ABSTRACT
Richard von Krafft-Ebing, in his influential study of perversion Psychopathia Sexualis, pleaded 'few people ever fully appreciate the powerful influence that sexuality exercises over feeling, thought, and conduct'. The homosexual was only one part of a much wider scientific inquiry into different sexual types. Sexology produced a vast catalogue of 'perversions' and figures such as the sado-masochist, the fetishist, the transvestite and the sexual hermaphrodite crossed the borders, back and forth, between scientific literature and popular culture. The social visibility of perversions, however, depended on the willingness of people to confess their desires. Perversion and decadence also became more explicit in literature. The voices of novelists, writers and classicists provided a repertoire of sexually ambiguous characters helping to shape representations of sexual perversion for a wider audience. Despite sharp differences between biological sexology and psychoanalysis, their shared interest in sexual perversion was integral to the emergence of concepts of sexuality.
