Historical pederastic relationships

Over the course of history there have been a number of pederastic relationships between adult men and adolescent boys which have become part of the historical record. In some of these cases one or both members are notable historical figures, while in other cases the individuals involved are only minor personages, often remembered only for this particular aspect of their lives.

Though all of these relationships are by definition homoerotic in nature, the individuals involved do not necessarily identify themselves as homosexuals.^[1] The nature of the relationships have ranged from overtly sexual to what is now commonly referred to as platonic,^[2] sometimes out of religious principle.^[3]

Contents 1 Limitations of the historical record 2 Known or presumed pederastic relationships 2.1 Middle Ages 2.2 Pre-modern period 2.3 17th century 2.4 18th century 2.5 19th century 2.6 20th century 3 See also 4 Sources 5 References 6 External links

Limitations of the historical record

In the pre-modern and modern West, their equivocal status has made pederastic relationships difficult to document, since it was in the interest of both participants to keep the relationship secret. According to historian Michael Kaylor,

[S]ince in Victorian England ‘homosexual behaviour became subject to increased legal penalties, notably by the Labouchère Amendment of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, which extended the law to cover all male homosexual acts, whether committed in public or private’, expecting ‘verifiable data’ concerning their unconventional desires is the ultimate scholarly presumption.^[4]

Another obstacle to the documentation of such relationships has been the destruction of "incriminating" personal and public records, either to "preserve the honor" of the individuals involved, or as retribution against their perceived transgressions.

Nevertheless some of these relationships have become public knowledge, usually because one of the members disclosed it as part of his artistic production, or because the relationship came to the attention of the authorities and the legal record was preserved. In recent years, with the greater public acceptance of homosexual expression, such information has become somewhat easier to come by, especially in those cases where the relationship is no longer illegal.

Known or presumed pederastic relationships

In the following list the couples are listed in chronological order, and the name of the older partner precedes that of the younger. Although many more men are known to have engaged in such relationships, only those instances in which the name of the younger partner is known are included. In keeping with various traditions which allow (and actually privilege) chaste pederastic relationships (See Philosophy of pederasty and Nazar ila'l-murd), included below are also relationships in which there is evidence of an erotic component even in the absence of actual sexual relations. The more famous partner is usually the older one but not always so.

This is an incomplete list, which may never be able to satisfy certain standards for completion. You can help by expanding it with sourced additions.

Middle Ages

• Waliba ibn al-Hubab and Abu Nuwas
  • Waliba was a teacher of poetry to his beloved,^[5] who was to far surpass him in talent and renown. He took the young man (b. 756 C.E.) to Kufa, where he lived an openly gay and bohemian lifestyle,^[6] to live with him as his apprentice.^[7] Abu Nuwas went on to become a prolific writer of mudhakkarat (boy love) poetry.^[8]

• Roger de Pont L'Evêque, Archbishop of York and Walter
  • According to John of Salisbury, Roger had been involved with a beautiful boy who, upon growing up, regretted the relationship and blamed the Archbishop, who had the young man tried and had his eyes gouged out. When he persisted with his accusations, he had him tried again and hanged. The scandal broke in 1152, and Roger escaped his deserved punishment through the efforts of Thomas Becket.^[9]

• Mahmud of Ghazni and Ayaz
  • The two, sultan and slave, are paragons of male love in Islamic culture. Their story depicts the power of love of a man for a youth, where the king becomes a slave to his slave. Mahmud appointed Ayaz ruler of Lahore in 1021.^[10]

• Ibn Ammar and Muhammad Ibn Abbad Al Mutamid
  • In 1053 the 19-year-old poet Ibn Ammar was appointed tutor to the 13-year-old future ruler of Sevilla, with whom he promptly fell in love. Separated from the boy by his father, they were later reunited but eventually fell out. Al Mutamid killed his old lover with his own hands in 1086, only to then give him a sumptuous funeral.^[11]

• Muhammad Ibn Abbad Al Mutamid and Saif
  • "Henri Peres tells us: 'Sodomy is practised in all the courts of the Muluk al-Tawaif. It is sufficient to point out here the love of al-Mutamid for Ibn Ammar and for his page Saif...'"^[12]

• Raoul II, Archbishop of Tours and Jean, Archbishop of Orléans
  • Raoul appointed his adolescent lover (also known as "Flora") in 1097 to the post in Orléans over the vehement objections of other prelates.^[13]

• Ailred of Rievaulx and Simon
  • Ailred, the abbot of the Cistercian monastery of Rievaulx who was in his mid-twenties in 1135, was in love with a young monk named Simon, about 14 years of age. The relationship is thought to have remained chaste.^[14][15]

Pre-modern period

• Mehmed II and Radu cel Frumos
  • While a hostage at the Ottoman court in the 1440s, Radu (whose epithet, "cel Frumos" means "the Handsome"), younger brother of Vlad III the Impaler, became the beloved of the Sultan, after first refusing his favors and wounding him with his own sword.^[16]

