Queer in America.

• Author: Zonana, Victor F.

I first encountered Michelangelo Signorile in June of 1988, when he was head of the media committee of ACT UP, and I was a reporter writing about AIDS for the Los Angeles Times. I watched in astonishment as this street-smart kid from Brooklyn and his ragtag army of hypsters worked the media like pros, offering up everything from theatrical demonstrations for the television cameras to tightly reasoned position papers for the more serious minded. As ACT UP's message about Reagan administration neglect and pharmaceutical industry greed seeped into the national consciousness, I made a mental note to keep track of this fellow.

I needn't have bothered. By June of 1989, Signorile had once again burst onto the scene, this time as a columnist for Outweek, the gay and lesbian news magazine of the ACT UP generation. For gay-identified men and women wearied by eight years of plague and centuries of homophobia--myself included--Signorile's diatribes were like weekly jolts of adrenaline. But he terrorized a small subset of gay people: public figures who remained locked in their closets.

"I realize you're oppressed, just like the rest of us (which is why you're hiding in the first place)," Signorile wrote in one of his more temperate moments. "But don't react to it by oppressing us. It's much easier for you to break the chain of homophobia than it is for me. You are in enormous positions of power. Use it. This is a crisis."

Malcolm Forbes, Barry Diller, David Geffen, Liz Smith, Pete Williams, Jodie Foster--none was spared Signorile's upper-case invective as he transformed himself into a one-man battering ram determined to smash down the anachronistic relic known as the closet. Thus was born the furor over "outing."

Now comes Signorile's Queer in America. Part memoir, part social history, Signorile's book is must-reading for members of the chattering classes who are struggling to come to grips with the gay and lesbian struggle for equality. As timely as today's headlines, Queer in America is a landmark book, ranking with such other gay masterpieces as Larry Kramer's Reports from the Holocaust and Paul Monette's National Book Award-winning Becoming a Man. For the first time, Signorile is able to circumvent the filter of the mainstream media and directly make his case for the abolition of the closet to a wider audience.

Well, almost directly. This book was subjected to the second-longest legal review in Random House history. The vetting resulted in the...