Historical pederastic couples



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 noted only for this particular aspect of their lives.

The legal status of these relationships has varied with culture and jurisdiction. At present pederastic relationships between unrelated individuals above the local age of consent are legal in most jurisdictions.

Though all of these relationships are by definition homoerotic in nature, the individuals involved do not necessarily identify themselves as homosexuals. The nature of the relationships have ranged from overtly sexual to what is now commonly referred to as platonic, sometimes out of religious principle.

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." 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.

Some examples of this destruction of personal records by solicitous next-of-kin are the burning of the papers of Richard Francis Burton (among which his autobiographical magnum opus) by his wife at the time of his death, a project reported to have taken a number of days. Likewise, the sister of Horatio Alger destroyed his correspondence upon his death. The same fate befell the personal papers of Philip II, Duke of Orléans, whose wife entered his chambers upon his death and disposed of his voluminous correspondence with his various minions. Death is not the only occasion when such records are lost. The wife of André Gide burned thirty years of almost daily correspondence between them ("The best of myself," he later claimed) upon learning of his elopement to London with Marc Allégret, his teenage boyfriend, declaring she had been left with "nothing else to do."

Nevertheless a very small percentage 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. 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. Though 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.

Ancient and premodern Asia

 * Gong Wei and Wang Qi
 * According to 孔子 Confucius, Gongshu Wuren, known as Gongwei, son of King Zhao of 魯 Lu, had Wang Qi as his boy-favorite. Gongwei rode to meet the army of 齊 Qi in his war chariot with his favorite beside him. The two died in battle and their wakes were held at the same time. The people of Lu considered not giving the lad Wang Qi a funeral. They consulted Confucius who said, "If someone can wield the lance to protect his country, how can you not give him a funeral?"
 * Confucius and Yan Hui
 * Gaozu of Han and Jiri
 * Reigned 206-195 BCE.
 * Emperor Hui of Han and Hongru
 * Reigned 194-188 BCE. Before the tradition of meritocracy took root, male favorites rose to rank and power.
 * Yu Xin and Wang Shao
 * The great writer (513-581) was disowned by his beloved upon the latter's rise to power.
 * Walibah ibn al-Hubab and Abu Nuwas
 * Both poets, the younger (b. 756 C.E.) becoming by far the greater of the two.
 * Mahmud of Ghazni and Ayaz
 * The two, sultan and slave, are paragons of male love in Islamic culture. Their story depicts the power of love of a man for a youth, where the king becomes a slave to his slave. Mahmud appointed Ayaz ruler of Lahore in 1021. See Malik Ayaz for anecdotes of their relationship
 * Shah Hussain and Madho Lal
 * Shah Hussain's love for a Brahmin boy called "Madho" or "Madho Lal" is famous, and they are often referred to as a single person with the composite name of "Madho Laal Hussain." Madho's tomb lies next to Hussain's in the shrine.

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.
 * 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...'"
 * Raoul II, Archbishop of Tours and Jean, Archbishop of Orléans
 * Raoul appointed his adolescent lover (also known as "Flora") in 1097 to the post in Orléans over the vehement objections of other prelates.
 * Ailred of Rievaulx and Simon
 * Ailred, the abbot of the Cistercian monastery of Rievaulx who was in his mid-twenties in 1135, was in love with a young monk named Simon, about fourteen years of age. The relationship is thought to have remained chaste.
 * Frederick of Baden and Conradin
 * The sixteen year old king of Sicily and his nineteen year old best friend and lover were captured by the forces of Charles of Anjou. They were both tried, found guilty of treason, and decapitated.
 * Nicoleto Marmagna and Giovanni Braganza
 * In 1357 the Venetian court I Signori di Notte ("The Gentlemen of the Night") sentenced the boatman and his young servant to be burned at the stake. Their relationship of many years standing had been discovered during a voyage from Mestre to Venice.

