Epistemology of the Closet “proposes that many of the major nodes of thought and knowledge in the twentieth-century Western culture as a whole are structured-indeed, fractured by a chronic, now endemic crisis of homo-heterosexual definition, indicatively male, dating from the end of the nineteenth century. The book will argue that an understanding of virtually any aspect of modern Western culture must be, not merely incomplete, but damaged in its central substance to the degree that it does not incorporate a critical analysis of modern homo-heterosexual definition; and it will assume that the appropriate place for that critical analysis to begin is from the relatively decentered perspective of modern gay and antihomophobic theory.”