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

Jozin z Bazin: The Czech Swamp Monster and His Boyfriend

The Czechs and the Slovaks were joined into Czechoslovakia from 1918 to 1993 because they have similar histories, cultures, and religions.  Their languages are mutually intelligible:

English: My penis is as big as a baseball bat
Czech:  Můj penis je stejně velká jako baseballovou pálkou
Slovak: Môj penis je rovnako veľká ako baseballovou pálkou

They have the same pop culture icons, like model Jozef Mikovčák (left).

Pop singer Miroslav Šmajda (aka Max Jason Mai), a contestant in the 2012 Eurovision Song Contest.

And Ivan Mládek, the Weird Al Yankovich of Eastern Europe, whose novelty song Jožin z bažin (Joey of the Swamp) has been popular since its tv premiere in 1978.

Like the American Monster Mash parodies monster movies, Jožin z bažin  parodies Czech heroic sagas, in which a swordsman kills a dragon and thereby win "half of my kingdom and my daughter's hand in marriage."

Except instead of a dragon, it's a swamp monster named Jožin (Joey), who lives in Moravia (near Brno) but mostly eats people from Prague.  The mayor of the village of Vizovice  offers the narrator half of the collective farm and his daughter's hand in marriage for capturing the beast.  So he drops sleeping powder from a crop duster, putsJoey to sleep, and sells him to a zoo.

Sounds heterosexist, except it's typically acted out with men playing all the parts.

Sometimes the daughter is never mentioned again.

And sometimes the narrator marries the monster.

You can see versions in Czech, Lithuanian, Polish, German, and Hungarian on youtube. With the proper tweaking of the lyrics, it can be turned into a political satire.

By the way, the older guy who pops up out of nowhere and makes frenetic dance moves is Ivo Pešák (1944-2011), who performed in Mládek's Banjo Band in the 1970s, and was a familiar face on Czech tv.  Want to see him with his shirt off?

Behind the Iron Curtain: A Radio Free Europe Commercial from the 1970s

During the 1970s, when fear of the Soviet Union was rampant, a tv commercial appeared depicting a boy with rusty chains wrapped around his head, being brainwashed by Soviet propaganda.  A voiceover solemnly intoned "They took his country.  Now they're taking his mind.  Millions of children are growing up behind the Iron Curtain in Albania ... Bulgaria ... Czechoslovakia ... Hungary ... Poland ... Romania ... Yugoslavia."

I thought the boy was cute.  Maybe I could rescue him from his brainwashing!

In the school library, I found books on most of the countries "behind the Iron Curtain," with lots of pictures of boys and men.  They weren't sitting in dark rooms with chains around their heads.  They were dancing in traditional costumes, swimming in public pools, going to school, or just posing in groups.

But that made the brainwashing more insidious, I reasoned.  It was even more important to go to those countries and rescue them:

Albania

Bulgaria

Czechoslovakia  (now the Czech Republic and Slovakia)

Hungary

Poland

Romania

Yugoslavia (now divided into several countries, which I'm not going to list here, because if I make a mistake, I'll get in trouble).

I recently found the commercial on youtube.  It was directed by Jack Goodford, who also directed Mr. Magoo Cartoons for the UPA Studio.

Radio Free Europe was an anti-communist group broadcasting news and information from its base in Munich.  It still broadcasts to 21 countries in 28 languages.

R.E.M. has a song called "Radio Free Europe."  I don't understand the lyrics:

Keep me out of country in the word
Deal the porch is leading us absurd
Push that push that push that to the hull
That this isn't nothing at all

The Andy Warhol Museums: Erasing the Gay

You probably know that Andy Warhol, the gay-yet-homophobic pop artist, was the son of immigrants from Miková, a small town in Slovakia, near the Polish and Ukrainian borders.
 
You probably don't know that the nearby town of Medzilaborce features the Andy Warhol Museum of Modern Art, established in 1991 to celebrate Andy's Slovak heritage.

It was a tough sell to the locals, who worried that the museum would glorify the "homosexual aspects of the drug parties." So it tried to make him a good Slovak communist (later, a good Slovak Catholic).  There are paintings of butterflies, flowers, and a Russian hammer and sickle.  His gayness is not mentioned.

To emphasize his loving (and presumably heterosexual) family connections, there are also works by his mother (a drawing of the Annunciation of our Lord), his brother Paul Warhol and nephew James Warhola.

But no beefcake.  Not even this cover that James drew for Robert Heinlein's sci-fi novel Stranger in a Strange Land.

Still, locals stay away, and parents won't even allow their children to attend the art classes held on the site, for fear that the gayness will rub off on them.

There's another Andy Warhol museum in his native Pittsburgh, considerably larger, with 17 galleries and 900 paintings.  Is it any better at acknowledging Warhol's gayness?



They do a little better.

True, you can walk through the entire permanent exhibits of giant Campbell's Soup cans and silkscreens of Marilyn Monroe without ever suspecting.

And the biography page on the website discusses his college career, his Catholicism, the Factory, his celebrity interviews, his visits to Studio 54, but not his gayness.

But the gay-themed work is available for those willing to dig, like the short film, Tarzan and Jane Regained, Sort Of (1963), starring Davis Hopper and Taylor Mead (top photo).

And some of the special events are gay-inclusive. In 2012 there was a book signing and reception for Lance Out Loud, a biography of the gay icon by his mother, Pat Loud.

So, like the "outsiders" of Howard Becker's classic sociological study, it's invisible to most people, but you can find it if you're "in the know."