The Gilded Age Construction of Modern American Homophobia
by Jay Hatheway
Palgrave Macmillan
232 pages, $45.
Jay Hatheway’s The Gilded Age Construction of Modern American Homophobia traces the progression from the “invention” of the homosexual to the “construction” of a new kind of beast that threatens the very foundation of the civilized world. Hatheway is at home in the old essentialist-constructionist debate that permeates gay and lesbian studies; but to his credit he has dug beneath the historical moment in 1869 when the word “homosexual” was first coined. Prior to that time, going back at least to the Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th centuries, same-sex affection remained largely unspoken and undefined, existing as a habit or hobby to place alongside nail biting or fox hunting.
