Twenty who made their mark under thirty: a historical look at the great gay and lesbian prodigies in the arts

A historical look back at the great gay and lesbian prodigies in the arts

Gertrude Stein may have been the first artist to pinpoint 30 as the age at which true creativity initially can be expressed. Or, rather, 29. "A person either reaches his 29th birthday, or he does not," she said, meaning that sooner or later an artist sets aside influences and inhibitions and creates something new, a work of art distinctly his or her own. Here are 20 gay and lesbian writers, musicians, filmmakers, artists, dancers, and choreographers who met Stein's deadline: They achieved their first success before turning 30.

The original British bad boy

Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593)

The original bad boy of English literature, Marlowe was a brilliant, snide rebel who ran drunk through London pubs claiming that Jesus had sex with his disciple John. "Christ did love him with an extraordinary love," Marlowe insisted. He wrote his first play, Tamburlaine the Great, when he was 23 and created a string of successful tragedies for the Elizabethan stage, including Edward II, which is about the 14th-century British king who was killed in part because he lavished so many royal favors on his boyfriend.

Like Edward II, Marlowe met a bad end as well. He "died swearing," stabbed in a bar brawl, possibly in a fight over the drink tab. But there were rumors of foul play. After all, he'd been a government spy, an atheist, and an accused heretic. Perhaps he was being silenced for remarks like "All they that love not tobacco and boys are fools."

She lit up the City of Light

Colette (1873-1954)

Twenty-four when she wrote her first novel, Claudine at School, Colette originally published under her husband's name, Willy. Claudine sold 40,000 copies in two months. Later she said her marriage was "a morbid thing, akin to the neuroses of puberty, the habit of eating chalk and coal, of drinking mouthwash, of reading dirty books, and sticking pins into the palm of your hand."

After splitting from Willy, Colette became a music-hall performer, hung out with Paris lesbians, and fell in love with a woman named Missy. They were together until Colette married an editor, had a daughter at 40, and wrote her popular novel Cheri. By the time she died, she'd been a wife, lover, mother, actress, writer, and grand officer in the Legion of Honour. She even discovered Audrey Hepburn, whom she picked to star in the stage version of her most famous novel, Gigi. Yet she never forgot that "she had been one of those half-naked dancing girls whose naughty photographs are still preserved in certain albums."

Harlem's renaissance man

Langston Hughes (1902-1967)

Hughes's first volume of poetry, The Weary Blues, was published in 1926 when he was 24. Suddenly he was one of the leading figures of the Harlem Renaissance, which was at its height in the late 1920s. The child of a white father and a black mother, Hughes was a mix of French, Indian, and African blood. As a young man he was vague enough about his sexuality to make everyone fall in love with him. He carried on a long (perhaps unconsummated) flirtation with fellow Harlem poet Countee Cullen, who sent Hughes a number of poems, including one titled "To a Brown Boy" with the dedication "For L.H." Still, Hughes was coy about his sexuality throughout his life, though African-American filmmaker Isaac Julien controversially claimed him as a fellow homo, in his 1989 documentary, Looking for Langston.

High society's child

Truman Capote (1924-1984)

"I'm an alcoholic. I'm a drug addict. I'm a homosexual. I'm a genius," Capote wrote not long before his death. He died a self-parody, more famous as a celebrity than as the author of the novella Breakfast at Tiffany's and the classic nonfiction crime suspense novel In Cold Blood. But Capote was a literary sensation at age 24 with the 1948 publication of his first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms. It was lauded for its mature style and knowingness, including the suggested homosexuality of one of its characters. And it was famous for the author's photo: Capote, who looks 11 in the shot, lounges seductively on a divan, as if he were posing for kiddie porn.

Between a Rock and a hard place

Rock Hudson (1925-1985)

In 1947 Hudson was a boy named Roy Scherer Jr., fresh out of the Navy, when openly gay talent scout Henry Willson landed him a contract at Universal Studios. With his new name and disguised homosexuality, Hudson made action films like Seminole and Bengal Brigade. Then in 1954 melodrama king Douglas Sirk cast the 29-year-old Hudson in Magnificent Obsession, his breakout role. Paired with Jane Wyman, he played a bachelor who becomes a doctor to cure Wyman's blindness. The film set the standard for 1950s women's pictures and began a Hudson-Sirk partnership that included the classics All That Heaven Allows and Written on the Wind.

