Gerald Haxton
American secretary
Frederick Gerald Haxton (1892 – November 7, 1944), a native of San Francisco, was the long term secretary and lover of novelist and playwright W. Somerset Maugham.
He and Maugham met at the outbreak of World War I when they both began serving as part of a Red Cross ambulance unit in French Flanders.
Secrecy and arrest
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, bisexual (Maugham had had an affair with the actress Sue Jones before meeting Haxton and later had a child with Syrie Wellcome whom he married), neither spoke of their situation for fear of recrimination.
However, in November 1915, Haxton and another man, John Lindsell, were arrested in a Covent Garden hotel in London and charged with gross indecency. Military policemen, while 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 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.
Deportation
Haxton left England shortly thereafter.
After touring the South Pacific islands, Haxton was aboard the Hitachi Maru en route to South Africa when the ship was captured by the German raider SMS Wolf in September 1917.
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