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This chapter on religion and culture argues that H. Richard Niebuhr's model of Christ and Culture is too abstract in this context. The Pacific Northwest has no assumed religious ethos; it is an open religious market, where religions live and die on how well they sell their brand. The taken for granted aspects of Protestant mainline and liberal Protestant churches have less success though they do have a market in gay and lesbian men and women who make up nearly a third all these congregations. The evangelical brand offers an extensive program in local and global missions that challenges their congregations to evangelize their community and the world.

This chapter examines how vice squads developed a newly ethnographic form of policing to entice gay men in the late 1950s and 1960s. As gay culture in these years grew increasingly systematic and insular, vice officers seeking to maintain their arrest rates set out to master gay men’s often-obscure cruising customs as a tool of effective enforcement, relying on manuals, academy training, and field experience to learn to pass as gay among wary targets. Yet such officers continued to justify their campaigns, internally and in court, by denying the often-rarefied insights that facilitated their arrests, insisting that gay men’s indiscriminate sexual habits made such arrests inevitable. Tracing the vice squads’ evolving strategies, this chapter unearths the regulatory underside of the ethnographic study of gay life at mid-century, a seemingly progressive project that doubled as a powerful weapon of the police, and suggests the growing qualms inspired by the vice squads’ immersive undercover operations. Not least, it illuminates how, faced with the courts’ continuing ambivalence about police entrapment, vice officers avoided judicial disapproval of their increasingly manipulative methods by exploiting an epistemic gap within the justice system, separating how police officers and judges understood the nature of gay cruising itself.

This chapter examines the popular media’s “discovery” of the gay world in the 1960s, which inspired a reappraisal of both queer life in America and the police’s anti-homosexual campaigns. Startled by gay men’s frequent departure from common stereotypes, newspapers and magazines took it upon themselves to introduce readers to the contours of modern gay culture, often turning to vice officers—those professional students of urban queer practices—as their guides. Yet while early journalists celebrated officers’ impressive fluency in cruising customs, that same fluency ultimately undermined the legitimacy of the vice squads’ campaigns, raising questions about the utility, morality, and psychology of a police force whose greatest professional talents consisted of infiltrating an illicit sexual subculture. Examining the regulatory underbelly of media curiosity about homosexuality at mid-century, this chapter illuminates the emergence of vice officers as epistemic authorities on sexual difference: professionals, not unlike more traditional medical and scientific experts, who produced and popularized new knowledge about gay life. At the same time, it unmasks the deeper social anxieties, beyond more ethical or practical concerns, that counseled officers against acknowledging their insights about gay life: the fraught politics of claiming “expertise” over a taboo subject like the gay world.

This chapter traces the history and significance of The Gay Cookbook by Lou Rand Hogan. Published in 1965, the cookbook capitalized on a sudden fascination with gay male taste set off by Susan Sontag’s essay “Notes on ‘Camp,’” published a year earlier in the Partisan Review. What made The Gay Cookbook unique was the way Hogan used camp humor to reimagine gay domestic space. In the 1950s and 1960s, when mainstream journalism, movies, and popular sociology portrayed the lives of gay men, they typically conveyed an image of a dangerous, immoral, and unhappy “gay world”— seedy bars and street corners where men covertly ventured to find a companion for the night. Hogan depicted the home as a central stage for shaping gay life and relationships, a site of humor, community, and pleasure. At a time when many homophile activists still prioritized privacy, Hogan’s cookbook made the gay home public, embracing the culture of Cold War domestic consumption only to challenge its gender and sexual norms. It could not so easily overcome the racial logic of American domesticity and culinary cosmopolitanism.

This chapter examines two contradicting perspectives of two gay men from different generations regarding gay sexual culture during the 1960s to 1970s. The first one argues that during the peak of gay culture, gay men did not care about whether or not they would be infected by AIDS from unprotected sex, instead they looked forward to the enjoyment the intimacy brought to them in public sex spaces; this narrative is dubbed as the desirable narrative “queer” sexual culture. The second one counter-argues that the promiscuity during the 1960s paved the way for unhealthy sexual relations that resulted in the spread of AIDS, thus only focusing on the negative effects of sexual relations. Neoconservative gay journalist Gabriel Rotello, and Leo Bersani’s essay “Is the Rectum a Grave?” (1987) and Gregg Araki’s film The Living End (1992) supported the second gay man’s claim.

This chapter examines how access to marriage might change lesbian and gay identities over time in ways that are stressful for lesbian and gay people. Drawing on interviews with gay couples from the Netherlands, it considers the debate over the consequences of same-sex marriage for the gay community itself. In particular, it analyzes the fears and claims of those who oppose gay marriage in order to better understand what is behind the emotions. It also explores whether marriage will lead to the end of gay culture, whether the marriage campaign will impede progress on other important political issues such as health care, and whether marriage will marginalize unmarried lesbians, gays, and bisexuals.

