Denham Fouts was a business-minded teenager with a clear goal: he wanted to become the best-kept harlot in the world. His father had a degree from Yale, but it did little to help him live a comfortable life. The Fouts lost almost all their fortune in the crisis. Denny, as Denham was called, always carried his with him. With his sturdy body, the look of an eternal young man and the scent of vanilla that was supposedly wafting from his skin, he became the undisputed star among the paid love sellers. He may have only glittered in limited circles, but they were all the more select. Alongside artists, writers and poets, he was also loved and supported by princes, although he never made any secret of the fact that he was using them only to secure a life of luxury.
When he started building his career, he asked the poet and writer Glenway Wescott, 13 years his senior, for advice on how to become the best harlot in the world. Never say it for the money, he advised. Think of something you want to know, then ask them to guide you and help you get there.
But soon Denny didn’t have to think about money any more. As soon as he landed in New York, the gay world was at his feet. Why he left his native Florida, where he was kicked out of high school and sent to live with his uncle by his parents, bankrupt bankers, is unclear. Much later, he told his lover Peter Watson that he had to leave because he was “pushing his beautiful younger brother around”.
He had no moral qualms about sex, and had been promiscuous since he became aware of his sex drive. In New York, artists and actors were the first to kowtow to him, followed by diplomats and blue bloods. He charmed a German baron into taking him with him to Europe, where Denny quickly had his way and hitched a ride with a Greek rich man.
He went with him to his yacht, saw one of his crew members and together with him stole money from the millionaire. He and his sailor fled first to Venice and from there to Capri, then to a luxury hotel to enjoy themselves until the money arrived.
The sailor has gone out into the night, the bill has not. The then naive Denny ended up in the arms of the police, and he might well have had fun with the prisoners, had Lord Tredegar’s eye not rested on him. He saw Denny as he was being led to prison. “Let this handsome young man go, he’s mine,” he reportedly ordered firmly. He got his young man, Denny got freedom, luxury and valuable new acquaintances in exchange for sex.
He met many rich men and, when Prince Pavlos, later King of Greece, came to visit, he went on a Mediterranean cruise with him. In an environment where most men were decently married but indulged in sex with men for relaxation, he changed sponsor after sponsor until, in 1933, at the age of 19, he met an Englishman, Peter Watson. By then, his career as a harlot was slowly coming to an end. Or at least theoretically it should have been, because the market was relentless.
Youth Sale
For example, Berlin, the homosexual mecca of the early 20th century, was home to around 4 million people in 1920. Among them, around 400,000 were reportedly gay, and around 100,000 were harlots. A third of these were said to be heterosexual, but had to earn a living or raise their standard through sex, like many soldiers.
These were the cheapest. They charged 50 pfennig for their services at a time when the average price of gay sex was 5 marks and the most expensive boys cost 80 marks. Only the boys were cheaper than the soldiers, who demanded a meal and a bed to sleep on in exchange for sex.
The better-off boys could earn around 400 marks a month, but they had to start working young and they had to work a lot, because they had a limited duration. They were most in demand while they were teenagers, so most started at 17, although there was no shortage of 14-year-olds.
The most beautiful and the most flamboyant hung out in private clubs, moving from rich man to rich man. The slightly less outstanding worked in Berlin’s many gay bars, clubs, restaurants, dance halls and the like, while the least interesting worked by the rivers, lakes, canals, parks, swimming pools and train stations.
By the time they entered their twenties, they were already considered old and could only work on the streets. By then, the best people had earned enough to retire and open a shop, café or bar.
Denny did not have these problems. The years hadn’t got to him, and neither had the drugs, although he was taking them in increasing quantities. There was something magical about him, something that made everyone want to have sex with him. When Peter Watson met him in a club in 1933, Denny immediately took him to his hotel. In their world, to meet meant to have sex, without introductions, dinners, introductions and niceties.
In the room, he injected himself with cocaine in front of Peter, who was as promiscuous as he was. Peter was shocked by the scene, but not deterred. He simply could not resist Denny, as, for example, the writer Christopher Isherwood later could not. He compared Denny’s “sharp, knife-point profile” to a Picasso painting, but added that behind his beauty and attractiveness was pure corrosiveness. Of course, he stayed with him.
