I Am 6 Degrees of Separation From Activist/Pioneer Edward Carpenter On His Birthday

Gay activist, socialist, feminist, pacifist, nudist, mystic, poet, essayist, sandal wearer… The Post Apocalyptic Bohemian? Wrong... today’s Birthday gay is Edward Carpenter. Challenging both capitalism & the values of Western civilization, Edward Carpenter had an extraordinary impact on the cultural & political landscape of the late 19th & early 20th centuries. Carpenter’s enjoyed friendships with Walt Whitman, Robert Graves, Oscar Wilde, E.M. Forster, Isadora Duncan & Emma Goldman. After reading Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Carpenter envisioned a world of brotherly love that would do away with the class system & bring true freedom & democracy.

Edward Carpenter in1874

George Merrill in 1874

Carpenter graduated from Cambridge & held a position once filled by Leslie Stephen, the father of Virginia Woolf. He gave public lectures for the working class,but attended only by the middle class, who didn’t like to his ideas. He unsuccessfully sought the friendship of laborers, but in 1891, after meeting by chance on a train, he & uneducated worker- George Merrill became lovers. In 1898, when Carpenter was 54 & Merrill was 32, they set up house together, unheard of in England which was profoundly anti-gay after the Oscar Wilde trials. They lived openly as a couple for 30 years until Merrill’s death, & their love affair, crossing the classes, was the direct inspiration for their friend E.M. Forster’s novel Maurice, as well as D.H. Lawrence’s straight version- Lady Chatterley's Lover. American- Harry Hay, credited Carpenter’s writings for galvanizing him to start the 1st gay rights group- The Mattachine Society, in L.A. in 1950.

Carpenter in 1924

 Carpenter felt strongly that people tend to settle down into a single deep permanent union, but along the way they should be experiencing a variety of relationships & sexual adventures. He warned that the ideal of exclusive attachment can lapse into a stagnant 2 way selfishness. He saw a society with love & devotion between individuals without the quality of their love being defined by exclusiveness based on jealousy, a sense of private property in the other person, social opinions, & legal unions. He believed that such unions suffocate love in egoism, lust, & meanness.Carpenter wrote of sex as a good thing in human consciousness & not a sign or cause of human frailty & sinfulness.

In May 1928, Carpenter suffered a stroke leaving him almost helpless. He lived another 13 months before he died on a perfect summer afternoon, Friday June 28, 1929, exactly 40 years before the Stonewall riots. In 1910 Carpenter had written:

"I should like these few words to be read over the grave when my body is placed in the earth; for though it is possible I may be present & conscious of what is going on, I shall not be able to communicate. Do not think too much of the dead husk of your friend, or mourn too much over it, but send your thoughts out towards the real soul or self which has escaped to reach it. For so, surely you will cast a light of gladness upon his onward journey, & contribute your part towards the building of that kingdom of love which links our earth to heaven."

In 1967, gay Beat poet Allen Ginsburg interviewed Gavin Arthur (grandson of U.S. President Chester A. Arthur), world traveler, adventurer, & later a San Francisco astrologer,about his experience, as a young man of 23 years old, visiting Carpenter in England & having sex with the then 80 year old. Carpenter had told Arthur of his own sexual experience, as a 33 year old man, with the 58 year old Walt Whitman. When the young Arthur asked how Whitman had made love, Carpenter replied, "I will show you." The account of their night together is very sweet.

The Post Apocalyptic Bohemian in 1971

This means I am 6 Degrees of Separation from Walt Whitman
... who slept with Edward Carpenter:

Edward Carpenter slept with Gavin Arthur

Gavin Arthur slept with Beat poet Neal Cassady

Neal Cassady slept with Allen Ginsberg
Allen Ginsberg slept with James Dean
James Dean slept with producer Robert Fryer
Stephen slept with Robert Fryer in 1974.

For more on Edward Carpenter check out- Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty & Love by Sheila Rowbotham

Inside Stevie Clover, Or What Was That That I Smoked?

I met Gavin Lambert at a coke fueled, debauched, all-male party at the home of producer Robert Fryer in the Hollywood Hills. The year was 1973 & it was the only period that I was briefly considered an ingénue. I actually didn’t mind being objectified & passed around. I liked being the object of desire, & being a bit of a slut, I was feeling very democratic & exceptionally open minded. I was hungry for experiences, & was not above putting out for my crack at show business.



