Thomas Mann

Thomas Mann born 6 June 1875 (d. 1955)

Paul Thomas Mann was a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate, known for his series of highly symbolic and ironic epic novels and mid-length stories, noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and the intellectual. His analysis and critique of the European and German soul used modernised German and Biblical stories, as well as the ideas of Goethe, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer.

Thomas Mann was born in Lübeck, Germany to German and Brazilian parents. His mother was Roman Catholic, but Mann was baptised into his father's Lutheran faith. Mann's father died in 1891, and his business was liquidated. The family subsequently moved to Munich. Mann attended the science division of a Lübeck gymnasium, then spent time at the University of Munich and Technical University of Munich where, in preparation for a journalism career, he studied history, economics, art history, and literature. He lived in Munich from 1891 until 1933, with the exception of a year in Palestrina, Italy, with his novelist elder brother Heinrich. Thomas worked with the South German Fire Insurance Company 1894–95. His career as a writer began when he wrote for Simplicissimus. Mann's first short story was published in 1898.

In 1905, he married Katia Pringsheim, daughter of a prominent, secular Jewish family of intellectuals. They had six children who became literary, artistic figures in their own right.

In 1929, Mann had a cottage built in the fishing village of Nidden (Nida, Lithuania) on the Curonian Spit, where there was a German art colony, and where he spent the summers of 1930-32 there, working on Joseph and his Brothers. In 1933, after Hitler assumed power, Mann emigrated to Küsnacht, near Zürich, Switzerland, in 1933, but received Czechoslovakian citizenship and a passport in 1936. He then emigrated to the United States in 1939, where he taught at Princeton University. In 1942, the Mann family moved to Pacific Palisades, California, where they lived until after the end of World War II; on June 23, 1944 Thomas Mann was naturalised as a citizen of the United States. In 1952, he returned to Europe, to live in Kilchberg, near Zürich, Switzerland.

He never again lived in Germany, though he regularly travelled there. His most important German visit was in 1949, at the 200th birthday of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, attending celebrations in Frankfurt am Main and Weimar, a statement that German culture extends beyond the new political borders.

In 1955, he died of atherosclerosis in a hospital in Zürich and was buried in Kilchberg. Many institutions are named in his honour, most famously the Thomas Mann Gymnasium of Budapest.

Mann's diaries, unsealed in 1975, tell of his struggles with his sexuality, which found reflection in his works, most prominently through the obsession of the elderly Aschenbach for the 14-year-old Polish boy Tadzio in the novella Death in Venice (Der Tod in Venedig, 1912), which was famously filmed in 1971 by Luchino Visconti starring Dirk Bogarde, and turned into an opera by Benjamin Britten, his last, in 1973.

John Maynard Keynes

John Maynard Keynes born 5 June 1883 (d. 1946)

John Maynard Keynes, 1st Baron Keynes CB was a British economist whose ideas, called Keynesian economics, had a major impact on modern economic and political theory as well as on many governments' fiscal policies. He advocated interventionist government policy, by which the government would use fiscal and monetary measures to mitigate the adverse effects of economic recessions, depressions and booms. He is one of the fathers of modern theoretical macroeconomics.

Born in Cambridge, John Maynard Keynes was the son of an economics lecturer at Cambridge University and a successful author and a social reformer.

Keynes' early romantic and sexual relationships were almost all with men. Homosexuality was not unusual in the Bloomsbury group in which Keynes was avidly involved. One of his great loves was the artist Duncan Grant, whom he met in 1908, and he was also involved with the writer Lytton Strachey. Keynes appeared to turn away from homosexual relationships around the time of the first World War. In 1918, he met Lydia Lopokova, a well-known Russian ballerina, and they married in 1925.

After studying Mathematics at Cambridge, where his interest in politics lead him to switch to economics, Keynes accepted a lectureship at Cambridge in economics, from which position he began to build his reputation. Soon he was appointed to the Royal Commission on Indian Currency and Finance, where he showed his considerable talent at applying economic theory to practical problems.

His expertise was in demand during the First World War. He worked for the Adviser to the Chancellor of the Exchequer and to the Treasury on Financial and Economic Questions. Among his responsibilities were the design of terms of credit between Britain and its continental allies during the war, and the acquisition of scarce currencies.

His successes in this field led eventually to the appointment that would have a huge effect on Keynes’ life and career: financial representative for the Treasury to the 1919 Paris Peace Conference.

Keynes' career lifted off as an adviser to the British finance department from 1915 – 1919 during World War I, and their representative at the Versailles peace conference in 1919. His observations appeared in the highly influential book The Economic Consequences of the Peace in 1919, followed by A Revision of the Treaty in 1922. Using statistics provided to him by the German delegation, he argued that the reparations which Germany was forced to pay to the victors in the war were too large, would lead to the ruin of the German economy and result in further conflict in Europe. These predictions were borne out when the German economy suffered in the hyperinflation of 1923. Only a fraction of reparations were ever paid.

By 1942, Keynes was a highly recognised economist and was raised to the House of Lords as Baron Keynes, of Tilton in the County of Sussex, where he sat on the Liberal benches. During World War II, Keynes argued in How to Pay for the War that the war effort should be largely financed by higher taxation, rather than deficit spending, in order to avoid inflation. As Allied victory began to look certain, Keynes was heavily involved, as leader of the British delegation and chairman of the World Bank commission, in the negotiations that established the Bretton Woods system. The Keynes-plan, concerning an international clearing-union argued for a radical system for the management of currencies, involving a world central bank, the International Clearing Union, responsible for a common world unit of currency, the Bancor.

Keynes was ultimately a successful investor, building up a substantial private fortune. He was nearly wiped out following the Stock Market Crash of 1929, but he soon recouped his fortune. He enjoyed collecting books: for example, he collected and protected many of Isaac Newton's papers. He was interested in literature in general and drama in particular and supported the Cambridge Arts Theatre financially, which allowed the institution to become, at least for a while, a major British stage outside of London.

Keynes' personal interest in Classical Opera and Dance focused on his support of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden and the Ballet Company at Sadlers Wells. During the War as a member of CEMA (Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts) Keynes helped secure government funds to maintain both companies while their venues were shut. Following the War Keynes was instrumental in establishing the Arts Council of Great Britain and was the founding Chairman in 1946. Unsurprisingly from the start the two organisations that received the largest grant from the new body were the Royal Opera House and Sadlers Wells.

He also had a less laudable interest in eugenics.

Keynes died of a heart attack at his holiday home in Tilton, East Sussex, his heart problems being aggravated by the strain of working on post-war international financial problems. He died soon after he arranged a guarantee of an Anglo-American loan to Great Britain, a process he described as 'absolute hell'.

