Degeneration and Decadence in the Dragon’s Court:

How Fin-de-Siécle Paris’ Gay Cruising Scene gave The King in Yellow’s Play its Cognitively Poisonous Power.

At the Armitage Symposium during NecronomiCon Providence 2026, I presented on decadent art, the pseudoscientific theory of hereditary degeneration, and their relation to Robert W. Chambers’ seminal work of cosmic horror, The King in Yellow.

There is a lot that didn’t make it into this presentation (I only had fifteen minutes!) and I plan to rewrite it as an article, which will include everything I had to cut for time. In the meantime, I’m happy to answer any questions anyone has about it. :)

BIBLIOGRAPHY.

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Chambers, Robert W. The King in Yellow: Annotated Edition. 1895. Annotated by Kenneth Hite, Arc Dream Publishing, 2019.

Chauncey, George. “From Sexual Inversion To Homosexuality: Medicine And The Changing Conceptualization Of Female Deviance.” Salmagundi, no. 58/59, 1982, pp. 114–46, JSTOR

Choquette, Leslie. “Homosexuals in the City: Representations of Lesbian and Gay Space in Nineteenth-Century Paris.” Homosexuality in French History and Culture, edited by Jeffrey Merrick and Michael Sibalis, Harrington Park Press, 2001.

Ellis, Havelock and Symonds, Addington John. Sexual Inversion: A Critical Edition. 1897. Edited by Ivan Crozier, Pallgrave Macmillan, 2008.

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Mazzarello, Paolo. “Cesare Lombroso: an anthropologist between evolution and degeneration.” Functional Neurology vol. 26, no. 2, 3 July 2011, pp. 97-101. National Center for Biotechnology Information,https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3814446/

Merrick, Jeffrey. “Chaussons in the Streets: Sodomy in Seventeenth-Century Paris.” Journal of the History of Sexuality vol. 15, no. 2, 2006, pp. 167-202, JSTOR

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Ujvári, Hedvig. “Degeneration and Its Discontents: Rereading Nordau in Context.” Histories vol. 6, no. 2, 2026. https://doi.org/10.3390/histories6020027

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