Wilfred Thesiger was a British military officer, explorer, photographer, and travel writer. His book “Arabian Sands” recounted his crossing of the Empty Quarter of the Arabian Peninsula in 1945 and 1950.
By all accounts, he was a man’s man who craved danger. Thesiger was willing, even eager, to risk his life and once declared,
“I was the man, I suffered, I was there.”
Thesiger was a member of Wingate’s Gideon special force in Ethiopia and was noted for his courage in helping to capture a fort with 2,500 Italian soldiers. He was trained to be a secret agent in Cairo and then recruited for SAS with whom he fought behind enemy lines in the desert.
A contemporary described his first meeting with Wilfred Thesiger:
“He was 6ft 2ins, broad-shouldered with a deeply lined face, a large nose broken three times in a boxing ring, and he was as tough as he looked. In 1932, he was the first European to make it alive through the country of the notoriously violent Danikil in Ethiopia.”
According to another friend, Thesiger hated“soft” living, alcohol,and “intrusive” female company.
Thesiger was sometimes compared to Thomas Edward Lawrence (aka Lawrence of Arabia). Thesiger commented on Lawrence’s supposed homosexuality:
“He (Lawrence) should have slept with half a dozen of ‘em and got the damned thing out of his system.”
Regarding his own sexuality, Thesiger felt that his private life was nobody's business and nearly always refused to discuss it.
“I should have liked to have children. It was what I needed to do to get children that put me off.”
“I might have been homosexual if I had been born in a different age, but as it was, I remained asexual”.
Despite his protestations, Thesiger’s writings revealed his interest in beautiful young men, his close relationships with them, and his tendency to photograph them, sometimes in the nude.
Thesiger described the Arabs’ sex life as both alluring and perverse.
“The young men casually exposed their nakedness and were disturbingly beautiful. Some men, who dressed and behaved like women and were accepted by them.”
In the 1940s, Thesiger met Bin Kabina, a 16-year-old, who would join the trek across the desert. In his book, he compared Bin Kabina to Roman Emperor Hadrians’s lover, Antinous.
“This boy was dressed only in a length of blue cloth, which he wore wrapped round his waist with one tasselled end thrown over his right shoulder, and his dark hair fell like a mane about his shoulders. He had a face of classic beauty, pensive and rather sad in repose, but which lit up when he smiled, like a pool touched by the sun. Antinous must have looked like this, I thought, when Hadrian first saw him in the Phrygian woods… A stranger might have thought that this smooth, pliant body would never bear the rigours of desert life, but I know how deceptively enduring were these Bedu boys who looked like girls.”
Thesiger’s biographer described Bin Kabina as the love of his life.
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