He presents the idea of a gay identity as a part of a global spectrum of homosexual lifestyles and manifestations. America, according to Browning, is not home to all the world's homosexuals, but it has created all gays. It's a longing for certainty and stability whose story is all about uncertainty and instability. Browning uses Edmond White as an example. Browning comments that if this person who epitomizes the gay identity admits he might have been bisexual under different circumstances, and then surely many people must have been socialized into roles created by their culture.
Browning takes readers from the present to the past and soaring ahead to the future.
A Queer Geography , now available in paperback, leads those who can follow it from Italy to the tribes of New Guinea. Through vignettes wrapping around examples of his argument, Browning draws his abstract ideas into real-life situations. He also considers the femminielli, transvestite prostitutes who are an accepted part of the culture in Naples. He uses the Samian tribe in New Guinea to illustrate that point. He wonders, then, how the American gay culture as he describes it relates to this behavior in New Guinea that they may consider child abuse or, at the very least, bizarre.