In the '60s Hudson made comedies with Doris Day. Though he was the stalking playboy to Day's withholding virgin, the subtext of films like Lover Come Back is clear: Doris is the butch; Rock's the fem. Since Hudson's death from AIDS complications in 1985, it's startling to watch Send Me No Flowers, in which, because husband Rock thinks he's dying, he picks up guys man effort to find Doris a new man.

They used him as a woman

Sal Mineo (1939-1976)

Mineo was 16 when he played Plato, the fatherless boy yearning for James Dean's protection in Rebel Without a Cause. Mineo got an Oscar nomination, but he complained that he was put on Hollywood's "weirdo list." Unlike Hudson, who was gay but "all-American" in appearance, Mineo fell outside the racial main stream. And, unlike Hudson, he never pretended he was straight. So he played "outsiders": a Mexican farm boy who dies in Giant, an Indian brave in director John Ford's Cheyenne Autumn, a "cripple" cured by Christ in The Greatest Story Ever Told, and, in Exodus, an Auschwitz survivor raped by Nazis. "They used me as a woman," Mineo said and was rewarded with a second Oscar nomination.

Mineo's film career petered out after his role as a psychotic busboy who tries to seduce Juliet Prowse in the highly offbeat Who Killed Teddy Bear? In 1976 Mineo was murdered outside his apartment in West Hollywood, Calif., stabbed to death by a burglar (or, as it's rumored, a trick). Unlike dozens of homosexual or bisexual film stars, Mineo never denied his sexuality. "I like them all," he said. "Men, I mean. And a few chicks now and then."

Pyotr the great

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)

There's a photograph of 19-year-old "Petya" Tchaikovsky, graduating from the School of Jurisprudence in St. Petersburg, Russia, and holding hands with one of his male classmates. He was trained to be a good son and a civil servant, but he was already attracted to other men and so obsessed with music that he complained that it never stopped playing in his head.

Tchaikovsky was 29 and living in Moscow when he wrote his Romeo and Juliet fantasy-overture with its famously rhapsodic theme, later heard in the background of countless movies. Perhaps he was drawn to Romeo and Juliet because of his complicated love for Belgian singer and operatic soprano D6sir6e Artot. Or maybe he was thinking of a 15-year-old boy named Eduard Zak, who showed up in Moscow to study acting but killed himself instead. Fourteen years later Tchaikovsky was still writing about the boy in his diary. "How amazingly clearly I remember him, the sound of his voice, his movements, but especially the extraordinarily wonderful expression on his face," he wrote. "It seems to me that I have never loved anyone so strongly as him."

The empress sang the blues

Bessie Smith (1894-1937)

Smith belongs to the handful of vocal artists who helped define popular music in the 20th century. Her precocious ability was obvious from the time she was 10 years old and sharing a shack in Chattanooga, Tenn., with six brothers and sisters. Both her parents had died, and she joined her older brother Clarence as a street performer, singing "Bill Bailey, Won't You Please Come Home?"

In 1923, when she was 27, her single "Downhearted Blues" sold 780,000 copies in six months. The power of her presence soon won her the nickname Empress of the Blues. By 1925 Smith was at the height of her success, performing with her traveling show, supporting a husband, and having flings with her chorus girls when she wasn't chasing away Ku Klux Klansmen from vaudeville theaters by saying, "You just pick up them sheets and run." She recorded up to 160 songs in just ten years' time, including many she wrote, like the classic "Reckless Blues," where she's backed by trumpeter Louis Armstrong. The 1929 stock market crash killed the black vaudeville circuit, and Smith stopped recording in 1933. She died in a car accident in 1937. According to legend she bled to death because a white hospital wouldn't admit her. But that story has been contradicted, and her death remains mysterious.

Seventeen and still counting

Janis Ian (born 1951)

One of the first recording artists to acknowledge publicly that she is a lesbian, Ian shook the music world not once but twice before she turned 30. She was 15 when her single "Society's Child" was a pop hit in 1967. It was a song about interracial love, and its pungent lyrics, anguished tone, and political sophistication set the standard for Ian's 30-year recording career. She was born Janis Eddy Fink in New York City and attended New York's High School of Music and Art, where she changed her name and started writing songs. After performing in West Village nightclubs, she got a recording contract. But when she refused to sing other writers' material, the bosses dropped her. Then she was invited by conductor Leonard Bernstein to sing "Society's Child" on television with the New York Philharmonic. It made her a pop star.

