You think of Graham Chapman as one of the original members of Monty Python's Flying Circus and the star of Life of Brian, but the 6'2" blond was also a certified medical doctor, a rugby player, a mountaineer, an alcoholic, and a smoker, dying of cancer at 48. Python first aired in 1969, the same year Graham came out to friends and family, and he was one of the first queer celebrities to campaign for gay rights. He met his partner David Sherlock in Ibizia in 1966 and five years later they adopted a teenage runaway who later became Graham's business manager. Because Graham favored the unconventional, his autobiography has five authors, including David and a pre-fame Douglas Adams. His funeral was the scene of some comic one-upmanship in 1989, but David did not scatter his ashes until 2005.
It's inappropriate to talk about George without Gilbert because for decades now they've lived their lives jointly, wearing matching business suits, as an ongoing performance piece, thinking of themselves as "living sculptures." Although Gilbert & George see no distinction between their everyday activities in London's East End and their artwork, the world knows them best by their massive black and white photocollages tinted with primary colors and covered in black tape to suggest stained glass. They frequently feature themselves in their work, as well as the occasional, banally "shocking" nudity, sex, or bodily fluid. More shocking, they are big gay conservatives and still swoon for Margaret Thatcher. Like Warhol, they have achieved a signature style that is instantly recognizable as theirs alone, no small feat in an our era of image overload. Way back in 1985 they won Britain's most prestigious art award, the Turner Prize, and their importance has not faded.(Proof of their cultural significance: they were spoofed by South Park and derided by the Evening Standard as "PERV DUO.") In 2005 they represented Britain at the Venice Biennale. They have been together more than forty years, claiming it was love at first sight when they met while studying sculpture on September 25, 1967, when Gilbert Proesch was twenty-four and George Passmore was twenty-five. Today he's sixty-eight.
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