Pre-modern period



 * 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.
 * 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.
 * Leonardo da Vinci and Gian Giacomo Caprotti da Oreno (il Salaino)
 * Il Salaino entered his service in 1490 at 10, and remained for thirty years.
 * Babur and Baburi
 * According to Babur's autobiography, some time around the year 1500, "In those leisurely days I discovered in myself a strange inclination, nay! as the verse says, I maddened and afflicted myself' for a boy in the camp-bazaar, his very name, Baburi, fitting in.... From time to time Baburi used to come to my presence but out of modesty and bashfulness, I could never look straight at him; how then could I make conversation and recital? In my joy and agitation I could not thank him (for coming); how was it possible for me to reproach him with going away? What power had I to command the duty service to myself? One day, during that time of desire and passion when I was going with companions along a lane and suddenly met him face to face, I got into such a state of confusion that I almost went right off. To look straight at him or put words together was impossible.... In that frothing up of desire and passion, and under that stress of youthful folly, I used to wander, barehead, bare-foot, through street and lane, orchard and vineyard."
 * Leonardo da Vinci and Francesco Melzi
 * Melzi was Leonardo's last love. In 1506, he joined Leonardo's household at the age of 15. Later he went to France with him and finally inherited the artistic and scientific works of the great Italian master. Talking about Leonardo's affection for him, Melzi described it as "un ardentissimo e sviscerato amore," a fiery and passionate love.
 * 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.
 * 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.
 * Michelangelo and Cecchino de' Bracci
 * The artist composed fifty rhymed epitaphs for his friend, dead at sixteen in 1543. A few verses refer clearly to their shared physical joys.
 * 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. Upon being appointed pope in 1550, he raised the boy to the post of cardinal and indulged in pederastic orgies with him and other young cardinals. (Larivière, 1997)
 * Theodore Beza and Audebert
 * Among his 1548 Juvenilia poems was one which was understood to point to his bisexuality, in which he compared his passion for two young lovers, "little Candida" and "little Audebert," concluding he loved Audebert the best. Later this poem would be held against him in particular and against Calvinists in general as a proof of moral failing.
 * 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?"
 * 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."
 * Benvenuto Cellini and Fernando di Giovanni di Montepulciano
 * Ended after five years, in 1556, when Cellini, 56, had a falling out with his teen apprentice.
 * Esmé Stewart, 1st Duke of Lennox and James I of England
 * Esmé Stewart became the first favourite of the future king of England, in 1579, when James was only thirteen years old.
 * Anthony Bacon and Isaac Burgades
 * While living in Montauban in 1587, the elder brother of Francis Bacon was convicted of sodomy with a page who at the trial declared that "there was nothing wrong with sodomy" and that "Theodore Beza of Geneva approved of it." The two escaped conviction and probable death by burning only due to the intercession of Henry IV of France.
 * Prospero Farinacci and Berardino Rocchi
 * The Italian lawyer and judge, noted for his harsh sentencing of sodomites, was himself accused in 1595 of relations with Berardino Rocchi, a sixteen year old page.
 * Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford and Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton
 * Oxford and Southampton, besides having been lovers, are also thought by many to have been - the first - the pseudonymous author of the works ascribed to the historical William Shakespeare, and - the second - the youth known as the Fair Lord to whom most of the Sonnets are dedicated.

