IN 2010, Michael Kammen, the Pulitzer Prize-winning (People of Paradox) historian, an acquaintance from years earlier, asked me for some advice about gay history and culture. Michael taught at Cornell throughout his academic career, and at some point he learned that the university’s archival division had recently acquired a large manuscript collection—the Wormley/Crouse Papers (W/C).
“Wormley” was Edward Wormley (1907–1995), a modernist designer of furniture and interiors, who in the mid-20th century gained prominence for combining the avant-garde modernism of the Bauhaus and the International Style with certain features that derived from classical design. When Playboy chose the six most prominent designers of the day for a feature article on modern American furniture in 1961, it included Wormley (along with Harry Bertoia, Charles Eames, George Nelson, Jens Risom, and Eero Saarinen). Nationally prominent in mid-century, he also won a number of prestigious awards, including the Elsie de Wolfe Award from the American Institute of Decorators, the Distinguished Designer Award from the American Society of Furniture Designers, and an honorary Doctorate in Fine Arts from the Parsons School of Design in New York City.
The “Crouse” of the Cornell archive was Edward Crouse (1908–1975), Wormley’s lover of some fifty years. Born in 1908, Crouse was orphaned at ten and he and his two sisters had been lovingly brought up by an aunt and uncle. Even as a youngster Crouse adored the theater, regularly built sets and staged plays at home and hoped for a time to become an actor. As an adult, he became director of theatrical productions at the University of Georgia and, during World War II, at the Army base in Greenland. Though he’d gotten a master’s degree in journalism at the University of Wisconsin in 1936, that profession had never engaged him, and after the war he joined Wormley’s firm as an “associate” specializing in lighting.
Knowing that Kammen was heterosexually married and had two sons, I was delighted that a straight scholar, and one of distinction no less, had finally expressed interest in some aspects of gay life and culture. After our exchange in 2010, I didn’t hear from him again, put the matter aside, and simply assumed—accurately, as it would turn out—that he was working away steadily on the Wormley-Crouse project. Then in 2013 I received the news that Michael had died at age 77.
Earlier this year, I contacted his son Daniel and then, at his suggestion, his mother Carol Kammen (also a Cornell historian). She couldn’t have been more cordial and promptly sent me a copy of the nearly 200-page manuscript Michael had completed, as well as a thumb drive of a substantial portion of the Wormley/Crouse archive.
Carol and I agreed that Michael’s manuscript was too sketchy a work-in-progress to warrant publication, especially since his first-draft prose lacked the nuanced sophistication characteristic of his previous work. I myself had no wish to undertake a full-length study of the two Eds. Yet I thought that a condensed selection of their actual correspondence, along with commentary to help contextualize the material, would be a labor worth undertaking. Its real worth, it seems to me, lies in the detailed evidence it provides of the rather commonplace texture of two intertwined gay male lives during a fair portion of the last century, demonstrating that the period before Stonewall was not one of unbroken dread and repression for gay people.
Michael’s extensive originating labors, plus the usefulness of his manuscript in providing background details, makes it obvious that his name should be listed first as the true parent of this joint project. — Martin Duberman
BORN on New Year’s Eve, 1907, Ed Wormley was a sixth-generation American of German descent. When he was two, his working-class family moved from one small Illinois farm town (Oswego) to another (Rochelle), where he passed through the public schools, all the while nourishing his early attraction to interior design through correspondence courses. At least as early as 1920 he met another artistically inclined teenager, Ed Crouse. The two went to the same schools, took hikes, camped out—and by 1925 had become lovers. “What would the world think,” Crouse wrote Wormley that year, “could they but glance at our letters?” He didn’t much care—“if our neighbors talk about us, let them talk”—though he did think they could be “freer and happier” if they lived in a city. (The urban image conflicted somewhat with Crouse’s equally intense fantasies of a “rose-covered cottage,” yet they would ultimately manage both.)
Inseparable since adolescence, both men came out to their families at eighteen, and without any notable wringing of hands—perhaps in part because as announced atheists and aspiring æsthetes they’d already come to be regarded as creatures outside community norms. Both men came from financially modest and emotionally cramped backgrounds. Wormley “adored” his mother (as she did him), and, later in life, after she and her husband divorced, she would live with her son for extended periods. In contrast, he and his father were never companionable; Wormley thought his father was “embarrassed” by him, and relations were never good. Crouse, for his part, lost his mother at an early age and was raised by an indigent father who occasionally sold insurance and unsuccessfully became a preacher on the side. An additional trauma in Crouse’s young life resulted from being raped at age thirteen—an episode about which we have no details. He and his two sisters were essentially brought up by an aunt and uncle who, fortunately, doted on them.
