men and ignorance,

men, with superior extralinguistic resources and privileged discourse positions,

pullulate

cyclonic epistemological undertows

One considers: (1) primafacie, nobody could, of course, actually for an instant mistake the intent of the gay advocates as facetious. (2) Secunda facie, it is thus the court itself that is pleased to be facetious. Tr_ading on the assertion's very (3) transparent stupidity (not just the contemptuous dem-onstration that powerful people don't have to be acute or right, but even more, the contemptuous demonstration-this is palpable throughout the majority opinions, but only in ,this word does it bubble up with active pleasure-of how obtuseness itself arms the powerful against their en-emies), the court's joke here (in the wake of the mock-ignorant mock-jocose threat implicit in "at best") is (4) the clownish claim to be able at will to "read"-i.e., project into-the minds of the gay advocates. This being not only (5) a parody of, but ( 6) more intimately a kind of aggressive jamming technique against, (7) the truth/paranoid fantasy that it is gay people who can read, or project their own desires into, the minds of ''straight" people.

precisely in their ignorance

binarized identity that was full of implications, however confusing, for even the ostensibly least sexual aspects of personal existence.

"Homo-sexual" was a relatively gender-neutral term

algolagnia

It is a rather amazing fact that, of the very many dimensions along which the genital activity of one person can be differentiated from that of another ( dimensions that include preference for certain acts, certain zones or sensations, certain physical types, a certain frequency, certain symbolic investments, certain relations of age or power, a certain species, a certain number of participants, etc. etc. etc.)

The passage of time, the bestowal of thought and necessary political struggle since the tum of the century have only spread and deepened the long crisis of modem sexual definition

obvious

To \ the contrary, the recent historicizing work has assumed ( 1) that the differences between the homosexuality "we know today" and previous arrangements of same-sex relations may be so profound and so integrally rooted in other cultural differences that there may be no continuous, defining essence of "homosexuality" to be known;

hat every major character in the archetypal Ameri-can "allegory of good and evil" is English;

What's now in place, in contrast, in ~ost ~cholarship an~ most curric-/ ula is an even briefer response to questions like these: Don t ask. Or, les~ laconically: You shouldn't know.

Men who write openly as gay men have also often been excluded from the consensus of the traditional canon and may operate more forcefully now within a specifically gay /lesbian canon

heuristic

"once the paradigm is blurred, utopia begins: meaning and sex become the objects of free play, at the heart of which the (polysemant) forms and the (sensual) practices, liberated from the binary prison, will achieve a state of infinite expan-sion.

"Closeted-ness" itself is a performance initiated as such by the speech act of a silence

a chronic, now endemic crisis of homo/heterosexual definition, indicatively male, dating from the end of the nineteenth century

for years canvassed freely the emotional complications of each other's erotic lives-the man's eroticism happening to focus ex-clusively on men. But it was only after one particular conversational moment, fully a decade into this relationship, that it seemed to either of these friends that permission had been given to the woman to refer to the man, in their conversation together, as a gay man.