There is a painting by the Dutch master Frans Hals with the rather misleading title Merrymakers at Shrovetide (1616–17). Shrovetide? Well, if you notice the orange beads around the neck and wrists of the “maiden” at its center you can easily tell what holiday this group of merrymakers is celebrating. Today we call it Mardi Gras. Just think how much more approachable the painting would be if it were titled “Mardi Gras Party.”

THE FIRST GATHERING to discuss The Homosexual Matrix, which was held on February 2, 1976, was a good deal less fraught than my confrontation with Arno Karlen, though hardly a love fest. Over a five-hour period, most of the hot-button topics relating to sexuality came up for discussion, sometimes in heated exchanges.

A version of this article previously appeared in Physique Pictorial. The author is grateful to Tom DeSimone for his informative discussions of this early period of gay film history.

MOST READERS of these pages will probably identify James Ivory as the director of those sumptuous film adaptations of E. M. Forster’s novels—Maurice, Howards End, A Room with a View. Some readers will also know that Ivory formed a decades-long personal and professional partnership with the Indian producer Ismail Merchant to make those films. Yet few readers may know about Ivory’s small-town-boy-makes-good story, or about how he has lived his life as an openly gay man for most of his ninety years, …

Tóibín knows a thing or two about famous writers who were repressed homosexuals.  Mann was not afraid to recount his furtive gay encounters in his journals.

In 1927, Arnold Pyle (1909–1973), one of Wood’s former students, became his assistant. Pyle was eighteen and Wood, 36. Good-looking, tall, athletic, with thick black hair, the heterosexual Pyle epitomized the type of man Wood continued to fall for, over and over, throughout his life.