More on "Death in Venice"

While the class as a whole seem to have gravitated towards The Sorrow of Young Werther as most similar to Mann's "Death in Venice" -- they are both focused on confused males, one young and one middle-aged -- it is Andersen's "The Little Mermaid" that strikes me as Mann's real precursor, down to its semi-tropical setting. It is not coincidence that both writers were northern European males yearning fro the freedom of the Mediterranean. Werther, meanwhile, strikes me as wanting to remain at home with, or at least become part of Lotte's family -- a sister-like figure or, who could argue, possibly even a maternal one. Werther is attracted to children throughout the story, albeit without the slightest hint of sexual interest.

Rather it is Andersen's mermaid who is utterly transfixed by young male beauty. Here we see his mermaid gazing, Aschenbach-like, at her handsome young prince, captivated exclusively, not by his courage, intellect, or power (all traditional markers of male supremacy) but solely by his physical beauty:

Near the coast were beautiful green forests, and close by stood a large building, whether a church or a convent she could not tell. Orange and citron trees grew in the garden, and before the door stood lofty palms. The sea here formed a little bay, in which the water was quite still, but very deep; so she swam with the handsome prince to the beach, which was covered with fine, white sand, and there she laid him in the warm sunshine, taking care to raise his head higher than his body. Then bells sounded in the large white building, and a number of young girls came into the garden. The little mermaid swam out farther from the shore and placed herself between some high rocks that rose out of the water; then she covered her head and neck with the foam of the sea so that her little face might not be seen, and watched to see what would become of the poor prince.

One needs to go to art history and Donatello's "Bronze David," to find a comparable instance of unabashedly homoerotic desire and in a form -- that of the beautiful adolescent -- that even in 2012 still represents an illicit desire.

Compare the Donatello with the mermaid's prince an Visconti's final image of Tadzio as seen below:

The idea of the beautiful young male (an Adonis) is largely absent from contemporary political discussion of gay rights -- where so much of the emphasis is rightly on marriage equality; the image of the beautiful male, however, remains a mainstay of male fashion photography. As proof, see this collection of random photos of male fashion models at Google images.