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Title: American Gay (Worlds of Desire) by Stephen O. Murray ISBN: 0-226-55193-8 Publisher: University of Chicago Press Pub. Date: 01 May, 1996 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $18.00

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Average Customer Rating: 5 (2 reviews)

Rating: 5
Summary: Overflowing with ideas
Comment: Somewhere between a collection of essays on various topics relating to gay and lesbian experiences in 20th century North America and a developing narrative, it has a lot of ideas and citations, and many sentences as long as this one! The author is critical of much that has been written about lesbian and gay Americans and particularly contemptuous of those who think that enforcing respectability on wayward brothers and sisters will bring acceptance.

The last four chapters consider what has been written about Americans of African, Mexican, and Asian/Pacific descent. The Mexican-American chapter is very brief (there's more in his earlier book, Latin American Homosexualities), the two African American chapters extensive and provocative. Well, the whole book is provocative. Sometimes overeagerly?

Rating: 5
Summary: An informed and critical look at lesbigay America
Comment: Pulling together living in and writing about gay communities in Toronto and San Francisco, this book takes up many topics. Indeed, there are sentences that take up many topics!

The first part criticizes social theories while presenting an account of the de-assimilation of lesbigays and the misuse of AIDS to regain medical supervision of gay men's lives. The second part addresses social roles, same-sex couples, and "community" as that term is used by sociologists and by gay men. The third part looks at the unsatisfactory research on African-, Mexican-, and Asian-Pacific- American lesbians and gay men, relying heavily on memoirs and prose fiction.

Although not providing a unifed narrative -- Murray is perhaps overeager to embrace the fragmentatary quality of postmodern life -- this book provides much food for thought about minorities (sexual and other kinds) in North America, a mordantly critical sensibility, and a sometimes daunting command of the social science literature on lesbians and gay men (here, there, and elsewhere).