Sex between Wormley and Crouse would never be particularly intense—and never based on exclusivity. There was in fact an imbalance in their erotic attraction to each other from the start, with Crouse less interested in Wormley than vice versa. Nor did they ever seem to hesitate in writing each other detailed letters when apart about their assorted sexual encounters, with Crouse (a classically handsome blonde with an athletic physique) the more active of the two. Wormley, though pleasant looking, was no Adonis—decidedly not when compared to Crouse. Short (5-foot-5) and stocky with a slight limp left over from a mild case of childhood polio, Wormley had to do much of the initiating when they did have sex, and it mostly consisted of him fellating the well-endowed Crouse.
Both agreed that the sex between them was often enjoyable but wasn’t their primary bond. Crouse especially realized early on “that, truly, our friendship is not founded on sex [his emphasis].” What would keep them together for fifty years wasn’t sex but love: a compound of compatible values and tastes, the comforting assurance of emotional fidelity, concern for the other’s well-being, and intense pleasure in each other’s company—all of which made it possible to survive sometimes long periods of separation and major differences in personality. Wormley’s temperament was less given to extremes, well integrated, and highly functional. Crouse, ironically, though physically stronger and more attractive, was more emotionally brittle, more easily discouraged and unsettled.
Crouse graduated high school in 1925, a year ahead of Wormley, and enrolled in the University of Wisconsin. He was initially unhappy there and berated himself in a letter to Wormley (whom he soon nicknamed “Buster,” or sometimes “Bus”) as “a flat failure because of my lack of perseverance.” Yet on campus he grew increasingly popular, was elected vice-president of his fraternity and president of the glee club, and would periodically toy with the idea of marrying a woman and “settling down.” It would “give me self-confidence,” he explained to Buster, and would be “a stabilizing force.” In contrast to Wormley, who never felt any erotic or romantic attraction toward women, Crouse, until his late twenties, would now and then decide that he’d found this or that woman at least marginally appealing, and he’d experience periodic turmoil and shame about being “odd.” For an even longer period, he held on to the determination at least to appear “regular.”
Yet it was a fantasy he couldn’t sustain: “Gee, Buster, I don’t know what I’ll do if our plans all fail. If I have to live alone, or with a woman, I’ll never be happy.” By the 1930s, Crouse would often refer to Wormley as his “wife” (as did Wormley sometimes). In fact, Wormley would prove to be the stabilizing force in their relationship. An amiable, lively, and articulate companion, he was as well that rare phenomenon: a man who remained modest and sensible even as he grew prominent.
After graduating from high school in 1926, Wormley was able—thanks to a loan from his aunt—to move to Chicago (some eighty miles west of Rochelle) to study at SAIC, the School of the Art Institute. Even as a youngster he’d felt sure that he wanted a career designing furniture and interiors, and SAIC had an international reputation. Alas, Wormley ran out of money after three terms at the school and had to leave, though his luck turned when he landed his first job. It was with the interior design studio of the prestigious Marshall Field department store, which quickly recognized his talent and, after a two-year apprenticeship, commissioned him to reproduce a collection of 18th-century English furniture. He and Crouse continued to see each other whenever possible, but it would be many more years before they could actually live together.
Crouse, too, made a firm career choice when still young: by age ten he was building sets, making costumes, and performing weekly before a loyal audience of his two sisters and his uncle and aunt. His passion for the theater would never diminish, but he lacked Wormley’s drive and focus; he seemed to imagine that opportunities for a theatrical career would somehow magically materialize. None did. On graduating from Wisconsin in 1929, he drifted into a job on the copy desk of the Racine Times-Call. That summer, he took some journalism courses at his alma mater. A close college friend, Lorrie N. Douglas, tried to warn Crouse against simply drifting into a career that held no basic appeal for him (W/C, May 1, 1933): “Let journalism suffice for the breadwinner for the time being,” the close friend advised, but “find a purpose in life … why not be more than a dilettante. … Make Dramatics your career, Ed. Admit that you like it more than anything you’ve tried and go after it in a thorough, mature, and serious way.”
