Discontent with his sham marriage, McAlmon sought a divorce from Bryher, which was finalized during the spring of 1927. At this time, Sir John Ellerman, who seems to have become quite fond of his son-in-law, gave McAlmon a substantial financial settlement. Thereafter, McAlmon often was sneeringly referred to in bohemian circles as "McAlimony." Unfortunately, Ellerman's gift did not substantially improve McAlmon's financial situation because he quickly dissipated most of the funds through parties and drinking.

Apparently unable to remain in any place for an extended period, McAlmon traveled throughout Europe, the United States, and Mexico from 1927 to 1940. However, although discontented with the changes occurring in the French capital, he continued to live at intervals in Paris until 1940.

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Despite his peripatetic existence, McAlmon continued to write, though at a considerably reduced level. His later publications included the epic poem North America, Continent of Conjectures (1929, published through his own Contact Editions) and The Indefinite Huntress and Other Stories (Paris: Crosby, 1932). His last published poem was an eloquent attack on the effects of Mussolini's government of Italy, "Encyclical to Pope and Fascist" (1941).

Undoubtedly, Being Geniuses Together, 1920-1930 was the most significant endeavor of McAlmon's later years. He intended this book to be an honest and comprehensive memoir of his life in Paris and of his interactions with others in the expatriate community. Needing money, however, he agreed to the publication of a shortened and heavily edited version by the London firm of Secker and Warburg in 1938.

In 1940, as he attempted to flee from the advancing Nazi army, McAlmon abandoned the complete manuscript of the memoir in his cottage in Dampierre (France), and it presumably was destroyed during the war. In 1968 and 1984, McAlmon's friend, Kay Boyle, produced revised editions, which supposedly incorporated material from typescripts that McAlmon supplied to Secker and Warburg. However, concerned about rehabilitating McAlmon's reputation, she retained the moralistic approach of the London publishers.

Despite the many emendations of McAlmon's original text, Being Geniuses provides a lively, and often provocative, overview of Paris in the 1920s, and it is still widely consulted by scholars of the era. In particular, the book gives many indications of the honesty and bluntness that often disconcerted McAlmon's associates. Thus, he offers strong criticism of the pomposity that he perceives in such iconic figures of the expatriate community as Stein and Hemingway. Unfortunately, missing from any of the extant versions of the texts are the sexual escapades, which Williams and other friends mentioned in their responses to McAlmon's drafts.

During the initial stages of the Nazi Occupation of France, McAlmon was interned, but his family successfully implored United States Senators to use their influence to secure his freedom. His family paid for his return travel to the United States and found him a job selling medical equipment for a company based in Phoenix.

By the time that he returned permanently to the United States in 1940, McAlmon's health had deteriorated significantly. Suffering from tuberculosis and many other serious ailments, he spent extended periods in hospitals.

In 1951, McAlmon retired to a home that his sisters purchased for him in Desert Hot Springs, California, and he lived quietly there until his death on February 2, 1956. After his death, neighbors were very surprised to learn that he had once been considered a notable writer and that he had been an active participant in the dynamic community of expatriates in Paris during the 1920s.

Conclusion

Editions of some of McAlmon's most important stories, published by the University of New Mexico Press during the early 1990s, have helped to make a new generation of American readers aware of his work. Certainly, such books as Distinguished Air: Grim Fairy Tales deserve an important place in queer cultural history. It is to be hoped that future scholars will give McAlmon's achievements as writer and publisher the attention that they merit.

Although largely invisible to the general public, a large body of twentieth-century gay male literature by American authors was published prior to Stonewall, some of it positive but most of it tinged with misery or bleakness as the price of being published and disseminated.

Despite the widespread homophobia in the Modernist movement, several of its practitioners were homosexual; some of them wrote openly about homosexuality, and the groundwork was laid for the gay liberation movement.

American photographer Berenice Abbott made memorable images of lesbians, bisexuals, and gay men in Paris in the 1920s and in New York from the 1930s through 1965.

Through her Parisian bookshop and her editorial work, American expatriate and lesbian Sylvia Beach did much to influence the course of modern literature.

One of America's first modernist painters, Charles Demuth was also one of the earliest artists in this country to expose his gay identity through forthright, positive depictions of homosexual desire.

The bisexual poet and novelist Hilda Doolittle, who published under the initials H. D., wrote poems and autobiographical prose works that celebrate women's romantic relationships with each other.

Although Eliot tried to suppress the fact, The Waste Land is an elegy for a young Frenchman whom he met and loved in Paris and who died in the Great War in 1915.

A central figure in the evolution of modern American art, Marsden Hartley created works that help define the delicate balance between the erotic and the poetic.

Ernest Hemingway, himself sexually insecure, included negative, even abusive portrayals of gay men in his fiction.

A major Anglo-American novelist and a pioneer in the gay liberation movement, Christopher Isherwood created gay characters whose homosexuality is a simple given, an integral part of the wholeness of personality and an emblem of their common humanity.

Though Katherine Mansfield was reticent in the depiction of lesbianism in her short stories, she had close female friendships and was always deeply concerned with the status of women.

In addition to becoming--with Alice B. Toklas--half of an iconic lesbian couple, Gertrude Stein was an important innovator and transformer of the English language.

The multifaceted Gore Vidal is important in the gay literary heritage because of the straightforwardness with which he has pursued gay themes and included gay characters in his work.