Joe Dallesandro

Joe Dallesandro born 31 December 1948

Joseph Angelo (Joe) Dallesandro is an American actor and Warhol icon.

Joe Dallesandro was known for his voluptuous physical beauty, flesh-baring film appearances, and openness about his bisexuality. Although he never became a major mainstream star, Dallesandro is generally considered to be the most famous male sex symbol of American underground films of the 20th century. According to biographer Michael Ferguson, Dallesandro was 'the first openly eroticized male sex symbol of the movies to walk naked across the screen'. As well as beauty, his on-screen presence has an enigmatic quality. This derives from what often seems (especially in his appearance in several Warhol films) a bored or surly withholding, and almost comical physical inertia.

As a teenager, Dallesandro supported himself by nude modelling - including sessions for Bob Mizer's Athletic Model Guld and Bruce of Los Angeles - and prostitution, and appeared in at least one gay porn film.

Dallesandro met Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey in 1967 while they were in the midst of shooting The Loves of Ondine, and they cast him in the film on the spot.

Dallesandro was the obvious choice for the part of a teenage hustler in Flesh, where he had several nude scenes. To a large extent, it was because of him that Flesh became an internationally successful film. Dallesandro became the most popular of the Warhol stars. He quickly drew a devoted cult following that savoured his long sandy hair, distinctively muscular physique, large, thick penis (which is often directly alluded to in the Warhol films), and his utter unselfconsciousness in baring these attributes on camera.

Dallesandro also appeared in Lonesome Cowboys, Trash, Heat, Andy Warhol's Frankenstein and Andy Warhol's Dracula, also directed by Morrissey. These last two films were shot in Europe, and, after the films were completed, Dallesandro chose not to return to the US. He continued to star in films made mainly in France and Italy for the rest of the decade, returning to America in the 1980s. He made several movies without Warhol and Morrissey, and is known for his portrayal of 1920s gangster Lucky Luciano in Francis Coppola's The Cotton Club. He also appeared as a religious zealot in Cry Baby by John Waters.

Dallesandro has a famous tattoo on his upper right arm that reads 'Little Joe', and was portrayed as the money-minded 'Little Joe' in Lou Reed's hit 1972 song Walk on the Wild Side, which was about the characters Reed knew from Warhol's studio, The Factory. A Warhol photograph of the large crotch bulge of Dallesandro's tight blue jeans graces the famous cover of the Rolling Stones album Sticky Fingers.

The Smiths would later use a still photograph of Dallesandro from the film Flesh as the cover of their eponymous debut album.

John Waters has praised him as, 'A wonderful actor who forever changed male sexuality on the screen'. He is considered an underground film and gay culture icon, and still has a large cult following.

Dallesandro has been married three times and has two sons. He currently manages a hotel in the heart of Hollywood, where he lives with his cat Booky. He has said: 'I've lived such a full life. I've had such great things. There were some hardships, but overall everything has been great.'

Joe Dallesandro - official site

Orry-Kelly

John Orry-Kelly born 31 December 1897 (d. 1964)

Orry-Kelly was the professional name of John Orry Kelly, a prolific Hollywood costume designer. Some sources cite his name as George Orry Kelly.

Born in Kiama, New South Wales in Australia, he grew up to study art there, becoming a tailor's apprentice and window dresser in Sydney.

He journeyed to New York to pursue an acting career. He shared an apartment there with Charlie Spangles and Cary Grant. A job painting murals in a nightclub led to his employment by Fox East Coast studios illustrating titles. He designed costumes and sets for Broadway's Shubert Revues and George White's Scandals.

He went to Hollywood in 1932, working for all the major studios (Warner Brothers, Universal, RKO, 20th Century Fox, and MGM), and designed for all the great actresses of the day, including Bette Davis, Olivia DeHavilland, Katharine Hepburn, Ava Gardner, Ann Sheridan, and Merle Oberon.

He worked on many films now deemed classic, including 42nd Street, The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca, Arsenic and Old Lace, Harvey, Oklahoma!, Auntie Mame, and Some Like It Hot.

He won three Academy Awards for costume design (for An American in Paris, Cole Porter's Les Girls, and Some Like It Hot) and was nominated for a fourth (for Gypsy).

A longtime alcoholic, he died of liver cancer in Hollywood, California and was interred in the Forest Lawn Memorial Park (Hollywood Hills).

Paul Bowles

Paul Bowles born 30 December 1910 (d. 1999)

Paul Frederic Bowles was an expatriot American composer, author, and traveller.

Bowles was born in New York in 1910. His father was a dentist who exhibited little warmth for his son; an inflexible man, he evoked responses of passive resistance and secrecy, characteristics that would mark Paul's life and writing. As a boy, Bowles had few friends and took refuge in fantasy writing. He matriculated at the University of Virginia, but academic life did not interest him, and he left for Paris abruptly in 1929. Although he soon returned to New York, from 1931 onward he would spend most of his life outside the United States.

Bowles's literary reputation rests on his novels, but until he was thirty-five he showed more interest in musical composition and poetry. Aaron Copland was a mentor, and in France, he intrigued Gertrude Stein, though she thought he was no poet. But Bowles was gifted in a number of fields, and increasingly he spread his skills over several: music for plays and films, short stories, autobiography, travel writing, and translations.

In Berlin, he met Stephen Spender and Christopher Isherwood. Isherwood later gave the name Bowles to the heroine of Goodbye to Berlin. The following year Bowles returned to North Africa and travelled throughout other parts of Morocco, the Sahara, Algeria and Tunisia. Throughout the next decade, Bowles composed a good body of music including sonatas, song cycles, and music for stage productions (including Doctor Faustus directed by Orson Welles, the orchestration for George Balanchine's Yankee Clipper at Lincoln Kirstein's request), and also made early recordings of North African music.

