Dwight: The idea that "radical" gays (like members of Sex Panic, who essentially advocate nothing more than this board advocates)despise¨"ordinary" gays is just classist argumentation. Sun might as well be talking about a "queer moral majority." It´s a polemical fiction.

I second Warner´s and Bronski´s books, though I think Warner´s is better and certainly more grounded in queer theory. Warner is an important queer theorist because he attempts to reconcile queer theory´s disassembly of identity to the very real-life need for political action.

I´ll try to explain. Queer theory -- a la Judith Butler and Eve SEdgwick -- argues that gender and sexual identity are cultural expressions of performativity, the reiteration of certain markers (like dress, gesture, etc.). QT wants to sabotage those gestures, or in the pomo spirit, to displace them, to¨"play" in the Derridean sense, if you know his work.

This is the difference in¨"queer" and "gay". Queer plays with gender and identity, whereas gay is a pretty fixed identity based on the assumption that sexual orientation is stable, likely biologically programmed. One common expression of the problem this difference causes is when gay people argue that trangendered and bisexual people should not be included in "their" movement. To "queers," anyone playing with gender and orientation is welcome, including straight people (and, frankly, I meet a lot queerer straight people than gay people often times these days).

Of course, if you destabilize gay identity, you likewise make it very difficult to form a cohesive political movement. Warner attempts in his work to address this problem.

The idea that "queer theory" is some kind of politically radical gobbledegook is bullshit. It´s difficult because it is rather radical in the way it contextualizes gender and sex and has had to create a new vocabulary to express the novelty of its ideas. Some of Warner´s most interesting comments are on the way queer theory is excluded by current media. This, he says, is because it really has the potential to make a big differnce in the way we see ourselves -- meaning,f or one thing, that we might begin to realize "gay" has become basically a marketing word. Gay media are not going to jeopardize their position by questioning identity-based politics.

Short course.