The development of autobiography as a dominant literary genre and the formulation of modern conceptions of sexuality are largely synchronic phenomena. Modern autobiography, produced in the context of high capitalism, presupposes the existence of a discrete self whose meaning is revealed through reflection and rendered tangible through linguistic representation. According to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century sexologists, this self is fundamentally sexual. In what is perhaps the most famous passage of The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault explains how sexologists conceived of male homosexuality as “a singular nature” lying “at the root of all [one’s] actions” (43). Its essence, they maintained, was expressed not through sexual orientation but “a certain way of inverting the masculine and the feminine in oneself” (43). But femininity in a male is a paradoxical essence that, when enacted through sex, functions not to endow him with being but rather to negate what is perceived as his natural essence of masculinity. The male homosexual, as the male incarnation of the feminine, is thus not a site of plenitude but rather an absence that in Western theology is associated with sin and in the modern medical/psychoanalytic disciplines with disease—both of which (sin and disease) are tantamount to death. Homosexual autobiography, therefore, is indeed a life-writing intended to affirm a self in often life-threatening conditions.