American Allegory: Lindy Hop and the Racial Imagination

ual minorities come out over and over again throughout the course of their lives. He argues that coming out is not a gradual process that is eventually completed, but rather, like a career, it is identity management for a lifetime. Guittar’s book raises important questions about essentialist understandings of sexuality and gender by demonstrating how the process of coming out and forging an LGBQ identity is complicated and filled with ambivalence. The experiences of the participants in this study are evidence of how, in mainstream U.S. culture, there is a lack of commonly understood language to accurately express the diversity of sexual and gender identities individuals experience. This work suggests a need for a more complex analysis of so-called bisexual and other non-binary sexual orientations and identities. The book is peppered with anecdotes about Guittar’s experiences teaching sexualities to undergraduate students, which may be useful to teacher-scholars in this field. Guittar’s analysis is relevant to the field of the sociology of sexualities in that it supports the findings of existing studies on this topic, but it did not leave me feeling as though the way people come out as LGBQ has changed dramatically over the past several decades, as he claims. The aspects of his research that did feel novel and under-theorized, like coming out as a pathway to acceptance and validation, being selectively closeted, the multiplying of terms for same-sex orientation and identity, and the marginalization of non-binary identities like bisexuality and pansexuality, were left underdeveloped. In addition, I found it difficult to distinguish between the concepts of the queer apologetic and coming out with affinity, as well as internalized homophobia and internalized heteronormativity. Further, I would have liked to learn more about how Guittar recruited his participants. Although he explains that he uses purposive and snowball sampling and includes demographic data about each participant, he neglects to explain where he recruited his participants. Given their ages and educational backgrounds, I was left to assume they were students at his university, a detail that is critically important to a reader’s understanding of his findings. Guittar’s book is most appropriate for newcomers to the field of the sociology of sexualities and could be used in an undergraduate course on sexualities, particularly to explore concepts of social construction and essentialism.