In childhood, Bowles was fond of a homosexual uncle. During one stay-over with him, he happened to enter a room where men were dancing intimately together. His uncle's anger at his nephew hurt Bowles, who had not been alarmed at this sight, and the incident suggests Bowles's attitude to different sexual behavior: He liked to examine sexuality from a dispassionate perspective for its psychological suggestiveness. Such is the case in his most explicitly homosexual story, Pages from Cold Point (1947), in which a boy tries to seduce his father.

Pages from Cold Point marked a turning point in Bowles's life. In 1938, he had married Jane Auer, and in 1947, they went to live in Tangier. Jane Bowles had published Two Serious Ladies, and explored gay relationships in both her life and in her fiction.

Paul Bowles explored the psychological dimensions of relationships less directly, and many readers prefer to interpret his ground-breaking novel The Sheltering Sky (1949) in existentialist terms, even though it deals centrally with the extraordinary dynamic of his relationship with Jane - a dynamic to which the homosexuality of both is relevant.

With the arrival of the Bowles, the Tangier cult developed rapidly. American writers and artists of the Beat Generation - William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, and others - visited and socialised; the ambience of Tangier, as well as its toleration of experiments in drug use and sexual expression proved liberating and stimulating.

Jane Bowles, always on the edge of sexual scandal, died in 1973. Paul Bowles, though he continued to attract interesting figures and, in his discreet way, a cult following, was very stable, and continued to produce a stream of work until his death in 1999.

His translation work started with the Sartre classic No Exit (1958) but became more significant with his translations of previously unknown works by Moroccan writers Mohammed Mrabet, Mohamed Choukri and, subsequently, others.

Bowles died of heart failure at the Italian Hospital in Tangier on November 18, 1999 at the age of 88. He had been ill for some time with respiratory problems. The following day a full-page obituary appeared in The New York Times. Although he had lived in Morocco for 52 years, he was buried in Lakemont, New York, next to the graves of his parents and grandparents.

Douglas Coupland

Douglas Coupland born 30 December 1961

Douglas Coupland is a major Canadian fiction writer as well as a playwright and visual artist.

His first book, the 1991 novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, became an international bestseller and popularised the terms 'McJob' and 'Generation X'. Much of Coupland's work explores the unexpected cultural shifts created by the impact of new technologies on middle class North American culture. Persistent themes include the conflict between secular and religious values, difficulty in ageing and taking on adult roles, ironic attitudes as a response to intense media saturation, and an aesthetic fascination with pop culture and mass culture.

Coupland was born on a Royal Canadian Air Force base in West Germany. He was the third child of four sons. Coupland's family returned to Canada four years later, settling in Vancouver, British Columbia, where he was raised. He currently lives in West Vancouver.

Coupland left Vancouver as a teenager to study physics at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec. There he stayed only one year before going back to Vancouver to study art at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design. Trained as a sculptor, Coupland graduated and worked and studied in Japan and in Milan, Italy.

In 1985/86, Coupland attended the Japan-America Institute of Management Science in both Honolulu, Hawaii and Tokyo, Japan. He graduated with honours. In late 1986, he returned to Vancouver, where he began to write on popular culture for Vancouver Magazine and Western Living magazine. In 1988, he moved to Toronto to work on a now-defunct business magazine, Vista. In 1989, Coupland severed his magazine connections and began writing fiction.

His breakthrough debut novel was Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (1991). It was critically praised for capturing the zeitgeist of his peer group, for whom its title provided a convenient label: he had literally provided one of the names for his whole generation.

Though his next novel, Shampoo Planet (1992), had a more conventional structure than its predecessor, there were similarities, including a detailed eye for the mores and minutiae of the lives of its young protagonists (video games, hippie parents and an obsession with consumer culture).

This novel was followed in 1993 by a collection of thematically linked short stories called Life After God.

Microserfs (1995) is centred on high-tech life in Seattle, Washington, and Palo Alto, California, contrasting the corporate culture of Microsoft with pre-dot-com bubble start-up companies. Microserfs also reflected Coupland’s art school roots. Much of the book’s page layout used bold and unusual typography and was grounded in Pop Art and Text Art, influenced by artists such as Andy Warhol and Jenny Holzer. Because of Coupland’s lack of roots in traditional literary academia, critics had a hard time locating the meaning and intent of these pages. A decade later, this use of typography is being understood as a bridge between the art and literary worlds.

1997’s Girlfriend in a Coma (with a title from The Smiths) showed Coupland’s willingness to tackle broader themes and featured some of his most mature writing. Like the earlier novels, however, some critics disapproved of its experimental structure.

With its adoption of supernatural elements, Girlfriend in a Coma also marked a change in Coupland's work. Hitherto, his narratives were focused on conventional characters living in a carefully drawn but instantly recognisable modern world. The plots of Girlfriend in a Coma and his subsequent novels have all introduced either supernatural occurrences or involve 'low probability events' (e.g. air disasters, meteorite impacts). This change has moved Coupland away from his earlier generation-defining work, but has allowed him to develop and explore new and darker themes.

While his books are rich in humour, observation and carefully drawn vignettes, some of Coupland's early critics noted a tendency for the plot development to be lost amongst these elements. The apocalyptic ending of Girlfriend in a Coma, for example, was seen by some to be forced and out of step with the remainder. Miss Wyoming (1999), his next work of fiction, was considered by some to be a more rounded and satisfying, even though Coupland himself considers it as a light comic novel.

In Japan in 2001, Coupland published God Hates Japan, a Japanese language novel done in collaboration with Vancouver computer animator Michael Howatson. The novel describes psychic malaise in Tokyo after the collapse of the 1980s economic bubble. That same year, Coupland also published All Families Are Psychotic, a comic novel exploring familial disintegration using the urban Florida landscape as a metaphor for human relationships.

In 2002 Coupland collaborated with French conceptual art maker Pierre Huyghe on School Spirit, a book that explored the ominous and unexpected darkness in high school environments. At the time Coupland was writing Hey Nostradamus!, a novel that was published in 2003. This was a dark story that explored the transmission of religious and secular beliefs from one generation to the next. It used the backdrop of a high school shooting massacre similar to that of the April 1999 Columbine Massacre in Colorado. As with all of Coupland’s novels, it was distinctly different from the novel preceding it. The book was well received and was shortlisted for several book awards.

