Queers Read This

I thought that these readings marked a significant shift in the discourse around homosexuality from earlier hesitation around invoking homosexuality, to a historical juncture whereby different means of addressing the homosexual, and talking about the homosexual, are being offered up.

This affects the epistemic tension of acts v/s identities in that gayness becomes an identity that an individual can wear, or claim themselves to be, as opposed to a sexual act. These alterations in the theoretical underpinnings of gayness, shore up the important question of how gayness was recognized in the 90s.

“Queers Read This” presents gayness as anti-straight; the straights are othered and the two communities, cultures and identities are set-up to be irreconcilably different from one another, where straightness is understood as a lack of queerness. “We must look at our lives and see what’s best in them, see the queer and what is straight and let that straight chaff fall away.” Both the term “queer” and its function of inventing desire and lust are reclaimed and the rhetoric calls for an ownership of the queer identity.
Gayness metamorphoses from an institutionally imposed pathologization to an individually given, or claimed, identity, whereby not only is an individual given the agency and accorded with the knowledge to out themselves as gay, but also society at large has been lent the ability to out an