Tom Robinson

Tom Robinson born 1 June 1950

Although he was never really a proper 'punk', the Tom Robinson Band emerged on the back of the punk movement and enjoyed some success. Notably his ground breaking 1978 anthem Sing If You`re Glad To Be Gay, which was a Top 20 hit in the UK. His other notable hits were 2-4-6-8 Motorway (1977) and War Baby (1983)

Tom enjoyed some solo success and then Britain's first openly gay pop star 'ruined' it all by getting married and having children - which attracted some amusement from the press and the ire of some sections of the gay community.

He now sings that he's glad to be bi and continues to be an advocate for the LGBT community.

He finally retired as a full-time musician in 2002 and works as a broadcaster for BBC 6 Music. He occasionally appears in concert for fan events and for causes he supports.

Rupert Everett

Rupert Everett born 29 May 1959

Rupert James Hector Everett is an English actor. He is perhaps the first Hollywood movie star to have a long, mainstream, and successful acting career while being openly gay, and blasé about it.

Rupert Everett was born in Norfolk, England. From the age of 7 he was educated at Farleigh House preparatory school and later was educated by Benedictine monks at Ampleforth College, but dropped out of school at 15 and ran away to London to become an actor. In order to support himself, he worked as a male prostitute, or rent boy, as he later admitted to US magazine in 1997. After being dismissed from the Central School of Speech and Drama for insubordination, he travelled to Scotland and got a job in the avant-garde Citizens' Theatre of Glasgow.

His break came with the 1982 West End production of Another Country, playing a gay schoolboy opposite Kenneth Branagh, followed by a film version in 1984 with Colin Firth. He began to develop a promising film career, until he co-starred with Bob Dylan in the huge flop Hearts of Fire (1987).

In 1989 he moved to Paris, writing a novel Hello, Darling, Are You Working? and coming out as gay, a move which some at the time perceived as damaging to his career. Returning to the public eye in The Comfort of Strangers (1990), several films of variable success followed. In 1995 he released a second novel, The Hairdresser of St. Tropez.

Everett's career was revitalised by My Best Friend's Wedding (1997), playing Julia Roberts's gay friend. In 1999, he played Madonna's gay best friend in The Next Best Thing (he also sang backup on her cover of American Pie, which is on the film's soundtrack). He has since appeared in a number of high-profile film roles, often playing heterosexual leads. He is also a Vanity Fair contributing editor.

In 2006 Everett published his memoir, Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins. In it he revealed he had had a 6-year affair with British television presenter Paula Yates. 'I am mystified by my heterosexual affairs — but then I am mystified by most of my relationships,' he said, with the article describing him as bisexual as opposed to homosexual.

But in a radio show with Jonathan Ross, Everett described his heterosexual affairs as resulting from adventurousness: 'I was basically adventurous, I think I wanted to try everything.'

In recent years Everett has expressed the view that his career has been negatively affected by his having come out and gone so far as to advise younger actors against doing so. Whilst his career has seen him achieve varying levels of critical and commercial success through the years, this may be as much due to his limitations as an actor - posh, brittle, slightly camp - as to the industry's view of him as a gay actor.

Helmut Berger

Helmut Berger born 29 May 1944

Helmut Berger is an Austrian actor.

Berger (whose real name is Helmut Steinberger) was born in Bad Ischl, Austria, into a family of hoteliers and although he had no interest in gastronomy or the hospitality industry, he initially trained and worked in this area. At the age of 18, he moved to London, where he did odd-jobs whilst simultaneously taking acting classes. After studying languages in Perugia, Berger moved to Rome.

In 1964, he first met Luchino Visconti, whose life partner he later became. Visconti gave him his first acting role in the movie Le Streghe (1967) (in the episode La Strega Bruciata Viva), but he attained international fame playing Martin von Essenbeck in Visconti's The Damned (1969). In this film, in what is perhaps his best known scene, he mimics the role of Lola, as played by Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel . However, the role of Ludwig II of Bavaria in Visconti's Ludwig can be considered the pinnacle of his acting career: here he portrays the monarch from his blooming youth, to his dissolute final years – and in the process reveals a nervous and paranoid lord of decay drawn from his own weaknesses and psychological depths.

Visconti also introduced him to new people. Musicians and models first (in London), and then Berger was introduced to international artists - conductor Leonard Bernstein, opera singer Maria Callas, ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev - with whom Berger had an affair; Nureyev was sexually hyper-active, but Berger disliked the Russian's passion for garlic and vodka. Nureyev wanted to live with Berger but he could not give him the security of Visconti. For a short time, Nureyev was his lover, but Visconti was his husband and his father-figure.

Visconti's death in 1976 plunged Berger into a deep personal and financial crisis. Visconti's will, in which Berger was apparently named as heir, could not be found. A former friend and companion of Visconti, the director Franco Zeffirelli, has subsequently castigated Berger publicly, accusing him of exploiting his mentor. In addition to a suicide attempt on the first anniversary of Visconti's death, Berger has also had alcohol and drug-related problems.

He has made appearances in various B-movies and smaller prestige pictures such as Ash Wednesday (1973) with Elizabeth Taylor. Berger has also worked in television, most notably in the role of Peter De Vilbis on Dynasty. Since Visconti's death no director has been able to fulfill Berger's potential again.

Berger, with his dissipated lifestyle and openly acknowledged bisexuality, has been a welcome guest on talk shows telling for example of erotic adventures with Marisa Berenson, whom he supposedly wished to marry, and Mick Jagger.

In 2004, to the great interest of the Austrian media, Berger moved from Rome to Salzburg to live with his mother; he denied rumours of financial difficulties, explaining he was merely looking for a new apartment in Rome. He also declared he had come off all drugs.

In 2007, he received the honour of a Special Teddy at the Berlin Film Festival for his overall professional achievements.

Donald Maclean

Donald Maclean born 25 May 1913 (d. 1983)

Donald Duart Maclean was a career British diplomat turned Soviet intelligence agent. Maclean was one of the Cambridge Five, members of MI5, MI6 or the diplomatic service who acted as spies for the Soviet Union during WWII and in the early-Cold War era. His actions are widely thought to have contributed to the 1948 Soviet blockade of Berlin and the onset of the Korean War. As a reward for his espionage activities, Maclean was brevetted a colonel in the Soviet KGB.

Educated at Gresham's School and Trinity Hall, Cambridge, he was the son of the Liberal politician Sir Donald Maclean, who was Leader of the parliamentary Opposition in the years following WWI.

From Gresham's, Maclean won a place at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, arriving in 1931 to study modern languages. While there, he joined the Communist Party. In his second year at Cambridge, his father died, and in his last year he was recruited into Soviet intelligence by Anthony Blunt, ultimately becoming one of the Cambridge Five.

