Kafka's Boyfriend: 10 Surprising Gay Facts about Everybody's Favorite Writer

The one thing I learned from studying literature at Augustana College, Indiana University, and USC:
Writers must never, ever be gay.

If their gayness is undeniable, it is a trivial thing, not worth mentioning, as irrelevant to their art as their preference for marshmallow sundaes.

If it is deniable, it will be denied.  Diaries, journals, and stories will be scrutinized, and the most fleeting reference to a woman will be pointed out triumphantly: "See?  See?  See?  He mentions a woman!  He can't possibly have been gay!"

And the strongest, most passionate, most intense same-sex friendships will be ignored.  "He never mentions that they did anything in the bedroom!  Not gay!"

Like Franz Kafka (1883-1924), author of The Metamorphosis, which everyone has to read in high school (the one with the giant cockroach).

The Trial, an existentialist classic: everyone is on trial, but we don't know the charge, and the rules keep changing.  Josef K. has been played by gay actor Anthony Perkins, and Kyle MacLachlan (above).

The Castle: I haven't actually read it, but the onerous red tape necessary to gain access to the bureaucracy sounds like going to the DMV.   K has been played by Maximilian Schell, Nikolai Stoltsky, and Ulrich Muhe. 

Movies about Kafka, starring Jorge Marrale (1988), Jeremy Irons (1991), and Idan Weiss (2025), invariably center his life on the Woman of His Dreams.

More after the break

Francois Göske : Searching for gay subtexts amid the constant drone of "girls! girls! girls!" At least he shows his junk

Robert Louis Stevenson's books are sacred, memories of childhoods past where boys conjured up lavish adventures with each other.  Especially Treasure Island, written specifically upon a request from his stepson Lloyd Osbourne that there be "no girls in it."  And there aren't, except for Jim Hawkins' mother.

So I was quite disappointed with the German miniseries (2007), in which Jim Hawkins (18-year old Francois Göske) not only does stuff with a lady of the evening, he falls in love with a female stowaway on the ship, Sheila (Diane Willems)!

Ok, I thought, but maybe Göske's other work will redeem him.  Some gay characters, or some substantial gay subtexts?

His first starring role was in a 2003 remake of the children's classic Das Fliegende Klassenzimmer (The Flying Classroom), set in a boys' school.  Only this one had girls -- and he gets a girlfriend.

In French for Beginners (2006), Goeske goes to France as part of a student exchange program.  It looks like he has a gay subtext buddy-bond with Lennard Bertzbach, but actually they are partners in crime, dedicated to winning the Girl of His Dreams. 

 A reviewer  suggests that this "charming" movie be used in French language classes.  It's not charming when you spent your childhood with the "what girl do you like?  What girl?  What girl?" interrogation.

Grimm's Finest Fairy Tales: The Farmer's Daughter (2008).  I'm not familiar with that particular fairy tale, but I imagine it involves Goeske kissing some girls.

Summertime Blues (2009), based on the juvenile novel by Julia Clarke: Goeske goes to the countryside with his mother, and meets the Girl of His Dreams.

Dornroschen (2009): The fairy tale of Sleeping  Beauty.  Guess who wakes her with a kiss?

More after the break

Michael Strogoff: Jules Verne's Gay Couple

Jules Verne is most famous today for his science fiction novels, like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and The Mysterious Island, but during his lifetime his biggest fame came for a romance, Michel Strogoff, or Michael Strogoff: Courier for the Czar (1876).  

It was translated into a dozen languages, and there are film versions in English, Spanish, French, Italian, and Turkish. The 1970 French-Italian version starred counterculture beefcake icon John Phillip Law (the nude angel in Barbarella), and the 1975 German version rugged bear Raimund Harmstorf (left).

The plot sounds unrelentingly heterosexist:  In "contemporary" Russia, Tartar rebels have taken control of Siberia, and the governor, brother of Tsar Alexander II, is trapped in the besieged city of Irkutsk.  Michael Strogoff is assigned the task of traveling across enemy-occupied territory to warn him of a plot to blow up Irkutsk.

On the way he meets and falls in love with Nadia, who is traveling to meet her exiled father.  They are captured by the Tartars, who decree that Michael be blinded (in a shirtless scene that appears on almost every book cover and movie poster).

But the blinding doesn't work, and Michael and Nadia escape and continue on to Irkutsk to save the day.  Then they are married. The end.

