Lately ideas of gayness have become more complicated. Gay communities are vilified over AIDS, courted as consumers, urged to be queer and/or bisexual. In a sequence running historically from Stephen Spender through Harvey Feinstein, Derek Jarman and the Pet Shop Boys, and politically between the transgression of Jean Genet and the assimilation of David Leavitt, Sinfield shows how gay identities have been constituted and how they may change in the future. In a global context, where identities are unstable and the market rules, what does gay mean and how are gay communities to generate a new politics? In this accessible, wide ranging and provocative book, Alan Sinfield answers these key questions of gay sexuality at the end of the century.