All of the Cambridge Five came from privileged backgrounds, and two of the others, Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt, were known to be homosexuals. It is sometimes stated that Maclean was, too, and Guy Burgess claimed to have seduced him, but it seems more likely that he was bisexual.

In 1934, Maclean passed the Civil Service examination and started work at the Foreign Office in London. While there, he was under the operational control of the Russian secret service.

Maclean was later posted to the British Embassy in Paris, where he was when the Second World War broke out. In 1940 he married the American-born Melinda Marling in Paris shortly before the Germans captured the city. They escaped to the coast and got back to England on board a Royal Navy warship.

Maclean continued to report to Moscow from London and signalled in 1941 that a uranium bomb might be constructed within two years through the efforts of Imperial Chemical Industries with the support of the British government. Maclean sent Moscow a sixty-page report with the official minutes of the British Cabinet Committee on the Uranium Bomb Project.

He was transferred to Washington, where he served from 1944 to 1948, as Secretary at the British Embassy and, later, Secretary of the Combined Policy Committee on Atomic Development. For the Soviets, this was his most fruitful period, and he was Stalin's main source of information about communications and policy development between Churchill and Roosevelt, and then between Churchill or Clement Attlee and Harry S. Truman.

Although Maclean did not transmit technical data on the atom bomb, he reported on its development and progress, particularly the amount of uranium available to the United States. As the British representative on the American-British-Canadian council on the sharing of atomic secrets, he was able to provide the Soviet Union with minutes of Cabinet meetings. This knowledge alone gave the Soviet scientists the ability to predict the number of bombs that could be built by the Americans. Coupled with the efforts of Alan Nunn May and Klaus Fuchs, who provided scientific information, Maclean's reports to his KGB controller helped the Soviets not only to build their own atomic bomb, but also to estimate their nuclear arsenal's relative strength against that of the United States.

Armed with this information, Stalin was able to conclude that the United States did not possess a sufficiently large stock of atomic weapons or bomb production capacity to attack the Soviet Union or its allies in either Europe or the Pacific in the near future. This knowledge played a central role in Stalin's decision to institute a blockade of Berlin in 1948, as well as his decision to extensively arm and train Kim Il Sung's North Korean army for an offensive war (a conflict that would later claim the lives of over 30,000 U.S. and Allied troops).

In 1941 Maclean was tentatively identified by Walter Krivitsky, a Soviet defector, who is rumoured to have been assassinated by Soviet agents in the Bellevue Hotel in Washington D.C.. It was said that Krivitsky had claimed there was a mole in British intelligence who was "a Scotsman of good family, educated at Eton and Oxford (sic), and an idealist who worked for the Russians without payment."

Maclean's continual monitoring of secret messages between Truman and Churchill allowed Stalin to know how the Americans and the British proposed to occupy Germany and carve up the borders of Eastern European countries.

Maclean reported to Moscow that the goal of the Americans was to ensure American economic domination in Europe - the so-called Marshall Plan. The new international economic organisation to restore European productivity would be under the control of American financial capital. At that time the Soviet Union had no export earnings, war reparations were the sole source of foreign capital to rebuild the war-torn Soviet economy. Yalta and Potsdam agreements allowed German reparations in the form of equipment, manufacturing machinery, cars, trucks, and building supplies to be sent to Russia for five years. The flow of goods was unregulated by international control, and could be used for whatever purposes the Soviets chose. Six months after the Marshall Plan was rejected by the Soviet Union, multiparty rule in Eastern Europe ended.

In 1948, Maclean was transferred to the British Embassy in Cairo. Undoubtedly, Maclean's information was significant in assisting Stalin in his strategy for the Cold War.

The story of the Burgess and Maclean defection, and the subsequent implication of Philby, is a fascinating one of code-breaking, detection, and discovery. In 1949, Robert Lamphere, FBI agent in charge of Russian espionage, along with cryptanalysts, discovered that between 1944 and 1946 a member of the British Embassy was sending messages to the KGB. The code name of this official was 'Homer'. By a process of elimination, a short list of three or four men were identified as possible Homers. One was Maclean.

Shortly after Lamphere's investigation began, Kim Philby was assigned to Washington, serving as Britain's CIA-FBI-NSA liaison. As such, he was privy to the decoding of the Russian material, and recognised that Maclean was very probably Homer. He confirmed this through his British KGB control. He was also aware that Lamphere and his colleagues had found that the encoded messages to the KGB had been sent from New York. Maclean had visited New York on a regular basis, ostensibly to visit his wife and children, who were living there with his in-laws.

The pressure on Philby now began to grow. If Maclean was unmasked as a Soviet agent, then, were he to confess, the trail might lead to the other Cambridge spies. Philby, now in a very important position in his ability to provide information to the Soviets, might be implicated, if for no other reason than his association with Maclean at Cambridge. Concerned that Maclean would be positively identified, interrogated, and confess to MI5, Philby and Burgess concocted a scheme in which Guy Burgess would return to London (where Maclean was now the Foreign Service officer in charge of American affairs). Burgess would then warn Maclean of the impending unmasking.

Before Burgess left, Philby was explicit in his instructions to Burgess. He was not to defect with Maclean.

The Philby-Burgess plan was for Burgess to visit Maclean in his Foreign Office quarters, give him a note identifying a place where the two could meet - it was assumed that Maclean, now under suspicion and denied sensitive documents, had a bugged office - and Burgess would explain the situation. They met clandestinely to discuss Maclean's imminent exposure and necessary defection to Russia. Yuri Modin, the controller at the time, made arrangements for Maclean's defection. Maclean was in an extremely nervous state, and reluctant to leave alone. Modin was willing to serve as his guide, but KGB Central demanded that Burgess escort Maclean behind the Iron Curtain.

In the meantime, MI5 had insisted that Maclean be questioned. They had decided that he would be confronted with the FBI and MI5 evidence on Monday, 28 May 1951.

On Maclean's 38th birthday, the Friday before the Monday when he was to be interrogated, Burgess and Maclean fled to the coast, boarded a ship to France, and disappeared. Had Blunt learned of the impending questioning of Maclean, and warned Burgess that the time had come? Blunt never admitted to that, and it is possible that Burgess and Maclean had selected Friday to flee whatever the current circumstances. Both Modin and Philby assumed that Burgess would deliver Maclean to a handler, and that he would return. For some reason, the Russians insisted that Burgess accompany Maclean the entire way. Perhaps Burgess was no longer useful to the KGB as a spy, but too valuable to fall into the hands of MI5.

