This book was interesting--I think I'd like to go back and read it again but with a copy I can write in, but I don't love it enough to buy it, if that makes any sense. To me, the earlier parts of the book were the most useful, though it was definitely an interesting read (I finished it in less than a day.) In some ways, though, it felt like 'just another piece of queer theory,' which is no real mark against it necessarily if that's what you're looking for I guess, but wasn't the most interesting thing in the world to me. ( )

This is a mid-1990s work on homosexuality (mostly male homosexuality). It has no clear overarching point, presumably because it is critical theory. Even so, I found the discussion of the tension between the visibility of an identity and the mainstreaming of that identity (in the Prologue and first two chapters "The Gay Presence" and "The Gay Absence") very interesting. It was full of known theory nuggets put together in interesting ways, with especial resonance added in the last 15 years because we've gone so far down first essentializing and then normalizing gay identities in search of legitimacy. (The naturalness of gayness as an identity rather than an act is an assessment about reality that is just as fraught for the Queer Left as for the Christian Right -- and, interestingly, opposition from both groups is crumbling.)

Some quotes from the parts I liked:

• The constructed binary sexual divide: "The gay liberationists of the early 1970s, as Steven Epstein notes, repudiated 'the notion of "the homosexual" as a distinct type...in favor of a left Freudian view of human sexuality as "polymorphously perverse."'"
  
• Why we de-gayed ourselves: "The sodomite had no case to make for his sexual practices; the homosexual personality, by psychologizing such practices and integrating its sexuality into the structures of a demonstrably viable social self, could begin to make a persuasive case for legitimation. The invention of the homosexual may have been the precondition of sexual liberation in that the homosexual essence partially desexualizes (and thereby sanitizes or domesticates) the very acts that presumably called the essence into being."
  
• Problems with de-gaying: "De-gaying gayness can only fortify homophobic oppression; it accomplishes in its own way the principal aim of homophobia: the elimination of gays." (This quote is the book's winner.)
  
• Inevitability of homophobia: "Inasmuch as homophobia is itself the sign of the ineradicability of homosexuality, however, it must remain."
  
• Drag may be fun but is not significant: "Resignification cannot destroy; it merely presents to the dominant culture spectacles of politically impotent disrespect."

The second half, though, was pure literary criticism ("The Gay Daddy" and "The Gay Outlaw"). Critical theory applied to authors like Proust and Genet didn't work for me, since I have not read their works and I don't really care about the topics at hand (ahem, Genet's rhetorical use of rimming). So, I tuned out. Way out.

Overall, the first half is intriguing, and the second half isn't. To get a better introduction to the valuable concepts, I'd recommend Warner's The Trouble With Normal over Bersani's Homos, with the recognition that Warner built on Bersani. ( )