5
From Community To University
Generations, Paradigms, and Vernacular Knowledge in Lesbian and Gay Studies^[*]

Homosexual emancipation is not possible without a politics of knowledge. The stigma that categorizes homosexuality behavior as morally, medically, or psychologically undesirable is bolstered by elaborate edifices of scientific theory, theological rationale, and normalizing behavioral modification. At the core of the stigmatizing process is the organization of knowledge. Since the late nineteenth century, homosexual emancipationists have battled deeply entrenched intellectual structures, which have perpetuated and disseminated the ignorance, silence, and hegemonic knowledge that sustained the social stigma against homosexuality.

Lesbians and gay men would never have been able to escape the serious effects of stigmatization if these cognitive structures remained in place, particularly those of the psychiatric and medical professions and those of religious institutions. Thus, from the very beginning of modern homosexual emancipation, knowledge became one of the primary targets of political mobilization.

One of the major political or cultural resources has been the knowledge that guides the conduct of everyday lesbian and gay life.^[1] In the period before Stonewall, this stock of everyday knowledge about homosexuality, adaptive social patterns, and the predatory behavior of hostile outsiders (police, lawyers, blackmailers) was distributed unevenly because closeted homosexuals were isolated from each other, and because society's homophobic discourses circumscribe this knowledge, preventing it from spreading. The explicit intellectual articulation of theories and interpretations derived from this stock of vernacular knowledge has been a crucial dimension of lesbian and gay political organizing and has given rise to an effective critique of medical, psychiatric, and religious discourses.

The explicit rendering of vernacular knowledge has also played a political role within the community—it helps to socialize new entrants into gay life and facilitates the transmission of community traditions to new generations. Gay and lesbian activists have often been profoundly ignorant about the social life, history, and culture of homosexuality—as indeed has been true of many longtime participants in the gay subculture.

Collective action has reinforced the need for explicit knowledge of homosexuality and gay and lesbian culture and for critical perspectives on the knowledges implicated in the homosexual stigma. Newspapers, study groups, and all kinds of writing proliferated to create a public arena for the discussion of these issues. These media have found eager audiences among homosexuals outside and inside the militant gay liberation organizations.

There have been earlier times and places in which writers and activists have mobilized, creating intellectual resources to combat homophobic frameworks of knowledge. Literature and knowledge about

homosexuals served as powerful tools of self-knowledge and acceptance for earlier generations of gay men and lesbians. To realize the absolute significance of cultural and intellectual contributions to the emergence of the modern homosexual, one has only to think of the historical role that The Well of Loneliness —despite all its flaws—has played for generations of lesbians, or that Walt Whitman's "Calamus" poems had for male homosexuals such as Oscar Wilde, J. A. Symonds, and Edward Carpenter in late-nineteenth-century Britain.^[2]

Gay men and lesbians, like all competent social actors, are also amateur "social theorists" who, as a matter of routine, offer interpretations of their conduct, analyze others' behavior and motives, and supply explanations, stylized models, and narratives about the functioning of social life. Individuals regularly employ such forms of knowledge in their social interactions—which, in turn, also generate knowledge. The presuppositions members of a social group share, as well as the meanings attributed to their experiences and actions, also contribute to the community's stock of vernacular knowledge. This stock of knowledge is a soup of ideas, theories, quasi facts, and interpretations that may be seen as the community's "common sense." In part, society's hegemonic discourses also influence this accumulated intelligence.^[3]

Lesbian and gay studies as a public discourse emerged from the movement's need to challenge the hegemonic cultural institutions and the specific forms of knowledge that they produced and disseminated. The psychiatric profession was the preeminent intellectual discourse that fed the homophobic complex during the middle third of the century. I can recall demonstrations and zaps (as quick, surprise confrontations were called) in the early 1970s at public forums about homosexuality in which gay activists carried signs declaring, "We are the experts."

Since 1987, lesbian and gay studies as an academic discipline has flourished in the United States. The number of books published on the subject each year has multiplied rapidly, numerous college courses exist all over the country, university departments increasingly seek faculty specializing in the field, and the 1994 CLAGS Directory of Lesbian and Gay Studies lists nearly six hundred scholars now working in the field in the United States.^[4]

In the late 1980s, Martin Duberman, Esther Newton, and John Boswell among others sought—for the second time—to establish lesbian and gay studies programs.^[5] Centers were established at the Graduate Center of The City University of New York, Yale, and the University of Toronto, and graduate seminars, courses, and scholarly conferences put lesbian and gay studies on the academic map across the country. A boom in lesbian and gay publishing has reinforced these academic developments. Such developments are only possible if there is a sophisticated and increasing audience of lesbians and gay men interested in the political and cultural issues of their lives. Making lesbian and gay studies into a formal academic discipline sets the stage for a potentially significant historical shift in the intellectual life of the lesbian and gay communities—the entry of the university into the communities' cultural development.

