Christopher Isherwood
(August 26, 1904 - January 4, 1986) U.K. - U.S.A.
Poet, novelist, and playwright
 Isherwood, whose full name was Christopher William Bradshaw Isherwood, was born in Disley, Cheshire, and studied at Cambridge. He realized at the age of ten that he was gay, he would wrestle with other boys and often had orgasms. But it wasn't until he was in college in his late teens that he actually had sex with another man. One of his first lovers was Heinz.
Isherwood, W. H. Auden, and Stephen Spender, are the three best-known gay British-born writers. During the years from 1929 to 1939, Isherwood taught and wrote in Berlin. In 1939 went to USA and was naturalized in 1946.
Christopher Isherwood described his coming-out:
"I told my mother quite early on. She provoked me. She didn't believe in any sexual relation that didn't involve a woman. She could have respected a lesbian relationship, perhaps. But she didn't believe men did anything together."
 In 1953 he fell in love with an 18-year-old college student, Don Bachardy, who achieved independent acclaim as a painter, and with whom Isherwood would have his most enduring relationship. Isherwood's long-term relationship with Don Bachardy caused scandal initially among his friends. They settled in Santa Monica, California, where they lived until Isherwood's death. About his relationship with Don, he said:
"When you fall in love, you feel you've discovered the bird of paradise, the magic person from the Other Land. You suddenly see a human being in all his magic extraordinariness. And you know that you can never understand him, never take him for granted. He's eternally unpredictable-and so you are to him, if he loves you. And that's the tension. That's what you hope will never end."
 The two collaborated on a dramatization of Isherwood's novel A Meeting by the River and on a book, October, which paired Isherwood's prose with Bachardy's portraits. Isherwood and Bachardy, lived together, quietly in California, for more than 35 years. In the latter years of his life, Isherwood became more active in the gay-rights movement. Isherwood's novel "A Single Man" is considered by some to be the finest ever written about a homosexual male.
Christopher Isherwood wrote Christopher and His Kind, an account of his life as a gay man, and The Berlin Stories, which were the basis for the play I Am a Camera (1951) and subsequently the musical and movie Cabaret (1969), inspired on his book Goodbye to Berlin.
Works:
- All the Conspirators (1928)
- The Memorial (1932)
- Mr.Norris Changes Trains (1935)
 - The Last of Mr. Norris (1935)
- The Dog Beneath the Skin (1936, with Auden)
- The Ascent of F6 (1936, with Auden)
- Lions and Shadows (1938)
- On the Frontier (1938, with Auden)
- Goodbye to Berlin (1939)
- Journey to a War (1939, with Auden)
- Prater Violet (1945)
- The Condor and the Crows (1949)
- The World in the Evening (1954)
- Down There on a Visit (1962)
- A Single Man (1964)
- Exhumations (1966)
- A Meeting by the River (1967)
- Kathleen and Frank (1972)
- Christopher and His Kind (1976, about himself and his male lovers)
- My Guru and His Disciple (1980)
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