This book examines the visual culture of the ‘spectacle of the closet’ outlined in relation to literature - and specifically with reference to Proust's character, the Baron de Charlus - by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in her pioneering work Epistemology of the Closet (1990). This book looks at the ways in which ‘homosexuals’ were depicted and visually presented themselves before and after the trials of Oscar Wilde in 1895. It also explores the visual aspects of the emergence of gay liberation which involved attempting to imagine, depict and interrogate the space of the closet itself. The work also explores the wider potential for the application of Sedgwick’s insights in the field of literature to the histories of British art and culture.