Posts made by shirfmohsen

about Christopher Isherwood

Early life and work[edit]
Isherwood was born in 1904 on his family's estate close to the Cheshire-Derbyshire border.[3]

Repton School
At Repton School in Derbyshire, Isherwood met his lifelong friend Edward Upward with whom he wrote the extravagant "Mortmere" stories, of which one was published during his lifetime, a few others appeared after his death, and others he summarised in Lions and Shadows. He deliberately failed his tripos and left Corpus Christi College, Cambridge without a degree in 1925. For the next few years he lived with violinist André Mangeot, worked as secretary to Mangeot's string quartet and studied medicine. During this time he wrote a book of nonsense poems, People One Ought to Know, with illustrations by Mangeot's eleven-year-old son, Sylvain. It was not published until 1982.

In 1925 A.S.T. Fisher reintroduced him to W. H. Auden,[4][5][6] and Isherwood became Auden's literary mentor and partner in an intermittent, casual liaison. Auden sent his poems to Isherwood for comment and approval. Through Auden, Isherwood met Stephen Spender, with whom he later spent much time in Germany. His first novel, All the Conspirators, appeared in 1928. It was an anti-heroic story, written in a pastiche of many modernist novelists, about a young man who is defeated by his mother. In 1928–29 Isherwood studied medicine at King's College London, but gave up his studies after six months to join Auden for a few weeks in Berlin.

Rejecting his upper middle class background and embracing his attraction to men, he remained in Berlin, the capital of the young Weimar Republic, drawn by its reputation for sexual freedom. There, he "fully indulged his taste for pretty youths. He went to Berlin in search of boys and found one called Heinz, who became his first great love."[7] Commenting on John Henry Mackay's Der Puppenjunge (The Pansy), Isherwood wrote: "It gives a picture of the Berlin sexual underworld early in this century which I know, from my own experience, to be authentic."[8]

In 1931 he met Jean Ross, the inspiration for his fictional character, Sally Bowles. He also met Gerald Hamilton, the inspiration for the fictional Mr Norris. In September 1931 the poet William Plomer introduced him to E. M. Forster. They became close and Forster served as his mentor. Isherwood's second novel, The Memorial (1932), was another story of conflict between mother and son, based closely on his own family history. During one of his return trips to London he worked with the director Berthold Viertel on the film Little Friend, an experience that became the basis of his novel Prater Violet (1945). He worked as a private tutor in Berlin and elsewhere while writing the novel Mr Norris Changes Trains (1935) and a short novel called Goodbye to Berlin (1939), often published together in a collection called The Berlin Stories. These works provided the inspiration for the play I Am a Camera (1951), the 1955 film I Am a Camera (both starring Julie Harris), the Broadway musical Cabaret (1966) and the film (1972) of the same name. In 1932 he met and fell in love with a young German man named Heinz Neddermeyer.[9]

After leaving Berlin in 1933, he and Heinz moved around Europe, and lived in Copenhagen, Sintra and elsewhere. Heinz was arrested as a draft-evader in 1937 following his brief return to Germany after he was ejected from Luxembourg as an "undesirable alien." Convicted of "reciprocal onanism,"[10] he was sentenced to six months in prison, a year of state labor and two years of compulsory military service.[11] Isherwood collaborated on three plays with Auden: The Dog Beneath the Skin (1935), The Ascent of F6 (1936), and On the Frontier (1939). Isherwood wrote a lightly fictionalized autobiographical account of his childhood and youth, Lions and Shadows (1938), using the title of an abandoned novel. Auden and Isherwood traveled to China in 1938 to gather material for their book on the Sino-Japanese War called Journey to a War (1939). In 1939, Auden and Isherwood set sail for the United States on temporary visas, a controversial move, later regarded by some as a flight from danger on the eve of war in Europe.[12] Evelyn Waugh, in his novel Put Out More Flags (1942), included a caricature of Auden and Isherwood as "two despicable poets, Parsnip and Pimpernel", who flee to America to avoid World War Two.[13]

Although my hatred for the idea of treason in itself, but that a homosexual act is full of such a world and I am talking specifically about my so should tolerate and forgive so life goes on

Sex with girls very disgusting for me

Fortunately no unprotected sex with girls never,, only practiced with the elderly men ;D

Don Bachardy interview: 'I was just waiting to be told who I was'