Ian's next big hit came when she was 24. "At Seventeen" was the anthem for every geek, freak, dropout, and queer who went to high school in the '70s. It was a Grammy-award winner, number three on the pop charts, and one of two singles off the 1975 platinum album Between the Lines. After a few more albums, Ian took a 12year break from recording. She returned as an openly lesbian artist and emerged as one of the most personal, identifiable voices in the gay community with her columns in The Advocate.

Inside the velvet closet

Virgil Thomson (1896-1989)

By the time Thomson was 30, he had finished the Prologue and Act 1 of the opera that would make him famous, Four Saints in Three Acts. It didn't have its world premiere for almost ten years, but Thomson spent much of that time performing it for potential backers. The first recital took place at Thomson's Paris garret, at a "stand-up-and-walk-around supper for 12 people," including Gertrude Stein and her lover, Alice B. Toklas. Stein wrote the libretto, which included the notorious lyric "pigeons in the grass alas."

Thomson's music set the standard for new explorations and innovations by 20th-century composers like Leonard Bernstein, Ned Rorem, and Philip Glass. Thomson was an influential music critic for the Now York Herald Tribune; he was also a friend and sometime rival of composer Aaron Copland, perhaps the most famous gay American composer of the 20th century. During the 1950s and '60s, Thomson found himself at the center of a certain homosexual elite of gay male artists and intellectuals who lived in what has been called the "velvet closet." Gay novelist James Purdy satirized the group in his 1993 book Out With the Stars.

The firebrand of the modern stage

Eva Le Gallienne (1899-1991)

Le Gallienne influenced generations of movie stars without appearing in more than a handful of films. She was an openly homosexual woman who nonetheless refused to call herself a lesbian. Born in England, she was the daughter of a fiercely independent Danish woman and a dissolute novelist father who may have sexually abused her. She started acting at 14, and by the time she was 22, she had her career-making success in the Broadway premiere of Liliom (later the basis for the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Carousel).

She wasn't a Broadway star for long. In 1926 she couldn't get backing for a Broadway production of Henrik Ibsen's The Master Builder. So she started the Civic Repertory Theater in Manhattan. There she produced, directed, starred in, and sometimes translated popular plays like Peter Pan as well as classic works by Ibsen and Anton Chekhov. It was the country's first repertory theater, with an apprentice program that trained people like John Garfield, Burgess Meredith, and novelist and poet May Sarton, with whom Le Gallienne had an affair. After the Civic Repertory Theater failed, Le Gallienne spent the rest of her life supporting nonprofit theater. She said film acting was tedious and commercial, but she received an Oscar nomination in 1980 for her supporting performance in Resurrection.

The matinee idol

Noel Coward (1899-1973)

The first time Coward was propositioned by a man, he ran home to his parents' house and shouted, "Mother, I have lost my innocence!" She gave him hot cocoa. At the age of 12, Coward was already adept at delivering shocking news in such a breathless tone that he got rewarded for it. He had his first London stage success at age 14, playing one of the Lost Boys in Peter Pan. By the time he was 20, he was a seasoned professional actor and playwright.

Coward was drafted into the army during World War I, but he spent most of his time in the hospital recovering from a nervous collapse. "My stage life had ill prepared me for any discipline other than that of the theater," he said. He went back to the stage, and at 24 he produced his first success, The Young Idea. It was the 1920s, the age of neuroses, and Coward's characters were stylishly knowing and sexually confused. He wrote plays with names like Fallen Angel, Semi-Monde, and Easy Virtue, and by 1930, when he had produced one of his greatest works, Private Lives, he was declared the world's highest-paid writer. At 30 Coward was at the height of his career, and he endured his fame for the next four decades, a pioneer of the wickedly pan-sexual sex farce.

