SOURCE: Valente, Joseph. “Thrilled by His Touch: The Aestheticizing of Homosexual Panic in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.” In Quare Joyce, edited by Joseph Valente, pp. 47-75. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998.

In the following essay, Valente explores homoerotic elements in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

In his letters and essays, Joyce alludes repeatedly to the homoerotic activities supposedly rife in English or Anglo-Saxon boarding schools and implicit in their representative social and athletic customs (see especially SL [Selected Letters of James Joyce] 74, 136; CW [Critical Writings of James Joyce] 201-2).¹ In the process, he not only displays a familiarity with the burgeoning scientia sexualis of his day, he flaunts a facility with the subcultural argot, dropping arcane phrases like “captain of fifty's regime” in the manner of a cognoscente (SL 136). Yet he does so by way of disclaiming any...