Maclean, unlike the self-indulgent Burgess, assimilated into the Soviet Union and became a respected citizen, learning Russian and serving as a specialist on the economic policy of the West and British foreign affairs. He worked for the Soviet Foreign Ministry and the Institute of World Economic and International Relations. Maclean was awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labour and the Order of Combat.

While living in Moscow, he spoke up for Soviet dissidents, and gave money to the families of some of those imprisoned. His American-born wife, Melinda, joined him in Russia with their children, but they were soon divorced and she had a brief affair Kim Philby in 1966. Later she and the children returned to the United States.

Maclean died of a heart attack in 1983, at the age of sixty-nine. He was cremated and some of his ashes were scattered on his parents' grave in the churchyard of Holy Trinity Church, Penn, Buckinghamshire, England.

Gabriel Atkin

Gabriel Atkin born 1897* (d. 1937)

Gabriel Atkin was a British artist.

Born William Park Atkin, Gabriel Atkin was born in South Shields, Durham, the son of a builder. Before the First World War he showed promise as a water-colourist and he studied briefly at Armstrong College in Newcastle with tutor Richard George Hatton.

With the start of the war he enlisted and was based mostly on the south coast. In the summer of 1915 he was sent to Cambridge for officer training. While there he got to know the circle of gay men including the academics Edward Dent and A. T. 'Theo' Bartholomew. Although Atkin could be charming he was also prone to drunkenness and riotous behaviour, which caused those around him embarrassment and anguish. They engaged in some matchmaking and encouraged Siegfried Sassoon to meet Atkin. The meeting took place when Siegfried Sassoon travelled to Margate, where Gabriel Atkin was staying, on 20 November 1918. The meeting went well and they immediately fell for each other. They spent that Christmas together at Siegfried Sassoon's family home at Weirleigh and at Robert Ross's rooms in Half Moon Street in London. Gabriel Atkin almost certainly provided Siegfried Sassoon with his first sexual encounter.

After this Siegfried Sassoon became a minor literary celebrity and got to know a number of well-known people. This meant that Gabriel Atkin also got to know them. Sacheverell Sitwell introduced Siegfried Sassoon to Ronald Firbank. Although Siegfried Sassoon did not find Ronald Firbank's work appealing they met a couple more times mainly because Atkin was a devotee. They had also got to know some of the Bloomsbury Set including Lytton Strachey, Mark Gertler, Duncan Grant, and John Maynard Keynes.

Gabriel Atkin had a show at the London Salon in 1919. He also sent work to the Artists of the Northern Counties exhibits.

In 1920 Atkin was living in a studio flat in Tite Street in Chelsea, London, and Siegfried Sassoon gave him an allowance of £300 so that he could continue painting. They began to see much less of each other, although Siegfried Sassoon continued to send money for some years.

Gabriel Atkin travelled to France and for a while was a male prostitute in Lyon and then the south of France.

In 1928 he met the minor writer Mary Butts, and they married in London in 1930. For the first two years of their marriage they lived in London and Newcastle. They then settled in Sennen in Cornwall and bought a cottage that they called Tebel Vos. They both relied on drink and drugs. The marriage was troubled and Gabriel Atkin left in 1934. By 1937 they were both dead.

*actual birthday unknown

Bruce Chatwin

Bruce Chatwin born 13 May 1940 (d. 1989)

Bruce Charles Chatwin was a British novelist and travel writer.

After leaving Marlborough College in 1958, Chatwin reluctantly moved to London to work as a porter in the Works of Art department at the auction house Sotheby's. Thanks to his sharp visual acuity, he quickly became Sotheby's expert on Impressionist art. He later became a director of the company.

In late 1964 he began to suffer from problems with his sight, which he attributed to the close analysis of artwork entailed by his job. A leading eye specialist recommended that Chatwin take a six month break from his work at Sotheby's. Having been involved in the design of an eye hospital in Addis Ababa, he suggested Chatwin visit east Africa. In February 1965, Chatwin left for the Sudan. On his return, Chatwin quickly became disenchanted with the art world, and turned his interest instead to archaeology. He resigned from his job at Sotheby's in the early summer of 1966.

Chatwin studied archaelogy at the University of Edinburgh for two years but left without taking a degree, finding the work tiresome.

In 1972, Chatwin was hired by the Sunday Times Magazine as an adviser on art and architecture. His association with the magazine cultivated his narrative skills and he travelled on many international assignments, writing on such subjects as Algerian migrant workers and the Great Wall of China, and interviewing diverse people.

In 1972, Chatwin interviewed the 93-year-old architect and designer Eileen Gray in her Paris salon, where he noticed a map of the area of South America called Patagonia which she had painted. 'I've always wanted to go there,' Bruce told her. 'So have I,' she replied, 'go there for me.' Two years later, in November 1974, Chatwin flew out to Lima in Peru, and reached Patagonia a month later. When he arrived there he severed himself from the newspaper with a telegram: 'Have gone to Patagonia.' He spent six months there, a trip which resulted in the book In Patagonia (1977), which established his reputation as a travel writer. Later, however, residents in the region came forward to contradict the events depicted in Chatwin's book. It was the first, but not the last time in his career, that conversations and characters that Chatwin reported as true, were alleged to be just fiction.

Later works included a fictionalised study of the slave trade, The Viceroy of Ouidah, which he researched with extended stays in the West African state of Benin. For The Songlines, Chatwin went to Australia to develop the thesis that the songs of the Aborigines are a cross between a creation myth, an atlas and an Aboriginal man's personal story. On the Black Hill was set closer to home, in the hill farms of the Welsh Borders, and focuses on the relationship between twin brothers, Lewis and Benjamin, who grow up isolated from the course of twentieth century history. Utz, his last book, was a fictional take on the obsession which leads people to collect. Set in Prague, the novel details the life and death of Kaspar Utz, a man obsessed with the collection of Meissen porcelain. Chatwin was working on a number of new ideas for future novels at the time of his death in 1989.

Chatwin is admired for his spare, lapidary style and his innate story-telling abilities. However, he has also been strongly criticised for his fictionalised anecdotes of real people, places, and events. Frequently, the people he wrote about recognised themselves and did not always appreciate his distortions of their culture and behaviour. Chatwin, however, was philosophical about what he saw as an unavoidable dilemma, arguing that his portrayals were not intended to be faithful representations.

Much to the surprise of many of his friends, Chatwin had married Elizabeth Chanler in 1965, whom had met at Sotheby's where she worked as a secretary. Chatwin was bisexual throughout his entire married life, a circumstance his wife knew and accepted. They had no children, and after fifteen years of marriage, she asked for a separation and sold their farmhouse in Gloucestershire. However, towards the end of his life they reconciled.