The friend, while acute in analyzing Crouse’s inability to concentrate and mobilize his energy, was in essence asking him, then in his twenties, to change his core temperament, to stop longing for something as abstract as “happiness” and face the fact that “you yearn for things that don’t exist … one must become reconciled to the truth that life is precarious and unstable.” Ed had neither the ethical profundity nor the moral stamina to face so challenging a set of prescriptions; few of us do. Faced with a sternly worded directive, he grew uneasy and resentful: the demand was simply beyond his unsteady, shapeless temperament.
And yet, although Crouse’s own efforts (as well as his credentials) were minimal, he somehow managed to land a job as an instructor in journalism at the University of Georgia. (Academia was not a particularly desirable or competitive profession at that time.) Still, Ed’s luck held: the student drama club on campus—perhaps because he looked like an actor—asked for his help in staging productions. And he made good at it. During the ’30s he staged three productions a year, received periodic promotions, and in 1939 was appointed to head up a new department of drama (with the added bonus of no longer having to teach journalism, which he loathed).
Throughout this period, Wormley and Crouse continued to see each other regularly and between visits wrote frequent and candid letters. At one point, in 1934, Crouse—the more sentimental of the two—sat down and read through Wormley’s letters from the preceding five years. He was impressively honest in telling Wormley flat-out that his letters were “so damned good, and so sincere. Mine, by comparison, must be a sorry lot. I know a lot of them have been pretentious—I mean pretending.” He added that “despite all our … ordeals and self-searching … we’ve had pretty happy lives, and made immeasurably more so by each other’s companionship. I think often how utterly empty the world be without you, if you were to die. … I’ve realized so definitely and strongly this year that you are essential to my existence.”
He also let Wormley know, with sympathetic glee, that he’d come across one of his friend’s early letters in which even he had described a halfhearted attempt at heterosexual intercourse—as if to say “you see, I wasn’t the only one who thought and hoped I could settle down with a woman” (though Wormley, unlike Crouse, never had any such explicit thought). What Crouse quoted back to his friend from his youthful letter was closer to an example of resigned disinterest:
She drew me down into her lap and said I was like a little boy … then she embraced me like a bear and wouldn’t let my lips go … she almost carried me to the bed … my mind was working overtime, and my blood vessels not at all. She tried to give me ‘entrance,” but complained that I hadn’t sufficient erection. And that was true enough. I felt … pliable as putty, passionless as can be. … When finally I made an effort to get up and go, she clutched me tightly again and the process began anew, this time with better success. I … realiz[ed]self-consciously that “I am actually having intercourse.” … [She] prosaically disentangled herself, fetched me a towel, and unconcernedly and disgustingly raised her gown and dried herself with an awkward straddle and stoop.
When only 23, Wormley moved on from Marshall Field to the Dunbar Furniture Company in Berne, Indiana (about a three-hour drive from Chicago), where his talent soon won him an appointment as “sole designer and stylist.” He would remain at Dunbar’s for 37 years, living eleven of those years in Chicago (in what was locally known as Fairytown, the gay area) and then moving to New York City. Over time he would assemble a loyal staff and amass considerable wealth, reputation, and awards. As early as 1931, he was already earning enough to afford a trip to Europe, where he traveled, enthralled, with a casual friend. Still essentially a young man from the provinces, he was smitten by Europe’s assorted æsthetic wonders. This first trip inaugurated a lifetime of passionate travel and self-education in the arts, which would turn him into a man of cultivated, urbane taste—but without the usual snobbish veneer. (He comes across throughout his life as an unpretentious, compassionate man free of status anxiety.) For the rest of his life, always accompanied by Crouse, Wormley became an ever more adventuresome traveler, venturing over time far beyond the confines of Europe.
The effect of his travels on his own work was powerful: his furniture became increasingly distinguished for its superb construction, the imaginative use of unfamiliar woods and fabrics, and perfectionist detailing. Understated and sophisticated, like the man, Wormley’s deceptively simple yet elegant designs rapidly gained a following. His furniture came to be known as “nostalgic modernism”—a combination of past and present—exemplified by his widely applauded “Janus Collection” in 1957. Wormley himself chose the title “Janus”—the Roman god of two opposing faces, which had been associated since at least the 15th century with homosexuality.
