A Queer Geography: Journeys Toward a Sexual Self

Browning, Frank

ISBN 10: 0517598574 / ISBN 13: 9780517598573

Published by Crown, 1996

Bibliographic Details

Title: A Queer Geography: Journeys Toward a Sexual ...

Publisher: Crown

Publication Date: 1996

Binding: Hardcover

Book Condition: Good

About this title

Synopsis:

What is the gay identity? Do gay people even exist? The bestselling author of The Culture of Desire journeys into the minds of gay men in America and

elsewhere to discover how their lives are shaped by time, nation, and desire. In a brilliant argument, Browning shows how and why the gay movement

could have only arisen in America.

From Kirkus Reviews:

A murky collection of essays about varying strategies for gay male self-definition. National Public Radio reporter Browning (The Culture of Desire,

1993, etc.) theorizes that in America the ``search for place is at the heart of the gay faith of coming out and being reborn into our own queer culture.''

While his discussion of how this process mirrors the Puritans' original impulse in settling America is occasionally provocative, he confuses the point by

noting that many gay men flout the idea of, and the need for, a queer culture. In anecdotes drawn from his own life and many contacts, professional and

romantic, Browning finds that the perspectives of men who desire men are so divergent that, especially across generations, they often don't share anything

like the same ``interior geography.'' Browning discusses an obscure New Guinea tribe whose boys perform fellatio on their elders for a time, then become

heterosexual; he holds up this provisional brand of sexuality, which is ritually bound up with communal identity, as a contrast to Americans' insistence on

sexuality as a matter of individual identity. A chapter on transvestite prostitutes in Naples reinforces the unoriginal point that other cultures take for

granted ambiguities most Americans have trouble confronting. Browning questions whether the process of coming out doesn't so much liberate the

individual as commit him to an unnecessarily formulaic category, and explains that Michel Foucault didn't publicly avow his homosexuality for this

reason; the argument is clever but barren. And like many of Foucault's less brilliant disciples, Browning constantly lards his prose with specious

analytical language; for instance, explaining his ``open relationship'' and how gay men acquire extended networks of friends through sex, he says such a

social system ``values a dynamic ethics of human interaction over an inherited rule of domestic exclusivity.'' Yes, plus, you get all that sex. (Author tour)