Others also described him as pure poison, unlike Peter Watson, who they could tell was a good and reliable man. In his twenties, after the death of his wealthy father, he inherited a fortune that has made him a patron of the arts, although in reality he more or less financially supported his many lovers, helping them to get an education or a professional career.
Charming, sincere, witty and handsome, and confident and wealthy, he charmed everyone who passed by. Many fell in love with him, none had the chance to love him. Denny took him, Peter did not. No one took him. He didn’t believe in relationships, let alone love. He believed in money, sex and a life of luxury.
Three years later, when this “man-whore, a kind of black angel of the night streets of Paris”, as George Plimpton described him, crossed Watson’s path again, the then 22-year-old Denny had been through so much that almost no one believed he was telling the truth.
For example, Gore Vidal was later convinced that he was being made fun of when he sent a telegram to the then Greek Prince Pavlos. He could not believe it when the reply came back: ‘Dear Denham, it is so wonderful to hear from you again …’. Love, Pavlos.”
Peter Watson was again ahead of Denny. Although he was six years older than him, and therefore older, Denny, who preferred boys between the ages of 14 and 16, did not resist his new sponsor. They moved into one of Peter’s Paris apartments, but Watson preferred not to talk about it. Denny’s reputation was already so perverse by then that an alliance with him would have been damaging, even among their equals.
A year later, in 1937, they went to Ceylon and Shanghai. Denny, of course, travelled at Peter’s expense, but this did not stop him from choosing a bar owner as his new lover in Shanghai. Loyalty was not in his mental world, and fortunately it was not in Watson’s vocabulary. Just as he never limited himself, he did not impose conditions on his lovers.
He preferred to go to Hawaii himself and reported from there that they were “well stocked with muscular young men”. He met Denny again when he tired of Chinese boys, and they were back in Paris in 1938.
In a drug haze
Peter, aged 30, enriched the apartment with art, while Denny, now 24, brought in opium, which he had become addicted to in Shanghai, cocaine and heroin. Peter added bathrooms when there were hardly any, and even provided hot water, while Denny had fun in the Alps with the artist Edward Melcarth.
Peter didn’t get upset. During Denny’s absence, his former lover Stephen Spender knocked on his door and made the journey with him. Denny returned to an empty flat and set his eyes on Jean Marais, the lover of the French poet and writer Jean Cocteau. He went to the theatre in his pyjamas, demanded to see Cocteau and, of course, charmed him.
At home, he explained to his two Jewish friends that he was a member of Hitler’s youth. It is quite possible that he sympathised with the Nazis, but it is also quite undeniable that his friends did their best not to conceal the disgust they felt at his words.
A drug-addled Denny hid in his bedroom. Suddenly, a gunshot rang out. The two friends rushed in and found him in tears. They took his gun and spent the night by his side.
By then, Denny was already on his way to the bottom. His body was full of drugs and his sex life so depraved that he often lost control of himself. The only time he could control himself was when Peter Watson was home, but that was not often.
Peter may have been Denny’s main support, his most loyal friend, advisor and completely infatuated lover, but he didn’t last very long with him either. He didn’t complain because Denny was always hitting on him and bringing new boys to their flat every day, but when he had had enough, he simply ran away to America or the French coast. And that was not rare.
It is not clear whether Denny even had sex with the boys who came to him, given that most of the time he was so into it that he was barely conscious, and it is equally unclear what he was doing in Finland in 1939, but it is known that he went from there to London and got back together with Peter.
A year later, he sent him to America to be safe when bombs were dropped on London. To wish him luck on his journey, he pressed a Picasso painting into his hand to sell if he got into financial difficulties. He himself retreated from London to the countryside.
That’s how Denny ended up in Los Angeles in 1940 and met Christopher Isherwood, a famous Hollywood screenwriter and novelist. Isherwood, like Denny, was also a fan of boys aged between 13 and 15, but unlike Denny, he was not opposed to unions. He always had a steady lover and even when he met Denny, he was not alone.
