Mapping the Journal of Homosexuality: A Preface

This article serves as a Preface to the supplementary section of this special issue on "Mapping Queer Bioethics," in which we take a solipsistic turn to "map" the Journal of Homosexuality itself. Born contemporaneously with the depathologization of "homosexuality" in the early 1970s, how does the Journal of Homosexuality's commitment to LGBT health issues the past four decades reveal longstanding tensions between medical pathology, cultural appropriation, and political progress? Introducing the articles that follow (each of which examines a seminal medical-themed subject from the journal's history), this article asks how LGBT-sensitive academic texts play complicit roles in both the reinforcement and the liberation of queer subjects in biomedical discourse.