Corydon - Gide

"Corydon" is the title of a set of essays by André Gide on homosexuality. The text was published separately between 1911 and 1920, and the complete book only had its first French edition in 1924. The essays make use of the testimony of naturalists, historians, poets, and philosophers to support Gide's argument that homosexuality existed in culturally and artistically advanced civilizations (such as Periclean Greece, the Italian Renaissance, and Elizabethan England), which was reflected in writers and artists from Homer and Virgil to Titian and Shakespeare in their representations of male-male relationships in a non-platonic or friendship form, as others proclaimed. Corydon, like its author, faced strong reactions from the conservative society of the time, but what the author did was simply to openly discuss the topic of homosexuality in sociological and historical terms. Corydon is a profound book that deserves to be read, regardless of the reader's view on the subject of homosexuality.