Epistemology of the Closet, Updated with a New Preface
                                
                                
                             
                            
                         
                            
                            
                        Since the late 1980s, queer studies and theory have become vital to the intellectual and political life of the United States. Working from texts of European and American writers, this work analyzes a turn-of-the-century historical moment in which sexual orientation became as important a demarcation of personhood as gender had been for centuries.