Drawing from both the liberal republican and feminist traditions, Phelan defines citizenship in terms of legal status, meaningful participation, and recognition. Progressive liberals might be content to argue solely for the extension of basic civil and political rights to LBGT people, but Phelan complicates matters by pointing to the symbolic and discursive dimensions of participation. To have one's voice heard in a public debate, there must be some shared understanding that one deserves respect as a valued member of the community. Working in a similar vein, Nancy Fraser has explored the importance of combining redistribution and pluralistic recognition strategies in her work. Phelan's specific contribution consists in her discussion of the complex ambiguities that homophobia presents for democratic citizenship theory. LBGT people are not singled out for apartheid-style treatment—access to the vote, public office, public accommodation, and residential property ownership is not organized according to sexual classes in a systematic manner. Yet, Bowers v. Hardwick establishes that gays do not have a right to privacy; the “don't ask, don't tell” military policy bans self-affirming lesbians and gays from the military; the criminal justice system usually fails to address antigay violence; and laws protecting LBGT people from discrimination are weak, few, and far between. Phelan contends that although LBGT people do have access to many fundamental rights on a formal basis, the denial of other rights and symbolic recognition tends to diminish the political effectiveness of our citizenship.

Phelan concludes that democratic activists must work to introduce an antihomophobia and/or proqueer ethos of solidarity into American society. From this perspective, she urges conservative homosexual leaders to abandon their assimilatory attempts to depict lesbians and gays as just another middle-class suburban ethnic group. She contends that their tactics have become particularly offensive insofar as they have borrowed a typical ethnic group normalization tactic and have positioned “normal” homosexuals as “mainstream” citizens by attacking the marginal figures in our own community—the transsexual, the gender nonconformist, and the bisexual. This mainstreaming approach will inevitably fall short and backfire. Even if the conservative homosexuals secure small reforms, unless the deeply engrained systems of antigay bigotry and discrimination are addressed, many LBGT people will remain in the closet and will not exercise their rights. Furthermore, heterosexuals will not be pressed to examine their assumptions about sexuality, sex roles, the family, and the community, and the support from opinion-sensitive politicians and judges will remain so shallow that many of them will abandon the reforms as soon as they are pressured by the religious Right.

Although Phelan is entirely convincing on these points, she could have engaged more substantially with radical queer theory, which has much to offer to any critique of assimilation. Phelan's analogy between the exclusion of LBGT people and racism and ethnic discrimination is quite interesting, but she also could have given more consideration to the ways in which homophobia remains somewhat unique. The expulsion of LBGT people from their birth families, for example, is a distinct feature of homophobia. Although families in some fundamentalist religious communities systematically expel their children if they reject their faith, this sort of deep-seated intrafamily antagonism is generally quite rare within racial and ethnic groups.

The Blasius anthology deals with the politics of sexuality. The chapters span the entire political science spectrum in terms of research paradigms. Some of the essays were first presented as papers at a 1996 conference, and the high quality of the work is such that even the oldest pieces have stood the test of time. Blasius nicely situates the various chapters so that interesting contrasts emerge. Rayside's overview of LBGT social movement politics in the institutional contexts of the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States sets up Duyvendak's treatment of gay organizing in the French republican political culture and centralized political system, as well as Diaz-Cotto's analysis of Latin American lesbian-feminist activists' negotiations of the uneven organizing opportunities created by a series of feminist conferences.

The comparative politics chapter by Altman addresses international cultural politics. He demonstrates that in some Southeast Asian gay male communities, Western LBGT ways of thinking about sexuality have been enthusiastically taken up by new generations of bar queens, but Western-style activism has generally not taken root in the difficult economic and political conditions of the developing world. Petchesky, by contrast, emphasizes deliberate coalition-building tactics that have brought feminists together from both the north and the south. Her chapter discusses the progress that feminists have made in institutionalizing sexual rights within official international human rights discourse.

