Jeffrey Escoffier traces the emergence of a gay and lesbian political identity over the last four decades in this wide-ranging collection of his most influential essays. Situating the development of gay and lesbian communities in a broad sweep of recent American history, Escoffier examines how an urban subculture created by stigmatized and invisible men and women evolved into a vital public community with an activist political agenda and an influential position in contemporary American culture.

Detailing what he calls the "political economy of the closet," Escoffier argues that the market process often played a crucial role (for better or for worse) in the emergence of gay and lesbian communities, and conversely, that these new communities have significantly impacted the American marketplace.

From the development of a camp sensibility in popular culture--inspired by the erotic exhibitionism of drag queens--to the public reformation of safer-sex guidelines, Escoffier demonstrates how the gay movement has gradually acquired both social authority and recognition as a booming market. Throughout the ongoing struggle for legitimacy, gays and lesbians have had to negotiate the historical tension between the homoeroticism that courses through American culture and periodic outbreaks of homophobic paranoia.

Escoffier follows the lesbian and gay movement across the contested terrain of American political life between the poles of multiculturalism and the religious right, to reveal how sexual minorities constitute a challenge to American society even as they are thoroughly integrated as citizens and kin. From McCarthy-era witchhunts to the activism of Queer Nation, Escoffier vividly describes the characteristic American homosexual journey through the tangled political web of authenticity, identity, and community.

From the Inside Flap

"It is rare to find a writer whose intellectual orientations so effortlessly span the gaps from political sociology to cultural studies to economic history. It is likewise rare to find a solid analysis of contemporary politics and culture in which the emphasis on identity and discourse is grounded in a concern with social structure and cultural process. The virtue of Escoffier's articulate prose is its insistent concern with the relation between high theory and the struggles of everyday life."--Steven Epstein, author of Impure Science

"Through his three decades as an independent, activist intellectual, Jeffrey Escoffier has established himself as one of the senior statesmen in the field of gay and lesbian studies. His experience and intellectual acumen bridge both the 'town-gown' divide and the transition from gay studies to queer theory and cultural studies. This is a wise, original book from one of our finest."--Judith Stacey, Streisand Professor, University of Southern California

"It is rare to find a writer whose intellectual orientations so effortlessly span the gaps from political sociology to cultural studies to economic history. It is likewise rare to find a solid analysis of contemporary politics and culture in which the emphasis on identity and discourse is grounded in a concern with social structure and cultural process. The virtue of Escoffier's articulate prose is its insistent concern with the relation between high theory and the struggles of everyday life." (Steven Epstein, author of Impure Science)

About the Author

Jeffrey Escoffier is a writer, theorist, and deputy director for policy and research of the Office of Gay and Lesbian Health in New York City. He teaches Queer Social Theory at the New School for Social Research.

Read American Homo: Community and Perversity Online

Jeffrey Escoffier
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

• Paperback: 316 pages
• Publisher: University of California Press; 1 edition (September 30, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0520206339
• ISBN-13: 978-0520206335

INTRODUCTION

    So we are taking off our masks, are we, and keeping our mouths shut? as if we'd been pierced by a glance!
    FRANK O'HARA, "Homosexuality "

    No social study that does not come back to the problems of biography, of history and of their intersections within society has completed its intellectual journey. … Perhaps the most fruitful distinction with which the sociological imagination works is between "the personal troubles of milieu" and the "public issues of social structure."
    C. WRIGHT MILLS, The Sociological Imagination

    Am I to become profligate as if I were a blonde? Or religious as if I were French?
    FRANK O'HARA, "Meditations In An Emergency "

The desire to live honestly underlies the political emergence of lesbians and gay men in our time. Such honesty requires self-knowledge. The moment of acknowledging to oneself homosexual desires and feelings—the culmination of a process that, for many, intermingles horror and excitement—and then licensing oneself to act, and perhaps to discover anew one's vulnerabilities, is the central drama of the homosexual self. That moment of self-classification, of self-naming, and of exile from our natal culture is an emergency—sublime, horrible, wonderful—in the life of anyone who must confront it. Although we become ourselves in that moment of recognition, we also discover the injunctions of the law, the punitive rule of normalcy, and the ferocity of social exclusion. We see that our selves are traversed by social processes that shape our lives.

That cathartic moment initiates three phases of homosexual emancipation. In the first one, we begin to narrate our autobiographies in new ways. Out of necessity, we start to theorize what has happened to us and seek to recreate our place in society. In our autobiographies, we find our responsibilities—to the realization of our desires.

In the next phase, we "discover" ourselves and begin to learn the social skills that enable us to share our desires, achieve bodily pleasures (perhaps even moments of bliss), and build fragile solidarities with others. In the course of our trajectory, which is one of emancipation from stigma and self-hatred, we strive to act as though we are "real" members of society. We say to ourselves, "I want recognition and acceptance of my difference."

In the third phase, we find out how complicated life is: that we are outsiders at the same time as we belong, and that although we may live like our putatively happy married straight friends and neighbors, we owe our independence to sexual perversity. Ambivalence and perversity constitute the sublime elements of homosexual life—by which I mean the mingling of the exalted, unimaginable, painful, and glorious. And we grasp the thought, "My homosexuality is an adventure."

This adventure starts with a drive for personal fulfillment, moves on to the building of communities, and almost inevitably ends with a division of communities. Differentiation separates and divides members from one another, sometimes quite acrimoniously, and leads to the creation of new communities for those who share issues and identities. ...

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