#teleny or the reverse of the medal

[relnicht]

teleny will always come back to haunt me

[lord-alfred-douglas-official]

Gonna get teleny or the reverse of the medal in a few weeks and I'm angry about the fact I'm only gonna get it in a few weeks. Bitch give me the pornography NOW.

[dick-chugger]

Obsessed with Teleny being attributed to Oscar Wilde despite the fact that he almost definitely didn't write it. Truly the peak of fake Oscar Wilde quotes, everyone just agreeing that he wrote a whole book that he didn't write.

[honeylemonsunflower]

so i'm searching for the perfume Teleny could or could not have worn in The reverse of the medal, he says it's called "héliotrope blanc" and i've found 3 of this name released before the publication of the book (1893) : 1st is a 1850 by LT Piver, 2nd a 1880 by Guerlin, and 3rd a 1886 by OL Legrand, pls tell me what you think thank you ;-;

[romanticfatale]

'How can I express all that I felt from the contact of Teleny's hand? It set me on fire; and, strange to say, it soothed me at the same time. How sweeter, softer, it was, than any woman's kiss. I felt his grasp steal slowly over all my body, caressing my lips, my throat, my breast; my nerves quivered from head to foot with delight, then it sank downwards into my reins, and Priapus, re-awakened, uplifted his head. I actually felt being taken possession of, and I was happy to belong to him.'

— Teleny, or The Reverse of Medal by Anonymous (attributed to Oscar Wilde and company)

[molluskzone]

"i promised to give you guys the porn novel so its in your optional reading for this week"

[dearorpheus]

(that last anon again) Thank you so much for the recommendations! I'm truly in awe of how well read you are and how thorough your answers are. May I ask if you have any fiction recommendations with the same themes?

(following on from this ask)

hi!! you're very kind, apologies for taking so long to get back to you! i've been snowed under with assignments+readings for uni and the slowly encroaching exam crawl... but yes absolutely♡

- The Story of O, Anne Desclos - The Bloody Chamber ; The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman ; The Passion of New Eve, Angela Carter -> Angela appreciated and referenced symbolist artists like Rops:

Woman Putting on Costume, 1848-1898, Rops; The Bloody Chamber, Angela Carter; excerpt from Romana Byrne's Aesthetic Sexuality: A Literary History of Sadomasochism (mentioned in previous ask) which seems esp pertinent given the Bloody Chamber is a Bluebeard tale (but which is actually referencing Story of O)

I also mentioned Giger in the previous ask, and Hans Bellmer was an influence of his whom I enjoy viewing alongside Rops...

this is Sans Titre (Jeune Fille et la Mort), 1963

- The Torture Garden, Octave Mirbeau

(Le Jardin des supplices (1976) dir. Christian Gion; screencap from estateofinsanity)

- Exquisite Corpse, Poppy Z. Brite - Necrophilia Variations, Supervert - Story of the Eye; My Mother, Madame Edwarda, The Dead Man; Blue of Noon, Bataille - Justine, or The Misfortunes of Virtue ; Juliette ; 120 Days of Sodom, Sade - The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty, Anne Rice -> supplement w Sleeping Beauty (2011) dir. Julia Leigh - Venus in Furs, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch - Monsieur Vénus, Rachilde - Le Necrophile, Gabrielle Wittkopp - The Apprenticeship of Big Toe P, Reiko Matsuura - The Damned ; Against Nature, Joris-Karl Huysmans - Empire of the Senseless, Kathy Acker - Crash, J.G. Ballard (+ the Cronenberg of course) - Salomé / Teleny, or the Reverse of the Medal, Oscar Wilde - La Morte Amoureuse, Théophile Gautier

^Romuald bitterly remembers his lost love, 1904, Eugène Decisy—his etchings for Gautier's story are beautiful (x, x)

- The Image, Jean de Berg - Trois Filles de leur mère, Pierre Louÿs - House of Incest, Anaïs Nin - My Dark Vanessa, Kate Elizabeth Russell - Naomi, Jun'ichirō Tanizaki - “Dolores”, Algernon Charles Swinburne:

-> first of many stanzas^ ; I also like his “Laus Veneris” - Trouble Every Day (2001) dir. Claire Denis - Belladonna of Sadness (1963) dir. EIichi Yamamoto

(screencap from eternal--return)

- Nekromantik (1988) dir. Jörg Buttgereit - Thirst (2009) dir. Park Chan-wook -> supplement w Zola's Thérèse Raquin and In Secret (2013) dir. Charlie Stratton

[mordere-diem]

“I longed to feel that mighty love which maddens one to crime.”

