Heath A. Diehl

Stages of Sexuality: Performance, Gay Male Identity, and Public Space (S) Heath A. Diehl

Stages of Sexuality argues that the lived spatial experiences of Generation X gay men are characterized by a profound sense of homelessness (a psychic/material condition distinguished by social dissociation, restricted social mobility, and invisibility to the public gaze). In each of the four chapters of this study, Diehl explores the cultural/sexual/generational politics of a single site at which young gay male identities are produced/performed to gain an extended understanding of how spatial practices can facilitate a more equitable and just distribution of the social order and reveal less restrictive alternatives for how young gay men inhabit that order. At the heart of the study is a search for home, a search which Diehl argues is tempered by the knowledge that home is both kaleidoscopic and fictive¿not the place we come from but the places to which we endlessly return. Ultimately the author suggests that while young gay men are always and only ¿halfway home,¿ they continue to press their bodies against social space both with cause and with determination because those actions matter to both personal and political survival.