ABSTRACT
Although long studied by scholars with “special interests,” homosexuality has only recently reached a wide academic audience. In part a result of 1970s activism, this increased visibility marks as well the extent to which gay work has moved beyond its original historicist focus to address the kinds of theoretical issues relevant to other disciplines. In America the theoretization of gay male material in literature was pioneered by the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Her books Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985) and Epistemology of the Closet (1990) took the examination of homosexual themes beyond the preliminary stage of cataloguing and consciousness-raising to make it a subject of serious theoretical interest. 1 Sedgwick’s talent for conceptualization, in particular, uncovered in male-male relationships a series of interpretive categories that, by locating homosexuality within a larger sexual dynamic, lay the foundation for a truly ecumenical study of gender. It is difficult today to talk critically about sexual preference without reference to “homosocial desire,” “homosexual panic,” “paranoid gothic,” or many of the other terms Sedgwick has read into our theoretical vocabulary.