Beginnings: Generations, Politics, And Community

Historical generations are not like families or political organizations, in which people are bound by kinship or commonly stated purposes. When a large group of people experience significant historical events at the beginning of their adult lives, it often creates a sense of shared identity. Although the demographic concept of cohort refers to a group of people born at the same time, that contemporaneity is not enough to forge a generational identity. Instead, that bond derives from a shared historical experience that creates a distinctive attitude toward life, a sensibility, and a collective state of mind.^[6]

Frequently, people belong to certain generations in lesbian and gay life depending on when they came out, rather than how old they are. Important historical episodes such as the Stonewall riots, the advent of AIDS, or the influential political-cultural ideas of a period (lesbian-feminism between 1978 and 1980 or the antipornography debates between 1978 and 1984) define lesbian and gay generations. Together with social and political challenges from outside the lesbian and gay communities, cultural trends are very important. In some sense, lesbian or

gay "generations" last only a short time (roughly five years) because the political and cultural atmosphere changes so quickly.

The Stonewall period of the late 1960s and early 1970s provided formative experiences for both women and men, although in somewhat different ways. The clash between the male-dominated gay liberation movement and lesbian-feminism deeply marked the women of the Stonewall generation. Lesbian-feminism created the context in which the next generation of lesbians came out in the mid-1970s. Later, the sex wars of the late 1970s established a new context in which women could come out; in this conflict, feminist sex radicals opposed lesbian-feminists leading an antipornography movement. Now there is a post-sex war generation of lesbians.

Gay male generations emerged in a somewhat different rhythm. The lesbian separatist impulse of the mid-1970s left the men of the Stonewall generation isolated from the political debates of the women's movement. Nevertheless, through women's studies courses and other public debates, feminism decisively influenced the next generation of gay men. Then the sex wars reopened intellectual exchange between gay men on the Left and the feminist sex radicals. With the advent of AIDS, there was a major watershed in gay male life, and to a lesser degree, in lesbian life. Many gay and lesbian participants in the sex wars became involved in AIDS activism and education.

Lesbian and gay studies is not exempt from the historical circumstances that have shaped the politics and culture of the lesbian and gay male communities. In the midst of the sweeping changes in the lives of lesbians and gay men, scholars, writers, and other intellectuals have strived to formulate theories of homosexual life that interpret both the historical changes and the texture of everyday life. The intellectual frameworks or paradigms that scholars and community intellectuals develop reflect the underlying cultural assumptions of the times and suggest concrete research programs. Research on lesbian and gay life takes place in most of the major disciplines of the humanities and social sciences, but a number of interdisciplinary theoretical paradigms have been very influential.

The recent effort to establish lesbian and gay studies as a discipline

brings together several generations of scholars. One is the generation of writers and scholars who were mobilized by the gay liberation and the women's movements in the early 1970s. This generation responded to the profound cultural appeal for personal authenticity stirred by the influence of existentialism, the Beat generation, and feminism.^[7] The quest for authenticity emphasized the unrealized potential for cultivating, directing, and understanding oneself, and for being creative.^[8] Although the search for authenticity provided a feasible political framework for early homosexual liberation, the criterion of authenticity as an intellectual paradigm posed severe limits and inconsistencies. Important figures of this early generation included Jonathan Katz, Esther Newton, John D'Emilio, Karla Jay, Lillian Faderman, John De Cecco, James Saslow, and Martin Duberman.

The second wave of lesbian and gay studies (from 1987 to 1992) matured intellectually under a different set of cultural assumptions—one much more attuned to the importance of cultural codes and the signifying practices. In this framework, authenticity still has an appeal, although the terminology has shifted away from the existentialism of the late 1960s and favors a poststructuralist discourse instead. Among the scholars in this second generation, Eve Sedgwick, David Halperin, Diana Fuss, Thomas Yingling, Judith Butler, Douglas Crimp, Teresa de Lauretis, and Michael Moon are among the most eminent representatives.

Another group of writers and teachers, mostly women of color, bridges these two generations and has challenged lesbian and gay academics to confront the exclusion of race from intellectual and political discourse. This group includes poet Audre Lorde, playwright Cherríe Moraga, editor and publisher Barbara Smith, and writer Gloria Anzaldúa.

The work of each group or generation has markedly different intellectual styles. The Stonewall generation has created three influential intellectual perspectives that have framed research in lesbian and gay studies: a social-psychological model of authentic selfhood, the social-constructionist theory of homosexual identity, and essentialist theories of the woman-identified lesbian identity and gay identity. These three

paradigms are linked in their struggle to articulate the dialectic of authenticity and history—the interplay between the psychological sense of true self or real desires and the cultural and historical process of identity formation. The later generation was trained in literary and cultural criticism; it has developed an eclectic approach that emphasizes the significance of interpretative strategies and cultural codes in gay and lesbian life. The paradigm articulated by Audre Lorde, Cherríe Moraga, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Barbara Smith, like those of the Stonewall generation, is rooted in the discovery of authentic selfhood, but it explores the effects of hegemonic social patterns on the constitution of social and personal identities. It challenges the exclusion of difference and race from the approaches of the two generations.

