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Ralph G. Moritz papers, Coll2008-040, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, Los Angeles, California.
Date and method of acquisition unknown.
Collection processed by Michael P. Palmer, June 24, 2008.
Ralph G. Moritz was born in Waterloo, Iowa, on November 16, 1912. He attended the University of Northern Iowa, in Cedar Rapids, in the 1930s. He became a librarian; his last known position was Chief Catalog Librarian at California State University, Los Angeles. His special interests were travel and music, and from at least the 1960s onwards he made several trips a year to music festivals and performances both in the United States and Europe.
The collection consists of Moritz's travel diaries and the letters he received from Octavian Brown. Moritz traveled extensively to Europe, where he attended music festivals and performances. The diaries consist largely of typewritten outlines of Moritz's daily activities-including, from the late 1970s, his sexual encounters-on his travels. The letters from Brown form the bulk of the collection. Samuel Potter, aka "Octavian", Brown (1916-1995) was an expatriate American living in Rome, who in the 1970s and early 1980s ran a small bed and breakfast and male bordello, that Moritz frequented, out of his apartment. The letters, written in an engaging, breezy style, detail the trials, tribulations, and pleasures of life in Rome, and are filled with gossip about the lives of his "boys" and his clients, from the unnamed to the famous. In 1982, Brown moved to Santa Barbara, California, where he died in 1995. The miscellaneous materials include a letter on family matters from C. E. Moritz, of Denver, Colorado, a 1985 letter to
The following terms have been used to index the description of this collection in the library's online public access catalog.