ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the story two men struggling to come to terms with their sexuality. Quite probably masturbation became a more important sexual outlet for Andre Gide than homosexuality, and childhood experiences explained that Gide became fixated on the practice. Elizabeth Moberly has interestingly argued that failure in relationships between the child and the parent of the same sex lie at the heart of the aetiology of homosexuality: the appropriate therapy is for the child to work through the lack by homosexual but non-erotic relationships. Gide’s was an ideal of classicism, of ‘equilibrium, plenitude and health’. Discovered early, it was to survive: it was to secure its finest expression in his last major work, Thesee. Always a guarded libertarian, after the Second World War, Gide came to believe ‘that absolute liberty destroys the individual and also society unless it be closely linked to tradition and discipline’.
