Richard Halliburton

Renowned thrill-seeker and global adventure writer Richard Halliburton (1900-1939) went rogue in his private, as well as professional life. Richard’s partner was his ghostwriter, Paul Mooney (1903-1939), but neither of them gave even a fleeting thought to fidelity. Mooney had another lover, William Alexander Levy (1909-1997), a twenty-something architect and interior designer. Movie-star handsome Halliburton commissioned a house from William to be built high on a cliff above Laguna Beach, CA, with three master bedrooms, one for each of the men – a cozy, if somewhat offbeat arrangement. The result was a stunning cantilevered Modernist structure of concrete, glass and steel dubbed Hangover House, built for $36,000 – a huge sum for 1937.

Halliburton, while forgotten today, was a household name during the 1920s and 1930s, as famous as Amelia Earhart and Charles Lindbergh. He was the idol of every schoolboy, and his popular radio broadcasts supplemented his adventure books, such as the Book of Marvels, which fueled the imaginations of countless youths. The Book of Marvels was published in two volumes (The Occident 1937, the Orient 1938), each filled with photographs and text that hooked armchair travelers who grew up in the days before Indiana Jones.

Raised in Tennessee as a small, sickly boy, Halliburton over-compensated as an adult with an action packed life of extreme adventures. In 1931 the whole world followed with interest his circumnavigation of the globe in an open cockpit single engine plane dubbed the Flying Carpet, the title of his fourth book. In it he described his outsized feats during that adventure, such as flying upside down over the Taj Mahal, photographing Mt. Everest and encountering head hunters in Borneo.

Always lusting after fame and fortune, Halliburton was aware that his high public profile required a heterosexual emphasis, so he embellished his writings with entirely fabricated female love interests. Nevertheless, his travel narratives included lingering accounts of male beauty, and his private letters were explicitly gay.

Halliburton was not above breaking the law or stretching the truth to achieve his goals. Just months after his graduation from Princeton in 1921, Richard climbed the Matterhorn. His wanderlust took him to Paris and on to the Rock of Gibraltar, where taking photographs of defense weapon emplacements landed him in jail; nevertheless, he published a dozen of his forbidden photos along with a breathless account of the escapade.

Richard continued to Egypt, sleeping on top of a pyramid and swimming the Nile. He hid himself on the grounds of the Taj Mahal, so that he could swim in its pools by moonlight. Traveling through the Malay peninsula, he steamed to Singapore as a stowaway, survived an attack by pirates, and trekked through Manchuria. When he reached Japan, he climbed Mt. Fuji in winter. Halliburton's books achieved enormous popularity, and he became one of the highest paid celebrity authors to appear on the lecture circuit between the two world wars.

A master of publicity and self-promotion, Halliburton shrewdly exploited his escapades in order to increase interest in his books and lectures. In one such stunt, he registered himself as a ship, paid a toll of 36 cents, based on his weight of 140 pounds, and swam the Panama Canal. He remains the only person to have swum all 48 miles of the waterway.

In March 1939, the famous Halliburton-Mooney duo and their experienced crew left Hong Kong in a commissioned Chinese junk, the Sea Dragon, to sail eastward for the San Francisco Golden Gate International Expo. Three weeks into the journey they encountered a typhoon and perished; their bodies were never recovered.

In a letter written to his father, Halliburton expressed his carpe diem philosophy:

“And when my time comes to die, I’ll be able to die happy, for I will have done and seen and heard and experienced all the joy, pain and thrills – any emotion that any human ever had – and I’ll be especially happy if I am spared a stupid, common death in bed...”

Montague Glover

Montague "Monty" Charles Glover (1898-1983) was an English freelance architect who is best remembered as a private photographer whose images chronicled London’s homosexual underground during the first half of the twentieth century. It is notable that Glover's photographs and personal relationships crossed strict social class barriers of the time, since he was primarily sexually attracted to working class men. His work documented rough trade, the male prostitutes of the period, and members of the military. Glover himself served with distinction as an officer in the British Army during WWI, being awarded the Military Cross for bravery. In the photo above, Glover is on the right, offering shoulder support to another WWI soldier.

Glover's work as an architect mostly involved projects for the British government. Monty had numerous affairs with working class men, to whom he was particularly attracted. These liaisons were with builders, road-workers, dockers, laborers, young military men and even rent-boys in Trafalgar Square

However, Monty is also remembered for his daring photographic record of his partnership with Ralph Hall (1913-1987, portrait at right), providing one of the rare documented examples of a long-term homosexual relationship prior to the legalization of homosexuality in Britain in the 1960s. The two met in 1930, and Monty subsequently employed Hall as his manservant, in order to provide a socially acceptable alibi for two men living together. Their relationship lasted for more than 50 years, surviving WWII (Hall was drafted into the Royal Air Force in 1940).

