Best known for his collection of fairytales, in particular "The Little Mermaid" with its upcoming live-action remake this year, Hans Christian Andersen was also a "classic disaster bi trashfire" with a trail of messy romances and unrequited infatuations following him across Europe.
Born into a working-class family in Odense, Denmark, Andersen moved to Copenhagen at the age of 14 to join the Royal Danish Theatre as a soprano. However, his voice changing quickly put an end to that particular career. Fortunately, a theater colleague recognized his literary talent, and the theater's director managed to gain him the patronage of the king, enabling him to go back to school and complete his secondary education. By the age of 17, Andersen had published his first short story and fallen in love with Edvard Collin, the son of his benefactor and guardian, Jonas Collin, with whom he lived while attending school.
At first, Edvard didn't like Andersen very much, but the two eventually bonded over Latin homework and became fast friends. Unfortunately for Andersen, friendship was as far as it went. Edvard was an affectionate but thoroughly heterosexual young man who was by turns perplexed and oblivious to Andersen's advances. When his more subtle gestures, such as secretly leaving a rose under Edvard's pillow didn't work, something Collin apparently failed to realize was Andersen's doing until he confessed years later via letter, Andersen resorted to writing him a series of increasingly obvious love letters. Though most queer men of the era tended to be more circumspect in their writing due to the harsh legal and social penalties that would result if they were discovered, Andersen was either desperate or trusting enough to throw caution to the wind in his attempt to make his feelings known.
The letters that Andersen wrote to Collin featured such proclamations as “I long for you as though you were a beautiful Calabrian girl” and “my sentiments for you are those of a woman”, as well as an outright lewd poem about the rose he had hidden under Collin's pillow. The love and desire that Andersen expressed for Collin in these letters were unmistakable. However, while Collin seems to have received these revelations about his friend with unusual acceptance for the period, Andersen's feelings were still not reciprocated. Instead, Collin got engaged to a woman and wrote a letter to Andersen referring to him as his "worthy friend", something that Andersen received with outrage and heartbreak, replying;
Why do you call me your “worthy friend?” I don’t want to be worthy! That is the most insipid, boring word you could use. Any fool can be called worthy!... I have hotter blood than you and half of Copenhagen. Edvard, I feel so infuriated by this loathsome weather! I also long for you, to shake you, to see your hysterical laughter, to be able to walk away, insulted, and not come back home to you for two whole days.
Andersen then turned to less honorable methods, first befriending Collin's fiancée, Henriette, and then trying to sow discord between them. After Collin realized what was going on and took him to task for it, going ahead and marrying Henriette despite his friend's best efforts, Andersen retreated to the island of Funen where he wrote "The Little Mermaid". Already a fairly obvious analogy for his relationship with Collin, Andersen left no doubt as to the matter when he sent Collin a copy of the tale. Whether this was intended as a rebuke, a gesture of acceptance and well-wishes, or some combination of them all, given the mermaid's ending in the original story, is unclear. However, Collin and Andersen were able to resume their friendship, as were Andersen and Henriette, and the three of them were close enough by the end of their lives that they agreed to be buried together.
So far, this seems like an iconically gay story, and many people who have only looked into Andersen's relationship with Edvard Collin and "The Little Mermaid" assume that's what he was. However, Andersen had many powerful infatuations with both men and women throughout his life, almost never reciprocated by the objects of his affection. Among the women he loved as desperately as he loved Collin were the opera singer and international superstar Jenny Lind, who was made famous again, though wildly misrepresented in the process, by the musical The Greatest Showman.
Andersen wrote his story "The Nightingale" for her, which led to her being nicknamed the Swedish nightingale by the public. However, after she turned down his proposal, sincerely assuring him that while she did love him it was as a sister loves a brother, Andersen went on to write the Snow Queen, and many suspect he based its eponymous villain after Lind as well.
Another was Riborg Voigt, a girl whom Andersen had loved as a boy, like Edvard Collin. However, unlike Collin, Voigt was married to someone else. Nevertheless, it appears that Voigt reciprocated his feelings. It's unclear whether Andersen knew this or not, but Voigt, perhaps due to the greater consequences for a married woman caught in even just emotional adultery, was more cautious in her letters to him. However, just as Andersen died with one of her letters hung in a pouch around his neck, Voigt kept the letter that he had instructed her to burn, storing it safely away with a bouquet of flowers and a portrait of Andersen until her own death.
There were other men in Andersen's life as well. One of them was the much younger dancer Harald Schaff, whom Andersen loved in middle age. Their friendship was often described as "romantic" before Schaff too got engaged. Andersen attended their engagement party and wished them well, expressing in his diary that while he did not feel the usual heartbreak that the end of such a relationship has always previously brought about, he suddenly felt his age, "cut off from youth". Like Jenny Lind, Schaff also inspired one of his own fairytales, "The Snowman". Charles Dickens was another object of Andersen's devotion. It is unclear whether his feelings for Dickens were simply literary hero worship or a full-blown romantic passion. However, what is clear is that Dickens absolutely loathed him. He celebrated the end of Andersen's long visit and abruptly ended their correspondence soon after.
Finally, there was the one successful relationship of Andersen's life: his romance with Carl Alexander, the Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach. The two met at the theater and immediately spent three weeks together at the Grand Duke's estate, where Andersen also spent the following two summers. Andersen wrote of their time together with the dreamy enthusiasm of an adolescent, describing an early encounter with Carl Alexander: "The Hereditary Grand Duke walked arm in arm with me across the courtyard of the castle to my room, kissed me lovingly, asked me always to love him though he was just an ordinary person." He summed up his own experience with the touchingly sincere words, "I fell asleep with the melancholy, happy feeling that I was the guest of this strange prince at his castle and loved by him... It is like a fairy tale."
Andersen and Carl Alexander maintained an affectionate correspondence until Andersen's death. His letters to the Grand Duke were as full of gushing sentiment as his journal entries, expressing a genuine adoration for the man that coexisted with his longstanding love for both Collin and Voigt. Despite the pursuit of emotionally unattainable loves throughout his life, Andersen found deep, long-lasting love towards the end and came to a degree of peace with himself, his desires, and his sexuality. It's worth noting Andersen's groundbreaking and genre-defying choice to grant his mermaid a soul despite her unrequited love. While mermaids in fiction were often portrayed as dependent on human romantic love in order to gain an immortal soul, Andersen rejected this wholeheartedly, allowing his mermaid to ascend to heaven on her own, albeit after centuries of asceticism and hard work. With the mermaid as his stand-in, her alien nature representative of queer people and their lack of societal acceptance, Andersen was willing to grant her a means of becoming whole. Though it may have been a longer route, it was a path to happiness and belonging nonetheless, despite the roadblocks set against her.
In the early days of Copenhagen Pride, it was called the Mermaid Festival in honor of Andersen and his impact on the queer community in Denmark. The revelations about Andersen's life and sexuality are not new, but rather they have been ignored and pushed aside in the English language media for years by those who seek to erase our history and portray us as a corrupt anomaly of the present. However, Andersen was a part of our community, and his stories have provided a sense of understanding and belonging for LGBT individuals for more than a century now. That cannot be erased.
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