Escal Vigor

Georges Eekhoud (1854 - 1927) was a French writer, homosexual and anarchist, Belgian.
 
Escal Vigor is a gay novel by Georges Eekhoud.
 
A clear and resolute novel about homosexuality, Escal-Vigor was heading towards trouble. Although it was well received by most critics, a lawsuit was launched against it. However, a storm of protest, especially vociferous because of numerous literary celebrities, and a cunning lawyer with literary aspirations, Edmond Picard, did their part in acquitting Eekhoud.
 
Small excerpt of the novel :
 
On the first of June, Henry de Kehlmark, the young "Dykgrave" or Count of the Dike, the lord of the castle Escal-Vigor, entertained a numerous company, as a sort of Joyous Entry, to celebrate his home-coming to the cradle of his forefathers, at Smaragdis, the largest and richest island in one of those enchanting and heroic northern seas, the coasts of which the bays and fiords hollow out and cut up capriciously into multiform archipelagoes and deltas.
 
Smaragdis, or the Emerald Isle, was a dependency of the half-German, half-Celtic kingdom of Kerlingalande. At the very beginning of commercial enterprise in the west, a colony of Hanseatic merchants settled there. The Kehlmarks claimed descent from the Danish sea-kings, or Vikings. Bankers, who had in them a dash of pirates' blood, men both of knowledge and action, they followed Frederick Barbarossa in his Italian expeditions, and distinguished themselves by an inalterable devotion, the fidelity of thane to king, to the House of Hohenstaufen.
 
A Kehlmark had even been the favourite of Frederick II., the Sultan of Luceria, that voluptuous emperor, the most artistic of the romantic house of Swabia, who, in that brilliant southern land, lived a life energised by the deep and virile aspirations of the north. This Kehlmark perished at Beneventum with Manfred, the son of his illustrious friend.