The Great Mirror of Same-Sex Love - Prose - 68. Hans Christian Andersen through a kaleidoscope

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Hans Christian Andersen through a kaleidoscope

Although the biographical blurbs that follow were all penned by Gay people, they show a range of writers refracting the same truths, ranging from a judgmental “othering” and attempted sex-shaming, to an honest portrayal of the writer’s extensive and fulfilled love life. Most Gay artists of any kind continue to be run through the meatgrinder of 20th century lettres in two ways, and two ways only. This is because the label of a person having “a sexuality” (an outmoded, Victorian disease-model that belongs on History’s trash pile as sure as other gas-lit notions like white supremacy, eugenics, man’s ownership of women) forces even the best-educated straight minds to resort to the abdominal H-word slurring of the defenseless artist. In writings belonging to this dead-end notion, the Gay person is converted into either a celibate, sexless, “pure” self-loather, or a sex-crazed, narcissistic, Dr. Jekyll psychopath. [i] There are no other choices using the mythos of 19th century “sexuality.” Thus, Hans Christian Anderson received the pure, un-touched-by-man designation, as arguably his legacy was too important to name-call as a f*gg*t. Unfortunately, to our Minority Group’s continuing shame, even the best of LGBT+ minds ape the barbaric, eugenics-inspired notions of defining ourselves via “attractions,” “desire,” “erotics,” “lusts” etc. As if we have no other definition for our time on earth except as abusers – nay, predators – of bodies, and bodies, bodies, and bodies alone. Someday soon, a liberated idea of Gay as nothing to do with genital matters better dawn, or we’ll be the very last people on earth allowing 19th mores to oppress us, from within and without.

Hans Christian Andersen

1805-1875

Throughout his whole life, Andersen was in love: in love with his friend Edvard Collin who was twenty-two: “No one has brought more tears to my eyes, neither has anyone been loved so much by me as you.” In love with another young friend, Ludvig Müller: “I miss you so dreadfully . . . I am as fond of you as if you were my brother . . . I am a strange being, my feelings run off with me too quickly, and I only make myself unhappy. Oh, do come, come my dear Ludvig . . . . “ [Scholars speculate he] was also in love with their sisters, but perhaps only to bring him closer to their brothers. [Because no such “love letters” to them exist, or can be proven to have ever been written.]

He did not draw a line between friendship and physical love; […] his life was one of constant frustration [due to possible unrequitedness]. “My soul is so full of love . . . my pain is crushing me when I suffer [rejection].”

As a boy, he did not play with other boys, but delighted in making clothes for his dolls. As a youth, he was [gentle] and innocent, an innocence [which] stayed into his twenties, and in fact never left him. As a man he lived a [guarded] life.

His friend Søren Kierkegaard observed early on – when he was twenty-four and Andersen thirty-two – that Andersen’s work “should be compared with those flowers which have male and female [components] placed on the same stem.” Only in fairy tales could he express himself completely. It was a medium whose formal distance from reality allowed him to write as he felt: as the social outsider; as the rejected lover.

Later in life, when he became famous, he traveled and met Dickens, Browning, Schumann, German Grand Dukes and European royalty. He witnessed the whirling dervishes of Pera. The throbbing male dancers, who seemed to whirl themselves to death, groaning and dripping with sweat and sinking down into “obscene positions,” sent him into ecstasies. The swiftly gliding gondoliers excited him too, with their powerful naked arms emerging from their wide gauze-like sleeves. “Feeling sensual,” he wrote, “an Asiatic sensuality is torturing me here. Oh, how I'm burning with longing!”

It was with this passion, his biographer Jackie Wullschlager noted, that he wrote The Ice Maiden, The Little Mermaid, The Red Shoes, and The Ugly Duckling, a passion the reader senses today. The Little Mermaid, for instance, can be read as an expression of his sensual longings; his physical anguish. It is a tale of social exclusion, castigated desire, and “wrong feelings below the waist.”