In 2004, Coupland published Eleanor Rigby, a novel about human loneliness, its title coming from the Beatles song of the same name.

In 2006 Coupland published JPod, which he described as a sequel 'in spirit' to 1995’s Microserfs. JPod explores the lives of tech workers in a Vancouver computer game company, which appears to be loosely based on Electronic Arts. The novel is an exercise in black comedy that investigates life inside an amoral culture bombarded with too much information from sources such as the internet. The book also explores Pop Art and text art typography themes Coupland explored in 1995.

In 2001, Coupland stopped writing for magazines and concentrated more on his visual art. His work is a continuation of the Pop Art sensibility, often bluring the distinction between art and design. In 2005, he began to explore the relationship between literary and visual arts cultures. Using text and lyrics from such pop culture sources as R.E.M., The Smiths, Chuck Palahniuk and Bret Easton Ellis, Coupland’s work explores the infinite number of ways in which a single sentence or lyric can be interpreted. Coupland also did a series of works in which he chewed up copies of his own books and wove them into hornets nests; in so doing, breaking the link between modernism and nature.

Coupland has also written several non-fiction books and various screenplays.

Coupland is gay (he came out in February 2005). He describes himself as being politically unaligned, and has espoused both conservative and liberal views on different matters.

In June 2007, Coupland was elected into the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts (RCA).

Kevin Greening

Kevin Greening born 30 December 1962 (d. 2007)

Kevin Greening was a British radio presenter, who co-hosted the BBC Radio 1 breakfast show with Zoe Ball from 1997 to 1998.

Kevin grew up in Bristol where he worked voluntarily for the Bristol Hospital Broadcasting Service and later secured a place at St Catharine's College, Cambridge, where he was station manager at Cambridge University Radio. His first job was a construction worker on the Humber Bridge. He then trained as a studio manager and began his broadcasting career at the BBC World Service. In 1989, Kevin joined London's Local station BBC GLR as a producer, before becoming a presenter of their Breakfast show in 1991.

In April 1993, Kevin joined the newly launched Virgin Radio, where he remained until he quit in December 1993.

In January 1994, Kevin joined BBC Radio 1, presenting the Weekend Breakfast Show. In November 1994, Kevin took over the Weekend Lunchtime show. Again he featured many of his comedy characters featured on Weekend Breakfast. October 1995 saw Kevin move back to Weekend Breakfast where he would remain for another 16 months. Kevin was given the Drivetime show in February 1997.

Kevin moved to a Sunday morning show in September 1998. At the time he was also presenting shows for BBC World Service & a TV show for digital station BBC Choice. It was during this period that Kevin became the main stand-in presenter on the network, covering for several weekday presenters. There was also a period when Kevin took over the weekday lunchtime show whilst regular presenter Jo Whiley was away on maternity leave.

On Sunday 16 January 2000, Kevin presented his final Radio 1 show. In the last half hour he played some of the sketches from his time with the station.

Not long after he left Radio 1, in 2000 Kevin's next move was to BBC Radio 5 Live, where he was a stand-in presenter for various daytime slots.

In March 2001, whilst undertaking supply work at Five Live, he began co-presenting a Saturday Morning show on GLR's replacement, BBC London Live, and lasted until September the same year.

Throughout late 2001 into 2002, Jazz FM employed Kevin for various stints, then in May 2002, he briefly joined London's Heart 106.2.

After a stand-in stint on the BBC 6 Music Night Train Programme and in addition to XFM, in April 2004, Kevin re-joined Jazz FM, presenting weekend morning shows.

Kevin remained at Jazz FM in various time slots as the station morphed into 102.2 Smooth FM.

Kevin was openly gay and had a long-term boyfriend, whom he often referred to on air as his 'lesbian life-partner' or 'live-in chum'.

On 30 December 2007, it was announced by Greening's agent, that Greening had 'died peacefully in his sleep', at the age of 44. No details about the cause of death have been issued.

Despite much speculation on the Internet that Greening's death was due to an AIDS-related illness, a man was subsequently arrested at Greening's London address and questioned in connection with possessing and intending to supply Class-A drugs. Metropolitan Police initially treated the death as 'unexplained' after a post-mortem examination failed to establish a cause. However, further tests revealed that he suffered a heart attack and died after taking large quantities of ecstasy, cocaine and GHB. In May 2008, the case was closed. An inquest in June 2008 heard that Greening had died of a drugs overdose after taking part in a bondage sex session.

L P Hartley

L P Hartley born 30 December 1895 (d. 1972)

Leslie Poles Hartley was a British writer, known for novels and short stories. His best known work is The Go-Between, which was made into a 1971 film with a star cast, in an adaptation by Harold Pinter. The book's opening sentence, 'The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there', has become almost proverbial.

He was born in Whittlesey, Cambridgeshire. He was educated in Cliftonville, Thanet, then briefly at Clifton College, where he first met Clifford Henry Benn Kitchin, and at Harrow School.

In 1915 he went up to Balliol College, Oxford, to read modern history. There he befriended Aldous Huxley. In 1916 he joined the British Army. He was commissioned as an officer but for health reasons never left the United Kingdom. Invalided out, he returned to Oxford in 1919, where he gathered a number of literary friends, including Lord David Cecil, who remained a friend for life.

He was published in Oxford Poetry in 1920 and then 1922. He edited Oxford Outlook, with Gerald Howard and A B B Valentine in 1920, in 1921 also with Basil Murray and M C Hollis. At this time he was introduced by Huxley to Lady Ottoline Morrell. Kitchin was at Oxford also, who introduced him to the Asquiths; Cynthia Asquith became a lifelong friend. Despite being named for Leslie Stephen, he always belonged to the rather louche Asquith milieu, and was rebuffed by the Bloomsbury group.

