In May of 1975, then-Los Angeles Police Chief Edward Davis was invited to participate in the LA Pride parade — an annual celebration of the LGBT community which first took place in 1970 — by the event’s organisers, Christopher Street West. Davis responded with the following letter.

LA Pride continues to this day. 2013’s three day event begins on June 7th.

Transcript follows.

(Source: Paul Forte, via Virginia C. McGuire; Image above: LA Pride 2012, via Boston.com)



Transcript

LOS ANGELES POLICE DEPARTMENT

May 23, 1975

Ms. Sharon D. Cornelison, President
Christopher Street West Association
P.O. Box 3949
Hollywood, California 90028

Dear Ms. Cornelison:

As you no doubt expected, I am declining your invitation to participate in the celebration of “GAY PRIDE WEEK.” While I support your organization’s constitutional right to express your feelings on the subject of homosexuality, I am obviously not in sympathy with your views on the subject. I would much rather celebrate “GAY CONVERSION WEEK” which I will gladly sponsor when the medical practitioners in this country find a way to convert gays to heterosexuals.

Very truly yours,

(Signed)

E. M. DAVIS
Chief of Police

The following moving love letter was written by American World War II veteran Brian Keith to Dave, a fellow soldier he met and fell in love with in 1943 while stationed in North Africa, on the occasion of their anniversary. It was reprinted in September of 1961 by ONE Magazine – a groundbreaking pro-gay magazine first published in 1953. The original letter is held, I am told, by the Library of Congress.

(Source: ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives, via Carrie Kendall.)

Dear Dave,

This is in memory of an anniversary — the anniversary of October 27th, 1943, when I first heard you singing in North Africa. That song brings memories of the happiest times I’ve ever known. Memories of a GI show troop — curtains made from barrage balloons — spotlights made from cocoa cans — rehearsals that ran late into the evenings — and a handsome boy with a wonderful tenor voice. Opening night at a theatre in Canastel — perhaps a bit too much muscatel, and someone who understood. Exciting days playing in the beautiful and stately Municipal Opera House in Oran — a misunderstanding — an understanding in the wings just before opening chorus.

Drinks at “Coq d’or” — dinner at the “Auberge” — a ring and promise given. The show 1st Armoured — muscatel, scotch, wine — someone who had to be carried from the truck and put to bed in his tent. A night of pouring rain and two very soaked GIs beneath a solitary tree on an African plain. A borrowed French convertible — a warm sulphur spring, the cool Mediterranean, and a picnic of “rations” and hot cokes. Two lieutenants who were smart enough to know the score, but not smart enough to realize that we wanted to be alone. A screwball piano player — competition — miserable days and lonely nights. The cold, windy night we crawled through the window of a GI theatre and fell asleep on a cot backstage, locked in each other’s arms — the shock when we awoke and realized that miraculously we hadn’t been discovered. A fast drive to a cliff above the sea — pictures taken, and a stop amid the purple grapes and cool leaves of a vineyard.

The happiness when told we were going home — and the misery when we learned that we would not be going together. Fond goodbyes on a secluded beach beneath the star-studded velvet of an African night, and the tears that would not be stopped as I stood atop the sea-wall and watched your convoy disappear over the horizon.

We vowed we’d be together again “back home,” but fate knew better — you never got there. And so, Dave, I hope that where ever you are these memories are as precious to you as they are to me.

Goodnight, sleep well my love.

Brian Keith

In 1932, months after first meeting in Paris and despite both being married, Cuban diarist Anaïs Nin and hugely influential novelist Henry Miller began an incredibly intense love affair that would last for many years and, along the way, generate countless passionate love letters. Below, in my humble opinion, is one of the most powerful examples, written by Miller in August of 1932 shortly after a visit to Nin’s home in Louveciennes.

(Submitted by Laura Dillon — originally from A Literate Passion: Letters of Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller, 1932-1953; Images: Anaïs Nin & Henry Miller via here & here.)

