Author Argues Adventurer Everett Ruess Was Not Gay

Many adventure readers hadn't heard of the young wanderer Everett Ruess [right], who started ambling at sixteen and disappeared at twenty while hiking the Utah desert in November 1934, until Jon Krauker devoted several pages of Into the Wild to him for the obvious similarities with Christopher McCandless. Several profiles say people claim Ruess was gay, without citing reasons, so I had been very much anticipating yesterday's publication of Finding Everett Ruess: The Life and Unsolved Disappearance of a Legendary Wilderness Explorer [[Kindle]] by David Roberts. Not anymore. Short of seeing the book firsthand, there's only this early review on Amazon by a reader from NYC to address the queer question:

"Roberts makes a determined effort to establish that Everett was not a homosexual as some have asserted and implies that if he were, it would somehow discredit him. In doing so, he glosses over a possible explanation of why Ruess felt unfit for conventional society and something that might even be insinuated in his death."

All told, you're better off waiting for Wilfred Thesiger: The Life of the Great Explorer, covering the complete life of a great writer-explorer who was absolutely gay. Overlook has moved the U.S. pub date from June to September. Until then, try his Penguin classics, Arabian Sands or The Marsh Arabs.

Comments

[J.P.]

So are there any sites and/or books that talk about the possibility that Ruess was gay?

[Matt G]

Also gay was the great 18th-century German explorer Alexander von Humboldt, a fact that was not 100 percent overlooked (but still, maybe 98 percent, annoyingly enough) in the recent-ish international bestseller, MEASURING THE WORLD. Sigh.