"Lawrence Schehr's French Gay Modernism is the only study devoted to analyzing these representations of male homosexuality in early twentieth-century French literature. Schehr explains how earlier representations of homosexuality, encoded rather than conspicuous, served as a basis for later writers to treat homosexual behavior as sets of relationships rather than as secrets or scandals. The prominence of authors such as Proust and Gide also helped other writers take up homosexual relationships in their works, often by adopting the same representational strategies."--BOOK JACKET.