Dominic’s talk will discuss a series of cartoons of effeminate men and other queer characters from the eighteenth to the late nineteenth century. The aim is to explore the degree to which Oscar Wilde was the first camp ‘proto-gay’ man or whether we have lost touch with a prior history of dandified display that he simply inherited and deployed. The material is derived from collections of prints and illustrations of periodicals. The audience will be invited to participate in whether they think the images in question indicate not merely effeminacy but also same-sex desire. The book project (published November 2016) from which the visual materials are derived is Oscar Wilde Prefigured: Queer Fashioning and British Caricature, 1750–1900, Chicago University Press.