The End of the Homosexual?

Description

In The End of the Homosexual? – part memoir/part politics – Dennis Altman connects what has happened within the changing queer world over the past forty years to larger social, political and cultural trends. This is a case study of both local and global change, yet one told from personal experience. Written engagingly, this timely new book explores the idea that major changes in the understanding of sexual and gender diversity reflect larger social and cultural shifts. For example, the internet has changed patterns of sexual behaviour as widely as did the contraceptive pill forty years ago. In both cases the changes were neither foreseen nor intended, and in both cases the impact of new technologies partly depended on political and ideological controls. Homosexuality has become a faultline for debates about western influence, and human rights. In this riveting and personally revealing work, Altman reflects on decades of cultural and political change and considers the future of sexuality: is this the end of the homosexual that gay liberationists predicted forty years ago? Front Cover......Page 1 About the Author......Page 2 Title Page......Page 3 Copyright Page......Page 4 Dedication......Page 5 Contents......Page 6 Introduction......Page 7 PART ONE: Homosexuality before the Gay Movement......Page 18 What has Changed? What Remains the Same?......Page 19 The World That Made Gay Liberation......Page 54 PART TWO: Triumph – and Tragedy......Page 70 The 1970s: New Affirmations......Page 71 Back in the US of A......Page 89 Where Were the Women?......Page 101 The 1980s: HIV/AIDS and Working inside the System......Page 112 The Queer Moment and Reborn Radicalism?......Page 133 The Emergence of the ‘Global Gay’......Page 141 PART THREE: Twenty-first Century – The New Polarisation......Page 152 Reconnecting with My Tribe......Page 153 Normalisation and the Glass Ceiling......Page 159 Global Inequalities......Page 186 Sex, Love and Same-sex Marriage......Page 196 CODA: The End of the Homosexual?......Page 208 Acknowledgments......Page 222 Notes......Page 225 Index......Page 243