ABSTRACT
Other key roles within gay cinema history he played include Gustav von Aschenbach, the man who falls in love with a beautiful Italian boy, in Death in Venice (directed by Luchino Visconti, 1971), adapted from the novel by the German writer Thomas MANN. Bogarde made many films and was quite a screen idol as the romantic lead in heterosexual romances. In his fifties he began to write, producing eight autobiographies as well as a number of novels. These include Voices in the Garden (1981), West of Sunset (1984), Backcloth (1987), Snakes & Ladders (1988), A Gentle Occupation (1990), A Particular Friendship (1990), Jericho (1992), An Orderly Man (1992), Great Meadow (1993), A Short Walk to Harrods (1994), A Period of Adjustment (1994), Cleared for Take-off (1996), Closing Ranks (1998), and For the Time Being (1998). Bogarde had a fifty-year relationship with his manager Tony Forwood but never came out of the closet completely. For many years Bogarde and Forwood lived near Grasse in Provence, France. When Forwood became seriously ill in 1983 they returned to London where they lived until Forwood’s death from cancer in 1988. Bogarde was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Lettres in 1982. He was knighted in 1992. In 1996 he suffered a serious stroke and became partly paralysed. He became active in the Voluntary Euthanasia Society and drew up a living will. He eventually died of a heart attack at his Chelsea flat.
(1948-). US performer and writer, born Albert Herman Bornstein, who grew up in New Jersey and for the first thirty years of her life lived as a man. She then underwent surgery to become a woman but, as she makes clear in her writings, she did not achieve the commonly assumed sense of harmony between body and mind through her surgery. Her transsexual status led her to explore gender identities, and in the 1990s she became an icon of queer performance, partly because unlike many transsexuals she continued to question her gender identity. Bornstein epitomizes the troubling of gender theorized by Judith BUTLER and it is significant that she gained prominence in the 1990s, the decade which inaugurated ‘queer’ in the lesbian and gay community. The work that gained her international recognition was Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us (1994), which, written in an experimental style, details not only Bornstein’s history, including her surgical history, but also engages much more widely with questions of gender identity and gender performance. The volume contains her play Hidden: A Gender, first produced in 1989. Together with Caitlin Sullivan, Bornstein wrote Nearly Road-kill, an Infobahn Erotic Adventure (1996). In 1998 she published My Gender Workbook, a text designed to encourage readers to engage with questions of gender identity and to understand that gender is an ascribed and acculturated category that is the object of socio-cultural constraints, which, however, one does not need to subscribe to.
