player associated with the NBA to come out.

The son of a Nigerian father, he was raised in Stockport, England by his English mother. Amaechi moved to the US to play high school basketball at St John's High School in Toledo, Ohio. He began playing college basketball at Vanderbilt but transferred to Penn State where he was a two-time First Team Academic All-American selection.

The 6' 10", centre was signed by the Cleveland Cavaliers in 1995. He played 28 games for the Cavaliers during the 1995-1996 season, then played for three years in Europe before signing with the Orlando Magic in 1999. With a solid 1999-2000 season he gained fame for scoring the NBA's first points of the new millennium in 2000. Before speaking publicly about being gay, Amaechi may have been best known for turning down a $17 million contract offer from the Los Angeles Lakers in 2000 to return to play for Orlando for $600,000 per year instead. Amaechi went on to play for the Utah Jazz from 2001 to 2003.

He was traded to the Houston Rockets midway through his final NBA season in exchange for Glen Rice, and though he was an active player, he did not participate in any games for them.

Amaechi came out of retirement to represent England during the Commonwealth Games in Melbourne, helping the England national basketball team win the bronze medal.

Amaechi owns Animus Consulting, which provides motivational speakers, and is a partner in Animus Development, an executive training program.

Amaechi is also involved with the ABC Foundation in Manchester, which encourages children to become involved in sports and their communities by building youth sports centres throughout the United Kingdom. The first such facility was built in Manchester, not far from Amaechi's childhood home of Stockport.

In February 2007, Amaechi spoke about his homosexuality on ESPN's Outside the Lines programme. He also released a book, Man in the Middle, which discusses his career and life as a closeted professional athlete. Amaechi is the first NBA player to speak publicly about being gay.

Very few male team sports members have come out. Among them are former NFL players Esera Tuaolo, Roy Simmons, and Dave Kopay, former NRL player Ian Roberts and former Major League Baseball players Glenn Burke and Billy Bean.

Months after coming out, Amaechi stated he had 'underestimated America', saying that the 'wrath of a nation' he expected never came about.

John Amaechi was awarded the OBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours 2011.

David B Feinberg

David B Feinberg born 25 November 1956 (d. 1994)

David Barish Feinberg was an American writer and AIDS activist.

Born in Lynn, Massachusetts, Feinberg grew up in Syracuse, New York. He attended MIT, majoring in mathematics and studying creative writing. He subsequently worked as a computer programmer for the Modern Language Association of America (MLA) and also pursued a Masters degree in linguistics at New York University. He completed his first novel, Calculus, in 1979, although it has never been published. Feinberg himself described the novel as 'godawful', telling one interviewer that it was a novel that 'only an MIT math major could have written'.

In the early 1980s, he joined a gay men's writing group, eventually creating the character B J Rosenthal, a young gay man, much like Feinberg himself, who became the central character in virtually all of Feinberg's later writing. He contributed a humour column to the gay magazine Mandate in 1986 and 1987, which in turn led to his first book deal. The novel Eighty-Sixed was published in 1989, and won Feinberg the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Men's Fiction and the American Library Association Gay/Lesbian Award for Fiction.

Feinberg tested positive for HIV in 1987, and joined the activist organization ACT UP. In 1991, he published his second book, the short story collection Spontaneous Combustion, a selection of both the Book of the Month Club and the Quality Paperback Book Club.

For the next few years, Feinberg balanced writing and political activism with working full-time. Stories, articles, and reviews by him appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Advocate, Details, Outweek, Tribe, Out, The Body Positive, Gay Community News, Art & Understanding, The James White Review, Diseased Pariah News, Poz, and both Men on Men 2: Best New Gay Fiction and Men on Men 4.

In July 1994, however, failing health led him to take disability leave. That autumn, he was admitted to St Vincent's Hospital, where he died early in November. Even while hospitalised, he continued to write. His final book, a collection of essays called Queer and Loathing: Rants and Raves of a Raging AIDS Clone, was published in 1994 shortly before his death.

B J Rosenthal, the main character of Feinberg's first two published books and a wise-mouthed, perpetually libidinous urbanite, was something of an alter-ego for his creator.

Queer and Loathing, by contrast, was 'as close to the truth as I can get', as Feinberg wrote in the book's introduction. The essays were his attempt 'to capture what is to me a painfully obvious reality that is rarely written about: what it is like to be HIV-positive in the 90s; what it is like to outlive one therapist, two dentists, two doctors, and one gastroenterologist.'

'It was so biting and so satirical, and it had a very New York edge,' said author Jameson Currier, who knew Feinberg as a fellow member of ACT UP. 'He was the first to write in that style about AIDS, and he created quite a bit of controversy. He broke a lot of ground in that respect.'

Virgil Thomson

Virgil Thomson born 25 November 1896 (d. 1989)

Virgil Thomson was an American composer from Kansas City, Missouri who was instrumental in the development of the 'American Sound' in classical music, so often associated with the patriotic compositions of Aaron Copland.

