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This chapter relates Christopher Isherwood’s novel A Single Man to E. M. Forster’s 1913 homosexual fiction Maurice. In the documentary film Chris & Don: A Love Story (2007), home movies show a young-looking Isherwood and a boyish Don Bachardy in swimsuits at Will Rogers State Beach in the early 1950s. That footage operates in the film as the locus of the pair’s trysting. Out of their surfside camaraderie on a sunny beach grew a friendship that turned amorous and lasted until Isherwood’s death in 1986. In a 1915 critique, Lytton Strachey expressed doubt about whether the relationship between the two lovers in Forster’s novel, Maurice Hall and Alec Scudder, would last half a year, much less a lifetime. This chapter argues that such a relationship could and did last.

No person better defined the collaborative gestalt of queer Chicano art practices than Joey Terrill. As a principal figure in the Escandalosa Circle, he bore witness to his friends’ HIV infection and eventual demise. This chapter examines the queer visual testimonios engendered by his scene paintings and portraits. As it follows his excursions between coasts, it shows him rendering sights of contagion, whether on a Fire Island beach in New York or a hazardous garden in Beverly Hills. Terrill’s retrospectively eyes his HIV transmission in self-analytical portraits tempered by a pathogenic time stamp, creating what is arguably the most consistent visual account of AIDS in American art. The implications of his queer visual testimonios on canvas and paper have profound meaning for collectors rearticulating their domestic environments with traces of Terrill’s retrospective examinations of HIV infection and terminal illness.

This chapter examines how Christopher Isherwood worked through grief while writing multiple drafts of the novel that was to become A Single Man. Isherwood wrote the drafts during a particularly turbulent period in his relationship with his lover Don Bachardy, in which a breakup seemed imminent. In these drafts, he recounts a journey from shock to resignation, as he contemplates the loss of his beloved life partner. Engaging in an artistic process that parallels the psychoanalytic process Sigmund Freud alludes to in “Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through,” Isherwood proceeds from pain and incomprehension through an increasing understanding of personal crisis and novelistic potential to ultimate insight and artistic realization. In contemplating the loss of love, Isherwood recalls and works through multiple previous losses—the loss of innocence, of homeland, of youth. Thus he comes to confront the ultimate loss, that of life itself.

This chapter examines Christopher Isherwood’s collection of personal papers, which reveals the intangible, subtle aspects of his way of thinking or acting that cannot be discerned through his or her publications or public persona. Acquired in 1999 by the Huntington Library from his life partner Don Bachardy, with later additions from various sources, the Isherwood archive consists of 4,000 items that offer a glimpse into the writer’s life and work, including such topics as gay rights, Vedanta, pacifism, Hollywood, and the film industry. This chapter discusses some of the unique and rare elements of the Isherwood papers and their significance for research, touching on particular sections and items in the archive and what they reveal about Isherwood, his fellow writers, and the matters that meant most to him. It also looks at Isherwood as a writer, and the way his papers reveal his writing craft, with particular emphasis on the place of his 1954 novel The World in the Evening in his canon.

This chapter focuses on the making of Chris & Don: A Love Story, a feature-length documentary film that chronicles the thirty-year relationship between Christopher Isherwood and his lover Don Bachardy. The authors of this chapter, who directed the film, reflect on the problems and challenges they encountered before they could finish it. They traveled to Ireland to film John Boorman, to Paris to speak with Leslie Caron, and to many other locations, including England and Los Angeles. Going to places like London was particularly difficult in terms of logistics. Also, some of their interviews didn’t pan out as originally planned, as was the case when meeting with David Hockney. They interviewed Don about nine times over a period of two years. Aside from interviews, the directors made use of archival footage shot by the couple from the 1950s, letters, and excerpts from Isherwood’s diaries. Chris & Don premiered in 2007.

This chapter examines Christopher Isherwood’s treatment of the realities of multiculturalism and multiethnicity in his 1964 novel A Single Man. Isherwood’s novel takes place on the campus of San Tomas State College, the fictional locale of Los Angeles State College (now California State University at Los Angeles). Isherwood wrote A Single Man after having spent several terms teaching at various colleges and universities in Southern California. More than any other teaching experience, Isherwood drew on his year at Los Angeles State for his portrait of college life in A Single Man. His depiction of minorities in the novel is progressive; he calls for acknowledgment and discussion of diversity. Aside from showing the life two gay men such as Isherwood and Don Bachardy built together and what they endured in mid-century America, A Single Man teaches us an approach to diversity as an opportunity rather than a problem.