GLR May-June 2026

ESSAY Fantasy Island, 17th-Century Style V ERNON R OSARIO

I MAGINE being caught in a violent storm in the middle of the Atlantic and becoming shipwrecked on an un charted island. You and your companions trudge through lush wetlands till you reach a magnificent mar ble-clad palace. To your great surprise, the elite of this land are fabulous drag queens! Like an ethnographer, you explore the sumptuous chambers and learn that they com pete to have the most lavish, outlandish clothes and jewelry. Their hair is straightened and curled with hot irons into aston ishing forms, like “skies covered in little puffy clouds.” Their

This is basically the plot of a French novel published in 1605! The original booklet was so scandalous that it was printed with no author, title, or publisher attributions. Subsequent reprint ings were titled Description de l’Isle des hermaphrodites, nou vellement découverte, Contenant les mœurs, les coutumes & les ordonnances des habitans de cette isle (1726). 1 The Island of Hermaphrodites was republished in a French critical edition in 1996, but this is the first time it has been available in English thanks to a splendid translation by Kathleen Perry Long, pro fessor of French at Cornell University. She is uniquely quali

fied for the task, as her prior monographs have examined her maphrodites and gender in Early Modern Europe. She provides both a lengthy introductory essay and extensive footnotes to the novel’s archaic words and obscure literary references. Long further assists the reader by distinguish ing two speakers in the text (which otherwise run together in the original with hardly a para graph break): a “frame narrator” who introduces us to a “story teller” (the Frenchman who dis covered this wondrous island in the New World). Such a framing device was common at the time, along with tales of exotic voyages punctuated by lengthy digressions into philosophy and politics. The Island of Hermaphrodites , for ex ample, includes “translations” from the Latin of the hermaphro dites’ laws, customs, articles of faith, and decrees on public pol icy. (It is unclear why these exotic islanders would write their laws in

Title page and frontispiece for the 1726 edition of The Island of Hermaphrodites .

eyebrows are waxed to the thinnest of lines. Skin treatments and make-up are so elaborate they could “turn a coarse complexion into a delicate one” with ruby cheeks. Their dainty, bejeweled shoes force them to adopt a swishy gait. They feast on the most refined dishes in a luxuriously appointed banquet hall. They fawn over every action of their king-queen to win favor and treasures; otherwise, deception and licentiousness are the law of the land. No, this isn’t an upcoming RuPaul’s Survivor reality show. Vernon Rosario, MD, PhD, a frequent contributor to these pages, is a historian of science and child psychiatrist in Los Angeles.

Latin, but we must frequently suspend our disbelief.) Although the work uses the medical term “hermaphrodite,” it is never clear that the islanders are biologically intersex (i.e., of ambiguous or double genitalia). The astonished, at times mocking, narrator describes a “half-woman” ( demi-femme ) and flounders between male and female pronouns in describing the _______________ 1. I referred to the digitized 1726 edition in the Duke University library. Although the frontispiece credits publisher Herman Demen of Cologne, the Duke library notes this is probably a false imprint, and the book was likely published in Brussels by Foppens. Over a cen tury after its original printing the work remained controversial!

TheG & LR

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