Blasius, Currah, and Bailey call into question popular approaches to LBGT subjectivity. Blasius argues that the effect of an LBGT presence should be theorized in terms of our community-based production of a specific form of emergent subjectivity—the dialogical process of self-constitution or “coming out”—rather than social movement or interest group analyses. Currah argues that lesbian and gay advocates ought to abandon the conservative tactic of constructing sexual orientation discrimination as simply a type of sex discrimination (e.g., Mitchell Y would have been able to marry Juan X if Juan had been a woman) but should instead struggle against any attempt by the state to regulate or punish those who deviate from traditional gender roles, inhabit transsexual bodies, or express unconventional sexualities. Bailey's analysis of lesbian and gay households in urban settings suggests that the LBGT presence should not be depicted as easily defined and homogeneous neighborhoods—the “gay ghettos”—but as highly differentiated, transitional, and shifting urban spaces in which LBGT people from all economic brackets coexist with seniors, female-headed households, and racial/ethnic minorities.

Several authors explore questions related to political strategy. The Cook and Hartnett analysis of television news coverage traces the ambiguous representations of lesbians and gays as worthy individuals and as a dangerous collective movement, thereby revealing the unevenness of strategic media opportunities. Harris deploys a key LBGT studies tactic by championing the work of a neglected gay African-American philosopher, Alain Locke. Yang rejects an elitist approach to mass opinion change, which suggests that “experts” always play a leading role in changing popular attitudes, and demonstrates that the privileging of “experts” depends on the precise issue in question. LBGT activists influenced the American Psychiatric Association's decision to remove homosexuality from its list of pathological disorders but were unable to shape the military's “don't ask, don't tell” policy. Echoing Foucault, Yang points out that democratic struggles always involve struggles for the authority to determine truth and morality. Salokar urges LBGT activists to maximize the opportunities presented by the federal and multibranch nature of American government by working at all levels and in all areas of politics, while Badgett underlines the importance of LBGT think tanks.

The Blasius collection includes one of the most important pieces published in the entire LBGT literature during the 1990s (given the size, breadth, and quality of this body of texts, that achievement is no small feat), namely, Cohen's critique of radical queer theory. Whereas queer theory has constructed the political as a single struggle—LBGT people versus heterosexuals—Cohen points out that such a construction fails to capture the complex nature of the sexuality-oriented relations of domination that are central to contemporary American politics. Poor women of color have been attacked as sexual deviants and subjected to increasingly punitive welfare programs precisely because of their heterosexual fertility. Cohen affirms that homophobia remains a serious obstacle to progressive social change, but she urges LBGT activists to abandon the single-issue approach to politics. She concludes that the radical promise of apparently transgressive queer activism will only bear fruit to the extent that we grasp the intersections among homophobia, institutional racism, class exploitation, and the patriarchy and situate a radical, antiassimilationist struggle for LBGT rights within a broadly based leftist, feminist, and antiracist coalition.

It can be argued that both books are significant because they transcend the “narrowness” of LBGT politics and address much broader and universal questions of ethnic group politics, democracy, and citizenship. These texts are in fact significant, but we should not have to judge their importance in this manner. It is true that Phelan moves deftly back and forth across LBGT, feminist, multicultural, and democratic theory literatures with ease and to great effect, and the Blasius collection features first-rate works drawn from every corner of the entire political science discipline. These texts should find appreciative audiences not only in LBGT studies but also in the fields of feminist theory, social and political theory, and political science.

But such an assessment would implicitly accept the premise that LBGT politics is an inherently specialized and narrow field of inquiry, and that mainstream scholars should only value LBGT studies when we translate our work into mainstream terms. Literature departments, for the most part, have demonstrated that they welcome the very best humanistic scholarship, and the fact that some of it addresses problems related to gender, sexuality, and race has not interfered with their assessments. If our humanities colleagues have been more open to LBGT studies, our social science colleagues have, for the most part, failed to value this field of inquiry. The latter have often used the “particularism”/“universalism” code to conceal their exclusionary attitudes. Ultimately, the claim that a given knowledge project is particularistic instead of universal can only be defended in political terms; indeed, the charge of particularistic and narrow against LBGT studies is nothing more than the latest version of homophobic pathologization and erasure.

As Phelan and contributors to the Blasius book demonstrate so well, LBGT politics is not a narrow, special interest group, minority concern; it is a field of struggle that brings the very foundational architecture of American citizenship to light. In the words of Salokar: