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]

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.^{citation needed}

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.^{citation needed} 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 couples

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 completeness. You can help by expanding it.

Middle Ages

• Ibn Ammar and Muhammad Ibn Abbad Al Mutamid
  • In 1053 the nineteen year old poet Ibn Ammar was appointed tutor to the thirteen 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.^[5]
• 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...'"^[6]

Pre-modern period

Radu cel Frumos

Cecchino de' Bracci

• 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.^[7]
• 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.^[8]
• 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.^[9]
• 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.^[10]
• Pope Julius III and Cardinal Innocenzo Ciocchi Del Monte
  • The future pope hired the illiterate 14-year-old street urchin for his charms in 1547. Gossip called the boy Pope Julius III's "Ganymede," and the Venetian ambassador reported that Innocenzo shared the pope's bedroom and bed. The relationship became a staple of anti-papal polemics for over a century: it was rumored that Pope Julius III, awaiting Innocenzo's arrival in Rome to receive his cardinal's hat, showed the impatience of a lover awaiting a mistress, and that he boasted of the boy's prowess, although no doubt such tales were exaggerated. Upon being appointed pope in 1550, he raised Ciocchi Del Monte to the post of cardinal. Pope Julius III poured benefices on Innocenzo that gave him one of the highest incomes in Europe, even more than that of the Medicis (http://www.glbtq.com/social-sciences/julius_III)
• 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?"^[11]
• 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."^[12]
• 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 sixteen 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." (http://andrejkoymasky.com/liv/fam/biof1/fari1)

Seventeenth century

• 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."^[13]
  • Louis, the fourteen 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.^[14]

Nineteenth 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.^[15]

• 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 with a young recruit, Charles Grant (grandson of the seventh Earl of Elgin), sixteen at the time. His love was reciprocated by the boy.^[16]
• 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."^[17] 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.^[18]
• 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.^[19]
• Reginald Brett, 2nd Viscount Esher and Ernlé Johnson
  • Inspired by his tutor and close friend William Johnson Cory, Brett engages the fifteen year old Ernlé in a romantic but chaste mentorship of many years duration starting in 1874.^[20]
• Oscar Browning and George Curzon
  • After fifteen years a master at Eton College, Browing, a former student of William Johnson-Cory,^[21] was dismissed in 1875 over his "overly amorous"^[22] (but purportedly chaste) relationship with the sixteen year old Curzon.^[23][24]

• Arthur Rimbaud and Djami Ouddei
  • While in Ethiopia in 1883 the adventurer hired a local boy of fourteen to sixteen 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."^[25]
• Charles Kains Jackson and Cecil Castle
  • Jackson, active in the turn-of-the-century Uranian circles had the fourteen 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)
• 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.^[26]

• John Ellingham Brooks and Somerset Maugham
  • Brooks, an impoverished British pianist about twenty six at the time, had an affair in 1890 with the sixteen year old Maugham in Heidelberg, where the latter was at university. It was the boy's first sexual experience.^[27]
• 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 fifteen year old youth whom he also appointed as houseboy. They were together for four years, until the boy's death.^[28]
• André Gide and Ali
  • The first homoerotic encounter of the young writer, in North Africa, with a young Arab.^[29]
• John Gambril Nicholson and Frank Victor Rushforth
  • In his Dead Roses the Uranian poet hides the name of his thirteen 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!^[30]

20th century

Charles Beach

• J. C. Leyendecker and Charles Beach
  • The illustrator met his lover in 1901, when the youth was fifteen. 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.^[31]
• Jacques d'Adelswärd-Fersen and Loulou Locré
  • Loulou was a pupil at the Lycée Carnot, involved with Fersen in 1903.^[32]

Nino Cesarini

• 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.^[33]

Selim Ahmed

Noel Coward

• 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."^[34][35]
• 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. ^[36]
• Forrest Reid and Kenneth Hamilton
  • From 1916 until 1920 the two were linked by an intimate friendship, interrupted by the boy, now sixteen, leaving to join the Merchant Service and then, at eighteen, cattle ranching in Australia. Shortly thereafter he rode off alone into the bush, where he is thought to have died.^[37]
• John Henry Mackay and Atti
  • Mackay fell deeply in love with the Berlin schoolboy in early 1916 during a school holiday.^[38]

Mohammed el-Adl

• 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)

Raymond Radiguet

• Karol Szymanowski and Boris Kochno
  

  

  Boris Kochno
  • Szymanowski, 37, the foremost early 20th c. 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.^[39]
• Gustav Wyneken and Viktor Behrens
  • In late 1920, Wyneken had a love affair with his seventeen year old student. A year later he was brought to trial and convicted of acts of frottage.^[40]
• Sergei Diaghilev and Boris Kochno
  • Kochno was taken on as lover and secretary by Diaghilev at the age of seventeen in February of 1921. He remained as librettist and close friend till Sergei's death in 1929.^[41][42] 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.^[43]
• J. R. Ackerley and Ivan Alderman
  • In 1924, having acquired a taste for working class youths, Ackerley spotted the fifteen 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.^[44]
• 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.^[45]
• Benjamin Britten and Wulff Scherchen
  • The composer met the thirteen 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"^[46]

Robert Denning in photograph taken by Edgar de Evia in the 1950s.

• 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. ^[47]
• "Walt" and Rudi van Dantzig
  • The 1945 relationship between the twelve 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.^[48]
• 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 seventeen-year-old runaway, and the two remained very close, until Happsberger's marriage three years later, an event that left Baldwin devastated.^[49]
• 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. ^[50]

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)