I smoked a joint that must have been enhanced with something extra, because I don’t remember how I ended up in bed with the handsome older man. In the early morning hours we started in for round 2, & when the little strands of conversation revealed that this man had written the novel & screenplay for one of my favorite childhood movies- Inside Daisy Clover, starring my favorite star- Ruth Gordon, I went absolutely nutty, screaming- “oh my god, oh my god, that is my favorite movie, I love that movie! Oh yeah, that feels so good. Tell me about working with Ruth Gordon! Do that again, but slower, harder & lower! Oh, I can't believe your created that movie. I love that movie! Will you autograph my ass?”  I think I ruined the hot mood with my sudden outburst of fandom.

 For 50+ years, the “go to” guy for bitchy, witty & perceptive gossip about Hollywood was screenwriter, novelist & biographer Gavin Lambert, who has died. For much of the 1950s & 1960s, he lived in Hollywood, the inspiration & setting for most of his novels, including The Goodbye People (1971), The Slide Area (1960) & Inside Daisy Clover (1963).


Armistead Maupin: "Decades before it was fashionable, Gavin Lambert expertly wove characters of every sexual stripe into his lustrous tapestries of southern California life. His elegant, stripped down prose caught the last gasp of old Hollywood in a way that has yet to be rivalled."


Lambert wrote the biography- Mainly About Lindsay Anderson (2000), about his friend & roommate at Oxford, director Lindsay Anderson (This Sporting Life,O Luck Man & If ). He & Anderson founded the short lived but influential film journal- Sequence (1949-51), while still at Oxford. Unlike Anderson, who was tortured throughout his life by guilt about his homosexuality (he fell for happily married, heterosexual young men), Lambert was happily gay. He had a series of fulfilling relationships.


Lambert had an affair with director Nicholas Ray, whose films- Bigger Than Life (1956) & Bitter Victory (1957) Lambert wrote. His longest relationship, however, was with Mart Crowley, who wrote the influential gay play- The Boys In The Band (which I performed in- Boston, autumn 1972). The couple had a home together in L.A..

Lambert wrote & directed Another Sky in 1955, & the film was shot in Morocco. The rather modest film tells the story of a young English woman who discovers her sensuality in North Africa, a reflection Lambert's own sexual liberation in Tangier. He lived in Morocco from 1974 to 1989 on the suggestion of writer Paul Bowles, whom he met in L.A. at the home of Christopher Isherwood & Don Bachardy.

One of my favorite movies from childhood- Inside Daisy Clover (1966) was made into a film from Lambert’s novel with a screenplay by the author. Directed by Robert Mulligan, it tells the tale of how the fame & fortune of a young star, played by Natalie Wood, leads to misery & a nervous breakdown. Lambert first met Wood when he went to Hollywood as an assistant to Ray on Rebel Without A Cause. In 2004, he wrote a revealing biography of the star- Natalie Wood: A Life, admitting they had shared at least one lover. According to Lambert, a 17 year old Natalie Wood lost her virginity to Lambert’s boyfriend Nick Ray. Lambert's biography includes Wood's relationships with Elvis Presley, Robert Wagner, Warren Beatty, Paul Mazursky, & Leslie Caron. In his book, Lambert claimed that Wood frequently dated gay & bisexual men, including Nick Adams, Raymond Burr, James Dean, Tab Hunter, & Scott Marlowe. Lambert also said that Wood helped support his lover- playwright Mart Crowley making it possible for him to write his play, The Boys in the Band (1968).


Lambert's best screenplays were adaptations: Sons & Lovers (1960), based on the novel by D.H. Lawrence, was Oscar nominated, & The Roman Spring Of Mrs Stone (1961), from Tennessee Williams' novel, I Never Promised You A Rose Garden (1977), & Liberace, Behind The Music (1988).

