In Keats's day there was no such thing as ‘gay’, and to be exposed as homosexual was to make oneself vulnerable to prosecution. Byron accuses Keats of arousing sexual desire in the reader, something he thought unhealthy. The Romantic period may be the first in history in which literary style provided the basis for speculation concerning sexual orientation. It matters not that Keats's actual sex life was uneventful, even dull, at least by comparison with those of such witnesses for the prosecution as Lord Byron and Swinburne; it was enough he align himself with Leigh Hunt, whose poetry displayed what its critics described as ‘extreme moral depravity’ and ‘a noxious and disgusting mixture of libertinism and jacobinism’. Keats appropriation as gay icon may be inspired in part by his protracted disintegration over many months in the arms of Joseph Severn, which resonates in a period devastated by AIDS.