T

Taktsis, Costas (1927-88), Greek author. Taktsis’s fame rests about equally on his writing, his lifestyle and the manner of his death, and to all of these his sexuality was central. Born in Thessaloniki, but growing up in Athens, he led an adolescent existence as much disrupted by family circumstances (his upbringing was almost exclusively in the hands of a variety of female relatives ) as by the German occupation of Greece and the Greek civil war which followed. The circumstances of his early life are very shadowy, and his autobiography The First Step (published posthumously in 1989) is written in such a way as to focus the reader on the discontinuities of his existence rather than to clarify his personal history, although it does give an amusing account of the variety of sexual possibilities open to a schoolboy bent on self-education in a period of great social upheaval. In the post-war period, his first publications, Brazilian Symphony (poems, 1954) and Café Byzantium (also poems, 1956), attracted no particular attention, and between 1954 and 1964 he left Greece altogether, moving between Western Europe, Africa, the US and Australia and keeping himself by methods that can only be guessed at. In 1963 he published, at his own expense, The Third Wedding, a blackly comic novel which devastatingly exposes the oppressive role of the family in Greece and explodes the traditional Greek mythology of motherhood. But even this

novel, although translated into French and English in 1967, only really became widely known in Greece with its second edition (1970). It was followed by a similarly sophisticated but more elliptical exploration of comparable issues in his short-story cycle Small Change (1972). In the meantime Taktsis had begun to gain a reputation for himself as an amusing and scandalous wit in various Athenian cafés and salons. After the fall of the Colonels’ dictatorship in 1974, he went on to make frequent contributions in the media, both in the press and on the air, on issues of Greek society and culture, and began to publish essays on the same topics. He made no secret of his homosexuality but declined to take an active part in the gay liberation movement, ostensibly because he believed that oppression of homosexuals could only be solved as part of a wider social liberation. Nonetheless, some of his journalistic contributions of the 1980s were very outspoken on the subject, such that rapidly Taktsis and homosexuality became virtually synonymous in the public mind. What was perhaps less widely known was that for many years he had also been practising as a transvestite prostitute, a profession which seems to have led eventually to his death, since he was probably murdered by a client. On this subject, as on all aspects of sexuality, his autobiography is entirely open, and if read in conjunction with it, his novel and story-

cycle take on a new importance. Between the three works, Taktsis constructs a highly individual account of the fluidity of sexual identity, the ways in which society in general – and Greek society in particular – works to limit that fluidity for its own purposes, and the extent to which Greek literature has helped to ‘fix’ the gender values of its culture.