11-29-2022, 04:20 PM
(This post was last modified: 11-29-2022, 04:20 PM by gayprojectforum.)
I inform you that today I have put online a new book that enriches Gay Project Library: “SEXUAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS”. It is a text of about sixty pages, which is also accompanied by notes that require the typical layout of a book, and which, therefore, cannot be posted in a forum post.
The text is based on a recent and important publication: “The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds”, in the critical edition edited by Amber K. Regis for Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, in the Genders and Sexualities in History series, from which I took the texts of Symonds that I quote in my essay.
This is not a generic memoir but the author’s sexual autobiography, written with absolute adherence to the facts and total transparency to leave a document that describes the true sexual evolution of a cultured Englishman, born in 1840 and died in 1893, precisely as he himself saw it.
I have translated two important Symonds books into Italian for the Gay Project Library, and I think it is really useful to publish now, both in English and in Italian, a text that illustrates the evolution of Symonds’ sexuality.
Symonds’ Memoires are unique, because they constitute in practice the only sexual autobiography absolutely free from commercial interests of any kind that has been published. It should be emphasized that the text was not originally intended for publication because in England homosexuality was punished by criminal law and the text I am presenting to you would certainly have been considered obscene and its publication would therefore have been a real crime. This is not a novel. Symonds in addition to telling the facts explicitly names the protagonists. The book, which required the author a tremendous effort and removed him from the possibility of pursuing greater success in the field of art history and classical culture, which he dealt with at the academic level, is therefore a unique contribution to serious study of homosexuality which in his time was taking its first and uncertain steps. It should be noted that Symonds married and had four daughters, and his marriage story, carried on despite some important and enduring homosexual relationships, is a one-of-a-kind testimony of him.
I will be immensely grateful to anyone who reads my work and wants me to know his thoughts on it.
You can read the book just clicking on the following link. I remember that all the material of Gay Project is always and absolutely free and Gay Project never asks for personal data and does not keep any data relating to accesses.