Seventeenth century

 * Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio and Francesco ('Cecco') Boneri
 * The youthful Cecco modelled for many of Caravaggio's most famous paintings, including his 1602 Amor Vincit Omnia, and became a well-known artist himself, known as Cecco del Caravaggio.
 * James I of England and Robert Carr, 1st Earl of Somerset
 * The 41-year-old king fell in love with the 17-year-old ex-page at a 1606 jousting bout. Their love lasted several years, though as the boy matured the king was powerless to prevent Carr's “creeping back and withdrawing yourself from lying in my chamber, notwithstanding my many hundred times earnest soliciting you to the contrary.”
 * Charles de Luynes and Louis XIII of France
 * Counselor and friend to the Dauphin who was 23 years his junior, de Luynes was his lover from at least 1615, when the future Louis XIII - already experienced in male love - was 14.
 * Louis XIII, King of France, and the Marquis de Cinq-Mars
 * Cardinal Richelieu introduced the eighteen-year-old marquis to his king in 1638, thinking the youth would be easy to control. Instead, the marquis tried to convince the king to have Richelieu executed. Cinq-Mars induced some French nobility into revolt, but the effort failed and Richelieu had him beheaded in 1642.
 * Cyrano de Bergerac and Chapelle
 * After befriending the seventeen year old Chapelle in 1643, de Bergerac passed him on to his friend d'Assoucy, another in his libertine circle.
 * 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."
 * Charles, marquis du Bellay, and Richard de la Monnerie
 * Du Bellay, when already of an advanced age and hunchbacked obtained in 1661 his young valet in exchange for fifty louis d'or from the soon to be notorious Jacques Chausson, who ended his days on a pyre for various sodomitical acts. The marquis, also known as the Prince of Yvetot, died without issue, thus extinguishing the line.
 * Molière and Michel Baron
 * Molière's wife, exasperated over his infatuation with the fifteen year old Michel, in 1668, presented the playwright with an ultimatum: her or the boy. The result was the wife moved out and Molière continued to live with the young actor until his own death five years later.
 * Henry III of France and Anne de Joyeuse
 * Known as "The King's King" for his influence over his royal patron, de Joyeuse was one of the two principal mignons of the king, having first won the king's favor at the age of fourteen in 1674.
 * Philippe de Lorraine and Louis de Bourbon, Count of Vermandois
 * Louis, the fourteen year old bastard son of Louis XIV, fell into royal disfavor 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 joins the battle despite the advice of the royal physician, and succumbs to the disease shortly thereafter. The king does not mourn him.
 * Jean-Baptiste Lully and Brunet
 * In 1685 the 53-year-old composer was denounced for his dalliances with his young page. The boy confessed to Roman orgies involving so many of the great lords that all was hushed up.

Eighteenth century

 * Hans Hermann von Katte and Frederick II of Prussia
 * The 18-year-old crown prince Frederick sought to flee his brutal father in 1730, together with his twenty six year old lover, whom he had met during private instruction in mathematics and mechanics the previous year. Betrayed, they were caught, von Katte being sentenced to death before his friend's eyes. Catching sight of each other at the last moment, the prince exclaimed: "Pardonnez moi, mon cher Katte," (Forgive me, my dear Katte!) "La mort est douce pour un si aimable Prince," (Death is sweet, for such a kind prince,) came the answer.
 * Luc de Clapiers, marquis de Vauvenargues and Hippolyte de Seytres
 * Both belonged to a French regiment that fought in Bohemia since 1740. Hippolyte, also an aristocrat, was 18 and Vauvenargue 8 years older when they became companions. The younger of the two died during the Siege of Prague in 1742. De Clapiers addressed his philosophical work Conseil à un jeune homme (Advice to a young Man) to Hippolyte de Seytres. "He understood all the passions and opinions, even the most singular, that the world blames."  —Vauvenargues about his friend.
 * William Thomas Beckford and William Courtenay
 * Beckford, 19, fell in love with Courtenay, 10, nicknamed Kitty and "one of the most beautiful boys in England," in 1789. Both pursued lifelong involvement with boys. In a letter to Courtenay's aunt he describes his feelings: "You know, he was never so happy as when he reclined by my side listening to my wild musick or the strange stories which sprang up in my fancy for his amusement. Those were the most delightful hours of my existence."