But there is also a gay-subtext couple, French and English reporters Alcide Jolivet and Harry Blount (played by Donatello Castallaneta and Christian Marin in the 1970 version), who accompany Michael on his journey.

They meet as jealous rivals for the same "scoop," but then they must work together.  They help Michael fight off a giant bear.  Harry is shot, and Alcide tends to him.  They are captured by the Tartars, and escape together.

At the end of the novel, they attend Michael and Nadia's wedding, with an exchange that sounds very much like a marriage proposal:

"And doesn't it make you wish to imitate them?" asked Alcide of his friend.

"Pooh!" said Blount. "Now if I had a cousin like you—"

"My cousin isn't to be married!" answered Alcide, laughing.

"So much the better," returned Blount, "for they speak of difficulties arising between London and Pekin. Have you no wish to go and see what is going on there?"

"By Jove, my dear Blount!" exclaimed Alcide Jolivet, "I was just going to make the same proposal to you."

And that was how the two inseparables set off for China.

Death in Venice

My sophomore year in college revealed the world of Winnetou and Bravo magazine, but my junior year was oppressively heterosexist: gay-free Modern British Novel and Modern American Literature, and in German Literature, Dr. Weber assigned us the Thomas Mann novel Der Tod in Venedig (Death in Venice, 1912), and then spent a lot of time on a blazing hot spring day pointing out that Aschenbach was not Wearing a Sign.

What I read was obviously about a stymied same-sex courtship.  The middle-aged writer visits Venice on holiday, and becomes obsessed with the beautiful 15-year old Tadzio.  He watches the boy and follows him around Venice, but does not approach.

Aschenbach notices that there is a cholera epidemic in Venice, being covered up by the authorities, but he doesn't warn Tadzio, for fear that he will leave, and beauty will be lost to the earth.  Nor does he leave town himself; he sits, watches Tadzio, and smiles.  Finally he succumbs to cholera and dies. I couldn't help noticing the parallel with Herman Melville's Billy Budd, which we were reading in my American Renaissance class at the same time.

Why didn't Aschenbach just strike up a conversation with the boy? I wondered. Same-sex act were legal in Italy, and the age of consent was 14.  Maybe he thought the match inappropriate due the age difference?  Maybe he was just shy, or maybe same-sex desire was so alien to  his self-image that he was paralyzed?  When Tadzio smiles at him, inviting a "hello," Aschenbach runs away in terror and whispers "I love you" to an empty garden.






But Dr. Weber said: "Aschenbach's obsession for Tadzio is the desire of age for youth, for the new that will supercede the old, even of civilization for savagery.  It is a quest for ideal beauty that always kills.  When Icarus flies too close to the sun, he dies.  There is no hint of homosexuality in the novel."


As "proof" that Aschenbach and Tadzio, like all fictional characters, were straight, Dr. Weber showed us the 1971 film version, Morte a Venezia (this was the same class that showed us a beefcake version of Das Nibelungenlied).  Tadzio was played by 15-year old Swedish actor Bjorn Andresen (left).









But in the movie, Tadzio is obviously gay, engaging in homoerotic horseplay with his friends.  He even appears to have a boyfriend.  And Aschenbach, played by gay actor Dirk Bogarde, is obviously gay, too.  They are separated not by sexual orientation, but by their different worlds.

I've seen the Benjamin Britten opera three times, twice on tv (in 1981 with Robert Garde and an unnamed, non-singing performer, and in 1990 with Robert Tear and Paul Zeplichal). It gives Aschenbach a girlfriend.  But the ballet doesn't; and it transforms Tadzio from an androgynous waif to a muscular, gay-and-proud twenty-something.

So the obsession becomes that of an old-style gay man who believed that his same-sex desire was "too personal" to reveal, who pretended to be heterosexual, who married a woman, and who now longs for the freedom of modern gay youth, cavorting openly on the beach.

See also: Male Nudity in German Class; and The Gay Werewolf of Steppenwolf.

Shock-headed Peter: Castration and Gay Panic in a German Children's Story

When I was in Germany a few years ago, my friend Doc took me to a restaurant called the Struwwelpeter Apfelweinwirtschaft (The Slovenly Peter Apple Wine Tavern).

Its logo was a boy with wild blond hair and long sharp nails like Edward Scissorhands.

Nearby there was a statue of the same boy, along with some other children.