• Marsilio Ficino and Giovanni Cavalcanti
  • Ficino lived with the youth at his villa for many years, only separating briefly in 1473, occasion of ardent love letters.^[17]

• Leonardo da Vinci and Gian Giacomo Caprotti da Oreno (Il Salaino)
  • An attractive youth with beautiful hair who delighted and exasperated Leonardo ("ladro, bugiardo, ostinato, ghiotto") Salai entered his service in 1490 at 10 and remained for thirty years. His master spoiled the boy with money, food and clothes, and used him as a model for his Saint John the Baptist, a painting related to an erotic charcoal drawing by the artist.^[18] Leonardo's physical and emotional attraction to other males have been identified in his art. His relationship with Salai has been seen as homoerotic since the Renaissance, by such writers as Gian Paolo Lomazzo, Walter Pater and Kenneth Clark who, writing in the 1930s, stated that the relationship between the two was of a kind "honored in Classical times and partly tolerated in the Renaissance."^[19][20].

• Babur and Baburi
  • According to Babur's autobiography, some time around the year 1500,

    In those leisurely days I discovered in myself a strange inclination, nay! as the verse says, I maddened and afflicted myself" for a boy in the camp-bazaar, his very name, Baburi, fitting in.... From time to time Baburi used to come to my presence but out of modesty and bashfulness, I could never look straight at him; how then could I make conversation and recital? In my joy and agitation I could not thank him (for coming); how was it possible for me to reproach him with going away? What power had I to command the duty service to myself? One day, during that time of desire and passion when I was going with companions along a lane and suddenly met him face to face, I got into such a state of confusion that I almost went right off. To look straight at him or put words together was impossible.... In that frothing up of desire and passion, and under that stress of youthful folly, I used to wander, barehead, bare-foot, through street and lane, orchard and vineyard.^[21][22]

• Benedetto Varchi and Giovanni de' Pazzi
  • Varchi's first love affair, around 1525, was with Giovanni, the adolescent son of a local aristocrat. The father had Varchi knifed upon finding his son stole out of the house to spend his nights with his lover. Varchi survived to have other lovers.^[23]

• Nicholas Udall and Thomas Cheyney
  • Udall, headmaster at Eton College resigned in 1541 after confessing to having "committed buggery" with his pupil, for which he spent a short time in Marshalsea gaol.^[24][25][26]

• Pope Julius III and Cardinal Innocenzo Ciocchi Del Monte
  • the 16th-century historian Onofrio Panvinio asserted that Julius was "puerorum amoribus implicitus" (entagled in the love of boys).^[27] The future pope "picked up" (the phrase is used by the Catholic Encyclopedia) the illiterate 13 or 14-year-old street urchin in 1547, and the resulting scandal almost cost Julius the election to the papacy, becoming a staple of anti-papal polemics for over a century. Innocenzo was 17 when Julius became pope in 1550, and despite the boy's evident unsuitability for high office Julius' first act was to raise him to the rank of cardinal, with benefices which made him one of the richest individuals in Europe. Julius, awaiting Innocenzo's arrival in Rome to receive his cardinal's hat, "showed the impatience of a lover awaiting a mistress", and boasted of the boy's bedroom prowess. Gossip called the boy Pope Julius' "Ganymede," and the Venetian ambassador reported that Innocenzo shared the pope's bed. Innocenzo fell out of favour with the Church after his patron's death, and was buried beneath an unmarked slab beside the del Monte chapel at the church of San Pietro in Montorio, Rome - Julius himself is buried inside the Vatican, not far from the tomb of John-Paul II.^[28] to each other, as well as of the ignominy that attended Innocenzo.^[29][30]

• Theodore Beza and Audebert
  • Among his 1548 Juvenilia poems was one which was understood to point to his bisexuality, in which he compared his passion for two young lovers, "little Candida" and "little Audebert," concluding he loved Audebert the best. Later this poem would be held against him in particular and against Calvinists in general as a proof of moral failing.^[31][32]

• Benedetto Varchi and Giulio della Stufa
  • Giulio, the subject of many passionate letters around 1552, complained to his teacher to send fewer letters and more subdued in language, since his father had read one and exclaimed, "This is nonsense! What kind of love is this?"^[33]

• Marc Antoine Muret and Memmius Frémiot
  • The two lovers had to flee Toulouse in 1554, where they were later burned in effigy as sodomites. Muret and his young pupil had been warned of the danger by a friend in parliament who sent him only a verse of Virgil: "Oh, flee this cruel land, flee the bitter shore."^[34]

• Benvenuto Cellini and Fernando di Giovanni di Montepulciano
  • In 1556, when Cellini dismissed his apprentice, the latter denounced the sculptor, according to the trial records, for having: "Cinque anni or sono ha tenuto per suo ragazzo Fernando di Giovanni di Montepulciano, giovanetto con el quale ha usato carnalmente moltissime volte col nefando vitio della soddomia, tenendolo in letto come sua moglie." (For five years or so he kept as his boy Fernando di Giovanni di Montepulciano, a youth whom he has used carnally numerous times by means of the abject vice of sodomy, keeping him in bed as his wife.^[35][36][37]

