Abstract
This chapter argues that Antonio Botto not only fashioned himself as a gay icon in the relatively confined context of the literary and artistic circles of Lisbon, but also constructed a comprehensively developed alternative reality, international if not global in scope. The life, writings and critical fortune of Botto present a singularly complex case study in the epistemology of the Portuguese closet. The radically groundbreaking sweep of Botto's homoerotic poetics can best be appreciated by surveying briefly the history of the representations of male homosexuality in Portuguese literature. A much broader, nuanced, and at times utterly fascinating picture of Botto's lifelong enterprise of self-invention emerges from his archive, housed in the Portuguese Biblioteca Nacional. The Baron's homosexuality is as loquaciously over-analysed by the narrator as Libaninho's is tacitly inferred, and throughout the novel he is clearly headed toward a disastrous end as the only possible outcome for the appalling horror of his being.