ABSTRACT

Male homosexual citizenship is predicated on the conjunction of individual consenting adult freedoms including, indeed particularly, those of a consumer market, and the reinforced stigma of immorality which bans this citizen from the ‘moral community’ and polices him into privacy. As gay men claimed their leisure and lifestyle market, the market claimed them, colonised and exploited gay sexuality. The potency of the modern homosexual male’s ‘virilisation’ is as much economic as it is sexual, allowed to exercise his rights as consumer but denied ‘equal’ rights elsewhere, and on the whole he doesn’t seem to mind.