Hidden gays

I am a strange being, my feelings run off with me too quickly, and I only make myself unhappy. Sometime in the fifties he was picked up by the police in San Francisco's Castro District. "John Allexander [and] Thomas Roberts were both examined and found guilty of lude behaviour and uncleane carriage one w[ith] another, by often spendinge their seeds one upon another, which was proved both by witnesse & their own confession; the said Allexander found to have beene formerly notoriously guilty that way, and seeking to allure others thereunto."

Both men confessed to the crime and "the said John Allexander was therefore censured by the Court to be severely whipped, and burnt in the shoulder [with] a hot iron, and to be perpetually banished [from] the government of New Plymouth, and if he be at any tyme found w[ith]in the same, to bee whipped out againe ..."

Roberts, an indentured servant, was "censured to be severely whipt, and to returne to his m[aster] Mr.Atwood, and to serve out his tyme w[ith] him, but to be disabled hereby to enjoy any lands w[ith]in this government, except hee manefest better desert."

Joseph Alsop 1910–1989

Joe Alsop parlayed a privileged background (Groton '28, Harvard '32) and important political connections (first the Roosevelts, later the Kennedys) into a spectacular career as newspaper reporter, syndicated columnist (with his brother Stewart) and finally as a significant Washington host.

Aragon was now eighty, and must have made a noticeable impression riding in an open pink convertible, a favorite scene on internet blogs.

A poet to the end,Aragon romanticized those gay rendezvous—the baths of Paris. In 2006, the couple was finally officially able to tie the knot in Massachusetts, “the only place in the US where it was possible to get married”.

He did not come out sexually until after her death in 1970, in plenty of time for him to join Paris's first Gay Pride march in 1977. In 1954 he had a sexual encounter with a State Department official in Germany. They sold over 200 million copies.

He was born in Chelsea, Massachusetts, graduated from Harvard Divinity School in 1860, and traveled abroad for a year.

His wife discovered his sexual proclivities on their honeymoon and had their marriage annulled soon after.

Notwithstanding the fact that his yearly income was £110,000, he accumulated debts of over a half million pounds and was forced into bankruptcy. Here, surrounded by the boys he loved, he devoted the rest of his life to making amends for his early disgrace, and found the material for his phenomenally successful novels, and there were over a hundred of them.

His poem, Friar Anselmo's Sin, seems to be autobiographical.

Friar Anselmo (God's grace may he win!) Committed one sad day a deadly sin ...

It is a tale of social exclusion, undisclosed desire, and wrong feelings below the waist. The Little Mermaid, for instance, can be read as an expression of his sexual longings, his sexual anguish. He explained to me that historians, scholars and those who study American Gay History consider the 1962 Mansfield affair a landmark on the timeline, as a significant cultural precursor to Stonewall.

I suspect it is not terribly likely that the City will embrace this particular claim to fame, but I have gone ahead and reconfigured the marker for my friend in Hollywood, at least digitally, depicting the long-gone Gentlemen’s room festooned with crime scene yellow tape.