Though he beme better known as the thor of novels like Of Human Bondage and The Razor’s Edge and is praised now mostly for his short stori, W. Somerset Mgham was, wh Sir Noël Coward and Sir Terence Rattigan, one member of the triumvirate of gay...
Contents:
- MGHAM'S GAY LIFE
- FRANKL: WHEN WILL GAY MARRIAGE’S TIME COME LERATURE?
- NEW DOC SHEDS LIGHT ON GAY LIFE OF W. SOMERSET MGHAM: VIDEO
MGHAM'S GAY LIFE
Have we reached a pot where bgraphers and crics n discs a closeted subject's gay relatnships whout gigglg, droolg, or nmng? After the recent books on bi or gay Cheever, Wgh, and Forster, this week offers Sela Hastgs' much praised new The Secret Liv of Somerset Mgham: A Bgraphy ,... * somerset maugham gay *
Mgham was now fally ee to create the regime of hard work and self-dulgent hedonism – the Villa Mrque beme a kd of discreet sexual nirvana for the lerary gay man – that he really sired. I mean, surely one simply n't do that stuff about the district officer hearg there's a whe man dyg a Che slum and turns out that 's gay lighthearted Jack Almond, who disappeared and no-one knew what had bee of [him] and he went right unr, poor chap, bee a woman England had let him, turned out that one simply uld do that stuff, and go on dog . The tradnal ratn of bullyg, beatg, and buggery seems to have been unually effective his se, leavg him wh a ightful lifelong speech impediment and a stnch mment to homosexualy.
FRANKL: WHEN WILL GAY MARRIAGE’S TIME COME LERATURE?
* somerset maugham gay *
)An ial way to "lock " homosexual disposn is probably to spend time as a gynelogist a slum district of London—which, astonishgly enough, is what the fastid young man did. Throughout Jefey Meyers's book one is remd of the remarkable difference ma to English letters by the Victorian-era law that prohibed homosexual nduct.
(My ntributn to the gay-marriage bate would be this: remember what vast unhapps was generated the days when homosexuals felt obliged to marry heterosexuals. The work of an ambulance man wartime was the perfect unterpot to gynelogy—and has a vivid nnectn to gay inography, as we know om the poetry of Walt Whman and also the work of Wiled Owen and Y Mishima.
NEW DOC SHEDS LIGHT ON GAY LIFE OF W. SOMERSET MGHAM: VIDEO
Elements of secrecy and disguise and "" may be nate the gay makp, but they didn't nfer any advantage on Mgham when he was nonted wh Len and Trotsky. And, as for so many of the homo duplex English lerary queens of that epoch, the solutn was—abroad.
) Quent Crisp was entranced, and summed up Mgham as one of "the stately homos of England. If he put his geni to his life and property rather than his work, was bee the former were apter reposori for such talent as he ma ntradictn seems to be this: Mgham was gay, all right (he probably exaggerated when he said that he was one-quarter "normal"), but he wasn't pecially pleased about the fact. Pursug a pet artistic theory of his, that the patgs of El Gre were revelatns of the athetic of a reprsed homosexual, he chose to phrase like this:It nnot be nied that the homosexual has a narrower outlook on the world than the normal man.
A distctive tra of the homosexual is a lack of ep serns over certa thgs that normal men take serly. Decidg that "the homosexual n never reach the supreme heights of geni, " as Mgham did, may be slightly preferable to the tirome sistence of some gays that all great artists have been members of the club. One uld hardly classify Kgsley Amis's Lucky Jim as a gay novel, even sublimally, yet when was published Mgham wrote a review praisg Amis for his outright attack on the young barbarians ("they are scum") who were then threateng English mp wh their beery, plebeian subversivens.