Thomson displayed an extraordinary intelligence at an early age. He attended Harvard University, and his tours of Europe with the Harvard Glee Club helped nurture his desire to return there. Upon his move there, he eventually studied with Nadia Boulanger and became a fixture of 'Paris in the twenties'. His most important friend from this period was Gertrude Stein, who was an artistic collaborator and mentor to him.

Following the publication of his book The State of Music he established himself in New York City, as a peer of Aaron Copland and was also a music critic for the New York Herald-Tribune from 1940 through 1954. His writings on music, and his reviews of performances in particular, are noted for their wit and their independent judgements. His definition of music was famously 'that which musicians do', and his views on music are radical in their insistence on reducing the rarefied aesthetics of music to market activity. He even went so far as to claim that the style a piece was written in could be most effectively understood as a consequence of its income source.

In the 1930s, he worked as a theatre and film composer. His most famous works for theatre are two operas with libretti by Gertrude Stein, Four Saints in Three Acts, especially famous for its use of an all-black cast, and The Mother of Us All, as well as incidental music for Orson Welles' depression-era production of Macbeth set in the Caribbean. He collaborated closely with 'Chick' Austin of Hartford's Wadsworth Atheneum in these early productions. His first film commission was The Plow That Broke the Plains, sponsored by the United States Resettlement Administration, which also sponsored the film The River with music also by Thomson. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1949 with his film score for Louisiana Story.

Additionally, Thomson was famous for his revival of the truly rare technique of composing 'musical portraits' of living subjects, often spending hours in a room with them before rushing off to finish the piece on his own. Many subjects report feeling that the pieces did capture something unique about their identities in spite of the fact that nearly all of the portraits were absent of any clearly representational content.

Later in life, Thomson became a sort of mentor and father figure to a new generation of American tonal composers such as Ned Rorem, Paul Bowles and Leonard Bernstein, a circle united as much by their shared homosexuality as by their similar compositional sensibilities.

Virgil Thomson Foundation

Bruno Tonioli

Bruno Tonioli born 25 November 1955

Bruno Tonioli is an Italian-born British dancer and professional choreographer.

He was born and raised in Ferrara in North-East Italy. He is best known as a judge on both the British television series Strictly Come Dancing and its American adaptation, Dancing with the Stars. He is well known for a cry of 'TEN!!!!!!!!' followed by a punch of his left arm up and out when he gives a couple an aforementioned 10/10 for their dance. In 2007, he went up against fellow Strictly judge Arlene Phillips to compete in BBC's DanceX show.

As a toddler Bruno would dance in front of the radio to entertain people. In the late seventies and early eighties he was a leading dance teacher at London's acclaimed Dance Centre, with a huge following. He also choreographed and centre staged in Elton John's I'm Still Standing video. In 1980, he participated in A Song for Europe, the UK heat of the Eurovision Song Contest choreographing Duke & the Aces. The song, Love is Alive, finished seventh.

He has worked on such films as Ella Enchanted, What a Girl Wants, Enigma and Blow Dry. His long list of music video credits includes Sheena Easton, Elton John, Sting, Michael Jackson, Tina Turner, The Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney and many more. Among his numerous concert credits are Tina Turner's Foreign Affairs and Duran Duran's World Tour. He also works in theatre and television.

He is fluent in English, Spanish, French, German, and Italian.

He is openly gay and has been with his partner Paul for over twenty years.

Candy Darling

Candy Darling born 24 November 1944* (d. 1974)

Candy Darling was a pre-op transsexual Warhol superstar who starred in Andy Warhol's films Flesh (1968) and Women in Revolt (1971).

Candy Darling was born James Lawrence Slattery in Forest Hills, New York, son of a bookkeeper at Manhattan's Jockey Club and a father who was described as a violent alcoholic. There is some conjecture around Candy's year of birth. According to former Warhol associate, Bob Colacello, Candy was born in 1946, while IMDb has listed her year of birth as 1948. Her friend, roommate, and posthumous editor, Jeremiah Newton, states that she was born in 1944.

Early years - as a male - were spent in Massapequa Park, Long Island, New York where he and his mother had moved after his parents divorced. His half-brother Warren, from his mother's first marriage, left home for the US military, leaving Jimmy as the only child; Warren later denied his connection to Candy/Jimmy.

Jimmy spent much of his childhood absorbing the influences of US television and old Hollywood movies, from which he learned to impersonate his favourite actors and actresses - his favorite being Joan Bennett and Kim Novak. He claimed to have 'learned about the mysteries of sex from a salesman in a local children's shoe store' and finally revealed an inclination towards cross-dressing when his mother confronted him about local rumours which described him dressed as a girl frequenting a local gay bar called The Hayloft. In response Jimmy left the room and reappeared in full drag. His mother later said that, 'I knew then... that I couldn't stop Jimmy. Candy was just too beautiful and talented.'

Late at night Candy would often take a cab (thereby avoiding the attention of neighbours she would receive if she walked) a short distance to the Long Island Rail Road station for the train to Manhattan. Once there, she referred to her modest home in Massepequa Park as her 'country house' and hung out in Greenwich Village, meeting people through the circle of Seymour Levy on Bleecker Street.

