They function, here, as objects for an almost theologically speculative meditation, rather than as evidence of lives and communities actually, presently inhabited. The more than Balzacian founding narrative of a certain modern identity for Euro-American gay men, afer all, vibrates along a chord that stretches from provincial origins to metropolitan destinies. But a metropolis continually recruited and reconstituted by having folded into it the incredulous energies of the provincial. There's a way in which the author of this book seems not quite to have been able to believe in the reality of the gay male communities toward whose readership the book so palpably yearns. The yearning makes the the incredulity.
Obsessions are the most durable form of intellectual capital.
Blockage, frozenness have seemed to characterize its address, in particular, to many of the women queer readers whose incredulous desire it has also solicited. For that matter, virtually all the readers who have forcefully used it have drawn, I believe, on a hardly less heterogeneous and conflictual spectrum of responses to it. But it has vastly more to say for the inveterate, gorgeous generativity, the speculative generosity, the daring, the permeability, the activism that have long been lodged in the multiple histories of queer reading .