Success came with having his first writing published and becoming a reviewer after his Oxford degree. Though this gave him rapid social elevation his life remained very strained, and in 1922 he suffered a nervous breakdown. He shortly started spending much time in Venice, as he did for many years.

Until the success of The Go-Between he counted as a somewhat snobbish minor writer. He did, however, receive a measure of recognition in being awarded the 1947 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Eustace and Hilda and later through the CBE he was awarded in 1956.

His The Harness Room (1971) is seen as his only homosexual novel.

There is a critical analysis of Hartley's ghost stories in Jack Sullivan's book Elegant Nightmares: The English Ghost Story From Le Fanu to Blackwood (1978). A critical essay on Hartley's ghost stories appears in S T Joshi's book The Evolution of the Weird Tale (2004).

Jason Gould

Jason Gould born 29 December 1966

Jason Emanuel Gould is an American actor, writer and director. His parents are Barbra Streisand and Elliott Gould, who divorced a few years after his birth. Born in New York, Gould spent his formative years around major Hollywood players in Los Angeles, California.

Gould appeared in such films as Say Anything (1989) and the Streisand-directed film The Prince of Tides (1991), but has since rarely appeared in front of the camera.

Gould was outed (as gay) around 1991 in tabloid newspapers, and since then has never hid the fact that he is gay.

Manuel Puig

Manuel Puig born 28 December 1932 (d. 1990)

Manuel Puig was an Argentinian author. Among his best known novels are La traición de Rita Hayworth (1968) (Betrayed by Rita Hayworth), Boquitas pintadas (1973) (Heartbreak Tango), and El beso de la mujer araña (1976) (Kiss of the Spider Woman), which was made into a film by the Argentine-Brazilian Director, Héctor Babenco, and in 1993 into a Broadway musical.

Puig was born in General Villegas, an isolated town in Buenos Aires Province, Argentina, on December 28, 1932. As a child, bored by the provincialism of his surroundings, the young Puig would go to the local moviehouse five nights a week to be entertained by the glamour of Hollywood movies.

After completing his elementary education, Puig was sent to boarding school in Buenos Aires. In 1950, he entered the University of Buenos Aires, first studying philosophy then architecture, but never obtained a degree.

In 1956, he was awarded a scholarship to study film at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia and from 1956 to 1962 he moved back and forth between Rome, London, and Argentina, attempting, unsuccessfully, to get his film career off the ground.

In 1963, abandoning hope of a career in cinema, he moved to New York City where he began to work on his first novel, La traición de Rita Hayworth. The novel was published in Argentina in 1968 but not after first running into censorship problems as a result of the portrayal of the protagonist Toto as effeminate and sexually ambivalent.

In 1969, the prestigious French publisher Gallimard issued the French translation of La traición de Rita Hayworth, and in June of that year the work was selected by Le Monde as one of the best novels of 1968-1969. After this recognition, Puig became one of the most admired and popular authors in Latin America.

Although Puig also published plays and film scripts, he is most recognised in Latin-American letters today for the innovative techniques of his novels. The Argentine writer can perhaps be classified as one of Latin America's first post-modern authors. He is responsible for breaking through to a post-modern, unpretentious literary space where so-called low-brow culture - Hollywood movie stars, soap opera, popular radio serials - is considered as valid an indicator of personal and collective truths as high-brow art.

In 1973, while living in Greenwich Village, Puig began to write his fourth novel, the story of two cellmates in a Buenos Aires prison during Argentina's military dictatorship of the 1970s. Luis Alberto Molina, an aging homosexual convicted of 'corrupting minors', is a modern-day Scheherazade who recounts and recreates filmed stories to seduce a young Marxist political activist, Valentín Arregui Paz.

The novel is the now classic El beso de la mujer araña (Kiss of the Spider Woman), which was made into a commercially successful Hollywood film in 1985, and has also been adapted for the stage, both as a drama (in Spanish and in English) and as a Tony Award-winning musical.

Although homosexual themes and motifs are suggested in a number of Puig's novels, in El beso de la mujer araña explicit homosexual desire is central to the fiction.

When it first appeared, the open portrayal of homosexuality in El beso de la mujer araña was unsettling for many members of the Hispanic literary establishment who found it difficult to accept an openly gay novel. Yet, though it was considered a flop with intellectuals and critics, the novel, nonetheless, gained popularity and eventually became a best-seller.

By portraying the gay Molina as sympathetically complex, Puig counteracted the Hispanic world's intolerance toward homosexuality.

When Manuel Puig died in 1990 at the age of fifty-seven, the New York Times obituary reported that he had suffered cardiac arrest following a routine gall bladder operation. What was most puzzling, however, was that the obituary mentioned Puig's two 'sons', thus making him appear to have been heterosexual. Stories have since surfaced erroneously indicating that Puig's death may have been AIDS-related and his real cause of death covered up.

F. W. Murnau

Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau born 28 December 1888 (d. 1931)

Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau was one of the most influential directors of the silent film era.

He was one of a number of German film directors to take part in the expressionist movement that took root in German cinema during the 1920s, and he directed a number of movies that were influential and remain widely seen among film scholars today. Some of Murnau's output from the silent era has been lost, although many of his films still survive; film scholars widely acknowledge them as masterpieces.

He was born as Friedrich Wilhelm Plumpe in Bielefeld, Germany. He attended the University of Heidelberg and studied art history. He took the name 'Murnau' from a town in Germany. He was a combat pilot during World War I and directed his first film Der Knabe in Blau ('The Child in Blue') in 1919.

Murnau's most famous film is Nosferatu, a 1922 adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula that caused Stoker's estate to sue for copyright infringement. Murnau lost the lawsuit and all prints of the film were ordered destroyed, but bootleg prints were stored and preserved over time, so that Nosferatu is widely available in the present era. Werner Herzog remade the film in 1979.
Nosferatu, subtextually, depicted demoralised Germany post-World War I.