Her first assumed name was Hope Slattery. Candy adopted this name sometime in 1963/1964 after she started going to gay bars in Manhattan and making visits to a doctor on Fifth Avenue for hormone injections. Jackie Curtis claimed that Candy adopted the name from a well-known Off-Off Broadway actress named Hope Stansbury, with whom she lived with for a few months in an apartment behind the Caffe Cino so he could study her. Holly Woodlawn remembers that Candy's name evolved from Hope Dahl to Candy Dahl and then to Candy Cane. In her autobiography, Woodlawn recalled that Candy had adopted the last name of Darling because a friend of hers affectionately called 'Candy, darling' so often that it finally stuck.

Before they actually met in 1967, Candy saw Andy Warhol at the after-hours club called The Tenth of Always. Candy was with Jackie Curtis, who invited Warhol to the play she had written and directed called Glamour, Glory and Gold.

It wasn't long before Warhol invited Candy to appear in one of his movies. She was given a short comedic scene in Flesh (1968) with Jackie Curtis and Joe Dallesandro. After Flesh, Candy was cast in a central role in Women In Revolt (1971). She played a Long Island socialite drawn into a woman's liberation group called PIGS (Politically Involved Girls) by a character played by Jackie Curtis.

Women in Revolt was first shown at the first Los Angeles Filmex as Sex. Later it was shown as Andy Warhol's Women, an homage to George Cukor. Unable to get a distributor for the film, Warhol rented out a small cinema in New York and launched the film with a celebrity preview on February 16, 1972. After the screening there was a dinner in Candy's honor at the restaurant, Le Parc Perigord on Park Avenue at 63rd Street, followed by a party at Francesco Scavullo's townhouse round the corner, where they watched disastrous TV reviews of the movie.

Candy Darling went on to appear in other independent films. She also appeared in Klute (as an extra in the disco scene) with Jane Fonda and Lady Liberty with Sophia Loren. Her attempt at cracking the mainstream movie circuit - by campaigning for the leading role in Myra Breckinridge (1970) - led to rejection and bitterness.

Theatre credits include two Jackie Curtis plays - Glamour, Glory and Gold (1967) and Vain Victory: The Vicissitudes of the Damned (1971) and Tennessee Williams' play, Small Craft Warnings, at the invitation of Williams himself. She also starred in the 1973 Off-Broadway revival of The White Whore and the Bit Player, a 1964 play by Tom Eyen. Darling's character, a Hollywood actress known only as 'the Whore', was based on Marilyn Monroe [pictured].

Candy succumbed to leukemia and pneumonia on 21 March 1974, aged about 29. She allegedly developed leukemia as a result of the hormones she had been taking, the long-term results of which had not been sufficiently studied. In a letter written on her deathbed and intended for Andy Warhol and his followers, Darling said, 'Unfortunately before my death I had no desire left for life ... I am just so bored by everything. You might say bored to death. (D)id you know I couldn't last. I always knew it. I wish I could meet you all again.'

Her funeral was attended by huge crowds; Gloria Swanson was remembered for saluting Darling's coffin. The New York Times honoured her request that her obituary should appear on the front page of that newspaper.


She is the subject of The Velvet Underground's song Candy Says and was one of several Warhol associates mentioned in Lou Reed's Walk on the Wild Side.

Peter Hujar's photo, 'Candy Darling on her Deathbed' was used by Antony and the Johnsons for the cover of their 2005 Mercury Music Prize winning album I Am a Bird Now. [pictured above]

An image of her, taken from Women In Revolt, was also featured on the front cover of the 1989 single Sheila Take a Bow by The Smiths. This was in keeping with lead singer Morrissey's penchant for using photographs of sometimes obscure cultural icons on the band's record sleeves.

Arthur Tress

Arthur Tress born 24 November 1940

Arthur Tress is a notable American photographer. He is well known for his staged surrealism and exposition of the human body.

A New Yorker, Tress began his photographic career at age twelve, making snapshots of dilapidated mansions and Coney Island decay. An introverted child of divorce, Tress moved between two worlds - his lower-class mother's neighbourhoods and his nouveau riche, remarried father's more prosperous one, observing and eventually photographing both milieus.

As he recalls, from a very young age he was already aware that his sexuality was different from most of his classmates and he was drawn to subject matter that was similarly marginalised and different.

During his studies at Bard College, Tress explored painting and filmmaking but was ultimately committed to still photography. Although he worked in a documentary style, from the beginning his imagery was characterised by a surrealist sensibility.

After graduation Tress traveled the world, in part financed by his father and also supporting himself by making ethnographic and documentary images. During his travels he became increasingly influenced by his experience of other cultures, particularly in matters of spirituality and consciousness.

Tress's first book, The Dream Collector (1972), was an attempt to visualise children's dreams, often featuring children whom Tress had interviewed as models. His second book, Shadow: A Novel in Photographs (1975), showed 'portraits' of the photographer's shadow and explored the idea that the shadow literally and metaphorically represented one's dark side.

