1. Georg Simmel, "How Is Society Possible?" in On Individuality and Social Forms, ed. Donald N. Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), p. 11. The imagined gay social world is a projection of the possibility of gay community, an ensemble of shared lifestyle that differs from that of the mainstream society. For a discussion of this concept in terms of "the social imaginary," see John Thompson, Studies in the Theory of Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 23-38. See Hans Joas, Pragmatism and Social Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 167, for a discussion of Cornelius Castoriadis's recognition of the social a priori. For a critical discussion of the imaginary and its relationship to Lacan's psychoanalytic theory and ideology, see Paul Smith, Discerning the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), pp. 18-23.

2. Simmel, "How Is Society Possible?" p. 9.

3. Allen Young, "Out of the Closets, into the Streets," in Out of the Closets, ed. Karla Jay and Allen Young (New York: Douglas/Links, 1972), pp. 17-20; Edmund Bergler, Homosexuality: Disease or a Way of Life? (New York: Hill & Wang, 1957); Irving Bieber, Homosexuality (New York: Basic Books, 1962); Albert Ellis, Homosexuality: Its Causes and Cure (New York: Lyle Stuart, 1964); Charles Socarides, The Overt Homosexual (Philadelphia: Grune & Stratton, 1968); Lionel Ovesey, Homosexuality and Pseudo-Homosexuality (New York: Science House, 1969); Lawrence Hatterer, Changing Homosexuality in the Male (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970); and Cory, Homosexual in America.

4. Pierre Bourdieu, "The Social Space and the Genesis of Groups," Theory and Society 14, no. 6 (November 1985): 729.

5. A parallel discourse on race also emerged in this period. Gunnar Myrdal's The American Dilemma (New York: Harper & Row, 1944) marked the renewed recognition of race as a social issue in American life.

6. Alfred M. Kinsey et al., Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (Philadelphia: Saunders, 1948). See the useful commentaries on the Kinsey report by Morris Ernst and David Loth, American Sexual Behavior and the Kinsey Report (New York: Educational Book Co., 1948); and Donald P. Geddes, ed., An Analysis of the Kinsey Reports on the Human Male and Female (New York: New American Library, 1954).

7. Roger Austen, Playing the Game: The Homosexual Novel in America (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1977), pp. 93-94.

8. For a survey of the fiction that explored homosexuality in this period, see the following studies: John W. Aldridge, After the Lost Generation: A Critical Study of the Writers of Two Wars (New York: Noonday Press, 1951); Austen, Playing the Game; and Sarotte, Like a Brother.

9. Aldridge, After the Lost Generation, pp. 90, 99-104.

10. Vito Russo, The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies, rev. ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), pp. 120-22, 140-43; Paul Welch, "Homosexuality in America," Life, June 26, 1964, pp. 68-80; Tom Burke, "The New Homosexual," Esquire, December 1969.

11. Kenneth Lewes, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Male Homosexuality (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988).

12. Ibid., pp. 122-73.

13. See the essays collected in Lary May, ed., Recasting America: Culture and Politics in an Age of Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1989), and in Elaine May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988).

14. Richard Dyer, "Homosexuality and Film Noir," in A Matter of Images, (London: Routledge, 1993); and Frank Krutnik, In a Lonely Street: Film Noir, Genre, Masculinity (New York: Routledge, 1991).

15. David Savran, Communists, Cowboys, and Queers: The Politics of Masculinity in the Work of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992).

16. For writing about alienation, see Eric Josephson and Mary Josephson, eds., Man Alone: Alienation in Modern Society (New York: Dell, 1962), which contained essays by Marx, Dostoyevsky, W.E.B. DuBois, C. Wright Mills, and James Baldwin, among others. This volume was one of my first introductions to modern social thought. Albert Camus's The Rebel (New York: Knopf, 1956) and Colin Wilson's The Outsider (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956) were the other two books central to my intellectual development in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

17. Lindner's essay on homosexuality was reprinted in the important and influential collection of sociological and psychological articles that Hendrik M. Ruitenbeek edited: The Problem of Homosexuality in Modern Society (New York: Dutton, 1963).

18. Robert Lindner, Must You Conform? (reprint, New York: Black Cat Book, 1961), pp. 40-41.

19. Ibid., p. 42.

20. Ibid., p. 43.

21. Ibid., p. 73.

22. Ibid., p. 75.

23. For an account of sexual radicalism in the 1950s and 1960s, see King, Party of Eros.

24. Lindner, Must You Conform? pp. 123-45.

25. In contrast to Lindner's emphasis on the urgency of sexual instincts, Mary McIntosh first elaborated the social constructionist approach to homosexuality in academic sociology during this period. See her influential article "The Homosexual Role." McIntosh was very much influenced by the interactionist tradition in sociology.

26. For a useful discussion of the effects of a discursive formation on the individual, see Michel Pecheux, "The Subject-Form of Discourse in the Subjective Appropriation of Scientific Knowledges and Political Practice," in Language, Semantics, and Ideology, trans. Harbens Nagpal (London: Macmillan, 1982), pp. 155-70.

