A Roland for an Oliver: Gay Medieval Lovers

"A Roland for an Oliver" is apparently a common expression, although I've only seen it in British fiction.  It means that you're equally matched (for instance, these brothers can both bench press exactly 320 pounds each).

It's derived from the Medieval gay lovers that I first read about in The Young Folks' Shelf of Books during my early childhood.

I heard about them again in college, when my French Literature class was assigned a modern version of the 12th century Chanson de Roland, the national epic of France.





During the siege of Viana, Emperor Charlemagne agreed to let the outcome rest on single combat between two champions.  He sent his nephew, the bold, heavily-muscled Roland, the Prince Valiant of France.  Count Gerard of Viana sent his grandson, the handsome, quick-witted Oliver (or Olivier).  Their talents were complementary; they were perfectly matched.

As they fought, an angel appeared, separated them, and bade them become friends (the same thing happened to Simon and Milo a few generations later).

They spent the rest of their lives together, fighting side by side, and their love, with its divine mandate, was acclaimed in every corner of Charlemagne's Empire.

Then the Saracens began wending their way through Basque country,  In 778, the approached the pass at Roncevaux, Spain, in the Pyrenees.  If they entered France, they would take all of Europe.  Charlemagne and his troops tried to stop them.  In the heat of battle, Oliver was killed, and the distraught Roland cried:

So many days and years gone by
We lived together.
Since thou art dead, to live is pain.

Then he died as well.

Actually, the battle had nothing to do with the Moorish caliphate; Basque guerillas ambushed Charlemagne's troops, in retribution for his destructiion of their capital, to rob them.   Roland really existed, the leader of the Franks' invasion of Brittany, but there's no historical evidence for the existence of Oliver.  The Chanson de Roland  created him to be Roland's true love.

I didn't bother to point out the homoromance to my French professor, who no doubt would have insisted that Roland, like Aschenbach in Death in Venice,  wasn't Wearing a Sign.  He was betrothed to Oliver's sister, after all, and in the Italian epic Orlando Furioso, he falls in love with a woman (and flies to the moon).  

More after the break

Muscleboys in French Class: the Signe de Piste

During my senior year in high school, I thought myself too mature for the boys' adventure books in the Green Library, so I asked my French teacher for something about "adventure" with "no girls in it."  She reached onto her bookshelf and gave me one of those pulpy French paperbacks: Guy de Larigaudie, Yug.  A boy living in prehistoric times who domesticates animals, discovers fire, and travels to distant lands.  And is drawn as a semi-n*de preteen.

Ok, that wasn't quite what I was looking for.  I was 16 years old, not really into kids.  Maybe two teenage boys together? 

Les tambours de l'ete (Summer of the Drums), by Theodore V. Olsen. Michigan Territory, 1832, settlers and Indians each mistrust each other.  Only two teenage boys. Kevin and the Indian To-Mah, can help them reconcile.

Both are drawn as slim, golden muscle gods in loincloths or altogether nude, clinging together in an idealized Old West.

Ok, but I didn't care for Westerns.  Something a tad more contemporary?

Mon Ami Carlo (My Friend Carlo), by Gine Victor.  A new boy arrives at a dull boarding school in Italy. A thin boy with a pale face, ebony hair, and eyes like stars.  Milo instantly fell in love with him.  They bedded down for the night in their underwear, their smooth hard chests glowing in the moonlight.

Now I had to ask: what was this publisher who specialized in teenagers in love, and who was this illustrator who created endless pages of muscle gods?

The publisher: Signe de Piste, a collection of boys' adventure novels published between 1937 and the 1990s, most with gay subtexts.

The illustrator: Pierre Joubert (1910-2002), who illustrated many scouting publications as well as many of the Signe de Piste series.  He  specialized in idealized semi-n*de teenagers, muscular, blonde when he could get away with it, enjoying the pleasures of "comradeship."

With Signe de Piste, the Green Library, Alix and Enak, Tintin, Corentin, and Spirou, how could gay boys growing up in France ever feel alone?

The Swashbuckling Boyfriends of November

November is my favorite month.  The colors are soft and muted, the sky is not too bright, the air is cool but not cold, it's festive but not overwhelming like December, and it contains my birthday and Thanksgiving, the two holidays that provide the most pleasure and least guilt.

Besides, when I was a kid, November and December were the only months where I could read without getting yelled at.

