André Gide 
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.

Mengenai Pengarang

André Paul Guillaume Gide (Paris, November 22, 1869 — Paris, February 19, 1951) was a French writer who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1947. Coming from a high bourgeois family, he was the founder of the publishing house Gallimard and the magazine Nouvelle Revue Française. Gide was an openly homosexual man and openly advocated for the rights of homosexuals, having written and published, between 1910 and 1924, a book aimed at combating the homophobic prejudices of his time called ‘Corydon.’ Rejecting moral and puritanical restrictions in favor of freedom and liberation, his work revolves around the constant pursuit of intellectual honesty: how to be true to oneself, to the point of embracing his homosexuality. Among his most important works are ‘The Fruits of the Earth, ‘ ‘The Pastoral Symphony, ‘ ‘The Immoralist, ‘ and ‘The Counterfeiters, ‘ as well as the most controversial of all: ‘Corydon.’