Though he’s been dead for 40 years, Cole Porter has continued to have a huge influemce on music. “In a sense, Porter has never been away, though his reputation rests mainly on songs he wrote between the late 1920s and late 1940s, and he died in 1964 at age 73. He’s remained an icon in cabaret music and gay culture by virtue of both his music and his glamorous, if contradictory, lifestyle.”