An Open Secret: The Family Story of Robert and John Gregg Allerton

by Nicholas L. Syrett

In 1922 Robert Allerton—described by the Chicago Tribune as the “richest bachelor in Chicago”—met a twenty-two-year-old University of Illinois architecture student named John Gregg, who was twenty-six years his junior. Virtually inseparable from then on, they began publicly referring to one another as father and son within a couple years of meeting. In 1960, after nearly four decades together, and with Robert Allerton nearing ninety, they embarked on a daringly nonconformist Allerton legally adopted the sixty-year-old Gregg as his son, the first such adoption of an adult in Illinois history.An Open Secret tells the striking story of these two iconoclasts, locating them among their queer contemporaries and exploring why becoming father and son made a surprising kind of sense for a twentieth-century couple who had every monetary advantage but one glaring they wanted to be together publicly in a society that did not tolerate their love. Deftly exploring the nature of their design, domestic, and philanthropic projects, Nicholas L. Syrett illuminates how viewing the Allertons as both a same-sex couple and an adopted family is crucial to understanding their relationship’s profound queerness. By digging deep into the lives of two men who operated largely as ciphers in their own time, he opens up provocative new lanes to consider the diversity of kinship ties in modern US history.

Genres: Nonfiction, LGBT, History

218 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 29, 2021

About the author

Born and raised in Peterborough, Ontario, Nicholas L. Syrett is a historian of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century US and Professor of Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of The Company He Keeps: A History of White College Fraternities (2009); American Child Bride: A History of Minors and Marriage in the United States (2016); and An Open Secret: The Family Story of Robert and John Gregg Allerton (2021). He is also a coeditor of Age in America: The Colonial Era to the Present (2015). His most recent book is The Trials of Madame Restell: Nineteenth-Century America's Most Infamous Female Physician and the Campaign to Make Abortion a Crime (2023).

Reviews

[Tim Williams · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nick Syrett’s Open Secret was a fantastic book to read during Pride Month. It is the story of a same-sex couple (Robert Allerton and John Gregg) who could only formalize their relationship later in life through the process of adoption. Along the way to that decision, the couple embraced many forms of queerness and queer domesticity that Robert Allenton’s wealth uniquely allowed. Ultimately, Syrett shows that, although LGBT progress has recently been measured in terms of marriage equality, there’s a much deeper history of creating and defining queer relationships in non-heteronormative ways. And he reminds us of the many ways in which class and race shape experiences of affluent white men much differently than others. (In fact, I think a bit about the extent to which social media has long relied on depictions of married gay celebrities as iconic gays without underscoring the ways wealth helps them achieve that seemingly normative position and privilege).

Importantly—and unlike married queers today (myself included)—Allerton and Gregg were never “out” (their relationship bridged eras) and thus the documentary record of their queerness is difficult to isolate. By engaging deeply with the historiography and the era’s cultural history of gender and sex, however, Syrett brings to light a story that was intended to be hidden but, uncovered, can tell us a lot about the long and diverse history of queer relationships in America.

[Brian E Reynolds · Rating 3 out of 5]