• Shah Hussain and Madho Lal
  • The love of Shah Hussain, a Punjabi weaver, for a Brahmin boy called "Madho" or "Madho Lal" is famous, and they are often referred to as a single person with the composite name of "Madho Laal Hussain." A mystic poet and talented musician, his love for the Madho is seen as a stepping stone to his fana, absorption in God. The culmination of their relationship was the conversion of the Hindu Madho to Islam. Today Shah Hussain is one of the major patron saints of Lahore. Madho's tomb lies next to Hussain's in the shrine.^[38]

• Anthony Bacon and Isaac Burgades
  • While living in Montauban in 1587, the elder brother of Francis Bacon was convicted of sodomy with a page who at the trial declared that "there was nothing wrong with sodomy" and that "Theodore Beza of Geneva approved of it."^[39] The two escaped conviction and probable death by burning only due to the intercession of Henry IV of France.^[40]

• Prospero Farinacci and Berardino Rocchi
  • The Italian lawyer and judge, noted for his harsh sentencing of sodomites, was himself accused in 1595 of repeated sexual relations with Berardino Rocchi, a 16-year-old page in the Altemps palace, where Farinacci lived. He was excused of the crime by Pope Clement VIII, who famously made a pun of Farinacci name (which alludes to "flour" in Italian) by claiming that "The flour is good but the bag it's in is not so clean." ^[41]

17th century

• Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio and Francesco ('Cecco') Boneri
  • The youthful Cecco modelled for many of Caravaggio's most famous paintings, including his 1602 Amor Vincit Omnia, and may be the articst known as Cecco del Caravaggio.^[42]

• James I of England and Robert Carr, 1st Earl of Somerset
  • The 41-year-old king fell in love with the 17-year-old ex-page at a 1606 jousting bout. Their love lasted several years, though as the boy matured the king was powerless to prevent Carr's “creeping back and withdrawing yourself from lying in my chamber, notwithstanding my many hundred times earnest soliciting you to the contrary.”^[43]

• Francis Bacon and Godrick
  • Acording to the Puritan moralist Simonds d'Ewes, Bacon, after his fall from power, released most of his servants but "kept still one Godrick, a very effeminate-faced youth, to be his catamite and bedfellow."^[44]

• Cyrano de Bergerac and Chapelle
  • After befriending the 17-year-old Chapelle in 1643,^[45] de Bergerac passed him on to his friend d'Assoucy, another in his libertine circle.^[46]

• Charles Coypeau d'Assoucy and Chapelle
  • D'Assoucy and Chapelle fell deeply in love. As d'Assoucy later recalled: "I could not live without him, and he could hardly live without me."^[47]

• Charles, marquis du Bellay, and Richard de la Monnerie
  • Du Bellay, when already of an advanced age and hunchbacked obtained in 1661 his young valet in exchange for fifty louis d'or from the soon to be notorious Jacques Chausson, who ended his days on a pyre for various sodomitical acts. The marquis, also known as the Prince of Yvetot, died without issue, thus extinguishing the line.^[48]

• Molière and Michel Baron
  • Molière met the young actor, with whom he fell in love, in February of 1666. He hired the boy into his troupe and had him live in his house, a matter that created conflict with Armande, Molière's young wife. Gossip had it that Baron eventually cheated on Molière, just as his wife had done.^[49][50]

• Henry III of France and Anne de Joyeuse
  • Known as "The King's King" for his influence over his royal patron,^[51] de Joyeuse was one of the two principal mignons of the king, having first won the king's favor at the age of 14 in 1674.^[52]

• Philippe de Lorraine and Louis de Bourbon, Count of Vermandois
  • Louis, the 14-year-old bastard son of Louis XIV, fell into royal disfavour in 1682 upon discovery of his relationship with the lover of Monsieur, the king's brother, and was sent away from court by the anti-sodomitical king. A year later he was given the chance to redeem himself at the siege of Courtray. Ill with a high fever, he joined the battle despite the advice of the royal physician, and succumbed to the disease shortly thereafter. The king did not mourn him.^[53]

• Jean-Baptiste Lully and Brunet
  • In 1685 the 53-year-old composer was denounced for his dalliances with his young page, who was said to be lovelier than Cupid, and who had been preceded by another boy, Lafarge.^[54] Brunet, punished by being confined to the Saint Lazare monastery, confessed to Roman orgies involving so many of the great lords that all was hushed up. ^[55][56]

18th century

• William Thomas Beckford and William Courtenay
  • Beckford, 19, fell in love with Courtenay, 10, nicknamed Kitty and "one of the most beautiful boys in England," in 1779, a relationship which lasted a number of years. Both pursued lifelong involvement with boys. In a letter to Courtenay's aunt he describes his feelings: "You know, he was never so happy as when he reclined by my side listening to my wild musick or the strange stories which sprang up in my fancy for his amusement. Those were the most delightful hours of my existence."^[57][58]

