Queer Places:
Mount Zion Cemetery, 59-63 54th Ave, Maspeth, NY 11378, Stati Uniti
Lorenz Milton Hart (May 2, 1895 – November 22, 1943) was the lyricist
half of the Broadway songwriting team Rodgers and Hart.
The earliest stories confirming Hart's homosexuality center on his life
in Hollywood. He attended parties with
Tallulah Bankhead and
William
Haines and followed the nightclub career of drag performer
Jean Malin.
While there, he came under a blackmail threat; he confided in one friend
that "his mother would die if she thought her son was homosexual." One
acquaintance recalled: "In those days it wasn't an open and acknowledge
thing... Hart felt permanent guilt because he was a homosexual."
According to Meryle Secrest, author of Somewhere for Me: A Biography of Richard Rodgers (2002): "Milton G. 'Doc' Bender was always somewhere in the background: 'a very devious, nefarious, strange man who preyed on the weaknesses of men basically homosexual', as Gary Stevens said of him. Claiming to be their manager, he procured booze and boys. 'He did it to Lorenz Hart and he did it to another man,
Harry Revel, who was a big songwriter, of the Mack Gordon and Revel team, supplying him with boys for money. Harry Revel had to go to ASCAP to get advance money' to pay Bender off."
Hart lived with his widowed mother. He suffered from alcoholism, and would
sometimes disappear for weeks at a time on alcoholic binges.[2]
Holden writes:
Many of his lyrics were the confessional outpourings of a hopeless
romantic who loathed his own body. By all accounts, Hart, who stood just
under five feet tall and wreathed himself in cigar smoke, saw himself as
an undesirable freak. Homosexual in the era of the closet, he pursued a
secretive and tormented erotic life of which only hints appear in his
songs.[4]
Hart suffered from depression throughout his life. His erratic behavior was
often the cause of friction between him and Rodgers and led to a breakup of
their partnership in 1943 before his death. Rodgers then began collaborating
with Oscar Hammerstein II.
Devastated by the death of his mother seven months earlier, Hart died in
New York City of pneumonia from exposure on November 22, 1943, after drinking
heavily.[9]
His remains are buried in Mount Zion Cemetery in Queens County, New York.[10][11]
The circumstances of his life were heavily edited and romanticized for the
1948 MGM biopic Words and Music.
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- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorenz_Hart#References