Dario Bellezza: “Crazed, Crazed for Love”

Photographers Unknown, Crazed, Crazed for Love

For Pier Vittorio Tondelli

At night we lose sight of the Tiber.
The wind forces open your honeyed
mouth; I taste firsthand
the languid roses of your springtime.

The quick pace of a police officer
perhaps young and willing, or maybe
elderly who gropes for the stairs
confounds the memories and the sky
goes dark–

Crazed, crazed for love, to love
thresholds oblivious and rabid for trade
where I enter without looking for the gloom
within, muted lover, I shout
to get through the days, arrived
midway through life and sated,
but still unknown to myself
restless, high-wired for sex –
inclined to abandon personal grievance,
to abjure, repudiate the celestial spheres
of nightly idleness or of infected Narcissus.
I’ll trample History
out of dishonor or delight.

Dario Bellezza, Crazed, crazed for love, Snakewoman, Translated in 2025 from the Italian by Peter Covino

Born at Rome in September of 1944, Dario Bellezza was Italy’s first openly gay major prizewinning poet, author and playwright. He is considered to be among the best poets of the second half of the twentieth-century due to the veritable variety of his work from epigrams and brash love-lyrics to unfaltering political chronicles.

Bellezza’s elementary education was at Rome’s classical lyceum from which he graduated in 1962. His education led to writing for several Italian literary and poetry magazines, including the 1967-1968 journal “Carte Segrete (Secret Cards)” dedicated to avant-garde and contemporary literature, art and thought. Bellezza began his rise to prominence in the 1960s through his lifelong collaboration with the magazine “Nuovi Argomenti (New Subjects)”, a literary magazine founded in 1953 by Alberto Moravia.

Through his association with literary critic and writer Enzo Siciliano, Dario Bellezza entered the intellectual world of mid-1960s Rome, at a time when Italy was undergoing convulsive ideological confrontations in its culture and politics. Those writers who primarily influenced his work included Italian poet Sandro Penna, French novelist and playwright Jean Genet, symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud whose entire poetic works would later be translated into Italian by Bellezza, and Elsa Morante, poet, novelist and wife to Alberto Moravia.

Bellezza’s first published prose work was the 1970 “L’innocenza (Innocence)”, a dark partially-autobiographical story of the protagonist Nino, who after recognizing his own homosexuality, chose condemnation rather than acceptance. In 1971, Bellezza’s first volume of poetry “Invettive e Licenze (Invectives and Licenses)” was published by the Milan press Garzanti. Noted for its technical precision, the autobiographically-inspired poems depicted people overwhelmed by bitterness, guilt, scandal, and shame.

Dario Bellezza’s debut poetry volume was praised by poet, film director and playwright Pier Paolo Pasolini, prominent in the Roman intellectual scene and a major figure in European cinema and literature. Bellezza was very grateful for Pasolini’s affection and support for his work. Upset and angry at his friend’s death, Bellezza wrote the 1981 biographical essay “Morte di Pasolini” in response to the November 1975 brutal kidnapping, torture, and murder of Pasolini in the Roman coastal neighborhood of Ostia. This was followed three years later by a second work on Pasolini, “Turbamento (Disturbance)”.

In 1983, Bellezza published “io (me)”, a collection of autobiographical poems that described his everyday life and the desperation of his loves. Seeing himself as a highly educated bourgeois man and homosexual bigot, Bellezza suffered from insomnia that he felt was due to feelings of guilt as well as the many contradictions that struggled within him. The difficulty of a secret and clandestine homosexual life in Rome was a predominant topic in both his poetic and prose work. Bellezza cites the systematic refusal of the self as the only salvation from homosexuality in his 1972 “Lettere da Sodoma (Letters from Sodom)”,

Over his twenty-five year career as a writer, Dario Bellezza published more than twenty books, including eight full-length poetry collections, eight novels, two theater plays, and translations from the French. He received the 1976 Viareggio Prize, Italy’s prestigious literary award, for his 1976 poetry volume “Morte Segreta (Secret Death)”. In 1994, Bellezza received the Montale Prize for his poetic work “L’avversario (The Adversary)” and the Fondi la Postora Prize for his play “Ordalia della Croce (Ordeal of the Cross)”

Known for his candid exploration of homosexuality and its complexities in the modern world, Dario Bellezza, in the midst of writing a book about his struggle with AIDS, died a premature death related to complications from AIDS on the last day of March in 1995. He is interred at Campo Cestio (Cimitero Acattolico), Rome, Lazio, Italy.

