ABSTRACT
As male homosexuality grew more visible in the late nineteenth century its cultural manifestations became sharper and more precise, incorporating in the arts references of the Middle Ages and mysticism as well as to the Greeks. In literature the homosexual could be made a hero, even if he was defined as an aesthete or lover of beautiful things, or as a dandy doomed to disaster. His was the decadent society in which sexual and artistic pleasure went hand in hand with wealth and luxury. Oscar Wilde’s The Portrait of Dorian Gray (1895) and Joris-Karl Huysman’s A Rebours (Against the Grain) both showed the aesthetic dandy living a life of self-indulgent luxury. Des Esseintes, Huysman’s hero, was wealthy and hedonistic, able to live a life of luxury and excess with little regard to conventional standards. Though a creation of fiction, Esseintes was based on the artist, writer and aesthete Robert de Montesquiou.