Nearly as important as Nosferatu in Murnau's filmography was The Last Laugh (Der Letzte Mann, German, The Last Man) (1925), written by Carl Mayer and starring Emil Jannings. Often voted second greatest film of all time by international critics' polls, the film introduced the subjective point of view camera, where the camera 'sees' from the eyes of a character and uses visual style to convey a character's psychological state. It also anticipated the cinéma vérité movement in its subject matter.

Murnau's last German film was the big budget Faust (1926) with Gösta Ekman as the title character, Emil Jannings as Mephisto and Camilla Horn as Gretchen. Murnau's film draws on older traditions of the legendary tale of Faust as well as on Goethe's classic version. This carefully composed and innovative feature contains many memorable images and startling special effects, with careful attention paid to contrasts of light and dark. Particularly striking is the sequence in which the giant, horned and black winged figure of Mephisto (Jannings) hovers over a town sowing the seeds of plague. The acting by Ekman (who miraculously transforms, in the course of the film, from a bearded old man to a handsome youth) and the sinister, scowling, demonic Jannings is first rate and the virtually unknown actress Camilla Horn gives a memorable performance as the tragic figure of Gretchen.

Murnau emigrated to Hollywood in 1926, where he joined the Fox Studio and made Sunrise (1927), a movie often cited by film scholars as one of the greatest films of all time. Filmed in the Fox Movietone sound-on-film system (music and sound effects only), Sunrise was not a financial success but received several Oscars at the very first Academy Awards ceremony in 1928. In winning the Academy Award for Unique and Artistic Production it shared what is now the Best Picture award with the movie Wings.

Murnau's next two pictures, Four Devils (1928) and City Girl (1930), were modified to adapt to the new era of sound film and were not well received. No copy of Four Devils now exists. Their poor receptions disillusioned Murnau, and he quit Fox to journey for a while in the South Pacific.

Together with documentary pioneer Robert Flaherty, Murnau travelled abroad to Bora Bora to realise the film Tabu in 1931. But Flaherty left after artistic disputes with Murnau who had to finish the movie on his own. Because of images of bare-breasted 'native' Polynesian women the movie was censored in the United States. The film was originally shot as half-talkie, half-silent, before being fully restored as a silent film - Murnau's preferred medium.

Murnau did not live to see the premiere of his last film; he died in a car crash in Santa Barbara, California on March 11, 1931. The car was driven by Murnau's fourteen-year old Filipino valet Garcia Stevenson. Murnau was entombed on Southwest Cemetery (Südwest-Kirchhof Stahnsdorf) in Stahnsdorf near Berlin. Only 11 people showed up for the funeral. Among them were Robert Flaherty, Emil Jannings, Greta Garbo and Fritz Lang who delivered the funeral speech. Garbo also commissioned a deathmask of Murnau which she kept on her desk during her years in Hollywood.

In Berlin, Murnau moved in artistic circles where homosexuality was accepted as a matter of course. In Hollywood, however, Murnau's homosexuality was the cause of much gossip, including the infamous rumour that his death was precipitated by his fellating his chauffeur while the latter was driving. All evidence has shown this rumour to be false, yet it persists.

A fictionalised account of the making of the film Nosferatu was Shadow of the Vampire by director E. Elias Merhige. Murnau is portrayed by John Malkovich. In the film, Murnau is so dedicated to making the film genuine that he actually hires a real vampire to play Orlok.

Simon Raven

Simon Raven born 28 December 1927 (d. 2001)

Simon Arthur Noël Raven was a novelist, journalist and dramatist. His obituary in The Guardian noted that, 'he combined elements of Flashman, Waugh's Captain Grimes and the Earl of Rochester.'

He attended first Cordwalles preparatory school and then Charterhouse, from which he was expelled for 'the usual thing' (having sex with one of the other schoolboys). It is said that the stress of expelling Raven turned headmaster Robert Birley's hair grey. After national service in the Parachute Regiment, during which he was sent as an officer cadet to Bangalore and commissioned, Raven arrived, in 1948, to read English at King's College, Cambridge.

Raven was undiscriminating in his sexual tastes, and Cambridge offered these more scope than Charterhouse had done: one disgruntled Newnham girl was overheard saying, 'I’m not going to bed with Simon ever again. One day it’s Boris, then a choral scholar, then it’s me, then it’s back to Boris again. No!' Raven was a promiscuous bisexual who on balance favoured young men over women. In 1951, he married Susan Kilner, a fellow undergraduate who was expecting his child; afterwards, he studiously avoided her, and they were divorced in 1957. In one well-known incident he received a wire from his estranged wife reading 'Wife and baby starving send money soonest,' and sent the reply: 'Sorry no money suggest eat baby.'

After failing to submit a single word of his fellowship thesis, he withdrew from King's, and, desperate to flee 'the pram in the hall', successfully applied for a regular army commission. He spent three years in the King's Own Shropshire Light Infantry (KSLI) in Germany and Kenya, where he set up a brothel for his men, and was sent home to be training officer at Shrewsbury.

Alas, officers in the KSLI were expected to represent the regiment at local race meetings - a prescription to go bankrupt, which, within a year, Simon did. The regiment cared more for its good name than for army regulations, and he was quietly allowed to resign rather than face a court-martial for conduct unbecoming.

His major work was a series of ten novels under the umbrella title Alms for Oblivion. The novels cover the period 1945 to 1973 and centre on a group of upper and upper middle class characters. They can be considered a novel sequence, if a somewhat loosely structured one.

The early novels are robust satires of the English upper set of the mid 1950s, but the later tend to a more detached and philosophical tone. The later novels become more concerned with the occult and supernatural, and include strange happenings, though this was a feature of Raven's work early in his career (for example the early novel Doctors Wear Scarlet, (1960) which features Balkan vampires, and was once cited as one of the thirteen best supernatural horror novels). The best known and of most gay interest in the sequence is Fielding Gray (1967). His vaguely autobiographical first novel The Feathers of Death (1959) is also worth reading.