Mom and Dad disapproved of reading -- it was a waste of time, it would strain my brain, it was antisocial -- I should be out playing sports, or at least watching tv with the family.  Science fiction and fantasy was especially suspect, likely to turn me into an atheist, or, much worse, a Catholic.  So I always hid books, or read at my friends' house, or said they were for school.

But in November,they actually were for school.  Teachers always assigned us swashbuckling adventure novels to read over Thanksgiving and Christmas vacation!


It wasn't my fault -- blame my teacher.  Sorry, no time to play basketball in the driveway, or touch football in the schoolyard -- I had to get through this book.

Four of the books we were assigned were particularly memorable.  They had gay subtexts as well as a heteronormative primary plot.

1. The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexander Dumas (1844).  Edmond Dantes escapes from his unjust imprisonment in the Chateau d'If, and gets vengeance on the people who betrayed him.  He gets a girlfriend, but also forms several passionate male friendships, notably with Peppino, a boy who was also betrayed and becomes his...um...."servant."  Henry Cavill, top photo and left is one of the more muscular Dantes in film.

2. The Three Musketeers, by Alexander Dumas (1844). A young man named d'Artagnan wants to become a Musketeer, one of the king's bodyguards. The three current Musketeers reject him, but then find him worthy.  He gets a girlfriend, but rejects her; his most passionate relationships come with men. (Chris O'Donnell, left, is one of many hunky d'Artagnans).

3. Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson (1883). A boy helps pirates find buried treasure, with nary a woman in sight.

4. The Prisoner of Zenda, by Anthony Hope (1894). An Englishman on holiday in Ruritania bears a striking resemblance to King Rudolph, who has disappeared, and agrees to impersonate him.  He falls in love with the King's fiancee, but has to leave her.  The king and the commoner share many a touching moment.

5. The Scarlet Pimpernel, by the Baroness Orczy (1905).  A precursor of Zorro, Batman, and all of the other superheroes with a milktoast alter ego, Sir Percy Blakeney pretended to be gay -- weak, shrill, feminine -- but he was really a hetero hero, saving French aristocrats from the guillotine during the Reign of Terror.  He has a girlfriend, whom he marries, but he also spends time rescuing male aristocrats, notably the hunky Sir Andrew.

6. Captain Blood, by Raphael Sabatini (1922).  Dr. Peter Blood, an Irish physician (who would want to go to a doctor called Blood?), is wrongly convicted of treason and sold into slavery in the Caribbean.  He and his friend Jeremy Pitt commandeer a ship and become pirates. (Ross Alexander played Jeremy Pitt in the 1935 movie).

All of these novels have been filmed many times, usually with a hetero-romance tacked on to provide a "fade out kiss" ending.  But I didn't know that during those long, cool November afternoons.

Beefcake and Bonding in the Green Library

When I was studying French in high school,  if I ever tired of Tintin, Alix and Enak, Corentin, and Spirou and Fantasio, I could move on to the small square children's books published by the Librairie Hachette, the Bibliotheque Rose (pink) for humor and the Bibliotheque Verte (green) for action/adventure.

I preferred the green, especially Georges Bayard's Michel series, about a 15-year old and his older brother who sleuthed like the Hardy Boys (Michel a Rome, Michel en plongee, Michel et Monsieur X, etc.)  Except there were more kidnappings and last-minute rescues than the Hardy Boys faced, more stories set on boats and at the beach, and  unlike the American adventure boy series of the 1940s and 1950s  Hachette was not skimpy on the beefcake.  He was as physique-intensive as the British boys annuals.  Apparently being a teen sleuth gives you a magnificent physique.

I also liked the Italian street urchin of David Daniell's "By Jiminy" books in his French translation, Cricketto (Cricketto de Napoli, Cricketto et le petite prince, Cricketto dans la foret vierge, and so on).  He became a lean, muscular teenager, who adventured and buddy-bonded with his older friend and benefactor, Tom Trevor.  The illustrations favored black speedos for Tom and red for Cricketto.

Willis Lindquist's Haji of the Elephants is about a young Indian mahout and his Western boyfriend, in the tradition of Sabu, Jonny and Hadji, and Terry and Raji.  But in the French translation, they both became teenagers in dhotis with beautifully drawn chests and shoulders.

Rene Guillot wrote many juvenile adventure stories about massive Tarzans raised in the wilderness, such as Le Chef au masque d'or. 

