Unpleased

It would appear Zizek was right: neo-liberal capitalism really doesn't offer 'choice' to everyone. I noticed and deplored the same strictures in my hometown's bookstores: the placing of 'gay writing' in a section of its own, squirreled away first with the 'black writing' (another ridiculous appelation), then in the basement, next to the books on religion, then (after bigoted complaints), with the straight 'erotica'. The fact that the majority of the 'gay writing' (at least in the stores I knew) was stroke-novels does, I guess, mitigate it slightly. What is creepy about the whole 'amazonfail' phenomenon is the way in which queer authors were, in fact, 'disappeared': they ceased, to the searching consumer, to exist. It appears, more than a century after 'homosexuality' gained its name, that the fact of queer status, and the acts pertaining to it, still have to be made to vanish by society...

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