An Open Secret: The Family Story of Robert and John Gregg Allerton

Abstract

In 1960, at the age of eighty-six, Robert Allerton adopted his longtime partner, John Gregg. Allerton was twenty-five years Gregg's senior, and they had been referring to themselves as adopted father and son since the 1920s. Although not a well-known practice, over the course of the twentieth century, some gay couples used adult adoption to secure family rights. This strategy accelerated significantly in the 1980s when Aids (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome) made questions of the legal recognition of queer partnerships desperately pressing. As Nicholas L. Syrett argues, Allerton's enormous wealth made this choice both more necessary and easier to accomplish. With the press breathlessly covering the antics of America's wealthy, Allerton's private life, first in Chicago and then in Hawaii, received more scrutiny than that of a middle-class or working-class man. Allerton and Gregg needed a way to explain why two single men would choose to live together that deflected attention away from what was obviously true, but deeply stigmatized—that they were a couple. But wealth also made their cover easier to enforce. As it turns out, no one in their life—family who might inherit or employees whom they paid for services—had any interest in challenging their explanation of their relationship. Syrett's portrait of Allerton and Gregg is a masterful intervention into both family history and the history of queerness.