#Elegy Jones

[devilmaydaycare]

Elegy Jones & Avandra ||

We all must find our own way forward

[humble-wayside-flower]

Come Back at Any Time

Surya and Elegy

[manwalksintobar]

Portrait of My Father and His Grandson // Richard Jones

Because I love my father, I can see him turning away from the river and the divers and the policemen and the red lights; I can see him walking back to the house, follow him down the long hallway to the child's room; I can see him bending over the empty bed and lifting the heavy white spread and carrying it back to the river's edge to wrap around his grandson. But even though I love them both, I cannot see why this should happen, or tell you what the boy saw under the water, or how my father felt standing by the river when the divers came up, or where he found the strength to survive that night, hugging the wet body, wrapping it up against the cold, carrying it though the darkness, home.

[quirkycatsfatstacks]

Review: Batwoman: Elegy

Series: Detective Comics #854-860Writer: Greg RuckaArtists: J.H. Williams III, J.G. JonesPublisher: DC ComicsReleased: July 6, 2010Received: Library Find it on Goodreads Summary: Kate Kane is Batwoman. Her path to get to this point was less direct than some, but this is the persona that fits her best. More importantly, this mantle enables her to help others and take a stand for what matters…

[april-is]

April 27, 2024: Witness, Crystal Wilkinson

Witness Crystal Wilkinson

I’m convinced that if you could have seen my grandmother standing in the doorway waiting for him to come home from the fields, if you’d smelled that spectacular evening thick with sweat & felt the pulsing of the stars, if you’d borne witness to the animals’ moans echoing in the holler that night, if you just could have seen the hair rise up on granddaddy’s arm like that, like offerings to god, when his elbow touched hers, if you could have seen her longing dissipate just a little as he came through the door smelling like a day’s work, you should have seen them close enough to breathe the same air while not even touching. (He smiled at her without smiling.) If you could have seen them watching me watch them, then you’d know how much i love you. If you could have heard her say, You want some supper? We got pie.

--

Also: + After Work, Richard Jones + I Come Home Wanting To Touch Everyone, Stephen Dunn

Here's a quick survey on the future of these posts, if you have a moment. (Mega thanks to those who've replied!)

Today in:

2023: from Burial, Ross Gay 2022: Ode to Tortillas, José Olivarez 2021: Say Thank You Say I’m Sorry, Jericho Brown 2020: The Restoration, Gary Jackson 2019: The Termite, Ogden Nash 2018: Elegy, W.S. Merwin 2017: Young Wife’s Lament, Brigit Pegeen Kelly 2016: For the Confederate Dead, Kevin Young 2015: Awaking in New York, Maya Angelou 2014: when you have forgotten Sunday: the love story, Gwendolyn Brooks 2013: Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey, Hayden Carruth 2012: My Place, Franz Wright 2011: from The Wild Geese, Wendell Berry 2010: Love After Love, Derek Walcott 2009: To This May, W.S. Merwin 2008: Father, Ted Kooser 2007: from Little Sleep’s-Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight, Galway Kinnell 2006: Crusoe in England, Elizabeth Bishop 2005: Dream Song 1, John Berryman

[kwebtv]

Mark Goddard (born Charles Harvey Goddard; July 24, 1936 – October 10, 2023) Film and television actor who starred in a number of television programs. He is probably best known for portraying Major Don West in the CBS series Lost in Space (1965–1968). He also played Detective Sgt. Chris Ballard, in The Detectives, starring Robert Taylor.

In 1959, after just three weeks in Hollywood, he landed a role in the CBS Four Star Television series Johnny Ringo, having played the character of Cully, the deputy to Don Durant's character of Ringo. At this time, he changed his name to Mark Goddard at the suggestion of his friend and mentor Chuck Connors of The Rifleman. Goddard appeared as Norman Tabor in the 1960 episode "Surprise Party" of the CBS anthology series The DuPont Show with June Allyson. He was cast as Sheldon Hollingsworth in the 1960 episode "To See the Elephant" of the ABC Western series The Rebel, starring Nick Adams. He played Tod Rowland in the 1960 episode "The Mormons" on Dick Powell's Zane Grey Theatre. Goddard also appeared in The Rifleman as Marty Blair in 1962 in the episode “Mark’s Rifle.”

