Well played, Karma: The youngest son of the Home Secretary who signed the "gross indecency" arrest warrant against Oscar Wilde grew up to be the gay movie director of The Importance of Being Earnest. After graduating from Oxford, Anthony Asquith went to Hollywood not to struggle but to live in high style as a six-month houseguest of Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks Sr. Later, back in London, he directed his first feature, a romance called Shooting Stars set among actors at a movie studio. That success launched a career spanning forty films, including three Shaw adaptations and ten collaborations with Terence Rattigan, among them French Without Tears, The Winslow Boy, and The Browning Version. Asquith was at ease in many genres -- war movies, comedies, costume dramas, thrillers -- and directed actors as diverse as Leslie Howard, Laurence Olivier, Michael Redgrave, John Mills, Dirk Bogarde, Rex Harrison, and Richard Burton. Closeted but not shrinking, he was widely believed to be the man in the mask at the orgy in the Profumo affair. That person's "theatrical display of masochism" crystallized the public's notion of the Empire in decay and a government run by degenerates... basically, the gross indecency trial of its day. He remained president of the film technicians union from 1937 to his death from cancer in 1968. The British Academy Award for best music is named in his honor.
After much childhood upheaval and fights with a stepfather who hated his constant reading and tried to prevent him from getting a library card, James Schuyler dropped out of Bethany College in West Virginia, joined the Navy, and was kicked out for being gay. He settled in New York with an alcoholic ex-soldier named Bill Aalto. When Schuyler inherited a farm, he and Bill moved to Italy. Their up-and-down relationship lasted five years until Bill attacked him with a carving knife. Back in New York again in 1950, Schuyler suffered his first of several breakdowns and the next year he met Ashbery and O'Hara. He published his first full-length book of poems at 46. After another relapse in 1961, Schuyler began living with Fairfield Porter's family on Long Island and in Maine, a situation that lasted eight years. In addition to more books of poetry he published a strange, funny, domestic novel in 1976 called What's for Dinner?
memorable for many aspects, including its sexual relationship between teen brothers. He won the Pulitzer prize for poetry in 1981. He released another major work in 1985 and FSG published his Selected Poems in 1988. He died in 1991. Read his Collected Poems
, Uncollected Poems, Selected Letters, Letters to Frank O'Hara, or Diaries.
[Schuyler at 19 in Key West via.]
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