Another shift in the study of emergent American literatures that seems inevitable is a closer affiliation between the fields of ethnic literature and gay and lesbian literature, between minority discourse theory and queer theory. Understanding the ways in which the dynamics of emergence both change and do not change when the literature in question orients itself around sexuality rather than ethnicity is a conceptual task that is pressing in both of these fields.

Gay writing has, of course, been around since at least the time of Socrates and Sappho, but the idea of a self-constituted field called “gay and lesbian literature” did not exist before the era of gay liberation that began in 1969 and could not have existed before the latter part of the nineteenth century. The labels gay, lesbian, and homosexual take for granted a relatively recent idea: namely, the idea of sexual orientation, according to which same-sex erotic attraction, if present, constitutes an abiding and defining characteristic of personal identity. Indeed, it is thought that the term homosexuality did not exist before 1869, when it appeared in a pamphlet written by Karl Maria Kertbeny entitled “An Open Letter to the Prussian Minister of Justice.” Classical Greek has no word for “homosexual” because ancient Greek culture understood sexuality as a matter of preference rather than orientation, liable to change from occasion to occasion – at least as far as men were concerned. Describing the sexual practices of ancient Greece in The Use of Pleasure (1985), Michel Foucault argues that “the notion of homosexuality is plainly inadequate as a means of referring to an experience, forms of valuation, and a system of categorization so different from ours. The Greeks did not see love for one’s own sex and love for the other sex as opposites, as two exclusive choices, two radically different types of behavior.”