The Detectives, another production of Four Star Television, was a hit series which ran on ABC and NBC from 1958 to 1961; Goddard was signed for a role lasting three years (64 episodes). In 1963, Goddard appeared as Roy Mooney on the Perry Mason episode "The Case of the Potted Planter". In 1964 Goddard appeared as Richard on The Virginian in the episode titled "The Secret of Brynmar Hall." That same year he guest starred as a wild killer named “Boyd” in the episode “Journey For Three” on the TV Western series Gunsmoke (S9E36).

Goddard's next role was Major Don West on Lost in Space (1965–1968). A blossoming romance initially existed between West and Judy, the elder daughter of the Robinson family, but by the middle of the second season, West maintained an adversarial relationship with the hapless, sociopathic Dr. Zachary Smith

Goddard guest-starred on three ABC series, The Fugitive, The Mod Squad, and The Fall Guy and for a while, moonlighted as a Hollywood agent. In 1970, Goddard co-starred with Kent McCord and Martin Milner in an episode of Adam-12, in which he plays a friend of Pete Malloy (Milner), who is killed in the line of duty. The episode was titled "Elegy for a Pig" (so titled and announced by Jack Webb himself). Mark Goddard also played Ellie May's beau on the Beverly Hillbillies. Goddard played a supporting role in a 1974 episode ("Dark Legacy") of CBS's Barnaby Jones.

In 1979, Goddard starred as Ted Clayton on One Life to Live and as Lt. Paul Reed on The Doctors. Later, he starred as Derek Barrington on General Hospital. (Wikipedia)

IMDb Listing

[rollingthundereview]

Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep — / He hath awakened from the dream of life — / ‘Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep / With phantoms an unprofitable strife, / And in mad trance, strike with our spirit’s knife / Invulnerable nothings. — We decay / Like corpses in a charnel; fear and grief / Convulse us and consume us day by day, / And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay. / The One remains, the many change and pass; / Heaven’s light forever shines, Earth’s shadows fly; / Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, / Stains the white radiance of Eternity, / Until Death tramples it to fragments. — Die, / If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek! / Follow where all is fled!

july 5, 1969, hyde park. mick jagger reads adonais, percy bysshe shelley's elegy for john keats, in memory of brian jones.

[thelonelybrilliance]

2023 Reads: thelonelybrilliance

Final count 72! I set a goal of 52 originally but raised the bar when I realized that would only bring me into early November.

Decided it would be fun to share some stats and recommendations along with the full list.

First, ten recommendations:

The Queen's Thief series by Megan Whalen Turner (best completed series)

Gregory Orr, The Last Love Poem I Will Ever Write (best new poetry read)

Minka Kelly, Tell Me Everything (best memoir)

E.B. White, Here Is New York (best short read)

Carrie Fisher, The Princess Diarist (best journals)

Sydney Taylor, All-of-a-Kind Family (best children's lit)

Laurie Halse Anderson, Shout (best poetry memoir)

George Eliot, Middlemarch (best classic)

Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart (best food writing)

Red Rising series by Pierce Brown (best sci-fi/ongoing series + best audio drama (Red Rising (Book 1))

Of my 72 reads, 31 were rereads, 41 new . Four were audiobooks, the rest print (primarily e-books). My longest read was David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. My shortest read (I think? A lot of poetry collections are short) was the longform essay, Here Is New York by E.B. White. I read the most books in December (15) and the least in June (2). 50 authors were women, 21 were men, and one poetry collection was multi-author. My most-read authors were as follows:

Megan Whalen Turner (7 books)

Lucy Maud Montgomery (6 books)

Louise Glück (5 books)

Elizabeth Wein (5 books)

Jane Austen (3 books)

Pierce Brown (3 books)

Full list organized by month under the cut!