"You've never heard of Struwwelpeter?" Doc asked.  "He's a national hero, like Bart Simpson in America!"









Turns out that all German schoolchildren read Der Struwwelpeter, written and illustrated by Heinrich Hoffmann (1809-1894), about children who misbehave and get their comeuppance -- usually a violent retribution.

A girl who plays with matches burns to death.
Kaspar, who won't eat his soup, wastes away and dies.
Hans, whose "head is always in the clouds," falls into a river.
Robert, who goes outside in a storm, blows away.

Hoffmann was a psychiatrist, though he lived before Freud's discovery of the unconscious, and many of his stories have been analyzed for their psychosexual undertones

The most obvious gay connection is in the story of Konrad, der Daumenlutscher (the Thumb-Sucker).  

Though his mother warns him to not suck his thumb, Konrad persists in the bad habit.  Then he encounters the Tailor with the Scissors (in modern versions, the monstrous Scissor-Man), who cuts both of his thumbs off.  

Oral fixation, symbolic castration, gay anxiety, and a 19th-century Freddie Kruger!

The stories have been translated into several languages.  They were adapted into a 1955 movie (available on youtube), an operetta (1992) and a musical (1998).  

In 2010, Richard Mansfield filmed an explicitly homoerotic shadow-puppet version,  of the Daumenlutscher story, "Suck-a-Thumb." It made the rounds of the gay film festivals.

In an even more explicitly gay sequel, Konrad is sent to a psychiatric hospital for a brutal "cure."

Don't worry, that's a door handle, not what you're thinking.

The Gay Werewolf of Steppenwolf

When I was an undergraduate at Augustana College in the early 1980s, I took three German classes with tall, gray-haired, constantly-scowling Professor Weber, who was obsessed with demonstrating that homosexualitat did not exist in modern Germany.

Stefan George, Thomas Mann, the Physical Culture Movement, Robert Musil, Magnus Hirschfield, the Kit-Kat Club of Berlin between the Wars?

"Posh!  Nonsense!  About friendship and the nationalist ideal, not homosexualitat!"

He would allow no discussion of current campus favorite Steppenwolf  by Herman Hesse: "Posh!  Nonsense!  A book of monsters!  Fit only for the Late-Late Show!"

So of course, I had to read it.

The cover illustration of two nearly-naked women nearly turned me away.

As did the clueless school librarian who kept trying to point me to the music section, insisting that the book was about the rock band Steppenwolf.

But finally I managed to get a copy.

I saw immediately why Dr. Weber forbade the class from discussing it.

The protagonist, Henry Haller, feels depressed, friendless, and alienated from the world he no longer understands -- what adolescent hasn't felt like that?  Especially gay adolescents.

The source of his alienation: he is a werewolf, a man with two natures, one civilized and stable and heterosexual, the other wild.

Wild, savage, untamed, homoerotic.

While wandering aimlessly through the city, he sees an advertisement for "Magic Theater -- not for everybody." (Or, in this Spanish sign, "for lunatics only.").

 Maybe in the Magic Theater he will find a way to reconcile his two natures.  Or maybe it will lead him to oblivion.  He resolves to seek it out.

En route, he meets two people.  Hermine nurtures his "civilized" side, introducing him to the pleasures and constraints of heterosexual normalcy, including sex with women.

Seductive saxophonist Pablo offers him a "walk on the wild side."

(In the 1974 film version, Henry is played by Max von Sydow, and Pablo by Pierre Clementi).

Eventually Henry kills his "civilized side," and Pablo announces that he is ready for the Magic Theater. He walks inside, through a narrow corridor into the future.

For the gay men of my generation, it sounds precisely like your first visit to a gay bar.  You circle the block a few times, then park, and walk slowly, terrified, to that door marked "Magic Theater: Not for Everybody."  Your future lies behind it.

Hesse envisioned several other close male "walks on the wild side," in Narcissus and Goldmund (1930) and Magister Ludi (1943).  

See also: Death in Venice; and Male Nudity in German Class;

Kaspar Hauser: Too Beautiful for the Heterosexual World

As you know from the story of My Date with Richard Dreyfuss, I have always been fascinated by the paranormal, especially mysterious disappearances and appearances, like the puzzling case of Kaspar Hauser.

