XTRA:

On April 10, 1912 the RMS Titanic set sail from Southampton, England to New York. It sank in the North Atlantic Ocean four days later. Among the passengers there were the wealthy, the famous and the gays.

“Clearly there were just as many queer people a century ago as there are today,” says Hugh Brewster, the author of RMS Titanic, Gilded Lives on a Fatal Voyage.

Brewster’s book enlists Frank Millet, a gay man, as the protagonist in his account of the events on the ill-fated voyage. Brewster devotes an entire chapter, “Queer Lot of People,” to the Titanic’s gay and lesbian passengers.

Brewster has written several books about the Titanic. He also worked with Robert D. Ballard on The Discovery of the Titanic and oversaw the creation of Titanic: An Illustrated History, which provided the inspiration for James Cameron’s blockbuster movie, Titanic.

ALSO READ THIS STORY ABOUT ONE OF THE TITANIC’S HEROES…
Unsinkable Love: One Of The Titanic’s Heroes And His Rarely Acknowledged Relationship

By Richard Davenport-Hines

When the Titanic sank, Maj. Archibald Butt, a military adviser to President William Howard Taft and former aide-de-camp to his predecessor, Theodore Roosevelt, was among the heroes of the hour. Amid the disaster on the night of April 14-15, 1912, Butt fulfilled all the archetypes of manly courage, escorting women from their cabins to lifeboats, standing back to let them live and facing death with selflessness. One of the women he helped to save — he had known her when she gave music lessons to the Roosevelt children in the White House — later testified that after he helped her into the lifeboat, he tucked a blanket around her with careful nonchalance, as if she was going for a breezy ride in an open car.

Taft wept when it was confirmed that Butt was lost in the freezing Atlantic Ocean. Much of Washington grieved. In the press rooms of the White House and the War, State and Navy buildings, as one reporter wrote at the time, “the name of Maj. Archie Butt, once synonymous of laughter and jest, now symbolic of heroism, was repeated while eyes blurred and voices became queerly strained.” Ever since 1912, writers have depicted Butt as an archetypal Southerner and military officer. They have not noticed, or have shrunk from mentioning, that his was also love story, a story involving another man, Frank Millet.

READ THE FULL STORY HERE @ THE DAILY

GAVIN ROACH [as told to Suz Tucker]:

For Gavin Roach Grindr was a revelation. However, like it usually tends to, the endless quest for instant gratification eventually steered into Addiction Territory. Confessions of a Grindr Addict is Gavin’s semi-autobiographical work inspired by his tumultuous relationship with the app that literally changed his life. In the one-man show he tries to answer the big existential question of modern times: Is the internet and social networking really making us less lonely? Gavin told us the story of how he became addicted to Grindr…

“I’m on Grindr all the time. Or at least I was.  Using Grindr you get the opportunity to talk with people all the time and you’re not just stuck with yourself.  If you’re lying awake at 2am there’s always someone to talk to. If you’re sitting at work bored you can jump on and just chat to someone about something light, something flirty – anything.  So after a while it really did consume my world.”

“Part of the inspiration for the show is the fact that we’re all searching to connect with someone on a number of levels but on Grindr can blur the line because a lot of it’s appeal is that you can be very blunt and evolve into a purely physical connection.”

READ THE REST OF THE STORY HERE @ PTV