Russell Harty and Jamie O'Neill - Dating, Gossip, News, Photos list. Help us build our profile of Russell Harty and Jamie O'Neill!
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While living in England and on holiday to London in 1982, O'Neill met BBC Host/television presenter Russell Harty. O'Neill was 20, Harty 48. They became a couple and soon shared a home in London and at Rose Cottage, Harty's home in Giggleswick, Yorkshire.
Together for six years, Harty encouraged O'Neill to write, not only reading his manuscripts; but secretly mailing them to publishers, securing a book deal was with Weidenfeld Publishers, for O'Neill. Soon after, Harty passed away of AIDS related Hepatitis B.
Following Harty's death British tabloid press pursued the story of their relationship, splashing a nude photograph of O'Neill, that he done modeling, when he first came to London earn some money, across the front of the Sunday Mirror. O'Neill was also offered £50,000 for interviews about their private. He turned them all down.
It was the news coverage of Harty's death how O'Neill's parents in Ireland found out that their son was gay. O'Neill saying later that his mother did not have a picture of him up in their home after that, for fear people would ask, if or when her son would marry and have to tell them he was gay. Tough enough being outed to your family through the tabloid, things would get worse when members of the Harty family threw him out of the cottage shared with his partner, burned all his clothes and left him homeless. “I had nothing. They burnt my clothes. They stole my car. They even wanted my dog.” They did, however relent and allowed him to take his and Harty's and pet dog, Paddy with him.
A year after Harty's passing, his belief in O'Neill's writing came to fruition with when O'Neill's first novel, Disturbance, was published; his second Kilbrack followed in 1990. Both novels had been mostly finished while Harty was atill alive. When asked about those two early novels during the press for his book, "At Swim, Two Boys", O'Neill said “I don’t consider them to be mine. They’re from what I would consider a previous incarnation.”
Grieving for Harty and alone in London, he struggled with depression and his writing. He went into therapy and ended up leaving both his agent and publisher. He decide to take on a job as a night receptionist at the Cassell Hospital, a psychiatric institution in Surrey. He worked there for 10 years.