Favorites: Bold | Rereads: Underline

Fiction: Blue | Non-Fiction: Red | Poetry: Purple | Audiobook: *

JANUARY

Megan Whalen Turner, The Thief

2. Annie Chagnot & Emi Ikkanda (eds.), How Lovely the Ruins

3. Banana Yoshimoto, Kitchen

FEBRUARY

4. Jane Austen, Pride & Prejudice

5. Richard Siken, War of the Foxes

6. Jane Austen, Sense & Sensibility

MARCH

7. Rita Dove, Playlist for the Apocalypse

8. Louise Glück, The Seven Ages

9. Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

APRIL

10. Megan Whalen Turner, Moira's Pen

11. Megan Whalen Turner, The Queen of Attolia

12. Megan Whalen Turner, The King of Attolia

13. Megan Whalen Turner, A Conspiracy of Kings

MAY

14. Megan Whalen Turner, Thick as Thieves

15. Megan Whalen Turner, Return of the Thief

16. Elizabeth Wein, The Winter Prince

17. Elizabeth Wein, A Coalition of Lions

18. Elizabeth Wein, Sunbird

19. Elizabeth Wein, The Lion Hunter

JUNE

20. Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

21. bell hooks, Applachian Elegy

JULY

22. Michael Gibney, Sous Chef: 24 Hours on the Line*

23. C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

24. Elizabeth Wein, The Empty Kingdom

25. Dorothy Dunnett, Spring of the Ram

26. Michael Bazzett, You Must Remember This

27. Lisa Ampelman, Romances

28. Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential

29. Natalie Diaz, Post-Colonial Love Poem

AUGUST

30. Jenny Han, The Summer I Turned Pretty

31. Jenny Han, It's Not Summer Without You

32. Natalie Diaz, When My Brother Was an Aztec

33. Ocean Vuong, Time Is a Mother

34. L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Windy Poplars

35. Ocean Vuong, Night Sky with Exit Wounds

SEPTEMBER

36. Gregory Orr, The Last Love Poem I Will Ever Write

37. E.B. White, Here Is New York

38. Minka Kelly, Tell Me Everything

39. P.G. Wodehouse, My Man Jeeves

40. Carrie Fisher, The Princess Diarist

41. Jonathan Stroud, The Screaming Staircase*

42. Tobias Wolff, Old School

OCTOBER

43. Emi Nietfeld, Acceptance*

44. Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

45. R.F. Kuang, Yellowface

46. Louise Glück, Vita Nova

47. L.M. Montgomery, Emily of New Moon

48. L.M. Montgomery, Emily Climbs

49. L.M. Montgomery, Emily's Quest

50. Ada Limón, The Hurting Kind

NOVEMBER

51. Ron Rash, Poems

52. Louise Glück, Meadowlands

53. Tom Perrotta, Election

54. L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Avonlea

55. Louise Glück, Averno

56. L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

57. Curtis Sittenfeld, Prep

DECEMBER

58. Tom Perrotta, Tracy Flick Can't Win

59. Pierce Brown, Red Rising*

60. Diana Wynne Jones, Howl's Moving Castle

61. Frances Hodgson Burnett, A Little Princess

62. Pierce Brown, Iron Gold

63. Sydney Taylor, All-of-a-Kind Family

64. William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

65. George Eliot, Middlemarch

66. Louise Glück, Ararat

67. Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart

68. Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

69. Kate Baer, And Yet

70. Marguerite de Angeli, The Lion in the Box

71. Pierce Brown, Golden Son

72. Laurie Halse Anderson, Shout

[itsvalpenguin1]

Abril o'neil nunca ha sido un personaje que llame particularmente la atencion,yo soy mas de contraer salmonela

Peeeeero hay algo que encuentro genuinamente entretenido en dibujar a todas sus versiones juntas como si fueran amiguitas jajs,elegi a estas versiones porque son las que mas he visto y ademas todas visten amarillo y a mi me gusta el amarillo

En fin QUE SE JODA ABRIL CASEY JONES SUPREMACY

[devilmaydaycare]

Elegy Jones & Antheia Dúlinnel || So Far Away From The Place Where We Were 7 Hours Ago

[humble-wayside-flower]

Wrong by Nancy Friedland // Players Handbook by WotC // Euripedes translated by Anne Carson // A New York City Subway Station // OK Overture by AJR // Home is Not a Country by Safia Elhillo // My Bathroom at 11pm // Brennan Lee Mulligan "The Unsleeping City // Clackamas Transit Map // Sue Zhao // Rainer Marie Wilker // Zombie by Orla Gartland // Amy and Roger's Epic Detour by Morgan Matson // Familiarity by Punch Brothers // Holly Warbs // could you love me while i hate myself by Zeph // Trying by Cavetown // @hobikissesboys // Matter of Time (Interlude) by Asthon Irwin // Skinny Dipping by Ocean Vuong

[theatrepup]

The Rolling Stones Song About the Death of Brian Jones

“As Jones had fallen so far into his addiction without recognising it, the band felt the only thing they could do was leave him behind. A few months later, he was dead. On the surface, it looked like The Stones responded in a cold and uncaring way. They continued on their road to the top without much acknowledgement of their lost friend or seemingly much upset over the sad passing.