And I can't even begin to count the homoerotic subtexts in Philippe Ebly's "Conquerants de l'Impossible" series, about three buffed, eternally shirtless teenagers from different time periods: Serge (modern France), Xolotl (Aztec Mexico), and Thibault (Medieval France).  They band together in a complex plot arc that decides the fate of worlds, while never so much as looking at a girl.

Ebly also wrote the "Evades du temps" series (Time Runaways), about two  teenagers, Thierry and Didier, who are hiking through a mysterious woods when they become unstuck in time, like Paul in Spellbinder.  They meet the prehistoric teenager Kouroun, who doesn't own a shirt, and band together to fight supernatural enemies and look for a way home.

They even had gay-themed novels, such as Pierre Loti's Iceland Fisherman.

I wonder if my French teacher noticed that I only borrowed the books with the beefcake covers.

In college I discovered a whole new collection, the Signe de Piste.

Spirou and Fantasio: The Bellhop and his Boyfriend

The young hunk and his blond, balding but still youthful boyfriend recline cozily on the couch, watching tv, their legs pressed together.  The young hunk places his foot atop his boyfriend's in a gesture of intimacy.

Suddenly the telephone rings.  "It's a woman," the young hunk announces.  "One who has the chutzpah to call us at this hour and say It's me."

His shirt is open, revealing a smooth, buffed chest.  His boyfriend is wearing a lavender t-shirt and a sky-blue jacket, a style that an older gay man might wear.

As his boyfriend takes the call, the young hunk cuddles their pet squirrel, adopting a nurturing, feminine pose. He's wearing extremely  tight pants.  The boyfriend glances over at him, apparently thinking "I'm lucky to have landed such a hot guy."

It's their coworker, Seccotine, asking for a ride to the airport.  "Sorry, tomorrow I'm going to a conference in Bali," the boyfriend says.  Ignoring the young hunk's frantic gestures, he continues: "...But don't worry, my partner will be glad to give you a ride."

A gay comic?  A parody?  A slash fantasy?  No, this is an actual excerpt from Spirou et Fantasio, a Belgian comic strip for children (and college students learning French).


The young hunk Spirou began his career in 1938 as a bellhop engaged in humorous antics.  In 1944, he met intrepid journalist Fantasio, and soon the two were pairing up for investigations, traveling through time and space, confronting gangsters, spies, dictators, mad scientists, and alien invaders, rescuing each other again and again.


 Like Tintin and Captain Haddock, Corentin and Kim,  and Alix and Enak, Spirou and Fantasio became domestic partners, and rather obviously lovers,  Occasionally Fantasio liked a woman (unlike Captain Haddock), but in the end he always returned to his true love.

During the 1990s, the couple was redrawn, becoming more naturalistic, with pleasantly muscular physiques -- and the gay subtext was revved up (it's hard to read them as anything but a modern-day gay couple).

Over fifty albums have been released to date.  Three have been translated into English.

Tintin and Captain Haddock

When I studied Spanish, I got songs about liking blonde girls ("Las rubias me gustan mas") and a story about Juan y Maria in love.  

When I studied French, I got comics: the muscular Roman Alix and his Egyptian boyfriend Enak; Asterix the Gaul;  the cowboy Lucky Luke; the race car driver Michel Vaillant; bellhop turned adventurer Spirou and his reporter boyfriend Fantasio; and of course, Tintin.











A teenage reporter, Tintin first appeared in the Belgian children's magazine Le Petit Vingtième.  23 comic albums, or bandes-dessinees, appeared between 1930 and 1976, sending Tintin to the Congo, Egypt, Tibet,  America, and eventually the Moon (a 24th, Tintin and Aleph-Art, was left unfinished at cartoonist Herge's death).  The albums have been translated into over 100 languages, and in an interesting twist, dozens of dialects. Would you like to know how the Antwerp and Oostend dialect differs from ordinary Dutch?  How about Picard and Gallois from standard French?

There was not a lot of beefcake in the comic stories or the animated films and tv series, but two live-action films starring Jean-Pierre Talbot took care of that.

Early on, Tintin made new friends in each adventure.  His most intimate relationship came in The Blue Lotus, when he rescued Chang, a Chinese boy victimized by the Japanese invasion of Manchuria.

But in The Crab with the Golden Claws, Tintin meets the blustering, irascible Captain Haddock and helps him reclaim his ancestral home, Marlinspike Manor.  Tintin moves in.  After that, there is no question: they are a couple..

