Tracking Down the Greek Boy of Mykonos

June, 2016

My friend Doc just returned from a holiday on Mykonos, the Greek island five hours from Athens by boat (or a direct flight from London, Paris, Brussels, and Vienna).   He invited me but I refused.  I've already done enough traveling this year, and besides, I don't like gay resorts.

1. They're beaches, with no museums or art galleries for miles around, and nothing to do but get sunburned and incredibly bored.
2. There's an awful lot of booze and drugs floating by.
3. They're packed with white upper-class elitists.  I can get those at home.

But it did give me the idea of tracking down the Greek boy of Mykonos.

When I was a kid, I loved the "My Village" books by Sonia and Tim Gidal, photo-stories about real 10-12 year old boys living in traditional villages in Japan, Israel, Denmark, Morocco, Finland, and so on.  Although they were published during the 1950s and 1960s, the modern world had very little impact on the villages: the house might have electricity, but automobiles were rare, and there were certainly no tv sets, fast-food restaurants, or tourists.

The stories were told in the first person, present tense ("I get up and..."), with very minimal plots, mostly involving going to school, learning a little of the country's history, meeting colorful villagers, and taking a trip to a nearby big city.  But since the boys were all extraordinarily cute and not the least interested in girls, I found them kindred spirits, hints of gay potential amid the incessant "what girl do you like?" interrogations of my childhood.

My Village in Greece, published in 1960, starred a boy named Yannis, who lives on the island of Mykonos, in the Aegean Sea.  His story involves going to school, catching octopuses on the beach, buddy bonding with his friend Markos, learning about Odysseus and Theseus, picking figs, and visiting the Island of Delos.

Yannis and Markos are inseparable, and neither mentions having a girlfriend!  A gay paradise!  There's even a statue of Hercules in the museum by the harbor.

When I read the book as a kid, I didn't realize that the Gidals were manipulating us into thinking that Mykonos was tiny, isolated, and untouched by the modern world.

Yannis mentions that there are nine coffee houses in town, an archaeological museum, and 350 families.  That's a total population of 2,000, a small town, not a village.  But even a town of 2,000 doesn't need nine coffee houses, unless there are a lot of visitors.

It turns out that in the late 1950s, Mykonos was already a thriving tourist destination, a playground of the rich and famous.  During the 1960s and 1970s, tourism boomed; annual arrivals increased by 800%.  Mykonos became more famous for its trendy nightclubs than for its whitewashed houses and narrow cobbled streets.

In the early 1970s, Italian artist Piero Aversa settled there and opened the island's first gay bar. By the late 1970s, it was a gay mecca.

Yannis and Markos, iconic figures of my childhood, emblems of gay potential, grew up in a gay mecca.

Could I track them down, find out if they were gay?

There are actually 10 villages on Mykonos, but the only one with 2000 people, an archaeological museum, and views of the islands of Tinos and Siros from the harbor, is the main city, called Mykonos City or Chora.

And the Gidals give the full names: Yannis Nikou and Markos Constantinou, as well as names of other people in the village.

Surely they were pseudonyms?

No -- an internet search revealed five entries for Yannis Nikou from Mykonos, under various spellings.  In 1973, the society page of the San Mateo, California Times announces the engagement of one Jill Carson to Yannis, described as a "merchant and exporter."  He would be about 24 years old.

Other newspaper articles describe their wedding and their move back to Mykonos.

There's also a reference to his export business.  It specialized in women's clothing.

Jill lives alone in San Mateo now.  I don't know if she's widowed or divorced.

Ok, Yannis was probably heterosexual, but what about Markos?

Several of those -- it's a common name in Greece.

One Markos from Mykonos currently lives in Luxembourg.  He was in the Greek Air Force from 1970 to 1973, got certified in aircraft maintenance, and now works for an aircraft company.

I'm going to guess heterosexual.

But another is probably gay.  At least he works at the Elysium Hotel -- expensive ($400 per night), predominantly gay but "straight-friendly."

And it's a 10-minute walk from "Marco's house" on the map on the flyleaf of My Village in Greece.

I'm not sure that he's the Markos from the book.  He might be a son or grandson or some other relative, or someone not related at all.

But it's nice to imagine that one of the iconic books of my childhood features a straight boy and his gay best friend.

See also: The Gay Villages of Sonia and Tim Gidal