That was until 1972 when one track on Exile On Main St sat as a sad ode to the souring of an old friendship. ‘May the good Lord shine a light on you, make every song your favourite tune,’ Jagger sings on ‘Shine A Light’, a song that was started with Jones but came to be a kind of elegy to the musician.

The earliest version of ‘Shine A Light’ goes back to 1968 when Jones was still in the group. Jagger seemed to begin penning the track right as the guitarist was slipping away from them and becoming estranged from his old friends. As the situation grew uglier, the musician only spiralled deeper into his addiction, and his friends didn’t seem to know what to do about it. That’s where the song begins as Jagger describes a sad scene, singing, “Saw you stretched out in room ten o’nine, with a smile on your face and a tear right in your eye.”

The band didn’t finish the song for years as it seemed to get shelves for a prolonged period. After the death of Jones, however, Jagger returned to the track. As the piece goes on, the verses become more and more heavenly, almost following the timeline from Jones’ final days through to his passing. By the finale, Jagger is singing “come on up now” like a command from God, using the central image of the light as a comment on Jones going to some better place in the afterlife and hopefully finding a healthier and happier version of himself there.

While the Stones’ feelings towards Jones still to this day feel confusing, and the band members never really discussed their friend’s death with much kindness or care beyond cold, business-like statements as it was merely colleagues parting ways, this track feels like an insight into their true emotions. ‘Shine A Light’ stands as their eulogy to a friend and fallen legend who they couldn’t help but hope some power somewhere could after he’d found peace.” 

Shine a Light: https://youtu.be/Vln9V7dDrIY?si=-8XgYJnemgy0ZF9t

[cheapnicotine]

3 pm beer on a tuesday night (or, an elegy on the rolling stones and mortality)

home early. precious seconds of solitude arise and i steal one of my fathers coors lights from the fridge in the basement—its rusty with stickers from his favorite hunting brands peeling across the surface. i pour it into a solo cup and crush the can. up the stairs into the house then up the stairs again into my room. flick the tie-dye curtain shut and light the incense—im no hippie but you could guess otherwise. battered copy of the stones let it bleed on the turntable. its been my weekday drinking record for as long as ive been weekday drinking because i like to think about keith richards while im trying to reach a state of something bordering on contentment. happiness is far too ambitious at this point and maybe it will be forever but i like to think that one day i will have 3 pm beer on a tuesday night and i will be happy. i didnt bring this cup all the way up here for the record to skip during the solo on gimme shelter. gimme gimme shelter…i close my eyes and imagine mick singing it at altamount in the face of that terrible tragedy and i think that my whole life is a tragedy and i need some goddamn shelter right about now. i finish the beer. love in vain fades into country honk. i kick the cup under the bed and lay on the dirty carpet on my back and i pinch the bridge of my nose because ive had a headache for three weeks now and i think i might be dying. country honk fades into live with me and i wish i didnt have to live with myself so often. its times like these i think i can push myself away but it turns out 3 pm beer on a tuesday night and the rolling stones shine a blue light on my soul that throws it into sharper relief than i ever wanted to see it in. i dont like what i see and at the same time i think my soul is a lot like brian jones soul was. most people dont know but brian played on let it bleed even though he isnt listed in the credits and i wish more people remembered brian jones because i dont want to be forgotten and if my soul ends up face down in chlorine then they might forget me like they forgot him. live with me fades into let it bleed and god knows ive let it bleed. im bleeding from everywhere from my fingers and my nose and my eyes and i cough it up and spit to out and it drips down my guitar strings and gets in my hair and stains the carpet. we all need someone to bleed on and if you wanna you can bleed on me but i aint got no one to bleed on. blood pours out in my words and in how i wont meet your eyes and i fish the solo cup out from under the bed and spit into it. red. red on red. its all red and let it bleed ends and i stand up unsteadily because someones gotta flip the record and i guess its gotta be me. the needle drops into midnight rambler and i never liked midnight rambler much but i always listen to it anyways for some reason. i lay on the floor and wonder how i got here like this because i never thought i would make it this far anyways and i sure as hell didnt think i would be listening to the stones and drinking 3 pm beer on a tuesday night. dont you do that. dont you do that. dont you do that. i flip over on my stomach and rub my eyes because midnight rambler fades into you got the silver and that one always makes me cry because of keiths voice. one time a friend told me i was like a cross between johnny thunders and keith richards and i never forgot that because maybe i will die on a motel room floor and maybe ill live to be seventy-eight and counting. who knows. i cough again and whimper because it feels like im not going out with a bang. t.s. eliot wrote about the end of the world and i think i might be dying. i have a little silver and a little gold but it doesnt matter. you got the silver fades into monkey man and i wish i had the energy to get up and skip it even though i like it. man is a monkey anyways. what is man? god only knows. hes probably a monkey too. or keith richards is god which is something ive always thought in my mind but never said out loud because it was like something special to me. i dont know who anyone elses god is but keith richards is one of mine. monkey man fades into you cant always get what you want and i trip out during the opening chorus like i always do. my mother used to play you cant always get what you want every time something went wrong for me as a lesson because she had the hot rocks cd and she thought it was funny. i loathed it for years and then i didnt any more because who the fuck was she to take the final track off let it bleed from me? all seven minutes and twenty-eight seconds of it and then hissing and the record is over and my 3 pm beer on a tuesday night is long gone and i lay on the floor listening to the hiss and wonder if im dying. seventeen going on twenty-seven, brian jones, let it bleed and gimme some fucking shelter.

