Answered Prayers, the scandalous code novel that Truman Capote never quite finished, hit not only New York high society but also the European royal family in the 1970s. In May 1976, a year after publishing two chapters in Esquire magazine revealing the intimacies of his rich and famous friends, the author of In Cold Blood and Breakfast at Tiffany’s Perfect Monsters revealed a third preview of the work. “Capote attacks again. More on the most commented book of the year,” the magazine headlined on the cover. In this excerpt, the American writer dared to tell an open secret from Gotha using real names and surnames: the youthful relationship between Prince Paul of Greece, father of Queen Sofía and grandfather of Felipe VI, with Denham Denny Fouts, an American gigolo who died Christopher Isherwood has been hailed as the “most expensive prostitute in the world”, Cecil Beaton called her a “whore”, Jean Cocteau called her a “bad influence” and Gore Vidal defined her as “a homme fatale”.
“All European dynasties had homosexuals and bisexuals. This has been accepted by the Bourbons since Louis XIV. The Sun King’s little brother, Philippe of Orleans, was openly gay. The taboo is petty-bourgeois,” says writer and royal expert Ricardo Mateos Sáinz de Medrano in an interview with EL PAÍS. Sáinz de Medrano, author of numerous royal biographies such as Queen Sofía’s family (2004) or Isabel II’s sisters-in-law: the rarest infantas that Spain has been (2022), provides a brief review of recent history to show that the Queer monarchies are plagued by romances: from the affair between King Gustaf V of Sweden, the great-grandfather of the current Swedish monarch, with a younger married man in the 1930s to Prince George of Greece’s affair with his own uncle, Prince Waldemar of Denmark, early 20th century. However, all of these relationships took place at a time when homosexuality was a crime, leading to secrecy and secrecy. Even today, European royal families hesitate to justify this past or to contemplate what would happen in the future if an heir to the throne falls in love with a person of the same sex.
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“The story of Pablo de Grecia and Denny Fouts was always public and notorious among the jet set and royal families, but Truman Capote was the first to tell it to the general public,” admits Sáinz de Medrano, who wrote in his Book The family of La Queen Sofía also includes this sentimental chapter in the life of the grandfather of the current Felipe VI. Capote narrated the connection between the Greek prince and the professional playboy with his characteristic irony and the romantic tone that brought him worldwide fame. “On Capri, Denny saw a 70-year-old great-grandfather who was also a director of Dutch Oil and ran off with him. But that gentleman lost Denny at the hands of royalty, Prince Paul, later King Paul of Greece,” says the writer and journalist in Answered Prayers. “The prince’s age was much closer to Denny’s, and their affections for each other were fairly even, so much so that they once had the same tattoo done in Vienna, a little blue badge over the heart, though I don’t remember what.” it was or what it meant. I don’t remember how it ended either, except that the ending was an argument stemming from Denny snorting cocaine in the bar of the Hotel Beau Rivage in Lausanne.”
American writer Arthur Vanderbilt corroborated this story in his 2014 best-kept boy in the world, Fouts’ biography. According to Vanderbilt, the father of Queen Sofia and the American bon vivant, the Welsh met in the late 1920s at a party at Tredegar House, the country home of aristocrat Evan Morgan. The relationship had the complicity of the Bright Young Things, an intellectual and artistic group made up of nobles such as Evelyn Waugh, Stephen Tennant and Siegfried Sassoon. Gore Vidal defined this circle as “the glamorous world of Mountbatten, where everyone was bisexual and married”. For several years, the prince and the gigolo engaged in an intensive correspondence – the future king addressed the object of his affections as “my dear Denham” and signed all his telegrams “with love, Paul”. The relationship cooled after the Hellenic prince, 36, married Frederica of Hanover, 20, granddaughter of the last German emperor. Fouts found solace in multimillionaire art collector Peter Watson. As Capote told editor George Plimpton, “If Denny had slept with Hitler, he would have saved the world from World War II.”
Francisco de Asís de Borbón, in an image from the Royal Academy of History.
