Lesbians and gays have gone from "coming out," to "acting up," to "outing," meanwhile radically redefining society's views on sexuality and gender. The essays in Inside/Out employ a variety of approaches (psychoanalysis, deconstruction, semiotics, and discourse theory) to investigate representations of sex and sexual difference in literature, film, video, music, and photography. Engaging the figures of divas, dykes, vampires and queens, the contributors address issues such as AIDS, pornography, pedagogy, authorship, and activism. Inside/Out shifts the focus from sex to sexual orientation, provoking a reconsideration of the concepts of the sexual and the political.

"This is the first anthology to offer full-strength, state-of-the-art lesbian and gay theory in all its immediacy, all its sophistication. `Theory' means something new in the hands of these two generations of passionate activist/intellectuals --Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, author of Epistemology of the Closet."