During their adventures, Haddock and Tintin work as a team, rescuing each other over and over, hugging, pressing against each other.  At home, they are blatantly domestic, often shown sitting at breakfast, lounging around the parlor, going to movies, taking vacations.

Neither expresses any interest in women, but in Tintin in Tibet, when Tintin's old friend Chang writes to ask for help, Haddock blisters with jealousy and refuses to accompany him on the adventure (he relents later).  And when Haddock spends time with a new friend, Tintin mopes and pouts.

Many commentators, including Jamie Bell, who played Tintin in the 2011 movie, have noticed that Tintin and Haddock behave precisely as a gay couple.

Even Herge himself found it necessary to address the "accusations": he said that Tintin and Haddock could not actively pursue women because mostly boys read the comics, and they were interested in adventure, not romance.  But if that is the case, why did Herge put them into a relationship that looked and felt precisely like a romance?

Anyway, he was wrong: gay boys wanted both adventure and romance.  And they found both in Tintin.

See also: Fifty million Frenchmen can't be straight. 

The homo*rotic hijinks of Skyler Gisondo's crew

Akim and Jim: Tarzan and Boy of European comics

One of the more popular Tarzan clones was Akim, Son of the Jungle, created by Italian cartoonist Roberto Renzi and artist Augusto Pedrazza.  In Italy Tarzan clones are called Tarzanidi.

During his run in Italy (1950-1967), he was exported to France for 700+ issues, Germany for 500+ issues, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, and Greece (where he was renamed Tarzan).  Hundreds of issues appeared through the 1960s and 1970s, with ironic "new adventures" in the 1990s.

Amazon.fr has them for sale for between 5 and 10 euros.

Some of the rarest appeared in this single-strip per page format.  Here Akim fights the Biblical muscleman Samson.

Akim's back story is nearly identical to that of Tarzan:

Count Frederick Rank, the British ambassador to Calcutta, is shipwrecked on the wild coast of Africa along with his wife and infant son, Jim.  The parents soon die, leaving the toddler to be raised by gorillas.

Grown up, he becomes Akim, Son of the Jungle, with various animals at his command.  He marries the British heiress Rita, and they adopt a son, Jim, who turns into buffed blond man-mountain.

In most adventures, they leave Rita back at the tree house and venture out as a pair, leaving all of the gay subtexts of the 1940s Tarzan movies starring Johnny Weissmuller and Johnny Sheffield.

Sometimes Jim goes out adventuring on his own, requiring Akim to rescue him from the usual jungle poachers, cannibals, and lost civilizations, as well as aliens, mad scientists, and dinosaurs.

Whether they're speaking French, German, Italian, or Dutch, the buddy-bonding is easy to spot.

The Flowers of Evil: A Place Where Hercules and Christ are One

Back before there were shelves labeled "gay literature" in bookstores, when library card catalogs contained two books labeled "homosexuality," if that, you found gay books through key words in the title: something dark, dangerous, sinister was likely to be gay.

So one day when I was an undergrad at Augustana College, I found a copy of Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil), by Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867).

A series of poems about a man who is an alien in his own society, searching for a beauty that the people around him cannot understand.  He remembers countless past lives of Arabian Nights opulence, living only for the pleasures of sight, sound, taste, and touch, surrounded by "nude, perfumed slaves." Male slaves, I assumed.




He longs for a "good place," the distant country portrayed by Michelangelo, where "Hercules and Christ are one."  Where they worship masculine beauty?

He tells the story of four boys charting out their futures. The first longs for the theater, the second, for God, the third, for women...and the fourth, for gypsy men "with enormous black eyes" who live together and make "astonishing music."

The fourth boy is obviously gay.

Turns out that most scholars disagree with my undergrad reading of Les Fleurs du mal.  Baudelaire was a precursor of the Symbolist Movement, whose main voice, Paul Verlaine, was indeed gay.  And he was a dandy, one of one of those flamboyantly feminine men who scandalized polite society in Paris and London.



But Baudelaire himself was apparently heterosexual.  He has a prurient, sordid interest in women's bodies, especially lesbian bodies -- his first title for Les Fleurs du Mal was The Lesbians.  But barely a glimmer of interest in male beauty.

No do we see any significant same-sex loves in his life.  He smoked and drank heavily, wrote in taverns, patronized prostitutes, and had a series of mistresses.

But we know that author's own identity is not necessary for a gay reading.  Nor is authorial intent.  The meaning arises in the interaction between the text and the reader's life experience, expectations, and desire. When you are erased from most literature and mass media, you find meaning where you can, and Les Fleurs du mal remains one of my favorite books.

