Chris and Don: A Love Story

The talk of gay literary and film circles these days is the documentary Chris and Don: A Love Story (opening for a one-week run at the E Street Cinema this Friday, 7/25), chronicling the over-30-year relationship between author Christopher Isherwood and artist Don Bachardy. Isherwood—who wrote the at-the-time quietly revolutionary gay novel A Single Man (1964) and is perhaps most famous for The Berlin Stories, which were adapted into the movie Cabaret—lived with Bachardy from 1953 until he died in 1986. As a couple, they garnered attention not only for their tremendous individual talents, but for the great contrast in their ages, the 48-year-old Isherwood together with the 18-year-old Bachardy.

In his anecdotal memoir Dropping Names (a deliciously wicked book, by the way: check it out), the gay writer Daniel Curzon, who was friends with the couple, describes the pair as they appeared in the mid-1970s:

“When I got to Isherwood’s house I met Don Bachardy, his lover of many years—a man thirty years his junior. This was in 1974, and to be truthful, I didn’t know who Bachardy was, knew nothing about his drawings. He was slim and attractive, his hair just going white then. He had adopted Chris’s British accent.

Isherwood and Don were a lovely couple. I was pleased at how thoughtful they were to each other. I guess they’d had their troubles over the years, but when I knew them they seemed idyllic. By that I mean they didn’t squabble, pick at each other, upstage each other, or any of the other things I’ve seen long-term couples, both gay and straight, do.”

Chris and Don focuses on this coupledom, beginning with Isherwood’s life up until his meeting with Bachardy, then recreating the pair’s relationship through diaries, archival footage, and current interviews with Bachardy, still going strong as an artist in his 70s. Don also narrates the film, which has been earning raves as narratively innovative and emotionally uplifting. Don’t miss it during its brief D.C. run.