Sean Flynn: Was the Son of the Legendary Actor Gay?

Born in 1941, Sean Flynn was the son of infamous bisexual superstar Errol Flynn (and uncle of his namesake Sean Flynn, star of the Nickelodeon teencom Zoey 101).

Handsome, muscular, and the son of a superstar, he was naturally pushed into acting, and in 1962 appeared in the swashbuckling Son of Captain Blood, a sequel to his father's Captain Blood (1935).  

Some other actioners followed, with Sean playing Zorro (Duel at the Rio Grande, 1963), a man-mountain of Colonial India (Temple of the White Elephant, 1964), and a James Bond-style secret agent (Mission to Venice, 1964).  But there were lots of better movies with similar characters, and audiences stayed away.

Besides, Sean didn't care for acting.  He wanted to be a real-life adventurer, like Richard Halliburton and Michael Rockefeller.   He moved to Africa to become a hunter and game warden. Then he became a photojournalist, covering the Vietnam War and the 1967 Egypt-Israeli War for Paris-Match.  

In April 1970, while traveling near the Cambodian border, he and colleague Dana Stone (left) disappeared.

His mother spent years searching for him, and eventually found evidence that the two were captured by the Khmer Rouge or Viet Cong, imprisoned for a few months, and then executed.

A tragic end to a fascinating life.

Of course, you're wondering: was he gay or bisexual?










Sean's friend Perry Deane Young (left, the one with the bulge) doesn't say anything about Sean's same-sex interests in his memoir of their Vietnam experiences (published in 1975).  But then, one wouldn't expect him to.

However, it is compelling to note that Sean spent his life surrounded by attractive men.

See also: The Disappearance of Michael Rockefeller; The Disappearance of Richard Halliburton.

The Mysterious Disappearance of Richard Colvin Cox

Richard Colvin Cox from Mansfield, Ohio, was conforming to the expectations of Cold War culture, to the letter.  In high school he was an accomplished athlete and well-liked by both adults and other teens.  After graduation he was stationed in Germany for two years, and then was admitted to the prestigious U.S. Military Academy at West Point, where he planned to graduate as a commissioned officer.

He spent Christmas 1949 back home in Mansfield, visiting his parents and hometown girlfriend.  He returned just after the New Year, ready to begin classes again.

On January 7th, a gruff, demanding man called the barracks and asked to speak with "Dick Cox."  Peter Hains, the cadet who answered the phone remembered him as gruff and impolite: "He'll know who I am.  We knew each other in Germany."  Hains was "fairly certain" that he gave his name as George.

That evening "George" stopped by, and he and Richard left together.  Instead of going to the Hotel Thayer, the only place cadets could bring visitors, they sat in "George's" car and drank whiskey.

Richard returned to the barracks drunk, and fell asleep.  When he heard the final bugle call, he jumped up and ran out into the hallway, screaming something incoherent.  Some of the cadets heard "Allus kaput!" (It's all over) in German, and others, "Is Alice down there?"

During the next few days, Richard met with "George" several more times.  He told his bunkmates that he was disagreeable, a "morbid guy" who liked to castrate the German soldiers he killed.  But he didn't seem afraid of "George," just annoyed.

On January 14th, Richard announced some distaste that he was going to have dinner with "that guy" again.  He left his room at 6:00 pm, and was never seen again.

Over the next weeks, the local police, the army, and the FBI mounted one of the largest manhunts in history.

What they discovered was perplexing:

Richard -- or his body -- was nowhere on the base.

He couldn't have driven off the base.  He would have had to sign out.

He couldn't have walked off, since his footprints would be found in the newfallen snow.

That means he had to have left in someone's truck, willingly or not.

He probably wasn't intending to go anywhere, since he left a large sum of money back in his room.

UNLESS he wanted to implicate this "George" as his murderer, the better to disappear off the face of the Earth.

Painstaking research never revealed the identity of "George."  No one like him served in Germany with Richard.  Maybe it was all a carefully planned con to allow Richard to disappear.

What would cause a well-liked, successful cadet to want to vanish during his second year at West Point?

