A Classic of Gay Fiction Close to Darger's Heart

Henry Darger was a reader.

His father taught him how to read newspapers before he ever attended school. He loved books and read them voraciously, and in fact, he had a large library that ranged in subject from the popular (The Dion Quintuplets “Going on Three” and The Great Chicago Fire) to the esoteric (Sources of Volcanic Energy and Catechism of Christian Doctrine). He owned a nearly complete run of every Oz book that L. Frank Baum wrote, having thirteen of the fourteen.

But one of the most peculiar volumes in his library was a classic of gay literature, Condemned to Devil’s Island. Written by Blair Niles and published in 1928, it’s supposedly a fictionalized account of the life of a very handsome young Frenchman who’s imprisoned there because he was a thief. She claimed to have visited the island and interviewed him thoroughly, and the book’s subtitle, The Biography of an Unknown Convict, suggests just that. But it reads more like fiction than nonfiction.

Sent to the jungle penal colony at Devil’s Island, just off the shore of French Guiana, Niles’ “unknown convict,” Michel Oban, recalls early in the book that he had no family. His mother had disappeared when he was very young and he rarely saw his father—exactly what Darger could have said about his own parents. Darger’s mother died when he was four, and his father was rarely at home, leaving him to roam Chicago’s notorious West Madison Street vice district at will. Many pages later, Oban discovers, “There are only three sorts of men in prison … the men who keep brats, those who become brats, and those who learn how to relieve themselves.” (page 133) Brat was a term at the time for a young man who exchanged his sexual favors for money, protection, and/or affection.

This hardback was among the nine novels by Dickens and A Shirley Temple Story Book that Darger saved, but why did he save it? We save what is important to us, but why was this book important to him?

For the answer to this and other mysteries surrounding the life of outsider artist Henry Darger, be on the lookout for Throw-Away Boy: A Life of Henry Darger…