Performers - Part 34

 Ian McKellen

Most people know English actor Ian McKellen, born in 1939, as Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings movies.  But he has had a long career on stage and screen.  Above, at right, he was King Edward II in a 1970 BBC production of Marlowe's play Edward II.

Ian McKellen is gay, as was King Edward II.  Above, the king kisses his lover, Piers Gaveston, played by James Laurenson.  By the way, it wasn't good to be a gay king of England in the 14th century.  The real King Edward was murdered by his wife's lover by having a red hot poker stuck up his ass.

In 1981, McKellen starred in the movie Priest of Love, a biography of writer D.H. Lawrence.  In 1914, Lawrence married Frieda von Richtofen, a German woman who was a cousin of the World War I German flying ace known as the Red Baron.  They went to live in rural Cornwall during World War I, where English soldiers kept them under surveillance and harassed them because of Frieda's German connections.  Lawrence's book The Rainbow was banned and burned as obscene in 1915, and he went to work on another book, Women in Love.

In the clip above, D.H. Lawrence (played by McKellen with his hair dyed red) frolics naked in the ocean with a local farmer while the soldiers observe.

Above, Lawrence and the farmer are accosted by the soldiers who have been spying on them.  Lawrence apparently was bisexual in real life.  Frieda wrote that Lawrence had an affair with the farmer.  Lawrence was also quoted as saying, "I believe the nearest I've come to perfect love was with a young coal miner when I was about 16."

Speaking of D.H. Lawrence, his books, such as Lady Chatterly's Lover, were filled with sex, which is why they were banned.  The sex is straight sex, but there are also many homoerotic passages, like the wrestling scene above with Oliver Reed and Alan Bates from the 1969 film version of Lawrence's book Women in Love.  One wit wrote that the book should have been called Men in Love.