The American artist Don Bachardy and the British writer Christopher Isherwood were an item for more than 30 years. Despite the gap in their ages – Bachardy was 18 when they met, Isherwood 48 – and the fact that few gay couples lived openly as couples in America in those times, they became the most solidly enduring arty-literary relationship inSixties and Seventies California, parted only by the death of Isherwood in 1986.
When circumstances made them live apart in the Sixties, they wrote copious letters to each other, full of gossip, name-dropping, sighs of loneliness and fond endearments. Many critics of the collected missives, which have just been published, were intrigued (or amused, or dismayed) to discover the slushily anthropomorphic names they called each other: Don was “Kitty” or “Pussy” or “Angel Kitten”; Christopher was “Dobbin” or “Dub” or “Angelhorse” or “VelvetMuzzle”.
When we met in London’s Holland Park, I asked Bachardy about “the Basket”, a kind of Platonic haven for which the animals, the skittish Kitty and the stolid Dobbin, ache when they’re apart. It’s mentioned several times, but never described. What did it signify?
“The Basket was essentially our house in Santa Monica,” said Bachardy, “and of course the real basket was the bed we always slept in together – not only slept together, but very closely, with arms around each other. I always thought that was very animal-like. We believed we communicated with each other in the night, and the animals carried on their adventures in the night hours.”
Now 79, spry and agile in a simple T-shirt and box-fresh trainers, Bachardy talks a blue streak, with his head bowed in concentration. Then, abruptly, his sentences end and he raises his head to scrutinise you. His piercing gaze has been trained on hundreds of portrait sitters (“Aldous Huxley’s colouring was wonderful – his face all pinks and greys and silver, with the wonderful opaqueness of his eyes, like clouds in different shades of grey”) and made them quake.
As a child he taught himself to draw by copying portraits of movie actors. “I thought I could bring something special to their photographs,” he says. “I don’t think any drawing done from a photograph could ever be of real interest, but I was developing the sharpness of my eye.”
Half a lifetime later, he encountered movie actors again, and drew them again – but by this time, his eye had grown sharp.
“So many people have said, 'Do I look like that to you?’ They’ve never seen what they look like when they’ve been sitting still for three hours. Something deep comes out, something very different and shocking. Fred Astaire sat for me once. He looked startling when his face was un-animated. He looked almost scary, like Boris Karloff. He was very deflated by the result. He offered to sit for a second portrait and of course I said yes – but the result was every bit as grim as the first.”
Isherwood always encouraged his young lover to write, but suggested he should also follow his talent for drawing. “He’d observed couples who lived together and practised the same art, and thought they were inviting rivalry and competition. He said if I did something creatively different from what he did, we’d have a better chance of staying together.”
A remarkable symbiosis grew between them. Isherwood was first to suggest that Bachardy try drawing from life, and became his first sitter – and his most prolific.
In turn, when writing a book, Isherwood would ask Bachardy’s advice about physical descriptions of characters. Both men used each other as sounding-boards of authenticity. “Often,” said Bachardy, “I felt that he was in some way forming me, creating in me his idea of a companion, and I was responding to that. I was just waiting to be told who I was and what about me was of use to another person.”
The end was astonishing. In the last six months of his life, Isherwood was Bachardy’s only sitter. “I cancelled all others, and worked on many drawings a day. It was an amazing experience for me, just working with him day after day, it was the intensest way I could be with him, nothing could be more intense than looking at somebody in the way I look at them while I’m drawing them. After he was dead, I did 11 drawings, and was about to do a 12th, but his doctor arrived. I was so relieved not to have to do the 12th, because by then the corpse hardly looked like him.”
Wasn’t there something a bit … heartless, drawing somebody while they die? Bachardy smiled. “I must be heartless, because I can do it. The focus I use when I’m working is relentless, and when I get into it, I can’t be taken out. Sometimes I see those drawings now and I can hardly bear them. I think, 'How did I manage to do that without breaking up?

since i was young i always love older men،،  I finally discovered that this condition is called Gerontophilia~

Gerontophilia is the sexual preference for the elderly. A person with such a sexual preference is a gerontophile. The word gerontophilia was coined in 1901 by Richard von Krafft-Ebing.[1] It derives from Greek: geron, meaning "old man or woman" and philie, meaning "love".[2] Gerontophilia is classified as a paraphilia, but is not mentioned in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders or International Classification of Diseases.[1]
The prevalence of gerontophilia is unknown.[1] A study of pornographic search terms on a peer-to-peer network reported that 0.15% had gerontophilic themes.[3] Sex offenders with elderly victims do not necessarily have gerontophilia. There are other possible motivations for these offenses, such as rage or sadism, that may not involve a sexual preference for the elderly. There are no studies showing that most such offenders are gerontophiles. In one small study, two of six sex offenders against the elderly evinced gerontophilic tendencies.[4] Gerontophilia can also be expressed with consenting elderly partners in a legal context.[1][5]
Research on gerontophilia is limited to a small number of case studies, beginning with a paper by French physician Charles Féré in 1905. Féré described a 27-year-old man who rejected an arranged marriage with a 20-year-old "beauty" in favor of a 62-year-old man.[1] Such studies commonly report that the subject had an early sexual experience with a much older man.[4