[Macdonald]

Peggy Guggenheim was noted to have lusted after Beckett, to which she never received a response. After he died, she was quoted as saying that he was a homosexual. Does anyone have further information on this subject?
Also, I am looking to find out more about the sexuality of Jorge Luis Borges and Franz Kafka.
You just watch - the legions of gay writers will expand in our lifetimes.
Mark in Vancouver.
_________________
Book buyer for Little Sister's Book & Art Emporium in Vancouver

[Saladin]

[Tony]

My guess is that what Guggenheim said was sour grapes over her rejection. Beckett was close to women all his life. There is no evidence I am aware of that he was gay. As to the supposed remark on his death, the 'how can they tell' was first said by Dorothy Parker of Calvin Coolidge.
Kafka gay? That seems more likely though he too had relations with women. As for Borges I simply have no opinion

[Tony]

Anthony Heilbut in his Thomas Mann: Eros and Literature, has the following about Kafka and Mann.

*The unexpurgated diaries of Kafka reveal homoerotic tendencies expressed with astonishing vigour, particularly from a writer so associated with repression and impotence. During his teens, Kafka had devastating crushes on his fellow students. Biographers like Ernst Pawel dismiss these episodes as adolescent and nonsexual. But ten years later he exhibited the same inclination.
Kafka may resemble the Mann who declared that looking was good enough for him. But if so, his attentions were more hot-blooded. During a train trip in January 1911, he noticed a young salesman whose "well rounded penis" made his pants swell, perhaps in response to Kafka's glances. In July 1911, Kafka took one of many health cures, this time in a nudist male spa. He was struck by "handsome young Swedes with long legs, so well-formed and taut that one could gladly lick them": a response more ardent than Mann's when he beheld the legs of his Argentinean Hermes.
Kafka was a close friend of Franz Werfel, another Prague Jew. In November I9I7, he writes Max Brod: "If I go on to say that in a recent dream of mine I gave Werfel a kiss, I stumble right into the midst of Bluher's book." Like Mann, Kafka found himself reflected in Bluher's homoeroticism—but only to a point. "The book upset me; I had to lay it aside for two days. However it shares the quality of other psychoanalytic works that in the first moment its thesis seems remarkably satisfying, but very soon after one feels the same old hunger." He knows that this hunger can be explained away "psychoanalytically: instant Repression." But like Mann he didn't find the method useful in explicating his desires.*

[klemmre9]

somhow I doubt that Franz Kafka had a sex life :)

[Macdonald]

[Ryan]