ABSTRACT
Symonds is an exemplary Victorian man of letters: art critic celebrated for his Renaissance in Italy, he was also a poet, though no one reads his verse today. Perhaps his supreme accomplishment was an Autobiography that remained unpublished until 1984, an explicit if fumbling account, in alternately lyrical and dissecting prose, of his sexual, spiritual, and intellectual development, a work remarkable for recognizing no border between growth as writer and growth as homosexual. Sexual Inversion continues the history of homosexual literary self-mutilation, but it began, on Symonds’s part, with intentions of loud, political declamation. Symonds’s role in Sexual Inversion, however, demonstrates the enormous stake that inverts themselves had in sexology. Symonds sought to be objective, reasonable, sincere, everything he was not; he collaborated in order to bring on more enlightened attitudes about homosexuality, but he would have benefited from the stronger medicine of a muse.
