Henri Ghéon (March 15, 1875 – June 13, 1944)
Henri Ghéon (March 15, 1875 – June 13, 1944), born Henri Vangeon in Bray-sur-Seine, Seine-et-Marne, was a French playwright, novelist, poet and critic. Brought up by a devout Roman Catholic mother, he lost his faith in his early teens, while still at the Lycée in Sens. Among the factors that brought this about, one stood out in his own mind: at school religion was taught without life or understanding. Ghéon did not miss it. As F. J. Sheed says, "His was a happy atheism." He replaced Catholicism with a semi-pagan cult of beauty in all its forms — nature, literature, music, painting. (picture: Henri Ghéon by Jean Veber) He moved to Paris in 1893 to study medicine. Around the same time, he started to write poetry, along with his colleagues Francis Jammes and Mallarmé. He also published avant garde criticism. In 1887 he met André Gide, who became his literary guide and friend for twenty years. Ghéon, writes Gide's biographer Alan Sheridan, "was Gide's closest friend and companion on innumerable homosexual exploits." Ghėon actually drafted a militant text in favour of homosexuality, La Vie secrète de Guillaume Arnoult, which was one of the inspirations for Gide's Corydon. In 1909 they were founding members of the Nouvelle Revue Française (NRF). Ghéon also painted, studied music and travelled widely.
Ironically, it was the sceptic Gide who occasioned the first cracks in Ghéon's paganism when he invited him to visit Florence with him in 1912. There Ghéon discovered the religious art of Giotto and Fra Angelico and was overwhelmed to the point of shedding tears.
"At St Mark's," he wrote, "with Christ dying on the cross and the Virgin waiting for the angel in a bare and silent corridor..., even our senses had a soul. Art had transported me before, but never so high."He served as an army doctor in the First World War. During this period he regained his Catholic faith, as described in his work L'homme né de la guerre (The Man Born from the War). His conversion was bound up with a devoutly Catholic naval officer, Pierre Dominique Dupouey, whom he met three times only in the space of a few weeks, but who impressed him greatly. Ironically, it was again Gide who was the occasion for this fateful encounter: when Ghéon left for the Belgian front, Gide urged him to try to find Dupouey, who had once been his disciple and with whom he still corresponded. On Holy Saturday, 1915, Dupouey was killed in action on the Yser. By Christmas, Ghéon had returned to the Catholic faith.
He founded the "Compagnons de Notre Dame" (Companions of Our Lady), a sort of amateur theatre confraternity of young people, for which he wrote over 60 plays, usually on episodes from the Gospel or the lives of the saints. Ghéon's plays had clear similarities with the medieval mystery and miracle plays. The Companions of Our Lady performed with success in Paris and throughout France, as well as in Belgium, Holland and Switzerland, and Ghéon was awarded a prize for his work by the Académie française. He also wrote poems, saints' biographies, and novels, among them a three-part work, Les Jeux de l'enfer et du ciel (Games of Hell and Heaven), centred around the Curè d'Ars.
Ghéon died of cancer in a Paris clinic on June 13, 1944, a week after the Allied landing in Normandy and six days after the opening of his most recent play, Saint Gilles.
In 2008 the writer and philosopher Fabrice Hadjadj, reviewing Catherine Boschian-Campaner's biography of Ghéon in Le Figaro, wrote,
"Henri Ghėon is not a minor writer and his work speaks for itself. If his novels recall Dickens, his theatre loses nothing in comparison with Anouilh and Giraudoux. It was he alone who, in the first half of the 20th century, revived the popular burlesque and verticality of the medieval mystery plays, thus anticipating Dario Fo."His Miroir de Peine was set to music by Hendrik Andriessen.
Selected works
The Secret of the Little Flower
The Secret of Saint John Bosco
The Secret of Saint Margaret Mary
The Secret of the Curé d'Ars
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Gh%C3%A9on
André Gide: A Life in the Present by Alan Sheridan Paperback: 752 pages
Publisher: Harvard University Press (October 2, 2000)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0674003934
ISBN-13: 978-0674003934
Amazon: André Gide: A Life in the Present
One of the most important writers of the twentieth century, André Gide also led what was probably one of the most interesting lives our century has seen. Gide knew and corresponded with many of the major literary figures of his day, from Mallarmé to Oscar Wilde. Though a Communist, his critical account of Soviet Russia in Return from the USSR earned him the enmity of the Left. A lifelong advocate of moral and political freedom and justice, he was a proscribed writer on the Vatican's infamous "Index." Self-published most of his life, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1947, at the age of 77. An avowed homosexual, he nonetheless married his cousin, and though their marriage was unconsummated, at 53 he fathered a daughter for a friend.
Alan Sheridan's book is a literary biography of Gide, an intimate portrait of the reluctantly public man, whose work was deeply and inextricably entangled with his life. Gide's life provides a unique perspective on our century, an idea of what it was like for one person to live through unprecedented technological change, economic growth and collapse, the rise of socialism and fascism, two world wars, a new concern for the colonial peoples and for women, and the astonishing hold of Rome and Moscow over intellectuals. Following Gide from his first forays among the Symbolists through his sexual and political awakenings to his worldwide fame as a writer, sage, and commentator on his age, Sheridan richly conveys the drama of a remarkable life; the depth, breadth, and vitality of an incomparable oeuvre; and the spirit of a time that both so aptly expressed.
Al Berto, pseudonym of Alberto Raposo Tavares Pidwell (Coimbra, January 11, 1948 - Lisbon, 13 June 1997) was a poet, painter, editor and animator of the Portuguese cultural environment. 
Lusosex: Gender And Sexuality In The Portuguese-Speaking World by Susan Canty Quinlan 
Date: Wednesday, June 15 
The Complete Wendel by Howard Cruse 
George Platt Lynes: The Male Nudes edited by Steven Haas 
Date: Wednesday, June 15 
The Complete Wendel by Howard Cruse 
George Platt Lynes: The Male Nudes edited by Steven Haas 
I was not sure about the combination of such different element, cowboys, poems and BDSM, I was not sure the mix would have been good… and I was wrong. First of all I have to admit my ignorance since I didn’t know cowboy poetry was an art and apparently well known in some part of the US country; Clint Darrow is the dominant of this story, but he is also a well experience cowboy plus a cowboy poet… a lot of things condensed in one man, but the character manages to be realistic and also very nice. I wouldn’t mind to find such cowboy myself. Clint is so self-confident (something maybe he learnt also being a dominant) that he has no issue at all at being openly gay, and that confidence allows him to be well respected by his colleagues. His strength is not even something physical, actually Clint is lean and tall, but not muscular; Tyler Sutton, the man he falls in love with, his probably physically stronger than Clint, but nevertheless, Clint is the one in command.