For a lesbian and gay political project that has had to combat the heteronormative tyranny of the empirical in order to claim a public existence at all, how visibility is conceptualized matters. Like “queer,” “visibility” is a struggle term in gay and lesbian circles now – for some simply a matter of display, for others the effect of discourses or of complex social conditions. In the essay that follows I will try to show that for those of us caught up in the circuits of late capitalist consumption, the visibility of sexual identity is often a matter of commodification, a process that invariably depends on the lives and labor of invisible others.

This argument needs to be prefaced, however, with several acknowledgements and qualifications. First of all, the increasing cultural representation of homosexual concerns as well as the recent queering of sex gender identities undoubtedly have had important positive effects. Cultural visibility can prepare the ground for gay civil rights protection; affirmative images of lesbians and gays in the mainstream media, like the growing legitimation of lesbian and gay studies in the academy, can be empowering for those of us who have lived most of our lives with no validation at all from the dominant culture. These changes in lesbian and gay visibility are in great measure the effect of the relentless organizing efforts of lesbians and gay men. In the past decade alone groups like the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, the Human Rights Campaign Fund, GLADD, and ACT-UP have fought ardently against the cultural abjection and civic eradication of homosexuals.