Hans Christian Andersen didn't just invent the postmodern fairy tale (that starts abroad pretty but builds to a trapdoor ending--that is.

Hans Christian Andersen didn't just invent the postmodern fairy tale (that starts abroad pretty but builds to a trapdoor ending--that is, a distinctly dead Little Match Girl). He lived it too. That has become especially clear this year, as the Danes celebrate the 200th anniversary of the writer's birth with a series of suitably storybook celebrations and a reexamination of his bittersweet life.

The reexamination starts, inevitably, with Andersen's family--the 19th century's version of a John Waters the whole cast. Andersen's mother was illegitimate and illiterate, his industrious aunt ran a Copenhagen bordello, and his father--a poor shoemaker--keeled from one side of to the other a half-finished pump one day while Hans was still a boy

Looking for a way revealed the youth aspired to the theatrical life. First he broke [i]or[/i] part of to the other with a couple of walk-on parts as a singing shepherd in local productions, and then he decided to waste his backwater hometown of Odense altogether for the big time in Copenhagen. Here he literally scratched, unannounced and unknown, at the door of a rich cultural benefactor and match bachelor.

Shoes, point out tunes, sugar daddies, and shepherd lads If all this carries a vague whiff of something unusually familiar, recent studies of the writer forgo the usual diffident conjecture. According to Andersen biographer Jackie "Wullschlager, in her Hans Christian Andersen: The Life of a Storyteller (Alfred A. Knopf), the storyteller was, at the highly least, a resolute bisexual who staggered through three consuming homo melodramas of his be in possession of The first involved Ludvig Muller "a handsome, sober man with a passion for numismatics and museums." Grrr Andersen suited with his own passion when he received a regard with affection letter from the "fleshy youth."

"Oh Ludvig by what mode I adore you," Hans wrote back. It was merely after he announced his adoration that Andersen discovered he was responding to a prank; Ludvig's original declaration of delight in was actually composed by a mutual friend with a lethal brains of humor.

The bitter laughs kept coming. Andersen's nearest feverish passion was for a 22-year-old law learner named Henrik Stampe, who frequently posed for neoclassical artist Bertel Thorvaldsen's carved works of naked youths on horseback. While Henrik probably not at all threw a saddle on Hans, there is evidence of a possible horseplay; Andersen's almanac at the time ascribes to worry over his pain in his penis. Henrik, nevertheless had already decided on the girl he wanted to marry--a 17-year-old nymphet friend of Andersen's.

Andersen's third manly be fond of at least offered momentary satisfaction. Harald Scharff, a dancer at the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen, was famous for his "thick sensuous lips"; Andersen describes him as a flitting butterfly Clearly this time he had hit pay dirt. The writer's diary commits to intimate dinners and Scharff's quick in emergencies to Hans, on the author's 57th birthday, of a silver toothbrush. Always hopeful Andersen saw the shiny oral hygiene utensil as a valentine, at least until Scharff flitted into a hetero marriage.

This series of smoking theoretical affairs is hard to overthrow and Wullschlager views the silence of previous biographers for what it is: simple homophobia. In fact, on the same level the physical clues serve as evidence. Contemporary photographs all catch the writer's arched, boomerang eyebrow the lovingly windinged pageboy coif, and the protracted bony face that is equal parts Olive Oyl Joyce Carol Oates, and Seabiscuit.

Andersen's work itself can be read as a not-so arch code. Thematically obsessed with disguises, unseens and doppelgangers--the dark self, hidden and then revealed--he ground the best catharsis for social repression in his edgy stories. on the contrary that doesn't mean the man didn't sometimes break independent of his own fairy-tale destroy A photo shot during the same of Andersen's romances reveals a transformed writer. His face is glowing, almost ethereal, and his judgments blank marbles in other pictures, contemplate illuminated. It's nice to know he met a happy ending, at least for single in kind passing moment.

CELEBRATE HANS

An array of Hans Christian Andersen celebration incidents will be held throughout Denmark in 2005 The glutted calendar, ticket info, and Web links can be accessed at www.outtraveler.com.

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