The final stage in the argument of the book will be to link the tropes of gay exceptionalism to those of national exceptionalism. Now I'm finally seeing how the argument of the book will play out! "I'll use the line from Ginsberg: "America, I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel." Why I didn't see this before I don't know. Perhaps I did and forgot about it, because I wasn't ready to write that section yet. I can't think of everything at once.
I read all those queer theory books as they were coming out in the 90s and early 2000s. I've used them and taught them. I know this body of work pretty well and even had a book project that never came to anything aside from some articles. It is a very different time now, when the rhetoric of equality trumps that of endless difference.
The best of that now 20-year old theory balanced "minoritizing" and "universalizing" impulses (Sedgwick).
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