1. This essay was both very difficult and quite fun to write. I am grateful for the encouragement of Amy Gluckman and Betsy Reed, who solicited it for a collection of essays on "homo economics" and who allowed me to write such a speculative essay. The comments of Terence Kissack, Regina Kunzel, Matthew Lore, Molly McGarry, Kevin Murphy, and Michael Rothberg were, as always, extremely helpful and stimulating.

2. Regina Kunzel suggested the term hypercommodification to me. It refers to the way in which mainstream corporations promote identification with brand names and the lesbian and gay communities.

3. See Amy Gluckman and Betsy Reed, "The Gay Marketing Moment: Leaving Diversity in the Dust," Dollars and Sense, November—December 1993; and Grant Lukenbill, Untold Millions: Gay and Lesbian Markets in America (New York: HarperCollins, 1995).

4. See the section on employment discrimination in William Rubenstein, ed., Lesbians, Gay Men, and the Law (New York: New Press, 1993), pp. 243-375. There is now a series of books about gay men and lesbians in the workplace. See James Woods with Jay Lucas, The Corporate Closet: The Professional Lives of Gay Men in America (New York: Free Press, 1993).

5. For a survey of economic issues, see Jeffrey Escoffier, "Homo/Economics: A Survey of Issues," in Out in All Directions: The Almanac of Gay and Lesbian America, ed. Lynn Witt, Eric Marcus, and Sherry Thomas (New York: Warner Books, 1995). See also M. V. Lee Badgett, "Thinking Homo/Economically" (paper presented at "Homo/Economics: Market and Community in Lesbian and Gay Life," a conference sponsored by the Center of Lesbian and Gay Studies at the City University of New York, New York, May 7, 1994). On employment discrimination, see idem, "The Wage Effects of Sexual Orientation Discrimination," Industrial and Labor Relations Review 48, no. 4 (July 1995): 726-39; and for an early discussion, see Jeffrey Escoffier, "Stigma, Work Environment, and Economic Discrimination against Homosexuals," Homosexual Counseling Journal 2, no. 1 (January 1975). For a discussion of the gay market, see Gluckman and Reed, "Gay Marketing Moment," as well as Lukenbill, Untold Millions.

6. D'Emilio, "Capitalism and Gay Identity," in Powers of Desire, ed. Snitow et al.; and Jeffrey Escoffier, "Sexual Revolution and the Politics of Gay Identity," Socialist Review, nos. 82-83 (vol. 15, nos. 4-5; July-October 1985).

7. See D'Emilio, Sexual Politics; Kennedy and Davis, Boots of Leather; Esther Newton's Cherry Grove, Fire Island: Sixty Years in America's First Gay and Lesbian Community (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993); Gayle Rubin, "The Valley of the Kings: San Francisco's Gay Male Leather Community" (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1994); and the recent dissertations on Philadelphia (Marc Stein, University of Pennsylvania) and San Francisco (Nan Almilla Boyd, Brown University).

8. In reconstructing the history of gay and lesbian communities, a number of recent studies have begun to provide a portrait of gay and lesbian economic life. See Martin Bauml Duberman, Stonewall (New York: Dutton, 1993), especially the chapter on the Stonewall bar, pp. 181-90; Kennedy and Davis, Boots of Leather; Newton, Cherry Grove; and Rubin, "Valley of the Kings."

9. Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965); Douglass C. North and Lance Davis, Institutional Change and American Economic Growth (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1971); Douglass C. North, Structure and Change in Economic History (New York: Norton, 1981); and idem, Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

10. Goffman, Stigma.

11. Georg Simmel, "The Secret and the Secret Society," in The Sociology of Georg Simmel (New York: Free Press, 1950), pp. 307-78.

12. Georg Simmel, "The Stranger," and "The Metropolis and Mental Life," in Sociology of Georg Simmel, pp. 402-27.

13. Harold Beaver, "Homosexual Signs (in Memory of Roland Barthes)," Critical Inquiry 8, no. 1 (fall 1981).

14. Maurice Leznoff and William Westley, "The Homosexual Community," Social Problems 3 (April 1956): 257-63.

15. These patterns of social life predated World War II. See George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994).