Notes: The Poetry Foundation has a May 2025 article on Dario Bellezza written by essayist and poet Daniel Felsenthal, entitled “Drink Me, Lick Me Even” at its online site: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/1679372/drink-me-lick-me-even

The online literary site Asymptote has two poems by Dario Bellezza translated by University of Rhode Island Associate Professor Peter Covino: https://www.asymptotejournal.com/poetry/dario-bellezza-what-sex-is-death/

An obituary on Dario Bellezza written by James Kirkup for the online “Independent” news magazine can be located at: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-dario-bellezza-1303484.html

There is a collection of Dario Bellezza’s poetry, translated by Italian literature researcher Luca Baldoni, in Volume 1 of the 2006 Italian Poetry Review available as a PDF at Academie.edu: https://www.academia.edu/44358397/Dario_Bellezza_Selection_of_Poems_Translated_into_English

Top Insert Image: Guglielmina Otter, “Dario Bellezza”, circa 1976, Gelatin Silver Print, Interview with Velio Carratoni for Fermenti Magazine

Second Insert Image: Dario Bellezza, “Morte di Pasolini”, January 1, 1981, Arnoldo Mondadori Editore , Milan, Italy

Third Insert Image: Dario Bellezza, “Addio Amori, Addio Cuori”, January 1, 1996, Fermenti Editrice , Rome, Italy

Bottom Insert Image: Guglielmina Otter, “Dario Bellezza”, circa 1976, Gelatin Silver Print, Interview with Velio Carratoni for Fermenti Magazine

Hevré Guibert: “He Who Wished to be Master of the Truth”

Photographers Unknown, He Who Wished to Be Master of the Truth

He had to finish his books, this book he had written and rewritten, destroyed, renounced, destroyed once more, imagined once more, created once more, shortened and stretched out for ten years, this infinite book, of doubt, rebirth, modest grandiosity. He was inclined to destroy it forever, to offer his enemies their stupid victory, so they could go around clamoring that he was no longer able to write a book, that his mind had been dead for ages, that his silence was just proof of his failure. He burned or destroyed all the drafts, all the evidence of his work, all he left on his table were two manuscripts, side by side, he instructed a friend that this abolition was to continue. He had three abscesses in his brain but he went to the library every day to check his notes.

His death was stolen from he who wished to be master of his own death, and even the truth of his death was stolen from he who wished to be master of the truth. Above all the name of the plague was not to be spoken, it was to be disguised in the death records, false reports were given to the media. Although he wasn’t dead yet, the family he had always been ostracized from took in his body. The doctors spoke abjectly of blood relatives. His friends could no longer see him, unless they broke and entered: he saw a few of them, unrecognizable behind their plastic-bag-covered hair, masked faces, swaddled feet, torsos covered in jackets, gloved hands reeking of alcohol he had been forbidden to drink himself.

All the strongholds had collapsed, except for the one protecting love: it left an unchangeable smile on his lips when exhaustion closed his eyes. If he only kept a single image, it would be the one of their last walk in the Alhambra gardens, or just his face. Love kept on thrusting its tongue in his mouth despite the plague. And as for his death it was he who negotiated with his family: he exchanged his name on the death announcement for being able to choose his death shroud. For his carcass he chose a cloth in which they had made love, which came from his mother’s trousseau. The intertwined initials in the embroidery could bear other messages.

Hevré Guibert, A Man’s Secret, Written in Invisible Ink: Selected Stories, 2020, Translation by Jeffrey Zuckerman, Semiotexte Publishing

Born in Saint-Cloud, Hauts-de-Seine on the fourteenth of December in 1955, Hervé Guibert was a French author and photographer. Through his novels and autobiographical studies, he was influential in changing the French public’s attitudes towards the HIV/AIDS crisis. Guibert wrote with aggressive candor, detachment, and passion, mixing diary writing, memoir, and fiction. His art and his writings were closely linked to his private life. Those of whom he wrote often became his friends, and his loved ones were often portrayed as celebrities, alternately idolized and exposed.