My wife’s book group was reading this book and it piqued my interest, having often visited Allerton Park in Monticello, Illinois, as a University of Illinois student. In my professional life, I attended one conference and hosted another conference at the Allerton Park facility. I was interested in learning more about the life of this incredibly cultured gay man who added many moments of beauty to my usually drab life.
I had mixed feelings during the first half of the book. The book was much more of a scholarly treatise of Robert Allerton and John Gregg’s role in overall queer life than I anticipated. Of course, reading any blurb on the book or author Syrett would have prepared me for the themes of the book but instead I went in cold.
I found myself learning more general info on queer life of the time and in places the Allertons lived and visited than details about the Allerton’s life. Much of the info Syrett provided on queer life and queer history was quite interesting. However, Syrett’s frequent speculations on the Allerton’s actions in an attempt to connect the general info he was providing to the life the Allertons were living were annoying. Chapter 3 on “Travel” contained several comments similar to “Allerton would likely have run into” and “Allerton and Gregg would likely have frequented." While this type of non-factual speculation is used in many biographies, I find it annoying in those works and its frequency made it especially annoying here.
At one point, I found myself saying to my wife, “I just wish the author would at least provide some info on how the couple obtained some of their artwork.” The next day, I read Chapter 6 which included a vignette on the purchase and creation of the wonderful Sun Singer sculpture at Allerton Park, one highly enjoyed by many conferences attendees and located in a wonderful and memorable setting only as the result of a mix-up. Kismet.
In fact, starting with chapter 4, on the early history of the couple, and continuing to the end, the book started providing information I had sought from the book. That vignette on the SunSinger may have affected my attitude to both the book and Syrett himself. Syrett became more scholarly and insightful in my eyes. I started finding myself nodding in approval at Syrett’s analysis and comments on the couples’ life in view of the queer life of their times and present-day. As a result, the last half of the book took me to the point that I could say I liked the book. I rate it as 3 stars.

[Christopher Gerrib · Rating 4 out of 5]

I became aware of Robert Allerton in the mid-1980s as an undergraduate at the University of Illinois. His former mansion was and is being used as a conference center which I ended up staying at for a weekend. Then, tto get my history degree I had to write a paper on an artist and an art patron. My selected patron was Robert Allerton. It was during the research of that paper that I learned that the then 80+ year-old Allerton adopted a son - a man 26 years his junior. Neither man married or had other children.

When I found out about this book, my long-dormant interest in Robert Allerton was piqued, so I ordered it and finally got around to reading it. It's a short book - 174 pages - and academic, with extensive footnotes. The author was also hindered in that Robert and his companion, John Gregg, met in 1922 and were practically inseparable. For example, during WWII, when both men were living on Hawaii, John joined the local Home Guard. Just him being away for the day with the troops was cause for sadness in Robert's letters to his accountant back in Chicago.

Nicholas Syrett, the author, performed extensive research and showed both men's place in the gay communities of the 1800s and 1900s. He also highlighted some of the obvious contradictions of their lives. For example, even into the 1980s (John died in 1986) the pair never admitted they were gay. They were also both lifelong Republicans, and exhibited a number of the bigotries of the age. For example, John was a member of the University of Illinois chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. (I should note that the Klan of the 1920s was open enough that they had a club picture with clear faces and names in the college yearbook.)

Overall, I found this an interesting read and look into history.

[R.J. Gilmour · Rating 4 out of 5]

Syrett looks at the relationship of Robert Allerton, one of the richest bachelors in Chicago & his life-long relationship with John Gregg who was 26 years his junior. The two lived as father & adopted son at a time when queer men couldn't live together & while it is unknown if the two were intimate with each other, Syrett makes the case for defining their relationship as queer. It is a rich history about a couple that left no records about their intimate lives.

The union between Bartlett and Allerton had all the trappings of what scholars have dubbed a romantic friendship. As Carroll Smith-Rosenberg first described them, romantic friendships emerged out of the relatively gender-segregated worlds of Victorian households and schools. 24
ROMANTIC FRIENDSHIPS

The sociologist Herbert Gans’s notion of a ‘taste culture’ is instructive here. In Gans’s definition, taste culture encompasses the class and educational backgrounds of particular sectors of the population and link them to their aesthetic and cultural values and the culture they regularly consume. 29-30
TASTE CULTURE

