In Trieste, he was forced to wait on a ship, and it is during this delay that he became acquainted with his murderer, Francesco Arcangeli. Although the official police documents have been published, the true motive has never been determined. The rumor that his death was the result of a shady homosexual liaison persists.

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After his death, Winckelmann continued to be a figure of homosexual identification. Even as the German infatuation with Greek antiquity grew stronger, circles of male friends shared and distributed their copies of Winckelmann's letters. Within eighteen years of his death, five separate correspondences had been published, including the complete set of his love letters to the Baltic nobleman.

At the turn of the century, Goethe reread Winckelmann's works, his published correspondence, and the letters that Dietrich Berendis, Winckelmann's boyhood friend, had brought to Weimar, and decided to memorialize him.

The result was a book aptly called Winckelmann und sein Jahrhundert (1805), which included the Berendis letters, essays by an art historian and a classicist, as well as Goethe's own biographical essay.

In sections entitled "Friendship" and "Beauty," which would become touchstones of homosexual sensibility, Goethe obliquely if unmistakably evoked the deep connection between Winckelmann's aesthetics and homosexuality.

The only account that comes close to rivaling Goethe's is the English-language essay on Winckelmann by Walter Pater.

A theory of art and an approach to living that influenced many European and American gay male and lesbian writers at the turn of the twentieth century, aestheticism stressed the independence of art from all moral and social conditions and judgments.

Male singers who were castrated before they reached puberty, castrati reached the height of their popularity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; although not necessarily homosexual, they occupy a "queer space" in cultural history.

During the eighteenth century, men whom we would now call homosexual, such as Johann Winckelmann, Horace Walpole, and William Beckford, were at the forefront of public taste, championing respectively the fresh interest in Classical, Gothic, and Oriental styles.

The treatment of homosexuality in German and Austrian literature was largely negative until the eighteenth century, when the basis was laid for the development of a more positive attitude.

Travel has afforded gays and lesbians both freedom from the restraints of their own cultures and the erotic stimulus of exotic sexual customs and partners.

The aesthetic of the important and influential Victorian critic Walter Pater reflected a homosexual sensibility.