1. I want to thank the following friends for their comments and suggestions on this introduction: Chris Bull, E. G. Crichton, Jim Green, Amber Hollibaugh, Robert Hughes, Terrence Kissack, Loring McAlpin, Molly McGarry, Kevin Murphy, Matt Rottnek, Andrew Spieldenner, and Leith ter Meulen. I would especially like to thank Matthew Lore, who guided me through its many drafts. I remain responsible for its shortcomings.

2. These structures reflect the temporality of the longue durée—the slower, often hidden social developments, as opposed to the temporality of current events. See p. 31 of Fernand Braudel, "History and the Social Sciences: The Longue Durée," in his book of essays On History (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1980). See also Raymond Williams on structures of feeling in Marxism and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 128-35.

3. For a rare first-person account of a homosexual life originally published in 1901, see Claude Hartland, The Story of a Life (San Francisco: Grey Fox Press, 1985). See also the documents in Jonathan Ned Katz, Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A. (New York: Crowell, 1976), and in Martin Bauml Duberman, About Time: Exploring the Gay Past (New York: Gay Press of New York, 1986), pp. 5-48.

4. Barbara Welter, "The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860," in The American Family in Social-Historical Perspective, ed. Michael Gordon (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1973); Carol Smith-Rosenberg, "The World of Love and Ritual," in Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Knopf, 1985); and Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (New York: Morrow, 1981).

5. Ben Barker-Benfield, "The Spermatic Economy: A Nineteenth-Century View of Sexuality," in American Family, ed. M. Gordon.

6. See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), pp. 83-96.

7. For example, see Estelle B. Freedman, Maternal Justice: Miriam van Waters and the Female Reform Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); and John D'Emilio, "Homophobia and the Trajectory of Postwar American Radicalism: The Case of Bayard Rustin," Radical History Review, no. 62 (spring 1995).

8. See Edward Carpenter, "The Intermediate Sex," in Selected Writings, vol. 1, Sex (1908; reprint, London: Gay Men's Press, 1984), pp. 217-19. See also John Addington Symonds, A Problem in Modern Ethics, reprinted along with Symonds's letters to Carpenter in Male Love: A Problem in Greek Ethics and Other Writings (New York: Pagan Press, 1983), pp. 93-103, 153-54. For a fuller sense of the historical background and Walt Whitman's role, see Sheila Rowbotham and Jeffrey Weeks, Socialism and the New Life: The Personal Politics of Edward Carpenter and Havelock Ellis (London: Pluto Press, 1977).

9. My view of homoeroticism as an American cultural semiotic was suggested by Houston A. Baker's study of blues as a cultural semiotic in Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), pp. 1-14; and from Thomas E. Yingling's discussion of homosexuality as a cultural semiotic (he cites Baker) in Hart Crane and the Homosexual Text (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 1-23.

10. Michael Moon, "Disseminating Whitman," South Atlantic Quarterly 88, no. 1 (winter 1989): 248.

11. Ibid., p. 251.

12. For a pioneering discussion of the social implications of this mix of dread and desire from the perspective of French philosophers of desire Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, see Guy Hocquenghem, The Problem Is Not So Much Homosexual Desire as the Fear of Homosexuality (London: Allison & Busby, 1978; reprint, Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994).

13. See the two documentary histories that Jonathan Ned Katz edited. One section of Gay American History ("Trouble: 1566-1966," pp. 11-128) documents the repression of homosexual behavior throughout U.S. history. A more focused exploration of repression during the colonial period appears in Gay/Lesbian Almanac: A New Documentary (New York: Harper & Row, 1983), pp. 66-133.

14. George Chauncey documents Roosevelt's investigation of sexual perversion in the Navy. See Chauncey, "Christian Brotherhood or Sexual Perversion? Homosexual Identities and the Construction of Social Boundaries in the World War I Era," in Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, ed. Martin Bauml Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey, Jr. (New York: New American Library, 1989), pp. 294-317.

In addition to the findings in lesbian and gay history, works of broad cultural interpretation reveal a powerful current of homoeroticism in American culture and history. See especially Leslie A. Fielder, Love and Death in the American Novel (New York: Criterion Books, 1960). See also F. O. Mathiessen's correspondence with his lover Russell Cheney: Rat and the Devil: Journal Letters of F. O. Mathiessen and Russell Cheney, ed. Louis Hyde (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1978) on the homosexual background to Mathiessen's magnum opus, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941). For other historical work documenting American homoeroticism, see the following: Steven Watson, The Harlem Renaissance: Hub of African-American Culture, 1920-1930 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1995); Georges-Michel Sarotte, Like a Brother, Like a Lover: Male Homosexuality in the American Novel and Theatre from Herman Melville to James Baldwin (New York: Anchor Press, 1978); and Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988-89). Texts documenting the history of homophobia are somewhat scarcer, but see again works of lesbian and gay history, particularly Katz's documentary histories, Gay American History and Gay/Lesbian Almanac.