• William Thomas Beckford and the Marquis of Marialva
  • While in Portugal in 1787 where he had taken refuge after his affair with Courtenay had become a public matter, Beckford entered into a relationship with the fifteen year old son of Marialva. The young marquis' father remained quite fond of Beckford, hoping to effect a marriage between Henriqueta, his illegitimate daughter, and the rich Englishman.^[59]

19th century

• Ali Pasha and Athanasi Vaya
  • A native of Tepeleni, the same town as Ali Pasha, the Greek youth eventually rose to be the most trusted subordinate of the Pasha.^[60]

• Cheng I and Cheung Po Tsai
  • Cheng I was a pirate of the Chinese coast, who kidnapped the 15 years old Chang Pao in 1801. Chang Pao later became the leader of Cheng's pirate fleet.^[61]

• Lord Byron and Nicolò Giraud
  • Lord Byron fell in love with the French-Italian lad in 1810, when the boy was 15. ^[62] "It is about two hours since, that, after informing me he was most desirous to follow him (that is me) over the world, he concluded by telling me it was proper for us not only to live, but 'morire insieme'. The latter I hope to avoid - as much of the former as he pleases."^[63] Byron wrote to a friend that he and the boy were having anal sex (in code, "the Pl. & opt. C." short for "coitum plenum et optabilem").^[64]

• Franz Desgouttes and Daniel Hammeler
  • Daniel moved in with his 25-year-old lover, a Swiss lawyer, at the age of 16 in 1810, and lived with him for seven years, until he was murdered by Frantz in a fit of jealousy. His lover was executed by being broken on the wheel, an event that galvanized the early Swiss homosexual emancipation movement.^[65]

• John Hepburn and Thomas White
  • The two lovers were hanged for sodomy at Newgate on 7 March 1811, though Hepburn protested his innocence to the bitter end. The elder was a 46-year-old ensign in the British Navy, the younger a 16-year-old drummer boy.^[66] They were "launched into eternity" before "a vast concourse of spectators among whom were numbered memebers of the royal family."^[67] Their relationship had come to light as a result of the Vere Street scandal.

• Edward John Eyre and Wylie
  • The Australian explorer met Wylie in 1840 and took him as companion, together with two other Aboriginee boys and a European, on his 1841 expedition across the Nullarbor Plain. Afterwards he formed repeated close associations with such boys.^[68]

• James Brooke and Charles (Doddy) Grant
  • Brooke, Rajah of Sarawak, a man uninterested in women and with a penchant for falling in love with adolescent boys, fell in love in 1848 with a young recruit, Charles Grant (grandson of the seventh Earl of Elgin), 16 at the time. His love was reciprocated by the boy.^[69]

• Charles John Vaughan and Alfred Pretor
  • Vaughn, headmaster at Harrow School, in 1851 was engaged in a long-standing love affair with Pretor, the head boy at the school, a youth known as "the house tart."^[70] Pretor boasted of the affair to his friend, John Addington Symonds. The latter eventually divulged matters to his father who blackmailed Vaughn into resigning. Pretor never forgave John his indiscretion.^[71]

• Émile Petitot and Baptiste
  • While posted on a mission to the Chipewyan nation, Father Petitot "formed an excessive attachment" to a young native boy who worked for the mission. Bishop Grandin determined that things had gone too far: He had in his possession an intimate letter from Petitot to Baptiste, and Father Petitot had committed "indiscretions." He sent Father Petitot to take over the mission at Fort Resolution, where one of the Father's first acts as director was to ask Grandin to transfer the boy to his station. Grandin refused, citing Petitot's "fatal attachment to a child." Two years later Father Petitot was assigned to Fort Good Hope, where it became known among the traders and the natives that Father Petitot' preferred lover (though not the only one) was a fifteen year old native boy in the employ of the mission.^[72]

• John Addington Symonds and Norman Moor
  • Symonds was introduced to the schoolboy in 1868 by a common friend, and for Norman's sake sought an appointment as teacher at his school, Clifton College.^[73]

• Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud
  • Both major poets, they became lovers in 1871, at age 27 and 17 respectively. ^[74][75]

• Reginald Brett, 2nd Viscount Esher and Ernlé Johnson
  • Inspired by his tutor and close friend William Johnson Cory, Brett engages the 15-year-old Ernlé in a romantic but chaste mentorship of many years duration starting in 1874.^[76]

• Oscar Browning and George Curzon
  • After 15 years a master at Eton College, Browing, a former student of William Johnson-Cory,^[77] was dismissed in 1875 over his "overly amorous"^[78] (but purportedly chaste) relationship with the 16-year-old Curzon.^[79][80]

• Paul Verlaine and Lucien Létinois
  • At the age of thirty four, the poet fell in love with his seventeen year old student, with whom he had a relationship of five years' duration, ended by the death of the young man. Verlaine eulogized his beloved in his collection of poems Amour.^[81]