16. See Escoffier, "Stigma." See also ibid. For a discussion of how informal social networks play a role in landing jobs, see Mark Granovetter, Getting a Job: A Study of Contacts and Careers (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974).

17. Blackmail and extortion have been features of homosexual life as long as it has been stigmatized. For an account from the early twentieth century, see Edward Stevenson, The Intersexes: A History of Similisexualism as a Problem in Social Life (private printing, 1908; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1975), p. 478. See also the example of police harassment in Jonathan Weinberg, Speaking for Vice: Homosexuality in the Art of Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley, and the First American Avant-Garde (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), p. 57. Homophile publications such as One or the Mattachine Review frequently referred to the extortionist aspects of gay and lesbian life; I owe this reference to Kevin Murphy. See also the chapter on blackmail in Jess Stern, The Sixth Man (New York: Doubleday, 1961), pp. 176-88.

18. See the chapters on bars and cruising in Donald Webster Cory and John P. LeRoy, The Homosexual and His Society: A View from Within (New York: Citadel Press, 1963), pp. 105-29; and Evelyn Hooker, "The Homosexual Community," in Sexual Deviance, ed. John Gagnon and William Simon (New York: Harper & Row, 1967).

19. For a good, general discussion of social norms and behavior in bars, see Sherri Cavan, Liquor License: An Ethnography of Bar Behavior (Chicago: Aldine, 1966).

20. To read about the role of protection (as well as other topics), see Martin S. Weinberg and Colin J. Williams, "Gay Baths and the Social Organization of Impersonal Sex," Social Problems 23, no. 2 (December 1975): 124-36.

21. Bob Dameron, the publisher of a national gay bar guide, estimated that by 1975, between 75 and 80 percent of San Francisco's gay bars were gay owned. See Wayne Sage, "Inside the Colossal Closet," Human Behavior, August 1975, reprinted in Gay Men: The Sociology of Male Homosexuality, ed. Martin P. Levine (New York: Harper & Row, 1979).

22. Christopher Gunn and Hazel Dayton Gunn, Reclaiming Capital: Democratic Initiatives and Community Development (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), pp. 3-6.

23. For a discussion of the relationship between economic behavior and social norms, see Jon Elster, Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 113-23.

24. Theorists have classified such social situations under the name of "the prisoner's dilemma." In game theory, the prisoner's dilemma is about two people who are arrested and questioned separately. They cannot communicate with one another, and each must choose whether or not to betray the other. Each would seem to benefit individually from giving away the other, but if they both chose to protect each other, they would both go free. For a brief discussion of this famous game, see Elster, Nuts and Bolts, p. 29.

25. The argument is made in Gagnon and Simon, Sexual Conduct, pp. 153-54, and Kenneth E. Read, Other Voices: The Style of a Homosexual Tavern (Novato, Calif.: Chandler & Sharp, 1980), pp. xvii-xviii. For a discussion, see Joseph Harry and William B. DeVall, The Social Organization of Gay Males (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1978), pp. 151-54.

26. Richard Dyer, "Entertainment and Utopia," in Only Entertainment (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 25.

27. In particular, see Karl Marx, "Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts," in Early Writings, ed. Quintin Hoare (New York: Vintage Books, 1975); and Carol Gould, Marx's Social Ontology (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1976).

28. See Francis E. Kobrin, "The Fall in Household Size and the Rise of the Primary Individual in the United States," Demography 13 (February 1976): 127-38; and D'Emilio, "Capitalism and Gay Identity," in Powers of Desire, ed. Snitow et al.

29. This process is analyzed and empirically tested in Martin P. Levine, "Gay Ghetto," in Gay Men, ed. M. Levine; and in Joseph Harry and William B. DeVall, "Urbanization and the Development of Homosexual Communities," in Social Organization, pp. 134-54.

30. Even before Stonewall, gay and lesbian bar owners in San Francisco formed their own business association—the Tavern Guild.