BURIED TOGETHER
Husband John Spofford Morgan
Queer Places:
New Verdi, Verdi Square, New York, NY 10023, Stati Uniti
Center Cemetery, Norfolk, CT 06058, USA
When
the Columbia Library closed each night at ten, it was the custom of John
Spofford Morgan, who was studying for a master’s in international affairs,
to hop on the subway and head downtown to the New Verdi on West 72nd. Back
then, there were two kinds of bars for gay men, he says: pickup joints and
old-friends joints. The New Verdi was the latter, but it turned into the
former when at around 10:30 on May 17, 1947, Louis Halsey walked in. “Love
at first sight,” says Lou now. “Was it?” John wonders. “For me it was
slower.” In any case, Lou and John spent the night together, just as they
have spent most nights in the following 6 decades. They married on
November 11, 2011.
When they married, John was 94, recovering from a broken hip but
otherwise as hale and handsome as Lou, 88, says he always was. One
snapshot shows the pair on a beach in Beirut in 1952. Lou looks like Tony
Curtis, glossy and pompadoured. John looks like JFK except, as his mother
used to complain when people compared their families, “we have chins.”
Both served in the Navy in World War II, but on different oceans, as in
a way they were from different worlds on land. John, who still speaks in
the accent of the turn-of-the-twentieth-century elite, worked as an
economist. Lou, of Hungarian-immigrant stock, cut hair for decades at the
Westbury Hotel. He wears rings and bright colors; John emphatically
doesn’t.
But being gay was a great equalizer then. And
being married is a great equalizer now. “People say, ‘So if you’re
married, where’s the certificate?’ ” Lou explains. “Now we have it.” The
pair ignored domestic partnership when it came along (“A halfway step,”
says John), and since they had already invested in the complicated legal
work-arounds—trusts, powers of attorney—needed to protect one another,
they didn’t see the point of claiming marriage rights in, say, Iowa. But
when the law passed in New York in June 2011, they knew they would take
the step. “Just to see it in black and white,” says Lou. For John, “it was
more like finishing something.”
The small ceremony, with a minister and three witnesses, was held in
their Village apartment on November 11, a date they chose because they
have for years noticed the time 11:11 on the clock by the bed. They did
not exchange rings and got no gifts, “except bourbon!” Lou says. “But
he”—he waves at John—“started to cry.”
“Did I?” John wonders.
Louis E. Halsey, longtime resident of Norfolk, died October 10, 2014,
at Pleasant Valley Nursing Home in Stroudsburg, Penn. He was survived by
his husband, John Spofford Morgan, who died on April 28, 2015. They are
buried together at Center Cemetery, Norfolk, CT.
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