Male Sexuality and Erotic Pleasure in Greek Autobiographical Discourses of the 1870s

This chapter draws on approximately 100 letters exchanged in the mid-1870s by two Greek middle-class brothers in their early 20s, Nanos (1855–1914) and Emilios Valaoritis (1857–1882), as well as with their close friends. These letters offer an intimate window into their clandestine sexual lives—lives unfolding beyond the knowledge of their families and marked by fear, emotion, fantasy, and sensation. The correspondence invites multiple readings and reveals complex layers of meaning. First, the letters function as narratives that construct the sexual self in a specific historical and social context. They celebrate male sexual freedom and depict the city as a secret space of erotic opportunity, accessible only to a select few. Second, the letters expose the tacitly accepted but unspoken norm of premarital male sexual activity—particularly through paid sex—underpinned by the dominant double sexual standard. Understanding these sexual discourses and experiences as “twilight moments,” in the sense proposed by Anna Clark, helps explain why the forbidden desires and fantasies of these young men did not crystallise into a fixed sexual identity, nor challenge the prevailing ideal of heterosexuality, which, by the late nineteenth century, was framed primarily as a spiritual and emotional bond within marriage.