Guibert’s writing style was initially inspired by the work of Jean Genet and, later, Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard, a post-war author who explored obsession and isolation through multiple perspectives. Three of Guibert’s lovers played an important role in his life and work: Thierry Jouno, director for the International Theater for the Deaf whom he met in 1976; philosopher and author Michel Foucault whom he met in 1977; and Vincent Marmousez, a teenager who inspired his 1989 novel “Fou de Vincent (Crazy for Vincent)”.

Born into the conservative middle-class family of a veterinary inspector and a former teacher, Hervé Guibert moved to Paris at the age of seventeen with the hope of becoming an actor or scriptwriter. After his rejection from a Paris film school, he entered the literary world and, by the age of twenty, was writing dating advice for the glossy women’s magazine “20 Ans (Twenty Years)”. In 1977, he published his autobiographical novel/diary, “La Mort Propagande (Death Propaganda)”.

Guibert was hired in 1978 as a photography critic by “Le Monde”, France’s evening newspaper, and successfully established himself as a photographer with a photographic literary volume containing intimate portraits of his great-aunts. In the same year, Guibert completed his second book “Les Aventures Singulières (The Singular Adventures)”, a collection of stories centered on a singular character, published through Éditions de Minuit in Paris. During the 1980s, Guibert was a reader at the Institut National des Jeunes Aveugles (Institute for the Young Blind) in Paris. This experience became the basis for his 1985 “Des Aveugles” which won the Fénéon Prize for that year.

In 1981, Hervé Guibert published his “Image Fantôme (Ghost Image)”, an insightful collection of essays on various photographic forms such as family album portraits, photo-booth film strips, and pornographic Polaroids. In this work, Guibert presented photography as tactile, fetishistic and linked to frustrated desires. For a collaborative work with his theatrical friend, opera and theater director Patrice Chéreau, Guibert shared a 1984 Best Screenplay César Award for the 1983 “L’Homme Blessé (The Wounded Man)”.

In 1987, Guibert was granted a two year residency scholarship at Villa Medicis, the site of the French Academy in Rome, where he studied with his friend, the openly gay writer and journalist Mathieu Lindon. In January of 1988, Guibert was given a positive diagnosis for AIDS and began work on recording what would be the remainder of his life. In June of 1989, he married Christine, the partner of director Thierry Jouno, so his royalty income would pass legally to her and her two children.

In 1989, Hervé Guibert published his highly erotic novella ““Fou de Vincent (Crazy for Vincent)”, a dramatization of his intermittent relationship with the impulsive and unpredictable teenager Vincent Marmousez. In 1990, Guibert revealed his HIV status in his real-life based novel “À l’Ami qui ne M’a Pas Sauvé la Vie (To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life)”. He described in this work the existential effect the virus had on his life, its impact on a complete generation of people, the deaths of friends and lovers, and how AIDS forever transformed humanity’s relationship with desire and sexuality.

Following the release of his 1990 novel, Guibert became the focus of media attention with interviews and several talk show appearances. He filmed scenes of his daily life with AIDS between July of 1990 and February of 1991. This film, “La Pudeur ou l’impudeur (Modesty of Shamelessness)”, produced by Pascale Breugnot, was broadcasted posthumously on French television in January of 1992. Guibert published two more additional auto-fictional novels that detailed the progression of his illness: the 1991 “Le Protocole Compassionnel” and the “L’Homme au Chapeau Rouge (The Man in the Red Hat)” which was published posthumously in 1992.

Hervé Guibert’s last work, “Cytomégalovirus” was a description of his hospitalization in the autumn of 1991 and the increasing blindness he suffered from his illness. In the second week of December in 1991, Guibert attempted suicide by taking digitalin, a heart medication toxic in large doses. Two weeks later, he died at the age of thirty-six in Clamart, Hauts-de-Seine, on the twenty-seventh of December in 1991.