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.
 * Cheng I and Chang Pao (Cheung Po Tsai in Cantonese)
 * Cheng I was a pirate of the Chinese coast, who kidnapped the 15 years old Chang Pao in 1801. Chang Pao later became the leader of Cheng's pirate fleet.
 * Lord Byron and Nicolò Giraud
 * Lord Byron fell in love with the French-Italian lad in 1810, when the boy was 15. "It is about two hours since, that, after informing me he was most desirous to follow him (that is me) over the world, he concluded by telling me it was proper for us not only to live, but 'morire insieme'. The latter I hope to avoid - as much of the former as he pleases." Byron wrote to a friend that he and the boy were having anal sex (in code, "the Pl. & opt. C." short for "coitum plenum et optabilem"). As a result of their copious couplings the boy developed an anal rupture, for which Byron consulted an English doctor passing through the area.
 * Franz Desgouttes and Daniel Hammeler
 * Daniel moved in with his twenty five year old lover, a Swiss lawyer, at the age of sixteen in 1810, and lived with him for seven years, until he was murdered by Frantz in a fit of jealousy. His lover was executed by being broken on the wheel, an event that galvanized the early Swiss homosexual emancipation movement.
 * Hail-Storm and Rabbit
 * Of the two Oglala Lakota he met in 1847, Parkman recounts, "Hail-Storm and [Rabbit] were inseparable: they ate, slept and hunted together, and shared with one another almost all that they possessed. If there be anything that deserves to be called romantic in the Indian character, it is to be sought for in friendships such as this, which are quite common among many of the prairie tribes." Hail-Storm was an older adolescent entering manhood, while Rabbit was still a boy.
 * Ludwig van Beethoven and Karl van Beethoven
 * The possessive love that the composer bore his nephew drove the latter to an attempted suicide. His subsequent departure in order to join the army sent the uncle into a depression which is thought to have precipitated his death, shortly thereafter. Beethoven's biographer, Anton Felix Schindler, destroyed 264 of the 400 Conversation Books (p. 15) in which were recorded exchanges between the uncle and nephew.
 * Edward Fitzgerald and William Kenworthy Browne
 * While on a steamship crossing in 1832, Fitzgerald met the sixteen year old boy and fell in love with him. Their friendship continued until his friend's death in a riding accident in 1859. The poem Euphranor: A Dialogue on Youth was a glorification of Browne.
 * Edward John Eyre and Wylie
 * The Australian explorer met Wylie in 1840 and took him as companion, together with two other Aboriginee boys and a European, on his 1841 expedition across the Nullarbor Plain. Afterwards he formed repeated close associations with such boys.
 * 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.
 * Digby Mackworth Dolben and Martin Le Marchant Gosselin
 * He marked his romantic attachment to another pupil a year older than him, Martin Le Marchant Gosselin, by writing love poetry
 * Edward Carpenter and Andrew Beck (a master of Trinity Hall)
 * According to Carpenter, the two formed a close relationship that had 'a touch of romance'. Beck eventually ended their relationship and denied the attachment, causing Carpenter great emotional heartache.
 * Walter Pater and William Money Hardinge
 * Recently uncovered documents reveal an affair with a 19 year old Hardinge.
 * William Johnson Cory and Charles Wood
 * William Johnson, master at Eton, wrote a book of Uranian verse, Ionica, dedicated to his pupil, in 1850.
 * 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." 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.
 * John C. Frémont and Jesse Shepard
 * The adventurer and politician took on the thirteen year old boy as his page, a role he filled for two years, until 1863. Jesse had been chosen because he was queer, and the two were constantly together.
 * Russell Conwell and John Ring
 * During the American Civil War Conwell, a non-believer at the time, was attended by a sixteen year old aide de camp named Johnny Ring, a youth who shared his tent and was also charged with safeguarding the captain's saber and was devoutly Christian. The boy "idolized Conwell and was always with him," an affection which Conwell returned. On one occasion, Conwell being away from camp, the platoon was forced into a hasty retreat, setting fire to a bridge to block pursuit. Ring, attempting to save his captain's sword, crossed the burning bridge and enemy lines, retrieving the sword and crossing back through the flames, dying later of his burns. Upon hearing the news, Conwell lost consciousness and spent days in delirium of grief, converting later so as to be able to rejoin his friend after death. According to his own account, is the memory of the love they shared that gave him the energy to accomplish his works in life.
 * 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.
 * Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud
 * Both major poets, they became lovers in 1871, at age 27 and 17 respectively.
 * Henry Morton Stanley and Kalalu
 * Stanley wrote a book about his love for the African boy, around 1870, "My Kalalu."
 * Reginald Brett, 2nd Viscount Esher and Ernlé Johnson
 * Inspired by his teacher 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.
 * Oscar Browning and George Curzon
 * After fifteen years a master at Eton College, Browing, a former student of William Johnson-Cory, was dismissed in 1875 over his "overly amorous" (but purportedly chaste) relationship with the sixteen year old Curzon.
 * Jules Verne and Aristide Briand
 * Verne engaged in a "curiously" close and extended relationship with Aristide Briand, whom he met in Nantes in 1876 when the young man was a fifteen year old lycéen and schoolmate of his son Michel. He frequently picked up Briand from the lycée and brought him to his house. Love between a man and a handsome youth is a quasi-universal theme in Verne's novels, and the author is thought to have expressed his own feelings in the description of one such relationship: "Halg was the only one able to move this disaffected man, who knew no love other than the one he felt for a child... Is it because they have some dim notion of this disproportion that, despite its resplendent beauty, such an emotion astonishes more than it charms other men, and seems inhuman to them, even though it is above them?"
 * Wilhelm von Gloeden and Pancrazio Bucini
 * Von Gloeden, a famous fin de siècle photographer of Italian youths, hired Bucini in the early 1880s, when the boy was 13 or 14. Bucini, called "il Moro," was his lover, assistant and finally his heir. In 1936 Bucini, as curator of the collection, successfully defended himself against the charge of keeping pornography, accusation made by the Italian fascists, who destroyed most of the remaining three thousand picture plates.
 * Lord Henry Somerset and Henry Smith
 * Though Somerset had met the commoner when the boy was only seven, their intimate relationship only blossomed about ten years later. The lord had to take refuge (and permanent exile) in Italy shortly thereafter as a result of his irate wife publicizing the affair. Driven to poetry, he produced a collection titled Songs of Adieu which was reviewed by Oscar Wilde:
 * Lord Henry Somerset's verse is not so good as his music. Most of the Songs of Adieu are marred by their excessive sentimentality of feeling and by the commonplace character of their weak and lax form.  There is nothing that is new and little that is true in verse of this kind [...] It can be produced in any quantity.  Lord Henry Somerset has too much heart and too little art to make a good poet, and such art as he does possess is devoid of almost every intellectual quality and entirely lacking in any intellectual strength.  He has nothing to say and says it.