Writing his stories, Kierkegaard said, was less an expression of self [for Andersen] than a [cauterization].

—Clinton Elliott, [ii]

2014

Andersen, Hans Christian (1805-1875), Danish author. [iii] Born into the lowest proletariat of the Danish provincial town of Odense, Andersen in 1819 traveled to Copenhagen in order to pursue a career in the theater. A process of upward social mobility that was remarkable for his times now began. He lived by himself, had very little money, but was financially supported by patrons to whom he had introduced himself. His strange ability to gain entrance into the families of the middle and upper classes, even the royal family, probably owed much to his talent for being sweetly and weirdly [sic] entertaining and amusing. One of these houses was the Collin family, which for the rest of his life became the center of his existence. Jonas Collin, a prominent civil servant and co-manager of the Royal Theater, took charge of Andersen’s education and secured a royal grant through which Andersen was a boarder at the high school (gymnasium) from 1822 to 1828. In 1829 he published his first novel. From then on he was a well-known literary figure in Copenhagen. Novels, poems, travelogues and plays followed. In 1833-1834 he traveled on a royal grant through Germany and France to Italy. From 1840, traveling became an almost compulsive habit which took him (in 30 trips) to all corners of Europe and made him the most cosmopolitan of Danish authors. “To travel is to live,” he said.

In 1835 Andersen published his first collection of the fairy tales that made him immortal among poets [sic]. In an autobiographical sketch two years earlier, he had written of his own life as a fairy tale, in which the hand of God directs everything for the best. In 1847, he published his autobiography The Fairy Tale of My Life. By then he had achieved the fame as a poet and an artist that he had longed for since childhood, and honors were bestowed upon him nationally and internationally. More than most authors, Andersen saw the connection between life and art as decisive. “Reality’s the most beautiful fairy tale of all.”

Andersen’s life is like an open book. His amazing desire to communicate was embodied in intimate diaries, autobiographies and thousands of letters to his many friends. [iv] In his fiction, he is nearly always present in a highly personal manner. Clearly Andersen conceived of himself as being different from others.

Eighteen years after Andersen’s death, a newspaper in 1893 hinted at his orientation for the first time [in print]. In 1901, the Danish author Carl HANSEN FAHLBERG published an article in Magnus HIRSCHFELD'S Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen, “H. C. Andersen: Beweis seiner Homosexualität.” The analysis of Andersen’s conception of himself […] in Hans Mayer's Aussenseiter (1975) is perceptive, although not always founded in fact. Mayer’s stern judgement of Andersen as a suppressed “h*m*s*x**l” is heavy-handed and influenced by his concept of it as a transitional essence.

[…] Most of his correspondence with women (Riborg Voight; Louise Collin [–sisters of men he loved]) were destroyed in his own lifetime. His love for men was probably considered less improper than his comments about it to women, and his love letters to men have been preserved and are, to a large extent, published. The most important love of his life was undoubtedly Edvard Collin (1808-1886), son of his benefactor, Jonas Collin. […] Edvard maintained an emotional distance that hurt Andersen deeply. Contemporaries labeled Andersen’s unmistakable affection for Edvard – and his yearning for warm friendship with Edvard, as well as with other men – as “childish,” “morbid,” “unmanly,” “overwrought,” “sentimental” and “romantic.” Andersen, succumbing to outsiders’ views, himself wrote to Edvard in 1833 that it was [the young man’s] own “softness and half-womanliness” that made him cling to Edvard, and in the draft of an 1835 letter to Edvard that was not sent, he wrote that his love for him was not overwrought sentimentality, but “a pure, noble feeling.” Edvard’s wedding [to a woman] in August 1836 made Andersen review their relationship. The fairy tale The Little Mermaid (1837) is an existential, poetic reflection and clarification of his love for Edvard – the impossible and fatal love of a little mermaid for a prince who never really sees her, except for her art; her dancing on the small feet that hurt as if she were treading on knives. Andersen wrote no more love letters to Edvard. […]

In the [play] Herr Rasmussen (1846), Andersen anonymously presented a model of close friendship between two men by having them enter a formal engagement. The play was performed only once, at the Royal Theater, and [withdrawn].

