The Libertine's Friend is a nuanced study of male homoeroticism and its relationship to concepts of masculinity and romantic love (qing) from the late Ming to the mid-Qing. Based mostly on his reading of vernacular fiction, from Stories from the Water Margin (1550) to Precious Mirror for Ranking Flowers (1849), which includes many pornographic stories, Giovanni Vitiello successfully illustrates the shifting, competing, and sometimes contradictory meanings of male-male sex relations, and relates them to changing ideals of masculinity in late imperial China.
Vitiello sets the stage by briefly summarizing two contradictory attitudes in classical Chinese writings regarding sexual relations between men. On one hand, the value assigned to male beauty (nanse) of a boy is comparable to that given to female beauty (nüse). Politically, a beautiful boy could be as dangerous as his female counterpart, for he could distract a ruler from his official...