15. In Between Men, Sedgwick explores a similar pattern of interlocking social structures—homosocial desire and homophobia—in the hundred years between the mid-eighteenth century and the mid-nineteenth century.

16. New York Times, February 11, 1996. See also Frank Rich's op-ed piece "Bashing to Victory," New York Times, February 14, 1996.

17. Jonathan Ned Katz, The Invention of Heterosexuality (New York: Dutton, 1995).

18. Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966); and Norman O. Brown, Life against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1959).

19. Karl Marx, "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon," in Surveys from Exile: Political Writings (New York: Penguin Books, 1973), 2:146.

20. Paul Berman discusses this phenomenon in A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968 (New York: Norton, 1996).

21. See Marshall Berman, The Politics of Authenticity: Radical Individualism and the Emergence of Modern Society (New York: Atheneum, 1972); James Miller, Democracy Is in the Streets (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987); and Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971).

22. Frederick A. Olafson, "Authenticity and Obligation," in Sartre: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Mary Warnock (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1971), p. 138.

23. See Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991); and The Miami Theory Collective, eds., Community at Loose Ends (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991).

24. Berman, Politics of Authenticity, pp. 284-320.

25. Gerald Early, ed., Lure and Loathing: Essays on Race, Identity, and the Ambivalence of Assimilation (New York: Allen Lane, 1993). This collection of essays explores W.E.B. DuBois's notion of the "double consciousness" of African-Americans.

26. Bruce Bawer, A Place at the Table: The Gay Individual in American Society (New York: Poseidon Press, 1993). Other writers share many of Bawer's positions, including Andrew Sullivan, Virtually Normal: An Argument about Homosexuality (New York: Knopf, 1995), and Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen, After the Ball: How America Will Conquer Its Fear and Hatred of Gays in the Nineties (New York: Doubleday, 1989).

27. Urvashi Vaid, Virtual Equality: The Mainstreaming of Gay and Lesbian Liberation (New York: Anchor Books, 1995), p. 3.

28. See "Queer/Nation," the brief article I wrote with Allan Bérubé. See also articles on Queer Nation in OUT/LOOK: National Lesbian and Gay Quarterly, no. 11 (winter 1992); and Lauren Berlandt and Elizabeth Freeman, "Queer Nationality," in Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory, ed. Michael Warner (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 193-229.

29. Warner, introduction to Fear of a Queer Planet, p. xxvi. See also Steven Seidman, "Deconstructing Queer Theory or the Under-Theorization of the Social and the Ethical," in Social Postmodernism: Beyond Identity Politics, ed. Linda Nicholson and Steven Seidman (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 123-31.

30. Warner, introduction to Fear of a Queer Planet, p. xxvii.

31. For a discussion of queer theory, see chapter 8 in this volume: "Under the Sign of the Queer."

32. Hocquenghem, Problem Is Not Desire, p. 36.

33. Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on Sexuality (New York: Basic Books, 1962). See also Freud's 1908 essay "'Civilized' Sexual Morality and Modern Nervousness," in a collection of his essays, Sexuality and the Psychology of Love, ed. Philip Reiff (New York: Collier Books, 1963), pp. 20-40.

34. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (New York: Norton, 1961).

35. In a series of essays and books, Leo Bersani has explored the significance of perverse, transgressive sexuality. See Bersani, The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986); idem, "Is the Rectum a Grave?" in AIDS: Cultural Analysis, Cultural Activism, ed. Douglas Crimp (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988); idem, The Culture of Redemption (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990); and idem, Homos (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995). Jonathan Dollimore has also explored these issues in Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault (Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1991).

36. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1975), p. 19. The "perverse," or polymorphous perversity, represents what might also be called "the homosexual sublime," which Yingling examines in Hart Crane, pp. 145-85. Fredric Jameson characterizes the sublime as "something like the pleasure in pain" in his essay "Baudelaire as Modernist and Postmodernist," in Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism, ed. C. Hosek and P. Park (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 262.

37. John Rechy, Sexual Outlaw (New York: Grove Press, 1977).

38. Bersani, Freudian Body, pp. 81-106, and Culture of Redemption, pp. 29-46.

39. Bersani, Homos, pp. 2-3.

40. Ibid., p. 4.

41. Ibid., p. 4.

42. Ibid., p. 69.

43. Tony Kushner, Thinking about the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness: Essays, a Play, Two Poems, and a Prayer (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1995), p. 78.

44. Erving Goffman explored identity ambivalence in Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1963).

45. Hannah Arendt developed a post-Holocaust theoretical framework within which to examine Jewish identity politics. See Ron H. Feldman, ed., The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age (New York: Grove Press, 1978).