[demdifferentstories-29]

Masterlist (alphabetical)

General Info

Started: 26/12/22; Updated: 11/6/24

Total works: 77

Fandoms

Broadchurch

The Cabin in the Woods

Doctor Who (2005)

Jessica Jones (TV series)

Scream (film series)

Multiple David Tennant works/projects aside from the aforementioned (see multifandom/crossovers).

List of Works ↳ Broadchurch

One-shots

The Boyfriend (Alec Hardy & Daisy Hardy) ♥ ♦

Series’

The Dimension Cannon and The Fob Watch (collection) (completed; 2/2) ★ ♥ ♦ ✽          ↳ Broken-Hearted (completed; 28/28) ★ ♥ ♦ ✽          ↳ In Another Life (completed; 1/1) ♥ ✽

↳ The Cabin in the Woods

One-shots

Marty x Dana

Contagious Chemistry ★

Jealousy ♦

↳ Doctor Who (2005)

See my list of TenRose works here. See my list of TentooRose works here.

One-shots/short fiction Gen/misc

An Elegy (Tenth Doctor & Martha Jones) ♦

NineRose

Delicate ★

The Doctor’s In ♥ ♦

Love Actually ♥ ♦ ✽

A Lovely Place ♥ ♦

Mistletoe ♥

One Good Scare ♥

Special Treatment ♥ ✽

A State of Vulnerability ♥

Vindication ♥ ♦

Series’

DoctorRose

States (collection) (completed; 2/2) ♥ ♦ ✽

NineRose

Roxanne (ongoing; 1/11) ★ ♥ ♦ ✽

↳ Jessica Jones (TV series)

No Jessica x Kilgrave here, folks. Any of my work that involves them together is a character/relationship study and/or an expansion on what we see in the show.

One-shots

Domestics ✽

Fobwatched, Chapter 8: Kilgrave ♦ ✽

↳ Scream (film series) One-shots Randy x Sidney

Play On ♥ ♦

↳ Crossover/Multifandom

Series’

The Dimension Cannon and the Fob Watch (collection) (completed; 2/2) ★ ♥ ♦ ✽

          ↳ Includes: Broadchurch and Doctor Who (2005)

Fobwatched (ongoing - slow updates; 10/?) ♥ ♦ ✽ !

          ↳ Includes: Around the World in 80 Days (2022), The Catherine Tate Show, Criminal: UK, Doctor Who (2005), DuckTales (2017), The Escape Artist, Gracepoint, Jessica Jones, Secret Smile, Takin’ Over the Asylum, and You, Me and Him. 

Thank you to @izthecannibal​ for this extremely helpful and useful guide to making a Masterlist on Tumblr - I had no idea how I was meant to approach this, but their post made it so easy.

[homomenhommes]

THIS DAY IN GAY HISTORY

based on: The White Crane Institute's 'Gay Wisdom', Gay Birthdays, Gay For Today, Famous GLBT, glbt-Gay Encylopedia, Today in Gay History, Wikipedia, and more …

1888 – Although T.S. Eliot (d.1965) liked to be thought of as the most impersonal of poets, looking at the world with a detached and objective eye, many personal elements in the poems deserve to be read with the poet's life in mind. Indeed, there may have been personal reasons for his "impersonality." Certainly, one of its effects was to give the impression that he had something to hide. A number of younger writers, including Hart Crane and Harold Norse, assumed he was homosexual.

