Talk:James Ivory (director)

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[edit] Romantic relationship with Merchant

Regarding queries over Ivory's relationship with Merchant as romantic life partner, this is public knowledge, and I am copying and pasting a reply below that I wrote some time ago to another user who queried the same thing about Merchant:

Most newspaper obituaries of Ismail Merchant did not address directly his romantic relationship with James Ivory. A notable exception was the Los Angeles Times - one of the three major US national newspapers.

Please see this link to the obit article in the LA Times archives:

• Obituary of Ismail Merchant, LA Times, May 26 2005

Note how the first line of the article excerpt describes James Ivory as Merchant's life partner in addition to being a professional partner. The full article (I have the full article from a commercial database with restricted access) ends with the line:

"In addition to Ivory, Merchant is survived by sisters Saherbanu Kabadia, Sahida Retiwala, Ruksana Khan and Rashida Bootwala."

i.e. Ivory is treated with greater priority in that final sentence than Merchant's 4 sisters, and the use of "survived" indicates a personal relationship.

There was some unhappiness in the LGBT community that most obituraries censored or used euphemisms for the personal relationship between Merchant and Ivory e.g. The original Guardian obit (there were 2) used a pointed and emphatic last line "He did not marry."

Please see also this column from the Washington Post, another of the major 3 US national newspapers addressing this unhappiness about the censorship:

• "Question Celebrity", Washington Post, June 26 2005

and this one from the LGBT newspaper, The Washington Blade:

• "News organizations ignore gay filmmaker’s sexual orientation"

see also these blog posts:

• http://thenexthurrah.typepad.com/the_next_hurrah/2005/05/ismail_merchant.html
• http://www.nicksflickpicks.com/2005/05/rip-ismail-merchant.html

Bwithh 22:33, 28 April 2006 (UTC)