The host of Hollywood Squares asks Paul Lynde, "Why do bikers wear leather?" "Because chiffon wrinkles so easily," Lynde quips.
Since at least the end of the nineteenth century, gay culture -- its humor, its icons, its desires -- has been alive and sometimes even visible in the midst of straight American society. David Van Leer puts forward here a series of reading that aim to identify what he calls the "queening" of America, a process by which "rhetorics and situations specific to homosexual culture are presented to a general readership as if culturally neutral." In his recinsiderations of the all-American "Damn Yankees" or the gay adult classics of Patrick Dennis ("Auntie Mame, Little Me"), Van Leer overturns simplistic notions of camp as merely a humorous exaggeration of straight culture.
"The Queening" "of America" examines how the invisibility of gay male writing, especially in the popular culture of the 1950s and 1960s, facilitated the crossing of gay motifs in straight culture. Van Leer then critiques some current models of making homosexuality visible (the packaging of Joe Orton, the theories of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, the rise of gay studies), before concluding more optimistically on the possible alliances between gay culture and other minority discourses.

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Ralph Waldo Emerson, an important figure in the popular understanding of America has been rediscovered by scholars and critics, yet there has been no critical study of Emerson"s relation to traditional nineteenth-century questions about ethics and epistemology. In Emerson"s Epistemology David Van Leer turns to this unexplored area of Emerson"s philosophy and especially to the problem of his relation to the central intellectual issue of his age - the transcendental idealism of Immanuel Kant. Although Emerson would throughout his life try a number of vocational roles, he considered himself primarily a thinker. He saw his roles as poet and prophet as versions of the more fundamental one of philosopher. Thus an understanding of Emerson"s relation to traditional problems about the theory of knowledge clarifies not only the arguments of the specific essays, but the shape of his complex career.

Since their first publication in the 1830s and 1840s, Edgar Allan Poe's extraordinary Gothic tales have established themselves as classics of horror fiction and have also created many of the conventions which still dominate the genre of detective fiction. Yet, as well as being highly enjoyable, Poe's tales are works of very real intellectual exploration. Abandoning the criteria of characterization and plotting in favour of blurred boundaries between self and other, will and morality, identity and memory, Poe uses the Gothic to question the integrity of human existence. Indeed, Poe is less interested in solving puzzles or in moral retribution than in exposing the misconceptions that make things seem `mysterious' in the first place. Attentive to the historical and political dimensions of these very American tales, this critical edition selects twenty-four tales and places the most popular - 'The Pit and the Pendulum', `The Fall of the House of Usher', `The Masque of the Red Death', `The Murders in the Rue Morgue, and `The Purloined Letter' - alongside less well-known travel narratives, metaphysical essays, and political satires.

Since their first publication in the 1830s and 1840s, Edgar Allan Poe's extraordinary Gothic tales have established themselves as classics of horror fiction and have also created many of the conventions which still dominate the genre of detective fiction. Yet, as well as being highly enjoyable, Poe's tales are works of very real intellectual exploration. Abandoning the criteria of characterization and plotting in favour of blurred boundaries between self and other, will and morality, identity and memory, Poe uses the Gothic to question the integrity of human existence. Indeed, Poe is less interested in solving puzzles or in moral retribution than in exposing the misconceptions that make things seem `mysterious' in the first place. Attentive to the historical and political dimensions of these very American tales, this new critical edition selects twenty-four tales and places the most popular - `The Fall of the House of Usher', `The Masque of the Red Death', `The Murders in the Rue Morgue; and `The Purloined Letter' - alongside less well-known travel narratives, metaphysical essays and political satires. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

SOME DANCE TO REMEMBER has been reviewed as "the gay GONE WITH THE WIND." But such popular praise does not do literary justice to this eyewitness classic of the 1970s, that "first golden decade after Stonewall." This best-selling epic of San Francisco's Castro and Folsom streets seethes with sex, drugs, panic, and passionate characters: a gay writer, a drop-dead gorgeous bodybuilder, a cabaret singer, a Vietnam vet, a Hollywood bitch, and a rough-trade porn mogul. Narrator Magnus Bishop channels Ryan O'Hara, a writer pioneering a tell-all voice in the emerging subculture of gay magazines. When Ryan meets Quentin Crisp's "perfect man" in Kick Sorenson, lust and politics collide. Steroids rule Castro Street. Gender fascism divides queens versus clones into gay civil war over correct queer identity. White assassinates Milk. Gay rioters burn City Hall. Ryan, romancing the morphing trickster Kick, cruises through nightclubs, ecstatic sex, and leather rituals in legendary bathhouses. Sprung from Isherwood's CABARET, 1970s San Francisco mirrored 1930s Berlin: decadent, dazzling, diverse, doomed. It's all here. A city. A murder. A plague. A lost civilization. A love story. SOME DANCE TO REMEMBER is dedicated to Jack Fritscher's 1970s bicoastal lover, Robert Mapplethorpe. "My God, what a book It's all there, done with Fritscher's usual elan and verve. I wouldn't be surprised if he has written what will be looked on as that period's Great American Gay Novel. What lovely stuff -Sam Steward (Phil Andros) "Jack Fritscher didn't invent the Castro. He just made it mythical. HEADY, EROTIC, COMIC....A comprehensive fictional chronicle of the best of times....If one can learn American history via the novels of Gore Vidal, one can learn gay American history through SOME DANCE." - THE ADVOCATE, David Perry "Cinematic intensity....A brilliant record of gay life before AIDS....An astonishing spectrum of queer lives....This sprawling saga...has not lost a whit of its muscular passion, punchy immediacy, or transformative literary impact." - BOOKS TO WATCH OUT FOR, Richard Labonte "STAGGERINGLY ORIGINAL and completely absorbing....Here is San Francisco's gay male scene in the 1970s and 1980s as never told, or documented, before." - Michael Bronski, Author of CULTURE CLASH: THE MAKING OF GAY SENSIBILITY