Taking center stage for black America

Lorraine Hansberry (1930-1965)

"Black people ignored the theater because the theater had always ignored them," James Baldwin said, explaining why it was so remarkable that Hansberry, an African-American, emerged in the '60s as one of the country's most important playwrights. Her first and greatest success was 1959's A Raisin in the Sun; it made her the first black woman to have a play produced on Broadway. With the play she also became the first black person to win the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. Hansberry was the youngest winner of that award and only the fifth woman.

Hansberry's career was brief. But she managed to write five plays before she died of cancer at age 34. (After her death her ex-husband adapted her writings in the play To Be Young, Gifted, and Black.) Until the last months of her life, she was involved in political activism, including lesbian rights. In 1957, after she privately acknowledged her own homosexuality, she wrote two letters of support to the lesbian newsletter "The Ladder" in which she linked homophobia with antifeminism. Her second produced play, The Sign in Sidney Brunstein's Window, was bold in addressing the artistic and sexual issues of a white homosexual artist. The play went against the era's demand that black writers concern themselves only with black characters. But Hansberry was immune to orthodoxy, whether it came from whites or blacks. She confronted then--attorney general Robert Kennedy about racism as easily as she addressed issues of sexism and homophobia in the black community.

Broadway's one singular sensation

Michael Bennet (1943-1987)

The son of a machinist and a secretary, Bennett was 18 years old when he first danced on Broadway, in the musical Subways Are for Sleeping. Over the next 25 years, he became one of musical theater's most innovative and influential choreographers. When he died of AIDS complications in 1987, his masterpiece, A Chorus Line, was the longest-running Broadway production as well as the defining musical of the '70s.

Bennett started choreographing in 1966, at the age of 23. His first two shows flopped, though they did garner him a few Tony award nominations. Then Bennett worked on the Burt Bacharach-Hal David musical Promises, Promises. It was a hit, and for the next ten years, Bennett's career soared. He choreographed Stephen Sondheim's Company and choreographed and codirected Sondheim's Follies with Harold Prince.

Bennett followed A Chorus Line with Ballroom and Dreamgirls, and he was casting for the musical Chess when he became ill, retreating to his home in Tucson, where he died. Like Rudolf Nureyev, Liberace, Perry Ellis, and a number of other celebrities, he never made a public statement about his being HIV-positive and never discussed his orientation.

Leaping over the Iron Curtain

Rudolf Nureyev (1938-1993)

When Nureyev danced in London for the first time, in November 1961, it was, according to one audience member, "as if a wild animal had been let loose in a drawing room." He was 23 years old. Six months earlier he had defected from the Soviet Union because the KGB threatened him with seven years' hard labor in Siberia for the crime of homosexuality.

In other words, Nureyev's international career--and his revolutionary effect on Western dance--was actually the result of Soviet antigay policy. He gained instant fame as the partner of ballerina Margot Fonteyn at London's Royal Ballet, and his appearances on U.S. television helped make dance a national obsession--especially male dance. "Ballet is woman," said New York City Ballet choreographer George Balanchine. But Nureyev changed that. He was sensual, athletic, and male, though with an androgynous appeal that was called "pantherine" and "exotic." "Everybody else looked like truck drivers next to him," said friend Elena Tchernichova.

Nureyev was one of the first wave of gay men infected with HIV in the late '70s and early '80s. Still, he never publicly acknowledged his homosexuality. He was willing to be artistically risky, even foolish--consider his appearance in director Ken Russell's 1977 film biography Valentino--but he never got over the social stigma and legal consequences attached to homosexuality in his homeland.

The prophet of Revelations

Alvin Ailey (1931-1989)

Ailey was 23 years old when he danced in the Broadway musical House of Flowers, based on Truman Capote's short novel The Grass Harp. It was the 1950s, and though there were plenty of great black dancers in New York, few got jobs. Ailey was in a few more stage productions, including Jamaica, starring Lena Horne. But he wanted constant work, so he started creating his own dances.

Ailey's choreography led to his forming the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, one of the first showcases for black American dance. Much of his work drew on his experience growing up poor in the Brazos Valley in Texas. Ailey's mother took him to live in Los Angeles when he was 12. One of his earliest memories of that time was watching her scrub floors in white folks' homes, an image that later turned up in his ballet Cry. But Ailey's most famous work is Revelations, which is based on black spirituals and which has been seen around the world by more people than almost any other piece of modern dance.

