1. I would never have written this essay without the constant encouragement of four people: Dick Bunce, Mark Leger, Ilene Philipson, and Gayle Rubin. In addition to thanking them, I would like to thank Dennis Altman, Jeanne Bergman, Allan Bérubé, George Chauncey, Donald Lowe, William Simon, Howard Winant, and the Bay Area Socialist Review Collective for their extensive comments and suggestions. I owe a special debt to the students in my course on homosexuality and social change at the University of California, Berkeley, during the summer and fall of 1983; their critical, passionate, and intelligent arguments helped me develop many of the ideas in this essay.

2. For a theoretical discussion of the political ontology of identities, see Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985), pp. 114-22.

3. Rubin, "Traffic in Women," pp. 159, 199-200. Recently, Rubin has modified her earlier formulation to distinguish between the sex and gender components of the sex/gender system and to outline a model of "sexual transformation." See Rubin, "Thinking Sex," pp. 284-87, on sexual transformation; and see pp. 307-9 for modifications to her conceptualization of the sex/gender system.

George Chauncey, Jr., has also used the sex/gender system as an analytical framework in his history of medical theories of gender deviance and homosexuality. See George Chauncey, Jr., "From Sexual Inversion to Homosexuality: Medicine and the Changing Conceptualization of Female Deviance," Salmagundi, nos. 58-99 (fall 1982-winter 1983): 114-46. Chantal Mouffe has argued that the sex/gender paradigm is more useful than concepts of "patriarchy" or the "social relations of reproduction" for understanding the different practices, discourses, and institutions by which women's subordination is constructed. See Mouffe, "The Sex/Gender System and the Discursive Construction of Women's Subordination," in Rethinking Ideology: A Marxist Debate, ed. I. Bessenyei et al. (New York: International General/IMMRC, 1983), pp. 139-43.

4. Anthony Giddens's analysis specifies these three dimensions (domination, normative regulation, and coding) as aspects of social reproduction. See his Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure, and Contradiction in Social Analysis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), esp. pp. 96-115 and 225-33, for his discussion of the analysis I draw on here.

5. For an account of racial formation, see Michael Omi and Howard Winant, "By the Rivers of Babylon: Race in the United States," Socialist Review, no. 71 (September-October); no. 72 (November-December 1983). For an analysis of class formation in the same spirit, see Adam Przeworski, "Proletariat into a Class: The Process of Class Formation from Karl Kautsky's The Class Struggle to Recent Controversies," Politics and Society 7, no. 4 (1977). Authors who have mapped some of the interactions of the sex/gender system with other sectors of society include Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics, and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality since 1800 (London: Longman, 1981), pp. 12-16; and Gagnon and Simon, in their pioneering work Sexual Conduct, pp. 287-307.

6. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), pp. 15-50.

7. Clellon S. Ford and Frank A. Beach, Patterns of Sexual Behavior (New York: Harper & Row, 1951).

8. K. J. Dover, Greek Homosexuality (New York: Vintage Books, 1980), pp. 39-57.

9. Will Roscoe, Zuni Man-Woman (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1991).

10. Jeffrey Weeks, Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain, from the Nineteenth Century to the Present (London: Quartet Books, 1977); John D'Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940-1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); Kenneth Plummer, ed., The Making of the Modern Homosexual (London: Hutchinson, 1981).

11. Lionel Trilling, "The Kinsey Report," in The Liberal Imagination (New York: Anchor Books, 1953), p. 234.

12. Alfred C. Kinsey, Wardell B. Pomeroy, and Clyde E. Martin, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (Philadelphia: Saunders, 1948), and Alfred C. Kinsey et al., Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (Philadelphia: Saunders, 1953), p. 10.

13. Paul Robinson, The Modernization of Sex (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), p. 51.

14. Ibid., pp. 49-51, 115-19.

15. Ira L. Reiss, "Standards of Sexual Behavior," in The Encyclopedia of Sexual Behavior, ed. Albert Ellis and Albert Abarbanel (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1961). This was calculated from unpublished data from the Institute for Sex Research, which were quoted in D. Smith, "Dating of the American Sexual Revolution"; also Linda Gordon discusses the dating of sexual behavioral changes in Woman's Body, Woman's Right: Birth Control in America (New York: Penguin, 1977), p. 193.

16. Lewis M. Terman, Psychological Factors in Marital Happiness (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1938), quoted in L. Gordon, Woman's Body, Woman's Right, p. 193.

17. For discussions of the distinction between homosexual persons and homosexual acts, see Claude J. Summers on Gore Vidal, in Gay Fictions: Wilde to Stonewall (New York: Continuum, 1990), p. 113; and Richard Goldstein's interview with James Baldwin in Goldstein, "Go the Way Your Blood Beats," Village Voice, June 26, 1984, p. 14.

18. D'Emilio, Sexual Politics, pp. 57-91.

19. Two books by Robert J. Corber explore the connection between anticommunism and homophobia. See In the Name of National Security: Hitchcock and the Political Construction of Gender in Postwar America (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993); and Homosexuality in Cold War America: Resistance and the Crisis of Masculinity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997).

