Outlaw Marriages: The Hidden Histories of Fifteen Extraordinary Same-Sex Couples

From the Prologue

The couples who come to life in the following chapters were social insurgents.
That is, each pair of men and each pair of women defied the social order by creating sub-rosa same-sex marriages long before such relationships were legally sanctioned.

Tennessee Williams and Frank Merlo, for example, began their outlaw marriage in 1948—spending every day and night together, while loving and supporting each other to a degree fully comparable to that of any husband and wife. Their partnership continued until Merlo died of cancer in 1963.

Outlaw Marriages tells Williams and Merlo’s story, along with those of fourteen other same-sex couples who combined their lives either as husband and husband or wife and wife during eras when no legal institution and no church approved of such a union.

The other trait that these renegade couples have in common is that they all fully qualify as, in a word, extraordinary.

In many instances, that powerful adjective fits because of the remarkable contributions a particular couple made to the culture—the fields ranging from literature to modern art to filmmaking. The achievements of other couples include opening graduate education to American women and pioneering a new form of journalism in the pages of the New Yorker magazine.

With Williams and Merlo, their gift was creating some of the most memorable plays in the history of American theater. Williams was addicted to drugs and promiscuity when he met the rock-solid Merlo. The World War
II vet then saw to it that the playwright regained his emotional and physical equilibrium, allowing him to write such theatrical masterpieces as the
Pulitzer Prize–winning Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

A few of the other extraordinary contributions that unfold in this book are

• Walt Whitman and Peter Doyle reinventing American poetry

• Jane Addams and Mary Rozet Smith revolutionizing the field of social work

• Greta Garbo and Mercedes de Acosta taking the lead in transforming
Hollywood into the celebrity capital of the world

When reading the statements above, you probably recognized only one of the two names in the pairings. That’s because the achievements of one partner often became widely known, while those of the other partner stayed hidden—until the publication of this book.

Outlaw Marriages is an apt title on two levels.

First, all fifteen couples created unions that defied the laws and mores of their day. Many of these de facto partnerships survived and thrived, despite their lack of support by church or state, for thirty or forty years—in some cases, fifty.

Second, these couples flouted convention. Aaron Copland was thirtytwo years old when he met and instantly fell in love with a drop-dead gorgeous violinist named Victor Kraft, who was only seventeen. The composer’s friends and family didn’t take the relationship seriously, convinced the couple wouldn’t survive the dramatic age difference. Copland and Kraft proved them wrong. The men not only stayed together but also jointly created a distinctly
American style of music that critics today, eighty years later, are still praising.

That the couples were willing to bend the marital rules doesn’t mean they all succeeded in creating relationships that were made in heaven—far from it. A regrettable scenario that plays out in several chapters begins with the lesser-known partner being absolutely essential to the better-known partner’s rise to success, but then . . . the high-achieving partner getting what might be called the “twenty-year itch.” Martha Carey Thomas set the standard back in the 1890s, summarily dumping her partner of two decades, Mamie Gwinn,
for another woman. Janet Flanner went a similar route in the 1930s, as did
Audre Lorde in the 1980s.

In the instances listed above as well as in others where the outlaw marriage eventually falls apart, readers hear the whole story—which typically includes infidelity, deceit, and betrayal. These unfortunate factors are revealed in full detail, as they’re the realities that often confront any long-term relationship,
gay or straight.

To help the various outlaw marriages come alive in the reader’s mind,
I’ve included photos of all fifteen couples. Tracking down these images was often a challenge, especially in the instances when one or both members of a couple—as with Greta Garbo and Mercedes de Acosta—didn’t publicly acknowledge their relationship. And so, in some cases, I’ve had to use two separate photos of the partners, since a single photo of them together either didn’t exist or wasn’t available. There are also instances—as with Jane Addams and Mary Rozet Smith—when I’ve used a photo of poor quality because it shows the partners together, even though higher-quality photos of the two individuals separately could have been used.

Whether a chapter begins with a single image or a pair of them, each story that follows is a page-turner. Sometimes the most compelling element in it is the contribution the couple made; other times, it’s the internal dynamics of their relationship. But one theme runs through them all:

Two people joining together to create an outlaw marriage plays a central role not only in the couple’s extraordinary achievements, but also in each individual partner’s very being.