For social moralists, the theater promoted instability and immorality by allowing deviations from sexual and gender norms to materialize on the stage. The tremendous growth of theater culture in cities aggravated this threat. As gender bending became common on the stage, the sheer theatricality of the inversion made it, as Howells states, a parody: rather than reinforce sexology’s negative view of the “third sex,” the theater destabilized and even normalized it. Homosexual audiences, who understood both the threat of the “inverted” image and how the parody operated, could appreciate the
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