• Wilhelm von Gloeden and Pancrazio Bucini
  • Von Gloeden, a famous fin de siècle photographer of Italian youths, hired Bucini in the early 1880s, when the boy was 13 or 14. Bucini, called "il Moro," was his lover, assistant and finally his heir. In 1936 Bucini, as curator of the collection, successfully defended himself against the charge of keeping pornography, accusation made by the Italian fascists, who destroyed most of the remaining three thousand picture plates.^[82]

• Arthur Rimbaud and Djami Ouddei
  • While in Ethiopia in 1883 the adventurer hired a local boy of 14 to 16 years of age who became his constant companion for the remainder of his life in Africa. After his return to France, while on his death bed, "it was Djami's name that was always on his lips when he finally sank into unconsciousness."^[83]

• Walt Whitman and Bill Duckett
  • Whitman's teenage camerado lived with him for a number of years, and also served him as driver of his carriage. He also posed for Thomas Eakins' collection of erotic male nudes.^[84][85][86]

• Oscar Wilde and Robbie Ross
  • Ross, at 17 a journalist and future literary executor to Wilde, seduced his 32-year-old mentor in 1886. ^[87][88]

• Charles Kains Jackson and Cecil Castle
  • Jackson, active in the turn-of-the-century Uranian circles had the 14-year-old Castle as his boyfriend in 1888. The boy also posed nude for Henry Scott Tuke's The Bathers and for Frederick Rolfe's camera. (Rictor Norton on British pederastic art) They remained lifelong friends. Upon Castle's death in 1922 Jackson published a collection of poems, Finibus Cantat Amor, and two years later another, titled Lysis, in memory of his friend.^[89]

• Lord Arthur Somerset and Algernon Alleys
  • Somerset, an intimate of the Prince of Wales, fell in love with a London telegraph boy who moonlighted at Charles Hammond's male brothel at 19 Cleveland Street. He wrote the lad a number of incriminating letters, which, once revealed in the investigation of the Cleveland Street scandal, prompted his self-imposed exile on the continent in 1889.^[90]

• John Ellingham Brooks and Somerset Maugham
  • Brooks, an impoverished British pianist about 26 at the time, had an affair in 1890 with the 16-year-old Maugham in Heidelberg, where the latter was at university. It was the boy's first sexual experience.^[91]

• Eric Stenbock and Norman O'Neill
  • Count Stenbock met the 16-year-old O'Neill on the upper deck of a London omnibus in 1891, where he immediately fell in love with the youth. Two years later he assisted O'Neill with his studies at conservatory in Germany, and left him £1500 in his will.^[92]

• Charles D. Williamson and Salvatore
  • Williamson, a former pupil of Johnson Cory and former beloved of Reginald Brett, took Catholic orders and moved to Italy, where in 1892 he developed a relationship with a 15-year-old youth whom he also appointed as houseboy. They were together for four years, until the boy's death.^[93]

• André Gide and Ali
  • The first homoerotic encounter of the young writer, in North Africa, with a young Arab.^[94]

• John Gambril Nicholson and William Alexander (Alec) Melling
  • One of the poet's boyish muses, Melling was the dedicatee of Nicholsen's collection of Uranian poems, A Chaplet of Southernwood, published in 1896.^[95]

• John Gambril Nicholson and Frank Victor Rushforth
  • In his Dead Roses the Uranian poet hides the name of his 13-year-old beloved:

But art is victor still through all the ages
And renders evergreen our sunny hours:
Key to my verse you are; and may its meaning
Every time you turn my volume’s pages
Rush forth to greet you like the scent of flowers!^[96]

• Hector MacDonald and Alaister Robertson
  • At the time of the Battle of Paardeberg in 1900, MacDonald's principal friend was Alaister Robertson, a Glenalmond schoolboy from Aberdeen whose photograph he kept on his desk and with whom he corresponded.^[97][98]

20th century

• J. C. Leyendecker and Charles Beach
  • The illustrator met his lover in 1901, when the youth was 15. He immortalized the boy - and later the man - by using him as the principal model for The Arrow Collar Man ad campaign. Their relationship lasted fifty years.^[99]

• Lytton Strachey and Duncan Grant
  • The two, former childhood friends, became lovers in 1902 when Grant was a house guest of the Stracheys in London. He was 17 and Strachey 22. "When he was 17, it was decided that he would join the vast household of his London cousins, the Stracheys. It was not long before Lytton Strachey, five years Grant's senior and openly homosexual, declared himself besotted with his handsome cousin. After several rebuffs -- legend has it Grant told Strachey, Relations we may be: have them, we may not -- Strachey finally had his way, becoming the first of Grant's many male lovers." ^[100]

• Jacques d'Adelswärd-Fersen and Loulou Locré
  • Loulou was a pupil at the Lycée Carnot, involved with Fersen in 1903.^[101]

