GLR January-February 2023

BOOKS

Coming Out without the Vocabulary

S OME TIME around 1888, a 23 year-old Italian aristocrat wrote an anonymous, undated letter to the French writer Émile Zola, in which he confessed to “the plight of a soul who seems to be pursued by a horrible fatality.” The Italian—who described himself as “a pretty, cute, perfumed, irreproachably ele gant, frivolous, and secretly debauched being”—was a homosexual, and he wanted to give Zola, an author he greatly admired, Catholicism, and “dresses with trains.” He was particularly keen on the heroes of the Trojan War, espe cially Paris, “imagining myself as Andromache in order to be able to hold him in my arms.” As for his sexual awakening, by thirteen he had learned about masturbation from the family’s groom; an other servant let him stroke his “virile member.” During the Italian’s military service, when the contrast be tween his pretty face and his hussar’s uniform lent him the “charms of a transvestite,” he enjoyed his first consum mated homosexual experi ence with a barracks mate. When the friend was killed in a drunken quarrel, the Ital ian vowed “not to revert to the horrible error of my senses.” He ended his letter by confessing to being afflicted with misery, guilt, and the sense of a “frightful destiny” from which he could not escape. “I don’t

an affair with a 53-year-old friend of his family, who tried to fuck him, though the physical pain “made me withdraw from the violent act.” Other adventures followed, all of which left the Italian with the “ardent de sire to die in the flower of my youth and beauty.” A third letter soon followed in which the Italian provided Zola with still more details of his personality and passions. It’s fascinating to follow the Italian man’s struggles to come up with language clared, surpassed everything else. “For me all vices, all crimes are excused by it. ” He came to realize that “as long as you are alive , you can have pleasure .” Initially, Zola didn’t know what to do with this confession, but the letters touched him with their sincerity and “eloquence of truth.” And while he felt that “public order” must be upheld by morality and justice, nev ertheless he saw no reason to condemn this unfortunate man. Eventually, he handed over the Italian’s letters to a young medical doctor in his acquaintance, Georges Saint Paul. The doctor, eager to chal lenge himself with a new research project, turned his at tention to the study of “sexual perversion.” By 1895, he had written a book, Defects and Poisons: Sexual Perversion and Perversity , published under the pseudonym Dr. Laupts, to which Zola coura geously supplied a preface. The book included the Italian’s letters, cen sored in part, and Saint-Paul’s analysis of

P HILIP G AMBONE

THE ITALIAN INVERT A Gay Man’s Intimate

Confessions to Émile Zola Edited by Michael Rosenfeld with William A. Peniston Columbia U. Press. 272 pages, $30.

with which to describe himself and his homosexual experiences. Words like debauchery, moral ugliness, perverse, corrupt, sick, and monstrous pepper these three letters. At the same time, he could not deny the beauty that he sometimes felt in his homosexual love affairs, a beauty which, he de

material the French master might use in one of his novels. To that end, the Italian recounted his experiences as an ado lescent, when he first realized that he felt an irresistible at traction to men. He told Zola about his early passions: a love of literature, the pomp of

know whether you can do something with the terrible passion I have confessed to you,” he wrote. Nevertheless, he continued, if what he had revealed could find a place in Zola’s future work, his only request was that Zola not make him “too odious.” The next morning, the Italian wrote a second letter to Zola, giving him even more details of his “filthy tale.” He told Zola of Philip Gambone, a regular contributor to these pages, is the author of As Far As I Can Tell: Finding My Father in World War II (2020).

this person with “tainted instincts.” As heroic and forward-looking as Saint Paul was in publishing the Italian’s confession, his opin ions were still mired in the prejudices and ignorance of the day. He thought the Italian a “strange, revolting, and truly pitiful per son,” and interpreted his behavior as a clear indication that he desired to be a woman. He counseled the French educational establishment to create a system of diversions—physical and

Émile Zola

January–February 2023

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