Gifting a GLBT legacy

by Michelle Simmons

January 2, 2010

Allen Tanner (right) was a close friend of many literary and artistic luminaries, such as the poet Edith Sitwell. At left is Tanner’s partner, the painter Pavel Tchelitchew. Sitwell, reportedly, had an emotional attachment to Tchelitchew.

During her time at Dickinson, Liz Hamill ’82 made annual visits to Missouri to see her paternal grandmother, Gertrude Hamill. There Liz met her acclaimed cousin Allen Tanner, former concert pianist and accompanist for the Ballet Russes. Tanner and his partner, the painter Pavel Tchelitchew, had been part of an inner circle of expatriates living in Germany and France during the 1920s and ’30s—including Gertrude Stein, Edith Sitwell and Igor Stravinsky—who would go on to define the Modernist canon.

Tanner, born in 1898, was long retired, and he lavished attention on Hamill. “Allen was trying to help me, to protect me as a young teenager who didn’t quite know that she was gay,” she recalls. “I know that he knew. He was always talking about Gertrude [Stein] here and Alice [B. Toklas] there.”

She points to a photo of him with Tchelitchew and Stein. “There were many, many more like this. He would say, ‘Here we are laughing, here we are eating a crust of bread, here’s the cheese.’

“Allen was the other great man in my life [besides Buddhist lama Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche],” she continues. “The first time as a young person I heard the word ‘Tibet’ was through him. … He always talked about the mystical in music, especially the music of [composer] Alexander Scriabin. There was a piece called ‘Album Leaf’ that Allen played for me—I remember being really affected by that.”

When Tanner died in 1987, Hamill inherited his collection of letters, posters, sheet music, albums and photographs. “My grandmother said, ‘These are for you. Allen wanted you to have them.’ ”

Hamill held on to his papers for decades, not knowing what to do with them. Yale University already had an extensive collection of Tanner artifacts—along with those of Tchelitchew, Stein, Sitwell and Charles Henri Ford—so she considered donating the boxes there.

But in 2009, she learned that Dickinson had recently co-hosted a gay-straight alliance student conference. When she saw the efforts the college was making to welcome gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender (GLBT) and questioning students, she decided that Tanner’s papers belonged in Carlisle.

“He would have wanted to have this framework and to discuss it in ways that have a historical, literary, musical, religious and philosophical value,” she says. “There’s a treasure trove [in Tanner’s papers] for young, questioning students—and parents who are dealing with their children who are coming out—to have historical role models.”

She contacted Dickinson librarian Kirk Doran, who connected her with Malinda Triller, special collections librarian. In March, Hamill brought the two boxes she had been holding to Archives & Special Collections.

“It’s an ideal collection for interdisciplinary research—from music to American studies to gender studies,” Doran says. “There’s literature, history, life in Paris, arts, culture.”

Archivist Jim Gerencser ’93 agrees. “It’s a very rich collection. Tanner lived a long and full life—the materials span 60-plus years, from the 1910s to the 1980s.” He adds that because of the collection’s complexity—some items are in French and require translation—it will take time to appropriately catalog everything and would be an excellent project for a student intern.

Reflecting back on her own student days, Hamill says, “Any person who was GLBT had kind of a scarlet L or scarlet G. We all had to pass through that, or just remain hidden. … My motivation [for this gift] is to help protect and save the lives of young gay and lesbian people and their families, to create avenues of connection, understanding and acceptance on all kinds of levels.”

To learn more about Hamill, read "Dharma in two Keys."