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!
 * Walt Whitman and Bill Duckett
 * They were together from 1884 to 1889
 * Oscar Wilde and Robbie Ross
 * Ross, at 17 a journalist and future literary executor to Wilde, seduced his 32 year old mentor in 1886.
 * Robbie Ross and Christopher Millard
 * Ross had a sexual relationship with Millard while the latter was a teenager.
 * 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)
 * Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky and Vladimir Lvovich Davïdov
 * The composer and his nephew (b. 1871) were lovers for five years, from c. 1888 until the elder's death at 53.
 * 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 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.
 * 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.
 * 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.
 * André Gide and Ali
 * The first homoerotic encounter of the young writer, in North Africa, with a young Arab.
 * Lord Ronald Gower and Frank Hird
 * Gower, the model for Lord Henry Wotton in Wilde's "The Picture of Dorian Gray", adopted the boy (no later than 1894) and lived with him in what became a lifelong relationship. "Gower may be seen, but not Hird." —Oscar Wilde
 * John Gambril Nicholson and William Alexander (Alec) Melling
 * One of the poet's boyish muses, Melling was the dedicatee of Nicholsen's collection of Uranian poems, A Chaplet of Southernwood, published in 1896.
 * John Gambril Nicholson and Frank Victor Rushforth
 * In his Dead Roses the Uranian poet hides the name of his thirteen year old beloved:
 * Norman Douglas and Michele
 * Douglas had an affair with the youth, 15, in Capri in 1897.
 * Hector MacDonald and Alaister Robertson
 * At the time of the Battle of Paardeberg in 1900, MacDonald's principal friend was Alaister Robertson, a Glenalmond schoolboy from Aberdeen whose photograph he kept on his desk and with whom he corresponded.