Hall was himself a cheerful working-class lad from London’s East End, fifteen years younger than Glover. Every year of their life together was documented in loving snapshots. Ralph was poorly educated, but absolutely devoted to Monty. The strikingly good looking Hall posed for Glover in outdoor settings, yielding photographs that were so suggestive that they could not be shared with the general public. While Ralph was serving for four years in the Royal Air Force, he sent Monty hundreds of love letters – the same sort of letters that countless boys sent to their sweethearts back home to bolster their spirits during the war. Ralph preserved them, and they were published after his death.

Much of their later years were spent at Glover's country house in a village near Coventry, where his sister lived with them until her death in the 1950s. Glover himself died in 1983 at the age of 86, leaving Ralph Hall as his sole heir. Hall died four years later after suffering a gradual decline in health. Friends of the couple described Monty as "charming, if somewhat reserved", and Ralph as an "outgoing cheerful cockney".

Montague's possessions were put up for auction in 1988 by Hall's heirs. One lot was a box that contained a collection of negatives from Glover’s photographs taken since serving in the trenches during WWI, as well as journals and correspondence from his many lovers spanning a period of several decades. Among them were letters from Hall written during his air force  service in WWII. Much of the collection was published in a book with text by James Gardiner – A Class Apart: The Private Pictures of Montague Glover (1992), and it gives great insight into the underworld of gay British society in the early twentieth century. Many of the photographs are sexually charged, but stop short of being pornographic. Any Internet search for Glover's photographs will yield dozens of examples.

A portrait of Glover's lover Ralph Hall is shown on the book's cover.

 

Special thanks to blog reader Michael for bringing this photographer to my attention.

Monty Glover's partner Ralph Hall (below):

Two boys in Victoria Park in London's East End (1930s):

Necktie and salaciously tight shorts:

London delivery boy (1920s):

Rough trade in the then notorious cruising ground of Trafalgar Square, London:

Another portrait of Monty's partner, Ralph Hall:

Michelangelo

Renaissance artist Michelangelo (1475-1564) was born in Florence as Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni. His statue of David (1504) in Florence and his frescoes in the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel (1512), which took four years to complete, are among the most famous works of art in the western world. He worked until a few days before his death at the age of eighty-eight, leaving an important legacy in sculpture, painting, drawing, and architecture. So great was his fame that he was the first Western artist of whom a biography was published during his lifetime.

Many of his drawings, paintings and sculptures are of a homoerotic nature, and he had relationships with many of his young models: Gherardo Perini, the nobleman Tommaso Cavalieri, Cecchino dei Bracci and a young male prostitute by the name of Febo di Poggio. He referred to Febo as a “little blackmailer,” because Febo demanded money, clothes, and assorted gifts in return for his love. Perini lived with Michelangelo for more than ten years. Bracci was only thirteen when the sixty-six year old Michelangelo fell in love with him. Two years later, when Bracci died, Michelangelo was so devastated that he wrote epitaphs for the youth’s tomb for an entire year, such as this example:


The earthy flesh, and here my bones,
Deprived of handsome eyes, and charming air,
Do yet attest how gracious I was in bed,
When he embraced, in whom my soul now lives.

Well, there you have it. Michelangelo’s correspondence, poetry and diaries that refer to his passion for young men were suppressed for centuries, and his love poems written to Cavalieri were censored by his publisher, who changed the gender from male to female in order to avoid scandal. Michelangelo was himself quite secretive, burning all of his personal drawings and papers before he died. In one sonnet Michelangelo wrote that the highest form of love cannot be for a woman, because “a woman is not worthy of a wise and virile heart.”

Michelangelo painted and sculpted a lot of beefcake. The Sistine Chapel ceiling is awash in paired male nudes. There are 48 naked boys depicting cherubs alongside 24 mostly naked youths, 16 adult male nudes supporting the Medallions, 16 bronze male nudes flanking the Ancestors, plus the famous 20 Ignudi (seated males) depicted as young, completely naked men. None of these figures has any relevance to a Christian narrative. They are on the ceiling because Michelangelo was besotted with masculinity. Pure and simple. Even his female figures had rather masculine bodies, differentiated from the men only by their longer hair.

After 1534, Michelangelo turned his attention almost exclusively to architecture. He became the architect of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, which had already been under construction for forty years. The massive dome he designed for St. Peter’s is among the greatest architectural and engineering feats of its time; Michelangelo’s red chalk drawing of its trademark radial columns was not unearthed in the Vatican archives until 2007.

Frank Israel

Gay Architect to the Stars

After traveling to Italy and working on the East Coast, Frank Israel (1945-1996) moved to Los Angeles in 1979. He taught at the School of Architecture at the University of California at Los Angeles and designed sets for Paramount movies (“Star Trek: The Motion Picture” and “Night Games”), private houses for a number of prominent gay and straight Hollywood figures and offices for independent film production companies. One of the "Santa Monica" architects, he was responsible for the Art Pavilion in Beverly Hills (1991) and the Fine Arts Facility at the University of California at Riverside (1994 - see photo at right). Among the private homes he designed were those of Robert Altman, Joel Grey, and talent agent Howard Goldberg and partner Jim Bean (photo at end of post).

