Notorious Newport: gay tales of booty, murder and mansions by the sea!

OSCAR WILDE TOURS are dedicated to connecting people to gay history and art which so helps our community (and allies) learn so much more about the journeys taken by some great men and women that have helped us shape our own lives.

Sappho and Socrates, Michelangelo and Shakespeare, Marcel Proust and Oscar Wilde: we all know that many of the great figures in art and literature—as well as in other fields—have loved people of their own sex. And while in some places (such as Classical Greece and Renaissance Florence) a culture of same-sex love has flourished, in others (such as Victorian England and pre-Stonewall America) it has been driven underground.

Up until now, people curious about the places where this history occurred have had limited opportunity to visit them but the people of Oscar Wilde Tours have changed. all that.

What we like about their itineraries is they literally cover the waterfront with tours of famous queer sights ……such as Greenwich Village NY, to the Greek Islands of Mykonos and Santorini. But better still they also have tours of places which not many of us had known even had much of a gay history such as Newport, Rhode Island.

Newport was once the top summer resort for the American elite from Civil War to the Great Depression. During this period, dubbed by Mark Twain the Gilded Age, families like the Vanderbilts, the Astors, and the Morgans built palatial seaside mansions along the shore—mansions that feature conspicuously in everything from Edith Wharton’s novels to the new HBO series, “The Gilded Age.”

Until his death in 1905, one of Newport’s gay greats was the famous party host Robert L. “Bobby” Hargous. Another was Edith Wharton’s friend, architect Ogden Codman. Codman was responsible for some of the resort’s most elegant houses and interiors.

Gay men like Codman, his fellow gay Newport and New York designer Whitney Warren, and Harry Leher, whose only “job” seems to have been keeping everyone in Newport entertained, took the precaution of getting married. So did the LGBTQ+ Vanderbilts: Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, an accomplished sculptress and founder of the Whitney Museum, and Harold Stirling “Mike” Vanderbilt, who invented contract bridge and successfully defended America’s Cup three times—though the third time by cheating…. Mike didn’t get married till he was 49, after a dozen years “engaged” to a lesbian friend, Eleonora Sears—one of the great athletes of the early 20th century.

What we were particularly intrigued to discover was that Newport’s gay life wasn’t confined to the elite, however. Newport was then the nation’s main naval base, and plenty of gay “trade” flourished here too, leading to the spectacular Navy YMCA Scandal of 1919—and the cover-up, led by none other than Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Nor did the scandal die out in the early 20th century. Another talented gay designer, Eduardo Tirella, came to Newport in the 1950s. But he ended up run over in 1966 by the richest woman in America, Doris Duke—supposedly accidentally, though it’s widely believed that she got away with murder.

Notorious Newport: gay tales of booty, murder and mansions by the sea!
Sun, March 13, 2022
2:00 PM – 3:30 PM EDT
N.B. The Tour is  also accessible ONLINE