William Gordon Merrick (3 August 1916 – 27 March 1988) was a Broadway actor, wartime OSS field officer, best-selling author of gay-themed novels, and one of the first authors to write about homosexual themes for a mass audience.
William Gordon Merrick was born in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia. His father, Rodney King Merrick, was a manager of a truck company who eventually became a bank manager. His mother was the former Mary Cartwright Gordon (b. 26 July 1893, in Natchez, Mississippi). His only sibling was his older brother Samuel.[1] Gordon and Samuel were great-grandsons of the Philadelphia philanthropist Samuel Vaughn Merrick (1801–1870).
Merrick enrolled in Princeton University in 1936, studied French literature, and was active in campus theater. He quit in the middle of his junior year and moved to New York City, where he became an actor, landing the role of Richard Stanley in George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart's The Man Who Came to Dinner. Merrick became Hart's lover for a time,[2] but tired of the theater, with its endless nights playing the same role.[3]
In 1941, Merrick quit Broadway to become a reporter. Exempt from the draft because of hearing problems, Merrick moved to Washington, D.C., where he got a job with the Washington Star. He later worked for the Baltimore Sun, before returning to New York City to write for the New York Post. His years as a reporter helped him to develop a love of writing as well as a writing style.
Eager to participate in World War II, Merrick got a job with the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner to the Central Intelligence Agency. He was sent to Algeria as a counter-intelligence officer, rising to the civilian rank of captain. He was diverted to France and took up residence in Cannes. Because he spoke excellent French, the OSS gave him papers listing him as a French citizen. He was case officer for the double agent code-named "Forest".
In August 1945, Merrick returned to the United States. He again sought work as a reporter, but did not find employment, so he went to Mexico and began writing novels.
Merrick's first novel, The Strumpet Wind (1947), was successful in the United States.[4] The somewhat autobiographical novel is about a gay American spy in France during World War II. Homosexual themes are minimized in the novel, which explores concepts of individual liberty and freedom. The spy's director is a dazzlingly handsome, but sadistic, bisexual.
With the money he earned from his success, Merrick returned to France to continue writing.
In 1956, when Merrick was 40, he met Charles Gerard Hulse, who was working in Paris at the time – a 27-year-old American dancer and actor (b. 26 March 1929, Arkansas). Hulse became his lifetime companion. The following year, they began living together, but Hulse returned to the U.S. for four years to work as a dance instructor in Marin County, California.
In 1960, Hulse returned to Paris to be with Merrick; the two remained together until Merrick’s death.[5]
After moving to France, and then to Greece, Merrick continued to write. He published three further novels in the 1950s, but success eluded him.
In 1970, 10 years after moving to Hydra, Merrick published his second successful novel and his best-known book, The Lord Won't Mind.
At first, Charlie attempts to live a double life, expressing his homosexuality through acting and painting, but he feels incomplete without Peter.
It is through Charlie's anguish that Merrick's interest in the problems gays face in establishing an identity becomes evident. Charlie's socially imposed resistance contrasts with Peter's childlike innocence. Charlie eventually throws Peter out and marries a woman to appease his controlling grandmother.
Charlie's wife later suspects his homosexuality and perpetrates a horrific act of violence on her husband. As Charlie deals with the aftermath of the attack, he comes to realize that honesty and self-acceptance are the only ways to resolve his situation. Merrick presents this self-isolation as a necessary first step on the road to self-realization. At the end of the story, Charlie confesses his love for Peter, and they move in together.
A film version of the trilogy has been in development since 2004, and remains in pre-production as of 2018. Writer Renatus Töpke and later John Bernstein have written and revised a screenplay based on the books. Director and producer Sven J. Matten is seeking financing for the production.[6]
Merrick contributed book reviews and articles to The New Republic, Ikonos, and other periodicals. In all, he wrote 13 books. Merrick’s works are rarely included in anthologies, and few discussions of American gay authors mention him.
Although Merrick’s novels are often criticized for their focus on handsome, virile men, some critics defend this emphasis as authentic:
Beauty is a part of gay life, an important part – those men aren’t spending all those hours at the gym just for the cardiovascular benefits. This “obsession” has its roots in our core definition: We are gay because we find men beautiful. Beauty has its dangers, of course. That’s part of our complex response to it, and it is in fact this complexity that makes beauty a valid and vital subject for our literature.[7]Some dismiss Merrick because of his obvious romanticism; others do so because he sprinkles explicit scenes of gay sexual intercourse throughout each novel.
But underneath the handsome blonde studs with too much wealth falling in love on the Côte d'Azur, are fairly progressive and even radical conceptualizations of what it means to be gay, the likelihood of self-actualization, identity politics, and the role that power plays in relationships.
In his later works, Merrick rejected socially imposed roles and labels, insisting that each gay person question the assumptions underlying his life. Gordon Merrick broke new ground that has only recently become fertile. Deeper probing into Merrick's works will undoubtedly yield richer understandings of the complex social dynamics that construct networks of control over human sexuality.
Gordon Merrick died of lung cancer aged 71 in Colombo, Sri Lanka, on 27 March 1988. He was survived by his partner of 29 years, Charles G. Hulse, and his brother and nephews.[5]