He expected his lover, who lived with him, to look after him and get out of his way so that he could work in peace and join him in bed when he wanted to. Denny was the complete opposite of everything Isherwood wanted, but they soon shared both a home and a spiritual teacher.
To cure himself of promiscuity, alcohol and drugs, Isherwood gave himself completely to spirituality. The idea of reaching nirvana seemed perfect to Denny, but he could not understand what the path to enlightenment had to do with sex and why Isherwood refused to be with him in such an idyllic setting as the temple.
Isherwood remained, at least temporarily, steadfastly celibate, even though he tasted, by his own account, 500 boys’ bodies in his brief Berlin period alone. Denny was not prepared to give up his pleasures. Not that he didn’t try, but his willpower evaporated as soon as a new attractive boy crossed his path, and there were more than enough of them during the war years of the Blackout, when the beaches of California were abuzz with debauchery.
The spiritual master did not complain about his “slip-ups”, and he also looked through Isherwood’s fingers when he too finally fell. He even praised him for being on the right path after all and advised him to be patient with himself.
But patience paid off for the teacher too. Isherwood, who was then earning very well in Hollywood, not only lavished him with money, but also sent him wealthy clients who, like him, were trying to break away from habits that brought them short-term pleasure and long-term ruin.
Again, it’s not clear what kind of relationship Denny and the 10-year-old Isherwood had, but when there wasn’t a young man in Denny’s bed, they probably shared it. It is also very likely that Denny also gave up a young man to his host when he was salivating for bodies that he could never get into bed himself.
But Isherwood also depended on alliances, even if they were completely dysfunctional. When he met Bill Caskey, he moved him into his house. Now the trio lived together, but in anything but style. Caskey was also promiscuous, but this did not affect his outbursts of jealousy, which Denny provoked by his very presence.
Whenever there was enough alcohol in Isherwood’s veins, arguments with Casky ended in bloody noses, but the truth is that it was always the alcohol that made them so much more passionate. Sober, Isherwood was careful of his dominant partner’s image; drunk, he relaxed. Not only in bed. He was a big fan of exhibitionism. For him, sex on the sofa in the living room in front of everyone who came to the party was an indescribable pleasure. He didn’t care who was underneath him, as long as he was male.
Orgies with teenagers
Denny, who liked to tell his circles what a spectacularly successful harlot he was, enjoyed his time in America. He was in no hurry to go to Europe, even though Peter Watson had returned to their Paris apartment in 1942. He was not ready to give up the beaches of California until 1946, after he had sold a Picasso painting and used the money to pay off his debts, which were not few.
He was now 32 years old. By anyone’s standards, he should have retired as a harlot long ago, but despite all the drugs he had taken and all the debauchery, he still retained the appearance of the young man everyone wanted him to be.
On his return, Watson gave him a welcome party. Denny did not leave the bedroom. By then, he was completely addicted to cocaine and opium. He only appeared in the living room after everyone had left.
In front of him he saw 17-year-old painter Michael Wishart, who had held his first solo exhibition the previous year. The teenager stared in silence at Denny, about whom he had heard so much, until Denny ordered him to go to his bedroom and undress. For Wishart, this was nothing traumatic.
He was introduced to sex at a very early age on his wealthy parents’ farm, when, as was the custom at the time, a German prisoner of war was sent to live with them. Wishart later recalled that he never again in his life felt the same desire as he did for that prisoner, even though he was in love three times.
His deepest feelings were supposedly for Denny, but they were not classical. When Denny ordered him to undress at a party, he first realised that Denny thought of himself as a blue-blood and was gentlemanly accordingly. He ordered everyone around, including Wishart, who, at 17, was a little too old for his liking, even though he was 32.
Then he had to befriend the fisherman’s 16-year-old son, whom Denny dressed in his own clothes and who regularly visited Denny every weekend. That wasn’t a problem for him either, at least he got something out of the sex. Although they had a threesome, it is not clear how much Denny, constantly floating on a cloud of drugs, was able to participate at all.