A handsome, "well-knit" young man appeared wandering the streets of Nuremberg on May 26, 1828.  He spoke only a few words of German, and was unfamiliar with many everyday objects.  Gradually, over many weeks, he told a story of growing up in a dark cell so small that he couldn't stand up all in it.  He saw no other people, but food and water appeared by his bedside every morning.

Kaspar became an international celebrity.  He made a strong impression on everyone who saw him, and several men vied to become his guardian with an urgency that suggest homoerotic attraction.

Finally the British nobleman Lord Stanhope fell in love -- um, er, I mean "took an interest" in the teenager, moved him to Ansbach, and promised to take him back to England.  But before he got the opportunity, on December 14, 1833, Kaspar was stabbed by an unknown assailant.  He died three days later.



Who was Kaspar Hauser?  A prince held captive so he could not inherit the thrown?  A charming con artist who made the whole story up?

Science fiction writers have speculated that he was an alien, a time traveler, and a genetic experiment.

Writers such as Herman Melville and Hans Christian Anderson have made him into a gay symbol, the man who is too beautiful to live long in the tawdry heterosexual world.

The most significant film version, by gay director Werner Herzog, is The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (Jeder fur sich und Gott gegen alle, 1974).  It does not shy away from the gay symbolism.  Bruno Schleinstein played Kaspar, and Walter Landengast played his main mentor, Professor Daumer.

A 1993 version, directed by Peter Sehr, stars Andrei Eisermann (top photo) as Kaspar and Udo Samel as Professor Daumer.

The town of Ansbach, about two hours from Munich by car, has erected two statues of Kaspar Hauser, one as he originally appeared, and the other as the "refined young man" he became.  There are also a number of artifacts from the case and other  memorabilia in the Markgrafenmuseum (on Kaspar Hauser Platz).

Nothing Like Before: Homophobia Condemns a Gay Teen

They say "hello" pleasantly as you pass on the street.  They don't cringe when you hold hands on the bus.  They let you join their churches, as long as you don't take on a leadership role.  They will even sell you a cake for your wedding, sometimes.  But when sickness, unemployment, or tragedy strikes, the veneer fades away, and the screaming starts.

In the German tv movie Nichts mehr wie vorher (Nothing is Like Before, 2013), a young boy is molested and murdered, and 16-year old Daniel Grudermann (24-year old Jonas Nay, top left) becomes the prime suspect.

He claims innocence, but he has no alibi.  He can't tell anyone that he was at the lake that night waiting for the boy he has a crush on, Sven (Gerritt Klein, left).

Daniel's mother and lawyer support him, but his father is suspicious, especially when he discovers a link to a gay hookup site on Daniel's laptop.  Gay men are uniquely violent, prone to murder those who reject their advances, right?

When news of Daniel's gayness reaches his classmates and the townsfolk, they call for his lynching.

The media goes crazy with homophobic condemnations.  We were so stupid to pass all of those gay rights ordinances --  to permit them domestic partnerships -- to elect a gay Vice Chancellor!  This what gay people are really like!  

Then someone else confesses to the crime, and Daniel is released.  He goes home.

But he can't go home again.  He can't forget the suspicions and accusations, particularly from his father.  He now knows what's lurking just beneath the smiling "hello" of tolerance.

 This is a gripping, depressing story about the tenaciousness of homophobia.

Kostja Ullmann after Summer Storm

You've probably seen Kostja Ullmann in Summer Storm (Sommersturm), the amazing German movie (2004) about gay people who aren't trapped in a pre-Stonewall world of angst, homophobia, and silence.  The 28-year old actor has been a fixture of German tv and film ever since, usually in projects that require nude or semi-nude shots.

 Not a lot of gay content, but some atypical sexual situations that lend themselves to queer symbolism.

He reunites with Sommersturm costar Marlon Kittel in The School Trip (Klassenfahrt, 2004).

I haven't seen The Ode to Joy (2006), about German prisoners of war in Japan during World War I, but POW movies always have strong gay subtexts.

What's going on in this episode of Dona Leon entitled "The Girl of His Dreams"?  It's about an inspector trying to solve the murder of a Gypsy girl.  Maybe Kostja is a suspect.

In Hounded (Verfolgt), aka Punish Me (2006), a troubled teen named Jan (Kostja) begins a destructive relationship with his middle-aged probation officer.  She's a woman, but Jan's androgyny gives the move some strong gay symbolism.

Stellungswechsel (2007) is about five guys who set up a male-escort service.  All female clients, but still....