He wrote biographies: On Cukor (1972) , Norma Shearer: A Life (1990), & Nazimova: A Biography (1997) which was the first full scale account of the private life & acting career of lesbian actress Alla Nazimova. He also wrote GWTW: The Making of Gone With the Wind (1973). Lambert was able to interview & gain personal remembrances of those involved with the classic 1939 film, including dismissed director George Cukor & star Vivien Leigh . I have reason to believe that before his death in 2005, Lambert was working on a book- The Greatest Sex in Hollywood: The 1970s, where I was to be mentioned, maybe in the chapter- Live Fast & Die Young, but I was probably there as a footnote. Mr. Lambert was was every inch a gentleman. Today is his birthday.

On This Day In Gay History... The U.S. Supreme Court Rules On Lawrence v. Texas

In 1998, John Lawrence & Tyron Garner were arrested in Lawrence’s Houston home & jailed overnight after officers responding to a false report found the men having sex. The two men were convicted of violating Texas’s “Homosexual Conduct” law, which made it a crime for two people of the same sex to have oral or anal sex, even though those sex acts were legal in Texas for people to engage in with persons of a different sex. Lambda Legal quickly responded to represent Lawrence and Garner. Battling for years in the Texas courts, they sought to overturn the criminal convictions (which made the 2 men registrable “sex offenders” in several states) & to have Texas’s law declared unconstitutional. When the highest court in Texas eventually refused to even hear the arguments, the U.S. Supreme Court to take the case On this day in 2003, in a stunning victory, the highest court in the land found the “Homosexual Conduct” law unconstitutional & established, for the 1st time ever, that lesbians & gay men share the same fundamental liberty right to private sexual intimacy with another adult that heterosexuals have.


The mere existence of sodomy laws often had been used to justify wholesale discrimination against LGBT people. In striking down those laws, this historic ruling removed a major roadblock in the battle for LGBT rights. No longer can gay people be considered “criminals” because they love others of the same sex. Moreover, laws that deny gay people liberty or equal protection no longer can be justified on moral grounds alone.


The breadth of this landmark case is extraordinary. The Supreme Court declared all sodomy laws unconstitutional, putting an end to the sodomy laws that remained on the books in 13 states at the time of the ruling, including laws that criminalized only same-sexual conduct & laws that criminalized oral & anal sex irrespective of the sex of the participants. The Court also reversed Bowers v. Hardwick, its 1986 decision that upheld Georgia’s sodomy law that had been extraordinarily harmful to gay people’s struggles both for liberty & equality. The decision’s sweeping language about gay people’s equal rights to liberty marked a new era of legal respect for the LGBT community. Lawrence v. Texas is considered the most significant gay rights breakthrough of our time.


I think I may have to celebrate this historic anniversary with some hot & very legal man sex.

In  the early autumn of 1976, I had a brief, but very intense affair with a still world famous classical guitarist. A class act, he spirited me away from NYC to Martha's Vineyard for 3 days of hot sex, guitar breaks,  food & wine, & more hot sex. During our rest periods he would play for me. One of the compositions that really struck me & made me temporarily forget his other gifts, was Erik Satie's Gymnopodie #1. This piece was written for piano & the arrangement for guitar was by my new friend. I still listen to his recording of it & I can remember the salt air, & the sweat from our extended weekend.



Dadaist, absurdest French composer & pianist Erik Satie, was contemporary of Ravel & Debussy. he collaborated with Jean Cocteau to create the ballet Parade (1917) for the Ballet Russes, with set designs by Pablo Picasso . He knew, worked with or influenced most of the artists,  writers & musicians in Paris when it was the cultural capital of the world. He is credited with nearly every avant-garde movement of the 20th century.Satie was  influential in the fields of minimalism & ambient music,&  the use of piano music-to-film synchronisation.


Satie referred to himself as a "phonometrician" (meaning someone who measures sounds) preferring this designation to that of "musician", after having been called "a clumsy but subtle technician" in a book on contemporary French composers published in 1911.



In addition to his body of music, Satie also left a remarkable set of writings, having contributed work for a range of publications, from the Dada 391 to the American culture chronicle- Vanity Fair.

Satie was an incredibly private & eccentric man. He was known to enter a room & sit without removing his hat, coat or gloves, & always with a brand new umbrella.

After his funeral 1925, his friends entered the tiny room he had occupied for 27 years but had never allowed anyone else to enter. Along with dust & cobwebs, they found huge quantities of umbrellas, many never used, as well as large numbers of unknown compositions hidden all over the room.