Now he was so addicted to drugs that he was once found unconscious with a needle still in his arm, still containing heroin. His addiction was, of course, financially sustained by Peter Watson, even though he resisted it to the core.
But even two teenagers weren’t enough for Denny, and they were regularly joined by random boys. Peter Watson’s flat became a place for orgies, with a dash of spice in the form of women added by Watson himself. A bisexual didn’t care who he had sex with, just that he had sex.
But he never lasted long in such orgies. Not even now. He fled to New York and fell in love with a 23-year-old writer, Waldemar Hansen. He finally decided to expose himself to Denny, but that was easier said than done. He couldn’t throw him out of the apartment.
“He is stuck at 16 and resists any attempt to grow up. Yet I feel it is somehow my fault,” he later wrote about why he had failed again. Mentally, Denny was really an eternal teenager and as such he always knew how to play his cards right.
Not even Waldemar Hansen could counteract his influence on Peter. He came to Paris and Peter took them both to lunch. “Denham has a southern accent, he’s insanely neurotic and stupid. He was extremely anti-Semitic at lunch and I left them. I’m absolutely sure Peter doesn’t feel a shred of love for him, but Peter’s soft heart will keep giving him money for years to come. D. feels absolutely no gratitude,” Hansen wrote later.
Watson was prepared to leave Paris with Hansen, but not to stop supporting Denny. He returned home in 1947 determined to put an end to the matter. This time, Denny learned the hard way. Just before Peter’s arrival, he overdosed, so that Peter had to visit him in hospital instead of at home. He dared not say anything to him.
Denny was thus able to continue living in his flat, even though Peter had now taken everything of value out of it. He left Denny with just a bed and a few chairs, and the chaos of Paris was slowly coming to an end.
Writers’ lovers
But to make the drama worthy of the name, Peter started pushing Hansen away because he wanted more time for other boys, who in turn became convinced that Peter was incapable of breaking up with Denny. Christhopher Isherwood also came to Paris and renewed his relationship with Denny.
In 1947, he introduced him to another writer, Gore Vidal. He had a reputation for paying for every fuck and owing no one anything. In fact, he did not develop a relationship with anyone in adulthood and, even when he met Denny, was one of the few who did not immediately succumb to his charm.
Some believe that he was saved from it by the memory of his youthful love, Jimmie Trimbleon, to whom he is said to have subconsciously compared all his later lovers. He and Jimmie, who was an excellent sportsman, met as schoolboys at the age of 12. Vidal had his first taste of happiness with him, as he later reported, and that feeling never left him, even though their paths diverged at the age of 14.
They met again at the dance three years later. They spent two wonderful years together until Jimmie volunteered for the war in 1944 and died at the age of 19. Jimmie is said to have remained Vidal’s invisible life companion until his death at the age of 86, and they lie grave to grave in death.
Four years after Jimmie’s death, Vidal reflected on Denny and wrote that his asymmetrical face resembled that of an American Indian and that he was attractive in a deadpan way. “Like many drug addicts, he had a medicinal, caustic smell.”
At the time, Denny was already impotent because of the drugs, but that didn’t stop Vidal from sneaking into his apartment and raping him a few times. The rape of the “most beautiful boy in the world”, which Denny still was in spite of everything, turned him on to no end, and Denny, because of the drugs, no longer knew very well what was happening to him.
Another writer, Truman Capote, appeared in Paris. Denny reportedly sent him a cheque with an unwritten sum as an invitation. Unlike Vidal, Capote was not aroused by the rape, but he was interested to know why Peter Watson tolerated Denny’s cruelty. According to him, he was in love with her. “He was convinced that only his love could save his Beloved from a heroin grave,” he concluded.
But in 1948, Watson had had enough. He had left Paris, others had left, and Denny wanted a change. He went to Rome with another of his admirers, Tony Watson-Gandy, an officer in the British Royal Air Force. From there, of course, he wrote to Peter to send him money, as he always did when he was short of it, but then, after the war, Peter was not blooming either. He saw only darkness before him.
