LGBTQ In My Family

There are three people in my father’s family who were and are gay: my great uncle, Francis “Frank” Crowninshield, my uncle, Frederick Josiah Bradlee III, who have both passed on, and one of my nieces who is still alive, young, and well. One of Frank’s best friends was the one and only Condé Nast, back in the twenties and thirties, who was the publisher of Vanity Fair. However, what a lot of people don’t know is that Frank came up with the name and was put in charge of creating and editing the magazine. According to what I have read and my research, Condé came up with some name that had vanity in the title; Frank did not like that name at all and said, “What you want to call it is Vanity Fair,” and that was that. 

My uncle, Frederick or Freddy, as we called him in the family, was one of the early actors on Broadway in the same time period. After he got expelled from Harvard for being socially awkward, he started acting and eventually starred on and off Broadway. According to my dad, his grandfather, Carl de Gersdorff who was a New York lawyer, hated when my uncle Freddy would stay at his apartment in New York because my uncle was almost always wearing makeup. My father also told me that he remembered when Freddy told his dad. My grandfather, who was also named Frederick, took it very well and was very loving, which was very rare back in those days. My grandfather was also considered to be very macho because he was an All-American football player at Harvard. After his retirement, he moved to the island of Hydra, pronounced (Ee-dra). Unfortunately, he was an alcoholic, but when he moved to Greece, he ended up starting the very first AA meetings on the island of Hydra. 

So, just because you are gay doesn’t mean you can’t go on and accomplish things and not have a successful career. My uncle and great-uncle could do it back then, you can most certainly be successful these days. I wish everybody in the LGBTQ community the best of luck with their lives. Also, if somebody doesn’t understand your way of life, that is not your problem; that’s their problem.