Theater of the Mind (1976), which included an essay by his friend and mentor, gay photographer Duane Michals, explored adult fantasies and marked the introduction in Tress's work of overtly erotic imagery.

Tress's most famous image, Stephan Brecht, Bride and Groom (1970) [right], of the actor in character for his role in The Grand Tarot, is an eloquent, enigmatic exploration of gender and identity that neither denies nor embraces either.

Around 1972 Tress consciously began to include what he called 'the more intimate spheres of a gay sexuality and homoerotic fantasy life'. Facing Up (1977-1980), alternately titled Phallic Phantasy, was Tress's first explicitly conscious exploration of his sexuality in which he exclusively photographed male nudes.

Many of these images were included in Tress's homoerotic homage, Male of the Species: Four Decades of Photography of Arthur Tress (1999), which culls imagery from Tress's forty-year career of exploring the male body and sexuality. The sensual photographs, sequenced in a loose narrative of experience from youth to death, matter-of-factly infuse male sexuality with humour and irony.

In contrast, Tress's obsessive constructions made and photographed for the Hospital series (1984-1987) are a garish, nightmarish reckoning with health-related issues and death in the era of AIDS.

Tress is an internationally renowned photographer with work in almost every major museum in the world. These include the Whitney, MOMA, Centre Georges Pompidou, Stedelijk Museum, and the International Museum of Photography.

Arthur Tress

Romain de Tirtoff (Erté)

Romain de Tirtoff (Erté) born 23 November 1892 (d.1990)

Romain de Tirtoff (pseudonym Erté, a French pronunciation of initials RT) was a French artist and designer.

Tirtoff was born as Roman Petrovich Tyrtov in St Petersburg, Russian Empire to a very distinguished family. His father Pyotr Ivanovich Tyrtov was a Fleet Admiral.

Erté discovered a love of costuming through the ballet. By his teens, he was sketching his own designs and at age 20 ventured to Paris to pursue a career as a designer. This decision was made over strong objections of his father, who wanted Romain to continue a family tradition and to become a marine officer. Romain assumed the pseudonym to avoid disgracing the family. He first drew attention for his costumes for Mata Hari and in 1915 he got his first significant contract with Harper's Bazaar magazine.

Between the two world wars, Erté designed spectacular scenery and costumes for the ballet, opera, theatre, and music-hall. His work on the Ziegfeld Follies, the Folies-Bergère, and shows at the Casino de Paris and the London Palladium is considered some of his best. But Erté's imagination stretched far beyond clothing. He designed everything from fabric, linens, and furniture to handbags, watches, and perfume bottles.

Erté is perhaps most famous for his elegant fashion designs which capture the art deco period in which he worked. His delicate figures and sophisticated, glamorous designs are instantly recognisable, and his ideas and art influence fashion into the 21st century.

Although Erté continued to work extensively throughout the 1950s and 1960s, it was not until the Art Deco revival of the 1970s and 1980s that his work again became fashionable, particularly in the United States. Many of his lithographs became popular posters.

By far his best known image is Symphony in Black [pictured], depicting a tall, slender woman draped in black holding a thin black dog. This influential image has been reproduced and copied countless times.

In 1975, he published a memoir, Things I Remember: An Autobiography. While discreet, the book is frank about the number and nature of his romantic liaisons, including descriptions of the homosexual demi-monde of 1920s Paris.

Vigorous and working until the end, Erté died on April 21, 1990 at the age of 97. His unique vision and genuine talent have made him a lasting fashion icon.

Benjamin Britten

Benjamin Britten born 22 November 1913 (d. 1976)

Lord Edward Benjamin Britten, Baron Britten, was a British composer, conductor, and pianist.

Britten was born in Lowestoft in Suffolk, the son of a dentist and a talented amateur musician. He began composing prolifically as a child, and was educated at Gresham's School. In 1927, he began private lessons with Frank Bridge. He also studied, less happily, at the Royal College of Music under John Ireland and with some input from Ralph Vaughan Williams. Although ultimately held back by his parents (at the suggestion of College staff), Britten had also intended to study with Alban Berg in Vienna. His first compositions to attract wide attention were the Sinfonietta (Op.1) and a set of choral variations A Boy was Born, written in 1934 for the BBC Singers.

The following year he met W H Auden with whom he collaborated on the song-cycle Our Hunting Fathers, radical both in politics and musical treatment, and other works. Of more lasting importance was his meeting in 1936 with the tenor Peter Pears, who was to become his musical collaborator and inspiration as well as the partner with whom he was to spend the rest of his life.

In early 1939, the two of them followed Auden to America. There Britten composed Paul Bunyan, his first opera (to a libretto by Auden), as well as the first of many song cycles for Pears; the period was otherwise remarkable for a number of orchestral works, including Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge (for string orchestra), the Violin Concerto, and Sinfonia da Requiem (for full orchestra).