He followed the Alms sequence with the seven-volume series The First-Born of Egypt, but by then he was bored and exhausted of ideas.

As a screenwriter, Raven received screen credit for writing additional dialogue for the James Bond film On Her Majesty's Secret Service. He was also responsible for a 22-episode adaptation for the BBC of all six Palliser novels by Anthony Trollope, first broadcast in 1974. And he also wrote Edward and Mrs Simpson, an acclaimed and Emmy-winning 7 episode drama for ITV, first broadcast in 1978, and Nancy Mitford's Love in a Cold Climate in 1980

He always considered himself a second class writer motivated more by money than art and there is some truth in that.

Raven lived out his final years at Sutton's Hospital almshouses, a charitable foundation. He died of a stroke, aged 73

Who was Simon Raven? by Brooke Allen
Simon Raven - Obituary in The Guardian

Wilson Cruz

Wilson Cruz born 27 December 1973

Brooklyn-born Wilson Cruz is an openly gay Puerto Rican-American actor. Cruz has in both his acting roles and community work served as a model and mentor to gay youth, especially gay youth of colour.

Best known for his role as Enrique 'Rickie' Vasquez, the troubled gay teen on the short-lived but popular television series My So-Called Life, Wilson knows first-hand the many struggles and hardships that face young gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered people as they struggle to come to terms with their sexuality and the reactions of their families, friends, and society at large.

At 19, Cruz came out to his parents, first to his mother and then his father. While his mother was initially hurt and shocked, she eventually accepted the news. His father, however, threw him out of the house, and he spent the next few months living in his car and at the homes of friends. Cruz eventually reconciled with his father.

After coming out to his parents, Cruz went to Hollywood to seek work as an openly gay young actor. While many gay and lesbian performers had come out later in their careers, he wanted to see if he could be out from the beginning and still make it as an actor. His strategy paid off in 1994, when he was cast in My So-Called Life. In one episode drawn from his own life, 'Rickie' came out to his parents and was violently thrown out of the house.

Following My So-Called Life's cancellation, Cruz went on to play J Edgar Hoover's servant Joaquin in Oliver Stone's film Nixon and had a small role in the television movie On Seventh Avenue. In 1996, he appeared with David Arquette in johns, about the daily (or nightly) struggles of male prostitutes. In 1998, he portrayed Angel in the Broadway production of RENT, and in 2000 played Victor during the final season of Party of Five.

Cruz's other acting credits include a number of other films and guest appearances on various telkevision series including ER, Ally McBeal, and Noah's Arc.

While playing numerous roles on television, film, and the stage, Cruz devotes more and more of his time to GLBT youth. He is especially concerned with GLBT youth of colour.

Cruz was the 2005 Grand Marshall of the Chicago Pride Parade and the 1998 West Hollywood Gay Pride parade.

Reichen Lehmkuhl

Reichen Lehmkuhl born 26 December 1973

Reichen Lehmkuhl, born in Cincinnati, Ohio, became famous in the US for winning season four of the reality game show The Amazing Race with his then-'husband' Chip Arndt.

After Lehmkuhl's parents divorced when he was five, his family moved to Norton, Massachusetts and his mother remarried. He later changed his first name legally from Richard to Reichen. At age 16, he received his nomination from United States Congressman Barney Frank for admission to the United States Air Force Academy. After graduating in 1996, he served five years and attained the rank of Captain before his honourable discharge. He has since advocated for gay rights in the military as a spokesperson for Servicemembers Legal Defense Network.

Lehmkuhl was working simultaneously as a Physics teacher at Crossroads School for the Arts and Sciences, flight instructor and model in Los Angeles when he was approached by a casting director for The Amazing Race. Lehmkuhl and Arndt were a happy couple during the competition but have since split. Lehmkuhl moved to Dallas, Texas briefly after his win on The Amazing Race but before all episodes had been broadcast. Reichen's spending habits at that time caused speculation that he had won The Amazing Race — and that he and Arndt had broken up.

Lehmkuhl hosted The Reichen Show on Q Television Network until Q Television ceased operations on May 2006. His autobiography Here's What We'll Say, about his time in the Air Force under the military's commonly called 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' policy, was published in October 2006. He publishes a beefcake calendar each year and has appeared on sitcoms, soap operas, and other reality shows.

On July 26, 2006, former 'N Sync band member Lance Bass told People Magazine that he was gay and in a relationship with Lehmkuhl. The revelation was prompted by a highly active rumour mill generated by the celebrity blogging community. Lemkuhl moved in with Bass shortly thereafter.

After much conflicting tittle tattle concerning their relationship Lehmkuhl and Bass spilt up in January 2007.

Lehmkulhl is now in a relationship with personal trainer, model and new 'face' of Emporio Armani underwear Ryan Barry.

Reichen Lehmkuhl

Quentin Crisp

Quentin Crisp born 25 December 1908 (d. 1999)

Quentin Crisp was an English writer, artist's model, actor and raconteur known for his memorable and insightful witticisms. He became a gay icon in the 1970s after publication of his memoir The Naked Civil Servant brought to the attention of the general public his defiant exhibitionism and long-standing refusal to conceal his homosexuality.

Born Denis Charles Pratt in Sutton, Surrey, he changed his name to Quentin Crisp in his twenties after leaving home and cultivating his outlandishly effeminate appearance to a standard that both shocked contemporary Londoners and provoked homophobic attacks.

By his own account, Crisp was effeminate in behaviour from an early age and found himself the object of teasing at Kingswood Preparatory School in Epsom, from where he won a scholarship to Denstone College, near Uttoxeter in 1922. Whilst in the sixth form, Crisp served in and eventually commanded a squad in the Officer's Cadet Force. After leaving school in 1926, Crisp studied journalism at King's College London but failed to graduate in 1928, going on to take art classes at Regent Street Polytechnic.

