Queer Identities and the Ethnicity Model

Abstract

‘It’s as if we were an ethnic grouping,’ Peter Burton wrote in Gay Times (April 1995). Thinking of lesbians and/or gay men as an ethnic group runs counter to the constructed and decentred status of the subject as s/he is apprehended in current theory. None the less, very many lesbians and gay men today feel, intuitively, that they are like an ethnic group. This is partly because, as Steven Epstein (1992, p. 255) suggests, we have constituted ourselves in the period when ethnicity, following the precedent of the Black Civil Rights movement, has offered the dominant paradigm for political advancement. So we too claim our rights: that is what ethnic groups do. The culmination of this tendency is Simon LeVay’s belief that he is doing us all a good turn by locating a part of the brain that is different in gay men, because this will enable US gays to claim recognition in the courts as a minority having immutable characteristics (LeVay, 1993; Sinfield, 1994, pp. 177–84). So North American lesbians and gays can get to be as well off as the Indian peoples.