Britten and Pears returned to England in 1942, Britten completing the choral works Hymn to Saint Cecilia (his last collaboration with Auden) and A Ceremony of Carols during the long sea voyage. He had already begun work on his opera Peter Grimes, and its premiere at Sadler's Wells in 1945 was his greatest success so far. However, Britten was encountering opposition from sectors of the English musical establishment and gradually withdrew from the London scene, founding the English Opera Group in 1947 and the Aldeburgh Festival the following year, partly (though not solely) to showcase his own works.

Grimes marked the start of a series of English operas, of which Billy Budd (1951) and The Turn of the Screw (1954) were particularly admired. These operas share common themes, with that of the 'outsider' particularly prevalent. Most feature such a character, excluded or misunderstood by society; often this is the protagonist, such as Peter Grimes and Owen Wingrave in their eponymous operas.

The greatest success of Britten's career was his War Requiem, written for the opening of the rebuilt Coventry Cathedral in 1962.

In the last decade or so of his life, Britten suffered from increasing ill-health and his late works became progressively more sparse in texture. They include the opera Death in Venice (1973), the Suite on English Folk Tunes 'A Time There Was' and Third String Quartet (1975), which drew on material from Death in Venice, as well as the dramatic cantata Phaedra (1976), written for Janet Baker.

Having previously refused a knighthood, Britten accepted a life peerage on 2 July 1976 as Baron Britten, of Aldeburgh in the County of Suffolk. A few months later he died of heart failure at his house in Aldeburgh. He is buried in the churchyard there.

Stephen Hough

Stephen Hough born 22 November 1961

Stephen Hough is a British-born classical pianist and composer. He became an Australian citizen in 2005.

Hough was born in Heswall (then in Cheshire) on the Wirral Peninsula, and grew up in Hoylake, where he began piano lessons at the age of five. In 1978, he was a finalist in the BBC Young Musician of the Year Competition. In 1982, he won the Terence Judd Award in England. In 1983, he took first prize at the Naumburg International Piano Competition in New York.

Hough performs as a recitalist and chamber musician, and has appeared as a soloist with major orchestras around the world including the Chicago Symphony, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Toronto Symphony, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the London Symphony, the New York Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony, the Hong Kong Philharmonic, the English Chamber Orchestra, the Malaysian Philharmonic, the City of Birmingham Symphony, the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra and the Singapore Symphony Orchestra.

One of his most notable CDs is a set of the four Rachmaninov Piano Concertos and Paganini Rhapsody recorded during live performances with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, which have been compared to the recordings by the composer himself. These recordings won him his seventh Gramophone Award as well as the Classical BRIT Critics Award.

Hough holds a Master's degree from the Juilliard School and was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship in 2001. He is also a notable composer and transcriber, and often includes his own works in his recitals. The premiere of his cello concerto, written for Steven Isserlis took place in March 2007, and Westminster Abbey and Westminster Cathedral performed Masses he has written for them in the summer of 2007.

He is visiting professor of piano at the Royal Academy of Music in London and the International Chair of Piano Studies at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester.

He joined the Roman Catholic Church when he was 19. He has written about his homosexuality and its relationship with both his music-making and his religion.

Harold Nicolson

Harold Nicolson born 21 November 1886 (d. 1968)

Sir Harold Nicolson was a British diplomat, author and politician. He was born in Tehran, the son of a diplomat father. He was educated at Wellington College and Balliol College, Oxford. In 1909 he joined the diplomatic service, in which he held various posts, participating in a junior capacity in the Paris Peace Conference in 1919.

In 1913, he married the writer Vita Sackville-West, who encouraged his literary ambitions. In 1921, he published a biography of French poet Paul Verlaine, to be followed by studies of other literary figures. In 1933, he wrote an account of the Paris conference entitled Peacemaking, 1919.

Both Nicolson and his wife practised what today we would call an open marriage. They each had a number of same-sex affairs, and once Harold had to follow Vita to France, where she had 'eloped' with Violet Trefusis, to try to win her back. However, they remained happy together – in fact, they were famously devoted to each other, writing almost every day when they were separated, for example, because of long diplomatic postings abroad. Eventually, he gave up diplomacy, partly so they could live together in England. They had two sons, Nigel, also a politician and writer, and Ben, an art historian.

In the 1930s, he and his wife acquired and moved to Sissinghurst Castle, where they created the gardens that are now famous and run by the National Trust.

In 1931, Harold Nicolson joined Sir Oswald Mosley and his recently formed New Party. He stood unsuccessfully for Parliament in the 1931 General Election and edited the party newspaper. Nicolson ceased to support Mosley when Mosley formed the British Union of Fascists in 1932. Nicolson entered the House of Commons as National Labour Party Member of Parliament for Leicester West in the 1935 general election. In the latter half of the 1930s he was among a relatively small number of MPs who alerted the country to the threat of fascism. A friend (though not an intimate) of Winston Churchill, he often supported his efforts in the Commons to stiffen British resolve and support rearmament. He served briefly as a Parliamentary Private Secretary in Churchill's 1940 war time government of national unity; thereafter he was a well-respected backbencher, especially on foreign policy issues given his early and prominent diplomatic career. He lost his seat in the 1945 election. Having joined the Labour Party, he stood in the Croydon North by-election in 1948, but lost once again. He was knighted in 1953, as a reward for writing the official biography of George V.