“If there was any hope in the world. If only I could take things for granted, as any fool can. I am only interested in a life that reaches a certain standard. How dreadful it is to grow old. Wisdom settles nothing,” he wrote back. Denny, too, had had enough of everything.
He was completely on the ground. He decided to return home. He sent his mother a big envelope full of papers. Inside was apparently his diary. Mum read it and burned every last page.
Shortly afterwards, Peter Watson received a telegram. It was from Rome, telling him that Denny was dead. He was going to the opera one evening. His eyes were so sensitive to light that he could only go out at night. He collapsed in the bathroom. He was dead on the spot. The autopsy showed that death was only a matter of time. He had had a poorly developed aorta and left heart valve since birth.
Peter Watson died in his home bathtub in 1956, aged 48. Police suspected he was drowned by his lover Norman Fowler, who inherited all his assets. Denny ended his life at the age of 34, but he had achieved his goal: to be the best-kept harlot in the world. He lived off rich lovers, including Prince Peter of Yugoslavia, and had sex with boys of his own choosing. He dined with the blue bloods and talked to the greatest artists and intellectuals of the day.
Truman Capote knew him for only a few weeks, but he wrote about him: “Bitter, bitter, bitter, corrupt to the core.” The sight of what drugs had made of him scared him to death, but still not enough to stop him from taking them himself.
Denny Fouts is now famous in particular as the lover of writers Gore Vidal, who claimed to have had 1,000 men by the age of 25, Christopher Isherwood, who reported having had 500 in Berlin alone, and Tenneessee Williams, who was so sexually obsessed that his lovers had to flee his apartment if they wanted to get some rest. Vidal, Isherwood and Capote also made him immortal in their works, although none of them found in him what he was looking for.
In his old age, Tennessee Williams compared himself to the Queen in Andersen’s fairy tale Snow White. She has a chunk of ice in her chest, he said, and she can’t feel a thing. All his life he had wanted a relationship in which someone loved him for himself and not for what he was, but he had not found it. In one way or another, he had always paid for sex, either directly or by giving his lovers a lifestyle they could not afford.
He had three long-term relationships, but only because he couldn’t live on his own. He drank heavily, took more barbiturates or tranquillisers, amphetamines or stimulants, and human placenta, but he worked all the time. At the age of 71, he took his own life.
Truman Capote was also looking for love, but couldn’t find it, even though he had a companion ten years his senior, Jack Dunphy. They were alike and different, breaking up and returning to each other, until Capote’s death. His body was cremated and his ashes were split in half.
Jack died eight years after him. Half of Capote’s ashes were mixed with his, but their remains disappeared to an unknown destination. The urn with the “clean” half of Capote’s ashes has also disappeared several times, and to this day it is unclear where it is.
Gore Vidal claimed for himself that there was no warmth in him. That when you penetrate the icy exterior, you realise that the interior is even icier. He explained that even the countless young men do not necessarily soften your nature, but that if you pay for sex, at least you have the freedom to write and do whatever you want. If you stay with one man for years, all you have are daily horrible problems, like Tennessee Williams, for example.
Both were obsessed with quantity. Vidal needed at least one guy a day and Tennessee was not far behind, but Vidal was not alone. He lived with his friend Howard Austen until the day he died, and also claimed to the day he died that they were never lovers, although their mutual friends say that at least in the beginning, when they met, they were.
William Isherwood was the only one who found something remotely like love. When he met Don Bachardy, he was 48 and Don was 18. It was then that he was deciding whether to go to a monastery, travel the world like his colleagues, or settle down with one man and have sex with him.
He chose the latter, settling down with a teenager 30 years his junior, who, at 49, he wrote was “the ideal companion, to whom you can reveal yourself completely and he still loves you for who you are”. He also educated Don, sent him to an art academy in London, bought him expensive gifts and introduced him to his circle of acquaintances.
Although the young man was intelligent, sensitive and gentle, he was treated like rubbish, as he said later, but he was independent and rebellious enough not to be broken by it. He grew up with Isherwood and became completely independent, but he remained with him until his death. He painted his portraits all the time, even when he was suffering from hallucinations before the end, and was still tormented by life. He painted his last portrait immediately after his last breath.