While Wormley’s horizons were steadily expanding, Crouse’s path grew more precarious. While he and Wormley continued to see each other frequently (and often wrote three or four letters a week), when alone Crouse often felt isolated and morose. There’s even evidence of a breakdown at one point. When preoccupied with a student stage production, he was even-keeled, and when a play went well and applause redounded, he could become downright euphoric. But between productions, he bemoaned being “stuck in the sticks,” declared most Southerners to be “vapid,” was tempted to take a menial job in Chicago so that he and Buster could live together, and gradually increased his intake of alcohol. He had several car accidents, each time escaping without injury or arrest, yet he would never heed Buster’s sound advice to avoid drinking and driving. Crouse’s good looks remained intact for a while longer, and he usually had little trouble picking up tricks—often married men—for casual sex.
In contrast to Crouse’s comparative isolation, Wormley lived in the heart of Chicago’s “Fairytown” (also known as “Towertown”), his apartment close to the central gay cruising area of North Michigan Avenue. During the ’30s a considerable gay subculture had formed in Chicago and like New York City—though unlike most of the country—was known to non-gay residents and to some extent integrated into the life of the city (Chicago “is going pansy,” Variety reported).
As the historian David K. Johnson has persuasively argued, while the psychiatric definition of homosexuality as an “illness” was thoroughly entrenched by the 1930s, the sociological studies of gay men in Chicago that were done at the time show a “striking absence from the narratives of these young gay men … [of]any internalization of the notion that homosexuality is a sickness. … It belies the notion that, prior to World War II, gay men led tortured, isolated lives.” At the risk of overstating the matter, it can be said that the prevailing view for at least a segment of the gay male population was the same one Ed Crouse had expressed to Wormley when they were still teenagers: “If the neighbors talk about us, let them talk.” In a 1934 letter Wormley re-affirmed that sentiment: “I feel no shame for anything we have done.”
Wormley quickly made friends with his neighbors, enjoyed their parties, and occasionally accompanied them to one of the many “mixed clientele” cabarets (the gay bar scene only developed after the repeal of Prohibition in 1933). Yet as he wrote Crouse in 1934: “I make no acquaintances that I value very highly … we came through so much together in those Crucial Formative Years that true rapport with new friends is virtually impossible.” Temperamentally, Wormley was more a discrete spectator than an active participant. He also had a marked, and widely shared, disdain for the many “swishy” men who were part of the mix at the cabarets.
One evening Wormley agreed to accompany a friend to the annual Halloween ball for queer (yes, that term was in common use in the ’30s) people, but he found it “the most disgusting and pathetic spectacle I hope ever to witness. There were about a thousand present, including a sprinkling of soldiers, sailors, and policemen. Fully half that number were in ‘drag’ … nobody looked happy or gay, and the painted faces were too sad to describe.”
Somewhat more prudish and less given to sexual adventuring than Crouse (and certainly more prudent about mixing alcohol and pickups), Wormley—despite a time-consuming professional life—did his share of openly pursuing sex and even frequently picked up and paid taxi drivers. In the early ’30s he and his co-tenant would have numerous bachelor parties in their Chicago apartment (he called them “let us be gay” gatherings), but when they turned into orgies, Wormley remained aloof, his sense of decorum offended by what he called “tired and aimless lovemaking.” He even had an occasional misadventure (at least, he was robbed and beaten), though neither he nor Crouse endured many episodes of victimization—and certainly not the kind of police entrapment that during the Fifties became so familiar.
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By the mid-1930s, the pattern of their relationship had been set. “I feel closer to you than to anyone else in the world,” Crouse wrote Wormley, “and I know our relationship is not built on sex, to put it bluntly.” They pretty much accepted each other as they were: Crouse gave up encouraging Buster to make an effort “to change your outward manner” and appear more “regular,” and acknowledged that Buster and he were “regular-appearing” enough. Wormley, in turn, gave up what in retrospect he called his “body worship” of Crouse and decided to believe Crouse’s insistence that “platonic affection … is the only kind that lasts.”
