Photograph of James Orville Bloss, published in John Franklin Sprague, New York, the Metropolis: Its Noted Business and Professional Men (New York: The New York Recorder, 1895 [c. 1891-92]), 50.

Claude M. Gruener is one of four gay men inspired to become history sleuths by an exhibit on OutHistory about William Sterling's and James Bloss's forty-year intimacy.

Bloss was the live-in, sleep-with, forty-year companion of John William Sterling, a corporate lawyer and major Yale donor who died in 1918. The earlier exhibit on OutHistory about Bloss and Sterling provided evidence that these lifelong bachelors lived together for forty-plus years. Their “unusual relation . . . was often spoken of,” said Jonathan Ned Katz, who conducted the original research.

“Bloss’s friends called him ‘Blossy,’” said Katz, “suggesting, at least, an informality that didn’t apply to Sterling, and, perhaps, a defiant hint of effeminacy.”

Gruener found the first picture of James Orville Bloss.[1] The new team of researchers also found Bloss’s passport applications, which included his signature and described his physical appearance. He had a “heavy mustache” and “ruddy complexion”; his height was 5 feet, 7 1/2 inches.[2] Gruener additionally found a previously unknown, character-revealing photograph of the mature Sterling, which is reproduced here.[3]

Sterling is remembered today mainly because he bequeathed Yale University $15 million ($200 million in 2011), said at the time to be the largest donation to any institution of higher learning in the world. His gift today supports Sterling Law Fellowships and Sterling Professorships (the latter, Yale’s most prestigious and highest paid), and it built Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library, Sterling Chemistry Library, Sterling Law Building, Sterling Hall of Medicine, the Hall of Graduate Studies, and the Sterling Divinity Quadrangle (the campus of Yale Divinity School). Sterling’s law firm continues today as Shearman and Sterling, a major transnational corporate practice.

The Community Research Group is Formed

Photograph of John William Sterling, age 54-55, c. 1900, published in Mitchell Charles Harrison, compiler, New York State's Prominent and Progressive Men: An Encyclopaedia of Contemporaneous Biography (New York: New York Tribune, 1904), 211.

The four gay researchers met on a Google Group called Historical Pictorials, devoted to discussions of the past. Early in 2010, intrigued by the relationship between Bloss and Sterling documented on OutHistory, they set to find new information about its character.

After the group’s research report was complete, Gruener stumbled, almost by accident, on the picture of Bloss, one of the major items for which they had earlier looked in vain. Gruener, a resident of Albany, was thumbing through a volume in the New York State Library and Archives when he came upon the picture.

The community-based historians purchased, reviewed, and transcribed young Sterling's hand-written journals, and his later, hard-to-read diaries, which are housed in Yale’s Sterling Library. Those transcriptions, published in this exhibit, include references to the two men living together. The four Sherlocks devoted multiple hours to research and debate about the meaning of their finds; they completed an enormous report about Bloss and Sterling, published in the following sections.

“I’m thrilled and awed by this group’s huge contribution and I’m still assimilating their discoveries,” said Katz. He added: “This team’s work in recovering the LGBTQ past is exactly the kind of community-based research we hoped to spark when we started OutHistory.”

The group's research is credited to Gruener and Rick Wagner, who edited its findings. Two other members of the team did not wish to be named.

“Fight against forgetting!” sums up the mission of OutHistory,” said Katz. He added: "This example of community-based history research is particularly poignant because it was the last activity one member of the research team participated in before losing his memory due to an incapacitating condition. The researcher’s guardian feels that he would not want his name revealed.

Notes

[1] Photograph of James Orville Bloss published in John Franklin Sprague, New York, the Metropolis: Its Noted Business and Professional Men (New York: The New York Recorder, 1895, [c. 1891-92]), 50.