to New York in 1904, he filled his apartment with his Guatemala purchases: rich velvet and damask vestments, ornate carved church paneling, reliquaries, gilded candlesticks, and other rare ornaments. He made "good money" selling them to visitors. In 1905, Mizner visited Spain for the first time; after that, he visited Europe every year. After relocating to Florida, these trips occurred during the "off" season. In 1924, Mizner went on a buying trip to Spain, scouring antique shops, buying "furiously" thousands of items: wrought iron, tapestries, furniture, grillwork, and whole staircases. He was accompanied by one of his clients, Eleanor Cosden, who is reported to have recalled "the guide in the church in Toledo who, Addison pointed out, got several things wrong," and that "he even straightened out our host, the Duke of Alba!" (The Duke of Alba, one of the richest men in Spain, visited Palm Beach in 1926.) In 1926 he went on a similar trip, cut short by the financial crisis. Mizner's homosexuality Mizner has been described as "an early influential gay man in South Florida," "the gay father of South Florida architecture." He is portrayed as openly gay in the Stephen Sondheim — John Weidman musical Road Show. Mizner described himself as a "lifelong bachelor," after "a few unsuccessful relationships with women in California and New York." One modern researcher says that "Wilson loved women sexually; Addison cherished their friendship and companionship." He tells us, in The Many Mizners, that he "fell desperately in love with Bertha Doffer", but the love did not last long, as she "had fallen out of a window at the Waldorf-Astoria and had been instantly killed". At the same time, when he was living in San Francisco, he had "an emotional relationship with a young man, Jack Baird". He described a buying trip to Europe with Margaret "Peggy" Thayer, "a wicked little devil", as "the happiest two months of my life." (His story that he had had a "love affair with the president [of Guatemala]'s daughter" is fictitious.) Although at that period he could not be open, his biographer Caroline Seebohm said "his mature sexual taste was for very young men," "pretty boys with pretensions," and he had "a series of young boys in tow" during his later years. One of these "young and handsome" men was Alex Waugh, who accompanied Mizner on buying trips and ended up manager of the antiques