• Stefan George and Max Kronberger (Maximin)
  • A chaste love (one of many for George) which lasted one year, till the boy's death at 16 in 1904. George was then creating a cult that lifted Maximin to a godlike status. ^[102]

• Jacques d'Adelswärd-Fersen and Nino Cesarini
  • The baron, 24, met the 15-year-old newspaper boy in Rome, 1904. They lived in Capri till Fersen's 1923 suicide.^[103]

• Frederick Rolfe and Ermenegildo Vianello
  • The writer, also known as "Baron Corvo" met the boy, a young gondolier of around 17 years of age, in Venice in 1908

• John Moray Stuart-Young and Thomas Olman Todd
  • Described as "the love of his life," Tommy Todd, son of the Sunderland occultist by the same name, visited Stuart-Young during his school vacations. Their relationship deepened over the years.^[104]

• T. E. Lawrence and Selim Ahmed (Dahoum)
  • For love of a Syrian boy of 15 met in 1912 at 24, Lawrence fought and won Arab independence. As he told Robert Graves, the boy was the only person he ever loved. Graves also identifies Ahmed as the mysterious dedicatee of Lawrence's magnum opus, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom which reads "To S.A. I liked a particular Arab very much, and I thought that freedom for the race would be an acceptable present." On the flyleaf of a book of poetry Lawrence wrote, "I wrought for him freedom to lighten his sad eyes, but he had died waiting for me. So I threw my gift away, and now not anywhere will I find rest and peace."^[105][106]

• Philip Streatfeild and Noel Coward
  • Streatfeild, a 35-year-old painter and member of the Uranian Society, took the 14-year-old child actor in and introduced him to high society in 1913. Coward is thought to have modeled for his painting of nude boys on the beach. "His "friendship" at age 14 with painter Philip Streatfield (the only relationship about which the program is somewhat coy - homosexuality may have reached a greater level of acceptance today, but man-boy sex is still taboo) led to a connection with aristocrat Mrs. Astley-Cooper, and indeed, residence at the Cooper estate."^[107][108]

• André Gide and Marc Allégret
  • Became lovers in 1916 when they were 47 and 15, remained friends for life. Allégret was the son of Elie Allégret, best man at Gide's 1895 wedding, and later became a renowned filmmaker. ^[109]

• Forrest Reid and Kenneth Hamilton
  • From 1916 until 1920 the two were linked by an intimate friendship, interrupted by the boy, now 16, leaving to join the Merchant Service and then, at 18, cattle ranching in Australia. Shortly thereafter he rode off alone into the bush, where he is thought to have died.^[110]

• John Henry Mackay and Atti
  • Mackay fell deeply in love with the Berlin schoolboy in early 1916 during a school holiday.^[111]

• E. M. Forster and Mohammed el-Adl
  • Forster met the 17-year-old boy in Ramlah around 1917. Their love served as inspiration for much of the writer's later work. (http://www.emforster.info/pages/cavafy.html)

• Jean Cocteau and Raymond Radiguet (contested)
  • Cocteau met the young poet in 1918 at 29, when the boy was 15 years old. The two collaborated extensively, socialized, and undertook many journeys and vacations together. Cocteau got the youth exempted from military service and exerted his influence to garner the "Nouveau Monde" literary prize for Radiguet's novel, Le Diable au Corps. Many commentators assume that they were lovers.^{[112][113][114][115][116][117]} Their relationship has been placed in the context of "a series of younger lovers and collaborators". ^[118] An anecdote told by Ernest Hemingway has an enraged Cocteau charging Radiguet (known in the Parisian literary circles as "Monsieur Bébé") with decadence for his tryst with a model: "Bébé est vicieuse. Il aime les femmes." ("Baby is depraved. He likes women." [Note the use of the feminine adjective]). The youth actively sought out relationships with women, explaining that ""Je ne veux pas qu'on m'appelle madame Cocteau."^[119] Radiguet also, Hemingway implies, employed his sexuality to advance his career, being a writer "who knew how to make his career not only with his pen but with his pencil," a salacious and phallic allusion.^[120][121] In 1919 Radiguet's father discovered a "compromising correspondence" between Cocteau and his son, giving rise to an exchange of letters in November of that year between the two adults in which Cocteau compared the youth to Rimbaud. In mid-March 1921 he hastened from Paris to join Radiguet (among others, including Georges Auric and Monsieur et Madame Hugo Valentin), who had left alone for Carqueiranne. On the 30th of the same month he replied to his mother, who had commented on this voyage: "Have you not yet understood that my life is spent releasing my instincts, watching them, sorting them once they are out, and forging them to my advantage?" After Radiguet's death (of typhoid fever), Cocteau did not attend the funeral, and takes to his bed prostrated with grief. Later he would say "Since the little lucidity I had I got from him, his death left me without instructions, incapable of leading my life coherently, of sustaining and nourishing my work, of providing for it."^[122][123] After the death of Radiguet, Cocteau began to use opium, to which he became addicted. This reading of the story is contradicted by Cocteau himself (see below)[9]
  • Others contest this interpretation, claiming that it has not been confirmed in any correspondence or writings by Cocteau or those close to both of them, and that Radiguet had any number of well-documented liaisons with women and generally spent his nights alone at the apparments of Max Jacob and Juan Gris, sleeping on the kitchen table or the floor. Cocteau, speaking about Radiguet in a transcription of a television interview made three months before Cocteau's death claimed that he did not particularly care for Radiguet personally and only respected his talent as a writer. Upon Radiguet's death, which was due to typhoid fever complicated by heavy drinking, Cocteau was, in his own words, "paralyzed with stupor and disgust". He did not attend the funeral -- Cocteau did not attend anyone's funeral, as a rule -- but instead immediately left Paris with Sergei Diaghilev for Monte Carlo for a performance of Les Fâcheux by Auric and Les Biches by Poulenc. While Cocteau began to smoke opium after Radiguet's death, to which he became addicted, he himself said that this was pure coincidence and had nothing to do with Radiguet's death.^[124] Cocteau however was guarded in his discussion of his relationships: "Cocteau never put his name to an openly, unashamedly homosexual text and invariably alluded to his male lovers - the most celebrated being the precocious novelist Raymond Radiguet and the actors Jean Marais and Edouard Dermit - as his 'adopted sons' (in the case of Dermit, even formally adopting him)".^[125]

