Things bernstein did for the gay community

His wife also suffered the humiliation of receiving phone calls and discovering love letters from her husband's many boyfriends. Photo: With wife Felicia and children A major event in Bernstein's personal life was his decision that he could no longer repress his homosexuality; he left his wife in to live with Tom Cothran , his male lover at the time.

The same with actor Anthony Perkins, who did not have a sexual experience with a female until he was 39 years old he was so closeted and paranoid prior to that time that he insisted on parking blocks away from the homes of his male lovers and arrived at events and restaurants well before or after his boyfriends.

Leonard Bernstein, Jerome Robbins, Arthur Laurents and Stephen Sondheim were the four gay Jewish men, all working at the very top of their craft, who created West Side Story, one of the most enduring musicals of the 20th century. Bernstein was going to Paris to spend half a year with Cothran, whom Felicia detested.

Allen Irvin Bernstein was born in Nashua, New Hampshire, in The essay is notable for the insights it provides into gay life, including slang, sexual practices, and relationships, in the United States during the s and before, based on what Bernstein learned from his gay friends and acquaintances as well as on his wide reading and research in literary and sociological sources.

Long before there was a real gay rights movement, a man went on a mission to bring injustices against homosexuals to light. It's changed everything. The next year Felicia was diagnosed with lung cancer, and Bernstein moved back in to care for her until she died in Bernstein himself was to die of progressive lung failure.

Allen Irvin Bernstein (June 19, – September 8, ) was a gay Jewish American World War II veteran who in wrote a defense of homosexuality entitled Millions of Queers (Our Homo America), a page unpublished typescript that was discovered in the National Library of Medicine in by Randall L.

Sell, associate professor at. [1] ". Most biographies of Bernstein relate that his lifestyle became more excessive and his homosexual activities cruder and less discrete after her death. Cooper directed the film and co-wrote the screenplay. The screenplay focused on Bernstein's relationship with his wife Felicia and the impact his dalliances with men often his younger students , alcohol and drug abuse had on their marriage.

Bernstein's sexual relations before, during and after his marriage were overwhelmingly homosexual, so I agree with Laurents' assessment. If the gay rumors about George Gershwin proved true, I'd label him bisexual, because he was known to have regular sexual relations with women.

Lenny walked across the stage to hand the roses to Felicia, but as he did so, she pivoted on her heel and stormed offstage. Pete Townshend? It's a hell of an experience — nerve-racking and guts-tearing and wonderful. Afterward, Bernstein was disconsolate, but went through with his plan to join Cothran in Paris.

The two had been booked long in advance of their personal turmoil, but there was no question of the Bernsteins not fulfilling their obligation. Bernstein was madly in love: "I can't quite believe that I should have found all the things I've wanted rolled into one.

Those who knew Perkins said that he'd let nothing stand in the way of his career, and getting married served his career goals. Once he sampled married life, he was so relieved that the gay rumors and suspicions no longer haunted him that he at last settled into a zone comfortable for him.

Professionally, however, Bernstein felt that his homosexuality was a curse. The giant bouquet fell to the floor with a thwump , and the audience gasped. If a person has sexual relations regularly with both men and women, then I call that person bisexual. At the end of the concert, an assistant brought a hundred red roses to him.

When Bernstein took the podium, the audience went wild. Cothran died of AIDS in Just three years before his marriage, Bernstein visited Israel and had an affair with Azariah Rapoport , a stunning young Israeli soldier who was his guide. A personal comment here: homosexuality is not a life style.

He said Bernstein was a "gay man who married. Do we call Bernstein bisexual because he married and fathered three children? The recently deceased Arthur Laurents did not think we should. He underwent psycho-analysis with Hungarian-born Dr. Sandor Rado, whose specialty was "curing" homosexual men of their "inversion".