This text examines how and why effeminacy and empire were so very much at odds at the time of the Oscar Wilde trial in 1895. Exploring the late-Victorian association of effeminate behaviour with male homosexual identity, Joseph Bristow looks at how a number of gay writers negotiated the stigma attached to the man-loving man of letters. Chapters examine, in turn, Wilde's fatal effeminacy, the effeminophobic narratives of E.M. Forster, the Anglophobic camp effeminacy of Ronald Firbank and the structures of sexual self-identification in the autobiographical writings of John Addington Symonds, J.R. Ackerley, Jocelyn Brooke and Quentin Crisp. A short coda investigates the impact of the AIDS epidemic on this tradition of gay men's writing, discussing in particular Alan Hollinghurst's novel, The Swimming-Pool Library.