Jacques d’Adelswärd-Fersen (1880-1923) was a French writer who was arrested, tried and convicted in Paris for “inciting youth to commit debauchery”. He fled from Paris to the Island Of Capri where he built a beautiful villa “dedicated to the youth of love”. It still stands today. You can visit it. Capri was the home of other gay men of the era, including Friedrich Alfred Krupp and Oscar Wilde.
The villa was called Villa Lysis. D’Adelswärd-Fersen lived there with his boyfriend Nino Cesarini. The couple edited a literary magazine that was a subtle cellebration of gay love, titled Akademos. It is probably the first gay-themed magazine. Unfortunately, Akademos lasted only one year, with just twelve issues, amounting to 2000 pages of poems, stories, articles and pictures.
Portrait of Cesarini by Paul Hocker, 1904.
D’Adelswärd-Fersen published several novels, including Lord Lyllian (1905), which satirized the scandal around himself in Paris, with a dash of the Oscar Wilde affair thrown in.
D’Adelswärd-Fersen on Capri
D’Adelswärd-Fersen died from too much champagne and cocaine, in 1923. His ashes are conserved in the non-Catholic cemetery of Capri.
