In The End of the Homosexual? – part memoir/part politics – Dennis Altman connects what has happened within the changing queer world over the past forty years to larger social, political and cultural trends. This is a case study of both local and global change, yet one told from personal experience.
Written engagingly, this timely new book explores the idea that major changes in the understanding of sexual and gender diversity reflect larger social and cultural shifts. For example, the internet has changed patterns of sexual behaviour as widely as did the contraceptive pill forty years ago. In both cases the changes were neither foreseen nor intended, and in both cases the impact of new technologies partly depended on political and ideological controls.
Homosexuality has become a faultline for debates about western influence, and human rights. In this riveting and personally revealing work, Altman reflects on decades of cultural and political change and considers the future of sexuality: is this the end of the homosexual that gay liberationists predicted forty years ago?
