1. My work proceeds from the axiom that sexualities are socially constructed and historically contingent discourses, and not (for the historian’s purposes) essential, universal, and timeless biological impulses. For post-essentialist guides to conceptualizing ‘homosexuality’ and the male ‘homosexual’ in history, see Edward Stein (ed.), Forms of Desire: Sexual Orientation and the Social Constructionist Controversy (New York, 1990);
2. Jeffrey Weeks, Against Nature: Essays on Histoty, Sexuality and Identity (London, 1991).
3. For a genealogy of effeminacy, see Alan Sinfield, The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde, and the Queer Movement (London, 1994).
4. On irony as a constituent of modern gay identity, see Brian Pronger, The Arena of Masculinity: Sports, Homosexuality and the Meaning of Sex (London, 1990), 104–10; on the functions of male femininity in the homosexual subculture,
5. see George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York, 1994), 101–11.