overcoming obstacles and living happily ever after. The Romantic movement gaining momentum at the end of the 18th century allowed men to "express deep affection for each other", and the motif of ancient Greece as "a utopia of male-male love" was an acceptable vehicle to reflect this, but some of Duke August's contemporaries felt that his characters "stepped over the bounds of manly affection into unseemly eroticism." The first American gay novel was Joseph and His Friend: A Story of Pennsylvania (1870) by Bayard Taylor, the story of a newly engaged young man who finds himself instead falling in love with another man. Robert K. Martin called it "quite explicit in its adoption of a political stance toward homosexuality" and notes that the character Philip "argues for the 'rights' of those 'who cannot shape themselves according to the common-place pattern of society. Henry Blake Fuller's 1898 play, At St. Judas's, and 1919 novel, Bertram Cope's Year, are noted as among the earliest published American works in literature on the theme of homosexual relationships. The new "atmosphere of frankness" created by the Enlightenment sparked the production of pornography like John Cleland's infamous Fanny Hill (1749), which features a rare graphic scene of male homosexual sex. Published anonymously a century later, The Sins of the Cities of the Plain (1881) and Teleny, or The Reverse of the Medal (1893) are two of the earliest pieces of English-language pornography to explicitly and near-exclusively concern homosexuality. The Sins of the Cities of the Plain is about a male prostitute, and set in London around the time of the Cleveland Street Scandal and the Oscar Wilde trials. Teleny, chronicling a passionate affair between a Frenchman and a Hungarian pianist, is often attributed to a collaborative effort by Wilde and some of his contemporaries. Wilde's more mainstream The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) still shocked readers with its sensuality and overtly homosexual characters. Drew Banks called Dorian Gray a groundbreaking gay character because he was "one of the first in a long list of hedonistic fellows whose homosexual tendencies secured a terrible fate." The French realist Émile Zola in his novel Nana (1880) depicted, along with a wide variety of heterosexual couplings and some lesbian scenes, a single homosexual character, Labordette. Paris theater society and the demi-monde are long accustomed to his presence and role as go-between; he knows all the women, escorts them, and runs