Remembering Denny
The Yale golden boy everyone expected to become president, and why he killed himself instead.
Denny Hansen was a Rhodes Scholar and swimming star in Yale’s class of 1957, photographed by Life magazine, expected by everyone to end up in the White House. In 1991 he killed himself in his garage. Trillin, a classmate, went back through Hansen’s life to work out what the expectation had done to him, and how much of it turned on being gay in a decade that made that unspeakable.
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Thomas Mallon
Trillin was also a member of that class, and Remembering Denny is his meditative investigation of the depressed life that led Hansen to suicide in 1991.
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