1. See Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckman, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (New York: Doubleday, 1966), pp. 19-46, for a thorough discussion of the construction and use of knowledge in everyday life.

2. Although I have long believed in the power of such contributions, I owe this sharp formulation to Ara Wilson. On the significance of The Well of Loneliness, see Esther Newton, "The Mythic Mannish Lesbian: Radclyffe Hall and the New Woman," Signs 9, no. 4 (summer 1984). On Whitman's impact on Wilde, Symonds, and Carpenter, see Weeks, Coming Out, pp. 45-83.

3. Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks; Stuart Hall, The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left (London: Verso, 1988).

4. The Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies, CLAGS Directory of Lesbian and Gay Studies (New York: Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies, CUNY, 1994).

5. Chapter 4, "Inside the Ivory Closet," gives a sketch of the earlier attempt. See also John D'Emilio, "The Universities and the Gay Experience," in his collection Making Trouble, pp. 117-27.

6. See the essays by Karl Mannheim, "The Problem of Generations," in Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge, ed. Paul Kecskemeti (New York: Oxford University Press, 1952); Annie Kriegel, "Generational Difference: The History of an Idea," Daedalus: Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 107, no. 4 (fall 1978): 23-38; and Matilda White Riley, "Aging, Social Change, and the Power of Ideas," Daedalus: Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 107, no. 4 (fall 1978): 39-52. For an excellent example of generational history, see Robert Wohl, The Generation of 1914 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979).

7. Two books brought together some of these influences: C. Wilson, Outsider; and the anthology The Beat Generation and the Angry Young Men, ed. Gene Feldman and Max Gartenberg (New York: Greenberg Books, 1958).

8. For two opposing testimonials on the significance of this issue, see Berman, Politics of Authenticity, and Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity.

9. For a critical discussion of the model implicit in this approach, see Olafson, "Authenticity and Obligation," pp. 121-75.

10. See Ronald Bayer, Homosexuality and American Psychiatry: The Politics of Diagnosis (New York: Basic Books, 1981), pp. 67-101.

11. Altman, Homosexual; and Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (New York: Doubleday, 1970).

12. George Weinberg, Society and the Healthy Homosexual (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1972).

13. For an account of the gay movement's confrontation with the psychiatric profession, see Bayer, Homosexuality and American Psychiatry.

14. New York University Press has issued an anniversary edition of Jay and Young's Out of the Closets.

15. "The Homosexual Imagination," special issue, College English 36, no. 3 (November 1974).

16. Jonathan Ned Katz, interview by Jeffrey Escoffier and David Hathwell, in Gay Alternative, no. 6 (1974).

17. First appearing in the Body Politic, a Canadian gay journal, their work was eventually published in book form: Steakley, Homosexual Emancipation Movement; and D'Emilio, Sexual Politics. See also John Lauritsen and David Thorstad, The Early Homosexual Rights Movement, 1864-1935 (New York: Times Change Press, 1974).

18. McIntosh, "Homosexual Role." In the same volume, see the interview with Mary McIntosh, pp. 44-49. See also Carole S. Vance, "Social Construction Theory: Problems in the History of Sexuality," in Which Homosexuality? Essays from the International Conference on Lesbian and Gay Studies, Dennis Altman et al. (London: Gay Men's Press, 1989).

19. Erving Goffman explored the discursive formation of identities and social interaction. See Goffman, Stigma.

20. Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol. 1, Introduction.

21. For essays on the feminist debates about pornography by two important activists, see Duggan and Hunter, Sex Wars.

22. Steven Epstein, "Gay Politics, Ethnic Identity: The Limits of Social Constructionism," Socialist Review, nos. 93-94 (vol. 17, nos. 3-4; May—August 1987); and see Diana Fuss's essay "The Question of Identity Politics" in her book Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature, and Difference (New York: Routledge, 1989). For a cross section of the debate, see Edward Stein, ed., Forms of Desire: Sexual Orientation and the Social Constructionist Controversy (New York: Routledge, 1992).

23. Radicalesbians, The Woman-Identified Woman (Somerville, Mass.: New England Free Press, 1970); and Jill Johnston, Lesbian Nation: The Feminist Solution (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973).