Chatwin was known as a socialite in addition to being a famous travel author. His circle of friends extended far and wide and he was renowned for accepting hospitality and patronage from a powerful set of friends and allies. Penelope Betjeman - wife of the poet laureate John Betjeman - showed him the border country of Wales, and thereby helped to contribute to the gestation of the book that would become On the Black Hill. Tom Maschler, the publisher, was also a patron to Chatwin during this time, lending him his house in the area as a writing retreat. Later, he visited Patrick Leigh Fermor, in his house near Kardamyli, in the Peloponnese.

Numbered among his lovers was Jasper Conran.

In the late 1980s, Chatwin developed AIDS. He was one of the first high-profile sufferers of the disease in Britain and although he hid the illness - passing off his symptoms as fungal infections or the effects of the bite of a Chinese bat - a typically exotic cover story - it was a poorly kept secret. He did not respond well to AZT, and with his condition deteriorating rapidly, Chatwin and his wife went to live in the South of France at the house that belonged to the mother of his one-time lover, Jasper Conran. There, during his final months, Chatwin was nursed by both his wife and Shirley Conran. He died in Nice in 1989 at age 48.

His ashes were scattered by a Byzantine chapel above Kardamyli in the Peloponnese near to the home of one of his many mentors, Patrick Leigh-Fermor.

Alan Bennett

Alan Bennett born 9 May 1934

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Michael Bennett

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hans Christian Andersen

Hans Christian Andersen born 2 April 1805 (d. 1875)

The son of a poor shoemaker and an illiterate laundry woman (I'm not making this up), Hans Christan Andersen was an ill-educated and eccentric boy who arrived penniless aged fourteen in wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen. Odd as he was, he managed to charm the wealthy locals into sponsoring his education and on his graduation from high school in 1828 published his first novel in 1829. More novels, dramas, poetry, travel books and autobiographies followed - he was Denmark's leading man of letters. In 1837, he began writing the fairy tales for which is now known and loved , and famous then. He travelled extensively throughout Europe, and was a hit in England although he drove his host, Charles Dickens mad with his fussy, effeminate ways.

Hans Christian Anderson was likely bisexual and probably remained celibate for his whole life, but he certainly indulged in many romantic relationships and much letter writing with young men, and some of the tales are alleged to be autobiographical. Certainly The Little Mermaid, The Ugly Duckling and other tales of impossible loves and poor self-image have resonated with gay readers through the ages. The Danny Kaye film doesn't help either. There has been much controversy in Denmark at suggestions that Hans was as big a fairy as his tales.

He died in 1875 leaving private journals detailing his refusal to have 'sexual relations' and his enthusiam for masturbation, perhaps giving new meaning to Thumbelina...

Paul Verlaine

Paul Verlaine born 30 March 1844 (d. 1896)

One of the greatest and most popular French poets, bisexual Paul Verlaine was born in Metz, but educated in Paris where he started writing poetry early. He published his first volume in 1867 aged 23 and was soon recognised as a poet of promise and orginality.

His private life and his work are inextricably linked, beginning with his love for Mathilde Maute, who became his wife. He eventually lost interest in her after he paired up with a young poet who hero-worshipped him and became his drinking buddy and lover - Arthur Rimbaud.

Together they travelled widely throughout Europe but Verlaine brought their volatile affair to an abrupt halt in 1873 when he shot Rimbaud in a drunken jealous rage. Rimbaud survived but Verlaine was eventually arrested, subjected to a brutal internal examination to identify the nature of their relationship and sentenced to two years imprisonment at Mons. There, he underwent a religious conversion and his ensuing work took on a mystical spiritual bent.

On his release, Verlaine travelled to England where he continued to write and teach. On returning to France in 1877 to teach English, he became infatuated with a pupil named Lucien Letinois, but was devastated when the boy died of typhoid.

Verlaine's final years saw a decline into poverty and alcoholism - although his enthusiam for younger men remained with him. He continued to be recognised as a ground-breaking poet and did much to preserve the poetic reputation of his former lover, Rimbaud, who died aged 37 in 1891.

His best known poem is probably Chanson d`automne, largely thanks to its use as a code message for the Allies during WW2. His poetry has also proved popular with composers - Gabriel Faure set several to music. A heavy drinker and plagued with poor health in later years, he remained a prolific writer passionately dedicated to sensuality and poetry.

Lauritz Melchior

Lauritz Melchior born 20 March 1890 (d. 1973)

Born in Copenhagen, Denmark Lauritz Melchior was a boy soprano and amateur singer before starting operatic vocal training in 1908.
He became a professional opera singer in 1913, initially performing as a baritone. Between 1917 & 1918 he studied to become a heldentenor - a powerful tenor suited to heroic operatic roles.

In 1920, he came to England where he sang in an experimental radio broadcast for the Marconi company, and where he met a man who was to become patron and lover for several years - author Hugh Walpole. After his relationship with Walpole cooled he apparently enjoyed the company of a merchant seaman he shared with his friend, the American poet, Hart Crane. He also married.

Melchior began to master the major Wagnerian roles which were to become his trademark; through the 1920s he performed in most of the major concert halls and opera houses in the Western world, with most of the great sopranos and conductors of the age, but he is best known for his hundreds of Wagner performances as a member of the Metropolitan Opera company between 1926 and 1950.

He appeared in 5 Hollywood musicals for MGM and Paramount between 1944 and 1952, mostly in jovial singing grandfather roles. In 1947, his hand and footprints were immortalised in cement in the forecourt of Grauman's Chinese Theatre.

He unofficially retired in 1955, although he continued to make occasional singing appearances. In the late 1960s, he set up a fund through the Juilliard school for the training of heldentenors. He was married twice but is widely acknowledged to have batted for both teams. A household name in his day, he is not so widely remembered today, although many recordings of his performances are still available.

He died in Santa Monica, California in 1973. He had been an American citizen since 1947, but is buried in Copenhagen.

Edmund Goulding

Edmund Goulding born 20 March 1891 (d. 1959)

Edmund Goulding was a film director. He was born in Feltham, Middlesex, England.

The son of a butcher, Goulding began acting in amateur theatricals and by 1909 began appearing on the West End in productions such as Gentlemen, The King (1909), Alice in Wonderland (1909), and a notorious presentation of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1913), adapted for the stage by G Constant Lounsbery.

Goulding served in World War I, then immigrated to the United States to become a singer. He was a fine ideas man, and could crank out a silent screen scenario very quickly. His writing talents were in demand by producers at Paramount and Famous Players Lasky, and so his singing aspirations were shelved. He wrote for several early film stars, and met his greatest success as co-author of Henry King's Tol'able David, a 1921 silent masterpiece.

