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You know about our obsession with the glass closet -- but the harder questions on our end often come with those (especially artists) whose candor is less likely to be tested by tabloids, but who have rarely or never acknowledged their place within our community. Does that make them closeted or simply overlooked?
In any case, strike one more name off that list. In today's New York Times, the one and only artist and Where the Wild Things Are writer/illustrator Maurice Sendak brought it up himself:
Was there anything he had never been asked? He paused for a few moments and answered, “Well, that I’m gay.”
“I just didn’t think it was anybody’s business,” Mr. Sendak added. He lived with Eugene Glynn, a psychoanalyst, for 50 years before Dr. Glynn’s death in May 2007. He never told his parents: “All I wanted was to be straight so my parents could be happy. They never, never, never knew.”
Children protect their parents, Mr. Sendak said. It was like the time he had a heart attack at 39. His mother was dying from cancer in the hospital, and he decided to keep the news to himself, something he now regrets.
A gay artist in New York is not exactly uncommon, but Mr. Sendak said that the idea of a gay man writing children books would have hurt his career when he was in his 20s and 30s.
Like most kids raised anytime after the 1963 publication of Wild Things, I ran around my house in make-shift capes and imagined thorn-tangled worlds far beyond my bedroom, universes where adult authority was not the final word. (My brother's name is Max, like Wild Things' main character, so it always seemed I had a bit of inside advantage to ascending to that fantasy land.) But the closest I remember him coming to talking about being gay was his mural commissioned by New York's Gay Men's Health Crisis for their children's waiting room.
Congrats and thanks, Maurice Sendak, on joining us so proudly out in the wild queer world, and for deciding at 80 years young there was no point in waiting around any longer to be asked.
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