Private life
Malecón
​​
'Jorge had a partner [Tex Compton] for decades who travelled with him always. He was just always there but it was never really laid out clearly who this was. You could think he was a boyfriend, you could think he was a secretary, a manager or whatever you chose, but there he was. We really shouldn’t demand too much heroism in the past because it was so different.'
Sir Stephen Hough, pianist
PHOTO:
La Rampa, Calle 23, from L until the Malecón
(Noah Friedman-Rudovsky)
Jorge grew up as a gay man, coming into society - both in Caribbean Cuba and in North America - where this identity had to an extent to be concealed. While it seems that homosexuality in the USA enjoyed greater recognition in the media after World War I, many were still arrested and convicted for their acts. Little change in the laws, however, or in the mores of society was seen until the mid-1960s, when the sexual revolution began.
​
'Coming from a Latin country like Cuba, with its traditional element of machismo/hyper-masculinity masking a more complex attitude among men, being different from the average young man - unsure of himself and of the world, and not anxious to make waves, kept in check by the proprieties of polite Philadelphia society and the extreme cosseting of a prodigy, both by his family and by Curtis, it makes sense that Jorge would have encountered a complex world, of which his family and others might disapprove.' (Private letter to the website)​
​
'His improbable handsomeness was sufficiently striking to attract the worst as well as the best attention. Like many other performers, he was sheltered from worldly or sophisticated considerations from an early age, and he had difficulty in differentiating between sycophants and genuine admirers. Hurt and confused on too many occasions, he acquired a formidable outer image or protective shell. Pursued and questioned about his failure to marry, Bolet quickly developed an evasive Jekyll and Hyde personality, elements increasingly hard to reconcile.' Bryce Morrison 1997
Confirmed bachelor at 40
The Province (Vancouver), 19 March 1955
However...
Diario de Noticias (Rio de Janeiro) & Diario Carioca, 8 October 1946 have a notice:
"Com destino a Montevideo, procedente de Nova York, passou pelo Rio a pianista urguguaia Nybia Mariño Mellini, que se vai preparar para o próximo casamento com o pianista cubano Jorge Bolet."
Travelling to Montevideo from New York, Uruguayan pianist Nybia Mariño Mellini (*actually Nybia/Nibya Élida Mariño Bellini, 1920 -2014) passed through Rio - she is going to prepare for her forthcoming wedding with Cuban pianist Jorge Bolet.
​
What are we to make of the tittle-tattle by Dorothy Kilgallen in the Mansfield New Journal, 1 November 1948? 'Ever since her divorce, Lucille Manners has been getting orchids and long-distance phone calls from Jorge Bolet.'
Born in Newark, New Jersey in 1912, Manners was a soprano vocalist who made her radio debut in 1932. Following an audition at NBC, she was a featured guest on programmes including The Voice of Firestone.
​
Raymond Fayette Stover (1894-1979)
​
For a possible early relationship with Raymond Fayette Stover (b.1894, Windsor, Ontario, Canada, d.1979), twenty years older than Jorge, see the pages covering the early 1940s. Stover was a 'gentleman of leisure' through family money (Windsor Star, 29 June 1974). 'I am a lawyer by profession, but have never worked a day in my life.' An admirer of great ladies, he never married. World trouble spots and skirmishes be damned, travelling became a way of life. Big game hunting in Africa, exploring the Arctic with British explorer Newburn Garnet, winters in imperial India, months in Peking, railroading it across the expanse of Siberlia, sailing the pure cold Scandinavian fjords. He crossed the Atlantic 50 times. Philadelphia was his home base. His sister Lilian lived there.
​
The earliest reference in newspapers to a connection with Jorge is The Windsor Star, 22 March 1940: 'Señor Bolet of Havana, Cuba arrived yesterday [Thursday] to visit Mr Raymond F. Stover of Shadowlawn, on Lake St Clair for a few days, having come on specially to attend the wedding of Alison Hitchcock and Armistead Greene tomorrow night at the Church of Our Father, Detroit. Mr Stover and Señor Bolet will leave Tuesday for Washington DC.' [Jorge aged 25, Raymond Stover c.46]
​
In the late 1930s, Jorge's sister Maria, worried about his contacts. She wrote to a friend: 'I appreciate deeply your interest in my brother's affairs, and your keen insight of the whole situation regarding that man whom I felt all the time was dangerous to my candid brother. I cannot imagine how blind Jorge has been or what powerful influence that man must exercise over him. (...) I feel that trouble is coming.' ('That man' is most likely Raymond Stover, who seems according to the many newspaper clippings of the early 1940s to have acted as Jorge's manager as well as his companion.)