Goulding directed Joan Crawford in her first substantial role, in Sally, Irene and Mary (1925), and Greta Garbo and John Gilbert in the smash hit Love (1927), before writing the script for Broadway Melody (1929), the first film musical.

Goulding directed Gloria Swanson in her first talkie, The Trespasser (1929). However, his greatest triumph came as director of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's Grand Hotel, winner of the 1932 Academy Award as Best Picture and granddaddy of the all-star ensemble story format.

Goulding moved to Warner Brothers in 1937, where he directed some of his best movies: Dawn Patrol (1938), White Banners (1938), and four outstanding melodramas with Bette Davis: That Certain Woman (1937), Dark Victory [pictured](1939), The Old Maid (1939), and The Great Lie (1941).

The Constant Nymph (1943) with Joan Fontaine, Claudia (1943) with Dorothy McGuire, and Of Human Bondage (1946) with Eleanor Parker were further testimonies to Goulding's adept direction of actresses.

After World War II, Goulding was hired at Twentieth Century Fox and made two excellent movies of starkly contrasting themes: The Razor's Edge (1946), based on a novel by Somerset Maugham, and the noir thriller Nightmare Alley (1947), both featuring Tyrone Power at his best.

Goulding's output after that was uneven. His last movie was Mardi Gras (1958), a dismissable musical starring Pat Boone.

By then, the man who directed the great stars of early moviedom was old, tired, and alcoholic.

Goulding's style as a director is distinguished by brisk pacing and an ability to elicit honest emotion from his players. He mastered a number of genres - comedy, romance, musicals, noir, and the war picture - and he adapted well to the personnel and conditions of each studio for which he worked.

There is a paradox to Goulding. His sensitivity to women's emotions brought him enduring success, as witnessed by his swooning melodramas, but his private life tells a different story. Goulding was bisexual, with a decided taste for promiscuity and voyeurism. His sex parties and casting couch were notorious.

A 2004 biography of Goulding, Edmund Goulding's Dark Victory by Matthew Kennedy says that it was widely known in Hollywood that Goulding was bisexual, and hosted wild parties for all persuasions.

But he cannot be dismissed simply as a sex addict or sexual exploiter. For every excoriation of his morals, there are accounts of his loyalty to friends, generosity to family, gentlemanly manner on the set, and preternatural ability to bring out the best in his actors.

He never had a long lasting romance. A marriage to dancer Marjorie Moss ended quickly with her premature death from tuberculosis. He maintained brief love affairs with younger men and women throughout his life, but either did not want or proved unable to sustain a long term relationship.

The real romance in Edmund Goulding's life is found in his movies.

He died following surgery at Cedars of Lebanon Medical Center in Los Angeles, California in 1959, although there are sources that say he committed suicide.

[Matthew Kennedy]
Edmund Goulding: Q&A with biographer Matthew Kennedy

Henry Cowell

Henry Cowell born 11 March in 1897 (d. 1965)

Henry Cowell was an American composer, musical theorist, pianist, teacher, publisher, and impresario.

Henry Cowell was born in Menlo Park, California, where he was unconventionally home-schooled by his left-wing writer parents, and surrounded by a wide variety of different music, from Irish and American folk to a wide variety of what would now be called World Music. Musically gifted from an early age, he began to study music formally at the University of California and went on to teach music in California and New York.

He was hugely influential, expanding on European classical traditions to explore Appalachian, Irish, Chinese, Japanese, Javanese, African, Indian and Tahitian music. He was a true musical innovator; The Tides of Manaunaun (1912) was the first to include tone clusters, The Aeolian Harp (1923) required the soloist to directly play the strings of a piano without the keyboard. In 1931, he worked with Russian engineer and electronic music pioneer, Leon Theremin, to create an early electronic keyboard called the Rhythmicon.

He composed some twenty symphonies and many other orchestral and choral works, including his best known work Fuguing Tunes (1945-1945).

He was a teacher and mentor to many other composers including John Cage, George Gershwin and Burt Bacharach, and particularly championed the music of Charles Ives. He did much to develop and promote and inspire contemporary music.

However, his career took an unexpected downward turn in 1936 when he was arrested for having sexual relations with a seventeen year old youth. Hoping for leniency, he pleaded guilty to that and related charges, but was sentenced to fifteen years in prison.

He continued to compose and write, but his reputation was destroyed, although he was loyally supported by family, friends and colleagues, including Martha Graham and Percy Grainger. Charles Ives, for whom he had done so much, dropped him like a hot stone.

He was paroled in 1940, and in 1942 received a pardon and became a Senior Music Editor in the Office of War Information. Shgortly after his parole he married a prominent folk music scholar who had been prominent in campaigning for his release. Whether this was a genuine love match or a marriage of convenience to complete his 'rehabilitation' is not clear, although the marriage was musically productive and lasted twenty-five years.

He spent the rest of his life continuing to compose, write and teach. He received many honours and grants, including his election to the American Institute of Arts and Letters in 1951.

Hugely significant in expanding the cultural and experimental boundaries of classical music, he has never been regarded as the significant composer his early career suggested. Whether this is due to the unfortunate disruption of his imprisonment, or to his unconventional musical approach, is anyone's guess.

Recordings of his work are available, including some on the excellent budget Naxos label.

Will Geer

Will Geer born 9 March 1902 (d. 1978)

Will Geer was an American actor. Geer's real name was William Auge Ghere. He is best known for his portrayal of the character 'Grandpa' Zebulon 'Zeb' Walton, in the popular 1970s TV series The Waltons.

Geer was heavily influenced by his grandfather, who taught him the botanical names of the plants in his native Indiana. He started out to become a botanist, studying the subject and obtaining a master's degree from Columbia University. But he eventually succumbed to the allure of acting.

He began his career touring in tent shows and on river boats. He eventually made his way to Broadway, and in 1964 received a nomination for the Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Musical for 110 in the Shade.

He was married to the actress Herta Ware, best known for her poignant performance as the wife of Jack Gilford in Cocoon. Geer and Ware had 3 children, including actress Ellen Geer. Although they eventually divorced they remained close. Ware also had a daughter, actress Melora Marshall, by another marriage.

Geer had a brief romantic relationship with late noted gay activist Harry Hay when they worked together as strike organisers in the early 1930s.

Geer was also a social activist, touring government work camps in the 1930s with folk singers like Burl Ives and Woody Guthrie. In the 1950s he was blacklisted for refusing to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. During that period, he built the Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum in Topanga Canyon, California, which he and Herta Ware helped to found. He combined his acting and botanical careers at the Theatricum, by making sure that every plant mentioned in Shakespeare was grown there.