20. Recently, Daniel Harris has explored the role of gay culture as the basis for group consciousness. See Harris, The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture (New York: Hyperion, 1997).

21. The quotations from and material about the Mattachine Society are from D'Emilio, Sexual Politics, pp. 65, 77-91.

22. Donald Webster Cory, The Homosexual in America: A Subjective Approach (New York: Castle Books, 1951; reprint, 1960).

23. Ira L. Reiss, Premarital Sexual Standards in America (New York: Free Press, 1960); Robert R. Bell, Premarital Sex in Changing Society (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1966).

24. Barbara Ehrenreich, The Hearts of Men (New York: Doubleday/Anchor, 1984), pp. 42-51.

25. H. W. Arndt, The Rise and Fall of Economic Growth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 27.

26. Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, "The Crisis of Liberal Democratic Capitalism: The Case of the United States," Politics and Society 11, no. 1 (1982): 65-66.

27. Richard A. Easterlin, "What Will 1984 Be Like? Socioeconomic Implications of Recent Twists in Age Structure," Demography 15, no. 4 (November 1978). See also idem, "American Population since 1940," in The American Economy in Transition, ed. Martin Feldstein (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).

28. Robert A. Gordon, Economic Instability and Growth: The American Record (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), pp. 105-7; Harry N. Scheiber, Harold G. Vatter, and Harold Underwood Faulkner, American Economic History (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), pp. 422-27.

29. See Ruth Milkman, "Organizing the Sexual Division of Labor: Historical Perspectives on Women's Work and the American Labor Movement," Socialist Review, no. 49 (vol. 10, no. 1; January-February 1980): 128-41; and idem, "Women's Work and the Economic Crisis: Some Lessons from the Great Depression," in A Heritage of Her Own, ed. Nancy F. Cott and Elizabeth H. Pleck (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979), p. 532.

30. See Winifred D. Wandersee, Women's Work and Family Values, 1920-1940 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), esp. pp. 27-54, 103-17.

31. William H. Chafe, "Looking backward in Order to Look forward," in Women and the American Economy, ed. Juanita Kreps (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1976), p. 17.

32. See Wandersee, Women's Work, pp. 111-117.

33. John Modell, Frank Furstenberg, and Douglas Strong, "The Timing of the Marriage in the Transition to Adulthood, 1860-1975," American Journal of Sociology 84, supplement (1978); and Andrew Cherlin, Marriage, Divorce, Remarriage (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), pp. 8-12, 19-21.

34. Easterlin, "American Population since 1940."

35. Norman Ryder, "Recent Trends and Group Differences in Fertility," in Toward the End of Growth: Population in America, ed. Charles F. Westoff (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1973), p. 61; see also Judith Blake, "Coercive Pronatalism and American Population Policy" (paper prepared for the commission on Population Growth and the American Future, 1972).

36. Rubin, "Thinking Sex," pp. 269-70; see also Allan Bérubé, "Marching to a Different Drummer," in Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, ed. Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983); D'Emilio, Sexual Politics; idem, "Gay Politics, Gay Community: San Francisco's Experience," Socialist Review, no. 55 (vol. 11, no. 1; January-February 1981).

37. Eileen Applebaum, "Women in the Stagflation Economy," in Reaganomics in the Stagflation Economy, ed. Sidney Weintraub and Marvin Goodstein (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983), p. 38. For more recent data, see George Masnick and Mary Jo Bane, The Nation's Families: 1960-1990 (Boston: Auburn House, 1980).

38. Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1976), pp. 33-84.

39. Mark Poster, Critical Theory of the Family (New York: Seabury Press, 1978), pp. 166-205; and Masnick and Bane, Nation's Families, pp. 95-116.

40. Ehrenreich, Hearts of Men, pp. 14-28.

41. Ilene Philipson, "Heterosexual Antagonisms and the Politics of Mothering," Socialist Review, no. 66 (vol. 12, no. 6; November-December 1982.

42. For example, see Daniel Bell, Work and Its Discontents, reprinted in his collection The End of Ideology (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1960); and Ely Chinoy, Automobile Workers and the American Dream (New York: Random House, 1955).

43. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, p. 50. See Paul Goodman, Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized System (New York: Random House, 1960).

44. Quoted in Richard King, The Party of Eros: Radical Social Thought and the Realm of Freedom (New York: Dell, 1973), p. 84.

45. Chauncey, "Sexual Inversion," pp. 114-46.

46. Ibid., p. 120.

47. See James D. Steakley, The Homosexual Emancipation Movement in Germany (New York: Arno Press, 1975).

48. Carpenter, "Intermediate Sex."

49. For a critical discussion of this assumption, see Gagnon and Simon, Sexual Conduct, pp. 132-36.

50. Barbara Ponse, Identities in the Lesbian World: The Social Construction of Self (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1978), pp. 24-30; see also Gagnon and Simon, Sexual Conduct, pp. 99-109.

