This study charts the stormy emotions of the friendship between Oscar Wilde and Andre Gide, whom he met in Paris in 1891. Through letters and diaries, Fryer looks at the men's lives through the eyes of their mothers, their wives and their boyfriends, The book is not just a chronicle of a cross-channel literary relationship, it also provides an insight into what W.H.Auden would much later call the Homintern - an international network of gay men and their companions, as well as the hypocracy of the 1890s.