Hundreds of calls came in over the next decade, stating that Richard had been sighted in various distant locales.  They all turned out to be false leads.  In spite of the concerted effort of the U.S. Military and the FBI, the mystery was never solved.

In Oblivion: The Mystery of West Point Cadet Richard Cox, Harry J. Maihafer uncovers a reason.  He was gay. In 1950, being discovered would cause him to get booted from the military, arrested, disowned by his family, and probably placed in an insane asylum, where he would be subject to castration and electroshock therapy.  Better to just vanish, leaving behind a mysterious story and the suggestion that he had been murdered

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 was 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 will appear in February 2015, written and directed by Claude Miles, who will also play 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 will not be a serious production.

See also: Richard Halliburton

The Mysterious Disappearance of Mr. Gay Austria

34-year old Aeryn Gillern was living the life that every gay American wants: he had a beautiful apartment in Vienna overlooking the Danube, a job at the United Nations, and a face and physique that won him the title of Mr. Gay Austria in 2005.  Best of all, he had found a "good place," where the homophobia and heterosexism of his home country was a distant memory.

Or so he thought.

On the night of October 29th, 2007, he left work at 6:00 pm and checked into the Kaiserbrundl, a gay sauna near the City Center.  It is known for its upscale, closeted clients, including high-ranking politicians and religious leaders.

He was never seen again.  

The next morning, his partner called the police, but they refused to take a missing person report for three days, and then refused to investigate. 



A few days later, Aeryn's mother, Kathy Gilleran, flew in from Ithaca, New York.  A retired police officer herself, she tried to appeal to their professionalism, but, as she said, the police "treated me...as a vile creature who had the audacity to ask them to help me find my gay son."

Sexual deviants disappear all the time, they said; it's not a police matter.  When they finally issued a statement to the press, three weeks after Aeryn's disappearance, they called him an "emotionally unbalanced homosexual."


They told Kathy that Aeryn was probably so wracked with guilt over being a sexual deviant that he decided, on the spur of the moment, to commit "spontaneous suicide" by jumping in the Danube.

Good riddance.  Case closed.

Eventually, through the efforts of Kathy and Aeryn's friends, witness statements began to emerge.  But the story was contradictory:

7:00: A bald man, naked except for a towel, is seen running out of the Kaiserbrundl.

8:20: A passerby hears a splash, and sees a bald man floating in the Danube Canal near the Urania Bar in the City Center.

8:30: The police search the river.  They have divers, or don't, depending on who you ask.  They find nothing.

10:00: The Kaiserbrundl staff claims that Aeryn is still in the sauna.  He gets into an argument, and they call the police.  He runs out before the police arrive, leaving his clothes behind.

So he ran out at 7:00 or 10:00, or not at all.  Why would he run from the sauna naked, on a cold Austrian night?

And if he indeed fell (or was pushed) into the Danube near the Urania bar, why did it take him an hour and a half to go 1/2 mile?   

And why didn't anyone see him run through the crowded, heavily-traveled streets, dodging cars and trams?

Two years later, two witness came forward and said that they had seen a naked man running through the City Center.  They mentioned that he "looked terrified."  They sounded like they had been coached.

Sounds like Aeryn saw something he shouldn't have, and ran, but didn't get far.  .

Kathy has continued to investigate, and to publicize the official homophobia.  In June 2014 the newly-formed Sonderkomission, the Cold Case Division of the Austrian police force, agreed to re-open the case, based on an article in Der Falter by investigative reporter Joseph Gepp.  You can read about new developments on her website.

The documentary film Gone, by Gretchen and John Morning, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2011.  You can see the trailer on youtube.

Fall 1973: Junior High Fantasies of Paul Getty Junior

During the summer of 1973, just after 7th grade at Washington Junior High, I started reading newspaper articles about Paul Getty Jr., the 16-year old grandson of oil tycoon J. Paul Getty, who had mysteriously disappeared from his apartment in Rome.

Soon I discovered that it wasn't a paranormal disappearance: he had been kidnapped, with a ransom demand of $18 million.  His father and grandfather refused to pay, believing that he had somehow arranged the kidnapping himself.

