Nietzsche had just finished writing his intellectual autobiography Ecce Homo (published 1908) in late 1888, when he suffered a complete mental and physical breakdown, collapsing in a street in Turin, Italy.

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He was brought back to Germany for treatment and lived with his sister for the rest of his life. Though he lived for ten more years, neither his mind nor his body ever recovered. His sister gained control over his work and used it selectively to support her own anti-Jewish, Aryan supremacist views.

There is still dissent among students of philosophy about whether Nietzsche's ideas of the Übermensch, or "superior man," who rises above society's restrictive morality, were actually founded on prejudice and racism or were misrepresented and misunderstood by his sister and, later, by Adolph Hitler himself. This controversy gives special poignancy to the last line of his biographical work, Ecce Homo: "Have I been understood?"

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

As part of its agenda to preserve an "Aryan master race," Nazism persecuted homosexuals as "asocial parasites"; more than 100,000 men were arrested on homosexual charges during the Nazi years, with 5,000-15,000 gay men incarcerated in concentration camps.

Concerned with the music, theoretical writings, political ideas, and aesthetics of the German composer Richard Wagner, Wagnerism had a profound influence on late nineteenth-century European culture, including the expression of same-sex desire.

Editor, photographer, and activist, Adolf Brand was the leader of a faction of the early German homosexual emancipation movement whose cultural views were expressed in Der Eigene (The Self-Owner), the first homosexual literary and artistic journal.

The bisexual Lord Byron treated many of his homosexual love affairs in his poetry, encoding them by the use of classical references or by purporting that they were affairs with women.

An outspoken homosexual, Jean Cocteau was a prolific poet, novelist, critic, essayist, artist, and filmmaker.

André Gide, one of the premier French writers of the twentieth century, reflected his homosexuality in many of his numerous works.

Best known for his enthusiastic patronage of Richard Wagner and for his fabulous castles, Ludwig II of Bavaria withdrew from public life, perhaps in part due to the impossibility of living openly as a gay man.

The poems of Count August von Platen are homoerotic expressions of Platonic love, idealism, beauty, friendship, and longing.

Siegfried Wagner, the son of composer Richard Wagner, was himself a prolific composer and conductor; his bisexuality was the source of both scandal and also of elaborate attempts to erase it from histories of the Wagner family.