Contains essays about: Freud's views on homosexuality among American psychoanalysts: sexual practice during England's eighteenth century: the contemporary relevance of Thoreau's Walden, particularly to queer politics: the emergence of a queer critique of previous approaches to lesbian and gay history: the origins of American studies as scholarly discipline: the impact of literature - specifically the same-sex eroticism found in works by writers as James Baldwin, Elizabeth Bishop, Paul Bowles and Ned Rorem - on the gay liberation movement of the 1970s.