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

SKU: 9760226761550
SKU: 9780226761558
$20.00
(0) No Reviews yet

Details

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 move: 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 problem: 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.


Paperback;  224 pages


ISBN: 978-0226761558 


About the Author


Nicholas L. Syrett is professor of women, gender, and sexuality studies at the University of Kansas. 


He is the author of The Company He Keeps: A History of White College Fraternities and American Child Bride: A History of Minors and Marriage in the United States, coeditor of Age in America: The Colonial Era to the Present, and a contributor to the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, and Daily Beast.


Praise For An Open Secret: The Family Story Of Robert And John Gregg Allerton…


The first lines of Nicholas Syrett’s third book, An Open Secret: The Family Story of Robert and John Gregg Allerton, had me hooked. . . [Syrett] takes us into the world of an Illinois couple—one born into a rich family with ties to the founding of the Union Stock Yards and the First National Bank of Chicago; the other an orphan in his early twenties, attending the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for architecture with a part-time job and inheritance money."

— Chicago Tribune

“The book brings a critical view to the gay intergenerational relationship. It reveals how same-sex love was transformed into familial ties but also into an open secret where the boundary between knowingness and unknowingness was always in suspension.”
 
— DNA Magazine






Ratings & Reviews

No reviews available

Be the first to Write a Review