1 Archives d’ anthropologie criminelle, de criminologie et de psychologie normale et pathologique 9 (1894) 212-15Google Scholar, 367-73, 729-37; 10 (1895) 131-8, 228-41, 320-5. The most influential discussion of this text in English is by Rosario, Vernon, ‘Inversion’s histories/history’s inversions: Novelizing fin-de-siècle homosexuality’, in Rosario, V. (ed.), Science and Homosexualities (London and New York 1997) 89–107 Google Scholar. Central to my argument has also been Reed’s, Matt T. excellent article ‘ “La manie d’écrire”: Psychology, auto-observation, and case history’, journal of the History of Behavioral Sciences 40:3 (2004) 265-84Google Scholar; see also Reed, M., ‘Historicizing inversion; or, how to make a homosexual’, History of the Human Sciences 14:4 (2002) 1–30 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

2 Dr Laupts’s real name was George Saint-Paul (Laupts being the inversion of this name); he also used the nom de plume Espé de Metz for his literary writing.

3 I am quoting here from my translation of the original French. The most easily available translation of the Roman in English is in Peniston, W. and Erber, N. (trans, and eds), Queer Lives: Men’s Autobiographies from Nineteenth-Century Prance (Lincoln, NE 2009) 173–248 Google Scholar.

4 On the life-story and its use by sexology, see Reed ‘“La manie d’écrire”’.

5 Quoted in Oosterhuis, H., ‘Richard von Krafft-Ebbing’s “Step-children of nature”: Psychiatry and the making of homosexual identity’, in Rosario, (ed.), Science and Homosexualities, 67–88 Google Scholar.

6 André Raffalovich copied long parts, including the scene in the barracks, in his Uranisme et unisexualité (1896), and Dr Laupts published the Roman in his monograph Tares et Poisons of the same year. The latter, we do know, was eventually spotted by the ‘inverti’ himself in the window of an Italian bookseller, and this is how Zola’s correspondent came to read his own account turned into the Roman d’ un inverti. These details are given in Laupts’s later book Invertis et homosexuels (1930).

7 It is interesting to note that the poem’s first ‘semi-private’ publication by Cavafy took place in the month of July - potentially heightening the effect of a recollection of an event that had taken place in July many years previously - and that almost a decade passed before this poem was republished in newspapers and its musical setting performed in public.

8 Foucault, M., The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (London 1978) 36 Google Scholar. Even though its temporal boundaries may have been redrawn (to include at least the eighteenth century), Foucault’s larger gesture in ‘historicizing the subject of desire’ remains the most productive paradigm in the relevant discussion. See, for instance, the ground covered from Halperin’s, David One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love (New York 1990)Google Scholar to his more recent How to Do the History of Homosexuality (Chicago 2004); cf. Weeks, J., ‘Remembering Foucault’, Journal of the History of Sexuality 14:1-2 (2005) 186–201 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Of course, there is vast number of publications treating this issue; a useful overview is given by Waters, Chris, ‘Sexology’, in Cocks, H. G. and Houlbrook, M. (eds), Palgrave Advances in the Modern History of Sexuality (London 2005) 41–63 Google Scholar.

9 More recent discussion has astutely elaborated on the difference between the diagnosis of ‘sexual inversion’ and that of ‘homosexuality’ - a distinction Foucault does not make. See Halperin, One Hundred Years, 15-16 and Chauncey, G., ‘From sexual inversion to homosexuality: Medicine and the changing conceptualization of female deviance’, Salmagundi 58 (1982-83) 116 Google Scholar.

10 Even though from different perspectives, a number of essays in Roilos, P. (ed.), Imagination and Logos: Essays on Cavafy, C. P. (Cambridge, MA 2010)Google Scholar, support a similar argument. Important earlier work that attempted to use gender theory in order to reread Cavafy includes Alexiou, M., ‘Eroticism and poetry’, Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora 10:1-2 (1983) 45–65 Google Scholar; Syrimis, G., ‘Promiscuous texts and abandoned readings in the poetry of C. P. Cavafy’, in Nagy, G. and Stavrakopoulou, A. (eds), Modern Greek Literature (New York 2003) 96–114 Google Scholar; Robinson, C., ‘Cavafy, sexual sensibility and poetic practice: Reading Cavafy through Marc Doty and Cathal O Searcaigh’, journal of Modern Greek Studies 23:2 (2005) 261-79CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Papanikolaou, D., “Ή νέα φάσις του έρωτος”: О νεοτερικός λόγος της σεξολογίας και о Καβάφης’, Επισ-τημονική Επετηρίδα της Φιλολοσοφικής Σχολής Θεσσαλονίκης 12 (2010) 195–211 Google Scholar.

12 All the notes I am reading here come from Cavafy, C.P., Ανέκδοτα σημειώματα ποιητικής και ηθικής (Athens 1983)Google Scholar. It is possible that other similar notes exist in the Cavafy archive, yet as long as they remain ‘in preparation for publication’, they cannot be seen by researchers.

