ABSTRACT
Don Leon-a fifty-two-page poem-is a difficult text. A portion of the poem tells the story of its protagonist’s life, from earliest childhood through maturity, describing a process of sexual self-awakening that presents a propensity towards same-sex desire, among other sexual propensities, as natural, written into a person’s character from the very start of life. This precocious argument raises questions about the origins of this text. The answers open onto an overlooked era before the much-heralded “invention” of modern typologies of sexual identity.