Only once, apparently, did a serious crisis arise in their relationship. Crouse decided he’d fallen hopelessly in love with a former student who had starred in several theater productions at the University of Georgia. By getting him drunk, Crouse managed to seduce him and for a time persuade him that “swinging both ways” was perfectly acceptable; but he soon admitted defeat. Throughout the crisis he kept Wormley informed of the liaison’s ups and downs in seemingly needless detail (even sending photos of the student). Wormley was tolerant to a fault, tactful and supportive. If he felt any hurt, he concealed it impeccably when writing to Crouse (June 18, 1938):
He sounds like a nice boy, and his pictures are appealing. … But poor, sweet, confused darling, why do you feel disgusted? Why does it all seem so cheap to you? I don’t feel those things—ever—about my relation with you, or even for taxi-driver incidents … our kind of physical pleasure and love is just as “natural”—because it is so widespread—as the “regular” kind. … The one thing I fear and dread, my sweet, about the possibility of your forming a happy alliance sometime with some charming boy who loves your attention is that such a relationship may upset the schedule of visits and vacations we have come to spend together. They are my real life. I couldn’t give them up without enormous loss of happiness. Would a threesome work? I hate to think of it. … Now please don’t pine, and remember I shall love you always and want to help you. If I only could. And don’t talk about suicide!
Wormley’s loyalty was unwavering. “Call it love, call it damn-foolishness, I think about you to the exclusion of my work,” he wrote Crouse. “When I have left you I exist in a state of incompleteness. That sounds like the most utter rot to read but I mean it.” Yet Wormley was no foolish romantic. Astute and sophisticated, he recognized the difference between the infatuation characteristic of an early stage in a relationship when one is still blind to the beloved’s very real quirks and inadequacies, and the long-term love that’s fully aware of a partner’s limitations and accepts them as part of the package.
By the late ’30s, Wormley had fully grasped the indelible nature of Crouse’s unsteady habits, his lack of perseverance, his depressive moods, his growing reliance on alcohol, and his “bantering elusiveness”—and continued to love him anyway. “Our long association,” he wrote Crouse at one point, “has become so involved, that it seems to me that any analysis you or I could give it, with the meager knowledge that we—or indeed, any psychologist whom I have run across—have, would be too facile.” Those were the words of a mature and sensible man.
With the outbreak of World War II, the two Eds experienced long separations. Wormley took his civic responsibilities seriously, joined the Office of Price Administration as chief of the furniture unit, and relocated to the capital. He considered his OPA work of considerable importance to the war effort and worked at it conscientiously. He’d always been the more public-spirited of the two, though both men were political liberals, decidedly sympathetic to the plight of black Americans—and rather off-handedly anti-Semitic (Wormley’s wariness of “Hebrews” became considerably diluted over time, and by the 1940s an increasing numbers of his friends were Jewish).
Crouse, for his part, enlisted in the Army in 1942, though in a decidedly callow spirit: “I can’t delude myself into believing I have any noble motive in it,” he wrote Wormley. “I still feel more than anything else about the war that it is utterly childish and foolish.” Thanks to his experience with theater, Crouse was assigned to the Division of Welfare and Entertainment, which kept him far from the battle lines. He ended up as a first lieutenant stationed in Greenland as the Entertainment Director for the base command. Yet despite praise and commendation for his work, his unhappiness steadily deepened during the war and he self-medicated with increasing amounts of alcohol. When Wormley made the decision in 1944 to move to New York City and to start his own design firm, Crouse volunteered to become an associate specializing in lighting effects. Discharged in August 1945 with the rank of captain, he spent a year teaching at Syracuse University—which was just enough time to remind him how unhappy he was in academia and how much he wanted to live with Wormley.
When they finally moved in together for the first time in February 1947, they’d seen little of each other over the previous three years, and both had changed—in opposite directions. Wormley’s career and income had rapidly burgeoned, and Crouse acknowledged his awe of Wormley’s heightened ambition and achievement: “you are the luckiest and I guess the happiest person I know,” Crouse wrote. “You’ve always been sure of what you wanted and you’ve always got it.” As for himself, he acknowledged that he “no longer had any confidence”—“I’ve just started being pedestrian I guess. … I’ve got to bestir myself. The old charm has worn thin.” Given his low self-esteem, he turned not to building a career of his own but to cruising and carousing, racking up a growing list of car accidents and arrests for drunk driving. It got to the point where Wormley deviated from placid acceptance to open confrontation: “You, my boy, just fuck, fuck, fuck, like a rabbit. I wish you [would]think about yourself a little more, or…give some indication of it.” He then hastened to add that “I am not lecturing or even disapproving in any except a concerned sense: concerned first because of what you mean to me, and then for yourself, your eventual health.”