51. John Money and Anke Ehrhardt, Man and Woman, Boy and Girl: The Differentiation and Dimorphism of Gender Identity from Conception to Maturity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972); see also Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978) for an analysis of the social construction of gender identity.

52. See Esther Newton and Shirley Walton, "The Misunderstanding: Toward a More Precise Sexual Vocabulary," Pleasure and Danger, ed. Vance.

53. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 29-42.

54. John Rechy, City of Night (New York: Grove Press, 1963), p. 22.

55. Quoted in Sacha G. Lewis, Sunday's Women: Lesbian Life Today (Boston: Beacon Press, 1979), p. 30.

56. See Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community (New York: Routledge, 1993).

57. William Simon and John H. Gagnon, "Sexual Scripts," Transaction/Society, November-December 1984.

58. Joan Nestle, "Butch/Femme Relationships: Sexual Courage in the 1950s," Heresies, no. 12 (1981): 21-24.

59. See Amber Hollibaugh and Cherríe Moraga, "What We're Rollin around in Bed with: Sexual Silences in Feminism," Heresies, no. 12 (1981): 58-62; reprinted in Powers of Desire, ed. Snitow et al., pp. 394-405.

60. For the best account of camp and its importance in gay male culture of the 1950s and early 1960s, see Esther Newton, Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1972). For a somewhat priggish critique of camp from an early gay liberationist perspective, see Jeffrey Escoffier, "Breaking Camp," Gay Alternative, no. 4 (1973): 6-8.

61. "Notes on Camp," reprinted in Susan Sontag, A Susan Sontag Reader (New York: Vintage Books, 1983), p. 117.

62. For an excellent analysis of subcultures as counterhegemonic cultural responses, see Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (New York: Methuen, 1979), esp. pp. 73-99.

63. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1959), pp. 106-40.

64. Laud Humphries, Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places (Chicago: Aldine, 1970). See Michel de Certeau's discussion of "tactics" versus spatial "strategies" in Practice of Everyday Life, especially pp. 34-39.

65. See Allan Bérubé, "Behind the Spectre," Body Politic, April 1981, and idem, "The History of Gay Bathhouses," Coming Up! December 1984, 18; reprinted in Dangerous Bedfellows, eds., Policing Public Sex (Boston: South End Press, 1996). See also Ellen Klages, "When the Bar Was the Only Place in Town," in 1984 International Lesbian/Gay Freedom Day Parade Celebration (San Francisco: 1984), pp. 39-41.

66. Toby Marotta, The Politics of Homosexuality (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981), esp. pp. 48-68.

67. Mary McIntosh, "The Homosexual Role," Social Problems 16, no. 2 (fall 1968).

68. See the interview with Mary McIntosh, "Postscript: The Homosexual Role Revisited," in Making of the Modern Homosexual, ed. Plummer, pp. 44-49.

69. Antonio Gramsci, "Problems of Philosophy and History," in Selections from the Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 1971), pp. 366-67. Sartre also identified the significance of such a moment as the transition from "being-in-itself" to "being-for-itself." See Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (New York: Citadel Press, 1971), pp. 65-77.

70. Dennis Altman, Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation (reprint, New York: Avon Books, 1973). Altman later published another important evaluation of the lesbian and gay movements, The Homosexualization of America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1983).

71. Altman, Homosexual, pp. 13-41.

72. Ibid., p. 98.

73. Ibid., p. 94.

74. Ibid., pp. 108-51.

75. Ibid., pp. 234, 237.

76. Katz, Gay American History (reprint, New York: Avon Books, 1978), p. 1.

77. Gay Left Collective, Homosexuality: Power and Politics (London: Allison & Busby, 1980).

78. See Kenneth Plummer, Sexual Stigma: An Interactionist Account (London: Routledge, 1975), and Making of the Modern Homosexual, the essay collection that Plummer edited, which included many of the Gay Left authors.

79. John D'Emilio, "Capitalism and Gay Identity," in Powers of Desire, ed. Snitow et al.

80. Alan Crawford, Thunder on the Right: The New Right and the Politics of Resentment (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), pp. 144-64.

81. Robert Reilly, "Homosexual Rights and the Foundations of Human Rights," Family Policy Insights 1, no. 3 (December 1981): 539-40.

82. The sex/gender system is organized, according to the principle of consistency, into a plurality of autonomous practices and identities that involve age, gender, sexuality, and form of family. The breakdown of this system suggests the rise of a new sex/gender code that could be called the combinatorial principle. In this new code, the social relations of gender and sex will be more fluid. Thus, distinct sexualities would emerge based on permutations of the elements (not necessarily immutable elements) of the sex/gender system—for example butch heterosexual women and femme heterosexual men. The combinatorial principle of the sex/gender system would offer an ideological framework for these permutations of diverse components of sexualities and genders.

83. Goffman, Stigma, p. 111.

84. Michel Foucault, "A Preface to Transgression," in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 34-36.