"In the early nineteen-thirties, three young gay men made the scene in bohemian Los Angeles, absorbing influences and shaping one another's tastes. They staged art shows and concerts; they lectured confidently on aesthetics; they gawked at modernist architecture; they read Proust aloud. The leader of the trio was a thirty-year-old poet and artist named Donald Sample, who'd gone to Harvard and then wandered around Europe."
"At the time, it was Sample who seemed poised for bigger things. His poetry and art work won praise, his conversation glittered. But it was the quiet-voiced, ostensibly straitlaced Cage who seized the world's attention. After breaking up with Sample, at the end of 1934, Cage studied composition with the modernist master Arnold Schoenberg and began exploring new realms of sound. Within a couple of decades, he had established himself as a cynosure of the international avant-garde-the lord of noise, chance, and silence."
Three young gay men in early 1930s bohemian Los Angeles formed a close creative circle, staging art shows and concerts, lecturing on aesthetics, admiring modernist architecture, and reading Proust aloud. Donald Sample, a thirty-year-old poet and artist who had attended Harvard and traveled in Europe, acted as the group's leader. Sample met John Cage on Capri in 1930; Cage became his lover and moved with him to Los Angeles, where they connected with Harry Hay. Cage later became an internationally celebrated experimental composer and Hay a founder of the Mattachine Society. Sample, by contrast, slipped into near-total obscurity, his name appearing only sporadically and in variant forms. Researchers later consulted personal papers and newspaper archives to trace Sample's fate.
Read at The New Yorker
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