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Professor Greenberg has written an immensely readable and informative book about the social construction of homosexuality. He has amassed a wealth of detailed material about the attitudes, usages and, where applicable, philosophical stances of society toward homosexuality through the ages. Some interesting tidbits are hidden away in footnotes, such as Philo's notion that circumcision would reduce sexual pleasure (p. 202) or the attribution of homosexuality to foreigners as a persistent theme in 18th-century French and English sources, who spoke of it as the “Italian vice” (p. 328). I am citing these examples to show just how far Greenberg ranges and to illustrate the many sources he calls on to illustrate his point of view, or his ideology, if you will. Although he makes many efforts to be tolerant of opinions that oppose his own, he is not really successful. It is, of course, impossible to communicate without any ideology informing our thoughts and actions, despite the constant attempt to do so in some quarters. Texts, or, more accurately, utterances, are inherently polyphonous: They simultaneously express, reflect, and determine history and meaning, or so Bakhtin and his followers maintain .
Greenberg's utterances are polyphonous, indeed. He poses many questions about the social origins of homosexuality,