Was There a Gay Casanova? 

When author Marten Weber first read the memoirs of the legendary Italian lothario Giacomo Casanova, a man whose name is synonymous with seduction, Weber found himself disgusted at the historical inaccuracies of the books and films that have since been produced about the guy. "The image of this handsome adventurer who 'seduced' women is a complete fake. He was stupid, untalented, often mean, selfish, and manipulative. He paid off mothers to have his way with virgin teenage daughters -- he almost exclusively slept with very young girls. He bought and sold virgin girls as young as 9 to other men, and he swindled his way into a fortune. How he could ever end up a sort of cultural icon, or being played by Heath Ledger, is entirely beyond me."

But he did have a brother, and from that sprung Weber's new novel, Benedetto Casanova: The Memoirs (Aquarius Publishing), one of many new books that reimagine -- some with more fictional flourish than others -- the lives of LGBT historical figures. Most notable of them is acclaimed lesbian author Ellis Avery's The Last Nude (Riverhead Books), which is a lush work of historical fiction that imagines a love affair between bisexual art deco painter Tamara de Lempicka and a young American woman who serves as muse for her most iconic work, Beautiful Rafaela (a painting that TheNew York Times called one of the most important nudes of the 20th century).

Paul Russell's The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov (Cleis Press) is a story as moving as Avery's and one that's never been told. Nabokov, brother of the famous author of Lolita, was arrested for being gay and sent to a German labor camp where he died of dysentery, exhaustion, and starvation -- while Vladimir was in the U.S. becoming one of the greatest authors of the 20th century.

Mary Walker Baron's new novel, But This Is Different (Steel Cut Press) is a lesbian eco-philosophical romance that even offers a solution to the mystery surrounding the disappearance of Amelia Earhart: What if she orchestrated it in order to live with her equally famous lover without the prying eyes of the paparazzi?

These "novels based on the life" of LGBT historical figures let authors like Russell, Avery, Baron, and Weber right the wrongs of invisibility or fill in the gaps of imagination with "what ifs."

While his book is fiction, Weber says, "My Benedetto is not entirely fictional. In his memoirs, the historical Casanova mentions that his mother gave away two newborn children, and that he had no idea what became of them. It was quite normal in the 18th century to have children raised by strangers, especially when the family was not financially well off. In 1761, Casanova visits the wife of his real brother and finds out that their marriage is loveless, because the brother has no 'interest' in the wife. Casanova does not write much about the incident, and the wife claims that her husband was impotent. There are however certain indications that he was simply not interested in women, so Casanova may really have had a gay brother."

These days, even Homer's Iliad is not safe from new interpretations: Madeline Miller's novel, The Song of Achilles (HarperCollins) brilliantly unmasks the doomed love affair between soldiers Achilles and Patroclus. The idea, though, wasn't new, she says: "I stole it from Plato! The idea that Patroclus and Achilles were lovers is quite old. There's a lot of support for their relationship in the text of TheIliad itself, though Homer never makes it explicit. For me, the most compelling piece of evidence, aside for the depth of Achilles' grief, is how he grieves: Achilles refuses to burn Patroclus's body, insisting instead on keeping the corpse in his tent, where he constantly weeps and embraces it --despite the horrified reactions of those around him. That sense of physical devastation spoke deeply to me of a true and total intimacy between the two men."

Don't think these authors are just dreaming these stories up either. For his Casanova, Weber "went through stacks of letters written during that time by travelers in Italy, and derived from these certain notions about the life of gay men in the 18th century, even though there was no such thing as a 'gay lifestyle' back then." Miller studied Latin and Greek for decades; Avery and Russell both clearly did meticulous research, which is why all these books read very much like they could be the absolute truth, rare windows into LGBT lives that we never discovered in those high school history books.

And sometimes, when one of these literary reinterpretations is good, it transcends time and place, weaving fact and fiction that links history with contemporary social issues. "I see the relationship between Tamara and Rafaela as specific to this time and place," says Avery of the expat Jazz Age Paris setting of The Last Nude, " which was one in which sexual acts between women seemed both more possible than in preceding or subsequent decades and one in which the meaning of those acts was perhaps even more up for grabs than today."