Oscar Wilde, Teleny or the Reverse of Medal

[quietsounds]

Watched The Whale today, wonderful movie, sobbed like a bitch. Then I had the bRiLlIaNt idea to read Teleny, or the Reverse of the Medal.

why did I do this to myself,, im

[selfmaiden-games]

Hello there,

This is my first post on Tumblr, so I thought I’d start by introducing you to the main character of my current project, Teleny—a romance simulator inspired by the victorian novel The Reverse of the Medal.

Meet Camille des Grieux. He’s a shy young man who has spent his adult life keeping his desires hidden, completely in the closet at the beginning of the game.

I knew early on in his development that I wanted to create an outfit that reflected this aspect of his personality, not just for the intimate moments but more importantly for the everyday ones. Camille usually dresses in a rather modest outfit, complete with gloves and a scarf, and he only starts to shed these layers in situations where he feels safe and protected.

In addition to the main artwork, I’m also sharing a younger version of Camille. His character changes after his father leaves the family, and you can see that his childhood self carries a tad bit more carefree energy compared to his later years.

If you’re interested in learning more about Teleny, you can find more information right here:

[tinawiththeglasses]

Teleny (or the reverse of the medal) by GhostWriter503

[relnicht]

much as Teleny is a weird little book, you have to admit this part is quite good and still relatable as a description of first love:

''Far from being ashamed of my crime [having gay sex with Teleny], I felt that I should like to proclaim it to the world. For the first time in my life I understood that lovers could be so foolish as to entwine their initials together. I felt like carving his name on the bark of trees, that the birds seeing it might twitter it from morn till eventide: that the breeze might lisp it to the rustling leaves of the forest. I wished to write it on the shingle of the beach, that the ocean itself might know of my love for him, and murmur it everlastingly.'' ''Still I had thought that on the morrow—the intoxication passed—you would have shuddered at the thought of having a man for a lover?'' ''Why? Had I committed a crime against nature when my own nature found peace and happiness thereby? If I was thus, surely it was the fault of my blood, not myself. Who had planted nettles in my garden? Not I. They had grown there unawares, from my very childhood.'' (2010 edition, p.107)

(Teleny is a gay pornographic novel published in 1893 about ''the magnetic attraction and passionate though ultimately tragic affair between a young Frenchman named Camille Des Grieux and the Hungarian pianist René Teleny'' and it's said Oscar Wilde had a hand in writing it)

[mumblingsage]

We’ll never know for sure if Oscar Wilde wrote it, but if you enjoyed Dorian Gray, you'll probably enjoy the lush prose style of this gay erotic novel. I certainly enjoyed the excerpt I read of it in Pages passed from hand to hand.

It left me wanting more.

So I went searching for the rest. Should be easy, right? Published in 1893, it's absolutely in the public domain. Yet I couldn't find any downloadable file of it to put on my eReader (at least none from a site I could trust). I did find the full text on Wikisource--great if I wanted to read the whole thing online. Or...

Long story short: I cut and pasted the text from Wikisource onto my computer, then formatted it into a PDF file of the sort I'd like to read (for instance, with clear page numbers). And if you're in the mood for a downloadable PDF file of Teleny, here it is for you too. 

[seffius]

Teleny is such a motherfucker honestly.

[queerographies]

[Teleny][Oscar Wilde]

Tradotto qui per la prima volta in versione integrale a partire dalla prima edizione inglese del 1893, "Teleny" viene accompagnato dall’assolutamente inedito "Des Grieux – Preludio a Teleny”

«Dalla prima volta che lo vidi sentii che poteva immergersi profondamente nel mio cuore e, ogni volta che mi guardava sentivo tutto il sangue ribollirmi nelle vene». Così comincia la magnetica attrazione sensuale e mistica tra Camille Des Grieux e René Teleny, il loro amore folle che spinge al crimine, l’ardore della carne che, rispondendo al richiamo della «forza della natura», spinge sentimento…

[fitz-higgins]

LGBT literature of the 1860s–1910s. Part 4

Well, it’s been a while. Here’s a new selection featuring three stories about love between students, lesbian poems, a comedy centered around a gay character, Proust's short story, and more

1. Bertram Cope’s Year, by Henry Blake Fuller (1919). Although this novel went unnoticed by its contemporaries, it is thought to be the first officially published American novel about homosexual men. It could be your perfect academia novel: Bertram, “no squire of dames”, is a self-conscious English teaching assistant at an Illinois university where he completes his thesis and tries to settle in life. Four women and three men are attracted to him, but Bertram is fond of “Dear Arthur”, his college friend Arthur Lemoyne who comes to live with him later. Interestingly, the story has a touch of comic and ironic, which was very rare for homosexual literature of that time. [Read online]

2. Le Monsieur Aux Chrysanthèmes (The Gentleman of Chrysanthemums), by Armory (Carle Dauriac; 1908). This is the first modern play (and a society comedy at that) that has a gay man as its main character. The character is Gill Norvège, a critic and writer, who uses a young widow Marthe Bourdon to get money. Marthe is hopelessly in love with Gill and borrows 30,000 francs from a poet Jacques Romagne, who, in turn, is hopelessly in love with Marthe. And then Gill sees Jacques one day and falls in love with him. [Read online in French or in English]

3. The Garden God: A Tale of Two Boys, by Forrest Reid (1905). Called “a classic of Uranian literature”, this story has it all: homoerotism, platonism, ancient gods and love at boarding school. In that school a fifteen years old Graham, who used to dream of friendship with a Greek god, meets Harold who looks exactly like that imaginary friend. But where there are gods there is also tragedy, so be prepared. [Read online]

4. Poems by Sofia Parnok. Parnok was the first open lesbian in Russian literature. She was in a relationship with another famous Russian poet, Marina Tsvetaeva, as well as with some other women to whom she dedicated a number of poems. Often called the Russian Sappho, she often refers to Sappho in her poetry and also used her famous phrase, “Someone, I tell you, in another time will remember us”. Some of Parnok’s poems are translated and more is available in Russian.

5. Teleny, or The Reverse of the Medal (1893). Not the first, but one of the earliest examples of English-language homosexual erotic novels (though rather sophisticated), its author is unknown, but some believe that it was written by Oscar Wilde. Here we have a tragedy again, a tragic love between a Frenchman and a Hungarian pianist, to be exact. There’s also something literally queer going on, because the Frenchman, Des Grieux, has a telepathic connection with the attractive pianist, Teleny. Eventually they meet, and Teleny introduces Des Grieux to the underground homosexual world of Paris. Bonus: the novel has a comic adaptation, Teleny and Camille, by Jay Macy, and also a “prequel”, Des Grieux, written in 1899. [Read online]

6. Anders als die Andern (Different from the Others), by Bill Forster (Hermann Breuer; 1904). The title is supposedly derived from a phrase that was popular among German gay men of that time, “We are, thank god, other than other people”. Herbert, the protagonist, falls in love with Ernst, the boy from his school. They go hiking together, and for some time they are close. But Ernst, although flattered by Herbert’s attention and feelings, rejects him twice, and it destroys Herbert’s life.

7. Avant la nuit (Before dark)by Marcel Proust (1893). A forgotten short story by Proust, written when he was only 22, despite what you might expect, tells about a lesbian woman. She is incredibly unhappy: she is in a relationship with a man, but wants to confess her true sexuality and suffers from her own dishonesty. Finally, she tells him the truth and asks for his compassion. In a way, this story defends homosexuality and explains why it cannot be condemned. [Read online]

8. The Prussian Officer, by D. H. Lawrence (1914). Praised as a masterpiece of short fiction by some critics, this story is rather grim. A captain slowly becomes attracted to his young, simple orderly. However, he represses his feelings and, instead of showing any kind of affection, turns aggressive and humiliates the young man. And it is not going to end well. [Read online]

9. Quelques Portraits-Sonnets de Femmes (Some Portrait-Sonnets of Women), by Natalie Clifford Barney (1900). One of the most famous lesbian poets of the 20th century, Barney wrote a chapbook of love poems to women that were so scandalous her father bought up all remaining copies and burned them. Two novels based on or about women’s affairs with Barney were also featured in previous chapters of this list. The book is not available online, but some poems can be found in English here and here.

10. The Intersexes: A History of Similisexualism as a Problem in Social Life, by Edward Prime-Stevenson (1906). Prime-Stevenson didn’t just write the first novel about gay men with a happy ending (featured in the previous part of the list), but also an interesting study, one of the earliest ones. Using science and history, he defenses homosexuality, which is why he is considered to be one of the first advocates for the rights of the LGBTQ community. A very progressive work for his time, it rejects the binary of masculine and feminine and insists that homosexuality is a natural result of human evolution. [Read online]

P.s. Previous parts are collected here.