After Homosexuality

Where do gay people come from? This has been one of the central questions for the gay rights movement in the United States. Responses to it animate arguments on all sides. Opponents believe that gay people have sexual practices and compulsions that can be redirected through counseling and prayer. Advocates have often said that gay people are born this way, and some suggest that scientists will prove it by finding “gay genes.” Or at least that’s what they have to say in court; the structure of U.S. constitutional law requires groups seeking sanctuary under the equal protection clause to show that they are a “discrete and insular minority” whose members share immutable characteristics and a history of oppression.

These are fundamentally historical claims. So for decades now, advocates have drawn on the history of homosexuality to bolster their arguments. Some historians became advocates in their own right, testifying in open court and drafting friend-of-the-court briefs for skeptical judges. Far more common is an unspoken acknowledgment by scholars that their work might be put to a particular political purpose, which provides an orientation for the field. Their work foregrounds the kinds of questions that illuminate both the origins of homosexual identity and a history of oppression on that basis.

In the past five years, the arguments finally worked. Gay people won work-place antidiscrimination protection and the right to marry. Some declared victory and went home; others have turned their attention to protections for trans people or to campaigns that touch gay lives—prison abolition, immigrant justice, and progressive climate policy, to name a few. The work goes on, but the public fervor over homosexuality has diminished. It is tempting to wonder if, in the United States at least, we have reached the end of gay history.

The answer, of course, is no. And Christopher Chitty’s Sexual Hegemony: Statecraft, Sodomy, and Capital in the Rise of the World System, an ambitious retelling of the history of capitalism through the politics of gay sex, has arrived just in time to help dissuade us of that idea. Sexual Hegemony suggests new substantive and methodological directions for the history of homosexuality—directions that could transform the meaning of queer politics in our moment.

The book is a gripping, and at times frustrating, attempt to return “the history of sexuality to a history of property,” as Chitty described his research. It is also a bittersweet record. In 2015, Chitty killed himself while he was in the final stages of his PhD in the History of Consciousness program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His friend and comrade Max Fox collected drafts of his dissertation, seminar papers, research notes, and transcriptions of his conference presentations to compose the final manuscript. In his grief, Fox couldn’t bear for the world to lose Chitty’s ideas, too. It’s an extraordinary act of generosity and care—for Chitty’s memory, for the countless scholars who will be debating and building from this text, and for sexual politics on the left.

After the 1975 Gay Pride Parade in New York City (Allan Tannenbaum/Getty Images)

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Start just about anywhere in the history of sexuality, and the road will lead back to Michel Foucault. The first volume of The History of Sexuality endowed the field and gave it a research agenda. Two core questions animated the book and the scholarship that followed: First, what explains the emergence of “homosexual” as an identity category? Here, Foucault famously declared 1870 as the birthday of the modern homosexual, a result of scientific discourses that converted diverse sexual acts into a consolidated “species.” He claimed to have found a historical trajectory where criminal sexual acts became understood as a medical pathology, and then a personal identity. Second, Foucault asked, how does sexuality relate to modern governance? His response— that modern states subjugate bodies and control populations through the exercise of “biopower”—illustrated his theory that regulatory power is...