Queer Ancestor Spotlight: Christopher Isherwood

Queer Ancestor Spotlight
Written By White Rose Witching

Christopher Isherwood was an author, diarist, playwright, screenwriter, and autobiographer. He is best known for A Single Man, his semi-autobiographical novel Goodbye to Berlin which inspired the musical Cabaret, and his memoir Christopher and His Kind which connected him with the ongoing gay liberation movement.

Christopher Isherwood, 1938

Christopher Isherwood was born in 1904 on his family’s estate in the northwest of England. Through his time at boarding and preparatory schools, Christopher met a number of fellow literary personalities including Edward Upward, W.H. Auden, and Stephen Spender. Collectively known as the Auden Group, they were identified as the most exciting new literary group in England in the 1930s.

In March 1929, Christopher traveled with Auden on a short trip to Berlin that changed his life. He began an affair with a German boy he met at a club called The Cosy Corner and was exposed to the broader homosexual community through Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science. He referred to his encounter with the German queer community as being “brought face to face with his tribe”. He moved to Berlin in November that same year. While in Berlin he kept a diary and gathered material which would eventually be included in Goodbye to Berlin, published in 1939. This book chronicled the rise of Adolf Hitler and the ignorance of his growing threat to the decadent German nightlife of the cafes, bars, and brothels. This novel would become the inspiration for the musical Cabaret.

In 1932 Christopher began a relationship with a German man named Heinz Neddermeyer. They fled Nazi Germany in 1933, however Heinz was denied entry into England. They spent time living in various countries - the Canary Islands, Copenhagen, Brussels, Amsterdam, and Portugal - looking for a place they could settle. Heinz was unexpectedly deported to Germany in 1937 where he was picked up by the Gestapo and sentenced to military service and hard labor for various charges. Heinz married a woman in 1938 and had one child, and after the war reached out to Christopher for assistance in escaping East Germany which was provided.

Christopher moved to the United States in 1939 and became a US citizen in 1946, after stating his reservation to the oath which required him to swear to defend the country. On Valentine’s Day 1953, at the age of 48, he met the 18 year old Don Bachardy with whom he would have an on-again-off-again relationship for the rest of his life. Up until this point in his life, Christopher’s works had a certain amount of self-censorship when it came to his homosexual identity. In the 1970’s he began to feel he had an obligation to renounce that approach and wrote Christopher and His Kind, recounting his experiences as a young gay man in Weimar Berlin. In this novel he places his homosexuality not as something that should be suppressed, but as central to his personal and creative development. Christopher saw this novel as his own contribution the gay liberation movement, the community which he viewed as “his kind” or “his tribe”.

Christopher Isherwood was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1981. He died on January 4, 1986 in the Santa Monica home he shared with Bachardy.

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