Of course, some scholars do not seem to fit exactly into any generational grouping, and there are scholars, writers, and intellectuals who have emerged before, in between, and after the main two waves of lesbian and gay studies scholars. All of these individuals and groups, though, inhabit a growing intellectual niche—lesbian and gay studies as a book market, as a specialty within traditional departments, or even as a separate program.

The Search For Authenticity, 1969 To 1976

The generation of lesbians and gay men galvanized by Stonewall had already witnessed five tumultuous years of intense political activity that fundamentally challenged American values—the black civil rights movement, the student antiwar movement, the women's movement, and the emergence of the counterculture. The cultural atmosphere rang with ideas of black power, sexual revolution, and liberation. Many of the leading intellectual figures of the period promoted sexual liberation—Herbert Marcuse, Paul Goodman, James Baldwin, Susan Sontag, and Allen Ginsberg. Of these, Goodman, Baldwin, and Ginsberg were openly homosexual, and in Eros and Civilization Marcuse had explicitly nominated homosexuals as cultural revolutionaries.

In The Second Sex , Simone de Beauvoir had written the first major

feminist work of the postwar era in which she not only examined women's issues from an existentialist perspective but also penned a pioneering essay on lesbianism. Furthermore, Jean-Paul Sartre had explored the psychology of authentic identity in a string of influential works such as Jew and Anti-Semite, Saint Genet , the preface to Franz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth , and chapters in Being and Nothingness on the authenticity and bad faith of the homosexual.^[9] Sartre, Beauvoir, Paul Goodman, and others who wrote on the importance of being true to one's authentic self had a profound influence on the lesbian and gay writers, intellectuals, and young academics writing about gay liberation and feminism. The ideal of authenticity offered an intellectual framework with which they could emancipate themselves from a culture that stigmatized homosexuality. In a period when psychology was the dominant intellectual and therapeutic discipline in the public discourses on homosexuality, the existential psychology of authenticity provided a personal and even political alternative. The idea of authenticity allowed this generation to assert its homosexual desire—stigmatized and repressed by social forces—in opposition to the more biological Freudian presumption of universal bisexuality. The impulse to realize one's authentic self informed much of the thinking and action in the 1960s political and cultural movements. "Coming out"—so fundamental to the personal and political development of gay and lesbian identities—is a perfect illustration of an individual's experience of authentic selfhood.

Almost immediately after Stonewall, a flood of books, periodicals, and other publications found an eager audience who wanted to explore the political and cultural implications of feminism and gay liberation. During the first few years, intellectual debates among gay men and lesbians centered on psychological theories of homosexuality and the role of psychotherapy in stigmatizing and repressing homosexuality.^[10]

The emphasis on authenticity and identity helped to undermine the assumption of bisexuality so prevalent among prominent homosexual writers of the previous generation—Paul Goodman, Lorraine Hansberry, Gore Vidal, and James Baldwin. Dennis Altman and Kate Millett, two of the authors most influential in the early gay movement, used the search for authenticity as a framework in their analysis of sexual

oppression and liberation. Both Altman and Millett, like many other liberation theorists, promoted the discovery and expression of one's repressed self as the true or authentic self. At the same time, they remained committed to Freudian ideas about "polymorphous perversity" and the bisexuality of human desire.^[11]

In the course of the public discussion about whether psychology's analysis of homosexuality was valid, George Weinberg, a gay-sympathetic psychologist, coined the term homophobia to designate the irrational fear of homosexual acts, persons, or sentiments.^[12] Discussion of these issues largely took place outside the university among activists and community-based writers and intellectuals. Eventually, the debate directly engaged the psychiatric profession itself over the official designation of homosexuality as a mental illness in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) .^[13]

Between 1972 and 1978, Karla Jay and Allan Young published three anthologies that explored gay and lesbian history, psychological theories, the problems and possibilities of coming out, lesbian and gay culture before and after Stonewall, the gay movement's relation to the Left, the women's and black civil rights movements, sex roles, and the images of gay men and lesbians in the media.^[14] These books were the locus of intellectual and political debate in the emerging gay and lesbian communities.

One of the earliest academic fields to experience this infusion of energy was literature. Louie Crew and Rictor Norton, a professor of English and a literary critic who edited the journal College English , assembled a special issue called "The Homosexual Imagination." They entitled their introduction to the issue "The Homophobic Imagination."^[15] The special issue stimulated the rediscovery of lesbian and gay writers of the past: Christopher Isherwood, Vita Sackville-West, Jean Genet, Gertrude Stein, and Radclyffe Hall. Mass-market paperback editions of these and many other lesbian and gay authors' works were reissued during the 1970s.

The search for authenticity also fed the impulse that led gay and lesbian scholars to track down the history of homosexuals. In 1971, gay activist Jonathan Katz started doing research on gay history, working only from the presumption that gay American history actually existed.

