Coming Out

Beneath its veneer of success and accomplishment, Philip Cummings's life was marked by turmoil and frustration. He was shocked and saddened by the sudden death of Federico García Lorca at the hands of Francoist partisans outside Granada in August 1936, privately fearing that Lorca had been targeted because he, like Cummings himself, was homosexual.

Lorca remained single all his life, but Cummings, like most gay men of his era, chose the safer path of marriage and children. Caught in a devil’s bargain between social acceptance and personal authenticity, he played the role of a typical family man within his community and professional circles, while secretly maintaining decades-long sexual relationships with other men.

Though he carefully hid his own homosexuality, Cummings longed to make the sexual component of his youthful friendship with Lorca known to others. He came close to telling researchers Kessel Schwartz in 1955 and Ian Gibson in 1985, but never allowed himself to go beyond veiled innuendo. In 1984, when Leslie Stainton asked Cummings if he had ever known Lorca to have a girlfriend, he paused, then casually replied, "Of course, some people have said that Lorca was homosexual, but I wouldn't know anything about that." He was more forthright with Daniel Eisenberg when they spoke privately in 1974, acknowledging his sexual activities with Lorca at Lake Eden, but did not mention their earlier encounters.

In the end, he revealed the full extent of his sexual relationship with Lorca to only one person, the Spanish poet Dionisio Cañas. Cañas first visited Cummings in November 1985 and returned for a longer stay in February 1986. At that point the 79-year-old Cummings had been widowed for two years and was in poor health, so he had little to lose by telling the truth. Of course it helped that Cañas was young, handsome, and openly gay, and strongly reminded Cummings of the other Spanish poet he had known so well.

The two men spent hours conversing in Spanish about Lorca, poetry, Spain, and sex. Cummings told Cañas that his sexual relationship with Lorca began in the summer of 1928 in his room at the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid, resumed in June 1929 in the sleeping car they shared on an overnight train to Paris, and continued in August during their ten days together at Lake Eden. When Cañas asked for more information, Cummings provided it. Most importantly, he gave Cañas permission to publish his revelations so that others might better understand Lorca the man, as well as his work.

Cañas wrote his first article about Lorca's relationship with Cummings for the Spanish newspaper El Pais in late 1985. He later published more extensive pieces in several Hispanic literary journals, including an insightful 1992 epitaph for Cummings in Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos. His most recent article about Lorca and Cummings appeared in El Mundo in August 2011.

Cummings may have felt great relief at finally coming out to Cañas, but a lifetime of concealing his true sexual identity had already taken a heavy toll on him and his family. Long accustomed to deception and evasion, Cummings became increasingly bitter and unhappy during his adult years. When at home between lecture tours, he drank heavily and was harshly critical of his wife and children. He resented the constraints and expectations of family life and returned to the relative freedom of life on the road whenever he could, but never found the courage to leave the security and social standing provided by his marriage.

After Cummings retired in 1971, his already weak sense of boundaries continued to erode. He embarrassed his family by making sexual advances toward the teenage boys who came to do yard work, who soon learned to avoid him. Far worse, he molested at least one younger child, seemingly oblivious to the harm he inflicted.

In his final years, Cummings began exhibiting signs of severe dementia and was placed in a nursing home. He died at the Mt. Ascutney Hospital in Windsor, Vermont, on June 17, 1991, from pneumonia and complications of Alzheimer's disease.