Casimir Dukahz

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Revision as of 01:13, 12 June 2010 by Will Robinson (talk | contribs) (added info about pen-name "Casimir")

Casimir Dukahz (pseudonym of Brian O. Drexel, b. July 07, 1909 d. June 28, 1988) was the author of some highly-acclaimed BoyLove novels.


With his first novel The Asbestos Diary (New York: Oliver Layton Press, 1966), written in a humorous style full of wildly inventive wordplay, Dukahz evoked "in a fashion appropriately episodic both the bittersweet transience of boyhood and all the adolescent silliness and surprise encountered by a man constantly available for the entertainment of boys." [1] The Asbestos Diary created a sensation in its era and it has been argued that it was partly responsible for the rift between boylovers and radical feminists.


His pen-name "Dukahz" may be a facetious reference to the prose poet Isidore Ducasse (1846-1870), the "comte de Lautréamont, (Count of Lautréamont)" who, in his six Chants de Maldoror,

celebrates the unbridled predatory misdeeds of a prowler monster whose shape is as indefinite as his age. ‘Peindre les délices de la cruauté’ is the avowed intention, and the reader is engulfed in a flux of nightmarish scenarios that unfurls with a strangely rhythmic insistence. Gothic paraphernalia and a grotesque menagerie of animal metamorphoses underpin a vision of man once innocent but now transmogrified into a wild beast. Male adolescents are the preferred prey, charmed, abducted, and destroyed in an atmosphere of psychopathic mayhem that smacks of the homosexual, but equally subverts any such inference.

- "comte de Lautréamont." The New Oxford Companion to Literature in French. Oxford : University Press, 1995, 2005. Answers.com 10 Jun. 2010.
http://www.answers.com/topic/comte-de-lautr-amont-3


Likewise, Dukahz's first name, "Casimir" may be a whimsical reference to the famous Polish-American general and hero of the American Revolution, Casimir Pulaski, who was a member of Polish nobility, a Count, just as Ducasse was the so-called "Count of Lautréamont."


His other published novels are Vice Versa (New York: Coltsfoot Press, 1976), It's a Boy (Amsterdam: Coltsfoot Press, 1984), Growing Old Disgracefully (Amsterdam: Acolyte Press, 1986) and the posthumously published Shakespeare's Boy (Amsterdam: Acolyte Press, 1991).

External links