Born August 17: Roger Peyrefitte

    

Like many men, Roger Peyrefitte had his first sexual experiences as a teen with a friend and, as he aged, he never lost his taste for youth. After a successful posting to Athens from roughly twenty-five to thirty-one, albeit with some run-ins with the police for disturbing the local lads, he was dismissed from the French foreign service at thirty-three for his affair with a fourteen year-old. Reinstated to work for the Vichy government in 1943, Peyrefitte returned to his first love in his much-praised and much-attacked debut novel Special Friendships [or Les amitiés particulières], in which one student at a Catholic boys school asks another the immortal question, "Do you know the things one should not know?" Despite its subtle but clear portrayal of homosexuality among many of the innocent or conniving boys and a few of the priests, the novel won the Prix Renaudot in 1945. (France was enjoying an orgy of gay writing: After Proust came Gide, Cocteau, Henry de Montherlant, Marcel Jouhandeau, and Genet in 1943.)

Peyrefitte hit another high point with his fifteenth book, The Exile of Capri in 1958, about a thirty-something and a seventeen year-old, but widespread critical opinion is that he put far more effort into getting attention and money than into getting the words right, and his work suffered. In 1964 Jean Delannoy directed a film version of Les amitiés particulières which is surprisingly faithful to the book and, perhaps unsurprisingly by this point, life imitated art imitating life on the set: Now in his mid-fifties, Peyfitte met the aristocratic extra Alain-Philippe Malagnac d'Argens de Villèle, who was twelve. They later became lovers, which, again, Peyrefitte detailed in subsequent books Notre Amour in 1967 and L'Enfant de cœur in 1978. A provocateur who adored the frisson of scandal, Peyrefitte said he did what he did, not as gossip -- such as outing François Mauriac and Pope Paul VI and claiming Frederick the Great topped Voltaire -- but to advance the gay cause. More directly, in 1973 he funded Le Colony, a gay club, and Le Bronx, said to be Paris's first gay sex bar. And yet he falsely accused Marlene Dietrich of having been a Hitlerite (for which she sued him and won) and he publicly supported the fascist homophobe Jean-Marie Le Pen. Peyrefitte died at ninety-three in November 2000. His writings about Malagnac claim they had a suicide pact. Malagnac, who had married the possibly trans entertainer Amanda Lear, perished in a suspicious fire in December 2000 at forty-nine.

Gregory Woods chose The Exile of Capri for the out-of-print gay rescue project The Lost Library. Woods also writes about Peyrefitte in his exhaustive survey A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition published by Yale.

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Pope Paul VI...