Crouse offered up a half-hearted defense, claiming on the one hand that Wormley had “an exaggerated idea of my activities” and admitting on the other that “I don’t like to stay in my room alone at night. The more I think about my present work, the less confident I am that I’m not just marking time waiting for something I don’t know what. I have no desire to make a real career of my work or anything else I can think of. I just want to have plenty of money and not work except putter about the house and go away when I want to in a nice car with you.” And go away they did, traveling regularly—and expensively. Over time they covered a fair portion of the globe, ranging from Mexico and the Caribbean to multiple five-week trips to Europe and eventually to Southeast Asia.
By the mid-’50s, Wormley’s talent and hard work had established him as one of the country’s leading designers. He not only continued to serve Dunbar as an affiliated independent but also designed the large “Precedent Group” for the well-established Drexel Furniture Company. He was featured in House Beautiful, photographed by Karsh of Ottawa, and was able to purchase outright a large duplex apartment in Manhattan’s expensive East ’50s. He also became an ardent and outspoken Democrat, supporting Adlai Stevenson in the 1952 presidential race and later George McGovern in his losing campaign against Nixon. By 1958 Wormley was giving buffet supper parties for the likes of Edward Durrell Stone, the distinguished architect, and John Bauer, director of the Whitney Museum.
It is a testament to Wormley’s continuing love and concern for Crouse that he regularly made sure that despite his own busy, glamorous life, he would leave all that temporarily behind in order to go off with Crouse on extended vacations. Their shared time alone probably had a lot to do with keeping their relationship afloat. In truth, though, we don’t know much about their relationship for the period following World War II, for the simple reason that they were seeing each other frequently and no longer exchanging barrels full of letters describing their intimate lives. We do know that Wormley took over the management of Crouse’s finances, that at some point he bought a separate co-op apartment for Crouse nearby (and moved his divorced mother into his own apartment). We also know that Crouse continued to work for Wormley’s firm, though his job description remained vague and unfulfilling (though he did install the display for Wormley’s masterful “Janus” collection in 1957).
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When in 1967 Wormley turned sixty, he surprised the design world by announcing his retirement. His explanation to the editors of Home Furnishings Daily (which they printed in a two page tribute to him) was that “there’s more to life than work—even if you like it. We know so little of the world. I want to read the books I’ve bought but never read, and go to new places and revisit old ones.” (In his reading taste, Wormley was something of a “highbrow,” appreciating Faulkner, for example, long before everyone else, and greatly admiring Richard Wright’s Native Son. Crouse, for his part, was fascinated with jazz and blues as early as the 1920s.) Over the previous few years, Wormley had bought up extensive property and a small cottage on a pond in Weston, Connecticut, and gradually built additions to it, including a heated swimming pool. Crouse moved back in with him and together they set about raising American Kennel Club-registered Pembroke Corgis, socializing with nearby friends, and, of course, traveling.
There were other, less salubrious continuities. Crouse continued to drink and to get into car accidents, once having his license suspended for a year. By 1974 his health began to fail. Although he had emergency surgery for a bladder stoppage, he continued to pass blood and stones in his urine. His condition—there never was a firm diagnosis—rapidly declined and, with Wormley holding his hand, he died on November 25, 1975. Wormley avoided seeing the funeral director take Crouse’s body away and wrote in his pocket calendar: “I’ll never get used to his not being here with me. 60 years, but not long enough … dear sweet man.”
“I miss him dreadfully,” he wrote six months later. Over time, his grief gradually eased, and he began seeing old friends, renewed contact with relatives, and eventually agreed to give lectures and to attend various gala occasions in Manhattan. In 1977 he resumed his lifelong love of travel, and as late as his mid-’70s took trips to India, Japan, and South Korea. In the early 1990s he suffered two strokes, and died in November 1995 at age 87.
In 2019, the two Eds seem a perfectly ordinary couple. And that, I believe, is why the reclamation of their story is important. First of all, it’s rare indeed to find the record of a long-lasting same-gender relationship documented in such intimate detail. More significant still, their correspondence adds further and needed testimony to counter the standard view that gay male life in all the long decades preceding Stonewall is the unaccented, unvarying story of secrecy and despair.
Wormley (and Crouse sporadically) did not regard himself as some sort of freak, a cursed aberration. And even Crouse, despite his inability to mobilize his gifts and his moody reliance on alcohol, was able to form a long-lasting and mutually supportive union that survived sexual incompatibility and acknowledged that both were entitled to independent liberty. The story of the two Eds is, finally, a love story. Love does not flourish in every climate. And a quiet life can be a gift from the gods.
Martin Duberman, historian, is a longtime contributor to these pages. His introduction of Michael Kammen can speak for itself.
