Gay Male Identities, Personal Privacy, and Relations of Public Exchange: Notes on Directions for Queer Critique

Discusses Andrew Sullivan's work (eg, 1995) as a fetishization of normative whiteness. Sullivan presents an optimistic view of recent acquired immune defiency syndrome drugs by rendering invisible the large majority of nonwhite, non-middle-class individuals who will not have access to these medications. Further Sullivan achieves an optimistic view about the integration of homosexuals into mainstream culture by assuming the existence of a liberal-democratic political subjectivity. Here, alternative strategies for producing homosexual subjectivity in public discourse are discussed. These strategies are grounded in a queering of homosexual identity such that homosexuality becomes defined in terms of the multiple factors, eg, race & class, that constitute identity. These acts of identity construction are interpreted less as the emergence of others in liberal political rhetoric, than as the growing recognition that identity is itself fluid; therefore, individuals might one day be that which they now find alien. D. M. Smith