If capitalism necessarily operates on a cultural logic of difference (i.e. masculine competition), the homosexual/heterosexual binaries serve as capitalism’s de jure oppositional categories of sexual difference. The late nineteenth century’s rapid and urgent framing of the normative from the non-normative required a rhetoric (medical, juridical, popular) that imbued the latter as an object of fear and disdain. Along with any number of cultural “non-normatives” of this period, the homosexual was marked as a disgusting anathema to the bourgeois sanctity of the heterosexual family. Moreover, because the homosexual body was scientifically and popularly presented as an “invert” (a woman trapped in a man’s body or vice-versa), the feminized male body (in particular) threatened the foundation of American masculinity. Thus, one might consider homophobia not so much a fear of the homosexual as such. More precisely homophobia may be more fruitfully considered as a response to the particular nineteenth-century concept of what a homosexual was, i.e. the “effeminized” male.

Historians as diverse as George Chauncey in Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (1994) and Edmund Morris in The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (1979) have demonstrated the castrating effect that the effeminized male body had on American notions of hetero-masculinity. If the body of the homosexual was generated as a site of perversity the body of the normative masculine heterosexual American male was manufactured with similar gusto. Theodore Roosevelt’s radical shift from dilettantish statesmen to rugged cowboys is one of America’s more brilliant accounts of masculine heterosexual “invert” anxiety.

Even with the contemporary rethinking of the political, scientific and popular place of the homosexual in the twentieth century, the masculinized hatred towards homosexuals (often played out in crippling and deadly acts of violence) continued to occur. In the late 1990s, in so-called “post-gay” culture and complacent assimilation of/ by the “homosexual lifestyle” in “mainstream” society, homosexuals have signed a Faustian pact. In order to dispel homophobia, sexual difference has been veiled. Homosexuals, in other words, must necessarily present themselves as “normal” so as to avoid the violence that accompanies homophobia. In contemporary parlance, he or she is insisted upon to act “straight.” One can be “out” as long as one does not act too gay With difference effectively erased and the masculine/feminine order of things perforce in place, homophobia curiously repeats its nineteenth-century beginnings. It is clear that the louder and more egregiously one speaks the love that dare not speak its name, the stronger the challenge to hetero-normative culture’s purported acceptance of homosexuality.