The articles didn't say anything else about Paul, but the photos showed a cute, long haired guy with a slim build and dainty, feminine hands.

He obviously liked boys, not girls.  I imagined flying to Italy to mount a daring rescue, and getting a "my hero" hug and kiss.

Was he tied up with his shirt off?  Or naked? Was he struggling against the bonds, his chest heaving, his slim biceps straining?

On November 10th, a week before my 13th birthday, the kidnappers sent Paul's mother a package containing his severed ear, and warned that they would start returning him "by bits."  What body part would they cut off next, I wondered.  A finger -- or maybe his penis.

How big was his penis, anyway?

When I stormed into the dungeon where he was tied up naked, I would find out.  Then we would...

It never occurred to me to feel guilty over using Paul's ordeal as the subject of my junior high fantasies.

The elder Getty finally negotiated a deal, and delivered $2.9 million.  On December 13th, Paul was released.



He dropped out of the news, and I heard nothing more about him; I didn't even realize that Balthazar Getty, a noted actor of the 1980s, was his son.  But recently I began to wonder about the object of my junior high fantasies, and looked him up.

Apparently Paul was not as innocent as I imagined: living with a girlfriend, hanging out with criminals and mafiosi, using and selling massive quantities of drugs.

But he was bisexual: his biography notes experiences with both men and women.

After the kidnapping, he continued his jetsetting, bon vivant life.  He was married from 1975 to 1991, but pursued many friendships with gay men.  He partied with gay celebs like Elton John and Andy Warhol, who managed to talk him into nude photos.

It didn't take much talking.  Friends describe him as amiable, uninhibited, and eager to explore the risque.

And his tastes in clothing veered toward the Quentin Crisp style.

Paul was interested in show business, and starred in two movies, The Territory (1981) and The State of Things (1982).

But he continued to use massive quantities of drugs.  In 1981, at the age of 24, he drank a nearly-lethal mixture of alcohol, valium, and methadone, and suffered a massive stroke that left him paralyzed and nearly blind.

The tragedy did not destroy his spirit.  Friends say that he remained positive, amiable, and charming up to his death thirty years later.

See also: The Gay Anthropologist and the Cannibal; and The Disappearance of Sean Flynn.

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.

The Gay Anthropologist and the Cannibals

Michael Rockefeller, the "secretly" gay son of New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, heir to one of the wealthiest families in the world, graduated from Harvard in 1960.  He was interested in anthropology, especially "primitive art," he embarked on an expedition to to New Guinea.

He fell in love with the Asmat men, with their muscular bodies and laissez-faire attitude toward sexual identity, and returned over and over again.

On November 17th, 1961, his boat overturned about 12 miles from shore, and he decided to swim for it.  He was never seen again.  Extensive searches of the area -- the Rockefellers could afford very extensive searches -- revealed no clue to his fate.

Sounds like a tragic but easily explainable event: Rockefeller drowned, or was eaten by a shark, during the 12-mile swim.  

But paranormal authors latched onto the story.  He was abducted by aliens, or swam through a time vortex, or was living as the god-king of a lost tribe, or was living incognito in Hollywood.  The fact that Rockefeller was "secretly gay" increased the aura of scandal.

A more plausible theory has him reaching the shore, where he was killed and eaten by the Asmat.  They weren't usually cannibals, but the play The Man Who Ate Michael Rockefeller (2010) suggests that Michael (Aaron Strand, top photo) represented a sexual threat.  

His barely-contained homoerotic interest in Designing Man (Daniel Morgan Shelley, left) threatens his lover, Plentiful Bliss (Tracey Jack), who happens to be his best friend's wife.  So Michael must die.

The book Savage Harvest, by anthropologist Carl Hoffman (2014), documents the murder theory with eyewitness testimonies from villagers.  But he minimizes the sexual-threat angle, suggesting that the Asmat killed Michael in retaliation for some murders of their people by Dutch traders a few years earlier.

See also: The Disappearance of Sean Flynn; He Walked Around the Horses.