In June 1972, he dramatized some of his early discoveries in a documentary play called Coming Out .^[16] Eventually, Katz's research led to two huge collections of lesbian and gay historical documents: Gay American History (1976) and Gay/Lesbian Almanac (1983). In the meantime, Katz had served as the general editor of the Arno Press series Homosexuality: Lesbians and Gay Men in Society, History, and Literature, a massive reprinting of over a hundred books that addressed homosexuality, from classics to the obscure, from both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Also in the early 1970s, John D'Emilio and James Steakley published pioneering explorations of homosexual emancipation movements that took place during the 1940s and 1950s in the United States and in pre-Nazi Germany.^[17]

The 1976 publication of Jonathan Katz's Gay American History marked the culmination of the early tradition of lesbian and gay scholarship that worked within the loose intellectual paradigm rooted in the search for authenticity. For various reasons, Katz included in Gay American History people who could not clearly be called homosexual, and these definitional ambiguities raised questions about what "homosexual" meant in earlier periods and in different cultures. For example, Katz included berdache (men who adopted the female role in Native American societies and engaged in sexual activities with their husbands); passionate friendships between pairs of men and women who probably did not engage in sexual activity with each other; and women who chose to pass and live as men, although some of these women may not have had homoerotic desires. Most of these people did not seem to resemble "homosexuals" in the usual sense of the word. Once scholars and writers began to question these inclusions, and therefore to question the definition of a homosexual person, the idea of discovering the history of authentic homosexuals seemed problematic. It was precisely these questions that stimulated the emergence of a new paradigm.

The Social Construction Of Identity, 1976 To Present

The outpouring of lesbian and gay social thought and history in the early 1970s assumed that the homosexual experience in earlier periods

and in different cultures revolved around a type of personality called "the homosexual." This initial assumption soon gave way to the discovery, so influential toward the end of the 1960s, that phenomena such as gender roles and racial stereotypes were historically conditioned and socially constructed. The feminist work of Simone de Beauvoir, Kate Millett, Shulamith Firestone, and Germaine Greer influenced American lesbian and gay intellectuals, who began to challenge the way gender stereotypes were entangled in homosexual behavior.

The feminist strand of early social construction merged with the work of a group of left-wing British homosexual theorists and historians. The starting point was "The Homosexual Role," a paper that sociologist Mary McIntosh published in 1968. Basing her work on the empirical results of the Kinsey studies, McIntosh challenged the belief that there are two kinds of people in the world: "homosexuals" and "heterosexuals." She argued that the homosexual should be seen as a "social role" rather than as a natural or fixed "condition."^[18] A group of young British intellectuals worked out the historical and political implications of McIntosh's theory in the journal Gay Left (1975 to 1979). In the pages of their journal, they synthesized Marxist social history and the "symbolic interactionist" school of sociology, which emphasized the importance of socially created meanings in everyday life.^[19] This perspective on the historical emergence of the homosexual identity informed the work of Jeffrey Weeks in Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain from the Nineteenth Century to the Present , and Sex, Politics, and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality since 1800 .

The American version of the Gay Left theory of homosexual identity surfaced in the work of John D'Emilio. His pioneering article "Capitalism and Gay Identity" and his book Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities bring together this new theory of homosexual identity with the social history that grew out of the political movements of the 1960s. This approach to gay and lesbian history was eventually identified as the social-constructionist theory of homosexual identity. Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality (1978) developed a line of thought parallel to that of the Gay Left group's social-constructionist perspective on sexuality.^[20] In addition, Foucault's work offered a full-scale philosophical critique

of essentialism—the belief that "the homosexual identity" exists as a stable phenomenon throughout history. Although lesbian and gay studies emerged originally from the essentialist impulse—the search for authenticity and roots—the debate about the historical and social construction of the homosexual identity has increasingly framed the issues that lesbian and gay scholars have addressed.

The social-constructionist theory of sexuality and sexual identity played an important role in the political debates about pornography in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The antipornography movement and the work of its leading theorists—Andrea Dworkin, Susan Griffin, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, and Catherine MacKinnon—often drew upon essentialist definitions of gender. Critics of the antipornography movement, such as Carole Vance, Gayle Rubin, Amber Hollibaugh, Ellen Willis, Joan Nestle, Deirdre English, and Cherríe Moraga, were social constructionists.^[21] The political and intellectual debates on sexuality and feminism surfaced in a controversial conference at Barnard College in 1982. The papers from this conference were later published in an influential anthology called Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality , edited by Carole Vance, the conference organizer. Together with another anthology called Powers of Desire , which Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson edited, Pleasure and Danger made major contributions to social-constructionist thinking about sexuality, gender, and sexual identity.

The social-constructionist theory of homosexual identity has its own weaknesses, however. According to some evidence, sexual behavior is a continuum and varies over the life cycle. This evidence brings into doubt the fixedness or stability of people's sexual identities. In addition, homosexual-identified individuals seem to have existed before the modern homosexual identity was created. Steven Epstein explored some of these ambiguities in an influential essay called "Gay Politics, Ethnic Identity: The Limits of Social Constructionism," as did Diana Fuss in Essentially Speaking and the authors in Edward Stein's anthology Forms of Desire: Sexual Orientation and the Social Constructionist Controversy .^[22] Despite the theory's ambiguities and limits, the social-constructionist interpretation of homosexual history is one of the major

intellectual achievements of the Stonewall generation of lesbian and gay scholars.

