Reissued for the 50th anniversary of Cocteau's death in 1963, Le Livre Blanc, a white paper on homosexual love, was first published anonymously in France by Cocteau's contemporary Maurice Sachs and was at once decried as by the critics as obscene. The semi-autobiographical narrative describes a youth's love affairs with a succession of boys and men during the 1900s. The young man's self-deceptive attempts to find fulfillment, first through women and then by way of the church, are movingly conveyed; the book ends with a strong plea for male homosexuality to be accepted without censure. The book is fully illustrated and includes many woodcuts by the author.
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