Queer Places:
American Legion Mausoleum, Neuilly-sur-Seine New Communal Cemetery
Neuilly-sur-Seine, Departement des Hauts-de-Seine, Île-de-France, France
Daniel Anthony C. Mahoney (1885-1959), also known as Dr. Dan, was born in San Francisco. He served in the US Army during World War I and World War II. He died in 1959 at the age of 64 and was buried in the American Legion Mausoleum just west of Paris.
In a lesbian venue, the Gipsy Bar, John Glassco encountered ‘the famous Dr Mahoney, the most-quoted homosexual in Paris, a man who combined the professions of pathic, abortionist, professional boxer and quasi-confessor to literary women’. The good doctor regaled Glassco with an account of an encounter he had just had with a sexton. Maloney later appeared as that dynamic and dominating presence Dr Matthew O’Connor in Djuna Barnes’ novel Nightwood (1936).
Dr. Daniel Mahoney was a medical doctor R. Muriel Taylor knew when he was a small boy living in San Francisco. Dr. Mahoney tended to Muriel when she became very ill in Paris in late 1925. In 1936, Djuna Barnes wrote a book called Nightwood, about two lesbian lovers and a doctor living in Paris in the 1920s. Barnes stated that the two lesbian characters were based on her and her lover, and the doctor in the book was based on their friend, Dr. Daniel Mahoney. Barnes described Dr. Mahoney as an “Irish-American, quack doctor, sometimes abortionist, flamboyantly campy homosexual and café raconteur.” It was reported that Dr. Mahoney was so angry at her that one night he broke into Barnes’ apartment, held her hostage throughout the night and knocked her down several times when she tried to escape.
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