By the early twentieth century in at least some circles, ‘artistic’ and ‘aesthetic’ had become not-so-subtle code words for gay-identified men because of these linkages. In some cases, gay men were just called ‘artists.’… during his 1882 tour of the United States and Canada, Oscar Wilde lectured a good deal on how to make one's home beautiful, emphasizing the aesthetics of the decorative arts as they could be applied to a home. Many Americans would have drawn links between Wilde, art, interior design, and his 1895 trial for gross in decency. Wilde was queer not just because of his sexual proclivities, but also because he was a man focussed on aesthetics. As Christoper Reed argues in Art and Homosexuality, coverage of the Wilde trials ‘made the artist-genius the paradigm of homosexual identity. Indeed, Reed demonstrate that the category of homosexuality emerged at the same time as the avant-garde artist, and that the two were often linked, not just in the art world, but also in medical texts and in the public imagination. In demonstrable historical ways, ‘art and homosexuality have been significantly intertwined.’ 30
ART & HOMOSEXUALITY

Beginning in 1749, Walpole built Strawberry Hill House, an enormous Gothic inspired mansion in Twickenham, on the Thames….43

The Ladies of Llangollen and Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill are but two examples of queer historical subjects who created eclectic homes based on the combination of architectural revival, restoration and the inclusion of contemporaneous art and design…44
QUEER HOMES/SPACE

Historians have demonstrated that itinerancy has been key to the pursuit of queer pleasures and sometimes to the formation of sexual identities. In part, this was because same-sex desiring men were able to meet strangers in unfamiliar places, men they would not have encountered at home. Not only did some achieve an anonymity far from home that enabled them to pursue same-sex sexual encounters with less fear of reprisal, the very active being away led many to feel free in a manner that was not possible closer to home. It bears noting, however, that the itinerant pursuit of queer sex and companionship has varied by class. Working class men sometimes hitched or wrote the rails and met one another in various workplaces-logging camps, farms, and factories-as itinerant labourers-or they congregated in Skid Rows, boarding houses and occasionally prisons in big cities and across the great expanse of the American Midwest and West. Middle class men also used travel and displacement to forge queer connections, eventually also relying upon business travel to facilitate the same ends. Wealthy men like Allerton found queer community by travelling in different circles, including to major metropolis around the globe. 54
QUEER TRAVEL

Those that employed only young men and boys for the pleasure of older men were often called ‘peg houses.’ The city’s bathhouses we're also known for their same sex activities. This was a period in US history before the solidification of the homosexual – Heterosexual binary and when men who engaged in sex with other men, so long as they assumed the dominant position, did not question their own masculinity as a result…. In 1894 homosexuality in Chicago made headlines across the nation when a young man named Guy Olmstead shot his lover and fellow postman William Clifford in the back, so to straw was he that Clifford had ended their relationship. 55

By the 1910s, lovers Harriet Dean and Margaret Anderson were publishing the Little Review in Chicago. The magazine regularly included gay and bisexual authors, and because of its coverage of the contemporary fine art scene, it is likely to have been known to Allerton. 57

In 1910 or 1911, Allerton also met a man named Roger Quilter via Jane Emmett Von Glehn (cousin of both Ellen Emmett and Henry James). Von Glehn regularly hosted salons of artists and musicians in her London home; guets included John singer Sergeant and his sister Emily, Gervae Elwes, Léon Delafoss, and Gabriel Fauré. Quilter was a British composer and the eldest son of William Quilter, 1st Baronet and member of British Parliament. 70
SALON

Aldrich… there was also a geography of homosexual encounters-Hotels were foreigners gathered, Gardens where men and boys trolled at twilight, the Riverside where youths bathed and rowed. 77
HOMOSEXUAL MOROCCO

Thanks and large part to the writings of Charles Warren Stoddard, Tahiti also enjoyed our reputation as being especially welcoming of queer men. Stoddard was partially following in the tradition of Herman Melville, who wrote of Polynesian women's and men's beauty and sexual accessibility in Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847), as well as as a young men's tradition of taking a bosom milk companion who might be a fellow technician or a foreigner. In his 1873 South-Sea Idyls, Stoddard…79
TAHITI