In 1860, Karl Maria KERTBENY, who later became one of the early pioneers of Gay Emancipation – and inventor of the word “h*m*s*x**l" for such purposes [before being misappropriated and turned into a disease designation by late 19th century psychiatrists] – looked up Andersen in Geneva. Although Kertbeny, according to Andersen, was “extremely kind and highly spiritual,” their meeting made Andersen feel “inexplicably sinister” and seems to have triggered an almost suicidal depression. Andersen hurried home. Their meeting was an encounter of two very different generations of men-loving men; a meeting between two historically separate ages [that is, between the Romantic Age and the Industrial Age].

Although Andersen cannot be labeled “h*m*s*x**l,” his personality and his life make him easily identifiable as a precursor of the Gay men who’d emerge soon afterwards.

—Wilhelm von Rosen, [v]

2001

Hans Christian Andersen

AUTHOR

Born 1805 in Denmark

Died in 1875

As a boy, Hans Christian Andersen was apprenticed to be a tailor, but by age fourteen he knew what he really wanted to be: an opera singer. He ran away from home and was subsequently taken in by a series of older well-to-do men who acted as his patrons. First there were two musicians, Weyse and Siboni, [a famed couple] and then the middle-aged Gay poet Guldberg. Andersen also had a close relationship with the Gay Danish ballet dancer Harald Scharff. […]

[Andersen channeled his orientation] into his fairy tales, many of which can only be read as autobiographical Gay allegories. The feeling of suffering abuse for being “different” is a recurrent motif in his work. The Little Mermaid, for example, sacrifices herself when she finds she cannot be loved by her handsome prince. Her story incorporates Andersen’s own reaction to the marriage of his beloved Edvard Collin, son of the director of the Royal Theater. Hans once wrote to Edvard, “I languish for you as if you were a pretty Calabrian wench . . . my sentiments for you are as those for a woman. The femininity of my nature [meaning, his attraction to female qualities] and our partnership must remain a secret.” [vi]

Even after his death in 1875, Andersen’s reputation lived on. When writer Martin Kok (1850-1942) was charged, in 1892, with seducing seventeen-year-old Anders Andersen (no relation), Danish newspapers speculated that Kok himself had been brought out by Hans Christian Andersen. Kok refuted the allegations.

Further Reading: KATZ, GAY/LESBIAN ALMANAC [New York 1983]

—Keith Stern, [vii]

2009

HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN,

b. Odense, Denmark, 1805.

Forget that silly Danny Kaye [Gay man] movie of yesteryear [1952] in which Hans sings to inchworms and measures all the marigolds. Andersen was an odd Duck, all right [like Kaye], but odd in ways not even hinted at in that Technicolor atrocity. The real story, on the contrary, might actually make a good film. One can already see the scene between his poor parents as they realize that something’s a little strange about the lad. When the other kids are out doing masculine things, like circle jerks and pulling wings off flies, all he wants to do is sew clothing for his dollies. Then we can have the scene where he decides to leave his place as apprentice to a tailor to try to make it as an opera singer. He's really torn about leaving, because he just loves being surrounded by all those clothes to sew. Then there’s his time of homeless starvation on the road until he’s taken in by two Gay musicians who see to it that the hungry young man is plenty stuffed. Passed on to a middle-aged poet, and getting a little wiser, he decides that it’s much more fun being kept than taking dancing lessons, as he had originally wanted, in return for services rendered. Eventually, he makes it big as the greatest fairy-tale writer in Europe, and the entire cast joins in the great production number “It Takes One to Write One.”

—Martin Greif, [viii]

1982