Platos and Woman-Haters: Male-Male Love in the Fiction of Fin-de-Siècle Austria: Emerich von Stadion’s “Leonor” (1868) and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Die Liebe des Plato (1870)

This essay examines two late nineteenth-century works of fiction that thematize love and desire between men. The first of these is Emerich von Stadion's short story "Leonor." This tale of a young man being hoodwinked by a cross-dressing woman inspired Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's Die Liebe des Plato. Although the two works are similar, there is a key difference between the two texts with regard to how they portray male-male love.