Essential Identity: Lesbian Existence, Gay Universals, And Queer Science, 1975 To Present

The belief that the homosexual identity exists independently of historical, cultural, or social conditions is called essentialism . Most of us start our homosexual lives as essentialists—that is, when we first come out, we believe that Socrates and Sappho were "homosexuals" in the same way that lesbians or gay men of the late twentieth century are homosexuals. This belief is the naive form of essentialism. But essentialism as an intellectual program in lesbian and gay studies has two variants. The first one to develop was essentialism as a metaphysical or universal category of sexual identity, which might be called identitarian essentialism . The second variant to emerge focused on the biological explanation of sexual orientation and interpreted it as a naturalized category of behavior; this is behavioral essentialism .

Lesbian-feminism was the most thoroughly developed political philosophy to emerge from the heady days of early feminism and gay liberation. Through a series of popular and provocative writings, lesbian-feminists created an intellectual framework that posited such metaphysical and transhistorical categories of female identity as "woman" and "lesbian." This theory and intellectual paradigm was first publicly articulated in the pamphlet "The Woman-Identified Woman," which Radicalesbians published, and was elaborated more fully in Jill Johnston's Lesbian Nation .^[23] Authors such as Mary Daly, Kathleen Barry, Susan Griffin, Diana Russell, Catherine MacKinnon, Lillian Faderman, and Adrienne Rich developed bold and vigorous interpretations of feminist politics, pornography, rape, lesbian culture, theology, and history.

Lesbian-feminist scholarship worked with the presupposition that male and female behavior was "essentially" different, politically opposed,

and not very amenable to change. Patriarchy was seen as a transhistorical outcome of the male domination of women by means of compulsory heterosexuality. Within this paradigm, two of the most important theoretical essays were published in the early 1980s in Signs: Adrienne Rich's "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence," and Catherine MacKinnon's "Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State."^[24] Although lesbian-feminism presupposed that gender was immutable, it did argue that heterosexuality was socially constructed. Its "essentialist" notion of gender was very important to the thinking of the antipornography movement in the late 1970s and early 1980s—particularly in the work of Susan Griffin, Andrea Dworkin, and Catherine MacKinnon.

If the early emphasis on authenticity reflected the coming-out experience, and social constructionism captured the discursive aspects of identity development, lesbian-feminism synthesized a growing revulsion toward male misogyny and the appeal of women's separatism. Lesbian-feminism was both a continuation of the search for authenticity—though in this case an authentic female identity—and a theory of the social construction of heterosexuality. According to lesbian-feminists, the rejection of heterosexuality and the acceptance of lesbian identity would lead to an authentic women's culture.

A variant of this identitarian essentialism is the assertion that gay or lesbian identities have existed throughout history and in different cultures. John Boswell and Will Roscoe have offered relatively sophisticated interpretations of gay history that find universal components of homosexual identities.^[25] These versions of history are rooted in the history of religion. The earliest gay male version of the identitarian essentialism was published by Arthur Evans in Fag Rag , the radical political newspaper, and then in book form in Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture . In this book, Evans linked the persecution of gay people to the repression of pagan witches. In contrast, John Boswell's 1980 history of "gay people" in the middle ages portrayed a more tolerant Christianity and gave the "new essentialism" academic respectability. Judy Grahn applied her skills as a poet and storyteller in a book called In a Mother Tongue to provide a unique brew of history, etymology, and fiction.^[26]

Although lesbian-feminism and the very different versions of gay universalism of Boswell, Evans, and Grahn presuppose certain essential gender or sexual identities, they also assume that other aspects of homosexuality are socially constructed. Nevertheless, the intellectual program of essentialism implies that research in lesbian and gay studies must focus on realities or structures that span historical periods—patriarchy, spiritual identities, or the basis of sexual or gender identities in nature.

The second tradition—behavioral essentialism—focused on the biological origins of homosexuality, influenced, in part, by sociobiology. To some extent this work revives the tradition of Magnus Hirschfeld and others in the early German homosexual rights movement.^[27]

One of the most influential pioneers in this intellectual current is Simon LeVay. In 1991, while on the faculty of the Salk Institute at the University of California at San Diego, he published a paper in the journal Science on differences in brain structure between heterosexual and homosexual men.^[28] The reaction to this article, both in the mainstream media and among gay activists, made LeVay aware of the potential political significance of his research.

LeVay soon left his faculty position at the Salk Institute to found the Institute of Gay and Lesbian Education in West Hollywood. He has since developed his perspective in a series of books that explore the relationship between biological research and lesbian and gay studies: The Sexual Brain, City of Friends: A Portrait of the Gay and Lesbian Community in America , written with Elizabeth Nonas, and Queer Science: The Use and Abuse of Research into Homosexuality .^[29] LeVay and other biological researchers have conducted studies exploring factors such as hormones, brain structure, and genetic differences as causes of homosexuality. One of the most important issues is whether homosexuality is defined as sexual orientation, specific behavior, or sexual identity. Early criticisms of this research centered on its naive use of social and cultural distinctions; some of those conducting biological research failed to distinguish between "identity" and "behavior," or they attributed "homosexuality" to gender-variant behavior. For example, when male rats, sheep, seagulls, and primates allow themselves to be mounted, some researchers called it "homosexuality."^[30]

Most of the work on the biological origins of homosexual behavior has no intellectual or social relationship to the mainstream of lesbian and gay studies. LeVay is to some extent the exception. Although he has spent most of his career working as a neuroanatomist, his work at the Institute of Gay and Lesbian Education and his books reveal a serious effort to relate the biological research to the political and social needs of the lesbian and gay community.

