Introduction

In this issue of the journal, we are giving major prominence to a unique and daring publication in the psychoanalytic theory of sexuality: Disorienting Sexuality: Psychoanalytic Reappraisals of Sexual Identities, edited by Thomas Domenici and Ronnie C. Lesser. The book is an outgrowth of a groundbreaking conference held in 1993, “Perspectives on Homosexuality: An Open Dialogue,” which Lesser and Domenici convened

while still candidates of the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis. In refusing to concede any longer to the silencing effects of the risks of exposure, the analysts presenting at this meeting spoke their minds and told their stories in courageous and paradigmshifting ways.

The book expands and clarifies the issues raised at the conference, ultimately and persuasively making it impossible to take any form of sexuality as any kind of a given, even a psychoanalytic one. By conceiving of gay and lesbian sexualities as both ideological categories of identity and conscious and unconscious dimensions of erotic life, the authors ultimately reopen every question worth asking about the psychoanalytic fundamentals of desire, development, gender, and embodiment.

In the context of this radical questioning and revisioning of all the sexualities, it should be made clear, if it is not obvious, that the gay and lesbian analysts writing in this volume are not asking, or even insisting on a place at the table—they are upending it. They are telling “us,” the sexually unmarked, nominally and normatively heterosexual (presumptive) majority, that they've taken their meals with us all along, that, in fact, lots of “us” are “them,” and most importantly, that the categories of “