At Ohio State University in the late 1920s, a young Samuel Steward had sex with many fellow students, both those he met at his aunts’ boardinghouse as well those he met on campus, including what seems to be a sizeable number of brothers in one fraternity. Steward and those men he fellated were aware that in Columbus at the time-as in many other locations across the country-only those who performed oral sex were considered to be true homosexuals.92
1920s

From the mid-nineteenth century onward, poet Walt Whitman regularly referred to the young men with whom he associated and had sex as some version of a foster son, adopted son, and occasionally nephew. He sometimes did this in order to explain their relationship to those who might be curious, as in the following letter he sent to a man who would host him and his companion Harry Stafford: “my (adopted) son, a young man of 18 [Whitman was then fifty-seven], is with me now, sees to me & occasionally transact my business affairs, & I feel somewhat at sea without him.’ Whitman also indicated in this letter that he and Stafford would expect to share a room and bed…. Jonathan Ned Katz argues that, in the absence of a language of homosexuality, ‘kinship terms-father-son, uncle-nephew, Brother-Brother-provided nineteenth-century Male several ways to name and define intimacy between otherwise unrelated men and youths. 100-101
WHITMAN

In 1899 the McBrydes’ son Alexander lowered Queen Emma’s Home into the valley floor so that he might live in it further from the sugar cane that was planted in the upper portion of the valley. In 1917 he built a house of his own… he remained there, living with his companion a young Hawaiian man named Gabriel I, until his death in 1935…McBryde’s Brother Walter, also a bachelor with a male Hawaiian companion, Live nearby at Kukuiolono Park…109
MCBRYDES

During this period-the 1930s through the 1960s-most Americans understood male homosexuals, via the popular press, as shady lurkers of back rooms and bars, diseased and damage men who were arrested in parks and highway restrooms for soliciting sex. Following a 1920s heyday when homosexuality was both pathology by medical men and lawmakers, but also fat and celebrated by slamming city dwellers out for a night in the city, most historian see the 1930s through the early 1960s as the nadir of twentieth-century American gay life in terms of persecution. When the news media covered homosexuality and police attempts to ‘clean it up’ much of that coverage portrayed gay men as essentially existing in public, without private homes to which they might retreat and be among their own kind. There is some truth to this representation because many gay men did meet one another in bars, parks and public washrooms, but newspaper and magazine reporting focussed almost exclusively on those locations because that is where gay men came into contact with the law, neglecting the fact that of course queer people also had private homes. 126
1930s-1960s

For many years historians of homosexuality, especially for those studying the period before liberation and the rise of self proclaimed lesbian and gay subjects, found evidence for men's queer lives and public and women's in private. Gay men were understood through the prism of sex, for which records of arrest and criminal prosecution were usually available. Lesbians were much more visible in the form of the couple, which occupied a home. These divergences and queer history were based both on the actual lift experiences of queer men and women, as well as their own cultures’ blind spots. 127
GAY MEN VS WOMEN

As historian Alan Bérubé has shown, many of those who worked on the Matson line-as waiters, pursers, cooks, room stewards, bartenders, bakers, and butchers-were gay men, primarily white because of racial exclusion in hiring. A gay cook and steward who worked the very shifts that the couple took during the 1930s, and later went onto published what he called The Gay Cookbook in 1965, explained that of the 500 men working in the steward’s department in the Matson Company, ‘probably 486 were actively gay.’ Another former steward estimated that the percentage somewhat lower at 65 to 70 percent, still a remarkably high figure. The gay stewards referred to the ships that Allerton and Gregg regularly took-the Lurline and the Matsonia, and the Mariposa-as the ‘Queer-line’, the ‘Fruitsonia,’ and the ‘Mary-posa.’ 145
CRUISING/SAILING

Historians have demonstrated that many gay men formed informal networks of contacts to introduce one another to other gay men with whom they might socialize when they visited new places. While some of these contacts were explicitly sexual, and other others they were simply friendly. 157
SOCIAL NETWORKS

Ina Russell, ed., Jeb and Dash: A Diary of a Gay Life, 1918-1945

Katherine Parkin, “Adult Adoption and Intergenerational Same-Sex Relationships.’ notches: (re)marks on the history of sexuality December 15, 2017, http://notchesblog.com/2017/12/15/adu...

