SOURCE: "Dorianism," in Apocalyptic Overtures: Sexual Politics and the Sense of an Ending, Rutgers University Press, 1994, pp. 43-64.

Dellamora, who also wrote Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism, offers a more condensed version of his studies in the essay that follows. Looking at several of the major figures of the era—including Wilde, Walter Pater, and J. A. Symonds—Dellamora considers the shifting notions of masculinity and male-male desire that traversed the century, focusing specifically on efforts to maintain the Greek ideal.

In this chapter I follow Neil Bartlett's example [Who Was That Man? A Present for Mr. Oscar Wilde, 1988] in looking back to the 1890s as a site at which key issues in relations between subjects of male-male desire become evident. As these subjects were increasingly specified as "homosexual," the old patterns that mobilized male-male libidinal energies in service of the nation-state or in the...