ABSTRACT
For a lesbian and gay political project that has had to combat the heteronormative tyranny of the empirical in order to claim a public existence at all, how visibility is conceptualized matters. Like “queer,” “visibility” is a struggle term in gay and lesbian circles now — for some simply a matter of display, for others the effect of discourses or of complex social conditions. In this chapter I will try to show that for those of us caught up in the circuits of late capitalist consumption, the visibility of sexual identity is often a matter of commodification, a process that invariably depends on the lives and labor of invisible others.