After his last attempt to enter parliament, he continued with an extensive social schedule and his writing, which included books, a regular weekly piece for The Spectator and book reviews.

Oliver Sipple

Oliver Sipple born 20 November 1941 (d. 1989)

Oliver 'Billy' Sipple was a decorated Marine and Vietnam War veteran widely known in the US for saving the life of President Gerald Ford during an assassination attempt in San Francisco on 22 September 1975.

Sipple was born in Detroit, Michigan. He served in the United States Marines and saw action in Vietnam. Shrapnel wounds suffered in December 1968 caused him to finish out his tour of duty in a Philadelphia veterans hospital, from which he was released in March 1970. He later spent six months in San Francisco's VA hospital, and was frequently being readmitted into the hospital in 1975, the year he saved Ford's life.

Listed as being totally disabled on psychological grounds, he was unable to hold a job and was receiving disability pay. He lived, with a merchant seaman room-mate, in a fourth-floor walk-up apartment located in San Francisco's Mission District. Sipple was active in local causes, including the historic political campaigns of openly gay City Council candidate Harvey Milk.

Sipple was part of a crowd of about three thousand people who had gathered outside San Francisco's Saint Francis Hotel to see President Ford on 22 September 1975.

Ford, just emerging from the building, was vulnerable despite heavy security protection. Sipple noticed a woman next to him had pulled and levelled a .38-calibre pistol as Ford headed to his limousine. Reacting instinctively, Sipple lunged at the woman, Sara Jane Moore, just as her finger squeezed the trigger. While the gun did go off, the impact was enough to deflect her aim and cause the bullet to veer five feet wide of its mark. Had it not been for Sipple's action, the bullet could have struck the president.

The police and the Secret Service immediately commended Sipple for his action at the scene, while Ford thanked him in a letter. The news media portrayed Sipple as a hero but would eventually report on his outing by San-Francisco gay activists, thus disclosing his private life.

Though he was known to be a homosexual by various fellow members of the gay community, Sipple had not publicly 'come out of the closet'. His sexual identity was something he had always kept a secret from his family. He asked the press reporters to keep his homosexuality off the record, making it clear that neither his mother nor his employer had knowledge of his sexual orientation.

Despite his wishes, gay activist and politician Harvey Milk publicly proclaimed Sipple a 'gay hero' and said his act 'will help break the stereotype of homosexuals'. Gay liberation groups petitioned local media to give Sipple his due as a gay hero. Then columnist Herb Caen published the private side of the former Marine's story in the San Francisco Chronicle. Six other papers ran the column as well. After discovering her son's secret, Sipple's mother reacted to the knowledge of her son's sexual orientation by cutting off contact with him. Sipple's mother was reportedly harassed by her neighbours. When her son called to talk to her, she hung up on him. According to a 2006 Washington Post article, Sipple went through a period of estrangement with his parents, but the family later reconciled with his sexual orientation.

Sipple's mental and physical health sharply declined over the years. He drank heavily, gained weight, was fitted with a pacemaker, became paranoid and suicidal. On 2 February 1989, he was found dead in his bed, at the age of forty-seven. Earlier that day, Sipple had visited a friend and said he had been turned away by the Veterans' Administration hospital where he went concerning his difficulty in breathing.

His $334 per month apartment near the Tenderloin District of San Francisco was found with many newspaper clippings of his actions on the fateful September afternoon in 1975. His most prized possession was the framed letter from the White House.

Sipple's funeral was attended by 30 people, and he was buried in Golden Gate National Cemetery south of San Francisco.

A letter addressed to the friends of Oliver Sipple was on display for a short period after his death at one of his favourite bars.

'Mrs. Ford and I express our deepest sympathy in this time of sorrow involving your friend's passing...' President Gerald Ford, February, 1989.

Sipple's outing by the Chronicle remains a controversial subject in journalism ethics, raising questions about the appropriateness of reporting on his personal life.

Sipple filed a $15 million invasion of privacy suit against Caen, seven named newspapers, and a number of unnamed publishers, for publishing the disclosures. The Superior Court in San Francisco dismissed the suit, and Sipple continued his legal battle until May 1984, when a state court of appeals upheld the original dismissal.

Calvin Klein

Calvin Klein born 19 November 1942

American designer Calvin Klein has created an extraordinarily successful fashion empire through the simple and elegant design of his clothes and through his skilful employment of provocative advertising campaigns that are saturated with homoeroticism.

Born in the Bronx, New York, the son of a Jewish grocer, Klein taught himself to sketch and sew as a boy. His mother was an elegant and sophisticated woman who played an important role in shaping her son's fashion sense by taking him on trips to her dressmakers. His grandmother had the greatest influence on his budding career by teaching him to use a sewing machine.