20th century

 * 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.
 * John Maynard Keynes and Arthur Hobhouse
 * In 1902, his freshman year at Cambridge, Keynes fell in love with Trinity undergraduate Hobhouse, sixteen years old at the time. The youth was the first in a series of male love affairs that was to last seventeen years. Keynes and Lytton Strachey had been competing for Arthur's favors. When Lytton lost, he countered with a love poem to Arthur.
 * Lytton Strachey and Duncan Grant
 * The two, former childhood friends, became lovers in 1902 when Grant was a house guest of the Stracheys in London. He was seventeen and Strachey twenty two. "When he was 17, it was decided that he would join the vast household of his London cousins, the Stracheys. It was not long before Lytton Strachey, five years Grant's senior and openly homosexual, declared himself besotted with his handsome cousin. After several rebuffs -- legend has it Grant told Strachey, Relations we may be: have them, we may not -- Strachey finally had his way, becoming the first of Grant's many male lovers."
 * Jacques d'Adelswärd-Fersen and Loulou Locré
 * Loulou was a pupil at the Lycée Carnot, involved with Fersen in 1903.
 * Stefan George and Max Kronberger (Maximin)
 * A chaste love (one of many for George) which lasted one year, till the boy's death at 16 in 1904. George was then creating a cult that lifted Maximin to a godlike status.
 * St. John Lucas and Rupert Brooke
 * Whilst at Rugby in 1904, the 16-year-old RB had a relationship with 25-year-old St. John Lucas, an author and aesthete who gave a great deal of encouragement to RB, and introduced him to the 1890s poets (Wilde, Dowson, etc.).
 * Jacques d'Adelswärd-Fersen and Nino Cesarini
 * The baron, 24, met the 14 year old laborer in Rome, 1904. They lived in Capri till Fersen's 1923 suicide.
 * Frederick Rolfe and Ermenegildo Vianello
 * The writer, also known as "Baron Corvo" met the boy, a young gondolier of around seventeen years of age, in Venice in 1908
 * 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.
 * T. E. Lawrence and Selim Ahmed (Dahoum)
 * For love of a Syrian boy of 15 met in 1912 at 24, Lawrence fought for Arab independence. "I liked a particular Arab very much, and I thought that freedom for the race would be an acceptable present." —T.E. Lawrence
 * 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."
 * 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.
 * 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.
 * John Henry Mackay and Atti
 * Mackay fell deeply in love with the Berlin schoolboy in early 1916 during a school holiday.
 * 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.
 * Jean Cocteau and Raymond Radiguet
 * Cocteau met the young poet in 1918 at 29, when the boy was 15 years old. The two collaborated extensively, socialized, and undertook many journeys and vacations together. Cocteau got the youth exempted from military service and exerted his influence to garner the "Nouveau Monde" literary prize for Radiguet's novel, Le Diable au Corps. Some sources suggest that their friendship was loving and sexual. Their relationship has been placed in the context of "a series of younger lovers and collaborators". An anecdote told by Ernest Hemingway has an enraged Cocteau charging Radiguet (known in the Parisian literary circles as "Monsieur Bébé") with decadence for his tryst with a model: "Bébé est vicieuse. Il aime les femmes." ("Baby is depraved. He likes women." [Note the use of the feminine adjective]). Radiguet, Hemingway implies, employed his sexuality to advance his career, being a writer "who knew how to make his career not only with his pen but with his pencil," a salacious and phallic allusion.  Cocteau however was guarded in his discussion of his relationships: "Cocteau never put his name to an openly, unashamedly homosexual text and invariably alluded to his male lovers - the most celebrated being the precocious novelist Raymond Radiguet and the actors Jean Marais and Edouard Dermit - as his 'adopted sons' (in the case of Dermit, even formally adopting him)". In 1919 Radiguet's father discovered a "compromising correspondence" between Cocteau and his son, giving rise to an exchange of letters in November of that year between the two adults in which Cocteau compared the youth to Rimbaud. In mid-March 1921 he hastened from Paris to join Radiguet (among others, including Georges Auric and Monsieur et Madame Hugo Valentin), who had left alone for Carqueiranne. On the 30th of the same month he replied to his mother, who had commented on  this voyage: "Have you not yet understood that my life is spent releasing my instincts, watching them, sorting them once they are out, and forging them to my advantage?" After Radiguet's death (of typhoid fever), Cocteau did not attend the funeral.  However, in this version of the story, Cocteau takes to his bed prostrated with grief (see below to see what happened according to Cocteau) After the death of Radiguet, Cocteau began to use opium, to which he became addicted.  The people who wish to say that Cocteau and Radiguet had a relationship say that this was the direct result of Radiguet's death, but this reading of the story is contradicted by Cocteau himself (see below)
