The Project of This Book

This book takes up the inquiry I began in my first book, Sexual Politics: The Gay Person in America Today (2006), and journeys beyond it. It deals with some big questions, the Big Questions of power, sexuality, and gender, which are themselves the themes around which the following discussion/excavation is organized. Inquiry, with the experience of Gay life as its method, arrives at this quintessential question: Who can one be after a lifetime of being made into no one, no thing – nothing? The discovery this question invites is made all the more difficult because the Heteroarchy has always posed the questions, defined their limits, and usually hidden the answers. The reality of Gay life under heteroarchal law lays bare the relationship between epistemology as a method of knowing and law as a method of power to enforce dominant thought: In the condition that is straight dominance, what is epistemological is taken as ontological.

Any Gay person who manages to stay alive is engaged in a struggle for the freedom of Self. In the process of this struggle, Gays face a beguiling everyday – a Scylla and Charybdis that looks like placid water until it is suddenly the swirling vortex consuming you. The “gay rights movement” has plunged into this vortex, rushed headlong into it, seemingly without a thought of the danger. This vortex is the vortex of the Heteroarchy’s cleverly constructed everyday, in which they succeed in defining even the Gay struggle for identity on straight terms: the monogamous family ideal, reproduction, marriage, et cetera. Anything not defined by – not moving in and through this context – is made to seem illusory at best, deviant at worst. Sustained attacks on the political system of straight supremacy are thus rendered unlikely, if not unthinkable. After all, if the goal has become assimilating into the straight model, then who would think of destroying this model? Or if revolution is too much to hope for, who would think even of engaging it analytically, when it cannot be seen for the simple reason that it is omnipresent?