Offending Gender Being and Wanting in Male Same-Sex Desire

The hegemony of gender in theorizing sexuality has made sexual orientation the principal organizer of erotic experience. This has resulted in a heterosexual-homosexual binary in which male hetero-sexuality is presumed to hinge on the eroticization of difference while male homosexuality has been Understood as a desire for likeness. In this essay, I argue that this view of male same-sex desire is forced by the dominant heterosexist discourse that splits being and wanting into mutually exclusive categories for its understanding of normative heterosexual desire. Examining the psychic consequences of this forced splitting in both straight and gay men, I argue that subjective experiences of difference are no less central to same-sex desire and that, in gay and straight contexts alike, defensive forms of complementarity often wreak havoc with the capacity to love.