As Will Geer was dying on April 22, 1978, of a respiratory ailment at the age of 76, his family sang Guthrie's This Land is Your Land at his deathbed, and recited poems by Robert Frost. Geer was cremated, and his ashes buried at the Theatricum Botanicum in the 'Shakespeare Garden'.

Elagabalus (Marcus Aurelius Antoninus)

Elagabalus, also known as Heliogabalus or Marcus Aurelius Antoninus born 8 March AD 204 (d. AD 222).

One of the more debauched emperors of Rome, his brief reign was marked by five marriages to different women, extravagant homosexual orgies, a double 'wedding' to a well-hung blond charioteer named Hierocles and a boy named Gorianus and many other rum goings on, including prostituting himself in taverns and brothels. He was also partial to make-up.

He was murdered in a most unpleasant manner, along with his mother, his body dragged through the streets and dumped in a sewer; it didn't fit, so they weighed him down and dumped him in the Tiber. He was just 18 years old.

His reign did not leave Rome with much of a legacy but it sounds like fun while it lasted...

Elagabalus from Wikipedia

Bret Easton Ellis

Bret Easton Ellis born 7 March 1964

Bret Easton Ellis is an American author. He is considered to be one of the major Generation X authors and was regarded as one of the so-called literary Brat Pack, which also included Tama Janowitz and Jay McInerney.

His novels feature a 'flat effect' and a glossy, empty style that garners him extremely polarised reviews. He has called himself a moralist, while he has often been pegged as a nihilist. His characters are young, generally vacuous people, who are aware of their depravity but choose to enjoy it. The novels are also linked by common, recurring characters, and dystopic locales (such as Los Angeles and New York).

Less Than Zero, a tale of disaffected, rich teenagers of Los Angeles, was praised by critics and sold well (50,000 copies in its first year). He moved to New York in 1987 to release his second novel The Rules of Attraction.

His most controversial work is the graphically violent novel American Psycho. Some consider this novel, whose protagonist, Patrick Bateman, is both a cartoonishly materialistic yuppie and a serial killer, to be an example of transgressive art. American Psycho has achieved considerable cult status and is considered by many to be Ellis' magnum opus.


Less Than Zero was filmed in 1987, American Psycho in 2000 and The Rules of Attraction in 2002.

Ellis has been vague and evasive about his sexuality for much of his life, seemingly reluctant to tag himself as either straight, gay or bisexual, but in August 2005 he broke his silence about his personal life and told The New York Times that his best friend and lover for six years, Michael Wade Kaplan, died in January 2004, at the age of 30. Even so, it appears that Bret and Michael's relationship was 'loose' and unconventional, as neither were interested in embracing the 'gay' lifestyle. His 2005 novel Lunar Park, was dedicated to Michael Wade Kaplan.

His next novel is a follow up to Less Than Zero entitled Imperial Bedrooms.

Perry Ellis

Perry Ellis born 3 March 1940 (d. 1986)

Perry Ellis was an American fashion designer.

Perry Edwin Ellis was born in Virginia. His father owned a fuel company, which enabled the family to live a comfortable middle-class life. Perry studied at the College of William and Mary, in Williamsburg, Virginia, and graduated with a degree in business administration in 1961. He enlisted in the United States Coast Guard reserve to avoid the military draft and after six months he enrolled at New York University, from which he graduated with a master's degree in retailing in 1963.

He then started out in department store retailing in the Richmond, Virginia area to gain experience in the fashion industry as a buyer and merchandiser. He later joined the sportswear company John Meyer in New York. In the mid-1970s, eventually, he was approached by his then employer, The Vera Companies to design a fashion collection for them. Soon after that, Ellis presented his first women's sportswear line, called Portfolio, in November 1976. Although he could not sketch, he knew exactly how the industry worked and proved a master of innovative ideas who created 'new classics' that American women longed for at the time.

Praised by critics as the ideal American sportswear designer of the time and loved by female consumers for his clean-cut yet casual style, Ellis, together with The Vera Companies' parent company, founded his own fashion house, Perry Ellis International, in 1978. He opened his showroom on New York's Seventh Avenue. As the company's chairman and head designer he later developed Perry Ellis Menswear Collection — widely successful, and marked by 'non-traditional, modern classics'. Step by step, he added shoes, accessories, furs and perfume that all bore his name. It became his trademark to skip down the runway at the end of his fashion shows.

Throughout the 1980s the company continued to expand and include various labels such as Perry Ellis Collection and Perry Ellis Portfolio. By 1982, the company had more than 75 staff. In 1984, Perry Ellis America was created in cooperation with Levi Strauss. In the early 1980s, wholesale revenues had figured at about $60 million. By 1986 that number had risen to about $250 million.

In November 1984, Barbara Gallagher, a Hollywood screenwriter and long-time Ellis friend, gave birth to Ellis' daughter Tyler Alexandra Gallagher Ellis.

Ellis' long-time partner Laughlin Barker since 1980, an attorney, became president and legal counsel for Perry Ellis International in 1981. Barker's health deteriorated seriously in the early 1980s and when he died on January 2, 1986, aged 37, it was said in a whisper that he had suffered from HIV and AIDS although officially only lung cancer was mentioned. 'It's been a difficult time for me', said Ellis of Barker's death in 1986: 'Laughlin was an extraordinary man, and I loved him. We worked together 24 hours a day, and he brought genius and humor to this business. We were together five years, and there was never an argument or a disagreement.'

Perry Ellis fell seriously ill during the mid-1980s. Initially, it was not said what he was suffering from although he had been treated for hepatitis in a previous year. At the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) annual awards ceremony in January of 1986 he had to be accompanied to the podium by an aide to receive his award.

On 8 May of that year, Ellis was not able to perform his traditional skip down the runway anymore and, looking shockingly gaunt and frail, had to be supported by two of his employees when he briefly appeared at the end of the runway. It was to be his last fashion show and he received standing ovations for it. Immediately after the show, he was admitted to New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center where he fell into a coma and died two weeks later of viral encephalitis, an AIDS-related disease, on 30 May 1986. A memorial was held at the New York Ethical Culture Society on 12 June. Perry Ellis was dead at 46 and one of the first prominent American figures to succumb to AIDS.

In early 1986, Robert L. McDonald, a former film producer and close friend of Ellis, succeeded Barker as president of Perry Ellis International. After Ellis' death in May 1986, McDonald announced that under the terms of Ellis' will he had full control of the company in trust for Ellis' heirs. McDonald successfully guided the company through setbacks and challenges in the years to come. Recommended to McDonald by the fashion director of Bloomingdale's at that time, the young designer Marc Jacobs, who would start his own label in 1993 and become head designer of Louis Vuitton in Paris in 1997, designed for the house of Perry Ellis from 1988 to 1993. Isaac Mizrahi and Tom Ford both also worked for Perry Ellis early in their careers.