Race, Difference, And Colonialism: 1979 To Present

A radical challenge to what Adrienne Rich called the gay and women's movements' "white solipsism"—its tendency "to think, imagine, and speak as if whiteness described the world"—came most decisively from a group of women of color, including poets, essayists, and playwrights.^[31] In a number of important speeches and essays, Audre Lorde criticized feminists' refusal to include differences of race and class in their analysis of male domination.^[32] The anthology This Bridge Called My Back , edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, made a major contribution by exploring the discourse and expression of ethnically or racially mixed identities. The writers in this tradition have examined the fault lines and borders around which women of color have often built their identities—the generational differences between mother and daughter, language barriers, sexual identities, the specific cultural histories of different races, the physical bodies of women of color, and the diversity of work situations.^[33]

This Bridge Called My Back was followed by other anthologies such as Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology , edited by Barbara Smith and published in 1983; Gloria Anzaldúa's 1990 sequel to This Bridge Called My Back , which was called Making Face, Making Soul, Hacienda Caras; and Carla Trujilla's 1991 Chicana Lesbians . Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga have both written in-depth autobiographical profiles of the multifaceted bridge identities of women of color. Gloria Anzaldúa explores her identity as "a border woman" in the 1987 work Borderlands/La Frontera . She maps the psychological, sexual, and spiritual borderlands

of her life in a work that switches "codes" from English to Castilian Spanish, a North Mexican dialect, Tex-Mex, and even Nahuatl. Cherríe Moraga takes up a similar exploration in Loving in the War Years/Lo que nunca paso por sus labios , published in 1983.

This Bridge Called My Back contributed an intellectual framework to lesbian and gay studies by mapping identities that exist at the juncture of different cultures and races. Gay male writers and scholars are just beginning to explore this terrain.^[34] Joseph Beam and Essex Hemphill have published anthologies of essays and other work that analyze the bridge identities of black gay men.^[35]

Questions of representation figure significantly in the work in this tradition. Scholars have raised this issue by asking whether depictions of the homosexualities of people of color are culturally and artistically adequate. In addition, they have questioned how the work affects the political or legal representation of those communities.^[36] Kobena Mercer has also pointed out how the "restricted economy of minority representation in which one speaks for all" poses a burden on those selected to represent (either culturally or politically) the black community or a marginalized social group. They are "burdened with the impossible task of speaking as 'representatives'"; with this responsibility of speaking for many different individuals and groups in their communities, they are inhibited about even speaking for themselves.^[37] This "burden of representation" reflects the fact that because of racism, marginalized communities have only limited access to public space.^[38] In "The Spectacle of Blackness," Robert Reid-Pharr explores another aspect of this burden of representation as he examines the interpretative schemes through which white readers and observers view representations of black homosexualities.^[39]

One increasingly significant aspect of the interaction of race, ethnicity, and sexuality originates in the diaspora experience of migrants from Latin America, Africa, and South and Southeast Asia. More recent work about homosexualities within racial and ethnic communities has drawn on British cultural studies and postcolonial theory. Paul Gilroy, for one, has argued that sexuality and gender occupy a central place in the contemporary discourse of race.^[40] Many of Kobena Mercer's essays explore

how a complex set of cultural exchanges between the Caribbean, Britain, Africa, and the United States mediates the life of black homosexuals in Africa, Europe, and the western hemisphere.^[41]

The gay and lesbian movement in the United States, as well as the growing prominence of lesbian and gay studies in North America, has also had a noticeable impact on those with homosexual desires in Latin American and South Asian immigrant communities. The historical presence in the United States of communities from Central and South America and the frequent migratory flows back and forth between the United States and Latin American countries have led to interactions between the North American lesbian and gay experience and that of Latin American cultures. Joseph Carrier and Tomas Almaguer have documented some of the interactive patterns that have developed between the North American and Mexican homosexual experiences; for example, Mexican men who adopt the "gay" identity (incorporating both passive and active sexual roles in their sexual repertoires) are known as internacionales .^[42] A number of writers and theorists have explored the relationship between race, gender, and sexual identity in Latino communities in the United States.^[43]

