Life outside

Popular Out magazine columnist Michelangelo Signorile galvanized a generation of lesbians and gay men when he took on the "closets of power" in his 1992 classic Queer in America. Now, in Life Outside, Signorile offers an expose of what he calls the "cult of masculinity" within contemporary gay male culture, while at the same time he finds hope and renewal in life outside the urban centers - and also among people who consider themselves outside the "scene" within the urban centers. Drawing on illuminating and often heartbreaking first-person accounts of life on the "circuit" - the drug-fueled parties that dominate the "scene" and largely define the gay aesthetic - Life Outside shows the pressure that gay men are under to conform to an impossible physical ideal and how that pressure filters down, even to those far removed from the circuit. Few, he contends, are immune to the anxieties and insecurities that result from the promotion of this ideal. But Life Outside also identifies another, more positive phenomenon in the gay male world. For years life inside the gay urban centers has set the pace for life outside, but with the expansion of the gay movement has come a new visibility. With more and more gays coming out - and remaining - in suburban, small-town, and rural America, life outside the urban "scene" is changing the face of what it is to be gay in America.