Since at least the end of the 19th century, gay culture - its humour, icons, and desires - has been alive and sometimes visible in the midst of straight American society. This text puts forward a series of readings that aim to identify what the author calls the queening of America, a process by which rhetorics and situations specific to homosexual culture are presented to a general readership as if culturally neutral. The study examines how the invisibility of gay male writing, especially in the popular culture of the 1950s and 1960s, facilitated the crossing of gay motifs in straight...

Since at least the end of the 19th century, gay culture - its humour, icons, and desires - has been alive and sometimes visible in the midst of straight American society. This text puts forward a series of readings that aim to identify what the author calls the queening of America, a process by which rhetorics and situations specific to homosexual culture are presented to a general readership as if culturally neutral. The study examines how the invisibility of gay male writing, especially in the popular culture of the 1950s and 1960s, facilitated the crossing of gay motifs in straight...

SOME DANCE TO REMEMBER has been reviewed as "the gay GONE WITH THE WIND." But such popular praise does not do literary justice to this eyewitness classic of the 1970s, that "first golden decade after Stonewall." This best-selling epic of San Francisco's Castro and Folsom streets seethes with sex, drugs, panic, and passionate characters: a gay writer, a drop-dead gorgeous bodybuilder, a cabaret singer, a Vietnam vet, a Hollywood bitch, and a rough-trade porn mogul. Narrator Magnus Bishop channels Ryan O'Hara, a writer pioneering a tell-all voice in the emerging subculture of gay magazines....