I believe my first contact with French homoerotic poetry was a small red dichrome volume of the explicitly queer poetry of Arthur Rimbaud and others sporting the drawing of a huge male sex organ on the cover and entitled “A Lover’s Cock”, published by the legendary Berkeley based Gay Sunshine Press. The 1979 edition is still available; please use the Artabolic affiliate link if you would like to purchase: BUY ON AMAZON.

Discovery of those outlandish verses by canonized French Symbolist poets sparked a lifelong interest which must certainly have influenced the eventual choice of my 1983 doctoral dissertation topic, “The Symbolist Movement in Modern Chinese Poetry”.

Having moved on from scholarly to other endeavors later in life, however, it is hard to convey my astonishment and delight many years and careers later to come across a small black volume with an equally disreputable sketch on the front cover entitled “François Villon : Ballades en argot homosexual”.

This delightful book of ballads is filled with verse treating the male sex organs with all the acquired knowledge and experience of a skilled auto mechanic, a veritable 15th century French prison gang leader’s gay-for-pay escort manual in verse!

In this publication by Montreal scholar, who has also translated queer erotic poetry from many other traditions, Thierry Martin not only took up the arduous task of deciphering and translating 15th century Parisian prison slang into modern French, but even compiled a dictionary of its deliberately cryptic terminology.

Coming across Thierry’s groundbreaking work rekindled an interest in the long and glorious tradition of homoerotic poetry, dating back even to Sappho’s famous 6th Century BCE raunchy declaration in fragment 146: No more tasting that sweet honeypot of hers because it for sure comes along with a stinger.

[ μήτε μοι μέλι μήτε μέλισσα ] .

And so I will be presenting a few representative erotic ballads of Villon into English here.