In Luchino Visconti's film, Death in Venice (1971), Gustav von Aschenbach, an older man, becomes infatuated with a young Polish boy named Tadzio during a trip to Venice . This same-sex attraction connects to several important themes of the film, particularly notions of voyeurism, illness, infatuation, and cross-dressing. Death in Venice received negative attention upon its release due to its homosexual connotations. Historically, homosexuality has sometimes been considered linked to mental illness. Likewise, the present and past treatment of pedophilia has been highly medicalized. It becomes apparent how homosexuality and pedophilia are linked within the film, both in their taboo nature and how the two are perceived as diseases, another clear theme that emerges in the film. Using Thomas Waugh's "The Third Body", this essay attempts to resolve the problem. In the film, Venice is rampant with disease and Aschenbach becomes seriously ill and ultimately dies at the film's climax. Although homosexuality is not currently seen as a form of mental illness or linked to psychopathology, it has historically been considered highly medicalized. One could link Aschenbach's disease to this dated view of homosexuality. Furthermore, his illness eventually leads to cross-dressing. According to Thomas Waugh, cross-dressing is a fundamental term for the survival of the homosexual as an invisible and stigmatized minority (Waugh 434). The costume of a gay subject acts in different ways. In Death in Venice it is Aschenbach's physical condition that he masks. Of course, age is what led Aschenbach to his current problems and, inevitably combined with his illness, death. In one of the film's flashback scenes, Aschenbach's friend tells him "There is nothing more impure than the impurity of old age" (Visconti). Tadzio is delicate and pure, and Aschenbach longs for this idealized perfect vision of