By the mid-1980s, South Asian homosexual writers had begun to study the status of homosexuality in India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh. Newsletters and groups of homosexual intellectuals and activists emerged almost simultaneously all around the world: Anamika, Trikon , and Shamakami in the United States; Khush Khayal in Canada; Shakti Khabar in the United Kingdom, and Bombay Dost in India. Spurred by their repression in South Asian societies and by their invisibility in the white lesbian and gay communities of North America and Britain, these lesbian and gay intellectuals often emerged from the cultural crosscurrents of the South Asian diaspora experience. Young women and men growing up in South Asia or reared within traditional South Asian families often became aware of their homosexual desires and began the coming-out process when they encountered lesbian and gay communities in North America or Europe, possibly during their college years.^[44]

The comparative study of cultural constructions of homosexuality in

non-Western societies increasingly takes place in the context of global patterns of cultural exchange, and in many communities of color scholars must take into account the interplay between the corresponding racial or ethnic communities in the United States and their countries of origin. Recently, in the introduction to a special "queer" issue of positions , a journal of East Asian studies, the guest editor Ukiko Hanawa noted that studying homosexuality in Asian cultures was no longer "simply a matter of locating indigenous or local sexuality, whether in Asia or in Asian America, and identifying an appropriate lexicon of sexualities. Perhaps even more so than in other areas of inquiry … the terms by which the sexual-political economy gets defined is [sic ] both local and global at the same time."^[45]

One of most influential theoretical consequences of exploring the relationship between race and sexuality is the increased skepticism toward a unitary racial or ethnic identity and, instead, the validation of the hybrid or "bridge" identities forged among the overlapping communities of race, ethnicity, and sexuality. Given that it is impossible to speak for the community and to produce unambiguously positive images, intellectuals have looked to bridge identities to challenge the homogeneity of the modern homosexual identity presumed in early social-constructionist theories.^[46] The women and men of color who explore homosexualities as scholars and intellectuals have drawn from the intellectual traditions of black and Latina feminists (for example, Audre Lorde, Cherríe Moraga, and Gloria Anzaldúa) as well as from postcolonial cultural studies (such as Kobena Mercer's Welcome to the Jungle ) to make a complicated, double move of both invoking identity and contesting it.

Queer Theory: The Cultural Studies Paradigm, 1985 To Present

Scholars working within the cultural studies paradigm have explicitly built on the social-constructionist paradigm. They have extended it to include the interpretation of all kinds of texts, cultural codes, signifying practices, and modes of discourse that shape attitudes toward homosexuality

and affect the formation of sexual or gender identities. As Thomas Yingling, a member of the new generation, has noted, "Gay writers seem often to have found literature less a matter of self-expression and more a matter of coding. The gay absorption into signs, meanings, interpretation and art is related to the fact that for the homosexual the 'problem of the homosexual' is in fact the problem of signs—homosexuality is a semiotic."^[47]

Scholars who began writing on lesbian and gay issues in the wake of the late 1970s and early 1980s sex debates helped to create this intellectual shift in lesbian and gay studies. The new generation of lesbian and gay scholars has particularly flourished in the academic arena of cultural studies—an interdisciplinary synthesis of fields such as American studies, ethnic studies, and gender studies. Their intellectual framework derives from literary studies and the humanities and is influenced by cultural theorists such as Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Mikhail Bakhtin, Antonio Gramsci, Stuart Hall, Victor Turner, and Clifford Geertz.^[48]

Representatives of this new approach include Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who has explored male homosexuality and homosocial desire in literature; Thomas Yingling, author of an original study of Hart Crane; Judith Butler, a philosopher who has published a book on the theory of gender identity; David Miller, author of a well-received book on the police in the Victorian novel; David Halperin, who has pioneered a new interpretation of homosexuality in ancient Greece; Diana Fuss, author of a collection of essays on essentialism and identity politics; Michael Moon, who has written on Walt Whitman; and Lee Edelman, who has published a string of brilliant papers on gay literature, including a famous essay on the ACT UP slogan Silence = Death.^[49]

In an important theoretical statement of the cultural studies paradigm, Harold Beaver wrote:

The homosexual is beset by signs, by the urge to interpret whatever transpires, between himself and chance acquaintance. He is a prodigious consumer of signs—of hidden meanings, hidden systems, hidden potentiality. Exclusion from the common code impels the frenzied quest: the momentary glimpse, the scrambled figure, the chance encounter, the reverse image, the sudden slippage, the lowered guard. In

a flash meanings may be disclosed, mysteries wrenched out and betrayed.^[50]

Eve Sedgwick's magisterial Epistemology of the Closet is a major statement of the cultural studies paradigm. In it, she argues that "an understanding of virtually any aspect of modern Western culture must be, not merely incomplete, but damaged in its central substance to the degree that does not incorporate a critical analysis of modern homo/heterosexual definition."^[51]

The political implications of this model of cultural analysis have been heatedly debated. In her book Gender Trouble , Judith Butler has "attempted to locate the political in the very signifying practices that establish, regulate, and deregulate identity."^[52] Communication becomes a form of identity politics because identity is made up of signs, symbols, and performances. The practical application of this approach is clearly demonstrated by the work of cultural activists on AIDS, especially groups of artists and makers of films and videos. These works of propaganda, education, and media criticism display great sophistication about the cultural codes of sexual behavior, disease, and politics.^[53]

The Politics Of Knowledge And Aids

The advent of AIDS has spurred an enormous explosion of research on homosexuality—though it is in many ways inadequate and is on a much smaller scale relative to the significance of the epidemic. Initially, most AIDS research was devoted to investigating the cause of the breakdown of the immune system. This led to the discovery of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), which causes the collection of diseases called AIDS. Then, research focused on developing a test for HIV. Consequently, most of the current medical research moved toward searching for a treatment or even a cure for AIDS (difficult though that may be to develop).