A consummate photographer and author, Hevré Guibert had published twenty-five books before his death, five of which were published in the last year of his life. Excellent translations of his work are now readily available through many sites. Several volumes of Guibert’s work can be read online at the Internet Archive

Notes: A selection from Hervé Guibert’s posthumously published “Mausoleum of Lovers: Journals 1976-1991”, translated from the French by author Nathanaël, can be found at the Asymptote Journal site: https://www.asymptotejournal.com/nonfiction/herve-guibert-the-mausoleum-of-lovers/

A 2014 review of “Mausoleum of Lovers: Journals 1976-1991” can be found at the Lambda Literary Organization site: https://lambdaliterary.org/2014/10/mausoleum-of-lovers-journals-1976-1991-by-herve-guiber/

Dennis Cooper’s blog has an excellent article on Guibert’s 1989 “To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life” that contains photography by Guibert, a biography, media trailers, book excerpts and a 1993 interview: https://denniscooperblog.com/spotlight-on-herve-guibert-to-the-friend-who-did-not-save-my-life-1989/

There is a noteworthy article by The New Yorker staff writer Julian Lucas from the print issue of September 21st in 2020 entitled “When a Virus Becomes a Muse”. This review of Hevré Guibert’s life and work can be found at: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/09/21/when-a-virus-becomes-a-muse

Information written by Christine (Guibert) on Hervé Guibert’s partner Thierry Joune and the impact he had on Guibert’s writings can be found at: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/281395860/thierry-jouno

Top Insert Image: Ulf Andersen, “Hervé Guibert, Paris”, Date Unknown, Gelatin Silver Print, 40.3 x 39. 2 cm, William Talbott Hillman Foundation

Second Insert Image: Hervé Guibert, “Sienne, 1979”, Edtition of 25, Gelatin Silver Print on Cartoline, 14.5 x 21.9 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Hervé Guibert, “L’Oisillon, Santa Caterina, Elba”, 1979, Gelatin Silver Print, 14 x 21.7 cm, Private Collection

Fourth Insert Image: Hervé Guibert, “Michel Foucault”, 1980, Gelatin Silver Print, 14.5 x 21.5 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Hans Georg Berger, “Hervé Guibert” Date Unknown, Gelatin Silver Print, September 2020 Issue of The New Yorker

Roland Caillaux

The Artwork of Roland Caillaux

Born in January of 1905, Roland Ferdinand Caillaud was a French film and theater actor, as well as, an illustrator and painter. Known professionally as Roland Caillaux, he was a key figure among the literary and artistic celebrities who lived and worked in Saint-Germain-des-Prés of Paris’s sixth Arrondissement.

The son of a wealthy Parisian family, Roland Caillaux inherited enough money upon the death of his parents to enable him to live a comfortable life free from financial restriction. He had a residence at 5 Rue de l’Ancienne-Comédie in the sixth Arrondissement of Paris and maintained a studio space on the Rue Boulard in the fourteenth Arrondissement. Caillaux was openly homosexual and enjoyed the relative freedom of Paris in the 1930s. He developed friendships with many of the writers, artists and filmmakers of the period including Jean Cocteau, Maurice Sachs, François Sentein, Jean Marais, Marcel Carné, and Jean Genet, among others.

In his lifetime, Caillaux was best known as a film and theater actor. His first appearance, an uncredited role, was in director Jaque Catelain’s 1924 drama film “La Galerie des Monstres”, a story of a young married couple’s tribulations after they join a circus. After playing the role of Le Sergent in Jene Renoir’s 1928 “Tire au Flanc”, Caillaux was given the role of Grippe-Soleil in Tony Lekain and Gaston Ravel’s 1929 “Figaro”, a film adaption of the 1778 Beaumarchais play “The Marriage of Figaro”. In the same year, he had a role in René Hevil’s film “Le Ruisseau (The Stream)”, and appeared onstage in a brief run of Vladmir Kirchon and Andreï Ouspenski’s play “La Rouille” at the Théâtre de l’Avenue in Paris.