​
The Windsor Star, 10 August 1937: Baron Maximillian Daum, Dutch nobleman, a native of Batavia, Java, 'a tall, good-looking young man who has seen he greater part of the world since he left Java in 1917 is visiting here with Raymond F. Stover at Shadowlawn, Belle River.
​​
"Shadowlawn" sounds like something out of The Great Gatsby! Stover's father Samuel in the late 1880s purchased a tract of land 7 km in length that encompassed the shoreline between Puce and Belle River. [Essex County, Ontario, situated along the southern shore of Lake St. Clair] The estate was known as "Shadowlawn" and the original homestead was just as Old Tecumseh Rd curves approaching the marina in Puce. Shadowlawn was a place of leisure for the Stovers, and boasted hundreds of peacocks roaming the lawns. After his death, his children had to sell off all of the lakefront lots to cover the inheritance taxes. Only the home on Shadowlawn remained as a summer cottage for his globe-trotting sons. [Kristopher Tremblay, 2024
Houston Larimore 'Tex' Compton (1910-1980)
​
Ramón Rodamiláns has a very interesting account of meeting Jorge and Tex in the 1960s in Spain.
​
Percy Tucker, Jorge's South African agent, has this charming memory (probably from the 1960s or early 1970s):
'In Madrid, I decided to take up Jorge Bolet's invitation to visit him. He and Tex gave me a thorough tour of Madrid, then we flew to their home at Fuenterrabia where Jorge's brother, the orchestral conductor Albert Bolet, was also visiting. What a great time we had - Liszt, Mozart, Rachmaninoff and Schumann in the mornings, trips to delightful places new to me, such as San Sebastian, for lunch, afternoon siestas, and late-night dinners in a series of magnificent Spanish restaurants.'
​
Ramón Rodamiláns met Jorge by chance in Fortnum & Masons, London in 1981. They agreed to have dinner that evening, and Jorge spoke excitedly of his Decca contract. 'His face changed when I asked after Tex, and he looked at me with downcast expression. Tex Compton had died a year earlier, in San Francisco, leaving, at same time, life and a big emptiness in Jorge's life. He told me about his sadness during the final weeks - when he visited him in the clinic, he did not recognise him. "Imagine, after living together for almost forty years!"'
​
Jorge's relationship with Tex Compton (over 40 years) seems to have been an open one. "Both Jorge and Tex had lovers-on-the-side. Jorge's longtime squeeze was a black limo-driver."
(Source via an email).
Tex said that in the past he had been married but that could not stand 'the bloody mess which comes with it!' He never made it clear whether this was true or merely a joke. However, he always wore a wedding ring, though this might have been for a different reason. (Source via an email).
​
'During the two years that I was in his class in Bloomington I had the privilege of having many hours of one-on-one conversations with Jorge Bolet, not only in the studio but also in several dinner parties at his place and mine. He and his manager Tex were delightful hosts (and guests), liked to eat well and they both loved my wife's cooking. After a few glasses of wine and some paella the stories and jokes would start to flow, he would relax and come out of his usually very stern public persona, and we would go late into the night laughing, listening to music, and having the best of times.'
Francisco Rennó, pianist
For more on 'Tex' Compton see here.