A much smaller proportion of federal research dollars was devoted to epidemiological research or work on the social and psychological

dynamics of prevention. Because most of the work published about AIDS and HIV is written in a scientific style and usually appears in scientific journals, there is not much likelihood that it will reach a general gay and lesbian audience—although recent books by Walt W. Odets and Gabriel Rotello, which are based on epidemiology and HIV prevention research, do manage to address a broader public.^[54]

The grassroots politics of knowledge, honed during the gay and lesbian movement's battle with the American Psychiatric Association to remove homosexuality as a disease from its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) , had a powerful effect on the conduct of AIDS research. AIDS activism, closely linked to the organized gay and lesbian community, focused on the medical research agenda. The story of this development is recounted in Steven Epstein's book Impure Science , a study of the AIDS movement's impact on biomedical research—and itself a major contribution to lesbian and gay studies.^[55]

Medical and public health disciplines have shaped much of the research on AIDS and HIV. However, the intellectual perspectives developed within lesbian and gay studies influenced AIDS research in three areas: exploration of the cultural meanings of AIDS, the political and social construction of knowledge about AIDS, and the strategies and policies of HIV prevention.

The first significant development emerged when those working within the cultural studies paradigm explored the social meanings of AIDS. Douglas Crimp, an art critic and an AIDS activist, edited a special issue of the art journal October and called it "AIDS: Cultural Analysis, Cultural Activism." Subsequently published as a book, it was a collection of pieces that analyzed key words, homophobia, biomedical discourses, visual representations of people with AIDS, and the impact of cultural meanings on gay male sexual practices. In 1990, Crimp collaborated with artist Adam Rolston (both were members of the AIDS activist group ACT UP New York and were associated with its political graphics spin-off Gran Fury) to produce AIDS Demo Graphics , a documentation of political graphics produced by AIDS activists.^[56]

Another group of intellectuals and scholars contributed to AIDS research by developing a strong social-constructionist analysis of AIDS

knowledge. These authors came from disciplines such as sociology, history, and cultural studies. In a series of books, Cindy Patton has combined cultural analysis with the sociology of knowledge to offer a critique of epidemiology, the AIDS service industry, public policy, and HIV prevention education.^[57] Like Cindy Patton, Paula Treichler has explored the overlapping discourses of science and culture.^[58] Historians of science Elizabeth Fee and Daniel M. Fox have edited two anthologies of work by historians of medicine and science, as well as epidemiologists and sociologists. The anthologies offer historical comparisons of AIDS in relation to other epidemics and diseases.^[59] In Impure Science: AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge , Steven Epstein has written a detailed account of the relationship between AIDS activism and AIDS research.^[60]

The third way in which lesbian and gay studies has had an impact on AIDS research has been through lesbian and gay intellectuals who, active in the sex debates of the late 1980s, have worked on AIDS education and HIV prevention. For instance, Amber Hollibaugh, Simon Watney, and Cindy Patton made contributions to the debates about pornography and the social construction of sexuality and, as activists, administrators, and writers, have helped to shape programs and policies for HIV prevention.^[61]

Despite the linkages sketched above, the AIDS epidemic has stimulated a disproportionate share of all the social and behavioral research on male homosexuality. Most AIDS-related research has had no relationship to intellectual work explicitly considered to be lesbian and gay studies.

The Future Of Lesbian And Gay Studies

This chapter has examined five paradigms in lesbian and gay studies: the search for authenticity, the social construction of identity, essential identity, difference and race, and cultural studies. In addition, the AIDS epidemic stimulated a great deal of research on male homosexual behavior and culture, but most of it has been shaped by medical and

public health paradigms. Although all five paradigms continue to have loyal adherents whose research and writing follows from the paradigms' core presuppositions, lesbian and gay studies is divided by the different cultural styles of various generations.

Many members of the Stonewall generation retain their commitment to the twin problems of authenticity and history—whether they are social constructionists or essentialists. Only the authenticity line of thought has failed to produce a major work of synthesis that claims to be an authoritative understanding of lesbian and gay life—although perhaps Andrew Sullivan's Virtually Normal could be considered as a contribution to this tradition.

The post-Stonewall generation came of age in a culture dominated by mass media and is acutely aware of the power of cultural codes. As post-Stonewall scholars enter the ranks of academics, the cultural studies paradigm has become increasingly influential. It is a flexible and eclectic framework that can incorporate elements from some of the other paradigms, but it is also stylistically more difficult and less accessible than most of the work produced in the other research traditions. Works in cultural studies run the risk of losing the readers and intellectuals in the community—those who have been the most supportive audience of work written by scholars in other frameworks.