Around this time, Crisp began frequenting the cafés of Soho – his favourite being The Black Cat in Old Compton Street – meeting other young gay men and rent-boys, and experimenting with make-up and women's clothes. For six months he worked as a prostitute, looking for love, he said in a 1999 interview, but only finding degradation.

Crisp left home to move to the centre of London at the end of 1930 and, after living in a succession of flats, found a bed-sitting room in Denbeigh Street, where he held court with London's brightest and roughest characters. His outlandish appearance – he wore bright make-up, dyed his long hair crimson, painted his fingernails and wore sandals to display his painted toenails – brought admiration and curiosity from some quarters but generally attracted hostility and violence from strangers passing him in the streets.

Crisp attempted to join the army at the outbreak of the Second World War, but was rejected and declared exempt by the medical board on the grounds that he was 'suffering from sexual perversion'. He remained in London during the 1941 Blitz, stocked up on cosmetics, purchased five pounds of Henna and paraded through the blackout, picking up GIs, whose kindness and open-mindedness inspired his love of all things American.

In 1940 he moved into the bed-sitting room he would occupy for the next forty years, the first floor apartment at 129 Beaufort Street, London. Here he stayed until he emigrated to the United States in 1981. In the intervening years he never attempted any housework, saying famously in his memoir that the dirt didn't get any worse after the first four years.

He left his job as engineer's tracer in 1942 to become a model in life classes in London and the Home Counties, and continued posing for artists for the next three decades. 'It was like being a civil servant,' he explained in his autobiography, 'except that you were naked.'

Crisp had published three short books by the time he was commissioned by the director of Jonathan Cape to complete what would become The Naked Civil Servant. Having heard Crisp interviewed on radio in 1964 he was keen to produce something of his in print. The book appeared in 1968 to respectable reviews. When the book was reprinted in 1975 on the strength of the success of the television version of The Naked Civil Servant, Gay News commented that the book should have been published posthumously. Quentin said this was a polite way of their telling him to drop dead.

Subsequently, Crisp was approached by documentary maker Denis Mitchell to be the subject of a short film in which he was expected to talk about his life, voice his opinions and sit around in his Beaufort Street apartment filing his nails. The broadcast brought enough attention to Crisp and his book that he soon entered talks about a dramatisation of his book starring John Hurt as Quentin Crisp [below].

The successful screening of The Naked Civil Servant launched Crisp in another new direction: that of performer and lecturer. He devised a one-man show and began touring the country with it. The first half of the show was an entertaining monologue loosely based on his memoirs, the second half was a question and answer session with Crisp picking the audience's written questions out at random and answering them in an amusing manner. In 1978 Crisp sold out the Duke of York's Theatre in London, then took the show to New York, where he eventually decided to move. His first stay there, in the Hotel Chelsea, coincided with a fire, a robbery, and the death of Nancy Spungen. He set about making arrangements to move to New York permanently and in 1981 he arrived with few possessions and found a small apartment in Manhattan's Lower East Side.

He continued to perform his one-man show, published books on etiquette and supported himself by accepting social invitations and writing movie reviews and columns for US and UK magazines and newspapers. He said that provided one could exist on peanuts and champagne, one could quite easily live by going to every cocktail party, premiere and first night to which one was invited. As he had done in London, Crisp allowed his phone number to be listed in the Manhattan telephone directory and saw it as his duty to converse with anyone who called him.

In addition to his listed phone number, Mr Crisp would accept dinner invitations from almost anyone. While it was expected that the inviter would pay for dinner, Mr Crisp did his best to 'sing for his supper' by regaling his hosts with wonderful stories and yarns much as he did in his theatre performances. Dinner with Quentin Crisp was said to be one of the best shows in New York.

During the 1980s and 1990s Crisp gained worldwide recognition when Sting dedicated his song Englishman In New York to him. Sting wrote the song not long after Crisp moved from London to an apartment in New York's Bowery. In late 1986 Sting visited Crisp in his apartment in New York and was told over dinner — and the next three days — what life had been like for a homosexual man in the homophobic Great Britain of the 1920s to the 1960s. Sting was shocked and fascinated at the same time and decided to write the song. In his 1995 autobiography Take It Like A Man Boy George tells about how he had always felt very close to Crisp during his childhood since he was facing similar problems as a young homosexual living in a homophobic surrounding.

Crisp remained fiercely independent and unpredictable into old age. He caused controversy and confusion in the gay community by calling AIDS 'a fad', and homosexuality 'a terrible disease', and famously commented 'disrespectfully' on the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. However, he was continually in demand from journalists requiring a sound-bite, and throughout the nineties his commentary was sought on any number of topics.

The year after The Naked Civil Servant was broadcast on British and American television and made both actor John Hurt and Crisp himself into stars, the former nude model & prostitute, now theatre-filling rancoteur, himself made his debut as a film actor in the Royal College of Art's low-budget production of Hamlet (1976). Crisp played Polonius in the 65-minute adaptation of one of Shakespeare's greatest works, in support of Helen Mirren, who doubled as Ophelia and Gertrude. It would be nine years before his next turn before the cameras, in the 1985 film The Bride, which brought him into contact with Sting, who played the lead role of Baron Frankenstein.

In 1992, he was persuaded by Sally Potter to play Elizabeth I in the film Orlando. Although he found the role taxing, he won acclaim for a dignified and touching performance. Crisp next had an uncredited cameo in the controversial 1993 AIDS drama Philadelphia. He was chosen by Channel Four to deliver the first 'Alternative Christmas Speech', a counterpoint to the Queen's Christmas speech, in 1993.

In 1996 he was among the many people interviewed for the historical documentary on how Hollywood films have depicted homosexuality, entitled The Celluloid Closet. In his final volume of memoirs, Resident Alien, published in the same year, Crisp stated that he was close to the end of his life. However, a humorous pact he had made with Penny Arcade to live to one hundred, with ten years off for good behaviour proved prophetic.

In June 1996 he was one of the guest entertainers at the second Pride Scotland festival in Glasgow.