Since then, the company has changed hands several times but the Perry Ellis name survives and is now one of the top menswear brands in the US.

Robert McDonald died of AIDS in 1990 at the age of 45.

Lou Reed

Lou Reed born 2 March 1942 (d. 2013)

Lou Reed was an influential American rock singer-songwriter and guitarist. He first came to prominence as the guitarist and principal singer-songwriter of The Velvet Underground (1965-1973).

An enduring but complicated figure whose shadow stretches back five decades to the very beginnings of the American rock underground, Lou Allen Reed was born on Long Island to a middle-class, suburban family - a family with whom he soon found himself at odds, as they were unable to accept his unconventional attitudes and sexually ambiguous behaviour. During his teen years, they went so far as to have him confined in a mental hospital, where he was forced to endure electro-shock treatments and drug therapy as a means to ward off any nascent homosexual tendencies; somehow Reed managed to emerge from this ordeal with his attitudes intact, and, despite his parents' disapproval, continued to pursue his musical interests.

Highly influenced by R&B and early rock music, Reed performed with a number of different bands during his high school years, making his first recording as a member of the doo-wop ensemble The Shades. After high school he moved on to Syracuse University, where his interests broadened to include free jazz and other more experimental forms of music. It was at this time that Reed decided to pursue a career as a writer.

After completing his studies at Syracuse, Reed moved to New York City and took a job as a songwriter at Pickwick Records. His hit-making duties proved less than rewarding, and he soon joined forces with fellow disillusioned employee John Cale to try and create some music that was more worthwhile. Initially assuming the name The Warlocks, the two spent short periods working with various other musicians as The Primitives and The Falling Spikes before finally enlisting guitarist Sterling Morrison and drummer Angus MacLise and becoming The Velvet Underground in 1965. Later in the year MacLise quit and was replaced by Maureen Tucker, at which time the band began performing in local clubs and cafés; not long afterwards they came to the attention of art prankster Andy Warhol, who, intrigued by their unconventional approach, offered to assume management duties for the band.

Warhol subsequently integrated the Velvets into his multimedia project The Exploding Plastic Inevitable, adding German vocalist Nico to the line-up and sending them out on a tour of the US and Canada in 1966. Later in the year, the band's debut was recorded within the space of one or two days; the album was eventually released by MGM in early 1967, sporting a Warhol-designed peelable banana as its cover. The strange mix of styles - and particularly the controversial subject matter dealt with in Reed's lyrics - resulted in an extremely mixed reception for the album, with sales being far from brisk. By the following year both Warhol and Nico were shed, and the band enlisted The Mothers of Invention's producer Tom Wilson to create their second album White Light/White Heat. Public and critical interest remained elsewhere. By this time, the relationship between Reed and Cale had entirely deteriorated, and Cale was fired from the band before sessions for a third album were organised.

After bringing in Doug Yule to replace Cale, Reed recorded two more albums with the Velvets in a markedly different stylistic vein: The Velvet Underground (1969) and Loaded (1970) - although a considerable amount of material not contained on these albums was also generated during this period (most of which would eventually surface in the mid-80s on the collections VU and Another View). The personal and professional dynamics of the group remained unstable, however, and in August of 1970 Reed made the decision to quit just prior to the release of Loaded. The next year was spent away from the music industry, living in his parents' house on Long Island and working for his father's accounting firm; in 1971 a contract with RCA finally initiated the launch of his solo career, and an eponymous album followed in 1972. Primarily featuring Velvets-era material, the release accordingly received the same lack of interest that had plagued his previous band.

In the hopes of avoiding the dismal response given to his first solo effort, Reed enlisted the help of long-standing Velvets fans David Bowie and Mick Ronson to create his second offering, Transformer (1972). Given a thorough glam makeover by the pair, the album featured one of his most commercially successful songs (Walk On The Wild Side) and at last provided a bit of forward momentum to his floundering career. Regardless of his new-found popularity, the subject matter of Reed's songs remained as uncompromising as ever - a fact that was abundantly evident on the follow-up release Berlin (1973), a concept album that explored the disintegrating lives of two drug addicts. This oscillation between commercial success and commercial suicide continued throughout the rest of his 70s output: the live collection Rock N Roll Animal (1974) reviving the enthusiasm generated by Transformer, followed by the blatantly mainstream Sally Can't Dance (1974) and the extreme, formless feedback assault of Metal Machine Music (1975). Upbeat pop was then shamelessly indulged on Rock And Roll Heart (1976), only to be discarded in favour of the the raw punk of Street Hassle (1978).

With the arrival of the 1980s, Lou Reed at last managed to gain control of his self-destructive personal habits, with the result that his recorded output became far less erratic. The strong critical momentum generated in the first half of the decade by The Blue Mask (1982), Legendary Hearts (1983) and New Sensations (1984) served to cement his standing as a major American songwriter once and for all, and this status was further reinforced by later releases such as New York (1989) and Magic And Loss (1992).

The 80s even witnessed a temporary reconciliation between Reed and his former bandmate John Cale, brought about by the death of Andy Warhol in 1987. The pair initially renewed their partnership in order to commemorate their former producer with the 1990 collection Songs For Drella, but by 1993 a full-scale reunion of the Velvet Underground had been organised. Not surprisingly, the reunion only managed to survive a brief European tour before the relationship between Reed and Cale once again hit the skids, and the death of Sterling Morrison in 1995 brought an end to the possibility of any future band revivals.

In distinct contrast to his years with the Velvet Underground, in the 90s and 00s Reed found himself an established and widely-respected member of the music industry. What would prove to be an enduring relationship with performance artist Laurie Anderson was started in the early 90s, with some musical cross-pollination resulting. During this same period, a relationship of a different nature was also established with theatre director Robert Wilson, initiated with the collaborative production Time Rocker (1996) and resuming for the Edgar Allan Poe-derived POE-Try in 2001. The Raven, a recorded version of the latter project featuring readings by Anderson, David Bowie, Steve Buscemi, Willem Dafoe, Amanda Plummer and several others was eventually released in 2003, and closely followed by the live document Animal Serenade in 2004.

In 2007 Reed rather unexpectedly began performing and touring a mixed media performance of his 1973 Berlin album. Reed continued to record and tour new work and revisit his previous work alone and in collaboration, now a highly respected, influential and established music veteran.

In April 2013, Reed underwent a liver transplant. Afterwards, he claimed on his website to be 'bigger and stronger' than ever. On October 27, 2013, Reed died at the age of 71.