Aquellos hermosos bandidos

The Belgian writer Georges Eekhoud was always attracted to petty criminals, prisoners, young sailors, conscript soldiers or rude peasants who had emigrated and lost in the big city. His attraction to those boys from the stream led him to write many stories with a markedly homoerotic tone, in which his audacity increased over time until he was able to publish stories in which love between men occupies the centrality of the plot. . He would not be free, since the publication of his most audacious novel, Escal-Vigor, would bring him to court accused of public indecency. In this volume we select nine of his most audacious stories, written at the end of the 19th century, showing signs of a courage that today we are unable to value in its proper measure. A beautiful soldier expelled from the army for dishonest acts; a couple of young thieves who live their love without hiding it, taking refuge in the underworld of crime, aware that right-thinking society will never accept that love; two boys, almost opposites, who at the boarding school will discover what actually covers up the harassment of the stronger towards the weaker; a ragged teenager who falls in love with someone he would never have imagined, at the social antipodes; a little thief, apprentice criminal, who discovers unorthodox love and social ideology at the same time... Barracks, boarding schools, prisons, popular dance halls, suburbs, common dormitories, a boat on the waters of a wide river driven by two young rowers "handsome as cabin boys"... all the settings, all the environments, all the characters were useful to this author, whom someone has called the Pasolini of Flanders, to try to demonstrate that love between people of the same sex was legitimate, that the society that prohibited this type of love was also the one that subjugated the poorest, at a time when such feelings deserved general rejection and their defense was not innocuous.