Overcoming Domination through Self-Representation: Gay Men s Experience in 1960s San Francisco

Abstract

During the 1960s, many gay men experienced American culture as domination, as an intrusive and oppressive force outside their im mediate control. The material side of this domination took the ob vious, in-your-face forms of police raids and entrapment, exclu sion from meaningful social interactions such as family and church, and at its worst, incarceration and institutionalization. But there was also an internal, affective experience of domination, which arose from the continual stream of information about homosexual