Denham Denny Fouts was not able to relate to anyone. He must have had feelings for Peter Watson that were more akin to those between father and son than between lovers. The closest he came were the teenage Michael Wishart and the fisherman’s son. Visitors to his Paris apartment often caught the trio playing cards or other teenage games in the nude.
Too young for sex?
Teenagers in the beds of older lovers was common then, and it has been common throughout history. In medieval Europe, for example, couples were allowed to marry at the age of 12 or 14, and even in the 16th and 17th centuries, sex between 12-year-olds was perfectly legal. In France, after the Revolution of 1791, the age limit was lowered to 11, and in Spain, Portugal and Denmark it was between 10 and 12.
The age was raised to 13 in the 19th century and to 16 in the 20th, when awareness of the sexual abuse of girls finally began to spread, and only Spain officially allowed sex with 12-year-olds until 1999. Then it was raised to 13, and it was only two years ago that the age of 16 was raised.
This is also the age at which sex is legal in Canada, although the law allows for exceptions: if one sexual partner is no more than 5 years older than the other, 14- and 15-year-olds can have sex, and if there is no more than a 2-year age difference between the couple, 12- and 13-year-olds can have sex. In Finland, the official age limit is 16, but teenagers can have sex before that if they are the same age.
Same-sex sex is no longer criminalised – it used to be. When the Medici ruled Florence, it was punishable by death, but in practice it was not. Since most men had also experienced homosexual sex before marriage, they were tolerant of it, and at most fined anyone caught having it. Only the rape of a child raised the pressure, and that was when heads could really roll.
At that time, it was believed that men were attracted to men because there were no women around, because they were “under lock and key” until marriage, or because they were bored of them. According to another interpretation, a man attracted to another man was a woman trapped in a man’s body and therefore looking for other men.
At the beginning of the 19th century, the view of homosexuality changed. While the death penalty was abolished, laws were tightened and more strictly enforced. In France, the law criminalising homosexuality was abolished after the French Revolution in 1791, followed by Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands and Italy, and parts of Germany, today considered the cradle of homosexuality.
In 1813, same-sex unions were allowed in Bavaria, with harsh penalties for rapists and men who had sex with boys under the age of 12. Homosexuality was also allowed in Baden-Württemberg, but criminalised in Prussia, Austria, Saxony, Hamburg and Bremen.
The liberal 1813 law was repealed after some minors were horrifically raped, and laws against homosexuality were reintroduced in 1871. In legal terms, Berlin was the most unusual. It was a homosexual paradise to which Italians, French and English pilgrimaged, because in Britain the death penalty for homosexuality was not imposed until 1835, when the last man was beheaded for it. But in liberal Berlin, it was abolished only 33 years later, in 1868, even though there were so many homosexuals there that a homosexuality department was set up in 1885.
Eleven years later, it was renamed the Homosexuality and Extortion Department, because extortion had become a real problem. Pimps realised that they could make much better money by sending boys out on the street or to clubs and then blackmailing those who had sex with them.
Despite all public efforts, homosexuality was still stigmatised, and therefore highly profitable. In 1902, for example, Friedrich Alfred Krupp, 48, from a wealthy steel family, committed suicide after first being blackmailed and then published in newspapers that he liked Italian boys. In the same year, a 28-year-old opthamologist ended his life after his business card was found in a boy’s jacket.
Business tycoon Hermann Israel took his own life on his yacht at the age of 40. He was raped by his lover. Before his death, he handed over his threatening letters to the police. The boyfriend was given two months in prison. A prominent lawyer shot his blackmailer dead after he did not have a penny more to give him.
There have been hundreds of victims of extortion. It is estimated that as many as a third of Berlin’s gay population was blackmailed at the time, yet gay men from all over Europe continued to flock to Berlin, at least until the Nazis made their paradise a living hell. Hundreds of thousands of men were found guilty, between 5 000 and 15 000 died in concentration camps. Denham Denny Fouts was having fun in America at the time.
