In some sense, Cocteau's White Paper is a kind of response to Gide's Corydon (1911-1924). Whereas Corydon presents a homosexual narrator giving a heterosexual man a series of lectures, White Paper, in contrast, recounts a series of erotic and compelling images of sexual joy and pain. Cocteau celebrates and illustrates the wild love of sailors like the one with a "Born-to-Lose" (Pas de chance) tattoo.

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Stunned by the bitterness of Gide's journal comments, published at his death in 1951, Cocteau began his own journal Past/Tense in July of the same year and carefully avoided belittling Gide.

Cocteau also had problems in his relations with Jean Genet. He compared Genet to Rimbaud, but Genet never saw Cocteau as his Verlaine. The men met in 1943, after Cocteau had read portions of Our Lady of Flowers and arranged to find a publisher. Later, Cocteau illustrated Genet's Querelle (1948) with erotic drawings of naked sailors buggering each other.

He attended Genet's many trials, supported him in prison, and organized a successful campaign to win Genet a pardon when he faced possible life imprisonment as a habitual criminal. As a character witness, Cocteau swore under oath that Genet was "the greatest writer of the modern era." Cocteau resented the truth of that statement, and Genet resented being judged by Cocteau.

Cocteau's best criticism explains his own work and that of his friends. Professional Secrets (1922) and The Difficulty of Being (1947) resemble Nietzsche, whom both Genet and Cocteau emulated. Cocteau asserted that "Nietzsche never makes mistakes, except in Zarathustra when he becomes 'poetic.' To be poetic is the opposite of poetry."

Cocteau perhaps makes similar mistakes in The Rooster and the Harlequin, an attack on Russian and German composers in favor of the French Six, Darius Milhaud, Georges Auric, Arthur Honegger, Germaine Tailleferre, Francis Poulenc, and Louis Durey. His attack here highlights one of his weaknesses and perhaps strengths, his complete Gallicism.

Cocteau's alleged frivolity might be charged to his immersion in the feminine. His father died in 1898, and he lived close to or with his mother until her death in 1943. He enjoyed the company of wealthy women like Coco Chanel, who often supported his work and his lovers. He played the little boy to figures such as his mother, Comtesse Anna de Noailles, Valentine Hugo, and Francine Weisweiller.

He created powerful roles for women in his films and plays. Like many gay males, he loved actresses and women singers. A companion explained that women "formed part of the décor of his life." On the day that Edith Piaf died, he recorded a tribute to her, which was broadcast on French radio; he himself died later that day, October 11, 1963.

In celebrating the painter, Cocteau's Ode to Picasso (1919) celebrates the nine muses as each a separate aspect of creation or poetry. For Cocteau, genres did not separate but bound together his and others' work in the theater, the cinema, drawing, painting, music, dancing, and sexual relations.

In bibliographies assembled in his later years, he catalogued his numerous works under various branches of poetry: Poetry itself; Poetry of the Novel; Critical Poetry; Poetry of the Theater; Graphics Poetry (including book illustrations); and Cinematographic Poetry.

Although he hated academies, Cocteau near the end of his life accepted their accolades: among them, an honorary degree from Oxford (1956) and membership in the Académie Royale de Belgique (1955), the Académie Française (1955), National Institute of Arts and Letters (New York, 1957), and the Légion d'Honneur (1961).

The publication of his Complete Works (1946-1950) in ten volumes, though hardly complete, stamped him as a classic author. But the man himself, however much he reveled in celebrity, struggled continuously not to become monumental.

Today, Cocteau is best remembered for his cinema. Doubtless, this is more a commentary on our times than on Cocteau. He has been recognized as a pioneer in film and his films continue to inspire viewers and other filmmakers.

In Republic of Images: A History of French Filmmaking (1992), Allan Williams writes, "Cocteau's films are arguably more significant as expressions of his personality and artistic vision than as contributions to film history. Though in the cinema's evolution, they are not of it." This comment could be said of all the genres he attempted.

As Jean Genet remarked, "We deny Jean Cocteau the stupid title 'enchanter': we declare him 'enchanted.' He does not 'charm.' He is 'charmed.' He is not a wizard, he is bewitched." Cocteau relished such comments; he never wanted to be in the "in" crowd; he ever feared being killed by his own creations.

Since the 1960s, European film has included significant gay-themed films, many of them directed by openly gay and lesbian directors.

Gay, lesbian, and bisexual film directors have been a vital creative presence in cinema since the medium's inception over one hundred years ago.

The contributions of gay men and lesbians to twentieth-century French literature have been closely intertwined with the course of mainstream literature.

French-speaking theater has a long history of depicting male and female homosexuals and in exploring the complexities of homosexual life.

Despite the widespread homophobia in the Modernist movement, several of its practitioners were homosexual; some of them wrote openly about homosexuality, and the groundwork was laid for the gay liberation movement.

For prolific French poet and artist Jean Cocteau, filmmaking may have served as the best medium for the expression of his genius.

One of France's most beloved authors, Colette wrote novels with strong lesbian subtexts.

For Russian nobleman Sergei Diaghilev, who revolutionized music, the visual arts, theater, and dance, homosexuality may have been integral to his creativity.

Jean Genet's work has left a powerful legacy to post-modernity and remains a provocation to questions of gay identity.

André Gide, one of the premier French writers of the twentieth century, reflected his homosexuality in many of his numerous works.

Jean Marais became one of the most celebrated stars of French movies, theater, and television partly because of the early sponsorship of writer and film director Jean Cocteau.

One of the most influential and most misunderstood of modern philosophers, Friedrich Nietzsche in his work searched for a primal joie de vivre that he felt had been distorted by religion and that he was unable to realize in his own life.

One of the greatest dancers and most innovative choreographers in the history of ballet, Vaslav Nijinsky embodied the sensuality and sexual ambiguity associated with the distinctive new art of the twentieth century.

One of the first openly gay composers, Francis Poulenc became one of the most thoughtful composers of serious music in the twentieth century.

Marcel Proust is the author of A la recherche du temps perdu, one of the major achievements of Modernism and a great gay novel.

Because his writing stresses liberation, the French "boy-poet" Arthur Rimbaud, whose art is based solely on his individual creativity, is a progenitor of modern gay poetics.

Poet, translator, literary and art critic, and short story writer, Edouard Roditi was associated with most of the twentieth-century's avant-garde literary movements from Surrealism to post-modernism.

In addition to becoming--with Alice B. Toklas--half of an iconic lesbian couple, Gertrude Stein was an important innovator and transformer of the English language.

The poetry of Paul Verlaine celebrates both heterosexual and homosexual activity, including lesbian relationships.

American writer Glenway Wescott is author of a series of critically esteemed novels, but may be best known for his central position in New York's artistic and gay communities of the 1950s and 1960s.

Publisher, book designer, and museum director, Monroe Wheeler was a leading figure in New York artistic and gay communities of the 1950s and 1960s, alongside his partner of sixty-eight years, the writer Glenway Wescott. 

Oscar Wilde is important both as an accomplished writer and as a symbolic figure who exemplified a way of being homosexual at a pivotal moment in the emergence of gay consciousness.