13 One feels inclined to suggest that the word ‘διαστροφή’ could be translated here not as ‘perversion’, but as ‘inversion’. J. A. Symonds, Raffalovich and Edward Carpenter, but also a number of self-identified inverts who offered themselves as case studies to sexological treatises, made a point similar to the one Cavafy makes here, and they did so quite repetitively (see Raffalovich, Unisexualité, passim).

14 Both notes are quoted in Manuel Savvidis’ translation available on http://www.cavafy.org, with slight changes.

15 I have decided not to overcrowd this article with a detailed exposition of textual affinities to particular sexological texts. For the record, though, the first note presents an argument about innate inversion that reads almost exactly like the opening of the first edition of Havelock Ellis’s Sexual Inversion; the second note uncannily resembles comments made by a number of people studied in that book. See the excellent new critical edition of Sexual Inversion by Ivan Crozier (London 2008).

16 I am using this term here in the way Foucault uses it, for instance in The Archaeology of Knowledge (London 1972) 192.

17 I am thinking here of the three poems written by Cavafy in 1903-4: ‘O Σεπτέμβρης του 1903’, ‘О Δεκέμ-βρης του 1903’, Ό Γεννάρης του 1904’.

18 Dowling, L., Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (Ithaca 1996) 133 Google Scholar.

19 Cf. Bristow, J., ‘Symonds’s history, Ellis’s heredity: Sexual inversion’, in Bland, L. and Doan, L. (eds), Sexology in Culture: Labelling Bodies and Desires (Cambridge 1998) 79–99 Google Scholar.

20 See also the poems Έπήγα’, ‘Ev τη οδώ’, and even Όμνύει’.

21 Papatheodorou, Y., ‘H γνώση των ηδονών: О ιστορισμός του Καβάφη και η κριτική (1932-1946)’, Ποίηση 24 (2004) 252 Google Scholar. Cf. Karaoglou, Ch. L., Εκτός ορίων (Thessaloniki 2000)Google Scholar and Roilos, P., Cavafy, C. P.: The Economics of Metonymy (Champaign, IL 2010)Google Scholar.

22 ‘Little by little, he is lured by the idea to confess’, Malanos, T., О ποιητής К. П. Καβάφης (Athens 1933) 97 Google Scholar. Cf. Komis, A., К. П. Καβάφης (Corfu 1935)Google Scholar: ‘His passion has blinded him. It will push him to confess incidents, to reconstruct explicit scenes from his private life [...] in the rawest way. We will accuse him of immorality, but he is just honest.’ (22) It should be noted here that the idea that sexual abnormality creates an urge to talk, narrate and confess, was widely held in the late nineteenth century. As Rees observes, according to many doctors of the time, ‘the very urge to confess their desires and to recount their stories was itself a symptom of degenerate perversion’ (‘La manie’ 275). Laupts, in a comment that predates Komis’ statement on Cavafy by half a century, said about the ‘inverti’ that ‘at certain moments, when the memory of his guilty pleasures reappears to his imagination, passion takes the upper hand and dictates’ (quoted ibid.).

23 In the standard 1963 Greek edition the notes to the four ‘Days’ poems written in the third person include a brief mention of Cavafy’s age at these different dates. Interestingly, the only one that does not have such a note is ‘Μέρες του 1903’, which is also the only poem of this series written in the first person as a direct diary entry about lost love. What is implied by Savvidis is taken to an extreme by Sarah Ekdawi, who, in a recent article, has tried to show the importance of those dates (and of all the alternative dates Cavafy toyed with while drafting the poems) for Cavafy’s own life. See Ekdawi, S., ‘Missing dates: The Μέρες poems of C.P. Cavafy’, BMGS 35:1 (2011) 70–91 Google Scholar.

24 Gillmore, Leigh, in her Autobiographies: A Feminist Theory of Women’s Self-Representation (Ithaca 1994)Google Scholar, has proposed the term autobiographies to suggest genealogies of autobiographical writing beyond the genre of autobiography, and on the basis of it ‘to further a feminist thought of autobiographical production’ (13). For her, autobiographies describes ‘those elements that mark a location in a text where self-invention, self-discovery, and self-representation emerge within [while also resisting and contradicting] the technologies of autobiography’ (42). With homobiographics I similarly point to the strategies of re-inventing and re-presenting homosexual life-stories while also self-consciously referring to the possibility, difficulty and social negation of such representation.

25 My argument talks about Cavafy’s strategy in his erotic poetry as a whole, and this means that I believe that almost all his erotic poems, including the ones in historical settings, converge in the socially subcultural and erotic experience they convey, in the way they present it as crucial for the shaping of certain people’s self, and in the strategy they use to redeem this experience. For the sake of conciseness, though, and in order to avoid a lengthy discussion of whether Cavafy’s historical erotic poems need to be read as allegories of contemporary sexual experience, I have for the time being limited myself to talking only about erotic poems set in a contemporary setting.

26 I use the term technology here in the way Michel Foucault employs it in his later work. See, for instance, Martin, L., Gutman, H. and Hutton, P. (eds), Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault (London 1998)Google Scholar.