The 1991 Goldberg-Bean residence ((2029 Castilian Dr. in West Hollywood) was a landmark re-design of a ranch house as a series of pavilions linked by a long, blue curvilinear wall. Each of the pavilions faces toward a specific view of downtown Los Angeles, Hollywood, or Santa Monica. He used unusual materials: lead coated copper panels, mustard-yellow pigmented stucco, and fir plywood with redwood battens against concrete block walls.

The Eames Office (photo at right) at 901 Washington Blvd. in Venice Beach was used by Charles and Ray Eames from 1943 until Ray's death in 1988, when the building required extensive earthquake proofing. The husband and wife designers worked for decades from this renovated garage, and their enduring classic "Eames chair" was designed in this office. The building still stands after extensive remodeling of the interior and facade by Frank Israel. The street name, however, has been changed, so the current address is 901 Abbot Kinney Boulevard.

In 1979, he also designed the first of a kind of building in which he would excel, offices for independent movie production companies. These included the headquarters for Propaganda Films, designed in 1988, and for Limelight Productions and Virgin Records, both designed in 1991.

Once diagnosed with HIV, Israel worked hard to be imaginative and distinctive. He took greater risks in the profession and began educating people about living with AIDS. He is survived by his long-time companion, Thomas Haase.

1991 Goldberg-Bean residence in West Hollywood

Architect Philip Johnson

Philip Johnson (1906-2005) was one of the twentieth century’s most influential architects. His career spanned more than seventy five years. When Cleveland-born Johnson died just shy of his 99th birthday, he was survived by his partner of 45 years, David Whitney, who died six months later. Whitney, 33 years younger than Johnson, was an art collector and curator who had been a friend and confidant of Andy Warhol. Johnson did not officially come out publicly until 1994, when his biography by Franz Schulze was released.

Johnson designed a new sanctuary and chapel for Dallas's Cathedral of Hope, at 4,000 members the nation's largest gay and lesbian religious congregation. The chapel was dedicated in 2010, but the 2,000 seat main sanctuary remains unbuilt because of a lack of funds. The design has no parallel lines; the walls twist, tilt, and bend into ceilings and floors. Monumental, unconventional, and ever-changing, the proposed building will be a symbol of strength, hope, and unity. It will minister to society's need for the wisdom to perceive that homosexuals are integral to society, not alien from it. The Cathedral of Hope complex was Johnson's last project before his death in 2005.

While in his twenties Johnson visited landmark architectural sites and structures in Europe. It was a meeting with Bauhaus architect Mies van der Rohe that changed his life. The two became instant collaborators and competitors. They also incurred the pique and envy of Frank Lloyd Wright, who rejected their stripped down International Style, pared of ornament.

In 1949, after service in the U.S. Army, Johnson created his masterpiece, the "Glass House" in New Canaan, Connecticut, a profoundly influential work (above). The all glass house set in a landscape with views as its real walls served as his own residence. The building is an important achievement in minimalism, geometry, proportion, and the effects of transparency and reflection.

Johnson went on to design important buildings in NYC, particularly the Seagram Building (1956) on Park Avenue and the coordination of the overall plan of Lincoln Center (1960s). The AT&T Building (now the Sony Building) in Manhattan (1984) set the world of architecture on its ear by introducing a new style known as post modernism. That building boasts a Chippendale pediment, as if it were a highboy or wardrobe, instead of an office building (photo at top of post shows Johnson holding the model).

I am lucky to live within a few miles of one of Johnson’s quirkier buildings, the Pre-Columbian Pavilion at Dumbarton Oaks (Washington DC), a little-known architectural masterpiece. Completed in 1963, it is part of an estate property best known for its gardens designed by Edith Wharton's niece, Beatrix Farrand. Now owned by Harvard University, the museum was originally the home of philanthropists Mildred and Robert Woods Bliss, who filled it with their extensive collection of rare books and Meso-american art.

The pavilion, a perfect square which consists of a series of eight undulating glass circular galleries with domed ceilings (each 25 feet in diameter), wide marble-clad columns and a central, elegant open-air fountain, perhaps outshines the objects it displays. Curved walls of glass integrate the building into the garden setting, and teak floors are laid in radiating patterns in alignment with the domes.Think of it as the way a set of dice indicates "nine," a grid of three rows set in three columns, with the middle dot missing (that's the open air fountain, below).

The noble beauty of the small structure in this intimate setting proves that Johnson could deliver a significant intimate structure other than his famed 1949 Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut. Johnson said his inspiration for the Dumbarton Pavilion came from the great 16th century Turkish architect Sinan, who designed all those mosques in Istanbul. It is interesting to note that both Johnson and Sinan lived well into their nineties.