"At what point in history did a "homosexual identity" begin to emerge? Many cultural historians have agreed with Foucault that the late nineteenth century witnessed its birth - they argue that earlier eras were dominated by discourses of sodomy, and that people of earlier eras understood sodomy as a category of forbidden acts and did not engage in producing same-sex identity formations. In this rethinking of the question, Susan E.

Gustafson goes beyond the medical, psychoanalytical, and legal discourses that Foucault viewed as the initiators of modern sexual identities to explore the literature and discourse of male-male desire a century earlier, within the tradition of German Classicism. Reading such authors as Goethe, Winckelman, and Moritz, she finds a self-conscious formulation of same-sex desire leading to a sense of identity and community."--BOOK JACKET.