The height of Roland Caillaux’s acting career occurred in 1930 with appearances in two films: “Soyons Gais” and composer John Daumery’s comedy musical “Le Masque d’Hollywood” directed by Clarence Badger. In the same year, he was in two theatrical performances: playwright Georges Neveux’s first notable work “Juliette ou la Cié des Songes” and Edmond Haraucourt’s “La Passion” held at the Comédie-Française. In 1932, Caillaux appeared in two films: the character of André Duval, Sergent de Spahis, in Rex Ingram and Alice Terry’s “Baroud” and a lead role in Georges Lacombe’s comedy “Ce Cochon de Morin”. His final film role was Lieutenant Jean Dumontier in Jean Benoît-Lévy and Marie Epstein’s 1934 “Itto” which, filmed in French Morocco, received a nomination for Best Foreign Film at the 1935 Venice Film Festival.

As a visual artist during the period from 1940 to 1960, Caillaux worked in his Rue Boulard studio where he produced landscapes, portraits, lithographs and drawings. The rare erotic works he produced were meant to be circulated among his circle of friends in the arts, cinema and music worlds. In Paris in 1945, Roland Caillaux produced what is probably his best known illustrated work, “Vingt Lithographies pour un Livre que J’ai Lu (Twenty Lithographs for a Book I Read)”, a folio of twenty homoerotic lithographs loosely presented in printed wrappers within a cloth folding box.

Caillaux’s “Vingt Lithographies pour un Livre que J’ai Lu” was published in a small run of one-hundred fifteen copies without the name of the author, illustrator or printer. The lithographs were accompanied by text, attributed to novelist and playwright Jean Genet, that contain variant excerpts from two poems, “Notre Dame-des-Fleurs” and “The Parade”. These two poetic works by Genet were later published in a limited edition run, entitled “Poems”, in 1948 by Editions L’Arbalète.

Roland Caillaux passed away in Paris in December of 1977. Many of his illustrations, not publicly seen before, were discovered by Nicole Canet of Paris’s Galerie Au Bonheur du Jour and subsequently exhibited. Caillaux’s works are housed in many private collections and frequently appear in international auctions.

Note: The spelling of Roland Caillaud’s birth name was written with a “d”; however, throughout his career as an actor and draftsman, he wrote his last name with an “x”. In regards to his drawings, those not erotic were signed Roland Caillaux; while the erotic drawings were signed with a “spider” signature, a small spider web with an “x” in the middle.

Nicole Canet’s Galerie Au Bonheur du Jour, located in the heart of Paris, represents work by Caillaux and other artists in the fields of painting, illustration and photography. The gallery also publishes a wide collection of catalogues. Galerie Au Bonheur du Jour is located online at: https://www.aubonheurdujour.net

Top Insert Image: Dora Maar (Henriette Théodora Markovitch), “Portrait of Roland Caillaux”, Date Unknown, Gelatin Silver Print

Second Insert Image: Roland Caillaux, “Sailor”, 1932, Oil on Canvas on Cardboard, 26 x 21 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Dora Maar (Henriette Théodora Markovitch), “Portrait of Roland Caillaux”, 1935, Gelatin-Argent Negative on Flexible Support in Cellulose Nitrate, 18 x 13 cm, Le Centre Pompidou, Paris

Jean Genet: “I Shall Dare What Must Be Dared”

“I want to fulfill myself in one of the rarest of destinies. I have only a dim notion of what it
will be. I want it to have not a graceful curve slightly bent toward evening but a hitherto unseen beauty
lovely because of the danger which works away at it overwhelms it undermines it. Oh let me be only utter
beauty I shall go quickly or slowly but I shall dare what must be dared. I shall destroy appearances the
casings will burn away and one evening I shall appear there in the palm of your hand quiet and pure like a
glass statuette. You will see me. Round about me there will be nothing left.”

-Jean Genet, The Thief’s Journal

Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol, “Querelle”, Silkscreen Series, 1982

Andy Warhol was commissioned by the German film director Rainer Fassbinder to design the poster for his filmed adaptation of Jean Genet’s novel, “Querelle”, which follows a young sailor’s sexual escapades in a French port. Warhol took a polaroid of two young men as a starting point for his silk-screen print, but idealized the young boy’s features and marked with a bright blue the other man’s tongue. The image’s sensuous character distills Genet’s erotic tale.