Hans christian andersen gay
The Romantic Life of Hans Christian Andersen
Millions of people recognize Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875) as the writer of over a hundred famous children’s tales, but only a few people know the man behind the stories. The correct Andersen was certainly not a writer of the happily-ever-after variety. Throughout his life, he was often very lonely–traveling around the earth and meeting hundreds of fascinating people, but never truly finding a person to share his life with.
Andersen considered himself to be an hideous duckling. He was abnormally tall and quite awkward, with sunken eyes, hollow cheeks, and a elongated, protruding nose. Like the duckling, he was sometimes teased and humiliated as a child, especially for his effeminate demeanor. As one story goes, the other children at the factory where heworked start him to be so girlish that they ripped hisclothes off to watch if he was actually female. The writer’s problems with ladies later on in life may contain had more to execute with his sexual repression than his unattractiveness or effeminacy. Danish scholar Johan de Mylius hypothesizes that this repression may stem from Andersen’s childhood. When the boy’s mo
There have been a lot of articles recently about the queer-coding of the original animated The Beauty and the Beast, but they’re for some reason ignoring the other Disney film the late, great Howard Ashman worked on: The Little Mermaid.
Which is puzzling, because the first fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen is one of the saddest (gay) love letters of all time.
Scholars agree that Andersen was biromantic, and possibly asexual. He wrote many intimate letters to his friend Collin, but sent only a few of them. One reads: “I long for you, yes, this moment I long for you as if you were a lovely girl…No one have I wanted to thrash as much as you…but neither has anyone been loved so much by me as you.”
Collin admitted in his control writings that he was unable to return Andersen’s feelings. In 1836, under some pressure from his family, Collin married. Andersen escaped to the island of Fyn at the time of the wedding, where he wrote the tale he would later send to Collin: a fairytale about a mermaid who didn’t belong.
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Homosexuality
- Since in 1901 the Danish homosexual author, Carl Albert Hansen Fahlberg, under the name of Albert Hansen published an article in Magnus Hirschfeld's journal Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen entitled: "Hans Christian Andersen: Beweis seiner Homosexualität", the theory that Andersen was homosexual has surfaced from time to time. The most thorough descriptions of Andersen the male and analyses of his work that have their inception in the theory of homosexuality is Heinrich Detering's chapter on Andersen in his book Das offene Geheimnis. Zur literarischen Produktivität eines Tabus von Winckelmann bis zu Thomas Mann (Göttingen, 1994. The book has one of Andersen's paper cuts on the front of the cover!), Allison Prince's biography Hans Christian Andersen. The Fan Dancer (London 1998) and Jackie Wullschlager's biography, Hans Christian Andersen. The Life of a Storyteller (London and New York 2001, Danish ed. 2002). This book in 2002 gained the prestigious Hans Christian Andersen prize of Odense City of 50,000 euro.
Wullschlager, who speaks of Edvard Collin (of all people!) as Andersen& The life of the Danish author Hans Christian Andersen (1805�1875) resembles that of his most notable fairy tale, "The Story of the Little Mermaid." In letters written to his beloved youthful friend Edvard Collin in 1835�6 Andersen said "Our friendshp is like 'The Mysteries', it should not be analyzed," and "I long for you as though you were a beautiful Calabrian girl." In the fairy tale, written when Collin decided to get married, Andersen displays himself as the sexual outsider who lost his prince to another. Andersen's biographer, Elias Bredsdorff, in 1993 used diaries to dispute that Andersen never had sexual intercourse but was a compulsive masturbator; Bredsdorff is uneasy with the notion of "homosexual emotions" and therefore declines to label his subject gay. Kinsey, according to his associate W. B. Pomeroy, suspected Andersen was male lover, and was shown by a scholar in Copenhagen an immenA Fairy Tale
The Gay Love Letters of Hans Christian Andersen
Excerpts from My Dear Boy: Gay Admire Letters through the Centuries (1998), Edited by Rictor Norton