A brick at the Saranac laboratory has been dedicated in the name of Gerald Haxton by Historic Saranac Lake.Born: 1892 in San Francisco.
Died: c. November 1944
Frederick Gerald Haxton was the longtime secretary and lover of novelist and playwright W. Somerset Maugham. A number of Maugham's fictional characters are said to be based on Haxton.
He and Maugham met in 1914 at the outbreak of World War I, when they were serving as part of the Red Cross ambulance unit in French Flanders.
In November 1915, Haxton was caught by British police in a homosexual act. Although acquitted in a British court on charges of gross indecency, Haxton was deported, and Maugham and Haxton spent many years traveling abroad, on the Riviera, in India, Southeast Asia, China and the Pacific. Maugham regarded Haxton as indispensable to his success as a writer; Maugham himself was painfully shy, and Haxton, an extrovert, gave him access to the human material that fed Maugham's fiction.
Haxton later cured at the Alta Vista Lodge.