 * Others contest this interpretation, claiming that it has not been confirmed in any correspondence or writings by Cocteau or those close to both of them, and that Radiguet had any number of well-documented liaisons with women and generally spent his nights alone at the apartments of Max Jacob and Juan Gris, sleeping on the kitchen table or the floor. Cocteau, speaking about Radiguet in a transcription of a television interview made three months before Cocteau's death claimed that he did not particularly care for Radiguet personally and only respected his talent as a writer. Upon Radiguet's death, which was due to typhoid fever complicated by heavy drinking, Cocteau was, in his own words, "paralyzed with stupor and disgust". He did not attend the funeral—Cocteau did not attend anyone's funeral, as a rule—but instead immediately left Paris with Sergei Diaghilev (see below) for Monte Carlo for a performance of Les Fâcheux by Auric and Les Biches by Poulenc. While Cocteau began to smoke opium after Radiguet's death, to which he became addicted, he himself said that this was pure coincidence and had nothing to do with Radiguet's death.
 * Karol Szymanowski and Boris Kochno[[Image:Boris Kochno.jpg|thumb|120px|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.
 * 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.
 * Sergei Diaghilev and Boris Kochno
 * Diaghilev's librettist for 8 years, till Sergei's death in 1929 at 57. Later, Monte Carlo ballet director.
 * Willem de Mérode and Ekko Ubbens
 * Ekko, whom he met in 1922, was one of de Mérode's chaste pederastic friendships.
 * E. M. Forster and Kanaya
 * While serving in 1923 as secretary to the Maharajah of Dewas, Forster entered into a regular relationship with Kanaya, a boy barber provided to him by the Maharajah for sexual purposes "if the boy agrees." The relationship lasted six months.
 * 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.
 * 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.
 * 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"
 * W. H. Auden and Michael Yates
 * In 1934 the poet took his former pupil, aged fifteen and by Auden's own account one of the five great loves of his life, on travels through Europe, and was inspired by him to write some of his tenderest love poems, such as Lullaby ("Lay your sleeping head, my love . . .")
 * 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.
 * Giovanni Comisso and Guido Bottegal
 * In 1943 the novelist Comisso (1895 - 1969) fell in love with the 16 years old Guido, who later was shot by partisans for being mistaken for a fascist spy.
 * "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.
 * Bernard Montgomery, 1st Viscount Montgomery of Alamein and L.T.
 * According to Nigel Hamilton in his 2001 biography of Montgomery, "Monty" fell passionately in love the twelve-year-old Swiss youth in 1946, and would spend time with him at his chalet in Gstaad. The intimacy only went as far as bathing the boy and towelling him off. They corresponded for many years.
 * Bill Tilden and Bobby
 * Tilden, thought at the time of this death to have been the greatest tennis player in history, was apprehended in late 1946 while fondling his fourteen year old friend as the boy was at the wheel of Tilden's car in Beverly Hills. Though Bobby's father, a film studio executive, did not want Tilden incarcerated, he nonetheless served seven months of a one-year sentence.
 * James Baldwin (writer) 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.
 * Sandro Penna and Raffaele
 * The Italian poet took the 14 years old streetboy from Rome to his home in 1956 and lived with him for several years.
 * William S. Burroughs and Kiki
 * During the years in which William S. Burroughs was living in Tangier he had a relationship with a Spanish teenager named "Kiki".
 * René Schérer and Guy Hocquenghem
 * Guy Hocquenghem began an affair with his teacher in 1959, when he was 15. The gay activist Hocquenghem and the philosopher Scherer remained lifelong friends.
 * 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.
 * Roger Peyrefitte and Alain-Philippe Malagnac d'Argens de Villèle
 * Peyrefitte met the 14 year old aristocrat during the filming of his novel Les Amitiés particulières in late 1963. Their love is described in Notre amour and L'Enfant de cœur. Malagnac lived with him from the age of 16, was adopted by Peyrefitte, and eventually married Amanda Lear.
 * Alexander Ziegler and Stephan (Mutscha)
 * In 1966 the twenty two year old Swiss actor and writer was sentenced to a two and a half year jail term for a love affair with the sixteen year old Stephan, documented in the autobiographical novel Die Konsequenz and later turned into a movie by director Wolfgang Petersen.
 * Anthony Mercieca and M. F.
 * Father Mercieca and the future US Congressman engaged in a two year relationship starting in 1967, when F. was thirteen years old. In The Herald Tribune "Father Anthony Mercieca said Thursday he never had sexual intercourse with former U.S. Rep. M. F., but throughout the day offered more details to national media outlets about his intimate relationship with the then-Lake Worth altar boy. Mercieca told the Washington Post he and F. once engaged in "light touching" and told CNN he fondled F. when he was a teen, though he didn't consider the contact abuse because F. "seemed to like it."
 * Jan Hanlo and Mohammed
 * In 1969, when they were 57 and 12 - a chaste relationship, as were his others.