[Martin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a fascinating book about Robert Allerton, a very wealthy man, who legally adopted John Gregg, his younger companion in 1960 after living together since 1927. The author makes a persuasive case that the two men were actually a gay couple. Some of the writing is dry and academic but it is an excellent read nonetheless. Their opulent homes in Illinois and Hawaii were donated to be used for the public to enjoy.

[Timothy Juhl · Rating 3 out of 5]

AUDIOBOOK:

I truly enjoyed listening to this and I learned something about the Chicago Art Institute and Illinois history as well.

Robert Allerton and his 'son' had a significant impact on the cultural development of both Illinois and Hawaii (although in Hawaii they could be accused of colonizing the land and taking it from the Indigenous People of the island). There's no denying how important the Allerton name is in the development of Chicago, both artistically and through livestock (his father made all his money in the early days of Chicago).

At times, I found it uncomfortable the degree to which Allerton and John Gregg (the 'son') kept their relationship private, but I can appreciate the time in which they lived and it has only been in the last decade or so that their story is being told (neither of them would like this). On the Allerton place in Illinois as well as the Botanical Gardens they established in Hawaii, only recently have staff been comfortable alluding to the more personal degree of Robert and John's relationship.

It's inspired a future trip back to the Chicago Art Institute so that I can see how much influence Robert Allerton had on it (his philanthropy and commitment to the arts is why the main entrance exists as it does today).

There was a lot of study into queer culture during the early 20th century and how class made some experiences easier for men of money. That Allerton inherited his wealth and was able to have the life he had with John when other queer men might not have been so fortunate is both infuriating and worthy of celebration in gay culture.

[Jordan · Rating 4 out of 5]

An insightful telling of how two lives unfolded in such a way, rooted in wealth and secrecy, that complicates understandings of queerness and queer couplehood in the first half of the 19th century.

[Emma Ann · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fascinating look at Robert Allerton, one of my favorite historical figures, and his complex relationship with John Gregg.

[Sabrina · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first learned about the Allertons when visiting their gardens in Kauai. Our tour-guide kept mentioning Robert Allerton and his partner and my queer eyebrows kept going up and up. “Partner” you say???? whips out phone to confirm they were queer. That quick Google led me to this book, which then led to me telling anyone I could about the Allertons and their gay gardens (my term). But there is so much more to unpact about Robert and John Allerton than their pretty property in Hawaii.

An Open Secret delves into the privileges Robert Allerton had due to his family’s wealth and how that allowed him to “get away” with being queer in a society that was focused on his wealth and life-long bachelor status. The book really drills into the reader's head that Allerton’s wealth was the reason he skirted by as an eccentric to the point that the reader can never forget it. What I really appreciated though, was how brought attention to all the ways that Robert and John Allerton were discriminating against other marginalized groups because their race and wealth protected them.

All in all, this was a highly interesting look at a historical queer couple that made me think about privilege vs marginalization in relation to queerness in a new light, and for that alone I recommend it.

[Don Heller · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a fascinating story about a gay couple in early 20th century America. We came across the story because of our visit to the National Tropical Botanical Garden in Kaua’i, Hawai’i earlier this year. The Allerton Garden, part of the NTBG, had been the home of Robert Allerton and John Gregg, a wealthy gay couple from Illinois who outwardly presented themselves as a father and son, but who carried on a decades-long closeted relationship.

Syrett’s book uses deep archival analysis to piece together the story of this couple and place it in the context of early 20th century queer history. It is well written and a fascinating story, well worth reading. And if you have the chance, you should definitely visit the NTBG and take a tour of the gardens.