LETTERS From CAMP Rehoboth |
PAST Out: Who was "Daring Dick"? |
by Paula Martinac |
Although his name has been largely forgotten, in the 1920s and 30s adventure-seeking, globe-trotting writer and lecturer Richard Halliburton was a household word. While he earned the nickname "Daring Dick" in his professional life, Halliburton was less bold in personal matters, carefully guarding his homosexuality from the public. Halliburton was born near Memphis in 1900. He was a shy, slight boy who read Oscar Wilde. Despite his parents' concerns about his fragile health (he had a rapid heartbeat), Halliburton embarked on his first long voyage while in his late teens, taking time off from his studies at Princeton to work on a freighter bound for Europe. Halliburton eventually returned to college, but dreamed of making his mark as an adventurer. In April 1921, a month before graduation, he wrote to his parents, announcing his plans to make a living as a world traveler. His first book, he told them, would be a "vivid narrative of real experiences of a very live, open-eyed and sympathetic young man on an unconventional and originally executed circumnavigation of the globe." By July he and a friend were biking and hiking their way across Western Europe. Along the way, they stopped to scale the 14,000-foot Matterhornwithout the benefit of any training or conditioning. Over the next couple of years, Halliburton hunted tigers in India, crossed the Malay peninsula on foot, stowed away on a ship to Singapore, and climbed a Japanese volcano solo. Keeping careful notes of his travels, he then chronicled his adventures in a book called The Royal Road to Romance, which sold a phenomenal 100,000 copies during its first year. Although women swooned for the dashing blond adventurer, Halliburton could not have cared less about the attentions of his female fans. Never married, he traveled with a series of young men whom biographers have called his "companions" and was extremely guarded about his private life. In recent years, his name has been linked romantically with silent-screen actor Ramon Novarro and writer Paul Mooney, who collaborated with Halliburton on one of his books. Halliburton published six additional books, earning the nickname "Daring Dick." In one of the most famous, The Flying Carpet (1932), he chronicled an exhausting flight across Africa and Asia with pilot Moye Stephens, a heterosexual man with whom Halliburton was in love but who rebuffed his affections. Eventually, Halliburton began to tire of the traveling life, but his publisher pressed him for new, more dangerous escapades. He dreamed up an adventure that would prove to be his lasttraveling across the Pacific in a replica of an ancient Chinese junk. In January 1939, Halliburton set sail on the Sea Dragon, complete with captain and crew. But the junk met with typhoon-force winds, and sometime around March 24, the Sea Dragon went down. A Navy search party scoured the ocean around Midway Island but turned up nothing. Many admirers refused to believe Halliburton was dead - one popular rumor was that he was living on an island with missing (and possibly queer) aviator Amelia Earhart. As late as 1976, one of his female fans was quoted in the Los Angeles Times as wondering, "Do you think he'll ever come back? He was so beautiful."Paula Martinac is a Lambda Literary Award-winning author of seven books, including The Queerest Places: A Guide to Gay and Lesbian Historic Sites. She can be reached care of Letters from CAMP Rehoboth or at POcolumn@aol.com. |
LETTERS From CAMP Rehoboth, Vol. 12, No. 03, April 5, 2002. |