Modern gay identity is pervaded by the trope of the secret. Building on the work of Michel Foucault and D. A. Miller, the literary and cultural critic Eve Sedgwick has argued that gay identity is fundamentally shaped by the dualism of secrecy and disclosure, but since "telling" is both prohibited and required, queer identity is always an internal contradiction between opacity and transparency, at once hidden and revealed.1 It is this double bind between secrecy and disclosure that Sedgwick refers to when, arguing for the enduring centrality of the epistemology of the closet for gay people and culture, she points to the way that homosexual identity has been "distinctly constituted as secrecy" from its inception (73).2 But how do we account for this conjunction of homosexuality and secrecy? How has the queer come to be defined as a contradiction between the "seen" and the "unseen"-a disjunction between the visibility of outward appearances and the invisibility of inner relations? I hope to answer these questions by providing a theory of how the dandy emerges out of the historical contradictions of capitalism-in particular, the opposition between outward appearance and inner essence. A wide range of historians and cultural critics have placed the dandy at the center of debates about the history of the homosexual in the West, the history of modern culture, and the role of the queer in constructions of modern identity. While they have agreed on the centrality of the dandy in gay and lesbian history-presenting him as the premier model of modern gay subjectivity-scholars have disagreed on the meaning of dandyism itself.3