Constantinos Petrou Kavafis

Konstantinos Kavafis (1863–1933), born and living in Alexandria, is not coincidentally an icon for the Greek and international LGBTQ+ community. He was the first major poet in modern Greek literature to publish openly homoerotic poetry, at a time when homosexuality was treated as criminal and pathologized by both the law and medical science (Transtextes, Wikipedia). Of his 154 officially published poems, dozens have a distinctly homosexual theme, alongside poems about Greek and Hellenistic history.

What distinguished Cavafy from many contemporaries was his directness. W.H. Auden wrote in his introduction to the complete poems that "Cavafy was a homosexual, and his erotic poems make no attempt to conceal the fact... he refuses to pretend that his memories of moments of sensual pleasure are unhappy or spoiled by feelings of guilt." He wrote about casual encounters, desire, and memory without the feelings of guilt that were present in Proust, for example, and without linking the homosexual experience to illness or sin, contrary to the prevailing medical and religious rhetoric of his time.

Pascal Brackman