The Freudian and Marxist aspects of the work are somewhat obscured in the English translation, which is 14% shorter than the original Italian. Some omissions would mainly be of interest to Italian readers (such as passages from the writings of Dante and Pier Paolo Pasolini), but a number of quotations of Marx were omitted, as were all references to Hegel. As a result, some coherence of the theoretical argument is lost, though Mieli's reasoning is everywhere quite compelling.

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Soon after Mieli's death, the largest gay organization in Rome changed its name to Circolo di Cultura Omosessuale Mario Mieli (Homosexual Cultural Circle "Mario Mieli"). Massimo Consoli, the founder of the Italian gay movement, has called Mieli "an extraordinary militant, one of the few clear minds of our movement."

A form of behavior modification that employs unpleasant and sometimes painful stimuli, aversion therapy was one of the more popular treatments for homosexuality and cross-dressing in the 1950s and 1960s.

Writer, archivist, and theorist, Massimo Consoli was the founder of the Italian gay movement and its leading activist.

In the Divine Comedy Dante treats male homosexuality first as violence against God and then more sympathetically as merely one of the kinds of love.

Most of the fiction and much of the poetry of Pier Paolo Pasolini, one of the great Marxist homosexual artists of the twentieth century, was shaped by his fascination with the lives of subproletarian youths.