At the emotional core of Eliot's poetry is his friendship with Jean Verdenal (1889-1915), a young Frenchman. All we know for certain is that the relationship took place in Paris in 1910 and 1911 while Eliot was studying at the Sorbonne and that Verdenal died in the Great War in 1915 at the age of 26. A month later, Eliot hurriedly married his first wife, Vivien.

In 1917, he dedicated Prufrock and Other Observations to Verdenal's memory, over an epigraph from Dante's Purgatorio that expresses "the measure of the love which warms me towards you." This quotation comes from one of Eliot's two favorite segments of the Divine Comedy, both of which he kept returning to throughout his career: In Inferno XV, Dante meets Brunetto Latini among the sodomites (the "violent against nature"); and in Purgatorio XXVI, he meets Arnaut Daniel among more sodomites and "hermaphrodites."

Eliot's love for Verdenal is one of the central facts of The Waste Land. In particular, it is possible to identify the so-called Hyacinth girl of the poem's opening section with the poet's sentimental memory of "a friend coming across the Luxembourg Gardens in the late afternoon, waving a branch of lilac." This figure is then subsumed into the theme of death by water, which is in turn mixed with references to the trenches of the Great War. The poem's despair is expressed as both personal and philosophical loss in the crucial line, "He who was living is now dead." The Waste Land is, in short, a funeral elegy.

When John Peter wrote an essay to this effect in 1952, Eliot instructed his solicitors to intervene, and all traceable copies of the relevant issue of Essays in Criticism (II, 242-266) were destroyed. Peter reissued the essay, with additions, after Eliot's death.

One of Ezra Pound's self-appointed tasks as editor of the manuscript of The Waste Land was to tone down the poem's homoeroticism. For instance, he recommended the cutting of the poem "Saint Narcissus," that peculiar fusion of pagan and Christian imagery that now appears at the end of the Complete Poems. A number of familiar lines in the final draft of The Waste Land are toned-down versions of what appeared in the manuscript: "My friend, blood shaking my heart" was originally "My friend, my friend, beating in my heart."

However, he had an abhorrence of sex in general, though as a boy, he masturbated guiltily and wrote a magnificently sensuous poem about it; an excerpt here:Then he knew that he had been a fish With slippery white belly held tight in his own fingers Writhing in his own clutch, his ancient beauty Caught fast in the pink rips of his new beauty.

1967 – Rich Merritt is an author, blogger and attorney. Merritt is a speaker at universities, law schools and other civic organizations about topics ranging from issues on gay and lesbian equality to fundamentalism. He has been a controversial figure since he was featured on the cover of the New York Times Magazine on June 28, 1998, which is Gay pride day in New York City, in an article by Jennifer Egan entitled "Uniforms In The Closet: The Shadow Life Of A Gay Marine", and soon after exposed by The Advocate as a porn star.

Rich Merritt was born in 1967 in Greenville, South Carolina. In 1973, his parents enrolled him at Bob Jones Elementary School, the educational "Fortress of Fundamentalism." Merritt finished Bob Jones Elementary and went on to Bob Jones High School and Bob Jones University but was expelled before he got his university degree.

In his memoirs, Merritt claimed that when he attended Bob Jones Junior High School, Bob Jones III, then-president of BJU, said at a White House anti-gay protest that "homosexuals should be stoned to death as the Bible commanded." The hostile environment forced Merritt to deny to himself that he was gay. Once removed from the fundamentalist world, however, he could no longer deny his same-sex attraction.

After he got a degree from Clemson University, Merritt joined the United States Marine Corps, where he rose to the rank of captain. Unbeknownst to his superiors, Captain Merritt, by this time an active gay man, supplemented his income for a while by appearing in male adult films under the name of "Danny Orlis" (which Merritt stole from the hero of a series of Christian boys' books).

In 1998, Merritt caused a sensation when he came out in a New York Times Magazine cover story about gay Marines. Even worse (for Merritt), The Advocate dug up Merritt's porn past and exposed it. Having left the Marines (with an honorable discharge), Merritt's life took a wrong turn as he descended into a tailspin of circuit parties, drugs and alcohol, only to eventually recover and begin a new career as a lawyer - and as the author of his published memoirs "Secrets of a Gay Marine Porn Star."

2021 – 64% of Swiss Voters pass a referendum which will allow same sex marriage with the same rights as heterosexuals.It is set to be in effect by July 1 2021.

[lesser-known-composers]

Frederick Septimus Kelly - Elegy for Strings 'In Memoriam Rupert Brooke' ·

BBC Symphony Orchestra · · David Lloyd-Jones