Out Spotlight XCI

Today's Out Spotlight is author Charles Warren Stoddard.


Born August 7, 1843, in Rochester, New York Stoddard third of five children and second son to Sarah Freeman and Samuel Burr Stoddard, a paper merchant, Stoddard moved with his family to New York City, where they lived until 1855, migrating to San Francisco. At age 14, he returned alone to New York, living with his grandparents for two years, before rejoining his family in San Francisco. Shortly there after he began writing verses, and his first poems were published, under the pseudonym "Pip Pepperpod," in the Golden Era. Met with great success and thy were later published with the modest title Poems by Charles Warren Stoddard. Stoddard gave up his dream of college due to poor health and dedicated himself to a literary career. He joined San Francisco's journalistic and Bohemian circles, and he established enduring relationships with Ambrose Bierce, Ina Coolbrith, Bret Harte, and Samuel Clemens.

Beloved for his wit and amiability, Stoddard had a genius for friendship; his large literary acquaintance ultimately included both contemporary and younger writers, such as Robert Louis Stevenson, W. D. Howells, Henry Adams, Joaquin Miller, Jack London, George Sterling, Bliss Carman, Yone Noguchi, and George Cabot Lodge.

He was also connected to the developing gay networks of the nineteenth century through his friendships with Theodore F. Dwight and Dewitt Miller.

In 1864 Stoddard visited the South Sea Islands and from there wrote his Idyls — letters which he sent to a friend who had them published in book form. "They are," as William Dean Howells said, "the lightest, sweetest, wildest, freshest things that were ever written about the life of that summer ocean."

He made four other trips to the South Sea Islands, and gave his impressions in Lazy Letters from Low Latitudes and The Island of Tranquil Delights. Several times he visited Molokai, and became well acquainted with Father Damien, the Apostle to the Lepers, and wrote his interesting little book, The Lepers of Molokai, which, with Stevenson's famous letter, did much to establish Father Damien's true position in public esteem. In 1867, soon after his first visit to the South Sea Islands,he converted from Protestantism to Catholicism. The story of his conversion was told in a spiritual autobiography entitled: A Troubled Heart and How it was Comforted. Of this book he has said: "Here you have my inner life all laid bare."

Inspired to sexual self-awareness by reading Whitman's "Calamus" poems, Stoddard gained his first experience with the natives of Hawaii and Tahiti, about whom he wrote his best stories, those collected in South-Sea Idyls and The Island of Tranquil Delights.

The subtle eroticism of his was evidently lost on his audience--except for "Xavier Mayne" (Edward Prime-Stevenson), who noted their significance in The Intersexes. Readers were also mystified by Stoddard's only novel, For the Pleasure of His Company, an experimental work of gay fiction, which was unsucessful.

In 1873 he started on a long tour as special correspondent of the San Francisco Chronicle. His commission was a roving one, without restrictions of any kind. He was absent for five years, during which he traveled over Europe as well as Palestine and Egypt. He sent considerable matter to his newspaper, much of which was never reprinted, though some of it was among his best work.

During his time abroad Stoddard fell in love with the painter Frank Millet during living together with in Venice. But he usually favored younger men. Of his several "kids," as he called them, the most important was Kenneth O'Connor, aged fifteen in 1895, when Stoddard unofficially adopted him and took him home to his Washington "Bungalow."

In 1885, having decided to settle down, he accepted the chair of English literature in the University of Notre Dame, Indiana; where he clashed with colleagues over his attentions to the students and resigned after three semesters, although it was officially noted as health problems for his resignation The same reason caused him to resign a corresponding position which he held in the Catholic University, Washington, D. C., from 1889 to 1902.

In a short time he moved to Cambridge, Mass., intending to devote himself exclusively to literary work. A serious and almost fatal illness interfered with his plans, yet he was not idle. He put forth his Exits and Entrances, a book of essays and sketches which he called his favorite work, probably because it told of his intimate friend Robert Louis Stevenson and of others among his host of literary acquaintances.

At this time he also wrote his only novel, For the Pleasure of His Company, of which he said, "Here you have my Confessions." So strictly biographical are most of his writings that Stoddard hoped by supplying a few missing links to enable the reader to trace out the whole story of his life. In 1903, his health failing and his relationship with Kenneth deteriorating, Stoddard returned to California. After a triumphal visit to San Francisco, where he was feted as a pioneering California writer, he settled in Monterey, with a hope of recovering his health. Stoddard died of a heart attack on April 23, 1909.

Stoddard was admired in his own time as the author of exotic and humorous travel books, but more of interest today for his unabashed love of men at the historical moment when "homosexuality" was taking a recognizably modern shape. Those who knew him, including many of the major writers of the age, agreed that Stoddard had a genius for geniality, and he spent much of his life circulating among his friends in Europe, the South Seas, California and the East. Yet Stoddard's "double life" also drew him into the company of those who shared his samesexuality. His gay island stories have been published in 1987 as a collection titled Cruising the South Seas.