GLR July-August 2024

lounging in the sun, clothing of any kind was optional. For many men, nudity came to define a visit to Tuckernuck. Bigelow’s guests came primarily from Boston, New York, or Washington, D.C. “Sturgis Bigelow, MD,” wrote Thomas Russell Sullivan to a friend, “has come in with hypnotic influence and carries me off to dine with him tonight, seductively, with the resident literati and tutti fruiti [of Boston].” Among the many tutti fruiti in Bigelow’s immediate circle was Sullivan himself, a gay playwright best known for his stage adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Sullivan was a frequent guest on Bigelow’s island, writing in his journal in 1896: “At Tuckernuck, living independ ently in the open air, playing golf and ten

able fifteen-year-old when Bigelow re turned from his extended stay in Japan. The elder Lodge and Bigelow had been close friends since childhood, and when Bay met his father’s old comrade he immediately fell under Bigelow’s spell. “Dokko” pro vided the sensitive young man with an al ternative to the bruising life of politics and commerce in which the Cabots and Lodges thrived, and Bay quickly adapted elements of Buddhism to his personal philosophy. For many summers the Senator and his son split their time between the city and the “male paradise” of Tuckanuck. From a steamy Washington, where he was working as the Senator’s secretary, Bay wrote to Bigelow: “I suppose I am here for about three weeks more—and then, with your permission, kind Sir! Surf, Sir! and sun,

Sturgis Bigelow. Harvard Peabody Museum.

nis, bathing in the magnificent surf without hampering garments, to dry in the sun like a seal, afterward, on the warm sand.” Sullivan’s housemate (and sometime lover) in Boston, Theodore Dwight, was chief librarian at the Boston Public Li brary, and privately amassed one of the largest collections of homosexual pornography in the country. Dwight trained himself in photography in order to capture his own images of male nudes. Most of his models were burly Boston Irish, though he had a particular penchant for Italians (his barber would provide him with likely liaisons). Tuckanuck was furnished with its own darkroom where Dwight could have developed and printed shots of his fellow guests, though if he ever captured such sou venirs, they have yet to be uncovered. Included in Sullivan and Dwight’s charmed circle was Canadian poet Bliss Carman, whose poem “The Bather” may be describing a visit to the is land: “I saw him go down to the water to bathe;/ He stood naked upon the bank. ... / His legs rose with the spring and curve of young birches.” When visiting from Washington, D.C., gay writer Charles Warren Stoddard was Bigelow’s frequent guest, both in Boston and on the island. Stoddard provided a memorable description of his arrival on Tuckernuck: “A skiff transported us to the dock, where the butler and the cook in white raiment awaited us. At this moment a tall figure clad in paijamas [ sic ] appeared at the top of the stairs that led from the dock to the plateau above. He descended with the air of an Eastern potentate, and gave us wel come with Oriental grace.” Not all of the doctor’s guests were impressed by the lan guorous pace of Tuckernuck, however. After years of urging his longtime friend Theodore Roosevelt to visit, Bigelow finally convinced the president to accept his invitation, and in 1905 the exhaustingly alpha T.R. stormed onto the island with his en tourage. Finding no pleasure in its refined atmosphere of dolce far niente , the president spent only one night and then charged off the next morning. Bigelow was able to introduce Roosevelt to jiu-jitsu, though, and the president eventually earned his brown belt while in the White House. The Golden Boy of Tuckernuck Island was the poet George Cabot Lodge, known to everyone as Bay. The son of Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, Bay was an impression

Sir! and nakedness!—Oh, Lord! how I want to get my clothes off—alone in natural solitudes. In this heavy springtime I grow to feel exquisitely pagan.” Even after he married Elizabeth Davis in 1900 and the cou ple had three children, Bay Lodge took every opportunity he could find to escape to Tuckernuck, alone, or with his father or a friend. (The Lodges were welcome to use the cottage even when Bigelow himself was not in residence.) From the island Bay wrote to his wife about his holiday with playwright Lang don Mitchell: “I lead a sane and hygienic life. We go to bed be fore twelve, and sleep all we can. We breakfast, read, write perhaps an occasional letter, talk for long, fine, clear stretches of thought, and regardless of the time, play silly but active games on the grass, swim, bask in the sun, sail, and talk, and read aloud, and read to ourselves, and talk, and talk.” § G IVEN THE NUMBER of literary guests who gathered on the is land over the years, and the almost mythic status that Bigelow’s summer retreat held for homosexual writers (Charles Warren Stoddard called it “Tuckernuck the fabulous, the forbidden”), it’s not surprising that the place found its way into fiction, with attempts to capture the ambience of a private space created for the exclusive pleasure of men who represented a wide spectrum of sexual orientations. Perhaps the most evocative fictionalized version can be found in the novel The Last Puritan , byGeorge Santayana (born Jorge Ruiz de Santayana y Borrás), which was begun in 1891 but not published until 45 years later. Santayana was embedded in the homosexual coterie that Thomas Russell Sullivan referred to as “Boston’s tutti fruiti,” and while he in sisted that in his novel about what he termed “erotic friend ships” all of the characters were merely composites of people he’d once known, one of the protagonists, Dr. Peter Alden, is clearly based on Dr. William Sturgis Bigelow. Instead of living on an island similar to Tuckernuck, Alden sails from place to place on a private yacht that he has named Black Swan , a ves sel small enough to be operated with a minimal crew to assure his privacy, but large enough to accommodate part of his col lection of Japanese art and antiquities. The fictional doctor’s closest companion on his voyages is

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