ABSTRACT
The problem of inventing queer relationships can be further complicated by additional factors, such as differences between the partners in age or race or class or nationality: there exist no readily available social formulas for mediating and negotiating those differences. In any case, to conceive gay politics as a reverse discourse and a form of resistance is not to assign to it an entirely reactive, or negative character — to deny it a claim to independence or creativity. Gay polities is not a politics of pure reactivity, then, even though its conditions of possibility are admittedly rooted in an oppressive regime of power/knowledge. To shift the position of 'the homosexual' from that of object to subject is therefore to make available to lesbians and gay men a new kind of sexual identity, characterized by its lack of a clear definitional content.
