Was Elisa Lam Gay?

 

The Elisa Lam case has some undeniable fascination.  In January 2013, a 21 year old Canadian college student on a tour of California checks into the sleazy Hotel Cecil in downtown L.A. (why would anyone who knows anything about Los Angeles stay anywhere near downtown?).  She vanishes.  

Two weeks later, her body is discovered in a water tank on the hotel roof.  The only way to get there is through a door that will ring an alarm, or up a fire escape on the outside of the building.  In the middle of the night?

And the tank access lid was closed.  Elisa would not have been able to close it after jumping in.  Obviously someone was with her, helping or forcing her into the tank.

Then there's the security footage of Elisa in an elevator, crouching, pushing all of the buttons, making weird hand gestures, looking around as if she is waiting for someone, apparently talking to someone.  Who was with her?

The video went viral on the internet, with wild, crazy speculation.  She was playing a Korean game where, if you push elevator buttons in the proper order, you end up in a parallel world.  She was re-enacting (or being forced to re-enact) the plot of an old horror movie about a haunted hotel.  A ghost was holding the elevator doors open.

The bloated Netflix miniseries Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel plays up all the speculation, and adds some of its own.  Why did the police searching the hotel not check in the water tanks?  It took guests complaining that the water tasted funny for a staff member to think to take a look.  Why did the autopsy report take so long?  Were the police involved in a cover-up?  What about Morbid, a death-metal musician who stayed at the Cecil -- could he be the murderer?  What about the two men who delivered a mysterious package to Elisa the day before she disappeared -- could they be involved?

There are a lot of closeups of people's hands on keyboards, a lot of interviews with people who weren't involved in any way ("Yeah, we stayed at the Cecil two years before Elisa did.  It wasn't very nice"), and a lot of set-pieces about unrelated incidents at the Cecil (two serial killers stayed there...not at the same time as Elisa...and no hotel guests were victims..but still...).  Strangely, there are no interviews with Elisa's family or friends.  

The series waits for the last 10 minutes of the last episode to reveal that Elisa was bipolar, and had the habit of not taking her medication, which resulted in psychotic episodes where she thought people were trying to kill her.  She had been exhibiting bizarre behavior during her entire stay at the hotel.  On the night she died, she was probably fleeing from an imaginary assailant.  She climbed onto the roof, thought the water tank would be a good place to hide, climbed in, was unable to get out again, and drowned.  

The closed hatch? Probably a staff member noticed it the next day, and closed it without checking for a body at the bottom.

The elevator?  Elisa accidentally pushed the "stop elevator" button, got frustrated when the elevator wouldn't move, looked around for someone to help, and talked to herself before giving up.

The mysterous delivery? Some books she bought earlier that day.

Morbid?  Not even in the country at the time.

The four hours of wild speculation are not only annoying, they do Elisa a disservice, making her mental illness a "dirty secret."  And having to postpone it to the big reveal means that we learn nothing about her life before the visit to Los Angeles.  We learn nothing about her family and friends.  

 I assumed that the absence meant that Elisa was gay, and skittish producers closeted her.  But an internet search reveals several photographs of Elisa in chummy poses with male friends.  Buddies, or romantic partners?  It would be nice to know.

Richard Halliburton: A Gay Adventurer of the Jazz Age

When I was a kid in the 1960s, I was constantly looking for "a good place," where I could be free from the "what girl do you like?" interrogations.  One such "good place" was a book in the Denkmann Elementary School Library, Richard Halliburton's Complete Book of Marvels (1941).

I didn't know much about Richard Halliburton, except for his amazing adventures:

Crossing the Alps on an elephant, like Hannibal.

Swimming naked in a pool outside the Taj Mahal at midnight.

Swimming across the Panama Canal.

Exploring a secret room beneath Temple Mount in Jerusalem.

Receiving a gift of shrunken heads from a Dayak chief

Sort of like Donald Duck and his nephews jetting off with their Uncle Scrooge to find King Solomon's Mines or explore a lost city in the Himalayas!

Except Donald always had to return to Duckburg, where Daisy was waiting to "civilize" him with afternoon teas and shopping trips, and marriage and children and despair.

How did Richard Halliburton manage to have all of those adventures, and avoid the mind-control drone of "what girl do you like?"

Many years later, I discovered that Richard Halliburton (1900-1938) was the last of the old-style adventurers, thrilling the Jazz Age with his exploits through speaking engagements, radio broadcasts, a syndicated column, magazine articles, and a dozen books: The Royal Road to Romance, The Glorious Adventure, New Worlds to Conquer, Seven League Boots

 And he was gay. He knew gay rights pioneer Harry Hay, he was romantically linked to silent film star Ramon Novarro, and he had a long-term domestic relationship with journalist Paul Mooney.  In 1937 they had an idiosyncratic house built in Laguna Beach, called Hangover House because it was hanging off a cliff.

There is no hint of Halliburton's same-sex romances in any of his writings, and evidently he kept them secret from almost everyone in his private life, including his parents.

Following the footsteps of Richard Halliburton, I've lived in five countries (including the U.S.) and visited 26. It's not exactly swimming across the Panama Canal, but it's a start.

See also: The Disappearance of Sean Flynn; The Disappearance of Michael Rockefeller.

He Walked Around the Horses

I'm a big fan of the paranormal, especially mysterious disappearances, people who suddenly and inexplicably vanish.

You and a friend are hiking in the woods.  He's a few paces ahead.  You see him go around a bend, but when you arrive, a second later, he's not there.

Your father walks out the front door of your house to go to the mailbox, a journey of 10 yards.  He is never seen again.

A man boards an airplane.  He is served by the flight attendant in flight.  When the plane lands, he is gone.

But the greatest of the "they never came back" stories happened on November 25th, 1809.  Benjamin Bathurst, a 25-year old British diplomat, was on the way to Vienna for  a meeting with Emperor Francis II.  He and his assistant, Krause, stopped for dinner at an inn in Perleberg, Germany.  When it was time to continue the journey, he walked around the horses to climb into his carriage.  Except he never made it to the carriage.

He was never seen again.

It was a journey of 10 feet.  He would have been out of Krause's sight for only a few seconds.

A few days later, his coat was discovered on a farm a mile north of Perleberg.  And his pants, in the woods near the town of Quitzow.




The gay connection:
1. Bathurst and his servant sharing a room.
2. Wherever he  went, he was naked when he arrived.

The story didn't get much press in 1809, but when it was rediscovered by Charles Fort in the 1920s, paranormal enthusiasts went wild.  It was repeated in every compendium of the unexplained.

Maybe he was abducted by aliens, or zapped into a parallel world.  Maybe he became a time traveler.  Or a vampire.

Many science fiction writers, including Poul Anderson, H. Piper Beam, Robert Heinlein, and Robert Bloch, have covered his story.

Recently debunkers have been pushing a more mundane explanation: that Bathurst was dragged back into the inn and murdered, with robbery or political assassination as the motive (it was a rough part of town, in the middle of the night).

An adaptation of H. Piper Beam's story He Walked Around the Horses appeared in February 2015, written and directed by Claude Miles, who also played Benjamin Bathurst.  Miles has also appeared in such films as Trouser Snake (aka Penis Monster), The Last Temptation of Fluffy, Cow Tippers from Outer Space, Flying Saucers over Fetishland, and Tarzan's Teenage Daughter, so I'm going to guess that this was not a serious production.