SOURCE: "Henry James, Charles Sanders Peirce, and the Fat Capon: Homoerotic Desire in The American" in The Henry James Review, Vol. 14, 1993, pp. 166-78.

In the following excerpt, Torsney examines the writings of both Henry James and Peirce to further her assumption that the two men were sexually involved.

I

Jonathan Dollimore opens Sexual Dissidence, his influential examination of politics, perversity, and homosexual aesthetics, with a short narrative, "Wilde and Gide in Algiers." Gide, Dollimore explains, spent considerable time in Wilde's company in Paris in late 1891, and Wilde encouraged Gide to liberate himself from the very core of the younger man's identity, which was "rooted . . . in a Protestant ethic and high bourgeois moral rigour and repression which generated a kind of conformity which Wilde scorned" (3). Gide reports: "Wilde, I think, did me nothing but harm. In his company I had lost the habit of thinking. I had more varied...