In the realm of queer studies, it's become a commonplace for the figure of the gay man to serve as the norm beneath and against which other forms of queer difference proliferate. This figure has been vital for tracing the effects of homonationalism, the term Lisa Duggan has devised to describe how neoliberal political orders can accommodate forms of difference without any radical challenge to the power relations that sustain that order. Gay men can enjoy acceptance and relative safety because the risk of queerness is displaced onto less easily assimilable forms of gender and erotic difference, especially those found among working-class immigrants and persons of color. Despite the continued necessity of those critiques, they run their own risk of conceptualizing gay men as a homogeneous group and, as a consequence, treating too bluntly the micro-politics of gender and sexuality. Rusty Barrett's From Drag Queens to Leathermen: Language, Gender, and Gay Male Subcultures returns nuance to such critical reductions by revealing a significant and fraught diversity of gay male subcultural identities where one might least expect to find it.

To make his case, Barrett applies a sociolinguistic analysis to the public speech of six different gay subcultural groups: African American drag queens, radical faeries, bears, circuit boys, barebackers, and leathermen. With the exception of the first case study, the other groups represent what at first seem to be a fairly homogeneous lot. Nevertheless, analysis of their particular discursive practices reveals some significant differences in how their respective subcultural members come to understand themselves as gay men. Barrett renders this diversity legible by calling attention to the indexical qualities of language use: those aspects of an utterance that convey information beyond its referential content, including information about the speaker or the context in which the utterance acquires a specific meaning. In each chapter, Barrett focusses on a different aspect of indexical meaning, such as stance or the chronotopes associated with the appropriated information. The successful performance of a subcultural identity, or the sociocultural process by which it is recognized as real or “natural,” requires that other subcultural participants comprehend not only the utterance, but also the indexical meanings that furnish the utterance with its subcultural meaning.

Gay male subcultural identities acquire their specificity through forms of discursive appropriation that extend to indexical meanings. Barrett coins the term “indexical disjuncture” to describe that borrowing process, as well as to emphasize the unusual discourses from which gay men borrow. Subcultural participants often appropriate their indexical meanings from either dominant cultures or other subcultures, such as southern rednecks, traditionally understood to be hostile to sexual and gender minorities. For example, Barrett's African American drag queens regularly adopt a “white-woman” style of speech (35), yet in doing so convey not a cross-race identification but an aspiration to transcend their working-class status. Similarly, indexical disjunction characterizes the leatherman's pronouncements of banal nationalism at the International Mr. Leather conference and the liberal rhetoric of personal responsibility that barebackers deploy against the moral imperative of health. Crucially, the distinctness of a subcultural identity has less to do with any singular trait than with the combinations of meanings produced through temporally and spatially specific deployments of indexical disjuncture. The semiotics of body hair serve as Barrett's go-to example. The absence of body hair is important for successful performances of drag-queen and circuit-boy identity, yet that absence signifies differently within each subculture. While the drag queen's hairlessness serves as an index of femininity, the circuit boy's smooth chest indexes self-control and athletic masculinity. Furthermore, the hairlessness of each contrasts with the hirsute qualities of the bear, whose fuzzy face and belly index the masculinity of the rural working class. The different indexical meanings associated with a single trait allow subcultural members not only to position themselves as speakers within a subcultural public, but also to differentiate themselves both from forms of dominant culture and from other subcultural identities.

Barrett's book convincingly demonstrates what a sociolinguistic approach to the study of queer gender and sexuality can do by putting its conceptual tools to work on instances of gay male language use and subcultural identification. However, the book at times feels stuck in the realm of possibility, and I frequently found myself wishing that Barrett had pushed his analyses further rather than rest with pat diagnoses of subcultural practices. For instance, the chapter on African American drag queens (which feels somewhat anomalous amongst Barrett's other case studies) concludes with a fascinating example: Barrett recounts a remarkable performance in which a black drag queen stages the rape myth for a primarily black audience by pulling an embarrassed audience member onstage to play the black rapist figure. Barrett acknowledges the political complexity of the performance, yet he does little to unpack either that complexity or what he quickly pronounces as the “inescapable misogyny” of acting out a rape scene (53). While I share Barrett's unease about making light of rape, it seems like there is more going on there given the already gnarly negotiation of gender, race, and class relations that characterizes the drag queen's performance. Similar, though less confounding, instances of aborted analysis occur in other chapters as well, but there are also bright spots: in addition to the drag-queen chapter, I found those dedicated to bears and leathermen particularly engaging. They should be of use to anyone doing focussed studies of those subcultures. In the end, From Drag Queens to Leathermen opens the door for more detailed analyses of how the power relations that comprise homonationalism produce and multiply identities through distinctive linguistic and semiotic practices.