The prohibition against homosexuality forms only one target of Sade's delirious yet systematic efforts to outrage all morality, whether religious or secular. Yet Simone de Beauvoir has compellingly argued that homosexual libido is central to Sade's own personality as it emerges from his fiction--focusing particularly on the character of Dolmance, the senior libertine and master of ceremonies in Philosophie dans le boudoir, who Beauvoir, like many other readers, takes as representative of Sade himself.

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One of the women in the dialogue calls Dolmance "a sodomite out of principle [who] not only worships his own sex but never yields to ours save when we consent to put at his disposal those so well beloved charms of which he habitually makes use when consorting with men." Dolmance--whom Sade depicts as a kind of erotic superman, tireless and inventive--announces that the ideal sexual position is to be, simultaneously, the active and the passive partner of anal intercourse.

For well over a century, Sade's writings were suppressed--a fate that helped create his reputation as an apostle of liberty. Advocacy of his work by the surrealists and the work of a few devoted scholars have led to a greater appreciation of his transgressive vision, which has deeply influenced writers including Georges Bataille and Michel Foucault.

Enacting a perverse fusion of desire and ideology, Sade pursues the idea of sexual freedom with a ruthlessness that is often genuinely unnerving. Alternating between pornographic and theoretical discourses--composed in a prose that shifts with astonishing ease between eloquence and vulgarity, combining humor and the most nightmarelike brutality--Sade's novels are among the most disturbing literary works ever written.

Perhaps no other book has been more influential--for better or worse--in determining the construction of gay and lesbian identity in the modern world, as well as social attitudes toward homosexuality, than the Bible.

Nineteenth-century Decadent literature either describes aspects of decadent life and society or reflects the decadent literary aesthetic.

Erotic and pornographic works have been written in many cultures since ancient times and recently have flourished with the relaxation of censorship.

While evidence from earlier centuries is sparse, from the sixteenth century onward there were several French writers who treated male and female homosexuality.

Since World War II, the gay male novel has progressively flourished in England and especially in America.

Best known for her revolutionary study of women's condition, The Second Sex (1949) and as the companion of philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir had a number of same-sex relationships during her life.

Controversial writer Dennis Cooper is best known for his series of strikingly original, critically acclaimed, albeit transgressive and contentious, novels exploring the nature of sexual obsession, alienation, brutality, and death.