The revolution was an affair of
'fists and not of feathers' (Samuel Feijoó)
'The bourgeois male homosexual of this era (pre-1959) tended out of guilt to avoid same-class liasons with other homosexuals and was constantly on the lookout for the heterosexual macho from the lower strata of the population. Thus, in many ways pre-revolutionary homosexual liaisons in themselves fostered sexual colonialism and exploitation. The commodification of homosexual desire in the Havana underworld and in the bourgeois homosexual underground during the pre-revolutionary era did not produce a significant toleration of homosexual life-styles in the larger social arena. Attitudes in traditional workplaces and within the family involved... shame toward the maricones. [maricón, the (usually) abusive/negative term in Iberian and Latin American Spanish for 'gay']
'Homosexuality had been a component of the thriving industry of prostitution in pre-revolutionary Cuba, with many gay men drawn into prostitution largely for visitors and servicemen from the United States. There were few gay-friendly bars in Cuban cities, such as the St. Michel, the Intermezzo Bar and El Gato Tuerto ("The One-Eyed Cat", which opened in Vedado in August 1960) in Havana. However, despite the vibrancy of the Underworld and the breadth of its influence, Cuba still had laws that oppressed homosexuality and targeted gay men for harassment. The homosexual culture was purely recognised as an economic strategy.​
Lourdes Arguelles & B. Ruby Rich, Signs, Vol. 9, No. 4 (Summer, 1984).
Ian Lumsden, in Machos, Maricones, and Gays mentions that historically in Latin America, gender and sexuality norms have been more socially punitive toward deviations from traditional male appearance and manners than toward homosexual behaviour in itself. In Cuba, it was assumed that males whose comportment deviated from stereotypical masculinity would be homosexual. They were called maricones. (1996, 27).
​
As Ian Lumsden, Emilio Bejel, and Jafari Allen all point out, in Cuba, homosexuality is seen as more dangerous for its refusal to perform patriarchal masculinity properly than in the sexual act itself. Allen points out that “the male body is allowed a fair amount of mixing and ambiguity, as long as the body performs the masculine gender script competently". For example homosex experienced in youthful relationships which then passes is exempted from mariconísmo” (2011, 127).
Kerry P. White (2017)
'By the late 1950s, when Fidel Castro and his guerrilleros came to power, homosexuality was viewed as a form of capitalist decadence at best and counter-revolutionary deviance at worst.
​
'[But] times changed. By the 1990s, Castro began to soften his stance on queer rights, to the point that he recently declared that the persecution of homosexuals in Cuba was “a great injustice” for which he accepted personal responsibility.'
Jeffrey Round (2013)​
​
'The cult of masculinity was so pervasive that men feared wearing pants (trousers, UK) without creases - too effeminate. (So that men could have this 'masculine edge,' women would have to do more ironing!)​
Alfred Padula, Latin American Research Review 31/2 (1996), pp. 226-235, reviewing M.Leiner, Sexual Politics in Cuba (1993) &
Alberto Orlandini, El Amor El Sexo Y Los Celos (Santiago de Cuba: Oriente, 1993)
Cuba today
'I asked a gay group - one of them a macho boy, all muscles and cool hair - in La Habana Vieja.
They named a few bars but said that to find gay Cubans you simply had to go to La Rampa. They also named a nearby park in Old Town that is a cruising ground at night. I asked if it is peligroso – dangerous. One laughed. “Los Cubanos no son peligrosos,” he told me. Cubans aren’t dangerous.
​
What about the park around Coppelia? I wondered, naming the ice cream parlour made famous in what is likely Cuba’s first gay-positive feature film, Fresa y chocolate ("Strawberry and Chocolate"). No, they told me. It was closed at night a causa de los gais. Because of the gays. Little wonder: the film made the park a sexual landmark on its release in 1993, and more so with an Academy Award nomination in the following year. It’s still the centre of Havana’s hustler activity.
On La Rampa, you might experience a bewildering moment looking at all the attractive, fashionable young people and wonder which ones are gay. It’s not the hottie boys in pink T-shirts...Those are the straight ones out for an evening of fun.
The gay boys will approach you only once they see you looking around. They usually come in pairs, for protection and support, and are “straight-looking, straight-acting” by North American standards. That’s for protection, too. In Cuba, if you’re gay, you usually don’t advertise it.​ Jeffrey Round (2013)
The story takes place in Havana in 1979. David (Vladimir Cruz) is rejected by Vivian, who marries an older and wealthier man. It is revealed that he is a university student when he meets Diego (Jorge Perugorría), a gay artist unhappy with the Castro regime's attitude toward the homosexual community as well as the censored conceptualisation of culture. David's heterosexual classmate, Miguel (Francisco Gattorno), plans to use David to spy on Diego, a person whom they see as aberrant and dangerous to the Communist cause.
Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert commented (1995) that "nothing unfolds as we expect. Strawberry and Chocolate is not a movie about the seduction of a body, but about the seduction of a mind. It is more interested in politics than sex—unless you count sexual politics, since to be homosexual in Cuba is to make an anti-authoritarian statement whether you intend it or not."​
"As with all statements from today's Cuba, Strawberry and Chocolate can be seen reflected in many different mirrors. My first reaction was to wonder how director Tomás Gutiérrez Alea could get away with such pointed criticisms of his country. Yet conservative Cuban exiles in Miami have called it propaganda, precisely because it gives the impression that Cubans can safely be critical of Castro. Have it either way: The movie has real strength and charm, especially in the way it leads us to expect a romance, and then gives us a character whose very existence is a criticism of his society."
The 'Lavender Scare' (USA)
The Red Scare, the congressional witch-hunt against Communists during the early years of the Cold War, is a well-known chapter of American history. A second scare of the same era has been much slower to make its way into public consciousness, even though it lasted far longer and directly impacted many more lives. Beginning in the late 1940s and continuing through the 1960s, thousands of gay employees were fired or forced to resign from the federal workforce because of their sexuality. Dubbed the Lavender Scare, this wave of repression was also bound up with anti-Communism and fueled by the power of congressional investigation. The purge followed an era in which gay people were increasingly finding each other and forming communities in urban America. ​
The Red Scare, the congressional witch-hunt against Communists during the early years of the Cold War, is a well-known chapter of American history. A second scare of the same era has been much slower to make its way into public consciousness, even though it lasted far longer and directly impacted many more lives. Beginning in the late 1940s and continuing through the 1960s, thousands of gay employees were fired or forced to resign from the federal workforce because of their sexuality. Dubbed the Lavender Scare, this wave of repression was also bound up with anti-Communism and fueled by the power of congressional investigation. The purge followed an era in which gay people were increasingly finding each other and forming communities in urban America.
During World War II, many men and women left behind the restrictions of rural or small-town life for the first time. After the war, young people poured into cities, where density and anonymity made pursuit of same-sex relationships more possible than ever. By the late 1940s, even the general public was becoming more aware of homosexuality. Alfred Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, published in 1948, became a bestseller and drew attention for its claim that same-sex experiences were relatively common.
Judith Adkins (2016)
​
The term for this persecution was popularised by David K. Johnson's 2004 book which studied this anti-homosexual campaign, The Lavender Scare. The book drew its title from the term "lavender lads", used repeatedly by Senator Everett Dirksen as a synonym for homosexual males. In 1952, Dirksen said that a Republican victory in the November elections would mean the removal of "the lavender lads" from the State Department. The phrase was also used by Confidential magazine, a periodical known for gossiping about the sexuality of politicians and prominent Hollywood stars.
​
It is bad enough to brand a man as a Communist without proof, but to brand him as a homosexual would be to ruin him completely... The American public finds these unfortunate creatures repulsive. [And because they don't advertise their "abnormality", they are open to blackmail]
Kingsport News, Tennessee, using a syndicated article by James Marlow, after the government fired 91 homosexuals (May 1959)
​
Moral degeneracy and the destruction of the greatest civilisations in the world were tied hand in hand. The later days emperors of Rome were perverts. Considerable evidence that the top men in Hitler's Third Reich were perverts. "I simply want to get them out of town," says Miami Beach Chief of Police.
Miami News, August 1954​
Philadelphia, DC & New York City
In the 1930s, LGBTQ+ (to use the current term, anachronistic for the time) life in Philadelphia was largely underground, existing in the shadows.
In the 1950s, Rittenhouse Square (off which is the Curtis Institute, on Locust Street) and the nearby coffee houses on Sansom Street—where jazz, espresso, and alternative beatnik culture flourished—took on an identity of the city’s gay geography. South of the Square, so many gay men were moving into the rows of red brick apartments that Philadelphians, straight or gay, commonly referred to them as the “Spruce Street Boys.”as the "Gayborhood" around Washington Square West, a hub for nightlife since the 1920s. [Bob Skiba (2014)]​
Jorge left Philadelphia for Washington in the early 1940s, and thence to Washington Square, New York city in the 1950s. He was a very private man ("I am not allergic to solitude'" he told Roy Plumley on the BBC radio programme Desert Island Discs, when asked how he would cope with life shipwrecked on the proverbial island.) In later years, - for example - he found it awkward seeing men walking hand in hand in Amsterdam.
