ABSTRACT
In the contemporary world, becoming gay requires becoming other. For much of this century gayness has been understood in terms of a perversion or deviation from a (hetero) sexual object choice, whose pathology was to be understood in terms of arrested or malformed development. Gay Liberation intended to change such notions, but even in these liberal times, being a gay man or a lesbian still requires a deliberate differentiation from a background of presumptive heterosexuality.
