The Third Sex
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A gold mine of information about a hidden queer culture Thirty-two years before Simone de Beauvoir's classic The Second Sex, popular French novelist Willy published The Third Sex, a vivid description of the world of European homosexuals in France, Italy, and Germany during the late 1920s. Stepping directly into the heart of gay men's culture, Willy follows homosexual nightlife into music halls, nightclubs, casinos, bars, and saunas. While he finds plenty of drug and alcohol abuse, he also discovers homosexual publishers, scientific societies, group rivalries, and opinions--both medical and political--about the nature of homosexuality itself. Lawrence R. Schehr's introduction provides context and translator's notes for this first-ever English edition. The New York Times - Stacey D'Erasmo What a charming and peculiar bulletin from the past is this little book from 1927…Ostensibly a quasi-scientific tour of the male homosexual world in France, Italy and Germany in the 1920s, The Third Sex is by turns leering, sympathetic, philosophical, patronizing, exuberant, impenetrable, tender and hilarious, often all on the same page…Whoever wrote it, this slender volume offers a fascinating glimpse not so much of exotic homosexual practices but of something much more delicate and transitory: the moment just before homosexuality became an identity, before sexual acts had been organized into the solid categories we recognize and traffic in today. A collision of conflicting impulses and wildly incongruous discourses, The Third Sex does not know what it is—"gay Baedeker," cautionary tale, scientific treatise, pornographic handbook, literary essay, opportunity to slander the Italians and the Germans—and that is what makes it so delightful. It's not about the love that dared not speak its name; it's about the love that didn't quite know what its name was yet and was trying on many different ones, all at the same time…The Third Sex maps a lost world not only of sex, but of the myriad things we modern folk once thought sex could be, and mean.
Contents Translator's Introduction....................viiIntroduction by Louis Estève....................1Preface....................111. Looking across the Borders....................152. A Bit of Psychology....................323. Some Leaders....................414. The Tour for the "Curious"....................565. Varied Opinions....................706. Androgynous Literature....................81Epilogue....................95Notes....................99Bibliography....................131Index....................133