​
​Gay life in 1940s Washington, D.C., was a contradictory era of expanding, hidden subcultures existing alongside intense persecution. World War II brought an influx of people, allowing for secret networks, yet the late 1940s marked the start of the "Lavender Scare," with police targeting gay men (e.g., Lafayette Square) and federal purges accusing them of being communist security risks.
In 1947, the U.S. Park Police initiated a "Sex Perversion Elimination Program", but despite risks, social scenes existed. The Chicken Hut on H Street NW was a prominent, popular, and discreet hangout for white gay men, particularly known for hosting unofficial drag. In 1948, Congress passed an act for the treatment of "sexual psychopaths," which was used to target and institutionalise gay people. The era was marked by a shift from viewing homosexuality merely as a sin or medical disorder to a political, subversive threat.
​
Jorge and Tex Compton rented an apartment at 71, Washington Square, in New York City during the 1950s (the earliest record for this address which I have is March 1948). The Square served as a vital, albeit discreet, hub for gay life, acting as a crucial meeting and cruising area in the heart of Greenwich Village. Amidst intense "Lavender Scare" policing, the park was a safe harbour for the queer, Beat Generation, and bohemian communities, connecting to nearby clandestine bars. Despite being a refuge, individuals faced high risks of entrapment, harassment, and arrest by police, with homosexuality heavily stigmatised as a "sickness".
​
​
Jorge Bolet came from a strongly religious background, and several siblings became missionaries for the Protestant faith.​ In the late 1930s, his sister Maria, who had essentially looked after him during his Curtis days, worried, however, about his contacts. She wrote to a friend: 'I appreciate deeply your interest in my brother's affairs, and your keen insight of the whole situation regarding that man whom I felt all the time was dangerous to my candid brother. I cannot imagine how blind Jorge has been or what powerful influence that man must exercise over him. (...) I feel that trouble is coming.' ('That man' is almost certainly Raymond F. Stover, who seems according to the newspaper clippings to have acted as Jorge's manager and friend.)
​
​Homosexual acts were illegal in Pennsylvania throughout this period; decriminalisation did not occur until 1980. ​
New Orleans 1958
​On 28 September, 1958, Fernando Rios, a 26-year-old Mexican tour guide and gay man, died in New Orleans due to injuries sustained during an assault he experienced the previous night. The assault had been perpetrated by John Farrell, a 20-year-old student at Tulane University (a prestigious Southern Ivy university), who was accompanied by fellow students Alberto Calvo (a student from Ciudad de Panamá) and David Drennan. Earlier in the night, Farrell had recommended to Calvo and Drennan that they rob a gay man, with Farrell targeting Rios at the Cafe Lafitte in Exile, a gay bar on Bourbon Street. The two left the bar together, with Farrell, accompanied by Calvo and Drennan, assaulting Rios in an alley of the St. Louis Cathedral, resulting in his death the next day. Following his death, the three individuals turned themselves in to the police, and pled not guilty to murder. The three were ultimately found not guilty, with their defence team employing a "gay panic" defence. Subsequent prosecution resulted in convictions on lesser charges, but did not result in any of the men serving jail time.
​
After the murder trial, which attracted a significant amount of local news coverage—much of which expressed a bias in support of the accused—the event largely faded from local memory.
Starting in the 1940s and going into the 1950s, there had been a significant push from New Orleanians to clean up the French Quarter. At the time, New Orleans's tourism industry was growing, and city officials were concerned that the visible gay community in the French Quarter could damage that industry. As a result, New Orleans Mayor deLesseps Story Morrison organised a "Committee on the Problem of Sex Deviates", which recommended that the city government take a more hostile stance towards the city's gay population, including an increase in the number of police raids on gay bars. In 1955, the superintendent of the New Orleans Police Department (NOPD), Provosty A. Dayries, publicly referred to homosexual people as the city's "Number One vice problem", further stating, "They are the ones we want to get rid of most." These actions in New Orleans can be viewed as part of the nationwide Lavender Scare.
