ABSTRACT
Academic gay studies, in the United States, inevitably begin with the first volume of Michel Foucault's Histoire de la sexualite, and in particular with a paragraph early in the analysis of homosexuality in the nineteenth century. Foucault's Histoire argues explicitly that "homosexuality", as a biomedical concept invented in response to specific conditions of nineteenth-century culture, cannot be reapplied to earlier cultures without misrepresentation. In a similar fashion, it suggests by extension that a neologism like "gay" cannot usefully describe earlier persons who, whatever their sexual object-choices, could not by definition share in the late-twentieth-century political and aesthetic presuppositions of that term. Near the end of William Bradford's history Of Plymouth Plantation, arguably the most canonical of early American texts, the youth Thomas Granger is put to death for "unnatural" sexual activities with numerous barnyard animals and a turkey. More important, extreme constructionism in gay theory tends to lose track of Foucault's crucial point about the genealogy of sexual terminology.
