Gerald Haxton

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Frederick Gerald Haxton (1892 – 1944) a native of San Francisco was the long term secretary and lover of the famous novelist and playwright W. Somerset Maugham.

He and Maugham met at the outbreak of World War I when they both began serving from 1914 as part of the Red Cross ambulance unit in Flanders, France.

Maugham and to a lesser extent Haxton had been affected by the trial of Oscar Wilde. Common to men who were either homosexual or in the case of Maugham who had sexual relationships with both men and women, (Maugham was also married and had a child at the time of meeting Haxton) neither spoke of their situation for fear of recrimination.

However in November 1913 Haxton and another man, John Lindsell were arrested in a Covent Garden hotel and charged with gross indecency. Unluckily for the two men, military policemen, whilst looking for deserters had burst into the hotel room of Haxton and Lindsell to find them committing a homosexual act that was not buggery. On December 7 that same year both men were indicted under the same law that had been used to prosecute Oscar Wilde. However unlike Wilde when the two men appeared in the Central Criminal Court at the Old Bailey on December 10 they were both acquitted.

Haxton left England shortly thereafter and then on returning in February 1919 he was deported from Britain as an undesirable alien and was never allowed to enter England again. The papers providing reason or reasons for this deportation were placed in a special access category for 100 years and are still closed from the public view.

However, Haxton's deportation did not particularly affect the relationship between the two men with Maugham and Haxton travelling abroad during most of World War I and was the main reason that they decided to live on the French Riviera in the villa 'Mauresque'. They lived there almost exclusively until they were forced to flee the advancing Germans at the commencement of World War II.

Indeed it is thought that Haxton’s flamboyant nature, said to be portrayed in the character Rowley Flint in Up at the Villa, was the key to Maugham’s invitational success with the various members of the society at whatever location that the pair was visiting at a given time.

Haxton continued as Maugham's constant companion for 30 years, until he died in an alcoholics’ ward in a New York hospital. Maugham later placed the following dedication in his 1949 compilation, A Writer’s Notebook: In Loving Memory of My Friend Frederick Gerald Haxton, 1892 -1944.