American Homo: Community and Perversity

by Jeffrey Escoffier

Jeffrey Escoffier has been writing about gay and lesbian life since the 1970s. He was a founding member of the hugely influential journal The Gay Alternative as well as the executive editor and publisher of OUT/LOOK, the quarterly that redefined gay and lesbian publishing in the late 1980s. Through it all, he has been in the vanguard of shaping, planing, and enlivening gay politics. In American Homo, Escoffier has collected almost 20 years' worth of essays that display not only his growth as a thinker, but provide a map to the past and future of gay theory.

Escoffier's interests mirror the enormous changes that have occurred in gay life over the past two decades. In his early chapters, he traces the rise of the gay movement and the increasing importance of visible sexuality in gay people's lives, moving from there to the importance of how identity manifests itself in community and politics. He discusses the tensions that exist between a professionalized homosexual politic (particularly in the academy) and the more independent, community-based models of grass-roots groups such as ACT UP and Queer Nation. Escoffier is able to communicate complicated ideas in plain language, and his vision and common sense are enlightening. American Homo is the perfect culmination to an already distinguished career. --Michael Bronski

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

288 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

[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…)