• Karol Szymanowski and Boris Kochno
  • Szymanowski, 37, the foremost early-20th–century Polish composer, met Kochno, 15, a poet and dancer, in Elisavetgrad, 1919. The composer wrote four love poems to the boy, and also gave him a Russian translation of "Symposium," the central chapter of his legendary lost novel, Efebos.^[126]

• Gustav Wyneken and Viktor Behrens
  • In late 1920, Wyneken had a love affair with his 17-year-old student. A year later he was brought to trial and convicted of acts of frottage.^[127]

• Sergei Diaghilev and Boris Kochno
  • Kochno was taken on as lover and secretary by Diaghilev at the age of 17 in February 1921. He remained as librettist and close friend till Sergei's death in 1929.^[128][129] Later, he was ballet director at Monte Carlo.

• Willem de Mérode and Ekko Ubbens
  • Ekko, whom he met in 1922, was one of de Mérode's chaste pederastic friendships.^[130]

• E. M. Forster and Kanaya
  • While serving in 1923 as secretary to the Maharajah of Dewas, Forster entered into a regular relationship with Kanaya, a boy barber provided to him by the Maharajah for sexual purposes "if the boy agrees." The relationship lasted six months.^[131]

• J. R. Ackerley and Ivan Alderman
  • In 1924, having acquired a taste for working class youths, Ackerley spotted the 15-year-old Ivan, who was gay and about to enter art school. The two struck up a relationship, for Ivan his first with an adult, which was to last close to a year.^[132]

• Harry Stack Sullivan and James Inscoe
  • Sullivan, a psychiatrist believed there was a homosexual element to latency age peer relationships and that a failure to go through this stage led to self-loathing, psychosis, and lasting homosexuality. His patients, who were all young male homosexuals as well as schizophrenics, in their positive interactions with the attendants, also young male homosexuals, would heal the wounds from missing male intimacy as pre-people. His own life-long partner came from among his patients, a boy of fifteen who moved in with Sullivan in 1927 and remained as his lover for twenty two years. Jimmie was known to Sullivan's associates as his adopted son, a fiction whereby he could keep his identity in the closet.^[133]

• Christopher Isherwood and Heinz Niedermeyer
  • Their seven year love affair began in spring of 1932, when the boy was 16. Isherwood later wrote that the relatioship was "far more serious than any he had had in his life." ^[134]

• John Henry Mackay and Otto Hannemann
  • At Mackay's death in 1933, Otto was one of the two executors, being the one boy of Mackay who remained a friend for life.^[135]

• Giovanni Comisso and Bruno Pagan
  • In 1933 the novelist Comisso (1895 - 1969) entered into his first significant love relationship with the nephew of a sea captain he had worked for. Initially he took in the boy, who had been released from jail for stealing a bicycle. Eventually their relationship became passionate. It lasted four years, and when the youth left him Comisso was distraught.^[136]

• W. H. Auden and Michael Yates
  • In 1934 the poet took his former pupil, aged 15 and by Auden's own account one of the five great loves of his life, on travels through Europe, and was inspired by him to write some of his tenderest love poems, such as Lullaby ("Lay your sleeping head, my love . . .")^[137][138]

• Benjamin Britten and Wulff Scherchen
  • The composer met the 13-year-old son of Hermann Scherchen in 1934. Their relationship lasted six years, and inspired at least one major work, Young Apollo." Lie back and think of Britten "Adam Mars-Jones finds that John Bridcut has set himself a daunting task in Britten's Children - to prove whether 'Darling Benjamin' was a mentor or a menace to boys"^[139]

