Roger Peyrefitte

Roger Peyrefitte (17 August 1907 – 5 November 2000) was a French diplomat, writer of bestseller novels and non-fiction, and a defender of gay rights and pederasty. Born in Castres, Tarn, to a middle class bourgeois family, Peyrefitte went to Jesuit and Lazarist boarding schools and then studied language and literature in the University of Toulouse. After graduating first of his year from Institut d'Études Politiques de Paris in 1930, he worked as an embassy secretary in Athens between 1933 and 1938. Back in Paris, he had to resign in 1940 for personal reasons before being reintegrated in 1943 and finally ending his diplomatic career in 1945. In his novels, he often treated controversial themes and his work put him at odds with the Roman Catholic church. He wrote openly about his homoerotic experiences in boarding school in his 1943 first novel Les amitiés particulières which won the coveted prix Renaudot in 1944. The book was made into a film of the same name which was released in 1964. On the set, Peyrefitte met the 12-year-old Alain-Philippe Malagnac d'Argens de Villèle; and both fell in love. Peyrefitte tells the story of their relationship in Notre amour ("Our Love" – 1967) and L'Enfant de cœur ("Child of the Heart" – 1978). Malagnac later married performer Amanda Lear. A cultivator of scandal, Peyrefitte attacked the Vatican and Pope Pius XII in his book Les Clés de saint Pierre (1953), which earned him the nickname of "Pope of the Homosexuals". The publication of the book started a bitter quarrel with François Mauriac. Mauriac threatened to resign from the paper he was working with at the time, L'Express, if it did not stop carrying advertisements for the book. The quarrel was exacerbated by Mauriac's articles attacking the memory of Jean Cocteau because of his homosexuality and the release of the film adaptation of Les amitiés particulières. This culminated in a virulent open letter by Peyrefitte in which he accused Mauriac of being a hypocrite, a fake…

Known for

Writing

Born

1907-08-17 · Castres, Tarn, France

Died

2000-11-05