“Each of us has his tastes inscribed in his brain and heart; whether he fulfills his urges with regret or with joy, he must fulfill them. He should let others act according to their own nature. It’s fate that creates us and guides us throughout our lives: to fight against it would be little more than fruitless, foolish, and reckless!” In the late 1880s, a dashing young Italian aristocrat made an astonishing confession to the novelist Émile Zola. In a series of revealing letters, he frankly described his sexual experiences with other men—including his seduction as a teenager by one of his father’s friends and his first love affair, with a sergeant during his military service—as well as his “extraordinary” personality. Judging it too controversial, Zola gave it to a young doctor, who in 1896 published a censored version in a medical study on sexual inversion, as homosexuality was then known. When the Italian came across this book, he was shocked to discover how his life story had been distorted. In protest, he wrote a long, daring, and unapologetic letter to the doctor defending his right to love and to live as he wished. This book is the first complete, unexpurgated version in English of this remarkable queer autobiography. Its text is based on the recently discovered manuscript of the Italian’s letter to the doctor. It also features an introduction tracing the textual history of the documents, analytical essays, and additional materials that help place the work in its historical context. Offering a striking glimpse of gay life in Europe in the late nineteenth century, The Italian Invert brings to light the powerful voice of a young man who forthrightly expressed his desires and eloquently affirmed his right to pleasure.

In the 1880s, a young Italian aristocrat writes to novelist Émile Zola, narrating the story of his seduction as a teenager by his father's (male) friend. This is the first English version of this famous gay autobiography. Essays provide additional context.

Science and Homosexualities is the first anthology by historians of science to examine European and American scientific research on sexual orientation since the coining of the word "homosexual" almost 150 years ago. This collection is particularly timely given the enormous scientific and popular interest in biological studies of homosexuality, and the importance given such studies in current legal, legislative and cultural debates concerning gay civil rights. However, scientific and popular literature discussing the biology of sexual orientation have been short-sighted in representing it as objective, new scientific work. This volume demonstrates that the quest for the biological "cause" of homosexuality and other sexualities is as old as the term itself. These essays explore the active role experimental subjects played in shaping scientific theories of homosexuality and cultural perceptions of sexuality and sexual identity. Finally this anthology studies the way in which this doctor-patient interaction shaped not only scientific theories of homosexuality, but also cultural perceptions and self-identities as well. Contributors include: Garland E. Allen, Erin G. Carlston, Julian Carter, Alice D. Dreger, Anne Fausto-Sterling, Margaret Gibson, Stephanie Kenen, Hubert Kennedy, Harry Oosterhuis, James Steakley, Richard Pillard, Jennifer Terry

An examination of how female same-sex desires were represented in a wide range of Italian and British medical writings, 1870-1920. It shows how the psychiatric category of sexual inversion was positioned alongside other medical ideas of same-sex desires, such as the virago, tribade-prostitute, fiamma and gynaecological explanations.

Drawn from insights of the past twenty years, the essays reflect the renewed approach of gender and sexuality as they relate to homosexuality and its representation, and they rely on models that differentiate between sexuality and gender and between natural inclinations and social constructs. Despite the wide variety of subjects, critical positions, and authors' backgrounds, what these essays have in common is the willingness of the contributors to go beyond a set of rhetorics, a set of limitations that were a defining moment in the struggle of gay liberation, and its reflection in both creative and critical writing.

Literature strives to interpret and explain the unknown, and to propose ways in which to engage with it—even if, at least initially, these keys exist only in the realm of the imagination. This is one of the many important qualities that draw us to study literature, and to marvel at the creative understandings that it offers. However, many questions call for further exploration: how does something “unknowable”, unspeakable, become a subject that can be examined and debated? How have literary and scientific communities entered into the dialogue and exchange that are crucial to the consolidation of knowledge? By what processes can we come to know and understand that which remains hidden, undocumented, unspoken, poorly understood: the memories, secrets, “unknowable” and “unspeakable” truths of public and private human lives? Inspired by questions such as these, the contributors to this volume reflect on fin de siècle discourses around homosexuality and sexual “inversion”, on Émile Zola as seeker of concealed truths and figure of scandal, on the modes and crises of representing human experience in literary and visual forms, and on the dialogic space between self and other.