Lost in the Stars
Chester “Gavin” Arthur III
I want to talk about someone in my family who went down another path. Chester Alan “Gavin” Arthur III was President Chester Alan Arthur’s grandson. His grandmother, Ellen Lewis Herndon Arthur is one of the family members who looks exactly like my mother. After President Arthur died, his son, Chester Alan Arthur II withdrew from Columbia Law School and sailed for Europe. He then spent his life mingling with the social elite of Europe and America.
He was interested in horses, women, and fine cuisine. He owned a 250,000-acre ranch in Colorado, but never dirtied his hands with actual work. Oddly, I’ve found this to be a pattern with a large portion of family members.
Conversely, his son, Chester Alan Arthur III rejected the elegant living and embraced political and social issues. When he was attending Columbia (later dropped out), where he discovered the works of Edward Carpenter, a hardcore socialist poet/philosopher now known as the "Walt Whitman of England" and the "Gay Godfather of the British Left."
In his 20s, he joined the Irish Republican Movement. In 1930, he founded the magazine, Dune Forum, which promoted communication between the masses and the intellectual elite. He was a member of the Utopian Society of America with John Updike. In the 1950s he taught at San Quentin State Prison.
By the late 1950s, Arthur moved to San Francisco and was part of the Beat Movement, devoting his time to astrology. In 1966, he wrote The Circle of Sex, a book about gay, bisexual, and gender issues in astrology.
His life intersects mine in 1967. He used an astrological chart to determine the date for the Human-Be-In in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. I was there, however I was only 3 and more excited about a hat given to me by my parents than the event. At the end of his life, in 1972, Arthur was a leader in the gay rights movement and had been married to three women, including openly lesbian American heiress Esther Murphy.
A fantastic read by John Nova Lomax about Arthur can be found on Vice .
President Chester Arthur I
Moy Mell, California
Dune Forum, Vol 1, No 5-1, 1934
Ellen Lewis Herndon Arthur and my mother
Chester Gavin Arthur III at 18
Ted Inigan, Gavin Arthur, Edward Carpenter, George Merrill
America’s Youth, Civilian Conservation Corps
The Circle of Sex
Esther Murphy Arthur, 1920
From this issue
REDWOOD FOREST
by JACK LYMAN
The trunks of the redwoods
Cinnamon—soaring
Are giants lost in a lofty twilight.
The silver -lighted tanbarks,
The smooth madrones,
Dirn-lustred, motionless,
Dream,
And float
In liquid air-streams,
Cool-pervading,
Cocoon-soft,
Delicious waters of rest.
my hat
