The white paper

Jean Cocteau, Kevin Lane, Margaret Crosland

Le Livre Blanc, a "white paper" on homosexual love, was first published anonymously in France by Cocteau's contemporary Maurice Sachs, and was at once decried as by the critics as obscene. The semiautobiographical narrative describes a youth's love affairs with a succession of boys and men during the 1900s. The young man's self-deceptive attempts to find fulfillment, first through women and then by way of the church, are movingly conveyed; the book ends with a strong plea for male homosexuality to be accepted without censure.