GLR November-December 2024

ESSAY A Power Couple Leaves a Legacy F RANK R IZZO

I N THE MID-20th CENTURY, there was an LGBT net work of literary figures whose professional and personal lives were discreetly—and sometimes not so dis creetly—intertwined, a roster that included such writers as Truman Capote, Gore Vidal, Tennessee Williams, Christopher Isherwood, John Ashbery, W. H. Auden, and Glenway Wescott. In the midst of that heady configuration was a dashing gay couple whose names are far less familiar to us, but who would have an unexpected literary impact in the 21st century. Donald Windham and Sandy M. Campbell were

were living in Manhattan, newly arrived from Atlanta and prac tically penniless,” Windham wrote, adding: “In his eyes our at tachment was as romantic as his independence was heroic in mine.” The three became close friends, with Williams quickly connecting them to New York artistic and gay society. Williams encouraged Windham to keep writing, something he had started to work on in Atlanta and continued to do in New York, focus ing on his young life in Georgia. Windham and Williams would forge an especially deep friendship, which ended publicly many years later, in 1977, following Windham’s publication of per sonal letters that he had received from Williams over the years.

patrons of the arts whose legacy would eventually become the Windham-Camp bell Literature Prizes. Brimming with charm, elegance, and wit, they became friends not only with leading literary figures of that era but also with notables in the visual and performing arts, including artists Paul Cadmus, Joseph Cornell, Pavel Tchelitchew, Jared French, and George Platt Lynes; actors Alfred Lunt, Lynn Fontanne, and Montgomery Clift; and dance impresario Lincoln Kirstein. W INDHAMAND C AMPBELL B ORN IN A TLANTA in 1920, Donald Wind ham was raised by his widowed mother and aunt in a large Victorian home that was a sad reminder of the family’s once pros perous past. By the time he’d reached his teens in Depression-era Georgia, even the house was gone. Following high school, his mother got him a job rolling barrels through the warehouse at the Coca-Cola factory where she worked as a receptionist. At the age of nineteen, in early 1940, he took a Greyhound bus to New York City with his Atlanta lover, graphic artist Fred Melton, age 21, whom he had met at a gathering of local artists and writers. But

In 1942, Windham became an editorial assistant under Lincoln Kirstein at the bal let magazine The Dance Index . When he was drafted, the young man declared him self to be homosexual and was rejected. But when Kirstein was called to duty in 1943, he did not take this route, was drafted into service, and handed over the editorship of the magazine to Windham, who used it to further his entrée into the New York literary and artistic worlds. Around this time, Windham began working on his first novel while also co writing the play You Touched Me with Williams, based on a D. H. Lawrence short story. It was Williams’ only co-authored play. And while the idea for the project originated with Windham, he never really got credit for his contribution. In late 1945, You Touched Me received a short-lived Broadway production of 109 perform ances, featuring the romantic lead Mont gomery Clift, who had earlier been Windham’s lover. Theater critic Lewis Nichols wrote in The New York Times that the play was “verbose and filled with lofty and long speeches; it needs editing as well as cohesion.” Nevertheless, its production

Donald Windham and Sandy Campbell in Italy,

seeking to be a writer, being gay and in a relationship, Windham knew that Atlanta in the early 1940s was not where he wanted tobe. In New York, Windham and Melton met Tennessee Williams, a promising but not yet famous 28-year-old writer, when “a mu tual acquaintance [Harold Vinal, publisher of Voices magazine] brought him to the furnished room where Fred Melton and I Frank Rizzo is a theater writer and critic for Variety and a freelance journalist based in New York City and New Haven.

allowed Windham to quit his job as editor of The Dance Index and continue working on what was to become the novel Dog Star . (In 1953, Williams wanted to direct a play by Windham ti tled The Starless Air in Houston, but plans for a Broadway run fell apart when Williams couldn’t find the time to stage the play in New York.) Windham met Campbell when he and Melton visited the stu dio of artist Paul Cadmus, for whom Campbell, a college un dergraduate, was modeling for a portrait of dancers titled Reflection . Strikingly different from Windham in background,

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