‘Gay Lives’ chronicles passion and persecution in the LGBTQ community throughout history

"Gay Lives" by Robert Aldrich; Thames & Hudson (304 pages, $29.95)

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Gay Pride events are always about celebration.

But expect next month’s activities to have a note of brave defiance, too.

That’s because, after years of legal victories, LGBQT+ people face severe challenges and increased attacks. New laws are pushing them, and their stories, out of libraries, out of classrooms, and even out of public performances.

As “Gay Lives” by Robert Aldrich proves, we’ve seen this sort of erasure tried before. It didn’t work.

Aldrich, a veteran historian, profiles more than 80 LGBTQ people from antiquity to the modern age. Their stories feature passion and persecution, triumphs and tragedies.

And their common denominator across time and distance is determination.

“Gay life stories … offer fascinating records of individuals whose lives are fun, moving, inspiring troubling, cautionary and occasionally exasperating or tragic,” he writes. “Their personal experiences, their writings and art, their loves and lusts are antecedents for present-day efforts to find pleasure, love and happiness.”

The stories come from all parts of the globe and every class. Ancient philosophers and poets like Socrates and Sappho are represented, as are Christopher Isherwood, whose autobiographical books were turned into “Cabaret” and Carson McCullers, who wrote “The Member of the Wedding” and shared a Brooklyn brownstone with Gypsy Rose Lee.

There are royal rulers, too, like Frederick the Great, the 18th century king of Prussia. As a teenager, his loving friendships with men enraged his father, who ordered one of his son’s companions beheaded in front of him. Later, he forced Frederick into a loveless and, ultimately, childless marriage.

Yet the father overlooked the son’s strengths. When Frederick was crowned in 1740, he proved himself a confident and capable ruler. Frederick, a brave military leader, fought off Prussia’s enemies and almost doubled the country’s size. He also banned torture, supported the arts, and promoted freedom of speech.

He may have indulged himself freely, too, with attractive soldiers, musicians, and courtiers. After a lengthy visit, the king, Voltaire observed, “liked handsome men.”

A less memorable but more flamboyant ruler was the uninhibited Maharaja of Chhatarpur, who ascended the throne in that Indian state in 1867. With India already under British rule, the Maharaja had no opportunities to lead soldiers into battle or pass essential laws. Instead, he spent his spare time seeking out attractive youths.

“He had a weakness for male beauty,” his private secretary admitted later.

A devotee of ancient Greece, the Maharaja even dreamed of building his own Parthenon and requiring his subjects to wear togas. Eventually, he settled for creating an all-male troupe of performers, “adolescents who danced, played music and put on plays,” Aldrich writes. “They seemed at times to perform other services as well.”

A fondness for teenagers would bring disgrace or prison today. But mores change. And, as Aldrich points out, his book includes spies and gangsters among the poets and princes. Gays, he writes, don’t “always follow the straight and narrow … There are homosexual fraudsters, thieves, brigands, and serial killers.”

Like Ronnie Kray.

Along with his two brothers (including his twin, Reggie), Kray went from a brief career as a boxer to a lifelong one as a thief, arsonist, and extortionist. By the time of London’s Swingin’ ‘60s, he was the head of his own crime family — dubbed “The Firm” — and the owner of a celeb-stuffed nightclub.

He was also busy picking up men. “He liked boys, preferably with long lashes and a certain melting look around the eyes,” a Kray biographer notes.

But Ronnie Kray was also a paranoid schizophrenic with a hair-trigger temper. In a bar in 1966, a rival gangster made the mistake of calling Kray “a fat pouf.” Kray shot him dead on the spot. The Krays and their gang would eventually be convicted of several murders, with Ronnie and Reggie sentenced to life imprisonment. Ronnie served most of his time in a hospital for the criminally insane.

A less dramatic but more fantastic criminal was Shi Pei Pu. An actor, Chinese opera singer, and translator, Shi met French embassy worker Bernard Boursicot at a Beijing party in 1964. Shi told Boursicot that because his parents wanted a boy, they’d raised him as one — even though he was, in fact, a woman. They began meeting in dark rooms for half-dressed sex.

Then, reportedly at Shi’s urging, Boursicot began stealing secret documents.

Both were eventually convicted of espionage and given six years. When French prison authorities revealed that Shi was, in fact, anatomically male, Boursicot tried to commit suicide. After their release, the men went their separate ways — although their bizarre romance later inspired the play, “M. Butterfly,” and demonstrates, Aldrich writes, “the unfathomable depths of human desire.”

But most of the people featured here led far more admirable lives.

Like Harvey Milk, the San Francisco activist and pioneering politician who fought for everything from gay rights to a pooper-scooper ordinance, and was assassinated by a right-wing colleague in 1977. And Del Martin, another San Franciscan, who in 1955 co-founded one of the first lesbian rights groups, the Daughters of Bilitis. More than 50 years later, Martin and her lifelong partner were finally able to marry legally.

Unsurprisingly, Aldrich notes, many LBGQT+ people have found a haven in the arts. Surprisingly, Aldrich doesn’t include any famous actors in his book. But there’s room here for the great dance impresario Sergei Diaghilev. And the French painter Rosa Bonheur — the first female artist to be awarded the Legion of Honor.

Aldrich is also careful to save room for two great gay writers, Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde.

Whitman was undoubtedly the luckier of the two. Although he loved men, he had “such broad resonance throughout American culture that he became a national hero, the nation’s poet,” Aldrich writes. Perhaps that was also because, Aldrich notes, “the more conservative of his admirers carefully bowdlerized sexual passages in his writing, and passed over his homosexuality as they christened streets, schools and other public institutions in his memory.”

Wilde was one of Whitman’s most famous fans; after meeting him in 1882, the Irishman proclaimed the native New Yorker “strong, true, and perfectly sane: the closest approach to the Greek we have yet had in modern times. Probably he is dreadfully misunderstood.”

Unluckily for him, Wilde was perfectly understood. Although he was married with two young sons, the novelist and playwright had an entirely separate semi-public life as a gay man, finding love with rough laborers and posh aristocrats. When, in 1895, the titled father of one of Wilde’s lovers denounced him as a homosexual, Wilde’s response, disastrously, was to sue.

He not only lost but was charged with sodomy, which resulted in two years in prison of hard labor. Wilde died, in poverty and exile, three years after his release.

At his second trial, Wilde defended his affection for young men. “It is beautiful, it is fine,” he insisted. “There is nothing unnatural about it.” But because of society’s ignorance he lamented it had become “the love that dare not speak its name.”

Today, with book bans and “don’t-say-gay” curriculum rules, some people wish the LGBTQ+ community would return to that life of silence.

Next month, Gay Pride marchers are sure to give their response.