August 14, 1932 

Anais:

Don’t expect me to be sane anymore. Don’t let’s be sensible. It was a marriage at Louveciennes—you can’t dispute it. I came away with pieces of you sticking to me; I am walking about, swimming, in an ocean of blood, your Andalusian blood, distilled and poisonous. Everything I do and say and think relates back to the marriage. I saw you as the mistress of your home, a Moor with a heavy face, a negress with a white body, eyes all over your skin, woman, woman, woman. I can’t see how I can go on living away from you—these intermissions are death. How did it seem to you when Hugo came back? Was I still there? I can’t picture you moving about with him as you did with me. Legs closed. Frailty. Sweet, treacherous acquiescence. Bird docility. You became a woman with me. I was almost terrified by it. You are not just thirty years old—you are a thousand years old.

Here I am back and still smouldering with passion, like wine smoking. Not a passion any longer for flesh, but a complete hunger for you, a devouring hunger. I read the paper about suicides and murders and I understand it all thoroughly. I feel murderous, suicidal. I feel somehow that it is a disgrace to do nothing, to just bide one’s time, to take it philosophically, to be sensible. Where has gone the time when men fought, killed, died for a glove, a glance, etc? (A victrola is playing that terrible aria from Madama Butterfly—”Some day he’ll come!”)

I still hear you singing in the kitchen—a sort of inharmonic, monotonous Cuban wail. I know you’re happy in the kitchen and the meal you’re cooking is the best meal we ever ate together. I know you would scald yourself and not complain. I feel the greatest peace and joy sitting in the dining room listening to you rustling about, your dress like the goddess Indra studded with a thousand eyes.

Anais, I only thought I loved you before; it was nothing like this certainty that’s in me now. Was all this so wonderful only because it was brief and stolen? Were we acting for each other, to each other? Was I less I, or more I, and you less or more you? Is it madness to believe that this could go on? When and where would the drab moments begin? I study you so much to discover the possible flaws, the weak points, the danger zones. I don’t find them—not any. That means I am in love, blind, blind. To be blind forever! (Now they’re singing “Heaven and Ocean” from La Gioconda.)

I picture you playing the records over and over—Hugo’s records. “Parlez moi d amour.” The double life, double taste, double joy and misery. How you must be furrowed and ploughed by it. I know all that, but I can’t do anything to prevent it. I wish indeed it were me who had to endure it. I know now your eyes are wide open. Certain things you will never believe anymore, certain gestures you will never repeat, certain sorrows, misgivings, you will never again experience. A kind of white criminal fervor in your tenderness and cruelty. Neither remorse nor vengeance, neither sorrow nor guilt. A living it out, with nothing to save you from the abysm but a high hope, a faith, a joy that you tasted, that you can repeat when you will.

All morning I was at my notes, ferreting through my life records, wondering where to begin, how to make a start, seeing not just another book before me but a life of books. But I don’t begin. The walls are completely bare—I had taken everything down before going to meet you. It is as though I had made ready to leave for good. The spots on the walls stand out—where our heads rested. While it thunders and lightnings I lie on the bed and go through wild dreams. We’re in Seville and then in Fez and then in Capri and then in Havana. We’re journeying constantly, but there is always a machine and books, and your body is always close to me and the look in your eyes never changes. People are saying we will be miserable, we will regret, but we are happy, we are laughing always, we are singing. We are talking Spanish and French and Arabic and Turkish. We are admitted everywhere and they strew our path with flowers.

I say this is a wild dream—but it is this dream I want to realize. Life and literature combined, love the dynamo, you with your chameleon’s soul giving me a thousand loves, being anchored always in no matter what storm, home wherever we are. In the mornings, continuing where we left off. Resurrection after resurrection. You asserting yourself, getting the rich varied life you desire; and the more you assert yourself the more you want me, need me. Your voice getting hoarser, deeper, your eyes blacker, your blood thicker, your body fuller. A voluptuous servility and tyrannical necessity. More cruel now than before—consciously, wilfully cruel. The insatiable delight of experience.

HVM

In 1968, shortly after finishing 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick began work on what he would later predict to be “the best movie ever made” — a meticulously researched, large-scale biopic of Napoleon Bonaparte. A 1969 draft of his screenplay, which he later discarded, can be read here. A few years later, after adapting Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange for the big screen, Kubrick brought Burgess on-board to write a Beethoven-inspired Napoleon novel on which his epic could be based.

In June of 1972, Burgess supplied the filmmaker with the first half of his manuscript; Kubrick rejected it by way of the following letter, thus ending the collaboration. Burgess was undeterred, and Napoleon Symphony was published as a novel in 1974. Kubrick’s movie, however, failed to materialise.

