Baron Corvo’s Venice Letters and Modern Male Homosexuality
Abstract
In discussions of the history of modern homosexuality, work on Italy remains under-read by non-Italianists in the US in particular. Yet from the late 19th century until the mid-Fascist years, Italy was a space where the sex tourism industry provided the conditions of possibility for what Christopher Chitty has characterized as a plebian male homosexual public. This essay explores some of the historical conditions of possibility of that public by re-reading Frederick William Rolfe’s, alias Baron Corvo’s, 1909-1910 letters from Venice to British industrialist and chess aficionado Charles Masson Fox. This re-reading of Corvo’s letters also provides the occasion to reconsider how we historicize modern homosexuality and Italy’s role in it. It suggests the continuing value of bringing an analysis of capitalism as a world system to the history of sexuality.