24. Adrienne Rich, "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence," Signs 5, no. 4 (1980), and Catherine MacKinnon, "Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State," Signs 7, no. 3 (spring 1982).

25. John Boswell, "Revolutions, Universals, and Sexual Categories," Salmagundi, nos. 58-59 (fall 1982-winter 1983); and Will Roscoe, "Making History: The Challenge of Gay and Lesbian Studies," Journal of Homosexuality 15, nos. 3-4 (1988).

26. Judy Grahn, In a Mother Tongue (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984).

27. Simon LeVay, Queer Science: The Use and Abuse of Research into Homosexuality (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), pp. 11-40.

28. Simon LeVay, "A Difference in Hypothalamic Structure between Homosexual and Heterosexual Men," Science 253 (August 30, 1991): 1034-37; see also Dean Hammer and P. Copeland, The Science of Desire: The Search for the Gay Gene and the Biology of Behavior (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994); and Chandler Burr, A Separate Creation: The Search for the Origins of Sexual Orientation (New York: Hyperion Books, 1996).

29. Simon LeVay, The Sexual Brain (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993); Simon LeVay and Elizabeth Nonas, City of Friends: A Portrait of the Gay and Lesbian Community in America (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995); and LeVay, Queer Science.

30. LeVay, Queer Science, pp. 195-209.

31. Adrienne Rich, "Disloyal to Civilization: Feminism, Racism, Gynephobia," in On Lies, Secrets, and Silence (New York: Norton, 1979), p. 229. See also Elizabeth V. Spelman, The Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought (Boston: Beacon Press, 1988), for an exploration of the relation of racial difference to feminism.

32. Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Trumansberg, N.Y.: Crossing Press, 1984).

33. Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, eds., This Bridge Called My Back (New York: Kitchen Table / Women of Color Press, 1981), pp. 105-6. See also Norma Alarcon, "The Theoretical Subject(s) of This Bridge Called My Back and Anglo-American Feminism," in Making Face, Making Soul, Hacienda Caras, ed. Gloria Anzaldúa (San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1990).

34. Tomas Almaguer, "Chicano Men: A Cartography of Homosexual Identity and Behavior," Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 3, no. 2 (summer 1991).

35. Essex Hemphill, ed., Brother to Brother: An Anthology of Writings by Black Gay Men (Boston: Alyson Publications, 1991).

36. Kobena Mercer has several excellent discussions of these issues in Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1994), particularly in his introduction and in "Black Art and the Burden of Representation." See also my essay on representation, "The Limits of Multiculturalism," which is now chapter 9 in this volume.

37. Kobena Mercer, "Black Britain and the Cultural Politics of Diaspora," in Welcome to the Jungle, p. 21.

38. K. Mercer, "Black Art," pp. 234-36.

39. Robert F. Reid-Pharr, "The Spectacle of Blackness," Radical America 24, no. 4 (April 1993).

40. Paul Gilroy has explored these transnational exchanges in The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993); see especially p. 85.

41. See Kobena Mercer's essays, especially "Black Britain" and "Diaspora Culture and the Dialogic Imagination," in Welcome to the Jungle.

42. Joseph M. Carrier, "Gay Liberation and Coming Out in Mexico," in Gay and Lesbian Youth, ed. Gilbert Herdt (Binghamton, N.Y.: Haworth Press, 1989); and Almaguer, "Chicano Men."

43. Moraga and Anzaldúa, eds., This Bridge Called My Back; and Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Spinsters, 1987).

44. Many such accounts are included in A Lotus of Another Color: An Unfolding of the South Asian Gay and Lesbian Experience, ed. Rakesh Ratti (Boston: Alyson Publications, 1993). In this volume, see especially the coming-out narratives, pp. 167-293; the interview with Urvashi Vaid, pp. 103-12; and the discussion of this history in Nayan Shah, "Sexuality, Identity, and the Uses of History," pp. 116-18.

45. Ukiko Hanawa, "Guest Editor's Introduction," Circuits of Desire, special issue of positions: east asia cultures critique 2, no. 1 (spring 1994): viii.

