LUCIUS BEEBE AND Charles Clegg came from opposite sides of the track sociologically. Beebe grew up in a wealthy Boston family and Clegg in a middle-class family in Youngstown, Ohio.

They met at a high-society brunch in Washington, D.C., in 1941. Clegg attended with J. Edgar Hoover, then director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, who hid his identity as a gay man until his death in 1972. Unlike Hoover, both Beebe and Clegg were very open about their romantic preferences. The two met at that brunch and established a lifelong professional partnership as both authors and photographers. Their respect and affection for each other transcended professional boundaries, developing into a deep personal relationship uncommonly public for
the time.

Clegg volunteered for the navy immediately after the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. He was not immune to discrimination against gays in the military, however, and ultimately received an undesirable discharge on January 5, 1944.

Beebe and Clegg went back to work together following Clegg’s military career, spending three summers in Carson City, Nevada, writing in their private rail car the Gold Coast. Leaving the east for good in 1950, they moved to the John Piper House in Virginia City, Nevada. The pair generally was accepted in Virginia City, even purchasing the town a fire engine and making efforts to revitalize the region. While in Virginia City they reactivated and began publishing the Territorial Enterprise, a weekly newspaper that achieved high circulation in the West.

Their prodigious literary output continued until Beebe’s death from heart failure on February 4, 1966, at their winter home in Hillsborough, California. Clegg took his own life on August 25, 1979, a significant date. Both Chuck, as he was familiarly known, and Lucius lived exactly 23,069 days—not a coincidence, but a testament to the intense bond between the two.