| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Methods/Theory

David M. Halperin. How to Do the History of Homosexuality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2002. Pp. 208. $30.00.
David M. Halperin reads his critics. With extraordinary perception, he absorbs their accounts and attends to their interventions. He disputes faulty reasoning—at moments generating considerable heat—but he also honors productive provocations, yielding ever greater levels of analytical precision. As a result, in both the text proper and the elaborate notes to this book the reader discovers the contours of vibrant scholarly communities in pitched engagement, particularly in the fields of classics and lesbian and gay studies. As he chronicles and extends key debates, Halperin helps destabilize traditional disciplinary boundaries while insisting on the utility of bedrock historical practices.	1
This is a volume of revised and expanded essays, each of which has appeared in print from one to three times before. Highly influential, cohering around themes in the politics and philosophy of history, they do not, together, constitute "an instruction manual so much as a series of reflections on the interpretive quandaries and intellectual pleasures of doing the history of homosexuality" (p. 2). Halperin's now trademark "How To" formulation serves other ends. It recalls his controversial class, "How To Be Gay," at the University of Michigan, and its distinctive political project. It pays tribute to intellectual compatriot Arnold I. Davidson and his similarly titled Critical Inquiry article, "How to Do the History of Psychoanalysis" (1987). And, crucially, Halperin's title acts as what he refers to in another, related context as a "deliberate anachronism" (p. 174). Homosexuality—a present-day category—fuels an investigation into elements of the past that are, Halperin argues, irreducibly different, specific, other.	. . .

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