Teaching homosexual literature as a "subversive" act.

If taught in a way that exposes students extensively and closely to its texts, homosexual literature can "subvert" the long-standing cultural notion that homosexuality is and should remain "unspeakable" and "untouchable." The author's working methods and materials in his gay and lesbian literature courses at the New School for Social Research, where he has been teaching the subject since 1979, are organized according to those principles. His courses also have a secondary "subversiveness" in the present academic climate, in implicitly dissenting from the dominant "new-inventionist" trend in gay studies now.