Still, Ailey, who struggled for many years with drug problems, never recovered from his early experience of racism. "I felt that no matter what I did," he said, "what ballet I made, how beautifully I danced, it was not good enough."

He's Still/Here

Bill T. Jones (born 1952)

Jones's father was a contractor for migrant workers, and for most of Jones's early life, his family moved up and down the East Coast, transporting migrant laborers and bringing in crops. Then they settled in upstate New York, living for a time in a converted barn. An actor and track star in high school, Jones went to the State University of New York at Binghamton. There he discovered dance and the man who would become his lover and partner, Arnie Zane.

Zane and Jones had their first kisses to Bessie Smith songs and soon formed a dance company. Then, when Jones was 23, he performed his first solo piece, Everybody Works! in New York. A postmodern multimedia political autobiography, it started Jones on a career that has addressed issues such as racism and AIDS. Zane died of AIDS complications in 1988, and Jones has been open about his own HIV infection since he acknowledged it in an Advocate interview in 1990. His controversial 1994 dance piece, Still/Here, included filmed interviews with people all over the country discussing their illnesses and their feelings about death.

He created heaven on earth

Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564)

When Michelangelo was 23 he was commissioned to create a marble sculpture for St. Peter's Cathedral in Rome of the Virgin Mary holding Christ. He made the Pieta. "It is a miracle that a stone without a shape should have been reduced to such perfection," said the famous artist's biographer, Giorgio Vasari, one of Michelangelo's contemporaries. Before he was 30 Michelangelo had also sculpted David, the famous nude figure that now graces so many gay men's kitchens as a refrigerator magnet.

Michelangelo never married, though he was "intimate" with a Roman nobleman named Tommaso Cavalieri and perhaps with Pope Julius III. A poet, sculptor, draftsman, architect, and painter, Michelangelo created the biblical murals on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and designed the Campidoglio, the public square atop one of Rome's seven hills. In his work he virtually reinvented the male body as a Renaissance figure of divine beauty, dignity, and muscularity.

She wore the pants

Rosa Bonheur (1822-1899)

One of the best-known animal painters of the 19th century, Bonheur showed her work at the Paris Salon in 1841, when she was 19. During her 20s she built a reputation with her dynamic paintings of wolves, tigers, and lions. At 29 she started her most famous painting, The Horse Fair, a huge canvas showing the Paris horse market.

To fit into the all-male world of the market, Bonheur dressed as a man and made sketches twice a week for a year and a half. She showed the painting to wide acclaim at the Paris Salon in 1853.

Bonheur grew up in France's Bordeaux region, and she was a lifelong nonconformist and early feminist. Though she discouraged speculation that she was a lesbian, she lived with her female companion, Nathalie Micas, for more than 40 years. Bonheur was also involved with American painter Anna Klumpke, whom she made her sole heir.

If Bonheur, suffered persecution, the record doesn't show it. In 1857 the secretary-general of France issued a permit allowing her to wear,men's clothing; in 1894 she became the first woman to be awarded the Grand Cross of France's Legion of Honor. Bought in 1887 by Cornelius Vanderbilt, The Horse Fair today hangs in New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Spray art, street-smart

Keith Haring (1958-1990)

A populist artist who explored the boundaries between graffiti and fine art, Haring was famous fast, He was 24 when he broke through to mainstream fame with his first major gallery show, in SoHo. Just seven years later, at age 31, he died of AIDS complications.

A native of small-town Pennsylvania, Haring arrived in New York City in 1978 to study at the School of Visual Arts. His dad dropped him off in front of the YMCA, and within a few years Haring's now-famous "radiant child" drawings were showing up on subway billboards all over Manhattan. With his gallery success and the opening in 1986 of his Pop Shop, which still sells* merchandise based on his art, Haring became perhaps the most visible superstar of the wildly affluent 1980s downtown New York art scene. But he worried that he wasn't taken seriously as a fine artist. His iconography struck some art aficionados as too easy.

Ironically, though Haring was famously out, he was careful to market his "universal" (public) art differently from his "private" (homosexual) works. His subway art, aimed at black and Latino youth, is gender-neutral. But the walls of one of the bathrooms in the New York City Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center are covered with radiant male children having sex.

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