What makes a text queer? Why are some texts emblematic of ‘queer theory’, as opposed to traditional lesbian and gay studies? What exactly lies behind the discursive curtain of ‘queer’? Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender studies speak to a certain specificity that a term like ‘queer’, and a theory like queer theory, may seem to ignore. Eve Sedgwick illuminated this, writing, “the most exciting recent work around “queer” spins the term outward along dimensions that can’t be subsumed under gender and sexuality”. Queer theorists are afforded a unique opportunity in the term’s ambiguity, “using the leverage of “queer” to do a new kind of justice to the fractal intricacies of language, skin, migration, state”. No more is this present than in Jane Ward’s “Dude Sex: ‘Authentic’ Heterosexuality Among Dudes Who Have Sex With Dudes” and in Robert Reid-Pharr’s “Dinge”. Though their subjects, related discourses, and research methods differ, both articles express a willingness to explore how exactly constructions of sexual and gender-identities are influenced, and in turn influence, seemingly distinct identity categories like blackness, whiteness, masculinity, and regional and linguistic specificities. 
	Of the two articles, Jane Ward’s is the most explicit in its struggle with these themes. Whereas a typical gay and lesbian scholarship might assume their constituent sexual identities are both homogeneous across race and class and immutable to the force of time, Ward immediately begins with questioning the construction of the homosexual subject, making motions to argue that ‘culture’, rather than sexual action, both defines the subject and reinforces a binary between homosexual and heterosexual men. The introduction of men who have sex with men, a category identified through social media analysis, emphasizes this point. The existence of men who have sex with men exemplify Ward’s ideas of homosexual identity; through embracing whiteness and rejecting lower-class and feminine identity schemata, these men maintain a heterosexual identity while engaging in sex with other men. 
	Absolutely key to this analysis, however, is the focus on how race may function within the interpellation of identities; that a homosexual identity becomes fundamentally distinct from a heterosexual M2M identity through a strong alliance with whiteness. “Dinge”, the Reid-Pharr text, provides a distinct analysis, though one that also keeps a close eye on the functions of whiteness. Reid-Pharr, too, looks to sex, but to examine the functions of whiteness when confronted with non-white bodies. While the actual functions of sexual orientation are not brought to analysis, “Dinge” provides a glimpse into a function nearly as integral: cross-racial desire. Reid-Pharr, through the relation of a personal anecdote and several literary texts, argues that cross-racial sexual contact has a revolutionary potential, the ability to render whiteness visible and upset the typical functions of white supremacy, but this glittering possibility is belied by the fact that cross-racial desire, more often than not, reproduces typical racial hierarchies. “Dinge”, however, provides a more general call to action than the Ward text, calling for queer theorists and readers to “not only think as we fuck, but also pay close attention to all the implications, good and bad, of those sometimes startling thoughts”. In comparison, the Ward text uses its breadth to describe the functions of heterosexuality in a clinical manner. Reid-Pharr is concerned with queer living and queer mobilization on a grand scale, while Ward works within neatly circumscribed and scientific spaces to study the functions of non-queer living. 