Klein attended New York's Fashion Institute of Technology. After graduating in 1962, he worked for a Seventh Avenue coat and suit house. In 1968, with his childhood friend Barry Schwartz, he opened his own business, designing and selling women's coats.

Klein's emphasis in designing clothes has always been on modernity and simplicity, creating wearable outfits for both men and women.

In 1964, Klein married Jayne Centre, with whom he had a daughter, Marci. Klein and Centre were divorced in 1974.

During the late 1970s and early 1980s, Klein was a familiar face on the New York club scene. He was regularly seen at celebrity night spots, such as the now legendary Studio 54, accompanied by a loosely knit circle of friends, who included designers Halston and Giorgio di Sant'Angelo, artist Andy Warhol and his acolytes, and Bianca Jagger, among others.

Rumours of drug consumption and sexual excesses abounded, as did rumours that Klein had contracted AIDS. In fact, an Italian radio station announced his death from the disease. In May 1988, Klein revealed his drug addiction and checked into a drug rehabilitation clinic.

Rumours have circulated widely about Klein's sexuality. In their 1994 unauthorised biography, Obsession, Steven Gaines and Sharon Churcher alleged that he is bisexual. They said that he has a preference for 'straight boys' and that he is a member of a so-called 'Velvet Mafia' of millionaires who swap lovers.

In 1986, Klein wed a thirty-two-year-old worker from his design studio, Kelly Rector. The fact that the couple continued to live in separate apartments only added fuel to the rumours.

Klein developed his fashion empire by branching out from women's coats to sportswear, then developing a line of designer jeans, and launching successful fragrances in the 1970s and 1980s.

In 1982 Klein altered the way men viewed and bought underwear with the introduction of Calvin Klein underwear. This may be his biggest contribution to gay culture. To announce the launch of his men's white briefs, he erected an enormous billboard in New York's Times Square, featuring an overtly sexual image of a perfectly formed muscular man wearing nothing but white underwear.

Klein's billboard has been credited with heralding a new era in imagery of men in advertising and in precipitating a new fashion in men's underwear. This campaign ran just a few years before the revolution in men's magazine advertising that sexualised the male form as a hairless muscular object of desire.

The homoerotic appeal was enhanced by the use of photographs by Bruce Weber and Herb Ritts. By the beginning of the 1990s, Calvin Klein white cotton briefs were the most popular item of underwear for gay men, enhanced by the use of increasingly sexual images, such as the 1992 campaign featuring then rap star Marky Mark (Wahlberg).

In 1993 Klein created a breakthrough new concept in designer fragrance with the launch of cK One, a unisex fragrance designed to be worn by both men and women.

Advertising has played a major role in the success of Calvin Klein's many fashion enterprises. From the Richard Avedon advertisement for Calvin Klein jeans featuring a young Brooke Shields asking, 'You know what comes between me and my Calvin's? Nothing,' through the homoeroticism of the jeans insert in Vanity Fair shot by Bruce Weber, and the stylish black and white advertisements for the perfumes Obsession and Eternity, to the controversial 1995 campaign for cK Calvin Klein jeans that was quickly withdrawn after accusations of child pornography, Klein's advertising campaigns have been both provocative and enormously successful.

Commenting on the importance of advertising Klein himself stated that 'I think it starts with the product. Then you need to communicate what the product's about. We've done that efficiently.'

More than efficient, the advertising campaigns for Klein's products have made homoeroticism a staple of consumer culture in North America and Western Europe.

Nathan Leopold

Nathan Leopold born 19 November 1904 (d. 1971)

Richard A Loeb and Nathan Freudenthal Leopold, Jr., more commonly known as Leopold and Loeb, were two wealthy University of Chicago students who murdered 14-year-old Bobby Franks in 1924, and received sentences of life in prison.

Their crime was notable in being largely motivated by an apparent need to prove the duo's belief that their high intellects made them capable of committing a perfect crime, and also for its role in the history of American thought on capital punishment.

Leopold, who was 19 at the time of the murder, and Loeb, 18, believed themselves to be Nietzschean supermen who could commit a 'perfect crime' (in this case a kidnapping and murder) without fear of being apprehended.

The friends were exceptionally intelligent: Leopold had already completed college and was attending law school at the University of Chicago. He spoke five languages and was an expert ornithologist, while Loeb was the youngest graduate in the history of the University of Michigan. Leopold planned to transfer to Harvard Law School in September, after taking a trip to Europe. Loeb planned to enter the University of Chicago Law School after taking some post graduate courses.

Both Leopold and Loeb lived in the wealthy Jewish neighbourhood of Kenwood, Chicago. Loeb's father, Albert, began his career as a lawyer and became the Vice President of Sears and Roebuck. Besides owning an impressive mansion in Kenwood, two blocks away from the Leopold home, the Loeb family also had a summer estate in Charlevoix, Michigan.

