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Gay and Lesbian Politics: Sexuality and the Emergence of a New Ethic. By Mark Blasius. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994. 239p. $24.95 cloth, $14.95 paper.
Blasius' book on gay and lesbian politics makes two principle contributions to the contemporary discourse on the politics of the gay and lesbian movement. First Blasius contends that lesbian and gay existence is best conceptualized as an ethos, as opposed to a sexual orientation; sexual preference, life style, subculture, or community. Blasius argues that unlike the terms most frequently ascribed to gay and lesbian existence, a lesbian and gay ethos implies a conscious repudiation of society's dominant regime of truth, compulsory heterosexuality (a term borrowed from Adrienne Rich's 1980 article in Signs).
Sexual orientation is problematic because of its association with the medical model of homosexuality, the cornerstone of the oppressive pathological etiologies of gay and lesbian existence. Sexual preference, on the other hand, reproduces the dominant regime of truth by trivializing the differences between gays and straights to anatomical proclivities or preferences. If this were indeed an accurate representation of public opinion, he argues, there would be no need for the institutions developed by lesbians and gays to secure their safety and promote their well being.
Life style, on the other hand, implies a degree of self-reflection, self-creation, and community building, qualities that Blasius feels are the core of an ethos of lesbian and gay existence. But life style "is also a principle site at which we have all come to be governed" (p. 191). Life style, for example, has come to...