This is a rare, UNREAD and out of print hardcover copy of AMERICAN HOMO COMMUNITY & PERVERSITY, written by JEFFREY ESCOFFIER in 1997 and published and distributed by University of California Press. No dust jacket, off-white covers and black spine with red titles, are tight as new, and show minor shelf wear along the spines; end papers, title pages and text are clean. See photos for condition.

SYNOPSIS
Jeffrey Escoffier traces the emergence of a gay and lesbian political identity over the last four decades in this wide-ranging collection of his most influential essays. Situating the development of gay and lesbian communities in a broad sweep of recent American history, Escoffier examines how an urban subculture created by stigmatized and invisible men and women evolved into a vital public community with an activist political agenda and an influential position in contemporary American culture. Detailing what he calls the "political economy of the closet," Escoffier argues that the market process often played a crucial role (for better or for worse) in the emergence of gay and lesbian communities, and conversely, that these new communities have significantly impacted the American marketplace.

From the development of a camp sensibility in popular culture—inspired by the erotic exhibitionism of drag queens—to the public reformation of safer-sex guidelines, Escoffier demonstrates how the gay movement has gradually acquired both social authority and recognition as a booming market. Throughout the ongoing struggle for legitimacy, gays and lesbians have had to negotiate the historical tension between the homoeroticism that courses through American culture and periodic outbreaks of homophobic paranoia. Escoffier follows the lesbian and gay movement across the contested terrain of American political life between the poles of multiculturalism and the religious right, to reveal how sexual minorities constitute a challenge to American society even as they are thoroughly integrated as citizens and kin. From McCarthy-era witch hunts to the activism of Queer Nation, Escoffier vividly describes the characteristic American homosexual journey through the tangled political web of authenticity, identity, and community.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jeffrey Escoffier has been writing about gay and lesbian life since the 1970s. He was a founding member of the hugely influential journal The Gay Alternative as well as the executive editor and publisher of OUT/LOOK, the quarterly that redefined gay and lesbian publishing in the late 1980s. Through it all, he has been in the vanguard of shaping, planing, and enlivening gay politics. In American Homo, Escoffier has collected almost 20 years' worth of essays that display not only his growth as a thinker, but provide a map to the past and future of gay theory.

Escoffier's interests mirror the enormous changes that have occurred in gay life over the past two decades. In his early chapters, he traces the rise of the gay movement and the increasing importance of visible sexuality in gay people's lives, moving from there to the importance of how identity manifests itself in community and politics. He discusses the tensions that exist between a professionalized homosexual politic (particularly in the academy) and the more independent, community-based models of grass-roots groups such as ACT UP and Queer Nation. Escoffier is able to communicate complicated ideas in plain language, and his vision and common sense are enlightening. American Homo is the perfect culmination to an already distinguished career. --Michael Bronski