André Gide

Bad Gays

Warning: this episode contains discussions of child sexual abuse. Listener discretion is advised.

This week, we tackle the French author André Gide, a self-styled "immoralist" who oscillated between an austere Protestantism and a sensualism he associated with the so-called "Orient," and who elevated pederasty above sodomy in a way that helps us understand the often-disfiguring influence of upper-class male sexual desires on the construction of the 20th century gay male identity.

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SOURCES:

Kadji Amin, Disturbing Attachments: Genet, Modern Pederasty, and Queer History, electronic resource, Theory Q (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017)

Andre Gide, If It Die . . .: An Autobiography, New Ed edition (New York: Vintage, 2001)

Andre Gide, The Counterfeiters (Vintage, 2012)

Andre Gide, The Immoralist, trans. Richard Howard, Reissue edition (Vintage, 2014)

Mary McAuliffe, Paris on the Brink: The 1930s Paris of Jean Renoir, Salvador Dalí, Simone de Beauvoir, André Gide, Sylvia Beach, Léon Blum, and Their Friends, Illustrated edition (Lanham Boulder New York London: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2020)

George D. Painter, Andre Gide: A Critical Biography (London: Littlehampton Book Services Ltd)

Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism, Reprint edition (New York: Vintage, 1994).

Alan Sheridan, André Gide: A Life in the Present (Harvard University Press, 1999)

Edmund White, "On the chance that a shepherd boy...," London Review of Books, December 10, 1998, https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v20/n24/edmund-white/on-the-chance-that-a-shepherd-boy.

Our intro music is Arpeggia Colorix by Yann Terrien, downloaded from WFMU's Free Music Archive and distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. Our outro music is by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicsdesigner.