AUGUST VON PLATEN, German poet and dramatist, born; There must be something in the air under the sign of Scorpio. Like Ned Rorem, the German poet and dramatists August von Platen, wrote it all down. His detailed, explicit diaries, published in unexpurgated form at the turn of the century, long after his death, are remarkable for their homosexual revelations, documenting Gay life in German universities of the early 19th century. His intense crushes, idealizations and subsequent disenchantments are not at all dissimilar from those of, say, Thoreau or Emerson in the United States, and his lamentable habit of fixing his desires on the unattainable are typical of youthful homosexual experience in any age and any culture. The diaries are psychologically authentic, far more convincing than Platen’s appended prologue in which, anticipating publication, he bewails the cruel Providence that made him different. “Why is it impossible for me to love women?” he cries. “Weep with me, that I should have suffered so unspeakably.”
