A gold mine of information about a hidden queer culture
"The Third Sex is a delightful read even while it provides us with valuable information - legal, scientific, pseudo-scientific, anecdotal - toward a more complete assessment of the state of post-WWI queerdom. Lawrence Schehr is doing us huge service in opening these pages that are like an archeological find." Robert Harvey, Professor of comparative literature, Stony Brook University "What a charming and peculiar bulletin from the past is this little book from 1927, supposedly written by a man famous in his day as a cultural impresario and libertine but now remembered as the husband of Colette. 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. "The Third Sex" is 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. It maps a lost world not only of sex, but of the myriad things we modern folk once thought sex could be, and mean."--International Herald Tribune, 10 November 2007 "A fascinating collection from popular French novelist Willy. Examining in vivid detail, the world of European homosexual culture during the late 1920s, this is an intriguing and enlightening glimpse into an era and society long-passed."--Gay Times, Jan 2008
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