When the so-called "gay literature" had not yet managed to emerge as a thematic genre, and homosexuals did not even dream of having a public identity, The Confusion of Sentiments formed, together with Maurice and The Flesh Mask, one of the fictional mirrors where the more or less educated homophiles rushed to recognize each other.
Written by one of the authors who have best portrayed the paradoxes and ups and downs of the old bourgeois respectability, The confusion of feelings leaves aside the androgynous aestheticism of Death in Venice, and the sadomasochistic ambiguities of Young Törles -to cite two classic examples Central Europeans of novels recovered as homophiles-, to delve into the anguish and creative blocks of a homophile intellectual of the golden twenties, whose enigma recalls his already elderly disciple with longing and Lombrosian borders.
