Edward gorey gay
Lost in the Mail
This piece originally appeared in the Conversation.
Artist, illustrator and writer Edward Gorey would have turned this year, and the recently published “From Ted to Tom: The Illustrated Envelopes of Edward Gorey” is a fitting celebration of his wit and talent. The book reproduces, in stunning detail, a series of 50 elaborately illustrated envelopes Gorey created in the mids. But when I started reading “From Ted to Tom,” I felt confused—and a little grant down. The book makes no mention of Gorey’s queerness. To me, this is a missed opportunity to shed light on how being gay may have fueled some of his most personal work.
Today, Edward Gorey is widely known for his sprawling, macabre-yet-humorous body of work, which spans nearly every medium. There are dozens of his own books, notably “The Doubtful Guest” and “The Gashlycrumb Tinies,” as adv as cover designs for many others; sets and costumes for the Tony Award-winning revival of Bram Stoker’s “Dracula”; the opening credit sequence for the PBS television series “Mystery!”; “The Fantod Pack,” a deck of Tarot-li
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The King of Macabre
With skeleton season upon us, I figured it would be fun to main attraction an artists who’s labor I had the opportunity to see when I was a child at the Portland Museum of Art.
Born in Chicago, Edward St. John Gorey () was an American illustrator and writer, most eminent for his children’s books, usually filled with his signature unnerving style that depicts Victorian and Edwardian settings with exaggerated and unsettling characters.
Edward Gorey is a fascinating man, too. His main body of work is comprised of children’s books, sometimes without any words at all. Despite this, Gorey largely disliked children and also professed to have small interest in romantic relationships. In addition to this, he was also extremely vague about his sexual orientation, and when pressed about it he quoted,
“I&#;m neither one thing nor the other particularly. I am fortunate in that I am apparently reasonably undersexed or something &#; I&#;ve never said that I was gay and I&#;ve never said that I wasn&#;t &#; what I&#;m trying to say is that I am a person
“S is for Susan who perished of fits”: Mark Dery suggestions the first major biography of Edward Gorey.
Born to Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey, by Tag Dery, Little, Brown, pages, $35
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By his mid-twenties, the artist and illustrator Edward Gorey had already settled on his signature look: long fur coat, jeans, canvas high-tops, rings on all his fingers, and the packed beard of a Victorian intellectual. His enigmatic illustrations of equally fur-coated and Firbankian men in parlors, long-skirted women, and hollow-eyed, doomed children (in The Gashlycrumb Tinies, among other works) distribute his own gothic camp aesthetic. Among the obvious questions for a reader of Gorey’s biography are: Where in his psyche, or in the customs, did all those fey fainting ladies and ironic gone tots come from? And, not unrelatedly: Was Gorey gay?
This last question has no easy reply. But it’s one that his biographer, culture critic Identify Dery, come
goreyphilia
When I was growing up in Central PA, my parents had an ancient Manhattan phone directory sitting around. One day when I was 18 and newly obsessed with Edward Gorey, it occurred to me to look him up in it.
Astonishingly, I found his listing there, just as if he were any ordinary mortal. I tore the page out of the guide and have guarded it like a religious relic ever since.* I bring up this because on my way back from Provincetown yesterday, I stopped off in Yarmouth Port to see his summer dwelling, which has been turned into a museum.
It was rather a powerful exposure to be there. But I didn&#;t cry (like I did when I visited the Norman Rockwell museum years ago). The people who run the place had set up a Gashlycrumb Tinies scavenger hunt&#;all around the dwelling you could find evidence of each of the 26 dead children. Love Zillah&#;s gin bottle.
Here&#;s the huge cat who lives in the house.
Holly, who didn&#;t know anything about Edward Gorey before this visit, flustered the docent by asking the evident question: did Gorey hold a partner? The human said no, tha