The pair had worked themselves up to committing the crime for months, starting out with petty theft.

On Wednesday, 21 May 1924, they put their plot in motion. The pair lured Franks, a neighbour and distant relative of Loeb's, into a rented car. Loeb first struck Franks with a chisel. Leopold and Loeb then suffocated Franks. After concealing the body in a culvert under a railroad track outside of Chicago - the body was burned with acid to make identification more difficult — they did their best to make it seem that a kidnapping for ransom had taken place; the Franks family had enough money that a request for $10,000 in ransom was plausible.

Before the family could pay the ransom, though, the body was found. Investigators saw at once that this could not be a mere kidnapping, since there would have been no reason for a kidnapper to kill Franks.

A pair of eyeglasses found with the body was eventually traced back to Nathan Leopold. The ransom note had been typed on a typewriter that Leopold had used with his law school study group. During police questioning, Leopold's and Loeb's alibis broke down and each confessed. Although their confessions were in agreement about most major facts in the case, each blamed the other for the actual killing.

They had spent months planning the crime, working out a way to get the ransom money without risking being caught. They had thought that the body would not be discovered until long after the ransom delivery. Regardless, the ransom was not their primary motive; each one's family gave him all the money that he needed. In fact, they admitted that they were driven by the thrill. For that matter, they basked in the public attention they received while in jail; they regaled newspaper reporters with the crime's lurid details again and again.

The murder and subsequent trial received worldwide publicity, and part of the fascination was based on public perception of the crime as a 'Jewish' crime. In 1924, Chicago was consummately an ethnic city, where the majority of residents were immigrants or the children of immigrants, and in which politics, neighbourhoods, and institutions often carried ethnic labels. Neither defendant was a practicing Jew. Loeb's mother was Catholic and his father was Jewish. Bobby Franks' parents, while ethnically Jewish, were converts to Christian Science.

Leopold [above left] and Loeb both admitted to the press that they had a sexual relationship, and this increased the lurid (for that time) aspects of the crime considerably.

The trial proved to be a media spectacle; it was one of the first cases in the USA to be dubbed the 'Trial of the Century'. Loeb's family hired 67-year-old Clarence Darrow — who had fought against capital punishment for years — to defend the boys against the capital charges of murder and kidnapping. While the media expected them to plead not guilty (by reason of insanity), Darrow surprised everyone by having them both plead guilty. In this way, Darrow avoided a jury trial which, due to the strong public sentiment against his clients, would most certainly have resulted in a conviction and perhaps even the death penalty. Instead, he was able to make his case for his clients' lives before a single person, Cook County Circuit Court Judge John R. Caverly.

Darrow gave a twelve-hour speech, which has been called the finest of his career. It may be, in fact, that Darrow accepted the case because it offered a huge public platform for such a speech; he knew that his strong argument against capital punishment would be reprinted in newspapers around the world. And if he could successfully reason that such heinous murderers should not be executed, perhaps he would make other capital punishment cases more difficult to prosecute. In the end, Darrow succeeded; the judge sentenced Leopold and Loeb each to life in prison (for the murder), plus 99 years each (for the kidnapping).

In 1944, Leopold participated in the Stateville Penitentiary Malaria Study where he volunteered to be infected with malaria. Early in 1958, after 33 years in prison, Leopold was released on parole. That year he wrote an autobiography titled Life plus Ninety Nine Years. Leopold moved to Puerto Rico to avoid media attention, and married a widowed florist. He died of a heart attack on August 30, 1971 at the age of 66.

Richard Loeb was less 'fortunate' - he was attacked and killed by a fellow prisoner in 1936 at the age of 30.

The story of the Leopold and Loeb case has become ingrained in popular culture and is often used or referred to in film and television. The crime was also inspiration for Alfred Hitchcock's film Rope (1948), and Tom Kalin's more openly gay-themed Swoon (1992) as well as Murder by Numbers (2002), the 1985 play Never The Sinner by John Logan, and the off-Broadway musical Thrill Me by Stephen Dolginoff.

Anton Walbrook

Anton Walbrook born 19 November 1896 (d. 1967)

Anton Walbrook was an Austrian actor who settled in the United Kingdom.

He was born Adolf Wohlbrück in Vienna, Austria, descended from ten generations of actors. His father broke with tradition and was a circus clown. Walbrook studied with the director Max Reinhardt, built up a career in Austrian theatre and cinema.

In 1936 he went to Hollywood to reshoot dialogue for the multinational The Soldier and the Lady (1937), in the process changing his name from Adolf to Anton. As a homosexual, his life in Austria was becoming intolerable under Nazi rule. Instead of returning he settled in England, and continued as working as a cinema actor. High points include the dashing, intense German officer Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), the tyrannical impresario in The Red Shoes (1948) and the ringmaster in La Ronde (1950).

Co-star Moira Shearer said Walbrook was a loner on set, often wearing dark glasses and eating alone. He retired from films at the end of the 1950s, and in later years appeared on the European stage and television. He died of a heart attack in Garatshausen, Germany in 1967.