46. Henry Louis Gates discusses these issues in response to Isaac Julien's film Looking for Langston. See Gates, "The Black Man's Burden," in Black Popular Culture, ed. Gina Dent (Seattle: Bay Press, 1992), pp. 75-84, as well as Julien's essay "Black Is, Black Ain't: Notes on De-essentializing Black Identities," in the same volume, pp. 255-63. Ross Posnock explores these issues; see Posnock, "Before and after Identity Politics," Raritan 15, no. 1 (summer 1995): 95-115. See also Scott Bravmann, "Telling (Hi)stories: Rethinking the Lesbian and Gay Historical Imagination," OUT/LOOK: National Lesbian and Gay Quarterly, spring 1990, 68-75; idem, "Queer Historical Subjects," Socialist Review 25, no. 1 (1995): 47-68.

47. Yingling, Hart Crane, p. 25.

48. For background on these developments, see Patrick Brantlinger, Crusoe's Footprints: Cultural Studies in Britain and America (New York: Routledge, 1990). See also these influential works on cultural studies, the new historicism, and related topics: H. Aram Veeser, ed., The New Historicism (New York: Routledge, 1989); and Grossberg et al., eds., Cultural Studies.

49. A good sampling of the work of this new generation can be found in several anthologies: Ronald R. Butters, John M. Clum, and Michael Moon, eds., Displacing Homophobia (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1990); Diana Fuss, Inside/Outside: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories (New York: Routledge 1991); Henry Abelove, Michele Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin, eds., The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader (New York: Routledge, 1993).

50. Beaver, "Homosexual Signs," 104.

51. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 1. See also her recent essays collected in Tendencies (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993).

52. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 147-49. See also her collection of essays, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (New York: Routledge, 1993).

53. See Douglas Crimp with Adam Rolston, AIDS Demo Graphics (Seattle: Bay Press, 1990); Crimp, ed., AIDS; and Tessa Boffin and Sunil Gupta, eds., Ecstatic Antibodies (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1990).

54. Walt W. Odets, In the Shadow of the Epidemic (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996); and Gabriel Rotello, Sexual Ecology: AIDS and the Destiny of Gay Men (new York: Dutton, 1997).

55. Steven Epstein, Impure Science: AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).

56. Crimp, ed., AIDS; and Crimp with Rolston, AIDS Demo Graphics.

57. Cindy Patton, Sex and Germs: The Politics of AIDS (Boston: South End Press, 1985); idem, Inventing AIDS (New York: Routledge, 1990); idem, Fatal Advice: How Safe Sex Education Went Wrong (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996).

58. Paula A. Treichler, "AIDS, Homophobia, and Bio-Medical Discourse: An Epidemic of Signification," in AIDS, ed. Crimp, pp. 31-70; and idem, "AIDS, Gender, and Biomedical Discourse: Current Contests of Meaning," in AIDS: The Burdens of History, ed. Elizabeth Fee and Daniel M. Fox (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 190-266.

59. Fee and Fox, eds., AIDS; the same editors later assembled AIDS: The Making of a Chronic Disease (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). See also Catherine J. Kudnick, "One Epidemic, Many Histories," Socialist Review 21, no. 2 (April-June 1991): 165-70.

60. Epstein, Impure Science; idem, "Moral Contagion and the Medicalizing of Gay Identity: AIDS in Historical Perspective," Research in Law, Deviance, and Social Control 9 (1988): 3-36.

61. Patton's books are cited above. See Simon Watney, Policing Desire: Pornography, AIDS, and the Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987); idem, Practices of Freedom: Selected Writings on HIV/AIDS (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994). See also Amber Hollibaugh, "Lesbian Leadership and Denial in the Age of the AIDS Epidemic," in Women Resisting AIDS: Feminist Strategies of Empowerment, ed. Beth Schneider and Nancy Stoller (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994); idem, "Seducing Women into 'A Lifestyle of Vaginal Fisting,'" in Policing Public Sex, ed. Dangerous Bedfellows; and Amber Hollibaugh and Carmen Vasquez, "The Myth of Invulnerability: Lesbians and HIV Disease," Focus 8, no. 9 (1994).