• Edgar de Evia and Robert Denning
  • They met in 1942 - de Evia was 32, Denning, 15, their relationship lasted 18 years until Denning met Vincent Fourcade, but they remained close friends for life. ^[140]

• Giovanni Comisso and Guido Bottegal
  • In 1940 Comisso fell in love with the 16-year-old poet, who later was shot by partisans who mistook him for a fascist spy.^[141]

• "Walt" and Rudi van Dantzig
  • The 1945 relationship between the 12-year-old van Dantzig and a Canadian soldier was dramatized in van Dantzig's autobiographical book and movie by the same name, For a Lost Soldier.^[142]

• Bill Tilden and Bobby
  • Tilden, thought at the time of this death to have been the greatest tennis player in history, was apprehended in late 1946 while fondling his 14-year-old friend as the boy was at the wheel of Tilden's car in Beverly Hills. Though Bobby's father, a film studio executive, did not want Tilden incarcerated, and the probation officer concluded that the sexually experienced Bobby "was not injured as much [by Tilden] as are his parents and the general public," he nonetheless served seven months of a one-year sentence.^[143]

• James Baldwin and Lucien Happsberger
  • At the time of his first trip to Paris in 1949, Baldwin met and fell in love with Lucien Happsberger. The boy was a Swiss 17-year-old runaway, and the two remained very close, until Happsberger's marriage three years later, an event that left Baldwin devastated.^[144]

• Sandro Penna and Raffaele
  • The Italian poet took the 14-year-oldd streetboy from Rome to his home in 1956 and lived with him for several years.^[145]

• William S. Burroughs and Kiki
  • Starting in 1954, during the years in which William S. Burroughs was living in Tangier he had a relationship with a Spanish teenager named "Kiki".^[146]

• René Schérer and Guy Hocquenghem
  • Guy Hocquenghem began an affair with his high school philosophy teacher in 1961, when he was 15. The gay activist Hocquenghem and the philosopher Scherer remained lifelong friends.^[147][148]

• Pier Paolo Pasolini and Ninetto Davoli
  • The Italian poet, novelist and film director Pasolini started a relationship with the 15-year-old Davoli in 1963 and let him play many comic roles in his movies. ^[149]

• Roger Peyrefitte and Alain-Philippe Malagnac d'Argens de Villèle
  • Peyrefitte met the 14-year-old aristocrat during the filming of his novel Les Amitiés particulières in late 1963. Their love is described in Notre amour and L'Enfant de cœur. Malagnac lived with him from the age of 16, was adopted by Peyrefitte, and eventually married Amanda Lear.^[150]

• Alexander Ziegler and Stephan (Mutscha)
  • In 1966 the 22-year-old Swiss actor and writer was sentenced to a two and a half year jail term for a love affair with the 16-year-old Stephan, documented in the autobiographical novel Die Konsequenz and later turned into a movie by director Wolfgang Petersen. The movie, shown on German television, had a pivotal role in that country in starting a dialog on the topic of homosexuality, a role analogous to that played by Peyrefitte's films in France.^[151]

• Scott Symons and John
  • Symons left his wife and child and eloped with the 17-year-old John in 1967, traveling through Mexico, chased by the RCMP, the Interpol and the Mexican police. He returned to Canada to claim a literary prize, and met with Pierre Trudeau, a meeting which, according to Symons, resulted in the decriminalization of homosexuality in Canada in 1968.^[152]

See also

• Friendship
• Greek love
• Homosexuality
• Pederasty
• Pederasty in ancient Greece
• Pederastic couples in classical antiquity
• Platonic love
• Pederastic couples in Japan
• Shudo
• Sodomy

Sources

General

• Louis Crompton. Homosexuality and Civilization, Cambridge, Mass. and London, 2003. ISBN 0-674-01197-X
• Michel Larivière. Homosexuels et bisexuels célèbres, Delétraz Editions, 1997. ISBN 2-911110-19-6

Muslim Lands

• Stephen O. Murray and Will Roscoe, et al. Islamic Homosexualities: Culture, History, and Literature, New York: New York University Press, 1997. ISBN 0-8147-7468-7
• J. Wright & Everett Rowson. Homoeroticism in Classical Arabic Literature. 1998.
• 'Homosexuality' & other articles in the Encyclopædia Iranica

China

• Chinese couples documented in Hinsch, 1990, p.37, 69.

Pre-Modern Period

• Serge Bramly. Leonardo : The Artist and the Man, Penguin, 1994. ISBN 0-14-023175-7

Modern

• Michael Matthew Kaylor, Secreted Desires: The Major Uranians: Hopkins, Pater and Wilde (2006)Michael Matthew Kaylor, Secreted Desires: The Major Uranians: Hopkins, Pater and Wilde (2006), a 500-page scholarly volume that considers the major Victorian pederastic writers and their relationships (the author has made this volume available in a free, open-access, PDF version).

References

External links

Look up pederastic in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• World history of homosexual relationships (including pederastic ones)