American Homo: Community and Perversity

by Jeffrey Escoffier

Jeffrey Escoffier traces the emergence of a gay and lesbian political identity over the last four decades in this wide-ranging collection of his most influential essays. Situating the development of gay and lesbian communities in a broad sweep of recent American history, Escoffier examines how an urban subculture created by stigmatized and invisible men and women evolved into a vital public community with an activist political agenda and an influential position in contemporary American culture. Detailing what he calls the "political economy of the closet," Escoffier argues that the market process often played a crucial role (for better or for worse) in the emergence of gay and lesbian communities, and conversely, that these new communities have significantly impacted the American marketplace.

From the development of a camp sensibility in popular culture—inspired by the erotic exhibitionism of drag queens—to the public reformation of safer-sex guidelines, Escoffier demonstrates how the gay movement has gradually acquired both social authority and recognition as a booming market. Throughout the ongoing struggle for legitimacy, gays and lesbians have had to negotiate the historical tension between the homoeroticism that courses through American culture and periodic outbreaks of homophobic paranoia. Escoffier follows the lesbian and gay movement across the contested terrain of American political life between the poles of multiculturalism and the religious right, to reveal how sexual minorities constitute a challenge to American society even as they are thoroughly integrated as citizens and kin. From McCarthy-era witchhunts to the activism of Queer Nation, Escoffier vividly describes the characteristic American homosexual journey through the tangled political web of authenticity, identity, and community.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, LGBT, Queer, Politics, Gay

316 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

About the author

Jeffrey Escoffier wrote on glbtq history, politics, culture, sexuality, music, and dance. One of the founders of OUT/LOOK: National Lesbian and Gay Quarterly, he published widely. Among his books are American Homo: Community and Perversity and a biography of John Maynard Keynes in the Chelsea House series on the Lives of Notable Gay Men and Lesbians. He co-edited (with Matthew Lore) Mark Morris' L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato: A Celebration and also edited is Sexual Revolution, an anthology of writing on sex from the 1960s and 1970s. In 2009, he published Bigger Than Life: The History of Gay Porn Cinema from Beefcake to Hardcore. He was also on the board of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at The City University of New York.

Reviews

[heptagrammaton · Rating 4 out of 5]

The essays of American Homo are very of the moment they were written, inbetween 1985 and 1997, often originally published (with some or none revision undergone on their way in this collection) in response to concurrent events. As such, they are dated – but also offer a useful glimpse in the preoccupations of the period, adding to these essays' value in sketching out queer history, which is one of Escoffier's interests here anyway.
   If there is a crucial point that he insists on in talking about historical developments and (indeed, as a statistical fact, the inherent, inborn, to-be-overcome-with-each-generation, that we are not born among it but must acquired in later life) discontinuities of knowledge within queer communities: there is such thing as historical lessons which generations of activists and theorists learned that easily slip out of common memory.
   Stylistically, Escoffier is not much of a prosaist: his more autobiographical passages are bland and stilted. Abstract or somewhat terminology-laden prose, if anything, serves him better. In a tech
   Ch. 9 (The Limits of Multiculturalism: Identity Politics and the Transformation of the Public Sphere, orig. publ. in the Socialist Review 21, VII-XII/1991) offers some still applicable and sober advice about organizing at the same time as it engages in a humane and nuanced way with the emotional investments that all identity politics brings to the fore and the vulnerability that may be experienced even by hegemonic groups.

... The very term "multicultural" assumes enduring and distinct cultural idenitties—both personal and collective. These collectively constructed identities require strong boundaries, however, to protect the values embodied in them . . . other community members experience any modification of the normative boundaries of individual threat.

(More notes, better notes, about the 1970s-present cultural takeover of the astroturfed American Right to come when I have brain, more brain, and my keyboard is not being threatened by a cat.)

notes on the book as a physical object:
   (2018 reprint by Verso, paperback)
   The rub about Verso is that they regularly use this t h i c k𒑰 and thicker yet cardstock for their covers, amounting to a volume that fights to be opened, fights to remain closed, fights you when you are trying, gets its spine crinkled like linen pants after 8 hours in a train seat by dint of the resistance the aforementioned material exert on each other as you are wrangling it to get to read the bloody thing, and then will need you to borrow some heavy duty clamps from your partner who's into wordworking should you ever wish it to occupy a width comparable to how it was as it was yet unopened.
   (My review notes on physical books' material feel and makeup does not, as ever, bear any relation to star rating. That'd be sort of silly.)

____
 𒑰 spelling it with two Cs would imply i find it sexy, whereas, and i wish to make this clear, find unnecessarily bookshelf-space-intensive codices utterly unsexy

[Lars Meijer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ondanks dat de essays soms inhoudelijk met elkaar overlappen, is de bundel een overzichtelijke en waardevolle toevoeging aan het gesprek over de politieke kracht van queers. Ik was vooral getroffen door het stuk 'Inside the Ivory Tower', over het verschil tussen 'hedendaagse' denkers en de oudere groep activisten en het effect hiervan op actie/beleid.

*4,5

[El cassidy · Rating 4 out of 5]

really interesting but feels a little disjointed

[Janet Wertman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting but published in 1998 so it did not cover the key developments of the past two decades….(duh but…)