27. Cory, Homosexual in America; A. M. Krich, ed., The Homosexuals: As Seen by Themselves and Thirty Authorities (New York: Citadel Press, 1954); J. Mercer, They Walk in Shadow (New York: Comet Books, 1959); Stern, Sixth Man; idem, The Grapevine: A Report on the Secret World of the Lesbian (New York: Doubleday, 1964); Alfred A. Gross, Strangers in Our Midst (Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press, 1962); R.E.L. Masters, The Homosexual Revolution: A Challenging Exposé of the Social and Political Directions of a Minority Group (New York: Julian Press, 1962); Cory and LeRoy, Homosexual and His Society; idem, The Lesbian in America (New York: Citadel Press, 1964); Ruitenbeek, Problem of Homosexuality; Martin Hoffman, The Gay World: Male Homosexuality and the Social Creation of Evil (New York: Basic Books, 1968).

28. Hoffman, Gay World, p. 3.

29. The increase in popular sociology literature was paralleled by the growth of an academic sociology in the interactionist tradition that treated homosexuality as a social phenomenon, without moralism. Academic sociology books on the subject included Howard Becker, Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1963); Goffman, Stigma; Edwin Schur, Crimes without Victims (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1965); Gagnon and Simon, Sexual Deviance.

30. For a brief history of the interactionist perspective, see Randall Collins, Three Sociological Traditions (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 180-222, and Nicholas C. Mullins with Carolyn J. Mullins, Theories and Theory Groups in Contemporary American Sociology (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), pp. 75-104. In 1963, two of the most influential symbolic interactionist books on "deviant identities" appeared: Becker's Outsiders and Goffman's Stigma.

31. Becker's famous definition from Outsiders was quoted in David Jary and Julia Jary, The Harper Collins Dictionary of Sociology (New York: Harper Collins, 1991), p. 263.

32. Georg Simmel, "The Problem of Sociology," in Essays on Sociology, Philosophy, and Aesthetics, ed. K. H. Wolff (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1959), pp. 327-40.

33. Frank Caprio, Female Homosexuality (New York: Citadel Press, 1954); George Henry, All the Sexes (New York: Rinehart, 1955); Edmund Bergler, Homosexuality; idem, One Thousand Homosexuals (Paterson, N.J.: Pageant Books, 1957); Bieber, Homosexuality; Ellis, Homosexuality; Socarides, Overt Homosexual; Ovesey, Homosexuality and Pseudo-Homosexuality; and Hatterer, Changing Homosexuality in the Male.

34. Cory, Homosexual in America, p. 63. Cory's most extended discussion of effeminacy appears on pp. 62-64.

35. Ibid., pp. 129-34.

36. As a sociologist, Sagarin specialized in deviance and criminology. He completed his dissertation, "The Structure and Ideology in an Association of Deviants," in 1966. Arno Press published it in 1975.

37. Cory, Homosexual in America, pp. 230-31, 258-59.

38. Ibid., p. 264.

39. Stern, Sixth Man, p. 13.

40. Ibid., p. 16.

41. Ibid., pp. 13-18.

42. Ibid., p. 16.

43. Ibid., pp. 76-92.

44. Ibid., pp. 189-90.

45. See D'Emilio, "Gay Politics, Gay Community."

46. For a discussion of this process, see Pecheux, "Subject-Form of Discourse," pp. 110-29.

47. Michel de Certeau discusses reading as an active process in Practice of Everyday Life, pp. 165-76.

48. From Roland Barthes's thoughtful and suggestive essay "On Reading," in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill & Wang, 1986), p. 35.

49. Ibid., pp. 33-43.

50. Ibid., pp. 42-43.

51. James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room (New York: Dial Press, 1956).

52. Somewhere during that time, I also came across an essay by liberal newspaper columnist Max Lerner called "The Gay Crucifixion," reprinted in The Unfinished Country: A Book of American Symbols (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1959). This, along with Baldwin, was the start of my search to learn as much as I could about homosexuality.

53. Ibid., p. 12.

54. Norman Mailer, Advertisements for Myself (New York: Putnam, 1959).

55. Norman Mailer, "The Homosexual Villain," in Advertisements for Myself, p. 194.

56. Ibid., p. 196.

57. For James Baldwin's contemptuous dismissal of Mailer's essay "The White Negro," see "The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy," in Nobody Knows My Name (New York: Doubleday, 1961). Then, for Eldridge Cleaver's praise of Mailer's essay and his attack on Baldwin for his homosexuality, see Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968), pp. 97-111.

58. James Baldwin, Another Country (New York: Dial Press, 1962), pp. 301-2.

59. See Richard Goldstein's interview with Baldwin in Goldstein, "Go the Way Your Blood Beats," in James Baldwin: The Legacy, ed. Quincy Troup (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989), p. 174. When Goldstein asked Baldwin if he felt like "a stranger in gay America," Baldwin responded: "Well, first of all I feel like a stranger in America from almost any conceivable angle except, oddly enough, as a black person. The word 'gay' has always rubbed me the wrong way.... I simply feel it's a world that has very little to do with me, with where I did my growing up. I was never at home with it."

60. Undoubtedly, these interests also influenced me to pursue a graduate degree in African studies.

61. Participation in consciousness-raising groups and study groups during the early years of the women's and gay movements socialized the relatively private experience of reading.

62. Barthes, "On Reading," p. 42.

63. It is necessary to remember that Baldwin's rejection of the "gay community" is always compensated for by his deep commitment to the African American historical experience.

64. Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc J. C. Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 45.