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Parting Glances: Where there's smoke, there's gas

Christopher Isherwood met Don Bachardy on an L.A. beach when Don was 18 and Isherwood, 49. For 33 devoted, creative years they were together. Aging writer. Youthful artist.
Bachardy drew portraits of Isherwood, including several as Isherwood lay dying in 1983. "Chris would have wanted nothing less," says Bachardy. "My final act of love at the end of a long, wonderful companionship."
September's Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide has an in-depth article about Chris and Don's journey as senior and teenager, mentor and pupil, co-catalysts in the struggle for LGBT human rights. Author Armistead Maupin calls them "America's first gay couple."
"Chris and Don: A Love Story," will soon be released as a DVD documentary, narrated by Bachardy, with photos, film clips, drawings, interviews and recollections by famous colleagues, friends, movie stars, activists.
(It's a tribute worth owning, coming out, as it will, during the release of Gus Van Sant's "Milk," a film about Harvey Milk, America's first openly gay elected official and martyr by assassination.)
I once had the privilege of reading an unpublished letter from Isherwood to my friend of 20 years, Collins George, Detroit Free Press music critic, who died in 1981. Isherwood and George met in a Conscientious Objector Camp in 1942. (George later became a World War II war correspondent in Italy, and following D-Day, a managing editor of the Pittsburgh Courier.)
Collins and Chris were also CO Camp buddies with Denham "Denny" Fouts, by all accounts a stunning hustler. A charmer to be sure, Denny wound up kept by a member of the Swedish Royal House. Sadly, he also OD'd in Paris while still in his radiant 30s.
George and Fouts are characters in Isherwood's 1962 novel, "Down There On A Visit." Other of Isherwood's many titles include coming-out books "A Single Man" and "Christopher and His Kind," and legendary "Mrs. Norris Changes Trains" (1935) and "Goodbye to Berlin" (1939).
The last two are adapted for the Broadway musical/film "Cabaret". Sally Bowles is as famous today as Isherwood, thanks to Lisa Minnelli. (A handsome Michael York plays the film-version Isherwood role.)
For "Goodbye to Berlin," Isherwood drew upon his 1929/1930 gay experiences living in that notorious sin-hole capital of the Weimar Republic (1919-1933). For gays, lesbians and crossdressers, life was free, liberating, debauched – enjoyed in over 125 gay bars. (Berlin's Magnus Hershfield Museum of Human Sexuality housed the first collection of its kind. Dr. Hershfield, early homosexual rights champion, was Jewish.)
Things imploded in 1933 when Adolf Hitler became chancellor and his right-wing National Socialists became the totalitarian party. The Nazis fully criminalized abortion and homosexuality in 1934. 15,000 gay men were sent to concentration camps. A handful survived.
Germany was hard hit by the 1929 Stock Market Crash. A billion Reichsmarks bought one loaf of bread. The Nazis created scapegoats: the Jews. Their books were burned. Businesses, boycotted. Synagogues, destroyed. Citizenship and schools, denied. Six million Jewish victims were gassed in 24/7 concentration camps. The average German – so-called devout "Christians" – looked the other way as even little Jewish children vanished up the chimneys as smoke.
Given the political, economic, religious climate in America, given a trillions-dollar unnecessary war, several billions-dollar "act of God" disasters, organized fundygelical hate-mongering, could life-threatening LGBT scapegoating happen here? Good question. No way? Well, read St. Dobson 3:16:
"Yea, verily, thus saith the voice out of the burning bush: With gas nearing five bucks a pump, true believers who don't count up their mileage lessons of the past are dumbed, er, doomed to refuel them. Amen."

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Topics: Opinions
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