Francisco de Asís de Borbón, husband of Isabel II, is the most outstanding case within the Spanish royal family. The historian Pierre de Luz was the first to write about the alleged bisexuality of King Juan Carlos’ great-great-grandfather in his biography Isabel II, Queen of Spain, published in 1936, five years after the fall of the Alfonsinian monarchy. In it he describes the consort as “small, thin, with a mannered gesture, a high-pitched voice, and the gait of a mechanical doll”. People referred to him with derogatory and homophobic nicknames like “Doña Paquita”, “Paquita Custard” or “Paquito Mariquito”. According to De Luz’s book, when told that she would have to marry her first cousin, the monarch screamed, kicked, cried and threatened: “Before I marry Paquita, I prefer to abdicate.” They said on October 10 1846 “Yes, I will” and officially had 12 children, although the marriage has consistently been the subject of ridicule and satire. Just before the 1868 revolution, a series of cartoons exposing the king’s sexual preferences (and the queen’s infidelities) began to circulate. Entitled “Los Borbones en pelota” and using the pseudonym “SEM”, some attribute them to the Bécquer brothers, while others believe they are the work of Republican humorist Francisco Ortego.
Ricardo Mateos Sáinz de Medrano, who is now writing a biography of Francisco de Asís, confirms that the king had relationships with other men before and after the marriage. “In Pamplona, still single, he had a secretary who was removed from his side. According to the letters, the family said that things happened in this relationship that were not appropriate, ”says the writer. “But his most important relationship was with the aristocrat Antonio Ramos de Meneses, Duke of Baños,” he adds. Francisco de Asís y Meneses, who was also married, lived together for a long time after the 1868 revolution, even in exile.
At the beginning of the 20th century, there were two other notorious examples in Spain: that of Francisco de Borbón y Borbón, Duke of Marchena and cousin of Alfonso XII, who died in 1923 in a psychiatric hospital in Paris that was said to be performing treatments curative to homosexuality; and that of Luis Fernando de Orleans y Borbón, cousin of Alfonso XIII, whose title of infant was withdrawn due to his sexual condition and “not very exemplary” behavior. “Luis Fernando was the first openly gay member of the Spanish royal family. And the only one,” points out Eduardo Álvarez Bragado, author of a biography of the child entitled Eulalia’s son. The rebellious bourbon became a benchmark for the queer culture of the time. Marcel Proust would have been inspired by him to create the character of Baron Palamède de Guermantes in In Search of Lost Time, an aristocrat tormented by his sexual condition.
“Back then, the European courts accepted the homosexuality of their members as a matter of course, but they did not allow it to be displayed, made public. The infant Luis Fernando has crossed that line,” assures Álvarez Bragado. The Spanish and international press of the 1920s began to report on the antics of the Infanta Eulalia’s son. The death of one of his lovers one night and his involvement in a drug trafficking case were the straws that broke the camel’s back. In 1924 Alfonso XIII robbed his cousin of his child privileges and expelled him from the royal family. “You take away the only thing you can’t order, since our titles are inherent in our characters. I was born a child of Spain and will die just as you were born and will die King of Spain long after your subjects have given you the kick in the butt you deserve,” Luis Fernando would have told the king. “They sentenced him to ostracism until the end of his days,” Álvarez Bragado regrets. He died in 1945 after castration surgery to remove the testicular cancer he was suffering from. He is buried in Paris, “where nobody remembers him,” says his biographer.
Franz von Bayern with his partner Thomas Greinwald on July 25, 2022 at the Festspielhaus Baden-Baden in Baden-Baden, Germany. Daniel KarmanGetty
In 2018, Lord Ivar Mountbatten, a cousin of Queen Elizabeth II of England, became the first member of the Windsor dynasty to marry another man. In 2021, Duke Franz of Bavaria, 89, officially posed as the first head of a European royal family, the Wittelsbach family, with his partner Thomas Greinwald. The picture by the Dutch artist Erwin Olaf went around the world. But for Álvarez Bragado, homosexuality and bisexuality remain taboo in the royal family. “The issue is still not discussed, to the point that those who need to make legislative reforms don’t want to do it. In Spain, where equal marriage has been legal since 2005, the constitution and current laws governing the functioning of the monarchy do not provide for the possibility for an heir to the throne to be homosexual,” the author points out.
This debate was opened in the Netherlands, where same-sex marriage has been legal since 2001. A MP asked in 2021 if Princess Amalia of Orange, daughter of Kings Willem-Alexander and Máxima and heir apparent to the throne, could marry another woman and still be head of state. Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte replied that there was no legal obstacle for a king or queen to marry a person of the same sex, although he did not clarify how the issue of descent would be resolved in an institution based precisely on succession , from father to son. Rutte only specified that “in a marriage between two people of the same sex, it must be clear who the children are”. Maybe this is the first step so that no more queer prince or princess has to hide in a palace closet.