Conclusion: Deviant Erotics from Plato to the Postmodern

Abstract

As I was thinking about the conclusion to this book, while my partner and I were visiting my sister in Puerto Rico in the summer of 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court had just struck down Bowers v. Hardwick—the 1986 decision that had enabled individual states to continue to criminalize, and to prosecute people for engaging in, “sodomy,” even when their laws singled out homosexual sodomy alone. The Supreme Court’s 2003 decision in Lawrence et al. v. Texas also struck down all remaining state antisodomy laws, including that of the state in which my partner and I reside, Louisiana. Already that summer, on June 17, 2003, Canada had become the first North American country to legalize same-sex marriage, when Prime Minister Jean Chrétien announced that his government would not appeal an Ontario court’s decision that equal marriage rights had to be granted to same-sex couples in that province immediately. In fact, one reason we chose to vacation in Puerto Rico that year was to invite my sister to the wedding we were planning in Toronto, which, with luck, will have taken place by the time this book is published. As erotic activity between members of the same sex gains increasing social acceptance and legal recognition, the notion that it is “deviant” may eventually come to be of merely historical interest, rather than the grinding force for daily oppression, repression, depression, and suppression that my partner and I, like other gay men and lesbians, have found it to be all our lives.