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Inspiring Gays of History, Vol. XXVIIXI: Richard Halliburton, Adventurer I’m not one to believe that gay people are in their hearts just like everybody else, which has caused some irritation among my fellows. The uncorrupted gay nature is, I insist, a joyous and generous one. In a mindful society this nature would pass unscathed from child to adult. I look to the words of Whitman and Wilde and Woolf and Sappho and Coward and Williams and Kushner and Byron and Rumi and Cavafy and Mary Oliver and Proust (oh, yes), I look to the art of Michelangelo and Warhol and George Platt Lynes, the music of Tchaikovsky and Cole Porter and Sondheim and even Elton John – I look to gay and lesbian artists who continue this joyous line unabated despite living in difficult and prejudicial times. For what time hasn’t been difficult for gay people? Throw a dart at a timeline of the world and, yes, you’ll hit a rough age for the homos. So bless the closet cases, those who threw up their hands and sank beneath the typhoon of hatred blown their way. Bless Senator Larry Craig, for whom happiness is so near and insurmountably far. Bless his colleague Lindsey Graham (oh yes, I went there.) Bless them all, for the joyous gay boy inside them still cries out in horror of the world their master has chosen. How hard it is to forgive those among them who deride the "others" -- those who live out of the closet. But that’s what happens when a closet case’s true nature butts heads with the straight world and the happy gay kid comes up short. Bless all of the closet cases. I'm serious. You can still feel disgust for their lack of balls. Let’s now avert our gaze and look to gay heroes. Today I look to Richard Halliburton (1900-1939).
I write of an adventurer nonpareil and inspiration to generations of people, young and old alike. His Book of Marvels was highly recommended by my mother when I was a child. She read it avidly herself. As a child I didn’t touch the Book of Marvels. Something about it struck me as an eat-your-vegetables read, though I devoured nearly every other book in the house. Not until adulthood, when I came across a copy at a flea market, did I open it. Man, did I miss out. The title doesn’t lie. The Book of Marvels is fantastic: a whirlwind voyage across the world through the Occident and the Orient, meeting great figures both historical and contemporary. It’s a rollicking adventure told in a generous, you’re-my-friend style. Halliburton is the first person ever to swim the Panama Canal (taking care to avoid the alligators); when asked to pay a toll for passage, it was decided that he should pay by his freight, incurring a charge of thirty-six cents. He hid from the guards in Istanbul’s Santa Sophia (now called the Hagia Sophia) and stayed overnight to explore its wonders – and did the same at the Taj Majal. He slept atop an Egyptian pyramid. He took Iraq’s impetuous Prince Ghazi on a flight over Baghdad and nearly missed the stern curfew of his father, the king.
Something about the generosity of Halliburton’s writing pricked my ear. It seemed -- well, queer. A simple Internet search confirmed my instinct: Richard Halliburton was indeed gay. Inspired by Wilde’s The Portrait of Dorian Gray, Halliburton wrote this in the opening pages of his first book, The Royal Road to Romance (1925): I began to recite lines from [Dorian Gray] that had burned themselves into my memory: 'Realize your youth while you have it . . . Don't squander the gold of your days.' Let those who wish have their respectability -- I wanted freedom, freedom to indulge in whatever caprice struck my fancy. . . . Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you. Be afraid of nothing. . . . The romantic--that was what I wanted. May I note a congruency, not just between Wilde and Halliburton, but in the seize-the-day sensuality of Byron and Whitman (and may I add Patrick Dennis, whose Mame might well have chirped the above quote between gulps of gin?). In my searching, I found a marvelous letter from Halliburton to his father: Dad, you hit the wrong target when you write that you wish I were at Princeton living "in the even tenor of my way." I hate that expression and as far as I am able I intend to avoid that condition. When impulse and spontaneity fail to make my "way" as uneven as possible then I shall sit up nights inventing means of making life as conglomerate and vivid as possible. Those who live in the even tenor of their way simply exist until death ends their monotonous tranquility. No, there's going to be no even tenor with me. The more uneven it is the happier I shall be. 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, thrills—every emotion that any human ever had—and I'll be especially happy if I am spared a stupid, common death in bed. So, Dad, I'm afraid your wish will always come to naught, for my way is to be ever changing, but always swift, acute and leaping from peak to peak instead of following the rest of the herd, shackled in conventionalities, along the monotonous narrow path in the valley. The dead have reached perfection when it comes to even tenor! How beautifully articulated! Halliburton belongs with the great gay artists in shrugging off the “even tenor” of a dominant culture in favor of gasping in great breaths of life. Is it any wonder that gay people, whose very existence brings into question traditional notions of gender, are so loathed by so many? What ordinary person consciously wants their “even tenor” threatened, though they may unconsciously yearn for it? If there is a reason gay people spurt from the wombs of heterosexuals at a rate of one in twenty, it is this. For without gay people to contest comfortable, firmly-held divisions, the world would become unbearable for all. Anger, fostered by a life rooted in divisiveness, would brim over. Anyway. My enthusiasm runs away with me.
Halliburton was indeed spared a “stupid, common death in bed,” as he presciently wrote to his father. Buoyed by the financial success of his books and popular speaking engagements, Halliburton built a Chinese junk named the Sea Dragon on which he planned to sail from Hong Kong to San Francisco. In 1939, he undertook the voyage with Paul Mooney -- as well as a crew disgruntled by the junk’s top-heavy construction. This is his last contact to the world, by radio from his bedeviled sea vessel: “Southerly gales, squalls, lee rail under water, wet bunks, hard tack, bully beef, wish you were here, instead of me.” An adventurer and wit to the last, an iconoclast living his life to its fullest and inspiring countless others, Halliburton belongs with the great gays and lesbians of history. Immensely popular in his lifetime, it’s a shame that he is largely forgotten. I planned to bring this discussion back to Senator Larry Craig. But I cannot find a seamless way. Considering Halliburton's profile in courage and Craig's embarrassing profile in cowardice, they do not belong in the same world. But they do exist together, somehow. Halliburton, like countless hundreds of thousands before him, lived in a world without a popular notion of "gay culture" -- at a time when coming out was impossible. No language existed to do so beyond society's moral priggishness. So he adventured and found a culture, lived bravely, finding friends and lovers and a sensibility on his own. And he gave back to the world, feeding the imaginations of generations of children and adults with his swashbuckling tales. To think that even today the Larry Craigs of the world, whose secret interior lives would find succor if brought bravely to the light, still choose to live a truculent lie, seems impossible. But the dominant culture demands such deformity still. So we'll end with a prayer for the closet cases, whose true natures grimly surface in bathrooms and secret places. They have declined a glorious adventure, and suffer grievously for an "even tenor" along Halliburton's despised narrow path in the valley. What a bitter price to pay for smooth sailing. |
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