A Queer Geography: Journeys Toward a Sexual Self

This is the provocative question posed by Frank Browning in a A Queer Geography. In this contemporary classic of gay literature, now with a revised first chapter, Browning shows us that gay culture is more a fabrication of American identity politics than of actual sexual desire. He explores the gay psyche as he travels from the streets of Brooklyn to the hill of Kentucky, from France to the Bay of Naples. As he does so, he argues that roots of gay identity by showing how the Puritan compact led to the backroom bawdy house, how being "born again" is reenacted as "coming out," and how gay men's search for their own identity profoundly echoes American's relentless quest for a national identity of its own. In the end, he demonstrates that while homosexuality may be universal, "gay identity" is a twentieth-century creation already being challenged.