This original study re-evaluates central texts of the modernist canon--Eliot's early poetry including The Waste Land, Joyce's Ulysses and Proust's Remembrance of Things Past--by examining sexual energies and identifications in them which are typically regarded as perverse. Colleen Lamos's analysis of the operations of gender and sexuality in these texts reveals conflicts, concerning the definition of masculine heterosexuality, which cut across the aesthetics of modernism. What emerges is a reconsideration of modernist literature as a whole, gender categories, and the relation between errant sexuality and literary 'mistakes'.