‘I went to bed with my own kind once’: the erasure of desire in the name of identity David Valentine 1 Sarah Lawrence College, 1 Mead Way, Bronxville, New York, NY 10708, USA Abstract This paper explores how some individuals’ talk about sexual desire is rendered as incom- prehensible when those desires are not easily talked about through categories of sexual iden- tity. Using data from an ‘alternative lifestyles’ support group in New York City, I argue that paying attention to expressions of desire is vital for understanding what ‘sexuality’ has come to mean in contemporary theoretical accounts. Moreover, such an approach enables a critical view of both the political systems which underpin sexual identity as well as the relationships among language, gender, sexuality, and desire. # 2002 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. Keywords: Desire; Identity; Sexuality; Gender; Transgender; Politics 1. Introduction What does it mean to talk about erotic desire? By this, I mean two inter-related things: what does it mean to talk about desire in a scholarly context; and what does it mean to talk about one’s own desires? In the contemporary USA, popular dis- cussions of erotic desire are drawn inevitably into a discussion of ‘sexuality,’ one which—again, inevitably—occurs against and invokes the binary of hetero/homo- sexual identity (troubled perhaps by the evidence of bisexuality, though even with bisexuality, desire is seen to lie discretely within the bounds of an identity category, namely ‘bisexual’). Within queer, feminist, and anthropological scholarship, Fou- cault’s famous point—that sexual identity has come to stand as the truth of who we are (Foucault, 1990[1980], pp. 51–73)—has been utilized to show how, since the late nineteenth century in the West, the erotic is not expressed as particular desires but, Language & Communication 23 (2003) 123–138 www.elsevier.com/locate/langcom 0271-5309/03/$ - see front matter # 2002 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. PII: S0271-5309(02)00045-9 E-mail address: dvalenti@mail.slc.edu (D. Valentine). 1 David Valentine is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Sarah Lawrence College.