ABSTRACT
George Du Maurier’s 1894 novel Trilby is one of the earliest manifestations of what would become a popular Western cultural paradigm in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries: the gay (or otherwise queer) high culture impresario or aficionado who expresses his passions and desires in public through women’s bodies and voices.1 Rooted in the dangerously fascinating Byronic (anti)hero of the British Romantic period, this figure found his home in the age of Oscar Wilde, which was a time when most popular scientific, medical, and public notions about what was beginning to be called male “homosexuality” centered around the upper class dandy and gender inversion.
