BEZA,THEODORE (1519-1605), French Theologian

Theodore Beza was a close friend of theologian John Calvin and an outspoken supporter of Calvinism. He was also, at least in his youth, unmistakably homosexual. In his collection of Latin verse, Juvenilia, are love poems addressed to a young man named Audebert. In Beza's later life as a Calvinist, these poems provided considerable ammunition for rival Catholic polemicists, one of whom accused him of having been "tortured by a burning lust for his young Audebert." Another, the Catholic theologian De Sanctis, wrote that "Instead of your Audebert, now you have embraced Calvin, and so have substituted a spiritual male-whore for a carnal one; thus being still what you were - a sodomist."