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
"It is rare to find a writer whose intellectual orientations so effortlessly span the gaps from political sociology to cultural studies to economic history. It is likewise rare to find a solid analysis of contemporary politics and culture in which the emphasis on identity and discourse is grounded in a concern with social structure and cultural process. The virtue of Escoffier's articulate prose is its insistent concern with the relation between high theory and the struggles of everyday life."—Steven Epstein, author of Impure Science
"Through his three decades as an independent, activist intellectual, Jeffrey Escoffier has established himself as one of the senior statesmen in the field of gay and lesbian studies. His experience and intellectual acumen bridge both the 'town-gown' divide and the transition from gay studies to queer theory and cultural studies. This is a wise, original book from one of our finest."—Judith Stacey, Streisand Professor, University of Southern California