On the one sunny day of the greyest month since 1855, I made a pilgrimage to the home of Edward Gorey near the beaches of Cape Cod. Gorey was a lonely sort whose delightfully morbid stories and drawings have enchanted the world with their timeless sense of deranged Edwardian decorum. Before Gorey retired to the comforts of New England seclusion, he lived in a studio in Manhattan, where he dressed mainly in large fur coats and attended the ballet daily.

Living in his Elephant House with his many cats, Gorey led a life tinged with the sadness of a talented man who was never able to come out of the closet. He wrote a pornographic picture book, The Curious Sofa, under the pseudonym “Ogden Weary.” It makes mention of “particularly well-formed” male characters at every turn. At least Gorey found a way to express something of his hidden passions in his art.

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