One of the most urgent tasks for gay studies today, James Creech argues, is the retrieval of a repressed, closeted literary heritage. But contradictions and problems cloud even the most basic theoretical questions: What does a lesbian or gay reading of a literary text require or presume? Can we talk about a homosexual writer expressing him- or herself before the invention of homosexuality? Was it possible for a writer like Herman Melville, for example, to create literary works linked to his own prohibited eros? In this book, Creech shows how a literary critic can be receptive to implicit and closeted sexual content. Advocating a tactic of identification and projection in literary analysis, he lends renewed currency to the kind of sentimental response to literature that continental theory - particularly deconstruction - has sought to discredit. In the second half of his book, Creech sets out to analyze what he considers the exemplary novel of the 19th-century closet, Melville's Pierre; or, The Ambiguities. By approaching Pierre as the gay man Melville longed to have as its reader, Creech is able to decipher the novel's encrypted erotics and to reveal that Melville's apparent tale of incest is actually a homosexual novel in disguise.