Crisp died shortly before his ninety-first birthday in Chorlton-cum-Hardy, Greater Manchester, on the eve of a nationwide revival of his one-man show. His body was cremated with a minimum of ceremony, and his ashes flown back to New York and scattered over Manhattan.

Quentin Crisp's comment following the death of Princess Diana was as follows --
"She could have been Queen of England -- and she was swanning about Paris. What disgraceful behavior. Going about saying she wanted to be the queen of hearts. The vulgarity of it is so overpowering." (Atlanta Southern Voice, 1 July 1999).

Kenny Everett

Kenny Everett born 25 December 1944 (d. 1995)

Kenny Everett - born Maurice Cole in Crosby, Merseyside, Liverpool - was a popular British radio DJ and television entertainer.

After a a successful career on radio In 1978, London's Thames Television offered him a new venture, which became the very successful and ground-breaking Kenny Everett Video Show. This was a vehicle for Everett's characters and sketches interspersed with the latest pop hits, either performed by the artists themselves, or as backing tracks to dance routines by the supposedly risqué (for the time) dance troupe Hot Gossip.

In the pre-MTV era, this mixture of pop bands and comic sketches was a new format for television. It was so successful that pop and TV stars queued up to make cameo appearances, including Rod Stewart; Billy Connolly; Kate Bush; Cliff Richard; Freddie Mercury; Terry Wogan; and Suzi Quatro, to name just a few.

These shows were also unusual in that there was no studio audience or laughter track. The only reaction sounds were those of the writers, staff and crew at Thames' Teddington Studios in South West London. Everett would often ad lib and deviate from the script; his bloopers were sometimes left in the final cut and on several occasions he would pull the camera around the studio revealing the crew not quite sure what was going to happen next. There were also the stories of Captain Kremmen, a science fiction hero voiced by Everett and originally developed for his Capital Radio shows, who travelled the galaxy battling fictional alien menaces, along with his assistant Dr Gitfinger and his voluptuous sidekick Carla. In the first three series these segments were animations created by the Cosgrove-Hall partnership (responsible for the successful children's cartoon series Dangermouse, among many others). In the fourth series ('Video Cassette') Kremmen was featured as live action, with Anna Dawson playing Carla, the segments were comedy shorts, rather than the erstwhile stories.

Other characters included ageing biker Sid Snot (remembered by fans for unsuccessfully attempting to flip cigarettes into his mouth - at one point Everett managed to catch one in his mouth, to the amusement of the studio crew); Marcel Wave, a lecherous Frenchman played by Everett wearing an absurdly false latex chin; and Angry of Mayfair, a middle-class City gent complaining of the risqué content of the show, banging the camera with his umbrella, only to then be revealed as actually wearing women's underwear.

Everett's interest in (then primitive) video processing technology and electronic effects showed itself in such features as the appearances of a bobbing 'alien' entirely composed of a distorted video image of his own head ('Hello. I'm Spod, from Planet Thfnnnn. And this is all I do... Pathetic, isn't it?').

The series ran for four seasons on ITV, and was a big ratings hit, being required viewing for any teenager of the time. The last episode ended on a rather sour note (after Everett had locked horns with Thames management over his show and its scheduling) with Everett giving a rather restrained farewell speech as the set and scenery was being stripped down by the crew. The final shot before the closing credits was Everett himself being picked up and placed inside an oversized garbage can.

In 1981, Everett fell out with Thames regarding the management of his show, including the scheduling of the programme against the BBC's Top of the Pops on Thursday evenings. TOTP was a ratings powerhouse at the time, and was effectively unbeatable in the days of three channel television in the UK. The BBC offered Everett a contract for a live audience sketch format comedy programme, and this partnership came to fruition at Christmas 1981, with a one-off special, followed by five series.

There were legal concerns when Thames attempted to block the transfer of Everett's characters to the BBC, claiming them as their copyright. This led to the creation of new characters such as the spooneristically named Cupid Stunt an American B-movie actress with pneumatic breasts (Everett made no attempt to cover his beard) who told (usually to a rapt cardboard cut-out of Michael Parkinson) lurid and incredible tales of life on set with Burt Reynolds and other male stars of the era.

It has been alledged that Cupid was originally to have been named Mary Hing but this was vetoed by the BBC as too obvious. It remains unconfirmed as to how Cupid Stunt was then approved. Announcers were often encouraged to simply refer to her as Cupid, to prevent the possibility of mispronunciation. A new punk character known as Gizzard Puke was developed, as Thames were trying to prevent Sid Snot from moving to the BBC. In the event, Thames' action failed, and all the characters from the Video Show were released for use. Inept TV handyman Reg Prescott became another firm viewers' favourite, as each week he managed graphically and bloodily to injure himself with tools whilst attempting to demonstrate DIY tips.

Brazilian-born Cleo Rocos, a glamorously curvaceous co-star, featured heavily in all of the BBC series and became one of Everett's closest friends. She was often portrayed wearing little more than frilly underwear and high heels, and her figure was used to great comic effect.

Some fans feel that the move to the more traditional BBC watered down the anarchic spirit of his previous work. The corporation assumed much tighter control over both content and production, and it is felt that this removed some of the spontaneity which had become a hallmark of the Thames series. However, the series performed equally well in the ratings, and the characters and their catchphrases endure 20 years later.

By the late 1980s, although still successful on the radio, the TV show format had run its course, and Everett's personal life was becoming increasingly complicated. He had married the singer Lee 'Lady Lee' Middleton (Billy Fury's former girlfriend) in 1966; but by 1979 they had separated, and Everett came out as gay. He launched himself into the London gay club scene, and could often be seen in London club Heaven (then a very popular clubbing destination) on Saturday nights. He was an active campaigner for gay rights. He seemed never to fully come to terms with his sexuality however, and he suffered bouts of severe depression.

By the 1990s Everett's health was declining. He died of an AIDS-related illness on April 4, 1995, at the age of 50.