Born frail but rich in 1883, Charles Demuth was free to follow his aesthetic inclinations, partly shaped by Beardsley and Wilde, without having to please the market to make a living. Attending the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, he lived in the same boarding house with William Carlos Williams, a lifelong friend whose poem "The Great Figure" inspired Demuth's most famous work, The Figure Five in Gold. In 1912 he had his first exhibitions, found another lifelong friend in fellow gay artsit Marsden Hartley, and began dating his most significant partner, Robert Locher. More than a decade before Paul Cadmus, Demuth painted gay men cruising, embracing, and having sex. Two favorite subjects were all-male baths, where patrons enjoyed relaxing, massage, or more [after the jump, in a 1918 self-portrait, see the upper right corner]; and salty sailors galore, dancing (above), with their pants open, with a john, with a woman, or nude with each other. When he died of diabetes at 51, he left his watercolors to Locher and his oils to Georgia O'Keefe.
In American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America,
Robert Hughes writes, "Demuth was not a flaming queen, in fact he was rather a discreet gay, but if he could not place his deepest sexual predilections in the open, he could still make art from them. Seen from our distance, that of a pornocratic culture so drenched in genital imagery that sly hints about forbidden sex hardly compel attention, the skill with which he did this might seem almost quaint... [he] took a special delight in sowing his work with sexual hints. To create a secret subject matter, to disport oneself with codes, was to enjoy one's distance from (and rise above) "straight" life. The handlebar of a vaudeville trick-rider's bicycle turns into a penis, aimed at his crotch; sailors dance with girls in a cabaret but ogle one another."
For more, read Jonathan Weinberg's Speaking for Vice: Homosexuality in the Art of Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley, and the First American Avant-Garde from Yale.
After three seaons with the NY Giants, 6'3" 290 lb. offensive lineman Roy "Sugar Bear" Simmons quit the team in 1982 to concentrate on drinking and smoking crack. He worked as a baggage handler at JFK. Months later he went to rehab, wanted his job back, and was traded to the Redskins where he played special teams to block kickoffs, all the way to the 1984 Super Bowl. Among the twenty family and friends he'd invited to Tampa for that game, each staying separately in the same hotel, were his three lovers: two women and a man. The night before the Super Bowl, Simmons snorted coke and got laid three different times, which is not the reason the Redskins were destroyed by the Raiders (38 - 9) but it is typical of the chaos that got him cut from the team the next year. He moved to San Francisco and disappeared from the extended family he had supported on his player's salary. In 1992, accepting a free trip back east to appear on
Donohue, he impulsively came out on national television to the great surprise of former teammates, family, and his female girlfriend on the show with him. Then he really disappeared. He amped up his drug use, his sex addiction, became homeless, and in 1997 discovered he was HIV+. Making that announcement to the NYT six years later on the eve of World Aids Day 2003, he hoped to reach other struggling closeted, self-destructive athletes engaging in high-risk-activities. In 2006, he published a truly unflinching memoir
Out of Bounds [
Kindle], that begins with him blowing a stranger who introduces him to a friend willing to swap Simmons' clock, jewelry, and table lamps for a few grams of crack. When it's gone, he trades his big-screen TV. As PW said, "Unlike recently celebrated and bestselling rehab memoirs, Simmons's story has no happy ending. Nor is there a happy beginning or happy middle." He says he has low self-esteem and wonders if he became gay because a married neighbor in Georgia raped him when he was eleven. His shocked family learned of the assault and ignored it. Simmons, 56 today, still lives in the Bay area. To date, only three other NFL players have come out.
[
, following his winning collections 
and 
was a wise panorama exploring the meaning of home, her brand-new novella 
[
, and Garth Greenwell's 
or his subsequent 
and 
(1999):
(2003):
(2007):
. He wrote twenty-four plays (his twentieth, Le bel indifférent, was created for Edith Piaf and became a towering success). He wrote eleven ballets (his second, Parade, was produced by Diaghilev and designed by Picasso). He wrote six operas. He was a graphic designer, a clothes designer, and an interior designer. He painted. He drew. He photographed. He managed a professional boxer, who became the sport's first Hispanic world champion. He was an actor. And he made six feature films, two of which happen to be among the most lauded in the history of cinema, 
and 
, both of which star his boyfriend, superstar idol Jean Marais. God only knows where