Don Leon is a 19th-century poem attributed to Lord Byron celebrating homosexual love and making a plea for tolerance. At the time of its writing, homosexuality and sodomy were capital crimes in Britain, and the nineteenth century saw many men hanged for indulging in homosexual acts.
It is not known who wrote it, although there are several theories.
As it includes in its narrative and notes several incidents that happened after the poet the Lord Byron's 1824 death it obviously could not have been written by him.
From internal dating, it was probably written in the 1830s.
It was published in 1866 by William Dugdale, who appears to have believed initially in the attribution to Byron as he attempted to use it to blackmail Byron's family.
It was reprinted in a Fortune Press limited edition in 1934 and immediately fell foul of the obscenity laws; the edition was seized and ordered destroyed, although several copies escaped the destruction and come up every so often on the rare book market. The 1934 edition was reprinted in facsimile by the Arno Press in 1975.
The extended poem is well constructed and extremely well written, showing evidence of a classical education and knowledge of the processes of the House of Commons, as well as an intimate knowledge of the poet Lord Byron's life, including his youthful homosexual adventures on his travels 1809-11 and his romantic friendship with the beautiful choirboy John Edlestone whilst at Cambridge University. This has led to the supposition that it may have been written by an intimate friend of Lord Byron's - however not by one who was concerned about his posthumous reputation. It was not common knowledge that the poet was what we would now call bisexual until the twentieth century.