This chapter examines George Lipsitz’s analysis of the dynamics of theater and television in relation to the emerging gay culture. The comedic genre was the easiest television format to link with gay culture. James Burrow’s sitcom Will and Grace, for instance, was the first television show to feature a gay man as the main character. However, the show has been criticized for suppressing homosexuality on television. Its plotlines and character development failed to enable “queer visuality,” since gay bashing still was central to its rhetorical appeal.

By examining the creative and critical oeuvre of Thom Gunn, with particular emphasis on his notebooks and his work's critical reception, which, when read side by side, allow us to witness a kind of interior/exterior dialectic concerning the terms “gay” and “poetry.” Ultimately, it is the author's contention that, when taken together—Gunn's publication record and its critical reception, his development in his notebooks of a distinctly gay poetics, and his relationships with mentors Yvor Winters and Robert Duncan—all tell an exemplary story about the tension created, sustained, and sometimes resolved by the close proximity of “gay” to “poetry.” And though this chapter is foremost a story about Gunn's own poetry and his development as a gay poet, this story might also be read as representative of aspects of both poetic and gay histories in twentieth-century Anglo-American literature. In light of this dialectic between the evolution of Gunn's work and its interpretation by his critics, the chapter suggests that Gunn's career so expertly elicits from twentieth-century critical discourse the shifting historical definitions of “gay” and “poetry” for the following three reasons: To put the argument about Gunn's style another way, the distinction between homosocial and homosexual is “a strategy for making generalizations about, and marking historical difference in, the structure of men's relations with other men.”

This introductory chapter discusses the general disregard for America’s queer culture that has been observed since the onslaught of AIDS among homosexuals during the early 1980s. Gay culture, among all kinds of queer culture, was targeted not because of the AIDS epidemic but because of the AIDS epidemic becoming an avenue for cultural forces, which include straight men and women, as well as the gay neoconservatives. For instances during the post-AIDS onslaught, the issue of “gay marriage” has risen to the forefront of public consciousness as an in-demand debatable topic, an abandonment of “gay ghettos,” and the hampering of the entry of the rhetoric of sexual liberation to the popular media.

This chapter concentrates on Devon, a white working-class city dweller whose late childhood is marked by family violence and homophobic bullying. Devon's interviews took place over a period of four years, when he was aged 18 to 21. They are also supported by his memory book. In describing and interpreting Devon's successive accounts, the chapter focuses on the process through which he becomes increasingly interested in the gay culture; the way he manages the boundaries between the gay and straight life; and the articulation of gender, sexual, class, and ethnic dimensions within his identity. Devon's case study is structured by the three fields of existence that are the most important in his evolving biography: family, work, and play. These three arenas characterise each of his interviews in different ways, family being the dominant theme of the first, work and the boundaries between work and other parts of life dominating the second, and play dominating the discussion in the third. Devon's case history draws attention to the different ways in which ‘disembedding’ and ‘re-embedding’ may take place. Although he was disembedded from the physical locality of his community of origin, Devon nevertheless continues to be embedded in a particular generational class culture, expressed in part through the camp practices of his gay peer group, his experiences of work, and his enduring connections with his family of origin.

This book concludes with a discussion on the gay legacy of literary decadence and its influence on C. P. Cavafy's poetic expression of homosexuality, and how it continues to play a role in the ongoing attraction of queer artists and critics to his work. By focusing on his erotic poetry, it shows that Cavafy often sublimates raw sexuality in favor of a more elevated passion transfigured by memory and aestheticized by art. It suggests that Cavafy also presents a genuine physicality in poems that worship male beauty and recount specific sexual encounters. Finally, the chapter argues that Cavafy's erotic poems illustrate “the peculiar merging of eroticism and aestheticism that is distinctive to gay male culture,” and that his “kitschification” as a gay icon may be a manifestation of his unique relationship to the decadent tradition.