​
See further: Clayton Delery, Out for Queer Blood: The Murder of Fernando Rios and the Failure of New Orleans Justice (20170
The City and the Pillar by American writer Gore Vidal was published on January 10, 1948. The story is about a young man who is coming of age and discovers his own homosexuality. Vidal calims New York City is the homosexual capital of the USA. One review notes that at Chenonceaux's Bar, "the New Orleans mecca for the sexually abnormal", one character Paul Sullivan speaks out for all who must seek love in the dark, 'There should be no need to hide...'
(Brooklyn Eagle, 11 January 1949)
​
The City and the Pillar is significant because it is recognised as the first post-World War II novel whose gay protagonist is portrayed in a sympathetic manner. But it sparked a public scandal, including notoriety and criticism, not only since it was released at a time when homosexuality was commonly considered immoral, but also because it was the first book by an accepted American author to portray overt homosexuality as a natural behaviour.[Bronksi, Michael (2003)] The controversial reception began before the novel hit bookshelves. Prior to its even being published, an editor at EP Dutton said to Vidal, "You will never be forgiven for this book. Twenty years from now you will still be attacked for it." Looking back in retrospect from 2009, it is considered by Ian Young to be "perhaps the most notorious of the gay novels of the 1940s and 1950s."[in Drewey Wayne Gunn, ed. (2003). The Golden Age of Gay Fiction].
The book sold well, enjoying several paperback reprint editions.
Spain 1960s
​​​​​​​​​​​​​The Boletín de la Sociedad Filharmónica de Bilbao (No.10, July 2009) has an article "Recuerdo de Jorge Bolet" by someone who signs as R.R. (whom I believe to be Ramón Rodamiláns Vellido, b.1932) who got to know Bolet and who had visited him in the spring of 1966. He states that Jorge was living in the Villa Egoki, Fuenterrabia in northern Spain at this time
​
I arrived at Villa Egoki with Alberto Bolet, and Rosita, his wife.
Alberto was as chatty and outgoing as Jorge was quiet - he could almost seem taciturn and introverted. His height and build transformed him into a dark giant (‘gigante moreno’), endowed with a deeply penetrating gaze. I must confess that this penetrating but impenetrable look, and the fact that he did not say much, had an intimidating effect on me. Later I discovered that when he relaxed, behind those unfathomable eyes there lay hidden an affable, friendly personality and an intelligent conversationalist.
In Villa Egoki, Jorge lived with Tex Compton, an American who had sacrificed his own business career to concentrate his energies on helping Jorge achieve great success [...]’
Ramón Rodamiláns compares their relationship to that of Somerset Maugham and Gerald Haxton. This is an intriguing observation. Frederick Gerald Haxton (1892–1944), a native of San Francisco, was the long term secretary and lover of the distinguished British author W. Somerset Maugham. He and Maugham met at the outbreak of World War I when they both began serving from 1914 as part of the Red Cross ambulance unit in Flanders, France. Later they settled on the French Riviera in the villa ‘Mauresque’. It is thought that Haxton’s flamboyant nature, said to be portrayed in the character Rowley Flint in Maugham’s novella Up at the Villa, was the key to Maugham’s invitational success with the various members of the society at whatever location that the pair was visiting at a given time. They lived there almost exclusively until they were forced to flee the advancing Germans at the commencement of World War II.
‘Tex, like Haxton, was outgoing and friendly. When we arrived at Villa Egoki, he greeted us, smiling, warm and jovial. One might have thought he himself was the host. He prepared drinks and snacks in the garden, and he served an impeccable lunch. In the garden, peaceful and quiet, no kind of noise reached us, and the warm spring day was very nice. Jorge smoked a lot and spoke little, maybe because he knew what I could only guess - the tense relationship that existed between Tex and his brother. After coffee, we went to the living room, white from the carpet to the ceiling, where a black Bechstein grand paradoxically dazzled. Jorge sat at the piano and in that moment was transformed. He played several transcriptions, wonderful transcriptions by Godowsky of Schubert songs, plus the ballet music from Rosamunde, but offered the surprising confession that his secret dream was to play and record all Mozart's piano concertos.' (He never did.)
Santa Fe New Mexican
6 March 1959
Jorge Bolet's love of art
