Queer Places:
5 Rue de l'Ancienne Comédie, 75006 Paris, France
Roland
Raymond Ferdinand Caillaud (January 5, 1905 – December 3, 1977) – known
professionally as Roland Caillaux, and sometimes using the pseudonym Roland
Caipland – was a French actor and artist. He is known for acting in several
French films in the 1920s and 1930s, and for producing and publishing
homoerotic illustrations in the mid 20th century.
Caillaux has long been best known for illustrating 20 lithographies pour un livre que j'ai lu (20 lithographs for a book I read), which accompanied a text attributed to Jean Genet with images of male homosexuality, including explicit sexual activity. The book was published in April 1945, without the name of the author, the publisher or place of publication, with a print run of only 115 copies.
In this text there are excerpts, however variants, of Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs and The Parade, poems published by Marc Barbezat in 1948 in a collection entitled Poems and signed this once Jean Genet (Editions L'Arbalète).[1]
Roland Caillaud's studio was located on Rue Boulard in the 14th arrondissement of Paris; it is there, between 1944 and 1945, that Jean Genet met the painter through model Édouard Dermit.[2]
Nicole Canet, who has rediscovered many of Caillaud's drawings, reports that he inherited money from his parents and lived as an annuitant after having been an actor. He lived at 5 rue de l'Ancienne Comédie. In a memoir, François Sentein says that when he traveled by bicycle to Montpensier street where Jean Cocteau lived, he kept his bicycle pump in his hand, for fear of it being stolen.[3]
My published books:
