ABSTRACT
Unhappy on her Aunt Em and Uncle Henry’s farm in Middle America, eleven-year-old Dorothy Gale yearned to travel “somewhere over the rainbow.” Little did she realize, as she sang this song, that she would soon travel quite some distance courtesy of a powerful tornado that would sweep her and her dog, Toto, far away from Kansas and into the Land of Oz. Now, it is true that Dorothy can hardly be called a tourist—she never intended to fly that way in the first place, let alone land on the back of the Wicked Witch of the East! The only aim of her subsequent journey along the Yellow Brick Road to the Emerald City was to meet the Wizard of Oz and ask him to send her back to Kansas. The ultimate, conservative moral of Dorothy’s story is that “There’s no place like home!” Yet the search for a place to call home has much resonance for many “gay men,” a social identity used in the context of this book that has been embraced by Euro-American liberal political movements from the 1970s onward.