(Source: Jim Allen; Image: Anthony Burgess & Stanley Kubrick, via here & here.)

STANLEY KUBRICK

15 June, 1972

Dear Anthony,

I shall start off by saying I don’t really know how to write this letter, and that it is a task which is as awful for me to perform for me as it may be for you to read.

You are far too brilliant and successful a writer, and I am far too much of an admirer of yours to patronize you with a listing of what is so obviously excellent about ‘Napoleon Symphony’. At the same time, I earnestly hope that our all too brief friendship will survive me telling you that the MS is not a work that can help me make a film about the life of Napoleon. Despite its considerable accomplishments, it does not, in my view, help solve either of the two major problems: that of considerably editing the events (and possibly restructuring the time sequence) so as to make a good story, without trivializing history or character, nor does it provide much realistic dialogue, unburdened with easily noticeable exposition or historical fact.

I’m very sorry that the subject of the letter could not be of more pleasure and benefit to both of us, and after saying all this, I can only thank you for trying this and hope that you will continue to accept my admiration and respect for you as an artist, and my great feeling of warmth and friendship for you personally.

Sincerely,

Stanley

Early-1999, shortly after the release of Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line, in which he starred, Sean Penn approached 20th Century Fox and asked for a private jet to take him to a screening of the movie in Houston. Much to his dismay, the studio refused on grounds of cost and company policy.

Infuriated by the rejection, Penn wrote the following letter to the studio in response. It was very quickly leaked to the press.

Note: “Red Carpet Room” refers to the VIP lounge at LAX.

(Source: Greg Sullivan; Image: Sean Penn, via.)

January 6, 1999

To whom it may or may not concern at 20th Century Fox, et al. (in hope that those copied will spread the word to those deserving):

The purpose of this scratchpad communique may well be as much to amuse you or inform you. Clearly, its less than humble writer has found grounds for amusement in its content.

In my continuing effort to support our shared entity, “The Thin Red Line,” I have yet again run into another of the endless bureaucratic hurdles that your company relentlessly plants in my path. As a result of Terry Malick’s invitation, I made plans to join Terry in supporting the film’s screening, and ultimately its profile in Houston. As I have two movies, two children and (as each woman is at least two people) two wives presently in distribution, my schedule is rather hectic. I therefore requested that Mr. Murdoch’s gigantic corporation might be so generous (with the money they’ve earned exploiting the pain and suffering of myself and my peers in their tabloids) as to supply me with a private jet to travel to Houston.

The response was a clear NO.

Two things were cited: 1) The $40,000 cost. 2) Policy. As to number 1, we at my tiny little San Francisco office went ahead and priced the cost of such a jet ourselves. In fact, it came to $16,000, which we had offered would be divided by two, as Fine Line Pictures had already committed to pay half (I would do an interview on behalf of “Hurlyburly” while I was there). Next we priced the commercial fare somewhere in the area of $2,000. The final cost differential to Mr. Murdoch’s pool-heating expenses: A WHOPPING $6,000, which, against the price cut I offered in my deal to act in this movie, seemed equivalent to the fair market price of one hair on Mr. Rupert Murdoch’s formidable ass. Next comes policy, the number 2 reason cited us in denial of our request. Evidently this is a word prized by Mr. Murdoch’s company as I ran into it before when Mr. Malick requested that I be given an opportunity to view a videotape of the movie prior to his locking the print. I think we all know what a shameful little dance went on there, with wasted time, wasted money in the name of a policy. Has anyone at 20th Century Fox considered that it might not be my policy to do 7-figure favors for multi-national corporate interests as I did when I took the salary you paid me on “The Thin Red Line”?

Bottom line is…our policies collide. Good luck with the picture.

P.S. I know you guys don’t remember what the inside of a commercial airline terminal looks like, but if you send me a picture of your jets, I’ll send you a picture of the door at the Red Carpet Room. Wish I could’ve been in Houston. It’s a beautiful movie and I’d like to have helped spread the word.

P.P.S. If my name is unfamiliar to you, you can check your computers under Movie Buff. I believe they consider me to be someone with a career.

Best,

Sean Penn

cc: Rupert Murdoch, Peter Chernin, Bill Mechanic, Laura Ziskin, Tom Sherak, Mike Medavoy, Terry Malick, Brian Gersh, God Almighty, Kit Caruthers