This chapter explores the representation of race and sexuality in experimental documentaries produced by gay Asian men in the United States, Canada, and Australia in the mid- to late 1990s. These include Slanted Vision by Ming-Yuen S. Ma (USA, 1995), 7 Steps to Sticky Heaven (USA, 1995) by Nguyen Tan Hoang, Tony Ayres’s China Dolls (Australia, 1997), and Wayne Yung’s The Queen’s Cantonese (Canada,1998). These films seek to contest the feminization and desexualization of Asian men in gay visual culture by presenting self-consciously performative, sexually explicit material, which acts as an urgent counterpornography. A central component of the reeducation of desire for these films’ intended gay Asian male audience is the goal of replacing the so-called wrong, misguided desire for white men with a supposedly more empowering desire for other Asian men, such a shift ostensibly signals a concomitant shift in masculine agency from passive sexual object (the Asian boy toy) to active sexual subject (the politicized agent). The chapter argues that this politically correct lesson fails to account for desires and identifications that cannot be so easily disciplined, especially those desires that embrace bottomhood and femininity. In other words, such a reeducation ends up arresting the play of desire and marginalizing a gay Asian male subject’s desire for submission and domination—in effect, a move that curtails a gay Asian subject’s choice and sexual possibilities.

In 1992, Quentin Crisp appeared on cinema screens as Elizabeth I in Sally Potter’s Orlando; the following year, he provided the “Alternative Queen’s Message” on Channel 4 television on Christmas Day, going head-to-head with Elizabeth II. This chapter will revisit this cultural moment, examining the significance of Crisp’s perfonnances of “queenliness”. The late 1980s/early 1990s heralded a shift away from the lesbian and gay politics of the 1970s and “80s towards a more confrontational queer activism. Orlando can be seen as an example of early queer cinema, given its play with gender and sexuality, and Potter’s casting of Tilda Swinton (a regular collaborator of Derek Jannan). Other queer films of the time also unsettle and complicate particular moments in history, and equally employ a pointedly artificial mise-en-scene (Jannan’s Edward II, Julien’s Looking for Langston, Kalin’s Swoon). How does Crisp’s appearance–as an embodiment of the flaming, camp homosexual–complicate the film’s politics of sexuality? Does it articulate a political “clearing of the ground”, with an older gay culture (Elizabeth) giving way to a fresh queer one (Orlando)? This chapter will consider the film as a provocative transition between particular forms of cultural production–bound up with changing attitudes towards the monarchy itself.

This chapter focuses on the costumes of gender-bending performers affiliated with the San Francisco-based groups the Cockettes and its offshoot the Angels of Light, in the 1970s. These collectives were equal parts experiments in communal living, theater troupes, and active promoters of radical new modes of queer and feminist self-fashioning. Category-defying in every sense, the Cockettes and the Angels of Light were known for their outrageous performances wearing handmade outfits both in the theater and in the street. The chapter investigates the handmade costumes of the Cockettes and the Angels of Light to propose that the upsurge in crafting in the late 1960s and early 1970s overlapped in provocative ways with a simultaneous emergence of gay and feminist culture in northern California in the post-Stonewall era. It examines the historical moment when the actual outfits were part and parcel of a utopian vision in which smashing normative gender conventions seemed entirely possible. It focuses on the specific material practices that went into constructing these garments and ornamentations, and how the Cockettes and Angels of Light aligned handmaking with countercultural world-making—both as an individualist practice of differentiation and a larger, if somewhat inchoate, communalist project.

For Allen Ginsberg, Blake was more than a poetic influence, he was a spiritual forefather. Blake played an integral role in Ginsberg’s relentless self-fashioning and Ginsberg repeatedly turned to Blake in his search for poetic and social freedoms. Blake became a figurehead of the drug-fuelled psychedelic revolution of which Ginsberg was part. But Ginsberg’s Blakeanism went far beyond the claims of the drug culture towards a more serious and thoughtful poetic engagement with freedom and form, influence and authenticity. Like many of the older generation of American poets, Ginsberg yoked Blake together with Whitman. He saw them as icons of gay and homosocial culture, who debunked the prejudices of social conservatism and advocated an ethic of sexual openness and communality. Blake became an aid to a more affectionate re-envisioning of the myth of America, where tenderness and embrace were a means to positive social action.

How can the body find ecstasy? How can it survive it? For some Romantic poets, moments of bliss may come to a solitary explorer who “wanders lonely as a cloud,” then finds a new flower or ocean. Yet the obdurate materials and boundaries of Thom Gunn's urban world resist such moments of sensation and access, and the simple naturalism of first-person change. His boyhood home of postwar London is the gray city of Dickens, not Keats; his second home of San Francisco, though streaked with Ginsberg's hallucinogenic “Blake-light,” is still plagued by Blake's “mind-forged manacles” and “harlot's cry.” In postwar America, other poets of Gunn's generation sought bliss in drugs, drink, and flesh; but whether through Ginsberg's “Blake-light tragedies” or Robert Lowell's dramas of mania and incarceration, they put the primacy of individual vision before such stable observations of the social world as Gunn's unfevered and unsentimental poetry shows. His work provides, then, a brave alternative to some of twentieth-century poetry's muddy experiments in “personhood.”