See also: The Dandy and the Gay Cult; A Season in Hell

Bob Morane: James Bond without the Girls

When I was in high school in the 1970s, French class offered a practically infinite amount of beefcake-and-bonding riches.  If you tired of the Green Library, you could always move on to the Marabout Junior series, which featured adventurer Bob Morane.

Bob Morane was a former RAF pilot who worked as a reporter and freelance adventurer, often accepting secret-agent or detective assignments.  In later volumes he worked for the Time Patrol, going back to dinosaur times or fighting androids in outer space.

 There weren't a lot of illustrations, but those the books had displayed Bob with a massive chest, usually when one of the bad guys (such as Ming "The Yellow Shadow") had him strung up for weird torture.

Bob's best buddy, a Scotch bodybuilder  usually traveled with him to provide the gay subtexts, and get strung up for a series of "my hero!" rescues.

Ok, there were some girls. But I don't remember Bob actually having sex, and the girl-chasing was minimal, far less than in James Bond.

Belgian author Henri Vernes published 12 volumes of Bob Morane's adventures (1958-67).  Most have been translated into English. There have also been over 100 bandes-dessinee (which I haven't read), a 1964-5 tv series (with Claude Titre as Bob Morane and Billy Kearns as Bob Ballantine), a 1998 animated series, and some tie-in video games and toys.

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.

Corentin and Kim

Like Alix and Enak, Jonny Quest and Hadji, and a dozen others, Corentin and Kim were a teenage European-Indian homoromantic pair. Belgian cartoonist Paul Cuvelier began painting the androgynous, muscular teenager in 1943.

Herge, creator of Tintin, saw them and suggested a comic strip, which appeared in  Tintin magazine beginning in 1946.














The comic story begins with Corentin at age 14, a Breton boy in the 18th century who runs away from his abusive uncle, stows away aboard a ship, and is shipwrecked on a desert island.  Soon he teams up with an Indian boy named Kim.  They also add a gorilla named Belzebuth and a tiger named Moloch to their entourage.

Corentin was aimed at somewhat younger children than Alix, so his adventures were less complex, but the backgrounds were just as spectacular, and there was nearly as much nudity (especially as the two boys aged into muscular late adolescence).









  








Seven comic albums appeared between 1950 and 1974, rather a paltry number compared to Alix, sending Corentin and Kim to India, China, Italy, Egypt, and back to Brittany (Corentin's grandson also appeared in the 1800's Wild West).  There were also novels, an animated cartoon series (1987),  and an original comic strip, translated into German, Spanish, and Dutch.

Nevertheless, Corentin was never as successful as Alix, and Paul Cuvelier less concerned with homoromance; eventually Corentin gets a girlfriend, and many of Cuvelier's other works featured female nudity.

Alix and Enak: Jonny and Hadji in Ancient Rome

If the gay kids of Britain had it good, then France must have been a Paradise of beefcake and bonding: bandes-dessinee (hard-bound comic books) overbrimmed with same-sex couples, including Tintin and Captain Haddock, Spirou and Fantasio, Corentin and Kim, and Alix and Enak.

 Alix, who premiered in 1948, was a Roman citizen from the province of Gaul (modern France) who travels through the ancient world,  through Gaul, Egypt, Persia, and eventually as far afield as India, China, and the Pacific, having death-defying adventures in historically accurate settings (give or take a few hundred years) with beautifully detailed backgrounds.






Alix is blond-hared, handsome, muscular, and frequently nude.

That's right, nude.

His creator, Jacques Martin, had no qualms about introducing rear and occasional frontal nudity into his strips.

But that's not all.  Alix is accompanied by his boyfriend Enak, a slightly younger Egyptian, dark skinned, equally handsome, muscular, and nude.

Sort of a Hadji to his Jonny Quest, or a Raji to his Terry.

In the early books, they have no interest in girls; they are devoted to each other, rescuing each other from deadly danger over and over again, saying things like "I won't leave without you!" and "If anything were to happen to you. . . ."

In the books published since the 1980s, they occasionally get girlfriends, but only as momentary dalliances; nothing can interfere with their devotion to each other.

Thirty volumes have appeared, along with some "straight' history of the ancient world illustrated by Alix comics. They have never been translated into English, but you don't need to read French to enjoy the beautifully detailed backgrounds -- or the beefcake.