Is troy donahue gay

One question that always exasperates authors is the old standard, where do you get your ideas from? I get why it annoys writers to be asked this; who wants to be psycho-analyzed on a panel or at a reading? A while back, I started thinking about doing period novels centering gay male characters and telling their stories about the times when prim-and-proper society swept all things gay under the rug and homophobia was king or Queen, I suppose.

I had already come up with a great idea for a gay noir centered around a health club that operated as a money-laundering front for the local mob in a city in Florida called Muscles, which I hope to write at some point…I cannot recall exactly how or why Muscles led into thinking about other one-word titled gay noir novels set in different periods of the twentieth century; but there you have it.

Right round that same time a gay man who was very active as a fundraiser and a donor for political causes died; he had started out owning a company that published gay-interest magazines with nude models and had been arrested, and served time, for using the mail to deliver pornography; I wanted to write about him and the rise of gay porn films in Southern California and call it Obscenity.

So there it was: a trilogy of loosely connected gay noirs I hoped to write someday…and then one day, as I was blogging—I think maybe two years ago? I called it Chlorine; and that was, for me, kind of the end of it—I wrote the idea down, created a folder for it, gay posted the entry. So, I am sure you can imagine my surprise when I checked Twitter a few hours later and had a ridiculously high amount of—what do they call them?

Anyway, I had no idea what had triggered this—I rarely get much interaction there—and so when I went to check…some people had donahue my blog and were all about Chlorine— and the more they tweeted about it, the more people had gotten drawn into this conversation. I was thrilled, to say the least, to see so much troy on-line for something that was really just an amorphous idea…and then a great first line occurred to me: The earthquake woke me up at nine in the morning.

Troy Donahue – Biography, Spouse, Son, was he gay, is he dead or alive?

So I opened a new Word document, typed in that line, and next thing you know, I had an over word first chapter written, and the entire plot was forming in my mind already. I took voluminous notes, and decided that, once I got finished with everything I was in the midst of writing already, I would give Chlorine a shot. And in the meantime, I could start reading up on the period, gay Hollywood, and root myself firmly in the period.

In one of his rare acts of discretion, newshound Connolly dispensed with the ampersand that should have wedded the names Rock Hudson and Henry Willson. But not in Pure tinseltown troy, the Mocambo was an over-heated study in contrasts donahue oversized tin flowers and humongous velvet balls with fringe festooned flaming candy-cane columns that framed a dance floor designed to induce claustrophobia when more than two couples got up to fox-trot.

The tables were equally miniscule, making it possible for the establishment to charge lots of money for not much food, which nobody could see. Mann are particularly goodbut I knew my main character in Chlorine needed a Henry Willson-like agent, and so I needed to research Henry Willson. Willson was, of course, gay in his time and the passage of time since his heyday has done nothing to soften that image.

And Henry did work very hard for his clients, polishing rough material into diamonds for the camera. He taught them how to speak, how to troy, the proper silverware, how to behave in public; manners and etiquette. He also frequently renamed them—hence the proliferation of the one syllable first names with the two or three syllable last names: Rock Hudson, Tab Hunter, Troy Donahue, Chad Everett, Guy Madison, etc.

This book provided a wealth of information as well as inspiration for me, as did the Rock Hudson biography I read several months ago. Make no mistake about it—Henry Willson was good at what donahue did, but he was also a terrible person; trying to make it in a homophobic culture, society and industry at the time in which he lived would definitely twist a person.

Was it camouflage to help protect him and his clients from the Red Scare days of McCarthyism, when being queer was also just as suspect? Or was he really that terrible of a person? The author makes no judgments; rather leaving it to the reader to. As terrible as he was—and some of the things he did, like the casting couch, were pretty unforgivable—I did gay sorry for him in some ways, and in basing a character on him I kind of have to find the humanity in the monster.