The most poignant conversation I had in the roughly three-year period during which I spoke and wrote the words that make up this book was with a young, Gay male college student. This was no Gay man with a straight man in his head. He had recently come out of the closet in ethnic and religious circumstances that made this action one of particular bravery. He had heard me lecture, he had read my books and articles, and he sought me out to tell me that I still had not answered the most important question he had about his own life: that I had not, to his satisfaction, provided him with an answer as to where he fits into the world as a Gay man. He asked a question as bewildering as it was marvelous in its metaphysical complexity: What is Gay identity? For example, when I said that the aim of Gay liberation is a new order in which homosexuality is something other than the absence of heterosexuality and where Gay people are more than a counterfactual to straight supremacy, that its aim is a world in which Gay people are finally accepted as irreducibly human, he wanted to know what this humanity will look like. What will its content be? When I said that in order to be free Gay people must overcome the identity we have been raised to, which has been primarily as the masochistic counterpart to heterosexuality’s sadism, he wanted to know what identity would take its place. And he said with deep understanding that perhaps the reason so many Gay youth resort to suicide is that they are disconnected from any sense of community, of history – of identity.

The answers he wants are not easily given, nor are the questions even fully articulable at this time. One cannot know now, at the rough beginnings of a process, what sexuality unconditioned by sex inequality, and male supremacy in particular, might look like. Certainly, the answer is not accessible through mere phenomenological observation. The systematic erasure of Gay experience and point of view has made discovery more difficult and the need for a process of discovery – of becoming – more urgent. Questions, and hopefully answers, become apparent through time, but also, importantly, through resistance and opposition, which is to say through effort.